Crazy-making cuts instantly increase government costs

The funny thing about the current government is that I often agree with what they say. It’s what they do that makes me crazy.
For instance, here’s the premier in an interview with the Times Colonist last week: "I think it's really important for people to understand that the costs of our health-care system are staggering, frankly.”
Indeed. Health eats up 42 cents of every dollar the government spends. Premier, you’ll get no argument from me on that.
But on the very day that Gordon Campbell was saying that, his government was preparing to eliminate birth-control options for women and men living in poverty, who will soon lose access to IUDs and condoms. It was taking away $50 glucometers from people on income assistance who have diabetes, needed to measure their blood sugar every day. It was cancelling funding for a little plastic adapter that makes it easier for people with asthma to use their inhalers.
And I’m left to wonder: Hey, guys, what the heck are you thinking? And how on Earth did your talk ever come to be quite so far away from your walk?
“Who did they consult? Certainly not a doctor I could ever imagine,” says Dr. Danica Gleave, a Cool Aid Health Centre physician who predicts dire repercussions from the health cuts to people on income assistance. “It just baffles me. These are people who have no backup, no other resources.”
Looks like they didn’t fly the plan past the provincial health officer, either. Asked this week about the cuts, Dr. Perry Kendall wondered whether a cost-benefit analysis had been done. “The impact should be monitored, as this may turn out to be counterproductive to health and budgets in the longer run,” he noted.
Hopefully a journalism teacher has latched onto the press release announcing the cuts. It’s a fine example of modern-day propaganda. (As was Budget 2010; there must be a new communications mandate that all bad things are to be restated as good.)
The headline: “Province protects services for low-income clients.” The opening paragraph: Changes will be implemented “in a manner that is fair to all British Columbians and supports children and families.” The cuts to birth control, glucometers and asthma adapters are needed to “ensure these programs will be available to meet the most medically essential needs of clients.”
Well, except for impoverished people in their fertile years, diabetics and asthmatics. And the ones who no longer qualify for “ready-made” orthotics - insoles, braces and the like, which have also been cut. Oh, and the ones with HIV, hanging onto their health with the help of $20 worth of bottled water every month.
Doctors at the Cool Aid centre typically prescribe IUDs to at least a dozen women on income assistance a week, says Gleave.
“We see all kinds of women who benefit from an IUD - sex workers, people with developmental disabilities, people who have behavioural issues that make it hard for them to be compliant with taking a pill every day. These cuts are being made on the backs of the most vulnerable people,” she says.
“The cuts will result in an increased number of unwanted pregnancies. It will increase emergency-room visits for people with asthma. Every diabetic needs to have a glucometer - it’s a huge safety issue for insulin-dependent people. We’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
There are no savings to be had by denying access to IUDs, says Island Sexual Health executive director Bobbi Turner.
“The IUD is the most cost-effective form of birth control out there. Something like the Copper T costs $60 and lasts three to five years,” says Turner. “IUDs are not part of the ‘compassion program’ that drug companies have to provide free birth-control pills to these women, so this change cuts off a really effective form of birth control.”
I tried to get Health Minister Kevin Falcon to talk to me about this, because it’s obvious that the cuts in Rich Coleman’s Ministry of Housing and Social Development will increase health costs almost immediately. But it appears the government doesn’t like to talk about such things, because I just ended up routed back to the MHSD communications staff.
Maybe I should try for Mary Polak next over at the Ministry of Children and Family Development. The cuts ultimately mean more kids in care for the women who end up pregnant. But she’s probably too distracted right now, what with the $12.3 million in community cuts already going on for non-aboriginal children and families served by her ministry.
Or maybe just straight to the top. Premier, do you really want to get a handle on health-care spending? You have to know you’re never going to get there this way.

Read this and weep.

