CACL GAI Mincom n a December afternoon, Frances Amy Richardson took a break from her quilting class to reflect on a groundbreaking experiment she took part in 40 years earlier. “Well, that was quite a few years ago,” she said. “There was a lot of people that really benefitted from it.” Between 1974 and 1979, residents of a small Manitoba city were selected to be subjects in a project that ensured basic annual incomes for everyone. For five years, monthly cheques were delivered to the poorest residents of Dauphin, Man. – no strings attached. And for five years, poverty was completely eliminated. The program was dubbed “Mincome” – a neologism of “minimum income” – and it was the first of its kind in North America. It stood out from similar American projects at the time because it didn’t shut out seniors and the disabled from qualification. The project’s original intent was to evaluate if giving cheques to the working poor, enough to top-up their incomes to a living wage, would kill people’s motivation to work. It didn’t. But the Conservative government that took power provincially in 1977 – and federally in 1979 – had no interest in implementing the project more widely. Researchers were told to pack up the project’s records into 1,800 boxes and place them in storage. A final report was never released. Read more about the minimum income: $10,000 For Everybody? Why A Guaranteed Income Just Might Work Richardson is now 87 and still lives in Dauphin. She says only three or four of the city’s original Mincome recipients remain among the prairie community’s 8,251 residents. During the program’s heyday in the mid-1970s, Richardson was a mother of six – three of her children lived at home. To earn money, she ran a small salon out of her home called Fifth Avenue Beauty Chalet. Whatever cash she could make styling hair contributed one stream of the family’s income; her husband Gordon provided the other with his job at the local telephone company. Her ailing mother also lived in the house at the time. She remembers Mincome researchers visiting the home regularly to calculate how much money the family was qualified for. “We kept track of everything and somebody would come once a month,” she explained. “I kept track of what I made and they would pay the difference to what they figured that cost many people to live.” A postcard shows “Canada’s National Ukrainian Festival Choir” in Dauphin, Man. During the 1970s, the prairie community was home to one of the countrys largest Ukrainian populations. (Photo: The Printing House) Mincome provided the Richardsons with financial predictability and a sense of stability. There was always food on the table. The bills were paid. The kids stayed in school. And when Gordon’s health took a turn for the worse mid-way through the pilot project, the family still made ends meet. “It was a lot of good, but see, the Manitoba government and the federal government both went out of power that year and they ran out of money – so it was just dropped,” Richardson said. “It was done.” An extraordinary program for ordinary people In five years, Mincome helped one thousand Dauphin families who fell below the poverty line earn a livable income. When the project ended, locals didn’t make a fuss because they knew the cheques were temporary anyway. “Some people thought it was like charity,” Richardson said about Mincome. “It wasn’t really charity, it was need.” So in 1979, it was business as usual again. After Mincome folded, people tapped into their prairie work ethic and looked to make do however they could. The Richardson family went back to scraping by, the same way they had before the project began. The kids found jobs: one sold gas at the local garage, another landed entry-level work in insurance. Richardson continued to bake bread and can her own preserves at home. It’s a cash-saving skill born out of hard times some food bank-dependent families have lost today, she suggested. “I think if we had a Mincome where they were helped a little,” she added. “That might be better.” * * * Why Dauphin? How did a farming community play host to such a landmark social assistance program? Good political timing didn’t hurt. In 1969, the left-leaning provincial NDP led by Edward Schreyer swept into power for the first time. The transition injected new rural sensitivities and democratic socialist influences into politics. On the federal level, Pierre Elliott Trudeau was prime minister. The two men worked swiftly to set up conditions for a basic income experiment. In 1973, Manitoba and the federal government signed a cost-sharing agreement: 75 per cent of the $17-million budget would be paid for by the feds; the rest by the province. The project rolled out the next year. All Dauphinites were automatically considered for benefits. One-third of residents qualified for Mincome cheques. How Mincome cheques were calculated: 1. Everyone was given the same base amount: 60 per cent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off. The cut-off varied, depending on family size and where they lived. But in 1975, a single Canadian who was considered low-income earned $3,386 on average. 1975 2014 dollars Individual $3,386 $16,094 Family of two $4,907 $20,443 2. Base amount was modified: 50 cents was subtracted from every dollar earned from other income sources “It was sort of something new and utopian. It was completely different,” said Dauphin’s current mayor Eric Irwin. “It was an attempt to define social services in a different way.” A ‘gap in the system’ ignored Dr. Evelyn Forget is the researcher at University of Manitoba credited for tracking down those 1,800 dusty boxes of Mincome raw data that sat forgotten for 30 years. She first heard about the project in an undergraduate economics class at the University of Toronto in the ‘70s. Mincome cheques were still being delivered when her professors praised the experiment as “really important,” saying it was going to “revolutionize” the delivery of social programs. It stuck with her. In 2005, she began looking for the Mincome data. After a strenuous search, she located the records at the provincial archives in Winnipeg. She was the first to look at them since they were packed up in 1979. “[Archivists] were in the process of wondering whether, in fact, they could throw them out because they took up a lot of space and nobody seemed interested in it,” said Forget. It didn’t take her long to realize the plethora of files could never be funneled into any sort of statistical analysis. There were questionnaires with circled answers. And data on one family could be scattered between countless boxes. It also didn’t help that there were no labels or index. Because of an ethics board policy, Forget couldn’t directly contact the people whose data she was now in possession of – the participants had consented to speak to the original researchers only. Instead, she used a guest spot on a local radio station to invite Mincome recipients to call her.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 22:23:07 +0000
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