Graphic by Valerie Thai

Canada is in the midst of a housing crisis, and one perpetuating factor is the skyrocketing cost of rent. Rent control is a type of provincial rent regulation law that limits rent increases. While every province and territory restricts the frequency of rent increases, only four provinces have some sort of policy that caps the percentage by which rent can increase. Although some provinces enacted a freeze on rent increases at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, only a couple extended the freeze as the pandemic continues. Here is a closer look at rent control policies across the country.

British Columbia

The B.C. government enacted a rent increase freeze at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Although the rent freeze came to an end on January 1, 2022, the Vancouver Tenants Union has advocated to reinstate the freeze since many tenants remain in precarious conditions due to the ongoing pandemic.

Manitoba

The Manitoba government’s rent freeze, a temporary measure first enacted in April 2020, has been extended until the end of 2023, but critics have concerns over the actual implications of this policy. The province’s Residential Tenancies Branch has the authority to approve ad hoc requests to increase rent—a power which they exercised 100 percent of the time during the 2019–2020 fiscal year, according to a document obtained by the Opposition NDP through a freedom of information request.

Ontario

Much like B.C. and Manitoba, the Ontario government passed legislation in October 2020 to freeze rent until the end of 2021. Organizations such as the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario and the East York chapter of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) have noted the importance of reinstating the rent freeze.

Quebec

Although the Tribunal administratif du logement has a system for landlords and tenants to agree on a rent increase, the process is not legally required. Moreover, tenant advocates, including the Regroupement des comités logement et associations de locataires du Québec and the Comité d’action de Parc-Extension, note that the power imbalance between tenant and landlord can result in inequitable rent increases, and are lobbying for better laws to protect tenants in Quebec.

Nova Scotia

In November 2020, the government of Nova Scotia passed rent control legislation due to the state of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a temporary measure though: it first expired in late 2021, but the two percent annual cap has been extended until the end of 2023 as a result of the work of community organizers, housing advocates, and tenants.

Prince Edward Island

P.E.I.’s unit-based, rather than tenant-based, rent control means that the amount of rent increase should be the same regardless of whether the property changes hands. But housing advocates, such as the P.E.I. Fight for Affordable Housing, note a lack of systemic accountability that can result in unlawful rent increases. Moreover, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation found that average rent hikes in 2020 were well above the rent increase guideline.

Graphic by Valerie Thai

The average grocery bill for Canadians has increased by 170 percent over the last two decades, according to Canada’s Food Price Report 2021. This is especially so over the last two years—since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, Canadians have seen a major bump in their grocery bills.

Food production issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have touched every province and territory in Canada. The pandemic caused border and facility closures, labour shortages (including brief restrictions on temporary foreign workers), and shifted consumer demand from foodservice to food retail as restaurants grappled with shutdowns. New safety measures and procedures, such as physical distancing, meant processing plants were operating below capacity and efficiency.

Meanwhile, the price of oil was down in 2020, in turn lowering energy and distribution costs for food products. However, this weakened the Canadian dollar, shooting import costs up.

Atlantic Canada

Provinces on the Atlantic coast are highly vulnerable to systemic variables, as most food production and processing is done outside the region. It’s expected that the Atlantic region will continue to see costs rising above the national average. One food bank in Charlottetown, P.E.I., reported a 10 percent user increase in May 2021, up from the previous year, due to swelling food and gas prices.

British Columbia

B.C. agricultural producers have suffered from severe drought and wildfires over the past two years. BC Cattlemen’s Association estimated that the province lost approximately 3.5 million hectares of land to forest fires in the last five years, meaning cattle had less green space to graze. While B.C. farmers would typically purchase feed from the Prairies to compensate, those provinces, too, were experiencing dry conditions. It could be three to five years before the beef industry sees some resolution.

The Prairies

Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba all saw record heat levels and little rain in 2021. While some droughts are cyclical, last year’s dry conditions were particularly unusual, exacerbated by climate change. With less supply, processors must pay more for their inputs, especially wheat and canola—an expense destined to catch up with consumers.

Ontario and Quebec

Despite the hefty price of meat, residents in Ontario and Quebec have decreased their meat budget the least among Canadians at 46 percent compared to Albertans’ 57 percent. Ahead of Thanksgiving 2021, a Toronto butcher estimated turkey was up a dollar per pound compared to 2020. A CTV news report said retailers are taking the brunt of consumers’ frustrations. In Montreal, the two-dollar increase of a six-pack of yogurt ($5.99 to $7.99) has forced some customers to skip the product altogether.

The North

Food prices in the North are so high that one Inuk woman, Kyra Flaherty, started using TikTok to bring awareness to the exorbitant costs and their impact. Despite a federal food subsidy program, northerners still face food insecurity every day, owing to long-distance shipping expenses. This issue existed long before the pandemic.

In addition, traditional food sources are threatened by climate change: animals’ migration patterns are changing; travel required for hunting, trapping, and fishing are limited because of ice made unstable by warming temperatures; and low water levels make canoe trips difficult.

Photo by Michelle Spollen

Back in April, a friend and I had met up to grab smoothies at a café before going on a lockdown walk.

