Introduction
Recent decades have seen a steady move in Western liberal democracies from income support programmes based on alleviating poverty, to workfare programmes that direct individuals back into the workforce. Underpinned by the prevailing political rationality of neoliberalism (Brown, Reference Brown2015), these social assistance programmes prioritise the market over the state’s social and redistributive functions. They place primary emphasis on economic variables as both determinants of what constitutes ‘good’ or ‘desirable’ individual behaviour and indicators of successful policy outcomes. Restructured programmes provide deliberately meagre benefits and incorporate high degrees of surveillance tied to employment-related outcomes and metrics (Maki, Reference Maki2011).
In Canada, provincial (sub-national) governments are responsible for the provision and regulation of social assistance programmes. Policies across Canada have not been immune to neoliberal restructuring. In Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the provincial government’s most recent poverty reduction strategy (Government of Ontario, 2020) has the single stated objective ‘to get more social assistance recipients to move into meaningful employment’. As in other jurisdictions, labour market participation is prioritised over poverty alleviation, leaving policy-based or collective responses to income insecurity far out of frame (Smith-Carrier and David, Reference Smith-Carrier and David2022).
The goal to reduce caseloads covers both of the province’s social assistance programmes. They consist of workfare (called Ontario Works, hereinafter OW), and the Ontario Disability Support Program (hereinafter ODSP). ODSP, for citizens with long-term disabilities who are unable to work full-time has traditionally offered more generous payments and included less punitive sanctions than OW, though a recent focus on ‘resilience’ and ‘stabilisation’ in Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy signal that this may be changing (Smith-Carrier and David, Reference Smith-Carrier and David2022). Despite their framing and design as programmes of last-resort, OW and the ODSP are often life-lines for recipients (Crawford, Reference Crawford2013). However, they have been criticised regularly for rates of payment that are inadequate for meeting basic human needs (Chouinard and Crooks, Reference Chouinard and Crooks2005; Herd et al., Reference Herd, Mitchell and Lightman2005; Smith-Carrier, Reference Smith-Carrier2017; Sainz et al., Reference Sainz, Martínez, Sutton, Rodríguez-Bailón and Moya2020; Maki, Reference Maki2021). Further, such dehumanising constructions of recipients as lazy and poor at financial management then support the implementation of complex eligibility criteria and application processes, along with stringent monitoring and surveillance.
Experiments with alternative forms of social welfare have provided the opportunity to examine and question the dominant construction of social assistance, including various forms of basic or guaranteed income that have been piloted globally. From 2017 to 2019, one such experiment took the form of the OBIP. The Pilot was designed as a three-year programme to test an innovative poverty reduction approach by providing recipientsFootnote 1 with an unconditional monthly cash transfer (Government of Ontario, 2024). OBIP was designed as a relatively generous social assistance programme, oriented towards the analysis of the impact of basic income on a variety of quality-of-life measurements (Segal, Reference Segal2016). In contrast with the employment-oriented design of most contemporary basic income pilots, OBIP had uniquely high benefit levels, as it assessed the benefits of replacing the current system of social assistance with a guaranteed income (Widerquist, Reference Widerquist2018; McDowell and Ferdosi, Reference McDowell and Ferdosi2021).
There were three Pilot locations – Hamilton/Brantford, Thunder Bay, and Lindsay (Government of Ontario, 2024). Participation eligibility hinged on low-income status (Government of Ontario, 2024). The maximum amount provided under OBIP was set at 75 per cent of the official poverty line; individuals received up to $16,989CAD per year, less 50 per cent of earned income, with a $500CAD per month top-up for those with eligible disabilities (Government of Ontario, 2024). These OBIP rates were substantially more generous than social assistance rates in Ontario at that time, with the potential to almost double recipients’ income. In 2017, a single non-disabled person could receive a maximum of $8,652CAD per year on Ontario Works, and a single disabled person could receive a maximum of $13,812CAD per year on the Ontario Disability Support Program (Income Security Advocacy Centre, 2017). Despite being slated to last three years, the Pilot was prematurely cancelled in early 2018 by a newly elected provincial government only months after the first payments were administered. The final payments were administered in March 2019 and all official evaluation research was cancelled.
In this article, we ask: How did OBIP challenge recipients to think differently about social assistance programmes? The article reports on the findings from a study with participants in the OBIP from the Hamilton region of Ontario, Canada. Themes reflect how participants experienced the Pilot, often in contrast to neoliberalised workfare and welfare programmes. In this article, we focus our examination on the levels of support offered to Pilot participants and the ways in which support was provided. In particular, we put participants’ experiences with the OBIP in conversation with what we know about existing welfare programmes, which rely on extensive dehumanising surveillance in administration and the individual responsibilisation of poverty. We argue that through experiencing OBIP, participants became more aware of how the current organisation of social assistance is not natural or inevitable, and that a more humane version is possible.
