Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 13 — Wednesday, October 2, 2013 (HTML)

Present: Dan Ashton, MLA (Chair); Mable Elmore, MLA; Eric Foster, MLA; Scott Hamilton, MLA; Gary Holman, MLA; Marvin Hunt, MLA; Lana Popham, MLA; Jackie Tegart, MLA

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

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

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

9. 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	360
G. Ivans
C. Basran
B. Hrasko
C. Grover
I. Stuart
D. Bond
J. Bateman
C. Miller
J. Dukhia
G. Lucas
J. Wu
B. Berchowitz
C. Kashuba
C. Van Staalduinen
K. Gillis
T. Walters
J. Gabriel
D. Nicholas
M. Kapp
B. Sieben
N. Cameron
D. Buszard
M. Shakespeare
C. Kergan
W. Kmet
J. Ricketts
A. Nedelec

D. Ashton (Chair): Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for coming. Before we start, I'd like to recognize Minister Steve Thomson and MLA Norm Letnick and also a couple of Kelowna councillors. Thank you very much for coming today.

Before we get started, since we are live, we have a dissertation that we have to make, and then we'll get right to you. Once again, welcome everybody. We are the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. This is an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly whose mandate includes conducting annual public consultations on the upcoming provincial budget. We would like to welcome everybody in attendance today. Thank you very much for taking the time to attend. We really appreciate you participating in this important process.

Every year the Minister of Finance releases a budget consultation paper. This paper contains fiscal and economic forecasts and key issues that need to be addressed in the next budget. Once the consultation paper has been released, this committee is required to hold provincewide consultations. All British Columbians are invited to provide input on the budget.

Following the consultations, the committee releases a report of the consultations, along with recommendations for the upcoming budget. This report must be presented to the Legislative Assembly no later than November 15.

There are several ways for British Columbians to participate. This public hearing is one of 17 scheduled to take place in communities throughout the province. All British Columbians are invited to present or attend the hearings.

You know, it's really difficult being on the road. There are a lot of nights away from home and everything, and I have to say that this group gets along really well. You always have to add a little bit of levity to it, and Marvin always adds a little bit of levity to it.

We've also scheduled a video conference session for an additional five communities, so in all, we're in 17 communities, plus five by video, in the province. British Columbians can also participate in the consultation by sending a written submission, a video file, letter or fax.

Information on the consultations, including instructions and how to make a submission, is available at our website, which is www.leg.bc.ca/budgetconsultations. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, October 16. All public input we receive is carefully considered.

At today's meeting each presenter may speak for up to ten minutes. An additional five minutes is allotted for questions from the committee members.

Time permitting, we may also have an open mike near the end of the hearing. Five minutes are allotted for each presentation. If you would like to register for the open mike, please check with the staff at the information table.

Today's meeting is a public hearing and will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes, will be printed and be made available at the committee's website. A live audio webcast is also broadcast through the website. The committee is also on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook you'll find us underneath the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia. On Twitter we are at twitter.com/BCFinanceComm.

D. Ashton (Chair): And good morning once again. My name is Dan Ashton. I represent the South Okanagan — Penticton, Peachland — part of it, along with Linda.

I'll be chairing these proceedings and working very closely with Mike Farnworth. Mike is the vice-Chair. Unfortunately, he's unable to be with us today. All the committee representatives and staff are here today to ensure what is said is forwarded to the Legislative Assembly for proper consideration.

Also joining us today from the parliamentary committees office are some very hard-working and incredibly dedicated individuals — our Clerk, Susan Sourial; and Stephanie Raymond, starting at the desk over there, who is staffing the registration; and Michael Baer and Alexandrea Hursey. You wouldn't believe what these individuals have to go through each day: pack, unpack, set
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up, un-set up and get everything loaded. So guys and gals, thank you. Great job.

First introductions and first presenters. Again, welcome. Thank you very much. Some familiar faces. So ten minutes. I'll give you a two-minute warning. Then we have some questions. There usually are questions. I will hold everybody to the ten minutes. So good morning. The floor is yours.

G. Ivans: Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the select standing committee. If I may, I'd like to introduce you to Bob Hrasko. He's a water engineer. He has been involved in a lot of projects in the valley from Penticton up the valley — Summerland, in the Kelowna area — and is well respected amongst his peers.

Also with us is Colin Basran from the city of Kelowna. He's a councillor, and he's the representative for the Joint Water Committee.

Also behind us we have a lot of members from the various water utilities with us too. That's all these guys sitting back here.

Anyway, getting back to our water situation here in the valley, this is our fifth presentation to the select standing committee. We actually started probably seven years ago with Al Horning, when he was an MLA in Victoria. We've come a long ways in the last seven years. We do have a master water plan. We have an integrated water strategy in place. Everybody's on the same page now, and it's great to see that everybody's working together in the city of Kelowna here.

As everybody knows, in 2014 there's going to be some infrastructure money available. Hopefully, we can get our hands on some of that. We did work with former Minister of Community Services, Bill Bennett. He requested some of the criteria, and it was approved by the province. It's in your brief here, some of the stuff that has transpired.

C. Basran: Good morning, everyone. First of all, on behalf of Mayor Walter Gray and Kelowna city council, welcome. I'd like to start by saying first of all, in light of what's happening south of the border, it's certainly refreshing and inspiring to see MLAs from different parties working together on the B.C. budget.

Cooperation is the fundamental building block of the Kelowna Joint Water Committee. It's a made-in-Kelowna solution, bringing together our city's five water purveyors into one collective unit. As a result, we've created our integrated water implementation plan which outlines water infrastructure priorities for our city. The plan has received unanimous support from city council and the partners of the Kelowna Joint Water Committee.

As you are aware, clean, safe drinking water is a high priority for B.C. residents, including those in Kelowna. We look forward to working with you to make sure this continues. Your financial support for these infrastructure projects would be greatly appreciated.

B. Hrasko: The committee has asked me to provide you with background information, maybe a little bit more technical than what you just heard. We prepared the six-page brief that's in front of you. There's a lot of information in this brief on where we've come from and why Kelowna may be different than other areas of the province.

We're impacted by three major points. One is that we do have problems with our water quality here in town. We do have to improve it.

I wouldn't say we had a serious battle, but there were a lot of heads knocking together when Interior Health set some very stringent guidelines for us about six years ago. There was a push-back to Health, but the fact was that we did have to improve our water quality.

We never disagreed with that. We work very hard to find ways in which to improve and meet the national guidelines and the provincial guidelines. The B.C. safe drinking water regulation sets out the rules for it, and this plan that we have is going to address those rules.

Another issue that we have is that we have a huge agricultural area here. We have about 15,000 acres of agricultural land in the Kelowna region, in central Kelowna and around the perimeter where these five large water utilities are.

The problem is that in the 1970s they created combined systems. That means one pipe services both the agriculture and the domestic, so there's a huge volume of water that flows into the pipes in Kelowna. It's about three times what flows into Kamloops during an annual year.

Collectively, these five water utilities are the second-largest water supply group in the province, next to Metro Vancouver. We're bigger than the capital regional district in terms of our annual demand. So this is a substantial water supply area.

The other thing that we have is that four of the five large utilities here are improvement districts. There are very good reasons why the province wants to see the improvement districts rolled into municipalities. But the fact is that, with the agriculture, the improvement districts that are around the perimeter are very streamlined and very conscientious in protecting agriculture and getting water to the agriculture.

That's one of the reasons why they're still there, because they really do service the agriculture very well, and that's recognized. That's recognized by the province. It's recognized by the city. It's recognized by the customers.

There's a map on page 3. Then, when you get into page
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4 of our memo…. One of the things that we have done, as Colin has stated, is we've worked very cooperatively with city staff and city council. We actually spent two full years at the direction of the province to come up with a cooperative plan for all of the utilities that would take down the borders.

How would you service this area in 20 years? How would you integrate this area in 20 years if there were no borders? What projects and what do you have to do? We came up with a simple plan that did that, and we still respected everybody's organizations at the end of it.

It's a streamlined transitional plan that we have. It's about a 300-page document that we put together — very comprehensive — at the request of the province. The province has reviewed it and accepted it. All of the water committees, like the board of trustees and city council, have reviewed it and accepted it.

It's very simple. It's getting the cleanest water into the pipes. It's minimizing the number of sources, getting proper disinfection of those sources and then pipelines in between to integrate so that we can flow water across the city when we need to.

We've done that in such a way that we defer, and we do not…. We're not putting filtration in at this time. It's too expensive. It's $300 million. We're not asking for funding for a filtration plant for Kelowna. We're asking for money to do the proper disinfection upgrades, which is ultraviolet light. That's very cost-effective in comparison with filtration.

We've done this with a very commonsense approach, a staged approach that's manageable. We've spent over $20 million in the last three years between just two of the districts in terms of pipeline installations. There's a major pump station that actually has its grand opening this afternoon on the shores of Okanagan Lake. It's probably the biggest pump station on the lake for Glenmore-Ellison improvement district. It's a $6 million or $7 million project, and it was built over the last 2½ or three years.

A whole number of projects have gone ahead without…. What has happened as a result is the costs to the consumers have increased substantially. What we want is to not continue to impact the consumers with increased water rates. Right now the highest water rates we have in town are in the range of 650 bucks a year for a single-family connection.

We're trying to avoid getting that up to…. If we don't get any funding assistance, the water rates could reach $1,300 a year for some of the areas, particularly where there is agriculture, where the density isn't there. We're trying to avoid that.

In summary, the water supply improvements are preventative in terms of health benefits. It's up-front cost. If you give them good water to start with and they have healthy drinking water, you avoid all sorts of health costs later on.

The water suppliers are large. We've played by the rules. We've done everything the province has asked us to do, and we work very hard to do that — conscientiously, cooperatively. We keep on working at it. We're going to keep on working at it, regardless of what happens.

In the next three years there are approximately $54 million of projects on the table. All we're doing is asking for support at this time.

E. Foster: Gentlemen, thanks for your presentation this morning. I'd like to commend you on the way you've managed to get all the groups together, with the city, and move forward on this very ambitious project.

One question I have for you regarding your purification. You said you're going to go an ultraviolet system as opposed to a filtration system. Are you getting good support for that method from Interior Health?

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. These are very daunting numbers. I commend you on the work that you've done to get to this point and the dollars you've expended.

I think one issue the committee would have to consider for funding for water treatment is an equitable solution for all the province. There are other areas. That, I'm sure, is one thing the committee has to think about.

Two quick questions. Are all the users metered? And do you treat the agricultural use water to the same level as you do for potable water for domestic? You talk about separate pipes. Is the treatment to a different standard too?

B. Hrasko: Okay, there are a couple of questions in there. One, with respect to metering, probably about 95 percent of the volume is metered, but not all of the customers are metered yet.

Metering is in our plan, and all of the big connections are metered. It's more cost-effective. There is a large cost benefit to meter all of the large connections. All the agriculture is metered right now. There is some single-family housing for some of the districts that aren't yet metered. That's in the plan.

There's a big cooperative meter purchase that we want to do for…. That will save money for the consumer.

B. Hrasko: Some of the areas are split already. The intent is that when you have a single pipe, it's better to put it all in that existing pipe and just disinfect, if the source water is clean enough.

Where the source water isn't clean enough, and we have sources that are murky and colourful water, in those areas it does make sense to separate. There is a different standard of water going through those pipes.

I'd also like to recognize a former peer, Mr. Horning. Thank you very much. Good to see you, sir.

D. Ashton (Chair): Thank you very much for coming. I have David, Caroline and…?

We have ten minutes for the presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning, and then five minutes are reserved for questions.

D. Bond: We handed out a document…. I apologize; we probably just handed it out right now. So you've got it out in front of you.

By way of background, we'll go over…. In past years we provided quite a longer document with more information in it. This year the approach we've taken is we've focused on two issues and brought those to your attention. I won't go into a whole lot of detail, because a lot of the background information has been discussed and is in the B.C. Chamber of Commerce's policy manual that should have been provided to you already. Both of these items have been either brought forward by ourselves or, in one case, brought forward by the Penticton chamber and discussed at that level.

I'm going to flip over to the two areas we're touching on, which are two areas of tax. We're looking at, from our perspective, areas where tax can be a little bit more competitive, recognizing in some cases that in the economy we're still trying to work to move forward with finances to get to a balanced budget, moving forward and recognizing that if you do anything with tax, you've got to manage what that does to the province's revenues.

Of the two areas that we're touching on, one is property transfer tax. Maybe I'll touch on that first. You may recognize this. We brought this issue forward before. The way property transfers are usually brought in…. It was brought in — help me out — in the 1980s, I think.

It was set at a rate where it was 1 percent of the first $200,000 and 2 percent of the remainder. I might have that backwards. And $200,000 at the time was set at a price of what was considered to be…. You wouldn't expect there to be too many homes where you're paying over that $200,000 threshold.

It has been 27 years since, and we still have that same threshold. So we're looking at it, and that threshold doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. What we're trying say is that from our perspective, the property transfer tax as a whole can be a deterrent to transactions happening.

I think when we looked at it…. You look at our neighbours in Alberta. In areas where there isn't a property transfer tax, and B.C. is one of the few provinces that does have a similar tax, the turn rate of houses is actually a little bit more.

I. Stuart: If you compare Alberta to B.C. and if you compare Manitoba to Saskatchewan, those are very comparable. We've adjusted for population in terms of households. Typically, the turn rate or turnover rate of housing in these lower tax regimes — which would be Alberta and Saskatchewan — is anywhere from 12 to 17 percent higher. So you will incur a greater number of transactions and the associated spending if you do lower the tax rates.

D. Bond: Our recommendation is to move the threshold for the property transfer tax to $525,000, which is more representative of an average house price or maybe above-average house price in B.C., to be more representative of the spirit of the tax when it was put in. Recognizing that it's difficult to…. There could be an impact on revenue, obviously, by changing the tax. But at the same time, with an increased turn rate, it frees up other cash, and there are other means.

For instance, if someone is not paying that much in property transfer tax, they're probably spending some money on the house anyway. That frees up some cash to spend more money on the landscaping, put some more stuff into furniture, which also generates tax revenue. It's more than just the property transfer tax.

Again, it's from a perspective of competitiveness between B.C. and Alberta. You've got one province that
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doesn't have a property transfer tax and one that does.

The second tax we're touching on is provincial sales tax. If you go back four or five years ago, we would have been in front of this committee saying that the provincial sales tax is not a competitive tax and there needs to be a way to look at it. Then you moved to some sort of value-added tax. We've gone through that exercise already. Now we're back to where we were before.

We recognize that the idea of moving directly back to a value-added or harmonized sales tax is probably not something that people want to stomach at this point. But there are very good concepts of the value-added tax system.

I mean, the provincial sales tax itself was kind of a broken tool anyways from our perspective. It was a tool that was put in, in the '50s. It was a commodity-based tax. It drove, in business, a lot of uncompetitiveness, notwithstanding that you had two sets of sales tax rules and two sets of administration to deal with. There are situations where you have this concept of a built-in tax on a lot of different things.

If you look at the recommendations that were put forward this year at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce that we wanted to highlight…. Again, we have the opportunity now, with the provincial sales tax back in, to look at it from a different view — frankly, back where we were five years ago — and say: "Are there things that can be done with this tax to make it more competitive, to eliminate some of these anomalies in the tax that drive some funny results from time to time?"

The suggestions that were put forward were to look at…. For a lot businesses, one of the big expenses that was impacted — which I would say was appreciated — out of the HST was that if they were investing in machinery and equipment, they had the ability to get this input tax credit.

In the situation now, with the PST, there are situations in different industries, such as manufacturing and agriculture, where there is an incentive to invest in equipment, to being an investment tax credit. What we're suggesting at this point is maybe to continue that onto all machinery and equipment so that it's not mainly just manufacturing, not just agriculture. Look at encouraging business to invest in their businesses by giving them an investment tax credit on equipment.

Then the second recommendation is really to continue to look at the tax as a whole and find out if there are ways to make it a little bit more competitive for business, whether it's moving towards some sort of value-added-tax system that is good for the consumer and also good for business as well.

