2009 Legislative Session: First Session, 39th Parliament


SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND
GOVERNMENT SERVICES


MINUTES AND HANSARD

MINUTES SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Wednesday, November 25, 2009


9:00 a.m.


Douglas Fir Committee Room


Parliament Buildings, Victoria, B.C.


Present: John Les, MLA (Chair); Doug Donaldson, MLA (Deputy Chair); Norm Letnick, MLA; Don McRae, MLA; Bruce Ralston, MLA; John Rustad, MLA; Jane Thornthwaite, MLA; John van Dongen, MLA


Unavoidably Absent: Michelle Mungall, MLA; Bill Routley, MLA


Others Present: Josie Schofield, Manager, Committee Research Services


1. Pursuant to its terms of reference, the Committee continued its review of the three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budget estimates of the Independent Officers of the Legislative Assembly.


Conflict of Interest Commissioner

• Paul Fraser, Commissioner

• Daphne Thompson, Executive Coordinator

Information and Privacy Commissioner

• David Loukidelis, Information and Privacy Commissioner

• Mary Carlson, A/Deputy Registrar, Lobbyist Registry

• Catherine Tully, A/Executive Director

• Shelley Forrester, Director of Shared Services

• Lanny Hubbard, Director of Corporate Services

Elections BC

• Harry Neufeld, Chief Electoral Officer

• Linda Johnson, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer

• Nola Western, Executive Director, Electoral Finance & Corporate Administration

• Anton Boegman, Executive Director, Corporate Planning & Event Management

2. The Committee adjourned at 12:13 p.m. to the call of the Chair


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


Wednesday, November 25, 2009


Issue No. 16

ISSN 1499-4178

[ Page 409 ]

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2009


The committee met at 9:02 a.m.

[J. Les in the chair.]


J. Les (Chair): This morning we will be dealing with the budget of the Conflict-of-Interest Commissioner. The commissioner is here.


I'd invite you, Paul, to take it from here and tell us what you'd like to do.


Office of the
Conflict-of-Interest Commissioner


P. Fraser: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think, probably, at this time of the calendar year and in the course of your responsibilities, you're wondering, as a group, whether you're closer to the end or just further from the beginning. But I hope that I can make the end at least informative for you.


You should have two things. One is a budget proposal for the 2010-11 period, extending to '12-13. Then there was a handout this morning of some background information. The reality is that most of the members around this table know as much about the operation of my office as I do. But I thought it might be helpful and, perhaps, a bit convenient to put in quick form some aspects of our operation.


What I had proposed to do, Mr. Chair, having told Mr. James that I thought I could do this in half an hour, would be to use about 20 minutes, not more, for my presentation and reserve the rest of the time — at your discretion, of course — for any questions.


The background information contains the mandate with respect to the office. You will have seen this before because it's the mandate that migrated from the office into the Members' Handbook, which all of you have read, and read again, I'm sure.


The vision of the office is new, I think I can say. It's to advance towards a paperless office — as Orwellian as that may sound — capable of recording, indexing, storing and retrieving the information that was mandated by our statute to collect and report, while at the same time providing advice and service to MLAs.


The office really has two functions, broadly. One is service in the public interest. The other is service to the members themselves. Those two things are equally important. They are the things that, day to day, occupy us.


The structure of the office is contained on page 2. We have two locations: one in the red-brick building on Menzies Street, the other in Surrey.


[0905]

We have in this current fiscal year been involved in a personnel reorganization of the main office, so as to enhance our ability to do research; to better communicate, both with the public and with the members; and also, to provide some supplemental, clerical and document support.


With me this morning is Daphne Thompson, who is the executive coordinator of the office. Daphne has been with the office since 1994 and is, incarnate, the institutional memory of the place. She is essentially the horsepower behind the office. My time is 75 percent devoted to the work that I do, but on a day-to-day basis, Daphne is the person that many of you will have met already. She does, I'm bound to say, a wonderful job, and I'm very grateful to her.


We also have, as you can see in the chart, a research professional, which is a new development. What we have is a young lawyer who works part-time on a contract and provides me with the kind of in-depth research assistance that I need in order to do a couple of things. One is to process the work that comes before us from time to time, either in the form of complaints or requests for opinions, and also to help Daphne to interact with a group which has been set up across the country — of which British Columbia is really one of the senior partners — of other conflict-of-interest commissioners, such that we have now, increasingly, the ability across the country to communicate and understand what's going on in various places, given that, as you might expect, some of the problems are close to similar.


We have — and you'll see references in the budget proposal — an active involvement in the CCOIN, as it's called, conference or network, simply because of course British Columbia and Ontario were the first jurisdictions in this country to establish a conflict-of-interest regime.


At the moment Daphne has no clerical support. The expectation, as I have indicated, is that we will, as of January of 2010, have brought on board a clerical and administrative assistant to support Daphne in what she does and to be available should Daphne ever think that she's entitled somehow to a holiday.


Clearly, we're a small office. We're the minnow in the committee's net, if I may put it that way, but we're very happy to be here.


The update on our existing budget is something that no doubt will be of interest to you. As I indicate on page 3 of this background document, I'm pleased to be able to tell you that the most recent advice that we have from the Ministry of Finance is that we're currently on budget, and we're forecast to finish the fiscal year within our allocation.


I do have to say with a caveat, which is always present of course, that that assumes that we do not, before the end of this fiscal year, suddenly get faced with an event which would cause us to have to become involved in an inquiry or some very expensive endeavour. Things look good in terms of how we're likely to finish this current fiscal year.

[ Page 410 ]

Moving quickly to the budget proposal itself, it's in a form which, on the recommendation of your predecessors last year, is more or less standardized with what I think you've been receiving from other, much larger offices. I hope it's in a form that's been easy for you to follow.


On page 1 you'll see portrayed there the budget that existed in 2008-09, then the actual during that fiscal period, and on the same page, on the right-hand side, the 2009-10 current budget.


[0910]

I point out, in respect of the 2008-09 situation, that we were fortunately, at the end of the last fiscal year, able to turn back — or perhaps more properly, not draw down on — a contingency vote that the committee granted to us. So the sum of $6,022 was not drawn down.


It is significant, I guess, in this sense. In the 2008-2009 fiscal period we took the initiative to establish an office in Surrey. We did that as a convenience to members, given the number of members that there are in the Lower Mainland, but we also did it in an attempt to cut down on travel costs that are involved in my commuting, by agreement with the committee that appointed me, from where I live, in Surrey, to Victoria.


It was unclear to some as to whether or not that move was likely to pay any kind of financial dividends in the bottom line. The result was that by the end of the year, as you'll note, the travel budget — the first item in the third group of entries there — was at $25,000, and we finished the year spending $19,323. That difference of about $5,500 is, frankly, most of the $6,000 that we were able to turn back to the treasury.


The result, I guess, is that the proof was in the pudding. We did save travel expense as a result of opening the Surrey office, and I think, in the end, it has added a dimension to our office's operations that was much needed.


For those of you who are used to looking at the much larger budgets that have come before you as proposals, I should say that we don't have a capital budget per se. The office has never had a capital budget, given its size and given the amount of money that's available. We have always, apparently, simply submitted an operating budget. There are within the budget proposal numbers, however, some capital items, which I'll allude to in a moment.


I think, looking at the numbers on page 2, what we have done now is to break out the budget request for this year into the various standard objects, STOBs, which, as you probably all know, identify particular areas of expense. You'll see that we have been operating on a budget in this current year of $440,000. We're asking for a lift of $47,600, or an increase of 10 percent, so that the proposed budget for '10-11 would be $487,600.


In terms of percentages, I ask you to keep in mind that what we are proposing in terms of expenditures for next year takes into account that our workload has increased by approximately 7½ percent simply as a result of the additional six seats in the Legislative Assembly. Of course, there are economies of scale. To say that the 7½ percent is a pure number would, I think, probably be a bit misleading, but you get the point. Essentially, what we've had to do within this fiscal year and certainly beyond is to cope with a much larger group of people who require our services.


I wanted to point out a couple of things. One, in terms of the first note under "Travel." For all of the time that the conflict-of-interest network has existed, only the commissioner from this province has attended. With respect to at least the larger provinces in this country, members of staff are invariably there, and it's a good opportunity for them as well as the commissioners to get together, compare notes and make arrangements for the future.


[0915]

The travel request for next year would include Daphne attending at the meeting in Toronto, which is planned for next August. She can meet for the first time people that she deals with on the telephone on a fairly regular basis. Equally important, though, is that it's been 11 years since we've had the meeting of the conference in British Columbia. It's not been since 1998.


In those circumstances, we have invited our colleagues to come to Victoria in 2011. There is some planning and preparation that needs to be made, and Daphne's attendance at the Toronto meeting is going to be important in that respect.


As you'll see from note 2, there's been a variety of changes from STOB to STOB that have been mandated by direction of the Treasury Board. There's been a reallocation of numbers in some areas. It makes it a little bit difficult to talk apples and apples and oranges and oranges, but I'm sure that's an experience that you're having elsewhere.


The largest couple of points that I wanted to speak to, by way of explanation, are that under the "Professional services" column, you'll see that there's a big jump from 8,000 to 38,400. Formerly, that column was devoted to the amount of money that we notionally had to pay from time to time to get outside counsel to assist us where necessary.


We now have the arrangement I described earlier, where we have someone who is part-time but is with us all the time, performing a professional service in terms of the research that gets done. That cost comes out to about $38,400 annually and has been a huge boost to our ability to quickly — and frankly, economically — respond to requests that we have from time to time.


Under the tab, or at least STOB 63, you will see that there's something called "Information systems operating." This is an item that is filled with some capital expense, and it really is at the heart of the increased budget request that we make. I'll come to that in a moment when we are
[ Page 411 ]
about to turn the page. It involves a new electronic filing system, a new records management system and a new copier lease. We're daring to be great and even leasing a colour copier for the first time in the office.


The other notes, I think, are self-explanatory. But I think it's important, if you look quickly at the pie chart on page 3, to see at a glance…. It's a bit embarrassing for me to see the "Officer salary." It's like my colleagues having to share a tea table with an elephant, I suppose.


But we've got 74 percent of our budget being paid to people. Thirteen percent is building occupancy and other office expenses; 13 percent is travel. So the only discretionary aspect, if you like, of the budget request is the travel, and that's 13 percent. The rest of the expenses are fixed in a non-discretionary sense and must be paid.


On page 4, what we've attempted to do here is to break out from the entries that you've seen on page 3 — what is on the right-hand column — the "New money request," in terms of: how do we justify the increase of $47,600 that we've asked for?


You'll see that the reasons for that are particularized. The net cost — this is note 3 of the "Personnel reorganization" — we had a 0.6 FTE person in the office who is no longer employed, so we started the year with a 1.6 staff component. At the moment we're in a one FTE component. The 0.6 is to emerge early in January, and we've added the research component. The net cost of all of that as an increase year over year is estimated to be $14,800.


[0920]

The two notes, No. 1 and No. 6, are the important aspects of creating for us a new database for electronic filing. Principally, in the first instance, for taking the completed confidential disclosure forms that we receive from the MLAs and having a system where MLAs can respond by e-mail, if they choose to do so, to the disclosure forms, which for the first time this year, for example, they received over the Internet, by e-mail.


Then, when we have the information in hand, we want to be able to do something with it in the office that speaks generally to the problem that we have, given that we are essentially a full-paper office. Over the years there has not been any contribution, typically, to infrastructure, so the information that we have — the information that we're mandated to demand of you and do receive — sits there.


It sits there in paper form, which is expensive to store — not difficult to store, because you just pile it on. But on a retrieval basis we simply don't have the capacity. What's happening, year over year, is that the information keeps piling up, and we have no ability to be able to organize it, index it and file it.


We've started on that process, and we've done, I think, a good job so far this year. What we're talking about now is the next step in terms of having the information put into a form electronically and digitally that we can access. 


How do you monetize progress? I suppose, in its very simplest terms — and, quite frankly, we've looked at this very carefully — in its least expensive terms, what you've got is the proposal that's before you.


Those of you who make reservations over the Internet from time to time will know that there are some ways of buying airline tickets and hotels and so on that have a series of prompts to people, telling them, "You've left out the answers to these questions or that question," and telling you that you can press to send. And then if you've made a mistake, you're prompted, etc.


My naive assumption that that sort of technology had been around long enough that it was likely to be affordable proved to be entirely wrong. To do that sort of thing would put us in the arena of $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 just for that software.


