Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 73 — 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	1661
G. Ullstrom
J. Baker
P. Kent
D. Smith
A. Legin
J. Sandy
D. Cooper
K. Burden
I. Gartshore
P. Barbosa
S. McCarthy
R. Bealing
G. Elliott
J. Iker
S. Beasley
M. Marshall
R. Boscacci
D. Mackie
M. Stanley

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Scott Hamilton. I’m the MLA for Delta North and the 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 by November 15, 2015, with recommendations for next year’s budget.

We’ve had to modify our planned schedule of in-person community meetings this years, as the Legislature has been called back for a fall session beginning 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 video conference, teleconference or Skype.

British Columbians are also invited to participate by sending in written, audio or video submissions 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 to participate.

All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as it prepares its final report for the Legislative Assembly. Just a reminder that the deadlines 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 from the committee. If time permits, we will 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 behind you.

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.

I will now ask the members, starting to my left, if they would kindly introduce themselves.

C. Trevena: Good afternoon. I’m Claire Trevena. I’m the MLA for North Island.

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

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you. Also assisting the committee today — to my immediate left, Susan Sourial, and in the back of the room, Stephanie Raymond, from the Parliamentary Committees Office. Michael Baer and Alexandrea Hursey from Hansard Services are also here to record the proceedings, as mentioned.

Before we get going and proceed, I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce the MLA for Nanaimo, who is joining us today in the audience — the esteemed Leonard Krog. Thank you very much, MLA Krog, for being here today. It’s much appreciated.

Without further ado, we can get started. I would like to call on Mr. Garry Ullstrom from Kuterra LP. It’s good to see you again. I remember your presentation from last year.

G. Ullstrom: Well, thank you very much. I know you’re working a long day today. I appreciate that, on behalf of the province.

Well, yes, my name is Garry Ullstrom, and I’m the CEO of Kuterra Limited Partnership. Last year I was here to tell you about Kuterra land-raised salmon and the seeds of a new industry sector in B.C. I’m pleased that some of you and your fellow MLAs visited our farm over the past year to see more closely what we’re up to. I extend that invitation again to you all. Our farm is just outside Port McNeill.

This year I’m here to talk about progress, both at Kuterra and in land-based aquaculture, and to contribute to your deliberations on how to strengthen B.C.’s economy with information on growing a profitable salmon aquaculture industry that also protects wild fisheries.

We want to work with the B.C. government to help B.C.’s new aquaculture policy leverage B.C.’s first-mover advantage, the growing global demand for premium sustainable seafood and the undeniable global momentum that’s moving aquaculture onto land.

Kuterra is the first in North America to grow Atlantic salmon for food fish in giant tanks on land. The ’Namgis
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First Nation is sole owner of Kuterra and has invested more than $1 million of its own money in this business. ’Namgis built Kuterra because of their concerns about the impacts of open-net-pen salmon aquaculture on the ecosystems that are their traditional harvest areas and that are essential for the health of wild salmon and other species. The ’Namgis want to show there is a way to farm Atlantic salmon without the environmental impacts, risks and uncertainties of ocean-based farming.

Kuterra has already benefited B.C. with more than $6 million spent here on building module 1 and $1 million a year spent here on Vancouver Island on operations. We have five direct operational jobs, and using standard industry multipliers, Kuterra created more than 24 indirect and induced FTEs in our first year of sales.

We’ve sold more than 650,000 pounds of Atlantic salmon since April 2014. Just over a year ago we started selling fish. The market has been very receptive. Our product attributes allow Kuterra to maintain a consistent, very high premium price compared to commodity-priced farmed Atlantic salmon.

Demand is exceeding our supply. Given our current production capacity, our sales are focused on western Canada, but we are developing markets for expansion and building brand recognition by selling to select retailers and fine dining restaurants right across North America.

Underpinning our business is the goal of proving the technological, biological and economic feasibility of growing Atlantic salmon on land using RAS technology. Now, RAS stands for recirculating aquaculture systems technology, which cleans and reuses water in the system.

We’ve completed the commissioning process, and we’re fully stocked with fish. Now we’re shifting our emphasis to optimizing production, planning expansion and using our knowledge to help roll out a larger land-based industry.

As I mentioned, our biggest constraint is production capacity to meet market demand. We started small because we were bringing technology from research scale to commercial pilot scale. As with any leading-edge innovation, there certainly were risks. Our early support was grant funding from philanthropic organizations and from government programs that shared our objective. Now we’re in the process of making the transition from grant-funded to investor-driven development, and we’re working on growth plans and talking to investors.

Investor interest is growing for several reasons. Aquaculture has become a hot investment topic. You’ve likely heard reports about the potential of aquaculture globally. It’s hard to miss. For example, just a few days ago the Wall Street Daily had a headline: “Big Agriculture Becomes Big Aquaculture.” At the same time, informed investors are aware that ocean-based aquaculture is facing unprecedented challenges. With environmental issues increasingly hitting profits, industry, governments and investors are looking more closely at land-based aquaculture.

As an example, an international sustainable seafood investment competition called Fish 2.0 is attracting significant investor interest. We’re delighted that Kuterra, along with six other land-based seafood producers — several of them, actually, from B.C. — have earned a chance to pitch to investors at this important event in Palo Alto.

Norway is also increasing its focus on RAS at the same time that it’s restricting growth of ocean-based aquaculture. Norway is recommending free licences for land-based farms, in contrast to many millions of dollars for ocean farming licences. It has issued the country’s first two land-based farm licences, and Norway is spending $25 million over eight years for joint government-industry research into improving closed-containment technology.

The international accounting firm Deloitte recently, within the past few weeks, completed a report that says the pros of RAS are undeniable and that land-based fish farming production “will explode” over the next five to ten years.”

There’s evidence that Norway and the Nordic countries aspire to be world leaders in RAS aquaculture. But we want to see this province, our province, hold onto and build on its lead in this sector. We’re sending one of our team members to Norway and Denmark next week to examine and evaluate their RAS technologies to assess their usefulness here in B.C.

We’ve identified ten global trends driving ocean-based aquaculture towards RAS. One is that rising feed costs favour RAS because the technology allows better feed efficiency than in ocean-based farming. Also, market trends favour RAS. Consumers are increasingly seeking, and paying more for, food produced in controlled, traceable systems, without the need for antibiotics or pesticides, all of which are avoidable in land-based production.

Earlier this year Costco, believed to be the biggest farmed salmon buyer in the U.S., and Wal-Mart announced that they’re shifting salmon buying away from Chile because of concerns about the Chilean industry’s high level of antibiotic use. Last year the Chileans used 1.2 million pounds of antibiotics in their production.

Ongoing environmental issues are challenging the profitability and growth of ocean-based aquaculture globally. In Chile, it’s antibiotics needed to fight ocean-borne pathogens. In Scotland and Norway, it’s sea lice. Last year in Norway they spent more than $380 million fighting sea lice alone.

B.C. has a special challenge with plankton and algae blooms. Measures to manage these issues are constantly being challenged by their high cost, by virus mutations and by increasing resistance to antibiotics and parasite treatments. These issues do not apply to RAS. Recirculating systems solve these problems and open the door to growing aquaculture in a low-risk, environmentally benign manner.
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North America’s second commercial RAS Atlantic farm, Sustainable Blue in Nova Scotia, will start selling fish next week. China is also producing RAS-grown salmon for a market driven by health and quality concerns. Other producers are preparing to enter the market in Denmark, Poland, Switzerland and elsewhere.

Many of these operators are looking to us. In the past two weeks alone, Kuterra has been asked to help train some Swiss staff, work with Israeli researchers and host a delegation with representatives from the Chinese Central Government. Word is spreading through media, with reports on Kuterra in National Geographic, Time magazine and Chinese-language media.

What we’ve done here in B.C. is a big deal, and the world has taken note. We want to work with the B.C. government to build a robust, profitable, environmentally benign aquaculture industry that all British Columbians can embrace. We’re excited about the potential for land-based RAS aquaculture to benefit everyone in this province.

We understand that at the end of October, cabinet will be considering recommendations to improve B.C.’s aquaculture policy, and we hope the recommendations will include the opportunities provided by RAS that I’ve outlined for you today.

We look forward to your support in conveying this information, and I thank you for your time and attention.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Ullstrom. I appreciate the presentation. I’ll go to the committee for questions.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. I think many of us were excited about the opportunities last year when we heard you present, and I think the excitement continues. Your passion continues.

It’s interesting. You mentioned the situation in Norway, where they’re offering free licences — an interesting approach to encourage land-based approaches. I wonder if there are any other specifics that you’d like to talk about that you think would be helpful for government to take a look at if they wanted to encourage land-based fish farms to expand.

G. Ullstrom: Thank you for the question. Yes, I think a five-year investment tax credit to encourage the early adopters to build out more RAS facilities in the province would be helpful.

Also, I think a polluter-pay fee for those who discharge waste directly into the marine environment would be helpful. Those funds could be used to fund the InSEAS RAS research facility at UBC and, again, move the industry forward.

Lastly, assistance with a breeding program to breed fish that are optimized for growing in land-based facilities would be most helpful and a role for government.

S. Gibson: A couple of questions. You used the word “farm” to describe what you’re doing, and I think that’s appropriate. But isn’t it possible now, because it’s on the land, that you really could, with a little bit of engineering, even have your aquaculture right in an urban setting? Why do you have to be in a rural setting? Because you’re on the land, you’re not prescribed now by the availability of vast quantities of sea water. That’s my first question.

G. Ullstrom: You are right. One of the advantages of RAS is rising transportation costs and the ability, ultimately — once this technology is mature — to do exactly that. It’s to locate these farms, these facilities, either at the edge of urban areas that are the markets, so people can buy local.

There is in Hong Kong, I think on the 32nd floor, or something like that, an RAS farm that grows grouper and sells to local restaurants right in Hong Kong. That’s the next stage.

S. Gibson: My only other question, I guess, is controversial. From time to time, people talk to me, and I’m sure other MLAs, about the fact that Atlantic salmon are on the west coast, and they were never supposed to be here. You hear that lament. It still percolates from time to time.

Is there the option for you to use indigenous salmon on the land — chum or coho or sockeye or pink, local salmon — as opposed to Atlantic salmon? I think we still hear that push-back. You get it, too, from time to time, so I’m just asking that question.

G. Ullstrom: It was a very important question that the ’Namgis community struggled with, because salmon is at the heart of their culture, and Atlantic salmon are viewed as an invasive species. Yes, very good question.

The ’Namgis realized that in order to convince industry and government that it was possible to transition their industry from the ocean to land, we would have to grow the species that they’re growing in the ocean now. Also, Atlantic salmon have been bred or domesticated for many, many generations, so they grow more efficiently than other species. That’s why we are growing them, but yes, we could grow steelhead. We could grow chum or coho in our facility, yes.

J. Yap: Thank you for your presentation. A question on the premium that you referred to — that because your product is unique, it commands a higher price. What is the order of magnitude of that premium that you’re able to charge for your product?

G. Ullstrom: It’s close, at times, to more than twice what one would obtain in a commodity market — Seattle f.o.b.

J. Yap: Really, twice. It sounds quite impressive. It’s 650,000 pounds already. Who are the buyers? Are they Canadian or U.S.?
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G. Ullstrom: Primarily, we sell in western Canada right through to Manitoba but also to restaurants right across the country. We sell into the U.S. In terms of double the price, one of the Albion Fisheries sales people — they’re our distributors — has a restaurant in Banff that converted all of their Atlantic salmon dishes over to Kuterra, and they said their sales nearly doubled for their Atlantic salmon products.

What that tells us is there are people who will eat Atlantic salmon if they can eat clean-conscience Atlantic salmon. That’s what we see here. That’s what we’re providing to the market, and people are responding. That’s why we’re able to get that premium.

C. Trevena: Garry, thank you very much for your presentation. I found it very interesting when I did do the tour, and I’m very glad that ’Namgis have got such a successful business in their territory, outside Port McNeill.

You mentioned that Deloitte says that land-based fish farming is going to explode. Kuterra is being seen by many overseas as a leader in this. Is Kuterra and is B.C. ready for this explosion of land-based RAS aquaculture?

G. Ullstrom: Are we ready? Well, one thing that would help, certainly, would be if there were more trained RAS technicians around. There is certainly a lot of interest in B.C. from investors. We know of a project that wants to start up in the Fraser Valley, for example. There are a number of them, so I just think what the industry needs is that helping hand.

I mentioned the investment tax credit to get us over that risk threshold. You know, we’re trying to lower the risk threshold for new entrants by being an open-source facility. We share what we’ve learned because we receive public funding. That’s what needs to happen — to accelerate the adoption of this technology, to beat others to the punch and create the jobs here before they go elsewhere.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Mr. Ullstrom, fascinating technology as it goes forward. I can only see good things happening in the future. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Mr. Baker, welcome. You have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a two-minute heads-up close to the end so that you can wrap up your thoughts. Then I’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

J. Baker: Thank you all for coming here and spending your time listening to us. Some of you may not want to hear the message that I have. I’m employing the supporters to help us and Minister Stone and the Premier to proceed forward on this issue.

I’ll just give you some personal stuff to start with. I’ll try to get into some of the costs, but I’m a scientist by training, not an actuary or an accountant. My name is Jeremy Baker, and I’m making this presentation on behalf of those from the community of Gabriola Island who petitioned the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, MOTI for short, for a feasibility study of a bridge link to replace the ferry system to Gabriola Island.

While the Gabriola Island Bridge Society — GIBS, as we should call ourselves — have waited for the study to be concluded and released, we have spent some time and thought on developing our own analysis by comparing costs of the present ferry system and the numerous estimates, over the years, of a bridge link, going back to 1973.

We have also projected costs for both transportation choices over the next 30 years. Thirty years is the time interval the ministry has specified for their choice of engineering consultants, CH2M Hill, to use for comparing ferry and bridge future costs. In addition, our technical engineer has used the lifetime of a contemporary bridge structure, 100 years, to project comparable costs over 100, 75 and 50 years, as well as 30.

The provincial government expects to release the feasibility study by the end of September, and we expect the results to suggest that a bridge alternative would offer major financial savings for the local community, and the province, mainly. Very much for the community as well.

If the feasibility study indicates a favourable financial projection, the Gabriola Island Bridge Society respectfully requests that the Budget 2016 include a provision for funds to start the next step by undertaking a detailed engineering construction plan and property acquisition cost analysis. So far, $200,000 has been spent in order to do the feasibility study.

Some more personal stuff before I get into things. I’ve been out there for 42 years. When we came there, the Islands Trust was just being created. The Islands Trust is seen by us as being an active group for the NDP in general. There are partisan overtones.

At that particular time, the New Democrats were very intrigued by the prospect of having a better transportation system to Vancouver Island. They made somewhat extensive plans to do the bridging, to go further and to have a more financially viable transportation system to Vancouver Island. They created the Islands Trust, and those plans went awry quite quickly.

Since then, every government has taken a look at B.C. Ferries because of the remarkable expenditures and debt that multiply each year. They have come to a point where they’re now cutting back services and increasing costs. People are leaving the islands. Young people are leaving the islands. Elderly people are leaving the islands.
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Some of the advantages of having a bridge over a ferry, from a social point of view, before we get into the money part, are obvious. We would be able to travel whenever we want. The cost of a bridge is so cheap compared to a ferry, as far as we have figured out — hundreds of millions, over years, cheaper than a ferry — that the costs of people travelling back and forth for health, education, recreation, etc., would be much reduced. Access to health care, etc.

Water is a significant, growing problem. Unfortunately, it’s growing in the wrong direction. Clearly, the main cost of our water supply is coming over on the ferry — $200 a ticket for a big truck carrying 6,000 gallons. That’s the newest addition this year. One had to be hauled off the ferry backwards the other day because it conked out, unfortunately. We could have a pipeline coming to a central reservoir on Gabriola. Not looking at piping would be horrendously expensive. We could distribute the water by truck on Gabriola.

Fire protection. We would be able to have the help of other communities in the immediate vicinity — Nanaimo, Cedar, Ladysmith, etc. They could come and help us if we ever did have a big forest fire. Right now, we do not have that help. I’ve been a fire trustee over there for a while.

There are many social reasons why. And it would maybe even stop the deterioration of land values. If you want to refinance your house now, depending on your asset value and the amortization, you’re in trouble.

I’m going to try…. Forgive me for this. The details are in here of what we’ve done for the financial projections, okay? I’m going to read a few things here. We’ll see how it goes over.

Using a 4.8 percent per-year inflation rate, doubling costs every 15 years, a close approximation to B.C. Ferries operating costs’ actual inflation trend for the last 30 years…. This is based on 30 years’ records of actual costs, right? We have that. We know what all these costs are. They’ve been printed. They’re out there. People with great skills can do this — not me — can work backwards and figure out what all these increases are to today, and then they can project forward those things — Bank of Canada cost of living, things like that.

For instance, we are now spending for the Gabriola ferry, including both provincial and federal money, $11.53 million. We actually put in $6 million out of our pockets. That $6 million in itself — as a toll, should it go that direction — would pay for the bridge.

For any more details on that, you’re welcome to have a look at my book. There’s all kinds of stuff in here. It’s gone down to Stone and the Premier and Sturdy and those guys down there. They know what we’ve been doing and that we’re just waiting for the feasibility study.

If you have any questions about the local community…. Or if you ask any questions about the financial parts, well, I’ll just guess, probably. It’s millions being wasted.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Baker, for your presentation. I’ll go to the committee for questions.

Should the bridge be constructed, it would be my understanding that commuting into Nanaimo would be considerably more convenient. Thus, the value of the homes of all the property owners on the island would increase, perhaps significantly. They’d be more attractive now because of mobility and access. You mentioned health care, education and others.

Is it your thought that the islanders would make a contribution, a significant contribution, towards the construction of a bridge, that there would be some kind of a levy — because the beneficiaries of a bridge would be, predominantly, the residents of the island?

J. Baker: Yes, we’ve made that case every single time we’ve talked to Minister Stone, MLA Sturdy and anybody else who will listen down in Victoria. So yes, we expect that to be done in the newest high-tech way — cameras and automatic billing and everything like that. We would expect that to take place. Everybody’s quite willing….

In fact, there’s a train of thought that we should have that a little bit higher so that either…. We can make money, in the short term and the long term, that we could use for things like having better recreation facilities. That has come up several times — better recreation facilities on Gabriola Island too.

S. Gibson: A supplementary. Has there been a referendum of any kind or a formal investigation of the residents’ views on the matter?

S. Chandra Herbert: You mentioned the Islands Trust. I just wanted to clarify. I don’t live on an island. I’m not part of Vancouver Island. It is an elected body, isn’t it?

J. Baker: They are totally opposed to it. They don’t want to even know how much it costs. They’re not con-
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cerned about the exorbitant extra funds that have been taken out of workers’ pockets to pay for this very wasteful ferry service compared to a bridge.

That was sort of my line of thinking. I was just kind of curious what the sentiment is of people on the island. Obviously, you’ve taken polls. You know how many people are actually for this and how many people actually like the isolation of living on an island without a bridge. I mean, there are a lot of folks within the Gulf Islands that wouldn’t want any kind of permanent link. So you’ve spent a long time feeling these people out as to what their sentiment is.

J. Baker: Yes. Well, the ones that you’ll hear, without a doubt…. The Islands Trust has quite a hold over the politics of the islands in general, Gabriola especially. It’s quite vitriolic, the antagonisms that go on there. I’ve got a very thick skin; I don’t care anymore. People don’t like to voice their opinion in public, so they won’t. But we’re convinced that should you decide….

