Senator Pate: I certainly hope so. Thank you very much for your advocacy on this and in so many other areas as well.

Hon. Marilou McPhedran: Senator Pate, to your point about the overall impact of expanding guaranteed livable income, could you comment, please, on populism and the fact that the research available to us now is that populism, including what we have seen in Canada in the last two weeks, has roots in economic disparity and opportunity disparity?

The Hon. the Speaker: Senator Pate, would you take a question?

Senator Pate: That was a very good summary of the research that does exist. Thank you very much for raising it.

Yes, as I mentioned in my speech recently regarding some of these issues, it’s key. It certainly is seen as one of the key issues stoking the flames of discontent and assisting in drawing people to go toward individuals and groups that they believe are interested in assisting them but don’t necessarily support their overall well-being.

Hon. Diane F. Griffin: Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Pate’s bill, Bill S-233, An Act to develop a national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income.

The bill stipulates that the minister must develop a national framework for the implementation of a guaranteed basic livable income program throughout Canada for any person over the age of 17, including temporary workers, permanent residents and refugee claimants.

I recognize that for some colleagues the idea of a guaranteed livable income in Canada may seem radical, but I believe that implementing a guaranteed livable income would have meaningful long-term, positive impacts on Canadian life.

When I was thinking about policies that have a profound impact, what came to mind was the Canada Health Act. In a chapter of the interim report of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada entitled Values and How They Shape Canadians’ Views, Commissioner Roy Romanow notes:

Almost all Canadians I have heard from to date want to ensure that the poorest in our society have access to health care. They also believe Canadians should not be bankrupted by the costs of acquiring needed health care services, and that all Canadians should be protected against catastrophic illnesses and injuries. . . .

In a paper entitled Waiting For Romanow: Canada’s Health Care Values Under Fire, Arthur Schafer at the University of Manitoba notes that:

. . . it is one of the inestimable virtues of Canadian Medicare that those who lose their jobs don’t face the catastrophe of also losing their public health insurance. In good times and in bad, the principle of universality translates as health care security.

There are two additional benefits of our universal system: Canadian workers, unlike their American counterparts, are not forced, by fear of losing health insurance, to stay in jobs they hate, and thus the labour market becomes more flexible and efficient.

A good example of how health care security can result in human flourishing is Hank Green, an American author and entrepreneur who has colitis, which is extremely expensive to treat. He couldn’t get health care insurance and thought he would have to get a job at a big company so as not to go bankrupt from medical bills. But thanks to Obamacare and to legislation in Montana, Hank was able to get health insurance. In the years since, he has written two bestselling novels, started several businesses and created two educational YouTube channels called “Crash Course” and “SciShow.”

Your kids and grandkids have probably watched some of his videos. According to his brother John, today those shows reach over a million learners per day and employ dozens of people.

Over-incentivizing people to work for large companies stifles entrepreneurship and job growth. It’s not just wrong, it’s also bad business.

If an additional benefit of our universal health care system is that Canadians are not forced by fear of losing insurance to stay in jobs they hate, I submit this would also be an additional benefit of a guaranteed livable income.

There are real psychological consequences to financial insecurity. A common metric for measuring financial security is the ability to cover an unexpected expense. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, in its 2019 Canadian Financial Capability Survey, found that individuals who are living with a common-law partner, separated, divorced or who have never been married are less likely to have emergency funds to be able to cover an unexpected expense of $2,000, especially if they are lone parents. Women are less confident that they would be able to cover a sudden expense of $2,000.

The American Psychological Association notes that scarcity drains mental resources, narrowing our focus and impacting our choices; increases negative emotions which affect our decisions and its effects contribute to the cycle of poverty. Financial scarcity, the APA notes, is really problematic. When low-income people are asked to think about financial dilemmas, their problem-solving ability decreases. High-income people do not show the same effect. Chronic deprivation can diminish psychological bandwidth, harming cognitive capacity and decision-making.

