Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 94 — Wednesday, May 4, 2016 (HTML)

Present: Wm. Scott Hamilton, MLA (Chair); Carole James, MLA (Deputy Chair); Dan Ashton, MLA; Robin Austin, MLA; Eric Foster, MLA; Simon Gibson, MLA; George Heyman, MLA; Jackie Tegart, MLA; John Yap, MLA

2. The following witnesses appeared before the Committee and answered questions regarding financial and operational updates.

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 Ombudsperson	2163
J. Chalke
Office of the Conflict of Interest Commissioner	2170
P. Fraser
Committee Workplan and Meeting Schedule	2173

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good morning, everyone. Today we’re going to start our round with our statutory officers — financial and operational updates. First on the list is Mr. Jay Chalke, our Ombudsperson.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Kate, correct me if I’m wrong. I think we have 45 minutes — yes.

However you want to use that time, bearing in mind that, hopefully, we’ll have an opportunity for some questions. I will just simply turn the floor over to you to acknowledge and recognize your guests, and we’ll go from there.

J. Chalke: Good morning, again. Thank you for this opportunity to talk to you this morning about the Office of the Ombudsperson.

With me this morning are Deputy Ombudsperson David Paradiso; the executive director of investigations, Bruce Clarke; and a face familiar to all of you, the executive director of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten.

I’ll start by channelling Mr. Van Swieten, who, as you know, ably supports four officers of the Legislature. What you may not know is he’s also a huge Star Wars fan.

I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you at this point in the year, in addition to our opportunity in the fall, about our budget.

I’m well aware that this round of meetings and hearings that you are holding adds to an already heavy workload for your committee. I trust that you find these spring discussions useful and, if there’s anything we can do in the years to come to make this round of sessions better and more useful to you, that you’ll let myself and, either individually or collectively, the rest of the officers of the Legislature know what we can do to provide greater value.

I also want to say to all the members of the committee that I’d be pleased to meet with you and, if you wish, your constituency assistants to provide further background on services provided by our office. Sometimes your work in your constituencies brings you into contact with complainants who also may be people who seek assistance from our office.

I’m conscious that our time is tight, so I’ll get right to it. I’ll be framing my remarks around three main themes — firstly, a brief background on the purpose of our office and how we got to where we are now; second, a description of the three key types of ombudsperson investigations that we do and where I see those going; and, third, an overview of our 2016-2021 strategic plan that was tabled by the Speaker on Monday, copies of which you have in front of you this morning.

First some background on our office. Think of it as a ten-minute primer into B.C.’s independent voice for fairness.

The Ombudsperson Act was passed in 1977, as stated in this building during second reading by then Attorney General Garde Gardom:

“With the establishment of an ombudsman in British Columbia, we will have a person who can represent the conscience of the state and provide additional service for our citizens, move aside the bureaucratic roadblocks, wade through the red tape, approach the unapproachable and recommend improvements to administrative practice and administrative procedure.

“Government and regulation, order and edict, law and bylaw and the rules and the roadmaps that are constantly being imposed upon society today obviously illustrate the need for a citizen champion independent of the civil service, independent from the system, independent of the administrator and independent of politics, to wade through administrative hurdles, to cope with crises and to recommend betterment, as well as to defend against unjustified and uncalled-for criticism.”

The office then opened its doors in 1979 and immediately started its work in earnest. It very quickly encountered challenges by government and others to its jurisdiction and its approach. There were challenges to whether the office could see certain records, whether particular public bodies were within the jurisdiction of the ombudsperson — or ombudsman at that time — and whether certain kinds of decisions or activities by those public bodies could be reviewed by the ombudsman. The office pressed forward a mere five years after the office came into being. A case on many of these fundamental issues had made its way all the way to the highest court in the country.

In 1984, the Supreme Court of Canada decided the landmark case of B.C. Development Corporation V. Friedmann. The case was at the time, and remains to this day, the leading judicial statement of the function of Canadian ombuds offices. So what did the court decide? Well, it was a ringing endorsement of the office and one that has shaped the work not only of the British Columbia ombuds office but also our counterparts across Canada. Indeed, the case is cited around the world. In fact, last week I saw it quoted in a new report issued last month by an American ombudsman.

It’s worth spending a moment on key parts of what Mr. Justice Dickson wrote in delivering the unanimous
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judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Dickson said:

“The traditional controls over the implementation and administration of governmental policies and programs — namely, the Legislature, the executive and the courts — are neither completely suited nor entirely capable of providing the supervision a burgeoning bureaucracy demands. The inadequacy of legislative response to complaints arising from the day-to-day operation of government is not seriously disputed. The demands on members of legislative bodies is such that they are naturally unable to give careful attention to the workings of the entire bureaucracy. Moreover, they often lack the investigative resources necessary to follow up properly any matter they do elect to pursue….

“The limitations of courts are also well known. Litigation can be costly and slow. Only the most serious cases of administrative abuse are, therefore, likely to find their way into the courts. More importantly, there is simply no remedy at law available in a great many cases.”

“It’s quite possible nowadays for a citizen’s right to be accidentally crushed by the vast juggernaut of the government’s administrative machine. In this age of the welfare state, thousands of administrative decisions are made each year by governments or their agencies, many of them by lowly officials, and if some of these decisions are arbitrary or unjustified, there is no easy way for the ordinary citizen to gain redress.”

“The Ombudsman represents society’s response to these problems of potential abuse and of supervision. His unique characteristics render him capable of addressing many of the concerns left untouched by the traditional bureaucratic control devices. He is impartial. His services are free, and available to all.

