Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 100 — Wednesday, September 21, 2016 (HTML)

Redwood Aspen Room, Ramada Hotel and Conference Centre
2170 Harvey Road, Kelowna, 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; 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	2331
L. Hawker
D. Hawker
D. Buszard
P. Barker
C. Denesiuk
J. Hamilton
T. Warshawski
B. Froehlich
R. Nelson
J. Gordon
F. Steele
G. Lucas
T. Dyas
J. Hansen
S. Muff
L. Trepanier
S. Taylor
M. Welsh
B. Qualey

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good morning, everyone. 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, and 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. That can be found at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/finance.

We invite all British Columbians to contribute to this important process, and for those of you in attendance today, we’d like to thank you for taking the time to participate. 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 being recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services, and a complete transcript of proceedings will be posted to the committee’s website. All the meetings are also broadcast as live audio via our website.

I’ll now ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves, and I’ll start over on my left with Jennifer, please.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, everyone. Also assisting the committee today are, to my left, Susan Sourial and Stephanie Raymond from the Parliamentary Committees Office. Michael Baer and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard Services are also here recording the proceedings.

I won’t waste any time. I’m going to go to the first submission on the list, and that’s Leona Hawker and David Hawker.

Please come on up, and good morning. Welcome. As I mentioned earlier in my dissertation there, ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a little signal as we get close to the end of the ten minutes so you can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go to the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

L. Hawker: Good morning, ladies and gentleman. We are Dave and Leona Hawker, and our request is that the Home Owner Grant Act and/or the regulations be changed to include privately owned principal residences located on property registered as shared interest.

By way of introduction, we are advocates for homeowners in Caravans West RV resort in Scotch Creek, B.C. We own property there, but our principal residence is in Kelowna. We have been working on this situation since February of 2014 and have gone through the ranks of B.C. Assessment, who referred us to the property taxation department in Victoria, who referred us to the homeowner grant administration branch, who apparently took this to the budget review committee, all to no avail.

The Hon. Michael de Jong’s office referred us to our local MLA, Steven Thomson, who has referred us to this select standing committee. The tax policy branch is familiar with this complaint, and their decision is based on a precedent being set and/or situations where relatives sharing space in a family home would then qualify. This, in our view, is not a realistic picture, because you can only claim one homeowner grant on one home even though there could be more than one registered owner.

Let us draw you a picture of what it looks like. Suppose that you, ourselves and your secretary decide to buy a
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piece of property together as a shared interest. On that property, we decide to put in a swimming pool and maybe a clubhouse. The expenses are shared three ways. In this agreement, we also stipulate that we each have exclusive use of a specific lot. Then suppose that we put a park model on our lot that is 35 feet long with no extras, just a step out the door — total value at $50,000. This becomes our principal residence.

Then suppose that you bring in a park model that might be 45 feet long and, to that, you add an addition and a deck valued at $100,000 on the lot that you have exclusive use of and make that your principal residence. Then suppose your secretary leaves her lot empty and uses it as a recreation lot during the summer months and brings in her RV, tent or whatever for the summer.

Now comes time for the assessment authority to place an assessed value on this property. He places a value on the total property, including the property privately owned by you and us. They submit this to the taxing authority, and they in turn send out one tax bill that now includes the privately owned property and the shared-interest property which includes the land and the common property. This does not allow for the two lots which are used as principal residences to claim the homeowner’s grant. In turn, the tax bill is divided in three equal parts and does not separate the privately owned and occupied residences.

This is the situation at Caravans West, which is managed by a board called the Caravans West Owners Association. There are 382 lots, with the majority of them being used for recreation purposes. There are, however, a small number of them being used as principal residences because this provides affordable housing for them.

In our understanding, the requirement needed in order to claim a homeowner grant is that there must be improvements on a piece of land that would indicate a dwelling — a mobile home, a park model, etc. — that would be an owner’s principal residence. This land does not need to be owned by the owner of the home. It can be leased, rented, etc. In other words, the land can be owned by another person.

This land could be owned by someone perhaps in a shared-interest situation or a mobile home park, renting or leasing the property to someone who has a personal improvement, i.e., park model, which is being used as their principal residence. It could also be situated on land owned by natives and in a rental or lease situation. In these situations, the homeowner is taxed on the home, and the landowner is taxed on the land. A vacant piece of land does not qualify for a homeowner’s grant.

We cannot speak for all shared-interest properties, but Caravans West is registered at land title office. We have included a copy of the registration number at land titles for our property. We’re also attaching a document showing how B.C. Assessment has a separate value on the improvements on each site, namely the home — park model in this case — and perhaps a shed on that site. According to B.C. Assessment, park models that cannot be licensed as motor vehicles are taxed based on the Mobile Home Tax Act.

B.C. Assessment provides the values directly to Caravans West Owners Association in order for them to bill each owner for their share of the improvements included in the property taxes, which now puts them in the position of tax collector. Caravans West Owners Association now calculates each owner’s share on a percentage basis.