Individuals without a safety net — and you’ve heard Senator Pate say this in the past, in fact, tonight — are using so much of their mental bandwidth to survive that it’s even more challenging for them to allocate bandwidth to do things that would help them to thrive.

What benefit might a guaranteed livable income have for these folks? Data from Finland sheds some light. A study by researchers at University of Helsinki paid 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people an income of 560 euros a month, with no obligation to seek a job and no reductions in their payment if they accepted one.

An article in The Guardian, in the U.K., summarized the study’s outcomes. While there was significant diversity in recipients’ experiences, they were generally more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain, depression, sadness and loneliness than the control group. As for employment, researchers noted a mild positive effect in that participants also tended to score better on other measures of well-being, including greater feelings of autonomy, financial security and confidence in the future.

The improvements in mental health are particularly important to me. Unfortunately, mental health resources are scarce in our country. Addressing mental health problems that are rooted in financial insecurity by addressing the financial insecurity itself would help to take some pressure off of our overwhelmed mental health resources system.

Senator Pate’s bill is a first step. I thank her for it.

In November 2020, the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island Special Committee on Poverty tabled a report whose central recommendation was the creation of a basic income guarantee. The province of Prince Edward Island is willing and eager to play a role in developing a guaranteed livable income framework and in being the venue for a project to demonstrate its utility. We need to run this experiment, work out the mechanisms and figure out how it can be scaled up to a Canada-wide program.

In an interview with another paper called The Guardian — this time in Charlottetown — Premier Dennis King noted that a guaranteed livable income could have a positive impact on labour force participation in P.E.I. because folks wouldn’t fear losing their benefits if they picked up a part-time job. Premier King would like to see an experiment run in the province but emphasized the need for the federal government to get on board:

. . . I really wish we could find a way to get the federal government to sit down more seriously to talk to us about it.

. . . the other side of this that we need to be thinking about . . . is the labour shortage that we have. Is there a way for us to be able to change some of our programs — whether they’re social assistance or others — to allow people to work a little bit more and keep some of their money, as opposed to having these antiquated programs that actually discourage people from getting into the labour force?

In 2019 and 2020, the Honourable Ernie Hudson, then P.E.I.’s Minister of Social Development and Housing, wrote twice — twice — to his federal counterpart. This was followed by a letter from the premier to the Prime Minister to explore what a basic income might look like for P.E.I.

By the way, the P.E.I. government has not been idly sitting by while waiting for a federal partner. It has implemented a targeted basic income pilot at 85% of Market Basket Measure that supports eligible social assistance clients, youth aging out of care and Islanders with disabilities.

So far, 590 Islanders have benefited from this targeted basic income program, which has helped the people living with disabilities and limitations entering into the workforce to have their basic needs met and enjoy a better quality of life.

There is an inspirational quote that you’ve probably seen in a classroom or a fitness studio that asks: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” I wonder what new career paths folks might try if they knew that they wouldn’t miss their rent payments if it didn’t work out. I wonder what new businesses people might open if they knew they’d still be able to buy groceries if the business didn’t turn a profit in the first few months. How might children and elders be better cared for? How might people’s mental and physical health improve?

Colleagues, I can’t wait to find out. Please join me in supporting Senator Pate’s bill so that we can make a start down this exciting path.

Thank you.

Hon. Kim Pate: Thank you, Senator Cordy, for introducing this bill.

Honourable senators, Bill C-12 builds upon the vital direct income supports provided by the government throughout this pandemic.

All of these programs, particularly the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, made a crucial difference for many who had lost jobs or income as a result of the pandemic. It enabled people to prioritize the health and well-being of themselves, their families and their communities, with less worry about such fundamentals as how to feed their families or the spectre of eviction.

We continue to applaud the government for the CERB and similar measures, as well as the expressed intention to leave no one behind.

We must also continue to challenge the government to make good on that promise by urging action to address the shameful inadequacies and inequalities that continue to stigmatize, exclude and abandon millions of people below the poverty line.

Bill C-12 is another in a series of adjustments and patches designed to ensure that the income supports flow to people in need, who are too often struggling through the vagaries of a system for responding to poverty that is cruelly distrustful, complex, inflexible and wholly inadequate.

This legislation illuminates how restrictive, competing and contradictory rules around programs meant to provide economic support to those in need, especially those in dire need, too often collide in ways that push those most in need of assistance further into precarity and poverty.

For more than 200,000 of the lowest-income seniors in Canada, accepting the CERB payments they were entitled to in order to try to stay out of financial crisis in 2020 resulted in them losing part or all of the Guaranteed Income Supplement payments they needed to make ends meet in 2021.

In case it was not clear, let us remind ourselves, dear colleagues, that in order to qualify for CERB, these seniors are some of the most economically marginalized in Canada. They are poor past retirement age, who are obliged to work to make ends meet, yet who are working the type of minimum wage and precarious jobs that do not pay them enough to raise them above the poverty line.

Many other types of income supports for those most marginalized have similarly resulted in cuts or clawbacks for those who received the CERB, from social assistance and disability payments in many provinces and one territory, to the Canada Child Benefit.

Bill C-12 would ensure that, in future, seniors should not be penalized with GIS payment reductions for having accepted CERB or similar pandemic supports. This is a wonderful and much-needed step in the right direction.

Most income support programs provide minimal financial support and aggressively and punitively claw back already inadequate assistance if recipients manage to have access to any other sources of income. This design is based on assuming the worst of people in poverty, assuming that they are looking to game the system instead of simply trying to feed, clothe, house and provide for their families. Worse yet, this design keeps people trapped, not just in poverty, but in the near-perpetual crisis of too little to survive on and punitive clawbacks of any monies earned.

Bill C-12 resiles from this approach. It is a welcome step toward anti-poverty policy focused on meeting people’s needs rather than on leaving them in abject poverty.

With this in mind, I speak today to add my voice to the chorus of support for Bill C-12, but also urging further and decisive action to eradicate poverty, including through the guaranteed livable basic income proposed by Bill S-233 and Bill C-223.

Throughout the pandemic, the government has demonstrated a laudable openness to adjusting its income supports to better reach those falling through the gaps. Unfortunately, however, the more than 3.5 million Canadians living below the poverty line have disproportionately borne the consequences of the time that it takes to adjust coverage under this step-by-step approach.

Bill C-12 is a vital measure, but the relief under this legislation, along with a planned one-off reimbursement for past GIS clawbacks, will arrive far too late for too many who have been forced to go without food, shelter or medication since July 2021. As detailed by Campaign 2000, many seniors have had to turn to usurious payday loans to afford rent. Many more have been evicted or face the threat of eviction before these new government measures take effect. Elderly people who lost their housing during the pandemic — and dealt with an unusually cold winter — have been left with absolutely nowhere to go.

For many, the loss of GIS payments also means the loss of other provincial and territorial benefits and services available only to those who qualify for the GIS.

Even once Bill C-12 comes into force, seniors who claimed CERB in good faith and later found out that they were not eligible are still facing the prospect of having to make repayments to the government. The CERB payments they received have long since been used to secure food, shelter and other necessities for survival. At a time when the government too rarely enforces prohibitions on corporate tax avoidance and evasion that cost Canadians billions of dollars, will impoverished seniors be expected to use their vitally needed GIS incomes to make CERB repayments?

It bears mentioning that when we talk about CERB eligibility for those below the poverty line, most of those who were ineligible did not qualify because they had too little income. They did not make at least $5,000 in the previous year.

The CERB was created because of the inadequacy of current responses to poverty. When millions of Canadians who weren’t already in poverty faced sudden economic loss as a result of the pandemic, the CERB was necessary to prevent them from having nowhere to turn but to those wholly inadequate, dehumanizing and stigmatizing provincial and territorial social assistance programs — programs that cannot be accessed until people exhaust all their savings and lose all of their assets and that keep people trapped in deep, deep poverty.