What we've got is a modified proposal. It won't allow you to do those things, but you'll be able, if you get the information over the e-mail, to pause and continue to fill it in tomorrow, rather than having to do it all today, and not losing it. We think it represents a realistic, in these times, assessment of what we have to do to reorganize the office.


I don't want to make any submission that, essentially, says to the committee: "In order for us to do our job, you must do these things." I simply want to share with you what the cost has accumulated to be of not doing these sorts of things.


The only way, in terms of a business case, that I can think of to make sure that we keep our staff numbers under control is to allow the people who are working for us now and into the future to be able to do their job better and to manage this information flow.


Information is, we all know, the currency of democracy. It's certainly the currency of our office. It's what we are required to accumulate. We can't simply go on, year over year, accumulating information and not coping with it.


Mr. Chair, that's my submission. I'm happy to answer any questions that members may have.


J. Les (Chair): Thank you very much, Paul. I have a couple of questions so far.


[0925]

J. Thornthwaite: Thank you very much for your presentation. Just a question about the travel. You had mentioned that it appears on — whatever they call it — No. 57 here that your expenses for having the Surrey office…. The travel expenses are less, because you live over there and have to travel over here. I'm just wondering whether or not that travel has included the cost of actually maintaining two offices.


P. Fraser: The maintenance of the office is in another STOB, as they call it. It represents a $1,200-a-month
[ Page 412 ]
payment for a staff-less office. It's simply a room that's connected to our office over here. The travel expenses simply track the cost, in part, of my travel back and forth.


Last year we had estimated that that cost would be $25,000. We were able at the end of the year to reduce that to $19,000. In short, I didn't have to come over here as often because I could do more of my work on the Lower Mainland.


The concern was that we would, by establishing the office, simply have doubled up on our costs somehow. The reality is that there was in fact a saving, and the proof is in the pudding in terms of the diminution of the travel expense.


J. Thornthwaite: What you're saying, then, is that the office over in Surrey is virtually just an empty office if you're not in it.


P. Fraser: Yes, that's right. There's nothing we can do about that, in terms of trying to recoup its use, simply because of the confidentiality aspects of it.


J. Thornthwaite: How much does it cost for that office to sit there? That's what I'm getting at.


P. Fraser: Well, the monthly expense is $1,200. The annual expense is $14,400. I'm probably in Victoria, on average, eight to nine working days a month, depending on whether the House is in session and so on. The rest of the time I'm sitting in that office in Surrey.


J. Thornthwaite: Okay.


N. Letnick: Mr. Fraser, thank you very much for your presentation and your hard work. As you know, we are facing revenue shortfalls in government. I see, from the last year at $420,000 in your budget to the plan for next year, an increase of $67,000, which is approximately 15 percent. In the big scheme of things, in the billions of dollars we deal with, I would guess it's not a major impact. However, if we don’t look at each item one by one, then we can lose control over our overall budgets for taxpayers.


In light of that and with all due respect, I have to ask you: if I voted against your proposed increases, what would that mean to the delivery of your services?


P. Fraser: Well, it would mean that we would continue to effectively export our real problem into the future. It would mean that we would not be as timely in the delivery of the services as we would like to be, in responding to requests that are sometimes urgent. I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but you can imagine a situation where people are asking for opinions that are important to them, in terms of what they may or may not do, or should or should not do.


Given that our key function, as I see it, is that prevention is more important than cure, you can imagine the scenario which occurs now, where people phone or write, and — if it’s not something that we have dealt with before or know that we've dealt with before — it's a matter of having to go back through all of this paper, un-indexed, to see whether there's anything there. It's not on the basis that we have a stare decisis principle going on, such that past precedents bind us. But at least we want to be consistent, even if that means we're consistently wrong. I think that people who've asked for opinions are entitled to know what the office's position has been in the past.


[0930]

At the moment, we're not helpless, because the person sitting on my left has an incredible memory and can help us. But she then has to go back through literally thousands and thousands of pages. That's what we're hoping to stop.


If we do, by scanning documents, then indexing them and storing them appropriately for retrieval, I think it's self-evident that our service is going to get quicker — time is usually of the essence — and we're going to be, frankly, in a more secure situation. We feel strongly that we should be able to assure people of two things: first, that the information we've got will remain confidential, and secondly, that it will remain secure and in a manageable form to retrieve.


N. Letnick: One supplementary on that. You brought up an issue during the answer which tweaks my curiosity. Is it appropriate, given that you are an independent officer, for you to keep track of and then supply to the Finance Committee on an annual basis some benchmarks as to how many different inquiries you do get, and what the average response times are for those inquiries, so that we can judge over decades whether or not we are improving our services and also whether or not there's actually more call for services?


P. Fraser: You make a good point. It's information that's never been either requested or provided. It's information that should be available. The place for that, I guess, is in annual reports and things like that.


Some of the jurisdictions, I notice, spend a lot of time — this is a bit tangential, but not unimportant — talking about what opinions they were asked for. To me, that's a fundamental breach of the confidence that surrounds them.


But I take your point. I think that kind of data could easily be reported on an annual basis and should be, particularly in circumstances where…. If we're going to say that the reason for doing all of this is temporal, then I think we have to be prepared, obviously, to agree to show that that's working.


D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): I had a general question and a specific one about the budget. The general
[ Page 413 ]
one was actually following along the lines of what Norm was getting at. I was curious as to, if people are asking me as a member of the Finance Committee, "Well, what the heck does the Conflict-of-Interest Commissioner do in regards to the budget…?" To help me answer that, can you give me an idea of how many conflicts of interest you've investigated this year, so that I get an idea of some numbers? Is that at all possible to quantify?


P. Fraser: Sure. I think I can tell you that we have a monthly average of requests from members for oral opinions that typically is about half a dozen. We have, on average, a monthly request for written opinions that would be only slightly less than that. The vast majority of the work we do and have done remains confidential to the members, and only at their discretion becomes public.


In terms of the other, larger-profile work that involves receiving complaints — either complaints from one member against another member or complaints from members of the public against a member — we have had, in the past 20 months, three of those. They have all matured into written opinions which have been delivered and are put up on our website — something else that we have succeeded in getting done this year — where everything from the beginning of the time of the office that we have decided in that public way, based on formal complaints, is now up on the website.


[0935]

Some of those complaints were complaints that we could deal with fairly quickly. By fairly quickly, I mean typically a matter of weeks. Others required a great deal of, if you like, research or inquiry in the small-i sense. Some of them took a matter of months to conclude.


The procedures that the commissioner has adopted have, by the decision of the Court of Appeal in British Columbia, been said to be a procedure that the commissioner can decide without, for example, having to open up interviews that he may conduct or put on the public record the efforts that he's making to obtain information.


The court in 1997, in a case called Tafler, concluded that the Legislature had delegated completely to our office all of its discretion in respect of the matters that we have to deal with. Therefore, how we go about investigating or inquiring is really for us to decide. Those decisions are not essentially reviewable.


D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): I appreciate the answer, and I know that we've had conversations, so I was curious as to how many of those kinds of conversations take place in a year. Thanks for your answer on that.


One other quick one: was the 0.6 FTE for clerical assistant that is to be implemented in January 2010, which I assume is going to be three months under this budget…? Where is that reflected? Would that be reflected on STOB 50 or STOB 54?


P. Fraser: It's 50. You can see, following that top line, that the amount of that top line has gone down year over year. The reason for that is the person who was dealing with research was formerly on staff, and her salary would appear in "employees." Now we've got professional services further down the list, so the top line has been reduced as a result of that.


D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Okay.


D. McRae: Well, the nice thing about being fourth is that you have your questions stolen before they get to you.


The only question, for clarity I guess, that I still have is…. From what you were saying in terms of number of complaints or issues that are raised in your office, most of the issues you deal with are MLA-driven — people asking you questions. However, the public questions seem to take up by far the most amount of time. Is that fair to say in terms of percentages of labour?


P. Fraser: No. We receive inquiries on a day-to-day basis from members of the public who typically are people troubled by some event. When they see the code word "conflict," they think that's maybe where they should be going.


We hear from them, and the office's position in respect of those people is not to say, "We have no jurisdiction. Sorry, you'll have to go somewhere else," but to attempt to help them as best we can in terms of trying to figure out who does have jurisdiction and where they might go and passing that information on.


We get an average of — what would you say, Daphne? — four or five such calls a month from people wondering if they can report their municipal politicians or if they can do this, that or the other thing.


D. Thompson: It's probably more than that.


P. Fraser: More than that. Okay. Daphne, how many is it?


D. Thompson: I'd say maybe a dozen.


P. Fraser: Daphne says it's about a dozen. Essentially, that's our point of contact with members of the public.


[0940]

Where members of the public can, in a formal way, engage us is if they actually decide to complain. The formal complaining process isn't as big in numbers. In fact, we've only had one, I guess, since I've been the commissioner.


But one of the very key aspects of our act that isn't common across the country is that members of the public can file a complaint. Complaints are not just restricted to members of the House complaining against each other.
[ Page 414 ]
Fortunately, those complaints, which used to be very frequent, have diminished.


J. van Dongen: Thanks, Paul, for your presentation.


I have been asking this question…. I will say that I have had a previous bad experience within government with procurement of copiers and copier leases.


On page 4, item No. 5. Who is workplace technology services? How long is the lease? How was the procurement done on this copier? Was it part of the other electronic package, or was it a separate procurement process?


P. Fraser: Yes, I think I can say — Daphne can correct me — that is our best estimate of what the cost would be, John. We have not gone through the formal process. All we've done is face the reality that the lease on our current copier will be up in the next fiscal year and that we have to have a machine which we think will, as we've noted, comply with government security standards. Our best inquiries to this point have led us to believe that to do that is going to cost us about $4,000 — $2,800 of which is in the budget already as the cost of the existing lease. So there will be a lift of about 1,200 bucks.


J. van Dongen: Who is WTS?


P. Fraser: WTS is the acronym for workplace technology services. They are the government provider, as I understand it, who will deal with these machines in terms of providing them. I think I'm right in that.


J. van Dongen: Are they part of the Ministry of Citizens' Services?


P. Fraser: Yes.


B. Ralston: Just mindful of the time. The information management system that you talked about…. I gather, from the way in which you described it, that you would take a lot of the paper documents that you had and image them and file them electronically and then be able to have a database that became searchable and all that sort of stuff. Is that…?


P. Fraser: Yes.


B. Ralston: So that's what's intended here. To my way of thinking, although you do list it as "operating," it seems to me that this is really a capital expenditure. Or is the $38,000 a year really an ongoing cost to operate that kind of system? It seems a bit high, but I'm not necessarily very familiar with op costs.


P. Fraser: Good question. I am treating the notes 1 and 6 on page 4 as both being capital items. The maintenance cost of that equipment itself is not something that we have factored in, because the best information I've got is that those costs will not rise. What you're seeing there is simply the cost of the software that's necessary to make the system go, as opposed to a much more elaborate system such as I described, which would have ongoing maintenance costs and so on. These are capital expenses, as I see it.


B. Ralston: Just so I understand that. Then the $39,000, say, in the following year…. And it seems to step up slightly each year. Is that the cost of licensing the software? How is that an ongoing operating cost that then gets built into the budget? If it's simply a one-time thing where you buy the system, you set it up…. Obviously, there's a little bit more labour required to put all the documents into the system, but after that it would seem to me that it would be much more straightforward to just maintain it. Therefore, I'm surprised that the cost continues at the same level.


[0945]

P. Fraser: I agree with your point. I have to say that to some extent, we're uncertain about the next step. We're clear that the initial step is both urgent and necessary. Beyond that, it may be that the system will be sufficient for our needs.


Quite frankly, what's happened in the two succeeding years is that we've simply applied, notionally, a 2 percent increase across the board. But I take your point. As we had in all of them, in some cases, doing that makes sense. In this case, I take your point that it may not.


B. Ralston: I think it's an important point, just for the comfort of the members of the committee. If it's a one-shot deal, it's more in the nature of a capital cost, and you're not building $40,000 a year more into the budget of operating costs. I'm sure members might feel a little more comfortable with that, because that then sort of deals with your 10 percent issue. I'm sure that's something that, in the current fiscal environment, members will be properly concerned about.


The ongoing cost is a notional cost, and it may well be a one-shot deal. Is there any possibility that we'd be able to refine that in a more precise way before the committee deliberates on your request?


