Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 73 — Wednesday, September 19, 2012 (HTML)

Present: Douglas Horne, MLA (Chair); Mable Elmore, MLA (Deputy Chair); Gary Coons, MLA; Marc Dalton, MLA; Dave S. Hayer, MLA; Pat Pimm, MLA; Bill Routley, MLA

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

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


CONTENTS
Page
Presentations	1913
K. Boparai
G. Lucas
L. Kayfish
A. Coyle
R. Eby
R. Hrasko
G. Zimmermann
G. Ivans
R. Ingram
M. Gabias
P. Gabias
M. Friesen
M. Kapp
L. Denton
S. Josephson
J. Gabriel
D. Nicholas

D. Horne (Chair): Good afternoon. My name is Douglas Horne. I'm the MLA for Coquitlam–Burke Mountain, the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier of British Columbia.

This is an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly whose mandate includes conducting annual public consultations for the upcoming provincial budget. We'd like to welcome everyone today in the audience and thank you for taking the time to participate in this very important process.

Every year, in the preparation of next year's budget, the Ministry of Finance releases a budget consultation paper. This paper presents the current fiscal and economic forecast and identifies key issues that need to be addressed in the next budget. Printed copies of the 2013 consultation paper are available on the information table at the back of the room.

Following the release of the consultation paper, this committee holds public consultations and invites input from British Columbians on the upcoming budget. Following the consultation period, the committee releases a report containing a series of recommendations for the upcoming budget. The report must be presented to the Legislative Assembly no later than November 15.

There are several ways for British Columbians to participate. This year the committee is scheduled to hold 19 public meetings in communities throughout the province of British Columbia.

This is our second day of public hearings. We have been in Surrey, Castlegar, Cranbrook, and today we're here in Kelowna. We're also scheduled tomorrow to be in Vernon, as well as Vancouver, Coquitlam, Abbotsford, Fort St. John, Quesnel, Kamloops, Prince Rupert, Kitimat, Smithers, Prince George, Courtenay, Parksville and Victoria.

In addition to the public hearings, we also have scheduled video conferences. Next week, while we're in Victoria, we'll be holding video conferences with Dawson Creek, Fort Nelson and Salmon Arm. In addition to public hearings, British Columbians can also have their ideas heard by sending written submissions through the on-line forms on the website. We also accept written submissions by e-mail, letter, fax and video, as well as audio files.

British Columbians can also participate in the consultations by filling out a short on-line survey which is available at our website, which is www.leg.bc.ca/budgetconsultations. There you can also find information about the budget consultation process, download a copy of the budget consultation paper and learn more about the work of the committee. All of the public input we receive is fully considered, and the deadline for submissions is Thursday, October 18.

At today's meeting each presenter will have up to ten minutes to speak, followed by five minutes of questions. Time permitting, we also may allow for those in the audience to address the committee for five minutes each.

Today we have a couple of our members who are missing, as they had other duties elsewhere. But I'll take this time now to have the members who are here introduce themselves.

P. Pimm: I'm Pat Pimm. I'm the MLA for Peace River North, and I live in Fort St. John.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon. Mable Elmore from Vancouver-Kensington and Deputy Chair of the Finance Committee.

G. Coons: Good day. Gary Coons. I'm the MLA for North Coast, and I live in Prince Rupert.

D. Horne (Chair): To my left, as well, is Kate Ryan-Lloyd, who is the Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees for the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia.

As well, we actually have a live transcript and a live audio webcast of today's presentations. As well as the addition of the webcast, we'll also have the audio file put on our website for those who wish to consult it at a later date. Taking care of those matters are our people from Hansard Services, who help us so much. We have Michael Baer and Jean Medland here today to help us from Hansard Services. As well, at the back of the room, we have Stephanie Raymond, who registered everyone and who is so ably helping us.

With that, we'll call our first presenter of the day today. That will be the British Columbia Fruit Growers Association. Kirpal and Glen, welcome. As you heard, you have ten minutes for your presentation. You can begin anytime.

K. Boparai: Thank you. Welcome to Kelowna, City of Orchards. My name is Kirpal Boparai. I'm president of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association. I have been picking apples today, so I'm kind of a little tired but bear with
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me. I have 80 acres here in Kelowna. With me today is Glen Lucas, our general manager, who will be presenting with me today.

The B.C. Fruit Growers Association appreciates the opportunity for input into the provincial budget. We have had the privilege of presenting a brief to the prebudget consultation each year since 2002, so this is our eleventh presentation to the committee. Our association represents 106 commercial tree fruit growers in the Okanagan, Similkameen and Creston Valley, with a farm-gate value of about $80 million.

The theme of this year's budget is balancing the budget by 2013-2014. The focus appears to be on freezing the public sector and maintaining tax rates. While we understand the need to focus on these short-term activities, we will make the case that focusing on the short-term alone will have a negative impact on future opportunities, especially job growth. It is an opportune time to refocus investment in the resource sectors. This will stimulate the economic activity that creates jobs and ultimately generates the provincial revenue needed to support government programs.

Recent reports have focused on the failure to invest in proper inventory evaluation and management in the forest sector. Agriculture has suffered similar neglect. In the budget discussion paper it is noted that the Ministry of Health budget is 100 percent higher than in 2000-2001, compared to the present. That budget is now over $16 billion per year.

For the same period, the Ministry of Agriculture budget has been reduced by 39 percent from $108 million to $66 million. The hollowing out of the agriculture budget funds 0.3 percent of the Ministry of Health budget. Rather than neglect the growth and job opportunities in natural resources, is it not better to focus on efficiencies and reduction of the administrative burden in health care? A 0.3 percent efficiency gain in health care would fund a 64 percent budget increase for agriculture, and that will lead to job creation in B.C.

K. Boparai: The farm sector is being hit by high taxation or by unfair competition from the subsidized competitors. For example, the carbon tax makes our production costs higher than our competitors. Our competitors also receive more government subsidies and program supports. Apple growers in Washington State have received $100 million towards farmworker housing over the past 11 years. In B.C. we face increasing regulatory costs and a restriction on farmworker housing.

The tree fruit sector has been very responsive. Unfair competition and…. Growers recognize and have acted on the need for efficient gains. The industry has invested heavily in restructuring and replanting. With the assistance of the provincial and federal governments, gains in efficiency and product quality have been and will continue to be made in the B.C. tree fruit sector. We appreciate the province's contribution of $2 million to the replant program and the recent announcement of $2 million for the Buy Local program.

We have received great support from the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture throughout the past year on everything from export marketing development to management of invasive pests and other horticultural matters.

Budget consultation 2013 questions. The Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services discussion paper asks several questions, which we will briefly comment on.

K. Boparai: The priority of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association is to see a fair agriculture budget in B.C. — not one that places agricultural producers at a competitive disadvantage.

G. Lucas: What opportunities do you think there are to address this fiscal challenge of balancing the budget?

K. Boparai: The BCFGA feels that the focus should be on developing jobs and economic activities, rather than on cost reduction during these recessionary times.

K. Boparai: The BCFGA has repeatedly suggested that more efficient delivery of health care service, possibly with greater attention to the increasing administrative burden, could result in significant savings.

K. Boparai: The public service could be paid what is fair, and we do not feel that the front-line public sector service gets the recognition they deserve.

K. Boparai: The BCFGA feels that there is room to consider a tax increase, but this must be made within the framework of increasing fees for government service and the economic distribution of taxation.

G. Lucas: Now, just an aside here. Another possibility is determining the value of water, other than that provided for hydroelectric power and flood control, under
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the Columbia River treaty.

For example, since the regular supply of irrigation water was made possible by the Columbia River treaty in 1964, the Washington State apple industry has grown from the same size to 25 times the size of the B.C. tree fruit industry.

The Columbia River treaty is currently under review. Fruit and vegetable sectors affected by the Columbia River treaty have asked to be consulted and to be provided with resources to calculate the current value as well as the value of future expansion of irrigation water provided through the Columbia River treaty.

If the U.S. is willing to pay for assured and increased access to irrigation water storage and other services — and those would include fisheries, navigation and First Nations water — then some Columbia River treaty benefits could be directed to each of the affected sectors — tree fruits, potatoes, field vegetables — with no effect on the provincial budget.

There could be additional funds beyond that allotted to general revenue. Such a strategy, if successful, would result in further investment in innovation, infrastructure and environmental stewardship in our industries as well as contribute to a balanced budget.

K. Boparai: We feel that potential revenue will be left on the table if the B.C. ministry of energy, mines and natural gas does not directly involve the Ministry of Agriculture and affected agriculture commodity associations in the calculation of the irrigation value of water provided under the Columbia River treaty.

G. Lucas: The next question in the budget review document: would you make changes to government's programs to reduce spending?

K. Boparai: The BCFGA feels that reducing government expenditure must be delayed, if possible, until economic times improve.

K. Boparai: Resource sectors, especially in the renewable sectors such as agriculture, can create jobs in partnership with the province, provided that there is a competitive level of government programs for the sector. This is not the case at the present time in agriculture in B.C., as the graph in our presentation shows.

G. Lucas: What would you like government to do to create conditions necessary for jobs and economic growth?

K. Boparai: Increase the agriculture budget so that it is competitive with other regions.

G. Lucas: Kirpal, I think we'll skip to the summary. I've got the first part here.

The BCFGA appreciates the opportunity to provide input into the budget for an 11th consecutive year. The BCFGA recommends, one, placing the agriculture budget at an average level of competing provinces. That would increase the budget to the level it was ten years ago at $108 million.

In terms of budget priorities, we recommend that prudent debt reduction be postponed until the economy recovers and that health care costs be managed. Taxes might be increased, but that should not impact the provincial credit rating. Addressing tax inequities between rural and urban areas is important, and we're talking about the carbon tax in that case. And investment in resource sector budgets is needed to correct years of neglect.

K. Boparai: We appreciate the time and effort of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. Our hope is that the focus on getting the economic basis right will bring a positive change in focus in agriculture, which will then allow the tree fruit sector to create jobs and sustain families.

G. Coons: Thank you for your presentation — very thorough, Glen and Kirpal. I was picking apples today too. I was out in Oyama at Jim Elliot's orchard, my brother-in-law — not as long as you were, but I had an opportunity today.

I see that it is a real concern over the last ten years — the budget for the Agriculture Ministry being reduced 39 percent. I'm reading this correctly that one option is to return it to the amount it was ten years ago or to direct some money from the Columbia Basin treaty.

Could you explain more of that for me? Again, I'm trying to understand the amount that would come over.

G. Lucas: At present the Columbia River treaty provides funding. The water that is stored in B.C. is measured and converted into power generation and value, and we get half of that value from the State of Washington, from Bonneville power authority. That amounts to about $300 million a year into general revenue for the province. Our sector has not directly received any funding.

The Columbia Basin Trust has been formed, and it's received a substantial amount of money, in the hundreds of millions. That area of the province has been helped. Our area has been heavily impacted by the huge increase in apple production in Washington State, and we haven't
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received a penny.

We're saying that we don't want to dive into that existing $300 million. We want to make that $300 million larger. We're negotiating with the U.S. right now, and we want a share of that increase, if there's any extra funding that would go into the general revenue.

