Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 78 — Wednesday, September 30, 2015 (HTML)

Present: Wm. Scott Hamilton, MLA (Chair); Carole James, MLA (Deputy Chair); Dan Ashton, MLA; Spencer Chandra Herbert, MLA; Eric Foster, MLA; Simon Gibson, MLA; George Heyman, MLA; Mike Morris, MLA; Claire Trevena, 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	1867
S. Crowley
A. Scott
L. McGuire
P. Leitch
P. Klassen
S. Thompson
R. Beaudry
T. Robertson
C. Giroux-Schmidt
R. Santiago
N. Stark
G. Dearle
S. Parkinson
B. Davis

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

We are 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 year, as the Legislature has been called back for a fall session that began on September 28. In order to accommodate as many presenters as possible, we’re holding public hearings in communities across the province through in-person sessions or via teleconference, video conference or Skype.

British Columbians are also invited to participate by sending 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 website at www.leg.bc.ca/budgetconsultations. We invite all British Columbians to make a submission and to contribute to this important process, and for those of you in attendance, we thank you for taking the time to participate today.

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

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. Today’s meeting is being recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A complete transcript of the proceedings will be posted to the committee’s website. All of the meetings are also broadcast as live audio via our website.

Now I’ll ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves. I’ll start with Simon.

S. Gibson: Good afternoon. I’m Simon Gibson, MLA for Abbotsford-Mission riding.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Hello, I’m Carole James, and I’m the MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill.

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

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

S. Hamilton (Chair): If I may, currently missing is George Heyman, MLA for Vancouver-Fairview; Mike Morris, MLA for Prince George–Mackenzie; and Eric Foster, MLA, Vernon-Monashee. They are participating with House duties at the moment and will probably be joining us a little later.

Also assisting the committee today are Susan Sourial to my left, Lisa Hill and Stephanie Raymond from the Parliamentary Committees Office. Mike Baer, Jean Medland and Rob Froese are helping us with Hansard Services. They’re here recording the proceedings, as I mentioned earlier. Thank you very much for indulging me there while I read through the script.

Now we’re going to start, hopefully, with someone on the line by the name of Sharon Crowley with Literacy Matters Abbotsford. Sharon, are you there?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Fantastic. Okay. You have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to interrupt you, maybe with two minutes to go. I apologize for that in advance. I’ll let you know it’s time to summarize, and then we can go to the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

S. Crowley: As you know already, my name is Sharon Crowley. I’m the literacy outreach coordinator for Abbotsford.

First, I wish to thank you for your time and attention today. It’s an honour for me to present to this committee.

I’m going to start today with a story, one I’m sure you will find touching. It’s Anna’s story.

“I was raised differently. I went to school and had no help from my family. I had difficulties learning. I coasted. In grade 6, I left school. And at home, I left home at 14. I learned to deal with no education.

“I was never on the streets. I always worked two jobs. Dentist office, car wash, university cafeteria. I got married and had children. I was able to get a driver’s licence and drove the school bus. I went to the university for testing, but they wanted me to write a story, and I couldn’t do that. Then I went to the CALL program, and now I’m learning how to spell. Now I realize I can write a whole page without breaking into a sweat. My tutor — she’s an angel. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t go back. She’s such an inspiration, a great teacher. What a wonderful person. She’s so amazing and keeps me motivated to continue.

“Learning to read and write has given me more of myself. Now I can get more out of reading. It’s taking me time to get more self-esteem. My grown children are delighted, and now they ask me
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how my schooling is going. I now have grandchildren. I never read to my children. Now I can read to my grandchildren, although not very well yet.

“I hope to get my high school graduation. It’s sad to know there are people out there like me, unable to read and write. I never had the time when I was younger, and now that I’m retired, it’s time for me. Everything happens for a purpose, and this was the time for me. This has meant a lot.”

Anna is a learner at our one-on-one tutoring program at Abbotsford Community Access to Literacy and Learning, one of the many people that benefit from programs in our community.

This is why the work being done by literacy outreach coordinators is important. This is why we are grateful for the $2 million provided by the Ministry of Education at the end of 2013-14, even though it was less than required. This is why we need sustainable funding, funding that will allow this work to continue so that we can plan, strengthen current partnerships and build new partnerships. This is why we need to have a better coordination process and communication between the government and the provincial literacy organization, Decoda Literacy Solutions.

As you can see by looking at Abbotsford’s community literacy plan, our goals, starting on page 17, focus on adult learners, aboriginal learners and families. The funding provided to Abbotsford has grown fourfold through grants, partnerships and in-kind contributions. This shows a commitment on the part of service organizations and community members in Abbotsford to support literacy. They, as you do, understand the positive impact of literacy funding to communities as a whole. It affects everything from health care to employment to the economy. Increased literacy rates improve a community’s ability to participate in today’s B.C. jobs plan.

Once again, thank you for your time. I urge you to recommend, as you did in the last year, that the government provide sustained funding, the minimum amount of funding required for coordination of literacy work annually — $2.5 million for the province.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Crowley, for that. I appreciate your taking the time to present. I will go to questions from the committee.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. I was wondering. You were looking for the continued funding, and we’ve heard from other literacy groups around the province who are also asking for the funding.

One of the concerns we’ve heard elsewhere is sort of on having to apply every year. I’m wondering how your programming evolves when you’re looking basically year-on-year, rather than being able to plan for a three-year cycle if there were three-year funding — whether that is limiting your ability to reach your goals, or whether you just have now learnt to work around it.

S. Crowley: I would say it’s a little bit of both. We go ahead and plan where we can, as if things are going to continue, but it’s really hard for partners to take us seriously when we say: “I might have cuts to my position.” Or: “Right now, my funding is less this year than it was last year; we’ve got a little bit of money left, so we’re able to cover that for this year, but next year if we have less money again, my position will be a little less hours.”

So it is a real challenge without that sustained funding. It does impact us on a daily basis.

S. Gibson: Good to hear from you, Sharon. I know you focus on children in particular. One of the areas that I know we struggle with in Abbotsford and, I think, around the province is to try to connect with adults who have serious literacy issues.

I know a businessman…. I did share that with our committee. There’s a businessman I know, very well known in Abbotsford, who once confessed to me that he can’t read or write, yet he has a very successful business — I’m sure through a lot of heartbreak — in Abbotsford.

How do you recommend that we connect with adults who are embarrassed or feel awkward about their lack of skills in literacy and who are really not being connected in a way that allows them to master the skills of literacy?

S. Crowley: I think that it’s in part letting people know that these programs exist in the community. For example, the story that I told was of Anna, who attends the CALL program, Community Access to Literacy and Learning — first of all creating the awareness that that program exists.

The other part is helping people in the community understand that there are programs that they can volunteer for as well. Creating more volunteers is also going to help. That way, then, we have somewhere to send people when you hear those stories — and letting them know that I’m out there, that my name is connected to literacy in the community and that my big role is to connect people to services and services to people.

S. Gibson: One of the things that I’ve noticed in adult students that I taught over the years — 16 years of teaching post-secondary — is the girls tend to much better in reading and writing skills than boys. I’m wondering if you have any comments on that.

S. Crowley: That is a little bit tricky, isn’t it? Our education system seems to — in the past, for sure — be more
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geared toward the female learner rather than the male learner, who needs to move around and connect with the learning in a more kinesthetic way.

What we have in Abbotsford for young fathers is an Abby dads program, which is one of the unique programs in our community. That gets men together and thinking about different aspects of literacy — financial literacy, digital literacy and even citizenship — so community literacy as well.

That’s one program that we have in place that we support and that would help the males who might not have been as successful in the system.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your work. We often say that in the literacy community, in particular, if you take a look at the small amount of resources you get, you certainly stretch the dollar and build the partnerships.

You mention, on page 7 of your handout, the goals and actions for the coming year. You talk about areas you’ve addressed this last year — the aboriginal, the adult and family. I wondered if you’re looking ahead now. Would those areas…? Are they continuing to be priority areas? Are those the areas where you feel the greatest need right now — having to set priorities?

S. Crowley: Yes, absolutely. I just stepped out of a meeting where we’re planning our new APALS session for the year — Aboriginal Parents As Literacy Supporters. That’s where we’re planning a four-pronged family literacy program. We’re inviting adults and families into the community. We’re going to provide a meal for them, taking away another barrier. And we’re going to provide a book for the children that we will read to the children. They will take it home in a bag.

While the children are having their story time, the parents will learn about what kinds of strategies that we’re trying to strengthen that week through activities. Then the parents will join the children, and they will participate in those activities with them. Then the families go home together with the book, and they can read the book to their child and think about the kinds of things that we discussed in our evening together. That’ll happen once a month from now until May.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Excellent. Thank you, Ms. Crowley. I don’t see any more questions, but just from my own perspective, thank you for all the work that you do. I said earlier on in our travelling sessions that through your umbrella organization, Decoda…. I don’t think I’ve met an organization that’s better at stretching a buck than you guys are. We get a lot of bang for the money that you do get.

You provide great services to your community. On behalf of the committee, thank you for that.

S. Crowley: You’re welcome. If I could just make one comment based on stretching the dollars, we provide a pancake breakfast as a kickoff for our community reading challenge that we host each year. I’ve got 16 community partners that help us with that. Last year we provided a free pancake breakfast for 400 people, and we made $100 on it. I thought that was pretty good.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s excellent. Thank you for that little anecdote. I appreciate that. And thank you again for taking the time to present to the committee. We do appreciate it. It’s a lot of good information.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Not a problem. You’re from SpeakBOX. Welcome. You have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention when there’s about two minutes left, so you can summarize your thoughts. Then we can go to the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

A. Scott: Excellent. Just to give some context of who I am, a little bit of my background and what SpeakBOX is — because it is a newly established organization — I come from a background of lived experience. As this committee might be aware, mental illness is a serious issue in our province, in our country and on our globe, really.

I bring that up because that’s where my passion is coming from. I have directly experienced mental illness and come from a place of being completely lost and being in that place of confusion and fear and shame. What my story was, was a story of abuse. When I was a child, I went through about ten years of child abuse. As you can imagine, that creates a lot of stress in anyone’s life.

As a young adult in grade 12, my challenge really came to the front because I could no longer hold it in. It’s common with a lot of young men out there, and that’s what I did. I held it in, I put on a face, and I tried to live life. In grade 12, it just exploded.
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Teachers found out. Counsellors found out. And systems were in place to help me. What’s important about that is when I didn’t know, necessarily, everything that was wrong, somebody else was there to help me. At the core of it, it’s a literacy. In fact, the presenter right before me, I noted, was talking about literacy in different ways. The literacy that I want to talk about is mental health literacy.

Mental health literacy cannot start young enough. In fact, in 2015, in the change that we’re seeing in a lot areas of our education system, of curriculum, mental health needs to be a core subject in our curriculum.

Now, another part of me, since having gone through recovery and come out the other side, is…. I’ve been a public speaker. I’ve been in public schools for over five years now, and I’ve spoken to several thousand youth. I’m part of the organizing committee of a major conference that happens every year in B.C. — we’re going into our fourth year now — called Balancing Our Minds. It’s now staged in Rogers Arena. We had well over 10,000 young people that appeared last year and discussed the topic of mental health. So we know a lot of work is being done in this area and a lot of funding is going into this area of youth and into mental health.

That’s fantastic. I call all the work that’s been done up to this point “trail-blazers.” This government has actually supplied the funds to make that possible.

What we want to do, moving forward, with SpeakBOX and with the proposal that we’ve put in front of this committee, is to enhance the work that’s being done. We’re not about creating a new wheel, another website, or fragmenting resources more than they already are. In fact, the proposal to make a new web service is actually to create a model, to create a format and a system where future and current data can be shared and can be amplified.

Right now in our province, if there is a young person — or even a young adult or a parent or a teacher — that needs to go and find mental health literacy to become more educated…. We know that that is the basis to somebody having the keys to be able to be accountable and to be self-sufficient.

In fact, through knowledge, somebody doesn’t become more reliant on our health care system; they actually become less. It actually opens up doors where they can be treated better in the community. They can take initiatives to put proactive, positive routines into their day, so we can minimize things like anxiety and depression, which we know are the No. 1 diagnosed mental illnesses and the ones that have some of the biggest impacts on our provincial and our national budgets.

This platform. It’s not a men’s website. It’s not a children’s website. It’s something that can speak to all generations. This council might be familiar with Facebook and Twitter and some of those resources that are out there. That’s the approach that we’re taking. We actually don’t need to make a website that’s a youth website. Facebook is perfect evidence that we can actually design websites that appeal to all generations. Health is generational. It’s universal. It should be open and should be available to all genders, all people, in one single place, to make it simple, to make it communicable.

The other importance to that is because that creates community. It actually creates opportunities where more people can connect and understand.

In this community, we are actually not the content creators. SpeakBOX is a technology company, so it’s creating a platform, just as people created Facebook, created Twitter and created other resources for social sharing. This is a health-sharing platform.

With health-sharing, the curators actually become our partners. There are a lot of them that we are collaborating with on this project. We’ve already been in discussions with another group that does receive support from the B.C. government, the Child and Youth Mental Health Collaborative, which is currently a partnership between Doctors of B.C. and a number of organizations.

We’re working with them on looking at policy, looking at making sure that there’s best practice and, most importantly, that we’re not duplicating — that, in fact, this service doesn’t exist in our province. In fact, environmental scans show that this service doesn’t actually exist in our country.

The next one is partnering with youth. There’s a fairly new organization, called Youth Mental Health Association. They’re a group that was actually founded right here in the Fraser Valley. They’re a bunch of youth just out of high school. Some of them are at UBC, SFU and other universities now. They’re establishing clubs in schools.

They’re the other piece to our puzzle. Where we’re very much the digital platform and the on-line service and connecting a vast amount of population through digital technology, which we know is possible at very low budgets, they’re the face-to-face. They’re the heart. They’re the peer-to-peer — which we also know a lot of evidence suggests is sometimes the best way to communicate mental health education and to spur the young population into action. Youth are the best people to deliver that.

Our project has two phases. One is the on-line tools, and then this direct peer-to-peer in schools. As they, through our partnership with SpeakBOX, establish clubs in schools across our province, we use our adult and youth mentors to connect and support those schools.

Now, all of this technology is possible not on open technology, because having talked to Jane Thornthwaite and her committee, child and youth mental health, we know that things like Skype, things like Facebook, are not okay for this. They’re not the appropriate tools for this, because they don’t have the security that these tools have.

We’ve actually created an industry partner, another company right here in B.C., who’s actually met the regulatory standards to do video streaming, to do data shar-
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ing, to do data storage to a clinical level. They’ve actually created the technology that allows us to do clinical visits over a virtual technology.

To wrap up my point, what we’re coming to the committee to do is not to ask what the committee might see in a lot of other projects, with these very, very large budgets. This is actually very different.

This is very much taking the approach of a grassroots project where we can make significant impact with the budget that’s been presented to the committee — of looking at around $80,000. This new web platform will be created, and schools across the province will be engaged in one centralized location where we can share information, share existing content — and which has been funded: things like mindcheck.ca, things like Kelty Mental Health, a number of these names the committee may be familiar with — all in one place.

It’s also the opportunity that through web service, through peer support workers — which we have evidence to do — we can connect the province in very unique ways. Now, knowledge is the initial catalyst to this. But this, as the committee might see, has a lot of other opportunities that become created through this, and it really opens up the door for innovation in the area of mental health, in the area of health and the area of young people, to give us an opportunity to have a piece of the change here and to put our ideas into motion, because a lot of them are technologically based.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, that was a very succinct, articulate presentation. I appreciate you taking the time to do that. I will go to the committee with questions.

S. Gibson: Thank you. It looks quite innovative. A couple of quick questions. How will you protect participants from people who may join in for malevolent reasons or evil intentions? How will you protect young people from people that have other agendas?

A. Scott: Absolutely. The system actually has safety put into it. A lot of my work I have done with the Kids Help Phone, so I pull a lot of best practices from their national work, and they, of course, have a lot of official technologies as well.

The system actually works in an asynchronous way. When it’s initially launched, with a budget of this size, it actually works in a way where there isn’t open communication between participants and other participants. Somebody can go on line, they can post a question, and it will go to a member of our staff or a member of another organization’s staff, and then it’ll be posted on the Internet. Everything has a degree of filter. Everything has a check that it has to go through.

In the area of video sessions. Video sessions can only be initiated from a coach’s side. Only members of our organization or other organizations who have coach level accounts can actually create a video session with anyone else in the province, and it’s designed to only host those meetings or mentorship moments. You can’t have somebody getting on the system and then go in and make a private call with another participant.

S. Gibson: My second question, if the Chair will allow me: how will you measure success quantifiably?

A. Scott: Absolutely. That’s something that’s very important to us. We know that in a lot of these projects, that’s a concern that comes up. There’s been a lot of money spent in digital technology. How our success is measured is to reach a much broader percentage of a school.

With the Youth Mental Health Association, with them having almost no budget, they’re already in over 50 high schools in the Fraser region. That represents tens of thousands of high school students. They have a model and that peer-to-peer engagement level that really drives the point home with youth. That’s incredible, and we want to continue to build on that and use technology so that it’s scalable.

Right now, in high school, we’re looking at a population of about 240,000 young people in our province alone. Frankly, we probably reach maybe 50,000 in programs that we do right now. Really, we are looking, in that first year, to reach over 100,000 young people. That would be based on the number of clubs that are established in our province and the reach of events in education that we host.

The project is actually based on the results. That’s something that I really want to stress to this committee. For $80,000…. It’s significantly small, because it is a very small team working very collaboratively, using existing technologies, not recreating wheels, and using things very efficiently.

The budget is small to prove a point, and once we prove our point, there are new opportunities for our sustainability financially, internally, but also to show that this is the way forward. This is the trend. We know that there’s evidence that supports it. We just need to put it into action. We need to embrace the passion and innovation of young people in our province. There are a lot of answers lying here. We just need the support of government so that we can move ahead.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation — very interesting, and a very interesting project. You’ve obviously started to work on partnerships and
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build up the connections, and you are working towards having this organization getting up and going.

My question is getting out into two areas. You mentioned that you’ve got connections through the schools and how you’re going to be building that up and how much you’re going to be using schools as the way forward.

The other is looking at rural communities, particularly with First Nations, where young people have that sense of isolation, a sense of desperation — we know that there are serious problems sometimes — and whether you’re going to be looking at it as a unique community or whether you’re going to be building it into the general network and the general framework.

A. Scott: Absolutely. It’s a great question. Yes, they’re a very important community to us. One of our partners that I’ve worked with over a few years, just to build my own knowledge as the organization has formed around me, is PeerNet B.C. They’re really crucial in this because their strength is working with multicultural populations, working with First Nations. You know, myself, based on my background, I’m not the best person to go and work with these communities, but they have champions that directly come from a background of these communities.

Our approach is to be very community-focused to those groups. How can we eventually get to the point where we have a Mandarin-Canadian working with Mandarin communities? How do we have First Nation Canadians working with First Nation Canadians, rather than going about old stereotypes and old, poor methods of communicating with these groups?

We also know that in First Nations, this use of technology can sometimes be invasive to their culture and to their beliefs and to how they go about working through things like mental health. That’s why this project is very much two-staged. The technology is a means, a portal, but it isn’t the only part of it. Definitely that face-to-face, that peer element, is king. That is what takes it from an idea and knowledge to creating innovation and change within the communities. It’s the people. We’re just the support method.

All of those different populations are incredibly important, and B.C. is a leader in that. Because we’re a multicultural province, we have a huge opportunity — that’s how we see it — to reflect and work with all of those different groups.

C. Trevena: The other question is how you’re working with the school districts, how you’ll keep your organization as a unique organization when you’re working with the bureaucracy, often, of school districts and their counselling services and how that will all flow in.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You’ll have to exercise some brevity with this answer, because we have another call waiting now.

With that, absolutely, partnership is something that does take time and does take work. It is going about it in showing the strength of the opportunity to work alongside existing systems. Just as with health care, the same discussion exists, definitely. Part of reaching out to government for financing is also government for partnerships, because things like MCFD, of course, need to be involved in this from the ground level so that we can make sure that the systems are in place to meet their needs so that they have a comfort and they have an acceptance for the system to work collaboratively alongside them.

The reason it needs to have its own identity is so that it eventually can go multi-province, can go national, can go global. As we know in the UN, with the 17 goals to reach by 2030, health is huge — the No. 3 goal in that.

We can be a leader in that. But it has to be a separate entity to do that, and that’s why this can’t really be absorbed by somebody.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for that. I appreciate you taking the time, Mr. Scott, to present to the committee. Keep up the great work. I’m very encouraged by what I’m hearing from you.

I hope I pronounced those acronyms correctly, Ms. McGuire. You have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention, rudely, with a couple of minutes left, and we’ll wrap up and then go to questions from the committee. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

L. McGuire: FIOSA-MIOSA was established in 2007 to address the health and safety challenges in the food and beverage industry, and then we were asked to expand to the manufacturing sector in 2010. We’re a provincewide, industry-led and -funded organization, with the goal to help reduce injuries and claims costs and to share information about how this can be achieved.

