No Canada is not considering a guaranteed universal basic income.
The consideration is being done by the Senate, which is a sleepy home for appointed political party bagmen, and unlike the US Senate, has zero power or relevance.
It is so irrelevant and useless that the New Democratic Party has been calling for its abolition for decades.
I'm no "everything is a conspiracy by They/Them" Twitter nut, but if Canada were considering a large-scale economic change, then running it through the senate to generate a couple months of media coverage would be a good test balloon, and it would get the public familiar with the concept for when they eventually do introduce it via real policy.
How is that a conspiracy mindset? That's just basic political tactics 101. Floating an idea to gauge interest or to see how many dogs bark is nothing new. It a way of proposing something before deciding to sink a bunch of political resources into it
> The consideration is being done by the Senate, which is a sleepy home for appointed political party bagmen, and unlike the US Senate, has zero power or relevance.
Studying things is basically the modern canadian senate's job. Just because they do not use their legeslative power much doesn't mean they do nothing.
The system is not without flaws, but i generally like the idea of having former gov big-wigs studying things and making reccomendations. They have the experience to know what is up, but also aren't any more beholden to party politics.
> Most modern conceptions of UBI don’t conform to its literal meaning anymore, Michael Mendelson, a fellow with the poverty policy think tank Maytree, told the Star.
> Nowadays, UBI has come to mean any kind of basic income plan, which usually takes the universal form or a “guaranteed” income plan that scales depending on a person’s need.
Step 1: redefine the term?
Looking at the text of the 2021 bill, which you should probably read instead, it uses the term "livable basic income", not UBI. So at least that's more honest. The text is here, it's really very light, closer to an announcement of an announcement than a plan: https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/S-233/first-...
Is there an updated bill somewhere that has more detail? There were debates this year that you can sorta read here:
"Universal" would be too easy to automatically apply and reduces scope for exercise of bureaucratic power, therefore is unacceptable, as is any idea that such a scheme could possibly replace as opposed to augment existing provisions.
UBI or negative income tax to replace the minimum wage and other welfare provisions would be a huge win for Canada, but there are too many people (left/right, federal/provincial etc.) that think they're getting something out of the current situation for it to ever go anywhere.
I'm not going to lie to anyone, but as someone with a paid off house in an ultra low COL location and a desire to give up? If we ever get a UBI I going going to say fuck work and live off it.
I don't need almost any money to survive month to month and I fucking hate working.
Thankfully for society though Canada will never give us such a thing.
Then why don't you save your money and go for FIRE? I mean if you were living on $10k per year you'd only need $250k saved, and if you were living on that on a dev salary it wouldn't take long to save.
It's odd how when I mention FIRE there are all sorts of people who say they don't want to "live on lentils" for a bit more freedom, yet when I mention UBI it seems everyone wants to!
>Then why don't you save your money and go for FIRE?
Because UBI doesn't exist and you can't predict what life will throw your way. I've seen what can happen to people and without a safety net I continue working out of fear.
I need between 15-20kCAD/y to survive, but you never know when that won't be enough anymore.
At this point I honestly just hope I can leave enough money to make other's lives easier when I'm gone in a few years. A nice parting gift if you will.
So the reason you don't go for FIRE is because things might go badly and you'd be left in a situation where you had to find a job, with nothing but the big huge chunk of money you'd saved to see you through?
Trying to make sense of the logic of an alcoholic is pointless, so I don't recommend it. I will never FIRE, because I'm afraid of the future.
I also don't make nearly as much money as other people in this industry. I only managed to crack 100k CAD this year and I'm on the verge of being laid off for "economic reasons".
Living on lentils for the hope to not have to work in the future, vs immediately not having to work. FIRE requires dedication for a decade or more, UBI is immediate. I don't see how you can find that odd tbh.
Universal income is a dumb idea. If you have money to give away then give it to those who are struggling for example, single mothers, families with low income, those with disabilities, those who cannot afford education and got stuck in minimum wage job. No need to pay money to young healthy men and women who will spend them on alcohol, online games or dresses.
