WHITEHORSE, YK—Try to imagine a town where the government paid each of the residents a living income, regardless of who they were and what they did, and a Soviet hamlet in the early 1980s may come to mind.

But this experiment happened much closer to home. For a four-year period in the '70s, the poorest families in Dauphin, Manitoba, were granted a guaranteed minimum income by the federal and provincial governments. Thirty-five years later all that remains of the experiment are 2,000 boxes of documents that have gathered dust in the Canadian archives building in Winnipeg.

Until now little has been known about what unfolded over those four years in the small rural town, since the government locked away the data that had been collected and prevented it from being analyzed.

But after a five year struggle, Evelyn Forget, a professor of health sciences at the University of Manitoba, secured access to those boxes in 2009. Until the data is computerized, any systematic analysis is impossible. Undeterred, Forget has begun to piece together the story by using the census, health records, and the testimony of the program's participants. What is now emerging reveals that the program could have counted many successes.

Beginning in 1974, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals and Manitoba's first elected New Democratic Party government gave money to every person and family in Dauphin who fell below the poverty line. Under the program—called “Mincome”—about 1,000 families received monthly cheques.

Unlike welfare, which only certain individuals qualified for, the guaranteed minimum income project was open to everyone. It was the first—and to this day, only—time that Canada has ever experimented with such an open-door social assistance program.

In today’s conservative political climate, with constant government and media rhetoric about the inefficiency and wastefulness of the welfare state, the Mincome project sounds like nothing short of a fairy tale.

For four years Dauphin was a place where anyone living below the poverty line could receive monthly cheques to boost their income, no questions asked. Single mothers could afford to put their kids through school and low-income families weren't scrambling to pay the rent each month.

For Amy Richardson, it meant she could afford to buy her children books for school. Richardson joined the program in 1977, just after her husband had gone on disability leave from his job. At the time, she was struggling to raise her three youngest children on $1.50 haircuts she gave in her living room beauty parlour.

The $1,200 per year she received in monthly increments was a welcome supplement, in a time when the poverty line was $2,100 a year.

“The extra money meant that I was also able to give my kids something I wouldn't ordinarily be able to, like taking them to a show or some small luxury like that,” said Richardson, now 84, who spoke to The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

As part of the experiment, an army of researchers were sent to Dauphin to interview the Mincome families. Residents in nearby rural towns who didn't receive Mincome were also surveyed so their statistics could be compared against those from Dauphin. But after the government cut the program in 1978, they simply warehoused the data and never bothered to analyze it.

“When the government introduced the program they really thought it would be a pilot project and that by the end of the decade they would roll this out and everybody would participate,” said Forget. “They thought it would become a universal program. But of course, the idea eventually just died off.”

During the Mincome program, the federal and provincial governments collectively spent $17 million, though it was initially supposed to have cost only a few million.

Meant to last several more years, the program came to a quick halt in 1978 when an economic recession hit Canada. The recession had caused prices to increase 10 per cent each year, so payouts to families under Mincome had increased accordingly.

Trudeau's Liberals, already on the defensive for an overhaul of Canada's employment insurance system, killed the program and withheld any additional money to analyze the data that had been amassed.

“It's hugely unfortunate and typical of the strange ways in which government works that the data was never analyzed,” says Ron Hikel who coordinated the Mincome program. Hikel now works in the United States to promote universal healthcare reform.

“Government officials opposed [to Mincome] didn't want to spend more money to analyze the data and show what they already thought: that it didn't work,” says Hikel, who remains a strong proponent of guaranteed income programs.

“And the people who were in favour of Mincome were worried because if the analysis was done and the data wasn't favourable then they would have just spent another million dollars on analysis and be even more embarrassed.”

But Forget has culled some useful info from Manitoba labour data. Her research confirms numerous positive consequences of the program.

Initially, the Mincome program was conceived as a labour market experiment. The government wanted to know what would happen if everybody in town received a guaranteed income, and specifically, they wanted to know whether people would still work.

Only two segments of Dauphin's labour force worked less as a result of Mincome—new mothers and teenagers. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies. And teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families.

The end result was that they spent more time at school and more teenagers graduated. Those who continued to work were given more opportunities to choose what type of work they did.

