Does pandemic make case for basic income?
It took another two years for photographer Jessie Golem to build up the resources to start her own video production business after she shelved it in 2018, when the province announced it was scrapping the basic income pilot project.
“When the pilot got cancelled, I was angry … but I also thought that I won’t be able to have the time and the money to focus on my business again,” said Golem, one of more than 1,000 local program participants. “I have to go back to the gig economy, into the four jobs that were keeping me trapped in poverty.”
Golem documented the experiences of other participants in a photo series called Humans of Basic Income.
She was laid off before the pandemic began, and is now teaching virtual piano lessons while gearing up to launch her business, which she projected would be able to generate enough revenue to make her ineligible to receive basic income by the time the planned three-year program would have ended. It was cancelled about one year in by the new Progressive Conservative government, with then-Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod calling “into question whether the $150-million being spent is actually going to be with valid research.” She claimed the previous Liberal government had difficulty signing people up and that 25 per cent had dropped out or weren’t meeting their obligations.
The complexity of this type of program and resulting research emerged as a lesson learned from the 1970s Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment, or Mincome, which was cut short because of the high cost of the project.
An important hypothesis researchers sought out is whether an income supplement could be linked to deterring participants from pursuing employment, a common criticism. When funding was pulled, Mincome laid off most of its 200 full- and part-time staff, and effectively abandoned its data analysis for a time.
Years later, health economist Evelyn Forget got her hands on some of the data, and found a staggering 8.5 per cent decline in hospitalizations in the affected communities, linked to a reduction of emergency visits from alcohol-related incidents and better mental health outcomes.
Hamilton resident and pilot project participant James Collura said he was “disappointed” that the study was not completed and that other places would be looking to Canadian “data for insight on whether or not this would be viable,” he said.
Debates at Queen’s Park surrounding paid sick leave, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) and other pandemic-related income supports have amplified calls to implement a permanent program, such as a negative income tax, said Jeffrey Martin, co-chair of Basic Income Hamilton.
“That’s how I think we can implement this program, at least initially, for people who are living in poverty, or the people that we call the working poor,” Martin said.
A Feb. 11 virtual panel organized by Martin and co-chair Lisa Alfano sought to make the case for basic income from the perspective of business owners. Keanin Loomis, president of the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, cited the political movement south of the border, led by politician and former Democratic primary hopeful Andrew Yang, and others calling for universal basic income.
“Now obviously, during COVID, it seems like a fresh opportunity to revive this as a major topic of discussion within the policy sphere,” he said in an interview. “You see how CERB kind of acts as a basic income, and you start to wonder, is this something that needs to remain in place in the post-COVID world?”