Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 90 — Thursday, November 19, 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:

Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia and Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists

5. 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 Information and Privacy Commissioner and Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists	2117
E. Denham
J. Fedorak

S. Hamilton (Chair): We will continue our presentations from our statutory officers, and we’d like to welcome Elizabeth Denham, our Information and Privacy Commissioner.

Office of the
Information and
Privacy Commissioner and
Office of
the Registrar of Lobbyists

E. Denham: Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the committee.

Joining me today are Jay Fedorak, deputy registrar and assistant commissioner, and the ubiquitous Dave Van Swieten, who is our executive director of shared services. I know the members of the committee are familiar with Dave.

I also have my colleagues sitting behind me: Michael McEvoy, deputy commissioner, and also Cara McGregor, our director of communications.

In accordance with your request, I’m going to keep my remarks brief to allow more time for questions and discussion. I’m going to very briefly highlight some key accomplishments, and then outline our priorities for the coming fiscal year. I continue to support the idea of meeting with the committee on a semi-annual basis. It really gives me the opportunity to provide the committee with more detailed information about how I’m fulfilling my mandate, the substance of the work of our office, and it’s an important accountability mechanism to the Legislative Assembly.

I’m going to begin with a brief overview of the key priorities of the coming year for my two core functions, and then I’m going to move on quickly to my budget proposal.

As you know, I fulfil two roles: the registrar of lobbyists and the Information and Privacy Commissioner. I’m going to begin with my role as registrar of lobbyists.

My job is to monitor and enforce the Lobbyist Registration Act, or the LRA. In the first six months of this fiscal year, we conducted 95 compliance reviews, which are reviews of a lobbyist’s activity identified either through a complaint, an inquiry or through an environmental scan by our staff. Of these 95, 16 went on to formal investigations, one has been resolved informally, and three resulted in a published report and also the application of administrative monetary penalties. We’re on pace for a 20 percent increase in compliance reviews and a 150 percent increase in investigations over last year.

As I’ve outlined in my budget submission, my first priority as registrar for the coming year will be to continue with our enhanced enforcement program, because it’s proving to be successful in promoting compliance with the legislation.

My second priority as registrar is to implement the public education plan that we developed over the year to meet the needs of lobbyists, stakeholders and the public. We intend to use a variety of strategies, including conferences; training workshops; speaking engagements; articles in newsletters and journals; and our e-newsletter, which is called Influencing B.C.

As committee members may recall, I recommended legislative changes to the LRA that would actually make it easier for lobbyists to comply with the law, provide more transparency in lobbying, as well as save both them and our office money and resources. So these legislative proposals remain with government.

I now turn to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Pages 7 through 11 of my budget submission outline the OIPC’s major accomplishments since the beginning of the fiscal year, some of which I described to the committee during my presentation in May of 2015, so I’m not going to repeat them here.

My major priority over the next fiscal year as commissioner is to address the significant growth in demand for our services and reduce the growing wait times facing citizens and consumers that are seeking redress from our office. Last year I outlined for the committee the number of appeals resulting from increasing numbers of access requests and also the advancing awareness of citizens and consumers about the risk to their personal privacy posed by new technologies.

Investigation is the first stage of our process when we receive a complaint or an appeal. Investigators attempt to resolve the matter by working with the parties, and they issue informal findings. They resolve 96 percent of the 1,200 complaints and appeals that come in through our door. There are 12 staff and one part-time contractor on the investigation team.

Adjudication is the second stage of our process, which involves a formal written hearing or inquiry. Adjudicators or the commissioner issue binding written orders, and there are four staff and one part-time contract employee on our adjudication team. If one of the parties disagrees with an adjudicator’s decision, they can seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. We currently have nine outstanding judicial reviews, which is about the same number as we had last year.

In my presentation to the committee in May of 2015, I indicated that the number of files that were waiting assignment to an investigator had grown to 300, and I committed to you to reduce that number by 20 percent. I’m pleased to announce that as of November 5, 2015, this backlog of unassigned files — those are the files that are
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waiting in the queue — was reduced to 240. We’re committed to making further reductions to ensure better service for those who are awaiting our services.

I’m grateful that the committee recognized last year the need for more resources to deal with the increased workload — and your recommendation of additional funding for an investigator. In addition to obtaining increased resources, we have recently completed a business process review, which we called a continuous improvement process, to ensure that we are working in our office as efficiently and as effectively as possible.

