VICTORIA — Every day someone makes a good case for the provincial government to spend more money on a worthy program, witness the following snapshots from recent media coverage.

• Premier Christy Clark back in June released a 10-year plan to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, including a vague commitment “to consider disability assistance rate increases as the fiscal situation allows.”

Advocates for the disabled were not long in disparaging the lack of urgency, saying the $906 monthly rate for a single person on disability had not been increased since 2007.

“We cannot wait until the fiscal situation allows,” declared social justice lawyer Kendra Milne in an opinion piece published in the Province newspaper. “We certainly can’t wait until 2024.”

• The legal community is mounting a campaign this month to make the public aware of the chronic underfunding of legal aid and the critical needs going unmet as a consequence.

“Their concerns — about too many disoriented, self-represented litigants created by legal-aid underfunding, and about the delays, exacerbated by systemic inefficiencies, caused by the involvement of confused parties, and the injustice they produce — have been decried for years,” wrote my colleague Ian Mulgrew in The Vancouver Sun earlier this month.

“The roughly $85-million B.C. legal aid budget … scandalously remains below pre-turn-of-the-century levels and Victoria has shown no enthusiasm for providing more cash.”

• Among multiple calls for the province to begin funding a proper child care plan, was a letter to the editor earlier this year from advocate Sharon Gregson.

“Families in Quebec pay just $7 a day for child care, while B.C. parents pay between $40 to $60 a day for the same services,” she wrote. “Quebec has a far better system than we do — and economists document that their provincial government investment into child care is paying for itself because more parents are able to participate in the workforce — thereby paying income tax to government.

“There is a reason the $10/day child care plan launched by grassroots organizations, early childhood educators, parents and advocates has gained so much traction in B.C.: We have a child care crisis here with high fees and too few quality spaces, but nothing government has announced to date will fix it,” she argued.

• “Mental-health cases flood region’s police,” read the headline in a June report in the Victoria Times Colonist. “Province’s chronic underfunding of treatment often leaves officers to pick up the pieces.”

The story reported a 350-per-cent jump over five years in calls to police regarding “disturbed persons,” with chief Frank Elsner estimating that on some nights, “the vast majority — if not all” of the officers on duty were tied up with mental health issues.

“Rightly so, governments have moved away from institutionalizing people with mental illness to a community approach,” he told reporter Katie Derosa. “The problem has been it’s been drastically underfunded for years. So I think what we’re seeing now is the result of that drastic underfunding.”

• When the health ministry rebuffed the need for a significant increase in funding for the Fraser Health Authority earlier this year, the Surrey Delta North Leader put the disparity into perspective.

“FHA is the largest and fastest-growing health region in B.C. It has 36 per cent of the provincial population, but gets 28 per cent of the health care funding,” wrote columnist Frank Bucholtz. “Thus, saying that FHA can manage within its budget and allocating small annual increases fails to take into account the historical under-servicing of Surrey, Delta, White Rock and other communities by the province.”