Finance and Government Services - Issue No. 5

2001 Legislative Session: 2nd Session, 37th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES
MINUTES AND HANSARD

Present: Blair Lekstrom, MLA (Chair); Tony Bhullar, MLA (Deputy Chair); Jeff Bray, MLA; Ralph Sultan, MLA; Harry Bloy, MLA; Kevin Krueger, MLA; Barry Penner, MLA; Brian Kerr, MLA; Lorne Mayencourt, MLA; Ida Chong, MLA; Joy MacPhail, MLA

1. The Chair called the meeting to order at 10:04 a.m.

2. Opening statements by the Chair, Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

3. The Committee heard the following witnesses on the matter of pre-budget consultation:
     1) Kelly McDonald
     2) University College of the Cariboo:
         Marten Lettinga
     3) Brenda Brown
     4) Michelle Schilling
     5) Gale Engstrom
     6) Paula Kully
     7) Debbie Demare
     8) Cariboo Economic Action Forum:
         Garth Greskiw
     9) British Columbia Heritage Trust:
         George Atamanenko
    10) James Bast
    11) Cariboo Chilcotin Child Development Centre Association:
         Bob Fish
    12) Florence Flynn
    13) Edna Park
    14) Lars Carlson
    15) Ministry of Forests:
         Stephanie Mundeling
    16) Debra Yearley
    17) City of Williams Lake:
         Mayor Ivan Bonnell
         Tom Reynolds
    18) Simon Moses
    19) Greg Robart

4. The Committee adjourned to the call of the Chair at 2:05 p.m.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		104
	K. McDonald	104
	M. Lettinga	105
	D. Demare	106, 114
	B. Brown	107
	M. Schilling	109
	G. Engstrom	111
	P. Kully	112
	G. Greskiw	116
	G. Atamanenko	119
	J. Bast	120
	B. Fish	123
	F. Flynn	124
	E. Park	126
	L. Carlson	129
	S. Mundeling	131
	D. Yearley	134
	I. Bonnell	135
	T. Reynolds	135
	S. Moses	136
	G. Robart	137

Chair:	* Blair Lekstrom (Peace River South L)
Deputy Chair:	* Tony Bhullar (Surrey-Newton L)
Members:	* Harry Bloy (Burquitlam L) * Jeff Bray (Victoria–Beacon Hill L) * Ida Chong (Oak Bay–Gordon Head L) * Brian Kerr (Malahat–Juan de Fuca L) * Kevin Krueger (Kamloops–North Thompson L) * Lorne Mayencourt (Vancouver-Burrard L) * Barry Penner (Chilliwack-Kent L) * Ralph Sultan (West Vancouver–Capilano L) * Joy MacPhail (Vancouver-Hastings NDP) * denotes member present

Witnesses:

George Atamanenko
James Bast
Ivan N. Bonnell (Mayor, Williams Lake)
Brenda Brown
Lars Carlson
Debbie Demare
Gale Engstrom
Bob Fish (Cariboo–Chilcotin Child Development Centre)
Florence Flynn
Garth Greskiw (Cariboo Economic Action Forum)
Paula Kully
Marten Lettinga (UCC Faculty Association, Williams Lake)
Kelly McDonald
Greg Robart (Williams Lake Performance Arts and Discovery
Centre)
Simon Moses
Stephanie Mundeling
Edna Park
Tom Reynolds
Michelle Schilling
Debra Yearley

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is now 10 a.m., and I would like to begin. We do have a full slate and a full agenda of presenters that will be presenting to the committee today.

My name is Blair Lekstrom. I am the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services and the MLA for Peace River South. I'll first make a few comments, and then I will ask our other members of the committee to introduce themselves.

We're here today to hear from the people of the region on our prebudget consultation tour. What that is about is to hear from the public as to what your priorities, concerns and issues are surrounding the upcoming budget for next year. There are many challenges out there. Although government has many ideas on the direction we're trying to head in, we want to hear from the people to find out what their priorities are and take guidance from them in the preparation of a report that we have to complete by November 15 and get to our Minister of Finance, the Hon. Gary Collins.

We are travelling today with a number of people, members of the committee. Also, we have some Hansard staff members with us today, Pat Samson and Catherine Schaefer, as well as our committee researcher Josie Schofield, and to my left our Committee Clerk Anne Stokes.

We hope to hear a wide range of issues, recommendations and ideas on what we can look at to try and make the changes that are necessary to put our government's fiscal house back in order. I would encourage you, through listening and participation, to put your ideas forward on that. If people are unable to make presentations here today, there is the ability for written submissions. There's information on the back table on how to submit your written submissions to the committee, and those written submissions will receive our full consideration as equally as a verbal presentation before this committee.

With that, I will begin the process. We are going to cover 16 communities around British Columbia. Two a day is our agenda right now. In some of the centres — the lower mainland, for instance — we will have some full-day sessions to try and accommodate as many people as we possibly can. Getting around to every area of this province is important, I think, because each area is unique.

I know that the area I come from has a unique situation up there, and I know the Cariboo has a unique situation here. One-size-fits-all doesn't necessarily apply, whether it be finance or the delivery of any service, so we're going to listen to you, do what we can to accommodate the needs of British Columbians and formulate a budget that works for British Columbians. I thank each and every one of you for coming out this morning.

R. Sultan: Thank you, Chairman. I'm Ralph Sultan from West Vancouver–Capilano. I'm the same Ralph Sultan who was president of Williams Lake Fibreboard Co. and laboured for several years to build a $150 million medium-density fibreboard mill in this community.

While the citizens of Williams Lake poured their hearts, their souls and not a small amount of their own cash into this project, the large American partner I had recruited abandoned the project because of the difficult economic circumstances in this province. To try to turn that situation around is one of the reasons I decided maybe I should try to become a politician so that these things don't happen again.

L. Mayencourt: Good morning. I'm Lorne Mayencourt, and I'm the MLA for Vancouver-Burrard. It's my second visit this year to Williams Lake, and it's great to be back. I'm also delighted to see our colleague Walt Cobb in the audience.

I. Chong: Good morning, everyone. Ida Chong, Oak Bay–Gordon Head, one of the greater Victoria area ridings.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Tony Bhullar, Surrey-Newton. I'm Deputy Chair of this committee, and I'm happy to be here.

B. Penner: Barry Penner, MLA for Chilliwack-Kent. It's great to spend another night at the Overlander Hotel.

H. Bloy: Harry Bloy, from the new riding of Burquitlam on the lower mainland.

I would like to formally recognize our colleague Walt Cobb, MLA for your region. Good morning, Walt, and welcome.

With that, we will get right into our presenters today, so we can maintain a schedule that permits us to meet all our obligations and hear from the people. Our first presenter this morning is Kelly McDonald. Kelly, are you here? Good morning. Welcome.

K. McDonald: Good morning, hon. members. My name is Kelly McDonald, and I live and work in the Bridge Lake area. I've worked in the highways maintenance industry of B.C. for 24 years, and as a taxpayer, I'm very disturbed with the lack of funding and concern the government has shown toward the maintenance of our roads, bridges and highways in my area and throughout the province.

You don't have to travel very far before noticing the deterioration of the highways infrastructure. I thought that when the government privatized our highways maintenance, they'd eventually get better and would be cheaper for the taxpayers. I'm not sure that's happening. What I do see, though, is the horrid state of our infrastructure.

Let's face it: you don't have to travel very far to see potholes that need patching, roads and intersections that need sweeping and brushing so that you can see the oncoming traffic at an intersection or possibly a deer coming out onto the road. They're closing rest areas throughout the province, especially in the winter months. What does the government think — that people don't stop and rest and use these facilities?

Grading on our gravel roads is horrible. What I see as the biggest problem is that there's hardly any gravel on the road. It's impossible to grade mud and clay. I hear rumours that the government is about to turn over the enforcement of the maintenance contracts to the maintenance contractors themselves. If that's true, then who's going to ensure that our taxpayer dollars are well spent?

Hon. members, I urge you to take another close look at the highway maintenance funding in this province. We have good, well-trained people out there who are very knowledgable in their respective fields. We certainly don't want to lose them now because of a lack of funding. Our roads, bridges and highways need some serious funding to bring them up to a safe standard for the taxpayers and everyone else who uses them.

Let's face it: without roads and bridges, not much else will move in this province, because everybody's so dependent on them. Once again, please do not cut the funding to the maintenance and upkeep of our transportation infrastructure.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Kelly. I think what you've said is very near and dear to all of us — the issue of the infrastructure of our highways. I think you're bang on. You don't have to look too far, whichever region in this province you're in, to find out that the deterioration of our roads is a considerable problem for us.

R. Sultan: For comparison, Kelly, do you think our highways were in better shape ten years ago than they are today, or is it just an ongoing problem that we face every year?

K. McDonald: I feel it's an ongoing problem. It's the funding that's the biggest problem. Whether it's the maintenance contractor doing it or the government doing it, they still have to get fixed. The funding has got to come from somewhere.

J. Bray: In your region would you be able to say what the top three priorities are? You mentioned a number of different things, but in your area, what would be the top three priorities?

B. Kerr: Rather than putting a time frame on that question, I think the time frame is coincidental. When private maintenance took over, have you seen any deterioration there? I'm sorry. That may be putting you on the spot.

K. McDonald: Well, I see more of a profit-driven industry now than a safety-driven industry. That concerns me.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Can you cite some examples of improper work being performed by private companies?

K. McDonald: I'm not saying the private companies are performing improper work. I'm just saying that the work they are doing is fine, but there's not enough of it. They don't have the funds to do the paving that needs to be done. They don't have the funds to patch the holes they need to. Their budgets are low, too, I suppose. The gravelling that used to be done all the time on the side roads, by the ministry, doesn't get done anymore because the maintenance contractor is not going to go out there and do it for free. They're not getting the extra money they need to put that gravel on the roads.

In my area alone there are a lot of gravel roads. We've got probably 100 kilometres of paved road and 500 kilometres of gravel road. A lot of those roads are in really bad shape, and some of them are main arterial roads for the tourists. They even have tourist signs directing them to go on that road, but boy, I sure wouldn't want to take my motor home or anything along there.

In answer to your question, I don't think it's the maintenance contractors' fault or that they're neglecting anything. It's more like: "You pay me, and I'll do the job." That's the way it is right now.

Kelly, I see no further questions from members of our committee, but I'd like to thank you for coming out and making your presentation. I can tell you that from the area in the north I come from, as well, up in the Peace River area, the roads are the single most important issue. The balance we're going to try to bring is that in order to get the revenue we need as a province to better our quality of life, we're going to need to invest so that the resource industry can contribute even greater money to the province's revenues. Thank you very much.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): We will move along now to our second presenter. Our presenter is with the University College of the Cariboo: Marten Lettinga. I hope I've pronounced that right. Close?

Committee members, you should be receiving a handout that should be detailing my concerns. I'm speaking on behalf of the University College of the Cariboo, specifically the faculty association. I am the Williams Lake representative on the executive of the faculty association. As you can see, I am not an English instructor. I teach science. You can see in the first paragraph of my cover letter an extra comma that shouldn't be there.

M. Lettinga: The main concern I would like to address is the need for a consolidated educational facility here in Williams Lake. I don't know how many committee members are aware of the predicament we have been in, in Williams Lake. We have been without a consolidated campus for quite a number of years, due to unfortunate circumstances. We experienced a bit of a land slippage a few years ago, and that caused us to have to vacate our campus. In the interim we have been in various leased locations. I believe the taxpayer has been on the hook for about $600,000 in lease payments every year.

Also, due to being dispersed over about 11 different locations, our FTEs have been a lot lower than they should be. Typically, for this size of community we should have about 800 full-time-equivalents. We're hovering around half that number.

I'd just like to emphasize a few reasons why we need a consolidated campus here in Williams Lake. The first thing is that it's the lowest post-secondary participation rate in the province. It's about 10 percent below the provincial average. Secondly, as you can see as you go through your handout, there's a graph as well. It's figure 3, actually. It shows the pass rates on provincial exams in English and math. Pass rates, again, are very much below the provincial average.

On the next page you should also notice that the unemployment rate is quite a bit higher here in this part of the province, typically around 2 percent to 3 percent above the provincial average. Some other things I would like to note, as well, are that we have the highest child poverty rate, and we have the highest rate of children in care.

I would also like to highlight some reasons why education is so important, especially the adult basic education programs as a foundation. In terms of a resource-based economy, I think there's a real need for a very skilled workforce. That starts with a very strong adult basic education program and then, of course, expands from there.

Also, I feel there is a strong need to retrain displaced workers and to stimulate growth in the knowledge and information technology sector. Again, I think it's very important that we have very strong ABE programs to start with. If you don't have that, how are you going to train people in the information technology sector?

I know your government has very much of an emphasis on stimulating that part of the economy. Before we do that, I think we need to make sure that the basics are covered first. Also, I believe there are a lot of economic and social spinoffs for having an educated populace, especially in a place like Williams Lake, where we have very low post-secondary participation rates.

Those highlight some of the local concerns. My colleague in Kamloops, Tom Friedman, the head of the faculty association, will be speaking to you later today, I believe. He will address some of the global concerns, but let me highlight a few of them.

One of them is that I believe very strongly in maintaining the freeze on tuition fees so that we can have access for all, for anybody that wants to get an education anywhere in the province. Also, I very strongly believe in the university colleges, two-year colleges and institutes. I believe you should continue to maintain funding at adequate levels for these institutions — and not at the expense of really big research projects at the major universities. I feel that colleges make a tremendous contribution by providing a strong link between teaching and research, often with a very interdisciplinary type of approach.

I believe this summarizes what I wanted to say. The handout I provided should give you some further information on things I might have missed. Thank you very much.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thanks very much, Marten. I do have a couple of questions. I have Kevin, then I'll go to Joy.

K. Krueger: Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Lettinga. I was pleased to hear of your endorsement of the university college approach. I'm sure you know there are voices being raised in support of university status rather than the university college approach at UCC. You must hear that within the faculty association a fair amount as well.

M. Lettinga: Yes. I personally am a strong supporter of the university college, and I will continue to support that.

K. Krueger: What do you see as the advantages of this approach over full-fledged university status for a particular institution?

M. Lettinga: Well, it's a little bit of a difficult question, because we do have various viewpoints on that at the college. I believe we should continue to have a strong focus on teaching. We've been very good at that. There are a few people in upper-level courses who feel, of course, that they need to have more money available to do research, but I think the majority of the faculty really enjoy teaching and have been very good at that.

K. Krueger: I've seen one of the strengths of the university college concept as avoiding this elitism that developed, unfortunately, over the last couple of decades in B.C., where families felt they ought to steer their children into academics rather than trades. We see a tremendous shortage of skilled tradespeople, partly because of that.

It's always seemed to me that the university college concept not only embraces both — it does its graduation ceremonies with everybody together — but it demonstrates in a very tangible way that our society values tradespeople. I think sometimes it does encourage people to bridge from trades to academics, if that's how they begin to feel inclined. Do you agree with that?

M. Lettinga: Yes, there are many opportunities for laddering in a university college system — more so than at the universities, I would think.

J. MacPhail: Is there any special outreach that UCC does to first nations communities?

M. Lettinga: Yes, there are quite a few programs for first nations students at the moment, but I think that once we have a consolidated campus, there will be much more opportunity to expand on that.

J. MacPhail: You don't have any statistics here for first nations, aboriginal. Are they available?

M. Lettinga: I'm not sure on that one. I do have another representative here. I don't know if she knows. Do we have statistics?

D. Demare: From a college perspective, from a university participation perspective?

D. Demare: That's a good question. I wouldn't know that answer either. I'm sure we do.

I. Chong: Mr. Lettinga, I note your comments here about the importance of maintaining the tuition freeze. I come from an area in greater Victoria. There are two universities and a college that I represent. I have met on occasion with the University Presidents Council. Their views are slightly different, and I'm just wondering if you can respond to this.

They're saying that the tuition fees should not always be linked to accessibility, because we have space requirements and things like that. They don't necessarily feel that those two are as linked as they should be. I'd like to hear about this area. Is that in fact a barrier to access to education here?

I. Chong: Well, they do feel that accessibility has everything to do with offering courses and with getting the faculty in place. They didn't feel that was necessarily linked to tuition. I'm wondering if things are different here and how you might respond to that. I'm just hearing different viewpoints, and I'd let to get a better idea.

M. Lettinga: We are in a slightly more adverse economic situation here in Williams Lake, I think. A cap on tuition fees would definitely help, yes.

L. Mayencourt: Thank you for your presentation. You've made a great statement — that higher learning means higher wages means higher quality of life. Just to follow up on what Ida was asking you about: are there other barriers within your community, other than the cost of tuition, to people getting their kids into the university college system? If there are, what kinds of approaches could we use to make sure that kids see it as a possibility and that families see it as something they want to get their kids to do?

M. Lettinga: Our utmost concern is, of course, having one centrally located and highly visible campus to attract students to this location. Actually, this year we've had an increase in enrolment in ABE programs as well as in the university transfer programs, despite being dispersed across several locations. That's a good sign. I think we could do much better once we had a central location again. In terms of adult students, I think that adequate support for child care facilities would perhaps be quite crucial to encourage adult learners to come to UCC.