P. Pimm: I see you mention carbon tax a few times here in your presentation. The question I have for you is: did you make a submission to the Minister of Finance under the carbon tax competitiveness review?

G. Lucas: Our umbrella organization, the B.C. Ag Council, did make a presentation on that. One result of that was a temporary reduction for greenhouses. But the rest of agriculture has not had a reduction at this time.

P. Pimm: Right. I want to follow up on that. He actually had another review this year, from July 1 to the end of August. Did you participate in that?

G. Lucas: I will get the answer for that question to you. I'll have to contact the B.C. Ag Council.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation. I know the apples out of the orchards here are certainly the best in the area, and I would say they're my favourite. They're a great product.

You referenced the challenges of competing with the Washington State apple industry. You cite that they received $100 million towards farmworker housing. You mentioned that in B.C. you face increasing regulatory costs and restrictions on farmworker housing. Can you explain that a little bit more for me?

What we'd have to do is we'd have to go to the city, and we'd have to provide…. Then they say: "Well, you can't do this. You've got to do this, and you've got to do that." There's so much regulatory on that from city hall that even if we did get it approved, we'd get a $50,000 to $60,000 cost out front before we can even dig a little hole in there. It's really, really tough for us to even improve, because our parcels are not 200 or 300 acres. They're ten to 20 acres.

They say: "Well, you've got 20 acres, so you're only allowed one or two houses." We can't even put workers on that. We have to go to motels, which are costly.

G. Lucas: Supplementary to that, the cities do charge development cost charges, which is a new thing they've moved into on farmworker housing. Those houses are generally — I mean, almost always — on septic, so there are no sewers provided. There's no road improvement. All the services that we pay for in residential areas aren't available in rural areas, yet we pay these huge development cost charges on worker housing that's only used a few months of the year.

M. Dalton: You're requesting a budget increase to agriculture. What would you say are the most pressing needs where you would like to see the ministry lift in the field for this increase? What are some of the most pressing things?

G. Lucas: Certainly, programs such as environmental farm plans. Kirpal mentioned food safety. Those are programs. We think that there is room for efficiency programs and new technology programs.

There are new reduced-risk pesticides available, but they're much more difficult to use than the old, more toxic formulations. They're more time sensitive. They're more expensive, and they're more targeted at certain pests. We need to get some extension help with that and some transition help to that new, safer pesticide use.

Deer fencing is another program. We had that for about six years, and it hasn't been around for about five years. It's not Kirpal's deer; it's the government's deer, and they come and eat his trees. And he has to spend the money right now. The old program used to pay 30 percent of the cost of deer fencing, and it was really appreciated. But with the shrinkage of the Ministry of Agriculture budget, those programs are just cut; they're gone. So that would be reintroduced.

K. Boparai: Can I add a little bit to that? Right now, somebody needs a deer fence. Somebody needs this, and we keep coming up with lots of programs. Then they will say: "We'll give you 20 percent; we'll give you 30 percent." Those farmers are really, really hurting. We need money.

I talked about FoodSafe. That's costing the farmer. So the money should be going to the farmers — not 5 percent; not 2 percent. Those farmers then can spend the money. If somebody needs deer fencing, they can do that. But we've got to have a program where the money hits farmers' pockets. With all these programs, it hits more accountants' pockets than it does our farmers'.

I'm sitting here pleading that these farmers are in a really, really bad situation. We need to get money to their programs. If you want to create a bunch of programs and let the public know that you gave farmers $2 million, please don't do it, because they need the money, not the public announcement.

D. Horne (Chair): I want to thank you for your presentation today. Actually, it would be helpful, following up on Marc's question, if you could actually provide us further details on some of the things that you would see as important from a budget lift and where that money could be spent and what types of programs you would feel
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would be important. Obviously, it's in how the money's spent, as well, that this committee needs to understand better. So if you could follow up and provide a further written response to the committee, that would be great. Thank you for your time today.

D. Horne (Chair): As all of us here at the table except for Kate are politicians, throwing it at us might not be good because not catching it wouldn't be a good thing. [Laughter.]

K. Boparai: I would just point out they're one of the best apples grown in the world because of the way the valley sits here. It's not our doing. It's just Mother Nature gave us….

D. Horne (Chair): Gary was actually at a farm earlier today, so we had an opportunity to have one, and they were fantastic. They really were. So thank you again.

D. Horne (Chair): All right. As decorum decreases, we'll now call our next witness, the Okanagan College.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us today. As you have heard, you have ten minutes for a presentation and approximately five minutes thereafter for questions. You can begin now.

L. Kayfish: Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. I'd like to quickly introduce my colleagues with me today. To my right I have Allan Coyle, who is our director of public affairs. To my left I have Bob Eby, who is our vice-president of finance. I am Lance Kayfish, and I am the chair of the Okanagan College board of governors.

We appreciate the very real challenges that you and your colleagues face as you contemplate this and future budgets. The challenge is, as always, how to apportion scarce resources to answer public policy needs, citizen expectations and to act on current opportunities.

I'd like to start by sharing some insights from an internationally recognized expert in strategic management that I had the privilege of hearing from last week at the Thompson-Okanagan Local Government Management Association conference. Dr. Nick Bontis from McMaster University spoke about the knowledge economy and the importance of investing in talent and training.

Dr. Bontis was talking about how important it is for organizations and publicly traded companies to invest in talent development today. He told us that forward-thinking firms will position themselves to leverage a competitive advantage in skill and talent as economic conditions improve. If we wait and be reactive, he said, it will be too late. If we want to outperform the competition — that's companies — we need to be proactive and find ways to invest in developing talent today.

I would urge government to keep this principle in mind as you plan today and throughout your deliberations for B.C.'s future. You know the numbers and the issues that we face as the consequence of demographics: 1.1 million jobs, 650,000 people to fill them. We all know the silver tsunami is coming. It's predictable.

In terms of keeping B.C.'s economy strong, we must do two things. First, train and retrain B.C. citizens so they can benefit from the opportunities to come. Second, encourage immigration. Okanagan College can help with both. It should be obvious how we can meet the needs of citizens of the region we seek to serve: to improve their resumes, in turn greatly increasing the probability they will stay here in the sunny Okanagan and B.C. where they were trained.

Likewise, by meeting or exceeding the province's goal of increasing the number of international students in B.C. by 50 percent, we can bring talented, motivated individuals from abroad who will enhance our institution's educational experience, and many of whom will stay to enhance our province's economy over the long haul.

The key message I want you to hear from me today is less about public policy than it is about human impact. A few weeks ago two of your colleagues — the Speaker of the House, Bill Barisoff, and the then Minister of Advanced Education, Naomi Yamamoto — had a chance to meet an outstanding, ambitious young woman at Okanagan College.

Crystal Short, a mother helping care for a blended family with five children, is a graduate of our women in trades program at Okanagan College. She was unsparing in her thanks for the funding that helped Okanagan College launch that program, a program that has grown to be one of the largest of its type in the nation. She was excited about the opportunities, the confidence it gave her and the doors that opened.

On September 4 a very excited Crystal started her first classes in plumbing and pipefitting. She knows what post-secondary education can do to help her, and she intends now to take control of her future with all the resolve she can muster. Indeed, we found out just today that she's already being approached by various firms to start her apprenticeship program, and we're very excited for her for that.

However, there are many more Crystal Shorts out there — people whose current skill set does not or will not match the requirements of the million jobs that are forecast over the next ten years. At least a million, let's say. If we don't provide those opportunities for them to skill up for those careers, we will be in the untenable and
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unfortunate situation of having jobs without people and people without jobs.

Okanagan College's track record shows we are part of the solution. Over the past seven years Okanagan College has outperformed provincial expectations, producing student spaces that exceed what we've been funded for. Despite growth and development, we still see opportunities to build programs that will attract more students.

This is a region where transition rates from high school to post-secondary education lag behind the provincial average. We are working hard to find ways to help us create those opportunities through new sources of funding and support.

Industries, municipalities, corporations and individuals have shown they are willing to invest to help develop our capacity by partnering with us. They appreciate the economic impact and promise of a great college that provides close-to-home access to higher learning and the training that produces job-ready journeymen and graduates. They understand the role that educational capacity plays in keeping our youth and skilled workers here in the valley and British Columbia.

We do much more than just teaching and training, though. British Columbia's colleges are helping to advance the province's innovation agenda. As an example, we can point to our partnership with Accelerate Okanagan, a non-profit, tech-focused agency that has a home on our Penticton campus. We're integrating business incubation space with classrooms and shops to give aspiring entrepreneurs, apprentices and technologists a chance to rub shoulders. As a result, new B.C. businesses are being brought to life.

Through innovation we are also helping to secure B.C.'s global position as a leader in sustainability — with the development of the Jim Pattison Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Building Technologies and Renewable Energy Conservation at our Penticton campus. The only thing that isn't conservative about the building is the length of its name, which I think is actually longer than the name of this committee. It is a building, however, that is one of the most sustainable buildings in the world, with an impressive list of awards that attest to its unique and distinguished nature.

More than that, though, the Jim Pattison Centre of Excellence embodies innovation itself. It is an energy-neutral facility which is very likely producing more energy on a sunny day like today than it's actually consuming. It brings together several new technologies and innovations to set a precedent for building and change perceptions, not only producing a great space to learn in but also acting as a teaching tool and experimental laboratory for the students that learn in it.

It bears Mr. Pattison's name to honour the contributions of a great entrepreneur to the economy and the well-being of this province, and also to acknowledge his significant donation of $2.5 million to our successful fundraising campaign. When we started that campaign, we had a $5 million goal. When it's complete, it will have raised more than $9 million. This is certainly, in large part, because of Mr. Pattison's vision, looking to ensure that his money can do the most good. He made his donation contingent on us raising equivalent dollars.

There may be a lesson in that for you as you contemplate ways to stretch limited resources. Matching-fund programs for colleges are a strategy government should look at in order to even better engage B.C. industry in contributing to colleges directly. After all, both B.C. as a province and B.C. industry benefit from those investments. When we can go to industry with programs and plans that will benefit them and ask for their support and their money, that conversation is made much easier when we can match their investment and they see their contributions having the impact of two-for-one dollars.

Industry is there to pitch in. Right now, for instance, we have several companies and industry organizations indicating support, much of that financial, for a new program we are proposing at the Jim Pattison Centre of Excellence: a three-year sustainable construction management technology program that will give graduates the skills that are being asked for today by industry. We — the college, prospective students and employers — are hoping for government support to get this program off the ground.

Now, while I make this pitch for increased funding on one hand, let me also say we understand that doing more with less is an obligation of organizations like ours in this current climate. We appreciate and are fully engaged in initiatives to find efficiencies within our sector and are not so bold as to say that there aren't ways we can save money by doing things differently.

With the support and sacrifice from staff, we have avoided program reductions at Okanagan College. With predictions of further cost increases and funding reductions in the years ahead, we cannot predict that is something we will be able to avoid in the future. However, as we seek further efficiencies, we ask government today to be mindful of the strategic power of investing in B.C. colleges.

