A postcard shows “Canada’s National Ukrainian Festival Choir” in Dauphin, Man. During the 1970s, the prairie community was home to one of the country’s largest Ukrainian populations. (Photo: The Printing House)

Mincome provided the Richardsons with financial predictability and a sense of stability. There was always food on the table. The bills were paid. The kids stayed in school.

And when Gordon’s health took a turn for the worse mid-way through the pilot project, the family still made ends meet.

“It was a lot of good, but see, the Manitoba government and the federal government both went out of power that year and they ran out of money – so it was just dropped,” Richardson said.

“It was done.”

An extraordinary program for ordinary people

In five years, Mincome helped one thousand Dauphin families who fell below the poverty line earn a livable income. When the project ended, locals didn’t make a fuss because they knew the cheques were temporary anyway.

“Some people thought it was like charity,” Richardson said about Mincome. “It wasn’t really charity, it was need.”

So in 1979, it was business as usual again. After Mincome folded, people tapped into their prairie work ethic and looked to make do however they could. The Richardson family went back to scraping by, the same way they had before the project began. The kids found jobs: one sold gas at the local garage, another landed entry-level work in insurance.

Richardson continued to bake bread and can her own preserves at home. It’s a cash-saving skill born out of hard times some food bank-dependent families have lost today, she suggested.

“I think if we had a Mincome where they were helped a little,” she added. “That might be better.”

* * *

Why Dauphin? How did a farming community play host to such a landmark social assistance program?

Good political timing didn’t hurt.

In 1969, the left-leaning provincial NDP led by Edward Schreyer swept into power for the first time. The transition injected new rural sensitivities and democratic socialist influences into politics.

On the federal level, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. The two men worked swiftly to set up conditions for a basic income experiment.

In 1973, Manitoba and the federal government signed a cost-sharing agreement: 75 per cent of the $17-million budget would be paid for by the feds; the rest by the province.

The project rolled out the next year.

All Dauphinites were automatically considered for benefits. One-third of residents qualified for Mincome cheques.

How Mincome cheques were calculated: 1. Everyone was given the same base amount: 60 per cent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off. The cut-off varied, depending on family size and where they lived. But in 1975, a single Canadian who was considered low-income earned $3,386 on average. 19752014 dollars Individual$3,386$16,094 Family of two$4,907$20,443 2. Base amount was modified: 50 cents was subtracted from every dollar earned from other income sources

“It was sort of something new and utopian. It was completely different,” said Dauphin’s current mayor Eric Irwin. “It was an attempt to define social services in a different way.”

A ‘gap in the system’ ignored

Dr. Evelyn Forget is the researcher at University of Manitoba credited for tracking down those 1,800 dusty boxes of Mincome raw data that sat forgotten for 30 years.

She first heard about the project in an undergraduate economics class at the University of Toronto in the ’70s. Mincome cheques were still being delivered when her professors praised the experiment as “really important,” saying it was going to “revolutionize” the delivery of social programs. It stuck with her.

In 2005, she began looking for the Mincome data. After a strenuous search, she located the records at the provincial archives in Winnipeg. She was the first to look at them since they were packed up in 1979.

“[Archivists] were in the process of wondering whether, in fact, they could throw them out because they took up a lot of space and nobody seemed interested in it,” said Forget.

It didn’t take her long to realize the plethora of files could never be funneled into any sort of statistical analysis. There were questionnaires with circled answers. And data on one family could be scattered between countless boxes.

It also didn’t help that there were no labels or index.

Because of an ethics board policy, Forget couldn’t directly contact the people whose data she was now in possession of – the participants had consented to speak to the original researchers only. Instead, she used a guest spot on a local radio station to invite Mincome recipients to call her.