Mr. Curley makes a point, sort of
Imagine you’re the coach of a hockey team. You’re asked to win a cup final. But for the entire 60 minutes of the game, your team’s permitted to ice only four, not six, players per shift.
If you’re in charge of Nunavut’s Department of Health and Social Services, you face the same obstacle. You have to play short-handed every day.
And every day you must face the wrath of those who blame you for never being able to score a goal.
Seen from that vantage point, Tagak Curley’s stated reasons for resigning from the Nunavut cabinet, where he served as minister of Health and Social Services, are not entirely unreasonable.
In interviews with Nunatsiaq News and CBC radio, the MLA for Rankin Inlet North said three years as the political head of such a “rigorous” department is long enough.
According to his version of events, Aariak wouldn’t give Curley another assignment or reconsider a proposal to split the department into two separate entities: a Department of Health and a Department of Social Services.
So he quit.
Curley makes a valid point. The Department of Health and Social Services has grown into a great unruly beast of a portfolio. It’s the biggest single department at the Government of Nunavut and its employees are responsible for responding to Nunavut’s most distressing health problems and its most painful social dysfunctions.
By the end of the 2011-12 fiscal year, the GN estimates that out of every four dollars it plans to spends, one dollar will be spent on health and social services: at least $305 million.
Within that budget, the biggest single spending item is the treatment of patients at health centres and hospitals. By March 2012, that will total at least $164.7 million, of which $69.4 million will be spent on wages and benefits and $56 million on medical travel.
In theory, the HSS department was supposed to have employed 918 people, as of March 2011. In reality, it manages to employ a much smaller number. Since 1999, about one in three HSS jobs have sat empty at any given time.
And so it was in March of 2011, when the department filled only 612 of those 918 jobs, while 306, mostly jobs that should have been filled by frontline health and social service professionals, sat vacant.
As we’ve said, when Nunavut plays the game of government, it always plays short-handed.
So Curley may be right in suggesting three years at the helm of HSS is more than enough for anyone.
But if that’s the case, why is it such a bad idea to split the department into two more manageable pieces?
The social services section of HSS is small when compared with the rest of the department. In 2011-12, it’s expected to spend at least $42.5 million. They’ll do this with only 64 funded positions, though about one-third of them will lie vacant at any given time.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Right now, at least two of the GN’s big projects involve social services functions: one is a re-writing of the Child and Family Services Act and the other is a review of the territory’s social service system, which began in September 2010. Yet another task is to plug the gaping holes in Nunavut’s child protection system that the Auditor General of Canada exposed in a recent report.
This suggests a strong argument in favour of dividing the department into two portfolios. One minister would be become accountable for work on the numerous problems that plague socials services and for overseeing a new Child and Family Services Act. Another minister would be responsible for improving the health care system.
In any event, this proposed restructuring scheme is old news. On June 3, 2011, Keith Peterson, the finance minister, told MLAs the GN hired Ken Lovely, a highly respected civil servant who began his career in the eastern Arctic and worked for many years at the highest levels of the Government of Northwest Territories, to do a restructuring plan.
This would include dividing HSS into two entities. Another idea, by the way, is the elimination of the small Culture, Language, Elders and Youth Department by putting its various functions within other departments.
Unfortunately, Lovely’s report has yet to be made public. So for now it would be wise not to jump to hasty conclusions.
One reality is certain, however. This is not the type of issue that could ever be resolved in a territorial election, as Curley has suggested. Few candidates or voters have enough knowledge to make an informed judgement on such a complex issue.
At the same time, Nunavut’s non-partisan elections do not allow voters to make a judgment on any outgoing government. In Aariak’s case, only the electors of her constituency can do that. In the other 21 electoral districts, voters, as they always do, will focus on small-time parochial issues.
Curley’s resignation may have been a strong expression of principle. But his logic, to say the least, is inconsistent. JB