D. Ashton (Chair): No, you've got about three minutes left, but if you're done, we probably have questions. Thank you.

M. Elmore: Thanks for your presentation — also, I think, the most concrete presentation with respect to suggestions and recommendations around looking at adjusting the provincial sales tax. I appreciate that.

You mentioned two aspects. An investment tax credit for stimulating investment in businesses to expand beyond current exemptions around manufacturing — can you talk about that a little bit more?

D. Bond: Yeah. If you look at page 10 on the document I passed to you, what I looked at is that there's certain machinery and equipment in certain areas that is already exempt.

Again, looking back to a lot of businesses, if you're looking at investing in equipment at a time when it could be in the best interests of your business but you've got to manage the costs, there are certain industries — and I use the example here of manufacturing and agriculture — where there are some incentives, by way of investment tax credits either on a corporate tax return or a direct exemption, that help encourage that investment in your business.

How you bring that out to other businesses, I'm not exactly crisp on. But the concept of "Let's encourage businesses to invest in machinery and equipment" is a way to build their business.

L. Popham: I'm curious on that. Would you go as far as having an incentive for the equipment to also be manufactured in B.C.? Is that part of the equation?

D. Bond: Well, when you look at the manufacturers of the equipment, they probably qualify under the manufacturing tax credit that's in place, so I think that part is probably already there.

Yeah, what we're trying to say is that if you look at B.C. and you want businesses to invest in B.C. and you want businesses to grow their businesses in B.C, looking at their biggest capital investments — leaving buildings and land aside — if you look at ways to encourage them to invest in their businesses, I think it should be a good result.

D. Ashton (Chair): Caroline, David, Ian, thank you very much for coming this morning.

Next up we have the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Jordan, welcome. Nice to see you again.

J. Bateman: Nice to see you. I almost called you Your Worship there, Mr. Chairman. Pardon me.

D. Ashton (Chair): Oh jeez. "Mr. Chair" will be fine. Actually, "Dan" is really good. I appreciate that part of it.

J. Bateman: Old habits die hard. I'm sure Marvin's ac-
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cidentally done that once or twice as well.

D. Ashton (Chair): Like I said, it's difficult when you're on the road as it is, and I have to say that this group of individuals works really well together. That's always good to see.

J. Bateman: That's something I wanted to comment on. I was actually sitting upstairs watching CNN before I came down here and seeing how you've got two parties there who can't even stand to be in the same room together to talk about important issues, but all of you here…. Having tracked the progress of this committee over the years now and seeing recommendations that have come here from submissions into your report and then actually into the budget, I think it's a positive sign that we're not American.

We definitely don't envy your task as a committee. I've been following the submissions that have been made — amazing organizations speaking, asking for help, trying to educate elected officials on what they do and what would make their lives easier.

Whenever we're at an event like this, we think back to a 2006 encounter in the House of Commons with the federal counterpart to this committee, where our then director John Williamson came in and made a presentation. He left, and an MP followed him out and said: "I just want to be clear. You're not asking us for any money?" John said: "No. No, we're asking you to spend less money, in fact." This MP actually said: "I've been tracking all the requests that our committee…. We've had $600 billion of requests." At the time the budget was about $220 billion. "You're the first person to come and ask us not to spend more. I appreciate that."

Our top priority this year remains the balanced budget. I mean, obviously, the Finance Minister has been unwavering in that, and we certainly appreciate it. We think it puts B.C. in an economically competitive position compared to other provinces. It's amazing to see what has happened in Alberta, where they've gone downhill so quickly as far as controlling their government spending. Who would have thought Alberta would be running deficits and have eaten up all of their heritage fund? But there they are. So our top priority remains that balanced budget.

Our recommendations are on page 5. This year we focused on the Crown corporations. Obviously, cost of living is a major concern to everyone in B.C. and certainly to our MLAs. One of the factors in cost of living is all the Crown corporations — the fees, the rates, all of the things that we pay in order to fund those services. We wanted to focus in on the Crown corporations this year and see if there are ways to try to bring some of those rates down, ways to maybe slowly transform the way government interacts with Crown corporations. We're well aware that nothing will be solved overnight. But there are certain things.

If I can highlight recommendation 5, which is from ICBC. The interesting thing about ICBC in the next three years is that government actually is budgeting for less dividends from ICBC than in previous years. This year it's about a quarter-billion dollars, $257 million, but next year the budget calls for only $222 million from ICBC and $205 million the year after, so it's trending downwards.

Our advice is that this an opportunity to see if we can trend it all the way down to zero over a period of eight to ten years. If you follow that percentage drop from this year to next, you could actually get there, to zero, in eight years. That money then could be put back into keeping lower rates for drivers, which I would certainly appreciate. My minivan is up for renewal any day now.

We're always looking for ways to try to save money. It's rare to see a Crown corporation dividend dropping in the budget, so we think that's something that might be doable over the mid-term, eight to ten years.

We have a lot of information here regarding B.C. Hydro, the 2011 audit that was done. I know that B.C. Hydro hasn't released their 2013 numbers yet. Mike Smyth's pieces have been focusing on last year's numbers. We're very keenly interested in what B.C. Hydro will roll out for their 2013 numbers to see if progress has been made on that audit. If it hasn't, I think that's a significant challenge that government will need to deal with.

Then finally, the other one I want to highlight now. You'll notice I've made a typographical error here. Recommendation 15 is: "Kill the Pacific Carbon Trust." Recommendation 11 is: "Eliminate the Pacific Carbon Trust." Number 15 should be: "Kill the carbon tax." However, if you want the kill the Pacific Carbon Trust twice, I won't argue with you. I find this to be one of the most puzzling of all government programs.

To give you an idea of just how puzzling it is, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation does not often find ourselves in agreement with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and with Mark Jaccard. But on this one, we're in pretty much lockstep that the Carbon Trust has not accomplished the goals that were set out for it.

The Auditor General's report last year further called that into question, along with some reporting by the Vancouver Sun and some investigation by former MLA Bob Simpson.

The Pacific Carbon Trust…. I mean, that's a way to put money immediately back into classrooms, into hos-
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pital rooms in this province. The city of Surrey spends about $600,000 a year on carbon credits. Even if you just let them go into the free market and buy cheaper carbon credits, they would save a considerable amount of money, let alone if you actually eliminated the program altogether.

Those are our major recommendations. I wanted to say thank you again for this opportunity. If there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

M. Hunt: Well, you can't get away with giving us this much information and having no questions, right? Let's start on your recommendation No. 4. I'm new at the job, so I'm not understanding some of the research that you've done. Please tell me what Hydro is doing.

J. Bateman: Well, the B.C. Utilities Commission — it's a weird quirk of the system where, if you bring an application to the BCUC, you actually have to fund opposition research into your application. So B.C. Hydro ratepayers fund people to go out there and basically make a living knocking the stuffing out of all of their presentations to the BCUC.

It's an odd thing, right? It would be like a municipal council funding, a group to come in and knock the stuffing out of a development proposal. You would never do it.

It should be based on free market. If there are people out there who want to oppose a B.C. Hydro rate application, who want to make a presentation, they should be able to. They should go out and get free-will donations, like the Taxpayers Federation does, and do it that way.

We don't like this government support for both sides. It drives up the cost of everything. It's a weird quirk that I was unaware of until, actually, I was speaking with former Energy Minister Coleman one day, who mentioned that to me. I did some digging into it, and it was pretty shocking that that was happening.

M. Hunt: Can I get you to go down to No. 9, with B.C. Ferries vetoing its competition? I don't understand that one either.

J. Bateman: Under the Coastal Ferry Act, B.C. Ferries gets to approve any other ferry operation. If you go to the section…. David Hahn was on a Vaughn Palmer TV show one day. Vaughn asked: "Why isn't there more competition in the ferries?"

Essentially, Hahn said, "Well, we get to check it for safety," which, okay, I understand. You want to have safety checks. You're transporting passengers. But: "We also have to make sure that these new companies' books stand up in front of ours."

Now, I find that a little bit rich from B.C. Ferries, whose books aren't standing up particularly well on their own right now. They literally have the ability to approve or veto their competition. It's similar to TransLink, right? TransLink has the ability to veto or assess any transit competition in the Lower Mainland.

It's another quirk of that quasi-privatized model that B.C. Ferries is in. You either have to, we think, rein them back into government or — our preference — privatize them and essentially throw them to the wolves of competition and see what happens.

This sort of in-the-middle thing isn't working. I mean, what business is going to approve a business across the street that offers the exact same service? You just wouldn't do it.

M. Elmore: Thanks, Jordan, for your presentation. I have a question with regards to your B.C. Hydro recommendations. Certainly, I guess we'll to have wait for the 2013 audit to see what comes out referencing staffing levels and also the process in terms of the approval for B.C. Hydro rate applications.

Does the Taxpayers Federation have a position on the contracts that were signed with independent power producers and, often, the differential in terms of market rates and long-term rates that have been signed on the contracts?

J. Bateman: Yeah. It's really one of those…. You have to almost go individually through them. I know Minister Bennett has, or B.C. Hydro has, I think, cancelled seven or eight of them recently. It just depends on the model. I mean, for some IPP producers, it'll make sense, and for other ones, it won't.

That's one of the reasons why we're supportive of having the BCUC review these things, so we can get that information out to the public. But yeah, it really is a one-by-one basis, and that's part of the problem. None of these IPPs are the same, so you actually have to look at them case by case.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation, Jordan. The comment you just made — would you not apply that more broadly? There are a couple of statements in here.

For example, you hone in on executive salaries and bonuses at B.C. Ferries. Certainly, I have some sympathy with that view, as you probably are aware. But would you not broaden that concern? It seems to be an issue across all the Crowns, not just the salaries and bonuses themselves but the growth in the management layer. Would it be fair to say that you'd apply that sort of principle of looking at the administrative and management level to all the Crowns, not just B.C. Ferries?
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J. Bateman: Absolutely. That growth of middle management is a concern to us. The way the executives are compensated is a concern to us. I thought one of the most interesting things I've read post-election was a small piece on three deputy ministers who left government, and they were paid a year's salary in severance. Their severance was something around $250,000. That's almost quaint compared to the Crown corporations.

Who would have thought that we'd ever sit here and think $250,000 is a bargain? But when you compare it to a transit CEO making $450,000 a year — a quarter-million dollars more than what the Seattle transit CEO makes — or you compare it to $563,000 for the B.C. Ferries CEO, clearly, there is an imbalance there.

I think it's political accountability. Every deputy minister has an elected official attached to them. If we think their pay is out of line, we can vote that person out, whereas a lot of these Crown corps hide behind their boards. There isn't that same accountability. They don't meet in public, and salaries escalate quickly.

G. Holman: Just quickly to follow up on Mable's question. I thought I heard you say, in relation to the question about IPPs, that those projects should be reviewed by the Utilities Commission. What you've got here is the Utilities Commission reviewing Hydro rate applications. Does that language also suggest they should be reviewing independent power projects as well?

J. Bateman: I would not be adverse to the BCUC looking at any long-term contract that Hydro was signing. I mean, obviously that is a commitment taxpayers are making in the future.

Up next we have the Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board — Christopher and Janice. Eric's going to take over for just half a sec.

E. Foster: Good morning. The format is very simple. You have ten minutes to do your presentation and then five minutes for questions. The floor is yours.

C. Miller: Good morning. On behalf of the Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board, or OMREB, I thank the Chair and distinguished members of this committee for the opportunity to bring to you today the recommendations of OMREB, one of the 11 boards represented by the British Columbia Real Estate Association.

My name is Christopher Miller. I'm a realtor and a director with OMREB, responsible for provincial government and community affairs. I'm joined today by Janice Myers, OMREB's executive director.

We're here to recommend measures that will improve tax fairness for homebuyers. Like you, realtors have concerns about housing affordability for British Columbians. The reality is that some of the highest housing costs in the country are seen here in B.C. OMREB's geographical catchment area comprises the Central and the North Okanagan and the Shuswap. It's a very large and diverse area, stretching from Peachland to Revelstoke.

Our region is not only a four-season recreational area with undisputed beauty, but it's also home to the fourth-fastest-growing population area in all of Canada and the fastest in B.C. itself, the Kelowna CMA. We've built a strong foundation here for families, for commerce, agriculture, high-tech and, increasingly, with the inclusion of the University of British Columbia, education and health care.

We're drawing the interest of new businesses and residents every year. Increasingly, we're the centre of good jobs and promising careers for graduates and in-migrants. We're benefiting from the policy of B.C.'s provincial government which, for 12 straight years, has put tax competitiveness front and centre as a cornerstone of the fiscal policy. However, our economic and growth potential is linked directly to housing accessibility.

Today I speak to you about the one glaring exception in that policy of tax competitiveness: the B.C. property transfer tax. The PTT works against efforts to encourage individuals and businesses to relocate to our region. The B.C. property transfer tax is the highest property transfer tax in Canada by far. As you know, in B.C. it's levied at 1 percent on the first $200,000 of the value of the property and 2 percent on the remainder.

Twenty-six years have passed since this wealth tax was introduced in 1987. The average home price then was just under $102,000. Those were the days. Today in B.C. we're looking at an average home price of $535,000. The 2 percent portion at the time that it was introduced was expected to apply to only 5 percent of the homes sold. Today over 85 percent of the homes sold have the 2 percent levied against them.

The structure of the tax has never changed since it was introduced, despite the dynamic, constantly evolving nature of the real estate market. B.C. homebuyers, therefore, are paying an increasingly unfair amount of PTT with every passing year. Buyers have to redefine their buying needs and wants, and in some cases purchases are postponed indefinitely.

The Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board is recommending a fresh start to the PTT. Our first priority is to index the 1 percent PTT threshold using either Stats Canada's new-housing price index or the MLS home price index and then adjust this figure annually. Indexing
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will ensure that both present and future homebuyers are treated equally and that taxation does not unduly impact the economic growth and stability of our region.

While indexing would possibly result in less taxation revenue, the provincial government would be able to anticipate and account for this in its financial projections in the same way that it projects the number of sales that would happen every year.

Secondly, we also recommend that the 1 percent PTT threshold be increased from $200,000 to $525,000. The 2 percent would continue to be applied to the remainder of the fair market value of the property. It's no longer a wealth tax. It's now a tax that's borne by just about every homebuyer in the province.

The recommendation to increase the 1 percent threshold to $525,000 could result in a drop of government revenues. There's no doubt. This drop, however, would be offset by home ownership being immediately more affordable across B.C. It frees up purchases to take on home renovations or other spending once the home purchase is secure, partially offsetting the lower PTT revenue.

Increasing the threshold would also put B.C.'s PTT on a more level footing with other provinces in Canada. It's important to remember that in the overall economic picture, the sale of existing homes produces substantial direct and indirect economic benefits. Housing is one of the most significant contributors to the provincial economy.

The average housing transaction in B.C. results in $64,500 in expenditures on services, transactions, taxes and other household purchases. This includes, I believe, about $11,000 in tax revenue. This $64,500 is well above the Canadian national average.

In the OMREB area 2012 housing sales of $2.2 billion generated conservatively $393 million being spent on these post-purchase goods and services. Throughout B.C. nearly 68,000 homes were sold through the MLS in 2012, representing an investment of about $35 billion by British Columbians and nearly $4.4 billion in pre- and post-purchase expenditures.

We recognize that home ownership is the cornerstone of a healthy economy and of a thriving province. We believe that fairer shelter taxes and the resultant prosperous economy will help citizens throughout the Okanagan and the Shuswap — and throughout B.C. in general — enjoy an enviable quality of life. Together the real estate sector and the elected officials can make dramatic improvements to housing attainability with simple adjustments to the province's tax structure.

Again, I thank you very much for this opportunity to make these recommendations. We urge the provincial government to consider restructuring the PTT.

D. Ashton (Chair): Janice, Christopher, thank you very much. Accept my apologies. I had to step out for a moment.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. There have been similar presentations by real estate boards, chambers, so the message is getting through. Just a couple of questions.

You're suggesting indexing the 1 percent threshold. Do those indexes ever go down? There are sometimes adjustments in the housing market, so what would happen in that case?

C. Miller: Exactly. For a true and in-depth answer to that, I think BCREA would be able to provide more information, because they have looked at the whole thing historically. Yes, it would be based on the average price whether the market is going up or the market is going down. It's a good question, and I'd have to check with them to see if it would go down or if it is just simply going to be going up as the housing market changes.

