 is it working? No. Hello and welcome everyone to the Health Law Institute's speaker series. This is our third talk this semester and things are going quite well. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Kwam McKenzie who has an extensive expansive array of achievements and credentials. He is a physician and a full professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He's the CEO of the Wellesley Institute which is a policy-generating entity in Ontario that focuses on research and policy to improve health equity and I draw upon their work extensively if you're not familiar with their work I encourage you to take a look. He's also a commissioner on the Ontario Human Rights Commission. His work on the social causes of illness, the social determinants of health and developing equitable health systems is absolutely groundbreaking for which he has received numerous awards and recognitions including being one of CIMH's 2017 Difference Makers in Mental Health and the 2018 Harold Jerome Trailbrates Laser Award. Today's format will be as as per usual. Dr. McKenzie will give us some formal remarks for some 30 to 40 minutes and then at close to one we'll turn to discussion and questions and then at about when that comes to a conclusion I'll just give a few little remarks at the end about upcoming events and now I'm going to turn you over to Dr. McKenzie. So thank you very much for that introduction. Every time I hear these introductions I just feel tired. All the things that apparently I've done but most of them are true, most of them. So health needs to start off by thanking you all for making me feel welcome in Halifax. It was great that you were able to bring the rain and the fog and all of the other things that us British people love. It feels just like home being here so thank you thank you very much and very much like Halifax in the UK which apparently always has this weather all the time. Disclaimer to start off with. These are my views. These are not the views of the Ontario government. There was an advisor for their basic income project. It's not the views of the Ontario basic income pilot project or the Ontario Human Rights Commission. These are my ideas so I need to say that just in case I did anything wrong which I will because this is contentious area when I say get it wrong. Things that they wouldn't agree with necessarily. I want to talk about four things to try and cover the ground but I'm really going to talk about this area in general so that we can get into a discussion and I can find out what you guys really want to know and we can get into a discussion about what we know about this. Very quickly about what is a basic income. Do we need a basic income in Canada? About the Ontario basic income pilot that I worked on and then finishing to make sure we get a human voice in. Some lovely pictures by Jesse Gollum which are the humans of the basic income pilot which is a nice set of pictures. Now there is another I want to give you a health warning on this. I am going to talk really quickly to cover the ground. If you try and keep up by writing things down it will be bad for your health. You will not keep up. This will all be the slides you can have. They will be on the Wellesley Institute site. They are here so they can be distributed and you can have the slides but it would be really good if you engaged in the thinking part and then we can have a really good discussion at the end and you can pick me up on things that I have got wrong. So the basic income movement all around the world. Everybody is getting interested in the basic income project. The green are basic income studies in progress. The pink is where they are planned. The mauve is where people think they are going to happen. They are high potential areas. The yellow orange is where they have been successful projects. Then there are other things like cash transfers like there are in Alaska or dividends. Luckily and delightfully Ontario is in grey and this basic income site has put us down as UBI pilot prematurely cancelled. So at least we are good at something. The truth is we are not the only people. Finland has cancelled as well. Just a couple of things to say. When people are talking about and I was really glad that the title of this talk was about the guaranteed income because in Ontario we did not actually do a basic income. A basic income by definition is supposed to be an unconditional non-means tested payment which is above the poverty line. That is the sort of standard proper basic income. You can have a partial basic income which again unmeans tested goes to the whole population below the poverty line. But then there are lots of variants and what we actually did in Ontario was that we did a negative tax credit which was another unconditional payment but it was really geared towards people who were poorer and people who were richer didn't get it. So it's not sort of a classic basic income that goes to everybody. It was a really targeted approach to people who were earning less than $34,000 a year. Why? Why would we do this? We're talking earlier about senators and Art Eglton as he left the Senate. Art Eglton was the senator. He was the longest running mayor of Toronto but also was at the federal level and in the federal cabinet. And he on leaving the Senate sort of has just published his book which is an e-book so anybody can get hold of. And I think I may have sent it so that people say it's on the reading list for people who want to read. And he gives three reasons for the basic income in Canada. One is poverty, second is inequality and the third is changes in work. Just to get us all on the same page from poverty, this is a sort of very straightforward graph that you can't read unless you've been to the opticians very recently which just shows the levels of poverty in a number of countries, 20, 30 countries who are sort of high to middle income. And in red we've got Canada's rate of poverty. The high you are on the list obviously the higher the level of poverty. And Canada though we're sort of a G8 country, we have quite high poverty levels. We have higher poverty levels than Korea, Italy, Australia, Portugal, Poland, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Ireland and so it goes on. We've actually got relatively high poverty and our child poverty is higher than our seniors poverty so we've got quite high poverty. Just to give you an idea for the room about, so if I stand here you can't see can you? You're having to look around me so but it's also on that so for people who need to see around me. Nova Scotia about 17.5, 17.5% of the population is in poverty. Child poverty very similar to the poverty