Local Elections Expense Limits — Issue No. 11 — Friday, February 6, 2015 (HTML)

Present: Jackie Tegart, MLA (Chair); Selina Robinson, MLA (Deputy Chair); Mike Bernier, MLA; Gary Holman, MLA; Marvin Hunt, MLA; Jenny Wai Ching Kwan, MLA; Linda Reimer, MLA; Sam Sullivan, MLA

• Heather Brazier, Executive Lead, Integrated Policy, Legislation and Operations Division

4. The Committee discussed preliminary consultation plans and meeting schedule for the upcoming months.

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.
The printed version remains the official version.

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
LOCAL ELECTIONS EXPENSE LIMITS


CONTENTS
Page
Briefing: Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development	151
H. Brazier
Phase 2 Planning and Consultations	158

J. Tegart (Chair): Welcome back. We’re the Special Committee on Local Elections Expense Limits. I hope everyone had a great holiday and a wonderful Christmas season. It seems like a long time ago.

I’m quite excited that we’re going into phase 2 of our work. Thank you very much to staff for the excellent first phase report and to all the committee members.

Our agenda today. The first thing on the agenda is the briefing on phase 2 of the committee’s work. We have Heather Brazier here from the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development.

Maybe what we’ll do first is go around the room so that everyone knows who’s here, and then we’ll move forward with Heather’s presentation.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I’m Selina Robinson. I’m the MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville and the vice-Chair of the committee.

L. Reimer: Linda Reimer, MLA for Port Moody–Coquitlam and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development.

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

H. Brazier: All right. Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to present again to the committee. It is exciting to be heading into phase 2.

Before I go through the presentation, I’d just like to, first of all, convey thanks on behalf of Minister Oakes for the committee’s work in phase 1. You made it very easy for us in the ministry to take the recommendations forward and to build on those recommendations with the expense limits legislation.

In terms of today’s presentation, I’ll start with a bit of a recap of some of the contextual pieces that, frankly, you’ll have heard before — some of things that will set the stage for the work that you’re doing in phase 2.

The second part of the presentation is about things to think about more deeply as you do move into phase 2. You’ll have some very rich data to draw on that we’ve not had from previous local elections. There are stakeholder views, obviously, that you will want to consider. There are also what I will call policy considerations that you’ll want to be thinking about as well.

Starting in with the recap. When the joint UBCM–provincial government task force was doing its work back in 2009-2010, they had identified a set of objectives related to campaign finance reform for local governments. When the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act was introduced in spring 2014, it dealt with four of those objectives: accountability, transparency, compliance and enforcement, education and advice. Obviously, that piece was in effect for the local elections in 2014.

Because those pieces were in effect, the reporting regime is much more robust now than it was previously. We’ve got standard information going to Elections B.C. So it’s all going to one body in one format, and it will all be publicly available.

The fifth objective was around accessibility. I think that equates quite well to the principles that you identified in phase 1 of your work, and that’s really about expense limits.

While staff in the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development are working on the legislation to implement expense limits, the limits themselves, the numbers or the amounts, will actually be set by regulation.

As you know, the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act covers the whole range of local government elections — not just mayor and council but a number of other bodies as well. There are also a couple of other small special purpose local government entities that are LECFA — local community commissions and the Sechelt Indian government district, for example. Spending in those elections is extremely low to nonexistent.

Just as a refresher, you’ll remember that there are a couple of different time frames in LECFA. The campaign
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period starts on January 1 of an election year. During that campaign period, spending is reported, but it’s not necessarily subject to limits.

In the election proceedings period, which is 46 days before general voting day, spending is reported, and the intention is that that’s when it will be subject to limits. It’s actually not legislated that way yet, but when LECFA was drafted, that was the framework that was embedded in the legislation.

It’s analogous to the provincial general election’s time periods, except, unfortunately, the terminology doesn’t align at all. The campaign period locally is essentially the same as the pre-campaign period provincially. Locally, the election proceedings period is the same as the campaign period provincially. Conceptually, they’re the same. The terminology is not in alignment, though.

G. Holman: A quick question. Is the 46 days…? I should know this, but is it specified in LECFA? Is that number in there?

H. Brazier: Yes, it is. It sounds like kind of a strange number, but it basically is the close of nominations. That’s why it’s 46 days. So from the close of nominations until general election day, limits will be in effect and a host of other rules around campaign finance as well.

To dig a little more deeply into the LECFA time frames, as I said, the campaign period starts on January 1 and runs until general voting day. It’s important to remember that value of things used during that period still qualifies as an election expense. Part of the reason for doing that is so that candidates can’t front-end load their election expenses — spend a bunch of money before the 46-day period starts — and not have that subject to expense limits.

If you were to pay for all of your signs before the election proceedings period, but then you use them in the election proceedings period, that still counts as an elections expense, and it will still count against your expense limit.

M. Hunt: For example, polling — let’s just use that as an example. You’re saying the person or the group would disclose that, but it’s not included in the expenses. I’m just making sure that I understand the act. I know that during public consultation, public consultation was asking us to go back to these earlier dates.

H. Brazier: I would actually have to check into polling specifically. That’s an interesting one, because when are you actually using the results of the polling? You’re using it in both the campaign period and the election proceedings period, I would think.

Your question points to a larger question, as well, about what is actually considered to be an election expense and what isn’t. We can provide the committee with some detailed information on that.

M. Bernier: If I can…. I don’t know if this is the best time to ask this one. I read through the presentation, and I didn’t see it covered off. How do we deal with, on these timelines, if there’s a by-election? I’m dealing with that one right here. I’ve got people who ran in the last municipal election and lost. Then there was a vacancy a month after the election, and those same people are running again now in the by-election. How would they…? I know it might not happen that regularly, but I can probably say that for every election, in between we know there are by-elections. Within that same calendar year, how would you allot for that now?