We each ordered, and I pulled out my debit card to pay. “Sorry, cash only,” said the woman behind the counter. I stared blankly at her, then my friend. “I don’t have any cash,” I said; my friend confirmed that she didn’t either. We apologized to the woman, then made our way to another café that took cards.

Even before the pandemic, Canada had been trending toward becoming a cash-free society: cash transactions have been declining steadily since 2011, when contactless debit and credit (i.e. tap) first gained popularity. While two-thirds of Canadians reported using contactless credit or debit in 2018, 90 percent of unbanked people (meaning those who have no relationship to a bank) report using cash.

Since the start of the pandemic, many businesses started banning cash transactions due to concerns about it being a nesting ground for the COVID-19 virus. A new report by FIS Global, an international FinTech company that uses technology to better engage in financial markets, states that since the COVID-19 pandemic began, cash transactions have declined by more than half. It also states that FIS Global expects cash to be used for only four percent of in-store payments by 2024.

It seems like very few banked people I know use cash these days. The friend that I had been walking with said she hadn’t taken cash out of an ATM since March 2020, before the pandemic—something I realized was true for me too, after thinking about it.

With what seems like the imminent death of cash, sped up by the COVID-19 pandemic, I wonder if the things we give cash to, being mainly small businesses and each other, will also disappear. As some of us adapt, who might get left behind?

The history of widespread cash use is a relatively short one. Standardized currency was first implemented in some regions of the world in the Axial Age, from 800 to 300 BCE, then again after periods of disuse in East Asia and Europe during the 15th century. Before its employment, people would use whatever was relatively abundant around them as a surrogate, like metal nails or cod, or would run up personal credits with each other’s businesses.

The second attempt to introduce a mass standardized currency coincided with the advent of capitalism in the 16th century. Adam Smith, a prominent economist of the 18th century, believed that it would be advantageous for a country to bring everyday transactions into a uniform currency, and to abandon the practice of mercantilism, which involved the crown accumulating as much bullion (gold or silver, before coining) as it could.

As the colonial exploits of Spain and Portugal brought massive amounts of silver into the European economy, it became more possible to regulate currency, and to remunerate everyone with the same reward. Near the same time, standardized paper money, backed by bullion, became more common, and was another means to regulate transactions.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, central banks increasingly assumed control of printing paper money.
In Canada, Indigenous people had longstanding practices of trading, using items of copper, precious metals, and furs as the basis of a currency. Early settlers used a variety of items as currency, including playing cards with royal stamps, French and Spanish silver coins, the British pound, Nova Scotian money (a currency used in Nova Scotia until 1871), American money and “army bills,” before a standardized Canadian currency eventually became more circulated in the decades after confederation.

The many types of currencies meant that money had many forms up until the 20th century. Money then became pretty standardized, with cash as the main method of payment, until two new forms of payment were introduced in Canada: credit in 1968 and debit in 1988. It took a while for debit to catch on, though, and it wasn’t until 1994 that it was offered by all banks and accepted by retailers in every province.
By 2009, however, cash accounted for only 54 percent of transactions, and this dropped to 33 percent by 2017.

The question then is, who uses cash these days? In the U.S., 55 percent of small businesses don’t accept credit cards. In a study conducted in Canada in 2008, 93 percent of businesses accepted debit, while 92 percent accepted credit, and all accepted cash.

Many small businesses prefer cash because they don’t incur processing surcharges. Salon SLiJ, a longtime hairdressing salon in Montreal, used to accept cash and e-transfers but began accepting only e-transfers during the waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oleg, the manager of the salon, who prefers to go by first name only, says that, like many salons through the pandemic, “our sales were down more than fifty percent.”

Nikhil Tangirala, an urban planner who lives in Montreal, says that he stopped using cash during the pandemic due to hygiene reasons. “I don’t use much cash anyway, but I definitely began using less during COVID,” he says. “I stopped going to my local depanneur,” which is cash-predominant and accepts debit with surcharges, he adds.

Beyond small businesses, those who predominantly use cash tend to be those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale. In Canada, three percent of Canadians, the equivalent of over one million people, are unbanked and 15 percent of Canadians, or nearly five million people, are underbanked, meaning that they have no or limited access to credit and debit for a variety of reasons, such as having a poor credit score or living in a location underserviced by banks. Correspondingly, proportional to those who are unbanked or underbanked, 15 percent of Canadians report being heavy cash users.

Étienne, who prefers to go by first name only, is an unbanked person living in Montreal who is also unhoused. His primary income is obtained through asking people on the streets for money. “It was tough, it was really tough,” Étienne says, in reference to his income during the pandemic. “It’s been tough now too, but it’s been better since COVID … More and more people use debit cards now instead of cash … they say ‘sorry, I only have debit.’”

As of 2019, cash transactions accounted for 21 percent of all transaction volume, and 80 percent of Canadians reported making at least one cash transaction per week. Of those 80 percent, over half reported giving cash to people (rather than using it for purchases) through the week.

As cash is increasingly fading out, a new player in the game, cryptocurrency, has been entering circulation, digital coin by digital coin. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, have no physical form at all and can only be used for online transactions, which are processed in a decentralized fashion by brokers who cash in on every trade. Cryptocurrencies typically have finite quantities of money which ensures that the currency doesn’t lose value. This differs from physical currencies, which are protected by interest rates.