levels for the whole of the population. About 17% puts us here at about third or fourth highest poverty rates in Canada. And people are interested in poverty because poverty increases the rate of crime. It's high levels of poverty linked to poorer development of children. Economies actually struggle when there are high poverty rates and so poverty is a drag, a significant drag on the economy. Actually it costs the Canadian economy about $38 billion a year. Poverty, that's the cost of poverty. There are ethical considerations and health. Poverty is linked to poorer health, increased rates of mental health problems, physical health problems, health use of health services. You name it poverty increases the rate of health problems. Then there are legal constitutional and human rights issues linked to poverty. One of the things that people sometimes neglect is the political alienation that's linked to high high rates of poverty and the psychological harm. And so just in general poverty is a social cancer. Higher rates of poverty get almost everywhere in society and tear it apart. So if I were Donald Trump I would say poverty bad. Sorry if I were Donald Trump really. Anyway sorry I'm not sure I wished it just you know when you're nervous and you're talking these things come out. Anyway inequality is a growing problem in Canada. What you can see on this graph is the plotting of the Gini coefficient from 1975 to 2015 and the Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality. A low Gini coefficient means that there's less inequality. A high Gini coefficient and the that goes up to one means that there is greater inequality. And so it's a measure of income inequality. There's quite a lot of research that shows that the health impacts of inequality start to accrue after the Gini coefficient gets to about 0.3. So 0.3 and that's one of the reasons we're plotting 0.3 here that's about your place you want to be less than 0.3 if you want to have no health impacts of inequality. The blue line is the market income the amount of money that people are earning and the red is that the income after taxes and transfers have been taken into consideration. And so you can have a Gini coefficient that's based on after tax or before tax. And all this graph is showing is that between 1975 and 2015 there's been increased inequality whether you look at it before tax or after tax. But the other thing that it shows is that up to about 1994-1995 the tax impacts on inequality were much more significant. They were pulling the Gini coefficient down to underneath three but from 1995 onwards that tax buffering has been progressively taken away and so in real terms the Gini coefficient has been going up. Now you have to take that with a pinch of salt. One of the things that has happened since 1995 is that the reporting of income by poor has stayed pretty much the same and the reporting of the income by rich has has changed significantly. The use of tax shelters and tax havens have increased and so consequently we actually have a much poorer idea of how much people are actually earning and so at the top levels some people are only really reporting about a third of their income. So this Gini coefficient is a huge underestimate of income inequality at the moment because people are hiding money and the richer you are the better you are at hiding money. Changing nature of work is the other argument for a basic income. Some people say it was great between 1945 and 1980. I'm not so sure really I don't think it's ever been that great from a race relations perspective from 1945 to 1980 but it was from a workers perspective. Unemployment was low, good supply of permanent jobs. Unions are high rates of unionization and they secured good wages, good benefits packages, pensions and then on top of that there are loads of legislative changes human rights legislations, employment insurance, public health changes and workplace health regulations which meant that it was actually pretty good to be a worker between 1945 and 1980 well really 1960 to 1980 was a real golden age. On top of that between 1960 and 1980 it was possible to have a middle-class life on one income on just one income you can have a middle-class life um up to that time and so really it was um a golden age era and things have changed. Unemployment is rising because anybody heard the phrase superstar companies yeah now a superstar company from an economic perspective is a company with very few people working there but very very high profits and so a lot of the new gig economy sort of companies are superstar companies huge profits with very very few people working and that's what people are working towards. More precarious work, unionization has dropped for everybody who's in the public service unionization has gone up but for people outside the public service unionization has dropped precipitously over that period of times. Only 40% of people have pensions and just to give you an idea of the social changes which we don't always see in 1976 if you're unemployed 90% of people who are unemployed got income assistance. Now in 2016 if you're unemployed you have a 50-50 chance of getting income assistance and these are the things that you don't see at the bottom end but there are significant changes not only to the rates of poverty but to low paid people and then of course as you all know the greatest share of the economic growth is going to people who own companies rather than to workers. So before 1980 if your company made a 10% profit about 8% was going to be distributed to the workers. If you move that forward to about now about half of that is going to the workers and if you're a low paid worker none of it is going to you. So that half is actually going to high paid workers and so there's a gap an increasing gap between rich and poor and in Ontario they talk about an hourglass economy. Have you heard this phrase? The hourglass economy is you get more people at the top, the middle class is completely hollowed out and then you have more people at the bottom and that's how the shape of the economy is changing in in Ontario. It's also changing if you're in work. This is from a study which is of people who are employed and when they looked at people employed in Ontario 70% of people were in full-time employment but only 50% of those people who are in full-time employment had what's known as the standard employer employment relationship and this is this concept where you're in a permanent job with one employer that you can reasonably expect to still be employed over the next year and you have a benefits package. So that's used to be the standard employment relationship and that is now not the