L. Mayencourt: Can I ask one more question? What percentage of your student population are adult learners?

B. Penner: I was interested in Kevin's question about the university status, because in my area, the Fraser Valley, there's quite a bit of lobbying going on to have the University College of the Fraser Valley get regional university status. That's what they call it there. I'm a person who benefited from education at the college level before going to university at Simon Fraser and the University of Victoria. I can honestly say that the best quality of teaching I experienced was at the college level, so I'm very cautious about endorsing the concept of changing the focus of the community colleges.

My question to you, though, is going to be in relation to the building you referred to earlier as having slipped — the new campus building. What year was that built in? Are there any plans to rehabilitate that facility, or it is essentially a write-off?

M. Lettinga: It's essentially a write-off, yes. The decision had already been made, I believe, by the previous government that it was a write-off. It's not economically feasible. It would cost almost as much to revamp the building — I believe it had to be built on floating platforms — as to build a completely new facility.

M. Lettinga: I believe it was built in the early 1980s as a waterbed factory. Unfortunately, I think it was only economically viable for a couple of years. I wasn't here at the time. Then the college saw an opportunity there and bought the facility. I think the college initially moved in in 1985.

R. Sultan: There's a basic geotechnical problem at this site, as I understand it. It's just built on a very unstable hillside, which is dangerous.

M. Lettinga: No, I don't think there are any financial commitments on the old site, as far as I know.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Well, Marten, I would like to thank you for your presentation. It's certainly something we will take into consideration in the drafting of our report, as we will with all presenters and all written submissions. Once again, thank you for taking the time and speaking with us here today.

B. Brown: Good morning. My name is Brenda Brown. This is the first time I've made a presentation to this committee.

My husband and I moved to Quesnel six years ago. We have two daughters, aged 12 and nine. My husband has worked in the forest industry for 30 years, and both my daughters attend elementary school in Quesnel. I have worked in the health care industry for 18 years as a long term care aide. I currently work in a 75-bed intermediate care facility in Quesnel. I'm here today to talk about my concerns about a freeze in funding to health and education.

As a mother, I'm concerned with an education system already stretched to capacity and programs already cut. A freeze in funding to education will only result in increases to class sizes, overburdened teachers, increases in tuition fees and a system that doesn't meet the needs of our children.

As a health care worker, a freeze on health care funding means that the workload issues we deal with every day won't go away. Health care workers will be at greater risk of injuries. The registered nurses I work beside every day will continue to get burnt out from all the hours they must work to cover vacancies that can't be filled. Cuts to Pharmacare coverage will hurt all of us, including seniors, the very people I care for every day.

As a daughter, I'm concerned that a freeze on funding in health care will send a system in crisis over the edge. My 54-year-old mother, who lives in Prince George — off work now for two years — was in desperate need of a hip replacement. Unable to walk without constant pain and confined to a wheelchair at times, my mother was placed on a waiting list to see the specialist and informed that it could take a year in Prince George. She was never called.

My mother got her new hip in July, to the relief of her family, but not in this province. At great emotional and financial cost to my parents — approximately $3,000 to date — they packed up and went to Edmonton for the 25 days it would take until my mother was able to travel the 500 miles back home to the support of her children and grandchildren.

Health care is already underfunded. We already have a system that sends mothers and grandmothers miles away from their families, with no support, for much-needed surgery. We need increases in health care funding to keep families together. We need increases in health care funding to provide much-needed long term care beds in our communities. The government needs to provide some stability, now more than ever.

I urge the government to postpone individual and business tax cuts, invest in the future of people of this province and provide adequate funding for health and education so that the people of this province will get the services they deserve.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thanks very much, Brenda, for your presentation. I will ask members of the committee if they have any questions of Brenda.

B. Penner: Just a comment, not a question. Health care funding has been increasing very rapidly in British Columbia. In fact, I believe it's the fastest-growing item in government. I think the previous government — and Joy MacPhail can confirm this — felt some frustration that despite ever-increasing allocations to the health care budget, the shortages in the system just never seemed to go away. I think we're going to have to look for some creative solutions, because if you keep doing the same things over and over, you're probably going to get the same result. We're not getting the results we want in health care. Clearly, some improvements are needed.

J. MacPhail: The only area where I would disagree is that you don't make the improvements while cutting.

I. Chong: Thank you, Brenda, for your presentation. I was out last year as well, and I think I recall seeing you out speaking. A number of people did come out. My comments follow that of my colleague Barry Penner in that health care funding last year had been in the $8 billion range and then was increased another billion dollars to $9.3 billion, I think. Then even in this recent budget another several hundred million was increased on that. We have been trying to deal with the spending pressures.

Being that you've been in the health care system for as long as you have, as a front-line worker you've seen how it has changed. I'm looking to you to maybe provide some input as to where you see that savings can be found and redirected to allow for better patient care. If there are, I'd certainly like to hear what suggestions you may have, or if you want to, put them in written form and then send them to our website.

B. Brown: I can make a short comment on where I can see some of the savings. Some of the savings in health care will certainly be to train more long term care aides, LPNs and registered nurses to cut down on the type of overtime we're seeing, which I've never seen in the 18 years I've been working in health care. We need more of those professionals, and that's going to cut costs.

I. Chong: We have a nursing strategy that we've just implemented. Hopefully, we'll be dealing with that.

I appreciate this. We as a committee would certainly like to hear any other thoughts you have. I hope you'll think about that and submit it.

L. Mayencourt: Brenda, thank you very much. I don't know about the situation, the details of your mother's surgery, but I take it from this that she basically got an appointment in a hospital in Alberta, went and paid for the operation and then came back home.

B. Brown: She was put on a list in Prince George soon after she was unable to work anymore. That was in August of around 2000. She was told it would take approximately a year before she'd even get the initial consultation with a specialist — not even on a wait-list for surgery. With that frustration she asked for a referral to a doctor in Edmonton and, by November of that year, was in to see the specialist in Edmonton and had her surgery in July of this year.

L. Mayencourt: We've been discussing different approaches to health care, because we're just not seeing that we can keep it going the way it is. We have to make some adjustment. How do you feel people in your community would react to some private delivery of those kinds of services as long as they're paid for publicly?

In other words, if you've got cataract surgery, you go to an eye clinic that does the surgery, and the government pays for it. In the case of your mother, she would go to a clinic here in British Columbia, perhaps in your community, and the province would pay for the surgery. How do you think people would react to that here?

B. Brown: I personally don't think that private health care is going to deliver better service. I think it will exclude people who cannot afford to pay for private health care. It wouldn't be an option for our family.

L. Mayencourt: If we were to assure your community and your mother and others that it was a publicly paid program, would that make a difference in how you would feel about it?

B. Brown: I would still be concerned that private health care would increase the costs and that people who have a low income or working families would not be able to purchase that. I think it's not a realistic way to handle it.

K. Krueger: Thank you for presenting to us this morning. Your family sounds like exactly the type of hard-working British Columbia family that our government really wants to support and encourage — two daughters on the brink of going to junior high and high school and two parents working hard to support them.

The first presenter we had today talked to us about highways maintenance and rehabilitation issues, which is one of the big hidden deficits British Columbia faces that hasn't been done. It's as if you didn't do any repairs on your house for the last ten years, and the rain is starting to come through the roof.

Our province has more than doubled its debt, because every year we've lived way beyond our revenues. Now we have to pay almost $3 billion a year in interest on that debt, even though interest rates are historically low. That's more money than we can budget for post-secondary education, and that affects your children's prospects to get a good education and a good job.

What would happen to your family if, every year, you spent more than you received, and at the end of ten years, you owed twice as much debt on your home, but it was in ten years of disrepair? What would that do to your family?

K. Krueger: No, and the bank probably wouldn't want to renew the mortgage. That's the sort of struggle we have. We and the people who voted for us are persuaded that by cutting taxes, we can encourage investors to come back to B.C. so that we can start to build a robust private sector economy to pay for the sort of services we all know we're going to need now and as we age, because our population is aging.

We really appreciate British Columbians coming in and talking to us. The opportunity doesn't end here. You've got a good local MLA and another one in John Wilson up north. They're eager to hear your suggestions and will keep feeding them in. To us it's not an adversarial situation at all. We want to provide those services, but we certainly need to rejuvenate our economy.

J. MacPhail: Ms. Brown, I'm going to spend my time talking to you rather than telling you a particular version of the economy. I completely disagree with the previous speaker.

The situation in Quesnel. You have a local hospital. Can you describe for us the situation between acute care and intermediate long-term care? Are there immediate needs for the community of Quesnel? Where are we at in terms of bed shortages, or are there any?

B. Brown: I work at the intermediate, but we are connected through the CHC, the community health council. At this time they haven't reopened our ICU unit, to my knowledge, or it hasn't been reported. It's a concern for us that we'd have to travel to Prince George or Williams Lake to get some of those services for ICU patients.

There is a shortage in Quesnel. We have a 40-bed extended care unit that isn't large enough to accommodate the intermediate care residents we have in our facility to move over there when we need it. That means an increase in extended care patients staying in intermediate care, and therefore workloads increase.

J. MacPhail: Is the facility that you work in multilevel care or just intermediate care?

B. Brown: We have a 55-bed intermediate care — ICU levels, I guess, one to three. We also have a 20-bed special care unit, which is dementia care, Alzheimer's, and so forth, so we have multiple functions and people we represent and look after.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Brenda, I would like to thank you for taking the time and making your presentation here today. I think you've hit on something that's near and dear to every British Columbian, and that's the provision of health care. It's certainly our job as government to try and find a method in which to deliver that service and provide a quality of life that we all strive to enjoy. I thank you again for your presentation.

M. Schilling: Good morning. It's an honour to be here. For a little different flavour, I've written you a poem.

M. Schilling: I'm a civil servant from the South Cariboo. I'm married and have two children. My husband works as a mechanic in the outdoor recreational equipment department.

I. Chong: Thank you for the poem. It brightens up our morning. How long have you been working in the civil service?

M. Schilling: Actually, I guess I worked for B.C. Rail in the early eighties, but my first real job was with the Ministry of Transportation in 1986 in Burnaby.

I. Chong: In that time have you seen changes within the programs you've worked under or through? Have you seen whether there were some efficiencies where programs should be eliminated, or even enhanced, that would make savings possible? You've been there 15 years. Have you seen those kinds of things that you could share with us?

M. Schilling: Yes. I think the education level of the civil service has greatly improved over the last number of years. Most of the people I work with now have post-secondary education. Even a lot of our clerical staff have degrees, so you have wonderful civil servants that you're working with.

I know the government spent thousands of dollars enhancing their training, so we've become a very tight, cohesive wheel. The technology the government has introduced with e-mail and computer systems has also improved efficiency. We can now get online consultations with the electronic cameras, so we're getting better quality work in the field. There's no question about that.

I've always worked in the contracting end of things. I basically came on-stream after contracting started, so we're all used to working with contractors. We just want to be able to continue to do that but also to continue to provide good value in the field. Our engineers — well, everybody is very dedicated. You probably won't see a lot of civil servants here today because they're not the type to go out there and pound the drum and express their point of view, but they're very loyal.

I. Chong: In this area and from your experience, then, are you saying that the jobs that are here — in the programs you're in, in particular — are a limited number and that all those jobs are complementary to each other? What I'm trying to get at is that I know there are some concerns out there about job losses.

Each area will be reflected in a different way because of some areas having opportunities for vacancies and attrition, and we will look at these in a very thoughtful and reasonable way. You've been here working in this area for 15 years. In the programs you've worked with, do you feel there isn't a possibility for that kind of a movement? That's what I'm looking to hear from you, because I know every region is different. We're looking for those differences.

M. Schilling: I guess the other thing, too, is that it's the economy I want to stress. If, say, my job gets cut, it won't just be me going. It'll be my husband, because I'm not about to get a divorce in order to exist. It will pull out my salary, my husband's salary. They may not be able to replace him, because he's got very specialized skills.

It's really hard to get specialized trades people up into rural areas if they don't get full-time employment. It'll just be, you know, $600 less of groceries in a week I spend in my town. Every part of my paycheque gets spent in my town, and it's gone. If it happens not just to me but to more people like me in the area — say, at the forestry office — it'll take a big bite out of the local economy.

K. Krueger: Thank you for the novel way of presenting to us. We're really hearing what you're saying. There's a dramatic effect in smaller town economies from even a few job cutbacks. You've probably seen quite a few. A few years ago, for example, agriculture took a hit. The district agriculture office in Salmon Arm that had been there for a hundred years was closed.

As a former civil servant myself, what I experienced, and what I continue to hear from people around the province, is that there's often a consolidation of government jobs down in the cities — in Vancouver and, particularly, Victoria. I've repeatedly been told there are a thousand registered professional foresters living in Victoria and working for government, and there wasn't any logging there in the five years I spent in opposition. Here in the interior I have a tough time getting people assigned to help salvage loggers get their permits.

You have a window on government operations. All civil servants do. Do you continue to see those trends — government senior managers building little empires in the cities? They're paid on the formula where they're paid more if they have more people. Do you think there is that in the cities compared to the situation you're talking about here?

M. Schilling: I don't know, but let's put it this way. The demands and the expectations on the individual tasks we do have increased. A job that used to be simple in the old days — just go in and do your basic job — now requires a lot more planning and preparation to prevent the potential for litigation. It seems like there's always somebody out to find fault with what you're doing.

K. Krueger: Do you have the impression that there is waste in government anywhere in the province?

M. Schilling: I don't know enough of what's going on in the rest of the province to answer that question honestly. We just see the media. I just don't know.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Any further questions from members of the committee for Michelle? I see none.

Michelle, I would also like to thank you. I think it was a very interesting way to present your case, and I think it says a lot. Rural British Columbia is certainly dependent on helping build this quality of life, and we'll take your comments to heart. Thank you very much.

My name is Gale Engstrom. My partner and I moved to Williams Lake in '84. He was then and is still employed by B.C. Rail. I moved here to attend the college and further my education. In 1985 I got a job with Community Living, which is a service for adults with developmental disabilities. Through that I've become an adviser for a group of adults, self-advocates. My grandson played minor hockey here, and I'm also a member of the Métis association.

Today I'm here mainly as an advocate for the adults with developmental disabilities. I believe that the work we do and the services we provide help to improve the quality of life for people by allowing and supporting integration, health and use of community facilities, and by helping people to be informed, make choices and set personal goals. I guess what I advocate is all of the things we take for granted in our own personal lives that are a struggle all of the time for so many of the people we provide services and support to.

When I started working in '85, many of the people we support had just moved from the institutions. It seems unreal, but we had to teach people that they do have rights and those kinds of things. I believe that at this time, even with the number of staff we have and the people who are there offering support, there are still many things that the people don't have and don't get. Many, many people need someone with them at all times, just to live their daily lives.

The people are aging at this point. One of the concerns, I think, is of people aging in place and how, as people age, there are more higher needs both for the people themselves and for the environment. They will live in wheelchair-accessible homes. There will probably be higher needs for staff to be giving medications, health care and all of those kinds of things.

Also, a couple of times this morning I've heard people talking about higher education and the more money, the better the quality of life. I think we need to remember that a lot of the people we support and a lot of the cuts that we talk about involve people who are very vulnerable and don't have the opportunity for a better education and more money.

I'm asking that there be some more consideration taken around these things and that people look at some of these things from maybe a different perspective. So many of the people who are so vulnerable are already not getting the things we take for granted, and I'm just asking you to please look at that.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Gale. I think your final comment about us having a look at it is something that we strive to do to bring balance to the table. I think there are decisions that have to be made that will affect each and every one of us in this province, but the key issue is making those decisions in a balanced manner and trying to move us forward as a society. With that, I will look to members of our committee, if there are any questions of Gale.

L. Mayencourt: This is not so much a question. I just wanted to clarify, because you raised an issue that's very important to me. I just want to say that I, too, and members of this committee think the work you do is really important. Not everybody can go back to college or go and make more money and all that sort of stuff.

We really have to be conscious of the fact that we have some people we have to look after in society. I

just applaud what you're doing and want you to know that it's very important to me, to the members of this committee and to our government to look after those people. That's just my promise to you: that we'll remember that in our hearts.

J. MacPhail: Thank you, Ms. Engstrom. I was interested in your role as a participant in the Métis association and also your work as an advocate for people with developmental disabilities. Being Métis, you may not be able to answer this, because it is a status question, really. How is the relationship between on-reserve first nations and the community in terms of services here in Williams Lake?

G. Engstrom: In the services we provide, there are a number of people that are status, and part of what we are doing is trying to help people to link up with their past and their native ancestry and things like that.

J. MacPhail: In your role you do assist in servicing on-reserve band people as well.

J. MacPhail: Oh, I see. In terms of the population of people with developmental disabilities in Williams Lake, are you a regional service? I realize you play a different role now, but is Williams Lake the regional centre for that kind of service?

J. Bray: B.C. Association for Community Living. What percentage of funding here in Williams Lake does your association receive from government versus other sources, or do you know?

G. Engstrom: I believe they receive all of their funding from government sources.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Are there any further questions from members of our committee? Ralph.

R. Sultan: Is the service you provide aimed specifically at Métis, or do you broaden out?

R. Sultan: I'm really repeating, perhaps, what Ms. MacPhail said. You're serving the community generally.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Anything further? I see no further questions. Gale, I would like to thank you for taking the time and presenting to us here this morning. As I've indicated to our other presenters, the information you've put forward will be taken into consideration in the development of our report, so thank you.

