Opinion: B.C.'s Liberal leader taking steps to leave his budget-cutting past in the rear-view mirror
VICTORIA — Opposition leader Kevin Falcon rolled out his first major election promise on Thursday, trying for a big spending contrast with his reputation as a budget-cutting relic of the last B.C. Liberal government.
Falcon promised to spend $1.5 billion over three years to remake mental health and addiction services, including $1 billion on program funding and the rest to build regional centres for those needing complex care.
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It’s part of what Falcon framed as a “radical” departure from the approach of successive B.C. governments, including the B.C. Liberal one in which he served as a cabinet minister from 2001-2012.
“Over 40 years, successive B.C. governments closed down a rightly criticized approach to mental-health care without ensuring an adequate system of supports was available for former patients in communities,” declared Falcon, referring to the now-shuttered Riverview Hospital.
“It is misplaced compassion to have society’s most vulnerable be exploited and abused by predatory drug dealers and human traffickers while we pretend to care about their welfare.”
One element of the Falcon plan seemed crafted to contradict notions of himself as an advocate of user-pay health care.
If elected, Falcon said he would “immediately expand free and accessible treatment and recovery options” and “eliminate user fees at publicly funded addiction treatment beds.”
His government would spend $150 million a year to subsidize free space in not-for-profit facilities and to directly fund overflow space in privately owned treatment facilities.
The publicly funded beds in private facilities would be reserved exclusively for government-sponsored patients.
More than half of the proposed $1.5 billion would go to a combination of “recovery communities” and “complex mental health supports” that would be spread around the province.
There’d be “a minimum of five regional recovery communities for addiction treatment where residents can stay for up to a year with individualized, holistic, long-term residential treatment including Indigenous specific care. … Recovery communities provide opportunities for people to enhance their life skills and social competencies to help them return to full community living.”
A Falcon government would build four new regional complex centres in the North, Thompson-Okanagan, Kootenays and Vancouver Island regions.
Those would ensure the estimated 2,200 British Columbians who require “highly specialized mental health support can receive it close to home.”
Falcon pointed to the Red Fish Healing Centre, located on the lands of the former Riverview centre for mental health.
“For admission, clients must have both a complex mental illness and a substance-use disorder. The program is designed for people who have experienced several relapses, and whose treatment needs are beyond what their local community health resources or health authority can meet.”
Its services are much in demand and it would be expanded, Falcon indicated.
The Opposition leader waded into one of the biggest controversies regarding problems of mental health and addiction, namely involuntary treatment.
He would “bring forward legislation allowing the limited use of involuntary treatment to keep our most vulnerable youth and adults at risk of harm to themselves or others safe at modernized, compassionate facilities with 24/7 psychiatric and medical supports.”
Emphasis on where necessary.
“Involuntary care must always be a last resort but we must recognize that there are some cases that require this type of intervention and support for both adults and youth.”
Before the last election, Premier John Horgan introduced legislation to allow brief, involuntary detention for young victims of drug overdoses.
After using the Green party’s opposition to the measure as an excuse for calling an early election — and winning a majority — Horgan backed off, concluding involuntary detention might be counterproductive.
Premier David Eby, during his bid for the NDP leadership, floated the notion of involuntary detention of those who overdose. Lately he has been having second thoughts as well.
Falcon contrasted his emphasis on treatment and recovery to that of the NDP government on several points.
On harm reduction: “This government is entirely focused on going down the harm-reduction path and frankly minimizing or dismissing treatment and recovery … If the entire goal of this NDP government is to help maintain an addiction lifestyle, that is not a good thing.
“Just being alive should not be our measure of success.”
As for the so called safer supply of drugs, Falcon warns it can mean “publicly supplying people with addictive drugs — and there is no safe level of addictive drugs.”
Falcon says he’s heard the objections to his approach and where it differs from that of the NDP.
“I’ve heard enough. Now it’s decision time. We’re going to make things happen.”
Presuming he forms the next government, which is far from certain.
As for the $1.5 billion price tag, “it is a lot of money” Falcon conceded.
“But people need to understand that we are already spending today literally billions of dollars in the criminal justice, in the policing, in the health care system … and many actually are not getting better.”
Besides, he added “I see government waste money all over the place.”
Pressed for an example, he cited the abandoned $1 billion makeover of Royal B.C. Museum, fast becoming the finger-pointing stand in for the fast ferry fiasco with this generation of Opposition politicians.
vpalmer@postmedia.com