‘WelfAir’ Won’t Get Off the Ground

Nelson, BC | BCBusiness
The government wants to send Vancouver’s welfare recipients “up North” where there are apparently a lot of jobs.

The next provincial election is a year away, and already it’s getting surreal. “WelfAir,” the latest election ploy to be floated, is just plain (plane) silly.

Well, credit provincial Finance Minister Kevin Falcon for injecting some unintentional levity into what’s already shaping up to be a grim election campaign.

Whether it was his idea or not, Falcon had to deliver the government’s latest trial balloon: let’s send Vancouver’s welfare recipients “up North” where there are apparently a lot of jobs.

On paper it might sound good – lower costs and more jobs should help all these welfare bums, oops, recipients, stand on their own two feet (presumably wrapped in thick socks and boots).

All they need is a lift (literally) to improve their lives – while also improving the lives of taxpayers who have been supporting them – or so the thinking goes.  

But, as usual, realities have a tendency to pierce that kind of easy thinking. In this case, a reality might be such as what jobs these welfare recipients are going to be able to do since many appear to be unemployable due to various social, mental and physical problems. In resource businesses, the act of breathing isn’t quite enough to do a job that often demands some modicum of skill and/or physical health, and often much more.  

How they’ll be housed, fed and chauffeured to those jobs also comes to mind when thinking of this surreal solution to several “problems” the big city boffins constantly complain about.

Although it’s been done before – during the Depression – no government in its right mind today is going to round up welfare recipients and send them off to work camps where they’ll be forced to earn their measly welfare payments. Not only is that a disgusting breach of human rights, it’s also much more expensive than they think. The “security” needed to keep them in work camps alone seems particularly budget breaking.

Also, if I were an employer anywhere near this modern-day gulag, I’d be very concerned about the quality of the worker I’d be getting. Rebellion, anger and depression at being yanked out of your home, no matter how humble, and being sent “North” to work doesn’t exactly make for a happy and productive worker.

But then, none of that matters because WelfAir, as it’s also been called, was never meant to get off the ground.

It was simply the announcement of a “plan,” designed to establish the Liberal government’s right-wing credentials and, it hopes, recapture the right-wing vote that has been floating over to the new B.C. Conservative Party.

An element of that vote would probably agree wholeheartedly with Falcon’s “plan.” But then, that element probably also believes that society started its downhill descent when they took the children out of the mines.

For the rest of us, this WelfAir idea just won’t fly.