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A Greater Toronto Area mayor says Canada has the ability to eliminate poverty if the political will is there – and his gut tells him that a basic income guarantee is the way to do it.
Ajax Mayor Steve Parish was one of 327 Canadian mayors who were invited to complete a national survey by Leaders and Legacies, in order to gauge municipal level support for a basic income guarantee policy. The town – known for its 7 km of protected walking trails along Lake Ontario — is a centre of 110,000, about 25 kilometres east of Toronto.
“People who are chronically poor are not usually getting a good education, their health outcomes are not good, and…their needs are not being met. There is a moral cost but also a financial cost to society,” for ignoring this truth, says Parish, who has been mayor for nearly 20 years.
A common definition of a basic income guarantee ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of work status. It involves a regular, reliable distribution of money from government to people to help ensure total income is sufficient to meet common, basic needs.
Parish says he believes Canada has the ability “to provide enough income to keep people above the poverty level.”
Ensuring Canadians have the basics to take care of their needs like food, shelter, and clothing is important, says the mayor, but also health care costs “not covered by our current system.”
Parish says a basic income policy “would help break the cycle of poverty that is often passed on to generation to generation, in the same way that wealth is.”
He knows that some people will immediately think about “a 38-year-old man avoiding work” when they think about a basic income guarantee.
“But they should be thinking about a million children across this country who have become imprisoned by poverty because their parents are. And that when they grow up, then chances are greater those children will grow up to face the same challenges. We can choose to break that cycle, though,” the mayor says.
Pilot Projects
Parish says he believes setting up some pilot projects ultimately makes sense, especially in smaller provinces where it might be quicker to set up a full program that can be studied for five to 10 years to collect hard data.
“We (politicians) are only going to get one chance to make a good first impression” with this policy, says the mayor, so having the data would be helpful.
“As a politician, I have to worry about these things because I know that’s what opponents would latch on. I have to know about that 38 year old male who, yes, may not choose to work. But I also have to believe he would only represent” a tiny fraction of the whole.
“That’s my gut instinct of what the reality is. Most people do not want to be unemployed. They want to move forward and they want their lives to be good ones. That’s my basic view of humanity,” says Parish.
The mayor believes it will be difficult to implement a basic income guarantee in a nation as decentralized as Canada, which means it will be more important than ever for citizens to speak out.
“If the people demand it, then it’s a matter of political will and priorities. Politicians will have their marching orders.”
Given there would be “tremendous cost-savings” with the policy, coupled with the fact that it’s “the right thing to do for society,” Parish says now, during the federal election, is a great time to have a public discussion of the policy.
Dear Mayor Steve Parish,
Socioeconomic Democracy is here offered as a peaceful, effective and democratic resolution to humanity’s present and needless systemic problems and sufferings. Socioeconomic Democracy will further be found to satisfy the increasingly acknowledged need for a “Next System Project”, advocated by, among many others, Gar Alperovitz.
The crucial question is whether humanity has yet evolved sufficiently to understand and peacefully resolve the utterly unnecessary obstacles to further healthy development and evolution.
It is here respectfully suggested that all of humanity seriously confront the multitude of needless problems created by the growing and unjust distributions of monetary income and far more importantly monetary wealth, within and among every country on this planet.
Fortunately, this appears relatively easily accomplished by simply recalling and reconsidering just a few insights and observations of writers and thinkers down through the decades, centuries and millennia, starting somewhat arbitrarily, to be sure, in ancient Greece.
Plato, in his last and most mature Laws, preferred equality of personal property but realized that was difficult, if not impossible, to precisely define. He therefore thoughtfully suggested limits on both poverty and affluence. Plato’s attentive student, Aristotle, suggested, with admirable specificity, that “No one should have more than five times the wealth of the poorest person.” Prior to Plato, Thales of Miletus provided a reasonable assessment of the situation: “If there is neither excessive wealth nor immoderate poverty in a nation, then justice may be said to prevail”.
