York Region leaders hear calls for basic income guarantee
Minimum annual income "would more than pay for itself": Queen's University associate professor Elaine Power

YorkRegion.com
June 10, 2015
By Lisa Queen

Is income security the next BIG idea?

About 50 community leaders from across York Region gathered in Richmond Hill July 3 to promote the idea of ensuring Canadians have access to a basic income guarantee (BIG) so they have enough money for food and other fundamental needs.

Not only would income security spare people the indignity of going to food banks, but it would reroute taxpayer money now spent on health and social programs while giving low-income earners the opportunity to contribute to their local economies, Queen’s University associate Prof. Elaine Power said.

“It feels like an idea whose time has come,” said Power, who has been studying food insecurity for 20 years.

“We see this, really, as the centerpiece and the foundation of a renewal of a different vision of Canada, of a more caring and compassionate Canada, We’re not talking about a luxurious standard of living.”

Power, who floated the idea of $20,000 being a possible benchmark, was the guest speaker at the annual food insecurity meeting hosted by the York Region Food Network, the umbrella organization for most of the region’s food banks.

While critics complain a basic income guarantee, also known as a guaranteed annual income, would cost taxpayers too much and pay people to sit at home “drinking beer”, Power maintains that wouldn’t be the case.

While it would require government investments, poverty now costs Canadian taxpayers $80 billion a year in health and social programs, she said.

“In the long term, it would more than pay for itself,” she said, adding Canada would still require other social programs such as a national pharmacare system, affordable child care and supports for people with physical and mental illnesses.

Meanwhile, research indicates people with an income that allows them to “keep body and soul together” are more likely to participate in the workforce and pour their income back into the local economy, she said.

While the goal of ensuring people don’t live in poverty is worthy, the government isn’t committed to a basic income guarantee, Newmarket-Aurora MP Lois Brown said.

“I appreciate the proposal of a universal guaranteed income put forward. The vast majority of Canadians, I believe, would like to see everyone have a minimum quality of life and this is certainly one idea,” she said in an email.

“However, the questions we would need to ask ourselves are: how do we determine who legitimately needs it, can we afford to pay those who don’t and what social programs currently delivered by governments could be eliminated or redirected?”

Richmond Hill Councillor Karen Cilevitz said the BIG idea campaign could dovetail with environmentalist David Suzuki’s Blue Dot movement, to which her municipality has signed on.

The movement promotes Canadians’ inherent right to a healthy environment, healthy food and a say in decisions that affect them.

“Everybody deserves the right to healthy food, sustainable food,” Cilevitz said.

“We don’t want it to put us into a welfare state because there’s no question that’s not what anybody wants, but there has to be a better way to serve those who do not have.”

A basic income guarantee is needed especially in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic downturn, from which we have yet to fully recover and may never completely bounce back, Power said.

The downturn was particularly difficult on young people who, even with post-secondary educations, are finding it extremely difficult to find good jobs and get on their feet, she said.

More than three decades after Canada’s first food bank opened in Edmonton in 1981, we are no closer to achieving food security for low-income Canadians, Joan Stonehocker, executive director of the food network, said.

“From a York Region Food Network perspective, we’ve worked on food insecurity and worked closely with food banks and watched what’s happening in our communities and nothing ever seems to get any better,” she said.

“We’re not going to solve the problem of our neighbours being hungry by donating another box of Kraft Dinner and a can of tomato soup to the local food bank. We do surveys that show people who attend food banks still go hungry, so we need to look at a bigger solution and this BIG idea or basic income guarantee really does resonate in terms of… opening our imagination and creating a society where we value different things, taking away some of the individualism and being more collective and caring for each other.”

It’s time to change the system, Stonehocker said.

 “There is plenty of food out there. (It’s) the indignity of having to go to a food bank and get your Kraft Dinner,” she said.

“Food banks are working hard to offer better food and that’s great, but it’s still never going to be enough.

“After 35 years (of having food banks), it’s not enough. I don’t think that’s going to change.”