When police mug shots of Gordon Campbell appeared on newspaper front pages across the country last year, he seemed like just another B.C. premier about to go down in scandal. Strangely, he was spared.

Campbell probably would have had to resign over his drunk driving conviction except that, at a televised press conference, he captured public sympathy by invoking the personal trauma he experienced growing up with an alcoholic father.

Parental drunkenness has certainly ruined many a life. I’d bet, for instance, that many living at the margins of B.C. society grew up with an alcoholic father. None of these people, however, will be able to invoke this as an excuse to be spared from B.C.’s draconian new welfare measures, which include time limits on benefits, rate cuts and tighter eligibility rules.

Ironic as it may seem, Campbell, who asked for and received enormous slack because of his tragic background, is offering no slack for thousands of welfare recipients, who could also probably capture public sympathy if they were given a chance to recount their tragic backgrounds on national television.

It’s probably unfair to compare Campbell to B.C.’s welfare recipients. After all, the welfare recipients have done nothing wrong (other than being poor in an age when the well-to-do are awfully stingy). Campbell, on the other hand, did something very wrong — he drove recklessly at high speed when he was so drunk that the police described him as staggering, slurring his words and reeking of alcohol.

It’s interesting that while Campbell tried to convince voters to avoid harsh moral judgments of him, he’s counting on them passing harsh moral judgments on welfare recipients.

Harsh moral judgments will indeed be essential if the public is going to feel everything’s okay as some of the most vulnerable people in the province are evicted from their rooming houses and windowless basements in the coming months. (Otherwise, the whole thing might just look cruel.)

Starting April 1, welfare benefits will be cut off entirely for thousands of people — B.C. won’t say how many — because they will have reached an arbitrary new two-year time limit for receiving benefits. Each month, a fresh wave of recipients will be cut off, as they reach their two-year limits.

These are people the government deems “employable” and it is clearly hoping the public will think of them as lazy layabouts, living the good life at public expense, rather than as people who are essentially unemployable — often because of mental or emotional disorders (perhaps caused by drunken fathers) or simply a lack of skills or abilities in a tight job market. If they are living the good life, it’s a frugal one. A single person receives a total welfare payment of $510 a month in B.C.

A single mother with two children receives $751. If her children are under age three, she’ll be spared the two-year cut-off rule — until the youngest turns three. Then her clock will start ticking and, at the end of two years, her payment will be reduced by $100, leaving her with $651 a month for herself and two children.

The cuts are apparently modelled on U.S. welfare reforms implemented in the late 1990s.

The U.S. isn’t known for coddling its poor, but B.C. is actually being even tougher on its poor. Seth Klein, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, says B.C. has adopted the harsh, punitive aspects of the U.S. reforms, but not the incentives that went with them, like support for child care, transportation and training.

This clampdown on the Canadian poor is only possible because the Chrétien government withdrew a key federal program in 1995 that had forced the provinces to provide basic welfare rights in order to receive federal money.

Paul Martin, then finance minister, brought in a new program with no such requirements, thereby opening the door for provinces to gut their welfare systems, as Ontario and Alberta promptly did. Although Martin doesn’t talk much about this, it’s a key part of his celebrated anti-deficit heroics.

Now B.C. is introducing the harshest welfare reforms yet in Canada, to help pay for its provincial tax cuts. Campbell is reluctant to alienate middle-class voters by cutting health care and education.

That pretty much leaves the poor.

Which brings us back to the real difference between Campbell and the welfare recipients, and explains why he was able to weather his storm and they probably won’t weather theirs.

Campbell has delivered significant tax savings to the province’s well-heeled elite. As for the welfare recipients — when was the last time they did something to improve the lives of the rich?

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...