You wonder where Canada’s Families Minister Jean-Yves Duclos is at when he tells the news media that the Canada Child Benefit can be considered a step toward a guaranteed annual income plan. The new Liberal baby bonus program is just a political bribe that panders to a serious societal need.
But programs such as the Canada Child Benefit are just another layer of government bureaucracy and should be replaced as soon as possible with a more carefully crafted Guaranteed Annual Income plan for all Canadians. The very fact that the tax-free baby-bonus type program was created by the Trudeau brain-trust to compete with the Conservative fully-taxed plan was simply political one-upmanship. Both served recipients badly.
And yet Duclos tells the media that it is simple and easy for families to understand. He also says it is simple for government to administer and yet we are told it is distributed according to need.
A Guaranteed annual income is even easier to administer and it makes sure that no Canadian in need falls through the cracks in a wide variety of assistance and income replacement plans. A single plan represents a huge saving in administrative costs over what we have today.
Duclos is a tenured professor of Economics at Laval University and has done many studies related to income security methods. If anyone can speak with authority about a Guaranteed Annual Income for Canadians, it should be this cabinet minister.
And it is certainly an idea that’s time has come. Both Ontario and Quebec are currently examining the idea on a provincial scale. If it appeals to our two largest provinces though, it would make better sense on the national stage.
One of the major stumbling blocks with developing a guaranteed income plan is the huge amounts of money involved in replacing employment insurance, child benefits, old-age security and supplements, and then there are the monies spent by the provinces in supporting the indigent, the handicapped and those unable to earn an income. Mind you it is replacing those programs and those people we are adding are those that our programs were failing to help.
Canadians are looking for great accomplishments from the Trudeau government and we will hope that the parochial attitude Duclos expresses about provincial rights is not the federal government’s answer. Great accomplishments require leadership, not appeasement.
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Copyright 2016 © Peter Lowry
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