Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate the opportunity.
I'd like to highlight why I'm here and why I've decided to speak. For me, it's very important to the people of my riding that I speak about this issue. This is something that concerns a lot of people in my riding. A lot of people don't fall under the normal parameters of what we often talk about with regard to our economy here in Canada. We often run things for the top 40%, the middle class, the top 60%. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people in this country.
The guaranteed annual income is something that I believe is so important. We do these little programs all the time. We do a little program here, a little program there. We have old age security. We have guaranteed income for seniors, and we have the new Canada child tax benefit, which is like guaranteed income for children and families, but a lot of other people fall through the cracks. These people fall through the cracks inadvertently, and I think it's a great shame.
It's a shame because I'll get people in my riding coming to see me, and they'll have a disability, or they'll be unable to receive the same level of social capital, but they also deserve a good quality of life. I'm not saying they deserve granite countertops. I'm not saying they deserve to have gold-trimmed toilets or anything like that. What I am saying is that they deserve to have basic human dignity.
We've been talking often about tax policies and how we can go about doing that. I highlighted last time a little bit about the negative income tax and the ways in which we can do taxation in this country. The basic income debate is something that's been going on since at least 1754, with the Second Discourse of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who talked about property. He famously claimed that the first man who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. There were many crimes. How many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors would a man have saved the human species if, pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches, he'd cried to his fellows to be sure not to listen to this imposter or they were lost: they would forget that the fruits of the earth belonged equally to us all and that the earth itself belonged to nobody. That was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
You might ask what land has to do with it. Well, sometimes it's about the equal distribution of wealth in our society and who deserves to have that wealth.
In 1848 there was another gentleman, another economist, Joseph Charlier, who presented what was, as far as what's identified in the literature is concerned, the earliest case for an unconditional income stream funded mainly from land taxation. Charlier continued to advocate the case over the next 50 years.
The second theorist was François Huet. In 1853 he offered a sustained justification of an abstinently unconditional capital endowment dotation for all young adults, to be funded by or from inheritance and gift taxation. That commitment was repeated in all of his later works.
This is not something that just a few people have been talking about. Even in 1795, the American revolutionary Thomas Paine advocated a citizen dividend to all U.S. citizens as compensation for loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property. It's in his book Agrarian Justice.
French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte echoed Paine's sentiments, and commented, “Man is entitled by birthright to a share of the earth's produce sufficient to fill the needs of his existence.” That comes from Herold, from 1955.
In 1962 economist Milton Friedman advocated a minimum guaranteed income, the idea of a negative income tax.
In 1963 Robert Theobald published the book Free Men and Free Markets, in which he advocated a guaranteed minimum income. This is actually the origin of the modern phrase that we use today.
In 1966 the Cloward-Piven strategy advocated overloading the U.S. welfare system to force its collapse in the hopes that it would be replaced by a guaranteed annual income, and thus an end to poverty.
One of my favourites is from 1967, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
And it goes on. We can find more examples of many economists who talk about this. The 1994 An Autobiographical Dialogue, from the classic liberal, Friedrich Hayek, stated, “I have always said that I am in favour of a minimum income for every person in the country”.
It's incredible even if you look at some of our own finance ministers in the western hemisphere, in the Commonwealth. New Zealand's Labour finance minister in 1984, Roger Douglas, announced a guaranteed minimum family income scheme to accompany a new flat tax. Unfortunately, both were quashed by the then-prime minister, David Lange, who sacked Douglas. Yet it still comes. I love the fact that in 1968, as well, James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and another 1,200 economists signed a document calling for the U.S. Congress to introduce a system of income guarantees and supplements in that year.
Many people often ask what this means. Why are we giving something free to someone else, people who don't deserve it? There are many different names for this. Even in Alaska they have a guaranteed income of sorts, the Alaska permanent fund, which takes the natural resources of the state and gives out 25% in disbursements to all its citizens. There are many other names: the guaranteed basic income, share the wealth; basic income, BI; guaranteed income, GI; social credit—we used to have that in Alberta. I remember a government called the Social Credit—basic income guarantee, BIG; guaranteed minimum; social dividend; citizens' dividend; guaranteed minimum income; social income; citizens' dividend; income guarantee; social wage; citizens' income; minimum income guarantee; state bonus; minimum income; territorial dividend; citizens' wage; mincome, as we have used here in Canada; unconditional basic income, UBI; daily bread; bread and roses—some of those old solidarity songs they used to sing in the 1930s, “Give us our daily bread and roses”—national minimum; universal allocation; demogrants; national tax rebate; universal basic income; dividends for all; negative income tax; universal benefit; guaranteed annual income; refundable income tax credit; universal grant; guaranteed adequate income; rent sharing; universal income tax credit. Those are just a few of the names to describe many of the same philosophies that we see throughout a lot of economic literature.
