Ben Earle is general manager of the Basic Income Canada Network and provides coordinating support to UBI Works. Sheila Regehr is chair of the Basic Income Canada Network and a former federal public servant. We caught up with Sheila and Ben at the 23rd Basic Income Earth Network Congress, recently held at the University of Bath, to discuss the importance of child credit programmes for basic income campaigning, the art of the compromise in Canadian politics, and the need to not let the great be the enemy of the good.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Beyond Trafficking and Slavery: Please start by describing the tone of the Canadian conversation around basic income these days. Is there openness to the idea?
Sheila Regehr: There is openness. It's not universal, but it's gaining ground among advocates and people working in sectors like food security, health and mental health.
We recently gained some sponsors from organised labour. That was a new and exciting development, because there are mixed views about basic income within the labour movement. I think there’s a growing sense that we need solutions to some really serious problems, and it’s bringing people towards the idea. It’s a struggle though.
Ben Earle: We have some political support too, but it's not broad political support. There are bills being put forward in parliament at the moment, mostly by junior and backbench politicians. They may not pass, but they’re helping us gain traction in the political realm.
There isn’t support yet at the level of party leadership, at least not publicly. Basic income is in the background of the political sphere right now in Canada. But it’s gaining ground in various sectors and across civil society.
Sheila: That said, I worked inside government. It's not a monolith. Different departments don’t always speak to each other, and sometimes there are advantages to that.
For example, an environmental ministry recently gave us funding for a major project linking basic income and the environment. A government gender equality office is helping fund a basic income project for women fleeing domestic violence. And we got government research funding for a conference we recently held in Canada.
So there’s some support. But from a political decision-making perspective, we’ve got a long way to go.
BTS: It sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you when campaigning on a national level. Is it easier to find support on a provincial level?
Ben: We’re seeing both support and programming for basic income on the provincial level. Some provinces have also started to use the language of basic income for their social assistance policies.
Some of our most successful work over the last ten years has been done on a provincial level. The Ontario Basic Income pilot is one of them. However, in true political fashion, as soon as an opposing government was elected, they cancelled it.
It's very volatile. If you don't build the policies into legislation, or if a government doesn’t start working on it right at the beginning of a term, it all just ends when the next government comes in.
We’re having these conversations at all different levels of government, but we don’t focus on working with local governments. Municipalities in Canada don’t have much power to implement these policies – not like in the US, for example. We’re focusing on advocacy at the federal level, since we want to see a national policy. And we still have a struggle there.
That said, a growing number of municipalities are becoming allies in pushing for a national policy. More and more are recognising the value of a basic income to them and making that known to more senior levels of government.
Sheila: National policymaking in Canada means federal, provincial and territorial. It can't just be federal, which is why there's an added layer of complication in Canada.
One key thing we have going for us is that we have done this before. Our child benefits structure is basically a guaranteed income for families with children under 18. And there are a couple of really important things about that.
The child benefits policy was developed in the late 1990s as a federal, provincial, territorial framework. So, there's a model for how to do this. That model also gives the provinces some flexibility, which is important because they generally don't like the federal government telling them what to do.
The child benefits structure is a hugely successful programme that's grown enormously since it was first established. This means we've got really good results from an actual programme. It's not a pilot. It's a programme. It's been running for roughly two generations of kids now.
Ben: And we have the infrastructure to support it, including the tax infrastructure to easily support the distribution.
Sheila: Exactly. So it’s possible. It's just a really difficult thing to actually make happen.
BTS: So there are around 25 years of lessons learned from existing programmes. Does this help you to market basic income as a viable program?
Sheila: Absolutely. One of the early successes of the Basic Income Canada Network was helping people to understand this concept. We’ve done a lot of work to show people that this idea is not foreign or radical. We already do this.
We've actually done it for seniors even longer and better than for families with children. Those policies have so many features of a basic income. People need to understand that these things already exist and we can build on them.
Ben: The challenge coming out of it, though, is that those are fairly easy calls. People are happy to support families with children because they see them as a deserving group. They're happy to support seniors because they've worked their whole lives, and they're happy to support people with disabilities because they’re unable to work.