G. Holman: One other quick question. If the tax was effectively reduced, does that mean necessarily that housing prices come down? Isn't there a line of argument that the market will set the price? If you remove the tax, that doesn't necessarily mean that the market price for that house will be reduced by the amount of the tax.

C. Miller: At this point property transfer taxes are not part of the valuation of a house. You're right. It is the market that sets the price, that sets the fair market value. But the property transfer taxes are not involved in the price of the house; they are costs of buying a house. As such, they cannot be included in any of the financing towards the house. It's a separate charge that's added on at the end in the lawyer's office when everything is settled.

I, therefore, do not believe in any way that it would change the valuation of a house. As it is done today, it would continue to be done. The property transfer taxes have no effect on the valuation of a fair market price for the house.

G. Holman: That was kind of my point. If it doesn't affect the valuation of a house, it means if you take away the tax, the price isn't going to go down. I'm just wondering if it actually improves home ownership. That's an ongoing debate.

The other comment, more rhetorical, is the reference to it as a wealth tax. It's actually not even…. If it was a wealth tax, a true wealth tax, I think it would be more justifiable. It's not. You're not even taxing wealth; you're taxing the value of a home. It has nothing to do with wealth. If it truly was a wealth tax, I think it would be more justifiable. But that's just an editorial comment.

C. Miller: The wealth tax — wealth obviously has a lot to do with the price of the house you can buy. With
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our average price being at $535,000 in B.C., it eliminates a lot of people, at this point, from being able to purchase houses. We're noticing that a lot in the Central Okanagan in particular.

I'm still not entirely clear, on your first question, why housing prices would tend to go down if the PTTs were removed. Once again, we're not advocating at this point that they be removed but that they be restructured only.

Welcome, folks. Nice to see you again. We have allotted ten minutes for the presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning visually. You'll see my fingers go up. Then we have five minutes for questioning. The floor is yours.

J. Dukhia: Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity for the 2014 provincial budget. My name is Jeet Dukhia. I'm the president of B.C. Fruit Growers Association, and I'm a grower from Vernon.

I have farmed for the last 35 years. I farm 40 acres in Vernon, and I am proud to be in Vernon. At one time we used to have five packinghouses in Vernon. We used to be called the King City of Apples in the Okanagan at that time. It's a shame that we've got no packinghouses left here.

To my right we've got our general manager, Glen Lucas. He's been with us for 15 years, so he's been through all the ups and downs in the industry.

In the audience we have vice-president Bhupinder Dhaliwal. He's a graduate from Simon Fraser, and I'm proud to see him come back to the land. His family farmed both sides of the border, in Oliver and down south in Washington. I'm very proud to see young people getting back to the land, with their degrees.

G. Lucas: Committee members, it's a pleasure to be here. The BCFGA has had the privilege of presenting a brief to the prebudget consultation each year since 2002, so this is presentation 12.

Our association represents 550 tree fruit growers in the Okanagan, Similkameen and Creston valleys, with a farm-gate value of $80 million. With packing and spinoff industries, our sector generates $300 million in economic activity each year, and our sector enhances tourism.

J. Dukhia: The theme of this year's budget is a balanced budget. We understand the need to focus on living within our means. That is one of the basic truths in the farm sector. However, farmers also understand that in order to develop industry, investment is required. The government that invests in industry will generate growth and maximize industry's contribution to the tax revenue.

The British Columbia Fruit Growers Association is therefore very pleased the government has stated their commitment to a long-term replant program for our tree fruit sector. While the current need for investment is less than it was a few years ago, a replant program is still negotiated as essential in improving our orchards and our competitiveness in the world. We are now waiting and looking forward to seeing the program detail on ongoing replant program efforts.

G. Lucas: In previous presentations to the committee we noted the opportunity to increase government revenue through the Columbia River treaty by expanding the scope beyond hydropower and flood control.

B.C. stores water for purposes other than power and flood control in the U.S. We know this because the U.S. has identified the need for the treaty to include other interests. These other interests include things like fisheries, environment, urban and commercial development, and agriculture.

The BCFGA has asked that the province's Columbia River treaty working group include an agriculture representative, and this has been granted. However, there are inadequate resources to help build the case on the value of irrigation for the Columbia River treaty. Without a strong case, B.C. cannot ask for payment to store water for irrigation and other purposes.

We fear that the treaty will remain hydro-centric. There is a need for provincial leadership that recognizes all the values in which the U.S. has interests in order that B.C. receives full value for the water that it stores for the U.S.

J. Dukhia: Budget consultation 2014 questions. The budget discussion paper has several questions which we will briefly comment on.

J. Dukhia: BCFGA members would seek to have almost all the extra dollars put into economic development. Our economy and our industries are at a vulnerable stage, and investment is needed to increase competitiveness in the lean times. We have not heard our members asking for reduced taxes. There seems to be an imperative to reduce debt when it is already at a manageable level and the economy is slow.

G. Lucas: Number 2: what are priority programs and services that government should continue or develop?

J. Dukhia: A long-term provincial replant program is expected and is a great example of our investing in a pri-
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ority program to help our industry continue to improve, to make a greater contribution to the economy.

G. Lucas: And (b): what should government do differently to help reduce costs to government and taxpayers?

J. Dukhia: The largest part of the budget is health care, so it makes sense to focus on efficiencies in that sector. For example, 0.3 percent savings in health care could be reused for a 64 percent budget increase in agriculture, bringing agriculture up to the level supported by other provinces.

G. Lucas: What programs or services should government reduce or eliminate to help save taxpayers money or free up funding for higher-priority programs and services?

J. Dukhia: We believe that government sometimes falls into the trap of telling industry what it's to do rather than making it possible for industry to improve.

For example, government is creating a website of agriculture information. Yet if the public has a question on the fruit or cattle or blueberries and an agricultural association like ours is opened in the first place, that person with a question calls. Why not invest in increasing the capacity of an association rather than reinventing the wheel with another government-based website?

G. Lucas: And 3: if you had $1 in new funding to share across programs and services that the government delivers, how would you divide it up?

J. Dukhia: Our members would like to see at least 50 percent of their dollars go into investment in management resources and economic development that bring the B.C. agriculture department and its programs at least to the Canadian average, though Canada itself lags behind our competitors in the U.S. and European countries.

G. Lucas: On the next page you'll see a graph which shows the level of support in percentage of GDP, which is economic value, for Ontario and for B.C. So B.C. has dropped to 3.8 percent, and Ontario is close to 10 percent. You can see the difference in level of government support.

J. Dukhia: Agriculture producers know the worst impact of the carbon tax on the sector, so eliminating and not increasing that tax is desired. While we have not posed the question to our members, we feel that they would agree that taxes on income, corporate and personal, mean that those who can most afford to pay will pay the most in taxes.

G. Lucas: What measures could government take to increase government revenues which could be used to support our priorities?

J. Dukhia: We feel that one of the best opportunities, but one of the largest risks, is the Columbia River treaty renewal. We will need to be well prepared. It means getting the value of the stored water for all purposes, not just hydro power generation.

In summary, the BCFGA appreciates the opportunity to provide input into the budget for a dozen consecutive years. We have the following summary.

Placing the agriculture budget on the average level of competing provinces. We used to have a $140 million budget. We're sitting at $67 million. Quebec spends $157 per capita on agriculture. We spend $15. Ontario spends $57. Nova Scotia spends $47.

Achieving the funding for the water stored for U.S. irrigation under a new Columbia River treaty. Let me give you some history of the Columbia River treaty. We used to have shoulder-to-shoulder orchards from Salmon Arm to Osoyoos. We had 53,000 cultivated acres before the Columbia River treaty.

The Salmon Arm area and all those areas were a desert, and the land value was not even $500 an acre down south. Now they're up to $10,000 an acre due to the Columbia River water treaty. This Columbia River treaty has shrunk us from 53,000 acres to 17,000 acres.

The third one is delivering on the program for replant. Replant is the incentive we'd like to see. We spend $30,000 per acre. We get $10,000 from the government, we're spending $20,000 from our pockets, and we wait four to five years to get good returns on that investment. So we're looking forward to the government to soon have an announcement on an ongoing replant program.

D. Ashton (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Jeet. Glen, thank you for being here.

On the Columbia River treaty, does your request come down to…? You make the point here that there are inadequate resources to help build the case. The point is well taken. But effectively, is what you're suggesting…? This working group needs to have the dollars or the resources to estimate that value. Is that the…?

J. Dukhia: Yes, that's what we want. We want some help from the government so we can hire somebody with a professional background with the CRT. We'll work with him as a farmer group of some old farmers in the valley who've been through that time when we signed the Columbia treaty back in the mid-'50s. So you're correct.
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We are looking for some funding.

G. Holman: Just quickly, the replant program. I should know this, but is there a budget commitment to this, as far as you know? Or is there a commitment in next year's budget to initiate that program?

J. Dukhia: What we were promised by Madam Premier, the replant must…. We talked about it with a few of our local MLAs, and everybody. We requested $2 million. It used to be $5 million per year for a replant program. We know that times are tough. We see our economic situation. We dropped our demand to $2 million, which is fairly reasonable, per year.

You have to understand that $2 million is…. Growers put in another $15 million or $20 million from their own pockets, and it has created lots of jobs.

G. Holman: I understand that the commitment has been made. What I'm trying to figure out is whether the dollars are actually in the three-year budget forecast right now. Eric is indicating that it is.

J. Dukhia: Thank you very much for inviting us, sir. And we also have some Honeycrisp apples for you guys.

J. Dukhia: Last year in the spring we had a round-table meeting with our Premier. She wanted to see our exports go from $13 billion to $18 billion in the next five years. We'd love that. We were excited about that.

What's wrong with this can? This can is a product of China. I'm ashamed of it. I live in the Okanagan. I've farmed the last 35 years. I'm eating canned pears from China.

D. Ashton (Chair): Well, there's an opportunity for growth. I grew up in a community called Summerland, and we had two canneries there. So there is an opportunity. Sometimes when that is there, maybe we all have to step up to the plate and seize that opportunity. But I'll leave it at that. I apologize. I have to cut you off there.

Glen, thanks for coming. Jeet, thank you very much for coming today. And Jeet, again, thank you for the apples.

Welcome. For the presentation, we have ten minutes. I'll give you a two-minute warning. Then we have five minutes of questions, and I will hold you to the time on it. The floor is yours.

J. Wu: Good morning. My name is Jingwei Wu. I'm the chairperson of the Okanagan College Students Union, Local 53 of the Canadian Federation of Students–British Columbia.

Our local represents over 5,000 students across the Okanagan Valley. The OCSU was formed in order to organize students on a democratic, cooperative basis for advancing students' interests and to achieve a higher quality of the post-secondary education system which is publicly funded, accessible and affordable for all our citizens, regardless of their family income. Our organization has worked steadily on these goals by lobbying our institution to commit to putting students first.

Students at Okanagan College pay more for their education than any other college in B.C., as per Ministry of Advanced Education post-secondary data. When we compare our arts program against the average, our students are paying approximately $500 more.

We have been successful in four of the past five years in getting our board of governors to not increase students' fees for all students. However, last year the board was forced to bring back a tuition fee increase due to the underfunding by the provincial government. Regrettably, students attending OC ended up paying even more for their tuition fees for their educations.

In recent years we have been seeing a structural shift in the way in which our institutions are funded. Students' share of post-secondary education has increased while core funding to our institution and availability of financial assistance has decreased. As a result, our members have directed us to seek government measures to reduce student debt.

All of our recommendations today are focused on providing adequate funding to our post-secondary education system with the understanding that investment in public education brings massive economic returns and better secures the future of our province.

We believe that an accessible post-secondary education system with lower tuition fees, grants, interest-free student loans and more robust public funding will increase household incomes, diversify the economy and keep the B.C. workforce competitive — ultimately, a benefit for both the public and the private sectors.

Students will tell you that those with higher income as a result of a post-secondary education should and do pay their share in the progressive income taxes. This model worked very well for the preceding generation, whose success is in no small part due to their ability to complete the education they required to start a career and support a family.

Our hope is that after our presentation you, as decision-makers, will reflect on the financial hardship and personal debt that students of this generation are forced to take on compared to the previous generation. I encourage the committee to consider our following recommendations so that we can work together towards
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a high-quality system of post-secondary education that supports our economy and that is equally accessible to all British Columbians regardless of their family incomes.

These are the top priorities for improving access and equality for post-secondary education in British Columbia: (1) a reduction of tuition fees back to 2001 levels, adjusted to inflation; (2) establishment of an upfront, needs-based provincial student grants program; (3) elimination of interest rates on B.C. student loans; (4) restoration of operating funding to universities and colleges to 2001 levels, accounting for inflation; and (5) the reorganization of Industry Training Authority governance and funding. We will provide the committee with detailed support for the recommendations in our written submissions.

Tuition fees are the biggest proportion of a student's cost in education. In British Columbia tuition fees have steadily increased over the last decade, from $1,727 in 1990 to an average of $5,029 this year. This translates to a 300 percent increase in one generation. This shift in policy means that students today are being asked to pay a much higher proportion of their costs of a college education than ever before, which has reduced access. We are witnessing a narrowing demographic of those who can access post-secondary education, leaving low- and middle-income families last in line.

There are two detrimental effects of B.C.'s tuition fee levels. One, fees are a barrier to participation for families from low-income backgrounds and at a time when most of the new jobs require post-secondary education. Two, for those who attend, increased fees can cause student debt to skyrocket higher than ever before.

In order to provide critical relief to students struggling to pay for the rising costs of a higher education, we are recommending a reduction in tuition fees back to 2001 levels. The most equitable way to finance a widely accessible system for post-secondary education is through the progressive income tax system. Reducing tuition fees must be part of a larger strategy to ensure access to post-secondary education in British Columbia.

The second recommendation is for re-establishing an upfront, needs-based grants program. The federal government acknowledged the burden of student debt across the country and implemented the Canada student grants program after lobbying efforts from students.

In contrast, B.C. has the lowest level of non-repayable financial aid in the country, at just 12 percent. A combination of record high tuition fees and a lack of non-repayable financial aid is undeniably the cause of the British Columbia students' debt crisis. Financial aid should be used to help those who cannot afford post-secondary education to enter the system and attain the degree or diploma needed to support themselves and their family.

If aid was distributed properly, students would be able to leave university or college without massive debt and able to pay into tomorrow's education system through taxes. Today the average student debt in British Columbia is $37,000 upon completion of a four-year degree — over $10,000 above the national average of student debt — awarding B.C. the prize for the highest student debt in the country.

Student debt should not be taken lightly, and consideration should be given to the adverse impacts student debt has on B.C.'s economy. For the first time in history, an entire generation will attempt to enter the workforce with incomparable levels of debt and will certainly delay purchasing a home, starting families and investing in business ventures. B.C. was once a leading province in assisting students but now is home to the largest amount of student debt in the country. The B.C. government has an opportunity to reverse this trend by establishing a needs-based grants program.

Continuing on the discussion of financial aid, I will now address student loans. While student loans may get students who otherwise couldn't afford the high cost of education through the door, they do nothing to combat student debt in the province. A majority of the post-secondary students in B.C. cannot afford to pay for their tuition fee up front. Those who can afford to borrow end up paying substantially more than those who can afford to pay up front.

British Columbian students are being charged interest at prime plus 2.5 percent on their student loans, higher than anywhere else in the country, meaning a student who can afford to pay their tuition fee up front pays no interest to government, but a low-income student who needs a loan will pay thousands of dollars in interest.

This revenue from student loan interest to the provincial government is $30 million. Eliminating interest on student loans is an obvious and affordable policy mechanism to reduce the student debt level in B.C., given an inherent inequality created by student loan interest charges and at a relatively minor cost of removal.

On the topic of core funding, we feel that this needs to be substantially increased if our institutions are going to continue to provide a high-quality education that competes globally. Since 2001 students have seen a gradual erosion of college and university funding on a per-student basis, leading to program cuts. These remain as liabilities, reduced services and increases in salary and fees.

Institution budget cuts are disproportionately allocated to protect direct classroom learning, so academic and support services like counselling, advising, support for students with disabilities, and learning centres are disproportionately affected. Many institutions are struggling to serve 2013-level enrolments with a 2001-level service budget, meaning that students are not able to access support services.

