2008 Legislative Session: Fourth Session, 38th Parliament

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

MINUTES AND HANSARD

MINUTES SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Monday, December 1, 2008

10 a.m.

Douglas Fir Committee Room

Parliament Buildings, Victoria, B.C.

Present: Randy Hawes, MLA (Chair); Bruce Ralston, MLA (Deputy Chair); Dave S. Hayer, MLA; John Horgan, MLA; Richard T. Lee, MLA; John Rustad, MLA; Diane Thorne, MLA; John Yap, MLA

Unavoidably Absent: Robin Austin, MLA; Harry Bloy, MLA

1. The Chair called the Committee to order at 10:07 a.m.

2. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions:

3. The Committee recessed from 11:31 a.m. to 11:37 a.m.

4. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions:

5. The Committee recessed from 1:17 p.m. to 1:48 p.m.

6. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions:

7. The Committee recessed from 2:23 p.m. to 2:27 p.m.

8. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions:

9. The Committee adjourned to the call of the Chair at 2:52 p.m.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.

The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

select standing committee on
Finance and Government Services

Monday, December 1, 2008

Issue No. 95

ISSN 1499-4178

[ Page 2239 ]

MONDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2008

The committee met at 10:07 a.m.

[R. Hawes in the chair.]

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay, we'll commence our meeting.

We're here to look at the budget submissions of the independent officers. The first one is with the Ombudsman's office. We have a number of people on the phone and a couple of people that have been delayed by weather, etc. I know one will not be here because he's ill today, and that's Harry Bloy.

I think without any further ado we'll get going. Kim, I see you're ready to roll. So the floor is yours.

Office of the Ombudsman

K. Carter: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to the committee. What I propose, given the time lines, is to do a submission and then be available to answer specific questions that you may have. I understand that you all received the electronic copy of the budget submission, and I know that Josie has worked hard to make sure there are hard copies for those who are here in person.

I'll talk a little bit about an overview of the office — last year's work, our successes, the challenges we're facing and how they're being addressed, some specifics of our request — and then I'll conclude and hopefully be able to address any questions that you have.

The first thing I would say is that our budget was developed and revised with careful consideration of current fiscal uncertainty, the reality of our office being a very lean organization and also being one that is facing an increase in demand for services.

The proposal in our budget is a minimal increase to allow us to deal with immediate issues, and there will still be some strategic implications of not proceeding in certain areas, which I will deal with later. This year's submission, as requested, is quite simplified and cut back. Last year we gave you 27 pages; this year you have 13. I think the most important ones are page 1 and page 9. So we've tried to be short, clear and to the point, as was requested.

[1010]

The total amount that we're requesting as an increase is $299,000. In part, we've managed to keep the request to that level because a review of our shared services identified that there was a better way of allocating the costs. That allowed the Ombudsman's office to avoid, essentially, double payments for certain issues.

What this also does is allow us to maintain our focus that we've begun on seniors issues. We commenced that this year. You will also find that in the $299,000, we have provided for an orderly administrative transition in 2010. I understand from various sources that this was an issue that was raised.

I have to tell you that I'm not sure Lanny can be replaced by one person as the executive director for four offices. But we've had a series of meetings, and he's convinced me we should try to achieve it with one person. So we're looking for one person to do human resources, finance, administration, IT and all the other duties that Lanny does.

Our annual report 2007-2008, which I provided to you, has been changed somewhat for a couple of reasons. The first one is that we changed to reporting on the fiscal year rather than the calendar year. That was to reflect in our view the importance of the resources we received and our ability to function that is derived from that. So that's one change.

Another change is indicated in the annual report. We are starting to feel the effects of the restoration in 2006 of services in all areas — that is, receiving complaints and investigating them in relation to health authorities, self-regulating professions, local governments, schools and other areas which between 2003 and 2006 my predecessor had had to cut back.

As you might expect, the consequences of not providing a mechanism for independent and impartial dispute resolution in those areas are not that the problems go away, but rather that an opportunity to resolve them in a timely fashion, before they grow too large, disappears. Indeed, the lack of a mechanism becomes part of the problem, and that is equally a problem for authorities as it is for individuals dealing with those authorities.

We have restored our services in all areas, and what has happened as a result, not surprisingly, is an increase in demand. I would also say that despite our annual report and the other work we've done on our website, essentially 95 percent of the resolutions that we obtain are done quietly and effectively and are in fact not reported out, other than to the individuals and to the authorities involved.

I would also point out that the Ombudsman's office in British Columbia has the widest jurisdiction of any Ombudsman's office in Canada. In 1993 the jurisdiction was extended to a number of areas that are not under the jurisdiction of other Ombudsman's offices.

There are three significant factors. The increase in demand; the increase, I think, in the understanding of our role that comes out of our outreach; and another factor which I would ask you to keep in mind is the implementation of the recommendations that we make in systemic and other investigations. At the moment all the recommendations we've made have been accepted and are being implemented, and I would say that's an indication of the usefulness of the work that we do.

The issues that we've dealt with in the last year range from adoption through tenancies, school issues, youth justice, issues of debts, disability benefits, income assist-
[ Page 2240 ]
ance, workers compensation, prisoners' rights, workers' retraining, tourism and even liquor distribution.

So I would say to the committee that I know you have heard from people across the province about what their concerns are. Having looked at your report, I see that very few of the areas that have been mentioned are not things that our office has dealt with in the past year.

[1015]

Next year is the 30th anniversary of the Ombudsman's office. When we look at our work, we're not dealing with one act or several acts but all British Columbia legislation. We're not dealing with one or two ministries or authorities but all ministries and many authorities — almost 2,800. We don't deal with one group of people, but we deal with everyone who connects with public authorities — youth, people with disabilities, seniors, people suffering from burn injuries, students, people on income assistance. I have to say that I see the office as very integral to access to justice in British Columbia, particularly for people who have no resources to go for other routes.

We assist individuals to obtain fair treatment, which benefits not only them but the institutions they deal with, public administration and British Columbia's reputation generally.

In 2008 we dealt with 7,400 inquiries and complaints. That's our projection to the end of the year, and that's up about 15 percent over two years. We've got about 2,100 investigations. During the year I did two tours — in the winter, from Squamish through Mission, Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Hope; and in the summer, from Prince George through Quesnel, Williams Lake, to 100 Mile House. I consider that very important, because we represent the concerns, the interests, and we hear complaints from people across British Columbia. So it's important that we go out and talk to people.

We're very economical in our approach. We use government agent facilities wherever we can. We allow people to come in, in these areas to make their complaints in person. In addition, I speak to authorities and other groups. It's an active time when we go on tour — everything from talking to the authorities, to institutions, to service clubs. I'm well aware of the work that the service clubs do, having started at 6:45 in the morning, when the Rotary Sunrise clubs are apparently very wide awake — I less so, but they've managed to catch me — through to Lions Clubs in the evening.

In addition, last year we were happy to go speak to the Tsawwassen First Nation, who had requested that we come to them to talk about developing fair, impartial and transparent processes. Although obviously that's not something within our jurisdiction, I think it's important to realize that we do go out to talk to groups about this.

Specific examples of the results that we have changed, we've achieved. If you have a look at our annual report on page 39, there was a lady with a disability who had received improper advice and had to expend a small inheritance she had rather than invest it. We became involved in this, and as a result, $20,000 in disability benefits was restored to her.

On page 41 of our annual report there is a case summary that relates to income assistance. Somebody came to us, and there was a change in legislation that allowed for more appropriate burial and cremation benefits for people on income assistance.

On page 36 you'll see a case that involves health, and in particular MSP coverage for a new Canadian.

On page 37, an income assistance case that involved winter boots for somebody in the north.

On page 47 you'll see information about a small business person who came to us, and as a result, there was a change in legislation so that there would be better information provided to applicants for tenure for tourist chalets.

So I'd use these as specific examples because, as I said earlier, we deal with all groups of people, all areas.

[1020]

There are also some unreported ones from this year, which I will mention to you. One was a homeowner who came to us about a concern regarding hydro billing. As a result of our investigation and the work done by Hydro, there was $114,000 in overbilling that was identified to Hydro clients, and reimbursement was made to them.

We dealt with a college because we received a complaint from two gentlemen who were busy retraining as heavy equipment operators and felt that they were not getting the training they needed and had signed up for. Unable to resolve it with the college, they eventually came to us, and we resolved it. Their course got changed. They got an extension of the course so that they could get the training they needed.

Driving. We had someone who was a newer Canadian who had difficulty with language, who came to us. We became involved to facilitate an explanation of the problems with driving tests.

With a student. We became involved and had a change to a university policy about when athletic scholarships end.

Finally, with a fisherman. We arranged, after a complaint to us, in conjunction with the authority, a reimbursement of a fine paid because charges subsequently had been dropped and the person did not have to pay the fine.

Let me talk about the investment that you made last year and what has happened as a result. The first thing last year that the committee authorized was an investment in outreach. You have some information in front of you about that. One is just a copy of the front page of our website, which has been completely revamped.

You can see on there that we have, in particular, accessibility to certain groups, youths and seniors. Also, we have made it more accessible to people whose first
[ Page 2241 ]
language is not English. We've also added a number of our case summaries to that.

In addition, I think for those of you who have the opportunity to look at our annual report, you will find it is much clearer. It has also now been identified in terms of regional interests so that people in different regions of the province can have a look at what has happened in their region over the course of a year.

In addition, as mentioned in the submission, we've had a significant increase in the requests for presentations about the office, which we're able to meet now because of the outreach position and education position that you have funded.

In terms of early resolution, this is a program that has been initiated. We set it up through April to June of this year, and we now have it operating. It began operation in September. It is starting to divert some matters from full investigation through to early resolution. The response has been very positive, perhaps even more positive from organizations than from individuals. There is a great deal of interest.

In terms of the kinds of issues we've dealt with, one of them was a complaint with regard to the validity of a health insurance debt. This was somebody who was actually trying to resolve it. They were in South Korea, and they couldn't get this resolved.

The response that came back from them when it was successfully resolved through early resolution was: "All has been successfully resolved. Thank goodness for the democratic process. I'd like to say a special thank you to Christine" — who is one of our early resolution people — "for orchestrating everything in such an efficient and competent manner. I can't believe you've helped me to accomplish in a week what I couldn't accomplish for seven months on my own."

I'll just mention another one, which was again a health-related issue — a delay in obtaining a CareCard. This person said: "I appreciate the efforts on my behalf of your office and Diane specifically. She not only persuaded revenue B.C. to have my CareCard approved, but she also phoned me to ensure that this had been done."

"As such," the person says, "I hope her rewards are greater than material things." As my staff will reassure you, most of their reward is not material.

[1025]

What about the challenges that we are…? Sorry. I should go back and say there was one other area that I do want to deal with, which is the systemic investigations. Last year you approved a position for systemic investigations. We filled that this year at the beginning of June. That has allowed for the production of our systemic investigation report that came out during that time frame. This was on water quality and drinking water safety.

It was a report that I think is very important. Its recommendations were accepted and are now being implemented. It probably had more of an effect in the rural areas of the province than in the main cities, such as the greater Vancouver and greater Victoria area, because of the different water delivery systems there. But it was, from our point of view, a very important report. It is probably one of the first that has been done that involves multiple authorities. So in that case, we had to deal with eight authorities. We made recommendations to them, and they were accepted and are currently being implemented.

I will also say that — and this is not something that was new last year, but I like to re-emphasize it — our student program has gone very well. We have stretched it a little this year in terms of coverage, but it's a very modest program. I think we are asking about $50,000 for that. For that we receive a great deal in our office. I think the province receives a great deal, and it's a good investment in the future in terms of young people.

We are a lean organization, as I've said — 41 people. In terms of the services to our office, we hope that if you approve this submission it will be 48 temporarily for next year, going down to 47 the year after. That will provide shared services to all four offices of the Legislature.

We have had a turnover of staff, and this was as I predicted in my submission last year. We are starting to lose our telecommuters, and we're also starting to lose people to retirement. We are recruiting new people. I think the value of the work and the interest of the work, truthfully, rather than the level that we have as our main level of working people — because it's an ML4, which I think you'll find is pretty modest….

In terms of workload and salary, I'm probably one of the few people in Victoria who goes around regularly telling their staff what the weather is like in Saskatchewan. That's because we had the Saskatchewan Ombudsman to one of our workshops, and he told them what the workload and the salary were in Saskatchewan. So I'm hopeful that it's the weather and the pleasantness of B.C. that keeps people, because it may be one of the few times when people would consider going the other way.

We have an increase in the number of challenging complainants. This is a consequence of being the last in line, where no one can go anywhere else. I think it's, again, a valuable role that we play — that we are there, that we do listen to people. If you have a look at our annual report, you'll hear from some of those people. Even if they don't get the result they want, the work that's done in going through the process and confirming independently and impartially that they've been treated in the right way is invaluable to them.

The other thing, in terms of challenges, is the large systemics. I talked about the water systemic that we did. The one we are currently doing is on seniors care facilities. This was announced in August, and quite frankly, the response has been overwhelming in terms of complaints coming to us. In June there were some issues
[ Page 2242 ]
about where people could go if they felt that they hadn't been treated fairly by health authorities.

[1030]

I put out an information release to remind people that they could come to our office. We immediately started getting numerous complaints. In about a little under four months we have over 150 open files. In terms of our systemic questionnaire — and this is an opportunity for people who don't necessarily want us to investigate a complaint but want us to look into a matter or to share some information about a situation with us — we've had over 350 of those. That's in a four-month period.

That is what is, quite frankly, the focus of our systemics organization and indeed some additional resources right now — looking at that issue. I'm happy to talk more about that because you'll see that that is the foundation of, really, what our increase is about for next year.

In terms of the request, as I've said — pages 1 and 9 — we're looking at an increase of $299,000. We're looking at two FTE investigative levels for seniors complaints and one temporary FTE for administrative succession planning. This is so that when we do lose Lanny — who, as he describes it, received an offer he couldn't refuse last year, so he's back for a while — we have somebody who we know can make sure that the four offices are still sailing and stay afloat.

Also, $25,000 for interpretation and translation. You may recall last year that one of the options provided was to reopen the Vancouver office. That was for both short-term and strategic reasons. The committee decided not to fund either option 2 or option 3 last year. As a result, we are proceeding with trying to provide these services within our current resources, but we do need translation and interpretation. If we get people through the door with, for example, the website and our brochure in different languages, we can't just cut them off as soon as they arrive, by not having any facility to deal with them in the language that allows them to explain their problem.

I will go back and say, when you look at this request, that we've reviewed it to ensure that it reflects, as I've said, the current fiscal uncertainty. It is not asking for everything that we think would be useful. There is not a request this year for the re-establishment of the Vancouver office. It may well be something that should come back in the future, but this year we're going to try and work with the interpretation and translation costs.

I have not asked for a full team of six positions for seniors. I can tell you that I'd be happy to receive it, and I expect that the work will be there. But what we're looking at is simply beginning with two positions to try and address this.

I'm not asking for something that I had intended this year, which was funding for a deputy position. I don't have a deputy. We're not asking for that. And although we've had an increase in our legal costs this year, we've looked at — and we will continue to contract out — our legal costs and not ask for a part-time legal counsel. We don't have a legal counsel either. In fact, we don't even have a full-time executive director. The only executive director in our organization is Lanny, and I'm afraid not all of Lanny's time is mine. He's a shared services.

So in comparison with the 2008-2009 budget, if you look at page 9, which I think is probably the clearest outline, there are a number of non-discretionary increases. If you look at STOBs 50, 51 and 52, and also 59 and 73, these are mainly salaries, central management support and amortization expenses. That's a total non-discretionary increase of $206,000. We have had an increase, if you have a look at STOB 60, and we are predicting, in terms of professional services, that this will be for legal fees, which are increasing, and also for interpretation.

[1035]

In STOB 63 there's an increase of $15,000, and that's for some specialized network consulting. Although we have an IT organization that provides planning, support and development for the four offices, there are still some specialized areas, and so we are looking at that. We want to make sure we can support teleworking, that we can establish the most effective system possible, and we're looking at those kinds of options. We need to consult occasionally, and that's what that's for.

Office and business expenses are probably the increase that's most significant, and so that's an increase of $95,000. Now, there are a number of things that play into that. Looking back, Lanny and I have concluded that we underidentified to some degree in 2008-2009, because there were certain costs that weren't included.

One of those was hiring. We have had to hire people. Both the interviewing costs of bringing people in and the moving costs to bring them here are part of our budget. There's been an increase in printing, in postage, in hiring. If we have someone, for example, in Shared Services who has health problems, we absorb the cost of providing a replacement out of our budget. That's something that has happened. So those are the kinds of things that we have factored to this year.

In addition, we've had an increase in storage costs. That ties in, probably, to the information systems consulting, because we'd like to look at trying to store as much as possible electronically, and if we're successful on that, we should be able to reduce our storage costs.

It also ties into something that is set out both in the annual report and to some degree in the budget submission, which is the increased complexity of the files that end up with us and the amount of information that people provide. In the past there might have been quite a limited amount. Now people will send binders and, indeed, boxes of information that we're required to go through and we're required, ultimately, to keep and store.

STOB 67, "Information advertising and publications." Our advertising budget is less than $4,000. It is strictly for
[ Page 2243 ]
mobile intake in the Lower Mainland and our mobile intake on tours into local papers and the occasional local radio station. The remainder is brochure and report printing.

You may ask: can we not go all electronic? I can say that we do a lot of things electronically, but I see a real value in continuing paper reports. Certainly, with the consultation with various senior groups we've heard of, in our current systemic they've encouraged me, in fact, to not only make it on paper but make the type bigger, so it might increase in terms of costs.

Statutory advertising and publications. We don't do any statutory advertising. In terms of publications, this is to meet our obligation to report publicly into the Legislative Assembly.

Amortization expense. If you have detailed questions, I'll let Lanny answer that one, but in essence, it's paying back the capital expenditures for IT equipment and furniture over $1,000.

I think that probably is a summary of what the comparison is with our budget. There are a number of other financial comparisons I can do if you have particular issues that you want to address. I would ask you to look very carefully at what it is that we wish to use our money for.

[1040]

We have managed to keep this down to 299 in large part because we have done a reassessment, as I indicated at the beginning of my presentation, with regard to shared services and how those are allocated. They are now done on essentially a per-FTE basis. I am confident that the shared services is the most efficient, most effective and lowest-cost way of providing the services to our respective organizations, and if you have questions about that, again, I and possibly Lanny will answer that. But please do have a look at what it is we are looking to do with the money.

I think, also, I'd ask you to look at our organization in terms of looking at ways to be more efficient. If it was to cut back on deputy, it's already done in our office. If it's to consolidate our office space, we've already done that. As I explained, in terms of executive director, I only have part of one, so it's very hard for me to look at those kinds of savings.

In terms of having people go and use telecommuting, we already do that. Shared services — we already do that. So there's not anything, really, that you're looking at other than very much our core in terms of dealing with people that we spend our money on. I appreciate that no matter what size of budget, you want to make sure that we've looked carefully at all the issues. I hope I've reassured you that we have. We may be less than 2/10 of 1 percent, but that doesn't mean we don't think we should be careful with the money. We are.

I'm open to questions.

R. Hawes (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. We'll go to questions.

J. Yap: Thank you, Kim, for your presentation — well-presented and laid out.

We'll start off with an easy one. In my past life in the business world, the organization I worked at referred to complaints as customer service opportunities, or CSOs. I wonder if you've given thought to another way of describing complaints.

K. Carter: Absolutely. I will tell you there are a couple of issues. One is that I like to call it questions, concerns and complaints, because often that's the way things are presented, which is that people start with a question. I'll just use an example, which is: "Is it usual to leave somebody sitting tied to a chair for several hours?" And when they get the answer, "No, it's not," then they go to a concern, which is: "Well, in that case, I have a concern about it." If that's not addressed, then they have a complaint.

I would love to, but I'm constrained by the act. They're called complaints.

J. Yap: I hear you.

K. Carter: So what you'll see is that, in essence, we try as much as possible to call them questions, concerns and complaints, mainly because people like to be concerned citizens, not complainers, and we don't consider them that.

The other issue, just coming out of that, is also constrained by the act, because it's an old act — 30 years ago. That's why I'm an Ombudsman, not an ombudsperson. I'm hopeful that those are issues that we perhaps can get resolved by some minor legislative changes.

Even though they're complaints, I see them…. You call them service opportunities. That's a service I see that's provided to the authorities. When people come to our office, we often provide that third-party, independent, impartial review that allows an authority to step back and say: "Yes, okay. There's an issue here." And we think we can help. We can resolve it. That's what I think we provide.

[1045]

Often people think of us providing that service to complainants, and of course we do, but I think it's equally important for the authorities that they get that assistance from us. I think if you talk to them, you will find most of them consider it exactly that, which is an assistance.

J. Yap: Right. With that in mind, I….

K. Carter: So now the difficult question.

J. Yap: Right. But I thought we'd start with an easy one.
[ Page 2244 ]
I understand that not every opportunity or complaint falls within your purview to deal with. I'm wondering: what percentage of the files…? When you open a file, you do some kind of triage to see if that falls within your purview or if it really isn't within your purview. Do you have an idea or a number as to what percentage of complaints that come to you are actually…?

For example, with the 150 seniors, would those be the ones where you've done a triage already, and yes, these are things you need to follow up on? To get the 150, there were probably many other complaints that you looked at and said: "No, that's not really within our purview."

K. Carter: Thank you for that. Yes, the 150 are ones where we've done the triage. In fact, the triage is done very early in our process. It's done when people call. As I've explained, we actually have, in recent years, made sure that we have a live person on the end of the line. When people call, they get somebody to talk to. We do a very early analysis.

I think you'll see in our annual report that last year it was around 20 percent of the inquiries that came in that were outside our jurisdiction for different reasons. It may be it's a federal issue — a number of people, understandably, don't have a handle on what's federal and what's provincial — or it may be a private issue.

I'll give you an example of a couple of them. Someone may come to us with a concern about their taxes, and it turns out it's income tax. We would then refer them to the new Canada Revenue Agency ombudsman for assistance. Alternatively, it may be a tenant who's coming to talk to us directly about their landlord, in which case we would look at whether or not it was a B.C. Housing issue or whether it was a residential tenancy board issue, and we'd refer them.

For all the files — our files that we're opening, basically — that's where we've done the triage, not only in terms of jurisdiction but also the issues that we can look at.

Now, what I would say, of course, is that the definition of "matter of administration," which is what the Ombudsman is authorized to look at, is a very broad definition. The Supreme Court of Canada, back in 1984, said it's essentially anything that relates to the implementation of policy, with the exception of the decisions of the Legislative Assembly and the decisions of the court.

So it's quite broad, but we do that and, for the ones we open, except in very rare cases where there turns out to have been massive confusion or misunderstanding on the part of somebody, those are all ones that we're actually looking at.

J. Yap: Within your mandate, you are able to discern where there seem to be trends, and prioritize, as you have with seniors. You're looking at this as an area that you should focus on. Would it be fair to say, with such a broad mandate — you've got, as you said, the widest mandate of the position across the country — that it would be great to do everything, but in the real world you can't do everything? You have to focus and prioritize.

You're obviously doing that, and looking from today and looking forward, you've highlighted seniors as one area. Would it follow that there might be other areas...? To focus on seniors, you might have to limit the engagement in one of the other areas — kind of prioritizing?

[1050]

K. Carter: What I would say to that is: I'm not sure I can refuse to investigate something that is legitimately brought to me as a complaint. My background is in the military. We used to have a saying: "Ultimately, the desire is that we can do everything with nothing." You can't, but often people come and want the Ombudsman to do everything. I guess I could do everything in a thousand years. There's kind of a cutoff.

I think, truthfully, what we try to do is deal with these issues as effectively and efficiently as possible. The point of the systemic investigations and the systemic team is to try and reduce future complaints by resolving issues in a systemic fashion. I think that's where our investment is — in reducing issues.

But if somebody comes to us with a problem — somebody who has been denied a disability benefit — I cannot truthfully say that I can say to that person, "I'm sorry, you're not one of our priorities," not only, really, because I see it's the work of the office, but I think, actually, in the act it lays out why we can turn people away — an exercise of discretion — and one of them isn't that there's just too much work to do.

I think that my investment there is in systemics and dealing with, as much as possible, issues on a systemic basis and, therefore, reducing them in the future. That's what I would intend to do.

J. Rustad: Thank you for the presentation. I just have a couple of quick questions around the graph on page 5 with regards to the complaints files. In particular, when I look at a 75 percent increase in the number of open files…. From 2003 through 2006 the number of files that were one year or older were decreasing. We've seen that trend now change since 2006 with the systemic files that are now open and the increase of the less-than-one-year-open complaint files. Are you anticipating a continual increasing trend of the number of files that will be open for larger than a year?

It seems to be what the graph is suggesting, and with the new files opening. That, to me, raises a concern.

K. Carter: It is a concern. I indicated that, in essence, between 2003 and 2006 we weren't fulfilling our mandate in total. We had stepped away from certain areas.
[ Page 2245 ]
They were not being looking at. That was a decision that was in place. We gradually reinstated that. In 2006 we went back to dealing with our full mandate.

The consequences of that are just coming through. As you might expect, it takes people a while to realize. A prime example of that is the seniors care facilities. We step back from health authorities. I know that the previous question was, in part: couldn't we do that again? I will only say that that was done previously. I don't see that that's an option for us — to step away from those. I see, quite frankly, that when we do, all that happens is you increase the requirement. People start looking for other places to go to have their complaints handled.

I'm delighted, for example, that we've got new health care quality review boards. In part, I think that was because our office wasn't as active in that area as we were previously. So we are starting to feel that.

What I have done to try and address that just recently is reorganized the office into three teams. One of them has a focus on health and local services, because I see those as the two areas where we can anticipate growth.

[1055]

This is a reflection of people leaving and getting new people in. First of all, you cannot hire the best people if you are hiring them in anticipation of future vacancies. You have to hire for vacancies. There's a gap. Things accumulate. We've taken a number of internal steps to try and resolve this issue. I'm hopeful that the number of files per investigator and the length of time can be reduced, but not if we're going back and we don't have the resources to deal with the seniors file so we throw them in on top of all the others. We'll just continue to go backwards.

For me one of the challenges is that one of the hallmarks of administrative fairness is that there's not an undue delay in dealing with someone's complaint. I don't want to build in a system where that's essentially where we are. So this has accumulated. I've taken steps internally to reorganize to try and address some of this. I'm hopeful that will pay off in the short term, but if we don't have the resources, that's going to continue.

The other thing is that it also reflects what I mentioned earlier, which is that the complaints we get now tend to be more complex and, frankly, have more paperwork. When you get a box or binder of material, because somebody has accessed all the material and then come to us, it just takes longer.

R. Hawes (Chair): Before we get the next question, could I just remind members that at 11:15 the next…. Perhaps at the same time as we're looking at the budgets here, we could budget our time. The questions and the answers perhaps could be a little briefer.

J. Rustad: In follow-up to that, where this leads to my concern is that 75 percent of your budget, or thereabouts, is salary and benefits. You've seen a 75 percent increase in the number of case files that are open. You've gone from just over 400 to close to 750 in terms of the number of case files that are open. You're asking for a 1 percent increase, roughly, in your budget.

I guess the question is: did you have extra capacity in the past? Have you found ways to…? You said that the files are far more complex than what has been done in the past. With a 75 percent increase in the number of files, you're talking about a huge change here in workloads and the way the approach is. So I'm just wondering: how are you managing to do that?

K. Carter: I think the answer is that in terms of the organization, we are stressed right now. That's why I said, in terms of six positions for another team, that would make everyone's life very easy. It's very much a cumulative thing, as you will understand.

Once a file is…. You establish an equilibrium, and when you lose that equilibrium, then it becomes cumulative. Things take longer. So as new things come in, old things haven't gone out…. New things have urgency.

We are looking at trying to do this in terms of internal reorganization, in terms of looking at how we can perhaps get more effectively to a quicker resolution with the early resolution program. I mean, that's what we put in place. It's been in place now for only about three months. That's another thing I've done that I hope will address this.

But the reality really is that we're getting more files in. We have more of a demand. They are more complex. Will this change around in the next year? I'm hopeful that it will, if we can get a modest increase. If not, then I don't think it will.

Are we doing things differently? I'm not sure if we're doing things differently. We're trying to be rigorous in what we're doing, but I think it is the nature of the issues, and sometimes it's the responses from organizations. Sometimes they take longer as well.

[1100]

R. Hawes (Chair): Kim, could I just ask…? You mentioned earlier that you…. I think you termed yourself as the last resort. The cases you read out that were the examples of cases that you've resolved, frankly, are things that I know I see in my constituency offices — from people I deal with — every day. I think I'm not atypical. I'm sure that every MLA, all 79, see those same issues in their constituency offices on a regular basis and regularly resolve them.

I'm wondering. When people come to you like that, are you first saying: "Have you been to your MLA first?" In every case, they should be going to an MLA's office to see if they can get resolution. I'm pretty sure that's probably less expensive, because we already have people there that deal with this every day.

Secondly, you mentioned — and this is part of the same question — the quality review boards that the
[ Page 2246 ]
health authorities put in place that are also there to look at complaints.

Are you automatically first referring people back, if they have not been to those places first? Then you are the last resort, if you send them back — if they haven't been there first. But if they enter your office an open file, without first going to the MLA's office or the quality review board or the other avenues that are available, then you are becoming the reference of first resort, not last resort.

K. Carter: I'm very confident in saying to you that if we were doing that, we would be ten times as big — if we were the first resort, not the end.

We work very much with authorities. If they have a good internal complaints resolution process, then that's where we look at having people go to.

R. Hawes (Chair): Does that include…? In that definition, is that the MLA's office?

K. Carter: In terms of every issue…. Some issues that come to us, it's possible the MLA's office has already dealt with. Often that is the case — for example, with workers compensation issues. We have a number of workers compensation issues where the MLA's office has been working on it for a long time and can't get a resolution, and they refer those people to our office.

I've been out to various MLA offices. I speak to the MLA and the constituency assistants. I know I've been to your office in the past year and, I think, most of the other people on the committee.

What I say to them is that often MLAs are looking at the same issues. If the MLA's office can't deal with it, if they have come to the end of what they can achieve, then we are there, and we're happy to have people resolved.

R. Hawes (Chair): What I was looking for, though, was more of a commitment from you that would say…. I'll give you the examples you gave. Somebody has trouble getting their CareCard. We deal with that every day in our constituency offices with great success. I would like to hear your commitment that in every single case when somebody comes to your office with a complaint like that, the first question is: "Have you been to your MLA's office? If not, go there first."

Because I can tell you…. I think you'll find that the success rate in solving those types of complaints is probably up in the 90 percentile or greater at the MLA's office.

I just wanted your assurance that that's exactly what's happening in your office.

K. Carter: I can give you my assurance that whenever there's a reasonable option open to people, then we will encourage them to do it.

What I have to say is that most people who've come to us have gone through all these processes that they have available. They have not received and have not achieved success and a successful resolution.

There are a number of resolution options. We, in a number of areas, refer people to MLAs because there's something we can't do — for example, people who come to us who are looking for changes to legislation. That is clearly something where that's an MLA issue, not an issue that we can deal with.

R. Hawes (Chair): I do understand that, but….

K. Carter: Yeah. I do understand your point, which is….

R. Hawes (Chair): I think where I'm trying to get to is this. You spent some time talking about the systemic work you're doing. I would suggest to you…. I would go this far. If there are complaints that people are bringing to you that are relatively simple things to solve through an MLA's office…. I can't tell you that a hundred percent of the MLAs' offices have success at these things. If they don't, then maybe there's a systemic problem there. Maybe we should be working together to make sure that MLAs' offices understand the process — the constituency assistants in those offices — to take the workload off of your office, because there are things that…..

[1105]

That's what, frankly, our offices are there for — to provide assistance to our constituents. I happen to think that in probably the vast…. Well, maybe all offices are very effective at solving certain types of complaints. I don't like to think that the types that we do solve regularly are in your office. There's something wrong if they wind up there — something seriously wrong, and it's not with the system.

It's with the office that the people went to and didn't get resolution, perhaps. Or they didn't go to their MLA's office, because they didn't understand that that was an avenue they could take. That's why I have some difficulty. If your office is not asking straight up, "Have you been to your MLA's office? If not, please go there first now, before we open a file...." I would like the assurance that that's what's happening.

K. Carter: What I would say to you is that whenever it's appropriate, we make a reference, and that will include to the MLA's office. To say that we require everybody to go to the MLA's office before we will open a file…. I would say that if it's not appropriate, we're not able to do that. Our mandate is that if somebody comes with a complaint — it's in our act — there are a number of reasons why we can close or discontinue an investigation, if it falls within our jurisdiction.
[ Page 2247 ]

Referring it to an MLA is not one of the options that are available. What I would say is that I have gone out and talked to all the MLA offices on exactly that basis, to say: "This is what we do. If people come to you, you may well be able to deal with issues." I think it does differ depending on, perhaps, the MLA's office and the experience of the constituency assistants and indeed, perhaps, the accessibility that the individual MLA has to different authorities. Whether that be school boards…. I'm presuming the MLA will be able to resolve school board issues, health authority issues — not just ministry issues.

I think there's a real variance there. What I would say is that for the past two years I've been going out and looking to work cooperatively with the MLAs and the MLA offices on that issue. In terms of referring for every single thing that comes to our office….

R. Hawes (Chair): I didn't suggest that at all. What I was trying to….

K. Carter: I'm sorry. I misunderstood. I thought it….

R. Hawes (Chair): I'm suggesting that those issues…. It would be very easy for us to work together to figure out which issues they are, which really ought to be handled at a constituency office level and are regularly handled in that fashion. If people are coming to you as the first resort…. I'm sure there are some that do that. They're not sure where to go, and somebody out there will say: "Oh, go to the Ombudsman's office. That's where you go with this stuff." And we never see them in our constituency office.

I would like to think that when someone brings a complaint about a service they're receiving from government to your office, they have first gone to their MLA's office and not received the service or satisfaction or whatever that they normally would get if they went there. If they're coming to you first, without ever talking to the MLA's office, that will add substantively to your workload and will open more files for you.

I'm just trying to suggest a means in which your office can have some of the pressure relieved, if there are cases like that. That's all I'm trying to do here.

K. Carter: Well, as I said, I think when there are cases, appropriately, we refer people back. For example, if there's a complaint process that's unused in ICBC and the person can use that, we'll refer them back. We'll assist them by not only referring them but perhaps helping them with some questions.

I have to say that I don't see our office as simply a duplication of the work that's done in the constituency office by MLAs. I see that what we do is a different kind of work. I think it's a valuable one. I think we are an independent, impartial, apolitical body and that that is very valuable for a number of the people who come to us with their issues. There are some cases in here which may be resolved….

A number of them, frankly, probably should be able to be resolved within the institutions themselves, but they weren't, and they came to us. I think we provide a valuable service.

[1110]

R. Hawes (Chair): I'm not arguing that. I was merely suggesting…. The examples that you read at the very beginning — I know we deal with the majority of those routinely in my office, and I will guarantee you that the same is true for every MLA. Whether they're on the government side or the opposition side, the offices are apolitical as well, and our constituency assistants are apolitical or non-partisan in their approach. They work to solve people's problems. That's what they do, and they're very good at it.

In fact, I would like to even think of them as outreach workers for you, or your people are outreach workers for them, because that's their job as well. So you're on the same wavelength.

K. Carter: I'd be delighted if they're outreach workers for our office.

R. Hawes (Chair): And they solve the problems before they hit you. But if they don't get a chance to solve them and do what they're good at, that's, I guess, where I'm suggesting that maybe there's an avenue where we can communicate better between our offices and your office to take some of the files that we should be resolving and make sure that they are resolved at the appropriate place, before they hit your desk.

K. Carter: What I would say is that I'm actually confident that a lot of that is happening now, and that's what our office has been doing. I see us doing much more than simply resolving the individual files. And if you have a look at some of the issues we've dealt with, that also leads to a systemic improvement. That's where a number of individual cases have come to us.

I'll give you an excellent example, which is from our Victims of Crime report in 2006. That was one lady who came to us. If, hypothetically, it had gone through an MLA and that office felt they could resolve it for that person and had, what would have been missed is the over 400 other people who were in the same position as her. That's the kind of work, I think, we do.

I think there is lots of room for resolution of complaints within organizations, with MLA offices and with our offices. But I see them as complementary, not as duplicating each other.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. I do want to ask one more question, and that's with respect to the budget presentation.
[ Page 2248 ]

The first two presentations we had with respect to shared services…. Lanny explained that what had happened was that their budgets went up because there was a reallocation of the shared services and that the increase to their budgets would be reflected in a decrease to yours.

Now, I see it in here. I think that's the $303,000 at STOB 88.

K. Carter: Yes.

R. Hawes (Chair): Then there's another one below that, recoveries external. I don't really quite know what that is. Is it relating to the same thing?