P. Fraser: I think that's a fair request, and I will certainly attempt to do that.


J. Les (Chair): Great. That would be appreciated if you would do that.


I have a question as well. On STOB 75 on page 2, building occupancy charges, they are budgeted in this current fiscal year at $8,000, and then they go to $35,000. Now, in the notes it talks about $20,000 — what I guess I would term as an internal reallocation. That alloca-
[ Page 415 ]
tion comes from somewhere else in government and is applied to this budget. Fair enough, but that doesn't explain the entire increase. I'm having some difficulty understanding that. Maybe you could help me.


P. Fraser: Yes, there's that $20,000. Then there's the WTS support services, which have also, by direction of the Treasury Board — amounting to $8,000 — been imported into that.


J. Les (Chair): Okay, I see that there. Well, that's been reallocated to STOB 63.


P. Fraser: Oh, I see. In STOB 59 originally was the $20,000 for the ARES expense, which has been reallocated to STOB 75, so that's $20,000 of it. The other $15,000 is the Surrey office.


J. Les (Chair): Oh, okay. All right.


Anybody else? Then it looks like we're done for now. If you would get that clarification that Bruce referred to, that would be very much appreciated. We'll look forward to receiving that. Thank you for coming this morning.


We'll take five to do the reshuffle before we hear from our next delegation.


[0950]

We're a few minutes before the appointed time for our next delegation, but with general consent I think we can get the show on the road. Our next presenters are from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner — Loukidelis and company.


David, it's over to you.


Office of the
Information and Privacy Commissioner


D. Loukidelis: Chair, members of the committee, before I begin my remarks I should introduce to you the colleagues who are with me today.


I have on my immediate left, to your right, Catherine Tully, who is the acting executive director in my office. On my further left and your further right is Mary Carlson, who is the executive director of my office but who has been acting in the last number of months effectively as deputy registrar of lobbyists, for reasons that will become apparent as I continue with my remarks.


On my right and your left, first we have Lanny Hubbard, director of corporate services with the Office of the Ombudsperson and very deeply involved, of course, in the design and delivery of shared services to my office and to other offices of the Legislature.


To your further left and my further right is Shelley Forrester, who's the director of shared services. She's also with the Office of the Ombudsperson and deeply involved in delivery of shared services to my office and the other offices that participate in this beneficial — I may say it right off the bat — arrangement.


You should have in front of you today copies of the budget submission for my office for the next fiscal year and, for planning purposes, the two fiscal years following that, along with a copy of our service plan — looking forward in terms of the priorities and goals that we have set for ourselves in the coming years.


[0955]

My objective today is, first of all, to give you some sense of what it is we do in the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner and the office of the registrar of lobbyists; to describe for you, in general terms, what our priorities are for the coming year in terms of our operations and the objectives we hope to achieve; and last to outline some of the key components of the budget request that you have before you today.


Beginning with the overview of what it is we do — who we are and what we do — I am, of course, an officer of the Legislature, appointed by and responsible to the Legislature for the work that my office does under three statutes now. First and foremost, and certainly the longest-standing area of activity of the office, is the work that we do under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.


As is recognized across Canada — indeed, increasingly across the world — freedom of information is an absolutely key component of fundamental importance to open and accountable government across all sectors. Certainly, here in British Columbia we have over 2,000 so-called public bodies that are subject to the freedom-of-information requirements of this legislation. They exist at all levels: all ministries of the provincial government, Crown corporations, local governments, school boards, universities, colleges, hospitals, health authorities and many other bodies at all levels of government here in British Columbia.


Freedom of information, of course, is key, and this has been recognized on numerous occasions by the Supreme Court of Canada, because it allows citizens to have access to government information which they need to fully understand what is going on in their name, what government is doing, why government is taking certain actions — basically, to have the information and the knowledge that information imparts to hold government agencies accountable.


Freedom of information is critically important to the health of our democracy, in fact, because of its key role in ensuring that through access to information, public agencies are kept accountable to the public that they serve. At the same time, the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act is important because it contains privacy protections for all citizens in British Columbia.


In an era of increasing reliance by government, by all public bodies on electronic information systems that
[ Page 416 ]
involve the collection, use and disclosure of increasingly large amounts of our personal information, often very sensitive information — for example, in the health sector — it is absolutely critical that the protection afforded by the privacy provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act be robust and meaningful in practice so that reasonable limits placed through that legislation on what government does with our information are actually respected.


Indeed, our role is, under both aspects of that legislation, to ensure that those rights and responsibilities are respected. As an independent agency charged with the oversight and administration of compliance with the legislation, we serve to investigate, mediate and adjudicate freedom-of-information and privacy complaints and appeals. We independently review, in depth, these matters that are brought to us by citizens or that come to our attention and are investigated at our own initiative to ensure that the freedom-of-information objectives of the legislation — again, openness and accountability — are respected and, as far as possible, made meaningful in reality; and, similarly, that the privacy protections afforded by the legislation are respected and made meaningful in reality.


We also serve to provide at arm's length independent and expert perspective on a variety of matters in both areas through, for example, commenting frequently and extensively on proposed legislation, policies and programs of public bodies and through educating and informing the public bodies and organizations about their freedom-of-information responsibilities and rights and their privacy responsibilities and rights.


The second key area of our activity is under the Personal Information Protection Act, which applies to literally hundreds of thousands of private sector organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit. This legislation places reasonable limits on the ability of private sector organizations to collect, use and disclose the personal information of customers, clients and other individuals.


Similarly, under this legislation, again as an independent arm's-length enforcement agency, we investigate, mediate and adjudicate privacy complaints and appeals, whether the complaints or appeals are brought to us by individuals or whether we initiate investigations on our own motion when we understand there to be reasonable grounds to undertake such investigations.


[1000]

We also, again, comment on proposed programs, legislation and policies and I think, quite importantly, play a very active role in educating and informing business organizations and other organizations on how they can best comply with the legislation in playing a very supportive role for both organizations and individual consumers.


The last area of activity, and one that will bear, I think, some discussion today in terms of the actual budget request in front of you, is the work that we do as the office of the registrar of lobbyists. Under the Lobbyists Registration Act, I am the registrar of lobbyists and have served in that role for some seven years now.


The Lobbyists Registration Act, consistent with the objectives of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, is about transparency and, ultimately, accountability. It is intended to and does serve to ensure that those who lobby government — and this is an entirely legitimate and indeed, I think, inevitable activity, if you will, in a democracy such as ours — are required to register, to put details in a public registry of what it is they're doing, who they're lobbying in government, why they're lobbying and what it is that they're lobbying about so that, again, the public can have access to that information through the public registry and understand better who is influencing government about what issues and to what objective.


Over the last number of years we have therefore served to register lobbyists, to maintain a publicly accessible on-line registry of lobbyists and information about their activities and to educate and inform the public, the lobbying community and elected and appointed officials about the requirements of the legislation and how to comply with it.


Now, as we'll see in a few moments, we are in fact soon going to be taking on new responsibilities under the amendments to the Lobbyists Registration Act which received third reading on November 17, just a week or so ago. I think it's fair to say at this point that the amendments to which we're going to be responding operationally will significantly increase our responsibilities under the legislation, in terms of investigations of complaints, adjudication of complaints and enforcement of the legislation.


Before I turn to the priorities for the coming year, I did want to comment now on the reality we face in terms of workload. As you'll note from appendix 1 of the service plan, we are, at this point of the fiscal year — we're seven months into the current fiscal year — projecting an increase of some 11 percent this year overall in terms of the demands on us in terms of complaints, appeals, requests for assistance — the other activities that make up the body of work that we do.


We are also faced with a persistent — I would like to avoid saying chronic — backlog of cases, some 200 cases, which we have managed to hold steady during this fiscal year. We were at a point towards the end of the last fiscal year and early this fiscal year where the backlog was being added to, but through a variety of strategies we are so far, at least, this fiscal year holding it steady at 200 cases.


That is basically the workload of two full-time portfolio officers or investigators, if you will. That is what we would need to be able to eliminate the backlog so that we can provide service to citizens under these pieces of
[ Page 417 ]
legislation in a timely way, as I believe they have every right to expect. But the reality is that we are facing what is perhaps becoming a chronic backlog, and at the end of the day it means we're delivering service to complainants, to appellants, to the public in not the rapid fashion that I think we should be able to do.


That said, we are not seeking any more funding for our core work this year. We will do our best to stay current and, if not substantially reduce that backlog, to do our best to achieve that even though we are not asking for funds for our activities under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act or the Personal Information Protection Act.


Now, our priorities for the coming fiscal year — the second part of my remarks today; these are outlined for you on page 10 of the service plan — fall into a variety of areas. First and foremost, as I've already foreshadowed, our work in implementing the amendments to the Lobbyists Registration Act, which have received third reading and will be coming into force on April 1, 2010, is a very significant component of what we will be doing in the coming year.


We will, in undertaking this work, of course be responding to very welcome legislative changes that were tabled by the government. We will be doing our best to ensure that we come up with an operational plan, an actual program of enforcement and compliance oversight that is efficient, effective and prudent.


[1005]

The second area that I wanted to mention goes more into our operational activities under the two pieces of legislation that I've already mentioned in terms of our case backlog. In the coming months and moving into the next fiscal year we will be performing our second annual review of the provincial government's response times when it comes to freedom-of-information requests. In February of this year we did our first report card on government compliance with its legislated responsibilities in responding to freedom-of-information requests, and we will be performing our second review and publishing our second report in the coming months and into early next fiscal year, because we are moving to a fiscal year basis.


As is also reflected in the service plan, we'll be looking at aspects of the e-health initiatives of the Ministry of Health Services, including but not limited to the electronic health record initiatives of the ministry from the perspective of compliance with the E-Health Act, which came into force fully in 2008, and most recently a couple of other amendments came into force in 2009.


We will also, in the coming months, be assisting the special committee of the House that has been struck under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to perform an all-party statutory review of that legislation. We'll be making recommendations to that committee with a view to assisting it with its work, in turn making recommendations that keep the legislation current with evolving technologies and demands respecting freedom of information and protection of privacy.


We will, as well, be revamping our existing website for the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner as well as creating a website for the office of the registrar of lobbyists. We will be providing training for public bodies and most likely focusing on local public bodies, as they're known, that might benefit from more training on their freedom-of-information and privacy-protection responsibilities.


In the private sector we will be continuing our support work for organizations and the public generally when it comes to the privacy provisions of the Personal Information Protection Act. Operationally we will also continue to do our best to ensure that we are efficient and effective in the services we deliver as an office under any of the pieces of legislation I've mentioned.


Now, turning to the third aspect of my remarks, I will just touch on some of the main aspects, if you will, of the budget request that you have before you. First and foremost, of course, as I've mentioned, is the request for funding for the Lobbyists Registration Act. We are seeking funding of $635,000 for the next fiscal year, fiscal year 2011, and projecting, for planning purposes, a likely decrease in each of the next two fiscal years after that to $615,000 per year. The bulk of this request is in order to staff for the first time on a full-time permanent basis the functions, if you will, of the office the registrar of lobbyists.


I am proposing to staff a full-time deputy registrar of lobbyists, effectively under my supervision but as my delegate, to direct and oversee all aspects of the lobbyist registration functions of the office; a single investigator and analyst, who will work on investigations in response to any complaints we receive under the new legislative amendments and also to assist with policy analysis and similar work; and third, a manager of the registry.


A new on-line registry will be coming on stream when the amendments come into force, and we do need someone to assist not only with management of the on-line registry but also the website and to provide other administrative support to those working in that area.


These changes, these staffed positions, are needed to implement the major changes that are found in the amendments that have just received first reading. Those amendments change the definition of lobbying. They change and indeed expand registration requirements in many respects. And I think, most significantly, that they introduce for the first time the ability on the part of the public to make complaints to my office and give the registrar the power to investigate and impose sanctions for breeches of the legislation.


These latter provisions in particular carry with them some fairly significant requirements in terms of the
[ Page 418 ]
operational planning that we do, the creation of policies and procedures to guide our investigations, so that we can be seen to and in fact operate in an administratively fair way that complies with the requirements of natural justice while at the same time ensuring that when we undertake investigations and impose sanctions, we do so in a way that is effective and gives meaning to the requirements of the legislation.