“Because he often operates informally, his investigations do not impede the normal processes of government. Most importantly, his powers of investigation can bring to light cases of bureaucratic maladministration that would otherwise pass unnoticed. The Ombudsman ‘can bring the lamp of scrutiny to otherwise dark places, even over the resistance of those who would draw the blinds.’

“On the other hand, he may find the complaint groundless, not a rare occurrence, in which event, his impartial and independent report, absolving the public authority, may well serve to enhance the moral and restore the self-confidence of the public employees impugned.

“In short, the powers granted to the Ombudsman allow him to address administrative problems that the courts, the Legislature and the executive cannot effectively resolve.”

“Read as a whole, the Ombudsman Act of British Columbia provides an efficient procedure through which complaints may be investigated, bureaucratic errors and abuses brought to light and corrective action initiated. It represents the paradigm of remedial legislation…consistent with the unique role the Ombudsman is intended to fulfil.”

There is much more I could quote from the reasons in that case, but you no doubt get the flavour. It’s a critically important case, not just for us in the B.C. office but, as I say, for ombuds offices across Canada and indeed around the world.

It has stood the test of time. We turn to this case frequently in our work to guide us.

With that decision in hand, the office has, over the past 36 years, received hundreds of thousands of inquiries and complaints, investigated tens of thousands of matters and issued 87 public and special reports to the Legislature. We have assisted so many British Columbians who otherwise would have been, in the words cited in the Friedmann case: “crushed by the juggernaut of government.”

The breadth of the mandate of the office is set out in a schedule to the Ombudsman Act. Not all of the schedule was brought into force in 1979; rather, the schedule was brought in, in phases. First, in 1979, the provincial government ministries and Crown corporations, and then in the 1990s, the portions of the schedule covering local governments, schools, universities, colleges, professional regulators and others were gradually brought into force.

The 1990s expansion to our jurisdiction provided British Columbians adversely affected by administrative unfairness with recourse to us for a far wider range of public bodies, but at the same time, it severely strained the capacity of our organization to respond.

That strain reached a crisis point some 13 years ago following very significant budget reductions imposed on the officers of the Legislature. The office took a number of austerity measures to cope with the reductions, but not surprisingly, services were impacted.

Slowly, the office recovered from those reductions. However, resourcing remains very tight for what is, from the perspective of the range of public bodies under our jurisdiction, one of the broadest jurisdictions of an ombuds office anywhere in Canada.

Our small organization faces ongoing challenges in terms of effectively serving the volume of complaints, marshalling our internal knowledge management, developing and retaining staff expertise and addressing the great many issues of administrative unfairness that arise in public authorities under our jurisdiction. We have to be very organized, efficient and constantly triage our work to ensure that we are best using our resources.

I want to turn now to describe the three main types of Ombudsperson work and our investigations, and then I’ll turn to our strategic plan.

First, our main stock-in-trade: the investigation of complaints from individuals. We receive about 8,000 inquiries a year, and we open about 2,000 investigation files a year and close a similar number.

As of 2015, ranked by the number of complaints we receive, our top ten authorities, by volume, would be — and these are in order from one to ten: Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation, Ministry of Children and Family Development, Ministry of Justice, B.C. Hydro, ICBC, Workers Compensation Board, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Finance, B.C. Housing and Fraser Health.

Being on that list doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of their administration. One thing all those organizations appear to share in common is that they’re large-volume public service organizations. For example, ICBC completes over five million transactions with British
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Columbians every year. It also means that many of these public bodies are delivering vital public services where the capacity of a member of the public to withstand a potentially unfair decision is very limited.

While we have jurisdiction over well in excess of 2,000 public authorities, the complaints are far from evenly distributed. Just 25 public authorities — the ten I mentioned and another 15 — comprise about 75 percent of the complaints to our office. That distribution pattern, I believe, affords us some opportunities that I’ll talk about in a moment.

By category of public authority, the overall distribution of complaints looks like this: ministries, a little over half, 54 percent; Crown corporations, 17 percent; commissions and boards, 10 percent; local governments, 7 percent; health authorities, 7 percent; 2 percent each for professional associations and for schools and school boards. The remainder fit into the last 1 percent, most notably colleges, universities and libraries.

In carrying out investigations into individual complaints, we are — this is critical to our role — impartial investigators. As is often said in our trade, we’re neither an advocate for the complainant nor an apologist for the public body. In determining whether a complaint is substantiated, we apply a number of tests set out in section 23 of the Ombudsperson Act. These go beyond traditional legal concepts, such as negligence, to include concepts such as whether the public authority acted in a manner that is unjust, oppressive, based on irrelevant grounds, done for an improper purpose or even the very general “otherwise wrong.”

At the end of an investigation, we can recommend to the public body a resolution of the complaint. We do not have the power to order a public body to follow our recommendations. As the Supreme Court of Canada recognized in the Friedmann case:

“It is important to note that the Ombudsman has no power directly to force any governmental authority to remedy a wrong he uncovers. The act does, however, create a variety of mechanisms whereby the Ombudsman may move the government to implement any decision he reaches after an investigation. He may recommend corrective action to an authority who must then notify him of what action will be taken, if any, and where no action is planned the reasons why.

“If the Ombudsman remains unsatisfied, he may report the matter to the Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council and to the Legislative Assembly. He may comment publicly on any case where he deems it appropriate.

