Bootstraps Need Boots

For more than four decades, Hugh Segal has been one of the leading voices of progressive conservatism in Canada. A self-described Red Tory warrior who disdains “bootstrap” approaches to poverty, he has always promoted policies, especially a basic annual income, to help the most economically vulnerable. Why would a life-long Tory support something so radical? In this revealing memoir, Segal shares how his life and experiences brought him to this most unlikely of places, beginning with his childhood in a poor immigrant family in Montreal to his time as a chief of staff for Prime Minister Mulroney and to his more recent work as an advisor on a basic income pilot project for the Ontario Liberal government. This book is a passionate argument not only for why a basic annual income makes economic sense, but for why it is the right thing to do.

Boot Straps Need Boots is a great Canadian memoir of a poignant Canadian experience recognizable to millions. And it is more than that. Segal recalls as a 12-year old the day Prime Minister Diefenbaker spoke to his school assembly. Diefenbaker had a way of mesmerizing schoolchildren. “The family table we call Canada is the finest table in the world,” said the Prime Minister. “There is space and food for all.” Here Segal comes to the point of Boot Straps, a plain argument for a national guaranteed income program., Segal’s book reflects the author’s deep understanding of his country. He has travelled widely, especially during his Senate years, talking to hundreds of people who share with him a lived experience of poverty. He lucidly explains the hardwired link between poverty and spiralling health-care costs. Cutting the first will mean dramatic reductions in the latter.

Hugh Segal, OC, O Ont, is a remarkable Canadian whose multiple vocations have spanned politics, academia, business, and communications for more than four decades. He has served in myriad capacities in provincial, federal, and international politics, including formal roles as chief of staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and principal secretary to Premier Bill Davis. Internationally, he was a member of the nine-person Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group that proposed reforms around democracy, rule of law, human rights, gender equity, judicial independence, and modernization to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in 2011. Hugh Segal has taught at Queen’s University’s School of Policy Studies for twenty years and has lectured at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. He is a distinguished fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Policy Studies, a life-time fellow of the Institute for Research on Public Policy in Montreal,a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Calgary, and a former principal of Massey College.He is also an outspoken political commentator and the author of seven books on public policy and the nature of conservatism in Canada – the most recent being Two Freedoms: Canada’s Global Agenda. In 2016 the Ontario government commissioned him to devise a blueprint for a guaranteed annual income pilot project in Ontario. Although shelved by a change in government in the province, it serves as an important model to put poverty reduction into practice.