Senator Griffin: Thank you for your question. Yes, I agree that this is very important, which is why I want it to go to committee and have it done correctly.

You mentioned future legislative action. Am I to infer from that that you’re referring to the upcoming anticipated budget implementation act?

Senator Griffin: It could be proposed on the floor of the Senate if it’s not accepted in committee. I have it in my briefcase.

Hon. Diane F. Griffin: Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Senator Pate’s bill, Bill S-233, An Act to develop a national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income.

The bill stipulates that the minister must develop a national framework for the implementation of a guaranteed basic livable income program throughout Canada for any person over the age of 17, including temporary workers, permanent residents and refugee claimants.

I recognize that for some colleagues the idea of a guaranteed livable income in Canada may seem radical, but I believe that implementing a guaranteed livable income would have meaningful long-term, positive impacts on Canadian life.

When I was thinking about policies that have a profound impact, what came to mind was the Canada Health Act. In a chapter of the interim report of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada entitled Values and How They Shape Canadians’ Views, Commissioner Roy Romanow notes:

Almost all Canadians I have heard from to date want to ensure that the poorest in our society have access to health care. They also believe Canadians should not be bankrupted by the costs of acquiring needed health care services, and that all Canadians should be protected against catastrophic illnesses and injuries. . . .

In a paper entitled Waiting For Romanow: Canada’s Health Care Values Under Fire, Arthur Schafer at the University of Manitoba notes that:

. . . it is one of the inestimable virtues of Canadian Medicare that those who lose their jobs don’t face the catastrophe of also losing their public health insurance. In good times and in bad, the principle of universality translates as health care security.

There are two additional benefits of our universal system: Canadian workers, unlike their American counterparts, are not forced, by fear of losing health insurance, to stay in jobs they hate, and thus the labour market becomes more flexible and efficient.

A good example of how health care security can result in human flourishing is Hank Green, an American author and entrepreneur who has colitis, which is extremely expensive to treat. He couldn’t get health care insurance and thought he would have to get a job at a big company so as not to go bankrupt from medical bills. But thanks to Obamacare and to legislation in Montana, Hank was able to get health insurance. In the years since, he has written two bestselling novels, started several businesses and created two educational YouTube channels called “Crash Course” and “SciShow.”

Your kids and grandkids have probably watched some of his videos. According to his brother John, today those shows reach over a million learners per day and employ dozens of people.

Over-incentivizing people to work for large companies stifles entrepreneurship and job growth. It’s not just wrong, it’s also bad business.

If an additional benefit of our universal health care system is that Canadians are not forced by fear of losing insurance to stay in jobs they hate, I submit this would also be an additional benefit of a guaranteed livable income.

There are real psychological consequences to financial insecurity. A common metric for measuring financial security is the ability to cover an unexpected expense. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, in its 2019 Canadian Financial Capability Survey, found that individuals who are living with a common-law partner, separated, divorced or who have never been married are less likely to have emergency funds to be able to cover an unexpected expense of $2,000, especially if they are lone parents. Women are less confident that they would be able to cover a sudden expense of $2,000.

The American Psychological Association notes that scarcity drains mental resources, narrowing our focus and impacting our choices; increases negative emotions which affect our decisions and its effects contribute to the cycle of poverty. Financial scarcity, the APA notes, is really problematic. When low-income people are asked to think about financial dilemmas, their problem-solving ability decreases. High-income people do not show the same effect. Chronic deprivation can diminish psychological bandwidth, harming cognitive capacity and decision-making.

Individuals without a safety net — and you’ve heard Senator Pate say this in the past, in fact, tonight — are using so much of their mental bandwidth to survive that it’s even more challenging for them to allocate bandwidth to do things that would help them to thrive.

What benefit might a guaranteed livable income have for these folks? Data from Finland sheds some light. A study by researchers at University of Helsinki paid 2,000 randomly selected unemployed people an income of 560 euros a month, with no obligation to seek a job and no reductions in their payment if they accepted one.

An article in The Guardian, in the U.K., summarized the study’s outcomes. While there was significant diversity in recipients’ experiences, they were generally more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain, depression, sadness and loneliness than the control group. As for employment, researchers noted a mild positive effect in that participants also tended to score better on other measures of well-being, including greater feelings of autonomy, financial security and confidence in the future.

The improvements in mental health are particularly important to me. Unfortunately, mental health resources are scarce in our country. Addressing mental health problems that are rooted in financial insecurity by addressing the financial insecurity itself would help to take some pressure off of our overwhelmed mental health resources system.

Senator Pate’s bill is a first step. I thank her for it.