“It is these sections that ultimately give persuasive force to the Ombudsman’s conclusions: they create the possibility of dialogue between governmental authorities and the Ombudsman; they facilitate legislative oversight of the workings of various government departments and other subordinate bodies; and they allow the Ombudsman to marshal public opinion behind appropriate causes.”

While this soft power — the power to propose rather than impose — concerns some, I find much to like in the views of former Ombudsman Stephen Owen, who once wrote that the inability to force change may be the central strength of the office. “It requires that its recommendations be based on a thorough investigation of all facts, scrupulous consideration of all perspectives and vigorous analysis of all issues.” This application of reason produces results that are more powerful than can be achieved through coercion. A coercive process may produce reluctant change in a particular instance, but it creates a loser who will be unlikely to embrace change in the future. By contrast, change that results from a reasoning process changes a way of thinking, and the result endures to the benefit of future users.”

The second type of Ombudsperson investigations are systemic investigations and reports. Over the past decade, we’ve developed the practice of releasing one or two of these reports a year. These are the subject of careful and rigorous selection and involve a significant commitment of our resources. The purpose is to identify systemic administrative unfairness and propose solutions that potentially could benefit all British Columbians who’ve encountered a recurring problem or issue with a public authority.

The office has produced a wide range of systemic reports over the past few years on issues such as the protection of riparian areas; private career training institutions; drinking water quality; delays in reconsiderations of income and disability assistance denials; and our most recent report, released in March of this year, on bylaw enforcement by local governments.

The most well known of these systemic investigations over the past few years was the series of reports that the office did on issues facing seniors in the home support, residential care and assisted living sectors. These were major undertakings and resulted in about 200 recommendations over four reports. Sometimes a public authority’s implementation of the recommendations we make in our systemic reports can take years, and the seniors reports are a good example. While Best of Care (Part 2) was issued in 2012, and the Ministry of Health accepted virtually all of the recommendations, it was not until 2014 that the Ministry of Health started their four-year implementation plan that will carry on until 2018.

In the past few months, we’ve seen some progress on some of these recommendations. This session’s Bill 16, Community Care and Assisted Living Amendment Act, responded to some of our recommendations about assisted living and residential care. The seniors advocate’s recent directory of residential care facilities made public a number of indicia about residential care facilities that we had, back in 2009, recommended be published. We said then that the Ministry of Health should: “develop a single provincial website for the public reporting on useful information about residential care facilities. The information should be updated regularly and organized in a way that makes it easy for seniors, their families and other members of the public to search for and compare facilities.”
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I’m glad to see what the seniors advocate has done — frankly, stepping into the breach of what the Ministry of Health had not got around to — but there’s a great deal more to be accomplished.

We publish monitoring reports concerning the implementation of systemic reports, typically for five years following publication of the initial report. In this way, legislators, non-governmental organizations and the public can see how public bodies are doing in living up to their promises to implement our recommendations.

The third type of ombudsperson work is in the area of preventative ombudship. This involves applying our expertise in administrative fairness to assist public authorities proactively to address fairness issues. The idea is to prevent problems from arising in the first place.

This has great potential to benefit members of the public, since their dealings with government will look, feel and be more fair. It benefits the public body because a more harmonious relationship with clients and customers can be more efficient and satisfying than an acrimonious one. It can benefit our office by addressing common problems of unfairness once and for all, and thus, in the long run, allow us to reallocate resources to serve people facing other problems.

This is where that uneven distribution of complaints that I spoke of earlier can, I believe, work to everyone’s advantage. Our preventative ombudship work can focus on a relatively few number of public authorities, and we can make a measurable impact for us, those public bodies and, most importantly, the public.

In my view, this preventative work is underdeveloped, not through lack of interest in our office or in public bodies, but due to resource pressure combined with some anxiety about needing to maintain distance. I believe the latter concern is manageable, with early and transparent communication with the authority. The former concern, resources, is the bigger issue. We will be working on this over the next few months and, by fall, will have scoped out what, at a minimum, a pilot project would look like and cost.

I want to now turn to our 2016-21 Strategic Plan that was tabled by the Speaker on Monday, copies of which are in front of you. This plan is the product of in-person and web-based consultation with public authorities, the general public and non-governmental organizations, our staff and legislators over the past couple of months.

As for legislators, you will recall that I wrote to all members of this committee and the Special Committee to Appoint an Ombudsperson to invite members of either committee to speak to the Chair or Deputy Chair if you had any suggestions or input. I then met with the Chairs and Deputy Chairs of the two committees and received excellent input from all four. Thank you to all members of this committee for your suggestions and, to the Chair and the Deputy Chair, for taking the time to provide us with that feedback.

The purpose of this strategic plan is to provide a high-level description of the direction the organization intends to take over the next five years, consistent, of course, with our foundational mandate document, the Ombudsperson Act. It will integrate well with the annual rolling three-year service plan and budgets that we present to this committee. You can think of the strategic plan as describing the what we are going to do, while the service and operational plans describe the when and how those plans are to be realized.

During our internal and external consultations, you reviewed the description of our vision, mandate and guiding principles. Our vision statement continues to resonate very well, so we decided to leave it as is: British Columbia’s independent voice for fairness. You will see, at page 4 of the strategic plan, that we’ve unpacked that vision statement, because there’s a lot contained in those six words.

Our current state assessments — there are two in the plan, one internal and one external — highlight our challenges, our strengths and our opportunities. I want to acknowledge the support the committee provided to address one of our main challenges: the volume of our inquiries and the resulting impact on our timeliness. The funding you provided for one employee will play a part in our three-year plan to gradually reduce our backlog of cases awaiting assignment to an investigator.