Inside the B.C. 2010 budget lockup

For those of you who have never been in a provincial budget lockup, this is how it is: You spend six hours flipping through page after page of financial information, scribbling asterisks in the margins here and there to signal “Important!” and folding down corners to remind yourself to go back and figure something out late.
And then you leave thinking, hey, did I learn anything new at all? Do I really have a clue about how the next year in B.C. is shaping up?
It has always been thus, ever since my first lockup in 1996 or so. I go every time thinking that maybe this once, I’m going to find the nugget, experience the “Aha!”, make somebody squirm in government by ferreting out The Thing, the one they really didn’t want to talk about.
Not so far. In my experience, it’s more like a shell game. I go up to the nice people in suits with my budget in hand and ask some variation of “Where’d the money go?” They always have a prompt and clear answer, but it’s always some variation of, “No worries, its right over here.”
Is it? Who knows? By then it’s been blended into three other funding streams, cut up across eight new programs, given a different name and shifted to another ministry. Good luck following the money.
The lockup is a provincial tradition that gives several hundred media and “stakeholders” an early look at the coming year’s budget, and to ask questions of deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers who know their stuff. That’s the real attraction of the event, but you also get a lot of documents to browse through, too.
They call it a lockup because that’s what happens: Once you’re in, you can’t leave until the finance minister rises in the legislature around 2:30 p.m. So you’ve got a lot of time to reflect on those numbers if you arrive early enough. I guess that’s why I always think there’s a chance that in an entire six hours, I might unearth some fascinating fact, some deeper understanding of the figures.
But it’s not just because I’m no expert at numbers. The lockup this week was such a stellar example of obfuscation that I got to wondering whether that’s somebody’s job in government. So much changes budget to budget that a genuine comparison is virtually impossible unless you’re a financial analyst, and I imagine even some of them are tripped up in the fog that politics brings to an exercise like this.
One thing that’s very clear in the budget is the Liberals’ misuse of their own “performance measures” initiative. Come on, you guys! I thought it was a great idea when you started establishing measurements for government performance when you first took office, but what’s the point when you keep changing the goal posts year to year?
I keep vowing to myself I’m going to spread out all the service plans from previous budgets one of these days, and count how many times performance measurements have changed, been severely diluted, or just plain vanished since the initiative started a decade or so ago. I think it would be quite an eye-opener.
The measurements have reached the point of ridiculousness now, as a browse through the 2010-13 ministry service plans underlines. Service plans are where the ministries state their priorities for coming years and then list the performance measures they’ll be using to gauge whether they’ve succeeded.
A couple telling examples from the Ministry of Children and Family Development service plan:
The ministry’s number-one priority is to “Place primary focus on preventing vulnerability in children and youth by providing strong supports for individuals, families and community.” Absolutely. But here’s the single performance measurement the ministry will use to determine whether it’s meeting that priority: An increase in the number of single parents receiving a day-care subsidy.
Really. I can only hope that whoever actually put that into the report as the sole measurement of child and family vulnerability was embarrassed to have to do it.
Another priority calls for early intervention. Bravo. But the sole measurement is a reduction in the number of children coming into government care who are instead placed with extended family and friends.
Targets for improvement are often missed budget to budget - things like aboriginal graduate rates (50 per cent), the number of elementary-school students who are reading at expected levels( as low as 68 per cent), children starting kindergarten behind in their development (28 per cent). Who’s actually responsible for making things happen? Who do we hold accountable?
Us, I guess. We’re the ones who put up with it.

Longer hours, less pay - welcome to a new era

Ever feel like you’re working longer hours than you used to, but still not getting ahead?
Maybe that’s because you are.
The average Canadian now puts in more hours on the job than ever (or at least since 1976, when the federal government started tracking such things). Paid work takes up more than 10 per cent of a typical Canadian’s total year these days, compared to eight or nine per cent in days past.
Worse news still: We’re putting in longer hours but bringing home the same old paycheque. In B.C., the average weekly earnings in 2008 were $780.85. Adjusted for inflation, that’s just $7 more a week compared to a decade earlier.
If you’re the type who likes to ruminate on what trends say about where the world is going, you’ll want to bookmark an intriguing federal Web site, The Indicators of Well-Being in Canada. It tracks statistics in 10 different “areas of well-being” - from work life to family life, from educational status to community connectedness.
I dove into the work category this week and was intrigued by the story the numbers told. It’s certainly not the tale of a new leisure class that the futurists of 20 or 30 years ago were predicting.
The stats get really interesting when you separate the genders.
It’s true that on average, Canadians overall are putting more time than ever into paid work. But most of the Canadian workforce is female now, almost 62 per cent, and that’s skewing the averages when it comes to what’s really going on for working men and women.
So it turns out that only female workers are actually logging longer work weeks. Women now work half an hour more a week on average than they did in 1976, while men work 78 minutes less.
Women continue to earn much, much less than men - $661 a week on average, compared to $903 for men. Take (small) comfort from knowing the wage gap is ever so slightly less now than it was a decade ago, having narrowed by a whopping $19 a week.
Men used to outnumber women in union jobs, but for the last six years it’s been the other way around. Overall unionization rates are falling for both genders, however, with less than a third of Canadian workers now employed in a unionized environment. The Indicators site takes that as worrying news, given that “unions provide workers with a support network to address various work-related issues affecting their well-being.”
On the bright side, men and women alike are experiencing shorter periods of unemployment. Ten years ago, people were typically out of work for six months or more when they lost their job. Now, the average Canadian is back in the saddle within 14.8 weeks - slightly faster if female (13.2 weeks) compared to male (16 weeks). One exception: Workers over the age of 55, who on average will be out of work 23 weeks.
Both genders are experiencing fewer on-the-job injuries.
It’s definitely men who come out the big winners on that front. Their work-related injury rates have fallen dramatically in the last couple of decades, from 44.6 per 1,000 to 23.4. Injury rates for women in that same period fell a more modest six percentage points to 13.6 per 1,000.
Are those improvements because we got a whole lot better at preventing workplace injuries? Could be, but a more likely explanation for falling injury rates is that Canada just doesn’t have as many risky resource-industry jobs anymore.
Unfortunately, that might also explain the lack of growth in average earnings over the years. Yes, more people got injured back in the days when resource industries were booming, but at least they were well-paid.
As for the percentage of Canadians out of work, well, that’s been all over the map for the period of time tracked on the Indicators site.
The worst year on record in the last 35 years was 1983, when the unemployment rate hit 12 per cent. Ten years later, it shot up nearly as high, then settled into a more modest six per cent for most of the years after that. It’s now at 8.3 per cent nationally, and just under that in B.C.
And here’s another sign of changing times: The unemployment rate used to be higher for women than men, but that trend flipped in the 1990s and now it’s men who consistently experience higher rates of unemployment.
Check out the report at http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/. Scroll down to “Knowledge Centre” and you’ll find the link there. Happy browsing.