Personally, many of us don’t think it should go to referendum. This is a housecleaning job. This is a job for the people in the rest of B.C. The referendum should go to the rest. If anything, you’re going to put a referendum to the whole population of B.C. Do you really want to go on wasting money for the ferries on this? If you have to go to a referendum on Gabriola, personally, I don’t mind going that route. Other people are not so happy about it, but if that’s the way this government — Premier Clark — chooses to go in Victoria, well, so be it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Baker. I appreciate your taking the time to present to the committee. If you have extra copies of your documentation…. I know you just glazed over it. There’s probably a lot more detail that this committee isn’t privy to.

J. Baker: Oh, you haven’t seen the half of it. They’ve got everything. It’s not just here. Minister Stone has got the whole works — spreadsheets going from one end to the other.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. Maybe I could ask the Clerk’s office to contact the minister’s office, and the committee can get copies of that presentation.

We now have the Island Coastal Economic Trust. Representing are Mayor Phil Kent and Line Robert.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’ll give you the same spiel. About ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll give you the heads-up about two minutes toward the end so you can wrap up your thoughts, and then I’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

P. Kent: Great. We appreciate the opportunity to present to you. I have met most of you, or a number of you, and we’re glad to be here today. Line was…. We’ll be joined by Dallas Smith, making a grand entrance. Dallas is president of the Nanwakolas Council, and he’s also an appointed ICET director.

P. Kent: I appreciate this opportunity to bring some up to date and, for the new members of the committee that may not be familiar with the Island Coastal Economic Trust, just the things that we have been doing, where we are today, and where we hope to be going in the future.

In 2006, of course, there was an endowment given to three trusts in the province: one to the Southern Development Trust and us of $50 million, and $180 million to the Northern Development Trust. At that time, all the committee members that participated in the Island Coastal Economic Trust, either through the regional advisory committees or through the board, decided to use a model that made key investments in economic development structure throughout the Island and the coast.

It was eight years ago that that began, in terms of making those investments, and they were key investments. They leveraged a tremendous amount of other funding and other dollars from private sector, other government funders, and communities and community groups to develop these infrastructures.

Most of the highlighted projects that you’ll see…. We did distribute the annual report to you, and you’ll see right on the very last two pages a number of projects that were those key investments. They were just concepts on paper. They were only just ideas. One of the things the trust did was to make those things happen — a very nimble and responsive form of funding through the trust system.

Obviously, we believe strongly in the model of the trusts. I think it was something where the Legislature did a very good thing throughout the province.

One of the things that goes beyond just making those investments is the support that it builds in the sustainability of communities, the sustainability of the models of economic development — in other words, providing ongoing support. We don’t just go away after we’ve made the investment. We’re there to support them with other programs.
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This is how the trust has evolved, since those initial key investments, to look at things like economic development readiness, providing capacity-building in communities — especially around economic development bursaries or the economic development readiness program, which is something that a lot of communities now, once they’ve made that investment, have followed up with, collaborating within their subregion in the overall trust region to start to really take advantage of those investments.

You’ll see many of them, again, in the examples there. But when we look at some of the anecdotal ones — like some of the marine infrastructure, whether it was the Ladysmith harbour, the port here in Nanaimo, some of the aquaculture investments — other groups have formed to look and take advantage of those investments. That’s a really important thing, whether they’ve done it through strategy, marketing.

The trail networks that we see — a tremendous amount of work is now being done to take advantage of those investments. The Vancouver Island tourist association is working along with us collaboratively to develop a strategy around marketing those trails as world-class, and there will be more and more work done in several phases that will do that — so that follow-up, in terms of the capacity to build on the investments that were originally made.

Many of those things are important, because it provides a life cycle for those people. This is not something that is normally done through regular funding. They apply for funding. Maybe their card comes up; maybe it doesn’t. We’ve provided support to those communities to be ready, to actually make incremental economic development a success. And we’ve done it. You’ll see in the numbers that you’ve got.

There’s a report card in the very first part of the annual report that shows that they were delivered on, both in jobs, both in construction and sustainability over the long term. This is a really key difference to the normal way that economic development is done in communities.

I’d really like to talk, too, about the collaborative efforts that it’s done to bring different kinds of communities together. Mr. Smith, being president of Nanwakolas and having experience throughout the Island with First Nations, probably would like to comment a little bit just on how that’s made a difference for First Nation community.

D. Smith: Yes, definitely. Thank you, Mayor Kent. I apologize for the tardiness. Parking in this city — wow. Wrong people to complain to, though.

It’s been an excellent learning process for us, as First Nations communities, to grow these economic partnerships with regional districts, local government and the people in our area. It’s always sort of been an us-versus-them outlook when it came to economic development. We always thought we were fighting for dollars.

But ICET has really built a harmonization where we’ve understood the symbiosis between successful First Nations communities and the ripple effect that has for our surrounding non-native communities. And we’ve learned to support each other and our projects to make them line up and have that synergy.

It was a tough lesson after the fall of the fishing industry specifically. That was a big employer to most of the northern Island communities. We’ve been able to look at these tourism projects, these trail projects, and we’re looking at them through the same lens now. I think that’s something that wouldn’t have happened without Island Coastal Economic Trust, to be honest with you. That’s part of the support that First Nations have for this entity in keeping it going forward, because we now finally have some calm waters behind us that we’ve paddled through together.

At the reconciliation conference last week with Premier Clark and her gang, sort of one of the outcrying things was that we’re finally just starting to figure out how to do things together with local government and communities, and our ability to find funding to channel those efforts has diminished a little bit. WED doesn’t have the money that it used to have. The feds aren’t spending the money in B.C. that they used to. We’ve found a way to work together now, and we just simply need the ability to keep paddling the calm waters together.

P. Kent: I think there’s a great deal of work that we can still do. Whether it’s development and attraction of new high-value sectors; whether it’s aerospace, and we’ve worked together collaboratively with them; aquaculture; agrifood; green tech; creative industries — we’re at a point now where we can leverage and create the advantage of the momentum that’s been set so far with this.

But I have to be really clear about the life cycle of all of this. We’re getting near the end of our funding. We have about $3½ million of uncommitted funding at this point, to put towards projects.

We’ve evolved the way we approve projects, the kinds of amounts that we invest, to basically be aware of the circumstances with the economy if we made those big investments. Now we’re looking at making the best advantage of them, working with communities to continue to be sustainable.

When you look at the life cycle costs here, on average, the five-year investment over the time of the trust has leveraged over $23 million of investment on an annual basis, and it’s delivered a very, very good dividend.

P. Kent: Yes, $5 million a year, leveraging $23 million a year in further investment.

It’s provided a good dividend to the province as well. By our economic figures, that’s bringing back a dividend to the province of over $10 million a year.
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The net cost to the province at this point has been very minimal, and the investment coming back, not to mention what it means to all of those people — over 2,400 people who got permanent sustainable jobs and over 2,700 who got construction jobs through all of these investments — how meaningful that dividend is to them.

We think it’s very prudent for the province at this time to make that commitment to these trust models. We know the Northern Development Trust had a significant amount more money, and if we’d started with that much, we wouldn’t be back talking to you again. But that wasn’t the case. I think the results come back to us, and they come back to us in a very, very quick way. These results come back in two to five years. This is not long-turnaround money. This is money that comes back very, very quickly.

I think one of the very, very important things that we need to say is that you need — the government needs, the Legislature needs, on behalf of everyone across this province — to pay back a dividend.

We didn’t put this in the bank to pay dividends to anyone in multinational funds or stock market. We did it with people, with the province as the bank, and you’ve reaped the dividends.

I thank you very much for allowing us to give you a presentation. We’d be happy to answer any questions that you have.

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

E. Foster: Your Worship, thank you very much for your presentation. When the three trusts were formed originally, the province said that these were one-time investments and that the three groups could do as they wished with them, however they felt they should invest the money. And the northern trust did get a whole bunch more — well, they got double — than either the island or the southern interior trusts received.

But that was the agreement when the money was first put on the table. Both the north and SIDIT chose a different method of putting the money on the street than the island trust did. They still had money, and they put a tremendous amount of money on the street as well.

I guess my question is…. The agreement was that when the money was put out, it was a one-time investment in a trust. Not to diminish the value you’ve got out of the money — no question about it — but if we support your request, what do we say to the other two trusts that have gone at it a different way and still have considerable money left?

P. Kent: Well, I think if their results were equal, they deserve dividends back into their communities and their region as well. But if I was to make an investment plan and it was really successful, I wouldn’t necessarily pull the plug at the end and say: “Oh, the plan is over. I think I’ll do something else, or I won’t do anything at all.” I would need to want to maintain the momentum that it has.

This is a benefit not to us personally, although there’s a great deal of benefit to individuals and communities, but it’s a benefit to the province. It increases the province’s prosperity, its sustainability, its ability to diversify the economy. That’s good investment, simply good investment.

D. Smith: One of the other interesting factors we faced…. I talked about the demise of the fishing industry and how that was going through its last rattle and shake as we started to take in the trust dollars. But also note that the Interior trusts were having their beetle-wood bonanza. I mean, the allowable annual cut in those regions was much higher. The forest industry was struggling here. So we had a different set of conditions. We were very grateful for the trust to be developed, but we’ve built a model that works now, and we’ve got past that.

We’re diversifying our economy much more from being resource-dependent. We just didn’t have the luxuries of doing some of those things because of the state of our economy. Whereas, like I said, in the Interior they had to get rid of that beetle wood because it only had so much of a shelf life. All the contractors were working. There was more tax being paid, and all those extra sorts of things that add to it.

There was just a little different economic situation that we were facing at that time that led us down the path we had to go to, to lead towards diversification.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your work. You’ve described well the importance of both building the partnerships, which I think you’ve described really well, and taking the time to do that, because if you don’t take the time to do that, the projects aren’t going to be successful. But also, it’s the spinoff of having local decision-making and the ability for some resources to be in the local community, where you can be nimble and you can be quick.

If there were further funding coming for the trusts, would you see it as sustaining existing projects, expanding existing projects, or looking at new projects? I wonder if there’s been any kind of discussion about what route?

P. Kent: I believe that it would be all of those. In fact, there would be some new project funding, because we need to allow those communities to come forward with things that are going to work for them. We ensure, through the way that we assess those investments, that they’re going to have sustainable economic development. But it can’t just end after the project is done.
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That ongoing support, that ongoing ability to tap more funding to develop strategy, to develop marketing, to develop capacity in the communities…. One of the key things the trust does that no other model does is to create capacity. We do that through our economic development readiness program, in training bursaries. And developing capacity…. It doesn’t matter what size of community. Their ability to make their own way — that’s very important.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, thank you. Perfect timing. I appreciate you coming forward and presenting to the committee and look forward to all the good work you’ll do in the future.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next we have our friends from Coastal Community Credit Union — Adrian Legin.

Welcome, Mr. Legin. I’ll give you the same spiel. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with about two minutes to go so you can wrap up your thoughts, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. Does that work?

A. Legin: Good afternoon to the committee. My name is Adrian Legin. I’m the president and chief executive officer of Coastal Community Credit Union. I’m here representing the five island and coastal credit unions: Coastal Community Credit Union, Island Savings, First Credit Union, Ladysmith and District Credit Union and Union Bay Credit Union.

I’d like to start by, first, thanking the committee for this opportunity to create this forum where residents and local businesses and other stakeholders can have a chance to have their opinions and input into the budget process.

I’m here to tell you about the island and coastal credit unions that make up a part of the system consisting of 42 credit unions that serve 1.9 million citizens of British Columbia. We’re member-owned, cooperative financial institutions whose purpose is to help build strong and vibrant communities across B.C. Together, island and coastal credit unions have four head offices and a total of 48 branches, including some in remote communities where there are no other financial institutions.

Credit unions make a major contribution to the prosperity of B.C. and its island and coastal communities. We all realize the importance of creating jobs within the region and the positive impacts that has on the local and broader provincial economy. As cooperative financial institutions, we keep our jobs, our tax dollars and our dividends local. In fact, island and coastal credit unions account for over 1,000 jobs, some of which are based in the more remote areas of the province.

Now I’d like to tell you a little bit about my credit union, which was established in 1946 and has grown to be the largest financial services organization home-based here on the islands. Coastal Community Credit Union has a member and client base of over 110,000, as well as assets totalling $2.4 billion, including $1.9 billion in on-book assets.

Our head office is located right here in beautiful Nanaimo. We have 600 employees, and we’ll be opening our 22nd branch this fall. All of us at Coastal Community Credit Union are engaged in the vision of being the leaders in building relationships that improve financial health, enrich people’s lives and build healthier communities, because our communities are our home.

Here are a few ways where we have put that very vision into action. We focus resources in finding effective ways to increase community involvement and cohesion while providing value to our members and our communities. For example, we have our free outdoor movie series, Sunset Cinema, which is enjoyed by thousands of island families for the past five years.

Not only was this event a huge success again this year; almost $10,000 was raised through the event’s concession stand, which will go towards expanding our classroom-based young entrepreneur program. This program provides over 1,000 students in classrooms from Campbell River to Victoria with the ability to gain real-world-business and money-management experience.

Supporting small businesses is also a big part of what we do. At Coastal Community, we currently have $471 million loaned to almost 1,400 small businesses. From helping nurture young entrepreneurs to creating the expansion of already-established businesses, we help create local jobs and careers as we work with our members to see their projects through from the beginning to the end.

Recently, we were approached by an established professional in the Oceanside region. He told us that he had a deal in place to sell his practice and was planning to help the new owner transition into this business. However, they had run into a challenge. The purchaser hadn’t been able to secure financing. They’d approached the seller’s bank, the purchaser’s bank and several other large financial institutions, which, in the words of the member: “Wouldn’t give them the time of day.”

We took the time to meet with the purchaser and were able to use our knowledge of the local market, the seller and the purchaser to structure a financing package that allowed the business to be sold and for the risk of the credit union to be managed, allowing this business to stay on the Island, where it’s helping to create jobs, career paths and local expertise.

This is just one of many examples of how our local knowledge can help us make decisions that benefit the credit union, our members and the communities that we serve, while helping our local economic development.

In recent years, budgetary tightening, weakened tourism demand, a slowing in population growth and an overbuilt housing market have conspired to slow the growth in our region. The issue would have been much more pronounced without the economic development work and community support that credit unions provide.

After lagging provincial growth and posting an employment contraction of more than 5 percent since the mid-2000s, a mild pickup is anticipated for Vancouver Island over the next two years. As with many parts of B.C., population growth is a key driver of economic activity. While local labour market conditions attract households to the Island, the region is also resilient to migration of retirees and semi-retirees. An aging population and demand for retirement living will lift population growth to 0.7 percent this year and to 0.9 percent in 2016, with gains concentrated in larger urban areas.

While economic performance has been mixed in our communities, the housing market is back in growth mode and should provide some lift to the regional economy after a post-recession lull. On a regional basis, employment growth is expected to climb 0.4 percent this year and 1.1 percent in 2016. Unemployment is forecast to trend in the 5.5 to 6 percent range from the lows of 2008, owing in part to the low participation rate.

There still seems to be a strong service sector that is influenced by resource production, including forestry and fishing. Forestry has faced challenges in recent quarters, due in part to weaker demand in the Asian markets. This has contributed to a closure of Western Forest Products’ Nanaimo sawmill and temporary curtailment of activity in the Ladysmith operations. Going forward, forestry will likely see mild improvements with higher demand, but the sector will continue to shrink as a share of the regional economy, as other sectors improve, including a growing tech sector in some of our communities.

All things considered, credit unions can be an important part of the modest economic growth that is occurring in our regions. The economic conditions surrounding the island and coastal communities are just one of the many exogenous factors affecting our ability to do our job as credit unions.

As you know, 2016 is when the phase-out of the provincial preferential tax treatment is scheduled to begin. We’re very grateful for the committee’s recommendation over the past two years to maintain the current rates that B.C. credit unions have. I hope that you will support us again this year to make the preferential tax treatment permanent.

The phase-out of the preferential tax will have a direct impact on our members, your constituents. Retained earnings, the principal source of capital growth for credit unions, and this higher tax rate will mean a lower ability to lend to B.C. residents and businesses. It’s estimated that the scheduled tax increases will reduce the island and coastal credit unions’ retained earnings by $1.5 million annually. The amount we’re able to lend to local residents and businesses will also take a hit as a result of the tax increases.

In 2020, once fully implemented, the tax rate is expected to reduce the loans we make by almost $23.8 million each year. This is going to make it difficult for us to support residents with securing mortgages and getting small businesses off the ground, with its associated impact on local jobs and the support of local social services. These difficulties will have a negative impact on the province’s overall income tax revenue, potentially affecting the support — or worse, the actual existence — of social services in these communities.

As credit unions, we exist to serve our members and strengthen our local communities. This is who we are, and we aren’t going to stop doing what we’re doing due to the impending tax increases. But it will make it much more difficult for us to do our job and will limit our ability to positively impact our communities and our province.

I’d like to leave you with this final thought. Helping us keep the preferential tax treatment is in direct support of the government’s goal to support B.C. businesses. It will also assist in building a stronger and more diversified economy and will help provide access to expertise in community services, all of which are vital to creating local jobs.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for your time and attention. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have now.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Legin. I appreciate your taking the time to contribute to a litany of thoughts that have been expressed by other credit unions as we travel around the province. Thank you very much again for the presentation.

J. Yap: As you may have heard, your colleagues, CEOs of other credit unions, have come and made presentations and given us the local flavour of what the credit unions in each part of the province have been doing supporting small business — you gave an example of that — and giving back to the community.

Some of them have actually expressed the amount of community support as a percentage of operating income. What is your credit union’s level?

A. Legin: I don’t have it for all the credit unions, but I can tell you that for our credit union we spend in the neighbourhood of 5 percent to 6 percent of our net operating income. I believe I’ve heard the stat for our competitors is about 1 percent.
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J. Yap: So 5 percent to 6 percent is returned to the community in bursaries and charities and donations.

As was said before, we’ve heard a lot about this issue from other credit unions, not your competitors. I just wanted to acknowledge that this is something that the committee is hearing very clearly and had the recommendation last year. I wasn’t on the committee at that stage, but it very clearly is a concern for many communities that definitely rely on credit unions.

I know that credit unions themselves have their own problems in ensuring that they can meet community needs. So I’d hope that if the tax can be kept, we can expand credit unions back into certain communities.

S. Chandra Herbert: Just to say that I love credit unions, because they do invest in their communities. So to hear 5 percent to 6 percent that you put back into the communities…. We’ve heard a range from across the province — from 3 percent, 3.5 percent. That’s a hefty investment from your members. Thank you very much.

A. Legin: It is our mandate, as you know. Creating healthier communities is part of why we were formed. So I appreciate it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, you’re very good at it. Thank you, Mr. Legin. I appreciate you taking the time.

Ladies, welcome. I’ll give you the same spiel. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with about two minutes to go, and then we’ll go back to the committee for questions. If that works for you, then the floor is yours.

J. Sandy: Good afternoon. I’m Jessica Sandy, and this is Jamie Lund. We’re here representing the students from North Island College, across northern and central Vancouver Island — all the way from Port Hardy to Port Alberni. There are about 4,000 students that are regular, full-time members, about 8,000 when you include some of the extra programming that North Island does.

It’s our hope that the interests of students and their families are heard and acted upon by those of you who can enable positive changes within the post-secondary education system in British Columbia. We hope to see a reversal of the changes that have led to a reduced quality and a reduced affordability of education in colleges and universities across B.C.

We’re absolutely certain that you will continue to hear, in your travels around the province…. As you know, our institutions have faced a dramatic decrease in public funding. This has pushed the system to seek more and more funding from individuals to pay for their education.

This is especially apparent in the case of the adult upgrading students, who are faced with the implementation of tuition fees for their courses this year. This $6.9 billion cut to provincial funding for adult upgrading has translated to a 30 percent decrease in enrolment for these upgrading courses at North Island College. This is particularly concerning because a considerable portion of NIC students begin their studies in upgrading courses before continuing into the trades or academic study. This will, in turn, mean a decreased number of students streaming into college-level courses at North Island College.

