Jodi Dean was looking forward to back-to-school season this year. For the first time in a long time, she and her husband had some money to spend. Usually, their eleven-year-old daughter wore hand-me-down clothes from her older siblings. “This year, we were hoping to buy her her own shirts,” says Dean, who lives in Hamilton, Ontario. “No faded shirts. Just crispy clean new shirts.”

The difference was that Dean had a few hundred extra dollars in her pocket each month — $325 Canadian dollars ($250 USD), to be exact. It was a relatively small amount but it had made a big difference for the better part of the past year. Although Dean’s husband is employed at a large retail chain, “we are very much working poor,” she says.

Most of the extra money was going towards her daughter, Madisen, who has multiple health issues, including “brittle bone disease” which causes her bones to break easily. Dean says they used the money to buy parking passes for the hospital in bulk, to save money on the typically twice-weekly trips. She was also able to buy “little things” that were unnecessary but nice, like a smoothie for Madisen after a physio appointment.

She and her husband had even been considering dropping $140 on a new pair of shoes they found on a site for kids with special needs. They were made to fit over leg braces, and could replace the “big, clunky, stupid standout” shoes that Dean didn’t want Madisen to enter sixth grade wearing. “We were excited,” she says.

But then the money came to an end. The extra cash was part of Ontario’s basic income project, which the Deans and 4,000 other low-income individuals and families had been enrolled in across three cities. It set them up with modest monthly payments, adjusted for income, that were scheduled to last for the next three years. But last month, the newly elected premier of the province, Progressive Conservative Party leader Doug Ford, abruptly ended the pilot program, despite a campaign promise that he’d leave it be.

“It’s such an emotional thing,” says Dean. “Basic income gave me the security I needed to relieve some of the stress of everyday life.”

Participants are reeling after the announcement, which gave no details about how the program will be wrapped up or when they can expect their final checks. Personal hopes, dreams, and financial goals evaporated. There’s also a sense of loss of an opportunity to prove something bigger: the radical notion that poverty, long viewed as an intractable policy problem, can be solved by putting money in the pockets of those who have the least.