Is this really how the premier wants us to remember him?

By the time you’re premier of B.C., you’re probably wrapped pretty tight in people who tell you what you want to hear.
So I got to thinking a while back about Gordon Campbell, and how he might not even know how small and mean his government is looking these days out here in the larger world. It’s not like he gets much opportunity to check in with the common folk and see what’s up.
But if I were him, I’d be making that happen very soon. Once the Olympics party wraps, I hope he takes some time to touch base with the people whose lives he governs.
Campbell will be B.C.’s premier for at least 12 years, possibly longer if he and his government hang in for another term after the 2013 election. What legacy does he want to leave from his time in office?
I’m sure the Olympics are a major piece, as is the sprucing up of B.C.’s economy (well, up until the economy tanked). Campbell can also take credit for making B.C. a friendlier place to do business, and bringing rapid transit to Vancouver International Airport.
But surely the man wouldn’t want to be remembered for picking on people who were barely hanging on to begin with. Yet that’s what sticks in my mind from his time in government so far, and I’m wondering if he really understands that. And that I’m not the only one.
Campbell’s government has been elected for three terms in a row, so we’ll have to presume that most British Columbians support his way of thinking. But not everything has come up roses under the Liberals, and after 12 years it’s definitely starting to show.
Campbell wants government to function more like business. Good business smarts definitely are important for effective governance, because much of government at the ground level is about attending to the very same things that any business needs to attend to in order to stay in operation.
But there are some big differences between the goals of business and government. Most notably: A business operates for the benefit of its owners and shareholders. A government, at least in a democracy, operates for the good of society. They’re very different things.
Being fiscally astute means a heck of a lot to business. And it needs to mean a lot to a provincial government as well, because the cost of debt goes on and on.
But balancing the books certainly isn’t the only consideration for a government. Businesses don’t need to worry about figuring things out for all the poor, weak, old, young, sick, out-of-work or challenged people in their communities. Governments do.
I’m not against the Olympics. But I can completely understand why people might get incensed at governments sparing no expense to fly piles of snow from one mountain to another via helicopter, while at that very moment the province is announcing $15 million in cuts to services for non-aboriginal B.C. youth and families. I mean, that’s just plain wrong.
Nobody can fault Campbell for believing way back when that trickle-down economics and tough new “hand up, not hand out” programs would take care of British Columbians’ problems. Who’s to say until you try?
But a dozen years in, what’s resulted is an entrenched, growing sub-class of people with bigger problems, poorer health, less education and fewer prospects for well-paid, consistent work and stable housing. They are so close to the edge that the tiniest push sends them head over heels into the abyss. Is that really what Campbell wants?
A small example: If you ran B.C., would you opt to provide $6 a day for Meals on Wheels and a small alarm system to help maintain the independence of a man living with Parkinson’s disease, or deny him that and instead fork out $3,000 or so a month for the long-term care bill he’ll soon be ringing up?
It’s a pretty obvious choice, and I bet Campbell would make the smart one if I could ask him. But his government and the insulated yes-men running B.C.’s health authorities consistently make the wrong one - in that particular case and in many similar situations. Small, stupid cruelties like that happen all the time in the lives of thousands of British Columbians down on their luck.
Mr. Premier, time for a reality check. You don’t strike me as a small-minded, mean man. Don’t let your government be remembered as one.