standard employment relationship and if you are one of the workers who is in a more precarious work you're more likely to have your hours changed, you're less likely to have benefits and your pay is likely to change over time. Unfortunately I like the phrase sharing the scraps economy because it is actually more indicative of what the sharing economy is. The sharing economy isn't really in fact I can't remember. If I said to my brother let's share this only you pay me. I think he'd say that's not really sharing. I think he'd say how do you have to get sharing out of that but that's really what the sharing economy is. Sharing economy is not sharing at all. Not only is it not sharing it's got two or three purposes. One purpose is to allow people to sell things they have or sell whether it's an extra room they have or the fact that they've got a car and they can drive people about. The other thing is it allows big business to monetize your stuff because they never really previously got any money from your spare room but now they get money from your spare room and if you can do that all over the world there are millions and millions and millions of spare rooms that we're just sitting there not bringing any money into an app provider but now they're making money out of it. But one of the other things that it does is it internationalizes an ability to circumvent employee protections and so it produces a huge unprotected workforce that allows big business to make money and so as a way of undermining employee standards it's a great tool and makes it sound like having followed the saying if i were Donald Trump and then saying undermining employees that employment standards is a good thing. I think i'm going in the wrong direction here. Last 47 percent and this is the AI of US jobs is susceptible to automation. Now it's not saying they will be automated but they are susceptible for automation and so we've hit this what some people could say is a perfect storm. Increased poverty, increased inequality, less secure work, increasing unemployment, less tax buffering from poverty, a smaller safety net, few pensions and fewer benefits and the likelihood of significant retraining. Is that an actual train? Is this your... as ringtones go that's not the most embarrassing thing i've seen? Anyway here's one way of thinking about it and this is what it feels like in Toronto and i'll carry on with this sort of storm analogy or scene. Most people in Toronto and Ontario it feels like they're on sort of a luxury cute cruise loads of entertainment all the food they want basically having a good time but there's a significant proportion of the population maybe a third of the population who are actually in the sea and they're treading water okay and if they stop treading water they drown if they continue to tread water they will die younger because of the energy they use up and if a big wave comes over they're gone and that's what's happening and the idea of a basic income was simply to put a platform under them and keep their head above water that's all it was it wasn't even to get them on the ship the ship's going off into the distance but it was just to make sure that the impacts of poverty and inequality didn't lead to premature death that that's the only thing that it was really trying to do from a health perspective from a social perspective apart from it just being the right thing to do in a high income country it also has a huge number of economic and social benefits that you might imagine and that's why it's not new they had this worry in the 60s in the 60s when they were reforming work when there's higher unionization they were still worried that there are too many people who were poor and just in North America in the 60s between 68 and 75 there were five basic income studies four in the USA one in Canada the Canada was the min-come study and that was a negative tax relief study again there are about 10,000 people in these studies over that time four of them were randomized controlled trials and one of them was a saturation side which was a Canadian and just some of the worries that people have in basic income is that if you give people money they'll stop working and they'll just get lazy that's one of the big things that that people say and it was interesting if you look at all of those studies young men reduced their hours generally to go back to school but the hours the amount of hours people reduced their work was one to eight percent but it was one to eight percent invested back in these studies and most of these studies remember were being done when you only needed one income to be a middle class family and so women were working much less women decreased their working significantly more as a percentage but the actual hours that were decreased were slightly more but not as much as you think but that was for caring and so it was either caring for parents or caring for kids but I mean people again were using their time positively Netflix didn't exist no one was spending their time sort of going through back episodes of broad church or whatever your particular passion is people were doing things with their time they were stopping work to do things and stopping work or decreasing work and decreasing the tension in households due to these basic income seemed to improve the education of children in every study whether it's through test scores or through high school completion it made a difference and the study in Manitoba showed increased health decreased hospital admissions decreased accidents decreased visits to family doctor and decreased visits to mental health professionals so all in all back to my Donald Trump basic income good okay so what were we doing in Ontario so Ontario 2016 Liberal government decided that it was worth having a look at the basic income and the Minister of Finance launched this in the budget in 2016 really standing on the back of everything that happened before we wanted to test a growing view at home and abroad that the basic income could build on the success and then they can't help themselves of minimum wage policies they just said they were going to increase the women's wage and increases in child benefit which they've had already done to provide a more consistent and predictable support in the context of today's labour market and the first thing they did is they got Hugh Segal who was a conservative senator and who had been interested in the basic income since the 70s to write a discussion paper and he because his policy guy obviously started off by congratulating the government progress on old age security child poverty decreasing though it hasn't that much free student tuition and stuff