Best way to modify the query?

In Views 1, I had some code in the arguments section to basically modify the filter. I've searched in the issues cue for Views 2 and there appears to be a couple of different routes to do this, but I was wondering what the "correct" way to do this would be.

I'm basically creating views to display stuff by location.province. For certain provinces, I modified the filter to search for a string of multiple provinces:

<?php
$view->filter[] = array(
    'vid' => $view->vid,
    'field' => 'location.province',
    'value' => $thefilter,
    'operator' => 'word',
    'position' => count($view->filter), 
    'id' => 'location.province');

$view->is_cacheable = 0;
?>

How should I do this in Views 2? I can use hook_views_query_alter and then inject a custom query, but is there an easier way to modify the arguments "where" section of the query? Change the argument from

<?php 
location.province = %s" 
?>

TO

<?php
UPPER('location.province') like UPPER(%s) OR UPPER('location.province') like UPPER(%s) ... etc
?>