We ask you to look at redirecting savings from baseline reductions and efficiencies to targeted areas like matching programs. Help us enhance our ability to engage industry and make strategic investments in specialized program areas such as the sustainable construction management technology program I just mentioned.

Invest in initiatives that focus on enhancing B.C.'s appeal to international students, programs to improve access and success rates for aboriginal students, and focused funding to increase transition rates from high school to post-secondary education. These are examples of targeted opportunities government should be considering.
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We need to keep providing the opportunities for people like Crystal Short. We need to keep our eye on the prize and think about how our colleges are an investment in the success of our citizens and the communities we serve.

Things are always changing, of course, and just after lunch I did learn, and I was heartened to learn, that government has announced a skills and training plan that will invest $75 million in training facilities and equipment in our system. It is much appreciated. And from what I have been saying, you can guess that many of the directions outlined in that plan are indeed welcome.

To all the members of this committee, I would ask that you continue to think strategically and position our province for continued success as one of the best places to live, learn and work in the entire world. Invest in institutions like Okanagan College with a track record for exceeding expectations and creating innovation, and taxpayers can be confident they're being well-served.

M. Dalton: Just your demographics. I know that in the K-to-12 it's been going down significantly. What's the experience here over the past number of years with Okanagan College? Also, your campuses are located where? How many different satellites or sites are you…?

L. Kayfish: I can start to answer those questions and look to my colleagues to fill in the blanks.

We have four main campuses in Salmon Arm, Vernon, Kelowna and Penticton, but we also have other smaller satellite operations that go as far as Revelstoke and Osoyoos. So we do stretch for quite a large demographic area.

In terms of the experience in terms of the enrolment at Okanagan College, I did mention having exceeded expectations for the last several years. I know we have grown every year since the college was created seven years ago, with, I think, an average growth rate, it would be fair to say, of about 5 percent a year. There are years when we've had as large as 9 and 10 percent, and we are now just, I think, levelling out.

Transition rates and what is happening in the K-to-12 system are certainly something that we're looking closely at. But as I mentioned, even as some of the students coming through that system might decrease over time, what we are working with the school boards to do is to focus on improving the number of students that come out of that system to Okanagan College and, hopefully, to other institutions as well.

M. Dalton: The UBC college, is that totally separate? Okay. Is that providing a source of competition for students, or is it going to work out fine?

L. Kayfish: I'll jump on that question and then pass it over to my colleague Allan.

No, I think this region is being very well served by the two institutions, and we're constantly looking for ways to collaborate. There are areas where we meet needs together. In a lot of areas we focus on separate program areas.

A great example of a successful area is that we have now started providing the first two years of a bachelor of nursing program, where the final two years are completed here at the university. That is something we're able to do, creating capacity that they would otherwise not have been able to create. What happens after the first two years? Our students merge with their students. They've done two years at the University of British Columbia, and they continue on as a cohort. So by working together we're able to answer a much-needed need in terms of nurses.

A. Coyle: I think not so much competition as cooperation and serving the same and different markets. UBC, not to speak for them, has been able to attract a fair number of students from outside the region. We're focused primarily inside the region but have become much more of a destination institution as well, attracting students from throughout British Columbia.

I think one of the reasons is because the Okanagan is becoming known as an education destination.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation. I'm interested in terms of the transition from high school into post-secondary. Do you have a number or a percentage? Is that available?

A. Coyle: I can speak to it fairly knowledgably. We're about 10 percent behind the provincial average, and it depends on whether you're talking first-year transition or transition over seven years. No matter how you slice that pie, we're about 10 percent below the provincial average and significantly below the transition rates you'd find in the Lower Mainland, for instance.

I think we're running at about 43 percent right now for immediate transition. We're very conscious of the fact that the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Advanced Education are both highlighting those transition rates as a key driver and accountability measure for the systems in the future.

We've been working closely with the eight school districts that are contained within our region to try and improve those transition rates. We've been having a great
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deal of success. Part of it is the dual-credit programs, etc., but it's building.

The question about: what do high school numbers look like for us in the future? We've peaked already, and they're starting to drop. They will come back, but as we look at demands for the education and training services that we have, we're looking at: "Okay. We need to build those transition rates as well."

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Right. I just have a quick follow-up. We've heard from other institutions that the issue of administrative accounting measures — for example, allowing carryover of surplus, and, I think, really motivating that kind of entrepreneurial spirit…. Is that a priority that you also identify would be helpful?

L. Kayfish: It's a concern, and Bob, who's with us today, is working closely with the ministry on providing some ideas about some solutions. But certainly your point about hampering the ability to be entrepreneurial, to think innovative…. We were talking right before coming in about that exact problem.

What it doesn't allow us to do is take a business model approach, where we might look at kicking off a program or working with government to partially fund the kickoff of a program. And maybe the program doesn't make all the money back in the first year. It might not just be a program that's normally offered through your normal, tuition-based sort of route. Maybe it's a contract service that we have with a specific industry to provide certain training.

Sometimes the upfront costs are going to be such that you might lose money for a few years before you start making money, but it's a good business case, and that's the sort of innovative approach that B.C. colleges could do more of if we had more flexibility that way.

R. Eby: I think you've stated the main issue pretty well, Lance. The other issue that we have is that we're at increased risk in entrepreneurial activities even in areas like international education, where there can be significant fluctuations year to year. I think back — I don't know — six or seven years to the SARS outbreak and the tremendous impact that had on international enrolments. Without access to our surplus, we can't smooth that kind of transition out. We're stuck in a situation where we have to cut back significantly in other areas in order to adjust the programs that we know would come back in a couple of years or even as short as one year, simply because those kinds of fluctuations can't be smoothed as a business normally would use their surplus.

D. Horne (Chair): Bob, it was mentioned that you were looking at solutions to that. If you do have any solutions and you could send them to us, it would be great, because we are looking at doing something there as well. Thank you so much.

B. Routley: Quick. I've got a couple of quick questions, but the main one is…. We've heard from students in the past. I've been on the committee a number of times now, and one of the common themes from students was the issue of tuition and the fact that some students become debt-averse, as they called it. After a two- or three-year term they end up dropping out. I wondered if your college had experienced any of that. Is that actually an issue that we should be aware of? Do you concern yourself at all with students that don't complete their programs? Do we have any numbers of students that do not complete the program that they entered?

I guess the other thing was about oversubscribed programs. Have you had a situation where you've actually had to turn students away? We heard in the past about students being turned away from nursing programs, for example, at a time when the province needs nurses. I've wondered if you had any experiences with some of the skills that we're clearly going to need and people actually being turned away.

L. Kayfish: Well, I think I'll start by answering the last point you addressed to us. As an example, in nursing in particular, for those 24 spots I mentioned to the earlier question, I think we had over 350-some qualified applicants for those spots.

I think in general you can say on a year-to-year basis we have at least 1,000 qualified students on wait-lists that don't get in. That varies from year to year, from program to program. We have some good numbers on it. In fact, we don't have maybe the best numbers, and we're talking about improving our tracking there. What we actually do is cut the wait-lists off after it gets unrealistic to put students on wait-lists and take their application. We just let them know that the program is full. That's a practice that we're looking at maybe refining so we can get some better metrics.

In general, to your question about: do we have any concerns about students who aren't completing their program? Yes, that's where we're focused on — the student experience and the success of our students. In general, we are very sensitive to both the politics around tuition and the impact of rising costs on students. But it certainly does occur to us. In fact, I actually just had lunch today with a former student board member who just rolled off. We spoke about this very issue.

The reality is that for most students the main costs of education and taking time out of their lives to achieve that education aren't the tuition costs. They're the living expenses and not being able to work and study that really make it most difficult. I believe the tuition costs
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in this province are currently manageable. I would go back to the theme of part of our presentation, which is…. You know, if that's something that this committee is concerned with, targeted funding areas — other provinces, for instance, that have special granting programs for students from rural areas to attend college, understanding that those students in the urban centres might more easily be able to attend a college or university close to home. I'm not aware of a program like that here in B.C.

Those are the types of things you might look at. I would be remiss if I didn't mention on behalf of the students — whom, I just said, we always serve and concern ourselves with — that they would not mind to see tuition reductions as a government initiative either.

D. Horne (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for being with us today.

We'll now call our next witnesses, which are the Kelowna Joint Water Committee and the city of Kelowna.

As they're getting forward to the table, I'd like to recognize Al Horning, who's in our audience, a long-time Member of Parliament for this area. Welcome to the committee today.

As you've heard, you have ten minutes for a presentation. We'll have about five minutes of questions afterwards, and you're ready to begin now.

R. Hrasko: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Bob Hrasko. I am the administrator of Black Mountain irrigation district. I represent one of the utilities, but collectively, with the group that we have, we represent all five large water utilities within the city of Kelowna.

I have beside me city councillor Gerry Zimmermann. Gerry is also regional district director and sits on the Okanagan Basin Water Board. He's representing the city of Kelowna and, collectively, the efforts that we have.

G. Zimmermann: Just very briefly, thank you for letting us present today. The work that Bob's going to talk about we've been working on now with Kelowna Joint for about two years. I'd just like to tell you that the relationship between the five water purveyors in Kelowna has never been better. We as a city recognize the need for good, clean water, and the work that these people are doing right now is invaluable to us.

R. Hrasko: The other person at the table is Gordon Ivans, and he's the chair of the board of the whole of elected officials for the five utilities. Gord is also the chairman of the Black Mountain irrigation district.

What happened three years ago was that Interior Health raised standards in the southern Interior for drinking water quality, and it put pressure on all of the utilities to upgrade their quality.

What we have in Kelowna is very large combined irrigation and domestic systems. What happened was the irrigation systems were there first in the early '70s, and they were pressurized in the early 1970s. What happened was that the city grew onto those pressurized mains and the water quality needed to be improved.

These are huge systems. Collectively, it's the second largest water supplier group in the province. We actually provide more water than the capital regional district does on a daily basis in our summer or on annual basis. The only larger purveyor in the province is the greater Vancouver water utility.

Right now this is the third time we've been in front of this committee. We weren't successful, I guess, the last two times. So we're hoping that you'll listen to us and see that we're trying to do the right thing for greater Kelowna.

Kelowna right now is the largest populated area in the province that still has a large number of water quality advisories and/or boil-water notices in the spring. That happens with the turbidity in the creeks and the lack of filtration on those systems or alternate sources by which we can provide the domestic water to the households. We're subject to that because of the health regulations.

We also have large agricultural land holdings where the ALR has actually set what the land use is, and the density is very low in those areas. So there are outlying areas in the peripheral region in Kelowna, meaning Glenmore-Ellison improvement district, Black Mountain irrigation district and southeast Kelowna irrigation district. That's on the eastern benches, and it gets the water out of the creeks. Those utilities get their water out of the creeks.

There's also a provincial policy not to provide funding assistance to improvement districts. That is a policy because there are so many tiny improvement districts in the province. There used to be over 350; I think it's down to about 220 right now, and most of them are small. They're, like, 50 connections or 100 connections.

These are large improvement districts that we have in Kelowna. All of them have over 2,000 connections. Black Mountain serves over 20,000 people and by itself provides more water than all of the city of Penticton. Collectively, they're large systems. They're very effective systems because they're single-service providers.

