Basic income could lift singles out of deep poverty: Thunder Bay activist
Ruth Westcott says she's lived the benefits of receiving a basic income, knows its potential
Before she was selected to participate in the Ontario Basic Income Pilot in April 2018, Thunder Bay resident-turned-activist Ruth Westcott's life was "out of control."
"I was living in a trailer park on the outskirts of town, and I was completely isolated. I didn't have health care. I was massively depressed, and my auto-immune diseases were raging. There was no hope."
The basic income pilot project — which was run in Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay until being cancelled by the provincial government in March 2019 — changed all that for Westcott.
She says her sense of dignity was restored.
"The thing about being on social assistance that you don't realize until you're no longer on it is how bad and how utterly powerless you feel. It's not enough money to survive. it's so far below the poverty line, you get so sick, you get so ill," Westcott said.
"And what happened to me is what I saw happen to everybody else that I knew in the pilot, is I got better really fast. So I got well enough to work … and I did."
More supports needed for single individuals
Westcott said the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed holes in the federal and provincial social assistance programs, especially for single people without any children.
"We've had some very good progress in poverty reduction with families, with kids, as we did with seniors through federal programs. And that's what we need for this population."
A new study released by the Institute for Research on Public Policy echoes Westcott's concern specifically for singles living in deep poverty. The study found that "working-age singles constitute the largest proportion of beneficiaries on social assistance, and they are three times as likely to live in poverty as the average Canadian."
The average income of singles living in deep poverty is less than $10,000 per year including social assistance benefits, according to the report.
"One has to acknowledge that the economic risks that single person households face is often much more challenging and complex than the household economic risks that dual-person or many-person households face," said Colin Busby, the research director for the institute.
"Should they face job loss … should they face disability, a car accident, you name it … there's no one else in the household that can offer up their time and their services and potentially earn income. So economically, they're just naturally more vulnerable."
He added, "a lot of the improvements we've made to the social safety net in the most recent decades have tended to focus on families, families with children particularly and seniors. And so we've been plugging those holes in the safety net, but singles tend to get ignored."
Busby said this is the case, despite the fact that census data from 2016 shows single individuals as the largest household group in the country.
Universal basic income could plug the gaps in social assistance funding
Both Westcott and Busby acknowledge that a universal basic income — a policy with a wide range of options for implementation, but guarantees a regular, minimum income to all qualifying individuals — is a promising option to support single individuals.
"I went to work on this project with peers [and we] just talked about what it had been like for us on social assistance and what it was like on the [Ontario Basic Income Pilot]. And what we heard across the board was this restoration of dignity … because we had economic security. And that gives people autonomy and empowerment to take back their lives, which you don't have when you're making half the poverty line," Westcott said.
That's why Westcott said she was "delighted" when she heard that the federal Liberal caucus recently prioritized a policy recommendation to implement universal basic income for all Canadians.
The decision came during the Liberal Party of Canada's policy development process, where currently elected federal Liberal members of Parliament voted to send the policy recommendation through to the party's national convention in November to be debated whether it should form part of the party's platform.
"But that doesn't mean much right now for single people living in poverty, who continue to be among the most at-risk populations when it comes to COVID-19 transmission and feel burned by their relative exclusion from government supports," Westcott said.
"It was devastating when the government announced that they believe that $2,000 a month [the same amount as the federal government's Canadian Emergency Response Benefit] was the minimum that a person needed to survive when they knew that people on social assistance in Ontario were making far less than half that in the case of O.W. and not much more than half that if they were profoundly disabled people."
But the Thunder Bay activist remains hopeful, as she waits to hear the new federal government's throne speech on September 23.
"There's always an opportunity in a crisis. And so, please, let's not waste this incredibly difficult crisis that my community is in now."