Brian Russell had $40 left in his pocket when he was one of 4,000 people selected for Ontario's basic income pilot project. "Your life is better," he says. "I had better food and money to travel around the city. My life was more stable and secure."

For Joan Frame, basic income payments from the province meant she no longer had to borrow from friends to make it through the last few days of the month. Frame says she was always juggling bills and that basic income gave her back power over her life.

"I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you need to ask for money, but it is impossibly difficult," she says. "It was the worst part about being on any kind of assistance for me."

Chronicle-Herald

Everything in Ruth Westcott’s life changed for the better when she became part of Ontario’s basic income pilot project.

The Thunder Bay woman had been on social assistance for nearly 30 years, but once she came out of the now-cancelled pilot project, her health improved dramatically and she became well enough to work.

“Just like everyone else I know on social assistance, I was getting sicker and sicker and more and more disabled the deeper and deeper my poverty was getting,” she said.

When Canadians head to the polls on October 21, they should ask themselves how Canada’s political parties will tackle inequality.

Over the past two decades, the richest Canadians have seen their share of income go up and up. The top one per cent absorbed almost a third of all income growth between 1997 and 2007, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Meanwhile, one in seven people in Canada lives in poverty — which hurts everyone, because poverty is expensive. In 2008, for instance, the cost of failing to address poverty in Ontario – including everything from health care and criminal justice system costs to lost tax revenue – was estimated to be 10 to 16 per cent of the province’s budget. That’s around $2,000 to $3,000 per household per year.

Interesting Engineering

The nature of work has changed dramatically since the 1950s.

In that glorious post-war period, work was primarily a man's purview, while women did so-called "invisible" work - taking care of children, maintaining the home and cooking.

It wasn't unusual for a man to retire 40 years laterfrom the same employer he started with. That employer picked up the worker's health and life insurance, and some employers even paid school tuition for their workers' children. There was a sense of continuity. 

By George Dutch

George Dutch is a career counselor in Ottawa, Ontario and curator of the online magazine, UnDone, devoted to exploring the intersect between technology and work.

Algorithms are a silent killer of jobs. According to Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking and other luminaries, these mathematical calculations will continue leaking into the vital organs of our economic system through computers and robots until they cause a massive hemorrhage in the labour market.

Social analysts have called for preventative treatments to avoid a calamity of economic insecurity and social unrest. A social dividend as some form of Basic Income (BI) is now being tested in various jurisdictions around the world (including three Ontario cities) to evaluate its potential for inoculating citizens against mass unemployment, income inequalities and the destruction of the middle class.

Roderick Benns recently interviewed Nick Taylor, a project manager who has worked around the world on both public and private endeavours, from roads, railways, airports, and buildings, taking ideas from plans to reality. He is helping develop ways for people in Vancouver to discuss and engage with the idea of basic income. 

Part two of two  

Benns: What about a basic income guarantee makes it a social justice issue? 

Taylor: Basic Income is a means to provide choice as to how people meet the security of their basic needs. Providing people the independence to decide what those basic needs are, along with unconditional cash, is the way we provide that dignity. Everyone I've talked with understands that. There is a one in six chance of being in poverty in Vancouver, and those are odds that no rational person would accept.

Roderick Benns recently interviewed Nick Taylor, a project manager who has worked around the world on both public and private endeavours, from roads, railways, airports, and buildings, taking ideas from plans to reality. He is helping develop ways for people in Vancouver to discuss and engage with the idea of basic income. 

Part one of two 

Benns: How did you come to be involved in this issue? Do you have any lived experience with poverty?

Taylor: My daughter is 9. She is very smart and utterly absorbed in ecology. She understands that responding to (and possibly even mitigating) the impacts of climate change will be the work of her generation. Recently, her school was celebrating its 100th year since it's founding, and they asked the kids to write about the future 100 years from now. And she couldn't. She cried. She didn't want to write about the future she saw. The environment will be her generation's fight -- dealing with a legacy we've inherited and done little to improve. She and her friends want to do something.