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Basic income ‘won’t stop people working’: lessons from Canada [1]
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Date: 2025-01
Ben Earle is general manager of the Basic Income Canada Network and provides coordinating support to UBI Works. Sheila Regehr is chair of the Basic Income Canada Network and a former federal public servant. We caught up with Sheila and Ben at the 23rd Basic Income Earth Network Congress, recently held at the University of Bath, to discuss the importance of child credit programmes for basic income campaigning, the art of the compromise in Canadian politics, and the need to not let the great be the enemy of the good.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Beyond Trafficking and Slavery: Please start by describing the tone of the Canadian conversation around basic income these days. Is there openness to the idea?
Sheila Regehr: There is openness. It's not universal, but it's gaining ground among advocates and people working in sectors like food security, health and mental health.
We recently gained some sponsors from organised labour. That was a new and exciting development, because there are mixed views about basic income within the labour movement. I think there’s a growing sense that we need solutions to some really serious problems, and it’s bringing people towards the idea. It’s a struggle though.
Ben Earle: We have some political support too, but it's not broad political support. There are bills being put forward in parliament at the moment, mostly by junior and backbench politicians. They may not pass, but they’re helping us gain traction in the political realm.
There isn’t support yet at the level of party leadership, at least not publicly. Basic income is in the background of the political sphere right now in Canada. But it’s gaining ground in various sectors and across civil society.
Sheila: That said, I worked inside government. It's not a monolith. Different departments don’t always speak to each other, and sometimes there are advantages to that.
For example, an environmental ministry recently gave us funding for a major project linking basic income and the environment. A government gender equality office is helping fund a basic income project for women fleeing domestic violence. And we got government research funding for a conference we recently held in Canada.
So there’s some support. But from a political decision-making perspective, we’ve got a long way to go.
BTS: It sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you when campaigning on a national level. Is it easier to find support on a provincial level?
Ben: We’re seeing both support and programming for basic income on the provincial level. Some provinces have also started to use the language of basic income for their social assistance policies.
Some of our most successful work over the last ten years has been done on a provincial level. The Ontario Basic Income pilot is one of them. However, in true political fashion, as soon as an opposing government was elected, they cancelled it.
It's very volatile. If you don't build the policies into legislation, or if a government doesn’t start working on it right at the beginning of a term, it all just ends when the next government comes in.
We’re having these conversations at all different levels of government, but we don’t focus on working with local governments. Municipalities in Canada don’t have much power to implement these policies – not like in the US, for example. We’re focusing on advocacy at the federal level, since we want to see a national policy. And we still have a struggle there.
That said, a growing number of municipalities are becoming allies in pushing for a national policy. More and more are recognising the value of a basic income to them and making that known to more senior levels of government.
Sheila: National policymaking in Canada means federal, provincial and territorial. It can't just be federal, which is why there's an added layer of complication in Canada.
One key thing we have going for us is that we have done this before. Our child benefits structure is basically a guaranteed income for families with children under 18. And there are a couple of really important things about that.
The child benefits policy was developed in the late 1990s as a federal, provincial, territorial framework. So, there's a model for how to do this. That model also gives the provinces some flexibility, which is important because they generally don't like the federal government telling them what to do.
The child benefits structure is a hugely successful programme that's grown enormously since it was first established. This means we've got really good results from an actual programme. It's not a pilot. It's a programme. It's been running for roughly two generations of kids now.
Ben: And we have the infrastructure to support it, including the tax infrastructure to easily support the distribution.
Sheila: Exactly. So it’s possible. It's just a really difficult thing to actually make happen.
BTS: So there are around 25 years of lessons learned from existing programmes. Does this help you to market basic income as a viable program?
Sheila: Absolutely. One of the early successes of the Basic Income Canada Network was helping people to understand this concept. We’ve done a lot of work to show people that this idea is not foreign or radical. We already do this.
We've actually done it for seniors even longer and better than for families with children. Those policies have so many features of a basic income. People need to understand that these things already exist and we can build on them.
Ben: The challenge coming out of it, though, is that those are fairly easy calls. People are happy to support families with children because they see them as a deserving group. They're happy to support seniors because they've worked their whole lives, and they're happy to support people with disabilities because they’re unable to work.
The paradigm of deservingness is a massive stumbling block in the discussion in Canada. If you're meant to be tied to the labour market, then you supposedly don't need this help. How do we convince people that we need a programme available to everybody, regardless of age, gender, ability and status? This is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing.
Sheila: It feeds into the neoliberal paradigm that fetishises employment over everything else. People are forced to build their whole lives around paid labour. And if they’re fortunate, they might get some support on either side of their working lives. It’s a kind of religious orthodoxy that we’re challenging.
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