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Talk to almost any program design expert and they will tell you that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) is an incredibly badly designed program. They will also tell you that at the beginning of a pandemic crisis with little information, an economic lockdown and no vaccine, it is exactly what we needed. The CERB is incredibly simple; a few rules, a flat amount of $2000 a month, an internet connection and a social insurance number and Bingo! The program is out the door. It's like tying a jet engine to a VW Beetle and opening the engine at full throttle. It’s going to fly off the launch pad and go wherever it goes and it did. Step right up! Click the ‘submit’ button and away we go! You lost…

 On Saturday May 30, 2020, in large red letters in the Toronto Star’s Insight section, the question is asked: “Is the time ripe for a basic income?”[1] Beside the headline, some supposedly provocative figures are mashed together: “$2000 – Monthly amount of the Canada Emergency Response Benefit$151.7 billion – Total emergency spending to date including $40 billion to 8 million on CERB$86 billion – Estimated annual cost of a basic income the last time it was looked at$260 billion – Revised estimated deficit, $8 billion higher than last reported.”[2] I think what the headline and the numbers are trying to acknowledge is that, as a nation, we suddenly agreed with the idea of handing out large amounts of money to our residents who lost income because of the COVID19 crisis.…

A modern history of benefit confiscation from social assistance, RGI housing, post-secondary assistance and low income seniors programs in the time before COVID19 In 1935, the newly minted Minister of Ontario’s Public Welfare department, David Croll, was faced with a new dilemma respecting the delivery of ‘relief’ to the poor. A significant number of municipalities across the province were declaring bankruptcy. Their workforces were being furloughed and being added to unemployment lines. Up until then, municipal staff had gathered bags of food, coal and coke for furnaces, clothes hampers and personal effects and delivered them to the poor who lined up for these provisions at municipal offices. But with no staff to stuff bags, relief lines were growing shorter even though the need was just as great. The 35 year…

“The protected make public policy, the unprotected live in it.”[1] - Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, 2016 I frequent three online chat forums visited by low income people with disabilities in receipt of a program called the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). For the last month, one of the hot topics has been the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) which will provide - as of this writing on May 16, 2020 - up to $8,000 to people who lost work because of the COVID19 pandemic and earned at least $5,000 last year. The CERB is one of the simplest and most straightforward income programs ever designed. Just one monthly amount of $2,000 with just 3 qualifying rules surrounding COVID19 and ‘Bingo’: you get it. But that is not what online…

This is a tale of what happens when governments attempt to compensate people for losses incurred in the context of a disaster.  When governments do that, the rich get compensated and the poor lose out. The rich own more and the poor own less.  And the poor pay less for things like shelter and food in the first instance. This is a cautionary tale that can instruct governments to compensate based on need and income as opposed to losses and how much they pay for things Listen to my story.   On May 31, 1985, a swarm of tornadoes broke out across southern Ontario. The one that hit Barrie was an almost 'unheard of' Category 5 while Category 2’s hit Orangeville, Dundalk and a few other towns especially along Lake…

On Sunday August 16, 1977, I drove my 1976 Honda Civic east on Kingston Road past Woodbine Avenue with no memory now what I may have been thinking about.  I was listening to the radio. A news flash came on –they didn’t call it ‘breaking’ back then. I don’t know what they called it but they said that Elvis Presley had died at the age of 42. I turned left on Brookside and stopped the car. I looked around and thought that some part of the world had come to an end. Just a few weeks earlier I had been shopping at Canadian Tire and was able to buy two tape cassettes they called 8-tracks of the ‘King’ singing his greatest hits. The 8-tracks were in a bin where the…

Just the other day, I was asked an interesting question by a concerned Scarborough resident who knew that I had worked in social policy with the provincial government. She also knew that I was someone who had studied and had written about the effects of social policy in Scarborough since I left government. Her question: “What will be the effect of the COVID19 crisis and how will we come out of it in Scarborough?”   I was actually surprised by my reply as I had not yet put the question to myself. Here is what I said as I thought through the question: First, you have to remember that Scarborough has more poverty than the rest of the City of Toronto, the GTA, and much of the rest of urbanized…