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Photo by Chris Young/The Canadian Press

The basic income has a different goal than traditional welfare, which aims to make poverty less onerous until circumstances change, usually a return to work. But in Ontario today, many welfare recipients are already working, earning just enough to leaving them running in place as they lose their benefits.

The goal of the basic income is to help people get out of poverty altogether, either by providing a level of “top-up” for employment income that clears the poverty line, or by providing the time and space to study or retrain or look for a better job, or even start a business, in which case it would be possible to get off the basic income permanently.

From the government’s point of view, the basic income should reduce the need for all the case workers who supervise the amalgam of benefits that low-income people have to demonstrate that they qualify for. I am skeptical that bureaucracies can be made to shrink even after their assigned work is complete, but for a new government that will have to cut spending, the basic income might have proved one small way that the public sector could have been shrunk.

That may have been the case. It may not have been. The purpose of the pilot program was to see what in fact would happen. Social welfare policy has been largely the same in Canada for generations, with no great success, save for the elderly, who actually have a basic income by another name — CPP for retired workers, old age security and the guaranteed income supplement. Something new could have been something better. It is very unlikely that it would have been worse. And it is a shame that the new government has chosen to use only the old ways.