Okay. Did you change anything? You were saying that there is a certain system, and then that complex system would end up being replaced by a different complex system.

Were there any changes at all as a result of your research? Or did you come to the conclusion that it was very complex, and, therefore, you maintained the status quo? I’m asking because I was in charge of the social assistance program in Newfoundland and Labrador at one point, so I can relate to this.

Where did you go with it? Did you actually take a group of people and do a pilot in something?

That’s a great question. I appreciate knowing your background, so I know that you’re aware of everything I’m talking about.

We didn’t do a pilot. Ours was meant to be input to further deliberations of the kind that I’m sure you’re familiar with. In fact, B.C. is going through a renovation of its income assistance system right now, and our report fed into that. We’ve been talked to several times to talk about how to do that.

As a useful example, as you know, a large portion of the income assistance and social assistance systems in Canadian provinces right now have to do with people living with disabilities. We recommended a big suite of changes that would make access simpler, as well as make a whole part of it more dignified, and would bring the benefits up in a permanent basic income way to the poverty line — because now they’re below it — but it also had a big part that was assisted to work. We heard from people living with disabilities that there was a feeling that this was a system that punished them for trying to work or even volunteer. We were trying to find our way toward a system that was more respectful and more dignified, with better supports, and our feeling was that a basic income alone was really not going to do that.

Thank you very much. It’s very interesting.

Welcome to our witness. Thank you for being with us. I have read part of your book. I found it very interesting, Mr. Green. You mentioned basic income in your opening remarks. If I go to your conclusion on page 218, it states that basic income could simplify the system of income and could be easier to access than the existing program. You mentioned that it comes with a cost, and you conclude by saying that a simpler system could mean fewer specialized programs to address particular needs, and, in some aspects, they have some people who stay behind.

Could you give me two or three examples where going with basic income is worse than staying with the current program, for example, or group of people? You seem to refer to a particular situation.

That’s quite a good question.

One example that comes to mind is one of the areas that we’re all concerned with: people living in poverty. The biggest group with the highest poverty rate is single adults without children because they don’t get the Canada Child Benefit, and they’re not yet able to get the Guaranteed Income Supplement or Old Age Security benefits.

If you take a close look at that group, the top 20% in terms of income are actually people who are working more than 40 weeks a year. They’re working in poverty. In that group, a substantial proportion are women working in service sector-type jobs in cities. A lot of them are racialized and immigrants. For that group, our feeling is that a basic income could potentially, as you said, get them more directly to the poverty line. But that’s not where they’re at. What we need to do for them is a combination of increasing minimum wages and increasing the Canada Workers Benefit — those are policies that already exist, so we don’t need to create other ones in those cases — as well as increase the enforcement of regulation. A lot of what happens with that group are problems with dignity at work and control over their work schedule — it’s all things that, in our mind, a basic income wouldn’t address. Our feeling is that all of those tools are sort of there, but there are ways to use them much better to directly affect and help, hopefully, that group.

To change topics, the timing is good to have you here today because of the detailed P.E.I. report from this working group that my colleague mentioned. It seems very attractive. You mentioned that you would have 65% fewer children in poverty and 90% fewer people living alone.

I don’t know if you had any time today to look at that report that was released, but is it fair to say that conclusion could apply to the rest of Canada — from coast to coast — if we were to go with the national program, and that you would see a significant decline in poverty if we have a national basic income? Is it fair to conclude that based on that report and your own experience?

I have seen the report; it’s authored by a set of people for whom I have great respect. They are high-level researchers. Moving it to the country as a whole is a difficult prospect. Spending directly on moving incomes up is clearly a way that you would reduce monetary poverty, but poverty is more complex than that. That’s part of my point.

In terms of moving it from P.E.I. to the rest of the country, it’s important to notice that in the proposed pilot, 65% of the expenditures that were needed for that basic income would be paid by the rest of Canada, not P.E.I. In other words, you would have a funding model where the money is sort of coming in from the heavens for 65% of it. If you take that and move it to the national level, you couldn’t do that anymore. P.E.I. is small enough that you can do it without affecting anybody’s federal tax rates. If you move it to the federal level, however, you will have to move federal tax rates considerably. When you do that, you will change incentives and the whole tax structure. That means the movement from there to the national level is not clear, at least in my mind.

That’s a good question. I don’t know where the 10% comes from. I would dispute that you can get a lot of savings exactly for the reasons that I just said in my opening remarks, which is that 8% of Canadians don’t file taxes. If you want to replace some of the existing systems, like income assistance systems, for example, to say, “We’ll have less red tape because we won’t have those systems,” you’ll have to implement a different system where you go and find those people. It’s not clear to me that there are a lot of savings to be had there.

Glad to have you with us tonight, sir. I have a follow-up to Senator Gignac’s question.

Critics of the national basic income program argue that jurisdiction issues across Canada could prove to be a major impediment in its implementation. As you’re aware, we have a plethora of social support programs, which you started to talk about, across the provinces and territories. As the Parliamentary Budget Officer has suggested, some of these social programs would have to be curtailed to pay for the new program.

What’s your take on that concern? How would the federal government — which already has a hard time bringing the provinces and territories together — deliver on a national basic income program?

That’s a great question. It’s a bit outside of my purview. I don’t study federalism. I agree that I think it would be hard. On the other hand, I think if the feds were coming to the table with a bunch of money, as in the P.E.I. example, saying, “We’re going to take over your income assistance and social assistance components,” my guess is that you would find a certain amount of positive response to that. But, as you were saying, the devil is in the details.

