As part of the BC Basic Income project, my team and I were tasked with trying to understand the system of income and social supports available to BC residents. We developed these visualizations which have proven very popular

Pair these with our paper that goes through a detailed description of the system of income and social supports in BC here

TLDNR? There are 194 programs offered by the various governments that are available to support BCers in various stages of life and crises. The federal government offers more supports in terms of money, the province more in terms of basic services.

While complexity has disadvantages, a big advantage is that the multiple points of entry actually means that there are multiple ways a person can be assessed for assistance for all these programs better capturing those that fall through cracks in other programs.

Given that the fed tends to offer cash programs and BC tends to offer basic services and we were asked if BC should offer a basic income, naturally this begs the tradeoff question then should BC replace its services with income supports. Our answer was unequivocally no.