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The Ontario project, announced in last year’s budget, will have the benefit of input from former Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, one of the idea’s most tireless champions. Segal provided the province with a blueprint for how to proceed in a report late last year (Finding a Better Way: A Basic Income Pilot Project for Ontario), whose modest and sensible proposals may reassure some of the idea’s critics even as they dismay its more enthusiastic proponents (or perhaps vice versa: who knows?).

It is best to begin with what Segal recommends the province should not do. It should not, he suggests, test what is sometimes called the “big bang” version of a basic income, in which all sorts of different government benefits, both cash and in-kind, are melted down into a single unconditional payment. Some of the programs sometimes mentioned as candidates for the melting-pot, he points out, have quite incompatible purposes. For example, employment insurance and the Canada Pension Plan are by their nature contributory programs: how much theypay out is supposed to vary with how much contributors pay in.

If it works well, we might then proceed to add a basic — very basic — income guarantee for those of working age to the existing guarantees for children and retirees

And while there is merit in cashing out benefits now delivered as services — among other virtues, to give recipients more choice in the nature and source of the service in question — there is simply no political constituency for that sort of of radical overhaul of the welfare state. Not at one go, at any rate.

Likewise, Segal cautions against testing the version of the basic income sometimes called the “demogrant,” as in the Finnish experiment, in which a fixed payment is made to every adult citizen. Though conceptually similar to the “negative income tax” he prefers — you can either pay everyone the same amount, then tax it back starting with the first dollar of earned income, or you can pay out to those with incomes below that point, and tax those above it — it entails a much heavier gross outlay. And besides, other countries are already testing it.