This new process has streamlined our case file management from when a complaint or an appeal arrives in our in-basket through to when it is resolved or discontinued by an investigator. We have new policies with respect to the opening and the closing of files. We have strategies to ensure that all citizens have fair and timely access to our services.

We have put a limit on the number of active investigations that any one individual can have at any one time. We’ve established performance targets and measures to evaluate the success of our investigators, and I will also be reporting that to you in future presentations. We have also taken some measures to streamline our adjudication process.

In addition to challenges posed by the increasing volume of files, and as technology becomes more advanced, privacy and access issues are becoming more complicated. We have had a number of files this year that required special expertise and extraordinary expenditures.

In the case of the district of Saanich investigation, we were looking at the installation of employee monitoring software on the computers assigned to the mayor and staff. This required technical expertise with respect to the analysis of the system’s security software.

In the case of the loss of a hard drive containing student information from the Ministry of Education, we’ve had to conduct a forensic examination of the duplicate hard drive.

In an investigation into allegations of deleted e-mail, we had to conduct a forensic examination to determine whether or not certain e-mails had previously existed. This involved extensive analysis of metadata. We also needed to interview witnesses under oath, record testimony using a court reporter, and I estimate that the extraordinary costs relating to IT, relating to the need for external legal counsel and administrative support to be approximately $35,000.

One result of this increasing complexity is that it takes more time to close a file, and this means that it takes longer before the next file is opened. This compounds the backlog of outstanding investigation and adjudication case files, despite the increase in staff resources that the committee has provided and despite the efficiency measures that I’ve implemented.

Similar to the evidence that I provided last year, an additional investigator would close an average of six files per month, 72 files over the course of a year. By the end of next year, this would reduce the backlog and enable us to deliver faster outcomes to citizens by decreasing the average wait time by one month, which constitutes a significant reduction of 20 percent.

An additional adjudicator would be able to close 20 files per year, and with the current backlog at 80, this would result in a 25 percent decrease in the first year. If the annual caseload of adjudicators remains steady, which we expect it will, we should be able to eliminate the adjudication backlog in four years.

My budget request for this year is framed around, first, addressing ongoing and unavoidable cost pressures such as mandated increases to salaries and benefits and, second, investing in additional staff to help us make further reductions in our backlog of files waiting for service.

On the topic of cost pressures, 68 percent of my budget is for salaries and benefits; 8 percent is for professional services; 18 percent is for fixed costs such as shared services, rent, utilities; 5 percent is for operating expenses such as amortization and office expenses; and 1 percent is for travel.

We have a staff complement of 35 positions, plus the commissioner. This means that management of mandated cost increases must come from salaries — i.e., not hiring staff — or a reduction in outside professional services such as legal advice.

Over the past two years, my office has absorbed $375,000 in cost pressures. The year before last we absorbed $72,000 by reducing legal advice, choosing not to fill vacant positions and deferring activities in our strategic plan. And at the end 2014-15, our budget came in at 99.8 percent of our allocation.

Last year we faced further unavoidable cost pressures for 2015-16 of $303,000, and I was able to manage my budget within the same funding as 2014-15 by reducing travel; reducing contracted professional services; and with the approval of the committee, reallocating surplus funds dedicated to legal services for judicial reviews. The committee also approved additional funding for a new investigator.

Our 2015-16 budget is again very tight, and based on our best projections, we expect to expend 99 percent of our allocation — though I may have to return to this committee in February 2016 if this projection turns out to be too low.

For the forthcoming fiscal year, my office is again faced with an adjustment to cover government-mandated salary increments and adjustments for schedule A, which are union classified positions and the commissioner; voice, data, building and electricity increases. This amounts to unavoidable increases netting out at $98,000, compared to our 2015-16 estimates.

We have exhausted our flexibility in the budget to address these cost pressures. The only option available to
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me going forward would be not to hire for any vacant position. For these reasons, I’m requesting a funding increase to cover these new and ongoing cost pressures, totalling $98,000.

As I mentioned in my presentation in May 2015 and again today, my number one priority is to improve service to citizens. Given that I’ve increased the efficiency of our processes, and recognizing the large backlog that we face, I’m asking for one additional investigator position and one additional adjudicator position, with corresponding salary and benefit costs in the amount of $230,000. These resources are required to deal with a workload that I’m projecting to remain high, given the trends of the last three years and the growing public concern about access to information and privacy.

The combined budget request is for an increase of $328,000 in total. These three requests represent an operating budget increase of 5.8 percent, compared to the current fiscal year. I note that last year my projection of my budget for future years was based on the assumption of the financial and staffing status quo. The changes that I have proposed for the 2016-17 budget are the result of mandated salary, benefits, voice and data, building and electricity increases not known at this time last year, plus a request for two additional staff.

In order of my priority, I ask consideration of the committee for: funding to cover unavoidable increases in salary, benefits, voice and data, and building costs netting $98,000; secondly, funding for an additional investigator to help reduce the backlog of files, in the amount of $110,000; and funding for an additional adjudicator to help reduce the backlog of files, in the amount of $120,000. In total, this represents a requested operating budget of $5.964 million and a capital budget of $45,000 for 2016-17.

Thank you very much for your attention. I’m pleased, Mr. Chair, to take any questions the committee may have.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Denham. I appreciate that. I will go to the committee for questions.

S. Chandra Herbert: Thank you, Ms. Denham, for the presentation on the two different offices, the two different hats.

Can you remind me what the caseload this year, compared to last year or even the year before, looks like? In reading through the report, I can’t seem to track down the page number. It’s quite a considerable increase on the freedom-of-information side, for FOIs — for requests, files, complaints, adjudication and so forth. For such a large increase, I’m amazed that you’re still able to keep up with what you’ve got so far. So if you could remind me of what that is.

E. Denham: Yes. We have had an increase, in particular over the past several years. Two years ago we had a 33 percent increase in the files before our office. In terms of new files received, going back to 2012-2013, new files coming in the office, 1,165. It jumped the next year, ’13-14, to 1,536 files. The next year, there was a slight decrease, 1,354. We estimate that for this year, we’ll be at roughly the same level.

But given the number of staff that we have in our office and the different roles that they play on both sides of the office — because I’ve integrated the two offices — I think the public is getting a pretty good bang for their buck.

You mentioned that the additional investigator and the additional adjudicator are to deal with backlog of files. I just wonder what capacity you feel there is in your budget if you are given another big investigation to do, for example, that came up this year. What kind of capacity is going to be there in the office if you face those? I’m presuming these positions are mainly focused on backlog. What will that do to the rest of the budget?

E. Denham: Those positions will be dedicated to dealing with what I call the bread-and-butter work of the office, which are the files that come in from citizens asking for appeals, complaints about privacy. On top of that, we have a systemic investigation team. Really, I call it our technology and policy team. There are five people on that team. Their responsibility is to take on those larger, systemic investigations, such as the deleted e-mail or our most recent cyberbullying report. We actually complete between five and seven of those larger reports every year.

The committee may know that we’ve also started an audit program, which I think is a really effective way to get at compliance issues. It’s not a gotcha exercise but looking at issues such as breach management within health authorities and privacy breach management within the government of British Columbia. I think those systemic investigations are very important for all public bodies to get the message on how they can properly comply with the legislation. So I do have a built-in team for that.

That said, if something extraordinary happened, we would have to come to the committee and present our needs for that.

You made a comment earlier that you have limited the number of active investigations from any one particular complainant. The first question is: what did you limit it to? One or two or five or ten?

The other one, I guess, might go into your systemic investigative side as well. Do you get a number of com-
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plaints from any one particular group or discipline of folks out there where you could do one investigation that would cover all of their issues and concerns? Maybe you’re doing that already.

E. Denham: We looked across Canada…. Because of our backlog, my concern was: how do we provide fair and timely access to all of the British Columbians that come to our office looking for services? We took a look at the high-volume applicants, some of whom had scores of requests for review, or complaints, before our office.

I just want to emphasize, first, that nobody has lost their right to come to our office or file a complaint. It just means that that file is going to sit in the queue if we already have five active investigations or appeals from that individual.

I looked long and hard across Canada to see what kinds of thresholds other offices were using. We are the master of our own processes, but I had regard for fairness. That said, we could also triage and expedite an important request that was in the public interest to move ahead in the queue.

It’s not a science, but the number is five. We have implemented that process, we have made it public, and we have advised all of our high-volume applicants that that’s our new way going forward.

In terms of what kinds of applicants are our most frequent type, we actually don’t do the work to classify them because we consider each on its own merit. I mean, you know that we do receive a lot of applications from ordinary British Columbians that are frustrated that they can’t get their personal information from public bodies. That’s quite a common type of applicant. Obviously, journalists, opposition parties…. We have business applicants. It really runs the gamut.

To your third point, I agree with you that we very carefully target our own motion investigations, our audits, to try to stretch our compliance dollar, if you will, and take on issues that are important or relevant to many types of organizations. We think it’s useful, because peer organizations will look to, let’s say, an audit of duty to assist in the city of Vancouver, and they’re teachable, important messages for compliance for other public bodies.

S. Chandra Herbert: I’m curious what sort of follow-up goes into these special reports. For example, constituents have asked me: “Well, the deleted e-mails investigation — what happens next year or two years down the road?” Is there going to be a random audit of a number of ministries to see if e-mails are still being deleted or what? How do we ensure that a report is not, in the end, acted on within one year and then forgotten the next?

E. Denham: Our normal process for any of these systemic reports, the big public reports that we do, or our audits…. We’re diligently following up. First of all, we get commitment on the recommendations — yes or no. If there is commitment on the recommendations, then we will go back. We will set a time period — three months, six months — and go back and check and see how the follow-up is actually being implemented. That’s really important.

Next week I’m meeting with CEOs of many of the health regions to follow up on the commitments that they made on our audit of health authorities breach management. That’s one way that we do it.

In our annual report, we report out on compliance with all of our recommendations. Don’t forget that my office is backstopped with order-making power. We can issue recommendations, but then again, at the end of the day, if a public body or an organization is not complying, we have the ability to order.

In the deleted e-mail investigation, I do have commitment from the government of British Columbia that they are going to comply with the recommendations. My expectation is that the policy and training work is going to be provided to me in advance of Mr. Loukidelis’s report so that I can assess whether it does actually meet the spirit and the letter of my recommendations.

Thirdly, we have a history of doing timeliness reports on FOI, where we go into ministries and see how they are doing on responsiveness time for FOIs. I’m going to change the thrust of those future reports and look at the duty to assist and how the government — various ministries — are responding to their obligations in section 6 of the act because it seems to be a particular challenge, not just with the provincial government but many public bodies.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for both your work and your submission. Part of my question was asked and answered in response to Spencer.

We’ve seen a lot of increasing attention in the public lately on privacy concerns as well as very significant concern about access to information, particularly in the last few months.

My question is…. I have, actually, three questions. Do you see an increase in your workload from investigations you might undertake on your own motion to respond to this public concern?

Second question is: if the government were to implement your long-standing recommendation of enacting a duty to document in response to a number of concerns that have been raised recently — I believe that was one of the recommendations that was contained in your recent report which, apparently, the government says it will implement — do you see that having an impact, either positively or negatively, on your workload?

Finally, do you foresee any potential change in your workload or activity that might flow from the all-party
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legislative committee that’s currently reviewing the act? I guess, to clarify, that might be: should they respond to recommendations that you’ve made to them?

E. Denham: For the committee members who may not be following the legislative committee that’s reviewing the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, yesterday I appeared before that committee. I made my recommendation again that the legislation be amended to require a duty to document, which is really a duty to create important records.

We have some rules around the deletion of records at the provincial level and at the local public body level. But what I’m saying is there needs to be a focus on professional records management in all public bodies in order to protect not just good government — very important — but to protect our information rights. We can’t assert our information rights if there are no records or if important decisions or the basis for decisions are not recorded.

Other jurisdictions have, in legislation, a duty to create records, as well as offences and penalties for unauthorized or illegal destruction of records. I’ve called for all of those additions.

Your question is whether or not I would see a workload impact in our office should the government amend the legislation. The answer is yes, but I also think that it can come through policies. It can come through training, and I think that this would happen over time.

There would be an impact, but I think it’s important to the public that there be professional records management to assure that there’s a historical record, good governance and the protection of our information rights.

The other question that you didn’t answer was whether you see any increased workload in responding to public concerns about both protection of privacy and access to information that might flow from your decision to undertake any own-motion investigations in response to that. I just want to clarify — given that you’ve taken a pause — that my question about impacts on workload wasn’t to insinuate that if workload went up, it was a bad idea to change the policies.

