Chong's food bill tough to swallow

Tough economic times are a particularly sensitive time to be learning that our political leaders think  belt-tightening doesn’t apply to them.

Admittedly, news of elected officials pushing the limits on how much of the public dollar they’re spending on themselves is unsettling at the best of times.

But when a province is in the midst of wiping out services and supports for people who really, really need them, it is truly offensive to hear about things like Ida Chong making full use of her publicly funded meal plan.   

We paid for $6,000 worth of restaurant eating for the Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA last year.   Chong was within her rights to claim it, mind you; legislature rules allow even local MLAs to charge up to $61 a day for restaurant meals while on the job in Victoria.

But would you do it? If services and supports were crashing all around you during a terrible economic year and it was your job to set things right, would you feel comfortable claiming $6,000 in restaurant tabs?

Not to put too dramatic a point on it, but little children suffered in B.C. so that Ida Chong could avoid packing a bagged lunch.

Her restaurant bill was equivalent to almost five months of full-time work for somebody earning minimum wage, which pays per eight-hour day roughly what MLAs are eligible to claim for a day’s eating. You could subsidize daycare for three school-age kids for a year on the public money Chong spent in restaurants in 2009.

What mental health and addiction programs lost funding while Chong and our other MLAs dined out? How many long-standing community services closed their doors so our provincial politicians wouldn’t have to feel the pinch in their own work lives?

Chong is simply the latest politician to have caught the media’s fleeting eye. She isn’t the first and won’t be the last who has taken what was on offer as a right.

But she certainly owes more of an explanation to her constituents than just her comments this week defending her level of spending due to “no meals or things like that provided for” in much of the work she does for government.

Out here in the real world, there aren’t many meals provided, either. We mostly have to pay our own way. I doubt many of us spend anything like $61 a day on restaurant food, probably because spending money like that becomes a lot less appealing when it comes out of your own wallet.

Why did Chong choose to spend so much when she knew full well that so many services her government funded were being sacrificed? I hope she’s reflecting on that right now.  But I also wonder why the premier didn’t just put expense rules like that on hold in the first place, when it became clear that B.C. needed to buckle down.

Not every politician dined out to excess, of course. Saanich-Gulf Islands MLA Murray Coell, spent a comparatively modest $1,321 on restaurant meals last year. And it goes without saying that being a politician is hard work, requiring frequent travel and quite a lot of restaurant dining.

But if Gordon Campbell is the leader of B.C., then surely he knows that leading by example is a cardinal rule. Yet what kind of example is it when government pays its cabinet ministers $152,000 - more than double the median household income in B.C. - and they still rack up another $6,000 on restaurant meals?

(Interesting fact: Chong’s salary and food expenses combined would cover 52 rent supplements of $250 for a whole year. It would keep 22 people on income assistance.)

I do know enough about budgets to recognize that Ida Chong eating out less often wouldn’t necessarily translate into more money for public services. Every pocket of funding has its own line on the budget. Money doesn’t readily flow even within programs, let alone between different ministries or from the political level to the squeezed community services below.

But Campbell’s government could change that tomorrow if they wanted to. MLAs could be told to make a real effort to reduce expenses, and savings could be channelled directly into struggling services.  Wouldn’t that be a good-news story?

Instead we’re reading about Chong’s eating habits and feeling betrayed again. It’s like catching your parents gulping down steak and lobster in the shed while the kids huddle in the kitchen eating gruel.

 Come on, you guys. B.C. is hurting, and it’s a real drag to find out that our political leaders aren’t sharing the pain. Pack a lunch.

A disturbing link to a site that lets you put the giant BP oil disaster into the context of your own back yard. Try moving the spill to Victoria, B.C. - terrifying.

Here's  a thoughtful piece from today's Vancouver Sun opinion pages that points out the folly of our federal and provincial governments when it comes to improving the health of their citizens.

It's still the back of the bus for mental health services

Alan Campbell couldn’t believe the kind of care and support his wife received after being diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago.

The speedy treatment. The kind words. The follow-up calls and offers of support. It was an amazing experience, says Campbell - and all the more striking when compared to the level of care his own clients typically see.

Campbell has spent the last 34 years working in B.C.’s mental-health system, most recently as director of mental health and addictions for the Vancouver Island Health Authority.

I’m sure he would have liked to have been finishing off his career this week reflecting on the tremendous gains made around mental-health care in his time. That’s certainly been the case for breast cancer and for many other major health concerns that we’ve tackled with fervour in the last three decades.

Alas, Campbell retired Wednesday from a field that is very nearly as underfunded, misunderstood and stigmatized as it was when he got into it in 1976. Had his wife been diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia instead of breast cancer, her family’s journey through a fractured and overwhelmed mental-health system would have been very, very different from the experience they had at the tender hands of the B.C. Cancer Agency.

Why is that? Why does one disease get the resources it needs to do things exactly right, and another have to beg for leftovers at the back of the line?

 Mental illness accounts or 20 per cent of all illness, yet its share of health-care spending on Vancouver Island is a mere eight per cent. Make that six per cent in B.C. overall.  

“We haven’t figured out how to get behind mental health as a country,” says Campbell. “It’s not just a problem here. In other regions, other provinces, the same dynamic exists. When we compare ourselves to other countries, we don’t look good.”

Campbell’s final months at VIHA can’t have been fun, what with the outrage building in the local psychiatric community over the loss of even more mental-health services.

In recent weeks, a doctor with the Schizophrenia Affective Disorders Clinic, Dr. Adam Gunn, resigned over the cuts. Dr. Anthony Barale has closed his outpatient service at Victoria General Hospital for people with brain injuries, saying he can’t support a system that’s failing patients and their families.

Dr. Andre Masters noted those resignations in a letter to the editor last month, and says more are likely coming. VIHA’s Department of Psychiatry passed a motion last fall condemning everything about the way budget deliberations were handled at VIHA.

Yes, there’s an urgent need for more spending on mental-health services, says Campbell. But when his department takes that message forward, the answer is usually “no,” he adds.

“For every one of the five years I’ve been doing this job, we’ve put forward strong, well-reasoned cases for more funding,” he says of his department. “The only time we were successful was in getting money for the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness. My understanding is that our requests are given real consideration, but they just don’t fare well in the end.”

Nor does it go well when VIHA starts moving money around on the Island, taking funding away from places like Victoria and Nanaimo in order to provide more services in places like Port Hardy and Duncan. Mental-health services may be insufficient in Greater Victoria, but they’re downright dismal elsewhere on the Island, says Campbell. 

The economy will eventually improve, of course, and brighter days will dawn for many of the health, education and social services under the knife right now.

But that won’t get to the fundamental problem plaguing mental-health services, which is that it’s buried at the bottom of the priority list for health spending even in the best of economic times.

Once upon a time, cancer treatment was poorly funded and misunderstood as well. But brilliant minds as far back as 1938 saw a way to address that problem, and the foundations of what would eventually become the B.C. Cancer Agency were put in place.

Its mandate and practices are everything that health care should be: Consistent and thorough; well-resourced; research-based; thoughtful. It’s a made-in-B.C. blueprint for doing things differently around mental health. So is the province’s new 10-year mental-health plan, if it’s able to become something more than just words on paper.

What can you do in the meantime? Write B.C. Health Minister Kevin Falcon and Health Canada Minister Leona Aglukkaq and tell them that mental-health care matters (kevin.falcon.mla@leg.bc.ca, aglukkaq.l@parl.gc.ca.). Governments won’t change unless we make them.  

An eye-opening study out of Vancouver that clearly shows how much of B.C.'s homelessness problem is about people with mental illness falling through the massive gaps in the health-care system.