The past week marked not one but two unpleasant anniversaries in the life of the country: a year since the referendum in Quebec, of course, but a year, too, since the government of British Columbia chose, four days later, to impose a three-month residency requirement for social assistance. Which will prove the more lasting blow to confederation is difficult to say.

It is the residency requirement, not the transparent pre-election lies about the budget deficit, that best measures the depths of the B.C. government's cynicism. The timing was hardly coincidental: the moment of maximum federal weakness, in the immediate wake of the referendum near-disaster.

What better opportunity, with a provincial election coming, to pick a high- profile fight with the feds? And what better issue than the province's efforts to defend itself from an invasion of migrant welfare bums?

This is, you will remember, the government that proclaims itself the conscience of the nation, whose compassion is so often contrasted with the social darwinists in certain other provinces. Yet the same government continues, one year later, to deny aid to those in need, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of the reasons for their misfortune, regardless of any initiative they might have shown on their own behalf, for no reason other than their origins: whether from another country, or another province.

As the present Minister of Human Resources has put it, "British Columbians will protect British Columbians first." It persists in this naked nativism in open defiance of federal conditions for aid to the provinces under first the Canada Assistance Plan and now the Canada Health and Social Transfer: the $26-million the province claims to have saved from the measure is more than offset by the loss of $47-million in federal funds. It has continued to discriminate against Canadians arriving from outside the province -- to choose, in effect, which sorts of British Columbians it will protect, and which it will not -- even after a court ruled it did not have the power under existing law to impose the residency requirement. Rather than quietly withdraw the offending provision, the government simply reissued it under a new law.

Since the government is fond of these comparisons, let it be noted that the Harris Conservatives in Ontario have not imposed a residency requirement.

This is particularly helpful in assessing the reasons the B.C. government has offered for its policy. There is first the suggestion that it was made necessary by reductions in federal transfers for social assistance. Yet Ontario was hit just as hard if not harder by the "cap on CAP": in 1995, Ontario received roughly $3,700 in federal funds per welfare case, versus $3800 in B.C. And the government of B.C. collects far more in revenues from its own citizens -- about $4600 per capita in 1994, to Ontario's $3500 -- with which to make up any shortfall in federal transfers.

Was the residency requirement needed, then, to protect B.C.'s more generous welfare system from being overwhelmed by refugees from the heartless misers to the east? Was the province merely refraining from joining the "race to the bottom"? Measured by its rhetoric, maybe. Measured in dollars, no. Welfare benefits in Ontario, even after the Harris government's 22 per cent cut, are higher than in British Columbia. That's right: higher. A single employable person in Ontario is eligible for $520 a month in benefits, to $500 in B.C. For a single parent with one child, the amounts are, respectively, $957 and $879; for a couple with two children, $1178 versus $1033.

The difference is even more dramatic when you consider that the cost of living is higher in B.C. than in Ontario: according to the "Basic Needs Index" compiled by Prof. Christopher Sarlo for the Fraser Institute, the bare minimum a single person would need to get by in Ontario is $7,544 a year, against $8,108 in B.C. Indeed, measured in this way -- relative to the cost of a subsistence standard of living -- B.C.'s schedule of benefits is actually less generous even than Alberta's! (There is very little evidence, in any event, that people move from province to province, let alone from country to country, in search of higher welfare benefits.)

While it is certainly true that a great many recent arrivals in B.C. claim social assistance, if only for a while -- some 2200 new cases a month, until the residency requirement was imposed -- two additional points should be made about this. One: if too many people wind up getting stuck on welfare, that is perhaps more a statement about the design of the system than the proclivities of recent migrants. Two: if being Canadian means anything, it means the right to live in the province of one's choice, without hindrance, without discrimination -- and without being used as the pawn of political gamesmen.