Reluctantly neglecting all too many other important contributors to the increasing understanding and advancement of an economically and psychologically healthy humanity, may it briefly be mentioned that a powerful sequence of thoughtful humans, down thru the ages, considered and contributed to the discussion.
A valuable list of some of these people is available at “A Brief History of Basic Income” (see below). Of course, the rapidly increasing popularity of some form and amount of universally guaranteed income for all (by itself) leaves in question just how it is to be financed.
Nevertheless, this writer cannot constrain himself from explicitly mentioning two of the many contributors to this crucial conversation. First, the world-changing work and dedication of that Societal Engineer, Thomas Paine, who, in a later work following Common Sense entitled Agrarian Justice, proposed and discussed the virtues of a guaranteed income for all.
Then there was Henry George who, not unlike Paine, did time in a print shop to get his writings printed. One of Henry’s major contributions was to link financial assistance for the poor with a suggested tax or limit on personal wealth, then mostly being land property.
Over forty years ago this writer, and would-be Societal Engineer, was given the specific ideas of Socioeconomic Democracy. A history of the development and presentation of these ideas is available in our Bibliography (see below).
Socioeconomic Democracy (SeD) is a theoretically consistent and peacefully implementable psycho-politico-socio-economic system wherein there exist both some form and amount of locally appropriate Universally Guaranteed Personal Income (UGI) and some form and amount of locally appropriate Maximum Allowable Personal Wealth (MAW), with both the lower bound on guarantee personal income and the upper bound on personal material wealth set and adjusted periodically and democratically by all participants of a democratic society.
Socioeconomic Democracy is easily implemented with elementary Public Choice Theory. The median values of society’s preference distributions regarding these two crucial societal parameters peacefully, democratically and unambiguously resolve the matter.
Whether society realizes some appropriate form of Socioeconomic Democracy is a cogent question. Clearly, public dissemination and discussion of the suggestions presented here will prove determinative. An alternative to Socioeconomic Democracy as defined above would be where the two economic boundaries discussed here were considered and established by, say, the legislative branch of a “Representative” Democracy.
This planet’s trivially eliminated or significantly reduced societal problems, by realizing Socioeconomic Democracy, include but are by no means limited to, those familiar ones associated with Automation, computerization and robotics; Budget deficits and debts at the personal, national, regional and global levels; Contempt for much presently practiced politics; Costly crimes and costly prisons, both governmental and corporate profit-motivated; Corporate profit-motivated as well as general publicly expensive exogenous pollution; Inadequate public education for all ages, “races”, and both sexes of humanity; Oversights and confusions of some, but certainly not quite all, Economists and Politicians; Ignoring the elderly, to whom we all owe our very existence; International costly conflicts; national costly conflicts; Involuntary employment; Involuntary unemployment; Lack of access to necessary physical and psychological healthcare, causing unnecessary harm to the individuals themselves, their “close” relatives, and many “innocent bystanders”; Pay injustices to both sexes, all ages and all “races” of our human family; Corporately profitable yet publicly costly “Planned Obsolescence”; Political non-participation, carefully planned, designed, legislated and realized by some, but not all, power-intoxicated politicians; Population explosions; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) caused by “patriotic” and/or pathetic human-killing wars, as well as all the PTSD created by all the other unnecessary societal problems; Voting district gerrymandering; Needless and obscene poverty, racism, sexism, and everything else that effectively opposes, neglects or negates the General Welfare.
Break Time: Consider and enjoy “Rapids of Change” at
http://www.centersds.com/rapids.htm
Responses to this communication are welcome and sought.
“A Brief History of Basic Income Ideas”
http://basicincome-europe.org/ubie/brief-history-basic-income-ideas/
A Bibliography of Socioeconomic Democracy is available at
http://www.centersds.com/biblio.htm
Robley E. George, Founder and Director
Center for the Study of Democratic Societies
http://www.centersds.com
[email protected]