Okay, we will move on in our agenda this morning. Our next presenter is Lars Carlson. Is Lars with us? We're slightly ahead of schedule right now. Possibly what we'll do, versus jumping ahead…. I have three names of people who would have liked to have addressed us under the open-mike session. Is Paula Kully here? Paula, if you would like to come forward now. Thank you and good morning.

P. Kully: Good morning, hon. representatives. As you know, my name is Paula Kully. I work for a small community economic development organization in a rural remote community called Horsefly. I think I can speak for many of the rural and remote communities in this region, as we've been involved for approximately four years and have had a lot of communication with other communities that are similar to ours.

I think one of the main concerns of these smaller communities is that economic development is going to be overlooked and the adverse effects it will have on these small communities if that should happen. When I say rural, I mean small communities like 800 people, 400 people. They're often really the backbone of a region, though. For example, our forest district office is in Horsefly.

You can imagine the large number of dollars that come out of these regions every year, go into Victoria and don't really come back into the community. That is, I guess, the key issue I wanted to bring up. I agree with a lot of the other speakers here today. As far as education goes, that's a big issue in rural communities, as well, and health care, but that is the one issue I wanted to bring up personally.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Paula. If you would answer any questions, if there are any. I will go to Harry Bloy first, and then Jeff.

H. Bloy: Thank you for your presentation. How much funding do you receive from the provincial government now?

P. Kully: Right now, actually, nothing. Our organization got caught in the cutbacks. We had been promised approximately $48,000, and it never came to us. I understand there were many other small groups, as well, that were in the same position. Ultimately, groups like ours are working toward self-sustainability. We

don't want to have to depend on government grants, but it's hard to operate and do all the things that we do on nothing. I mean, you can only work so much as volunteers. You can only do so much with in-kind contributions, etc.

Considering that our operating budget is probably under $70,000 a year, we generate approximately 15 percent of that on our own. We've done the things in the community, as opposed to an amount of money. For example, we've created jobs. We've increased and improved the tourism dollars into our community.

We have Internet access available to all rural community residents now. A lot of these people don't even have phones, so Internet access isn't possible for them. There are many other things. We've worked on trail development, bringing skills training out to rural people who otherwise wouldn't be able to obtain it. We do a lot for the small amount of money we do receive.

P. Kully: As I said, we've had some that was supposed to come from the province and didn't. We are working on a federal grant right now through the Canadian rural partnership pilot projects program. Like I said, once again, some of the money that we do bring in is generated by other activities we do within our community.

J. Bray: Actually, you answered part of my question. It was about some examples of what you've done in your community of Horsefly, which is somewhat remote as well. It's not just small; it's also somewhat remote. You may or may not be able to answer this right off the top of your head, but of the jobs that you've created in your community, what percentage are created and funded by the private sector versus the public sector? Tourism would be a private sector operation. Have you got some sense of that?

P. Kully: It's hard to measure. It's a very difficult thing to measure. I mean, I can say for sure that I know there are three people that work at the centre itself. If this place didn't exist, those three jobs wouldn't exist. As for the private sector, that is difficult. With our work in tourism, we have enabled several different tourism-related operators to hire more people because they have more business. I guess what we're lacking right now is a measuring stick to determine exactly what we're doing. Is it working, and how well is it working? That's a shortfall on our part, really.

I can give you one example, though. We had a young girl that worked on a youth-funded program. She didn't really know what she wanted to do. She came and did a bit of computer work, found that she had a knack for it, went on to do another project somewhere else and is now starting her own business making websites, etc.

Another young man, who two years ago was going to leave the community because he couldn't find work, came in and used some of the resources available and is now operating his own small-scale logging business. Those are a couple of the examples I can give you. It's a real domino effect, though.

I really strongly believe in giving people in these small communities the resources to work with, the tools to work with, because they're the ones who know what their community needs. Like you said earlier, what works in Horsefly does not work in Tatla Lake, so you cannot put the same shoe on different feet.

I. Chong: Paula, thank you. I was heartened to hear that you are working toward looking at economic-growth opportunities in your community. As you probably heard in earlier deliberations today, our prebudget consultation is about looking to people and their communities for solutions — solutions that would help us meet our spending pressures, solutions that would help us find sufficient revenues to maintain B.C.'s priority social programs and also steps so that we can move toward job growth.

Having said that — and you indicated that your original request for funding from government of less than $70,000 was needed to help you and your community — if you got the ear of the Minister of Finance, what would you say to him? Would you say that a program that needs to be maintained would be one that would provide seed money for just one year for those community development programs, or would you offer another kind of an alternative? Again, we are looking at ways to deal with the elimination of some programs as well as enhancing those that clearly would move toward economic growth.

P. Kully: If I had his ear, yes, by all means I think seed funding is important, but one year is not sufficient. We've been working now for three and a half years. The organization has existed for four years but three and a half years doing what we're doing, and it has just now obtained a level of, I feel, near-independence. That's been struggling through, and as you say, it's always the one-year funding that is really an obstacle. That's a barrier, if anything.

I. Chong: That's important to hear, because so often the government programs are initiated, and they don't sustain success in a program. So what you're saying is that if a program were to be proceeded with, it should have some clear, definitive, long-term goals and plans. Thank you. That's helpful.

Paula, I would like to thank you. You said one very important thing. I think that whichever service we're delivering, we have to be able to evaluate it to see if it's being delivered properly, if it's an effective delivery and so on. I think that's one of the key issues we're working on right now. I thank you for coming forward today.

I will now ask if Lars Carlson is with us yet. Okay, seeing that Lars is not available, I have two other speakers who have asked to be on the list, and we do have time to slate them in before our next speaker. Is Debbie Demare with us?

D. Demare: As you've noticed, my name is Debbie Demare. I've lived in Williams Lake since 1981, and I'm employed by the University College of the Cariboo. I run our continuing education department, but that's not why I'm here today. I was also a founding member and off-and-on board member of a provincial organization called Literacy B.C., and I also co-chair our local literacy society, which is called Cariboo-Chilcotin Partners for Literacy. The information I've given you is probably similar to what Marten gave you earlier today.

This spring I was at a Literacy B.C. board meeting, and the executive director had invited a gentleman called Dr. Ron Faris. Ron is a professor at UVic, and he advocates a philosophy called learning communities. In the course of that presentation he had three overheads he put up. They were compiled by B.C. Statistics, and they were maps of British Columbia divided into regions, with each region a different colour. Red was the colour on the overheads for areas that were lowest on the scales.

The first overhead he put up was one showing socioeconomic indices. There were two areas in the province that were quite glaringly red, the Cariboo-Chilcotin being one of them. The next overhead he put up was of health and disease. Once again there were two areas in red, showing the lowest levels in the province, and one of them was the Cariboo-Chilcotin. We stick out. We're right in the middle of the province. Lastly, he put up educational indices, and again, there we were right in the middle — a nice, glaring red.

I'm sitting at this board table with people from around the province, going: "I wonder if they know where I'm from." I've been involved in the literacy movement and in education for ten or 15 years, but this was striking to me. It clearly showed the link among the three, and it clearly showed a level in the Cariboo-Chilcotin that is lower than the rest of the province. It got me to thinking: what on earth are we going to do? We have to do more — and more effectively — than we're currently doing in a number of areas. My interest, of course, is education.

I understand the priorities of your government, and I've read the information on new-era priorities being held: high-tech, engineering, and so on. I think Marten made the point earlier that in this region, showing those kinds of statistics, we're not even on the starting level to be able to address those priorities in this area. My experience here has been that as a UCC person or a person who's involved in societies, there's a lot of competitiveness and territoriality.

I kind of buy into the idea of learning communities as presented by Dr. Ron Faris, where the community itself takes charge and mobilizes around this issue. It systematically looks at what is going on in the community to address educational needs and then looks to what partnerships, sometimes unusual, can be formed. It looks at different mechanisms for encouraging learning in the community.

If I were to suggest something to you as a priority — and we've heard it here today already — it's to support communities mobilizing and identifying their own needs. Sometimes that takes a little bit of money. The learning communities were being funded, I believe, through one of the ministries, and that is under review.

I like that idea, because it encourages the UCCs, the school districts, the CMHA, which provides certain kinds of learning programs, and non-traditional providers to get together at the same table and identify where the gaps are and what kind of partnerships can be formed to continue to work at a community level on these issues. That would be the first thing I would suggest to you.

Secondly, I want to further discuss the idea of adult basic education. I've been extraordinarily frustrated in seeing so many people at a grade 12 or lower level, and the information I gave you pretty clearly shows that. Over 40 percent in this region have not completed grade 12.

I think we need to shift funds and focus funds, in this region in particular and maybe in others, on adult basic education, whether it's through the college, through school districts or through community-based programs. We've got to do it. In this area, for high-tech or health training or whatever, we're not even going to be on the starting page. We have to look at focusing and targeting funds to adult basic education, from the literacy level right on up to grade 12. That would be a second priority I would suggest.

Thirdly, I wanted to talk about expertise in training and education for first nations. This region has between a 9 percent and 10 percent first nations population, which is considerably higher than the provincial average. My experience has been that there are different techniques and styles around training and education to make them effective for first nations. We need to encourage the development of expertise in teaching first nations. I'd like to see a little more funding devoted to helping rural communities and their teachers, wherever they are in the system, and have expertise around teaching and delivering instruction that's effective for first nations.

One more thing: digital. I think that in a rural community, UCC and our literacy groups are struggling with providing service in a 60,000 square mile area that is very sparsely populated. I think digital methods of education and communication are very important.

Those are the four areas I see as being pivotal in this area to moving us forward and getting us on the starting page, as it were, to address the ability to work in a knowledge-based society and to keep our industry and our communities on that path.

R. Sultan: Thank you for your presentation. The poverty, morbidity, health and education statistics that you present are really quite catastrophic by any measure. I assume, but correct me if I'm wrong, that they're rather significantly influenced by the high percentage of first nations people in this part of the world. If that assumption is correct, and I could stand to be corrected, I just wonder in terms of the priorities I read about in The Tribune this morning for UCC in terms of proposing to spend — what is the proposal? — $16 million on a new campus, including a new bridge over the creek, etc.

It seems to me, as an outside observer, that the challenge here is to reach communities spread over these 60,000 square miles. Having a new campus isn't necessarily the way to do it, particularly, as you pointed out, with digital communication, the Internet, distance learning and the need to get into these communities and reach people scattered all over the place to bring them into the twenty-first century in terms of education. Could you comment?

D. Demare: Well, I certainly support the idea of having a consolidated campus in Williams Lake. The amount of money spent on that is, I think, a good question. I certainly support the concept of having a centralized, consolidated campus. I think it's a really difficult situation for our students and for providing quality education for our students in the current situation. Where it goes, how much it costs and how fancy it is, is a good question. I also think that providing education and training and different kinds of opportunities throughout the Cariboo is extraordinarily important. Putting a focus on that is extraordinarily important.

R. Sultan: Well, as a supplementary, is the present student body of UCC representative of the total population? Indeed, I would suspect that the need is disproportionately large among the first nations. Does the current enrolment of this campus, as it exists today or as proposed, reflect that?

D. Demare: Absolutely. I think UCC has done an incredible job of attempting to provide education and training for first nations people. We're working on it, but we're working within the constraints we're given in developing expertise and being able to effectively educate our first nations population. They are too. They are working within their constraints too. I think our student body is reflective — very much so — of the region and is perhaps even weighted to first nations participation.

In response to the assumption, perhaps, that first nations are skewing our literacy and adult basic education statistics, I think that's certainly a factor, but I don't think it is the only factor. There was a study done of eight mills by the Council of Forest Industries. They studied from lower levels right up to mill management and found that 50 percent or better scored at approximately a grade 4 reading level.

While I think first nations are certainly a factor here and one we need to address to help our economy be vibrant — because we all play a role with first nations — I think we also need to address our regular population, many of whom will not admit or understand that their ability to function in today's world is impaired. They only find that out when they're displaced and all of a sudden they're faced with: "Well, my goodness. I can't go take a computer technician program, because I actually score at a grade 9 level." I think it's important to recognize that the literacy levels in the Cariboo cross all boundaries.

K. Krueger: Thank you, Ms. Demare. I saw that you were here when Mr. Lettinga made his presentation earlier. Given the brief that you presented to us, it seems likely to me that you share his opinion that this area is better off with a university college than a university. Is that how you feel?

D. Demare: Absolutely. I hear the rhetoric around: if we're made a university, we'll remain comprehensive. That's a difficult thing to conceive of. Just the word and title "university" connotes other things. I think the funding of university-level education in this area, where it's effective and affordable, is important, but I also think that the comprehensiveness that UCC provides in Williams Lake and this region is amazing.

We do everything from soup to nuts. Our continuing education department provides first-rate training right around the Cariboo, and we're one of the few agencies, private or otherwise, that has the capacity to do that. Maintaining that comprehensiveness in a community and region of this size is really, really important. If we were to go to university status, I'd find it very important to have those reassurances that we're going to maintain that type of role.

K. Krueger: Mr. Lettinga did say that he was representing the faculty association when he spoke. You started off a little differently but obviously share his views. Is it pretty much the unanimous feeling of the faculty here that we're better off with a university college configuration?

D. Demare: There's concern about what it means to become a university. I think they want resources, and they need resources. I think this initiative has come more from a strategic concern of university colleges and is in response to what other geographic locations and university colleges were pursuing. My feeling is that it's more a response to that and a concern that somehow we're going to be left out of the funding loop.

H. Bloy: I believe in advanced education, but you spoke quite passionately about adult basic education. It

hasn't worked in the traditional methods. Are you reaching out so that it's home-based taught, where you have a number of volunteers or teachers that are teaching in small groups to upgrade them so that they have the opportunity to go to this college? The college setting may be disturbing to a number of people.

D. Demare: Yes. That's sort of where the linkage comes between our society and the college. The literacy society here is funded through a provincial-federal cost-share program to deliver a volunteer tutoring program. We have also been funded this year to do a number of what they call family literacy initiatives, which go at literacy from a family perspective, bringing the adult and the children in together to do literacy training. They do other things as well. There's a hook to get them in.

The idea that literacy is intergenerational is important, and I think this is a factor in the Cariboo. Family literacy is a proactive, long-term approach to addressing this. We have a university college staff person who's actually the coordinator of that program of linkage with the society. It's a great partnership. Our intention is to reach out and provide different kinds of literacy activities in the community. I think that's pivotal.

I got a new vacuum. I'm not a vacuumer, as my daughter likes to tell me. There's the fear of: how does this thing work? I have to be in my living room with nobody around so that I can fool around and turn this on, turn that on, whatever. I think that as adults, we have to provide safe environments for people to come to learn — community-based, where they're doing it with a volunteer tutor or doing it in their workplace or whatever, providing that safe environment to take that first step.

Once you've got the idea that you can learn, then it's safer to take the next step. It's a bridge. Just think back to something that you've been learning — that computer or whatever. It's feeling safe to experiment. So many adults for so many years conceded the fact that they could not learn. As soon as the door is open and it twigs with them, "Yep, I can do that," then the next steps are possible.

I've seen people, often, that have gone from basically reading nothing to going on and taking a certificate-level program and moving on in their lives. I think that's so important, and it creates an excitement. I think that's what we're talking about in B.C.: creating an excitement and a vitality.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): With that, Debbie, I would like to thank you for making your presentation and coming forward today.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): It's now close to 11:30. We will move to our 11:30 presenter from the Cariboo Economic Action Forum, Garth Greskiw.

The Cariboo Economic Action Forum has a history of nine years of representing grass-roots economic development initiatives in the region. Mobilizing the volunteer sector of our economy is crucial. I think we've all heard about the third sector of economic development, and that is the volunteer sector. There's the public sector, the private sector and, of course, the volunteer sector.

For the past two years and until July 31 of this year, there's been about $1.2 million invested annually in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region to improve volunteer-sector initiatives and promote business development in the region. It's been my task to work with investment analysts from Victoria in the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Services — previously Cooperatives and Volunteers — and to work with Cariboo-Chilcotin community volunteer organizations to make the best investments in building communities' capacity to create their own small business enterprises.

Today I want to emphasize that the Cariboo-Chilcotin region has a great diversity of natural and human resources to develop business solutions. As a regional economic planner, it's hard not to notice the tremendous potential of this region for forestry, tourism, agriculture and industry — manufacturing in particular.

Nevertheless, it's also hard not to notice the poverty and the poor socioeconomic indicators of both health and literacy in the region. We are a region that has finally grown to realize that forestry and mining industries and government cannot themselves manage for socioeconomic stability in our community.

The employment generator and the new source for community stability in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region will be found in growing our small business and volunteer sector initiatives. However, in order to strategically invest in the growth of our region, business and community leaders will need to work together and collaboratively with the federal and provincial governments to identify the limiting factors to small business growth in the region.

Economic infrastructure limitations in the area of telecommunications, energy and transportation continuously affect the acceleration and diversification of economic growth in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region. These infrastructure topics have been recurrent themes of the past eight annual Cariboo Economic Action Forums.

