Finance and Government Services - Issue No. 8

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		239
	S. Abbott	239
	H. Bassford	241
	V. Cleary	244
	S. Rogers	244
	J. Simpson	246
	M. Tessier	247
	Dean Johnson	249
	Dale Johnson	250
	B. Neufeld	250
	J. Davidson	252
	G. Engh	254
	K. Elder	255
	S. Jesperson	259
	B. Brinton	260
	T. Stoeckly	262
	T. Westlin	264
	R. Rogalsky	266
	B. Plowright	267
	R. Caldwell	268
	S. Rogalsky	270
	N. Westfall	271

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:

Susan Abbott
Dr. Harold Bassford (President, University College of the Fraser
   Valley)
Bill Brinton (B.C. Government and Service Employees Union)
Robin Caldwell
Val Cleary
Jack Davidson (President, B.C. Road Builders and Heavy
   Construction Association)
Katie Elder (President, Sardis Society of Debate and Politics)
Greg Engh
Steen Jespersen
Dale Johnson
Dean Johnson
Barry Neufeld (Chilliwack Restorative Justice and Youth
   Diversion Association)
Bob Plowright
Rudy Rogalsky
Sharon Rogalsky
Stan Rogers (Chilliwack Chamber of Commerce)
John Simpson (Fraser Valley East Brain Injury Association)
Tony Stoeckly
Michelle Tessier
Norman Westfall
Ted Westlin (Councillor, District of Kent)

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to welcome you to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services pre-budget consultation hearings. My name is Blair Lekstrom. I am the MLA for Peace River South and Chair of the select standing committee. We're here today to hear your input on next year's budget, which the government is in the process of looking at putting together. There are many challenges facing British Columbia, and we are asking you to give us your views on your priorities as to what you feel should be encompassed in next year's budget.

This is an all-party committee. Ms. MacPhail will be joining us shortly. We are a committee struck by the Legislature. We are a committee that has been put together and mandated to go out and host public consultation meetings throughout this province, as well as to allow procedures for written submissions to be submitted to this committee for the individuals who are unable to attend any one of the 16 committee hearings we've held or are in process of holding throughout the province

Throughout the day we will have presentations made. We will run until 2 p.m. today. The presenters are allowed 15 minutes. Usually we like to go with ten minutes from the presenter, and then if there are any questions from members of the committee, the following five minutes are for clarification or questions that committee members may have.

At this time what I would like to do, before going to our first presenter, is begin by asking the other members of the committee to introduce themselves. I will begin on my right with Kevin.

K. Krueger: Hi. I'm Kevin Krueger from Kamloops–North Thompson. I'm pleased to be with you.

L. Mayencourt: Good morning. I'm Lorne Mayencourt from Vancouver-Burrard. I'm also very happy to be here in Chilliwack.

B. Penner: I'm Barry Penner, and I'm from Chilliwack — Chilliwack-Kent to be precise. I can't tell you how shocked I was to see that it was raining this morning, so I want to assure out-of-town visitors that this is very rare.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Good morning. My name is Tony Bhullar, and I'm from Surrey-Newton.

H. Bloy: Good morning. I'm Harry Bloy from the new riding of Burquitlam that takes in Simon Fraser University. I'm looking forward to hearing all your positive suggestions on how we can improve the budget in the coming years.

R. Sultan: My name's Ralph Sultan. The riding I represent is partly in North Vancouver and partly in West Vancouver.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Also with us today we have members of Hansard staff. We have Catherine Schaefer and Wendy Collisson with us as well as our committee assistant, Jacqueline Quesnel. To my left is our Committee Clerk, Anne Stokes. Everything that is said during these hearings is recorded and transcribed by Hansard, and it is also available on our website, with the information located on the back table. If anybody would like to review the hearings that have already been held, it is on the Internet. These recordings will also be posted as soon as we're completed here today.

With that, I would like to begin the work of the committee. I will call our first presenter here this morning, Susan Abbott. Good morning, Susan.

S. Abbott: Good morning. Thank you for hearing me today. I come as a low-income person and as a single parent who lives in B.C. Housing. I have spoken to a number of the people who live in our complex, and I have dealt with a number of issues over the years as a single parent and being low-income, having been on welfare, EI, and self-employed as well as employed in the working sector. I've worked as an employment counsellor. I've managed retail. I'm in no way deficient of brain power to do what I need to do.

However, there are a number of issues that face low-income people, and rarely are we ever heard or asked by the government what we need. We have a lot of people approach us with research projects, but nobody ever asks us. They just come and give us some opportunity to be part of some guinea-pig group. The most recent one I took part in was for single parents who wanted to become employed. The federal government would give them up to $30,000 a year. It didn't work for me. I was going through a court case. I was in and out of court every other week, and there was no way that any regular employer would ever hire me, so this program did not work for me. I could not do it unless I was self-employed.

Nobody in the government ever looks at people becoming self-employed, and yet 75 percent of women entrepreneurs are successful at becoming self-employed. Welfare will not recognize you. If you become self-employed, you're cut off. There's no incentive for people to work. Currently I have to stop doing what I'm doing. I started my own cleaning business. I have a disability. I have scoliosis, and I'm developing arthritis, so I need to go through a career change. There is no funding for education for people who are self-employed, for people who have to make a career change. I am told that I have to go back on welfare and apply for a disability pension.

I have no desire to go on welfare. I have no desire to be taking handouts. I am very thankful, very grateful that B.C. Housing exists. It gave me the ability to be independent, to have income and shelter for my children and still retain my dignity as a human being. Welfare is debilitating. It causes people to stay on the system. They are not helpful. If you go out and work, you're penalized. If you go to school, they penalize you. I was cut off for going to Douglas College because I didn't ask somebody's permission. Fourteen years later I'm not in any better position.

The training they offer is six months of training. It's usually geared to either bookkeeping or office administration. There are oodles of people out there who have far more training. You cannot compete in the job market with six months training. I can tell you that as an employment counsellor. If they would give people the proper training and education, they could go on. If I had trained 14 years ago to become a teacher, which is what I wanted to do, I would be employed today. The market is crying for teachers. They say five years from now there will be a crisis in that market. I can't get the training. I can't get funding to go anywhere. I'm low-income. I do not qualify for loans. I have to go back on welfare assistance to get educational support, and even if I do, they'll probably give me a six-month training program to become a secretary, which I am not. What people need to do in this government is look at what the skills of low-income people are, because every person has gifts and skills to offer. There is no skill assessment done in the welfare system to see what people are best suited to do in the workforce and then train them to do that.

I worked as an advocate for WCB people and welfare recipients. Half the time they get into a six-month program and two weeks before completion WCB cuts them off and says, "If you continue, we will cut your benefits," and people have to drop out of education. They have to drop out of the things that would actually put them into a career change.

Another problem is rotating workers. Social workers that you see are rotated on a regular basis, so every time you see somebody, you have to renew all of the previous information and start over again. This goes on in the system with children who have ADD, all different types of problems. Every time it's addressed, you've got different social workers. They trade them like musical chairs. I would say it is about the same as when an employer is hiring new employees all the time. They have to keep spending money on training new employees. It's a waste of money, it costs the system, and it's not effective. What we need is workers who deal with the case and see it through to the very end. Then you will be cost-effective. You will not be going over the same ground over and over again.

There are many parents who need help. The fostering system is another thing that produces dysfunctional families. I can tell you I have run an open-door policy and have taken more kids off the street, and I don't get paid by the government to do that. I have taken children as young as 12 years old that are locked out overnight. They didn't make their curfew, and the foster parents have locked them out on the street. They are locked out during the day, on the street with no place to go. No wonder they get in trouble. They have no money in their pockets, no lunch bag packed, and they're out there. God knows what they're going to do with that four hours they're locked out because that's the time the foster parent has off. These kids are not even aware of their right to be in school. There are a number of stigmas and things that are attached to kids from low incomes that cause them to lose their education.

In the case of my son, because he's low-income, he was called a slow learner. We had to fight for two and a half years. He is a gifted student. He is above average to gifted. Because they've put him in all the wrong programs, it's cost him two years of education. He will be turning 18 this December. We are facing a financial crisis. Our child tax benefit is being cut off, and yet I will have to support my son another two and a half years before he completes high school. I am not unusual. There are many people. In fact, there was a single parent that wrote to the paper a week ago, to the editor, with the same problem. The tax benefits end when the children turn 18. They should end when the kid is out of high school. It is a well-known fact that many single-parent children are actually losing a minimum of one year of education. This is not due just to the problems that single parents have. It's a problem with the system and the stigmatization that goes along with it.

I have also heard that you are considering rent vouchers. Self-employed people, if under this system of welfare as it stands now, will not qualify for rent vouchers. I will be homeless again. I have already been homeless in this province once. It was not fun, and I do not wish to be homeless again. People who rent do not want to rent to welfare recipients. We are stigmatized. There has to be some way that vouchers will address that, because even if you have a voucher, it doesn't guarantee someone will rent to you. Also, for people who are on disability pensions the shelter portion of their pension is $325. Where are you realistically going to rent anything for $325 a month? It does not reflect what the rental market has. These are problems that must be addressed.

We have a co-op right across the street from us. That co-op is currently facing bankruptcy. All those people are insecure about whether or not they'll be able to continue to live there. They have mould problems in their homes. None of this is being addressed. There is a lack of funds. They don't even want to say anything, because if the co-op goes bankrupt, all of those people will be homeless, basically. Another place that was run by a church on Switzer Avenue in Abbotsford has been sold through a private sale. Their rents have almost doubled. How is a voucher system going to address that? This is something that we as low-income people must know. We have to have these problems addressed in order to have security as a family. If we don't have security as a family, you're going to see more dysfunctional households. A lot of the dysfunc-

tion in a household is due to stress, and financial stress is one of the biggest ones.

One of the things I want to suggest to the government. You have a program called Healthy Kids. It has its own providers. Why is it not in with the B.C. Medical? Why is it not provided? Why can you not compress these services so that when you're phoning, you're dealing with one service, not having to deal with five different locations and five different bureaucracies? If the government could have bureaucracies mainstreamed so that if your Healthy Kids is dealing with medical, B.C. Medical is dealing with medical…. Then have Revenue Canada feed that information back and forth. Mainstream these communications, and you would save money. You would also make it a lot easier for the people who are receiving those services. Strong families are the backbone of the community. Healthy parents will have healthy children. The parents need to have more support.

I am currently on the steering committee for Habitat for Humanity. I don't know if you're aware of that particular group, but Habitat builds low-income housing for people so that they can actually own a home and get a leg up in the system. One of the things that's very impressive with that organization is that they believe in training people. They don't just hand people keys to a home and say: "Here. Handle your mortgage." They actually put together a group that partners with the family and teaches them the life skills they need, whether that's financial counselling, how to be a good neighbour, how to maintain your home, how to think like an owner instead of a renter and all of those different things. If we could provide services through the community to low-income families and help them gain the life skills they need, they would become stronger as a family, more functional and able to get the leg up that they need into the community, into the workforce and off welfare.

Education is very important in all aspects — proper education. We need university education, not six-month programs. We need to be able to go and take actual training programs that will make us marketable with BAs and master's and whatever else it takes for people to get trained. If they don't have the skills for university, they have the skills to be a day care worker or something else. Every single person on welfare has skills, and what we need to do is tap those skills.

It is my understanding that in Holland — I didn't have the opportunity or the time to research this as I was only informed of it yesterday — apparently they have had some model where the unions actually got involved with the welfare recipients and put together a program where they assessed what the skills were and started employing those people in those skills so that everybody on welfare was employed and eventually became marketable.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Susan, for your suggestions and your presentation. I will look to members of the committee if there are any questions.

B. Penner: Thank you, Susan, for your presentation. You talked about being penalized for working while on social assistance or on welfare. Help clarify this for me. Is there not a $200 threshold of income you're allowed to earn and retain before your benefits are reduced?

S. Abbott: At the time I was on it, it was $100, and what happened was that I declared it. At that point I was doing telemarketing for Fabricland from home. My children were very small, and it was only a quarterly program. I got harassed every month. I was told that I was probably cheating. I was investigated continually, to the point where it wasn't worth working. So I went to the manager of Fabricland and said: "Please write a letter to tell them that I don't work for you any more." I didn't work any more because every time I went, I got harassed, even though I was honest and I declared it. They are not sympathetic to that. They are actually very discouraging.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Seeing no further questions, Susan, I would like to thank you for coming out. Thank you.

Our next presenter this morning is Harold Bassford with the University College of the Fraser Valley. Good morning, Harold.

H. Bassford: Thank you very much for allowing me to be here. I'm Harold Bassford. I'm president of University College of the Fraser Valley, and I have the privilege this year of being chair of the University-Colleges of B.C. In addition to saying thanks, I'd like to express my sympathy to the committee but also my admiration to you for taking on this year a task which is truly of difficult and gigantic proportions.

Today I hope to bring two suggestions for economic recovery in the higher education community which will not be of large cost for the province. Let me begin by speaking for just a few moments about the university colleges. The university colleges were started in 1989 under then-minister Stan Hagen. Since that time, I think they have been, in my judgment, probably the most innovative and one of the most successful ideas in higher education in decades. B.C. should be proud of the experiment, even though I fear that the university colleges and our success is one of the best-kept secrets in British Columbia. An example of the success might just be in the size. UCFV in 1989, when it was Fraser Valley College, had 1,800 full-time-equivalent students. This year, this autumn, we have 6,200. The demand for education in the valley is tremendous, and that's why our size has tripled. The five university colleges in British Columbia have grown much the same, and we now serve well over 30,000 full-time students.

Why are we successful? There are two reasons. First, we are, probably for the first time, truly compre-

hensive higher education institutions. We offer what our communities and our regions say they need for their economic and social development, and we are comprehensive in the sense that we stretch from adult basic education, through trades, through all kinds of diplomas and academic degrees. This allows a mix of applied and traditional academic studies, which is unique. Our tradespeople are taught communication skills, and they can ladder into business programs to start businesses if they wish to apply their skills. Our criminal justice students get hands-on experience as well as theoretical knowledge. It's our largest program. Every one of them gets a good job. This mix that the university colleges all have allows new kinds of programming. An example from Fraser Valley is our bachelor of business administration in aviation. At the end of four years our students get not only their degree in business but also they have qualified for a commercial pilot's licence. Those combinations have them flying and working and managing airports all over the world.

The second reason that the university colleges are so successful is because we are truly community oriented. At Fraser Valley, in every community we serve, we have a community advisory group that we meet with regularly to tell us what they need in education. Every one of our programs — and we have over 57 different programs at the moment — has a community advisory group that works with them to see that they are doing relevant things for our communities. Partially through our talk with our community advisory programs a year and a half ago we undertook a study at Fraser Valley of our economic impact for the region. This led to several conclusions, and I've presented you with a summary of that study. It said that our process of trying to discover whether our programs were relevant or not works and that our graduates are clearly contributing to the economic development of the Fraser Valley. It also led to a discovery that there are some needs we must have to be proper community partners. We needed to do more contract training, including contract training that was on a post-graduate level.

One thing we've done to develop since then is to set up a very active industrial relations office, which indeed has led to several new programs. We were also told that we need to be able to apply the research skills of our faculty, which are significant. When one has over 300 faculty at the highest point of their degrees, those research skills need to be applied to the needs of our region. They need to work with industry and with social services organizations to help the region to develop.

Both of those things, graduate programs and research skills, led to us undertaking a program of trying to get new legislation to cover the university colleges. That's true for Fraser Valley. It's true for the other four university colleges. I believe my colleague Roger Barnsley spoke with you in Kamloops when you were there. He mentioned our need for being under an act which is not the colleges act, because we are four-year institutions that need additional opportunities to develop within our province. That's my first suggestion I would give to you: look at ways to allow us to be entrepreneurial, which is not allowed under the current legislation. It was probably adequate legislation in 1989. It's not in 2001.

The second suggestion is perhaps a little more general. Higher education — and there is much evidence to demonstrate it — is counter-cyclical to recession. What I mean by that is in times of economic slowdown people go to school. In times of economic slowdown people go and get the skills that are needed to prime the pump of economic recovery and lead to economic growth. I know we face a situation in B.C. where we don't have the new dollars to put in more dollars for higher education, but we now must plan for a fairly soon addition, infusion, investment in higher education if we are to have those skills we will need in B.C. for us to really move as a knowledge economy in the next decade.

Just this year we have to make moves as well. Although I hesitate to say it and in many ways am very sorry to say it, I believe we must make some changes in the tuition freeze in British Columbia. I don't know that we need to greatly increase tuition dollars across the board, but there are certainly some things that can be done. When tuition was frozen in B.C., tuitions were quite unequal across this province. At BCIT their career technical programs charge tuition of $2,265. At the University of Victoria their university-level programs charge $2,265 per year as tuition. At UCFV in both cases our tuition was stuck and remains at $1,204. If we were able to charge fees equal to BCIT and the University of Victoria for the same courses for the same students, we would have over $3.5 million extra income at UCFV. That would allow us to add 400 sections to our teaching. That would allow us to serve over 1,000 full-time students in terms of teaching, extended library hours, better service and several hundreds of thousands dollars that we could use for bursaries for those students that genuinely could not afford the increased tuition.