everything's going good but we haven't been able to change the rate of poverty from about 16 percent so we need to do something different and what's different could be a basic income and the basic income he said could needs to do some things we've got this horribly bureaucratic welfare program that could change it's not nimble for people to come in and out of work and it undermines people's dignity it's off-footing it's discouraging you have to keep on sharing that you're poor or you can't work in order to continue to get the money and those who've already got who've built up savings get penalized on top of that there are millions and millions of dollars in Ontario which is spent on policing poverty to making sure you're really poor and therefore you deserve to get the money we're saying the basic income could help by refocusing things we could think about protection of human dignity and rather than just thinking of efficiency we could think about supporting families and therefore improving child development and we could think about the fact that currently we do a huge amount of tax reduction reducing and tax transfers but they only go to people who've got RRSPs or TFSOs and maybe we could give it to people who haven't got those you know haven't got their own safety net maybe we could give tax transfers to people in poverty bring them out of poverty rather than to people who are rich to keep them rich and it's always great to see a conservative senator arguing that poverty damages life choices that if you get rid of poverty it would do its best for everybody's life and that it costs a huge amount of money and inequality is corrosive and for the ended up saying but we actually don't know what would happen if we had a basic income in Ontario now their previous studies were 40 years ago and things had changed so what would happen if we did it now so we needed the research it then went off to consultation so this report went to consultation thousands of people were involved you could do it online there were public sessions and they're written submissions and I was around the thought leaders table to try and really discuss it and think it through and the outcome was we decided to do a negative income tax communities across Ontario the level would be above the poverty level it would be simple but we try and measure lots of different things so we wanted to measure poverty reduction employment work labour market education health housing crime life choices food insecurity social inclusion citizenship and what happened to other benefits and then we were trying to make sure whether we were going to have a saturation site in the saturation site as you go into one area and you try and give the basic income to everybody who's eligible in that area so what did we do uh we actually did introduce a guaranteed income we called it the basic income but it wasn't really the basic income it increased and the aim was to increase the stability of people's lives and reduce economic anxiety and we thought it would help people meet their basic needs reduce stress and be able to invest in themselves and their families so that they would have more stable housing mental health and employment outcomes so they were in a position to really be part of society and be lifted out of poverty and and that's what we were trying to do so above the line in the dark blue is our theory of change and below the line is just the outcomes that we were hoping it would be simpler it would be less intrusive there'd be less barriers to getting into the workforce with reduced poverty increased food security decreased stress and stigma and that we would have better mental health less health care usage that people would be able to look after themselves better have more housing stability education training and so in general we'd produce a better quality of life uh and we'd get more people into the labor market with decreased crime and we would basically try and make people's lives a little better the level was simple 19,000 for a single individual which was 75 percent of the low income cutoff instead of 50 that if you then went to work for every dollar you earned we took half of it but you could carry on making money with and not hit your tax until you hit 34,000 32 to 34,000 depends how it works if you were disabled you'd get a disability supplement of $500 a month if you had drug benefits and dental benefits you would keep them they would not be taken away and if you had child benefit it wouldn't be taken away either that you'd be eligible if you were 18 to 65 and you'd lived in your area for more than 12 months and you would be able to opt in or opt out as you liked and we were hoping for 4,000 people to be in pay and 2,000 controls and just to move to the sites we had one site which is in Thunder Bay which is in further north in Ontario and that was going to be a thousand people in the study and a thousand controls and then we needed a thousand people in Hamilton and Brantford again a thousand people taking in who are being paid a thousand people in control and then we had a saturation site which was Lindsay and Lindsay's a semi-rural town of about 20,000 people and there are about two and a half thousand maybe more like 2,200 people who are earning less than 32,000 dollars and we were aiming to get about 90 percent of them into the study which if any of you have tried to do big population studies you'd know was crazy totally crazy to go to somewhere and say we're just going to get everybody who's eligible into this study so we did that actually we launched in the summer of 2017 we did get 6,000 people plus in pay I think 6,200 something like that we did get about 80 percent of the people in Lindsay into the basic income who were eligible into the basic income pilot study and everybody came around to my house we popped a you know we popped the cork everybody was really happy and we were flying because at that time we're completely clear that all parties had been spoken to and all parties NDP liberal and conservative all agreed that they were never going to shut down this project and this project would continue for the full three years so as you know in September 2018 the project was cancelled and currently there's a judicial review about whether it's a lawful decision and there's a class action lawsuit being taken by the people from Lindsay and I think also from people from Hamilton and you can imagine if you're if you are in somewhere like Lindsay where just about everybody who's low a low wage is in a study which increases their wages and increases their flexibility and ability to do things it's changes the whole town and if you just take that away that causes chaos that's a real problem and that's what happened at the moment the decision is that it ends on March in March 2019 but no data is now being collected the data sets have been sent back to the government and there's no plans to use the data so we don't really know exactly what happened but I just wanted to finish with just pictures that were taken by somebody called Jesse Gollum who is I think she's the director or certainly one of the people who is working in a group called photographers without borders and she looked up basic income participants in Hamilton and I'm just going to go through 10 pictures that she's taken which are from 10 different participants where they've written what they what they experienced and I'll read it just in case it's difficult to read for some people basic income helped me to move into safer and clean housing as well as finally to be able to buy Christmas and birthday presents for my children basic income alleviated my stress when my income wasn't enough to each month I'm precariously employed I'm a full-time student and beginning manual therapist in my community basic income was helping me as a single parent to recover and rebuild myself as a professional artisan after a business closure a serious injury with no unemployment assistance benefits low wage employment it was the it was my last lifeline of hope security for a better future health hope and security for a better future when I was on the basic income I had enough money to buy groceries and still have money left over I didn't have enough money to survive on when I was on the Ontario disability security support payment program program thank you it's good that people here know these better than me yeah no I think no it is good it is good I just wanted to have enough money to afford food and have extra to save universal basic income has helped me to become an active volunteer artist and entrepreneur it can do the same for you universal basic income among many other benefits has provided me with a chance to get to work from Hamilton to Ontario and cook and look for more work in Ontario and Toronto developing my business universal basic income has made it possible to afford a means of transportation to eat and to be able to study as a full time student currently I have 30 hours a week of unpaid placement I'm a student and trying to work part time around that schedule before the universal basic income I couldn't afford to travel to school stroke placement or work as there's no public transportation in my area the universal basic income has alleviated stress from my busy life please save the universal basic income the basic income was assisting me to become financially stable obtain an apartment and move out of this motel room and cook I was well on my way to finding an apartment where could I where I could find a sense of peace then Doug Ford's PC canceled basic income glad not to be locked into a lease took vocation for the first time in years next summer who knows I pay my taxes too basic income gave me the first opportunity in my 25 years of survival to be able to lift myself out of poverty universal basic income helped me to catch up on pills not live paycheck to paycheck and get my husband in and to get my husband into recovery it has also helped me pay for yearly shots for my animals and their ongoing health care basic income helps me stay healthy with good food I am ill the universal basic income has made it possible for me to return to school for social work so I can give back to my community and sometimes I just wanted to end there because sometimes when we're in policy and we're talking with big numbers and sort of big theories we forget that this is with these are real people not statistics and so just wanted to end on the voices of some real people who went through what we thought was an experiment would change their lives and it looks like it did for a bit but it but when it's cancelled that clearly leads to devastation and there are many more pictures and you can go on and on looking at what changes were made so that you know so that we sort of know that we were doing some good or we think we were doing some good but it's changed and if you did want to see more just put in google humans of the basic income and jessie gollum's pictures will come up so I think I'll stop there I can talk more about the health impacts I can talk more about the social impacts but I wanted to spend this time giving a broad brush of what we did and why we did it and start a conversation about you know why it was needed and then sort of move into the conversation where if you have more detailed questions or things that have been missed I'd be happy to try and help so thank you very much the images yeah the images make people cry request makes it sound like I'm gonna sing I'm not gonna sing I'm not gonna sing you're you're you're you're sad yeah so what happened was the government decided that they were going to close the basic income project initially the idea was and this was in september the initially the idea was maybe it would close in september or october but they were persuaded that people needed to have more time and so it's going to go on to the end of the financial year and will end at the end of march but I understand from the researchers that they're not collecting any data and the data sets have been sent to the government because their funding has been cancelled the basic income is continuing but the funding for the researchers the payments are continuing that's my understanding but nothing else is continuing in the same way do i understand that so if someone is working the basic income would get them up to $32,000 is that how yeah so it's a negative tax credit so to go into the study you have to say you know preferably but this is not usually what happened you would show your previous year's tax return and if you're earning say for instance 18,000 in the previous year then they would you would get a percentage of the basic income yeah but if you're earning 32 you wouldn't get anything and so that's that's how it works out it's a sort of graduated scheme you had a slide kind of early on that said I think it was back maybe in the last century um technically yes sorry um that uh uh participation in like unemployment insurance or something was 90% and in 2016 was 50% yeah so if you were unemployed um say for instance in the um and it was last century so and then sort of 80s and 90s of the last century um then 90% of people who are unemployed would get employee assistance but and about the sort of between the sort of 90s well in the 90s employee assistance rules changed and because of that change fewer people are