Also, access to timber and tourism land tenure has impaired regional investors' ability to develop new small and medium-sized business in the region. Many entrepreneurs have difficulty in acquiring sufficient borrowed capital to invest in a potentially successful small business development. Our talented young people are moving elsewhere in search of training and better opportunities to start their own businesses.

This brings me to our first recommendation. This recommendation is that the provincial government may realize efficiencies in allocating infrastructure spending capital in partnership with the federal government to a development trust fund for the Cariboo.

A volunteer-based regional development consortium board of directors would be fully accountable for strategic investments of these funds — accountable to the region and accountable to the levels of government.

You will notice in the printed material that I've handed out some information under the heading "Cariboo-Chilcotin Regional Development Consortium." This consortium or trust fund concept is not new in B.C. It has worked well in other areas of rural B.C. to stimulate a new climate for economic development. For example, there's the Columbia Basin Trust, and in Nechako, there's a similar trust fund, an investment fund.

The Cariboo Economic Action Forum Society has appointed members to the current RDC — that's the regional development corporation — interim board. We haven't got the trust fund in place yet. Last spring there was a commitment to about $3.8 million just to start the fund. The federal government had given us a verbal commitment that they would match that funding, but it's up in the air now due to the core review.

The Cariboo Economic Action Forum Society proposes to provide assistance to the RDC by doing what we do best. We propose to continue presenting our annual economic forum for our stakeholders, and we will do that. It will be much more difficult without the support of government, of course, but we still have scheduled the ninth economic action forum for October 12 and 13 next year. We're doing the planning now to present it next year.

I think I've submitted four copies of the previous forum, the eighth annual forum, and that will give some background as to what our issues are in economic development. If you want to look at any of the previous plenary reports, you're welcome to come over. We still have an office at the skills centre until at least the end of the year. We're hoping to keep fundraising and stay open for business to help represent economic development grass-roots initiatives in the region.

We want to keep maintaining our rural outreach network. I think we are developing contacts, developing relationships with first nations economic development organizations that seem to be authentic. We all live here, and that seems to make a big difference. The Cariboo Economic Action Forum can utilize volunteer resources and local knowledge to multiply the benefit of provincial investment in community development.

Our second recommendation to government would be that this network that the Cariboo Economic Action Forum has built over the last nine years should be acknowledged, and so should the regional Community Futures development corporation. We really need to take stock of what we've got working for us in rural community economic development, so we can see how to strategically invest in that and improve it.

We believe that the Cariboo Economic Action Forum network could be an important tool for this regional development consortium to utilize in a public outreach program for regional community development. It's a large area, and it does take quite a few groups linked together to be able to make initiatives work.

There are three sectors that create and develop our regional economy and society. In the Cariboo-Chilcotin the volunteer sector has figured very prominently in the economic development of the region. The Cariboo-Chilcotin's most memorable examples of volunteer initiatives are the original road to Bella Coola and Rudy Johnson's bridge across the Fraser. The Cariboo-Chilcotin prides itself in its volunteer-offered, made-in-the-Cariboo solutions. With a little guidance from the other two sectors — the private sector and government — these made-in-the-Cariboo solutions can provide win-win opportunities and a renewed sense of innovation and enterprise for many years to come.

To give you an example of what our organizations can do from mobilizing volunteer resources to work on economic development — that is, diversification and capacity building — I included our final report on a contract we completed for Community Enterprise B.C. last month. As I mentioned, we have been working on contract with Community Enterprise B.C., which is now a section of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Services.

The contract mobilized training and facilitation assistance from dozens of volunteers and brought key regional development issues into focus. It cost B.C. taxpayers only $50,000. Unfortunately, due to cutbacks to the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Services, CEAF's function as a partner with the province in promoting diversification in the region has been cancelled.

This brings me to our third and final recommendation, which is that the provincial government should reinstate the $1.2 million annual allocation to regional economic diversification and capacity-building projects administered by the Cariboo Economic Action Forum in conjunction with the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Services.

Considering that every dollar of this fund levered at least another dollar of volunteer resources and often another dollar of federal funding — not to mention the hope, good will, skills and information transferred for cultural bridge-building to rural and aboriginal communities — this $1.2 million annual investment in the Cariboo-Chilcotin was actually a good deal for B.C.

It's surprising how prudent the volunteer sector initiatives are in managing limited resources. When volunteers are working side by side with paid staff, it's amazing how modest the bills are that come in from the paid staff and how carefully managed that limited pot of money is. I was always impressed with how well-managed volunteer sector resources could be.

You'll also notice on the table that I handed out a printed submission dated July 4. This table summarizes the community enterprise projects that were approved and those that were not approved at the CEAF project review committee meeting on July 4. We have a rigorous process for approving community volunteer sector initiatives projects. It's a peer process, but we tend to be hard on those projects that we don't think are going to result in jobs. That is the bottom line, I think, for eco

nomic action. At least, it's a very important indicator of success in a volunteer sector initiative.

There were community business development projects that the review panel had approved in conjunction with the evaluation analysts from the Ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Services. They were approved in principle but then were cancelled by the ministry on July 31, just three weeks after we'd given the nod to the projects.

In the Cariboo a handshake and a nod are almost as good as a signed contract, so CEAF is suffering for that quite a bit. There were thousands of volunteer hours committed to developing those projects, and now we, along with government, are having to explain why those projects were cancelled. It's a very hard thing to explain when you're among the people that approved them.

Sometimes it took as long as 14 months and a difficult learning process to develop the proposals. We are talking about people with literacy issues, people who are otherwise very clever, but communicating can be difficult. So we work at capacity building to get people to a place where they can write a proposal that they understand and that their constituents understand so that they can then deliver on a business project.

It works. We've shown that it works. You're welcome to look through our files. I know that our evaluation analysts in Victoria also have copies of those files, and there has been a really good partnership between Victoria and CEAF in delivering this program. It was disheartening to hundreds of volunteers and small businesses in the Chilcotin — literally hundreds of volunteers and related small businesses.

For example, I was talking to the president of the Quesnel farmers' market this morning, and they're still reeling from a $9,000 cutback to their program to develop a market coordinator. To bring more business to the downtown core of Quesnel, they thought the farmers' market would be a good thing, but they were hoping to enhance their business prospects by having a paid person. I think it was about $12 an hour.

They wanted to have a person paid to champion the marketing for the farmers' market, which would have tremendous spin-off benefits for Quesnel as well as to the direct farm marketers and growers, but that portion of the funding was cancelled. It had ripple effects to their funding through the federal government. They had agricultural rural initiatives funding, plus they would have had Buy B.C. funding, and they were unable to proceed with that.

G. Greskiw: She's not here anymore. Paula Kully was here for quite a while. Hopefully, she'll have a chance to talk about how Horsefly has been affected by cutbacks.

Just a couple more points. If the province were to reinstate this funding, for only about $300,000 we could recover hundreds of hours of ministry and thousands of hours of volunteer time that was invested in the design of promising and acceptable local economic development projects. We could possibly also still recover the commitment of resources from federal funding sources to these projects. Most importantly, reinstating the $300,000 project funds that were cancelled would show respect to the project proponents. It would be clearly acknowledging that a promise is a promise and that the government tries to not break its promises.

I've presented for your consideration today and to the best of my ability a snapshot of regional development priorities for the Cariboo-Chilcotin. Setting up a regional development trust fund with the provincial and federal governments is currently the highest long-term regional development priority with the board of the Cariboo Economic Action Forum.

Our medium priority would be to enlist CEAF as the non-partisan group to assist the regional development consortium in accomplishing outreach economic development work. Community economic development stakeholders found Community Enterprise B.C. to be successful in bringing new small project opportunities to the region. It is therefore a medium-term priority for CEAF to become effective again in assisting the province in bringing community development to the region through the community enterprise program or something else like it.

It is our short-term priority to somehow get the projects that we approved last July back on the rails again so that the hundreds of thousands of dollars of government and volunteer time spent designing these projects is not lost. The Cariboo Economic Action Forum board is offering our local outreach assistance to the provincial government to make community economic development work in the Cariboo-Chilcotin. We suggest that our first priority and first task at hand should be to not lose this existing investment in regional business development. We must somehow find that $300,000.

Our second task should be to develop ways and means that CEAF and our volunteer network can continue with the province. We ask that the province review the unique capability of CEAF in organizing volunteers. Our third task and long-range goal will be to support the function of a regional development consortium in the Cariboo-Chilcotin region.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thanks very much, Garth. I know that's a lot to put into 15 minutes, with the time frames, in order to try and accommodate as many presenters as we can. We've had to limit it to that, but I think you've done a terrific job putting all that information across in that time frame.

We are going to move on. If we have one quick question for the presenter, I would entertain that. Otherwise, we will move to our next presenter. That's a tough thing to ask for — a quick question.

G. Greskiw: Thank you. Feel free to ask me any other questions. My address is on the material.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Okay. We will move on to our 11:45 presenter, who is with the B.C. Heritage Trust. With us is George Atamanenko.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): All right. I was looking at it for the last while, a little worried.

G. Atamanenko: There are time constraints for all of us, I guess. What I'd like to do is thank you for coming. It's really important for us in the Cariboo to have the opportunity to express our interests on financial matters as well as the services that are being provided to us through the public.

I guess one thing I should do is say I really represent a small hands-on heritage museum group in the Chilcotin. That's about three hours from here, on the way to Bella Coola. The other is that I do sit on the B.C. Heritage Trust board, which is a legislated body and is considered to be one of the best legislations in the country. We went through a whole legislative review of the Heritage Conservation Act, and it's really considered to be one of the best.

My presentation will be very brief. I understand I'm not to go beyond 1 o'clock. [Laughter.]

G. Atamanenko: I asked myself the question: why should I appear before your committee? I let that sort of sift around. I'm supposed to be a retired person, but I ranch, and I also do some volunteer work on various committees. After thinking about it for some time, the answer became very clear: the concern about losing our seniors and our elderly and their stories and their experiences, at times very colourful and sometimes very tragic. These hard-working persons paved the way for our resettlement in British Columbia.

The second sort of concern I thought about was about losing our historic buildings and structures and sites that truly provide the visual part, the authentic part, the impressions that were carried forward by our seniors and our elderly over the years. Those impressions are for us and also for tourists alike, as the tourists come to British Columbia.

The other concern that I thought about was our youth. You know, will they be able to learn from our past experiences and endeavours and hard work in order to project themselves into the future with greater hope and security — and yes, with meaningful jobs and opportunities?

In the Cariboo we're working hard and steady to diversify our economy. You just heard from your last presenter, Garth, talking about moving ahead in the Cariboo in terms of diversifying it. I don't want to bore you with too many statistics — I always want too many statistics — but I still have to mention some on the importance of heritage and culture.

It touches every community in this province, sometimes more than touching it. This is part of our reaching into the diversity of the economy that I've just mentioned. The efforts of the B.C. Heritage Trust on a partnership basis with local governments, non-profit societies and aboriginal communities has provided job opportunities and investments. Some of those would not have got off the ground if the trust hadn't provided just some of those funds. I'll give you a few examples later on.

In the last 22 years $27.5 million has been invested into some of these heritage projects, which lever to about $110 million. That's a substantial amount for what's happened over the past number of years. That is, for every dollar invested, over three have been generated in the local community. I think that's pretty significant.

Heritage and the arts employ more people than mining and fishing combined. Some 2,700 employees, supported by about 7,000 volunteers, work in this whole heritage sector alone. There also has been declining funding over the number of years for the B.C. Heritage Trust, which now stands at about $750,000 a year. That's been declining for quite a number of years.

I sincerely hope that in the core review that is in progress — this first phase, as I understand it, is a crucial one — the Heritage Trust will have some positive response to move ahead and create some of those opportunities for people. The trust does need a secure public funding base and also to be a true Crown corporation under legislation. We are a Crown corporation, but it hasn't been formalized, and we have been working toward being independent from government.

Again, whether some of the dollars come from a portion of hotel taxes, the lottery or its own sustainable woodlot — and I don't say that facetiously, but maybe there are ways we can explore together — we need to bring public funding back to at least the original annual level of between $3 million and $4 million if we are to keep the heritage movement, protect some of our sites and build on the whole tourism economy.

Certainly the trust continues to explore ways and means to partner with corporate partners. We haven't been sitting back the last couple of years that I've been involved. We're trying to move ahead, be more independent and involve partners. In the Cariboo-Chilcotin we are making efforts to diversify from our economic resource base.

I think it means support for new opportunities to small, home and beyond-home businesses. It means retraining, new skills and support for technical training. I think this has been mentioned, as well, this morning. It means support for our tourism and service industries.

Tourism. I think the word is used very broadly in our country. Tourism is really the beneficiary of the heritage, culture and arts activities that are going on all

the time. This is what people that come to British Columbia are drawn to. A market does exist and is increasing in the whole tourism/cultural tourism sector.

A recent B.C. visitors study for non-residents indicates that 33½ percent of visitors wanted and did heritage and culture activities while on vacation. The facts are around. We don't have to reinvent them. It's the emerging economy that the Heritage Trust feels very good to be part of.

Here are several examples where B.C. Heritage Trust investments in partnership with various organizations have provided a stimulus to that local economy. Again, I won't bore you. I have to finish fairly soon. In the Shuswap, Vernon and Revelstoke areas, for example, this is a combined investment of over $800,000 from the period 1979 to 2001, and that means from a small investment of $500 for a historic plaque in Vernon to $135,000 for the O'Keefe Historic Ranch for some of the restoration projects. Again, the multiplier effect has been over $3 million to these communities. It's the potential.

South of Williams Lake, if you're travelling to Kamloops — or perhaps you're flying; I don't know — before you get to Lac La Hache, there's a Heritage Trust investment of over $20,000 for the restoration of the historic Felker ranch. The ranch house is being restored now, and this site was saved.

The Ministry of Transportation and Highways wanted to get rid of the old house, because they wanted to widen the highway. It was moved, saved from demolition, and several jobs were provided in that period and still are there. This will become a tourist attraction as part of that whole Cariboo gold rush period. It's there.

In summary, there are three items I'd like to mention. Heritage, culture and the arts do provide new job opportunities, new and expanded investments and stimulus to local economies and regions throughout B.C. It's happening. We've got to continue it.

Second, please continue to support heritage, culture and the arts with adequate resources in B.C. We can't lose out. At least keep it at the level we have. Hopefully, we can increase that level of adequate funding to support the B.C. Heritage Trust to ensure that it does become a true corporation, and we can move on.

I have a written submission, but it's verbal to you at this point. I've also attached a couple of facts and figures, Give Heritage A Secure Funding Base, and some interesting facts that will be part of the presentation. Thank you very much.

If there are any questions from members of the committee, I would look to them at this point.

B. Penner: I'm just kind of curious how you define heritage stock. Is there a particular date or an arbitrary number that you assign to what qualifies as a heritage building?

G. Atamanenko: Heritage is not a simple term to define. Every community is somewhat different in terms of how far back they feel they should go in time. In our community here in Williams Lake, for example, if you've visited Williams Lake or are familiar with it, our stock in terms of heritage is very little — one, two, three or four buildings.

The Station House Gallery is a prime example. Williams Lake got on its feet with the coming of the railway. That was about 1919, but some of our housing stock is from the thirties, even the late thirties. However, if you go to Barkerville or to Wells, those communities were during that whole gold rush period, so the definition comes through that community. They have people that can look at the housing stock, look at the sites and provide some definition for it.

R. Sultan: George, just to educate me a little bit more, when B.C. Heritage Trust gives grants to projects, are those projects — let's say it's an old building in Barkerville or somewhere — secure in terms of ownership of the property, or are these grants to private individuals who we hope will maintain that building forever and ever for future generations? How, in fact, do we secure these properties for our future generations?

G. Atamanenko: The trust does not provide funding to private individuals. It's all through societies, local government or aboriginal communities, so there is that sort of public endeavour there. However, we have been exploring trying to provide funds to private individuals, but we can't do that just yet. Perhaps if we do become a Crown corporation, we can form a foundation, and then dollars can be allocated on some pro rata basis.

Let me give you another example of where some element of control is going to happen. At Lac la Hache just south of us, on the Felker homestead, the society and the community club — the community club owns the land — are going into a covenant arrangement that will give some protection for that. Also, the regional district, which happens to be outside corporate limits, can enter into an agreement with societies, so we do have that kind of protection.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Well, I see no further questions, George, but probably the most telling thing that I heard in your presentation is the issue of our heritage and what we can learn from it. We have to learn from our heritage. We can't change yesterday, but we can certainly learn from what took place in our history and try and build a better society. I thank you for your presentation.

Moving right along, our 12 p.m. presenter is James Bast. Welcome, James. It's good to see you.

J. Bast: Well, it's definitely a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to see you, Blair, in this new role. Quite frankly, it looks good on you, sir.

I would like to thank the committee for affording me the opportunity to make a presentation here today. I'm pleased that the committee is actually travelling the

province and soliciting information from the citizens, garnering ideas and different points of view. It's a tough job. I don't envy you your position, but I applaud the fact that you're doing it.

Having spent two terms in regional government, I've also been a member of such a committee, albeit exponentially smaller in scope. Nonetheless, the recommendations that I received from my constituents at the time may be of some assistance today.

As you already know, regional government is primarily a service-delivery mechanism. It provides specific services to the population within specified areas at a specific cost. In essence, every dollar of revenue collected by regional government has a service delivery to which it must be applied.

The provincial government, on the other hand, has two forms of revenue. The first can be characterized as revenue collected for the greater common good: general revenue. Examples of this would be health care, education and road maintenance. The second form of revenue is collected for a specific purpose. It's usually called a fee, a permit or a licence. Examples of these are tire or battery eco-fees, camping permits or fishing licences.

Although the provincial government has always had these two types of revenue, the lines between them have become blurred. I feel, personally, that the general revenue pot has been used as a buffer by certain administrative bodies and that over time it has had the ability to mask inefficiencies.

My request today is that the provincial government consider clearly delineating these two types of revenue and that the revenue collected for a specific purpose be managed as if it were within regional government. That is to say that the legislation that enables regional government is very clear regarding specific rules.

For example, each service or function must have its own separate budget. Each budget must be balanced each year, and each budget must have firewalls between it and any other budget so that revenue cannot be transferred from one function to another. Perhaps the provincial government could follow these same rules concerning fees, permits and licences.

By way of example, let's just follow the present path of the revenue that is collected for a camping permit. An administrative body will collect the $27, and it will be deposited in general revenue. This money can then be used for any number of projects, only one of which may be campground maintenance. As priorities change, it is entirely possible that no money is ever spent on campgrounds, and it is virtually impossible to determine if the $27 was originally sufficient to provide that specific purpose and to provide it in an efficient manner.

If the provincial government were to use regional government rules as guidelines, the scenario would be different. Camping permits would be treated as a separate function. It would have its own budget and its own budgetary process. The budget for camping permits would have to balance each year. Furthermore, the revenue from camping permits could not be transferred to any other function — or worse, transferred to general revenue, the other type of revenue.

Perhaps a mechanism could be used that local government has to use a balance sheet. A simple, one-page balance sheet is what I envision. It could be provided to the public, particularly — in this case and with this example — when they purchase a camping permit: a one-page balance sheet that shows clearly the revenue from the permits, the revenue from other sources, the cost of firewood, the cost of toilet paper, the cost of administration. At the bottom it should balance to zero.

I feel the benefits of clearly separating these two types of revenue — that is, revenue collected for the common good and revenue collected for a specific purpose…. If we could separate those two, I believe that the benefits would be great. Administrative bodies, either public or private, that provide a specific government service will be able to develop five- or ten-year capital plans based on actual cost. The administrative bodies will be able to calculate the actual cost of a specific service.

Administrative bodies can begin to work towards a true user-pay system, where it can be shown that the benefit to the greater population, the common good, is negligible. Administrative bodies will develop a fiscal responsibility mindset if the general revenue pot is not available to mask inefficiencies. The public could be assured that they will receive the service they paid for and that it is provided in the most efficient manner.

I feel that over time these benefits will help to correct the financial mêlée that this province is presently in. It will do so by using standardized accounting practices that have been used by regional governments for many years. The working model already exists.

Although I do not have a degree in economics, I have balanced my own chequebook. I have balanced the chequebook of my business, and I have balanced the chequebook of regional government for many years. I know that many of the MLAs within the governing caucus have the same experiences in both business and local government.

I hope my ideas have already been discussed at the caucus table, but if not, I hope they are. As Gordon Campbell once said, it's time government began keeping its books the way it expects us to keep ours.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): James, I thank you for your presentation. I will look to committee members. Ida has a question.

I. Chong: Well, not so much a question but more of a comment. Thank you, James, for your presentation and in particular the efforts you made to discuss the fact that there are two different revenue sources. You're quite right that there are currently thousands of fees and licences that are being collected by government.

I want to assure you that your request is actually currently happening. Our government is reviewing the thousands of fees and licences, and we hope that when that's made available, you'll be in agreement with that.

J. Bast: Perfect. I kind of figured that's possibly what was happening, and I'm reassured that it is. Thank you very much.

K. Krueger: I want to thank you also, James, for a presentation that…. I see one error, and that is that you said Gordon Campbell once said that. I think I've heard him say it a million times. I know he means it, and so do the rest of us. Of those thousands of fees that Ida mentioned, some are for $1. We have a provincial government spending money collecting a $1 fee from people for certain things and administering it, and so on.

When the $27 campground fee was implemented, they decided that Forestry employees in pickup trucks would collect it and, of course, then realized that it's hard to process a Visa card out in the bush when you come across a camper. They often had cash; they needed to have change. You start having to carry around strong boxes, and it just gets more and more ridiculous — the costs of administrating some of these fees.

It's the Ministry of Competition, Science and Enterprise that will be reviewing this whole issue of fees and licences. It perturbs many people that they pay a so-called environmental fee when they buy a tire or a battery, and yet they see tires accumulating in dumps around the province and no apparent result of their money having been collected in that way.

Thank you very much for the presentation. It's a timely reminder, and we'll make sure that the Ministry of Competition, Science and Enterprise gets it.

R. Sultan: May I ask a provocative extrapolation of your views? Namely, would you extend this to trucks and automobiles, gasoline taxes, highway licences, etc.?

J. Bast: That is a decision that would probably be best made within caucus. The idea is that if a revenue was originally designed for the greater common good, then in my mind it's best put in general revenue and allowed, using acceptable accounting practices, to be used to provide the services — for example, gasoline tax for road maintenance.

If something has a specific purpose — I just used camping fees because it seemed to be the one that stuck out the most — that's something that the core review would probably best decide. If there's a specific tax on a specific item, was that designed for general revenue, or was it designed for providing a specific service? That's something that I think you folks would have to decide.

H. Bloy: We're all consumers here, but do you see the fees and permits as being related to the costs — that they must cover that activity?

J. Bast: Yes, but in my view they don't have to cover 100 percent of the costs. In an ideal world that would be a goal. For example, the camping fees. There does not seem to be any correlation between the $27 and the actual cost of providing firewood, toilet paper and ground maintenance. If there were a direct correlation, then 100 percent should be able to be collected in user fees to be grounds maintenance.

If it turns out that in one year you find that $27 is not sufficient and you need $33 or $35 or any other number, and if you can provide a one-page balance sheet to the public showing that every penny they spend is going into the service they use, I can almost assure you they will pay the $35 not even begrudgingly.

It's when the money disappears into that general revenue pot and then manifests itself in some other politically advantageous program that people begin to question the $27.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): All right. Barry, one further question, and then we'll carry on.

B. Penner: At the risk of taking a somewhat contrarian stance, I'd just like to shed some light on perhaps a different way of looking at collecting camping fees, if we're talking specifically about camping fees. For a few years I worked as a park ranger, putting myself through university. One of my duties included collecting camping fees from people in provincial parks.

It's hard to put a tangible figure on the value of interacting with everybody in a campground, but certainly from a security perspective it was valuable for us to have that excuse or reason to interact with each and every camper in the park and form an impression or do an assessment of where your likely problems were going to come from later in the evening.

Almost every time our hunch was right as to where the problems were going to come from, and we could prepare for it and get some sense of what kind of issues we were going to deal with later in the day or throughout the weekend — if it was a long weekend, for example. That's just an observation on my part that sometimes collecting the fee may not be the only…. You may not be collecting the fee just for the money. There are some other benefits that come from interacting with people in the parks or campgrounds.

J. Bast: One thing I'd like to make perfectly clear. I'm only using camping fees as an example. This philosophy can work with any particular camping fee. I'll just use an example of the fees in regional government for building inspection. The cost that the developer paid for building inspection, at one time, was about 50 percent of the actual cost to administer that function for that particular effort. The idea would be to try and creep 50 percent up as close to 100 percent as possible so that's it only a user that pays. The general taxpayer is not burdened with the cost of dealing with that effort.

If building inspection can be deemed — and that would be something you would have to decide — as something that does provide a benefit for the greater

good, then perhaps 85 percent — 80 percent, 60 percent, 70 percent — or some other number would have to be used to try and reflect the amount of benefit to the greater good but still using standardized accounting practices.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): James, I want to thank you again for your presentation. It was well thought out, and I can assure you that it will be taken into consideration when we develop our report. Thanks a lot.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Our next presenter this afternoon is with the Cariboo-Chilcotin Child Development Centre, Mr. Bob Fish. Welcome, Bob.

B. Fish: Good afternoon. It's slipped past the noon hour. Thank you for this opportunity.

I do apologize. The executive director, Mrs. Nancy Gale, was supposed to be here, but she had a chance for some elective surgery yesterday and didn't want to put it off.

My position is the financial manager with the Cariboo-Chilcotin Child Development Centre. We're concerned about potential cutbacks in social services, and we're interested in speaking to that.

The CCCDC has annual contracts with the Ministry of Children and Family Development totalling almost $1 million. Provincially funded programs include infant development, family support, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, supported child care, child and youth care, and intensive support and supervision. Direct employment for these programs amounts to 22 full-time-equivalents. Other programs, not provincially funded, include fetal alcohol prevention and bingo-funded programs such as preschool and the youth street worker.

We operate very accessibly and efficiently — this is our humble opinion, of course — in all the innovative community-oriented services, managed by a volunteer board. We had 872 clients last year in, if anything — and I'm paraphrasing my presentation — an economically depressed area. We're only going to see more and more need for the services.

One of the recent catchphrases for child development centres is "early intervention." Our organizations have been promoting the system for many years and are pleased to see the federal and provincial governments coming on board. By assessing and treating children's and families' disabilities as early as possible, many thousands of dollars can be saved down the road. An ounce of prevention, or intervention, is worth a pound of cure.

It may be very tempting to cut back these services, but the additional strain on the education, health and court systems in the future will be predictably financially onerous. Many disabilities are not obvious to the layperson or parent until much later in life. We encourage the government to actually expand these programs to assess as many children and families as possible before they reach the school system. The boost to their self-confidence alone is immeasurable.

Service organizations such as ourselves are often called on to assist only after the problem has reached crisis proportions, usually after ministry or court intervention. It is common knowledge that children with disabilities can be in school for many years before the difficulties are recognized and treated.

Many local social service agencies are participating in a process called integrated case management, whereby clients' needs are discussed on a coordinated and cooperative basis, and assistance programs are formulated. This process and others like it should be encouraged because of the additional client service and the potential of dollars saved by cutting through red tape and preventing duplication of services.

If ministry personnel were encouraged to be innovative with local situations and conditions, more service could be provided with fewer dollars. By utilizing the strengths of local social service contractors in more efficient and unique ways, for instance, the need for budget cutbacks would be redundant, as the savings would come automatically. That's it.

J. Bray: Thank you very much. You used a term I've latched onto very quickly: integrated case management. I worked for 13 years with the Ministry of Human Resources and have often seen service providers to some extent operating in silos and, as you said, duplication of services, a lack of coordination and a lack of timely intervention because of that. In this area here, can you give some examples where you think you may be able to in fact find some efficiencies by better coordinating between ministry staff that exist in the region and the various local social service agencies?

B. Fish: Well, we are into communication discussions with the local friendship centre and a number of other agencies. One of the difficulties is that many of the clients are skilled in — how can I put this politely? — utilizing services and almost doing some shopping around. One of the integrated case management things is to try to see where we are seeing people who are maybe abusing the system.

I will say that locally, the integrated case management hasn't really been all that successful. There have been a lot of communication difficulties and other things. Quite often our social service employees will actually know people in other agencies, including the ministry, and do a lot of phoning around. In a small town you get to know people; you get to know other agencies really well. There's a lot of the overlap being controlled just through knowledge of individuals and systems. Does that help?

J. Bray: It helps a little bit. You've got a current budget from the Ministry of Children and Family De

B. Fish: They've consolidated recently, and that's saved a few dollars. Into about six, I believe.

J. Bray: Okay. Just one more question, Mr. Chair. Do you know how many other contracts in the general community this ministry has with other agencies?

B. Fish: No. I'm sorry, I wouldn't even want to begin to guess. I do know of three or four other agencies that have at least as many contracts, if not more.

J. Bray: All those have a certain percentage of an FTE towards administration of the contract. So one of the areas where there could potentially be some savings is more of a core funding model to the community so it is able to deliver the services by spending less on reporting on each contract and more on the actual direct service.

B. Fish: That's very true. I do know that even the preparation of the contracts is quite time-consuming and onerous.

R. Sultan: I'm very intrigued by your comments and the questions from Mr. Bray concerning duplication of services. For example, three or four agencies — or perhaps more — might potentially serve the same case. If that's the case, is there in fact potential here for savings as this government faces up to a severe cash crunch? We don't want to diminish the front-line services. Is it the practical reality that these service providers could have some sort of consolidation? What is the potential here for some economies of scale?

B. Fish: I can only speak for Williams Lake, of course. We're already recognizing some of the writing on the wall and have implemented our own consolidation and communication efforts. A number of agencies do cooperative work and share employees. We've recently entered into a partnership with what's called Noopa. It's the local Boys and Girls Club. They do a lot of work with troubled teenagers and street kids.

We have been working sort of cooperatively but separately for many years now. We have our own youth street worker. He is now working out of the Noopa centre. He's funded by the Child Development Centre but working with the Noopa programs. That has already created a great deal of assistance. That's one small example.

There's a number of other agencies — mental health, a couple of friendship centres — where we've instigated a joint executive director of communications, where we're trying to recognize this and proceed to have joint facilities or joint management cooperative efforts. We're really pushing for it here.

B. Kerr: Yes. You know the core review is happening. I guess you guys heard about this core review. I'm just wondering if you've had any contact or have been able to make any presentation to the person in your ministry that you're dealing with in regards to that.

B. Fish: Not specifically, no. Again, perhaps our executive director might have had more experience with that.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): No further questions? Thank you for the presentation on that, Mr. Fish.

F. Flynn: Thank you, members of the committee. My name is Florence Flynn. I live in the country north of Williams Lake at Soda Creek, which is in the McLeese Lake area. I live alone. My children have grown up; they're away at universities. I continue as a single parent to help them out with some of their costs.

I work at one full-time job in the mental health field and at one, two, three or sometimes four others part-time to make ends meet. I grow a garden and preserve foods. I'm active as a member of a large extended family. In my community I'm also active as a neighbour and as a member of groups such as ACME, which is family and friends of people with a mental illness — and consumers — and the Contact Women's Society and a bluegrass club. In my work I'm active in my union. Fortunately, I'm relatively healthy because I'm very busy. In short, I'm an average, ordinary citizen.

The money that I earn goes to pay for the necessities of life. I pay taxes, and I like to pay taxes. I like to think that I contribute to paying someone's old age pension or disability pension, help someone on welfare, help keep my country road open so the kids can go to school and people can get into town to shop, to get needed services and to get mail delivered somewhat close by. Among other things, I like to think that my taxes go toward those things.

In my daily life I spend money on housing, food, utilities, car insurance and expenses, personal expenses, contributing to my children's education, gas to get to work and, as a member of an extended family, costs associated with that. My extended family is old and young. They work; they're unemployed. They raise families. They're sick; they're healthy — as the case may be. They work in the forestry business, in ranching, in the service industry and in small business.

I have a couple of things that I want to say here today. First, I count on my government to provide some stability in the lives of my family and neighbours, in my community and in the province. Lately it has been a pretty unstable time, a worrisome time. The events of September 11 have affected people deeply, especially vulnerable people, causing fear and uncertainty. Stress causes physical and emotional unwellness, and I see this around me.

In the area in which I live, the mine has gone out of business, and the forestry industry has been cutting

back. So there are unemployed and worried people. A car rental business just went out of business last week, and a neighbour was unemployed as a result of that. I plead with you, in your budget preparations, not to further destabilize our lives with budget cuts that will mean more loss of jobs, more loss of needed services, more uncertainty. I can only imagine how budget cuts may impact on the people with whom I work. They can hardly eke out a living on the amounts of services and financial assistance that they receive now.

Secondly, the provincial budget affects my daily life in small ways — but I suppose, in big ways. It affects whether or not I can buy an antihistamine when I am bitten by black flies; whether I have to get my teeth out or I can get a filling; whether I can afford bifocals; whether, when the time comes, I can afford to go to Kamloops to get my eyes fixed. It decides whether I can speak to my children on the telephone once a week or once a month. It affects whether and how many Christmas cards I send this year, whether I have good tires or bad ones when I drive the car that I need in order to go to work.

I beg you to consider the ramifications of each job lost in terms of other jobs lost and businesses that must cut back or go out of business. Eleven percent of the people who live in our area work in the service industries. Whether or not people work has a lot to do with supporting other people who work, and it's got a lot to do with people being able to live meaningful and healthy lives.

J. MacPhail: I must say that the presentations we've had today in Williams Lake from individuals have been incredibly eloquent, and yours is amongst them. I've never been to Soda Creek, I confess. Is this a topic of discussion amongst your neighbours?

F. Flynn: Well, people are very worried. I think that's the main thing — that this is a time of a lot of worry among ordinary people. People talk about that a lot. A lot of people talked about the events of September 11. Everybody talks about the mine closing. Everybody talks about the lack of jobs in the forest industry. Everybody talks about trying to make ends meet and how to pay their debts. It's pretty well common talk on the road.

R. Sultan: I would like to join Ms. MacPhail in observing that the presentations we have heard this morning are particularly eloquent and certainly have impact. I commend you and the others. How many of the people in your community are dependent on the government in a very significant way, either through EI or social assistance or perhaps a government job? Are we talking 10 percent? Are we talking three-quarters of them? Can you give us some idea of what Soda Creek subsists on?

F. Flynn: Well, Soda Creek's an area, and it includes a reservation — the Soda Creek band. It includes a very small place of about six families who live in what used to be an old town that had about 3,500 people years ago, when they went up to Barkerville with the barges and stuff. Then it includes a whole rural area. There are a few people who are retired, and there are some people who have market gardens — two or three people. Most of the people commute to work. There used to be more people able to work in the mines and the forest industry, but there are at least four young men — three of whom head families — that are now unemployed.

K. Krueger: When people in the Soda Creek area talk about the mine having closed and the forestry jobs having disappeared, do they talk about why? What do they think the reasons are?

F. Flynn: Yes. They think the mine has to do with somebody buying up the mine who really wanted to have the mine here, because they also had a mine in Mexico. They wanted to be able to run the mine in Mexico because it was cheaper wages, so they closed down this mine. That seems to be pretty common knowledge among everyone.

In terms of the forestry industry, people think it has to do with the United States agreement and the amount of money that has to be paid out there. It has really caused a lot of restrictions. I think a lot of people in my area actually voted Liberal because they thought the Liberals were the same party as the federal government, and maybe the federal government could do something about the forestry agreements with the United States.

K. Krueger: You see, what we're told and what we were told for years before the last election was that forestry was on its knees because of way too much regulation and way too much taxation and that the mining exploration industry had pretty much stopped in British Columbia. It was down to, I think, less than 10 percent of its former levels for the same reasons.

We laid out a program and committed to significant, dramatic personal income tax cuts. We've done that because we believe that that's the way to restore the private sector economy, which was, not long ago, the most robust economy in Canada. It's with a good private sector economy that we can afford to pay for the social programs like health care and education that are the responsibilities of government.

Nobody wants to deliver bad news to good people. The fact remains, though, that even before the softwood lumber issue turned out the way it has turned out recently, thousands and thousands of IWA jobs in this province had disappeared, and thousands of mining jobs. I suppose it's unrealistic for government to expect that it can continue to provide all the same programs and employ the same numbers of people when the private sector taxpayers who generate the revenue to pay for that are no longer able to pay their taxes.

I asked a previous presenter: what if, in your personal financial circumstances, you were spending substantially more than you were taking in every year. You've given us some examples of how very careful you are in your finances, growing food and preserving food and so on. But what would be the outcome if, for ten years, you had spent more than you made every year and you owed money. In our case, $34 billion and $3 billion a year in interest.

F. Flynn: Well, I think a lot of the money that we owe now in our province comes from tax cuts. I personally haven't got a very big tax cut, maybe $13 a month, but my hydro went up more than that. I don't know anybody that isn't terribly in debt, actually, just to make ends meet. I don't know if I know anybody that doesn't have debts. I don't think I do.

K. Krueger: That's probably perfectly understandable, too, and you know that the average take-home pay for British Columbians dropped $1,738 per year in the last ten years. Before that, my life experience was always that people would have more take-home pay every year, as long as they worked hard and applied themselves and especially if they were advancing in their careers.

It is a situation many British Columbians are caught in. There is significant debt, but the prospects have been so poor. Certainly, it's a heavy responsibility and a difficult task to make these choices, but we really appreciate you presenting, from such a human point of view, how it affects you and your neighbours.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Are there any further questions from members of the committee?

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm here today to speak on my view on the challenges facing many British Columbians. My name is Edna Park. I live and work in the city of Quesnel, and I've been a resident there for the past 28 years, 26 of those years as a single parent. My family consists of a grown daughter and my grandson, who is 11 years old. They also live in Quesnel, and they drive daily — two hours a day — to Nazko, which is a small community west of Quesnel. This is where my daughter works as a student support worker. She works for a special needs child. Her hours have been cut. My grandson also attends that school in Nazko, which goes from, I believe, kindergarten to grade 7. He's in grade 6 at the present.

As a member and a resident of my community, I've been involved in many organizations. They include 24 years as an active volunteer for the crisis line. The types of issues and calls are as varied as the persons that call the line. This is a 24-hour service. Sixteen years as a volunteer with Good Cheer. This is the group responsible for fundraising and packing of food hampers for families and persons in need in my community. I have 14 years as a volunteer with victim services with the RCMP. Many of those callouts are to do with family crisis. I'm also a member of the Quesnel Advisory Committee for the Hospice House, the Palliative Care Society and the Canadian Cancer Society. We are working towards a hospice house in Quesnel and hope to have that one day.

My employment has been with the same employer for the past 18 years, and my job is to work with families who find themselves in difficult positions of separating and being or becoming single parents. The job is not always positive and is sometimes very difficult, as there is no way to tell families how to behave in these situations. Explaining the judicial system is frightening for many people, and it's not always valued as being positive.

Workers in my field and others who work in similar types of positions or with families directly cannot do their jobs properly now, with the workload and the expectations. The overtime and workload are not flexible nor reasonable, and this is not conducive to good morale. Workers are stretched beyond belief. The impact in a rural community is unbelievable when families lose their jobs. At Christmastime last year 750 hampers were made up for people in need of food. This wasn't because of cuts; this was just 750 hampers that were done. Today we have a caseload of between approximately 1,600 and 1,800 people on B.C. Benefits in Quesnel.

What is the impact going to be of the 10, 40 or 50 percent job cuts from the government workforce and then the ongoing result of the job loss for other positions or other jobs in the community? If these job cuts happen, I can see my job increasing beyond measure, even if my job continues to exist after the cuts. Families who face job loss will be facing uncertain futures.

No jobs creates more families living in poverty and more single-parent families who can no longer meet their car payments, rent or mortgage. Less money is spent on food or other items and more on health issues. No money is put away for children's futures or their education. No clothing is bought. Families that have incurred debts will not be able to meet the payments in a timely manner, if they make the payments at all.

No jobs means more bankruptcies. No jobs means more family violence, poor health and more problems with substance abuse. I believe there are other and better choices to be made, and we need to be working

towards a more stable environment for the members of our communities and more programs for single- and low-income families. We need to stop cuts and work towards helping communities.

I would like to extend an invitation to members of this committee to visit my worksite and come and see and meet with people that I work with and see the effects of job cuts on the people in my community.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you, Edna, for your presentation. I will now look to members of the committee, if they have any questions of you.

H. Bloy: I thank you for the passion and the heartfelt presentation. Which society do you work for?

E. Park: I don't work for a society; I work for the Ministry of Human Resources. I'm a family maintenance worker.

H. Bloy: Over the last number of years has there been a loss in the number of employees you work with, your fellow workers?

E. Park: Not a loss per se. What happens is that positions and the use of generic workers or the redistribution of specialized workers are changed. There will be a change to the number of financial workers. Somebody else will be doing something else. In essence, there is a cut.

J. MacPhail: I'm just trying to see, from a statistical sheet a former presenter gave us that was very useful on the stats for the regional district…. One of the stats that's not here is the number of single-parent….

J. MacPhail: No, the income assistance stats are here, and they're higher than generally in B.C.

J. MacPhail: Yes, you were asking about that. They're higher than both EI and income assistance combined. The number of single-parent families in the area….

E. Park: My particular caseload in Quesnel is well over 300 single-parent families.

E. Park: I'm trying to think. I've been doing the same job for 11 years. I don't think it's changed a whole lot. I think that as people go off and find employment, or as other events happen in their lives, it stays pretty well the same. I don't think there's been a lot of change.

J. MacPhail: Now, if I remember correctly, a family maintenance worker actually generates revenue for the province, in that deadbeat parents…. I shouldn't call them deadbeat parents; they're not.

E. Park: We get the orders for the children and the spouse, whoever has the children. What we're working towards is trying to help them become independent of the system, thereby getting a valid order which is registered with the court and then the enforcement program. So it's helping them become independent and getting a proper, valid support order for children.

L. Mayencourt: I was looking at this, and I see that you're involved in hospice work. That's always good. I was doing that as a volunteer. Someone had started a non-profit agency that dealt with people in the same sorts of predicaments that you're facing in Quesnel. Do you have a lot of community support for that kind of thing? Are you raising money from within the community to support that?

E. Park: If you're asking about hospice, yes. We have raised a lot of money this past year. We have a joint fundraiser that we do with the Frank Cushman Memorial Trail Ride. It's done with two societies: the Palliative Care Society and the Cancer Society. We raised $16,000 on horseback.

L. Mayencourt: Tremendous. That's great. The other question I have for you is that I notice that you said you have to do some referral to people for justice issues.

L. Mayencourt: Do you liaise with agencies like the People's Law Society that provide plain-language brochures on how the legal system works?

E. Park: From my position as a family maintenance worker, that's my role: to provide them with information and to help them through the court process, to attend court with them. For people phoning in or for working with individuals who are going to be the payers, we need to do a referral to legal aid or Dial-A-Law

or lawyers within the community. We have to be fairly knowledgable about our process and what's available to them.

L. Mayencourt: Sure. Do you actually use materials from that non-profit agency? You don't. Do you create your own?

E. Park: No. It's basically referrals. I have worked for legal aid, so I know what's available through their process and what they have in their offices. My referral would be: "This is where you will find information. Check with the government agent or with the court registry" — those types of things. We don't have forms.

L. Mayencourt: Do you do referrals to non-profits, or is it just to government agencies?

L. Mayencourt: Well, the People's Law Society, for example, is an agency here in British Columbia that provides all kinds of materials for schools, for single moms, for renters and what have you. It's a free resource that people can access.

E. Park: They may have those types of brochures available at the court registry. I basically would use that as a referral source. I have that information myself and use the information that's available, but I don't have their pamphlets. I don't have their information as a resource. I use strictly the child support guidelines and what's available for families.

L. Mayencourt: The reason I ask is that as someone in non-profit, we often found that a lot of people don't necessarily want to go to get that information from a government agency. If you guys are under a lot of pressure and there's a wonderful non-profit agency willing to provide it, it's a great way to link with them. Maybe I can get them to send you a selection of their materials, which you could then ask for a supply of.

I. Chong: Listening to your presentation, I hear that the problems in your experience as a front-line worker haven't gone away in a number of years and seem to be escalating. You're finding more and more work being downloaded onto you. Over our years in opposition we did hear that that was why some people were just not able to cope in the system. We're losing some very, very good people. Recruitment and retention was a serious problem.

As has been indicated, our government is currently conducting a core review of ministry and Crown corporation programs, but the reason we're out here is still to seek input from all British Columbians as to ideas and suggestions that would help our government establish those priorities and to determine which programs or services can be restructured, expanded or terminated.

Ms. MacPhail asked you whether you were part of the core review process. I'm wondering, talking with other co-workers of yours, whether you have been able to consider some of those areas that you think can be changed and even if you're not directly asked with the core review process, whether you submitted any of that information to us through our…. We have a waste-buster website as one area. You could submit those things anonymously as well. It's just to get British Columbians to come forward, because we really are seeking input.

E. Park: I am an activist with my union, and I have made sure that all of my co-workers know about the website and to forward presentations and to let the core review and the members know what their feelings are about possible cuts and to whom. I don't think you need to worry about that at all.

I. Chong: If this helps, I know there has been some miscommunication, for lack of a better word. Some people think that these cuts are happening next week or next month, and that certainly is not the case. The idea is that ministers are being requested to look deeply and look at areas. There will be some programs that will, in fact, be enhanced. If you have a program that isn't working effectively, it's better to not keep that and put the money back into a program that works well. We will be looking in those areas too.

R. Sultan: Earlier we had a presentation from the chief financial officer for CCCDC here in Williams Lake. He alluded to the possibility of overlap and duplication between service providers, indeed perhaps some degree of competition and perhaps, also, the possibility of shopping around on the part of clients.

I guess the prospect of some degree of overlap presents itself. As persons concerned about trying to squeeze the last dollar out of scarce government dollars, do you see the possibility of combining services among the various agencies you see in Quesnel, perhaps trying to save money in terms of service delivery without affecting the final service delivery?

E. Park: Combining services. I'm not really sure. When I think about the Child Development Centre combining services with Special Services to Children, no, that is not going to be able to be combined. That's just because of the nature of the work that's being done and how it's done. There may be the possibility of one or two things, but I don't see a lot of duplication of services.

Children go to the Child Development Centre because they have speech issues or hearing problems or a whole lot of other things. People attend and use Special Services to Children or those programs. That's working with keeping youngsters in school or working with a special needs family who is trying to keep the children in the home. They're very different; they're not similar. If there are others and they are similar, then maybe

K. Krueger: Thank you for your presentation, Ms. Park. The program that you work for is a particularly effective program when it comes to collecting money and making sure the money is provided to those it's supposed to be provided to and so on. I've seen a lot of examples of that, and it's very thorough. It seems to work well.

I appreciate that you've talked about the effects on families of the stresses — financial stresses and so on. I have a lot of files from people who've come to me who are working with the program. As you know, as soon as a custodial parent has had to go to the Ministry of Human Resources even once, they end up involved in the FMEP program and so on.

Another aspect of their whole situation that the program apparently wasn't designed to address and that often, I'm told, isn't being addressed at all is the aspect of non-custodial parents who are paying but not having regular access to their children, despite all their efforts and going back to court time and again.

Years can go by, and it becomes very tough on them psychologically and every other way, especially since the age of the children can be well beyond 19 under changes that have been made over the years, and they're still paying. Often they don't have a relationship anymore because they've never been allowed access. That's something I want our government to focus on correcting, to make sure that if there's no valid reason why the non-custodial parent shouldn't get access, they do get their access.

You've probably encountered this problem many times in 11 years, and you've probably thought about it. What do you think is the most practical answer to that problem?

E. Park: My personal opinion is that as family maintenance workers, we should be involved in all of those. I sometimes think that the judicial system itself is not the proper place to be having those. I attend court once a month, because that's what happens in my community, and we wait from 9:30 in the morning until probably five, possibly later, on one day.

That's what happens in one day. It's setting new dates and adjournments. The occasional case will get heard, and then there's a break. It's just a constant, ongoing session for the whole day. A lot of things do not get decided quickly. They may take court date after court date after court date, and it's a waste. So that part of the process should maybe have some changes.

If they included things like access, custody or guardianship — some of the other issues…. Although they're very legalistic, and maybe you need a lawyer on board somehow or other. That should be looked at and maybe changed. There are very talented, skilled people within the communities doing these jobs. We know what the issues are. I think that needs to be looked at and changed to include those kinds of things so that we can follow through and do everything the client needs rather than going back twice or three times.

K. Krueger: I think it's an abuse of children and does them harm to be denied a relationship with their parent, as I say, if there's no valid reason why that parent shouldn't have one. When you said that you felt you should be involved, I think that's possibly right. How would family maintenance workers be involved? Would it be something as practical as having a meeting place where the children and the estranged parents are brought together when the payment is made and the access is ensured, using perhaps family access centres? Have you thought about the mechanics of that at all?

E. Park: I think what you're wanting to come out with is like a liaison between the two parents. Things like that happen within communities to encourage access where one parent isn't allowed to visit the other parent. Those things are happening. Lots of times access is denied for various reasons, and that's something that process would have to look at. There are, and have been, processes within communities with family maintenance workers acting as family court counsellors or justice counsellors.

That was the process. It worked for quite a while. They had specific places across the province that used that system. I think it worked very well. I've never heard any negative feedback. It looked at all of the needs of the family and the children. It wasn't just strictly child support. So I agree: I think there are things they can do with that, but it's a process that has to happen.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Well, Edna, I would like to thank you for your presentation. Certainly, we're hearing many, many presentations that are coming from personal experience, and the concerns being expressed are being heard. I thank you once again for your presentation.

Our next presenter this afternoon is Debra Yearley. Is Debra with us? I don't see Debra.

I know Lars, our 11:15 presenter, wasn't available at 11:15. At this time, I would entertain Lars Carlson. Lars, are you with us? Good afternoon. Thank you for waiting.

L. Carlson: Good afternoon to the committee. I do have a presentation. Is that being distributed? Thank you for the opportunity to present to you, and thank you for coming out to the rural communities so that we have the opportunity to present to you our concerns as you do your deliberations on budget considerations.

My name's Lars Carlson. I've lived in Quesnel for about ten years, and I've lived my whole life in British Columbia. I work in the community social services field. I've been an active volunteer in my community through quite a number of involvements, previously with the hospital board and for the past five years with the Quesnel community health council. I'm very concerned about the impacts that public service cuts will

have on the people of rural communities like Quesnel, Williams Lake and 100 Mile House.

In Quesnel our primary industry is forestry. The new softwood lumber tariff of almost 20 percent will have a severe impact on our community economics, as it will on almost all forestry-based towns. The mining sector is almost non-existent, and the agricultural business is struggling.

The public service sector is the third-largest economic driver in the towns of the Cariboo: for 100 Mile, Williams Lake and Quesnel. With the decline of industry sectors, it becomes more critical that our government continues to provide economic stability and support for forest industry–dependent towns. Statistics show that for every dollar paid into employees' hands, it means a sevenfold economic impact to the community as the money circulates through the community and gets returned to the government through sales taxes, business taxes, etc.

For example, in the Quesnel health services sector over $60 million is paid to employees. These people spend most of their money in their home community or within the Cariboo area. The full impact of these funds is actually seven times to the businesses and members of our community.

