The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice

by Jamie Swift, Elaine Power

Inequality is up. Decent work is down. Free market fundamentalism has been exposed as a tragic failure. In a job market upended by COVID-19—with Canadians caught in the grip of precarious labour, stagnant wages, a climate crisis, and the steady creep of automation—an ever-louder chorus of voices calls for a liveable and obligation-free basic income.

Could a basic income guarantee be the way forward to democratize security and intervene where the market economy and social programs fail? Jamie Swift and Elaine Power scrutinize the politics and the potential behind a radical proposal in a post-pandemic world: that wealth should be built by a society, not individuals. And that we all have an unconditional right to a fair share.

In these pages, Swift and Power bring to the forefront the deeply personal stories of Canadians who participated in the 2017–2019 Ontario Basic Income Pilot; examine the essential literature and history behind the movement; and answer basic income’s critics from both the right and left.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, Canada

244 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2021

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice, by Jamie Swift & Elaine Power, is an interesting look at Canadian Basic Income (BI) schemes, notably the canceled pilot project under the Kathleen Wynne's Liberal party in Ontario from 2017-2019, when it was canceled by the Conservative Ford government, who had promised to see the pilot through to completion, thus breaking their own election promise. The pilot project took place in Thunder Bay, Lindsay, and Hamilton, Ontario. Many hundreds of recipients joined the program, and as basic income experiments go, this one was interesting. The authors note that during COVID-19, the Canadian government instituted its own Basic Income structure, called the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which helped those laid off due to the pandemic (this reviewer included).

As a self-described supporter of the center-left and social democrat, I have always been favourable, if skeptical about BI schemes. In Canada especially, BI is touted by members of the Conservative establishment as a means to reduce other welfare provisions. What would a BI matter if one had to pay for healthcare, and lost subsidies for education, medication, and so forth? It is also an excuse for employers to negotiate or remove away employment benefits. The "cost-saving" aspects of BI lead me to believe that, at least in this country, BI could very well be used as a tool to reduce the social safety aspects of Canadian society, something I myself greatly respect and admire (even though there are many legitimate complaints about said safety nets, much to do with continued deregulation by centre and right-leaning governments like the Liberals and Conservatives). This book has done a good job of challenging my beliefs in this field. BI would make an excellent baseline for lower-income Canadians and must be married to existing social welfare schemes. The cost of BI would be easily recuperated by the increased livelihood of the recipients, and the opportunities opened up to them. One of the great fallacies of market fundamentalism is the old "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" meme, which is easy to say, but impossible to do without liquid assets. Increasing take-home income for individuals allows for greater nutritional intake, better health, more exercise, and thus more energy, time and resources for education, opportunities to build businesses, gain employment, clean living spaces, and so forth. All of these outcomes are extremely beneficial not only to the individual, but to society as a whole. Such benefits for society include reduced health care costs, greater employment numbers, increased productivity, and more entrepreneurial spirit, just to name a few.

The authors of this book have done an excellent job not only examining the history of Basic Income in Canada, such as the Minecome experiment in Manitoba, but also examining the ideological against BI from both the left and right, as well as the poverty reduction aspects that BI brings to the table. This book also offers some hopeful notes on the future of BI in Canada, even though the last experiment was so brutally canceled and its research benefits trashed by an ideologically bent Conservative government in Ontario, one that has not served the public of this province very well at all over its four-year term. One can hope that BI projects will continue to glean new information in Canada, and hopefully, after two grueling years of market failures during a pandemic, Canada will get wise to the issues of market fundamentalism, and improve the welfare of Canadians for the benefit of both individuals, and the community as a whole. This will be a great read for those interested in Basic Income as a concept, or in studying social welfare principles and techniques.

[Nigel]

Same author as Vimy trap 🪤, with Ian McKay, and with Jamie swift writes universal basic income for all.
Found this book with Jamie swift…


Talks about how universal basic income can went to 8 million people in Canada but 4 million cannot access it because it didn’t work for $5000 in a year and sometimes they have to go back to work even in dangerous situations and they made too much in the year, so they couldn’t collect but had to go back to work in life threading situation for them with Cerb.

