Advocate says government must change how it manages social programs or risk their collapse on multiple fronts

11 March 2024

FREDERICTON – The provincial government is using outdated practices from 30 years ago to manage social programs, and must change how it operates or risk a breakdown of multiple social programs at once, according to Child, Youth and Seniors’ Advocate Kelly Lamrock.

In his new report How It All Broke, Lamrock examines social program failures across multiple departments and makes 10 recommendations to the Executive Council and Department of Finance and Treasury Board.

“Many New Brunswickers rightly wonder why a number of social services are breaking down at once,” said Lamrock. “It is not a coincidence. It is because the government is organized at its centre to defeat good people working on how it delivers social programs.”

Lamrock further questions why, all at the same time, the province has emergency rooms that warn people not to show up, long-term care patients stuck in hospitals, schools that barely teach half of all children to read, child-care wait-lists, mental health care wait-lists and family court wait times nearly two years long, and a child protection system that repeats the same mistakes.

The advocate also notes this is the first time his office has issued a report aimed at the central departments that manage government: the Executive Council Office and Finance and Treasury Board.

“In reviewing breakdowns in child protection, long-term care, mental health, disability support, family courts and classroom education, we noticed that the same flaws kept happening over and over,” said Lamrock. “This led us to consider the possibility that the problem is not necessarily within the departments themselves, but the failed central-governance model they work under. This report addresses where the common problems lie.”

The report identifies what Lamrock calls five central governance flaws in how the province has been organized since the mid-1990s and how these errors keep defeating social programs and depriving New Brunswickers of service. The five flaws are:

• Failing to plan for human resource needs with good models and training targets.
• Budgeting without any measurement of what works or clear social outcome goals, which leads to funding actions rather than funding results.
• Holding public servants to bureaucratic rules and uniform processes without ever holding anyone accountable for outcomes.
• Setting hard targets for fiscal goals but never setting clear, measurable targets for social outcomes.
• Avoiding preventative planning and investment in optional programs that might prevent crises, then overpaying to fund the crises.

The advocate also said that the problems are not new.

“If it was the case that these things were caused by incompetent people or one round of underfunding, I could say so,” said Lamrock. “However, the reality is that there are good people working in the system. Also, recent budgets compare well to the historic averages and very well compared to the austerity budgets of the mid-1990s, in terms of social spending. It is not bad or incompetent people. It is a broken system.”

The report also makes 10 recommendations aimed at fixing the governance model:

• Creating a social policy branch of the Executive Council Office to support social departments with modelling demand, setting service standards, reviewing best practices and measuring outcomes.
• Separating the functions of Treasury Board and the Executive Council Office.
• Holding a training summit with the private sector, professional associations and the post-secondary sector to set hard targets for training based upon credible demand models.
• Launching a “reinventing government” initiative to reduce social program red tape, increase discretion of front-line workers to solve problems, and make regions and departments more accountable for delivering results.
• Reviewing government training programs to focus less on training for uniformity and compliance and, instead, train for problem-solving and flexible delivery.
• Setting social outcome targets for government departments and reporting on progress in an annual update.
• Establishing more accountable budget processes by ensuring that demand projections, service standards and projected social outcome targets for key social programs and new social investments are regularly included in the supporting budget documents.
• Reviewing the relationship between government and the non-profit sector, including looking at ways to make program delivery more local, flexible and client-driven.
• Establishing more flexible rules and incentives for social departments to provide integrated services to clients, based upon a “meet the need first” model.
• Assessing the impact of operational changes resulting from new collective agreements on the citizens receiving the service.

“I am tired of seeing the same problems cause harm to children, seniors and vulnerable New Brunswickers. It is time to call out these patterns of failure,” said Lamrock. “The fact is that we have a lot of good people working hard to support the vulnerable, but the system keeps producing the same problems. Good people should not have to work in a poorly designed system.”

NT6