The paradigm of deservingness is a massive stumbling block in the discussion in Canada. If you're meant to be tied to the labour market, then you supposedly don't need this help. How do we convince people that we need a programme available to everybody, regardless of age, gender, ability and status? This is one of the biggest challenges we’re facing.
Sheila: It feeds into the neoliberal paradigm that fetishises employment over everything else. People are forced to build their whole lives around paid labour. And if they’re fortunate, they might get some support on either side of their working lives. It’s a kind of religious orthodoxy that we’re challenging.
People have been searching for decades to try to prove that these kinds of benefits disincentivise employment. And it's just not there
BTS: Deservingness comes up a lot in basic income discussions. Have you found ways to respond?
Ben: UBI Works, who I also work with, is a good example of this. The organisation was started by a colleague of ours, Floyd Marinescu, who's a successful business owner in the tech sector. His argument is that, in this stage of capitalism, we can't expect everybody to get wealthy from work anymore.
We've engaged with this argument by showing the great divide that happened in the mid 1970s. This is when you start to see the split between wealth and incomes in countries like Canada and the United States. The wealth of the countries increases, but incomes stay stagnant.
There remains this religious orthodoxy to it, but the systems we’ve built aren’t working for the majority of Canadians. The social assistance system in Canada, for example, was built 50 years ago when full and secure employment was assumed. But we don't have that environment anymore.
It’s getting harder and harder to deny the challenges. And that's why we now have businesspeople like Floyd and other colleagues, who are saying, you know what? We're business owners. We've made money. But we realise that the model that helped us do this is not sustainable. It's not available to everybody.
Sheila: Part of our job is to help people understand how current child benefits work too. The money doesn't go to the kids. The money goes to working age adults. Yes, the group that we're all afraid is somehow going to misspend or drop out of the labour force.
One of the clear, publicly articulated policy goals of the child benefit was to help parents maintain paid labour force participation. And yet some people still respond to us by saying they’re worried basic income will be a disincentive for work.
People have been searching for decades to try to prove that these kinds of benefits disincentivise employment. It's just not there. In Canada, more and more people are seeing this on the ground now. There are tent encampments across the country, and the demand on food banks and the non-profit and charitable sector is just huge.
There are plenty of incentives to work – yet work isn’t working out for people. I think we just have to keep doing a better job, over and over again, of helping people to understand the evidence before their very eyes.
BTS: Are you finding any traction when it comes to arguments based on poverty levels?
Sheila: For a lot of people, arguing from a perspective on poverty hasn’t really resonated. The response would be, ‘I'm not one of those people’. And it goes back to all these questions of deservingness.
But I think things are beginning to change with this argument. People are realising more and more how commonplace income insecurity is in this economic climate. We are all, to a certain extent, quite seriously economically insecure. I think this realisation is bringing people to the movement from outside the sector.
When I worked in federal government, I was also involved in issues around the recognition and valuation of unpaid work. Our economic system pretends to assume that only employment is work, but work is much bigger than that. If you don't allow the rest of it to happen, society falls apart. Democracies fall apart. Economies fall apart. This argument is also driving a need for solutions.
BTS: How did Covid-19 affect these conversations? Did you see a significant shift in peoples’ understanding when the lockdowns hit?
Ben: I think we’ve seen a broader understanding of these issues because of Covid, or at least a broader recognition of them. People have told us they realised their lives are more precarious than they thought. And we’ve seen people making different choices to the ones they might have made otherwise.
In Canada – and probably in the US as well – people are choosing to change the way they work. As a result, they're turning to ideas like basic income as a way to support them through those changes. At UBI works and Basic Income Network Canada, we talk a lot about providing choice in the economy. Basic income isn’t a substitute for employment income. It’s a tool for choice and empowerment.
Sheila: And a tool to help someone manage transitions. Because transitions happen.
Ben: Covid also showed us how things could work on a practical level. Within just a month of the pandemic starting, Canada created benefits for people who were out of work because of the pandemic. Of course there were some hiccups, especially in hindsight. But it was frankly a fairly seamless operation, considering how quickly it was done.
Sheila: Yes, one of the really irritating technical criticisms we get in Canada is that the tax system is so slow. And yet, it took the government nine days to roll out the pandemic benefits. They proved that we've got the administrative capacity, it’s just been hidden.
