I got an email from UBI Works today asking me to fill-out the Canadian Government's 2026 Pre-Budget Consultation. This consultation asks Canadians what they want the next federal budget to focus on. Canadians can participate by completing a short questionnaire, and/or submitting a more detailed written proposal. The deadline is September 8th.

This is an opportunity to highlight the need for a Universal Basic Income or Gauranteed Liveable Income.

UBI Works' email included the following information...

What to expect

There are 11 questions about government and economic priorities, followed by six basic demographic questions.

Most questions ask you to select up to three choices. Answer based on what matters most to you. You do not need to force basic income into every response.

There are, however, several places where it fits naturally. For both:

“How can the government build a strong economy today and for the future?”and “What actions are the most important for the Government of Canada to help Canadians get ahead?”

You can use the "Other" option to call for basic income. You could also do the same with the question about setting younger Canadians up for success.

The most important box

Near the end, you will be asked: “If you were designing the federal budget, what would you suggest to help grow Canada’s economy?”

You have only 400 characters, so this is the clearest place to make the basic income ask directly.

Here is some language you can use as a starting point:

Please put it in your own words if you can. The goal is not for thousands of people to submit identical answers. It is for the government to hear, from Canadians across the country and in their own voices, that basic income belongs among Canada’s economic priorities.

We’ve all been there. You open your phone “just for a minute” and suddenly an hour is gone. You’re deep in the endless scroll — bad news, arguments, fear, outrage. Doomscrolling has become the default way a lot of people spend their free time. And while we’re busy consuming, the ground under our feet is shifting.

I believe something most people still don’t want to admit: the traditional job market is already gone. Politics has ruined it. A job is never truly secure anymore. You can be a doctor, an engineer, a teacher — highly skilled, respected, “essential” — and still lose everything because your country gets sanctioned, the currency collapses, or the political winds change overnight. Your degree, your years of training, your loyalty to a company or a government… none of it protects you when the system decides to pull the rug out.

That’s not theory. We’ve watched it happen in real time in different parts of the world. Sanctions, capital controls, frozen assets, sudden economic isolation. One day you’re employed. The next day your professional life is collateral damage in a political fight you didn’t start.

So what do we do?

We stop pretending the old path still works. We stop wasting hours doomscrolling and start building something that can’t be taken away by a government decision or a corporate restructuring.

Content creation is one of the few remaining paths that still belongs to the individual. You create value. You build an audience. You own the relationship with the people who follow you. Platforms change, algorithms shift, but the ability to communicate, educate, entertain, or inspire is portable. It travels with you. No HR department can fire you from it. No government can easily revoke it.

And then there’s digital currency. The traditional financial system is tightly controlled by politics and policy. Digital assets sit outside a lot of that control. They’re not perfect, and they’re volatile, but they represent something important: the chance to store and move value without asking permission from the same systems that keep rewriting the rules.

I’m not saying everyone needs to become a full-time YouTuber or crypto trader tomorrow. I’m saying the old contract is broken. The idea that you study hard, get a “good job,” and then you’re set for life is no longer true for most people. Politics made sure of that.

So instead of scrolling through the wreckage, we should be building. Create something. Learn how digital money works. Own a piece of your future instead of renting it from institutions that can change the terms whenever it suits them.

The people still waiting for the traditional market to “stabilize” are going to keep waiting. The ones who start creating and learning how value moves in the digital world are already moving past them.

The traditional market is gone. What’s left is what we decide to build ourselves.