Wednesday saw the release of a new report called A Proposal for a Guaranteed Basic Income Benefit in Prince Edward Island. The report was written by a team of public servants, politicians, and advocates from PEI and across the country. It presents a basic income model for a fully-funded 5-to-7 year demonstration program in PEI, which it says would considerably reduce poverty for Islanders while being more cost-effective than previously presented models.
The report estimates that the proposed Guaranteed Basic Income benefit would put PEI on a path to meet its poverty reduction targets by considerably reducing the poverty rate for Islanders aged 18 to 64 from almost 10% to nearly 2%. It says the poverty rate for families with children would be reduced from 5.4% to 1.8% and that of single adults aged 18 to 64 would fall considerably from almost 27% to about 3%.