As I said, Lindsay Tedds and her team went through literally every program that was available to British Columbians in our case, and we found little scope for taking things out. If that’s true, then the complexity of the project that you’re talking about is bigger than it might appear on the surface.

You also participated in the opinion piece which you co-authored for The Globe and Mail in May of this year. To move it forward, you highlighted that the delivery and benefits through a tax system where the majority of vulnerable Canadians don’t even file taxes is a complex problem to solve. The government announced a pilot program through the Canada Revenue Agency for automatic tax filing. The goal is to ensure that vulnerable Canadians do not miss out on much-needed benefits.

Is this potentially a step that you feel could make a potential basic income program more successful?

Yes, I think it could. To be clear, it’s something we probably need for all of our programs. Whether you decide to go for a basic income or not, that seems like a platform we want. Yes, I agree; it would be a step forward in that project.

Thank you for joining us, and thank you for all your work on this and related issues.

I was struck when I was reading the recent book that was published, which Senator Gignac referred to, where you talked about the different and current approaches to income support being like a house, and we continue to add extra rooms and improvements throughout the years. The analogy that you made was that a guaranteed livable basic income would be tantamount to needlessly knocking down a perfectly good house and building another one in its place.

In the 45 years of experience that have led to me tabling this bill, I’ve learned that it’s people living in poverty and trying to access income supports who say something very different. For them, it’s more like a house where the foundation is cracked, the beams are rotten and the roof is caving in — and they’re not receiving enough to live on and they have to contend with inflexible conditions that they can’t meet. Yet, they’re watching politicians continue to use the same approaches by building new additions onto upper levels — a nice new room, but the rest of the house is collapsing.

I know that you did some of this work during the pandemic. I understand the limitations that you indicated in that you weren’t able to continue all the consultations, particularly with Indigenous people. What kind of research has been done recently around the impacts of income supports with those other kinds of supports? As you probably recognize from this bill, we’re not proposing an income-only model. It is a model that would streamline the income component, and also keep in place the supports components.

Most of the literature shows that the downstream benefits of such programs in terms of health and well-being — and you talked about the overall increase of a more just approach — seem to play out. In fact, it’s behind some of what Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and now P.E.I. are suggesting.

I’m curious how you see that playing out, and why you wouldn’t see a blending of those two as being beneficial.

To be clear, if you had read out the rest of that passage, you would see that we used almost the same words that you used. We didn’t say it was a perfectly good house; we said it was a house where the doors are often hard to access. We didn’t use the foundation analogy, but it sounds perfectly in line with what we think. We believe the house needs to be reformed in a big way. We said that sometimes a basic income is presented as something that streamlines — that knocks out walls and makes things simpler. My whole argument — and the thing that I’m trying to say here — is that a basic income has to be integrated with that house. As soon as you try to do that, it makes the house more complicated rather than simpler.

In our mind, in many cases, trying to knock walls down doesn’t improve things. A basic income is not going to deliver better outcomes. I’m not disputing that it can sometimes deliver good outcomes; I’m saying that, in many cases, there is something that does it better. That’s the point we’re trying to make. It isn’t that the current system is great — there are a whole bunch of arguments that it is not, and our whole suite of reforms that we propose says it’s not. A basic income can’t be separated from the others — to me, this bill says, “We do the basic income, and we also keep in place the other parts.” It’s the integration of those two parts that is the hard part. How one integrates it and makes it effective is the hard part of the question.

It’s not like I think you’re not aware of that; I just don’t see it in the bill.

The B.C. panel doesn’t seem to address the fact that the income project in Manitoba is the only pilot where benefits and potential cost savings were identified for health and well-being. Certainly, that shores up part of why Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon and P.E.I. are looking at these models. The PBO has acknowledged that there will likely be downstream or upstream savings.

We see these in income and cash transfer programs in Ontario and Finland, and I’m curious why your findings didn’t find that there would be savings in health care costs, ultimately.

That’s a good question.

It turns out that there are not a lot of studies out there on exactly how much health savings you get. There are studies on the benefits of cash benefit types of programs for health outcomes. Because a basic income is just one of those classes, you would get the same benefits as you would out of, say, a wage subsidy program — to a large degree.

In terms of the savings on the fiscal side, the main study out there right now is by Professor Forget on the Mincome experiment. I published an article in a peer-reviewed journal that shows that, in fact, there were no such savings from the Mincome experiment. In regard to the claim that there ought to be, it seems plausible that there might be, but our point was that there is not evidence — that we know of — that shows that there actually is health care savings of that kind.

My understanding is that, in response to that position that you put out, Dr. Forget actually published a subsequent peer-reviewed article that showed that, in fact, there was an 8% decrease in hospitalizations.

Actually, my study was a critique of exactly that number. I can explain it quickly, I think: In the Mincome experiment, the people of the town of Dauphin were given a basic income. What Professor Forget did, which was quite remarkable, was pull together all this health expenditure data, follow the people of Dauphin over time — as the Mincome experiment came into place and then passed out — and compared it to other towns in Manitoba.

What you find if you pull the data apart, I argue, is that, yes, Dauphin had a lower level of expenditures, but it was actually on a decreasing path of expenditures before Mincome came in, and it continued on that decreasing path after Mincome came in.

In other words, the finding that Dauphin had lower expenditures was the path that Dauphin was on. In my mind, while that’s published in a peer-reviewed journal, that number doesn’t stand up. I certainly wouldn’t recommend a government basing any kind of fiscal projections on that claim of 8% savings.

Thank you, Professor Green.