Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 55 — Friday, October 5, 2007 (HTML)

2007 Legislative Session: Third Session, 38th 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		1367
	A. James
	J. Swanson
	B. Sandy
	S. Briggs
	G. Royer
	C. Petter
	R. Clift
	L. Anglin
	S. Witter
	A. Taylor
	D. Marsden
	H. Daniels
	P. Leitch
	M. Gleeson
	D. Ramage

Chair:	Bill Bennett (East Kootenay L)
Deputy Chair:	* Bruce Ralston (Surrey-Whalley NDP)
Members:	* Iain Black (Port Moody–Westwood L) * Harry Bloy (Burquitlam L) * Randy Hawes (Maple Ridge–Mission L) * Dave S. Hayer (Surrey-Tynehead L) * Richard T. Lee (Burnaby North L) * John Horgan (Malahat–Juan de Fuca NDP) * Jenny Wai Ching Kwan (Vancouver–Mount Pleasant NDP) Bob Simpson (Cariboo North NDP) * denotes member present

Witnesses:

Lyn Anglin (President and CEO, Geoscience B.C.)
Susan Briggs (President, Douglas College Faculty Association)
Sherry Carroll (ArtsConnect Tri-Cities Arts Council)
Robert Clift (Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C.)
Helen Daniels (Executive Director, ArtsConnect Tri-Cities Arts Council)
Dr. Mychael Gleeson (Director, Mychael Gleeson and Co. Ltd.)
Alan James (Raise the Rates Coalition)
Peter Leitch (Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C.)
Dennis Marsden (President, Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce)
Chris Petter (President, Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C.)
Dianne Ramage (Maple Creek Streamkeepers)
Gaëtan Royer
Bruce Sandy (B.C. Association of Child Development and Intervention)
Jean Swanson (Raise the Rates Coalition)
Andrew Taylor (Douglas College)
Susan Witter (President, Douglas College)

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon. I am Bruce Ralston, the Deputy Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. Bill Bennett, the MLA for East Kootenay, is absent on government business, so I am convening the meeting in his place.

I'd like to welcome everyone here to the audience. Thanks for participating in this process. We are charged with carrying out public consultations on behalf of the Minister of Finance, and this all-party committee will report back to the Legislative Assembly no later than November 15 of this year.

Today we're going to hear from a number of presenters who've preregistered with the Office of the Clerk of Committees. The presentations are — I'm sure you've been advised already — to be no longer than ten minutes, with up to five additional minutes allotted to members' questions. If you go over the ten minutes, you'll take away from the five minutes we have for questions.

We should also have time near the end for an open-mike session. Open-mike presentations are to be no longer than five minutes.

I'll now ask other members of the Finance Committee to introduce themselves, beginning with John Horgan.

J. Horgan: I'm John Horgan. I'm the member of the Legislature for Malahat–Juan de Fuca, which is just north of Victoria.

H. Bloy: Harry Bloy welcomes you to the heart of Burquitlam. This is the middle of the riding, and I'm the MLA for this riding.

I. Black: Good afternoon. I'm Iain Black. I'm the MLA for Port Moody–Westwood.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Joining us today, I'm also pleased to introduce Les Gönye, who is the Clerk-Assistant for the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, Australia. He's up on a bit of a substitution tour and is helping us out here.

Also, we have Jacqueline Quesnel, who's staffing the registration desk, and the staff of Hansard Services, who prepare the written transcript of the meeting.

I'd like now to call on Alan James of Raise the Rates Coalition to begin our first presentation. I understand you've circulated a written version of your presentation, and I see Jean Swanson is joining you.

A. James: That's correct. I'm presenting on behalf of the Raise the Rates Coalition today.

We're a group of non-profit organizations working to improve the lives of those British Columbians who have not yet benefited from what Finance Minister Carole Taylor calls a strong, competitive economy.

I've not done much public speaking. It's pretty stressful for me, and I am passionate about social justice and equality issues, so if I stumble or sound a little too strident, please bear with me.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Even the most experienced speakers do that, so don't worry about it.

A. James: This exercise today is to set budget priorities for the province, and I'd like to give you an example of how some other people see budget priorities.

Imagine that you're on income assistance and that there are nine days left until the next cheque, and you have $15 to buy food for you and your two boys. You know that it's important to have good nutrition and lots of fruits and vegetables. The $15 will buy you a bag of apples, a bag of oranges, some grapes — or a box of macaroni, two pounds of regular ground beef, a package of wieners and buns, two cans of tomato soup and two loaves of bread. How would you choose?

B.C. has the highest child poverty rate in Canada, and all low-income families sacrifice quality and quantity of food to meet other costs of daily living.

We are recommending five simple changes you can make. To make these changes, all you have to do is write the words on paper and change the legislation. You don't have to go out and do a lot of investigation into the issues. That's not too difficult, is it?

People are going hungry in B.C. According to HungerCount 2006, children make up 41 percent of food bank clients, and nearly 2 percent of our population, more than half of whom are on income assistance, receive food bank charity. Income assistance rates are simply inadequate — full stop. In my view, the recent $100-a-month increase was cosmetic, not substantial. That $100-a-month increase cost only $60 million a year, which is a minuscule fraction of the $4 billion budget surplus.

The first of our five recommendations is to increase the income assistance rates to a level that provides an adequate standard of living and to index those rates to inflation. Based on the market basket measure from Human Resources Development Canada, that's about $1,300 a month for a single individual living in Vancouver and $1,700 a month for a single parent with one child. You say we can't afford that now, but you can. You can make a plan. You can do it gradually. You can raise taxes. You can do it. We can't afford not to do it.

An increase will help only those who qualify for assistance. Current regulations make it increasingly difficult for some to qualify. For example, to qualify you have to have earned $7,000 a year for two consecutive years before getting assistance. Young people, immigrants, refugees and homeless people have a hard time meeting these criteria. And what's the point?

Social workers have become gatekeepers, not caregivers. I quote from the application form for social assistance: "The B.C. government is responsible for making sure assistance goes only to people who are eligible." There's nothing in there that says anything about their responsibilities under international law or the need to help people in need. Our second recommendation is to remove the unjust and arbitrary barriers to receiving income assistance.

Would any of you accept a 100-percent tax on your income? I don't think so. Then why impose it on income assistance recipients? Our third recommendation is to eliminate the clawbacks. Give all people on income assistance an earning exemption of $500 a month, and allow parents to keep all child support payments.

A minimum wage of $10 an hour is a must. There's no cost to the province but likely more revenue. The minimum wage has not been raised since November 2001, yet this June the B.C. Legislature boosted MLA paycheques to $98,000 a year and the Premier's to $186,000 a year — and those paycheques are indexed to inflation. Wouldn't it be better if everyone in B.C. could share in the benefits of this hot economy?

Our fourth recommendation is to increase the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour and index it to inflation. By the way, Saskatchewan has announced that they're raising the minimum wage gradually to $9.25 an hour by May 2008 and intend to reach the low-income cutoff by 2010.

On the issue of affordable housing, it's clear that rents and evictions have increased substantially in the run-up to the Olympics. Housing advocates fear the worst is yet to come. There were early promises by VANOC to build housing, but I did a word search through the Vancouver 2010 progress reports for the last three reports, and there were no occurrences of the word "housing" in those reports.

The market fails to provide affordable solutions, and public solutions are needed. Our fifth recommendation, then, is to commit significant new budget funds to build 2,000 units of non-market housing per year in addition to assisted-living and shelter beds, at a cost of about $400 million a year.

Raise the Rates members believe that the provincial government could significantly reduce poverty if it implemented: a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy and a provincial action plan committed to full government compliance with its obligations under international law to ensure the human right to an adequate standard of living for all; a broad-based consultation process to ensure that the poverty reduction targets and the ways in which they are measured were agreed upon by the community as a whole; and integrated income, housing, nutrition and social policies, free of charity and stigma, focused on poverty prevention and the eradication of homelessness, hunger and social exclusion.

I'm not an economist, but I know that the economy is a social construction, not some external force. Therefore, as legislators you have the obligation to change it to meet the needs of our citizens' basic human rights. Let me remind you of those rights.

In addition to article 25 of the universal declaration of human rights adopted by the UN in 1948, Canada adopted article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1976: "The states parties to the present covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions. The states parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right."

We need a comprehensive provincial poverty reduction strategy with clear, measurable targets agreed upon by the community. Public problems require public solutions.

In the meantime, I urge you to be part of the solution by recommending that the provincial government increase income assistance rates substantially and index them to inflation, remove the bars and barriers to obtaining assistance when needed, remove the 100 percent income tax on assistance recipients' other income, raise the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour indexed to inflation and build 2,000 units of non-market housing per year.

J. Kwan: Thanks very much, Alan, for your presentation. The information you have presented to us also comes with an attachment around the cost of food and the inability of families on income assistance to access proper food. I wonder: do you have a breakdown of the cost of food for a family unit, and what the amount should be for a person to be able to eat properly under the health and nutrition guide?

In addition to that, do you have information on the current cost of housing, on market housing costs? Those are the two essential pieces, I think, that would be required for one to fully appreciate what is needed for someone to survive, living on income assistance.

A. James: I know the housing one. The current average cost for a bachelor apartment in Vancouver is about $800. The $375 housing allowance doesn't come close to that.

As far as the food is concerned, I believe the dieticians were looking at about $160 a month per person.

D. Hayer: Thank you very much, Alan. My question is on point 2 of your recommendation where you talk about "given assistance when needed." If there's a person who is healthy enough to work and there's a job available for them, do you think they should be given assistance, or should they be trained to go to work so that they can work and make earnings rather than getting assistance? How do you define that part? I'm just trying to find out.

A. James: I agree that it's much better to be in a position where you can provide for yourself than to have to live on government assistance. I don't think there's anybody who would choose to live on government assistance if they could find work.

Yes, we need training, but we need some sort of progression out of assistance. As I said on the clawback issue, if I were on income assistance and I earned $10 by doing some work for a neighbour and I declared that $10, then that would be subtracted from my next cheque. There's no incentive to do any kind of additional looking for work.

A. James: By all means. You do. You keep some percentage of what you earn. So should a person who is on income assistance.

J. Horgan: Thank you very much, Alan, for your presentation. I want to let you know, for the record, that not everyone is accepting the pay raise that was legislated. Certainly, for myself, I'm giving the increase that I'm receiving to the food bank in my community.

I'd like to focus on the food question. The government has been promoting healthier living. I encourage that; I embrace that. Most in the community do, but as you've quite ably articulated today, not everyone in the community can follow those lofty policy goals.

In terms of the five recommendations, if we were to only pick one that would deal with proper and adequate nutrition, which one would you select? I'm assuming it would just be the rate increase, but it's not that simple. Maybe you could expand upon that.

J. Swanson: For people on welfare it would be the rate increase. For people who are working it would be the wage increase.

The Minister of Finance, in commenting upon a request to increase the minimum wage, has said that she opposed it, among other reasons, as it would discourage investment. I'm wondering if you have a comment on that.

A. James: Investment is such a broad, difficult category to talk about when you're trying to compare it with an individual who doesn't get enough to eat. I just don't think it's a worthwhile comparison.

J. Swanson: I think the reasoning behind that, I guess, is that people who would make investments want low-wage workers because it increases profits. Or they have the theory that it increases profits. But I've talked to a lot of small businessmen who have told me that they like the idea of a minimum-wage increase because it gives customers in their neighbourhood more purchasing power. Purchasing power, according to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, is the main thing that drives businesses.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): We've come to the end of our time. Thanks very much.

The next presentation is from the B.C. Association of Child Development and Intervention, Bruce Sandy.

B. Sandy: Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to you today. I'm here speaking on behalf of Dr. Glenda Prkachin and the board of the B.C. Association of Child Development and Intervention.

The B.C. Association of Child Development and Intervention is a provincial non-profit association founded in 1991 which provides advocacy, communication, networking, research and education services to over 25 member agencies throughout B.C. and the Yukon.

The BCACDI represents member agencies which provide diagnostic, developmental and intervention services for children and youth with special needs and their families. The core services which our member agencies provide include early intervention therapy services, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology; infant development programs; supported child development programs; school-based therapies; behavioural support services; and autism services and programs.

The agencies have been identified as in integral component in the delivery of a continuum of integrated service for children and youth with special needs in a recent review conducted by a multiministerial review team. It's also important to note that the vast majority of the members of BCACDI have received the top accreditation from accreditation bodies such as CARF.

We also actually want to remind the government that the B.C. government stated two years ago that children are one of its top priorities and that one of the key government goals is to build the best system of support in Canada for persons with disabilities, those with special needs, children at risk and seniors. We're also aware that the government, at this point in time, has a reported $1.4 billion surplus.

We were delighted last year, when we received the report of the Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, that they had adopted two of our recommendations. Those recommendations were that the B.C. government should allocate $25 million to $30 million to address and eliminate the wait-lists for services and programs for children and youth with special needs and that additional funding of at least $7 million should be allocated for the hiring of psychologists and other mental health professionals to address the diagnostic and behavioral needs of children and youth with special needs.

