Halfway through one of the boldest social experiments Canada ever ran, the researchers were given a strange instruction. Keep collecting. Stop analyzing.

The experiment was called MINCOME, and it ran in Manitoba from 1974 to 1979. Its most unusual site was Dauphin, a farm town of about 10,000 people, with roughly 2,500 more in the surrounding rural municipality. In most income experiments, a few scattered families are chosen at random. In Dauphin, every family was eligible.

The offer was simple. A family with no other income would receive 60 percent of Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off, adjusted for family size. Every dollar earned from other sources reduced the payment by 50 cents. Benefits rose with the cost of living.

Then the money got tight. Inflation ate the budget, political support faded, and the project was told to adopt what the economist Evelyn Forget later called an “archive” strategy: researchers would collect and archive data, but not engage in analysis. The sociological work, which had studied family life and community cohesion, was among the first things cut. New governments in Ottawa and Winnipeg had no interest in continuing. Boxes and boxes of paper files went into storage.

By Forget’s account, the Dauphin data were never examined. When she went looking decades later, the national archives held a few obsolete tapes from the Winnipeg sample and 1,800 cubic feet of paper that had never been entered into a database.

Collect, but don’t look

I keep turning that instruction over. Collect, but don’t look.

It’s a precise description of a habit, and not only a government one. We gather evidence about how people live, and then decide, for budget reasons or political ones, that we would rather not read it. The paper exists. The lives in it were real. Nobody is required to open the box.

Forget couldn’t easily open those boxes either, so she went around them. Manitoba kept health insurance records for everyone in the province, and she used them to compare Dauphin residents with matched people in similar communities that never got the program. Her paper, published in 2011 as “The Town with No Poverty,” reported that hospitalization rates in Dauphin fell by 8.5 percent relative to the comparison group, with the clearest drops in accidents and injuries and in mental health. Physician contacts for mental health also fell. More teenagers stayed in school through grade 12.

That is a big claim, and it didn’t go unchallenged. I’ll come back to that.

Insured against the weather

The part of Forget’s paper that stays with me isn’t the hospital number. It’s a quieter observation about who the program actually helped.

Only about a third of Dauphin families qualified for payments at any point, and many of those payments were small. Yet Forget argued the program reached everyone in town, because it worked like insurance. People who buy fire insurance on a house feel its value even if the house never burns. In a town that lived on harvests and grain prices, many families couldn’t know in advance whether they would qualify. What they knew was that a bad year, a sudden illness, or a collapse in prices would no longer be devastating.

That is a different picture of survival mode than the one we usually carry. We tend to think survival mode means having too little. Dauphin suggests it can also mean not knowing. A family can have enough on the table tonight and still live braced, because next season could take it all. Anyone who has worked on the water knows the difference between a storm and the forecast of one. The forecast changes how you move long before the weather arrives.

Forget’s explanation for the school numbers fits that picture. Teenagers at risk of leaving school mostly came from families that received payments or thought they might. Once the floor under the family was predictable, a parent could let a teenager stay in class instead of going to work. And because whole friend groups were making that choice together, she suspected the effect spread from student to student.

The numbers that don’t hold still

Here’s the honest complication. In 2022, the economist David Green reanalyzed Forget’s hospital data in the same journal. He found that Dauphin’s hospital use was already falling relative to the comparison towns before the program began, and that much of the remaining drop came in the years after payments ended. Account for either problem, he argued, and the data show no reduction in hospital use, and possibly an increase. His conclusion was plain: MINCOME does not support the claim that a guaranteed income lowers health care costs.

Forget replied, and the two disagree about timing and method. I’m not qualified to settle a dispute between two economists about pre-trends, and I won’t pretend to be. What I can say is that the hospital result is contested, and anyone citing Dauphin as proof that basic income pays for itself is leaning on a number that is under real dispute.

Green deserves credit for something else, too. He described Forget’s data work as impressive, and it was. The boxes weren’t her fault.

And the boxes did eventually get opened. In 2017, the sociologists David Calnitsky and Jonathan Latner worked through the archived Dauphin files and found an 11.3 percentage point drop in labour market participation, driven mostly by young and single-headed households. That’s a real tradeoff, and critics of guaranteed income are right to weigh it. When participants explained why they had stepped back from work, they usually pointed to care work, disability and illness, uneven job opportunities, or going back to school.

A modern experiment points in the same direction while staying careful. Finland gave 2,000 unemployed people a tax-free 560 euros a month in 2017 and 2018, whether or not they worked. Employment effects were small. Recipients who answered the follow-up survey reported more life satisfaction, less mental strain, more trust in other people and institutions, and more confidence in their own future. Kela’s lead researcher said it’s not possible to say with certainty that the improvement came from the basic income itself, and the survey’s 23 percent response rate leaves room for bias, as later reviewers stressed. But the theme the respondents described keeps coming back: they felt protected.

Survival mode is a forecast

I don’t think Dauphin settles whether a guaranteed income is good policy. Taxes, work incentives, and fairness to people who pay in are serious questions, and serious people land on different sides of them.

What Dauphin does settle, for me, is a question about seeing. A small group of decision-makers had the evidence about how thousands of ordinary people lived with a little more certainty, and they chose not to read it. Not out of cruelty. Out of priorities. That’s how survival mode usually stays invisible to the people who aren’t in it. Not because anyone hides it, but because no one is assigned to look.

Creative mode in a game isn’t just more blocks. It’s knowing the night won’t erase what you built. Maybe that’s what abundance looks like in a town, too. Not everyone getting a check, but everyone being able to plan past the next bad season, and somebody in charge actually opening the boxes.

If you could open one box of evidence about how people around you are really living, what would you want to read first, and who would you want reading it with you?

Sources

• Evelyn L. Forget, “The Town with No Poverty: The Health Effects of a Canadian Guaranteed Annual Income Field Experiment,” Canadian Public Policy 37, no. 3 (2011): 283–305.
• David A. Green, “A Reanalysis of ‘The Town with No Poverty’,” Canadian Public Policy 48, no. 4 (2022): 539–548.
• Evelyn L. Forget, “A Reanalysis of ‘The Town with No Poverty’: A Reply,” Canadian Public Policy (2022).
• Library and Archives Canada, “Operational files of Manitoba Basic Annual Income Project (MINCOME),” RG29.
• Finnish Government, “Results of the basic income experiment: small employment effects, better perceived economic security and mental wellbeing” (2020).
• David Calnitsky and Jonathan P. Latner, “Basic Income in a Small Town: Understanding the Elusive Effects on Work,” Social Problems 64, no. 3 (2017).
• Kari Hämäläinen and Jouko Verho, “Design and Evaluation of the Finnish Basic Income Experiment,” National Tax Journal 75, no. 3 (2022): 573–596.

This essay reports published research findings and makes no medical claims.

WEHSEE
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