At Okanagan College we no longer have a health nurse
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on any of our campuses, yet the needs still exist. We have also seen growing cuts to our college programs in recent years, with new programs introduced under a cost recovery model with much higher course fees. To combat this trend, students seek a return to 2001 levels of core per-student funding adjusted for inflation.

Our final recommendation is on behalf of our members in trades and apprentice training.

D. Ashton (Chair): You're right at the end of your presentation. Could you summarize, please? I apologize.

D. Ashton (Chair): Okay, perfect. Thank you. Go ahead. I'll let you summarize it.

B. Berchowitz: With regards to trades training, we now have modulization, which is the compartmentalization of the trades training. So instead of being a carpenter, you'd be, like, a framer. We're looking for a change to that and also a change to the ITA governance board. It doesn't have any student representatives or any trade union representatives, and that's a change we should make.

D. Ashton (Chair): It is, eh? Okay. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'm sorry. I just have to keep everybody on the same time schedule.

E. Foster: Thank you very much for your presentation. You've gone through all the stats from the '90s, and so on. Has anybody factored in what your request is going to cost the taxpayers of this province?

B. Berchowitz: Well, that's your guys' job as government officials — to figure out where priorities are going to be and how we're going to make these changes. It's not our job to figure it out. It's our job to bring proposals to you guys. But definitely, it'll be a crunch for the numbers, I believe.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. You are aware that we've been getting presentations like this from the student groups across British Columbia, so two quick questions. One is just on the ITA. You talk very quickly, so I missed that, just to repeat that. I think the other….

You're making four recommendations — right? — zero-interest loans, increased core funding, student grants, reduced tuition fees. If you had to pick one of those, keeping in mind what your primary objective is…. Seems to me it's around accessibility — affordability for, perhaps, lower-income students. It seems to me that's kind of at the core of what you're suggesting. If you had to pick one of those things, what would be the most effective in achieving the goal of greater accessibility? And if you could just repeat what you said about the ITA again.

B. Berchowitz: Sure. I'll start with the ITA part. Sorry, I do speak really fast, so that's why Javid did the speaking.

What is happening with trades, the programming itself, is it's being modularized into smaller compartments. So instead of being a well-rounded carpenter at the end, what they're doing now is forcing students to go into being a carpenter. And then they can have those jobs just as a framer. Sorry. Then they'd be moved on from the jobsite, and a new person would come in to do the next step of the trades part.

Instead of being well rounded, it's being put into small pieces, and it's not making a stronger employee, at the end of the day. It's creating quite a large problem with being a lower-income paid employee at the end.

B. Berchowitz: To stop modularization and go back to a well-rounded education for trades training.

Then in terms of what the ITA governance is, currently the ITA, the training authority, doesn't have any representation from the students or trade unions on their board. Now that modularization has occurred, if we had representatives from students and trade unions, they'd be able to be a voice of reason — to say, like, that that's not a good policy choice. And to go back to having a well-represented training authority and to increase government funding.

Then in terms of the priority, that's a really hard thing to narrow down to. I think it's almost like…. It's expensive to get in, and it's really expensive to get out. So I think access for any student, regardless if you're low-income or high-income or medium-income, just knowing that it's going to cost you a significant amount to even enter…. Then if you can't afford that, it's going to cost you a significant amount on your way out, with debt being prime plus 2½.

I think it comes down to fees and access. All citizens of B.C. should have post-secondary. We all have secondary and primary school as a right. It should be the same for post-secondary.

J. Wu: Accessibility is always the issue, and also, the service is always important for our students. I'm an international student, and service by far is the most important and then it's the most critical for international students willing to say here to study. As international students, unfortunately, we are the third-largest commodity for the
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country to contribute to the GDP. And the service we're getting is really not that great.

D. Ashton (Chair): As an international student, then, you have the opportunity to go where you want. Sorry, but I just have to say that. I apologize. You know, that's your choice. You chose it here.

I just want to thank you. I'm sorry. We're out of time. I appreciate the input, and we have heard, on a similar basis, what has been said today, and it is good, positive reinforcement. I've got Brianne, and I'm sorry. Is it Jingwei?

D. Ashton (Chair): Okay, thank you. Have a great day. Thank you for coming today, both of you.

Christine, thank you for coming this morning. It's a ten-minute presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning, and we have five minutes reserved for questions.

Hey, kids, before you go, there are some great Honeycrisp apples there, if you want to grab a couple too, just in case. I would offer that to anybody in the gallery also.

C. Kashuba: Good morning, members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. I really appreciate this opportunity to be able to make this presentation to you. My name is Christine Kashuba. I'm a director on the ArtsBC board. I'm an artist. I'm a member of the Arts Council of the North Okanagan, and I manage a heritage facility called Mackie Lake House for the Mackie Lake House Foundation.

Whenever I begin a project, I try to relate it to what I already know and understand, so please indulge me as I present my information.

A lot of your work is left-brained, which is logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective. It's really important in your line of work.

A lot of my work is right-brained, which is random, intuitive, holistic, synthesizing and subjective. That's really important in my work. I'm not totally right-brained, and you're not totally left-brained. But rather, we complement each other, so we can bring out the best in each other.

What is ArtsBC? ArtsBC, also known as the Assembly of B.C. Arts Councils, is a non-profit, registered charity and provincial arts service organization with a mandate to support and advance community arts and community cultural development in B.C.

Through our member network, ArtsBC provides a vital link between arts organizations in every region of the province, including geographically isolated communities. We represent and work on behalf of our 220 members. Of those 220 members, about 100 are arts councils. So those aren't individual members. They're arts councils which also represent a lot of other members.

Our membership isn't broad in scope and reach. The operating budgets range from minuscule, less than $10,000, to magnificent, in the millions. It makes it a challenge for us as an organization sometimes.

They employ thousands of artists and cultural workers. Their volunteers donate countless hours and volunteer boards include many community and business leaders.

Some of the services that ArtsBC provided our members in the past have included a community arts toolkit, and that was so successful, it was sold out. We would like to reproduce that.

There were recent sustainability seminars, and in there everything was covered, from considering what a sustainable, non-profit arts or cultural organization looks like to good governance, solid planning, skilful management and things that are important to the sustainability of any organization.

We learned how to identify where our organization was in terms of its life cycle. We improved practices in areas of financial management, reporting, planning and proposal writing. We learned how to effectively communicate goals, and we learned that there might be unwritten, relevant resources or people in our communities.

Personally, I participated in those seminars, and I found the practical information, the support material and follow-up helped me to understand how to manage and sustain a cultural organization.

Currently ArtsBC provides members with information, everything from professional development, grants and fundraising — I've listed them all there — all the way to upcoming events for our members.

We have a newsletter that provides quarterly information and updates, and we provide networking information and support at our annual conference, which is held in different locations throughout the province. Two years ago it was held in New West. This year it was held in Vernon. Next year it will be on Bowen Island. The following year it will be in Penticton. Because our members are representative for such a broad spectrum across B.C., we really try to move our conferences around to accommodate them.

What did our members ask for? In our last members survey, which was just done about six months ago, they asked for how to engage the public of all ages, skill levels, nationalities and backgrounds more effectively.

They wanted to know about the intersection between arts and other disciplines and how to take an organization into new areas of expression such as health or environment. They wanted information about public art, where funding was found, how communities responded to that.

They wanted to maximize partnerships between non-profit groups so that costs could be reduced by working together and sharing resources. They want ongoing board
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development, training and tools. They want statistics and information regarding economic impact of the arts. They want more in-depth social media marketing workshops.

Then they had some things that they wanted that we had never done before. These are the new ideas that they really want us to look at. Creation of regional forums to share experiences and supplement content of the provincial conference. So more opportunities to learn from each other.

They want to explore the creation of a functional interprovincial artist showcase, with a regional exchange. They want us to help provide an art instructors list so that instructors could go out to different parts of the province to help in their organizations and then to develop training for art instructors on class management, course development and time management.

Today I come before your committee on behalf of ArtsBC and our members to encourage you to make recommendations to increase investments in the arts and culture section in B.C. in 2014-2015.

ArtsBC recognizes the provincial government's commitment to B.C.'s cultural life, including increasing the B.C. Arts Council funding for this current fiscal year. The increased investment is a strong indicator that you, the provincial government, understand and recognize the important role of the arts and culture sector in sustaining and building B.C.'s future prosperity.

ArtsBC emphasizes the need for the provincial government to continue its increased investment in arts and culture through the B.C. Arts Council and through gaming revenues. This funding allows community-based arts organizations to leverage money from local governments and from the private sector.

The three things that we ask for. Firstly, that the B.C. Arts Council budget would be increased in the upcoming year and then further increased in 2016 — so up to $32 million in 2014-2015 and $40 million in 2016. Currently the B.C. Arts Council is not adequately funded to fulfil its mandate or address current demand for its programs. An increase to $32 million will begin to address existing shortfalls while activating the associated economic and social benefits. A longer-term increase to $40 million will help to make British Columbia more competitive in a national context.

Secondly, community gaming grants provide essential funds for many arts organizations and, specifically, for those programs not funded by the B.C. Arts Council. Previous cuts in this area created turmoil for the sector. These have not fully been recovered from, despite ongoing growth in gaming revenues.

We propose increasing the gaming community grants to organizations from $135½ million to $156 million, with the option to further increase gaming grants in the long term.

Thirdly, we ask that you provide stable, predictable funding for the B.C. Arts Council and community gaming grant programs so that they can offer multi-year funding to arts and cultural organizations. We recommend specifically considering a three-year budgeting model that includes the ability to carry over unspent earmarked funds so that it does not penalize successful fundraising.

Arts and culture are significant contributors to the well-being of communities and our province's economy and identity. The people of British Columbia can be extremely proud of what has been achieved by its artistic creators and cultural workers — even more so knowing that the growth in this sector will be sustained and supported by the provincial government.

D. Ashton (Chair): Christine, thank you. Good presentation. I like the Coles Notes in the middle. That's great.

J. Tegart: Thank you very much for your presentation. It's a similar presentation that we've heard in other venues, but your enthusiasm is infectious. As you heard in the presentation before, we try to look holistically and certainly understand the value of arts and culture in communities. So I just want to say thank you for the presentation today.

C. Kashuba: You're welcome. I hope I brought a bit more personal information into that.

E. Foster: Well, thank you very much, Christine. I'd be remiss if I didn't put a plug in for Mackie House, one of the great cultural organizations and facilities in our riding, in Vernon. Christine does an outstanding job of operating it.

I do appreciate the fact that when you came with your ask, you actually had one, not an open-ended request for all the money that we had. It's still a pretty substantial request, but I do appreciate it. And as Jackie said, we've heard from the Arts Council. I will give you credit. You people talk to each other, because your numbers are exactly the same as theirs were. So thank you very much for that.

D. Ashton (Chair): Christine, thank you very much for today. It was an infectious presentation.

C. Kashuba: I was really, really tempted to bring my paintbrushes and paint something while I talked. But there were all these numbers and things, and I thought the two sides of my brain would just have a problem with that. Thank you for your time.

D. Ashton (Chair): Next up, we're jumping ahead, so
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we have Casey and Ken, Sunrise Village society. Thank you for being available to jump in. That will help us out a lot. We have ten minutes for the presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning and then five minutes for questions.

C. Van Staalduinen: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Ken and I are here on behalf of the Sunrise Village, Kelowna, manufactured home park. The reason we're here today is to present to you regarding our concerns about the mobile home park formula that was passed in July 2007, allowing landowners to charge a 2 percent yearly increase plus inflation.

I'll stop here for a minute. I'm not used to doing this sort of thing, so you'll have to bear with me here.

C. Van Staalduinen: I'll try to talk a little slow, because I noticed that lady before me…. I couldn't follow her. She's too fast.

Anyway, at first glance, this allowable increase that the government has in the legislation does not seem high. However, as years go by, the compounding effect year after year starts to add up to a large increase over time.

Under the present act a homeowner has no power to negotiate changes with the landlord, so it falls onto the provincial government to ensure that there is a balance to this power, and fairness. The fact that landlords are permitted annual land increases that builds into an extra 2 percent above inflation means that rents are rising faster than income or the SAFER grant levels. This is creating hardships for those living on fixed or low incomes. As we all know, the vast majority of tenants in mobile home parks are seniors.

Calculating the annual rent increases of 2 percent plus inflation plus any utilities or tax increases for the whole park compounded over a period of time…. This seemingly minor increase ends up to be a major rent increase in mobile home parks over time. The present situation is very unbalanced at this time and strongly favours the landlord.

If this formula is allowed to continue into the future, our annual land rents will soon rise into the $500- to $600-a-month range, while the resale value of our homes will decrease substantially. For those responsible for amending the tenancy act or regulations, this will require a complete change of thinking.

If not acted on, in the future more and more tenants will have to ask assistance by way of SAFER grants — which, in turn, will put more financial strain on your budget.

A recent article in the Globe and Mail newspaper indicates that the spread between the top-income earners, about 1 percent of the population, and the vast majority of people, including seniors, is growing fast. This issue is taking place right now with the present mobile home park act and regulations. For people earning a six-figure salary, this is not an issue. However, most seniors are not in that category.

We feel that the owners deserve a profit, but the last five years of compounding increases are averaging almost 4 percent per year, and over five years that average turns out to about 20 percent, while inflation increases in pensions is approximately 1½ percent per year over that period, and bank interest, as we all know, is very low.

We also had a recession in the last five, six years. We feel that the maintenance cost increases by established inflation rates and then, on top of that, the owners getting an extra 2 percent on that maintenance…. We feel this unacceptable.

Our proposal to the government would be as follows. Amend the existing manufactured home park act to split the monthly rental rates into land rental at 2 percent and maintenance costs at inflation rate. This would lower the increase, fairer to both parties. For example, if land rental would be, say, $250 per month, a 2 percent increase per year would be $5. If maintenance fees — this is an example we're using here — would be $200 a month and this year it's 1.8 percent inflation, it would be $3.60. Total increase would be $8.60 per month.

As the matter stands today, increases are calculated at 3.8 percent per year. On the full $450 of the example that I've indicated, the increase at today's rate is $17.10.

We are very concerned about the future, as the compounding effect will make living in a mobile home park unaffordable for a lot of seniors, especially for the ones that lose a spouse. Just as a sideline, we were just talking about that this morning. Approximately 25 to 30 percent in our park are single seniors. A lot of people don't realize it, but as you get older, one of them…. It's usually the men that pass away — sorry, guys — earlier. The women outlast us.

Furthermore, we ask that the government limit the increase per year to 2½ percent, as is the law in the province of Ontario. We're concerned about the future. Today we've got a low inflation rate, but what is it going to be tomorrow? We could be having a 4 or 5 percent increase. We don't know.

As we look at the last election…. One of the themes of the present government is to look after all the people, including seniors. The future is very uncertain for a lot of seniors today. Under the present act, as allowed by the government, the anxiety at present is very high amongst the tenants about what could be in store for them.

This proposal does not cost the government any money.
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We're not here to ask for money, which you probably get all day. We respectfully ask that the committee take this very seriously, as time keeps compounding this problem.

I thank you for your attention. There's a letter included in my presentation. I think you got the letter. Did you all get a copy?

C. Van Staalduinen: We had a petition, which I have here, that we presented to all the government people involved — our local MLAs and the Premier and the opposition people. They all got a petition that we held in April, which was 95 percent in favour of what our proposal is asking.

"Having canvassed the area assigned to us for the petition regarding the money charged to the residents of Sunrise Village by the way of land increase, we confronted many anxious residents. Nearly all expressed concern about the fact that they're coming to the point that they're not able to remain living here, this due to the fact their homes are not keeping pace with the rise in land lease payments.

"Another issue is that the residents know of no ceiling in sight to these charges. How high can this land levy go before it becomes out of proportion to the value of the homes sitting on the land?

"Most residents spoken with are really concerned about the future. Is there no way of developing a plan that would stop this increase at a certain level or after a certain number of years living in the village?"