The committee actually recommended that the government immediately allocate necessary resources to eliminate the wait-lists for assessments of children and youth with special needs and, furthermore, that the government should provide funding for a comprehensive prescreening program for all children.

The government chose not to follow the recommendation of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services in the allocation of funding for early intervention services in the 2007-2008 fiscal year, the year we're in now. When questioned why the government had not adopted the strong recommendation of the standing committee last year, a senior government official wrote: "The government considers the recommendations of the standing committee but ultimately decides on the province's funding priorities."

At this point in time there are still approximately 6,000 children on wait-lists for services for children and youth with special needs in the province. These wait-lists have been increasing over the last five to ten years.

Research shows that for every dollar invested in early childhood development services for children and youth with special needs there is a seven- to eightfold savings in future health, educational, social services, correctional and other societal costs.

BCACDI appreciates that the government is living up to previous funding agreements for increased services for children and youth with special needs that were made in '04-05 and '05-06. There are still, however, approximately 4,000 children with special needs on the wait-list for therapy services alone, and there are ongoing wait-lists for IDPs and supported child development.

That is why we're here again this year: to make the recommendation that a minimum of $30 million should be allocated to address and eliminate the wait-lists for services and programs for children and youth with special needs.

Additional funding for early intervention and school therapies — including physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech-language pathology — should be the priority. These funds should be allocated in a timely, equitable and consistent fashion to all MCFD regions in the province.

The other recommendation that was not followed up on last year was around mental health professionals. There is a shortage of psychologists and other mental health professionals in the children's sector to address the diagnostic and behavioral needs of children.

The government funded an additional $16.8 million for child and youth mental health, for the final phase of the child and youth mental health plan as announced in the February 2006 budget. None of these additional funds went to direct service delivery for children and youth with special needs, as per our recommendation of an additional $7 million for mental health services for children and youth with special needs that was adopted by this committee last year.

Therefore, our second recommendation is that additional funding of at least $7 million should be allocated for the hiring of psychologists and other mental health professionals to address the diagnostic and behavioral needs of children and youth with special needs.

Our next point is around child care funding. The MCFD budget for early childhood development, ECD, and child care and supports to children with special needs was reduced by approximately $119 million for the 2007-2008 fiscal year as a result of the B.C. government not receiving the funding for child care programs — the $455 million committed to by the previous federal Liberal government. BCACDI is naturally concerned about what impact this will have on child care programs.

We're aware that the government actually chose to continue the funding for supported child development programs in 2007-2008 at the level of $54 million, and we appreciate that the supported child development program will continue to receive approximately this amount in ongoing funding for 2007-2008.

We are concerned about the overall cuts to the child care budget, since this will erode the foundation for all child care programs. We were somewhat encouraged to learn that the provincial government had changed its plan to reduce the child care funding reduction to $5 million as opposed to the originally proposed $11 million cuts to child care resource and referral centres in '07-08.

We were also concerned about the amount of one-time funding of approximately $40 million that we have heard is being allocated by the province from federal child care funding to a number of agencies for non-direct child care expenditures, such as professional development, by the end of this fiscal year. Funding is needed on an ongoing basis for child care programs and direct service delivery.

The direct funding strategy implemented by the current federal government of $100 per child under the age of six per family, per month, funds only a small percentage of the actual costs of approximately $1,000 per month for infants and about $2,000 to $3,000 per month for children with special needs. Our recommendations in this area include that the B.C. government should continue to enhance the current level of funding for the supported child development program.

We also recommend that the government should develop a comprehensive day care strategy and funding base that protects, enhances and describes in detail their objective for the future in corresponding service levels and budget commitments.

The next area that we want to comment on was actually in our standing committee report last year, and it is with respect to Community Living B.C. Community Living B.C. was recognized by a number of reports as not being ready for the delivery of services for adults with developmental disabilities, let alone services for children and youth with special needs.

Community Living B.C. received a $16 millionincrease in funding for children's services in this last

fiscal year as a fund transfer from the Ministry ofChildren and Family Development in order to streamline the contracting process for children's services and for compensation increases for the CLBC service providers. Even with an increase in funding there were still major problems such as no clear plans, policies or accountability guidelines for the delivery of children's services under CLBC. Parents and family members report major frustrations and delays in trying to obtain funding and appropriate service coordination and support from CLBC staff.

Our recommendation in this area is that children and youth with special needs and their families are better served under one ministry, the Ministry of Children and Family Development. All autism programs and funding should be transferred back to MCFD. Serious consideration should be given to transferring all programs and services for children with lifelong disabilities back to MCFD until CLBC is able to produce a clear plan, policies and guidelines for working fairly and effectively with families of children with lifelong disabilities.

Our next recommendation is with respect to children in care with special needs. At this point in time it's recognized that anywhere from 50 percent to 70 percent of children in care have some form of special needs. We are therefore recommending that significant funding in the order of $20 million or more should be allocated to address the needs of children in care with special needs and their foster families.

The next recommendation is with respect to facility and capital costs. We are recommending that the government should invest a minimum of $25 million for capital projects in this area. Contract agencies should receive appropriate capital allocation grants along with their third-party service agreements.

The last recommendation is with respect to training programs for rehabilitation therapists in B.C. At this point in time there is a chronic shortage of physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech-language pathologists with pediatric experience in B.C. We are recommending that the size of the school of rehabilitation and the speech-language pathology program should be increased by 100 percent at the University of British Columbia and/or that new satellite or independent schools of rehabilitation and speech-language pathology should be established at the University of Victoria and the University of Northern British Columbia, similar to what is being done for the faculty of medicine at these three universities.

Those are the major recommendations from the B.C. Association of Child Development and Intervention. We would like to thank you for the opportunity to come and speak to you today. Most of these recommendations were included in the recommendations for the report to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services last year.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Thank you. Questions from members of the committee?

J. Horgan: Thank you very much for the presentation. I just wanted to ask, Bruce, in terms of the wait-list, we had a similar presentation this week in Victoria.

B. Sandy: That was from one of our member agencies, from the Nanaimo Child Development Centre. That is correct. It hit the press, actually.

J. Horgan: It hit us like a bit of a rock, as well — at least those on this side. I think I speak for the majority of members that the fact that the wait-list remains…. In fact, it has increased.

Can you give us a sense of…? Were the funds to be allocated as you have recommended, would it meet the challenge in one fiscal year? Or are we looking at a longer-term problem because of the delay in meeting the needs last year?

B. Sandy: It would go a long way to address the wait-list problems in one year. It would also be dependent on the availability of particular therapists and behavioral interventionists, so it may take longer than one year to actually eliminate the wait-list.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I have a question. You made what I thought was a fairly dramatic recommendation about transferring funding for autism programs back to the Ministry of Children and Family Development. You make what I think would be fair to say is a fairly strong judgment about Community Living B.C.

B. Sandy: The reason we've come to that conclusion is what we hear from parents and family members of children with special needs and their concern about dealing with CLBC staff, the facilitators and the analysts. We hear that they are unsatisfied.

They are able to talk to the facilitators about particular plans for their children with developmental delays or developmental disabilities, and they are completely frustrated when they go to the analysts and find out that there isn't the funding available there to actually support the developmental needs of the children.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): At the time when the change was announced, there was some sense that this would encourage, in the long run, independence of the individuals that would be handled or would be part of the agency. Are you saying that that goal is just no longer attainable or that it's not attainable by this agency?

B. Sandy: It's not attainable through how this agency is going ahead at this point in time. There is difficulty enough for our member agencies providing the professional therapy and intervention services. You can imagine the challenge, when it goes to a family, of all of a sudden becoming the case manager and trying to find the appropriate services for a fraction of the costs for their children.

J. Kwan: With respect to the wait-lists. We heard a member agency of your group make a presentation around their wait-lists. Do you have information on what that wait-list looks like from community to community in terms of its breakdown so that we have a fuller sense of the different needs throughout the province?

B. Sandy: We do have a breakdown. In fact, I should have brought it along today. The wait-lists around the therapy services…. The report was actually done by the government two years ago, and it did a breakdown with respect to the wait-lists for physiotherapy, occupational therapy and speech-language pathology. We can also easily get the breakdown of the list for infant development programs and supported child development programs.

J. Kwan: If you could actually bring that information or at some point in time send that information to the Clerk's office, it would be very useful and helpful.

The report that you referred to from two years ago — can you just refresh my memory what report that was?

B. Sandy: It was a report looking at the wait-lists for early intervention therapies and school-based therapies provided by our member agencies throughout the province.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Bruce, we've come to the end of your time, so thank you for your presentation.

The next witness is Douglas College Faculty Association, represented by Susan Briggs.

S. Briggs: Good afternoon. I've brought copies of my presentation. In listening briefly here, I'm going to change what I've written.

S. Briggs: I just think that everyone comes here with real need, and you have to determine where you're going to apportion the money. We're all citizens, and we're all trying to work together.

To come behind an agency that's begging for money for disabled children is just…. We need to fund those things. I'm an English teacher. I'm the president of my faculty association, and we're members of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators. I can't believe that we have to beg for money to support health and education. The most important things in a society are healthy, intelligent people who are able to make decisions and live independently.

I'm going to vary widely from what I was going to say, to speak to you about things that come from my heart and my experience. I think that's probably a better way to approach you, because you've been snowballed with numbers and reports and figures and facts and stuff. They're in my report, and you have all those things. I'd rather speak to you about some of the things that are important apart from figures.

First of all, you know Douglas College. Iain, we're in your riding. We've got a diverse faculty membership. We've got diverse staff. We have diverse students. Everybody has certain specific needs, and we try to fill those all the time.

We have new degree programs to try to keep up with how to get money for funding our students. So we create degrees, which are needed. We have bachelors of science in general nursing, psychiatric nursing, therapeutic rec. We even developed an autism program at Douglas College to continue to get funding to serve the needs of the population.

It seems to me that while we're running after new money, we're forgetting about some of the old things that we do and that we do well. That's creating a population that's able to think for itself and adapt to changing times. That's what post-secondary education is about, and that's why it needs to be publicly funded — so that all people have access.

Deregulating tuition, encouraging the rise of private education over public education and funding that. I find it difficult to work in a system for 20 years and to see these things happening. I suppose I'm speaking personally here, but I find it a problem.

The other thing that is sort of fortuitous today…. Two things. One is that I would follow the gentleman that was just speaking to you about disabled children, and the need for service.

There are declining enrolments in post-secondary education. I don't think any smoke-and-mirrors display will hide that. We have a demographic that is causing us to dip in enrolments. We're competing with the universities, who have a rising and falling GPA scale so that if their enrolments are down, they just open up the floodgates. Students rush to the university because of the cachet of university education, and they don't necessarily come to school in their communities.

That's what Douglas College is all about: creating a strong community, bringing students from their neighbourhoods to schools. It's very difficult to compete against the universities, which have funding and have the ear of the government and corporations. The privates are very well represented in the province these days. We need advocates as well.

I just think that we could deal with declining enrolment if we had funding to increase our services. By that I mean creating programs that serve the needs of the people in our community. And one of those groups is disabled students.

I'm not saying that there are going to be hundreds of thousands of disabled students choosing to come to

Douglas College. But I know that 10 percent of our students have self-identified as disabled. They're choosing to come to Douglas College because we have an amazing faculty and staff there that work well with disabled students and give them amazing access to education, which allows them to have a more full life.

When we're fighting to keep a department like that open and functioning well and we're throwing money after other programs, it makes me worry about the competition. I wish I didn't have to be doing those kinds of things.

I want to draw your attention to the fact that it's important to create the upper levels of school, but at the same time, we have to encourage all people to come to school, to give them chances to make better lives. By denying services such as those the gentleman before me was asking for and the very ones I'm asking for as well…. We have to make a more equal society, a fair society.

It gets to the point where you have to wonder about the human rights of it and just the dignity of education and what it gives us. I'm appealing to you. When you have to go back and tot up the books and find out who gets the funding, you have to remember that to have a democracy that works, you need access. You need people who can think, and you need people who are well so that they can participate. That's what education is about.

I look around at you at the table, and some of you were at school when I was at school. When I went to school, I didn't have to spend that much on my tuition. In fact, for my first year at university the whole year was $500, and I had scholarships, so it was paid. It was 15 to 18 percent of my income to go to school at the time, and now students are paying 25 to 30 percent.

If you're disabled and you need extra services…. They can't afford those. They won't come to school. Even the students who can afford that amount have to work while they're going to school. They're not going to school the way I did or the way you might have done, where it was the only thing we did.

I just think we have to be more sensible with how we're allotting the money. I'm sorry that I deviated from my prepared speech, which was numbers and…. You're tired of that.

The second thing that happened to me today is that I just visited one of my colleagues, who was felled by a stroke and is now in Eagle Ridge Hospital. I realized what a gift it is to be able to teach.

