“We need to take care of each other, and that's what this program was helping to do:” Disabled women’s experiences of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot

Abstract

From 2018 to 2019, some 4,000 Ontario residents received money as part of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot (OBIP), a basic income experiment that ran in three municipalities across the province. Drawing on interviews with 15 disabled women who participated in the pilot, this paper mobilizes women’s stories about their lives before, during, and after basic income to critically explore income security policy through a feminist disability lens. Women’s experiences of OBIP reveal important insights about the complex relationship between poverty, debility, impairment, and disability, as well as how targeted income support programs sustain or challenge ableism. This study’s findings suggest that while basic income offered material benefits to disabled women that supported them to survive in an ableist world, it is not inherently immune to the challenges characterizing other income security programs (e.g., the Ontario Disability Support Program, or ODSP). Despite this, women’s stories offer a glimpse at how by offering a more adequate and less conditional income to participants, OBIP created space to practice resistance and imagine different disability futures.