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Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay will be the three trial sites for Ontario’s experiment with a universal basic income, Premier Kathleen Wynne announced Monday morning, competing with New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath’s promise of a new provincial drug-insurance program if her party wins the next election.

It was a big day for new social programs among legislators looking forward to life with a balanced budget.

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Both the Liberals’ work on a replacement for Ontario’s mess of welfare programs and the New Democrats’ work on pharmacare are responses to problems from the worsening reliability of employment. Or, rather, problems we’ve had for a long time that are more visible now than they used to be because Ontarians can’t count on full-time jobs as much as they used to.

The basic-income program first, because it’s a thing the current government is actually doing.

On principle, we don’t want the dole to be easy and we want to make sure the money people get is well spent. But maybe we’ve reached a point where it’s more expensive to maintain a bureaucracy to monitor welfare spending than to let a few dollars be spent unwisely. Maybe following all the welfare system’s rules is so exhausting that it keeps some recipients from getting off welfare.