Winnipeg railway underpass, 2008. Photo By Ken Yule.
The North American Basic Income Group held
its 15th annual congress in Winnipeg on May 13 to
16. The event brought together activists, researchers
and people with experience of poverty from
across North America and beyond to discuss an idea
that is gaining momentum as a tool for poverty
reduction: Basic Income, a program which would
pay a guaranteed amount monthly or annually to
every adult member of society.
Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest
in the concept at home and abroad. Pilot projects
have been implemented in Kenya and Finland, and a
national referendum on basic income was held in
Switzerland.
All over Canada, support from community organizations
and political parties, along with media interest,
has pushed the idea into public consciousness
over the past few years. During Manitoba’s last provincial
election, the Manitoba Green Party put forward
a detailed policy proposal for a negative
income tax, while the Manitoba Liberals promised a
Minimum Income Pilot program. The federal government
has been exploring minimum income and other
provinces such as Ontario and Québec are considering
implementing programs as well.
It is a concept that goes by many names: basic
income, negative income tax, guaranteed annual
income, among others. While the basic income
rubric covers a wide variety of policy proposals, the
public’s enthusiasm about basic income centres
around a fairly intuitive idea: our current system of
social assistance is not working to end poverty. If we
simply gave people enough money to live, we could
save elsewhere on administrative costs. And the
simple fact of reducing poverty would give rise indirectly
to additional savings by relieving pressures
on the healthcare and justice systems, for example.
The idea is broad in its appeal and has historically
attracted support from across the political spectrum.
But as with many good ideas, the difficulties
reside in the details. Anti-poverty advocates see the
potential of using basic income as a means to
reframe the debate about poverty, and as an argument
for increasing assistance to low-income people.
On the other hand, market fundamentalists like
Milton Friedman and Fraser Institute researchers
Charles Lammen and Hugh McIntyre have long promoted
basic income’s potential for administrative
simplification and cutting public sector employment.
Between these positions, there is wide room
for debate.
Bringing women’s voice forward
A range of approaches and topics for investigation
were put forward during the Congress. A key theme
was how basic income could meet the needs of communities
and groups with higher levels of poverty.
One session brought together feminists who talked
about how women’s voices could be brought to the
fore, and how basic income could be used as a tool
for their empowerment. Too often the discussion on
basic income becomes mired in technocratic theoretical
perspectives far removed from practical realities
and lived experience. Previous NABIG congresses
have focused on how basic income could be
used to help economies transition to a future automated
world without work. But such concerns are
remote from the immediate preoccupations of
women with jobs and families who continue to work
double shifts or victims of domestic abuse seeking
to escape violence. The voices of people with lived
experience of poverty, including Indigenous people
and communities of colour, need to be heard if we
hope to develop basic income policies that will work
in the real world. Congress 2016 was a welcome step
forward in this area.
Mincome project centre stage
The conference also aimed to look at what can be
learned from various pilot projects over the past few
decades. Holding the event in Winnipeg provided an
opportunity in particular to reflect on experiments
that were conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s. The
Manitoba Mincome project was a joint federal/ provincial
initiative which operated from 1974 to 1979. It
featured the only community-wide “saturation”
study ever conducted in North America in which all
the adult residents of the town of Dauphin were eligible
to apply to the program, subject to a means
test. Low-income households in the study were
given an income equivalent to 60 per cent of lowincome
cutoff levels, extending benefits to households
not previously eligible for welfare programs.
The amount of the benefit declined at a rate of 50
cents for each dollar earned.
With changes in government and shifting priorities
at both the federal and provincial levels, interest in
the program waned and funding was cut. The results
of the program remained unanalyzed for decades.
However, over the past several years, researchers
have begun to systematically assess the Mincome
program. The 2016 Congress brought researchers
together with some of the original civil servants and
administrators who designed the program as well as
some of the participants who benefited.
In Dauphin, there were noticeable improvements
in physical and mental health status and a drop in
domestic violence, while employment participation
did not significantly decline. By 1978, Dauphin had
significantly lower rates of hospitalization than
demographically comparable communities in Manitoba,
especially for illnesses frequently associated
with income insecurity. There were some modest
reductions in work hours across the population,
estimated at approximately 13 per cent during the
duration of the program. However, most of this
labour force withdrawal was associated with young
people staying in school longer and mothers delaying
re-entry to the workforce in order to look after
children. There was no significant decrease in the
working hours performed by primary wage earners
as a result of the program.
Narrow labour market focus
Early proponents of basic income were faced with
having to prove that the introduction of benefits
would not adversely affect the labour market. Since
any reduction in labour market participation was
seen as lethal to the implementation of basic
income, advocates went out of their way to minimize
the extent to which recipients chose to work less.
However, one of the main purposes of basic income
is to provide much needed time — for studies, child
care, recreation and other necessities that are too
often deemed luxuries for working class people.
Similarly, basic income programs of the 1970s were
heavily criticized for some data in U.S. experiments
that showed basic income tied to increased likelihood
of divorce. Today, it is possible to recognize
that at least some of the family breakdown reported
in experiments was the result of women having the
modicum of economic freedom that allowed them to
escape domestic violence. Renewed analyses of the
basic income experiments of the 1970s have taken a
more nuanced view of these effects.
One practical concern that attracted considerable
attention during the conference was the extent to
which advocates of basic income should content
themselves with government promises of further
pilot projects, which are often an excuse for governments
to defer implementation of any substantial
program, rather than push for immediate implementation.
With cost-constrained politicians looking for
cheaper ways to say “yes” to activists, pilots can be
a dangerous distraction from long-term objectives.
The conference was held jointly at the University
of Manitoba and at the Neeginan Centre, an Indigenous
training and community development centre in
downtown Winnipeg. Thus it successfully wedded
community experience and academic research in a
way that is often lacking at conferences organized
exclusively by universities. Unless we learn from the
people experiencing poverty, the data and analyses
will remain limited and partial. Meanwhile, the community
has much to gain from studies and debates
on how basic income has been applied elsewhere.
Despite regrettably minimal media coverage, the
conference succeeded in raising the level of debate
on basic income and its potential role in creating a
more equitable and sustainable society.
This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of Canadian Dimension (Basic Income).
Subscribe today and receive every issue of Canadian Dimension hot off the press.
Continue reading