[1010]

We'll also be doing a considerable amount of outreach to stakeholders and public education, particularly in the early days. We are already working on this. During the remainder of this fiscal year we'll be doing a considerable amount of outreach stakeholder consultation. Work is already underway on policies and procedures and a communications plan, and we'll be moving ahead with that during the next fiscal year as well, of course.


The other aspect of the Lobbyists Registration Act budget request that you have in front of you deals with information technology. I've mentioned the on-line registry and the need to ensure that it's properly maintained and operates well moving into the next fiscal year. I should underscore here, as is mentioned in the material before you, that as we move into the second and third fiscal years outlined in the service plan and the budget, we do anticipate that the IT maintenance costs will decrease, because this is fairly typical with these kinds of systems.


We'll also have legal costs, of course, because as we design our policies and procedures, our investigation approaches, and so on, we have to be sure, again, that we do that in a way that complies with the requirements of natural justice and ensures that we can do our work without fear that we are not acting in accordance with what the law requires.


Now, I will say here that when it comes to the request for Lobbyists Registration Act funding, depending on the progress we make during the current fiscal year — again, with communications, stakeholder outreach, work on policies and procedures, and so on — it may be that the amount of money requested for the next fiscal year, for fiscal 20011, is not fully subscribed, if you will. It may also be, as we move in to the second and third years of the budget material you have in front of you — again, those are for planning purposes — that we'll find areas where we need less funding.


We may find areas where we need more funding, but I am hopeful that if anything else, we'll be able to come forward next year at this time with a proposal that, with the benefit of experience, allows us to be somewhat more precise, perhaps, in terms of where we need to go in the following fiscal year in terms of the amounts of money that we're seeking.


I can assure you that what I've tried to do, working with Mary Carlson and Catherine Tully, is prepare for you and submit to you a request that we fully believe is prudent and realistic and, in fact, cost-effective as we move forward with these substantial new obligations and responsibilities on our part.


The second highlight that I would like to touch on in relation to the budget request for this next fiscal year has to do with the costs of legal representation associated with judicial review proceedings brought against my office, primarily by government and other public bodies — very rarely by access-to-information requesters or others, although those occasions do arise. In this budget request I am seeking a dedicated fund of $400,000 restricted solely to the costs of retaining counsel and appearing to advance our position in the courts in relation to judicial review applications that are brought against the office.


In all of last fiscal year we had four new judicial review applications instituted, and so far in the first seven months of this fiscal year we have had six judicial review applications, so a 50 percent increase barely halfway through the fiscal year as compared to the entire fiscal year before. We cannot, of course, control how often these applications are brought against us.


The other aspect of this that grows out of the inability to predict when these applications will brought or how many will be brought is that it makes it next to impossible to accurately predict and control our expenditures throughout the year. The impact in the last fiscal year was that because of the need to ensure that we had sufficient reserves for possible litigation and, indeed, the costs of litigation that had already been brought against us, the upshot of it was — and this is outlined in the service plan — that in effect we had to hold off on staffing full-time positions that would be responsible, or dedicated, to operational work of the office. This of course presents challenges to us.


We are in effect trying to hedge our bets responsibly, as best we can, in terms of predicting future litigation, which is necessarily next to impossible to do, and the costs of litigation. It meant, of course, that we held off on staffing positions that we needed in order to do the work that we're mandated to do. I'll remind you here at this point of the 200-case backlog that we have already in the office and that we're barely holding steady on.


[1015]

So far in the first seven months of this year we have spent $246,000…. Sorry, I've got that backwards. It was $246,000 all of last year, and so far this fiscal year we have spent $280,000. We've already exceeded the entire total for last year by some $34,000. I can predict that those costs will obviously continue in this fiscal year, but because of the nature of litigation and scheduling and so on, I can assure you that the new judicial review applications will have an impact on the next fiscal year in terms of those costs. Getting trial dates, preparing for the actual hearing and so on — all of that work will, absolutely in a significant way, bleed into the next fiscal year.

[ Page 419 ]

You'll see from the material in front of you that we have only budgeted, in the ordinary course, $300,000 for all kinds of contract services, not just legal costs. We do, of course, need legal advice from time to time. It's not just related to litigation. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we are put in a very difficult position in terms of ensuring that we can dedicate full-time staff to the work that comes in the door, as opposed to holding back and trying to provide for litigation over which we have no control.


Again, the request there is for $400,000. As I've indicated in the material in front of you, it is something that we're requesting on the condition that it would be used solely to fund litigation costs of the kinds I've described and, of course, if there is any remainder of that fund left over at the end of the next fiscal year, it would be returned to the consolidated revenue fund.


The last budget item that I wanted to touch on has to do with the request for capital funding — a one-time request for next fiscal year only. This is an item that is related to the new shared premises that you'll have heard about already from the Office of the Merit Commissioner and, of course, correspondence that has gone back and forth between the four offices of the Legislature involved and this committee, which on October 28, 2009, approved the entry into the new shared premises lease by my office and the three other offices involved.


Of course, one aspect of that is the need for capital funding — again, on a one-time basis — to ensure that we can furnish and fully equip the office, with a view to moving in by the end of October 2010, which is in, of course, the next fiscal year.


In conclusion, we have worked mightily to prepare what we believe is a prudent and reasonable request overall. Certainly, that said, as I've already indicated, I fully recognize the fiscal climate in which we all find ourselves and that the responsibilities of this committee include having regard for that fiscal climate.


It is for this reason that I'm not seeking any increase in funding for our responsibilities under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act or the Personal Information Protection Act, notwithstanding the fact that we continue to struggle with providing service in a timely and effective way, as I've illustrated by reference to the 200-case backlog that we do have.


We are, in effect, seeking funding for our new responsibilities under the Lobbyists Registration Act in order to respond to, again, these welcome legislative initiatives in order to responsibly implement that law and give it meaning on the ground. The legal costs increase that I am seeking, again, is due to factors beyond our control and would be dedicated to satisfying those costs if and as they arise, with any surplus being returned, as I say, to the consolidated revenue fund at the end of the fiscal year.


Then last, we have the one-time request for capital costs in relation to the leasehold accommodation that has already been approved by the committee.


With that, I'd be happy to take any questions from members.


J. Les (Chair): Thank you. We have three so far.


J. Thornthwaite: A couple of questions. You said at the beginning that you've got a persistent backlog of cases, and then you used the term "rapid fashion to respond". What, in your opinion, is a rapid fashion or a rapid response or an adequate response time for these requests that you're getting?


D. Loukidelis: Well, they vary. We have service benchmarks that we have set for ourselves in terms of how quickly we respond, depending on the nature of the matter. Some of them are privacy complaints. Some are so-called requests for review, which are appeals brought by those who have sought information from government. Certainly, we try to respond in a timely and as rapid a fashion as we can. It's not next-day service, nor would I ever try to achieve that.


[1020]

On the freedom-of-information side, for example, it's often said that access delayed is access denied. We're well aware of that and do try and respond in as rapid a fashion as we can.


We do have some numbers that we can provide to you in terms of…. If you look at the service plan, measures 6, 7 and 8, on page 6, it gives you the figures in terms of the service targets that we have set for ourselves. A proportion of No. 6, FIPPA and PIPA review files — these are the access-to-information appeals that we're speaking of there.


You can see that our target is to respond to 52 percent of them within 90 business days, which works out at close enough to 120 calendar days, and then moving on to try and improve that, I think admittedly somewhat modestly but bearing in mind where we're at in terms of the demands for service. So from 52 percent to, in fiscal 2013, a target of 57 percent within 90 business days.


Similarly, complaint files, somewhat longer to resolve — this is performance measure 7 — a target for the next fiscal year of 62 percent within 120 business days and moving on up to 64 percent by 2013.


Then we've set standards for our adjudicators, who issue the binding decisions under both pieces of legislation in terms of their performance requirements in the next three fiscal years. We do struggle there with a backlog, as well, in terms of getting these formal decisions issued. We're trying to work on that very, very hard right now.


J. Thornthwaite: I'm just trying to get a feeling as to what response…. And then you had mentioned, with your judicial reviews, that they had gone up 50 percent. Why is that?

[ Page 420 ]

D. Loukidelis: Well, it would be, I think, rash of me to speculate why it is that we've seen already this year a 50 percent increase in the number of judicial review proceedings brought against us by public bodies. That's something only those who retain counsel on behalf of the government could tell you, really.


Certainly, we do our level best to ensure that the work we do is done not only in a timely fashion but in a high-quality fashion. It could be coincidence, but I don't know. There's no way for me to really say.


I should add, by the way, if I might, on your earlier question about performance standards and so on, that there is a legislated requirement under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that applies to freedom-of-information appeals. There's a 90-business-day time limit imposed on us there in terms of resolving those. That's something, by the way, that I have asked be deleted, but government has declined to do that in the past.


N. Letnick: Thanks for your presentation. I have three questions for you. One has to do with page 11 of your book, your service plan. You show, in appendix 1, caseload statistics. That's very informative, so thank you for doing that.


Under the "Other" category it shows fiscal '08-09 going up to 564 from…. It's over a hundred more units, so 20 percent from last year. What does "other" really encompass?


D. Loukidelis: I don't…. Catherine, can you best…?


C. Tully: This would be….


N. Letnick: You can get back to me, if you want.


C. Tully: Yeah. It's a whole mishmash of little things gathered together, so I'm sorry.


N. Letnick: Right, but something's really skewed the number up, so it'd be interesting to know what that is.


C. Tully: Skewed? It's roughly the same as last year — 564, 564 on the projection.


N. Letnick: Yeah, but from the year before.


C. Tully: Oh, from the year before. Okay, yeah.


N. Letnick: Okay. The other two questions are…. The $400,000 that you're putting aside for litigation. You had kind of answered Jane's question, but I still have this feeling that…. Are you aware of why these litigations are coming forward? Is there a particular reason that we can take back to somebody else and say: "Hold off on these things; it's costing us taxpayers $400,000 a year. What are you doing?"


D. Loukidelis: Well, I should be very clear. These are proceedings brought to challenge, because we're accountable through the courts, decisions — primarily freedom-of-information orders, where we've ordered disclosure of further information by a government agency.


[1025]

I should be very clear that public bodies have every right, if they believe they have the grounds to challenge one of these decisions, to seek recourse in the courts. We are, again, accountable through the courts, and if there is a conclusion reached by a public body that it has grounds to challenge that decision, then it can do so. It's on fairly narrow grounds. It's on natural justice grounds. It's on grounds of unreasonable interpretation, for example. It's not a full appeal or a review on the merits by the court.


As I say, in the last fiscal year we had four. That's about the average — three or four a year. And again, it would be rash of me to speculate what the reason is for these. It could just be a cluster, if you will, where there's a coincidence. I mean, candidly, that could be it. But it's not as if we've issued that many more orders or decisions this year. There have been a few more. We're trying to ramp up production, if you will, on that front. But I just don't know what the reason is.


N. Letnick: The last question I have is…. You've asked for $635,000 to implement the changes to the Lobbyists Registration Act. Is there anything in the legislation that prohibits or permits cost-neutrality in that? In other words, why can't we get the lobbyists to pay for us as taxpayers to provide them with the service?


D. Loukidelis: That's a fair question. It's one that's come up in past years in relation to our other work as well.


N. Letnick: I specifically didn't ask about the other work. I don't think it belongs there. I think people should have the right to access information without having to charge them. But in the case of lobbyists, they're actually trying to persuade government on all kinds of matters. We're asking them to register, just like we're asking people to register for their car licences. Why aren't we charging them a fee so that taxpayers don't have to subsidize their lobbying?


D. Loukidelis: I understood your question. I wasn't…. I'm just saying that in the past we have had those questions, and I've given the same answer. Certainly in this instance, government has, as I understand it, decided that there will be no registration fee, which is quite commonly the case across Canada. Mary Carlson could confirm or correct that, but my impression is that the trend under lobbyist registration has not been to make that policy choice. Here in British Columbia the government, as I understand it, is going to make that choice.

[ Page 421 ]

When we were — because there was a registration fee under the old system, if you will — charging those fees, I think that the annual income was something like $24,000 a year, based on the number of registrations. I think that one of the reasons — and again, this is to some degree speculation, so I probably shouldn't indulge, but I will — the fee is being eliminated, in view of that kind of number, is that there is a concern that it inhibits registration and that the transparency and openness that you're seeking through registration of lobbyists is somehow being dissuaded by that fee.