D. Ashton (Chair): Casey, thank you. A great job. I don't know what you were nervous about.

L. Popham: Thanks for the presentation. Do you happen to know how many seniors would be affected by this in B.C.?

K. Gillis: I can answer that. It's 100,000-plus that live in mobile home parks, manufactured home parks, and they're all facing the same situation.

We're not disappointed or discouraged with the present owner of our park. They do a wonderful job for us in that regard. They're just living by the rules that are presented to them, and it's nearing a 4 percent increase on a compound basis year after year after year. Eventually that's going to drive us out of the village.

My concern is…. I like our park. It's well maintained. If the residents can't afford to keep the upkeep coming, what that generally means is that you're going to have a deterioration in the buildings. You're going to have a deterioration, and we don't want to see that happen either.

We're not here asking for money. We're asking for fairness, and I think that's the theme we came with today. We're not disappointed with our owners. We just want fairness throughout. I think 100,000-plus votes mean a lot in this constituency and in all constituencies in B.C.

G. Holman: Just a question about how these rules — I probably should know this; maybe some committee members know it — the legislation for mobile home parks, compare to, say, the rentalsman act. Have you considered that, or have you made that comparison? The rules that allow, say, just for an apartment building — there is legislation governing, as I understand it, rent increases in those situations. Have you looked at that?

K. Gillis: No, I haven't looked at that. Is there a formula there for apartment blocks and such?

D. Ashton (Chair): I can't answer. I'm not sure if anybody can. There is a rentalsman act, and it might be something to have a look at. I don't know if it affects mobile home parks or not. I'm not sure.

G. Holman: I was thinking just more in terms of the fairness question. If there's legislation applied to other rental-type situations, what are those rules, and how do they compare to the mobile…?

K. Gillis: Well, I think Casey has laid out a nice comparison to the province of Ontario. What they've done is that they've capped it at 2½ percent. By doing that, that allows the residents to maintain their homes and still live there. I think it's a good way to go — the 2½ percent. It's sure as heck a lot better than 4 percent.

E. Foster: The reason, I think — if you look into why the legislation was changed in '07 — was that the rentalsman act did not apply to pad rentals and land leases in mobile home parks. That's why it was changed, because there was no provision there to govern what the park owners could raise the pad rents to. That's why it was brought in.

It basically is on a parallel with what landlords can charge under the rentalsman act in rental properties for
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apartments, and so on. That was the purpose of it. Now, not to say that you can't look at what your proposal is, and that's fine.

Prior to '07 the landowner or the park owner could raise pad rent by whatever they wanted at any time, so it was actually brought in to protect the people who lived in the parks. But if it's not working, then it needs to be looked at.

C. Van Staalduinen: What's happening, as a sideline of this…. I remember at the time when there was a different government in power and the rental situation was that the maximum was 10 percent per year. That's fine and dandy. It sounds good, except what happens is that landlords — and you can't blame them — will charge an extra 10 percent per year if they need it or not, and it's automatic.

That's what's happening here. The landlords are allowed 2 percent profit on the whole monthly, and that includes 2 percent profit on the maintenance that they charge, besides the inflation. When it's set in stone, they're going to charge it, regardless. And this is what we're asking. The compounding effect is taking a very serious effect on this situation.

D. Ashton (Chair): Sir, thank you. Good presentation. It may have been brought in at a time where 2 percent was considered more reasonable than what zero is now. Those are the things…. Eric touched on it, and so did Gary — a possibility to have a look at it. I appreciate the presentation. I'm sorry to cut you off. You're out of time.

C. Van Staalduinen: We thank you for allowing us to be here and present this to you.

D. Ashton (Chair): Have a good day. Grab an apple, sir, if you want, as you're going out. There are some nice Honeycrisps there.

Okanagan College Faculty Association — Tim Walters. Good morning, sir. We have 10 minutes for the presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning. Then we have five minutes for questioning. The floor is yours.

T. Walters: Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to address what the government's budget priorities should be for 2014. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we're meeting today on unceded Syilx territory, part of the Okanagan Nation, and by identifying myself. My name is Tim Walters. I teach English and film courses at the Salmon Arm campus of the college, but I'm here today representing the Okanagan College Faculty Association.

We have close to 300 members who work and teach not only here in Kelowna but also in our various campuses throughout the region. Let me start with a bit of background on our institution.

Okanagan College was first established 50 years ago as a community college. We actually had our birthday celebration last week. In the early 1990s our institution's mandate was expanded to allow third- and fourth-year programs, leading to an undergraduate degree. We become 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 the new Okanagan College.

Like other colleges, OC has a mandate to provide comprehensive learning opportunities to students in this region through a network of four major campuses and three satellite centres. By comprehensive, I mean a full range of program offerings that lead to degrees, diplomas, certificates and completed apprenticeships. It also means providing avenues for adult learners to re-engage in post-secondary learning by completing their grade 12 or by simply getting the necessary prerequisites for entry into different streams within the public post-secondary education system here in B.C.

It's important to note that the learning that happens at Okanagan College is more than just a list of credentials and prerequisites. Learning is also about students expanding their understanding of their community and maturing their sense of how they see themselves in that community. That community can be measured by a postal code or comprehended as something more global. Either way, a post-secondary education helps transform students. That's our mandate at the college.

That transformation is something that every one of our faculty sees every day in their students, It may be a cliché to talk about enquiring minds, but at its core, that's what much of post-secondary education is all about: getting students to look and think critically at the world around them and, through that process, to become more confident as learners, more capable of becoming lifelong learners and more adaptive to the process of acquiring new skills.

As faculty, our members see the transformations as their students gain confidence and insights and become more involved in their communities. They see adult learners make the sometimes difficult but always rewarding transition to new careers and new skills. All those transformations make a difference to the individual students and to our province as a whole. The point is particularly important here 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 the committee has already heard that post-secondary funding is under pressure. At a provincial level, the core funding, our operating grants from the Ministry of
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Advanced Education, is not keeping pace with enrolment demands or the unique cost pressures within the public post-secondary education system.

The budget and service plan tabled by the Minister of Advanced Ed in 2013 included some disappointing measures. By 2015, for example, real per-student operating grants to colleges, universities and institutes in B.C. will have dropped by 20 percent since 2001. Capital spending was also affected by the 2013 budget. The documents show that spending is slated to decline again in the 2013-14 fiscal year.

For post-secondary students, the budget shows no relief for the affordability, the crunch they face. The budget documents forecast tuition fee revenues to climb by close to $100 million over the next three years.

For a college like ours, these funding pressures are particularly tough because our mandate is to provide access through a geographically dispersed area. Unlike colleges in large metropolitan areas, for example, we have a real challenge recruiting students to full programs in many of our smaller campuses. The first reaction when cost pressures increase is to simply cut back those programs and course offerings, but in doing so, we are also turning our backs 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 already been well served by the large, established research universities. However, not every student is able to attend those institutions. That shouldn't be a reason for them not accessing the post-secondary education in their 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, we put at risk our capacity to match skills with future job prospects.

Funding pressures at Okanagan are having a direct impact on faculty as well as students. There is a trend to shift faculty positions to part-time or contingent and term 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. Students are not well served by that approach, obviously. Neither is the local community that our college has a mandate to serve.

Funding pressures also contort the publicness of our public institutions. As colleges 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.

One other frustration we have with funding is a direct result of a policy change made over a decade ago, in which the government moved away from targeted funding to a system of block funding, a change that gave local administrators a lot more latitude to choose how to spend their operating grants. During the intervening decade, we've seen the number of administrative positions and associated budget increases — a lot more than other areas within the institution.

For example, in 2001 Okanagan had 81 full-time-equivalents of excluded administrative staff. By 2012 it had climbed to 120, almost a 48 percent increase, and the budget for those positions has increased accordingly.

All of this happened at a time when real student operating grants were in steady decline. We have long held that the move to block funding was misguided, and we would hope that as part of a larger review of funding for post-secondary, the government reconsiders this policy.

The provincial government stated over a year ago its commitment 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 plan for international education includes additional funding to support that diversity, it runs the risk of never achieving the goal that has been set.

In conclusion, our faculty association would like to see the following priorities either addressed or strengthened in the 2014 provincial budget. First, today's students face a significant affordability crunch. Tuition fees have more than doubled over the last decade, and they've been raised twice at Okanagan in the past three years. Student debts have moved higher in tandem with those tuition fee increases. That places an enormous burden on them, one that cannot be ignored. A meaningful step in the right direction would be reviving the student grant program.

Second, new funding needs to be in place to provide post-secondary institutions with 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 ensure stronger completion rates in our system.

Third, achieving the government's goals in the area of international education will require additional provincial
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support that needs to be articulated in the 2014 budget. As 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 receive needs to better respond to the cost pressures that smaller institutions face. The sensible approach, in our view, is to engage in a thorough review of the funding formula so that regional inequities and core funding needs for the system as a whole are adequately addressed.

Thank you very much for your time. I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have.

G. Holman: Thanks very much for your presentation. You're probably aware that many other institutions are coming to us with similar recommendations.

G. Holman: Just the question on international students. You're indicating, and it makes sense, that they need additional supports. But don't they also pay much higher tuition fees which would fund those supports?

T. Walters: They do pay much higher tuition fees, which is a good thing and a bad thing for our institutions. It's unfortunately been the case lately that some institutions — not so much Okanagan College, but I know other places in the sector — have been perceiving international students as…. The, I hope incorrect, acronym that they're using is RGUs, revenue-generating units.

I don't think that the extra tuition defrays the expenses required for hiring extra faculty to work with them, hiring individuals to help them integrate better into our local communities, and things like that. I don't think that the amount of money that they bring in is close to being equal to the amount of spending that's required to give them the kind of education we're hoping to offer them.

G. Holman: The previous presentation about the students. Again, they're obviously conspiring behind the scenes, because it's the same. And there are four….

G. Holman: There are four recommendations they're making. I noticed, though, in terms of your proposal around access, that you honed in on student grants as opposed to — well, I'm not sure — reducing tuition fees in general, whereas you seem to be recommending…. I can't remember if the other institutions were doing the same.

If you had to pick one of the four things the students were recommending, you seem to hone in on the grants, which would, of course, focus on those who otherwise might not be able to afford tuition. Is that a fair comment on my part — that if you had to kind of pick among the number of things the students are proposing, you would pick the measure that focuses in on the affordability question for lower-income students?

T. Walters: I wasn't here to hear their presentation. Having conspired with them as much as perhaps it seems…. If I had to pick, the first thing we would do is offer free post-secondary education to every student in British Columbia. I don't think that it's an either-or proposition. I think that college and university tuition has become too expensive for everyone, but obviously, it's particularly taking a toll on people from low-income communities. And I think that grants have to be one of the pieces of the puzzle by which we address the access issue.

D. Ashton (Chair): Sir, we're out of time. Thank you very much for your presentation. Appreciate it. Have a good day.

Is there anybody in the gallery that is on the list to speak? No, we haven't missed anybody?

PacificSport Okanagan — is that correct? Welcome, gentlemen. I like to see you here. Thank you for coming. Ten minutes for the presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning. Then we have five minutes reserved for questions or comments.

J. Gabriel: I'll start it off. Thank you for the opportunity. As you can see from our cards, I'm Jim Gabriel. I wear two hats. I'm the active living and cultural divisional director with the city of Kelowna. I'm also the president of the PacificSport Regional Sport Centre Okanagan Society.

This is Doug Nicholas. Doug is the general manager with the PacificSport organization.

PacificSport is a multisport training support centre for athletes and coaches. The non-profit society is based in Kelowna with satellite centres in both Penticton and
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Vernon. We are connected to a network of five regional centres throughout the province and to the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific's three national campuses across the province.

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

Together we have intentionally strived to provide purposeful program delivery that empowers our communities to play, participate and perform to their best through sport. That's our new vision statement that was just developed.

We are here today, firstly, to thank you for the investment in sports throughout the province. The funding provided to sports speaks volumes to the government's commitment to ensuring B.C. leads the nation as a culture that values sports excellence and, most importantly, sport as a vehicle for health promotion and prevention. The sports sector has worked diligently to provide a strong return on the government's investment by becoming more efficient and effective in the delivery of its programs and services.

Through the leadership of ViaSport, some of the newly developed sector efficiencies include a clearer, more transparent granting and reporting process; shared communication and data-tracking systems; reduced administration and management costs; opportunities for organizations to work together on a provincial sports strategy.

Secondly, we are here to request continued support for our sport development initiatives through a multi-year investment that stretches beyond a 12-month cycle. This type of stable, consistent funding would provide greater opportunity to leverage other funding sources and better sustain programming that has proven successful. Additionally, sport organizations would be able to create multi-year sport strategies that would not only support community sport development but also strengthen the infrastructure for sport as a whole in our province for years to come.

To be clear, our ask is not for more funding but for government's current annual investment in sport to be extended over a multi-year agreement.

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics ushered 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, three years later, the PacificSport network of centres continues to build on the momentum of the games, working with our sport partners to provide a sport pathway aligned with the Canadian sport for life framework that supports communities from playground to podium.

D. Nicholas: We want to share a little bit about what we're doing here in the Okanagan, specifically PacificSport.

Thanks, in part, to the provincial government's investment, we have developed and delivered a number of participation and performance programs that have benefited thousands of people, ensuring that everyone has a place to play, a way to get in the game.

This past year one of our programs, the Xplore SportZ sport discovery program, partnered with over 40 community 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 physical literacy mentoring program provides resources, mentoring and expertise to over 200 Central Okanagan teachers and municipal recreation programmers so that children have the basic tools they need to take part in physical activity and sport, both for healthy lifelong enjoyment and for sporting success.

The IGNITE athlete development program uses regionally based sport service providers to train over 100 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, 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 Canadian sport school, Kelowna campus, introduced 30 student athletes last year to a high-performance lifestyle and offered a flexible academic timetable that supported their competitive training schedule.

These are just a couple of examples. These programs and others like them have had 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 programming, children and youth, I think, are unplugging their devices, and they're getting physically active.

Educators are realizing the importance of physical literacy and discovering new ways to teach fundamental movement skills. Young athletes are taking a broader approach to their training in developing foundational athletic skills. Families are getting away from fast-food options and adopting healthy and nutritious eating habits. Coaches are taking advantage of personal and professional development opportunities and learning new skills that will positively impact athlete development, and students are meeting the demands of both sport and education.
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The positive benefits of sport programming stretch beyond these examples as well, and they're noticed in terms of employment opportunities. You may have heard this already, but the sport sector provides an estimated 2 percent of all jobs in B.C. These paid positions leverage over 400,000 additional volunteers in B.C. who each contribute an average of more than 140 hours a year to sport.

The economic spinoffs. 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 million in 2010 — up 9 percent from 2008, two years before that — compared with an overall decrease in tourism of 0.7 percent.

Also, sport contributes to lower health care costs. Research shows that individuals who are physically active have fewer preventable health issues such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

This is a cool stat, I think. Additionally, on average, for each $1 that government contributes to the sports sector, sport organizations are able to leverage $4.77.

J. Gabriel: PacificSport Okanagan 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 inspire our 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.

S. Hamilton: Just one. Thank you very much for the presentation. As you probably know, we've heard from a number of organizations that you're affiliated with as we've gone around the province. You do fabulous work. Many of the people around here, I'm sure, are like me — the consummate mom or dad on the soccer pitch or the softball field.

It's very compelling when you present those numbers in terms of the payback. For every $1, you get $4. All the sweat equity and all the free labour that we can leverage for such a small investment is incredible.

BrainTrust, Magda, welcome. So ten minutes for the presentation. We'll give you a two-minute warning, and then we have five minutes reserved for questions.

M. Kapp: Thanks for having me today. It's a pleasure to be here and see all of you. I'm sure you've had a great experience speaking to all the different groups.

My name is Magda Kapp, and I am the director of communications for a not-for-profit organization called BrainTrust Canada. We are based here in the Okanagan, and we've actually been here since 1986.

We provide community rehab services to individuals with brain injury in the Okanagan. We have offices in Kelowna and Vernon, and we work one-on-one with our clients with brain injury to improve their quality of life and maximize their independence. We also work with their families and have groups, as well, during our year.

Acquired brain injury, for your information, occurs after birth and can be caused by both traumatic and non-traumatic means. People generally just think of brain injury as something where you hit your head, but it's also stroke. It's things like tumours, meningitis. There are many ways — lack of oxygen — so many different ways that you can sustain brain injury.

