Reforming Human Services: The Experience of the Community Resource Boards in B.C.

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Most of us are used to locally elected boards of education; in 1973, the NDP government of British Columbia decided to extend the notion of locally elected boards to the area of social services in order to achieve the goals of decentralization, integration, and local accountability. Thus, under Minister Norman Levi, the Department of Rehabilitation and Social Improvement established Community Resource Boards across the province to handle services within that Department’s mandate, while over in the Department of Health Services and Hospital Insurance, Minister Dennis Cocke authorized the establishment of five Community Health Resources and Health Centres. Clearly, the subtitle of this book is misleading, since more than the CRB’s are discussed.

The book has two other minor flaws as well. The first is the responsibility of the UBC Press. In the Introduction to Part 2, on pages 26 and 27, two numbers appear in the text that do not appear in the end-notes, and the last three paragraphs on page 68 are repeated word-for-word at the bottom of the next page. The second flaw is the responsibility of the authors: while they have written two introductory chapters, which set the stage for the CRB/CHRHC experiments, one regrets that they did not include a chapter exploring in some detail similar experiments elsewhere. The authors’ largely ethnocentric approach may handicap their book’s appeal.

And a pity this would be, for Reforming Human Services is one of the most powerfully argued and well-researched documents to come this reviewer’s way in some time.

Four people were involved in its preparation: two academics (Brian Wharf, Dean of the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria, and Roop Seebaran, Assistant Professor in the U.B.C. School of Social Work), and two practitioners (Michael Clague, the Executive Director of the Community Council of Greater Victoria, and Robert Dill, Coordinator of the James Bay CHRHC). Surprisingly, perhaps, theirs is not a random collection of articles but a most cohesive text that will be of interest to social service professionals, public administrators, politicians, and, of course, anyone interested in the development of public policy. Example: the CRB’s were developed on Levi’s initiative with little attempt to keep his ministry or his party informed; the CHRHC were instituted more slowly, and after broader consultation. Since both initiatives were controversial, it is not coincidental that the former became the lightening rod for opposition attack, and the first to suffer the axe when the Socreds resumed office in 1976.

While the authors are openly biased in favour of the NDP experiments, they are scrupulously fair in presenting their case. The book is a surprising example of a text that the reader will not want to put down until the end.