Article content continued

That seems to be part of the idea in Finland, whose centre-right prime minister has talked of “simplifying the social security system.” The Finnish plan now being bandied about would give every adult €800 ($1,172) a month — money that would be tax-free, although it would count toward the personal tax exemption for those with earned income.

Manitoba’s Mincome trial, which ran from 1975 to 1979, is being spoken of respectfully now because guaranteed income has so rarely been tested in a thoughtful way. Mincome was designed consciously as an experiment, applied in two theatres. In the city of Winnipeg, 1,187 households were randomly chosen to receive a “negative income tax,” and each was paired with a similar household elsewhere in the city to serve as a control. The guaranteed income was also given to everybody in the town of Dauphin, Man., and the surrounding rural municipality, in order to check the effects of “saturating” an area with money for merely existing.

This seems like a broadly sensible design for a social policy experiment. Different households in the Winnipeg part of the program were given different clawback rates on the income they earned, in order to provide what one might call dose-response details of the labour-market effects. The Dauphin side of the project did not come with an explicit control group, but, after all, every other similar town in Canada was there to provide an implicit one.

But what are we to conclude if we take the botched, almost shameful implementation of Mincome itself as a lesson in what becomes of ambitious big-government ventures? Gulp.

Scientifically, however, the whole thing ended in disaster. The original budget for the experiment was set at $17 million, but, in the words of Evelyn Forget, a University of Manitoba health economist who did a sort of historical autopsy on Mincome in 2011, this “was never more than a wild guess.” Most of the budget was to be covered by the federal government, which was, at the time of the program’s founding in 1973, under pressure to rethink (and streamline) Canada’s social safety net.