The basic idea of Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the government gives out a set amount of money every month to all its citizens. This non-taxable money would ideally cover everyone’s basic needs.
Having our basic needs taken care of through UBI would allow us to participate in a labour market that does not rely on its workers fearing starvation to produce goods and services.
UBI has been a contentious topic for a long time. Political parties from the right and centre-right have said the policy would encourage laziness and immediately cause people to stop working.
However, UBI has already had a few trial runs in Canada.
In 1974, the city of Dauphin, Man., ran an experiment where they offered people a basic income based on the number of people in each household.
The Manitoba basic annual income experiment, also known as the Mincome project, came to an end in 1979 when the Progressive Conservatives gained control of the provincial government.
But the project provided insight into how people reacted to UBI.
The experiment showed under one per cent of the people who participated in the experiment stopped working.
Those who did were almost exclusively women who used their time and money to take on extra child caring duties in their homes.
The experiment data also showed participants only reduced their work hours by an average of 10 per cent.
Participants mostly used these extra hours to go back to school, look for other jobs and engage in their hobbies.
The importance of having time for leisure and hobbies should not be understated.
A Statistics Canada report from 2022 showed one in three people working in Canada felt at least some form of work related burnout in the previous year due to long working hours.
Working for fewer hours is often seen as a problem when it should be taken as a huge advantage. The problem is not working less, but rather we, as a society, view productivity solely through a financial lens.
Having a UBI would begin to eliminate the idea that spending all of our time working is necessary in order for our economy to survive.
A 2017 McMaster University study said a UBI would “improve people’s lives in every way.”
Skeptics will often pose the question of how a UBI system could be funded, implying this is an unrealistic and utopian system.
However, the UBI system would give people more financial security while keeping the free market intact.
The case could be made the whole welfare system could be converted to a UBI system. A less radical approach would be to fund a UBI by raising taxes for the richest one per cent of the population.
A UBI would give citizens more spending power which in turn would grow the country’s economy.
More importantly, it would allow people to significantly improve their lives and help in the fight to decriminalize poverty.
Canada already has a number of organizations that work under the UBI model such as the Old Age Security or the Canada Child Benefit.
The country would be a perfect candidate to implement a UBI, especially now when the idea is more popular than ever. Having a policy that would drastically reduce poverty and increase quality of living should no longer be up for debate.