Michael Kirby spoke as the second distinguished speaker of the McKenna Centre for communications and public policy on Monday night at St. Thomas. The AQ was able to ask him some questions before the talk.
You stepped down from the Senate 10 years before you needed to. Why?
All of my life, I have left jobs when I was at my peak. I left because I said, “Well I’m never going to get any better than this. I’ve done the constitution which is the biggest issue around and so why don’t I leave?” And, similarly, I’ve done a number of reports on health care and the one on mental health. And then I said “Well, do I want to do this for another ten years?” And so I decided to retire.
In theory I was going to slow down. In actual fact, that’s a theoretical statement. Six months after I left, the prime minister asked me to put together and run the mental health commission.
It’s a cause I care about passionately. When someone in government asks you to take on a really difficult issue and it’s something you really care about, then you do it.
What’s your takeaway from the Duffy-Wallin-Prime Minister’s office fiasco?
There are conflicting stories out there as you would expect. The senators claim everything they did was within the rules. The audit suggests otherwise.
All I know is that it’s done an extreme amount of damage on the Senate as an institution. But I have no opinion on whether they did the things they were accused of doing. I have no evidence one way or another.
After years of indifference and apathy, public opinion in Canada is drifting towards disgust and a desire to abolish the Upper Chamber. What are your thoughts on that?
What people have to understand is getting the Senate abolished would require the unanimous agreement of all the provinces. I think that would be extremely difficult to achieve. I think a lot of the smaller provinces and Quebec would make the argument that it’s important, as it is in every other federal country like Australia or the United States, that there be a second chamber in which the smaller jurisdictions have a disproportion number of members so you can’t have the tyranny of majority. I think instead of abolishing the Senate, you could make lots of changes in reforming the Senate.
Will the Senate still be an election issue in 2015?
Yes, I think they may be talking about this but nothing like they have been this year. The election in 2015 is going to focus on the economy. It’s going to focus on whether people like what the Harper government has done or whether they think it’s time to change leadership after 10 years. I do not think the Senate will be a pivotal issue in the next campaign at all.
New Brunswick’s finances are not in great shape. Many tend to blame high health care costs. Yet, the public is wary of reform. Back in 2002, you called for greater private sector involvement in health care. What would your advice to New Brunswick be now?
I don’t know the details of New Brunswick’s health care costs, but what I do know is that two things are true. Everywhere in the country, health is taking a larger and larger share of the provincial budget. No question. That is sort of almost inevitable just because it is very expensive. The health care system is so difficult to change because there are so many special interests in the health care system, and I include doctors, nurses and administrators, that trying to get meaningful change is very difficult.
Now, in the mental health area, New Brunswick has done a couple of really innovative things as a result of Judge Michael McKee’s report. And they are really working. Everybody has clearly put aside their own parochial interests of a broader system. Question is: can you get it done in the more rigid part of the system, which is the old Medicare hospital doctor and nurse system? This is very difficult to achieve. But, frankly, every government is going to have to do it because if you don’t do it, government ultimately will have a health care system that is not sustainable. I said 10 years ago that it was not sustainable and here it is 10 years from then, so it’s even less sustainable now than it was if we’d started to make changes 10 years ago.
Do you think we can learn anything from the recent American health insurance reforms?
No. You can learn absolutely nothing about the Canadian health care system from the American system. The American system is the most expensive, the most disorganized in the world. Their current attempt to move to a system in which everybody is covered is the right thing for them to do just in the sense that they had people going bankrupt and all kinds of people not getting any health care, but trust me there’s not a thing we can learn from their system. Unless you’ve got a lot of money, it’s the worst in the industrial world.
You were the first chair the Mental Health Commission of Canada. This has become a huge issue on this campus, one that students, administrators and faculty are all struggling to deal with. How do we get beyond awareness?
That’s a really good question but that’s exactly why I created Partners for Health. That’s the organization I’m running now. We have to get beyond awareness and we have to start actually doing something. So, I have proposed if you go on the website, you’ll see where we’ve given a very specific proposal to each of the provincial governments and a very specific proposal to the federal government in which I think we are making a very compelling argument for moving beyond just awareness. And the place you’ve got to move beyond more than anything else is kids or youth or those under the age of 24. The reason for that is 70 per cent of adults with a mental illness at its onset under the age of 24. So if you can deal with the damn problem early, you’d make a lot of progress and yet, only 25 per cent of kids with a mental health problem get any help.
The way to change that is to copy what the breast cancer movement did. No one used to talk publicly about breast cancer. Look how well the movement has done in the last 25 years in the way they’ve raised awareness and getting research done. My view is simply to rip a page out of their book, copy what they did, except we have a huge advantage because social media obviously didn’t exist in the 80s. With social media we can reach large numbers of people very cheaply and quickly. That’s why I’m optimistic that we can make some changes.
You started your career as a professor (of business administration). You’re the second “distinguished speaker” for the Centre of communications and Public Policy here. What’s your vision for the 21st century university and how can it help shape positive public policy debate?
In terms of public policy debate, there is a problem because inside of government debate gets constrained by all the rules in how government works. It’s really hard to get new ideas in place in government. I think there’s a huge role for the academic community to play in terms of generating new ideas and then communicating those ideas widely. It’s very badly needed. The U.S. and Britain get a lot more of that because they have a lot more think tanks than we do. We have one really in the country, which is the institution on research and public policy, which I started back in the ’70s. There are all kinds of research institutes in Britain and in the U.S. So what we’ve got to do is use places like the McKenna school to start that debate.