The latest figures available on cryptocurrency usage in Canada are from 2019, when it was reported that nearly four percent of Canadians were using bitcoin, and close to one percent were using the next most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum. In 2016, 64 percent of Canadians were aware of Bitcoin, and this percentage jumped to 85 percent in 2017.

While cryptocurrency circulation is growing, increasing pressure on central banks to create their own digital currencies to facilitate transactions, in their current private form they present significant barriers to access. For one, the limited quantity of cryptocurrencies mean that they are very expensive; at the time of writing, for example, one bitcoin is equivalent to $47,784 CAD. Another major issue is that cryptocurrency transactions are expensive, with bitcoin transactions costing nearly $60 in April 2021.

Cryptocurrencies also are also uniquely digital currencies, meaning that they are again reserved for those who choose or are able to process electronic payments. Even though there were nearly 900 Bitcoin ATMs in Canada as of 2020, these only service people who want to trade in physical currency for bitcoin, not the other way around.

Professor Matt Tiessen researches digital economy at Ryerson University. He thinks that cryptocurrencies are on the rise because they can potentially circulate money quicker. “Money likes to move,” he says, “and the liquidity of cryptocurrencies permits that.” At the same time, he agrees that the cost and means of processing private cryptocurrencies present significant barriers of access. “It’s prohibitive,” he says.
Tiessen is wary, however, of the concept of a central bank-produced digital currency, thinking that it could create significant and novel annexations of economic control. “[A national cryptocurrency] would create a system of surveillance and power,” Tiessen says. “Cash just sits around.”

“Part of the allure for government in creating a national cryptocurrency would be that it could be quickly distributed, and then also expire, which would ensure that it was always being spent.” (This comes up while he is speaking about a potential Universal Basic Income issued by the government.) A national digital currency could then side-step some of the barriers to access of private cryptocurrencies, but could also reduce autonomy. “It could limit your financial freedom,” Tiessen says.

As we slowly transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic, into a version of life that involves touching, hugging, filtering between stores and homes, and feeling near to the people and things we care about, where will we go with cash? Back before the loonie, we had lots of different forms of money, but these had widespread circulation within localized communities, and, within these communities, had relative accessibility, despite general inequality.

Contactless tap might run in the same vein of magic as buying physical goods with invisible currency, or of “mining” intangible bounty. Cash, though, links us to a current, a common denominator, of which we are all a part.

“Sharps container” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

New Brunswick’s Health Minister, Dorothy Shephard, announced in February 2021 that the provincial government plans to implement overdose prevention sites this year.

But Debby Warren, executive director at Ensemble Greater Moncton, wants the government to work toward a robust set-up that allows people dealing with addiction to leave with more than just a surface-level solution.

Ensemble Greater Moncton is an organization that seeks to alleviate social challenges by reducing harm in relation to drug use.

“Unless we address their past trauma, it’s just a Band-Aid,” says Warren. “We really have to get to the root.”

The community stakeholders committee Warren is part of has been trying to open an overdose prevention site during their two active years but had to stop because they lacked funding. She says because of the funding from the government’s initiative, the committee can continue their project, but it needs to be done right.

She hopes that one day there will be nurse practitioners or primary care providers at the sites which could allow people dealing with addiction to access health care they wouldn’t normally have access to, such as having someone who could understand their past trauma.

Warren does not want the overdose prevention sites to be done on a shoestring budget. Prevention is key. If someone with an addiction delays getting health care for serious infections or abscesses, they can turn into something more critical later on. According to Warren, it costs taxpayers $55,000 to treat endocarditis (an infection of the heart valve) or $35,000 for skin or bacterial infections, but if someone goes to the overdose prevention site for a clean needle, which could prevent infection, it’s only 14 cents.

“[The government] is planning on opening sites around the province,” says Warren. “Sometimes we try to skimp, and this is a population who have been skimped [on] all along.”

People with addictions face discrimination in the healthcare system where they are not always treated respectfully because they’re often flagged as “seeking drugs,” she says.
An overdose prevention site is a place for people to use substances where there are new and sterile resources for them. Warren says that while a lot of the work is harm reduction, it’s also about preventing HIV, Hepatitis C, and other blood-borne infections.

In the beginning, the sites will be basic and not have “all the bells and whistles.” But once the need is demonstrated, the end goal would be to have a centre where people with addictions can get counselling and health care, as well as stabilization and a better quality of life.

PHOTOS COURTESY BLOOD TIES FOUR DIRECTIONS CENTRE

A 240-square-foot house may not seem like an ideal living situation, but for some people who are unhoused, tiny homes can be a creative solution tackling a small part of the issue.

According to a 2018 Canadian government report, approximately 35,000 Canadians experience some form of homelessness on any given night, and the Territories face unique challenges including extremely high building costs and a shortage of vacant housing. Blood Ties Four Directions Centre, a non-profit organization offering HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C support in Whitehorse, Yukon, started one tiny home in 2012 when funding for housing was a pervasive issue amongst their clients, as well as discrimination and inadequate/insufficient housing types.

“It’s really hard to help a person get on Hepatitis C treatment and care when they don’t know where they’re going to sleep that night,” says Patricia Bacon, former executive director for Blood Ties. Bacon thought, why not start small? “We wanted to be able to do something within the scope of our agency,” she says.

From 2012 to 2016, the one, 240-square-foot tiny home served as transitional housing for five clients. Then it moved into storage while Blood Ties searched for a permanent lot. After securing funding and getting a zoning change, they were finally able to build four more homes creating the Steve Cardiff Tiny Home Community. (Steve Cardiff was a Yukon Territory MLA and supporter of Blood Ties who died in a car crash in 2011.)

Since opening in January of 2019, 10 people have lived in the homes—two people have stayed since 2019, says Brontë Renwick-Shields, executive director for Blood Ties. One client, who struggled with chronic homelessness for many years, found stability in a tiny home, says Bacon.

“That is a hugely successful outcome.”

But the homes aren’t for everyone—some people have challenges with collecting excessive belongings, something which can offer a sense of security, and others need 24/7 support, says Bacon. The homes are not suited to those with limited mobility either. The Steve Cardiff homes have sleeping lofts accessed by stairs, making it difficult for those with mobility issues.

“The tiny houses definitely work for folks, but we also need to have mixed models because one style of housing doesn’t work for everybody,” says Renwick-Shields.

But the idea has caught on. Tiny home communities now house veterans in Calgary’s Homes for Heroes development and people in Carcross/Tagish First Nation, Yukon.

For Blood Ties, the project is a success—even if it is only a small one. “I think we have had a lot of clients that have appreciated having their own little house to call home,” says Renwick-Shields.

Photo by goodiesfirst, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Why people love it
Approximately 4.4 million Canadians (about one in eight households) experienced food insecurity in 2018, according to Statistics Canada. Token programs at various restaurants aim to fight hunger by encouraging patrons to buy low-priced tokens which can then be handed out to someone in need and redeemed for a meal or snack. One example of such a pay-it-forward system is The Nook Espresso Bar and Lounge in Halifax. Since January 2018, the café offers a $10 sandwich or a $7 coffee–bagel combo for free with a token. Tokens are handed out on the street and distributed by community organizations, but if someone doesn’t have a token, they can buy one upfront ($5 for a sandwich or $2 for a coffee and bagel). Similar programs exist in Vancouver and Edmonton.

What’s the problem
Small businesses are picking up where governments failed to mitigate a public health issue. Programs like these provide surface solutions, but food insecurity is rooted in income inadequacy and poor infrastructure (for example, the lack of affordable grocery outlets and accessible transportation for those living in food deserts). Patterns of hunger also point to systemic racism; studies have shown that the highest rates of food insecurity are found among Black and Indigenous households. Inequitable policies create the problem and the token programs are only a Band-
Aid solution.
Tokens help make space for those struggling to cover their basic needs amidst rising food costs, but healthy communities are hardly built on bagels. While a warm breakfast could help restore colour to a person’s face after a night on the streets, a booth in the corner isn’t the same as affordable housing for the homeless. Similarly, a café can provide access to clean washrooms and sharps containers for drug users, but those are not substitutes for safe injection sites and addictions services. It is important to recognize that chronic hunger is compounded by problems that exceed the scope of token programs.
Nutrition is a human right. Everyone deserves the security of being able to predict their next meal. Charity doesn’t provide this. Furthermore, giving tokens instead of cash implies that people experiencing poverty can’t make decisions about their own spending, writes food activist Peter Driftmier in his critique of token programs for the online publication The Mainlander.

Possible solutions
Hold elected officials accountable to their promise to end hunger, as laid out in the 2019 Food Policy for Canada and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Advocate for policies that promote an equal standard of living across the socioeconomic spectrum, including a livable minimum wage, designated affordable housing and improving public transit in low-income neighborhoods to help those living in food deserts. Donating time or money to organizations working directly with people facing homelessness or addiction, and supporting initiatives to strengthen local food systems through community gardens and affordable produce markets are other ways to build towards a society in which no one is forced to choose between paying bills or buying groceries.

PHOTO COURTESY CHILDCARE IS ESSENTIAL

A few years ago, Kisa MacIsaac, an early childhood educator (ECE) and mother of three in Winnipeg, tried to calculate the feasibility of putting three children in childcare for the summer. At 70 dollars per day, she “would have been working for nothing, anyways,” she says.

She ended up taking the summer off while her husband’s salary carried them through, but she knows that many others aren’t as lucky. Although Manitoba’s childcare fees are the second lowest in the country, “for many it’s still very, very expensive, especially if you have two or three children,” she says.

The lack of access to affordable childcare, especially during a global pandemic, when many people around the country have lost their jobs, was striking to MacIsaac. As government leaders began discussing what school would look like in the time of COVID-19, MacIsaac heard no mention of childcare. That’s why she joined a group of parents, ECEs, and community members to form Childcare is Essential, a Manitoba-based group advocating for publicly funded, high-quality daycare in the province.

When brainstorming a name, MacIsaac says, “The messaging that kept coming through is the words ‘childcare is essential.’” So, they went with it. Through weekly Zoom meetings, they planned campaigns and activities, ultimately mobilizing community members at a rally in late August in front of the Minister of Families, Heather Stefanson’s, office.

