In question period on October 8th Jenny Kwan asked Human Resource Minister Murray Coell to disclose the number of people who will be kicked off welfare in April when the maximum two year rule kicks in. Coell should be embarrassed over his rant about the evils of socialism that he inserted in place of simply providing the number that was requested. Government has the number; it was in the briefing paper that the Opposition obtained under Freedom of Information but it was blanked out. Kwan said that based on government estimates of "savings" the number must be 26,000. That's not an abstraction; it means that 26,000 real people will have nothing to live on when they are cut off in April. Even if the number is half Kwan's estimate, it will be a disaster.

Don't look for former social worker Murray Coell to do what the late Emery Barnes did as an MLA when he lived for a month on nothing more than the amount a single person receives on welfare. Anyone doing that would realize that trying to survive on welfare is incentive enough to do anything possible to get off. The Campbell government has argued that the 8,000 people who make over $250,000 a year needed over $200 million per year in tax cuts in order to provide them with incentives. Why can't they provide that kind of incentive to the poor rather than kicking them while they are down? Could it be that the cuts to the poor are necessary to pay for the tax cuts for the rich?

Someone who has been on welfare for two years has got to have problems. People in that situation are not likely to be at the top of the list when an employer picks who will be hired, but Coell would have you believe that he has thousands of jobs just waiting for the marginally employable. He claimed that BC has created almost 100,000 jobs since they took office, and that many of the people who are no longer on welfare are in those jobs. Unfortunately, Coell has his figures wrong. Statistics Canada reported that 1.9738 million people were employed in BC in May 2001 when the election was held (later revised to 1.9698 million); it also reported that 2.0233 million people were employed in August 2003. That's an increase of 49,500 (53,500 revised), not 100,000. There were 143,800 people unemployed in BC in May 2001 compared to 193,100 unemployed in August 2003 - an increase of 49,300 jobless. The Campbell gang inflate their employment figures by comparing December 2001 with the current numbers because employment reached a low seven months after they came to power. They simply don't talk about the increase in the unemployed. (Numbers cited here are seasonally adjusted in order to validly compare May 2001 with August 2003.)

In May 2001 there were 157,424 BC Benefit cases which include seniors and disabled as well as employable recipients. In July 2003 (the most recent data) there were 117,516 assistance cases of all types. No one knows what really happened to the 39,908 "cases" and their families but if you believe the government line about people leaving welfare and finding work you would have to believe that almost all the jobs created since Campbell came to power went to people who were coming off welfare. That is not credible, but neither is the Campbell government.

For more information on BC's slow job growth see http://economics.cucbc.com/economics/briefing/sept0503.pdf