What has happened in the past three years is that we've been very busy. We've been working on these projects. In the last three years between Glenmore and Black Mountain alone we've spent over $15 million on water quality upgrades. That's without assistance. That's dipping into capital reserves, and that's weakening our ability to actually leverage any money in the future in paying our third if we were successful in getting funding.

Fortunately, right now the banks are friendly and interest rates are very low. But we still have figured it all out with our projects and our reports, and we're facing some very steep water rates without any assistance. Southeast Kelowna — their water rate looks like it's going to be over 1,300 bucks a year. That will get them a dual-distribution system and a groundwater well supply.

When we went to the province, they said: "You have to do these certain things." They're set out in the agenda, on page 4. We had proposed water treatment projects. The province asked us to develop a report and a plan for all of Kelowna based on four provincial objectives: best lowest-cost solutions, flexibility in development of solutions and in governance, make sure we achieve the public health outcomes of Interior Health and make sure we look after our agriculture.

We developed a plan collectively with all five utilities, all of the consultants of those utilities. It's about a 350-page report. It has everything you need to know about water, domestic water, water supply in Kelowna and how we move forward in a staged process. We've gotten favourable comments from four different ministries on the plan, and the province has now asked us to develop an implementation strategy, which we're working on right now. So we've been busy on this.

At the table right now everybody's still hopeful, but with the recent news on the natural gas lack of funding, everybody kind of goes "argh." We are still moving forward on these projects regardless. But this being the largest area in the province that hasn't received funding…. The last time we got funding for major water-quality projects in Kelowna was in about 1972.

These are self-sufficient utilities. They've been operating without assistance for over 40 years now. It seems to me that…. I work as a consulting engineer sometimes, and every time I see a major screwup, that community gets funding. These are not screwed-up utilities. They are challenged by a number of factors that are not their fault. They are the evolution of a city around them, and now the costs are going up and they're asking for help. They haven't screwed up along the way. They're very well-managed, well-run utilities. The public's very happy with the level of service in these areas.

We developed this plan. We think it's a good one. It's staged. It's manageable. We're looking for approximately $90 million, of which we're looking for one-third from the province, and support from the federal government — so $30 million for the Kelowna utilities, $30 million from the province, $30 million from the federal government. We've been in discussions with Ron Cannan, who's our local MP here, and Ron is very supportive. He has been supportive all the way through with us, but he says: "You have to convince the province." That's where we are today.

D. Horne (Chair): You've got about 2½ minutes, but if you'd prefer to use the time for questions….

D. Hayer: Well, thank you very much for a very good presentation. So you're basically looking for capital funding for one time.

D. Hayer: You say a Member of Parliament has said that if the province funds it, the federal government had the money available or they might have the money available. Do you know?

G. Ivans: Ron has indicated that if the province comes to the table, he seemed pretty confident that he's going to be able to do his deed at the other end. So time will tell.

G. Ivans: Yeah, Steve and Norm and Ben and these guys are all aware of what's happening in Kelowna with the Joint Water Committee, what we're doing with our capital works projects. Like Glenmore, ourselves, we're starting on our UV plans. Kelowna is doing their separation. Rutland waterworks…. Everybody's got their capital works projects, I guess, kind of laid out for the next five or six years. It's not like we're going to be able to do these all in one or two years. It's going to be spread over time.

As Bob indicated, too, it would be nice if we got something because, you know, we've looked at Kamloops, Summerland, Vernon and stuff like that. We understand things are tight in Victoria, but if you guys do have any money available for something like this, it would certainly help the ratepayers and the rates that are happening right now. Regardless of the funding we get, we're going to have to increase the rates quite a bit just to move to where Bob was talking — to this $90 million mark. So anything we can get we sure would appreciate.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation. Just if you can help to explain a little bit more. You have a $90 million plan. Is that over a number of years and through…?

R. Hrasko: It's over five years. What we have…. Actually, it's about a $300 million plan if we put filtration and major transmission mains in. The numbers are on page 5. What we have to achieve to meet the minimum requirements from Interior Health is $49 million, which is the end of stage 3. And then what we need to achieve to be reliably meeting the requirements of Interior Health is to the end of stage 5. So it's $90 million.
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If we can't keep the sources clean enough or we have to filter the water, then a filtration plant gets added, and they're very expensive. A UV plant costs approximately one-tenth of that of a filtration plant. UV is the best available cost-effective technology that we can use, and that's what we have built into our plans.

R. Hrasko: To get to the end of stage 5 would be, yes, approximately five years.

M. Dalton: Did you receive significant grants two or three years back, with the infrastructure plan through the feds, in collaboration with the feds, the province and the municipality? Did any of that funding go towards…?

R. Hrasko: No. The majority of the projects were ineligible because we are improvement districts. Four of the five are improvement districts.

D. Horne (Chair): Well, thank you so much for your time today and making a presentation to the committee.

Richard, welcome to the committee. I think you've heard that you have ten minutes for a presentation, and your time begins now.

R. Ingram: Good evening. Thank you very much. I won't take ten minutes, but I want to thank you for coming to Kelowna, and I want to applaud all the MLAs for taking the time to tour the province. I know the Finance Committee is not the first, and I'm sure it won't be the last that's come through.

I've lived in this community for over 25 years and been an integral part of many of the community activities to try and make this a better place to live, and my comments really are to encourage the province of British Columbia and the Finance Committee to continue down the road that you are on. I believe it's important to continue to focus on levelling the income tax field, and I don't necessarily mean by raising the lower levels of income from a tax perspective. I may suggest that you want to have a flat tax. There's been lots of economic discussion about the value-added for a flat tax on income.

I also want to encourage you to bring back the value-added tax. The HST was poorly presented, as you all know, and it is the most efficient and fair means of collecting a tax in the province. I want to encourage you to do that.

Lastly, I would encourage the provincial government to focus on tomorrow. And by focusing on tomorrow, I really believe that you want to focus on youth and education. The better the standard of living, the better the ability of education that the child has, the higher the standard of living they can have and the better standard we have in the province, and I want to encourage you to continue to find efficient ways to fund smart education and better education.

That's all I want to encourage you to do. I know you have lots of groups, and I know lots of groups come and beat on you. I want to encourage you to be positive, and I want to encourage you to be smart with our money.

R. Ingram: I'm a portfolio manager and vice-president with RBC Dominion Securities. I've been a Rotarian in this community for over 30 years, past director on the KG Hospital Foundation, past president of a group called BrainTrust Canada — we work with acquired brain injury — a founding member of a group called Rotaplast Canada, which does cleft lip and cleft palate repair around the world in underdeveloped countries, to name a few. But RBC Dominion Securities.

G. Coons: Thank you, Richard, for your presentation, your thoughts. I really appreciate that.

Throughout our travels so far, and I'm sure we're going to hear more as we go to the other 15 to 20 communities…. You talked about focusing on tomorrow, and we've heard that. The youth and education is a key, I think, to where we need to go. But you talked about taxes also — levelling income tax, flat tax, value-added tax. What are your thoughts about the corporate taxes?

R. Ingram: I believe that the corporate tax levy is a very, very competitive field, and corporations will pick up and move if we don't provide a sound environment for them to work. Tax is one of the primary costs of their business.

I remember the early '80s. I called it the lost decade. I lived in Prince George at the time. I remember the construction industry stopped with the 19 and 20 percent interest rates, and I remember how all the subtrades had to pick up and move. They went to Ontario because that's where the work was. I remember also at that time in that community there were 500 vacant homes with mortgages in default with the Royal Bank.

I know corporations will move, because they have to survive, and we've seen it. We've seen Finning Tractor move their head office to Edmonton. We've seen Telus move their head office. We know these things happen. I truly believe that the best environment you can create from a corporate tax perspective is to encourage re-
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investment in our communities and allow them to have the funds to create the jobs and keep your tax rate low.

D. Hayer: Thank you very much for your presentation, and thank you for helping the community organizations. You have helped in so many ways in so many different organizations.

I take it your view is that if the corporate tax rate was to be increased, go back to the way it used to be ten years ago, we will lose jobs and we'll lose investment?

D. Horne (Chair): You thanked us for our work. I want to thank you for taking the time today to be with us here and to present to the committee. I think it's important. I think your presence here today and giving your ideas really does help — being a part of the process. So thank you so much.

R. Ingram: You're welcome. I appreciate the opportunity, and I wish you success.

D. Horne (Chair): I'll now call our next witness, which is the Canadian Federation of the Blind. I believe Mary Ellen and Paul are here in the audience.

M. Gabias: Hi. My name's Mary Ellen Gabias, and I am president of the Canadian Federation of the Blind. My husband, Paul, is also with me. We're here to talk to you about the province doing something that I'm sure most of you believe is already being done.

Let me ask you a quick question. If you became blind, do you believe that you could go to a city you've never been to before and find your way around unassisted? Do you believe you could cook a meal for 40 people? Do you believe you could take eight or ten kids to the Rutland May Days? Do you believe you could use the computer to handle e-mail? Do you believe you could just live your life the way you've always done?

A lot of people don't think they can do that if they become blind. They believe that blindness leads to diminished expectations and lower possibilities for employment or for success in life. It doesn't have to be that way. Every one of the things I mentioned are things that blind people routinely do if they have the training and if they have the opportunity.

The problem is that in B.C. the training doesn't exist. If you have a brain injury or a spinal cord injury, you can go to G.F. Strong and get rehabilitation to learn how to function with your disability. If you have a mental handicap, then Community Living is there for you. And yes, I know there has been some controversy about that program, but it is there and the province does fund it.

I believe that people in British Columbia believe that blind people are getting good training, because I know that if people thought that we weren't, they'd want to do something about it.

There are different ways to provide training to blind people, and one of the most intensive but effective is blindness immersion training. That's training that lasts six to nine months and is done 24-7. People go to class during the day and take Braille, cane travel, woodworking, homemaking and other courses. They do water-skiing and go into rock climbing and other kinds of recreational challenges.

The whole point is to build skills, to build confidence and to change attitudes about blindness. That's an approach that we believe very strongly in. For people who need it and who don't get it, it may be the only thing that makes the difference between being unemployed and on welfare for life and being an employed and productive citizen.

Our request is that the government of B.C. fund training for blind people who need blindness immersion skills training. There are roughly 3,000 to 4,000 working-age blind adults in British Columbia. By no means will all of them need that training. In fact, in most places in the United States where these kinds of skills training programs do exist, about 1 percent of the adult working-age blind population a year attends them, so we're really talking a small number of people. Because people would need to travel to Minnesota or Colorado or Louisiana, which is where those training programs exist, the numbers from B.C. would be small.

The cost per person is about $40,000 or a little less, depending on whether a person needs nine months or a year. And the cost of keeping somebody on welfare for 30 years is considerably more than that. In fact, I did some quick figures this afternoon and figured that if somebody works for just 38 months and is off welfare for that long, they will have saved the province enough money to have paid for their training. Over a lifetime, the province would save over $250,000 per person if somebody goes through training and becomes skilled.

