A study in government empathy

Opinion

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This article was published 05/06/2023 (569 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Of all the qualities politicians need to fulfill the duties of their offices, compassion and empathy are likely most important.

Throughout the commission of their duties, politicians are faced with an incredible array of complex challenges. In many cases, lives are at stake and those with their hands on the levers of government need to use empathy to be aware of those in need, and compassion to prompt us to help them.

This week, we saw an example of what empathy and compassion looks like.

We also got a reminder of what it looks like when people lose sight of those critically important abilities.

First, compassion and empathy in action.

On Friday, the Progressive Conservative government committed just over $400,000 of ongoing, annual funding to the Winnipeg Police Service for the Alternative Response to Citizens in Crisis (ARCC), a program that pairs officers with mental health clinicians to perform wellness checks and respond to incidents involving someone in the throes of a mental health or addictions crisis.

A pilot program started in 2021, ARCC was designed to soften police response to incidents involving mental health and addictions, and provide more on-site clinical support. It was hoped a team-based approach would reduce the number of people incarcerated or transported to hospital for treatment.

Using the lowest-hanging metrics, the pilot program has been a qualified success. The PC government reported 82 per cent of incidents were “resolved by ARCC intervention alone,” and 91 per cent of individuals involved did not have to be transported to a hospital.

There would need to be a much deeper dive on ARCC before it could be declared an unqualified success. Information about how often its teams were called to help the same people was not provided. Nor did we find out how many people effectively sought treatment after the crisis was over.

However, the important point here is this is a program that sees those suffering from mental health and addictions as people first, and not criminals. That’s legitimately compassionate.

Now, let’s look at a couple of examples of what a deficit of empathy and compassion look like. One involves a politician who seems to have had his empathy and compassion surgically removed; the other exposes a lamentable limit on a government’s ability to relate to help people in need.

In social media posts earlier this week, Coun. Jeff Browaty had occasion to refer to people in downtown Winnipeg suffering from mental health and addictions as “drugged-out zombies.” When the Free Press called him for confirmation, the North Kildonan councillor doubled down.

“I think it reflected my level of frustration with the way things are going and it is not good,” Browaty told the Free Press. “People are frustrated.”

The gulf that exists between Browaty’s posts, and the message the province and police are trying to communicate through ARCC, could not be bigger or more concerning. The latter is compassion in action; the former is ignorance personified.

However, even the PC government that created ARCC has limits on its empathy and compassion. Remember, this is the same government that refuses to entertain the idea of safe consumption sites to save the lives of addicts.

No provincial minister would be foolish enough to use a phrase like “drugged-out zombies,” but the city councillor and the PC government both possess a cruel indifference about the more than 400 Winnipeggers who die every year from overdoses.

The aversion to active harm-reduction programs is a core value for the right-of-centre who think, as Browaty explained to the Free Press, that supervised consumption is really just “encouraging the use of drugs.”

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

As Free Press reporter Katrina Clarke has painstakingly noted in her ongoing investigation of supervised consumption, the strategy is all about keeping people alive long enough to seek treatment.

Not everyone who takes advantage of supervised consumption goes on to treatment, and not everyone makes it to treatment becomes completely sober, but a significant number do both.

For those who cannot escape addiction, supervised consumption is the best way for society to put its compassion and empathy into action, ensuring everything possible is done to keep them alive.

It is particularly frustrating a government with the emotional intelligence to create ARCC could have limits on how and where it displays its empathy and compassion.

Turning its back on harm reduction as part of a broader strategy does not erase the good work being done through ARCC. It does, however, undermine and weaken the overall system for helping people with addictions and mental health problems (and that includes ARCC).

The bottom line is you cannot agree to help one person from drowning but ignore the pleas from another, and then declare yourself empathetic and compassionate.

When you only help some of the people some of the time, you are still turning your back on others who desperately need assistance, like the “drugged-out zombies.”

And that is cold and cruel by any measure.

» Dan Lett is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist. This column previously appeared in the Free Press.