Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 89 — Wednesday, November 18, 2015 (HTML)

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

2. Pursuant to its terms of reference, the Committee continued its review of the three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budget estimates of the statutory officers.

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

• Bill Naughton, Chief Investigator and Associate Deputy Representative, CID and Monitoring

6. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to consider its draft report. (Simon Gibson, MLA)

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES


CONTENTS
Page
Office of the Representative for Children and Youth	2095
M. Turpel-Lafond
B. Naughton
Office of the Ombudsperson	2106
J. Chalke
Committee Schedule	2115

S. Hamilton (Chair): The Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services will continue hearing the budget submissions for the statutory offices and welcome the Representative for Children and Youth, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.

Good morning. Thank you for attending. We appreciate you taking the time. It’s been awhile since we saw you last, so we’ll look forward to your presentation. If you like, we have an hour set aside, so the floor is yours. Use it however you wish. We can go back and forth with questions at whatever time you’re ready. I’ll leave it with you.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning to everyone. I want to start out by first introducing senior staff members who are with me today. To my left, your right, is the Deputy Representative for Children and Youth, Dawn Thomas-Wightman. To my further left, your right, is Bill Naughton, who’s the chief investigator and runs the program for critical injury and death investigation and, as well, assists in the oversight of our monitoring, research and evaluation projects. And to my right, your left, is my financial officer, Dianne Buljat.

I also want to just take a moment to introduce two people who are in the gallery who came today, who I just met myself this morning. Obviously, sometimes the work of an office like mine attracts families that are deeply impacted by it.

Today we have in the gallery Linda Tenpas, who came from Chilliwack, and we have Charles Douglas Lang, who came from Campbell River. They are the mom and the grandfather of a young boy who died tragically this year, which is one of the cases that we will talk about in terms of the work of my office. I’d like to also personally welcome them and recognize that they made a long trip to come here, of their own choice, and really send respect to them for doing that. Appreciate that we will work, as our office, closely to support them.

Also, I will have a few opening remarks and then, of course, look forward to answering any questions. We’re in a bit of a unique situation this year, where you have our submission, and we also did appear earlier in this current fiscal year and made a supplementary budget submission. We’ve had some communication back and forth on that, so I’ve already had an opportunity to present on that. I’m not going to spend a lot of time re-presenting on it, although just to say that it continues, in my view, to be a live item that I would like a determination on, as it affects our work.

We’re here to provide you with an overview of our budget request for 2016-2017 and the rolling budget out to 2018-2019. My budget for the current fiscal year consists of $8.138 million operating and $50,000 capital. My office currently includes 56 full-time employees operating out of our three offices in Victoria, Burnaby and Prince George.

For the past four years, I’ve come to this committee with a request for a stand-pat budget. As some members of the committee will know who have been here throughout those various years, I did that despite significant pressures on our organization but also in recognition of other, broader cost-cutting initiatives in government. I’ve said consistently year over year that that position I would manage within budget in an attempt to continue to do the mandate.

Unfortunately, I am here this year to say that I cannot continue to do that, for two reasons: (1) the impact of those year-over-year, stand-pat budgets has really come home to roost, shall I say; and (2) the workload and the complexity and the need to discharge the legislative function, particularly in terms of areas of advocacy that need dedicated, focused support, but also areas where critical injury and death investigations need to be concluded.

This year I’m requesting a budget increase, and I will go into the details of that shortly. I just want to highlight again for members that may be less familiar with the functions of my office that are legislatively mandated.

First of all, our agency provides advocacy services for children and youth and their families to help them navigate the child-serving system. As well, we keep individual advocacy cases where we help to support children and families to get a resolution of issues. We don’t just give information and sort of passively inform. We also keep individual case files. We have access to the highest level of sensitive information in government — personal information about individual citizens and their services — and it’s important that we have that.

We try to resolve conflicts as quickly and as successfully as we can so children and families can be supported. That means having a very high-functioning, skilled team that can meet a high standard in terms of respecting issues around confidentiality and being well-educated, well-coordinated and properly set up.

We review and investigate, as you know, child injuries and deaths. That includes exercising investigative authority, such as: the power to issue subpoenas; the power to take evidence under oath; and the requirement to reach findings that need to be defended publicly, that can be contested, that go through administrative fairness and that are akin to powers of public inquiry.

The purpose of that function is to play one role inside a system that can say that in British Columbia, we carefully and collaboratively review all injuries and deaths of children across systems. That’s not just my office. It needs
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to be a system that includes the coroner, the Ministry for Children and Families as impacted, the Ombudsman at times, the provincial health officer and a range of other people who have powers and authorities to review and look at matters.

That’s a very significant function, and I would say, with respect, that the representative’s office has had to take the leadership — and the default leadership role — in that way, in lieu of the fact that we do not have a strong, systemic process in British Columbia to review child injuries and deaths.

We also monitor and review and audit — we have powers of audit — systems across the child-serving system to improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of those services and to improve public reporting on public expenditures on services for children and families but also on their effectiveness — what outcomes are achieved, whether or not targets that are set are met, whether or not tasks are undertaken with dispatch but also with the best interests of children and with full evidence that we are meeting the objective of supporting particularly vulnerable children.

Values are important in our office, as have been created in our statute by members of the House: the value of independence, public accountability and transparency. The central theme of the work of the representative’s office across these program areas is really about a need for stability and accountability in the child-serving system and, fundamentally, about a need to assist citizens, particularly children and youth, to navigate the complexity of the system.

We take a strong approach to a very basic value, which is that every child in every family counts, and if they have a crisis or a situation, it deserves attention throughout that system by those that are charged to give attention to it, including, when necessary, attention by those at the very senior levels of the system.

Included in our role is the duty to help the public understand how the system works as well as explore how it could be improved. Our office has a role to assist government.

In fact, we meet with Ministry of Children and Families officials regularly — we’re in touch with them almost on a daily basis — and a range of others in the education system, the health care system, community-serving agencies and beyond to try and promote strong approaches, particularly to vulnerable children.

The advocacy and outreach responsibilities in our organization are important because people, particularly families which are vulnerable, find the complexities of dealing with a large bureaucracy…. Whether that is the Ministry of Children and Families or heath services, as you have it, or Community Living B.C., they find it very difficult to deal with those large bureaucracies and sometimes find that they cannot get a response from those large bureaucracies when they need that.

That, in fairness, has been a deep concern to our office as well. Some ministries…. For instance, Social Development has reduced its footprint to be more of a call centre than a social service agency. So the pressures on our organization to help families navigate that have increased.

In terms of the current 2016-2017 budget proposal, you have our service plan and annual report. We combined those into a single document so you can see the work that’s been achieved. You can see how we actually break down the types of performance measures that we hold ourselves to account for and also how we plan our work in the year ahead.

Like any agency, we can plan our work, although we are an agency that depends a bit on what arises. There are times, such as in this past year, when what might arise is unplanned for. For instance, this year there have been a fairly challenging set of circumstances where there have been numerous deaths of children — children with fairly complex needs — where families have felt very concerned about the type of information and reviews that have been conducted into those.

Some of you will be familiar with a few of these cases. One involves a youth that was placed in a hotel. Another involves a youth that was placed in a short-term day treatment centre and died. Another involves a youth that was in the B.C. Children’s Hospital. He died on the grounds of the B.C. Children’s Hospital. That is the first time, certainly in my time as representative, we’ve actually had a youth die in a hospital setting. There’s evidence that that young person was experiencing a lot of mental distress.

These are very significant and important cases. Every case is important. Every case needs to be reviewed. Every file needs to be taken seriously. But there have been a range of cases that have arisen this year that are deeply serious and require a thorough, rigorous process. Also, based on the experience of my office in doing this work, we appreciate the magnitude of the work that is required to do a proper investigative process.

We have the authority to do it. We need the resources to complete that work to a high standard and to a level that can satisfy, first of all, the family’s need to know what happened with respect to their child but also the important principle of public accountability. When a vulnerable citizen in British Columbia dies, particularly in very suspicious circumstances, whether it was evident that it was by their own hand or otherwise, there needs to be a fulsome, complete review and accountability for that. That has become very clear.

There has also emerged around some of these cases the fact that there may need to be, in the context of some of those reviews, a reconsideration of some of the privacy dimensions of how families are treated or not treated. These are very serious issues that require careful, cautious work by a high-functioning, high-performing team.
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I certainly recognize, in the individual of my chief investigator, Mr. Naughton, who’s with us today, a very skilled investigator who has a very high-functioning and valuable investigative team that I think provides very good service to British Columbians at a very reasonable cost. However, understanding the scope and scale of some of these investigations….

If I take the example, for instance, of the Paige report, which is a report that we issued in May about a 19-year-old girl that died on the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver…. Investigating and reporting on her situation, including determining where she lived for the years that she was in Vancouver….

She moved 50 times in the Downtown Eastside, including to shelters, SROs, dodgy rooming houses, and so forth. She lived in abject homelessness. It required us to really retrace the steps of Paige and learn about her experience. I’ll learn about what she went through and look at the world through the perspective of the child and then look at the world through the perspective of how people served that young woman.

In fact, the Downtown Eastside is a notorious neighbourhood, as we know. It’s also a neighbourhood into which the province contributes about $400 million a year for services. This young woman and her mother didn’t receive very many services.

Credit to the chief investigator and his team who actually, in the context of the investigation, were able to tell the experience of Paige and were also able to attend personally at places like the Balmoral Hotel and other places in the Downtown Eastside, places that even social workers wouldn’t go to serve Paige.

Again, an investigative team that looks at what happens to our most vulnerable children has to be prepared to go out and do this work. They have to be prepared to do it safely, they have to be prepared to do it in a sort of unflinching way, and they have to be prepared to take the information forward, make sense of it and then provide that information to a whole range of people.

In the Paige case, it was the Vancouver police who had to review it, provide feedback, and go through a respectful and appropriate process; and the Ministry of Children and Families and numerous agencies. A very complex situation arising from the Paige report is a new-found look at whether children who are at risk are receiving appropriate services — and, possibly, even an RCMP investigation of some possible wrongdoing with respect to her.

These cases are of the highest significance. One may think that a very vulnerable child like Paige, who’s 19, who dies in those circumstances is a situation that goes without notice, and it isn’t. It’s something that’s taken very seriously. We all need to work on it to a high standard, and we need to have the resources to do that properly.

I raise that to say that we have a good understanding and are prepared to respond to questions about: what does it cost to do that? What is required to do that?

My submission today. I’m asking for an increase to the budget, particularly because I’m anticipating I will have four unique investigations that will require high-level dedication and skill and will require an intensity like the Paige investigation and a meticulous, careful review of what occurred, using the full powers of inquiry under our statute.

