Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 27 — Friday, December 6, 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

2. Pursuant to its terms of reference, the Committee began its review of the three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budget estimates of the statutory officers.

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:

11. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to deliberate on its draft report. (Eric Foster, MLA)

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
Office of the Representative for Children and Youth	635
M. Turpel-Lafond
T. McNally-Dawes
J. Greschner
Office of the Ombudsperson	646
K. Carter
Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner	656
E. Denham
S. Forrester
Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner	663
S. Lowe
S. Forrester

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Good morning. Kate Ryan-Lloyd, Clerk to the committee.

Thank you very much for coming. In the presentation today we have a 30-minute presentation and 30 minutes for questions, if required. Please start.

Lana, I'm quite sure, will be here quickly, and Mike is not available today. But he did say that there would be some checking in at some points in time, so we'll make sure that he does get the transcript.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Good morning. First of all, I'd like to apologize for a rather croaky-sounding voice. A seasonal cold is upon us as we get ready for Christmas. If I start hacking and coughing, it's not in response to a question or the importance of the subject matter. It's just really a bit of a virus, so keep a healthy distance from this end of the table.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I'd also like to introduce my colleagues that are with me today. On my left, your right, is John Greschner. He's my deputy representative. On my right is Tanis McNally-Dawes. Tanis is our chief financial officer. You may not be seeing her again with us in future years, because after 33 years of government service, Tanis is retiring this year. If she seems abnormally happy and cheerful….

A shout-out to Tanis for exemplary public service in many incarnations at the Ministry of Justice, Elections B.C. and elsewhere. She has been with us for the past five years and provides excellent service. She not only deals with keeping the finances in shipshape in every sense of it but also with managing facilities.

So they're also here to answer questions and, should I fall into a coughing jag, take over the presentation.

First of all, I want to start with the good news, the important news, and that is that my request for you today is a stand-pat budget. I'm not requesting any increase. I am requesting that the operating budget continue into fiscal 2014-2015 as it has been. That really is a reflection of my understanding of the difficult times that we are in and the clear mandate within government to keep expenses under control and to try and manage as best as is possible within the current budget.

The operational funding for my office of approximately $7.9 million supports a staff of 53 FTEs. Unlike some of the other officers of the Legislative Assembly, I actually have offices in three locations, because I serve children and youth throughout all of British Columbia. I'll talk more about the mandate in a minute. We have an office in Victoria, an office in Burnaby and an office in Prince George.

Our budget proposal has a small capital request — small — of $190,000. I want to note that we are going to do our best to economize on that front. We may in fact be returning a significant part of that capital budget.

We are not quite sure yet around tenant improvements and a few other matters that are required to address some upgrades that had to be made and changes that had to be made to accommodate the expanded mandate that we got as of September of this year to advocate for 19- to 24-year-olds with special needs.

As I said, we are confident we can manage within that budget despite two things: a significant increase in our advocacy cases in an expanded mandate and a continued demand for important work by our monitoring and investigative divisions.

We always have some unknowns in a year. We don't know things that we may be asked to do or areas that
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we may be asked to wade into. Sometimes government, sometimes the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth, which I work very closely with, will ask me to take up some issues. There are occasionally some unknowns, but we do intend to manage within that budget.

On that front, I would like to note, again, that I'm very fortunate, as an officer of the Legislative Assembly, to have a close reporting relationship with the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. I know some members present, like Mable Elmore, have served on that committee as well.

I've had the opportunity to meet 28 times with that committee. We have a very close reporting and accountability relationship, and it's extremely valuable. Of course, in the role as representative I'm here to advocate and serve the needs of vulnerable children and families, but a close reporting relationship with Members of the Legislative Assembly is really one of the key ethics of my office.

So when we develop a service plan, key performance indicators, we spend a lot of time with Members of the Legislative Assembly on that committee on how we report, how we do our work, debriefing on the work that is done, taking feedback from Members of the Legislative Assembly, having public hearings. All of that is extremely important and valuable. There is a very close relationship.

I know some other officers work with Public Accounts or other committees, but the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth is a unique and important committee called forth under the Representative for Children and Youth Act, and the dimensions of that work allow us to very regularly report. I'm always very grateful for our Clerk, Kate Ryan-Lloyd, who makes sure that the issues around the work of our office have regular feedback into the Legislative Assembly.

As a result of that regular reporting, I'm not going to go into as much detail as I know some other officers do about their work, because they don't have as many opportunities to speak about it. I'm just going to give more of a high-level overview of what it is that we do and why we do it — and, of course, answer any questions you might have.

We have three service areas that we run. One is an advocacy mandate to advocate, support and advise children and their families in order that they obtain necessary services. In that regard, we've had a fairly strong advocacy caseload. It's sort of like a direct service mandate that we actually have in that program area where we work with children and families. We've had about 11,000 individual cases, since we got going in 2007, around supporting young people.

As I said a moment ago, that advocacy was expanded to include, as of September of this year, 19- to 24-year-olds with special needs transitioning — for instance, to CLBC. The nature of that advocacy work — sometimes the issues are very minor and easily addressed through a meeting and some collaborative work with government or service providers. Sometimes they are very, very complex, and the file is going to remain open almost for the full childhood of the child.

For instance, we had a case not too long ago where we reported. It was an investigation of a critical injury of a boy. It was a boy that was tasered by the police. We did a report into his life circumstances, and in fact, the tasering by the police was the least of the difficulties that he had faced in his life. He was living in a very substandard situation, a sole-source residence where he was routinely being kept kind of in a plywood room to de-escalate his behaviours. The police were constantly being called out.

There was really nowhere to place a young person like this boy, who had serious behavioural and emotional issues but who had also been severely abused, both before he came into foster care and while he was in foster care. In fact, in one of his foster placements he was routinely given cold showers, locked in a shed and traumatized.

So we did the investigation. We discovered that this was a boy who had very high needs, but he was being managed by being placed in a residence that was completely unsuitable. Everybody recognized that.

Now, he was 11 at that time, and as you can imagine, this is an instance where our advocacy will likely continue with that young boy, because he is still not placed in a suitable placement. There is no suitable placement in British Columbia for children with major behavioural-emotional challenges who are overcoming trauma.

We are working very hard to see better residential services built. But in that instance, we will likely have an open file and work on that young boy's situation — monthly updates, meetings, and so on — probably right through to his 24th birthday.

It gives you an example of the type of complexity. Sometimes the cases are where there's no resource. We need to go back if there's not appropriate clinical support, family support — very complex cases. It's a joy when we have the easy cases — the child that perhaps is a First Nations child in care that can't get approval for orthodontics but can't chew properly and needs to have dental work, and no one knows who's going to pay. We can work those things out. We can collaborate closely with ministries and government to do that.

The advocacy mandate is an important one. Again, I know many of the Members of the Legislative Assembly refer cases to my office along the whole spectrum. Whether it's a child and youth with special needs, a child and youth experiencing mental health challenges and not being able to navigate the system, whether it's a child in care or a foster family concerned about a child in care, whether it's a child waiting for adoption and can't get through the process or whether it's someone in connection to early childhood education or child care, we do a whole range of advocacy.
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As a result, we have to have a pretty nimble, educated and collaborative staff. We have to have staff that can work in the community. We have to have staff that can work with government. Although we have oversight of government, our goal is to have the Ministry for Children and Families succeed in its important mission to support children and families.

Sometimes really our goal is just to make sure that the best interest of the child is kept at the forefront and sometimes where we have policies or programs or services that just frankly don't work for real people, that we see them improved or changed to work for real people.

We have had a lot of success around the advocacy program. I'm very proud of the work that the staff does in the advocacy program. As a result of that work, we then get into the second program area that we run. So advocacy is one. The second is to monitor, research and audit the child-serving system to see if it's effective and responsive. Is it actually meeting the needs of groups of children? Is it reaching all children geographically, different ethnocultural groups and their needs?

In the monitoring, research and audit side, this was a very important component of the work. When our office was created after the report of the hon. Judge Ted Hughes, it was seen that the Ministry for Children and Families needed to be able to speak with greater confidence about what it's achieving for children — whether it has the types of services in place that are needed and, for the $1.2 billion expenditure inside that ministry, whether or not the outcomes for children and youth are improved.

We have engaged in some pretty significant monitoring projects. The budget that we're requesting today will support the conclusion of one very big project that I'm quite excited about, which is that we've done the first major research, review, collaborative initiative on adoptions. The area of adoptions hasn't been looked at for years. The number of adoptions in British Columbia is declining. There are only about 200 adoptions a year, even though there are 5,200 children in permanent care who could have planning toward an adoption.

I'm anticipating publicly reporting on a very extensive research and monitoring and audit report on adoptions. This is the product of a lot of work but very interesting and important and valuable to support the ministry to maybe rethink and improve its adoptions program so that children can have a forever family and have a strong placement, because children that are placed for adoption have better outcomes than children that drift through foster care.

The monitoring programs also conduct broad-based research. We have engaged with the provincial health officer in B.C. in some of the biggest research projects that have ever been undertaken, such as we looked at an entire birth cohort of children born in B.C. We followed them through to their 16th birthday. We looked at all of the administrative data available in government to see which children in British Columbia become involved in the criminal justice system — at what age, how many of those children stay in the system, what do they become involved for, do they go on to become adult offenders?

In other words, we looked at the pathways into criminogenic risk and how we circumvent and change that. That's been quite an impactful report. I have had the opportunity, with Dr. Kendall, to see parts of that published and reported on, testified before federal committees looking at the Youth Criminal Justice Act and, of course, constantly look at how we can improve services to those who are in the youth justice system in B.C. to see that we can perhaps get them out of that system.

Not surprisingly, that type of research brought very sharply into focus that it is some of the most deeply vulnerable children that find themselves in youth custody centres — children that experience a lot of socioeconomic disadvantage, aboriginal children, children who have not had the benefit of parenting within their home. They're living out of the parental home.

So we see which children, in the end, actually come in early, at age 12, into the youth justice system and tend to stay and how we can work more effectively to get them out.

Again, that type of research — I can't emphasize how collaborative and important it is. We couldn't complete all of that on our own, so what we do is have very strong partnerships — in that case, again, the provincial health officer. We work closely. We also collaborated with Simon Fraser University — Dr. Ray Corrado, who is a leading criminologist, and a group of criminologists.

We would work intensively on projects like that, leading to major public reports. So that's one example.

Last year we put out another very important audit report. It's not necessarily value-for-money audits that we do, per se, but we audit compliance with standards.

We did an important audit this past year. We audited whether or not the Ministry of Children and Families and its delegated aboriginal agencies are meeting their own standards to plan effectively for the emotional, educational and long-term development of children in care.

That report was quite a significant report. It's called More than Paperwork. It found that in fact, there is only 5 percent compliance in the care planning across the board for the ministry in meeting its own standards to make sure children in care have appropriate plans. This is an extremely important area to report on and see improvement in.

Any of you around this table that are parents will know that you probably have back home, depending on the age of your kids, on your fridge pictures of your kids or your grandchildren. You have in your head the story of how they've grown and developed. This time of year you probably think about getting together and talking to them about all the amusing things that have happened
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at different family occasions and events.

For children in care, there is something called a life book. When they age out of care at 19, they receive a life book that has entries in it about who they are, their school pictures, where they lived, how they did in school.

We found in our audit that in many instances those life books are not kept up to date. In fact, we found that for one boy who's 14, there wasn't even a school picture in his life book for four years.

When he ages out of care and receives his life book, he's not going to find out what his childhood was like. He's not going to have the parent, like those of us sitting around this table, who will sit down with him and say: "I remember when you were seven and you got your new bike" or "I remember when you took your first step" or "I remember these things."

The hardship and difficulty that children in care experience is very uppermost in our mind. When we do things like audit plans of care, we really do them to say it is much more than paperwork. It's about actually making sure…. To somebody, it's maybe a piece of paper and a job, but to that young person who's going to age out of care, that life book will be enormously important to tell their story.

They need to be well attached to good people, and we need to make sure we get that work done to a high standard. When we get out and audit and find out there are offices where there isn't staff or people don't feel it's a priority to do it, we really need to monitor the ministry. We report publicly to say: "You're not getting it done. Get it done."

The ministry made a very strong commitment after that to change that. We've been working with them. We will report on whether they achieve that. But if it wasn't for the audit, we would never know.

The audit was a very interesting process. Again, we need very skilled people in my office to do these audits. They have to be rigorous. They are evaluated through a fairness process at a high level.

When we started the audit…. On that one, I'll give you an example. The staff got out with the first group of files to start looking through them and begin the audit. We look at the file. We interview people. We do focus groups. It's quite a complex process.

We got out, and we discovered that the ministry…. When we pulled the files, they actually started interfering in the audit and trying to make the file look better by writing up plans where they saw there were gaps.

We had to actually stop — suspend the audit — and we had to talk to the deputy minister at MCFD and say: "You can't do this. Practice is what practice is. If you're not doing plans of care, you can't, because you know the representative's office is coming in, suddenly try and put the files in better order so it looks better."

"We really have to own up to what we are doing, where are we doing it and how we are doing, so we're stopping this audit. We're sending all of those files back, and we're going to have a new randomized pull of the files to start again. Your staff is not to come into the room and try and update them."

You can see that we face a lot of issues when we do this work — to work together collaboratively and talk about what an audit is. How do you do things, and how do you look at things? Accepting practice where it is, is one thing, and then improving it is another thing.

There is quite a lot of work that happens behind the scenes. In the end, by the time it comes out to be a public report, we make small numbers of recommendations, and we expect to see those recommendations implemented. We follow and track them.

The research, monitoring and audit area is a very important audit area. Mr. Hughes, when he recommended that our office be created, thought maybe that area could disappear in time. I actually personally thought that area might disappear in time, too, when I became representative. We did a comprehensive review of the representative's statute last fiscal year, and we decided that we needed to retain that area.

In fact, the Ministry of Children and Family was very frank to say, "We think we still need the oversight of the representative's office to do this type of work," because they were having challenges with their own audit program and their own quality assurance.

The final area — and I think, certainly, a very difficult and important area — is the area of critical injury and death review. The representative's act allows us to have sort of powers of a public inquiry to launch and conduct full and pretty exhaustive investigations when there's been a serious injury of a child or a death of a child. Not every case leads to a full-blown individual investigation, but some do, and they require that.

An example, which you may recall, is we did a very thorough and significant investigation into the homicides of the Schoenborn children — Kaitlynne, Max and Cordon — who were murdered by their father, Allan Schoenborn. There was a very significant history there of not only child welfare concerns but criminal justice issues, untreated parental mental illness.

We found in that report that those were preventable deaths. There were some very serious failings in our social serving system and in our justice system that did not adequately protect those children from a situation of significant harm. That report was accepted on the day it was released.

The Premier of British Columbia got up in the Legislative Assembly and not only accepted the report and apologized to Darcie Clarke, the mother, for the poor services that were given to the children but pledged to fully implement recommendations for a new domestic violence strategy in British Columbia and work on that.

That was an area where, again, you can imagine the
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sensitivity. We need a very diverse and skilled group of people to do that investigation. Members of our team had to interview the father, the mom, other family members, service providers across policing, the justice system, community, school to really, first of all, look at things from the perspective of the children — what were the lives of these children like? What were they going through with their father having a serious, untreated mental illness? What was happening in their lives — and trying to get an idea of if we could prevent this from happening again.

There was a lot of learning from that report. That's another example of a report that will, I hope, lead to a comprehensive domestic violence strategy in British Columbia. We're not quite there yet. I understand the government is still coming to grips with it, but they promise they'll see it the fall of this year.

But it's also a report that has had a lot of resonance at the federal level, because the report was used to change legislation at the federal level and elsewhere. So the work is important. I, again, give strong tribute to the team that works with me to do this work.

Our mission around looking at injuries and deaths is a very, very difficult one. It's not about blaming and shaming. It's really about understanding how systems work and whether we can do a better job for children and families. There is lots of room for improvement. Not surprisingly, as many of you know as MLAs coming from different parts of the province, it's a big province with a lot of different circumstances, with a complex ethnocultural population with different families in different situations, and a good need to keep a strong attitude of improvement.

So I'm going to just end it there, in terms of the background, and I'm going to indicate to you that the budget request that we are making today really is to support this work to continue. We are a pretty productive office in the sense that we have activity in those three areas, and we do a lot of reporting. You probably see a lot of our public reports in all of those three areas.

We anticipate the budget that we're requesting this year will see us have a significant degree of reporting next year. We do have key performance measures in every aspect of our program areas. We do report on the compliance with those key performance measures, and we do have a pretty, as I say, robust and positive relationship with the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. You get the feedback on that.

I'm not going to go through that in length, because we do have that opportunity, but I am happy to respond to any questions you may have.

I didn't talk a lot about the education and outreach part of our mandate because we do have to get out and serve. The travel, being present in community, is very important. Children and families need to see people, and you need to get out and see them. Sometimes it can be done. A lot of our advocacy is in the Lower Mainland, so it's not difficult. But when we get into the Interior and the north…. You have to be present. You have to go out and see people.

Often a lot of their complaint is that they are just too disconnected from the services or there are no services in their community. We have to start working on those. That's an area where the funding is so important for our advocates to be able to travel.

In an ideal world, if we lived in very good times where we could do things creative and we didn't have to worry so much about our fiscal situation, I would love to see my office have a stronger footprint in the Interior. The Interior is served through the Burnaby office mostly, but we're not able…. We go in and out, but we don't have a presence there in the same way that I wish we could.