I have set out five goals in the plan. Each goal has two or three associated objectives. We then identify, at the back of the plan, six strategies that will serve to achieve these goals. Each strategy has been designed so it addresses multiple goals. Each strategy addresses at least two and some as many as all five goals.

While the language of goals, objectives and strategies can be pretty enervating, I’m actually quite excited about the plan. I passionately believe that if we achieve what we set out to do in this plan, we’ll have a service and an organization that really delivers on our vision statement.

The six strategies described at page 16 set out the general approach we’re going to pursue in order to achieve the outcomes in the plan. The six strategies and the underlying questions they are answering are: one, to develop a public outreach strategy focused on underserved British Columbians. In other words, who aren’t we reaching, and how do we fix that?

Second, to build a model of preventative ombudship focusing on proactive engagement. That is, how do we prevent administrative unfairness arising in the first place?

Three, review our internal processes to reduce delays in service. Are there changes we can implement to accelerate our service without impacting investigation quality?

Four, review and improve internal policies and knowledge management frameworks to enhance service. How can we capitalize on our extensive expertise in
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administrative unfairness to improve our quality and productivity?

Five, maximize impact by applying a systemic approach wherever possible. In other words, how can we help remedy the most significant problems of unfairness in public authorities and thus derive the biggest benefit for the largest number of people while also ensuring that the everyday problems of administrative unfairness are also addressed?

And six, develop and implement a revised professional and career development framework. In other words, how can we continue to attract the best and the brightest to develop them and keep them?

I could go on at some length about each of the goals, objectives and strategies, but recognizing the time constraints this morning, I’m going to focus on just one of particular relevance to legislators that is identified at page 12 of the plan.

You will see objective B attached to goal 3. I believe it is important that my office improve our linkages with the Legislative Assembly to enhance the consideration of reports we table. One way to do that is through legislative committee consideration of our reports. The reports of two of the officers of the Legislature — the Auditor General and the Representative for Children and Youth — are, by virtue of the terms of reference of two legislative committees, referred automatically to those committees, the Public Accounts Committee and the Children and Youth Committee, respectively.

In contrast, our reports are tabled and, other than our annual report, receive no further formal consideration by legislator as a matter of regular process. Our reports are the tip of the iceberg of the work we do addressing issues of fairness in public administration across the province. When we publicly report a case, we do so because we believe that the matter deserves a broader discussion, beyond the specific public authority in question.

For that reason, I believe a more robust public consideration of those reports and the response by government or other public body would be in the public interest. Given the broad range of reports that we issue, I rather expect that the example of the Auditor General’s reports is perhaps more apt than those of the Representative for Children and Youth, whose reports are more tightly focused on one area of public administration. But there are, no doubt, useful lessons that can be drawn from both examples, and there may be other models to consider.

This idea is not new, and from what I’ve been able to glean, it’s not a particularly contentious proposal. But the detail seems to have bedevilled previous attempts to get it done.

I look forward to working with legislators to move this forward, perhaps so that it can be established in the next parliament, following the 2017 general election, when the mandates of all the legislative committees are established anew.

That, I think, completes my remarks. I’d be pleased to answer any questions that the committee has.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Chalke. I appreciate your taking the time to present. I’ll go to Eric first.

You started off by saying that you had 8,000 inquiries and 2,000 investigations, and then broke down for the list of the ministries. Essentially, you launched investigations into a quarter of the inquiries you’ve had.

Would that quarter…? As you went down through the list, would it be representative of all the ministries? Would there be, like, 25 percent of the inquiries about social development…? Would 25 percent of those inquiries go to investigation? Or would there be a higher percentage of some of the others? Or would it just sort of follow through?

J. Chalke: If I understand your question, it is that whether the investigative files that we open reflect the distribution I was speaking about earlier. Is that correct?

J. Chalke: More or less, I think. I mean, we do have an early resolution program that focuses on files that are within our jurisdiction, where what really needs to happen is resolution in a couple of days, rather than a long investigation that may find unfairness but may not be the best way to help somebody.

Some of those deal with individuals who are vulnerable, who need immediate assistance, and so would be served by that early resolution program, but they would be in those statistics.

The answer would be that that wouldn’t affect the statistical answer. It may affect how we deal with them, whether we deal with some cases that, say, deal with the Ministry of Social Development more through the early resolution program. Even that is a fairly small percentage compared to the amount that go into full investigation.

I think if we were to go to our offices and look at the number of inquiries that we get from our constituents, it would probably follow that same order fairly closely — jumping around a little bit, I guess, from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Although, I would suggest that, in some of the ministries, we find that we have a much higher percentage of requests that really aren’t all that well founded. That was why I wanted to ask the question. I wondered if by the time they got to you, was that following. But you’re saying that, pretty much, that 25 percent is more or less….
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J. Chalke: Let me describe, a little bit, what we do with the 8,000 calls that come to us — or inquiries or complaints that are made to us — before we decide to start an investigation. I mentioned before that we triage our work quite thoroughly.

The first thing we try to determine is whether or not this is a complaint about something we have jurisdiction over. We get lots of complaints about, say for example, the federal government. We get complaints about people’s cell phone bills — things like that.

That’s our first step. We refer those people to others who can serve them. There are a network of people who will assist those people. So we do that quite quickly and quite efficiently, right out of the gate in the initial call — same day. Say, if we have a veteran who is concerned about their veteran’s benefits, we can link them up with the Veterans Ombudsman right away.