In total, I’m requesting my annual budget should cover lifts to the critical injury and death needs. As I say, I can speak to them individually, and I can speak to them as a group. We have some other cost pressures that have caught up with us. Some increased costs related to shared services, and you’ve heard about them from some of the other independent officers. Salaries — mandated salary increases that are based on court decisions or other matters that are outside of our control; they’re not discretionary.

We are requesting an increase to our budget in the amount of $1.69 million for 2016-2017. I appreciate that this appears to be a sizeable ask — depending, of course, how you look at it, because it’s even less than a rounding error in one STOB item of MCFD’s budget. However, it’s a significant matter, and I don’t take that lightly.

This increase is needed, as I said, to address two of these key areas. I’ve talked about critical injuries and deaths. I want to talk a little bit about the adoption permanency request that I made later this year. I’m not going to go through it again except to say I’ve asked for an increase. I need that increase. How I’ve managed it in the face of not receiving the increase that I asked for earlier this year is that I’ve had to task my staff to do some of that work and double up. Something has to give when you do that.

The purpose of that work is as follows. In the summer of 2013, my office issued, effectively, an audit report on the adoptions program in B.C. We found in that audit that adoption placements were at an all-time ten-year low. The adoption program was really withering on the vine. We interviewed families that were prospective adoptive parents, we interviewed children, and we interviewed youth. We found that there are more than 1,000 children waiting for adoption, and year over year, we were seeing a decline in placements and adoptions.

We did a lot of work on that. It was a very thorough report. The government completely accepted the report, and we commenced a joint strategy — myself and Minister Cadieux — to attract new families and support families who had been in the adoption process who really hadn’t been well supported. I think there are actually some members around this table who would know this very well.

They may have been subject to three or four home studies when there are perfectly capable, valuable homes open for children in British Columbia who kept getting more and more bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureau-
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cracy — including being asked, “Give us $500; we’ll do another home study on you,” as opposed to saying: “We have 1,000 waiting children. How can we actually get them placed?”

We found some very interesting challenges. The minister and I committed very strongly to a joint strategy. Adoptive Families Association of B.C. and others committed.

We had a really good social media campaign. It was the first campaign to promote adoption in over a decade in B.C. It attracted more than half a million hits to a special website that was set up. Many people came forward. I pushed the government to set a target. They set a target of 300 adoptions in the first year, in response to the report.

We worked very hard to support them to get that 300. They didn’t make the mark in the first year. They got about 274, not 300, even though I thought 300 was a modest target.

Behind the scenes, my advocacy staff worked tirelessly with kids and families — particularly, youth who wanted a placement with a permanent family. No child in British Columbia wants to be raised in foster care, and we know what has happened to a generation of children that are in foster care now. They’re in foster care too long. By the time they age out of the system, they may have had 20 placements, increasingly more fragile and questionable placements in group homes and so forth. We want them to have a family.

The pressures in my office were…. We did an adoptions review. We supported the ministry. We came out, and we did a public campaign. Yet we have 1,000 waiting children. Hence, I came to this committee with a supplementary budget request and said: “Look. I need a small additional staff complement for three years to do nothing but really focus on permanency and adoption, especially on aboriginal permanency and adoption. That’s really a critically vital area. It’s a small ask, for three years. As I said, it was for eight advocacy staff on a time-limited basis: one senior advocate; five advocates — I would put them in each region; a research analyst; and an administrative clerk.

Where are we now with that? Well, I’ve reorganized as much as I can. I’ve put together a team. They work tirelessly, but we can’t respond to the need. B.C. didn’t make its target.

Twice the ministry had one-time budget allocations of $2 million. They sent money out to try and promote change and improvement. I will soon report on that, because I report periodically on how they’re doing on their targets. They need to make the investment. I appreciate that. But the investment isn’t getting to that target.

I come back again to this committee to say that I need to do my part as the Representative for Children and Youth. I’ve promoted it. I’ve pushed it. But when children and families are calling me saying, “We need support,” I need to have the staff to give the support. I need to be able to say: “Yes, this placement should be expedited.”

We have a lot of knowledge about placements for adoption, even in my senior executive team. It’s a point of great pride to me that in my senior executive team, the senior staff in the representative’s office…. Among our staff, there are families that have eight adopted children in total.

My staff actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to adoption and permanency. This isn’t just a program that we look at today, and then tomorrow we look at road safety, and the next day we look at something else. These are all important. But we actually look at it because we know that finding a forever family is really significant. The 1,000 children waiting in British Columbia — there’s no reason why they have to be waiting.

I push the minister hard, and we work closely together. I have deep regard for her, because she has a very strong commitment to this issue. Her senior staff call me all the time and ask me for more assistance.

This year I took my very limited budget and used a significant part of it to organize the first-ever permanency forum with all the aboriginal delegated agencies, all the aboriginal leaders, the ministry and my staff to look at how we can promote aboriginal placements. That was extremely valuable and positive.

I know the Premier has recently brought on Grand Chief Ed John to work in this area, and I applaud that. That’s good. I’m working closely with Ed John. In fact, my staff is spending a lot of time briefing him on the file so he can get up to speed on it. He’s got a part-time appointment advising the Premier, as he also has other important responsibilities, such as his responsibility as an LNG negotiator and so forth. This is one file for him. In our office, this is our job.

We need that advocacy resourcing to be able to deal with the adoption placement. It’s a very significant area. We have organized a strong internal aboriginal-specific permanency team that’s been working. We cannot keep up with the demand.

I’m not confident, if we don’t get that. I’ve even asked for an early appropriation for this fiscal year of a portion of that. If we can’t get some support there, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do everything I know I can do to support MCFD to make its target for this year.

I want it to make its target. They committed to me. The minister committed to me that not only would they do 300 this year, but they’d catch up for what they missed last year. That’s approximately 330.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to help them get there if I can’t get the staff, who, as you can imagine, have to come to senior people in the ministry and say: “You’ve got three kids in Dawson Creek, and they’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. What is holding this up?”
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In some of these cases, the intensity of the advocacy…. I cannot emphasize to you how intense it is. My deputy and I had a case last year where every single day except for Christmas Day, for 63 days, we advocated for the placement of three children. Yes, I know it was persistent and annoying, and there were days where the director of child welfare and others said: “Please, Mary Ellen, don’t send me another letter. Don’t call me again today.” And we had to say: “Well, we have no choice. It’s our job. Why are these kids not placed with this family that is ready to take them? They’re aboriginal children. They should be with their aboriginal family every single day.”

Yes, I met with the minister. Yes, we worked my staff team, worked with families that were in crisis, and yes, we got the children placed. Now, after the children were placed, it was like: “Well, we knew that was the right thing to do all along, and we’re glad we did it.” Of course, it’s like amnesia. They didn’t realize that for 60-plus days. Every single day we had to work to get those three kids placed.

I can’t explain to you how…. At my level, as the representative, I get personally involved, of course, in these cases. But you need that kind of focus sometimes to get that to a decision, because it’s one of those issues where “well, let’s consider this,” or “oh, sorry, five people are away this week,” or someone is on stress leave, and they can’t deal with the file. Thousands of reasons come forward about “why not.” We need to push for the “why” and get it done around placements. I’m not saying every placement is appropriate, but a lot of the time, it’s about someone that can’t make the decision, and it’s getting that accountability.

On the advocacy ask, I appreciate that three-year, time-limited is for $958,000. For this year, I would like it to be effective January 1 and have about a $280,000 request this year. In part, that’s actually just to allow me to continue to do what I’ve started to do, which is push really hard so that the government can make its targets. I want to support them to be successful, and they need support to be successful. They’re not getting the success, so they’re going to have to get more support. As I say, we’re very much on the same page, and we’re working hard on that.

In addition to me allocating, internally, a lot of emphasis on this, which I needed to do, I’m also facing in my advocacy program a 17 percent increase in the advocacy caseload. Since 2006, we’ve had 15,000 advocacy cases. That’s a really high number of advocacy cases, as you can imagine, and we are finding that there are places in the province, not surprisingly, where people are not getting the type of support they need.

We recently had a coroner’s inquest that was conducted into the suicide and tragic death of a mom and her son. Their son had significant autism, and the family was really struggling. This was in northern British Columbia. It was a valuable process, the inquest. What did the coroner’s jury recommend? The coroner’s jury recommended there be more access to the representative’s advocacy supports in the areas of Terrace, Rupert and other areas in that region in British Columbia.

While we do have advocacy there, we don’t have a footprint there. I don’t have a satellite advocate, for instance, in that region, and I need one. A lot of families of children with special needs are desperate to get support. Telephoning and getting someone in Burnaby, Victoria or even Prince George is not adequate. We need to be out there.

Some of the other advocacy pressures in my office stem from that. We do the best we can with the budget we have. But with this budget lift to allow us to do the permanency work, I can get that advocacy staff able to be out there more and perhaps staff up a satellite advocate in the north and perhaps in the Interior, where I have significant pressures, and, as well, in the north part of Vancouver Island or, at least, central Vancouver Island.

I’ll return again to the issue of the critical injury and death area and just give you a little bit more about the active investigations underway and then why I need an additional set of resources over the active investigations and over what is now allocated in that area.

We have active investigations underway at the moment, including the suicide death of a male youth and the critical injury of a female youth. We have a challenge with respect to critical injuries and deaths generally.

If I can just give you an example, in September of last year, we would have had 28 reportables of injuries and deaths. In September of this year, there were 82 reportables. The growth in the number of injuries and deaths reported to us has been pretty phenomenal — it’s been astronomical — for a couple of reasons.

MCFD has trained its front-line staff and its agencies to report more routinely when a child is injured or when there is the death of a child known to the ministry. We had some blips for a period of time. Particularly, we had a bit of a faulty information system that didn’t work. We had a lot of issues that came forward. We’ve improved the reporting. We’ve now found that the number of reports we receive…. My chief investigator is in my office routinely saying to me: “This is a very significant increase.”

The numbers are quite high. I’m very sensitive to…. When I became the Representative for Children and Youth in 2006, it came out of a situation that had arisen in British Columbia where there were 900-plus files sitting in the Coroners Service that had not been reviewed and looked at.

You have to stay on top of this work. You can’t say: “I’m going to keep doing the same number that we’ve always done, and I’m just going to ignore all of those new things that come in.” We need to actively review, investigate, coordinate with other agencies — the Coroners Service and others who have a review responsibility — and do learning, constant learning.
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We’ve gone through a period of time where the numbers have gone up significantly, and we have to cope with that. We have to do the reviews, but we also have to do more investigative reports. We do two to three full-blown investigative reports per year of the calibre of what I’m talking about with the Paige report. We probably need to be doing five to seven at this pace, and even that is a small fraction of what needs to be done.

