Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 29 — Thursday, April 10, 2014 (HTML)

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

1. There not yet being a Chair elected to serve the Committee, the meeting was called to order at 8:45 a.m. by the Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees.

2. Resolved, that Dan Ashton, MLA, be elected Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. (Eric Foster, MLA)

3. Resolved, that Mike Farnworth, MLA, be elected Deputy Chair of Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. (Mable Elmore, MLA)

4. The Committee reviewed correspondence received from Elections BC dated March 20, 2014 and March 27, 2014.

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

6. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to consider the requests for supplementary funding from Elections BC. (Jackie Tegart, MLA)

9. Resolved, that the Committee recommend that Elections BC be granted access to contingency funding in the amount of $150,000 for fiscal year 2014/15 in order to defray the expenditures to prepare for the expansion mandate as a result of the anticipated passage of Bill 20, the Local Elections Campaign Funding Act, which was introduced in the Legislative Assembly on March 26, 2014; and further, that the Chair advise the Minister of Finance, as Chair of Treasury Board, of the recommendation of the Committee. (Jackie Tegart, 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
Election of Chair and Deputy Chair	675
Correspondence from Elections B.C.	675
K. Archer
N. Western

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Good morning, Members. As this is the first meeting of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services for the second session of the 40th parliament and there has not yet been a Chair elected to serve the committee, I would like to begin with that item and open the call for nominations.

Are there any further nominations? Any further nominations? Any further nominations?

D. Ashton (Chair): Good morning and thank you very much again. Last year was a very good experience for me, a great learning curve. I haven't worked with such a nice group of people, from both sides. It was a very enjoyable time, and I think we were good at bringing a lot of recommendations unanimously forward, and that made a big difference. So again, thank you, and I look forward to working with each and every one of you again this year.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): It would be the same, a call for nominations.

Are there any other nominations for vice-Chair, for the first time? For the second time for vice-Chair, any other nominations? And for the third and final time, any other nominations for vice-Chair?

Next on our list. This morning we have some nice folks from Elections British Columbia — Dr. Keith Archer and Nola Western. And the gentleman in the back is….

Dr. Archer, thank you very much for your patience in waiting for us to convene. The floor is yours, sir.

K. Archer: Well, Mr. Chair, Mr. Vice-Chair and members of the committee, thank you for convening this morning to consider my request of $150,000 from the 2014-15 contingencies vote. The funding will assist Elections B.C.'s continuing preparations for potential new responsibilities for local elections campaign financing.

I'm joined at the table this morning by Nola Western, the deputy chief electoral officer for funding and disclosure and in the gallery by Anton Boegman, the deputy chief electoral officer for electoral operations.

I last met this committee on December 5 to present the budget proposal for my office for the 2014-15 fiscal year. At that time I presented what was described as a hold-the-line budget for the ongoing responsibilities of Elections B.C. However, I did add a caveat at the time. I noted that the government had issued a white paper on local government elections reform, and the white paper anticipated an expanded mandate for Elections B.C. in which my office would be responsible for administering new requirements for local elections campaign financing and third-party advertising.

In anticipation of these new responsibilities, I requested, and this committee recommended, an additional $79,000 in operating funds and $70,000 in capital funds for the remainder of the 2013-14 fiscal year. This funding was used to undertake work necessary to prepare for the potential new responsibilities so that we could be able to deliver an expanded mandate for the November 2014 general local elections.

With the start of a new fiscal year, 2014-15, I wrote to the Chair of the committee with a bridging funding request for the period of April and May of 2014. We need
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to continue our activity in preparing for this potential new mandate.

The request I've put before you this morning is for $75,000 in operating funds and $75,000 in capital funds for a total of $150,000 for the two-month period of April and May 2014. Should the mandate of my office be expanded to include local elections campaign financing, then I'll communicate with this committee at that time to confirm the funding required for the full fiscal year.

The funding that I'm requesting for April and May 2014 is almost entirely for staffing to complete a number of key tasks. The first of these is stakeholder education. The proposed legislation for local elections requires new financial disclosure obligations for candidates, for electoral organizations and for third-party sponsors. It's necessary to develop guides, other learning tools and instructional materials so that those involved in local election campaigning know the rules, understand what's necessary for compliance and are able to comply.

