I think the problem is just a lot more complex than saying there is one measure that is going to fix it: we can just put more money in everyone's pockets and the issues around poverty will go away.
Importantly, more money in a low-income person's pocket is a piece of the picture, but I don't think that is the only piece of the picture. We run the danger of saying, for example, that really what we need here is a guaranteed income, and we are going to make sure, across the board, that everybody has this certain level of income.
We run a couple of dangers. First of all, we'll run the danger of what analysts have called the “chump change” problem. What is politically realizable and practical about what that level of guaranteed income might be? I bet any level that we could come up with that would be politically possible would leave significant numbers of people still in some pretty dire circumstances.
The second point is that for particular groups of Canadians, they need more than simply more money in their pockets. They do need more money in their pockets, but women, for example, need a national child care program. You will not see women's economic inequality adequately addressed until we have affordable, quality, accessible child care across this country. I think that is clear. Any strategy that is going to address the disproportionate poverty of women has to deal with the resulting paid labour force inequality that comes from women's disproportionate child care responsibilities, and child care strategies have to be part of it.
We won't deal with women's inequality without also changing some employment strategies to deal with the issue of women's disproportionate location in the precarious work sector. A guaranteed income at the levels we could achieve won't fix that.
There are some real dangers in saying we are just going to go with a national payment to every individual and we're not going to recognize that there are other things to deal with. Some needs of some groups are very specific. If you're sick, you can't purchase your adequate health care in the marketplace with a guaranteed income. There's no way. We need to have an effective health care policy across the country. The federal government has a role to play in that through the imposition of national standards attached to dollars. That's clear. That is part of the Canadian tradition.
We can't deal with the needs of education of the low-income, even through the kind of guaranteed income that would be politically possible. We need post-secondary funding. We need a tuition policy.
Some of this obviously lies in provincial jurisdiction, but I mention that only as an illustration of the fact that there are some targeted needs that can't be met by just turning everybody into a market citizen and meeting their needs with a little bit of extra money. And it will only be a little bit of extra money; that's all, I'll bet, that would be politically possible in these times to deal with those needs, with a little bit of extra money in their pocket in the market.
It has to be a multi-pronged policy that looks at the special needs of groups most vulnerable to poverty in Canada and that uses the leverage that the federal government has to change key provincial policies as well. There needs to be some rethinking of the federal imposition of national standards in the area of federal contributions to the costs of income security in provincial programs. We need to return to some national standards attached to money that provincial governments are able to put into their social assistance programs.That's a way of getting extra money into the pockets of those who are poorest in our society, but we do so not just through raising welfare rates, which clearly needs to be done, but also by making sure that provincial welfare programs are actually provided to everybody in need and there is no such thing as a five-year cut-off rule or elaborate labyrinths of eligibility and qualification loss, and so on.
I am concerned about that route, but not because I think a guaranteed income or some universal payment is necessarily a bad idea if it is also conjoined with other program changes. I am concerned about our getting stuck in thinking that this is all we need to do, and that when we do it, we have done it, and here's what is politically possible in terms of the money we can give to everybody. We're still going to see significant degrees of inequality, poverty, and social exclusion.