24 Jun Perth and Tay Valley Township Councils Endorse Basic Income

    Posted at 23:23h in Uncategorized by

    The Lanark Basic Income Network (LBIN) is delighted to announce that on Tuesday, June 18, 2024, the councils of the Town of Perth (unanimously) and Tay Valley Township (5-3 on a non-recorded vote) passed resolutions supporting basic income. These resolutions call on the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to collaborate on designing, introducing, implementing, and continuously evaluating a national basic income guarantee program for working-age adults. The full resolutions for each municipality are attached.

    With these latest endorsements, at least 20 municipalities in Ontario have passed resolutions in favor of basic income over the past 13 months. This includes three municipalities in Lanark County (Perth, Tay Valley Township, and Smiths Falls) and others such as Belleville, Clearview, Greater Napanee, Grimsby, Guelph, Hamilton, Kingston, Kitchener, Niagara Falls, North Bay, Quinte West, St.-Charles, Waterloo, Wawa, and the regional municipalities of Halton, Prince Edward County, and Waterloo.

    Special thanks go to LBIN volunteers Celina Tuttle and Tom Todd for leading the delegation at the Perth Committee of the Whole (COW) meeting on June 4th, and to volunteer Karin Nakumura for preparing numerous slides used in presentations to the Perth and Tay Valley committees of the whole. Additional thanks to those who attended the June 4th COW meetings and the June 18th council meetings of Perth and Tay Valley, as your presence likely helped underscore the local public support for basic income.

    The LBIN Political Advocacy Committee (Bill Janes, Paula Stewart, Tom Todd, Celina Tuttle, and myself) will now focus on strategies to engage the remaining six municipalities in Lanark County (Beckwith, Carleton Place, Drummond/North Elmsley, Lanark Highlands, Mississippi Mills, and Montague), and eventually the County of Lanark itself. Additionally, as the Reeve of Tay Valley Township, with my municipality’s resolution now on record, I will intensify my direct advocacy efforts with my municipal counterparts across Ontario. A key opportunity for this will be at the Annual Conference of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, taking place in Ottawa from August 18-21.