Ottawa needs to act on a proposal for a guaranteed basic income for P.E.I.

The highly touted GBI plan could be a model for other provinces, but it will take full cooperation between federal and provincial governments.

Canada has made little progress in reducing poverty over the past 50 years. In 2019, the relative income poverty rate among the working-age population was 11.4 per cent, up slightly from 10.3 per cent in 1976, wrote Kourtney Koebel, a post-doctoral researcher with GATE and Prof. Robin Boadway of Queen’s University in a column from Policy Options on August 28. This is despite the fact that Canada: (a) spends substantially more on aggregate social expenditure as a percentage of GDP today (18.8 per cent) than it did in the 1980s (13 per cent) and (b) has radically reduced poverty among seniors and children thanks to generous, unconditional income support programs for those groups.