B.C.'s first addictions minister says merger back into Health Ministry an error

VICTORIA — New Democrat Judy Darcy was early in her term as B.C.’s first minister of mental health and addiction when the shock of it hit her.

During a tour of the psychiatric emergency department at Surrey Memorial Hospital, she stepped into the “safe room” — sterile, simple, no sharp edges or objects that patients could harm themselves.

Then, as Darcy tells it in a memoir published this fall, “suddenly I began to weep.”

The new minister had flashed back to something that happened decades earlier, her own mother’s losing battle with mental health and addiction.

“I saw her being strapped down, an object placed in her mouth so she wouldn’t bite her tongue, electrodes attached to each side of her head as she received the electroconvulsive treatment that was supposed to cure her condition,” writes Darcy. “I cried openly and unashamedly: Poor little mommy. Poor little mommy.”

The first inkling had emerged a few months earlier, when then premier John Horgan appointed her to the ministry, telling reporters that she’d been given “one of the toughest jobs” in the new NDP cabinet.

“It hit me that John Horgan had no idea my mother had struggled with mental illness and addiction, or that she had taken her own life with an overdose of barbiturates. He had selected me for other reasons.”

Darcy would eventually use the backstory, albeit sparingly, to illustrate her personal understanding of one of the biggest obstacles to treatment in that toughest of ministries.

“By sharing my mother’s story, it could combat the tremendous stigma that still surrounds mental illness and addiction and encourage others to share their stories and seek help.”

There’s more, much more, to the story Darcy tells in her book Learning from the Heart, subtitled “the battles of a feminist, union leader and politician.”

Her father was a Holocaust survivor, her mother a member of the Danish anti-Nazi resistance. Darcy was a communist and a Maoist. She also rose to the head of CUPE, Canada’s largest public sector union, experiencing bullying and sexism along the way.

The book is funny, too: Witness the opening chapter on her subversive term as “Miss York University” in the last, unlamented Canadian university beauty pageant.

Only three chapters deal with Darcy’s 3½ years at the NDP cabinet table as minister of mental health and addictions.

But at the recent NDP convention, she suggested I interview her for a contrary view to the column I’d written on Horgan’s view as expressed in his memoir, also published this fall.

The late ex-premier didn’t fault Darcy — “she worked her tail off.”

But he said establishing a stand-alone ministry, separate from health, was “a mistake.” He also regarded most of what the NDP attempted on the overlapping crises of mental health and addictions as “unsuccessful.”

Darcy “has the greatest respect” for Horgan. But she doesn’t agree that it was a mistake “to have someone at the cabinet table who wakes up every morning focused on just mental health and addictions.”

Nor does she concede a record of failure. On the contrary, says Darcy, in the first two years the ministry presided over a 36 per cent reduction in deaths from toxic drugs. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the indicators reversed.

“We did make a difference,” Darcy told me. “But we needed a lot more money.”

The ministry didn’t get more because there was bureaucratic resistance to the stand-alone ministry. Horgan eventually lost interest in the experiment as well.

Darcy recounts how one day she was called in by someone she identifies only as a “senior government official.”

Just what did she think she was doing, he challenged, pushing decriminalization of drugs and safer supply? “Nobody gave you the authority to do that.”

Darcy protested that both were within the mandate she’d been given as minister.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your excuses,” replied the unnamed taskmaster. “I’ve made myself clear. This isn’t going any further.”

Darcy thought briefly of quitting. “He’d scolded me as if I was a naughty child, not a cabinet minister with a really tough job.”

I put it to Darcy that only a senior staffer speaking on orders from the premier — or the premier himself — would dare to speak to a minister that way.

She didn’t argue, simply reminded me that she had not named names.

As a point of comparison between the Darcy and Horgan memoirs, I’d rate the minister more respectful of cabinet confidentiality than was the premier.

In any event, Darcy didn’t run for re-election in 2020. She says having entered her seventh decade, she wanted a better work/life balance.

The book ends on a bittersweet note as Darcy notes the retrenchment on harm reduction and other measures. She blames a right wing backlash, but it was David Eby who folded her former ministry back into health, branded decriminalization a “mistake,” and reduced safer supply.

Still Darcy, a self-described optimist of the “glass more than half full” believes that for all the retreats, the province will remain on the “pathway to hope,” where she helped place it eight years ago.

vpalmer@postmedia.com 

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