There has been a renewed push for the federal government to implement a Basic Income scheme over the past several months, advocates buoyed by what they see as the "success" of the rollout of CERB to deal with the pandemic.  There has been a failed motion in the House of Commons on the subject, while a Liberal private member's bill is also on the Order Paper, and delegates at both the Liberal and NDP policy conventions this weekend will be debating resolutions around it.  Adding to that, my inbox has been spammed by all manner of social justice organizations calling on both parties to adopt these policies as a means of advancing the cause.  A group of senators has been agitating for the cause, brandishing dubious reports by the Parliamentary Budget Officer as "proof" of its necessity.  But are we really going to have a proper discussion about just what a Basic Income entails?

There have been a number of provincial studies on the topic in recent years, the two most comprehensive ones being from Quebec in 2017, and in BC just this last year.  Quebec's study essentially concluded that it was not clear it was affordable to implement effective Basic Income, while the BC basic income report  which was exhaustive concluded that a Basic Income is not the best way to go about a transfer system to help people, because "the needs of people in this society are too diverse to be effectively answered simply with a cheque from government."  They instead recommended, among other things, better basic services to low-income households, more targeted supports for particular high-needs groups, and targeted basic incomes for those with disabilities.

The notion that CERB was some kind of test run for a basic income is completely flawed, but that hasn't stopped proponents.  CERB was not universal, and conditional upon $5000 income in the current or previous year; it was not permanent; and it faced the problems associated with using the tax system to help people.  Those problems include the fact that some 14 percent of people are not currently in the tax system (10 percent of whom are known to the system but do not file, and a further four percent who are simply unknown to the system), and it's not very reactive because the information gets stale very quickly, generally waiting for people to file in April before benefits can flow.  (The federal government's promises for automatic filing will help combat some of these problems, once they get implemented).  Basic Income proponents who point to CERB are simply not being honest about the comparison.

Another major problem with the way the basic income conversation has been carrying on is that welfare and most social supports fall under provincial jurisdiction.  There seems to be a notion that somehow a federal Basic Income program could be a cute end-run around areas of jurisdiction, but that's not how federalism works, and what happens instead is that the interaction between federal and provincial programs gets really complicated really quickly.  If you thought that negotiations around health transfers, national pharmacare or child care were complex and fraught with difficulty with provinces, they would have nothing on the absolute nightmare of complexity of what Basic Income would be and how to integrate it with existing systems especially because there would need to start with a common agreement on what is meant by Basic Income.

There are a number of terms that are being thrown around Basic Income, Universal Basic Income, Guaranteed Liveable Income, National Guaranteed Basic Income and they can mean a multitude of different things.  Part of the problem is that there is a notion that this, by whatever label you apply to it, is a kind of magical solution to poverty in this country.  It is often billed as a less complex system than the current bureaucratic morass of social programs, but as the BC report pointed out, it's often far more complex.  There are additional problems if you simply propose to use a Basic Income system to replace current needs-based systems, because while a disability top-up may help people with few needs, it really disadvantages people with greater needs particularly those with disabilities.  Disability supports are some of the most complex parts of our existing system, so the promises for simplicity are largely overblown.

Not helping matters was another dubious report from the PBO that claimed that for $85 billion, a Basic Income Programme could halve the poverty rate in the country.  His methodology is deeply flawed, basing it on the Ontario pilot project that was self-selected and therefore useless as a proper study, and it was predicated on eliminating most existing supports, replacing them with an annual $6000 disability top-up useless for a great many people with disabilities.  It also had particular problems around its tax-back rate that essentially re-create the "welfare walls" that Basic Income proponents are trying to eliminate, and too many proponents including senators have mistakenly read the price-tag as price neutrality, which it is not.  As well, the focus on the poverty rate is less effective than other outcomes that could be sought.

I fully expect a superficial debate on these Basic Income proposals over the weekend at the two conventions, and plenty of brandishing of this PBO report, but I don't expect we'll see nuance, or a commitment to improving current systems it will be Basic Income or nothing.  There are more effective ways to spend the billions of dollars being contemplated, but nothing is going to have an easy answer, particularly in a federation like ours, where there will need to be provincial buy-in, regardless of what is contemplated.  But what should be clear is that the research has been done particularly with the BC report and we don't need any more pilots.  We instead need action to improve existing systems and plugging gaps rather than wasting time and money trying to build something new that won't be the magical solution that proponents hope for.