Christy Clark's Next Battleground

Now that the dust has settled on Premier Campbell's cabinet shuffle, those on the front lines of government policies are beginning to consider what likely lies ahead. With a few exceptions, they are not optimistic.

And among those most worried are those who work with the children and youth involved with the Ministry of Child and Family Development - the ministry from which Gordon Hogg resigned under a substantial cloud.

It was Hogg's departure that prompted Campbell to shuffle a majority of his cabinet ministers this week, handing Hogg's portfolio to former education minister Christy Clark.

Without Hogg's resignation, the premier would presumably have waited until after the upcoming spring session of the legislature to make the changes. Traditionally, cabinet shuffles don't occur just two weeks before a Speech from the Throne or three weeks before a Budget. Premiers would rather give their new ministers some time to get up to speed with their new responsibilities before facing Question Period and Estimates debate in the House.

In offering Campbell his resignation, Hogg was following the parliamentary tradition of ministerial responsibility for problems within his jurisdiction. That in itself was refreshing, for it's a parliamentary tradition that has almost disappeared in British Columbia over the past two or three decades. Ministers now most often feel compelled to resign only if they are somehow personally caught up in whatever scandal is plaguing their departments.

There is no suggestion that Hogg was personally responsible for the problems that centre on the new transitional authority for Community Living (read: services to adults with mental disabilities) and its now-resigned head Doug Walls. Hogg's sins were those of omission, not commission.

He can and should be faulted for not taking matters seriously enough when he was first warned last summer that Walls, a Liberal insider and bankrupt car dealer known to trade on his somewhat-distant relationship-by-marriage with Campbell, was likely to lead the authority and the ministry into serious trouble.  When a full independent audit of all the ministry's doings with Walls was required, it was generally agreed that Hogg did the right thing by stepping down.

Toughest job in government

Despite that, there are now a lot of social workers, foster parents, youth workers and others involved with children and youth who are very much wishing he had not departed.

For despite the many problems in the ministry, there are few who would argue that Hogg was one of the most passionate spokespersons in government for the needs of children and youth.

It might well be argued that he has had one of the toughest jobs in government for the past 30 months. Responsibility for child welfare has a lengthy history of being a time-bomb waiting to explode, not just in British Columbia, but in most jurisdictions in both Canada and the U.S. It appears to be next to impossible to strike an appropriate balance between protecting children in danger and wrenching far too many children away from their families. Children commit suicide, die in preventable tragedies, or worst of all are abused and murdered - and the ministry always comes in for at least a share of the blame.

But in Hogg's case, the situation was made much worse by the determined budget cutting of Campbell and his finance minister and treasury board.

During their time in opposition, the Liberals made much of the need to provide the necessary funding for taking care of B.C.'s troubled children and youth. However, when they came to power, they did not provide for the children's ministry even the limited funding protection promised to the ministries of health and education - a guarantee that funding would not be cut, and would be increased with growth in the provincial economy. It can well be argued that the children's ministry deserved that same protection. It is a ministry driven by demand, making it exceptionally difficult to control costs. If the transportation ministry runs out of money, it's easy enough for a government to say it won't build any more new roads for a few months, but one can hardly say they're just going to stop investigating reports of child sexual abuse because the well has run dry.

Hogg's grand plan: Cut big in 2004

However, Hogg was stuck with the same orders as all those other unprotected ministries - to find savings totalling about 20 per cent of his ministry's budget over a three-year time period. He began hatching a series of ambitious plans to try to achieve that goal.

His first aim was to try to reduce substantially the number of children coming into the care of the ministry, one of the most expensive parts of the budget. New efforts would be made to keep families together, and to place children with relatives rather than in government-run foster or group homes.

At the same time, he began work on a project to decentralize almost all the ministry operations to a series of regional authorities, much like those that are now running the health care and hospital systems across the province. Each region would have two parallel authorities - one for aboriginal and one for non-aboriginal children which would take over responsibility for child protection investigations, foster homes, services to troubled youth, and the like.

At the same time, a new provincial authority would take over responsibility for the community living sector, stressing "individualized funding" in which the mentally challenged or their families could receive payments from the government and then buy their own services.

The result of the plans was that Hogg chose not to spread his forced budget cuts over the three year period. Instead, he would cut little during the first two years while he was reducing the number of children in care and developing the new community authorities. The big cuts would come in Year Three when the entire new (cheaper) system could be put in place.

However, the theory didn't work out nearly so well in practice. After a first brisk decrease in the number of children take into care, the level stalled. Ministry staff couldn't figure out how to reduce the numbers further, without putting some children at serious risk of harm. The plans for decentralization also proved to be more complex than had first been believed. Not only front-line agencies but eventually reports from the government's own consultants began warning that the new system would need massive start-up resources and couldn't safely be implemented at the same time as huge budget cuts. And the community living system got all mixed up with Doug Walls.

Clark brings hard-nosed approach 

Through it all, Hogg fought desperately for the money he knew he needed to make the new system work. Eventually Treasury Board was convinced that the ministry simply could not meet its budget targets for the upcoming fiscal year. They agreed to provide enough extra money that the cuts would have to be only about 12 per cent, instead of more than 20.

It still was going to cause immense pain in the system - and Hogg knew it. The cuts would total about $70 million. The ministry would still have the money to do the absolute essentials, like investigating complaints of sexual abuse, but services to children in trouble were going to become a lot scarcer on the ground. Virtually until the day he resigned, Hogg was still scrambling, trying to find every dollar he could for children, youth and families, even though Treasury Board had imposed tight controls on ministry spending.

Now Christy Clark has taken over the ministry. In the education portfolio, she has shown herself to be much more hard-nosed than Hogg, telling school boards they have to make "tough choices" when it comes to issues like closing schools and reducing services to students.

And those who work with vulnerable children and youth are realizing they may have lost a man who made mistakes in his running of the ministry. But they've also lost a man who was their champion at the cabinet table.

Barbara McLintock is contributing editor to The Tyee.