Cancelling Basic Income is cancelling hope
How much money does someone need to participate fully in community life? As health professionals, health researchers, and community members, this is a question we often contemplate. We are deeply concerned recent policy changes in Ontario have further eroded our already fragile safety net, with potentially devastating implications for some of our most vulnerable community members.
We know what we do every day has an impact on our health and well-being. However, poverty and limited access to resources can stymie opportunities to engage in meaningful activities. People living in poverty are often unable to purchase healthy food or get around their communities. These constraints have a significant impact on health and wellbeing.
Social assistance is often where people end up after they have exhausted all of their resources and have nowhere else to turn. There is widespread agreement that the current system is inefficient, that money is wasted on monitoring recipients and enforcing a multitude of rules that seem to serve no purpose except to make life difficult for those who are already struggling. Eligibility requirements are tough and once on the system, people often become trapped. The system is not designed to help recipients tackle their barriers to employment. As a result, transitioning off social assistance for employment can be difficult, leaving few avenues for people to break the cycle of poverty. The current system makes little sense if the goal is to help people become more selfsufficient. Furthermore, existing social assistance programs provide little support to the working poor or those trapped in precarious employment.
Clearly, innovative policy ideas are needed. Yet, social assistance is one of the few areas of social policy that has lacked real innovation in North America for over 50 years.
Through the Basic Income Pilot project and Ontario’s Roadmap for Change, the former provincial government set out a course to test new approaches to reducing poverty. The central idea was to give people a bit more money with fewer requirements and rules. This approach offered hope to ease the burden on low-income Ontarians, and represented work done by many key stakeholders, including lowincome earners and experts. They came up with a plan to improve the system by making it more efficient (less monitoring) and effective (better access to support).
Initial reports were promising. Contrary to a popular assumption that when you give low-income people extra money they would squander it, the opposite occurred. The stories from people participating in the pilot suggest most used the opportunity to improve their health, build a better future for themselves and their families, and contribute to their communities. They went back to school, started new business ventures, enrolled their kids in activities that they could now afford, secured better apartments in safer neighbourhoods. If the study is not completed, there will be no determination that what we know anecdotally would be proven scientifically — that when you give people more money, they will live healthier, more productive lives, while actually costing the system less.
Although the pilot program would only directly help those living in one of the three sites, Hamilton/Brant, Lindsay or Thunder Bay, the potential was much greater. The objective was to learn from this experiment and then scale up to a Basic Income program across the province, offering tangible hope and change to the nearly 2 million Ontarians who are trapped in the cycle of poverty.
By the time the pilot project winds down prematurely on March 31, 2019, it will be well underway. It would make much more sense to see this project through to completion, examine the results and then make informed decisions about next steps. We suspect that a comprehensive economic evaluation would show that the benefits far outweigh the costs — reduced healthcare utilization, improved education and employment outcomes, and so on.
We are surprised that this promising initiative was cut without a good rationale. This decision is contrary to the objectives of the current Ontario government. Do they not want to end poverty through employment and find efficiencies in the public sector? Do they not realize that we all benefit when our neighbourhoods thrive and people have real hope and opportunity?
We recommend that the current administration consider how they can effectively build on the work that has already been done. By doing so, there is the potential to save money and reduce the incredible poverty-related suffering faced by an unacceptable number of Ontarians. At this time we call on our federal leaders to pick up the pilot project and scale it up into a national effort, offering hope to all Canadians living in poverty while collecting robust evidence. Addressing our broken social assistance system and the impacts of precarious employment would cultivate innovation in social policy and support economic growth. That seems efficient and effective to us.
Rebecca Gewurtz, Pamela Lahey, Lorie Shimmell and Shaminder Dhillon work at McMaster University. Lynn Cockburn works at the University of Toronto and Carrie Anne Marshall works at Western University. This commentary draws on their research in occupational therapy, public health, housing and homelessness, employment and income security.