Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 98 — Tuesday, September 20, 2016 (HTML)

Van Horne/Baker Salons, Prestige Rocky Mountain Resort
209 Van Horne Street, Cranbrook, B.C.

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; Jennifer Rice, MLA; Jackie Tegart, MLA; John Yap, MLA

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

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

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES


CONTENTS
Page
Presentations	2267
J. Hawley
J. Kaun
D. Walls
D. Teslak
J. Berdusco
B. Knight
B. Johnstone
T. Larsen
C. Johns

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

We’re an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly with a mandate to hold public consultations on the next provincial budget. The consultations are based on the budget consultation paper that was recently released by the Minister of Finance. The committee must issue a report by November 15, 2016, with its recommendations for the 2017 provincial budget.

The committee is holding a number of public hearings in communities across the province. British Columbians can participate via teleconference, video conference or Skype. There are numerous ways to submit your ideas to the committee. British Columbians can complete an on-line survey or send a written, audio or video submission through our website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/finance.

We invite all British Columbians to contribute to this important process. For those of you in attendance, we thank you for taking the time to participate today. All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as it prepares its final report to the Legislative Assembly. Just a reminder that the deadline for submissions is midnight on Friday, October 14, 2016.

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. If time permits, we will also have an open-mike period at the end of the meeting. Five minutes are allotted for each presenter. If you wish to speak, please register with Stephanie at the information table.

Today’s meeting is recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A complete transcript of the proceedings will be posted to the committee’s website. All of the meetings are also broadcast as audio via our website.

Now I ask all the members of the committee to introduce themselves. I’ll start on the other side this time, please.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Of course, this being an all-party committee, I meant the other side of the table as opposed…. But nevertheless. Thank you, everyone.

Also assisting the committee today are Susan Sourial and Stephanie Raymond for the Parliamentary Committees Office. Michael Baer and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard Services are also here to record the proceedings.

Without further ado, I will go to our witness list. I see our first is all lined up and ready to go. We have PacificSport Columbia Basin, Jodi Hawley. Very pleased to see you. You have ten minutes for the presentation, five minutes for questions. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left to go, and we can go to questions.

J. Hawley: All right. Good morning. First, I’d like to thank the committee for the opportunity to present this morning in Cranbrook.

PacificSport Columbia Basin is the most recent addition to the ViaSport Regional Alliance. This is a provincewide network of 11 regional sport development hubs that are passionate about energizing communities through sport.

The existence of a sport resource that is connected to such an extensive network is unprecedented in the Columbia Basin, and it wouldn’t be possible without the commitment to this region that our provincial government and our partners have demonstrated. I’d like to thank our provincial government for their investment and tell the committee a bit about how that investment is positively impacting our communities. I’ll also speak about the importance of quality sport in our communities and describe how continued support of the sport sector can help PacificSport to increase opportunities for all residents of the basin to participate and thrive through sport and physical recreation.
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As you may know, the Columbia Basin sport sector has historically been underorganized and underserved. In 2013, the region’s most pressing needs were identified as improved access to sport and recreation for all residents; more and better education opportunities for coaches, athletes and officials; and improved access to support from provincial sport organizations. Further, the region was experiencing a decline in sport participation and reduced volunteering in sport.

In response to these needs, the provincial government and ViaSport partnered with Columbia Basin Trust to establish the PacificSport Columbia Basin Society, which was incorporated on March 16, 2015. The combination of government investment and the generous support of Columbia Basin Trust gave the society a unique capacity to promote all forms of sport and physical recreation in a wide variety of settings. Through collaboration with local and regional partners, we aim to enable every basin resident to participate, play or perform in sport and physical recreation no matter their activity preferences or their level of expertise.

In its first 18 months of operations, PacificSport Columbia Basin has leveraged its membership in the regional alliance and connected with provincial partners to bring programs to the basin that have traditionally been unavailable. For example, we partnered with the Aboriginal Sport, Recreation and Physical Activity Partners Council to extend the reach of their sport camp programs into the East Kootenays.

We worked with B.C. Athletics and the B.C. Wheelchair Basketball Society to promote the Let’s Play program throughout the basin and brought three wheelchair-movement skills workshops to the East and West Kootenays. During their visits, the Let’s Play program provided sport wheelchairs to children with mobility impairments, gave elementary students the opportunity to learn about parasport while playing in sport wheelchairs during half-day school visits and helped local sport and education leaders learn how to adapt activities to include wheelchair users in their programs. The feedback from this initiative has been overwhelmingly positive.

PacificSport is also focused on building the capacity of local sport organizations, especially by acting as an effective link between provincial sport organizations and local sport clubs in the basin. For example, soccer clubs throughout the basin, as well as gymnastics and basketball coaches in the East Kootenays, have identified an overwhelming need for local sport-specific education workshops, but few individual clubs have the capacity to provide them.

PacificSport Columbia Basin has taken up the challenge. This year, for the first time ever in the basin, ten different sport-specific training courses will be included in the Coaches Week coach education schedule thanks to a grant offered jointly by ViaSport and PacificSport Columbia Basin. Overall, PacificSport will offer 23 coach education workshops in 12 different communities throughout the Columbia Basin during National Coaches Week.

These are just a few examples to highlight how communities in the Columbia Basin are being strengthened through collaboration and capacity-building in the sport sector. It’s especially important to demonstrate this in an Olympic year, when the focus of amateur sport is often on medals. Make no mistake. We are also working to enhance athlete training and development opportunities because we believe that having high-performance athletes in our midst is a vital part of creating a healthy sport culture in our communities.

When local athletes like Tristen Chernove win multiple medals, including his gold in last week’s paracycling time trial, everyone experiences a direct connection with the Olympic movement and is united by a sense of pride in Canada’s athletes and coaches. Some of us will even be inspired to loftier personal goals.

At PacificSport, we also know that the value of sport to our communities reaches far beyond the power of our elite athletes to unite and inspire us. At its best, sport is a golden example of the greatest opportunities our communities have to offer. It gets people involved. Sport attracts the highest number of volunteers and volunteer hours in Canada. It engages children in learning. Participation in school-based sport and physical activity has been shown to result in considerably healthier social and academic self-concepts as well as improved academic performance. Sport creates a sense of belonging.

One of the top-five reasons kids find sport fun is because they learn to work together as a team. It keeps us all healthy. At any age, physical activity through sport reduces our risk of developing chronic diseases such has heart disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis.

Sport teaches good habits. Sport is a means for youth to achieve recommended levels of daily physical activity while learning important life skills such as teamwork, respect and discipline. Sport builds confidence in and understanding of how our bodies move. Youth nine to 18 years old who participate in sport more than once a week are five times more likely to be physically active adults.

In short, quality sport is a means to healthy lives and healthy communities. For all these reasons, we need to do all that we can to increase sport participation and enhance the quality of sport programs throughout the province.

Given the demonstrated benefits of sport participation, it is concerning that only 4 percent of Canadian teens — those 12- to 17-year-olds — are active enough to meet national physical activity guidelines. Moreover, between grade 6 and 12, participation in school sport drops 26 percent among girls and 14 percent among boys. In fact, many students stop playing sports because they’re de-selected or cut rather than because they choose to drop out. In the Columbia Basin, this is largely due to a lack
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of capacity to maintain multiple teams in middle schools and high schools, as well as a lack of local leagues for children over 12 years of age.

Having identified an urgent need to provide more opportunities for youth to be involved in sport, PacificSport Columbia Basin will consult with municipal recreation departments, school districts and existing youth action networks throughout the region to establish a regional strategy to increase the number of community and school-based sport participation opportunities for ten- to 18-year-olds and young adults.

The provincial government could help meet the need for increased school-based sport opportunities by providing targeted funding to expand intramural sport programs and facilitating professional development opportunities for teachers to receive coach education training.

Perhaps more concerning, the basin as a whole has a low capacity to deliver programming designed to develop children’s physical literacy, which is defined as the ability to move with competence and confidence in a wide variety of physical activities in multiple environments that benefit the healthy development of the whole person.

The entire regional alliance was excited when the Ministry of Health recently launched its active people, active places physical activity strategy, highlighting the importance of physical literacy. In addition, we’re pleased to see that the importance of developing physical literacy is clearly emphasized in the Ministry of Education’s new curriculum.

Sport has being paying attention to physical literacy for years, and the members of the regional alliance are pleased to be invited to share our expertise with the Ministry of Health and community leaders in providing physical literacy mentorship and programming in the school setting. However, we are concerned that the capacity for this initiative is far exceeded by the need for physical literacy development in our communities.

We have learned through past initiatives that when the importance of physical literacy is strongly emphasized through cross-sectoral collaboration and multiple complementary initiatives, impact on community residents is maximized. For the past several years, the Royal Bank of Canada learn to play grants have provided funding to develop this kind of multi-pronged community collaboration. But this program is ending, leaving a funding gap.

We encourage the provincial government to consider establishing a targeted fund of $500,000, which communities could leverage by bringing matching funds to the table to activate physical literacy programming through community-wide collaboration across the sport, recreation, education and health sectors.

I expect that it’s obvious by now, but I’ll conclude by saying that PacificSport Columbia Basin and all members of the regional alliance are passionate about promoting and supporting sport as a vital contributor to community health and personal development.

I hope I’ve demonstrated the impact the sports sector can have on rural communities in B.C. and defined PacificSport Columbia Basin’s role in creating a vibrant and connected culture of sport and physical recreation in the basin.

Thank you to the committee for your attention, and I welcome any questions you have.

D. Ashton: Jodi, thank you for your presentation. This isn’t a left curve at you, but how does PacificSport line up against the Scottish Institute of Sport?

J. Hawley: Well, the Scottish Institute of Sport is very focused on high-performance sport development. That’s the first place I worked as an exercise physiologist, my former career.

Really, PacificSport Columbia Basin and all the PacificSports in B.C. do have a role to play in developing athletes towards national team performances and going on to international competition, but our focus is really on developing community sport — the quality of that, increasing participation and building the foundation for high-performance sports.

I would say that probably 5 percent of what PacificSport Columbia Basin does is 100 percent of what the Scottish Institute of Sport does.

D. Ashton: Oh, that’s good. You reinforce what PacificSport’s all about, so thank you for doing that.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I wondered what kind of partnerships you have, both in the training of coaches and in the physical activity for children with the school districts. In many districts, there used to be designated physical education teachers. In many districts, that doesn’t happen anymore. So I know that the need for training and the need for support is there.

J. Hawley: Yeah. As we’re only in our first 18 months, we are definitely developing some of those local connections. The Let’s Play program that we run was a partnership with school district 5. We are working with them this year really to identify professional development needs that we could offer in the winter or next year.

I think that in terms of coach education, we do have a bit of a ways to go in terms of creating a partnership in the school districts that would offer that. But we do have good relationships with the colleges so that those students can receive coach education training.
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S. Hamilton (Chair): I guess my question follows on the line of Carole’s. That really has to do with capacity and your ability to build the organization, hopefully bigger than what it is. You’ve identified that. Is it an issue of people versus money, or…?

J. Hawley: In this region, I think it’s an issue of people at the moment, partly because we’re new. I also think that the need in this region…. The geography is so vast that we require quite a large number of people relative to, say, the number that you might require on the coast to deliver to the same population.

I think that the resources to train enough people and be able to have them travel around is really our biggest limitation in this region. We’re fortunate that we’re connected to ViaSport and to the regional alliance. There’s a vast amount of experience there in terms of the programming that we would offer. It’s just a matter of trying to get it here.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Great. That was going to be my next question, in terms of your affiliation with and your ability to exploit the resources of ViaSport. So you’re very well plugged in with them.

J. Hawley: Yeah. We’re completely connected to them and the regional alliance. Everyone shares all their experience. For us, it’s one of the reasons in the first 18 months that we’ve been able to hit the ground running. If there is something that we want to do, we can call someone who has experience with it, and we can implement version 2.0 here most of the time.

Any further questions? Seeing none, thank you very much for taking the time to present. We appreciate it. Always an interesting subject.

Next we have the College of the Rockies Faculty Association — Joan Kaun. Please come on up. Welcome. Good morning.

I’ll repeat that we have ten minutes for the presentation, and then we can go to the committee for five minutes worth of questions. I’ll try to get your attention when the time’s winding down to a couple of minutes so you can conclude your thoughts, and we can go from there.

I’m Joan Kaun. I’m an office administration instructor at the College of the Rockies and president of the college faculty association. Our association represents over 200 full- and part-time instructors at our seven campuses in the East Kootenay. Programs at our college include trades, health, business, arts and sciences, and adult basic education.

My message to you today will focus on needs and priorities of rural regions of B.C. that need to be addressed in the upcoming provincial budget. I’m sure you’ll hear similar topics from my colleagues at other rural colleges.

College of the Rockies is Rocky Mountain–inspired and small-college proud. We pride ourselves for building relationships with our students, giving them a high-quality and affordable post-secondary experience close to home. As an example, the first-year student in arts and science has tuition fees of about $5,000. The student who leaves our area to take the same courses in the Lower Mainland will pay approximately $18,000 because of living expenses.

Public post-secondary education in B.C. is experiencing a funding crisis and has been for several years. The per-student operating grants have declined since 2001 by about 20 percent when adjusted for inflation. Colleges, institutes and universities are forced to seek other sources of funding to make up the shortfall. Tuition fees are annually increased by 2 percent, the maximum allowed. However, some programs have been redesigned so that new tuition fees can be established that exceed the 2 percent limit.

Recruitment of international students increases each year, and partnerships are becoming more and more common. The funding formula is not adapted for specific community needs. Rural colleges and large urban centres are funded based on estimates of student FTEs. The funding pressures of rural colleges differ from urban centres.

Our potential student population is lower and further spread out geographically. We must provide services at multiple campuses and recognize that many locations where our students are still rely on dial-up for Internet services. Our own campus has struggled to provide adequate Internet services and recently has directed additional funds to upgrade this need. At our college, the repeated funding reduction makes it a struggle to balance the budget each year. Resources are devoted to revenue generation, and cuts have been made to education.

Recruiting more international students has definitely increased our revenues and grown the diversity of our college and community. College of the Rockies has been ranked number one in Canada and the world for international student satisfaction in 2012, ’13 and ’14. We’re proud of this achievement, but it does bring additional challenges. International students require additional support services, including tutoring for courses as well as cultural barriers.

Our faculty also needs support to understand these students and for resources to ensure quality education. Many faculty find themselves offering longer office hours and offering additional tutorials. This also impacts our domestic students because of the time crunch on our faculty. Students, domestic or international, shouldn’t be referred to as revenue-generating units, but this does happen in our province.
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Each student should be valued as a learner; a contributor to the education community; and contributors to our communities, economically and socially. They should be given an opportunity to learn without encountering financial barriers of their own or the institution’s. Offering a full range of courses we know are in demand and would be utilized is a challenge because of the funding crunch. We are limited in our ability to offer a full complement of second-year university transfer courses.

Many courses and programs are rotated among semesters, years and our campuses, rather than being offered every year. Students are opting to leave home earlier than they really should have to, because the opportunities are limited. The decision has a significant financial impact on each of them. The student who moves to an urban centre after year 1 faces $18,000 per year for three years rather than two. The average student loan in B.C. after a four-year degree is $35,000. That’s a huge financial commitment.

Geographic and economic barriers are higher for our rural students. Costs of post-secondary education are being shifted to students and families. An annual tuition fee increase of 2 percent may not sound significant, but many students face additional fees for technology use, printing fees and textbooks that are not capped at 2 percent. When you also consider that wages aren’t increasing significantly, but groceries and other living expenses…. It’s becoming more and more difficult for students to find the resources they need to balance their education budgets. Education is becoming an opportunity for the rich. Students shouldn’t be treated unfairly because they live in rural areas.

Recently our faculty association, with the support of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators, launched a bursary campaign and asked students to share their stories of challenges and barriers as well as their plans for the future. We’ve awarded 52 bursaries of $500 each. The stories we received were heart-wrenching and seemed to have common threads — the most common theme that of financial barriers.

Students want post-secondary educations because they know this is the pathway to financial success in the future. The dreams shared by these students are real but not without challenges. In 2014, the provincial government cut $6.9 million in adult basic education funding and revoked the policy for providing tuition-free ABE. College of the Rockies was one of the last institutions in B.C. to begin charging tuition for ABE when it was reinstated in January of 2016.

Enrolment in our ABE program is lower this fall than previous years. Although the government now spends $7.6 million for the adult upgrading grant, it doesn’t help enough students. Students who earn more than $23,700 annually are not eligible for the grant. Those who do qualify must include the grant in their earnings the following year and may become ineligible. These individuals are being forced to live below the poverty line, and attempts to make a better life for themselves through post-secondary education are met with more and more barriers.

Adult basic education in rural B.C. is essential. Most of these students do have their high school diploma; however, they find they need additional courses to meet the prerequisites for their program of choice. We often see students completing ABE courses such as biology 12 and math 12 before entering into the program that they’re choosing.

In summary, I encourage you to make the following points priorities for the 2017 B.C. budget: the reinstatement of tuition-free adult basic education programs; improved funding support for students, including a revised student grant program and interest-free student loans; a funding formula that better responds to the cost pressures faced by B.C.’s post-secondary institutions.

R. Austin: Thanks, Joan, for your presentation. I think the issue of funding ABE seems to be a bit of a theme. This is only our second day, and we heard multiple people yesterday, in Vancouver, come to talk about the cuts to ABE and how important it is, so thank you for doing that.

I had a question. Because this is a rural community college and I’m from an area that also represents a large geography and multiple campuses, I’m interested to ask whether the sort of new emphasis on skills and trades has taken away from this college’s capacity to provide UT courses to enable kids locally to get their first and second year of university in both the sciences and the arts.

Where I come from, that’s been a real tragedy. We have so many cuts to the university transfer courses that it’s almost impossible now to have an associate degree or for kids to stay in town for their first years and then go on to a bigger university down south. I’m just wondering what your experience is here.

J. Kaun: I’m a vocational instructor, so having those facts…. From other colleagues, I can tell you that yeah, there are challenges for students. Our second-year options are very limited, and they’re primarily at our Cranbrook campus, which actually impacts the students in the other communities in the area as well.

I do have one with respect to ABE. As Robin mentioned, we did hear quite a bit about it yesterday. Are we talking the sort of upgrade courses that people need to move on to some level of post-secondary — the sciences, the maths, that sort of thing?
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J. Kaun: I think it’s all of the ABE. I mean, granted, quite a few students do have their diplomas, and they’re looking to upgrade to get into the programs, but there are still quite a few that need their graduation diploma. We also have challenges with fundamental ABE, which is our students who need to get skills to employment, so may not actually get a diploma, but need those….

Okay, seeing none, thank you very much for taking the time to present. We do appreciate the time you take out of your day, and I’m sure we’ll be having more discussions about this subject as the committee continues its travels.

Good morning. Welcome. You may have already heard my spiel — ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave with a couple of minutes left, then five minutes for the committee for questions. So whenever you’re ready, the floor is yours.

D. Walls: Thank you very much. I’m David Walls. I’m president of College of the Rockies, and Dianne Teslak is vice-president, finance and corporate services. Actually, we should have had Joan come up and sit with us as well. She’s already done a good job of setting the scene, I think.

I think you have the handouts that have just been given to you. I’m going to talk, just to set the scene a little bit for College of the Rockies, to what Joan’s presented in terms of what we do, and Dianne’s going to talk a little bit about what the needs of the college are moving forward.

To begin with, thank you for the opportunity to participate in the prebudget consultation process. We’re really one of 11 B.C. community colleges. There are 22 post-secondary institutions in the advanced education system, 11 community colleges that serve upwards of 170,000 students provincewide.

College of the Rockies offers a comprehensive range of programs. I think you heard from Joan this morning that we have our own degrees. In fact, there are three degrees that you can or will be able to complete at College of the Rockies, baccalaureate degrees, and we have the university transfer, university studies, that have been mentioned. And of course, we do the range of career, technical and trades education as well as the adult upgrading for students that likely didn’t complete high school or maybe need some upgrading to be able to get into a higher level of education.

I like to think of ourselves as the regional hub for post-secondary education. As we mentioned, we have a large geographic area. We have seven different campuses between Golden, Fernie and Creston. Cranbrook’s the main centre for College of the Rockies. But the hub of post-secondary education…. Students that want to stay in our region or want to have education that’s more affordable than having to move to the coast or out of the province — it’s certainly a very viable option.

As Joan mentioned, the cost of education is increasing. We like to see students stay. We recognize they have choices, but if they do stay, our tuition fees tend to be cheaper than going to university for the same types of courses. Also, the accommodation costs are obviously less if they stay in the community as well.

We’re also a hub for labour force development. We work very much with industry, making sure that we’re helping to develop the future labour force of our region to meet the primary employers. Also, we’re very responsive to the community needs. We work with lots of partners, including First Nations as well.

In all, College of the Rockies has 2,200 full-time-equivalent students, and that’s about 7,000 head count. We issue more than 1,000 credentials, typically, every year.

We believe we’re very strategic and efficient in our operations. We’re considered one of the more effective and efficient colleges with respect to cost — cost per FTE student — and also in meeting our student targets, so we have a lot of success in that.

We recently published our strategic plan, Our Road Map to New Heights. So we’re really trying to instil a culture of strategic planning at College of the Rockies with a renewed focus on growth and reducing our dependence on government funding — which, as Joan has indicated, has been flat or declining in the last few years. We continue to seek out and grow new revenue streams, which is a key component to our strategic plan. About half of our budget is a grant from the province, and the rest is tuition revenue we generate from contract training, continuing education and our considerable international operations.

We offer exceptional programs and services. The recent British Columbia Council on Admissions and Transfer, BCCAT, reported on students’ success among B.C. post-secondary institutions. The report found that College of the Rockies’ transfer students excel after transfer to a new institution, graduating with amongst the highest grade point average in the province for transfer students. Further, 85 percent of College of the Rockies’ transfer students complete their degrees, the highest completion rate of transfer students from any B.C. institution. So we know that we do a great job within the province.

Earlier this year, Premier Christy Clark was here and announced the bachelor of science in nursing program, which we offer in partnership with the University of Victoria, and it’ll be held in its entirety at the Cranbrook campus. That’s us being responsive to the community needs. We need nurses to stay, and currently stu-
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dents leave after 2½ years to complete their education in Victoria. Now they’ll have the option to stay and complete their degree here. So the chances of retaining those for Interior Health and the regional hospital is increased by that. We appreciate the response of the government to that for being able to achieve that.

In terms of our value that we provide for students, I’m going to just…. There are a couple of examples — they’re actually on page 3 of the handout — that I think give some idea of what we do and the impact that we create. It talks about two students, both single mothers.

One of them, a single mother with two children, living with a permanent disability and needing to upgrade her education. She came to us as one of our students — recognized her calling as human service worker program, graduated from that program. Now she’s employed as a youth support worker in the foster care system and plans to continue her education by earning a degree in social work.

The second example. Again, another single mother, this time First Nations, wanted to make a better life for herself and her daughter. She began training in the heavy-duty-equipment program. Much needed to have females come into some of our trades programs. She was nervous about returning to school but credits her instructor with helping her overcome fears and feel comfortable in the program.

During her time, this young lady developed confidence such that she decided to compete for the Lower Kootenay Band Council position and was successful. Now she’s working hard to improve the quality of life for her community and is continuing her apprenticeship training.

Those are some examples. As we focus not just on recruitment but also success and retention of those students…. A lot of our students do come to us with disabilities. They come to us with mental health aspects. As a college, we have to figure out how to deal with those. So our support services continue to increase to provide that service to make sure that our students are successful.

Most of you are aware of the increased focus on sexual violence misconduct in post-secondary institutions throughout North America. Of course, we’re making sure that we’re able to deal with that from a perspective of prevention, education as well as how to deal with situations when they occur.

The question was asked around our university transfer. I would say that although we have shifted funding towards some of our trades and career-type programming, we’re also increasing the number of second-year options as well. In fact, we do have dual admission agreements with the university and the University of Lethbridge.

D. Teslak: We have three requests, essentially — I’ll try and be quick here — for your committee to consider as priorities in the upcoming budget.

First of all, flat funding or, in fact, declining funding has been a challenge in terms of looking at growth and strategic planning. Something that also is coupled with that to make it more challenging is the “no annual deficit” directive or the frozen net assets world that we live in.

As early as the 2014 budget consultations, your committee recommended a review of those accounting issues with some very specific recommendations in the report, yet these government administrative and accounting policies continue to restrict our ability to engage in strategic long-term planning and growth and to support the skills-for-jobs blueprint. In fact, the policies restrict our ability to become less dependent on government funding.

Secondly, College of the Rockies is one of 14 institutions in the province that does not receive funding to support our aboriginal service plan. That restricts our ability to be able to provide programs and services to that critical group that is so important in the looming skills gap situation.

Finally, post-secondary institutions across the province are struggling with student housing. In Cranbrook, our apprentice students come from out of town, and we’re not able to accommodate for their short-term stays while they do their technical training on campus. Our aboriginal students don’t have space to have their families join them on campus while they’re studying, and we have all but exhausted our homestay options for our international students. The occupancy rate for private rental properties in Cranbrook is at about 1.8 percent, so extremely low. Our hope is to gain financial support to build an additional residence and allow for our college to attract more students, knowing that we have some housing options available.

Clearly, the college’s strategic objectives require investment. As David mentioned, we are committed to increasing our non-government revenue streams, but we need stability and predictability in our provincial government funding as well. Similarly, we need a relaxation of the “no annual deficit” directive, which freezes our net assets, to support us in long-term planning and allow for the normal ebbs and flows in our businesses.

Thank you for the opportunity to share how our college contributes to the economic prosperity in our region. Through increased and sustained investment by the province, we will be able to continue to provide the range of programs and services to meet our region’s and the B.C. labour market challenges.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. Just to follow up, Robin mentioned the strength
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of the community colleges in rural B.C. I think you see it in urban settings as well. Certainly, in Victoria, many students find the college system a much more supportive approach in the beginning of their post-secondary.

The other shift we’re starting to see, and I’m wondering if you’re seeing it in your communities as well, is a shift to people who have their university degrees who are coming back to college. I think most people wouldn’t imagine that. They’d imagine the transfer the other way. But I think it really is the strength of our community college network in British Columbia — feeling the pressure, but stretched right now.

D. Walls: Thanks Carole. That’s a very good point, and certainly that is the case. We’ve seen that begin to develop over the years. Usually, the expectation is that you come to community college, and then you move to university. We’re seeing a lot the other way, particularly when people coming out with degrees or part degrees can’t get into the labour force and they recognize they need a more applied learning. So we’re seeing greater numbers then going to community college afterwards. So thank you for that point.

J. Yap: Two quick questions. I’m glad to see your emphasis on working with First Nations communities. What’s the trend line in that community in terms of students coming to College of the Rockies?

D. Walls: We have the Ktunaxa, the Shuswap and Métis in our region. We definitely mirror the population — probably do better than the actual number in terms of percentages. So we’re about 10 percent First Nations, aboriginal and Métis students right now. We’re working directly with them in terms of trying to increase that number. But I think, more importantly, too, the retention and the success is the most important part so that they can fulfill their dreams.

We continue to increase. As Dianne mentioned, the challenge often is that the funding for both programming and services tends to be one-time, so it’s hard sometimes to build that continuity. But we’re trying to do that.

My second question. You’re also looking at gradually increasing your international student population. What are the main source countries for those students?

D. Walls: We’re very diverse, actually. Because we’ve been in this business for a long time, I think we’re more diverse than most colleges. I think we’re close to about 40 different countries. Principally, as you’d expect, you still see China would be the number one, but that’s decreasing.

We don’t have the same number of Indian students as most other institutions, but we are looking at that market, and we want to grow that piece slowly. Primarily we’re from Africa, from South America, from the Caribbean. Our students are from all over, including Europe. It’s best to be diversified, because if one market dries up, it makes us vulnerable.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you. We’re out of time. I have two questions left. I’m going to go to Simon and then to Robin. Brevity.

S. Gibson: My university experiences taught me that there are students that just don’t make it. They start with great intentions. Particularly in the First Nations community, frankly — all the First Nations students I taught — many of them struggle. How are you working with your students here to ensure their success and completion?

D. Walls: Part of it is through our supports that we provide. We do have an education advisor that works with our First Nations students. Also, we’re just in the process of hiring a new liaison person, and we’re looking at an aboriginal scholar-in-residence that’s more at the academic level. So we’re trying to increase the support for our students, primarily. We do have some one-time funding that we did get, but of course we need to figure out how we’re going to increase that. So it’s really the personal attention.

We do very well with our international students, partly because they’re paying more in tuition fees and deserve more supports. We’re not able to provide the same level of support yet for our aboriginal students. That’s what we aspire to.

R. Austin: Dianne, you mentioned one of your requests is the ability to borrow money.

I understand, in listening to other colleges and universities, the ability for you to borrow money, specifically to build housing…. I totally understand that, because then the revenue that comes in from the rents would cover the mortgages. But are you also talking about being able to go into debt to cover ongoing operational expenses, or is it just for housing?

D. Teslak: I wasn’t so much talking about going into debt. I was more referring to allowing us to use our frozen net assets so that we can, I guess, borrow from ourselves, essentially, to contribute to capital projects and to possibly contribute to operations in years where something happens in the international market and we don’t meet our revenue targets in terms of our international operations or contract-trading operations — all of those other streams of revenue that are vulnerable to multiple effects out of our control.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time. We appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of your day.
[ Page 2275 ]

Good morning. Welcome. As you’re getting settled, I’ll let you know we have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave with a couple of minutes left. As time winds down, conclude your thoughts, and we go to the committee for five minutes’ worth of questions.

J. Berdusco: Morning, members of the Standing Committee on Finance, and thank you for the opportunity to present today. I’m Jeff Berdusco, president of the East Kootenay Wildlife Association. Welcome to Cranbrook.

The East Kootenay Wildlife Association is an executive board made up of B.C. Wildlife Federation–affiliated fish and wildlife clubs in the East Kootenay. Our membership consists of probably 1,000 or more members regionally, but as a whole, there are roughly 10,000 licensed hunters in the East Kootenay.

These clubs are a place where outdoor enthusiasts can get together, talk about issues and take part in volunteer initiatives in their area. One of the main goals of these clubs is to coordinate, raise funds and provide labour for local projects that help conserve and protect fish and wildlife. That’s where the real bonds are created, and children are brought up in these clubs to respect and understand nature.

Some of the issues local hunters face today are dramatically changing landscapes due to population growth and increased development. Couple that with shifting climate, the increased predator populations and reduced focus by government to fund fish and wildlife management, and we get the current situation that we find ourselves in. Hunters no longer benefit from robust game populations but are faced with multiple species in severe decline, some at all-time lows.

An underfunded wildlife branch in government means many important aspects go without. The offices are understaffed and overwhelmed with workload. When this happens, things get swept under the rug. Wildlife surveys critical to evaluating game populations and setting regulations aren’t completed, and proxy information is cobbled together, or they end up reaching out to local clubs, putting further pressure on the common folks. Conservation officer services are always strapped for cash and frequently don’t attend complaints simply because they don’t have the budget.

Similar programs like the ecosystem restoration programs, invasive plant management, wildlife branch crossing over into resource development planning — things like this are severely hampered under today’s funding model.

Importantly, competition over dwindling resources leads to conflict between different user groups — the guide-outfitting business, tourism, etc. — and a general lack of enjoyment, which eventually leads to reduced participation.

Overall, a lack of funding in government’s fish and wildlife management model persists. The wildlife branch has been among the most understaffed and underfunded of any wildlife agency in North America. We feel that it’s time for that to change.

The following recommendations to the Standing Committee on Finance come at a critical time. Economic diversification is highly desirable, especially during this current period of economic uncertainty. Socially, we need to continue to have our youth connected to nature.

Furthermore, now more than ever, we must address the increasing human footprint on our province and work collaboratively to ensure conservation of fish and wildlife and their habitats for future generations.

Recommendation No. 1 is to dedicate all hunting and angling licence and fee revenue back to the resource. Most North American jurisdictions have dedicated funding models; B.C. does not. Currently about $15 million is raised annually through hunting licence sales, and of that, about $2.5 million actually goes back to the resource. The rest goes into general revenue. For us, this is what has to change: 100 percent of those funds should be allocated back to wildlife resources in the same way that 100 percent of fishing licence fees go back to that resource.

Recommendation No. 2 is that natural resource users contribute to conservation. Natural resource use and extraction has an impact on B.C.’s shared natural capital. Government should be collecting rent and dedicating a portion of it to fish and wildlife conservation. Activities such as ecotourism, wildlife viewing, mining, heli-skiing, timber extraction — all those should contribute directly to natural resource conservation.

In summary, B.C. is fortunate to have a rich diversity of fish and wildlife resources, but it’s starting to disappear. We’re adding more people to the population every day, putting more and more stress on our resources at the same time as cutting funding and capacity to steward those resources. Without proper funding, this downward trend in our natural capital will accelerate. We invite the B.C. government to join us in maintaining the province’s wealth through sound strategy in conserving our diverse resource and providing education and awareness in conservation and the outdoors.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for a thoughtful presentation. More particularly, thank you for the work that you and the people you work with in the organizations do to maintain nature and to connect people to nature.
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I have a couple of questions about your presentation. I’ve had meetings at times with members of the Wildlife Federation who have said that should a recommendation such as the one that you made to devote all the revenues from licences to conservation activities be implemented, they thought that many hunters, for instance, would be willing to pay a higher fee, knowing it was going to conservation. My first question is: do you agree with that? It wasn’t a hugely higher fee, but a higher fee.

My second question. Even if all of that money went to conservation activities, even if it was doubled, there would still be limits on what could be done with it. From your own experience in this region, what would you say the immediate priorities would be for that expenditure?

J. Berdusco: Well, to answer your first question, I’d say yes. We have quarterly meetings amongst the region, and whenever that question is brought up, it’s not even discussed. It’s essentially that people would chip in more if it meant that they would get more out of the resource personally, I guess. It just makes sense to most hunters.

On the second question, as far as priorities within the region, it seems that the wildlife branch is always underfunded. They frequently reach out to clubs to top up funding to complete very important surveys. A lot of times…. I wouldn’t say they’re operating in the dark, but they’re very wary of the data that they actually get to use to set regulations. So instead of going back to users like the specific hunters to offer more, it would be almost imperative that the funding just come from the province, instead of having to worry about that.

Ecosystem restoration is another huge priority, invasive plant management. These are the types of things that have been continually chipped away at, but we’re finding out more and more how important they are to an ecosystem’s health as a whole. Instead of sort of treating the symptoms, the whole ecosystem needs to be taken care of from the ground up, if that answers your question.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Hi, and thank you for your presentation. I think people often don’t think about hunters and others in the bush who are actually providing support for all that ecosystem restoration.

You mentioned other jurisdictions across North America that were low in funding. Is there anywhere you could point to — if you don’t know the answer, it’s fine; we can get it — that you think is kind of a good example of the kind of support that governments are giving — anywhere across Canada?

J. Berdusco: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think other jurisdictions in North America that we at the B.C. Wildlife Federation, at the board level, tend to compare…. A want would be Idaho and Washington, where they have upwards of $100 million of hunting and fishing revenue that goes back to the resource.

I wouldn’t want to try and explain it. The folks within the B.C. Wildlife Federation board have that stuff nailed down. The way it was explained to me is that when all your funding comes from the users themselves, people find that it’s okay to keep putting back into that. There’s a tax on all equipment used for hunting and fishing and any outdoor purpose that goes back into it, and it just grows.

Seeing none, thank you for your presentation. As a former hunter myself many, many years ago, I’ve always appreciated the stewardship that your organization and organizations like yours put into conservation and resource management. It goes a long way, and we wouldn’t be the same kind of province without you, that’s for sure.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. Next we have Betty Knight from the Columbia Basin Alliance for Literacy.

Ms. Knight, good morning. Welcome. As I’ve said to everyone else, we have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left so that you can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go to the committee for questions.

My name is Betty Knight. I am the East Kootenay and Valemount regional program manager for the Columbia Basin Alliance for Literacy. We’re known as CBAL.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you again about the importance of literacy in our province. We appreciate our government’s invitation to the people of B.C. to talk with you about issues that concern us and what we believe government can and should do to help address them. Thank you also for the recommendation you made last year for annualized funding of $2½ million for community literacy work throughout the province.

We appreciate the funds that were allocated last year, but Decoda Literacy Solutions and the network of provincial literacy organizations continue to advocate for multi-year stable funding for this important work that
[ Page 2277 ]
impacts every area of life — health, employment, community and family life, and immigration.

CBAL employs 16 literacy outreach coordinators in communities throughout the southeast corner of the province to provide literacy programs and services. The LOCs throughout the province provide leadership for their communities to identify available resources and strengths, to identify needs and gaps and to plan for literacy development with representatives from a wide cross-section of their community. The LOCs make efficient use of limited resources to provide literacy programs in communities large and small throughout the province.

Literacy is a set of skills that, like other skills, people have more or less of and that encompass reading and writing but also numeracy, problem-solving ability, critical thinking and computer use. Citizens today need many more and better developed literacy skills than ever before to be successful in their lives and to effectively contribute to our society and economy.

People with less than a high school diploma are employed 4½ percent less now than they were in 2008. We know that there are more than a million job opportunities expected over the next decade, but only 600,000 students are in the education system, of which 16 percent or 96,000 are not expected to graduate. More than 500,000 adults have significant challenges with literacy, according to PIAAC, the latest international literacy survey.

Both internal migration and immigration from other countries are robust in B.C., but many immigrants to Canada speak a language other than English — 50 percent in the Lower Mainland. And by 2031, the number of immigrants with low skills is predicted to be more than 61 percent.

We need to do better and use all available paths to support all our citizens to have the literacy needs to be successful. We see representatives of these populations in our literacy programs daily.

The young parent who did not finish high school that we support to complete the requirements for a diploma and go on to career training while also improving her parenting and support for her children.

The adult who wants to improve their literacy skills so that they can enter an apprenticeship or other training program to improve their employability.

The older adult who finds that they need computer skills to navigate government forms and websites and to communicate with friends and family as they participate in our modern world.

The parents who want to support their children’s learning in school but don’t have the skills and knowledge to do that.

Children in school who, for whatever reason, are not interested in or excited about reading and who benefit from a program that trains volunteers to read and support them to practise the skills they’re learning in the classroom so that they’re interested and excited about reading.

The immigrants new to our country who find support with a literacy organization to learn English, find employment and develop connections in their communities so that they’re able to build new and productive lives as they raise their families and contribute to our economy and society.

There are also those who find their way to us that we are able to help improve their literacy skills in ways they weren’t expecting. Literacy practitioners are skilled in incorporating skill-building into programs touching on many topics so that those citizens who are not necessarily aware of their need to improve skills are able to do so.

These programs use topics such as journaling, writing an autobiography, book clubs, gardening, cooking or other subjects people are interested in pursuing to improve reading and writing skills, numeracy, critical thinking, planning skills and document use.

Surveys such as PIAAC tell us that approximately 25 percent of the population is not likely aware of the limitations that their low literacy skills place on them. These people are not among those who would seek out tutoring or go to a college to improve their literacy skill-building, but they will come to a program that speaks to their interests.

In CBAL alone, we welcome over 5,000 people to our programs each year. They attend a wide range of programs delivered in many locations with many partners. The goal of every program is to help participants improve their literacy skills and their confidence in their ability to learn so that they can achieve their goals in life.

Community literacy programs provide a bridge to formal education for adults, help parents with the skills and knowledge they need to support their children’s learning, help immigrants become successful and settled in their new lives, and help our population as a whole to build the skills they need to be most engaged, informed and contributing members of our society.

This is important work and deserves the committed support of our provincial government. Please recommend again this year that the province provide the community literacy field multi-year funding in the amount of $2½ million a year.

We know that the B.C. government is concerned about this issue. Certainly, continuing investment in the K-to-12 and post-secondary education system is vital.

However, the 52 percent of adult British Columbians whose lower-than-optimum literacy skills mean they have difficulty accomplishing some daily tasks and finding meaningful employment are not often able to participate in the formal education system without some support and skill development. Particularly now that many community colleges are reducing their programs for fundamental literacy programs, community literacy
[ Page 2278 ]
is often the only option citizens have to improve their ability to be successful.

Thank you again for allowing me to talk with you about literacy and how important it is for all of us that the government adequately and reliably support community literacy in B.C.

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

G. Heyman: I don’t really have a question. I just want to thank you for the presentation as well as the work that you and community literacy groups around British Columbia have been doing for years. I think it’s pretty clear from the committee reports over the last few years that everyone on the committee recognizes the importance of that work and the value of that kind of investment. So thank you again very much for coming.

You mentioned in your presentation that 25 percent of people that have literacy issues are not aware of it. The other dimension to that, and I’d be interested in having you comment on it, is the embarrassment. Somebody who’s an adult, maybe not even an immigrant or someone that you would normally think may have literacy issues — just somebody in the workforce, perhaps someone like myself — has literacy problems, and yet they’re embarrassed about it.

How do you work with those kinds of people? How do you discern them to come forward and self-identify?

B. Knight: That’s a challenge for every literacy organization in the world. It’s true that people who know they have literacy issues are sometimes too hesitant to come forward. It’s another reason why we do the general kinds of programs I was talking about — the journaling, the seniors autobiography, the community garden focus programs that will draw those people out to something that is related to an interest they have.

Once we get them there, then we start to work on their numeracy skills, their reading and writing skills, their presentation, their oral communication. As we get to know what their skill levels are — and we have a tool to do that called community literacy benchmarking that was developed by the province — then we’re able, through the relationship we’ve built, to start to bridge them to more directed support. That’s our most effective tool to help those people overcome that sense of embarrassment.

It’s my sense that males, boys, seem to have more literacy issues than females. I’d like you to comment on that, please.

B. Knight: Yes, definitely. One of the things that we do with young boys in the grades 4-to-7 age group is that we have developed a program called Guys Read. We bring in some local celebrities in our small community. It could be their local pro. It could be a fire officer. It could be somebody from local government. The facilitator is someone that the boys can relate to. In Golden, we have a newspaper reporter that facilitates that program, and the boys are very excited about that. In other places, we’ve had a hockey player.

It’s to try to get them young, because boys at that age tend to not be interested in reading for pleasure, and if you read for pleasure, your reading skills improve.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your work. Just to follow up on that — the community itself and the work you’re doing in the community. I wondered if there’s any particular area…. I think one of the strengths of the literacy program is that each community meets their needs — and that they’re unique, community from community.

Are you seeing any particular group or demographic that has shifted over the last while, any changes in the kinds of people who are coming for support or the kinds of focus that you’ve had to change in your programs over the last number of years?

B. Knight: Well, aside from the immigrant work that we do, we have contracts at CBAL. We have contracts with both the province and the federal government to provide settlement support and English language instruction, so that has been a big change for us.

Aside from that, we also work closely with our employment agencies. They are actively referring people to us for everything from computer use to document use to basic reading and writing to study skills, because they want to go back to college. It’s been 20 years, and they don’t have the confidence or can’t remember how to effectively study. That’s been a big change for us.

J. Rice: I, too, would like to thank you for your work. Literacy is such an important topic. I know historically that whenever the literacy group in my community were doing their annual tabling event, I always thought of just the notion of literacy as whether you could read or not read. I fully understand now that that encompasses a whole range of things. I just wanted to thank you for that.

I guess one of the other things I wanted to acknowledge is the importance of financial literacy. I know that with some of the people I assist in my office, that is a huge barrier when you’re managing limited amounts of income and how to budget on a really small disability cheque or fixed income. So just to thank you for that and acknowledge that.

B. Knight: Financial literacy is something that we do as stand-alone programs and that we also try to integrate into other things. I mentioned cooking programs. Being able to comparison-shop and so on helps with financial literacy, for sure.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’ll echo that. We hear from a lot of literacy groups as we travel the province. I think the one common thread that all organizations share is the fact that you tend to work in the fringes a little bit. You quietly go about your work, but the impact that you have in a community really is profound. It’s amazing, when people really start looking into it, how many people in a community really need your help. We certainly appreciate all the work that you do. Thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time. Take care.

Okay. Next we have our friends from the Meadowbrook Community Association — Margie Hayward and Bob Johnstone.

Good morning. Welcome. You’ve probably sat here long enough to hear me say it a couple of times. You have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll get your attention with a couple of minutes to go. You can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go to the committee for about five minutes worth of questions. If you are ready, the floor is all yours.

B. Johnstone: Thank you. I’m Bob Johnstone. I’m president of the Meadowbrook Community Association. With me today is Margie Hayward, who’s our secretary and who put together the presentation that you have in front of you. Unfortunately, our director who takes the lead on invasive plants, Sandra Loewen, is ill today and is disappointed she isn’t able to attend. We affectionately call Sandra the weed lady.

The Meadowbrook Community Association covers the area of Woods Corner and Meadowbrook. Woods Corner is immediately north of the airport, where I presume you landed. Between Woods Corner and the city of Kimberley is the area of Meadowbrook.

Our association’s mission is to preserve and enhance the Meadowbrook and Woods Corner area for residents and recreational users. Many of the people in Kimberley and surrounding areas use that area.

We’ve been concerned about noxious weeds, as many of you know because I’ve presented to this committee on a couple of other occasions. We feel the province does share that concern, because you do have a Weed Control Act and regulation. A critical part of that is that the province is designated as the occupier of lands such as Crown land and highways areas and so forth. Those are areas of our concern.

We decided that this year we wanted to give you a bit of a pictorial presentation. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do it as a PowerPoint because the facility isn’t here. But the first point we’d like to make is that there is a real need for treatment. The Meadowbrook and Woods Corner area is not very large. We have about 15 kilometres of highway and probably 20 to 25 kilometres of side roads. The photos that we’re showing you are just dealing with that area.

If you just flip through pages 5 through 17, you’ll get some idea of what the situation is along the highways and the side roads. If you just quickly look at that, I think you get some idea of what we’re facing. You know, we have knapweed on Dransfeld Road. We have pea vine growing on Dransfeld Road. We have knapweed and blueweed along Manor Road and knapweed along a bike path on Manor Road. Highway 95A, which is the main highway — knapweed is flourishing there. Drinkwater Road has more knapweed. Toadflax along the highway. Toadflax along one of the major side roads, Thompson Road. Blueweed on another road, Berard Road. Bussey Road also has blueweed. You see a couple of other ones: toadflax on Sanderson and blueweed flourishing along Sanderson Road.

All of these roads are roads that have not really been properly treated. In fairness to Highways, they’ve decided to treat gravel pits as their top priority this year and haven’t been treating the side roads or the main highway as much as they had in the past. Of course, that creates problems for landowners.

There’s also a need for some enforcement. Mainroad is the major highway contractor in this area. Because they have invasive plants on their property and around their property, they tend to spread it when their trucks and everything else go around the community. You’ll see, from pages 19 through 23, what their yard and just on the fringe of their yard actually looks like. So we have toadflax and knapweed all across. That’s the highways maintenance responsibility.

The other thing we’d like to point out is what happens on private land and the fact that homeowners and property owners need some assistance. Because of the lack of treatment — plus, to some extent, the fact that many people still don’t necessarily understand all about invasive plants — we have this spreading through private property.

So 25 through 32 gives you some shots of some of the conditions of private land owners. There’s knapweed growing in a pasture; then another pasture, along Thompson Road; knapweed moving from the ditches into private property; toadflax and knapweed spreading into private land; knapweed taking a hold on private land; knapweed again, on an access road to private property; blueweed on a property on Sanderson Road; and knapweed taking hold behind fence lines. I think you get….

Those are sample photos of what’s happening in our community. As I said, it’s only 15 kilometres on the highway and maybe 20 to 25 kilometres of side roads. It’s not a huge area, but that’s what’s facing it. Of course, I spend a lot of time in the city of Kimberley, and it’s amazing — the knapweed and other invasive plants that are taking over in the community there as well.
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Why are we concerned? Existing infestations are thriving. It’s worse this year than ever, and adjacent areas are being contaminated. The failure to control noxious weeds has economic, social and environmental impacts. Providing adequate funding for controlling noxious weeds can be justified purely on economic grounds — preserving jobs, profits and property values. I mean, if somebody has a whole…. If their acreage is infested with invasive weeds, think of the effect that that has on their property values.

The province’s efforts to preserve agricultural capacity and to promote tourism can be seriously impaired if noxious weeds are not controlled, and local efforts could be thwarted and initiatives abandoned out of frustration. We have a community up the St. Mary’s valley that has basically given up. They used to have a pretty active program about dealing with invasive plants, but because the province really hasn’t been doing its share, many of the people there have given up. We don’t want that to happen in our community. We’re trying to get our community more concerned and more willing to take action.

What’s happening locally? The RDEK produces pamphlets on weeds. It hires staff to promote control on private property, and it shares in the cost of spraying with approved owners. However, as people have become more concerned, the demands on the RDEK funding have increased, and they’ve now had to limit it to a one-time-only thing, which will not deal with the issue.

Some owners are pulling and spraying and so forth or are using goats, for example. Too bad Sandra’s not here, because she spent more than $1,000 of her own money this year hiring goats and spraying. The goats are on her own property, but she actually sprayed some of the highway, the side roads, to prevent it from coming into her property.

Our association has been calling attention to the need for weed control among residents. We have a spring newsletter where we feature one page which shows the major noxious weeds in our community. We help residents access the RDEK funding. We identify the areas that are the worst infestations and report them to the provincial ministries, and we’ve made submissions to your committee.

What’s needed, we think, is a partnership between the province, local government, community associations like ours and individual landowners. We need to educate people about the threat. We need to control the weeds, and we need to enforce the legislative requirements to address the issue.

What we would like you to do is to recognize the importance and urgency of controlling noxious weeds for economic, social and environmental reasons; the potential to impair the success of provincial initiatives to promote agriculture and tourism if noxious weeds are not controlled; and we would like you to recognize the province’s statutory responsibility, as the occupier of Crown land and provincial highways, to control all noxious weeds in those areas.

We’d also like you to use your authority as a province to ensure that provincial ministries and other occupiers comply with the legislation. We would like you to recognize the economic wisdom of investing in efforts to control noxious weeds and to provide the necessity of funding a stable, adequate, long-term provincewide program for controlling these weeds.

There’s a need for a significant increase in funding for education, treatment and enforcement. “There just isn’t enough money.” That’s the argument we get from highways. That’s the argument we get from the Invasive Species Council, from the RDEK. There’s just not enough money to do all of what we want.

Please help us eliminate invasive plants, and thank you very much for coming to Cranbrook and for allowing us to make the presentation.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for coming here and presenting to us. I do appreciate it. I’m going to go first to someone who’s having some problems with weeds herself in her own community.

J. Tegart: It certainly is an issue in my riding, around grasslands, also. I have to say I learned more about noxious weeds, being on this committee, than I ever thought I wanted to know. To think that one knapweed plant has 200,000 seeds — one plant is too many. So it’s a priority I expect that we’ll hear across the province.

Similarly, the rights-of-way not being sprayed makes it almost impossible for ranchers and people protecting grasslands to get any forward movement against the noxious weeds.

Your presentation is very clear. Your pictures are reflective of what we’re seeing. We thank you very much for the presentation today, because I think we’ll hear a lot across the province.

S. Gibson: Thank you for your presentation. It’s a provincewide issue, just as Jackie has said. In my riding, Abbotsford-Mission, we’ve got tansy ragwort. You’re familiar with that. Then we’ve got weeds taking over lakes — two kinds of weeds. So you’re not alone. I know that’s not any solace to you.

Have you put together maybe a little bit of a budget? There’s no budget figure, say, to control in your particular…. This Meadowbrook association — do you have a budget in mind? That would be helpful, I think.

The other thing is I don’t think you can eliminate
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them; you can just control them. What would you say to that comment?

B. Johnstone: Well, I’m no expert. Like Jackie, I’ve learned more about noxious weeds than I care to learn about. It wasn’t on my bucket list, quite frankly.

No, we haven’t put a budget together, but we do have a very capable invasive species council, which I think is going to present to you — maybe even right after us. I think they have a better handle on what it would cost in the area in terms of that. Certainly, it’s a lot more than we’re spending right now, because the problem is getting worse, not better.

This committee has endorsed our presentation previously. In 2014, I think you actually quoted us in your report. We appreciate that, but unless the funding is there, things only get worse.

C. James (Deputy Chair): The piece I’d just add — and thank you for the work you do — is the strength of having, and I think you pointed it out, provincial support to be able to do things like the education program. That needs to be, as you’ve said, a large program. There are a lot of people that just aren’t aware. To be able to spread that word, I think — the provincial support for something that is a provincial issue — would certainly add to it. So thank you for emphasizing that again.

B. Johnstone: Our newsletter doesn’t just go to members. We have about 100 members, about 20 percent of whom are non-residents, but we have 400 homes in Meadowbrook, and we actually bulk-mail our newsletter to all the residents. So everybody gets that one page every spring so that they have some idea of what’s available.

S. Hamilton (Chair): To use the same analogy, much like the literacy groups — the pun’s intended here — you work in the weeds a lot. People on the fringes…. You know, I drive down the road. I don’t what a noxious weed is half the time. I see a big sign that says, “Knotweed. Do not mow,” or something to that effect, and I’m quite sure what I’m looking at. There’s a lot of public education that’s necessary here, too, for people to buy into what the problem really is and how it exists.

I do have one question you might be able to answer. There was some discussion about this in previous tours. We used to have a lot of plant shops selling what are classified as invasive species. Is that still happening? I’ll go around this table too. I don’t know if anyone can answer that. That was hopefully going to be addressed.

J. Tegart: I don’t know the answer to that, but I have to say that as I looked at the pamphlets for noxious weeds, I realized I grew some in my backyard. I thought they were lovely because they came back every year, right?

J. Tegart: It is about education. Certainly, we had the discussion around the sale of noxious weeds and plants in nurseries and people taking them home quite innocently.

S. Hamilton (Chair): As this committee goes forward, I wouldn’t mind if we could capture that and bring it back for our discussions. I wouldn’t mind advancing that as well again. You know, try to bring it to someone’s attention that might be able to do something about it — Ministry of Environment, whoever it might be.

B. Johnstone: I have one that is at the entrance to my driveway that I didn’t know about until Sandra walked by walking her dog and said: “You have an invasive plant.”

Okay, thank you very much for taking the time. We do appreciate your time you’ve taken to present to the committee and the time that you take to help the community. Thank you very much.

All right. Next we have the East Kootenay Invasive Species Council — Todd Larsen.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. As I’ve said before, ten minutes for the presentation, five minutes for questions. I’ll try to give you a wave-down when you’ve got a couple of minutes left so you can conclude your thoughts. Then we can go to the committee. The floor is yours.

T. Larsen: Great. We’re passing around some sheets there, and I’ll just go off of that.

To answer your first question there about the invasive weeds, they actually are…. It’s still legal to sell weeds that are designated on the noxious weed list. That’s something I want to bring up here as well…

T. Larsen: …and also to commend the Meadowbrook Community Association. They’ve been strong advocates for the last long time about invasives. It’s nice to not have the message coming from an invasive species group. Although we are representing a lot of members, it’s important for you to hear that from community members as well — and also the fact that they are frustrated with the current scenario.

The East Kootenay Invasive Species Council, or EKISC, has been a non-profit group since 2008. Prior to that, the East Kootenay has had a long history of weed management, specifically through the rancher…. There are some
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rancher sprayer programs, pulling weeds on the side of the roads. There’s some funding through the Ministry of Forests to provide support to that program. It’s, I think, because of that our region has had a good history of success for managing invasives.

However, we’re starting to see some issues where we’re not having enough funding and there are constant pressures of new weeds coming in. So we’re trying to figure out how we can be better at that.

Our organization’s goals include public commitment to mitigating the negative impacts of invasive species. We coordinate the management of invasive species on lands, and we’re constantly trying look at strategies for adequate, stable and timely funding for education, prevention and treatment.

Our group covers the East Kootenay, of course, with eight municipalities. This week and next week we’re having open houses in each municipality to hear public input and see what the concerns are. We put that into our annual strategies each year on how to treat weeds and also how we can raise awareness through there.

We had a meeting yesterday with a ranching group, the Kootenay Livestock Association. They are frustrated, to say the least, on the issues of weeds in our area, especially since their history of the last 40 years of what they’ve been doing.

Invasive species, as I’m sure you’re aware, pose serious threats to the economy, environment and society. It’s important to have a long-term strategy at a local, regional and provincial scale.

Just a couple of small…. Some numbers here. In 2012, the Inter-Ministry Invasive Species Working Group determined that around $6 million was spent on management by the province and partners. This year the Ministry of Forests announced $1.7 million is what that ministry was contributing.

But I’d also like to point out that B.C. is a leader in Canada in terms of weed management — the way it’s organized. We have regional invasive species organizations and the provincial group as well. But we do have a long way to go.

If these species weren’t managed, the cost, the economic impact analysis, was $65 million in 2008, rising to $139 million by 2020 — of just six species that they were analyzing there.

I also want to point out that under the service plans for the Ministry of Environment, one of the key objectives was to prevent the introduction and spread of invasive species. Under the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, one of the key objectives was sustainable natural resource management. In there was invasive species and ecosystem restoration.

Some of the challenges. Funding — there are multiple tiers to this. We do get funding from the Ministry of Forests for operations as well as coordination and awareness for outreach and education. However, that is determined in April or May of each year, so we’re unsure of how much we will receive. It’s very difficult to create budgets from there.

The Ministry of Transportation is also a large funder. However, that fluctuates widely. So we’re requesting more stable, adequate and long-term — and timely — funding as well.

We have had to augment the provincial funding with other sources — last year other sources such as B.C. Hydro, FortisBC, fish and wildlife compensation program, Columbia Basin Trust. We were able to raise funds for specific operational projects that exceeded the amount that we received from the Ministry of Forests on Crown land management there. There’s the issue of: are these groups funding government responsibilities?

The provincial support. Just recognizing that the range branch, the invasive plant program, is very well run. However, there’s only four or five staff across the province that are allocated to each sub-region in the area.

There is an invasive species strategy for B.C. that is outdated and needs to be strengthened and implemented. We need to have better research and extension to provide solutions. We need to identify and provide input to natural resource industries, such as forestry, mining, transportation and utilities, that are contributing to the spread of invasives — and how we can work with them to minimize those impacts through best management practices and enforcement. Right now we’re working on forest stewardship lands and on input there.

Finally, another challenge is the B.C. Weed Control Act. That has been in the works since 2012. Every year I’ve heard that it’s going to be released or going to be up for reading each year. Now I’m told it may be up for this spring. However, with the election, that may be pushed back. If anything, I think having the Weed Control Act expedited and read…. To have a reading prior to the election would be very important.