eligible for employee assistance so now only 50% of people who are unemployed actually are eligible to receive employee assistance because the rules change significantly um over the 90s and so that's that's why that's why that has been a significant change in um uh what happens to people who are low of aid according to Logan Lawrence under the THD health program and I'm wondering from a policy perspective there was a lot of time that went into developing this project and then it had a slight cut short if there is another change of government and a future government does want to take this up for a government and another community jurisdiction wants to take it up how much of what's been done is transferable to a new context so that maybe this part of just hope sometime in the near future oh most of it's transferable I mean um it it's not really how can I put it it it's not that difficult to do this uh the main issue is political will and um getting all your ducks in a row right it's uh but most of the learnings about what you do and what you don't do uh how you reach people if it's a project um you know initially it was very difficult to convince anybody to be in a basic income project because most people they think if it's too good to be true it's not real yeah and free money isn't I mean you don't give people free money and so um you know there are ways of getting people into the studies there are ways of keeping people in we there are ways of um of running the study so that it works for people and so it's not punitive and all of those things are transferable I am not allowed to talk about them because all of those things happen all of that information would be things that I would know from the time when I was um an advisor and and we're not supposed to talk about that but um but yeah there's loads of transferable knowledge and it was all captured so we spent a lot of time making sure that all of the decisions that were made and why were captured so all of that information is there and is you know in theory could be mined by other people so you could do a swap analysis of that all dot the data you captured I would imagine so yes opportunities and threats I mean it would be a very valuable oh yes it could happen you know all you'd all you'd have to do is get it out of the Ontario government that cancelled it during during the uh take a few years and then yes I'll say yes I'll say yeah during during a um uh sort of two court cases so it wasn't my question but okay I had a couple questions you said perfect storm 35 trading water did you meant is that what I heard you say hmm that's how you look at it if you look at it as the number of um if you look at sort of you say well 16 percent of people in poverty poverty and then you look at the number of people who are two or three paychecks away from going into poverty you get to 30 percent really quite quickly okay the next question was um or is judicial review class action lawsuit what is there legislation in place that you can hang either of those on to to bring to bring bring this back like is there how will you go about the judicial review is there something what's the law that you created or was it populist decision-making that brought about the basic um it's a question I don't know now um though I don't know obviously it went through the legislature yeah and so there was um both in 2016 um there was I think there was an act and then in 2017 obviously it was in the budget but then on top of that um the question would be whether you can actually cancel something like this that's gone through a research ethics board and how that works and what the relationship may be between government and the research ethics board or and you know are they really governed by research ethics board if they get a research ethics board approval and you cancel the study and then the class action lawsuit would be because people believe that they signed um they signed ethics they signed their consent forms which said that they'd get two or three years of money and then it was cut short so they would argue probably that uh there was a they had a deal and a contract um with the government and that's been broken and so I think those are the areas that people are contesting at the moment but um you would have to speak to the government lawyers on that and okay I'm not I'm not a lawyer right sorry thank you thanks that was that was wonderful um so I'm thinking about this from the point of view of you know when do we know enough to act to make a policy decision you mentioned that when the pilot was coming about what we knew it's somewhat dated so things have changed illustrated in many ways and therefore we don't need to do a study again but in light of what happened politically I'm wondering whether you're thinking back on that as a mistake or whether you'd entertain that as the end I was in you know we don't need more research to know what we should act we don't know that it's going to work but the inequality is plain and so there's a a set of policy reasons whether it's from the point of view of justice or whatever that suggests we should act and see what happens in real time but we don't need to do this study first yeah so to approach you you're talking about the the difference between the real world and the political world yeah so the real world is that it is plain as day that if you've got a whole bunch of people underneath the poverty level and you take them above the poverty level that's probably good for their health right no brainer but you have to do it and you have to pay for it and if you're going to pay for it you're going to have to take the money from somewhere so if we were going to say for Canada the feds decided they did a paper last year which came out and said that if there was a basic income on the Ontario model for the whole of Canada that that would cost the feds probably about seventy seventy five billion dollars okay so where would you get seventy five billion dollars well TFSAs RSPs and other tax transfers that's 120 billion dollars right so you're likely to start looking at that which means that you're going to have possibly an issue with the electorate okay so if you're trying to do it locally you would probably go for an incremental approach of building ahead of steam linking to other international projects softening up the ideas around basic income and then turning around and saying look your biggest fear is that people wouldn't work people will not only work to they improve your biggest fear is this would be incredibly expensive it didn't happen your biggest fear is everybody spent would spend it on pot that didn't happen right and you'd need politically probably