Literature review
Constructing the neoliberal subject
Neoliberalism’s ascendancy as a hegemonic political, economic, and social paradigm has established the market as the state’s raison d’etre, requiring it to orient its policies towards cultivating the ideal conditions for the accumulation of private profit (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Davidson and Burchell2008: 121). As neoliberalism has become dominant, it has expanded from a set of abstract beliefs to an ontology, integral to the construction of the identity of the modern human subject and their essential ‘being’. The neoliberal subject is constructed by what Foucault called governmentality, or a process through which individuals produce the truth for themselves through self-censorship, by integrating their own subjective identities into power networks (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Davidson and Burchell2008). The ideal subject in the neoliberal era, then, can be described as homo economicus, or the person who ‘accepts reality’ and embraces market competition as an essential aspect of their own identity, transforming themselves into producer and entrepreneur of their own human capital (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Davidson and Burchell2008).
This market logic shapes the horizons of assumed rational conduct. It sanctions those who resist assimilation into this culture of possessive individualism, as well as those who ‘fail’ to meet the market standards of personhood, like those experiencing poverty. Homo economicus is conceived of as the ‘subject of individual choices’ whose destiny lies within their own free will (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Davidson and Burchell2008). The responsibilisation of individual conduct, reinforcing notions of the deserving and undeserving poor for those who are unable to realise a living wage through the market (Ilcan and Lacey, Reference Ilcan and Lacey2011; Kelly, Reference Kelly2016). The neoliberal era, then, is characterised by a dual process in which neoliberal subjectivity is reinforced externally by the state, which establishes coercive policies requiring individuals to conform to market principles, and internally, through the continued process of absorption of one’s own identity into the ‘proto’ self (Klein, Reference Klein2016).
Market-oriented, scarcity-based provision of social assistance
One example of the ascendency of neoliberalisation and the notion of the ideal subject in government service provision is how employment-focused behavioural requirements and success metrics have become central to social policy design and delivery, including in Ontario (Herd et al., Reference Herd, Mitchell and Lightman2005; Mitchell et al., Reference Mitchell, Lightman and Herd2007; Smith-Carrier, Reference Smith-Carrier2010; Maki, Reference Maki2021). Social assistance programmes in Ontario are now explicitly oriented towards rapid labour-market integration, and rather than adequately addressing poverty, their goal is to get social assistance recipients into formal paid employment and off the caseload as quickly as possible (Smith-Carrier and Lawlor, Reference Smith-Carrier and Lawlor2017; Smith-Carrier and David, Reference Smith-Carrier and David2022).
Critical scholars argue that instead of supporting individuals with meaningful training opportunities, programmes are designed to socialise workers into tolerating precarious, exploitative work through stringent job-seeking behavioural requirements tied to meagre benefits (Herd et al., Reference Herd, Lightman and Mitchell2009; Maki, Reference Maki2011; Smith-Carrier, Reference Smith-Carrier2017). Labour market outcomes after exiting welfare do not match the promises made by workfare programmes that poverty is an individual problem solved by getting a job (Cooke, Reference Cooke2009; Lightman et al., Reference Lightman, Mitchell and Herd2010; Shibuya, Reference Shibuya2018). Employment outcomes are compounded by other systems of discrimination and oppression; for example, immigrants and single parents (the majority of whom are single mothers) fare even worse in the labour market after leaving welfare, when compared with Canadian-born workers, and childless workers (Mitchell et al., Reference Mitchell, Lightman and Herd2007; Smith-Carrier, Reference Smith-Carrier2017; Shibuya, Reference Shibuya2018).
Another key feature of market-oriented social assistance programmes is minimal levels of support. Recipients of social assistance are often unable to meet basic needs, let alone achieve financial stability, with one recent report finding recipients of social assistance across Canada living in poverty – and often, deep poverty (Laidley and Tabbara, Reference Laidley and Tabbara2022; see also L. Buckland et al., Reference Buckland, Jackson, Roberts and Smith2001; Csiernik et al., Reference Csiernik, Csiernik and Brideau2017; Herd et al., Reference Herd, Kim and Carrasco2020). Inadequate rates of support are associated with a range of outcomes. For example, there is a well-established relationship between food insecurity and receipt of social assistance in Canada (Sod-Erdene et al., Reference Sod-Erdene, Shahidi, Ramraj, Hildebrand and Siddiqi2019; Tarasuk et al., Reference Tarasuk, Li and St-Germain2022). Social assistance recipients also report experiencing housing insecurity, social isolation, and challenges sustaining their mental and physical health and well-being (Baker Collins, Reference Baker Collins2005; Wilson et al., Reference Wilson, Lightman and Mitchell2009; Herd et al., Reference Herd, Kim and Carrasco2020).
The normalisation of surveillance
Restrictive social assistance schemes common in liberal welfare state regimes like Ontario draw on constructions of those experiencing poverty as ‘less than’ to reify rigid and punitive systems of control to prevent fraud, subjecting applicants and recipients to multifaceted surveillance (Sainz et al., Reference Sainz, Martínez, Sutton, Rodríguez-Bailón and Moya2020). OW and the ODSP were introduced as part of Conservative premier Mike Harris’s ‘Common Sense Revolution’ in the mid-1990s, and involved more complex eligibility criteria and behavioural conditions than their predecessor programmes.Footnote 2 Rather than understanding social assistance as an entitlement that citizens are owed by the state, they now include more advanced and intrusive systems of surveillance to monitor the ‘deservingness’ of applicants. Despite rates of convicted fraud in OW and ODSP being lower than politicians’ and media estimates (Toronto City Council, 2002; Mosher and Hermer, Reference Mosher and Hermer2005; Varma and Ward, Reference Varma and Ward2014), harsh penalties for fraud have been used as ‘deterrence’ policies. These have included ‘zero-tolerance’ approaches to fraud, which, for a short time, included lifetime bans on receiving future assistance payments (Carruthers, Reference Carruthers1995; Mosher and Hermer, Reference Mosher and Hermer2005; Varma and Ward, Reference Varma and Ward2014). Lifetime bans were repealed by a new government following the death of Kimberly Rogers in 2001, who had been sentenced to house arrest with no access to financial support for social assistance fraud (Varma and Ward, Reference Varma and Ward2014). However, the majority of the recommendations from the inquest into Rogers’ death were not implemented. Currently, those suspected of fraud of any amount (perhaps as a result of tips to the Welfare Fraud hotline), face extensive investigation, possible criminal charges and prison sentences (Maki, Reference Maki2021).
The eligibility criteria for OW and ODSP are assessed and controlled through multifaceted surveillance mechanisms, which make it harder for people to access benefits they are entitled to (Herd et al., Reference Herd, Mitchell and Lightman2005; Baker Collins, Reference Baker Collins2016; Maki, Reference Maki2021). These mechanisms include case reviews (which include financial monitoring and compliance monitoring for employment programming), the delineated roles of eligibility review officers, welfare fraud hotlines, and drug testing for employment programming (Maki, Reference Maki2021; Abdillahi, Reference Abdillahi2022). While surveillance has always been integral to social assistance, the ongoing adoption of (often privately owned) technologies has enabled deeper and more intense monitoring of recipients than was previously possible with caseworker-based surveillance (Herd et al., Reference Herd, Mitchell and Lightman2005; Maki, Reference Maki2021; Abdillahi, Reference Abdillahi2022). For example, Maki (Reference Maki2011) has uncovered the ways in which these surveillance mechanisms within Ontario’s social assistance system are increasingly automated, including the Consolidated Verification Process which draws on third-party data to automate the process of flagging recipients for their ‘risk’ of welfare fraud. Research shows that social assistance administrators also recognise pervasive surveillance within Ontario programmes (Baker Collins, Reference Baker Collins2016; Raso, Reference Raso2017; Baker Collins and Cranmer-Byng, Reference Baker Collins and Cranmer-Byng2019). As such, the state has cultivated a culture in which social assistance recipients are viewed and treated as deviants who fail to be good market citizens and deviate from the model ‘homo economicus’. This discourse of criminalisation, narrowed eligibility criteria, and increased surveillance has resulted both in substantial decreases in the number of people claiming social assistance, while also providing justification for reduced rates of benefits (Kneebone and White, Reference Kneebone and White2009; Varma and Ward, Reference Varma and Ward2014).
Dehumanisation and decreasing trust
Hardened welfare systems with poorer benefits, greater conditionality, and increased surveillance are not unique to Ontario or Canada, but characterise programmes across liberal welfare states (Soss, Reference Soss1999; McDonald and Marston, Reference McDonald and Marston2005; Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2009; Soss et al., Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011; Manji, Reference Manji2017). Rooted in neoliberalism, the design of current social assistance programmes represses the state’s role in resource redistribution and foregrounds its role in creating ideal conditions for capital accumulation. The scarce, degrading, highly restrictive social assistance programmes in Ontario continue the use, originating in the Elizabethan Poor Laws, of the principle of least eligibility; that is programmes that provide for a lower standard of life than that available by entering the workforce (Bonnet, Reference Bonnet2019). As Maki (Reference Maki2011) contends, this allows governments to regulate and maintain a supply of cheap and exploitable labour.
In discussing implications for how humans see themselves and each other, Brown (Reference Brown2015: 9–10), building on Foucault’s notion of ‘homo economicus’, argues that neoliberalism has
transmogrifie[d] every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetised.
Individuals experiencing poverty who seek support through social assistance programmes report being objectified, degraded, and dehumanised. Support for limiting provision of social assistance is strengthened through the dehumanisation or ‘animalisation’ of potential recipients as wasteful and lazy, as unable to meet the expectations of ‘homo economicus’ (Sainz et al., Reference Sainz, Martínez, Sutton, Rodríguez-Bailón and Moya2020). The programmes engender a culture of fear in which recipients can be terrified to even receive small gifts, in case this affects their eligibility (Halpenny, Reference Halpenny2019). Ultimately, recipients are sold the tale that poverty is an individual problem they can solve by working harder, rather than a collective problem that has more adequate and humane policy alternatives than the systems we have now.
The erosion of welfare state institutions has been associated with a decline in social trust, with the relationship between the state and citizen undermined by decades of market-based approaches (Kumlin et al., Reference Kumlin, Stadelmann-Steffen, Haugsgjerd and Uslaner2017). Recent studies demonstrate a long-term decline in trust in government, with a majority of the population claiming they believe politicians are detached from the material concerns that shape their lives (Pew Research Center, 2022). Specific to the current topic, scholarship exploring social assistance and basic income proposals alike argue that the restrictive and punitive nature of current income support schemes and their prioritisation of labour market outcomes fuels a sense of mis-trust between applicants, recipients, and case managers, and ultimately a sense of mistrust between state and citizen (Manji, Reference Manji2017; Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019).
Basic income as an alternative
Basic income has been touted by many proponents as a potentially more humane alternative to hardened and neoliberalised social assistance programmes (Van Parijs, Reference Van Parijs2004; Emery et al., Reference Emery, Fleisch and McIntyre2013; Mulvale and Frankel, Reference Mulvale and Frankel2016; Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019). Basic income proponents have also suggested that implementing less restrictive and punitive income supports than current social assistance schemes can foster trust between citizens and the state (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019). Indeed, the OBIP was explicitly designed to test whether and how a basic income programme could replace existing OW and ODSP models (Segal, Reference Segal2016) and address such issues as ‘broad policing, control’ (Segal, Reference Segal2016: 5) and inadequate rates of payment. Former Senator Hugh Segal, who was commissioned to support the design of the OBIP, noted basic income’s potential to reduce the institutional restraints social assistance recipients experience on OW and ODSP. He claimed that there is ‘a profound difference between a system characterised by rigid conditions (and their enforcement and monitoring) versus a system of automatic transfers’ (Segal, Reference Segal2016: 21). Segal (Reference Segal2016: 11) advised the province that one of the most significant findings from the Pilot would be to establish whether basic income could ‘provide a more efficient, less intrusive, and less stigmatising way of delivering income support for those now living in poverty’.
Acknowledging that arguments for basic income are broad and sometimes even far-reaching, in this article, we centre findings on participants experiences of basic income as an alternative income support programme. We do not focus on the theorising about the broad liberatory potential or utopic possibilities of any number of hypothetical basic income proposals or the reforming potential of basic income to allow people who can work to choose not to, as some scholars promote (see, for example, Van Parijs, Reference Van Parijs2004). Instead, we concentrate on how recipients framed their experiences of OBIP, particularly in relation to the scarcity, surveillance, and dehumanisation many of them had experienced under neoliberalised welfare programmes like OW and ODSP, and the implications for their views of alternative policy options for alleviating poverty. We discuss our findings in relationship with existing literature in this area (e.g., Halpenny, Reference Halpenny2019; Hamilton and Mulvale, Reference Hamilton and Mulvale2019).
Methods
We draw our findings from a larger project that aimed to address some of the research gaps created when the government prematurely cancelled the Pilot and all associated research. In that larger 2019 project, academics and community partners collaborated to collect survey data and qualitative interview data from OBIP recipients in Hamilton, Brantford, and Brant County. Once approved by the host university Research Ethics Board (McMaster University), 217 former recipients participated in the survey, and forty of those participants completed follow-up semi-structured interviews. Participants were recruited using a variety of methods, mostly by sharing materials with relevant advocacy organisations and local or regional media outlets.
This article reports on findings from secondary analysis of the qualitative interview data and open-ended survey responses. Though interviews had been focussed on OBIP rather than previous forms of assistance, we noted a prevalence of participants who discussed their experiences of OBIP in the context of prior experiences with OW and ODSP. This prompted us to ask: How did OBIP challenge recipients to think differently about social assistance? This secondary data analysis was conducted in consultation with the original researchers by a research team from a second university (Carleton University, from which Research Ethics Board approval was also attained) who had not been involved in the initial project. Approximately half of the interview participants were accessing OW or ODSP prior to the Pilot. About 60 per cent of interviewees were women, and about 40 per cent were men. Almost half of interviewees were between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, while the rest were between forty-five and sixty-three. Unfortunately, ethnocultural demographic information was not collected for interview participants, though in the original, larger project only 10 per cent of survey respondents self-identified as being part of a racialised minority group.
As qualitatively-oriented researchers carrying out secondary analysis of qualitative data originally collected as part of a larger mixed-methods (though predominantly quantitative) project, we deemed a codebook thematic analysis approach to be appropriate (Flick, Reference Flick2018; Braun and Clarke, Reference Braun and Clarke2022). Falling between the coding reliability and reflexive thematic analysis approaches described by Braun and Clarke (Reference Braun and Clarke2022), this allowed the coding process to be structured for early theme development while maintaining a reflexive qualitative research philosophy throughout the process. The codebook thematic analysis approach enables exploration of both manifest meanings that may have already appeared in the quantitative survey findings (e.g., tangible benefits of OBIP) and latent meanings (such as changes in underlying attitudes towards government). As such, we sought to understand and interpret stories that emerge from the intersection of our theoretical assumptions, analytic resources and skill, and the data with which we were working (Braun et al., Reference Braun, Clarke, Hayfield, Terry and Liamputtong2019).
The research team co-created the codebook and refined the final set of codes by individually reviewing subsets of interview transcripts, cross-checking coding for alignment, and then adjusting the final codebook for subsequent full analysis. We attended to rigor and credibility through prolonged engagement with the data and research topic, maintenance of an audit trail, reflexivity discussions between researchers, and (where possible) ‘within-method’ triangulation with the quantitative survey data (Carter et al., Reference Carter, Bryant-Lukosius, DiCenso, Blythe and Neville2014; Flick, Reference Flick2018). All participant names used in this article are pseudonyms.
The findings section first describes, in the context of extant literature, participants’ experiences of what was provided to OBIP recipients (i.e., the levels of support) and how it was provided (i.e., application and ongoing administration), which participants often contrasted to previous programmes. Participants associated OBIP policy design and implementation with impacts for multiple aspects of their lives (Ferdosi and McDowell, Reference Ferdosi and McDowell2020; and which the original research team has written about elsewhere (see for example Ferdosi et al., Reference Ferdosi, McDowell, Lewchuk and Ross2020; McDowell and Ferdosi, Reference McDowell and Ferdosi2020; McDowell and Ferdosi, Reference McDowell and Ferdosi2021). Here, we centre themes of degradation and (de)humanisation, which became clear to participants both during OBIP and as a result of the cancellation. We specifically report on analysis of the thematic codes of ‘surveillance and privacy’, ‘trust’, ‘relationship to government’, and in particular their intersections with ‘ODSP’, ‘OW’, and ‘cancellation of the Pilot’. We conclude by reflecting on limitations and implications for future research.
Findings
Our analysis illustrates how participants’ experiences with the Pilot exposed long-standing issues with existing social assistance programmes by challenging the normalisation of scarcity, degradation, and surveillance integral to them. Participants were clear that OBIP was not a perfect solution to all issues that arise under the current neoliberalised welfare state. However, their reports highlight how the Pilot demonstrated the possibility for alternative, more humane policy approaches to challenge the prevailing status quo of neoliberalised residual social assistance schemes. Unfortunately, the premature cancellation of OBIP undid many of these gains.
Levels of support provided: “It Made a Big Difference”
Starting with what was provided under OBIP, the higher levels of cash support compared with previous forms of social assistance was a common theme, with multiple implications for the lives of participants. Supporting previous research on the inadequate levels of social assistance in Canada (Buckland et al., Reference Buckland, Jackson, Roberts and Smith2001; Csiernik et al., Reference Csiernik, Csiernik and Brideau2017; Herd et al., Reference Herd, Kim and Carrasco2020; Laidley and Tabbara, Reference Laidley and Tabbara2022; Tarasuk et al., Reference Tarasuk, Li and St-Germain2022), participants highlighted the role of scarcity in their lives prior to OBIP. As Veronica explained, chronic food insecurity (both an insufficient quantity and quality of food) was a recurring battle on OW and ODSP: ‘I can remember two weeks where I ate nothing so that my kid could eat’. Participants who were otherwise ineligible for social assistance programmes like OW and ODSP but who still lived in poverty likewise reported challenges with chronic food insecurity. In addition to challenges accessing food, participants also reported challenges accessing and maintaining stable housing, saving and building assets, and issues with debt (especially pay day lenders) prior to the Pilot.
Although OBIP payments were still below the poverty line, the higher rate of benefits meant better short- and medium-term financial security for previous social assistance recipients (representing just over half of interviewees). The difference in entitlements was significant; the maximum OBIP rates were considerably higher than the maximum rates of ODSP and OW, by approximately 20 per cent and 50 per cent, respectively. Of the higher rates of payment, Judith said, ‘it made a big difference’, and Ian described how this affected his mood: ‘I was on cloud nine man, I was just happy for once. It was a daily struggle with ODSP’.
The increased economic security allowed recipients to purchase necessities they were otherwise forced to live without prior to the Pilot, which participants connected in turn to improved health, well-being, and quality of life. In the short term, this meant participants were better able to secure stable housing, pay for groceries, and access transportation. They reported being able to purchase higher quality and quantities of food, and reductions in their food bank usage. Natalie described the agency she felt when she could choose to say no to the ‘god-awful ugly’ glasses paid for by social assistance. With the new, better-quality glasses she could afford under OBIP, she ‘found [she] was treated better. It was more dignifying’, suggesting a rehumanisation based on the ability to consume (Ndiaye, Reference Ndiaye2022). Medium-term security allowed participants to pay off loans, improve their credit scores, access jobs, and purchase essential supplies to support their employability.Footnote 3 That rates were still below the poverty line, and additional barriers to expenses such as education and housing, meant that longer-term implications for larger ongoing needs were more limited. For those who did make changes in these areas, the abrupt cancellation described below was particularly difficult.
Assessing eligibility: ‘It Assumes People can be Trusted’
In terms of eligibility assessments for income support programmes, certain participants again contrasted OBIP with previous social assistance programmes. This included extensive assessment and monitoring of stringent eligibility criteria, intrusive application processes, dehumanising behavioural conditions, and cumbersome reporting conditions. Echoing previous literature from Ontario and beyond (Soss, Reference Soss1999; Chouinard and Crooks, Reference Chouinard and Crooks2005; Wacquant, Reference Wacquant2009; Baker Collins et al., Reference Baker Collins, Smith-Carrier, Gazso and Smith2020), interviewees who had accessed social assistance programmes described frequent degrading interactions with welfare administrators who were ‘judgmental’ and ‘very powerful’.
Patricia highlighted the intrusive and medicalised nature of the ODSP application process, which requires a doctor to complete a comprehensive assessment and approve an individual’s eligibility for assistance. Robin described similar experiences:
When I was applying for ODSP, a lot of spotlight was placed on me. It’s an intrusive and probing process, where you have to open up about all kinds of stuff that may not even be necessary for you to qualify. And this is information you have to share with a complete stranger. But you feel like your fate is in their hands, so you answer everything they ask about. You’re also treated with suspicion and there is some doubt about your intentions. It hurts to be viewed that way.
These capricious and highly medicalised application and review processes for disability-targeted welfare programmes have been criticised by disability studies scholars in Canada (Chouinard and Crooks, Reference Chouinard and Crooks2005; Kimpson, Reference Kimpson2020) and beyond (Soldatic and Chapman, Reference Soldatic and Chapman2010; Soldatic, Reference Soldatic2013; Soldatic, Reference Soldatic2018; Mills and Pring, Reference Mills and Pring2024). Our findings mirror Halpenny’s (Reference Halpenny2023) analysis of disabled women’s experiences on the OBIP, who argues that their ‘receipt of a (mostly) guaranteed, (less) conditional, (more) adequate income offered a shield from the structural ableism embedded in income security policy and society at large’.
ODSP comes with unique barriers to access and assessment models, but recipients on OW also reported that its eligibility processes are likewise degrading. Douglas identified the demeaning process of maintaining eligibility for OW: ‘It was like being interrogated, they didn’t believe a God damned word you said (….) It was like, “How did you know about that? We can’t give you that”. It’s like everything was secret.’ Similar experiences of social assistance applicants and recipients being treated with suspicion and dehumanised are commonly reported findings in the literature (Baker Collins, Reference Baker Collins2005; Herd et al., Reference Herd, Mitchell and Lightman2005; Hughes, Reference Hughes2017; Manji, Reference Manji2017; Maki, Reference Maki2021).
Paternalistic experiences with social assistance application processes continued with ongoing surveillance for as long as support was received. This included the lack of trust embodied in the scrutiny of ongoing eligibility and how benefits were spent. Highlighting the power and control of administrators over recipients (Baker Collins, Reference Baker Collins2016; Raso, Reference Raso2017; Baker Collins and Cranmer-Byng, Reference Baker Collins and Cranmer-Byng2019), Linda called her overall experience on OW ‘humiliating’, while Deborah described it as ‘depressing, demoralising, degrading, confusing’ and the administration processes as ‘pointless’. Our findings echo those from Hamilton and Mulvale’s (Reference Hamilton and Mulvale2019) phenomenological research with OBIP participants, who referred to the ‘bureaucratic hurdles, intrusive eligibility rules, work disincentives, and separation from the mainstream economy’ (p. 590) inherent to traditional social assistance schemes.
In contrast, although recipients were required to provide personal information and agree to participate in (ultimately incomplete) state-facilitated research as part of the Pilot, study participants still described less surveillance and fewer encounters with state administrators than experienced previously. Ashley argued that the OBIP model was ‘unique (….), it assumes people have different needs, and people can be trusted to use it as necessary to address their needs’, that is, as human beings able to make independent choices. Of the reduced monitoring during the Pilot compared to social assistance, Ashley said that she was able ‘to run [my] own life, rather than [having OW] dictate how the resources should be used’, ultimately increasing her sense of dignity. Indeed, this finding responds to one of the benefits that Segal (Reference Segal2016) hypothesised might be possible during the Pilot: that reduced monitoring would mean that people were able to make better choices for their own lives, and ultimately lead to the ‘enhancement and protection of human dignity’.
(Dis)trust and (de)humanisation: “basic income was healing”
Participants interpreted the scarcity and surveillance in their experiences of OW and ODSP as reflecting distrust and dehumanisation. Previous OW and ODSP recipients exposed an internalised sense of individualised responsibility for the circumstances that had led to them accessing supports, with associated feelings of shame and humiliation. Veronica, for example, described a feeling ‘that you have failed as a person, as a mom, as anything, if you’re forced to receive a handout from someone else. It’s seen as weakness in a society that doesn’t accept weakness’.
Facing chronic scarcity and poverty prior to the Pilot had a significant impact on participants’ sense of humanity and dignity. Robin, for example, explained how ‘when you’re trying so hard to keep yourself intact, you don’t even feel like you’re human. It feels like nobody cares about you, like you don’t matter’. Several participants referred to this as being in ‘survival mode’ and described its impacts on their mental and physical health, hope for the future, relationships to others, sense of belonging, and their employability. This echoes existing literature about the dehumanisation of social assistance recipients and the impact that stigma, suspicion, surveillance, and maltreatment have on one’s sense of self (McDonald and Marston, Reference McDonald and Marston2005; Smith-Carrier, Reference Smith-Carrier2010; Manji, Reference Manji2017; Sainz et al., Reference Sainz, Martínez, Sutton, Rodríguez-Bailón and Moya2020; Buckland, Nur and Dueck-Read, Reference Buckland, Nur and Dueck-Read2023). Our findings support, for example, Manji’s (Reference Manji2017) findings that social assistance conditionality and surveillance not only impact recipients’ confidence and self-worth, but also cultivates feelings of isolation and breaks bonds of social solidarity.
Once participating in OBIP, the increased and unconditional income support was described as a more humane approach to welfare, helping recipients to feel like they were being trusted and recognised as full members of society. Participants reported a stronger sense of agency, independence, and confidence. For example, Jacqueline said:
It’s wonderful not to have to lay my life out to strangers anymore every step of the way. It’s dignifying not to have to deal with Ontario Works in general (….) It was very much dignifying. I was trusted for once, it felt like. I could make my own decisions without having a devil and an angel on my shoulders telling me what to do. Because I know where I am going.
Of this shift, Diana described how: ‘Basic income changed my life. I went from being a victim, to somebody in control of my destiny. The time that I was on basic income was healing. The money was healing wounds and barriers that were built by poverty’. The ability to pay for basic necessities and achieve more stable financial security impacted participants’ sense of dignity, humanity, and hope. Further relief was provided by the relative anonymity allowed under OBIP (also found in research by Halpenny, Reference Halpenny2019), with the enhanced privacy described by Barbara as ‘calming your embarrassment a bit’. These findings mirror those from other qualitative research with OBIP participants, in which they report a greater sense of privacy or anonymity compared to other social assistance schemes (Halpenny, Reference Halpenny2019; Hamilton and Mulvale, Reference Hamilton and Mulvale2019).
Participants reported having more time to meet fundamental human needs such as actively participating in personal relationships and their broader communities, with easier access to leisure, volunteering, and taking care of the important relationships and activities in their lives. As described by Tracy:
I do a lot of work and I’m not paid for it. I help roommates out as a gift. Then getting the basic income, was like getting a gift back. It allowed me to give to society and do work just as before and I found that as really freeing. The basic income is like a gift economy to me in that respect.
Re-humanisation under OBIP was further associated with an increased feeling of belonging and a sense of community. Diane explained, ‘This newfound sense of belonging was intimately linked to my ability to thrive in the world. I began feeling more connected to society, to people within my circle, which in turn improved my employability, relationships, and overall outlook on life’. Robin also reflected on a new sense of community:
My sense of community changed a bit during the Pilot. I felt there was help in my little community. That I was being supported, and other people were being taken care of. When you have so much going on in your own world, and you’re trying so hard to keep yourself intact, you almost become numb to what’s going on outside, to other people, to the community, to politics. You just don’t even feel like you’re human, like nobody cares about you, like you don’t matter.
Theoretical literature on basic income has proposed that less restrictive welfare programmes might improve people’s confidence and felt sense of autonomy, ultimately engendering greater trust between citizens and state (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019). Other examinations of OBIP hypothesise that ‘basic income might afford individuals the potential to construct renewed relationships with the state, grounded in mutuality, legitimacy, and trust’ (e.g., Halpenny, Reference Halpenny2019: 53).
Cancellation: ‘Makes your faith in human beings go a little bit sideways’
These new feelings of trust and belonging did not last long. The premature cancellation of the Pilot following the election of a Conservative provincial government in 2018 reaffirmed and deepened feelings of alienation, dehumanisation, and sense of distrust in the state that participants had prior to the Pilot. Participants described the cancellation as ‘shit, inhumane’, a failure to uphold a ‘promise’, a ‘sudden change’, a ‘flip flop [which] screwed all these people’, and ‘brutal’. Several participants referred to the loss of trust specifically borne by false campaign promises by the elected Conservative party to see the Pilot through without cancelling or changing it.
The lack of accountability or resolve for the government’s failure to see the Pilot through to completion resulted in frustration for many participants. James, for example, said that he felt ‘totally screwed around’ because although ‘the government expects you to be lawful and honest and responsible and honest towards them, they haven’t set a good example for me to want to be that way’. Similarly, Nancy lamented the failure of the government to support her after being an employed, tax-paying citizen for over forty years. Judith described how she chose to trust the government when she applied to participate in the Pilot, noting that ‘yes, we’re getting a benefit from being on basic income, but we’re trusting that you’re going to be honest with us and stick with that three-year Pilot’, a trust that was subsequently broken.
Disillusionment with the government over the cancellation led some to think more deeply about government motives. For example, Nancy protested that the government, ‘never gave [OBIP] a chance to see what it was doing’. Brian went further, questioning how:
…..just to cancel it mid-stream. That seems quite odd. They promised they were going to allow it to go through to its full time, and then they changed that suddenly. I think it was a disservice to the public that they cancelled it so early without studying it, to be honest. I don’t think they wanted to know [the results of the Pilot].
Keith shared that the cancellation impacted his life and capacity to trust in others so deeply that it changed how he approaches all his relationships: ‘Now I just don’t want to be in a relationship ever again (….) It’s because I feel like this Ontario government has kind of betrayed me in a way. I feel kind of betrayed’. Judith described how the cancellation – which she described as a broken promise – ‘makes your faith in human beings go a little bit sideways’.
Highlighting how the cancellation exacerbated already strenuous and mistrusting relationships with the state, Douglas reported irreparable damage to any feelings of trust that the Pilot may have once nurtured: ‘You’re dealing with people who have been lied to by every level of government (…) The level of trust is way gone and it won’t be there again. They’re lost forever in that muck’. Similarly, James shared that it would take a long time to rebuild trust in the state that was lost because of the cancellation.
Discussion and conclusion
In this article, we explored how participants’ experiences of OBIP laid bare the issues of existing social assistance programmes. We contend that scarcity, degradation, dehumanisation, and surveillance are not inevitable facets of income support programmes. More humane versions of support are possible. Our findings show how experiencing a new programme with fewer behavioural conditions and decreased monitoring and surveillance only further illuminated the degradation inherent to current neoliberalised welfare programmes in Ontario. The intrusion and lack of privacy while accessing OW and ODSP highlighted the construction of recipients as wasteful, untrustworthy, and less than human. The disparate power between recipients and those who administer and monitor the programmes was experienced by participants as humiliating, degrading, and dehumanising. By implementing – even temporarily – a more humane programme, participants experienced the degradation and dehumanisation of social assistance as preventable and unnecessary.
Our analysis highlights how the neoliberal rationality theorised by Foucault (Reference Foucault, Davidson and Burchell2008) is insidious within both the design and implementation of social assistance programmes in Ontario, as well as how OBIP helped participants to identify and challenge it. For example, in contrast to the market-focused success metrics centred on rapid labour market integration, the unconditional nature of OBIP payments was experienced by participants as both relieving and empowering. Greater financial stability afforded participants greater choice and control over their time, creating opportunities for many to invest in basic human needs such as relationships and projects with no ‘market’ return, like taking care of themselves, their families, and being engaged in their communities. OBIP created opportunities for participants to experience and imagine more humane income support systems beyond the neoliberalised status quo.
Participants’ narratives poignantly demonstrate that less intrusive and more dignified policy approaches to addressing income insecurity are possible should governments choose to implement them. In contrast to the dehumanising restrictive and punitive social assistance regulations, participants described how feeling trusted during OBIP generated a greater sense of confidence and reciprocity in their close relationships, communities, and with the state. The Pilot demonstrated the possibilities for more humane policy approaches. Paul stated this quite neatly when he explained:
Basic income was an oasis, it was so surreal, it wasn’t a mirage, out of the desolate sands there it was, it was tangible and really changed my life. I believe it would have gone on to change the culture and society. I was so surprised that our society did something like this.
The evidence we put forth in this article has important implications for the implementation of future basic income programmes. While there is potential for thoughtfully designed and implemented basic income programmes to foster trust in state institutions, the premature cancellation of OBIP suggested that the detrimental impacts of failing to fulfill time-bound Pilot programmes should not be dismissed. The instability and broken trust caused by the swiftly cancelled Pilot programme suggests the need for more stable, permanent solutions to addressing income insecurity.
For governments considering the development of permanent basic income programmes, this research has important implications for design and political feasibility. Our findings show that reduced conditionality and surveillance are key programme features that recipients associate with fostering trust and social solidarity. These positive outcomes can be attributed, in part, to OBIP’s design as a poverty reduction programme, which included relatively generous social assistance rates (Segal, Reference Segal2016; McDowell and Ferdosi, Reference McDowell and Ferdosi2021). Similar to Hamilton and Mulvale’s (Reference Hamilton and Mulvale2019) inquiry with OBIP participants, we found that OBIP’s adequate rates of payment were integral to addressing the scarcity experienced by recipients, along with the associated dehumanisation of poverty. Our findings also highlight that basic income schemes cannot address all facets of dehumanisation and degradation inherent to experiencing poverty. Although having more cash may have afforded participants access to essential goods in the short-term, structural barriers to, for example, affordable housing, medical care, education requires robust policy responses that cash transfers alone cannot address.
There are limitations to this study. This study did not attempt to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the OBIP, which should have been facilitated by provincial evaluators as part of the Pilot itself. Rather, this study attempts to address some of the evidence loss that came with the Pilot’s cancellation. The project used non-probability convenience sampling to recruit interview participants, which are appropriate for qualitative inquiries like this one. As with any small-scale qualitative project, our findings are not representative of recipients in the Hamilton-Brantford area or of all Pilot participants, and are not generalisable.
The interview guides did not focus explicitly on previous experiences of social assistance. The number of participants who nevertheless brought up their experiences of OW and ODSP in contrast to OBIP suggests this would be a rich area for further research. This could attend to nuances that reflect the differences in design, eligibility, and management of OW and ODSP. For example, it could explore how prioritising employment-based outcomes within social welfare programme philosophy naturally has disparate impacts within an unequal labour that has systematically discriminated against, for example, racialised people (Block and Galabuzi, Reference Block and Galabuzi2011), disabled people (Till et al., Reference Till, Leonard, Yeung and Nicholls2015), lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, Two-Spirit, and other gender and sexual minority people (Brennan et al., Reference Brennan, Halpenny and Pakula2022) in Canada.
There are a number of issues that we did not have the space to cover in-depth here but would be worthy of further investigation. There are important questions about how alternative forms of income support are portrayed in the media, and how this may serve to push back against the rise in certain quarters of a right-wing ‘populist zeitgeist’, (Mudde, Reference Mudde2004: 541) that has mobilised this discontent against both the welfare state and democratic institutions. The potential role of basic income in changing the nature of relationship to community and state was hinted at in our findings and is also ripe for further investigation, particularly given the nature of declining trust in government.
Acknowledgements
The authors extend their sincere gratitude to the individuals who received basic income and participated in interviews during the foundational research project that this report builds upon. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who provided insightful feedback to strengthen the article. This research project received financial support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Hamilton Community Foundation, McMaster University, and Carleton University. It is the product of a collaborative endeavor carried out in partnership with the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction.
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