We need to add post-graduate programs, as I said before. We need to add some specific industry-directed courses. At current tuition levels we simply cannot do so. If we were allowed to have some differential tuition for those cases, where industry needs it or people are able to afford, at the graduate level, fees which would allow us to work at a cost recovery program, then we would be able to get people on that process to where they will be able to contribute to our economic recovery and, even more, to our ongoing economic development.

I have lots of other ideas but no more time. Let me just suggest to you that I personally am available, my institution is available, and all of the university colleges are available to provide you with any information or any help that you would want. Just feel free to ask. Thank you very much.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Bassford, for your presentation. I will look to members of the committee if there are any questions.

L. Mayencourt: You mentioned the issue of being under the college act. We've been at a few communities where there are university colleges. We've heard from some people that they should be under the college act, and some people think something new should be developed. One of the concerns we also have heard from people is that if we were to move you to a university classification, then somehow your institution loses its focus on teaching. That's been a concern. How would you address those sorts of tensions, if you will, that exist under some new legislation that gives you what you need?

H. Bassford: I would like to first refer the committee to the core review report that the university colleges have written where we do discuss that in some detail. Let me just say that one of the keys to the success of the university colleges is our comprehensiveness. It's because we do cover the whole spectrum of educational services that we can serve the function we want to in our community. If we were to abandon some of what we do, we'd be abandoning the educational needs of our regions.

Out here in the valley there's no question that people need adult basic education, that people desperately need more trades programs than we have, and that they need degree work. Also, there's no question that we need some professional programs, even at a master's level. I find it very difficult that the nurses in this valley, for the most part, have to go to Washington to get their master's degrees.

It's an addition we're talking about, not an instead of. The last thing I would want for Fraser Valley College is if we were to become a traditional university or if we were to become a truly research-intensive university. We have one great research university in B.C., and we should keep it that way. That's the University of British Columbia. It's internationally known; it's superb. What we should do is remain a really good teaching institution, a broader one. We must remain one that does more than we do now, that can offer those additional services the current act doesn't allow us to offer. I don't think that what we need is the University Act. It also isn't the case that what we need is the College and Institute Act. We need our own act that recognizes our unique nature.

J. MacPhail: Thank you, Mr. Bassford. That was an excellent presentation, and I did have a chance to scan through your core review document at the same time. A couple of things. University colleges are almost unique in Canada, aren't they?

H. Bassford: They are indeed. There's only one other, the University College of Cape Breton.

J. MacPhail: Okay, great. What I was looking at in this core review document was the funding formula and that your funding is about 35 percent lower than the universities for FTE.

J. MacPhail: I actually am pleased to hear that you don't want to become the universities. I think you have a very unique role, which has proved very effective. What is your relationship with the University Presidents Council? Is there any discussion that can occur about FTE funding, or is that too painful?

H. Bassford: It's not too painful, but it's not simple. The University College Consortium now meets fairly regularly with the University Presidents Council. Indeed, I met with them last week. We've tried to talk together enough to know how we can have some joint proposals to put to government. The question of our being funded at a lower level is one that obviously we don't get a lot of agreement with in terms of raising it. Although I think it needs to be done, it's something that needs to be done over time. It's not an issue that I think is crucial this year, simply because it can't be done in this year or even next year.

J. MacPhail: I totally agree with you. I was thinking in the longer term in terms of expanding access. Clearly, the growth areas geographically are in the university college areas, so perhaps the need for expanding access could be part of that discussion.

H. Bloy: Thank you very much for your presentation. I was interested in your discussion on tuition. Do you believe that if the tuitions were equal across the province, that would hurt your enrolment?

H. Bassford: We had approximately 4,000 class seats that we had people wanting to fill this year that we couldn't fill because we don't have the dollars to put the courses on. If it hurt our enrolment, it wouldn't hurt it all that much. If tuition were raised tremendously high, there could be tuition shock. If it doubled over a period of time, I think we'd be fine. We would have to be very careful. There are people in the valley and across B.C. that cannot afford higher tuitions. For all that tuition at universities and colleges is a bargain in B.C., they can't afford it. We'd have to be very careful, if we raised tuition, to really work on better bursary programs than we have.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Mr. Bassford, I thank you for taking time out of your schedule to come and present. As you said earlier, 15 minutes is a very limited time

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Our next presenter this morning is Val Cleary. Is Val with us? Welcome.

V. Cleary: Thank you. I'm not a public speaker, so I have more than enough time.

I moved to Chilliwack about 15 years ago with my husband and two daughters. I've worked in a health care facility here in Chilliwack for the last 14 years. This facility is a private, for-profit business. In the last few weeks I've been reading in the newspapers and hearing from my co-workers about health care funds being frozen and Pharmacare being drastically reduced. In effect, you are cutting services to the frail and the elderly of this community. These are the very people who built the province we live in, and now they need help, too, to live their lives without having to make decisions about whether they're going to buy food or buy medications. We all know that when people stop taking their medications, they end up being a bigger cost to health care. I urge you not to cut Pharmacare. Pharmaceutical companies, food suppliers and landlords do not freeze their price increases for three years just because the government of the day decides to freeze the funding for health care. In effect, you're creating hardship for the very people who depend on health care and Pharmacare being there for them.

In the last ten years the facility I work in has gone from a personal care facility to a long term care facility, although on paper it is still an intermediate care facility and is funded as such. This facility now houses extended care, Alzheimer's, level 3 and some level 2 residents. We also care for mentally fragile residents. There's no specialty unit at our facility. New residents are admitted to whichever room is vacant at the time. The ratio at times is 18 to 1. Add a post-op resident with a broken hip and you should really get the picture.

These frail elderly people deserve quality care. It is always hoped that when health care funding is released, we may be able to apply for another health care worker. By freezing health care dollars, you're on a road to warehousing the elderly and making second-class citizens of health care workers. We're all human beings, not machines, and that's how we're being treated sometimes. That's how we feel in these facilities as health care workers.

Chilliwack's economic base is agriculture and small business. You're proposing to make cuts to the public service anywhere from 35 to 50 percent. The Chilliwack area enjoys a large employment base of public employees. By cutting that part of the workforce, you're jeopardizing the economic growth and maybe even the existence of these businesses. It is a known fact that when people are faced with layoffs and no jobs, they think twice about going out for dinner or to a movie. Small businesses in this area rely on these people to keep their businesses going. I'm afraid the that the highway sign that reads "Chilliwack is open for business" may have to be changed to "Chilliwack is closed." I urge you to find other alternatives to reduce your deficit. Personal and business tax cuts may not be the answer if this leads to layoffs in the public sector and the freezing of funds for health care and education.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Ms. Cleary. We'll look to members of the committee, if there are any questions.

Ms. Cleary, just one from me. We understand the choices aren't going to be easy to make, but we are going to have to change. You made a comment on the issue of Pharmacare — and that's certainly a very important issue — not to cut it. At the rate of growth that we're experiencing with Pharmacare, do you have any suggestions as to what avenue we may look at? As far as sustainability I don't believe it's sustainable for the people of British Columbia, growing at the rate it is. I wondered if you had any ideas there.

V. Cleary: I'm not an economist, and I don't know how these things work. I do know that cutting taxes to the very people who need these services is not going to help.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): If we look at the picture and take the tax cuts out of the picture, we're still facing a very significant multibillion-dollar deficit by the year 2004-2005. Taking the tax cuts out of the picture, there are still a number of other issues that we as a government have to deal with in British Columbia to try and get our house back in order. I guess, really, what we're trying to accomplish is hearing the priorities, and I thank you for coming forward.

Our next presenter this morning is Eldon Unger. Is Eldon with us? Possibly Eldon will appear at a later date. We could move on if John Simpson of the Fraser Valley East Brain Injury Association is here.

Okay. We're making our way through this list quite quickly. Is Stan Rogers here from the Chilliwack Chamber of Commerce? If it's acceptable, Stan, would you like to go now? Thank you.

S. Rogers: It is my pleasure to be here today representing the Chamber of Commerce. I'd like to compliment the current government on a variety of measures they have taken to date to make some corrections and to give us a new paradigm shift in the economy and in the business presence in British Columbia. I heartily agree with many of the presentations that were made by various people to your committee throughout the province. As a business person I agree that workers need to be treated fairly. There needs to be a good environment within the workplace. There needs to be fair wages, fair benefits and fair issues, but I want to just draw an analogy for you from the business community's point of view.

Capital, which is the money that makes the world turn, is also very portable. We've had threats in this province from people wanting to resign if they're not fairly treated and fairly paid. They'll move to other provinces or states, etc. Capital is much more movable, if you want to call it that, than even you and I, who are individual workers. You know yourself that the pension funds you invest in, your mutual funds and the stock market investments that each one of you make, including what the unions make, are invested where they can get the best rate of return. Frankly, British Columbia has become a place where you don't even want to invest.

I was in Singapore twice this spring. Both times I went to the Canadian consulate. I talked to various Rotary members in Singapore and met with various business leaders. As soon as they hear you're from British Columbia, they say: "Oh, that's a poor place to do business." It's a very negative atmosphere we have created in British Columbia over the last number of years. We have become known as the place that is the highest taxed and with the worst regulations available for business, a lack of clear direction, etc. I would suggest to you that if we as individual employers treated our employees the way that business has been treated in British Columbia for the last ten years, we would not have very many good employees in our company.

We have to change the paradigm shift. I compliment the government for doing what you're doing, and in many respects I would urge you to do more. Capital will not tolerate a hostile environment. It wants a friendly environment. It will not tolerate being overtaxed. It will go to Alberta or to neighbouring jurisdictions or to the States or to other countries. It will not tolerate being overtaxed. It wants competitive or lower tax rates. It will not tolerate being overregulated. It wants to have reasonable, informed, dedicated regulations that have good science behind them. Capital will not tolerate long delays. It wants to have fast, efficient, positive responses. Capital will not tolerate bureaucratic delays. Rather, it needs to have bureaucratic input and assistance. We need to change the attitude in British Columbia from "Why should I allow you to do this?" to "How can I help you to do this?"

Clearly, not every idea that comes forward from a business person or from an employee is a good idea. Every idea deserves the right to be debated and thought through. We have a very clear public hearing process — I'll use an example — in municipal government. Just because I want to rezone a piece of property doesn't mean that I should be able to rezone it without proper input from the community and proper balance for environmental issues, set-back issues and things that will make my proposed development friendly to the overall community and of benefit to the overall community. At the same time, if that process becomes so bureaucratic, so strung-out, so long in getting approval, capital will not tolerate that. It will simply move on.

In the industry that I happen to actively work in, the property development industry, a number of developers from the Fraser Valley have moved their businesses completely to Alberta and other provinces, even Saskatchewan, where they are finding it to be much more friendly, and they're able to work so much more efficiently.

We need to market and sell British Columbia to the world as a great place to do business and to invest. If you go back ten, 12 or 14 years ago, we had a B.C. Trade Development Corporation. That organization sold British Columbia to the world. Lots of jobs, lots of high-tech and a variety of issues came to British Columbia as a direct result of that organization. Unfortunately, that was disbanded during the last ten years.

Another item that a previous government very successfully used was an economic advisory committee to the Premier. That had a variety of members from around the world who came and gave volunteer time. Yes, they were reimbursed for their travel expenses, but they gave volunteer time. And I'll tell you what. We had top-quality people. Phenomenal ideas came out of that and had tremendous input into some of the growth and benefits that we enjoy in British Columbia today.

We need infrastructure improvements. All you need to do is to drive from Chilliwack to Vancouver some day or Vancouver out to Chilliwack in the afternoon and experience at least an hour of excess time that you will take in the morning to get across the Port Mann Bridge and into Vancouver. Although we don't want to centre everything in Vancouver, Vancouver is a critical part of our lives, and the infrastructure to get us to, in and out and around Vancouver is, frankly, atrocious. Even here in Chilliwack we have highway overpasses that desperately need to be improved. We have on-ramps and off-ramps and various access issues that are absolutely critical. Go to the Lickman Road exit. It's one of the heaviest used truck stops in the Fraser Valley, and it's atrocious sometimes to see the lineup of vehicles there. You cannot ask people to do things when you make it very onerous on them.

We need to rework some of the regulatory codes and change the focus to providing a friendly atmosphere for business. Change the mandates of some of the acts and some of the bodies we have. For instance, the Land Reserve Commission's mandate needs to be completely restudied. Chilliwack and the Fraser Valley have been absolutely strangled by the Land Commission sitting in Burnaby and thinking they can make better decisions than local community governments. Our good friend just spoke for the University College of the Fraser Valley. It's atrocious for the Land Commission to completely annihilate parking requirements that the university college needed. That is a case in point. Students have to park unsafely out on roads and leave their vehicles where it simply isn't acceptable at all.

Your government, I know, is addressing the Human Rights Commission, the Labour Code and a variety of other issues, but I would suggest to you that you need to take even more intense looks at some of those issues. What I'm saying to you is this. Government only has so much money. For any dollars that you tax

If the cost of doing business in British Columbia is too onerous, other business people and myself will take our business elsewhere. If you make it friendly for us, we will invest here. If you make it so that the world can say, "Yes, comparatively speaking, I can enjoy the climate and the social structure of British Columbia, but I can at the same time be competitive with my business costs; I'll come and invest there," then we can enjoy higher rates of employment and all the other benefits that flow from that.

I'm all in favour of budgets, and I'm all in favour of judicious spending, but the Chamber of Commerce would like to say this. We need a proper balance in the business environment. Let's change the paradigm. You're doing a lot toward that already, and I would just urge more. Thank you very much.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Rogers, for your presentation this morning. I will look to members of the committee, if there are any questions. Seeing none, you have done a wonderful job. Thank you for your presentation, Stan, and have a great day.

At this time we will go to Mr. John Simpson with the Fraser Valley East Brain Injury Association.

J. Simpson: I hadn't prepared anything for this because I didn't have time. I want to talk and give you some ideas, I hope, on how to generate more money to meet the needs of those that are without funding. Briefly, with brain injury there are somewhere around 12,000 new cases a year, roughly 450 in the Fraser Valley alone. The Fraser Valley East Brain Injury Association corresponds exactly with the Fraser regional health district.

People with funding are those that were injured in a motor vehicle crash or at work or through a criminal injuries act or if they happened to have private insurance, which is really very rare. It's very interesting, in my experience, that of those that have private insurance, very few have anything to do with rehabilitation. It really is amazing why employers and unions don't negotiate better rehabilitation agreements in the negotiation for benefits plans.

At any rate, those that are covered by workers comp are well protected. Some of those — and I say some — with ICBC are well protected, particularly if they have a tort claim. There's ongoing funding. What has been happening over the last few years is that the specialized head injury unit at ICBC has been out there literally denying people the contract rights under part 7, and I have asked Human Rights to investigate them. What is happening is that these people are now going on welfare and costing taxpayers money. As you probably know, Human Resources do not have any subrogation rights, so they don't get back any money they may pay out in the interim, even if that person eventually gets a settlement.

There's one man I spoke to recently — although I've retired, I still get these phone calls — who the bank had foreclosed on. He has no benefits. His wife has left him. He has literally nothing, all because of the behaviour of that unit at ICBC. I see that the Solicitor General is talking about changing criminal injuries, taking it away from the present plan and moving it to a separate setup. It has taken many years to educate the criminal injuries section of WCB on the needs of brain injury, and basically things have been going very well for the last few years. I don't know why there's a need to make this change.

I'm going to get into some suggestions for changes, but I want to show you another example of an absolutely gross waste of taxpayers' money. This review of brain injury was done in 1987 and '88. It was actually issued in October 1988. That's 13 years ago. I'm not sure how much it cost then. This report was just the draft. It was just finished in August of this year. It accomplishes absolutely nothing. It didn't achieve one single objective it was set out to do. The other one is better, and they did implement some things. This one cost $400 million, which was just thrown down the drain. It hasn't done a thing. These are the kind of areas that government has to change. It's absolute waste. If you go back to the one in 1988 and follow the guidelines, there would be no problems. Just follow the guidelines done, probably at a fraction of the cost, in 1988.

There are other areas where there could be relatively simple changes. I'm talking now about auto insurance. It doesn't really matter whether or not you privatize ICBC or whatever as long as they follow the same rules. I'm not talking no-fault. If the limits were enlarged for part 7 — in other words, no-fault — to take care of future care, increased to $1 million or $500,000, something in that neighbourhood, you would not have people running out of money and going back on the system, which does happen in some cases. Again, I'm not talking no-fault. People who have a tort claim can still sue for general damages in that area, but if the areas of income loss, rehabilitation and, most importantly, future medical care were taken care of under part 7, it would save the province money.