There are areas where I know if we had different circumstances, we could expand and reach more children and families and, I think, serve them more effectively and collaboratively. But I appreciate that that's not going to be something we can accomplish, so we're going to be keeping our staff travelling, keeping them seeing children. We are going to continue to try and make do with the budget that we have, because we have tough times.

As Representative for Children and Youth, I do feel very strongly that I want to be able to run this office as effectively and efficiently as I can. If there is new money in the system, I want it to go into the direct service system where children and youth need services, and other parts of government where we really need to put the money. I'd only be too happy if my office didn't have to do this work and all of that money could go into services. But monitoring the $1.2 billion budget of the Ministry of Children and Families is a very important and needed function.

M. Elmore: Thanks, Mary Ellen, for your presentation and also to your office for your work over the last year. I think the substantive recommendations that have come out benefit not only children and families in British Columbia but really also have a positive impact across the country.

My question is, specifically, if you can just explain the capital request around the $190,000 and what's involved with that.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I'll ask Tanis to explain why we are not 100 percent sure we're going to be able to economize with that. I'll let her give you some of the parameters we're working with, because it's sort of on a daily basis we're trying to pin that down.
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T. McNally-Dawes: I guess in the actual submission there it's broken down into some of the categories. The $20,000 for office furniture is literally that. When we are doing a major renovation in Burnaby for new space, which we're in the very beginning stages of, we will require some new furniture for that. That's basically what that is.

The information systems funding request is for ongoing maintenance and hopefully enhancements to our case management system, which is managed by our IT manager. He's on top of that.

The final piece is a guesstimate on our part. We are hoping to have most of our capital costs embedded into the new lease that won't start until April 1 of next year. We're still negotiating with the landlord on that piece. It's such early stages. The budget is estimated on our behalf by Shared Services B.C., the central agency that manages the whole process of this.

I wanted to have a little, tiny piece of cushion, so to speak, so that in case anything comes along very unexpectedly during the construction process, we'll have that as a cushion. I'm very hopeful that we won't have to use it. But at this stage, it's such early stages…. We just wrapped up planning for the project. We won't start construction until probably February, March. It's just that little, tiny request in case something goes sideways, a bit like a contingency fund.

M. Hunt: Continuing on the budget side of things, I thank you for the two pages of both forward-looking and backward-looking.

My question is in the backward-looking one, which of course is irrelevant, but by the same token it's just a curiosity where I have two numbers that don't make any sense to me at all; that is, on what in the future is called "grants" and in the past was called "transfer general." You have the two large numbers in '12-13 and '11-12 of over $300,000 that suddenly disappear. What was happening back then?

Although we have many very well qualified staff within our three program areas, we can't cover all the bases, and we can't have experts in every area that we sometimes require. Typically, we handle that through short-term professional services contracts. Occasionally, there's work that we like to support because it can feed back into our office and it's less specific than the kind of work that we would contract for. We're not looking to create an initiative that will give us deliverables for our office; we're looking to influence some other work that's going on that will eventually yield information that will be helpful to us.

A good example of that is some research that is going on in the area of domestic violence. We're kept in the loop about that through the FREDA Centre at Simon Fraser University, for example. We approached them and said: "Well, if we could give you a small grant, could you put more focus on children in this research, and when the report comes out, could you address some specific needs of children in that report?" We're not directing them in the way that we would a contractor, but we're supporting work that will support our work, provide information.

Now, in terms of the historical piece on this, I'll have Tanis talk about that because she's got more of a memory for that. This wasn't part of my portfolio in previous years.

T. McNally-Dawes: Typically, in terms of the budget side of things, we don't actually budget for the grants. The difference between transfers in general and grants is just wording. They are the exact same thing.

T. McNally-Dawes: Yeah. But we don't typically have an actual budget request for that because each year we don't know what our needs will be. We have, actually, grants with a lot of the major universities, and we get together during the year to decide how that's going to be allocated out. There's a subcommittee in the office that makes those decisions. It's a bit of an unknown at the time of putting a budget together, so we just leave it as a very small amount, and it really does depend on the funding available during the fiscal year.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. You indicate that the Ministry of Children and Families is $1.2 billion. Then we're spending $8 million to monitor a $1.2 billion budget.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, yes, that is the case. It doesn't sound like a lot, I know, but at the same time we monitor not only the Ministry of Children and Families with their $1.2 billion budget, but there are a range of services that are also within our portfolio — for instance, child and youth mental health. Every health authority also has that mandate. Home care — that's sometimes in MCFD. Elsewhere, addictions. It's outside MCFD. So the total, if you like, budget envelope of what we monitor is probably closer to $2 billion.

Then we don't monitor the federal expenditures, but as you can imagine…. In relation, for instance, to aboriginal children, we just did a very significant report called When Talk Trumped Service, looking at a $66 million ex-
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penditure for aboriginal child welfare governance. The annual expenditure in B.C. on the delegated aboriginal agencies is $90 million from MCFD and $57 million from Aboriginal Affairs Canada.

We did a report and analyzed it, but we, of course, analyzed the $57 million from them as well, because it's all blended. Of course, Aboriginal Affairs Canada is very excited about our report, has circulated it widely. I've had a chance to meet with the minister — very grateful for the work that we've done, even though it's not in our mandate.

So the breadth of what we look at is pretty big because it's about who provides services to children, who funds those services. Sometimes it's MCFD; sometimes it's a blend.

I think the fair statement is we are about an $8 million shop that oversees about $2 billion of services. I try not to say that to my staff very often so they don't run for cover.

We have to do something very important, which is that we have to pick our priorities carefully. We have to make sure that we can respond to the public requests for service and support. But we have to find areas where we can have influence and make changes that will be positive for the greatest number. So it is definitely a bit of a David and Goliath situation, although it's not a conflict. But it takes a lot of shrewd planning to be sure that we can take on something and complete it to a high quality, that it will have impact and respect within bureaucracy — within public policy areas — and see improvements for children.

M. Turpel-Lafond: No, it's not really clear to me whether all the offices of the Legislative Assembly are under core review. I did have a chance to meet recently with the Minister for Core Review, Minister Bennett, and his staff and look at core review in the social-serving areas. I appreciate the government's trying to find $50 million of savings this year or maybe next.

I really was encouraging Minister Bennett, given my work, to look at better performance management in outcomes-based contracting. Like, even in MCFD and the social ministries there's no standard contracting processes. There are so many areas where it's not just about cost saving but making sure that the work that's being funded is reaching children and that we see improvement in their lives.

I'm such a supporter of improved accountability for outcomes for children and support. I think it's great. In terms of my side, I would certainly not be immune to that, but I think we're a pretty lean shop, frankly.

But I do certainly wonder why in some areas where you have a big policy shop we don't see more regular public accounting about what's achieved. My goal would really be to see the Ministry for Children and Families report regularly in a very robust fashion on what it is achieving for children and see our oversight rule change, because they really have got that as a core part of what they're doing. Performance accountability is so second nature there. I know there have been attempts, but there's still quite a bit of work to do in that area.

G. Holman: Thanks very much for your report. I had a question about First Nations. Could you just describe, briefly, kind of the relationship there? Do you deal with reserves, for example? And, I guess, just a general question: do you feel that since your office was established, we are making progress there? In your view, particularly given the outcome of your more recent study on the $66 million, are we making progress there?

Since I became representative, I have had a very strong collaborative relationship with the 200-plus First Nations — like a memorandum of understanding with the First Nations Summit, B.C. Assembly of First Nations — and then a whole range of service providers like delegated aboriginal agencies, First Nations schools — a whole range of people who play leadership roles in their community for their children as well as, of course, working on those advocacy cases. I would say half of them are aboriginal children, primarily First Nations children.

We have a strong footprint there, in part because section 88 of the Indian Act brings laws of general application of the province on reserve. So the Child and Family Service Act, the Adoption Act, the Youth Justice Act all apply on reserve in B.C.

But as you can imagine, given the failed policies of the past around residential schools and other things that really affected families, there's a lot of sensitivity. There's a lot of protocol. We have really tried to promote, on the one hand, understanding all of the failed policies of the past and all of the dimensions of the anger, disappointment, disrespect and tried to really take a strong approach, saying: "Okay, we're not going to solve everything from the past, but can we focus on how children are doing today?" That's been a very big issue.

The recent report was a little devastating for some people. They were a bit taken aback to realize that over the last decade most of our innovation has gone into what we call governance talk, which is talking about what a new system could look like but never actually launching it.

That was from 2001 to 2008 talking about creating one, two, five, 11 regional aboriginal authorities — that was a $32 million expenditure with not a single child being served — and then more recently about a $33 million expenditure of talking about what a new child welfare system might look like.
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The report that we offered recently was to say that there's no reason why people can't think about a new system, but I really wanted to encourage the Ministry for Children and Families to stop thinking that by funding people to talk about issues….

M. Turpel-Lafond: In any event…. I'm just glad that wasn't my nine-year-old son, because that's the sort of thing that he ends up doing at every event we ever go to.

The planning that they did… The talking about what you might do for children versus the actual doing of service for children. My concern in that recent report was MCFD, in particular, has kind of given money out to people to go away and think about things on their own. It's not that they maybe haven't been doing invaluable thinking, but that's not service.

There are six service lines in the ministry. Aboriginal children are very poorly served. There are significant unmet needs in every of the service lines, from child safety to child and youth mental health to children with special needs, all the way down for aboriginal children.

The recent report really said to the ministry, "You've got to focus back on service delivery," and at the same time, with the aboriginal community, First Nations leaders and others to say: "What are we actually accomplishing through this talking?"

I think some innovation maybe has happened, but it was really hard to point to what has been changed. We need to be very open to taking a hard look at these areas. That report takes a very hard look at things, to say: are things improving for children? There's money being spent to talk about improving it, but are they improving?

Pretty much we've seen a lot of stagnation around outcomes for aboriginal children, particularly on reserve. I'm hoping the report and its recommendations are going to bring people back.

When I've been out talking extensively about the report, not just with the ministry but…. Yesterday I was meeting with the delegated aboriginal agencies. I met with BCAFN last week. A lot of the leaders and technicians are now saying that we really do have to redouble efforts on service. I think that that's valuable.

We need to plan for things to be better. Your question is a very good question, which is: are we improving?

We're not improving sufficiently. The situation for aboriginal children in British Columbia is in many, many places a very difficult situation; 48 percent of them are living in deep, deep poverty, substandard housing. They're in schools that do not have the teachers that can support them. They do not have schools that are safe. They are not going to be able to realize all of their hopes and dreams as any other child should.

A lot of work is needed to change that. I really would like the ministry, the federal government and others to focus on that and to find some real hard discipline to look at the outcomes.

The issue of what children need to help them succeed is…. There are three big things that children experience around child maltreatment. Aboriginal children have a higher level of child maltreatment in B.C. probably than any other children. The big three issues are parental addictions; parental mental health, and sometimes a child's mental health after; and domestic violence. Those are the three underlying issues. We don't have strategies on those three issues on reserve.

We continue to have high levels of maltreatment. We have had failed policies in the past. We don't want to repeat them. We want to support families and communities. This is such a complex area, but it's important that you still make progress.

I say often in public service, whether you're an MLA, whether you're someone working in MCFD, that public service is a sort of area where when you see a disaster, you don't turn away and run away from it. You actually have to walk into it and work on it. That's a very good example of an area where many people have just chosen and said: "We just want to walk away from it. We don't know what to do. But here, give someone some money. We'll feel better."

The report of our office says: "You know what? This isn't working." We really actually need to get some services and some outcomes and some accountability. We can't afford to spare another generation of aboriginal children, to accept that they're not going to graduate from high school, that they're not going to be successful, that they're going to be left without their needs being met, with families that are struggling with some very significant issues.

The issue of serving aboriginal children is a hugely important issue in my office. We have quite an impressive and skilled group of staff, including aboriginal staff in all three program areas, but it's a constant outreach. Because we field the phone calls from the aboriginal children and youth themselves, it's sometimes our job as advocates to get out there in the community and say: "How are things going with the kids? We're not hearing some very good things here. Can we get to work on them?"

I agree that we all in British Columbia all have to do so much better, and we are not there. Hence, this year I've done three major reports on aboriginal children. I expect, in my office, to continue that emphasis and that focus across all program areas.

I also really have encouraged the federal government and the Aboriginal Affairs ministry to have a proper re-
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lationship with B.C. and for that to work together so that their outcomes can be supported by both levels of government and be more incisive and focused on how we are serving those kids. The federal government is planning on, perhaps, changing the education area. That could be very beneficial if we can agree on it and get it going.

There's lots of work there, more work than we could possibly ever want to do. But we do collaborate a lot on that, so I really appreciate that question. Of course, I'm very willing to give you a briefing at any time on any of those issues too.

E. Foster: Thank you very much. To start with, since we started this exercise in September, every organization that has presented to us told us they were running a lean ship. Not that I don't believe you, but I let you know that we've heard that before.

I've got a couple of questions — one on the comments you just made and the other, actually, on your budget. I think it was Einstein who said that if you continue to do things the way you've always done them and expect a different outcome, you're delusional.

You just mentioned the fact that we continue to pour more money — both the feds and the province have, over the years — into the issues surrounding the First Nations, and we're not getting better outcomes. There's no question about it. I'm not happy to hear you say that, but it is nice to hear someone acknowledge the fact that you can't fix an inefficient system by pouring more money into it. You actually have to get the money on the ground where it belongs. I've heard you say that before, and I agree with you.

How do we do that? We've got so many…. I mean, between the feds and province we've put this money out, and by the time it gets all chewed up, nothing gets to the kids. How do we cut that middle piece out of it? What do we do? The more money we pour into it, the more it gets eaten up in the middle.

It's like people who, oh gosh, argue about taking food to food banks. I'm just going to put this out. The food banks are, unfortunately, a necessary part of our society. They would rather take the food and deliver it to somebody's house so that they know they're eating it.

How do we do that? I mean, there's the advice we need. We know the problem. You've identified the problems over and over again. What we need is a solution to that problem.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I really value this as a very important discussion. We need sound public policy to do it. The recent report I did is a good example. I think probably every person I talked to in leadership and government told me not to do that report, because it was "too hot of an issue and you can't talk about it." Furthermore, the ministry….

I asked them for years: "What are you accomplishing for this investment? What is it you think you're achieving?" Finally, I said: "I'm going to have to analyze this in detail." The reason why I did that report was because a Member of the Legislative Assembly who was on the Standing Committee on Children and Youth said: "Mary Ellen, what did we get for that $33 million we spent? What did we learn from that?"

It was a good question. It was just a straight-up question. I thought: "Okay, I'd better be able to answer questions of Members of the Legislative Assembly. I'll look at it." So I had the ministry send me over 76,000 documents, totally unorganized. I had to hire an archivist to actually CLIFF them, as we say in government, and organize it. Then I had to start sifting through it, saying: "What was in the minds of people when they were doing it?"

Part of it is that you have to be able to take a hard look at what you're doing, because the Einstein comment is a good one. People don't realize they're still doing the same thing until someone actually looks at it.

When the report from my office came out, everybody was like: "Oh, we accept your report." But for six years I've been talking to you: "What are you accomplishing?" What you told me makes no sense, because when I actually did the work — interviewed people, looked at another 20,000 documents; I mean, it's a monumental piece of work — I learned something, which was that we weren't sufficiently focused on serving kids and outcomes for kids.

What did we learn? We need to recalibrate. We need to do a course correction. We need to get back and focus on that, make that accountability and see those outcomes. If you can't deliver the service, then we've got to find an innovative way to deliver the service. Maybe we need to make sure that the kids get the resources and that they get the right to get those resources.

The whole debate has shifted, but it's one of those areas where…. I'm pretty confident that if that report didn't come out, the money would continue to go in abstract discussion process limitless, because people actually feel good that they're giving money to someone to solve a problem, and then they don't have to think about it. I'm saying that we've got to actually all collaborate to solve this problem together. There's no sector of our society…. All children need to be served. There's no one off-limits — whatever.

This is a really good question that you ask, but part of it is that mentality of "we're just going to give someone else the money to fix it." Well, actually, I'm not saying government can fix it, but they need to be very crystal clear in their public policy about what they're doing, how they're going to do it and whether or not the outcomes are there.

E. Foster: I guess, then, the next question I would
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ask…. I mean, I've heard that rhetoric before, and not just for children and youth and families. What I need to hear, as a member of the Legislature, so when I sit down with my colleagues, I can say: "Okay, listen…." We've just blown, over the last number of years, $250 million out the window. We've accomplished nothing. I don't want to hear about another study, and I don't want to give the money to people who are not giving the service.

When I talk to service providers in my area, when they're upset because of the raise that…. The very first question I ask them is: how many people do you have in your organization that do not provide service to a client every day? If they've got 30 or 40 people in their organization and they've got ten people — say it's a youth organization — that don't talk to kids, you've got nine too many. I look around, and I look at the millions and millions of dollars we spend on this, and there are more people that don't serve kids that are getting the money than those that do.

What I want is for somebody — whether it's you or the bureaucracy — to come to me and say: "Okay, here we've got a plan. The plan is that this whole level is gone." We don't need them. We know what the problem is. We've got starving kids. That's the problem. It's way more than a problem. We need to put food in their mouths. That's it. If somebody is hungry, they need food, however we get it to them.

We don't need any more studies. We're studied to death. We're paying millions and millions of dollars for people to do studies. You've identified the problems over and over again. You're studying the same study you did two years ago because, obviously, nobody listened to you, or they listened but didn't fix it.

I guess my request to you would be that somebody has got to stand up and say: "I'm sorry, but this $10 million we spent on this level — we don't need to spend that anymore." Take that $10 million, and feed people with it.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I think your perspective is extremely refreshing and important. I think, though, that for the Ministry for Children and Families and its six service lines, it's not really…. That report was a study, if you like, that became public, but the discussions behind the scenes about what you're achieving for that resource — there was no public accountability on it.

