Thursday Morning Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- Heather Stewart writes about the OECD's study showing the connection between increasingly precarious work and worsening inequality. 

- Tara Deschamps reports on a few of the challenges facing poor Torontonians, while Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Laurie Monsebraaten cover the United Way's report card showing that most workers are now stuck in precarious work. And Star offers a few policy suggestions to improve that situation, while Ella Bedard points out how Andrew Cash is pushing for solutions at the federal level.

- Edward Keenan writes that it's long past time to stop relying on charity to ensure that basic needs are met. Cara Feinberg discusses (PDF) the effect of scarcity in limiting individual capacity to achieve goals of any kind. And David Wheeler takes a look at the growing movement for a basic income:

Those skeptical of basic income might ask: If you give people enough to live on, won’t they stop working? Won’t they get lazy? Evidence from pilot studies by Guy Standing, a professor of development studies at the University of London and a co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, points the other way.“When people stop working out of fear, they become more productive,” Standing says.

Karl Widerquist, a leader of the worldwide basic income movement, applauds Santens’ project, but says the goal of the movement is not to create privately financed basic income. “We need a publicly financed basic income for everyone; private charities can’t—and shouldn’t have to—do that,” says Widerquist, a philosophy professor at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University, and the author of several books and papers about basic income. Widerquist also organized the most recent North American Basic Income Guarantee Congress in New York in March. “The point of a private basic income is to show how well it works, draw attention to the issue, and further the movement for a truly universal basic income,” Widerquist says.

- Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on the IMF's study showing that the fossil fuel sector is subsidized to the tune of $5.3 trillion each year - offering a strong indication that there's plenty of money available to fund a basic income if governments were more interested in citizens than resource extraction. But Nelson Bennett highlights how Christy Clark is determined to lock in long-term subsidies to the gas sector no matter how thoroughly the public might want to change direction.

- Finally, Martin Regg Cohn writes that the Ontario Libs' Hydro One selloff represents little more than an utter failure of leadership, as Kathleen Wynne is willing to harm her province in the long term to avoid making the case for better revenue sources while in office. And Brent Patterson rightly slams the Cons for trying to force First Nations to privatize their water services