H. Brazier: My staff and I were actually just talking about the issue of by-elections yesterday, so that’s clearly something that we have to wrestle with in the legislation.

The intention right now is that expense limits won’t take effect until the 2018 local elections, so they won’t have any effect on by-elections before the 2018 local elections. That said, it doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with that question. We certainly do. It’s just that it won’t actually take effect until after the 2018 elections.

M. Bernier: Yeah, I was just looking at the situation I’m in. If this was 2018, it would make a heck of a mess if we didn’t have it figured out.

H. Brazier: And the time periods will actually be different for by-elections. For a by-election, it won’t necessarily be January 1 of the year in which the by-election takes place.

M. Bernier: I just wanted to flag that one. Pretend it is 2018 and these rules are in effect, in this situation that I have here in Dawson Creek, like I said, they were going to have the by-election almost right away, which means you could have almost been in the same calendar year. Then how would you have reported? If you ran in the election before and now you’re running again, do you have to report twice or not?

H. Brazier: Next up is a refresher on the expense limits model that’s been approved by government. As you know, for jurisdictions with a population under 10,000, the intention is that there will be a flat rate. That will be one of the amounts that the committee turns its minds
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to. What should that flat rate be for those jurisdictions less than 10,000? For communities over 10,000, there will be a per-capita formula. Again, what the numbers for the per-capita formula look like will be for the committee to deliberate on.

As you know, provincially, all electoral districts have the same limit, but for local elections, because of the diversity, it was felt that a one-size-fits-all approach just isn’t appropriate. You can’t really have the same limit for Hope and for Vancouver or Surrey.

The idea, again, behind this model is that it balances simplicity and flexibility. There will actually be somewhere around 65 percent of the jurisdictions within local elections that will have simple, easy-to-explain limits — that flat rate — and that won’t change from election to election. The larger jurisdictions will have limits that are scaled to population and that adjust automatically as the population changes.

G. Holman: Sorry, I had a question. You make a comment here that the rule for communities of less that 10,000 works well for third-party advertising. Could you explain that?

H. Brazier: Sure. The idea there is, again, that simplicity to it. So for third-party advertising in smaller jurisdictions, they will have the same flat rate as…. I shouldn’t say the same flat rate. They will have the same approach, with a flat rate, as candidates or folks running for office.

G. Holman: Okay, so it’s kind of the same reason. And for communities less than 10,000, for expense limits, there’s one flat rate, which means if the third-party limit is related to that somehow, there’s going to be one number for third-party advertising as well.

H. Brazier: This is just a graphical depiction of what the model means in terms of the number of municipalities and the population of B.C.’s municipalities. We have 103 municipalities under 10,000 population, based on the 2014 population estimates. All of those communities will have the flat-rate limits. That’s the blue slice of pie in the top graph.

Of course, most of our population lives in the larger communities, so they will be the folks whose jurisdictions are subject to the per-capita formula.

G. Holman: Another question. We are talking municipalities here, not local governments. So we’re not talking electoral areas at this point.

G. Holman: But would…? Well, virtually all electoral areas would be less than 10,000 and probably subject to the same limit as municipalities.

H. Brazier: Yes. If I go back to the previous slide, it’s actually a little clearer. It talks about a flat rate for jurisdictions. A jurisdiction would include a municipality or a regional district electoral area or a school board.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): This is very helpful, actually, just to get a sense of how many we’re actually likely to have to deal with.

M. Hunt: I agree with the questions being asked. I find shifting this to, suddenly, municipalities interesting because you haven’t got regional districts on there, so therefore you don’t have electoral areas on there, which are all smaller, which would distort this even more.

I wish, in a sense, that that had been included so that there’s a recognition of the order of magnitude of where the problem is. The problem is actually a very small portion of elected officials in the province of British Columbia. And I think, unfortunately, this makes it seem there’s more than it really is, because there are so many other offices that are…. Very small populations that they’re dealing with.

H. Brazier: And typically, with electoral area races or with school board races, spending is considerably less than it is for council and mayoral races. I do have another graph coming up that speaks somewhat more directly to that.

MLA Holman asked about third-party advertising. I think for my team in drafting the legislation, and perhaps also for the committee in doing your work, this might end up being the trickiest area.

The idea, of course, is that the limit for third parties will be proportional to a candidate’s limit in each jurisdiction and, as per the committee’s recommendations in phase 1, that there would be an overarching, cumulative limit.

It might be worth just going back and touching on why third-party advertising matters at all. In part, it’s to pre-
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vent candidates and parties from being drowned out. If you think about a deep-pocketed organization that might want to do a lot of advertising, it’s pretty easy to see how that organization could drown out an independent candidate running in a small jurisdiction.

It’s also meant to promote the integrity of the spending limit system. Again, it gives candidates and parties or electoral organizations an opportunity to have their message get out in the same way that third-party advertisers can as well.

Finally, it probably levels the playing field amongst third-party advertisers themselves. Organizations that are interested in doing advertising will have different abilities to do that. They’ll have different financial resources. If they’re all subject to a limit, then the less well-resourced third-party advertisers are able to get their message out on a level playing field with those who have deeper pockets.

Another consideration with third-party advertising is that there are Charter implications. Limiting third-party advertising is a limit on freedom of expression. There have been court cases in B.C. at the provincial level that have tested that. For example, in the provincial general elections there used to be a limit on third-party advertising that was actually included in the pre-campaign period, and that was not supported by the courts.