I think that when the ministry does its service planning, Members of the Legislative Assembly have the opportunity to have input there. Its service plan — what are its objectives? To make sure those service plans are focused on outcomes, that they're reporting on that, that their contracting is aligned with that, and — you're right — that children and families get those services.

I think in many places they do. There are many good examples. Other examples there aren't. It's an area that's important, but I would just caution you on one thing, which is studies. This report is not a study. It's not an academic piece of work. It actually looks at the work of government, and it looks at the outcomes government can achieve.

I think performance management requires being able to accept feedback or reject it. The recommendations that get crafted are very specific recommendations, which is absolutely in line with your thinking, which is: stop doing the same thing you're doing, if it's not working, and get back to doing the thing that works, and show us that it works.

It takes some time to do a report like that, then track the recs and really see, to be on top of it, what's happening. I hope we can…. In our reporting on our recommendations and outcomes, we want to show how the work of at least the representative's office leads to some changes of the ilk that you're speaking about, which is that actual children are getting the services that they need and having better outcomes.

For aboriginal children, a good example is that I want to see the graduation rates up on reserve and off reserve. I want to see the child maltreatment numbers down. It's not enough to say we want fewer children in care, because if children are being maltreated, they have to be in care. I want the child maltreatment down.

There are key outcomes that we need to see improve in British Columbia. Adoptions I talked about earlier. We've got the lowest level of adoptions the last couple of years, a number of years. We need those up.

I appreciate we have very limited time. This is an important area, but the focus is on performance improvement and better outcomes for kids.

E. Foster: Just one quick question on the budget line here. Under STOB 70, "Operating equipment, vehicles and other," you have $10,000 and then $8,000. Then if you go back to the page before, a couple of years ago it was $3,700 or whatever it was. Just a reason — where we were $3,200.

T. McNally-Dawes: We have two government vehicles that we bought when we first opened the office. After five years the amortization costs for those vehicles drops off because you finish paying for them. Then we only need to maintain them.

T. McNally-Dawes: No, we're using the existing vehicles. They're in great shape.

T. McNally-Dawes: Yeah, and that's what I'm saying.
[ Page 645 ]
When you've originally purchased the vehicles as a capital asset, you then have to pay for them over the lifetime of that asset, which is five years. So there is an additional cost to that.

E. Foster: Okay, I'm missing something. That line item in 2012-13 was $3,251. In '13-14 it's $10,000.

T. McNally-Dawes: Oh, I see what you're saying. Sorry. Okay, so that's the actual cost versus the budget cost. Yeah. The budget is an estimate of what we think the maintenance will be. I had bumped up the budget, thinking that the vehicles were, at that point, five years older. So I wanted to have some funding in there in case we needed to do any kind of maintenance on the vehicles. Does that help?

E. Foster: No, not at all. You went from $3,251, which was the actual in '12-13, to $10,000 in '13-14.

T. McNally-Dawes: So that's what I'm saying. I had increased the budget request for that particular item in case we needed some maintenance for the vehicles. They're the main item in that.

T. McNally-Dawes: No, we haven't. That's the actual budget. That's not the actuals for '13-14.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Just to clarify, we budget an amount because if some of those things were to go down because of our travel — we have two vehicles for our staff to cover everywhere — we have to use it. We have it. But there's a difference between the planned and the actuals. Our actuals are quite less than the planned, which is why we tend to have a minor surplus, so we return an amount at the end.

This is an example of an area where, if there's a surplus, it goes back. But we still have to plan in case we need to have that. But it's a pretty minor variance. Again, we pretty much economize around that area.

L. Popham: Yeah. Mine's a quick question. It's around the review of MCFD adoption services. My question is: does this include only in-province adoption, or is there an analysis out of province and out of country?

M. Turpel-Lafond: No, it's only MCFD adoptions. We don't have a mandate over international adoptions, so we're just looking at adoptions of the children in care in British Columbia who have permanency or are eligible for adoption. It's about 5,200 kids.

L. Popham: Is there information available to show that out-of-province or out-of-country success rates are different? And would there be any comparison at all between, I guess, the reasons why that would be, whether it is more successful or not?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, we do some comparisons. I do still have some involvement with private adoption agencies, for example, because sometimes MCFD contracts with the private adoption agencies to do their home studies because they can't get them done. So they can speed them up. One of the difficulties prospective adoptive families have is that they wait so long, and we lose families. We want to understand: why is it that we can't get the child and family matched quicker?

So I do work with them, but there really is no evaluation of the private adoption numbers in British Columbia — in and out. It's a bit of a concern on that front, and it's not within my mandate.

D. Ashton (Chair): Mary Ellen, John and Tanis, thank you very much for coming today. We greatly appreciate your input.

Tanis, congratulations on a long career. Good luck in your future endeavours, and thank you for your contributions over all those years.

D. Ashton (Chair): Up next we have the Office of the Ombudsperson. We have a 45-minute presentation, 30 minutes for questions of the committee.

I'd like to welcome Kim Carter and Shelley Forrester. Thank you very much for coming today. I appreciate it.

K. Carter: Thank you very much. I'll perhaps, if you're agreeable, start and just do some general introduction while people sit down.

S. Hamilton: Hello, I'm Scott Hamilton. I'm the MLA for Delta North.
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K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Good morning. I'm Kate Ryan-Lloyd, Clerk to the committee.

K. Carter: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chair. If you're agreeable, I'll divide my presentation into three parts that correspond roughly to the documentation that you have in front of you. The first is a report on our 2012-2013 activities, then an overview of the work to date this year that we've been doing and the service plan 2014-2015 to 2016-2017 — there my focus would be primarily on the upcoming year — and then the budget proposal 2014-2015 to 2016-2017, again with the primary focus on the coming year.

I realize you're operating on a tight schedule, so I plan to speak a little under 45 minutes and to leave sufficient time for your questions. If you have any questions about matters that I don't cover, then of course, I'm happy to answer those questions as well.

I have with me Ms. Shelley Forrester, who I know the committee members have already met. You'll be seeing quite a lot of her this morning because she is the executive financial officer for four offices of the Legislature. I'll talk a little bit about that when I mention our shared services role.

So if that is suitable from the committee's perspective, then I'd like to begin with talking about 2012-2013 activities. You have a copy of our annual report, and this presentation supplements that. There are two major activities centres in our office. The first are our core Ombudsperson activities, and the second is our work in providing shared service support to our own and three other offices of the Legislature.

I'd like to begin by talking about the core Ombudsperson activities. Before I do so, however, I'd like to acknowledge the passing in June this year of a person who was very influential in establishing this office, and that is the hon. Garde Gardom. Among his many accomplishments, as you will know, he was a former Lieutenant-Governor of British Columbia and a former Attorney General. It was in that latter role that he introduced legislation, in 1977, to establish the Office of the Ombudsman.

As his obituary said, he was particularly proud of introducing that act. Some of his words in doing so are ones that I would like to share today, because they are ones that we still think about as we do our work. He said:

"With the establishment of an Ombudsman in British Columbia, we will have a person who can represent the conscience of the state and provide additional service for our citizens, move aside the bureaucratic roadblocks, wade through the red tape, approach the unapproachable and recommend improvements to administrative practices and administrative procedure.

"Government and regulation, order and edict, law and bylaw, and the rules and roadmaps that are constantly being imposed upon society today obviously illustrate the need for a citizen champion independent of the civil service, independent of the system, independent of the administrator and independent of politics to wade through administrative hurdles, to cope with crises and to recommend betterment as well as to defend against unjustified and uncalled-for criticism — or, in short, to render every person their due, I'd say, both for those within the organizational structure and for those who are dealing with it."

I wanted to say that although no one can quite express it in as moving terms as he has, that is something that we take as our guide for our office and what we see as our role.

As you may know, in British Columbia the Ombudsperson office is one of nine provincial and one territorial Ombudsperson offices, and we're part of a community of Ombudsperson offices that have, since the establishment of the first Ombudsman office in 1802, spread to more than 100 countries around the world. In B.C. we have the broadest jurisdiction of any provincial office in Canada.

One of the documents that has been provided sets out the public agencies that came to our attention last year. The approximately 7,500 inquiries and complaints we received involved public agencies that range from the Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation to the Workers Compensation Board.

Our jurisdiction includes provincial ministries, provincial boards and commissions, Crown corporations — these would include B.C. Assessment and Community Living B.C. — local governments, health authorities, universities and colleges, and professional associations ranging from the Certified General Accountants Association of B.C. to the College of Massage Therapists.

Our client base, if you look at things from that perspective, is anyone in British Columbia who has had an interaction with a provincial public agency or receives a mandated public service. In the majority of cases it's individuals who come to us, but in some cases it may be a group of people directly affected by the actions or the decisions of a public agency.

Our focus is on what has been described by one of my colleagues in the European Union as a fundamental
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democratic right — that is, the right to be treated fairly and reasonably by your government. We are also often described as the office of last resort for people who have nowhere else to turn.

I like to see our office as a visible demonstration that government, in a non-partisan sense, is committed to making sure that programs are operating effectively and achieving their goals and that the people who must interact with government agencies, where the citizens, residents, taxpayers, constituents, visitors to B.C. — whoever you describe them as — are treated reasonably, fairly and consistently and that their dealings with public agencies are positive and respectful.

The investigations that we do are mainly into individual complaints. We do about 1,900 investigations and early resolutions — in 2012-2013 — and our approach to these is independent, impartial and confidential. As set out in our act, our aim is to consult and resolve problems.

Again, to give you an appreciation of the range of our office's work, the administrative fairness, which is what our focus is, encompasses well-recognized principles of procedural fairness and good administrative practices such as appropriate legal authority, functional organization structure, necessary policies and procedures, clear public information, accessible programs, consistent standards of practice, adequate monitoring and enforcement and effective complaints resolutions.

The type of determinations that we may make after investigating a matter include that an action, decision or policy is contrary to law; unjust or improperly discriminatory; based on arbitrary, unreasonable or unfair procedures; or not explained with adequate reasons. Finally, there's a residual category, which I have never used, but is described as otherwise wrong.

I would say that over the years, as we work to improve internal processes with individual agencies, many of the complaints that now come to us are the type that are not easy to resolve; otherwise, they would already have been done.

Page 3 of our annual report gives you a general idea of which agencies we interact with most regularly. About 55 percent of our files involve provincial ministries, 14 percent provincial commissions and boards and 11 percent Crown corporations. The most significant authorities — that is, the authorities that we open the most files in regard to — are listed on page 66 of our annual report. These include the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation, the Ministry of Children and Family Development, the Ministry of Justice, the Workers Compensation Board and ICBC.

The one thing I would point out, though, is that we do treat the Ministry of Health and the health authorities as separate. If you combine those, in fact, health-related issues would be the fourth-largest category.

As is set out in our service plan, we have an integrated process for dealing with inquiries and complaints. Those complaints that we believe have the potential for a relatively quick and straightforward resolution are ones that we look at using our early resolution process for.

People who come to our office come generally to us by telephone. That's how most people are making their inquiries and complaints. Our intake and early resolution team are our first line of human contact for people who come to our office.

I say human, because of course, we have an excellent website that we are continually improving to make it more useful for complainants and public agencies.

We've had an increase in use in 2012-2013 of about 4 percent, which is just over 34,000 unique visitors and about 50,000 total visits in 2012-2013.

As well, because we serve many different communities, we continued to have paper-based materials such as our brochures, which we have available in seven languages — the ones that are most used in British Columbia. Recently we have started to produce a newsletter twice a year, which, hopefully, you have a copy of. We recognize that in this day and age people have limited time, so we have a two-page newsletter in which we try to highlight a number of our current activities on an ongoing basis for people.

I believe that the work we've done in outreach and communication contributes positively to the much lower number of non-jurisdictional enquiries our office deals with in comparison to our colleague provincial offices. Though I will add, of course, that our very broad jurisdiction also contributes to that as well.

As more than 80 percent of our first contact with people is by phone and because we know that people are calling us about something that is a problem for them, that initial contact is very important. In 2012-2013 the intake and early resolution team exceeded our goal of responding to 80 percent of the more than 6,000 phone calls in less than 45 seconds. So when somebody calls our office, they actually get a real person on the end of the phone to talk individually to them about what their issue is.

I think that timeliness, combined with the knowledgable staff that we have, allows us to appropriately resolve many matters by providing information, referrals to available and appropriate internal dispute resolution options or advice.

I'd like to give you some idea of the impact of our work in different areas of jurisdiction. When we investigate and when we identify an administrative unfairness, I will say that generally we are successful in convincing the public agency that they wish to find a fair resolution. If I can highlight a few individual investigations from our 2012-2013 annual report, I think that's the best way to give you an idea of the range of work we do. I will use individual names, but we change them for confidentiality reasons, so it's not actually the name of the person involved.
[ Page 648 ]

The first relates to a local government issue. Lee contacted us because he had encountered a problem in connecting a commercial building that he was renovating to a city water main. He had bought the building in 2006 and had spent thousands of hours and most of his savings on renovating it. When he was ready to reconnect his water line, he learned that the city had replaced and relocated its water mains in 2001. While other properties in the area were reconnected at city expense at that time, because his property wasn't occupied, that didn't happen.

He was told that to reconnect would require digging up the street at considerable expense, and it was made clear it would be his considerable expense, in order to now make that connection. He tried to work it out with the city, unsuccessfully, and then came to our office.

We investigated, and one of the things we did, of course, was to look at the city's own water and sewage connecting line bylaw as well as the details of the decision that they made not to reconnect the property at the time that the line was put through. We concluded, and the city agreed, that the decision did not appear to be supported by bylaws or consistent with their policies. The city reconsidered the matter and agreed that the water reconnection should have been done by them and that it would now be done at the city's expense.

Another case demonstrates how, as is often the situation, the complaint that comes to us results in program improvements.

This is a situation that involved a man, Hal, who was on disability and suffered from diabetes. His doctor gave him a sample of new drugs that significantly improved his well-being. Given these results, Hal's doctor sent a request for coverage for this new drug to PharmaCare. The response that came back was that PharmaCare had decided not to cover the costs of the new drug for anyone.

Hal had several medical professionals contact PharmaCare seeking a change, but all they could find out was that in exceptional cases, coverage could be considered. But they could not get an explanation about how the process actually worked. Hal came to our office, and we investigated.

As a result of our investigation, PharmaCare contacted one of Hal's doctors, who was able to provide the information necessary for PharmaCare to conclude that in fact, in Hal's situation, he had exceptional circumstances. They would cover him for a year, and there could be a renewal.

In addition, however, our investigation highlighted for us the inadequacy of the information that was available about this program. We followed up with the Ministry of Health on this issue and, as a result, the ministry produced and included on its website information about how the program for last-resort, exceptional applications for non-benefit medications operates.

If you are interested, the case involving Lee you can find on page 41 of the annual report, and this one is on page 28.

The third and last case I'll mention is one involving Community Living B.C. A mother whose daughter had been receiving support and living in a group home for more than 20 years contacted us because CLBC had told her it planned to end its contract with that group home but had not provided her with any suitable alternative group home that would meet her daughter Alison's needs.

We investigated whether CLBC had followed a fair and reasonable procedure in planning for the daughter's ongoing care. In the course of doing so we examined both CLBC's placement and their resource planning policies.

While we were looking at these policies and talking to CLBC, they again considered the situation and determined that one of the main reasons for the move, which was that no other suitable residents had been identified as interested in moving into the group home, was no longer valid. As a result, Alison was able to remain in her long-term home, in a situation and in a community that met her needs.

As I said, we do about 1,900 investigations and early resolutions a year. Those are a handful of them that give you the range. We're not dealing with one ministry or one organization or one group, but a wide variety.

Our three investigative teams are divided into social programs, regulatory programs, and health and local services. These teams really are the backbone of our office, and 20 of our approximately 35 FTEs are assigned to this area.

Now, not all the files that we investigate result in a conclusion that there has been administrative unfairness. Sometimes people come to us, and when we investigate, we determine, in fact, that they have been treated fairly by an authority. When we look at those matters, we really look at three areas.

The first is: was the person treated fairly and reasonably? Secondly, were the rules — that is, the regulations, policies and procedures — followed and properly applied in this situation? Finally, are the rules themselves fair and reasonable, non-discriminatory and have a solid legislative and regulatory base?

When we decide after our investigation that somebody has been treated fairly and reasonably, we do the same concluding work that we will do if we decide that there is an unfairness. That is, we will communicate to the individual and to the agency our conclusions. I think this is valuable in a number of ways.

Often individuals don't understand, really, everything that's happened. We are very careful to communicate clearly, both orally and in writing, what the circumstances are and why we decided what we did. For some people, just knowing that there's an independent, impartial third party who's looked at it allows them to accept that the decision was not an unfair, unreasonable one based solely on their circumstances or personal issues.
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For authorities, it can be very useful for them to know that indeed, their policies are appropriate and are being followed by their staff.

I'd like to conclude this section by telling you a little bit about our systemic and team reports. In 2012-2013 we issued two public reports. They are available here, if you'd like a copy, and I know you've all received copies at your offices.

The first was a report on open local government meetings. This was a slightly different approach that we took. It was to develop a best practices guide.

This was based on our office's experience in responding to complaints about improper considerations or improper procedures being followed in closing local government meetings. While we can deal with complaints, I see a real benefit in some areas to sharing our experiences on a proactive basis so that different agencies and authorities can, perhaps, put into practice preventative measures and avoid having someone come to us about an issue.