Our core values include safety first, trust among FIOSA-MIOSA members and with the industry, industry leadership in taking responsibility for reducing the injury rate, commitment to a healthy and safe work environment, and responsiveness to industry needs and safety priorities.

Our customers are primarily employers within the B.C. food processing industry and manufacturing industry, representing over 2,000 B.C. companies. Some of our membership includes Canadian Springs, Canada
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Bread, Peller Estates, Sun-Rype, Armstrong Cheese and many, many others.

The results we’re seeing in the food industry, where we’ve worked the longest…. From 2013 to 2014, injuries were down 10 percent and serious injuries down 24 percent. A total savings to industry by reduced premiums to WorkSafe B.C. was over $8 million from 2008 to 2012, with more expected from these recent results.

One of the initiatives we’re leading is the B.C. safety charter, which represents commitments from leaders of industry and organizations in B.C. to create a culture and adopt practices that value health and safety. It is founded on the principle that the effective management of health and safety is essential to long-term success, profitability and sustainability. The vision in 2025 for this initiative is that all B.C. business leaders value and create a culture of safety and well-being, making our province the safest place to work and live in Canada.

Some of our B.C. charter member signatories include Brian Scudamore, founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?; Trevor Linden, president of Vancouver Canucks and Club 16 Fitness; and Paul Henning, the VP of Rio Tinto. We have 150 more, as well, that we engage — leaders within this initiative.

Our goal is to bring our industry to an occupational health and safety standard of excellence. It’s consistent with the goal of the LNG project. When we performed a performance study on our OSSE-certified company, we recognized that the performance is significantly higher in OSSE-certified companies when compared to similar companies that are non-OSSE-certified. More work is being done in this area, but the preliminary results are very, very promising.

Our strategy is to engage our members and to work with them to build a health and safety program. We do this by deploying health and safety advisers in the field to perform a gap analysis and, from that, provide tools and resources and training to help support them to the OSSE goal.

Our key message includes that we are an industry-led and industry-funded organization taking responsibility for reducing the injury rate. The foundation of the B.C. jobs plan and skills and apprenticeship training is workplace health and safety, because skilled workers are safe workers. It’s working.

Our goal is to reduce injuries and costs. You are reducing injuries and reducing costs. We want to be a partner in the conversation on how we build a strong, safe economy around LNG to world-class standards.

Skilled training equals health and safety training. It’s the key to a successful jobs plan — a skilled and safety-conscious workforce. Of the one million job openings ahead, 43 percent will need trades, technical and safety training. We are in consultation with IPA and related organizations to look for systematic solutions to incorporate OHS across all trades.

The Canada–B.C. job grant is an employer-driven cost-sharing program that can help you offset the expense of employee training and boost the effectiveness of your workforce. The grant covers up to two-thirds of the cost of training an employee to a maximum of $10,000 per grant. This program has significantly benefited the members who we serve to increase their education and skills in the area of health and safety.

Most post-secondary institutions still offer occupational health and safety as electives and are not mandatory or are considered add-ons to their program. We recognize that there is very little consistency in the programs across the province, although some trades and professions are better than others. Our goal is to improve this.

FIOSA-MIOSA wants to be a partner with government when it comes to building a strong economy, especially around LNG. Occupational health and safety training will assist in building a strong, safe economy.

A greater number of B.C. post-secondary institutions need to integrate health and safety in their curriculum diplomas. We need to increase the number of health and safety diploma programs to support our economy and improve the pass levels. Currently, they’re 50 percent. We need to ensure competence in this area, and we want to see consistent application of training in all institutions.

In terms of moving forward, I would like to ask you to recommend that more funding is needed in the 2015 budget to allow the Ministry of Advanced Education and B.C.’s universities, colleges and institutions to provide more diplomas and degrees in occupational health and safety. Build on the success of the 2015 Canada–B.C. job grant training program by providing more funding for this program. Skilled workers are safe workers.

That now concludes my presentation. I would welcome any questions that you have.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful. Thank you, Ms. McGuire. I appreciate you taking the time to present.

C. Trevena: I have two questions, if the Chair will indulge me. I’ll ask them separately.

One is your ask for more funding for the Ministry of Advanced Education to provide more diplomas and degrees in occupational health and safety. I wondered if you’ve got a target of that — literally both number of courses, in which institutions, and how much you would like to see spent on it.

L. McGuire: Well, in terms of BCIT, where the health and safety diploma program is offered…. Currently there are approximately 20 seats. Most of them, from our research, are consumed within six months once they graduate. So we certainly would like to see that added to — at least five or six seats a year to start with. I know, from an organizational position, we are recruiting and have had
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challenges getting competent health and safety professionals, because they’re consumed by the employers in British Columbia.

C. Trevena: Just for clarification, then. There are only 20 places for diplomas or degrees in occupational health and safety across the province. That’s it?

L. McGuire: Well, in terms of the specific two-year program, that is where we get most of the graduates from. UBC offers a master’s program in health and safety, but it’s a different specialty. What most employers are looking for is having a two-year diploma level of competence, which we recommend employers that we work with look for when they hire a health and safety professional.

C. Trevena: So this is something that could be expanded into community colleges. They could be running these courses as well.

L. McGuire: Yes. Consistency is important as well. You have some that are on line — courses available through a one-year program. Really, we’re looking at, from a skill set, having it at least two years.

I was wondering. You’re working, obviously, with employers about this. There is oftentimes…. I represent a forestry community. Very sadly, we have injuries and — very, very sadly — deaths in the woods. You look at what the companies are doing, and I see that you’re trying to work with the companies to improve safety generally.

L. McGuire: We do have a union representative on our board. So we certainly work through that contact and within employers that we serve in helping support their needs. It includes employees — so those that are unionized. We certainly work through their health and safety contact within the organization and their senior management to support any challenges and are supporting mechanisms that they recommend for health and safety.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Seeing no further questions, I’ll take the opportunity to thank you, Ms. McGuire, for taking the time to present to the committee. Hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

S. Hamilton (Chair): On the line, we have Paul Klassen and Suzanne Thompson from the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C.

I’ll just let you know you have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to interrupt you when there’s about two minutes left so you can conclude your thoughts. Then we can go to the committee for questions.

P. Leitch: I’ll start. It’s Peter Leitch, the chair of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association. I’m joining Paul and Suzanne also.

This is a success story, 2015, for the film and television industry in British Columbia. The motion picture production industry is really a cornerstone of the screen-based entertainment content, which integrates physical production, visual effects animation and post-production, creating world-class entertainment and content creation.

The demand for content worldwide exceeds $1 trillion and represents a great opportunity to diversify B.C.’s economy. We’re really seeing strong growth in the industry in all sides of the industry, including post-production, visual effects and physical production, which means we’re creating as many jobs and more jobs than we ever have before.

Our impressive record in film and television production spans more than three decades, and I have to say I think the industry has never been healthier. There’s a number of reasons for that. One is our highly skilled employees, both crew and cast members. The second one is the investment in the private sector in terms of infrastructure. We’ve got maybe the largest visual effects and post-production hub anywhere in the world locating here.

We have got fantastic training facilities that we’re continuing to work with to produce qualified personnel for the industry. We now employ in excess of 25,000 people in this industry. With visual effects and post-production being one of the largest hubs in the world, we’re creating jobs that also play into the digital media realm of things, where we share a lot of that talent with the gaming sector also.

I’d like to turn this over to my colleague Paul Klassen to talk about some of the benefits of the industry.

P. Klassen: As Peter mentioned, the industry continues to support well over 25,000 well-paying, knowledge-based jobs, and it is currently expanding.

The majority of the direct work is concentrated in the Lower Mainland, but the people who perform these jobs and the families they support come from all reaches of the province.

The production industry contributed, as Peter mentioned, an annual average of $1.1 billion in production spending to the B.C. economy for the past decade. The majority of this is new money coming into the province. This figure does not include ancillary spending and economic spinoff to regional and municipal governments and to other sectors such as hospitality, tourism and the multitude of small to medium-sized businesses that supply goods and services to the motion picture industry in British Columbia.

The total contribution to the B.C. economy since the incentive program started is well over $15 billion, and over $1 billion of private investment has been made in industry infrastructure. It has been invested in the province, and more of that is coming on line in the next few years.

There are 24 post-secondary institutions located across the province which offer internationally recognized industry education and training for the next generation of production professionals. Due to the specialized nature of some of the jobs involved in film-making, there is still a significant amount of training which is learned on the job and not necessarily taught within curriculums currently offered.

In order to continue the industry’s expansion and attract top-quality production to British Columbia, segments of the production industry will be spending additional time and resources in the upcoming years to evaluate and broaden training initiatives. We hope to partner with the government in developing and expanding programs to train the next generation of film-makers.

Film and television production showcases the beauty and diversity of British Columbia to the world. Not only does the industry promote tourism, but it provides real economic impact wherever film crews and facilities are found.

Of recent significance was the feature film Tomorrowland, a Disney feature starring George Clooney, which not only spent a significant amount of time filming in various parts of the province, including Enderby and Armstrong, but followed up their positive experience with an advertising campaign whereby ads carried the slogan “Proudly filmed in beautiful British Columbia.” Producers are proud to film in British Columbia, and the province continues to attract the top talent in the world.

I’d like to touch upon post-production. The post-production sector of the B.C. film and television industry is experiencing a definite uptake in business since the expansion of the DAVE program. To name a few of the highly skilled post-production jobs that are currently in demand: editors, assistant editors, sound mixers, colourists, data wranglers, post supervisors, post coordinators, composers and dailies technicians.

Television shows and feature films that previously had chosen to go back to Los Angeles after they finished shooting in British Columbia are now deciding to stay in B.C. and finish their post-production sound and picture. Some examples include Man in the High Castle, an Amazon Studios series — ten episodes. This is a Ridley Scott–David Zucker project. Production, visual effects and post-production all completed in British Columbia this year. This series will air later on this year on Amazon Prime, and the content creators expect this investment to have a five-season run.

This content, much like that of Netflix, requires, from a technical level, to be shot in very high resolution and finished in high resolution. Our talent in B.C. has proven we have what it takes to deliver to global leaders in content creation like Amazon and Netflix.

Another example, from ABC, is a series called Of Kings and Prophets. This will be one hour per episode, a nine-episode series, currently shooting in South Africa. ABC, I must note, is a Disney company. Of course, Disney loves British Columbia, so they have chosen British Columbia as its destination to complete post-production sound, picture and visual effects for this series. This is going to premiere prime time on ABC, and it aims to be the scale of a series much like Game of Thrones.