If we think about the analogy to local elections and to LECFA, what that means is that third-party advertising will only be limited during that elections proceedings period, not in that period going back to starting January 1 of the year of the election.

By having third-party limits proportional to candidate limits, there’s a logical connection to what candidates can spend. For those jurisdictions over 10,000, there’s also a connection to population, which is a reasonable proxy for what it might cost a third party to actually achieve a reasonable level of expression.

There are a number of approaches that I’m sure you’ll consider in your deliberations as to what that proportionality means. In the work that my team has been doing up to now we’ve typically thought about it as a percentage of a candidate’s limit, but you might want to think about a ratio or a fraction or any number of other ways.

G. Holman: Doesn’t it amount to the same thing? Isn’t a ratio and a fraction a percentage?

H. Brazier: And how that actually gets worded in the regulation will make a difference as well.

The overarching cumulative limit is another area that I think will end up being interesting and possibly a bit tricky as well. My staff have been talking to Elections B.C. to try to get a better understanding of how the provincial limits work — the limit per riding and the overall limit.

We’re trying to figure out how that translates into the local situation as well. You may want at some point to have Elections B.C. and/or the folks in the Ministry of Justice who are responsible for the provincial Election Act come and talk to you about how it works at the provincial level.

Of course, because third-party advertising limits are proportional to candidate limits, you’ve got some sequencing to think about as well. When you’re trying to establish candidate limits, which might be the easiest place to start, you may want to be thinking forward, as well, about what that looks like in terms of potential third-party limits.

This is just a refresher or a reference on what the provincial general election expense limits look like. You can see the pre-campaign period limits and the campaign period limits for candidates, parties and third-party advertisers. Of course, third-party advertising is notable because the limit only applies in the campaign period.

Then finally, a very important piece of contextual information, the principles that the committee identified as being foundational for expense limits when you conducted your phase 1 work.

With that, I’ll shift into phase 2 and some of the key pieces of information related to phase 2.

Numbers. You are going to have great data to work with, far better data than we’ve ever had to this point, and there’s going to be a lot of data. On Elections B.C.’s website they’ve already posted some of the stats from the 2014 local elections.

There were over 3,200 candidates. There were elector organizations operating in 18 municipalities and five school districts. There were actually about 14 elector organizations who endorsed candidates in municipal and board of education elections using the same name in both jurisdictions. For example, Vision Vancouver would have candidates in both the municipal race and the school board race.

There were 19 individuals registered as third-party sponsors and 135 as organizations. I don’t have a flavour from Elections B.C. what their view is on compliance and whether individuals and organizations who were engaged in third-party advertising did actually register.

M. Hunt: We’ve got a change of word usage here, and I’m really wondering why. That says “third-party sponsors,” which to me is completely different from third-party advertisers. Why the change of words?

H. Brazier: In fact, the terminology in the legislation is “third-party advertising sponsors,” just to make it more confusing.
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M. Hunt: Yeah, because to me, an advertiser would apply. You can be, in any way, on it. A sponsor tends to be positive. I don’t sponsor somebody that I want defeated.

M. Hunt: Yeah. So I just find it interesting that you shifted the use of the word. Okay, fair enough. If we had both of them in there….

H. Brazier: To your point, the advertising can be positive in tone or negative in tone, for or against.

There is one municipality that uses wards. My suggestion to the committee is: don’t worry about it. I think that’s something that my team and I will really have to sort through and figure out, on the basis of the recommendations that you make, how to translate that into the single jurisdiction that uses wards.

I also wanted to mention that one of the things you’ll find with the data is that there are a number of acclamations. Typically, there are somewhere between 250 to 300 acclamations. That makes a difference to how much people or elector organizations spend, because if there’s nobody running against candidate X, candidate X may feel that he or she doesn’t have to spend very much money, if any.

In terms of the process, as you know, all of this data on what candidates, elector organizations and third-party advertisers have spent is going to Elections B.C. Those disclosure reports are supposed to be submitted by February 13, but there is a late filing period which takes us to mid-March. The data from the February 13 filings will be available by February 27, and again, there will be a lot of it. It’s expected there will be over 3,000 statements, and those statements are not in a database of any kind.

Elections B.C. also is not the body that does data analysis. They look at it for compliance. They post it. They make it publicly available. But they are not the number crunchers.

There have been discussions between my staff and the Clerk’s office about the possibility of having B.C. Stats undertake the data analysis, which would enable the committee, I think, to be able to slice and dice the data in a number of different ways. You’d be getting an organization that’s expert in doing this kind of statistical analysis.

A couple of things to consider about the data. With the number of records, the number of pieces of data that will be available, the committee may want to consider having B.C. Stats do a sample rather than trying to do an analysis on the basis of every piece of data, every piece of spending in every jurisdiction.

A sample of council races, mayoral races might be just as valid and reliable as trying to do an analysis of every single piece of data. For the smaller types of races like parks board races, electoral area director races, the numbers will be fewer, so for those pieces you may actually be able to have an analysis done on all of the data points.

There was some discussion about the idea of looking at averages, and averages are a very interesting piece of data. They can also, as you know, be misleading from time to time. If there are outliers, that will skew the average. So if there are candidates whose spending is unusually high or unusually low, that has an effect on the average, and the average may not actually look like what anybody in that race spent.

Another concept to think about is the idea of contenders. MLA Holman, for example, is familiar with the candidate in greater Victoria who ran in 12 mayoral races in 2014. He wasn’t a credible candidate in any of those mayoral races and spent virtually nothing. Actually, the last I heard, he had not filed any of his disclosure statements, but that may well have been rectified.

