Huffington Post: A Canadian city once eliminated poverty and nearly everyone forgot about it

Evelyn Forget is a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Her research on a guaranteed income project in Dauphin, Manitoba is continuing to draw attention. From 1974 to 1979, “Mincome” provided monthly cheques to the poorest residents of the small prairie town which eliminated poverty for five years.

In 2005, Forget began looking for the Mincome data. After a strenuous search, she located the records at the provincial archives in Winnipeg. She was the first to look at them since they were packed up in 1979.

She then used data from the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy‘s repository to see if the health of Mincome recipients changed. She found overall hospitalization rates dropped for accidents, injuries, and mental health diagnoses for those who received the income supplement.

For the full story on the Huffington Post, click here.

Forget’s full report, The Town With No Poverty, is available here.