Hugh Segal has been calling for a basic income for 50 years. Maybe it's time

National Post, 15 October 2020

This is a debate we should be having now, as the pandemic has caused the ground to shift on unemployment and government assistance.

In honour of the 70th birthday of Hugh Segal this week (Oct. 13), might I recommend reading my friend’s latest book, Bootstraps Need Boots: One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty in Canada. Not as a gift to him, but as a gift to readers.

It is one of the more unusual political memoirs, organized around a policy idea rather than a curriculum vitae, and one of the more entertaining — and, in these troubled days, uplifting. Hugh called himself, in an earlier book, a “happy warrior” and a measure of happiness is most welcome now that we have warriors aplenty.

Many Canadians might think that Segal is older than his three score and 10, given that he made his debut in Canadian political life 50 years ago. He started very young. While still a student at the University of Ottawa he assisted his mentor David MacDonald, the Red Tory from Prince Edward Island, in opposing martial law in October 1970. When the Public Order Act, a statuary continuation of the War Measures Act, was introduced in December 1970, MacDonald was the only MP to vote against it. Segal learned not to be afraid of being in the minority in his own tribe.

Minority did not mean marginal. He spent the next several decades near the centre of power, complementing the exercise of high political office with the influence of ideas as a columnist and author.

His ascent began with a rather rapid succession of roles. He ran for Parliament twice before turning 25, losing an Ottawa riding in the federal elections of 1972 and 1974. In the interim he served as a legislative aide to Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield and then joined the premier’s office of Ontario’s Bill Davis, where he rose to principal secretary, participating in the negotiations to patriate Canada’s constitution. He would later serve as chief of staff to Brian Mulroney, be appointed to the Senate by Paul Martin, serving as head of the Institute for Research on Public Policy (Montreal) and Massey College (University of Toronto) along the way. He taught me at Queen’s University School of Policy Studies in 1994, the beginning of what has become a long friendship.

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