The Interview

Michael Kirby steps out of the shadows

From repatriating our Constitution to his blockbuster healthcare report, Michael Kirby, the new Mental Health Commissioner and ex-Senator, has been a powerful behind-the-scenes player in Canadian politics for decades. He recently chatted with NRM about our screwed up mental health system, his rivalry with Roy Romanow and whether Justin Trudeau could be PM.

Photo credits: Ashley Fraser

How come mental health became your cause cél�bre? My sister suffered from very severe depression for many years so I had lots of experience with the mental health system because of being an advocate for her. She was hospitalized in a psych ward and it was quite shocking to me. I couldn't believe the system was as bad as what I had encountered, but I learned that was the system, it was that bad.

Sounds like a king-sized screw up. Can it be fixed? It's not a quick fix here, man — it is a long, slow process. But mental health has a huge advantage in that no party has ever championed it at all so it doesn't come with the kind of political baggage that the rest of the healthcare system does.

What kind of hands-on stuff do you have in mind? One of the big things we need to do is build the knowledge exchange centre, to provide information for people living with mental illness, and information for service providers about the best examples in the country. If something good is happening everyone will know about it. And if something bad is happening, everyone will learn from it.

You called your 2006 report on mental health "Out of the Shadows at Last." Wasn't that a little premature? Let me put it this way — it was optimistic in the sense that if you could get the Mental Health Commission created, you could keep mental health out of the shadows. I'm an optimist by nature. If I wasn't, I'd never have proposed a mental health care guarantee. That is the ultimate optimism!

Do you think there's less stigma now than when your sister was diagnosed? Not really. We may have made a bit of progress around the edges. There is no benchmark data, so the first thing is to find out what Canadians' attitudes really are, and how to change them over time.

At least doctors don't look down on the mentally ill, right? One of the things that surprised us in our hearings is that people in the healthcare profession in general have just as negative a view of mental illness as the public. That includes testimony from doctors, even doctors with mental illness. It's quite discouraging... very discouraging, actually. It's just going to take a while to get that changed.

You must have been happy when the Tories threw some money at tackling mental health stigma in their last budget? I was tickled pink.

You proposed putting 5¢ from every glass of booze Canadians drink into mental health to fund your initiatives. What's happening with that? Nothing, obviously — the government hasn't done it.

Access is a huge problem in mental healthcare. Should GPs have to pick up the slack? Their current role, that's the reality — it's where we're at. GPs are the first contact people with mental illness have with the healthcare system and they're often the people that first diagnose the problem.

Alberta's considering locking up schizophrenics who go off their meds to protect the public. What do you think of that? Generally speaking those kinds of policies haven't worked all that well.

Your Senate committee's 2002 report on the health system, which trumpeted private care delivery, was called "big on rhetoric and short on evidence." Meanwhile Roy Romanow's Commission from the same year was praised to the skies. What gives? The criticism against me was only put out by very strong left-wing guys who, as the left wing often does in Canada, are not willing to debate the issues. They just attack the person who put them out. I regard that as an occupational hazard.

Most kids don't dream of growing up to be a policy wonk. How'd you get here? I wanted to be a university prof. I was in physics first, then I switched to math in my last year as an undergrad, for no special reason. I just suddenly decided I'd rather do math.

Math equals easy? I'll take your word for it. But I've heard all those equations can drive a guy nuts. I'm thinking of famous mathematicians like Kurt Gödel, Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and John Forbes Nash, who all went mad. Oh yeah, A Beautiful Mind. That was a great movie. You're right, the two seem periodically linked. No question about that.

How does a math nerd end up a Senator? Someone once said the Senate is the best academic appointment you can have — you don't have to deal with faculty politics stuff.

Stephen Harper promised an elected Senate. Why do you think he's dragging his feet? All he can do, whenever there's a Senate vacancy, is to have an election in a province and fill the vacancy that way. But he'll never change the constitution. If he tries, the provinces will want to change things, and we'll be back into the constitutional quagmire.

If the Senate were elected, would you have made the cut? Boy, that's hard to tell. I do think the Senate as an elected body would have never done what we did on healthcare. We were absolutely pilloried. We said some things people regard as heresy, that healthcare should be publicly funded and whoever delivers the service doesn't matter. I don't think many elected people would have been willing to stick their necks out because it would've been clear political suicide.

Why'd you resign from the Senate last year, a decade before they would've put you out to pasture? I'd been in Senate for 23 years, and I thought I had done as good a job as I could, in the sense of my impact on the healthcare file. My philosophy is to go in, do a job as well as you can, then leave.

Are you sure it wasn't so you could spend more time down in Florida? No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I like being down here in the wintertime, but I'm a Canadian. The weather is good though.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the repatriation of Canada's Constitution. Pierre Trudeau hand-picked you to work on that, right? Before that I was deputy chief of staff, in today's parlance, as my first job. I left and then came back to do the constitution issue. In that capacity I reported directly to him.

His son Justin has just thrown his hat in the political ring and a lot of people are saying he could be PM one day. Besides his father's name and his mother's looks, does he have anything to recommend him? You can never ever predict who will be prime minister. Obviously he's an extremely bright man but when someone's only 35 it's impossible to tell how far up they'll go.

You played a leading role in two of the biggest events in this country's history, the Charter of Rights and the repatriation of the Constitution. You must feel pretty proud. Nothing's compared to that, and nothing could.

Interview conducted by Sam Solomon