The traumatic means we hear about in the media so much — right? — in terms of concussion. When you hear the word "concussion," concussion is brain injury. Sidney Crosby being out, not playing hockey for a year, is brain injury. It's cognitive changes to the brain. We try our best to also have a very strong focus on education and prevention, especially for youth, who are at highest risk for brain injury.

An interesting fact is that our brains are actually not fully formed until the mid-20s. That actually plays into it when people are making judgments that maybe are not the smartest choice. Areas such as judgment are the last to form in your brain when you're in your 20s — reasoning, perception, things like that.

At age 16 or 17, youth are driving. They're starting to drink. They're taking risks. So it's no wonder that that group — 14 to 25 — is at the highest risk for brain injury.

The province of B.C.'s guiding framework for public health, a report called Promote, Protect, Prevent: Our Health Begins Here, stated that each day 1,200 people are unintentionally injured. Of these, five die every day. Brain injury is the most serious form of injury, so those people likely are dying of brain injury, not of a broken limb.

Conservatively, there are about 22,000 new brain injuries in B.C. annually, 456 people a day. That's about one every three minutes. In a study in 2012, Interior Health actually ranked second highest for age-specific head injury mortality rates with children under 19. In another
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study, it showed head injury mortality in B.C. was highest for 15- to 19-year-olds. This really speaks to the importance of prevention, and that's what I'm here to talk about today.

A brain injury can happen in an instant and last a lifetime. The costs, actually, for just one serious brain injury over a lifetime are about $4 million. It also results in social consequences. About 80 percent of prisoners live with brain injury, and over 60 percent of homeless persons have brain injury.

With youth being at the highest risk, we put a lot of energy towards that. We educate kids in schools. We try and talk about the importance of prevention, how fragile the brain is. We do a helmet safety program in Vernon and Kelowna, and we reward youth for positive safety behaviour.

Where funding allows, we coordinate unique marketing programs. We did a Protect Your Head program that actually won several awards in New York, Cannes and the Mexico International Safety Media Awards. The advertising agency that took us on as a cause pro bono entered them into all these awards, and they won several.

We're working on something new as well for next year, if funding allows. Our dollars reach very far. We always believe that prevention is the best answer, and there's an important place for community-based injury prevention initiatives.

We don't receive any funding for our brain injury prevention initiatives. We only receive funding though Interior Health to work with our clients, so we have the two sides to our organization.

As a community-based organization, we've been delivering services for almost three decades. We have an important role to play in the continuum of service delivery for brain injury prevention. We believe we can deliver these services in a cost-effective and creative way.

We feel there's a gap with regards to leadership and resources for prevention of brain injury at a provincial level. Injury prevention is actually identified as a priority for the provincial government, however, the most serious form of injury — which is brain injury — is not. It's not anybody's mandate. This disconnect is very challenging, and we're calling on your committee to help to address the issue by recommending leadership and resources within the province for brain injury prevention.

We have handouts that I've provided for all of you. I thank you for your time and would love to take any questions.

M. Hunt: I have to admit, when I saw this BrainTrust, I thought: "Oh, this is all for the smart kids or something, I guess. This is for the intellectual elite." You've really surprised me with what you're doing. Your information — thank you for it. In real terms, it's only been in recent times that we've started to….

Pick on Crosby as an example. As we see it in the professional athletes, now it's becoming more and more a recognized thing that the concussion isn't just a normal thing that happens and you just get on with life.

Thank you for the information. I'm sort of overwhelmed at this moment and will read through this a little slower later. But thank you for it.

M. Kapp: Another example would be the actress Natasha Richardson. About five years ago she fell on the bunny hill and wasn't wearing her helmet and banged her head and ended up dying that week in Quebec. The brain is extremely fragile, so prevention is always the best cure.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. I'm also needing to be educated on the issue. What I'm not clear about is the current funding for your existing activities and whether there's an order-of-magnitude dollar amount — given that we're the Finance Committee — that you're suggesting would better fund what you do. You're a provincewide organization?

M. Kapp: No, we are based in the Okanagan. The reason that we changed our name about seven years ago was for this Protect Your Head initiative that we did on a larger level. Actually, at that time we had a different management team, and we were looking to partner with organizations and have opportunities beyond the Okanagan.

We are just an Okanagan organization. However, the prevention initiatives that we have done in the past — some of them have gone beyond that. They have been provincial in nature, like our Protect Your Head initiative. We did another one called Sponsor My Head that was also provincial. But service for clients is only in the Okanagan.

G. Holman: The service for clients — in other words, after the fact — is funded through IHA?

G. Holman: Right. And that's what you're suggesting. There needs to be more resources.

M. Kapp: Well, I guess we didn't go that route because…. See, I sit on a B.C. Injury Prevention Leadership and Action Network committee with a number of members that focus on injury prevention as a whole in the province. From my understanding, there is a mandate for injury prevention within the province but not for brain injury. I think we're trying to have it be someone's mandate so that there can be more attention to it overall.

We didn't come today with a particular ask for funding. Of course, as I mentioned, our dollars can go a long way when we have the opportunity to do initiatives. We've had great success in terms of creativity and awards and all of those sorts of things — to reach out to youth.

Today our ask was more about having it be within the mandate — brain injury being the most serious form of injury that there is and that people die of, and prevention always being the more cost-effective way to look at things.

S. Hamilton: Thanks for the presentation. Just to change gears a little bit, it was interesting. I was watching a football game not long ago. I think it was during halftime. There was a segment about a university or a college in the United States that was….

You talk about preventative issues when it comes to brain injury. Someone had developed a helmet, and the helmet is full of sensors. The helmet is worth about $1,200 each, and they've fitted an entire team. Of course, on the sidelines is the equipment that's monitoring the helmet. If a young person gets into a situation — a certain type of hit from a certain angle, a certain velocity, etc. — he's immediately pulled off the field and assessed.

S. Hamilton: Right. But I do wish that more communities, maybe even this government, would take hold of the issue again from a preventative standpoint and start impressing, at whatever level we have to, the importance of preventing these injuries in the first place.

I wish I saw more skateboarders with helmets, more skiers with helmets, more cyclists with helmets. It just doesn't make any sense to take those chances. Again, I appreciate your presentation.

M. Kapp: Yeah, it's interesting. On the ski hills, actually, things have come a long way. I would say it's probably 75 percent now who are wearing helmets. Things change over time.

Our next presenter is not here yet, so we'll just take a recess till they arrive.

D. Ashton (Chair): We have Tourism Kelowna here, if you could come forward. We have a couple of our committee that are coming in — one more — in seconds.

We have ten minutes allotted for the presentation. We have a two-minute warning that I'll give you visually, and we've allotted five minutes for questions or comments from the committee. Thank you very much. The floor is yours, and welcome to the Finance Committee.

B. Sieben: Thank you very much. My name is Brad Sieben. I'm the chair of the board of the directors for Tourism Kelowna, and I do want to thank you for the opportunity for us to present.

Tourism Kelowna is a community-based destination marketing organization responsible for the marketing of Kelowna and area as a travel destination. Our board of directors is a policy-driven board, is elected from the tourism industry and is representative of all tourism sectors. We also have an agreement with our neighbouring municipality, the district of Lake Country, to act on their behalf as their destination marketing association on record.

We have ten full-time staff, five part-time, 25 visitor sales and service volunteers, and 18 volunteer board directors. Some key items to outline that drive tourism in B.C. are some things that we're going to touch on before you.

Also, I want to make a note that I'll go through part of this presentation. Then I'll turn it over to our president and CEO, Nancy Cameron, to follow up. We'll ping-pong back and forth a little bit but not too much.

Firstly, we'd like to express our appreciation for the actions that government has taken over the years to emphasize and support tourism, specifically with the following items.

The formation of Destination B.C. — previously Tourism B.C. but now Destination B.C.

Having two ministers responsible for Tourism — Minister Bond, the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training, looking at more of the strategic direction for tourism; and Minister Yamamoto for the operations side as the Minister of State for Tourism and Small Business. Like I like to say, tourism is an industry so nice it gets represented twice.

Also, the enthusiasm that government has in looking at tourism and recognizing it over the number of years as a key economic driver for the province.

We would also like to thank the provincial government for continuing to provide the legislation required to collect the municipal and regional district tax, formerly known as the additional hotel room tax. This 2 percent revenue stream represents 60 percent or $1.6 million of our budget, which we then leverage with an additional $600,000 in revenue contributed by the tourism busi-
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nesses and by participating in our marketing programs.

This, combined with some municipal grants from both the city of Kelowna and the district of Lake Country, make up our $2.6 million budget, which is used for destination marketing and the operation of our two visitor centres.

I'll now turn over this portion of the presentation to Nancy Cameron, our president and CEO.

N. Cameron: It's always difficult, and tourism has a challenge attributing results. So we look at that 2 percent hotel tax, the investments that we make with that money and the strategic growth opportunities that we have. Every five years we do a comprehensive economic impact assessment to look at the landscape of tourism in Kelowna and know that those funds are directly contributing to the results.

In 2012 we received our study for the period of 2006-2011, and over that period of time, Kelowna hosted 1.5 million visitors annually. That was an increase of 27 percent over the last five-year period that we measured, and 7,100 direct jobs. Those are direct jobs, not all the indirect jobs that we know are out there — and in Kelowna particularly, retail and restaurants, hospitality. That was a 5.8 percent increase in jobs between 2006 and 2011.

A 50.2 percent increase in GDP in that period — $335 million. A 68.6 percent increase in direct economic output, equalling $653 million.

We know that those funds — those municipal and regional district funds, 2 percent hotel tax funds — are contributing to this growth, and we really appreciate that. That goes to Brad's comments of appreciation to the government for allowing that piece of legislation to continue to be in place and allow for the communities to collect those funds.

In conjunction with that economic impact assessment, we measure tax revenues, and $100 million a year of tax revenues are generated in the Kelowna tourism industry. That was up 12.4 percent over the previous five-year period that we measured.

Again, those tax revenues, and attributing them to tourism and the impact that has on your community, is always a challenge for communities to communicate — that that money goes to the services for residents in British Columbia for health care, for education. Tourism continues to be a critical driver within many communities in British Columbia, and Kelowna particularly. It is our third-largest private sector industry and employer, so we know that tourism is critical for Kelowna.

We also know that Kelowna has a great deal of growth potential when it comes to tourism. We look forward to that funding stream of municipal and regional district tax. We look forward to continuing to leverage it to the high level that Tourism Kelowna does — $600,000 or another 25 percent added into that through the tourism businesses and the participation in our programs and in driving toward that potential.

Partnerships are particularly important for us, as in all industry. For Tourism Kelowna, it's really important for us to have good relations with all of the different bodies that contribute to the tourism industry. Our region, the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association and ourselves struck a memorandum of understanding two years ago that ensured that we work together pretty closely to make sure that we're not duplicating, or we're minimizing that wherever possible, and that we're aligned in our messaging. We create those efficiencies.

As Brad mentioned, also the district of Lake Country, being the designated destination marketing organization for them, has been a really terrific partnership so far. We include Lake Country — as we do other neighbouring communities, but Lake Country particularly — in all of our advertising and promotions under the Kelowna lead brand. There's a sense of place developed for Lake Country within all of our materials. We look at that as an asset to the Kelowna brand and ensure that that personality of that community is exposed within the Kelowna brand.

B. Sieben: Looking at the current landscape in which tourism stakeholders do business, as well as community DMOs like ourselves, it's a pretty good environment right now. The 2 percent hotel tax is something that allows you to be self-sufficient in working forward.

Looking to the horizon at what things can also affect the environment, one thing we'd like to encourage this group to do and to take forward is to have a look at the resort municipality initiative fund and maybe the criteria that define resort municipalities. Currently we feel that at times it does create a bit of an uneven playing field when it comes to groups such as ourselves which don't fall into that category.

An example was that in a sort of healthy bid process and good competitive environment, both Kelowna and Whistler did take initiative to look at hosting the Ironman triathlon here. It happened. With Whistler, they obviously have a little bit more funding that comes from this fund, and it does put us at a bit of a disadvantage. Look at the criteria that determine it.

Obviously, in this economy here, as Nancy alluded to, tourism is a key economic driver. It's just something to be looked at there, to look at the criteria and the usage guidelines and see if those can be broadened or if, in certain situations for events, maybe that can change.

Other things that we'd like to continue to encourage is air access. Kelowna has been a beneficiary of having strong air access here, which is even evident now with daily direct flights through United Airlines to Los Angeles. We'd really like to encourage you to continue to do Open Skies policy and to create that.

Currently the funding strategies for airports are still, at times, cost-prohibitive when you're competing with the United States.

Another thing that's on the horizon. Since 2007 the Tourism Kelowna board of directors has made the project of a new location for a new visitor information centre a key strategic priority. It remains the key strategic priority for our board of directors.

We are happy to see that it has progressed. The city of Kelowna, both staff and the council, has advanced this concept and is currently reviewing it. As this moves along, we certainly look forward to provincial support in creating this initiative. It's an absolutely integral part to continuing to drive tourism in Kelowna.

L. Popham: Thanks for your presentation. While you are developing your plan…. I know that in this area one of the highlights is the culinary tourism. I'm wondering: how much emphasis are you putting on that, and how much business do you think that's attracting?

N. Cameron: Sure. Culinary tourism is growing very rapidly in this area. Thanks to the Investment Agriculture Foundation grant that we received this year, we were able to bring it into much more of a promotional framework. We were able to start to position this area for culinary tourism within the scope of a farm-to-table program and really nurture that relationship between our local agritourism industry, the farms and the chefs that are now so committed to the farm-to-table movement and buy local, support local.

Those funds — we received $100,000. We matched that as well, so we had a $200,000 budget this year to work with our farms, to work with the restaurants and to promote it externally as a reason to travel to this area.

Now, we know that for the whole of the Okanagan that's an important concept, so we work up and down our valley with our partners — in Penticton, in Osoyoos, in Vernon — on those kinds of initiatives. But that grant was specific to Kelowna and was an excellent opportunity for us.

L. Popham: Great. I have one follow-up. Can you tell me: do you have an idea of the average age of those culinary tourists?

N. Cameron: That's a good question. We know average age of travellers from various marketplaces. From the Vancouver area we're a 35- to 55-year-olds destination. From Toronto we're a little a bit younger, actually. We're skewing a little bit younger. But we're finding that that culinary tourist seems to be in that 35-to-55 range.

D. Ashton (Chair): Very good. It was very good, and only going to grow. Thank you.

D. Ashton (Chair): Doctor and Michael, thank you very much for coming. We've allotted ten minutes for the presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning. Then we've allotted five minutes for questioning or comments from the committee. The floor is yours.

I know that our institution has already made a presentation to this group, I think in Vancouver on the 20th, but it's an opportunity for us to come and present the other campus of UBC. As we are such a new entity, I thought I'd just give you a quick understanding of what UBC here means in the Okanagan.

UBC is a system with two main campuses — and, of course, the distributed medical program, also in Prince George and in Victoria. This campus was founded in 2005 in a beautiful location that had been Okanagan University College. When it was founded, the intent was that it would be a destination intimate-learning campus with an undergraduate program and offer a modern, liberal education.

Today, over the period of the last eight years, it has become a full-service university with a medical faculty, with engineering, management and a range of health professions. That change from the original intent — which, if you like, was imagining a university perhaps like Mount Allison or an American private undergraduate college — was exactly as a result of the drive by the community that this community would have a world-class, research-intensive medical university here in the southern Interior.

The decision of the government to make that happen and the investment of $400 million to build it is prob-
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ably the boldest move that I have seen made in my 30-year career as an academic in Canada to really change the trajectory of a community by building a transformative institution. I commend the government for that.

If you look at this third slide, it shows the change from 2005 to 2013. We have gone from 3,500 students to close to 8,500 students overall. The campus has doubled in size, so we now have a land bank for future use for academic and developmental purposes. We've built a million square feet, we have almost 1,700 students living on campus, and our budget is now $116 million a year.

