Tag: guaranteed income

The Ontario government is expected to release details today of its highly anticipated pilot project to provide basic income to those living at or below the poverty line.Premier Kathleen Wynne is scheduled to make the announcement alongside Minister of Community and Social Services Helena Jaczek and Minister of Housing Chris Ballard in Hamilton, Ont. on Monday. Story continues below

The province has already earmarked $75 million for the three-year pilot project which is set to begin this year.The criteria for implementing the basic income plan is based on a discussion paper released by former senator Hugh Segal last fall, who […]

Full Post at christiannewstoday.com

Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen | LSE Old Theatre | lunedì, 08. maggio 2017

Speaker: Professor Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at SOAS and honorary co-President of the Basic Income Earth Network)

Chair: Professor Mike Savage (International Inequalities Institute)Shouldn’t everyone receive a stake in society’s wealth? Could we create a fairer world by granting a guaranteed income to all? What would this mean for our health, wealth and happiness?A basic income is a regular cash transfer from the state, received by all individual citizens. It is an acknowledgement that everyone plays a part in generating the […]

Full Post at it.eventbu.com

Disabled people in Ontario are much more likely to experience poverty than non-disabled people. Many have to live on sub-poverty payments under the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) or the even more wretched income provided by Ontario Works (OW). Those that are in this situation are confronted by an ongoing process of surveillance, invasion of their privacy and moral policing. Those disabled people who are working, because of systemic discrimination, are less likely to be receiving living wages and are far more likely to be precariously employed. As anti poverty organizers, we fully understand the anger and desperation that […]

Full Post at socialistproject.ca

A former labor leader is urging unconventional political alliances in support of public policy to buffer workers from the coming automation age.

Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees union, has kept himself busy being a senior fellow at Columbia University and wading into sticky political debates. His just-released book, Raising the Floor , goes deeper into one of these debates, the clash over the idea of a “Universal Basic Income.”

Stern considers a Universal Basic Income, or UBI, the answer to rising inequality and the joblessness he sees coming from accelerating automation. He gets a lot right […]

Full Post at inequality.org

The entire Canadian and Ontario tax/transfer systems are heavily weighted against enabling women to make paid work pay. "The original basic income experiment in Manitoba demonstrated that the basic income payments encouraged more women with young children to take more time off paid work to provide unpaid care work," writes Kathleen Lahey. "It is well known that it is precisely women’s long-term absence from paid work during lengthy parental leaves that exacerbates gendered pay and income gaps." The basic income guarantee (BIG) as being framed in Ontario today may well be a conversation-changer. But in reality, it will change […]

Full Post at www.thestar.com

From Italy to India, the basic annual income is back in the news. Around the world, eight jurisdictions — including Kenya, Finland, the Netherlands, Uganda and California — are conducting experiments providing regular payments to cover basic living costs, regardless of recipients’ economic situations.

With welfare programs consuming billions of tax dollars without eliminating poverty, and with robots poised to seize more jobs and make more people redundant, governments are seizing the moment and launching test runs of different types of guaranteed annual income (GAI) programs.

Add Ontario to the list. This month, the provincial government will unveil a basic […]

Full Post at ipolitics.ca

A universal basic income will be politically unpalatable or solve our core problems. But the good news is that we may not need it…

Politicians like to solve big problems with ideas they can reduce to quick soundbites. Unfortunately, they’re often in the business of writing laws and raising support for their ideas while faceless bureaucrats are left to try and implement them on the ground. Even if those ideas become difficult to fully deploy (like the ACA), or backfire when they fail to achieve what they set out to do (like No Child Left Behind), they gain legislative […]

Full Post at rantt.com

Ontario is about to embark on a bold experiment in poverty reduction. A pilot project, set to begin sometime this spring, will measure the effect of replacing participants’ welfare and disability benefits with a guaranteed basic income.

The Ministry of Community and Social Services says it will announce details “soon” about which communities will be selected for participation, and how the pilots will be structured. It is taking into account public feedback based on a detailed discussion paper prepared by political strategist and former senator Hugh Segal.

During his nine years as a Conservative senator, Segal was a passionate advocate […]

Full Post at www.lfpress.com