So that's what we did in this case. It was a short report, and it has a one-page attached checklist, which has been extremely popular with local governments. As I've said, it's designed to reduce errors and mistakes.

In addition to being well-received at UBCM, the report led to presentations being made to a variety of local governments in locations such as Nanaimo and Abbotsford, where I went to their council meetings and spoke about this. It also resulted in changes to their procedures. It was not necessarily that they felt they were doing things wrong, but they did feel there were things they could do better.

This interest has continued, actually, this year, and further presentations have been made to several local governments, including the city of Victoria, which is making the guide a foundation of it's policy. When I was out on one of my tours in the Interior, everywhere from Elkford to Radium Hot Springs, I was welcomed and talked to the local governments about this.

The second report we issued was titled No Longer Your Decision. It was a comprehensive, 187-page examination of the adult guardianship process in British Columbia and involved the examination of the roles and responsibilities of two different ministries — the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice — as well as a commission, the Public Guardian and Trustee, and the six different health authorities.

Adult guardianship is a mechanism used when there are concerns that adults are no longer capable, usually due to cognitive decline or a brain injury, to make their own financial and legal decisions. When no suitable family member can be found, then the Public Guardian and Trustee steps in to manage the financial and legal affairs of an adult who is found by health authority staff to be incapable.

As you will appreciate, this is a significant decision in an adult's life — to lose control of decisions about your money, about where you can live, what you can buy or what you can give away, even who you can marry. It's one where you would expect that there would be significant procedural protections, given the vulnerability of individuals and the significance of this decision. By procedural protections, I mean such things as providing notice, making sure that any examinations of individuals are current, allowing participation if people wish to contest their capability.

The actual case — and we deal with quite a number — the one that really highlighted the challenges in this area for us, was a gentleman who came to us. In his particular case, there were several procedural difficulties. The one that I'll highlight and, I think, brought things home very clearly was that he was sent a notice that said there was a consideration going on of whether or not he would be declared incapable. He had ten days to respond to the health authority before the decision would be made.

However, the same day that the letter was dated and posted, the health authority actually made the decision. So by the time this gentleman got around to getting the letter and saying, "Yes, actually, I'd like to contest it because I think I am capable," he was told that it was too late. He'd already been declared incapable, and there was nothing he could do.

So he went to hire a lawyer, because he thought, "It's a real difficulty. I'll need some legal assistance," which is when he ran into the real significance of the decision because, of course, he wasn't capable of hiring a lawyer now.

Happily in that case, a lawyer did step up, and the lawyer did a number of things, including coming to our office. When we looked into it and investigated, we determined that this was not fair and reasonable. Happily, the issue was reversed. Indeed, the man was found to be capable, and that resolved that individual case.

But it led us to look in depth at this system. It's a very old system. It's one where there have been several initiatives over the past 20 years to update it, none of which have come to fruition. So we had a look, as I've said. We looked at everything, from the initial evaluations through what notification is provided to people through to whether anyone actually got a copy of the certificate that took away all of their ability to run their financial and legal affairs and whether or not there were ways that they could challenge and appeal this.

We made 28 recommendations, and happily, you will see that 24 of them were accepted, one was accepted in part, and two of them are under review. So not only have there been changes to the actual processes in place right now, but there will be legislative and regulatory changes as of July 2014 to make this a fair and reasonable system. That's perhaps an illustration of how some individuals coming to us in one area, which is the area of incapability, can result in really positive changes.
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Now, in addition to the work done in that report, I will say that we have had a real continuing interest on our report on home and community care for seniors. Over the past 18 months, and certainly in 2012-2013, there was significant interest and invitations to come and talk to different seniors groups.

One of the things that we have put in place is, on an annual basis, we do an update on the implementation of our recommendations. We do it on those that have been accepted. We actually do it on those where they haven't necessarily been accepted but agencies still decide that they'll do some work in that area.

I have one of my colleagues who says that he's not quite sure whether it's more frustrating to have recommendations accepted and then not implemented or recommendations rejected and then implemented because really they were a good idea all along. From my perspective, in our office, as long as it's implemented, we don't spend too much time worrying about whether or not the credit is given to the right place.

We have started doing that. I find it's a very useful process. Sometimes ministries, for example, do have the best of intentions, but things can get lost over time and priorities can change, and having an annual review with them of implementation and a reporting out publicly can produce positive results. So we do it. I describe it as a rigorous process. Some of our staff have described it as tedious because it is quite time-consuming. We don't just ask the authorities what they've done. We go out and talk to different groups and look to check policy and practice changes. But I do feel that that's a positive measure towards getting things implemented and changes made.

Now, because of the wide variety of different work we do, I don't have the ability, as perhaps some of my colleagues do, to tell you just about a certain area or a certain ministry and what are good things and what challenges they have.

I thought I would just finish this by talking a little bit about some recurring themes I've seen both in individual investigations but also in systemic ones. These are ones where there are challenges at the institutional level that invariably produce difficulties, unfairness for individuals.

The first one is something that's not necessarily thought about, but it's when institutions end up replacing large legacy computer systems with new systems. Invariably, there's a certain degree of optimism on how well the new system is going to work and how many fewer people are needed to operate it. On a recurring basis we found that optimism is misplaced. Essentially, people unplug the old system before the new system is working, which means applications are lost, files can't be transferred easily, people's benefits are delayed.

That's a recurring theme. It ties in with something, which is a lack of clear responsibility for transition. When programs change, when one program ends and a new program begins and there's a change of responsibility within agencies, sometimes things get lost. One part of the organization stops doing something, and the new one doesn't actually pick it up. That's another area.

A lack of clarity for criteria in exercising discretion. A number of decisions are discretionary ones, and there can be real unfairness when there's a lack of clarity on what criteria should apply in exercising discretion.

A lack of training and communication, perhaps between senior levels of an organization and lower levels, where the senior levels expect something to happen, but it's not communicated clearly, so it doesn't happen at a lower level.

Finally, what I would say is really a lack of monitoring and quality control. When something is put in place, people don't go back regularly, even if it's something that they say they're doing, to look and make sure that things are happening the way they should.

Let me finish by talking briefly about our shared services organization. In our shared services organization, as I've said, we provide support to four offices of the Legislature. It's a very lean organization. All the important positions in four of our offices are filled by the same people. Ms. Forrester, who's next to us, is the director of corporate services — executive financial officer for four offices. The chief financial officer is the chief financial officer for four offices. Our manager of IT, essentially the chief information officer, is the chief information officer for four offices.

In addition to our staff, there is also shared space. We are all in one building, and that allows us, for example, to share meeting spaces. In fact, we've actually loaned out our meeting spaces to other offices of the Legislature, so there's even greater informal sharing going on.

I think it's something that's very efficient. Our office, I will say, carries the burden. When this began about ten years ago, the proportion of our staff was higher as opposed to the other offices. As we've added additional offices, we're now probably in a 40-60 percent; that is, we're responsible for providing support to probably 60 percent of people who are not part of our office.

In all honesty, I would prefer to be the recipient of the shared services as opposed to the provider, because it does make additional work for our office, but I do accept that it's something that works well. I think it does because those of us who are together in that area are flexible, we have a history of working together, and we really do cooperate to make sure things are efficient.

Let me move, if I can, quickly to some things from this year and our service plan, and then talk about our budget.

This year I set out several objectives that were designed to build on our strengths and successes. We are doing a number of our outreach tours. We did one, as I've mentioned, from Elkford through Sparwood, Cranbrook,
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Invermere and to Radium Hot Springs. That's part of the work we do in recognizing that we serve the whole province, even though our office is here in Victoria. I take staff with me, and we open the office for the day in those communities.

I visit with different authorities. Perhaps one of the ones I'll mention is I had an interesting meeting with the benchers of the Law Society. Often people don't realize that professional associations fall within our jurisdiction, but they do. I did a presentation to the benchers in July of this year.

We also are focusing on underserved communities in the Lower Mainland. We have a three-year plan to reach out to people who are recent immigrants, people whose first language isn't English. We've expanded our brochures. As I've said, we have seven languages now. We've just added Farsi to our brochures.

In the fall we went and did our Ombudsperson Office for the Day, not only in communities in the Lower Mainland but actually in facilities that were tied to new-immigrant services, to provide additional access.

In terms of systemic investigations, you'll see in the newsletter that we're engaged in one right now that deals with environmental issues. We're looking at one of the environmental programs, the riparian areas regulation, that provides protection for fish habitat in British Columbia.

I'm continuing our focus on preventative ombudsmanship — that is, trying to reach out and talk with agencies when they're developing programs, when they're developing practices to share expertise so that those programs and practices are better. Thereby, ultimately, the aim is to reduce complaints about procedural flaws at the other end.

We have also focused on our early resolution program and done an evaluation. We believe that there's room for expansion there. That is a benefit, I think, both to the individuals who come but also to the agencies that, if we get quickly to them, can often resolve something. If it takes longer, sometimes either positions are entrenched or the opportunity to get a resolution…. Certainly, for straightforward things such as reducing delays, getting better explanations, that opportunity gets lost.

If I can, I will move now to the budget part of our submission. What I will do there is focus, as I've said, on the first year but highlight changes that are anticipated in the two years further out.

Our budget request this year is based on an overall approach to building increased deliverables and efficiencies within our existing resources, which we feel we can do if we are successful in obtaining funding for non-discretionary cost increases. These cost increases are set out on page 1 of the budget request. I'm going to move between page 1 and page 3, if you are looking for some details.

There is a certain complexity to our budget due to the inclusion of internal recoveries for shared-service payments from the other three offices we provide support to as well as external recovery costs from offices outside the government of B.C. to whom we provide IT — that is, case-tracker support services. Those are set out on page 3 of the budget request in STOBs, or lines, 88 and 89.

To give an overview of where our funding goes, we have included a pie chart on page 7 of our submission. As you can see, the bulk of our office's budget costs is non-discretionary expenditures. These include salaries and benefits, 64 percent; followed by space costs — for example, rent — at 12 percent; shared-services costs at 8 percent; and amortization costs at 4 percent.

I point out that the shared-services costs are ones that I don't really control because we have a commitment to provide it to all four offices. It's not something where I can change how much I provide support to shared services halfway through the year if I find a greater need in my core area.

In the other categories of operating expenses that you'll see in the pie chart, which are operating expenses and professional services, there are also included non-discretionary costs, such as the cost of phone lines, the cost of computer operating licences, the cost of legal services.

At page 3 we set out the proposed budget by individual category and STOB. I'd like to go through simply the changes. I'll be moving, as I said, between page 3 and page 1 of the submission to show the changed amounts, any offsets or recoveries and how the final amount has been calculated.

The total budget request for the Office of the Ombudsperson for 2014-15 is $5.693 million. This is a $78,000 increase over the current-year budget which is exclusively for increases that are outside the control of the office or reductions in external recoveries.

If I go first to STOB 50 on page 3, employee salaries, you'll see there's a change there of $43,000; $28,000 of that is for schedule A employee increases. These are increases that the government has mandated for non-management excluded staff. That generally reflects the increases that are negotiated by union staff. So $13,000 of that is from the Ombudsperson budget, and $15,000 is recovered from shared service contribution from the other three offices. This is because most of our schedule A staff are found in our shared services organization.

You'll see the amounts on page 1 of the budget proposal. The remaining $15,000 of the $43,000 is a change that I have made internally in STOB 50. It's a change that comes because I anticipate an increasing pressure on the salary-benefit envelope, and I've moved internally $15,000 from STOB 63, "Information systems," to STOB 50, employee salaries.

That's the salaries. If you return to page 3, the next STOB change is STOB 52, "Employee benefits." This is the largest non-discretionary increase this year and is a result of benefits charged from central government agency
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increasing to 25 percent.

Again, this amount is set out on page 1 of the budget proposal. So $44,000 comes from the Ombudsperson budget, and $10,000 is recovered from the shared service contribution of the other offices.

For clarity, you'll find the $15,000 STOB 50 recovery and the $10,000 STOB 52 recovery reflected in the increase in internal recoveries in STOB 88 on page 3.

STOB 54 is the next change. This is a $4,000 increase that results from the decision of the Legislature on judicial salaries, which the salaries of officers of the Legislature are tied to.

The next change is in STOB 60, and it has to be read in conjunction with STOB 90, "External recoveries."

External recoveries in STOB 90 have been a recurring feature of the Ombudsperson budget submission. For the past 15 years the Office of the Ombudsperson has been providing IT services, specifically our case-tracker system and associated support, to external entities — that is, Ombudsman and ombudsman-like offices in different provinces.

Last year these services were provided to the Alberta Ombudsman, the Saskatchewan Ombudsman and the Saskatchewan Children's Advocate, and we recovered $98,000. This external recovery was an offset to our budget, and basically, we asked for $98,000 less from the committee. These arrangements are confirmed on an annual basis.

Looking ahead to 2014-2015, we tried to confirm before we came to the committee what the plans are for next year. The Alberta Ombudsman office has advised us that due to changes in its mandate and processes, it will not be continuing with this arrangement. Consequently, our external recoveries will be down by $30,000, from $98,000 this year to $68,000 in 2014-2015.

Rather than asking the committee for that full amount, I've reviewed our budget, and I've identified $18,000 in our professional services budget that I can cut to offset this decline in external recoveries. The $18,000 was the amount that we set aside each year to purchase additional case-tracker support services to allow us to provide the necessary support to all our clients — ourselves, our internal clients and our external clients.

As our external clients — i.e., Alberta — are being reduced, from my perspective, I think we can risk-manage and provide support without this additional contracted cost. You will find on page 1 of this budget proposal the $30,000 reduction in STOB 90, external recoveries, and the offset from within our existing budget of $18,000.

Returning to page 3, STOB 69 is "Utilities, materials and supplies." The increase of $2,000 is attributable to a reasonably anticipated upswing in hydro costs.

STOB 75 is building occupancy costs. The $3,000 increase on that line is based on the landlord's projected costs for 2014-2015. The increase includes items such as building insurance — for example, you may have noticed that earthquake insurance costs have soared recently — and municipal taxes. Both of these are part of the operating expenses that the landlord charges.

Again, these costs are listed on page 1 of this proposal, with a utilities increase. Neither of these increases — that is, utilities or building occupancy — are optional or within our control. As you will see from page 1, the total increase in cost is $121,000, but that has been reduced by recoveries and offsets to an actual budget increase of $78,000.

I have considered whether this is an amount that our budget can absorb. I want to explain to you why I don't think that is the case and why I don't think it's a responsible approach, on my part, to suggest to you that we could do that.

Firstly, our office has just come out of a period where we had been absorbing incremental salary and benefit and operating cost shortfalls, and I found that it's something that has a cumulative adverse affect. First, an increase in one year carries over to the next year, and then an increase in the next year further compounds the shortfall that you're operating with.

Secondly, there are often unanticipated or unplanned changes that actually increase costs. For example, this year, in the budget that we presented last year, we anticipated that the actual benefit charge would be less than it turned out to be, and we've absorbed that cost this year.

Thirdly, there's a tendency to overcompensate to ensure that nondiscretionary costs are covered, and that has an effect on our initiatives. It really means, in our case, that the only thing we can do is not hire when somebody leaves. Because when you look at our budget, the landlord's not going to take less money for rent, or any of those other nondiscretionary things.

So what I will say to you is that we try to manage within 98 to 99 percent budget expenditures and, of course, we do return any unexpended funds at the end of the year. There are some additional changes in the outlying years, but I know, perhaps, that that's something I can leave for questions. What I would do is simply say to you that I'm open to questions both about our work and about the budget that I presented.

E. Foster: Thank you very much, Kim. I've got two questions about the report, actually. The first one. You talked about one of your case files with a gentlemen who the health authority was determining was incapable. In those situations, who initiates those? Is it family? Is it the hospital authority? Is it doctors?

K. Carter: It varies. Often it's a report from…. It may be a family member. It may be a medical person. Sometimes, actually, it comes out of private institutions, such as banks that have dealt with somebody for many years and see a sudden change, perhaps, in their financial practices — usually to a health authority or to the Public Guardian and Trustee.

Then the process, as it's set out, is that the Public Guardian and Trustee and the health authority have different but complementary roles in examining whether or not there appears to be a problem and, if so, going through a process of actually declaring somebody incapable.

E. Foster: Thank you, and the second one. You mentioned a report that you're working on now on the investigation of riparian areas. What's the nature of that report investigation, and who initiated that? Again, from the general….

K. Carter: Well, with those kinds of reports, as with the one on adult guardianship, I initiate them, because I have the power to self-initiate, but I do it based on complaints that have come to us. We had a number of complaints that came to us from different parts of the province about different aspects of this particular program.

It's an environmental program. It's one that is focused on fish habitat in internal waters. While we worked through those initial individual complaints, what we identified were some issues that we thought were worth following up on with regard to how, essentially, evaluations were done.

It's a very interesting program that involves federal, provincial and local government responsibilities and authorities. You'll remember one of the themes I talked about was kind of communication and clear identification of responsibility, which can be challenging within agencies. As you might guess, with three levels of government, that can be increasingly complex.

It's also a program that moved, over time, from something that was very much government-based to now much more relying on the proponents of developments and individual professionals who are hired by them to do evaluations. It has provided us with the opportunity to look in depth at some of those challenges and the issues of, as I'd talked about, who is reviewing what and how often, and how much reliance can be placed on things.

I can't give you a final outcome, because we're still in the stage of actually going back to the ministry that's responsible, which most people think is the Ministry of Environment. But it actually isn't. It's the Ministry of…

K. Carter: Exactly. It is a report that I expect will be out in the next few months. We actually have a couple of other systemic reports that I hope will be out in the next couple of months too — one in the area of, essentially, income and disability assistance.