In November 2020, the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island Special Committee on Poverty tabled a report whose central recommendation was the creation of a basic income guarantee. The province of Prince Edward Island is willing and eager to play a role in developing a guaranteed livable income framework and in being the venue for a project to demonstrate its utility. We need to run this experiment, work out the mechanisms and figure out how it can be scaled up to a Canada-wide program.

In an interview with another paper called The Guardian — this time in Charlottetown — Premier Dennis King noted that a guaranteed livable income could have a positive impact on labour force participation in P.E.I. because folks wouldn’t fear losing their benefits if they picked up a part-time job. Premier King would like to see an experiment run in the province but emphasized the need for the federal government to get on board:

. . . I really wish we could find a way to get the federal government to sit down more seriously to talk to us about it.

. . . the other side of this that we need to be thinking about . . . is the labour shortage that we have. Is there a way for us to be able to change some of our programs — whether they’re social assistance or others — to allow people to work a little bit more and keep some of their money, as opposed to having these antiquated programs that actually discourage people from getting into the labour force?

In 2019 and 2020, the Honourable Ernie Hudson, then P.E.I.’s Minister of Social Development and Housing, wrote twice — twice — to his federal counterpart. This was followed by a letter from the premier to the Prime Minister to explore what a basic income might look like for P.E.I.

By the way, the P.E.I. government has not been idly sitting by while waiting for a federal partner. It has implemented a targeted basic income pilot at 85% of Market Basket Measure that supports eligible social assistance clients, youth aging out of care and Islanders with disabilities.

So far, 590 Islanders have benefited from this targeted basic income program, which has helped the people living with disabilities and limitations entering into the workforce to have their basic needs met and enjoy a better quality of life.

There is an inspirational quote that you’ve probably seen in a classroom or a fitness studio that asks: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” I wonder what new career paths folks might try if they knew that they wouldn’t miss their rent payments if it didn’t work out. I wonder what new businesses people might open if they knew they’d still be able to buy groceries if the business didn’t turn a profit in the first few months. How might children and elders be better cared for? How might people’s mental and physical health improve?

Colleagues, I can’t wait to find out. Please join me in supporting Senator Pate’s bill so that we can make a start down this exciting path.

Thank you.

Senator Griffin: Senator, that is an excellent question. I’m not an economist, but the people we are asking to work this out certainly are. That’s why the premier and his minister were contacting the federal government, asking them to help them develop such a framework that would actually work out what this would look like.

We don’t want to cause inflation. We don’t want to cause rents to go up; they’ve gone up anyway, and so has all housing. We don’t want to accelerate that.

The people who have the knowledge to work on this, it’s important to bring them to Prince Edward Island to help work all of this out and then scale it up at a national level. I believe Senator Pate has already cited some examples in her second reading speech on this. I can get that for you, Senator Richards.

Thank you.

Senator Griffin: Let me put it this way — I don’t know if you were here the other day when I received the answer about Registered Education Savings Plans and why they can’t be protected during bankruptcy proceedings. What I heard back via the Government Representative in the Senate were all the answers why they couldn’t be done. My response to that was this: Let’s find some reasons why we can do something as opposed to why we can’t. If it’s convenient or inconvenient, that doesn’t count. What counts is what is for the betterment of our population. That’s why we’re here.

Senator Griffin: Yes, I understand what the official is saying. I come back to my point: The law is the law. We have a chance here to correct it very efficiently and expeditiously. Let’s do it. It can go to committee. We can vote on sending it to committee today. The committee can meet next week. The committee can report back to this chamber and, theoretically, by Thursday, it can be out of this chamber and back over to the House of Commons.

I’m not sure where their break week lands — I know theirs is not always the same as ours — but the point is that they can fix it quickly and relatively easily via this act, or very shortly via the budget implementation act, and make it retroactive. It wouldn’t be the first time governments have ever done something like that.

Thank you for the question.

Hon. Diane F. Griffin: I rise today to speak in support of Bill C-12 receiving second reading and being referred to committee to be studied and potentially amended to correct a drafting error.

On November 24, I raised the issue of this drafting error to Senator Gold here in the Senate during Question Period. The Budget Implementation Act, 2021, No. 1 contains a drafting error related to clause numbers due to an amendment made in the House of Commons that deleted a clause of the bill.

When the bill arrived in the Senate, the government requested that the Senate not refer the bill to committee, where normally our law clerk’s office would have quickly identified such an error and flagged it for the Senate to correct. Had the law clerk’s office not caught the error, I’m confident that Senator Marshall would have. However, because the government asked us to rush, we did not undertake a basic function of our role as a revising chamber. Senators, I see us now, in a rush to pass Bill C-12, making the same mistake all over again.

