Guaranteed Livable Income
Inquiry--Debate Continued
June 25, 2020
Honourable colleagues, I rise today with thanks again to Senator Pate and Senator Lankin for their leadership in advocating for a guaranteed livable income or a basic minimum income for Canadians.
I’m pleased to rise in this chamber not only to voice my own support for this initiative, because I’m an activist myself, but also to share the ideas thought up by my youth advisers, who have used advocacy tools to rally behind senators on this important issue.
This initiative of bringing this inquiry before our chamber is one that allows many of us to speak at a somewhat different angle on a very important program. Support has been garnered from across many of the lines that sometimes divide us.
I’d like to thank Senator Miville-Dechêne for her contributions to this discussion just prior to COVID-19, which shut us down for a period of time. I’d also like to begin by reminding this chamber, our colleagues in the other place and by inviting Canadians to read the letter that was sent to our Prime Minister and cabinet on April 21, 2020, amidst the ongoing pandemic calling for a minimum basic income in Canada at a livable threshold.
Colleagues, it’s not often that Canada has seen more than half of its senators, over 50, make such a public declaration in favour of a transformative policy pivot in national programming. This is reminiscent of when our national medicare program was established after the Second World War.
Following the leadership of senators, some of my youth advisers with the Canadian Council of Young Feminists — who are also members of the Basic Income Canada Youth Network — coordinated a supportive letter sent on May 5 to the Prime Minister and cabinet sharing youth perspectives on why we need a guaranteed liveable income in Canada. This second letter was signed by youth leaders, youth-oriented organizations and researchers across the country, a reach of over 1 million mostly young Canadians.
Just a few statistics highlight the reality of poverty in Canada. Almost 5 million Canadians live in poverty; one fifth of single mothers in this country live below the poverty line; and 1 in 5 racialized families live in poverty, compared to 1 in 20 white families.
What is more important to note is the human impact that poverty has on poor Canadians, their families and their communities.
I would like to give voice in this chamber today to testimony from poor Canadians presented by Canada Without Poverty to a parliamentary meeting recently.
Leila from Ottawa wrote:
. . . What is poverty? It is stress, isolation, and poor health; it is unacceptable.
Laura from Hamilton pointed out that:
. . . poverty can be simply a lack of food. But it’s something more than thattoo. It’s a sense of determining . . . worth . . . relative . . . to others. Poverty is about where I belong and if I belong. . . .
Wayne from Halifax explained:
When living in poverty, you lose opportunities. It’s amazing to me when people say that Canada is a land of opportunities, but the reality is that you need a way to access those opportunities.
The opportunities that Canadians living in poverty lose are reliable access to food, shelter, adequate health care and education. This could be living in overcrowded house or spending half of your monthly income or more on rent. It could be understanding the fact that men who live in poverty are likely to die four years earlier than men in the wealthiest 20% of the population.
We know that income levels are directly tied to health quality. On the Public Health Agency of Canada’s web page, the first factor listed in the determinant of health is one’s income and social status.
In an article on the impacts of poverty on Canadians’ health, Dr. Dennis Raphael from the York University School of Health Policy and Management highlighted that:
. . . individuals living within the poorest 20% of neighbourhoods [are] more likely to die of just about every disease from which people can die of, than the more well-off. These included cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory diseases . . . .
Poverty undermines mental health in addition to undermining physical health. A study from the United Kingdom on the impacts of poverty on mental health found that.
Poverty increases the risk of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety and substance addiction.
The study also found:
Poverty during early childhood is associated with genetic adaptation, producing a short-term strategy to cope with the stressful developmental environment. This comes at the expense of long-term health, with increased susceptibility to cardiac disease and certain cancers.
A guaranteed liveable income can provide the resources needed to lift Canadians out of poverty more efficiently and respectfully than our current patchwork of social assistance programs. We do not need to continue the model of having our public service acting as welfare police, and requiring Canadians in poverty to prove their poorness and fall under the stigma of welfare. A basic income can provide a more efficient solution to poverty by providing a judgment-free source of income stability that is easy to administer.
The idea of a basic income is not new. As Senator Pate mentioned when she introduced this inquiry, it was in 1971 that the Croll report recommended a guaranteed liveable income as the first step towards fighting poverty in Canada.
In my home province, between 1975 and 1978, a basic income pilot was launched in Dauphin, Manitoba, not that far from the town where I grew up. In 1975, the Government of Ontario introduced an unconditional cash transfer to lift seniors out of poverty. Such a model was adopted by the federal government and still stands today as the Guaranteed Income Supplement.
In 2017, the Government of Ontario launched the basic income pilot that was designed by former Senator Hugh Segal, who worked for many years, also in collaboration with retired Senator Art Eggleton.
I must commend the other place for establishing a national poverty reduction strategy in 2018. The strategy does good work by legislating targets to reduce poverty in our society, but it does not include a guaranteed basic income for every Canadian that needs it. It reflects the cross paththat we are at in our fight to solve poverty, because no honest person in this country can hold the opinion that Canada is not capable of having no poverty in our country. If there is any country in the world with the resources and the capacity, it is Canada.
We can either be static and accept the often condescending social assistance programs as they are, or we can respond to more than 50 years of studies, reports and the lived experiences of those who demonstrate the effectiveness of guaranteed liveable income.
We have generally agreed as a society that it is beneficial to provide financial support to economically vulnerable people in our society. Economics and ethics argue in favour of supporting someone when they don’t have the capacity to buy enough food or shelter. We’ve adopted the idea of Canadians receiving income assistance. We already have a wide range of patchwork income support across provinces and territories.
This pandemic has exposed the insufficiency of unemployment insurance at the federal level. We have seen how impressively rapid the Canada Revenue Agency has been in mobilizing CERB payments to those who very much need it.
A guaranteed liveable income, a minimum basic income, could become the largest, most effective paradigm shift in poverty reduction since the expansion of the modern welfare state. Our system should be efficient and transparent. It should be imbued with respect for the dignity of all Canadians, and not just because it’s the right thing to do or the good thing to do. Let’s move forward toward a more equitable future that provides Canadians the opportunity to escape poverty and to make our democracy stronger as a tangible result.
Thank you. Meegwetch.