E. Foster: Yes, it does. Thank you. I would assume that some of those, I would say, complaints came from my area, and I really look forward to your report. I wasn't aware you were doing it. I'm really glad to hear that.

D. Ashton (Chair): We have about ten minutes left, and I have Mable, Gary and Scott.

M. Elmore: Thanks for your report, Kim. It's very interesting, certainly — just the breadth of areas that you cover — and the scope is quite impressive.

I know that when you do your outreach and you feed into the Lower Mainland — I've talked to constituents and also people who can contact my office who have attended either session — it's very helpful. I know, in my office, we refer on occasion a number of cases to your office, so I appreciate that.

What have the uptake and the response been when you've held other outreach sessions in different communities?

K. Carter: The uptake has been very good. What we do when we go out, as you know, is go and talk to different groups — everything from advocacy groups and authorities to service clubs. Staff are there in the community so that people can come in and actually meet with staff. That can make a real difference. It may sound strange, I think. Both in the newer communities and in the Lower Mainland there's a feeling that if you can go in and see someone, that's really important. There has been good uptake.

We have had a continued increase in the use of our translation services, and we're looking for more ways to advertise that. Out of that last tour, in October, a number of the immigrant services groups have added our office — both a little explanation and a link — to their websites. We hope that's going to continue. And as I've said, our translation services are something that I'll continue to expand. I think that that's very good.

As I've said, it's also important, we find, in communities where we go out…. We go to Sparwood, and we go to Invermere and set up the office for the day and talk to authorities. I had a great opportunity to talk to the smallest school board, I was told, in British Columbia when I was in Invermere.

In both of those, that reaching out is important, I think, for the communities. But it's also important for our office that we go out and we meet people and we listen to people in their communities.

So I think the uptake has been good. We're planning on continuing it without any fixed expectation, other than having people have a better understanding and more comfort with us. We think that will lead, eventually, to more interaction.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation. A quick comment on RAR. I have a background not as a biologist but as a professional consultant, and I think who that professional reports to can be important. I hope you do think about that. The regulation — it's your….

In my view, the report should be to the local government as opposed to — I mean, you're reporting to both — the proponent. That's just my comment on that.

K. Carter: No. It used to, but it was specifically removed from our office in 2003.

G. Holman: A quick question about the shared services approach. You did express the view that you'd prefer to be the receiver rather than the giver of the shared service. My question is whether that approach could be applied more broadly to all of the independent offices of the Legislature to try and achieve economies on the administrative overheads.

K. Carter: First of all, of course, you're hearing afterwards from two of my colleagues who are recipients. They may tell you it's actually better to be the provider, so perhaps I should let you talk to them about that.

What I would say is that it may well be, but it shouldn't be our office who's providing it. So if that's something that the committee wants to explore…. I would say that, in fact, the current shared services actually came out of a strong invitation from a committee, one of your predecessors, to do it. It works for us because we make it work. But if you're looking at broader, then, I think you need to have something that's not just part of one office but is a support organization for all.

For example, my core staff is about 35. The Information and Privacy Commissioner and lobbyists registry is roughly the same size. But when you look at the Auditor General, I think they've got 110, 120. If you start to add them to our office, it really wouldn't make sense.

What I would say, though, is that we make things work. If there's an organization that's not belonging to part of one office but is perhaps under a committee of all the offices — maybe. You would, I think, have to talk to each of the offices. But without trying to engage the wrath of any of my colleagues, if it has to be someone, it should be the biggest office. That's what I would say.

D. Ashton (Chair): Gary, thanks for that question. I have that report here in my hand. It's something that we can discuss after.

S. Hamilton: Thank you for the presentation. I know the work that you do is vital. Invoking the words of Garde Gardom helped to remind us of that.

You called yourself the office of last resort, in many cases. There are people out there that will sort of skip over certain bodies, certain other bodies like constituency offices and so forth, and go straight to an ombudsperson to resolve whatever difficulty they're having, whatever problem they're posed with.

My question really has to do with one of your case studies in terms of how you manage the case when it does come to your office. Uma and her $2,000 MSP refund — when I read the body of what you had written here, it almost related to me that this is the type of work that someone in a constituency office is well prepared to do, in addition to your office.

When someone comes into your office, do you ask them…? Do you usually go through a series of questions that might suggest that there are other places for them to go, and help reduce your workload a little bit?

K. Carter: In fact, what I would say is that we do have…. In our intake process, that is part of what our staff do. A very good example, I would just say, is in ICBC. They have, essentially, a customer complaints and a fairness commissioner. If somebody comes to us and they haven't gone through that, then we will refer them back.

Often people come to us at the beginning. They don't know where to go, but they know the word "ombudsperson." It kind of has an all-encompassing ring to it, so that's where they call. It's a 1-800 number. In a lot of cases there are referrals back to existing procedures.

The same thing is in ministries. For example, somebody comes to us and says: "I applied for income assistance, and I was turned down." We will say: "Have you gone through the reconsideration process?" If they haven't, then our staff will help them a little bit with that.

Sometimes people come to us because they can't actually get through to the agency. They've been trying the 1-866 number, and it's not working. Some of the work we do with…. Our staff have some of the other numbers, and if it's a situation where somebody obviously needs to talk to somebody quickly, then we'll get a call made the other way.

A good example we had was a young chap who was trying to get in contact with an income assistance office. It was before a long weekend. It was a Friday afternoon. If he didn't get his housing supplement, he was going to
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not get anything till Tuesday. He couldn't get through, and we could. Happy ending.

Sometimes people ask: how long do our investigations last? That wasn't an investigation. I say that some things can be dealt with in four hours; some take 3½ years. It all depends. What I will say is that we are always looking for the most efficient way.

One of the things I do when I go out on tour is I always stop in, as Mable will tell you, to the constituency office, whether the MLA is there or not. I'm very happy to talk with the staff at the constituency office to talk about what we do. When people come in, they're comfortable dealing with a lot of things. Sometimes they run out of things they can do. I often hear that workers compensation is the one that they kind of run out of things that they can do relatively quickly. Then they know when to refer people to us and when that wouldn't be useful.

L. Popham: I've appreciated very much the relationship that my office has had with your office. I find that it's extremely valuable when I have nowhere else to turn. I think it's great.

I went on a tour of your new building, and it's fabulous. I'm wondering. Is that building now full, or is there room for more tenants?

K. Carter: There isn't room for more tenants. We moved into the building in October 2010 — the four shared service offices of the Legislature. Actually, before we moved in, we went to see if anyone else would like to join us. At that time, which was 2008 when we were doing this, no one else was interested, so we went together. We have the second, third, fourth and fifth floors and a little bit of the sixth.

There is a private IT operation on the sixth floor as well, and on the ground floor there is the less-used wedding dress place and the more-used London Chef café and cooking school — from the perspective of our staff, anyway. It's a full building right now.

It does work well. It's cost-efficient. We're very happy. We're going into our second five years. We have a 15-year lease, so you will see in the budget going forward a reduction in our amortization and a slight increase in our rent in the outgoing years that reflects that we're coming up to five years. But it has worked well.

D. Ashton (Chair): Kim, Shelley, thank you very much for your presentation — greatly appreciated, very informative. We have asked others to try and live within their means, and I'll plant that seed with you. You did give a good explanation of it, but I will leave it with you. We have been asking others to take a look at their existing budgets.

K. Carter: I guess what I would say to you is that I did do that for a number of years. The answer is that I honestly think this is a very small amount. This is not discretionary. I'm not asking for something. Really, living within it is a cut. It's a cut to our budget. I've only got one place to do that, which is with staff. That means, really, that people aren't going to get timely resolutions of their problems. We aren't going to be able to do the kind of, I think, really useful and important systemic investigations, because almost invariably that's where I cut back on staff.

I have done some shuffling within the budget. I would say that it's all connected. Certainly for the four shared services offices, if you do one of us on our shared services issues, then it affects all of us. There's a real plus, but I would ask you to remember that, for example, if there's no increase for schedule A salaries or for the benefits for the offices, then that has a cascading effect on our budget.

The other thing I would say is that I think we're different from central government. I know from dealing with the ministries that a number of them have been asked to absorb some costs, but in the final analysis, the government can always put in a few extra dollars if they need to, where they need to, to make sure that the important program gets done. This is our only opportunity, with you. We don't have the opportunity to take a few extra dollars or get a few extra dollars from central government.

I do think that we have traditionally been treated somewhat differently, and I would strongly advocate that that be taken into consideration, because it really is a cut to us and we've got nowhere to go. Coming back to the committee to say that we need more money for things that we identified now is not something that I would do lightly. It really is something where we have to do a cut, and the cut is to our operations. I don't have much discretion. When you're talking about the $78,000, that's a pretty significant part of my discretionary budget.

D. Ashton (Chair): Okay, I plant the seed. That's what I'm doing. But thank you. I really appreciate the presentation.

Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Thank you very much for coming in, Elizabeth. Jay, thank you. The floor is yours. We have you down for a 30-minute presentation and 30 minutes of questions. We can kind of cut into the question period if required, but I'll leave it with you.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Good morning. Kate Ryan-Lloyd, Clerk to the committee.

D. Ashton (Chair): Good morning again. Dan Ashton, from Penticton. Scott Hamilton has just stepped outside really quickly. He'll be right back. So please, the floor is yours.

E. Denham: Thank you very much, and good morning, hon. Chair. Good morning, members of the committee. Joining me today are Jay Fedorak, who is deputy registrar and assistant commissioner. You've already met Shelley Forrester, who is the executive director of our shared services.

I understand that you have copies of both our budget submission and our service plan and both of my office's annual reports.

I'm going to speak for — let's see; I timed it last night, and I think I cut it down by two minutes — about 28 minutes and look forward to your questions.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging that the government continues to face challenging economic times. I know that this committee has some very tough decisions to make in its deliberations. So in my remarks this morning I'd like to put my service plan and my budget request in context. Especially for the new members of the committee, I want to describe the work that our office does and the work that we've completed in the last year and also to outline our priorities for the next fiscal.

In the summer of 2013 we developed a new three-year strategic plan that is really charting a vision to continue our proactive focus to stay abreast of the rapid changes in new technology and in social norms. So our OIPC staff, with the assistance of our external advisory board, established new goals and objectives for the remaining three years of my six-year term.

This strategic plan will really focus our work, make sure that we don't chase every rabbit and ensure that we continue to deliver on the critical aspects of our mandate. This plan is the basis of our 2014-15 to 2016-17 service plan and our budget submission.

Unlike some of the other officers, I wear two hats. I have two completely separate roles. I am registrar of lobbyists, and I'm also the Information and Privacy Commissioner. In my presentation today I'm going to deal separately with each of these roles.

Beginning with my role as registrar of lobbyists, my job is to monitor and enforce the Lobbyists Registration Act, or the LRA — one of the first acronyms I'm going to throw at you today. The purpose of the legislation is to promote transparency in lobbying and give the public the ability to know, at any given point in time, who's lobbying on whose behalf and to what end.

We use a variety of strategies to educate and inform lobbyists of their responsibilities, from publishing advisory bulletins to carefully reviewing each new or updated registration to make sure that they're accurate and complete. We also investigate possible contraventions of the LRA. As registrar, I have the authority to make findings and also to issue administrative monetary penalties in cases of non-compliance, which are enforceable by a court of law.

Last year, when I addressed the committee, I indicated that the ORL would be intensifying its efforts to investigate instances of non-compliance. In the past fiscal year we conducted 107 compliance reviews, which are reviews of a lobbyist's activity identified through a complaint, through an inquiry or through an environmental scan by our staff.

During the first three years of my mandate as the registrar my emphasis was really on educating lobbyists about their responsibility to register and to keep that information up to date. But in my view, it's time to shift from an emphasis on education to one of enforcement. As I've outlined in my budget submission, my first priority for the coming year will be to enhance our enforcement capacity. What that means is putting additional resources into identifying and investigating cases of alleged non-
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compliance with the LRA.

To stay within our means and to enhance our investigative capacity within our budget, I've eliminated our stand-alone role of deputy registrar of lobbyists, and I transferred that function to the OIPC assistant commissioner. So my colleague Jay Fedorak has a new title — lucky him — as deputy registrar and also assistant commissioner. Two executives in one. There are some cost savings that were associated with this change, and I've applied those savings to hire a full-time permanent investigator to meet the demands of ORL investigations.

My second priority for the ORL in the coming year is advocating for legislative reform. After more than six months of consultation with lobbyists, with public office holders, with key stakeholders, last month I tabled a report in the Legislature recommending five critical amendments to the Lobbyists Registration Act.

To be very brief, these amendments are, first, to change the registration requirement from lobbyists naming who they expect to lobby to a requirement to register who was actually lobbied; secondly, to harmonize the registration requirements for the different types of lobbyists; third, to add a cooling-off period for former public office holders; fourth, to mandate the disclosure of third-party interests when lobbying; and fifth, to add a statutory review of the LRA every five years. There is no statutory review period at this point.

These five recommendations are very practical, and they have the support of the majority of the stakeholders who we consulted. I've met with the Minister of Justice and her senior staff about these amendments, and I will continue to make the case for reform in the coming year.

Turning now to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, my job there is to enforce the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which covers 2,900 public agencies, including B.C. Ferries. I think that was somebody's question to Kim Carter. So 2,900 public bodies — and that includes municipalities, school boards, post-secondary, health authorities and, of course, government ministries.

I'm also charged with enforcing the Personal Information Protection Act, or PIPA, which covers 300,000 business, commercial and not-for-profit organizations in British Columbia. In the last year my office took in 1,061 complaint and request-for-review files. Our office has a very high mediation rate, and we resolve 95 percent of all of our complaints through mediation. In the other cases, the matter proceeds to a formal hearing, so we're an expert tribunal, and a binding order or a binding decision is issued. During 2012-2013 we conducted 73 formal hearings.

I also have a public education mandate, and I believe this work is absolutely critical in promoting and protecting information access and personal privacy rights. There are persistent privacy concerns being aired in the public domain. Every day I open the newspaper, and I keep asking myself: "What are we doing about this?"

Every day new technologies are invented. They're brought to the forefront, be it surveillance technologies like drones, wearable computing devices, body-worn cameras, facial recognition technology, biometrics. And it goes on and on.

Citizens need clarity about what's at stake, and they also need an independent assessment of the impact that these new technologies will have on their privacy rights. My office has a significant role here, and I'm very focused on providing information, education and oversight on behalf of citizens and consumers.

I'm going to move now to highlight some of the major accomplishments of the OIPC in the current fiscal year. Even though our case files have grown by 20 percent this year, I'm pleased to report that our backlog is currently at 50 files. Two years ago, when I came to this committee, I reported that our backlog — those are cases that haven't been assigned to an investigator yet — was at 180 files. A year ago it was at 90, and now it's at 50. I credit the success of this to the skill of our intake and investigative staff.

Another major trend this year is a substantial increase in time extension requests by public bodies submitted to our office. We've had 735 such requests in the past fiscal year, which is a 92 percent increase over the previous year. This is a worrying trend. We've been working with public bodies to develop strategies for responding to access-to-information requests on time.

I'm going to turn now for a moment to our policy casework. In fiscal 2012-13 we saw increases in the number of privacy impact assessments coming through our door — a 31 percent increase — and policy consultations — a 34 percent increase. We actually expect this trend to continue as public bodies contemplate new programs that involve the collection, use and sharing of personal information. In my presentation to this committee last year I identified privacy challenges posed by rapidly advancing technology as the area of highest priority for our office.

One of the most important files in the past year was my office's review of phase 1 of the B.C. Services Card. I wonder how many of you have a combined driver's licence and health care card now. There's one in the crowd. Within five years all of us will have this card.

Our team conducted a thorough review, and we made specific recommendations to enhance privacy and security of this initial aspect of the services card and the infrastructure behind it. My major recommendation coming out of phase 1 was for a broad and meaningful public consultation with British Columbians before any future phases or future enhancements of the card were put in place. I'm heartened that the government took this recommendation seriously, and this public consultation is currently underway.

We've also committed to conduct quarterly audits of
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the B.C. Services Card program for at least the first year of its operation to assess whether the systems are architected according to the privacy impact assessment and functioning in a privacy-protective and secure manner.

Another area of significant work involving privacy and technology this year relates to GPS and electronic monitoring technology by employers. We issued four decisions on this subject, applying both to public and private sector employers. Those decisions received widespread coverage in the media as well as legal and specialty publications. The use of tracking technologies by employers is a cutting-edge issue in workplace privacy, and these decisions establish a balanced approach to implementing GPS in the workplace.

Finally, my office continues to undertake important policy work related to data-linking. We continue to work out the details of a comprehensive framework that would see my office being given early notice of data-linking proposals as well as being provided privacy impact assessments before any project goes live.

I'm going to turn now to our systemic investigation reports. My office has published the results of five systemic investigations in the past fiscal year.

Starting in March I released a report that revealed a growing trend of "no responsive records" replies by the government of British Columbia in response to general access-to-information requests. The Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens' Services accepted all of my recommendations relating to improving access-to-information processes in government, and I also continue to advocate for an update of our 80-year-old statute to ensure that we have a duty to document.

In June my office published a detailed investigation report that examined a series of unauthorized disclosures of personal health information affecting millions of British Columbians by the Ministry of Health in the context of health research. Our report made a number of recommendations which the ministry has agreed to implement.

In July I released a report that evaluated the B.C. government's open information and open data initiative, and I made 18 recommendations to strengthen the initiative and to ensure its long-term sustainability.

In August I issued an investigation report examining allegations of information-sharing between the government and the B.C. Liberal Party, as described in the draft multicultural outreach plan. In that investigation I did not find evidence of unauthorized sharing of personal information between the government and the Liberal Party. However, one of the key points coming out of this investigation was the common use of personal e-mail accounts by certain government employees.

Finally, earlier this week I released a report regarding section 25 of FIPPA. That section of the act has two parts. The first part mandates public bodies to disclose information affecting the health and safety of British Columbians, and the second requires disclosure of information that's otherwise in the public interest. This duty to warn and duty to inform is mandatory, and it overrides all other provisions of FIPPA.

I'm concerned that public bodies are not using the provisions of section 25 very often, due in part to a lack of policies, a lack of training, a lack of awareness but also because a very high legal bar has been set for triggering these kinds of disclosures in law. What's really clear from this investigation is that legal reform is needed to ensure that public bodies' responsibilities under section 25 are properly discharged to the benefit of the public.

Turning now to public education and outreach, our major initiative this year was celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. We wanted to have a really big party, so to mark the occasion, our office organized a conference, which was held in Vancouver, called Privacy and Access 20/20: A New Vision for Information Rights. This conference was sold out. We had 300 seats in the room, and we had over 400 delegates, so it really was standing room only.

Another important initiative was a global one. In May the B.C. office joined 19 privacy regulators around the world to participate in a global privacy sweep of Internet sites. For our part, the B.C. office reviewed 250 websites of B.C. companies, and we found that 45 percent of websites had no privacy policy whatsoever. That's more than double the global rate.

So B.C. companies have some work to do to ensure that consumers in B.C. can make informed decisions about the type of information they choose to share when they go on line. To help address that issue, we produced guidance called Practical Suggestions for Your Organization's Website's Privacy Policy to address some of the deficiencies that the sweep identified.

The final achievement of the past year I want to share with you is the introduction of our audit program. Investigations such as the data breach in the Ministry of Health demonstrate a really important point. That is, while many public bodies have developed policies and procedures to address privacy obligations, a lot of those policies just sit up on the shelf, and very few public bodies are conducting any kind of active review, active monitoring or follow-up to see whether employees are complying with policies and meeting legal obligations. We expect the first audit to take place in 2014.

In describing the scope of the work completed by my team so far during this fiscal, we're doing our very best to be as efficient and strategic as possible in order to meet the expectation of citizens and legislators to properly fulfil our mandate.

I'm going to turn now to priorities for 2014-2015. As I've outlined in my budget submission, my first priority on the OIPC side will be ensuring robust privacy rules
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and guidelines are implemented for data-linking and information-sharing activities of public bodies. This is a continuation of the work that we've been doing since 2011 to ensure that there is a comprehensive framework in place to govern data-sharing initiatives by public bodies.

There is no doubt and no question that government is seeking to serve citizens in new and innovative ways. Public bodies are looking for efficiencies in the way they design, evaluate and deliver services. Sharing and linking information is increasingly a critical part of those efforts. But sharing and linking citizens' data has privacy risks. It's essential that public bodies implementing new information systems ensure that privacy and security are in place, and independent oversight of these programs is essential.

My second priority for the OIPC is to increase the number of public and private sector organizations that have comprehensive privacy management programs in place. Just as the focus of a doctor is to treat the whole patient and not just the symptoms, managing privacy risks requires a comprehensive approach, making sure that all information systems, paper or electronic, embody the same core privacy principles.

This year we published a new guidance document tailored specifically to public bodies to give them the building blocks to create a tailored privacy program. Our new audit and compliance program will audit public bodies against this privacy management document and will continue to promote privacy management in our interactions with the public and the private sector.

The third priority for the OIPC in the coming year will be to encourage the adoption of open government, open data programs, and to monitor the timeliness and the quality of public body responses to access requests. The first step in achieving the goal of an open and transparent public sector is to increase the numbers of public bodies that have implemented open government programs.

We have a number of initiatives in mind for the coming fiscal, including increased training and support to information professionals to assist them in implementing these programs.

A key to transparency is the quality and timeliness of providing responses to access-to-information requests. As I mentioned earlier, our office has seen a significant increase in time extension requests by public bodies. We're going to assess the underlying cause in those agencies who have failed to meet their legislated time frames for access and also conduct periodic reviews of the quality of responses.

Turning now to my budget request for 2014-15, which you will find on page 16 of the budget submission, the priorities that I've outlined can be accommodated without further funding for new positions, goods or services. I'm requesting the same base funding as my office received for 2013-14, with increases only to cover mandated increases in certain costs.

I request the following cost increases in order for this office to be able to provide the public with the same level of service as fiscal '13-14. One, an adjustment to cover government-mandated salary increments and adjustments for schedule A, union-classified staff. There are no salary increases for other excluded staff.

There has also been — and Kim Carter spoke to this earlier — a realignment of resources within the shared services area of the four officers of the Legislature which has resulted in an annual increase of shared services salary costs for the OIPC-ORL. The combined cost increase there is $33,000.

Secondly, an adjustment to cover the corresponding increase in benefit costs of those salary increases, combined with a government-mandated benefit rate increase of 1 percent for all staff, for a total of $35,000.

Thirdly, the commissioner's salary is mandated by statute to be the equivalent of the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court of British Columbia. When the base salary for judges was raised this year, it resulted in an increase to my salary of $4,000. I have reduced the budget for professional services by $4,000 to offset this increase.

Fourth is an increase of $2,000 to cover building occupancy costs owing to a raise in the rent and an increase of $2,000 to cover higher B.C. Hydro costs, for a total of $4,000. So the total amount of those four increases is $72,000 for fiscal 2014-15. With a base budget of $5.526 million, the increase of $72,000 represents a rise of 1.3 percent, for a total of $5.598 million.

In the event that my offices were not to receive these increases, there would be direct consequences for individuals making complaints and requesting appeals. So without the additional funding, we would have to cut resources devoted to investigating privacy complaints and conducting appeals.

Right now we employ nine investigators and three contracted investigators to handle approximately 1,200 files per year. So if we didn't receive these mandated costs, we would be required to cut one investigator, which would significantly affect service to the public. Another 70 files would be added to our backlog.

I'm going to end there. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm happy to answer any questions about our operations or our budget.

E. Foster: Thank you. I sat on two committees over the last four years. One was the committee that struck every six years to go around and do the public hearings into FIPPA. The other was the legislative committee that looked at the Police Complaint Commissioner and specific cases and so on.
[ Page 660 ]

In both instances, we heard from people from all over, all walks of life. One of the issues with the privacy act that kept coming up over and over again was not on the high level that you were talking about, but how it affected the operations of people at street level. We heard from police, and we heard from the private sector as well.

On issues, for example, a policeman…. The police department talked about a specific case, but this happens, apparently, quite often. They had information on a criminal history of an individual and were not allowed to share that with the lady he was living with, and she ended up dead.

I bring this up because you talked about education. People are afraid of you — not you personally; your office. They're concerned, and they will err way on the side of caution so that they don't have to get called in front of an investigation by the Privacy Commissioner's office. Other people use it as an excuse: "Oh, we can't do that, because the Privacy Commissioner wouldn't let us." Fair enough. We see that in both the public and private sector.

On the education end, I think the people who have to do the day-to-day work — not those of us sitting around here but the people that have to deal with these issues…. At two o'clock in the morning they can't get a hold of you. They need to be educated, and they need to have some latitude. You may not totally agree with what they say at the end, but they did the right thing at the time to protect someone. They don't believe that that's there. These are the people that I talk to, that come into my office, that I have coffee with and that I've worked with over the years in the private sector and in my involvement with the RCMP.

From an education point of view, that's where the education needs to go. It doesn't need to go to the deputy ministers. Although, certainly, you talk to them all the time. That education needs to filter down to the people on the street that are actually using it. I think it's there; I just don't think it's getting to the people that need to use it.

E. Denham: I couldn't agree with you more that what we really need to do is more education for the practitioners, more education for the people that are actually making these decisions at two o'clock in the morning. There are a lot of myths about what the law allows and what it doesn't allow.

There are provisions in both of our acts for disclosure of information in the case of immediate risk to health and safety of an individual. People don't necessarily understand that, so maybe it results in a conservative approach to disclosure of information. I agree that there needs to be a lot more education. It's where we're focusing our attention in the next year.

The other comment I would make is, because you were part of the review committee, you would be aware that there were amendments made in 2011 to allow more information-sharing for common and integrated programs, like when a health authority is trying to cooperate with the Ministry of Justice and trying to cooperate with the city of Victoria to provide services for the homeless — so more collaborative, integrated programs.

The law allows for that. There are some checks and balances that need to be in place because people still have rights, and there needs to be transparency about how information is shared. But I totally agree with you that we need to educate. It's not the law that prevents information from being shared; it's that we need to communicate the interpretation of the law. So thank you for that comment.

E. Foster: Thank you. Back to the 2011 report, those changes were made, not in legislation but certainly in policy, but they still didn't get to the street. That's where we're missing the boat, I think.

G. Holman: Thanks very much for your presentation. A couple of questions, I guess — or a question and a comment. I was looking at your budget and actual expenditure for 2012-13 on page 18. It looks like the budget was underspent by about $300,000, if I'm looking at that correctly. Are you tracking the current budget? What was the reason for that, and what's the situation, as you understand it, for the current year?

E. Denham: We returned about 5.5 percent of our budget, unexpended funds, last year. Part of the reason for that is we have a judicial review fund. We're given $300,000 to use for judicial review. When somebody challenges one of our orders or decisions, we have to hire external counsel. We can't anticipate when that's going to happen. We don't know when judicial reviews are going to be scheduled, so we have a ceiling of $300,000. Whatever is not spent on judicial reviews must be returned to the consolidated revenue fund at the end of the fiscal. Sometimes we spend it all; other times we don't.

I believe last year we spent about $152,000 of judicial review money. The rest of it went back into the revenue fund. This year we think we're going to spend about $165,000. That's projected to the end of fiscal, so again, more of that money will be turned in. I think we also got a rent rebate very, very late in the year. I'm looking at Shelley Forrester. We got a rent rebate so late in the fiscal year that we couldn't allocate that to any other expenses.

This year we think we're going to be managing our budget within about 1.5 percent. But again, that judicial review money — we turn it back if we don't spend it.

G. Holman: Actually, that leads to my second question — kind of a comment. Your building occupancy costs are fairly substantial as a proportion of your budget. Again, I'm just wondering about the opportunities. Have
[ Page 661 ]
you looked into opportunities for sharing space? Do you think over time there could be some economies there, by consolidating office space, much in the same way as…. I take it you're one of the offices that's sharing services with the Ombudsperson — whether a similar principle could be applied to office space.

E. Denham: The four offices, as you heard from Kim Carter just before me, have collaborated in a shared services model. We share space. We share meeting space, we share kitchens, and we share pretty much everything. We share Shelley and her staff.

S. Forrester: Right. I gather you were referring to STOB 75, building occupancy. Is that what you're referring to?

S. Forrester: Right. There are a couple of items in that STOB that the money covers. The first is base rent. As Kim mentioned, we're in a 15-year agreement for our space.

The base rent is set for the first five years at a certain rate, and it will go up in the second five years. There's no way to reduce that because we are in a multi-year lease with our landlord.

The second component is operating costs. That would be like any tenant where you will share a cost of common space — like the elevator, as well as repairs and maintenance on the building, as well as janitorial for shared space, hydro for shared space, taxes and insurance. The landlord sets the cost based on what he reasonably expects the cost to be for the next fiscal year. We have used their figure to build that budget.

At the end of the day, when the reconciliation is done, anything that does not get spent does get returned. But we feel that the landlord has enough experience in our building, which is still a relatively new building, that we can have fair confidence in the numbers they've given us.

Those are the key components of building occupancy. It comes really from our lease agreement and information from the landlord. There's really no way to capitalize on any opportunity there to reduce that.

G. Holman: In other words, you are utilizing all those opportunities for sharing both services and space. I should have known that or understood that from the….

E. Denham: We could put staff in bunk beds. We could double-stack them in the office. They might not want that.

G. Holman: Your view on renting space versus owning space — do you have a view? I don't want to take a long time on that, but is that something that has occurred to you or that you've discussed?

E. Denham: I think we've entered into this long-term arrangement with the four offices, so I'm not sure if we looked at rental versus actual owning of space prior to this. But we are locked into this arrangement for the coming years, and I do think the direction to do so came from this committee. I think it gives us a lot of efficiencies in sharing one.… Again, we have one IT team. We have financial services and HR staff. So we're already sharing as much as we can at this point.

S. Forrester: If I could add, we also share boardrooms — I think Kim mentioned that — as well as a shared reception area. Those are the shared opportunities we have by being consolidated in one space. There were inefficiencies prior to being in the building that we're in now, because the four independent offices actually were in four different locations. It was opportune, in 2008, to look at a long-term arrangement for the reason of efficiencies and certainty for the offices and for the budgets of the offices, going forward.

There were certainly some advantages, and a business case was put to the former Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services with regard to the move and the options available at the time. It was approved by this committee in 2008.

M. Elmore: Thanks, Elizabeth, for your presentation. I'm very interested…. I know it's challenging in terms of responding to the breathtaking and rapid expansion of technology and the development and trying to keep pace with privacy concerns. You've mentioned, particularly, the measures you're taking with the B.C. Services Card — also very interesting in terms of Internet security for consumers here in B.C.

What are some other areas that you anticipate are important, that you've identified we need to improve our efforts here in B.C.?

E. Denham: I think big data. Many people have heard of what big data is. Really what that is, is data analytics on steroids. I think the application of big data to government services is a really challenging area for us to look at.

We're already having conversations with certain public bodies that want to apply sophisticated analytics to databases to give them ideas of new programs, to find links between the data that they have. Again, I think that's challenging, because we need to be able to do it while still respecting privacy and without linking the activities of a citizen across a whole bunch of discrete entities. So that's a really challenging area.

The other area that we are really focused on right now
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is health research. We're hearing a lot from researchers, a lot from commercial entities, that they want to use a treasure trove of health data that exists in B.C. to answer new questions, to come up with new ways of saving babies, of making our health and our lifestyles better. At the same time, we have to make sure that privacy and security is in place.

I think this is an area of focus for our office. There was a conference yesterday called the Data Effect, in Vancouver, where researchers are talking about how do we mine this data. We're convening a group of experts on Monday to talk about it, because we have to have both. We have to use health information, and we also have to have protection of privacy.

That is another area. Again, I think that's a game changer when it comes to protection of personal information.

The last thing I'd say is that data flows are completely borderless now. Data flows all over the world. We've got a law in B.C. There are laws across Canada. Increasingly, Privacy Commissioners have to work together to deal with the big Internet giants of the world. We need to collaborate and cooperate on enforcement. This is where a lot of our activities are focused as well.

M. Hunt: Some of the joys and the challenges…. This year Surrey has the dubious distinction of setting a new record for murders, which is not at all pleasant. But it's always amazing that as soon as we have a murder, the first thing that the RCMP do is they go to all of the security cameras in the area to try and pull their information.

To me, I find it frustrating that we have to go to businesses and that we can't find a positive way for us to do that as a local government or for local governments to be able to do that in particularly difficult areas or areas where we have what we'll call "high susceptibility to."

I'm hoping that somehow, through the processes, we can find a way to be able to get the information for our protective services so our people can feel safe in the midst of communities.

I recognize it's a massive challenge for us, but it's one of the ones that, as we're going through this, I always find so interesting that the first thing that's done is we run to businesses to see if their camera wasn't aimed right. Or we have a situation in Abbotsford where we have a missing person, where again, their first thing is to go to all the businesses and use anything from their cameras. I just find that a challenge of why we can't find a public way to be able to do that publicly.

E. Denham: To be clear, our office has not said no, across the board, to CCTV in use by municipal governments or police forces. What we have said, and what the law provides for, is installation of cameras where there is an area of demonstrated risk.

For example, you'll see that when you go to certain transit stations there are cameras. Again, those are high-risk areas. There have been thefts. There have been assaults. There are video cameras, and they're implemented in a privacy and security sensitive way.

I'm not sure that we, as a society, want to live with CCTV cameras everywhere we go.

We don't necessarily want to have cameras watching us everywhere we go. That will change our society fundamentally. But again, cameras can be put in place for places where there is a demonstrable risk to the citizens.

You'll see that during…. Like post–hockey game in downtown Vancouver. You're going to see some use of cameras — one-time use, periodic use.

The law doesn't say no. Our office doesn't say no. But we have to think about it very carefully because we're balancing a whole bunch of risks, including risks of a surveillant society.

D. Ashton (Chair): Elizabeth, thank you very much for the presentation. Greatly appreciated. Jay and Shelley, thank you again. Congratulations on your new appointment — or should I say condolences.

I'd also like to recognize the individuals at the back of the room. I'm assuming it's staff. Is that correct?

Once again, I would just like to say I appreciate what you've put forward. You heard my request to the Ombudsman. Every one of us is challenged in budgets these days, and I would just ask that every measure be taken to bring it in line with what was prescribed last year.

I'll leave it at that. You have presented it, and we'll see what transpires from here.

D. Ashton (Chair): Well, good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks for coming around the table and the introductions, so we won't have to go through that.

I would also like to welcome, once again, Shelley Forrester. Thanks for holding that seat down. Gosh, you're almost a regular here.

D. Ashton (Chair): Stan and Rollie, the floor is yours. We have 30 minutes for a presentation and 30 minutes for questions.