The next question. Assuming that the complaint is about a public body that we have jurisdiction over, the next filter that we put a complaint through is: have they exhausted all their remedies internal to the organization to resolve the complaint with the public body in question?

Our expectation is that, generally speaking, people will take the steps that exist in a public body to revisit or seek a change to a decision that they’re unhappy with. We have a thorough knowledge of what those steps are, so we’re able to say: “Have you taken step X? Or have you pursued option Y?” We try to ensure that they have.

It’s not a bar. Sometimes we are able to inquire or commence an investigation even though the person has not chosen to do that, but generally speaking, we reserve our resources for people who have exhausted all those internal remedies that the public body has.

Those two steps, generally speaking…. That’s the big reduction from the 8,000 to the 2,000. There are some other filters that we’ll apply before we decide to open an investigation.

Having done all that, then the matter is scheduled for assignment to an investigator.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. On the issue of the tabling of reports, it’s certainly something I’d support around the table. I think the opportunity to give more profile and to get more depth to the reports than simply tabling them in the Legislature is a good opportunity, so it’s certainly something that I would support us working on and looking at opportunities to do that.

I just wanted to ask a question around the budget issues and preparation, I guess. Really, the point of these meetings is to provide us with some preparation and better knowledge of the work before to we get to budget requests.

You mentioned the one additional staff that you’ve been able to hire with the budget change. I just wondered what that’s doing to the backlog — what the actual impact is of that in the office — and how the budget’s going, as well, for the investigation and for the referral. Because again, that’s another additional piece that you’ve taken on that will impact what comes forward in the fall.

J. Chalke: In terms of the “file awaiting assignment” list…. We’re only now five weeks into the fiscal year, so it’s early days yet, and it’s a three-year plan to reduce that list down to something that would see a file assigned within a couple of weeks. I said two weeks, and that’s really our goal at the end of this.

We have seen a reduction applying some resources to the back part of last year and first month of this year. I think when I was here in November the “file awaiting assignment” list was north of 550, and now we have it down under 500. We’re continuing to work on that. So early indications are that, not surprisingly, applying the resources to that helps.

But I also want to…. I said to this committee that I didn’t expect this to be a resource answer only. This year we’re going to be undertaking a process review of what happens from the time a complainant contacts us to the time an investigator starts an investigation. So during that period of time, can we make that process work better for complainants?

Particularly, one of my things that I want to see achieved is that, if we come to a determination that we’re not going to commence an investigation, how can we get that information back to the individual as quickly as possible? Because then they can pursue other options, right?

I think that’s work yet to be done, but I think to combine the resources and that business process review will certainly help us. I’ll report back when we’re a little further into the fiscal year, when I’m back in the fall, as to where we’re going on that.

In terms of the budget, we came in, actually, at the end of last year, a little bit underspent. Basically, we came in a little over $200,000 underspent. We were almost bang on spending on referral. We reallocated staff from our general operations to work on the referral, and it took a little longer to backfill those staff, so we had a bit of salary slippage in those base positions, so we ended up a little bit underspent on our base operations. We ended up, in essence, between 96 and 97 per cent of our overall budget — as amended by this committee partway through — fully spent.

S. Gibson: This is a really interesting document. I really appreciate it. It’s very well done. I had the opportunity once to teach a systems course, and some of the stuff here…. So I just want to compliment you on this.
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A couple of quick questions, one a bit more theoretical. Ideally, in a perfect world, we shouldn’t need an ombudsperson, right?

Ideally, if our systems were working well, if our bureaucracies were at peak efficiency and responsive and handling inquiries equitably and transparently and expeditiously, we wouldn’t need an ombudsperson.

This is not a rhetorical question, but how do you strike that balance between providing the service that we value as government and at the same time — and don’t hear this as a criticism — ending up not being sort of a make-work program, at times? You know I mean that respectfully. How do you avoid making work where it’s not needed, at times? Don’t hear it as a criticism. I’m just wondering about that.

J. Chalke: In the future state you’ve premised — right? — I think we can imagine a situation where that, theoretically, could be true. I can tell you that we could remedy a number of issues of unfairness in public administration and still have a number of significant others to deal with.

Our investigators are alive to the question of identifying for my consideration potential systemic investigations that we’re to do. Each year we sit down and do a plan of which one or two systemic matters that we take on might be. We never lack for issues.

But your question does go to, I think, the initiative that we’ve identified here to make a more robust feature of our office this notion of preventative work. I think it is something that…. Preventing problems from arising in the first place is, for sure, preferable for everybody, to us or having somebody who is unhappy and then may turn to us but may not turn to us. There are many, many people who are not necessarily well served by a public body, but they don’t turn to us. They don’t get help. Our preventative work, because it won’t know which of those people are coming to us and which aren’t, will help everybody.

My view is our number one stock-in-trade, the thing we do, is to investigate complaints, but I think we can also make a feature of applying the expertise we have in administrative fairness and helping organizations develop systems that will prevent problems from arising in the first place. Maybe that will be a contribution to your future land.

A supplementary question that actually relates to that is you deal well, I think, with frivolous matters. My question to you last year was: how do you handle that? I thought you addressed those well.

What about the other facet of that, where you have, almost, an Ombudsperson client. They have some things in common. They’re people that are drawn to calling you. At the same time, you don’t really know how to handle them, at times, because they’ve got that persona that automatically seeks redress at any moment.