Perhaps it's not important to everyone, but it is important to a lot of people. At the end of the day, the state spends a lot of money, and how well we spend that money is very important. We have a lot of little programs around the country. We have a lot of little problems around the country. We put a bit of money here to address that problem; we put some more money over there to address a similar problem related to poverty. Yet, they seemingly never address that poverty overall, and they place many conditions.
One of my favourite works on guaranteed income is by Dr. Martin Luther King. I thought I would read an excerpt from one of his books. I don't want to waste the time of the committee, but I think this is so important to have on the record and for the people of Canada to know about this. Martin Luther King is one of my favourites, one of the great heroes in my life, along with Nelson Mandela, whom I had the opportunity of going to see in 1994, when he was first elected in free and fair elections in South Africa in his 70s. Dr. Martin Luther King, the truth that he espoused, of going to the mountaintop and seeing the promised land, is one of the things that I think many people in this country hold dear. The truth that he espouses here applies equally not just to the United States, but even to Canada. In his words:
There is only one general proposal that I would like to examine here, because it deals with the abolition of poverty within this nation and leads logically to my final discussion of poverty on an international scale. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derived from racial discrimination, I will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
I'm going to comment on this.
When I decided to run for mayor in 2014, in the city of Winnipeg, many people said to me that since I was the indigenous candidate, the indigenous guy running for mayor, I was going to look out for the interests of the indigenous people. I said I wasn't here just to look out for the interests of indigenous people, that I was here to look out for the interests of all of us in the city of Winnipeg. Those are the same ideals that I bring to this House and to this committee. Poverty affects everyone equally across this country, whether you are indigenous, a newcomer, or a non-indigenous person, as I like to describe people who are non-indigenous.
I'll continue the quote:
Up to recently we have proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils: lack of education restricting job opportunities; poor housing which stultified home life and suppressed initiative; fragile family relationships which distorted personality development. The logic of this approach suggested that each of these causes be attacked one by one. Hence a housing program to transform living conditions, improved educational facilities to furnish tools for better job opportunities, and family counseling to create better personal adjustments were designed. In combination these measures were intended to remove the causes of poverty. While none of these remedies in itself is unsound, all have a fatal disadvantage. The programs have never proceeded on a coordinated basis or at a similar rate of development. Housing measures have fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies. They have been piecemeal and pygmy. Educational reforms have been even more sluggish and entangled in bureaucratic stalling and economy-dominated decisions. Family assistance stagnated in neglect and then suddenly was discovered to be the central issue on the basis of hasty and superficial studies. At no time has a total, coordinated and fully adequate program been conceived. As a consequence, fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor. In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing—they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.
In Martin Luther King's own words:
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will.
It's incredible. This is 1968 where he's talking about the same things that are affecting many of the same people today, whether it's young people, whether it's people who have been displaced by the new economy. There's a new economy that is coming with the lack of drivers for cars, the lack of drivers for trucks, and where the automation of even many of the jobs that are considered high-level thinking will be affecting many people in our society, so even if you are lawyers, we will be able to use artificial intelligence to put many people out of work in this country.
Here he is talking about that exact same thing in 1968:
The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also never know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.
We can talk about growth, but unfortunately that poverty seems to always be there:
We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society. The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In 1879 Henry George anticipated the state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty—
—and I decided, Mr. Chair, to bring Progress and Poverty, one of my favourite economic books that I had in my library. It was given to me by a very good former finance minister of the Province of Manitoba, the Honourable Sid Green. Thank you very much, sir.
In this book he often talks about many of the issues facing them at the time—it was published in the 1850s—and it's an absolutely wonderful read. If any of you have any time, I encourage the listeners, if they are listening, the Twitterverse, to perhaps go out and take the time to read this wonderful book. It's a bit long, but nonetheless, the truths that are told in there are absolutely fantastic.
In the book he says:
The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power, and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for its own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want was abolished, work of this sort would be enormously increased.
Returning to Martin Luther King:
We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay.
Why provide people with money or societies or groups to set up social housing, when you can provide individuals with the wherewithal to decide what they want to do with that money themselves? I think that is in essence the nature of humans, allowing people the individual choices themselves.
Returning to Martin Luther King:
Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.
I have just come out of a meeting with the the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, the Hon. MaryAnn Mihychuk, and in some reserves, we believe there is an unemployment rate of 80% to 90%, and we wonder how we're going to develop this economy. We don't know. It's a hard question. We've been trying to deal with this for many decades, and somehow we have not succeeded.
Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result.