Lions Gate pictures has chosen to shoot a feature called The Shack, based on a the best-selling novel. This feature, as well, has chosen British Columbia for production and complete post-picture and -sound finish. To name a few other examples of companies that have chosen to finish their post-production up here in British Columbia along with their production: Disney Channel, ABC Family and WWE Studios.

As mentioned by Mr. Klassen, the industry has been working to evaluate and broaden training initiatives, and we hope to partner with government and educational institutions to bring up the next generations of film-makers, post-production experts and technicians, as well as visual effects artists. Industry, education and government working together to grow talent and keep talent living and working in British Columbia.

This is an exciting time for our province, and our partnership with government has been instrumental. Thank you for your investment in the digital future of British Columbia. It’s our future together, and the opportunity in the digital age is infinite for us all.

P. Leitch: I’d like to give you a quick update on recent government initiatives. As a result of including post-production as eligible for the digital animation or visual effects credit, we are seeing significant investment that Suzanne talked about in employment growth in this sector.

The government also established an L.A. office to create a more significant presence in Los Angeles to support the industry. This is expanding our reach with our largest customer and growing our business. When we talk about
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companies like Amazon and Netflix…. This will allow us to integrate with them much quicker.

The inclusion of the Victoria distant tax credit has significantly increased the interest and activity in the Victoria area, which is really one of the crown jewels of locations in British Columbia. It will certainly also add to the tourism factor there.

I’d I want to talk a little bit about an initiative that we’re undertaking. The creative industry — led by Creative B.C. and creative industry stakeholders, including film and television, music publishing and digital media — established a communications initiative entitled B.C. Creates to tell the great success stories of the creative sector.

The creative sector is now worth a combined $4 billion to the B.C. economy and represents 85,000 jobs. Creative B.C., which is essential to the building of the creative industry in the province — including film and television, music, digital media and publishing — administers the tax credit program that is recognized as the most efficient and effective in North America, which is a significant competitive advantage for B.C.

The film commission services provided by Creative B.C., including their digital library, is another key to our success.

We’d like to thank you for the creative industries. Its contribution to the economy is well established and growing, and we look forward to building upon the thousands of jobs that have created as a result of this strategic partnership between government [audio interrupted].

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I’m going to go to the committee for questions.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you very much to all of you for your advocacy for the industry and continued good work. It’s an exciting time indeed.

I’m curious. When I was in Los Angeles talking with film producers, they were interested in the concept of having an office in Los Angeles. I wonder how that has worked so far. I’m just assuming it’s just getting going and making connections now. Any thoughts on that?

And then the other side, on the tourism side, Mr. Klassen, I think you mentioned “Beautiful British Columbia” and Tomorrowland and where that kind of advertising happened.

I know some film jurisdictions with film tax incentives have things like a requirement that at the end of the movie, a large logo appear advertising the jurisdiction or something like that. I know that’s not a requirement in British Columbia. They believe that it helps them in tourism, because of course, in some movies, you guys are so good at doing your job, you’d have no idea where it was actually filmed.

P. Leitch: Okay, why don’t I start with the L.A. office. One of the things in our ask for the L.A. office…. We didn’t necessarily need the infrastructure there, because we’re a two-hour flight away. What we need is market intelligence. So Will Fox, who’s involved in international trade down there, was hired under a relatively modest contract.

What he’s done, with guidance from the industry, is.… First, he came up here and toured all our facilities and got to understand the business up here. He’s fairly connected in the digital media sector, which is very helpful when we’re talking about organizations like Amazon, Google and Netflix getting involved in production.

But he’s also hired Peter Wetherell, who we contracted when we had a WED contract for market intelligence down there. Peter goes to all the international marketplaces. He’s got his finger on the pulse of new people entering into the business, and he has set up a number of meetings for us when we’ve gone down to L.A. It’s been very helpful for us.

P. Klassen: Yeah, and the other thing that he’s been helping, through Will Fox’s office, is expanding our initiative that we’ve established through the industry called the targeted fam tour initiative, whereby we would bring industry professionals up to British Columbia who hadn’t been here before but who were active and had an established track record. Will Fox has been helping us identify some people and actually funding the trips themselves. That’s been very helpful.

As far as the tax credit logo, I think we have seen that in a couple of places, and it would certainly be the exception more than the norm. I don’t know if there’s any drive from the industry to do that. Certainly, we are very, very well known within the production community, and I think they like to, to a certain degree, pretend that British Columbia can be anywhere in the world. That adds to our ability to attract production. So I’m not sure if that’s the right way to go.

P. Leitch: I think we’re seeing real advocacy with the productions coming up here. When Tomorrowland came up here, they actually did a big premiere up here, which was big, through the Motion Picture Association — also with Ryan Reynolds advocating for the industry when he was up here doing Deadpool.

Los Angeles is very aware now of the ability to market the province when they come up here — Warner Bros., Disney and all of these other companies. I think it’s become much more of a benefit than it did previously, where they were a bit close-lipped on it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I have one minute left, and I’ve got some other people that want to ask questions. I don’t know if you want to put them on notice and ask them to provide information. I’ll start with George.
[ Page 1877 ]

We won’t answer the question. We’ll just take them on notice, and you can provide answers to form part of the public record. That gives us time to get through all of the questions.

G. Heyman: I very quickly want to thank all of you for the work you’ve done, both for B.C. and educating all of us, particularly me, in my meetings with all of you separately, on the nature of the industry. It was interesting to see the positive impact of the extension of the DAVE tax credit to post-production.

One of my questions is: are there other things? It was only $2 million in the budget. Are there other things that government can do to further help the post-production sector? I also wonder if there is anything else that you think Creative B.C. could do further to help the various sectors with which it deals.

Thank you very much for the presentation. My question is…. The film sector has been gaining strength over the last few years. At the same time, we’re seeing the dollar dive. Really, how stable is this going to be, assuming that we eventually get a strong dollar back? Because last time we had a strong dollar was also a time that the film industry was really struggling. I’m just wondering how that’s going to work.

S. Gibson: Just a superquick comment — Peter and everybody. The neatest thing that I enjoy when I watch a movie…. I suddenly say to my wife: “Hey, this is filmed in B.C.” It’s always a moment of real happiness. I think we all discovered that Seattle, San Francisco, Portland — all those settings — are really B.C. and Vancouver. So way to go.

Folks, if you can take those last few questions on notice and just provide us written feedback regarding them, before the 15th of October, we can add them to the record.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time. Take care.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay, folks. On the phone we have Richard Beaudry, Langley Teachers Association.

Mr. Beaudry, you have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left. After that, you can conclude your thoughts and we can go to the committee for questions. So if you’re ready, the floor is yours.

R. Beaudry: Hon. Members, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. Our concerns in Langley are similar to school districts across B.C. in that adequate funding for public education is a concern for the public at large, parents and teachers specifically, and how the funding directly affects students in classrooms.

I would like to start off by recalling two specific items called for by the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services in November 2014. The committee called for the government to undertake the following: 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; provide adequate capital funding to school districts for facility improvements, seismic upgrades and additional schools in rapidly growing communities.

My presentation today is twofold: first, to address funding on a local level and, second, to speak to the benefits of increasing funding provincially.

Local — Langley school district. Langley is a district that has seen, in the last few years, exponential population growth in the Willoughby area. As the Willoughby area develops, with an ever-increasing number of new houses, townhouses and condominiums, the area’s schools are filling up and bursting at the seams. This is not a new phenomenon, as it was presented to the public back in 2012.

“Mountain Secondary is bursting at the seams, with 11 portables and three more on the way. ‘Even with the new middle school coming to Willoughby in 2014, it may not relieve the pressure, because more families are choosing to move to the area,’ said Hugh Skinner of GHMA Architects, the consultant hired to create Langley school district’s long-term facility plan.

“‘It’s somewhat like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, with Langley school district reconfiguring elementary schools and building a middle school to relieve pressure on an exploding school population in the Willoughby and Walnut Grove areas.’

“On top of that, one in five students in Langley are selecting choice schooling — fundamental, French immersion and fine arts — and all have long waiting lists.

“There will be 17 schools in the Willoughby area in the near future. Langley will need up to ten new elementary schools, four middle schools and a new high school over the next 15 years, most of them in the Willoughby area.”

Based on current population expectations, the overcrowding can only get worse, with Yorkson Middle
[ Page 1878 ]
School hitting 1,343 students and R.E. Mountain reaching 1,455 students by 2020. This would effectively double the existing student population capacity at Mountain. Both schools are expected to rely heavily on portables in the near future. Three portables were installed at the Yorkson site before construction was even finished.

The announcement in 2014 that the ministry wants school districts to pay for more of the capital costs of the new school is complicating an already difficult situation, with the government suggesting that some of the capital is to come from land sales of surplus school sites. Early in 2014, trustees in Langley were told there was $4 million available in local funds to build a new high school in Willoughby, a school that would cost at least $60 million.

The district would also like to expand R.C. Garnett Elementary. The expansions are needed despite the fact that three schools have opened in the last three years in the Willoughby area. Parents in the Willoughby area were told that the Education Ministry is asking school districts to contribute 50 percent of capital costs.

A few years ago, school district 35 accumulated a large deficit. The district worked very hard to repay the deficit and to balance its budget in the ensuing four years, as mandated by the government. Even with balanced budgets, the ministry has continued to ask districts to cut their budgets.

The provincial budget tabled in February 2015 directed all 60 school districts in B.C. to slash $29 million last year and another $25 million this year. It becomes clear that adequate funding for a new school becomes difficult when school districts are continuously asked to cut their budgets.

The second part — provincial. Per-pupil funding in B.C. The convergence of lower spending per pupil and child poverty in B.C. is affecting the success rates of students in the province. According to Statistics Canada’s latest figures, for 2010-11, B.C. records the second-lowest spending per pupil in Canada after Prince Edward Island, and according to the annual First Call report card for 2014, the child poverty rate in B.C. climbed from 15.5 percent in 1989 to 20.6 percent in 2012.

In a recently published study in the journal Education Next, research, and longitudinal research over many years, has shown that there is a significant correlation between increasing per-pupil funding and graduation rates for low-income students. For children from low-income families, increasing per-pupil spending by 10 percent in all 12 school-year ages increases family income by 17.1 percent. The effects on family income may reflect increases in one’s own income and reduces the annual incidence of poverty in adulthood by 6.1 percent.

They concluded that the estimated effect of a 22 percent increase in per-pupil spending throughout all 12 school years for low-income children is large enough to eliminate the education gap between children from low-income and non-poor families.

In summary, the research of Jackson, Johnson and Persico shows that for children from low-income families, predicted increases in school spending are associated with increases in adult economic attainment in line with their educational improvement and likely reflect improvement in both the quantity and quality of education received. Taken together, these analyses show that increased school spending has had important, positive effects on adult wages, family income and poverty status.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay, thank you very much for that, Mr. Beaudry. I will go to the committee for questions now if there are any.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you, Mr. Beaudry, for illustrating, in a sense, through numbers, the kinds of challenges that Langley is facing in those schools with overcrowding and upcoming overcrowding.

A few questions, one relating to portables. Is there a lot of use of portables currently? How many in the Langley district? Secondly, what do you see…? What does that look like in the classes?

Are you finding that students have to perch on cubbies or share tables? What are you seeing in the day to day in the hallways? I know that sometimes when it’s overcrowded, that can lead to anxieties, sometimes fights and that kind of thing. What does that look like in terms of a student’s learning environment or a teacher’s working environment?

R. Beaudry: Well, it’s always more difficult to have a classroom outside of the school, specifically because the students don’t have the same access to, let’s say, the washrooms. They have to go outside to go inside for the gym, for art classes. So it does create a situation where it’s more difficult for them to have the same quality of education as somebody who would be in the school.

The other thing is that you find yourself in a school like the Yorkson Creek Middle School, which is brand-new and built for 750 students, which would have 1,300 students in five years. When they opened, they had already installed three portables. If they get to the number of students that they expect to have in five years, they’ll have just as many portables outside as they would have classrooms inside.

This is dependent on the fact that we really need the financing for a high school. In the whole area, there’s one high school, which was built for 595 students and now has a lot more than that and should have 1,400 in another five years. Without a high school, all of these kids are going to be shuffled around all over the place.

It’s caused, in the immediate past, in the last year, a reconfiguration of the school…. They have to reconfigure it to build a new school. They have to reconfigure it again, and they will have to reconfigure it again in the next five years if they don’t have a high school.
[ Page 1879 ]

It does make it difficult. I don’t how many portables there are, because they’re continuously putting them on. I don’t have the latest number for portables. You can rest assured that up in the area of Willoughby, there are portables pretty much at all the schools.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s really eye-opening to hear about it.

I’ve got a couple of questions. One is on the growth in the district. You might have answered this just in the end of your last answer, but are there portables at every school in the Langley school district?

My second question is more on what happens in the classroom. If you could answer that first. Then, if I might, with the indulgence of the Chair, have another question.

R. Beaudry: I don’t think that there are portables at every school in Langley. What I was referring to, and the majority of what my conversation was when I spoke on local issues, is the Willoughby area. In the Willoughby area, there are portables at all the schools at this point in time, but not at all the schools in Langley. There are areas of Langley where they don’t need portables.

C. Trevena: It’s just the geography of it, not being that familiar with the geography of Langley, so thank you for clarifying that. That, obviously, as you say, leads to the reconfiguration.

My other question is following a little bit on what Spencer was asking about what’s happening in the classroom. We’ve had presentations from parents and others in deliberations that have gone around the province, who are talking about the need for parents to be funding things, whether it’s the small things like the school books or the paper or the bigger things like playgrounds. I’m wondering what is happening within the school district on that front.

R. Beaudry: There are some requests. I don’t think we have a specific request for parents to bring in print paper for all the schools, but there are some schools that have requested that. The fees are a concern for all the parents in all the school districts, from what we can see. The same happens here. Every year there are more things — fees for all kinds of different things, for pencils, in some cases some paper, but they also need poster paper. They also need special crayons, so they get a list every year.

The parents, from the meetings that I’ve attended, seem to think that they’re asking for more and more things every year. The fact is that because the budgets are so tight for the school districts, they can’t give the schools the right amount of money so that they are supposed to buy these — even though in the School Act, there’s a clear indication that all of these things should be paid for by the school.

Seeing none, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you, Mr. Beaudry, for taking the time to present to the committee. A very thoughtful presentation and very informative, so I appreciate it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): If you have a copy, please submit it to the Clerk’s office, and it will form part of the public record. We also have your words, of course, transcribed on Hansard as well. If it’s verbatim, then it’s not as necessary. But if there’s more information that you may have skipped over in the interests of saving time, then by all means, send it to us.

Hi, Terry. Glad you’re here. Just to let you know, you have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll probably rudely interrupt you with about two minutes to go, just to let you know it’s time to summarize your thoughts. Then we can go to the committee for questions.

T. Robertson: I live in Prince George with my husband and my daughter. My daughter is 29, and she has severe cerebral palsy and so gets services from both Community Living B.C. and from the Ministry of Health.

I’m calling today because I have many friends in the region, around the province. I work for a provincial non-profit that supports families who have kids with disabilities. I’m not calling about myself today. I’m calling about other families that are truly struggling with the lack of services they’re getting from Community Living B.C.

I’m not here to bash Community Living B.C. Having been part of the group that created CLBC, I know what their limitations are, and I think that it’s been a really big challenge for them to meet the needs of families in the province.

It’s not happening the way it needs to happen. There’s simply not enough funding going into services. I’m not talking about services for my daughter. We are able to sustain what we’ve got right now, so we are okay.

I’m talking about other families that I meet every day, friends of mine who are struggling, as either single parents or perhaps two working parents with very low in-
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comes and kids with very high needs who need services and are…. It’s not called wait-listed, because it’s called a request for service list, but for all intents and purposes, people are waiting on a list to eventually get service.

Premier Clark did actually use the platform of families first when she was being elected last time. I think these families have been waiting a very long time to hear that they are first in the eyes of this government. It’s hard to support people, day in, day out, when you see what’s happening to them and the stress level that they’re under.

You know, it is not pleasant to go into Community Living B.C. offices and see the stress level of the people there, because they didn’t take those jobs to say no to families. They took them as social workers, and that kind of thing, to be helpful to families, and the system just isn’t able to support them the way they need to be supported.

It’s tough on both sides. I see both sides. I have friends on both sides. I’m just here to make a plea, as a mother, for other families to get what they truly need.

That’s about all I wanted to say. I mean, I’m not going to ramble about statistics. I think you probably…. It’s very uncommon now for people not to be touched by somebody with a disability, whether or not it may be the immediate family, a niece, nephew, cousin — somebody. The rate of disability is skyrocketing in this province. I just don’t want any families to have bad outcomes because of it.

Well, thank you very much for your presentation. I will go to the committee for questions, if you would like to take some.

M. Morris: Hi, Terry. I’m the MLA for Prince George–Mackenzie. I’m just wondering if you’ve got some specific examples that we could talk about that would point us in the right direction of how to address this issue specifically.

T. Robertson: It always comes down to money. CLBC was created — and, like I said, I was involved in the creation of CLBC — as a new way to deliver services to families. That model has been completely…. I hate to say the word “gutted,” but it did not get the funding it needed right out of the gate, which was a warning we got from other jurisdictions around the world: that if we didn’t have the funding for it, it would only continue to be a model that struggled.

CLBC is in a reorg right now but with no new funding. You could only find so many resources within the existing budget. The numbers of people that are on wait-lists continue to grow. I’m not saying you have to throw money at everything, but this is a situation where….

I could give an example — a family that lives in your jurisdiction. A mom who works part-time at a church is having to take summers off until next year, when her daughter will be finished school. Her daughter is total care — tube-fed, severely intellectually disabled, autistic, cerebral palsy. That mother will only have an income of $610 a month to survive on. Her daughter will get less money, because they’ll both be in a system that supports them. Mom’s going to have to quit work to stay home to care for the daughter.

I mean, it’s just beyond words sometimes what families have to do. Mom doesn’t want to place her daughter in an agency. Mom wants to be in control of what’s going on and be there for her daughter, but the system just doesn’t allow for the kind of support. We’re going to fight to get them some money so that we can get her some help so that she can go to work. But there’s no guarantee of that, and CLBC has told her that. It’s not because they don’t want to give her the money. It’s because they don’t know that they’ll have the money in a year and a half when her daughter is done.

M. Morris: I appreciate that, Terry. Maybe you could get her to contact my office there and talk to Charlotte about it and just see if there’s something that we can do there.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s very helpful, Terry.

I’ve got a few questions, again, like Mike. A couple of areas that I was interested in. I have a lot of people come to my office who are seniors. They’re already getting too old to really look after their adult children, but they still do. They’re very worried about what’s going to happen when they die. I’m wondering if you’ve had discussions about this.

The other question that I have is on the ability to access respite care and whether that is available or not — if this is an additional problem.

C. Trevena: If you’d like to answer those two, and then I might have another one.

T. Robertson: The answer to the first question is…. I actually work for a provincial non-profit that supports families who have aging parents or parents that are already thinking about what life will be like down the road. I didn’t want to bring the politics of what I do for a living into it, but you’ve asked the question.

We have a microboard. I have no idea if you know what that is. We’re a provincial non-profit funded by CLBC.
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We support families to get a group of family and friends together to create a non-profit society to support the family and the individual with the plan of future planning. I do know that there’s work by all of my colleagues. There are four of us that work around the entire province, so we’re kind of spread thin.

Planning for families is a huge, huge deal. There are only a few of us, so we don’t get everywhere. We have somebody on Vancouver Island, and I could give you that information if you were interested at another time.

Your second question was about respite. I think there’s just not enough respite for most families to be able to find. We only have one large agency in our community, and it has one home that families can use as a respite home. Other families would have to actually go and find caregivers for their sons and daughters amongst their friends and neighbours and that sort of thing.

I would say that of the families I know who get respite money, whether they’re in MCFD or now in CLBC, the big challenge is actually finding people that can actually deliver that service. When you only get $233 a month, it would cost me more than that for one 24-hour day for my daughter to get support because of her level of support need.

So people aren’t getting much, even if they found somebody. Many people wouldn’t be able to get more than a day or two out of the amount of money.

C. Trevena: I have the opportunity to ask one or possibly two questions. I’ll roll my questions together. They are separate questions. One is: a year or so ago, 18 months ago, we were talking and hearing about the cuts in day programs for people with special needs. Is this still impacting community?

Second question. It’s going back a bit to the funding. People who have children who have autism get a separate amount of money. I know there has been discussion about maybe that should be looked at as part of general funds. Rather than people getting some money, spread that more evenly. I wondered if you had a view on that.

T. Robertson: Oh, I do. In answer to your first question, which was around day programs, I know that lots of families are struggling. There’s another situation where, with no day programs, many families are having to make a choice. Does mom or dad go to work? Which one makes more? And perhaps somebody is having to stay home. I know people in Vanderhoof who had their other sons and daughters missing school for a single parent to be able to go to work. The other sibling is missing school to stay home and care for their sibling that’s no longer in school.

