'Fiscally compliant but ultimately fiscally stupid': N.B. advocate calls out government over social programs

New Brunswick’s child, youth and seniors' advocate is calling on the province to reduce red tape, and add better oversight when it comes to running its social programs, including health care, housing, senior care and child care.

Kelly Lamrock says, in many ways, the system is the same as it was in the mid-1990’s, and has allowed New Brunswickers to fall through the cracks because they don’t fit into a box on a checklist.

He used one example of a family with children who needed extra resources at school. The school said it couldn’t provide those resources on a daily basis, and the students could only attend on a part-time basis.

“The parents had hourly shift work, so they had to quit their jobs because there was no way they could do both. And then they wound up on social assistance and then they lost their housing,” he said. “But then, of course, even when social development knew they were teetering on the brink of homelessness, they had to wait to lose their house and move further and further into more and more unstable housing. Then they were further away. They lost their cell phone. So the social workers, if they wanted to talk to them, had to drive an hour to the rural community.”

And Lamrock reminds, it all started when the school district ruled the children could only go to school part-time because of lack of resources.

“By the rules, education did a great job because they stayed within their rules and their budget. The fact it created more problems later, well, that's not anything anyone's accountable for. The fact you broke a family. No one has to answer for that,” he said.

That’s an illustration of why he feels the province needs to take a look at how it runs its social programs, and the results it produces.

He believes change needs to happen at the heart of government – in the department of finance, the treasury board and the executive council.

Who then can direct other departments to reduce social programming red tape, and allow frontline workers to solve problems on the ground – using their own judgement for what’s best for the individual they’re working with.

“If Social Development turns down a $500 home care service and the senior winds up in a significantly more expensive hospital bed, that is fiscally compliant but ultimately fiscally stupid,” the report reads.

Lamrock also recommends the executive council office include a social policy branch that will support social departments.

That branch would create human resource recruitment plans, set service standards, review how departments are doing and measure results.

Green Party leader David Coon agrees with the report, but is skeptical change will come.

“Because it takes leadership to make these changes and that leadership is not in place. So it takes leadership to say we have to restructure government. Fundamentally, the system is the problem, not the people in it,” he said.

Coon says it’s a problem that’s plagued different governments, and different political parties.

“When I first got elected in 2014, raising these systemic issues in the legislature and the house leader for the Liberal government of the day standing up and saying to me in response in question period: ‘Well, the member from Fredericton South must understand the system is the system,’” he recalled. “He said that. And that fundamentally there reflects the problem. We've got to abandon that notion and change the system.”

Liberal leader Susan Holt says many of the recommendations are key to seeing real improvements in the care sectors.

“If we don't fix the front end and the back end of the spectrum, then nothing in hospitals are going to change,” she said. 

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