How people in poverty were propagandee of Covid doesn’t discriminate that was a lie. It was that Covid. There were people in boats on the ocean, somewhere in boats and didn’t have to worry about deviating course others were in boats with oars or without row oars barely making buyers sinking or flowing wherever the ocean took them that’s a better description of how Covid affected people.

The more people are on the top of what’s happened to the middle class not what has happened to the bottom class that’s where the tack is or the propaganda…

Not where the bottom is …. A bottom line is.

Here during Covid that they had to call in the military to work in senior centres because he’s probably owned were putting money in stockholders or dividend returns rather than actually helping workers who had to work in multiple facilities and not mention that most senior homes were the most risky Dying 2/3 more risky than other senior centres cause of poverty.

[Venky · Rating 4 out of 5]

The early part of the twentieth century birthed an extraordinary concept, where the ethics of work was deemed synonymous with the concepts of diligence, discipline and frugality. Termed the Protestant work ethic, this philosophy was first purveyed by the German sociologist, Max Weber. Also known as the Calvinist or Puritan work ethic, this thinking laid the steppingstone for the birth of capitalism. Unwittingly, the Protestant work ethic also resulted in a “sacralization” of work. Irrespective of the quality, indignity, brutality, or even futility of the nature of the job, the employee or worker was supposed to bear the same as a badge of honour. This entrenched dogma has led to a sustained and consistent opposition to schemes such as Universal Basic Income (“UBI”) or Guaranteed Basic Income. Politicians as well as taxpayers, irrespective of the ideologies they espouse seem to stand on a harmonized footing in their deplorably common belief that any scheme involving an unconditional payment of money would in the larger scheme of things, turn out to be a deleterious “largesse” encouraging sloth and vice. Award winning Canadian journalist Jamie Swift and Head of Department of Gender Studies in University of Toronto, Elaine Power, set out in gut wrenching detail the timely conception and untimely evisceration of a Universal Basic Income Pilot (“UBIP”) Project in Toronto.

Indefatigable efforts expended by the likes of Hugh Segal, former Senator, political strategist and a vociferous proponent of Basic Income, and health economist at the University of Manitoba, Evelyn Forget, whose meticulous revealing of 1,800 boxes of raw data from a similar Basic Income Project in Mincome in the 1970s lent further credence to the concept, resulted in the region of Lindsay being selected as the ‘saturation’ for the institution of a Universal Basic Income Pilot (“UBIP”). Supposed to be for a duration of three years, the Project was flagged off by former Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne in late 2017. However, in spite of its tremendous success (as attested to by the beneficiaries of the scheme) the UBIP was brought to a grinding halt by the newly elected Premier Doug Ford, a Member of the Progressive Conservative Party. Ford, within days of terminating the scheme announced with great pomp and splendour his intention to reduce the cost of beer to just one buck. Talking about priorities!

As Swift and Power beautifully illustrate, the COVID-19 pandemic that is wreaking wanton havoc across the globe has brought to light a new set of unsung heroes in the form of essential workers, and health care providers. But while the world was temporarily honouring these ‘heroes’ a precarious socio-economic situation still ensured that these people were forced to put their lives in danger by taking the public transport on a daily basis and ensuring that there was no interruption in their services to the general public. However, with some of these essential workers taking on multiple roles especially as caregivers in old age homes, the risks to both the caring and the cared takes on ominous proportions. The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that some ten thousand long-term care workers were infected. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the need for ushering in safety and security for the economically underprivileged and racialized segments of the society. The Canadian Government, responding to this clamour introduced the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (“CERB’). A whopping eight million Canadians applied for benefits under CERB. However as the authors illustrate an incorrigible linking of paid employment with CERB ensured that close to 1.4 million Canadians did not qualify for CERB. Again the sacralization of work had reared its ugly head.

With two Canadian billionaires Galen Weston and David Thomson enjoying the same proportion of wealth as is the prerogative of the poorest 30 percent of Canada, establishing exclusion criteria for a UBI only goes on to accentuate the perils of inequality. As the authors illustrate, Canada has always been a fertile ground for propagating the benefits of Basic Income. The Basic Income Canada Network (“BICN”) in fact as the authors write, “published the first-ever detailed set of policy options for a Canadian Basic Income, identified as an unconditional cash transfer from the state to individual people.” In a landmark report issued as long back as in 1971, the Special Senate Committee on Poverty headed by Senator David Croll, recommended a national Basic Income Plan to be income-tested and funded by the federal government. There was also the Mincome Project established in Winnipeg and Ottawa in 1974, with predominant funding provided by the federal government. The Canadian Council on Social Development (“CCSD”), supported a guaranteed annual income initiative christened as “CORE”, in the 1980s. CORE, critically strived to accord recognition and importance to what Swift and Power term to be an “amorphous” category of “community Development”, along with “voluntary work, education and training, and child rearing.” Thus an auspicious beginning was made towards an attempt at “desacralization” and redefinition of work.

Riding on the back of such illustrious and formidable social initiatives, the UBIP was kicked off with great fanfare, when in April 2007, Premiere Wynn stood before four thousand people from Hamilton-Brantford, Lindsay, and Thunder Bay to inaugurate the Pilot. The proposal was for every beneficiary to receive $17,000 per year. The programme was a resounding success as it enabled many people otherwise dependent on food banks and disability benefits to hope for a life of dignity, self esteem and good health. Single mothers such as Jodi Dean, whose daughter Madi Dean was suffering from an incurably debilitating disorder such as osteogenesis imperfecta, and patients such as Lance Dingman who, a fall and eighteen surgeries later still chose to lead a life of independence and courage, were immensely benefitted by the UBIP as were multiple other small business owners and labourers.

Yet Doug Ford and his party decided to pull the plug on a perfectly well functioning UBIP, just 8 months into its introduction. This was a scheme that taken an immense load of stress off its beneficiaries and lent them a degree of status and confidence. Behavioural psychologist Eldar Shafir and behavioural economist, Sendhil Mullainathan, “showed that reducing stress about money allowed people to think more clearly.” Ford and his party were egged on in their indiscreet action by the likes of the vitriolic Brian Lilley. A columnist for the Sun, Lilley terms the UBI “stupid” and rails against it at every given opportunity. This is in stark contrast to the views of long standing and rabid UBI advocates such as Guy Standing, Philippe Van Parjis and Yannick Vanderborght, who are steadfast in their opinion that building a Basic Income floor simply “helps equalize what people are given and more roughly “what they might achieve with what they are given”.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle holds forth on the virtues of a contemplative life and articulates how happiness can be established through virtue. Perhaps it is time to bring this simple yet profound philosophy to bear. It is time to undertake a brave and timely “desacralization” of work. A delinking that would ensure that in times of rampant robotization and automation, displaced workers can still find their footing. To quote Daniel Susskind in his seminal work, “A World Without Work”, “economists had thought that to accomplish a task, a computer had to follow explicit rules articulated by a human being — that machine capabilities had to begin with two-down application of human intelligence.” But machines are “now deriving entirely new rules, unrelated to those that human beings follow. This is not a semantic quibble, but a serious shift. Machines are no longer riding on the coattails of human intelligence.”

A UBI is not just to ensure that a harassed worker escapes a bad boss and still manages to lead a life of basic sufficiency and adequacy, although this in itself is good enough a reason. A UBI however goes beyond this. It attempts to bestow facilitate an aspiring yet economically debilitated individual to find genuine purpose in life. With this book, Jamie Swift and Elaine Power do much more than just add credibility to this proposition.

(The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice by Jamie Swift and Elaine Power is published by Between The Lines and will be released on the 3rd of May 2021)

[Josiah Coolen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super well researched and the authors back up all their claims with reputable sources. That made it feel a pretty dense at times and there were chunks of the book I really had to work at. It definitely makes a convincing case for BI, but I'm not sure how accessible (in terms of readability) it is to people not used to reading academic literature.

That being said, I found the case studies really interesting, especially the brief BI pilot in Hamilton!

[Ainsley Jeffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, but maybe a bit brief overview of the history of basic income programs in Ontario, including the three city initiative cancelled by the Ford government in 2018. I enjoyed the storytelling elements, but could have emphasized the impact of CERB more on universal basic income.

[Tracy Trofimencoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is in my top 3 of non-fiction books for the year 2021. The authors have included very relevant and current research to support their work. The authors reference experts in the field of basic income and economics along with social policy. The book includes a very good overview of what basic income is and how is can benefit our society. I was especially interested in the case studies around my hometown of Hamilton Ontario but also the inclusion of Lindsay Ontario and Thunder Bay Ontario. I also appreciated the first-hand accounts of those who received Basic Income during the very short pilot program. It brought a much needed human face to the issue. I also liked how the authors did not shy away from the opposition around this policy citing examples of where Basic Income may fail. Overall, the argument for Basic Income was successful in this book.

[Xylia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good primer on basic income within the context of Canada from 2017 and beyond.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book which argues for basic income is Canadian based & while not a primer offers a lot of institutional information about groups advocating for UBI along with the subjective experiences of those in need of UBI or who have benefited from it. While the book offers interesting insights especially in the Canadian context it would be nice to have more theoretical background about how UBI would actually work.

"Free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman had since the 1960s been instrumental in persuading politicians and pundits of his interpretation of freedom. As early as 1962, the influential right-wing economist argued that true liberty means freedom from government regulation and freedom for capitalists to spend their money where, when, and how they desire. He insisted that "underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." 24

"The Macdonald Commissions's UISC would have:
Eliminated the vitally important Pearson-era Canada Assistance Plan, a cost-sharing arrangement under which Ottawa underwrote provincial and social programs. Jean Chretien's subsequent Liberal government, also in thrall to let-the-market decided thinking, ended it anyway in the 1990s.
Killed nonmarket housing programs. These were also terminated under Chretien.
Eliminated the venerable family allowance program. This was replaced by tax-based measures in the last days of the Mulroney government.
Replaced Guaranteed Income Supplement, a notable success in cutting poverty among seniors. Cutting benefits for seniors was a non-starter, and this survived.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, both Conservative and Liberal governments deployed individualist rhetoric that urged those singing to the bottom to stop depending on the state." 66

"Corporate Canada gets to maintain the illusion that food banks are taking care of hunger. It's better than paying more taxes to support income security programs. Or paying employees living wages and providing full-time hours and benefits. All of which means that many have learned to disconnect the problem of hunger from its root source-lack of income." 146

"This old idea marked a return to market fundamentalism, a faith in free-market capitalism's ability to determine social outcomes. It is fundamentalism because "the term conveys the quasi-religious certainty expressed by contemporary advocates (perhaps apostles is more appropriate) of market self-regulation. It has much more commonly come to be described as neoliberalism, the prefix new suggesting the resurgence of nineteenth-century let-the-market-decide individualism. In the Anglosphere, unfettered capitalism had enjoyed a free run during a century of ideological hegemony until the disaster of the Great Depression in the 1930s." 150

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobook read by: Nathalie Toriel
Never has so hopeful a book been so disheartening. This book makes it clear that the Canadian government has all the information to make the benefits of a basic income obvious, yet still the federal and provincial governments hesitate or outright refuse to implement one.

[Jason Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of why a Basic Income is so desperately needed. The ending felt abrupt and I felt it really missed any analysis of the Basic Income Pilot in Thunder Bay and impact on indigenous peoples. Some parts felt very reptitive, but overall solid read.

[Kristine R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book made some very interesting points; that said, it was hard to get past the fact that it seemed to indicate that there is only one valid approach, and it was the one from the pilot that was cancelled.

[Mike Thomas]

Good resource.

[Alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐️ 4.5