Idea of a guaranteed minimum annual income for Canadians moves a small step closer to reality this week. Former Conservative Senator Hugh Segal will deliver a report on how the “basic income pilot” announced in Ontario’s February budget may work. The Ontario government has earmarked $25 million in this fiscal year to establish a pilot project in the province before April 2017 and has appointed Segal as an unpaid special adviser.
“For all those good folks on the right, who say that if you pay people to do nothing, they will do nothing, I remind them that 70 per cent of the people who live beneath the poverty line in Ontario, have jobs. They just don’t earn enough through minimum wage to be above the poverty line,” Segal said.
“So the notion that this is about chocolate, and couches and popcorn and watching TV is actually without any substantial basis in fact.”
“There is no plan to establish a federal pilot program,” said Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos’s spokesman Mathieu Filion, adding that “[Liberal] party policies are taken into consideration by the government but they are not automatically governmental policies.”
“Based on findings from the MINCOME project in Manitoba … and other GAI (Guaranteed Annual Income) pilots in the United States, it appears the results are mixed,” says the heavily censored document, obtained by the CBC News under the Access to Information Act.
“While there are poverty reduction impacts, these are sometimes offset by negative labour force participation rates. A GAI can also be very costly and does not necessarily lead to savings by government.” The document also warns about “the difficulty of delivering it to the self-employed, to farmers and particularly to those who change location or family structure frequently.”
By Premji