The service that we provide…. In the recent cases of these very high-profile deaths of children, where families and others like the Lang family are seeking clarity about what happened to their child, the Minister of Children and Families herself will write to the families, will write to other concerned citizens and say: “We have an effective death review process in British Columbia. The ministry is here, and then we pass it over to the representative’s office to do the work.” That’s fine. I’m prepared to do the work, but I have to have a budget.

My chief investigator frequently says to me: “You know, I can’t deal from an empty wagon.” We are willing. We have the skill set. We can staff it. But if we don’t have the resources, it’s just not going to be possible. It’s very important for me, from a perspective of personal integrity, that I be able to tell the families that I can do it or that I can’t do it.

As well, it’s very important for me that they feel confident with the process we offer. If they feel that they want a public inquiry into what has happened with their loved one, so be it. They should have a public inquiry into that, and they can have whatever advocacy that they wish to take. I don’t take away the voice of families when they’ve gone through a tragedy. They’re entitled to make their own choices.

In the case of the recent situations that have arisen, those families have been pretty straightforward with me, saying: “Mary Ellen, we’re very comfortable with your office doing this work because we feel you’re going to be independent. We want to listen to you. We want to work with you. We are prepared to share very significant personal information about our family situation with you. We feel like we can trust that. But also, we feel that you can come to a position of reaching a report that can make change — valuable change within the system — without coming from a strong position of necessarily blaming but, also, promoting accountability.”

That’s fine. Families can make their choice. But I am now faced with the situation, after four years of stand-pat budgets and a remarkable increase in these, that I can’t do that work. I have choices, I guess, based on what you decide. But I just wanted to be very straightforward with you to say, “I won’t be able to do that work,” so that I can go back to the minister and say: “You know, point of fact, write a different letter back to the family. I can’t do that, and we need to be realistic about that.”

We also need to be realistic about something that is starting, that I fear we will get to in a few years, which is that we will end up having 900 files that are sitting there and are not getting looked at. We do not have a good, collaborative policy across all of those that have a mandate to review child deaths and injuries in British Columbia. The rep’s office has taken on the role. I’m fine to do that. I can’t decide what the coroner does. I can’t decide what other people do. But I can decide what we do, and we have to do that work according to our statute and do it appropriately.

Hence, I don’t feel that the request that I am making is too extraordinary. What I am asking to handle the costs of these additional investigations is an increase of five employees to my office:— two investigators, two researchers and one records management clerk.

I’m also asking — with the greatest respect and support to my current staff, like my chief investigator and his team — that they don’t get burned out. They work pretty hard. I’ve really tasked them to the max, and they’ve worked very tirelessly. I really appreciate the public service that they provide over and above what is ordinary, required public service in British Columbia, because it is over and above.

This additional increase, of five, is a modest one. It comes to a total of about $656,000 per year.

In addition to the uncontrolled costs, such as salaries and so forth, these are the dimensions of what I am requesting with respect to the budget lift: a decision on the presentation I made earlier, which continues to hold firm, including an allocation for this year of a small amount to allow me to keep that going and perhaps help the ministry make its target, and then an allocation for the new year so that we can engage and complete — at a high calibre, in an appropriate, respectful process — these investigations.

I’ll leave it there. I’m happy, Mr. Chair, to respond to any questions that members might have.

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

M. Morris: Thanks very much for the presentation. I guess, coming from my background as a police officer and an investigator and seeing all the tragic situations that happen out there, I can certainly understand where you’re coming from.

A concern I have in listening to you is: is the Coroners Service falling down? The Coroners Service has the jurisdiction to investigate all deaths in the province — unless there are criminal implications there, which are turned over to the police force that investigates it. I guess what I’m hearing is that you are developing a parallel investigative agency alongside of the B.C. Coroners Service, alongside police jurisdictions that have jurisdictions to look into deaths that might involve criminal proceedings.

I’m also troubled, as well, by some of the comments about how the ministry of children’s services, family ser-
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vices, is calling you for assistance with work that, in my view, should be within their purview to look after. That goes, as well, with the adoption process.

I’m struggling with this. I’m going to have to take some time to read through your submission to understand a little bit more, but would the resources that you’re asking for be better served by enhancing the services within these agencies that are given that role in the first place? Again, from my perspective, your role is advocacy for this particular area, but does advocacy mean another parallel investigative agency?

M. Turpel-Lafond: First of all, the statute for the Representative for Children and Youth Act has a critical injury and death investigative role for a reason. One was that the Coroners Service didn’t do the job. In 2006, there were 900 files sitting in a coroner’s office, and there were families that had no answer to what happened.

Mr. Hughes did a review. They created the child death unit. The Coroners Service was audited by the B.C. Auditor, saying that they’ve had a lot of challenges delivering that mandate. They have a new director of that area, which is valuable.

I wrote to the Attorney General very early this year because I was chairing a structure called the Children’s Forum — which was myself, the coroner, the Ombudsman, the provincial health officer and the director of child welfare. We were trying to have a coordinated and collaborative approach to reviewing child deaths and injuries.

Good jurisdictions have a collaborative, explicit approach. I took that on because the Ministry of Children and Families didn’t take their role. I wrote to the Attorney General and said: “I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to be the only person that is committed to a collaborative role.”

The ministry said: “We’ll hire a consultant, and we’ll review it.” They hired a consultant, and the consultant came back and said: “Mary Ellen is absolutely right. We don’t have a collaborative role, and we need to bring it back.” So the Ministry of Children and Families is trying to put that back in place. However, I’ve been very explicit with the Attorney General, saying: “Put in a clearer piece of legislation about who does what and how you work.”

I can’t direct the coroner, nor would I want to. All I can say is this. When a family comes and says, “We need a full investigation of what happened to our child who died in a hotel,” I can only say what I can do.

I can also say to them: “I respectfully apologize to you that we do not have a consistent and coordinated child death review process in British Columbia.”

I am not a parallel office. The Coroners Service determines the verdict. Was it a homicide? Was it a natural cause death? That’s their role. They have a child death review unit that does work…. We work with them, and we support them to the extent that we can. They’ve had a lot of pressures to…. They don’t come here to present a service plan. They don’t come here to describe the work. They do put out reports. They do good work.

As I say, I value the collaboration that we have with them. However, one would expect we would have an overarching entity in British Columbia where, for instance, the child death review unit, every single year, presented a service plan that we all talked about and said: “What’s your part of the responsibility? What’s our part of the responsibility?”

I have to make findings of fact. The focus of the representative’s work is to look at children who are vulnerable, who need services. If we take the Lang example — a boy that has a sudden deterioration in his mental health, perhaps addiction — what happens with the family? Oh, well, we’re going to offer him a day program somewhere, and then he dies. What happened there? Was it the services that he was offered? Was it the right service? Was it the right treatment? Was it not?

We need to look at the connection between services and supports for vulnerable kids. We always have to have a prevention lens and a learning lens. The challenge we’ve seen in British Columbia, if you leave it to the ministry…. The ministry should internally review every death of a child in care. It hasn’t. It has just recently committed to do that. It hasn’t. They generally take about 20 months to do a review. They don’t release them publicly, so there’s not a lot of learning to be done. But they should do that.

The issue around how we learn and the lens…. What lens does the representative’s office take? The Legislature, through the statute, has asked the representative’s office to take a lens of looking at what the child experienced, not of looking at what the social worker may or may not have dealt with, although we look at that. What did the child experience? What happens when a child has a sudden onset of crystal meth or a child is living on their own and is having depression or a child is in crisis or a child like Paige is living on the streets of Vancouver? What happens in British Columbia?

People go to bed at night in British Columbia thinking we have a good child-serving system, and they should. But they actually want to know if that’s a fact. When Paige died in the Downtown Eastside, well, how good is that $400 million we’re spending in the Downtown Eastside?

When we did the Paige report, the ministry didn’t review it. The coroner’s office didn’t review it. No one reviewed it. There’s been a lot of learning ongoing from that case, including another RCMP investigation. But that was just a kid that would not have been covered. My office had to do it. Yes, we did it. We’re happy to do it, but we need the resources to do it.

Today I can’t say we’re in a perfect situation to have a good, sound policy. I’ve promoted that. I’ve encouraged that. I’d like to see that. Maybe in the future we’ll have legislation and a proper coordinated policy. In the meantime, I’m sort of the default agency. I will take the
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role, I will perform it appropriately, and I will treat families with respect.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Mary Ellen, for your presentation. You’ve answered some of my question.

Just to follow up on Mike’s point, I think all of us would like to get to a place where each agency is taking on their responsibility and there is accountability there. But that’s not occurring. I think the importance of your office and the importance of the independence for families can’t be underestimated. We can’t underestimate the importance for families who’ve gone through these kinds of tragedies to have that ability to be able to have an independent review.

You’ve spoken a little bit about it, but I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the difference between the investigative reports and the child death reports. You’ve talked about systemic recommendations, etc. I think it’s important for the committee to understand the difference between those and the importance of the investigator reports compared to the child death reports. It’s not a duplication. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.

Then the second question I have is just around the advocacy work and the increase in the number of requests that are coming forward and whether you have any kind of read on why those requests are increasing. Is it more publicity? Is it more cases? Is it less work being done at the ministry, etc.?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Yes. I think I’ll start with the second question first. That is: what is the reason for the increase in advocacy? I think it’s because we have a lot of deeply vulnerable children and youth in British Columbia. We do have a lot of challenges with a pretty fractured system at times. Sometimes when we’re active….

The representative’s office, with others, has played a very strong role to bring out into the public issues around, for instance, child and adolescent mental health. We have tried to reduce the shame and stigma for families to talk about that.

A lot of families feel very blamed and shamed to talk about their child’s mental health issues. They may have a child that’s not doing well and is acting out. They may be calling the police. They’re going to emergency rooms. They’re just completely overwhelmed.

When we do a report, like, on adolescent mental health, and how British Columbia has not got the strongest system for the 16- to 24-year-olds, which is where you really see early emergence of serious mental health issues and you have a great opportunity to work…. We do a report, and of course, we get lots of calls from people who say, “I saw your report. Was that my child’s case?” or: “I have a child that is really acting in a threatening way or has been in their bedroom for the last six months and won’t come out. Can you help me get through this?”

It’s to be expected that when these issues are brought out in public, the public is going to come more. They see the visibility of the representative’s office pushing and surfacing these issues, so they’re calling us. But they’re really calling us for advocacy support. I say: “Well, are you connected to your child and youth mental health team in the region?”

“Oh yes. We called, but we’re on a three-year wait-list.” Okay. Open a file. “You’re on a three-year wait-list. What are you doing?”

“Okay, well, let’s open the file, and we’re going to be working with you to try and see what we can do to get some support.”

“Oh by the way, my child hasn’t been in school for two years, because they’ve been thrown out of school,” and so on.