“People didn't have to take the first job that came along,” says Hikel. “They could wait for something better that suited them.”

When Doreen and Hugh Henderson arrived in Dauphin in 1970 with their two young children they were broke. Doreen suggested moving from Vancouver to her hometown because she thought her husband would have an easier time finding work there. But when they arrived, things weren't any better.

“My husband didn't have a very good job and I couldn't find work,” she told The Dominion by phone from Dauphin.

It wasn't until 1978, after receiving Mincome payments for two years, that her husband finally landed janitorial work at the local school, a job he kept for 28 years.

“I don't know how we would have lived without [Mincome],” said Doreen.“I don't know if we would have stayed in Dauphin.”

Although the Mincome experiment was intended to provide a body of information to study labour market trends, Forget discovered that Mincome had a significant effect on people's well being. Two years ago, the professor started studying the health records of Dauphin residents to assess the impacts of the program.

In the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 per cent. Fewer people went to the hospital with work-related injuries and there were fewer emergency room visits from car accidents and domestic abuse. There were also far fewer mental health visits.

“When you walk around a hospital, it's pretty clear that a lot of the time what we're treating are the consequences of poverty,” she says.

Give people financial independence and control over their lives and these accidents and illnesses tend to dissipate, says Forget. In today's terms, an 8.5 per cent decrease in hospital visits across Canada would save the government $4 billion annually, by her calculations. And $4 billion is the amount that the federal government is currently trying to save by slashing social programming and arts funding.

Having analyzed the health data, Forget is now working on a cost-benefit analysis to see what a guaranteed income program might save the federal government if it were implemented today. She’s already worked with a Senate committee investigating a guaranteed income program for all low-income Canadians.

The Canadian government's sudden interest in guaranteed income programs doesn't surprise Forget.

Every 10 or 15 years there seems to be a renewed interest in getting Guaranteed Income (GI) programs off the ground, according to Saskatchewan social work professor James Mulvale. He's researched and written extensively about guaranteed income programs and is also part the Canadian chapter of the Basic Income Earth Network, a worldwide organization that advocates for guaranteed income.

GI programs exist in countries like Brazil, Mexico, France and even the state of Alaska.

Although people may not recognize it, subtle forms of guaranteed income already exist in Canada, says Mulvale, pointing to the child benefit tax, guaranteed income for seniors and the modest GST/HST rebate program for low-income earners.

However, a wider-reaching guaranteed income program would go a long way in decreasing poverty, he says.

Mulvale is in favour of a “demo-grant” model of GI that would give automatic cash transfers to everybody in Canada. This kind of plan would also provide the option of taxing higher-income earners at the end of the year so poorer people receive benefits.

A model such as this has a higher chance of broad support because it goes out to everybody, according to Mulvale. GI can also be administered as a negative income tax to the poor, meaning they'd receive an amount of money back directly in proportion to what they make each year.

“GI by itself wouldn't eliminate poverty but it would go a heck of a long way to decrease the extent of poverty in this country,” says Mulvale.

Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.

It would also mean that anybody could apply for support. Many people fall through the cracks under the current welfare system, says Forget. Not everybody can access welfare and those who can are penalized for going to school or for working a job since the money they receive from welfare is then clawed back.

If a guaranteed income program can target more people and is more efficient than other social assistance programs, then why doesn't Canada have such a program in place already? Perhaps the biggest barrier is the prevalence of negative stereotypes about poor people.

“There's very strong feelings out there that we shouldn't give people money for nothing,” Mulvale says.

Guaranteed income proponents aren't holding their breaths that they'll see such a program here anytime soon, but they are hopeful that one day Canada will consider the merits of guaranteed income.

The cost would be "not nearly as prohibitive to do as people imagine it is," says Forget. “A guaranteed minimum income program is a superior way of delivering social assistance. The only thing is that it's of course politically difficult to implement.”

A Basic Income Guarantee results in more mothers staying with their children, more teens graduating high school, better health, and higher wages.

It doesn't result in the Freeloader myth or tyranny.

And before you scream, "SOCIALISM!!!! :doom:" just understand that Freidrich Hayek was for a Universal Basic Income as a necessary part of a great society (see Law, Legislation and Liberty vol 3 page 55)

Knock yourself out. . .just don't take MY hard-earned money to pay for it.

I earned MY money, I earned my standard of living. I earned everything I have. . .and being a middle-class white male, it wasn't easy.

For every Canadian (”America's Hat”) example of the greatness and goodness of socialism, history is chocked full of dismal (and lethal) failures.

And I'll bet the small community in the Canadian study was more of a ethnically homogenized "community" sharing common cultural standards than an urban jungle where feral thugs prowl and prey. Try that minimum income thing in, say, Wash DC or Detroit and see where it gets you.

This lasted for only four years. The article cites the case of a man who finally got a job as a janitor and thenwent on to hold it for 28 years, without the GAI. Only four years does not really show the effects. People were still living on the ‘cultural capital’ of a society that taught work is good, self-sufficiency is good, being married n order to raise children is good, etc.

For the effects after a few more years, another generation, look at Native American reservations both in Canada and the US, also the white working class of Britan, also the African American populations of large cities which in effect have a GAI. Native Ameicans live almost completely on public monies. the results in all these cases are alcoholism, (also: Russia) violence, people without internal controls, fatherless children and the pyschic distortion of women-only families, and I could go on but people already know this.

So this stdy of only four years has no relevance.

and I bet the other half of the ton paid high taxes to support this?

Oh wait, the money came from outside of town? So how is this experiment worth anything?

The town itself cannot afford to fund this program, the state and federal levels could not afford it either.

Today we spend a trillion bucks and distribute about $300 billion to the “poor” while the rest pays for bureaucracy. We should just merge all welfare into one program for the truly poor, heck add unemployment to it- why make it a seperate program?... Just hand out cash monthly if they show up in person monthly. Abolish 90% of the welfare bureaucracy.

Liberals would never agree to that of course.

Mincome for all is retarded though

Knock yourself out. . .just don't take MY hard-earned money to pay for it.

You do realize don't you that your response is why government assistance is need since your too damn stingy to help out people who need it.

I earned MY money, I earned my standard of living. I earned everything I have. . .and being a middle-class white male, it wasn't easy.

Cool story bro. Us white guys have had it real rough.

For every Canadian (”America's Hat”) example of the greatness and goodness of socialism, history is chocked full of dismal (and lethal) failures.

You're so deluded that you're really going to call a program advocated by libertarian hero Hayek as socialist?

Hahaha unbelievable . . . wait, it's actually not.

From my observances getting off welfare is about as hard as getting off of drugs and liberal politicians make it that way.

I don’t know the answers but it is way too easy to slide by on welfare than work. A woman with a couple of kids gets everything from health care to housing to food and then she can shack up with a guy who works and not tell the authorities and get that extra cash.

One of the problems is that if you get a full time minimum wage job you are in worse shape than when you weren’t working so there is no incentive.

$1200 per year. Probably Canadian dollars. Convert that to US dollars, adjust for 2012 inflation and try offering that sum to the welfare bums in the United States.

They would shreik in protest at being ripped off. Probably 1/10 of what they normally get from Uncle Sugar.

I'm sure it did make things better for the recipients. And, maybe the recipients mostly did continue to work. But who pays for it? If the value of work is not supported by market economics, then whatever the difference is is being taken from someone else - redistributed as it were.

Two problems with applying this to today. Recipients continued to work because they always did work - work was a habit and part of their culture. Not so with much of todays' American dependent class. Also, paying someone more than the value of their labor is unsustainable if applied to large swaths of the economy. The money either has to come from punishing taxation (a disincentive for productive workers), consumption taxes (regressive) or borrowing and money printing (Like we are doing now - in the long run terminal.)

I'm sure there are legions of post-graduate level puppeteers, avante garde performance artists and street corner stand-up comics who'd love to pursue their vocations and be provided a comfortable income level guaranteed by the Federal Gubmint. I'm sure that the street corners would be more colorful and entertaining as a result. Right up until the whole thing goes bust and we get this:

But, come to think of it, that's pretty entertaining too.

In America, if you're paid not to work - you don't.
People from around the globe come here for their "free gift."

In this study, people were EXPECTED to do well, in fact, encouraged to improve their lives. In America, people are encouraged to VOTE for free stuff so they never have to get out of bed in the morning.

In America, sloth is rewarded at the tune of $40 - $60,000 annually. The average tax payer, who makes an average of only $40,000, is being asked to work harder, longer, and pay more. (Workers in America are severely punished for their disobedience.)

This is why America is broke. The freeloaders and their annual freebies have outnumbered and out-scrounged the laborers. The grasshoppers are bleeding the ants dry, and everyone is about to starve.

A temporary safety net is fine for those who find themselves in financial dire straights, but in America, that safety net broke a long time ago, and it's been replaced by millions of freeloading condos.

Today, those who need the temporary net can't get it, because they're not part of a left wing voting block. They made the mistake of actually trying to work for a living (they "acted stupidly").

“Conservative senator Hugh Segal has been the biggest supporter of this kind of GI, claiming it would eliminate the social assistance programs now administered by the provinces and territories. Rather than having a separate office to administer child tax benefits, welfare, unemployment insurance and income supplement for seniors, they could all be rolled into one GI scheme.”

In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman said the same thing-abolish all welfare programs etc and provide cash income to the poor. On FR a few days ago we spent $60,000 per person for those in poverty.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MILTON FRIEDMAN BORN 100 YEARS AGO THIS YEAR. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO HIS BOOK CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM
PUBLISHED 50 YEARS AGO. His book helped launch the conservative revival.

You're so deluded that you're really going to call a program advocated by libertarian hero Hayek as socialist?

I'll go further than that. Number 1. Libertarians are not heroes. They're scum. 2. Hayek was no conservative. How do we know that? He wrote a damn book!

Why I Am Not a Conservative

by F. A. Hayek
by F. A. Hayek

In The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960)

Number 3. I don't care if you are a class of '98. I add a dittoes to what was posted upthread: IBTZ

hulka->Knock yourself out. . .just don't take MY hard-earned money to pay for it.

ksen->You do realize don't you that your response is why government assistance is need since your too damn stingy to help out people who need it.

He never said he was too stingy to pay for it. He said don't steal his money to do it. Charity is a free will offering. If he doesn't want to give, who are you, or anyone else for that matter, to FORCE him to give.

Prior to the welfare state we had less problems with poverty in this country than we do now. People who really needed help went to the churches and got help. That allowed someone to make sure they really needed help and the churches saw to it that they didn't become junkies for free money.

Cool story bro. Us white guys have had it real rough.

We have. We've been carrying most of the non-whites for decades. When do we get to enjoy the fruit of our labor rather than have it confiscated at the point of a gun?

You're so deluded that you're really going to call a program advocated by libertarian hero Hayek as socialist?

If it involved taking money by force from some people in order to give it to others than it is socialism. If Hayek advocated this then he betrayed libertarianism. (Now if he advocated taking up a voluntary contribution to do this it would be OK. That's what we had before the welfare state)

If you don’t want workers able to unionize in order to get more negotiating power then I think this is the next best way to empower workers. If you don’t NEED to take that crappy $7.50/hr job to do things like eat and live then you can hold out for a higher paying job or if enough people refuse to take bad jobs for even worse wages then it will force employers to raise wages.

It reminds me when people would say that mexicans do jobs americans don’t want to. Well, to be accurate the statement should have been mexicans do jobs for wages that americans wouldn’t do them for.

A Basic Income leads to more liberty and more happiness for society.

You do realize don't you that your response is why government assistance is need since your too damn stingy to help out people who need it.

If the government wasn't robbing the tax payer blind - so freeloaders can skate through life without working one day of their miserable, lazy lives - people would have 50% more income and a lot of extra cash for charity.
Through charity, those in WANT would not be served, but those in NEED would be given a cup that runeth over. They would have more than they could ever dream of.

When money is confiscated by the government through force, people rebel. When money is given to charity through the heart, people are very generous.

The problem with the "poor" in this country is democrat sloth. They never do anything for anyone - not even themselves. They lay around in bed all day eating Twinkies and demanding more. There are very few truly needy people in this country, and they're barely getting squat. The lazy freeloaders are devouring it all, and every four years they vote for more.

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