Ladies, Upstairs! by Monique Bégin

Author:Monique Bégin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

 14

Under the Microscope: A Few Very Public Files

A sixth branch of the department in the business of policies and programs was the Social Services Branch, under Brian Iverson. If I worked far less with its officials in my daily ministerial life than with the five other branches already covered in previous chapters, it is because of its “object.” Called “Social Services,” it was basically responsible for one of the most arcane, expensive, delicate, and key pieces of machinery of government: the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP). This is made of all the federal-provincial fiscal arrangements covering provincial “welfare,” a shared cost program distinct from the medicare one but as important a product of the Canadian system of federalism. It is also far less well known and understood in its many dimensions by the public. But, there too, when I signed a ministerial order, it would affect the income maintenance programs and the social services programs offered by the provinces. The CAP Directorate also administered other joint programs, such as the Vocational Rehabilitation of Disabled Persons Act. So, for obvious reasons, this branch and its activities would not have been under the microscope.

When I started in Health and Welfare, I immediately learned, almost like a new theology, the phrase health-promotion-and-disease-prevention. It was like one new thirty-five-letter word that, for quite some time, I did not even understand to what branch it belonged nor what it did. It had forty letters in French: promotion-de-la-santé-et-prévention-de-la-maladie. It appeared to me so basic and so vague that I had difficulty knowing what fell under it. But I always knew who incarnated it: Ron Draper was its hero, surrounded by a very dynamic small team of civil servants. (Shortly after his death in 1998, the Canadian Association of Public Health set up the annual Ron Draper Health Promotion Award.) I had rapidly sensed that those speaking that language were “the good guys,” and, like any good guy in my huge portfolio, they were under-financed and did not count much in our bureaucratic power structure. Finally, in 1978, my department created a new Directorate of Health Promotion ironically inside the most medically oriented branch, the one in charge of medicare … a branch labelled Health Services and Promotion (!) under Dr Maureen Law as ADM. After the Health Promotion group had worked on defining with precision its role and action priorities, these were launched, so to speak, by Ron Draper at a national forum in January 1980, at the First Canadian Conference on Health Promotion. Later that year, in September, their six priority areas had been selected and approved: tobacco, safety, nutrition for pregnant women and preschool children, health promotion for adolescents, alcohol use among adolescents and young adults, and emotional well-being. This Action Plan document, including the creation of a national health promotion survey by Statistics Canada, was approved by Cabinet in 1982 when I was back in the health portfolio.

In hindsight, what I should have received from the department together with the first meeting on health-promotion-and-disease-prevention

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