Thursday, August 02, 2018

Ontario Tories cancel basic income pilot because ... er, why?

Fresh from a petulant little tiff in the Ontario legislature yesterday, in which the Conservative caucus refused to answer any questions during Question Time because of an alleged slur against one of their own, a slur that the Speaker of the House did not hear, and the recording microphones did not pick up, Doug Ford has returned to doing what he does best, and what is beginning to be the defining characteristic of his administration - cancelling things.
The latest such cancellation, after a slew of cancellations of Liberal initiatives like the province-wide cap-and-trade system, energy efficiency projects, wind farms, etc, is particularly egregious, as Ford is on record as specifically saying during his election campaign that he would NOT cancel the Liberals' 3-year basic income pilot project. So it came as something of a surprise when, yesterday, the Conservatives announced, with no real explanation, that they were cancelling the Liberals' 3-year basic income pilot project after just one year.
Poverty reduction is a stated goal of the new Conservative administration. Without a full-scale pilot project of this type, we will never really know whether a basic income system, such as has caught the attention of many different governments across the world in recent years, would be an effective means of reducing poverty among the most needy in our society. That was the point of the small-scale pilot project. So why then cancel it part-way through, leaving the participants in the lurch, wasting all the money it has cost thus far, and breaking a firm campaign promise in the process?
It may be futile to look for logic or consistency in this particular government, but this particular move seems entirely baffling. Unless, of course, it is just a case of "anything the previous administration did must, by definition, be bad, so let's cancel it". This is going to get old

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