Recognizing that there are over 1,600 seats to be filled in local elections in B.C. and an expectation of over 3,000 candidates for office, the scope of this stakeholder education component of our potential new mandate becomes apparent. We must continue to work now to make the materials available in a timely manner.

A second task concerns the development of the reporting tools — the disclosure forms and instructions on how to collect the information required and completing them. The proposed legislation will require candidates, electoral organizations and third-party sponsors to report on their income and expenditures.

Elections B.C. has two decades of experience at the provincial level in ensuring that all election participants report within a consistent disclosure environment. Our intention is to bring that same level of disclosure consistency to local elections campaign financing. We must dedicate time now to the development of these materials so that those involved in campaigning are aware of the disclosure requirements and can adjust their internal processes accordingly.

Thirdly, it's necessary to prepare our information technology systems to capture this new disclosure information, once submitted, and to make it available to the public. This is addressed through our capital budget request. It's necessary that we now continue on two key infrastructure projects begun under the previously approved 2013-14 capital budget.

The first is to expand the design of our financial reporting and political contribution system, FRPC, used presently for provincial elections, to the local government environment. This system is accessed by the public when searching on provincial party candidate and third-party sponsor financial disclosures.

The second is an upgrade to our core election information system, or EIS, which we use to capture information about provincial electoral event participants. Updates are required to enable the system to also capture local election participants.

Once again, in each of these instances the expenditures during this two-month bridging period are required to prepare for a successful transition to a more standard reporting framework administered by Elections B.C. In some the funding requirement is $75,000 in operating and $75,000 in capital for April and May, for our potential new mandate.

With that description of our funding request, I'm pleased, Mr. Chair, to turn the floor back to you, and together with Nola Western, we'll try our best to respond to the comments and questions of the committee.

M. Hunt: I'm rolling over to your second letter from March 27 in my mind as I'm looking at this. If I were making the presentation, I would have made your presentation exactly in the reverse of the way that you had done it.

I would have said: "For the last two decades you've been doing this for the province. Now we have the experience, we have the infrastructure, we have all this. Now we have to expand this to handle another order of government and the volume." And certainly, there's a tremendous increase in the volume of candidates. But I would have said it almost the other way around.

So I’m having a little problem…. Again, I'm cheating. I'm going to the second letter, which is not part of what you just presented. But the numbers are sort of staggering to me. I'm sitting there going: "That big a number for what we basically are already doing?" Or at least that's my assumption of how this is rolling out.

Can you help me to understand the shifts in this and how I'm wrong in my thinking?

K. Archer: The order of the presentation was to walk through the two-month funding request and to talk about the new kinds of activities that we'll be involved in over the next two months, because up until now we have no responsibility for local government elections. We've developed a number of reporting systems that are currently in place for provincial electoral events, but it is not an insignificant change to redesign those systems for a set of local elections.

My presentation focused on the two-month funding request. Now, if your question is inviting me to talk about the full-year funding request, I would say that what we've done at this point is to put in front of the committee, so all sides of the House are aware, what anticipated funding requests will come in the event that the legislation is passed.

We've developed that funding request based upon the
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legislation as it's written. But I don't know if the legislation is going to pass, and I don't know if it's going to pass in the form in which it's being debated now or whether there will be changes. A defence of a full-year funding request becomes a bit hypothetical for us, whereas the two-month funding request is concrete.

These are the expenditures that we anticipate undertaking over the next two months to ensure that, in the event the legislation passes and there's a requirement for this kind of disclosure for November of 2014, we're in a position to deliver on that.

Can you help me to understand what you're referring to…. I hope I'm close to the ballpark to the words you used: "significant changes." You said that it's not an insignificant change that we're making here.

My naive mind is sitting there, saying that we would simply, you know, take relatively the forms that we have, and we're now changing that from provincial to local, that sort of thing. Can you give me an idea of the significance of the changes that are being made here?

