Basic Income for Canadians: From the COVID-19 Emergency to Financial Security for All

by Evelyn. L. Forget

Before the COVID‐19 pandemic, the idea of providing a basic income to everyone in Canada who needs it was already gaining broad support. Then, in response to a crisis that threatened to put millions out of work, the federal government implemented new measures which constituted Canada's largest ever experiment with a basic income for almost everyone.

In this new and revised edition, Evelyn L. Forget offers a clear‐eyed look at how these emergency measures could be transformed into a program that ensures an adequate basic income for every Canadian.

Forget details what we can learn from earlier basic income experiments in Canada and internationally. She weighs the options, investigates whether Canadians can afford a permanent basic income program and describes how it could best be implemented across the country.

This accessible book offers everything a reader needs to decide if a basic income program is the right follow-up to the short-term government response to COVID‐19.

324 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 13, 2020

Reviews

[Brahm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book I wanted to read when I read The War on Normal People by Andrew Yang: Forget dives deep into basic income and how it could be deployed in Canada.

The first thing I learned is that in Canada "we" (people who talk and think about this issue, in-depth, in Canada) typically don't talk about Universal Basic Income (or as Yang calls it, the "Freedom Dividend") where everyone in the country gets a cheque. The most probable model for Canadians is a "guaranteed livable income" or "basic income guarantee" which is also sometimes referred to as a "negative income tax". A handy way to remember this is "Mincome" (minimum basic income), which is also the name of a pilot program in Manitoba in the 1970s. Low earners receive basic income up to a certain amount, with a graduated cutoff that simultaneously encourages work and doesn't penalize people for earning just barely more than the minimum.

This book was persuasive as to the need for a basic income program in Canada, and fairly detailed in how it might be deployed. I deployed multiple stacks of page tabs on this one and I'll collect and highlight some of the most interesting takeaways for me:

1. Basic income in Canada is most commonly proposed as complimentary to most public services and would not replace public health care, education, daycare programs, public transit, or extra support programs for people with disabilities, Northern populations, people aging out of the foster care system, and more. It's designed to be a financial floor beneath which no one should live. (p20-21)

2. I had no idea how horrifically complicated and adversarial provincial income assistance programs are. In Ontario, there are over "800 rules, 240 benefit rates, 50 children's benefit rates, and 30 plus specialised benefits". Consent of a recipient's caseworker is required for registering in educational programs, and recipients have onerous and invasive reporting requirements. "Any gift, including even a gift of groceries from a family member, was listed as income and reduced the benefit". (p29) Later in the book the word "paternalistic" (p177) is used, and I harbour approximately all of the doubts that the gub'mint knows best, all the time.

3. "The biggest difference between a basic income and provincial income assistance is that basic income would not rely on the discretion, intervention, or interpretation of a caseworker. The amount received would be based solely on income" (p30). To me, I am far from anti-government but I am certainly not OK with the idea of the idea of government micromanaging anyone's daily lives. I was listening to Jeffery Madoff on the Tim Ferriss podcast today, and he had a great quote like (paraphrased), "if you want things to get done, don't have meetings. Write cheques".

4. "Provincial income assistance has been a system predicated on crisis and dependence. It was established to respond to crisis, and it perpetuates a situation where a recipient is always on the edge of crisis". (p38) Since Mincome would supplement programs designed to handle crises, but not replace crisis programs, no worries.

5. Mincome (and similar experiments) have shown interference- and caseworker-free basic income programs have more successful outcomes for full-time employment than similar programs that require regular or periodic reporting to a caseworker. Less bureaucracy and more autonomy better encouraged work. The absence of reporting and work requirements enabled recipients to find better jobs than just taking any job offer. (p61-62)

6. Big returns on population health and reductions in hospital admissions and doctor visits in basic income experiments (p79 and the whole chapter, "Basic Income and Population Health"). Most modern health issues are diseases of excess and/or poverty.

7. This book was updated in late 2020 and has lots of great comparisons to CERB. CERB was not designed as a basic income, and one of its flaws was a fixed cap on receiving income AND the benefit. One could earn up to $1,000 in a month and receive the $2,000 benefit, but if someone earned $1,001 (or more) they are ineligible for the benefit. This put a lot of low earners and variable-hour workers in a conundrum to return to work in uncertain conditions. (p99). The idea Forget is getting to is that low income workers should not have to absorb economic recessions they don't cause.

8. The author provided some thoughtful considerations about reconciliation in the context of basic income. "I have treated basic income as a simple redistribution policy and made no attempt to justify it beyond the desire to reduce income insecurity. However, basic income can be thought of as a dividend payable to residents for the use of the original resources of the land". (p139). In the final chapter, Forget also explores the rights of self-government of First Nations peoples and how the federal and provincial governments can work with First Nations governments to implement these programs.

9. Good exploration of concerns about substance abuse and basic income on p151. "Basic income becomes absolutely essential when people have decided to change their lives and work to become sober" - best and most basic point I've seen on this. I have become convinced of the argument that the vast majority of low income people don't need programs and services to improve their lives - they just need some money. (not that programs aren't beneficial, but it's not all they need).

10. What would it cost? A basic income program modelled on a 2010s-era Ontario experiment would be a net cost of $23 billion, about the same as what the Canada Child Benefit costs each year. A similarly probable scenario would include (paraphrased) "increased income tax for higher-income Canadians, eliminated GST credit and Canada Workers Benefit, deleting a bunch of non-refundable tax credits, increasing corporate taxes from 15 to 20% (and from 10.5 to 13.5 for small businesses), and deleting provincial income assistance in favour of a provincial contribution to the program. (p205). p224 clarifies that the top 20% of Canadians (by income) would likely be the ones financing the program: it can't be all on the backs of the 1%. This will be hard, Forget continues, because many people in the top 20% see themselves as middle-class, and no one really loves tax increases no matter how noble the cause.

11. "The costs of a basic income therefore depend on how well the economy is doing... the fluctuating costs [...] are not a design flaw, but rather a beneficial feature. The basic income program absorbs the risks of economic change so that it doesn't fall on the backs of individual workers and families who can least afford it". (p210)

12. Major challenge: The federal gov't would have to spearhead the program, but income assistance is a provincial responsibility which the provinces will "jealously guard". (p214)

I did have a few pet peeves about the book:

1. Overall, it could have been shorter. The book would have been more engaging if it were a bit concise and tighter. (says the guy posting the monster length review)

2. In a few places, the author uses average instead of median to describe income, which I think is unreliable and/or slightly deceptive. For example, p138: "The average total income for a First Nations Person was $31,519 - 66 per cent of that received by a non-Indigenous person".

Averages are deceiving because the "fat tails" - the outliers at the far end of the distribution (in this example, Canada's highest Indigenous and non-Indigenous earners) skew the averages. If you compute the average wealth of 1,000,000 people, the average is meaningless if the sample included Bill Gates and Elon Musk and 999,998 randomly selected humans. The median is more representative of what someone "in the middle" actually earns.

In this specific example, I would (sadly) be unsurprised to learn that Canada's 1% is mostly non-Indigenous, dragging up the average income for that group. I would also (sadly) be unsurprised to learn that the median income for Indigenous peoples is less than that of non-Indigenous peoples. My point is I am guessing the discrepancy in the medians would be smaller than the difference in averages, and this better reflects reality.

3. On p168, in a chapter called "Mythbusting" Forget says, "there will, however, no general increase in all prices when a basic income is introduced". I can't quite reconcile this with many discussions throughout the book on how basic income will put pressure on employers to improve working conditions and increase their wages (which both cost money, which is always passed to the consumer as for-profit businesses are not charities!), and a chapter on implementation where one scenario proposes an increase in corporate and small business taxes (p204-205). Maybe the weasel word on p168 is "all [prices]" - because at least some prices will go up as cost increases are passed to consumers.

Summary: Great, and more importantly current Canadian book to read on basic income, why we should pursue it, how it can be implemented, and what it will take. Highly recommend if you're interested in the topic.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a self-employed and gig economy worker, I am one of those individuals who is not eligible for employment insurance and so for people like me, a basic income of some form makes total sense. I had the opportunity to attend an online seminar with Evelyn Forget in the early part of 2021 and also decided to read her book. This edition is a revised edition to reflect the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic which demonstrated that benefits are easily distributed through the tax system. Forget presents her case for basic income by explaining how it would help certain demographics deal with poverty through research, particularly in regards to the Mincome experiment in Manitoba in the 1970s, how it would be paid for and why there is an urgent need. A good primer on this important social issue.

[ruby harrington · Rating 2 out of 5]

more like 2.5 stars

i agree that a basic income is essential, but some of her arguments are unconvincing. particularly in the myth busting section, the evidence can be unclear. for example, she says that prices of goods and services won’t increase because it hasn’t happened before with things like rental assistance or CCB. but those arent universally applied programs like the one she proposes.

loblaws is greedy — if they know everyone has more money, they will charge more money and eat the revenue increase, not passing it onto workers. the same with landlords.

she does a good job of outlining the benefits of a basic income, though i’m not sure the arguments needed to be as long and drawn out as they were. there was one group that i was expecting her to go more in depth about, and that was indigenous communities in canada. in the intro, she mentions how the MMIWG inquiry recommended a basic income, and continues to mention the impacts on indigenous peoples throughout the book, but they are far apart and not in depth, unlike her chapter on basic income and women.

[Marilyn Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kudos to Evelyn Forget for keeping the conversation going and building a case for basic income. Unfortunately, I found that I was more skeptical about feasibility after reading the book. Discretion and autonomy - dignity and respect ... The "why" is convincing but the explanation of the "how" is less persuasive and I didn't see a clear path forward suggesting there is more work to be done on this front. Basic income is an issue that has gained a lot of attention during the pandemic and I highly recommend this book to anyone who is sitting on the fence regarding this issue.

[Ellie O'Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great info - dry read, except for some anecdotes she includes in the middle.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely a must-read for anyone who believes that the divide between the rich and poor in this country must be reversed for the betterment of all of us.