Is he a legitimate contender? Should his spending be included in the analysis of the data? That’s a question for the committee to consider. One way to deal with that is to say that only candidates who come within a certain percentage of actually winning a seat would be included in the analysis.

In terms of elector organizations, they’re not required to break down their spending by candidate. So if there’s an elector organization filing a disclosure statement and they’ve endorsed ten candidates, they don’t show their spending broken down by those ten candidates. It’s a total.

Again for doing the analysis, you’ll want to consider whether to just say, “Okay, if they endorsed ten candidates, we’ll just divide what they spent by ten,” rather than trying to come up with some finer, potentially incorrect distinction as to what was spent. You may want to consider, as well, whether mayoral candidates would be considered differently from council candidates in terms of what you think EOs might be spending to support a mayoral candidate versus a council candidate.

The approach that my team has used in the past is simply just to divide by the number of candidates.

There are a number of other things that will affect the data that you see as well — for example, the size of the race. If there are a lot of candidates running for a particular office, that may mean that people spend more, because they sense there’s a lot of competition, and they want to get out ahead of their competition.

MLA Hunt mentioned the hot race. If there is a mayoral candidate, for example, who perceives that he or she is in a hot race, that there’s a contender nipping at their heels, again, they may be induced to spend more than they would if they didn’t think they had a good competition.

A number of the folks that you heard from in phase 1 also spoke to the incumbency advantage. Incumbents have name-brand recognition. They may not have to campaign as hard. They may not have to spend as much
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money to get their message out as candidates who are trying to break in. Is the incumbency advantage sufficiently important that you might want to try to get some analysis that looks at what incumbents spend versus what folks who are trying to become incumbents would spend?

One of the deficiencies with the data that you’ll have is that it won’t be amenable to trend analysis. That’s in part because the way in which the data has been reported is changing.

These forms look different from the forms that were used in the past. We believe that the quality of the data is probably much better this time around. The consistency will be better. Looking at what was spent in 2008 and 2011 compared to 2014 may not be statistically valid comparisons. It might give you an indication of what’s going on with spending — whether it’s generally going up or generally going down or pretty much staying the same — but there may not be a lot of really robust conclusions that you can draw from that.

Finally, the notion of sample size and balance. I spoke previously about doing some kind of representative sample, particularly for candidate and mayoral races where you’ve got a lot of data points. The B.C. Stats folks would be able to advise on what would constitute a statistically significant sample and how to appropriately balance it.

This is a graph which is one that was included in the briefing material my ministry provided for phase 1. At that time we kind of pointed to a few things that the graph says about what’s happening with spending. This time around I’m using it just as an illustration of the kind of analysis that you might want to get on spending.

This shows mayoral candidates, council candidates, electoral area directors and school trustees. This was done by ministry staff, and we’re not expert statisticians by any means, so our sample was drawn largely from local governments that posted their campaign finance disclosure statements on line. There’s an inherent bias because not every community did post statements on line. It also wasn’t regionally balanced, so you can probably tell from a glance that it may be overweighted in favour of Lower Mainland communities.

Again, going back to my earlier comment about spending by elector organizations, where there are candidates in a jurisdiction who were endorsed by elector organizations, we simply divided the EO spending by the number of candidates to arrive at a number.

In terms of stakeholder views, UBCM and the B.C. School Trustees Association obviously are key stakeholders. UBCM has expressed considerable interest in providing input into this phase of your work. I understand that the committee has already reached out to both the B.C. School Trustees Association and to UBCM to offer them an opportunity to provide input.

Other considerations about phase 2. I guess these are more of the policy things that you might want to think about.

First off, there are different ideas about where the problem is or what the problem is. You certainly heard a lot about that in phase 1. There were some folks who thought that problems only exist in large jurisdictions like Vancouver or Surrey — some of the other Lower Mainland communities. But I also remember a very compelling presentation from Sechelt that demonstrated that there can be very high spending, relatively speaking, in a smaller community as well.

One of the things is: what’s the overall objective? Is the committee looking at numbers that would, effectively, roll back or cap spending? If the numbers that come out of the process are relatively high and don’t actually reduce spending in some jurisdictions — and let’s use Vancouver as an obvious example — that may not resonate with the public. There’s clearly a component looking for expense limits that will actually bring down spending in some of those jurisdictions where there’s outlying spending, if I can put it that way.

High limits might also have kind of an odd influence on behaviour by candidates, in that they may perceive — and Minister Oakes heard this during some of her consultations — that they now have to spend up to that limit. So the pressure is on to spend more than they might. It’s hard to tell what will happen, given human nature and human behaviour.

We can say, though, based on the experience with Ontario, there is no evidence to support the contention that people will spend up to the limit. Expense limits have been in effect in Ontario, and spending in jurisdictions where previously it was low, stayed low. There hasn’t been a creeping up to the limit.

On the other hand, if limits are set fairly low — in other words, they significantly roll back spending — that might create some incentives for people to want to work around the rules. For example, people might want to run in more than one jurisdiction in order to get more spending room, although we’re hoping to come up with a scheme that puts a stop to that and doesn’t enable that to happen.

They may try to do things that are against the spirit of the expense limits, even if they’re staying within the technical limit. And low limits might be more likely to be overspent, which has some compliance and enforcement implications as well.

I also wanted to just touch on the shoulder concept, that transition point from communities in size of 10,000 and below, which have the flat rate, to those above 10,000, where the per-capita formula starts to kick in. Presumably, that transition should be somewhat gradual. For example, if there was a community, like View Royal, that has just under 10,000 and a community, like Coldstream, that has just over 10,000 people, they shouldn’t have radically different spending limits. There should be some resemblance between those limits. So that transition point where it moves from the flat rate to the per-capita formu-
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la is important to think about in terms of not wanting to take a big jump upwards.