Colleagues, I’ll leave it to others who are more proficient in financial matters and government databases to challenge the claim by Employment and Social Development Canada that it is unable to implement changes to the Old Age Security, or OAS, system if the bill does not receive Royal Assent by March 4. That rationale will be assessed in the committee examination process.

Rather, colleagues, I would like to go back to this drafting error and discuss why it should cause discomfort. In short, it’s because officials are presently violating the law. What is this error? Under Division 31 of the 2021 Budget Implementation Act, entitled “Increase to Old Age Security Pension and Payment,” section 268 exempts from the calculation of annual income the $500 one-time OAS payment for seniors aged 75 and above. This means that the benefit would not impact the OAS clawback threshold or other income-tested benefits, like the Guaranteed Income Supplement. However, this section incorrectly references section 276 rather than section 275 from the exemption. Section 275 refers to the $500 one-time payment under the Consolidated Revenue Fund. Section 276 refers to unrelated amendments to the Public Service Employment Act.

On November 24, in response to my question, Senator Gold stated:

I have been assured by the government that there will be no impact on the benefits paid or to be paid to Canadian seniors arising from the issue that had been identified following parliamentary approval of Bill C-30.

However, when I spoke with officials in a recent technical briefing, they actually acknowledged the drafting error and said that the government is not following the letter of the law where technically the one-time $500 payment could be counted against OAS and GIS benefits.

Their rationale for why it was acceptable to ignore the law was because they expected, at some point in the future, that this drafting error would be corrected by the Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Program. I point out to you that the last time this program was used was in 2017. Generally, it is not used for one small item; it’s used for a grouping of items.

Honourable senators, according to the Justice Canada website, this program is limited to minor, non-controversial amendments to be made to a number of federal statutes at once — in one bill — instead of making such amendments incrementally. The program also relies on the premise that not a single member of the Standing Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee will object to a change being deemed non-controversial.

Colleagues, if a drafting error resulting in an act referring to a completely different statute, it goes beyond merely being a technical amendment.

ESDC is violating the law in directing its employees to program the database in a manner inconsistent with the law on the premise that, at some point in the future, the drafting error will be corrected. This situation is unacceptable, and the obvious solution is before us right here in Bill C-12.

Bill C-12 is designed to ensure that certain benefits provided during the pandemic do not impact the OAS and GIS benefits of seniors by exempting them from the classification of income under the Old Age Security Act. This is the exact bill that should be amended to fix the error for the one-time $500 payment.

I remind you that the purpose of the Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Program is to make a series of changes when it is not possible to open up the parent act. But the parent act is open here right now. We can fix this error and demonstrate the purpose of the Senate as a revising body.

Colleagues, it’s impossible to reconcile the stated goal of officials to rush the passage of Bill C-12 to be in compliance with an arbitrary — dare I say, artificial — deadline of March 4 so that they can program the database accordingly with the fact that those same officials are also ignoring the legal text of the law respecting the $500 payment. If ESDC doesn’t seem bothered by an actual drafting error, and it’s ignoring the legal consequences of the rule of the law, why is it in a rush to pass Bill C-12 by March 4? That’s a good question.

Honourable senators, I propose the following solution: We take our time to amend the bill and fix the drafting error but also amend the coming-into-force provision to state that the bill is deemed to have come into force effective March 4, effectively undertaking legal retroactivity. ESDC could make its changes, including the correction of the drafting error, with the knowledge that their actions would be legally valid.

Honourable senators, perhaps this is something that the committee may wish to explore so that we are able to do our jobs and ESDC is able to do theirs. Thank you.

Senator Griffin: Most certainly.

Senator Griffin: Certainly.

Senator Cordy: Thank you, Senator Griffin, for pointing that out. I think a number of us who have been looking at it were certainly very much aware of that.

I was told that could be in the Miscellaneous Statute Law Amendment Program. We’ve all sat through them where it’s on and on about minor and non-controversial changes that would be required — and Senator Gold referred to that in his question to you. But you also talked about it not really mattering when it passes — it would still be implemented in July, or the end of June for seniors.

Did you read the testimony of one of the officials in the House when he said that it is critical that this be passed by the beginning of March in order for it not to impact individual entitlements for GIS benefits, which would be effective in July? I’ll go back to what his words were:

GIS benefits are renewed every July based on the previous tax year’s income, and therefore the system changes that we make always occur in March, when we shift from the previous tax year to the most recent tax year.

I just wondered if you had read that information from the official and understand the implications of not allowing the change in numbering that you suggested be done through the miscellaneous statutes.