“No nation can achieve true greatness if it lacks the courage and determination to undertake the surgery necessary to remove the cancer of poverty from its body politic.”

That’s a useful quote to keep in mind as the Wynne government pushes aside the naysayers, at least for the moment, and undertakes a three-city social policy experiment to test the efficacy of basic income. Hamilton, Lindsay and Thunder Bay are the chosen Petri dishes for the three-year Ontario Basic Income Pilot (OBIP) project, which means that this big test — will basic income not only provide better support for those on the bottom rung but also help push them up the ladder — may outlive the current government.

Or not.

The federal-provincial Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment of the 1970s, or Mincome, didn’t survive the political changing of the guard from Ed Schreyer’s NDP government to Sterling Lyon’s Conservatives. The fuller story: interest in the project, located in Dauphin and Winnipeg, was waning at the federal level. The project had already pushed beyond its initial time mandate when the plug was pulled, leaving behind a confusion of data and first person accounts. There were even complaints about researchers trying to get to interviews with Dauphinites in the middle of a Manitoba winter. Images of cost escalation aren’t difficult to conjure.

Throughout there was deep skepticism here in Ontario, which had been offered federal funding to conduct a similar experiment, but took a pass, taking the position that guaranteed income and negative income tax experiments had been conducted in the United States dating back to 1968, albeit with inconsistent results.

So the first takeaway is that regardless of what happens in the next provincial election, all parties need to pledge allegiance to OBIP’s full three years. History tells us that the rigorous research and evaluation experts promised by the Wynne government had better be the best in their field for this will be key to a robust scientific outcome. The third-party research consortium that will evaluate the study has yet to be announced.

The remnant data from Mincome has been much discussed, including here in an interview with Evelyn Forget, a University of Manitoba health economist. Forget’s first focus was on health outcomes, with the significant finding that health care utilization was reduced and mental health complaints dropped significantly.

When I spoke to Forget last spring she emphasized that one of the really big findings was the increase in high school completion for the children of Mincome-receiving parents. “Particularly boys,” Forget said. “Before Mincome they had been under a fair amount of family pressure to go out and become self supporting. When Mincome came along I guess their families decided they could support them in school a little longer.”

That’s a huge win that can’t be overstated, and the kind of result that plays into both federal and provincial promises to help advance “inclusive growth.”

Wisely, the Wynne government is not taking the Dauphin saturation site approach in which all residents were invited to participate — “a very weird way of doing an experiment,” Forget said, though the family files proved a goldmine for her own research — but rather will build its data base on 4,000 randomly selected participants between the ages of 18 and 64. Residents will be invited to apply.

A key point too is that by choosing Lindsay, Hamilton and Thunder Bay, the government has chosen representative sites that mirror the province as a whole: north, central, large, small. When I spoke with Forget she made the point that so much data — health, justice, education — is now routinely collected, it’s a completely different world than it was in 1974.

There are two elephants in the room.

The first is the fear that such a plan will serve as a disincentive to work — will there be negative labour market effects? And if so, where will they pop up?

The second, from the other end of the political spectrum, is that social programs will be compromised. The government’s announcement states that participants receiving support through Ontario Works will continue to receive the Ontario Drug Benefit.

The government hopes the first perceived barrier will be overcome by a 50-cents-on-the-dollar incentive: for every dollar earned, the basic income amount will be reduced by 50 cents.

It’s long past time that we figured out the labour market impacts of such a strategy.

Oh, and that opening quote? Those are the words of Senator David Croll, who led the senate committee’s report on poverty in Canada. In 1968. The key recommendation of the report? A guaranteed annual income.

Senator Croll’s words ring a familiar bell. Here’s what the Wynne government said in its release Monday: “Our approach to basic income is a simplified way to deliver income support that provides a floor under which nobody can fall.”

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Here’s Senator Croll addressing the Empire Club in 1972: “What does the guaranteed annual income do? In essence, it simply means providing a floor below which the income of Canadians will not be allowed to fall.”

A near half century has passed. It’s now up to the Wynne government to hold the experiment to a gold standard, and resolve the decades old guaranteed income conundrum once and for all.

jenwells@thestar.ca