Guaranteed Livable Income - Blog

Last month I participated in a press conference on behalf of Canadians for Tax Fairness, arguing for fairer taxes instead of service cuts. A reporter called me afterward and asked me if tax cuts weren’t necessary to ensure economic growth. “Oh no,” I assured him. “The Finance Department’s own calculations show that investing tax revenues in public services that Canadians need has a higher rate of economic return than tax cuts.”

My answer was true, but I nonetheless wondered later if I had in fact given the right answer. The reporter’s question assumed that economic growth was so important that we should do anything to achieve it – even lose valuable public services for the sake of cutting taxes if tax cuts were necessary to stimulate growth. My answer to him accepted this assumption. Read more »

Don Drummond had a bit of a strange op-ed in the Toronto Star on Sunday. On the one hand, he acknowledged the debate over the option of corporate tax cuts and called for the impact of cuts to be monitored so that we know whether or not they are actually delivering on their goals. On the other, he reviewed and dismissed all of the arguments against corporate tax cuts as negligible. Read more »

My mother-in-law passed me Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges, saying “You just have to read this one.” The next day, before I had even had the chance to crack the covers, Bob Goudzwaard referenced the book twice in his AGM speech, calling it “a most excellent little book.” With two such ringing endorsements, I could hardly put off reading the book. And having done so, I would echo Bob Goudzwaard: it is indeed a most excellent book.

Empire of Illusion is a stinging indictment of our celebrity-obsessed, narcissistic culture that has lost sight of how the values we preach have been perverted and replaced with consumerism, corporatism and militarism. Hedges laments the state of democracy, the power of corporations and the wealthy, the growing class divide, the unwillingness or inability of our elites to stop the slide, and the illiteracy and obsession with illusion over reality that prevent most of us from identifying the problems. Read more »

The Basic Income Earth Network Newsflash arrived in my mailbox this morning, and I was surprised to learn that one of the candidates pursuing the French presidency in the 2012 election is basing his campaign on a citizen’s income, also known as a Guaranteed Livable Income. And not just any candidate: former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, best known for his opposition to the Iraq war as France’s Foreign Minister in 2003.

I went to school in France for a year and a half and witnessed a historic presidential campaign up close, and I have retained a fascination with French politics ever since. The French political system is quite different than the Canadian system, with an elected President who selects the Prime Minister who may or may not be elected him/herself. Read more »

The Globe and Mail has an excellent article today looking at the costs of poverty and the social and economic benefits of fighting poverty and income inequality, "How paying people's way out of poverty can help us all." In particular, the authors look at the issue of widening inequality and the political unrest it can cause, concluding "Despite Canada’s reputation for a strong social safety net, the country is becoming economically polarized. And the decades-old dominant economic dogma that growing wealth among society’s highest earners would trickle down to those less fortunate is being challenged by an alternative approach: Eliminate crushing poverty among the lowest earners, and wealth will trickle up." Read more »

Now that the election’s over, I can get back to that task of clearing out all the things that accumulated on my desk and in my inbox while I was on mat leave. And may I say, it turned out to be a good half year for discussion of guaranteed livable income. Some interesting news coverage, online conversations, and some small but nonetheless hopeful political developments:

Yukon motion on GLI
Steve Cardiff, NDP leader in the Yukon, introduced a motion calling on the Yukon government to introduce a “guaranteed minimum annual income allowance” for all citizens. While the prospects of the motion being adopted may be small (the NDP represent 2 of eighteen seats in the Yukon legislature), the motion nonetheless draws attention to this important issue and provides a forum for debate. Read more »

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about the problems with labourism and its emphasis on securing economic security through paid jobs. I’ve highlighted the need to broaden our definition of work to include unpaid forms of work and the urgency of breaking the link between economic security and paid employment. But it has to be said that Christians are sometimes the worst offenders for insisting that people must work for a living. Our cultural emphasis on paid employment also has roots in the Catholic and Protestant notion of a work ethic.

But in fixating on paid employment, we’ve distorted the very idea of work as good for human development. We’ve also failed to come to grips with the fact that insisting on a responsibility to work must also equate a right to work – and how does that take shape in a world in which there are not enough paid jobs for all? Read more »

So if jobs are not the answer to poverty and economic insecurity, for the reasons outlined previously, what is? Guy Standing offers two new directions to replace labourism and industrial citizenship: occupational citizenship and basic income.

Occupational citizenship would allow people to shape their own careers with the mix of work – productive and reproductive, paid and unpaid – that they felt best suited them. It would also help to restore the reproductive aspect of work as occupation, including nurturing, caring and civic friendship. A good occupation, Standing argues, should be viewed as one that encompasses a range of activities that allow for self-development, improvement of skills and ability, a social identity, and the ability to allocate time to other activities such as leisure. It should not be defined by competitiveness or efficiency. Read more »

As we address in our response to the budget, the government once again demonstrated its commitment to the labour force as the answer to poverty and economic insecurity this week. In fact, if you only read the budget or listened to Jim Flaherty’s speech, you’d be forgiven for thinking things are looking rosy in Canada today. After all, there are more jobs than there were before the recession and more Canadians are working today than ever before. The fact that four million people are living in poverty, many of them despite having a job, and that nearly one million Canadians are working part-time involuntarily seems to have escaped the government’s attention. Read more »

As long as your income is secure, it doesn’t matter whether or not people around you are poor, right? Wrong, say Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, the authors of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone. By comparing outcomes across wealthy, industrialized nations, they demonstrate that inequality comes with a significant host of negative consequences – and they affect everyone, both rich and poor and in between. Read more »