Pilot programs for guaranteed annual income not a brand-new idea

If you had asked Evelyn Forget three years ago to assess the chances of pushing a guaranteed annual income onto the political agenda, she would have cited a percentage somewhere in the neighbourhood of zero.

The University of Manitoba health economist, currently the Kierans-Janigan visiting scholar at Massey College, has been deep into the study of guaranteed income for nearly a decade. Now, suddenly, it is the topic du jour.

“Now we’ve got a province saying they’re going to run a pilot and we’ve got pilots happening overseas,” she says. Finland. The Netherlands. Ontario. And, maybe, news from the federal government in Tuesday’s budget as to what role it might play in putting a guaranteed income under the national microscope.

In February, Forget appeared before the federal finance committee, making her pitch for the federal government to partner with the provinces to conduct pilot programs to examine the merits of the idea.

There have been such programs before. And Forget likes to say that it was an accident of history — a fortuitous one — in one of those projects, in Dauphin, Man., that made her an expert on the topic. The roots of that experiment were planted by a special senate committee on poverty, struck in 1968 and chaired by senator David Croll. The report that resulted from that work, tabled in 1971, sought a “new deal for the poor” with a primary recommendation that a guaranteed annual income (GAI) was “the first firm step in the war against poverty.”

In the language of the Croll report, “No nation can achieve true greatness if it lacks the courage and determination to undertake the surgery necessary to remove the cancer of poverty from its body politic.”

Initially, there was a plan to fund a pilot program in Ontario, with the federal government covering 75 per cent of the costs. That program was to put 700 Ontario families under study.

It didn’t happen — one news report of the day suggested that there had been enough experiments in the U.S. to tell the politicians everything they needed to know.

(There were four large-scale income maintenance experiments in the States, the last one wrapping up in 1976.)

Manitoba operated differently. Under then NDP premier Ed Schreyer, with the support of the government of Pierre Trudeau, a multipronged plan was set in 1973 that chose Winnipeg along with the town of Dauphin, the latter with a population of 8,900 at the time of the 1971 census and a further 3,200 in the surrounding rural municipality. Dauphin was a “saturation” site, which Forget describes as a “very weird way of doing an experiment.”

Instead of matching randomly selected subjects with control groups, every family in Dauphin was invited to participate. About a third were deemed eligible.

Decades later, Forget realized that the Dauphin data offered unique insights into quality of life.

Her primary conclusions: that hospitalizations fell for those in the so-called MINCOME group, as did physician claims for mental-health diagnoses.

“These results would seem to suggest that a GAI, implemented broadly, may improve health and social outcomes at the community level,” Forget wrote in an analysis that appeared in Canadian Public Policy.

She also found a significant increase in the rate of high school completion, especially among boys. The long-term societal and health benefits were obvious.

What didn’t get answered in the Dauphin experiment was the central question: does work effort decline under a guaranteed income?

Problems with the Dauphin study appeared quickly. Some residents objected to what they said was the overly intrusive nature of the researchers’ questioning. Some people dropped out of the study as a result. Costs advanced rapidly and exponentially. And ultimately, the changed political winds both provincially (PC premier Sterling Lyon) and federally (PC prime minister Joe Clark) resulted in the plug being pulled on the experiment. In the end, two years’ worth of data sat neglected in boxes at the National Archives in Winnipeg, until Forget came along and started sifting through it.

In significant ways, perspectives on a guaranteed income haven’t changed much.

“What people fear depends on where they are in the political spectrum,” says Forget. “For some people on the political left, there is a fear that this really is a way of sneaking in austerity — you set up a guaranteed annual income and then you start slashing and burning other programs . . . And certainly on the right, people are still talking about work effort and the need to encourage people to work, that there would be a loss of productivity if people were to reduce their work ethic.”

Forget makes clear that her definition of guaranteed income is not a so-called demogrant as has been talked about in parts of Europe — a lump-sum payment regardless of income — but rather a payout that is income-contingent.

“A family with no income from any other source would receive a certain amount of money,” she says, “and then as your income from other sources, particularly from working, increases, your benefits would decline, but would decline less than proportionately. So you actually incentivize people to work.”

At the end of the day, as Forget points out with understatement, “we haven’t done a very good job of eliminating poverty and improving peoples’ lives. I believe people have a moral right to a dignified life, and I think a guaranteed annual income is built on that moral foundation.”

That could be a scripted line for a federal politician. Maybe a version of it will be uttered, come Tuesday. Jennifer Wells’ column appears on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Reach her at jenwells@thestar.ca