The other issue is that ever since I came to Canada in '66, the insurance industry has always repaid hospital programs, and I'm strictly talking hospital programs. If there's enough money left after a case is settled, ICBC or whoever the insurer is repays the government for that amount of time the person is in hospital. That money doesn't go to the regions. I know that. I'm not even sure it goes back to Health, but it goes back to the government.

In 1986 I made a proposal that fines be split between research and rehabilitation and medical costs for those uninsured people. At that time, I think Mel Couvelier was the Finance minister, and he thought it was a great idea. This has been going on in the States for years. Well, as you know, the Rick Hansen Institute does get some money through that, but Vancouver alone raises between $30 million and $40 million a year in fines. If even part of that went to the Vancouver-Richmond health region, it would solve a lot of prob-

lems. Instead, some goes to research and probably gets piddled away in general revenue.

There are ways, with some adjustments, of providing more money to the government to meet the needs of not only brain-injured people but other uninsured people who are injured through some incident, be it a car crash or whatever, where they've run out of money. That shouldn't be the case, but there should be some way of providing funds for those people who have no other insurance.

One of the other areas of brain injury is that there's now very good research, Canadian research, that shows that many people with even a mild brain injury do develop psychiatric problems. There's also very clear research that shows that there's early aging in brain injury, and I've got many examples of this. People have been able to work into their forties, but after that, some relatively mild incident will cause them to literally go off the rails, and they're no longer employable. Eighty percent of those in provincial and federal prisons have had a brain injury, very many times on top of fetal alcohol syndrome or some other learning disability. One way or the other, taxpayers are paying for many, many people who've had brain injury, be that it in federal or provincial institutions or anything like that.

I think it is time to not ask why, as the late President Kennedy said many times, stolen from George Bernard Shaw, but ask, why not? Why can't there be changes? I've been dealing with bureaucrats — poor fellows — with ICBC and right up to…. It's always the same people. I mean, politicians come and politicians go, but bureaucrats go on forever, and they really cannot see any other way of addressing problems, because they're so set in their ways. Why can't ICBC refund hospital programs in full? Why can't ICBC cover all medical and rehabilitation and future care expenses under part 7? So many fall back on the system, and I think with the changes in fines, it can help the provincial government as a whole, and it can also help the regions.

I realize that brain injury is a very latecomer to those needing funding, but it is a very significant need. It's catastrophic in families. The system, in many ways, pays one way or the other way — as I said, in the criminal system or through mental health because of the psychiatric problems that develop from brain injury. The amount that has been given to the provincial brain injury program on an annual basis is a measly $10 million. That's what this report was meant to do: how to regionalize this measly $10 million. There have to be changes. I think the money is there. You have to have new thinking and not sit back and have the system go on as it has done for the last many, many years. There are my comments.

L. Mayencourt: I just want to get something straight. You're saying that we spent a quarter of a million dollars for a report that told us how to divide $10 million ten ways?

B. Kerr: I'm just looking at the report you've given us here, and you're saying that there were 450 new cases each year in the Fraser Valley, yet your organization services 280 people. I'm just wondering: is it lack of funding? Have the others dropped off, or is it because you don't do all the work? Are there other organizations? What's the reason?

J. Simpson: There are a number of reasons. It basically is that the people we serve mostly are those without funding. The balance is made up probably of people who are well funded through ICBC or WCB.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Are there any further questions by members of the committee? Seeing none, Mr. Simpson, I would like to thank you for taking the time to come out and present to our committee.

Okay. We will move on to our next presenter. Is Michelle Tessier with us? Good morning. Welcome.

M. Tessier: Thank you. My name is Michelle Tessier. I live in the Sardis area. I'm 32 years old, a single woman. I moved out to the Chilliwack area a couple of years ago to care for my mother. I'm here as an individual and as a member of the community to speak on the prebudget cuts. The majority of my work experience has been in the social services sector, so this is where I'm pulling a lot of my experiences from.

I just wanted to share my concern about the proposed budget cuts, especially to the social services sector and the core services they provide in the communities. In my job I see such a wide variety of problems and tragedies that happen to families from all walks of life, from all economic levels. I see so many barriers that individuals have for lack of opportunities in their past, and I see how vitally important the programs on supporting people in the communities are to their success and contributing back to the communities.

In light of the world economy and pending recession — the drop in our tourism, which has been such a major revenue source for this province, the drop in forestry — taking a look at cuts to government employees and direct public service employees. It dramatically affects the economy and the moneys that are spent. The average wage that a public servant has is about $58,000 a year with benefits. All of us living in the communities that we work in take our wages or our moneys and put them back into our local economies. Without this and with all the other layoffs I'm concerned about how people are going to support themselves. How are families going to survive? How can the citizens of our community and our province better their lives and have a fighting chance to better their lives without some of the programs we have in place for this?

I was reading the newspaper the other day, talking about the letter that was sent out to all the employable welfare clients saying: "You must be looking for work."

In 1982, when we had all the major cuts to government service, the Ministry of Social Services and other community sector services were cut dramatically. We're a lean, mean machine. We do business in the sense that we take a look at who's eligible for assistance and who isn't — extenuating circumstances. We're fiscally responsible, especially the employees that are working on the front lines, and we do our best to ensure that public moneys are not wasted in any way, shape or form.

For our employable people we have everything in place to try and get rid of the systemic barriers they face on a daily basis. The services that are provided to the people in the community are not really shared in the media too much — all the other people that benefit on a short-term basis from just that little bit of support and help they need to get back on their feet.

I think about our emergency social services and how apartment buildings catch fire on Saturday at midnight. You have 50 or 75 families with just the belongings on their backs who have nowhere to go. It's the government-funded programs that help these people put roofs over their heads, put some clothes on their backs and support and establish them until they can seek out other means of financial support.

I also think about some of the other programs that are in place, like the liaising the Ministry of Human Resources does with the Attorney General. They support inmates that have recently been released, focus on them and give them the support they need to be reintegrated into the community. I'm speaking as an individual, so I don't have statistics or specific figures or reports that I can submit to the committee, but I am aware that it has helped a tremendous number of people get the support they need to overcome their barriers. It could be drug and alcohol issues; it could be abuse. There are people who belong to family units who are not allowed to return to the family home. They have to start a life all over again. Our programs are there to support these people to help themselves, and it happens quite often. We have great success in getting people back into the workforce, helping them overcome issues they have so they can be successful, participating individuals in the community. It also helps decrease our crime rate, as they don't have to be looking for alternative means of income to support themselves after they've been released.

That's why I wanted to come here: to share how important it is that we support the people in our community, especially when they're under extreme hardship. I understand we need to look at budget cuts, and it's going to be tough. We all acknowledge and realize that. I'm just making a plea. If there are other options to be considered or a lesser rate as opposed to a deep slash in our programs, it would be much more beneficial to all of us in the communities to sustain a decent lifestyle.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Michelle. Your presentation was excellent.

J. MacPhail: Thank you, Ms. Tessier. You said you were looking after your mom. Is she in an institution?

M. Tessier: No. She became very sick with a supervirus. She was living out here on her own, and then she was in a car accident which incapacitated her as well. With her being in her home and not having a lot of family members around, at work I put in for a transfer to the Sardis office so that I could care for my mother.

J. MacPhail: That's very admirable. I'm not sure whether Chilliwack is feeling the effects of the downturn in the lumber industry yet, but I would expect the community may be doing that. I also know that people in the softwood lumber industry now are probably eligible for employment insurance benefits. Do you know if there is a coordination that's happening between the EI offices for support with income assistance in terms of training, particularly for our people working in the lumber industry?

M. Tessier: I know that in the federal government, HRDC has forest renewal programs and funding for that. There's strict criteria for a lot of people, so there are a lot of employees in the forestry industry who don't fall into being eligible for those programs. The Ministry of Human Resources has a reach-back qualification for participants who have exhausted their unemployment and are still unemployed. There are specific moneys and programs for training for them so that we can get them trained in other occupations and have them fully employed again. We do have a turnaround program, so to speak, that does help participants get back into different job fields and different work experience.

M. Tessier: Yes. We've found that we've had quite a good succession of people. There's quite a large number of people who are have received EI benefits and then are eligible for income assistance. They are funnelled and focused on for the retraining, and I know that in the Chilliwack area we haven't seen that much of an impact on forestry. I have noticed, coming out to this area from the lower mainland, there is a significant amount of migration within the province of people wanting to get to smaller community lifestyles and hoping there are alternate sources of income for them.

B. Penner: Just a follow-up to Ms. MacPhail and her question about forestry and the impact on Chilliwack. The forestry sector in Chilliwack has been hard hit for the last number of years through all kinds of changes. That's why you're not seeing a particular reaction right now to the softwood lumber quota situation. It's primarily because we've taken our hits with the spotted owl, with protected-area strategies and other things that have caused major layoffs throughout the Fraser Valley. The forestry industry, even before the

softwood lumber issue arose this summer, was really just a shadow of its previous self. There's a lot of work to be done to get that industry back on its feet — softwood lumber issue or not.

M. Tessier: Yeah. I do find that the people I come across and try to help — a lot of them are not so much softwood lumber, like you were saying — are more in-the-field workers, the tree toppers. A lot of logging truck drivers find themselves unemployed with a specific skill, not knowing how to apply that to any other sort of job.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): I see no further questions at this time, Ms. Tessier. I'd like to thank you for coming forward and presenting to our committee today. Thanks very much.

We will move on. I will call on Dean Johnson, if Dean is with us, and Dale. Welcome.

Dean Johnson: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for giving us the opportunity to come here today. I'm a small business man in the community, and there are some issues I would like to address. I'll try to do it as quickly as possible, not to take up too much of your time. I want to be as short and to the point as possible to give you some idea as to how a small business owner has adjusted to the current economic situation and what implementations we would like to see government take.

We are running lean and mean in order to survive until things improve. I want the government to also reflect that attitude. We cannot allow the bureaucracy to dictate to government what steps have to be taken. Small business perceives dealing with government agencies as a fruitless task strewn with many obstacles. We want the civil service to be reduced and streamlined into an efficient vehicle for doing business. In this day and age of high-tech communications there is no reason for the handling and issuing of applications, for doing government business, taking as long as it does. We should be able to contact a central clearinghouse for government business and at least be directed to the appropriate people.

I want to know why government agencies are not using B.C. businesses to provide services. It is imperative that we use B.C. business wherever and whenever possible. I can see absolutely no point in buying services from Ontario, for example, when we can provide the same services in B.C. by a small business at a competitive, if not lower, rate.

I would like to give you an example of what has happened to us as a company. Our company specializes in programming web applications for the Internet. When the previous government announced that it was going to establish a bed registry for the Ministry of Health, we were immediately interested, as this was the type of work we could do. My first step was to contact the Ministry of Health — in fact, the Minister of Health — and inform him that we had some exciting new ideas and that we were capable of providing this service at a cost of one-third to one-half of what they were budgeting. We received absolutely no response. We continued to get through to some ministry official who could at least steer us to someone who would listen. Not once did we get a response from them.

We have researched the bed registry requirements through a number of health care professionals in the province and proceeded to develop a program called Bed Check at our own expense. We have asked our MLA, Barry Penner, to put us in contact with the appropriate people. I should note that he responded immediately to that request.

What this small example does show us is there's a need for a system to track what is available in British Columbia, a better system for directing queries, government personnel to be open to new ideas for running more streamlined and cost-efficient departments, and government agencies that would not be in competition with private business.

If private business can provide the service, then it should be the first option. The civil service has developed many in-house departments that work in direct competition with small business at a more substantial cost than if it were done out of house. These should be eliminated right away. I feel that reduction in government must start at the top with the replacement of these officials with people that are able to make the decisions necessary for the changing world we live in.

B.C. residents gave you a mandate unprecedented in the history of our province to make these changes. Yes, it takes courage to change. Some people are going to be hurt, but the key to prosperity in this province is a positive change. The citizens will understand that these times require tough decisions, and they will stand by you if you implement them. The key is you must be able to show them the plan and the intent of these changes.

Some groups still do not understand how seriously these changes need to be implemented. I will single out the teachers in particular. I do not mean any disrespect to these fine people. However, they feel they need a 34 percent raise in a profession that has kept pace and surpassed other provinces. As a small business owner I can only look enviously at the wage and benefits package they currently have. I would just love to have their time off and benefit package. It is time they woke up to the reality of the situation. Their services are well compensated now. They are fortunate to have what they do.

In conclusion, I support government initiatives related to an immediate reduction in the civil service, with a target of upper management being cut in direct correlation to the percentage of civil servants released; a moratorium on public sector raises until four consecutive quarters of growth are achieved; a freeze on essential services — natural gas, electricity, ferry rates, tuition, etc. — until growth is achieved; an overhaul of WCB to reduce and streamline its procedures; eliminating any government duplication, amalgamating departments and personnel; making a government policy to use B.C.–based services whenever possible.

I want to see my province return to its former position as a "have" province. You have the citizens and the mandate to make this happen.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Johnson, for your presentation. I will look to members of the committee if there are any questions.

B. Penner: Thanks, Dean, for your presentation. I'm concerned, though, by your comment that you still have not been hearing anything back from the Ministry of Health on your Bed Check proposal? Can you tell me: has that program already been initiated by government? Is it too late, in other words, for you to bid on that program?

Dean Johnson: We are still in the process of beta-testing the program. We don't want to demonstrate it to the ministry until all the bugs are out of it. We're very close to that, though, at this point.

Dale Johnson: I think the point is we haven't been relayed the information to know if that is in fact the case: that it's too late for us to even be in a position to bid on this. Like my dad said, there just hasn't been enough information passed between us to know exactly what the status is, where anything stands.

B. Penner: I'll take another stab at getting a response for you from the Ministry of Health.

B. Kerr: I'm concerned about one of the comments you've got here on page 4, where you're saying that in-house programs would cost more than outsourcing. Yesterday we had an IT fellow speak to us, and he indicated that outsourcing in fact would be more expensive. I'm just wondering if you have any empirical knowledge of this or if this is just your opinion. In what area would you say it would be cheaper to outsource?

Dean Johnson: I have to apologize. I'm completely deaf, and I'm lip-reading. He is my ears.

Dale Johnson: I'll answer on his behalf. It's our personal opinion — I guess we're speaking on behalf of ourselves — that we could do a lot of things at a lower cost.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Well, now seeing no further questions, I would like to thank you gentlemen for coming and presenting to our committee today.

We will move on in our list of presenters. I will move to Mr. Barry Neufeld, who is with the Chilliwack Restorative Justice and Youth Diversion Association. Good morning.

B. Neufeld: Good morning to the members of the committee, and thank you for this opportunity to make this presentation to you. I am chairman of the Chilliwack Restorative Justice and Youth Diversion Association, and I also happen to be a founding member of the newly-established Abbotsford Restorative Justice program.

First of all, let me explain what restorative justice is. It's a group of volunteers dedicated to providing the motivation and personal help to keep a first-time offender from becoming a repeat offender. They will help an offender understand the impact of his or her action on the community, the victim, the family and him/herself. They assist the offender to make things right by making amends directly to the victim wherever possible. They will also help an offender and his or her family to access other help in the community.

What is the goal of our association? The goal is to hold young offenders accountable for their actions while reconnecting them to the community. This is done by bringing together a group of volunteers with a variety of life experiences to work one-on-one with youth in conflict with our community.

The objectives of our association are to deal with offences promptly, which is usually done within two to six weeks; to increase the offender's awareness of the way in which his or her action has affected the victim; to invite the victim to participate in the process and the consequences; to let the offender and his or her family know that the community as a whole is concerned about his conduct and to provide for restitution where appropriate; to follow up on an individual basis; to involve the community in the solution; and to leave the offender with a feeling of self-worth.

How do we remedy a problem? With youth a community accountability panel is held in private with the victim, if possible, the parents and the offender. The committee, after input from all parties, then decides on the consequences in the form of a diversion agreement. The process is the same for adults, but the offender's parent is not required to attend. All offenders sign a voluntary contract that may include any of the following: attending a family conference, restitution, apology, writing an essay, volunteer service work, attending counselling, attending support groups, viewing a video.

How do we ensure that the contracts are fulfilled? A volunteer mentor is assigned to monitor each case and report the progress. Moreover, each business, church or community organization that accepts an offender also provides supervision and mentoring. Successful completion means a fresh start.

Does our association provide any training? Yes. Members receive orientation and training from a number of community service providers, including probation, Ministry of Children and Family Development, University College of the Fraser Valley and mental health. We have at this time nearly 30 volunteers, and all of them have committed themselves to working

with youth for at least two years. The Justice Institute of B.C. is beginning a new training program this week, as a matter of fact.

The results. Our work with youth has been well received in our community and has enjoyed favourable reports in the local media. The RCMP are especially supportive. In our three years of operation we have dealt with nearly 500 youth who would otherwise have gone through the traditional system.

The youth feel they are valued when volunteers demonstrate true caring by offering them guidance and assistance. Youth respond more readily to a volunteer, who is not being paid to take care of them. Our dedicated volunteers experience a sense of doing something meaningful and worthwhile, and they are becoming increasingly aware of the needs of the youth in our community.