to do that in order to get to the next stage unless you were very early in your term yeah if you're doing it in the first year of your term you've got you've got three or four years to to deal with the fallout if you're doing it towards the end of your term right it's a problem uh you so yeah so they had to they believed politically they wanted to do it and they wanted to start small and then move on you or I would have just said do it probably yeah is that answer your question yeah oh hey hi how are you and I was at the legislature in the last city you know there's social here and since you all live you're all students and you live here you know you you can vote next time but anyways they and so I'm not you know this is something I'll have to find out I didn't know I was coming here till I saw the road was over half an hour before it all the bus I had a pretty much unanimous consent to do a study of you know what basic income would be you know the stoichi and so I gotta go you know and you can you can watch another social legislature on your computer you know and so you can actually physically see these people and you know the one guy that mumbled something under the breath I actually saw him later and asked him what did you say but it's a good thing but but you know like there is there is hope in all the stoichi for this and our house acts remember you know you know we're working on it you know so so it's a matter of political will but they don't do the things that you don't ask for and so you know as great as it is to understand all this if we don't really you know nearly as people nothing's gonna change and I think you know all over the world people are saying that things have to change because of the trends that there are in everywhere so I'm not surprised Nova Scotia is interested but also because you know the titans of industry are all saying the same thing which is you know we need a basic income pilot it was interesting in Ontario that industry were some of the biggest allies industry were in some ways bigger allies than sort of some parts of the NDP so you know industry is very much interested in the basic income and we can you're saying of course they are well that's a separate issue about whether they would pay and you know they have all these sorts of things there's this idea of a robot tax have you come across that and there are loads of other ideas about what you do with automation because in the end people do have to live and there needs to be enough money to allow the system to work so you can't really get 45% unemployment without it's going drastically wrong so you have to think of how it's going to work Just to point out clarification I didn't catch Beth and that slide were talking about scraps you were talking about people using their cars and their homes to earn a bit of extra income I think you said that enriched big business and I didn't follow how that works So if you are looking at Google I think I believe Google gave $315 million for Uber when Uber was having a difficulty and you'd say well why would they do that and one of the reasons they would do it is because you're always looking for things to monetize that you haven't been able to monetize and the idea of being able to monetize people's spare time which is what happens in Uber they just take 15% of it is an amazing opportunity for business and so similarly with not just the ride sharing but Airbnb and things like that that is a way of producing money for bigger business that it never used to exist and not just in one country all over the world and then you can decrease your regulations so one of the things that happened in Ontario was that Uber said it was impractical for Uber drivers to have to take a driving safety test the legislature caved on that then the taxi drivers said well just a second if they're not taking a safety test we're not taking a safety test and so the legislature caved on that and slowly sort of protections start going and as the price goes down the taxi companies say well just a second if there's anything that looks like we can't afford to pay you benefits that's your problem and you start deregulating the workforce and deregulating the workforce to drive down costs and increase profitability anything you can do to get an extra margin on the profitability of your profits and that's sort of where things are going and that's how you get more money going to owners of companies and less money going to workers because the more you can deregulate and internationalise your workforce the easier it is to pay off different parties against each other and drive down quality of sort of working life and quality of working life so that's the it's business, it's pretty straight forward stuff Sheena Thanks a lot It was such an important talk and I'm especially going to be left with that metaphor that gave us the luxury cruise of folks moving on with the rest turning on One of the things that you brought up just a minute ago in your comments that gives me hope for the basic income is the aligning of interests among folks who identify as conservatives and we can pay another senator on the other side both advocating for a basic income to be a little bit suspicious or concerned and so I wonder if you might develop a little bit your analysis of sort of why it is the titans of industry as you call them have come out in support and then second I guess are there approaches to the basic income or sort of models of some of which are sort of more responsive to income inequality than others is that not the right sort of question Okay so I'm a psychiatrist so I can tell you the paranoid position would be that the titans of industry are interested in this because that means that they don't have to pay their workforce reasonable amounts of money and that they can do much more sort of precarious part time work and they don't have that on their conscience because society in general looks after and that's fine and they can just carry on making their money but just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean you're wrong it could be that and you know industry is there and they try and make money one way of making money is the short term for balancing the amount of money you make to your costs they're doing it. Another way is to take a much more long term view about making sure that their stability in either a market or an area so you can grind out costs over a period of time and there are going to be people in industry who are interested in a cost reduction and pay reduction and there are going to be others who say yeah but if that leads to a revolution this is a bad thing right we need much more stability than there are