Guaranteed income a great idea
While a Canada without poor people may sound like a pipe dream, in fact, it is an achievable goal.
So says Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, who makes an argument for a poverty-free country in the Literary Review of Canada. It’s worth noting that Segal, a former chief of staff to Brian Mulroney who was appointed to the Senate by Paul Martin, is more Red Tory than Harperstyle Conservative.
Accordingly, the Ontario senator argues that a guaranteed annual income is as worthy a Canadian project as medicare.
He says it could be arranged by way of a tax credit through the income tax system, to top up income of anyone falling below Statistics Canada’s low income cutoff.
The cutoff for a single person is about $22,200; for a family with three children, it’s roughly $47,000.
“In other words,” writes Segal, “being poor would become a problem we all buffered in the same way as we buffer all Canadians relative to health care.”
He estimates the annual cost at about $10,000 per person. But when all the billions now spent on health care and heavily stigmatized welfare payments — to alternatively address needs of the poor — are subtracted, the net cost to government would be zero, he says.
“The cost to our Canadian economy of poor Canadians dropping out of school, getting sick faster, staying in hospital longer and living shorter lives than the rest of us is in the billions.”
Imagine what a guaranteed income might have meant to the Vancouver downtown eastside women murdered by Willie Pickton.
Wally Oppal, in a recent report on the murders, drew a direct link between poverty and the women’s plights.
Cost savings to governments would indeed be real, according to a study cited by Segal, carried out by University of Manitoba health sciences professor Evelyn Forget.
Forget tracked an 8.5-per-cent drop in hospital visits among a sample group of farm families in Dauphin, Man., who were part of a 1970s-era federal experiment guaranteeing minimum incomes in case of crop failures.
That experiment also rendered invalid a notion that guaranteed incomes prompt recipients to quit work to become couch potatoes.
“The efficient and humane thing to do is to take the example of Dauphin and learn from it,” writes Segal, noting Ottawa wouldn’t need a new bureaucracy to deliver guaranteed incomes.
“We have the (tax) system in place.”
That said, Segal tells me, when it comes to selling his idea, “I cannot report large progress with the present government or the provinces.”
That may be because promised cost savings to government treasuries aren’t precisely measurable, and wouldn’t be immediate. And the fiscal burden of a guaranteed income would be borne by Ottawa, through the Canada Revenue Agency, while savings would go to the provinces, which finance health and welfare programs.
Deficit-burdened governments aren’t likely to embrace the Segal proposal.
But the good news is that Canada’s poverty levels have been declining. Statistics Canada, back in 1969, put the poverty rate as high as 20.8 per cent of Canadians. Today, it’s 9.4 per cent.
According to the CIA’s World Fact Book, poverty in the U.S. afflicts 15.1 per cent; in the United Kingdom, 14 per cent; in France, 6.2 per cent.
An October study by the University of Waterloo’s Canadian Index of Well Being Network, meanwhile, notes that in the two years following the 2008 recession, Canadian living standards dropped substantially.
Alas, a guaranteed income for Canadians is a lot like getting rid of the Indian Act, simplifying the tax code, or abolishing the Senate. All great ideas that governments never get around to executing.