Basic Income Pilot Cancelled One Year Ago Today

"What I'm announcing today is about restoring dignity to Ontarians.”

That’s Minister Lisa MacLeod  (right) speaking on July 31, 2018 while axing Ontario’s Basic Income Pilot Project (BI).

On that day, mere minutes ahead of that edict, I had an inkling from reading social media posts what was coming.   

I’d picked it up on a live stream feed shortly after 2:00 p.m. In less than five minutes Basic Income was done.

BI was a three-year pilot intended to test this idea:  Can appropriate financial support programs be delivered efficiently while improving health, employment, and housing outcomes?

The concept of Basic Income goes back at least 500 hundred years. A basic income program ran in Dauphin Manitoba from 1974-79.  When the Ontario pilot was set up in 2017 it was one of the largest in the world.  It has been attracting international attention.

How could the government know that the Pilot was not doing what it is intended to do before any data had been collected, the Minister was asked? 

“Here’s the situation," said the Minister dodging the question.  “We have seen the program isn’t doing what it is supposed to do.” 

What about the recipients? 

We will end it “ethically,” the Minister boasted.

That’s the Minister’s story.  A narrative that fits her government’s agenda but is out of sync with the stories of BI recipients.

Hearing from participants we learn that BI gave them the opportunity to plan their lives.  Prior to the pilot project, poverty and the restrictive bureaucratic rules that came with it precluded having a life plan. 

Participants are fighting back by putting their stories out there.

Jesse Golem is leading the way.  She is a photographer, a writer and a Basic Income recipient. When the program was cancelled, she “needed to do something” so she created a photo series called Humans of Basic Income (@HumansBasic) as a way to tell the stories of those who had been participating in the project. 

Some snapshots from the photos:

I can finally buy Christmas Presents for my Children

It has given me a Chance to Recover My Future

Now I have the Dignity to go back to School

Helps me Stay Healthy

I Felt Human Again

I’m a late convert to BI. I’d always thought that we should live in a society where everyone has decent housing; where people are able to earn an adequate income and, if for whatever reason, they aren’t able to provide for themselves, there will be a safety net that takes care of them. 

But I was naive. Others have been too. Why do we trust these in-the-dark politicians who can’t countenance pilot projects, especially other people’s pilot projects?  So, when the government changed…well, we should have seen it coming.  That is what happened with Mincome in Manitoba nearly forty years ago.

We’ve got no data but the stories tell us that such programs have value; changing lives in ways that decision makers can’t or won’t understand.

Let’s keep getting their stories out there.