To give you an idea of the students that we serve, of those almost 8,500, we have 7,500-odd domestic students. We have a significant number now of graduate students, who weren't imagined at the beginning of the process; 300 aboriginal students, of whom we are very proud for their success in our system; and now 800-plus international students. The largest group of our students comes from the southern Interior, so we're very much serving the community here by making a UBC education available.

I want to be very, very clear that we do this very much in partnership with Okanagan College, which has regional campuses. I know you've heard from my friend Jim Hamilton. Students are able to begin their UBC degrees here in their home communities and move and transition to UBC after one or two years into a full range of programs, including engineering, education, nursing, and arts and science. It's a fantastic opportunity for students of perhaps limited resources living in small towns here in the southern Interior.

Quickly, our research impact. This is what you would expect from a growing research institution. It has grown rapidly. We're now cruising up to $15 million a year. That's federal funding that comes into this region and that is spent mainly on salaries and student support right here.

A study of our economic impact in the region done in 2010 showed that, overall, it was close to $1½ billion a year in the economic driver coming from having a new community of 10,000 people in post-secondary education here in Kelowna — a really transformative change.

The last two slides talk about where we're going and our trajectory. These are really what I would like to focus on — that is, that as a new institution we are still, in university terms, incredibly young, at the walking and not yet running stage.

We see ourselves having the potential to transform the economy of the region and, more broadly, of the interior of British Columbia by leading innovation and economic development, particularly by linking up our capacity to produce qualified graduates in business, in engineering and in the health professions and giving them the kind of training that will enable them to become entrepreneurial, innovative leaders in whatever field they work.

We have begun a process to create what we are calling Innovation in the Interior. It is part of UBC's commitment to community engagement and innovation, and we're working very closely with other post-secondary institutions here — including, of course, Okanagan College but also reaching out to the institutions at Thompson Rivers University and UNBC.

We already work with many, many companies here in the region, and we are the most successful university campus in Canada in terms of an NSERC type of grant called an engage grant, which allows industry to engage with the university to do research that will drive their business opportunities.

That is where we hope to go. If you like, think of places like MIT or Waterloo or Stanford in California, and think of the changes that they have made to the communities and the economies around them. Just imagine what our campus can do in the next 50 years in this region here in the Interior — truly a transformative opportunity.

I understand that I come here with a message, and I'm very much on the message that you have heard from my colleagues at the Research Universities Council of British Columbia and from my colleagues from the other campus of UBC. That is that to enable us play the important role that we know we can, we do need to have stable funding.

In the particular case of our campus, it was originally founded with a funding model that was specifically for undergraduate and not for research and graduate training. We will need to revisit that model. The model must be flexible enough to enable us to grow, to serve the community that's here.

Our model of partnering with Okanagan College means that we are receiving students for the expensive final two years of their undergraduate program, which is smaller classes and laboratory experiences — hands-on training. Their less-expensive two years are being spent at another institution. This is the kind of thing that we need to see as an opportunity to think about how we manage that piece of the funding model.

I would reiterate the request that we find a way to allow universities to access non-taxpayer-supported debt. I would finally like to ask that the government take very seriously this unique opportunity to foster innovation and economic development and think about the ways that we can create solid partnerships that will make sure that in 50 or 100 years' time this does look like an MIT or a Waterloo in terms of the connectivity with industry and with the community.

M. Hunt: Appreciate your comments on re-evaluating the model. I also appreciate what's been happening here in the Interior concerning the general model. My ques-
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tion, that I'm constantly asking, is on the use of on-line instruction.

I find that we're stuck in a model that's face to face, and we're not using the innovations of the Internet as much as we possibly could. My question is: looking at how you're shifting your model, where are you today with on line versus face to face? I recognize that, yes, you make places where you have to have labs and you have to have that collaborative working together, hands on. Face to face, on line?

D. Buszard: You may have heard of this in the other piece of the UBC presentation from Vancouver, but UBC is investing $4 million in flexible learning and development of on-line opportunities.

Our campus, because we are so new and young, in fact has a very high uptake of on-line learning systems that we use already in our instructional programs. For many students, they have resources that they're accessing on line as well as face-to-face opportunities. We see this…. And of course, we use a distributed model for teaching medicine here. There is a professor, but he or she is only in one place and the students are distributed around the province and also have access, again, to on-line digital materials.

I would say we're at the beginning, that it is a transformative period for us. We are making the move to offer students the mixture of both. For example, one can use simulations on line to give students in health professions the opportunity to work through an emergency medicine scenario, let's say — a little bit like a pilot flying a simulator rather than actually having to really crash a 747.

We are building these into our programs and, of course, looking at opportunities for developing mixed models, as I say, with our partners.

E. Foster: I refer to your question about allowing universities to access non-taxpayer-funded debt. Obviously, you're talking about going to the private sector for capital funding. But at the end of the day, who will pay that debt off?

D. Buszard: If I may, I will pass over to my vice-principal, finance, Michael Shakespeare. I can explain it to you, but he can explain it much better.

D. Ashton (Chair): Okay, we have about two minutes left, and we have another question, so please….

M. Shakespeare: I will try to be concise. We have a desire to access a debt for the advancement of student housing as a priority for the university, to enhance the student experience and to allow us to enable international growth as well.

It would be the revenues associated with those additional student housing rental revenues that would be directly funding the debt service.

E. Foster: So then you're looking at that private sector funding for housing, as opposed to other buildings on campus.

M. Shakespeare: Well, the access to debt enables us to support that student housing. It doesn't do anything for us to enable academic growth or any operating growth either. It's really around the student housing. I wouldn't call it private sector. It would be still public, but the rental revenue is from students directly supporting the debt and….

E. Foster: I have no issue with you going to the private sector. I just want to know how you would pay it. That's great. Thank you. Appreciate it.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. Just quickly on that and another question. On your question about the funding model, is it the model itself that needs to be revised or your place within it? Is it the overall funding model or the fact that the circumstances have changed where you're offering postgrad here?

D. Buszard: Yes. The campus was founded with an amount that was allocated per FTE student, which is one number. There is no specific funding for graduate students, and we know that offering professional and postgraduate training is significantly more costly than offering undergraduate training, so our model does not fit the kind of institution that we have evolved to.

I think it is a model that's specific to us. I would refer to it as a starter budget because I think that at the time the campus was begun, people were really not sure whether we would actually fill the number. It was difficult to be specific about what that allocation would be.

G. Holman: Okay. Just quickly on the debt question, is it just the fact that you want to be able to pursue, for example, investments in housing…? You can pursue it right now with provincial approval, I take it, but what you're wanting is more flexibility so that you can be more independent about those decisions? There are lots of institutions — presumably, even yours — that provide housing right now, and the province allows them to incur that debt. So the flexibility you're wanting is to be able to pursue these opportunities more independently?

M. Shakespeare: Our need is to take on additional debt, which we would be able to self-fund through the additional rental revenues, and we are currently prevented from taking on that debt because of being capped by the province. We're not able to issue any additional debt.
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G. Holman: Aren't you asking the province: "Here we have an opportunity; let us…"? Are they saying no?

Doctor, in closing…. You've heard me say it, I think three times, so this will be the fourth time. I sure hope UBCO has those spots open for those that maybe don't have the standard of marks to attend UBC in Vancouver, because it was a school that was brought into the Interior to allow kids from the Interior access to a full-blown university. I leave that with you.

D. Buszard: Well, I'm pleased to say that we do, and I think that the pathway that allows students to transition in from the college is a very important piece of that. For students who, when they leave high school, are not perhaps qualified, they can come in through that route.

D. Ashton (Chair): Okay. But doors, in my opinion, should still be open for four years' worth of university at UBCO.

Do we have our next presenter here? Okay, it's Carol, Central Okanagan Food Policy Council.

Welcome. Thank you very much for coming. You needed some photocopying done or something?

C. Kergan: Well, I know my person's probably coming with my other eight copies. I'd rather not waste paper. But it's not wasting if you can see something now.

D. Ashton (Chair): What we'll do is if you could start, that'll keep us on time. What we'll do is when that person comes, we'll make sure it's disseminated to the committee.

C. Kergan: Good morning, hon. members of this committee of the budget, and thank you for coming to Kelowna. Thank you for listening to what I have to say. In my realm, in the realm of sustainability for farming, I feel it is very important.

My name is Carol Kergan. I am an engaged community volunteer, self-employed contractor and director of external affairs with the Central Okanagan Food Policy Council here in Kelowna. I'm also a member of the board of the B.C. Food Systems Network, which is a provincial member-driven organization. I know that some members have presented to you already in Victoria on behalf of our network.

I'm also involved as a member of the board of the Canadian Unitarians for Social Justice and a past board member of the Central Okanagan Community Gardens Society. So with these different tendrils of connection, I'm very aware of the crucial need to support farming and to support local food systems and resiliency for the climate change future.

In this province we have an aging farming population, high land prices and an economy for food production which is greatly impacted by the NAFTA trade agreement, which has tended to shift farm production from food and serving local markets to wine and export production. I'm speaking largely of this area, because wine is a giant part of our agricultural production.

The wise politicians and policy-makers who instituted the Agricultural Land Commission and the agricultural land reserve foresaw this juggernaut of pressure. With the land prices already impacted by speculation for enormous profits every time land is authorized to be removed from the land reserve, the result is development interests which stagnate and hold out of production useful land, waiting for the day when the argument to remove it from the reserve falls on welcoming and cooperative ears.

A current example here in Kelowna is happening where a prime, useful chunk of farmland…. Basically, we have a mall here called Orchard Park. It is called that because it used to be an orchard. Across the street from that is land that right now is under application for removal from the Agricultural Land Commission. It's easy to argue that it's right across from a major mall. Well, it also backs onto currently in-use orchard land.

My concern, as I'm saying, is that when this happens, our city council is supportive. Therefore, usually that's the package that allows for a removal from the ALR. Of course, it will increase the coffers here, of our city. It allows for erosion of the prime farm land from the ALR.

This land is owned by the Bennett family, a prominent family in our community, and they do offer to do a trade in land in lieu of. In doing that, one can see that there is, perhaps, potential maintenance of acreage, but it still sets precedents. And this process of erosion of the agricultural reserve serves to fuel a domino effect of pressure on this land.

Our province's inventory of prime farmland is limited. It's crucial that development interests should not be encouraged or given incentives, such as shown above, that jeopardize this piece of vital infrastructure — vital to our food security and our economic diversity related to food production now or into the future.

Having lived beside an operating farm in the ALR in Langley for nearly 30 years, I know very certainly that the fact that the land was held in the reserve meant that when pressure to build the vast subdivision of Walnut Grove was occurring, the farm continued to be valued at ALR prices. Thus, the farmer continued to farm it and passed the farm along to his children.
[ Page 389 ]

I am certain that had he been able to sell at the great profit that everybody else not in the ALR did, it would have cost that part of Langley a farm that raised cattle that spent their youth in the field prior to moving into dairy production. Thus, he continued to be part of the dairy industry's sustainability in the Fraser Valley. I appreciated the fact the farm was there. I have gratitude for it, as this farmer strove to be sustainable and continue operating.

I think that the ALR and the ALC can be improved to become more effective, while continuing to safeguard farmland provincewide. There are already recommendations, coming out of the review of the ALR land held in 2010, which have not yet been implemented.

Having a core review, following up something where it didn't implement already suggested changes, seems early. Anyway, it does seem only fair to honour the process of the review that has been done within the government context prior to opening a new process of review on this venerable institution protecting farmland in an era of development and growth by other land uses.

In this world, with farming not holding its own in the number of farmers, and with the ones we have aging, it is crucial to have a way for young farmers to be able to farm, to dream of owning land and to have land security to invest their energy in, in whatever sort of farming they wish to pursue. Current regulations that limit accessory houses for apprentice farmers could be revised to support actions to make it possible for farmers to continue to farm as they age and for other reasons of farm sustainability.

Also, changes should and can be made to permit densification of housing on land within an ALR property which is not suited for agriculture. By permitting this densification, an environment where several families can share a farm enterprise could be a form of farming which provides more community support and sustainability, as people also need to work off the farm and can share in the farming responsibilities.

Thus, I see that the ALR and ALC can be improved to fit today's realities, but removal of land for development pressure needs to be minimized most certainly.

I think we would all agree that the economic and environment challenges the province faces are greater now than when this commission and land reserve were created with such foresight and good planning. Now, with the current stresses on agricultural viability and resilience, this makes it all the more vital to support and strengthen this model.

The ALR and ALC provide what is needed in the face of an uncertain and problematic future by establishing a model of adaptive management which preserves options, hedges bets and sees diversity as essential to sustainability.

In my capacity with the Central Okanagan Food Policy Council, I must speak to the essential need to have local food produced sustainably here in our region. We care about food security and resilience. We know this ties directly with access to farmland and viable ways to have new generations of farmers establish their livelihoods in a farming lifestyle. We see the ALR and the role of the ALC as key in maintaining the land to carry this out.

As the Auditor General stated in the 2010 audit of the Land Commission, there is less than 5 percent of B.C.'s land base suitable for agriculture. In closing, I'll quote him directly here.

"Agricultural land is an indispensable natural resource. Once taken for urban development" — and, I'd add, other forms of development — "farmland is no longer available for food production. Protected farmland fosters local economic stability and provides environmental services and public benefits. One of the main reasons for any jurisdiction to preserve farmland, however, is to secure food production into the future, especially in light of the impending changes of climate change."

I appreciate your consideration of my statements herein and hope that the B.C. government will do its part to ensure the continued function of the ALR and ALC with appropriate budget allocations therein.

D. Ashton (Chair): Carol, thank you for the presentation. It is on the public record and will form part of our discussions for the report to the Legislative Assembly.

M. Elmore: Hi, Carol. Thanks for your presentation and for your work. I certainly agree and support your principles of being supportive of local farming to produce food to serve local markets. I think that's an important principle of sustainability that we need to pay more attention to in the future.

The organization, the Central Okanagan Food Policy Council — can you talk about who that is, who the members are on the council?

C. Kergan: I'd be glad to. Our council has been, in various forms, in existence for about ten years here now. Three years ago we became organized as a non-profit society. We represent as many stakeholders in the local food world as come to our meetings, but currently we've got people who've been part of and associated with the city and regional district. We have farmers. We have academics. We have local citizens that really care.

E. Foster: Thank you, Carol. Are you aware that in this year's budget the Ministry of Agriculture had a boost of 20 percent in their budget? So $4 million of that was allocated to go to the Land Commission to do their work. Obviously, the government is very concerned that the Land Commission stay whole and be able to evaluate agricultural lands and any applications that come forward. So $4 million is a lot of money to add to your budget.
[ Page 390 ]

C. Kergan: It's good to see it sustained and increased. In fact, there are many ways that a sustainable future for agriculture can be supported. I need to trust that the right moves are being made by our government.

G. Holman: Thanks for your submission. Just a quick comment. I was interested in your point about the land swap proposal. Intuitively, that would suggest, well, there's no net loss. But you're making the interesting point that it still doesn't prevent the driving up of prices for agricultural land, particularly near urban areas — that even if there's no net loss in terms of productivity, it will still tend to drive up ALR pieces close to urban areas.

The question I had…. Your proposals for allowing housing and a couple of variations of that. I think the key concern there would be: how do you ensure that that housing is going to be for farm-related purposes in perpetuity? What mechanisms would you propose to ensure that? Or do you think that's an issue?

C. Kergan: Well, I can see a reason for concern, certainly. But I also know that there's been a lot of work on this with FarmFolk CityFolk. This work has been developed and proposed in a way that doesn't erode the usable, viable part of the land that is under reserve. Many times there is just area that isn't farmable that is on land, and it wouldn't actually change it.

But having some regulation that requires it stay in farming is something I was familiar with even on my property in Langley. You had an accessory house. It had to be for certain uses. It wasn't just a second house for any use. Those regulations can be placed on a property.

L. Popham: I wanted to thank you for your presentation. There has been some funding put aside for the ALC, but I think that your remarks were excellent, and the prior reviews that were done still have outstanding work to be done.

D. Ashton (Chair): Any other comments or questions? Carol, thank you for the report, a good report, and thank you for the presentation. Have a good day.

Wes Kmet. Good morning, sir. Welcome. The format is sort of a ten-minute presentation. I'll give you a two-minute warning, and then we have five minutes for questions. The floor is yours.