Certainly, myself, when I was on city council in Abbotsford, there was a certain kind of people that would contact me with issues. Their concerns were similar to other people, but the way they addressed them and the way they brought them forward in a combative style, seeking redress for themselves, often in quite an animated fashion…. Those are the kind of people, I think, that come to you.

How do you avoid attracting a certain kind of complainant, where other people who have similar complaints that probably should be addressed never knock on your door?

J. Chalke: I guess I would answer that two ways. One is approach, and the second is role.

On the approach question, as I said, we triage those initial contacts quite thoroughly. I think that we are able, through that method, to identify those cases that are valid and require investigation, whereas there may be, for whatever reason, a situation where someone has come to us but their matter doesn’t merit investigation. That’s kind of the approach question.

The role is that statute provides us with a lot of off-ramps that are in our discretion. The other aspect to role is we say very clearly to people calling us: “We are not your advocate. We’re an impartial investigator. That’s our job. If you want an advocate, you can go get one, but you don’t get it here.”

That’s a difficult distinction for some, but it’s essential to our role. We view ourselves and our credibility…. Because we don’t have order-making power, our credibility and our success in convincing public bodies to change their ways derives from the strength of the reasoning and the thoroughness of our investigation.

We’re basically quite dispassionate about that aspect of our work. We do try to help people who do come to us and try to direct them to somebody who can help them. But we’re not going to conduct an investigation just because somebody comes to us.

S. Gibson: A real quick one. Sometimes I get concerned about overlap. Yesterday the Auditor General for Local Government advised a bunch of us that were present that water quality would be an area he’d be investigating. You mentioned water quality. The Auditor General also investigates water quality. Our Ministry of Environment investigates water quality.

How do you avoid overlap with other agencies? I think this could lead to inefficient use of limited resources.

J. Chalke: We very much work hard to avoid overlap. When a new public body emerges — the Auditor General for Local Government or the seniors advocate, things
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that are relatively new — we have to work with them for a while to understand best how they’re going to operationalize their role and how it might relate to ours.

With respect to some of the organizations that have been around longer — the Auditor General and the representatives — our staff stay in touch with one another, and we try to avoid any overlap that way. But it’s also important to recognize that just because two oversight bodies have jurisdiction over the same public authority doesn’t necessarily make it impermissible overlap.

For example, I mentioned before our job is to be an impartial investigator. The representative’s job — sometimes, her job is to be an advocate. We can both have jurisdiction in respect to the Ministry of Children and Families, but we’re doing different things.

My only comments are that I think the world that Simon referred to earlier in terms of the necessity for your office…. I think that world Sir Thomas More referred to in the 1500s was utopian. I’m still looking for that.

In the meantime, thank you very for the work that you do. Just one quick comment. I love the simplicity of this report. You can pick your adjective, but I really appreciate the fact that it’s very easy to read and well laid out.

G. Heyman: I just add to the Chair’s comments that perhaps having an ombudsperson is part of being a perfect world. [Laughter.]

J. Chalke: Lovely. Well, I expect that we won’t get to the perfect world for the balance of my six-year term, so I think we’re good. But if I can get us to work us out of a job as quickly as I can, I’ll keep that in mind.

It’s certainly a reflection of what I would describe as a sophisticated, modern democracy that values openness and transparency and accountability. If those are things that really are part and parcel of a perfect world, then I guess we are part of it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’ll welcome Mr. Paul Fraser, our Conflict of Interest Commissioner.

Mr. Fraser, always a pleasure. I’m sorry we’re running a couple of minutes late. I don’t know if anybody has any place to go 45 minutes from now, but maybe we’ll give you as much time as you’d like to take in that period. The floor is yours.

P. Fraser: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. With me, of course, is Linda Pink, who is our executive coordinator, who basically runs the place and will be able to answer any of the really tough questions. That’s why she’s here.

When we come to ever have to deal with the issue of succession in our office, I expect that the Finance Committee can look forward to a budget that includes for me a trip to Krypton to try to replicate Linda’s contribution, which has been so considerable over the years, in so many places and also in our office.

The fact that we’re here today is a tribute to the committee. I hope that the idea that you had of having the semi-annual visit, or at least a stop-by, has been of some assistance to the committee, to my colleagues and to us in terms of being able to give you some indication of what the office is actually up to, rather than saving it all for one event, which is to discuss budgets going forward in circumstances where perhaps the committee hasn’t had the benefit of knowing what is happening in the various offices of the various officers of the Legislature.

So it’s a pleasure to be here today and to speak to you a bit about what our office is doing; what it has underway; what its aspirations are for this current operating year; and to discuss briefly, in the handout that you’ve got, what our financial situation is at this moment in time.

As you all know, our office is the smallest in the universe of officers’ offices, so the budget is more easily explained and understood, at least at this end, because of that.

This office has been on budget, I’m pleased to say, for the last eight years, except for two years. It was the year of the decision with respect to the complaint with regard to the Premier and the B.C. Rail issues of long ago, where we had an overrun simply because we were involved in having to employ extra human resources in the form of a guest commissioner and some professional staff. That’s the difficulty that we face in our work every year in terms of being able to come in on budget. We can’t predict, obviously, what the workflow is going to be when we’re supervising a complaint-driven process.

The other time that we were over budget was last year for the simple reason that it was my pleasure to receive an increase in my salary because the job was moved up from a part-time to a full-time position, so there was a consequential increase in pay and benefits. Otherwise, we’ve been able to stay on budget for six of the last eight years.

Insofar as last year was concerned, as you’ll recall, the committee was alerted to the fact that there would be an implication because of my increase to full time, and the committee was kind enough to allocate an additional $72,000, which happened to be the number that translated into the result of the 100 percent OIC, and the committee had agreed in advance, when we submitted our budget, that those funds would be available.

The other thing I want to say is that in terms of how the office operates, it has a legacy and a history of thrift because it’s a small office and because there’s no place to hide. One of my predecessors used to do a paper clip count and actually say to the equivalent committee how much he was valuing the paper clips at. It became kind of a joke that at least provided some fodder for columnists.

We have a very tight operation. We live in quarters that we’re proud of. They’re filled with recycled furniture and borrowed furniture. We’ve had donations of furniture from various people in the precinct. We have, for example, furniture that is the furniture of the mother of one of the more distinguished members of the table. We have Craig James’s mother’s soft chairs in the foyer. We have people who actually come in and visit us in order to sit in those chairs. One of them has a footrest. Sometimes we’ve had people fall asleep. But it’s our way of welcoming people and hoping that they will show up and partake of the service that we provide.

In any event, there was a bit of a ripple in this fiscal year just finished, which is reflected in some of the documents. You don’t really, I think, have to spend any time looking at them. But it was our view, based on information from the Ministry of Finance, that we were actually going to have an overage — not just the $72,000 which was covered but an overage of somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 for other things.

It turned out that the Ministry of Finance — if this is being recorded, people will want to refer to it for years to come — was wrong. They had double-counted. In the end, I’m pleased to say we were in balance. We don’t have to ask the committee for any more money, I’m relieved to say.

The budget for this coming year. Because of the calendar, because of the fixed election dates, because of the fact that the line between governing and campaigning has all but now disappeared, we can expect some demands on our time.

In trying to assess what it is we will spend over the coming year, we know that one thing is certain, and that is that the non-discretionary section of our budget is going to have to be carefully monitored and held, as it always is, under complete control, because the discretionary portion — that is to say, what happens when we have to gather together the resources to handle the workflow — is something that we simply can’t control for all of the reasons that we all understand.

So that’s our plan. What are we doing in the office at the moment that’s of interest, one hopes, to the committee? A couple of things. We have, together with our colleagues across the country, begun to look at the whole impact of social media on the work that we do, to try to understand what its implications are in terms of services to members.

I suppose an easy and quick example is with social media. If you come to our office, as some of you do, and ask us for advice with respect to, for example, letters of reference and things like that, we have, in the past, been looking at that in the simple context of sending letters by post to other people. Now, of course, with social media, if somebody wants you to give them a recommendation for LinkedIn or something like that, as we know, it’s all over the world and forever. How does that affect the advice that we give members, or should give members, in terms of how they behave?

There’s been a very in-depth study done by the conflict-of-interest commissioner for the city of Toronto, which is just out. We’ve been monitoring her work for about eight or nine months. She’s come up with a number of recommendations which we are studying to see how we can implement here in British Columbia.

One of the other things that we’re doing is we’ve taken a look at the whole new world of exchange-traded funds, which some of you will be familiar with. Many of you will know much more about it than I do, but we’re making our way through it. For those of you who don’t know what exchange-traded funds are, and I’ll include myself as someone who can self-educate here, it’s a security that trades on a stock exchange and, generally, tracks the performance of an index.

It’s a single stock representing a basket of securities underlying the index which can be comprised of stocks, bonds or other assets such as commodities. Simple ETFs generally seek to replicate an index, but others implement more sophisticated investment strategies. They’re like stocks because they trade on the stock exchange and can be bought and sold throughout the day. They trade at prices that change throughout the day, and there’s a lot of trading flexibility. They can be purchased through full-service or discount brokerage accounts.

Unlike stocks, and similar to mutual funds in the sense that they’re based on an underlying basket of securities, they offer built-in diversification, and they offer a portfolio of securities in a single stock. They offer a diversified investment in a sector with relatively small amounts of money in a way that has not previously been possible for individual investors.

What does all of that mean in our context? It means that when we come to deal with disclosure, we will be asking people if they are invested in ETFs. But as a threshold issue, prior to making that ask, we’re trying to understand what the investment is really like in terms of
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how much an individual investor knows about the actual investments that are being made. All of that, of course, to be put into a context of: if information is known about one’s investments, then that, obviously, guides or should guide the conduct of a member in terms of how they deal with the legislation or comments having to do with that particular investment.

ETFs are brand-new to those of us laypersons; well known, I think, to the investment community and perhaps to some of you people. We’re getting together as much information as we can so that we know as much about them as we can, if we decide to add them to the list of investments that would fall into, if you like, the category of mutual funds. Whereas we all know that mutual funds were always considered, for our purposes, to be fine, because the funds were diversified, etc.

The only modification of that view over the years has been that now there are sector-specific funds, which is why we ask you to go through the agony of telling us what specific funds you have, and we can check against whether they’re sector funds or whether they are in fact widely diversified funds that are, from our point of view, sufficiently widely dispersed that we don’t need to know what the actual investments are in each of the funds.

Last note: we have a capital budget of $25,000, which has been built into the budget for the last couple of years and going forward. We’re advised by our IT provider, which is the legislative IT provider, that the equipment that we have has reached such an age that for them to maintain it has become difficult, given how quickly things move. They are recommending — if not telling us — that in order to continue to access their services for, I have to say, zero money, we need to get some new equipment.