Tuition fee deregulation after 2001 led to a dramatic increase in tuition fees across the province. North Island College followed the trend with a doubling of tuition fees within three years. The continued increases, even after the tuition fees were re-regulated, has seen tuition fees at NIC begin to creep towards university-level prices. The tuition fee increases are deemed a necessary and stable revenue source, consistently included in preliminary budgeting targets for the college. Studies have shown that cost is the number one barrier to access to education, especially in our region.

British Columbia had, at one time, a flagship student-aid program that provided a significant amount of support for students who applied for aid through the Canada student loans program. We would like to see this program brought back at the same level of funding that it once had. Students supported by the national system of grants currently in place, and a potential provincial system of grants, would see their debt upon graduation greatly decreased. We believe that this program, while shown to be pragmatic, is first and foremost one that should be implemented on a principled basis.

Students in British Columbia are facing an average of $35,000 of student loan debt after they graduate. That’s certainly an average, and it’s a low one. I can tell you mine was a lot higher. Moreover, students in B.C. are required to pay more interest than their peers in other parts of the country. Currently, British Columbian students are charged interest at prime plus 2.5 percent on their student loans. This is the highest interest rate on student loans in Canada.

As more privileged students can pay for their education without borrowing, they are not required to pay interest.
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It is fundamentally unfair to charge some students more to obtain the same education as students who can afford to pay for their tuition fees up front without interest. Low-income students who borrow will pay thousands of dollars in interest over their repayment period and face much more trouble in trying to do so in the future.

We have four recommendations that we believe would improve the accessibility and affordability for post-secondary in British Columbia: (1) make a serious commitment to fully funded tuition fee reduction across the board; (2) re-establish a provincial system of needs-based, upfront grants that would provide upfront, non-repayable funding for students; (3) eliminate interest rates on the provincial portion of student loans; and (4) bring back the funding for adult upgrading students at institutions across the province.

There’s a large consensus across the province on the recommendations that we’ve put forward to your committee. Students are looking for some relief from the financial hardships they face while seeking the education that was available to a previous generation.

Thank you for taking the time to consider these recommendations. In previous years, there have been really strong recommendations coming out of this process, and we’ve appreciated that. It’s our hope that the members of your committee can move these recommendations forward to ensure a better and more equitable future for British Columbians.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Sandy, for a very articulate presentation. I appreciate it. I know the committee does as well.

S. Chandra Herbert: I really appreciate that you brought up the question of interest rates. It’s something that if you don’t have a student loan, a lot of people don’t think about it. I was shocked to learn that you could buy a car for lower interest rates than you pay to get an education and that the B.C. government makes more on interest in some cases, I’m told, than corporate taxes.

The question would be: what do you think it does to somebody’s future if they’ve taken on a student loan like that with a high interest rate and then they graduate? What does that set them up for?

J. Sandy: It’s hard. I tell you. I don’t want to tell you the amount of student loans that I have. I just graduated with a master’s degree. It really makes it so that buying a house is not on the horizon, even if the jobs are there. I started university 11 years ago. When I started school 11 years ago, they go: “Oh, this a good stream for you.” By the time you finish graduate work, that might not be a good stream anymore, and you’ve mortgaged this future, right?

S. Chandra Herbert: Hard to get an opportunity that way, to jump right in. Thank you.

Representing the north Island, I’m very aware that North Island College is also one of the lowest funded community colleges. It’s always struggling for parity. So there’s that issue on top of what you, as students, are facing.

Adult basic education. You say that at North Island College there’s been a 30 percent decrease in registration for it since the fees were introduced. That’s going to correlate to fewer people entering for trades training and for everything else. Are you actually seeing that impact now?

J. Sandy: That’s this year’s numbers. I spoke with the registrar on Tuesday.

S. Gibson: Thank you for your presentation. I, myself, struggled financially. I’ve shared this with the group here. I did two degrees in 4½ years, working almost full-time, and it was a struggle. Yes, tuition was lower in those days, but I worked constantly, and I got lower wages as well. So I have some sympathy.

We’ve had some really good, cogent presentations from you and your student colleagues. You’ve mentioned now you have your master’s degree, which you earned at another university. Is that right? So you got your degree at North Island.

S. Gibson: So your debt — you owe, say, $35,000, $40,000, but you have a full-time job now, presumably, probably making $60,000 or $70,000.

S. Gibson: I guess the point is…. I don’t know what discipline you’re in, but if you’re a full-time teacher or full-time social worker….

S. Gibson: But you make decisions. Don’t hear me being unsympathetic. But I went back and got two grad degrees working full-time, as well, and I’m not that smart. I just put my mind to it.

I guess I want to say to you that government can’t afford sometimes to fund everything or perhaps everybody that they would like. But I always encourage students, colleagues of mine and students that I taught — I taught students for 16 years in university — that it’s okay to work hard. It’s okay to do that. My parents didn’t give me a lot of money, and I had to work my head off. So I have some sympathy for you, but I also….
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J. Sandy: I worked full-time during university as well as at the students union.

S. Gibson: You know what? It’s good, because I admire people that do that. Other students that were bankrolled by mom and dad — many of them didn’t finish because they didn’t have ownership of the work that they did.

So those are my remarks. I have total sympathy for what you’re saying, and I’m sure government will address some of it, but you’ve got to own the education, I think, to commit to it. I don’t know whether you have any comments on that.

J. Sandy: I think the comment about the interest that the province is making off of the students loans certainly is something that could be done and done in a very real way. We’ve seen it done in other provinces. I think that that’s something that’s very tangible that could be implemented without, you know…. If corporate taxes are getting less than the students’…. We’re trying to start a new community, right?

G. Heyman: I’ll be relatively quick. There’s not really a question here. It’s just that in all the presentations I’ve heard from students unions around the province in the last two years, including this one, I’ve been impressed with the quality of the research and the presentation, which goes to the quality of the young people who are getting educations that will help us have a thriving economy in British Columbia.

It strikes me in listening — I guess to pick up on Spencer’s remarks — that we can parse whether loans should be interest-free or not. Certainly, I think, being the only province without needs-based grants makes us unique in a not very good way. But to charge interest of prime plus 2½ on student loans, when virtually anybody at this table could have a line of credit of prime minus half a percent for whatever we want to do, just seems usurious to me. There’s no excuse for that.

Seeing none, once again, a very good presentation. Well researched, as George said. We do appreciate you coming forward and presenting to the committee. Enjoy your day. Good luck with your continued studies — if there are more on the horizon, of course.

Next, PacificSport Vancouver Island — Mr. Drew Cooper. We were wondering when PacificSport would show up.

S. Hamilton (Chair): No, not yet. We had our first Invasive Species this morning, and now our first PacificSport. Welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation, Mr. Cooper. I’ll try to get your attention with about two minutes to go so you can wrap up your thoughts, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions for five, if that works.

D. Cooper: Great. Well, I’m glad I’m first out of the gate, because usually I’m at the end, and people are going: “Yeah, come on. Let’s go.”

D. Cooper: Exactly. Well, I do appreciate the opportunity to come and speak to you today because it gives me an opportunity to brag a little bit about some of the stuff that we’ve been doing. Normally, I don’t have an ask. I’m usually here to express appreciation on behalf of myself and my peers.

I’m going to tell you a few things about some of the successes, a couple of challenges, and then maybe throw out an ask at the very end.

For those who are not familiar with us, PacificSport is part of a network of six centres. We’ve got a new one in the Kootenays that just opened up this past summer. We pretty much blanket the province. We work in partnership with Canadian Sport Institute Pacific and that network of centres that goes right across the country. The services that are delivered in Montreal, Halifax and other parts of the country to national team athletes — we’re actually able to deliver those to the communities here that we serve in the central and north Island area.

I think our success is evidenced by what happened at the London Olympics. Canada — 40 percent of the national team that went to the London Olympic Games were B.C. athletes. Those B.C. athletes won half the medals that Canada won. When you consider that we’re 13 percent of the population, we’re definitely punching above our weight there, and we’re very proud of that.

Everything that we do is based on Canadian Sport for Life. Because, in part, of the success that we’ve had on the high-performance side, the province, three years ago, asked us if we would do some grassroots, participation-based activities in order to get more people moving. That’s something that we quickly embraced and got on board with, and it’s been an absolute joy to supplement the high-performance stuff that we do with some really quality, grassroots things that I’ll tell you about in a minute.

There are four things that we’re involved with. We’ve just finished a three-year deal in partnership with school district 68, where we taught every K-to-3 teacher in all 27 elementary schools. We trained the teachers on how
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to deliver PE based on physical literacy principles. It doesn’t replace the phys ed specialist, but it’s a happy compromise for the interim, until such time as we get those folks back.

We also have an afterschool program. When I shared a couple of stories last year at this time, I know that a couple of people…. It drew some tears. That’s another program. Between the two, we’ve touched every school this year alone, so we’re hitting a lot of kids.

The second initiative, which we’re quite proud of, that has happened this past year is our partnership with the Cowichan Valley regional district. Working with John Elzinga, the recreation director down there, we’ve now embarked on Canadian Active for Life communities. What that is, is we’re bringing together four sectors — the heath, education, recreation and sport sectors — and all those agencies associated with those groups to collaborate and cooperate in expanding physical activity opportunities to make for healthier communities. On the basis of this, it’s looking like we will be going to that district next with our physical literacy mentorship program.

We’ve just hired a coordinator for an innovative aboriginal project that we’re doing here in Nanaimo. We’re working together with the three local bands, the local friendship centre, the Mid-Island Métis and two other stakeholders in the community that work with the aboriginal community. We’re going to partner together and expand the opportunities for sport and physical activity for the aboriginal community in Nanaimo. These folks have never worked together in this capacity. We’re breaking new ground. Again, it’s a project that we’re pretty excited about developing and then bringing to other parts of our region.

Lastly, I’ll tell you about the IGNITE program. We’ve got one here in Nanaimo.

It’s a developmental program for 12- to 17-year-olds. We backfill those elements of their development that they’re missing, whether it’s in sprinting or whether it’s in some aspect of gymnastics — balance, agility, coordination or speed. We teach them how to live a high-performance lifestyle so that they have a chance to join and possibly be part of that B.C. contingent that goes to a major Olympic Games.

In the coming year, there are three things just with Island Health that we’re working on that we’re quite excited about.

We’ve got a frail seniors pilot project. We’re hoping to be able to work with seniors, again using some very fundamental movement skills type of techniques. We’re hoping to give seniors the confidence to enhance their mobility so that they’re going to be less likely to be more sedentary. We figure this is very soon going to show a quick gain in terms of reduced visits to emergency at our local hospitals.

There’s also a new health clinic that’s going to be opening up at one of the high schools here in town. We’ve been asked to come in and deliver a physical literacy component — in addition to the standard immunization things that they do and the distribution of STD pamphlets — to try and make it a more fun destination and educate kids and their families on the benefits of healthy active lifestyles.

The third health initiative that we’re going to be involved with is similar to our physical literacy mentorship program in the schools. We’re going to do a similar kind of work with the daycares in the region, training up their staff so that they’re doing quality activities with the kids that’s going to develop physical literacy. It’s also a gateway for us to connect with parents.

Now, while we continue to see our programs grow and thrive, we’re quickly arriving at a point where our resources can’t keep up with demand, and physical literacy mentorship is a case in point. I’ve got four districts right now clamouring for us to do that. I’ve got funding to do one, and even at that rate, we can only do 50 percent of that district at a time. With seven more districts to cover, I’m looking at another 15 to 20 years before this project is completed. By that time, we’re going to have a whole new crop of teachers coming into the system who are not trained, so we’re never really going to catch up at this rate.

We’ve also been approached to take on a youth basketball league that doesn’t have a home. This is a perfect opportunity to address the drop-out rate that happens for teens from 14 to 19 years of age. We all know what can happen for kids if they don’t have enough opportunity for engagement at that age. Staff looked around. Everybody is excited. We’d really like to run with this program. It would be exciting for us, but at the end of the day, there was nobody who was able to take it on, because we’re already all maxed out.

Lastly, I’ll just talk about our staffing. We find that many people who come to work at PacificSport like the impact that they’re making at the community level.

What we find, though, is typically after two years, they move on to either a university or a rec department, because we can’t match those salaries. It’s not that they don’t like the work. They love the work. They’re passionate about the work, but we cannot match the salaries and the benefit packages that those people do. If we’re going to be that world-class kind of organization, delivering quality programs and services, we need to address that.

I think our return on investment, you’ll agree, is pretty spectacular. The base funding that we receive, we leverage that 2½ times. In some cases, some of the programs initiatives, physical literacy, mentorship — again, I’ll refer to that one — we leverage that five times over. We’re do-
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ing all this with less than 4.5 FTEs, and that’s covering the whole Island from the Malahat north. The only area we don’t deliver services to is Victoria.

Double our base, and we’ll triple our output. Let’s put a one-penny tax on pop, and let’s properly support the sports and physical activity system so that we can get this province moving.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Cooper. We actually had a presentation in Kelowna yesterday from a gentleman, a doctor, who was talking about childhood obesity. He wanted to put a whole lot more than a penny tax on pop.

D. Cooper: I would also take 1/100th of 1 percent of the health care budget. There are all sorts of….

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. Just a question around the programs. I mean, it’s exciting to me to think of places like day cares — the teachers having the opportunity, because they don’t get a lot of pro-D and a lot of opportunities to do this kind of work. Schools, as you point out, have the gap of not having the specialist teachers in every district anymore.

Do you decide on those kinds of programs and priorities based on people coming to you? Are you taking a look at the kind of work you want to do? I mean, it’s everything from seniors to preschool to school to elite athletes. I just wondered whether it’s a request that is coming to you, to PISE, or whether it’s something that you’re setting up.

D. Cooper: It’s a combination of things. For example, the physical literacy mentorship program that we do — that was a provincial initiative that came our way. They said: “We’ve got a little pot of money. See if you can leverage that with your local districts to initiate this program.” So all five PacificSport centres are delivering on that provincially.

In the case of some of these health initiatives that we’re doing, Jan Tatlock is the person within Island Health in charge of preventative medicine or preventative health. I’m not sure of her title. She attended a presentation by Dr. Dean Kriellaars, and from that she went to the physical literacy conference in Vancouver, where he was again presenting. She’s drunk the Kool-Aid. She’s ready to move forward with these initiatives. That’s an instance of where we’ve kind of given a hint about what the possibilities are, and people have run with it.

J. Yap: That’s actually my question. Were you familiar with the proposal from the obesity association in regards to a tax on sugary drinks?

D. Cooper: No, I’m not familiar with it. It’s just something that I’ve been bringing up in the conversation I’ve had with provincial representatives over the last few years.

J. Yap: If more voices kind of reflect the interest in looking at the possibility of that now….

D. Cooper: Yeah. I’d be very interested in that. How would I go about getting my hands on it?

J. Yap: Well, it was on Hansard, so it’s in the public record — in the Kelowna public hearing yesterday. I’m sure you’ll be able to find out details, and we can put you in touch through Stephanie.

D. Cooper: We are part of an alliance with ViaSport, and this would be the perfect kind of a challenge for those folks to take on, as our provincial representatives, to deal with those kinds of issues and lend their voice to that. They would certainly have the six PacificSport centres plus the other new members that we’ve got on board as well.

E. Foster: We were all very proud of our B.C. athletes in London — no question about it. As much as that was great, I guess I’m more interested in what you’re doing with youth, because it just builds into, you know, the great elite athletes and so on. I like what you do. I think your organization has moved from that elite group down to developing the elite athletes from the kindergarten age.

I was going to mention the doctor yesterday, because he, I think, figured we could raise 120-some-million dollars with a 30 cent a litre tax. They wanted that earmarked for childhood obesity. So it might be a good spot for you to start.

Your ask here is obviously…. You need some more funding to continue and to expand what you’re doing. Do you have a dollar figure? Do you know kind of what you need to…? You were talking about only being able to do one area and you need to do five. What kind of money are you talking about?

D. Cooper: Well, I wouldn’t presume to speak as an individual centre. I think that we have to have a conversation that would include all our provincial partners. That conversation would happen with representatives alongside ViaSport administrators.
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We would want to do it in concert with all our partners. I can’t possibly put a figure on it provincially, but I would certainly contribute to the conversation that we would have internally to say: “Here’s what our ask would be within our region.” Then we would want to present it in such a way that we were able to deliver on standardized programs and services right across the province.

E. Foster: Fine, okay, thanks. You need to do that, though. Like, if we’re going to make a recommendation to the Minister of Finance, we kind of need to have something so that we can throw a number at him.

D. Cooper: I will follow up with our ViaSport partners and have them come to the table with a number.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, we’re out of time, but we’re a little ahead of schedule, so Spencer, I’ll certainly….

S. Chandra Herbert: When I was in municipal politics, one of the things we did was adopted the Canadian Sport for Life philosophy within the Vancouver park board system. I just wondered. I noticed you’re talking about Canadian Active for Life. Is that the new branding for it, or is that a change?

D. Cooper: This is my personal crusade. As you’re probably aware, if you talk about sport in Canada, people think of it as this elite thing. If you talk about sport in Australia, that’s any form of physical activity. I think in the original document, when they talked about a Canadian Sport for Life, it was in that Australian kind of ideal that they were talking about. It doesn’t resonate, so whenever I use it, I substitute the term Active for Life as opposed to Sport for Life just for that reason.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Mr. Cooper, thank you very much for taking the time to present to the committee. It’s always a pleasure. Once again, good luck in all the work that you’re doing.

My understanding is that we do not have our friends from Shore Energy Solutions here, but we do have Kim Burden from the Parksville and District Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Burden, welcome. Ten minutes to present. I’ll try to get your attention with about two minutes to go to wrap up your thoughts.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, you’ve got it. It’s in your pocket. Use it however you wish.

K. Burden: It’s an interesting spot to be in. I’m a customer and a member of the credit union, I have three students in university, and I’m the past chair of PacificSport Vancouver Island, so I’m feeling…. [Laughter.]

K. Burden: I could have done all of them, yeah. And I’m sure I’m not the first chamber of commerce that you’ve heard from in this exercise.

Thank you for the time that you put into travelling the province and gathering input from various groups and individuals regarding their budget priorities. As a member of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce network, the issues that I’m going to bring to your attention today are issues that have been raised by the chamber in the past and items that reflect the policies brought forward and accepted by the network.

My task today is to talk to you about three of the Ts, so we’re going to venture into VAT, PST and PTT, the property transfer tax.

We agree that government has a responsibility to ensure the judicious use of taxpayer dollars, and as one of the only three jurisdictions with a balanced budget, B.C. has developed a reputation for fiscal prudence. The fiscal restraint has seen public spending contained and debt levels low when compared to many other jurisdictions, and for that, we recognize that B.C. is in an enviable fiscal position.

We have seen an erosion of B.C. tax competitiveness. B.C. is highly competitive globally when it comes to corporate, personal and small business tax rates. Despite this record, B.C. has seen its competitive position slip.

It is our goal to ensure that B.C. retains its reputation for sound fiscal management. Key aspects of this reputation must be monitoring growth in public spending, reducing B.C.’s debt burden and continuing to innovate in service delivery. Further to this, the chamber’s goal is to create a tax system that attracts investment and encourages business growth.

We would like to see the provincial government continue to limit public spending to the rate of population and economic growth.

We would like to see the provincial government dedicate a minimum of 50 percent of surpluses to debt reduction, lead a public discourse on the development of a made-in-B.C. value-added tax, address the most pressing issue around the PST by removing the PST on the purchase of machinery and equipment, work with business to mitigate the impact of the carbon tax on B.C.’s export industries, and return the revenue neutrality of the B.C. carbon tax to broad-based personal and corporate tax cuts.

The first two points, paying off the debt and monitoring growth in public spending, are simply sound practices to ensure that spending remains controlled, that we pay down the debt — which will, in turn, ensure we re-
[ Page 1677 ]
tain our excellent credit rating — and that we don’t pass on excessive debt to future generations.

Regarding the development of a made-in-B.C. value-added tax, we’re looking to government to address the fact that B.C.’s tax competitiveness has been undermined by the public’s rejection of the harmonized sales tax. This has been compounded by the fact that the harmonized sales tax has been replaced with, essentially, an unchanged provincial sales tax. As a small, open trading jurisdiction, this cannot be left unaddressed if B.C. wishes to remain competitive as a jurisdiction.

The move to HST was greeted with wide support from the business community and virtually unanimous support from academics. This support was based on a recognition that the HST would result in increased competitiveness and increased productivity and a reduction in paperwork for business. While many of the arguments in favour of the HST focus on its broad provincial impact, it is worth noting that this is an issue of particular importance for small business, given B.C.’s reliance on small and medium-sized businesses for economic prosperity.

Now, despite the obvious benefits of a harmonized sales tax, the chamber recognizes that the public has spoken through the referendum and that there is no appetite, either publicly or politically, for a harmonized sales tax. However, reform is needed.

The chamber believes that the most damaging aspect of the return to the PST, and the aspect that therefore requires the most immediate attention, is the tax being levied on investment in machinery and equipment. This is not to suggest that the PST has seen an increase in cost on all machinery and equipment, as the PST already exempts certain machinery and processing equipment used in manufacturing and agriculture.

The reform needs to widen the scope of these sectors so that these can access savings to reduce complexity but also to reduce B.C.’s marginal effective tax rate. It has been estimated that offering an input tax credit on the acquisition of machinery and equipment would cut B.C.’s marginal effective tax rate to 19 percent, significantly improving B.C.’s position in relation to other jurisdictions in Canada. We recognize that this is not a measure that can be introduced immediately, as it would result in a reduction in revenue to government.

I’ll stop reading for a second and tell you that I attend all of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce policy sessions. You should note that when a policy regarding a financial ask from government or a tax issue comes to the floor, the first person to the microphone is always somebody who wants to talk about what the impact on government revenues is going to be, because we recognize that it’s critical and important.

I don’t want you to misconstrue anything that I’m saying. We believe that government does do a good job, and we believe that there is some room to make some more changes and to reform a little bit more.

I want to be sure that you understand me when I say we’re not looking to reduce government revenue. We’re looking to improve the fairness of the existing taxes and possibly look at a different way to tax business. We ask that government engage in a meaningful consultation with British Columbians, which is what you are doing, on our competitiveness and productivity and the role that taxation plays.

While the return of the PST represented the largest tax increase on business in B.C.’s history, representing an increase in cost of $1.5 billion, B.C. businesses are facing rising costs on a number of additional fronts in the form of higher employment insurance and WorkSafe B.C. premiums, a carbon tax that is the highest in North America, escalating electricity rates, increases in the minimum wage and uncompetitive municipal property taxes, quite a few of which you can do nothing about.

The direct hit on a company’s revenue is amplified by the ongoing permitting issues that continue to impede investment in our critical resource sector and the ongoing regulatory impediments facing business at every level.

We would like to see the provincial government provide a fully refundable investment tax credit claimed on businesses income tax returns equal to the PST paid on all acquisitions of machinery and equipment, including computers and software but excluding buildings and structures with a capital cost allowance rate of 5 percent or less.

We would like to see the government continue to work with the chamber of commerce and others to find ways to reduce the administrative burden of the PST and commit to a dialogue with British Columbians on the development of a made-in-B.C., value-added tax system to enhance B.C.’s competitiveness and productivity.

We would be remiss if we did not also bring to your attention the negative impact of the property transfer tax.

It is not our recommendation at this time to seek an end to the property transfer tax, but we are asking that the threshold be changed to reflect the current real estate market.

I’ll go away from my script again. I’m sure you’ve heard this, particularly in the Lower Mainland. The property transfer tax, given the current real estate market, has got to change. The threshold has got to be different.

I live in a service-sector economy in a retirement community. In order for young people to enter the housing market in our community on a service-sector wage, they’re looking at living a significant way away from the
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centre of our small community, out into the rural areas. It makes it difficult to attract young professionals to our community. We’re having a difficult time attracting doctors to our community. A lot of these things are tied to housing prices, which is why we want to put a little bit of emphasis on the threshold for the property transfer tax.

Thank you, Mr. Burden. I appreciate you taking the time to present to the committee. I’m going to go to George first.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much, Mr. Burden, for the presentation and the thoughtfulness of it. I had an interesting exchange with one of your colleagues from the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce this morning respecting the relative value of tax credits for specific activities that both business and government might want to incent, whether it’s job creation or capital investment or carbon reduction, versus a blanket reduction in corporate income tax. So I understand your approach, and I’m sure we will discuss it and consider it, as I’m sure the Finance Ministry will.

I do want to question you on your comments about the carbon tax. A number of commentators have stated — and one of them happens to be the Finance Minister — that in recent years the carbon tax is actually revenue-negative in British Columbia, as opposed to revenue-positive. If we adopted your recommendations to remove it from some of its current applications, it would be even more revenue-negative. I’m interested in your comment on that.

K. Burden: Well, I guess we’re looking at different numbers, and I’ll have to go back and review mine in light of those comments. Mine are from 2010, so there may be something more current that I should be reviewing.

I’m not a big fan of the carbon tax to begin with. I think that there are better ways to incent proper handling of the impact that we create on the environment, particularly with regard to municipalities and how they are required to put aside funding in their carbon reserves. I think that sometimes that creates a false…. I’m not sure they all know what to do with that money. I’ve had several discussions with our municipality with regard to what to do with that pot of dollars and what they could do to start renewable energy projects and those sorts of things.

I just think that we maybe need to have a discussion around the whole carbon tax concept as well. It hasn’t really been well received in other jurisdictions, and I do believe that it affects our competitiveness.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. As George said — very thoughtful.

I’ve got two distinct questions. One is…. You’re talking about a made-in-B.C. VAT, and I’m wondering what a made-in-B.C. VAT would be. Obviously, the HST was a B.C. version of VAT, and you’ve got to pull in the GST anyway. So I’m just wondering how that would look, in your mind.

The second…. As I said, two distinct questions. You mentioned that one of the issues facing businesses is the escalating electricity rates. I’m wondering if you’ve got any examples in your own chamber, the Parksville and district chamber, of businesses that have been particularly impacted by that. I’m thinking of dry cleaners or others that might have been particularly impacted on that level.

K. Burden: Okay. I’ll go with the VAT first. I don’t know exactly what that looks like. I loved the HST. What can I say? I think that for business and homeowners — you know, everybody…. It was a bad sales job on a really good government revenue initiative. I think that if there had been a bit more work up front, possibly the HST would have been more accepted.

Income tax is such a…. I know that government needs money. We’re here because we’ve got things that we want, and we want them from government. Government has become sort of the dad with the wallet to all of us. We have to fund that somehow, so taxation is the way to fund it.

Income tax takes money from people who, regardless of their situation, are out there working hard and being productive. A sales tax takes money from people who are using their money by choice. They’re making choices about how they spend that money. I think it’s a better way, a fairer way, to gather money from citizens to fund government. I would like us to return to a value-added tax system and possibly reduce income tax further, based on the revenue that we get from a value-added tax system.

Obviously, because of the results of the referendum, it has to be something that has a great deal of consultation with people around the province to develop a system that is as acceptable — no tax is acceptable — as possible to the citizens of British Columbia.

The HST was borrowed from other jurisdictions. It was not necessarily made in British Columbia. I think that Ontario was probably…. There were some goings-on there. And there are others. I think Quebec has….

We borrowed instead of creating. And let’s face it. We’re different. We really are different. The Rockies are not just a mountain range; they make us different. I think that we need to have a significant amount of work put into developing something that works here and is fair for British Columbians and much fairer than what we call income tax.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you. I’ll stop you there because we’re out of time. I have two questions left that I’d like to try to get to, if you’d indulge us.
[ Page 1679 ]

S. Chandra Herbert: The Parksville chamber suggested that for any surplus, 50 percent should go to paying down the financial debt. I wondered whether or not there’s any focus from the chamber on environmental debt. I speak of climate change. Certainly, it’s been impacting the environment of the Island and the province. What are your members’ priorities around addressing those kinds of issues?

K. Burden: I just came from a meeting with the city, with regard to creating a community power organization using renewable energy sources. We have solar panels on the roof of our offices. We hosted a business energy adviser to assist our businesses in reducing their energy footprint. We believe that the environmental aspect of doing business is an important one. We work on the principle of a three-legged stool — social, fiscal, environmental. They have to balance in order for business to be successful.

We live in the best part of the province. We live in the most beautiful place, and we have to protect that in order to protect both of our major industries, which are resource extraction through forestry, and tourism.

S. Chandra Herbert: Just in that regard, are there any priorities that your members have for the province in terms of addressing the environment?

I know I’ve heard from business owners around the need for more conservation officers, to deal with poaching and pollution. Anything come to mind?

S. Hamilton (Chair): We need serious brevity now, folks. Serious brevity. We’re a couple of minutes over here so far, and we have more people.

J. Yap: I think you were in the room when we asked Mr. Cooper about his opinion, and he had a view on a tax on sugary drinks. I’m just wondering if you have an opinion on that.

K. Burden: I do, but I choose not to share it because it’s my own and not my organization’s.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Burden. I appreciate your coming and presenting to the committee. Well done; have a good day.

Welcome. Ten minutes to present. I’ll try to get your attention and give you a two-minute warning so you can wrap up your thoughts. Then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

I. Gartshore: I’m really pleased to be able to come before you again. I guess I was two years ago or something like that. The province has now instituted one of the items that I suggested to save us health care dollars, so that’s great. I’m always glad to know that maybe I played a little part in the province. Who knows? That was in putting in heat-recovery ventilators in all the new homes. That’s going to save us lots of health care problems.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m building a house right now. I just spent a lot of money on one. Thanks a lot.

I. Gartshore: Yes. Well, you could spend a little money on that now, or you can spend a lot more money on having been sick and the health care system having to support you for that. So it is a problem.

I’m a certified energy advisor, and I’m going to mostly be focusing on energy. But I’m also a marriage and family therapist, so I’m going to touch a little bit on that in my presentation today. I’ve just got a few notes, so I’m going to go with those.

First of all, I just want to make a comment. I know Kim a little bit. We just came from the same meeting. So I appreciate where he came from. I find it strange that the carbon tax might be questioned, because it seems to me that that is a value-added tax.

We can’t do it both ways, and I think it is a very effective tax in terms of what it’s actually accomplishing here in the province. Without prices going up, we do not save energy. We simply do not. One of the advantages in the wretchedness of higher electricity prices, even though we’re still the third cheapest in North America, is that we end up saving more energy.

I can tell you that even though the province is no longer subsidizing energy audits, which is a little part-time side job for me, people are now willing to pay double what they used to pay to have their energy audits done — not as many people, by any means — even though the incentives are really awful. I just came from a household that’s complained about that.

I can tell you that people now, with the higher energy prices, are hurting and are now realizing: “Maybe it’s time for me to save energy.”

This brings me to my main point: that saving energy, energy conservation efficiency, creates about five time more jobs than in the fossil fuel industry. Those jobs are all local jobs.

Wearing my other hat as a marriage and family therapist, I can tell you what it does to families to export good people off to faraway places in this province or the next one. Alcoholism, family split-ups — a lot of horrible stuff ends up happening to people. If we can create five times more jobs, make them local jobs, save the environment and make homes more comfortable, more energy-efficient and, therefore, higher value, that seems to me a good value for everybody.

Here’s an idea that’s not new to me. For zero dollars — the province pays nothing — it finally puts into place an
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idea that it had years ago under its former Premier, which is that if you want to sell your existing home, you have an energy audit done. When you do, then people get to compare this house to that house and say: “Oh, this house is going to be 30 percent more efficient than that house. Which house am I going to buy? Which house goes up in value? The one that’s 30 percent more efficient.”

What does that do? It creates a huge number of jobs putting in windows, heat pumps, insulation and all kinds of other products — including, sometimes, even heat-recovery ventilators, as expensive as they are. It costs the province nothing and generates a huge amount of revenue for the province.

It means that people save energy, which of course helps us with our greenhouse gas emissions, helps us with more, shall I say, energy security. When the power goes off and your house is better insulated, you’re going to stay warm longer.

The second one, energy production. We have got, in sites, these big projects. As a former politician — elected or wanting to be, anyway — I can tell you that it’s really good when you can show big projects as being: “Yes, this is the way the province is going forward.”

W.A.C. Bennett did very well with the dams. He did very well politically. It’s all very fine and dandy to put in Site C dam if we need it for fracking and exporting natural gas, which is very much in doubt. This is the last jurisdiction, I think, in the world that is trying to bring natural gas to export market, even though we have a huge surplus of gas in the world market already.

Secondly, we’re going to have a world carbon tax brought into effect, which is not going to make B.C. very competitive, because that’s going to happen worldwide. When that does, then carbon fuels, of course, are going to be that much more expensive, which just means people are going to want to move away from them that much more. When we keep on, as a province, driving ourselves forward on this one track, we’re aiming for big trouble. We’re going to end up subsidizing that industry. We’re not going to get the jobs from it.

However, the good news is that two times the number of jobs — again, local jobs — are created when we put solar panels on our roofs. When we make more energy-conserving kinds of things happen, it’s even more.

I’m part of the same thing that Mr. Smythe is. We’re looking at how we can, as local communities, put in more renewable energy. One reason for that is because about three-quarters of our electricity here on Vancouver Island comes from the Mainland. In an earthquake scene, that means we could be without power for up to one year, says B.C. Hydro.

What would that do to our economy? What would that do to living here? What would that do to a quarter of the population of British Columbia? It would be horrible. And that’s a very real possibility.

The more electricity we can generate here and the more we can do it in a renewable energy way, in a way that’s going to generate more jobs and more economic opportunities for people right here, then the happier my families are — fewer people need to come to see me about their broken-up marriages, which is good — the more our local economies thrive and the more we are able to do well in the case of an emergency. That’s the second point.

Lastly, transportation — a very expensive item for the province, as you know. We love to be modern. We want to do what everyone else is doing. I can tell you that it’s not working well.

One of the ideas is to put a foot-only ferry between here and Vancouver. It looks like the federal government’s going to pony up some money for that private enterprise. While it’s going to make land prices here go through the roof, I think it’s probably a much better idea than trying to do everything car-centric, which we do and which costs you and me humongous amounts of money.

The carbon tax is peanuts compared to what it costs you and me. We want to get around — great. That’s fine. But if we were to go a more European style and like other parts of the world, we’d be putting more money into railways, more money into public transportation. We’d be putting a lot more effort into getting people moved around in more efficient ways than the automobile.

How’s that going to help us? If we do that, it’s going to cost us more money, yes, to support those kinds of things. We’re not going to get as much revenue from the gas tax — which, by the way, is going to go down anyway as we go to electric cars. What it’s going to do is greatly save money for people in this part of the world.

When people can save $5,000 a year on transportation, do you think they’re going to mind paying an extra $500 a year for the taxes? Nope.

Those people who want to keep on paying all those taxes — they can keep on paying them if they don’t want to take advantage of a good sustainable transportation system. If they want to pay that, that’s fine. If they want to pay through the nose, go ahead. But for those of the many people who would prefer to be able to get around more efficiently and safely by bicycle, bus, foot ferries, all that kind of stuff…. The more we can do that, then the more we save money.

B.C. Ferries is not sustainable the way it is — it simply isn’t — because it’s car-centric. That’s the bottom line. So if we want to keep on subsidizing that or having our coastal
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communities suffer more and more with prices going up and up and up…. I think we need to shift from that model to one that involves more sustainable transportation.

Those are my three key points. I think I’m just about out of time, aren’t I.

I. Gartshore: All right. Just to summarize, to require energy audits costs the province nothing. We’d get tons of jobs. That’s thousands of dollars in this province alone from that. Thousands of dollars, thousands of jobs — guaranteed. Energy production: smaller, more local, community-oriented. And transportation: more renewable, more sustainable, less expensive for us all, ultimately.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Gartshore. I appreciate your time. Thank you for taking the time to present to the committee.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for a very interesting presentation. I just want to touch on your first point, around conservation, to ask whether there’s anywhere, any jurisdiction that you’d point to that’s doing a better job or doing a job that you think should be looked at.

I. Gartshore: Vancouver insists on those energy audits being done. I can tell you that energy advisers have moved to that jurisdiction because they’re needed. I can tell you that a local company here on Vancouver Island that put in solar panels has now moved to Vancouver. It’s a hot spot because it’s doing it right. Or doing it righter than most of us are.

S. Chandra Herbert: I enjoyed the discussion about conservation because it’s clear that that’s the way to go. I wondered…. In terms of the building code, I know some changes have been made. I don’t think it went far enough. I wonder if you have any thoughts about…. I don’t know if you’d call them reach goals, stretch goals or what you’d call them. But to try and get B.C. to catch up with much of the rest of the world that’s addressing these conservation issues, with the use of Passive House and various other technologies to actually bring down your emissions and your energy use by up to 90 percent or even add power back to the grid, do you think the building code or those sorts of things should get another look to try and address these issues?

I. Gartshore: Well, when I compare us to Europe — which I know is not fair because they are light years ahead of us, but if we do — then, they can tell us what is doable. Now, Europeans are far more advanced than we are in terms of their thinking. I remember doing an energy audit for a couple who had moved from Germany, I think it was, and they were aghast at how much energy we waste.

People from B.C. and Ontario are amazed that we still have single-pane windows in these old homes. But even the new ones are not…. You know, they’re much better. In fact, in Canada we have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions in housing stock quite a bit, even though we have a lot more homes than we used to. So we’re getting there. It’s good. It’s actually one of the bright stars in the sky, if you like.

But, for example, in Europe, the windows…. Here we have…. You know, if they’re going to be vinyl, they’re double-pane and all that kind of stuff, so it’s a nice flat surface. There they put insulation on the outside of the frames, because the frames lose more heat in some ways than the glass does. So they’ve gone a lot further with that. In Whistler, when they did the Olympics, they put together a European house, and it’s energy efficiency was quite a bit higher.

In terms of what can be done, yes, we can do that. I think that the city of Nanaimo has very sadly turned down the solar option — so you put a run up to the roof to make it solar-ready. I think that that should be a provincial standard.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m not using it right now, but I just thought I better let you know that it’s there. The run is up to the roof.

I. Gartshore: When those kinds of measures are put into place that at least make it possible for us to go further, when…. I know, for example, you have to now put insulation under the slab. It’s not very much, but at least it’s a lot more than it used to be. That makes a huge difference for the energy audits — just a ginormous difference there. So any of those kinds of measures that we can continue to go further in.

Right now, some of the builders are having some difficulty with this current code because, frankly, they haven’t caught up to reality, to what it means to be in the 21st century. So they need to catch up. Maybe the province needs to help them along with that a bit more. But R20 walls is very minimal. I think that we could go further than that.

The windows, though, are their number one heat loss. That still is the case. Skylights are the worst — absolutely the worst — because they face to outer space and the heat loss is the square of the temperature difference between inside and outer space.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You can’t put them in anymore. It’s the new code. You’ve got to read the new code.

S. Hamilton (Chair): In the last minute we have left, I’m going to go to George.

G. Heyman: Thank you for your presentation. I know that in terms of the Hydro integrated resource plan conservation options, the option that was settled on was a more moderate rather than a more aggressive one, unfortunately. I also know that Hydro did a pilot project on a pay-as-you-save energy loan program that they didn’t think was particularly successful.

