In welfare, if you make above a certain income, you lose your benefits. One of the best things we did is Saskatchewan, well not me personally, but what the government of Saskatchewan did in the 90\u2019s was for health was to provide dental and pharmacy benefits to low income families so you could come off welfare and not lost these benefits for your kids. The result being all kinds of people now working and when you actually study it you find that they\u2019re happier, they\u2019re healthier, they\u2019re not engaged. It\u2019s not surprise they\u2019re now engaged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most people would prefer to work but to make a rational decision, would you actually, you know, as much as you want to work, you go to work, you don\u2019t make much more money, but you lose these benefits and these risks you increase for your kids. So if you remove that rational decision, then you find more people are actually in the workplace, then you see all the mental health, physical health, and other benefits as a result of that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s striking how simple these things are at one level and yet how complex they are because at this point, no other jurisdiction in Canada has implemented that in the same way in spite of the evidence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another example, from Saskatchewan actually, is related to connectivity in terms of if you\u2019re on social assistance you have a phone, but if somebody runs up a long distance bill that you can\u2019t pay you lose your phone, but you can put a long distance cap on, but at the time it was a $200 deposit. Well what was negotiated was for those on social assistance you remove the $200 deposit which they don\u2019t have so they can have basically free local calls and people can call in, but you don\u2019t have the risk of someone calling Hong King, running up the bill that you can\u2019t pay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So then what happened is thousands of phones; thousands of households with phones that didn\u2019t have them previously. Just imagine the, you know not just in terms of the individual and their sense of connectivity to others but also even for caregivers, for social workers, and teachers and others to actually connect with the family. Simple thing, not a costly thing, but again, not something that\u2019s being universally adapted. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In welfare, if you make above a certain income, you lose your benefits. One of the best things we did is Saskatchewan, well not me personally, but what the government of Saskatchewan did in the 90\u2019s was for health was to provide dental and pharmacy benefits to low income families so you could come off […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1049","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1050,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1049\/revisions\/1050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}