I think public education really, really needs to be funded. You're taking away a cornerstone of our society if you don't fund education adequately. Having us go out into a competitive system is not what education is about.

D. Hayer: Thank you very much, Susan. Actually, I went to Douglas College back in '77, and I used to be the business manager for The Other Press, the student newspaper. I was there for a couple of years. Just today I attended the event at the David Lam campus in Coquitlam and met with many of the teachers and the students there. They seemed really happy and excited about what's happening. They were especially happy with the economy and the job situation.

My question to you is that the 25,000 that government has.… They're creating new spaces in post-secondary education. Do you think that money should be spent there? Is that a good part, or is that a waste of money?

S. Briggs: No. Spending money on public education is never a waste. Education of any kind is never a waste. I think that the $25,000 was part of a new program that the government had adopted. We had been here previously asking for tuition-free adult basic education. That was granted.

We're hoping that with the 25,000 extra FTEs around the province we'll be able to create programs that meet changing demands and changing times. That's what education is about. I'm not saying that's a wasted thing. But sometimes I think we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

We do some really good things. The program that you took at Douglas College in business could be supported and made more accessible to more students so they have an opportunity to rise just the way you did.

No, it's not a waste. I think we need better planning. I see that as a real problem in education. We need better planning. We can't be reactive. We have to shape the world, not run to catch up to it.

D. Hayer: Just one follow-up to that. When I went to school, I also worked part-time. And I have four kids, and they worked part-time going to post-secondary — three of them. Do you think that if the students want to work part-time to help with tuition, we should discourage that or allow them to do it if the jobs are available?

S. Briggs: Well, you're asking me. I'm an English instructor. I have students come into my class, and they haven't done the readings for the day so that we can't discuss things at a university level. And why did they not? Because they had to work an extra shift in order to pay for their school. No, I don't think that's good.

When I was at school, you were allowed to work ten hours a week, and that was it. That was regulated. If a student would like to work ten hours because he would like the extra money or would like to pay for his tuition…. Obviously, it's not a totalitarian regime. I'm not going to stop a student from doing that. But I'm certainly not going to give him an A just because he showed up.

I assume you are prepared, and your children are prepared when they come. A lot of kids now are working too much, too long, and their focus is not on their education but on paying their fees.

H. Bloy: Thank you very much for your presentation, and from the heart is much better. We get so

many written presentations, and your faculty have presented all over the province with just about word for word the same presentation. I just wanted to thank you for that.

J. Kwan: Thank you. I appreciate your presentation, both in verbal form as well as the written form. There are a couple of pieces of information that I pulled from your written presentation that I think warrant some discussion.

On page 2 and page 3 of your presentation it states that real per-student funding of public post-secondary institutions has been going down, in the wrong direction, for the last six years. In fact, it won't be until 2008 that real per-student funding levels rise above the level they were at in 2001. Then further on down, in the third paragraph, you raised the issue of deficit in this year's budget cycle for your school and that therefore programs and services and ultimately students will suffer.

I wonder if you can shed some light on what is required, then, in terms of funding allocation to bring per-student funding to an adequate level. What are we talking about in actual terms?

The second question is on the deficit. How large is your deficit? In which case, faced with a deficit, what programs are therefore at risk?

S. Briggs: The first thing is that we're at risk of being $1.1 million in deficit. That's because we're not getting the inflationary grant that was rolled automatically into the university grants.

Now, I don't want to come and attack the universities. I've heard, in circles, that the government doesn't appreciate the colleges whining about what the universities are doing. But in fact, that's a real problem. They get it; we don't. And as soon as we don't get it, we don't have enough money to run our programs.

We will be $1.1 million in deficit because we're not going to get the inflationary grant. What happens when we don't get that? Programs are cut. We've already had some of our programs cut back. In the past there's been the prison ed program and that, but we're looking at service cuts this time.

One of the reasons I'm highlighting the disabled students centre is that we don't have enough deaf interpreters. We don't have enough people who will help our students who are suffering from head injury — that sort of thing. They're coming back to school, and they're quite able to learn, but they need some supports. We'll cut their program.

Then I have faculty members who work 150 percent. There's some suggestion, Mr. Hayer, that I am against working, and if people want to work…. I'm a very hard-working person, and so, too, are my colleagues, but if you cut the funding out from underneath us and expect us to do the jobs that one or two or three people do and one person is doing them, the service can't be good and we can't give access to students who need to be there.

Other programs that we'll cut, I think…. The applied programs at our school are very expensive. They require lab equipment, special facilities. We won't be able to fund those kinds of continuing programs. That will be a problem. Realistically and actually, a 10-percent increase from the budget would help us. It would take care of the funding, and it's not even that much money.

We've got millions of dollars in this budget. Just give us 10 percent more. I've written my recommendations at the end of my report, and they are, frankly, realistic. We can meet those. We have the money. We have the province. We should be leading the world.

I have a niece, an American, who had straight A's in her schooling, and I suggested she come to Canada to go to school. Her father is here. She could go as a regular student — no international fees.

She was worried about coming to Canada. I said: "Why? You've got straight A's. You'll be really good at it." She said: "No. I'm not sure that my studies are the same as your studies." I said: "How do you know? You got an A in calculus. Just take math." She said: "Well, no. My grade was based on how I performed on the Trivial Pursuit quiz as bonus grades." I said: "What are you talking about? Is there a Trivial Pursuit quiz for calculus?" "No, it was in geography."

She has inflated grades from a private school, and she didn't want to come to Canada because she was worried that her grades wouldn't cut it.

I can guarantee you that in the public school system there are standards. I want people to access my education so I can turn them out so that they can re-create themselves when jobs are spare, and that's coming in 2010.

We don't want to cut our services now, because students will be pouring back in. The economy is good now. Students are taking jobs rather than coming to school, but that's what I mean about planning. They're going to come back, and we need to be prepared for their return.

If we cut all our services now, we won't accommodate them. There'll be more students without access, higher tuition and only the rich students being serviced. I won't work in a system like that.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much. There are a number of other questioners, but the time allotted for your presentation has now ended, so I'll have to call on the next presenters, Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I gather that the Confederation of University Faculty Associations is not here, so Gaëtan Royer, city of Port Moody, go ahead.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Could you tell us, then: are you here on your own behalf?

G. Royer: My name is Gaëtan Royer. I live in Port Moody. I'm involved in the community in various capacities, but today I'm not speaking on behalf of my employer or any group.

I wrote a book titled Time for Cities. The subtitle is Canadian Cities are Going Broke. It's a survey of all Canadian cities. This is an advocacy book. It proposes a redistribution of powers among levels of government.

It's about time. It's five o'clock in the morning. Kids get up for a hockey practice. Months ago their mom and dad had to line up at 3 a.m. to get them into that program because there was a long waiting list.

At the bus stop someone waits half an hour to watch the bus drive by, and that's because it was full 20 minutes ago.

The fire hall that was needed five years ago is still not built, and response time has increased by another 20 seconds this year. Over five years that's an extra two minutes before the fire trucks get to someone's home.

The city's public hearing for an affordable public housing project runs until five o'clock in the morning, and that's when the kids get up to go to the arena.

It's all about time, and my pitch is that B.C.'s cities are running out of time. There's no money to fix bridges that fail earthquake testing. In other provinces bridges and overpasses have collapsed, and B.C. cities commission risk assessments. They prioritize which bridges are going to be fixed first — if they last.

Virtually every new Canadian immigrant settles in a city. Virtually every mentally ill patient settles in a city park.

Cities are running out of time, and they're running out of money. Senior governments are proud of their surplus, and together, Canada and the provinces reached a record $30 billion surplus in 2007. Local governments have a deficit that's estimated at $500 million, and that's without counting the infrastructure deficit. B.C. and the federal government must be managing money better than cities.

Well, not quite. Like many of our kids who move back home, senior governments are getting someone else to cover their expenses. Like boomerang kids, B.C. literally stopped paying for shelter.

Homelessness affects people of all ages. More than 3,600 teenagers slept at one Montreal shelter in 2006, and 155 of them were 16 years old or less. I don't have numbers for B.C. I'm told they're similar.

Metro Vancouver statistics show that the number of older homeless people went up 276 percent from 2002 to 2005. The number tripled in the last five years. Homeless persons tend to have a short life expectancy, so these are not homeless persons just becoming old. These are old folks becoming homeless.

When the federal government negotiated the devolution of affordable housing to provinces, provinces got the money and cities ended up with the problem.

Kids who move back to their home rely on their parents' income. Like boomerang kids, senior governments live off our cities' vitality. Every job created as a result of a city's growth generates more payroll taxes for the province. Every transaction that's made in urban economies generates more PST and GST. There used to be tax transfers to cities, but those are long gone.

The business world realizes that something's wrong. Let me give you a few quotes from business leaders. The first one is from Glenn Murray, a business consultant for Microsoft Canada. "Our property tax system is designed to make us a brown economy — utilitarian as opposed to creative, an economy for the last century."

A business columnist for the Vancouver Sun, Don Cayo, says that our competitiveness depends on civic amenities that tip the balance when a company can locate anywhere in the world. About taxation powers, Don adds: "In other countries cities have a lot more tax options and a lot more money to work with."

It's time for new fiscal arrangements. In 2005 cities stopped paying GST when they purchased computers, fire trucks and everything else that they buy. The GST exemption was certainly a step in the right direction. When cities buy chlorine to make drinking water safe or a heart defibrillator for the fire department, they still pay PST, and that doesn't make sense to me. Using taxes to pay tax doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Cities are running out of money to the point where it hurts the economy. The director of the Munk Centre for International Studies says: "Canada is living with a 19th-century architecture. Its fiscal arrangement grows out of a rural experience, and it's not responsive to the massive shift of population to our major cities." She adds: "Governments at all levels must flow resources to cities."

Many people think that our economy, especially in B.C., is resource-based, and that's a bit shortsighted. The future mailing address of B.C.'s wealth is in towns and cities, not at the bottom of a coalmine.

Downloading responsibilities to cities is a very good idea. There are a lot of inconvenient responsibilities, which have been discussed during these consultations, I'm sure. Downloading brings services much closer to the citizens, but the tax room has to be downloaded, as well, when that takes place. Otherwise, that's public policy by creating a vacuum, hoping for someone else to fill it.

There's a chapter in my book about the art of downloading. I talk about one-time grants that have come to replace annual tax transfers to cities. One-time grants are the same as a pail of water replacing a firehose. Once you've used it, that's it. One-time grants put cities in competition with one another. Grant applications make cities feel like they're in some kind of beauty contest with one another.

Public policy should not be a giftwrapped surprise at the end of the year when there is money left over. Public policy and public services are public responsibilities, not goodies that come at the end of the fiscal year.

Let me share the story of an average Canadian couple. They earned $75,000 in 2006, just above the B.C.

average family income. They got a $2,000 wage increase on January 1 of this year, which matches a 2.7-percent increase, which is the average across Canada. Thirty-five percent of that $2,000 is deducted at the source for income tax. So there's the first $700 gone.

These average folks live in an average home in the area, and property taxes went up by $65 in 2007. With school taxes and other fees the $2,000 has dwindled to a thousand and change. So they splurge. They spend the money, and when they do, at the till they realize that they've got to pay another $150 in GST and PST. So the sales tax alone, when they spend the money that's left over, is more than double the amount that goes to pay property taxes — the tax increases in that year.

These poor folks gave about $900 to senior governments and $65 to the city where they live. That creates an insidious system. There's a bias against cities that's built right into our fiscal system right across Canada. In 2004, cities got 12 cents out of every tax dollar. Only two years later that went down to eight cents out of every tax dollar that went to cities. That's in 2006. Projections that I've come across in my research now indicate that cities will get about six percent of our total taxes in 2008 or 2009, depending on the province.

In many countries cities get revenues from sources that are tied to the economy. There are many examples of governments that lowered their sales tax to create tax room for cities, and other jurisdictions are phasing out property taxes.

The property tax assessment is a system that's an archaic invention. It dates back to the 1800s. The amount of property taxes that businesses and residents pay is influenced more by realtors and the B.C. Assessment authority than by cities.

In conclusion, my message is simple. Cities are going broke. They have to pay for services downloaded by senior government, but their share of the revenues is getting smaller. B.C. needs to let go of some of its powers. B.C. needs to work with cities and launch a municipal tax reform initiative.

R. Lee: Thank you for your presentation. As we all said, they are only one taxpayer. What kind of a transfer do you think would be appropriate to cities from the federal as well as the provincial government?

G. Royer: I think if you take affordable housing as a case study, there have been negotiations between the federal government and the provincial governments of all the provinces at the time when the federal government decided to get out of affordable housing and housing complexes.

There are whole complexes that were transferred. The property title and the tax room were transferred. It was done in a negotiation. Cities were not part of that negotiation. It started in the mid-1980s. It was modelled after the Thatcher government and what they had done. It followed very much, as well, with what the Reagan government had done at the time and was completed under the Chrétien government. That was very well negotiated, carefully negotiated, through intergovernmental discussions.