In terms of your earlier question, if I may, we do have an answer for you if, with your permission, we could go back to that.


C. Tully: Sorry about that. The other files are things like applications to disregard requests, media requests, our review of privacy impact assessments, site visits, reconsiderations, public interest notifications, FOI requests to us as a public body and something we call non-reviewable issue, which is people coming to us and we evaluate the issue and it's not something within our jurisdiction. Those are the sorts of things.


J. Les (Chair): I'm surprised to hear you have media requests.


J. van Dongen: I'd just like to follow up on the questions on judicial reviews. You're asking for a specific allocation of $400,000. Do you know, David, what the cost was for the four judicial review proceedings in 2009, the legal cost for that to yourselves?


D. Loukidelis: In fiscal 2009 the cost for judicial review proceedings alone was $246,000 for the entire fiscal year. That was 41 percent of the overall budget for contract services.


J. van Dongen: Okay, so previously there were some dollars allocated, but it was part of the contract services budget? Or is this the first time that you're asking for a specific allocation for legal fees?


D. Loukidelis: That's correct because, as you'll gather, it gives us the ability to better allocate our other resources to other contract services — salary dollars — to where they belong, which is salary expenditures and associated costs as well.


J. van Dongen: I presume that when a judicial review is filed, it's public?


D. Loukidelis: Yes. It's a proceeding in the Supreme Court of British Columbia.


[1030]

J. van Dongen: So could we get a list of the four for 2009 and the six that you've got so far this year? I don't need it today, but I'd like to get a list of the government agency or whoever is disputing the decision and what the grounds are.


D. Loukidelis: I have a list here for the current fiscal year, but I'll have to undertake to provide the list for last year through the Chair.


J. Les (Chair): I'll get that done.


D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): John pretty well had my request. I had a quick question. The request was the list, and perhaps a summary sentence of each of the cases or the nature of the appeal or review. I think that'll go a ways to helping answer some of the questions that some of the other members had on the reasons for the reviews.


My other question was on STOB 60. This is a specific question. The professional services…. When you remove the $400,000 that you're requesting for the specific allocation for legal fees, it's still a $91,000 increase, from $300,000 to $391,000 in professional services. Can you give me an idea of what the 30-odd percent increase…?


D. Loukidelis: Yes. The $91,000 increase that is left over if you subtract the $400,000 for judicial review litigation relates to the Lobbyists Registration Act functions. It's made up of $51,000 for the support and then maintenance of the new on-line registration system and other IT support requirements and $40,000 in contract services costs, primarily legal services for the design and creation of the policies and procedures and investigative plan, if you will, or framework for the office of the registrar of lobbyists.


B. Ralston: Just to clarify, because I think it's included in the line on page 2, the reference to legal services support, forms of contract services to implement the office of the registrar of lobbyists…. So the $635,000 is the total, all-in cost of implementing the legislation. Is that a fair summary?


D. Loukidelis: Yes, that's correct.


J. Les (Chair): Anyone else? It appears not.


I guess that's it for today's chat about your budget. Thank you for a very detailed description. The information that we talked about earlier — if you could send that to Craig, he will distribute it to the committee members.


D. Loukidelis: Okay. Thank you, Chair, and thank you, members of the committee.

[ Page 422 ]

J. Les (Chair): We will recess while we await the arrival of the Chief Electoral Officer.


The committee recessed from 10:33 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.

[J. Les in the chair.]


Office of the
Chief Electoral Officer


H. Neufeld: Before we get into the details of Elections B.C.'s budget request, I'd like to briefly introduce committee members to the senior managers I have accompanying me today.


On my immediate left is Linda Johnson, who holds the position of Deputy Chief Electoral Officer. Linda has overall responsibility for legislation, policy, enforcement, advertising, communications, media relations and public education at Elections B.C.


On Linda's left is Nola Western, who holds the position of executive director, electoral finance and corporate administration. Nola has responsibility to oversee all aspects of political entity registration, financial disclosures, campaign spending limits, and election and referendum advertising rules. In addition, she is my office's chief financial officer and has overall responsibility for budget controls, payroll, office and warehouse space and human resource management.


To Nola's left is Anton Boegman, who holds the position of executive director, corporate planning and event management. Anton is in charge of all aspects of Elections B.C.'s strategic project and event planning and has overall responsibility to ensure that the electoral events that my office administers are done in accordance with detailed plans that are formally documented, tracked and managed within the funding appropriations recommended by this committee.


We plan to walk you through the budget request document you have in front of you, which is identical to the one that was provided to you on November 16 in electronic format. We expect that our presentations will require about 30 minutes.


After I provide just a few more minutes of context, Nola will introduce you to the details of what's behind the numbers on each page. Linda will describe how those numbers have been developed in relation to our business priorities to fit within the funding envelope recommended by this committee last year. Then Anton will talk to you about the planning process coming out of this event-heavy year and our relatively minimal event funding requirements for the next fiscal year. I will wrap up with a brief summary and then pass things back to the Chair.


There should be about 30 minutes left to answer any questions that committee members may have on our budget request or on the contents of our current service plan, our annual report for 2008-09 or the recent press release associated with a potential increase in the mandate of my office. Those supporting documents should all be in front of you and were included in the electronic package that you received last week.


This marks the eighth time that I and members of my senior management team have appeared in front of this committee as part of the annual budget review process. However, this may be the last time that I get to see you in this capacity because my term as Chief Electoral Officer will statutorily expire on June 5, 2010. I have advised the Clerk of Committees that preparations need to be made so that the process associated with selecting someone to fill the next term of office for the position of Chief Electoral Officer is complete before that date.


There are three budget components in our annual review with this committee: first, our annual operating budget; second, our annual capital budget, which is tightly tied to annual operating budgets, due to depreciation rules; third, the annual components of electoral event budgets for any events that are scheduled in law and that we know the timing of in advance.


There are, of course, some years where there are no scheduled electoral event delivery components that need to be funded. There are years where additional moneys are required because on-demand events, which cannot be predicted, must be administered. Examples are by-elections, initiative and recall petitions, referenda and plebiscites.


The protocol that has been established by this committee is that when an unscheduled, on-demand event occurs, the Chief Electoral Officer writes to the Chair of this committee, advising on the additional funds required. If the Chair feels that it is appropriate, he or she can convene this committee and ask the Chief Electoral Officer to appear to explain the supplementary budget request.


By statute, the cost of administering each electoral event must be detailed in a report by the Chief Electoral Officer and must be tabled with the Legislative Assembly following the conclusion of each event.


As my team prepared the budget figures we are about to describe in further detail, we were very mindful of the fact that government funding is under tremendous pressure, that all non-essential spending is being limited and that aggressively managing public money for maximum effectiveness is necessary. However, reducing costs and holding the line on expenses are the consistent instructions that my office has received from this committee throughout my term.


In the fiscal year before I started my position Elections B.C. had an annual operating budget of $10.02 million. Our budget request for next fiscal is $7.753 million, which is 23 percent less.


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In the meantime, the number of electoral districts and MLAs has increased by 8 percent. The population of the
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province has increased by 12 percent. The number of elected officials and temporary staff we must recruit, train and manage during major electoral events has increased by 23 percent. The number of voter registration records maintained on our provincial voters list has increased by 33 percent. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, inflation has increased by 16 percent during this decade. By any of these measures, our annual operating budget has not kept pace.


As you review the details of our budget request, please be mindful that core funding to my office is necessary if electoral events are going to continue to be managed without major administrative errors and the ongoing statutory functions of Elections B.C. are to be delivered as prescribed in law.


I'll now ask Nola Western to begin the detailed review of our budget proposal document with you.


N. Western: I'm pleased to address this committee, and I hope that my remarks will assist you in your deliberations regarding this budget request.


As far as the current fiscal year goes, we are pleased with the financial results to date. We're still incurring some costs related to the general election and other events, but the significant expenditures have all been made, and we expect to realize a small surplus overall.


For our ongoing operating budget this year, we anticipate that our actual expenditures will be close to the budget of $7.753 million, and we do not expect to have to request any additional funding.


Harry has already noted that Elections B.C. actually has three separate and distinct budgets. Our ongoing operating budget covers costs that we incur regardless of whether there is an election or other event in the fiscal year. It provides for expenses such as permanent staff salaries, office and warehouse rent, computers, telephones and amortization.


The capital budget is the budget for acquiring capital assets such as computer systems and office equipment. The thresholds for which items are capital and which are operating are established by the office of the comptroller general and are applicable to all the government ministries and offices.


Our event-related budget covers expenses specifically incurred in relation to the delivery of electoral events — for instance, general and by-elections, electoral district redistributions, referenda and enumerations.


Elections B.C. has a four-year business cycle, which starts the fiscal year after a general election and ends in the fiscal year of a general election. For the current cycle, which will end in March 2010, our ongoing operating budget component represents only 37 percent of the total ongoing and event-related budget for that four-year period.


Our requests for each of these three budgets are shown separately in the budget proposal document. The format of the document is consistent with our past presentations to this committee. Page 1 is the statement of operations for the past two fiscal years. It presents a historical view of our finances and shows our 2008-09 budget and actuals and our actuals for 2007-08. This document includes both the ongoing and the event-related operating results for these years.


The summary financial outlook for the next three fiscal years starts on page 2 of the proposal. Please note that in contrast to the statement of operations, this outlook does not include any event funding. It is our requested ongoing operating budget for 2010-11 to 2012-13, and it also shows the budget for the current fiscal year, 2009-10.


You will notice that we have not requested any budget increase for the next three years. Rather, our ongoing operating budgets are the same as our current year's budget.


In its report last year this committee recommended that Elections B.C.'s budget for ongoing operating expenses be set at $7.753 million in '10-11 and '11-12 for financial planning purposes. Despite the fact that that funding level was set for planning purposes only, we have worked carefully towards achieving that target and have adjusted our plans accordingly.


Salaries and benefits, amortization, office rent, office expenses and information technology costs support all the business areas of Elections B.C., and so they 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 further information about the nature of those expenses.


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Salaries and benefits will be slightly lower next fiscal year because we have reorganized in one of our program areas and we have cut our manager of communications position.


Amortization, which used to be called depreciation, is the allocation of the costs of 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, and it is not something on which Elections B.C. has any flexibility.


So although the actual costs of computer hardware and software or enhancements to our electoral information system must initially be paid from our capital budget, the total cost must also be paid out of our future operating budgets over a number of years. Amortization for 2011-12 is scheduled to increase because of the investment in capital assets we must make next fiscal year. I will talk more about the capital asset budget in a moment.


Building occupancy is the rent that we pay for our office and our warehouse. This figure comes from the accommodation and real estate services group, or ARES,
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of the Ministry of Citizens' Services. For several years Elections B.C. has been split into two and three different office spaces because of overcrowding. The third office has now been closed, and the second office will be closed by the end of this fiscal year. All staff will move into our headquarters at Quebec Street.


The space is too small to meet government office space standards, or GOSS, and we will need to acquire some additional space within the same building to fit the consolidated operations and staff.


ARES is currently negotiating the renewal of that space, and they have provided us with an estimate of the future rent. However, if the negotiations do not go the way that ARES expects them to, we may be forced to pay a higher rate than anticipated. In such an event we would be forced to return to this committee and request additional funding, as there is just no wiggle room in our budget to cover such a contingency.


Office expenses in telecommunications will decrease slightly next year because the one-time lease renegotiation fees will be incurred this year. Corporate information systems are expected to be lower next year and then increase for each of the following years, because in the current fiscal year we replaced our aged personal computers and office automation software, which is a cost that won't be incurred in '10-11.


However, our support contract with our technology partner expires at the end of 2010-11, and we do expect that a new contract will have increased costs. Linda will talk more about the technology plans in a moment.


Event readiness includes expenses necessary to ensure that Elections B.C. is constantly ready to administer unscheduled events, such as recall and initiative petitions and by-elections. The $40,000 budget, clearly, does not include the actual cost of administering such events, but rather covers forms, guides and software updates necessary to maintain that state of readiness.


During the current fiscal year we didn't conduct much in the way of event readiness, because we were fully engaged in administering the events: the general election, referendum, enumeration and boundary redistribution.


We don't anticipate any major changes to our address and boundary maintenance budget next year. Costs for the ongoing maintenance of the voters list are always lower in the year of a general election because the majority of voters list maintenance work is associated with post-election cleanup, and so it's charged to the election.