We know one woman who is bright. She's in her 30s. She has lived at home all of her life. Her parents love her a lot, but they're a little bit afraid to let her try new things, and if they don't know how to teach her, they do it for her. So she doesn't know how to get about by herself. She doesn't know how to cook. She's a bright woman. She has taught herself to use computers and has everything that you'd need to be a really productive employee. But as long as she's at home with mom and dad, she's not going to learn what she needs to learn.

She needs to go someplace where for nine months she's expected to learn new things, to do new things, to take care of herself and be taught how to do it. That can't be done while she's still living at home with mom and dad.
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This wouldn't involve a great deal of effort on the part of the government. All you would really need to do is to let Work B.C. know that what they consider pre-employment skills — learning Braille, learning how to get around — could be funded through Work B.C. You wouldn't need to set up a new program. Just simply set it out so that people who need that funding could go to Work B.C. and have that included as part of their plan for employment.

I'd be glad to answer any questions. My husband, Paul…. Just recently we found a blind woman here. She was an American living in Canada, but because she was a U.S. citizen, she was eligible for training in the U.S., paid for by a state agency. My husband just escorted her to the state of Nebraska, where there is that kind of training. If you'd like, he can tell you some of what that program has to offer and why we think it's such an important option for people.

P. Gabias: Okay. My background. I am the founder of the Canadian Federation of the Blind, and I am an associate professor of psychology at UBC Okanagan. I also am a wellness consultant with a Japanese company called Nikken.

My training as a blind person came at the school for the blind in Montreal, where I did learn Braille throughout my schooling. I did learn cane travel, and that's how come I know it. And I learned how to cook over time. But there are people who…. This woman that we met had no skills whatsoever. She was afraid to even come out onto her balcony and walk down the stairs. I had to spend some time teaching her those very basic skills.

The kind of training that we're talking about does not exist in B.C., and the CNIB does not offer it. Luckily, she's an American. The rehabilitation system in the United States is such that the federal government and the state governments are in partnership so that they are mandated by law to put people through training sufficient that they will actually be employable. So this woman will be given hearing aids, because she's partially deaf, and all the equipment that she needs. She's going to be expected to perform as a competent human being, in time.

That's what happened in Nebraska. What Mary Ellen explained is certainly what they do there. Nebraska — that's a state agency. There are private agencies that contract with each state. But there are also state agencies, and it's actually the government's responsibility to do the rehabilitation.

We have talked with government. We have talked to a number of people. This is not the first time we've raised this issue. We are told there's no money. So we get the impression that either blind people are not considered to be important, or the rehabilitation of blind people isn't considered to be important. It's either because people just don't think blind people are important, or they think that they're important people but that blindness just isn't…. There's not much you can really do to make people competitive.

I don't know what the reason is, but we've been asking for, I think, five years now. Nothing happens — nothing.

So we're getting, well, certainly disappointed and certainly disillusioned, but we keep asking. Maybe somebody will hear it.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. I think it was very informative and also very helpful and very clear in terms of outlining the challenges and your request.

I have a question. You mentioned that there's no training available in B.C. Is there training available in Canada? I know you mentioned, Paul, that you attended the school for the blind in Montreal. Your request for funding for the immersion training — are you thinking of sending, basically, British Columbians to the States to get that training, or are there facilities or institutions available in Canada to provide that?

M. Gabias: Believe me, if there were in Canada, that's what we would push for. But there aren't currently in Canada. There are people trying to help create them over time, but they don't exist now, and the people who need the training can't wait.

We've had a couple of Canadians who have gone down to the United States. In 1996-97 British Columbia did actually pay for a guy to go to get training in Minnesota. He came back and was employed within a month of his return and worked until he had a stroke which made it impossible to continue his job. He worked as a blind person for five years.

We had three people who have managed to talk American charities into paying for their training. The American charities have money that they usually set aside for people from Third World countries, but these Canadians were able to point out that Canada doesn't do anything and that they really needed it. So Canadians got American charitable money meant for the poorest of the
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poor, which ought to embarrass Canada, I should think.

No, there is no blindness immersion training like the training we're talking about anywhere in Canada.

M. Dalton: Thank you for your presentation. It was very informative. You answered some of the questions right there, but what are provinces doing? What would you say is the best model in Canada at this point?

You mentioned $40,000. That doesn't seem to be an inordinate amount of money for what's being offered. Is that what the program is, or is that all-inclusive?

M. Gabias: That $4,000 a month includes training and room and board. That's training eight hours a day, five days a week. Plus because people aren't blind just eight hours a day, the centres work at helping people deal with life in general outside of training. Things happen on evenings and weekends, whether it's a trip to the local bar to hear some music or to bowl, or whether it's…. For the Louisiana people, folks go down to Mardi Gras — anything to shake up people's notion that says: "I can't do that."

M. Dalton: What do we do here in British Columbia, for example, for the CNIB and others? Are blind people left to manage on their own?

M. Gabias: Pretty much. I'm not here to badmouth anybody. CNIB is the name everybody thinks of. Their training model is designed primarily to meet the needs of elderly people with vision loss of varying degrees. Those folks need services too, and mostly, if you're 80, you're not going to want to go down to Colorado for a year to get training. CNIB does not have, does not even claim to have, the kind of training we're talking about.

Mostly the provinces said: "Oh, CNIB takes care of the blind. We don't have to think much about it." The province simply hasn't paid any attention.

D. Horne (Chair): We've unfortunately reached the end of the time we have available. I wish to thank you for your presentation today and being here today.

M. Gabias: I have one question for you. How do we follow up with you or with the government to see what's being planned and to help make it happen?

D. Horne (Chair): Sure. Basically, this committee puts forward a report to both the Legislative Assembly and to the Minister of Finance on or around November 15. I'll make certain that the Clerk's office sends you a copy of that report. I'm not certain if we have any available, but we will….

D. Hayer: We can also send your comments and suggestions to the minister in charge of that to see the view before the Finance Committee. You made a very good business case, saying: "Look, they can be away from the social assistance program. They can actually be working and have a better lifestyle — better for them and better for the taxpayer and the government."

P. Gabias: If the government needs to send money to a Canadian entity, it can send money to the Canadian Federation of the Blind. It's a non-profit organization throughout Canada. Then we can dispense it such that people get the training where they want to get it.

M. Gabias: We're not doing this to raise funds for ourselves, though. We're doing it simply to…. We'll do whatever we can to facilitate this happening for people. Every day that people sit around doing nothing, they get more into the habit and it gets harder to change their lifestyle.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): I also suggest you can try and talk to your local MLAs and also your Member of Parliament to bring up….

P. Gabias: We talked to our local MLA. He said there's no money. That's why we're here.

We'll now call our next presenter, which is the BrainTrust Canada Association. As you may or may not have heard — I'll say it again — you have ten minutes to present, and then we'll have about five minutes of questions afterwards. You can begin your presentation anytime.

M. Friesen: Good evening, Mr. Chair and committee members. My name is Maribeth Friesen, and I'm the CEO of BrainTrust Canada Association. I'm here with two of my colleagues: Laurie Denton, the director of programs, and Magda Kapp, director of communications. We're here to tell you a little bit about our organization and to share our observations and experiences as direct service providers in this province.

BrainTrust Canada is a not-for-profit charity which has been in existence for more than 25 years. Service to community is provided in two ways: individual and group support for people and their families who are living with brain injury in Kelowna, Vernon and surrounding areas; and injury prevention education, which has a national reach through partnerships with other organizations and social media initiatives.

Acquired brain injury, for those not familiar, occurs after birth and can be from traumatic causes, such as car crashes, assaults or falls, or non-traumatic injury such as stroke, infection or lack of oxygen.
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In your packages you will see some compelling statistics for brain injury in B.C. and in Canada, such as the rate. Keep in mind that these are for traumatic cases only — 22,000 in B.C. each year, 165,000 in Canada, one new brain injury every three minutes — and that brain injury is the greatest cause of death and disability under the age of 44.

Brain injury is not selective. Anyone at any time can incur a brain injury, and it takes just a second to change a life forever. Physical, emotional and cognitive dysfunction too often lead to a downward spiral, and the social and economic toll is staggering. Loss of employment, relationships, housing, lost productivity and reliance on income supports are but a few. When one considers the overrepresentation of people in our prison and homeless populations alone who have brain injury, it is clear that this is one of the most costly conditions facing British Columbians today.

A year ago I moved to British Columbia to take on this position with BrainTrust. I've had the opportunity over the last year to talk with several people working at a community level for the cause, in the health sector, in government positions and to individuals and families living with brain injury every day.

It puzzles me why, given the obvious prevalence of this condition and its impact across so many sectors, it is not seen to be a priority. It is becoming even less so. Wait-lists are growing; funding opportunities are shrinking. Our organization, like so many others, must fundraise nearly half of our annual revenue to meet the costs of providing a basic service, one that meets only half of the need currently identified to us.

We applaud the work that has been done and the work that is happening every day to make people's lives better and to prevent injury from happening. However, we are missing a united, cohesive plan in this province to address brain injury, both from a service standpoint as well as from a research and policy perspective.

This forms the basis of our call to action today. The role of community-based organizations like BrainTrust Canada Association is integral to the continuity that is necessary to respond to this issue at both ends. We believe in what we are doing, and we know that it is making a difference.

Magda will now share a brief overview of our injury prevention work with you, followed by Laurie, who will share two stories about our client services.

M. Kapp: We believe that prevention is the best and only cure, especially for youth, who are at the highest risk for brain injury. One reason for this is that our brains are actually not fully formed until our mid-20s, and areas such as judgment and reasoning are among the last to develop. These are functions of our frontal lobe.

Youth 15 to 24 are at greatest risk, as they're more independent, taking more risks, playing sports, often drinking, driving and more susceptible to inattention — i.e., texting while driving and such. BrainTrust Canada has coordinated two social marketing initiatives over the past years to reach this audience, the first being Protect Your Head, which was actually a series of public service ads and visuals using drawings as the analogy for injury.

We won nine international awards for this, including Cannes, the New York Film Festival and the International Safety Media Awards in Mexico. Last year we were actually awarded the B.C. Association of Broadcasters award for these as well, and we won a full year of television and radio ads for these public service ads.

Last year we also coordinated an on-line contest for youth, called Sponsor My Head, in which youth made a one-minute video of themselves doing their street sport of choice.

We had a busy year last year. We also funded a young man, David McGuire. He ran a marathon a day across Canada — St. John's, Newfoundland, to Victoria. He actually sustained a brain injury through stroke in his early 30s. He was never a runner before and became a runner after, and yet he has no short-term memory. Some days he didn't remember running the day before.

We also have a strong focus on concussion, which is brain injury, and partner with the national ski patrol, whose members carry the concussion cards you'll see in your packages. In the Okanagan we do several programs, including a helmet safety program with RCMP and the bylaw officers. We're providing helmets to those who can't afford them, and we reward youth for positive behaviour.

We're active in the schools, speaking to youth of a variety of ages about the function and fragility of the brain and to bring awareness to prevention. We receive very little funding for our injury prevention initiatives and must fundraise for all these programs.

In closing, as mentioned, we believe prevention is the best and only cure. If we prevent, actually, just one brain injury, we will all save $4 million, which has been estimated as the long-term-care cost for one serious brain injury, and that does not include the human suffering or lost wages.