This is another sample slide that speaks to how you might create the limits and the numbers. This is an old slide. It’s actually based on data from the 2008 election, so please don’t think that the dots on here really bear any resemblance to the current reality. Because it’s an old graph, it also doesn’t show a straight line or a flat line at 10,000 population, which in the model that you’re working with would be the case.

What I really wanted to show is the bends in the line. If you’re thinking about a per capita formula for communities above 10,000, one number, like 30 cents per capita, may not make sense, given the diversity and the range of population sizes in B.C.

If you were to draw one line for communities from 10,000 and above, if you’re considering how that affects the communities at the lower end of the population spectrum and then the Vancouvers and the Surreys at the high end of the spectrum, it’s going to be difficult to get the line to slope in a way that makes sense for the majority of communities.

But you can actually do something like saying that from 10,000 to 50,000 it’s A cents per capita. From 50,000 to 100,000 it’s B cents per capita, and so on and so forth. That’s how you get the bends in the line which would enable you to have expense limit numbers that make greater sense for a range of communities.

G. Holman: Just to go back to that previous slide. I’m sorry if I missed it. The last bullet there, under the model considerations and opportunities. The possibility of more than one…. Oh, okay.

H. Brazier: The last thing I wanted to note on this slide is just the slope of the line regardless of the bends. So you can play with all kinds of different per-capita numbers, and that line C can go steeper in slope or more gradual in slope, depending on what the committee thinks is appropriate for where the line should be. Fun with numbers.

Then the final piece is just some of the relationships between the limits for different offices. In the ministry our thinking has been that because the data shows mayors spend more than council candidates, mayors should have higher limits than council candidates. Our working assumption to date has been that about twice as high makes sense, but that would be a matter for the committee to consider.

For school board, park board, Islands Trust trustees, electoral area directors — should their limits be the same as council candidate limits, or should they be different from council candidate limits? For the amounts themselves, what about that flat-rate number for communities 10,000 and under? What about the per-capita number or numbers for the communities above 10,000?

Finally, going back to third parties, how should that relationship between the third-party limits and the candidate limits actually look, and what amounts are appropriate for the limits in each jurisdiction and for the overarching limit?

The last thing from me is just to say that as my team continues to work on the legislation, things will evolve, so the committee may want to hear from us at various points, particularly as the work on third-party advertising gets more refined. There may be some information on what we’re doing with the legislation and the issues we’re wrestling with that bear on the committee’s deliberations as well. We’d certainly be happy to come back at any time and provide you with an update.

G. Holman: Great presentation. Maybe I missed it, but is the direction from government clear about inflation adjustments that are apparently in place provincially — that there’s an adjustment over time?

Well, thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it. I think that as this committee has done its work, we’ve realized the complexities of the challenge ahead. Thank you very much for putting it together for us. It’ll be an interesting spring session around where we go with this. Really appreciate the support from your team, Heather.

J. Tegart (Chair): Okay. So no further questions to Heather, then the next item on the agenda....

I’m going to suggest that we take a short, maybe five-minute, break and grab a cup of coffee and come back in, and then we’ll talk about planning and consultation. So five minutes — a five-minute recess.
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J. Tegart (Chair): We’ll call the meeting back to order. The next item on the agenda is the review of phase 2 planning and consultations.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, I’d be happy to. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Since the committee last convened, we did have a planning discussion with the Chair and the Deputy Chair to anticipate some of the next steps to support phase 2 deliberations and public consultations. As Heather noted earlier in her presentation, we’ve also made a preliminary contact with both UBCM and the B.C. School Trustees Association on behalf of the committee to ensure that they were aware and looking ahead to participating in your phase 2 deliberations.

Should the committee wish to embark on a public consultation program, there is a range of options that are available to the committee. As always, we’d be happy to support a process which encourages submissions in written form from interested British Columbians, and we’re also working towards developing some type of on-line survey or questionnaires on the website, which would give both opportunities. Both the written submission process and the on-line survey option would give wide opportunities to British Columbians around the province to get involved in phase 2 deliberations.

We continue to maintain, of course, contact information for all of the stakeholders who participated in phase 1 deliberations. All of those participants would have received a link to the phase 1 report that was released in December, and we would certainly be pleased to contact them again to advise them of phase 2 opportunities.

We had acquired contact information for those individuals from CivicInfo. If they had any other enhanced information that we hadn’t been able to incorporate into our mailout in the fall, we’d certainly hope that they would match the kinds of numbers that Heather touched on in her presentation today. There was, I think, up to 3,200 candidates, for example. We tried to get as broad of a reach as the committee might like with respect to those consultations.

If the committee does choose to embark on any public hearings, including regional public hearings, there’s a range of options. We’ve done some preliminary work to support whatever the committee’s interests might be in terms of having public hearings. Whether they’re based in the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island, as the phase 1 deliberations were, or if the committee wishes to take a broader regional approach, there are a number of options that can be discussed.

In terms of the committee’s timeline, we had suggested perhaps a preliminary schedule which would have the committee, if they were to undertake any regional public hearings, doing that towards the end of March or early April.

The advantage of that would be that some of the data analysis that Heather touched on earlier today might be available by that point in time. If it helps to inform either the committee’s own discussions with British Columbians at that point or perhaps even the type of input that you might receive from the public, to have that data analysis in hand may be advantageous.

