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.

That’s interesting. That’s a very good question. I would separate it into two parts.

First, as you said quite well, our investigation — in some ways — was broken into two parts. One was investigating those downstream benefits. A large part of that was done not by us — the panel. It was done by the set of researchers that we hired — we didn’t hire them; nobody got paid in all of this, but they did get access to good data, and they studied many different questions.

For those downstream benefits, almost none of those studies took any particular philosophical stance, to tell you the truth, and most were done by economists who are more favourable to this more individualistic — more Rawlsian — approach to the question. I don’t think it would be fair to reject the questions about the downstream benefits based on the philosophical stance.

In regard to the philosophical stance, it’s potentially fair that you’re saying that we’ve maybe taken a stance that makes a basic income harder to cross the line, but that is because of our reading of what it is to truly be a just society — one where we worry about social interactions. For example, if I go back to my example earlier about women working full-time essentially in poverty, a basic income as a response to that problem is a response in which we give people a certain amount of income, and we hope they will then walk away from bad jobs and force their employers to do better.

In our mind, an approach that is more, in some sense, communitarian — that says we are in this together, and we’re going to create and enforce regulations — seemed, to us, to be a more effective way of reaching the direct goal of a better job for these people, and also creating a society that we think of as more just, honestly.

One can disagree on one’s philosophical position, but I think you agree with me that you can be a Rawlsian without rejecting basic income.

I agree with that.

We can pursue different versions of a just society and reach different conclusions as a result.

I will have to reread your report more carefully. I’m not sure I agree with you that your panel, in fact, looked hard at the downstream benefits. I recall that, essentially, the panel felt that some of these things were too amorphous and too fuzzy to measure: criminal justice benefits, more education and even health care. I’m not so sure; you did cite some studies. But I got the impression that the panel felt the following: “We’re going to go for a just society that prioritizes reciprocity. We want participation income. We don’t want basic income. Therefore, the long-term benefits are not really relevant to this question.”

If I’m unfair, please tell me, but, as I recall from the report, there was very little looking at what most basic income advocates would put emphasis on, which is the long-term benefits to society beyond, say, poverty alleviation.

I appreciate the depth of your reading; I really do. I don’t agree that everything you’ve said is a fair interpretation of what we wrote. For example, on education, we had a study that explicitly looked at human capital creation and training, and looked at how a basic income would work into it. We had another study that looked at child education and exactly how a basic income would work into it. We looked at those very explicitly.

I do agree with you that some of the statements are on a broader scale — a basic income would make for a society where everyone can pursue their goals, and it is a happier, fairer society — exactly because we were trying to hold ourselves to empirical standards. We had trouble finding anything that would empirically back that up. The closest we could get was the following questions: When there are higher benefits, do we see more volunteering? Do we see more caregiving? Do we see things that look like pro-social changes in society? We could find no evidence that had happened.

I’m not saying that if everyone has a basic income, it wouldn’t happen. I’m saying that’s the piece of the pie that we are less sure of, and we tried to write that as clearly as we could, but it’s exactly because I don’t know of any evidence out there to support that claim.

[Translation]

Mr. Green, considering that Canada has a federal and provincial governments, to what extent is harmonizing a basic income like this feasible and viable? Given that we’re faced with a complex budget situation and shared responsibilities, does this make sense in a federation like Canada?

[English]

I do think this is difficult. Particularly from the perspective of Quebec, it would be very difficult. There would have to be an agreement from the provinces that they are willing to hand over some of these responsibilities, effectively, to the feds.

Essentially, the only way to make it work on a national level or, essentially, fiscally would be that you would be thinking about a system where the provinces would, more or less, withdraw from income assistance. Whether you could make that agreement easily is, obviously, up for a lot of questions.

I should say that even there it’s not quite so clear. If you look at the P.E.I. proposal, that proposal said, “Because we can’t find people at the sub-annual level fast enough, we’ll actually keep the income assistance system in place in order to make sure that we pick them up. It will be on a reduced scale, but it will still exist.” It’s another example of why you won’t get big savings from a basic income, but also one that, as you’re saying, would greatly complicate the fiscal federalism questions.

[Translation]

I heard your presentation; there are a lot of references in your studies. Is there a country with as many assistance programs as Canada — you mentioned Quebec — where they’ve studied the possibility of introducing a basic income like this? If so, what kind of experience have the countries you mentioned had? You talked about Quebec, which has a lot of assistance programs.

[English]

There are basic incomes, but most of them are targeted in some way or another. For example, the Canada Child Benefit is a basic income. There have been, as was mentioned earlier, basic income pilots. Most of those were very targeted. Most of them broke down at one point because of political interference, so we sort of view the evidence from those as weak.

A lot of what we did in order to try to study the impacts of health, for example, was to look at existing cash transfer benefits. There are benefit programs, and they for sure show good outcomes in some areas. Our argument is that it isn’t necessarily the basic income form that is really delivering those benefits. For example, wage subsidy programs also seem to deliver benefits in terms of the health and education of children in households.

[Translation]

Is it necessary and affordable, or do the current services meet the basic needs of people living in poverty?

[English]

I would answer very much in the same way that I answered Senator Pate — we believe not. Our recommendations for B.C. were, among other things, to increase the support levels and also to invest heavily in various other kinds of supports.

Our argument is not that things are all fine now — not in any sense. Our argument is that the most effective way to move forward is not to create a new program, but to figure out how to fix what we have. We think that’s a much more direct approach to helping people.

[Translation]

Aren’t you afraid that there would be a major social backlash if we adopted a national implementation process that might cut certain programs to lump them in with the basic income?

[English]

I’m not sure that I worry there will be an attack. I worry that there won’t be ongoing support — that you would try to put it in place and then a subsequent government would, more or less, undo it.

Part of what we were trying to advocate for was a system that we felt could get broad support, and maintain that support across the political cycle. To some degree, I worry that a basic income wouldn’t be able to do that.

[Translation]