Next year, in 2010-11, we will return to our ongoing voters list maintenance work. Also next year we need to start replacing the software modules and some server hardware that support the voters list module of the electoral information system. That support work will be completed in 2011-12, hence the subsequent budget decrease in 2012-13.


Political entity reporting includes the costs associated with registering political parties and constituency associations, reviewing their financing reports and conducting investigations in accordance with section 276 of the Elections Act. In B.C. we currently have 24 registered political parties and 92 registered constituency associations.


The costs for political entity reporting will be higher in 2010-11 because the 2009 annual financial reports of those parties and constituency associations, which must be filed by March 31, 2010, are expected to be more complex and require a higher degree of scrutiny due to the inclusion of the election-related financial transactions. You can see that the increase is not sustained for the two following years.


The Elections Act ties the chief electoral officer's salary to that of the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court, and there actually is a scheduled salary increase for April 1, 2010.


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Also, as Harry has mentioned, his term as CEO ends in June next year. In this figure we have included $20,000 to cover any relocation costs we may be required to pay for a new CEO.


The voter education budget covers our ongoing education programs, including school kits that are used in grade 5 and grade 11 classrooms. In order to meet our budget target of $7.753 million, we have had to reduce our plans related to voter education, hence the very low dollar amount that's allocated there.


The budgets for 2011-12 and 2012-13 are very similar to that for '10-11. We have made some adjustments in some areas where we're confident that the expenditures will differ or where we have had to defer some activities to accommodate anticipated expenses in other areas, but the bottom line remains at $7.753 million for each year. Naturally, of course, 2011-12 doesn't actually start until April 2011, almost a year and a half from now. Things might change between now and then.


Our full-time-equivalent, or FTE, budget represents the maximum number of positions for the permanent employees of Elections B.C. Without additional financial funding, we do not anticipate being able to create any new positions.


The capital budget is shown on page 4 of the budget proposal document. Because all capital items must be amortized and amortization is charged against our ongoing operating budget, over the past several years we have tried to minimize our capital investment.


Last year we advised that we needed to begin redeveloping our primary database system, called the electoral information system, or EIS. It was originally developed in the late 1990s. In its report this committee did recognize that need for redevelopment, but because of budget constraints, our plans regarding the EIS have continued to be adjusted. Linda will speak in a moment about where we are now with those plans.


Most of the capital budget is for EIS, but there are some smaller expenditures that we must incur next fis-
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cal year, including mapping and reporting software. We are also working on a client management correspondence tracking system, which will help us improve the service that we provide to our clients.


On page 5 of the package there's a pie chart of our ongoing operating budget for next year. It clearly illustrates that salaries, IT, rent and amortization dominate the budget, at 88 percent, and leave little flexibility in other areas.


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


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


The event-related budget is on page 7, and Anton will address that budget request after Linda speaks about our ongoing work and business needs.


L. Johnson: It's always a pleasure to appear before this committee and tell you about the work that we do. You may think that this is a quiet time for Elections B.C. and that we're just waiting for the next electoral event. Many people wonder what we do between elections, and our usual answer is that we're like firefighters. Between events we review policies and procedures, best practices of other organizations. We restock supplies, upgrade systems, recruit and train staff, and ensure our readiness.


We also have a lot of ongoing work. For example, at a time like this, when you would expect voter registration activity to be stagnant, we receive about 500 voter registration requests, updates and queries, including on-line transactions, each month.


Our electoral finance staff is busy year-round responding to queries from political parties, constituency associations and their financial agents. Event planning is also a continuous process, to ensure that we have adequate time to address the myriad details associated with a general election or other event.


I'm going to be focusing on our operating and capital funding requirements for the coming three fiscal years and explaining the effect of the spending limitations we're already dealing with. Last year at about this time we appeared before this committee and requested two additional FTEs to support the additional workload resulting from the May 2008 amendments to the Election Act.


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We requested a total of just over $8.7 million in operating funds for the '09-10 fiscal year, but in an effort to reduce expenditures during an economic downturn, this committee recommended a budget of $7.75 million in the current year and the following two years and did not approve the request for the additional FTEs. This resulted in a number of significant changes, which were difficult to make in an election year.


As noted by Nola and as shown by the pie chart on page 5, the majority of our funding is used for salaries. We have reassigned management duties to accommodate the increased focus on enforcement of the Election Act and have left some positions vacant to ensure sufficient funds for other necessary activities. Our budget proposal, as shown on page 2, reflects only 41 positions filled, as we have insufficient funding to fill all of our allocated positions at this time.


As a result of the expanded mandate, with no additional positions and insufficient funds to fill all of our existing positions, there are some things that simply won't get done. For example, there is no room for nice-to-haves. Without a position that's focused solely on compliance and enforcement, we are unable to develop an investigation manual and don't have funds or staff time to contract it out. Investigations are being managed off the corners of our desks.


We are struggling to keep up with updates to the provincial road network — they keep building things — and in managing our digital map base and are feeling a little stretched thin. Newsletters to filing entities to facilitate compliance take staff time that we don't have.


We are a very small organization, and we're doing our best, but funding limitations certainly create risks that we will not be able to fulfil our mandate. Even normal situations, like staff illnesses or vacation periods, can become very problematic.


Nola mentioned our building occupancy issues. The leases for both of our present offices expire in February 2010. We had requested additional funds last year to relocate to a single larger office and expected in the long term that we would realize some savings in efficiencies, as the intended new space would accommodate our requirements during electoral events.


Due to funding constraints, however, we will be moving out of our Wharf Street office at the end of the lease, and as Nola mentioned, we're consolidating on Quebec Street. ARES is negotiating a new lease that will add about 2,500 square feet to our existing space to accommodate all of our staff. Unfortunately, the total accommodation costs, including rent and maintenance, for the renewed lease are expected to be much higher than we have been paying. That increase is shown on page 2.


As there is no room for the extra staff we need for a general election or other major event, we will need to find a second office in the future to take us through the 2013 election. Those costs will be presented as a future
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event expense for the fiscal year that we acquire the space. This is an inefficient model from both a financial and management perspective, and we do hope that in future we will have an opportunity to move to a more suitable location.


Last year we also requested capital and operating funds for this year and the subsequent two fiscal years to redevelop our aging electoral information system, or EIS. This integrated computer system is essential to our business. It includes the centralized databases for the voters list, street index, candidate and advertising sponsor information, election officials, voting locations, elections results and other components that allow us to not only manage events but our ongoing work as well.


Now, the committee did recognize the importance of this system and recommended that we receive some capital funds to begin this work. However, it wasn't enough to do the full project. We haven't been able to proceed as planned. Instead, we are currently replacing the operating system of EIS and are upgrading the system one module at a time to ensure that it can take us through the next election. This is like renovating your house one room at a time and replacing all of the infrastructure while you're living in it. There is a lot of risk and inconvenience, and it takes a long time.


However, we are doing what we can with the funding we were told to plan for. Our technology vendor and IT staff have been quite creative in this approach, but it is at best a short-term fix. EIS still must be replaced in the future, and amortization costs from our renovation exercise are a significant part of the equation. You can see on page 2 of the budget proposal, where we show an increase in amortization starting in '11-12 to cover the improvements, that we're now beginning.


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The amortization figures also reflect work we are doing to upgrade our integrated digital electoral atlas — or INDEA, as we call it. This system matches every one of the more than two million addresses in the province to GIS coordinates and to the appropriate electoral district and voting area. This is an essential component in managing electoral boundaries and the voters list. It does have an effect on our capital budget, which I will discuss more fully in a moment.


One significant unknown for us in our operating budget at this time is the future cost of technology support. Our current contract expires next year, and while we believe we have allocated sufficient funds to cover the cost of a new contract, until the RFP and contract process are over, though, we simply won't know. If we haven't budgeted sufficient funds — and we hope we have — we may have to come back to this committee for additional funding to cover any shortfall there.


On page 4 our request for capital funding for the next three years is shown. Due to the associated amortization costs that have to come out of future-year operating funds, we have dramatically limited the amount of capital spending to contain those future costs.


As discussed, our capital requests over the next three years are primarily the updating of our EIS system by replacing the obsolete programming language with a language that is supported and improvements to our INDEA system, which are necessary to allow us to effectively manage risk and to ensure ongoing operations are not disrupted.


I'll now turn this over to Anton, who will explain our event budget requirements.


A. Boegman: Good morning, committee members. As Harry mentioned, my focus is going to be on our event-related funding requirements.


As mentioned, Elections B.C. approaches event funding separately from that funding that's necessary for ongoing operational activities. Elections B.C. has a detailed and comprehensive event-planning methodology, which is based on standards and best practices endorsed by the Project Management Institute. We're recognized as leaders in this by our colleagues and other Canadian provincial and federal electoral agencies.


This rigorous approach allows us to plan very thoroughly for both fixed-date and on-demand electoral events, incorporating best practices in both risk management and change management. Our event-funding requirements are developed using a proven bottom-up process whereby the specific deliverables necessary to successfully administer 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 our budget submission document.


As stated, our current-year budget for event-related activities is $33.687 million. This has provided implementation funding for the final activities associated with the 2008 electoral boundary redistribution and the 2009 mail-based provincial enumeration. It has also provided funding for the delivery of the 39th provincial general election and the 2009 referendum on electoral reform. These are two events which Elections B.C. is still in the final stages of closing out.


Indeed, while to the general public the election is over and done with at 11 p.m. on election night, Elections B.C. has been spending the past six months conducting reviews and audits of the election proceedings and election financing, carrying out extensive lessons-learned processes to seek out ways that we can improve our future event delivery and writing comprehensive event reports.


From an event perspective, the next fiscal year would look markedly different for our organization. While the extensive planning, preparation and delivery activities associated with a general election will be gone, they'll be replaced with other activities that we feel are no less important for our democracy in B.C.

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The main focus in 2010-11 will be on maintaining and enhancing event readiness. However, given our mandate and responsibility to administer both the Election Act and the Recall and Initiative Act, it is also likely that we will have to deliver non-scheduled events next year.


Our event-readiness activities will enlarge and build from the extensive lessons-learned activities conducted this fall. We will identify the event processes and activities that require enhancement prior to the next general election. These will range from streamlining voting processes where possible to improving election official training and methods and materials, and to better integrate technology in the way that we communicate with voters, candidates, district electoral officers and other electoral clients.


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Once we've identified our continuous improvement projects, we will have to prioritize them and make conscious decisions as to which projects we will pursue with the funding provided and which projects will be deferred. This means that there are some potential projects that could either improve voter service or save future election costs that we may not be able to pursue because of funding constraint.


Implementing change and effective improvement will take time, and the current economic climate is a factor. In order to be successful, we'll have to maintain sufficient capacity to both move forward these types of projects as well as continue our day-to-day functions.


Our event focus will therefore primarily be on readiness projects and activities that we can accomplish using our internal staff and resources. We are, however, as noted on page 7, requesting event funding of $875,000 to conduct a door-to-door enumeration pilot in 2010-11.


It's been 20 years since Elections B.C. has done a full door-to-door enumeration. With the amended section 42(1) of the Election Act in effect as of September 1 this year, Elections B.C. must conduct a provincewide door-to-door enumeration in the lead-up to the 2013 general election.


Processes and practices that were in place in 1989 must be completely overhauled and re-engineered to reflect today's requirements for an enumeration, including protecting the privacy of voter personal information, ensuring enumerator safety and the overall cost-effectiveness in creating a high-quality voters list.


We need to conduct a pilot in '10-11 so that we can evaluate our planned approach and make any necessary improvements prior to 2013. The budget request of $875,000 for the pilot will provide for field office space rental; training and enumerator wages and benefits — this is approximately $400,000, or 46 percent, of that total; supplies and equipment; technology; communications; the operation of an enumeration pilot 1-800 call centre; and a voters list quality audit on completion of the pilot.


At $875,000 the total cost of this pilot is estimated at less than 4 percent of what the cost of a full provincewide door-to-door enumeration would be. We have preliminary estimates which put this at approximately $24 million. Given the societal changes since 1989, we strongly feel that a pilot is necessary to gain door-to-door enumeration experience in today's environment and that it will contribute to an effective model for 2013.


Finally, as I mentioned earlier, Elections B.C. may be called upon under the Election Act or the Recall and Initiative Act to administer non-scheduled events in 2010-11. These could include by-elections, initiative or recall petitions. As Harry mentioned, if such events arise, the Chief Electoral Officer will write to the committee Chair outlining the additional event funds required to administer the event.