I have spent my entire almost-30-year career working in various sectors of human services, and my educational background is in nursing. Half of that time I have worked specifically with people with acquired brain injury.

What I can tell you from my experience is that acquired brain injury creates the most complex, diverse and misunderstood picture of disability that I have encountered.
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I'm going to share a couple of individual stories and experiences of brain injury that will help to illustrate the personal cost of acquired brain injury. I'm going to call it ABI from now.

Peter is a man who was deeply street-entrenched and marginalized when we first met him in 2008. Current Canadian research states that 60 percent of the homeless population have acquired brain injury. We discovered he had sustained a subdural hematoma from a fall off the roof of a downtown building years earlier but had received no ongoing support following his discharge from acute care — this despite the fact that he was left with very little short-term memory or ability to learn new information.

When we met him, he was having numerous contacts with police weekly, was drinking to extreme intoxication daily and was abjectly homeless. He was using a significant amount of community services and posing a great concern to local service agencies and law enforcement.

Peter had not bathed or washed his clothes anywhere other than the lake in years. He had not lived in an apartment or home of any sort — other than the homeless shelter when it was very cold — in at least ten years. He had not been seen by a doctor since his hospitalization. He spent his days dumpster diving and hunting for bottles to return for money at the nearest bottle depot.

Since we began working with Peter, many areas of his life have changed. He is stably housed and living with people who, through our support and intervention, understand and are tolerant of his needs. Peter regularly attends groups at BrainTrust that help him to manage his addiction through a program approach that is uniquely designed to take his brain injury into account. Another group provides an opportunity to socialize with others, meet friends and discuss current-event topics. Each of these activities provides a meaningful outlet to Peter and time in which he is not drinking or involved in self-harming behaviours.

Peter has daily community-based contact with our staff in order to complete the activities of daily living that you or I would take for granted, which include shopping, cooking, attending appointments and taking medication. Recently his name was brought up at a community agency meeting. He was inquired about because his previous errant and unruly behaviour had not been a focus of the downtown patrol or the RCMP for a number of months.

Another person I would like to tell you about is a woman who illustrates how ABI is very often an invisible injury. Mary is an attractive, middle-aged woman who was enjoying a career as a legal assistant at a prestigious law firm. Mary was married and raising two teenagers in an affluent area of town. She was the hub of her home and her office. She kept both running smoothly with her ability to multitask, organize and make quick, accurate decisions.

Mary was the victim of a hit-and-run while riding her bike to work. Despite having been unconscious for a number of hours, she was released from hospital when her physical injuries were healed, with no mention of a diagnosis of brain injury. Mary struggled through the next 18 months. She attempted to return to work but quickly discovered that she was no longer able to attend to the details of her work, organize, sequence or follow through with the tasks and activities she had earlier completed as second nature. She was fatigued, anxious and frustrated, and even simple day-to-day tasks such as cooking and cleaning were no longer manageable.

Had Mary been properly diagnosed and referred for our services at the beginning, much of her struggle and pain would have been alleviated. It is during times like these in a person's recovery that our community support can be instrumental in teaching compensatory strategies and providing accurate information on the effects of acquired brain injury. If provided in a timely manner, this intervention can often prevent the downward spiral that many people experience when they have no support and do not know where to turn.

Eventually, Mary was diagnosed and contacted BrainTrust Canada. She currently attends a peer support group and has become an eloquent and passionate supporter of the cause. Since brain injury is particularly devastating on relationships, especially when one of the partners sustains injury, we also provide one-to-one and group caregiver support. Mary's husband has been able to benefit from these services, and their marriage and family life have remained intact.

The one aspect I would like to highlight from both of these stories is that brain injury is permanent. While everyone with acquired brain injury can increase their functional abilities with support, the strategies employed are not cures. Most people will always require some level of support in order to function optimally and to prevent a downward spiral into crisis situations triggered by loneliness, substance abuse, eviction, financial ruin and/or mental health issues such as depression and also isolation.

In working with brain injury there are many sad stories for sure, but there are also many successes, and we are honoured to be able to walk along in these journeys with these individuals in our community.

D. Horne (Chair): I'm sorry. You're actually way over ten minutes already. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt already. Sorry, but you're at 12 minutes at this point. I'll start the questions with Dave.
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D. Hayer: Thank you very much. Are there some other provinces handling this differently — the support for brain injury? Are there other organizations in other provinces doing the same thing as you, or also in the province of British Columbia are there other organizations trying to do a similar type of program as yourself?

M. Friesen: The question is about what's happening in other provinces, or how those models are. I can speak to Alberta. I worked with the Alberta Brain Injury Network, which is a provincial fund in Alberta specifically for acquired brain injury. It provides funds to agencies who have staff who work directly with clients the way we do. I can speak to that.

D. Hayer: Are there any other organizations in British Columbia that provide a similar type of service as you?

M. Friesen: Yes, there are other organizations. They're scattered and unique to the communities where they have developed.

M. Friesen: There is the B.C. Brain Injury Association. It is quite small and does not provide any direct service to clients. But it is a provincial organization that we are working together with to try to build capacity — for sure.

G. Coons: Thank you for your presentation. I've got a lot of questions. I'll try to shorten them down. Back in 2000 I read that there was a provincial brain injury program. Is that what you think we need again? What budget do you work with, and how much provincial money do you get?

The last one is…. You're a community rehab program. Are there other ones in British Columbia?

M. Friesen: The first question was around the need for a provincial program. Whatever form and shape that takes, I would say yes. That would have been part of my summary. The call to action, which you have in front of you in our handout, is that that is lacking and has been lacking for about 12 years now. So some sort of a provincial, multisectoral group, we feel, is needed to bring together these issues. They are cross-sectoral. It isn't just a not-for-profit sector issue. It is multisectoral. So yes.

The second question was around government funding. In our case about 52 percent of our funding is government-based. Our budget is around $800,000 annually.

L. Denton: There are a number of community rehab agencies similar to this — brain injury agencies who are doing similar work. They're all not-for-profit except the ones who are funded through things like ICBC or WorkSafe.

M. Dalton: Thank you very much for the work that you're doing. Just before coming here I visited my nephew who just was in an accident, went through a concussion and lost his memory. So he's going through that. I just recognize the value of what you're doing.

I'm interested about the film project that you had. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? How did that take off? Is it from the association right here locally, or is it across Canada?

M. Kapp: We actually worked with an advertising agency, DDB in Vancouver, that took us on as a cause. We did a series of three television public service ads. One of them is visualized on one of the handouts that you have. We also did posters, and we did non-traditional.

It was a campaign where some elements went national. We actually liaised with ski hills. They had advertising across the country. The TV ads were primarily in western Canada, but some played in Ontario. The B.C. Association of Broadcasters award that we won last year was just provincial. That was actually radio and television. We've had lots of life to that campaign, and it's done very well for us.

The premise drove back to the protectyourhead.com website. That was actually done locally. A company called Artistech here in Kelowna took us on as a cause and did that for us, which is great.

M. Dalton: Well, that's great, because there certainly is a lack of information out there on some of the symptoms.

B. Routley: I was interested…. Maribeth had some kind of summary, but maybe given the limited time, could you give us a few key points that you want to make sure this committee is aware of?

M. Friesen: The first one I had covered around the support of a multisectoral approach to create consistent policy throughout the province. That's very important in our mind. We feel we're very under-resourced. It's difficult to fundraise just to keep basic services going. That's not different in any other brain-injury organization.

We also feel that brain injury is not identified as a priority within the framework of injury prevention in B.C., and we would like to see that as a select area that receives attention and focus.

D. Horne (Chair): I was just reminded that Arnie Hamilton, who was the member for Esquimalt-Metchosin,
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a member of this committee back some years ago, suffered a brain injury during a fall, actually on this tour, in Prince George. We do understand the difficulties.

I'd like to now call the next witness, being the Okanagan College Faculty Association, represented here today by Sharon.

As you may or may not have heard — I believe you've been in the audience, so you've probably heard it many times at this point — you have ten minutes to present, and we'll have about five minutes of questions afterwards. I'll give you a signal at about nine minutes so that you'll know you have a minute left. You can begin now.

S. Josephson: Welcome to the Okanagan. We should all be out by the pool, I think.

I'm here as the president of the Okanagan College Faculty Association, and I represent close to 300 members who work and teach not only in Kelowna but also at our various campuses in Penticton, in Vernon and in Salmon Arm. I want to thank the committee for this opportunity to share our views on what we think the priorities for next year's budget should be.

By way of background, let me give you a very brief overview of our institution, and I apologize if you've had it already from Allan Coyle and Lance Kayfish.

Okanagan College was first established over 45 years ago as a community college. In the early 1990s our institution's mandate was expanded to allow for third- and fourth-year programs leading to an undergraduate degree. We became known then as Okanagan University College, a name and a mandate that stayed in place until 2004, when a partnership with UBC led to the creation of two separate institutions, UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College.

Like other colleges, Okanagan College has a mandate to provide comprehensive learning opportunities to students in this region through a network of four major campuses and three satellite campuses. We offer a full range of programs that lead to degrees, diplomas, certificates and completed apprenticeships. We also provide avenues for adult learners to re-engage in post-secondary learning by completing their grade 12 or by simply getting the necessary prereqs for entry into different streams within public post-secondary education here in B.C.

I would say that the learning that happens at Okanagan College, as a teacher myself, is really more than a list of our credentials and our prerequisites. Learning really is about transformation. It's a process that every one of our faculty members sees every day in their students.

It is, I think, almost cliché to talk about inquiring minds, but at its core that's what we do, and that's what much of post-secondary education is about. It's about getting students to look and think critically at the world around them and, through that process, to become more confident as learners and more capable of becoming lifelong learners and more adaptive in the process of acquiring new skills throughout their lives.

As faculty — our members, myself — we see these transformations in our students as they gain confidence and insights and become more involved in their community.

We see adult learners make the sometimes difficult but always rewarding transition to new careers and skills, and all these transformations make a difference to the individual student and to the province as a whole, a point that's particularly important in the Okanagan, where post-secondary education attainment rates are slightly below the provincial average.

I know, from talking to colleagues in other regions, that you've seen and heard that post-secondary funding is under pressure. At a provincial level the core funding, our operating grants from the Ministry of Advanced Education, aren't keeping pace with our operating demands or with the unique cost pressures within the public post-secondary education system.

I know, as well, that the 25 presidents of public post-secondary institutions across the province took the very unusual step of releasing a letter that they sent to the former Minister of Advanced Education back in the spring of this year. In that letter they highlighted many of the same problems that faculty have been saying for many years. In particular, per-student operating grants from the ministry are trending down, and this is a reality that forces institutions to look for yet more ways to reduce costs.

For a college like ours the funding squeeze is particularly tough, because our mandate is to provide access throughout a broad and geographically dispersed area. The first reaction when cost pressures increase is to cut programs and to cut course offerings, but in doing so, we're turning our back on students in outlying areas and making access for them more of a challenge and, ultimately, more expensive.