S. Lowe: Hon. Chair, Deputy Chair and hon. members of the committee, this will be my fifth occasion that I've had the pleasure of appearing before this select standing committee. I welcome this opportunity to address you, and I thank you in advance for your time and consideration of my requests.

With me today is Rollie Woods, Deputy Police Complaint Commissioner, and Shelley Forrester, executive director of shared services, for the record. In terms of my submission today, I hope to be approximately 30 minutes, which will leave ample time for questions.

I'd like to begin by providing the committee with an overview which, I hope, will provide the members with the basic lay of the land in terms of the police complaint system in British Columbia and the work of our office. I will then focus on our formal budget submission that you have received. However, I intend to summarize some aspects of the document and really focus on the areas germane to my request today for funding.

I'll begin with a bit of background and overview about our office. The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner provides impartial civilian oversight of police complaints related to allegations of professional misconduct against municipal officers in British Columbia. Our jurisdiction is defined by statute, and it's contained under the Police Act of British Columbia.

I think it's important at this time that I distinguish our jurisdiction from that of the IIO, because you may hear about them from time to time — the independent investigations office that opened just over a year this past September. The IIO conducts criminal investigations regarding police-related incidents that result in death or serious harm. They have jurisdiction over the RCMP and municipal police officers in terms of criminal matters. In terms of our work, our jurisdiction is confined to the area of professional misconduct, public complaints and those against municipal officers in British Columbia.

We ensure thorough and competent investigations of police complaints and fair adjudication amongst the parties. Our jurisdiction is, as I said earlier, confined to municipal police officers, and our goal is to facilitate quality policing and public trust in law enforcement through effective, transparent civilian oversight of the complaint process. We strive hard to be impartial and fair to all stakeholders in the complaint process.

It's important to note that our legislation underwent substantial revision some 3½ years ago as a result of recommendations made pursuant to a review of the complaint system. This review was commissioned by the government and undertaken by Josiah Wood, who then was a retired justice of the Court of Appeal but now is sitting as a Provincial Court judge. This report included a comprehensive audit of police complaints and made many recommendations for change in the Police Act process, which included strengthening the oversight powers of this office.

My appointment began approximately a year before this legislation came into force, and much of our work at that time was dedicated to the successful transition to and implementation of the new legislation. The OPCC has undergone significant transformation, both operationally and organizationally, over the past 3½ years. Our goal was to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of this office. I can assure the committee today that our office does not resemble the same office that I walked into almost five years ago.

On March 31 the House unanimously passed into law sweeping changes to the Police Act which incorporated a majority of the recommendations of Josiah Wood. Mr. , who is a member of this committee, should be very familiar with this legislation, because he was engaged in a detailed review of the provisions at the committee stage.

In his report Josiah Wood recommended that a further administrative and investigative audit take place three years later, after the new legislation came into force. Mr. Wood's recommendation became part of the new legislation, and in March of this year the Special Committee to Inquire into the Use of Conducted Energy Weapons and to Audit Selected Police Complaints released its report.

Mr. Foster is well acquainted with that report, as the hon. member sat as part of the special committee that adopted the recommendations and findings of the Auditor General office's report. I can tell you that the Auditor General's findings were very positive in terms of the investigations that it reviewed in the operations of our office. I intend to review those findings shortly in my formal submissions.

Our role is one of performing a gatekeeping function. What we mean by that is our oversight powers are confined to either opening or closing a gate. We can close the gate when we determine a complaint is not admissible or that an investigation should be discontinued or where we agree with the decision of a discipline authority, which is usually the chief constable or their designate. You'll hear me use the term "discipline authority" quite often. Those are in terms of unsubstantiated complaints.

We are also gatekeepers when it comes to the review of decisions of discipline authorities, as we decide whether or not the matter should be reviewed by a retired judge pursuant to any of the three avenues of adjudicative review set out under the act. I should advise you that previously there only existed one avenue of adjudicative review,
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and that was a public hearing.

The new legislation provides for two additional intermediate avenues of adjudicative review, and both have proven to be both effective and efficient. Having the ability to refer a matter to a retired judge for adjudicative review is critical to maintaining public confidence in the police complaint process.

Furthermore, it provides stakeholders with adjudicative guidance, which really did not exist prior to the introduction of this new legislation and the adjudicative avenues. This ability to open the gate to review is a very important oversight power of our office.

There is one aspect of our gatekeeping function which is mandatory, and that involves cases where a discipline authority or a chief has found that the incidence of misconduct requires or proposes a demotion in rank or a dismissal of the officer. In these instances I am required by law to either arrange a public hearing or a review on the record, when requested by a member. This mandatory adjudication has accounted for approximately 38 percent of the public hearings in the past three years and has had a significant impact on the dedicated funding available for adjudicated review.

Now, I should pause here and discuss this concept of dedicated funding and explain it to the committee, for those who've not served on the committee earlier. In our operational budget is an amount earmarked by the previous committees for use in funding the three adjudicative avenues, as well as legal expenses associated with administering the Police Act. It's referred to as dedicated funding. Any unspent funds must be returned to treasury each year. These funds cannot be used for any other purpose in my office.

Two years ago this same committee increased the dedicated funding to $300,000 from its earlier amount of $100,000, which was in existence since 1998. That increase was based on a demonstrated need provided by my office associated with the two additional avenues of adjudicative review and the associated costs. You may note that since that date I have been forwarding, on a quarterly basis, to the committee the costs associated with administering the adjudicative system as a matter of monitoring, to keep you in the loop as to what we're spending money on.

In terms of adjudication, it's important that you understand the role of our office. We are primarily an administrator or registrar of the adjudicative system, as we rarely have our own counsel appear in these matters except, usually, in cases of legal interpretation or statutory interpretation. We have been fortunate to be able to retain legal counsel, many of whom are special prosecutors, who are prepared to work at a reduced rate to keep the costs of administering the system down in the interests of public service.

The funds paid to legal counsel and retired judges as adjudicators are administered at arm's length through a third party, which is our shared services department. In our role as gatekeepers, we do not make any determinations of whether or not an allegation has been proven, and we do not impose discipline or corrective measures.

Finally, as part of our oversight powers, we have limited oversight powers in terms of investigations. We're able to direct investigative steps, reject reports, order further investigation, and order external investigations or discipline authorities when the need arises. What we do have less control over, however, is the manner and nature in which the evidence is collected by investigators.

Over the past four years we have worked hard to develop and maintain relationships with all stakeholders in the complaint process. We've established professional working relationships with the executive management of police agencies, police unions, B.C. Civil Liberties, Pivot Legal Society and other special interest groups. I have been an advocate of a consultative approach with stakeholders; however, our office has jealously guarded our independence arising from my role as an officer of the Legislature.

At this time I'd like to turn to our formal submissions and take you through some of the materials. If I could take you to page 2 and directly to the issue of our request for funding, as I pointed out in my overview, since there has been increase of adjudicative avenues pursuant to the act from one to three, the actual expenditure from my office on legal expenses has exceeded the dedicated funding, on average, by approximately $100,000 per year. The current fiscal year is no exception, as the forecast expenditure is expected to be $408,000, which is $108,000 over the $300,000 earmarked.

Through cost-saving measures, including the delaying of filling staff vacancies, I'm confident that we'll be able to offset the shortfall this current fiscal year. I've done that in each of the previous fiscal years, with one occasion in which I had to go for very modest contingency funding to Treasury Board.

Now, these measures come with a commensurate strain, and this strain is really on staff and workloads. Where I've delayed the hiring of staff, it has certainly met the fiscal needs of good fiscal management, but it has been very difficult and manifested itself in terms of staff turnover.

More recently, I've filled all the positions that I need, just to avoid the aspect of a challenging workload in an area which is really an acrimonious area. We conduct oversight in a complaint system. It's a difficult system in which to work in. In order to attract long-term employees, they have to be mindful of the fact that for years they're going to be mired in a system that's acrimonious to some extent on days. So it's hard to attract good people to that work.

The quarterly summaries, as I indicated, that I've provided to you for the past two years, had this consistent
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shortfall. So I am respectfully seeking an increase of $100,000 in dedicated funding commencing next fiscal year for legal expenses to adequately fund anticipated adjudications and judicial reviews. Obviously, as dedicated funding, any unspent sums would revert yearly back to treasury.

In addition, I'm also respectfully seeking an increase of $34,000 in our operating budget commencing next fiscal year to offset increased costs outside the control of our office. These costs include scheduled salary increases agreed to by government, an increase in the rate charged to our office for employee benefits and an increase in our operating and utility costs associated with the lease of our existing space.

I want to brag, at this point in time, about the Special Committee to Audit Selected Police Complaints. I have with me today a copy of the report produced by that committee, and I'm going to ask my colleague to hand that over to you as a memento of my visit today and an opportunity to brag.

In March 2013 the committee released its report which included the findings and recommendations of the Auditor General. The findings of the Auditor General were very positive and really validated the exemplary work of our office.

Some of the key findings in the report to the committee were as follows: "Police complaints are addressed in compliance with the act. The commissioner promotes thorough and competent investigations of complaints by exercising discretion as provided by the act." One of the determinations in making this finding or this statement was a review of my exercise of discretion in the area of adjudicative reviews.

Finally, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner "has taken steps consistent with the act to increase public awareness of the police complaint process."

On page 3, at the top, the Auditor General commented further in his report: "My office concluded the police complaints are being processed in compliance with the act. The complaints and investigations we audited were found to be well-documented and comprehensive, providing sufficient evidence that complaints are respectfully addressed and that all investigations are conducted in a thorough manner. We observe that none of the complaints we reviewed were treated as trivial."

That comment is really a comment on also the work of the stakeholders in the system and the work of the police in investigating these particular complaints.

However, there were two recommendations of the Auditor General that were endorsed by the committee that were targeted at reducing, first of all, what I view as a culture of delay in the system that persists despite the new legislation. And there was a recommendation that I provide further training and monitoring of police detachments in the area of receipt and handling of complaints.

I can advise the committee today that we're well underway in addressing both these issues as best we can with our limited jurisdiction — if I can put it in those terms.

Next, on page 3, is a summary of our workload since the introduction of the new legislation which came into force March 31. I'm not going to go through each and every one of these charts, but I think I'll go through and summarize some of the more important information.

We have opened, ending in September 30, 2013, over 4,041 files. They're broken down in five primary categories. Registered complaints, as you'll see, comprise about 50 percent of our workload.

The rest are ordered investigations, which are investigations based on information that we have or based on a request from a police agency. We have the ability to order an investigation.

Non-registered complaints are complaints from people come in that don't want to enter the formal system but have a concern. That's probably the best way to describe them.

Monitor complaints are those where we receive information involving police actions and a member of the public. We monitor these types of matters to see if they, in themselves, progress to a complaint.

We also overlook internal discipline, which are allegations involving police misconduct that don't involve a member of the public but are dealt with internally by police departments.

On page 4, if I can take you to that graph there. Basically, it's showing that we had a huge spike the first year, with the introduction of all these other types of complaints that we were requested to monitor. We have seen, primarily, a steady increase — at least around the 1,100 to 1,200 level, per year. We've done our best to provide what it may look like in the next few years, but I think at this time it's very difficult to be accurate in our prediction.

One aspect of our work I think is really important is the admissibility determination. That was something new in the act. I call this the front end of the police complaint process. This gatekeeping function is crucial to ensure the proper management of public and police resources.

What we have is an enhanced admissibility screening. We have made approximately 47 percent of registered complaints we received admissible. This has translated in a substantial decrease in the number of complaints forwarded to the professional standards section of a police department for informal resolution or formal investigation as compared to past years. On average, it takes us approximately 13 days to perform this assessment.
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Now, when I say 47 percent of all complaints received are made admissible, comparatively, that's low in Canada. My colleagues in Ontario, who oversee 28,000 police officers — we oversee about 2,800 — experience about 52 percent. I don't know why there's a difference. It's obviously statistically important. I believe that we put more effort on the front end. We really discern…. We spend time gathering more information, and we deal with each case on a case-by-case basis.

We are low. I think we can be arguably said to be quite frugal in our exercise of discretion, but I think we're doing a good job in that area. Between March 31, 2010, and September 30, 2013, out of the 240 registered complaints we received, 962 were deemed admissible.

Now, if I could take you two pages over, to page 6 of my formal submission, and down to the chart at the bottom. I think the pie chart at the top is a little more difficult to envision.

We start off now with 47 percent of complaints that are made admissible. What happens to this 47 percent? As you go through each one of these years, if you look cumulatively, another 13 percent of those are discontinued; 1 percent are reviewed and closed; approximately 18 percent are either informally resolved or mediated; 8 percent are withdrawn — which means that if you add that up, a further 50 percent of those that are admissible are taken out of the track, through those methods. Now we are dealing with about one in four or one in five complaints that are made actually having to be investigated. Under the previous legislation, all complaints had to be investigated.

Anecdotally — and dealing with, for example, Vancouver — when my appointment first began, the average investigation load for an investigator in professional standards was about 25 files. Now they're done to around seven or eight, which I think is quite manageable. We're seeing that in the exemplary investigations that they're conducting.

Now, one line that I want to go across, though, and probably expand on further, is the informally resolved section, which is third down on the chart.

Not contained on the chart is that when I first began, there were about 55 allegations that were informally resolved. After I began — you'll hear in a moment my view on informal resolution — in 2010-2011, I started an initiative. I think that informal resolution is really the way to deal with less serious complaints in this process. I think it's so much better for the complainant as well as the officer engaged.

In 2010-2011 that doubled to 114 allegations; in '11-12, 164 allegations; '12-13, 170 allegations. I started to see, at this point, a bit of plateauing.

What I did this past year is I hired someone specifically as an alternative dispute resolution coordinator to focus full-time on informal resolution and mediation. In the six months up to September 30, we've already had 128 allegations resolved. We're on track to 225 to 250, which would be a substantial increase of about 40 percent.

It's my hope at this point in time that 30 percent of those complaints made admissible will now be resolved through informal resolution.

That is a good segue to page 7 of my formal submissions. I've identified alternative dispute resolution as a legacy project. By hiring this year and creating the position of an alternative dispute resolution coordinator, I've cemented, in the operations of the OPCC, informal resolution and the ADR.

The criteria set out there — it's obviously for less serious matters and for matters that are not complex and matters in which we assess that individuals are able to work on their own. For informal resolution, they're able to go through the process by themselves or with a support person. We provide both of those.

Our experience has shown that there are a large number of police complaints that are better suited for alternative dispute resolution than undergoing an extensive investigation and having a third party deliver a decision. By participating directly in the solution to the dispute, the majority of complainants and members come away from the process with a more meaningful and positive level of satisfaction.

A meaningful resolution of a complaint through alternative dispute resolution promotes lasting change amongst the parties and restores public confidence in policing, one relationship at a time.

I have also engaged in a partnership with the Neutral Zone, an organization specializing in conflict resolution. We have in place a training program for police, in which we've just completed the fifth training session. We try to offer these daily seminars three times a year.

We have also completed a roll-call video — a video that hopefully will be seen by all police in the province, in conjunction with the Vancouver police training section, the Vancouver Police Union and the Delta police department. This video is really introducing members to alternative dispute resolution.

We've reached, I think, the 30 percent mark. That was the goal that I had hoped for by the end of my appointment. I've now increased our goal to 50 percent. I'd like to see 50 percent of all admissible complaints resolved through alternative dispute resolution.

On page 8 in the bottom chart, again, you'll see the allegations resolved by fiscal year. We have reached 31.1 percent. That's another way to look at the numbers.

Another aspect that I'd like to mention about the work that we do is we are also engaged in a memorandum of understanding with the RCMP. During the development of the IIO we had engaged in an MOU with municipal
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police agencies and the RCMP to be a gap measure of review while the IIO became operational.

We are in the process of negotiating a new MOU with the RCMP in hopes of being able to provide oversight in cases which fall outside the jurisdiction of the IIO. As I said earlier, the jurisdiction of the IIO is limited to those cases involving serious harm or death. I can advise you that in providing this important service, we will not be seeking additional funding from the committee. It's something that I feel is an obligation of this particular office.

In terms of the makeup of our office, an ongoing project has been to improve and develop a strong civilian presence in our office. We are just now reaping the benefits of a very intensive in-house training program which has now turned into more of a mentoring program and which has brought a number of people with civilian backgrounds on board to work within our organization. I'm pleased to advise the committee that currently, of staff that are engaged in decision-making positions, civilians occupy approximately 50 percent of that staffing, which I think is probably a good balance in terms of skill set and civilianization.

Page 10 now, perhaps drilling down a little further, is more information in relation to my request for dedicated funding. As I alluded to earlier, we have a gatekeeping function in relation to three avenues of adjudicated review. As you will look and see, currently our funding stands at $300,000. The last three fiscal years have all been in excess of the $300,000 that was provided in the fiscal year 2011 and '12 and fiscal year 2012 and '13. That's what we're estimating.

The first year at $351,000 — I should advise the committee that my funding at that time was only $100,000. We did have to go to the Treasury Board and contingency funding in a very small amount. I think it was — I'm guessing now — less than $20,000.

I want to provide, probably, a deeper explanation about what constitutes these adjudicative reviews. There are three types of adjudicative reviews.

The first type is really what's called an appointment of a retired judge. Once a file has been investigated and goes through the process, a discipline authority, usually a chief constable or their designate, will make a determination whether or not, based on the evidence received through the investigation, the allegations as stipulated in the complaint are substantiated or unsubstantiated.

Where they are unsubstantiated and I disagree with the finding of the discipline authority, I can appoint a judge to review the entirety of the evidence gathered. In terms of my discretion exercised in this area, since the act came into place, I have referred 17 files for section 117 reviews or I have appointed retired judges to review these matters.

