The Case for Basic Income

Freedom, Security, Justice

Jamie Swift, Elaine Power

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781771135481
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Inequality is up. Decent work is down. Free market fundamentalism has been exposed as a tragic failure. In a job market upended by COVID-19—with Canadians caught in the grip of precarious labour, stagnant wages, a climate crisis, and the steady creep of automation—an ever-louder chorus of voices calls for a liveable and obligation-free basic income.

Could a basic income guarantee be the way forward to democratize security and intervene where the market economy and social programs fail? Jamie Swift and Elaine Power scrutinize the politics and the potential behind a radical proposal in a post-pandemic world: that wealth should be built by a society, not individuals. And that we all have an unconditional right to a fair share.

In these pages, Swift and Power bring to the forefront the deeply personal stories of Canadians who participated in the 2017–2019 Ontario Basic Income Pilot; examine the essential literature and history behind the movement; and answer basic income's critics from both the right and left.

CHAPTER 1

A GOOD IDEA GOES VIRAL¹

COVID-19 has revealed for all of us the cracks in our economic situation in Canada. Many people cannot pay their rent and can scarcely afford food. Now is the time to make a systemic change in the system that will remove the stigma of being poor and encourage a more equitable society.

—Rev. Lois Wilson, former United Church
Moderator and senator

When all this is over, it is to be hoped that more of us will have internalized the lies and the hidden contradictions that keep capitalism afloat, that more of us will remember that when the virus hit us, capitalism tested positive.

—Harry Glasbeek, Professor Emeritus and
Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School

THE CRACKS REVEALED

It took ten years for Leonard Cohen to write “Anthem,” a hopeful song that featured on his otherwise foreboding 1992 album The Future. The song’s chorus makes his hope clear. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” For the profoundly spiritual artist, the light represents repentance, return, and resurrection. It also exposes “the brokenness of things.”² In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic, what earlier generations would have called a plague, showed how very broken things have been all over the world. Canada was no exception. The pandemic shone a light on some serious cracks indeed.

First, we saw that many of the people doing what we suddenly recognized as the most essential work—those in all aspects of health care (including cleaners and personal support workers), the food supply chain (from farm workers to grocery store employees) and the transportation sector (truck drivers, bus drivers)—work for low wages with few if any benefits. These people were suddenly considered “heroes.” A light was now shining on the significant degree to which the smooth functioning of our society depends on people doing precarious, undervalued, and underpaid work.

Next, the plague cast racial inequalities into stark relief. It soon became clear that the pandemic was sickening and killing visible minorities in a wildly disproportionate manner. In Canada’s largest city, 80 percent of COVID cases involved racialized people—who make up only 50 percent of Toronto’s population.

Soon we learned that this was not only a racial plague; it was also a class plague. Fully half of COVID cases in Toronto involved people living in poverty, yet less than a third of Torontonians fall into that category. As part of this particular revelation, the disease cast a cold light on the scandalous housing situation in big cities, where so many low-income people cannot afford decent shelter. More than a quarter of COVID victims in Toronto lived in households with five or more people.³

And then, we see how all these strands are connected and interwoven. The families living in households with five or more people? They are generally not white. The people working as farm labourers, cleaners, personal support workers? They are also generally not white. These jobs are low-paying, involving hourly wages as opposed to salaries, along with the commensurate lack of benefits. So, we know that the people doing these jobs—the primarily racialized workers—are also low-income people.

Yet these same jobs had now been revealed as essential—essential to food production and distribution, to looking after the sick. The people performing these jobs had to keep working; everyone relies on them for their basic needs. Moreover, they could not perform these jobs from home; they would have to come in to work, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk. Additionally, as low-income people, they would tend to rely on public transportation and therefore have to expose themselves even further just to get to work.

Finally, we see how COVID-19 is not only a racial and class plague but also a gender plague. Another sector of jobs was revealed to be non-essential—jobs related to the hospitality industry; for example, jobs in hotels and restaurants. These jobs, also precarious and low-paying, were primarily held by women, who were laid off in staggering numbers—just one aspect of the gendered nature of this pandemic.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that some ten thousand long-term care workers were infected. Nine died, along with thousands of elderly adults they looked after. Of the 8,454 Canadians dead from COVID-19 by late June, some 6,000 lived in long-term care institutions. While Canada’s overall COVID-19 mortality rate was relatively low compared with the proportions in other OECD countries, we had the highest proportion of deaths occurring in long-term care. LTC residents accounted for four of five reported COVID-19 deaths in Canada, compared with an average of less than two in five LTC deaths in other OECD countries.⁴

Toronto’s North St. Jamestown, home to personal support and retail workers as well as domestic servants and cleaners living in overcrowded apartments, was a raging COVID-19 hotspot, with 698 cases per 100,000 people in late May. For legions of these precarious service-sector workers, the notion of self-isolating by working from home was an absurd impossibility.

A short stroll north across Bloor Street one finds the lavishly wealthy Rosedale–Moore Park district. It had 72 cases per 100,000.⁵ One Dale Avenue house that sold for $5.2 million at the height of the pandemic featured a nanny suite with a separate entrance, parking for four cars, and an in-ground pool on a 6,000-square-foot lot.⁶ Rosedale hedge fund managers and others could, it seems, easily heed the advice of the authorities by working from their opulent homes.

There was nothing new in a plague having differential effects on rich and poor areas. A century earlier, during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–20, there was a broad popular and scientific consensus that “the flu hit the rich and the poor alike.” Yet India’s death rate was forty times higher than that of Denmark. In Norway, the flu killed most efficiently in Oslo’s working-class districts. Chicago death rates were also highest among the unemployed and poor. People in crowded cities suffered more than those in the countryside.⁷

While doctors extolled the virtues of sunshine and pure air, working-class families living in slum areas not far from Queen’s Park in Toronto inhabited overcrowded, vermin-infested row houses. Many had a single tap or an outside stand pipe. Toilets that did exist were often blocked in summer, frozen in winter. The air was choked by factory emissions and coal smoke. After the Spanish flu subsided, these were the conditions described in a report for the city conducted by Lieutenant-Governor Dr. Herbert Bruce.

The Bruce Report concluded by pointing to factors familiar to St. Jamestown residents when the COVID-19 crisis hit one hundred years later:

Housing conditions are bad because there are many families which cannot earn enough to pay for decent and healthful dwellings. In the lowest income groups of society, the insecurity of employment and the inadequacy of wages do not permit the payment of rentals much in excess of $10 to $15 per month in good times.⁸

Similarly, during the COVID-19 crisis a century later, slogans such as “we’re all in this together” quickly emerged. The virus “does not discriminate,” maintained British cabinet minister Michael Gove.⁹ However, Father Augusto Zampini, adjunct secretary for Pope Francis’s COVID-19 response commission, had a different metaphor, one more congruent with the social inequities that pandemics expose and reinforce. “We are all in the same storm, but we’re in different boats. Those who have big boats—with houses, income, and food—might get a little seasick but don’t worry about dying,” he explained. “But other people are in tiny little boats, some with oars and some just completely at the whim of the giant waves.”¹⁰

The plague of 2020 ravaged poor neighbourhoods. It was an ailment of inequality, as are diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular conditions familiar to so many disadvantaged Canadians and their communities. The devastation was not inevitable. But it was utterly predictable. In early March, just before the term COVID had become common parlance, journalist André Picard wrote,

Protecting seniors, particularly those in institutional care, from infection and death is an enormous challenge. So too is protecting staff, who work tirelessly and intimately with their charges. . . . Complicating the response is that many workers juggle shifts between various facilities, and their pay and benefits are so abysmal that they are reluctant to take time off if they are sick.¹¹

Some people clean up other people’s messes. Some don’t. The pandemic tragedy had widened many a crack. The light got in.

NORMALIZED INSECURITY AND HELICOPTER MONEY

Late in the winter of 2020, it was dawning on Canadians that the COVID-19 crisis was starting to shake things up in unimagined ways. A Kingston man wheeled a supermarket cart groaning under the weight of water, five cases of twenty-four plastic bottles. As he loaded it into his late-model SUV, he was asked why he was buying so much—“Lots of water in the tap?” His reply didn’t catch the irony. It was sincere, clearly anxious: “I hope so.”

Gnawing insecurity abounded everywhere, daily certainties suddenly evaporating. Would there be enough food? How about public transit? Passing encounters with strangers in stores? What if they took the bus to get there? Jobs evaporated. Pop-up roadside signs blinked the insistent message “Stay Safe, Stay Home,” municipal authorities carelessly assuming it was possible for everyone to do so. The stress pandemic quickly spread, the anxiety in part provoked by the sense that, suddenly, things seemed out of control.

For millions of Canadians who depend on precarious jobs or, even worse, social assistance, the stress of lives being out of control is hardly new. It’s the commonplace stuff of daily life. Forget about hoarding food, or anything else for that matter. Providing food generates anxiety every single day. With the unexpected arrival of COVID generating mass anxiety, Canadians experienced what could be described as the normalization of insecurity. Unemployment skyrocketed as businesses from retailers to airlines laid off workers en masse.

Many could hope that the insecurity would, in the fullness of time, pass as things returned to normal. In the interim, the threat of Depression-level joblessness—coupled with a collapse of consumer spending—quickly gave rise to wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• On Basic Income
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. A Good Idea Goes Viral
• Chapter 2. A Brief History of Basic Income in Canada
• Chapter 3. Basic Income Comes to Ontario—But Briefly
• Chapter 4. Lindsay: The Saturation Site
• Chapter 5. Hamilton I: The Freedom to Live with Some Dignity
• Chapter 6. Hamilton II: Thinking Further Down the Road
• Chapter 7. Hamilton III: New Choices
• Chapter 8. A Provocation to Freedom
• A User’s Guide to: The Case for Basic Income
• Notes
• Index