The Star
Alana Baltzer credits the year and a half she spent on Ontario’s aborted basic income pilot project for helping her get to where she is today — off social assistance and working a job she loves with plans to attend college in the fall.
The experience, even in its abbreviated form, was life-changing.
So she’s happy to see the NDP and Liberal parties promising to bring the pilot back if they’re elected, calling it “an amazing idea.”
But Baltzer said she probably wouldn’t sign up again, even if she was still on social assistance, given what she went through after the pilot was cancelled in 2018 by Doug Ford’s newly elected government.
“It was just devastating,” she said in a recent interview. “It threw me for a loop for so long.”
As part of the pilot — which Ford had promised to keep running prior to his election — Baltzer thought she would receive $1,915 a month for three years. For the first time in her life she started planning beyond the next month’s cheque.
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