N. Western: Keith's right. They are significant. The legislation at the provincial level and this bill are different. The details are different. The rules are different. What the candidates, electoral organization and third-party sponsors will have to report is different. So we can't use the same forms. We can't use the same guides. We can't use the same training materials for our staff or for the client. So everything has to be new.

We're just lucky that we have some experience, and we can build on that experience and use it, but basically, everything's new. The systems, like the electoral information system, don't have placeholders to add a new kind of candidate or a new kind of political party, which is essentially what electoral organizations are. So we have to build that into the system, and that's part of the capital requirements.

M. Elmore: Thanks for the update. Certainly for the next two months $150,000 sounds reasonable in terms of doing the preparatory groundwork. I think, certainly, the expansion is significant, moving from…. Currently Elections B.C. is responsible for administering 85 provincial seats to over 1,600 on the municipal level. Certainly, I can appreciate…. I know that there's a lot of work that will need to be done in terms of communicating that to the public candidates, parties and third-party sponsors. Certainly, it's significant.

In terms of this, for the request for the $150,000, have you initiated any work, or is this your budget to prepare for the next two months in terms of anticipating the bill going through?

K. Archer: When we came to this committee in December, we requested funding at that time to take us to the end of March, so we have begun to do this work, yes.

G. Holman: I just want to be clear in terms of the timing. You came in December, requesting…. Have we not already approved this? Sorry, a dumb question, but have we not already approved this for these couple of months in this calendar year?

K. Archer: The funding that was recommended by this committee in December and approved by the government was for the 2013-14 fiscal year. The approval ended on March 31. There may be some confusion because the amounts requested are so similar in those two time periods. It sounds like about $150,000. Then, it was $149,000 and $150,000 now. But that's coincidence.

They are two separate funding requests, and the month by month expenditures now, of course, are increasing, because we will need to increase our staffing as we go from the hypothetical situation of legislation being introduced to actually having a bill now that begins to provide a lot more clarity to what will need to be included in the various forms and guides and other instructional materials that we're developing.

G. Holman: I could understand on the operating side that now we're talking about an additional couple of months. On the capital side, though, have you not already…? You were talking about the materials you had to prepare, the forms, that kind of thing. Had you not already done that with the first capital request?

K. Archer: Again, some of the changes are changes to our information technology systems, and the work that was completed between December and the end of March is not all of the work that needs to be completed for us to have a system that's operating to the level that we require for November. So this is a continuation of the work that was commenced earlier, and we would expect that when we come back, in the event that the legislation is passed, for the full-year request, that there would be some continuing capital expenditures even beyond these two months. But this request is for the two-month capital expenditure.

Folks, thank you very much for coming this morning. Again, Dr. Archer, I apologize for the delay, but thank you. We're going to have a discussion in camera. So you'll hear by a letter from us, as the results of the conversation that will take place shortly.
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J. Tegart: I move that the committee recommend that Elections B.C. be granted access to contingency funding in the amount of $150,000 for fiscal year 2014-15 in order to defray expenditures to prepare for the expansion of mandate as a result of the anticipated passage of Bill 20, the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act, which was introduced in the Legislative Assembly on March 26, 2014.

Further, I move that the Chair advise the Minister of Finance, as Chair of Treasury Board, of the recommendation of the committee.

Is there any discussion on this? Did we want, on the record, discussion about the breakup? We were talking about the capital and a request for additional information.

M. Hunt: Speaking to the motion but not in changing it, I would ask in the future discussions that we have with the Chief Electoral Officer that two things be done. One is that we get greater detail on the total capital, both the contingencies that have happened in the past and what the expectation is in the future. Secondly, I'd also ask if we could get rough estimates of their concept of the four-year cycle, what their expenditures would look like across the four-year cycle of municipal elections.

D. Ashton (Chair): Okay. Is everybody okay with that as a recommendation? Any other discussion on it? I'll call the question.

Well, nice to see everybody again. Byron, Kate, Members — thank you very much. Hansard, nice to be back working with you.

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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:	Dr. Keith Archer (Chief Electoral Officer)
	M. Nola Western (Elections B.C.)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES