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Friday, March 29, 2024

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We Need Both Adequate Incomes and a Job Guarantee

For over 400 years, social assistance programs in the provinces and territories with the exception of Quebec, reflected the punitive and discriminatory colonial legacy of the British Poor Laws. They were the first statutory provision in the English-speaking world to provide for the destitute but only at the level of bare survival. Paradoxically, receiving public income support singled them out as “outsiders/others and fundamentally different from the self-supporting members of their communities.

To overcome such notions of otherness requires more than a reformative approach to social assistance but a paradigmatic transformation into a life changing program of opportunities. The best method of providing income support and of facilitating full participation in the life of the community is a job was the message of Transitions, the report of the Social Assistance Review Committee (1988), which laid out a detailed program how to achieve this.

The Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the financial response by the federal government in the darkest days of the pandemic brought out the inequities of the precarious income conditions of the working poor and social assistance recipients living in deep poverty.

We can reverse their precarity, promoting a People’s Economy as suggested by economist Stephanie Kelton that would ensure that our most important resource, human labour is not wasted and important care and service work in the community gets done.  The expectations for people with permanent and total disabilities are different, requiring their own program based on their specific needs.

We are on the threshold of entering a new era of massive shifts in jobs and skills.  The Transitions Report saw all social assistance recipients, like all members of society, as people in transition (p.4), recognizing that we are all linked in the underlying purpose of the social commons to make live better for each other.

A new universal income support program, providing livable income floors for both current recipients of assistance, and the working poor, using the Canada Child Benefit as a scaling model would ensure that the economically most vulnerable could both contribute to and share in our common wealth and well-being.

Nobody should be expected to work for sub-level wages so that her employer can make a larger profit. Also, nobody should have to work with assistance payments that often forces them to choose between food and decent housing, and pushes them into deep poverty.

Arguments about the affordability of such a new program can be countered by a quote from John Maynard Keynes: “Anything we can actually do, we can afford!

Its all about choosing priorities.  At long last, its time to put our most vulnerable first.

A more detailed discussion of both the Legacy of our existing Social Assistance System and the Shifts we need to transform this system of neglect can be found here and here.

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