W. Kmet: Good morning to all of you. I'm going to make comments in general. I have some specific topics, but this will be sort of as somebody who has lived in Kelowna since '89 and from the Prairies, with an agricultural background as a child.

I know the city of Kelowna as well as anyone, the downtown core. I've biked and know the city better than anybody in the last 20 years. I would argue that with anyone, because I've been down every alley, and I've watched the progress. A couple years ago I had spoken about how our city got to the way it has gotten because of certain issues and not dealing with certain issues.

I'll just go on here. I sort of will be bouncing around a little bit, and the issues are in general. I know you've heard of a lot them, but this is a little bit of my take.

Carrying on with what Carol was saying about agriculture, this is a really major concern for me, because with climate change and really, really big changes in our future — not only Internet and all kinds of other issues but agriculture — we're going to have to particularly be able to be self-sufficient.

I'm thinking of Site C. It comes to mind right away with the hydro project up there, and that scares me, because they could feed all of B.C. and northern B.C. and northern Alberta.

Jobs, obviously, are something that for all of you, I know, are right at the top of the list in your priorities. We have to really start doing things that are sustainable — and for a long period of time. That's part of our challenge with our political system: the short-term thinking. Even corporations and businesses like that are always thinking in the short term. We have to go beyond that.

I can't help but think of the aboriginal thought of us working and spending our money, because this is what it is. It's priorities, and then it's putting the money towards those priorities, and seven generations is something that we really have to keep in mind.

I know you guys are all conscientious legislators, but you do go home and then have to deal with all of these issues at home. Now, what I do in this city is hand out boxfuls of business cards with the politicians' phone numbers, our local politicians' phone numbers here. I gave blood yesterday, and I talked to somebody in Montreal or Toronto and gave her the little blib about how we need to input. Now, obviously, that's what you guys are here for, and that's great, but the average citizen does not input enough.

Getting on to some of the other…. With agriculture, just to touch on that, I'm very concerned about the encroachment on ALR. Sure, you hear lots of good issues as to why it should be taken out. Our budgets have been terrible in the past — some of the lowest budgets in agriculture in all of Canada, which is a shame for what B.C. is.

Our lumber industry is not doing very well. That will jump me into another one of the things: that we need to make more money, in my mind.

Marijuana, for instance, is something I'm involved in with Sensible B.C. — legalizing marijuana. The money that that can gain in the longer term could really, really help with a lot of the other priorities, and there are needs ad nauseam in our society. All you have to do is pick up the paper. There's always this issue: "Well, sorry, we don't have enough money." It goes on and on and on, the treatment and the prevention and all of these kinds of things.
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The war on drugs is a complete bust. It's about 35 percent of what the RCMP do in the city, and that comes directly from the former RCMP superintendent. Eighty percent of what the RCMP do in Kelowna is on drugs. That was spoken to me last year.

Food bank. Articles on the food bank today, the third-largest in all of Canada here in Kelowna, yet we're supposedly a hub — a big city with all kinds of entrepreneurship and all of that. That is a real…. I make a joke in public that the food bank is growing just like all the other banks, and I'm not a big fan of banks.

Anyway, inequality was the other thing in the papers today. What a lovely bunch of grades we got. Inequality, D — I'm just trying to go through the rest of my notes — housing, D. There are a couple of other ones that'll come up here as I get through. Anyway, I'll jump to other things.

Tax loopholes and assisting the feds. Even our friend Mr. Harper is going after offshore accounts to gather money, so just to reiterate my point earlier about how we need to be able to come with more money so that we can do equitable things for everyone in our province.

Mental health. As you know, that's a big issue. We've got challenges here big time. I see it on the streets. Everywhere I turn, I see the people walking up and down the streets. I think: "What kind of a life do they have?" One in five — so many, many people in your family and your friends — have this, and we do just a completely crappy job in that regard. It's a shame. It really is.

More money for transit, car-shares. A car-share has just started here in the last number of months. The city has been working on providing some parking spots.

Bike infrastructure is also something that really needs to be expanded. I'm talking not only in Kelowna but also overall.

As you know, we have to get away from the car culture and/or the dependency on pipelines. We have all the things that go on with cars. I used to be a real car nut, and now I am a real bike nut. I've only driven about four times in the last year.

The economy in the city here also got a D. I still remember that Western Star is an example where nobody of our MLAs or our politicians really stepped up and said anything about what the impact on our city was. I think that's the kind of thing that we can't stand. Again, our citizens have to push that and stop that kind of thing.

Health care. There's a biggie. The 2014 accord is coming right around the corner, and there are going to be big cuts to the province. There's another hole that…. The money has to come from somewhere.

I was just reading another article about the actual legal aspects of the provincial and the federal…. I think maybe some misconceptions or myths were the basis of that. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of privatization. I'm not a big fan of private efforts. We should have a clinic on the west side — a community clinic type of thing — where some money can go.

The last point I would like to make is on government structure. Proportional representation. I think money should go towards a committee or whatever the structure is for proportional representation. That is just a must. I can't emphasize how important that is. It obviously came close here in B.C.

Our governments are very poor in their records. Even though we can and do say, "We've got a great Canada," boy, we sure can be a lot better. There is just so much that is not accomplished because different parties or MPs don't have enough input into the workings of government.

D. Ashton (Chair): Well, sir, right on time. Thank you. Boy, you threw a lot at us.

M. Elmore: Hi, Wes. Thanks for your presentation, really covering a broad range of subjects and topics. I think you can characterize yourself as a very engaged and involved citizen. I think you're a great role model.

I also share your concerns in terms of sustainability, inequality and support for mental health. I hope we can have those deliberations and come out with some recommendations that reflect those concerns.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. Yeah, there was a lot there to digest. I was wondering where the grades come from.

W. Kmet: Oh, that was the annual report that's made by a number of groups. Those statistics come from all across Canada.

W. Kmet: Yes, basically talking about the Kelowna area. I'm not sure exactly how far that reaches, whether it's just the city of Kelowna. I'm not sure, but basically, this has come out…. Vital Signs is part of it, but you'll see it in the papers.

It is quite an interesting thing, because it obviously raises some good discussion for a week or two, or whatever. This is based on Statistics Canada and a number of other groups, including — I think it was mentioned — the food security folks.

There was a young woman there who also was part of our bike club, and a number of other organizations doing good work. I'm trying to think of some of the other
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individuals. But you'll be able to catch it in the papers.

M. Hunt: I wanted to comment on your final comments on proportional representation. I know that it sounds good in theory, but when you go over to Europe and you see the countries that actually have proportional representation…. It's the fragmentation, the numbers of parties and the coalitions that are totally unstable. You see the messes that we have in Greece and Italy and Spain as examples of it.

I'd really be cautious. It sounds good in theory. But when you actually look at nations that have done it, it doesn't work as well in practice as it does in theory.

W. Kmet: I'd make a real quick comment to that. I don't have a ton of knowledge in that regard. Yes, there's definitely…. Germany is just an example, in an election, and on it goes.

D. Ashton (Chair): Wes, thank you very much for your input — greatly appreciate it.

Jeff Ricketts, please come forward. Sir, it's five minutes. There won't be a question period after, but the floor is yours. You have five minutes.

J. Ricketts: My name is Jeff Ricketts. I'm a young farmer here in Kelowna. I own Old Meadows Organic Farm, just past the H2O centre there. This is my first year of farming. I wanted to come here and make a comment today, because I've seen a lot of problems with the land prices here in Kelowna as well as other areas in B.C.

I used to be in finance. I used to trade the stock market, worked for the banks for a while, then went into financial advising and then decided that where our food comes and the future of farming is a lot more important than any of that there.

I decided to work at an organic farm last year, then fell in love with the actual farming practice. I found a big open gap there where improvements need to be made, so I decided to purchase the farm and become an organic farmer myself.

Along with that, I also believe in a lot of sustainable ideas, like bringing electric vehicles and other things to integrate into farming — energy management and all that — as well as education.

I think there's a lot of opportunity here to bring farming and agriculture to the schools and the young crowds there so that they actually get more education about their food and everything like that. If you look at the school systems, there's not a whole lot of education about growing food and providing those options of growing your own stuff.

Anyways, where I'm going here is that the agricultural land needs a lot more work over the next couple of years. It needs to be expanded into a bit more of a program where the agricultural land actually goes to farmers, where it gets managed.

Essentially, what I wanted to do…. I noticed there was a problem, so I started a program called the Okanagan Valley farmland protection fund. The idea is to hopefully acquire farmland in the Okanagan over the couple years, with government funding or public funding, to create a non-profit organization that will acquire the farmland and actually protect it while providing it to young farmers.

We will take applications from young farmers who want to start getting into agriculture and provide that land to them, as well as equipment, machinery and whatever they would need for whatever term of years they hope to be farming for, and get all that land to good use.

Seeing all these properties getting taken out and becoming developed is really shameful. It's actually criminal. Kelowna has a lot of really amazing farmland. I can attest to that, because the soil that I grow in, down there in the Mission, is phenomenal — not a rock in there. It's just gorgeous.

It's a shame to see right across the street from me, even, being built into condos, townhouses or whatever. It's really a shame that the agricultural land reserve was made and all these lands were put into it but they keep getting taken out every year. That doesn't really make sense.

I'd love to see more funding go towards the program and then have it expand and take on the ideals of what I'm doing there, where we can find young farmers and provide that land to famers so that they can actually put that land to good use and it's not just growing hay every season.

For an example, my farm is 3½ acres, and I provided 11 jobs this year and food for the community. I get people coming up and hugging us and thanking us at the end of the season here as we close down. It'd be really nice to see that in every different neighbourhood in the area, where we can have farms providing direct food for the community around them. I think there's a lot of opportunity economically there to really expand agriculture.

I think the next big drive for us is really locking down our food security here in the Okanagan, as well as the rest of B.C., and stop relying on getting stuff from Mexico and California. We have to always wonder. If anything ever happens in the world for transportation, if we can't get their food up here, we're stuck with nothing.
[ Page 393 ]

Along with locking down the farmlands here…. We need to do that so that we get more young farmers bringing more ideas, so that we can do things like vertical farming or farming in greenhouses. All these ideas can actually give us food throughout the whole season and not just in the summertime, so we can actually be secure all year long.

I believe in a lot of things like that. I'd really like to see a lot more protection and stuff for our farmland.

D. Ashton (Chair): Thank you for the presentation. It's customary that the committee doesn't ask questions of the presenters at the open mike.

We have one more — Anne Nedelec. Thank you for coming in. You have five minutes for the presentation.

A. Nedelec: I have strong concerns with this government, their environmental policies, which don't really exist, or their direction for the future that's not based on the future. It's based on instant monetary gain. The big concern, of course, in this region, is agriculture. There has to be a priority to agriculture, and that means keeping the ALR and not having this conflict of interest with the Bennett family, who want to make money on that property instead of having food grown there.

There is all kinds of money going to the bureaucracy to decide who can grow, which doctor can put Christmas trees on the ALR and whatnot, instead of putting the money towards the farmers that are family farms that have been growing food for years and years.

This has existed in this valley, and it's been eroded systematically by this government. You have new agriculture ministers constantly. It's a flip-over. It's very hard for farmers to communicate with them. The laws are undoable. They're unaffordable, and they're not realistic. Nobody is on the top organizing in a way that makes healthy food production the priority.

Instead, you've got places like Summerland agriculture research station, and now they're trying to GMO apples to make them stay white. Well, do you know what that is? That's poison.

How can we do this to our children? When the whole planet is in danger, we're even destroying an apple. We've been told in the past, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," yet we, the taxpayers, are paying for these poisons to be researched in the name of places like Monsanto. Those are the corporations that we are doing their research for, and they are doing it for money, not to feed people. Because when you start tampering with transgenetic modification — and young people know this — you are destroying the future.

That means cancer. If we cared about cancer, we would not do this kind of research. Instead, we would teach people how to grow healthy foods in their yards. We would have that as a program at all schools, where all schools would be funded to grow gardens. We would have school programs where food is given to every child, and it's healthy food. It's not GMO'd, and it's not coming from China, where the regulations are totally unverified. They don't have to go through the hoops and the somersaults and the back twists like farmers here.

You see that with small farms that had meat, and they couldn't go to the butcher any more. They had to put in their own…. For slaughtering, they had to have a government-approved site. That has been a disaster. People are going underground, or they're folding. They're not farming anymore.

As far as making transportation the priority, airports the priority — that's the exact opposite of what this planet needs right now. We need to have people biking more, walking more to work. We have to have those infrastructures in place for everyone. It can't just be cosmetic for those who find it fashionable. It has to be structured so that everyone can do it.

We're making a world where young people cannot survive, and they're not doing well. Some of them, they have the facade of going to school and are getting in debt. They're not promised jobs. The jobs out there, a lot of the time, are really unhealthy. Who wants to make a pipeline that's going to put bitumen into the ocean? That is not the way to go, and we know it.

We have to change, and we have to change quickly. We're running out of time. Calgary, Toronto, China are all proofs with the disasters. It's not a facade that the world is changing. It's happening now, so governments have to take the leash, and they have to change quickly. They have to change for the better. They can't do it in a way that makes them look good so that they'll get re-elected. No, they have to do it in a way that the children can have a world tomorrow and next year. It's that important.

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2) Kelowna Chamber of Commerce	David Bond
	Caroline Grover
	Ian Stuart

Chair:	* Dan Ashton (Penticton BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Mike Farnworth (Port Coquitlam NDP)
Members:	* Mable Elmore (Vancouver-Kensington NDP)
	* Eric Foster (Vernon-Monashee BC Liberal)
	* Scott Hamilton (Delta North BC Liberal)
	* Gary Holman (Saanich North and the Islands NDP)
	* Marvin Hunt (Surrey-Panorama BC Liberal)
	* Lana Popham (Saanich South NDP)
	* Jackie Tegart (Fraser-Nicola BC Liberal)
	John Yap (Richmond-Steveston BC Liberal)
	* denotes member present
Other MLAs:	Norm Letnick (Kelowna–Lake Country BC Liberal)
	Hon. Steve Thomson (Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, Kelowna-Mission BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Susan Sourial
Committee Staff:	Stephanie Raymond (Administrative Assistant)

Witnesses:	Colin Basran (Kelowna Joint Water Committee)
	Jordan Bateman (Canadian Taxpayers Federation)
	Brianne Berchowitz (Executive Director, Okanagan College Students Union)
	David Bond (President, Kelowna Chamber of Commerce )
	Deborah Buszard (Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of British Columbia Okanagan)
	Nancy Cameron (President and CEO, Tourism Kelowna)
	Jeet Dukhia (President, B.C. Fruit Growers Association)
	Jim Gabriel (PacificSport Okanagan)
	Ken Gillis (Sunrise Village)
	Caroline Grover (CEO, Kelowna Chamber of Commerce)
	Bob Hrasko (Kelowna Joint Water Committee)
	Gordon Ivans (Chair, Kelowna Joint Water Committee)
	Magda Kapp (BrainTrust Canada Association)
	Christine Kashuba (ArtsBC)
	Carol Kergan (Central Okanagan Food Policy Council)
	Wes Kmet
	Glen Lucas (B.C. Fruit Growers Association)
	Christopher Miller (Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board)
	Janice Myers (Executive Director, Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board)
	Anne Nedelec
	Doug Nicholas (PacificSport Okanagan)
	Jeff Ricketts
	Michael Shakespeare (University of British Columbia Okanagan)
	Brad Sieben (Chair, Board of Directors, Tourism Kelowna)
	Ian Stuart (Kelowna Chamber of Commerce)
	Casey Van Staalduinen (Sunrise Village)
	Tim Walters (President, Okanagan College Faculty Association)
	Jingwei Wu (Chairperson, Okanagan College Students Union)

1) Kelowna Joint Water Committee	Bob Hrasko
	Gordon Ivans
	Colin Basran

4) Okanagan Mainline Real Estate Board	Christopher Miller
	Janice Myers

5) British Columbia Fruit Growers' Association	Jeet Dukhia
	Glen Lucas

6) Okanagan College Students' Union	Jingwei Wu
	Brianne Berchowitz

13) University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus	Deborah Buszard
	Michael Shakespeare

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES