WELFARE ADDICTS

Before the Mike Harris government came to power, welfare rates did one
thing in this province. They went up, up and up.

And as successive political administrations prior to the present Tory one
relentlessly raised welfare premiums, the number of people on welfare,
also, not surprisingly, went up, up and up.

Occasionally a premier - even former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae at one
point - would fret about all this, but the sad story remained the same.
Both in good economic times and in bad, more and more Ontarians ended up on
welfare.

Until the Tories first came to power in 1995, cut welfare rates by 22% and
cracked down on fraud. And guess what happened?

Human nature being what it is, welfare rolls started going down, down,
down, with hundreds of thousands getting off welfare.

If a left-wing administration had achieved this by hurling billions of
dollars more at welfare - the very policy that ended in failure for a
generation - it would have been hailed as a miracle worker.

That the Tories did it by cutting welfare rates and delivering tax cuts so
that there were more jobs for people and more incentives to get off
welfare, made them the bane of the politically correct.

Of course, we're now supposed to believe, according to the left, that the
hundreds of thousands of people (and families) who have escaped from
welfare since the Tories came to power have all somehow ended up living on
our streets, which is utter nonsense.

The fact is the Tories came up with the only solution to welfare that
worked. That's why, while we're less enthusiastic about their more esoteric
ideas such as workfare, and, now, mandatory drug testing for welfare
recipients suspected of being drug addicts, we're willing to hear them out.
We know the activists and do-nothing opposition parties - the same people
who in government watched the welfare rolls skyrocket and compounded the
problem - are aghast.

No doubt they're already plotting legal challenges to the very idea that
any government would actually try to do something to help get the minority
of people on welfare who take drugs off them.

But our view, based on the Tories' record of success on reducing welfare
rolls to date, is to let Social Services Minister John Baird proceed with
his consultations to see if a fair, humane and constitutional way can be
found to help get people on welfare off drugs.

As terrible as that may sound to all the usual suspects on the left.