The same kind of downloading of responsibilities and downloading of tax room could be taking place. Right now we have a situation where affordable housing is basically being handled in the form of one-time grants, various initiatives that vary across Canada and across the province. There are a lot of people who are falling between the cracks and who are not being housed out of that.

The kind of tax room that I'm talking about…. When New York City was going bankrupt in the 1975 time frame, the state was not doing that well. There was a decision made and a transition phase where New York City went from 100-percent property tax to what it is now, which is 25-percent property tax. The rest of their revenues are a combination of sales tax, corporate tax, hotel tax and income tax.

R. Hawes: You have a very interesting proposal. I am to some degree a creature, too, of local government. I served there for quite a few years.

You talk, for example, of affordable housing. Much of the problem with affordable housing and what prevents affordable housing is policies of municipalities. Longtime delays for approvals; NIMBYism where they, frankly, don't allow affordable housing to be built because everybody wants affordable housing "but not in my neighbourhood," and some city councils are averse to that; the size requirements in some municipalities. The minimums are set so high that housing is not affordable.

There are many, many reasons in some communities why affordable housing isn't there. Some cities just don't want to partner and make these sorts of things happen.

Other cities think outside of the box and find other sources of revenue. We see them every day here. EPCOR, Edmonton Power Corporation, is so huge now, and I think the shares are still predominately owned by the city of Edmonton. They are branching out all over, running water and power systems in British Columbia and Alberta, because they formed an outside corporation, which other cities can do.

I live in Mission. We have a thing called the Mission Development Corporation, where we have a profit-making development corporation, or it was making a profit. We also have a tree farm, which we've operated for almost 50 years, from which we make some income that pays for social infrastructure like libraries, etc.

There are revenue sources available, but it's a matter of thinking outside of the box and having local councils, in some cases, want to go there and think that way.

I appreciate what you're saying, but I think it's a two-way street, and it can't all be heaped on senior government to say: "Give. Give. Give." Sometimes local councils also have to think outside of the box and be somewhat creative. Quite often there's a lack of that kind of creativity, which also adds to the problem that you're talking about.

G. Royer: I entirely agree. I think that as Canadians we pay enough taxes. I wouldn't sit in front of you saying that we have to grow the pie. I think it has to be divided differently.

There are responsibilities that would be better handled at the local level. There are responsibilities would be better handled by the private sector as well.

However, I think if you look at the cases that you've mentioned where there's a for-profit element, I'm not sure what the cap rate is, but it's probably in the 8 to 11 percent, which is a typical cap rate now. That means that if there is a government contribution, a taxpayer contribution, some of that is being funnelled out to generate profit to pay back dividends to shareholders.

I think if we're going to throw money at a problem, I'd rather spend 100 percent of it on resolving that public policy issue and not have to pay a cap rate on an investment as part of that. I've been involved in many public-private partnerships, and there is always an element of return on investment when the private sector is involved.

R. Hawes: I think what I was suggesting here is that the private sector in EPCOR…. Actually, the shareholder is the city of Edmonton.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I think we're going to have to end this here, as I'm sure we could head on for some time on this discussion.

G. Royer: I want to qualify. Somebody added city of Port Moody. I'm not here, as I said, representing….

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I think you made that very clear. I'm sorry. I was misadvised.

I believe the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia is here.

C. Petter: My name is Chris Petter. I'm the digitization librarian at the University of Victoria. I'm appearing before you today in my capacity as president of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia, also known as CUFABC. CUFABC represents more than 4,300 university professors, lecturers, instructors, professional librarians and other academic staff at UBC, SFU, UVic, UNBC and Royal Roads universities.

With me today is Robert Clift, the executive director of CUFABC. Rob's academic affiliation is with UBC's Centre for Policy Studies in Higher Education and Training.

We will be submitting a comprehensive written brief to you in about a week's time. But I want to take our time today to focus on a single topic: the need for the provincial government to increase core funding so that we can improve the quality of education and research at our universities.

Just so that you don't get the wrong impression, let me assure you that the quality of education and research provided at our public universities is still very good. Rather, the problem is that it's not as good as it could be, and it won't get better unless the provincial government improves core funding for the operating budgets at our public universities.

For almost 20 years successive provincial governments have focused on the critical shortage in student spaces in our public education institutions. Between 1985 and 2005 full-time-equivalent enrolment at B.C.'s public universities grew by more than 80 percent, jumping from 42,000 to almost 77,000.

I won't take time today to reiterate the reasons why we had to meet increased demand for higher education. Suffice it to say that as a province we were and still are unprepared to meet the demands of a knowledge economy. I also want to note in passing that CUFABC was one of the prime motivators behind the push to increase access back in the '80s.

However, this two-decade expansion has come at a cost. Provincial governments of all political stripes asked us to provide more spaces for students, and we delivered. Unfortunately, those new spaces did not always come with full funding. As per-student funding eroded, so did the quality of education we provide most students and the quality of the research environment for our faculty and grad students.

Between 1985 and 2005 provincial funding per full-time student dropped by just over 16 percent when measured in constant 2005 dollars — from $11,100 in 1985-1986 to $9,200 in 2005-2006. Some of this lost revenue from government sources has been made up in hefty increases in tuition fees, but the total constant dollar resources available on a per-student basis have only recently exceeded the levels of 1983-1984. So we're making progress very slowly.

In any event, it's not fair that we've balanced our books on the backs of our students. It's even less fair that students are paying higher fees but have a lower-quality education than their parents.

Today's classes are larger. Faculty members are forced to choose methods of evaluation based on the

ease of marking rather than the appropriateness of the subject matter. Increasingly, students are taught by limited-term, part-time instructors. Libraries, as I've said before to this committee, have fewer professional librarians to guide the faculty through a confusing plethora of on- and off-line resources.

Additionally — and this is critical — there are fewer academic and personal support services for students. This is of particular importance because the student demographic expands to include far more first-generation learners and adult learners. We should be providing them with the support they need to succeed. This is even more true for first nations students. We need to provide better support services for them, too, to succeed.

Although these changes mainly affect undergraduate students, our graduate students are also having a tough time of it. Presently about one-third of the overall graduate student spaces in B.C. universities are unfunded. This means that the universities have received no direct funding from government to support these 3,800 students across the province.

The 2,500 new, fully funded graduate student spaces over the next four years, announced in the 2007 budget, was very welcome news to us. Unfortunately, the funding for these spaces and the companion scholarships and internship programs will run out in four years. We are already at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the country in graduate education. If this new funding is to have the necessary impact, it must be guaranteed as part of the base funding and it must be increased to close the gap with Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.

This is in no way better illustrated than by the fact that in spite of a building boom at the universities, graduate students are still packed into offices, and in some departments they have no work space at all. In many labs they have to raid one another's experiments in order to move ahead on their research.

This is certainly not the way that we want to educate the next generation of researchers, thinkers and leaders, nor is it going to build the kind of innovation capacity that will be needed to make B.C. a leader in Canada or in the global economy.

This is not to say that our students are getting poor-quality education — far from it. My faculty and staff colleagues work very hard to provide students with the best education, but if you're teaching upwards of 500 students a semester and you don't have enough support for teaching assistants, you have to find ways to make the workload manageable.

Even though the teaching quality remains high, we don't evaluate students' learning as often or as rigorously as we once did. Consequently, we're not living up to the legacy of high-quality, affordable public education that was established in the 1960s and '70s.

On the research side, even though there is enough money for immediately marketable research, we need better funding for research that is primarily about building knowledge rather than developing products. Both are important, but this isn't reflected in theavailable funding. Moreover, without research to build knowledge, we are choking off information that may be in high demand in the future.

Recently a new barrier to high-quality research was revealed. It's child care — or rather, the lack of it. The current strike at the child care centre at Simon Fraser underscores this. We hear from our SFU colleagues that literally millions of dollars in research grants have been lost because faculty members with children, who are unable to arrange alternate care, miss deadlines to apply for federal research grants.

We will deal with these and other issues in more detail in our written submission. As time is running short, however, I'll move straight to the recommendations regarding quality.

First, government has to provide increases to the general operating grants to help us turn back some of the decline in quality. Creating more spaces is important, too, but we can no longer trade one off against the other.

Second, government has to build upon its recent funding for graduate students. For too many years, governments of all political stripes virtually ignored funding for graduate education. This was despite the fact that graduate students act as teaching assistants, research assistants and add generally to the intellectual life of the university. The funding announced in the 2007 budget for this purpose has to be committed and increased, both for graduate student places and for graduate scholarships.

Third, government needs to make new investments in university-based research. No matter how you slice it, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec have been way ahead of us for many years. We do well with what we have, but we could and should do better.

Finally, government needs to take action to create and support day care spaces. Others will have details that we lack on this issue, but this should definitely be done.

I hope I've been able to impress upon you the need for government to start paying attention to the quality of our universities. Mr. Plant certainly did in the Campus 2020 report, and we urge you to do your part to turn his ideas into action.

We risk today's lower quality of education becoming our new high-water mark. This can only lead to mediocrity, which is a disservice to our students and to taxpayers who fund our public institutions. It is not too late to turn things around, but it has to be done very soon.

As the Campus 2020 report — entitled, I might add, Access and Excellence, not Access or Excellence…. To quote Mr. Plant: "Our research-intensive institutions must continue to be the key incubators of the innovation needed to address our most pressing social and environmental challenges and to develop a strong economy. They must also be places of teaching excellence, and they must be destinations of choice for the best and the brightest students from across the province and around the world."

Thank you for your attention. Rob and I will answer any questions you might have.

H. Bloy: Thank you for your presentation. You had mentioned something about SFU. You did a quote that because they have children, they couldn't apply for grants. What was that?

R. Clift: There's an independent child care society at SFU, and the child care staff there are currently on strike. The child care spaces are used both by students and by faculty members. Those faculty members who had children in care and who were not able to arrange alternate care for their children during the strike literally had to miss deadlines on federal grant applications amounting — and we're not kidding — literally to millions of dollars that we lost.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): The next presenter is Lyn Anglin from Geoscience B.C.

L. Anglin: Good afternoon, and thank you very much for the opportunity to come and speak to you today. What I thought I'd do today is just give the committee a bit of an update on who Geoscience B.C. is and what we've been doing, as we were funded with a large grant from the provincial government a couple of years ago.

I wanted to take this opportunity to give you an update on where we're at with our activities and answer any questions you have about what we've been doing and what we're talking about doing in the future.

Just to start off, I've prepared a short handout, which is done in the format of PowerPoint slides. In addition, there is a colour flyer that gives some information on one of our specific projects that I may talk a little bit more about, if there's time, and also a draft brochure on a scholarship program that we initiated this year for students working in graduate school on mineral and oil and gas exploration–related projects.

Because we realize these days that one of the great needs in the industry is going to be geoscientists, we want to encourage students to finish their degrees if they start them. We know that we're competing with the industry right now, so it's a little bit of a catch-22, but we initiated a scholarship to help encourage those students to finish their degrees.

Some background on Geoscience B.C. We are an industry-led, not-for-profit society that was funded by the province with a grant for $25 million in 2005. Our mandate essentially is to generate and market new geoscience data to attract more exploration investment to British Columbia. The chart on the second slide on the first page is the exploration spending in B.C. In 2006 it was $265 million, up significantly over the previous four years, and we'd like to see that chart continue to go upwards — exactly.

The way we've decided to try and achieve our mandate is by providing technical leadership to the exploration community in and for B.C. We've had tremendous volunteer contributions from the industry. They've obviously really engaged in this model. We have a technical advisory committee that's largely from industry, and they're all volunteers. Our board of directors is largely volunteer. I have yet to calculate what that may actually be worth in terms of those people's time, but it's not inconsequential.

We have a highly respected project development team. They're consultants whose time we do pay for, but they have a wealth of industry experience, and they're helping us develop the programs that we are delivering. We really are bringing leading-edge technology to British Columbia with the projects that we've initiated.

One thing I'll just comment on is that we're really focusing in our larger projects on collecting what we call regional exploration–related data, the sort of things that really attract industry's attention but that no individual company will do themselves.

In terms of the approach that we've taken, in the first couple of years of our operation we were really focused on partnerships. In fact, of the approximately $6 million that we have invested in projects in response to calls for proposals, which we do each year, we've managed to lever that one-to-one with funding from partners.

Speaking of partners, we're working very closely with the ministry and the federal government. They both have geoscience agencies, and we're working with them to ensure that all of our work is complementary and that there's no duplication of our investments. That's particularly true in the mountain pine beetle area, for which we've developed a collaborative geoscience plan.

In 2007 we are very happy to see the federal government contribute some of their mountain pine beetle money to geoscience, to the tune of $6 million over the next couple of years, through their own department, Natural Resources Canada. We're working with our colleagues in that department. I'm very happy to say that the federal government committed to working collaboratively with the provincial B.C. geological survey and oil and gas group and with us at Geoscience B.C.

Now, in 2007 we initiated a couple of major initiatives in the mountain pine beetle area, one of which is our minerals QUEST project, which you may have heard of. It was announced in June. It's a large project: $5 million worth of geoscience data collection in central B.C. focused on the heart of the pine beetle area. The Northern Trust essentially committed to be a partner with us to the tune of three-quarters of a million dollars in that project.

The industry commitment in this project has been almost half a million hectares of new mineral claims staked in the area since the project was announced, and this was before we even started collecting data. We consider that a pretty positive indication of industry's interest in what we're doing and of buying into the

The QUEST project, which stands for Quesnellia exploration strategy — Quesnellia is a term that geologists use to describe the rocks that are the target of this project — was essentially a project designed by our project development team in response to recommendations made to us by the volunteers on our technical advisory committee.

Again, just some of the evidence of the industry buy-in to the model and this approach. I mentioned the staking. In addition, we've had a couple of junior companies form a joint venture and name their project after our project. They took the name QUEST and named their joint venture their QUEST project. We've seen a major company that, as far as we know, had not done any work in B.C. for over ten years — maybe as many as 15 — come back into B.C. and stake a significant number of claims and, in fact, were immediately in touch with us to find out more about what we were doing.

We've had smaller companies follow up on data that we've released and also stake large chunks of ground, attribute it to the data we're generating and anticipation of the data that will be released in the future.

On the bar chart at the bottom of that page, the little dark part there is essentially the number of claims that have been staked so far just with the announcement of this QUEST project of Geoscience B.C.'s. The big difference, of course, is when the province went to mineral titles on line, and I can say that the exploration industry in this province really likes that approach.

The other thing that really assured us that we've started to get attention for B.C. and get B.C. back on the radar screen for the exploration industry was when Don Lindsay, who's the president and CEO of Teck Cominco, made a comment about this project and about how this is evidence that the province is really doing the right thing to attract industry investment back to B.C.

We've had extensive media coverage, a lot of calls and requests from the public, including first nations that want our assistance in helping them to design projects or put in proposals for funding to help attract industry investment. We're seeing a lot of community engagement.

In addition to the Northern Trust funding, we're working with the beetle action coalitions, especially in the mountain pine beetle area, where they're looking for real options for diversification. We've been working with them to help develop mineral sector strategies. The communities, including Terrace and Burns Lake, are very interested in working with us to try to generate more exploration industry interest in their areas.

In terms of government cooperation, as I said, we are working with our colleagues in the federal and provincial governments. We each have a role to play in this and have, I think, developed a very good collaborative partnership. What Geoscience B.C. is able to bring is a really flexible, responsive and entrepreneurial approach to some of these bigger projects and a very good working relationship with industry and direct input from industry on what kind of data should be collected.

In terms of the mountain pine beetle, as I said, the forestry-based communities in the pine beetle area are really looking for diversification options — we think, certainly, mineral exploration and with new discoveries, mining, and possibly oil and gas exploration. If there is potential in the interior, perhaps some development will really help provide options for diversification for some of these communities.

It's the provision of geoscience information that really helps give companies a roadmap to target their exploration dollars, reduce their exploration risk and help attract them into a region that has some potential, making that region more competitive with other jurisdictions.

In terms of our mountain pine beetle initiatives, with our QUEST and a project in the Nechako which is related to oil and gas, we've committed about $7 million in funding just this year, in 2007. That's partly in partnership with the Northern Trust, who have committed about a million dollars of that $7 million.

Previous to that we had funded about $4 million in other projects in the mountain pine beetle area, and those have been leveraged with our partners to the tune of about another $4 million. So we think we're really developing a good base for the exploration community to try and help bring more activity into the mountain pine beetle area.

Just in terms of our financial snapshot, where we are with the $25 million that was granted to us, and I should have said that $5 million of that was for oil and gas and $20 million was for minerals…. Of that, we expect that the oil and gas money will be fully committed by the end of next year. If we do a couple more QUEST-style projects, and those are on the order of $4-million to $5-million projects, that's another couple of years. We expect to have that money fully committed by 2010.

One of the things we're very proud of is that we're managing to do this with a very low overhead. We expect that low overhead to be, in fact, less than 7 percent of the original $25 million at the end of a five-year spending cycle.

In terms of the impact, something you might be interested to know is that at Mines Ministers, other jurisdictions in Canada, and especially their industry associations, expressed real interest in the model that Geoscience B.C. represents. We're very impressed by the direction that the B.C. government has taken in creating this kind of an innovative model.

I expect they're probably very envious of the increasing percentage of the mineral exploration dollar that is now being spent in B.C., compared to the rest of Canada. That's what that chart shows — that B.C. has gone from being just barely over 5 percent in 2001 up to almost 17 percent in 2006 of exploration dollars spent in Canada. That's quite a turnaround.

In terms of the future we are, as I said, expected to have our dollars fully committed by 2010. I'll just reiterate that projects like QUEST are still very much a regional-scale project at $5 million. For instance, one component of that, the dream catcher survey that is referred to by many…. There's a picture of that in the colour brochure, which is in fact what's called a variable time domain EM system. That's a $2-million project, but we're flying the lines four kilometres apart. If industry was doing this over one of their properties, they'd be flying them 100 metres or 200 metres apart. To do this to industry scale would be a $40-million project rather than $2 million.

There is a lot more that can be done in B.C. There are huge areas that we think still have potential, and more geoscience data could really help attract that investment to those areas. We really think that in the pine beetle area, this is a key component of a diversification strategy and would like to encourage as much exploration as possible in a short amount of time.

I think I'll just comment that it's important for the government to keep making these investments to keep British Columbia ahead of the pack and keep us competitive with the rest of Canada and the rest of the world, because exploration dollars are extremely mobile. When that exploration money is spent in B.C., discoveries are made. If we bring new mines into production, these are the things that help us pay for education, health care and the things that we rely on in our cities.

I differ from one of the previous speakers who commented that cities were going to be the driving force in the economy, not the bottom of a coalmine. I think it might be the other way around, that in a big way cities are driven and survive on the basis of what comes out of the resource industries and all of those communities in northern B.C. who help maintain the standard of living we all enjoy in B.C.

On that note, I'll finish there. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Thank you. I think he's still here, so maybe you'll be able to have some dialogue afterwards.

R. Hawes: You must have been talking to some of our rural members like Blair Lekstrom about where wealth comes from in British Columbia.

R. Hawes: Just a quick question regarding…. In your presentation it says that first nations…. You're providing geoscience information, presentations and assistance with the development of proposals to attract mineral industry activity.

In this era of consultation and accommodation, do you get involved at all in that side of it? I know that is a very, very important part now of any mining proposal going forward.

L. Anglin: We are well ahead of anything being a mining proposal, so to speak. But yes, we try to inform every community. When I use the word "community," I mean first nations and non–first nations communities.

We have routinely, with any large projects that we're involved in…. We send out information to communities and contact them ahead of time. For the work we are proposing to do in the Nechako basin, we have been involved with direct consultation with the first nations communities.

The other thing I was referring to in that point is that over the past three years we have been contacted several times by first nations who want to put in a proposal to us and are seeking advice on where to go for partner funding.

We're seeing that more and more and are very, very interested in engaging with these communities, helping increase their awareness of what geoscience is, how that links to mineral exploration and what sort of long-term benefits that can bring to a community.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I have a question. Looking at the QUEST project and the results of that survey, then. Those are provided to industry without a user fee, if I could put it that way. It's a direct government assistance to spur exploration in that particular region of the province. Is that a fair way to put it?

L. Anglin: It's information that's going to be available to the public. It's not just going to be to industry. You're right. We intend, with this model, to make all of that information publicly available to anyone who's interested. And yes, we hope that industry will in fact use it.

We tend to liken ourselves to Tourism B.C. Where Tourism B.C. attempts to make B.C. a more attractive jurisdiction for tourism dollars, we are attempting to do the same thing for industry exploration dollars through provision of, essentially, knowledge about the geology and the various aspects of what's beneath our feet. It's essentially an investment in knowledge and data collection, and we are making it freely available to all groups.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): There are other questions, but we're now at 15 minutes, which is the time for the presentation and the questions. I'm going to have to draw it to a close, unfortunately. Thank you very much.

The next presenters are from Douglas College — Susan Witter and Andrew Taylor.

S. Witter: Good afternoon. I'm Susan Witter, president of Douglas College. My colleague is Andrew Taylor, chair of the board of Douglas College.

Thank you, first of all, for the opportunity to speak with you today — some familiar faces. We're here, really, to give you a bit of an update about Douglas College but also about the B.C. colleges throughout the

province — I think you've had some other presentations from colleges; to share information about an economic impact study that was just completed for our colleges; and to present our case for some increased funding so that we can continue to play our part in producing the most literate, well-educated citizens in this province.

First, I'll tell you about the economic impact study, and then Andrew will explain about what is needed and why.

The provincial government, as you're probably aware, supports 13 community colleges and institutes in British Columbia, and they serve upwards of 200,000 students in 50 communities throughout the province every year. Douglas College, as you're aware, has two major campuses — one in New Westminster, about 15 minutes away, and one in Coquitlam. Today it was about 40 minutes away. We also have a number of storefronts in a lot of the shopping malls in Maple Ridge, Burnaby and Surrey.

To carry out our responsibilities to our students, we provide programs in adult education, career and vocational training, university preparation and a narrow range of applied degrees. Douglas College now offers six applied degrees in our own name and partners in three others. These programs provide an education that enables students to become entrepreneurs, dedicated employees and engaged citizens in their communities.

To carry out the responsibilities to the communities in which we are located, we develop our programs in consultation with local business and industry to make sure that the graduates' skills are in line with the local employer need. To carry out our responsibilities to provincial government across the province, we provide a return on the investment of 14 percent, or $7.7 billion a year. That's almost 4 percent of the total provincial economy.

This is a major finding of a recent study of 13 B.C. colleges done by CCbenefits. It's the largest-ever economic impact study of the colleges in British Columbia.

There are other significant findings of this study. B.C. college graduates generate $220 million annually in higher earnings, thereby expanding the tax base and reducing the tax burden on provincial and local taxpayers. About 3 percent of B.C. college students come from outside the province. Their expenditures generate roughly $24 million into the British Columbia economy.

Colleges play a key role in ensuring that B.C. has an educated workforce prepared for the needs of business and industry, and in the future. The province benefits from improved health and reduced welfare, unemployment and crime, saving the public some $20 million per year each year that students are in the workforce.

As you can see, this major economic impact study shows that colleges are of significant social and economic value to the province, to students and their families and to the communities in which they reside.

In government's budget considerations, you're asking how British Columbians can be more environmentally responsible. Let me assure you that B.C. colleges are committed to environmental and financial sustainability.

As environmental leaders, many of our institutions, like Douglas, offer a range of innovative environmental sustainability programs. One at Douglas, the building environmental systems technology program, we launched two years…. We've had full classes, with waiting lists, each year. These programs introduce new leading environmental practices in the workplace.

Our institutions strive to promote environmental innovation and practices and to fulfil our collective mandate of educating and training tomorrow's skilled workforce.

To continue to provide the range of programs that are so vital in this province, we need sustainable base funding supported from the province. I'd like Andrew to carry on to explain the immediate and long-term needs of our B.C. colleges.

A. Taylor: Thank you, Susan, and thank you to the members of this committee for allowing us here today.

I speak today to a matter of some immediacy. Susan has explained the role the B.C. colleges play in helping make B.C. the most literate and educated province in Canada. To continue to play this vital role, the B.C. colleges need a new funding mechanism that, in addition to student tuition, ensures that the cost of colleges' operations are fully funded.

To maintain current levels of programs and services, we need the same overall one-time base operating adjustment provided in 2006-2007 — that being approximately $22 million for the B.C. college system.

To maintain and enhance our teaching and learning facilities, the colleges need an increase in equipment and capital allowance of 10 percent a year for three years.

To ensure that B.C. continues to lead the country in terms of competitiveness, we need increased investment in areas such as allied health, trades, career and paraprofessional.

We also need to make a meaningful investment and increase access and success for aboriginal, first generation and immigrant students.

I said the need is immediate, and this is why. Demographic projections show that B.C., like all Canadian provinces, is facing a labour shortage that will increase over the next few years. By 2013 we can expect 425,000 new jobs to be created in British Columbia, and 70 percent will require post-secondary education.

It is vitally important that we provide, right here at home, the training our young people need as 95 percent who graduate from B.C. colleges will accept employment here.

Fortunately, the number of college-age students is growing faster in B.C. and Alberta than anywhere else in Canada, fuelled by this unprecedented economic growth and by the desire of young people to pursue their dreams in provinces that offer a great way of life. As a consequence, enrolment in post-secondary education is up and continues to rise.

Government's own statistics show that more than 433,000 students were enrolled in public post-secondary institutions in 2006-2007. This is the highest number ever and is up 8,000. Enrolment in colleges, university colleges and institutes throughout B.C. represented 5,000 of that increase.

You should be aware, too, that in 2006-2007 more than 17,000 aboriginal students enrolled in post-secondary education, representing an increase of 15 percent over 2002-2003. More than 10,000 international students were enrolled during the third quarter of 2006, an increase of 11.4 percent from the previous year. Douglas College presently has over 800 students from 22 countries.

To respond to these increasing numbers of students seeking post-secondary education opportunities, for our part, the B.C. colleges need a new funding mechanism. We ask that you consider adding the base operating adjustment of $22 million to our budgets, and secondly, at a local level, provide the $400 million for the capital shortfall of rapid transit to the northeast sector. Sixty percent of Douglas College's students use public transportation, with 49 percent on the SkyTrain and 12 percent on the bus. Approximately 60 percent of our students working part-time earn $8 an hour or less and are therefore in need of transit to and from both of our campuses.

In conclusion, the recent CCbenefits report shows that the B.C. colleges are a valuable asset to the province, its businesses and industry and to its people. Colleges are economic engines for this province. Douglas College, as an example, with two major campuses — one in New Westminster, one in Coquitlam — has an operating budget of $85 million, 1,300 employees, offering six degrees, three partnered degrees and 60 credentialed offerings. A new $36-million health sciences facility will open in Coquitlam this winter.

Without sufficient funding, B.C. colleges are not able to deliver what students need and expect if they are to become a part of a literate and well-educated province. Without sufficient funding we cannot effectively respond to the education and training requirements of British Columbia's growing economy.

Inaction to any degree will mean that colleges will have to reduce access to education and training. The hopes and dreams of many students will be dashed, and the economies of the communities that we serve will decline — specifically, in our case, New Westminster and Coquitlam.

An adjustment to the base operating funds of $22 million for the college system and a new funding mechanism for the B.C. colleges would protect the nearly $8 billion annually that colleges contribute to the provincial economy, which represents an impressive 14 percent return on taxpayer investment. Just think: for every dollar invested by the taxpayer, colleges generate $3.80 as a return.

Positive action now would be a sound investment in the growing demand for academic, health and trades programs, in an educated labour pool for tomorrow and in first nations learning throughout British Columbia.

I. Black: While you are both aware that I am a very, very big fan of what you do at Douglas — especially the Coquitlam campus, to which I'm obviously a little biased — I wanted to thank you on the record for the commitment of your staff, your faculty and yourselves, the commitment to our community and the example that you guys set establishing such marvellous connections with it.

I want to acknowledge three issues identified not just by you, actually, but by some other presenters as well. One is the competition for students between the college system and the university system. The second issue I want to acknowledge is the differing views of the funding model on which, Andrew, you just spent time very eloquently articulating. Third is the declining enrolment, which is part of that time-honoured correlation between a hot economy and student enrolment. When the economy was not doing so well ten years ago, enrolment was way up. Now, of course, it's much lower.

Against a backdrop of that, we've got a new facility at Douglas College locally coming in — $35 million or so. We're expecting the new students that you talk about in the expanding psychiatric nursing programs that are being offered there starting next year. And then today's announcement with respect to the expansion of the successful Skills Connect for Immigrants program.

You have got some very, very difficult decisions to make in what you do. I wanted, if you could, to spend a moment and describe a little bit about how you go through that…. Describe for us some of the tough decisions and steps taken that have been made with respect to offering courses where demands right now are relatively low compared to where they were and then focusing resources where the need is to get the most effective use of the dollars that you do have today. Could you touch on that a little bit?

S. Witter: A very good question. As you know, the decline has only affected our university transfer arts and science. All the applied programs, diploma and degree programs, are very strong. Three new degree programs we launched this fall are all full, with waiting lists.

So the decisions we are making and will be making this year will be to downsize in the university transfer arts and science, where it's very competitive — the universities dropped their grade point average, and so more students will have been going to the universities

— and then expand in the applied areas where we don't have any problems with enrolments.

We've been doing a little bit of that each year. This year we'll be making more of an effort to look at reducing in some of those arts and science first- and second-year university transfer.

H. Bloy: Thanks for the presentation. I do have a question of Andrew. You had stated that students were working for $8 or less, yet we had the Canadian Federation of Students say just the other day at a presentation that because of the economy that's going on, students are making that much more money — way more than $8. I just question where you got those numbers from.

A. Taylor: Those numbers come out of the college's surveys. They come out of surveys from our actual student body.

S. Witter: That doesn't mean that students aren't making more than $8 an hour. But we do student surveys every fall, and that was an average of what they're making. Not everybody responds to that survey.

J. Horgan: Thanks very much for the presentation. I'd like to touch upon the suggestion of capital expenditure on public transportation, which has not been the norm from the colleges this year. I appreciate you doing that.

We did have a presentation from some college students — Cap College, I think — in Vancouver saying that there was no relationship between the student association, the college and TransLink. Do you and your students have a relationship with TransLink for bus or transit passes to reduce the cost of public transportation for your students, or is that on their own?

S. Witter: We don't have a U-Pass available with our students right now. They would like that, and they have to go to student referendum to make sure, if that happens, because there'll be an increased cost to the students. But our students do support the expansion of rapid transit to Coquitlam.

J. Horgan: I understand. I'm going back to the original question, which was the U-Pass. So there would be a referendum required for that to happen?

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): There are other questions, but I'm afraid our time has expired. Thank you very much for presenting.

D. Marsden: Good afternoon. My name is Dennis Marsden, and I'm here today as a longtime resident of the Tri-Cities and president of the Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce and, time permitting, a couple of words in my role as treasurer of the Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation.

I'd like to start by thanking you for allowing us to appear before you today and provide our priorities for the upcoming 2008 provincial budget.

The Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce represents 840 businesses within our geographic area. Our region is rapidly expanding, and we've benefited from the vibrant economy over the past several years. However, this success has not come without ongoing, continued challenges, which we're confident will be addressed in the upcoming budget.

It has been clearly stated that the 2008 budget will be seen as a green budget, and we're comfortable that our priorities will fit well within this mandate.

Transportation and infrastructure have long been the number-one priority for this region. It's not a coincidence that the current Ministry of Transportation project is entitled "Gateway," as it is true that the Tri-Cities are the gateway to the rest of the province in terms of movement of goods, services and our most valuable resource, our people.

As you know, traffic gridlock is a major concern in all areas of the lower mainland. The northeast sector is currently the fifth-largest and growing community in B.C. With our close proximity to many areas of light manufacturing, Highway 1, the interior of B.C. and the major port facilities, many businesses are electing to locate in our area and create jobs that generate tax income for all levels of government.

With the influx of these companies and their employees, the movement of goods, services and commuters in and out and around the area continues to be a major concern. We want to acknowledge and thank the government for the progress being shown in terms of the current construction of the Golden Ears and Pitt River bridges, the ongoing planning for the Coast Meridian overpass, the consultation and procurement process now underway for the Gateway project. Each of these pieces will help complete the puzzle that is the transportation infrastructure necessary in the northeast sector of Metro Vancouver.

This said, the significant piece of the puzzle that's still missing is the finalization and delivery of a rapid transit system that will provide the movement of our residents not only in completing their daily duties but in addressing the chaos that is the morning commute to work.

We recognize clearly the distinction between the senior levels of government and the TransLink body that is responsible for construction of this project, yet we have sat on the sidelines observing the constant cry for funding by TransLink and the inactivity or lack of leadership by our senior elected officials.

It has been said that the provincial government lacks the legislative authority to simply inject needed

capital into this project, to which we cannot argue. However, we can request the provincial government, at the behest of this body, institute the necessary legislative actions to inject the funding — and, perhaps, receive matching federal funding — to complete thedesign and construction of a sufficient rapid transit system for the region.

We believe that under the leadership of Premier Campbell sufficient precedents have been set to allow the injection of additional funding for major provincial projects from either budget line items or budget surpluses. We were pleased to hear from both Premier Campbell, at the recent meeting of the Union of B.C. Municipalities, and Finance Minister Taylor, in recent media reports, that funding is not the issue for the Evergreen line and that the line will go through "when everyone's ready to go."

This is a new message. We have not previously heard it, and as such, we will continue our request for funding until such time as the formal specific announcements have been made. We acknowledge the announcements that were made today and, again, look forward to their implementation and ask for the support to ensure that the budget lines are adequately appropriated.

At a time when this region is building at an unprecedented pace, in order to meet its livable region commitments and to do its part in reducing greenhouse emissions, not enough emphasis seems to be placed on issues in this region and to implement timely solutions to our ever-growing problems.

The Tri-Cities Chamber is not blind to the review of TransLink or to the pending P3 review of the Evergreen line. We look forward to the imminent release of this review and are confident that they will provide the necessary direction to move forward and deliver rapid transit to our region in a timely manner.

What is required, and what we ask of this committee, is the necessary funding support to ensure that upon release and review of the Evergreen P3 project, steps are immediately taken to deliver on the promise of rapid transit to the citizens of the northeast sector in Metro Vancouver.

While we know there is a catalogue of necessary expenditures which will be considered at budget time, we want to make our position clear. I appreciate that I am repeating myself. Transportation infrastructure for the northeast sector deserves the highest priority. It is an urgent need that a forward-thinking government recognizes this and deals with the problem. Now is the time to spend the money on the future sustainability of the fifth-largest, and growing, community in B.C. We are experiencing traffic gridlock today; by tomorrow we will be fundamentally inaccessible. We need a guaranteed investment in our future.

I wish to further go on that I do not want to dilute the urgency of our transportation message and have you think the Tri-Cities Chamber is a one-trick pony. I would like to take the time to bring to light a made-in-Tri-Cities policy that is adopted by the B.C. Chamber of Commerce related to the property transfer tax.

I will not go into great detail as to the origins of the tax. Suffice to say that the price points of homes in our province have escalated significantly since the introduction of the property transfer tax. However, the tiers in tax levels have not been adjusted. In your packages you should have the full outline of our brief and recommendations that now form part of the B.C. Chamber's policy.

We propose that the tax be revised — not eliminated, as some have asked — whereby the government collects 1 percent on the first $375,000 of purchase price and 2 percent on the balance. We also ask that this tax be linked to the first-time-buyer-exemption price point so that when the budget calls for changes to the price point for first-time-buyer exemption of the property transfer tax, the tiers for the tax itself would be amended accordingly.

D. Hayer: I was at the Premier's announcement today, with the supporting of the Evergreen line. I just have a question of clarification regarding…. You said that you support the Gateway project. Do you also support the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge?

I said that another community role that I do hold is treasurer of the Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation. Eagle Ridge Hospital is our local community hospital. It was constructed approximately 25 years ago and designed to house 200 beds. We're currently operating at 106.

We are not a full-service hospital. Given the rate at which our community is growing, we would ask for significant consideration that the budget allotments are made to allow Fraser Health to inject money into the Eagle Ridge Hospital to provide full services, including

maternity wards, to the residents of the Tri-Cities. Currently they're having to fight through the traffic to get to Royal Columbian Hospital.

We see a two-pronged approach here. We can address the traffic issue while addressing our hospital needs and concerns.

The next group is the ArtsConnect Tri-Cities Arts Council. There are two presenters: Helen Daniels and Sherry Carroll.

H. Daniels: I'd like to welcome the Standing Committee on Finance to Coquitlam today, and to thank you for this opportunity to speak to you. I'd also like to welcome our MLAs, Iain Black — who has just stepped out — and Harry Bloy, who we know in our community here.

My name is Helen Daniels, and I've lived in the Tri-Cities for about 25 years, specifically in Port Moody, which many of you may know is called the City of the Arts. I've been working as the executive director of ArtsConnect Tri-Cities Arts Council for about six years.

I'm also a member of the board of the Assembly of B.C. Arts Councils, representing the greater Vancouver region. The assembly, as you know, is part of the Arts Future B.C. coalition.

Besides working in the arts — like many artists, I'm modest about my art — I've displayed some of my photography, and I've most recently collaborated on a piece for the wearable art exhibition in Port Moody.

The main points I wanted to cover today are what we, as ArtsConnect, do in this local area and the need for sustainability for arts groups.

Firstly, ArtsConnect has served the Tri-Cities for close to 40 years. We've continued to evolve and change as our community has changed. We have a population of about 200,000 people here. It's one of the fastest growing regions, and also one of the most culturally diverse regions, in the province.

We believe that the arts are vital to creating a healthy, vibrant community. With this in mind, we work to make the arts as accessible as possible to our citizens. Our mandate includes promoting the work of talented local artists in a wide range of mediums. We do this through specific events, like the studio tours. These are activities where the public can come into a non-threatening atmosphere to talk to artists directly.

Also, we bring an arts element to many of the events in the Tri-Cities, such as the 14th annual Treefest, which was held recently at the Riverview Hospital grounds. Over a dozen artists displayed their work. We also invited local musicians to come and play at the free family event, which hosted about 1,500 people.

We serve both the arts communities — that's our members — and the community at large as well. We provide information through our website, which is www.artsconnect.ca, and also the local newspaper. We gather a lot of information and get that out to the community so they know where there are events that they can participate in.

We also present educational workshops, including topics like marketing for artists. We also pride ourselves on our innovative approach. After all, we are the arts council. Some examples have been…. Players, Painters and Politicians was an event we did that was an arts-focused all-candidates meeting before the last provincial election. Both Iain Black and Harry Bloy have collages that they received as a result, which were created that evening.

In the past year we started ArtistCircle, which has successfully helped newcomers and new immigrants from various backgrounds to become engaged in our local arts community. Several of those artists have exhibited for the first time as a result of opportunities that we presented.

Another innovative one — this has not happened yet, but is happening soon — is called BoardDate. We're partnering with the chamber — one of our community partners — and also Community Volunteer Connections. It's providing an opportunity for 20 local non-profit societies to have a first date, if you will, with local people that are looking to become involved in the community through being on a board of directors or committee. It's using the speed-dating model. That's coming up.

Our funding sources include the municipalities that we serve, access to gaming, the B.C. Arts Council and local fundraising that we do through memberships and programs.

Now onto the sustainability and our recommendations in concert with Arts Future B.C. I just want to stress, again, the importance of the arts not only to our community but throughout the province. There's no shortage of information and research about the benefits of the arts. What is lacking is significant investment in the arts so that more of these benefits can be realized.

B.C. ranks amongst the lowest of the provinces in per capita funding for the arts. Frankly, I find it embarrassing, considering the prosperity enjoyed in this province.

Although there are some funding programs in place, they don't go nearly far enough to sustain the health of the arts and cultural sector by providing core funding. We believe that the B.C. Arts Council is in the best position to deliver sustainable long-term assistance to the arts sector. In fact, one of the reasons the B.C. Arts Council was established is to provide support for the arts and cultural community in B.C. It has unfortunately been unable to properly fill its mandate, I believe, due to the lack of adequate funding to do so.

The need for support for the B.C. Arts Council was also noted in a report written by Max Wyman, which said in part that — this was at a provincewide cultural summit called by the Minister of Tourism, Sport and the Arts, which was held in the spring 2006 — "delegates from the social, economic, educational and cultural fields gave strong endorsement to the work and

achievements of the council and reached a broad consensus that it is time to build on the council's strengths by ensuring that it has the resources that will allow it to reach its full potential." The full report is available on the website of the Minister of Tourism, Sport and the Arts.

I just wanted to read a quote. This is from Arts Future B.C., so you may have heard this before. "The new world is a truly global economy driven by information, ideas and discoveries. It is a creative economy where art and culture are the building blocks of innovation, invention and understanding." That's from the Speech from the Throne from February 2006.

During the consultation process last year at this time, we were pleased to have been part of the unified voice of the arts community throughout the province that made recommendations to address the needs for increased funding to the B.C. Arts Council. We were pleased that the Standing Committee on Finance endorsed the recommendations put forward, but we were left perplexed over the fact that the recommendations to the Finance Committee did not result in the much-needed additional funding for the B.C. Arts Council.

On behalf of ArtsConnect and the assembly board on which I sit, we're joining with the other arts and cultural organizations both locally and across the province in a request that the standing committee support increasing investment in arts and culture in this province through the British Columbia Arts Council to the level of $32 million in the upcoming budget.

Not surprisingly, Iain has a question here. He wants to talk about his portrait.

Sherry and Helen, thank you again for being here. Indeed, as you know, Helen, the collage hangs in a place of honour in my office. I'm very grateful for it.

My question to you is this. As I've engaged in this area — and we've had a lot of conversations, so you know of my support in this area — in Victoria and with different ministers on this topic of the arts funding, very often I get a response back that says, "The money just doesn't go to ArtsConnect, it also goes to the Vancouver Foundation. There's direct access grant funding that takes place" — etc., etc.

So the single focus of increasing funding for the Arts Council is met with a kind of "yeah, but" very mixed and vague response from the different ministries with whom I've engaged on this topic.

My question to you is this. Would you be supportive of an analysis being done to really draw together the complete number of different sources of funding that go well beyond the Arts Council to get a really good analysis on this so that we could then address this in the right context, which I think would be more helpful from a ministerial support standpoint? Would you be supportive of such an analysis being conducted by the Ministry of Tourism, Sport and the Arts?

H. Daniels: I think if it would result in funding that is distributed provincewide. Right now, I mean, there are other programs. I grant that, but they are very specific. They don't reach sort of the grass roots throughout the province. That's basically B.C. Arts Council's mandate, and it supports 220 organizations through the province.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Well, the schedule was put together on the assumption that we might be sitting in the Legislature Monday to Thursday. That's why we're here, which we will be shortly.

P. Leitch: First of all, good afternoon, and thanks very much for inviting us here. I think this is certainly an important part of our communication with government, so I really appreciate the time.

The British Columbia motion picture industry is one of the province's success stories and an example of what industry and government can accomplish by working together. This success can be directly attributed to a commitment from industry, from government and from the community to build a competitive, progressive, world-class motion picture sector with a strong future in British Columbia.

With more than $1.25 billion in direct production spending in B.C. annually, employment of 20,000 directly and another 15,000 indirectly, the motion picture industry is a significant contributor to the economy of British Columbia, to the artistic and cultural identity of the province and to the livelihood of many B.C. residents.

Today British Columbia is home to North America's third-largest motion picture industry, with only Los Angeles and New York having larger industries. The B.C. motion picture industry has developed a suc-

cessful business model that is recognized and emulated in jurisdictions around the world.

A leader in the global market, B.C.'s service and domestic production sectors, together with a growing capacity in visual effects and animation, have attracted international talent and a significant investment in excess of a billion dollars from the private sector investing in British Columbia.

B.C. has played a key role in developing the competitive framework that applies across the industry internationally today. In other words, we've been copied by many, many jurisdictions around the world. The initial implementation of tax credits in B.C. — and these are labour tax credits, so they're only paid out when British Columbia labour is employed, then after they've been paid — helps to ensure that the motion picture industry maximizes all of its competitive advantages, outpacing the competition for foreign production year over year.

Success with tax credits in both Ontario and B.C. set the bar in the industry and led to the eventual adoption of the Canadian system worldwide. There are many provinces that actually have tax credits in excess of British Columbia's, but our major competitor is really Ontario, and that's where we want to have a level playing field. It's important to us.

The industry itself is very, very sensitive to costs. Obviously, with the high dollar that we're facing — I think it was almost $1.02 today — that becomes very challenging for us. In terms of tax credits, as long as we're competitive with other jurisdictions in Canada, we recognize that we don't want a race to the bottom in terms of heaping more tax credits on top of the tax credits we've got.

Without the tax credits, however, foreign production simply would go elsewhere. They would go where it's more competitive. In other words, every single production decides on where they're going to shoot based on location needs and where there's crew availability. There are 50 jurisdictions in North America, probably, now vying for the film industry. So it becomes very competitive, and we've got to offer good value with the dollar at $1.02.

States including New Mexico, Louisiana, and even New York now, are offering fairly attractive incentives. Toronto felt the brunt of that in the last 12 months where their production was down substantially as a result of New York offering these tax credits.

An ebb in foreign production in Ontario not so long ago underscored the point that the competitive landscape includes a wide field of players avidly vying for the same business. Where once British Columbia and Ontario were primary competitors for production out of Los Angeles, Ontario experienced a considerable downturn as a result of this aggressive tax credit in New York.

While the B.C. industry is also vulnerable to other competing lower-cost jurisdictions, it is the development of this full-service production industry that we've got now, including everything from direct production to post-production to visual effects — all those things — that have given us a competitive advantage not shared by some of the other locations — and also, this billion-dollar investment.

The chief imperative remains a competitive tax policy that is in line with B.C.'s most significant competitor, Ontario. As long we maintain that level playing field, I think we're okay. With the changing environment, though, we're looking at some modifications to match up with the changing environment that we live in now in terms of the film industry.

First of all, it’s a digital world, and people are watching television production on a whole bunch of different platforms including your iPod, telephone, TV, video-on-demand — just basically, where you want to watch it, when you want to watch it. That's a key thing that's changed recently, and we need to make sure we adapt whatever policies we had in place to provide incentives to those mediums.

The B.C. government in the past has recognized the importance of a level playing field. In January 2005 we increased our tax credits to match those of Ontario. It's not the only competitive advantage that we have in some ways, but it's certainly a really fundamental, important one.

If they go away, I think the government recognizes that the industry will not completely disappear, but I would think that if the tax rates were eliminated today, our industry would instantly drop by, I'd say, easily in excess of 50 percent, and the infrastructure would follow suit.

A number of major U.S.-based visual effects companies — like ZOIC Studios, Entity FX and Gray Matter among them — have established subsidiary companies in British Columbia now to recognize that we've really become a world-class centre here and that this is the place to be. This trend has also attracted top talent to B.C. and has contributed to the industry's worldwide reputation as a leader in the visual effects sector.

The growth of talent in B.C. is key to the long-term success of the industry. What we're really asking for is a renewal for a five-year period of the tax credits which expire this following March. Also, we're looking for regular communication in terms of a committee to meet with the government on a six-month basis — just to update you on the industry and the changing needs of the industry in terms of competitiveness.

The tax credit renewal — we've met with Minister Hagen on this, and the government has been very supportive of it — is the key ask. We're looking, also, to expand the apprenticeship training program, especially as it applies to digital effects.

Digital effects now incorporates music; new media, which is all the gaming industry; and also the film industry. We're working together as a committee to sort of say: "How can we become a real world leader in this knowledge-based, green industry?" We think we have a real opportunity to do that through an important initiative with this apprenticeship training program expansion.

Expand the DAVE credit. Let me explain. The DAVE credit is the digital audiovisual effects credit, which basically applies to a lot of the special effects that you see in the movies. A lot of them are computer-generated. This, again, could apply to different sectors, like the gaming sector. They work closely with our industry.

The B.C. motion picture industry's vision represents a unique and exciting economic opportunity for the province. A five-year renewal of the present tax structure will ensure the crucial momentum in business is maintained while new strategies for growth are developed and implemented.

The industry's goal in the coming five years is to continue to foster the development of a fully integrated digital entertainment production centre that is internationally recognized, a technically sophisticated infrastructure, and a vibrant domestic and service production industry. The service production industry is about 80 percent. In other words, most of the business coming out of Los Angeles is production service work, and 80 percent of that is our business here.

We're looking to expand the domestic side of the industry. One of the ways we can do that through training and everything is to develop producers that actually create product here and build their companies here.

The B.C. motion picture industry represents an equally important opportunity for cultural and artistic development in the province, which ultimately contributes to the identity of British Columbia and to Canada.

While the business of filmmaking must be economically viable in order to have a lasting role in the economy, the artistic and cultural voice of the industry and its value to the province and the country should not be underestimated, as industry stakeholders and government partners continue to invest in the future of the industry.

This is an industry with a promising future. It is adaptable and employs the right strategies for growth. One of the interesting things about the industry, once you get to be familiar with it, is the diversity of the jobs that we offer.

A crucial piece of the plan is the tax credit program, which is today proving very effective. A renewal of the program for five years would send an important signal to our L.A.-based customers that we're in this business to stay.

If we continue to meet these competitive challenges, this province will be rewarded with thousands of jobs and a flourishing, billion-dollar motion picture industry for the next ten to 15 years.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): That was one long take and just under ten minutes. Perfect.

R. Hawes: Thank you, Peter. I know we're all very familiar with the importance of that tax advantage that we need here, but I'm really very concerned about the change in the dollar. You kind of glossed over that. What are the real impacts? I mean, are we going to start losing some business to California now?

P. Leitch: I think the reality of it is that it's a part…. In the past it's been a more crucial part of the big picture, and it's still an important part of the big picture. There is concern.

I'll give you a real-life example. Today I'm negotiating with Psych, which is a TV series that has been done here for the last two years. They want to negotiate next year's contract and make a decision on if they're going to come back to Canada to do it or if they're going to do it in Los Angeles.

They used to save $300,000 an episode doing it up in British Columbia. Now their budget looks like they're saving $75,000 an episode, but they've got opportunities for more product placement and other opportunities for the advertising world of Los Angeles to get involved if they do it down in Los Angeles. It's actually a show that really takes place in Los Angeles. It takes place in Santa Barbara.

They've asked me for a 10-percent concession on our pricing. Our pricing has basically remained stable for the last five years in our facility, just because of the erosion of the dollar going up.

I think that's reality. It's something that we can't control. I think it's something that the industry…. As long as we've got a level playing field on these tax credits, I don't think it's something that the government should bail us out on. That's why we want the dialogue with government, to tweak some of these credits to make sure that they're simple enough to apply — that there are controls there, of course…. The certainty — when they budget that to plan on getting X amount of a tax credit, based on the rules — is very important.

There have been some inconsistencies with Revenue Canada's approach to it compared to the policy that's been established by Finance. That's one of the things that we're working on, on a federal basis.

With the dollar, it is just something I think that we have to live with, like a lot of other industries in B.C. that are exporting industries. We've got to kind of fight through it a little bit and become even more efficient. But it's going to have an impact on us. I think the impact will be seen in 2008, more so than this year. One of the reasons is that there are some significant U.S. labour issues happening with the Screen Actors Guild in the U.S. and also the Directors Guild in the U.S., which will culminate in June of 2008. They're kind of stockpiling things right now. So everybody's busy right now.

Also, because of the U.S. dollar weakening against other world currencies, they still look at it as: "There's still value there." Los Angeles is very expensive to shoot in. Vancouver's not inexpensive, but we are competitive now compared to other jurisdictions.

Long term, if the dollar stays strong, you'll see states like Washington get into the business and be competitive, whereas right now people would rather just pop across the border.

We have built a billion dollars' worth of infrastructure over the last 20 years. That is a big advantage for us.

H. Bloy: That was my question — the dollar. Also, I just wanted to say that I've got many businesses in Burnaby and Coquitlam that are really supportive and do a lot of business in the film industry, and they appreciate what's going on.

P. Leitch: The one thing about this $1.2 billion that was spent last year is that half of it goes to labour and the other half is getting spread throughout the economy here. Also, I think we're good for tourism in this province. Sometimes we don't get so much of the credit for that.

J. Kwan: On the apprenticeship program issue that you have raised. Can you be more specific in elaborating on what it is that the government can do to assist in that regard?

P. Leitch: I think you'll hear this even more from the New Media people. I think they're doing a presentation next week. One of the important facts in the apprenticeship program is that in the visual effects sector, where, say, a company like Rainmaker did the visual effects for The Da Vinci Code — a project that wasn't shot in Vancouver, but they got awarded that contract — they need to bring in highly skilled people.

Also, they have an issue. They want to train the people who are coming out of the institutions here, out of the colleges and universities and other training facilities that are in British Columbia. It's very hard for them to do that because it's almost worth them bringing in somebody with a certain level of skill versus taking a chance on somebody new, just because of the intensity and the high level of training required for these positions.

But if there's some sort of apprenticeship incentive for them — and let's just pick a number; say it's $10,000 per employee based on certain criteria that they're going to be there for a certain period of time — that could encourage them to hire these younger people. That's a model that's certainly, I think, in Quebec right now and in some places in Ontario, where there's some incentive for them to hire the new people coming out of school versus bringing in and trying to import people from around the world.

I think that's kind of a key thing. In the film industry itself it's more of the post-production side, which is the visual effects, post-production sound and those things where it just costs a lot of money and you're dealing on a project-by-project basis. It's not as if you've got this generally steady stream of work. You've got to bid on every project. So it's really training and retaining those young people with the highly skilled jobs that we're talking about.

That concludes those presenters who have registered with the Clerk's office. We now have a section of the meeting that runs under slightly different rules, open mike. We have, basically, a provision for five minutes to address us. We have two people signed up at this point, and the first one is Dr. Mychael Gleeson.

M. Gleeson: This is a tricycle, and it comes out of my office. It actually belongs to a small child. The reason that I have it is because this kid's going through a custody and access battle. His parents are represented by counsel, and no one represents him. This tricycle stays in my office so that when he comes to his appointments with me, he can have his tricycle.

Historically, legal aid would allow a child to be represented by counsel. Lawyers on one or the other side would make arrangements for a child to be represented by somebody like me. By trade, I'm a behavioral scientist or a medical anthropologist.

There are so many different clubs. If you're not a member of the right club, you're in real trouble with the other clubs. So I'm a medical-anthropologist-cum-behavioral-scientist. I'm the only person at lunchtime. The general practitioners won't talk to me. The Law Society people won't talk to me. The police won't talk to me. As soon as there's a battered child in the city of New Westminster, I get the 8-by-10 colour glossies.

Matthew's tricycle is important because what it represents is the fact that although we talk about custody and access and joint custody and joint access, we have a population of children with no home. Why the hell do I have Matthew's tricycle? Because if he takes it to his mother's house, it'll disappear, and if he takes it to his father's house, it'll disappear.

The Law Society will make a pitch to the government about requiring money for legal aid. I work solely with legal aid. Legal aid needs money for family law. Family law is the most difficult of all of the areas of law because we deal with children. We deal with abused children. We deal with special needs children. We deal with children who are not yet diagnosed. We deal with kids for whom there is no diagnosis.

I have kids who are really, really big kids. I have 70-year-old autistic adults who come to my office because they have nowhere else to go. They don't quite fit under the banner of my company, the Urban Child counselling project. My theory is: they were once children; they're allowed to come. Who am I to send them away, anyway?

My pitch is for more money, please, to go to legal aid so that we can represent children. I've been here before, and I'll be here next year.

The problem is we don't have the money. A custody access report, in the private sector, costs $5,000. I love many of my colleagues. None of them are worth five grand. The problem is that if you have five grand, you probably can afford a really good divorce attorney, and you don't need to have a kid who parks their trike with their doctor. But it's a sad state of affairs.

When I hear the lady who spoke so eloquently and so beautifully about Douglas College…. My kids won't get to college. I'm doing really, really well if my kids get through senior secondary school.

I don't know how many times I have gone to school and promised the science 11 teacher of a native youngster my 1984 Subaru if he'll just fudge the marks by two. "My guy got a 57. I'll buy you lunch if you make it a 61." That kid's not going to come back to school because he's out of foster care, and he's going to end up…. I'm going to see him in two years on skid row.

There used to be a joke in the New Westminster area that child care worker Mr. David Burrows, who I adore…. David would meet the kids in the detached youth program, and he'd say: "Do you know Mychael Gleeson?" They'd go: "Yeah, she helped our family when I was a child." This kid's now nine. I would meet the kid, they'd then be in trouble, and they'd be with David.

Ten years later I'd get a call from their criminal lawyer going: "I read a report that you wrote on so-and-so when he was nine, and you said that there was some possibility of autism and developmental disability. Where did you get that assessment?" Well, there wasn't any money to assess it, so I twisted the arm of Geoffrey Ainsworth at VGH who did a little bit for me, and then he passed it off to "Dr. So-and-so", who will no longer take my calls because I make him do all this stuff for free. But they owe me — right?

We're in a crisis. All of this is stuff that I used to be able to get by twisting the arms of lawyers, saying: "Get me four legal aid hours." Apparently, I'm only like one-quarter of a GP, although I have a real doctorate and they just have MDs. Sorry, if anybody's an MD. My father is an MD. He's going to be so choked. But a legal aid hour is 135 bucks. When the lawyers can't pay it, it's $88. When I really like the kid, it's $46, and I cannot tell you the stack of bills that haven't been paid.

Matthew's parents won't pay. The lawyers are still battling. He's six now. They're still talking about his prenatal expenses. Matthew attends every week and says to me: "Can I come back next week?" I go: "Yeah, sure, you can come back next week." He'll say: "Will you get better cookies?" "Well, what do you want?" He likes Mallomars. We like the stuff that's on sale.

Hopefully, the next time you see a tricycle, you'll remember Matthew's story, because all of you have tricycles in your basement, in your back yard. All of the people in the gallery go: "Yeah, right. I have to move it every time I park the 1984 Subaru."

For me, for my company, for what we do, it is the poster for the little kids we try to serve. If you give the money to legal aid, the legal aid lawyers will give the money to me. I will be able to talk to a judge, make a decision that is in the best interests of this kid, and hopefully circumvent him meeting my friend who is the criminal lawyer.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much. That was a very dramatic presentation and very effective.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I think we have another presenter, and I'd prefer to move on, so thank you very much.

D. Ramage: Hi. Thank you for providing this opportunity. I'm really nervous. I'm trying not to read….

D. Ramage: I want to come to talk about your conservation and your environmental initiatives to do with economics and the financial dealings of the province of B.C. I want to lend support to the initiatives that the Premier talked about, about doing good things for the environment.

Even though I'm a streamkeeper, I'm not just a streamkeeper. I don't know if people know what a streamkeeper is. We're not environmentalists. We're conservationists. Our issues are preserving and conserving natural services and the things they provide to humanity — which is not what I had written down here at all, so I won't go into that at all.

I'd like to lend support to initiatives that the government might be considering, such as tax shifting towards green taxation. I know it is done in many other countries, and it has been successful. I want to talk about how those taxations can be applied to different initiatives that can reduce greenhouse gases in the province, that can actually lend leadership and support to other areas where they're also looking at doing this.

By doing things for the environment, eventually when you move to full-cost accounting and are able to reallocate budget from places that you have it…. As you have a more healthy environment — I hate to use the word "healthy" because it is a human-centric term — you will eventually have savings in health care and other places.

Education, environment and social justice are kind of linked together. I don't want to separate them out. I don't want to say that the environment is more important than any other issues. But if you look after the environment, they follow.

I want to talk about land use decisions and land taxation as being maybe one opportunity where the Finance Minister…. She is asking for opportunities or ideas on what can be done about preserving and conserving agricultural land and allowing people to pay taxes on the portion that they use rather than the whole portion of their land.

If you shift tax away from taxing land that can be used to benefit and uptake impacts of climate change with frequency and intensity of storms, flooding, water quality that changes with all of these things that are happening…. By having broader setbacks, planting long-lived species in there and having carbon sequestering….

Change the taxes from that. Negative incentive tax. Tax for things where there are choices that people could make that are more environmentally friendly.

Those initiatives that you're doing…. I'm not representing anyone here but a small group of streamkeepers, but we are representative of many, many people. They say there are 20 percent of the people in the province that already make choices and are willing to pay more through taxation or higher prices that they pay for things.

There is another 60 percent of the population that are considered cultural-creative people. They're people that are willing to make change if someone can explain to them that it is actually going to make a difference for them, doing those changes.

There are many people out there that support the initiatives that are happening. What we want to do is give you collective political will to go towards that which needs to get done.

I had some really good things written down here for you — facts and figures — and I'm too nervous to read them. Talking about a duty of care that we have as people who are caring for the planet or that you're the chief stewards of the natural resources of the province as government….

We rely on you to make decisions and to provide policy or market incentives to be able to move society towards making different choices. We support you doing that, whether you do it through taxation, through social-based marketing, through policy and regulations.

There is a huge political will that is coming from constituents in this province to support what you're doing and what needs to be done, and an understanding that more needs to be done than what currently is being done.

That's really all I want to do. I just want to say thank you for providing an opportunity for someone. There are 30,000 streamkeepers in B.C. who are all volunteers, who work in watersheds. People think those are the salmon people. Salmon is just an icon that we use. It is a biosensor for watersheds that lets you know what is going on in a watershed.

If you can no longer support salmon in a watershed that always had them as a keystone species and, as I said, a biosensor, it lets you know that it's actually not supporting some of the other things that people value and rely on and that eventually are what are supporting our ecosystems, which we rely on to support those things that I called those natural services. I'm sure you already know what they are, so I don't have to tell you about that.

I'm sure you've listened to people all around the province already. I'm just one more person coming here to tell you that whatever choices you make, they will be less difficult than any choices that an individual has to make, because as a government, you can always….

Elections come and go, and you think: God, maybe I'll get re-elected, and I can continue on with this policy. But every individual thinks that their choice is more difficult than the government's. If you can lend that leadership and model that for individuals, provide opportunities for people that are most at risk and for the poorest people, who are least able to make choices that benefit the environment…. Those are the ones that need your help and your resources.

You do it with education, knowledge translation, and synthesis and exchange between and among governments, people and your constituents. That's it.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much, Dianne. That refocuses us all on our mission.

D. Ramage: I thought that's what this was about. I might have been confused, but all this benefits health care.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): The format doesn't allow for that, but we can chat informally afterwards. I think we're going to adjourn.

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1)	Raise the Rates Coalition	Alan C. James Jean Swanson
2)	British Columbia Association of Child Development and Intervention	Bruce Sandy
3)	Douglas College Faculty Association	Susan Briggs
4)	Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia	Rob Clift Chris Petter
5)	Gaëtan Royer
6)	Geoscience BC	Lyn Anglin
7)	Douglas College	Susan Witter Andrew Taylor
8)	Tri-Cities Chamber of Commerce	Dennis Marsden
9)	ArtsConnect Tri-Cities Arts Council	Helen Daniels Sherry Carroll
10)	Motion Picture Production Industry Association of British Columbia	Peter Leitch
11)	Mychael Gleeson and Company	Dr. Mychael Gleeson
12)	Maple Creek Streamkeepers	Dianne Ramage

Committee Staff:	Jonathan Fershau (Committee Research Analyst)
	Jacqueline Quesnel (Committees Assistant)

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REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
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