Axing basic income program defended
TORONTO • The Ontario government defended its decision to scrap a basic income pilot project by suggesting the program discouraged participants from finding work.
Although the Progressive Conservatives had promised to preserve the pilot project, Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod said the government reversed course after hearing from ministry staff that the program didn’t help people become “independent contributors to the economy.”
“It really is a disincentive to get people back on track,” she said Wednesday.
“When you’re encouraging people to accept money without strings attached, it really doesn’t send the message that I think our ministry and our government wants to send. We want to get people back on track and be productive members of society where that’s possible.”
A source involved in the pilot, however, said it had not been active long enough to generate the data required to gauge its success.
The government announced Tuesday it was “winding down” the project and cutting a planned threeper-cent increase in social assistance to 1.5 per cent.
The basic income pilot project, which launched last year and was set to run for three years, provided payments to 4,000 low-income people in communities including Hamilton, Brantford, Thunder Bay and Lindsay. Single participants receive up to $16,989 a year while couples receive up to $24,027, less 50 per cent of any earned income.
Statistics released by the previous government showed two-thirds of those enrolled had a job.
News of the project’s cancellation stunned antipoverty groups and those who received support, some of whom said they’d be left scrambling to make up for income they had counted on.
Jody Dean, a Hamilton resident who participated in the program, said the financial stability granted by the project allowed her to go back to school part-time and to buy parking passes to the hospital where one of her three children receives care.
She called the minister’s comments “ridiculous.”
“I know several girls that are working poor who have walked to work because they couldn’t afford the bus. Did they quit their jobs because they got basic income? Hell no,” she said.
Tom Cooper, of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction said “This is the government taking a political course of action without thinking things through, the ramifications (for) these real people who have huge stresses in their lives now.”