Province needs social policy planning

Program spending must be done with clear outcomes, Leslie Welin writes.

If you caught the news reports on the 2017-18 provincial budget, you might have concluded that life’s going in the right direction for most British Columbians. Significant savings on health premiums, more money for children and youth with mental health issues, a little extra for people with disabilities on income assistance — it all sounds pretty promising.

But in the absence of any plan or vision to guide social investment in B.C., the unsettling truth is that we have no way of knowing whether the 2017 budget is preparing us for better days or just randomly moving money from one pot to another. We can’t gauge whether it will improve average British Columbians’ lives over the long-term.

Board Voice is an umbrella group of volunteer board directors from community organizations throughout B.C. We’ve been talking for years about the need for a socialpolicy framework for B.C. — a thoughtful, collaborative and co-ordinated approach that would bring services, sectors and funders together to work in a co-ordinated and consistent fashion toward better social outcomes.

That’s not what we’ve got now. Take a look at the 2017 budget and you might conclude that our method of determining social spending is piecemeal and disjointed. While some people’s lives will improve due to changes introduced in this year’s budget, that will be more about the luck of the draw than the result of planning.

We would never invest in bridges, roads, schools and hospitals without a clear sense of why we were undertaking a project and what outcomes we were aiming for. But investments in social infrastructure are made without the overarching vision, goals and planning that would help to ensure better outcomes for people.

Many billions of dollars are spent every year in B.C. on human services and hundreds of thousands of British Columbians rely on these every day — daycare, early childhood intervention supports, schools, seniors’ care, immigrant settlement, community mental-health programs, foster care, income assistance and more. But we’ve never had the public conversation to establish the measurable, meaningful results we want to achieve in B.C. We haven’t established consistent funding or viewed such services through the lens of improving social determinants of health.

Consider the most-reported aspect of the 2017 budget: The reduction in Medical Services Plan premiums for families with household incomes below $120,000. It’s always nice to have more money in our pockets, but will the reduction improve people’s lives? Are the families who will benefit from reduced premiums the ones who most need a financial break right now? Where is the money coming from to cover the loss in premiums — and what other services will suffer as a result?

These are the kinds of questions that integrated social planning strives to answer before funding is allocated. Provincial governments in Nova Scotia and Alberta have already committed to this kind of planning. We urge the B.C. government to do the same. Having a provincial social-policy framework in place would at least ensure a shared vision and strategy.

The costs of a lack of social planning are high. Child poverty rates go up and down ever so slightly from year-to-year in B.C., but seem resistant to change. The high percentage of indigenous children in government care has barely changed despite 10 years of government-funded reports, public laments and much money thrown at the problem. British Columbians with disabilities still face immense challenges in finding affordable housing, which will not be rectified by the $50-a-month lift in their income assistance cheques announced in the budget.

The co-ordinated, longterm planning of human services to improve the wellbeing of all British Columbians transcends politics and ideology. By investing in the root causes of well-being, we will build a vibrant, strong province that works for everyone who lives here.