It's important for this committee to remember that B.C.'s network of community colleges was established, in part, to provide an important access point for citizens outside large metropolitan areas. Those areas have been well served by the large and established research universities. But not every student is able to attend those institutions, and that should not be a reason for them not accessing a post-secondary education in their own community.

The B.C. Business Council has made the point on several occasions that 75 percent of all new jobs will require some form of post-secondary education and training. If B.C. fails to improve access and affordability in post-secondary education, we put at risk our capacity to match skills with future job projects.

Funding pressures at Okanagan College are having a
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direct impact on faculty as well as students. There is a trend to shift faculty positions to part-time or to contingent, non-regular teaching positions. Administrators may see that approach as solving an immediate cost pressure, but ultimately, it undermines the college's prospects when it comes to recruitment and retention of qualified faculty. Students are also not well served by that approach. Neither is the local community that our college has a mandate to serve.

Funding pressures also contort what we might call the publicness, if there is such a word, of our public institutions as institutions face increasing pressure because core funding is not keeping pace with needs. They turn to for-profit options within their institution. The hazard of following this course of action is that our public institutions lose their independence. Rather than having the ability to choose programs and research that fit with the institution's public mandate, we move more and more towards a model in which we are responding to commercial priorities rather than student or institutional priorities.

About a year ago Premier Clark announced ambitious plans to significantly increase the number of international students enrolled in B.C.'s post-secondary education system. Our college, like most other colleges in the province, has a strong commitment to international students. However, our concern on this point is that increasing the number of international students is not just a numbers issue.

International students have diverse needs, needs that require a more intensive teaching effort, more one-on-one time to help the student navigate not just a new institution but also a new language, a new community and a new culture. Unless the Premier's plan for international education includes additional funding to support that diversity, it runs the risk of never achieving the goal that the Premier set.

By way of summary, our faculty association would like to suggest some priorities that need to be strengthened in the 2013 provincial budget.

Number one is that we need to address the affordability challenges that students face. Tuition fees have more than doubled over the last decade. Student debts have moved higher, in tandem with those tuition fee increases. That places an enormous burden on today's student, one that shouldn't be ignored in the 2013 budget. We could make a meaningful step in the right direction by reviving the student grant program, a program that would at least provide those with the most significant financial challenges some relief.

We need to see new money provided to post-secondary institutions to ensure that they have the capacity to restore student services that have been scaled back over the last ten years. These services are an effective way to help students succeed and to ensure stronger completion rates in our system.

We need to see a much more explicit connection between the funding that our institutions receive and the Premier's stated interest in expanding international education. As I mentioned earlier, successful international education programs require a more intensive teaching effort that isn't fully reflected in current funding arrangements.

Finally, the funding that colleges like ours receive needs to better respond to the cost pressures that smaller post-secondary institutions face. Our network of regional and satellite campuses provides an important access point for students across our region, and the cost of maintaining that network must be reflected in the operating grant that we receive from the ministry.

D. Horne (Chair): Thank you so much. We'll start with questions. Anyone have questions? Maybe I'll start with one myself.

You mentioned international students and the cost pressures that those international students place on the institution. But don't those international students pay considerably more tuition than domestic students do?

S. Josephson: They do, but that doesn't mean that they get the services they need. I think that that tuition is generally used to make up operating shortfalls across the institution. They're not paying for extra services. They receive the same services with their increased tuition as Canadian students.

I can tell you, as a teacher of writing — I teach writing — that teaching a student whose first language is not English — and it may be a very recent addition for them, a new language for them — is very difficult and requires a great deal of time and support that we don't provide to them.

M. Dalton: You made a comment about commercial priorities versus institutional or student priorities. I know that in B.C. there is a tremendous need, an increasing need, in areas of trades. The demographics don't look very promising at this point, so definitely, there is incentive to help kids — well, not just kids but people — to really look at that as an option.

I guess, as far as funding, even…. You mentioned as far as funding more. I think that's important. Yet the fact of the matter is that colleges such as yourself, such as Okanagan College and others, really do provide and reduce the cost for students because they are able to do it more locally.

My understanding is, from the previous presentation, that the number of programs has really increased over the past while. There's approximately 5 percent growth per year — the number of students.

S. Josephson: Well, the previous presentation was from our director of public affairs. It's a given that it's going to be a different presentation than the one coming from the faculty association, I would imagine. He's correct. We've had an enormous amount of growth, but we're now seeing that we can't actually maintain that growth. We actually can't keep serving students.

When I talk about the kind of commercial interests…. What I mean by that is that the last two leadership positions, senior management positions, that were posted at Okanagan College earlier in the spring are both revenue-generating positions, one of which is an associate dean of business. That position has a mandate, has a requirement, for the associate dean to raise money for the college. I don't think that's what a dean is meant to do.

But I understand that the college has to do that in order to make up the funding shortfall. I think that's a real problem.

B. Routley: We did hear about the lack of spots available for the number of applicants. We heard about wait-lists to actually get in. That's kind of alarming when you think about the fact that we also heard the speech about jobs without people and people without jobs and the fact that we're going to need to fill those jobs in the future. So there needs, clearly, to be more growth if we're going to fill the wait-list needs.

I wondered if you had a comment about that and also about…. We'd heard students in the past talk about dropping out of colleges. They become debt-averse. I didn't really get a satisfactory answer on whether or not that's happening in your particular college. Maybe you could tell me if there are students that are complaining about the cost of tuition and other costs and if that's an issue for them.

S. Josephson: Well, I'll answer the first question about wait-lists. We do find that. For faculty, that's a really difficult issue, because it's really hard to turn down the student who shows up at your classroom on the first day of classes and then comes to your office and says: "Can you please…? Could you sign a waiver? Could you let me in?"

So you have classes which are meant to be…. Really, it's just not reasonable to be more than, say, 30 students, to try to teach them how to write a sentence.

You know, you've got even five additional students, and most faculty will make up the slack. They make up the slack. But that has to stop, because we just see this kind of creeping growth in our class sizes. You let a couple of students in, and next year you see that there are more and more added to begin with. But it's very hard to turn them down.

As far as student debt goes and the affordability for students, I spend most of my time with students, and absolutely, it's not affordable for them — most students. It's not just that it's not affordable. It does often lead to failure.

They start out with great aspirations, a great idea of what they're going to do. It's kind of a wonderful time in a student's life when you first meet them. But often students, because they're struggling to make ends meet and they're worried about their debt, take on too many classes. I've seen students take seven courses — they'll do some distance ed — in a semester. There's just no way they can succeed. But they're trying to do it fast, because if they do it fast, they'll have less of a debt.

Then on top of it they're working. It's kind of crazy. Then they try to find some support, some help for that, and there really isn't. There are fewer tutors; there are fewer counsellors; there are fewer advisers. So our transition rates to second year are very poor. They don't make it through.

A college in a small community is a uniquely different place than a large research institution in a city. Our students are not as academically prepared or as academically aligned as they are, say…. Students who start first year at UBC Vancouver, for example, are very different students than the ones that start first year at Okanagan College. They need time to learn the system, and when they're pushing themselves through, they don't have that time.

D. Horne (Chair): We've actually gone over time, but one of the statements you just made actually intrigued me. I will just ask a brief question, if you could give me a brief answer.

Students are taking additional courses because they want to complete earlier so that their debt load doesn't go on. Obviously, we've talked earlier about debt load being associated with living costs and all of that, but also some of the other costs at the university.

I'd be interested in sort of your view, because I've heard from other students, as well, on costs like the sports fees and student union fees and many of the other fees that colleges and universities charge on a semester-by-semester basis and do significantly add to the cost of attending — what your views on that would be.

S. Josephson: I think they do, and I think they're kind of hidden costs that students don't really know about when they first sign up.

Books, textbooks. If you've ever gone and just spend an hour at a college or university bookstore…. I always tell my business students: "If you're looking for a good business to be in, it's the textbook industry." You can't buy a textbook, really, for less than $80 these days. Then they revise them every year, so you can't even sell them back.

Textbooks, all the student fees, the printing costs — all of that is downloaded to the students.

This year at Okanagan College, students can no longer pay their tuition with their Visa, because of course that costs the college money. That was one of the ways we
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could save money. We had to make up a funding shortfall. So students can't pay with Visa.

Meanwhile, they're waiting for their student loans. They have no money. They're trying to pay their rent. That's how they're starting their very first semester.

I'll now call our next presenter, which is PacificSport Okanagan, represented by Jim and Doug, who I believe are here in the audience now.

If you could come forward to the table. As I believe you actually haven't heard, because I think you just arrived recently, you'll have ten minutes to present, and then we'll go five minutes of questions after that. You can begin anytime now.

J. Gabriel: Good evening, and thanks for the opportunity to present. I'm Jim Gabriel, of course, and Doug Nicholas…. I'm the chair of PacificSport Okanagan, and Doug is the general manager. I'll just be reviewing the information that was provided to you.

PacificSport is a multisport training support centre for athletes and coaches. The non-profit society is based in Kelowna, with satellite centres in Penticton and Vernon. We are connected to a network of five regional centres — which are located in Prince George, Kamloops, Abbotsford, Nanaimo and, of course, Kelowna — as well as three national training centres, in Victoria, Vancouver and Whistler.

The Okanagan regional support centre has developed a variety of sports services to meet the needs of athletes, coaches, practitioners, volunteers and sport organizations within the region. Partnerships have been established with municipalities and sports service providers to assist in the coordination, delivery of events and sport development programs.

We are here today, firstly, to thank you for your investment in sports throughout the province. The sport legacy fund speaks volumes to the government's commitment to ensuring B.C. leads the nation as a culture that values sport excellence and, most importantly, sport as a vehicle for health promotion and prevention.

Secondly, we are requesting your continued support of our sport performance and participation initiatives.

The sports sector has worked hard to become more efficient and effective in the delivery of its programs and services. We have restructured to eliminate duplication. We are implementing shared services across organizations to reduce administrative costs. We have introduced web-based reporting programs and services to reduce travel and reporting expenses and where multisport programming has been created to expand the geographic reach.

Our ask is not for more funding but rather that the government's current investment in sport be protected by rolling the $10 million annual legacy fund into the base ministry programming.

Finally, we ask for the continuation of gaming funds to sport — for many, the lifeline for local sport organizations — and that this allocation of funds be centralized with one entity which can make more strategic decisions across the sports sector and better measure the impact of funding support in communities across B.C.

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Games marked the beginning of a new era for sport in Canada. Across the country we experienced firsthand the power of sport to unite communities, break down social barriers, inspire people to live a healthier lifestyle and pursue excellence.

Now, two years later, the PacificSport network of centres continues to build on the momentum of the games, diligently working with their sport partners to provide a performance pathway aligned with the Canadian sport for life framework, helping develop a long-lasting support system that supports our communities from playground to podium.

The evolution of the sport legacy fund into the base funding for sport, along with the continuation of centralization of gaming grants to sport, would cement an enduring legacy of the 2010 games and support the development and sustainability of sport organizations.

In the Okanagan, thanks in part to the provincial government's investment and to the leadership and collective working relationship with the newly formed B.C. Sport Agency, PacificSport Okanagan has developed and delivered a number of participation- and performance-based programs and services that have benefited thousands of people, ensuring that everyone has a place to play and a way to get in the game.

