Sunday, February 16, 2025

Community health board embraces basic income guarantee

Area municipalities urged to endorse concept

  • January 29 2025
  • By Alec Bruce, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter    

GUYSBOROUGH — The Guysborough County Community Health Board (GCHB) is throwing its support behind a basic income guarantee (BIG) for every citizen of Nova Scotia, and wants all councils in the tri-municipality area to do the same.

“You can’t expect people to participate in society, if they don’t have what they need,” Dorothy Bennett, Nova Scotia Health’s CHB coordinator for the Eastern Zone, told The Journal in an interview this week. “You can’t build your front porch while your back porch is burning.”

To this end, she said, the GCHB is reaching out to the councils for the Municipality of the District of Guysborough (MODG), Town of Mulgrave and Municipality of the District of St. Mary’s for presentation time to urge them to endorse a guaranteed basic income for all.

According to GCHB co-chair and MODG District 2 representative Mary Desmond, addressing fellow councillors at its regular monthly meeting Jan. 22, the presentation would be “a special day on which we can get the three municipal councils together,” possibly as soon as April 9, when their annual joint session in Sherbrooke is scheduled.

Bennett said the GCHB decided to move on the issue after hearing from representatives of the advocacy group Basic Income Guarantee Nova Scotia (BIGNS) in November. “They showed us what [a basic income] would mean and what it would look like,” she said about the seminar. “The question that we had for them was: ‘As Canadians, can we afford this?’ We invited some community partners in and had discussions ... We decided to support it ... If everybody had what they needed then we’d have a better... society.”

According to BIGNS, if residents of Guysborough County were guaranteed a basic income – a direct payment from the government that ensures that everyone earns at least a gross minimum of, say, $24,000 a year – the high cost of food and housing wouldn’t be as onerous and more people would be free to pursue and develop new economic opportunities for themselves and their communities. At the same time, it noted, the program could be covered by gains realized through commensurately lower costs of welfare and health care.

“A [BIG] payment would help individuals cover essential living expenses such as food, clothing, shelter, and access to resources that foster social engagement, like travel and communication,” Bennett’s summary of the presentation points out. “The goal of a basic income is not only to alleviate poverty, but to empower individuals to fully participate in society, secure in their ability to meet their needs. This participation makes them healthier and costs less in government assistance. When individuals are healthy [they and their] community don’t just survive, they thrive.”

That assessment appears to be gaining traction across the Maritimes. In 2023, A Proposal for a Guaranteed Basic Income Benefit in Prince Edward Island, by the PEI Working Group for a Liveable Income, concluded that a maximum benefit of 85 per cent of the official poverty line ($19,252 for a single adult) would cut the Island’s poverty rate to less two per cent, from almost 10, for 18 to 64-year-olds “and ensure that no Islander lives in deep poverty (income below 75 per cent of the official poverty line).”

Since 2022, no fewer than 16 Nova Scotia municipalities – including the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, the Municipality of the County of Antigonish and the Town of Antigonish – have passed resolutions supporting the implementation of a basic income guarantee.

“I do think Nova Scotia is ready for it,” Nancy O’Regan, chair of Community First: Guysborough County Housing Association, told The Journal recently. “Let Guysborough County try it. We have the highest level of poverty in the Eastern Zone, and that’s nothing to be proud of. We’ve got to move the needle on a lot of things. People are struggling with housing, food security, heat ... for God’s sakes, give us a pilot.”

For the time being, Bennett said, the GCHB is focussing on getting the word out. Regarding local councils, “We’re asking for the opportunity to present some of the information; we’re not going in strong arming or anything ... We want them to have enough information to make an informed decision.”

That said, she added: “You still gotta put that back porch fire out first before you can do anything for the front.”