That's an interesting question, certainly among the researchers. When this project was introduced in 1974 there was a belief that Mincome was a pilot project that would be rolled out across the country by the end of the decade. It was seen as very much like Medicare, and a lot of the conversation I'm hearing now about guaranteed annual income is much like the old conversation about Medicare. It's something whose time has come. We need to think about it a bit.
In terms of how this affected people's lives, I have all kinds of anecdotes. When we interviewed people and we went to talk to participants in the study.... I have two favourite stories. One involves a small business. It was a family farm and they relied on a truck to take their material to the farmers' market to sell their vegetables. When Mincome came along it supported small business people as well. It was available to everybody in the community. It depended solely on the amount of income coming into the community. When the truck broke down, they were out of business. Mincome didn't have the kind of asset tests that provincial welfare had at the time, so they were able to use that money to invest in an asset that allowed them to get back on their feet.
My other story involves a librarian, and very much like your example she was a single mother with two daughters. She was on mother's allowance, on provincial social assistance, when Mincome came along. She had always been treated respectfully by the welfare system, but she was frustrated because she wanted to undertake job training and her case worker kept saying, “You go home and take care of your kids and we'll take care of you.” When Mincome came along she transferred to the program, engaged in some job training, and got a part-time job that turned into a full-time job. When I talked to her she had just retired after a 25-year career as a librarian and was incredibly proud of having modelled a different kind of life for her daughters. She had graduation pictures on the walls and the daughters had both become quite independent on their own.