For example, this year in the Okanagan the XploreSportZ discovery program partnered with over 30 local sport organizations to provide an opportunity for over 5,000 children to test-drive a variety of summer and winter sports in a fun and supportive environment under the direction of certified coaches.

The IGNITE athlete development program used regionally based sport service providers to train over 75 of B.C.'s up-and-coming high-performance athletes with foundational programming based on explosive power, balance, strength and speed.

The sport education program provided innovative, current and interactive seminars, courses, workshops and conferences to over 25 local sport organizations and over 2,500 community members, giving them practical information designed to help them succeed both inside and outside of sport.

The newly launched Canadian sport school, Okanagan campus, introduced 25 student athletes to a high-performance lifestyle and offered a flexible academic timetable that supported their competitive training schedule. These programs and others like them have had
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a tremendous impact on our sport community and have contributed positively to the health and well-being of our Okanagan communities as a whole.

As a result of PacificSport's positive sport programming, children and youth are getting physically active; young athletes are developing foundational athletic skills; families are adopting healthy and nutritious eating habits; coaches are learning how to effectively lead and communicate, plan a practice and teach fundamental movement skills; and students are meeting the demands of both sport and education.

The positive benefits of sport programming stretch beyond these tangible examples and are also noted in terms of employment opportunities. The sports sector provides an estimated 2 percent of all jobs in B.C. These paid positions leverage over 400,000 additional volunteers in British Columbia who each contribute, on average, more than 140 hours a year to the sport.

Economic spinoff. Sport tourism continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the tourism industry. Statistics Canada reported that spending associated with sport tourism reached $3.6 billion in 2010, up 9 percent from 2008, compared with an overall decrease in tourism of 0.7 percent.

Lower health care costs. Research shows that individuals who are physically active have fewer preventable health issues such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease. Additionally, on average, for each dollar that government contributes to the sport sector, sport organizations are able to leverage $4.77.

PacificSport strongly believes that sport is an effective and efficient investment in health, education and community development and recognizes that we have an important role to play. The positive results of strategic program investment are increasingly evident in the communities and on the podium, and we are committed to building on these results.

Thank you for your continued support for sport. Together, we will help athletes win medals for Canada, inspire citizens to use sport as a vehicle for health and the pursuit of excellence in their own lives, and build vibrant communities through sport for life.

That concludes our comments. We'd be pleased to address any questions you may have.

D. Horne (Chair): Well, thank you for your presentation. We'll begin our questions with our Deputy Chair, Mable.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. I'm interested if you can talk about, just to the extent that you work with, I guess, athletes on either the national teams or that compete internationally…. Do you provide supports for those athletes? Also, if you can talk about, with the restructuring of the B.C. Sport Agency, how that has impacted your organization and how you see the relationship now.

D. Nicholas: As far as the national team athletes, we are one of five regional sport centres based throughout the province. Our job is not only to help athletes stay at home and get to the national team level but also to support the athletes of the national level right here in our own communities. Not only do we send them to their national teams in some cases; we work with those who are here as well.

So we do have quite a bit of touch on national-team-level athletes, and we work with regional-based athletes that are here throughout the Okanagan.

D. Nicholas: Winter sports, yeah. So particularly in the Okanagan, one of our strengths is winter sport.

At our last Winter Games, the 2010 Winter Games, I think there were about 16 or 17 Okanagan-based athletes that were on the national team for the Olympics Games. In summer that's a little lower.

M. Elmore (Deputy Chair): Right. Yeah, and the second one was with respect to the B.C. Sport Agency.

D. Nicholas: The B.C. Sport Agency has been a great unifying agency to not only PacificSport but I think to sport as a whole. It's brought together the sport community. It's kind of creating collaboration and cooperation among sport. It's a process, though. We're just kind of beginning that, and PacificSport is one of the groups that they're working closely with. We're aligning ourselves with them as well.

D. Hayer: Thank you very much. A very good presentation, a very detailed presentation, especially reminding of the 2010 Olympics. I was just thinking about how the world came together and how British Columbians from all different backgrounds were celebrating right till one, two, three in the morning in Vancouver.

Now, you talk about that you provide a service of help with the volunteers. In your organization how many staff are there? What is your budget? Do you also have volunteers who work in your organization? I know youth sport. Do you help other volunteers learn about the different programs you have available?

D. Nicholas: We consider ourselves really a sport resource centre. Just further to the question about the B.C. Sport Agency, it has expanded our role to become maybe not only a sport performance centre, but it's allowed us to really get into sport participation and opened the door
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for us to work with the sport communities.

The local sport organizations we support with volunteer development, with organizational development, with those types of services to help them succeed and move forward. As I said, it's just that our mandate in that sense has expanded considerably.

We have five staff members — four full-time staff members and one part-time. We have, in Kelowna, three of them, and in Vernon we have a full-time staff member. In Penticton we have a part-time staff. So that makes the five staff members. Our annual budget is about $400,000, so it's fairly small.

We are doing our best to do as much as we possibly can for sport and for sport organizations in our region.

D. Nicholas: Yes. Sorry. We work with a number of, I would say, practitioners, community organizations and volunteers. We have literally, I would say, hundreds of volunteers that we're working with on different events and activities and things that we're doing throughout the year. We work closely with UBCO and practicum students that are there and are aligning ourselves with as much volunteer work and support as we can get.

J. Gabriel: Just to add one more comment on Doug's earlier point. One of the things that's important, I think, and one of the key successes for PacificSport in all of the regions — and I think it really hits home here in the Okanagan — is the relationship with municipalities.

You look at PacificSport Okanagan. It goes right up and down the valley, and there's a strong connection with the city of Kelowna, with the city of Penticton and the city of Vernon. They've become an important part in making sure that the services are hitting where it needs to be hit up and down the valley. That's another important, I think, aspect in the delivery, in how we deliver our services.

G. Coons: Thank you so much, Jim and Doug, and thank you for the work that you do in the community.

I acknowledge the benefit of sport. For many years I worked for B.C. Amateur Hockey, doing coaching clinics — I'm from Prince Rupert — up and down the highway from Vanderhoof to Prince Rupert, and I did the national coaching certification program levels 1 and 2. I instructed that. I have many years of sport background.

I really appreciate your presentation. The first page tells us what you're asking for, and it is well done.

I do have a question about the gaming fund. Number 1, how much do you get through your organization through the gaming funds? And you're talking about being centralized with one entity — that the allocation of these funds could be centralized with one entity. Do you have in your own minds what that entity would be?

D. Nicholas: We received $50,000 in gaming and have annually for the last two or three years — around three years, I think. That money has been essential to our operations and to us moving forward.

Each year we reapply and we report, and we do that process again. That's fine, although it's always a challenge, because if we don't get it, it severely affects us. We're one organization, but for sport in general, it has great ramifications on a lot of local sport organizations here if they don't get gaming in.

I think the challenge is that not only do we need the funds, but we don't know if we're going to get them until after the fact, until it's almost too late, until we're moved on. Then we're in trouble. We're digging ourselves out, and there are different ramifications that come with that.

So the challenge is…. What would help us, really, would be if we could centralize that with an organization like B.C. Sport Agency that would have a good understanding of the sport sector, would have a good idea of the various programs and developments in sport and could strategically help us in getting the money to where it needs to go.

One of the communities I represent is Mission, and we have the 2014 B.C. Winter Games. I'm just wondering what your involvement is with the B.C. Summer and Winter Games — how it all plays together.

D. Nicholas: The B.C. Summer Games and Winter Games. We're quite often on the committees that help lead the events, particularly when they're in our region. We're involved in the organizing committee part of it.

Beyond that, we work with the athletes too. We provide sessions ahead of time to provide support for them so they know what they're getting into. We support the coaches. We try to help them in what they need to participate in the sport or in the event. During the event we'll provide support as necessary or as needed to us, and we work closely with the B.C. Games Society to do kind of whatever they need us to do, if the event is in our region, to support it.

J. Gabriel: Let me jump in there. My other hat that I wear…. I'm the director of sport, recreation and culture with the city of Kelowna, and we hosted the 2008 B.C. Summer Games. We also put a bid in, an unsuccessful bid, for the 2015 Canada Winter Games.

PacificSport Okanagan was integral to that bid process for the 2015. It was a huge part of that. In hosting the 2008 Summer Games, PacificSport played a key role in the sport section of the overall games. PacificSport
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basically stepped in and looked after the sport side for us. That was huge. Again, they've got the connection with the athletes, with the LSOs, and it just made it such a seamless process. They were hugely involved and very important.

Thank you so much for your presentation tonight and being part of it. It's very important, and we really do thank you for your time.

D. Horne (Chair): That ends the formal presenters for today. I do see one person in the audience who might want to speak, but it appears not. So I will look for a motion to adjourn.

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Chair:	* Douglas Horne (Coquitlam–Burke Mountain BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	* Mable Elmore (Vancouver-Kensington NDP)
Members:	* Gary Coons (North Coast NDP)
	* Marc Dalton (Maple Ridge–Mission BC Liberal)
	* Dave S. Hayer (Surrey-Tynehead BC Liberal)
	John Les (Chilliwack BC Liberal)
	* Pat Pimm (Peace River North BC Liberal)
	Bruce Ralston (Surrey-Whalley NDP)
	* Bill Routley (Cowichan Valley NDP)
	John Slater (Boundary-Similkameen BC Liberal)
	* denotes member present
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd
Committee Staff:	Stephanie Raymond (Administrative Assistant)

Witnesses:	Kirpal Boparai (President, British Columbia Fruit Growers Association)
	Allan Coyle (Okanagan College)
	Laurie Denton (BrainTrust Canada Association)
	Robert Eby (Okanagan College)
	Maribeth Friesen (CEO, BrainTrust Canada Association)
	Mary Ellen Gabias (President, Canadian Federation of the Blind)
	Paul Gabias (Canadian Federation of the Blind)
	Jim Gabriel (Chair, PacificSport Okanagan)
	Robert Hrasko (Kelowna Joint Water Committee)
	Richard Ingram
	Gordon Ivans (Kelowna Joint Water Committee)
	Sharon Josephson (President, Okanagan College Faculty Association)
	Magda Kapp (BrainTrust Canada Association)
	Lance Kayfish (Chair, Board of Governors, Okanagan College)
	Glen Lucas (British Columbia Fruit Growers Association)
	Doug Nicholas (PacificSport Okanagan)
	Gerry Zimmermann (City of Kelowna)

1) British Columbia Fruit Growers' Association	Kirpal Boparai
	Glen Lucas
2) Okanagan College	Lance Kayfish
	Allan Coyle
	Bob Eby
3) Kelowna Joint Water Committee	Bob Hrasko
	Gordon Ivans
	Gerry Zimmermann
4) Richard Ingram
5) Canadian Federation of the Blind	Mary Ellen Gabias
	Paul Gabias
6) BrainTrust Canada Association	Maribeth Friesen
	Laurie Denton
	Magda Kapp
7) Okanagan College Faculty Association	Sharon Josephson
8) PacificSport Okanagan	Jim Gabriel
	Doug Nicholas

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