Providing the assessed values to a third party in this manner does not make provision for the owner of the improvements on a particular site to appeal the value assessed by B.C. Assessment Authority. This all happens after the fact. The taxes have been paid by Caravans West Owners Association, so there’s no opportunity to appeal anything.

In summary, the issue should not be how the land is registered but by the improvements on that property, which are privately owned and should give entitlement to the provincial homeowner’s grant. When you apply for a homeowner grant on your tax notice, you sign a declaration that you are the owner of the property and this is your principal residence. An example could be a cooperative, or a mobile home park which has multiple privately owned residences on one piece of property or land owned by someone else.

We thank you for the opportunity to appear before this committee and look forward to a favourable response from you.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you Mrs. Hawker. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

L. Hawker: I have a sample of some of the homes that are there so that you can see that they are not RVs — that you’re not going to hook onto them and move them overnight type of thing. They are permanently fastened to the lot. They’re skirted. They’ve got additions.

G. Heyman: Thank you for raising the issue and for bringing the case forward. I had to go back and actually read some of the submission, because it’s not a simple issue. It is for you, obviously.

I’m just wondering if, when you talk to the assessment authority or to Minister Thomson, if either of them gave you a rationale for the current practice outside of it being the current practice.

L. Hawker: The only one that we got from Minister Thomson was the one…. He got this from the tax office in Victoria. That was that they felt that it would be setting a precedent and that relatives sharing a home could
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also be claiming a homeowner grant, which doesn’t make sense. You can only have one homeowner grant, even if you have ten owners. Or if there’s 20 people living in a house, it’s still one homeowner grant.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I just wondered. You mentioned you obviously speak for yourselves, not for others. In the work you’ve been doing on this, have you talked to others across the province? Do you know what kind of an issue this is across B.C.? Do you know how big an issue this is?

L. Hawker: I honestly don’t know. The very first year that…. Well, you could probably speak better to that, because you lived there at the time. The first year they did get their own tax notice.

D. Hawker: Actually, we got it for about three years, and then the information that I got and the reason they said it was discontinued was because it was not registered at the….

D. Hawker: Yeah. The individual lots were not registered at land titles, and they certainly are. I have two lots there, and they’re both registered, as well as the entire block. The block, they told us, could have six homeowner grants. Of course, there’s no way of dividing that, plus the fact that it was all of the common area.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. Maybe you can explain something, because something’s jumping off the page at me when I’m looking at pages 10 and 12 here, the very last one. I look at improvements on a couple of the lots — substantially more, almost double, or even more than double, of some. So 314, 315, 319 particularly, 328. Can you explain that?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Oh 315. Okay, so most are assessed in the $67,000 to $68,000 range, and then there are a couple at $130,000, $135,000.

D. Hawker: Those were the ones that have park models. The other one I own…. So 327 on there is mine as well, and it is just strictly an RV lot with a fifth wheel on it and a shed, and they assessed the shed as an improvement.

L. Hawker: Some of the park models have quite a substantial addition, like they’re not just the park model, and some of them are just the park model.

D. Hawker: When you get to take a look at the picture there, you’ll see that 317 is a park model, and I have a 10-by-12 addition on it, which is considered a California room.

L. Hawker: When you referred, also, to that spreadsheet that is attached, it also shows you how they calculate it on a percentage basis, not on the actual tax rate. But it’s the only way that caravans have of dealing with that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): So this percentage basis you’re talking about is the rate that’s levied through Caravans West.

D. Ashton: On a square-footage basis? Is that based on a square-footage basis of the land or the assessment value?

L. Hawker: The land is a common area. It’s only the park models…. These are park models, because they’re not regular mobile homes. A mobile home is usually 65 to 70 feet long. The longest of these would be 45 or 44.

D. Ashton: How does Caravans come up with this percentage basis? Is it based on the percentage of the value, or is it based on the square footage of use of the lot?

L. Hawker: We’ve attached a little explanation from Caravans West on how they attempt to deal with that. It is highlighted on your page there. Any RVs that are in there do not get a tax value because they’re insured under the Motor Vehicle Act.

Next we have University of British Columbia Okanagan campus — Dr. Philip Barker and Deborah Buszard. As
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you’re winding your way up, as I mentioned, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left. You can conclude your thoughts, and we’ll go to the committee for questions.

D. Buszard: Thank you very much for allowing us to come and present to you. I believe this is the only presentation that you’ll have from UBC. Whilst we are from UBC Okanagan, we are here representing the big ship as well.

I’ll begin by thanking the B.C. government for the extraordinary investments that have been made in this great flagship university for the province of British Columbia. It is an extraordinary place. It’s consistently ranked in the top 40 universities in the world. It is among the top six public universities in North America and the top two in Canada.

It is an extraordinary thing for a young province and for a university that is only 100 years old. What’s even more remarkable, of course, is that our campus here has just celebrated its tenth anniversary, and it is becoming an extraordinary world-class institution in its own right within that UBC system.

