Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 72 — Thursday, September 17, 2015 (HTML)

Present: Wm. Scott Hamilton, MLA (Chair); Carole James, MLA (Deputy Chair); Spencer Chandra Herbert, MLA; Eric Foster, MLA; Simon Gibson, MLA; George Heyman, MLA; Claire Trevena, MLA; John Yap, MLA

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

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES


CONTENTS
Page
Presentations	1623
A. Storvold
N. Lane
T. Friedman
B. Hasanen
J. Anderson
A. Shaver
B. Ross
T. Smith
C. Mullaly
F. Clare
G. Wallin
M. Weedon
M. Plant
S. Wilk
M. Tierney
T. Thomson
F. Steele
G. Lucas
R. Archdekin
C. Salas

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Scott Hamilton. I’m the MLA for Delta North and Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

We’re an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly with a mandate to hold provincewide public consultations on the next provincial budget. The consultations are based on the budget consultation paper that was recently released by the Minister of Finance. The committee will issue a report on November 15, 2015, with recommendations for next year’s budget.

We’ve had to modify our planned schedule of in-person community meetings this year as the Legislature’s been called back for a fall session starting on September 28. In order to accommodate as many presenters as possible, we’re holding public hearings in communities across the province through in-person sessions or via teleconference, video conference or Skype.

British Columbians are also invited to participate by sending a written, audio or video submission or completing an on-line survey. You can make a submission or learn more about the consultation in general by visiting our webpage at www.leg.bc.ca/budgetconsultations. We invite all British Columbians to make a submission and contribute to this important process. For those of you in attendance today, thank you for taking the time out to be with us.

All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as it prepares its final report to the Legislative Assembly. Just a reminder that the deadline for submissions is Thursday, October 15, 2015.

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak, followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. If time permits, we’ll also have an open-mike period at the end of the meeting. Five minutes are allotted for each presenter. If you wish to speak, please register with Stephanie at the information table.

Today’s meeting is being recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A complete transcript of the proceedings will be posted to the committee’s website. All of the meetings are also broadcast as live audio via our website.

Now I’ll turn to the members of the committee and ask them to kindly introduce themselves.

S. Chandra Herbert: Hello. Spencer Chandra Herbert, MLA, Vancouver–West End, Coal Harbour.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Also assisting the committee today, to my left, is Susan Sourial, and Stephanie Raymond over at the information table, both from the Parliamentary Committees Office. Michael Baer and Alexandrea Hursey from Hansard Services are also recording the proceedings for us.

With that, I would like to call up our first witness, please. It is Thompson Rivers University Students Union. We have Amber Storvold and Nathan Lane.

Welcome. As I mentioned earlier, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a heads-up when you’ve got about two minutes left. Then we’ll close your commentary, and we’ll go to the committee for five minutes of questions.

A. Storvold: Hello. My name is Amber Storvold, and I’m the vice-president, external, of the Thompson Rivers University Students Union. This is my colleague, Nathan Lane, and he is the executive director. You can find on page 3 of our submission a table of contents to help guide you as we go.

I will now turn the floor over to my colleague to outline why we believe post-secondary education should be a budgetary priority and discuss the framework of our recommendations.

N. Lane: The Thompson Rivers University Students Union is confident that post-secondary education should be a priority for the 2016 provincial budget.

The social, economic and fiscal possibilities and imperatives of post-secondary education are clear. Post-secondary education remains the central means of social mobility, increasing levels of income, standards of health and independence from social services. Post-secondary education is also increasingly the means to our common economic prosperity as industry becomes more and more reliant on knowledge, creativity and advanced technical skills.
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Finally, as post-secondary education supports higher standards of living and productivity, it increases the fiscal resources of government, which reaps the benefits of an increased tax base and reduced demand for social services. In short, post-secondary education is one of the most effective and necessary public investments of our age. It’s an investment in the true assets of a new economy.

Today during our presentation, we’re essentially going to be, as many people will be, asking for resources from the province for post-secondary education. On page 5 of our submission, you can see what we think are the outcomes that those resources will achieve.

To achieve full economic and fiscal benefits of post-secondary education, provincial policies and resources must be directed to achieve and be measured against tangible and targeted outcomes. When we’re talking today about the outcomes we’re hoping to achieve, those are participation, completion and transition — that students can participate in the system, can complete when they participate and can transition from studies effectively into the workforce.

A. Storvold: I’ll start with the first policy lever that we have, which is tuition and ancillary fees.

Tuition and ancillary fees can constitute financial barriers and burdens that undermine sufficient and equitable participation rates, if not set appropriately. The current provincial policy of capping annual fee increases to 2 percent has successfully held fee rates constant over the last decade and remains a good long-term approach.

However, while the change in fees is being well managed, evidence demonstrates that the overall level of fees is too high to meet targeted outcomes of participation rates and equity. Reduction in fees is a necessary measure to ensure the economic and social benefits of post-secondary education.

In terms of fees and participation, in B.C., incentives to obtain a post-secondary education have grown considerably. Projections show that 78 percent of all job openings by 2020 will require a post-secondary education. Despite this significant incentive, participation in post-secondary education in B.C. has actually declined from a peak of 67 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in 1993 to a low of 46 percent in 2006. The levels of tuition and ancillary fees are a significant cause.

Surveys have clearly identified financing as the primary barrier to participating in post-secondary education. The youth in transition survey found that 71 percent of successful high school graduates facing barriers to post-secondary education in Canada cite financial issues. This reporting by prospective students is confirmed in the statistical correlation between rising fees and declining participation here in B.C.

Over the period of 1995 to 2006, average tuition fee rates in B.C. had had a statistically significant negative correlation with post-secondary education participation rates. This correlation is stronger than that between post-secondary participation and unemployment rates, suggesting that the cost of education, and not economic conditions, has been the primary force behind declining participation. Further underscoring this point is the absence of a surge in participation during the economic downturn.

Finally, instances of tuition fee reductions in Canada serve as natural policy experiments that demonstrate the clear link between affordability and participation, while holding other variables — from demographics to economic performance to labour market requirements — constant.

Surveys, statistical correlation and natural policy experiments together form a clear consensus that fees can significantly affect participation. Reducing financial barriers to post-secondary education is crucial to meeting the labour market demands of today’s economy, making it a key budget priority.

High fees negatively affect not only the overall post-secondary participation rate but also the equity of that participation. The consensus of high fees in the equity or participation is clear. In 2006, while 48.6 percent of youth from Canadian families earning over $100,000 per year had enrolled in university, only 21.7 percent of youth from families earning between $25,000 and $50,000 had.

In the college system, where average fees in B.C. are 37 percent more affordable, enrolment is equitable across incomes. The potential of education as a means of social mobility is undermined by financial determinants of participation.

Given evidence of the growing participation of tuition fees as a portion of the earnings of the lowest-income British Columbians and the effect of this financial barrier on the equity of participation, reducing tuition fees should be a key budget priority for the promotion of social mobility, poverty reduction and reduced dependence on other social services.

Now we’ll talk about the second policy lever that we have, which is student financial aid. While reducing tuition fees is the most effective policy lever, student financial aid can provide additional targeted mechanisms to support sufficient and equitable participation, completion and full transition from studies. However, the complement of financial aid strategies can have widely divergent performance against these targeted outcomes.

B.C. has an overwhelmingly loan-based system of student financial assistance, which is founded on incurring debt to participate in post-secondary education. This system improves participation for students with insufficient cash flow but not for those who both cannot afford upfront costs and are debt-averse. It can create financial disincentives for completion.

Finally, it requires years of debt repayment that delays, limits and distorts the full transition from study to economic and social participation. Those with the most
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need also become the most indebted and thus service larger debts with greater interest payments, compounding inequality.

In short, financial aid that relies too heavily on student loans performs poorly against post-secondary education outcomes.

Upfront, need-based student grants are a necessary component of a successful financial aid system because they are targeted to need, provided when financial need occurs and transparent, allowing students to be sure of their financial position before incurring the costs of accessing post-secondary. These characteristics make grants effective in increasing participation, completion and equity.

A key budget priority should be to balance the student financial aid system by establishing a provincial system of upfront, need-based student grants with the aim to reduce the average student loan per recipient per year to $3,000 in four years.

Now, in terms of financial aid and participation, loan-based financial aid provides students with the means of meeting upfront costs to post-secondary education by incurring debt. Access to debt solves the issues of insufficient cash flow but does not reduce the financial burden. Students who are not comfortable shouldering that burden due to other debts, expectations of modest income or simply a desire for financial security, do not achieve greater participation through loans.

Non-repayable aid, in the form of loan remission, does not address this issue either because instead of reducing financial burden at the time it is incurred, it offers debt-averse students an uncertain possibility of relief. Grants improve access by directly addressing the issues of financial need and debt aversion. Students receiving a grant are provided with the means to meet costs when they are incurred and to directly reduce the financial burden instead of deferring it as a debt to be repaid.

In terms of financial aid and success and completion, student loan debt, at excessive levels, has a negative effect on the ability of students to complete their studies. As debt increases, it may become favourable to choose employment over continued studies. Poor performance related to financial worry, which has been linked to greater levels of tension, anxiety and difficulty sleeping amongst students, may also cause them to fail.

Without grants, students who accumulate over $3,000 in loans per year are actually less likely to graduate than students who receive no aid at all. In fact, as student debt rises from $1,000 to $10,000 per year, completion rates plummet from 59 percent to 8 percent. Given low completion rates among borrowers with high debt, and that the average loan required per recipient in B.C. is $9,662 per year — suggests that student financial aid is being applied poorly.

Every financial aid dollar that facilitates participation but not completion is a wasted dollar. It is tempting to think that repayment makes student loans a cost-effective approach to participation, but without a positive impact on post-secondary education completion, the return on investment is fiscally neutral and economically and socially negative.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Before you continue, your ten minutes is up. You’re welcome to continue, but you’re carving into your question period.

N. Lane: Sounds good. We’ll just quickly highlight, then, the last policy lever, and I think the most important one that we want to talk about here today, which is per-student funding. This is something I think you’re going to hear about from our colleagues in both the faculty association and the administration.

Per-student funding is the only effective means of financing post-secondary education in support of institutional mandates.

At TRU, the formula for per-student funding does not reflect its mandate, and across the province, inflationary pressures have eroded the value of operating grants provided to institutions. Finally, increasing per-student funding is also necessary to facilitate reductions in tuition fees.

What you see on page 15 is the graph of per-student funding at Thompson Rivers University in comparison to all other institutions. I’m going to talk a little bit, on the next page, about the discrepancies between what TRU does and what it’s funded for.

In March 2005, the University College of the Cariboo was reincorporated as TRU under the Thompson Rivers University Act, making it only one of two institutions in the province with its own specific legislation. This legislation provided a unique mandate. This mandate is particularly unique and expansive in its combination of research and the broadest range of educational programs from adult basic education to master’s degrees and in its combination of both the regional and provincial mandate. While faculty, administrators, staff and students of TRU and the people of the Thompson region have been eager to fulfil and reap the benefits of this mandate, provincial funding of the institution has not reflected the required resources.

In its mandate for certificate, diploma and baccalaureate programs, TRU’s peer institutions include all post-secondary institutions in B.C. Despite this common mandate, TRU received $1,330 or 14.2 percent less per-student funding than the average.

TRU has the most expansive mandate for educational programs but also receives less than the institutions providing programs at each end of the spectrum. In its mandate for master’s degree programs, TRU received $1,541 or 16.1 percent less per-student funding than the average provided to its peer institutions. In its mandate for adult
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basic education or entry-level programs, TRU received $927 or 10.4 percent less than the average provided to its peer institutions. TRU also has an explicit research mandate but received $2,038 or 20.3 percent less per-student funding than the average provided to its peer institutions.

These funding discrepancies are not intended to suggest that TRU should receive exactly the per-student funding as other selected institutions but, rather, demonstrate the critical challenge that TRU faces in delivering the most expansive mandate in the province without appropriate resources. To this end, it’s critical that the funding formula for TRU be re-evaluated to ensure it receives necessary support to fulfil all aspects of its mandate and maximize its economic and social contributions.

I’d just like to draw your attention to the very last page of our submission, which we’re pretty proud about. This is a joint statement that was worked on between ourselves, our senior administrators at Thompson Rivers University and the faculty association, outlining what we think is the pretty grave concern regarding the funding formula at TRU and how it’s holding us back from delivering on the mandate for our region.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming forward and providing us…. That’s pretty slick. I like that.

Thanks for a well-prepared and well-researched presentation. I have two quick questions. One is on the recommendation for outcomes-based tuition and ancillary fee reduction. I’m assuming the outcomes you’re speaking of are higher participation rate and social equity.

The second question I have is that we heard a number of compelling presentations, both so far this year and last year, about the equity issues in the K-to-12 system. I’m wondering if there have been conversations between your student union or student unions generally with parent advisory committees or others advocating for measures to increase funding for K to 12 to ensure that, at that point in their education trajectory, students aren’t being disadvantaged that will play right through the system.

N. Lane: The answer to question two is we haven’t had those conversations at this point.

The answer to question one is that we’ve tried to…. In the past we’ve come forward and made recommendations about policy levers regarding tuition fees, etc., and it becomes an ideological debate, whether you believe that tuition fees should be lower or higher.

What we’re trying to say is that the system is there for a reason — to educate people to participate in the workforce — and that your ideology isn’t a valid perspective if it isn’t achieving an outcome. That outcome is: are people getting into the system and out of the system effectively? Tuition fee rates need to be framed in that context, not in what you believe they should be as an arbitrary number. Are they actually doing what British Columbians need them to do? That’s what we believe tuition fees should be set at.

Next we have Thompson Rivers University Faculty Association — Dr. Thomas Friedman.

Dr. Friedman, welcome. Once again, ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave when we’re at the last two minutes, and then we’ll go to the committee. The floor is yours.

T. Friedman: Good morning. Thanks for this opportunity to speak to the committee about the priorities that our members would like to see addressed in the 2016 provincial budget. I’m president of the TRU Faculty Association. We speak on behalf of 600-plus faculty members who teach not only here in Kamloops at our main campus but also at our satellite campus in Williams Lake and in a number of regional centres around the South Cariboo and North Thompson areas.

What we’re looking for in the budget are measures to support better access and improve the prospects for all B.C. students, but particularly for those in our region. Some of what I’m going to say, of course, has been said by the TRU Students Union. We speak with one voice on many of these issues.

I have a number of recommendations, but I want to first focus on the role that our university plays in this region. We have a base of about 13,000 full- and part-time students. We also have the open learning university, which we took over in 2004, with an additional 12,000 students who work at a distance. Eleven percent of our student population comes from 16 different First Nation and indigenous peoples, and that’s an important factor, I think.

Since TRU was first launched, we’ve made a commitment to meet the educational needs of this region by being a comprehensive learning institution. By comprehensive we mean a wide range of programs — not only the certificate, degree and graduate-level degree programs and apprenticeship trades programs but also the opportunity for adult learners to get basic skills they may not have been able to achieve in their teens. That part of our mission, I think, is extremely important. We want to make sure the people become employable by having their basic employment skills and their critical thinking skills.

We’re a unique institution, and we’re unique by legislation. As was mentioned earlier, the TRU Act created us not only to have an undergraduate focus but also a master’s-
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level focus, and to carry out our purposes, we have to meet the educational and training needs in this region. So our comprehensiveness certainly does make us unique.

I want to focus my submission really on two principles. One is access. We have a diverse population in this region and we have diverse community needs, but one thing we need is to ensure access for all our citizens to post-secondary. Government can play a key role in that by reducing barriers — reducing financial, social and, in our region, geographical barriers. We have the largest geographical catchment area of any B.C. regional university, and we have to make sure that we offer opportunities for access in our smaller regional centres as well.

Once students start their post-secondary training at TRU, we can provide them with success, but only if we have enough support systems in place — student advising, financial aid, learning centres, co-op and career placement opportunities.

Access also means the ability to achieve higher levels of skills and credentials. We’re committed to providing pathways for students who first come through our door, maybe at the ABE level, to then ladder into further studies. Adult basic education is extremely important. As I said, it allows students the foot in the door to higher education, and we are very proud of the fact that most of our ABE students will go on into academic programs. That’s, I think, an extremely important function we have as an institution.

As your committee knows, we lost $7 million in funding from the ministry that was offsetting free adult basic education. In 2008, the government decided that ABE tuition should be free to enable access. We feel that there’s a potential for barriers that are going to be created that will prevent students from enrolling.

There is a revitalized grants program in place, but we want to make sure that it’s easy for students to get those grants, and we want to make sure that there are resources available both in Victoria and on site at each institution to help students to get those grants. For a lot of those students, filling out a long, complex grant application form is a real barrier.

I want to identify another issue, very quickly, that your committee will hear from around the province, and that is the cut to ESL training for immigrant domestic ESL students. We didn’t receive a large amount of this grant as an institution, but we benefit from those ESL students, many of whom come with a certain degree of skills from other countries. They come to TRU and enrol in master’s degree programs, for example. Also, we would like to focus on the fact that we could be a region that attracts highly skilled immigrants, and if that’s the case, we want to make sure that funding could be in place.

The second principle I want to focus on is opportunity. TRU is uniquely qualified to provide opportunities for students. We’ve been doing this for 45 years now, and in the past two decades, our faculty have been involved in research — certainly, on an increased level since we became a full-standing university.

This research is not just to support undergrad and graduate students. This is research that’s community-based. Many of our major research projects have been in conjunction with community organizations — in arts and culture, social agencies, the school district, health care institutions. Our focus is on building the community through research opportunities.

Given our unique mandate, our ask is that we have a funding level appropriate to continuing to meet this very comprehensive and diverse mandate. As TRU changes with demands on enrolment, technology and the need to update programs, we have found that costs have outrun the funding, particularly for our research mandate and for our master’s-level students. Without adequate support, I think that TRU will find it increasingly difficult to meet those mandates.

Faculty, students and administration here are speaking with one voice. We call on your committee to recommend an increase in the provincial operating grant to TRU, an increase in the investment needed to ensure access and opportunity. The TRU Students Union has been very good about providing you with some of the details, so I’ll skip over that.

I want to say, too, that we are very much in support, as faculty, of having a robust provincial grants program. I think it’s extremely important. I see in my classes students who are really struggling to succeed, but the financial burden becomes too much for them. They’re juggling two or three jobs, and that’s not a way to create student success.