Hence, we were looking, I think, towards the week of March 29, if I’m not mistaken. I believe that that is a sitting break week for the Legislature. It might be an opportunity in your schedules, if they’ve not yet been fully booked for that particular week, to adopt some kind of a public hearing program.

If the committee was to undertake public consultations with public hearings during that week of March 29, I’m wondering about the committee’s interest in having, let’s say, written input and on-line input continue to perhaps mid-April. We’re cognizant, of course, of the requirement that a report must be finalized and released no later than June 12. So sort of working back…. Looking at the month of May, in essence, it’s our prime opportunity to work with you all in terms of preparing a draft report, which would then be available for release no later than June 12.

One of the key pieces of the data analysis, as Heather alluded to, is to ensure that we have some support of an agency that can assist us with the very complex process of taking the data in its current form and actually generating some meaningful results for you. We’d be happy to work with Heather to try and identify what some of those data products would look like.

Again, we understand that Elections B.C. will have some preliminary data available in a public report form by the end of February, but it would likely take at least a number of weeks thereafter to get it into some form with a breakdown, let’s say, by electoral office — for example, mayoralty numbers, councillor numbers, and that kind of thing.

We have prepared, in essence, a number of very preliminary draft documents — which we would, of course, welcome your input on — to support a consultation program for the spring. As I mentioned, that would be anticipating written and on-line consultations and then, perhaps, based on the discussions that you may have today or at subsequent meetings, some type of a public hearing schedule as well.

J. Tegart (Chair): I’m going to suggest to the committee that rather than get into the nitty-gritty of the outline
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that Kate has given us, I think we’ll have an opportunity, perhaps, to go in camera to talk about travel and those kinds of things.

But the overall outline in regards the consultation process — any input, any questions?

L. Reimer: Well, I fully support taking this to other parts of the province. I didn’t hear directly, although we had a lot of submissions, from other parts of the province in phase 1. I think it would be really good to do a face-to-face with other people in the province for phase 2. I fully support the notion of going to other places in the province and not just down here in the Lower Mainland or in Victoria.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I, too, think it’s important to check in at different parts of the province. It’s a big province. I also think we ought to be sort of modest in that, given how large this province is, and use as much technology as we can. We have opportunities for Skype presentations, FaceTime presentations as well as phone-in — so some sort of modest demonstration that we are accessible as a committee.

We want to hear from people. If they can physically come, that would be great, and if they can’t, we certainly have the tools. Access is really… I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s access to this committee and that we will make use of all of that.

M. Hunt: I just think, for example, slide 14 — that type of information. To me, we shouldn’t be going anywhere until we have that kind of information. Otherwise, the discussion is pointless, quite frankly, since our objective now is to deal with numbers. We have to have something like this to work with.

Even just looking at the 2011 election, it’s very clear that the only municipality I can see here outside of the Lower Mainland that is getting into the higher numbers is Prince George. You may have a similar thing in, for example, Kelowna-Kamloops. Other than that, you’re basically either in the Lower Mainland or you’re on the Island. So I would agree that this doesn’t need to be an all-over-the-province process, because really the issues…. The order of magnitude issues are in the larger areas.

However, by the same token, we do have all of those in the 10,000 and under. What is a reasonable number for them? Certainly, their input is going to be needed and wanted because, looking around here, I think we only have one that’s in an under-10,000 category. The rest of us are in the larger centres where the…. No, I guess that’s two.

M. Hunt: Yes, we do. We have Gary and we have Jackie. Madam Chair, you’re under 10,000 too, aren’t you?

M. Hunt: That’s all I’m saying, that I think it’s going to be important to get some feedback from those individuals.

By the same token, I agree: technology is a wonderful tool. It’s something that would be much easier to make use of — the technology piece — than us actually physically going around, because when we go around, we bring our friends from Hansard with us.

J. Kwan: Just looking at the municipality population — right? — you have basically five different categories: under 10,000; 10,000 to 24,999; 25,000 to 49,999; 50,000 to 99,999, etc. It might be useful to think about, in that context, getting representation in each of those categories — at least make some effort so that we can sort of connect with those communities to get that broad range of perspectives.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): This is more about process and coordination. I really do think having as many different ways for people to share with us their thoughts, their concerns, their suggestions is ideal. But I also think that we should coordinate the close of the on-line survey with the close of the hearings. There should be a natural end.

If we are going to, let’s say, do a little bit of a check-in with a few communities in that week — in, I guess, the first week of April or whatever — there needs to be a natural end. As one ends, so should the other, rather than have one end first and then keep going with public hearings, for example. I think we should coordinate all that.

M. Bernier: My comment about the under 10,000 is: just looking at some of the areas we might travel around the province, be cognizant of the fact that most of the communities that we’re looking at going…. None are under the 10,000. I just wanted to make sure we flag that.

S. Sullivan: For me, the logistics of travel are a little bit more difficult, so that makes me want to look at this more carefully — how valuable it is. If we do go and bring the committee and get a very small number of people actually come, that would be unfortunate.

Are there other options? If there are just a few people, could we bring them here versus bringing the whole planeload of people up? I just wanted to make sure we’re looking at it carefully.

J. Tegart (Chair): I’ll just make a comment. As the conversation happened here today, when we look at the different categories and the different numbers, maybe there is an opportunity to consider targeting the different populations and bringing people together to have that conversation.
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That’s very different than us going out and individuals…. I don’t know if there’s an opportunity to host a morning discussion about what this will mean to politicians, to school boards — well, to all politicians — and the different population groups.