These are very serious cases where we look at them, and then, of course, we work on them. But I also surface them, as you say, in a systemic way. “Oh by the way, I have 350 of those cases,” where the families are in the emergency room. They’re calling the police. They’re completely distraught. They don’t know what to do, and the kids aren’t in school.

Then I can go up to the school officials and say, “By the way, what are you doing with kids with complex mental health needs?” Or point of fact: “What are you doing putting kids in hotels when they have complex mental health needs?” They can’t live at home, and they’re going to get therapeutic support, but actually no, they end up in a hotel in Abbotsford. How did that happen?

These are the areas where sometimes our mandate…. There’s an advocacy case. We see a systemic concern. We may have a death. We have to investigate it, and we have to understand what is going on. Are we getting a strong system? Where are the investments needed? Where is the thinking needed?

But, really, the key issue in advocacy is making it more acceptable to talk about the situations that vulnerable children and families experience and to not treat people, just because a child is born into a family that’s poor and is experiencing poverty…. We don’t have the stigma of blaming that child because they were born into a family of poverty — that it’s their fault that they’re not an economically successful family that can navigate a system.

It’s really important, conceptually, to be non-judgmental and non-blaming. Hence, our work has increased, because we have promoted an approach of saying to people: “We’re not going to come from a position of judgment and blame toward families. We’re going to come from a perspective of understanding.” By the way, the ministry that has frequently had a very judgmental perspective, especially to aboriginal families, families in poverty — that’s no longer acceptable. So park your judgment, and now get in there and work with families.
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You can imagine that that is a pretty big workload. It’s not just us, but when you represent that, a lot of people will feel confident to come out and talk about what’s going on in their families, and so they should. I think that’s a positive sign, but someone has got to do something about the files.

I don’t just say, “Oh, thank you for telling me that your child is in the emergency room. You’re completely out of tools to deal with this, and I’m glad you called,” and hang up and say: “No, please go away, and don’t call me back.” I mean, in my agency, I’m like, “I’m going to be calling the director of child welfare today, and I’m going to be calling the head of B.C. Children’s Hospital,” or I’ll be calling whomever needs to be called to say: “What is it we’re doing here with the pathway that these families are on?”

We need to promote change, and we’re not the only one. But we need to promote accountable change. It has to be a more dynamic process, because we have serious challenges.

S. Chandra Herbert: I appreciate, first, the families who are in attendance, but I also just appreciate your explanation about how what you do is different from what the Coroners Service does or what any other organization does that looks into the deaths of children.

I wondered if you might help us understand what the four unique investigations are that you are going to be looking at or hoping to be able to look at. What kind of resources do they take? Because it is an increase, although I certainly appreciate that your office has worked within budget for many years and not come to this committee for increases, despite certainly some pretty tough, challenging cases that could see a need for more resources. But if we could understand a little bit more about these investigations, that would be helpful.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Sure. Then I’m going to ask the chief investigator to describe them. I’ll just speak to some of the dynamics very briefly.

When you investigate issues…. I’ll take the example of the youth that died at B.C. Children’s Hospital. B.C. Children’s Hospital does an internal review. That review is not shared with me. Whatever learning they do will be internal. I won’t even see the review.

They are not required or mandated to share it with me, because they feel, under their approach to privacy law in British Columbia, that doctors and others won’t talk openly if they have to share that information with people like the representative. I find that deeply problematic.

To do an investigation about a child that dies at B.C. Children’s Hospital — who may have been treated by doctors, nurses, community agencies, whatever — that’s again…. Fifty to 100 individuals will have to be subpoenaed, interviewed under oath, to try and understand not only what happened to the young person, but how those systems work and if they have a team. And when you have a deeply vulnerable young person….

In that case, that’s a boy that was living at B.C. Children’s Hospital for five months because he didn’t have anywhere to go. I understand that early indication is that there was an offer to send him to a shelter, which was completely unsuitable, and the hospital vetoed that. They kept him in the hospital, and he may very well have died at his own hand, in desperation, at our number one teaching hospital — in fact, one of the best hospitals in the world for children.

In my position, how could I not investigate the death of a child at B.C. Children’s Hospital? But the challenge I face is that that’s an immense investigation. If I don’t do it, and if there’s a public inquiry — which perhaps there needs to be; I don’t know — a public inquiry would involve, by my count, at least maybe ten or 15 top doctors. Each would probably have a lawyer, and we would have a probably adversarial process. We’d be talking probably about a $10 million to $15 million process.

The representative’s dimension — what we can offer and what we can do with the powers we have in our statute — is probably a $300,000 to $400,000 process. I’m going to ask the chief investigator on that front, because we have a staff, and we’re doing it, I think, for a very reasonable…. But we’re not doing anything from a perspective of not being unflinching and thorough. That’s the key piece — being able to do that.

You have to realize that I will have to come out of the starting gates with, perhaps, a very valuable internal report that will not be given to me. So can I turn around and say to British Columbians: “Oh, I’ve seen the internal report. It’s great. Everything is fine. Move along”? Well, actually, I don’t even, maybe, get to see the internal report at all.

I wish I could. There’s an area we could improve. But in the meantime, I’ll ask my chief investigator to give you the estimate, because he’s been working pretty intensely on these four. But that one alone is a substantial piece of work.

B. Naughton: I think a point of comparison would be the Paige investigation — if we look at our past practice and we use that to predict, sort of, the future demands. The Paige investigation involved two investigators full-time for more than a year.

I just wanted to comment. You know, in a police investigation, you ask: who? In a coroner’s death investigation, they ask: what? What killed this individual? In the representative’s office, we’re asking: why? Looking across the systems, why did this incident occur? That involves a much more comprehensive view than perhaps some of our partner agencies, and our perspective is somewhat different.

In the case of an adolescent who dies, you’re looking at reviewing, probably, at least a decade of file material.
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You’re looking at, in the Paige case, more than 100 in-person interviews across the province. You’re looking at extensive amounts of support in terms of research and other things.

A single investigation probably looks like three person-years of work, at a minimum — not engaging myself. Currently, if you include myself in the investigative team, we have five investigators. That gives you a sense of the scope and the capacity that I currently possess.

G. Heyman: Thank you for your detailed presentation. I’m going to ask you a question that I think may be useful to the committee, to try to see this from a different perspective. You would say that you don’t, and you will probably never, do every investigation that you might wish to. I think that in any kind of enterprise or office or ministry, there’s any number of things and choices that get made.

You are telling us today that in order to fulfil your function, the office’s function, in the way that you think needs to be done to be meaningful and help families and children in British Columbia, you need these extra resources. I think we’re all aware of some of the important investigations you’ve done in your time in office and in the history of the representative’s office.

I’m going to ask you to cast your mind back five or six years and say: if, at that point in time, your budget had been proportionately less than what you feel it is today, going forward into next year, what important findings or systemic changes that you were able to influence through the work you did then might have gone undone? I think that will help us see what the impact of our decision will be.

M. Turpel-Lafond: Certainly. I can point to a number, but I’ll point to one of the biggest ones. We did two thorough, important investigative reports into children affected by domestic violence — into the Christian Lee homicide and into the Schoenborn children’s homicide. As you will know, there’s a lot of public attention on the issues with respect to Schoenborn himself, as an individual, and his criminal justice and mental health issues.

But we put the lens very strongly on the children’s deaths and what happened in the system to support the children. That led to, first of all, the Premier — after that report was reviewed, after that investigation was reviewed — apologizing to the mom and actually mandating that there be a provincial office for domestic violence, mandating an entire new strategy on domestic violence with a new level of collaboration. Next month, for the first time, I’ll go to an event where there are police, social workers — everyone together — talking about how we have a strategy.

We’re not there yet, completely. We’ve changed protective orders. We’ve changed the Family Law Act. We’ve changed the issues with respect to children who witness violence. ERASE Bullying has a stronger component on domestic violence and children exposed to that.

The entire area of children experiencing domestic violence, and family violence response in British Columbia, are completely changed. Is it only because of those two investigative reports? No, but they played a key role. Creating a proper office, a single point of leadership…. I’d like to see stronger domestic violence legislation, frankly, and more compliance, more enforcement. However, the conversation changed dramatically. The protective order that can be obtained today under the FLA, Family Law Act, is completely different than what was an ineffective protective order.

Now, there are still a lot of challenges for aboriginal families and others, but if we hadn’t done that work, I don’t think we’d have that. I’m not saying that from a bragging perspective. It’s just that we had to surface a detailed, thorough analysis of what a family experienced and pointed out things like, if you run telebail in a community, and you release someone, and you don’t actually look at the bail situation appropriately, you can have a very dangerous situation.

So we had to look at criminal justice, family law, child welfare, but take that lens of the kids. What’s it like for kids who are living in situations where there’s really a hectic and chaotic ongoing dose of family violence? After alcohol-related driving offences, that is the biggest experience in terms of dysfunction that children have in British Columbia.

The child and family service legislation has been amended with a completely different approach to family violence. There have been massive consultations in work. Again, not perfect, but we have changed the dynamic significantly. It needed to be changed. It was rotting, if you like, because we had lost leadership. There was no women’s minister. There was no point of accountability. Nobody knew who was in charge of safety for women in British Columbia. Lots of things had to change.

It’s a journey. We’re still on it. But if we hadn’t done those two investigative reports and really meticulously dissected it and worked with those sectors, I don’t think the change would have happened. So I’m very proud of that work. But someone also had to bring it into the open.

After you do that work, people will come to me. Chiefs of police and others will say: “We’re really grateful for that. We knew that was a problem, but we just didn’t feel we could speak to it.” So that’s the other piece — being able to bring things forward without fear of repercussion. That’s why an independent, well-resourced, appropriate office that can report to the Legislative Assembly provides a function that is a really valuable quality assurance check on your system.

S. Hamilton (Chair): With the couple of minutes we have left, I have Mike, please.
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M. Morris: Just a couple of things that came up. Just going back to the chief investigator’s comment about how the police only look at who…. Actually, the police investigations look at who, what, where, when, why — the whole gamut of things.

Just going back to the comment — I don’t know whether it was Carole who brought it up — and your example of the child…. The B.C. Children’s Hospital report, their internal review done with the Paige file — it seems to me that we could probably save time, energy and money if reports like that were made available to you.

Do you have access through subpoena or other judicial means to access reports like that, or do we need to make some fundamental changes to the legislation?

M. Turpel-Lafond: Well, I think it’s important to note that internal hospital investigations where a child dies are subject to section 51 of the Evidence Act, which means I have no access to them. I think that should be changed. You would be very interested to learn that there are many things that are reviewed, and no one sees them.

