Given the fact that the Canadian economy isn't doing well and the government is running deficits, how are we going to pay for this ? What are we going to cut ? What taxes are we going to increase? Given the fact that value of CAD has dropped significantly which has led to increased food prices, how will this not hurt the working poor and the middle class ?
If the economy isn't doing well, then the government SHOULD be running a deficit. If they run a surplus, then they're depressing the economy even more.
Also, running a deficit by providing services (universal income included), is far better for the working poor and middle class than Quantitative Easing (i.e. jacking up asset prices, which predominantly benefits the rich).
Universal income is essentially the same as Steve Keen's suggestion of a modern debt jubilee, in which the level of private debt is returned to reasonable levels by expanding the money supply and paying down privately held debt. This would reset the clock, so to speak, allowing economic growth to continue. Whether such a policy makes ecological sense is, of course, a separate issue.
Basic Income is meant to cost less than current tax and benefits as the bureaucracy to means test every request for benefits is a lot less or even totally redundant. Ie less forms, less interviews, less investigations, less complaints, less fraud, and in the end less bureaucrats, ie cheaper. Obviously that does not happen over night, and no country/state/province has gone full Basic Income yet (Universal nor Negative) so still just theory.
Remember that this is about Ontario, not Canada. Ontario happens to be the largest sub-sovereign debtor in the world and has had spreads over underlying CAD govie benchmarks increase dramatically over the past few years.
Unless this plan is revenue neutral, which is likely not going to be the case, markets will continue to charge ever greater premiums for borrowing. Ontario desperately needs to get its fiscal house in order; it spends like it's a sovereign with the capacity to access a broad set of monetary and fiscal measures that only sovereigns have.
UBI can be a dramatic economic stimulus. It is not a black hole like military spending, and it is not an investment like social security or healthcare. It is immediate wealth transfer towards the bottom, and the economics of the last 30 years have well demonstrated how wealth concentrating near the top will stifle economic growth. Increased demand for necessities and wealth moving from investment to consumption is an economic accelerator.
While I have the same concerns, and my suspicion is that basic income given today's society would be an unaffordable and incentive-killing disaster, in 2016 they're just beginning to figure out how and whether to implement a pilot project.
It's hard to see how that could be anything but a good thing - it'll give us more data on how basic income performs today, so people can finally stop pretending the behavior of people in some town in Manitoba forty years ago has anything to do with the very-different present.
Once we have more information - god knows when, perhaps a decade from now - then we can measure the actual benefits, ask the hard questions you're asking, and figure out if the costs would be worth it. But right now that's premature.