My question is: are there models that you can point to of that kind of support for energy efficiency activity that you think work better and are successful?

I. Gartshore: Oh yeah, B.C. Hydro dragged its feet like crazy on that. They said: “We’re not a bank. We don’t want to be a bank.” That’s what their statement was, and they made that program fail, frankly. The loan program could be way, way better.

There are many jurisdictions in the States…. I can’t name them. I’m not prepared for that, but I could look that up and send it to you. The B.C. Sustainable Energy Association has lots of good information on that. They’re based in Victoria. They’ve got lots of good things on their website about that, which could take us a lot further.

The number one barrier for people is often: “I don’t have the money up front. I’m already in debt up to about here.” So if this debt can be added to the house and, furthermore, if you could work with the municipalities to tweak the rules there so that they can then do this with their people, then those would be ways that the province wouldn’t pay anything more but people could actually be able to up the efficiency of their homes.

I mean, we’ve got a lot of older housing stock that really needs to be improved. For people who are low-income, I really appreciate that the province, I think, is still subsidizing programs for them. That’s not advertised. Almost nobody knows about it. So I think the province could do a lot more to let people know that they can have a more efficient home. People who are low-income are paying the worst energy bills, because they’re typically in the cheapest homes that are poor.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Gartshore. I appreciate you coming forward and presenting — and yeah, all kinds of new things we’re learning.

Okay, next we have the Vancouver Island University Students Union. Sherry McCarthy and Patrick Barbosa, would you come on forward.

Good afternoon. Ten minutes to present. I’ll give you a heads-up with about two minutes left. Then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

P. Barbosa: Sure. I’m happy to introduce myself. My name is Patrick Barbosa. I’m staff at the Vancouver Island University Students Union, and I’m here to assist my chairperson, Sherry.

S. McCarthy: Hi. My name is Sherry McCarthy. I’m the Vancouver Island University Students Union chairperson. You’ll have to excuse me. I’m going to have to use my notes.

First off, I would like to begin by acknowledging that we’re on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. I would like to bring a message of greetings and hope from the more than 10,000 students attending Vancouver Island University.

We’re hopeful that you recognize the importance of providing the same opportunity to access education today that was provided to British Columbians 30, 25 and even 15 years ago. As you are probably already aware, students in this province are seeking four thoughtful and important improvements to the post-secondary education system.

I’d like to begin with tuition fees. Tuition fees in B.C. were dramatically increased a decade ago and have been rising steadily since then. Added to tuition are a whole host of mandatory ancillary fees charged by colleges and universities for everything from supplies to information technology and even graduation.

These fee increases have led to a predictable increase in student debt, which has reached a debilitating level for many graduates. The system of increased user fees has mortgaged the future of many British Columbians and has downloaded the cost of B.C.’s economic prosperity onto the backs of its citizens, and at the very stage in life where they are the least able to bear those costs.

I hope that even the most cynical opponent of public services would recognize that an educated citizenry has a direct correlation with economic prosperity and that individual economic success does not happen in a vacuum.

Economic prosperity takes all of us working together. That working together should include prioritizing government funding and reduction of tuition fees across all public universities and colleges.

Another area of concern to Vancouver Island University students is the rate of interest charged on B.C. student loans. While other provinces like Newfoundland and
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Labrador move their education systems and economies forward by eliminating student loans in favour of a system of grants, B.C. maintains the highest rate of interest on student loans in Canada.

Eliminating and reducing interest charges on student loans would cost the province a small amount but provide much relief, a huge debt burden on students and their families. Eliminating interest on student loans would not only assist current students; it would help recent graduates and the thousands of prospective students who are able to afford to go back to school or are too nervous of incurring debt to improve their education.

There appears to be a consensus within the post-secondary system — from administrators to faculty members to support in professional staff and, of course, students — that funding provided by the government has not sufficiently kept up with the costs of running our colleges and universities. Every single year our universities and colleges face greater and greater shortfalls when planning their budgets and have to cut to the bone.

Recent and future cuts to college and university budgets have and will vastly impact services for students, as well as the breadth and depth of programming. Further, and in specific reference to VIU, the per-student funding provided to our college and universities varies greatly and has the appearance of being somewhat arbitrary. Vancouver Island University receives less per-student funding than the majority of institutions in British Columbia — which is neither fair nor just to VIU students and their families, who pay taxes and tuition fees in our region.

Students implore committee members to recommend an increase in operational funding to B.C. universities and colleges. Moreover, we ask every committee member to act as an advocate for these recommendations in his or her respective caucus and in the Legislature.

We further recommend that the system of institutional funding be re-examined to ensure funding models are fair and equitable on a per-student basis. Young people are told that education is an investment in their future, and if this is true on a micro level, it is doubly so on a macro level. Post-secondary education is an investment our province makes in a more prosperous future, and we only risk failing to meet our needs and potential if we underfund this important investment.

British Columbia is the only province in the entire country that does not have a comprehensive needs-based grants program. Parties from across the political spectrum have recognized the logic of providing enhanced opportunities to students who do not have the financial means to pay for their education up front.

Grants are an important way to ensure students have the financial means to complete their studies without racking up huge debts that limit their financial abilities post-graduation. In most provinces, up-front grants act as a policy measure to ensure that those from extraordinarily low incomes are able to access the education they need to support their families.

If education is to be a social equalizer, we must have programs that enable those from the most marginalized backgrounds to overcome the existing financial barriers to colleges and universities and attain the designation they need to find equity in the job market. It is certainly better that the province invests in grants and other non-repayable forms of student financial assistance than have to spend money on the social ills created when we do not provide opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds.

In closing, I would like to thank the committee members for their time. We’re happy to answer any questions.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful. Thank you very much for taking the time to present. We appreciate that.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you very much. A very effective presentation, in my view, and one that’s been echoed across the province so far.

I guess the question I want to ask is: does VIU have a food bank that students access? I’m not sure. I’ve heard that at other universities they do, and colleges.

P. Barbosa: We have a program. We’ve opted to not have a food bank on campus, because we think that there’s a stigma that students feel when they attend a service like that — not to say that for folks that need to attend that service, there’s anything wrong with it.

What we do is we provide an emergency financial aid system, a fairly robust one, through the financial aid office, so students will access that fund. I can say with absolute certainty that across our institution, from campus to campus to campus, every year, every dollar in that fund is accessed.

S. Chandra Herbert: Okay, thank you. Each one deals with it differently, but it just shows the challenge and the struggle that students have.

What sorts of issues do students bring to that aid office? I ask because it helps me understand the impact of interest rates, etc., on students’ lives.

P. Barbosa: I think it runs the gamut from not having enough money to pay their tuition fees in the second semester to not having enough money to put food on the table, struggling to pay for rent, utilities. I would say that in each case, though, the reality is that students just don’t have enough money. Particularly if you’re coming from a lower-income background where your parents don’t have the resources to support you, you’re struggling on a day-to-day basis.

I know from personal experience, having been on a student loan my entire academic career — at least, the
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entire full-time academic career. I actually left full-time studies and became a part-time student so that I could work and try and pay for my education. It ended up taking me 14 years to finish my degree. I’m very proud of that, thank you.

It’s a challenge. When you get your student loan, you know that you don’t have enough money to meet the full costs that you’re going to get. It just doesn’t meet it.

S. Chandra Herbert: I’m assuming that many students end up working while trying to do their degrees, which then ends up taking a lot longer, as in your case.

P. Barbosa: Yeah, Sherry has been one of the more successful members. She’s just in the process of working on her MBA. But personally, it was a challenge. I had to work. I had a student loan. I was a single parent. Trying to pay for all of that and then also achieve the Canadian dream, I’ll call it, of reaching the middle-class level was quite a challenge.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I was going to follow up on that piece as well. I wondered whether you had any statistics around either the length of time people are taking to complete, because I hear the same kinds of examples, or around people who are taking courses and then dropping out — so beginning the course, hoping that they can manage it and then not able to because of the additional costs.

Then the second question — you may have said it, and I may have just missed it — is the differential between the per-student funding that you get and the per-student funding that is given at other universities.

P. Barbosa: We certainly have lots of anecdotal stories of students who have chosen to stop going to school because they couldn’t afford the costs. They’ve chosen to take that lower-income career, if you call it that, lower-income job that they’ve had in the past instead of amassing more student debt. There are tons of anecdotal stories. Certainly, you can call our office any time if you’re looking for some of those examples.

In terms of the per-student funding, when we talk about it being arbitrary, it is legitimately arbitrary. Vancouver Island University receives a number. Why do we receive $7,590 per student per year? I don’t know. Certainly, I’d like to know. Why does UBC receive in excess of $12,000 per student per year? I don’t know.

I mean, I just don’t know, right? The reality is that we are at the very lower end of all of those institutions. There are five institutions that receive less per-student funding than we receive. Why do they receive less? I don’t know. It’s a historical number that really doesn’t make any sense.

My best guess is that at some point, as part of sort of an accountability mechanism, the Ministry of Advanced Education ascribed a certain amount of FTEs to that institution. They probably did a big announcement saying they were going to increase them and then tied the funding of the day to that number of FTEs.

Unfortunately, that number was arbitrary. It didn’t really match up in the province. From our perspective, we would like to see all institutions brought up to the UBC number, or certainly have a number for each category of institution, for sure.

S. Gibson: I taught students at the university. I was out at UFV in Abbotsford. A number of these students worked full-time and went to university. Now, they may take a little longer than myself. That was my situation.

Now you have the opportunity to do on-line courses. Say you want to work full-time and take care of your responsibilities. You can go to school full-time. You might take some courses, say, on Mondays and Thursdays, in the evenings or whatever, and then you do on line.

I’m sympathetic, and we’ve had some excellent presentations that have been very cogent. But I’m often reminded that, so often, my students that had the toughest situations, in terms of financially, often did the best, because those students that were bankrolled and had no financial needs didn’t take ownership of their education.

I don’t want to sound like I’m unsympathetic. But in your situation, you’re both mature students.

In your situation, Patrick…. I appreciate your sharing some of your personal thoughts. But you could have gone to school full-time, possibly — I don’t know — and taken it on line and completed your degree a little quicker. Again, don’t hear me being uncaring. Many of my students that worked full-time did very well in university.

P. Barbosa: And I appreciate that. I appreciate that there are plenty of hard-working students who struggle through what I would argue is a two-tiered system and ultimately do succeed. But we are, really, creating a two-tiered system.

We have institutions like UBC that have some of the lowest access to student financial assistance in the province. What we’re essentially saying is: “If your parents have money — guess what — we have this beautiful UBC campus that you can access. If you don’t have money — guess what — we have these other campuses. They’re not quite as elite or quite as highly recognized, and you get to go to those.”

What we’re simply asking for is that we take away the financial barriers so that no matter what your family income, it’s actually the effort and the work that you put into it that decides how successful you are. I think that that’s a reasonable proposition.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that children in this province who don’t have access to those financial resources don’t have the same equal opportunity. They have to complete their degrees slower. There’s an opportunity cost that’s lost
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there. You have to work full-time. I mean, it really is about making a fair system. That’s what we’re really pushing for — a system that provides equal opportunity to people, based on their effort and not on their parents’ bankroll.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for presenting. Would you like another thought?

P. Barbosa: I do want to just provide a closing comment. I think that it’s safe to say that, overall, students have been, actually, reasonably satisfied with the reports that have been provided by the select standing committee. The challenge is that they’re ignored by the Finance Minister.

When we talk about being advocates for the work of this committee and for the recommendations that are coming forward, we are quite serious. That is the most important thing that we’re presenting today. We need these recommendations, which are very thoughtful and consider the needs of the province, to be listened to by the Finance Minister.

We’ve seen, time and time again, that the committee recommends things like eliminating tuition fees on ABE or providing a grants program. Unfortunately, those things aren’t delivered by the government.

We hope that you have the same important dialogue that you’ve had in the past and you have the same thoughtful discussions and come forward with the same very positive recommendations. But we’re also hopeful that you’ll advocate that the Finance Minister actually listens to those. I thank you for your work, and I really do thank you for letting us come here today.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, thank you very much, and I do appreciate your taking the time out of your busy day to present to the committee. It’s not lost on me how difficult the challenges can be, in terms of obtaining a good education — some more fortunate than others. I do appreciate how hard you’ve worked to get to where you are.

Mr. Bealing, welcome back. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave with about two minutes left so you can wrap up your thoughts. Then we’ll go to the committee for questions.

R. Bealing: Thank you, everybody, for the opportunity to talk. I’ve met you all individually over the years and think you can probably predict about 75 percent of what I’m going to say, but that’s my job. I’m here to remind you that we have a little, quiet, economic miracle that just quietly ticks away without too much intention or interference from government.

We provide all kinds of benefits and good things — jobs and families not least. I have a job in the forest industry, and my family is in the back of the room. We’re making this a family fun time this evening, for the first time, just to mix it up.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You’ll have to introduce them to get them on the public record.

R. Bealing: Well, maybe I’ll think about that. Let’s see how it goes. If the questions get nasty later, my mom is here.

What are we all about? I’ll try and be reasonably brief about this. We think that the province, and society in general agrees, that our sustainable, well-managed, responsibly managed forest is a good thing. We’re part of that success story.

How can the province encourage the responsible stewardship of private forest lands? We need access to international markets. We are an exporting jurisdiction. There’s no question about that. We need international prices for our product, whether we sell our product domestically or internationally.

We need appropriate policy distinction for private land. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to be held to the same standard when it comes to protecting water and fish. It means that we need some recognition that that land has been purchased, that the owners are paying property taxes on it and that they’ve made investments in it. It’s not owned by a society; it’s owned by individuals. We just need some appropriate level of distinction there.

We need a competitive regulatory framework. We are competing globally. We need to be able to compete with other jurisdictions, other places where trees are grown and harvested. We need certainty.

How do we get that certainty? We need provincial jurisdiction to be maintained over private forest land. What we mean by that is…. Local government plays a very important role in governing what goes on in our society, but local government does not have the long-term vision on resource management, especially. Forestry is a very long-term thing. It takes many decades to grow a crop of trees. Local government tends to be a little bit more short term in a lot of their policy development.

We also need a competitive tax model. I’m not here with my hand out asking for any subsidies, any special treatment. We just want to, really, be left alone to grow our trees. We’re farmers of trees on private land.

The pie chart on page 3 just kind of puts things into perspective. B.C. is exceptional in that it has an exceptional amount of publicly owned land. This little yellow sliver here is the private land. We’re an even smaller subset of that. However, even though we’re a tiny part of the picture, we generate a lot of fibre. We typically occupy the better valley bottom, coastal land. We are capable of growing a lot more fibre per hectare than on Crown land, so we’re a big part of the supply as a result of that.
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It’s all about balance, the way we manage our land — looking at slide 4: we balance the environment, community and commerce. We’re responsible neighbours. We enjoy positive relations with First Nations communities, workers, suppliers and customers. We’re in a long-term business here. Having the confidence to put a tree in the ground today, you need to have good working relationships with the community, with the people that buy logs from you.

Here’s the really exciting stuff, and we’ve recently done some work on this to make sure we’ve got some confidence in our numbers. We are generating 4,700 direct, full-time jobs in rural areas. We think that’s a big deal. Rural areas — it’s tough going out there. But through our business of farming trees on private land, we keep that going.

We also generate tax revenues in the region of $150 million a year. This would be a great event for me to hand over a cheque just as a kind of symbolic gesture. We bought the land. We pay taxes on it. We’re giving government $150 million a year.

We take wildfire prevention really seriously. We’ve just come through a nasty forest fire season. We are active participants in a really good program that the government runs, where we cost-share. That means that we pay every year into a program to share resources with government and have good initial attack capacity. It also means that we prepare very carefully and shut down during extreme wildfire hazard periods. We manage access to keep the public out during risky periods — that kind of thing.

Drinking water is another key issue in this part of the world. We’re very proud of our track record, working with communities on that. We’re a renewable, carbon-friendly land use. It’s a pretty cool thing to be involved with.

Our association represents individuals, families, pensioners and investors. The range of people we have working with us is really impressive, everyone from biologists through to firefighters, tree planters, loggers. Loggers are actually a tiny part of the picture when you think about it. They turn up every 50 years, and they’re not around for long. Everyone else is continually involved with the land.

Moving ahead to page 6. Our lands are forestry-certified, regulated through the managed forest program and legally required to reforest. We are required by law to reforest. We’re subject to penalties, audit and public reporting.

What are the challenges? Again, I said I’m not here to whine, and I don’t have my hand out, but it’s my job to remind you that it’s not all roses.

It’s a costly business taking care of forests. Having competent, professional people and having them working in safe environments is costly. The whole business is costly. So we need a competitive, stable operating climate. And world-class log prices are necessary.

Our number one risk regarding operating certainty and investor confidence is public policy development. We can plant our trees and anticipate harvesting a crop at a certain point in the future. Well, government could do all kinds of things that make it harder or easier to do that. So we just encourage government to think carefully whenever there’s pressure from other parts of society to develop policy. Think about the implications. Think about how it’s going to affect the owners.

I know you’re just dying to ask me about log exports. I’m going to tell you this: our best customer is our closest customer. We would be thrilled to bits if we could sell our logs to the guy down the road and get a fair return. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about selling logs internationally, dealing with currency exchange and people who don’t speak the same language and delays and ships and all that extra hassle that goes along with it. But getting a fair price for our logs is absolutely crucial to all the good stuff that we do.

I’m getting the signal to wind things up. We don’t have to drag ourselves through the entire presentation here. How long have we got? A minute and a half. Well, rather than run through it, I’m happy to wind it up there.

We’re not asking for anything. We’re not asking for your money. Right, it’s our money; we give it to you in the first place. But we’re asking for an appropriate level of respect and distinction.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, that’s the easiest thing to give. It’s great. It’s refreshing.

Thanks, Mr. Bealing, for the presentation. Obviously, you take time out of your busy schedule to be here, and we do appreciate that.

I want to go right to the business of the log exports because we all take a lot of heat for that — anybody that’s been in the industry. I’m just looking for the page. It talks about a competitive world price for logs. What did you say about log prices?

R. Bealing: What we want is international prices. We’d like to get them here. That’s my pitch, really.

E. Foster: Fair enough. Then what do you say to the local sawmill owner who, if he pays you that price, can’t make a dollar on his boards?

R. Bealing: Right. Then we’re all in trouble, and that’s really what’s got us into this pickle. We have this fantastic resource out there on Crown and private land, but if we tie ourselves to an industry that can’t maintain profitability, then none of us get any benefit.

Our dream is to have a competitive domestic processing industry. You know, we had one in the past. We know
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the ingredients that go into making that happen, but we’re not quite there yet. It’s going to take quite some time. Other parts of the world have been through the kinds of upheavals that we’re going through now as a province. They’ve come out the other side and developed profitable milling sectors.

Milling is an extremely competitive business. You’ve got to look around and look at where your strengths lie. Basically, if you were to ask anybody in the business globally how B.C. stacks up, or how the B.C. coast stacks up, as a place to invest in mills, they’re not ready yet. They think there are better places. In the meantime, all those jobs, all that tax revenue, all those good things that are going on…. We need a market for that.

E. Foster: I guess, on that same note…. I’ve been to Washington and Oregon. I’ve been to the mills. In the mill towns, their mills — I’ve been in this province 30 years — were antiquated when I came here. And they’re paying $40, $50, $60, $70 a metre more for the same log. How can they…? They’re selling their boards in the same market. I’ve never been able to understand how they compete.

R. Bealing: There’s a big difference in the technology involved, in labour costs, in the way the whole business is structured there. Of course, they’re closer to the market. They also benefit from not having the softwood lumber agreement encumbrances, so they have a bit more certainty there.