Restorative justice fosters an increased sense of community as we all work together to meet the needs of youth. Our staff and members have been able to encourage and guide the formation of similar restorative justice organizations in our neighbouring communities of Abbotsford, Hope and Agassiz. This afternoon representatives from restorative justice organizations in Abbotsford, Mission, Chehalis, Harrison-Kent, Hope, Chilliwack and the Stó:lo nation are meeting for a regional meeting at the University College of the Fraser Valley. We are all united in our desire to deliver justice in a restorative manner.

Is restorative justice widely accepted? We know our program is an efficient and efficacious way of dealing with youth in conflict with their community. Nearly 50 communities in B.C. have applied for start-up funding for similar programs. It is seen as an effective method of dealing with bullying behaviour, and we are strongly endorsed by most school districts and the B.C. Teachers Federation. Similar organizations have existed in communities in all provinces and territories of Canada for several years.

Restorative justice projects are strongly supported in principle by the RCMP, the federal justice ministry and the United Nations. Internationally there are many government-funded projects, and in countries like New Zealand the whole youth justice system is organized on this model.

The B.C. Attorney General sponsored a provincewide video conference on restorative justice in June of 1997. Hopes were raised at the time, but the government lost interest, and we have been forced to make do with no tangible support since then.

What other alternative is there? Well, the court and legal system remains as an inefficient but very powerful way to deal with the most severe and serious conflicts in society. However, the court is an antiquated system which is not based on the goals of win-win. There has to be a winner and a loser in court. The courts are very impersonal, because crime is viewed as an offence against the Crown. The victim is not seen as an active participant in doing justice. The rights of the accused often supersede the rights of the aggrieved.

Due to scheduling problems, the backlog in the court system can take well over a year to dispose of a case. Waiting for trials wastes a tremendous amount of time for victims, witnesses, police and other community members, such as educators. Some provincially funded programs have highly educated workers with innovative programs and expensive equipment, but the youth cannot access these programs until they have been convicted several times and are ordered by the court to attend.

The board of the Chilliwack Restorative Justice and Youth Diversion Association wanted me to remind you that this is a local initiative supported mainly by municipal funds and charitable donations. We have been warned that the city of Chilliwack may not be able to continue to do this. We are exploring other methods of funding — perhaps even bingo. That seems an uncertain source of funds right now. Bingo activity would take time away from direct service to youth. We have received no assistance from the province since our original start-up grant three years ago.

We can show that our methods significantly reduce crime and create a positive community. However, when we asked for fiscal support, the Ministry of Attorney General referred us to the former Ministry of Children and Families, who in turn stated that it was the Attorney General's responsibility. Now that the justice system is spread out over three ministries, including the Solicitor General, we are very concerned that we will never secure provincial support for our organization.

Our request to you. We ask that you please establish a provincial office with the ability to provide funding support and coordination for our work and the work of similar organizations in B.C. Although our program involves local community volunteers, we believe justice is a provincial responsibility. We have done a preliminary study to show how much more cost-effective our program is than the traditional method of processing a youth through the court system. Our director is off sick today and was not able to be here, but I intend to go and pick up a copy of that report for you. Just to give you an idea, the traditional court system costs over $2,500 to process a young person through court for their final disposition. We can do a much more effective job for less than $200.

K. Krueger: That sounds like a wonderful program, Mr. Neufeld. I may have missed it. Did you mention the rate of recidivism? Is there much experience of people having to go back through the system?

B. Neufeld: The RCMP has done a study that will be part of what I will be handing in to you. They take a very conservative approach to what is recidivism. They consider a youth a recidivist if they just have dealings with them — not charges, not convictions — if they just run into them in some conflict in the community. The RCMP tell us that 80 percent of the youth that go through our program are never seen again by the RCMP in any activity in the community.

B. Penner: I'd like to thank Mr. Neufeld for his presentation and for his involvement in the community. Panel members may not know it, but Mr. Neufeld is also an elected member of our school board and has served in the past, I believe, as chairman of the school board. I've had the privilege of working with him in the justice system as well, in his role as a probation officer.

Just to let you know, I did meet, along with Chilliwack councillor Sharon Gaetz and Inspector Jack Scrine, with the Attorney General about this specific program a couple of weeks ago during UBCM in Vancouver. The Attorney General has certainly indicated that he considers this program to fall within the auspices of his ministry. He's very supportive of the program but — no surprise — is facing a shortage of funds, so he's not able to make a commitment currently about increasing the $5,000 start-up grant. I think he feels very aware of the fact that more resources would be helpful, but at present they're not available.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Any further questions? Seeing none, Mr. Neufeld, I would like to thank you for coming forward this morning and putting your presentation to the committee. I can assure you that yours, as well as all presentations, will be given due consideration in the development of our report. Again, thank you very much.

J. Davidson: I'd like to thank you for taking the time to come and listen to us. I know you're very busy people. I'm the president of the B.C. Road Builders Association. The B.C. Road Builders Association, founded in 1966, is comprised of the hard-driven and competitive free spirits who opened up this province and who continue to make it possible for goods, services and tourists to move about the province. We would like you to recognize that in British Columbia the strength of our economy has always been tied to transportation.

Here's what we think. B.C. must create the tools to attract, support and retain human and investment capital. B.C. cannot be passive in an increasingly competitive environment. B.C. must build on the foundation of a traditional resource-based economy as well as move forward with a diversified knowledge-based economy. B.C. must strengthen the transportation infrastructure that links our province to continental and global markets.

Transportation and highway infrastructures are an essential component of our economy. Regional productivity absolutely depends on the effectiveness of the transportation system. One out of three jobs is dependent on trade. The trade corridors in B.C. are prone to excessive levels of traffic congestion. Traffic congestion and delays increase the cost of transporting goods and the cost of doing business. When it takes you an hour to get across town, just attending a meeting costs twice as much today as it did yesterday. The poor condition of the Trans-Canada Highway is driving truck traffic to detour south through Alberta and into the United States. We're losing revenue on that corridor.

Tourism opportunities will never be maximized as long as our most supernatural assets are hard to reach or are inaccessible. Residents and visitors alike need a safe, comfortable and affordable transportation system to access the natural splendours of our province.

We do not have a competitive north-south route for the northern communities through the Okanagan to access our markets in the United States. Throughout British Columbia our highway and side road access to our resources is inadequate and failing. One of our members who made his company in Prince George is corduroying roads just to keep school buses moving so they can deliver kids to the school. We haven't done that since the 1940s.

Efficient access to and from our ports is nonexistent. We're not competitive. Highway-related accidents and injuries tax our already overburdened health care system and negatively impact our quality of life. B.C. must support and promote the advantages and global competitiveness of this region. Please consider that. Before we can have the health care and education programs the public seems to be demanding, we must first have in place a strong economy to pay for it. To build such an economy, we need a viable and competitive transportation system.

I saw in the announcement that this was scheduled to close at 2 o'clock and that you were re-forming in Surrey at 5 o'clock. Today that's a real tight schedule. You'll be lucky if you get there. When you hit the freeway at 4:30 p.m., you're going to be stopped going to the Port Mann Bridge.

J. MacPhail: Thank you, Mr. Davidson. My riding is Vancouver-Hastings, so I have Hartland Court in my riding. Do you participate in the Gateway Council?

J. MacPhail: Okay. I agree with you wholeheartedly about access to the port. One of the issues we face there is the agency of the port authority and their relationship with the city of Vancouver — my particular area of the port access. Have you been having ongoing discussions with TransLink and/or the city of Vancouver?

J. MacPhail: I'd be interested in a copy — that's all — if you have made one.

J. Davidson: Pat Jacobsen addressed our conference in Penticton two weeks ago, and we sat down with our board and talked about her problems and how we could help.

J. Davidson: That would be good. Our position is that the Ministry of Transportation should be given the power and authority to put together a vision of the transportation system for B.C. and that all the parts should fit that division so that TransLink or the port don't go off on their own but there is a complete plan for B.C.

K. Krueger: Thank you, Mr. Davidson, for your presentation. Certainly we have inherited a hidden deficit in the condition of our roads throughout British Columbia — one of the less obvious deficits, unless you use the roads frequently as people in the interior, particularly, have to. Has your organization done any assessment of the anticipated costs to catch up with the rehabilitation and maintenance of existing highway infrastructure?

J. Davidson: We have some numbers on B.C., especially with the Trans-Canada Highway section of B.C., the corridors. I don't have those with me. I would like to tell you, though, that our road system is about 15 years old. At 12 years it costs about $60,000 a lane-kilometre to repair. At 18 years it costs $300,000. At 24 years it costs over $1 million to rehab and rebuild the road. We missed the first threshold, and we're on our way to the $300,000 cost. The economics of maintaining the asset we have are very important to consider when you're putting together your budget. It's a very expensive province to build in. We have some good roads, but we have to keep them.

K. Krueger: So you're saying that the degeneration of roads occurs in a geometric progression rather than simple arithmetic.

K. Krueger: And we're high up on the curve through lack of maintenance. You spoke of our need for more capital projects. I've been hearing for years that the Trans-Canada traffic is turning left at Alberta and heading down to the States to complete its run west, which, of course, affects our ports and everything else. Has your association had any assessments of what use the priority capital projects are when dealing with those problems?

J. Davidson: Our association tries to stay out of picking. We're an advocate for a system. Certainly repairs are needed from Cache Creek to the border and from the Okanagan down to the Washington border. We need a south perimeter road and a new bridge. There's a ton of things. The choosing of what projects to go ahead with has to consider what economic development that will bring. They can't be for convenience or for someone's riding or for a Whistler convention or the Olympics. If you want to fix that road, it has to be because it's economically viable and will contribute to the province, and Squamish and Pemberton will develop. I think that'll be true. The economics of fixing these roads has to be very high up in the consideration. That's the government's job. That's not our job.

K. Krueger: Speaking of that job, the source document that the committee's working with lays out the tremendous financial problems the government faces, with a debt that more than doubled in the last ten years and almost $3 billion a year in interest to service it. We know what you're saying is true: we not only have to repair what we own that hasn't been maintained and repaired, but we need to build new projects.

We had some interesting presentations to caucus from organizations that are interested in financing infrastructure — some kinds of public-private partnership approaches, lease-backs and that sort of thing. Does your association receive input from financing groups that are interested in partnering in public sector infrastructure projects?

J. Davidson: We do, and it's our members that have done, or have attempted to do, the three projects that are on the books now. We are committed to putting on a conference this year on public-private partnerships. We see our position as partnering with government in trying to get these projects done. People have to understand, though, that if it's a public-private partnership, it's going to cost a little more, and it still costs money. It's going to be paid in tolls instead of taxes; that's all. So they're not free, even if somebody else is financing them, but we absolutely have to have some work done, and we're willing to help wherever we can.

B. Penner: I just have a question of clarification. For some of us who don't know the term or aren't familiar with it, could you describe what "corduroying" refers to?

J. Davidson: That's how they used to build the logging roads. They used to lay small trees or timbers across the road and then drive on that so they wouldn't sink.

J. Davidson: Above Prince George they're laying treated poles across sinking sections of road to give them enough support to take the buses.

J. Davidson: Yes. They should be dug out, reballasted and then gravelled again, but there's no money for it.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Mr. Davidson, I thank you for coming forward and giving your presentation to the committee today. You've hit on a key subject of transportation routes.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): There will be members coming and going — and thank you for noting that — throughout the hearings. As was indicated by our last speaker, the schedules are very tight, and there is no opportunity, other than individually leaving, to receive some lunch. If you do see that, it's certainly not out of rudeness from the committee members. It's out of necessity so we can get to our next meeting this evening.

G. Engh: Thank you for allowing me to speak here today. My name is Greg, and I go to jail for you almost every day. I'm a correctional officer employed by the provincial government and the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. My workplace is nearby at a maximum security institution, which on any given day holds some of the most dangerous offenders in the world.

Deep budget cuts in the ministries that are responsible for administrative justice mainly impact three groups. They are employees, offenders and the public. I would like to speak briefly on the impacts to each group, and that will conclude my presentation.

The first group, the employees, are impacted almost immediately. Correctional officers don't make widgets, crunch numbers or build roads. We quietly serve the public under extreme stress so that you may sleep safely at night. Year after year we are asked to do more with less, and the professionals who work in this field have, like soldiers in battle, followed orders and got the job done. With up to a 50 percent ministerial budget cut, we would be on the brink of utter chaos.

My co-workers are living, breathing people and are not just numbers on a spreadsheet. We fear budget cuts like a gazelle fears a hungry lion. Cuts eat away at our safety, working conditions and quite literally our jobs. Cuts make our workplace, which for many of us is our second home, into a jungle environment where uncertainty and danger reign supreme. Historically, when an officer's safety or job is at risk and there are negative labour relations, there is a collateral effect on the stability of the institution. This happens not by diabolical design but, rather, by something much simpler.

The occupation of correctional officer demands intense focus to control the sometimes hostile environment. If your job safety and working conditions are at risk, who could argue that being focused is even possible? Imagine for a moment a group of large men or women approaching you at your desk, workstation or office. They start smashing a nearby window, your computer and desk, make threatening gestures, light fires and finally take you hostage. I know the odds of this scenario happening to you are almost laughable, but this possibility is what correctional officers face at their workplace. Do we have riots every day? Well, of course not, but the staff who work in correctional centres know that budget cuts are the seed of unrest and violence.

The second group that is affected is the inmates. You might instinctively think, "Oh, well. They're criminals," but think again. It has been said that the civility of any community is measured best by studying how it treats its prisoners. I believe this to be true. These troubled people are someone's brother, sister, father, mother, aunt or uncle. Most, if not all, have real stories of poverty, child abuse and neglect. Many of them are indeed victims themselves. I might be considered by you to be an unusual source for this message, but I'll tell you one thing: there is no better person to ask about the scarred lives of inmates than a correctional officer.

Some might argue that cost-saving efficiencies are the way of the future, like new technology and ergonomic designs for correctional centres. Companies are more than happy to tell you that technology, usually in the form of cameras, can replace the need for staff. The camera, a solver of all crime — right? Well, cameras are nice for family picnics and weddings, but what does a camera really do? A recent study about cameras and crime in the UK reported that they had no effect on crime rates because the criminals simply didn't care. The use of cameras, which at first were meant only to assist staff in their work, has ironically become the archenemy of correctional officers and inmates because they are now used in place of staff.

In an institution often the cameras serve only to record violence against employees to review later in a training video. Cameras do not interact with inmates proactively to defuse fights and other institutional violence; provide a role model for inmates; break up fights; quell riots, which sometimes cost thousands of dollars worth of damage; evacuate staff and inmates during emergency situations like fire; maintain order and civility; provide guidance counselling and life-skills training; refer inmates to behavioural modification programs and psychologists; provide for a healthy and safe environment for inmates to live and learn; or stop and capture inmates attempting to escape. They don't do any of that.

Hollywood has portrayed prisoners as evil and distasteful people. I'm here today to tell you they are real people with real problems. Maybe they're not like you or me, but nevertheless, we have a responsibility to all of our citizens, even the ones who have done wrong.

The third and last group impacted by budget cuts to administrative justice is the public. Governments all over the globe are experimenting with privatization and what's known as warehousing to save costs of incarcerating people. The American warehousing model

involves long lockups, few programs, poor hygiene conditions, violence and mental hardship for inmates. Sure, it's cheaper in the short term, but what about the long-term costs to our communities?

Right now as I speak to you today, correctional officers are facilitating something known as core programming. Core programming is a set of educational modules taught by staff in the jail which is having a profound impact on inmates. The models include substance abuse management, violence prevention, breaking barriers, breaking the cycle of criminal behaviour and a program to stop spousal assaults.

One core program facilitator told me this story. In one of the units there was a group of inmates who were involved in an institutional disturbance and threatening to take a hostage. After the incident was over, they were all charged and sentenced to take the violence prevention program. After they completed the course, they were completely different people. Out of six, four of them didn't come back to jail. The other two did reoffend but didn't hurt anyone during their crimes. How could you possibly put a dollar figure on those results?

My apologies for this analogy, but we have a captive audience ready to learn skills that we sometimes take for granted. The number of people being incarcerated today has dropped since the core programming. Provincially today there are 25 percent fewer people doing time in jail. The U.S. has moved away from rehabilitation because the private sector failed at it and because of the short-term costs. The warehousing that is created by budget cuts creates angry, bitter, violent and sometimes deranged people who are all one day getting out of prison and into our communities. It's short-term gain for long-term pain.

Governments are also experimenting with privatization. Currently the Ontario government has contracted out to a private company called the Utah Management and Training Corp.. Privatization of administrative justice is the black plague which threatens citizens' security. Even the business community in the U.S. is calling for a return of state-run security at airports after the horrific act of terror on the citizens of New York. The private sector does many things very well, but public security is not one of them.

