Senator Art Eggleton served for twenty-two years as a member of Toronto City Council, including eleven years as Mayor, the longest serving Mayor in the City’s history. He served eleven years in the House of Commons as the member for York Centre. First elected in 1993, he was soon thereafter appointed to Cabinet where he held a number of portfolios, including President of the Treasury Board, Minister for International Trade, and Minister of National Defence. In 2005 Mr. Eggleton was appointed to the Senate of Canada. He currently serves as Chair of the Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology as well as its Subcommittee on Cities and is a member of the Standing Committee on National Finance.
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Amélie Châteauneuf has a background in law and social services and is the spokeperson for the Front commun des personnes assistées sociales du Québec (FCPASQ). FCPASQ groups thirty local and regional organizations and is main objective is to defend and promote the realization of economical, social and cultural rights of people that receive last-resort financial assistance. FCPASQ has been created and is still run by people that are excluded from the labor market and that live in poverty. The official position of the members of FCPASQ is that an unconditional Basic Income Guarantee is central for the realization of human rights for all citizens.
Dr. Louise Haagh is Director of the Graduate School and Senior Lecturer in the Politics Department of the University of York. She obtained her doctorate in Politics from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and has been a visiting fellow at a series of research institutes and universities internationally, including Cornell University (USA), Yonsei University (South Korea), and the Brazil Centre at Oxford University. Louise Haagh is a world poverty, labour studies and social policy specialist working in the field of comparative labour market institutions, welfare regimes and the political economy of development. She has written on aspects of economic citizenship, labour policy, income security, democratization and neo-liberalism primarily in the context of Latin America (Brazil and Chile), East Asia (South Korea) and Northern Europe. She is associate editor of Basic Income Studies and is a member of the executive committee of the Basic Income Earth Network, an international network that fosters informed discussion about basic income. Louise Haagh is the author of Citizenship, Labour Markets and Democratization – Chile and the Modern Sequence (Palgrave 2002), coeditor of Social Policy Reform and Market Governance in Latin America (Palgrave 2002), an is currently undertaking research funded by the British Academy on the relationship between market and welfare reforms in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as completing a project on Citizenship and Economic Security in OECD and emergent economies.
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Tony Martin, MP was first elected as Member of Parliament for Sault Ste. Marie in 2004. He serves as the critic for seniors’ policy critic and poverty for the New Democratic Party. Tony also serves on the House of Commons Committee on Human Resources, Skills Development, Social Development and Persons with Disabilities, and has been working on a National Poverty Elimination Act for introduction to Parliament. This legislation will mandate the federal government to take the lead in a national poverty plan, in partnership with provincial, territorial, municipal and First Nations governments. Tony has also been actively engaged with the issues of pay equity, industrial restructuring, and job creation and protection. Tony served as a Member of Provincial Parliament in the Ontario Legislature from 1990 to 2003. His professional background is in small business and community development. He has long-standing engagement with faith communities and local service organizations in social justice work.
Rob Rainer has since November 2006 been the Executive Director of Canada Without Poverty, following over 20 years of leadership and consulting positions in environmental conservation and sustainable development. His work over 1986-2006 was thematically tied to concerns such as water pollution, climate change, biodiversity conservation and ecotourism; geographically spanned local, regional, national and international levels; and was predominantly within the not-for-profit sector. Through his “green” work, Rob came to fully appreciate that a sustainable society cannot be achieved without social justice, in particular the elimination of poverty and the attainment of more socially equitable communities. At Canada Without Poverty he has led the creation of new mission, vision and values statements, strengthened relations with many partner groups, and co-founded and is co-convening (with Citizens for Public Justice) Dignity for All, an emerging new human rights-based campaign for a poverty-free Canada. Rob is a Canadian Fellow of the international Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) network, to which he has belonged since 1997. He is also a past President of LEAD Canada Inc., implementing LEAD’s program in Canada.