But yeah, even those guys, you know, are having a hard time of it. If you look at milling the world over, there was a time when it was easy money. B.C. rode that wave and did great on it for decades. But the world has changed.

E. Foster: They have double the number of man-hours per 1,000 board feet that a lot of our mills do, and they’re still paying that much more for logs.

R. Bealing: Right. Again, it comes back to what you’re doing with that wood, what the end product is. If you want to take a log and maximize the value that you get from it, well, you can do all kinds of funky stuff. But whether you make money or not is another question.

Value-adding is always kind of touted as the panacea, but value-adding happens when people spend the minimum amount of money to turn a product into something that’s worth more. Well, you don’t do that where you have high wage costs and other encumbrances. You do it where wages are really, really low, typically.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, I have 90 seconds left and three people that want to speak. I’m going to start with Carole.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I’ll pass. Eric asked the question I was going to ask. I think you’ve touched on it. If there’s anything else that you would suggest…. I appreciate that you want to keep the logs here. I appreciate that that would be the market for the next….

C. James (Deputy Chair): All of us would appreciate that. And I take your point around the value-added — that it’s the end and we’ve got to do something at the beginning. But I think you’ve touched on the pieces that you think need to be looked at.

C. Trevena: Likewise. I just wanted to very quickly…. In your summary, you’re talking about the policy distinction for private land and the competitive regulatory framework and so on. In, I guess, 30 seconds, what distinction would you like to see for private land? And jumping through, what is the competitive regulatory framework you’d like to see?

R. Bealing: Two things there, really. When it comes to distinction, if the Crown makes a decision on Crown land to not harvest because there’s some appetite from society for that, well, there’s really nobody to compensate. There might be some licensees that are involved.

When you impose those kinds of policies on a private land owner — I’m a private forest owner myself — and you say I can’t harvest my crop, well, wait a minute. I’ve just bought the land, and it took me all these years to grow the crop. I’m going to ask for some recognition, some distinction, some compensation for that. It’s a decision that government has made to benefit society, but wait a minute, I’m carrying all the costs. That’s not fair. That’s where we want distinction.

Where we want a competitive regulatory climate…. You’ve got to look around the world and say: “Okay, Pacific Northwest — what kind of property taxes are people paying there on their forest land?” Other competitive jurisdictions…. Ultimately, we’re all selling product into the same market. Whether we like it or not, it’s a global market. We have to look at things that add to our cost, and property tax is a big part of that.

J. Yap: A very quick one, Rod. Are any of your members involved in log sales for bioenergy — pellets or biofuels?

R. Bealing: We’re constantly looking into it. Some of the Interior members have got involved with that, because the economics work out there. We haven’t quite
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been able to make the economics work on the coast. The numbers don’t stack up.

But there’s potential there. Again, if you look around the world at other jurisdictions, private owners are a big part of that, getting fibre into the bioenergy market.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Bealing, for coming forward and sharing your thoughts.

Next we have Garrett Elliott of the Aboriginal Sports, Recreation and Physical Activity Partners Council, Vancouver Coastal Regional Sport and Physical Activity Committee, otherwise known as the ASRPAPCVCRSPAC. That was a long one.

Mr. Elliott, welcome. Ten minutes to present. I’ll give you a heads-up with about two minutes to go, and you can conclude your thoughts. Then I’ll go to the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

G. Elliott: Thank you. [Hul’qumi’num was spoken]. Before I address the committee members, I would like to acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw people.

As you mentioned, my name is Garrett Elliott. My traditional name is Sawbutztun. I’m an elected Cowichan Tribes councillor. I’m employed as the manager for Lalum′utul’ Smun′eem, and I manage our group home. Lalum′utul’ Smun′eem carries full delegated status in the child and family service branch. I’m also the Vancouver Island regional lead for Aboriginal Sports, Recreation and Physical Activity Partners Council, that lovely acronym that was just used.

Like you, I at times wear many different hats, and it’s in my role with Aboriginal Sports, Recreation and Physical Activity Partners Council that I’m presenting to you tonight. The power of sports can make a difference on who we are, what we become and how we contribute to the overall success of our communities — and, in some cases, the strength to continue living.

My personal story is very similar to former NHL hockey stars Sheldon Kennedy and Theo Fleury. The horrific cycles of childhood sexual abuse have stopped with me. One branch of my family will not be continuing the legacy of learned behaviour that has transpired from my family’s forced attendance at residential schools.

This type of violence, family violence, unfortunately continues today with many of our First Nation people. The number of aboriginal people incarcerated and the number of children and youth in care indicates that we continue to struggle to find redemption for the action of our previous governments.

I was fortunate enough to have healthy mentors and coaches who helped me achieve national and international success in the sport of fast-pitch softball. Unbeknownst to them, they were teaching a very fragile and damaged young athlete. They helped me develop the strength and the courage to keep going. I was able to channel my hurt and pain onto the field, as it became my safe haven and provided me the fortitude to continue living.

Unfortunately, for many of our youth the opportunity to move on to the next level of the elite sports athlete is limited, as the resources are just not there. Sports changed my life and has influenced me on the importance of working together to become stronger people, stronger communities and a stronger province.

Together, with your sustainability, we continue to correct the wrongs of the past, and the river between our many cultures does not seem so impassable and distanced now.

Let me now share with you the important work we are doing on Vancouver Island and across the province building healthy, active and vibrant aboriginal communities through sport.

Back in 2008, the Cowichan hosted the North American Indigenous Games, which has been widely acclaimed as the best ever North American Indigenous Games. It was that event and its positive impact on our communities which inspired the development of the new provincial strategy for the aboriginal people of British Columbia.

The aboriginal sport, recreation and physical activity strategy was created to respond to the need for culturally appropriate, youth-centred, community-based opportunities for sport, recreation and physical activity. In fact, it’s the very first strategy of its kind in Canada.

As the stewards of the strategy, the Partners Council annually delivers hundreds of community-based programs designed to get youth active and engaged in sport, train sports leaders, build capacity and provide a long-term pathway towards excellence.

Four years into implementing the strategy, and through the continued support of our partner agencies — the B.C. Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres, First Nation health authorities, Métis Nation B.C. — and along with the financial support of the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development and the Ministry of Health, we have achieved some amazing things.

We built a new and comprehensive aboriginal sports infrastructure that partners with more than 20 separate provincial sports and multi-sports organizations to deliver provincial athlete development camps and provincial championships that support thousands of aboriginal athletes and coaches across B.C. The infrastructure also supports aboriginal team B.C.’s participation in national and international competitions, including the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships and the North American Indigenous Games.
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Our commitment to sports excellence has led us to some historic milestones. Our male team has medalled at the last three National Aboriginal Hockey Championships, in 2013 winning team B.C.’s first-ever national title. Last summer we took 500 aboriginal athletes and coaches to Regina to compete at the 2014 North American Indigenous Games, and for the first time in the 24-year history of the games, B.C. won the Overall Team Title and the team spirit award. In fact, no other team in the history of the North American Indigenous Games has won both awards at the same time.

While the medals and awards are important, it’s the long-term positive impact those experiences provide aboriginal youth that make them so vital. The North American Indigenous Games Council commissioned an independent social impact study at the 2014 games in Regina. It revealed some very compelling facts.

As a result of the experience at the North American Indigenous Games, 96 percent of the participants indicated their intent to stay actively involved in competitive sport, and 52 percent improved the healthiness of their diets. Of them, 97 percent indicated their intent to maintain their healthy diets after the games. Seventy percent indicated their intent to pursue at least a university degree, 91 percent believed that others in their communities saw them as role models, 89 percent said they felt more confident, and 63 percent felt more connected with their indigenous heritage.

The power of sport as good medicine wasn’t lost on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Their call to action makes five recommendations specifically related to sports.

Among other areas of concern, they called for the creation of policies that reduce barriers to sports participation; increasing the pursuit of excellence in sport and building capacity for aboriginal people within the Canadian sports system; the promotion of long-term aboriginal athlete development; continued support for the North American Indigenous Games; and government collaboration in support of stable funding, access to community sports programs, elite athlete development programs and coaching training. The commission recognized the intentional use of sports as a tool for reconciliation and social development.

Just a week ago, we received the wonderful news of Premier Clark’s appointment of Gordon Hogg to the newly established position of Parliamentary Secretary for Youth Sport. We look forward to working with Mr. Hogg in support of his focus on aboriginal sports development. With his appointment, it’s clear to us that government is committed to aboriginal sports and that we share the same appreciation for its ability to transform lives.

It is our hope that through the continued support of government, we will see an increased and sustained investment in aboriginal sport, which enables the Partners Council to advance the work of the aboriginal sport, recreation and physical activity strategy.

On behalf of my family, my community and the Partners Council, I want to say [Hul’qumi’num language was spoken].

Thank you with much respect for listening to me and making a difference for the aboriginal people of British Columbia. [Hul’qumi’num language was spoken.]

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Elliott. Thank you very much for taking the time to present to the committee on a very topical and very important issue.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your work. I had the good pleasure of attending in Cowichan when the games were there and in Victoria when they were doing the B.C. Indigenous Games. It’s an exciting…. It doesn’t take much to get you excited when you attend there — to see the difference it’s making. And thank you for sharing your personal story as well.

I wondered what connection you’ve made or are making with the First Nations Health Authority. There seems such a link between the positive, healthy approach that the new First Nations Health Authority is taking with your work that I would hope that there would be an opportunity to be able to leverage dollars and perhaps expand the kind of work that you’re doing.

G. Elliott: We do have an established relationship with many sectors of government and the ministries. There are a number of sectors. We do have a strong relationship with the Ministry of Health, but there are a number of ministries that we would still like to hope that we can collaboratively work with together, such as Justice and some of the other ones — long-term ones — that will benefit our overall province.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you very much. I’m interested in this document. I’m going to have to read it after we’re done, but I know it’s the first steps in the strategy around sports and aboriginal communities.

I’m just curious. What do you see as the, I guess, benchmarks towards success to make transformational change involving aboriginal folks in sport and in the wider community? What are you looking for, in terms of your benchmarks, to know that you’re on the right track and the right path?

G. Elliott: Well, I believe our Partners Council would like to see more involvement at all levels of sports for aboriginal people; continued involvement towards healthy, long lives; and just continuing to open those doors and break down those barriers that do exist for many of our people when they try to go from reservation games to mainstream games.
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On a personal level, I would really like to see an increase of some really good athletes at the next level. The opportunities are there, but the resources aren’t there right now. I’m quite confident, through my sporting career and being across Canada in different capacities, that we have a tremendous amount of First Nation athletes that just, unfortunately, for various reasons, have a difficult time taking the next level — moving away from home and things.

S. Gibson: Well, thank you for your presentation. It was my privilege over the years at a university in the Fraser Valley to teach many aboriginal students. I believe that you’re going in the right direction, because I have to tell you that many of my male students, I would say, were not successful in my classes, to be honest. But my female First Nations students often did better. I think once they had a sense of who they were and had a better sense of community and pride, then they succeeded, and I think that this program is going to be an asset to that.

Additionally, I want to ask you the question. Once they succeed in their own aboriginal community…. That’s inward, which is good. It’s inward, but the next step is to look outward and compete with other folks from other ethnic backgrounds.

I think that’s when you get that real sense of satisfaction, because they’re not just competing — and again, this is good; I’m not saying that…. But when you compete outside that in the regular milieu, all of a sudden the pride comes in, and I believe that’s going to be an important asset for those students that you mentioned who want to go on to university and make a sincere contribution to our modern society. So, way to go.

S. Chandra Herbert: If I could just ask one more. What do you see as some of the main barriers facing aboriginal folks in sporting and athletics and being active?

G. Elliott: Well, one of the biggest things is cost. Cost is an extremely difficult barrier for many of our people. We have plenty of opportunities in our province. We have some great programs that assist with getting our youth involved with sports and getting them there. The difficulty lies in the support that they will get from their parents or their family.

Something simple that you and I would take — picking up our girls and taking them…. Like, tonight I brought my girls to soccer practice and then came home. I drove them. I have three First Nation girls on my team, and they weren’t able to make the practice because they don’t have any transportation. Luckily, my wife got the text, and she raced back and got them. I mean, those things that we take for granted are very real, and sometimes we don’t see them. It’s easy to look the other way.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, Mr. Elliott, thank you. On behalf of the committee, thank you very much for the work that you do.

It must be exceptionally gratifying — you know, kids that you help who otherwise could be marginalized, slip through the cracks — when something like that happens in your life and then you see them, you catch them and you move them forward, like you did tonight at the soccer practice. Kids like that could just as easily be staying home and getting into something more nefarious, and their lives could go sideways. You make a considerable contribution on their behalf, and thank you for that.

G. Elliott: Thank you, and likewise to you, committee members. Without your support, we wouldn’t be able to make differences in lives.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next we have the British Columbia Teachers Federation — Mr. Jim Iker.

Mr. Iker, ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a two-minute heads-up when your time is getting close so that you can close your thoughts, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. If that works for you, the floor is yours.

Well, first of all, I just want to say hi to everyone. Thank you for having me here in Nanaimo. It’s actually good to get out of Vancouver. I want to first start by thanking the committee for their last two reports in the last two years.

The 2014 report from the select standing committee in particular was the first time that I feel that the reality of education funding in British Columbia got the attention it deserved. Last year this committee recommended to government — you’ll find these on pages 1 and 2: “Provide stable, predictable and adequate funding to enable school districts to fulfil their responsibility to provide continued equitable access to quality public education, and to meet required repair and maintenance needs.” That was last year.

The year before, the committee wrote: “Review the increasing demands on school district budgets and ensure that funding is appropriately directed to meet the growing support required for students with special needs.”

Those are just two of the recent recommendations from this committee that I’m hoping you will follow up
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on. Today I could really just say — and that’s our first recommendation: ditto to those recommendations that you made previously, which still matter but have not come to pass yet here in B.C.’s public education system.

Because my time is short, I want to review some of the issues and add some new layers that will, hopefully, help all of you understand some of the realities of what we’re facing this year.

Last year the government promised it would fully fund the cost of the collective agreement that teachers negotiated, including the teacher education fund. However, what we saw instead was money being shifted around, instead of a full commitment to funding the full scope of the agreement, as well as rising costs on school districts.

For example, in Budget 2015 the government forced school districts to cut $29 million in the 2015-16 school year, followed by $25 million in the next year. You’ll see these on page 4 and in the appendices. That left school boards facing another round of cuts that were far from administrative, as the government directed. As a result, another $54 million is being cut in the next couple of years — this year and next year — out of B.C. school districts.

What are some of these effects? Reduced school supply budgets, reduced custodial services, delayed replacement of textbooks, a cutback on education assistant hours and elimination of several school bus services. These are some of the examples that came out of a report that came out, I think, from the BCSTA and secretary-treasurers. These were not administrative cuts, and they will have and are having a negative impact on our students.

Another example of government just shifting money instead of fully funding its obligations was adult education. In the spring, the government pulled back $9 million in targeted funding for school districts that provided tuition-free high school courses for graduated adults. That refers to our recommendation 3, as well as in appendix 3.

These are the adults looking to upgrade their skills or take high school courses that they never completed, like biology 12, math 12, or to get into a new post-secondary program like care aide training or IT. By making these cuts, the government played a shell game. They took money out to make it look like they were meeting their commitments to the teacher contract.

This year we need this committee to once again strongly recommend to government that they fully fund all of their provincial obligations. If the funding crisis isn’t resolved, we’re just going to see more problems in the future. Just look up the highway to Comox, where dozens of high school students are still sitting without classes in the second week of school because of underfunding. We’ve seen similar problems in communities like Nelson and others, and the problem does rest with the underfunding.

When we look at the impact of the teacher education fund, for which we negotiated $75 million last year, the system was able to hire about 400 teachers. But those jobs were basically the ones that had been cut by school districts because of the funding. So our fund didn’t add any new teaching positions. It only prevented further losses. That’s not enough, and that wasn’t what the teacher education fund was supposed to be there for.

The government’s class size and class composition data from 2014 backs that up as well. In 2013-14, B.C.’s public education system had the worst year on record related to class composition. You’ll remember that class composition refers to the makeup of a class with regard to the unique learning needs of students, which really impact a teacher’s ability to meet every child’s needs and give them that so-needed one-on-one attention. In overly complex classes, all students get less and less time with our teachers.

In this school year we just finished, 2014-15, there were 16,156 classes with four or more students with special needs. The year before the number was 16,163. These are your stats. From year to year, it’s still the worst it’s ever been. There hasn’t been the improvement, despite the government’s promise to make class composition its top priority. If it wasn’t for the teacher education fund we negotiated, those numbers would be even worse. In addition, there was a staggering number — 3,895 classes with seven or more children with special needs last year, and the number this year is 3,875.

The data also shows that there is little progress being made in terms of class composition and support for our English language learners, ELL, formerly known as ESL students. There were over 4,400 classes with seven or more English language learners last year, compared to more than 4,600 the year before. Within that total there were 2,073 kindergarten-to-grade-3 classes with seven or more English language learners. Last year there were 1,956 such classes. So you can see that instead of improving, it’s getting worse, or it’s still flatlining.

As teachers, we fully embrace inclusion in our classrooms, but it has to come with the necessary funding and the resources. The government needs to increase that funding to ensure that we have workable, manageable classrooms, especially if we’re going to be successful in implementing the new revised curriculum and a learning style that is more personal.

The shell game the government played last year by making cuts and moving money around was exacerbated by the ongoing underfunding of downloaded costs to our school districts. You’ll see in our recommendation No. 4 that school districts continue to be burdened by increases that are mandated or set by government policies — B.C. Hydro rates, MSP premiums. Without additional funding, these cost pressures just continue to accumulate.

The B.C. Association of School District Business Officials estimates that school districts faced $193 million in cost pressures just in 2014-15, which is page 17.
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When these cost pressures are downloaded from government and are not met with matching funds, districts have to make cuts to our classrooms.

In downloaded costs, there are a few more areas that government needs to address. This has been in the news. I know that government is aware of it, and that’s MyEducation B.C., which was the replacement for BCeSIS, the B.C. enterprise student information centre that cost the province and districts over $100 million.

Now our teachers are struggling with this replacement in the first two weeks of school — slow log-ins, missing class lists, time-outs and many other glitches. This has then caused frustration for our teachers, who can’t do their jobs because the government’s great software program doesn’t meet their needs. This is causing a lot of anxiety for principals as well as support staff, in particular the secretaries.

In this, school districts are required to sign a memo of understanding that they will provide all of the necessary resources for implementation. But teachers aren’t getting the necessary in-service, and the government is not actually funding the resources that are needed for this program.

There are three more recommendations I want to touch on and then talk about future funding. I know my time, so I’m going to go quickly.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You’re welcome to cut into the question time, if you wish to conclude your remarks.

J. Iker: The fifth recommendation is to ensure that government provides the time and resources necessary for successful implementation of the curriculum changes, pages 9 and 10, which is mandated by the ministry. We’re proud of this collaborative work, because we have been involved in this work with government. We support the curriculum redesign. It’s been a good thing. But we know that we need targeted funding to ensure that teachers have the time, the space, the resources for the in-service as well as the concrete materials.

We’re having some good talks with ministry staff about how we can go forward into this area. I’m hopeful that will come through, but it’s something that this committee needs to realize.

The sixth recommendation is about mental health of our students, a great concern of teachers across not only British Columbia but across Canada. On page 11, you’ll see a summary of our submission. We made a submission to the Standing Committee on Children and Youth, because we think this is an important crossover with your work that you’re tasked with. We thought we would include this within our recommendations to the standing committee.

We need the funding to help address issues of student mental health. It’s an issue that has come out of the closet, which is really good. It’s out there in the open, but we need the support to deal with it.

