JAMIE SWIFT

Last week, just as it was dawning on people that the COVID-19 crisis was shaping up to be monumental, I was in a downtown Kingston grocery store. I noticed a fellow whose cart was groaning under the weight of water. He had five cases of 24 plastic bottles.

I suppose many have come to believe that tap water, treated at public expense, is not good enough. But, for me anyway, the sight of the water hoarder told a different story.

Why?

Because I asked Mr. Water why he was buying all that stuff.

“Lots of water in the tap?” I suggested.

“I hope so,” he replied anxiously.

This may be an extreme example of the way that the viral crisis is affecting the way so many feel these days. Yet there is an increasing sense of insecurity as the daily certainties to which we’re accustomed suddenly evaporate. Will there be enough food should stores run short? Can we still trust a bus trip with strangers? What about the safety of getting together with friends? Maybe they took the bus. We’re facing a stress pandemic.

By now we’re all familiar with one reaction — heading out to buy too much stuff. The bizarre compulsion to buy up toilet paper has been much discussed. The anxiety is that suddenly things seem out of control.

Let’s remember that for so many Canadians who depend on precarious jobs or, even worse, social assistance, the stress of lives being out of control is hardly new. It’s the commonplace stuff of life. Daily life.

I have been working on a book about the idea of providing a basic income, a universal, livable income to everyone as a right. The research has taken me to Hamilton, site of Ontario’s important basic income pilot project. It was terminated by Ontario’s Ford government.

Hamilton native Jodi Dean separated from her husband shortly after her youngest daughter was born 13 years ago. She didn’t qualify for social assistance because of her (sometimes sporadic) support payments. Young Madi was diagnosed with osteogenesis imperfecta, a rare and incurable bone condition. Brittle bone disease meant multiple fractures over many years, increasing the stress of single parenthood.

“When you open the fridge, it was like I couldn’t keep poverty away from my kids,” Dean said.

She was persuaded to apply for the basic income pilot. The extra money meant that she could tamp down the acute anxiety she had felt when confronted by hospital parking costs during the endless visits. The basic income payments lasted some 16 months.

Dean explains something familiar to people struggling with grossly inadequate incomes. And now it’s shockingly familiar to the rest of us as we try to process a COVID-19 world suddenly spinning out of control.

“When something quickly happens and changes everything that you’re doing in life, you can’t afford to go with the flow,” she explained to me. “It adds to the stress.”

Monthly tensions around phone bills, the cost of shelter and buying groceries are stressful enough. Two days before the Ford government dashed her hopes, she described how basic income helped.

“I know every month, ‘This income is solid coming in.’ I’m not going to be stressing about whether things are to be paid or not. I can’t even begin to tell you how things changed when I’m less stressed,” she said. “I know that the feeling in the whole house is less stressed.”

This month, McMaster University researchers who surveyed the effects of basic income on Hamilton people like Jodi Dean described the effects as “transformational.” Getting enough on which to live meant “fundamentally reshaping their living standards as well as their sense of self-worth and hope for a better future.”

With the completely understandable mass anxiety that’s accompanying the COVID-19 crisis, we’re experiencing what could be described as the “democratization” of insecurity. Democracy in the sense of a system that applies to all. Except that many know — or at least hope — that this, too, shall pass.

But not for all. Government aid to gig economy and part-time, precarious workers may be forthcoming. When the pandemic abates, the workers whose perilous paycheque-to-paycheque lives have suddenly been recognized — even by Ontario’s premier — could well revert to their usual reality.

What then? And what about people on social assistance for whom the notion of stocking up on groceries is a cruel hoax?

Milton Friedman, that leading apostle of small government and swaggering free markets, had something to say about new ideas. He succeeded in making his ideas seem like common sense.

“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around,” he said.

The COVID-19 crisis offers the opportunity for Canada to stop merely discussing basic income. It’s time to get going with this common sense.

Kingston writer Jamie Swift is the author, most recently, of “The Vimy Trap: Or, How We learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War (with McMaster historian Ian McKay), finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He lectures at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University.