Traditionally, in the West, the Church ran charities to help the poor. Tithing and charitable giving contributed to the coffers managed by, say, local monasteries. Communities also helped each other out on an as-needed basis, In both cases, help was local and this meant insight into the particular situation of each person who needed it (hence the superiority of the principle of subsidiarity). In both cases, no politicians were involved.
In the West, with the kicking out of the Church from the public sphere and the rise of hyperindividualism, many of the good works performed by the Church and the community was arrogated by the State. The State is now the uncontested institution, it is now the Church. Now these things become subject to and embroiled in all sorts considerations unrelated to the basic problem of dealing with someone in need. UBI entrenches the very isolating hyperindividualism that ruined the family and destroyed the resulting communities.
That is the problem today, but we could also just have it be based on filed income and get rid of the bureaucracy instead. The issue is that some political parties are actively against helping the poor. The more practical idea is a universal poor stipend. The problem with UBI is that it would literally require everyone above income X to pay and extra $500/month in taxes just so they could receive a "free" $500/month in taxes.
The government can't even provide citizens with basic necessities of life such as food , shelter, water, and bathroom. A government run soup kitchen and homeless shelter would solve this. However, two problems.
First Toronto homeless shelters are at max capacity during winter months. So there is already a lack of funding. And we already effectively taxed 30%. *
Second, what's stopping the world from immigrating to Canada to enjoy this social net?
I believe we need tiers for new immigrants or international students. A person that has lived in Canada 30 years should be infront of the line for social assistance.
*The average family paid 45.2 per cent of their income in taxes to federal, provincial and local governments in 2022, estimates the Fraser Institute
I am always amused at the argument of “If we make it too nice to live here we will be flooded with immigrants so we must maintain our current level of shittiness.”
Nope read what I said again, we can discriminate by putting people who live here longer or first ahead of the line. First in First out a simple queue system based on your government id.
The previous government before Trudeau got in trouble by saying "old stock Canadians"
…then change immigration law to stem the flow. Canada is a sovereign nation, not a state in the US where such experiments would be doomed by the freedom to relocate between the various states.
I just want to clarify the position of it proponents.
We already do a version of what you're saying and it has a lot of administrative overhead and costs.
For example unemployment requires recipients to actively be looking for a job. Unless you have a doctor approved disability. Or you got a really bad flu and were stuck in bed for a week.
Then you have the people who go apply at the same place every week just to fill the requirement. Other people get an offer but come up with a reason why that job doesn't suit them, it's too far, etc.
So now you need to legislate all that stuff and validate it.
It gets complicated and expensive real quick.
So maybe it's cheaper to "waste" money paying some young/rich people, if you can save all the administrative work.
Highly doubt that the amount of administration would go down. Having worked for the government for 2 decades I can assure you that isn’t how the government operates.
I can understand that! It’s kind of stupid that, for example, Galen Weston (the owner of one of Canada’s grocery store oligopoly members) will still get a cheque in the mail representing some infinitesimal chunk of his income. Same applies to people with regular high paying jobs who use it as monthly fun money or just toss it into a savings account every week. Feels pointless.
However, I would also bet the current system of multiple federal and provincial assistance programs with differing eligibility requirements and TONS of staff on the pay roll… might cost the same as “1 cheque per SIN”. It will massively ease up the stress on those systems, possibly even negate the need for quite a few of them. (Even if they don’t seem to plan on cutting any of them based on the article)
And on the access side, it’s much less effort, which is the ideal for someone that really needs it.
Also the cynical side of me thinks the Canadian banking oligopoly is excited about a monthly payment will be made into their client’s accounts.
Not so much when you realize that those with high incomes are just going to give their check right back via taxes . And that money is then used to send checks to others who don't make enough to have to give their check back.
> It’s kind of stupid that, for example, Galen Weston (the owner of one of Canada’s grocery store oligopoly members) will still get a cheque in the mail representing some infinitesimal chunk of his income. Same applies to people with regular high paying jobs who use it as monthly fun money or just toss it into a savings account every week. Feels pointless.
Which is a fraction of the money that they already paid in taxes to fund the program in the first place. How was this not self-evident?