Now, of course, the important point is: when you have extremely vulnerable children and you have a death, families want to know what happened. It becomes, perhaps, a little prehistoric when I have to say to the family: “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you what happened because I don’t know.” They’re like: “Aren’t you the Representative for Children and Youth? Shouldn’t you be on top of it?” “Well, I’ll have to investigate it, I guess, on my own.”

On the issue of information-sharing, these are really important issues. I know one of the parents of one of the children whose file is before me…. It was a situation where a young girl committed suicide on her 19th birthday. They believe she committed suicide. Her body’s never been found, but they believe she jumped off a bridge in Vancouver. A mom, in a backpack, finds the last plan of care that talks about what was going on with her. She wants to know what’s happening in her child’s life, and she doesn’t know.

A mom like that comes to an office like mine and says: “What’s going on with my daughter?” I feel a personal, public responsibility to be able to actually sit down with her, talk to her and tell her what we learned. The ministry may be of the view that “We’re not telling you anything.”

That’s not appropriate, but unfortunately, that is the situation we continue to deal with. If I can do my piece from my agency, I will investigate. I will deal with families respectfully. I will explain to them what my limits are. I’ll explain to them what my issues are. But I will not do what I would call a shutdown exercise.

A shutdown exercise is: “We’ve had a look at it. Move along. We’re not going to tell anybody anything that we’ve learned from it, because we don’t have to share.”

I think we live in a very different era, where people need accountability. They need sharing — within reason, with respect, with supporting families. But we probably need a review of some of those information processes — that’s beyond my competency — by Members of the Legislative Assembly, to really look at how we do that better. I’ve promoted that, but I’m not in charge of that review.

I’m not going to be part of a process that tells families we’re taking a thorough look at things when I know we’re not taking a thorough look at things. I refuse to be part of that. Hence, I wrote to the Attorney General and said: “I’m not going to be part of something and tell families we’re all working together when in fact we don’t have a structure to work together.”

We have room for improvement. That’s a structural issue. I think we can get there. That’s a bigger discussion than my job.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you for pointing out some of the systemic issues that need change — I know they move very slowly — but also for speaking about the immediate needs.

I want to go back, just to understand it better. You said that in September 2014 there had been 28, I think the figure was, injuries and deaths that were reportable, and this September, 82. It just blows my mind. I can’t understand how we’d have such a big increase. It’s frankly shocking that that’s where we’re at.

Now, I understand that some may have not been reported prior to this, and there may have been some changes, but I’d have a hard time believing that was all just a few people reporting more.

Can you explain that a bit more? I don’t understand exactly how that system works.

M. Turpel-Lafond: I can ask the chief investigator to give you an idea, year over year. I can also file some supplementary material to show you. Bill can give you a bit more of a dimension.

I think one of the dynamics you have to remember is that we’ve had a very challenging decade with respect to adolescents — adolescents who are in care now, who’ve been in care for ten-plus years. They are in pretty rough shape — the 16- to 19-year-old population. It’s not uncommon for me, on one or two cases alone, to have 15 or 16 reportables of a child at risk — so a child in self-harming, a child that’s been sexually assaulted. I mean, they’re pretty much living on the streets, some of these kids. The numbers of reportables on them is very high.

Now, we don’t just take that passively as a reportable. We’re like: “What’s going on here?” That’s why the other arm of the office kicks in.

I’ll ask Bill to give you an idea of the year-over-year increase.
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B. Naughton: I think what we’re seeing here are a couple of different things that are coming into play. The first is that…. Two things have occurred in the external environment. In 2011, our office issued a report that focused exactly on the issue of what constitutes a reportable incident, what constitutes a critical injury. In that case, it looked at the circumstances of a girl who was abandoned in a trailer with the body of her dead mother for a period of time. MCFD had not considered that a critical injury.

We released a report that sparked a significant series of discussions with the ministry about what constituted a reportable incident. We saw an increase in response to that, a substantial one.

This year MCFD has rolled out a significant amount of training for front-line social workers. What constitutes a reportable circumstance? When do you have to report? So I think we’re experiencing that.

If you look back, historically, at Paige, in Paige’s entire life we had a single reportable for her. Yet when you examine her life and you look at her file, there are dozens of reportable incidents that would have occurred in that time period.

So whether we’re seeing an increase or not, to me, is difficult to say. What I think we have seen is systemic under-reporting that we’re beginning to address. We’re finally beginning to get a more accurate picture of what’s actually occurring for this cohort of children and youth.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you for taking the time to present to the committee. Obviously, we’re going to have other meetings coming forward as we deliberate, but for now I’ll call a brief recess and wait for us to set up with the Ombudsperson.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’ll continue on with our presentations from the officers of the Legislature and welcome Mr. Chalke, our Ombudsperson, to the committee.

We look forward to listening to your presentation. We’ve got about an hour, whenever you’re ready. I’ll leave it up to you how you want to use that time, but we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

J. Chalke: Thank you. Good morning, Chair. Good morning, members of the committee.

With me today is Deputy Ombudsperson David Paradiso, to my left and your right. To my right, your left, is the executive director of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten. The latter, Dave, is familiar to you, I know. Corporate shared services, I do want to point out, is part of the Office of the Ombudsperson, although it also provides support to three other officers of the Legislature, two of whom have been before you on Monday — so Dave was here then — and also one to follow tomorrow.

Given that it’s my first annual budget presentation, I brought additional staff to help me, just in case I need to turn to them for help: Dave Murray, who’s the acting director of innovation, and finally, someone not named Dave, Zoe Jackson, who’s the manager of special investigations.

I’m very pleased to be here today to speak to you in support of our office’s budget request for the fiscal year 2016-2017. I’ll be making some opening remarks, and then I’d be happy to take your questions. Towards the latter part of my remarks, I have a couple of PowerPoint slides that I’ll ask you to look at, but not yet.

I’m conscious that in prior years, a good portion of the time of our annual budget presentation was taken up with describing the mandate and services of the office, and that’s an area that was often repeated for other officers of the Legislature. But now that this committee is in the process of establishing a second round of meetings each year with the officers, the purpose of which is to receive a substantive briefing on the work of each office, the intention is to focus this budget round to be more exclusively about our fiscal challenges and fiscal issues. Thus, I’ll spend less time describing our general services and mandate today than may be characteristic of our previous fall presentations.

Having said that, I have two concerns in doing that, and I want to put them on the table. The first and most obvious is that the Office of the Ombudsperson is yet to present at the spring round of meetings with the committee. I look forward to that opportunity, but our office has not yet provided that in-depth briefing. For that reason, in trimming down our presentation to focus on the financial issues, we are putting the budgetary cart before the orientation horse, as it were. So while I will expedite the comments about our mandate and services, I won’t eliminate them entirely. I think to do so would be unfair to you, given that you have to put this budget request into a proper context.

The second concern is that I’ve been before the committee on a few occasions over the past few months about a single investigation that we’re now conducting. There’s a natural tendency attributable to the recency effect or the prominence of that matter, or both, to view our office exclusively, or even largely, from that vantage point only. That would be a mistake.

We receive almost 8,000 requests for assistance a year from British Columbians, and we open about 1,500 investigation files annually. It’s essential, notwithstanding the amount of attention paid to one matter that we’re investigating, that you consider our budget request in all the messy complexity of our entire book of business and the
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service that we’re able to deliver to British Columbians, many of whom are vulnerable.

With those caveats in mind, I’ll provide you with some initial impressions of the work of the office formed over my first four months in the job and then turn to our budget request for the upcoming year.

The first thing I want to say is that I’ve been extremely impressed by the staff in our office. They’re analytic, empathetic, creative problem-solvers and investigators who bring a healthy dose of both pragmatism and realism. This blend of attributes allows them to focus on seeking to uphold the principles of administrative fairness and good public administration and governance while seeking practical solutions to people’s problems.

Another early observation I would share with the committee is the extraordinarily broad jurisdiction of our office. It is, in terms of breadth, the broadest jurisdiction of an ombuds office in Canada and possibly internationally as well.

The positive side of this breadth is obvious. The public has a one-stop shop for concerns about administrative fairness arising from virtually any provincial public body — some 2,800 entities in British Columbia. Think about that number for a moment. It’s pretty incredible. In many other jurisdictions that have ombuds offices, some or all of school systems, municipalities, universities, self-governing professions or the health system, to name a few, are outside the ombudsperson’s mandate. In British Columbia, all of those and more are inside our mandate.

While the positive aspect of this broad jurisdiction is obvious — and of course, I favour this wide jurisdiction — it does, at the same time, present some significant challenges. There are issues that this breadth presents in terms of staff expertise, staying current in trends across so many sectors, and relationship-building with public bodies.

The greatest challenge, though, relates to resources. There are risks that with limited resources and a very broad jurisdiction, the office can only provide limited assistance, that investigations will take too long, or that any one area will be the subject of systemic reporting only rarely because there are too many resources chasing too many important issues.

It’s clear to me that the office has developed a number of effective techniques to best manage this issue, but it’s a constant struggle that I wish to address over the next few years.

This overall mandate versus capacity question is not one that purely has a resource answer, nor is it a one-year fix. But there is an element of resourcing, and the fact that it is a multi-year issue makes it more important, not less, that we get on with the job of addressing it. I will return to this later when I set out our request for 2016-2017.

Another early conclusion that I’ve come to is that this is a highly efficient organization. While I intend to review certain aspects of the organization’s operations to determine if we can improve our service from within in any way, shape or form, my experience tells me that going forward from internal efficiencies, those gains will be limited. From our aggressive triaging of initial public inquiries to our streamlined corporate shared-services model that provides common support services to three other officers, we have for a number of years operated a lean organization.

My fourth and last initial observation for you today from my short term in this role is that we need a plan for the future. You will see in our three-year service plan that our immediate focus will be on developing a new five-year strategic plan. Obviously, our mandate is that established by the Ombudsperson Act, but within that statutory framework, I believe we need a multi-year plan on how we’re going to serve the people of British Columbia on a go-forward basis.

One key to a successful new strategic plan will be how it’s developed. We will endeavour to keep the strategic plan development process focused and reasonably short, but at the same time, I want to make sure that it’s sufficiently inclusive. In my experience, the process of developing a strategic plan is almost as important as the content of the plan itself.

I am committed to obtaining input from the public — both the general public and people who have used the office’s services — NGOs, public authorities, legislators and of course our staff.

As for how I will seek the input of legislators in that plan, I’ll be reaching out to the Chair and the Deputy Chair of this committee to discuss how that might best be accomplished.

With those high-level observations, I want to now turn to our fiscal picture and our budget request. The big picture on our fiscal structure is that we are a people organization. By that I mean that our budget is almost entirely devoted to the costs of our staff — their salaries, office rent and supplies and some systems costs to manage our information for staff to use. We don’t have transfer payments or grants and our capital costs are modest and mostly devoted to replacement of existing IT infrastructure as required.

We prudently budget through the year to come in under budget by 1 or 2 percentage points each year of our allocation. We endeavour to stay under our allocation, since our only alternative is to return to this committee in-year with a supplementary request. We try not to do that — my extraordinary request to you a few months ago notwithstanding. Any unspent funds are then returned each year to the provincial treasury.

Our overall budget request for 2016-2017 is for $7,117,000. That represents a $542,000 increase over the budgeted amount for 2015-2016. I want to spend the next few minutes describing the nature of this request and its rationale.
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The increased budget is largely comprised of two budgetary requests: first, a one-time request to complete the investigation into the matter this committee referred under section 10(3) of the Ombudsperson Act to our office in July and in respect of which you provided special directions in September; and second, a permanent increase of one staff to match our investigatory capacity with demand and thus eliminate overtime or a files-awaiting-assignment list.

I will deal with the budget impact of this committee’s referral from July 1. From the outset of this committee’s consideration in early July of the referral request from the Minister of Health, you have recognized the need for a special appropriation so that our office could undertake such a substantial investigation on top of the work we normally do.

I say “on top of” because unlike our regular work, a matter referred to us under section 10(3) imposes a mandatory duty on us to investigate and report. It is, in that respect, unlike all other matters we investigate, which repose in our office a measure of discretion. In a section 10(3) investigation, we must investigate. Thus, as I have pointed out previously, to refer a matter under that section and not fund it would mean that the ordinary complainants to our office would be seriously disadvantaged because their concerns could not be effectively investigated.

For that reason, in the special directions adopted on September 9, you directed me to return with a proposed budget for 2015-16, which I did, and you directed that our request for 2016-2017 funding for the 10(3) referral was to be made in conjunction with our regular budgetary submission. Hence, we’re here today.

This committee approved our 2015-16 supplementary budget request of $773,000 in September, which covered the balance of this fiscal year. While I’m sure you appreciate that I am unable to speak to the specifics about an ongoing investigation, we are on track to spend that amount by the end of the fiscal year.

The majority of the request for 2016-2017 is simply to carry forward that investigation team through to the conclusion of the referral and report, in accordance with this committee’s referral, late in the calendar year of 2016. That is the timeline I outlined to you in September, assuming no unforeseen delays, and there is nothing at this time that leads me to vary this timeline at this point.

I would also say that we’re carefully tracking all our actual expenditures attributable to this 10(3) referral investigation so that we will be able to report the costs once they are all in following the completion of the investigation.

While most of the costs under the committee referral budget request relate directly to the work to complete the investigation itself, there is a component of the budget request for the 2016-2017 impact of this committee’s July referral which actually relates to the ordinary operations of the office. I want to take a few minutes to describe why.

That is because the ordinary operations of the office have, in essence, provided a service quality subsidy to the committee referral investigation this year, in 2015-2016. By that I mean that following receipt of the referral and special directions, I reassigned four experienced investigators and a manager from regular work to the committee referral investigation. The manager started in September, and the four investigators started at the beginning of October.

The cycle time to hire replacement investigators, have those replacement staff extricate themselves from their then current place of employment, start at our office and then be trained in their new role at our office takes months, not days. So our regular operations have been significantly impacted during the course of this fall and will be for a short period of time into the new year.

While it was a difficult decision to reallocate the four existing staff rather than wait for new staff to be hired, start work and be trained, I was mindful of this committee’s statement in the referral about wanting the investigation to be completed in a timely manner and thus proceeded the way I did.

The impact of early reassignment of investigators is on the timeliness of our regular investigations. I want to reverse that in 2016-2017 to put the regular services of the office back in the position by the end of that fiscal year where they would have been but for this committee’s referral.

I foreshadowed this possibility when I was before you in September, and now I am more convinced that this will be required. In my view, it’s only fair to the people of the province who have turned to this office, often as their last opportunity to seek redress for administrative unfairness by a public body.

Given that all this would do is put the office back to where it would have been but for this investigation by this committee in July, I believe it is a reasonable cost to attribute this to the section 10(3) investigation. I’ll show you the adverse impact of this in 2015-2016 and the proposed reversal in 2016-2017 graphically in a few minutes.

I want to now turn to the second aspect of our budget request, which is to fund one permanent additional Ombudsperson officer. In reviewing the office’s resource needs for this budget submission, we’ve been focused on the immediate challenges currently faced by the office. At this time, our biggest challenge is the continued increase in the number of files awaiting assignment and the resulting delay many members of the public experience in having their complaints investigated by our staff.

I want to give you some background on this request, which, although it is only about 20 percent of our incremental budget request, does represent a very important investment in our services. Unlike the section 10(3) request, which is one year only, this is an ongoing position.
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The funding is to reverse a chronic backlog of files awaiting investigation. The list of files awaiting assignment was established by my predecessor, Kim Carter, on September 1, 2009. She explained in her budget submission that year that the list was established as a temporary measure to address the impacts of significantly increased complaint volume observed over the prior three years. As a result, Ombudsperson Carter determined that it was necessary to manage the assignment of files and made the very difficult decision to delay the assignment of non-urgent files.

Ombudsperson Carter raised with this committee the difficulties with the approach she had felt compelled to adopt. As she put it in 2012, the queue represented “a really significant discouragement to getting things resolved effectively, which, to some degree, requires things to be resolved in a timely fashion.” She then described in more detail the importance of an increase of two additional investigators. That request was not approved.

Two years later, in 2014, Ombudsperson Carter reported to this committee again, pointing out that the files-awaiting-assignment list increased over those two years from 75 to nearly 500. She pointed out at that time that it doesn’t mean that the office abandons these people, but it does mean that we are spending more and more staff time administering this queue and, thus, less and less time investigating matters and bringing people together to resolve issues.

Thus, such a backlog has a double effect — one, because it places people on a wait-list, and two, because office resources then have to be redirected to triage and managing that wait-list instead of investigating.

A bit of background about our intake process will be helpful here to explain how complaints are handled before they end up on this files-awaiting-assignment list. If I can ask you to direct your attention to the PowerPoint slide, this is a slide that describes, basically, the opening parts of what we do when we’re contacted by a member of the public. Basically, you can think of it as moving in time from left to right.

First, we have a dedicated team of experienced intake staff who conduct a preliminary analysis of every complaint we receive. Complaints that are outside of our jurisdiction are directed, wherever possible, to the right process. You see “no jurisdiction” down at the bottom of the screen.

Complaints within our jurisdiction are reviewed to determine whether there are any internal complaint processes within that public body — appeals or other appropriate means of having a person’s concerns addressed without our office investigating. Taking these opportunities to refer people to the right process before we take a look means that citizens get a more timely response and that public agencies have a reasonable chance to correct a problem or to provide a better explanation themselves without any outside intervention.

Our intake staff are also responsible for our early resolution program, which allows for immediate action on complaints where there is a potential to resolve a complaint by facilitating contact or resolving straightforward delay or communication issues.

New complaints that are not referred to available processes or resolved through early resolution are assigned to our investigative teams. All of these files are reviewed for urgency before they’re assigned to the list of files awaiting assignment. Our staff prioritize the assignment of urgent complaints so that children at risk or individuals who require our intervention to access or maintain basic necessities such as food and shelter are assisted immediately.

While we see this as a critical component of our service to the public, unfortunately the impact of this is that the assignment of non-urgent files is subject to further delays, as we receive urgent complaints on a daily basis. This files-awaiting-assignment stage is the box highlighted in red on that slide.

Once the file clears the files-awaiting-assignment stage, it is assigned to an investigator, but it is the time that complaints spend in that intermediate stage awaiting assignment that is our most pressing issue.

To identify what resources would be required to stop the growth of the list of files awaiting assignment, we reviewed numerous office statistics for each month since the list was established in September 2009 up to September of this year, including intake volumes, rates of assignments and closures, investigative staffing levels and the volume of files awaiting assignment.

What we saw was a concerning trend. From month to month and year to year, we’ve seen fluctuations as periods with fewer complaints and inquiries are followed by periods of increased volume. In the short term, the list of files awaiting assignment goes up and down. However, the longer-term trend is that there’s been a consistent increase in the volume of files waiting to be assigned and a corresponding increase in delay for complainants to have their concerns fully reviewed.

Our capacity to investigate is about six investigations a month less than our demand. Remember, that demand follows an aggressive triage at the front end. Without an additional permanent allocation, we project a continued long-term increase in the volume of files awaiting assignment and negative impacts on the public, arising from the resulting delays.

While we will continue to explore every opportunity to make effective referrals, prioritize the most urgent matters and temporarily reallocate resources as they become available, the long-term solution remains the same as that identified in Ombudsperson Carter’s budget submission in 2009, when she announced the introduction of the list of files awaiting assignment — namely, an increase to the permanent allocation of investigators.

With the addition of one permanent investigator, we
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can stop losing ground, slowly begin to catch up and, hopefully, fulfil our goal of one day eliminating the wait period for citizens seeking our assistance. In my view, the one additional investigator is a very modest recognition of this chronic issue and would make a material difference in our capacity.

But I want to reassure this committee that I’m not suggesting that the only element to dealing with this problem is based on resources. I’m committing to a rigorous business process review of how we deal with matters at the front end so that we are investigating the most value-added matters and doing so in a timely way. As I mentioned earlier, while this will, I expect, result in some improvements, the office already operates with a strong emphasis on efficiency. So a business process review approach alone will not deal with this entire problem.

That takes me to bringing all these aspects together. If I can just direct your attention to this slide, this is a graph that shows, over time, the size of the existing and projected files-awaiting-assignment list and the impact on our various requests.

First, here is the path our files-awaiting-assignment list was on before this year. We’ve normalized the trend to take out some of the short-term noise and show the impact of the trend of the chronic excess of new investigatory files of six per month.

Here is the impact of the committee’s referral to our office this past summer and the result of our early reassignment of four investigators to this matter. This is the service quality subsidy by the regular complainants to the referral investigation that I spoke of earlier. You will see that it immediately added a number of investigations to the queue as the four investigators were removed from regular investigations and assigned to the committee’s referral.

This next line represents the portion of the 2016-2017 committee referral investigation budget, which will allow for a short period of double-banking of positions as the investigators on the committee referral investigation complete this work and return to regular investigations. The auxiliary backfill investigators would remain on staff for that short period while we reverse the effect of this fall’s one-time bump.

But you will note that this does not affect the trajectory; it simply replaces the missing investigator months. It puts us back to where we would have been but for the section 10(3) referral, but the short-term, one-time nature of the funding does not affect our longer-term capacity. To alter the slope of the lines requires other action.

This next line represents the impact of the one additional investigator which, as you can see, starts to bend the line downward, although the slope is fairly gradual. Thus, achieving a timely commencement of investigations will take a number of years. Obviously, a bigger add to our complement would bend that line down more sharply, but I’m not asking for that.

In my view, there’s no question that at least one investigator is required, but I’m prepared to use a rigorous business process review to try bending that line further before seeking resources. I’ll show you what I’m hoping we can achieve through that.

This last line shows the results of what I anticipate we could do through a rigorous review of our front-end processes. I’m an optimist, and I’m setting an ambitious projection with the slope of that line.

But this shows that the combination of the recovery funding of the committee referral budget plus the single additional investigator and the unfunded business process review that we would undertake from within our existing allocation will yield an improvement in our files-awaiting-assignment list to what I would consider a good, steady state by 2019. This would be about 50 matters at any given time awaiting investigation.

What would that mean for complainants? It would be roughly one to two weeks from the time a matter is accepted for investigation, following our triage and intake, until an investigator starts an investigation. I believe that’s an acceptable service standard, and with this modest request, we can make this happen.

How does all that manifest itself in the budget submission document before you? At page 6 of our budget submission, you will see the budget broken into three areas.

First, Ombudsperson operation, which shows a net increase of $127,000. You see it’s in three columns on page 6. Most of that $127,000 is attributable to the one additional Ombudsperson officer, inclusive of salary and benefits and associated costs. There’s also an increase embedded in that amount to fund the going-forward impact of the Court of Appeal judgment on provincial judicial salaries, which in turn impacts our STOB 54 expenditures.

Second, corporate shared services, which is essentially flatlined from 2015-2016.

Third, this committee’s referral, which shows an increase of $415,000 in 2015-16, representing the carry-forward of the staffing model on which the 2015-16 budget was approved. It includes a short recovery phase of double banking following the investigation, to put the office back into the place it would have been but for the referral.

Page 7 of our budget submission sets out the multi-year description of costs, in a chart. On page 8, you can see the same information in a bar chart.

You will see that in 2017-18, our budget decreases with the completion of the referral investigation. Our budget in that year will decrease by just under $1.2 million. You will see that despite the year-over-year volatility — going back to last year, this year, next year and then 2017-18 — the variation is almost wholly attributable to the section 10(3) referral investigation. As you can see, the blue and orange portions of that bar are actually quite stable.

Lastly, I want to draw your attention to the corporate shared services that come out of the Ombudsperson’s al-
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location but is a service provided to our office and also to the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Merit Commissioner and Police Complaint Commissioner. These latter three officers reimburse the Ombudsperson budget on a prorated basis. We receive those funds under STOB 85, as you see noted there. You can see on page 11 a description of the allocation of those costs among the four offices.

To summarize, I’m requesting a budget increase in two respects. There’s a one-time increase to complete the investigation into this committee’s referral and thereby avoid reducing services to ordinary British Columbians who seek service from our office. This increase will be reversed in 2017-18, and our budget will decrease in that year by $1.2 million. I will report to this committee on our actual costs for this investigation once we’ve submitted our final report.

The second request is a permanent increment of one staff person to address a chronic mismatch of workload and capacity through this multi-year plan, which restores the timeliness of our investigations. This improvement in timeliness will benefit both complainants and public authorities — something that should allow us to demonstrate the very principles of administrative fairness that our office stands for.

Thank you for your attention, and with the assistance of my able team, I’m happy to answer any questions you have.

S. Gibson: Thank you very much. You do important work, and I think it’s valued by all of us on the committee. A couple of quick questions.

My colleague, during the previous presentation by the Representative for Children and Youth, made some anecdotal comments, based on his experience in policing, about some areas with potential for overlap. I was thinking about those comments, and then I heard you a moment ago use the phrase “children at risk.” Of course, my antennas were tingling a little bit on that one in light of the fact that we have a number of helping agencies.

We have organizations that have mandates to attend to these issues. Then when I hear that, I’m thinking: “Okay, are we getting, potentially, an overlap with her portfolio and responsibilities?” That’s my first question.

J. Chalke: Absolutely. There are some aspects of our jurisdiction in which we and other officers may both have jurisdiction. We are in quite regular contact with them to make sure that we fit hand in glove, as it were, in terms of the services that we both — or sometimes more than two — offer. All I would say is that we very strongly work not to be duplicating any work by ourselves and by any other officer.

S. Gibson: A supplementary and then the second question. Do you think it would be productive…? Just your thoughts, having started new. You’re a fresh face to this important responsibility. Do you think it would be worthwhile for this committee to set up some kind of means to systematically avoid any overlaps that some of us are seeing? I think that’ll be a useful exercise.

J. Chalke: I guess I would leave that in the hands of the committee. I can tell you that sometimes overlap isn’t necessarily what it looks like. For example, the representative has certain advocacy responsibilities. Sometimes she’s an investigator, but sometimes she’s an advocate. In that role, that would differ from what we do. So in any particular case, we could have an investigatory role, and she may have an advocacy role. So simply the fact that more than one officer is involved in a particular matter doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an overlap of the same function.

I would say that we work quite hard to make sure that we’re not overlapping in any effective way. I’d be happy to set that out, probably best with my other colleagues, to describe how we go about doing that. But we’re in quite regular contact with one another.

S. Gibson: Thank you for that response. My second question. I was encouraged by your remarks about looking at the overall structure. You were reviewing the business plan — how the files are processed through the system. I come out of a local government background and seeing what I would characterize as…. People would contact me with frivolous issues, contact our office regarding things that could be resolved quite easily. Sometimes it was kind of that restorative justice model, where people can address their own issues. I’m wondering if that’s going to be a part of your analysis.

I mean, the most blatant example, which is not directly related, are the 911 calls. People are encouraged with emergent situations…. The vast number of calls are frivolous.

Now, that’s the stronger example, but how are you able to discourage the sort of frequent flyers, the frivolous people from clogging up the system, taking away valuable time from genuinely problematic cases that deserve your expertise and your professional attention? That’s my question.

J. Chalke: Sure. I put this slide back up, really, to talk about the work that goes on — on the left-hand side of that slide. We get about 8,000 inquiries a year. But if you move to the centre of the slide, you see the box marked “Investigation file open.” We only do that about 1,500 times a year. The difference between the 8,000 and the 1,500 is the work that goes on in that intake area.

That team does a terrific job at, basically, triaging those sorts of calls. You know, is there some way we can provide
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some assistance without conducting an investigation? That’s really our stock-in-trade, but it’s also…. We’re quite conscious that it’s the most expensive resource we have. It takes the most time, and not every caller to our office is best served through the conduct of an investigation.

So really, there’s a whole piece of work that goes on at that front end in terms of: are there other ways we can refer somebody? Do they have other avenues for support? Sometimes it’s a matter where we could investigate something, but in terms of actually providing an effective service to somebody, really what we need to do is solve that problem that day.

If you’re dealing with somebody who’s having difficulty getting an emergency grant from the Ministry of Social Development, for example, we could investigate that, and we could come out with a report six months later that said that they were treated, administratively, unfairly. But the far more effective way to help somebody in that situation is to get them food that day.

That involves getting in touch with the ministry, clearing the decks so that if they’re just having a communication problem, or they can’t get through, or they haven’t been able to articulate their problem effectively, we can clear those roadblocks. It serves them better. It serves the public authority better. It means we are not conducting a long investigation post facto.

We do a lot in that regard. We do have people who call us more than once. The intake team is quite small. They communicate with one another quite well, and we track all of this in an information tracking system, so everybody is aware that if we’ve investigated a matter previously, we’re not going to investigate that matter for that person a second time. People who call us back repeatedly are often advised: “We’ve already dealt with this matter. If you don’t have any new information, then we’re not going to investigate it again.”

S. Chandra Herbert: I always enjoy reading the Ombudsperson’s annual report because there are stories that relate, often, to cases we see in our own offices and that we as MLAs have to advocate for constituents on. Sometimes it gives me good ideas of how to help people.

I’m curious. Given what we see on the slides and what you’ve said about increasing numbers of files stuck on a wait-list, what sorts of files are those? Are they the kind of cases that you see in your annual report — cases of people not being able to get to work because a bus pass never came through, not being able to get medication because the government program didn’t work? Are those the sorts of cases?

J. Chalke: Every file that we do decide to open an investigation on goes to that file-awaiting-assignment list. How long it spends on there is a function of urgency. We do work that list, as it were. We’re not robotic in the sense of sort of adding it to a list and then taking just whatever the longest file is off the bottom as we have capacity.

Where somebody needs medication, where they need something on a more urgent basis, those are the matters that are serviced. That, obviously, is the right approach to do in terms of helping people. But what it does do is the people who have the kinds of complaints that are not as time sensitive but are still substantive complaints about unfairness from some public body…. The effect of that is that those complaints are slowed down even further. They’re not getting dealt with at or above the average, because the urgent complaints are getting dealt with more quickly.

There’s a hidden unfairness there, which is that in order to ensure that we don’t let somebody fall through the cracks, people who’ve had, say, longer-term concerns that don’t necessarily have that same health and safety risk attached to them but are still legitimate concerns that the Ombudsperson should be investigating promptly, are being delayed even further.

S. Chandra Herbert: Just to follow up. I like the phrase you used — that because of the Health firings investigations, the referral we’ve made, there’s a service quality subsidy. The public in general, who have complaints, are having to pay right now, because they don’t have the timeliness that they would expect.

I wonder: what does that timeliness look like? I might’ve missed it, but for people who are on that wait-list — I understand there will be a difference by file — what are we looking at, on average? How long would the person at the bottom of that list have to wait?

J. Chalke: I think, as I mentioned before in the presentation, if we got to a to-be-assigned list of 50 files, that would be about a week or two, and 150 is about a month. So at 500, you’re at about three months. That’s an average number. But then, as I said in response to your previous question, some people are not spending that much time, but some people are spending considerably longer, as we take files that are higher up on that list in terms of urgency.

S. Chandra Herbert: At the bottom of the list, it could be six months? It could be a year?

G. Heyman: I have two questions. I’ll ask them separately. The first one is with respect to the additional FTE to address the backlog. Presumably, if you have a time frame of about three years to reduce the backlog down to the level that you think is reasonable, some percent-
[ Page 2113 ]
age of that deals with new intake and some percentage of that deals with piled-up backlog.

My question is: what happens at the end of that time frame? Do you believe that you need less than a full FTE, or do you expect demand to have ramped up slowly to meet the newly set staff level?

J. Chalke: My intention would be to report to this committee each year as to where we’re at in terms of the progress of this project. I would anticipate that if we really got to, if I can put it, the bottom line, as it were, at that point in time, you would either expect me to return that position or come up with a plan of other important things that needed to be done.