To summarize, we need only to listen to the name of the ministry that the government is proposing to cut from. Listen carefully to the first part of its name — the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. What we are proposing to do here is cut 35 to 50 percent of your safety. Think about what this would mean to your family. Think about the heinous crimes against women and children that are often the headlines of our daily papers. Think about what it would mean to cut your safety by 50 percent. Think about it.

My name is Greg, and I go to jail for you almost every day as a professional public servant looking after some of the most dangerous people on earth — like this one, right here in the paper. This is in one of our provincial jails. This isn't one of the terrorists. We need to ask ourselves if a budget cut will threaten my ability to do my job and what we are risking if it does.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Greg, I thank you for your presentation. When you speak from the heart, it certainly means a great deal. You've put some very interesting points forward here today. I will look to members of the committee.

B. Kerr: Greg, thank you very much for your presentation. Yesterday we had a presentation from somebody who worked in the justice system, and she indicated to us that the front-line workers weren't getting support. I assume you're a front-line worker. Is that the case?

B. Kerr: She said that one of the problems is that there are too many directors taking up the funds and not enough people actually down on the front line working. Do you have any comments with regards to that?

G. Engh: Well, I think it's important to adequately fund the public service no matter what position you hold. I would be lying if…some of my front-line workers haven't told me that we're top-heavy.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Are there any further questions from members of the committee? Seeing none, Greg, I want to thank you for your presentation, and I want to thank you for the job you do, on behalf of myself and the committee.

Our next presenter today is Steen Jespersen. Is Steen with us? Okay, we are ahead of schedule, so I will call on Bill Brinton from Valley Recovery Support Association. Is Bill with us?

We'll just keep working through the list. Would Katie Elder be here — the Sardis Secondary School Society of Debate and Politics? Good day. How are you? Welcome.

K. Elder: As I was introduced, my name is Katie Elder and I'm representing the Sardis Secondary School Society of Debate and Politics, of which I'm the founder and president. It's with great pleasure today that I present this report of suggestions for a realistic, affordable, and measurable fiscal plan. These views are a collaboration from our society, which consists of students in grades 10 through 12. With many policies facing changes in our province, many concerns have been expressed within our group, and fortunately we have this opportunity to voice our opinions.

Preparing this report has been challenging but inspiring. We look forward to seeing positive results from the current review process. Financial recovery demands immediate spending sustainability to improve all areas of the province. We need to be able to sustain levels of service, specifically education, even when the economy is in a downward period. Thus, stipulating that funding will increase when the econ-

omy warrants an increase is not enough to say that we will ever be able to afford increases to social services and social programs. More successful and effective ways of deriving revenues are the real key. This delicate balance between stimulating economic growth and ensuring that sufficient funds are available for social programs is understood and appreciated.

The long-term health of the economy will depend on the investment climate, employability rates by availability and attractiveness, as well as the employability of British Columbians. Constant public review, for example, by people who actually use services is necessary to maintain government accountability in these areas.

The government is the important link between the innovative and successful businesses of our province in that they must ensure there is enough funding reaching the public sector and that the public sector is at the same time providing the private sector with the needed human resources. The importance of this symbiotic relationship is, I believe, the basis for a truly successful economic partnership. Therefore, I will be focusing on the importance of post-secondary education as one of the most important factors to ensure that British Columbia has the leading economy in Canada.

Trade education is an important area where the government is a link between public and private sectors. Trades are an integral part of the economy and should be treated as such through institute funding. This is where our important universities and colleges come in. A generalization that I think many of us are faced with when considering post-secondary education is that we are better off going to a university than to a college. This is not necessarily true. Colleges may be able to provide a level of teaching and program diversity that cannot be provided at a university, but universities do have an important purpose in the economy. Research funding attracts individuals who can bring innovation and advancements to all sectors, and colleges are then able to provide people with the needed training to staff these innovations.

Keep intelligence here for British Columbia's post-secondary. Make it profitable to do business here in British Columbia with continual improvement, diversification and success in the B.C. economy. One of the important factors is the elimination of our deficit so that we can move forward in these areas. To think that we are forced to budget a much, much larger amount of money to pay interest on this debt than we can budget for post-secondary is very, very frustrating.

Specifically, to narrow down some key areas. Attractiveness of local post-secondary depends on the ease of moving on from high school. In my own school career planning is consistently emphasized and effectiveness is improving. We have a newly renovated career centre, popular apprenticeship programs as well as opportunities to advance academically. Students are now able to take advantage of a course at UCFV that allows them to complete first-year calculus while still attending high school. As well, our school has an amazing number of computer courses which allow students to gain valuable skills while saving the expense of taking these same courses at a university or a college.

The career preparation program is also maintained at amazing levels. A district employee arranges relevant work experience for students. Personally, having had the opportunity to take part in the financial management career preparation program, I've not only been able to narrow down my post-secondary goals, but I feel that being able to narrow them down will also save me time and money later on.

All of these programs are invaluable in the transition to post-secondary. However, the largest obstacle I still keep hearing about, when one is considering the move on to post-secondary education, is the financial difficulty. I feel the tuition cap is one of the most helpful ways of dealing with the financial problem. Provincial and district scholarships are also a great help, and the Passport to Education system is effective.

To improve all current programs, greater awareness needs to be achieved among students as well as among parents. Career choices are our social responsibility, but these incentives are definitely motivators. Any programs or assistance that is available need to be well publicized, because the perception that post-secondary education is not affordable and thus not an option for many is limiting the number of students who make the transition. Unfortunately, perception plays a role in planning for many people.

I feel reviews and restructuring are necessary on all levels of government to ensure that spending is efficient. However, the review process itself cannot be used as a cost-cutting measure; for example, the postponed building project at our own local university college. The construction project has been delayed for review for 18 months and may not even be able to continue here in Chilliwack. It may be true that the plans dictate change, but the staff and students of the school should not suffer due to the actual review process after the long struggle to get approval for this project, which is obviously very needed.

Knowing that we are maintaining quality, integrity and sustainability should be a credit to the review process, as it covers the many areas of policy. I would just like to review the areas we felt were important to touch on today: ensuring that the initial review process is efficient and completed promptly; efficient and viable restructuring of government services; sustainable and efficient spending; annual public review of services; maintaining the partnership between the public and private sector through strong post-secondary programs; and smoothing the transition to post-secondary school as well as maintaining post-secondary as affordable for everyone.

Moving ahead with the long term in mind is a priority of many youth today, and sharing this goal with the province is important to ensure that we move ahead together. As restructuring occurs and debt reduction becomes a reality, we look forward to building a successful province that provides an attractive

economic climate with services that provide quality, integrity and sustainability.

I hope our information will be helpful in developing the fiscal policy for the coming year. We will absolutely take advantage of the October 31 deadline to make further contributions to your fiscal policy review. On behalf of the society I would like to thank you for the opportunity to make this contribution. I welcome your questions and will answer them to the best of my ability.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Katie. I will look to members of our committee at this time.

K. Krueger: Thank you for a very impressive presentation. In your first paragraph I was worried that you were going to be taking the tack that deficits didn't matter. By the bottom of the first page I was reassured that you understand full well how much they matter and that the interest on the accumulated deficit is a tax on the future.

K. Krueger: That's something we're all struggling with, and I see that you're well aware that currently those carrying charges are higher than what we are able to budget for post-secondary education.

Then we have this convergence of problems we have to deal with, but we also have double-digit increases in Pharmacare costs. We have committed, because we share your opinion about the high priority of education, that we won't cut the Education budget. We also won't cut the Health budget. You just heard the presentation from a public servant very concerned about the public safety budget and, before that, from a road building expert on the deteriorating state of our roads and how we have to bring those up to speed in order to have our economic prospects improve. None of that is very positive stuff to work with.

K. Krueger: Hearing from young people, such as the ones you represent, with such a competent presentation for us, is something that makes us feel good.

What do you think about the notion that tuition assistance should be geared to scholastic achievement so that in theory those who are getting the best marks might well have free education and those who don't care to be applying themselves would be on their own until they shaped up? What do you think of approaches like that?

K. Elder: I think that approach is definitely an important one to take a stand on. People who work hard in school deserve to have financial breaks. For people who do make the commitment to work hard to overcome the financial obstacle through academic success, that's absolutely necessary.

It doesn't start and it shouldn't start at the high school level. This kind of preparation for academic excellence begins in early primary stages. That's why I feel all stages of education, from primary right through post-secondary, should receive a great amount of attention. You cannot say to someone in grade 10, when they haven't been paying attention up until that point, that unless they get straight As, they can't go to university or college. These kinds of goals need to be emphasized all the way along to be effective. I think that's absolutely a positive idea, but it cannot be implemented at a secondary level. These kinds of steps need to be taken from primary on to ensure that everyone who can take advantage of those programs is able to.

K. Krueger: One of our problems with the shortage of professionals in British Columbia — and we've been struggling with that in the nursing profession, and we're facing that all over the province with a shortage of doctors — is we haven't been graduating enough to meet our own needs. Another problem is that people graduate and immediately leave British Columbia for places that tax them less and pay them more. It's one step forward and six steps back when that happens. Even though the cost of education seems high to the student, it runs only about 15 percent of the actual cost. The taxpayer is paying the rest.

K. Elder: I understand we have the third-lowest tuition rates in Canada, and I also do feel the pull out of British Columbia once I have completed a degree. I'll absolutely say that factor is there. We need to stop the brain drain in British Columbia, because the key to a long-term successful economy is keeping the resources we have here for the long term.

K. Krueger: What are your ideas and your group's ideas on how to stop the brain drain?

K. Elder: One of the things I wanted to emphasize is that I understand the importance of eliminating the deficit. It affects many more things than people realize. The long-term credit rating of our province and interest rates that we pay are affected. We're just taking away revenues from other projects. While short-term programs may be hurt, the long-term outlook of the economy is the important thing to keeping students here. I'll honestly say that I have considered going away to Ontario for even my post-secondary. The economic climate just seems to be pulling me east.

The long-term forecast of our province is definitely a factor in stopping the brain drain and keeping students here. We need to know not only is the economy going to improve now but when I graduate from university in four years, it's also going to be maintained and is going to continue to grow and diversify.

B. Penner: Thank you, Katie, for an excellent presentation. You made some comments about college versus university. I was somewhat concerned to hear there still remains a perception among high school students that they're better off going immediately from high school to university as opposed to a stop at the Univer-

sity College of the Fraser Valley, for example. Any ideas why that perception persists? Is it simply the thinking that if something's further away, it must be better?

As you know, I attended the local college, and I found that compared to Simon Fraser or the University of Victoria, the teaching and level of instruction at the college was vastly superior to what I encountered elsewhere. Of course, earlier today we heard Skip Bassford from UCFV indicate that their tuition is exactly half of what it is at UBC. Do you have any insight on that?

K. Elder: I feel the opportunities people feel they will have if they have a piece of paper that says "UBC" on it will be much greater than one that says "UCFV." It's definitely, as I mentioned, perception of the opportunities. I don't think people feel the level of education they would receive at a college is going to be higher than that at a university. Although it's absolutely true, I don't think a lot of people know that. It's hard to change perceptions, but it can be done. I think more education and more information about the actual process and structure of the university colleges in the community will be able to get us on the right track.

B. Penner: If I could just close with this, I repeat my offer. If you would ever like me to attend your society of debate and politics at Sardis high school, I'd be pleased to do that.

L. Mayencourt: Thank you very much. I appreciate your presentation. I'm really glad you took the time to come here today.

When Mr. Bassford was here, he talked about the fact that they have about 4,000 people waiting to get into the University College of the Fraser Valley. There are lots of people that want to be there. He also commented on the tuition freeze and whether raising that tuition slightly would help. I think he used an example that would allow for 1,000 new students if you raised it to a certain level. How would you as a student feel about higher tuition fees? Would you pay them? Would you go somewhere else? How would you react? What about your friends?

K. Elder: Well, personally I feel the tuition rates in British Columbia are low and that's an excellent factor for keeping students here. I mean, I had geared the presentation towards saying that I personally felt fine about the level of tuitions as they are. The information I was getting back from society members is that it's still too expensive. They still feel that financial obstacles are the greatest for going on to post-secondary education. It's even kind of a joke that it costs less for tuition at UCFV than it does for books. I realize there's an imbalance there, but it's an imbalance that's going to have to be met with funding from other areas, for example.

It just goes back to the realization of the long-term economy. If kids' parents are getting better jobs as a result of even their ability to get a better education, they'll be able to afford to pay higher tuition prices to send their kids to universities and colleges. I think it's a reasonable consideration to raise tuition, but the funding in other areas needs to…. I'm not saying it has to be just from the government. Even endowments or other options should be considered, but it should be met from another area.

L. Mayencourt: In your opinion — I don't know if you've ever applied for a student loan, but maybe you have friends that have — how accessible are student loans?

K. Elder: From what I've heard, student loans are easily accessible. They are also too easily accessible, to the point where large debts are accumulated. That's one thing that's concerned me, that with our low tuition rates we still have such a high rate of debt when we're leaving university. As well, that results in a high rate of people defaulting on the debts. I honestly wanted to try and see if I could find some ways to think about that and maybe develop that thought more, but I honestly don't know. I do know it is relatively easy to get student loans, but being financially responsible for paying them back later is a problem that many people are having.

L. Mayencourt: There's going to be an education committee touring the province. Maybe you would want to expand on that to them. They'll be in this neighbourhood, I think. It would be great if you would do that.

J. MacPhail: Sorry for being out of the room. I've had a chance to read your presentation. My question is beyond the presentation. In your society what's the participation rate amongst young women and young men?

K. Elder: Well, the society was only started about two weeks ago, actually, in my school. The first meeting we held had over 30 students come out. It's relatively balanced between males and females. I was honestly really surprised how many people were interested. I can honestly say, though, that adding "Politics"— originally it started out to be a debate team — actually seems to deter a few people from the society.

K. Elder: There definitely has been a strong showing of people showing an interest. I have brought some members of the society today, just to become more involved. I think it was definitely an area that was lacking in our school — a more political emphasis on taking a role in the future of our province, particularly in the areas of education and our economy in general.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Katie, I would like to thank you for your presentation. It was very thoughtful and well presented. It's encouraging, and we will do our part to make sure that draw to the east is changed, and it will be a draw to the west. I thank you for your presentation.

At this time we will move on to our next presenter. I will call on Steen Jespersen.

S. Jespersen: Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, as you heard, my name is Steen Jespersen. I've been engaged in the practise of law in the Chilliwack area for more than 20 years.

I'm here today to give a little bit of input with respect to the proposed economies that the government is mooting at this point. It is my personal feeling that cutbacks in government spending are both necessary and long overdue. The last ten years were supposed to be, statistically, my peak earning years. These theoretical peak earning years coincided with an unprecedented time of economic growth and prosperity throughout the world, particularly North America. British Columbia was a notable exception to this positive economic trend.

It so happens that during that decade, it would appear that the provincial government did not have much interest in matters relating to the provincial economy. It is somewhat ironic to note that the end of the boom period coincides with a changing of the guard in Victoria.

As British Columbians we did not really benefit from the good times experienced by the rest of Canada and all of the United States. Instead of using the period of prosperity to put our financial house in order — as was done by Alberta, Ontario and numerous foreign jurisdictions — we are now forced to attempt to retrench our finances during a period of no growth or perhaps even recession.

Attempting to curb government spending during a time of recession will undoubtedly cause significant hardship, but I feel this doesn't alter the pressing need for basic reform of the way that government does business. It is unfortunate that the new government will be forced to remedy the errors of the past in a time of economic weakness.

As a small business person I can tell you that the climate for carrying on any kind of small business in British Columbia has deteriorated for more than the last ten years. The amount of bureaucratic red tape which we must deal with becomes increasingly unmanageable. The highest-paid employee in our small firm does virtually nothing but service the demands placed upon us by the various levels of government.

During this time we've also found it increasingly difficult to attract and keep quality employees. Our primary competition comes from the provincial government. We've consistently lost our top employees to government service as we're unable to compete with their wages and benefits, not to mention the less stringent demands of the work environment for the government.

I have often asked myself the question: "Is there any particular reason that government employees should be the leader in wages, benefits and job security?" In the past government employees earned much less than their counterparts in the private sector. This disparity has historically been explained by the fact that government employees have near-perfect job security. Government employees, as a rule, are not exposed to the vagaries of competitive business pressures. It's inexplicable to me that having such employment security, the public sector should also be wage and benefit leaders. All the more so in circumstances where the government, whether intentionally or unintentionally, directly competes for scarce labour resources with the private sector. I also find it ironic that the superior wages which are paid to public employees are derived directly from taxes that I and other British Columbians pay. The government is in effect putting me at a competitive disadvantage by outbidding me in the market with my own tax dollars.

We've all heard exhortations from both the provincial and federal governments to the private sector urging them to become more competitive in the way in which business is conducted. It appears to me that such efficiencies are always expected of the private sector and seldom of the public sector.

In my opinion, public employees are not entitled to preferential treatment. The government must find a way to increase its efficiency, and if this includes downsizing government agencies, so be it. If it means privatizing functions which could be more effectively performed by the private sector, then there is no justification for the government to continue operations in those areas.

Both the federal and provincial governments have done an excellent job of selling the concept of high taxes to the public at large, but the traditional carrots which have been held out to the public, such as health care and other core government services, are no longer valid. As baby-boomers enter late middle age, we increasingly find that the programs which constituted this carrot are now being modified, eliminated or subjected to clawbacks. Increasingly the tax burden becomes unacceptable to Canadians as a whole. This has many manifestations, not the least of which is the gradual submarining of a large portion of the economy. By that I mean that significant portions of the economy now operate under the surface and are not subject to government regulation or taxation. A government must understand that the process of taxation fundamentally depends upon the voluntary compliance of the people being taxed. Both federal and provincial governments are losing that cooperation.

Speaking for myself, I made a decision to lower my personal debt as much as possible, lower my expectations and work less. My wife understands this decision and supports it fully. I intend to teach my children, ages five and eight, that this is the way of the future.

The current level of taxation creates huge disincentives for hardworking Canadians, and likewise, it creates widespread tax avoidance and evasion. We must

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Jespersen. I will look to members of our committee, if there are any questions regarding your presentation.

B. Penner: I want to take a stab at one question. A number of years ago the previous government introduced a specific tax on lawyers services. I believe at the time the justification was that it would provide funding for legal aid for people in British Columbia who are disadvantaged. Do you have any comments on that tax, which was not applied to other professional services like accounting or architects or dentists?

S. Jespersen: Yes, I do. That tax was in fact described by our then Premier as a tax on lawyers, although in one way one could argue that the tax was in fact passed on to the ultimate consumer. To a large extent it was absorbed by the profession itself. Mr. Clark was right when he said that it was a tax on lawyers.

The tax itself appears to be what is in legal terms considered ad hominem; that is, a law directed at a specific individual or group of individuals. It is unfair insofar as solicitor's work which is performed by notaries public or chartered accountants doesn't attract the tax, putting the legal profession at a competitive disadvantage. In addition to that, the funds which were supposed to be earmarked to service the Legal Services Society, commonly referred to as legal aid, were never earmarked for that purpose and went into general revenues. Ultimately the government was not very forthcoming as to the purpose for which the tax was being levied, and that alleged purpose has never been followed through on.

I might just add, in conclusion, that I don't see how taxes on people who come to lawyers for their wills or estates have any logical connection with the fees that are paid with respect to defending people like drug traffickers. I don't see what the connection is on all legal services.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you. I see no further questions, Mr. Jespersen. I want to thank you for your presentation here this afternoon.

Our next presenter today is Bill Brinton with the BCGEU. Is Bill with us? Good afternoon.

B. Brinton: Greetings to you, Chairperson, and to all the members of the panel and to all other people. I'm a shop steward with the British Columbia Government and Service Employees Union. I've been asked by my union to come and speak today.

My name is Bill Brinton. I'm an addictions counsellor, and I work in the Fraser Valley at a large residential treatment facility. I've worked in the field of addiction for about 14 years. I'm a homeowner, and I've resided in the Fraser Valley area for the past 16 years. I pay my taxes, and I certainly watch how they're being spent, to the best of my ability. I've been personally affected by addiction. I became clean and sober myself 17 years ago.

The focus of my talk today is concerning the provincial government's position that funding be frozen for health care. The Health ministry funds our agency, so this causes me great concern. The main reason for my concern is how it will impact negatively on the clients who need the services we provide and will therefore impact on all British Columbians.

Over the last years there have been no increases in government funding in the area of addictions, at least not at the centre that I work for. This amounts to an already major cutback in funding. This seems to be a growing trend in the field of addictions. Over the years I have watched and listened to politicians talk of the many different ministries and what we could do to improve them. I cannot remember any politician — on TV, in the media, in the newspapers — ever uttering the words "addiction services." It is my opinion, at least, that you're clearly not taking addiction seriously. The money-eating, people- and family-eating, health care–eating monster of addictions is growing larger and larger. It consumes all areas of health care, welfare and corrections services in British Columbia. It impacts in a tragic way on families, children and parents. If you took a poll, I would venture to say that most British Columbians are affected either directly or indirectly by addiction.

The question for me is: how does this impact on our clients and on the people of B.C.? People who are living addictive lifestyles misuse and abuse all of the health care facilities. We British Columbians have set up a paradise for addicts. They thrive on our system of care. I want to add here that it's through no fault of their own but because of the nature of addiction.

Our hospital emergency wards are full of addicts trying to get drugs. I've watched lately on TV about the problems we're having with overcrowding at emergency centres and hospital emergency wards. I happen to know firsthand, because I was one myself at one time, many years ago, going to the emergency wards and seeing my friends there trying to score drugs. Addicts will harm themselves to get painkillers or other psychoactive drugs. They're good at feigning depression and other mental disorders in order to get a few days in the psychiatric ward of a hospital, where they can get more drugs and a warm bed.

Our medical clinics are kept busy with addicts. Again, they are trying to get some kind of drug to help them escape their reality. Our mental facilities are kept busy trying to figure addicts out. Many are on drugs for mental disorders that they display because they're bugged out with drugs. Actually, addicts know how to display the symptoms of many disorders in order to get drugs.

Dental problems. Well, of course, addicts know that they can get dentists to give them painkillers at times. Diseases such as AIDS, HIV and hepatitis A, B and C. Hepatitis C is just running rampant across North America, not just in British Columbia. Heart and lung

problems and general body rot are causing many addicts to need increasing funding for their care and treatment, and we provide it.

If we can get a person to become clean and sober and responsible for meeting his or her needs, we can reduce dramatically the strain that addicts put on health care services. They need to face their reality, learn to solve problems and make positive and success-oriented changes in their thinking and behaviour, and learn to take full responsibility for their lives. They need this, and they can get it if we as counsellors are provided with funding to help these addicts get back to leading a success-oriented lifestyle. The money you spend on achieving this would save the taxpayer a thousandfold just in the area of health care.

As I read that statement, I just want to remind you people that I'm not a number cruncher. I'm not here to provide statistics. I can't give you any statistics. I've given you my personal opinion based on the years that I've worked as a counsellor and on my own personal experience of being an active addict myself at one time.

Addicts and their families become dependent on the welfare system big-time. Families are being torn asunder and ending up on welfare. The addict becomes unemployable. They love to be diagnosed unemployable. They get a disability cheque from welfare which is a little bit more than the regular cheque, but that little bit more that each person gets adds up if thousands of addicts are getting it.

Women who have children and become addicted to drugs end up on welfare. Some women get abandoned because of their husband's addictive behaviour. He leaves the home, wife and children to fend for themselves. They end up on welfare.

The addicts I have worked with know better than anyone does how to work the welfare system to their advantage. As hard as you want to try, you can't keep them from it — believe me. If we can get the person into his or her recovery, they have the opportunity to return to being employable and self-sustaining. If we can make a difference in this area alone, we can save the taxpayer — I'm one of them; so are you — millions of dollars a year.

Criminal behaviour. Over time, many addicts, men and women, need to commit crime to buy their drugs. That's the nature of the monster of addiction. Most will commit petty theft, but many others move on to committing violent crimes. This impacts significantly on our taxpayer. The costs of court, judges, lawyers and correctional services is costing the taxpayer huge amounts of money. If we can help more addicts get into a healthy recovery from addiction, we will reduce the numbers filling our courts and our jails, and there are lots of them. Our jails are full of addicts.

I could go on and on, but suffice to say that our whole system of care is suffering as a result of insufficient funding for effective treatment for those suffering from addiction. How can we fix it? I would challenge the government to look at what would happen if addiction treatment services in British Columbia were cut back even more. Then look at what is currently working and at least fund it.

Like I said earlier in my talk, at the centre I work at we haven't received an increase in funding in the budget for a number of years now, and it has in itself caused a great burden to be borne on just one centre that treats 52 male adults in a residential setting. I'm asking you to consider deferral of the target date for the balanced budget requirement. I would further ask the government to not cut the much-needed services of addiction treatment in British Columbia but rather increase spending in this area and save in the long run.

I believe our Premier said he believes in responsible government, and I really take him at his word. I liked how he said it, and I believe him. I would like to think that I have not been talking to the wall today — no disrespect — but to men and women much like myself who are taxpayers and who want to make British Columbia a healthy and prosperous province, the best province in Canada and the best place to live in the world. I thank you all for taking the time to hear me. I only hope you did.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Brinton. I can assure you that you're talking to a group of people who have listened and who do plan on putting our report forward. It's our intention that this report will be listened to and read and understood. I can give you that assurance.

J. MacPhail: Thank you, Mr. Brinton. I don't think you were in the room to hear the presenter just before you, a lawyer from the community. If you were, I apologize. His premise, which we were listening to as well, was that government employees are overpaid and have expanded in the last decade at the expense of taxpayers. He's also a member of the community, as are you. When you tell people what you do, what do they say?

B. Brinton: They usually tell me about somebody in their own family, relatives, or friends that are also addicted to drugs and suffering from the effects of addiction. They don't normally say I'm being overpaid, and I'm not being overpaid. I'm not going to reveal what my salary is here, but I'm certainly not overpaid for what I do.

I came to work in the field of addictions because, like I said before, I myself was a suffering addict, and I climbed out of the gutter and got back into education. I re-educated and eventually moved back into helping other suffering addicts. I have firsthand knowledge of how they think, what their beliefs are, how they behave and their patterns of behaviour. I try my best to try to break that and help them to help themselves to become responsible for their own behaviour.

We can enable. I see this province as enabling addicts to continue to thrive and flourish in British Columbia. How can you keep addicts from receiving the same services as other people? They receive emergency services and doctors care. If they're on disability, they get their drugs paid for. They get everything met. They have become totally dependent upon the province.

I'm telling you here today that like I said, I haven't heard Members of Parliament talking about addiction treatment, addiction and the problem it is, except policing it and trying to do something else about it. You can make longer jail sentences. You can be harsher in your police departments, but I'm telling you they don't care, because that gives them a warm bed if they're at Alouette River Correctional Centre or one of the institutions. They have a warm bed and three squares a day.

What they need is appropriate treatment. There's an area that you MLAs could certainly take a look at and get people that are qualified to sit on panels to discuss this more and move into providing productive behavioural change and leading these people back into success-oriented lifestyles to become productive citizens and taxpayers rather than a burden to taxpayers.

B. Penner: Do you work for a particular government ministry as an addiction counsellor?

B. Brinton: Yes, I do. I work in residential treatment for Kinghaven Treatment Centre which is now the Valley Recovery Support Association.

B. Penner: You might be interested to know that just a few weeks ago in my capacity as Chair of the Government Caucus Committee on Communities and Safety I asked for a presentation from the Salvation Army on the types of addiction services they provide in the province. I was wondering if you could give us your view on whether there is an opportunity for non-governmental agencies to provide some of this important work to help people kick their addictions. Maybe you can comment on the effectiveness of those programs as opposed to direct government-run programs.

B. Brinton: That's interesting. I think non-profit, funded agencies provide an effective service to begin with. I don't know that privatization would be a good thing because of compartmentalization of services. I think there has to be a continuation of care.

Honestly, you've asked me a question I don't really feel that at this time I'm qualified to answer. I wish I could answer it. I only know that the government is burdened. I understand they're burdened with the responsibility of health care and whatever. All I'm pointing out here and really want to focus on today is that if I'm not doing anything about addictions in the form of positive treatment, it is really causing a major burden on other areas like health care, which is suffering, as we all know.

I don't believe it's because of one government or the other. I think it's just that as British Columbians we have ignored the monster of addiction, and we wish it would go away. Unfortunately, it's not going to go away. Any agency could be funded in a private sense — I think it would have to be non-profit to begin with — but I believe it would have to be also accountable and hooked into the system of care in some way to provide a continuum of service from the time a person enters detoxification right on through to aftercare. That's my opinion about that.

B. Penner: Your comments are similar to what we heard from the Salvation Army about the need for the continuity of care right up through to job training and job placement.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Bill, I want to thank you for your presentation this afternoon.

I will call on Mr. Eldon Unger. Has Eldon joined us yet? He must have been delayed.

That concludes the part of our formal process as far as registered presenters. We are early and ahead of schedule, which is something we're not used to at this point in our committee hearings. We will now move to our open-mike session. I would like to point out that we would like to go with five-minute presentations under this format so that we can get to as many people as possible. I would like to call on Tony Stoeckly. Good afternoon.

T. Stoeckly: Mr. Chairman, distinguished panel members, my MLA Mr. Penner, thank you for giving me the opportunity to say a few words to you. My name is Tony Stoeckly. I'm retired. Having lived in B.C. since 1965, I am deeply rooted within the farm community. I've watched my province's economic tailspin unfold from a have to a have-not province in our confederation over the past decade. Our provincial debt has increased to an extent that I can't comprehend and that our kids will have to struggle with in their lifetime. You know the figures better than I do. One thing I know, Mr. Chairman, is I cannot spend more than I earn, and I expect my government will have to address the same financial reality. The plastic-card mentality is just not sustainable.

I would like to address a few topics on spending restraint and on what I consider a must for revitalizing our economy. We have to stop the wild flow of grant moneys and endless studies within various departments, often duplicating studies with a slight variation, with little or no benefit for the future and disregard for the economic impact on existing industries and municipalities. Grants and studies in the millions of dol-

lars to groups and organizations under various names are handed out each and every year with little or no economic and social benefits other than to the self-serving nature of the applicants — government and non-government partnerships, committees, Fraser River studies, etc. What benefit is knowledge of the intricate sex life of the dreaded mosquito at this time for the forest worker and his family just about to lose his job? They know about the plant species in our ditches, the count of the sticklebacks and frogs and different species. What gain is that knowledge to the elderly suffering, waiting for a hip replacement, the less fortunate in our society who try to make ends meet at this time of a spending economic meltdown?

Priorities, Mr. Chairman. Yes, I have attended meetings sponsored by groups complements of the taxpayers. I am appalled to admit that I do not understand what benefit derives out of them other than self-serving jobs to directors and friends. If we do expect the economy to turn around, then start thinking how we as governmental taxpayers can serve the common goal and help entrepreneurs proactively by using a more commonsense approach, replacing the present indoctrinated, overzealous advocacy resulting in debt by consultation. The impact of autocratic red tape is discouraging investments and employment badly needed to revitalize the present economy.

Secure, reliable, affordable energy, electricity and gas, is the blood of our economy. With our well-trained workforce we can look proudly to the future. Let small entrepreneurs compete or at least complement B.C. Hydro to bring us out of the net of importing electricity to this province.

Rigorous controls of departmental travel budgets. Government decision-makers have to ask themselves: "Is it for health, safety and security; for the economic benefit of the province; or solely to choke any attempts to generate new business? Is it necessary to have triplicates or more in attendance at department meetings?" Endless meetings fell the civil servants, merely to bulk down the real progress with negative studies. An example is the poor old Fraser River studies — agriculture partnership meetings at which ordinary and not-paid folks are outnumbered and outgunned.

Great amounts of money is deployed in studies of areas with little or no hope of success. Insisting on creating fish habitat in known watershed drainage works is failing and potentially crippling our food supply for the future. There is a difference between a pristine stream and a municipal drainage works. Cost benefit seems not to be in the dictionary all too often, and that is the fundamental criterion for success.

Over the past two years I've walked with my friends — a former forest engineer, an alderman, an office manager of a large towing firm — thousands of kilometres on old and not-so-old logging roads. Mr. Chairman, we have to stop wasting money on deactivated logging roads. Yes, I was told all the common answers, and I also know the responses from B.C. Hydro, Forest Renewal, etc. “Your taxpayers' money is at work.” In my way of thinking, a form of subsidy is through the back door. I failed to see any trees planted on those former roads, now deactivated. I can show examples — the good, the bad and the ugly — if anyone is willing to come for a walk.

If money is to be spent, then let's spend it by improving things for future years down the road. We do have a slogan — don't we? — self-sustaining and renewal of forestry. I know a good example on Mount Woodside, at the lake. We harvested in my short stay the second time, and from the old, yes, improved logging roads.

Mr. Chairman, accountability, responsibility for decisions to the taxpayers and service are the key elements for success in the future.

Finally, blanket policy revelations without financial consideration and present industrial agricultural activities are hindering its full growth potential and will put a stranglehold on this province's economy in the future. Attempting to pass on costs by relocating frogs in our drainage works and then having the district pay for recovery costs is unacceptable. A blanket setback regulation as proposed is crippling development, the agricultural sector and municipalities.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, panel. This is a sample of studies on the same subject.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Do any of the committee members have any quick questions?

H. Bloy: I wanted to thank you for your presentation. Can you expand a little further on the deactivation of the logging roads?

T. Stoeckly: Logging roads are presently and were in the past deactivated after they were used. I could walk you through samples on Mount Hope, behind Mount Cheam, at the lake. Actually, what they're doing is bringing in big machinery and ripping out the roads they put in before, but what I fail to see is their planting even a single tree there. What they're doing is ripping up a road and doing nothing with it. I have photos. It is disgusting.