The other thing I’d like to mention about the provincial grant is that we’re still concerned about the re-engineering of the system, the blueprint. We think that it’s got to focus on developing not just job-ready skills but on critical thinking and analytical skills that can be offered in other areas like liberal arts. We want to make sure that’s going to be a focus of the committee’s recommendations.

We know that with adequate funding, we can make a difference in this region. We can create the economic growth that’s needed, the employment that’s needed, and we can grow our communities, not just from a financial and economic basis but from a sense of belonging and participation in citizenship.

I’ll just reiterate our three asks. An increase to the provincial operating grant. We have a comprehensive trades-to-law institution, and I think the funding for our institution has to reflect that.

We want a commitment on the part of your committee, as a recommendation to government, for a revitalized, comprehensive student grant program that will allow access to students in this region without the burden of a heavy debt load.

Finally, we’d like a direct and ongoing commitment of at least $22 million to support provincially funded ESL
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programs. We think that’s the right thing to do to build our province and our economy.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Dr. Friedman. I appreciate you coming forward and providing us that presentation. I’ll go to the committee.

We will hear from all the institutions in British Columbia, all the student unions in British Columbia and probably most of the heads of faculties. I asked this question before and never got an answer, on two levels. Has anybody costed this out? The $22 million was…. Thank you. You did cost that out.

Then, as I looked at the graphs that were presented by the student union in their presentation, which was excellent, one of the graphs said, “We would like to have tuitions frozen,” and 90-something percent of the people supported that.

If you asked those same people if they would like to make a choice between having a hospital upgraded and tuitions frozen. Or if you asked — I see the chamber of commerce is up, “Would you like the business taxes raised to pay for these hundreds of millions of dollars?” I think your graph will come up with a different answer.

I mean, I support a post-secondary education, but at the same time, if we gave…. Everybody’s asking for the same thing. It’s hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and I think when you come forward with an ask, you’ve got to put a little more effort into the costing.

I appreciate you coming forward, both the student union, and I see the dean is up here a couple more down, so…. Across the province, the cost of this is astronomical. How do you propose that, as a committee, we move forward with this and then suggest to the Ministry of Finance how we’re going to pay for it?

T. Friedman: Two things, and thank you for the question. One is that we don’t see this solely as a cost. Post-secondary education is an investment in a strong British Columbia and, particularly, a strong economy. I realize that there’s going to be the matter of priority discussions about where resources should go. I think that this is a very good investment, because what it does is that it allows the next 20, 30, 40 years of economic growth to be guaranteed.

Without our citizens getting the necessary skills to enter the workforce job-ready, on one hand, they’re not going be able to involve themselves in the new economy. But at the same time, too, I think it’s an important issue about social equality — making sure that we have a province where the equality of citizens allows for full participation.

What that does is it lowers costs in other areas. We’ve seen the benefit of post-secondary in lowering health costs, in lowering social agency costs, because an educated population is productive and contributes. They’re not drawing on resources; they are contributing resources.

S. Chandra Herbert: I didn’t get the chance at the student presentation, the student association, but I did want to thank them for their very comprehensive and detailed presentation — and, I’m sure, the faculty and the whole TRU for working together on this.

I guess I wanted to ask…. Some students can make it through university and do very well, even though they have to work two or three jobs. Others really struggle. I just wondered if you might be able to share — and I know it’s anecdotal — some of your experiences with the students that can’t quite make it, because not everybody can.

T. Friedman: Well, thanks for that question. I’ve taught for 22 years at this institution, and I’ve had very promising students who have come to class, and I see, just by looking at them at 8:30 in the morning, they’re exhausted. They have really tried to be there alert and on time, but it takes a huge toll, and we shouldn’t allow financial barriers for well-deserving students to prevent them getting ahead.

I know that a lot of them have been able to do this. It’s amazing, and from my own experience in university, I don’t know if I could have done it. I was lucky. Tuition was low, and I could get through. But I’ve seen it on the faces of these students — young men and women who really want to succeed — and the financial barrier is huge.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. A couple of things. And thank you also for recognizing the importance of the liberal arts for the future of the economy. For that sort of critical thinking, it’s not just the square block into the square hole.

You mention the commitment to ESL — the $22 million. You had also mentioned, earlier on in your presentation, about adult basic education. I wondered if you could explain why the recommendation is on ESL and not adult basic education.

T. Friedman: Certainly. Our situation at TRU is a bit different from that of other institutions around the province. Our adult basic education enrolments are very high, and we think that the way to maintain that is to make sure that grant program, which actually is a very strong program, is available to students as easily as possible.

I would say: “Sure. Put more money into having ABE at a lower tuition rate.” But our evidence shows that we have students coming. We just want to make sure they’re supported. That’s why we’re calling for an enhanced grants access program. The grant is fine. We need to make sure students have access to it.
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S. Hamilton (Chair): Dr. Friedman, I appreciate you taking the time to present to the committee.

Welcome. You have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with about two minutes to go, and then we’ll break into questions from the committee.

B. Hasanen: That would be great. It’s very much appreciated for this opportunity to share with the committee some ideas, and maybe even some concerns, that the business community of Kamloops, as well as the rest of province, has.

Full disclosure: I serve as the chair of the policy committee for Kamloops chamber, and I’m past president of the Kamloops chamber. I also currently serve as the chair of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce. But I speak before you as a policy chair and representative of the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce. You will, no doubt, be hearing from the B.C. chamber policy people at some point in this process.

Now, saying that, there is a lot of crossover between the submission that we’ve given you today and what you’re going to see from other chambers throughout the province because of the unified message that the chamber of commerce is able to bring, through our stringent policy process.

We’re very, very dedicated to the idea of bringing forward well-thought-out policies, recommendations and discussions with provincial government to ensure that…. I heard earlier that there are concerns. If we are going to dedicate our extra dollars to one area, where are we going to get it from — the other area?

The chamber of commerce is very committed to the idea of ensuring that all of our recommendations are well-thought-out and manageable and able to bring forward workable and usable ideas.

One of the things, I think, that’s most important about it, though, is that when an idea starts, there doesn’t necessarily seem to be an immediate solution on the table. And when an idea starts, it is always discussion and partnerships between government and business that make these ideas come to fruition.

The discussions I’d like to share with you this morning are some ideas that we want to at least get on the table to open up discussions where we’re able to sit down with the ministry, or various ministries, to be able to figure out solutions that will make this a better province going forward.

We’ve broken the presentation into four or five different sections, which you have in your handout. Then I’ve also put in a handout which is with reference to the resource-driven economy in the province that is becoming more and more important, as you’re aware, through various major projects.

To start off just with the notion of the fiscal discipline — recommendations and observations, if I may. The B.C. government must be commended for achieving a balanced budget, but now that it’s been achieved, we would like to have a discussion about the structure of debt reduction and what to do with the surplus to ensure a stable balance sheet for British Columbians going forward.

Essentially, what we believe would be prudent is that with the surplus budgets, it would be nice to see the government fulfil the electoral commitment that they’d made, where there’s a dedication of at least 50 percent of the surplus…. I’m not saying all the surplus should go to paying down the debt, but 50 percent of the surplus.

It would be nice to see a commitment that that could be used for debt reduction. I’m not sure if you all have a copy of the B.C. chamber policy book, but there is a policy in that book that’s dedicated to that notion.

Further to that, B.C.’s competitiveness is becoming a huge concern to B.C. business and the business in the Kamloops area. Our competitiveness is very much under stress or duress for a couple of reasons. One is the issue that we have where we…. We’re not advocating for the notion of tax reduction to business as much as we are tax reform. I’ll be discussing the idea of the carbon tax as well as a discussion on a value-added tax.

On the notion of tax reform, we did notice that there was an increase in the corporate tax rate. Although the chamber doesn’t advocate for immediate reversal of that, in that the corporate tax rate isn’t something that we’re seeing pending in other provinces…. It’s very manageable, and business will do it, but it’s not something that business is encouraged by.

On that note, we would also like an opportunity to create or, through discussions of a partnership, find ways of reducing that corporate tax rate to encourage businesses from across the country as well as around the world to do business in British Columbia when they’re looking at new places to set up.

Saying that, going into that much-hated discussion about the value-added tax. As you are all aware, for probably all the wrong reasons…. The value-added tax was presented poorly and received poorly by the province, but the mechanics of it is something that is very much an internationally accepted process or structure for taxation of the retail sector or consumption sector.

The Kamloops Chamber of Commerce is a strong believer, in that we understand the sensitivities of the subject. But at the same time, we also understand that there is a need to sit down and figure out a way of creating a built-in-B.C. value-added tax, one that can be presented and created and received by the people of British Columbia as something that is very valuable. In the meantime, as a result of the removal of the HST and reversion back to the PST, there is still a significant disadvantage to business that the HST would bring along.
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A recommendation I would like to bring today through our chamber is that you look at the idea of creating a tax credit of some sort that the HST offered businesses with reference to acquisitions of machinery and equipment, including computers and software, but at the same time excluding things like buildings and structures that have a capital cost allowance rate of 5 percent or less, because there would be no real advantage in that.

Again, the HST did bring a significant competitive advantage to the businesses of British Columbia through the notion of the input tax credit. We’d like to look at, maybe without actually doing a full-blown value-added-tax conversion, the idea of creating some sort of input tax credits that similarly brought some value. The reason for that again: keeping balancing the budget and the push and pull of where the money’s coming from.

The urgency is to create the competiveness of the business environment in this province. As the submission suggests, the OECD noticed that Canada’s competiveness slipped six points, of which B.C.’s competiveness and productivity is currently one of the worst in the country as a result of the removal of the HST and the desire of other large corporations to move to British Columbia, specifically manufacturing.

Now, moving from that over to the carbon tax. As discussed, when the carbon tax was introduced, the chamber did cautiously support that on the notion that it was a revenue-neutral tax and it was there for the right reasons. However, it seems that the notion of the revenue neutrality is being tested.

We would like to introduce or open discussions on how the revenues from the carbon tax are actually going to be redistributed in the right way as opposed to going off into possibly some areas that might not be what the tax originally was intended for.

The freezing or capping of the rate at $30 per tonne was received with open arms. We’re not looking for a reduction on that note.

Another area of focus that I’d like to share with you real quick is the notion, specifically here in Kamloops…. It’s the acceptance of the resource sector industries in this province and in this area. We are very concerned about what is happening, what’s going on, in order to move these projects forward.

We’re very much in support of the LNG projects, the major pipeline projects and many of the mining projects, with the specifics of the environmental assessments being successful on a very, very positive nature. On that note, we are frustrated with government and business and all stakeholders’ ability to move these projects forward.

The reason why it’s a frustration for us is that in the event that we can get these things moving, this province is going to be able to realize revenues, as Premier Clark brings forward, of situations that we’ve never seen before in history. We acknowledge that this is, in fact, the case. The rest of the world needs our product, and we are not seen as being interested or ready and willing to jump to the table to do what we have to do to solve the world’s appetite with what we have. If we aren’t at the table quickly, efficiently and ready, we could lose our opportunity.

The chamber believes there’s a lot of work that needs to be done. Most importantly, we’re willing to partner with government and any other stakeholders to be at the table to find out what we have to do to move these projects forward successfully.

S. Chandra Herbert: Mr. Hasanen, two quick questions. One, in the submission it suggests that the chamber believes B.C. is now dead last in Canada in terms of our attractiveness to investment. I just wondered what source that came from. Is it anecdotal? Where’s that source from?

B. Hasanen: Thank you for the question. That’s a good question, and I will be able to get that information for you. Again, the information provided in this submission comes from the policy chair from the B.C. Chamber of Commerce. The premise of statements from the chamber of commerce is one of averages after taking all data into consideration.

My thoughts, with reference to competitiveness, are that in those provinces that do have a value-added tax, businesses are more interested and ready to introduce or start discussions about starting businesses in provinces such as those, as opposed to a PST environment.

S. Chandra Herbert: Okay, but if there is a source, then you’ll send it our way.

S. Chandra Herbert: The other one. You referenced the carbon tax and how it’s now being directed to things that it wasn’t meant to be, maybe not supposed to be. What are those things?

B. Hasanen: Again, further to that, I’ll be happy to provide you with the details. We’re seeing that there are certain aspects of the carbon tax going off to certain housing projects and various other types of projects that aren’t directly related to the greenhouse effect and/or carbon being used by major industry. That was originally established for consideration of what the carbon tax was introduced for.

S. Chandra Herbert: If you can send that along, that’d be great. Thank you.
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G. Heyman: Thank you for your presentation. I have a couple of questions for you.

You’ve suggested that business would do better with a corporate tax reduction. A number of years ago, I had a very interesting conversation with a senior executive in Jim Pattison’s empire, who said to me — not in response even to a question — that in his opinion, it was better to offer tax credits that were targeted to things like capital investment, or it could be job creation, or it could be specific kinds of investment, rather than an across-the-board corporate tax reduction that wasn’t tied to any particular outcome. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.

You’ve suggested that we move toward more rapid debt repayment, but from the perspective of this committee, we hear a lot of presenters around the pressures on — let me use, for example — the education system and young people. I think most people consider the future economic health of British Columbia to be dependent on training the next generation of entrepreneurs and professionals who can meet the skill needs of British Columbia. I’m wondering which you think is a more important approach for us to take.

Finally, on the carbon tax, I’m unclear. I’d look forward to your examples. I’m not aware of any examples of diversion of the carbon tax. I am, however, aware of the Finance Minister stating publicly that the carbon tax is actually revenue-negative, not even just revenue-neutral.

B. Hasanen: Good questions, thank you. On your first notion of tax reduction versus credits, the chamber of commerce position on any sort of taxation is to create a much more simple tax environment — one that is manageable, easy to understand and that doesn’t take a lot of extra negotiations and discussions.

One of the things…. I’m not sure when the discussions with the Jim Pattison Group may have happened, but the world of business is evolving at a very fast pace, where a tax credit or a special consideration three or four years ago may be of no value today. Business evolves at such a rapid pace now that the idea of reducing the corporate tax rate gives our business a competitive advantage.

Again, the reason for that is not so much just to give tax rate reductions. The idea is to create a competitive business environment in the province of B.C., in the Kamloops area. When people are looking from the outside in, the first thing they look at is: what are the tax rates? They almost get lost in all of the various different special allowances, occurrences or whatever it is, based on what the flavour of the day is.

It’s a good idea. It worked well when we had a more simple business environment. But in today’s environment, it’s something that we could spend a lot of time on and by the time we realized what we were doing, it would no longer be valid. Computers are a great example of that.

On your second point, on debt versus education or health care, etc., again, your education budget and health care budget are laid out to the point where if you run a zero-base budget, you’ve got those all covered off. The surplus is a decision that you’re welcome to make on what to do with the extra money available. That’s why the chamber advocates for only 50 percent of that going to debt and the other 50 percent going to what the will of Parliament is on where it will be best served.

We’re not asking for all of it to go to debt. We’re asking for prudent management of the surplus over and above what you’ve already budgeted for your health care and your education, which, ideally, would be satisfactory for the institutions that are affected by this.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m sorry, sir. I’m going to have to stop you. We’re out of time. We have more people waiting.

J. Yap: Yes. You made a comment about applying surplus to debt, 50 percent, as you just said. How do you see the difference between operating debt and infrastructure debt? The province is called on to build more hospitals, build more bridges, highways, infrastructure, and that means adding to debt, right? In the recent update from the Finance Minister, the debt is gradually increasing, but the operating debt is decreasing. What are your comments on that?

B. Hasanen: That’s a very good point, the idea being that there is no question that infrastructure is going to need serious attention. The key focus is on the operating debt. There is a difference. We all know good debt versus bad debt. As long as the budget is in such a place where you take interest rates into consideration and there is a need for structural, that’s something that should definitely be embraced. But when it goes to operational debt, I think that’s something that we have to pay serious attention to.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Great. Thank you very much for taking the time to come forward and present to the committee. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Mr. Anderson, welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a heads-up when there are a couple of minutes left, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

J. Anderson: Good morning. As you mentioned, my name is Jim Anderson. I’m the executive director of
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Venture Kamloops, which is the economic development agency for the city of Kamloops. You have your handouts in front of you. Today I’d like to speak to you about an issue that we believe is gaining more and more importance and becoming more and more dire as time goes on, and that’s the issue of business succession.

I’ll just say, before I get into my presentation, that the presentation refers to small business owners and entrepreneurs interchangeably. We’re talking about the owners of small businesses in our province, particularly in Kamloops.

I guess the first thing I would like to do…. I won’t read the handout verbatim, but on the second page after the title page there are two diagrams. Those are what are normally referred to as population pyramids. They’re no longer pyramids; they’re more like a population hourglass. Traditionally, in history, the younger population has been larger than the older population. That is no longer the case.

The purpose of the two diagrams is to show you that Kamloops is very representative of the population of the province as a whole in the age demographic.

The reason that becomes important when we talk about business succession is because the number of small business owners and self-employed business owners is aging. The number of younger business owners is not increasing at the same pace. So our concern becomes: what happens to these businesses if there are not enough young entrepreneurs to take over businesses that are currently in existence? We have business owners who would like to retire, who would like to enjoy the golden years of their life. But increasingly, the only option for them is to just discontinue the business when they retire.

That becomes a problem for us as economic developers, because the numbers of jobs that are tied to these small businesses and small business entrepreneurs is actually quite startling. There’s data in the presentation to support this.

I just wanted to run you through it. I guess I will say this. The idea of the aging population and its effect on business…. In most cases, there are large assumptions made. They’re largely based on data, but there are many assumptions made. What I and my staff tried to do in this example was to bring some empirical data to the equation and just give you an example of what it would do to Kamloops if we don’t act to promote business succession.

The data that you see at the top of page 4 is taken from StatsCan and from the 2014 B.C. business profile. The age cohorts that are identified there are a combination of both those data. We did a little math.

To make a long story short, considering the aging of the different cohorts and the expected retirement ages of people in the oldest age cohort, over the next ten years, we can anticipate the potential closure of 404 businesses just in Kamloops. That is a combination of that data plus the number of business licences that we see in Kamloops.

Why is that number of 404 significant? It represents an 8 percent decrease in the number of business licences issued in Kamloops, which may or may not — depending on your perspective — seem like a large number until we start to look at the number of employees that are attached to those 404 business licences.