L. Hubbard: No, the external recovery is related to the services external to the province. We've mentioned before, and it's mentioned in here, that we have agreements with some other ombudsman offices to support the case tracker that we've sold to them in the past. We charge them for the services rendered, and that's those external recoveries.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. I'll leave that for a second and just talk about the $303,000.

When you talk about the $299,000 increase, then, there is another $303,000 that will reflect itself as an increase in the budgets of three other independent officers. Correct?

K. Carter: It will be reflected in their budgets, I guess…

R. Hawes (Chair): As an increase.

K. Carter: …as an increase — yes.

R. Hawes (Chair): Let me go a different route. If we didn't do this reallocation, we would be spending about the same money on the shared services. It would all be going through the Ombudsman's office, I guess, or a lot of it, because there wouldn't have been a reallocation, but it would be basically the same money.

In my view — and correct me if I'm wrong — that would increase, actually, the budget ask that you have from $299,000 up to over $600,000. Is that not correct?

Your real increase here…. As Lanny did explain to us, the reallocation was really just a break-even deal. Well, if it's a break-even deal, then your real ask here is not $299,000. Your ask is a little over $600,000. Is that not correct?

[1115]

K. Carter: What I would say is that if you, for example, decide not to fund the increase on the others for shared services, then our budget will be down by that amount — $300,000.

In terms of where the money goes, I think globally, as you've said, from the point of view of the committee — whether you paid all the extra shared services in our budget or in the other budgets — it all comes from the same source.

R. Hawes (Chair): It's not material. Absolutely.

K. Carter: As I said earlier, it's…. From our perspective, we're a very, very small part of the overall budget. But the reason why we've gone to this is because up until now, the shared services, although we've been doing them, essentially have been…. We've been double-paying in our office.

R. Hawes (Chair): I agree, and so I don't have a problem with the reallocation of the shared services. Where I guess my question is…. I'm trying to look at the shared services as though it was just a straight wash. Their budgets go up a bit; your budget goes down a bit. But in fact, the way you have reflected it….

I guess I'm thinking that if STOB 88 actually was moved down below the totals, and then it was a sub-category, your budget increase for your operating of your office is…. You're asking for an increase of over $600,000. You're not asking for an increase of $299,000; you're asking for an increase of over $600,000. Am I reading this wrong?

K. Carter: No, I don't think you are reading it wrong. I think you are reading it differently. I guess what I would say is that if you looked at it, we have $206,000 for next year, which is non-discretionary. So in terms of increases, those were the increases I went through and….

R. Hawes (Chair): You have $390,000 for staff plus $94,000. That's your staffing change — correct?

K. Carter: Yes.

R. Hawes (Chair): Am I wrong there? That's close to $500,000.

K. Carter: Yes. And so when we ask for a $299,000 increase, that's less than what is required. So if you take $206,000 non-discretionary increase, and then you add on top of that the things I mentioned, which are the two FTEs for investigative positions for seniors, the one FTE — temporarily for one year — for administrative transition, the money for the interpretation and translation…

R. Hawes (Chair): I get that list. I have it.

K. Carter: …and then some increases with the office and business expenses, then that certainly adds up to
[ Page 2249 ]
the combination of those two numbers — $299,000 and $303,000.

R. Hawes (Chair): Well, what it adds up to…. I'm looking at it this way. Your shared services, the recoveries, etc. — that's not really part of your operating. That's sort of moving some money around to make it a little bit more equitable. But the decrease that you show is an increase on the others' budget, which we were told would be a wash.

So if it's a wash, I'm just going to put my little line right here under STOB 75 and say that everything above that is what your ask is in your operating budget. Everything below that is part of the wash. So I'm seeing over $600,000. I'm not seeing $299,000.

I'm a little disappointed that it's reflected this way because when we talked to the first two independent officers, they did say very clearly — and Lanny, you said quite clearly — that this would be a wash. We're just going to increase theirs on the shared services, and you'll see the corresponding decrease in the Ombudsman's — which is great. So it's a wash.

L. Hubbard: First of all, it's the one that you've heard from before, not two.

R. Hawes (Chair): One. Okay.

L. Hubbard: The expenditures that are made on shared services appear above the line. So the total expenditure…. All of the staff that are paid for on shared services are above that line.

R. Hawes (Chair): I know.

L. Hubbard: So to the extent that we have to recover the cost of shared services, that comes below the line, on the recovery. The amount of the recovery is more, projected for the coming year, on the basis of that reallocation.

So you're right in the sense that if you just look at the expenditure side, the budget would be $600,000-odd greater — just on the expenditure side. But you have to factor in that recovery, and that then reduces the amount of the overall budget request on the Ombudsman's budget.

[1120]

The alternative to continue the status quo is essentially to not reflect that true cost on the shared services and just reflect that higher $600,000 request and then a lesser request on the other offices. The other offices would be $300,000 less request, but the Ombudsman's request would then have to be $600,000 in order to maintain the same level of shared services and not distribute the costs equally.

It really is a matter of trying to balance that and reflect what the real cost is to each of those offices. There is no other way of presenting it, other than the mechanism that we have here, because those are considered recoveries. The previous chargebacks were shown as recoveries. It's a matter of understanding how the numbers work together there. I don't know if that's helpful or not.

R. Hawes (Chair): Well, I'm not sure it is, because I am looking on the increase side at the…. Well, it's $500,000 plus the $95,000 — almost $600,000 in those three line items.

L. Hubbard: Right.

R. Hawes (Chair): So there is going to be an increase in staffing of…. I think you said two FTEs plus a temporary. Does that amount to the $390,000?

L. Hubbard: That's within the $390,000 — yes.

K. Carter: It's not the total.

R. Hawes (Chair): What else is in the $390,000?

K. Carter: The increase in the costs for professional services, which you'll see in the change category.

R. Hawes (Chair): Now, in the $390,000, STOB 50 is up. So what's in STOB 50 for that increase? What makes that $390,000?

L. Hubbard: Okay, I can give you the breakdown on that. The $150,000 is due to the statutory increase in base salaries, plus classification change and awards — increments that people get through the course of the year; $140,000 is due to the two requested positions for the seniors; and $100,000 is due to the temporary shared service backfill position.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay, that's what I was….

L. Hubbard: And similar amounts then of course flow — that 23.83 percent on STOB 52. Whatever happens to STOB 50 has a corresponding increase in STOB 52.

R. Hawes (Chair): And then the increase on the office expenses of $95,000. What would be in that $95,000?

L. Hubbard: Okay, in the office expenses it covers a lot of things — everything from buying paper to supplies, moving expenses.

R. Hawes (Chair): Moving? For staff?

L. Hubbard: When you move people, when you hire people and bring them in. Postage, the warehouse storage that Kim referred to in terms of our off-site file storage — there are a number of things there.
[ Page 2250 ]

To be clear, the increase is higher year over year than really it should have been, and that's because I think I made an error last year in terms of the actual costs. We're running around $180,000, projecting close to $200,000 in terms of actual expenditures in that STOB for the current year. So we've just reflected what I've estimated as realistic. To be honest, I'm not quite sure how I arrived at the $110,000 in last year's budget, but it clearly isn't realistic even looking back to the year before.

R. Hawes (Chair): Off the top of your head, do you know what it was the year before?

L. Hubbard: Sorry?

R. Hawes (Chair): What was it the year before, in 2007? I don't have that in front of me, but I'm just curious — 2007-2008.

L. Hubbard: In fiscal '08 — $152,000 we spent in fiscal '08.

R. Hawes (Chair): In 2007-08 you spent $115,683.

L. Hubbard: In fiscal….

R. Hawes (Chair): In 2007-08's budget the actual was $115,683.

L. Hubbard: Right.

R. Hawes (Chair): So there is a fairly substantive increase.

[1125]

L. Hubbard: Right. And as I say, this year….

R. Hawes (Chair): Is all that moving expenses, just out of curiosity?

K. Carter: Well, some of it is moving to other office space too. As you know, we've had to spread out over different offices, and so just moving up the road and re-establishing computer hookups and things like that absorbs some money.

R. Hawes (Chair): So those would be one-time expenses.

K. Carter: They will be for this year. It all depends on how things go in the future. I think the other thing is that, as I mentioned in my presentation amongst other things, if we have a staff member who's away sick, particularly if it's shared services, we absorb the cost of hiring behind that person. We've had to do that this year.

R. Hawes (Chair): So we don't have an actual for the 2008-2009. Did you come in on budget?

L. Hubbard: So 2008-'09 — that's the current fiscal year.

R. Hawes (Chair): Pardon me. In the current year, are you coming in on budget, or are you going to be over budget?

L. Hubbard: No, current year I'm forecasting at this point about $182,000 to year-end — to the end of March.

R. Hawes (Chair): An $182,000 deficit?

K. Carter: Not a deficit. That's the total.

L. Hubbard: The actual expenditure of $182,000….

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. But in terms of your overall budget….

L. Hubbard: Oh, overall budget. No, overall….

R. Hawes (Chair): Are you going to come in on budget or…?

L. Hubbard: Yes.

K. Carter: Yes.

R. Hawes (Chair): You are going to come within your target budget. Okay.

R. Lee: I think you answered all my questions already.

R. Hawes (Chair): Do we still have people on the phone?

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I'd like an explanation of the recoveries, but I think we've got that. I just wanted an explanation of the recoveries and just to clarify that the non-discretionary increase was $206,000 of the $299,000 ask.

D. Hayer: I have one other question that some constituents have asked me. This Bill 29 and HEU. One of my constituents has asked me if the Ombudsman can help him out if the HEU is not treating them fairly, with the money they're getting from this extra benefit from Bill 29. Should I send this information to the Ombudsman's office? I wasn't sure if the MLA's office can deal anything with them, because we sent a letter to the newspapers….
[ Page 2251 ]

R. Hawes (Chair): Did you hear that? He says his constituent is asking on Bill 29, the recovery….

Dave, I'll ask the question. They can't hear you. Bill 29 —there was some recovery paid to be distributed among the HEU employees. If someone feels that they're being unfairly treated by the HEU in that settlement, can they go to you? That was his question.

K. Carter: The answer is that the HEU is not a public authority under the Ombudsman Act, and so it is not an issue that we can deal with. But presumably they can go to their MLA.

R. Hawes (Chair): Dave, the answer is no.

D. Hayer: All right. Thank you.

R. Hawes (Chair): Actually, that is an issue that the MLA's office cannot look after. They have to go to their union, which is who represents them. However, with that in mind, does anyone have any other questions?

Okay. Thank you very much for your presentation. We will in due course be doing our deliberations, and we will certainly be getting back to you.

K. Carter: Again, thank you very much to you and to the committee. I will just conclude by saying that, again, although we're a very small percentage — I think less than 2⁄10 of 1 percent — we have looked at trying to be fiscally responsible.

In terms of how we've listed our budget details, we've done it in the normal fashion. So to the extent there appeared to be some confusion, I can assure you that we were very upfront, we thought, in terms of explaining exactly how the recoveries were included and would go to reducing the amount of the increase that we were actually asking for.

[1130]

Finally, we have, depending on how the committee decides, about 41 people and a budget of, in this case, $4.6 million or $4.7 million. As I said, there are various ways that you can cut the figures and look at different ones. If I look back at our office, historically, ten years ago the budget we had was $4.663 million. So in terms of actual increase over ten years, it comes down to, I think, something in the neighbourhood of less than $10,000. If you actually looked at the figures in terms of cost of living, to be where we were ten years ago, we would be asking for a million dollars more.

So there are lots of different ways of looking at figures, but I think that we've been very, very responsible and cost-effective. I think that the work we do and have done for 30 years is important and unique. We work well with authorities and with MLA offices to try and deal with different issues. I hope the committee will take that all into account, as well as the amount we're asking for.

R. Hawes (Chair): Thank you very much. We'll take a brief recess while we get ready for the next presentation.

The committee recessed from 11:31 a.m. to 11:37 a.m.

[R. Hawes in the chair.]

R. Hawes (Chair): We will reconvene. Now we're going to hear the budget submission from the Chief Electoral Officer and his office. Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Harry.

You're on.

Office of the
Chief Electoral Officer

H. Neufeld: Good morning, committee members. To start, I'd like to briefly introduce three senior staff members I have asked to join me here today. On my immediate left is Linda Johnson, who holds the position of Deputy Chief Electoral Officer. In the past year I've noted with interest that some of the electoral agencies in Canada are establishing a chief operating officer position in their organizations. Linda is the equivalent of my COO and much more. She's been with Elections B.C. since 1982 and has held her current position as Deputy Chief Electoral Officer since 1991.

On my immediate right is Nola Western, who holds the position of director, electoral finance and corporate administration. Nola is a chartered accountant. Her responsibilities in my office cover all aspects of administering our province's political financing rules as well as managing my office's internal financial, administrative and human resource operations. Nola was a member of the Auditor General's staff prior to joining Elections B.C. 12 years ago.

On my far left is Anton Boegman, who holds the position of director, corporate planning and event management. Anton is a former Canadian naval officer, certified as a project management professional with the Project Management Institute. Anton joined Elections B.C. in 2004 as our event leader for the 2005 general election, referendum and targeted enumeration. He now leads all aspects of strategic planning, project and event planning and event management at Elections B.C.

The four of us are pleased to meet with the committee today to discuss Elections B.C.'s budget requirements for the coming fiscal year and to provide you with some projections for the following two years.

Repeating an approach used in previous presentations to this committee, the format we propose to follow is this. First, I'll provide some introductory remarks to set the context for our budgetary proposal.

You should have in front of you a printed version of the Elections B.C. 2009 to 2011-12 budget proposal document, which was distributed to you a week ago in electronic format. For a reference, we've also provided
[ Page 2252 ]
published versions of the Elections B.C. service plan for 2008-09 to 2010-11 as well as our annual report for 2007-08. All three of these print documents are exactly the same in content as the electronic ones you received a week ago.

[1140]

After my opening remarks, Nola will walk you through the financial figures contained on pages 1 through 6 of our budget proposal to provide you an overview of our ongoing operating budget requirements. Then Linda will review some of the business drivers that are associated with cost projections for future-year ongoing operations. Some of these are as a result of recent legislative change; others have to do with pending changes required in our administrative infrastructure.

Nola will then continue with a review of our electoral event funding requirements for the next fiscal year, which appear on pages 7 and 8 of our budget proposal. She'll pass the discussion on to Anton, who will explain to you what's associated with those anticipated event expenses.

I'll follow up with a closing summary, and then Linda, Nola, Anton and I will be pleased to answer any questions committee members may have. We should have approximately 30 minutes available for that discussion. I trust this proposed approach is acceptable to the Chair.

R. Hawes (Chair): Carry on.

H. Neufeld: To put our budget proposal in context, and for the benefit of some of our new committee members, I'd like to briefly describe our budget components. What we're presenting today are actually our proposals for three different budget types: an annual operating budget, an annual capital budget and next year's portion of multi-year electoral event budgets.

Our annual operating budget is distinct from our annual capital budget, but the two are tightly linked due to government accounting rules. These rules require capital projects and capital assets to be paid back from future-year operating budgets via an accounting mechanism called amortization.

As an example, we're required to redevelop and replace our central computer system, but we must first obtain sufficient capital funding to finance the construction and implementation of that system. Once that new system is placed into production, we are required to pay back a yearly 20 percent amortization value out of the following five years' annual operating budgets. The same amortization rules will apply to tenant improvements associated with an office move we must make.

To put these two budget components in perspective, for next year we're proposing an annual operating budget of $8.711 million and an annual capital budget of $2.86 million. Our annual operating budget is also distinct from our event-related budget. We never lose sight of the fact that Elections B.C. would not exist were it not for periodic electoral events such as general elections and referenda. However, the actual cost of conducting these events is accounted for per individual event, and the cost and conduct of each event is reported to the Legislature separately from ongoing operating costs. This is a statutory requirement.

Our budget request to cover costs directly associated with four electoral events in the next fiscal year totals $33.687 million. These major events are the electoral boundary redistribution, a mail-based enumeration of eligible voters, the 2009 provincial general election and the referendum on electoral reform.

New members of this committee should note that the electoral event budgets are only developed for one fiscal year in advance, and cost projections are prepared only for events that are scheduled. Currently there are no electoral events scheduled for fiscal year 2010-11, so at this time next year we may not be presenting any event-related funding requests whatsoever. However, if the May 12 referendum result requires my office to implement the single transferable vote system, we will be requesting special funding associated with the transition as part of preparations for the 2013 general election.

As we make our presentation today, it will be useful to bear in mind that we are dealing with three distinct budget types — ongoing operating, capital and event-related.

But, you might ask, what about unpredictable, on-demand events such as by-elections? When these non-scheduled electoral events happen, the established protocol is that I write to the Chair of this committee as soon as an on-demand event is underway and advise on the additional cost my office expects to incur. If the committee wishes to review that budget, a special meeting can be held to discuss the details. Otherwise, the need for contingency funding is normally dealt with at our next regular meeting with this committee.

On October 3, I did write to Mr. Hawes, as Chair of this committee, copying Mr. Ralston, as Deputy Chair, advising on the costs associated with the by-elections that were called on October 1 to fill MLA vacancies for the electoral districts of Vancouver-Burrard and Vancouver-Fairview. The projected cost to administer those two by-elections was $530,000 and $465,000, respectively.

I'll be returning to the topic of requesting a recommendation from this committee regarding funding for those on-demand events when I make my final remarks.

[1145]

At this point I'll turn things over to Nola, who will explain in further detail Elections B.C.'s budget proposal. As she will be walking you through the document we have provided, I think it would be helpful for you to have it open for reference purposes.
[ Page 2253 ]

N. Western: Thank you, Harry, and good morning. I'm going to briefly walk you through the budget proposal document with a view to explaining a bit about the document and the numbers therein.

As Harry has noted, Elections B.C. has three separate and distinct budgets: our ongoing operating budget, which covers costs we incur regardless of whether there is an electoral event in the fiscal year or not — things such as office rent, permanent staff salaries, computers, phones, office supplies, amortization, etc.; the capital budget funds the acquisition, either by purchase or development, of capital assets, including our electoral information system, other computer hardware and software, and tenant improvements; and our event-related budget, which provides for the administration of electoral events, including the upcoming general election and referendum, the redistribution of electoral districts, and enumerations. Each of these three budgets is reflected separately in the budget proposal document.

The budget proposal is in the same format as in previous years, so it will look familiar to some of you. Page 1 of the document is a statement of operations for the past two fiscal years. It is an historical document showing our 2007-08 budget in actuals and our 2006-07 actuals. The document includes both the ongoing and the event operating results for those years.