I have concerns that cuts to social services programs will have a negative impact on a system that has been quite successful in reducing its impact on the province's finances. Since 1995 the total number of people needing income assistance benefits has fallen by 28 percent, or 60,000 people. The percentage of people receiving income assistance has decreased from 9.68 percent in December '95 to 6 percent as of July 2001. Much of this improvement and savings has been achieved through the creation of and hiring of specialized program staff, such as program referral officers, verification officers and ministry investigators.

Through a partnership agreement with the federal government, HRDC, and the Ministry of Human Resources over $9.2 million was saved between April 2000 and March 2001, which enabled over 16,000 people to regain their independence from B.C. Benefits through finding new employment. This was accomplished by having the staff to achieve these savings to the provincial government. I hope that when government is looking at changes to ministry budgets ( the core review process ( these programs which are saving provincial government money will be continued.

I have concerns that with an ever-growing aging population in B.C., funding for health care services will be increased. Over the past five years health care funding has increased an average of about 9 percent per year. Even with these increases in spending, we all know that our health care system has been very challenged to provide good health care services.

I would ask that this committee consider the importance of ensuring that rural communities have safe health care. In Quesnel we are 120 kilometres from another community and health facility. Our intensive care unit has been closed since April of 2000. We've got partial finding for an ICU nurse-training program, but this got delayed because of the nurses' job action. We need additional funding to proceed with and complete this training, but this may be impossible if health budget funding is frozen.

We have contractual obligations for increases in wages to our employees, and we are being told that no new dollars are coming. This will only mean that services will need to get cut and that training for our ICU nurses may not get funding.

I would ask you to picture yourself living in a rural town like Quesnel, over 120 kilometres to the next town. It's the middle of winter, with snow blowing across the main roads, and there is no ICU open at your hospital to provide you the emergency medical care you need. I ask you to take my concerns to the ministers involved, and I encourage you to ensure that the public services that we all need will continue to be provided.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Lars, thank you very much for your presentation here this morning — now, this afternoon.

L. Mayencourt: Lars, you mentioned that we've dropped about 60,000 people off the rolls since 1995, and I don't think there's been a really appreciable increase in the amount of benefits to people that are getting whatever.

L. Mayencourt: Yet the budget seems to be pretty much the same. I wonder if you could tell me why.

L. Mayencourt: Well, okay. What was the budget for the Ministry of Human Resources in '95?

L. Carlson: I do not know that. As a front-line worker I don't get access to that.

J. MacPhail: Well, I was actually the minister responsible that brought in the program, and the budget was over $2 billion, approaching almost $3 billion, in 1995. It's now about $1.4 billion, so there's a huge drop in the income assistance budget.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Would it be possible for us to deal with our presenters versus internal discussion?

L. Mayencourt: The other question I have is with respect to the level 2 disability benefit. The percentage of people in the province that are on level 2 disability has gone up substantially in the last ten years. Is that

true here in Williams Lake as well, or is that just a phenomenon in the lower mainland?

L. Carlson: It's true in the rural communities. Across the board it's about the same statistically percentage-wise.

L. Carlson: I'm not sure what the numbers are specifically. It has increased. There was a change in the act and the regulations to qualify for disability benefits, and that change to qualify resulted in an increasing number of people qualifying for disability benefits. I'm sure that information and statistics are available on the ministry's website.

L. Mayencourt: I was actually looking at it. It's about a 12 percent increase this year, and that seems to be fairly consistent over the last several years. I think cumulatively it's somewhere in the 80 percent range. Does that seem correct to you?

L. Carlson: There has been an increase, like I said, because the definition to qualify was changed, so more and more people have applied and been accepted for disability benefits. My understanding is that the total core savings and the percentage of people on benefits, which I was talking about, include every category of benefit recipient. So these are the gross numbers.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Are there any other questions for Lars from members of the committee?

J. MacPhail: One of the issues, Lars, was front-line workers having incredible caseloads. This is back from when I remember it. What's happening with that now?

L. Carlson: As the number of B.C. Benefits recipients has gone down through the interventions and programs we've been providing, that's lowered the caseload that each worker has to carry. It's sort of the reciprocal or snowball effect: the more time you have freed up, the more you can do and the more you can get off.

L. Carlson: Yes. As I said in my presentation, I think the creation of some of the specialized workers to work on specific programs has also really improved the service we provided and got a lot more people off B.C. Benefits.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Well, I see no further questions from members of the committee, Lars. I'd like to thank you for taking the time and waiting around so that we could accommodate you and get you into the schedule. I thank you. Take care.

We'll move to our 1:15 presenter. Is Stephanie Mundeling here? Good afternoon, Stephanie.

S. Mundeling: Good afternoon. My name is Stephanie Mundeling. I live in Horsefly, British Columbia. That's a small community about one hour's drive east of here. I'm not a public speaker. It terrifies me, but it was important for me to come here today. I need to tell you some things that I know to be true about our province and the people in this province.

I'm gainfully employed as a cartographer. That's a fancy name for a mapmaker. I've worked in the forest sector for 12 years. I'm very active at work, both with work and social issues. I'm a student enrolled in a degree program in distance education. Besides all that, I'm a wife. My children and grandchildren live in the Cariboo. Even though they were raised in the lower mainland, they've made the Cariboo their home.

I'm an organizer and an active volunteer in my community. In my spare time — say, at lunchtime — I'm like every other ordinary British Columbian: I debate politics and I critique the government. I took time to read the 67-page document that is posted on the Web. It was an interesting document, but it only took me two pages to understand your focus, and that's on balancing the budget.

You asked some very specific questions in that paper. I can tell you that what I'm hearing today from the people that I work with and talk to is that a balanced budget is not the most important thing in our eyes right now. We're still concerned about it, but it's not our focus. Our thinking has changed. We know the global economy is actually the biggest factor in determining our economic viability. It's beyond a small government body such as yourself. We now think there are things that none of us have control over.

You asked in the document how government spending should change to meet a balanced budget. One answer would be to slow down. The Liberal government was intent, when they came into power, on putting a new face to the government. We knew you were new people. We knew you had a new agenda, but you did so much in such a short time. Some of those things you took on were expansive and expensive.

Creating new ministries and reorganization is important. We can see the end to it, and we can see the importance of it, but we know that hiring new deputy ministers and printing new stationery is an expensive proposition. We also know — I know personally — that some of those new ministries are in disarray. They're having a really hard time coming together. This is costing us money, and right now we don't need to spend that money for such things.

You asked what steps should be taken to make B.C. the number one economy in Canada. I found that a really strange question, because I don't think we're a contestant in some game and that we want to be number one economically. I don't think that's our goal. We want a vibrant economy, but I think what we really want is balance.

The new message that I'm bringing here to you today — and I think all of us feel it — is that money is not the most important thing. I mean, I'm sure this is something you're going to hear time and time again.

The world has changed, and we all feel it. We want B.C. to be the cleanest, safest, fairest and most abiding province. That doesn't necessarily mean we're the richest. If we're going to compete, we want to do it on the grounds of education, environment, research and development. There are other ways of becoming number one.

I tell you that if you want industrious people to live and work in B.C., you must take care to maintain the quality of life we have here. If there is poverty, illiteracy, a mass exodus of hard-working, intelligent and trained people, huge social problems or labour unrest, then you're not going to attract the capital you seem so focused on.

You asked what performance measures we need to evaluate programs. That was a hard one, but I can tell you a story that will explain my ideas or what this performance measure means to me. Twenty years ago my family would come to the Cariboo. We'd put on our hiking boots and go off and hike in the woods around Horsefly. We'd come on a cutblock that would be massive. It was huge. Not only was it huge but it was littered with debris. There was wasted wood. It was quite literally disgusting. There would be whole forests of trees, eight and ten feet tall, wasted. There would be garbage. There would be leftover parts from machinery that was abandoned. We would find garbage, litter, oil cans and gasoline containers in creeks.

If you go hiking in the bush today in Horsefly, you don't see that. You can enter into a cutblock, and you don't even know you're there. You don't realize right away. It looks so natural that you're hard-pressed to find a scrap of paper on the ground. This is all because of our Forest Service.

They've acted as stewards for our land, and they've ensured that our property, our Crown land, has been taken care of. They've maintained the stewardship that big business would walk away from. That, to me, is a measure of performance, and that's a visible measure of performance. It was no wonder that 20 years ago other countries found our logging practices abhorrent, because they were. They aren't anymore, and we should take pride in that.

The community of Horsefly is a logging community. I'm told that 100 loads of wood leave the district every day. The people in the Forest Service office provide services to large logging companies, small two-man operations, trappers, hunters, guides, farmers, realtors, local ranchers and woodlot owners. They provide support and education to the local school. It's a resource community's liaison between the government and its people.

We don't have any factories. We don't have any huge financial institutions. We don't even have an ATM. We have a district forest office, a great little school and a few small merchants. We have real people with real families. We are as important to the makeup of this province as anyone in a large centre. In our community, unemployment will create unemployment. There is no doubt about that.

You asked what steps government should take to finance what you term priority social programs. Firstly, as a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world, I find this a really strange statement. I honestly don't think there are some social programs that are more important than others or that some social programs aren't important. They're all important to us. Even if I don't use them or you don't use them, they're important to someone.

Everyone in the province appreciates the personal tax cuts we received this year, but we know something you probably didn't know. We knew where we were going to spend our tax dollars. We didn't go out and spend them. What we did was pay down personal debt that we incurred over the last ten years because our salaries weren't keeping up with inflation. We put away what we could for a rainy day, which seems to be coming, or our retirement. Some of us found ourselves fortunate enough to have a few extra dollars in our purse to maybe help charities in this province that need it. We're thankful for that.

We didn't understand the repercussions until the last few weeks. We didn't understand the price we would have to pay. Our province needs the social infrastructure that is in place. It needs all of it. It needs it for everyone, and it may need it even more in the coming year. We can't afford to let anything drop off the table.

By your accounting figures, as stated in the first page of the fiscal review panel report, the 25 percent tax cut you gave us amounts to $1.5 billion. If that amounts to a loss by 2003 and 2004 of $1.5 billion, then conversely, if we hadn't got that, it would have amounted to a $1.5 billion gain. That tells me that in two years plus a little bit, we'd have that darn debt paid for. It would be gone.

People understand this; they really do. Their support for reinstitution of taxes to pay down the debt in place of tampering with our quality of life…. I'm an ordinary person who is living in what's become extraordinary times. As empowered and fortunate as I feel, I know I'm at the mercy of things I can't control. I don't care if it's the water I drink or the condition of the roads I travel on or the mental state of someone sitting in a restaurant next to me. There are some things in our lives that we have no control over, beyond our own actions.

The most important part of your job…. I'm telling you, I'm hearing this daily. It's not something I just woke up this morning and decided that I'd come here and tell you. What I'm hearing on a daily basis is that you ensure each and every one of us are safe and secure. Now is the time for stability, not instability.

That's what we're feeling: a real unstable environment. Everything else is secondary. It really is. We know this costs money. Believe me, as long as there is accountability, most of us don't begrudge the money it will take to ensure this happens in our province.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you, Stephanie, for your presentation. I will look to members of the committee.

B. Kerr: We've been sitting for two days. That was one of the better presentations I've heard. I think it was because you related to this and you'd read this. I really took to heart the things you said. I would like to get a copy of it in writing. We don't have it in writing.

I'd just make one comment, I guess. At the end you started talking about the tax cuts. We have a $3.8 billion deficit before we even start talking about the effects of the tax cuts. With what you say, we're still going to have to make some pretty tough decisions.

That's what we're looking to try to create: some balance. The safe environment you talked about, the stability — that's certainly coming across. These are the things we're going to have to work at. We still have these tough decisions to make, and it's really, really difficult. I really appreciate your coming and making these comments.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Stephanie, I grew up on a blueberry farm, so I'm just a farm boy. When it comes to economics, I tend to defer to the economics of the professor from Harvard on the committee, Mr. Sultan. You know, when we bought a tractor and it was $10,000, we put $2,500 or whatever down, and then we paid interest on it. We eventually had to pay for that tractor or the dealership would come back and take it away. We've got a deficit in this province of approximately $34 billion. You're saying to continue to run up this debt. Where should it then stop?

S. Mundeling: My understanding from the paper was that $3.8 billion would be our….

S. Mundeling: We're not a poor province. We're making money. Some of that is covered. The $3.8 billion that you stated was going to be our deficit is all that we're worried about covering. Is that not what you're focused on?

S. Mundeling: My figures, even if our tax cuts came back to you, would only cover $1.5 billion of that every year. It would still be growing.

B. Kerr: That's right. If we maintain the status quo and don't do anything, the annual loss, the expenses that this province will incur over the revenue it brings in, will be $6 billion. Take the $1.2 billion off for the tax effects, and it's still about $3.8 billion every year. That compounds the debt. It just gets the debt higher. Right now we're paying $3 billion a year in interest. We have to make these tough decisions, you see. That's where the real problem is.

S. Mundeling: Well, obviously these figures are so humongous, you are not going to tackle that problem in the next two years. You're not going to erase that problem.

I don't know. What I'm hearing is that people have been frightened into voicing that we can't have all this public debt, and we don't like it. We've been able to live with it without a collapse in our economy for a long time, not just provincially but federally, and we're not the only country.

We don't need to panic about this. That's what I'm hearing. People are not saying: "Oh, my God, our whole world is going to collapse." That's not the reason it's going to collapse. At least, that's not the focus we see anymore. We want it paid off. Of course we do. Hard choices are fine, but darn it all, we do live in one of the richest countries in the world. What's wrong with us? Are we living beyond our means? Is that it?

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Our time frames are getting tight. Possibly just a summation.

The issue you're talking about, debt, is at $34 billion now. I don't think all debt is bad. I mean, a province builds its infrastructure by incurring debt for hospitals and schools and so on. We do that to buy a home. I don't know anybody that goes and pays cash for their home.

I compare the issue that we're really facing in the challenges in British Columbia to a household that continues to borrow money to buy their groceries. Eventually, that catches up to you, and you can't do it anymore. That's the position we're in with the deficit we face. As you indicated, if you take the tax cuts out of the picture, we still face a substantial deficit situation in this province. Every year we continually spend billions of dollars more than the revenue we bring in. That's the situation we're in.

It can't continue that way. If we don't balance that portion of it, we won't be in a position to deliver any services to the residents of British Columbia — of which I'm one, and a proud father. I want to make sure I have a future for my daughters and every British Columbian, but it is a struggle.

The issue of just making across-the-board cuts without compassion and caring. You have a government on both sides that is going to try and work toward a balanced result. We do have to balance our books so that we can deliver the enhanced services we presently enjoy. There are many good things that we enjoy today that we may not be able to enjoy for a

number of years until our financial house gets put back in order. It is a challenge.

S. Mundeling: Yes. I don't think there is anybody who sits in a position like myself that envies your job, but I'm telling you that we need to protect families. We need to protect children. We need to educate our children. That's so important if we're going to be viable in the future. I think we all agree on that.

Maybe you should be talking to the front-line people. There are little things that we all see in our offices that we can do — little things — but you think…. One of the things that I would like to speak to is that at the end of the fiscal year, I don't think there are very many government offices that don't have a few dollars stashed. There's this big push to spend this money. Spend it on new furniture. It doesn't matter if we got new furniture last year. Do whatever needs to be done to get this money spent. There's no incentive to take this money back to people and say: "Look, we did a good job, and we have this left over."

B. Lekstrom (Chair): We are going to create an environment that promotes that. It's no different than running a small business, a large business or your household. What we've seen is unacceptable. Putting politics aside, we are a legislative committee put forward by the Legislature. The issue is that we have to deliver services in a cost-effective manner. We're asking British Columbians….

There are going to be some tough choices, and we are all going to suffer some pain. In my view there's no way around that. If we can do it together and talk to the people on the front lines, we can get back the quality-of-life issues that we want to build on and carry on. With that, I know we could sit and discuss.

I think your presentation was very valuable and very much worthwhile, but our time is limited. I want to thank you for what I think was a very heartfelt and passionate presentation, Stephanie.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): I do have a number of presenters. I would like to move on, but before I do, I'd like to recognize His Worship, Mayor Ivan Bonnell. Welcome.

D. Yearley: First, I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to speak to your committee today. I have lived and worked in Quesnel for the past nine years and am a very proud employee of the province of B.C. Like my co-workers, I am very concerned about the announced staff reductions.

In 1996 the office that I work in was downsized, "rightsized" or whatever you want to call it, from 20 employees to 12. Did the work go away? No. Doing more with less is a very familiar phrase at my worksite, but how much more and how much less and at what cost? I wonder, too, how many jobs will be lost in the private sector by these announced reductions.

I am also very concerned about the lack of service in my community. As a taxpayer, if I need to deal with a government agency, I would really appreciate dealing with someone in my community and not a voice from Victoria who doesn't understand my community. Being from a small community, the thought of the trickle-down effect from a major job loss is frightening. Will it be me, a public service employee, or my neighbour who works in the private sector that becomes unemployed? Either way, someone in my community will be without a job — therefore, a loss of disposable income in my community, which will affect business.

Today I am asking you — no, actually, I am pleading with you — before you actually make any cuts, to please consider what the long-term effects and ramifications for our communities and province will be.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you, Debra. Are there any questions from members of the committee?

B. Penner: Just an observation. Unless I've missed something, I haven't heard of any actual announcements regarding staff reductions. The Premier has asked ministries to prepare different scenarios of 20, 35 and 50 percent reductions in their global budgets, but to date there have been no specific announcements regarding any layoffs.

D. Yearley: There might not be a public announcement, but the minister I work for has been reducing staff. I tend to call it death by a thousand scratches. They're being done on a one-off basis with no consulting with other…. It's done in isolation. The employees that are affected are isolated. They don't know that there's someone else in another community, whether it be Terrace, Nelson, Victoria, Nanaimo.

I know of seven employees whose positions have been made redundant in the past two months. Four of them have had to move. Moving from one community, especially in the north…. Our communities are small. We tend to know our neighbours. When you're being asked to move your whole family to a new community, not only is there a financial hardship to those employees but their families do suffer the social effects as well. Yes, the 50 percent has not come yet — or 20, whatever the percentage will be — but it is happening on an ongoing basis. I know firsthand with my ministry. I have heard from people who work in other ministries that the same thing's happening.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): I think you've touched on a key issue. We're gathering information, trying to add the input of the British Columbians that we hear from.

At the end of the day, I believe — as I indicated, I'm a realist — there probably will be some pain suffered by families throughout this province, by workers and individuals. I think it's important that we act in a responsible manner and don't drag it on, so it isn't a death of a thousand scratches, as you put it, but it's an upfront approach to try and get our fiscal house back in order and try and rebuild this province.

D. Yearley: I don't envy you that job, but while you're making that decision, please remember that behind those numbers that come from the budget are people and families. That's what I'm asking you today. Before you say, "We're going to get rid of 50 percent of the employees in B.C. that work for the direct government service…." By just saying a number, you're not looking at the people behind those numbers.

The job loss is devastating. It's very devastating personally for people who lose their jobs, whose jobs are made redundant. Like I said, in 1996 I was in an office that lost eight employees. I didn't know who I felt more sorry for: those people who were leaving or the people that were left behind. Everybody was affected.

I. Chong: Debra, we do hear what you're saying. The practices of the past, I guess, are the practices we do not wish to repeat, where it was a broad-brush approach to all ministries. That is not what we're attempting to do. We do want, as the Chair says, to take some information back to our Minister of Finance, who will therefore be able to share that with all ministries. We want to do this in a thoughtful way and look at each community in their own way. If it were to be 50 percent cuts in a ministry, it would not necessarily translate into 50 percent of the people. There are programs. The Minister of Finance was able to eliminate a program completely, but it didn't necessarily entail cutting 100 percent of those jobs. I mean, we got rid of the Buy B.C. bonds, for example.

I. Chong: We're trying to make sure that those things that aren't going to affect providing a necessary public service are going to impact….

D. Yearley: I work for the Ministry of Transportation — the one that gets beat up on a pretty regular basis. Shall I remind you of 1988, 1996?

I. Chong: You're comments are in Hansard. We're going to use that in a very thoughtful way and provide that to our ministers.

D. Yearley: I hope so, and that's all I wanted to do: voice my opinion about my community and my neighbours and myself.

Our next presenter will be His Worship Mayor Ivan Bonnell. Welcome, Ivan. Yes, we are now into the short presentations. [Laughter.]

I. Bonnell: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, Members of the Legislative Assembly. It's a pleasure to have you in our community to listen to the community's views about the challenges that are before the province and its fiscal reality of trying to meet the issues of providing service with diminishing revenues in that regard. It's our intent to try and present to you a concept for consideration in that regard around service delivery.

It's amazing, Blair, that I had a chat with Ida on Thursday evening at the Westcoast Energy reception, and here I am on Tuesday afternoon making a presentation.

I do want to clarify very succinctly that this presentation is not representative of municipal council. It is simply my presentation on behalf of a quick discussion with the city treasurer, Mr. Tom Reynolds, who is here with me today, to look at one aspect of a service delivery issue from an organizational stand, being local government and provincial government where there's a program that's offered by the provincial government called the homeowner grant program and how some proposed changes to that program can, in fact, both achieve some benefits at the local level of government and probably assist with the provincial question that your committee is struggling with.

Obviously, no change is without effect. There would be effects no matter how you make change. This program scenario here is no different in that regard. I do appreciate the shortness of the time that's available, so we will be succinct. I'll allow Tom to give an overview of what we're proposing for your consideration and some of its effects and try to answer any questions that you have and let the rest of the community get up here and share their views with you.

T. Reynolds: Basically, the suggestion is that the province take a look at the homeowner grant with a view of eliminating it. Instead of having this cycle of the city collecting the homeowner grant forms and then billing the province and the province sending us money, we suggest that you eliminate that. The money that would have come to the city for the homeowner grant is usually applied first to the school tax portion of the bill, and if there's a residual amount, it comes to the municipality.

The recommendation would be that instead of having this big cycle, you eliminate the homeowner grant and deliver that money that would have been a reduction of school tax to the homeowner and just send the cheque directly to the Minister of Education. That residual amount would go to a municipality. For Williams Lake, it's a good deal, but you would have to look at what the impact would be in all municipalities.

As you're aware, we're all made up of different ratios of residence to industry to commercial, so the

impact may be different. In our community what would happen is that the average tax bill would drop in the neighbourhood of about $334, which is less than the $470 homeowner grant they would get. That's because now the benefit is passed to all residential taxpayers, whether they're a landlord or an owner.

For seniors and the handicapped, the impact would be significantly greater, because the $250 and the grant that they would obtain would disappear. But the province has the ability to jiggle other programs to maybe put that $250 back in those folks' jeans. I'm not exactly sure how you would do that, but that's certainly one way of getting around that unfavourable aspect of the program.

The benefits to the province are quite clear. You would be able to eliminate…. Unfortunately, he was talking about jobs. I think there's about five or six people in Victoria involved with this particular program. I'm not sure if that's all they do, but it's certainly an area that, from the province's perspective, is a place to look where it doesn't necessarily impact the delivery of service to the extent that cutting out inspectors or things of that nature would.

We think, from our perspective, that it has some merit for you to look at, but you have to look provincially. It looks like a good deal for Williams Lake, but it may not be a good deal provincewide. It's an idea that needs some investigation but one we thought we should bring to your attention.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Certainly, those are the kinds of innovative ideas that we are looking to hear. You can't investigate anything until an idea is put forward. I appreciate your effort in doing that. It is unique. Having some background in municipal politics, the one-size-fits-all statement comes into play, and an issue like this may well be able to be looked at regionally. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Are there any questions by any members quickly? I'm throwing the word "quickly" in at this point, this late in the day.

I. Bonnell: I appreciate the opportunity. We're going to continue to pursue these objectives in future consultation with Minister Nebbeling's process on the community charter. Maybe in the next week we'll be able to flesh out more ideas. In the short turnaround of less than 100 hours, I thought it was fairly good. We tried to get something to you as quick as we could.

S. Moses: Good afternoon, standing committee. I am Simon Moses. I live in Williams Lake. I am a family man. My wife also lives in Williams Lake, along with my 21-year-old son. My wife is a full-time teacher, teaching at the local campus of the University College of the Cariboo. My son is now entering his second year, and he chose law as his career. I'm self-employed, having a go at consulting in our tough economy. We are all status Indians, and I attribute our social and economic health to education and health.

I would like to start with the summary and end with the summary. Health and academic education is the foundation of socioeconomic health. I am a practising student of philosophy. Normally, I would require ten minutes to warm up and five minutes to share my summary, but Josie tells me I only have five minutes, so I'll get right to the summary.

The submission handout I'm sharing with you is actually two parts. The first part is on the Cariboo-Chilcotin building partnerships with the British Columbia government. That's the summary. The second part is a two-page submission, mainly my family supporting the partnership between the Cariboo Economic Action Forum and the British Columbia government.

I would like to go to the summary. It's titled "Cariboo-Chilcotin Building Partnerships with British Columbia Government, October 2, 2001, Williams Lake, B.C., Social and Economic Health."

Build partnerships for Cariboo-Chilcotin development — social and economic health to enhance quality of life. Build partnerships with local communities, regions, organizations, businesses, forestry, tourism, services, associations, foundations, the Cariboo Economic Action Forum and municipals and the B.C. provincial government, to strengthen the capacity of economically depressed communities. Stimulate, renew and diversify science, automation and technology. Provide social and economic opportunities for long-term sustainability for individuals and communities.

Community solutions to catch up and keep up with global economics. Cariboo-Chilcotin is a resource-driven economy, with tourism and service as secondary economic drivers. The resources are very important.

I'm sorry. I'm reading this because I'm a bit nervous. I actually practised quite a bit.

The resources are very important for economic sustainability. That requires the very best qualified experts making management decisions in regards to our resource-driven economy and our fast-accelerating services and tourism, in addition to making our most important resource the human resource, the people resource of the Cariboo.

I would like to add a little bit to this. I walked here this morning. It took me about 25 minutes to walk here. I passed an elementary school playground and our local community leisure and recreation centre. Today each one of those facilities had several children actually playing, experiencing sports and athletic activities. The adults in the schools and the sports activities were facilitating and training our children — I saw several hundred of them today — in eye-hand coordination, physical fitness and bone structure as they're growing.

I would like to share a bit of an emotional thought with you. Each one of those children is very precious to us in the Cariboo-Chilcotin. Each one of those children felt secure, I'm sure. I could hear their laughter. They really felt secure, playing and exercising today. For certain, I know they have dreams. I know they have visions. I know they will have career aspirations when they get into their teenage years.

Our children are the people who are important for the future. Therefore, we must make them important today. In addition to making our most important resource the human resource, health and academic education for capacity in Cariboo-Chilcotin is an important priority. Social and economic health is our goal. In summary, health and academic education is the foundation of social and economic health.

S. Moses: The second part of the presentation is a two-pager supporting the provincial government partnerships with about 300 organizations who are members of the Cariboo Economic Action Forum. There is tremendous networking going on right now. There's a vibrancy; there's a lot of action. There are a lot of plans in place that require partnerships. They require investment by the Cariboo-Chilcotin people and by the provincial government. There is a lot of potential opportunity for economic action.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Simon, thank you. You captured a great deal within that five-minute time frame, and I can assure you that the information you have put forward will be taken into consideration in the development of our report.

It is now five minutes to two. We will be able to fit one more presenter in: Greg Robart. For the people that are unable to present here in person, there is information on written submissions for the preparation of this committee on the back table. I would encourage you to take that. It's very difficult to get to everybody. It's a huge issue. The schedule we're facing is very tight. We're off to Kamloops immediately following this for further consultations at that time.

G. Robart: Mr. Chairman, thank you, and thank you to the members of the committee for the opportunity. I have a two-page presentation. I will apologize in advance. This was quickly prepared. My spell-checker does not account for my bad grammar. That's always a good test. You'll be looking for my mistakes. Hopefully, you'll have a chance to read the two pages. In addition, I have attached a larger document which, hopefully, you'll have an opportunity to peruse at your leisure later.

My name is Greg Robart. I'm a resident of Big Lake, which is a community either to the south or the north — I'm never sure — but certainly to the east of Williams Lake. It's somewhat of a circuitous route. I am an advocate for the development of the Williams Lake performance, arts and discovery centre, an initiative of several arts, cultural and community organizations and private individuals in our community.

In March of 2001 an ad hoc steering committee of the Williams Lake Community Arts Council submitted a proposal for funding to the former ministry of many letters for partnership funding under the community business development program of the community enterprise initiative. Our goal was to secure provincial government support for the project that will determine the community need, feasibility and implementation plan for the building of the Williams Lake performance, arts and discovery centre for the Cariboo region, to be located here in Williams Lake. This request for funding was to be matched by our community with support from arts organizations, local business and individuals.

The development of the Williams Lake performance, arts and discovery centre represents a bold initiative to enhance the quality of life of our community. The facility will be a catalyst to expanding and improving arts education and participation. The new centre will provide new opportunities for cultural events and performances. We will attract world-class artists to a venue that equals theatres and galleries that up until now were to be found only in larger centres.

The Williams Lake performance, arts and discovery centre will be the home of a new science centre dedicated to learning about and exploring our natural history, our environment and habitat, and our own interactivity and interdependence with the land through forestry, mining and agriculture. Like science centres throughout the world, the discovery centre will be a major year-round tourist and education facility that will showcase the richness of our local community, the resources and the creativity of our people.

The arts centre theatre will become the community showplace, serving as a home for the Studio Theatre Society, the Festival Society and the Williams Lake Community Arts Council. The theatre will have amenities needed to house conference visitors to our region and serve as a wonderful adjunct to the proposed Williams Lake conference centre. Graduations, cultural and social events, business and government conferences, professional concerts and shows will be regular events at the arts centre theatre.

Amateur and professional artists contribute to the social and cultural life of our community. Their talents and creations attract visitors and enrich the lives of local people. The arts centre studios will provide space and resources for artists and serve as a place for teaching new and aspiring artists, both young and old, new forms of expression in an array of mediums.

The arts centre exhibit hall will become the site for commercial, artistic and entertainment events as part of the discovery centre. The exhibit hall will serve as a location for visiting exhibits that will attract tourists and school groups from beyond our region and contribute to the financial viability of the discovery centre.

Local industry will use the exhibit hall to showcase their accomplishments and products. Local, regional and national artists will have an ideal facility to present their work.

The Williams Lake performance, arts and discovery centre will enrich our community and strengthen our cultural tourism for the region, helping make Williams Lake a world-class community.

As the standing committee is aware, the review of public sector spending has put our application for partnership funding in doubt. It is my wish and strongest hope that our application for funding will be approved and we will be able to proceed with our initiative. If my worst fears are realized, the community enterprise program will be cancelled, and this important project, the Williams Lake performance, arts and discovery centre, will not receive provincial government support.

I am here to share with you why I want to have you help me make my dreams come true. Williams Lake is much like many other communities in British Columbia. We have the same needs and desires as other people in the province. We want the same education services and health care that is available to those living in larger centres. We want the same opportunities to diversify and grow our economy and to secure employment. We want the same quality of life.

Our traditional economy has contributed greatly to the wealth of British Columbia. However, we need to create new ways of diversifying our economy. Cultural tourism holds a great deal of promise and potential for our region, but we need help to develop the ideas and the products that will attract visitors. The community enterprise program offered an opportunity to develop and implement these ideas. The strength of the program is the partnership it engenders. We are not looking for a handout or for others to do it for us; we are looking for a helping hand to assist our small community to develop the means to develop the base for a growing opportunity in cultural tourism. The community enterprise program represents a small investment that will have a significant impact on Williams Lake. I want to encourage the standing committee to support the continuation of the community enterprise program.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Greg, I thank you for your presentation, certainly in the short time frame that's allotted at this point.

I. Chong: I guess my question to you is more in the line of an effort to ensure that taxpayers' dollars are used in the most effective and efficient way. The fact is that for a while there were a number of community programs which the provincial government administered, when they took the funding away from the municipalities, for example. Would you feel comfortable, in fact, with the new community charter that is being developed — whether it should be a function of your municipality once again to explore opportunities like this — or would you want your provincial government to continue to be the overriding oversight ministry to have such a program?

G. Robart: You're asking me to delve into something that I don't necessarily have expertise on, but I will share this with you. I think that as we contribute to the provincial economy here, and probably out of proportion to the size of our population in terms of our net contribution, we have seen the provincial government…. I don't think we necessarily have to be consistent — for example, the decision recently with respect to bingo income to be administered provincially.

I think, in fact, there are times when the provincial government has to play an equalizing role. Often in a community the size of Williams Lake, because of its population size and tax base, we certainly don't have the resources equivalent to the wealth that we're creating for the province.

I think that in a case such as this, because of the contribution this region is making to the provincial wealth, there may be a way in which the provincial government can ensure that a community the size of ours, which lacks the head offices, which lacks the property tax base, which lacks the ability to raise the funds that, say, might be possible for a community like Vancouver…. Yes, the provincial government maybe does have a continuing role.

R. Sultan: I see from a very quick perusal of the package that you're contemplating funding $140,000, of which $50,000 would be in kind.

G. Robart: No. In fact, the in-kind contribution is, I believe, less than that.

R. Sultan: Oh, I see. Yes, that's true. My apologies. In any event, the $140,000, if I understand it, gets you sort of through the fundraising stage for the complex itself. What is the approximate magnitude of the total capital that you're seeking through this funding campaign, and the approximate timing?

G. Robart: Well, this doesn't feel very informal saying it here. We've talked about a project on a scale of $5 million to $8 million. We recognize that for a community of this size, it's going to take a tremendous effort. We recently had a workshop with a presenter from Nanaimo. The community there built the Port Theatre, I believe, through tremendous community support. We hope we can achieve that level of support locally.

Our timeline. The Theatre Society has dreamed of a theatre since 1922, so we are a patient people. I don't

think we're that patient any longer, but we would hope it's within the next five to seven years.

In closing, I would like to extend, on behalf of myself and the committee, our gratitude to the people in the Cariboo-Chilcotin for coming out and making their views and wishes known on the upcoming budget.

Certainly, visiting this area is always a pleasant surprise, especially when a day like today is out there. Unfortunately, sometimes we're stuck in meetings. You live in a beautiful part of the country, and I thank each and every one of you for taking the time out of your day.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

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REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
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