While there is never certainty about non-scheduled events, at the current time we have had discussions with a number of voters about the initiative petition process. We anticipate that we may see formal application for initiative petitions in the new year.


I will now turn things back to Harry for his closing remarks.


H. Neufeld: Thank you, Anton.


In summary, I would be grateful if this committee would recommend to the Legislative Assembly that Elections B.C. be provided the following financial appropriations for the 2010-11 fiscal year: $7.753 million in ongoing operating funds, $1.365 million in capital expenditure funds and $875,000 in event funding.


All things being equal, my office is prepared to work at the same level of ongoing operating costs for the following two fiscal years. However, if things don't remain on the current equilibrium, we may need to come back to this committee for additional funding.


You've heard from Nola that we may need to return if the rental agreement that's being negotiated on our behalf is not within our budgeted figure for office rent. Linda described our potential need to return if our procurement for IT services results in higher than expected pricing. Anton has told you about various on-demand electoral events that may require funding for their administration.


Finally, I need to advise that the press release that accompanied the Premier's October 2 announcement about a new local government elections act being administered by my office may result in a return trip to this committee a few months into next fiscal year.


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Local government elections involve 160 municipalities, 27 regional districts and 60 school boards, with over 1,600 elected positions to be filled every three years. Implementing central supervision, administration and enforcement of new electoral rules in time for the November 2011 local government elections will require
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a significant effort on the part of my office, and there will be a need to aggressively start developing plans and preparing the administrative infrastructure as soon as the task force recommendations are made public.


Waiting for legislation to be finalized will simply not permit enough time to arrange the scope of administrative machinery needed to deliver a common electoral process across 247 local government jurisdictions less than two years from now.


To ensure this challenge is fully met, I remind committee members and the Clerk of Committees that it is vitally important that there be no lapse in having the position of Chief Electoral Officer filled when my term ends in just over six months' time. I expect that some members of this committee may be asked to sit on the special committee to select a Chief Electoral Officer, and I encourage you to give priority to ensuring that the appointment process is completed well before the end of the spring session of the Legislature.


At this point I'll be happy to pass things back to the Chair. My managers and I will be happy to answer any questions you or committee members have, Mr. Les. Thank you all for your attention and your time.


J. Les (Chair): Thank you.


Questions from Norm, John, Jane, Bruce.


N. Letnick: Sounds like everyone.


Thank you for the presentation. I'm still having difficulty…. Over the last year you worked on electoral boundary redistribution, enumeration, the general election, a referendum. Was all that with 44 FTEs?


H. Neufeld: We do hire 36,900 additional people.


N. Letnick: Yes, I understand that.


H. Neufeld: Most of them work for one day.


N. Letnick: I also understand that. I'm not trying to be tongue-in-cheek. I'm trying to say that you did all that with 44 FTEs. That's the question. Right now you're proposing to continue with 44 FTEs.


H. Neufeld: Actually, it's 41, because we don't have enough money for 44.


N. Letnick: Forty-one FTEs in between elections. I'm still trying to rationalize for myself and for everybody out there who is trying to think: "Well, he did all that with 41."


Why do you really need 41 for the next two years? I heard the explanation. I guess it's just not sinking in yet as to why we need 41 FTEs. If you can help me with that piece, I would really appreciate it.


H. Neufeld: Linda gets the honour, generally, of answering this question, but I'll start.


Electoral events are massive, and you simply can't turn on a dime and create an organization that can administer events of the size of an election or a referendum or, for that matter, an enumeration or a redistribution of electoral boundaries without having an ongoing infrastructure. Relatively speaking, the size of the electoral management body in British Columbia is average to small compared to the size of the population we serve.


We have electoral management bodies across the country. We have them around the world. It's an ongoing feature of a democracy. If you don't have staff to be ready to run these events — and as administrators, we're thankful for fixed-date elections; it makes it a lot easier — those events simply won't happen.


It's like the analogy of having fires and not having a fire station that has anybody working at it. If there's nobody there to make sure that they can respond, the firefighting won't happen. The fire will burn your structures to the ground.


Linda, do you have anything you want to add?


L. Johnson: I do. The 41 FTEs we have right now are working flat out and then some. That happens year-round. We've never had a dull moment in the office.


What we do around event management is…. As part of the planning process that Anton described, each program area within the organization identifies what additional headquarter staff they need. Over the year or two leading up to a general election, we bring in temporary staff, and we train them and position them to manage a lot of the event workload.


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We also hire a district electoral officer and a deputy district electoral officer in every electoral district around the province. We hire them at least a year before an election, and we bring them in for a number of training conferences. They are our managers on the ground. They're the ones that set up field offices and do the training and recruitment of all the election officials out there.


The 41 people that we have right now are the core that keeps ongoing operations going as best we can and do the planning for how we're going to manage those events. Although we provide the oversight and the direction, much of the event workload is done by temporary staff that come into our headquarters. Our office more than doubles in size with temporary staff for a general election. It's complemented by the over 170 district electoral officers and deputies out in the field.


J. Thornthwaite: Thank you for your presentation. I just have a couple of questions, and they're totally different.


The first one is about the moving expenses. You had mentioned, I think, Linda, that updating your technology is kind of like renovating a house while you're living
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in it. But it was my understanding from what somebody said before that you are actually moving into…. Is it a new office? Or you're consolidating other offices all in one office?


L. Johnson: We're moving back into our original headquarters on Quebec Street. We've been in there since about 2002 or 2003. As we started building additional staff getting ready for the election, we ran out of room, so we added a second office on Wharf Street. We then had to add a third office to accommodate more staff to manage the events.


We closed the third office. At the end of this year we're closing our second office as our staff goes down, and we're all consolidating into our original Quebec Street office, with the addition of 2,500 square feet to make sure we all fit in the government standards.


J. Thornthwaite: That would fit into what Norm's question was — that you are reducing staff and office space based on the fact that there isn't an election for another four years.


L. Johnson: Yes, we're shutting our temporary staff.


J. Thornthwaite: Okay. Then my other question is with regards to…. I think Anton mentioned the enumeration for your plan — $875,000 for 2010-2011. I'm just wondering why you have to do a door-to-door enumeration in 2010-2011 for long-term-care facilities and homeless shelters three years before an election.


I would think that in those two particular areas you're not going to have people that are going to be the same people there three years from now. Why is a door-to-door enumeration necessary at that particular point in that year?


A. Boegman: I'm not sure that I said we were doing a door-to-door enumeration of shelters and long-term-care facilities in '10-11. That was part of our enumeration process.


J. Thornthwaite: It says that in No. 2 here, on page 7.


H. Neufeld: That's the general description of an enumeration. But your point is well taken. The issue is that a pilot is going to create a list that's going to go stale. A door-to-door enumeration exercise should be comprehensive to give us the full range of the registration challenges we have, but we're very cognizant of the fact that 18 percent to 24 percent of the B.C. population moves every year.


It's not that we're doing the pilot to update the list and that's the last time we'll update it before the election. We're mostly doing the pilot to get a handle on how we do this as a provincewide exercise and really make it effective, both from a perspective of controlling costs and providing a good-quality list while protecting the privacy of voter information and ensuring the safety of both enumerators and voters.


A. Boegman: Just to add a point too. In '09-10, as part our enumeration leading up to the past event, we did do door-to-door in long-term-care facilities and homeless shelters as part of a field outreach to those voters. In '10-11 we're looking at how we can test procedures for doing a full door-to-door enumeration, so we're going to be selecting geographical areas of the province that represent the diversity of our province — some rural, some mixed, some urban high-density.


[1145]

We're going to be piloting new procedures on how we can best enumerate those areas — and that's what the $875,000 is for — so that when it comes time to finalize plans for the full provincewide door-to-door in 2013, we'll have a rock-solid approach that we know works well in all the different areas of our province.


B. Ralston: Since I've been on the committee awhile, I think that sometimes the way in which.... What is your business is presented very accurately, but I don't think there's sometimes a recognition of just what kind of preparation is necessary in order to administer a major event, as you talk about, like an election, efficiently.


I am concerned, and I spoke out publicly last year about the decisions that were made by the committee — I didn't share them — in terms of the failure to fund improvements to the IT system. It seems to me that information architecture and technology is everything in terms of composing an accurate voters list, and the description that you've given, of this system being at the end of its life, is troubling indeed to me.


Secondly, when the enumeration is spoken of…. I mean, I'm sure every member here has, in part of the electoral process or even sometimes outside the election, gone door to door. The problems in getting accurate information, even just finding out where people live even in an ordinary suburban neighbourhood with secondary suites, is immense. So I think the challenges that are faced by even establishing protocols for a door-to-door enumeration are difficult, let alone recruiting the people to do that accurately.


Then to take all of that raw information and transmit it into a database and compile it and merge it with all the other information from, I think, the drivers licence database, which is fed into the voters…. It's huge. So I don't, frankly, envy your challenges. I think it's reassuring that you're sending them out accurately.


The other thing I would say is that to some extent, I think, my reading of your budgets has been that you have been very responsible and have in fact rigorously adhered to cost control and to some extent have not
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been the beneficiary of a recognition by the committee of that when it came time to ask for increases. That's certainly my sense.


I guess my question is: is there another method of preparing for a replacement of the EIS system, such as setting aside a reserve in the budget years leading up to a replacement so that this doesn't come all as one gulp? Is there a way of doing preparatory work, such as tendering, and then in a year or so beginning to make the shift? Frankly, the danger of database difficulties in the middle of an election campaign is huge, and the whole election could be overturned in the courts if one came to some kind of major IT calamity.


I think these are very serious questions. I think you're right to raise them, and I'm wondering if you could assist the committee with some sense of how these challenges could be met by increasing your budget in a moderated way, but recognizing that simply holding the line in the way that you have is very, very problematic for the long-term future of the electoral process here in British Columbia.


H. Neufeld: Thank you, Mr. Ralston. The whole issue of our technology and the risks posed by it not working is something I'm very aware of. We had a very embarrassing moment last year in the fall where we tried for the first time to provide live results of the by-election voting results on our website, and the website crashed with just over 2,000 people trying to view the results. We had to really bolster our design and our testing in order to have it work successfully for the general election.


[1150]

We took a lot of flak both in the press and from disgruntled clients of all kinds when it failed in the by-election, and that's a relatively minor failure compared to some of the other ones that we could have, because we're completely dependent on computer systems to administer elections in the 21st century.


We're trying to manage our risk at the same time as we're trying to manage financial expectations set out by this committee that this is not the time that we can afford to spend $12 million replacing the central system.


I was in Ottawa last week meeting with my colleagues. We're not the only office faced with this dilemma — that there are budget squeezes on. We're in preliminary discussions with Elections Canada and Elections Ontario, who both are facing end-of-life systems and a need to replace, to see whether we can't come up with a joint solution that we could share between us.


Fundamentally, the election business is the same. It's the same electoral system at all three levels. There are differences in law. There are differences in procedure, differences in policy. But we think that, for the most part, they can be accommodated with an intelligent system design. We're at the beginnings of that discussion.


What we're setting out to do with this slow renovation is to take us through 2013 and possibly a little bit beyond. But we're told by Microsoft that Visual Basic will no longer be supported at a certain point in the future. It will be supported through 2013. Visual Basic 6.0 is the language our whole system was built in, so we're now wanting to replace module by module with a more modern language that has got good support in the industry.


There is a certain amount of risk by doing it that way. We think we have it manageable and contained, and we can do our testing in advance of the 2013 election. What we're struggling with is that functionally there are a lot of things that we can't do, and within the design envelope of that system, which was designed more than a decade ago, there are things that our clients expect that we should be able to do that we simply are unable to do. That's why, ultimately, the system needs to be replaced.


I'd like to be able to say that we're going to replace it with something that other jurisdictions are helping to fund. It's too early to say that. We warned this committee for three or four years in a row that this was coming. We had to have money set aside in the future for redeveloping EIS and that was going to take a significant amount of capital and a significant amount of amortization.


Unfortunately, our request for that exactly coincided with the economic downturn, and this committee said: "Sorry. This is not the time to start that kind of a project."


We think we've responded with a solution that gets us through the next few years. I'm hopeful that there's a good solution, by partnering with other jurisdictions, that we can put in place for when that system needs to be replaced following the 2013 election. But I'm not ready to make that commitment yet.


D. McRae: A couple of questions here. First of all, in regards to enumeration, you've sort of alluded to it in some degree, but we have three levels of government, obviously, in British Columbia — municipal, provincial and federal. Is there a will to have sort of a shared enumeration process, or because of privacy laws, is it just not realistic down the road?


H. Neufeld: Well, this gets us into an interesting public policy issue, which is that enumerations door to door are out of favour across the country. There are only two jurisdictions that still do them. It's the Yukon and Manitoba. Yukon has recommended that they move to a permanent voter register. We have a permanent voter register. We were the first in the country to have one. Doing a door-to-door enumeration in addition to a continuous registry is a very expensive proposition.


There is no appetite at the federal level of going back to door-to-door enumerations. Unless municipal and provincial elections were to coincide, which is something I understand the task force on the new local government
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election act will be looking at, I can't see the enumeration door to door being something that municipalities would favour.


[1155]

Many municipalities don't even use a voters list. They think that people showing ID and proving where they live and who they are is adequate on election day. This is the reality, and in many cases they feel very economically constrained on what they can do with regards to their electoral administration.


D. McRae: It just frustrates me that in the next three years we'll have lots of levels of enumeration and a census going on, and at the end of the day, they're all going to be talking to pretty much the same people, just four different times. It seems very labour-intensive and expensive.


In terms of electronic voting, or just in a general sense, I'd like to congratulate Elections B.C. In my dealings with your organization during the election, the staff were all very competent and forthright with answers — not always answers that we wanted to hear. But I thought they were nothing but professional in my constituency, and I'm sure the opposition candidates would have said the same thing as well. Thank you very much.


It still took me…. Polls closed at — what? — eight o'clock. I found out that I won by 11:30-ish. It takes a long time to transfer all the handwritten ballots into the computers and divvy them up. The city of Courtenay, where I come from, uses a scanned sheet, so the answers basically get determined in less than half an hour — by ten minutes, actually.


Things are changing. You think back to 2001 and the computer technology that we had available. We're at 2009. You guys work for a party every four years, and I think in 2017 the technology that potentially is available regardless of cost could dramatically change the way we have elections.


Do you guys have any crystal ball suggestion of where we're going to see…? Not just coming elections in B.C., but how jurisdictions produce elections. I just find it's very labour-intensive. We're also including on-line voting there as well. It just seems that the time it takes to vote and our need to have instant gratification as a society and actual voting conflict with each other. I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on electronic voting and technology.


H. Neufeld: I hope you have lots of time. We have lots of thoughts.


D. McRae: I don't mind coming to talk to you about it, actually.


J. Les (Chair): Actually, we don't have a lot of time. But it's fascinating.


H. Neufeld: Let me do a quick summary. Elections New Brunswick, who have responsibility for local government elections, are the pioneers in basically re-engineering the voting process. They've gone to what we call a bank teller approach. You go to wherever the next ballot box officials are available rather than standing in line in front of your particular voting area officials when all the other ballot boxes have got nobody in front of them — a massively inefficient arrangement, but very entrenched in our electoral law. That's at one level.


For municipal elections they used the scanning of the ballots and the instant results at the end of the evening. That was something they could make a business case for, for their municipal elections, but can't — as we can't — make a business case for provincial elections. It's just too much overhead for relatively simple ballots and relatively simple but time-consuming counting processes.


With regards to on-line voting, I'm a member of a national working group of Chief Electoral Officers who are looking into the principles and the standards that we must see addressed in any e-voting solution. We would like to see one solution developed instead of 14 separate ones.


We're very concerned that the integrity of the process has to be maintained. The secrecy of the vote has to be maintained. We need to know — the authentication of the individuals who are voting — that it's really that person. We need to have the transparency that how a vote is cast is how it is counted and that this is somehow completely dealt with in a way that all members of society can trust.


Those are high measures to reach. Some of the municipalities in Canada are using Internet-based voting solutions, and we're concerned that the security standards and the integrity standards simply aren't high enough for provincial elections.


My federal counterpart, Marc Mayrand, the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada, has publicly committed to an Internet vote-based pilot in a by-election before the end of 2013. Members of Parliament have endorsed this and are actively suggesting by-election ridings where he could do it any time soon.


We're not ready on that pilot yet either, and it's something that I have a very large interest in. It needs to be done carefully, and I think it's exactly the kind of thing that Chief Electoral Officers across the country should cooperate on. On behalf of Canadians, let's develop one very good solution and implement it gradually across all the jurisdictions.


[1200]

D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): I had two questions.


First of all, I wanted to say…. In the annual report, on page 13, there's a testimonial from a financial agent. I have to compliment the staff that you have working, as
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well, because my financial agent has nothing but good things to say about the interactions she's had with your staff since reporting out on the 2009 election, so congratulations on that.


My first question is around measures of success. I note in the service plan that you have different ways of measuring your success. I'm wondering: is it within the mandate to measure your success by voter turnout?


H. Neufeld: It is not, and I'm not sure I want it to be.


D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Rather than putting it in the terms of measuring success, is it something that is a responsibility or within your mandate to increase voter turnout, improve voter turnout?


H. Neufeld: This is a very big question. It's been debated by my colleagues across the country about how much of a role electoral management bodies have in the whole process of civic and democratic engagement in our society.


I think that is at the root of the decline — if we don't have engagement, especially on the part of youth. The arguments that are being made are that it's youth not voting for decades now and continuing not to vote as they get older. That's really at the base of the decline in turnout.


Some offices in the country have a mandate to reach out to those who are least likely to participate and to provide education and information. I have a general requirement under the act to provide information and public education about the voting process, but it doesn't really incorporate my going into schools and teaching civics.


Some of my colleagues across the country are starting to get legislation where an element of that is in their mandate and is funded. Most recently Elections Manitoba was given that mandate. They've hired four people just to do that element of their work on an ongoing basis.


It's one of those policy issues that we were talking about in terms of recommendations for legislative change. This might be one of those things where we just kind of put it into the language that says: "Legislators might want to consider what they want to do with our mandate surrounding civic and democratic engagement."


Some of my colleagues, quite frankly, across the country say: "Listen, it's got nothing to do with us. The whole business of motivating people to vote is a political issue or an education issue that should be dealt with by the education system." Others say: "Well, we have part of the role. We need to be partners in this."


I personally am of the opinion that while I don't want to be measured on turnout, I certainly feel like election management bodies need to contribute to the process by making voting accessible, making people aware of their voting rights and of the process by which they can exercise the franchise.


D. Donaldson (Deputy Chair): Thank you for that answer, and yes, I think there has to be a forum, at some point, where we discuss that — whether it is the mandate of Elections B.C., if that's the forum, or elsewhere in government.


I know, for instance, in the United States funding goes toward civil society organizations to increase voter turnout and engagement, so that's another model again. But we need to have that discussion, so if you want to push us on that, I think that'd be great.


The other question I have is around the press release around the striking of a task force regarding a new local government election act.


[1205]

Considering that the new act will designate you and your office as an independent supervisor, administrator and enforcer of a local government election process and that the task force is considering adapting the principles of the provincial Election Act to local elections, can you describe the advisory role, if any, that your staff is having to this task force or the input that you've been asked to give around that issue?


H. Neufeld: I met with the Minister of Community and Rural Development, who is one of the co-chairs of the task force, the week after the announcement was made. He was very emphatic that he wants my organization to be providing advice to the task force. My understanding is that they're not really underway yet, but when they are, they'll want us in an advisory role.


I've also had discussions with the senior personnel who are responsible for policy around local government elections in his ministry. They're actually coming to our office tomorrow for a briefing about how they see not only them and us but members of the UBCM staff, members of what's called the election committee of the Local Government Management Association, and a few other members — how we might work together to provide support to what the task force will want to consider.


I have hired a consultant, a former Chief Electoral Officer, to go and look at the arrangements that are used in P.E.I., New Brunswick and Quebec, where the Chief Electoral Officer has a mandate in different ways to provide a support function or a management function or an administrative function for local government elections. That report should be ready within about a month.


J. Rustad: First of all, I want to start off by saying thank you very much for what you've done over the last two
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terms of your mandate. I'm hopeful that you won't be before our committee again prior to the expiry of your mandate — that everything will work out and that you won't have to come back and be asking for more. But I do want to say thank you very much for the work that you've done over that mandate. I know that the position is quite trying at times and that you can be pulled in many directions.


I would love to know what your opinion is with regard to the conversation around motivating voters, around mandatory versus perhaps an incentive versus voluntary forms of democracy. Given that we don't have any time for that, perhaps that's something you can consider after your term has expired.


H. Neufeld: I can feel an op-ed coming on now.


J. Rustad: I can see that.


J. Les (Chair): Resist it, please.


J. Rustad: The other one I find very interesting is that I'd also love to know your opinion on the idea of the joint voting day between perhaps provincial and federal and what a minority government might do in that sort of situation, which could change those dates. But once again, that is for another day.


The question I do have on the budget is around the enumeration. I think the statement was that it was around 4 percent. The $875,000 was around 4 percent of what it would take to do a full enumeration. That works out to about $10 per voter or, if you were to hire somebody on a temporary basis to go out and do that, about one hour of work per voter, depending on what, of course, you're paying. I've just taken a number of $10 an hour.


That seems to be an unbelievable cost to do an enumeration, when you look at that. I just find it mind-boggling to think that it would take an hour per person who is on the voter list to go and do an enumeration. I'm just wondering how…. Isn't there any other way that that could be done that could be more efficient than that much time per voter?


H. Neufeld: I wish it were true. The model of going door to door has been abandoned by Statistics Canada. They no longer do it for the national census. It's why it's been abandoned by most jurisdictions across Canada. It doesn't work. You have to keep going back.


I conferred with my colleague in Manitoba who's an advocate of door-to-door enumeration — thinks it provides you with a great list that's very current just before an election. He requires his enumerators to go back a minimum of four times, if they don't make contact. He follows up with a revision process, and they'll go back and try another four times if they don't get the people on the list. They manage every response. Like, "Get off my property," is "refused." "Not eligible" is another one.


[1210]

Our society has changed. It's not 1955 anymore. We can't just expect that you go to doors and that you're going to get everybody to cooperate with you in terms of putting them on a voters list. Part of the factor is that it's not as simple as just going to every door and spending a few minutes on the front step recording the names of the people who are eligible to vote there. It's a lot of return visits, and it's a huge infrastructure around supporting that and managing it and making sure that all the addresses have been reached.


Quite frankly, I'm not sure, in our current economy, whether this is the best approach. We had a reasonably successful list with the election this year, where our measures are…. We had over 82 percent of eligible voters on the list at the right address.


J. Rustad: Just following up on that, the reason why I'm asking that cost is when you think that only 50 percent of voters are turning out and that you will have two or more voters, likely, per household — say, two voters likely per household on average — the cost just doesn't seem to be worth the effort. As much as I'd like to see a more comprehensive voters list, that's just an exorbitant cost.


H. Neufeld: I concur.


J. Les (Chair): I just have one quick question. "Building occupancy charges" —$464,000 going up to $678,000. You've explained why the increase. Do those numbers include rent, utilities, taxes and all those things, or are those rent only?


L. Johnson: Yes. They're all-inclusive.


J. Les (Chair): They're all-inclusive. Could you give me a breakdown on that some time in the next few days and feed it through Craig?


N. Western: I think so. I'll have to check with ARES and see what breakdown they give us. It comes from the accommodation and real estate services group.


J. Les (Chair): Yeah. I'm not picking on you guys. It just seems to me that it's an awfully big number every time. I want to be able to drill down a little bit and get per-square-foot costs on an annual basis if we can possibly do that. I think you're looking at — what? — about a 2,500-square-foot increase in space. That's accompanied by a lift of just over $200,000.

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N. Western: We will have 14,614 square feet when we've consolidated into one office on Quebec Street. Right now we have 22,000 square feet. But I'll get you the operating…. It's operations and maintenance. We also have a warehouse that's included in this building occupancy, so it's not just office rent in that number.


J. Les (Chair): Right — warehouse space, of course, generally being cheaper.


N. Western: Yes. But there's 10,000 square feet of warehouse space.


J. Les (Chair): Right. Okay. Maybe if you could just break that out a little bit, I would be happy to look at that.


Any other questions? If not, a motion to adjourn would be good.


Motion approved.


J. Les (Chair): We stand adjourned until Friday morning at nine o'clock.


The committee adjourned at 12:13 p.m.

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