Thank you, Madam Speaker. Firstly, I would like to acknowledge that the Department of ECE in income assistance does lots of great work, and we have probably one of the most generous income assistance programs in the country. I think the department even inherently recognizes some of the benefits of a basic income. During the pandemic, one of the first things we did is we payrolled people for three months to give them more guaranteed time to report. We also got rid of the productivity requirements such that they got their money whether they failed to show up for a meeting or whatnot. I believe the roots are there, but I believe we need to break out and look at what every department is doing and what the federal government is also doing to really make a proper guaranteed basic income. My question for the Minister of ECE is: as part of our income assistance review, will we conduct a feasibility assessment of a guaranteed basic income? Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Thank you, Member. Minister of ECE.
Thank you, Madam Speaker. I pretty much agree with everything the Member has said and earlier in his statement, as well. I will just answer the question. Are we going to conduct a review or a feasibility study for universal basic income? No. However, that is because I do think that the Income Assistance Program has a strong foundation and that we can build on it. In many ways, it's just a tweaking of a few rules here and there, and we have something that is very similar to what the Member is talking about. We have already made some of those changes, and he mentioned those, as well. He is doing my job for me today, so I think I will leave it at that and wait for the next question. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Numerous studies have said that the biggest issue for implementing a guaranteed basic income is actually jurisdictional; it's getting the federal money streams to line up with the provinces and territories. I know every time the federal government rolls out a new program, we in income assistance have to go change and see whether we are going to include it or not, is the first decision. Then we have to recalculate the seniors' subsidy; sometimes, pensions get involved; sometimes, income assistance gets involved. It causes this bureaucratic mess of programs not aligning. The federal government, this Liberal Caucus, has made a basic income one of their number one priorities. Our Arctic framework number one goal and the number one priority is ending poverty. I believe, when that framework comes out with lobbying, we could get it to be a guaranteed basic income. Is the Minister willing to write to the federal government and lobby for us to be a pilot project for rolling out a basic income?
I am not going to write to the federal Minister to ask that question. I am going to look into what we are doing, how we can do it better. When I have the conversations with the appropriate federal ministers and when I am on these FTP calls, I will have those types of conversations and promote the types of changes that we are looking at. The Member mentioned there are a number of different programs that we offer across the GNWT, across departments, and that the federal government offers, as well. Within the GNWT, part of the income assistance review is going to be looking at everything that is offered, what housing offers, what health offers, what ECE offers, because we need to move to a more streamlined approach. I think it will cut down on paperwork; it will make people's lives easier, and it will be more client-centred. I have no problem suggesting that the federal government does something similar, but it's a little difficult to get the federal government to change their programs just for us.
The Member mentioned that one of the biggest difficulties of implementing this is the federal government, but I think one of the biggest difficulties for implementing a guaranteed universal basic income is the amount of money. I think it's as simple as that. If we had $50-, $100-, $800-million to put towards a guaranteed basic income, we could use that money to solve a lot of problems. This is a very blunt instrument. Maybe we put a hundred million dollars into after-care for when people come back from treatment; they have a place to go where they know they can stay sober, and they can avoid all the issues that lead them back on the road to addictions. Then we can take another $100 million, and we can build economies in small communities. We can take another $100 million and do this. It's not as simple as just saying we want to do this. It's a lot of money, and I don't know if a blunt instrument like a universal basic income is something that would work necessarily in the territory, considering how different every community is.
I believe the problem with saying that it costs a lot of money is: we have not actually done the assessment to see what it costs, and we have not looked at the way all of these programs are working together and how much is already being spent. I personally believe we could actually lower income assistance if it meant we guaranteed the money for longer periods of time and with less bureaucracy. I heard the Minister of health the other day mention the idea of putting a seniors' portal such that all of the applications of funding for seniors is in one place, and I laughed because I know how impossible of a task that is. There are different pools of seniors' funding across multiple levels of government, not to mention pensions. Trying to bring one person to bring that all together is extremely difficult. It requires political will. As part of the income assistance, can I get a commitment from the Minister that he will not only look across departments what we're doing but also what the federal government is doing and roll that into the cost analysis.
Yes, we'll look at what everyone's doing. If we're going to review something, we're going to review the money that, a program that's solely about the money that people are getting, we're going to look at what money people are getting from every source. That includes the federal government.
Thank you, Minister. Final supplementary. Member for Yellowknife North.
Thank you, Madam Speaker. I've got a refusal to do a feasibility assessment. I've got a refusal to do a roadmap. Can I get something from the Minister that he can give me an idea of what we think it would cost because I honestly don't know? I don't know if there's already enough money that we could roll this out tomorrow or whether it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Can we do some preliminary costing, Madam Speaker?
Last year, about 4,000 people accessed income assistance. If we were to pay each one of those people the max amount that you can get on income assistance each year, it would be about $80 million. That's an extra $50 million on top of the $30 million that we spend now. If we did the real universal basic income where everyone in the territory regardless of income gets that amount, we're looking at $800 million. The very low end of this is $80 million. To the Member's point, if we spend money here, costs elsewhere go down. I get that. Same thing with education, but that doesn't mean that we have all this money to put into these things. I would love to put money into education right from prenatal all the way up to post-secondary. I think that would solve all of our problems in a generation. This would be utopia, but the fact is: there're needs now, and it's difficult to reallocate money that way. I'd be happy to sit down with the Member and have these discussions because income assistance is one of the areas that hasn't been thoroughly reviewed in a number of years, and it's one of the arguments that, by the end of this Assembly, I really want to make improvements to so that we can get to a system similar to what the Member is talking about. Thank you, Madam Speaker.
Thank you, Minister. Oral questions. Member for Kam Lake.