As we advised last year, the surplus for 2006-07 was as a result of the timing change for the second referendum on electoral reform. Some of you will remember that at the time the 2006-07 budget was recommended by this committee, in December 2005, we expected the referendum to be held in conjunction with the November 2008 municipal elections. The change in the date of that referendum resulted in significant changes to our work in '06-07, hence that large surplus.

The summary financial outlook for the next three fiscal years starts on page 2 of the proposal. This is our requested ongoing operating budget for 2009-10 to 2011-12. Also shown on this page is our current ongoing operating budget for 2008-09, as recommended by this committee and passed by the House.

Salaries and benefits, amortization, office rent, office expenses and information technology support all business areas and so are shown separately from the core business lines. Other expenses related to core business areas are also shown, and there are notes on the following page that provide some details of the nature of these expenses. The $8.711 million total for next fiscal year, 2009-10, is actually less than what we requested and this committee recommended during the budget process last year. Most of those savings are due to reduced amortization costs.

Salaries and benefits will increase due to the scheduled governmentwide salary increases for all excluded employees and some B.C. Public Service Agency–approved reclassifications of certain positions as well as our need for two additional positions or FTEs.

I spoke about amortization a moment ago. Amortization used to be called depreciation. It's the allocation of the cost of tangible capital assets over their estimated useful life. The length of the estimated useful life of different types of assets is government policy established by the office of the comptroller general. It is not something for which Elections B.C. has flexibility.

Building occupancy is the rent that we pay for our offices and warehouse. This figure comes from the accommodation and real estate services group of the Ministry of Labour and Citizens' Services.

Office expenses and telecommunications will increase next year due to higher postage and telephone rates and increased uptake of the Pacific leader scholarship program for public servants and website maintenance costs.

Corporate information systems are slated to increase, because we need to replace our personal computers, the operating systems and the MS Office software next year. Most of these costs involved are operating costs rather than capital because of the thresholds for capital assets established by government policy.

Event readiness includes expenses necessary to ensure that Elections B.C. is constantly ready to administer unscheduled events, such as recall and issue of petitions and by-elections. The $49,000 budget clearly does not include the actual cost of administering such events, but rather covers forms, guides and software updates necessary to maintain a constant state of readiness.

[1150]

The increase to the address and boundary maintenance budget is due to a few factors, including price increases from workplace technology services for the map servers and their backups, and work to align our road network and associated base geography data with the integrated land management bureau's digital road atlas 2and the national geographic database.

Costs for the ongoing maintenance of the voters list will decrease in the next fiscal year because the majority of voters list maintenance that year will be associated with post-election cleanup and so is charged to the general election. Also, this year we purchased and installed four new servers for the on-line voter registration system, which is a cost we won't incur next year.

Political entity reporting includes the cost associated with registering political parties and constituency associations, reviewing their financial reports and conducting investigations in accordance with section 276 of the Election Act, which requires the CEO to conduct periodic investigations into the financial affairs of parties and constituency associations. There's a very small increase of $2,000 to the budget for political entity reporting.

Officer's salary and benefits is the salary and the associated benefits of the Chief Electoral Officer. The Election Act establishes that the CEO's salary is equivalent to that
[ Page 2254 ]
of the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court, and there is a scheduled salary increase for April 1, 2009.

The voter education budget covers our ongoing education programs, including school kits used in grade 5 and grade 11 classrooms, and our Democracy Day programs. You can see that that budget will increase somewhat.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the $8.711 million bottom line for our '09-10 ongoing operating budget request is less than what we had expected to need for that year. At this time we are projecting the need for increases to the budgets for the two out-years, '10-11 and '11-12.

The increases include estimated salary increases; potential relocation expenses if a new Chief Electoral Officer is appointed in 2010; additional review staff under "Political entity," because the annual financial reports for 2009, which are filed in March 2010, must include election-related transactions and hence are larger and more complex reports to review; and new servers to support the voters list maintenance in 2010-11.

You will notice that corporate information systems decreases again in '10-11 and stays lower for 2011-12, and that's because it is next fiscal year that we must replace our personal computers and software, as I mentioned a few moments ago.

The largest increases in 2010-11 and '11-12 are for amortization and building occupancy. The leases for the three offices that we have currently will be up, and we need to move into a single location. Linda will address the need for that move in a moment. Our amortization costs will increase so significantly because in 2010-11 the new electoral information system will be well along and we must start to amortize its development cost over five years, as well as tenant improvements needed to the new location we will move into.

Although our current electoral information system has lasted almost ten years and the office lease will be for ten years, government policy for such assets is to amortize them over only five. You'll see a spike in office expenses for 2010-11 and a decrease the following year. In the summer of 2010 we will host the annual conference of Canadian election officials and there is also some budget that year for the office move.

Please remember that the budgets for the two out-years are for fiscal periods that do not begin until almost a year and a half from now, and they may change if this province's voters support a move to the single transferable vote system.

Our full-time equivalent, or FTE, budget represents the number of permanent employees of Elections B.C. We have identified a need for two additional permanent staff members, to make a contingent of 46, and Linda will discuss that need in more detail.

The capital budget is shown on page 4 of the budget proposal document. As we advised last year, for the past few years, including the current one, we have deferred as much capital investment as possible to manage the risk of introducing new systems in the year before a general election and to minimize the considerable impact of amortization on our operating budget. However, we cannot defer it any longer.

In '09-10 we must start the replacement of our electoral information system, or EIS, and invest $2½ million towards that. We have determined that it is necessary to do more capital work in 2009-10 than we had thought when we presented our budget to this committee this time last year. At that time we anticipated a $1 million investment in EIS for 2009-10. Since then we have continued to fine-tune that plan and now estimate that we will need to invest $2½ million in EIS next year.

[1155]

These are not net new costs. We are just moving more of the work to an earlier fiscal period to reduce the risk associated with developing new software too close to the 2013 general election.

The redevelopment of our systems will be comprehensive, and we are in the very early days of that extensive project. Until we receive responses from the vendor community to an RFP or a series of RFPs, we will not be a hundred percent sure of what the costs will be. It really depends on the responses and the approaches. The EIS development will continue into the following two fiscals, and in 2010-11 you can also see the budget for the tenant improvements to our new office.

On page 5 of the package there is a pie chart of our ongoing operating budget for next year. I think it shows that salaries and information technology dominate our spending and leave little flexibility in other areas.

The ongoing operating budget by standard object of expenditure, or STOB, is shown on page 6. The same STOBs are used by all government offices and ministries using the corporate accounting system. They show the type of the expenses incurred rather than the type of business or work that the funds support.

Please note that if you review this budget, you will not be able to reconcile the salaries and benefits figures to those on the summary financial outlook on page 2, because this STOB budget includes salaries and benefits of all permanent and temporary employees, while the salaries on the summary financial outlook only include those for permanent employees. The temporary employee costs are included in the relevant business activities on that page.

At this time I'm going to turn it over to Linda, who will elaborate on our ongoing work and the business needs for the operating capital and FTE budgets that I've just walked you through.

L. Johnson: It's always a pleasure to appear before this committee and tell you about the work we do and our plans for the future. I'm going to be focusing on our operating and capital funding requirements for the
[ Page 2255 ]
coming three fiscal years, but I first want to discuss our requirement for two additional full-time staff.

You will note on page 2 of the budget proposal that we currently have 44 FTEs. One of the interesting aspects of our work is that on general voting day next year, we will have approximately 32,000 employees, all trained and supplied with the necessary tools to do their job. Obviously, you need a solid infrastructure to support this.

In the '09-10 fiscal year most of our attention will be on the administration of the general election and referendum and the cleanup and review activities we typically conduct post-event. However, the effects of Bill 42, which was passed this spring and substantially amended the Election Act, will be felt not only in those events but in our ongoing operations.

We require two additional FTEs to absorb some of the work specifically associated with the amendments to the Election Act. One FTE will be a junior position in the voter registration and boundaries program. That program area is quite overburdened on an ongoing basis, and the addition of registration by telephone has taken the workload beyond the reasonable capacity of our existing staff. This position will support registration by telephone and assist the other program staff in amending voter records and updating the voters list in those situations that our automated processes can't handle.

The second position we require is in response to the Bill 42 amendment that established a duty for the Chief Electoral Officer to ensure the enforcement of the Election Act. Since 1995 the act has required periodic investigations of the financial activities of registered political parties and constituency associations. This work is quite time-consuming, especially if the organizations we investigate are very large, disorganized or uncooperative.

Our electoral finance department, lead by Nola, has done an outstanding job of facilitating compliance with the financing requirements of the act. However, the additional duty of ensuring broad enforcement of the act requires us to bring in some additional expertise that can focus on coordinating investigations in a broad range of business areas and work with officials within the Ministry of Attorney General to develop and maintain appropriate protocols regarding compliance and enforcement activities.

I'd now like to discuss our requirements for our ongoing operating budget as shown on page 2. As Nola has stated, our operating budget request for the coming fiscal year is very close to what we had projected when we met with you last year — a change of less than 1 percent. It is in the '10-11 and '11-12 budget years that you see the increases that Nola has alluded to.

[1200]

But first, the '09-10 budget requirements. As you can see, our budget request for the coming year is just over $8.7 million. The main drivers behind the increased costs above the current fiscal year are salaries, reflecting not only the scheduled increases for all public service employees but also the additional FTEs we required due to Bill 42, and increased information systems costs.

There are some considerable one-time costs in corporate information systems for the coming fiscal year. These costs reflect setup and installation of some new servers as well as the need to replace our desktop, laptop and printer hardware and software.

We deferred much of this work, as there is simply too much risk in making these changes in the year before an election. But we need to take care of this as soon as the electoral events of next spring are complete. It will have been six years since our last full computer hardware refresh.

We are also requesting an increase of $50,000 to our voter education budget. In some ways we are victims of our own success. Our grade 5 election toolkits that we provide to all schools in B.C. with a grade 5 curriculum have been very popular. We've made the kits bilingual this year to meet the needs of more classrooms, but the kits are somewhat costly to produce and ship. We are developing the grade 11 kits this year and hope for similar success.

This year also marked the first International Day of Democracy. A major media company in B.C. generously provided considerable advertising for this event this year at a nominal cost, but we cannot rely on such generosity in the future to communicate this important message. We believe our voter education programs to be an important investment in encouraging voter participation.

In '09-10 we will not incur costs associated with the new requirement from Bill 42 to annually publish the acceptable types of ID for the purposes of voting and registration with voting, as that will be dealt with during the election and will be part of that. The cost of the annual publication of acceptable types of ID begins to appear in our 2010-11 operating budget.

Overall, our requirement for ongoing operating funds for '09-10 is $8.711 million, slightly less than what we predicated last year, due to decreased amortization costs. In the '10-11 fiscal year we see an increase of operating costs to a total of $9.714 million. This increase is due to a number of critical factors.

One, which Nola mentioned, is the increased cost of temporary staff, due to the complexity of the financial reports from registered political parties and constituency associations filed in the year following an election. This accounts for over $100,000 in temporary salaries, plus associated benefits.

The next significant impact on our budget is due to office space. Elections B.C. has been split into two physical locations for a few years, due to space constraints and the limited availability of office space in
[ Page 2256 ]
Victoria. We recently added a small third location to house temporary and permanent staff who will be dealing with the volume of work associated with our provincewide enumeration next year.

This is an incredibly inefficient arrangement resulting in productivity losses, communication delays and increased costs for duplicated equipment and services. It is also, as you can imagine, very difficult for our staff. We're all making do with this arrangement, but we need to address this issue.

In the current year and '09-10 our increased space needs have been primarily due to additional temporary staff required for redistribution and event preparation. The building occupancy costs for two of the three locations are therefore charged to the events and will appear in those budgets. In 2010-11 we will no longer have our third location, and the cost of the two primary locations and our warehouse will be shown as an operating expense.

The leases for our two primary locations expire in 2010, followed by the expiry of our warehouse lease. We have issued a request for proposal for our office space requirements and received 11 responses, ranging from $21 to $35 per square foot. And I'm happy to tell you that we've selected a new location and have negotiated a rate of only $20 per square foot.

The space is becoming available, due to construction of new space for the current tenant, but we will have to extend one or more of our current leases to cover the gap between the existing leases and expected occupancy in March 2011. There are increased costs in building occupancy reflecting this transition.

[1205]

The tenant improvements for the new location will result in an increase in amortization costs in both 2010-11 and 2011-12. The other significant costs that we see in the 2010-11 fiscal year are due to the replacement of servers and operating systems that support the voters list. We must also replace our electoral information system — EIS — which I will explain more fully when we discuss our capital budget needs. As Nola mentioned, the amortization costs for this system begin to appear in the 2010-11 fiscal year.

Turning our attention to the final fiscal year, shown on page 2, the budget increases by approximately $770,000 to $10.482 million. As discussed, you will notice an increase once again in the amortization cost. This increase is primarily due to both the redevelopment of the electoral information system and the amortization of tenant improvements for our new single-office location.

I'd now like to discuss Elections B.C.'s capital budget requirements for the coming three years. That's on page 4 of the budget proposal document.

Our capital budget request is primarily based on hardware and software replacement, office relocation and the replacement of the electoral information system. This system is the backbone of electoral administration in B.C. It contains the voters list, street index, information about all the voting places and assigned voting areas, as well as payroll for our election and voter registration officials, and it provides us with the necessary reports to monitor progress and generate voting books.

EIS also contains registers of political parties, constituency associations, advertising sponsors and agents for those entities. The system was considered to be at the end of its useful life following the 2005 general election. The underlying software is no longer supported by Oracle and Microsoft. But we've made some redevelopment over the past couple of years to extend its life through the 2009 events and are confident that we can make do until the final processing of the 2009 event data is complete.

However, we cannot continue to use this system following that time. We hope to have a request for proposal out for the replacement of this system in the next few months, and we'll begin work with a successful vendor immediately following the election next year.

The goal is to have a fully redeveloped and tested system ready one year before the 2013 general election to ensure adequate time for documentation and training. We also hope to integrate some other programs that we rely on into the replacement system, such as our inventory management system and our electoral finance disclosure system.

In '09-10 we require $2.86 million for capital costs. Most of this budget is associated with the beginning of the redevelopment of EIS, with some additional moneys required to replace end-of-life hardware that exceeds the limits for operating costs. As you know, the thresholds for capitalizing and amortizing the costs of most computer hardware and software are sufficiently high that most of the costs associated with replacing our hardware and software are in our operating budget. There are some items that are above the threshold and, therefore, appear in our capital budget.

Please bear in mind that our projections for EIS replacement are preliminary. As Nola mentioned, our actual costs and timing of the project will be dependent on the results of the RFP process. In 2010-11 you see the bulk of the costs associated with the redevelopment of EIS, and $5 million of the required $6.279 million in capital costs is directly attributable to this project.

We require an additional $975,000 in the 2010-11 fiscal year for tenant improvements to our new office location. It is an older building, and our future landlord will be making many upgrades to the building, but we will need to make some adjustments to ensure an efficient organization of the space that meets the needs of our various lines of business and also accommodates our event management needs.

There is also $250,000 in the 2010-11 capital budget to develop a web-based tool for registered political parties
[ Page 2257 ]
and other filing entities to enter their financing reports on line. This is something our clients have been asking for, for some time, and we look forward to providing this service. In 2011-12 our capital costs will be $3.5 million, reflecting the final stages of the redevelopment of EIS.

I'll now return you to Nola to explain the budget requirements associated with the upcoming electoral events.

[1210]

N. Western: Thank you, Linda.

If you turn to page 7 of the budget proposal document, you will see our funding needs for those upcoming electoral events.

R. Hawes (Chair): I'm just wondering. Excuse me for doing this, but would it be more beneficial to the committee members to deal with the first two, if you've got questions, while they're fresh? This is pretty much a different and separate event that we're going to talk about here. Or do you want to go through the whole thing and then go back to the previous, operating and the capital?

J. Rustad: Just let them go through the whole thing.

R. Hawes (Chair): You think?

J. Horgan: How much more time?

N. Western: I have about two minutes.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. Carry on.

H. Neufeld: I have about four at the end.

R. Hawes (Chair): I'm happy either way. Just while there were perhaps some questions that were fresh in people's minds from what you just did. This event and the money you're going to talk about here are totally separate from what we were just talking about.

So do you want to deal with that part first?

J. Yap: Sure, let's deal with it first.

R. Hawes (Chair): And then we'll come back, if that's okay with you.

J. Rustad: Let them wrap up. It's six minutes.

R. Hawes (Chair): It's 15 minutes. It's not so much wrap-up. It's: do we want to get the numbers mixed up here? These are separate events. So if we deal with the operating in the capital side first….

J. Rustad: Whatever you'd like to do, Chair.

R. Hawes (Chair): Well, let's go to this. We'll take the questions on this, and then we'll come back to the election side. I think that probably has fewer questions, even though it's a lot more money.

J. Yap: Your request for an upgrade on the capital side. I understand the system that we have is about six years old, I heard. Obviously, with technology, six years ago is a very long time.

My impression is that we have quite a well-functioning EIS — election information system. While it would be nice to engage in an upgrade to more modern technology, given the fiscal situation — economic situation — that we face as a province, if we had to justify a large level of investment — $2.5 million and perhaps more…. That's only a preliminary figure. We don't know what the actual cost will be. You're in the early stages. What would be the additional benefit to British Columbians when we already have a well-functioning system?

H. Neufeld: It's a very good question, John. I was grilling my IT director over the weekend with: "Do we have any options here?"

The reality is that the system is more than six years old. It's the hardware on the desks that was replaced six years ago. EIS was constructed starting in 1998. It was partially used in the 2001 election. It was fully used in the 2005 election, and it'll be fully used in the 2009 election. It seems like a short time in the sense of a huge investment for technology, but we're out of control of the environment here.

It's organizations and corporations like Oracle and Microsoft that really set the rules on what you can and can't do and what is and isn't supported. When Oracle and Microsoft both say that this software is no longer supported, there gets to be a point in time where the people at WTS say: "You're introducing a security risk. We're shutting your system off. We're no longer going to run it in our environment, and you can't access it through the provincial network."

We have another situation in that the whole system was written in a language called Visual Basic. It's no longer supported. The compiler is no longer being updated. We can run it through this next election.

I asked Bob Jasperse, my IT director, point-blank: "Could we run it in the 2013 election?" He said: "Maybe; maybe not."

The issue is that the operating systems that WTS will upgrade to change every five years. We're now running on an operating system called Server 2008, and by 2013 it will be replaced. We'll be in a situation where if you don't run on the new operating system and you're working with an old compiler, you introduce security risks, and it's just not something that WTS will allow. They will not allow a system that allows security risks running for the whole government computing environment.
[ Page 2258 ]

So we're really stuck in a very hard place here. I've been working with my colleagues across the country. You would think that we could come up with one system that would work for all provinces and for the federal level of electoral administration. We haven't come up with a solution where the rules are similar enough between jurisdictions so that we could make a concerted business case for going there. It's not to say that it won't happen in the future.