One of the issues that I am concerned about is that with 2,800 public bodies under our jurisdiction, we have to look at how we create the most leverage in our investigation reports with the least resources, as it were.

How can we have impact on a lot of people, help a lot people, help a lot of public authorities with single reports? That typically gets manifested in our systemic reports. If you go back over the past few years, we do one or two of those per year. They’re major reports. They have significant impact on changing practice in public bodies. But there are 2,800 public bodies.

My goal right now is to increase the volume and impact of those public systemic reports. Any resource availability that we would have as we clean up this backlog in the to-be-assigned list, I would expect at this point, we’d want to re-profile in terms of increasing our systemic reporting. Certainly by 2019, I’m happy to have that discussion again.

G. Heyman: My next question has to do with the referral, the budget for the referral. You haven’t broken it down this time into its component parts, so I assume that this is just an extension of what you showed us last time when you came and made this specific budget proposal for dealing with the referral of the Health firings investigation.

At that time, we asked you about a budget for legal assistance for the researchers or other people who might be called as witnesses. You replied that there were provisions for government employees to be indemnified but not for others. I believe that we requested that you return and have a discussion with the Chair and the Deputy Chair and report back to this committee.

I’m wondering if you have included some provision for legal fee indemnification/representation in this budget or if it’s an outstanding issue or what the status is.

J. Chalke: Yes. I have been quite conscious both before our discussion in September but particularly following the questions that this committee raised on that issue in September, your motion of this committee that I meet with the Chair and the Deputy Chair on this issue. I’ve held off meeting with them until I have something material to report, which I don’t quite yet.

However, based on our most recent communications with the Ministry of Justice, which administers the indemnification program, I’m getting quite close to being in a position to have a meaningful discussion with the Chair and the Deputy Chair. I would anticipate that would take place within the next couple of weeks. I can say that I’m quite hopeful, based on the discussions we’ve had to date, that I’ll be able to have a positive discussion with them.

G. Heyman: In the event that you’re not able to have a positive discussion with them — I take it that a positive discussion being that you’ve been assured that the funding will be provided for indemnification — would you return to this committee with a supplementary budget proposal?

J. Chalke: Well, I think it’s premature. I guess I do want to say that my concern always has been to ensure that, in the conduct of this investigation, we are not distorting our practice with respect to our other hundreds of investigations that we do each year.

I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to come back with something that works. Certainly, following that discussion with the Chair and the Deputy Chair, if the committee wants to have a further discussion with me, I’d be happy to do that.

G. Heyman: I recall your comment when we met previously that you didn’t want to prejudice other investigations. I think my reply then is the same as my reply now. This is a pretty unique referral, I think once in 30 years. Or was it longer? I think we need to deal with its unique circumstance.

I appreciate what you’re saying. But you have to appreciate that in our investigations, every day we’re potentially saying that somebody did something wrong, that they were arbitrary, that they were unfair, that they broke a law somewhere. We conduct those investigations, and have for decades, in a context where we’re able to do those privately and, typically, without requiring our organization funding legal counsel for those people who sometimes are a bit under the microscope in terms of their conduct in their jobs.

I guess all I would say is that I fully appreciate that there are a lot of unique characteristics to this particular investigation that we’re carrying out. But for the people who are the subject of other investigations they do, they will be tempted to look at the similarities, not the differences.
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When you made your initial presentation to the committee, you urged us to reach consensus because you didn’t want to see the inquiry politicized. We did our best. We were unable to achieve that consensus.

On this side of the table, we had some serious concerns, which led us to vote against the referral. But once the referral motion was passed, we’ve done our level best to be constructive, help frame useful terms of reference, hope that the investigation conducted by you will be successful but also to continue to represent what we think were legitimate requests by those most directly impacted, some of which would have been addressed by a public inquiry, including indemnification. And we’ll continue to do so.

J. Yap: You had mentioned, in response to George’s question earlier, that you do one or two systemic public project reviews, in-depth reviews. You’ve included one here, a recent one on the college training institutes.

This looks like a very major project. I’m wondering what resources would go into this kind of a review. How much would it cost to produce one of these that you might do one or two a year? Can you put a number to it?

J. Chalke: We have a systemic investigation team, comprised of basically three staff — a manager and two investigators. They’re responsible for the planning, investigation and reporting of each systemic investigation as well as the follow-up and monitoring of prior systemic reports. We have an active program of following up on public bodies a year or two or three after to say: “Where are you at in terms of your implementation?” Often systemic investigations raise bigger issues for public bodies, and it takes them awhile to actually implement those changes.

A great example is the Best of Care series of reports that we did with respect to seniors care in the province. Every health authority, the Ministry of Health…. It’s quite broad-ranging. It’s a multi-year exercise in order to see those recommendations implemented. In addition to developing new systemic reports, they also have quite a material role in respect to following up with public bodies about prior reports.

J. Yap: In our previous meeting with the children and youth representative, she put a figure on a review that her office would do. She said that she could do her review for $400,000. I was just curious if you can price one of these to that extent.

J. Chalke: I’d want to be accurate. I’d be happy to…. I could do that, but I think it’s probably better if I reduce that to writing, just in terms of…. If you’re going to ask for that specific one….

Obviously, there are bigger ones and there are smaller ones, right? That one was one that was conducted over a series of months. The Best of Care took a few years. These go up and down, depending on the nature.

We’re currently conducting one — I’m just about to, hopefully, bring it to conclusion in the next couple of months — on best practices in local governments with respect to bylaw enforcement, which will impact every municipality in the province. But it’s not a multi-year exercise. That’s something we were able to do all in this year.

I can go back and take a look at, basically, the range of reports from smaller to larger.

I have one more question. I’m glad to see that you’re going to undertake a business process review. I presume that will get started or is already underway. What types of things in your initial look-see in this area do you think you might be able to do to improve the business process?

J. Chalke: Well, I’m a big believer in turning over rocks and looking underneath. You can see on the chart what I’m hoping to achieve — certainly, if one goes back to the first chart — with respect to our intake process and moving towards that file-awaiting-assignment list. It’s how we can look at that front-end work to ensure that we’re doing the most value-added work; that there are as few work handoffs as possible; that the cycle time in those work handoffs is compressed as much as possible; that if we’re going to get to a determination that we’re not going to investigate, we get to that determination quickly.

If we’re basically saying to a member of the public, “This isn’t something that we are going to investigate,” they might as well hear that news as soon as possible. And if we are going to investigate, we figure out how we do that more quickly.

I think it’s an area where…. As I said, I think it is overall quite an efficient organization, but I think it’s always worthwhile to try looking at business processes again and again. Certainly, a number of my colleagues in senior positions have had good experiences with lean kinds of exercises. I think that might be a method of business process review we adopt, but we’ll see when the time comes.

S. Gibson: This analysis, of course, we always find interesting. My question is: do you sometimes get proscriptive with particular departments or offices? Do you see systemic complaints where it percolates more than you would think? Do you ever take the initiative and go and talk to a department head or a senior person and say: “You know what? We think you’ve got a problem in this particular department, because we’re getting all of these inquiries, all of these complaints showing up in a much greater proportion than we would expect based on our analysis.” Do you ever have those kinds of meetings?

J. Chalke: For me, not yet, but it’s been early days. I know that has been a practice in the organization previ-
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ously. I would say that there are…. Obviously, the major social services are the public authorities that we have the most frequent contact with because they affect, in a very visceral way, a very important way the health and safety of a lot of people in terms of having food to eat, in terms of dealing with benefits that they may or may not be entitled to — ensuring that they’re fairly treated through that process. So we have pretty constant contact with those people.

I recently met, just a week or two ago, with senior folks from ICBC, for example, about some of the work they do. Obviously, certainly in terms of the part 7 benefits particularly…. Also, it can happen in terms of tort claims as well. The benefits that they provide are something that…. Living up to those ongoing promises that they may make in the settlement of a matter is something where even ICBC can directly affect people’s financial health.

So, the short answer is yes. It is a practice. It’s also, if you look at our path of systemic reports, certainly obvious that those major social services are the sorts of things that we’re interested in, in terms of systemic investigations as well, because we have a lot of things that we see because we’re contacted quite a bit.

S. Gibson: Well, I guess a supplementary, just to comment. I think those are obvious. I don’t mean to offend you, but those are obvious ones, and I get that.

But sometimes you’ll have…. For example, a company that I’m familiar with had one particular department that would drive people crazy. The customers would always be ticked off. “Why do I have to talk to that person? They’re so rude to me,” or whatever. Sometimes it can be a real narrow slice of a company that’s creating the problems, when everybody else is doing a great job.

I get that these social service ministries have a huge issue, because they’re catching people at the most vulnerable times in their lives. But sometimes there are other departments where you’ve got a bunch of people that are unhappy or are just struggling to find their roles, and they show up a little more than others. I guess that’s really what I was asking.

J. Chalke: Certainly, particularly in decentralized organizations that can happen. One regional office, one local office, can sort of go off on a slightly different tangent than maybe the larger corporate interest thinks. So for sure, in those circumstances, a phone call just to redirect people can sometimes help.

Seeing none, Mr. Chalke, I appreciate you taking the time. I also appreciate the fact that you were pretty much thrown into the middle of the fire from almost day one. You’ve taken on an immense amount of work. You’ve done a great job with your offices, so I thank you for that as well.

J. Chalke: Thank you for that, and thank you for your attention. To the degree that we’ve been able to cope, it’s really because of the team that I have around me.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Let’s call the committee back to order, if we could, please. I will look for a motion to go in camera.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Carole is in Vancouver tomorrow in the morning and is unable to attend a morning meeting.

I don’t know how important it is for you to be here for that presentation, but how soon can you get back?

C. James (Deputy Chair): I can be here by quarter to one to start. I’m at the B.C. Business Council Summit as Finance critic, so it’s something I need to attend.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Are you okay with missing that one presentation from the Privacy Commissioner?

C. James (Deputy Chair): You could start at noon with the Privacy Commissioner and then start deliberations at one when I get here. I’m quite fine with that, if that works easier for people — to start at noon.

S. Chandra Herbert: I was going to be in Vancouver, but as it’s deliberations, I do think it’s important to be here. I’ll just have to find out what kinds of flights I can get over in the morning.

G. Heyman: I also scheduled stuff for the morning because of the schedule. I’d prefer we start at one.

E. Foster: I don’t get home until Saturday, anyway. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I guess we’re sticking with the schedule. It was at one o’clock?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): It had been originally scheduled that you would meet tomorrow from two till four.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): If it works for members, we can begin at one.

S. Gibson: I’ve got Treasury Board at one, but this takes priority. I’d prefer to be there for that, but I don’t have to be.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): One till three. Okay, I’ll send out a note.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We had this meeting in the afternoon yesterday, anyway, the whole time.

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES