“There is no economic or moral justification for the poverty afflicting millions of people in Canada—one of the richest places on earth. In this timely, passionate, and convincing book, Jamie Swift and Elaine Power invoke the powerful vision of basic income to inspire a fundamental rethinking of poverty and how to fight it.”

JIM STANFORD, economist and director,
Centre for Future Work

“This book should be required reading for every current and aspiring politician.”

PAUL TAYLOR, executive director, Foodshare Toronto

“An interesting and timely book on what basic income can mean to so many people—a leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. Jamie Swift and Elaine Power vividly capture the struggles and dreams of the precious working class in Canada, allowing people with experiences of poverty and aspirations for self-betterment to speak for themselves and make themselves heard.”

MOHAMMAD FERDOSI, co-author, Southern Ontario’s
Basic Income Experience

“Anyone interested in social justice should read this book. Swift and Power trace the emergence of the idea of a basic income in Canada and globally. They focus on how the Ontario pilot made a real change in the lives of those who participated. Using the words of participants, they tell a story of hope. Some see the cost of a basic income as out of reach. However, reading this book will convince you it would be money well spent!”

WAYNE LEWCHUK, co-author, Southern Ontario’s
Basic Income Experience

“For forty long years, Ayn Rand–blessed politicos have preached that ‘the greatest good’ belongs to those who achieve the ‘greatest gain’ (even if by theft or fraud), so ‘labour pools’ and ‘capital flows’—‘efficiently.’ But the COVID-19 pandemic—like the Great Depression nearly a century ago—has proven the free market a hoax. There’s no way for democratic societies to achieve ‘Freedom, Security, Justice,’ unless citizens demand that governments return renminbi (the people’s money) to the people, in part by providing a basic income.”

GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE, E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian
Literature, University of Toronto

“In this timely contribution, Swift and Power make a powerful case for basic income as a transformative poverty reduction strategy with the potential to reinforce a welfare state apparatus eroded by decades of neoliberal policies. The authors use the personal narratives of former OBIP participants to illustrate in vivid detail how basic income can change the lives of those who receive it for the better.”

TOM MCDOWELL, department of politics and public
administration, Ryerson University

“The COVID-19 pandemic has surely taught us that we need societal resilience. This book adds to the growing body of evidence that only a basic income as an anchor of a new income distribution system would provide us with that resilience.”

GUY STANDING, author of Basic Income:
And How We Can Make It Happen

“In the not-too-distant future, Canadians will look back and try to remember how we made possible a guarantee that everyone would have an income sufficient to live a modest life with dignity. This wonderful book captures the stories of the tireless activists and real basic income experts—those who tried to survive with the broken social systems of the past. It documents the opportunities lost when Ontario cancelled its prescient basic income guarantee experiment, but it also captures the hope and optimism that will ultimately prevail.”

EVELYN FORGET, author of Basic Income for Canadians:
From the COVID-19 Emergency to Financial Security for All

“This urgent case study brings to life a grassroots movement whose time has come. Swift and Power write passionately from the inside, shining a vital lens on Ontario’s fight for basic income.”

JOHN GREYSON, queer filmmaker/activist

“In a most touching and compelling manner, the authors underscore the vital role that the Ontario Basic Income Pilot played in the lives of participants. They also identify how a guaranteed livable basic income could help address current economic, social, and health crises, as well as the massive systemic inequality laid bare by COVID-19 and the patchwork of federal, provincial, and municipal responses. In addition to challenging myths and discriminatory attitudes of critics and naysayers of various political persuasions, the authors discuss how everyone will benefit from basic income initiatives, in no small part because of the ways they provide insurance against current and future unpredictable life events.”

THE HONOURABLE KIM PATE, C.M., Senator for Ontario

Foreword

Dr. Danielle Martin

Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.

—Rudolf Virchow

At the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was worried about a lot of people.

As a family doctor, I knew that the impact of the virus would be felt in different ways by different patients in my practice. An 86-year-old retired lawyer was living alone and found himself cut off from his kids, grandkids, and social circle. He knew he was at higher risk of getting seriously ill, but longed for the simple pleasure of a meal with friends or a hug from a loved one. A young woman with a history of anxiety, pregnant with her first baby, was terrified of giving birth in the hospital, knowing that people with the virus were being cared for in the same building.

But I kept thinking about that dance teacher.

I knew she owned a small business teaching ballroom dancing and how much she loved it. And I knew that when the lockdown came and her studio was closed indefinitely, this extroverted and expressive woman with a huge smile would be hanging by a thread. I called her to check in. “I’m okay,” she assured me as soon as she picked up the phone. “I’m on the CERB.”

At that moment, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy were stabilizing the incomes of tens of thousands of Canadians, preventing them from losing their housing and enabling them to put food on the table. The impact on people’s lives was obvious—but what may have been less obvious to some was the impact on their health.

In Canada, we pride ourselves on having designed systems of essential health services that are available to everyone. Those systems are deeply imperfect, but the uncoupling of health insurance from being employed is still a powerful force for health. At the height of the pandemic, as at all other times, Canadians could access necessary testing, physician visits, and, if necessary, hospital and even ICU care without having to worry about whether their insurance would cover it or whether they would have to take out a second mortgage to pay for their care.

But the CERB was as much an investment in health as any of those systems. More than anything we do for people in operating rooms or clinics, in chemotherapy suites or with high-tech diagnostic machines, reducing or ending poverty has always been the best investment we can make in health. Children born into low-income families start out with worse health than those born into high-income families; those differences persist throughout their lives and then are passed on to their own children. From lower birth weights to higher rates of asthma, more chronic disease to shorter life expectancy, poverty makes people sick.

And as we keep learning, sometimes at great human cost, poverty is only one facet of a complex set of social dynamics that shape health. Being a woman, a racialized person, a worker in a precarious job in the gig economy, a person with a disability—these factors and others intersect with people’s experiences of poverty and make it even harder to live to the fullest.

To protect people from the full blow of economic insecurity is to protect their housing, their nutritional status, their ability to fill their prescriptions for chronic disease, their sense of stability, and—through all those channels and more—their mental and physical health. The CERB was an imperfect experiment in a Basic Income, just as the Canada Child Benefit, Old Age Security, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement have all been. And like those programs, the CERB stood like an antiviral shield between people such as that dance teacher and ill health.

In The Case for Basic Income: Freedom, Security, Justice, Jamie Swift and Elaine Power document the many powerful arguments in support of a Basic Income guarantee. The simplicity of its design, which appeals across the political spectrum. The humanity of releasing people from the grinding work of filling out forms, standing in line, and filling out more forms to prove their “worthiness.” The uncoupling of gendered definitions of labour from the ability to feed one’s family. The higher-order principles of justice and community that are shifting in the gig economy. The book also honours the narratives of so many people whose advocacy has paved the route to the ongoing conversation about BI in Canada. All those who are joining the global movement in support of “freedom from want” stand on the shoulders of the many giants whose stories are honoured in these chapters.

Neither money nor health is an end in itself. Both are building blocks for a meaningful life. As the authors point out in Chapter 8, sometimes a basic income allows people to imagine different forms of work, to engage in caregiving for children or elders, or to clear some of the mind-space previously filled with preoccupations about which bills to pay in what order. Like health, financial security is an invisible building block for the ways in which we want to participate in our communities. For many decades, that conversation sat outside much of mainstream political debate. But in a heartbeat, with the arrival of the global pandemic of 2020, something shifted. It is now hard to imagine that we can ever go back to traditional models of social assistance and income support.

My patient weathered the storm of COVID-19. She didn’t have much left at the end of the month, but when the rug was pulled out from under her in the midst of a national lockdown, she didn’t lose her health insurance and she didn’t lose her home. Just as that health insurance had been uncoupled from her employment because of medicare, her income security had been similarly uncoupled from her employment because of a new income security program that allowed her to assure me “I’m okay.” That simplicity and decency of spirit is what underpins strong social programs like medicare and, as we begin to heal from the pandemic, the Basic Income guarantee that we must now put in place for all Canadians.

Dr. Danielle Martin is a family physician in Toronto, founder of Canadian Doctors for Medicare, and an advocate for health equity and health system improvement.

ON BASIC INCOME

A poem by George Elliott Clarke 2020

The economy’s an abyss whose bottom is a grave,

And each tightrope walker wobbles as a mere wage-slave.

And those who freefall, screaming, screeching, as they go,

Clutching for handholds or toeholds, only hope to slow

Their plummet to a crashing or a smashing that’ll whack

Wallet and skull, household and heart, for debt’s the crack—

The airy nothing through which poor and jobless catapult—

Down, down, down, to either suicide or homicide result.

Capitalism insists each citizen’s alone

To bargain with Fate and to barter blood and bone—

To work the best deal each can despite layoff

Or disease, bankruptcy or injury, and to play off

Labourer against labourer, to suffer or succeed,

As individuals, whatever shall be the collective need.

But yet a contradiction is ever starkly evident:

Businesses can’t sell products to customers indigent.

No matter how rich the rich, the people own greater riches—

For our tax dollars are ours to fulfil all our wishes.

Why not weave ourselves a mass, protective web

To catch all who tumble, whether the poor or pleb,

Off the high-wire of capitalist high-jinks and low-down tricks,

The badly frayed ropes and the greasy balancing sticks.

Why not grant ourselves—because the people’s money’s ours—

Platforms to stand on, cushions to land on, fail-safe moors?

Time to paraphrase the bards John Lennon and Yoko Ono!

Basic Income is ours; we can have it; purely pro bono—

If we want it. We can have it if we want it—just like health care,

U.I., the baby bonus, public transit, public schools, welfare. . . .

There’s no end to what we can do to improve our lives

Against all odds, if we’ll stand as one against capitalist thieves.

Basic Income is the price of bottom-line social equality:

So that all can ascend—escaping Poverty’s gravity.

George Elliott Clarke started as a songwriter, and he has worked with opera composers, as well as blues, gospel, folk, and rap. He was the fourth Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012–15) and the seventh Parliamentary Canadian Poet Laureate (2016–17). He has published twenty-six works of poetry since 1983, plus three books in Chinese, Italian, and Romanian. A pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, UBC, McGill, and Harvard. He is a seventh-generation Afro-Métis of Nova Scotia.

INTRODUCTION

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

—Jane Addams, 1892

Captain Ahab. Nurse Ratched. Darth Vader. Villains have long stalked the pages of fiction and cinema screens. Irredeemable nasties, symbolizing evil. One villain stands out, however, because he eventually saw the light. He became a good guy after seeing the error of his ways.

His creator caught the spirit of his times so successfully that both his name and that of his character became catchwords—we talk about the “Dickensian” era and someone who is being a “Scrooge.” Charles Dickens hammered away at the spirit of greed during the “Hungry Forties” of the nineteenth century. The protagonist of the massively successful 1843 novella A Christmas Carol was, of course, Ebenezer Scrooge—“a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.”

It was the heyday of unrestrained free-market individualism in England, cradle of capitalism. Dickens used a half-dozen adjectives to capture the era’s zeitgeist. The “undeserving poor” were paupers without jobs, whom the state forced into prisons called “workhouses”—the conditions of which were purposely made as grim as possible since their aim was to discourage people from claiming poor relief.

In A Christmas Carol, a couple of do-gooder businessmen approach Mr. Scrooge, a successful entrepreneur, seeking a Christmas donation to help those paupers still “outside,” resisting the workhouse. The miserly capitalist responds, “Are there no prisons? . . . And the union workhouses, are they still in operation?” When told that these institutions were still working with full vigour but many poor people would rather die than enter, Scrooge famously replies, “If they would rather die, then they’d better do so at once and decrease the surplus population.”

Of course, things have changed since the Hungry Forties. Capitalism is constantly adapting over time as social movements work to dull its sharp edges. Yet there remain two constants, both amplified by the pandemic that struck the world in 2020. One is that many are excluded, left in poverty and hunger, just as they were in the 1840s. Hunger, rebranded food insecurity, persists in Canada today.

Some two centuries after the industrial revolution was transforming England, the 2020 pandemic offered a mirror and a spotlight, highlighting our society’s brokenness. Around the world, COVID-19, a new disease caused by a novel coronavirus, consistently took its highest toll in poor communities. In Canada, the disease ravaged neighbourhoods where racialized people, many working in precarious jobs, are crowded into inadequate apartments.

The word vulnerable became common currency, particularly with respect to overcrowded and underfunded institutions housing senior citizens (who, it was quickly discovered, were more likely to succumb to the disease). Three of the outfits that dominate Ontario’s private-sector nursing homes (Sienna, Extendicare, and Chartwell) had disproportionately high numbers of COVID-19 cases. They also, over the ten years leading up to the pandemic, had paid their shareholders over $1.5 billion in dividends.¹

A Canadian Medical Association Journal study, published before the second COVID wave hit, cited a dozen previous academic probes showing the higher prevalence of inferior care and mortality in profit-driven institutions. The study’s own conclusions confirmed that this was the case during the 2020 pandemic in Ontario. For-profit status meant more outbreaks and deaths, though the McMaster University authors were careful to point out that private-sector institutions also tended to be older and more crowded.² They did not discuss the way the $1.5 billion payout reflected management priorities favouring shareholder satisfaction over much-needed facility upgrading for vulnerable seniors, often warehoused four to a room.

Aside from persistent poverty amidst overflowing wealth, the other durable feature of capitalism is its emphasis on freedom. Everyone favours freedom. Laudable though it surely is, freedom is nevertheless contested terrain, meaning different things to different people.

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.”³

Decades of rising inequality since then have exposed free-market fundamentalism, promoted so successfully by Milton Friedman and his acolytes, as a tragic failure. This book examines how a livable, obligation-free Basic Income, actually an old idea, offers a new way to promote a different interpretation of freedom—freedom writ large. From Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century to Karl Polanyi in the twentieth, some social analysts have insisted that the economy cannot be cut off from its social roots, that we owe our wealth and well-being to society and to one another. That we all have a right to a fair share.

“It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for,” wrote Paine, a leading figure in the American and French revolutions.⁴ He supported a universal, no-strings-attached cash payment.

The economic historian and social philosopher Karl Polanyi put forward a radical critique of free-market ideas and their socially corrosive consequences, laying out his complex understanding of the political origins of our times in his 1944 masterwork The Great Transformation. For Polanyi, allowing this thing called the market to take a primary role in organizing society was a historical aberration, unknown in the history of human endeavour before the late eighteenth century and the days of Dickens that followed. Polanyi would have seen Basic Income as part of an effort to re-embed markets in society and democratize prosperity.

It is our contention that the increasing chorus of voices supporting a livable Basic Income, amplified in the wake of the 2020 pandemic, is part of the double movement Polanyi talked about that re-embeds the economy in society: it would enhance freedom while also getting at the root of poverty: people not having sufficient money to live in dignity.

The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) was founded in the 1980s. Since then, many groups with a smaller geographical focus have formed, including the Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) and the Ontario Basic Income Network (OBIN). In 2013, the authors helped to launch the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee, based in Kingston, Ontario.

In 2015, a member of the Kingston Action Group, professor emerita Roberta Hamilton, met with James Janeiro, lead social policy advisor to then Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne and an ardent Basic Income supporter. We would later tell ourselves that we had helped persuade Ontario’s Liberal government to launch a Basic Income pilot project. We definitely succeeded in persuading Kingston City Council to unanimously support Basic Income, making our town the first in Canada to make this move. Given that the motion carried no financial costs, we had no illusions that the support, from across the local political spectrum, was more than symbolic; however, symbolism matters in politics. It also made us feel good, and in a long-haul political struggle, morale matters too.

After months of painstaking drafting by committee, we also concocted what we called, perhaps presumptuously, a “Charter” outlining our vision. The document calls for more than Basic Income, insisting that to be meaningful, unconditional Basic Income must be complemented by other measures to counter the broad effects of free-market fundamentalism. For example, the group identified the following additional needs, among others:

Nonmarket housing (the private sector having shown itself incapable of building affordable shelter)
Comprehensive, publicly funded child care and medication (both essential), and
Higher taxes on capital gains, along with introduction of an inheritance tax (key elements in moving towards a fair taxation regime).

This book examines the politics of Basic Income, scrutinizing the way that a sclerosis of political imagination has paralyzed important parts of the left. Many potential allies worry that a Basic Income would somehow automatically forestall moves to extend public provision to crucial areas like those listed above. We also examine the stubborn sacralization of labour that prevents people more broadly from understanding how Basic Income would promote a decent society. For example, we seek to elucidate the following:

Paid jobs are quite different from so much socially indispensable caring work—indeed, many that are highly paid are also quite useless (e.g., currency speculators, “strategic” communications types).
The rise of precarious work calls for a thoroughgoing shakeup of labour regulation and strengthening of organized labour. Trade unions have for two centuries been indispensable—achieving shorter hours, better pay, and safer working conditions while promoting public policies for the common good. But labour has suffered catastrophic setbacks in recent decades.
Finally, like many Basic Income supporters, we wonder about the coming impact of artificial intelligence and virtually worker-free factories.

We recount stories of people who briefly received a Basic Income as part of the 2017–19 Ontario Basic Income Pilot project, which was cut short by a newly elected government that had promised to carry the pilot through to its end. These stories speak their own truth about so much poverty in such an abundant country. We do not attempt to unravel Basic Income’s tricky policy knots. If ever a proposal was subject to the old saw “the devil is in the details,” Basic Income would be it, particularly in Canada with its overlapping—and often confounding—federal-provincial jurisdictional issues.

As we were starting to write this manuscript in early 2020, the pandemic arrived. Suddenly the overwhelming need for a Basic Income floor became obvious to most Canadians. Millions of jobs melted away, leaving workers with no income. Canada’s Employment Insurance system, decimated by years of cuts, its surpluses diverted to pay down debt, was exposed as a sham.

The mass anxiety that accompanied the pandemic featured what we initially thought of as the “democratization” of insecurity. This gave us hope. Perhaps the sweeping wave of insecurity would lead to a widespread recognition that, for so many, insecurity had long been a way of life. Perhaps the democratization of insecurity would at last lead to the democratization of income security—in the form of a Basic Income.

Sure enough, Ottawa implemented the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. CERB paid jobless people $500 per week until it was replaced by similar measures. Talk of Basic Income, long confined to circles of apparently eccentric idealists like ourselves, popped up like so many rainforest mushrooms. Metaphors matter. The tired old “social safety net,” so often described as frayed, now suggests people falling into an abyss. Maybe it is time for a firm Basic Income—a solid floor below which no one can fall.

Shortly after the pandemic hit, the Financial Times stated baldly that forty years of free-market fundamentalism needed to end. The world’s business paper of record editorialized that “radical reforms” were required. These included “policies until recently considered eccentric, such as Basic Income and wealth taxes” that would have to be placed on the table. The paper acknowledged that such measures were “taboo-breaking,”⁵ reflecting the way that more taxation and more robust public provision had for decades been regarded as laughable within the corridors of state and corporate power.

After neoliberal politics had so long hammered home the “you’reon-your-own” message, corporate titans and politicians were doing a sudden about-face. Cries of “we’re all in this together” and “all hands on deck” were accompanied by the startling recognition that the women struggling to make ends meet as personal support workers (PSWs) were “heroes.” Many were racialized newcomers who kept on working as nursing home residents for whom they had been providing intimate care started to die around them.

After decades of unquestioned pursuit of profit, a sub-microscopic infectious agent had suddenly cast a harsh light on the need for mutual survival. Public health. The common good. The collective ways we look after and care for one another. Long invisible low-wage workers who had been taken for granted—grocery store clerks, cleaners, PSWs, nurses, migrant farm workers, truckers, and so many others—enjoyed a brief flash of public recognition (though one newspaper’s hero list also included bank managers).⁶

And yet, even as transparent plexiglass walls went up to help curtail the disease, a cashier at a Kingston Loblaws supermarket was still working while receiving chemotherapy treatment, her immune system dangerously compromised. For a few weeks, essential workers like her got a two-dollar-per-hour bonus. But Canada’s largest food and drug retailer quickly took it away even though she was, presumably, still essential. The Financial Times put it succinctly: “Despite inspirational calls for national mobilization, we are not really all in this together.”⁷

When free markets do not improve society’s welfare, they can be said to fail. What is the purpose of markets unless they are rooted in society and are beneficial to all? Public policy is required to address these inherent shortcomings.

The 2020 pandemic exposed tragic market failure in Canada. The overwhelming majority of vulnerable elderly people left to die were living in so-called long-term care facilities. To call them “homes” would be a cruel hoax. The lethal places exemplify a market mentality that treats care, a basic human need, as a commodity:

By June 2020, Sienna Living, one of the dominant businesses in the expanding sector, was ravaged by the disease. The provincial Ministry of Long-Term Care reported that 291 of its residents and three staff members had died of COVID-19. The federal government deployed the armed forces to two Sienna buildings to help deal with the catastrophe.⁸ Two of its top managers resigned in disgrace.
By Canada Day, seventy-eight residents of a Pickering, Ontario, long-term care facility (managed by the sprawling Extendicare firm, with net 2019 earnings of $28.6 million) had also died of COVID-19. One in three of the vulnerable customers had perished at the 233-bed place, where the military once again had to be summoned.⁹
By October 2020, Ontario was reporting 1,909 deaths among residents in long-term care facilities. At the height of the pandemic’s first wave, the overall case fatality rate was 28.4 percent.¹⁰ Eight of the workers who had been trying to look after them had also died.¹¹ They were, it seemed, casualties of market failure.

In its formal legal defence against a class-action suit brought by the families of people in long-term care who were dead or had been sickened by this new plague, Ontario’s government—which licenses, inspects, funds, and regulates these institutions—argued that no one backing the suit had “suffered any loss or damages.”

The government then introduced Bill 218, indemnifying for-profit long-term care homes from liability for negligence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Premier Doug Ford had an abiding faith in the civilizing arts of commerce. While campaigning back in 2018, Ford had explained, “I believe in letting the market dictate.”¹²

Basic Income offers one important path out of the let-the-market-decide mindset. We believe it is an idea whose time has come. It would strengthen freedom. Freedom to say no to a job that is poorly paid, boring, or simply nasty. Freedom to work caring for a relative or friend. Freedom to exit an abusive relationship. Freedom to try something new, like a small business. Freedom to do socially and culturally vital work that is unpaid or underpaid. Freedom from bureaucratic snooping by welfare officials. Freedom, to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, to be lazy.

As the pacifist philosopher wrote in 1932, “I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”¹³

THE CASE FOR BASIC INCOME

THE CASE FOR BASIC INCOME

CONTENTS

Foreword

ON BASIC INCOME

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION