Basic Income replicates settler colonialism by reinforcing ownership of native lands.

As the work of so many water protectors makes clear, Canada (and the US) is still dependent on the land taken from Indigenous nations, land that those nations often still contest. Settler colonialism is about the need to secure those lands at all costs, which means refusing to acknowledge or working to extinguish Indigenous title to those lands. This is one of the trials and tribulations of living and organizing for justice in a settler colonial state. The educator and writer Luam Kidane writes that, “as architects of discourse and builders of movements, it is imperative that we shift our political paradigms and begin to act on alternatives that can provide for our material needs.” So long as projects like BI take for granted settler colonialism, they cannot be tools for social justice. Those of us who are most marginalized by society should and will determine what the movements for change will consist of. We must shift away from what we know all too comfortably and listen to alternatives that have been proposed. So how do we move forward? The history of social movements is clear: we need to build coalitions for deeper distributive transformations if we want to make our societies more just. It’s easy to get caught up in the abstract ideas that we brainstorm onto paper. We cannot build a solid structure on rotten foundations. So yes, the BI pilot project could mean growth in a lot of ways. But if we forget or ignore that the structures were built by and to accommodate those in power, then we risk continuously replicating the injustices that surround us in our everyday lives. But how do build deeper coalitions that could challenge the racist-colonial nation state we call Canada? That is hard and necessary work, with or without a basic income.