A Universal Basic Income Is Being Considered by Canada's Government

I'm canadian, yes.

But a well thought out subsistence allocation won't just "give" everybody 1000$ per month. The majority of people who continue working may/should end up even. I don't see a paid for scheme altering in major way the oligopolies you are talking about.

And I'm curious, oligopolies in which industries a you thinking about?

Things are arguably worse in the USA. 35 states have laws on the books preventing personal boycott of Israeli products. In some states employees can and are fired for choosing not buy products in their personal life.

It is really disgusting. Imagine laws requiring the firing teachers because they choose not buy Israeli shampoo or whatever at home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...

Months before the federal government did the same thing to the wetsuweten anti-oil blockades.

Politics or deplorable status isn't the problem, it's that out government turned tyrannical.

I spent the duration of the trucker's protest sitting at home, fully vaccinated, and wearing a mask to go to the grocery store.

My sibling worked daily at the vaccination clinic.

I 180º disagreed with the content of the trucker's argument (less so these days). But I fully supported their right to protest, loudly and irritatingly, because someday I'll need to protest loudly and irritatingly for something I care about.

But of course now I won't protest, because I don't want my bank account arbitrarily frozen with no legal basis "voluntarily" by my bank.

And that's just my bank account, not the basic income I rely on for food.

If you steel-man what I said, you'll see it's a direct concern about how UBI can be used as a boot on the face of Canadians.

Implementation details are a pretty important part of policy.

When discussing the government's overreach in quelling a protest, it doesn't matter to me if the protest was funded by the Estate of Adolph Hitler, Philip Morris Tobacco and the Society for the Preservation of Crying Babies on Airplanes.

It's the fact of the government's action that's in question. If they could do what they did with impunity, imagine what they will do with impunity when if you protest they can turn off the faucet that feeds your family.

So there are several notable differences.

Alaska payments have been about the same for the last 40 years (1-1.5k/yr). This means that payments are going down in real dollars.

For inflation from Alaskan UBI would have to look at the difference before and after it was started in the 1970.

Alaskan UBI is funded by real tax revenue, not printing currency or debt spending.

Alaskan "UBI" is ~$1000/yr, not ~$1000/month, so you would expect the impact to be quite small on overall inflation, even if inflation used up %100 of the UBI

A non peer reviewed white paper by an “independent” author written in first person. And horribly written.

Looking more into it the independent author is this person (Joshua Miller)

“Joshua's research focuses on macroeconomic impacts of universal basic income. He also hosts the ThinkCritical Podcast and runs a blog called InTheAggregate. Joshua is a high school senior in New York.”

https://www.ubicenter.org/about/our-team/

Good for him for being a motivated high schooler. However, posting his essay as some kind of authoritative proof with Alaska as a generalizable example is absurd. There’s not enough data for stratification or identifying confounders. Alaska is not a typical American state in any way.

UBI supporters, especially on that website, look like young academics living in wealthy urban areas in England and the US. That’s nice and all but maybe they should get out of their bubble. They’re just a bunch of stereotypes.

Alaska does not have a universal basic income. Alaska has a state, and therefore resident, owned oil resource that pays dividends to it's shareholders, the Alaskan population. There's no money being created, no tax paid to find it, there is only revenue from real production, that money is paid to the state by consumers of it's oil. You may want to conflate the two concepts but they are qualitatively and fundamentally different beasts. Alaska's dividend is more like a corporation paying dividends to shareholders, in fact it's exactly like that.

Do you think Alaska is a representative sample? Or might the conditions there differ from Canada's conditions today?

> between $500 and $3,000 per year

Which is quite a bit below the figure mentioned in the article (16k-24k CAD per annum).

It should be more than obvious to everyone that at the very least it will further inflate housing prices because supply is heavily restricted (something that doesn’t apply to groceries and most other goods).

> I think Canada has laws against a landlord doing this type of thing, maybe up to a percentage. Also, Not all landlords are that shitty.

Doesn’t matter. Prices would still go up over time as demand increases while supply stays the same.

Landlords set their rent at what the local market will bear. That is not just a trait of "shitty landlords": I have friends who inherited a flat or two and rent it out, but are bohemian types and not too concerned about making lots of money in real estate, and still their guide for how much to charge tenants is what the market in their town bears. Without targeted legislation, everyone getting some extra money absolutely will result in rent increases even from many chill landlords.

> Unless there is price fixing going on, why would I raise my prices with the other groceries stores?

You would raise your prices because you see your competitors are raising theirs, and you like money. You can also have more confidence there won't be much blowback if you're not the only one raising prices.

> Everyone would see the higher prices and instead shop at my store with normal pricing.

That kind of logic has demonstrably not kept inflation under control (IIRC, much of the "inflation" over the last few years was businesses raising prices to increase profits, and using "inflation" as an excuse).

It's probably possible to spread out price increases slowly enough that it doesn't tend to hit many people's "switch to competitor" threshold.

In Ontario at least, and I'm sure in many (all?) provinces, there is rent control.

Ontario rent increase for 2024 is 2.5%

https://www.ontario.ca/page/residential-rent-increases

Canada certainly has enough land to handle a little sprawl.

I havent seen a single UBI program tested or implemented that actually came alongside welfare reduction.

Every one is additional in practice.

Just look to this Canadian one for example.

One advantage of UBI is govts can streamline their social services division, as in eliminate them entirely. No means-testing and administration equals less bureaucrats needed to manage the money. You simply distribute it to ALL citizens regardless. Less pension obligations too. So in a sense UBI pays for itself. This why when they had a pilot project in Finland, govt workers were opposed to it. They saw the writing on the wall that they would be redundant.

I'm beginning to think so myself. The cracks are beginning to show from decades of poor management and de-industrialization. What does Canada make? Its mainly resource-extraction.

If the government kept tax rates flat and produced economic growth it would also raise taxes.

I think what people are getting at is that in Canada there is an artificial limit enforced by government on house production, when vacancy rates are a 1% adding more money but not more housing will cause the price of houses to rise.

I don’t think the exclusive options are UBI or destitute sacrifices.