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What price dignity

August 26, 2021   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Forget sentimentality and compassionate outreach. Put emotional response to one side for the moment. Bring in cool heads and people who love numbers and economics. Patricia wants them to condone her plans for Universal Basic Income (UBI), based on floating the economy, providing people with income additional to low paying jobs, dissolving homelessness, Yet, she insists that a graduated UBI be truly universal, available to anyone with a S.I.N regardless of stature within the nation’s economic structure. Also, it is her theory that UBI has failed globally in the past because it has been directed to “the poor” and, as a consequence, has always been too little.

She firstly, recommends a basic beginning at the bottom “wage,” as one might call a UBI, of $40,500, taxable mind you, per annum. Let us offer the number from Statistics Canada: homelessness costs $8Billion per year. Right away, we are better off.

Does that sound like a lot, like nobody would ever go to work again? Think again. Firstly, it provides an actual living income, where a person can rent a home, apartment, a studio apartment – still a home. Not a shelter, which is not a home, by any means. Even to share accommodation is to still have a home and, now, maybe a friend. Don’t say that person can’t bring the dog that has sat with him/her on so many street corners.

Second, it provides funds for actual food, things that are nourishing, so, that a person’s health improves exponentially, stops visits to emerge.

The first things that can go are shelters.

In other words, suddenly that person is contributing to the wider economy because he/she is shopping.

Moving up the scale to folk earning money lower and better, they too will benefit from UBI of this calibre by virtue of supplementing for the sake of also shopping, maybe saving some money for future investments in better housing, household items – whatever – to help balance the economy.

And so on: UBI is not government spending, it is the government investing in people, therefore investing in the economy. UBI opens the opportunity to reduce and relax many payments going out to people, like the current support of CRB, CRSB, CRCB. This economic pandemic crisis is not over – UBI protects the economy – as long we keep all the shops open – not just the big corporate chain shops, like Walmart and Loblaws.

Most of all, UBI is not a band aid solution like the temporary aids of the moment. It is permanent, a settled income to carry the way through.

People will respond with recovery from dreadful times, with improved health, mental health and living conditions – not just “the poor” but almost everyone, of most levels of income, as the UBI goes the distance throughout the tax brackets , being reduced, according to annual income, by Patricia’s calculations, levelling off at $25,620 at the top.

This version of UBI is an opt-in system: take it or not, so it is democratized, free to have; free to leave. It gives dignity back to so many. Just picture it.

Dignity and the danger of losing it: I invite you to read the following link, which details the substantial cuts the Doug Ford government has inflicted on OHIP, much of it meant to be secret:

UPDATE: Mounting Health Care Cuts

Also, to acquaint yourself with Bill 74 and the reaction of professionals and experts to it, saying particularly to repeal Bill 74, for the risks it creates.

Let us not lose track of the latest Ford insult: the Invoice that was sent out to a large number of households, reminding them that they “owed” money – anything from $400 to $800 – to the Progressive Conservative Party. Slated as an actual invoice, “amount due-” and “please respond today..” Like any scam, this was exposed but the official response was a shrug with mutterings about a “third party marketing company” and Ford made no comment.

This is a government without dignity. The widely posted scam “Invoice” is a realistic manoeuvre to elicit money from people falsely and it is a worry how many scrambled to pay their “invoice,” which funds will not be repaid, you can be sure. 

Governments have the power – and it is up to us, for we give them their chances with our voting or not, please remember – to influence our lives for better or for worse. Attacks on our environment and OHIP endanger all of us. 

UBI can give recovery and strength to individuals and the overall economy.

What are our dignity and our lives worth to us? Do we pay attention, bring forth our own ideas with the anticipation of respectful response?

Do we remember that we are a free society and with that freedom come certain responsibilities: to vote, to use our voices, to acquaint ourselves with the workings of our governments and hold them to account?

Think about Afghanistan and rejoice: in this country, we are masters, not victims of our governments.

That really matters.

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