I think it is a huge problem, although I would like to say that I think day programs have had their day. I think we need other options, which is why we created two programs at our local college to have advanced learning opportunities for our sons and daughters.

T. Robertson: …autism funding. Well, my daughter has cerebral palsy, and all through her young life, we’ve never had extra funds. We lived as a single-income family so that I was home with her. I would say it’s long past due that this Ministry of Health and all levels of government consider that it needs to be a level playing field. It needs to be who is getting what and who needs the most help?

I mean, that’s what the model that CLBC is based on. It’s a needs-based model, not “you’ve got this diagnosis.” I know families who will go to a doctor and say: “Please. Please.” And the doctor knows they’re having a rough time. If they get the diagnosis of autism, they are going to be able to access funding that other families can’t get.

I’m not belittling what folks who need that autism funding need it for, but every child has a right to reach their potential, and I don’t think that’s necessarily happening because of the unbalanced playing field there.

Seeing none…. It is funny, Terry, because one of the shortest presentations, yet one of the longest question periods. I appreciate it. Your presentation was very thoughtful and full of good information, and we do appreciate you coming forward and taking the time and sharing it with us.

T. Robertson: Thank you. I’ve done this before, usually in person, when somebody is in town. But you know what? If I’m the only voice out here saying something, I still have to say something, so I appreciate your time.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We all very much appreciate that, and on behalf of the committee, thank you for the work that you do. Take care.

S. Hamilton (Chair): On the telephone we have Colleen Giroux-Schmidt of the Innergex Renewable Energy folks.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just to let you know, you have ten minutes for your presentation. I will rudely interrupt
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you with about two minutes to go, just to let you know it’s time to summarize your thoughts. Then, when that’s done, we can go to the committee for questions. So if you’re ready, the floor is yours.

C. Giroux-Schmidt: Thanks for the opportunity to make this submission today to the select standing committee. For those of you on the committee who aren’t familiar with Innergex Renewable Energy, we’re a leading Canadian independent renewable power producer. We’ve been active since 1990. We develop, own and operate run-of-river hydro, wind and solar facilities and carry out our operations with more than 170 employees in Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and Idaho. We’re a publicly traded company, and we’ve been active here in British Columbia since 2004.

Today in B.C., we operate 13 run-of-river facilities and have four under construction, all of which will come on line by the end of 2016. All of the electricity we produce is billed to B.C. Hydro under power purchase agreements, and today, 4 percent of the energy that B.C. Hydro sells comes from our company.

We are currently in the middle of deploying $1 billion of capital investments in this province, and we’ve already created hundreds of local new jobs in construction and contracting. We’re proud that on our recently constructed northwest Stave and Kwoiek Creek projects, 40 percent of the workforce was First Nations.

Innergex strives for sustainability in all aspects of our business: the energy we produce, the contributions we make to local communities, the revenue we generate and the returns we provide to our investors. In other words, we work to develop projects that balance social, environmental and economic priorities. Here at Innergex, we believe that climate change is real and that renewable energy provides a clean, cost-effective and sustainable alternative to fossil energy.

As you’re all well aware, the challenge is for governments to plan their energy needs with the long-term view and a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We applaud British Columbia for its leadership on this file and its recommitment to climate leadership. We’re committed to continuing to work with both the government and communities to ensure this continues.

We develop renewable energy because we believe it’s the right choice for our current energy needs and also because we believe it’s the right legacy for future generations. British Columbia has already achieved so much of what the world is chasing — a clean electricity system powered by renewable energy. Our opportunity now is to lead the world on how we continue to transition to a carbon-free energy system and maximize the economic, social and environmental benefits that will accrue.

B.C. has legal greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that we need to achieve. It is also well known that because of our world-class electricity system, most of the low-hanging fruit for emission reductions have been realized. However, there is one more important way to help B.C. achieve its target, and that is a strong commitment to electrify additional segments of our economy and replace fossil fuels with made-in-B.C. clean, renewable electricity. Let me give you some examples.

There is tremendous opportunity to electrify the upstream oil and gas sector in the northeast of the province, to electrify the transportation sector and to electrify the built environment. B.C. has the renewable resources that would be required to provide this electricity, and companies like Innergex are ready and willing to invest.

A gap in infrastructure is one of the challenges we’ll need to overcome to enable a broad transition to electricity. This could be the large transmission lines needed to electrify the northeast gas field or the local interconnection solution to allow a business park to access the B.C. Hydro grid, or even smart grid technology and electric vehicle infrastructure to enable faster adoption of electric vehicles.

Across the province, there’s a need for progressive infrastructure investment. B.C. has an ideal opportunity to provide leadership and invest in the enabling infrastructure by creating a new clean infrastructure fund. This fund could be funded with either a larger lump sum investment or by a smaller annual amount repeated over several years. The fund could be structured to leverage matching funding from the federal government — for example, the Build Canada fund — or from other groups.

This fund would allow the province to harness the creativity of both communities and First Nations, unlock investment from the private sector and enable economic growth across the province. I’d be happy to speak with you more about this in the future.

B.C. has a unique opportunity to lead the world on what jurisdictions need to do at phase 2 in the transition to a carbon-free society. A strong commitment to electrification and an investment in clean infrastructure over the next several years can unlock unprecedented opportunities for economic benefits and innovation and enable climate leadership.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Ms. Giroux-Schmidt. I will, then, go to the committee for questions.

G. Heyman: Thank you, Colleen, for the presentation, and thank you for the many times that you’ve spoken with MLAs to increase our knowledge of what’s possible in your sector and what it is exactly that you do.

Ironically, there is a debate going on in the House right now about energy and energy options. I spoke earlier. I’m glad that I was finished in time to hear your presentation.

I’m wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about
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what you’ve experienced and what you’ve seen in terms of the rapid development of both solar and wind turbine technology, as well as the prices in terms of their increasing cost-effectiveness.

Both solar and wind are evolving rapidly right now in the world. There’s a tremendous amount of investment happening in North America, primarily in the United States, and in Europe. The result has been that the costs have been falling rapidly. It continues to be a race to the bottom in terms of the cost piece.

The other innovation that has been coupled with this is an increase in the efficiency of the technology. You’re getting higher-capacity resources that can harness more of the wind or more of the sun — so better returns at a cheaper price. All good trends. As I mentioned, we have both world-class wind in this province and a solid solar resource.

M. Morris: Hello, Colleen. As far as the technology goes, with wind and solar, we’re still very much reliant on having a backup system, because wind and solar are very cyclical. Where is the technology sitting today with respect to power storage? I’m talking about batteries or capacitors or something like that that sort of takes the edge off the cyclical part of solar and wind power.

C. Giroux-Schmidt: I guess I’d answer that in two ways. The first part is that in terms of new storage solutions, they’re also advancing. They’re not as far advanced as solar and wind and those kinds of existing generation technologies, so there’s not a lot of new, commercially viable storage solutions today. But I would not doubt that that’s going to come quickly, with the amount of emphasis on R and D that’s being put on that around the globe today.

The second part to my answer would be that we already have one of the best storage systems out there, which is the large storage that B.C. invested in historically. We have a tremendous opportunity to integrate even more renewables, balancing with that existing hydro system. We have a long way to go before we need additional storage to firm the renewables, if that’s what we chose to do.

S. Gibson: Hi, Colleen. As far as run of river and what I would characterize as mini hydro projects, will we ever get into a saturation? Or is there virtually unlimited opportunity in that regard?

C. Giroux-Schmidt: We have a tremendous resource here. I think it’s going to be: how long can run of river compete on a cost basis with the other technologies? Again, with wind and solar falling dramatically, we’re likely to see far more of that deployed in the near term than additional run of river. But we do have the resource. Run of river or small hydro can also be firm energy if we build it differently — so to harness small storage solutions. It doesn’t necessarily have to be intermittent.

S. Gibson: I know this sounds like a soft question, but what about aesthetic considerations? I was in Europe recently, and the — what would you call them? — wind towers…. I wouldn’t say they’re the most attractive addition to a tourist-oriented area.

C. Giroux-Schmidt: I think it’s highly dependent. I’ve actually had the opposite experience in Europe, where standing at a historic village, people were more excited to be taking photos of the wind turbines than they were the tourist attractions. So it’s all relative. And it’s clean energy. We like to have clean air.

S. Gibson: Oh no, it’s not a criticism, really — just more an observation. They were right there overlooking all of these monasteries and ancient buildings.

D. Ashton: Colleen, thank you. Just really quickly, my professor at university, Dr. Marshall, had done a paper on splitting during the freshet at Grand Coulee — everything being run through the turbines, splitting the water, putting hydrogen on one side of the river and oxygen on the other. During peak demand times, when required, they’d combine the two for energy. It might be something for the future, for storage.

C. Giroux-Schmidt: Absolutely, and I think there’s a tremendous breadth of different solutions that are being explored right now. We’re lucky here in British Columbia. We have an abundance of opportunity, which makes it difficult for us sometimes. But we’re not going to run out of renewable energy options any time soon.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you so much for the presentation. I’m curious. I’ve heard from some in the clean energy sector, renewable energy sector, that they’re finding it harder to get financing now, as international investors tell them that they don’t believe that there’s a future in B.C., given the Site C project and a lack of need for power. I’m not sure if you can comment on that. If you don’t want to touch that, no problem. It’s something I’ve heard, and I wanted to see if you’d heard anything like that.

C. Giroux-Schmidt: I can speak to my company’s experience, which has been for the project where we have a PPA. We’ve had no problems securing financing to build those assets. I think, looking at the future opportunities in British Columbia — there’s tremendous opportun-
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ity here — we would strongly encourage a good push to electrification, and that will enable some of those other opportunities to be unlocked.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Giroux-Schmidt. I appreciate your taking the time to enlighten us and present to this committee. It’s a lot of good information. I’m sure it’s been well absorbed by everyone around the table here. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to present.

On Skype. Next up we have the Abbotsford Community Services — Rod Santiago and Neil Stark.

Gentlemen, good evening. I’ll just let you know you have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with about two minutes left to go. I’ll ask then that you summarize, and then we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

R. Santiago: We appreciate the opportunity to provide this submission to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. We are Neil Stark, director of advocacy, seniors and community living, and Rod Santiago, executive director of Abbotsford Community Services. We speak to you today on behalf of vulnerable families and individuals in Abbotsford, as well as in communities throughout our province.

We would like to draw your attention to three areas where the provincial government’s focus would positively impact our community and the province: affordable housing, because basic housing is an inalienable right; mental health, caring for our citizens in their time of vulnerability; and child poverty, because none of our children should grow up hungry.

ACS is a multiservice agency engaged in a variety of initiatives aimed at addressing needs attached to homelessness and housing; addictions and counselling; food insecurity and poverty; employment and skill development; social isolation and independence; accessibility and integration; immigration and settlement; and aging and capacity-building.

We work in partnership with all levels of government, schools, faith-based agencies, foundations, local and regional businesses and with individuals in our neighbourhood to ensure that the under-represented and underserved have a voice. Our mission is to foster community well-being and social justice through positive action and leadership, and to us, community means family.

N. Stark: Let us share with you a story about one of our family members, Marilyn. Marilyn is a picture of vulnerability. She ticks all the boxes: homeless, elderly, First Nations, woman, physically disabled, addictions and cognitively impaired. Her life story reads like a summary of the Truth and Reconciliation findings. She was taken from her home at a young age and sent to a residential school, where as a child she lived through a thousand hells. Her sister numbers among the missing and murdered.

For 63 years she has carried with her all the markings of the legacy of pain that she was born into: fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, depression, alcoholism, limited literacy and intense institutional distrust. Her body wears scars earned through surviving a half-dozen abusive relationships, dozens of rapes and thousands of nights living on the street.

Marilyn had lived in her apartment for about six months, but each month she fell a little more behind in her payment to the landlord. She just couldn’t stretch her $906 monthly disability far enough to afford the $650 a month in rent.

On April 4, 2015, the landlord finally evicted Marilyn from her apartment for rental non-payment. Later that day, she was admitted to Abbotsford Regional Hospital, where she spent 2½ weeks. After this, Marilyn was discharged back to the street without a place to stay, despite concerns from her pastor and advocate.

Ten days later, standing outside the tent that had become her home, her pastor noticed that Marilyn had developed a rattling cough, clearly pneumonic. The next morning Marilyn was brought into the ER at Abbotsford Hospital. By that afternoon, she was surrounded by a nest of tubes and wires in the ICU on full life support.

The infectious pneumonia had entered her bloodstream. She was septic. She spent the next five weeks in the ICU and two more weeks in high acuity. She was then sent back to the very unit she had been discharged from two months prior. This unit yet again discharged her to the street, and the cycle continues.

The approximate cost of an ICU bed in Canada is $2,908 per day. This means that the cumulative cost of Marilyn’s ICU stay was approximately $100,000. That amount of money could have housed her for the rest of her life.

Consider implementing discharge plans from provincial institutions that factor in an individual’s housing situation. Involve other service providers in finding housing-first options.

Marilyn’s story is not unique. It is an amalgamation of the stories of hundreds of people in every city across the province, people who need to be protected, supported and cared for, because they are our neighbours, because they can’t support themselves and because not providing for their basic housing needs will continue to put tremendous financial strain on our institutions.

The cost of ensuring all British Columbians have access to safe and affordable housing is far less than the cost of addressing the symptoms of homelessness. The provision of affordable housing is a case where the compassionate thing and the fiscally responsible thing are the same thing. Let’s do the math.
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R. Santiago: Two weeks ago we were reminded what a fragile hold we all have on life. Alex Gervais, an 18-year-old boy in B.C. provincial care, fell to his death from his fourth-floor Abbotsford motel room. This unnecessary tragedy reminds us, along with many other things, that the journey from childhood to adulthood can be complex to navigate.

Across all our programs, we see individuals with much more severe and complex — specifically mental health — challenges accessing our services than even ten years ago. Unfortunately, the rate of funding to support these challenges has not kept up with the series or levels of these complexities. Programs for children, youth and families are severely underfunded.

Had such individuals received support in the earlier stages of these challenges, when their problems were manageable and less complex, then their safety and the safety of others would not be endangered, and it would not be costing the system unnecessary tragedies. Once again, let’s do the math.

ACS’s Abbotsford Addiction Centre, sexual-abuse intervention program and the Stopping the Violence program, Fraser Health, MCFD and Ministry of Justice funding all report the need for additional funding levels to fill gaps in counselling needs — including teen, anger-management and self-control counselling, to name a few — as well as to mitigate wait times for services that often extend three months.

We recommend improving and expanding access to health and mental health services. This includes the right to use free and/or very affordable counselling services, which currently do not exist or are extremely difficult to access.

N. Stark: Statistics Canada tells us that children who experience poverty, especially persistently, are at higher risk of suffering health problems and behavioural disorders. They tend to attain lower levels of education and are more likely to live in poverty as adults.

Partnered with poor nutrition, sleep deprivation and low feelings of safety, children in poverty are more likely to have lower literacy rates and poor school achievement and attendance. It’s alarming to note that 39 percent of individuals accessing Abbotsford Community Service’s food bank are children, and one in five children in B.C. is living in poverty. That’s roughly 169,420 children, enough to fill Rogers Arena over nine times. It has been estimated that $1 invested in the early years of a child’s life can save up to $9 in future spending in the health care….

The Abbotsford Community Services food bank, in partnership with the Abbotsford Rotary Club, local churches and other key community stakeholders created the starfish backpack program. Starfish arose in response to some public school teachers saying that students regularly come to school hungry after the weekend, as they didn’t get enough to eat at home.

During the school year, this Abbotsford Community Services program feeds 263 children three square meals per day every weekend. It costs only $15 a week to provide the food in the backpacks to one child for the entire school year. Already the concept has been reproduced in Langley, Aldergrove, Chilliwack and Coquitlam.

Consider replicating this business model provincewide — more importantly, that the province of B.C. develop a comprehensive poverty reduction plan which incorporates a strategy for children. A child who’s fed can think and has a fighting chance of succeeding in school and life. A healthy, succeeding child costs the provincial government less in the long run and will be a productive, contributing member of the community. The message is not hard to interpret, and we can all do the math.

R. Santiago: Thank you for considering these three areas of affordable housing, mental health and child poverty. Thank you for choosing to invest in individuals, families and communities by choosing to invest in community social services. Together we can make our community one where no one goes hungry or homeless; children, youth and families thrive; people feel safe; we are wise stewards of our resources; and everyone belongs.

S. Chandra Herbert: First, thank you, Mr. Stark. Thank you, Mr. Santiago, for your very, very well put presentation. We should all be able to do the math, indeed.

We are the Finance Committee here. There’s a lot of provincial money that goes into a whole bunch of different areas, and I think, as you pointed out, if we started to reinvest it in areas like addressing homelessness and preventing homelessness, dealing with mental health, dealing with child poverty, we’d be preventing a lot of the problems we end up paying for later. And people would live better lives. Thank you very much for pointing that out.

Your story of Marilyn is one that I’ve seen in my own community in the West End far too many times with other people. Ken is one fellow that I’m thinking about now. Unfortunately, he died on the street.

Now, I’m curious. The food banks that you referred to, the starfish program. How many people are using it? What does the child poverty, the homelessness rate look like in Abbotsford? Sometimes I raise these issues, and people tell me: “Well, that’s a Vancouver problem.” I kind of doubt that. I’m pretty sure that it’s a big challenge in the Fraser Valley as well.

R. Santiago: Our rates at this point are about 3,000 to 4,000 individuals using the food bank on a monthly basis, so it certainly is not just a Vancouver or a Lower Mainland–specific issue. It does certainly extend to our area as well.
[ Page 1886 ]

In terms of children, it is the growing issue. In terms of our tracking, there is definitely a correlation between individuals who don’t graduate from high school and usage of food banks. We see a direct correlation that way, and that’s why we’re doing a lot of work in terms of trying to make sure that we have kids who are graduating from high school and having that chance to be able to do so. That’s why pieces like starfish backpack program are pieces that we’re putting some effort into.

I guess one of the areas that I feel is important in dealing with these things is often through peers. There’s more acceptance and more social welcoming, if you will. Can you comment a bit on that?

So if somebody has a need, if they can deal with their peers, as opposed to kind of a top-down hierarchical approach, it’s much more likely to reform and rehabilitate, if you will, much as the 12-step programs are based on that peer model.

I wonder if you’d like to comment on that a little bit, in light of some of the issues you’re talking about here.

R. Santiago: A lot of the work that we do…. One of the other initiatives that we’re doing with the food bank, actually, is called the Everest program. Everest because it’s like climbing a mountain. We’re doing something audacious. The intent of it is working with families, one family at a time. It’s the goal of having someone not be the next generation, and their next generation, to still be on the food bank list.

The peer component of it is: how can we get the whole community involved in helping someone to end up not being on the food bank anymore? That’s through mentors. That’s through friends being a part of the solution. Yeah, the peer part to that is: how can the community be a part of the solution? Whether it’s the food bank or whether it’s….

ACS has over 1,000 volunteers. That’s a part of the solution to the way we can make our services work. It is the peers. The only way we can make our services happen is through the strength of the community.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s very clear, and as Spencer mentioned, you’re spelling out the math. It’s important to recognize this. All of the aspects — we’ve got to do better. There’s no question. I mean, the very fact that we start talking about food banks, as they are a part of our social system, is very discouraging. We shouldn’t really even be having food banks.

My question was on the housing side. We had a presentation earlier on today about the housing-first model. I’m wondering whether…. Obviously, there is a huge problem of homelessness in Abbotsford. I think that the whole province is aware of that.

I’m wondering if you are looking at the housing-first model, and if so, at what level you are looking at — the number of units and the costing. If not, whether you’ve also looked at what the actual housing need is in Abbotsford and, again, whether it is possible to put some sort of cost figure to it.

R. Santiago: B.C. Housing has been very supportive of the work that we’re doing here. We are finally close — this is after years of work that we’ve been doing here — to being able to have our very first housing-first initiative actually breaking ground. We’re almost there — having 21 units, and perhaps a little bit more than 21 units, for single men who are homeless or near homelessness be able to have a housing-first initiative. That’ll be the very first one to break ground, ever, for Abbotsford — first time ever.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, gentlemen, for taking the time to present to the committee. I appreciate all of the hard work that you do on behalf of the people that you serve. Thank you, and have a good evening.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. On the phone, we have the University of the Fraser Valley Faculty and Staff Association — Sean Parkinson, Gillian Dearle and Bob Davis.

G. Dearle: Good evening. I guess let’s just begin with some brief introductions. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

G. Dearle: I am Gillian Dearle. I’m the vice-president, negotiations, for the Kwantlen Faculty Association. With me is Bob Davis. He’s the president of the Kwantlen Faculty Association — as well as Sean Parkinson.

S. Parkinson: I’m president of the University of the Fraser Valley Faculty and Staff Association.
[ Page 1887 ]

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful, welcome. Just to let you know, ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll rudely interrupt you with two minutes to go and let you know it’s time to summarize. That’ll give us a chance to go to the committee for a few minutes of questions after that. The floor is yours.

G. Dearle: Thanks for this opportunity to speak to the committee about the priorities for the 2016 provincial budget. As we share similar concerns and interests, we’ve chosen today to do a joint presentation on behalf of the Kwantlen Faculty Association and the University of the Fraser Valley Faculty Association.

Before we speak about those concerns and interests, we’re going to tell you a little bit about our respective organizations. Kwantlen Faculty Association represents the 800 faculty who work and teach at four campuses located south of the Fraser. Our institution was established by the B.C. government 34 years ago. It was originally a community college, then a university college and now Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

Our enrolment base has grown steadily over those 34 years and now sits at over 17,000 full- and part-time students. One important feature of our institution is that it’s the only publicly funded, open-access post-secondary institution in the South Fraser region west of Abbotsford. Given the growth of this region, the increase in the number of eligible students in our area has been and will continue to be significant.

S. Parkinson: The University of the Fraser Valley Faculty and Staff Association represents more than 500 faculty and 400 staff, a combined bargaining unit that is unique in B.C.’s post-secondary sector. UFV was first founded as Fraser Valley College in 1974. Like Kwantlen, it was eventually granted university college status, and then became a university in 2008.

We now serve over 15,000 students, with major campuses in Abbotsford, at the Canada Education Park in Chilliwack and with six other locations in the Fraser Valley at Abbotsford, Chilliwack, Hope and Mission. This region of the Lower Mainland is diverse, growing fast and has extensive needs in the area of post-secondary education — needs that our institutions work to meet every day. Demands on our institutional capacity are significant, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain our programs when funding doesn’t keep pace.

As special-purpose teaching universities, a critical objective of our institutions is to provide students with a comprehensive range of post-secondary education options. “Comprehensive” means a full range of programs, offerings that lead to degrees, diplomas, certificates and completed apprenticeships. It also means providing avenues for adult learners to re-engage in post-secondary learning by completing their adult graduation Dogwood diploma or by simply getting the necessary prerequisites for entry into different streams within the public post-secondary education system here in B.C.

As educators, members of our associations are deeply concerned about shifting the financial burden onto students. What we’re seeing in our classrooms, advising offices and support services is that as tuition fees and accompanying student debt rise, so does the level of stress and anxiety among our students. The more students have to worry about whether they can afford their tuition, their rent, their food, the more difficult it is for them to concentrate on their studies. Consequently, it’s taking longer for students to complete their programs.

Just as troubling is the fact that institutional budgets are increasingly relying on outside revenue sources. At some institutions, over 50 percent of the budget comes from tuition and revenue sources other than the provincial operating grant. These shifts raise serious concerns about accessibility to our public post-secondary system. Affordable access to public institutions has significant implications for students, but also for the growth and success of our province.

G. Dearle: The Minister of Advanced Education recently wrote that 78 percent of new job openings will require a post-secondary education. But if the province doesn’t provide for accessible, affordable post-secondary institutions, there won’t be a workforce with the necessary education to meet those requirements.

We are also concerned that the government is making some problematic assumptions about what those educational needs and jobs will be. The minister has talked about targeted funds for high-priority jobs, as outlined in the 2014 Skills for Jobs Blueprint, but this blueprint doesn’t seem to recognize the very real need for strong communication and critical thinking skills or for problem-solving and analytical skills, skills which are learned and refined in programs like the liberal arts.

Students need choices of courses, of programs, of potential jobs. More choices mean more opportunities, and diversity among our students will lead to more diversity across British Columbia.

B.C.’s economy — indeed, the global economy — is become a more knowledge-intensive economy. If we make post-secondary education more difficult to access because of underfunding, B.C. is at risk of not creating the skills, knowledge or learning opportunities we need for economic success.

We also want to take a moment to talk about how funding cuts over the last year are affecting the post-secondary system in B.C. Last year, we know you heard about the cut of $22 million to English language training for domestic students. This year, the post-secondary system lost another $7 million — funding that was used specifically to keep adult basic education programs tuition-free.

The government made adult basic education tuition-
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free in 2008. When making the announcement in 2007, the Minister of Advanced Education, Murray Coell, said: “We are helping people upgrade their education so they can take advantage of our growing economy and enjoy rewarding careers.”

But in December 2014, the government announced that students with the means to do so would be expected to contribute. However, what this government considers the means to contribute is disturbingly low. According to a ministry fact sheet, a single student with a gross annual income in 2014-15 of over $23,647 would not be eligible for the adult upgrading grant.

The rationale for imposing tuition fees for ABE seems to be that programs were no longer sustainable and that by charging fees, institutions could better afford the programs. But the reality is quite different. At Kwantlen, students in ABE courses are now charged full tuition fees, and our enrolment in continuous intake courses for these programs are down significantly from last year, when tuition was not charged for continuous intake ABE courses.

S. Parkinson: At University of the Fraser Valley, ABE and ESL students are charged over $1,000 per semester for a full course load, and, like at Kwantlen, enrolment numbers are down.

G. Dearle: Those students who take ABE programs are frequently some of the most vulnerable and least likely to have good-paying jobs. Making it harder for those who need it the most to access even basic education doesn’t make any economic sense. Charging tuition for ABE limits opportunities for these citizens to pursue more rewarding careers and to earn a higher income.

As educators, our greatest concern is our students and how we can help them to grow and to thrive in their classes and beyond. We believe strongly in the value of public education and, as such, are deeply concerned by what appears to be a growing trend of declining accessibility and affordability in our public institutions.

We know that your committee’s recommendations last year included much of what we’re asking for in the 2016 budget. But as the funding crisis reaches a critical point, we’re once again asking for some specific priorities to be addressed.

First, the reinstatement of tuition-free adult basic education programs at all our post-secondary institutions. Second, a direct and ongoing commitment of at least $22 million to support provincially funded ESL programs delivered by B.C.’s post-secondary institutions. Third, improved funding support for students, both in terms of a revitalized student grant program and for student services, to ensure that students can complete programs and degrees in a timely way and without the burden of a heavy debt load. Fourth and finally, a funding formula that better responds to the cost pressures faced by B.C.’s post-secondary institutions.

Specifically, we once again recommend a comprehensive review of funding to address regional inequities and core funding needs for the entire system.

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

I notice more and more in the U.S., both public and private universities are offering complete programs in the evenings so that adult learners can keep their jobs and go to school in the evening and earn full credentials. This seems to be a growing trend in the U.S. but not very active in Canada.

I’m wondering what you think about this. It would allow people to keep their jobs, and at the same time, earn a credential so they can move up occupationally, career-wise, as you note in your presentation. Do you think that instructors would be open to teaching programs at night — not just night school or continuing ed but full programs — to allow adult learners to keep their jobs, often well-paying jobs, but at the same time, further their careers?

B. Davis: I can address your question there. Just so I understand, your question is really about the offerings in the evenings to allow people to work and better themselves and enter into our programs at both of our institutions. Is that correct?

S. Gibson: That’s right. Like myself, I did a couple of undergrad degrees working almost full-time. Now, I had to work flat out during the day as well. If you look at universities in the U.S. — for example, I’m familiar with Chicago — you can get a law degree or all kinds of full degrees at night and still keep your day job. But I tend to see that our universities here tend to discourage that, and instructors often are not willing — at least, I think they’re not willing — to work evenings but not in the day.

B. Davis: Well, I hear your point. At Kwantlen, my experience is that we are actually a three-semester institution, so your typical fall and spring semesters are augmented with a summer access to programming, as well as evenings. Our faculty teach from eight in the morning till ten at night, six days a week — various course loads and offerings. I think that’s in response to the need of our students. We’re finding more part-time students, because the sheer cost is requiring them to work to afford post-secondary. There is a real desire to advance themselves and get the credentials that they’re looking for and the skill set to do that.

Out of my 20 years that I’ve been at Kwantlen, I think that our offerings have actually expanded and tried to
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address the needs of our community to provide opportunities to better themselves through education. So we’re already doing that. It may not be publicized as much as post-grad and in the U.S. with those universities and such, but I know that we have quite an active student body that goes around all the year. We don’t have a summer or a term that’s off, so to speak.

C. Trevena: Thank you very much for your presentation. My questions are on adult basic education. Both institutions mentioned that you’re seeing a decline in the number of students who are registering for that. I wondered if you can quantify that.

Secondly, for the other students, the discussion about the cost of trying to get an education and the pressure of that. Are you seeing students drop out because they simply cannot afford to deal with the cost of living in the Lower Mainland as well as the cost of education? And again, can you quantify that?

G. Dearle: The numbers aren’t hard and fast at this point, but it does appear that continuous intake courses in adult basic education are roughly down to about 48 percent this year. It’s not really a reliable number, because there are fewer offerings. We can’t really make that as a straight comparison to last year. I’d say, at this point, that the numbers aren’t there to nail down the precise facts you’re looking for, if that helps.

B. Davis: I think that we make specific reference to the continuous intake courses, which are different than the lockstep courses for a particular amount of weeks in a semester.

Continuing intake courses — the enrolment has decreased since last year. We had about ten faculty on layoff notification with an anticipated drop in enrolment in all of our ACA and ESL programs. With a little bit of funding that was provided, those layoffs were rescinded.

However, in our offerings for continuous intake courses, which are better suited for students who need more personalized attention to get over the hurdles that they have, those enrolments have gone down. We suspect that the funding issues are part of that.

We could gather information and provide it to the committee, quantifying how enrolment has changed from the past two years, if you….

S. Hamilton (Chair): Yes, that would be helpful, if I could ask you to do that. It can form part of the public record. Please make sure we receive it before October 15.

B. Davis: Sure. We’ll pull some numbers together, and I think Sean has the contact information that we would have to make sure that your committee gets that. I think putting numbers and quantifying something does assist in those decisions. We’ll do what we can to put that information together.

G. Heyman: Both Claire and Scott have asked the questions that I wanted to ask, so I’ll simply say thank you for your presentation. We’ve heard similar presentations from all over the province. And thank you for your advocacy.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time to present to the committee, and once again, thank you for all your hard work.

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1) Literacy Matters Association Abbotsford	Sharon Crowley
2) Speakbox	Aidan Scott
3) FIOSA-MIOSA Safety Alliance of BC	Lisa McGuire

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

4) Motion Picture Production Industry Association of BC	Peter Leitch
	Paul Klassen
	Suzanne Thompson

7) Innergex Renewable Energy	Colleen Giroux-Schmidt
8) Abbotsford Community Services	Rod Santiago
	Neil Stark

9) University of the Fraser Valley Faculty and Staff Association	Sean Parkinson
	Gillian Dearle
	Bob Davis

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