The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Honourable senators, when shall this bill be read the third time?

(On motion of Senator Pate, bill referred to the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance.)

Leave having been given to revert to Other Business, Senate Public Bills, Reports of Committees, Order No. 1:

The Senate proceeded to consideration of the fourth report of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications (Bill S-242, An Act to amend the Radiocommunication Act, with amendments and observations), presented in the Senate on March 30, 2023.

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: It was moved by the Honourable Senator Pate, seconded by the Honourable Senator Dean, that this bill be read the second time.

Is it your pleasure, honourable senators, to adopt the motion?

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Are senators ready for the question?

Senator MacDonald: Honourable senators, I know I speak for my Conservative colleagues in regards to this bill because I know there is no support for this bill in our caucus. However, all bills deserve a chance to go to committee. I think that the light of day will expose the weaknesses in this bill. I suggest that the Senate send it to committee. Thank you.

Hon. Michael L. MacDonald: Honourable senators, I rise to contribute to the debate at second reading of Bill S-233, the national framework for a guaranteed livable basic income, or GBI, sponsored by our colleague Senator Pate.

This bill directs the Minister of Finance to develop a national framework to implement a guaranteed basic income program throughout Canada for any person over the age of 17, including temporary workers, permanent residents and refugee claimants.

Before I go on, I want to commend Senator Pate for her work in championing so many initiatives intent on improving the lives of the impoverished in Canada. It enables us to reflect on things that sometimes are not top of mind. I saw lots of marginalization and limited opportunities for people growing up in a small town in Cape Breton. Most people existed in a world that could only be described financially as lower middle class. Certainly my family was, although with 10 children and extended relatives, mom and dad probably had a few more mouths to feed than most.

I witnessed real poverty as well, although the reasons for that, like so many things, are often a product of circumstances less black and white than some might assume. There are many shades of grey as well. I don’t know if poverty is worse today than it was 50 years ago, but I know it shouldn’t be worse with the money and resources spent today on people and communities of people compared to half a century ago. I might not always share Senator Pate’s views on solutions to certain matters, but her relentless work on these difficult issues provides value to the discourse of this chamber, and I want to recognize her for it.

The notion of a basic income is not new. The concept arguably dates back to 1516 with the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. More was a wise individual and a brilliant, influential and principled conservative. Of course, for his principles, he was later thrown into the Tower of London by Henry VIII, found guilty of treason and beheaded. Apparently adhering to your principles can come with some risk. Considered a martyr for his faith, he was canonized in 1935, and in the year 2000 was declared by Pope John Paul II to be the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. The poor man can’t catch a break. Imagine having that responsibility and burden in the afterlife.

In modern times, the concept of the guaranteed annual income received considerable attention when it was championed by Nobel laureate and free market economist Milton Friedman. Friedman argued that a universal basic income would be a less paternalistic and more efficient method of providing government welfare than programs run by bureaucracies. Essentially, cut a cheque for everyone, dependent on their household income and based on a negative tax threshold, and allow the individual to utilize the social assistance as needed. No means test — no need for any gatekeepers. I find that idea very appealing.

Robert Stanfield discussed and studied this issue when he was leader of the federal Tories, and our former colleague Hugh Segal has been an articulate and persistent advocate for a guaranteed income. It was gratifying to witness Senator Pate’s embrace of what has always been a concept associated with conservative thought, and I encourage others to follow her lead.

I volunteered to be the critic of this bill when it was introduced. I have always been intrigued by the idea of a guaranteed income, especially with the reality that we now live in a huge welfare state. If we are going to spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars annually on various support systems anyway, and it was determined that a GBI, or guaranteed basic income, system would actually cost less to both fund and deliver, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t we consider it?

Importantly, we must always remember that historic models of basic income expected in return, concurrent with the establishment of GBI, the elimination of redundant bureaucracies and programs that deliver current social benefits. Unfortunately, the advocates of most modern models of basic income programs appear unwilling to propose cuts to our large and expensive welfare programs, which, I submit, negates the simplicity and egalitarianism of the concept and compromises its proper application. GBI can’t be just another welfare program. It must also replace them.

As you know, our offices received unprecedented level of emails regarding this bill. Some messages were misguided or misinformed, but many raised fair and thoughtful concerns about the bill and the implications for themselves and the benefits that they depend on and have paid into for much of their lives. I think this greatly stems from the lack of detail in the bill itself. However, what detail does exist is concerning and is very much the Achilles’ heel of this bill. After directing the Minister of Finance to create a framework for GBI, it arbitrarily puts age and broad eligibility criteria up front. If we are to seriously consider the establishment of a GBI, we can’t be dogmatic in establishing the ground rules. It is one thing to have a program available for citizens, but quite another to automatically extend it to temporary workers and non-citizens. I’m sure that most people would have many legitimate concerns about the eligibility of non-citizens to exploit such a program, particularly people entering the country illegally.

The idea of somebody receiving an annual income beginning at the age of 17 is a non-starter for me. I think that would have a very negative effect on young people. I believe that discourages the personal motivation and ambition that all people, particularly young people, require in order to prosper and advance in life.

The Basic Income Canada Network, which is very much a socially left organization, have GBI models that estimate anywhere between $187 billion to $637 billion in annual cost. To put these numbers in perspective, in 2021-22 the total personal income tax revenue in Canada was $189 billion and the entirety of the federal budget was $394 billion. Now, a mere one fiscal year later, the financial situation in Canada has deteriorated substantially and disturbingly. However, our precarious financial state notwithstanding, let’s review what informed and expert analysis has concluded about Canada’s potential ability to consider and implement a program of guaranteed income.

The Fraser Institute released a recent report bulletin during the pandemic entitled How Much Could a Guaranteed Annual Income Cost?, which examined the costs of four different variations of basic income models. The first used CERB as a baseline, the government’s pandemic emergency relief benefit of $2,000 every month to those who qualified. You may recall that there were calls among many proponents of basic income programs for Canada to keep the CERB benefit and apply it as a basic universal income. The Fraser Institute calculated that providing every Canadian of working age with an unconditional basic annual income of $24,000 a year would have a total net cost of $464 billion. That would increase federal program spending by over 132%. Of course, that is simply unsustainable. The report also found that although a universal basic income such as this would provide large financial support and have less adverse effects on work incentive than other models, it not only comes at a staggering cost, but also provides assistance to Canadians who do not need it the most.

The Fraser Institute then also made estimations for models that provide for government clawbacks on some transfers for when an individual’s net income passes a specific threshold. The report notes that while a higher reduction rate may reduce the overall costs of a guaranteed income program, it discourages recipients from working because they retain less of their income earnings when they meet the threshold.

The report states:

. . . a high reduction rate effectively imposes a higher marginal tax rate on Canadians once they reach the minimum income threshold because it reduces their reward for earning more income. This concept is known as the “welfare wall” because it discourages recipients from moving off social assistance.

The report illustrates the competing interests in the design of guaranteed income models. Understand that there are three key features of any GBI model: the cash transfer, the reduction rate and the income threshold. Three competing variables, seeking three competing interests: large enough transfers to alleviate poverty, while minimizing cost and avoiding disincentives to work. The report states that “. . . it is impossible to achieve all three objectives at once.”

Later, the report states that:

. . . there is an inherent tension in the design of any guaranteed annual income that its proponents need to address. At the heart of this tension in the unavoidable trade-off between reducing costs by aggressively phasing out payments as income rises on the one hand and avoiding severe negative work incentives on the other. . . . Policy options outside of the GAI may be more effective at alleviating poverty and should be explored in greater detail.

In a Fraser Institute article entitled “The expensive truth about a universal basic income,” the negative effects guaranteed income programs could have on labour participation as clawbacks prompt Canadians to reduce their work hours are recognized. The report reads:

. . . reducing an individual’s payment while they work additional hours encourages them to work less—that’s a harmful incentive and can lead to the welfare traps many Canadians suffered through in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I will also draw your attention to a recent report authored by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Managing Director, Brian Lee Crowley, and Munk Senior Fellow Sean Speer, titled A Work and Opportunity Agenda for Canada. In response to increasing public discussion regarding GBI models, their report sought to determine if unconditional cash payments, although well intentioned, in fact do more harm than good. The authors found that such programs, with higher taxes and higher government spending, are not only harmful to the economy, they also poorly serve the people these programs are intended to help.

The report outlines several key issues with basic income models, including affordability, intergovernmental and bureaucratic efficiencies and disincentivizing work, among others. Regarding the affordability of basic income models, and after crunching the numbers, the report concludes:

These costs would necessarily involve a significant increase in taxation, large-scale spending cuts, further deficit financing, or some combination of the three.

It continues:

But a real perversity is that providing everyone with a basic income may preclude the government from directing more generous, targeted benefits to those in need such as Canadians with severe disabilities. Spending less on people in real need so we can spend more on able-bodied, working-age people is far from compassionate. It is an indefensible use of scarce public resources.

I do agree with that.

The report also found that basic income programs would have a negative effect on labour participation within Canada.

Common sense dictates that giving people large, unconditional cash payments is bound to make work less attractive and rewarding, not least because now recipients are only working for the difference between their basic income entitlement and wages.

Since the status quo has not adequately addressed poverty, and if basic income programs are not a realistic option, what is the solution? The Macdonald-Laurier Institute paper provides an alternative agenda focused on expanding work and opportunity for all Canadians, using Canada’s “redemptive decade” of the 1990s, as they call it, as a blueprint. They explain that Canada experienced extraordinary growth in the 1990s, including reduced poverty, by shifting the focus from taxation and redistribution of finances to fiscal discipline, deregulation, investment and growth.

Furthermore, the sustainability of such a GBI program has also been brought into question. Here I would be remiss if I did not draw our attention to the contribution of our own resident economist in this chamber. Senator Bellemare has a doctorate in economics and specializes in macroeconomics. She has a lifetime of experience and an impressive résumé in her field of expertise.

If I may, I would like to quote from Senator Bellemare’s speech in the chamber on this bill where she says:

To finance this kind of program, governments would have to overhaul the income tax system. The tax changes it would take to fund such a program would have a negative effect on labour market participation, not because people are lazy, but just because they are rational. In essence, the number of people supported by the program would exceed the number of people the government set out to help initially. Fewer hours worked means fewer hours taxed, and that means less revenue for the government. In short, paying for guaranteed basic income is unsustainable.

Providing money to Canadians not to work, with little or no incentive to work, raises a host of issues, not the least of which is providing for an unsustainable system whereby there are negative effects on labour participation resulting in fewer hours worked, less income, less income tax, less revenue to finance what was intent on being an anti-poverty initiative.

Colleagues, I would also encourage you to read the op-ed published by Senator Bellemare in The Globe and Mail on this subject where she outlined why GBI would be among the most constitutionally complex and prohibitively expensive ways to tackle poverty and inequity.

In 2018, the Province of British Columbia committed to the creation of an expert panel to explore the concept of guaranteed income for the province. It was based on over 40 research projects from experts across the country and is said to have been one of the most exhaustive reviews of guaranteed basic income worldwide.

The report concluded that moving to a system constructed around a basic income as its main pilar is not the most just policy option. I quote from their report:

The needs of people in this society are too diverse to be effectively answered simply with a cheque from the government. A basic income is a very costly approach to addressing any specific goal, such as poverty reduction.

The B.C. panel also found that any viable basic income model would also create disincentives to work and that:

. . . the claims of advantages of a basic income put forward by proponents are hard to substantiate and that the policy goals implied by these claims can be achieved as well or better with other approaches.

The panel concluded that it was not even in the province’s best interests for further exploration with a pilot project.

So significant red flags have been raised by many about using GBI as a solution for fighting poverty. Does this idea have a future?

It would seem to me that one of the essential requirements precluding the creation of a GBI would be a stronger, responsible financial management by the federal government, regardless of its political stripe.

As our colleague Senator Marshall ably laid out in her excellent speech on the supply bill, the national debt in this country has doubled from $650 billion in 2015 to over $1.2 trillion today. In less than eight years, this administration has added more to our national debt than all administrations combined since Confederation, and we are a country that spent much of the first half of the 20th century engaged in international wars.

If we’re going to take an honest look at a guaranteed annual income, we should first take a hard look at what $1-trillion debt actually looks like. The well-regarded U.S.-based Certified Financial Group has provided a description that deserves our sober second thought. A million dollars, consisting of 100 packets of $100 bills of $10,000 each would have the size of three stacked 8-by-11-inch packages of printing paper. You could walk around with it in a shopping bag. One hundred million dollars fits nicely on a standard shipping pallet, about 3 feet high. A billion dollars would require ten of those pallets.

But let’s look at a trillion dollars. Do people really understand what a trillion dollars represents? A trillion dollars is a million million dollars or a thousand billion dollars, take your pick.

What does that look like? A trillion dollars on pallets would occupy an area just short of five acres. Think five football fields of billion-dollar pallets; that is what it equals. One more thing, the pallets are now double-stacked, so I guess it is actually ten football fields of billion-dollar pallets.

Canada’s debt is $1.2 trillion and growing. So when you hear the apologists for this government point to such statistics as income-to-debt ratios as a reason for comfort and reassurance, they are deflecting, willfully ignoring the precarious financial position we find ourselves in because of the gross mismanagement of the Canadian economy by this administration. Due to the irresponsible and reckless overprinting and overspending of Canadian money by this government and the Bank of Canada, we are experiencing an inflationary spiral now requiring interest rate hikes, which will only further increase the borrowing costs of our debt as well as the personal debt of every Canadian.

Because of this debt, the federal government will spend $35 billion on debt service charges alone in 2022-23, more than the $29 billion spent on child care benefits or the $24 billion spent on unemployment insurance benefits.

In short, the most expensive government program in Canada today is now debt servicing.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has informed Canadians that these public debt service charges will climb to $46 billion by 2027-28, with no end in sight.

Our debt grows by over $6 million every hour, over $144 million every day: what an unnecessary, unacceptable and ultimately immoral squandering of money and opportunity and what a terrible thing to impose and burden our children and grandchildren with.

Just think of what you could do for housing alone with $144 million daily. Just imagine the impact that $45 billion annually could have on the health care system in Canada.

From the evidence I have read and the precarious position of Canada’s finances, I cannot conscientiously support a bill that seeks to mandate this government to create a framework to overhaul our tax and social benefits system. We would be better advised to pass legislation prohibiting this government from having anything to do with fiscal or monetary policy.

In 2015, when this government was elected, Canada had emerged from the worst recession since the Great Depression with a balanced budget and strong economic indicators. Now we are told we endured an unprecedented $354 billion deficit in 2021, over $90 billion in 2022 and are promised significant deficits projected for the foreseeable future with a current fiscal trajectory that could take decades to balance.

However, all hope is not lost. Although it is obvious from Canada’s annual revenues and expenditures that it cannot consider a GBI, and the taxation demands presently existing on individual Canadians and businesses should not be increased but preferably reduced, what else could we do to put Canada in a position where it could realistically consider an annual guaranteed income? The potential solution is, of course, the creation of new wealth.

Creating wealth should be a constant obsession for all governments of Canada, whether they be municipal, territorial, tribal, provincial or federal.

In my almost 30 years of running a business and meeting a payroll in Cape Breton, there was never a shortage of people advising me on where or how to spend money. It was a lot like Ottawa in that regard. But the number of people advising one how to increase revenue and create wealth — they were scarcer than hen’s teeth.

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by land mass, with almost endless natural resources: rare earths, timber, minerals, fresh water and other advantages in quantities non-existent in most other nations.

We have a more diversified economy than in decades past. We have always been and will continue to be a country which needs to exploit its natural resources to maximize our wealth potential.

And none of our natural advantages have created more wealth for this country in my lifetime than the petroleum sector. Indeed, it has served as a great financial catalyst of Canada in the postwar period, which is now over 75 years old.

Our natural resources have repeatedly proven their value and importance to our shared prosperity. So I find it ironic that the most supportive advocates of Bill S-233, when asked to pass judgment on Bill C-48 and Bill C-69 a few years back, meekly acquiesced to the government’s agenda. Canada’s present levels of revenue and expenditures make a GBI initiative a non-starter, yet many in here dutifully voted to hobble this country’s ability to create wealth and studiously ignored the long-term impacts of these terribly short-sighted and inappropriate measures. Whether it occurs on election day or on the floor of the Senate, voting has consequences.

Yes, we all would like to have the best of everything. I drive a 2020 Nissan Murano and a 2013 Hyundai Elantra, although I honestly would prefer to drive a Bentley and a Maserati. Theoretically, I could; all I need is the money to pay for it. And so it is with social programs in Canada. We can have anything we want in Canada. We just need the money to pay for it, but that will require creating new wealth — a goal that seems to exceed the mental grasp of this government and its foot soldiers and its camp followers.

In conclusion, we all recognize that poverty needs to be addressed. For now, let’s focus on targeted and pragmatic solutions instead, ones that promote and provide training, education and community-based programming. We need to ensure that those who need the assistance get it. We need to provide sensible, targeted, pro-work policy recommendations that would bolster work opportunities to benefit all Canadians and help alleviate poverty.

I hope we can get to a time when we are wealthy enough in Canada to give serious consideration to a GBI to replace the presently structured welfare state, but Canada first has to get its financial house in order. This will require a Conservative government, as the Singh-Trudeau coalition has failed Canadians economically. Once we have a new Conservative government in Canada, we will free up the potential of this country and make Canada what it should be — namely the wealthiest, best and most generous country in the world.

Senator Housakos: And the most free.

Hon. Senators: Question.

An Hon. Senator: On division.

(Motion agreed to and bill read second time, on division.)

Some Hon. Senators: Agreed.

Some Hon. Senators: Hear, hear.

(On motion of Senator Yussuff, debate adjourned.)

Senator Woo: I support sending the bill to committee precisely to ask some of those questions in light of the growing interest publicly in the concept and in the hope that it will clarify a pathway for experiments in basic income that might, in fact, be fiscally feasible.

I don’t know that I support the bill as law. In any case, my understanding of the bill is not that it seeks to implement basic income, but to simply develop a national framework for basic income. It’s not clear to me that violates the prohibitions on the Senate proposing certain bills, but that is a question that we will all be faced with, I hope, at the end of a study that examines all of the questions that we should consider in deciding if it should go forward.

(On motion of Senator Martin, debate adjourned.)

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the motion of the Honourable Senator Francis, seconded by the Honourable Senator Klyne:

That the sixth report of the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples, tabled in the Senate on Wednesday, June 22, 2022, be adopted and that, pursuant to rule 12-24(1), the Senate request a complete and detailed response from the government, with the Minister of Crown‑Indigenous Relations being identified as minister responsible for responding to the report.