But then, like almost everywhere else in the world, as soon as the worst of the pandemic was over, things went back to how they had been. The lessons that could have been learned from the new benefit administration and structure were just left by the wayside.
I also think our government did a particularly terrible job of talking about its own policies. Of course there was some blowback, because things weren't perfect. When you roll something out that fast in the middle of a huge unexpected health and economic crisis, you're bound to make mistakes. There are bound to be criticisms.
The government got defensive in the face of those criticisms, and that was a mistake. Instead of getting defensive, they could’ve highlighted the fact that they turned around the lives of roughly 20 million people. Or that they saved the economy. Yes, it wasn't perfect, but they did something amazing. They completely missed the opportunity to emphasise that.
Trying to implement this in any country is too complicated to have an ‘all or nothing’ approach
BTS: What have you learned about the art of compromise in this context?
Ben: Canada is a country made up of compromise. Ever since the country was founded by the French and the British, we've compromised. We have regions that are very diverse, Quebec being the starkest example of that. They often want nothing to do with federal programmes, and have their own strong identity.
So federal policymaking involves deep discussions with all the provinces and territories about how it's going to be administered. Our constitution technically doesn't allow the federal government to create a policy like basic income without having the provinces on board.
Sheila: We're also a country founded on the colonialist exploitation of indigenous peoples. We've got a lot of work to do to heal that. And we're a huge immigrant receiving country. So we've got people from all over the world coming from different political and cultural systems. If our politicians are going to win elections, they have to understand all those different constituencies. It simply does involve a lot of compromise.
Ben: When it comes to basic income, we’ve developed a consensus statement using the concept of collective impact. We’re essentially asking, what is our common agenda? What are the key points that we're going to argue for together?
That doesn’t mean all our organisations are fully aligned. They differ on many points, but all found that they could support this common agenda. For example, the ‘Universal’ in UBI Works is quite contentious – we think of basic income a bit differently than others. But the organisation still chose to endorse the consensus statement, even though its ambitions around scope are more limited than ours, because it’s all about incrementalism. We’re working towards these early stages, and then we go from there.
Agreeing on the consensus statement took a long time. It was over a year of conversations with national leaders in the basic income movement. But we all came together. We've all recognised this is what we agree on. There might be groups with other ideas or nuance to add. But this is our compromise.
Some groups chose not to sign the consensus statement, even though they were supportive of the general process. They may change their mind eventually, but for now, they're still part of the movement and supportive. It's been decades of work to get to this point. And of course, we still have arguments, and we still disagree at times. But we don’t let that break the movement apart. This is what compromise looks like.
BTS: It sounds like there are lots of differing views about the best way to do basic income. How have you managed to agree on a collective vision for the movement?
Sheila: Before the development of the consensus statement, we published a policy options document that includes different ways of doing a basic income. We were trying to figure out exactly how to do it. Then Covid hit. All of a sudden we went, okay, we needed this yesterday. We chose Option 1, a basic income model that focuses on 18 to 64 year olds to fill the gaps. It’s the most feasible in Canada.
Covid had a huge impact on this process, because it showed us that we could do it any of these ways and arrive at similar results. That includes this universal model where every individual gets a certain amount, but that’s a hard sell in Canada at this point in time.
Ben: I think that's good. The ‘all or nothing’ argument is actually hindering us sometimes. Trying to implement this in any country is too complicated to have an ‘all or nothing’. You need to start with something, and then have the right conversations about what's going to work in your context.
We truly believe this is the type of basic income that will work for us. But that doesn't mean it's not a stepping stone to what's next. It doesn’t mean it can’t lead us towards another way of doing social policy in general. But you've got to start somewhere. Because if we argue for the ‘all or nothing’, we'll get nowhere – in our context at least.
Sheila: Yes, Getting started is the key thing. Again, the child benefit example is a good one, because the benefit actually started quite small. It tended to help two parent families more in the beginning because the benefit was low. But it still made it easier for many parents to get by, and kept people from needing to access other social assistance programmes.
Gradually, as it got larger, it brought in single parents. It helped them make their way through a combination of child benefits and paid labour. And a huge percentage of the Canadian population with families now receive varying levels of that benefit. It’s shown where you can get to if you just start with something.