H. Bloy: Would these roads be used for off-road camping and recreational purposes?

B. Penner: I've also seen the absolute frustration of having our logging roads deactivated. That's another word for being destroyed. I used to view one of the benefits of logging activity as opening up access to our mountainous areas to the public. Now we're losing even that. That causes me great frustration, and as you point out, it costs money. Whether it's funded by Forest Renewal B.C., B.C. Hydro or some other government agency, it ultimately does cost taxpayers a significant

amount of money. I was very interested in those comments that you made about deactivating logging roads.

I wonder if you could explain a bit more about what your reference was when you talked about the sex life of mosquitoes. Are you telling us there is some kind of government study taking place now about mosquitoes living in farmers' drainage ditches?

T. Stoeckly: Believe it or not, there was, but not for the last ten years. I used it merely to illustrate how programs are handed out or made which are absolutely useless, to my way of thinking, specifically in this time of our economic meltdown. Maybe if we have money available, you should do it. Go ahead. A study like that was done in Miami Creek some years ago.

T. Stoeckly: Yeah. I'm using it specifically to emphasize this waste of money.

B. Penner: There is currently, I'm told, a study or a requirement in Agassiz involving spotted frogs — do I have that correctly? — that is being required by the current Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection?

T. Stoeckly: A few years ago somebody found the dreaded spotted frog, which is now on the endangered list.

T. Stoeckly: It's similar. There are two areas in Agassiz where they supposedly live and thrive. At one point the egg mass was introduced from one area to another area by Chehalis people. Now they thrive there, and the provincial government agency is expecting us to pay for their removal. They've put another burden onto the taxpayers. We the stakeholders in the drainage system have to pay for that.

The same thing basically happens with fish. Fish were introduced in some drainage areas, and now, because they're habitat, they're considered fish habitat. That's not fair play. We created a fish habitat, and now we're getting punished for fish habitat. We basically created the frog habitat; now we're going to pay for it. That is not a fair play.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Mr. Stoeckly. On behalf of the board I wish to thank you.

T. Westlin: Mr. Chairperson, hon. Members of the Legislative Assembly, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Ted Westlin. I'm a lifelong resident of the district of Kent in Agassiz. Thank you for providing me with this opportunity to speak to you today.

I would like to provide the committee with some comment on the decision-making process and the determination of government policy as it relates to watercourse management. Watercourse management impacts the rural and townsite areas in the district of Kent. Since 1991 I have attended numerous DFO, MOE, and now Water, Land and Air day-long workshops to discuss protection of fish. Usually the morning presentations outline the life-cycle needs of various species of fish in the Fraser River systems. In the afternoon conference participants would divide into four discussion groups. With the aid of a facilitator using an easel, suggestions were written down, and each group would try to prioritize fish habitat needs for policies in a specific area. Near the end of the day the conference participants would reconvene as a whole to listen to each group's report. Over a period of ten years this policy meeting process became very fine-tuned in terms of developing advocacy for fish and other environmental issues. Many environmental groups had a voice in the meetings, but there seldom was any representation from property owners whose lands could be adversely impacted by government land use and fish and environmental legislation.

Let me give you an example of how senior level government bureaucrats handled watercourse drainage maintenance application approval in 1998. The work request was sent in November 1997 to begin work August 1, 1998. Written confirmation came September 1, 1998, one month late. This meant there was no opportunity for the agricultural community to discuss specifics. There was no lead time for municipal staff to include specifics in contract bidding. There was no chance for contractors to review the specifics before bidding on work.

The district of Kent could not wait for the approval process to begin work and hired a biologist to do a study as part of due diligence. In addition, MOE and DFO, at that time, insisted that Kent hire a biologist to supervise the work of cleaning mostly dry constructed ditches. Costs of cleaning were excessive and unnecessary. There was no benefit for fish. Kent was unable to put work out to tender due to time restraints. Money wasted in marginal areas is not available for use in better habitat areas. Local farmers were furious, to say the least.

Local farmers and residents are also very concerned about the lack of progress in managing flood control issues. Regional Water, Land, and Air and DFO habitat officials have been stonewalling proactive initiatives to lower riverbeds and provide gravel for district use. Gravel is a renewable resource for Kent. More gravel is deposited annually in the reach of the Fraser River, within the boundaries of the district of Kent, than we could ever hope to harvest. Removal of gravel and subsequent sale to others should provide funds for further flood protection projects such as diking, pumping and riverbank stabilization with rock. Removal of gravel from appropriate locations and in sufficient quantities will lessen seepage flooding of agricultural lands and townsite sewer systems and provide some flood protection. Removal and stockpiling of aggregate during low water — that's winter months — will also provide jobs at a time when they are most needed. An adequate supply of good quality aggregate is essential for com-

mercial, industrial and residential growth. An adequate supply of good quality aggregate at reasonable cost promotes affordable growth.

Provincial and government habitat officials claim that commercial removal of aggregate will harm fish habitat. Recent UBC studies have proven that habitat does rehabilitate. In Kent, Morrow's Trucking removed gravel from Morrow's Bar for nearly 30 continuous years. This Morrow's Bar location also provided for the best sport fishing during that time.

Adequate levels of gravel removal will encourage cheaper movement of logs and development of river tourism. My granddad travelled to Yale from Matsqui on a sternwheeler. I travelled on the Agassiz-Rosedale ferry until it was replaced by a bridge in 1956. If the ferry were returned, it would not have sufficient water to function for more than a few months due to riverbed aggredation.

I don't know if I'm making the point as to how the government could save money, but I think I did with the drainage. On the gravel issue I think the Fraser River is a vastly underutilized resource. Other river systems of that magnitude are used for transportation, movement of goods, tourism, etc. The materials taken out of the river — and those of you close to Vancouver know where you got the sand and everything to build the roads on the way to the airport…. I see the work there. When I get down there to a meeting, I find the people in that area say: "It's okay. We need to have commercial use of the river, but don't move anything in the Chilliwack area. That's sacred ground. You can't touch that." In other words, they won't allow us to have the same privilege of development they had.

I'll just stop it right there. I've been a politician, so I can get carried away. You may have some questions that you wish to fire at this time.

T. Bhullar (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Mr. Westlin. Do any of the panel have any questions?

B. Penner: Thank you, Ted. I heard you say you've been a politician. Are you not still an elected member of the district of Kent council?

B. Penner: Do you have any approximate numbers in terms of cost of all these studies and the extra work required for ditch cleaning initiatives?

T. Westlin: We have a $35,000 budget, and the unnecessary work in '98 consumed about $13,000 of that. On the Fraser River there's a lot of anxiety with the district of Kent, the way things are going. There was a moratorium put on for three years. We were afraid of damaging the fish habitat due to gravel removal, so there were three years in which studies were done. We spent in the neighbourhood of $750,000. Last year was the fourth year, and there were eight of nine applications.

To show how bureaucrats can stonewall you, I sit in on steering committee meetings, and at a February 5, 1990, meeting we spent time — it was a three-hour meeting, from 1 to 4 o'clock — reviewing eight of nine applications. We didn't hear any opposition to eight of those nine gravel removal applications from the regulatory bodies there. In those days that would be MOE, B.C. Assets and Land and DFO. The meeting didn't end at 4 p.m., but one of the participants went home at 4:15 p.m. Then DFO said: "Well, we might just reject all of these applications, depending on their technical merits. They're really not very good."

Now, I had the occasion to see some of them. On an application like that, you have to hire a marine biologist to determine fish presence. Some of the applications had hired a fluvial geomorphologist, a fellow with a PhD and a world-renowned specialist, to see that they didn't screw up the direction in which the river flowed. They were certainly not with a matchbox.

In the end only one application was allowed. That was in the district of Kent. That has a story to it too. Instead of the bureaucrats being enabling, when we requested that removal the year before, we were denied on the grounds that the legal description was incorrect. B.C. Assets and Land and MOE showed up at our doorstep and said that in 1952 there was an error in the land registry office. I said: "Well, no, never mind. It's Crown land instead of private land. We need the gravel to keep Agassiz Ready Mix and Vandale Trucking going. No, you can't have it, but we'll find another source of gravel." A subsequent meeting was held six weeks after that. When I went to the meeting with the contractor, B.C. Assets and Land did not show. Instead MOE had a copy of a letter stating that it wasn't Crown land; it was still a private estate. Then MOE sent a letter….

I have to back up a little bit, too. This is where I don't like the treatment by the bureaucrats. We had this meeting where B.C. Assets and Land told us it wasn't our land and we couldn't get the gravel, but there was a follow-up letter faxed to us in the afternoon saying that the meeting had been productive and that there was agreement on a number of issues. This was cc'd to the Minister of Environment and to us. There had been no agreement on anything. We only had one issue that we discussed, and that was to be able to get 20,000 cubic metres of gravel off Hamilton Bar.

To fire a letter back like that is really treating us with contempt. I think these bureaucrats should remember that they're our servants, not our lords and masters. I would like them to treat us as such. If you don't have a degree or something behind your name — you're not a specialist — then they won't listen to your experience, quite often, in all these matters. I've been involved in drainage for 40 years, with 31 years on the executive. I've lived all my life along the river. My friends my age spent all their lives on the river, with the rip tow towing and that. I have relatives that are fish people; they're sports fishermen.

I hear a lot, and these bureaucrats are telling me that what I have seen and experienced in a lifetime didn't happen. I think that's the rural disconnect with the political scene. It certainly cost me alienation with a political party that I belonged to from its inception. I don't belong to any political parties right now.

B. Penner: You've made the comment that you weren't sure if your presentation was relevant to the work of this committee. I think specifically your comments are relevant. We're not just looking to reduce costs; we're actually looking for other ways to generate revenue. It's my understanding that the province collects mining royalties from gravel if and when it's allowed to be extracted from the Fraser River, so that is an opportunity for revenue generation for the province if the gravel moratorium could be lifted and we can start extracting gravel according to a set annual budget.

T. Westlin: The moratorium was lifted, but we didn't get to move more than 20 cubic metres of gravel. In the meantime, we've had a four-year aggredation. I don't know if you understand the impact of aggredation on a floodplain. You get seepage, water flooding in your storm systems and farms too. The people from Vancouver and the environmental groups think that we can raise dikes to keep the river out. You can't do it with porous soils. It just comes in inside.

The thing is that the moratorium was lifted over a year ago. We were promised some gravel a couple of days ago, but I don't know how this year will go. If there isn't anything more forthcoming from that group, then it loses its viability, and I think the municipality will probably withdraw funding to keep the Fraser basin group going. The Fraser basin officials worked very hard to try and bring a consensus here.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Well, Mr. Westlin, I see no further questions, but I'd like to thank you. You made an interesting comment that it appeared that unless you are a professional or have some letters behind your name, people seem to be hesitant to listen. I can assure you that we're here to listen to average British Columbians, and that will be done.

We will move on to our next presenter, Mr. Rudy Rogalsky. Is Rudy with us? Good afternoon.

R. Rogalsky: Welcome to Chilliwack. I always appreciate it when the public has an opportunity to provide input to government decisions. Too often members of the public and even the government itself talk about government as though it was a separate entity over there and forget that in a democracy we all are the government.

I'm going to talk very briefly today about the tax system. It's a big subject, I know. I'm an unabashed environmentalist. However, my training is in economics, and for many years I worked in the federal government in that field. I've worked for the Royal Bank, UNDP, CIDA and various governments in that field. I don't consider myself to be an economist now. I sometimes call myself a recovering economist.

Regrettably, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Chilliwack is that in many months of the year the air quality is very poor. The reason for this is very complex, but one thing is sure: much of the pollution is directly attributable to the automobile and its usage. The next inescapable conclusion is that motor vehicle usage is highly subsidized. The revenue the government takes in, in fuel taxes, sales taxes, automobile licence fees and so on does not come anywhere near to the cost of providing roads and bridges and various infrastructure and for the additional hidden health costs attributable to air pollution. At the same time, this subsidization of the automobile has resulted in people buying bigger and bigger automobiles and has also resulted in a furthering of urban sprawl. The public has been subsidizing urban development further and further away from the urban core. This form of development results in even more pollution.

In one of Chilliwack's neighbourhoods — it happens to be the one I live in and the one Barry Penner lives in — we recently completed a survey, and one of the things we talked about was the commuting habits of people. There's 850 homes up there, and we calculated that the primary income earners in those homes put 40,000 kilometres per day on their cars just in commuting. That's more than the distance around the equator, and it works out to something like a million kilometres a month. If we took Barry Penner out of that, I don't know whether it would change significantly, but it would still be a very high figure. You don't have to imagine very hard all the pollution that creates and all the fuel that's being used up. We have this curious situation where you can go to the pumps and pay 70 cents a litre and then go inside and buy a half litre of water for a dollar.

There are other kinds of subsidies as well that the government engages in. Over the years governments at various levels have subsidized oil and gas and mineral developments, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly, through the provision of roads and other infrastructure. The same is true for the forest industry.

Despite all the good intentions and government regulations these subsidies have encouraged much environmental harm and unsustainable activity. At the same time, our taxation penalizes those things that are beneficial to society. We have often heard our national and provincial leaders say that income taxes are a tax on jobs. They're right. They are a tax on jobs. We have a curious situation where we subsidize things that are harmful and we penalize things that are good.

I recommend to the committee that the government gradually shift taxation away from those things that are beneficial, like incomes, and toward those things that are harmful to society. Our governments in B.C. and Ottawa have already reduced our income taxes, and that's very nice. By moving to a system where taxation is based more on expenditures, particularly those activities and products that are harmful and unsustainable, much greater decreases in income taxes would be possible.

Okay. So we start taxing those things that are bad and don't tax the things that are good. We subsidize things that are good and don't subsidize things that are bad. What would be taxed in a situation like that would be things that bring social and environmental harm, things like gases that contribute to climate change. People would pay more taxes for gasoline. They'd be paying less income tax, but they'd be paying more at the pump. They'd be paying more when they buy their SUVs. They'd pay more when they buy pesticides that are harmful. They would pay more when they catch wild salmon.

You'd pay more when you're taking down old-growth forest. You'd pay more when you use water and so on. Throw-away products, Styrofoam cups, all this paper and junk that you see littering the highway you'd pay more for. One thing about our economic system is that when you pay more, you use less.

Obviously, such a major structural change would not be done in isolation or in a single budget, but I strongly urge that the government move in this direction. I urge you to seek out assiduously those perverse subsidies in your expenditure program that result in negative consequences. At the same time, identify how our taxation system penalizes that which is good. Moving in this direction, we would have less pollution and more efficient resource exploitation, and government would be funded not so much from the incomes that we earn but from the expenditures that we make.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Mr. Rogalsky, I thank you for your presentation. I will look to members of committee, if there are any questions.

J. MacPhail: Thank you, Mr. Rogalsky. I firmly support the concept of tax shift and have studied it a great deal as well. It is a hard sell, as you know — not a hard sell to consumers but a hard sell to business people. There would be a fundamental shift in the nature of doing business in the province.

J. MacPhail: Right, exactly. Yes. Well, there are two hard sells. One is people with SUVs and the other is the business community.

Just out of curiosity, in your community that you talked about — with the 850 homes — is there public transit?

R. Rogalsky: Not out where we live. There is a public transit system, but it's pretty limp-wristed. It's a bus that wanders around town looking for people.

J. MacPhail: It's a curious method we have in North America that public transit is user-pay but highways aren't.

R. Rogalsky: That's very true. That's the sort of thing I think this committee or a committee like it should be looking for.

Just one last word. There's a very interesting book called Financial Capitalism. It'll be the best 22 bucks you'll ever spend.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon, Rudy.

Our next presenter this afternoon is Bob Plowright. Is Bob with us? Good afternoon.

B. Plowright: I'm a little nervous sitting up here in front of all you important people, so please bear with me here.

I'd like to mention a couple of things about the business community and my experiences with it. I ran my own small business here in Chilliwack since 1981, selling it in 1997. During that time, I found I had a very profitable business to start off with, and I found that over the period of the last ten years in the business, the bureaucracy of government — the extra costs related to licensing, monitoring and taxes — just ate up my bottom line. The increase in the minimum wage made it impossible for me to provide as much service as I would have liked to my customers, and while I think all the employees that worked for me did a great job and tried very hard, it was just eating up my bottom line. Eventually, I did sell it off and moved on to real estate. I've been in real estate since 1990. I've enjoyed that very much, and I've been very lucky. Once again, over the last number of years I've been in real estate, since 1990, the last ten years, we've seen many of the businesses that I've been looking at in the area — I do quite a bit of commercial real estate — close down or pull in their horns.

I personally worked on the sale of a building here in Chilliwack, the 125,000-square-foot YHS building, which was previously a drink manufacturing and production facility. It's been empty for the last four years or so. They haven't been able to sell it to another company. I know that other companies throughout North America were contacted to locate their business here. The response we were getting was that they wouldn't locate here in Chilliwack or the British Columbia area until they were sure they were going to be faced with a government that was going to be pro business and were going to be fairly taxed and fairly given an opportunity to operate here effectively and make a profit.

