Like so many who have come before him, Hugh Segal sees opportunity in the Yukon.

But the Liberal-appointed Conservative senator isn't thinking about gold or gas or wilderness getaways; he is thinking about reducing the number of Canadians living below the poverty line.

For many years, Segal has promoted the idea of replacing the country's myriad – and expensive – social assistance programs with a single, simple guaranteed income supplement.

The idea has been one of the standards of the NDP's wish-list for the nation for decades, as former federal NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin pointed out in her closing remarks for the Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Symposium. Both she and Segal spoke on Friday.

Segal, with McLaughlin's enthusiastic support, proposed the Yukon as the modern testing ground (the program was piloted in Dauphin, Manitoba in the ‘70s, then aborted shortly after government changed hands) for a new Canadian social assistance program.

A guaranteed minimum income program would essentially top up the wages of any Canadian living below the poverty line – $10,314 for a single person and $22,852 for a family of four, according to a 2006 Statistics Canada report – to a standard annual income.

Unlike the social assistance programs we have today, people would not be cut off when they go to work or take out student loans. The income "top-up” would only end once recipients earn enough money on their own to keep themselves above the poverty line.

Such a program would cost the government a maximum of $30 billion a year, Segal said, a fifth of the amount currently spent on a range of income security programs, not including education or health care-related costs.

As a result of the $150 billion spent on social assistance each year, Segal said, there has been no drop in the number of Canadians living below the poverty line.

"Any company, domestic or international, that invested $150 billion annually in a specific project and saw no change in the quality of results would initiate a serious review or serious staff changes at the top,” Segal wrote in an editorial published shortly after the December release of a Senate report he co-authored on the subject of poverty.

Segal dismisses those who suggest people would simply live off the government's largess. Referring back to the Senate report, Segal points out that the majority of people living below the basic income line are working, and will continue to work when offered assistance from the government.

A guaranteed income is not an incentive to sit around drinking beer all day, as some of his Conservative colleagues have suggested, Segal said. However, losing financial support from the government because you want to work more or further your education is an incentive to do nothing.

He gives the example of a single mother on social assistance who wants to go back to school. She gets accepted at a post-secondary institution and does what most students do: she applies for a student loan.

As soon as her loan is approved, her social assistance cheques are drastically cut or dry up all together, "which, in my opinion, is whacko,” Segal said. "It works out to 100-per-cent taxation on poor Canadians. Even the richest Canadians don't pay that.”

He blames "competing systems that were never designed to work together,” for the seeming lack of logic in the distribution of social assistance.

"They use it because they need it,” Segal said of the majority of Canadians on welfare. "They all want to get out of it. That is clear.”

And just as the national health care program began in a resource-based province with a relatively small population (Saskatchewan), so too a national guaranteed income program could be seeded here.

"The Yukon provides a rare opportunity to design a minimum income project that is more achievable than in a larger province,” he said.

As McLaughlin said in her wrap-up speech at the end of Friday's symposium, the idea is sound, but it needs a strong political will behind it to bring it to life.

Members of all three Yukon political parties were present when she said that, although no one from the Yukon Party was around for Segal's more detailed description of the proposed program.

Leaders of both opposition parties, the NDP's Elizabeth Hanson and the Liberals' Arthur Mitchell, said they supported the proposal and want to see the Yukon take a serious look at enacting it.

"I was happy to hear him articulate it so well, because it's something the NDP has promoted for a long time,” Hanson said.

Her party will be pushing to government to explore it further through motions and questions in the legislature, she said, but ultimately the fate of a pilot project is in the hands of the Yukon Party.

"I think it was a very intriguing idea,” Mitchell said today. "I would be interested in knowing if the government would be willing to pursue such an idea.”

He said Dennis Fentie in his dual role of premier and Finance minister, would have to be the one to approach federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty for the money "because we don't have the tax room or the ability to do this on our own.”

Neither Heath and Social Services Minister Glenn Hart nor deputy premier Elaine Taylor was present for Segal's speech.