Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee. We'll have a written brief that will follow shortly. Today with my limited time I want to highlight just a few points. I have four key points. I'm going to do a bit of history and then I want to talk mostly about the impact of precarious work on people.
My first point is that I went straight to the dictionary and I saw that precarity, according to what I read, encompasses uncertainty, lack of security and control, and threats of danger. I think threats of danger is the really important part, and, for people, those amount to things like income loss and poor health, but from a wider perspective they also include things like bursting of debt bubbles and societal unrest. Those threats are real.
The second point I want to make is that this committee talks about employment. I'm very particular about how I use “employment” and “work”. All work is precarious to some extent. New forms of paid work cannot be divorced from the broader circumstances that affect security: for example, maternity, disability, weather, or bad luck. For the growing precariat, however, the lines are increasingly blurring between employer/employee relationships and paid and unpaid economic activity, both market and non-market.
The third point is therefore that the definitions and indicators of precarity must reflect those first two points in order to inform effective policy solutions: for example, indicators of time spent in paid and unpaid work as well as education and training, and the impact of income security policies such as child benefits and tax credits, not just employment-related indicators.
The fourth point is that due to the increasingly precarious nature of employment, the expansion of forms of basic income—I assume that's why I was invited—not tied to employment, which some Canadians already receive, is urgently needed for others.
I'll take just a very brief divergence into some historical context. We all know that a key driver of precarious work is technological change—think of Uber being made possible by smart phones—but it's part of a larger challenge. I have a quote on that larger challenge of “the growing and serious imbalance between our ability to create wealth with our tremendous productive power and the inability of millions of families to consume that abundance because they lack adequate purchasing power.” That's a quote from 1955, from a labour leader to a committee like this one. Not much has changed, but I think the significance today of that era is that governments responded strongly over the next number of years to adopt public policies to meet those kinds of concerns that they saw coming, with things like unemployment insurance and student loans that continue to benefit people today.
The problem now is that change is accelerating and our progress has stalled, eroded, reversed in some cases, or is simply not kept up with new realities. I have just a few examples. Employment insurance is harder to get at a time when stable jobs are harder to find. More people are working at paid jobs or even just tasks with no benefits and protections. Financial shortfalls for a lot of people are being managed by taking on debt. Social assistance continues to be miserly and punitive while we continue with tax breaks for the wealthy.
The last point I want to make as an example is important because it points the way to the future, I think. That is that one of the really positive things we've done in Canada is that basic incomes for seniors and children, which have been in place for years, have been proven to be very successful in improving security for individuals and as a stimulus to the economy, but they exclude people. Those people are vulnerable to precarity and poverty. Things like the Canada workers benefit are helpful, but they're inadequate in amount and range of coverage.
Now I want to turn to the impact on people. I want to do this by looking at how people who are living precarious lives respond when that situation changes and they have more security.
The examples I'm going to provide are from a report called “Signposts to Success” done by the Basic Income Canada Network on the responses to a survey on the Ontario basic income pilot project. We ended up with a database that no one else had. We surveyed and received over 400 responses. I want to highlight three main areas that show you the kind of impact that increased security has on people.
Mental health was the biggest one. In the government's baseline survey of all the participants when they enrolled, almost 81% were suffering from moderate to severe psychological distress. That's 80% of the people enrolling in this program: people who are working for a living and struggling and also people who are on social assistance.
On our survey several months into the basic income, when they had been receiving this security, 88% of recipients reported less stress and anxiety and greater confidence. We have tons of examples, but they included things like reducing and eliminating medication. They controlled conditions better with diet, exercise and social contact. In turn, then, they were able to do things like go back to school, get a job or get a better job. There were similar results on health and food security overall. One of the important things here is that again they talked about things like reducing medication, but also about becoming more alert and actually physically more capable of activities that were not possible for them before.
The last area that I want to highlight is work. It's the one that everybody talks about when we talk about basic income and we worry about work disincentives. That's a bit of a myth. In our study, we found exactly the opposite. In the baseline survey, most people who were employed reported that they thought they were in dead-end jobs with no future. In our survey, we can see that people with the security of a basic income went back to school, upgraded skills, got better jobs, and were able to put gas in the car or buy bus tickets. Everybody improved in some way.
For me, then, I guess the bottom line is that basic income security reduces precarity. It improves lives, and it opens up options for everyone in ways that programs tied to employment alone cannot. The federal government has stated its intention to move in the direction of a basic income, and it's one that we fully support to address precarious work and many other phenomena.
Thank you.