In 14 of those instances, the adjudicator has agreed with my view and found that they should have been substantiated and moved to the disciplinary process. In two matters they disagreed with my view and confirmed that of the discipline authority. However, one of those two matters is currently under judicial review.

If I can give you an average, approximately 87 percent of the time, if you don't count the one currently under judicial review, a reviewing judge has agreed with the view of our office.

The second area is a review on the records. That's after a discipline proceeding has occurred. Discipline proceedings occur when a discipline authority has determined that a matter appears to be substantiated and then runs a hearing on the evidence and determines that the allegations of misconduct or the complaint are substantiated.

I may, after reviewing that particular proceeding, order a review on the record. Normally, it comes as a request from a member. It has occurred on four occasions. Three of the times, though, have been at the request of the member. One of those times has been after I've reviewed a matter and taken the position that the discipline authority was correct and asked for it to be reviewed.

The last area of adjudicative review is public hearings. This remains open to a commissioner if he or she believes that, after a review of a matter, a public hearing is required in the public interest. Public hearings are conducted by retired judges, are open to the public, and evidence is presented under oath. All upcoming dates for public hearings are published.

Since April 2010 I've called eight public hearings. Two hearings involved incidents which occurred under the current legislation, but six of those public hearings did not have the benefit of contemporaneous oversight or were what I call transitional files.

Under our current legislation, we're able to monitor investigations and we're able to recommend investigative steps. We really have a lot more control over the investigative process. Six of these public hearings did not have that benefit of the contemporaneous oversight because they were under the previous legislation. Three of these hearings were mandatory — and I've alluded to that earlier — because of the proposed discipline, and five of them were initiated by myself.

I have been, arguably, frugal in my exercise of discretion in remitting complaints to adjudication. Since the amendments to the Police Act, I have disagreed with the determination of discipline authorities approximately 2 percent of the time. I hasten to add that when you look at the public hearings, the determinations at the end, I enjoy an 86 percent confirmation rate in terms of the outcomes of these public hearings.

The Auditor General, in his report to the special committee, found that I promote thorough and competent investigations of police complaints by my exercise of discretion pursuant to the Police Act. This included my power…. They reviewed the instances in which I exer-
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cised my discretion to remit, as a gatekeeper, matters to any one of these three avenues of adjudicative review.

There have also been a number of judicial reviews, which I have described to previous committees as growing pains associated with new legislation. To date there have been ten judicial reviews, six initiated by police unions and four initiated by my office.

The number of judicial reviews has drastically slowed down. In the early days of the first two years of the legislation there were a number of them in which we sought adjudicated guidance and legal guidance as to the interpretation of the act.

Finally, the chart that you see before you is the expenditures that I've provided each quarter of this year, which amount to, so far, $164,509. The projected costs are between $402,000 and $408,000.

I say "projected costs" because the difficulty of predicting adjudicative costs is immense in our work. For example, we could have a public hearing that is scheduled to commence in January of this year, and then it could be adjourned to the next fiscal year. That public hearing could be like 30 days, and our estimated costs may be as high as $70,000 or $80,000. The unpredictability would be moved to the next year's budget.

We find that from time to time it's really hard for us to predict. However, we have demonstrated a need in the last three years, in excess of the $300,000, of approximately anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000.

Page 12 of my materials is data collected from British Columbia municipalities. I show this as part of the landscape of what we operate in.

As an administrator of these adjudicative avenues, I have a budget currently of $300,000 in dedicated funding. I then decided to look on the website and got information from other municipalities on how they fund their legal expenses, for the municipalities combined, and focusing particularly on Vancouver and Victoria police departments.

If you look at the last three years, you will note that the expenditures by the Vancouver police department and the Victoria police department at times are double, if not triple, the associated funding we have to fund the adjudicative avenues. I think it's fair to say that a significant proportion of this type of legal budget is dedicated to the Police Act and the associated costs of administering the Police Act, including some of the adjudicative avenues.

D. Ashton (Chair): Stan, can I interrupt for just a sec? We're going into the question period. I don't mind, but we've allotted an hour, so I'll just give you a bit of a heads-up. As we cut into it, it will shorten the questions up, so just a heads-up.

S. Lowe: There's not a lot of science to this. I just want to give you kind of the lay of the land as to what municipalities afforded police agencies that we have oversight over in terms of their legal budgets. As you can see, comparatively they significantly exceed the amount that we have for adjudications.

I hasten to add, also, that police unions have millions of dollars to expend in these particular areas.

If I can take you to page 14, it provides you with a statement of our operations for the current fiscal year and the previous year. As you'll see, it shows our actuals, currently, for the previous year and then our current budget that we have so far.

Page 15 is a proposed budget and what it would look like if you were inclined to support this office, as you have done so well in the past, in terms of funding.

Finally — and I said I'd wrap it up fairly quickly — I want to take you to page 18. What it does is kind of breaks down the amount of discretionary spending that we have in our operations.

We have one sole proprietary purpose, and that's to provide oversight of municipal police in British Columbia. These are oversight costs. We don't have a wide variety of programs that we can cut or manipulate in terms of discretionary costs.

If you look at what I would say are our fixed costs, you see our salary and benefits at 57 percent. Our professional services are at 4 percent. Our adjudication and legal have averaged out at 12 percent, and then the amortization and the systems, utilities and fixed operating costs constitute 6 percent more.

Our shared services, which is really a bare-bones operation, are 7 percent of our budget. Our space, which is a fixed cost, is 10 percent.

Our travel is 2 percent. Perhaps there is some discretionary spending in that area, but I must tell you that part of our restructuring was, really, closing down the Vancouver office, which saved us a tremendous amount of money.

Travel is really important in terms of going and meeting with stakeholders. Our travel budget hasn't changed over the last four years since I've been appointed. It's a modest travel budget of approximately $10,000.

The other operating expenses that, it's fair to say, to some extent are discretionary are really 2 percent of our budget. We are a bare-bones operation. You can see how our operation is broken down in terms of fixed costs.

Other than that, I think my time is up. I'm more than happy to answer questions from members of this committee.

D. Ashton (Chair): Thank you, Stan, for the presentation. I greatly appreciate it.
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E. Foster: Thanks for the presentation. Are you allotted a car? As a commissioner, do you get a car allowance or a car?

S. Lowe: I think it's about $600 a month. That's part of my compensation package.

S. Forrester: Right. I think it's actually under STOB 50, but I'd have to check on that. I apologize.

S. Hamilton: Thank you for the presentation. I'm curious, and maybe you can explain something for me.

The Delta police chief, for example, often conducts reviews of accused misconduct for other police forces. When he does that, what's your role in that matter? Is this before it gets to you? He's very often called upon to do that, to participate in that role.

S. Lowe: I think we all have a number. What happens is that in certain circumstances, a police chief may be asked by another police chief to become an external investigator. That could be for a number of reasons.

One of the reasons may be that, from the perspective of public confidence, it's always good to have an external investigator and sometimes an external DA. In some instances it may be ordered as a result of conduct of members and viewpoints that have been expressed during the course of matters that create a bias or an apprehension of a bias.

So we have a number of…. We can actually give you the actual numbers of externals, but that's one of our oversight powers that we can exercise.

In some instances it's a matter where it's really public confidence. Police chiefs have asked us on numerous occasions in the past: "Can you please send this out to another external department to investigate?"

S. Hamilton: Okay. So you do play a role in that process. It's not just one police force dealing with another one. You're engaged.

S. Lowe: No. When they decide, we look at the investigation. What we'll do is…. Whoever does the investigation, we provide contemporaneous oversight of that investigation in terms of working with the investigator, receiving evidence as it's brought in, providing a recommendation as to investigative steps.

Once a final investigation report is done — depending on whether there's an external DA or not, which is usually the chief constable — they decide whether, in their view, the complaint has been made out or substantiated. It's then when we provide another oversight function in which we say: "Okay, do we agree or not?"

Through that process, we can reject reports by saying it's a poor investigation. We can order a new investigation. We can send it off to another person.

Having said that, there's one category of investigations that I haven't raised that does involve an external police agency. Whenever the IIO gets involved in serious harm or death cases, we're usually involved to look at it for municipal police departments from a professional standpoint.

The act mandates that there must be an external professional misconduct investigation also. So whenever the IIO is engaged in a matter involving a municipal police department, you can be sure that we're also engaged on that.

Having said that, there is another category, without becoming too technical, called "reportable injuries." When a person is required to go to a hospital and be seen by a physician, we can also order an investigation into that matter. We can also order it, making it external. So there are some significant oversight powers.

The process works on the fact that part of the process is that every department will do their own to do external investigations. It's built right into the act.

S. Hamilton: If I may, turning to page 6. Maybe you can help me understand something here as well. The pie chart — I'm a little bit confused. You have 49 percent of the cases not substantiated. Of the 11 percent that are substantiated, do those not, then, roll up into a different category — either withdrawn, mediated, informally resolved or reviewed and closed?

S. Lowe: No, and that's why I avoid going to the pie chart, because it's confusing. What I can do is start with this: 47 percent of the cases are made admissible. Now let's just take that sample of cases and say: "How are these 47 percent broken down?" We go back to the 100 percent marker.

This is how it's broken down. So 49 percent of those are unsubstantiated; the informally resolved — this is
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17 percent on average over the three years, but this year we're up to 30 percent; 11 percent are substantiated; 13 percent are discontinued. It should add up to 100, if I could put it more simply.

With those 47 percent, now we create that as a sample of, let's say, 450 files that are made admissible that year. This is how they're broken down during the course of that year — our statistics.

S. Lowe: It's better on the chart. I have to tell you that the difficulty, really, is how they are concluded over a year. It's difficult to track these because some of them go longer than a year period. All we can produce is that this is how they're concluded in a year; these are what we've seen in a year.

We're working on — because it's again a matter of resources and time — being able to go back anecdotally and track a set time period, the exact cases and ensuring that we've a time period to see that they've all come to conclusion, and being able to provide something for that sample — if you know what I mean. It's difficult to speak to process with these statistics. I agree with you.

S. Hamilton: Finally, just with regard to the $100,000 as it relates to the third level of adjudication. This, essentially, relates to the same funding that you've had to go to Treasury Board in the past and receive?

S. Lowe: Yes. The first year I think I received…. You may have that, Shelley. It was a modest sum of about $17,000. Then I was able to convince the committee the second year to increase it to $300,000. But I was able to, within my own office, deal with over $100,000 in overage.

I've always kept a salary envelope. I've been slow on rehiring when we've had vacancies, knowing this has been a continual problem. In my view, I needed to demonstrate a few years so that the committee could have a feel for what the average cost would be to administer the system.

I come to you now, after having three years under our belt, saying: "Look. It looks like it's somewhere more approaching $100,000."

I think what's most important is it's funding that I view as more administrative. Once we have everyone engaged, we just get the bills. Fortuitously, many of the people engaged in this system work at a reduced rate. For example, a public hearing can take anywhere from three days to 30 days. It depends on the issues, the amount of members and counsel.

One thing I've noticed is that the system has, unfortunately, taken a turn towards becoming more legalized, legalistic.

S. Lowe: You're right. It's more judicious. It has moved from an area…. For example, when we do oversighted disciplinary proceedings, we really are on the outside. We really don't have a lot of power. It's run within that system.

We're now seeing, consistently, counsel showing up for members and discipline authorities having to hire counsel. It's run more legalistically. It's only at the end of those proceedings that we really have any say. We can look and determine whether or not it should go to adjudicative review. If it goes to a public hearing, our experience has been that in a majority of those cases, they've been fairly efficient and fast.

But we've had one recently in Victoria that caught the ire of the media and which took a very long time. We expended a significant sum, probably close to $100,000 of that fund, for one hearing. So it's unpredictable in cost.

I work hard on pressuring public hearing counsel, who is not my counsel — I can't instruct them; they're public hearing counsel — to try to get these things done quickly and economically. But because they've become legalized, that's the unpredictability of the costs.

G. Holman: Thanks for your presentation and the work that you do. I was looking at the budget versus actual for 2012-13, on page 14. Looking at "Professional services" seems to substantiate your statement that you need…. The $400,000 in professional services is in that adjudicative review area.

But you underspent the budget by $200,000, approximately, in that fiscal year, if I'm reading that right. I'm wondering about that and what your sort of projection is in terms of actual for the current budget year.

S. Lowe: Yes, you have to bear in mind that I did underspend, but I had the benefit last year of an additional $200,000 in adjudicative review–dedicated funding. So I had $300,000 that offset that.

In terms of my budget itself…. I'm not sure if that's right. We’re pretty close, that year. If we work the vote appropriation — $2.9 million. Yes, the salary. You'll see that STOB that says "Salaries." So $1.614 million was the budgeted, and the actual was $1.476 million. Again, that's a year where I delayed hiring in a number of areas, in vacancies, and created that overage to offset the increase in adjudicative costs.

I think that fiscally, it was a pretty…. I was trying to be prudent fiscally, but in hindsight, I think it also created a tremendous strain on my staff. Then it's a vicious cycle. It manifested itself with people going to other places of employment because of not only the workload but the acrimonious atmosphere.

So what I've done this past year is hired up all those vacancies in order to reduce the number of files per analyst. We have analysts that are assigned to each one of these investigations. As I spoke earlier, investigators may
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have eight files per investigator. Our analysts are averaging 25 to 30 files.

If I can explain that to you. That's 25 to 30 investigations that are individual stories. Sometimes it's hard to follow five or six stories. Could you imagine over the course of the year following 30 stories and remembering what the evidence is? Unfortunately, it becomes quite a redundant task. You're always having to make copious notes as to where you left off in your review, what needed to be done. And you also need to memorize or reacquaint yourself with the fact pattern, because some of them run into each other. So it's very difficult work.

It's hard to find people that are engaged enough to do that work, to the degree that they're doing professional work that you're very pleased with. I'm very fortunate. If I may pause for a moment to say that I have an incredible staff, those that have been around me and have supported me through the past two years with this introduction of new implementation. They're very hard-working individuals, but I can see the strain.

I think that by hiring up, we're now starting to get the benefit of less workload.

G. Holman: So for the year to date are you running, more or less, along your budgeted lines? How do you anticipate actual versus budgeted for the current year?

S. Lowe: On 15, the last I saw it…. This is a different way it's portrayed. We're pretty close. I have, because of earlier this year, the salary shortfall. That's why I said my request is for next year. I can actually cover the $102,000, estimated, over the $300,000 this year by virtue of my current delay in hiring. I'm good for this year. I'm seeing myself, at the end of the day, coming in…. My last estimate for a free balance was around $20,000, so I will come under, I hope.

G. Holman: One quick question about the complaints and approximately 50 percent being ruled inadmissible. Is it the Auditor General…? Who oversees your office?

G. Holman: No, but the Auditor General, you're saying, has indicated that he feels that you're conducting these reviews appropriately and diligently. I guess that is my question. Who oversees, except for periodic reviews by the AG, the 50 percent of complaints that get ruled as inadmissible?

S. Lowe: We, in our own office, have an auditing system in which we will individually — myself and the deputy — keep weekly and monthly statistics. If we see an anomaly…. They're usually around the 50 percent mark around the country. I know where you're going. It is concerning, because this year it's at 42 percent for this fiscal year so far. We will pull randomly a number of files and make sure that the determinations are appropriate.

What we also have done is we've decided to make the admissibility function the function of one person. So we have a consistent goalpost set for the exercise in discretion. There's one backup person for succession planning, for holidays and that, but the one person does all our admissibility, and that person reports to a manager who reviews his work. All the admissibility determinations are passed through a senior manager. Then, as I said, I and the deputy will pull from time to time, when we see an anomaly, some random files and conduct an audit to make sure they're done right.

Effectively, we understand that by ruling a matter inadmissible, it forecloses the matter entirely for a complainant. The only avenue of resort they have is judicial review on our exercise of discretion. They have to go to the courts and say: "The Police Complaint Commissioner did not exercise his discretion appropriately, and this is why."

When you talk about the Auditor General, part of his audit was coming into our offices and having staff in for about six weeks reviewing all the files. When they looked at my exercise of discretion, they were looking at files in which I utilized each of the avenues of adjudicative review, where I ordered an external investigation or an external DA, and then they looked at the quality of the investigations.

This harkens back to a concern that came out of the Frank Paul commission that was undertaken, in which this office came under scrutiny. In the Frank Paul commission of inquiry, the recordkeeping of this office was atrocious. In speaking with some of the staff at the Auditor General's, they do come across our reasons, and in many cases they call them a bit of war and peace. They're very detailed. Our decisions are set out, very detailed. Our rationales are set out, and our recordkeeping is immaculate.

I'm proud to say that we are, basically, 100 percent electronic now. We don't have a paper flow. We do everything electronically, which can also be poor when you have a power outage, like last night.

D. Ashton (Chair): Could I get a motion to go in camera, please? Moved, seconded. Perfect.
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D. Ashton (Chair): Is there anything else in the public session that we need to address?

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
Chamber debates are broadcast on television and webcast on the Internet.
Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.

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
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd
Committee Staff:	Byron Plant (Committee Research Analyst)

Witnesses:	Kim Carter (Ombudsperson)
	Elizabeth Denham (Information and Privacy Commissioner)
	Jay Fedorak (Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner)
	Shelley Forrester (Office of the Ombudsperson)
	John Greschner (Deputy Representative for Children and Youth)
	Stan Lowe (Police Complaint Commissioner)
	Tanis McNally-Dawes (Office of the Representative for Children and Youth)
	Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond (Representative for Children and Youth)
	Rollie Woods (Deputy Police Complaint Commissioner)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

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REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

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