In the absence of more permanent and inclusive measures like a guaranteed livable basic income, 1 in 10 Canadians continue to be abandoned to this unacceptable status quo. How can we justify a program like the CERB that so clearly recognizes that existing systems for responding to poverty are untenable and yet deny supports to the very people trapped within those systems?

The government has already taken vital steps toward more inclusive forms of income support. Last Parliament, it introduced legislation proposing a form of guaranteed livable basic income for persons with disabilities, and it has committed to reintroducing this legislation.

The Guaranteed Income Supplement at issue in Bill C-12, which also operates as a limited form of guaranteed livable basic income, demonstrates what the Canada disability benefit has to offer both in itself and as a further step toward guaranteed livable basic income for all Canadians.

While the circumstances surrounding Bill C-12 reinforce that the GIS has not eradicated poverty and economic uncertainty for seniors, the program has resulted in significantly lower rates of poverty, such that approximately 8% of single seniors now live in poverty, compared to about 32% of single adults under the age of 65.

The government introduced the GIS in the late 1960s, during a time of bold action to address poverty and inequality, seeing it as particularly reprehensible to abandon elderly people in Canada to hunger and homelessness. The lack of more robust support for working-aged Canadians means, however, that too many remain trapped in poverty their entire lives.

To illustrate the difference between social assistance programs available to younger adults and the Guaranteed Income Supplement, or GIS, Dr. Evelyn Forget, an economist and one of Canada’s leading experts on guaranteed livable basic income, refers to the lived experiences of people — people like Bill.

Bill worked at a Winnipeg food bank. He was also on social assistance and a client of the food bank. He lived in a tiny, insecure residential hotel with a shared, unusable shower until his life suddenly changed. On his sixty-fifth birthday, he qualified for GIS. Even though GIS has often failed to raise people above the poverty line, in Bill’s case, it doubled his income. His GIS entitlements provided him with twice what he used to receive on social assistance. As a result, he was able to rent a small apartment with a door that locked and a working bathroom. He no longer had to wear all of his clothes all the time out of fear that others might take his belongings. He had access to his own cooking facilities for the first time and could purchase several cans of beans or chili at a time, preparing his own food at home instead of having to pay extra for food he could eat from a package or lining up for hours at a soup kitchen.

The travesty of Bill’s story is that he had to wait so long, until old age, before he could access supports sufficient to provide even this small amount of stability. Guaranteed livable basic income would give people a meaningful chance to escape cycles of poverty much earlier in life. It would provide people the security and resources needed to regroup and plan for the future that can help people keep poverty temporary instead of permanent.

Those people include children transitioning out of the care of the state with no one to support them; young adults unable to afford post-secondary education or having to balance their studies with full-time work; recent graduates hoping to find a secure job in their field but forced to turn to gig work to try and survive; young families trying to care for children; single moms leaving a home they shared with an abusive partner; workers in struggling industries and people dealing with sudden illness or caregiving responsibilities. These are just some of the people in Canada who face economic uncertainty and for whom Canada’s current support systems too often work like a spider’s web to ensnare them instead of a trampoline that allows them opportunities to bounce back.

Honourable senators, Bill C-12 will ensure that seniors with the least do not lose the income supports that they rely on to survive.

Right now, let’s pass this bill. Going forward, let’s work together with renewed urgency to assist the government to continue the critical work that it has started by ensuring seniors and all in Canada currently struggling below the poverty line have access to the health, social and economic supports they need to not merely survive subsistence but to thrive.

In this way, we can sow the seeds of inclusion and help diminish the divisions that the pandemic and recent events have brought into sharp relief. I look forward to pursuing this with all of you. As the folks in P.E.I. are urging us, let’s get it done.

Meegwetch, thank you.

Senator Pate: Yes, I will.