It was an inspiring scene underneath the Surrey Central SkyTrain Station on a cold Sunday morning, the first of 2012: Surrey-Fleetwood NDP MLA Jagrup Brar stood with his family in jeans and a warm winter coat announcing the beginning of the month he planned to spend living on only $610. The campaign, which began as a challenge issued by an anti-poverty group called the Raise the Rates Coalition, is intended to draw attention to the plight of the nearly 180,000 B.C. residents living on welfare.

Brar joins a long list of political and media figures who have publicly sought to experience the travails of low-income life in Vancouver, a tradition that began with another opposition NDP MLA. In 1986, Fred Barnes spent the month of February doing almost exactly the same thing, ultimately losing more than 30 pounds living off welfare. The one idea shared by these two politicians and everyone who's attempted a similar publicity project in the 16 years that separate them is that awareness is what's needed to solve this city's poverty problem. That might have been the case in 1986, but in 2012, it's political will, not awareness, that's in short supply.

There's also a potential downside to publicity stunts like Brar's. What if the message the public takes away from his month on welfare is that it's not so hard after all? It's certainly easier for him than it is for most people who live on welfare, not least because he will return to his comfortable suburban home and family at the end of the month. He's not burdened by the many complex disadvantages that often compound the difficulties of living on only $610 per month—he doesn't suffer from mental or physical illness, he doesn't face serious addiction challenges, and he's not alienated from his community the way many welfare recipients are.

Jean Swanson, one of the campaign's organizers and a coordinator with the Carnegie Community Action Project, recognizes that one month on welfare is a lot easier for a well-meaning politician than life on welfare is for most recipients, noting that the image of Brar with his family on Sunday highlights the starkest difference. "His whole community came out, or a lot of people in his community, and his kids and his wife and it was very beautiful," she says, describing the scene, and offers an anecdote for comparison: "I met a guy once who was on welfare who told me he wasn't going to contact his family until he got the old age pension because they would despise him so much for being on welfare. He actually died before he got the old age pension."

Brar doesn't face the shame and alienation that can be so devastating for many welfare recipients, but that's not the only reason he has it a lot easier than most of the people he will share food lines with in January. As Swanson explains, finding affordable housing can be nearly impossible: "You have to go get an Intent to Rent form, then you have to go find a place, then you have to show the landlord the Intent to Rent form, the landlord discriminates against people on welfare and won't rent to you, and then you have to go and find another place, and it's endless."

Swanson believes that it should only add to the poignancy of Brar's "Journey Into Poverty" the he'll have an easier time this January than other low-income British Columbians, but some people will inevitably interpret his experience as proving that anyone can do it, forgetting all the reasons it's hard that don't apply to him. Indeed, the 'Anyone Can Do It' sub-genre of this tradition gave rise to the ethically dubious 2010 documentary called Streets of Plenty in which filmmaker Misha Kleider did exactly what Brar is planning to do, only with very different intentions. In Kleider's version, living penniless in the Downtown Eastside is a slice—the only pitfalls involve syringes.

More honest journalistic efforts have been made in the past, starting with the month Vancouver Sun reporter (and renowned punk rocker) John Armstrong spent living an SRO called the New World Hotel in the summer of 1989. His anecdote-laden series, called "Inside the Downtown Eastside," was thoughtful and nuanced. He was also careful to acknowledge his privileged position as a temporary SRO-dweller: "This is where the dead roads meet. The big difference this time was I knew I was leaving, and where I was going when I left. Not many guests of the New World have that luxury."

Armstrong painted a bleak picture of life in the DTES, and maybe back in 1989, the public needed his perspective as an outsider to understand the desperation of the people he met. Now, though, the practice of observing the DTES as an outsider, taking pictures and writing about it, is common enough that it verges on poverty tourism. Try searching Flickr for the words "Downtown Eastside." The poverty experience stunt has been performed by lots of different kinds of people over the years for lots of different purposes—it's now at the point where it's no longer revealing anything we don't know about the lives of poor people. And too often it's awareness of the politician (or journalist or filmmaker) that's raised, not of the problem. Brar's motives are certainly admirable, as are Swanson's, but it's time for new tactics.

Whether for a night or for a month, whether to prove that it's hard or that it's easy, whether for purposes political or journalistic, when people who aren't poor try to experience poverty so they can show all the rest of us what it's really like, they risk oversimplifying and obscuring what it's really like. Would we applaud a public figure who offers himself up for a carnival dunk tank game to raise awareness of the perils of drowning? And even if we did, if only to honour his noble intentions, we still wouldn't learn much about what it's like struggling to keep your head above water.