What we did to provide some data in that regard is we went a step further and incorporated some data that has been gathered by the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training in Business Walks that they’ve done in other smaller communities around the province. We’ve taken the averages of the number of employees that were identified as attached to small business entrepreneurs.

If we take those numbers and extrapolate them out to Kamloops, a decrease of 404 small business owners, depending on the way you do the math, could equate to a job loss of anywhere between 2,500 and 4,000 jobs over the next decade. That’s what becomes truly startling to us.

To overcome that type of job loss from an economic development standpoint is an insurmountable task. We need to act before this type of shift in the landscape happens. Then the question becomes: “Well, okay, fine. What kind of things can we do?”

Our organization isn’t a policy-driven organization. We don’t make recommendations for policy. But simply, I want to shine the light on what we believe is an increasing problem — one that not only affects or will affect Kamloops but is a provincewide problem.

There are things that we see now. There are programs in place to help the purchasers looking to purchase businesses, notably the B.C. PNP program for foreign investment. There are EI programs for people looking to get into business. In the private sector, financial institutions are now increasingly looking at ways to finance entrepreneurs who are looking to buy businesses more creatively than they did in the past.

But we feel that there’s a gap there with regard to incentives for current business owners, to provide them with that extra incentive to, first of all, sell their business — to make the effort to ready their business for sale, make it a saleable commodity and sell that to someone who is willing to continue the business on past their retirement.

Also, an incentive or a program or some help during the transition period. When that new entrepreneur, who will no doubt be less experienced than the existing entrepreneur, takes over that business, what can we do during that transition period to help the two of them, to help the outgoing business owner move into retirement and the new business owner move into business?

We talk, in our office, about an idea of tax credits on the business sale or some sort of funding for a period of months after the business changes hands — something that will ease that transition, promote the transition, give the new entrepreneur the best chance at success, allow that business owner to move into retirement with peace
[ Page 1633 ]
of mind, with comfort, and leave the community with a business that is part of the economy.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to say. I don’t want to go through all the numbers that are in this presentation, but I wanted to give you an idea of what we’re talking about.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you so much for your presentation, and thank you for the creative idea.

I wondered whether you have had any kind of either look or discussion with the purchasers to see what’s holding them back — people who may be looking at moving into taking over a business. Is there any kind of research done around what’s keeping them from taking that step?

The second piece of that, I guess, is: what’s that demographic? What’s that purchaser demographic? Is it folks who’ve owned a business? Is it new folks who are coming in? Is it young people who are keen entrepreneurs? Is there any kind of demographic that really needs to be focused on?

First of all, financing is a problem. It is tough for young people. That ties directly to the second part of your question. The demographic is the young, sharp entrepreneur who wants to do something, sees the opportunity in an existing business, has ideas to grow that business. But financing is a problem.

As I mentioned, the private sector, the banks, are looking at doing deals on cash flow now, which helps a great deal. After we get past the idea of…. Okay. We have these young, sharp people. If we can find ways to get them the money, do they really understand the need to maintain the culture of the successful business? That’s where that overlap with the existing business owner comes in. There’s a logistical, financial block for them that can be overcome in many cases.

I should go back and clarify. When I suggested a tax credit, we were thinking about tax credits on vendor takebacks. The existing business owner wishes to carry the financing for the new business owner. Perhaps there’s an incentive that way. That would get around that financing hurdle.

These young people aren’t as experienced in business. They understand maybe the core function of the business. Maybe they’re a great welder, or they know how to do the skill that is required at the core of the business. But they need to understand how to make that business part of the community and part of the economy.

I was curious. In the submission, it talked about providing incentives for sellers — that there needed to be more ways to convince them to sell the business rather than just close it. It surprised me, because, of course, you would think that they’d want to sell it because they could make money for their retirement. What would hold people back from wanting to sell a business rather than just…?

J. Anderson: It is surprising. Many of the things we see are…. Many of the aging entrepreneurs just don’t want to make the effort to make their business ready for sale. They don’t want to pay for a business valuation. They don’t want to go through the process of a business valuation. They have a number in mind that they want to sell their business for, and that’s the number. Many are wary of putting their business up for sale too early because they believe that a business up for sale is less attractive to customers.

There are any number of psychological reasons that just don’t fit. They are surprising. They don’t fit with what you would see as well. “Don’t you need to sell this business to retire?” If they’ve done things well and they’re in a good spot, maybe they don’t. For the majority of businesses, that’s definitely not the case, but there are some who just throw up their hands and say: “I’m just not prepared to…. I’m ready to retire. I don’t want to do more work now.”

S. Gibson: Interesting idea. I owned a small manufacturing company for a while. Getting to that, coming out of a university background, was quite fascinating — the contrast. So I share some of the points that you’re making.

Isn’t it true, though, that often when a business is sold, the value actually turns out to be in the building, not the business? It’s ironic, in a way — all the heartfelt effort.

My question is: isn’t it largely related to the personality of the individual? Sometimes that has value. It’s not discernable on the financial statement that somebody else comes along to buy the business. It’s hard to replicate that — where Uncle Bob is running his business for 30 years, and this young guy comes in and tries to replicate Uncle Bob, but he’s not Uncle Bob. I’d like your comments on that.

J. Anderson: I think “replicate” is too strong a word. I think when we talk about the idea of transition between the two business owners, it’s to give the new business owner an idea of how this was going for the existing owner, how he approached things, how he made his mark, how he filled his niche in the community and in the economy.

People are different. They’re going to want to do things in their own way. They’re going to want to go off in their own direction. But I think, during that transition period, if they take over an existing business, just to see what made that business successful — other than, like you say, the bottom line, or not the fact that the warehouse increased in value over time but the things that that existing business owner brought to that business that made it successful — is a key thing, that transition period, to help exactly that.
[ Page 1634 ]

J. Yap: You mentioned that the purchasers need some support and that financing is an issue. We’ve heard from the credit unions about their role in communities and the economy. One of the aspects of what makes credit unions unique is their focus on local — supporting community and supporting local business, especially small business. If the large banks are more discerning in their selection of risk, would credit unions not provide the support that potential new entrepreneurs and purchasers of businesses would be looking for?

J. Anderson: It’s interesting you bring up credit unions. I worked in credit unions for 22 years, and I’ll say this. While the criteria may be different, at the core of it, trying to fit a young, inexperienced entrepreneur into a potentially larger purchase like that can be difficult. I think there are extra measures that need to be taken to bridge that gap.

The credit unions do an amazing job of doing what they can to ensure that the community is supported, that local entrepreneurs have every opportunity to enter into business, but at the end of the day, lending decisions are lending decisions. I think we’re talking about something further than that, some support further than that.

C. Trevena: Well, it’ll be a very short question. You refer to PNP and foreign investors. I wondered if you had any figures on the proportion of businesses being bought by foreign investors in the Kamloops area and possibly provincewide — if you could reflect on that. I see it in other communities of this size.

J. Anderson: Those numbers are out there, and I don’t know them off the top of my head. I can tell you that with the PNP program, it’s a small percentage in Kamloops. We have been, historically, very successful with the PNP program. Just getting used to the new revamp of it, but we have been successful in that regard.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Anderson, for providing your presentation to the committee.

Welcome. As I mentioned before, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a heads-up with a couple of minutes left, and then we’ll shoot to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

A. Shaver: Thank you very much. My name is Alan Shaver. I’ve been the president of Thompson Rivers University for five years and really love living in Kamloops. I’m also very proud to be serving Kamloops and the community by being president of the university.

We’re here for our students. We’ve been here for our students for over 45 years. It’s our 45th anniversary. In fact, this year is our tenth anniversary of being a university.

We started off as a two-year college back in 1970. Then, as the community grows, we grow. As the community becomes more and more diverse and differentiated, they start to say: “We want four-year programs. We want baccalaureates. We want, in addition to the trades, professional programs like nursing, education, social work.”

That goes on for a number of years, and then, in 2005, they say: “Well, we need to go to the next step. We have access to baccalaureates and trades and four-year programs. We need graduate programs.” The next step for us, as a community and a region, is graduate programs, master’s programs. We also need access to a full-service university that does research — not the kind of research that you might think is esoteric but research that actually serves the region.

The baccalaureate programs, the trades programs and all those other programs serve the region. The research serves the region. That’s the way that we were founded — that sense of service. So our research serves the region as well. It serves the region in two ways. One way is through the education of undergraduates. Another way is through the education of graduate students. Then, of course, the benefits of research go to help our communities.

Why do undergraduates need a research-informed education? Because answers to the questions of tomorrow are not in today’s textbooks. And so this gets us to the design of a modern university and what we need to do in terms of understanding the variety and range of our students and also the modern needs of students with respect to being successful.

B. Ross: Thank you, Alan. My name is Brian Ross. I’ve been a lawyer in Kamloops since 1971 at Fulton and Co. and have volunteered to do service at Thompson Rivers University on many fronts. In the last six years, I’ve been on the board of governors and, in the last two years, the chair of the board of governors. I’m understandably proud of our institution. TRU is a modern university. We create many diverse paths for learning, and we encourage all segments of our society to seek out that learning at TRU.

Our student body includes mature students and working students. Over 10 percent of our students are international, coming from 78 different countries around the world. More than 10 percent of our student body are First Nations.

Our undergraduate and master’s programs engage in community- and industry-based problem-solving research. We do applied research, not theoretical research,
[ Page 1635 ]
and we partner with industry to help them solve their problems. A good example of what we can achieve occurred two days ago, when the province — and we thank you very much for this — announced funding for our health care assistant program.

The result of the funding created 32 new seats for this program. We had a waiting list. There’s a need in our society for these kinds of skilled workers, and the province recognized the need.

Minister Lake and Minister Stone spoke at the announcement, and also, a graduate from the program, Tiara Zerr, spoke. She’s a great example of what TRU can achieve. She was poised and assured and admitted that prior to attending TRU, she would not have had the confidence to speak to so many people.

After graduating from her short program, she was employed within a month, pursuing the career that she had chosen. Most importantly, during her discussion, she talked about her planning for future post-secondary education.

So we graduated a lifetime learner, which is the exciting part of TRU. She will be back and will become more and more skilled and provide more and more to our economy as she grows and matures.

TRU is also a very entrepreneurial institution. We have, through four public-private partnerships, built our two residences on campus. We’ve built our campus activity centre and our international building. All four of those buildings, valued today at about $100 million, did not involve the expenditure of any taxpayer money. We embrace public-private partnerships. They’ve been a great result for us.

Currently, we are continuing that entrepreneurial path. We are engaged in the development of a university village through development of our land. The transfer of the land will be by way of leasehold interest. Again, there will be no involvement in taxpayers’ money, but it will generate revenue for educational purposes as that development goes ahead.

A. Shaver: The next section is: meeting the needs of the province. Of course, that’s people — people of highly developed skills — and it’s successful people. If you go to the second page, we have a little sidebar about the utilization numbers with respect to the students in our programs. You can see that those numbers are great. The employment rates of students graduating…. By the way, the employment rates and the utilization numbers are B.C. government numbers. This is not something that is developed by the universities.

NSSE is the National Survey of Student Engagement. We engage in that to see how we’re doing against other institutions. We’re doing extremely well, as you can see, for having engaged students. Students actually can answer questions. It’s not an opinion poll. It’s: “How many times do you talk to your supervisor? Do you have students from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds in class with you?” So diversity. There’s a whole series of those questions, and we’re doing very well.

Forty-five years, 60,000 alumni — and a very high percentage of those are working in the Interior. So we’re really taking our mandate very seriously. And you can see that we’ve done economic impact studies. You can see that the ratio, the return on investment, is multiple times our base grant. And in the case of international students, internationalization, for which we get no base grant, it’s $113 million.

The formula that we have today for funding was generated 15 years ago. A lot has changed in 15 years. The kind of university that TRU is wasn’t envisioned 15 years ago. The transitions from high school to universities, from universities to business and careers — we’re engaged in that. Retention. The kinds of support, including student support. Also, there’s experiential learning, the co-ops, learning abroad, the hands-on learning. Those are totally unfunded by the system.

We feel we got started off poorly because we’re a kind of institution that the system for funding didn’t anticipate. And the form of education today has changed enormously with those extra student services, compared to 15 years ago. So we really think we need to have an overhaul, and we need to get more funding to do the kinds of things that we need to do.

B. Ross: Alan had touched a little bit on research. At TRU, we feel that our research is important for the education, for the institution, important for our community and our industry in the interior of British Columbia.

Our research is applied research. For example, we deal with mine reclamation, First Nations health, and it is undertaken by both our undergraduates and our graduate students. Unfortunately, we receive no funding whatsoever for our graduate students, from the province, and I think this puts us at a competitive disadvantage with other institutions.

Students who want to advance their education through research may choose not to stay at TRU because the resources just are not made available to us. There’s no funding for graduate students.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Sorry to interrupt, but you can continue on past the ten minutes. It’s cutting into to the question time, that’s all.

On the last page of our presentation are the two capital asks that we have spoken about to government before. I wanted to remind you of them.

As Alan pointed out, our current trades and technology building is utilized 200 percent. It services 2,000
[ Page 1636 ]
students. It was designed to serve 1,000 students. It’s extremely efficient but extremely crowded. We are currently planning a new technology and development centre, a second one, which will be built next to the first one.

We expect to have our concept plan and business plan submitted to government by November. The total cost of that project will be $30 million, and we will be asking the province to fund 70 percent of that capital cost. It provides graduates in all of the needed trades and professions to help this province grow.

A. Shaver: We have an ask in, where development would be with the government for increasing our capacity in health education. I’ll let you read that. We’ll go to the bottom line.

B. Ross: Again, just strengthening Alan’s comments that the funding formula for our post-secondary institutions has not been reviewed in any extensive manner for the last 15 years. The world has changed in 15 years. We’re recommending that this remarkable post-secondary education sector we have in British Columbia — that helps our province to be successful, that helps it to grow and to be economically prosperous — needs to be looked at more closely.

The funding has been essentially stagnant or frozen for the last number of years. While you can get away with that for a short period of time, it can’t last without doing damage to our economy.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. We have a couple of minutes left.

S. Gibson: Well, thank you very much. Good to see you again. I really admire the energy and passion you bring to Thompson Rivers and especially the entrepreneurial approach, which I think as government we certainly respect and admire.

One thing I’m given to understand is that in the U.S., universities there, especially in competitive cities like Chicago, where there’s a tremendous amount of pressure, not just one university in town…. A lot of universities now are going much more flexible in terms of where a person can have a full-time job and get a credential off hours. This tends not to be the paradigm in our province.

I taught, as you know, at a couple of universities for 16 years. They’re very conservative. If you don’t want to go to school during the day, you’re out of luck. Now there are some adult-oriented programs, but they’re not offering credentials. They’re more diplomas and certificates.

The other thing is that many U.S. universities are going after adult learners. It’s more lucrative, because they’re willing to pay more for tuition. Can you comment a little bit on those?

A. Shaver: Well, we’re in that business. We’ve been in that business since 2005 because we were merged with the B.C. Open Learning Agency. So we have B.C. Open Learning, and that’s exactly their clientele. When we do profiles of our students, you can see the age differential between the on-campus students and the on-line students.

We’re also starting to see on-campus students taking courses on line simultaneously as being on campus. You can get the same degree, whether it’s on line or on campus. It’s one TRU, one degree.

B. Ross: We have 12,000 customers on line right now and 14,000 customers on campus. We’re serving 26,000 students.

A. Shaver: We’re a university like no other, and the system doesn’t anticipate that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking time to present today. We appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule.

A. Shaver: We look forward to more conversation on how we might be able to start to modernize the way universities are funded in the province.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Our pleasure. As I’ve said to everyone else, you get ten minutes. I’ll try to give you a wave with a couple of minutes left, and then we’ll go to questions.

T. Smith: Ten minutes won’t be too hard, and one-answer questions are perfect.

I’ll give everybody a little background. I’m here for a couple of things — of course, to ask for something, and the other thing is just to create awareness of who we are as an industry.

I am the president of the Allied Golf Association of British Columbia, which encompasses British Columbia Golf, the National Golf Course Owners Association, the Canadian Society of Club Managers…. Really, what we’ve tried to do with this association is to collectively put all the associations together so that we can work with government with one voice. It’s an opportunity for us to interact with what happens with government and for
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government to have basically one phone call to find out what’s going on with our industry.

About six years ago, we got together to do that. In that last six years, what we’ve been able to do is unify the entire golf industry. We worked very diligently on other programs within government. We put on annual golf symposiums, and we work with the British Columbia Golf Marketing Alliance through Destination B.C. to work on bringing tourism to British Columbia.

We have made a number of presentations to government. One of the things that we didn’t realize ourselves was the size of the business. When you put over 300-plus golf courses together within the province, you realize that it’s over a $2 billion industry. We employ about 44,000 people, of which 50 percent are students, so it’s a large basic employment opportunity for the province.

It provides about $1.1 billion in household income and produces about $465 million in taxes. This is more than the ski, fitness and rec centres in the country. Golf is a large business for the province of British Columbia.

As we do have approximately 330 golf courses across the province, our opportunity for community involvement is huge. We can spread out the word of what it is that we’re doing, whether it’s water issues, pesticide issues, any of the issues that are affecting the industry right now. We have a very quick network of getting out to those individuals.

Golf is basically the number one participation sport in the country at this stage, and it’s also a sport that you can start and play for the rest of your life. I was at a golf tournament last Friday and having a conversation with a fellow whose father was 92 years old and still played golf three or four times a week. Unlike tennis or basketball or football, golf definitely allows you to continue to participate for life.

We also have a number of very high profile golfers who have gone through the ranks in British Columbia. Part of what we do is support that whole issue of creating heroes within the province and creating participation through those individuals.

B.C. is also a huge golf destination. Over one million Americans travel to British Columbia to play golf a year, and 1.7 percent of all the international visitors that come into British Columbia play golf as well. Golf from a Canadian perspective: Canadians spend about $585 million on travel in British Columbia. There are six primary golf destinations within the province.

We like to think of golf as a green space. That’s one of the reasons we’ve all managed to get together on this. There are a lot of perceptions of what golf is, whether it’s good for the environment, whether it’s not good for the environment. We have some of the most highly trained individuals working in golf courses utilizing the newest technology.

With that in mind, we have the capability of being able to answer most of the questions that come up quickly regarding the environment and the use of golf courses and properties within the province of British Columbia.

We also work very diligently with environmental stewardship. We’ve set the standards for integrated pest management by setting a greener standard and working with the Ministry of Environment and the province on setting standards for the qualified use of pesticides within the province.

We also work with outreach programs for schools. We’re dealing with this right now through the Ministry of Education, where we utilize golf courses as classrooms with the STEM program — or science, technology, engineering and math — and the arts as well.

We now have a number of schools on board. We’ll be having our first inaugural demonstration day, on the second of October, with representatives from the school districts to see the program that can be spread out across the province.

We fund that program ourselves. It’s just basically a field trip for the schools, utilizing the learning techniques that the school has set up.

Right now we’re dealing specifically with water and water management as it’s become a problem. We’ve been working on this for the last three or four years. With the drought situation that we looked at this year, we’re sort of ahead of the curve a little bit on that.

What we’re really looking at…. Our ask from our group to the government is to work in cooperation with us as partners in how our industry evolves and where you see water management, the environment and tourism and economy.

What we’d like to do is to introduce an adult fitness tax credit to help British Columbians maintain an active and healthy lifestyle.

Within the environment framework, we’d like to increase our work with the Ministries of Environment and Forests and Lands to produce more effective water resource management strategies so we can deal with some of the drought issues that may come up, and to work with local governments to maintain competitive water rates. Those are some of the issues that are facing different municipalities at this stage of the game. We’re really looking at just trying to participate in some of the municipal and provincial opportunities that will arise.

As for tourism and the economy, we work specifically with Destination B.C. right now. We’d like to continue working with them to produce an opportunity in partnership to bring people from everywhere to British Columbia and be able to play golf.

In closing, golf, we feel, is good for British Columbians. It’s good for our health, good for our environment and good for the economy of British Columbia. Thank you for allowing me the time.

E. Foster: Thank you very much, Trevor. I don’t see anywhere in there where you’re going to improve my golf game, so I’m not inclined to help you out.

I have two questions. Do you only represent the private golf club courses, or are the member-owned part of your organization as well?

T. Smith: No. We represent any golf course. Certainly not just private. That’s one of the reasons why we have this collaborative effort. There are different needs by private clubs and there are different needs by community clubs. So we represent all areas of golf.

E. Foster: My other question has to with water. In our area, which is semi-arid, I believe all the major golf courses are using reclaimed water. Is that something that you’re promoting across the province? Do you have any idea of what percentage of your members would be using reclaimed water?

T. Smith: Well, it’s funny. I ran the first project, Rivershore, that utilized wastewater in the country. So even 35, 40 years ago there was a huge effort to do that. Predator Ridge also uses 100 percent reclaimed water.

We really support the use of reclaimed water whenever possible. Our irrigation systems on a golf course are some of the most highly complex and technical applicators of water. If we can certainly be open to the opportunity to use reclaimed water, then we always will.

S. Chandra Herbert: I was interested in the suggestion about an adult fitness tax credit. I’ve read a lot of studies that suggest that those sorts of tax credits often get taken up by people who are already doing the activity, so it doesn’t actually incent more use. I’m just wondering if you have any studies to suggest otherwise.

T. Smith: We don’t have any studies to suggest otherwise, although it has been proven that by utilizing those, it certainly increases the participation in certain other areas.

T. Smith: I’m just trying to think of the study right now. It came out of the U.S.

T. Smith: Yeah, I’ll forward it on to you. That was the reason that we looked for the tax credit. It was specifically through that study.

S. Gibson: I just live around the corner from Ledgeview golf course in my riding, which is one of the toughest courses, as you know, in the Lower Mainland. The lament that I hear from a lot of the folks in golfing around my area is not getting enough young people coming in at the bottom to create this future golfing culture. That’s the real worry. Is there something that we can do as government to work with you to try and get that vortex moving? That’s the concern that they tell me they have.

T. Smith: Well, in the First Green program, which comes out of the United States, they’ve put through about 250,000 children through this program. We’ve adopted that program. What it is, is it takes the STEM learning program, but then it also introduces them to being able to play the game in that same three-hour component, so that they’re then exposed to it. Our idea is to take the participation component of the sport, mix it in with the education, get it into the schools at an earlier age, at grades 4, 5 and 6, and be able to have kids that would maybe have never been on a golf course subject to that.

That, mixed with the learning component of it…. I think sometimes it’s just a matter of exposure. The golf clubs now are way more inclined to bring people into the golf courses than they were back in the private golf club days. Those days are gone. This is about a sport for life. That’s really where we’re headed with it. That will be our initiative over the next year.

C. Trevena: Thanks very much for your presentation. It was very interesting. I’ve got a couple of questions. One, you’re very positive here, but I was reading in The Economist about three or four months ago that globally, golf is on the decline, that fewer and fewer people are actually playing golf, and that there’s been an overinvestment in the courses. I wondered if you could comment on that, how that reflects on B.C.

Secondly, the aspect of tourism. Again, very interesting. I know that there are a number of smaller golf courses, particularly on the Gulf Islands, both the northern Gulf Islands and the southern ones. I’m wondering if you’ve had any discussions with those courses about how to enhance that as part of the tourism, particularly when you’re looking at the cost of ferries. People who want to go over in these beautiful settings to play golf can’t actually afford to get there.

T. Smith: To answer your first question, it’s economics. There’s no question that golf has been overbuilt. Like anything, when the price goes down, the owners see a reduced value in their property, and the cost of everything goes up.

What we’ve seen are some golf courses going by the wayside, which helps the supply-and-demand compon-
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ent of it. But we’re really teaching better management now. Better business management of golf courses results in a lower price ratio, so that people are more apt to get back into it. I think it’s really an economic cycle that will probably change over the next five or six years. It’s not going to happen instantly, but it will be a slow change, based on what the economy does.

As for tourism through the Gulf Islands and Vancouver right now, we have the six regions. The Vancouver Island region is working specifically on bringing tourism, especially under golf. They do wine tours, and they mix a number of different things together with golf to enhance the desire to go into those different regions — the same as the Kootenays and the north as well.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Impeccably timed — well done, 15 minutes. If only you could help me with my slice.

Next, we have the Canadian Mental Health Association, Kamloops Branch — Christa Mullaly.

Welcome. As I mentioned to everyone else, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a little high sign when it’s getting close, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

C. Mullaly: Good morning, everyone. My name is Christa Mullaly — Canadian Mental Health Association, Kamloops Branch. I’m a new executive director in the community. I’ve been here about six months, and I came from the Downtown Eastside, where I had worked in mental health and addictions for just about 17 years. I’m going to tell you a little story about that at the end of my presentation.

The Canadian Mental Health Association, B.C. division, is part of a nationwide charitable organization and has been a champion for positive mental health since 1918. We facilitate access to resources that people require to maintain and improve mental health toward an end vision of mentally healthy people in a healthy society.

In addition to our provincial office, which is in Vancouver, we have 14 branches across the province and provide a range of services that reach over 100,000 British Columbians in over 100 communities each year. The services and supports we provide include housing, employment services and a range of programs designed to prevent mental health problems and to do early identification.

We recognize there are continued economic and systems pressures, especially when it comes to health spending. In times of continued fiscal restraint, it’s becoming increasingly important to spend smart, certainly with a focus on prevention and early identification.

We believe that with the right mix of investments, services and supports, it’s possible to prevent mental health and substance-use problems and, if problems have developed, quickly get people the help they need. In the long run, we know that this will save valuable public dollars.

This submission focuses on two areas: first, striking a better balance between the investments made in community and the investments made in acute and tertiary health care services; secondly, the ever-increasing need to help people who cannot work and who receive disability income assistance to make ends meet.

My first point is really about our current spending picture and how it’s crisis-driven. On the ground, we see that. It’s clear that there’s a continued investment in acute and tertiary care, yet in spite of a growing demand for services, there remains a lack of investment in community-based mental health and substance-use care.

Between 2000 and 2014, mental health and substance-use expenditures increased by 63 percent. The majority of individuals with mental health and substance use struggle to find timely and appropriate care. They have difficulty accessing safe and secure housing and, all too often, face incarceration as a result of their illness.

There is evidence to suggest that the prevalence of mental disorders has not changed across time. Yet between 2007 and 2014, emergency department visits and hospitalizations for children and youth with mental disorders increased by 45 percent and 37 percent respectively. Among the top ten reasons for hospitalization in B.C., substance use and mood disorders rank third and fourth, only behind childbirth and respiratory disease.

Clearly, our current health care system is crisis-driven. We’re paying for it in mental health and substance-use care, in the most expensive way possible.

I’m asking that the government match investments dollar for dollar in the area of community-based mental health and substance-use services with investments in the area of acute and tertiary health care.

One of the things that has been certainly important to me throughout my entire career is the focus on health promotion, primary and secondary prevention.

CMHA provides a lot of those services with not a lot of dollars. The focus on prevention and early identification really means that we currently invest very little in health promotion and prevention, not only for children and youth but also for adults. In 2011-2012, of the $12.6 billion spent by our health authorities, only $536 million was allocated to population health and wellness, and a small portion of that spending was allocated to mental health promotion.

Many studies have shown that investing in upstream approaches to mental health can have huge returns on investment, anywhere from 10 to 1, to 14 to 1.

Mental Health America’s B4Stage4 campaign is a comprehensive campaign geared towards raising the profile of
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early identification and screening, with a goal of identifying people at stage 1 of developing mental health or substance-use problems. The campaign uses the analogy that among physical illnesses — examples being cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes — stage 4 represents the last possible stage across the illness continuum. Stage 4 should be avoided at all costs, and mental health should not be an exception. CMHA B.C. is planning to bring B4Stage4 to B.C.

Accountability for addictions and treatment spaces is the next point that I would like to talk about, in that there be a straightforward and understandable system of tracking funds, system capacity and human resources, particularly to and within health authorities. Explicit tracking would aid in better understanding of how the B.C. government aims to meet their promise of 500 additional beds by 2017. Realizing this commitment would be an important step in building a robust addictions treatment system in the province.

Finally, income support. It’s probably not the first time today you’ve heard someone touch on this, and it probably won’t be the last.

I worked for 17 years on the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, and I worked with a population of folks that were on welfare and disability but had actually been banned from accessing government offices directly. So I was working with a really tough population. We had about 1,400 clients a month across five communities in the Lower Mainland. I thought: “Hmm. I’m going to move to Kamloops and see what’s going on there.” I did. It’s a beautiful community. I’ve been here six months, but I can certainly tell you that the mental health and addictions issues are the same.

It seems like quite a bizarre comparison, Kamloops to the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. I see the same people. I hear the same stories. I hear the same frustration and this sort of despair at not being able to find services and not being able to find services when they need them.

We know that income is one of the most important and powerful determinants of health. There’s a significant correlation between low income and high rates of mental health issues.

The Canadian Mental Health Association in Kamloops provides low-threshold shelter beds here in Kamloops. We’ve got a 35-bed shelter called Emerald Centre. We’re full probably six nights a week. We also offer the extreme weather response program here within our shelter. This year, we were asked by B.C. Housing to not put a top limit on how many folks we would take into the shelter during extreme weather. It indicates to me that nobody wants to really talk about how big this issue is.

Since 2001, the PWD rate has only increased by $120 a month while the cost of basic essentials — food, clothing, personal care and whatnot — has increased by 17.2 percent. Current PWD benefits — or persons with disability benefits — total $375 per month for shelter. When I moved here from the coast, everyone said: “Oh, Kamloops is so cheap. You won’t have any problem finding a great place to live.” Not the case. I do have a great place to live, but it’s on par with Vancouver.

A total of $300 less a month is what folks that receive basic welfare get as compared to what a low-income senior would receive under the federal OAS and GIS programs. A government commitment to index the PWD rate against the cost of living would better reflect the cost of living in B.C. and help give everyone a fair chance to make ends meet and survive.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. Appreciate that. I will go to the committee for questions.

S. Gibson: Thank you very much for your presentation. I’m sure it’s quite fascinating for you to move from a highly urban area to this kind of community, so congratulations for the courage to do that.

My question is, really, one regarding the causality. We see all these problems, but often we look at the systems. We don’t look at the problem itself. We diagnose a troubling issue that’s creating stresses on our society by looking at sort of the cosmetic side of it and not the underneath.

I’d be interested in your comments. I think part of the problem today is that people are so isolated. They don’t have the support group. I’ve shared with this committee before…. I read an article by a British psychiatrist that said that 40 percent of his psychiatric patients could be released if they knew that somebody loved them. I think the challenge is today that we have so much isolation that the family unit is breaking down.

I suspect that a lot of these folks you’re dealing with don’t come from a “traditional family” environment, whatever we want to constitute that as today. I realize that’s more flexible. But nonetheless, these folks don’t have anybody to work with so they’re going to professionals as opposed to friends or colleagues or family. I’d be interested in your comments on that.

C. Mullaly: I agree with you that our system is set up to treat symptoms, really, or to mitigate symptoms.

The folks that we see at the Canadian Mental Health Association are twofold. We see folks that have been diagnosed with a mental illness who come from your regular family. They have an intact family. They have supports. It just happens.

Nobody is immune from developing a mental illness. Addictions are the same. It’s about folks not having coping skills to deal with what’s going on for them, so they turn to substances or an addictive behaviour.

I agree that there is a population, certainly, that is disconnected from their community, from their family. We’ve got a number of aboriginal communities in and around Kamloops. It’s a very, very strong voice that they
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have around that disconnect. We had Dr. Gabor Maté here last week from Vancouver, who talked about the dislocation of folks in society.

The other part of that, though, is that it’s difficult to find community when you’ve never known it. The clubhouse services that we provide with the Canadian Mental Health Association are essentially a day program for folks to come to a safe place and really feel some ownership over their community that exists there.

We get funded by Interior Health — $250,000 a year to operate in two communities, five days a week. It doesn’t cover it. It doesn’t even come close to covering it. So what our folks do at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon when we say, “Bye, go have a good weekend,” is if they have a home, they go there, and they isolate.

I absolutely agree that we need to do a better job about bringing folks into community and embracing them in a real sincere way over the long term. It’s not about a support group here or a mentor here. It’s about really deliberate, legitimate relationship-building.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you for your presentation. Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing about Kamloops — a great place to live — from friends who’ve moved there from Vancouver.

I’m curious. Recent studies I’ve read talk about the impact of poverty, the impact of widening inequality. If you’re struggling to pay your rent and you’re struggling to eat, cortisol shoots up — and that’s one of those hormones that you don’t want, because it really does harm your health.

You raised the question of raising the rates of disability, PWD, as well as prevention. Do you see those as kind of similar — that you might be able to help prevent some of the challenges we’re having if low-income people were able to appropriately pay for food, pay for housing? Those kinds of things may help deal with some of the underlying mental health issues that we’re seeing?

C. Mullaly: Absolutely. People get stuck, right? People get to a point where they’re in such despair because they just don’t see any way out. Prevention has a number of…. When we think about prevention, most folks think of kids. We’re talking about young people. The prevention continuum exists all the way through the entire lifespan.

I think that for us to recognize that prevention is something that needs to be maintained over the long term — and measured, of course, which hasn’t always been done…. For us to realize that prevention needs to exist within every population…. With folks that are actively ill, we’re preventing further harms. With folks that aren’t ill yet, we’re teaching them coping skills and other behavioural assets that are going to help them or help their friends or help their families.

Once folks are at a point where they don’t have a roof over their heads, they’re in trouble with the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation for not turning in some document, and they’re in really dire straits — those are the folks we see at the shelter. Those are the folks that don’t trust anyone to help them. They come in, they shower, they get clean clothes, they have a great sleep, and off they go the next day to collect bottles or hang out and panhandle downtown.

I think that we’ve got these two populations and this big gap in the middle. If folks had more financial resources — I’m not talking about lots here — if they had enough that it was actually reasonable to think they could maintain on their own, I think we would see a real difference, certainly in the folks that we see at the shelter — and the folks that we don’t see at the shelter. They are some of the folks we see through extreme weather response, who are coming to us as a very, very last resort because they don’t trust the system.

We’re up against a lot of rebuilding trust. We’re working with folks that are extremely damaged. They don’t even know what it’s like to feel normal, because they’ve been in their illness for such a long time that it’s tragic. It really is.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Ms. Mullaly, I’ll have to cut you off there — I apologize — important as the subject is. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and present to us. Enjoy the rest of your day, and good luck with your future here in Kamloops.

C. Mullaly: Thank you very much. The fishing is great — yes. The B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association is in town today, and we are doing a tour at Emerald Centre for a number of folks at three o’clock. If any of you are still in town….

Ms. Clare, welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give a little wave with a couple of minutes to go, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

F. Clare: Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to address you once again — in fact my third time, actually — about the importance of provincial funding for the provincial literacy network. I’m Fiona Clare, literacy outreach coordinator for Literacy in Kamloops, and I’m representing our task group of 17 community organizations.

We appreciate that people in communities are invited each year to tell you about what is needed and what is important in our communities. We thank you for the
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recommendation you made last year for annual funding of $2.5 million for community literacy work in B.C., and we’re grateful for the $2 million that was provided by the Ministry of Education at the end of the 2014-15 fiscal year, but this is still less funding than what is required.

Also, there is no multi-year funding as you recommended, and there is no commitment for the 2015-16 fiscal year. That makes literacy work in this province very unstable and uncertain. We respect this consultation process. We know that it is timely and expensive, so it is really disappointing to us when the recommendations you make are not acted upon.

Tomorrow, we will be hosting one of five community consultations that the Ministry of Education has put in place to look at literacy planning and coordination as well as how to evaluate the effectiveness of that work. We look forward to participating in this discussion and hope that it will result in better communication and coordination between the Ministry of Education and Decoda Literacy Solutions, our provincial literacy organization.

We also hope that the process will help us have a clear discussion about outcomes and that funding to support those outcomes will follow. Measuring the impact of our work is challenging, even if we had the capacity and the resources to do so.

What we do know is that our community is better off because of the work we do. The positive impact of literacy funding to communities as a whole cannot be denied. Research shows, over and over again, that there is a direct correlation between literacy levels and poverty, income, employment, health, even voter turnout, to name but a few.

You each have a copy of our latest district literacy plan update, which we are no longer required to submit to the Ministry of Education, but we do submit it to Decoda each year. It reports on the community literacy work we are doing in our school districts — so in Kamloops, Barriere, Chase, Clearwater and Logan Lake — which is very similar to the work that is probably happening in each of your own communities as a result of the community literacy network.

In Kamloops we know that service providers are better connected. They are better aware of the programs and services each offers, and they are working together to meet the needs of the community.

We know families have access to free Parent-Child Mother Goose programs. More than 1,800 parents and children attended this program in our community last year.

Free literacy nights in the mall and free Unplug and Play events encourage families to find a better balance between screen time and active time. More than 5,000 children in Kamloops took part in the Unplug and Play challenge last year.

Free children’s books are available through the bright red bookshelf project. More than 8,000 books were distributed in our community last year. In the bright red book bus summer reading project, more than 1,500 children accessed and chose free books off the book bus multiple times this summer to keep reading over the summer.

Parents are learning positive reading strategies to support their beginning readers at home. More than 700 parents attended a Come Read with Me grade 1 workshop in our school district this year.

Reluctant readers in elementary school are catching a love of reading from trained one-to-one volunteer tutors — more than 300 children each year — and are becoming better readers.

Adults who do not read and write well have access to free volunteer tutors who work with them one on one to meet their own learning goals. In Kamloops we have the Kamloops partner assisted learning program, and we also have street school, with volunteer tutors. More than 450 adult learners attend street school each year.

Inmates at the local jail have the opportunity to read a story to their children through the Storybook Project and then can work with volunteers — again, in the school program at the jail.

Seniors are being helped — again, volunteer tutors, one on one — on how to use their technology and become more connected with the digital world.

We know that we are making a positive difference in the lives of many in our community.

It took a picture of the body of a small boy washed up on a beach to get the world to pay attention to the Syrian refugee crisis. We don’t have pictures of bodies — thank goodness — but we do have stories. Stories of real people — people like Ken Grover. At the age of 56 and just 4 feet, 10 inches tall, Ken Grover’s dreams are starting to come true. He has a job, is living independently for the first time in his life and has friends to go fishing with. Ken is finally feeling confident — confident enough, in fact, to share his story with us.

Ken spent his entire life hiding from everyone the fact that he could not read and write. Finally, at the age of 54, he said to his mom: “I’m going back to school.” Surprised, she said: “But Ken, you have an education.” Ken had a high school grade 10. Ken said: “Well, not really, Mom. In fact, I’d be lucky if I had my grade 4.” When Ken was tested, he was actually at a grade 2 level.

Ken does not have happy memories of school. He recalls getting the strap in front of the class, being put at the back of the class with the other kids who weren’t making the grade and being teased relentlessly for being stupid and short. He was moved around a lot, started skipping school and eventually dropped out.

He tried his hand at carpet laying, construction, demolition. He made good money, but he still felt like a failure. He couldn’t live independently because he was terrified people would find out that he couldn’t read and write. He said it was hard work getting by every day.
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When I asked him, “How did you do it? How did you read?” he said: “Well, what I would do is I’d go to one person and ask them to read this one word, and then I’d find another person and ask him what the other word was, until I could finally make sense of it.”

Ken felt like a failure. He began drinking, started doing drugs and getting into debt and ended up in jail. I think it’s quite good timing that I’m following the Canadian Mental Health person, because that’s kind of Ken’s story. It was there that he met Scott, a teacher in the jail who helped him believe in himself again, had him tested and gave him hope that he could learn.

After his release on parole, he moved up to Kamloops, where his social worker or support worker encouraged him to sign up for the partner-assisted learning program, the free adult literacy program for adults with lower literacy. His PAL tutor, who’s been working with him now for two years, built his confidence up to the point that he was actually willing to try street school, which is a school district program.

It’s a very innovative adult education program. Ken has been a student there now for two years. His life is getting better now because he’s finally getting an education. He passed his foundations level 4 in math and English, which is about the equivalent of grade 8, and is working on his next level.

He said: “I want to keep on going. I’d love to get my grade 12. I don’t care how long it takes. I have to dream.” He hopes his epitaph will one day read: “Ken got his dream.”

You may have noticed — hopefully, you managed to avoid it — that there’s some major repair work being done on our Overlander Bridge between the airport and the hotel. We didn’t wait for a car or two to fall off the bridge into the river below — that would have caused public outrage — before deciding to spend millions of dollars on repairing the bridge. Yet people fall through the cracks in our education system every day, and we allow this to happen.

Our education system serves most well, but it doesn’t meet the needs of all. And it cannot do it alone. Should we not be investing in those whose needs are not being met by our system and those who have already been left behind?

This is the essence of community literacy. This is what we do. We help children and adults who need support within the system to succeed, and we help those who didn’t make it. This hugely cost-efficient system, driven primarily by highly motivated, trained volunteers, does require core funding from the province to sustain the coordination of it all. It’s a small investment compared to the funding provided to the formal education system.

I’d like to leave you with a quote. As the former director general of UNESCO, Kōichirō Matsuura, said: “Literacy is inseparable from opportunity, and opportunity is inseparable from freedom. The freedom promised by literacy is both freedom from — from ignorance, oppression, poverty — and freedom to — to do new things, to make choices, to learn.”

We here ask that the government continue to provide the minimum amount of funding required for the coordination literacy network: $2.5 million for the province, according to the recommendation that you made last year and the year previous to that too.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. There are two things I was reminded of again. One is the resiliency of people who struggle with literacy. I think you described that so well. It’s not a matter of intelligence. It’s not a matter of determination. In fact, people who are illiterate have more than their fair share of those kinds of skills.

I think the other piece is how far you stretch a dollar. The description of all of the programs that you do with the small amount of resources is really outstanding.

I wonder if there’s any particular demographic that you’re seeing right now where there’s increasing pressure. You described programs, everything from Mother Goose to seniors programs. Is there an area where there’s a growing demographic that you’re feeling pressure from right now?

F. Clare: I think that with the seniors population there is definitely…. It always comes up at our community meetings that, with the baby boomers getting into…. Basically, I think anyone over 50 has some digital challenges, so there is a real need. Our society changes, and so much of our work has to be done on line now. If you want to access forms or anything, it has to be done on line. There is a huge need there for support for seniors around digital literacy.

Also, I know that in our adult education, a lot of 50-plus adults have lost their jobs, for whatever reason. To try and get back into the workforce, they have to have their grade 12 or their GED. They have to get their upgrading, and it’s such a challenge for them to go back to school at that age. I would find it a challenge, too, to do math 12 now.

Then, of course, with children…. I think we touched on that earlier about the families. The social-emotional, the EDI — that quotient is going up. I think it has a lot to do with our society and how people are…. We talk about them being disconnected and isolated, but a lot of that’s to do with technology, too, and people just being too attached to their screens and not talking to each other. That impacts literacy development as well. There are just always new challenges coming up all the time.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for your presentation and, more importantly, your work. I would love to see literacy organizations across B.C. get the stable fund-
[ Page 1644 ]
ing that you require to plan. I also want to commend you for painting a very, very clear word picture with your story about Ken.

Two things struck me. One is that the drive and determination that people need to actually get through their lives, doing various workarounds to the fact that they can’t read, certainly prepares them to do the work that is necessary to learn to read. The other thing that struck me is someone whose reading and writing abilities are at a grade 2 level actually made it to grade 10.

I’m wondering if you can comment on any work that is being done, or any work that you think could be done, between literacy organizations and the educational system to actually ensure that reading and literacy issues are addressed early instead of just passing people through the system.

I can only assume this was done because it was easier or because Ken was extremely adept at convincing people that there was no problem. But something’s wrong here, and I’m sure you would agree that Ken would have had, in many ways, a more rewarding life if the attention that he needed was paid during the K-to-12 years and not at the age of 54.

F. Clare: Absolutely. I bring this question up to our Decoda Literacy organization all the time. Why do we have such a high population of adults, 40 percent, who are still struggling with low literacy, yet we have such high graduation rates? Then I talk to the professors at the UPREP department at TRU. I’m sorry that Mary couldn’t be here today, but she often tells me that they have these graduates coming to TRU. They’ve got pretty good grades, and she said they can barely put a sentence together. They were doing a lot of upgrading.

Yes, I do think that there’s a big problem in our education system as it is. I think part of it is that accountability is an issue. I mean, I know that we…. People always get scared talking about this, but our unions are very, very strong. There are teachers in the system who are not necessarily doing a very good job, though pretty much every adult learner I talk to said that they hated school, they didn’t do well, and they didn’t get the help they needed in school. I think that is an issue. I think, as well, that…. Identification, of course.

I think when there’s a strong support between community and the education system working together and there’s a lot of use of volunteers, we can do better. Also, with no child left behind, we don’t like keeping children back. We keep pushing them through to keep them with their peers. But if they’re not making the grade, then that doesn’t actually set them up for success later in life.

So I agree. There’s a lot of work to be done within our education system as well.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Clare. There’s so much to say and so little time to say it. I apologize, but thank you very much for coming forward and presenting to this committee. It’s much appreciated, and thank you for the work that you do.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next…. Hey, we have our first Invasive Species Council of British Columbia. Welcome. We’ve gone all week without seeing you. Where have you been?

Ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a little warning when we’ve got about two minutes left, and then we’ll go into questions from the committee. The floor is yours.

G. Wallin: Okay, thank you very much. First of all, thanks again for having us. I’m not sure if that was because you overextended our times before.

G. Wallin: As I was looking around and listening to the last presentation, I was thinking ten years ago we wouldn’t have the same conversation, because invasives at that time would have been seen to have been a rural, agriculture issue. It’s actually one of the earliest acts in Canada, the Canada Thistle Eradication Act, 1865. So it’s got a long root, really, in that agriculture sector. It’s been a big shift.

Our council, the Invasive Species Council — I’m the executive director for it — is 12 years old. We’re the largest and oldest provincial chapter in Canada. We’re actually a founding member of the Canadian Council on Invasive Species, and I serve as a co-chair.

The Canadian council is actually a body that works closely with the federal government and provincial governments — there’s a rep from B.C. — to deal with national-wide strategy issues related to invasive species. So it’s pretty neat. B.C. is in a leading role in Canada in this.

We have the most invasives, along with Ontario, so we have other reasons to be in the lead, but we’re also seen as a lead in Canada, both for the role that government does — with the structure that you’ve taken — the role of our council and all the different initiatives and partners we have across.

I want to give the history of that, which you’ve already got, but I also want to say that it’s a new world now. Looking around, where you’re all from and where I’m from, we’re all connected by invasives. Many of you are connected by fire ants, which were not in the news till two years ago. Those are having a huge economic impact on us. But the agriculture, the forestry, the tourism
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sector — those are all other areas that have been heavily impacted economically.

Things I’ll highlight. I didn’t come here with a whole spiel on invasives, but a couple of other ones you might be interested in are the northern snakehead fish, which caught the news in 2012. Prior to that there were no regulations in B.C. to stop the sale and distribution of an exotic fish that can crawl across land, eat ducks, etc., and they found it in Burnaby Lake.

You guys acted very quickly, and you had, within six months, a regulation. But there are other invasives that fall between the cracks in the three major pieces of regulation you have.

A couple of other ones have been in the news — knotweed this summer. I don’t know how many interviews I did with knotweed, a species that impacts your infrastructure, road structure. It comes up right through the middle of highways. Fire ants. The hawkweeds are an agricultural one that you see across B.C. There are a whole range of them.

The economic impacts that I wanted to speak to are that…. Yes, these are an environmental issue. In fact, in the United States the research says that 42 percent of the threatened and endangered species in the United States are impacted directly by invasive species. We don’t have the equivalent here, but it’s big. We also have systems like the Garry oak ecosystem and the grasslands that are directly impacted, never mind specific species.

Yes, an environmental issue, but a huge economic issue. The estimates…. Actually, some people refer to it as an invisible tax. In Canada, basically $13 billion to $34 billion a year is lost to invasive species, which is a number that I find hard to believe, but that’s what the economic researchers quote.

The impacts for forestry. It’s things like you can’t get trees to grow in areas that you’ve had Scotch broom if it’s been thick enough, or Marsh plume thistle in the north, which will suppress the growth or change the soil toxicity. Agriculture certainly knows it infests the rangelands, infests the seed crops, etc. It’s a given. Tourism. Many of you are from the coast. That blackberry is great for blackberry jam. Actually, you can’t hike trails when that thing has crawled across, so there’s actually a major impact.

Local governments have actually been way more involved in the last five years because of species like giant hogweed. It has WorkSafe regulations that you can’t go on past or touch it without the risk of second-degree burns. So it’s got an economic impact.

The presentation I’m giving you today is asking for you guys to step up to the plate in a bigger way, being the major land managers in British Columbia — 94 percent of our Crown land. There need to be other players at the table. It’s not just the provincial government. Industry and other governments also need to be there.

There’s no doubt that prevention is the key. One of the things in the news right now is around invasive mussels, but that’s an example. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t forget about all the agriculture weeds, etc. But it’s an example that we can either prevent it, or we can deal with and spend millions a year every year afterwards. The goal is always prevention. We need to be able to stop the species at the borders before they come in, be they from, usually, the south, but sometimes from the east.

What it requires is that you need to have a coordinated approach, and sometimes we have a little bit of a patchwork approach. We have a patchwork approach in British Columbia. You have mixed regulations right now, provincially, and then you have some local governments that are in, some First Nations that are in, but not everybody. You can’t really make a difference on giant hogweed or orange hawkweed unless you’re all working together across the same boundaries.

The success for this will be making sure that there are preventative tools that are cross-jurisdictional, and that needs to be all parties at the table in dealing with that. I used mussels earlier as an example. I’ve been working with, on the Canadian council side, a forest insect in Nova Scotia which has the ability to close down forest trade to Europe or put extra…. We don’t want that out here.

What we’re asking for is, working with the federal government, to put in a program called “burn it where you buy it.” So keep your firewood back in Nova Scotia. And they’re putting barriers around that. Well, we’ve had the same issues here, but they haven’t caught the news.

We’ve been successful on the gypsy moth, but we don’t want the European gypsy moth, which almost got established in Surrey. We don’t want that, because that will impact our forest trade.

We need to be able to mobilize more parties. Our council works a lot with parties, both in the private sector and in governments, because we all need to be working together.

We actually have the ability…. If you take a look at…. I was thinking about when you call in to report a crime. That’s a place that’s mobilized everybody to take a role. We need that same role with invasives. There’s no way that the provincial government can do it all. Nor would you want to do it all.

You want to activate citizens. We’ve been working with that on the changing behaviour programs, and you’ve got some samples with you: “Clean, drain, dry,” PlantWise. The reason those two are there is because PlantWise…. Over 60 percent of invasive plants are intentionally introduced. They’re planted for landscaping or gardens. Then they go wild, and you have trouble like giant hogweed, knotweed, Scotch broom, etc. So we’re focusing on the vectors.

From a government side you need to focus more on the vectors and be able to close those vectors, which come in from a shipping/transportation side. Roads and development are major vectors for the spread of invasive species, particularly plants. That’s because, when you get
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development, you’ve got vehicles and equipment coming in from elsewhere that are contaminated. Unless they’re cleaned before they come in, they bring in those invasives.

You need to clean them, and there need to be better best-management practices. We’ve been working with industry to have them. There need to be the incentives to have them adopt those and the responsibility to adopt them, which is, underneath your Weed Control Act, their responsibility, but it needs to be enforced.

There are successes. Invasives can be seen as a challenge. They will be with us forever. We need to make sure we’re targeted on the high-priority ones. The Asian gypsy moth is a success. Giant hogweed is gone from many municipalities because of an aggressive approach. It still exists in some areas. We want to see more people involved.

I’m going to wrap with some sort of…. You’ve got more details on specifics in your report, but there needs to be the dedicated funding. I know you hear that from every organization, but invasives don’t do well when you hit them one year, and you come back five years later. That gives them a growth period when you haven’t caught them in-between.

You need to have the dedicated funding. It needs to be multi-party funding, of which you have to be a major player. We think there needs to be additional dedicated stream funding, just like we have for habitat conservation for fish and wildlife. We need the same thing, and we’ve given you some options on that. We’ve done a fair bit of research across North America, particularly in the west, about tools, and the examples you have here are from tools that are used elsewhere.

We need to be working in partnership. You need to be encouraging incentives for those industries that do good work and enforcement for those that don’t. Underneath the current regulations, maybe you want to look at a more consolidated act so that there aren’t the loopholes. Fire ants fall between them, and fire ants are a major issue for local municipalities.

We need to close those sectors. One of the tools that’s been recommended in the Invasive Species Strategy for British Columbia, which your government was a major part in developing, was to establish a trust fund to enable that quick response when that new invasive comes in.

When mussels came in, in 2012, when there was no act in place, our council was able to react quickly. We had had your support in the past, and we were able to respond much more quickly than government could. In 48 hours, I could have people and equipment on the ground, and that’s not always possible.

Having that outside government partner is a key player. We want to continue to work in partnership with the provincial government, with your Inter-Ministry Invasive Species Working Group, with your leaders and at the political and the staff level.

I think the partnership is critical. The fact that you can be nimble and quick, which government often isn’t just because of the structure, I think is really important. I also want to emphasize, and I think you mentioned it as well, the need to keep up the education piece.

We go camping every summer. Two years ago there was a big push around mussels and washing boats. Every campground we went to we had folks coming in reminding us to wash the boat before you moved on to somewhere else.

Saw nothing this year. Saw nothing last year. So I think the importance of keeping that education up just to remind people and to build that awareness is really critical. I see you’ve got it as one of the recommendations, and I think it’s going to be important.

The program you would have seen would have been our Take Action program, called “Clean, drain, dry.” You’ll still see the decals and signs around, and we’re just moving to expand that further on. But good point.

I have two things. You mentioned the mussels. I just wanted to check, and I think it’s true, that the Invasive Species Council is supportive and has called for actual permanent stations on the borders, as opposed to just roving stations, to address zebra and quagga. That’s the first question.

G. Wallin: We haven’t called for permanent stations, but we’ve called for really strong prevention tools. Looking at what they’ve done across the Pacific Northwest, there are tools other than just permanent stations. That definitely is a tool, in the right place. The challenge with permanent stations is the manning of them 24 hours a day. So having effective stations at the right time of the year….

Most stations in the States were set up as permanent for the summer season. What they didn’t count on was the snowbird factor, coming north, which doesn’t happen to be in the same stations.

What we’ve worked on with government, instead, is making sure that border staff are better trained and have the better tools, now, with the federal regulation and the provincial regulation. So it’s one of the tools. It’s not the only tool, the permanent stations.

S. Chandra Herbert: Then just the other question. It drives me crazy that in my community and I know in many others there are things like the ivy pull, where you go into the parks. You pull the ivy, because it’s killing off all the other species. Yet you go to the garden store just next door, and they’re selling ivy with no mention that that’s invasive. And of course, birds pick that stuff up,
[ Page 1647 ]
move it around, eat berries, etc., of many invasives and spread them everywhere.

I know there’s a voluntary program that some garden stores are looking at. I’m just curious if the Invasive Species Council has considered at all asking government to say that if you’re going to sell it, at the very least you need to put a sign explaining that it’s an invasive, or just don’t sell it at all.

G. Wallin: I’m going to answer it in two parts. One is: we started on a PlantWise program, “Grow me instead,” six years ago, way before government was really into this. What we did is identify, with the horticulture industry: “Here are the invasives. They’re not listed. They’re not regulated, but here are the ones that are known to be invasives. How can you phase them out?” And we worked with leading retailers and growers in the industry.

We ended up with that voluntary program, now called PlantWise, and we’ve gotten more and more stores on side. What’s been happening behind government is that you’re now proposing to redo the Weed Act, which will include most of those same plants that we identified. But the intent is to go further.

We did a fair bit of research this year. Very few — I could almost say none — of the stores that we dealt with, of the GardenWorks or of the retail stores, were selling those 13 invasive species. Where you see them is the big-box stores, because there’s a whole different system. We’re working with them, and we’re encouraging government to get the Weed Act in quickly, because that gives you the tools to enforce. Right now it’s not enforceable for you.

We hadn’t asked government specifically to put the sign up. We’ll go one step further. You guys put the rule in, but we’re going to encourage leaders. You’ve got speeding rules on the highway, and people don’t listen. Let’s make sure that gardeners and stores know what the responsible behaviour is. That’s PlantWise. You’ve got a little bit of information there on it.

S. Gibson: That was similar to my question, but mine also included pet stores. There was a lake somewhere near Comox, up in your area, where the lake had completely been destroyed by everybody dropping in goldfish or some kind of thing. You know the story. How do we avoid…?

I think people are doing that. It’s not a malevolent thing. They’re not going out to be evil. It’s just they think it’s kind of fun to do this, and of course, the results are devastating.

G. Wallin: Absolutely. A couple of things there. Actually, what is happening is people are getting rid of their pets — just like pet rabbits or pet turtles or pet aquariums — and they’ll dump them.

An aside here. We twice have done an aquatic workshop, twice have brought in an international speaker. I sent my staff out to buy plants from aquatic stores. Every single time they’ve come back with…. He goes to identify them. “You’ve been buying milfoil.” Well, they were never labelled as milfoil. Most aquatic plants are mislabelled. Every time you dump your aquarium, you’re dumping milfoil in there — mostly likely dumping milfoil.

Again, the provincial government hasn’t got it regulated. We’re working with the pet and aquarium trade, now, to start our Don’t Let It Loose! program, and we’ll be working with schools and organizations to get that in place.

Some of the places…. Koi, which is what you were referring to, and red-eared slider turtles are two big ones that are out there in a lot of places. They’ve just found some breeding red-eared slider turtles in the Fraser Valley — first time breeding in this area — so not a good thing. Again, we can have all the regulations, but we need to make sure we’re working with pets in schools. So we’re looking for funding right now for a program called invasive-free schools and playgrounds.

By having the schools involved…. They have a high percentage of imported invasives in their classrooms. We don’t need that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Wallin. Please take care of the fire ants. I had a bad experience with them one time a couple of years ago. They are nasty.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much again for your presentation and for taking the time out.

Next we have B.C. Bioenergy Network — Mr. Michael Weedon and Marnie Plant. Welcome.

So ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a little wave when we’re getting close. Then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

We presented last year in Whistler, you may recall. At that time, we made a recapitalization request. We have not received further funding, but we are here again to make a request. Indeed, we recommend two options for consideration by the government with respect to recapitalization — a $25 million lump sum, which was the original funding of the network in 2008; and alternatively, a $5 million funding per year over the next five years that would provide some funding to continue to do the good work we have undertaken.

In terms of the B.C. Bioenergy Network mandate, this was a mandate established by government, part of the climate action plan, and this was presented last year. At this point, we have fully committed $20 million of the
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original $25 million. We have plans in place to deploy the remainder, so the gas tank is close to fully committed.

What we’ve done and what we’ve focused on is reducing GHG emissions, part of our mandate. We’ve focused on organic waste utilization, which encompasses agriculture, municipal, as well as forestry. Last year we focused on forestry. There’s a big opportunity there, but this mandate is much broader than just forestry. It includes municipal and agriculture sectors. Indeed, one of the things we’re trying to do is accelerate deployment. We’ve had some great success in achieving that, but that’s part of our mandate.

Okay, moving on. Last year, you may recall, we talked about the new technologies coming for the forest products industry: solid fuels; torrefaction of wood — sort of the next-generation white pellets; as well as liquid fuels. Indeed, these technologies are coming. We focused upon these because they provide the economics to pay for the energy conversion. You just have to demonstrate that it can be done, and then the free market will take it forward.

Of course, this is a global problem. We need to demonstrate and attract the private capital. We want to accelerate, and we need to demonstrate.

Since last year, we’ve been hard at work continuing our mandate, and we want to comment upon the continuing success of some of our activities. You’ve undoubtedly heard of Harvest Power, a very large organic-waste-to-biomethane production and electricity generation in Richmond. This is a world-class leading facility in North America. The company has invested over $50 million in British Columbia, bringing the best technology in the world, and it has become a world demonstration centre. We’re able to attract potential deployers of this technology to B.C.

Nexterra Systems. Nexterra, in the past 12 months, received another $60 million order in the U.K. The U.K. is focusing on low-carbon fuels, and we’re very pleased. This $60 million award was after demonstration projects in B.C. in the total of $40 million.

Finally, we’ve been hard at work with our Korea initiative. We participated in the Ministry of International Trade B.C.-Korea forum, where we demonstrated six technologies — three that were novel new ones for the future and three that were being deployed elsewhere. We had a very successful event, and we’ve got some information for you.

Moving forward, we want to just talk about the technology development process. People think that you go and push a button and that things magically happen. Well, indeed, some technologies could take 35 years to develop.

Think of the fuel cell industry. That technology is actually just coming of its own right at the moment after substantial investment, not only by the private sector but also by governments. The U.S. government has put a lot into that.

We start from the lab bench. We have pilot scale, we have small demonstration, we have full commercial scale, and then we have expanding markets. The B.C. Bioenergy Network focuses on small demonstration and full commercial, and that’s where we get the leverage. We’ve mapped on this little chart here some of the companies that we’re involved with and where they stand.

In terms of deploying new technology for the future, the real challenge is that everyone wants to be first to be second. It’s really hard to get the first project. There is a lineup to be second, and this is why we need demonstration projects — to de-risk the new technology in logical stages. We want to attract investment capital, and we want to overcome the inertia that typically exists with existing traditional industries.

It’s a challenging job, but I think that in the public interest, we need to support the development of technologies which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Moving forward, in terms of what we see and what we recommend to the committee, we need to foster demonstrations over the next five years if we’re going to meet our greenhouse gas emission targets that we’ve established. They’re really in four fields, and they’re listed on page 8.

There’s biogas development — that’s taking landfill gas and municipal waste streams and turning them into compressed biogas or liquefied biogas.

Liquid fuels development — drop-in diesel, gasoline, jet fuel. These technologies — they’re not dreams. They’re here today. They just need to be demonstrated.

Solid fuels. We need drop-in coal replacements for municipal, agricultural and forestry sectors. All these sectors have low-cost waste streams that can be converted into valuable energy.

Then biomass processing. This deals with the fire-damaged issues that we have in the province, the mountain pine beetle, non-merchantable crops. Indeed, there’s the opportunity for short-rotation chops and the utilization of biochar, which can be a very valuable soil nutrient.

On the next page, we just outline the allocation of funds, where we would focus those funds in terms of demonstration projects. There’s a total of a $25 million commitment. Last year, we talked about a $20 million commitment. We think that we should be doing more.

Let’s focus now on the next slide about climate action 2.0. The work is underway. The homework is being done. Many of you are aware that there’s a discussion paper that has been out and a survey that has been conducted. Well, we contributed a technical briefing to the climate action secretariat on Monday of this week.

I’ve excerpted on slide 11 one of the key components of this technical assessment. This chart here shows a graph of all the liquid fuels that exist that can replace diesel. Diesel is shown in the bottom right-hand corner of that chart with a carbon intensity index of 94.

Where we focus our efforts is in the low carbon intensity. Up at the top in green you see the projects that we have been supporting and developing. We can get close to a 90 percent reduction in carbon intensity from fuels by adopting the new clean, sustainable fuels. That’s what
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we’re focusing upon. We’re focusing upon demonstrations in those particular areas.

One example. If 100 percent of these new fuels were used at a blended rate of 20 percent, we could meet our transportation fuel objectives that we’ve set out for ourselves. This is within our reach, if we remain committed.

We’re just finishing up. We made the point that we need to reduce our GHG emissions by 80 percent by 2050. That’s 35 years. We’ve got our work cut out for us, but we’re committed and believe that this is achievable.

In terms of some of the things that we want to do, we want to continue to work with Korea, which has an ambitious environmental program. We are working with China now, with the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, and they are quite literally desperate. Over 4,000 people a day are dying in China right now from pollution from carbon, from use of coal. I mean, they are desperate. They need energy solutions, but they need health solutions, pollution solutions. We’d like to work with them, and we might be able to attract some other capital here to B.C. to provide some of our solutions.

Then finally, just to wrap up, yes, we are looking for a serious commitment, and we hope to be able to answer any questions.

Now, with respect to the rest of this package, there are some more background slides. They’re provided here. We’ve included our technical submission to the climate action 2.0 for your reference. We’ve given some highlights with respect to the B.C.-Korea forum, which was a great success, and we also, for your reference, provided a copy of last year’s submission. So we’re hopeful that in the new year, you’ll find ways to support our request.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for your presentation. I actually spent quite a bit of time last spring and in the summer reviewing a whole range of alternative energy and low-carbon fuel alternatives.

My question for you is…. I don’t necessarily expect you’ll have an answer today, but I’d love to receive it at some point. In terms of lowering greenhouse gas emissions…. I think we know there’s a difference between utilizing biomass that would otherwise degrade in an uncontrolled manner and release carbon — where it’s, for instance, a waste by-product from logging — and using biomass that otherwise wouldn’t be utilized at all and would be storing carbon.

If you can quantify the proportions of the opportunities for focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from waste by utilizing them for biofuel and bioenergy, as opposed to actually taking carbon that would otherwise be stored and not released at all, that would be great information for me and my colleagues, I’m sure.

M. Weedon: Super. Well, there are opportunities. There are great opportunities in the forestry sector. There are at least five million tonnes of biomass that are wasted or are underutilized, and these new technologies will be able to utilize them and replace other fossil fuels.

On the municipal side, there’s a wide range of new opportunities coming. There’s some new technology coming that can take very low-cost and nasty waste streams and convert them. So there’s a big chunk in municipal. There are also agricultural streams. They’re probably the most challenging because they’re more dispersed and you’ve got a cost collection of those. But they’re great opportunities. I can follow up with further information with you.

M. Plant: I’d just like to clarify the question. Are you trying to figure out a trade-off between some kind of sequestering technology versus converting to energy, or are you just trying to get the big picture of what the volumes are of biomass and how much greenhouse gas emissions they might be able to reduce?

G. Heyman: In its simplest form, I’m trying to ask you to clarify the relative proportions of your feedstock — which is stuff that would be waste and which is stuff that’s being harvested specifically for projects. In the former, I would include off-gassing by municipal waste that would otherwise be uncontrolled.

M. Plant: We are trying to approach gathering that information. What’s interesting is that different sectors are in different stages of: “It’s easy to find the information.” We would agree with you that that is a really worthy information pursuit to follow, so we are pledging to try and report what we find, either through your written report process or to…. There’s a further submission we can make to the climate action 2.0. So I think our sense right now is we won’t have a complete answer in the next few months, but we’re going to give it a go.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’ve got one minute left, so if you want to get to one more question, could we hold that in abeyance? Thanks.

S. Chandra Herbert: I just wondered whether or not you were aware that the B.C. government has actually now committed to be at 80 percent below 1990 levels of GHG emissions by 2050. The law says 2007, but they signed an agreement earlier this year with Washington, California, Oregon. So it’s actually an even steeper climb.

Thank you for pushing us to act now. As you know, it’s time. I just really appreciate this. And thanks for raising Harvest Power. It’s a fascinating example. I got to tour it
[ Page 1650 ]
and would encourage others to as well.

M. Weedon: Thank you for that. Just to the order of magnitude, Harvest Power takes about 40,000 tonnes worth of food waste and residuals that were previously put into landfills. Well, in the Lower Mainland, we can probably deal with five of those plants. Surrey has just announced one recently, but there are two or three others. So there are big opportunities here. This industry is just getting started. It’s going to be a way of life for all of us in the future.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time to present. I appreciate it.

Next we have our friends from Enterprise Rent-A-Car — Stephen Wilk and Mike Tierney. Welcome.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good morning. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a little wave in the last two minutes so that you can wrap up. Then we’ll go to the committee with questions. The floor is yours.

S. Wilk: Sure thing. My name is Stephen Wilk with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and I’m the vice-president and general manager over our British Columbia operations. Joining me today is Mike Tierney, who is our corporate controller here within the province.

On behalf of our organization, which is Enterprise Holdings — I’ll get into a little bit about our organizational structure in a second here — we’d like to thank you for your time. We understand that you do have busy schedules, and we’re appreciative of you speaking with us today on British Columbia’s insurance regulation and, therefore, introducing competitive parity by harmonizing B.C.’s insurance laws that fall in line with other jurisdictions in North America.

To give you a little bit of an idea about Enterprise Holdings, we are the largest, most comprehensive rental car provider in the world. In 2014, Enterprise Rent-A-Car produced $17.8 billion in annual revenue and employed over 83,000 people in 70 countries, with 8,600 locations. As well, we also operated a fleet of over 1.5 million vehicles.

Enterprise Holdings is the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent-A-Car. We are the top-rated rental car customer service company in North America, as voted by J.D. Power and Associates. Locally, provincially here, we operate 56 locations between the three brands that we operate, over the four geographic sectors — which are the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island, the southern Interior and then the north central portion of the province — with an average fleet of 5,500 units.

Today we employ 481 folks within British Columbia, with an average payroll exceeding $13.7 million. Our economic impact is $210 million directly and $72 million indirectly.

On behalf of the rental car industry, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is respectfully seeking the reform of two insurance regulations in British Columbia: the current order of coverage, also known as primacy, and vicarious liability for the specific purpose of aligning liability with fault.

Order of coverage. British Columbia’s current order of coverage makes the insurance policy available to a rental car company respond ahead of the insurance policy available to the driver of a rental car. This forces the rental car company to bear the financial burden of damages resulting from the actions of a negligent driver, instead of the negligent driver being responsible for the damage he or she may cause.

Vicarious liability makes the rental car company jointly and severally liable for the negligent acts of anyone operating the vehicle with their consent. This leaves the rental car company liable for damage awards, which in British Columbia have been capped at $1 million, resulting from the negligence of the rental operator — even under circumstances where the rental car company has no direct negligence.

Consequently, the current order of coverage and vicarious liability laws have the unfortunate effect of unfairly placing financial responsibility for the negligent operation of a rental vehicle with the rental company and not with the negligent driver. If someone rents a car in British Columbia and gets into an accident due to their own negligence, it is the rental car company that is legally responsible for the costs, not the negligent driver.

It is our understanding that the law of negligence is intended to hold people accountable for their actions. The current order of coverage and vicarious liability laws, as applied to the rental car industry, do not achieve this accountability.

We are respectfully requesting that the insurance regulations be reformed to align liability with fault in accordance with the principle of accountability. British Columbia is one of the only remaining jurisdictions in North America to hold rental vehicle companies vicariously liable for the acts of their customers and on a primary basis.

Almost all Canadian provinces and the vast majority of states in the United States have reformed their insurance practices to align liability with fault, to make negligent drivers responsible and accountable for their actions. Most recently that was experienced in Nova Scotia, which passed the order of coverage in 2013 from primacy to a secondary stance for rental car companies.

It is time for British Columbia to modernize its insurance regulations, in keeping with the North America standard of practice, and realign liability with fault. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the unfairness of the current insurance regulation in British Columbia is through an example.

If an Ontario tourist comes to British Columbia and rents a vehicle and is in an accident which they have
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caused, the cost of that Ontario renter’s insurance or negligence will remain in British Columbia with the B.C.-based rental car company. The cost will not be borne by the negligent rental car driver or their insurance from Ontario. This example highlights some of the negative implications current insurance regulation has.

Competitive disadvantage. The current order of coverage and vicarious liability laws, perhaps unintentionally, transfers the financial consequences of the negligent car drivers to the rental car company, which has no responsibility for the accident. This drives up the cost of insurance for rental car companies, leaving B.C.-based rental car companies at a competitive disadvantage with most North American jurisdictions that have realigned.

The rental vehicle industry is an important component of British Columbia’s tourism industry and needs to be able to compete fairly with other jurisdictions for visitors.

Also, poor public policy. Current regulations are not good public policy. They do not encourage personal responsibility or accountability and contradict the accountability objectives of the negligence law.

Enterprise understands that the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia is currently seeking a 6.7 percent increase in insurance premiums. That was announced two weeks ago. We strongly suggest that the updating of B.C.’s insurance regulations in a manner that aligns liability with fault will help to prevent unnecessary insurance cost increases and support ICBC’s efforts to maintain fair insurance premiums.

In conclusion, we respectfully recommend that the rental car industry and the government of British Columbia work together to update and change the province’s insurance legislation by realigning liability with fault. Therefore, it would realign competitive parity by harmonizing the laws with most other jurisdictions.

S. Chandra Herbert: I guess, just to understand, all those insurance forms that I’ve signed when I’ve gone to Enterprise saying, “You’ll be held liable if you do this, that and the other thing….” Is the suggestion that now, I, or anybody else, could drive crazily and that you would be held responsible for the driver’s actions? It seems to be out of this world, if that’s the case.

M. Tierney: To answer your first part of the question, everything that you’re signing on the form — we’re talking about your direct responsibility, using you as an example here — that’s talking about the vehicle itself and not the liability impact that it has on third parties.

Currently, due to the nature of the law, our policy and we as a company are fully responsible for damages due to third party. As a renter, you’re primary responsibility — what you’re signing for or optional products that you might be purchasing — are just for our vehicle itself, nothing to do with third parties.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you. In reference to your vehicles, I rent from Enterprise when I travel in B.C. I’m curious what proportion of your cars are actually insured in British Columbia versus Alberta. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a car from Enterprise — or seen a car from Enterprise — that has British Columbia plates on it.

M. Tierney: Sure. Right now we are currently through an IRP program that allows us to rent vehicles from B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan. Legally, as Stephen mentioned earlier, we average about 5,500 vehicles in our fleet, so we have to maintain B.C.-plated vehicles on at least 5,500 vehicles. Now, some of them may be in B.C. Some of them may be in Alberta. But we have over 5,500 B.C.-plated vehicles.

S. Wilk: Along with the way our tourism industry here is, in B.C., we have a lot of one-way-corridor back and forth between Alberta and B.C., so you do see….

E. Foster: Part of my question was why would anybody buy insurance. Now I understand. You don’t want to make this public, because you’re going to lose all that.

I guess, then, my question is: if I’m the victim, if you will, and one of your cars hits me and your driver is responsible, where’s my protection? I say: “The driver is responsible.” I know that in other jurisdictions, if you use a gold Visa card, for example, the Visa card covers that personal liability, and so on. But as the victim, I have to know I’m going to be able to collect.

Right now I know that the deepest pockets are going to pay me. If we change the system and someone from California runs into me, where’s my protection?

S. Wilk: That’s a very fair question. In most other jurisdictions, there are minimum financial requirements that the owner of the vehicle must possess. For instance, in other jurisdictions, it’s $200,000.

The rental-car industry, Enterprise being part of that group, is not trying to exclude itself from the entire process. We’re trying to follow the negligence under the driver. Then once their policy is exhausted, Enterprise, Budget, Avis, a dealership or a body shop is responsible
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for their portion of those requirements as well.

Today, we’re capped at $1 million. We have to provide the first $1 million for liability. If it exceeds $1 million, the impact is back to ICBC policy payees. In our opinion, that’s where the public is losing. That’s where you see the 6.7 percent premium request and the 5.2 percent increase that occurred last year.

M. Tierney: To go directly to your initial question, I believe, though, if that customer came up from California and, for argument’s sake, they had Allstate insurance, under today’s laws, what we’re trying to accomplish is shifting the primary, where Allstate would be responsible for the first $1 million and then us and our policy responsible after that.

E. Foster: Okay, fair enough. I’m all in favour of the person who causes the accident being responsible. But at the same time, insurance is about protecting the victim. We want to make sure that we don’t encourage changes that aren’t going to cover that.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much, very interesting. I think it’s got us all asking lots of questions. I have two questions. One is: what is the cost to the company at the moment for the present situation? I mean, you’ve got the liability up to $1 million. How much are you actually spending a year on this?

S. Wilk: That’s a great question, Claire. In 2011, our liability premiums were $5 million. As we come out of 2015, we’re anticipating we’ll exceed $13 million in liability — just our company alone.

C. Trevena: We’re talking about the plates coming over this way. What happens if somebody rents a National car here in B.C. and drives over to Alberta and gets into an accident in Alberta? What are the responsibilities? Alberta — what sort of insurance setup do they have in relation to this?

M. Tierney: If you physically rent in B.C. today, then if you’re involved in an accident in Alberta, California, that liability is coming to the B.C.-plated vehicle. It’s coming back to the owner of the vehicle.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I have couple of questions. The first one actually relates to something that Eric brought up. What role does the underinsured motorist protection play? That is an option that you can purchase, if you do. In your circumstance, somebody rents a car. You have that initial liability, but you’ve also purchased the underinsured. Somebody hits you, damages your vehicle, and that person is from the state of California and they have minimal insurance. Does…?

S. Wilk: It would be the same way. The order of coverage would be your initial liability policy that you have. Then it would fall to the owner of the vehicle’s financial requirement, our policy, and then back to underinsured or uninsured motorist.

Secondly, you may not be able to answer this question, but I’m kind of curious how this situation might relate to the burgeoning car-share programs that we have. You can’t speak for them, I understand.

S. Wilk: No, unfortunately not. We do not operate Enterprise CarShare in B.C. as of yet.

S. Hamilton (Chair): No, but there are car-shares — car2go in Vancouver. Could this potentially pose a problem for them too?

S. Wilk: Absolutely. The rental car industry also impacts, as in one of the comments I made, body shops and dealerships that have their own courtesy cars.

That’s where the vicarious liability comes in. We’re capped at $1 million, but some of these fleet organizations have vicarious, which is unlimited. That’s one of the reasons why we’re looking at the two different sides of it.

J. Yap: Do you know if this will require a legislative change or a regulatory change?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Seeing no further questions, thank you very much for coming forward, giving us your time. I appreciate hearing that.

Next are folks from Vancouver Community College Faculty Association — Taryn Thomson. Hi. All the way from Vancouver.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, thank you. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave when there are a couple of minutes left. Then we’ll cut to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

T. Thomson: I’m Taryn Thomson. I’m currently the department head of the college and career access department at Vancouver Community College. Before that, I was an English instructor for 16 years. I recognize that you have all been sitting here for about three hours. If you were in my classroom, I’d get you to stand up and stretch or something like that. But just to make sure that you’re all paying attention, there will be a quiz at the end of my presentation.

Our department, along with the college foundations department, offers high school completion and focused upgrading. Our students are diverse. These students represent a broad demographic that includes Canadian-born, Canadian-schooled, settled and new Canadians, indigenous people, at-risk youth, people with disabilities, single parents, the working poor and heads of families.

Many of our students come to us because they need to get a better mark in a particular course — English 12, math 11, for example — in order to get into programs at our college or at other institutions such as Langara or BCIT. A huge number of our students need to upgrade in order to get into one of the health science programs at VCC, such as licensed practical nursing, hospital unit clerk, pharmacy technician and many others. Some of our students want to obtain their adult graduation diploma, as they didn’t complete high school.

The basic education department is another area of ABE at the college. It delivers basic reading, writing, math and computer skills to students, working from beginning skills up to about a grade 8 level. These citizens come to the college to learn, as adults, skills for living, working and furthering education. In the early stages, success is measured in many ways — by being able to help their children with basic homework or being able to read the notices sent home from school.

Basic education students with learning disabilities often experienced being pushed through school because there were not the resources there to help them, or they left school early because they were not succeeding. These students may have a leaving certificate from high school but not a Dogwood. If these students hope to get even the most basic of jobs or take advantage of any further job skill training or higher education, they must first acquire basic math, English and computer skills.

In 2008, the B.C. government made adult basic education tuition-free. This was a wise decision and meant that whether a student had graduated from high school or not, that student was eligible to do upgrading at whatever level they needed, for free. Last year, this government decided to insist that colleges charge tuition, as much as $1,600 per semester. The government also removed our base funding and replaced it with a pot of money called the adult upgrading grant.

Let me stop and emphasize this point. Not only did the government decide to impose tuition; it also chose to remove the college’s base funding for these programs. It left the colleges no choice but to impose cost-recovery-level tuition. This means that ABE charges an amount similar to, if not greater than, university-level courses. One has to ask why.

The government argues that any needy student can access this money and avoid the high tuition. However, the reality is much more complicated. First of all, the previous system worked. There was high enrolment in all our ABE programs. Students had a simple system whereby they could get any upgrading they needed and move on to employment, further training or education.

Now we have a level of bureaucracy that is much more complicated and which drives its own added costs. In order for a student to register, that student needs to provide his notice of assessment for last year, and he needs to fill out a lengthy form. Next, that information is processed by financial aid before the student is notified, up to a week later, whether he qualifies for the funding or not. Only then can the student proceed to get registered. All this creates barriers to access and delays in getting into classes. In the past, I could see a student at one o’clock in the afternoon and have him registered by two. Not so now.

In addition to the bureaucracy is the fact that only the poorest of the poor actually qualify for the adult upgrading grant, or AUG. In order to qualify, a student must have earned less than $23,700 per year. This means that if a student makes a little more than $11.25 per hour, he won’t qualify.

A person piecing together a living by working part-time at a low-wage job, and often in multiple jobs, cannot afford to pay the roughly $1,000 it would cost her to take math 12.

It is also very difficult for students who live with their parents. If a student is under 22 and living at home, financial aid will look at the income of the student’s parents. Often we’re talking about the working poor here, working families who barely make ends meet. So, too, the AUG rules don’t support these families, families who often support extended family but are not allowed to count them in calculation of income and family size.

I had a young woman and her mother in my office a few weeks ago. The young woman wants to do the medical lab assistant program at VCC. Dad and mom both work, but they don’t make a lot of money. When I talked about the AUG grant and the fact that this young woman’s upgrading would cost her about $1,500, the mother paled. “We have the money saved for the medical laboratory assistant program,” she said, “but we can’t afford an extra $1,500.”
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The new system is complicated, time-consuming for students and adds layers of work to all organizational elements within the college. Worst of all, however, is the effect this system has on student access to education. Students face the double whammy of very high fees for those whose income is deemed too high, and formidable bureaucratic barriers for those considered below it.

All ABE departments in the college have seen enrolment drop by 25 to 35 percent since tuition was brought in. This means that a certain percentage of students who need education in order to get better employment are not coming to school. In other words, hundreds of students at VCC and thousands of students around the province are not filling out an AUG application and not taking steps to improve their lives and the lives of their family members.

The long-term effects of these declining enrolments will be much further reaching than I think the government considered when it made this announcement in December. As thousands of students lose their opportunity to better their own lives, there will be significant repercussions for B.C.’s economy as those students have diminished spending capacity and less taxable income.

Last year, I know that my colleague and president of the VCCFA spoke to you about the devastating effects of the $22 million budget cut to domestic English language programs in post-secondary education. Some of the students who were in those programs have made an awkward transition into ABE out of desperation. Now, both those avenues for accessing education are closing for students and with them the opportunities they sought to improve their lives and contribute to society.

This government was elected in part on its promise to get people working and to make life better for families. This is precisely what ABE programs do. It is not logical for a government that has a jobs plan to place enormous hurdles before the very avenues that allow citizens to get jobs.

ABE students are future workers. They’re future intellectuals and food service workers. They’re future bridge builders and ferry boat drivers. They are nurses and electricians and mechanics of the future. Likewise, they or their children will be teachers and lawyers. They are our future. It does not make sense to place roadblocks in the way to the future for these folks who are taxpayers now, who will be taxpayers in the future. It is also not right to keep them small.

Everyone has the right to a basic level of education. I want to live in a province that values education and recognizes that it is an investment. This education, these programs, not only pays back the investment in higher accumulative taxes. They pay us all back with a better society.

Educated people are thoughtful people. They are voters. They eat better and are healthier. They participate. They volunteer in their communities. They care. This type of population is birthed from investment in education.

The new funding model for ABE doesn’t work, and it’s causing irreparable damage. I urge that this committee recommend that the 2016 budget include at least the $6.9 million previously allocated to post-secondary institutions to fund tuition-free adult basic education programs.

S. Chandra Herbert: There were two figures you mentioned in your presentation. One was, I think, the percentage drop in people accessing adult basic education. The other was the amount of money that had been cut to that program.

We’ve heard about adult basic education at all of our stops so far, and certainly, I hear it a lot in my community as well. Thank you so much for presenting and continuing the push to restore that investment.

T. Thomson: It’s currently about a 25 percent to 35 percent drop right now, as of September. We were down much more in the spring. We were down about 50 percent across all the ABE departments in the college. We’ve done a real push, and we’ve managed to get it up a lot more, but we’re still considerably down.

S. Chandra Herbert: If you could send those figures, it would be helpful for us — the rough figures. That would be great.

The other was just the budget figure that had been cut to provide, I think, $6.9 million.

G. Heyman: Thank you, especially for coming here to make the presentation. This is an important issue. I mentioned at one of the hearings yesterday that I’d been at a meeting where a number of people spoke about the potential impact that would have occurred to them as they were pursuing adult basic education to improve their lives, and others who were in the midst of it, talking about their fears about how it would impinge on their future opportunities — that their opportunities are our opportunities.

You were talking about how you used to be able to register people for ABE very quickly. They’d be up there within half an hour.

I’m wondering if you’re quantifying the amount of
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time that you are now having to spend in helping people through all of the grant process and talking through the awkwardness now — the bureaucracy and the difficulty of getting to that stage.

T. Thomson: Yes, it’s hugely complicated. It seems so simple to us. You just fill out a form and on you go. But I actually ran into a woman the other day whose son had just graduated high school and needed to go back just to do some math 12 or something, a little upgrading. He had grabbed the forms. This is a person just out of high school, really quite competent in navigating the world. He said to his mom: “But there are those forms that I have to fill out.”

It was even a barrier for a student like that. So for a student who has been out of the system, for whom educational bureaucracy is confusing, complicated and scary and hasn’t been good to them, it’s really overwhelming.

So, yeah, we spend a huge amount of time just trying to help students past that whole thing.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time to present.

Next, we have our friends from the B.C. Fruit Growers Association — Fred Steele and Glen Lucas.

Welcome, gentlemen. Ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll give you a little wave when we’re down to about two minutes left, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

F. Steele: Thank you. One of the things, very quickly, we would like to have you take note of…. The cherry industry has been growing for five years. We have found out in the last couple of weeks that the apple industry is now growing too. For the first time in 32 years, we put more trees in the ground than we took out. So that’s a positive move.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to address this meeting. We were at BCAC yesterday in Abbotsford, so we weren’t able to be in Kelowna. We’re currently harvesting in the Okanagan, Shuswap and in the Kootenays. We’re running about three weeks ahead of schedule, so it is causing a scramble, and it has done since the beginning of the season.

But we wanted to make some organized comments about the prebudget process for 2016, and I brought Glen Lucas, our general manager, with us today, to help to do that.

G. Lucas: Good morning. The BCFGA has had the privilege of presenting a brief to the prebudget consultation each year since 2002. Our association represents 550 commercial tree fruit growers in the Okanagan, Similkameen, Shuswap and Creston valleys.

Based on the most recent statistics available, the family-owned tree fruit farms in B.C. generate income of $74.5 million per year at the farm-gate level, with a packed value of $160 million per year and, using an economic multiplier, $552 million in economic activity annually.

There is renewal, as Fred mentioned, through replanting new varieties in high-density orchards. The cost to plant an acre of apples is at least $25,000. We are fortunate the provincial replant program assists with funding up to $7,500. We think it’s through this committee that that was introduced into the budget, the renewal of that program last year, so we would like to thank the province and MLAs for getting into place a replant program for the period 2015-2021.

F. Steele: Our new industry strategy for the period of 2015 to 2020 is ambitious. We’re returning to the idea of growth, job creation, niche markets, quality production, increased exports, and renewal and sustainability. These principles are, incidentally, consistent with both the provincial and federal goals.

G. Lucas: The prebudget consultation questions came out yesterday. We stayed up late last night and answered them. We’d like to step through those questions and give you the perspective of the tree fruit sector. We are biased, so that will come through.

The first question was: “Using a ranking of 1, most important, to 3, least important, how should the government prioritize flexibility that a surplus offers?” The three choices were: reduce debt and borrowing; invest in infrastructure like schools, roads and health facilities; and tax relief and affordability measures.

F. Steele: Incidentally, none of these are of the prime importance to our members. Our members are all family farm operations, and they provide employment and investment in the economy. They’ve not raised these as their major, overall issues.

However, having a balanced budget is wise and prudent. Tax relief, incidentally, is not a priority, as we have a competitive tax system at the moment. We would like to see investment and help in the industry to invest in infrastructure and innovation.

G. Lucas: The next question. “B.C. is working to protect priority services and keep life affordable for families within a balanced budget and declining debt burden. If you had $1 in new funding to share across programs and services that government delivers, how would you divide it up?”

I think another way to phrase this is: if you gave the BCFGA a dollar, what government services would they support with that dollar?

F. Steele: Well you’ve heard the old song “If I Had $1,000,000.” Well, this is a case of if I had $1, right?

We realize that government has other priorities and
[ Page 1656 ]
other competing interests as well, but this is what we would do: 15 percent for health care. Our members believe there’s a much greater emphasis needed on prevention. Growers have had to find new and more efficient and effective ways to farm, and we feel that operations of health districts need to have some transparent performance objectives.

We would put 10 per cent into kindergarten-to-Grade 12 education. Our members appreciate the school fruit and nutrition program, and we would like to see new invigoration of the teacher moments when the B.C. fruit and vegetables are being served in schools.

Five percent would go to post-secondary education and skills training. We would like some extra funding for institutions to adopt policies to provide, preferably, B.C. fruits and vegetables.

I can hear the laughter now. Zero for policing and public safety, although the role and importance and challenges for public safety are there. But our members have not raised that issue.

Five percent would go to social services. We would like to see more resources targeted for providing healthy fruit and vegetable choices for persons receiving support from government social services.

Here’s another one you’re going to get a laugh at: zero for roads and highways. While we appreciate transportation and infrastructure, our members did not identify that.

Twenty percent for natural resources and economic development. Economic development is a priority for our members. We appreciate the investment of the $1.2 million a year for the replant program. However, it is frugal when we consider that it used to be $5 million a year when the program started about 20 years ago. And there is a need for more investment in agricultural infrastructure and innovation, such as new packing and storage facilities.

For natural resources, we need the province to take responsibility for the deer in developed areas, as they do, for example, with bears. Deer are impacting a huge investment that we’re putting into new orchards, and a proliferation of fencing of individual farms could be stemmed if there were some ways to control deer.

Twenty percent for environmental protection in parks. Invasive pests — the reduction of pesticide use is a priority for tree fruit growers. We need investment in integrated pest management and in managing invasive pests.

Rail trails and hiking trails also link agritourism, which is beneficial. Zero would be spent on debt reduction. A 5 percent tax reduction would be nice.

Our sector supported the HST, as it clearly was a competitive benefit for food producers. Since the PST has returned and been reimplemented, we have returned to identifying what is exempt. We do appreciate the government participation in that program of having some things exempt. However, it becomes a real pain for both retailers and farmers in deciding what is part of that reduction and what is not part of that reduction.

The next question. B.C. is “one of the most diversified economies among the Canadian provinces. How should we continue our work to make job-creating industries more competitive? Choose your top priority.” The choices were to reduce provincial trade barriers and red tape, reduce corporate income taxes, reduce personal income taxes, make changes to PST within the existing framework and further promote access to new markets.

F. Steele: For all farmers, the common priority is to make changes to the PST within the existing framework. Some growers who export their crops are interested in promoting export market access.

G. Lucas: This is the final question. “What options could government consider to…make housing more affordable for those most in need without hurting families that already own a home?”

F. Steele: To increase affordability without negatively impacting families who already own a home, government could investigate the cause of increased home prices and regulate this demand. Any other intervention would distort the market, and the benefit would likely be transitory. As a result, it would cause further increase in home prices.

G. Lucas: Those were the questions. We have one final item of importance: the Columbia River treaty. We presented last year on that. We’d like to remind everyone that it’s still active.

F. Steele: The Columbia River treaty was signed in 1965, and it has impacted our sector in creating a steady flow for irrigation for Washington State tree fruit — and potato growers, incidentally. Washington State wants to secure these flows into the future.

G. Lucas: Currently, the treaty terms only recognize hydro power and flood control. However, both B.C. and the U.S. recognize that the stored and subsequently timed release of the CRT water has a benefit beyond flood control. One of the benefits of regulating flow is enhanced late season water flows used for irrigation.

We are pleased that the province’s position on the Columbia River treaty recognizes both the value of those other uses, as well as the impacts on B.C. producers due to the massive expansion in the Columbia River.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just for your information, we’ve cut well into the ten, so we’re into question period time.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Absolutely. It just cuts into questions — that’s all.
[ Page 1657 ]

F. Steele: In conclusion, thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your consideration of the 2016 provincial budget.

The B.C. fruit growers, themselves, contribute powerfully to the region and to the B.C. economy. We create value in jobs. We need government to provide infrastructure investment and to help us with the invasive pests that the tree fruit industry is facing so that we can grow this sector.

I remind you, as I always say, that the seeds of optimism do eventually bear fruit.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Nicely said. Thank you very much for the presentation. We are going to have three minutes for questions now.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for a well-rounded and integrated presentation. I thank the apple growers for helping to control health care costs. I have a very narrow question. You mentioned niche markets. I’m wondering if you could elaborate a bit more about what those are, what proportion they are of sales and what the opportunities for the future are.

F. Steele: Well, one of the things that we’re looking at…. Here’s a prime example. We signed a deal with Korea in the past year. Over seven years, there would be no tariffs. Right now, if you were to send a boatload of apples into the South Korean market, there’s a 45 percent tariff. In seven years, there will be none.

We’re taking a look now, saying: how do we prepare for those niche markets? There are more than one — Vietnam and a couple of others. What we can do is prepare everything from the grounds, the infill that we have, the replant program that we have.

We’re also looking at a program — it’s called bare ground — that’s five years or longer to replant some areas never planted before. We’re not a high-volume, Washington state type of grower, and we’re not a cheap grower. So we have to look for those niche markets where people can afford it and people are willing to pay. If we can do that…. It’s going to take five to seven years to have us into the position where we actually get the results we need.

J. Yap: You mentioned that the harvest was early this year and you had to scramble to get it done. How is the labour situation? I understand in the past it has been challenging to get fruit pickers.

G. Lucas: We start our big labour demand with the cherry harvest. Probably about half of the workers are French Canadians. They travel to the Okanagan, and they actually camp in tents. That’s very helpful, and we encourage that. We hire someone to help that process.

The other thing is the seasonal agricultural workers program — primarily Mexican workers but also Caribbean workers. That has helped fill the gap between domestic workers that come to our industry and the total demand for workers. Without that, we would be continuing to shrink. Speaking with individual growers, that was their business plan, and it was a labour issue.

Since the seasonal ag workers program was introduced, we’ve had access to the workers. That program is different from the temporary foreign worker program. It involves the Mexican government and the Caribbean governments. They are party to an agreement between Canada, the foreign government and the employer. That keeps the standards up.

J. Yap: So the changes to the temporary foreign worker program didn’t affect…?

G. Lucas: They didn’t affect the seasonal ag workers program. That’s correct.

S. Gibson: Your season was early this year. I’m from blueberry country down in Abbotsford, and we had the same thing. We were a month early. Most of our guys finished picking at the time that they would have been starting last year. You know the story.

My question is about value-added. That’s an area that I think has got a lot of potential for a lot of our agricultural industries. What are you folks doing with value-added? I know you looked at cider as one area. What are some other areas where you can add value to your crop?

F. Steele: Well, one of the things we did with the cider issue…. It’s not culled fruit. We have a contract with Sun-Rype that all culls go to Sun-Rype to make apple juice and fruit leather and things like that. The problem that we had was that we have a lot of fruit at times that ends up being too small or C grade or didn’t get enough colour, and that is a different category. It’s not culls. It’s just low-value fruit that we wouldn’t be getting any money for.

What they did was they turned that into a cider plant, and they’ve expanded that. In the first year, they’re already exceeded their expectations for the next three years. It’s been well received and well done. We’re looking at any other niche markets that can do that.

G. Lucas: Just a quick comment, Mr. Chair. One of our big value-added is actually the fresh eating product. As Fred mentioned, if it’s the right grade, right size, right colour and a different variety…. So Ambrosia, discovered in the Okanagan, is a worldwide hit, and we’re good at growing it. That’s our value-added: do something different from the Red Delicious.

G. Lucas: That’s a Gala. That’s our single largest production variety right now.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Terrific. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for taking the time to present. I appreciate the work you put into it. Keep up the great work.

Finally, we have Geoscience B.C. — Mr. Robin Archdekin, Mike Cathro and Carlos Salas.

Gentlemen, welcome. I’ll leave you with ten minutes for presentation. I’ll try to give you a heads-up with a couple of minutes left. Then we’ll go to the committee for questions for five. If that works for you, the floor is yours.

The committee, I think, is fairly familiar with us. So what I thought I’d do is go through the slides fairly quickly, with the hope to have the opportunity for lots of questions.

Robin Archdekin, president and CEO of Geoscience B.C. With me here today are Carlos Salas, vice-president of energy for Geoscience B.C., and Mike Cathro. Mike has been with the board for quite a while but is the new chair for the board of Geoscience B.C., and Mike is a resident of Kamloops.

I’d also like to recognize that we’re on the traditional territory of the Shuswap today.

As well, Dallas Smith sends his regrets. He had hoped to be here, and I understand he’s going to be meeting with you later today on another matter.

Now, I’m not sure. Have you got the presentation in front of you, by chance? Great. Perfect. All right, I’m going to go through the slides, as I say, very quickly. A lot of this will be familiar for some of you, but here we go.

I want to start by thanking you for the continued interest, support and investment in Geoscience B.C. On June 4, there was an announcement of further funding for the organization. Of course, during this time of fiscal restraint, we very much appreciate this funding and the opportunity to use it.

We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary in 2015 at Geoscience B.C. Over the ten years, we’ve been able to leverage our funding that we’ve received from the province with industry, $22 million in leveraging, for a total of $77 million over the ten years. That has funded all the good work that we’ve been able to do.

Looking at slide 3 now: who we are and what we do. We’re an independent, trusted earth science organization operating as a non-profit. We work closely with First Nations, with local communities, with all levels of government and with the resource sector. Over the ten years that we’ve been in existence, we’ve really built the organization into a recognized, world-class organization that turns out information that enables sound decision-making around resource use.

It’s interesting. I was talking to one of our founding directors recently — one of the original board members — and they said: “Given the current situation in the resource industry, the resource sector, these are challenging times financially. But of course, Geoscience B.C. was created during a challenging financial time.”

One of our founding mandates is that we attract investment and we promote investment. That’s a key part of what we do. So during times of fiscal restraint and challenges, there’s all the more argument for the work that we do to attract investment to the province.

Our work provides training and jobs for the province and for local communities. The spinoff dollars that we have when we do our work in our communities go out to the hotels, restaurants, equipment and local people.

Our outreach programs and education workshops involve First Nations, local communities and professionals in those areas that we operate. We also provide student scholarships. To date, we’ve supported 40 university students, in the decade, and awarded over 70 scholarships worth $385,000.

We’re noted as an independent, trusted, respected, responsive, collaborative, efficient organization.

In terms of being independent, regardless of what the results are that our science finds, our work finds, those results are published. We leave it up to others to pass judgment on whether they like the results or whether the results are something they can use. We’re not influenced by how people might respond to that — the outcomes. We’re seen as a neutral, unbiased organization, and the science is the same.

We assist First Nations and local communities with understanding the mineral and the energy resources as well, so there’s an educational level.

We collaborate with as many groups as we can that are willing to collaborate. If that’s First Nations, if it’s local communities, if it’s regional governments, the resources sector, we’re open to making sure we collaborate with them to whatever extent we can. Of course, that’s with the proviso that whatever we do, at the end of day, the science that we do is made public. Everyone will have access to it.

We’re also known for our responsiveness. We’re responsive to the concerns of First Nations, local communities and others. Part of our model is that engagement is key. It’s number one. We engage with those groups to hear what their concerns are. The second step is then we identify the priorities. What is the key science that needs to be done to address those concerns? Then step 3 is that we hire the world-class experts to do the good science, the independent science. Then step 4 is that we publish those results.

We’re efficient. We have a small staff. Our overhead is 16 percent, so it’s pretty low. If you include the leveraging that we get, of course, that wipes out that overhead expense that we have.

We really have two core streams of business at Geoscience B.C. There’s minerals and mining, and energy. Energy is oil and gas and geothermal. You’ll see in
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our work that there is a small amount that’s geothermal, but that’s growing. Historically, it’s been primarily minerals, but we’re growing that into mining. More recently, of course, with all the concerns in the northeast of B.C., the energy side is growing tremendously.

We have projects on the minerals and mining side. TREK is one of them, targeting resources through exploration and knowledge. Most of our minerals work is around mapping what’s out there across the province at a regional level in terms of minerals, with the idea that if people know it’s there, then they will be attracted, and investment will follow.

On the oil and gas, the energy side of oil and gas, the geothermal. There are water studies that we’re doing — surface water, groundwater. That’s been in the northeast of B.C. The fugitive gases, carbon isotope fingerprinting — we’re looking at work there.

Induced seismicity. We’ve seen a lot of media attention more recently around a recent event in the Fort St. John area that’s emphasized the need for more work and science to manage that aspect of that sector.

Geothermal, of course. I’ve mentioned that. We’ve done an economic viability test, and some direct-use studies have been announced.

I mentioned First Nations and community engagement. It’s really key to our work. We see that as a fundamental, that we engage and work with them on any of our projects.

Around the Peace project, which is mapping underground water, we’ve met with First Nations quite a bit lately. We started with the Blueberry River First Nation. Our 20-minute meeting was challenging, but it turned into an hour and a half. At the end of it, they asked us to expand the area that we’re doing, so we covered off some of their interests. That’s been the pattern with most First Nations. I’m really proud of the success the staff and I have had on that.

Future projects, quickly. I think more needs to be done on seismicity. I don’t think anybody would argue that. Airborne mapping and groundwater — we’re looking at doing more of that. More surface water. In northwest B.C., there are concerns transborder that we’re looking at as well. Then, of course, around safe disposal zones and carbon capture and sequestration.

I want to finish off by again thanking you for your support. We’re continuing to work with the province on establishing long-term, predictable funding for the province so that we can continue the good work into the next decade.

J. Yap: Thanks for your presentation. The work that you referred to with the Blueberry River First Nation and others — that clearly will be of increasing focus and importance, with the need for the province to work collaboratively with First Nations on economic development projects.

With that as an example, and others, do you partner with the First Nations? Do they retain Geoscience B.C. on a contract to do certain work?

R. Archdekin: We haven’t been retained on a contract level, but we collaborate with them. In northeast B.C., they’ve been doing water sampling on our water sampling project — service water. When we’re operating in any of their communities, we make sure that we review the projects with them and get their input and make adjustments to the projects. If it’s removing areas for cultural values or non-disturbance or wildlife at their request, we remove that — or where they want it expanded. I’d say it’s collaborative, very much.

Carlos has been doing some work recently with them. Did you want to comment on that?

C. Salas: We certainly do collaborate with them. For example, on this Peace project, we understood what their cultural events were, and we made sure that we were sensitive to that. We didn’t fly over certain areas at certain times and came back. They asked us to fly areas where they were wanting to drill new water wells, and by infilling our airborne geophysics, we’ll be able to help them get new water sources for the community. We did that, in fact, in three places.

Also, Fort St. John asked us to fly an area around Charlie Lake to help them with their water sources there, too.

J. Yap: Are you able to…? What I’m interested in would be a resource to the First Nations in what you do.

C. Salas: Definitely. We were asked by Fort Nelson First Nation: could we do a similar type of project with airborne geophysics over their territory? It’s something that…. Absolutely, yes.

R. Archdekin: They don’t always have the capacity or the expertise to do what we do. So they see us as helping them.

C. James (Deputy Chair): My question is following up on John’s — very similar but more around priorities. How do you determine priority areas for your projects? Do requests come to you for projects that people are interested in? Do First Nations reach out to you? How do you determine, and where do you go, on the priorities that you take on?

R. Archdekin: That’s a really good question, Carole. I point to the structure of our organization. Part of the rea-
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son we’re efficient is that we have a volunteer board. We have First Nations on the board. We have some resource sector individuals on the board, former government people. We have quite a selection, all volunteer.

Then we have our three technical committees. So our three technical committees around oil and gas, around geothermal, around minerals advise us and sort of evaluate…. They pull in that social piece. Well, they actually pull in more the technical piece. Then we have our board that will balance that out with the social side and the economic side. Then we put those together. That, through the TAC and then ultimately through the board, is how we arrive at what the priorities are.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I’m sure you get more priorities than you’re able to fund each year.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Yes, that’s helpful. I just wondered whether people can request projects, where they can come to you, but I guess they go through those teams and determine.

S. Gibson: Government is interested in empowering young people, which ties in beautifully with what you’re doing. Talk a little bit, if you will, about the way that you’re kind of getting young people indirectly involved. This is the next generation. I think government…. This is an area that we want to work at big time.

R. Archdekin: Oh boy. There are a number of areas. The scholarship program is a key part of that, of course, through the schools, through the work that we do. They very often hire people fresh out of university to take part in the studies that we do, the on-the-ground studies. They’re there with First Nations.

We do education programs and, where we can, train them to do the technical work. There is some stuff that is very, very technical, so we have to draw in people from the outside. But wherever possible, we make sure we use the local communities. We’ve had great success around water sampling, for example, in the northeast and other areas.

For example, there is a helicopter company that one of the First Nations is a partner of. We make sure that we use that local company where we can and where the First Nations actually request us to use them.

That’s a little outside your question. No, wherever we can, we try to get the younger crowds involved with our work, the younger students and so on.

S. Chandra Herbert: Just one question. In speaking with Geoscience B.C. a number of times, one thing I know we discussed in the past is working to try and convince companies that are drilling, doing various work out there, to ensure that they share their results.

I know geothermal Canada — whatever the acronym is for the geothermal folks…. CanGEA have said that sometimes it’s difficult to get heat ratings from some drill sites, etc., so it’s difficult to know what’s going on. If the information is there, of course we want to share it. I just wondered if you’d give us an update on how it’s going with industry in encouraging them to share their data.

C. Salas: That’s a very good point and something that we strive for. Whatever we work on, we want to make sure that that data is out in the public domain. We understand transparency is so important from all facets.

For example, we are working with industry folks to try to get as much information out into the public domain as possible — whether it be hydrometric data, in some cases, and, where possible, geothermal data. We’re trying to move forward and trying to assemble as much geothermal data as we can and to disseminate that. We do have some of that data already in our map viewer, which is on there already, but we can always do more.

We agree. We need to keep working on that and get as much data from companies out into the public domain. I think it’s a very good point.

R. Archdekin: Not everyone is happy with the results that come out. I think CanGEA was not particularly thrilled with the results. But those are the results. We can’t edit them, even if people are not happy with what they see, right?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to present to the committee.

R. Archdekin: Thank you very much. It’s an honour to be here. I always appreciate the audience.

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1) Thompson Rivers University Students’ Union	Amber Storvold
	Nathan Lane
2) Thompson Rivers University Faculty Association	Dr. Thomas Friedman
3) Kamloops Chamber of Commerce	Brant Hasanen
4) Venture Kamloops	Jim Anderson
5) Thompson Rivers University	Brian Ross
	Dr. Alan Shaver
6) Allied Golf Association of BC	Trevor Smith
7) Canadian Mental Health Association, Kamloops Branch	Christa Mullaly
8) Literacy in Kamloops	Fiona Clare
9) Invasive Species Council of British Columbia	Gail Wallin
10) BC Bioenergy Network	Marnie Plant
	Michael Weedon
11) Enterprise Rent-A-Car	Stephen Wilk
	Mike Tierney
12) Vancouver Community College Faculty Association	Taryn Thomson
13) British Columbia Fruit Growers' Association	Fred Steele
	Glen Lucas
14) Geoscience BC	Robin Archdekin
	Mike Cathro
	Carlos Salas

Chair:	Wm. Scott Hamilton (Delta North BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Carole James (Victoria–Beacon Hill NDP)
Members:	Dan Ashton (Penticton BC Liberal)
	Spencer Chandra Herbert (Vancouver–West End NDP)
	Eric Foster (Vernon-Monashee BC Liberal)
	Simon Gibson (Abbotsford-Mission BC Liberal)
	George Heyman (Vancouver-Fairview NDP)
	Mike Morris (Prince George–Mackenzie BC Liberal)
	Claire Trevena (North Island NDP)
	John Yap (Richmond-Steveston BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Susan Sourial

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