Basic Income Guarantee campaign comes to South Frontenac

Jeff Green | Jan 27, 2016

As a mother, a registered nurse, and more recently the wife of a United Church minister, Debra McAuslan has witnessed the effects of poverty on people. She also remembers a time when she had financial struggles of her own.

She was living in London, Ontario, working part-time as an RN because she had a young family, when her first marriage broke apart. “I returned to my parents’ home in the country, and even with the help of my parents and my siblings, and a nurse’s wages, it was a real struggle for me to get back on my feet. For those without all the advantages I had, the struggle is massive,” she said, in a telephone interview from her home near Railton (South of Sydenham) early this week.

McAuslan has been involved in the campaign to replace the existing social support programs such as Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Programs with a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG).

“The idea is to take away the stigma and the penalties associated with maintaining eligibility for benefits, and save the cost of administering federal, provincial and municipal programs. Instead the concept is that anyone who earns less than the poverty line would receive an automatic payment to bring them just above the poverty line,” she said.

The idea of a basic income guarantee, sometimes under other names, has been around for decades, but has never been enacted in Canada, although there was a pilot project in Dauphin, Manitoba, in the 1970s.

The project was brought in by the Trudeau Liberals in 1974, and was abandoned in 1978 when a recession hit. Under the project, which was called “Mincome”, families registered their income and received extra money each month to reach the poverty line.

Studies of various kinds were done as part of the pilot but when the program was cut, the data that had been collected was set aside. Two thousand boxes of documents were released to Evelyn Forget, a researcher from the University of Manitoba, in 2009 after she undertook a five-year struggle to obtain them.

According to Ron Hickel, the man who administered the Mincome program, those who opposed the program did not want studies to show it was a success; and those who supported it did not want studies to show it had been too expensive.

Forget has found that the program was more expensive than predicted, but her studies on health benefits, measured by declines in hospital visits and other uses of the health care system, indicate that savings to that system were also greater than anticipated.

James Mulvale, a social work professor from Saskatchewan, has written extensively on guaranteed income programs. He said that there are a number of programs in the same vein in Canada, but they are targeted at specific groups such as seniors and children.

He favours using the tax system as a mechanism for delivering the benefit. Those who earn under the minimum would see a tax payment each year, and as income goes up, so would taxes, as is the case now.

One of the aspects of the current support system that most bothers Debra McAuslan, is the fact that in her view there is a disincentive for recipients to work.

“I know a woman who had taken a seasonal summer job and paid up all her bills. In August her cheque was docked. When I heard this I had a fit. It just broke my heart,” she said.

The City of Kingston passed a motion on December 15, 2015 expressing its support for the Basic Income Guarantee. A request to support the concept was sent to other municipalities, including those in Frontenac County.

McAuslan addressed the issue at South Frontenac Council on Tuesday night, January 26.