By Roderick Benns

Publisher of Leaders and Legacies, a social purpose news site. 

The mayor of Whitehorse, Yukon, the recently re-elected Dan Curtis, says the challenges of northern living make investigating a basic income guarantee a viable idea.

Curtis says he “would love to see everyone in the middle class, but it’s challenging when there is so much work in the (lower paying) service industry,” even with people often working two or more jobs to make ends meet.

Curtis is the latest Canadian mayor to be interviewed by Leaders and Legacies, in order to gauge municipal level support for a basic income guarantee policy. A common definition of a basic income guarantee ensures everyone an income sufficient to meet basic needs and live with dignity, regardless of work status. It involves a regular, reliable distribution of money from government to people to help ensure total income sufficient to meet common, basic needs.

Roderick Benns, publisher of Leaders and Legacies, recently interviewed Julia Endicott about her advocacy for a basic income guarantee. Endicott is a first year Bachelor of Education student at Queen’s University. She also holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Waterloo and a Masters of Chemistry from the University of Toronto. 

Benns: From what perspective do you approach the basic income issue? And, how did you come to be involved?

Endicott: I have always been interested in social justice and I believe wealth inequality and poverty are issues that can be addressed if people can be inspired act. I learned about the Kingston Action Group for a Basic Income Guarantee  when Toni Pickard did a guest lecture in a class I am taking as part of my Bachelor of Education at Queen’s University. I had heard of the idea before but Toni’s description of the group and the type of activism they were doing made me excited to get involved with them.

By Scott Santens

Opinion

I think we should avoid letting our ideologies inform our opinions on matters of social and economic policy. What matters is scientifically observed evidence. I support the idea of providing everyone with an unconditional basic income not because I just think it’s the right thing to do, and the best way to make ongoing technological unemployment work for us instead of against us, but because such an overwhelming amount of human behavioral evidence points in the direction of basic income.

In their opinion pieces for the week-long series about universal basic income published in September by The Washington Post, I was struck by how both Oren Cass and Jonathan Coppage expressed a distinct lack of knowledge of the evidence we have available to inform our opinions on giving people money without strings attached, by citing none of it. Science involves testing our hypotheses. They both expressed the shared hypothesis that giving people additional income in the form of a basic income would somehow reduce social cohesion, and that it is growing social inequality that’s leading to economic problems and not the other way around. We can test such a hypothesis by simply looking at what actually happens when people are provided unconditional cash, and comparing it to a control group of those who aren’t.

Roderick Benns recently interviewed Luc Gosselin (left), a member of Basic Income Earth Network, and a member of France’s Mouvement français pour le revenu de base, about a basic income guarantee. 

Benns: How did you come to be involved in this issue?

Gosselin: It’s the last stage in a mental voyage that started with an aphorism I coined when a teenager: Il n’y a pas de salaire pour l’ennui, which translates as: No salary is high enough to pay for boredom.

A few years later, in one of Buckminster Fuller’s book, I came across this:

By Roderick Benns

Publisher of Leaders and Legacies, a social purpose news site 

The combination of people in short-term and contract jobs and those in other precarious work and living situations, has grown into a massive new class of people. Named ‘the Precariat’ by renowned economist Guy Standing, he says it is the only class of people in the history of the world that wants to eliminate itself.

Speaking in Toronto earlier this year to support his latest book, Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens, Standing told an energized crowd that he estimates the Precariat class is approaching 40 percent in Canada.

Standing observes that precariousness is becoming the new normal after years of neo-liberal policies that have broken down the old order. (Neo-liberalism emphasizes privatization, deregulation, and globalization — the so-called right wing policies that promote a laissez-faire atmosphere for economic development.)

By Roderick Benns

Publisher of Leaders and Legacies, a social purpose news site 

Most Canadians living in poverty are not sitting around, says a retired Conservative senator – they are actually working. They’re just not earning enough to adequately get by. That’s a problem for Hugh Segal, who has spent over 40 years in pursuit of a basic income guarantee policy for Canadians.

“There is no evidence that people living beneath the poverty line in Canada won’t choose to work” with a basic income guarantee. “In fact we know that about 70 percent of people who happen to live beneath poverty line are working —they just don’t earn enough.”

By Roderick Benns 

Publisher of Leaders and Legacies, a social purpose news site

The mayor of Yellowknife says it’s time to set up basic income pilot projects in Canada to build on the “encouraging” Manitoba example from the 1970s. Mayor Mark Heyck – a three-year mayor of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who faces re-election Oct. 19 – says basic income is “well worth looking into.”

“It could provide people who have low incomes rungs to help them climb out of poverty and further their own education and their own well-being — to become stronger participants in Canadian society,” he says.

By Roderick Benns

Publisher of Leaders and Legacies, a social purpose news site

It’s not something federal Liberal leader Justin Trudeau will be allowed to forget, if Senator Art Eggleton has his way. Early in 2014, at a Liberal policy convention, two resolutions were made and accepted by delegates that steer the Liberal Party of Canada toward a basic income guarantee for working-age Canadians.

Eggleton says this is significant, and he has been talking it up wherever he goes.

By Roderick Benns

Publisher of Leaders and Legacies, a social purpose news site

Another big city mayor in Canada says he supports the concept of a basic income guarantee to combat inequality and create better social cohesion. Halifax Mayor Mike Savage says “there’s a good case to be made for a basic income,” pointing out there are many advantages in ensuring that people have their basic needs met.

“I think we would have more social cohesion and a better balance of opportunities. We would have a narrowing of the gap between the very rich and the very poor. And we would have a more productive workforce because many would access new opportunities,” says Savage, who heads the largest city in the Atlantic Region of Canada.

By Roderick Benns

The mayor of Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, says basic income policy would bring dignity and equity to Canada’s largest territory.

Mayor Mary Wilman (pictured left) says the multiple challenges of northern living on Baffin Island and in the rest of Nunavut are so great that citizens need basic income policy to lift them out of poverty.

“Due to a lack of roads and access, the only means of getting food here is through an annual shipping route and by air,” says Wilman. “That means we have to pay about three times as much for food as people pay in the south.”