Too complicated. A big part of UBI fwiu is reduction in administrative costs, overhead, etc. Plus people don’t want a bureaucrat or politician deciding who is qualified or not
I agree that UBI is silly and that we should just give it to those who need it most. I also think we should just stop collecting income and income related taxes on the poorest X%. For example: if you are below the poverty line (or some multiple), you just don't have to pay income tax or into social security (but still get credit for it), etc.
That said, I don't understand you very judgmental take about people wasting money on things you don't approve of. I hardly think buying clothes has a large moral imperative but even if someone does want to buy alcohol with their own money, I don't see how that is any of your concern. Also, just because people are "young and healthy" doesn't mean they aren't disadvantaged and need support.
You can argue that X is the wrong value, but in Canada income under X (the BPA set for that year) is not taxed, as you deduct the Basic Personal Amount from your gross income revenue before calculating your taxes.
In order to implement the filter, you now need enormous bureaucracies tasked with tracking and identifying people to filter, equally enormous agencies to enforce the filters, you get endless loop politicians fighting who should be filtered, you get endless lobbying pro and con filtering certain people, you get lots of people who make it their career to evade the filters and another even larger crowd who make it their purpose in life to persecute those who avoid the filter and on and on. All of this is pure waste on society.
That's why UBI is a better idea. Just pay to everyone, remove all the nonsense overhead from being able to exist and move on.
Yeah, its a bad idea just to give money to people so they don't have to work....it has all kinds of corrupting influences on them. Make 'em work. That's why I support a 100% estate tax.
There is not enough work anyway and there is going to be even less with AI and automation.
I am struggling to find a job for a year already, seems there is no demand for DevOps/SRE anymore. Surviving thanks to a food pantry and a house I bought for 30k$ in East Cleveland knowing shit going to hit the floor.
Good idea in principle. I suspect it might lead to unintended consequences: there is suddenly an advantage to being a disabled single parent with many children.
Here in the province of PEI there is already a system called targeted basic income. Shockingly the government in power who implemented it is the Conservative Party.
It is pretty targeted though specific people on social assistance, no kids, top up to 85% only of the "market-basket measure". I'm sure there's more to it see the link below.
> Shockingly the government in power who implemented it is the Conservative Party.
It's not that shocking.
Political parties in Canada with the word "Conservative" in their name, and especially the ones with the oxymoronic term "Progressive Conservative", tend to be quite left-wing/socialist in practice.
Despite their names, such parties usually favor big and intrusive government, high taxation, high immigration rates, socialist education and health care systems, and other policies that are inherently contradictory with anything resembling conservative ideology.
Canada's general lack of truly centrist, conservative, and right-of-centre parties gives the illusion that the least-left-leaning parties are "conservative", when they really aren't.
When comparing platforms and policies, the Conservative and Progressive Conservative parties tend to be more similar to those of the far-left Liberal parties, and the even-farther-left NDP and Green parties to some extent, than they are to the platforms and policies of the more centrist People's Party of Canada or New Blue Party of Ontario, for example.
Reminder that the entire point of UBI is to eliminate needs testing for welfare. Why?
1. Administrative costs
2. Disincentive to work
3. Simplification
4. Equality
The government only does one thing: takes money from people, and gives money to other people. They don’t build roads or systems of defense. The vast majority of the government outlays are somehow concerned with giving out money to people that “need” it, and they do a patently awful job at it. The idea of UBI is just to give that money away efficiently instead of creating a massive poverty pimp administration. Even people that hate the idea of giving away money start to look at it favorably in comparison to the current system. In numbers, the US government spends about $25-30k per adult citizen. Maybe give each adult about $15k per year and eliminate all spending on healthcare, education, social security, welfare, housing, and anything concerned with diversity, equity, or inclusion, because everybody’s getting the exact same thing.
But that’s not going to happen without a huge fight from the poverty pimp lobby, and by fight I mean stuffing the pockets of legislators and judges while calling for riots over perceived injustices. So anything in this direction will just increase the size and inefficiency of the poverty pimp business, and thus achieve the opposite of its intention.
It's more importantly an alternative to the minimum wage to reduce unemployment.
The classic example is if you can only add $10 value/hour in an area where the minimum wage is $20/hour you will go unemployed. If there is a UBI instead then you receive the UBI plus whatever you are paid in accordance with the value added.
This also means you wouldn't need endless arguments over adjustments to a minimum wage.
You are dead right about poverty-pimps - they are the true parasites in all this.
That's certainly one approach and motivation for doing UBI, but it's not the only one. The idea of replacing welfare with UBI and only UBI is what the more libertarian folks want. But for example, if you look at Thomas Piketty and the like's ideas surrounding UBI, it's clear that it is meant as a supplement to current welfare programs, and is designed to improve the bargaining power of the workers in the job market.
So instead of being a cost cutting measure and ultimately a source for greater inequality of opportunity, it becomes a measure to reduce inequality of opportunity, with the drawback being that the government has to find a way to fund it. One proposed solution would be progressive wealth taxes, which, if you're a millionaire or higher is a perfectly reasonable thing to be upset about but otherwise not so much.
Were I a millionaire, I wouldn't be upset about progressive wealth taxes, I would be pleased. Why? Because in the philosophical justification for personal wealth and private capital, being a millionaire is a reflection of your worth to others in society. If your millions go to help others through taxes, you get double the social standing: once for earning the millions, once again for giving them back!
That's quite a poor assumption I find. Most modern leaps in progress have been publicly funded (see for example penicillin, the internet, anything resulting from the space race, and for a more comprehensive list, the entrepeneurial state by Mazzucato). Capital owners typically just take this publicly funded work, slap a sticker on it, and put it behind a paywall. Not much added value imho.
Nothing. This is exactly was happened in France where there is welfare money for housing (APL): landlords raised prices saying that rented are helped anyway. In the end the situation is better for landlords, equals for people getting the welfare money (not everyone), and worse for people who don't.
Then we already know that our major grocery chains will do exactly the same thing, based on their current behavior. Unless UBI is handled with care the average recipient will just be a middle person between the government and the greedy.
It does get into elements of the basic problem though: i.e. would the government be (in the short/medium term) better off using that money to subsidize housing construction ?
I believe a UBI is our future, but I'm not entirely convinced we've actually hit the societal-scale productivity necessary to support it yet
People with basic income have time to take part in politics, to regulate away such monstrous landlords. Landlords already know this, and will pay to prevent it.
The kinds of people who would benefit from UBI in this way are often the people least qualified or capable of engaging in politics. (Though in general, the credentialed class is full of people who don't understand the philosophical presuppositions either. The failure of education.)
In addition to the people who don't want to work, there's the people who can't work (due to disabilities, family care responsibilities, discrimination in the workplace etc.), and the people who could get more done without a job in the private sector (volunteers, artists, and... politicians!).
But to answer you as a landlord specifically, supply and demand will prevent that. There will be a one-time inflation event where you will raise your rents to a small degree, but you certainly can't pocket "all of it". Supply and demand will continue to exist just fine -- if you attempt to double your rent, everyone will simply move to a different landlord that raised prices by just 10%.
But poor tenants will be helped massively. (Again, see my linked comment for the math.)
If everyone gets a universal basic income, what is to stop the market from raising prices to account for that extra income? For example, if my landlord knows I'm getting an extra $500 a month, what's to stop him from raising the price of my rent $500? Or an iPhone or the price of groceries? It would seem the only way to prevent that is for massive price controls on everything, Otherwise, that extra income means nothing.
And the answer is that prices will probably be expected to go up to some degree as a one-time thing, in a way that would be approximately a wash for those already with plenty of income, but where it still makes a huge difference for those with little/no income, which is precisely the point.
For example if it's a one-time inflation bump of 10% and UBI of $10K/yr., then:
Person A with income $100,000/yr, now makes $110,000/yr., worth $100,000 in previous dollars
Person B with income $10,000/yr, now makes $20,000/yr., worth $18,182 in previous dollars
Person C with income $0/yr, now makes $10,000/yr., worth $9,091 in previous dollars
Again, this is precisely the goal: the extra income isn't supposed to mean anything for those who already have plenty of income. It's supposed to help those who don't, or those who lose their jobs, etc. Without a big government bureaucracy trying to determine who qualifies or not.
And it's important to realize that the inflation is a one-time event. Prices will rise but then they'll stop rising. And if it were 10% inflation over a year, that's the same as the usual targeted 2% inflation rate but compressed from 5 years. (And the central bank might very well target 0% inflation over the following 4 years to compensate.)
Yes, the UBI is on-going, but it's a one-time shift in income levels, which is what generates the one-time inflation.
The extra money keeps on getting spent each year -- it doesn't affect the economy in a cumulative way. The person who used to have $0, and now has $10K to spend this year, still only has $10K next year, and still only has $10K the year after. Inflation would only continue if that person received $10K in year one, $20K in year two, $30K in year three, etc.
And inflation is a complicated thing, but it doesn't tend to stick when its causes are known, and known to be temporary. Inflation is governed by expectations, and those expectations are often unknown. In the case of UBI, it's extremely known.
(Also remember that the UBI is not new money injected into the economy -- it's generally proposed as redistribution in the form of taxation. Which according to the simplest theory wouldn't generate any inflation at all, but because of the resulting shifts in consumption patterns, that's what generates the one-time inflation among basic consumer goods, housing, etc.)
UBI doesn't have to mean everyone gets a higher income. It could be revenue/income neutral over the population as a whole if properly funded by tax adjustments.
I guess it depends from where those money are coming: if they print the money then sure, if they take the money from all kinds of government programs, then the prices should stay the same.
That’s not how pricing works. The source of new buying power injected into the demand side of the rental market is irrelevant to the effect it will have on marginal prices. And yes, with some hysteresis, suppliers of inelastic goods like housing will capture nearly the entirety of the increased spending.
I think the original MMT folks’s jobs guarantee is the best option. Everyone that is willing to work is guaranteed a job that pays some reasonable wage. That sets a floor on compensation. Employers who want to attract people away from the government job will either have to pay better or offer otherwise more appealing work. The jobs program incomes in turn create a floor on demand. Note that this doesn’t have the UBI problem because it’s not a bonus additional income, but rather an income floor.
Ideally the guaranteed jobs are something more productive than paying people to dig ditches and fill them back in again. But frankly printing money to pay people to exercise 8 hours a day would probably save billions in healthcare costs.
Anyhow it’s not particularly difficult to work out a greatly more eucivic and eusocial regime than what we currently have. In fact it’s sufficiently easy that a reasonable person can only conclude that the enshittification of our societies is the intentional policy of rulers who don’t particularly care for our welfare.
>Oh, wait, so you're claiming it's not a free market in reality? Suddenly those price controls don't seems like such a bad idea then.
it depends - real-estate, in general, is still very much a free market. So to your point the thing to prevent rent from just being raised is someone else undercutting you. That requires there to be adequate housing to fulfill market need which there is in many places but not everywhere. That being said... the current trend of PE firms starting to buy up real-estate for the sole purpose of renting it back to people is pretty concerning, and quite frankly shouldn't be allowed IMO. What next? Privatize the water supply and then pretend the "market will make it more efficient"?
I don't know, it could be because you think people with UBI might have more time to spend on videogames, but since UBI is likely not a good income they'll probaly pirate them instead of buying them, threatening the business model of your whole industry.
Or maybe because you work in one of the most toxic tech industries and would like to have a way of supporting yourself while you find another place to work at?
Unfortunately the term UBI has negative connotations towards it for a large percentage of the population still so it’s going to be a huge fight to ever get UBI as it stands implemented.
But what I’m guessing will happen in the long run, Employment Insurance will relax it rules enough that almost everyone will qualify for it, therefore giving the guaranteed income through the EI program. It will be easier to refactor the rules in the EI program than it will be to create a whole new program from a political point to view.
The consideration is being done by the Senate, which is a sleepy home for appointed political party bagmen, and unlike the US Senate, has zero power or relevance.
It is so irrelevant and useless that the New Democratic Party has been calling for its abolition for decades.