To take it to the political level, you need recognised institutions and organisations that are backing it. Informal movements can’t have the conversations with the prime minister's office
BTS: Can you tell us about other lessons you’ve learned along the way?
Ben: Basic income has the potential to be the most transformative social policy of a generation – if it's done right. But you can't do that if you're not going to talk to and think about different interest groups, and if you're not going to fully address their concerns.
What are the concerns of employers in the labour market? What are the concerns of civil society? What are the concerns of government, and how are they going to pay for it? You have to address all of that head on.
Another thing we’ve learned is the value of private pilots. There are a lot of programmes running in the US right now, and they’re a good way to build evidence. But they're not going to turn into a permanent benefit.
A basic income will never be funded through private sector investment. This has to be public. It has to be collective. There are ways to provide people with money, but you can't do something transformative if it's not led collectively. We need a national policy. And it needs to be run at the federal level.
Sheila: Country context really matters too. You have to analyse your own situation and figure out what's going to work. One of the incredible advantages the US has is the sheer amount of pilots there. Some might say they're all different and you can't compare them. But that's the great thing. We want that diversity and flexibility.
Some pilots are focused on people leaving the criminal legal system. Others are focused on people fleeing domestic violence. Still others are focused on black and minority populations. More and more, the evidence pops up showing the same pattern.
But the way you get it into policy has to be based on your own country's context. We try to focus on the leverage points in Canadian policy and history that allow us to do that. You have to adapt to fit it into something pragmatic within your own country.
Ben: The only other thing I'll add is that this movement needs core organisations. We're lucky we've got a small group of organisations that work very well together leading the work in Canada. We’ve learned that movement building can only go so far without structure.
You do need the informal movement. That's absolutely a key component. You need the grassroots component. But to take it to the political level, you need recognised institutions and organisations that are backing it, because informal movements can’t have the conversations with the prime minister's office. Organisations and policy leaders can.
Sheila: We formed an organisation, and we became a federally-registered non-profit corporation. I think that's been critical for the movement. And it's allowed other smaller regional and local organisations to form around that nexus.
Ben: It's been a long struggle. But I think that's a key lesson – how you organise matters.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at the specific challenges that campaigners face when arguing for universal basic income in highly individualised and neoliberal contexts like the United States and the United Kingdom, and how they work to overcome them.
Part 1 | Getting on with it
- UBI in the US ‘not just an idea’ – it’s achievable
Shafeka Hasash, Economic Security Project - 'Hope goes a long way': BI as a lifeline for ex-prisoners
Kevin Scott, Community Spring - Could a guaranteed income pave the way for racial justice?
Rachel Pyon, Deon Hodrick and Matthew Harvey, Equity and Transformation - Direct cash transfers 'could halve child poverty' in Oregon
Antonio Gisbert, Oregon Rebate - What can end the suffering of Black mothers and children in the US?Zea Malawa, University of California, Berkeley Public Health
Part 2 | Widening the politically possible
- UBI could mean justice for everyone. How do we get there?
Philippe Van Parijs, UCLouvain - Basic income ‘won’t stop people working’: lessons from CanadaBen Earle and Sheila Regehr, Basic Income Canada Network
- Basic income could put food banks out of businessDavid Beck, University of Salford and UBILab Food
- Basic income: why we need to start talking about moneyCleo Goodman, Autonomy and the Basic Income Conversation
- Can cities do what national governments won’t on basic income?
Leandro Ferreira, Brazilian Basic Income Network
Part 3 | Getting the policy mix right
- It's time for a welfare revolution in the UK
Vibhor Mathur, University of Bath - Put the whole government to work rebuilding Britain
Matthew Johnson, Elliot Johnson and Kate Pickett, Northumbria University and University of York - Does Labour dare to renew the welfare state?
Cleo Goodman, Autonomy - Will Scotland be the first to guarantee a minimum income?
Ruth Boyle and David Eyre, Poverty Alliance - Sustainable welfare for a sustainable planet
Nicholas Langridge and Milena Büchs, University of Bath and University of Leeds - From dogma to data: a centrist case for pragmatic welfare reform
David Westlake, Cardiff University
