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.

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.

Thank you for being here.

Inflation is currently a main concern for many Canadians. How might the implementation of a guaranteed livable basic income be expected to influence inflation?

I ask the question because of the excess liquidity that might result for our economy. In the past, inflation was much easier to control regarding excess liquidity, scarce resources and higher interest rates. Today, additional issues affect inflation, such as geopolitical issues, energy transition and reindustrialization.

I think it still is a legitimate concern. I’d like to have your thoughts on that question and concern.

That’s an interesting question.

Straight out of the gate, it wouldn’t be one of the concerns that would make me go away from a basic income. The main impact on increased demand would come because you’re taking tax dollars away from people who tend to spend fewer of their dollars on goods, and giving them to people who are spending every dollar they have on goods. That will push up demand, to some degree, in the economy, but I wouldn’t predict that it will be so strong relative to the other factors that you mentioned — which are truly driving things at the moment — to really make a market change in any of that. It wouldn’t be a major concern of mine.

You don’t feel that it would create sufficient excess liquidity for it to be a major concern?

We are a nation of consumers. The savings rate in Canada before the pandemic was 3%. You’re putting all this excess liquidity back into the system. We’ve seen a bit of that effect with the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB, after the pandemic when everything was under lockdown and it reopened. It’s a different scenario, obviously.

Are there any studies that you looked into? I did read excerpts from your book. Are there any studies that we have across the world where that is not the case?

I don’t know of any. Part of the problem is that most of the attempts to study basic income look at the impacts at the individual level, and you’re talking about things that happen at the societal level.

The only thing I would throw in is to caution against treating the CERB like a basic income — as an example of anything that has to do with a basic income. It was an emergency measure. For the reasons you said, you had people who were forced to hold back their consumption for a while. They were then given those benefits, and things started opening up, and it all comes flooding back in. That, in my mind, interacts with the supply chain problems at the same time, and the two forces coming together are a lot of what’s been going on.

Hopefully, we won’t be in those supply chain problems forever. I think the liquidity burst that we saw there is not what would happen with a basic income.

Thank you for that.

I would like your thoughts on what potential effects a guaranteed livable basic income could have on workforce participation and productivity.

It’s a good question. It’s one of the major concerns, and it’s something that we studied. It has been a focus of many studies on basic income, and the general conclusion is that it won’t change labour force participation very much.

It’s interesting why that’s true in the Canadian context. There are offsetting effects. On the one side, for the people who are on income assistance, this tends to help them get into the labour market to some degree. On the other hand, some people who are already working will potentially cut back their labour supply to get access to the benefits, and the two cancel themselves out. But the net result is very close to zero in almost every study I’ve seen.

I hear you, and those are the main concerns. Why hasn’t any country adopted a guaranteed livable income or a basic income? We would be the first country in the world to adopt it. There have been experiments: Ontario closed off their experiment when the governments changed, mind you — maybe it’s not a good example. Why hasn’t any country in the world adopted a guaranteed livable basic income, given that there are so many positives, and there’s no concern over inflation, and no concern over work productivity or labour participation? I’ve heard many positive outcomes. Have you looked into that?

We haven’t investigated why no one picked it up. Our argument — which seemed to be in conjunction with what the government was thinking by the time we delivered the report — was that we don’t actually see such great benefits. In almost every area that we could think of, there was some other more direct policy that could accomplish what was needed at a somewhat lower cost. In regard to whatever amount you feel that you have to spend, a basic income was not the most cost-effective way to achieve the goal of a more just society in our context.

That’s our interpretation. Other people would probably have other reasons for why they think it hasn’t happened, but my belief is it hasn’t happened because it isn’t the best system.

That’s perhaps why the other countries didn’t adopt it either. Thank you for those answers.

Thank you, Dr. Green, for the work you did on the British Columbia Expert Panel on Basic Income study. I read your report. You have summarized it fairly but, of course, quickly.

If I could characterize your summary in the following way, you and your panel have rejected basic income for basically two reasons: The first is the excessive complexity that it would introduce into a system — a complexity that you can’t really get rid of because of all the other supports that you feel are necessary and essential for a just society.

The other reason, which you glossed over quite quickly, was the whole notion of a just society. For this idea of self-respect and social respect and the need for community and so on, you base it on a Rawlsian idea — it’s Elizabeth Anderson’s and John Rawls’s theory of justice. Now, it’s not axiomatic for Rawlsians to be against basic income. There are lots of Rawlsians who are supportive of basic income.

My question is this: If you take the philosophical position that basic income violates some basic laws of reciprocity — this is the term that you use in your report — is there any world in which taking that position would allow you to reach a position where you would support basic income?

What I’m trying to say, Professor Green, is it sounds like the framework you set up — the philosophical approach you took — essentially made it impossible for any type of basic income to be advocated. That may be why, in a very coherent way, your study stopped short of looking at some of the questions that my colleague Senator Pate asked, for example, on downstream benefits, health, criminal justice, education and so on.