Community and family service organizations may be struggling to meet budgets or deliver services in light of a wage increase negotiated between the province and unionized workers.
But at least one South Okanagan group said it is too early to tell how it will affect them.
“I understood we are still negotiating with government as far as getting relief for those funds,” said Richard Little, executive director for the South Okanagan Association for Integrated Community Living. “We’ve not been denied those funds. They just haven’t come.”
Little’s organization was named in a release from the B.C. Government and Service Employees Union, which said the provincial government had failed to provide bridge funding for a 1.5 percent wage increase negotiated for frontline workers earlier this year through the community social services bargaining association.
Several groups in Penticton including the Okanagan Boys and Girls Club, the release said, were either not paying the 1.5 per cent wage increase, or were looking at cutting programs and services because they had not received proper funding according to the release.
“If there is nothing forthcoming from them (B.C. government) to help until the savings are realized, we would need to start to look at what we could do less of in order to accomplish those increases,” said Tanya Behardien, executive director of the Penticton and District Community Resources Society. The PDCRS, she estimates, serves about 600 individuals and families on a daily basis.
“We’ve let our government funders know that we will want to work with them on looking at what reduced services might look like,” said Behardien, adding that few community and family service providers could survive the increase without making changes.
Family service workers provide vital community-based social programs for vulnerable children, struggling you and families across B.C. Community living workers provide programs and supports for people with developmental disabilities.
Tony Laing, executive director of the Penticton and District Society for Community Living, said that their group is facing the same questions.
“We are still holding out hope,” said Laing. “It will result in cutbacks if it isn’t funded, that’s the bottom line.”
Laing said it’s rare that there is any new money coming and for the last 20 years they have constantly been making changes to keep administration as efficient as possible.
“We have rarely cut services, but we have a very lean management team. I have open management positions if have never filled,” said Laing.
“This is unacceptable. There shouldn’t be any further cuts to programs or services due to a lack of bridge funding,” said CSSBA chair Patsy Harmston, who is also community social services chair at the BCGEU, the largest union in the sector.
“We negotiated the 1.5 per cent wage increase in good faith and found savings in our collective agreement to pay for it,” said Harmston. “We upheld our side of the deal. The government should do the same.”
The savings that Harmston refers to, balancing the increase, are still two to three years away.
According to the BCGEU release, the Ministry of Children and Family Development has failed to provide bridge funding while the Ministry for Social Development has provided the same funding for the much larger number of community-based social services that it funds.
Behardien said service providers will be meeting in Vancouver this week to discuss the issue.
“On the part of the service provider, we would really like the government to act across ministries in the same way,” she said. Some ministries, she said, have agreed to provide bridge funding, while others haven’t or are still discussing it.
“It’s 1.5 percent now and another 1.5 per cent in January, so it is actually three per cent,” she said. “The last few years have been about doing more with less and there is no more. There is no more squeeze to realize any more savings.”
