Foreign Affairs
Canada Is About To Give 4,000 Households Free Money For Three Years
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Canada is the latest place to experiment with a universal basic income, offering up to $24,000 to eligible Canadian households.
The province of Ontario announced plans to study basic income through a three-year pilot project, where it will provide the funding to 4,000 households selected at random.
The plan calls for single persons to receive up to $17,000, minus half of any income earned. Couples could be eligible for up to $24,000, and persons with disabilities could receive $6,000 more, according to CBC News.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, who faces re-election in 2018, hopes to find out whether a basic income is feasible. “It’s not an extravagant sum by any means,” Wynne said. “But our goal is clear. We want to find out whether a basic income makes a positive difference in people’s lives,” she continued.
“People are anxious about their jobs; they’re anxious about their futures,” Wynne asserted. “They’re worried about the soaring costs of renting or buying a place to live.”
The experiment will select the households from the Ontario communities of Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay. “We have chosen these communities intentionally because they are the right size and they have the right mix of population,” the premier said.
Experts question whether a universal basic income could succeed in the United States. “Giving people cash is not the solution to improving opportunity,” Aparna Mathur, a labor policy expert with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“In the long-run encouraging people to work or acquire skills and training and education is the only way to help people move up in life,” Mathur explained.
Finland is giving 2,000 residents a guaranteed income, a plan that could expand to include the entire adult population if it is deemed successful. Brazil also attempted to implement a basic income, but the program was criticized as discouraging workers from seeking new employment.
Mathur explains that cash handouts should be tied to work. “If cash transfers are conditional on work or job training, they are much more likely to be effective in improving mobility than if we simply give everybody an unconditional cash transfer,” she told TheDCNF.
“If we gave people the money without making it conditional on work, it might reduce their incentive to work,” Mathur concluded.
The Canadian program is expected to cost $50 million per year.
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