Basic Income is key to averting a dystopian future

The 2026 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress being held in Toronto from August 20 to 22, examines the theme, Basic Income & the Polycrisis: The key to unlocking the puzzle.

Ontario Basic Income recipient Credit: Jessie Golem

The Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) along with allies including Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) are organizing the 2026 Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Congress being held in Toronto from August 20 to 22, 2026. The theme of the BIEN Congress is Basic Income & the Polycrisis: The key to unlocking the puzzle.

The Congress will mark BIEN’s 40th anniversary and it is a testament to how the Basic Income movement has grown internationally as well as how people from a wide array of countries have shared their knowledge and findings.

In fact, the Basic Income movement has accumulated so much knowledge that organizing and sustaining institutional capacity may be the greatest challenge it now faces.

Sheila Regehr, Chair of BICN told Small Change:

“While ‘polycrisis’ might not yet be a common word, people around the globe know it well because we all live it daily in many ways — the impacts of AI and social media, floods, drought, fires, health problems, insecure jobs, inflation, racism, steep inequality, war and other interconnected crises that can’t be solved in siloes, or one puzzle piece at a time. It’s a dangerous direction for people and planet.

Basic Income is a key to averting that dystopian future. It is a common denominator solution, a foundation of economic democracy where we all — humans, not corporations or robots — use our income every day to vote on how we spend our money and time on what makes us healthy, gives meaning to our lives, and helps us solve problems together. The BIEN Congress is a gathering of people working for that better future.”

This year’s theme will be addressed by world leaders on Basic Income including Guy Standing and Philippe Van Parijs. Standing, a British economist and co-founder of BIEN, argues a Universal Basic Income is social justice in action and that it’s fundamentally a social dividend rather than charity.

Belgian philosopher and political economist, Van Parijs, co-authored Basic Income A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy with Yannick Vanderborght. In their book, Van Parijs and Vanderborght present the most acute and fullest defense of what can no longer be called a radical idea. Instead, a Basic Income is the most realistic hope there is for addressing economic insecurity and social exclusion by offering actual financial freedom while simultaneously ensuring social justice that safeguards individual agency over life choices.

Ontario Basic Income recipients Credit: Jessie Golem

BEIN is planning a pre-Congress day on August 19, 2026 focusing on Canada, but particularly on the people on the ground doing the work — researching, analyzing, developing and running programs and pilots, being part of pilots and programs, learning and promoting knowledge transfer, writing books, making films . . . and organizing.

“Mark Carney is right that Canada needs bold nation-building projects. But alongside pipelines and ports and hard infrastructure, we should also be talking about social infrastructure. A Basic Income is nation-building too. It creates the stability people need to care for family, pursue education, contribute to their communities, and weather economic change with dignity rather than fear,” Tom Cooper, co-facilitator Ontario Basic Income Network and Director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, told Small Change.

Canada has made many positive developments that it should be proud of when it comes to researching and implementing a Basic Income. The Mincome Project (1974 – 1979) was the inaugural Canadian Basic Income Pilot designed and implemented by Ron Hikel in Dauphin, Manitoba. That pilot documented the fact that folks receiving a Basic Income not only continued working, but improved their education as well as their employment trajectories.

Initiated under Ed Schreyer’s NDP provincial government, the 18,000 boxes of data were put directly into storage by the incoming Progressive Conservative government of Sterling Lyon who cut the program short and did not want the data analysed.

Roughly 30 years later, Dr. Evelyn Forget discovered the boxes and began analysing the data accumulated under Hikel proving the social determinants of health improved and folks kept working. The two exceptions to the folks who kept working were as the Conservatives described them, “young men and women.” It turns out the young men were high school aged boys who stayed in school and often went on to complete college or university rather than quitting school to help support their families. The women who temporarily stopped working were post-partum women who stayed home with their babies during a time when there was absolutely no maternity leave.

During a 2024 interview, Hikel told me, “Giving people more money is a good thing.” But despite talking about a BI for over 52 years, Canada has no program in place.

Hikel, who was in charge of the Manitoba welfare system while running the Mincome Project said, “the psychological approach to welfare, to this day, is fundamentally demeaning because it assumes there is something wrong with you if you are unable to provide sufficient income. However, the reality is that there is an incredibly complex number of factors that make the inadequacy of a family’s income insufficient.”

The Ontario Basic Income Pilot (April 2017 to March 2019) that the Ford government cut short after running on election promises to the contrary, proved unequivocally that the social determinants of health for individuals and families improved when folks received a Basic Income.

Ontario Basic Income recipient Michael Hampson died when the pilot was cancelled and he was forced to survive on ODSP payments Credit: Jessie Golem

The work of photographer Jessie Golem, Humans of Basic Income, along with the Luke Mistruzzi and Simon Brothers’ documentary, A Human Picture (2024), capture exactly how lives improved for Ontario Basic Income recipients and how hopes of a better future were dashed when the pilot was unexpectedly and abruptly cancelled without cause.

However, the very Canadian and extremely positive outcomes of both the Mincome Project and the Ontario Basic Income Pilot beg the question, why doesn’t Canada have a Basic Income in place?

It is amazing to see how many Canadian organizations whose main focus really is on “other issues” are also calling for the implementation of a Universal Basic Income. It is now a priority for the National Advisory Council on Poverty (NACP), the National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL), CEOs for Basic Income as well as the Tamarack Institute and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) as improved social determinants of health are increasingly recognized as an integral part of overall universal healthcare, workers’ rights, equity for women and the human right to live a life free from poverty.

Undeniably, the Basic Income movement in Canada is far more widely dispersed than in many other countries. In fact, John Stapleton, Canadian social policy expert, Metcalf Innovation Fellow and creator of Open Policy Ontario, recently highlighted several important areas that are receiving little funding and limited government and media attention. Those areas include:

• Organizations working on income. Instead, coverage flows to the consequences of inadequate income focusing primarily on food banks instead of people having enough money to buy what the need.

• Housing, much of which is always going to be unaffordable if people can’t make monthly rent or mortgage payments that exceed 30 per cent of their gross income.

• Financial services like Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) and Ontario Works (OW) payments that have been privatized under the Ford government and rely on an insanely complex system that delivers inconsequential benefits of $1,400 and $733 monthly respectively that make it a struggle to survive when rents are over $2,000 per month plus utilities for a bachelor or one bedroom apartment in the GTHA.

BICN acknowledges that government funding for civil society as well as philanthropic giving are eroding. No non-profit organization is able to keep up with demand for funds while individuals and entire communities suffer as the unhoused crisis and over burdened justice system lays bare.

The BIEN Congress is an important opportunity for Canada to share its wealth of knowledge while simultaneously benefiting from the quantitative and qualitative data countries including Finland, Iran, Namibia, India, Kenya, and various cities throughout the US and Europe have gathered from their Basic Income initiatives.

It is time to make the most of our accumulated knowledge and time for Canada to take the plunge to put Canadians and Canadian families on the agendas and spreadsheets of federal and provincial governments well ahead of repetitive and unending corporate bailouts.

Ontario Basic Income recipient who used funds to improve the social determinants of health for her children while fighting in court for enforcement of an existing child support order and collection of arrears child support payments totaling $35,000+ by the provincial Family Responsibility Office. Credit: Jessie Golem

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Find out more about the Basic Income Canada Network.

Register for the BIEN Congress 2026.

The Congress Solidarity Fund will be trialled at the upcoming BIEN Congress 2026. The fund provides financial support that helps financially challenged folks attend the congress.

BIEN Treasurer Lindsay Stirton is running the Rio Marathon to raise money for the BIEN Congress Solidarity Fund. Donate here.

More information of how the Congress Solidarity Fund works and how you can apply for financial support for participating in the congress will be available soon on the BIEN Congress website.

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