I believe what we need to do is generate that kind of atmosphere and get those people that are throughout the world and North America to invest back in British Columbia. I think the only way we're going to

do that is by taking a hard line and choking down a little bit of discomfort right now over the next couple of years while we cut back and reorganize. You must bring in legislation which is going to support business locally and throughout our whole province. I believe the only way you can do that is by making some hard decisions now that are going to put some people out of work for a period of time. They're going to be a reflection directly on myself. There's going to be people who are not going to be able to buy houses in the short term, but I think in the long term it's going to generate a broad tax base and increase our ability to move ahead as a province.

We can't afford to have any more situations where we're spending and losing money with fast ferries and those kinds of things, where we're just wasting dollars. We can't do that. We have to be conservative and concentrate on building a strong province. I urge the government to take a hard line, to be very careful and conscientious with the way they spend our money over the next couple of years, and to generate a tax base based on business investment. I do believe in the long term that's going to be what's going to generate the kind of long-term economic development we need to have.

B. Penner: Thank you, Mr. Plowright. Yesterday we heard a presentation in Vancouver from the Centre for Policy Alternatives. One of their presenters disputed the notion that there has been a significant drain of talent from British Columbia to other provinces or jurisdictions over the last number of years. I wonder if that squares with your experience as a realtor in this market. Have you found the situation to be different here?

B. Plowright: I've definitely seen it personally. There has been no question about it. We've seen local farmers sell their farms and move to Alberta and places like that, where they know they can operate more effectively and with a better return to them. We've seen builders who have been building here in British Columbia. In the Chilliwack area, I know builders who have moved from this area and gone to Alberta to construct projects there, because there has just been no work here and no future. We need to get them back, and we need to do that by having what I believe is a favourable, pro business atmosphere.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Are there any further questions from members of the committee? Seeing none, I would like to thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to come and present to us today.

R. Caldwell: Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you all. I consider myself to be an ordinary British Columbian. I've been a resident of this province for about 15 years now, having come from Ontario. By way of background as to who I am as well, I am a lawyer practising in the Fraser Valley area — not specifically here in Chilliwack but mostly in the Mission area. I also am a mother of four children who go to school here in British Columbia.

There are a few things I just wanted to mention in terms of ideas I had for improving the efficiency of service delivery, which I understand to be part of your mandate. First, with respect to my involvement in the legal profession, I have an idea with respect to the delivery of court services and how that might be done in a way that would reduce backlog and reduce the expense of building more courthouses. It's my sense that the primary legitimate function of government in a free and democratic society is to keep the peace between and among its citizens. As much as we have become dependent upon social services in western civilization, that is not the primary function of government. The primary function of government is to provide a means for citizens to peacefully live together with the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. Individuals sacrifice their freedom to government only so that government can keep the peace among them and so they don't have to spend their lives in constant conflict with one another. So we allow government to make laws for each of us to be able to live in peace with each other. Unfortunately, our focus has been diverted from this towards social services, and I'm going to suggest to you that is not wholly appropriate.

In any event, with that preliminary bit of philosophy, I'll move on to the idea I have. I think, particularly in the provincial court system, we could have a double-shifted sitting. That has been attempted before with a night court sitting. It has not been wholly successful because most folks don't actually want to go the court at night. They'd like to go home and spend time with their family.

I'm going to suggest to you that practically speaking there are only about four hours of hearing time that occur in any provincial court in a full day, and that happens with about two hours in the morning and about two hours in the afternoon. My suggestion is that what could happen is that those four hours could take place between 8 a.m. and 12 noon, with a separate sitting between 1 and 5 p.m. The savings that would result are that you wouldn't have to build additional courthouses and courtrooms in order to have matters heard, so you wouldn't have the capital costs associated with that. More cases would be able to be heard more expeditiously. It would clean up the criminal and family backlog.

The philosophical point I'll make alongside of that is that justice delayed is justice denied. If we can in fact move up that backlog, it will do several things. If family matters are dealt with in a quick and expeditious way, then it will solve some of the social problems that result in criminal behaviour that needs to be dealt with in the courts later on.

In any event, I believe that while this is a very brief outline of a suggestion that needs to be fleshed out in a much bigger way, it's a way that service could be delivered more economically. I think you'll find we

wouldn't need to double the court staff. We might need to increase it by about 60 percent in order to handle the extra cases going through, but you wouldn't have to increase your capital facilities, and more justice would be done more quickly.

I want to bring up two other minor points. One is with respect to my children and education. I heartily encourage this government to look into the process of a voucher system for education. Parents need to be the ones making decisions about how to educate their children, and I'm going to suggest to you that when they do that, they will find more economic ways to do it than the fully funded public system we have today. If parents are making the choices about how to educate their children, first they will have a greater desire to participate in the process of educating their children, and you will have increased volunteerism.

Secondly, as schools become more responsive to the desires of parents and educating their children, you will have greater success in the system. There will be a greater encouragement of both parents and students to make schools work instead of seeing them as a bureaucracy they have no participation in. The voucher system has been used effectively in the United States in several jurisdictions. It has not undermined public education in those situations where it has been used. Instead, what has happened is that public education has become competitive with private education. I would encourage the government to look at that option.

Finally, with respect to social services, which I know we're not going to back away from entirely — and I'm not suggesting we should as a government — I would encourage this government to look at means of providing services which are already very effective in keeping children and families safe without the need for them to come into care. A project I would draw their attention to in particular is the Mission Community Services Society crisis intervention program, which is a program that's funded by the Ministry of Children and Family Development. It is outside the ministry itself. It serves 400 families in the Mission area and prevents, in many cases, those families from needing to have a direct interface with the Ministry of Children and Family Development. That saves the government money, and it keeps families safe. When we're looking at ways to improve service delivery and reduce costs, I'd encourage you to look at programs such as this.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Ms. Caldwell, I thank you very much. Ms. MacPhail, you had a question?

J. MacPhail: It was an interesting presentation. I was speaking with a Provincial Court judge this weekend who said there's substantial reform going on under the new Chief Judge, both administratively and concerning the rules, particularly as they relate to family law issues. As a lawyer do you have access to input to the judiciary side for your suggestion about double-shifting? I assume you're on the presenting side to a judge, or are you a judge?

R. Caldwell: To a limited extent. We recently had a meeting in the Abbotsford courthouse, lawyers and judges alike, to attempt to streamline the hearing of family matters so that matters could be heard in a more expeditious way. Neither the judges nor the lawyers present had any power to influence the number of hours that were actually available for hearing. Nor did any of us have any influence over how many judges were hired or whether or not the planning for the use of the facility could be changed, outside the hours we already had. Hence, my visit here today to talk to you people in government who do have the opportunity to make those kinds of choices.

L. Mayencourt: You said courts generally operate for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.

L. Mayencourt: We've got courts doing this. I hear hospital operating rooms are only operating at a certain percentage of efficiency. We've got schools that are only used six or seven months of the year. Who's making these rules? I'll ask you to comment: why does the idea of having eight hours of courtroom time in a courthouse seem radical to someone? I'm not suggesting it's to someone on this committee. It seems like such a commonsense thing. Why aren't we doing it? Why do we have to have a hearing?

R. Caldwell: I don't think necessarily any one case can carry on for eight full hours of hearing in a day. Part of the reason for that is there needs to be time for consultation with counsel. There needs to be time for the transportation of accused people to and from institutions. There needs to be time for negotiation among the parties. All of those things are valuable things and need to be done and do result in the lessening of the number of hearing hours actually required.

Having said that, if, particularly in the Provincial Court setting, there were a two-shift streaming whereby there could be four compacted hours in the morning and four compacted hours in the afternoon and lawyers weren't expected to actually attend at both sessions but could streamline their cases to be either morning cases or afternoon cases, then the same time would be available for consultation and for moving people around. It would make the actual facility more useful, and it would mean things could be moved through more quickly. I'm not saying you'd get 100 percent improvement, but there would be a significant improvement.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Ms. Caldwell, I'd like to thank you for your presentation this afternoon and for taking the time to come forward with your ideas. They're very much appreciated. Thank you.

S. Rogalsky: I'll stick to my notes so I can be brief. I've worked with income assistance recipients in Chilliwack for about 20 years, since I came here in 1981. I won't call them welfare recipients. I don't like that word. I think it has a negative connotation in our society. I prefer to go with income assistance, which I think has a little more dignity. I'm of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I school, and that's why I've enjoyed working with this group for so long.

For the last 14 years I've been a private contractor delivering federally and provincially funded employment readiness programs for the start-up group and others. You might wonder why more of them aren't here today, and I would say I've found in my experience that it's because their survival takes priority. I think survival issues — living the way they have to with the limited funds they get and other issues they have going on in their lives — make it really difficult for them to participate in events like this. I would also say they feel very marginalized from the time they're children, some of them — those who have been on a long time. Those who have been on more recently soon begin to feel as though somehow they're disenfranchised when they're in receipt of those benefits. This leads me to my first point.

What led me to speak here today was that I was away on an extended weekend holiday, and I read the newspaper articles around possible cuts to the MHR budget. I saw again in the newspaper, in the quotes that I read, evidence of what's come to be known as poor bashing, which is something I cannot abide. That's really why I'm here today. I would ask all of you to think about avoiding inflammatory rhetoric which leads to this attitude. It feeds into, I think, misinformed prejudices about people who, for a variety of circumstances, find themselves on income assistance.

I think this view can be politically popular, because everybody knows some layabout who is on assistance who shouldn't be, but I think it also leads the majority of people who are forced to be on assistance to feel shame they are on assistance. I've known many people, like women who have not even let families know that they were on assistance because there was such a lot of shame attached to that. I think that's an awful way to have to live. I don't think our political leaders should be feeding into that attitude.

Another couple of points I'd like to make around possible budget cuts. I'm very concerned about any possible cuts to the MHR budget, Ministry of Human Resources for those of you behind me who don't know about these initials. I'm sure all of those in front of you do. I'm really concerned, because dealing with people who use those services all the time, I know the staff, particularly financial workers, already have really large caseloads. I know they can't get to know their people and are very hard to reach already. I can't imagine those workloads growing. I've never worked for that ministry, and that's one of the reasons.

I think about the clients in terms of cuts to them. It's unthinkable. Those rates have been frozen for so many years. I personally know three women in their 50s right now who have been trying very hard to find work. Some of them have work records already. They can't find work. They're living on $500 a month. I'd like you to try that. When your teenage children move out, you lose your home. One woman has her stuff in storage. She said to me: "Sharon, I never thought it would come to this." She's a woman with a long work history. She's living in somebody else's house. She has to leave, and she can't afford the storage. She said: "I don't know what I'm going to do." On her last job interview she was short-listed. They had 50 applicants. They short-listed to eight. She got an interview, but she didn't get the position. That woman does not fit the stereotype that's out there.

I would also really urge you to think — and I know some others have touched on this today — about long-term costs and not just short-term savings. I would include programs such as ours that help get people off income assistance, but I didn't come here today to try to save the work that I do. I'm here today to advocate for the clients who use those programs. There's a report being prepared by an organization called ASPECT which should be ready within the next couple of weeks and which I know is going to be submitted to your government. I would ask you to have a really good look at that. They're looking at the costs of programs and the numbers of people that are off income assistance or have reduced dependence on income assistance as a result of those programs. They're hoping and I'm sure they will show that those programs may look expensive in the short term, but they're very cost effective in the long term.

Further to that, I would just ask you in all the decisions you have to make…. Some speakers today — the substance abuse person, the young offenders speaker and some others — referred to this. One of them said: "No short-term gain which will lead to long-term pain." I think it's really, really important to think long term. It's very difficult, I know, for politicians to do that, because you're not getting elected for ten years from now. You've been elected to do a job right now. I think in all conscience that you have to think about the long-term costs of some of the cuts you may be considering, and please, please think of the repercussions of what it is that you're going to do. I think it's like having a family. You wouldn't let your children go without dental care, because you know if you don't pay for it now, you're going to have to pay for it down the road. You wouldn't have your car not serviced, because you know if you don't pay for it now, you're going to have to pay for it down the road. You wouldn't go without a good diet or good food, because you know if you do, you're going to have bad health down the road. It's no differ-

ent with your social programs. They're all about prevention, and they're all about preventing larger costs.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you very much, Ms. Rogalsky. We do have time for one question, if there are any, from the committee members.

K. Krueger: Given those last comments of yours, Ms. Rogalsky — the analogy of failing to take care of your children's dental health, because you want them to have healthy teeth down the road — don't you agree there's some problem with a system where we have generations within families and the generations are all on MHR benefits? That happens. I'm sure you know of families like that. How can we break that cycle and help people have the healthy lives that you're talking about?

S. Rogalsky: I know those families exist, and certainly in my experience it's been a minority of people on assistance. I think that's the popular view, that it's the majority, and I don't think that's true. That's the first thing I'd like to dispel. I don't have numbers; I just have my own experience to go with here. I don't work for that ministry, so I can't quote the numbers. I'm sure somebody can, though. I would say that you don't stop those kinds of cycles by withdrawing services. The same as you don't stop child abuse by withdrawing services. That, too, is a cycle. It can be a generational thing. People can break that if they get the assistance they need.

I think there's been some effort made in the last few years to make work more attractive. I think some of those changes that were made were good — supporting the working poor. There were some changes that came in that helped in that regard to make it more attractive. I think a lot of the not moving out into the workforce is based on fear. If you've been in a family where nobody has ever done that, it can be a very, very scary thing. You don't necessarily have the social skills to be able to do that and maybe not the education if that's not been supported in the home. It can be difficult to break, but it's not impossible. You can't do it without services, and services cost money.

K. Krueger: Do you think some of that failure to move into the workforce has to do with a sense of entitlement that exists in our society? Recently the minister sent out a letter reminding able-bodied people they are expected to be looking for work while they are collecting benefits. Immediately you hear, in the man-on-the-street interviews of people affected, the same thing you and I have often heard from people, to the effect of one quote I saw: "All I can find is minimum wage, and it isn't worth my while to get out of bed for that."

K. Krueger: Most of us in the workforce started with whatever we could get. We were paperboys. I sold greeting cards as a kid.

S. Rogalsky: I would say to you that the laid-off forest workers will have the same attitude if you talk to them. It's not just generational. I think that's a perception amongst our society in general, especially if you're an older person. With the young, if you start flipping burgers, that should be okay. We have a problem with that, but I think you'll find that attitude amongst a lot of older, laid-off workers as well.

K. Krueger: What do we do about that attitude? Obviously, when a major change has happened to society and that high-paying job isn't available any longer, then a person needs to regroup and gear up again. We're not just talking about laid-off forest workers. We're talking about people who, in some cases, have hardly ever worked or perhaps never work.

S. Rogalsky: Some of them don't understand how that whole thing works either. We look like we're doing fine, and some of them don't understand how we started from the ground up. That's an educational process too. That's a lot of what our programs do. What's the reality? How do people get where they've got? You talk to people and find out what their stories are, and you learn how people do that. If you haven't learned it at home, especially with the generational people, where do you learn that? A lot of it is just raising awareness about how it all works.

We are very limited with time. It is 5 minutes to 2 right now. We do have a number of presenters. We will be able to get to one further presenter, and that is Norman Westfall.

N. Westfall: Thank you for hearing me. I'll be as short as I possibly can. I worked for 16 years in the Kent maximum security institution. I dealt with a lot of lawyers as they came into the prison, and they talked to me quite a bit afterwards — not about the individual inmate and the individual case but about some of the wastage that went on. One of the best ones I can remember is an inmate suing the system for two scoops of ice cream. He was only given one, and he wanted two. They wouldn't give it to him, and the lawsuit started. I think that's very frivolous, and I don't think that sort of thing should carry on. That's one out of many thousands I heard over 16 years.

The other thing that really has gotten to me is that when there's a cut in service, it generally means the front-line troops get cut and we move people into management. We no longer have the people on the front line working, and we get so top-heavy that eventually it is going to collapse around our necks. It's a matter of the government starting to get control of the civil servants out there.

One other point is that we were promised a tax cut. We've gotten that tax cut. I'm thankful for it. Then all of a sudden I hear that Pharmacare is going to be greatly

reduced. There's no sense in giving me a tax cut if you're going to reduce my Pharmacare.

B. Lekstrom (Chair): Thank you for coming forward. Are there any questions from committee members? Seeing none, I thank you for taking the time.

It is now 2 p.m. That is our time frame. We do have to move on. We have another meeting this evening in Surrey.

For the people who were unable to get to the open mike or unable to present today, there is the ability to file written submissions with the committee, and they will be given the same consideration as any verbal presentation we hear as a committee. I would encourage you to do that. You have until the end of this month to put that forward to our committee. The information is on our back table for people interested in doing that.

In closing, I would like to thank the people for coming out and presenting and the people who came out to listen to what was said here today. Once again I thank you. Have an enjoyable day.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES