A controversial plan to guarantee Canadians a free pass is officially on the table after a universal basic income (UBI) bill officially works its way the Parliament. The Senate has passed Bill S-233, proposed by Sen. Kim Pate, is now being considered in committee having passed second reading earlier this year. If it passes, it will go through three readings in the House of Commons before being passed up to the Governor General. A committee meeting was held in October and again in November, having passed through the second reading in April. .The idea has sparked a major debate in Canada — particularly since the pandemic — as some believe it is based in compassion, while others maintain it’s another way for the country to go more in debt and the government to have more control over people‘s lives.The details of how the UBI would actually work still need to be determined, but if the bill basses through the Senate and the House of Commons, the finance minister would be compelled to design a “national framework” to make possible the implementation of a basic income for all Canadians. That includes immigrants and refugees."The minister must develop a national framework for the implementation of a guaranteed livable basic income program throughout Canada for any person over the age of 17, including temporary workers, permanent residents and refugee claimants," the bill states..NPD MP Leah Gazen has submitted an identical bill to the House of Commons, according to the CBC."There's a stigma about poor people and about assisting people — that we will give people a handout but we won't give them a leg up out of poverty," Pate said in April.The cost of such a program would be approximately $93 billion by 2025 to 2026, per estimates from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), calculated based on Ontario's basic income pilot project from before the days of premier Doug Ford in 2017 and 2018. .In a recently resurfaced interview from 2022, Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman said she "actually somewhat agrees" with UBI and "there is a Conservative position" on the issue. "The universal income benefit, where you’re giving people a living wage, that’s gonna come," Lantsman said. "And it could be that by a different name. “I actually think Conservatives can own this, because it does take government out of the mix of a bunch of means-tested programs, thrown out of Ottawa by a bunch of bureaucrats, and gives people that thing they need to get back to work, and we put that on to the people," she said. "And we believe in them, and we try to get them out of poverty."When asked how future governments were going to be able to pay for UBI, Lantsman said “any government that wants to bring that forward, has to have a mandate from the people. "“I don’t think the Liberals have a mandate to do that, I don’t think any party has a mandate to spend into the future like they have since the pandemic," she said. “I think the government needs to invest in people, in skills, in making sure that we’re ready for whatever the economy looks like.""Because we saw that, we closed our doors, and this affected adversely the lower-wage jobs, the precarious labour, and we’ve got to get people out of that, trained up into whatever a new economy looks like, a digital economy, a deliver economy, whatever it is."
