19 Oct Community Services stripped of recovery centre oversight

In a tacit acknowledgement that Community Services bolloxed the crisis it brought on at Cape Breton’s Talbot House Recovery Centre, the province has stripped the department of responsibility for all five addiction recovery centres in Nova Scotia. From now on, provincial funding, service agreements, and oversight will fall under the Department of Health and Wellness.

Peterson-Rafuse

The decision comes just in time for Health to assume responsibility for evaluating a proposal from Talbot House to restore provincial funding it received as Cape Breton’s only addiction recovery centre. That avoids the sticky problem of having Community Services officials, with their demonstrated bias against Talbot, evaluate responses to the Request for Proposals Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse ordered last June in a spiteful escalation of her department’s battle with the respected, 53-year-old treatment centre.

That’s all well and good. There is no reason to believe Health and Wellness can’t manage provincial funding of recovery centres professionally and fairly. But there remains the glaring need for a top-to-bottom investigation of the Department of Community Services. Its assault on Talbot was simply too reckless and too vindictive to let pass unexamined. There is ample evidence from other cases that imperious bullying of clients and client organizations has become standard operating procedure at Community Services.

If a government led by the New Democratic Party, which has criticized Community Services for decades, won’t undertake this long overdue review, who will?