We will probably, in this current year, have to access for that purpose some of the funds in the capital budget. We do not expect that the amount will be large and come anywhere near the actual budget itself. The best guess, I think, that we have at the moment is that we may have to spend somewhere between $7,000 and $10,000. But those are the only capital expenses that, so far, we’re able to predict.

Unless you have any questions about the actual numbers, I think the summary is that we finished last year as we hoped we would ultimately. We have every expectation that we can hold our discretionary spending to the amounts that appear in our current budget in this fiscal year. The only wild card in all of that is going to be whether the work that we have to do results in us having to spend more money to get human resources to staff the office in the event of a large amount of work coming through the door — larger than usual.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m happy to look forward to any questions from the members.

J. Tegart: Good morning. To the comments in regards to social media. I know that we’re heading into a busy year. I wonder if guidelines will be coming out of your office for members in regards to social media. Are there some general guidelines that people should be very aware of so that not all of us are knocking on your door?

P. Fraser: Our aspiration is to publish some guidelines, and it’s obviously got to be done in a timely way, because people are going to be wanting to communicate more and more, in the next 14 months, on social media.

One of the problems that we’ve already identified, given the way in which many of you are fully connected, is that if, for example, something’s coming out of the constituency office on social media, then there may be a lot of information going out which, until this point in time, has been thought to be partisan from a constituency office — and shouldn’t be. But it’s only going out — if you follow what I’m saying — because it happens to be in the tank. That’s an issue that we’re looking at as closely as we can.

I expect, frankly, that we won’t just put something out. We’ll probably come to both caucuses and say, “This is what we think is reasonable,” and give people an opportunity to contribute to that conversation.

E. Foster: Thank you, Mr. Fraser. Notwithstanding your paper clip count…. On the discussion of investments and so on, as you said, it’s very complicated. In a lot of cases, I know with the bigger investments that I have, they get moved around — depending on your financial advisor or your bank or whoever you’re using — to invest and move the money in my best interest.

How do we control that? Do we try to impress upon our financial advisors not to go into these different directions? A lot of this stuff they don’t even know. I mean, it just gets moved by the holders of the mutual funds or the bonds or whatever.

P. Fraser: The assets within a mutual fund can’t be controlled by an individual investor. Therefore, you’re under no obligation to inform us of all of that.

If you’re invested in securities only, and you have disclosed your investment, let’s say, in stocks and bonds and those investments change, then yes, you do have to disclose that and within 30 days of the transactions taking place. The act being that members of the public should be able, on a cycle of 30 days, to figure out how and where each and every one of you are invested. Not how much, but how.

We’ve done what we can to be realistic about those people who are carrying on life in that fashion. We have been able to make arrangements on behalf of members
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to have their brokers, actually, with their consent, transmit that information to the office so that we have it, and the member themselves, busy as you all are, doesn’t have to be as concerned about getting the information in, in 30 days. That’s worked well. It’s a service that we’ve made available to anyone who’s interested in having it.

We’ve also preached the gospel in respect to the accounts that we help to set up with the brokerage industry, called hold-mail accounts — which you all, I think, know about — where you can basically open an account and say to your broker: “You have complete discretion in investing.” If you’re not prepared to give that complete discretion to your broker, then a hold-mail account doesn’t work for you. If it does, then what happens is that the broker makes investment decisions, doesn’t send you any information, so you don’t know what you actually hold, and if you don’t know you can’t disclose it. It’s blind to you.

That’s been the cheapest, most effective and, from a practical point of view, most successful way of dealing with what would otherwise have to be a complicated, expensive blind trust kind of situation.

Seeing none, Mr. Fraser, thank you so much for taking the time to present. We appreciate it and look forward to hearing from you again as the year progresses. If you have anything else you want to share with the committee at any time, of course you know we’re always here.

P. Fraser: Thanks for that opportunity. It’s a pleasure to have that opportunity. We haven’t had it except under the aegis of this committee, and I’m grateful to you.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Just for the information of members in terms of your upcoming meetings, as noted in an email yesterday, the time of your final meeting in this series of meetings on Wednesday, May 18, has been modified to have a bit of a later start that morning — 8:45 a.m.

However, next week we also have a meeting of this committee on Tuesday the tenth. At that time, we will be hearing from the Office of the Auditor General and holding some deliberations. Just for the information of members. We’ll see you all next Tuesday.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I just want to make sure…. We have one outstanding piece of business still, which was the budget of the representative — that piece. Is that coming up? I just want to make sure that’s on an agenda coming up.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): Yes, I should have been more specific. Thank you.

The intention was, I understood, to have that as a second item at next week’s meeting. After the Office of the Auditor General’s presentation and discussion with members, then the deliberations will focus, I understand, on the proposal from the Representative for Children and Youth regarding adoption advocacy.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. No further business. I’ll take a motion to adjourn.

Access to on-line versions of the report of proceedings (Hansard)
and webcasts of committee proceedings is available on the Internet.

Chair:	Wm. Scott Hamilton (Delta North BC Liberal)
Deputy Chair:	Carole James (Victoria–Beacon Hill NDP)
Members:	Dan Ashton (Penticton BC Liberal)
	Robin Austin (Skeena NDP)
	Eric Foster (Vernon-Monashee BC Liberal)
	Simon Gibson (Abbotsford-Mission BC Liberal)
	George Heyman (Vancouver-Fairview NDP)
	Jennifer Rice (North Coast NDP)
	Jackie Tegart (Fraser-Nicola BC Liberal)
	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