Health — Issue No. 10 — Thursday, March 5, 2015 (HTML)

Present: Linda Larson, MLA (Chair); Judy Darcy, MLA (Deputy Chair); Donna Barnett, MLA; Dr. Doug Bing, MLA; Sue Hammell, MLA; Richard T. Lee, MLA; Dr. Darryl Plecas, MLA; Jennifer Rice, MLA; Dr. Moira Stilwell, MLA

1. There not yet being a Chair elected to serve the Committee, the meeting was called to order at 9:02 a.m. by the Committee Clerk.

2. Resolved, that Linda Larson, MLA, be elected Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Health. (Donna Barnett, MLA)

3. Resolved, that Judy Darcy, MLA, be elected Deputy Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Health. (Jennifer Rice, MLA)

4. The Committee reviewed its Terms of Reference and discussed next steps in its consultation process.

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
HEALTH


CONTENTS
Page
Election of Chair and Deputy Chair	161
Committee Terms of Reference	161

L. Larson (Convener): Good morning, everyone. We’ll do a relatively short meeting this morning just to get some ideas about moving forward, but the first item of business is to elect a Chair and a co-Chair. So I will turn this over to Susan to do that. Thank you.

S. Sourial (Committee Clerk): Good morning, Members. As this is our first meeting of the fourth session of the 40th parliament, are there any nominations for the Chair of the committee?

S. Sourial (Committee Clerk): Thanks, Donna. So Donna has nominated Linda as Chair of the committee.

L. Larson (Chair): All right. Now, do we have nominations from the floor for our co-Chair?

L. Larson (Chair): Is it Deputy Chair? Yes, for clarification — thank you, Doug — Deputy Chair.

L. Larson (Chair): You’ve got in front of you a summary. Now, there are some new members to the committee. This is a summary of the written submissions. It is still 200 pages, or roughly that, but it’s better than you having to read all of the entire ones. You can access any of them by going on line. You can certainly access the complete submissions from everybody, but this is a summary for you.

We do really need to make some decisions about moving forward. Certainly, we do need to respond to the submissions that we’ve received and decide which of them are ones that we will be able to make suggestions on or proposals or do a report on and move forward.

J. Darcy (Deputy Chair): Well, I think we should probably…. I mean, unfortunately, we always seem to get started several weeks after the session begins, so we’ve lost some valuable time already. I think we should schedule a meeting as soon as possible where what we do is strictly have a discussion amongst ourselves about what’s the best way to proceed on this. Do we want to do an interim report? What kind of further consultation? What does it look like? We had the four different themes. Does the consultation look different for the different themes, for instance?

About rural health — if we’re going to do further consultations there, it would make sense probably to go out in rural and northern communities to have that consultation. Some of the other topics don’t necessarily lend themselves as much to that.

I think that’s the kind of conversation that we need to have. I think that’s a more fulsome discussion than we’ll be able to have in this very short meeting.

L. Larson (Chair): Because we do have new members on our committee this morning, it would be probably beneficial if you went away with this summary, put them into the four groups and make your own notes in each category. Then we can actually have a discussion about the answers that came back in those four categories.

From there we can decide what we want to do with them — whether it’s just a report, whether there are people we would like to have come in and talk to us as a group to maybe explain more fully what they’ve suggested.

I’ve read it all, and there are some really good ideas in here, but we need to decide as a committee which ones we should move forward on and how we should report out on them. So fairly quickly — I would hope within the next couple of weeks — we could get back together again.

M. Stilwell: That sounds fine. If you don’t mind, I just want to re-raise a point that is related but perhaps parallel and maybe consider at the next meeting as we discuss. The Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth, as you know, is working on youth mental health.
[ Page 162 ]

It would seem an opportunity for the two committees to at least if not work in tandem in partnership on that particular issue…. How do you want to take advantage of that or not? Should we have a subcommittee? Should we have a parallel track with liaising?

Anyway, I just think it’s an opportunity that I haven’t seen happen in the short time I’ve been here, where two committees might be actually talking about the same thing from different ministries, which would be helpful.

L. Larson (Chair): I agree with you, Moira. There is an overlap here, the mental health part of it. There are certainly different ideas about how to deal with youth versus seniors or older individuals who have issues.

There’s definitely an overlap there, and I’m sure some of those ideas would work on both sides for both committees. So I think it’s a great idea.

I think that we probably should, either as a whole committee to whole committee on that one topic only, and then perhaps after that, break it down to maybe just a couple of the committee members from here sitting down with a couple of their committee members to keep track of how they’re moving forward.

Now, can I ask the question? Are there any of you here that are on that committee?

We have two, okay. So we area in a position, then, where we can actually, perhaps, get together as a group.

S. Hammell: And I have the critic area of mental health and addiction. I don’t see why there would be any break at 19. Mental health is mental health, no matter where you are on the spectrum and your age level. It seems to me there would be some great stuff that we might be able to do if we looked at the whole continuum of care.

L. Larson (Chair): I agree with you. Mental health issues do not start when you get to be 60 years old. They’re quite often part of the makeup of somebody from the very beginning of their life and all the way through.

I think that’s a great idea. If that’s all right with you, Judy and I will get together and talk to the other committee and see if they’re willing to meet with us.

R. Lee: The term of reference No. 4, “Consider health capital funding options.” Are we going to discuss the general funding options or specific projects? Because probably locally they have different situations in terms of capital funding.

L. Larson (Chair): Yes. Okay. We will do something about that one too. Because we have these submissions, and in fairness to the people who have made them, we need to deal with this first. But we will definitely…. That will be something the committee can discuss at a later date.

J. Darcy (Deputy Chair): This was referred to us in the last session — I think from Finance, I believe. It wasn’t about specific capital projects. It was definitely not about people then coming and pitching to this committee why this hospital or that hospital should be built. It wasn’t that. It was a broader approach to funding for capital projects in health care.

J. Darcy (Deputy Chair): Financing models, I think — public, private, mixed. I think that was the issue. So when the committee had discussed it previously, we said that we’ve got a lot of work to do on the substantive health issues, direct health care issues, that we’ve been consulting about and that we would come to that at a later point.

R. Lee: Yeah, I think I remember that discussion. Of course, I agree that we should deal with item 1 first, but I think we should, for the terms of reference, spend time in that discussion as well.

L. Larson (Chair): Yes, we will, definitely. We have discussed that. We do need to take a good look at those terms of reference too. But we wanted to get this item that we’ve already put out to the public off the table first, or in process — do that one, and then we’ll have a good discussion on those terms of reference and where we want to go next. But I really feel that in fairness to the public that have put in submissions, we need to deal with that first.

J. Darcy (Deputy Chair): On that same topic, I think our feeling was that when we did get to that point, we wanted a briefing on what those options are so that we know what it is we’re supposed to be considering, because it wasn’t one that had come from discussions here. It was something that the Finance Minister had recommended.

J. Darcy (Deputy Chair): We definitely would need some briefing and background. On the same issues of briefing and background, I think of the 400 submissions we received, there were many on the issue of dying with dignity. It’s not clear to me, given that the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled, what the role of the province is at this time. I think it would helpful for the committee to have a briefing from the Ministry of Health on that issue.
[ Page 163 ]

We will certainly be receiving…. I’ve certainly heard from lots of folks. The committee heard from lots of folks. I think we’re going to need to decide what further consultation we want to do, of course, but I think it would be helpful for us to have a technical briefing, a background briefing, from the Ministry of Health on just what the obligation of the province is in that 12-month period that the Supreme Court has given the federal government.

L. Larson (Chair): Right. I think that’s a good idea. Susan, do you have a comment on that?

S. Sourial (Committee Clerk): Yes. If I could just suggest to committee members that what we could do is have the Chair and Deputy Chair meet. If committee members have suggestions of a workplan for the committee, funnel them through the Chair and Deputy Chair. Chair, Deputy Chair and I and research will meet, put together a workplan and present it to the committee. Then the committee can start to implement the workplan or amend the workplan. Included in that workplan would be any briefings that the committee feels it would need.

L. Larson (Chair): On that topic, as you go through this you will find that a huge amount of the submissions are on that one topic. If I can ask you to concentrate on the other suggestions that have come in on our four questions…. We certainly have got the other ones summarized, and we’ll count them and, like you say, deal with them on a workplan. But so we can move forward on these submissions, if you would concentrate on the four questions and the submissions that came in that specifically deal with the four questions we put out, we can deal with those ones first.

S. Sourial (Committee Clerk): I also wanted to mention to members that what you have in front of you is a summary of the recommendations contained in the submissions. The submissions are all available through a members’ database.

If you need assistance in accessing or manipulating or working in that database, please let me know. I’d be happy to sit down and do a one-on-one with you, either on your laptops or your iPads or however you want to access it. As long as you have Internet access, you can access that database.

Another question that, again, will be brought to the committee is whether we want to post the submissions on the committee’s website.

L. Larson (Chair): As you’re going through this, and you see a submission that is of interest, and you want to look up the entire submission, then please go on line and do that or ask Susan for some help to get the….

Some of the submissions were many pages long, and they have been summarized. If you want more detail on the summaries, please ask for help or go on line to get that.

Is everybody okay with that? Anyone else have anything to add? This in itself took me about four hours to go through, so it’s not too bad. Just go through and make your notes and summarize and so on.

Like I say, the one where we do have a large amount of right-to-die requests, just kind of slot that in the back of your mind. We will ask for help from the Minister of Health or whoever we need to when we start to deal with that.

L. Larson (Chair): It’s not bad. We will put another meeting together as quickly as we can. I’m going to say within two weeks. Let’s try and get through this if you can — summarize, highlight. I’ve used a lot of highlighter.

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Chair:	Linda Larson (Boundary-Similkameen BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Judy Darcy (New Westminster NDP)
Members:	Donna Barnett (Cariboo-Chilcotin BC Liberal)
	Dr. Doug Bing (Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows BC Liberal)
	Sue Hammell (Surrey–Green Timbers NDP)
	Richard T. Lee (Burnaby North BC Liberal)
	Dr. Darryl Plecas (Abbotsford-South BC Liberal)
	Jennifer Rice (North Coast NDP)
	Bill Routley (Cowichan Valley NDP)
	Dr. Moira Stilwell (Vancouver-Langara BC Liberal)
Clerk:	Susan Sourial

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON HEALTH

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
HEALTH