Sheila Regehr assumed the job of Director of the National Council of Welfare in April 2006, a position she also occupied in 2001-2002. She has had a long career in the public service with what used to be Employment and Immigration, where she served on the front lines, before taking on various policy positions at Status of Women Canada and Human Resources and Social Development Canada. Her work has involved policy analysis and development in Canada as well as international relations. Her main areas of expertise include employment, taxation, income security, unpaid (non-market) work and equality indicators. For example, she played an key role in the 1997 changes to the taxation of child support to make it fairer to lone-parents, she was Canada’s lead negotiator on work and employment issues for the World Summit for Social Development in 1995 and chaired difficult, highly technical negotiations on unpaid work agreements at the 4th UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. Sheila Regehr has a degree in political science and a graduate degree specializing in social policy and administration. As a graduate student, she was a member of the Ottawa Citizens’ Advisory Committee on welfare issues.
Senator Hugh Segal spent several decades in the private and public sectors before being appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2005 by Prime Minister Paul Martin. His public sector experience includes work for the Right Honourable Robert Stanfield, David MacDonald (MP, PC, PEI), and former Ontario Premier Bill Davis, and an appointment as Chief of Staff to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Senator Segal is the former president of the Institute for Research on Public Policy and is a Senior Fellow and adjunct professor at Queen’s University in Kingston. He has authored numerous books and articles on public policy and the Conservative Party. He has served on several Senate committees and is currently the Deputy Chair of the Subcommittee on Cities and a member of the Committee on Social Affairs, Science & Technology.
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Allan Sheahen published and edited a monthly magazine devoted to senior (age 40+) runners for 25 years. He currently is a volunteer in the USA’s VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) program in Los Angeles. Al Sheahen is the author of Guaranteed Income: The Right to Economic Security and has written magazine articles and op-ed pieces on welfare reform, poverty in America, health-care reform, campaign financing reform, redistricting, and instant-runoff voting. He has debated the idea of a basic minimum income on radio and television. In 2005, Sheahen co-authored, with Karl Widerquist, “The Tax Cut for the Rest of Us Act”, the first true guaranteed income bill ever introduced in the U.S. Congress. The bill would have provided a “refundable tax credit” of $2000 to every adult American. For the next three years, he lobbied legislators, non-profit groups, and others to encourage the bill’s passage, but as this was the era of the conservative Bush Administration the bill failed to gain enough support to pass. Sheahen is a committee member of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network (USBIG), and has spoken at each of its annual conferences since 2002. He is also a member of the international Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), and has presented papers at several of its biennial conferences.
Professor Guy Standing is Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in the UK. Between April 2006 and February 2009, he was also Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. From 1999 until March 2006, he was Director of the Socio-Economic Security Programme of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1998-99, he was in the “transition team” set up by the ILO’s new Director-General to help restructure the organisation. He was previously Director of the ILO’s Labour Market Policies Branch, and before that Director of the ILO’s Central and Eastern European Team, based in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Professor Standing is a founder member and co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an international non-governmental organisation that promotes basic income, whose members include economists, philosophers and other social scientists from over 40 countries. He has written and edited books on labour economics, labour market policy, unemployment, labour market flexibility, structural adjustment policies, and social protection policy. His most recent book is Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2009). Earlier books include: Promoting Income Security as a Right: Europe and North America (London, Anthem Press, 2005); A Basic Income Grant for South Africa, with Michael Samson (Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 2003); Beyond the New Paternalism: Basic Security as Equality (London, Verso, 2002); and Global Labour Flexibility: Seeking Distributive Justice (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1999). He was coordinating editor and main writer of the ILO’s Economic Security for a Better World, a global report issued in 2004.
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Senator Eduardo Matarazzo Suplicy is Senator from PT-SP, Professor in Economics of Escola de Administração de Empresas e de Economia de São Paulo, from Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Ph.D. in Economics by Michigan State University, USA, author of the Bill of Law that originated Law 10.835/2004 which institutes the Citizen´s Basic Income in Brazil and Honorary Co-Chair of BIEN, Basic Income Earth Network.
Basic Income Conference in Montréal, 15-16 April 2010 