[1215]

We're really in a very tough spot with EIS. If we don't replace it in the coming electoral cycle, in the period between the next election and the following one, we will be facing very, very severe risks. Electoral administration is only about managing information. We've pretty much computerized everything except voting and vote counting. So if we don't have a system that operates, and operates securely and reliably, we are, quite honestly, imperilling electoral democracy in British Columbia.

J. Yap: You actually touched on my follow-up question, which was on systems in other jurisdictions. Surely other provinces have recently upgraded their systems. I don't know. I'm sure you compare notes with your colleagues across the country or other jurisdictions.

Would we not try to find a way — maybe you are planning this through your RFP — to first of all find out: is there one that we can do on a more economic basis than to reinvent the wheel, if you will, on a new system?

H. Neufeld: We've spent a lot of energy on that. The most recent province to invest in a new system to deal with all their administrative requirements is Ontario. But they had to pull the plug on using that system for their most recent provincial election. It just wasn't operating. They're now seriously considering pulling the plug entirely after over $11 million of expenditure.

They're talking to us about what we're going to do and whether we can maybe do something to work together to give them a system. However, their time frame is more aggressive than ours. One of the problems is that when you develop systems in a big hurry, you add additional risk. They've got an election in 2011. They want our system ready by 2010. I don't think we can do that without really adding a lot of risk to the project.

So it's one of those situations where I think we're going to get there eventually. The fact of the matter is that electoral law is different between the provinces.

Ontario is now looking at…. They have an all-party committee looking at modernizing elections. They're looking at things like electronic voting, merging the function of provincial elections and municipal elections to the administration by one body. They're looking at rationalizing a whole lot of the administrative processes associated with election administration.

But we're not in a position where there's a system that's available to us. Elections Canada is dealing with systems that are getting quite old, and they're just never in a position where they don't have an election just around the corner. I wouldn't have traded positions this last weekend with my federal counterpart for any money.

J. Yap: On the operating side — if I may, Chair. You're looking for about a $1.05 million lift, which is, by my arithmetic, about a 14 percent lift year over year — budget from '08-09 to '09-10. In the current environment that we're in, where we're all charged with being fiscally prudent, what would a scenario to hold the line — or try as far as possible to hold the line — look like for Elections B.C.?

H. Neufeld: You mean squeeze a seventh year out of our existing hardware? It's something we could look at.

J. Yap: No, I'm talking on the operating side.

H. Neufeld: On the operating side?

J. Yap: Yes. You're looking for a 14 percent lift — $7.65 million to $8.711 million.

H. Neufeld: This is less than what you approved last year when we presented this, and a lot of it is fixed costs. You know, we didn't negotiate the salary increases that all of my staff will get in the coming year. A lot of these things are associated with our ongoing costs, and we don't have a lot of flexibility.

Linda, do you want to add anything to that?

[1220]

L. Johnson: There are some hardware costs in there, as you mentioned. That's for our desktop hardware and software. But it's six years old. We're already receiving communications from clients where we can't open the attachments because our software is too old. Deferring that not only brings a greater amount of risk to us — because the closer we get to the next election, the greater the risk becomes — but it's also affecting our ability now to function effectively.

The two additional FTEs are included in that lift. We need those because of legislative change.

We've tried to absorb as much as we can of the impact of Bill 42 into our ongoing budget, but there are some places where we simply can't squeeze it anymore.

We obviously started working on this budget back in June, and as Harry said, most of it is based on our existing fixed costs. We do have the additional items of two FTEs and some hardware increases, but off the top of my head, I can't think of how we could possibly continue to operate within the current envelope.

J. Yap: So you're assuring our committee that you're as lean as you possibly can be — that there are func-
[ Page 2259 ]
tions you're undertaking as an organization, which your people are working on, that you've looked at and that are absolutely required for maintaining the best possible electoral system for the people of British Columbia. There are no areas where you can find some savings.

H. Neufeld: Our budget next year — if you were to provide what we've asked for, which is less than we asked for last year for the coming fiscal year — will be 13 percent less than it was in 2001-02. We've been holding the line for a lot of years here, and we are very, very prudent with our fiscal expenditures.

Democracy costs a lot of money. We've spent, in this country, a billion dollars in the last five years on electoral administration. We're doing our part to try and keep those costs in line, but these are constitutionally guaranteed rights that voters have to vote in elections.

We have an obligation under the Election Act to make that process very accessible, and we need an infrastructure ongoing so we can pull off these big events when they come along. If we don't have that, we run the risk that elections are not going to be administered in a way that's seen as fair and appropriate under our constitution.

J. Horgan: Thank you, Nola, Harry, Linda. And Anton, I look forward to your eight minutes. You come at a difficult time. I know we don't want to divide on partisan lines here. We've done a pretty good job as a committee of sticking to a bipartisan approach.

Regrettably, the time we find ourselves in and the time of your presentation leads to John's questioning. I could, if I were being chippy, throw back that there's probably some discretionary funding in core government services that would be easier to find than to lop a couple of bucks off of your budget as we go into these significant events — not just the general election but an enumeration, which I believe is the first one in a decade, as well as the referendum on electoral reform.

From my perspective, in any event, having heard you three times come forward deferring, deferring, deferring on the IT side to hope that you would be getting the best equipment possible at the closest opportunity to the events that you have to manage…. I for one applaud you for that. I know that my colleagues will do that in the fullness of time.

I have a couple of simple questions.

Linda, I loved your quote: "Large, uncoordinated and uncooperative." Am I misquoting you, or is that…?

L. Johnson: No, I think you're accurate.

J. Horgan: Okay, great. I loved that.

I didn't get the costs of the by-elections. Could you repeat those? Just keep a list. I've got a couple here.

R. Hawes (Chair): That was about a million dollars total, I think.

J. Horgan: Yeah, but I wanted to know the difference between Burrard and Fairview, because there was a difference.

On the two new staff, one for enforcement as per Bill 42. I'm wondering if there was any consultation on that before the legislation came forward in terms of the potential impact on your budget. As well, I'd like to know where you're moving to, if you can divulge that information.

Lastly, on the operating side, where would you allocate resources to assist with an initiative or recall campaign? I don't see that. I can't identify these….

H. Neufeld: That would be an unscheduled event.

J. Horgan: That would be an unscheduled event. Okay.

That comes under the event readiness component. Would you come back to the committee, were there…?

[1225]

H. Neufeld: Yes, as soon as we had a petition process that we had to manage, we'd be writing the committee Chair, and we'd be saying: "This is what we're looking at for this particular petition process." It would be the case with a recall petition, initiative petition, by-election.

J. Horgan: So if you could just give me those answers, that would be great.

L. Johnson: In terms of the budget impacts for legislative change…. When we made our recommendations in 2006 for legislative change, we costed out what those would be and provided those to the ministry when they started looking at a possible amendment bill. I do not recall if we were asked to provide full costing for Bill 42. They obviously would have pulled some of the costs that we had identified following our 2006 report, but I don't believe we were asked for a full Bill 42 costing.

Our new office location will be the current B.C. Ferries building on Fort Street. There have been….

J. Horgan: Bad mojo in that building, you know. Get a shaman to come through.

L. Johnson: We're going to be on the lower floor, so maybe it has drifted to the top.

J. Horgan: Okay. Good enough.

L. Johnson: They're relocating to a building that is under current construction.
[ Page 2260 ]

J. Horgan: That'd be a nice one.

The by-elections cost?

H. Neufeld: I have those numbers here: $530,000 for Vancouver-Burrard and $465,000 for Vancouver-Fairview.

J. Horgan: Why the difference? Is it the size of…?

H. Neufeld: The difference is basically voter populations.

J. Horgan: Yeah.

H. Neufeld: Those are two of the larger population ridings in the province.

J. Horgan: Just one more, Chair, if I might. I don't know if we're getting into event funding here, but the…. I guess we are, because it's enumeration.

You project to spend money on the voters list maintenance in this operating year. How are you dividing voter list maintenance in a non-election year with the large enumeration expenditure that you have in this budget for the event next year?

L. Johnson: The voters list maintenance is reflected in our operating budget on a continuing basis. That's used to, obviously, maintain the voters list, provide MLA and party lists, juror selection lists and so on. A lot of this is operationalized, and it's fully in that budget.

The enumeration budget covers the activities specifically associated with our enumeration activities. We almost suspend ongoing voter registration activities and attribute it all to enumeration during that enumeration window.

The general registration period that occurs up to day 7 of a general election…. From writ day to day 7 we attribute that to the event that the pre-activity is operating. As soon as general voting day is over, the ongoing budget then picks up voter registration activities that are occurring outside of the event, but the post-event processing of all of the registrations in conjunction with voting is attributed to the event.

So we have some very structured protocols in place to separate out what's an event cost and what's an operating cost.

R. Lee: A few questions. You mentioned that you invested in four servers to have on-line voter registration. Would that help you to reduce the future cost on registration? That's the first question.

H. Neufeld: The four servers are needed because we expect a huge spike in activity with voter registration on line as we get closer to the election. Part of it is going to be our mail-out enumeration, and we really want to drive people to the website, because it's the most convenient, lowest-cost way for them to update their registration, confirm it or register afresh.

So the four servers are attributed to supporting the on-line voter registration system. That's just one portion of our overall system. It feeds the electoral information system, but it's separate from it, and this is because of the security risks. We have a very robust system for the voter registration on line, but we keep it separate from our electoral information system — so separate servers for separate functions.

[1230]

R. Lee: But would that reduce the manpower requirement on the other end?

H. Neufeld: Certainly, the manpower requirement for voter registration, should we not have on-line voter registration, would be much, much higher. We're one of the only provinces so far in Canada that allows people to register on line. We're also now the first to allow registrations via phone. The great irony is that the 1-800 operators will be using the on-line system when people register by phone. That's another source for those four servers having to work extra hard in the coming six months.

R. Lee: Okay. My second question is on amortization. Last year you projected that next year amortization is close to $1 million — $954,000. In this year's estimation it's $640,000. That's a reduction of $310,000. Did you foresee this number last year? Why is there such a big reduction?

N. Western: One of the capital items that we had budgeted for last year was a new batch processing system for receiving batch updates to the voters list through Vital Statistics and ICBC. We found that we didn't have to actually do that batch processing system. They found some other, more efficient ways to do it. Our capital last year, in '07-08, wasn't as high. So that's why our amortization for '08-09 and '09-10 is less. And of course, unless we start to invest new capital, amortization just keeps going down.

R. Lee: Okay. One more question on the political entity reporting. In last year's budget you budgeted it as $315,000 for 2010-11. But here you increase it by almost over $100,000. What are the changes? Last year you probably didn't realize that this problem was coming?

N. Western: I don't recall what the difference is between what we thought last year about '10-11 and what we think this year about '10-11, other than just more experience. Every year you learn a bit more about how much the actual costs are.
[ Page 2261 ]

J. Rustad: Thank you for the presentation. I've just got a couple of questions. This is similar to or along the lines of what one of my colleagues has said. In particular, when you look at the proposed budget over the next three years, you're talking about a 37 percent increase in the bottom-line budget going from 2008-09 to years 2011-12.

We are facing a very significant financial challenge in this province. I understand the needs, particularly on the IT side because my background is coming from IT. I spent 15 years working in IT before going into politics, so I understand how technology changes, particularly the compatibility you can have between operating systems. So I understand those challenges, but I have a challenge — when I consider the provincial budget and the challenges that we're faced with provincially — to look at a 37 percent increase in the budget at this particular time.

I guess the question around that is…. And this isn't an easy one to ask, because I know the great work that you do, and I'm a huge supporter of democracy. But I mean, what would it look like if we weren't able to meet these budget requests that you're asking for? That's question No. 1.

The second question is just around the wages side, in terms of the mandated wage. You know, around the province there were a number of increases. What I've calculated here, going from 44 to 46 FTEs, just basing that out, is roughly based on about a 6.7 percent increase in wages between 2008-09 to 2009-10. I'm just wondering if you can confirm if that's what the actual wage and benefit increase was for your operations.

H. Neufeld: Do you want to take that last question first, Nola?

[1235]

N. Western: The scheduled wage increases are 2.5 percent for all public service employees, and benefits are 23.83 percent on top of that. So as wages increase, the benefits increase. Also, we did have some reclassifications. I mentioned earlier in the presentation that the B.C. Public Service Agency said that no, these people should be paid this. That's why it's a bit more….

H. Neufeld: Plus we're looking for two additional positions.

To go back to your calculation of a…. Was it a 37 percent increase?

J. Rustad: Roughly.

H. Neufeld: If we didn't have the amortization issue to deal with and if we didn't have the fact that when you go out to rent space, you're not renting it at the rates you were five years ago…. Even if we were simply to try to renew our existing space, we've been advised that the landlords expect market rates. They're not going to renew for the same rates that they signed up when we moved into the space.

That and the amortization of the electoral information system, I think, have got to be a huge component of those operating costs. If you're spending $2 million on amortization, you're going to have a big hit on the bottom line of your operating budget. But we've been deferring this, as John pointed out, for three years now. We've been trying to hold off on doing this, and we're wringing all the value we can out of the existing system.

I wish I had another answer for you in terms of: can we delay this? Can we avoid this? Can we pick up somebody else's system and plug it in?

I think, quite frankly, where we can do something for future costs is looking at the service delivery model for elections. The ongoing operating cost is a portion of what our event costs are. Our event costs are very, very heavily driven by the costs of human beings. We have to hire a huge number of staff, and we're faced all across the country with huge challenges in doing that.

There are not that many people who are willing to work a 14-hour day for $200. There are not that many people who are willing to take on increasingly complex procedures, and they are becoming more complex as our democracy evolves — things like voter ID. This requires a higher level of skill, and it requires more than two hours of training.

At the federal level, we just saw that deputy returning officers had a 97-page manual that looked like it was written by a lawyer, and two hours of training. It's very, very difficult to get the kinds of skills that you need for complex procedures with a couple of hours of training.

We could look at streamlining the whole process, putting the focus on a very good experience for the voter, a very good level of convenience for the voter, but a much more efficient manner of getting the ballots cast. I think we could look at reducing 35 or 40 percent in terms of the human costs of running elections and referenda. I think that's probably an area where we have more discretion, quite frankly, but it would require a legal change.

R. Hawes (Chair): Once again, I'm going to remind the committee members and the presenters that we are trying to budget time as well as money here, so….

J. Rustad: I just have one last comment to make.

R. Hawes (Chair): No, we don't have comments. We have questions.

J. Rustad: Just one brief little comment, and that is with regards to the STV and the work that you're going to be doing in getting that out there. Having looked at
[ Page 2262 ]
what we're looking at federally, it'll be very interesting to see what people's comments are on STV.

R. Hawes (Chair): Moving on.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I just wanted to clarify what you said about Bill 42. As I understood it, the additional cost to implement Bill 42 was one additional FTE only. Is that correct?

H. Neufeld: Two.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): If the court challenge is successful, then would you save those two positions?

H. Neufeld: I don't think there are any court challenges on the contents of Bill 42 that would save us positions.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I understood one was an investigative person on compliance with the publication ban. Isn't that correct?

H. Neufeld: It's across the board. It's all aspects of the Election Act to ensure that the enforcement is even across the entire province.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): So the court challenge, then, would have no impact at all in terms of your budget.

[1240]

L. Johnson: The court challenge is specific to the spending limits for third-party advertisers. Should the challenge be successful, I don't believe that would have any impact other than maybe an extremely nominal impact during the election, and that would be attributed to that event.

R. Hawes (Chair): So while we're waiting for Dave, I have two questions. One is with respect to the move to the new building. First, are you committed to that move? Have you signed documentation for that move?

H. Neufeld: No.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. I am not sure, but my understanding is that all new premises have to be LEED-certified. Have you looked at that? Have you considered that and the impacts that…? Well, I'm not sure if this building is a LEED-certified building.

N. Western: I don't believe that it's subject to the same rules, because it's not a new building. It's an old building.

R. Hawes (Chair): I thought that all new leases…. Well, okay. Maybe we could double-check that, because I thought maybe it was a move to new leased premises, but I could be wrong.

H. Neufeld: It's where you place the comma after "new."

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. Well, I just wanted to make sure that you are in compliance; that's all.

And then two questions with respect to the amortization and the EIS system. If I've heard you correctly, the bulk of the utility of that system falls on elections, on big events like a provincial election, and you scarcely get more than one election out of a system. The one we're going to put in place for 2013 may well not be suitable for 2017. Am I correct in that assumption?

H. Neufeld: Well, we're getting two and a half out of the current system, and we're trying to structure it so that we do at least as well out of the next system, but this is a set of variables that we don't have full control over.

R. Hawes (Chair): No. I get that. I'm just wondering, then, with respect to the amortization….

H. Neufeld: These are government rules.

R. Hawes (Chair): I know.

H. Neufeld: We're not allowed to attribute it to an election.

R. Hawes (Chair): Well, that was going to be my question. There's a portion of it that you use, and it has utility on, I assume, a day-to-day basis. But there's a very substantive amount of that system that's for one purpose only. I just wondered if there was a way to move it over to a different kind of amortization. Would that…?

H. Neufeld: I asked all these questions when I started in this job, and Nola gave me some very firm answers that government accounting rules restrict.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. And I guess my last question was with respect to one of those staffers, and that would be the one that's looking at the regulation that's….

H. Neufeld: Enforcement.

R. Hawes (Chair): Is that not sort of a temporary thing? That is not a full-time, ongoing, I would not think….

L. Johnson: We are required under the act to regularly conduct investigations. They aren't….

R. Hawes (Chair): There are two positions here. One's an investigator.
[ Page 2263 ]

L. Johnson: One is a position focused on compliance and enforcement, and that would be leading the investigation coordination. The other position is a junior position in voter registration and boundaries to support telephone registration and the fact that that program area is always swamped.

R. Hawes (Chair): Oh, okay. As we move through this, through the boundary change, this is not going to slack off so you don't need that person anymore. Is that what you're saying?

L. Johnson: No, it will not.

D. Hayer: One of the questions is: because we're having problems finding enough staff at election time, and some of the municipalities use a machine when they're doing the counting that eliminates some of the mistakes and ultimately makes the process faster and maybe helps out on the staff too, are you looking at some other technologies that can help us run the election day faster with less staff and maybe less chance of any mistakes or anything?