Members aren’t sure why affordable childcare isn’t on the provincial government’s priority list. Studies show that for every dollar invested in early childhood education, the payback is anywhere from six to 12 dollars. An investment in childcare, then, is an investment in an entire community.

There’s on-the-ground evidence to suggest this, too. In 2012, the provincial government added an early child development centre, Lord Selkirk Park Child Care Centre, and family resource centre in a social housing complex in northern Winnipeg. Using a learning approach specialized for under-resourced families, Healthy Child Manitoba, Manidoo Gi-Miini Gonaan, and Red River College studied the centre and found that children in the program made considerable gains in language development. Parents also reported multiple benefits, from financial security, to having time to work or go back to school, to developing trusting relationships with ECEs.

“If it wasn’t for the daycare, I wouldn’t have made it … I wouldn’t have gone to school. I wouldn’t have been working; I would still be on welfare,” one participant wrote online.

MacIsaac says she sees similar cases at the non-profit early learning and childcare program where she works. Families living below the poverty line receive a subsidy—a two-parent family with two preschool-aged children needs to make below $22,504 to receive the maximum subsidy. The extra time and money can give them opportunities to find new jobs or start saving to pay off loans or move into a nicer home. But as soon as they’re making a little more money, “their childcare subsidy gets clawed back and suddenly they can’t afford their childcare anymore,” she says.

In March, the government of Manitoba set aside $18 million to help ECEs open their own childcare centres at home or in the community in response to the COVID-19 childcare centre closures. But, MacIsaac says, “That’s not an exciting opportunity for me at all. I work in an extremely high-quality program with an amazing team.” It makes sense—evidence shows that on average, in North America, quality of care is higher in non-profit childcare centres.

And that’s what Childcare is Essential is fighting for. MacIsaac says success for the group looks like high-quality, universally accessible childcare with trained ECEs for anyone who needs—or wants—a space for their child.

“It sounds cheesy to be like ‘the children are our future,’ but they literally are, and anything we can do to help children in their early years is going to help everyone in the long term.”

“Smile! You’re on fare evader camera.” Such is the message of the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) ad campaign, which was rolled out in May 2019. The campaign follows a scandal that broke a few months earlier, when Toronto’s auditor general released a report estimating that the TTC had lost upwards of $60 million from fare evasion. It inspired an entire genre of articles that focus on describing the different ways that people manage to skip fares, often including photos and videos as public shaming. The bottom line is: your fellow riders, unlike you, are riding for free— and you’re paying the price.

Both the report and the ad campaign sparked their own iterations of an age-old debate: whose fault is it when public transit fails? The question pokes at a bruise: transit has long been a comically sore spot for Torontonians, who’ve been waiting for a much-promised relief line, intended to provide an alternative to the city’s overflowing Yonge line, since before the city’s first subway route was built in 1954. The transit system is so bad and frequently delayed that transit delays have practically become a part of Torontonian identity—but Canada’s largest metropolis isn’t alone in the issue.

As it turns out, Torontonians’ transit grievances are not only older than transit itself, but also endemic to Canada’s national approach to public transit. Overcrowded trains, late buses, crumbling infrastructure, and infinitely delayed construction projects seem to be recurring problems for Canadian cities. Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Winnipeg all have the same symptoms—and the fare-evasion rhetoric to go with it.

What Canadian transit woes have in common is a substantial lack of federal funding and supervision. When funding is earmarked for public transit, it is usually earmarked for the broader issue of infrastructure—a term which means the money may go toward public transit, but may also go toward building or maintaining highways, meaning that local transit commissions still have to fight for their share of the funding. Cities throughout Canada are facing the same problems and symptoms, because they are facing the systematic issue that Canada’s transit economy is built for cars and private transportation—but they are having to face it alone. That leaves transit planning to municipal and provincial governments, making transit funding a deeply partisan issue that depends on the election cycle.

Toronto’s relief line has been the subject of so many different proposals, many of them tied to elections, that they’ve been compiled into a book. The most recent iteration of these antics is Premier Doug Ford’s decision to shelve the line altogether in favour of a different route that would conveniently take riders all the way to a casino he would build in an already accessible and scarcely populated neighbourhood. (The casino plan has since been scrapped.)

There have been additions, even in recent years, like the UP Express connecting Toronto’s downtown to the airport, which originally flopped and then became a commuter success after slashing its fare in half. But even so, the system is failing to keep up with the city’s rapid population growth, leaving large areas sorely underserved. Poorer neighbourhoods receive substantially less service, leading to substantially longer, more stressful, and overcrowded commutes. This substantial burden makes transit least accessible to those who need it the most. When Presto, the Greater Toronto Area’s (GTA) universal transit access card that the province began rolling out in 2007 in an effort to make public transit more seamless, first started selling discounted fares for low-income people tied to Ontario’s disability programme, they found that half of those passes went entirely unused because it was very difficult to access.

Inaccessibility is perhaps theTTC’s most important problem, but it’s not its only one. Public transit advocates like TTC riders point towards aging infrastructure as one of many causes of the system’s frequent and long delays, which have been estimated to cost the city between $7 and $11 billion in productivity—including wages for people who weren’t able to work as many hours as they had planned. New infrastructure is also a problem: the Presto card is now infamously prone to glitches. The cards frequently fail to function, leaving riders no choice but to evade fares or let their bus leave without them. The system continues to grow more expensive to the province, which has now spent well upwards of $1 billion trying to implement it.

Despite these issues, the public service has only become more expensive: the monthly metropass was among the five most expensive in the world as of 2017, and its cost has only gone up since then. As the cost of transit becomes accessible to fewer and fewer people, the TTC ad campaign pulls on a lot of heartstrings: the TTC runs mostly on fare collection, and so the $60 million loss is an important cause of the system’s shortcomings. “I hear from residents daily who are frustrated by the cost of fare evasion,” TTC Chair Jaye Robinson says on the TTC website. “Riders who choose not to pay their fares are impacting our ability to deliver transit service to the entire city.”

But Robinson’s approach, which is endlessly recycled for clickbait articles, individualizes a systemic problem. TheTTC has the third biggest ridership of any North American transit system, yet it receives the least amount of subsidies, relying almost entirely on fares to continue functioning. Experts have for years pointed to this fact as the starting point for the vicious cycle by which low-quality service begets increased fare and vice-versa.

To say that these frustrations have gone entirely unanswered would be wrong: many transit systems have responded to the increasingly popular gripes with fare evasions through increased penalties. Toronto has recently hired more fare inspectors. Montreal is seeing widespread calls for a comprehensive audit and an increase in fare inspectors to go along with it. Transit coverage in Vancouver frequently follows the same path.

This goes hand-in-hand with coverage of the transit crisis that puts the blame on fare evasions, like an article on CityNews Calgary that points towards fare evaders “cheating” the transit system. With this kind of coverage, the blame for a systemic issue on a national scale that has been shifted onto provincial and municipal governments gets shifted even further onto individuals.

It also ignores a core purpose of public transit: to provide mobility, and thus access to healthcare, work, education, and other facets of life, to those who don’t use private transportation.

Advocates oppose raising fares and resent the increased funding allocated to fare inspection. A fine in Toronto can cost a whopping $425; in Vancouver, where fare evasion fines have been found to put youth in debt, you’d be looking at $173. In both cases, critics have pointed out, fare evasion will cost you more than a parking violation.

Increased policing in transit has been a controversial move, as it also increases opportunities for police brutality. This was the subject of the mass transit protest in New York in October 2019. It puts people of colour at a higher risk of encountering police brutality; it actively punishes people who can’t afford the fare but need to commute, thus making medical appointments, work, and other necessities even less accessible. At the same time, it spends money on fare inspectors’ salaries that could instead be put toward making the system more accessible.

And this is if the fare collection system works: for Canada’s showy but often-glitchy fare cards, that’s not a guarantee, and people throughout the country often find themselves facing fines after having already paid the fare.

“Municipalities don’t have that many options for [public transit] funding, unfortunately, under our system,” former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian told the Globe and Mail about the city’s 2015 vote on a 0.5 percent increase in tax sales to cover transportation infrastructure renewal. This “last-ditch attempt,” as the Globe and Mail called it, at giving TransLink, the authority responsible for transportation in Metro Vancouver, a functioning budget, was overwhelmingly rejected. The only other option to provide more funding, a hike in property taxes, was, again in the Globe and Mail’s words, “politically unsavoury” for the incumbent mayor.

In 2015, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities requested that Ottawa grant Canadian cities at least $1 billion in the yearly budget earmarked for new infrastructure spending. In 2017, their request was granted— a sure victory for city mayors, but not necessarily for transit advocates.

“There was this consensus that the majority of transportation planning and funding should be oriented toward accommodating more cars,” Victoria Transport Policy Institute director Todd Litman told the cbc. “What it boils down to is that it’s much easier for local governments to get funding for a highway improvement or new bridge than it is for a public transit project, even if public transit is the more rational investment.”

Public transportation is an investment that often requires a lot of money up front, and a lot of time to build before people can see the results—less traffic, faster and less stressful commutes, easier access to neighbourhoods throughout the city. What Canada’s lack of a federal public transportation policy does is pin this deeply necessary but controversial issue on municipal and provincial governments, allowing for it to be taken hostage by local party politics.

The poverty-shaming rhetoric that a lot of fare evasion clickbait adopts feeds into this. It pits people who use public transit and those whose interest it is to improve public transit and make it more accessible to all against each other. It makes the failure of public transit systems seem like an individual failure, a moral failure on the part of those who can’t pay their way. It ensures that Canadians continue dealing with chronic public transit underfunding simply by isolating cities and people from one another and pretending the shortcoming is personal rather than systemic.

illustration by Chantal Bennett

Monday evenings at FreshCo always carry an air of anxiety, but one particular evening was accented by a white couple with Apple watches. They were behind my mother and I in the checkout line, leaning against the conveyor belt and communicating through grimaces. Every time the woman sighed, my stomach tensed. The tension was three-fold, consisting of my social anxiety, my assumption that we look like fools, and the whiteness of the couple. They looked like the kind of couple that drive a Honda Civic and live in a studio apartment downtown. They looked nice enough, like the Game of Thrones smiling-Daenerys meme.

My mother grouped items by store. Most were to be price-matched from No Frills, some from Food Basics, and one from Walmart. The vegetable oil was the best deal from No Frills, almost half-off. Other things like a pineapple, onions, black beans, and lettuce were a difference of a dollar or a few cents. But it made a difference; I get that now more than ever. A couple dollars can be the difference between paying rent and not paying rent. Having something small to save, and having nothing. When I was younger I’d be frustrated hopping from store to store just to save a couple dollars because I didn’t understand the cumulative effects of it. I also figured there was no point expending that extra labour. I haven’t quite cancelled that argument yet, but I’m willing to concede for the time being.

It was work for my mother, going through all of the flyers and comparing prices across the board. It’s work to stand in the line and point to each item. It takes energy to wait and be waited on. My social anxiety always frames my identity in terms of other people. I figure we must look like a poor single mother with her 13-year-old daughter (I look a lot younger than I am), trying to scrape by as best we can with a batch of flyers and time on our hands. Some of that is true, but thinking about it uses energy too. The tension comes when I feel like my mother and I have to prove ourselves. If I wanted to, I could explain our entire life story to the woman’s impatient partner.

I even imagine what I would say. I would explain that we can’t store hop because we don’t own a vehicle. I would explain we don’t own a vehicle because we can’t afford one. I would explain why my mother is so picky with prices, because she can’t afford not to be, because she grew up with a resourceful Indo-Guyanese immigrant father who was impoverished long enough to know he never wanted to end up like that again, nor burden my illiterate grandmother and his own children with financial issues.

I would stick some stats in there for the sake of science. According to research by the Canadian Women’s Foundation, South Asian women make less than half the amount of what South Asian men make. Racialized single mothers in Canada are more at risk of poverty than single dads and nuclear families.

But survival is not about knowing those stats. My mom kept the anxiety of falling into poverty in the back of her mind when she became single over 18 years ago, but she pushed through. It was even harder because, due to her financial dependence on my father, she held little of her own monetary agency. We moved from place to place, trying to find something that fit our needs and that wasn’t over budget. South Asian communities like ours make up 19 percent of the population of low-income neighbourhoods in Toronto.
We moved to Parkdale over 10 years ago, when South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities visibly populated apartment complexes. Though there are still many of these people left, there are also a lot more white middle-class families inhabiting houses and renovated apartments. We were lucky to move into the neighbourhood when we did, locking into a cheaper rental unit before gentrification jacked up the housing prices and overpriced vegan stores created the exclusive culture of “Vegandale.”

I’m the people-watching type, especially when shopping. When I watch certain people grocery shop, I can see how little attention most pay to choosing the perfect vegetables and fruits. I see it when I grocery shop with my middle-class friends. From what I’ve observed, middle-aged women of colour almost always spend more time picking out grocery items. My mom is always extra focused, because she is so keen on getting the most for her dollar. She often gets me to check for spots of mould on fruits, read ingredient labels, and double-check expiry dates.

Most single dads (and, of course, men in general) work and earn more than single moms. This is true for my father as well, who provided me with a different perspective on finance. He also possesses that Indo-Guyanese vigilance with his money, but it’s because he works a well-paying job and has an abundance of funds to invest. He’s never price-matched. Once, we went to No Frills together and the woman in front of us at the checkout was price-matching a few items. My dad grew impatient, shifting from foot to foot, like a bull before it charges. It was then I realized he’d never had to think about price-matching. If he really needs something it doesn’t matter if it’s on sale. He values quickness over a few dollars in savings, and that quickness is something many can’t afford when budgets are tight.

Living in Doug Ford’s Ontario is becoming increasingly precarious for the lower-middle class. OSAP’s tuition grants were the only way I could afford to go to university in the first place, and now, for many, those grants are halved. Ford’s wage freezes for public sector workers deeply impact communities like mine and families who are already struggling to support themselves. On top of this, grocery prices are climbing, with an up to 3.5 percent total increase in food prices expected in 2019, according to Canada’s Food Report, put together by Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph. The rising cost of vegetables is particularly concerning for me and many families that want to eat healthily. Many provinces, like Ontario, are also facing a projection of above-average food price increases this year, with Ontario seeing the highest increase so far at 2.7 percent. With significant cuts and freezes, it’s going to be even more important for my mom and I to save where we can.

The older I get, the more anxiety I face when shopping. I become exhausted in a matter of minutes. It’s not that I’m always actively thinking about not being able to afford things, it’s that the idea of it is always lurking in the back of my mind, inconveniently piggybacking on my tendency to feel overwhelmed in crowded spaces. I feel like life’s biggest amateur, a burden to an otherwise easy-to-navigate system. But I know it’s not true, and that the system is designed in such a way that I’m going to feel left behind even if I work hard. I know that the extra time we take comparing prices, holding off on expensive purchases, and checking our bank accounts is valid, necessary, and not our struggle alone.

The receipt told us that price-matching saved my mom and I 20 dollars. My mom exclaimed this to me as we loaded the groceries, the woman’s partner side-eyeing us. “That’s really good,” I exclaimed in return, and I didn’t even look at the couple before we left.

The cancellation of Ontario’s basic income project not only violates our obligation as a society to ensure economic security for all. It also breaches the ethical obligations we have to those participating in research, and underscores the need for a multi-faceted research methodology in designing better income security programs.

The new Conservative government in Ontario led by Doug Ford has cancelled the Ontario Basic Income Pilot—an initiative of the former Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne.

The pilot promised a comparison of those receiving a monthly basic income in test sites in three areas of Ontario with those who did not. The research was aimed at ascertaining “whether a basic income helps people living on low incomes better meet their basic needs and improve their education, housing, employment and health.”

The Liberals put their faith in an evaluation design that approximated a randomized controlled trial. In research like this, a discrete variable (the basic income payment) is received only by those in an “experimental” group, and a comparison is done with a similar “control” group (who do not get the payment) to see if different, and potentially better, outcomes accrue to the experimental group.

My colleague at the University of Manitoba, Prof. Gregory Mason, recently made the made the case that it was time to abandon the project.

He argued that because the basic income pilot encountered several practical problems when setting up its evaluation methods as a more or less “pure” randomized controlled trial, there was scant valid and useful data to be garnered from the project.

Moral, ethical consequences

But, respectfully, I believe that a great deal was lost with the cancellation of the project. The moral and ethical implications of scrapping the program must not be ignored.

Some 4,000 recipients of benefits in the pilot—the members of the “experimental” group—are now without the financial support that was promised to them.

This abrupt and unexpected cancellation of the pilot by the Ford government amounts to a profound moral violation of the responsibility we have towards those who participate in research. This obligation is consistent with, but also goes beyond, the responsibility of narrow ethical research techniques as approved by research ethics boards.

The negative impact on those people has been extensively reported in the media, including in the pilot sites of Hamilton, Thunder Bay and Lindsay.On the campaign trail in the spring of 2018, Ford committed to allowing the three-year basic income pilot run its course. But Ford broke the promise less than two months after he was elected. The cancellation was an act of bad faith on the part of the new government to Ontario voters, and more importantly to the individuals already receiving basic income payments.

While these stories may be anecdotal, they describe real and significant hardships for those who had been promised a chance for a better life. The cancellation of both the pilot project, and of data collection and analysis from the three pilot communities, is a profound failure to uphold an ethical and moral obligation to research participants.

This ethical breach is not the fault of the team of academics and program evaluators who were in place to carry out the research. The blame must be assigned to their new political masters.

More than one tool in research toolkits

Prof. Mason’s argument suggests that the only worthwhile research design for the Ontario basic income pilot was a randomized controlled trial (RCT). But there are several tools in the research methodology toolkit besides a RCT design. Other methods could have been used to gather meaningful and useful data on the Ontario basic income pilot.

For instance, researchers might have amassed systematic data from those receiving a basic income payment in order to better understand the advantages and disadvantages, from the recipients’ point of view, of this new design for income assistance.

Quantitative techniques such as surveys, and qualitative techniques like interviews and focus groups, could have provided in-depth and nuanced evidence directly from the research participants themselves, even in the absence of a control group.

Comparative research could have also been done on the costs and benefits of a basic income payment compared to existing social assistance and disability support benefits using aggregate program, administrative and financial data.

All research methods have advantages and disadvantages. In certain contexts (for example, pharmaceutical testing), RCTs might be seen as the most rigorous and desirable methodology. But when tackling social scientific questions that are inherently complex and in constant flux, RCTs may not only be impractical, they may also have inherent drawbacks.

Alan E. Kazdin is a past president of the American Psychological Association, and (as quoted by Rebecca Clay in 2010) cautions that “overreliance on RCTs means missing out on all sorts of valuable information.” A 2016 study delved into the difficulty of applying the RCT method specifically to economic questions, making the point that “an RCT cannot simply be a matter of simple extrapolation from the experiment to another context.”

We need new approaches

One thing seems clear—the dysfunctional and oppressive nature of our current “last resort” income assistance system makes research into better approaches absolutely imperative.

Not proceeding with the basic income project, and not collecting available data from it, means that we are passing up a golden research opportunity.

Even if it were possible to run a highly rigorous RCT research design in a basic income project, there’s one big problem.

Research subjects in a pilot know that their benefit will cease when the research project ends. The recipients of an actual, operational basic income program, however, would know that there is no end date for the benefit—they will receive it for as long as they’re eligible.

So it would be reasonable to assume that the economic and social choices of basic income recipients (on questions such as employment, education, accommodation and fixed household expenditures) would differ between these two conditions.

Those with long-term assurance that their financial safety net is in place might take more risks and make longer-term plans to improve their economic situations. Thus, extrapolating from a time-limited basic income experiment run as a RCT to a real-world scenario seems an artificial and potentially misleading exercise.

Ways forward

While it’s important to make the case for a variety of methods (beyond just RCTs) in basic income research, this may be a moot point in regard to Ontario’s pilot. Despite national and worldwide dismay that the project is being cancelled, Ford seems committed on ideological grounds to stop the payments and halt the related research.

It can only be hoped that those who have been receiving basic income payments in the project will be given “a lengthy runway” to adjust to their new circumstances. Ontario’s minister of Children, Community and Social Services has given, so far, only a vague commitment that this will be the case.

Hopefully the project’s participants can also continue to tell their stories in the media and to academic researchers. We researchers need to gather evidence in a variety of ways if we are to contribute to the design and delivery of better income security programs.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.