From Punjab, and worked hard and became successful and looked after their education. However, they had something different. They had social capital. When you don't have social capital, when you don't have any capital at all, what do you do?
We can say we're working at it and we're looking at it, but I think our job here in this place is to think extremely long term. What I've heard in my discussions with the other members from the human resources committee whom we've asked to study this is that they're going to look at it in a very small segment, maybe one day. I think this requires a profound understanding of guaranteed annual income, and about what we should be doing.
If you go online, if you just Google this and look at it on Wikipedia, for instance, the first model encompassing the guaranteed annual income is a negative income tax, meaning that people under a certain level will receive a certain amount of money and those above it won't receive anything. Then you have the guaranteed annual income model, which means that you will receive a certain amount of funds each and every year no matter what your income level.
This is important in how we do taxation. This actually hits at the very heart of the way we do taxation. We did this once before. We did this under Trudeau the elder Pierre Trudeau. They studied this in the 1970s. We are now 1990, 2000, 2016—we're 40 years on from that pilot project.
We had a representative, Evelyn Forget, a doctor and an economist in the health sciences come to testify about this issue. She talked about how it was important. She talked about how we didn't actually see a reduction in the working hours of people as a result, how people didn't become lazy, how it does have an impact on governments, how it does and can reduce costs for government over the long term, how it reduced health costs. Whether we like it or not, Ontario right now is moving ahead with this.
We can go to the other committee, HUMA, the human resources committee, and hope they have the expertise and the experts and the analysis and that they'll do a good job, but sometimes we also have the expertise here—the economists, the people who have been studying financial arrangements and how they work.
