Core Services: The Role of Government in Community Services, Education, Economic Development, Health Services, Justice and Transportation/Infrastructure:

Health, educational, social, and justice services, as well as the provision of economic development and the construction and maintenance of infrastructure systems are all core services. Although all of these core services are interrelated, experiences in the area of providing social services have shown that service provision in the areas of health, education, justice, economic development and social services are highly interconnected. Reductions in services in one of these areas negatively affect the quality of service provision in the other areas.

Core services are those that are essential to the welfare of the population. Health, education, justice and social services, as well as economic development and infrastructure development are all considered to be core services. However, services in the areas of health, social service, education, justice and economic development are all services that are associated, either directly or indirectly, with human need. Therefore, these services are not only considered to be core services, but due to the human need factor, require special consideration.

The majority of current social, health, and education services, as well as economic development initiatives must remain as government-provided services although some may be appropriate for the voluntary sector in community-based programs. The rationale behind this argument is that the private sector would not provide adequate social assistance, universal and high quality health services, or attract wealth-creating businesses to the province, as these programs conflict with the primarily profit-making interests of private enterprise. In addition, there are concerns about the private sector providing education, justice and social programs, as these services are associated with providing human needs to vulnerable individuals. As such, the possibility that the needs of these vulnerable individuals will be exploited for the profitable gains of the private sector. We need to be concerned about the affects of children's exposure to commercialism in a classroom setting, about inadequate levels of care for incarcerated individuals and about significant reductions in rates of social assistance which may result, if the private sector were permitted to procure the administration of these services.

Responsible fiscal management must begin with informed policy initiatives. In order to achieve an informed perspective, government must conduct focus group consultations with service-providers to collect information pertaining the types of services provided, and to identify perceived gaps in social service provision. Then, using the data derived from the focus groups, government should conduct a quantitative assessment of clients' service consumption patterns, and their level of satisfaction with, both government-provided and community-based social services in various communities. The results of such a survey would identify which social services the clients deem as absolutely necessary, isolate areas of service duplication and indicate areas where social services need to be restructured or provided by a community-based program. In short, a service consumption survey could result in identifying areas where greater efficiencies could be implemented, without reducing the quality or quantity of service provision to clients.

The initial steps in providing responsible fiscal management and accountable policy formation should involve the consultation and survey processes outlined above. After the data analysis of the service consumption survey, a discussion paper which summarizes the results, should be published and distributed to any interested members of the community, including service providers and service consumers. Then, another series of public consultations should be scheduled, so as to have interested members of the community discuss the survey's results and formulate recommendations. Upon evaluation of the recommendations collected at the second phase of public consultations, policy initiatives would then be formulated and publicized.