The final recommendation is to eliminate funding for independent schools on a gradual basis. We’re suggesting that the way to start is to reduce funding to all independent schools to 30 percent of the per-capita amount of public schools. Currently, there are two groups. One gets 50 percent; the other gets 30 percent. Start reducing it to 30 percent. Eventually, we would like to see elimination of funding, and that can all go back into the public education system.

A comment on enrolment. For many years, the government has used the excuse of declining enrolment to minimize the impact of underfunding. Of course, we think it’s a weak argument, because funding has not kept pace with the fixed costs. Regardless of the enrolment, there are fixed costs as well as inflation.

Now what we’re seeing and we’re encouraging is that government…. We’re seeing a kind of a plateau, in terms of the enrolment, the decline part. Even government’s figures show that what we’re starting to see is growth in the next few years, growth in preschool and early years and the primary.

B.C. Stats indicate that the population of children between the ages of zero and four will grow by 21,800 between 2015 and 2022. In addition, the number of children between five and 17 will grow by 28,200 over the next seven years. I mean, this is really positive for all of us. But we need the funding to provide that. What we’re also going to be seeing is that there is going to definitely be a need for teachers to be working with our students.

This is another area that we’re hoping the committee will look at, because the government needs to start charting this particular piece and start to create new dollars in funding to match this expected rise in enrolment.

Again, I want to thank you for giving me the time. Everything is in our brief, with fuller explanations. I hope you will take the time. Hopefully you will come up with some great recommendations, like you did, and hopefully this government will actually heed some of the recommendations you’ve made in the past.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Iker. Yeah, you went three minutes in, but you had some important things you wanted to say.

I’m going to designate Carole as the question person here. We’ve got two minutes.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I’ll be quick. I just want to say thank you. Thank you for your advocacy, and thank you for also including the issue around youth mental health. I also sit on the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth.

I think it’s important to recognize, and I think you’ve outlined it, that there are two areas of funding that are
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needed. Funding for the education system for the download of costs and to address the challenges that are there, but funding for the additional pieces that impact everything you do in the classroom — whether it’s youth mental health, whether it’s poverty and inequality. I appreciate you including it, because I think there is such a direct link — not direct education dollars — between the work that you do in classrooms and the work that needs to happen in the province.

S. Gibson: Thank you. Good to hear your presentation. My wife was a public school teacher for her entire career in our province.

I want to say just a brief word on your recommendation regarding independent schools. One of the things that government values is choice. You know, parents can home-school their kids, and we’ve got 350 independent schools in the province. Many of them receive no funding from the government, as you know.

If the government had to build today all of those incredible schools that are operated as independent schools today, the cost would be significant for the public, as you know. That would be money that could not be used in the public system. Schools in my riding and your area, I think, do get 50 percent operating, based on the formula. I just wanted to make that comment that choice is important to education.

I value public education. I taught in the public university system for many years, so we’re on the same wavelength in many ways. I did want to make that remark. I didn’t want to leave that hanging — that choice is a good thing in education. Allowing parents to make that choice is a healthy thing for a healthy society. Thank you for letting me make that reaction to your comments.

J. Iker: If I could comment on that. We’ll support choice. We think parents should have the choice. It’s just whether government funds the choice of private education. That’s the difference for us. We think parents should have the choice, but in particular, we don’t think schools that charge $22,000 tuition should also be receiving money from government.

I also want to pick up on the private schooling, independent schools idea. You’re saying in your recommendation that all should come down to 30 percent. There are two tiers. There are those that get 50 percent and those that 30 percent, as I understand. There are those that are the religious schools, those ones. Then there are the Shawnigan Lakes, the more expensive private schools, and they get paid at a different level. You’re saying that they should all come to the 30 percent. I’m wondering why that. Why not sort of deal with the two as separate?

J. Iker: You know, the recommendation is to equalize it to 30 percent, but we would be happy if this standing committee made a decision that the…. I believe it’s the group 2 schools that charge a lot of tuition, and they’re only getting 30 percent. If you were to eliminate that funding, I think we’d be okay with that too.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Iker. From a personal perspective, both of my daughters were exceptionally well served by the public education system. I was fortunate enough. We had a choice, and that’s what we chose. They’ve done very, very well in their lives, and it’s thanks to the efforts of the good teachers that we have in this province. Thank you for your efforts.

J. Iker: Thank you for that choice too, because we have great teachers who are working hard to meet the needs of all of our students. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Okay. We have now — and I’m sorry; we’re running a little behind here, but it’s getting towards the end of the day — the Canadian Federation of Students of British Columbia. Do we have all three people in the audience?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Oh, we don’t have Jenelle Davies, but we do have Steve Beasley and Megan Marshall.

Welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave when you’ve got a couple of minutes left so you can conclude your thoughts. Then I’ll go to the committee for questions.

S. Beasley: I have to start by introducing myself. My name is Steven Beasley. I work for the Canadian Federation of Students–British Columbia. I’m a graduate student at the University of Victoria.

M. Marshall: Hi. My name is Simka, or Megan, Marshall. I’m from the Ahousaht First Nation, and I’m the chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students–B.C. I’m also a Camosun College student.

I do just want to say that when I timed this earlier, it was nine minutes and 30 seconds, so let’s just hope for the best here.
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Good evening, members of the committee. We are pleased to have the opportunity to provide comment on the preparation and priorities for next year’s budget. The CFS-BC is British Columbia’s provincial student organization, representing 15 students unions with a collective membership of roughly 200,000 university and college students studying at all levels of post-secondary education. The CFS-BC’s mandate is to advocate for a high-quality, publicly funded and accessible post-secondary education system in British Columbia.

Our written submission will identify a number of priorities students believe are key in moving our post-secondary system forward. They include (1) the improvement of student financial aid through grants and the elimination of interest on student loans; (2) the restoration of recent cuts and return to tuition-free status for adult basic education programs; (3) funding English-as-a-second language program to 2013 capacity; (4) next, a government-sponsored reduction of tuition fees; and finally, (5) an increase in funding to our colleges and universities.

Today’s presentation will focus on two areas from this list of recommendations: adult basic education and student financial assistance.

Adult basic education, or ABE, as we have heard, is an important yet embattled component of the post-secondary education system. ABE courses provided through colleges and university colleges in British Columbia instruct adult learners in basic numeracy and literacy; provide credit towards completing a high school–level education; and prepare students for a return to the education system after a time away, especially for those seeking to retrain in order to better qualify for the job market.

ABE courses allow those adults who have not completed high school to complete their high school diploma in a setting focused on adult learners, rather than needing to return to a high school environment. ABE also enables those adults who have completed high school to gain admission to B.C.’s colleges or universities through earning credit and prerequisite courses required for entry to specific programs or by upgrading skills in particular curriculum areas after a period of absence from formal education.

For these students, in particular, ABE programs provide an important gateway back into the education system. These programs are a venue for those who have been out of school for years to enter a university or college campus with their peer group and academic cohort of people just like them. In this way, ABE serves as a vital means of both recruitment and retention for B.C.’s post-secondary system.

However, for other ABE students, the goal is to increase their math and literacy skills in order to improve their lives. In this context, it is important to note that 40 percent of B.C. adults have difficulty reading a newspaper, filling out a work application form, reading a map or understanding a rental agreement, and 49 percent of B.C. adults do not have the skills necessary to create a budget, calculate sales tax or understand credit card interest rates.

The government of British Columbia eliminated all tuition fees for adult basic education in 1998, then again in 2007 after fees had been reintroduced, recognizing that many adults who require high school education are not in a position to pay for these courses. This change, which was implemented January 1, 2008, opened the door to many students previously prevented from accessing the education that they needed.

Today adult basic education students represent some of the most marginalized members of society. For example, 18 percent of ABE students are aboriginal peoples. By comparison, only 10 percent of those in the K-to-12 system are aboriginal, and according to the 2013 survey of B.C. baccalaureate graduates, only 3 percent of university are aboriginal.

The funds spent providing tuition-free adult basic education were and should remain an investment in providing literacy and numeracy skills as well as prerequisite access to those with some of the greatest need for education in our province.

In 2013, our organization appeared before this committee and expressed concern about the future of adult basic education programs. In response, the committee’s 2013 report recommended that government continue to support ABE programs and make enhancements where finances permitted.

However, rather than enhancements, government has moved in the opposite direction. Beginning this semester, adult basic education students will be charged up to $3,200 per year in new tuition fees. Rather than new funding, $6.9 million has been cut from ABE programs at colleges and universities, plus another $9 million from the K-to-12 system.

Though this new policy is only days old, we have already begun to see its negative effects. In a report to the Vancouver Community College education council, the college administration reported that enrolment declines of between 20 and 50 percent were being experienced across ABE programs. We expect similar reports of enrolment declines to come to light in the coming weeks and months, based on early evidence from faculty and students in those programs.

Because ABE is so vital to B.C.’s education system, economy, labour market and literacy levels, the Canadian Federation of Students–British Columbia recommends that the province provide sustained funding to those institutions to that offer adult basic education. This funding should cover the full cost of offering ABE programs as an investment in access to post-secondary education.

Full, targeted per-student funding will ensure that intuitions can offer courses at no charge to all students and
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that adult basic education programs do not have to compete with other curriculum areas for funding.

Such a system would ensure that those who start out from a low-income background are not shut out of the post-secondary system but rather have the opportunity to reach their full potential and then contribute that full potential back to their community and British Columbia’s economy.

B.C. students and their families continue to struggle with ever-increasing levels of student debt, as the cost of attending post-secondary education remains far greater than the resources students and their families are able to mobilize.

Whether due to high tuition fees, which have more than doubled since the early 2000s, course cuts that force students to spend longer in school, or the combination of high interest rates and low levels of non-repayable financial aid, students and their families are struggling with student debt in B.C. like never before.

Student debt has a negative impact on academic completion as well as program enrolment. University of British Columbia researcher Lori McElroy found that students with little or no debt were more than twice as likely to finish their degree than students with high levels of debt. Completion rates for students who carry less than $1,000 of debt was 71 percent, while the completion rate for those carrying more than $10,000 of debt was only 34 percent.

Those who incur debt are not just less likely to complete their degree. They are also charged an inequitable amount for that education. Students forced to borrow to finance their education end up paying significantly more than those who can afford to pay up front.

Student loans do help those who could not otherwise afford the high cost of education get through the door. But they do so at the expense of the principle of equal access, due to interest charges applied to loan amounts. This inequality is particularly acute in B.C., where students are charged interest at prime plus 2.5 percent, the highest rate in the country for student loans.

This means that a student who can afford to pay their tuition up front pays no interest to government but a student from a low-income family who needs a loan will pay thousands of dollars more for the same education.

Those who have participated in this committee in the past will recognize that the issue of interest charged on student loans has been raised by students a number of times. In fact, this committee’s report on both the 2014 and 2015 budget consultations included a recommendation to review interest charged on B.C. student loans.

One year ago, members of the Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services went even further and called for reduction of interest charged on student loans.

Canadian Federation of Students–B.C. recommends that the province commit to the elimination of interest charged on student loans and introduce a program of needs-based, upfront grants to the existing forms of non-repayable student financial assistance offered in B.C.

These pragmatic changes in policy would ease the debt burden for thousands of B.C. families and would receive widespread public support. For example, a poll conducted by our organization this past year found that eight in ten B.C. citizens believe that student debt is making it harder for students to complete a post-secondary education and 77 percent support the reduction or elimination of interest rates altogether.

Some provinces are moving beyond these public policy measures to make even greater strides in opening the doors to low- and middle-income students. This past year, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador successfully replaced its entire system of provincial student loans with a grants-only model.

Though such a move in B.C. would likely be very welcome and is encouraged, we feel that our recommendations to eliminate interest and offset loans with grants is a viable and reasonable first step that respects the current fiscal landscape in our province.

In closing, we would like to acknowledge the difficult task of the committee in developing recommendations that accurately and fairly balance the wide array of budget priorities presented from the diversity of groups and citizens coming before the committee.

We would like to express our appreciation for the past support shown to several key recommendations made by our federation and its member local student unions. We hope that the committee will once again recognize the unreasonable financial hardship and personal debt that students and their families are being forced to bear and will support our recommendations for the 2016 budget.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Marshall. I appreciate it — another very well-presented and articulate presentation.

G. Heyman: Thank you, Simka. It’s good to see you again. Thank you for the presentation. We’ve had a number of presentations on both adult basic education and the cost of tuition, student loans and the lack of grants in B.C. Over the last couple of days, we’ve had a number of good discussions. I’m not going to revisit them here, although I think the points that you make are important. I also welcome the pragmatism of your approach to guiding us in our recommendations.

What is new in your presentation, or at least new to me, was the comparison of the number of aboriginal students in adult basic education compared to the overall school system, which points to a pretty significant systemic failure.

It also seems to me that it goes even beyond some of the basic issues of equity and economic integration that
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are inherent in adult basic education. They also speak to important issues that we talk about but that we need to find practical measures to address, which have to do with reconciliation and integration of aboriginal people and aboriginal communities into both their own healthy economies and the overall economy of the province. I look forward to seeing those figures perhaps e-mailed to the committee so we can refer to them in our deliberation.

In addition, we heard earlier — I believe it was today — about a 30 percent reduction in students in adult basic education related to the fees that were being charged. I think I have that right. If you have access to or can find figures specific to aboriginal populations, I would be very interested in reviewing them and discussing them with the committee.

E. Foster: Something you said that I hadn’t…. This was new news. You said that in Newfoundland-Labrador, they had replaced student loans with grants. Is that what you said? So there are no more student loans in Newfoundland?

E. Foster: Then I assume there’s a means test to show that you need it. There will be people that can show a need that will go to university with no fees?

S. Beasley: If I can, in essence, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador decided that it better suited its needs to provide grants instead of loans, so they simply scrapped the loan program and replaced that with non-repayable grants. The means testing would work the same way as a loan program, in terms of the means testing and the application form a student would have to fill out and the various requirements for them to demonstrate need. But the moneys that they would receive are simply non-repayable.

E. Foster: It shocks me. I don’t know how they’ll pay for it. And there would be no incentive, then, for people to try and either save money or…. If I was the parent of a student that was going to school and I was able to pay, I would be concerned that I’m paying for my student and, through my taxes, for someone else.

I find that…. I’m quite surprised, actually. I don’t doubt what you’re saying. I had never heard that. Is that something fairly new? It’s the first that we’ve heard of it.

S. Beasley: Yeah. It occurred this year. I think that there’s a lot of reason behind a move like that.

I think that some of the opinions we rely on to make judgements about people’s motivations are just more opinion than fact. I think that most people do not behave in a way where they seek an unjust handout from the state and they work hard to be self-reliant. The programs, like a grant program, would help those that are legitimately in an unequitable situation.

We talk a lot about education as being a great equalizer. If that’s going to be the case, then we need to ensure that access to education is equal. Some people, based on their situation, have more barriers than others. So a grant program like the one in Newfoundland relieves those barriers.

I think it’s also important to note that the student financial assistance programs in this country have not kept pace at all with the cost of going to school. There are all sorts of discussions, even beyond those on tuition fees or books, about things like housing costs. We could talk a lot about housing costs and how people in Vancouver are trying to struggle to pay for housing that inflates exponentially compared to what we would deem as normal inflation for other costs. The student financial aid system doesn’t keep up with that in any measure.

I would hate any member of the committee to think that students in Newfoundland were getting any kind of free ride out of it. For their province, where retention in the province is of great importance and where their institutions rely on that and they have an economy to build there themselves, it’s something that the government is doing to, rightly, grow and develop the domestic economy in Newfoundland. For them, it makes a lot of sense. And we think for British Columbia it makes a lot of sense as well.

We have a number of proposals that are reasonable given our fiscal context, which might be different from Newfoundland’s. That’s why we’re not coming and asking for the identical policy here.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’re really out of time here, Spencer, but go ahead. If it’s a comment, you can do it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time to present to the committee. We do appreciate it, and thank you for the work that you do on behalf of the students of the province — yes, absolutely. Your message has been heard, and it’s been heard several times.

To steal a page out of Spencer’s…. Spencer made the comment: “Don’t take the lack of questions as an indication that we’re not interested.” We’ve heard the message so many times, and so many of the questions have been asked, that sometimes we’re lost for words.

S. Beasley: Yeah, no worries. We’ll linger outside for a moment if any member wants to come and ask a quick question.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.
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We now have the Home Medical Equipment Dealers Association of British Columbia — Darryl Mackie and Robert Boscacci.

Welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave when you’ve got a couple of minutes left and you’re drawing down on time so you can close your thoughts. Then we’ll go to the committee for questions.

So first off, thank you for having us. Honoured to be here. My name is Robert Boscacci, and I’m the president of the Home Medical Equipment Dealers Association of B.C., or HMEDA, to make it short. I’m also the co-owner of HME Mobility and Accessibility. We’re a Richmond-based company with offices in Victoria.

D. Mackie: My name is Darryl Mackie. I’m the treasurer of HMEDA, and I’m the owner of SelfCare Home Health Products, a similar company to Robert’s.

The association is an industry association of private enterprises, some of which are actually publicly owned enterprises — like Shoppers Home Health, for example — and small mom-and-pops, and a collection of businesses like Robert’s and mine.

R. Boscacci: Exactly. Our members provide a wide variety of equipment designed and intended to assist individuals with physical disabilities. Among the items we provide are walkers, scooters, wheelchairs, stairlifts, transfer aids, hospital beds and mattresses, bathroom safety and much more.

Our products are used in a variety of settings, so it could be anything from helping a hospital discharge to someone aging in their home. It could also be someone with a permanent disability in a power chair or someone in a nursing home.

The reason for our appearance here today is to bring to the committee’s attention the growing number of British Columbians who have one or more disabilities. In 2012, Statistics Canada found the number of B.C. residents with a disability was more than one-half million, or 546,000 to be exact. The paper we are presenting today calculates that by 2031, which is 16 years from now, that number will grow to approximately 850,000.

This is due in part to an aging population. When people are over the age of 65, typically 35 percent of the population reports having a disability. For those under the age of 65, it’s around 15 percent. Put another way, the number of disabled British Columbians may be expected to increase by 300,000 over the next decade and a half.

This significant increase in B.C.’s disabled population has implications for the provincial government and its finances. There is a cost associated with caring for disabled people, providing people with services and equipment they need to be fully functioning members of society. Indeed, over 49 percent of people with a disability work. That’s compared to 79 percent of people without disabilities.

HMEDA, which provides British Columbians who are disabled with equipment they need to join the workforce and to become active in their communities, wants to encourage the province and Members of the Legislative Assembly to continue efforts to ensure that disabled individuals have every opportunity to make a contribution to our province.

D. Mackie: I’ve only been sitting in this room for about 40 minutes, waiting to present. In that 40 minutes, my eyes were starting to glaze over with statistics. I can’t imagine how you feel. So I’m just going to bring it down to something a little bit more simple.

I apologize if I offend anyone, but except for Spencer you are all of an age, possibly, where you all have probably dealt with our equipment or had a loved one deal with our equipment — a wheelchair, a walker — or had a grandparent or a sibling or somebody in a similar situation. We are the men and women who actually provide that equipment for those people. It helps them get along with their lives on a daily basis.

Now, by and large, in this province we don’t have a system like they have in Ontario, with a universally accessible program that provides equipment to everyone in the province, or in Alberta, which also has a program. Both of those programs have come under tremendous fiscal pressure. Just recently, the Ontario government essentially slashed the reimbursement levels for those programs by between 15 and 24 percent, depending on the category of product. That’s caused a lot of disruption for the industry, as a group, but also, more importantly, a lot of disruption for the people who have come to rely on that equipment.

Now, universal programs probably aren’t going to fly in British Columbia. I’ve sat on a number of committees, dating back as long as 15 years ago, where it was much discussed with various people in ministries about developing more progressive programs that could be universally accessible. It was clear that there was no real appetite on the part of government to proceed down that road, and I don’t blame them.

Probably 85 percent of the stuff that we sell and service for customers is privately paid — paid out of their own pockets, but more importantly, paid out of insurance because they’ve already paid for their insurance. So they’re paying for that.

It’s targeted programs that the government gets involved with — that come through the Ministry of Health, through the health authorities, through the Ministry of Children and Family Development and through the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation — which speak to people who are on income assistance and need assistance in that regard. Those targeted pro-
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grams remain in this province, and they’ve become a great source.

We see that in the future there’s going to be a lot more pressure on the fiscal regime in the province because, quite simply, of the aging. We’re going to encounter a situation where people are going to be aging and they’re not going to be having nursing home care because there are simply not enough nursing home spaces for them. That’s a clear fact. Everyone knows that. I’m sure the committee is well aware of it.

People are staying home, and they will need supports to stay at home — physical supports, the kind that we sell and service, yes, and also obviously, human support, in the form of caregivers and caretakers, etc.

Strangely, we’re not really thinking that the government should be spending too much more money on this file. In fact, we think that they can probably save money on this file by actually doing something that the government should always be doing, which is encouraging the Ministry of Health and the health authorities to actually engage in proper public procurement, going out to tender and getting best value for the taxpayer dollar.

That’s something that the government and, certainly, the health authorities have not been paying close attention to and that certain branches of the government and ministries are not paying close attention to.

We’d encourage the committee to encourage the Ministry of Health to encourage the health authorities to go to public tender and get competitive pricing. That’s what our industry does. We are a collection of competitive businesses, and what we do best is to compete against each other to provide the service.

That’s our real ask. It’s not in this document, because I didn’t write this document. But that’s what I’m here to tell you. That’s what we’re asking for.

We hear often about the increased need that we have for home care support for people, now more and more, who want to stay in their homes and don’t want to have to end up in a care home. But I think we don’t talk often enough about the equipment and the supports that might be necessary for those people to be able to stay in their homes, so I appreciate your raising it.

What’s the process now? If there isn’t public tendering…? Right now, if it doesn’t go out to open bid, what happens now if you’re a health authority?

D. Mackie: Health authorities have a real regard for the high cost of acute care facilities, and they have a real need to get people discharged safely to their home. Right now none of the health authorities…. They’re all relying on the Canadian Red Cross, which is getting blanket grants every couple of years. Over the last six years, they’ve received $27 million. Quite frankly, if I’d tendered for that, it would probably cost half that amount to do the same job — maybe even less.

Public tendering, we think, is a cornerstone for actually getting best value, and we think that’s something that has been ignored. Now, has it been ignored for specific reasons? I don’t know. We just think that…. We’ve been after the Ministry of Health and the health authorities and have had many closed doors and little pats on the back saying: “Run along now. We’ll take care of it.” Quite frankly, it’s not very satisfactory.

One thing that I’ve noticed in my own constituency is that medical devices — maybe it’s a walker; maybe it’s something else, a scooter or what have you — sometimes are funded through the government, through ministries, particularly for lower-income folks. Then maybe they pass away. Maybe something happens. They don’t go into hospital. They can’t use the device anymore. It’s basically either put to disposal, put to maybe Craigslist or something like that.

I guess what I’m trying to figure out is…. There are often very good devices, very good tools that have had a couple months of use — maybe a year, maybe two years — that the taxpayer paid for to ensure somebody did have accessibility. Then they’re not used again, or they’re not given to somebody else who maybe didn’t qualify for a program but would need one.

Do you have any experience with that? Do people bring them back to you? I’m just trying to figure out a way that…. Some people don’t get the subsidy to get the thing, but they still don’t have any money to be able to properly afford it. Any thoughts on how we can provide that kind of access to people?

R. Boscacci: It’s a good question. It’s sort of a very convoluted answer. Depending on how you get your equipment — whether it’s private, public insurance — when a family member is done with it, it’s kind of…. It’s two parts: (a) the type of equipment that you’re looking at and (b) how much useful life it has left in it.

For something more complex, like a lift or a wheelchair, it’s actually very custom. So it can be quite challenging in those instances to kind of recycle it, so to speak. In other areas — simple things like walkers, bathroom safety — typically people…. It always kind of makes the rounds. One example is a lot of people do donations to different non-profits. A lot of families will give it directly to the health authorities, who will then redistribute the equipment to members in a nursing home or facility. It very
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much does get recycled, but it kind of gets recycled in a different manner.

D. Mackie: Even complex equipment can get recycled and does. If a piece of equipment…. It’s similar to your car. If you drive your car for ten years and you decide, “You know what? I’m done with the car,” you don’t just leave it on the side of the road and scrap it. Actually, you find a buyer for it. That car might pass through three or four hands before it hits the scrap heap.

It’s exactly the same with a wheelchair. It may pass through one or two hands, or three hands or four hands, before it’s actually scrapped. If it’s got real utility, real use, people will actually put it on Craigslist. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a commercial market that actually makes use of equipment.

What you’re talking about, I think, is a bit of a recycling program. Quite frankly, if you have a universal program like they have in Ontario, where equipment is provided free to the citizens of Ontario, you need to have a recycling program. Otherwise, you will get brand new equipment sitting in their closet, because why would I take that used piece that’s two months old when I could get a new one and not have to pay any money for it at all?

In our province, where we don’t have that universal program, there are always people who need that equipment who can’t otherwise afford it and are very appreciative when they get it at a much, much reduced price. Hence, Craigslist, and we recycle on behalf of our customers, for example.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time and the effort to come and present to us — very well received and unique. We don’t hear from your organization or organizations like yours.

D. Mackie: I was thinking that we might be one of the few places that says to you: “Don’t spend more money on us. Spend less.” [Laughter.]

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s the best part. Thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.

Last but not least, Vancouver Island University Faculty Association — Ms. Marni Stanley. Welcome. As you’re walking up, it’s ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll give you a two-minute warning so you can collect and wrap up and deliver your last thoughts, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

M. Stanley: I just want to open by saying that I really appreciate that I live somewhere where this happens — where the government goes out and makes opportunities for people to speak to them.

I want to talk mostly about those things which are more immeasurable. I’m an English major, so I don’t do stats.

M. Stanley: One of my best friends in faculty is a mathematician, and we have many impasses in our conversations.

It is both a cliché and a truth about education that it has the power to transform lives. In 1976, age 16, I was living in a tiny basement in Edmonton, on welfare, with a social worker managing my case. In 1982, I graduated from the University of Alberta with a full scholarship to Oxford, where I did my doctorate before returning to Canada to teach.

I’m telling this story because I am not exceptional. That’s my point. I worked hard, yeah, but I also was lucky. One of those things that I was lucky about was to be born at the particular historical moment I was born, which is that I’m a baby boomer. I’m 55 years old, born in 1959.

Education utterly transformed my life, and I want to see that same possibility for my students. The most important investment any government makes is in its own citizens and their potential, and I really do believe that investment is slipping away.

I’ve been teaching for 25 years in British Columbia, 21 of those years here at VIU. Each term I tell my students that I had privileges they do not. When I went to university in 1977, 82 percent of the cost of my education was subsidized by the government. At VIU, our funding is well below 50 percent, and this year, for the first time, tuition will exceed government investment in VIU. I mean, effectively, you’re minority stakeholders at this point.

Equity can only be achieved by acknowledging differences. It can’t be achieved on a model of sameness. I do have a couple of stats. Nanaimo is not a rich community. Our median household income is $6,000 below the provincial average. Our high school completion rate is 72 percent and only 56 percent for aboriginal students.

VIU has approximately 9 percent aboriginal students — it fluctuates from year to year, obviously — and that’s in both the academic and trades combined. We also have — although these are not stats, because we can’t ask students to reveal this information…. I mean, they do ask students, but these fields are not required fields in our student surveys. We have quite a high percentage of first-generation post-secondary students — i.e., no family member has gone to university.

We have a lot of single mothers. Nanaimo has a 17 percent single-parent household rate. And we have quite a few poor students. Many of the wealthier members of the community send their children to much larger universities, in particular UVic and UBC.

We all need an educated population, but over the two generations that now distance me from my own students, so those coming out of high school, we have transferred
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the debt to those students — from a social debt to an individual debt.

We have the highest interest rates in the country, and we also have a difficult and unpredictable grant formula. It’s a bit like our early retirement incentive at the university. It’s a complete lottery in any given year who’s going to get what.

For a lot of poorer families and families that come from non-traditional education, post-secondary uptake education families, debt is seen as a terrible risk. That’s true of my own family, where almost none of my ten nieces and nephews went to university — two. One did a college certificate, and there’s one left that hasn’t got there yet.

Part of the thing I found was that with all my education, they would say to me: “You don’t have a car yet. Why don’t…?” While I was a student, I never had a car, so it’s like I was a loser. That’s partly because it’s Alberta economic thought, because we make almost an inverse proportion to our education. There are six in my family. That’s because we’re from Alberta.

But even my brother with grade 9, who has a great job and makes a lot more money than I do, knows that he couldn’t get his own job, that his company no longer hires people without grade 12. Many of the jobs that only required grade 12 in my generation now require a BA, and that requires a debt load. For debt-risk-averse families, that decision is really difficult.

Every September I get calls, especially from young men who get better jobs, better resource-type jobs or building-trade jobs in the summer than most of my female students do, many of whom get minimum-wage jobs and are much more motivated to stay in university because they don’t want to spend the rest of their lives at minimum wage. But a lot of the young men get better jobs, especially in the building trades.

They phone me in September, and they say, “I’m registered in your course, but my boss is going to give me a $1,000 bonus if I stay, and I’m buying a truck” or whatever, and they don’t come back. It’s really noticeable, the gender change, in the 25 years I’ve been teaching, in the uptake of young men in post-secondary.

I think those things matter. We have a high attrition rate in first year, and that’s one of the things I’m arguing needs to be…. Individual schools, rural schools, schools that have a different demographic need to be looked at differently. It costs us in our FTE losses in first year. But if you look at…. One of the things that makes people succeed at university is seeing themselves in that space, believing that the university belongs to them, that they’re comfortable there.

I had a little confrontation with an administrator recently at VIU because they had done focus groups with students about what made them feel successful at university or what was a successful experience. They had done a focus group with aboriginal students, and when I asked her how it went, she said they didn’t understand the question. So I asked her what they answered, and they did understand the question. She just didn’t understand their answer.

They answered things like: “We don’t understand the parking here.” We have a campus in Cowichan, which has a high aboriginal — but there’s no charge for parking because of Duncan city policy. That’s not our decision. Then they come to the Nanaimo campus, which has a lot more courses, and the parking is expensive and different lots cost different amounts of money and it’s all completely chaotic and there are places you can’t park and places you can. If you park in the wrong place with the wrong pass, you get a ticket even though you had a pass but you’re in the wrong lot. It’s very confusing.

They told her they didn’t know what computers they could use and what buildings they were allowed in. Cowichan is one building and the computer lab is in the library and it’s really obvious, but here there are computer labs that belong to disciplines all over campus. You walk in when nobody’s in there, you sit down, start using your computer, log on with your university account and get thrown out. It’s embarrassing to have an instructor in a class walk in and throw you out, but they have to because it’s their classroom.

They don’t know which building is which — our signage is strange — and which building they’re supposed to be in. All of that confusion is about feeling comfortable, feeling space.

We had our Rock the VIU, our intro day, and I was in the lobby of one of the buildings welcoming people and telling them where to go in terms of what they were looking for. This group of five adults approached me, and I was trying to figure out who the students were in the group. There was only one student. The student had brought both her children and her parents. It was the whole presentation of needing to see what the university was and who it belonged to.

I’ve had students from the forest industry, first generation. This huge student, who looked like he could throw logs, put himself through university as a bouncer. He signed his paper “Rat Boy,” and I asked him why, because I found that rather disturbing. He said: “Everybody makes fun of me for going to university. I should have a truck. I should have gotten a job and had a truck, and now I’m ridiculous.” He has a great job now for the government of Alberta.

Megan spoke really well about ABE and ABE in relation to aboriginal students. But there was one thing she didn’t mention that I would like to mention, which is that when I discuss with students their experiences in school…. Every year, I ask my students about bullying and things like that. Bullying is terrible, and it’s getting worse because social media makes it more effective and more underground.
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You can say, “Okay, you can upgrade in high school,” but these students can’t upgrade in high school. Their experience of high school is so traumatic that the idea of even crossing into one of those hallways makes them feel ill. They need ABE. They need those transitionary programs. They are absolutely essential.

Finally, I’d like to say that there are a lot of harmful stories about students in the media — that they hang out in Starbucks. I encounter my students in Starbucks mostly behind the till. Yeah, they’re hanging out there for long hours, but that’s what they do. That’s their job. I’ve had students collect pop cans to pay for their diet of lentils. Literally, I had one student who I think lived on lentils for the whole year. Now in my building at the university, the pop can recycling bin is locked. Even that tiny economic opportunity is gone.

Yes, it’s true that they will benefit from their education, but that doesn’t mean all the debt should be theirs. It wasn’t ours. They suffer. A report from Stats Canada, which doesn’t usually talk about depression…. They argued in a report in 2010 that high debt loads create depression. They delay wealth generation. They delay housing purchases. They also have an impact on the level of job the person will get. Even though they’ve got the credential, they’re not as successful at job hunting. They have less confidence.

We also need to trust students to choose their own path and not over-direct them and not narrow the educational field. Knowledge needs to be diverse. It needs to be as rich and broad as possible.

I find that students are quite realistic. I’ve talked to fine arts students. They know they’re not going to make a living painting. Ten people a year make a living painting. But they’ve got plans. One of them was taking the event planning certificate, and she was taking technical courses in theatre, in lighting and sound. She was going to be an event planner and use her creativity and her wonderful sense of colour and so on to be a really good event planner. Another was taking fine arts and business courses so that she could run a gallery. She already had a part-time job as a gallery manager.

Students are quite practical. They have really great ideas about innovative combinations of courses. I think we need to liberate them into that possibility. We need to honour that education is a social and public value, and we all need to be invested in it.

I just want to end by mentioning this wonderful article — it was in a recent New Yorker — about a scientist in the United States who’s working with severe depression, really severe depression that doesn’t respond to any drugs. He’s discovered a technique of using little, tiny light pulses in the brain, and he can help people elevate their mood with this technique, which is non-surgical and which also doesn’t use drugs. He got the idea from reading an article by a biologist about swamp gas and the way a particular protein in swamp gas emits light as it decays. It’s that synergy between….

The reason we need great breadth in institutions and not to narrow our focus and not to cut programs because we think that we can predict which jobs will be in the future…. The future is very hard to predict. We need to be able to solve the weird problems we’re making in the world, and we need the synergies of that sort of play between disciplines for that to happen. I want to argue also for breadth, for keeping things like the fine and performing arts, for keeping….

Culture also makes cities livable. In fact, a lot of the best predictions about the future have come from science fiction writers, or, as William Shatner would argue, they’ve all come from science fiction writers.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Stanley. As a matter of fact, you went about three minutes over, but I wanted to indulge you, because you were taking such a philosophical approach. I was quite enjoying listening to you.

G. Heyman: I just want to be brief. Thank you. We’ve heard a lot about education over the last two days.

Perfect presentation for the end of a long day, because it was both philosophical and on point and also totally illustrated by important stories.

I agree with you, with your comments about the breadth of education. There’s lots of evidence to show that some of the most successful inventors and entrepreneurs ended up in careers that weren’t directly related to their course of study, except that their course of study led them to be creative and resourceful and to understand how synergies work.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Not a question. I just wanted to say that your students are fortunate — really fortunate. Thank you.

E. Foster: I have two questions. I almost interrupted you. What did you say the percentage of single-parent families was in Nanaimo?

M. Stanley: Well, according to the report…. I don’t know. It seems awfully high, doesn’t it?

M. Stanley: That was the Nanaimo annual check-up report. I believe it, however, because we have high schools with daycare, right? It’s a problem in Nanaimo.

S. Hamilton (Chair): And I guess you would sever off seniors, that sort of thing — people that you couldn’t actually classify there. So maybe that’s what brings it….

M. Stanley: Yes. They don’t slice the data enough for me to be able to. But I have a lot of single-parent students, especially women and often with three to four children.

M. Stanley: We don’t collect that stat at the institution because it’s a non-disclosure. We ask students to disclose, but it’s not required.

E. Foster: Then the other comment you made, and I’ve heard this from other educators in post-secondary, is that in the years you’ve been involved, the switch from the number of men in the classroom and women has sort of just flipped, basically. I certainly know that in my profession — I’m a forester by profession — the number of women…. Well, there were no women in the class that I was in. There had been a few before. Now they make up 60 percent of the class. Is that through all disciplines or just in your discipline?

M. Stanley: The most gender equity for us is probably the MBA, but it would probably still be slightly tipped towards women. If you look at the some of the bigger schools in Canada like York and so on, there the MBAs definitely tip to men. I don’t know about UBC. At quite a few universities in the last few years, even at Oxford, which is a very conservative private institution, it’s now 52 percent women, which is a huge shift from when I was there, when it was about 20 percent.

It’s definitely an issue in the way jobs are starting to gender in a different way and starting to separate out in a different way. It’s hard, because there isn’t longitudinal data at this point, but it may be costly to men in the long run.

It’s hard to know. There have been a lot of studies trying to figure out why that’s happening, and it’s really quite difficult to tease out the reasoning. Some people argue that just the presence of women makes men not interested in careers. [Laughter.]

But a lot of the data — it’s hard to figure out the cause and effect. You can make observations, but what caused it? Some people think it’s because there are too many women teaching in K to 12, and the lack of men in K-to-12 instruction is causing men to sort of distance themselves from the educational process.

M. Stanley: Yeah. I mean, it’s a difficult thing to decide why a population is shifting in this really large way. It’s a really major shift in the last 30 years or so.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Speaking of philosophical, I will turn to Simon for his closing thoughts.

I just wanted to affirm what you said. I taught university, not for as long as you. I taught for 16 years at a sister university. The thing I would say is that I would affirm your comment about depression, particularly in my male students. They would come and talk to me, and a lot of them were struggling. The female students were more strategic, more focused, and they did better than my male students.

I haven’t been teaching now since I got elected MLA, but I just want to affirm you and your heart for the students. They will pick up on that, and they will treasure that — the instructors like you who care deeply for students. The students will take that with them, much more than the curriculum they learned. They’ll remember the passion you showed for the students, and they will affirm that in their life. So good job.

S. Hamilton (Chair): On that note, Ms. Stanley, thank you so much. It was a great way to end the evening. I appreciate it.

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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

1) Kuterra LP	Garry Ullstrom
2) Gabriola Island Bridge Society	Jeremy Baker
3) Island Coastal Economic Trust	Mayor Phil Kent
	Line Robert
	Dallas Smith
4) Coastal Community Credit Union	Adrian Legin
5) North Island Students’ Union	Jamie Lund
	Jessica Sandy
6) PacificSport Vancouver Island	Drew Cooper
7) Parksville and District Chamber of Commerce	Kim Burden
8) Shore Energy Solutions	Ian Gartshore
9) Vancouver Island University Students’ Union	Patrick Barbosa
	Sherry McCarthy
10) Private Forest Landowners Association	Rod Bealing
11) Aboriginal Sports, Recreation and Physical Activity Partners Council; Vancouver Regional Sport and Physical Activity Committee	Garrett Elliott
12) British Columbia Teachers’ Federation	Jim Iker
13) Canadian Federation of Students, British Columbia	Steven Beasley
	Megan Marshall
14) Home Medical Equipment Dealers Association of B.C.	Robert Boscacci
	Darryl Mackie
15) Vancouver Island University Faculty Association	Marni Stanley

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