Is it about money or mental health?

The Nova Scotia government is doing more than talking, commiserating and strategizing about mental health issues. The Liberals are spending some money to help Nova Scotians who suffer from pain less visible, but no less debilitating, than most physical wounds.

The additional dollars are needed. Mental health services have been at the back of a very long line of underfunded health programs for far too long.

The government is directing most of the new care and counselling to young people, as it should. Early intervention can prevent a lifetime of suffering.

With that limited praise for the exterior, it is customary — here at least — to check under the hood.

The province’s news release offered a line-by-line, budget-like accounting that attached price tags to the mental well-being it is buying Nova Scotians. That’s not exactly the way the government would want it characterized, but that is exactly what it did.

There is a nagging discomfort with this government, and the mental health announcement is just the latest example. Cost features most prominently in virtually every “good news” announcement it makes. That offers some insight into its MO beyond the obvious, which is that the province wants you to know it is spending more on you.

In this announcement, mental health programs were inserted almost as punctuation to separate the dollar figures. Issues were addressed platitudinally. If numbers are that important, Health Minister Randy Delorey might have estimated how many more Nova Scotians will get services previously denied them, and how many will still be left waiting.

Instead, an announcement about mental health services read like a flyer for Everyday Low Prices at Walmart. In the end, we are better informed about what we’ll spend than the value we will derive.

This is symptomatic of a government that measures what it does by the money it spends, rather than the progress it achieves.

Here’s some of the meat in the announcement: $1.8 million to expand SchoolsPlus into 68 more schools; $700,000 to increase services delivered by the IWK in rural and underserved areas; $192,000 to hire two guidance counsellors and a social worker in the Cape Breton Victoria Regional School Board; $1.6 million to expand crisis services; $1 million to create a provincewide central intake system; $550,000 to increase access to community based supports; and on it went.

The minister’s opening statement was: “Access to mental health services is improving across Nova Scotia with an additional $8.6 million in government funding this year leading to almost 70 more mental health-care providers.” Some will say it’s not nearly enough, because it isn’t, but we’ll leave that to them.

The additional professional staff will make a difference, but the emphasis on the money is disquieting.

A government that looks first and most to the bottom line will do what the bottom line tells it to. The problem, the people suffering and what they truly need, is viewed through a single, financial lens.

“What do we need to do and how do we get it done?” is supplanted by, “How much do we have to spend?” Those two questions will elicit very different answers, and the second doesn’t lend itself to creative solutions. Indeed, it builds the very box we were once told to think outside.

The province’s finances are an essential consideration, but a problem-solving government will triage Nova Scotians’ needs and make politically courageous choices. A bottom-line government will, as we are seeing, scatter bucks around so that some land everywhere.

This is a tough province to govern. There is far more need than money. But is the best solution really to apply a tourniquet here and a patch there? Or is it time to figure out what really needs doing and stop doing some of the other stuff?

Every new government for the past 30 years has conducted some form of “program review” in search of something that can go. Each has discovered that every program has a constituency that will be upset and probably create some political pain if a program is eliminated. That’s where the political courage comes in.

There have been some nuanced alterations but, in the end, governments of all three stripes have mostly maintained the status quo.

The status quo just isn’t working for too many Nova Scotians.