Within the new Weed Control Act, there is language about enforcement delegated to natural resource officers. They require training first as a key part of that. Currently, the regional districts have weed inspectors that can enforce bylaws, if they have them, on private land, but there’s nothing on Crown land. The ranching industry constantly compares us to Alberta, which has a much higher enforcement ability that they think is what is helping them there.

The Weed Control Act is something we need to work on and, also, the sale of invasives. Right now we have a list of provincially regulated species that you’re not allowed to allow grow or spread on your property. However, there’s nothing saying you can’t sell them, so someone could just buy Japanese knotweed in a greenhouse and plant it. So having that “buyer beware” is not the best strategy on that.
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Just briefly, some of the solutions for these three points. Funding can be more effective with consistent income sources through the various branches, if it’s FLNRO, MOTI, Ministry of Environment or Ministry of Agriculture. That has varied quite a lot in the last few years.

Funding must be a line item so that it’s not just mad March money each year, trying to determine what we’re going to run on each year. Also, it’s not only management but also for education and to support some of these non-government organizations that are providing this role.

Also, a request for ministry departments to expand on the management strategies, research and outreach. This would support the regional groups that are working on these. Enforce the legislative acts and either generate revenue from industries or provide some sort of enforcement mechanism there.

Again, I mentioned the Weed Control Act — to expedite that process. I can’t stress that enough.

Finally, in the report from the budget hearings from last year, recommendation 33 stated: “Ensure there’s sufficient funding for the proactive prevention and management of invasive species and noxious weeds; update existing legislation where applicable to prohibit the sale of invasive species and plants.” Similar recommendations were made in 2013 and 2014, so we just recommend that this is brought forward again.

On behalf of our group, we’d like to thank our partners, members and stakeholders who we represent. Also, thank you to our MLAs Bill Bennett and Norm Macdonald, who have helped us out in our region here.

I’m speaking mostly about weeds, but we’ve also been working with zebra and quagga mussels. It’s great the province has really stepped up on that part as well.

G. Heyman: Thank you for the presentation, and thank you for your work. Invasive species, I think, often gets recognized at the community level but doesn’t necessarily always make its way into legislative consideration, although zebra and quagga mussels certainly did and eventually received some action.

I have two questions of clarification. In your fourth point, I think it is, under background, you say: “An economic impact analysis of six unmanaged invasive plants would cost $65 million in 2008, rising to $139 million by 2020.” Just to clarify, do you mean that as the cost to the economy of not managing the invasive species?

T. Larsen: That’s right — if you didn’t treat the weeds and they were left to grow.

G. Heyman: Okay. I thought that’s what you meant, but I wanted to make sure it was on the record.

Do you have any sense of what additional funding you are recommending be dedicated to education, enforcement and management of invasive species on an annual basis in a multi-year plan?

T. Larsen: For our region, we receive…. We’re one of the highest-funded groups from the Ministry of Forests for the regional groups — both to the regional district and to the East Kootenay Invasive Species Council. This year was just over $200,000. So $170,000 of that was for operations, and just over, I think, $35,000 was for coordination awareness, for educational and core funding there.

Each year we request around $350,000 or $400,000 — almost twice the amount — just to cover Crown land, forest service roads in the Crown range pastures, just from the Ministry of Forests. So about double that would be a bare minimum, I’d say.

The Ministry of Transportation — that has changed the last few years. We just received $85,000 two days ago. That was a surplus that we’re going to use for gravel pits and some secondary highways. It’s pretty late in the year to try and add that. It’s good to have it, but if we knew that was coming earlier, it would be great.

D. Ashton: Todd, thanks, and also thanks to the people from Meadowbrook for bringing this forward.

We know that there are issues. Everybody knows that there are issues. One of the things — public awareness. I look in Washington state. You know, “Weeds are a pain in the grass.” They have signs everywhere. They’re a little bit, I think, more forthcoming with it.

You can’t just start spraying everywhere. People have to be made aware of it. However, coming from the regional district, like what I did, Lisa Scott, one of your peers in the Okanagan…. At some point in time, we have to take more action than maybe what is transpiring. Like you just mentioned, there’s a time. You want to get those weeds before they go to seed, so maybe next spring, you’re targeting that along those road basins and along those gravel pits.

Also, a sterile insect. I know they have been taking some looks at the production of a weevil that affects knapweed, although Washington state is not allowing that into theirs — because we were releasing them right along the border. Maybe some proactive agreements with that sterile insect program might start bringing this to a little bit more of a head, where we can really start to address some of these things.

Again, I want to thank you and your groups for it, but it almost seems insurmountable sometimes. But how do you eat an elephant? A little bit at a time, right?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just so Hansard gets it right, MLA Ashton said: “Weeds are a pain in the grass.” I just wanted to clarify.
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J. Rice: Thank you for your presentation. I’m wondering if you wanted to spend a few minutes just talking about the zebra and quagga mussels. I grew up scuba diving in the Great Lakes in the St. Lawrence Seaway. As a recreational diver, zebra mussels were really beneficial, as the visibility was so good. However, I understand, as far as an economic impact, it’s a huge number as far as the devastation to the economy. If you wanted to talk a little bit about that….

T. Larsen: Right, yeah. Where to start there? As you mentioned…. Zebra and quagga mussels are filter feeders. They clear the water, which can be perceived as a benefit for a scuba diver, but it alters the food web in the lake system, of course. And they’re not native to this area, so it would have dramatic effects on the lake ecosystem, not to mention you’d cut your feet getting out of the water.

The annual cost in the Great Lakes area is $31 million. I’m not sure if it’s just the province of Ontario, or if it’s the…. And that’s every year for the annual maintenance costs of cleaning the intake pipes coming out of the Great Lakes that get clogged with these filter feeders, because they like the moving water there. That’s the annual cost.

There is a report from the Invasive Species Council of B.C. about the potential economic impacts of zebra and quagga mussels. The province has stepped up in the last few years with the boat-wash stations, with support from Columbia Basin Trust in this region.

I just met with the mussel defence crew last week. They’ve done 21,000 inspections this year and decontaminated 600 boats. They found 11 boats with zebra and quagga mussels, mostly coming from Ontario, not coming from the U.S., where they thought they would be coming from.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. My only question is…. You mentioned the B.C. Weed Control Act, and I’m ignorant. Is there an act, anything like it, now?

S. Hamilton (Chair): We do have a Weed Control Act, so I’m wondering whether or not things could just simply change through regulation if we have legislation in place now. Nevertheless, we’ll have that discussion as we go forward.

J. Tegart: Thank you for your presentation, Todd. Certainly, when I have people in my office, particularly ranchers and people concerned about grasslands, the question always is: how do you find the balance between the education and the actual spraying?

Is it a question of not enough dollars, or is it a question of where the dollars go? What I often get in my office is: what percentage of the dollars spent actually comes out at the end of a hose and sprays a weed? Just some food for thought. I don’t expect you to answer that. But it’s that tension — right? — around educating people and also actually applying something that helps us control the weeds.

T. Larsen: Yeah, great point. It comes back to having a strategic vision, as well, of what you’re going to do and being cognizant that it could be $1,000 or it could be $100,000 in that next year. How can we get the best bang for our buck and be as open to input from as many land managers and land users as possible?

I find education is important, because it make people realize the impacts of invasives. They also can speak to their local provincial representatives about what their concerns are, and then that can force more enforcement of legislation there.

Also, we’re preventing new weeds from coming in. We could be treating knapweed forever, but if we ever…. We know that if yellow star thistle comes in from Montana, we’ve got a lot of people that know what it looks like. They’ll report it, and we’ll treat it before it becomes established. I think that’s a really important part of the piece too.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Larsen. I appreciate your taking the time. Always an interesting subject.

Finally, we have the board of education, school district No. 5, southeast Kootenay — Gail Brown, Patricia Whalen, Debbie Therrien, Trina Ayling and Chris Johns.

Good morning everyone. As you’re settling in, I’ll give you my spiel. We have ten minutes for the presentation and five minutes for the committee for questions. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left, and you can conclude your thoughts. We will then go to the committee.

C. Johns: Just before I get started, Chair and committee, I’d like to introduce…. In the back row there, we have our DPAC president on the immediate left, Deb Therrien; our superintendent, Mrs. Lynn Hauptman; and our secretary-treasurer, Mr. Rob Norum. In booking this session, I wasn’t aware of whether or not people’s schedules would facilitate them being able to be here so I appreciate the fact that they’re here. Sitting at the table here with me are trustees Patricia Whalen and Gail Brown and my left-hand person — and she really is left-handed — is Trina Ayling.
[ Page 2285 ]

We have the package presented to you, and I would ask that you take the top sheet and just set that aside, because that’s basically the outline. I’m going to lay the groundwork through package A and package B as to the recommendations. Hopefully, there’ll be an opportunity to have some questions.

This board, this district, has been strongly advocating for our needs in education for a very long time. I’ve put together a summary package to give you a flavour as to how this leads to our recommendations. Also within the recommendations is support for your work and its ongoing nature.

If you look at the first package — what I call package A, the October 7, 2015 — I was able to get, at last minute, a presentation time, video conference time. You folks, or most of you, were in Victoria at the time.

It’s worth mentioning the last two highlighted bullets with respect to what the BCSTA stated at that time in their presentation. The BCSTA is going to be doing their presentation, I believe, tomorrow or the next day. I don’t have the opportunity to know what they will be saying again, but “a streamlined and transparent process for the approval of major capital projects,” I would expect, would be again a theme that will be referenced in their presentation — with respect, in our particular case, to the replacement of Mount Baker Secondary School as a neighbourhood learning centre.

The last bullet references our submission to the minister regarding the replacement of Mount Baker Secondary School. This package was part of what we presented to you, the committee, last time.

On the next page, letters to the minister — Minister de Jong and Minister Fassbender at the time — reference some of the off-loaded costs. That’s going to be a part of the theme that we have throughout our presentation. Inflationary costs alone equal over $1 million to our district, with carbon offsets, MSP premium increases, B.C. Hydro rate increases — and the list goes on and on and on. Stable, predictable funding is a theme that we continue to work at.

At the bottom of that page, personalized learning is another one of our themes in our recommendations. It requires districts to invest in and maintain current and expensive technologies and infrastructure in order to provide the meaningful and relevant experiences our learners require to attain success within and beyond our K-to-12 system.

If we turn the page, we go to, actually, a quote from the select standing committee: the provision of “stable, predictable and adequate funding…to meet required repair and maintenance needs.” Emphasis was added. That was part of the 2015 budget consultations, and that’s, again, a theme that we’re going to reiterate throughout our presentation.

The next page, dated June 9, is our press release in which our chairperson, Mr. Frank Lento says: “The simple fact is the current funding formula doesn’t work.” That was a theme that was in the BCSTA presentation. I’m sure you’ve heard it from other partners in education such as the BCTF and, I would presume, the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils.

At the bottom of the page, in the B.C. education plan Minister’s message, Fassbender states: “We owe it to our students to keep pace.” “What we don’t agree on,” said Lento, “is the level of investment government needs to commit to education if they are going to move from rhetoric to reality.” Again, that’s part of our ongoing theme.

Included next is our page from the 2015-16 budget reductions that we went through as a district to come up with a balanced budget, because that’s our required legislative duty. We will be submitting our needs budget prior to the October 14 deadline that the committee has, emphasizing what the needs are that we’ve had to cut back on.

Then we have the BCSTA submission of September 16, 2015, in which, the third bullet down: “Co-creation of more streamlined and transparent process for the approval of major capital projects.” Rural B.C., I think, is particularly disadvantaged. That’s my opinion. I think we’re seeing lots of seismic upgrading and new schools being built, but we have aging buildings in the East Kootenay. One, particularly, is Mount Baker. It’s over 60 years old. It’s the largest high school in both the West and East Kootenay. We need some definite indication as to when we’re going to get that replaced as a neighbourhood learning centre.

Then our capital project summary is the next. You can see it’s our number one priority, but also I would draw to your attention that it’s not the only building that we have identified as being in need of repair and replacement.

So that’s package A. Package B is letters that we have sent to various government officials — the Premier, Ministers de Jong and then the now minister, Mr. Bernier — with respect to the consultation of the budgets 2014, ’15 and ’16. We’ve quoted again, using the select standing committee’s quoting: “By…investing in this sector…suggests that economic and community goals have a better chance of being realized.” We concur with that.

The remainder of the letter again reiterates our concern to get a progress report as to what those recommendations that the select standing committee put forward with respect to the K-to-12 sector. We as a board have written numerous letters — you have the package in front of you — and we have yet to hear back in a response. Also, we have copied the letters to the select standing committee.

The next letter, October 27, to Michael de Jong. We’ve asked specifically for updates on recommendations 24 to 40 from Budget 2014. We’ve copied that, also, to the select standing committee.

February 11, 2015, to the Minister of Finance, Michael de Jong, and Minister Fassbender, specifically looking at capital funding for school building infrastructure up-
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grades and replacement. That was the topic. Our district has “pursued replacement of its largest and oldest school, Mount Baker Secondary School, as a neighbourhood learning centre since…2009. Since that time, our board has completed a project identification report and formal request for replacement, developed meaningful stakeholder partnerships, formed committees and provided additional reporting on numerous aspects of our replacement goal.”

I think at this point, our recollection is somewhere between five and six Education Ministers have actually toured the building to see firsthand what the building looks like.

The top of the next page: “Ministers of Finance and Education review the state of the schools and buildings in all districts and that funding be made available to upgrade or replace in a timely manner those buildings in need of upgrade or replacement.” So we clearly communicated to government many, many times our desire to have that happen.

The February 11 letter specifically looks at 2014 recommendations and 2015 recommendations, asking for progress reports, and we have not received any of them.

We say, in our second-to-last paragraph: “Government continues to request feedback from stakeholders across this province, and that feedback has consistently been for sufficient education funding to address a variety of areas that many believe are underfunded.”

Then March 10 we have a recommendation to the Minister of Finance again about a progress report on the 2015 consultations, copied to the select standing committee.

Then last in package B is the press release about us continuing to ask for a response from the minister on budget recommendations. I would draw your attention to the very last part of that page. “The provincial government’s own reports show — bang on, in my opinion — that funding for public K-to-12 education should be a public spending priority and that investment in this sector can increase achievement of economic and community goals. Ignoring these recommendations appears to be shortchanging the economic potential of our students, and that has to be fixed.” That was from the select standing committee.

If we go now to the single sheet, I’ve built the case for our recommendations.

Recommendation 1 is that adequate capital funding for facility improvements and replacement of aging school buildings — to wit, the Mount Baker Secondary School letter of February 11, 2015, and the additional capital indicated buildings — be undertaken.

Number 2, a very important one, that the minister and the government of B.C. fully fund all of the administrative staff compensation levels currently being mandated to ensure adequate and competitive compensation for administration.

Number 3, that the government fully fund all of the downloaded costs with respect to the implementation of the K-to-12 revised curriculum.

Number 4, that the government also fully fund special needs English language learners, as identified by school district professionals for funding. There is a disconnect between what we see in our buildings and what the provincial government recognizes.

Lastly, and I think we’ve demonstrated this in the package, is that the government of B.C., through the Office of the Premier, direct government ministries to provide a written response in a timely manner when an elected board of education makes a written request for a response.

We support all of the recommendations that this committee has put forward. Again, a mention about the chance for economic and community goals being achieved. We suggest that with the $1.9 billion surplus on hand, a significant investment must be a priority.

Our chairperson was not able to be here today, but he has sent along the quote at the bottom, select standing committee’s emphasis: “It should not be consumed by the quantity of submissions or by the quality of submissions of educational services provided to districts, but they should pay close attention to the quality of elected representations; the quality of communications; and, most importantly, the quality of commitments and promises they make.” That’s from our chairperson, Mr. Frank Lento.

Thank you for the opportunity to make the presentation. We intend to make a supplementary presentation prior to the October 14 deadline. We will be submitting an electronic copy of this package.

G. Heyman: Thank you for a very strong and clear presentation with good examples, particularly the focus on the importance to both communities and the economy of investing in education.

Obviously, the committee has heard your submission, other submissions around the province on similar lines repeatedly over the years. I expect we’ll hear them repeatedly over this series of budget hearing exercises, and we will have much discussion on this issue.

I think even yesterday some of what we heard in Vancouver echoes what you say. It’s very clear that in district after district around the province, parents are struggling. They’re being asked to provide more. Teachers are struggling, and more importantly, students are struggling, and we owe them the best we can give them.

C. Johns: I might just add one point. At last night’s Highlands PAC meeting, parent advisory committee
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meeting, was a startling statistic that the parent advisory committee last year raised over $50,000 and contributed that to the school operations. Now, lots of schools are not capable of doing that.

In my school district or my area, we don’t have the situation that we heard about yesterday in Vancouver where parents from wealthy neighbourhoods can raise huge amounts of money for their local PAC, and other schools right next door can’t.

In my neighbourhood, none of the schools can. We don’t have that problem, but we have that whole situation of trying to raise funds for things, and we heard it yesterday, that should be basically paid for under our public education system. So I think we’ve heard that loud and clear.

I just want to make a comment on your fourth recommendation around fully funding ELL learners and special needs kids who have been identified by school district professionals for funding. I wanted you to comment on this. In northern B.C., we don’t have the professionals at hand to even identify the kids, so our teachers constantly bring up this situation. Yeah, we have so many kids in our district who have been identified, and we have hundreds more in what they call the grey area, where they can never even get the professionals to come up to actually identify them and do all the paperwork and the assessments.

Is that a similar thing here, in the East Kootenays, where you have many more kids than just the ones that your professionals identified, who really need to be getting extra help?

C. Johns: Thank you for the question. Yes, it’s the same in the East Kootenay and Southeast Kootenay. It’s my understanding that we have about 100 kids on a “waiting list” to be assessed. By the end of the month, we’ll have more of the details in terms of our special education needs. That’s why I wanted to have an opportunity prior to October 14 to target that particular area.

One of the issues I’m mentioning here is that our very skilled professionals can identify students with special needs, but typically, there are limits, caps, to what the province will actually fund. In our school district…. I don’t have the current numbers, but we subsidize special education to a very large extent, and that comes out of general operating.

That particular part of our presentation, I want to amplify prior to the October 14 submission.

C. Johns: Well, I think the package that I’ve gone through with the letters to the various ministers and also to the Premier of the province would be indicative that we have not received responses back from those elected officials. As an elected school board, we think it’s common courtesy that you would respond to the concerns that we have raised. We’ve taken the time to research it, to put it together succinctly. Common courtesy, I would suggest, would demand a response.

D. Ashton: So do I. Thank you for bringing it forward. I’ll make sure it’s brought to somebody’s attention — in fact, this afternoon.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy day to present to the committee. It’s very much appreciated. Obviously, a very topical issue.

C. Johns: I think the committee should realize that, of course, there are those of us who study these documents very, very thoroughly. I appreciate your work and thank you very much.

The committee stands adjourned until we meet again in Kamloops in a few hours. Thank you very much.

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:	Susan Sourial

1) PacificSport Columbia Basin	Jodi Hawley
2) College of the Rockies Faculty Association	Joan Kaun
3) College of the Rockies	Dianne Teslak
	David Walls
4) East Kootenay Wildlife Association	Jeff Berdusco
5) Columbia Basin Alliance for Literacy	Betty Knight
6) Meadowbrook Community Association	Margie Hayward
	Bob Johnstone
7) East Kootenay Invasive Species Council	Todd Larsen
8) Board of Education, School District No. 5 (Southeast Kootenay)	Chris Johns
	Trina Ayling
	Gail Brown
	Patricia Whalen

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES