Guaranteed income elicits fears: survey

Canadians may support a guaranteed minimum annual income in principle, but they don’t want to pay for it and they suspect it may turn people into shiftless louts, according to a new survey by Angus Reid Institute.

As many as 67 per cent of respondents backed a guaranteed income of $30,000, provided that the payment would “replace most or all other forms of government assistance.”

However, nearly as many (66 per cent) said they would not be willing to pay more taxes to support such a program, and 59 per cent said it would be too expensive to implement.

A further 63 per cent said it would “discourage people from working.” Among Conservative voters, this sentiment jumped to 74 per cent of respondents. But even in the NDP camp respondents were split 50-50.

“It’s not as though you see people on the left of the spectrum incredibly supportive of this,” said Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid Institute.

At various times during the past 100 years, the concept of a guaranteed minimum income has been embraced by everyone from hard line conservatives to hard line progressives.

Conservatives, including former U.S. president Richard Nixon, have touted it as a way to dismantle the welfare state by merely cutting the poor a cheque each month.

Progressives, meanwhile, counter that it’s a necessary way to support workers idled by outsourcing and automation.

Indeed, the Angus Reid survey even hinted that this issue could rise in prominence as more and more jobs are taken by robots.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63 per cent) said that they believed new technology would “eliminate more jobs than they create.”

Ironically, the survey itself was a testament to this fact. Only a generation ago, polling Canadians would have required an office filled with telephone operators. But Angus Reid conducted this poll via an automated online form.

Increasingly, a guaranteed minimum annual income has been batted around by Canadian political parties, most notably by the Liberal party, which enshrined it as a policy plank at its most recent convention.

Finland will soon be debuting a plan to pay every citizen $1,100 per month and scrap all other benefit programs. In Switzerland, referendum voters overwhelmingly rejected a plan to institute a guaranteed monthly income of $3,315. In a June vote, more than 78 per cent opposed the measure.

Kurl noted that the Angus Reid survey should not be considered the “last word” in guaranteed minimum income, mainly because nobody in Canada has yet proposed an actual costed plan to do it.

Research is also thin. Some of the only hard Canadian data on a guaranteed minimum income comes from a pilot project held in Dauphin, Man., during the 1970s.

Over five years of paying Dauphinites a guaranteed wage, among the biggest empirical changes noted by researchers was that hospitalizations and psychiatric diagnoses dropped as much as eight per cent.

Said Kurl: “A big part of what we’re not able to put in front of Canadians is how much it would actually cost and how much it would actually save.”