other people who will say but if everybody has enough money then we have people who are going to buy things and if only a few people have enough money eventually we're not going to be able to make enough money out of them because richer people save more than they spend and poorer people spend everything they have and so it's actually easier to make money if you can lift everybody up to a certain level you can be stable over a period of time and you can make your money so I think there are going to be people in business who are sort of tight one people they're not caring about society at all they just want to make money and get out of there and there are going to be other people who say this doesn't work in the long term and it works badly in the long term and so we have to actually make things work in some ways for us so I think there's that that is an issue but part of that issue is in how you pay for it because if you pay for it by taking the profits or taking a percentage of the profits of the people who are making all of the money then it's less of an issue and the question is whether we have a political system that allows that to happen in any sort of reasonable way so there is a worry that this is a bad thing and I would share that worry as well as a fact that it depends how we do it and it does depend there's no particularly good reason I mean you have to think of how much you tax income compared to how much you tax wealth and if you move to taxing wealth rather than income you get to a different place it is and just to show how stark it is in the states you know who the Waltons are sorry not Jim Bob yeah Walmart so you take those seven Waltons and you put them in a car their wealth is the same as 120 million of the poorest Americans but about 20% of people who work in Walmart are on benefits so those 120 million people are actually subsidizing sort of how the Waltons make their money and so somebody could say well you know that's not reasonable yeah it can't just be on sort of your earnings in the amount you're earning each year it's got to be about how you're amassing wealth because it doesn't make any sense right and what are you doing with that money anyway it's not helping the economy and some people might say that that is a way of thinking about how you fund the basic income and that some people would be attracted to that because the idea of going after TFSA's and RRSP's is probably going to shrink the middle class even further and that would be a problem I just wanted to add the concern about this so-called sharing economy and I know more about Airbnb than Uber but Airbnb is a U.S. company with value of more than 40 billion dollars U.S. and doesn't pay a cent of tax in Canada and there's Airbnb that Amazon was doing that in the UK for years paying no tax at all and I think there are issues around how that is working Airbnb were taken to court because or somebody tried to take Airbnb to court because if you look at the same accommodation owned by somebody who's African American and somebody who is white American in New York there's a significant differential price probably 50% so somebody said to Airbnb hey well just a second there's clear sort of discriminatory practice here and Airbnb's position was and this is what I read and reported we're an app we're just an app we're just an app it's a way to pay for it how do you sell the idea of universal basic income to say a suburban idea in Toronto how do you change what the ethical standard is for society from another board to getting them to accept the universal basic income I think that's a good question and do you have any other good questions I can't answer that one there are a couple of assumptions I didn't say you had to I was just saying that that's where people might look they may look at TFSAs they may look at RSPs and the reason why we moved on to the Mac rather than anything else was there are other ways of doing it so I think people would have to try and work out how to do that but really they say about 75 billion dollars it would cost poverty cost 38 billion so if you're actually raising people out of poverty the differential doesn't come to the 70 the differential comes more like 40 and then the question is where can you find 40 billion dollars and I would argue that between provinces and the feds 40 billion dollars a year in order to improve health is not a problem and that if it does produce the economic improvements that it could the thing could pay for itself you don't need to sort of go to TFSAs and RSPs it's just where people often look at when they say hey well look these people are getting tax benefits already these people aren't why don't we swap them around I think there are other ways of doing it I know I didn't answer that I don't know actually the second way I was wondering the data that was going to be collected to what extent would it help quantify what those savings would be in other social programs the data that was collected would have looked to the efficiencies of actually giving out benefits because half the people in the study were on benefits and half were not and so there would be enough data to be looking at the cost of benefits then yes for the saturation side the economic benefits were going to be measured compared to other similar other similar towns so similar to Lindsay and so you could see whether there are significant economic benefits and where and how and so there was an in-depth costing not only sort of cost to government but possible benefits to government that was going to be undertaken just a broader question in terms of battling poverty is this the only thing you need and if you could do this across a country or other elements in that population that would need more to thrive or have a chance to thrive I think that given the situation that we have but it's very unlikely that a universal basic income by itself would be sufficient and one of the reasons why people didn't have their dental or disability benefits taken away is because other things are needed it's not clear that a universal basic income would allow you not to look at historical inequities that have led to intergenerational problems it wouldn't necessarily wipe out racism I say necessarily it wouldn't actually wipe out racism and it wouldn't deal with mental health and drug problems it would decrease all of those things but it doesn't give it wouldn't be an excuse for getting rid of all government assistance programs or targeted programs to improve social development or health or public health it's just an aid, it decreases the rate of it doesn't get rid of everything, it's not a panacea I ask you to join me in thanking Dr McKenzie