The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) was a temporary cash transfer program for workers who had reduced earnings due to the COVID-19 pandemic over the period of March 15 and October 2, 2020. While the benefits of getting the CERB out the door as quickly as possible should not be...

IA is the Government of British Columbia’s largest income assistance program, with an annual cost of just over $2B and reaching more than 8% of households. It is a program that is very complex to access and has complex eligibility rules and design features. It is also associated with a large...

B.C. residents are offered a large, complex web of income and social support programs. Those programs tend to be difficult to access, difficult to understand, and difficult to navigate, and are much more a collection of disparate programs than a cohesive and consistent system targeting an...

An important component of the work to be completed by the British Columbia’s Expert Panel on Basic Income is to design simulations to look at how various basic income (BI) models could work in B.C. (B.C. Poverty Reduction, 2018). The intent of these simulations is to identify the potential...

This paper delves into the academic literature that exists that models, in detail, specific basic incomes for Canada to understand what main proposals already exist in the literature. This information will help inform the work of B.C.’s Expert Panel on Basic Income in two ways. First, it will...

We detail the political party commitments of a basic income in Canada over the last decade, a period of time in which we have seen renewed conversations about a basic income in Canada. We find that in all but one case the policy commitments lack any detail about design choices and no commitments...

Basic income is not a single, uniform policy, but rather a range of policy proposals that share certain principles while also differing along key dimensions. Based on the extensive literature related to basic income, we conceptualize basic income as a class of policy proposals, all of which...

Although there are a number of benefits to using the income tax system to deliver a basic income guarantee (B.I.G) in Ontario, regardless of its form, there are also a number of difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the PIT system, as it exists at both the federal and Ontario...

When the federal government created the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) to help Canadians who had lost their jobs in the COVID-19 lockdown, it sparked renewed interest in the idea of a basic income. However, many policy questions need to be discussed and resolved in order to assess a...