The B.C. government is dismissing calls from one of its biggest public-sector unions to fold the Crown corporation responsible for the care of vulnerable people and to retake direct control of its work.
The B.C. General Employees Union (BCGEU), which represents workers at Community Living BC (CLBC), says the Crown corporation is a bloated bureaucracy that wastes money that should be spent on the people who need it more.
Community Living BC provides a range of supports and services for adults living with developmental disabilities.
BCGEU president Paul Finch told Global News the move to carve CLBC out of the provincial government in 2005 was a “failed experiment.”
“This is not providing the governance and oversight that is required,” he said.
“These are issues that span the scope and breadth of their interaction with other service agencies, with parents, caregivers, clients and frankly the people who work there.”
The push comes on the heels of a coroner’s inquest into the death of Florence Girard, a woman with Down syndrome who starved to death while in a home share program contracted through CLBC. The inquest heard testimony that caregivers are underfunded by the Crown corporation.
Last summer, Global News reported on families whose children with special needs had aged out of the school system and were told by CLBC that there were no spots for them in adult programs. The agency found spaces for the children after Global’s report.
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“(Our members) are in this field because they care about the services they provide, they care about their clients. It’s a caring profession. And they take their duties to administer those programs and provide those services very seriously,” Finch said. “And it’s frustrating when they are in a process and they are in an organization that is not adequately aligned or suited by structure to be able to do that.”
Both Autism BC and Down Syndrome BC recently issued statements calling for “meaningful change” at the Crown corporation.
“For over 20 years, CLBC–a Provincial Crown Corporation–has not adequately supported the needs of neurodivergent and developmentally disabled individuals in B.C.,” Autism BC said in its statement.
But both the province and CLBC are pushing back.
“The vast majority of individuals are getting the kind of care that they want and that they need, it’s very different from what the public perceives us as needing to do,” said Joanne Mills, CLBC’s vice-president of quality assurance and Indigenous relations.
Mills said CLBC was founded from a grassroots movement that included parents, self-advocates and people connected to the closure of the notorious Woodlands institution that once housed many people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
She said scrapping the agency would ultimately force people with complex disabilities out of their communities and back into institutions.
“We were built to provide the kinds of supports that would allow our folks and all the people we support to have full access and citizenship and inclusion to everything else every other British Columbia gets access to,” she said.
“And for government to define what that looks like is really a violation of not only their human rights but also their constitutional rights.”
Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction Sheila Malcolmson said CLBC’s independence from the government means the people it serves have a direct say in how the organization runs.
Adults with developmental disabilities have dealt with a long history of being institutionalized, she said, and as a result, there is “a lot of distrust and for good reason.”
“It’s a really special model where the voices of people with lived experience sit on the board, they sit in an advisory capacity, they have a really great say in program and service delivery — that’s key — and that’s what the people that CLBC serves had asked for,” she said. “And they have not been asking me to do away with CLBC.”
Malcolmson, however, acknowledged there is always a duty for the government to improve care and service delivery.
She said the province added another $216 million to the Crown corporation’s $1.7 billion budget last year.
CLBC, meanwhile, says it is open to meeting with the union to discuss workers’ concerns.
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