Ottawa Citizen

Don't give up on guaranteed basic income

Canadian jobs are becoming more and more precarious in today's labour market, writes Tess Martel.

- Tessa Martel is a University of Ottawa common law student.

At the beginning of December, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he could see no path forward for a guaranteed basic income right now. For the sake of Canadians everywhere, he should spend some more time looking.

Many working Canadians are struggling in the current labour market. Globalizat­ion, rapid technologi­cal change and the gig economy have changed the nature of the labour market. People no longer spend the majority of their career working for one company; many jobs limit the number of hours an employee can work to avoid providing them with benefits; and jobs in the gig economy (for example, Uber drivers, food-delivery drivers, renting out your home via Airbnb, and selling services or products through the internet) carry no benefits at all. About one-third of male workers and slightly more female workers are now in some non-standard form of work. Women, Indigenous Peoples, Black Canadians, people of colour and undocument­ed migrant workers are overrepres­ented in these kinds of risky job situations. Coupled with this is Canada's housing bubble: in 97 per cent of city neighbourh­oods across Canada, a single person working in a full-time, minimum-wage job cannot afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment.

It has been 50 years — half a century — since then-senator David Croll published the Report of the Special Senate Committee on Poverty that called for a guaranteed income as the “first firm step in the war against poverty” when Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. It is now past time for his son to implement that call.

Would a guaranteed income even address the struggles arising from the new labour market? A survey of participan­ts from Ontario's Basic Income Guarantee experiment says it would; the quality of jobs held by low-income workers tended to improve. Instead of shortterm, temporary, poorly paid work, the basic income allowed workers to search for better jobs with benefits and prospects.

You may be reading this and thinking: wouldn't a guaranteed income make people lazy, not want to work and dependent on the system? An experiment­al project conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s, known as the Mincome project, disproved this argument. The program selected families with low incomes to benefit from a guaranteed livable income. The study found that the effect on work incentive was very minimal. There was an annual reduction of hours worked of one per cent for men, three per cent for married women, and five per cent for unmarried women. Young men between the ages of 15 and 24 had the largest decrease in hours worked. The reason for this decrease? Less of them were choosing to leave school to work fulltime before graduating.

Neither the gig economy, technologi­cal advancemen­t nor globalizat­ion seems to be slowing down. All are contributi­ng to the creation of more and more precarious jobs for Canadians. Canada needs a guaranteed livable income to support its citizens and allow them livable lives.

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