Manitoba's forgotten social experiment

OTTAWA — "Once upon a time in Canada, there was a town where no one was poor."

No, this is not the opening line of some yet to be written fairy tale. It's the opening line in the summary of a new report that contains some heartening news buried in a long ago and mostly forgotten experiment that ensured all residents in a small Manitoba community were guaranteed a minimum annual income for five years in the mid-1970s.

With Canada awash in flu fears, corporate bankruptcies, rising joblessness and pension woes, the gradual unearthing of a tiny piece of 'utopian' history seems a timely reminder of the benefits of daring to dream.

So far, researcher Evelyn Forget has discovered that from 1974 through 1978, the residents of Dauphin were less likely to draw on the medical system than a control group elsewhere in the province. Dauphin's young people also stayed in high school longer. Within years of the experiment shutting down, those trend lines disappeared, Forget says.

Forget is banking on learning more about what was known as the MINCOME experiment once she gets access to about 1,800 sealed boxes, which, among other things, are jammed with personal surveys of Dauphin residents who lived the experiment.

The boxes, now at the National Archives building in Winnipeg, have been gathering dust since the program — a $17-million collaboration involving the federal Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau and the provincial NDP government of Ed Schreyer — collapsed in 1979 for lack of money and political will. Progressive Conservative Sterling Lyon won power in Manitoba in 1977 and Trudeau was ousted by Joe Clark, another Conservative, in 1979.

"This was a tremendously exciting project at the time," Forget recalled in an interview. "So everyone was eagerly anticipating the results, and then, of course, the funding cuts came and nothing much ever happened."

While it lasted, about one-third of Dauphin's 10,000 poor residents got monthly cheques to boost their incomes.

The actual dollar figures from the period seem shockingly small in today's world. The formula for the guaranteed minimum income translated into incomes in 1974, for example, that ranged from $1,255 for a single person to about $4,000 for families of four or five people.

The program's costs ballooned as the 1970s progressed and inflation took off, spurred in particular by skyrocketing oil prices at the time.

Though there remains much to learn from the little-studied experiment, Forget says she's increasingly persuaded a guaranteed minimum income is a "more reasonable, more just, more efficient and cheaper way" of eliminating poverty than the current system of targeted support programs.

Conservative Senator Hugh Segal has jumped on Forget's unpublished, preliminary research as welcome fuel for his campaign to persuade policy makers the best way to wipe out poverty in Canada is to make sure everyone has a "basic living income."

He brushes aside suggestions a recession might not be the best time to promote such a big-ticket idea.

"I think it's the perfect discussion to have because if we're talking about economic recovery, and if we're talking about job generation, and we're talking about focusing our resources on economy, economy, economy, well there are two economies," he said in an interview.

"There is the macro economy — which means supporting banks and auto companies and the resource sector, and I'm all for it. But there is also the 'decency-ready' and not just the 'shovel-ready' (projects)."

He said the best "decency-ready" response to the tough economic times would be agreeing to replace the current myriad of federal and provincial support programs — which cost an estimated $145 billion a year, excluding health and education spending — with a single minimum income that ensures no Canadians slip into poverty.

"A basic living income would strike most Canadians as fair," said Segal, who argues eliminating poverty will lead to less stress and therefore less spending on everything from the health system to the penal system.

The federal government has a national Guaranteed Income Supplement program for low-income seniors, which provides additional funds on top of the Old Age Security pension.

Forget says her interest in the MINCOME experiment, which also included Winnipeg, dates back to her undergraduate days in the 1970s when she was studying economics at the University of Toronto. At the time, talk of a "guaranteed annual income" was vogue in Canada and the United States, which had several field projects on the go.

"I was always a little bit disappointed that more results hadn't come out of the original (Canadian) experiment," she said.

Among other things, her study found Dauphin residents were less likely than the control group to be hospitalized because of such things as car accidents, injuries on the job and mental health problems. They also were less likely to consult physicians.

Forget's findings were reached by comparing Dauphin residents' health and high school education statistics with the statistics for residents living in similar Manitoba communities.

Forget said she wasn't too surprised that easing people's money worries produced positive results.

"It's fairly evident you are reducing one big source of stress in people's lives," she said.