E. Denham: The impact of some of our recent complaint investigations and our own-motion investigations, such as the archive study that we did, etc…. There may be.

We may receive more access-to-information requests and challenges around the duty to assist. But I’m actually hoping that our audit processes — instead of doing timeliness audits, we move to duty to assist audits. I think that’s a change in direction, but I’m not certain it needs new resources.

I do need new resources, but again, my bottom-line priority is to serve the citizens of British Columbia who are waiting too long to get the services of our office.

S. Chandra Herbert: I appreciate…. The submission calls, of course, for a bit more support, given that there were many years where you didn’t request anything from the committee. I understand that we saved money then. Your staff worked extra hard then. Now, in essence, because of that — because of the lag, because of the buildup — a bigger request comes in. I think we should always remember that when we try to push off costs, eventually they often catch up with us.

I have some frustration that the committee is being asked to find more money to deal with the increased number of files, complaints, etc., but not because of you. I’m just frustrated that our government is not dealing with these issues faster. You’re stuck in a position where, if we disclosed these issues earlier — if files were created and handed over and there were fewer adjudications, fewer complaints, because the information was just provided — you’d never have to be here making this request.

I don’t know. I would hope that that’s something the committee will consider as well, not that we can make the government do anything. Certainly, one hand has to know what the other hand is doing. In this case, I don’t see that very much.

I just want to thank you for this. I’m an avid user of freedom of information to find out what’s going on, often. I think that the issue of complaints and people’s timeliness to get even their own information…. It’s their information. I just really appreciate how simple you’ve made the system for us to understand here, and the challenges that your investigators and adjudicators are having to deal with.

J. Yap: You mentioned just now, Elizabeth, that citizens are waiting too long. Can you give a sense of how the wait times are here, compared to other jurisdictions? Do you have any comparators?

E. Denham: I’ll start by telling you how long, on average, British Columbians are waiting for our service. I don’t think I touched on that in answers to other questions.

The average waiting time that a file sits in the queue before it’s actively assigned to an investigator is about 24 weeks. The file comes in the door, and it goes into the cupboard that we call Casper the Ghost, sitting over there for about six months, which is much too long.

Then, once it’s actually assigned to an investigator, the file is usually closed within 15 weeks. If it can be informally resolved, it goes fairly quickly.

Is that on par with other jurisdictions in Canada? I could provide you with some specific numbers. I can certainly do that. But I’ll give you a sense of the wait times that I know in some other jurisdictions, such as Alberta,
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Ontario, and the federal Information Commissioner’s office.

In Alberta, there is a wait time, but it’s not 24 weeks. It’s about three months. It’s 90 days, their average wait time. But they also have $2 million more in budget and at least 12 more staff than we do — in Alberta. Ontario has wait times as well, but again, not as lengthy as ours.

I actually will take away my comment about the Information Commissioner federally, because that’s a completely different model — an ombudsman model — and it’s really not relevant. They have horrible delays at the federal level.

But I can give you some specifics if that’s helpful, Mr. Chair. I can provide that.

How do you differentiate or discern what I would characterize as frivolous inquiries or those that are designed more for…? I wouldn’t say academic exercises but simply to pursue something as almost an avocation, as opposed to correcting some wrong or drawing attention to some issue that is genuinely problematic.

How do you do that? You don’t want to be judgmental when people make their inquiries, and then you have your staff handle them. My feeling would be that there must be a number of people that are just doing this not for their own pleasure, exactly, but for nothing that is particularly constructive or helpful to the work that you’re doing or for a free society in general. Can you comment on that?

E. Denham: Thanks for that question. That’s actually part of our business process review and our continuous improvement processes.

We have — maybe if I could say it bluntly — hardened our intake process. We have the ability…. I have the discretion to determine that I’m not going to accept a complaint, for example. I don’t have to take every complaint that comes in the office.

We’ve actually spelled out some criteria now that have to be in place before we take a complaint, accept a complaint — if there’s not sufficient evidence that there’s been a contravention of the privacy rules, if an individual that brings an access appeal hasn’t, obviously, done everything they can with the public body. We often refer complaints back to the organization or the public body to deal with in the first instance. Obviously, if we don’t have the jurisdiction, we’re sending it elsewhere.

I’m going to ask my colleague Jay if he wants to follow up in a bit more detail about how we have hardened those front-end processes to make sure that we’re dealing with files that really are about privacy and access to information and not about something else.

J. Fedorak: The policies have been posted on our website, so you can get some more detail from that if you want to have a look at that.

What we’ve tended to do in the past, from a perspective of providing the highest level of public service, is to open and investigate every complaint that came in. Now what we’re doing is being a little bit more discerning. In cases where the issue is…. I’ll use the term “trivial.” If it’s related to the legislation but it’s of a minor nature, or if an individual’s complaint is multifaceted and some of the facets are substantial but other facets aren’t substantial, we’ll deal with the substantial issues.

Sometimes the complainants want all ten things that they’re complaining about addressed. What we might do in those cases is the non-substantive issues…. Once the substantive issues have been dealt with, the non-substantive issues won’t be dealt with.

If we have a situation…. There are some cases where an individual has made multiple complaints against the same public body or organization of a very similar nature that are almost entirely repetitive, and they’ve fundamentally already been dealt with. Then we’re going to decline to investigate the tiny little nuance that might be just slightly different from what they’ve brought up before.

E. Denham: Just to add one more thing, we have 5,000 individuals coming to our office. I gave some of the statistics in my answer earlier — 5,000 interactions but opened 1,300 investigations and complaints. So you can see that we’re not accepting everything that comes in the door.

I come out of a local government background, and I’ve shared this with other folks as well. From time to time, we’d have what I would call frequent flyers — people that identify themselves partly by a sense of being persecuted or that kind of culture. Those people tend to show up at the doors, perhaps, of organizations like your own where they can see that their personal issues are being addressed by you as kind of a cathartic exercise as opposed to addressing any wrong.

Do you know what I mean? I had those folks in my life in local government quite a few times. I don’t know whether you want to comment on that. It’s almost the psyche of those kinds of folks who clog up our well-meaning systems, like your own, for their own satisfaction, if you will.

E. Denham: We’re here to serve the public. That said, my intake staff are not trained counsellors. So again, I think that our new processes are helping to weed some of that work out — and also for us to focus on what is an access-to-information or protection-of-privacy issue. That’s really important. Again, these new policies are on
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our website. We have written to high-volume applicants so they’re completely aware of the threshold, the limit, that we’re putting on their files.

S. Gibson: I did look at your website. It’s quite impressive, the material. So thank you for that.

S. Chandra Herbert: So I get a sense…. Other officers that have come to us have kind of laid out the track. If the budget stayed flat, if the committee didn’t increase the resources to deal with wait-lists, etc., what would happen in terms of the track of the wait-list? How much would it expand? How much longer would it take to get to files? It would just be helpful for us to get a sense of what would happen to the other side if we don’t do the thing and increase resources.

J. Fedorak: If we don’t get an increase in resources, then based on the current volume of work that we get, assuming it remains steady at the high level that we’ve got, I would say the unacceptable level of wait times that we currently have is going to maintain pretty steady as well. So the people are going to be looking at 24 weeks off into the future.

If there’s a further increase, as we’ve seen over the last few years, then we’re going to see a commensurate increase in the wait times as the backlog piles up. If we didn’t get the increase to cover the mandated costs, then we’re going to have to compensate for those mandated costs by possibly not hiring when one of our staff members leaves so that we can make up that difference. And then, of course, if we don’t hire, our total investigative resources drop, and then the backlog is going to go up.

If we lost one full person, we’re probably looking at the backlog growing by about 70 files a year. That means everybody else waits another month for their investigation to be opened.

E. Denham: Right. The immediate effect would be…. We do have a staff vacancy right now, and if we don’t have an increase, then we will not be able to fill it. So immediately — April 1 — we can’t fill that vacancy.

Seeing none, thank you very much, Ms. Denham, for appearing and giving us your budget submissions, and thank you to your staff for being here to support you as well.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’ll ask for a brief recess, and we’ll move on with our deliberations.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’d like to call the committee back to order and look for a motion to move in camera.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Thank you for the discussion today. We will do our best to compile an outline of the decisions that have been made and a draft report for your review and approval at a forthcoming meeting.

S. Hamilton (Chair): So it ain’t over yet, folks. I’ll look for a motion to adjourn.

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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