[1245]

H. Neufeld: It's a question I get asked regularly, Dave. "Why don't you use the machines that they have in municipal elections for counting the ballots in provincial elections?" Well, I wish they all had the same machines. I wish they all had machines, and I wish we could make a business case for even just adopting the machines.

We've looked at this in the past, and the costs associated with getting everything set up, especially if you have different kinds of machines in different parts of the province, does not justify the price differential with having the voting officials sit down at the end of voting, empty out the box and count less than 400 votes. In addition to that, we'd have to change the law.

R. Hawes (Chair): And, Dave, the other thing is that there are voting machines….

D. Hayer: Are we sort of expecting any challenges there with the staff? You've probably learned from the federal government, and because right now you're going to the 85 different ridings and trying to divide the polling stations. Is that work going on as we're coming closer to the May 12 election?

H. Neufeld: This is one of the event issues with regard to redistribution, but the short answer is yes. I expect by Christmas we will have maps out for over 10,000 voting areas around the province.

R. Hawes (Chair): Dave, all I wanted to say to you was that if you look at how many voting machines the municipalities have, there are far fewer polling stations at municipal elections than there are in provincial. There are nowhere near enough voting machines at the municipal level.

D. Hayer: No, I understand. Also, turnout is much lower. I mean, in the city of Surrey it was maybe 15 or 20 percent, compared to maybe 60 or 65 percent at the provincial level.

N. Western: If you turn to page 7 of the budget proposals document, you will see the funding needs for the upcoming electoral events. This page shows the budgets for the current fiscal year for the redistribution, the enumeration of voters, the 2009 general election and the referendum on electoral reform. These are major events, and they take several years to prepare for, conduct and finalize. This committee has recognized that, by recommending the current total net event budget of just over $11 million.

The next fiscal year begins on April 1, 2009, less than two weeks before the start of the campaign period for the election. For the redistribution and enumeration, most of the work will be completed by then. However, the major costs related to the election and the referendum will be incurred next fiscal year, and you can see that reflected in the numbers.

As you know, the government has committed to fund proponent and opponent groups for the referendum. A total of $1 million will be provided to the two groups, which will be selected by the Ministry of Attorney General. In January this year the Ministry of Attorney General transferred funds for 2008-09 to Elections B.C. to partially cover the public funding of the referendum proponent and opponent groups. The funding for 2008-09 of $870,000 is, therefore, not included in the '08-09 budget recommended by this committee and shown in the first column. For 2009-10, however, I have included the balance of $130,000, which proponent and opponent groups will receive that fiscal year.

The last page of the document is page 8, and it shows a pie chart of the type of expenses that will be incurred for the election and the referendum. Like our ongoing operating budget, the single biggest cost is related to the people, and Anton is now going to provide you with more details about those event budgets.

A. Boegman: Thank you, Nola. Good morning, committee members. As Harry mentioned, my focus is going to be on the event funding requirements. Elections B.C. has a detailed and comprehensive event planning methodology, based on standards and best practices endorsed by the Project Management Institute. We're recognized as leaders in our planning by our colleagues in other Canadian provincial and federal electoral agencies, and this rigorous approach, combined with fixed-date elections, allows us to plan very thoroughly on a predictable time line.
[ Page 2264 ]

Our methodology also enables us, when necessary, to effectively incorporate change into our plans, and it allows us to prudently consider risk. These capabilities proved especially important when, less than a year from the election, we were required to revisit our event plans to incorporate changes resulting from Bill 42. I do not say this lightly. The effort necessary to adjust our plans caused considerable strain on Elections B.C. Our event funding requirements have been developed using a proven, bottom-up, costing process, whereby the specific deliverables necessary to successfully deliver electoral events are first identified, then scheduled and then fully costed.

To the budget. I'll begin where Nola left off, on page 7 of the document before you. As stated, our current year budget for event-related activities is $11.164 million. This has provided implementation funding for the electoral district boundary redistribution currently underway and for our mail-based provincial enumeration scheduled to occur between February 2 and February 27 of 2009.

[1250]

It has also provided funding for the final planning and preparatory activities for the May 12 provincial general election and referendum on electoral forum.

We will begin the next fiscal year on April 1, 2009, by setting up and opening 85 district electoral offices across the province in readiness for the general election and referendum. The first activities that the district electoral officers will undertake will be to implement the final stage of our enumeration.

Between April 6 and 20 of 2009 they will conduct a person-to-person enumeration of homeless shelters and long-term care facilities across British Columbia. This is the same model that was used prior to the 2005 general election, and it was very effective at accurately registering those voters on the list.

In April 2009 Elections B.C. will also be processing data from final enumeration voter transactions, incorporating data updates from external sources such as ICBC and Vital Statistics and carrying out quality audit procedures in order to produce the best possible voters list prior to the election.

Our budget requirements for the enumeration in '09-10 are $568,000. This will provide for temporary staff, salaries and benefits for enumerators and data processors and cover enumerator travel expenses, data-entry contract costs for the voter registration forms and the voters list quality audit.

The total enumeration costs over two fiscal years should therefore be less than $3.4 million. We strongly believe that this mail-based enumeration approach will deliver a high-quality voters list, while at the same time avoiding the significant labour and data-entry costs associated with previous approaches.

The years 2009-10 will also see the final elements of the electoral district boundary redistribution. We will require a total of $44,000 for temporary staff salaries and benefits for the review of political party deregistration financial reports, for developing and printing the Chief Electoral Officer's report on the redistribution and for mailing costs.

This brings us to the two big ones for 2009 — the general election and referendum on electoral reform. As we begin the '09-10 fiscal year, we will just have completed 12 months of intensive preparations for the election and referendum.

We will have appointed and comprehensively trained a district electoral officer and deputy district electoral officer in each of the province's 85 electoral districts. We will have stocked our warehouse with over 80 tons of forms, manuals and election supplies, from ballot boxes to pencils, and shipped them throughout the province. We will have acquired computers and tested the information technology infrastructure required to support their use throughout the election period, and we will have planned and prepared an advertising campaign designed to inform voters of the new Election Act requirements and their available voting opportunities.

Our work in '09-10 will build on these intensive preparations and take us through the 51-day event cycle from writ day on April 14 to return day on June 3. Election activity and costs will, to a very large extent, centre around our district electoral officers and the work they will be completing throughout the province.

As you know, a general election is comprised of simultaneous elections run in each of our province's electoral districts. The district electoral officers will be staffing and opening their offices, confirming voting places and voting area assignments, printing ballots, preparing voting supplies, accepting nominations from candidates, and hiring and training election and voter registration officials that will provide the public face to voters and will administer advance, general, special and absentee voting throughout the province.

For this election, driven by the new electoral district boundaries, we will have more offices, more voting areas, more voting places, more voting supplies and more election officials than at any time in B.C.'s electoral history. And these cost drivers account for over 80 percent of the event funding request. The staffing component of the election is, in itself, staggering. As mentioned, we will have to hire and train over 32,000 temporary election workers, and this is going to be a huge challenge to successfully accomplish, given our employment requirements and labour market conditions.

We will also be launching a comprehensive election-related advertising campaign starting on April 1, 2009, and continuing through general voting day. Election-related advertising will include the use of traditional and new media and will focus on informing voters of
[ Page 2265 ]
the new identification requirements as well as voting opportunities, timings and locations.

[1255]

The centrepiece of our election communication program will be sending the where-to-vote notices to each of the province's three million registered voters. This mailing will arrive in voters' mailboxes before advance voting begins on May 6, 2009.

After voting and counting has concluded, we'll be preparing and distributing the Chief Electoral Officer reports; conducting lessons-learned reviews with all staff and our district electoral officers and deputies; and completing electoral finance reviews for candidates, registered political parties, registered constituency associations and registered advertising sponsors. This work will extend through the end of May 31, 2010.

Our budget requirements to successfully administer the general election in '09-10 are $32.2 million, with approximately $20.6 million allocated to election and voter registration officials.

For the referendum, our budget requirements are extremely modest. Conducting a referendum in conjunction with the general election brings us great efficiencies and economies. Almost everything we need to do for the referendum is also needed for the election, so there is just a thin layer of additional work required.

The majority of the costs associated with delivering the referendum in '09-10 are related to advertising and staffing, and we will also have $130,000 allocated for funding the yes-no groups. For the referendum funding next fiscal year, we require a total of $851,000.

This brings our total event funding requirements to $33.687 million for the coming fiscal year. On page 7 you will see a table representing the breakdown of that total across the various events.

I'll now turn things back over to Harry for his closing remarks.

H. Neufeld: I'll try to be as brief as I can, Randy.

R. Hawes (Chair): That'll be a good thing.

H. Neufeld: I promised to get back to our funding requirement for the two by-elections of October 29. Those by-elections were not scheduled, and our approved budgets for the current fiscal year don't have funding available to cover these kinds of on-demand events.

My request is that this committee recommend to the Legislative Assembly that my office be granted access to the contingency vote for the $995,000 necessary to administer these two by-elections. My staff and I will be pleased to answer any questions at the end of these final comments regarding this fiscal year's supplementary funding requirement.

Looking forward to next fiscal year, we've made requests for three funding envelopes. As you've heard from Nola and Linda, Elections B.C. is asking for an increase in our ongoing operating budget for next fiscal year, but that increase is $216,000 less than was projected when we presented to this committee a year ago. As I mentioned earlier, our 2009-10 request for annual operating funds stands 13 percent lower than the Elections B.C. operating budget of 2001-2002.

You will have noted that our capital budget request for 2009-10 represents an increase from previous years and continues to rise in the following two years. This projection reflects the critical need to consolidate my office to a single physical location by the end of fiscal year 2011 and to invest in replacing our end-of-life information system by the end of fiscal year '11-12. Because of government accounting rules, these capital projects will result in five years of significant amortization costs that will have an impact on future year operating budgets.

You have also undoubtedly noticed that my office's event-related budget requirements are quite significant for 2009-10. Anton has just given you a high-level description of the extensive efforts and activities that are associated with completing the electoral boundary redistribution, making final updates to the voters list as a result of enumeration activities and conducting the 39th provincial general election and the second referendum on electoral reform.

There's a great deal of critical work to be done in the coming fiscal year, and the administrative success of the scheduled general election and referendum depends heavily on having adequate financial resources to properly meet the challenge my office is mandated to fulfil.

In summary, I'd like to focus your attention on the bottom line of each of the three components of our budget request for next fiscal year. I would be grateful if this committee would recommend to the Legislative Assembly the following request of funding for my office: $8.711 million for our ongoing operating budget in 2090-10, with an increase to 46 FTEs as shown on page 2 of our proposal; $2.86 million for Elections B.C. 2009-10 capital budget as detailed on page 4 of our proposal; and $33.687 million in event-related funding for next fiscal year as appears on page 7.

[1300]

At this point I'll pass the meeting's proceeding back to the Chair. With your agreement, Mr. Hawes, we'll be happy to answer any further questions members of the committee might have.

R. Hawes (Chair): I believe we have two.

J. Yap: I do have a question, but I would like to preface the question with just a brief response to the CEO.

I certainly value the work that your organization does. It's essential to our democracy. Just to respond to your earlier comment, I have no doubt that our democratic system has to rely on the quality of service that an
[ Page 2266 ]
organization like Elections B.C. provides. We only have to look at news reports of what's happening all around the world in terms of political events and how fortunate we are to have the democratic system we have and how well it functions here in B.C.

I just wanted to say that on the record, Harry.

It leads me to my question, with that in mind — that there is a cost to maintaining our democratic system. I believe British Columbians would agree with that.

You have a budget for the next event, the 2009 general election and the 2009 referendum, of roughly $33 million between the two. When you account for inflation and population growth and maybe changes in technology and those costs, how does this compare to the 2005 events? We had the general election then and the referendum then as well.

H. Neufeld: Well, the full answer to that I'll ask Anton to provide you, but we have a completely different environment. First of all, we have 85 electoral districts rather than 79. Secondly, we have a new legal framework. The Election Act changed in over a hundred places as a result of Bill 42 being implemented at the end of May this year. We have some cost drivers that are associated with a difference in pricing from 2005 to 2009, mostly associated with things like office rent and transport.

For perhaps a little more fulsome answer, Anton, do you want to give some details?

A. Boegman: Certainly. I can give you the precise increase between the previous general election…. The last election cost $22.9 million. The current one is slated over two years to be $38.121 million, a net increase of $15.2 million, which is approximately 65 percent more than what it cost in 2005.

I'd like to echo the caveat that Harry mentioned. It's impossible to get a direct apples-to-apples comparison over the two events. They are completely different events. There are three areas, just to touch on a little bit more from what Harry mentioned, that I'd like to raise.

The first one is environmental changes. These reflect the things that…. The cost to occupy offices has increased. The cost to get phone lines into those offices has increased. The cost to ship, the transportation of supplies, has increased. The cost to mail the where-to-vote cards…. Canada Post has increased its fees. There are other external factors, such as a requirement now from CRA to pay our election officials a 4 percent vacation pay that we previously did not think applied to those. So that's the first area which is driving costs up for this election.

The second one is the electoral boundary redistribution that takes place. As I mentioned, there's more of everything in this election than there has ever been in British Columbia. The act is very prescriptive in detailing how we must present and deliver and administer an election of all the number of officials. It ratchets upwards as soon as you have more places for them to be.

Electoral district voting areas increased by over 1,400 between 2005 and what we're projecting in 2009. Each one of those has two officials, a ballot box, ballots — all that sort of thing.

Then the last one, really, is Bill 42. Every voting document that we had, including ones that were in the warehouse that were in readiness for the election, had to be revisited, reworked and reprinted. The effect of Bill 42 on our administrative structure for the election was very, very significant. We had to rethink the way that we were doing things and make sure that all the documents reflected that. That's the bottom line in terms of the events.

[1305]

J. Horgan: Transportation costs. Of course, the carbon tax would have had an impact on you moving your materials around. I just throw that out because I had an opportunity to do so.

R. Hawes (Chair): Reducing gas prices would too. The gas prices falling would have a big impact.

J. Horgan: Thank you, Chair. Thank you very much for that.

On the event budget — and of course, that's driving everything in the organization as it should…. Harry, you started out by saying: "Were it not for the events, we wouldn't have a lot of reason to hang around." So we all value that and appreciate the importance of it.

I wanted to get a more fulsome response to my previous question about the impacts of Bill 42. Both Anton and you, Harry, have touched on that in terms of what sort of cooperation there was with your office and the Attorney and others who were drafting the bill. If you could expand on that a little bit so that I can have a better understanding of what you just said were profound impacts — a hundred changes. What has that led to in your organization?

I also want to touch on the funding of the "yes" and "no" camps in the referendum. You said that the two groups would be identified and selected by the Attorney General, but the funds would be transferred to Elections B.C. and distributed from your offices.

Did you agree to that formula? Did you recommend that formula? Why would we not just leave the Attorney General, who crafted the legislation, who is determining who the groups are…? Why not leave it to them to distribute the money?

That would be good for me.

H. Neufeld: Linda, maybe you could answer the last question first.
[ Page 2267 ]

L. Johnson: The original thinking around the proponent and opponent groups was that there would be multiple groups, and that it would be our office that was responsible for selecting those groups. The funds were originally transferred to our organization based on that assumption. Because our office will be responsible for ultimately reviewing the disclosure of the spending by those groups, it makes sense for us to be the ones that are issuing the funding.

Because of some public consultation, the model for selection of the groups was changed, and it was changed this summer after the funds had already been transferred to Elections B.C. The model for managing the disclosure did not change, and that's why the funding has remained with us.

J. Horgan: Was the decision to determine how the groups were selected…? Was that a cooperative exercise between your office and the Attorney General, or was it a regulation change? What input did you have into that?

L. Johnson: My understanding from the Ministry of Attorney General was that the change in how the groups would be selected was based on feedback that they received from the public based on the original model they put up. There was a clear indication from those that they did consultation with that they preferred a model with a single group on the "yes" side and a single group on the "no" side, based on some criteria.

Our offices never wanted to be in the position of evaluating various proposals around who would do what, and the Ministry of Attorney General took that on. So that was a change to the draft regulation based on public input, but we were certainly advised of the intent of that change.

H. Neufeld: With regard to Bill 42, my predecessor, following the 1996 election — the new Election Act had been put in, in 1995, so that was the first election — and following the 2001 election made recommendations for legislative change. I repeated many of those recommendations following the 2005 election. There is much of what was in Bill 42 that implemented about half of those recommendations.

There were other things that I would put in the realm of public policy where my office had not made the recommendation, and we were consulted in advance of the bill being presented — for workability, not for public policy input.

[1310]

So we certainly had an opportunity — a small group in my office — to look at iterations of the bill as it was prepared. But it was not a discussion about public policy. It was a discussion about how we would make this actually work, given the intent that was being presented by the drafters.

J. Rustad: I have one quick question, just with regards to the capital side. In this year they were for personal computer hardware and software — $67,000. You plan next year for $95,000. That's roughly $2,000 per person. Last year it was about $1,500 per person in terms of FTE.

I'm just wondering: are you going through a complete changeout of all your computers for that price tag? I don't see anything going forward in 2011-2012, so I'm kind of assuming that's what's happening. How often do you end up with that complete changeout of computers and software?

N. Western: The $95,000 for 2009-10 is replacing laptops and printers for the office. The laser printers are quite expensive. It also replaces the firewall for the office — so $10,000 for our new firewall right after the election.

H. Neufeld: But the idea, John, is that we're doing a refresh. It's six years ago that we did the last one. The industry standard, as I understand it, is three years. I think we're doing quite well with doubling it.

J. Rustad: Yeah, three to four.

R. Lee: A short question on enumeration. It's budgeted for $2.8 million this year and then $468,000 for the next financial year. I understand that enumeration would be done in April — the majority.

H. Neufeld: The enumeration will begin on February 2 with mailouts to every residential address in the province. The ones where we have voters at those residential addresses will have a different content than the ones that have nobody at them. We could talk at length. There are some variations. The letters will go out in February, and the campaign will go right through until the election begins in April.

R. Lee: Okay. So the major spending will be this financial year.

H. Neufeld: This fiscal year. Yeah.

R. Hawes (Chair): Anybody have any other…?

J. Rustad: Just one last quick question. I'm just wondering around having fixed election dates. Does that help? Does that reduce some of your costs and challenges that you face, as opposed to the way it used to be?

H. Neufeld: It's spreading all the way around the country, so I guess somebody else has seen that it's not just election administrators that like it. From an election administrator's perspective, it's excellent. It allows you
[ Page 2268 ]
to plan as if it's a project, and it really provides some certainty. However, there are fixed election dates at the federal level, and that isn't seeming to work out so well for my federal counterpart.

R. Hawes (Chair): Maybe this is the last question.

J. Horgan: Yeah, it is. It's following on Richard's. I meant to ask, in my clutch of questions, about why mail-based enumeration and not a door-to-door enumeration. I understand that you need more people to knock on doors, but then you're looking at people and they're realizing the gravity of the activity, rather than another piece of mail that goes into the recycle bin right at the door.

Why did you make the choice? Was it just a financial question, or is there evidence that a mail-based enumeration is more successful?

H. Neufeld: I hope we'll have some evidence after this mail-based enumeration is done. The cost on this mail-based enumeration will be significantly less than going door to door and, I think, will produce a significantly better quality list.

Going door to door was not a requirement in Bill 42 for this election. The implementation date was moved to next year. I think they thought we probably had enough on our plates without doing a door-to-door enumeration in addition.

Preliminary estimates are $20 million to $22 million for a door-to-door enumeration. If this committee is looking seriously at a way to save money down the road, maybe you'd like to recommend a legislative change to allow some discretion for the Chief Electoral Officer to decide what the best method is for doing enumeration of voters.

We expect to have over 92 percent of the eligible voters on the list when we go into the election. We expect to have 80 percent of them at their current address. We don't think we can do any better than that by going door to door, but it seems that legislators have thought so.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. Dave, Bruce and Diane, that's….

D. Hayer: Can you put me on the list too?

R. Hawes (Chair): The list has been exhausted, Dave, and we're half an hour beyond our time. But if you have a very brief question….

[1315]

D. Hayer: My question is: when you sent this information to people's homes to confirm if they're on the voters list or not, how do you make sure that they're actually Canadian citizens or that they were born here? Some of the public always ask the question…. Is there a certain way of checking it — a birth certificate or citizenship — or do you just rely on the honour system?

H. Neufeld: It's one of the features in Canadian democracy that we have a fair amount of trust of people who register and vote. They need to say, before they cast a vote — and in our case, they need to sign — that they're eligible — that they are Canadian citizens, that they lived in B.C. for more than six months and that they're more than 18 years of age.

When they sign that, we — after seeing ID that proves their identity and address — provide them with a ballot.

Now, we don't require them to prove citizenship. I know this is a question that comes up in political circles from time to time. It would be a very onerous demand to make every Canadian who wants to vote also prove their citizenship. We don't all have citizenship documents with us at all times.

Right now it's very much a trust issue, Mr. Hayer. People are signing that they're eligible, and part of that eligibility is that they're Canadian citizens.

D. Hayer: Is there also on the form that it states that if you lie on this, there's a price to pay for it or there are consequences for that, so that people know? There might be a very small segment…. I think almost all Canadians are very honest and will provide the right information. In case somebody does, so that they know that if they provide false information, then there are consequences for this….

H. Neufeld: There are indications that making false statements is punishable by law on the registration form that you fill out on paper — whether you fill it out on line, on our website…. Our 1-800 operators will be telling people that before they register via the phone.

R. Hawes (Chair): With that, thank you very much, Harry. Thank you to your staff. We will be deliberating here in the next couple of days, and we will certainly get back to you. I guarantee you we will get back to you before May 12. Just kidding.

We are going to take a brief recess for lunch. We are recessed.

The committee recessed from 1:17 p.m. to 1:48 p.m.

[R. Hawes in the chair.]

R. Hawes (Chair): We're going to hear now from the Auditor General in terms of his budget request for next year.

With that introduction, John, I'll leave it to you to introduce your staff. We will turn it over to you.
[ Page 2269 ]

Office of the Auditor General

J. Doyle: Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, and good afternoon, Deputy Chair and Members.

I'd like to introduce today Michael Macdonell on my left, who's the director of communications within the office, and on my right is Christine Davison. Christine is the chief financial officer for the office.

First of all, I'd like to thank you for your support last year and request your continued support in funding my office. Today I'll present my estimate of resources for the period 2009-2010 to 2011-2012. My estimate is an extension of last year's plan, with one minor exception. In short, I request the following for next year: $16.3 million to fund the operations of my office and a quarter of a million to fund capital expenditures.

Last year this committee supported my request for funding and supported my review of the operations of my office. At that time I explained the significant pressures and challenges that I faced and provided an outline regarding how I intended to address them. At that time I'd been in the office for four weeks.

Some of these challenges still exist, but thanks to the support of this committee, I'm now better placed to deal with them. Let me just explain.

Staffing. Most of my senior staff will retire within the next five years. Some have already retired and have told me that they're going to retire during the coming year. My plan is to grow staff from within the office to take their place. This is a long-term commitment from both parties.

[1350]

Structure. In the past the structure has shifted from the traditional triangle, where there are a lot of junior staff being led and supervised by some senior staff, to a different shape — more of a diamond. As a consequence, senior staff have been filling the gap. Basically, what that means is that there has been a higher cost than necessary in regard to the work. In other words, we've been asking more senior people to do more junior work.

Standards. Canadian GAAP, mainly Crowns at this stage, and auditing standards are changing. This will require a revision of audit methodologies and investment in training, and also some leverage of other audit officers.

Status. My office is independent of government but is still subject to overview. It must maintain its credibility by provision of external review of our operations and the application of professional standards in all that we do.

Services. The summary financial statement audit and associated work consumes about two thirds of my resources, leaving the balance for performance and governance work. All these teams will be more productive in the future.

The estimate of resources for 2009 is focused on the delivery of the financial audits, which was detailed in the financial audit coverage plan provided to the Public Accounts Committee.

Also, performance audits. There are two separate teams, one focusing on environment and the other on social services. Governance audits, which review the governance arrangements throughout the government reporting entity and provide reports on them, as well as performance reporting.

Standards. The integration of the relevant standards and how they're shifting and changing into the work of my office and also full compliance with all required standards at all times. I need staff who are well trained, committed and professional. They have the right tools in place at any time, and they're able to use them properly.

Communications. These need to be lucid, timely and credible, reporting on issues to legislators, government and the public in a timely and sensible way.

The requested funding is an extension of last year's plan. I wish to use the same funding envelope, but my reasoning for the funding is slightly different. Given the current fiscal constraints, I have structured my request to maximize my capacity to deliver within my mandate but also within the financial and staffing expectation ranges previously discussed with this committee. There should be no surprises.

In essence, the funding request for this coming year is last year's approved funding proposal updated for inflation and known cost changes. Last year's submission requested $16 million for 2009-10 but did not include pay increases or cost changes for general inflation. If they had, the requests would have been much higher.

This year I have presented the shift in funding as changes in the cost base, new staff but previously advised to the committee, less cost savings as the new staff become effective. The result is a request for $16.3 million as detailed in page 2 of my documentation.

The one variance from the previous plan is the bringing forward of the recruiting of staff to build internal capacity. The staff will be able to deliver sooner and thus reduce our reliance on broad and shallow professional services acquired at a much higher cost at the moment than the staff that I will use to replace them.

We will still need to access narrow and deep professional services into the future as the cost of internal development would exceed the benefits. Looking forward, I see no change to the size or structure of the office unless there is a substantial change in mandate or some of the underlying assumptions vary, for example, that I just cannot recruit staff anyway at all.

My budget this year proved to be more than adequate, and I plan to return a significant sum as unused. Partly this is due to delays in the acquisition of staff, partly because of my commitment to this committee that I will only spend what I really need, and partly because my strategy going forward was not formalized until later
[ Page 2270 ]
than expected, resulting in a delay to the commencement of the change program.

[1355]

Whilst it is not my intention to return moneys next year, I'll make the same commitment to this committee. I will only spend what I need. I'll be happy to address any questions the committee may have.

J. Yap: Thank you, Auditor General, for your presentation.

On the matter of staffing. It's obviously a critical area for your shop. In light of the recent downturn in the financial markets globally — and we're seeing a slowdown here in Canada — how would that impact your recruiting? Because it seems to me that with fewer transactions done in the financial markets…. You know, we're hearing reports of major financial institutions retrenching, and I presume that will translate into opportunities to recruit suitable resources — CAs, in particular. How would that affect your planning and your recruiting in the short term?

J. Doyle: Thank you for the question.

What I'm looking for in the way of skills for my financial audit are auditors or talented individuals who can be trained to be auditors within a very short period of time. Typically, they are the exact group of people who are in great demand during a recession period. Therefore, I still see, looking forward, some difficulties in acquiring staff at the more senior level. Therefore, I have taken the view that we need to grow staff.

We need to bring youngsters into the organization. I think I went through this last year as a strategy, and I still have the same view. We bring youngsters into the organization, and we train them. Now, we're fortunate in that we've got a number of people at the manager level that can be trained up to senior manager and director, but we'll need to invest in them to make sure that that occurs.

One of the features that you'll see in the documentation is an increase in our professional training budget to be able to do that. Now, I've found the funds to do that from within the organization.

Looking forward, it may be that a lot of CAs or other financial professionals become available in the job market. I think that's a great opportunity for government to take those people on board and to lift the financial management skills that currently reside within the whole government framework and within Crowns. But they have to be specialists in audit for them to be useful to me in the short term. However, I do not put aside the idea that bringing people on board and then training them up may, indeed, warrant the investment and would be a good strategy moving forward.

Currently I'm optimistic that I will be able to bring people in at an appropriate level and grow them within the organization.

J. Yap: My next question. You're looking for an '09-10 budget of $16.3 million, which is a lift of about just over $1 million, or 6.6 percent year over year. I know in your comments that you prefaced your presentation by saying that you're not asking for more, because last year, with the rolling three-year budgets, you had the $16 million for '09-10 in last year's presentation. But we're dealing on a year-to-year comparison.

At this time, looking at the current year before us, '09-10, 6.6 percent on its own may seem a reasonable request in light of what you had put in last year, but in view of the exceptional fiscal situation that we're facing, what would a more modest lift do to your plan if, after due deliberation and discussions, the committee felt that 6.6 was a little more than we felt we could justify at this time?

J. Doyle: If I were to trade funding — in other words, reduce the $16.3 million — the options available would be for that work not to be done or for that work to be done elsewhere or by another firm.

[1400]

Financial audit work, the review of the financial arrangements within government entities — Crowns, ministries, trust funds and so on — needs to be done. If I don't do it, someone else is going to be doing it, and therefore there is no cost saving to the public purse. Essentially, what happens is that it just comes off my budget and goes into another area. So that seems to me to be a counterproductive approach.

There are some benefits about the approach that I'm adopting, which I think need to be recognized. The first is that not everyone will want to stay as an auditor after they've joined us. And in fact, there are examples of chartered accountants throughout the entire public sector, including Crowns, that have started off in the Office of the Auditor General and then moved on, sometimes to very senior positions.

As such, we are a net exporter of talent into the public sector. We bring them in. We train them as an auditor. We get them through their exams. They provide us with valuable service during that process, and then they move on and help lift the average skills and talents that are devoted to financial management.

Now, not everyone, as I say, is going to stay and want to become an auditor for their entire career, and we see it as a healthy portal to bring talent into the public sector and to move out. I would expect staff to move into ministries and Crowns on a fairly consistent basis into the future. I think that's healthy, and indeed, I've put the point to my staff that I actually want them to have this additional set of skills, because I believe it’s important that we're not just allowing our staff to be looking just purely at audit but also to have line management and financial management experience.

Looking at it from that point of view, that opportunity may disappear. I might end up with difficulties in staff-
[ Page 2271 ]
ing some audits. But there'll be no benefit, because those costs will still need to be incurred. It's just that we will be paying someone outside the government entity to do it.

J. Yap: A quick question, Chair.

Now, there are audits that you have to do, that you're required to do. I'm assuming the financial audits, the assurance audits, have to be done. What percentage of the workplan would be more discretionary? You know, where it's not a financial audit or it's not perhaps an important follow-up audit. What is the percentage of your workplan that you may be able to either delay or not do, hypothetically?

J. Doyle: The first part of the answer is that the financial audit component takes up about two-thirds of my resources. The second part of the question is: what can be deferred?

Well, at the moment we only look at a limited amount of performance audit work. So if we're looking at the hundreds of programs that go across government, we're only looking at a few each and every year. Now, if you take that as a percentage of all the ones that are occurring, it's quite a small percentage as it is, at the moment, with the resources that I have. To actually reduce the amount of performance audit work I'm doing would be to reduce that percentage to an even smaller figure.

Can I just say that studies have shown that in the governance area, for example, attention to detail on control frameworks actually pays back the organization. It's just one of those things where it sounds like it's an increase in cost, but the reality is that it actually pays back dividends to organizations. And I think that investing some of my staff's time on that isn't discretionary; it's actually to the greater good.

If it were that we continue to conduct audits where we found nothing meaningful to say following the conduct of those audits, then I think we've reached a situation where we need to challenge whether or not that work is being undertaken. But at the moment that doesn't seem to be the case, and there is always place in the economy for ensuring that things are going as planned.

[1405]

That level of assurance is actually quite productive and helps both members and citizens to understand what government is doing.

R. Hawes (Chair): John, before we move on, can I ask you to just clarify one answer that you gave John Yap, and that's with respect to the Crowns that you audit. If you weren't auditing them, they would have to pay the expense anyway to an outside firm. Are you not getting any recovery from any of the Crowns?

J. Doyle: Sorry, my reference was to the public purse. What's happening at the moment is that the Crowns that we audit are being invoiced. The money goes directly to treasury, and it is not utilized by my office. That was a principle that was established by this committee last year when it decided to go to the full appropriation model. All income streams that flow from any work that we undertake go straight into treasury.

If we were not to do that work, then the Crown would still be paying that money over. If we were not able to do ministry work or other work for which we do not charge, then someone would have to be paying that over. That's the rationale behind my comments.

R. Hawes (Chair): Last year we started that, I recall. It was so that you could better maintain your independence, if I remember correctly, because you shouldn't be getting paid…. If you want to be totally independent, you can't be paid by the body that you're auditing.

In 2008…. No, when was it? The last budget — and I don't see the numbers on here — prior to implementing that change…. What was the budget at that point? I'm assuming what we've done is…. We're not showing a reflection in here now, in yours, as to what kind of money is being billed and what kind of recovery we do have. I'm just interested in a comparison between the net cost of operating your budget the way it was before to where it is today, because there is still a net cost.

J. Doyle: Oh, yes. Can I just refer to some papers I've got with me?

R. Hawes (Chair): Sure.

J. Doyle: I'm referring to page 3 of last year's presentation. My total funding for 2007-2008 was $12.75 million. Then I was going to add in six FTEs, which was approved by this committee, and also the inflation and the cost increases, which again was approved, which together total a million dollars.

So my base funding was $13.75 million, and then I presented to the committee the need to adjust salaries and compensation that had got out of sync not only with other provinces but also with the profession.

You afforded me $1.5 million to lift the proposed appropriation to $15.25 million, which was in fact what was approved last year.

R. Hawes (Chair): Yes. What I was curious about was that prior to the change we made, you had a recovery figure, and I'm not sure what that recovery figure was then as opposed to today and at what you're still billing. I guess I'm wondering what the net cost to the net cost is. I think the $16.3 million is not a net cost if I were to use the way you used to do it.

J. Doyle: I think the fees that we're going to be charging this year, which will go straight to treasury, would
[ Page 2272 ]
be $1.7 million, and the fees that private sector auditors will be charging to various entities within the government reporting entity would be $4.8 million.

R. Hawes (Chair): But the $1.5 million….

J. Doyle: The $1.7 million.

R. Hawes (Chair): The $1.7 million that's going directly to treasury…. If this were the way we were doing it before, your budget request would actually be…. You would have reflected that $1.7 million here as recovery, I'm assuming.

J. Doyle: That's right.

R. Hawes (Chair): So you would have been asking for $14.6 million — somewhere in that range.

J. Doyle: That's correct.

R. Hawes (Chair): Okay. That's what I was trying to ask you.

[1410]

J. Horgan: Thank you very much, John, for your brief presentation. I'm pleased to hear that the long-term succession plan that you spoke of last year is bearing fruit. When I reflect back to my time as a public servant, there was a sense of a revolving door at the Auditor's office, because it was an opportunity for individuals to build, pad their resumé, learn some skills and move on up the ladder, whether it be within the system or into the private sector.

When I look on page 5 at the data that you provide on turnover rates, which are still quite high relative to the overall public service, I'm wondering if you track those individuals. Could you identify those that may have stayed in the public service, gone to Crowns or taken more senior responsibilities in ministries? Or did they all just disappear into the private sector?

J. Doyle: No, they didn't all disappear. I can give you a few examples. Some were retirements. We had an assistant Auditor General retire at the beginning of 2008. Another one was a retirement of a senior member of staff. Those were both examples of where we had a loss of corporate memory.

The two graduates from the chartered accountants program both went overseas. One went to further their study and to learn a foreign language. The other one went to work as a chartered accountant in the Caribbean — for a number of good reasons, I think, linked around temperature and also linked around experience. Some of the others were actually corporate services staff that elected to move on, and they weren't operational staff.

What's happening this year is that I have already lost a seasoned director. She has retired, and I'm losing another one in February. He's been with the office for 20-plus years, and I'm losing another one at the end of the financial audit cycle, in July. He's been with the office, I think, for nearly 30 years.

Where are they all going? Those that retire are, obviously, going to do retirement things. I'm just jealous. I don't know what they're actually going to be doing. The two youngsters that moved off to go overseas I expect to come back and knock on the door at some time in the future, so they're not lost completely. The corporate services staff moved out to different areas within the public sector. From memory, some moved to local government or city government. Others moved into ministries or their equivalent.

On the other side of it, we received back from one of the Crowns a member of staff that had left previously and decided to come back. Also from one of the ministries, we received back someone who had previously been in the ministry, and we welcomed them back into the fold, as it were.

If you look around the public service, you will see literally dozens of people that started off in the Office of the Auditor General and have moved out over time. It has been a tradition that they are welcomed when they come back, but again, the issue is around training, to make sure that they can in fact, then, deliver the kind of services we want. Typically, what we find is that they have not necessarily kept up all their auditing skills but are very effective when it comes to the performance audit or governance or internal audit–style work that we undertake within the office. So it's very positive.

Part of my approach for the future is to actually encourage secondments to the public sector, secondments to the sun. We've got links with other jurisdictions in New Zealand, Australia and the U.K., where members of staff can go for a season, usually in our quiet period, and then come back to join us with different skills, different ideas and a different view.

We're also working on a closer link with an overseas audit office to see if we can help with their capacity-building. They can provide us with staff that can actually conduct work here, and also we can go back and help build and develop that particular area. That's being done through the federal audit office and through CCAF. It's being financed from outside, and therefore there's no cost to us in regard to doing that.

[1415]

We're trying to change the way that people will perceive the office and the opportunities that are within it. The most important part of that was to actually change the way that we remunerated our staff. Instead of having a very narrow range where it basically meant that someone had to die in front of you to get promotion, we've now built in, as an intrinsic part of what we do, develop-
[ Page 2273 ]
ment opportunities to give people the opportunity for special projects and lift their skill base as a natural part of what we do.

As we bring in more youngsters at the bottom end of the funnel, if you like, to be trained up as chartered accountants, we're finding them interesting work to do which will demonstrate that the public service is a good career choice and that in fact we can deliver good, quality work, right through their entire working life.

J. Horgan: Then, I deduce from that response that although the numbers are higher than the broader public service, there's good rationale for that. You've got in place policies and programs that are going to encourage people who have gone to come back and to relive the positive experiences that they gained in previous stints in the office.

Again, part of your succession plan, as you lose that corporate memory…. You've got a compensation framework now that allows you some flexibility, and you're seeing, as you said, some people coming back. This is all to the good?

J. Doyle: This is all to the good, and I'm grateful for the funding that I received last year to make a lot of this occur.

R. Hawes (Chair): John, I know other independent officers have talked about the increase that went across the civil service that applies to their staff. Do you have control totally of the salary levels of all of your staff, or are some of them set through the negotiated contracts through the civil service?

J. Doyle: We have a group of staff that their pay rises link to centrally negotiated processes. I think they're called schedule A.

R. Hawes (Chair): Is that within the lift that you're asking for? I'm just curious about how much of the lift is attributable to that.

J. Doyle: That's in the lift that we've asked for.

R. Hawes (Chair): But how much of the lift is attributable to that that's beyond your control?

J. Doyle: Just one moment, please.

Chair, it's a relatively small figure that we cannot avoid at all — roughly in the area of $40,000, I'm told.

There are two components of change in a salary. The first is that we have a relationship or contract with an individual where, subject to good performance, they have an expectation of an incremental rise each year. The second part of that is maintenance with the cost of living, which is more of a centrally organized construct. Now, the second part, the cost of living, we usually peg at the same level that the schedule A's are pegged at. So part of the increase, inflation and for salaries, is as of the first of April we would be paying our staff a small increase.

R. Hawes (Chair): That's across the entire staff?

J. Doyle: Except for me and the senior team. I get linked to a different system. It's in the legislation. The senior team, we've recently reviewed their salaries, and we're not looking to change it at the first of April.

R. Lee: After the transition from normal audit to GAAP standards, some of the costs in audit organization have been reduced. Do you see the overall system being more effective?

J. Doyle: This is Canadian GAAP?

R. Lee: Yeah.

J. Doyle: Financial reporting is only one component of the system. Just as important are the control frameworks and the financial management aspects. In other words, having beautiful instruments doesn't mean to say that you can produce beautiful music. You still need a range of other things in place to make sure that that occurs.

My view of the government-reporting entity is that there's still some work that needs to be done to make sure the orchestra plays beautiful music all the time, but all the ingredients are in place. The legislation framework is good, and the approach to moving forward is good as well.

[1420]

R. Lee: Okay. My other question is on mandatory retirement. Does it help you to retain some older staff? Even if they qualify to retire, they don't retire. They stay in the organization.

J. Doyle: I've had mixed feedback in regard to retirement of senior staff. For some of them, it's a situation where they will retire not because they're exhausted or have run out of energy, it's just that it's the best thing for them to do based on the pension plans that they have.

If I could find a way to retain staff post-retirement and keep that corporate memory without paying consultancy fees, then I will use it. I am exploring those options.

For example, one person that is retiring who is a wealth of corporate knowledge is my deputy. Errol Price has worked in the office for nearly 30 years, and he's retiring early next year. I for one do not wish to lose that corporate memory, and so I'm exploring with him, at the moment, how I can continue to tap into that wealth of knowledge and corporate memory post-retirement.
[ Page 2274 ]

There are others, as well, who have worked for the office for many, many years that are completely up to date in regard to all the professional standards. Again, I need the flexibility to tap into that knowledge, if I can, over the next period of time.

There will come a point when the succession planning process is so robust that before someone is able to retire or move on, we've already done the transfer of corporate memory, and therefore, that will change the dynamics of the situation. But I've got another couple of years to go before I feel comfortable about that.

R. Hawes (Chair): Anybody else have any…? On the phone? I'm not sure who's on the phone at the moment.

B. Ralston (Deputy Chair): I'm here, but I don't have a question.

D. Thorne: I'm okay. Very informative.

D. Hayer: No questions.

R. Hawes (Chair): Thank you very much, John. Apparently, your presentation overwhelmed all of us, and we have very few questions for you.

J. Doyle: Thank you very much, Chair.

R. Hawes (Chair): We will get back to you after we've done our deliberations at some stage in the very near future.

We'll have a recess for about four or five minutes while we change over to the next presentation.

The committee recessed from 2:23 p.m. to 2:27 p.m.

[R. Hawes in the chair.]

R. Hawes (Chair): We will resume and go back on the record. We're now going to have our presentation from the Merit Commissioner.

With that, I'm just going to throw it over to you, Joy. Go ahead.

Office of the Merit Commissioner

J. Illington: Thank you very much, Chair and Members, for hearing me today. I just want to check that everyone who is attending by telephone can hear me.

R. Hawes (Chair): Can you hear?

D. Hayer: Yes, we can.

R. Hawes (Chair): That's one. Diane and Bruce, are you there?

Well, apparently we have one that's listening and two that may have stepped out for a moment, but I'm sure that they'll be back.

J. Illington: All right. Well, then I will go ahead and make my statement, if I may.

I am making a request for $40,000 in additional funds for the coming fiscal year. It reflects an increase in the cost of shared services with the Ombudsman's office. Since my appointment in mid-2006 I have purchased payroll, human resources, financial and information technology support from the Ombudsman's office. This has been a way of keeping costs modest and of accessing the services of people who are in high demand and increasingly difficult to hire.

A rebalancing of the costs amongst the offices to reflect the current staffing levels in service provision results in a revised cost of $108,000, which reflects a more accurate value of these services.

The other options that I had were to hire the services myself or to purchase them from a ministry. When those costs have been compared, I've concluded that the revised allocation of the shared service costs is reasonable. It does appear to me that some of the costs of the first two years of this office — I was charged at the amount of $46,000 for both of the last two years — were, in effect, subsidized by the Ombudsman's office.

The other increase in my budget request reflects the shared accommodation costs of the previously approved shared building proposal. That doesn't show up until fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2012.

[1430]

The committee is requested to approve an operating budget for next year of $933,000, a capital budget of $15,000 and my current staffing of four FTEs; then in fiscal 2010 an operating budget of $1.052 million and a capital budget of $235,000; then for fiscal 2012 a similar operating budget of the same amount, but the capital budget will revert to $15,000 because any tenant improvements will have been made by that time.

I will just go through very quickly, if I may, the mandate, the three business areas, and then I'd like to flip directly to the actual budget details that are right at the end of this submission.

The mandate of the Merit Commissioner is to provide oversight and insight into the performance of merit-based hiring in the public service. This mandate supports our mission to serve the members of the Legislative Assembly and, through them, the public by giving credible and relevant information about the degree to which government is fulfilling its duty to hire and promote employees based on the principle of merit. Government's capacity to deliver public services to
[ Page 2275 ]
British Columbians does depend on its ability to attract and keep well-qualified and engaged employees.

To carry out that mandate we focus on three business lines. We do audits. We do independent staffing reviews, and we do education about the requirement of merit-based staffing, including making the connections between merit-based staffing and employee engagement.

The products of our work are audit reports, focus group studies, review decisions, educational materials. These outputs all support the long-term goal, which is to build employee confidence in the public service and form a strong consensus throughout British Columbia that staffing in the public service is based on the merit principle and fair processes. This office advances toward that goal through producing timely and credible reports about merit-based staffing that government will act upon to produce changes in merit-based staffing performance.

Here, I'd like to say that as a result of my 2007 audit, where I made five recommendations for improvement, government has been responsive in terms of meeting those recommendations. Immediately and on a very constructive basis, I have had government reply to four of those five recommendations to say when they will be implemented. On the fifth one, we're going to go through some constructive discussion about the timing. So I am very pleased to say that my mandate appears to be realized.

This submission that I'm making today highlights the progress that the office has made on commitments for which we've been funded and reports on our performance measures. It outlines the service plan for next year, including very importantly a change of approach in auditing in response to a concern — a criticism of my own office that I have — about timely reporting. With the budget that I've requested, I can continue to implement the priorities that I've outlined as necessary for this office to provide insight as well as independent oversight of merit-based staffing in the B.C. public service.

Now, if I may, could I turn to the very last page in my submission, which is called "Budget Details"? It's appendix C.

The first thing I'd say is that the submission does identify $33,000 in reductions in projected expenditures for 2009-10. As I go through the STOBs, I would just like to make some comments.

[1435]

For STOBs 50 to 52, the $56,000 change that is noted in column 3 is entirely that of the 2.5 percent lift that all public service employees will get, and that's for the four employees that I have. Then the rest of it is reflected in the shared services cost. So that's entirely what that is.

In STOB 54 there is a $12,000 change, which is marked. You'll see that it's in the officer of the Legislature salary. I have to emphasize emphatically that I'm not getting a salary increase, nor is my salary attached, as other officers are, to any judicial process. I am a part-time legislative officer, and I am paid on a part-time basis.

You'll recall that my appointment will come to an end during 2009. The office has slated the amount — $137,000 — as what it would be if the next commissioner worked every day instead of on a part-time basis at the same rate as I do. So that's the difference. I'm not intending to increase the number of days I work, etc. It's just the difference between the two.

Travel is frozen on STOB 57. We're not making any increase in that. Central management services are reduced, and they're reduced simply to come closer to what my actual rental costs plus data lines are.

STOB 60, "Professional services" — which are the auditors that I hire from time to time on contract; that is primarily what that STOB 60 is — is frozen. The information operating system is reduced. The reason that's reduced is…. You'll recall that several years ago you gave me some additional money so that I could implement a database and a tracking system so I could look year to year at what the changes are.

We've now gone through a full cycle of the new Oracle system that I had constructed and designed specifically for the purposes of the Merit Commissioner. We don't need to be spending more money on that. It's working now as it should be.

The office and business expenses are up slightly by $5,000. More than anything, that is to take into account increased courier costs that we incurred last year when, as we were doing a very large audit and moving files all over the province…. These are files with people's personal information. Their testing results and assessment and their personal reference checks are included in that, so we don't put them in the ordinary mail. We do send them by courier.

The STOB 7, "Information advertising, publications," is reduced. The STOB 68 is frozen, as are all the rest of the STOBs right down into the capital budget.

So that's my explanation for my submission for 2009-10. I do want to just touch on a few things, if I may. I'm not going to read through the rest of my submission. I'm going to assume that members have had an opportunity to read through the parts of my submission that talk about what our results have been from our 2007 audit.

What I would like to say is that we've spent almost all of the first ten months of 2008 working on the 2007 audit. That's the way that it works — calendar years — because you wait till you've got all the statistics as to what the new appointments were and then select what your audit method is going to be, and you do the selection cull in the files and begin to audit. That's exactly what we did in 2006 and 2007.

[1440]

My frustration is that even though I'm extremely proud of the 2007 audit — because we mined it very
[ Page 2276 ]
deeply, and we got a lot of useful information, not just for the Merit Commissioner's office but back to the Public Service Agency as well — I do think that it has one failure, and that failure, from my point of view, is to be timely. You want those audit reports to be timely (1) for managers to learn; (2) for managers to correct, so that if they've continued to hire during the year, they correct themselves; and (3) so that deputy ministers can hold their hiring managers accountable. I don't feel that our audit reports are timely enough.

We suffered two delays during 2007. One delay was because many of the files were missing documents as they came to us, and auditors had to spend a lot of time trying to get those additional documents; and secondly, because the hiring managers who had made the decisions weren't available anymore. They had moved on — not out of the public service necessarily but to other positions.

What I'd like to do as my changed approach is I'd like to audit much more contiguously to the time of the appointment. We've been talking with B.C. Stats about this. It is possible to do, so that when someone is hired in 2009 we can, on a random basis, get a signal from the payroll office, which is where the appointment is registered. Within two weeks of that automated signal, we can ask for the hiring file.

That should eliminate those two points of delay that we really experienced, and it should get to what my goal is, which is to make sure that deputies are getting very current information back for the appointments that we've audited and that managers are learning from the audit reports that we send out.

R. Hawes (Chair): Before I take a question…. Lanny, maybe you could just clarify. On page 13, "Total Capital," in the second line, I'm assuming that should be $15,000, not $25,000.

L. Hubbard: Yes. It should be $15,000 at the bottom there, where it says "Total."

J. Yap: Thank you, Joy, for your presentation.

Speaking of typos or arithmetic challenges, if you look at page 9, "Budget request summary" — that table — I'm either missing something here, or we may have an addition problem. If you look under 2009-10 estimates, you have $893,000, and I assume you add the $108,000 — the shared services cost. That does not add up to $933,000.

L. Hubbard: No, I was noticing that myself.

J. Yap: It should add up to $1.001 million — right?

L. Hubbard: No, the total is correct. The core operating expenses should be $825,000 and then the shared service is $108,000 for a total of $933,000.

J. Yap: Okay. So $893,000 should be $825,000? Is that right?

L. Hubbard: Yes. And that carries…. Then those totals agree with the….

J. Yap: The request of $933,000.

L. Hubbard: With the last, the detailed page — yes.

J. Yap: All right. Well that clears that up.

On the….

L. Hubbard: Clearly, I'm juggling too many budgets.

J. Yap: But you spotted this one.

L. Hubbard: I did. I was sitting here, and I was saying: "That doesn't add up right."

R. Hawes (Chair): Juggling isn't quite the word I would have used there.

L. Hubbard: Anyway, my apologies.

J. Yap: You were finessing through so many projects.

The question, Joy: what is the required level of audits? How much latitude do you have in deciding what your percentage of sampling should be? Or how does the statutory requirement influence that? If you can comment on that, please.

J. Illington: Yes, I will. There is no statutory requirement, and it is a target that I set myself when I came into the position in 2006. Because the previous audits had been very, very small — and you can see some of them on page 6 at table 1…. You can see the number of audits: in 2003, 40; 2004, 39; and 2005, 70. So those were all very small.

[1445]

The reason that I increased it to 8 percent in 2006 and then to 10 percent of new appointments in 2007 is so that I could, with full confidence, generalize from the audit sample to the population overall. That's what's most useful, and this year we've actually exceeded our target. We were trying to get it to a 90 percent confidence interval, and we hit 95 percent confidence.

J. Yap: Meaning the higher your sample, the higher your confidence.

J. Illington: Yes, exactly, and with more precision can we extrapolate our results back to the general population.

R. Hawes (Chair): Any other questions? Pretty straightforward.
[ Page 2277 ]

If I could ask Lanny. So the $40,000 — that is totally the chargeback of the shared occupancy expenses?

L. Hubbard: The shared services.

R. Hawes (Chair): So somewhere in the Ombudsman's budget there should be a corresponding $40,000 reduction.

L. Hubbard: It was in the recovery we spoke of this morning, in the internal…. The $40,000 is part of that number.

R. Hawes (Chair): All combined, all of the officers that are sharing space, putting theirs…. I think it worked out to $303,000 or something as the total chargeback amount.

L. Hubbard: The increase was that.

R. Hawes (Chair): The increase to the three officers and the corresponding recovery.

L. Hubbard: That's right.

R. Hawes (Chair): Good. I just want to make sure that I have that completely understood.

R. Lee: When I read the report, it says…. Of course, it has been celebrated already — the 100th anniversary of merit-based hiring. Someone reading this, maybe.… How do we know that, say, 50 or 100 years ago there was merit-based hiring? That's my question when I'm reading the report.

R. Hawes (Chair): How do you know it was based on merit, you mean?

R. Lee: I say based on merit. Also, I know that a lot of minorities are not qualified even to apply for public service.

R. Hawes (Chair): That's what the audits are for, I think — aren't they?

J. Illington: It's to determine whether or not the appointments are hiring based on the application of the merit principle, which really means that people are assessed so that you know that they're qualified for the position and also that the process was a fair process.

R. Lee: But before we had a Merit Commissioner, how did we guarantee hiring on merit?

J. Illington: I think that it was left up to individual deputy ministers to supervise their managers, and prior to the Merit Commissioner there was a statutory tribunal that heard appeals if employees did not think that they were merit-based.

R. Hawes (Chair): I could be wrong, Richard, but I believe a former Premier — several before, not of the NDP era or certainly our era but I think a former Premier — once said: "I hire people that I trust, and that would be people that shared my same beliefs and same party." So maybe that answers what used to happen.

J. Horgan: I was just going to comment on the appeal process that did exist prior to the Merit Commissioner coming into place.

I'm wondering, though, since I have the opportunity…. When you were saying your concern about the office was timeliness to inform and educate human resource staff, I didn't hear you give a solution. That could have been just because I missed it, but could you perhaps give us your solution for more timely responses back to the ministries?

J. Illington: Yes. That is if, instead of waiting till the end of the year to determine what the audit population is of new appointments, we start moving the audits so that they happen literally within weeks of the person being appointed so that we're doing a continuous audit throughout the year instead of doing an audit one year behind.

R. Lee: In the category it's a very small percentage. "Merit not applied" means about 2 percent. What happened to the employees at that point? Do they have some kind of a special process?

[1450]

J. Illington: No, and I hasten to say this, both in my annual report and here. That is, we found that no person was hired who was unqualified for a position, but sometimes the hiring process itself was not a fair process, and we did not find that a merit-based process.

I'll give you two examples, if I can. One was that in an effort to comply with government's initiative to reduce auxiliary staff in ongoing positions — auxiliaries are meant to be working in part-time positions — a competition was run and restricted to auxiliary staff. There were a number of vacancies in a number of different areas. However, the restrictions on who could apply were so severe that in fact the only people who could apply were the current incumbents of the job. That really meant it wasn't a competition. We are discouraging people from running competitions that in fact are not competitive.

R. Hawes (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, and congratulations on being so thoughtful with respect to the current economic conditions that
[ Page 2278 ]
we find across the world. Certainly, it doesn't escape our notice that you're not really asking for any more money.

With that, committee members, that would conclude the regular part of the meeting today. I don't think we're going to go into any deliberations. We have more officers to hear from on Wednesday, so we will adjourn this meeting.

We have a motion to adjourn, and we'll reconvene on Wednesday.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 2:52 p.m.

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