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“Understanding what causes the depression of their own employees would help make them much better policymakers than they would (be) … gliding across the horizon at 50,000 feet.”

Wilkerson has long argued that the public service, by virtue of its size and breadth of work, is the ideal workplace to test the Mental Health Commission of Canada’s national standard for a psychologically healthy workplace, which has piqued the interest of employers around the world.

Joseph Ricciuti, president of SEB Benefits and HR Consulting, worked on developing the standard. He said the government’s failure to implement it in the public service is puzzling. He likened it to “selling Fords but not driving one.”

“It begs the question: Why not?” he said. “If you spend all this money setting up the Mental Health Commission, making it a cause of choice and developing the standard, why not implement it?

“I think the government should make it mandatory for all agencies and Crown corporations. It would go a long way to mitigate the health and even the legal risks of chronic work stress.”

Mental illness is the number one – and fastest-growing – cause of short- and long-term disability in Canada, costing employers about $6 billion a year. It accounts for nearly half of the disability claims among Canada’s public servants.

The Mental Health Commission standard is a toolkit to assess any workplace, based on 13 psycho-social risk factors for mental health. The government’s own executives have pressed for the standard’s adoption as part of the Blueprint 2020 initiative to modernize the public service.