M. Hunt: If we look at those timelines, I’m thinking we have the area associations for local government all meeting in and around that time, which would cover it off. If we, for example, use the North Central as an illustration, Mike is well familiar with this group. But there are a lot of those communities that rarely come down for anything. It might be an opportunity to get feedback at those opportunities, as well, particularly NCLGA.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): I appreciate Marvin’s thinking outside the box. I think it’s pretty good. Unfortunately, those meetings are at the end of April and beginning of May. There are five area association meetings, and they’re all clumped around the end of April and beginning of May. I mean, it’s a great idea. I think it would be a perfect opportunity. And those are only for people who got elected.

Along those lines, I’m wondering if there’s a way to invite…. We’ll have all that contact information. We have all this data, right? Let’s say, for example, we want to check out folks in the Okanagan and we do a central location and we just send out: “We are going to be in the Okanagan on this date. Please let us know if you’d like to attend.” If we get sufficient attendance and people RSVP, then it’s a go. If we only get two, then say: “We’ll do it by phone.”

I think that there’s a way to…. I do like the idea of inviting. I think that will get better response than just putting out a broadcast.

M. Hunt: My only thought is that Selina is absolutely correct in the fact that those who go to the local government associations are those who are elected. But generally speaking, those who are elected are most likely going to be very representative of the amount of moneys that was spent, and particularly the higher end amount of moneys that was spent.

All I’m thinking of is…. For example, just having fun doing the math, let’s just suppose that we made the limit at $1,000 for those communities under 10,000, just for fun. That would mean that the third-party advertisers could spend $50 — obviously very unrealistic, right?

It’s one of those ones that…. I think there’s an essence there where those individuals that have been elected know and understand their turf. They also know and understand what has happened in their elections, because most of them have been elected multiple times. So you get a feeling for what’s happened even though, yes, they are elected versus those who ran unsuccessfully. But they’ll still have a very good feeling, I would expect.

J. Tegart (Chair): Okay. Lots of good ideas from the committee. I think what we need to do today is actually…. If we are going to put together a plan of action around outreach, we’re going to need to nail that down as quickly as possible, because it’s about schedules, it’s about community logistics, it’s about logistics of the committee, etc.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Well, at the earliest opportunity it’d be helpful to have a sense of the scale of public hearings that you might be contemplating. It is a very flexible model. We have experience in our office supporting public consultations that take committees on a very extensive tour of the province. We can also scale that back to some key population centres or regions that you may wish to cover.

Then, as I mentioned earlier, we would presume to support that through targeted invitations to stakeholders that we’ve identified and that you can help us supplement. Beyond that, also a general call-out for input for participants.

We will monitor very carefully the registration level in these communities. If it appears that we’re not successfully attracting sufficient participation, we will try and make a call on whether or not we’d recommend the hearing to proceed through technological means rather than a face-to-face exchange.

We certainly don’t want to take members out of their timetables to a community if there’s not sufficient interest, really, to participate in that kind of an exchange. But hopefully, we will get a good level of dialogue going, whether it’s through the written process, on-line process or some face-to-face public hearings.

Of course, logistically it may be easier to coordinate meetings in the Lower Mainland and/or on the south Island, and we’d be pleased to facilitate that as well. So this is really getting some direction from you all at some point as to the scale of what we’d like to propose at the outset with any regional hearings outside of those two areas.

If it’s helpful, it might be something perhaps that the Chair and the Deputy Chair can confer upon and then, with the dates, the week of March 29 — March 30, I guess, is the Monday — sort of tentatively held in your calendars, perhaps by way of e-mail we can have a more detailed proposal distributed to you all for input, if that would be helpful.

L. Reimer: Do we need to talk about our schedules? And if we do, then we ought to go in camera, because those generally are not public.
[ Page 161 ]

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): What I think I would find helpful — and this might seem really silly — in some ways is a map of some of the communities, like in terms of the size differences. Yes, we’ve talked about Prince George. We’ve talked about Kelowna. I know where those places are.

But I’m just thinking about sort of the smaller communities and if there are certain centres that make sense for us to be at, where there are enough smaller communities located where they could feasibly come so that we could hear from them so it’s not really too onerous on anybody. So we could get really what we need. We could hit all of those criteria in one visit or two visits — that would be, I think, ideal — so that it’s not too onerous, and it doesn’t mean lots of travel and lots of expense. It means really just having it very focused, but being able to hit all of the criteria that we need to hear from.

L. Reimer: So if we cover those main centres that you’re talking about, we’re talking about, then, southeast British Columbia, southwest British Columbia, central British Columbia, northeast British Columbia and northwest British Columbia. Those are about five main areas — and Vancouver Island.

S. Robinson (Deputy Chair): Well, yes, I mean I recognize that there are different parts of the community, but part of the criteria is to hear from larger centres and from smaller centres, not necessarily that each region will have…. I didn’t get the sense from our first round that each region had different experiences — that for people in small communities in northeast British Columbia and small communities on the Island there were similar challenges. They weren’t that diverse.

The idea for me was more: we need larger urban centres outside of Vancouver, because I think this is pretty unique, and then small communities. I almost see it as sort of other ways for us to look at the map of the province and say: “If we do go to this particular centre, we’ll hear from another part of the province” And there are 22 local governments within an hour and a half’s drive that we could feasibly hear from as well. That would get our biggest bang for our buck in terms of hearing from people in person. So that was just what I was suggesting.

M. Hunt: I find the discussion really interesting because when we’re talking about…. I would argue the majority of candidates running for office in the province of British Columbia spend nothing on getting elected, and we’re talking about going to them to hear from them, and at the very least, they’re going to spend more getting to our meetings than they spent on their election. Somehow, proportionately, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Yes, we are elected to the provincial government. Yes, we’re here to hear from the whole province. I get that. But when we look at actually the individuals involved and what they actually spent to get elected to the office, we’re asking them to spend more to get to a meeting.

That’s one. Two is I think we need to use the two big stakeholders that we have. We have the UBCM and the BCSTA. They are the two biggest stakeholders in all this. I think that the Chair and the vice-Chair should have a little telephone call to UBCM and to BCSTA and say: “In your information from this past election….” I think the Gibsons example…. Was it Gibsons?

M. Hunt: Sechelt. I think the Sechelt example is a very, very good one. If we can get the major organizations to say: “Are there some of those kinds of stories that are the really significant pieces of the puzzle that we should be hearing from…?” Make use of those networks, because in order of magnitude, I think we’ve really got to be careful….

J. Kwan: Just along those lines, I wonder whether or not this would be a feasible option. It would occur to me that the local governments throughout all British Columbia — school boards, as well — would have a forum in which they can reach their community maybe in a way that’s better and more accessible than we’re able to.

Whether or not it would be feasible for the committee — maybe the Chair and the Deputy Chair — to issue a letter to each of the municipalities and the school boards and invite them to accept submissions to them around this question…. In some ways it broadens the scope. I worry a little bit when we sort of put our word out there. It’s hit and miss. Sometimes people catch the information, and a lot of times I think they don’t.

If you bring it to the local government level, you’re closer to the people in the community. They say, “The committee has asked us to invite our community’s input,” and then they can sort of bring forward submissions, especially reaching into those smaller communities. I think that they may actually have better luck than we would. All it would require is, of course, for us to issue a letter to invite that kind of input back to us. I want to just put that forward for the Chair and the Deputy Chair to consider as something that we might want to embark on in terms of reaching the communities.

Having been, at one point, Municipal Affairs Minister… We actually embarked on an exercise on some of these similar issues, and we went all over the province to different communities. Surprisingly…. I remember this, because there was a snowstorm. In Grand Forks I didn’t
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think there would be very many people who’d be interested in coming out to participate in the process in the middle of a snowstorm. People came out in the middle of a snowstorm. Over 100 people came out — larger than a local Lower Mainland hearing. I was quite taken aback. People drove in the snow to come to give me input.

I stayed there for two days because I couldn’t get out. But that said, it was surprising. It’s kind of hard to gauge sometimes what the community would really do. You’d be surprised sometimes. At least, that’s my experience anyway.

J. Tegart (Chair): Okay, we’ve had lots of ideas around the table. There has been a suggestion that Kate and Selina and I can take a look at the input we’ve had and then put something together for the consideration of the committee.

Tentative dates. You’ve been asked to put some time aside on your calendars. We would get back to you as quickly as we could in regards to whether we need those dates or not, understanding how busy everyone’s calendars are and also taking into consideration the concern about logistics, about expenses. I feel quite strongly — and I think I’m hearing it in the committee — that we also have an obligation to recognize that elections happen all over the province, and so how do we engage people in a meaningful way?

At the end of the process my goal as Chair — and I’m sure I speak for everybody on the committee — is that all of B.C. has an opportunity, either through submission, through the Internet, through one-on-one, through telephone conference…. They’ve had an opportunity to voice their concern or their ideas about where this committee should go.

I would commit to you that…. I like the idea of us having a conversation with the UBCM president and the president of the school trustees association. We’ll put a plan together, and we will get back to you in a short period of time. If everyone’s happy and comfortable with that, we will do that as quickly as we can.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): That would be great. Thank you very much for your discussion today, and I’ll look forward to developing a plan that works for everyone’s schedule.

In the interim, I just want to remind members that because all parliamentary committees are appointed on a sessional basis in British Columbia, this special committee will be relieved temporarily of its responsibilities in conjunction with prorogation at noon on Tuesday, February 10.

We’re working with the Government House Leader’s office to quickly expedite the reactivation of this committee, but I don’t anticipate that it will be reactivated immediately. There may be a period of a week or so of hiatus, but we will certainly continue to work with the Chair and the Deputy Chair behind the scenes so that when we do resume later in February, we have some information.

As the Chair mentioned, it’d be ideal, if you would be so kind, to hold that week of March…. Well, March 30 is the Monday. The Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday would be ideal to hold…. Then we will be able to adjust it based on the number of locations that are identified, the details of travel logistics and those kinds of things. We are cognizant of some of the arrangements that we’ll have to coordinate, and we’ll ensure that everybody is well taken care of.

J. Tegart (Chair): All right. Thank you for the ideas and the discussion today. It’s been very helpful.

M. Bernier: No, that’s good. I agree with the direction we’re going. Thanks.

J. Tegart (Chair): Great. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. When we looked at phase 1, it seemed like a very short time frame, but we got the report in by 11:58 on the evening that we needed to. We’re going to have some challenges, but I think the committee works together well, and we’re committed to ensure that it’s a very comprehensive report based on good information. So I’m looking forward to the spring.

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Chair:	Jackie Tegart (Fraser-Nicola BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Selina Robinson (Coquitlam-Maillardville NDP)
Members:	Mike Bernier (Peace River South BC Liberal)
	Gary Holman (Saanich North and the Islands NDP)
	Marvin Hunt (Surrey-Panorama BC Liberal)
	Jenny Wai Ching Kwan (Vancouver–Mount Pleasant NDP)
	Linda Reimer (Port Moody–Coquitlam BC Liberal)
	Sam Sullivan (Vancouver–False Creek BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON LOCAL ELECTIONS EXPENSE LIMITS

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON
LOCAL ELECTIONS EXPENSE LIMITS