Over the many years she scraped by on government disability payments, she tended to stick to frozen vegetables. But since December, Bowman has felt secure enough to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. Now that she can afford the transportation, she might start taking classes in social work in a nearby city.
She feels happier and healthier—and, she says, so do many other people in her subsidized apartment building and around town. Sales are brisker for most of what they sell: used furniture, kitchen items, novelties. What changed? In a three-year pilot funded by the provincial government, about 4, people in Ontario are getting monthly stipends to boost them to at least 75 percent of the poverty line. But Hugh Segal, the conservative former senator who designed the test, thinks it could save the government money in the long run.
He expects it to streamline the benefits system, remove rules that discourage people from working, and reduce crime, bad health, and other costly problems that stem from poverty. Such improvements occurred during a basic-income test in Manitoba in the s. Tech investors such as Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes and Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, are funding pilot projects to examine what people do when they get money with no strings attached.
This momentum figures to keep building as AI and robotics make even more inroads. Legislators in Hawaii are beginning to study the prospects for a basic income. The Canadians are testing it as an efficient antipoverty mechanism, a way to give a relatively small segment of the population more flexibility to find work and to strengthen other strands of the safety net. The most obvious problem with that idea? Many economists concluded long ago that it would be too expensive, especially when compared with the cost of programs to create new jobs and train people for them.
But that masks how tough it is for a lot of people to get by. Manufacturing in the surrounding area, known as the Kawartha Lakes, has declined since the s. Many people juggle multiple jobs, including seasonal work tied to tourism in the summer and fall. Technology is part of the story too: robots milk cows now. When curatorial assistant Ian McKechnie gives me a tour, he stops and plays a lovely tune on a foot-pumped organ called a harmonium that was made in Ontario more than a hundred years ago.