We are a big institution. We have over 60,000 students. This year, we’re welcoming upwards towards 9,000 on our campus here. That means, on a daily basis, there are over 10,000 people on that campus. It’s a very important piece of the region. It’s really transforming Kelowna today, and it will in the future. The economic impact here of having UBC in Kelowna is about $1.5 billion a year.

Our new campus is slightly different from the old campus, just as a grandchild might be different from the grandparent. We aspire to be a model of what a university can be in the 21st century. Our campus, for those of you who have seen it, is really a remarkable, remarkable 21st-century campus.

We aspire to be innovative and interdisciplinary and have an impact on the communities we serve — very directly, of course, on the interior of B.C., through our health faculties and the research and economic activities and the graduates that we graduate — but also have an international impact.

I’ve given you a PowerPoint slide there with the numbers at a glance. I won’t go into them. But just to say it is a thriving campus that has much more than doubled in size over the last ten years and is already having significant success in national and international research funding and activities. So we are, I think, a grandchild of UBC that UBC can be very proud of.

We exist to serve the people of British Columbia through our academic and research work and through the work of our graduates. I would note that, although only 30 percent of our students at UBC Okanagan come from this region, 60 percent of our graduates are staying here. That’s an extraordinary contribution to building a very vibrant community here in the Interior. I think the investment that was made in constructing and launching the interior universities…. Our partners Thompson Rivers University and UNBC here in the Interior are all having a very dramatic effect on our regions.

We are producing graduates in important, high-demand fields. For example, in the last three years, we have increased the number of seats in our engineering program, undergraduate, from 600 to 1,000 at this time. Our ambition is to continue to grow our programming in high-demand areas. We have introduced a new program in media studies which is serving very much the needs of the digital media and the IT tech community which is, as you know, a very vibrant part of the Kelowna economy.

We also, as an institution, are very proud of our partnership with the Syilx people of the Okanagan Nation. Since our beginning, where we signed an MOU of partnership with that nation, we have more than doubled aboriginal student enrolment, and this year we have over 400 students who are self-identified as aboriginal on our campus. So that’s clearly not all of them, because they have, some of them, no interest in identifying, but nevertheless it’s a very important, growing part of our community, and we are very proud of the work that’s being done.

Finally, I would just end my part of the presentation, before I pass over to Dr. Barker…. We have just launched a co-op program across the campus so that every one of our students, whatever their program, will be able to have work-related activity as part of their programming.

P. Barker: Thank you very much for having us today to speak about some of the initiatives coming out of UBC. What I’m here to tell you about is an initiative that’s been launched over the last year to really have a major impact on socioeconomic development in the Okanagan while solving real-world problems and harnessing some of the innovation potential that we have at UBC, to move the needle on what the university is capable of doing, particularly in interacting with various partners.

What I’m speaking of is what we’ve dubbed the UBC Okanagan Innovation Precinct. That refers to a 30-acre parcel of land that’s located between the existing campus and Highway 97. You can see it right when you’re passing the airport. On the university side, there’s essentially empty land of 30 acres sitting there that’s owned by UBC that has been designated the innovation precinct as of about a year ago.

We’re developing that as an area in which we can partner with a variety of different organizations to provide opportunities for our students to have an impact on business-led research and development and to really allow our researchers to bring their skills to bear on important problems that are affecting Canada, and Canadian industry in particular.

Our first foray into developing the innovation precinct comes from a partnership that we’ve developed with a Delta-based company, Avcorp Industries, who is a supplier to Boeing, among others — a major supplier to the Boeing 787 line — through their plant in Delta and also subsidiary plants in California and elsewhere in Canada.

They came to us because they’re interested in partnering to solve a major problem that exists in the composite manufacturing area. That is particularly in the aerospace industry but also in other manufacturing domains. Essentially, they throw out 50 percent of what they make. The reason for that is that there’s a huge failure rate, because the science behind composite manufacturing remains as much wizardry and black magic as it does based on hard-core science.

A research group at UBC — been in existence for a long time; over 20 years now — called the Composite Research Network has been working in this domain for the last two decades, partnering with Boeing and, more recently, over the last five years — and with a major investment from Western Economic Diversification — with a broader array of industry partners, has developed a strong reputation in solving this area.

Avcorp has partnered with UBC to allow this network, the Composite Research Network, to conceive what we’re dubbing a learning factory in advanced composite manufacturing. This would have a working factory actually established on the innovation precinct, but it would be specialized in such a way that it would have sensors built into it. We would collect data in real time that would give us new insights into the manufacturing process.

This would be the first in the world in this domain that would allow us to harvest the data that would tell us what works and what doesn’t work. It would allow us to create, essentially, a digital factory in the cloud in which we’d analyze this data — here in the Okanagan, as well as in Vancouver — and allow us to solve these problems in real time.

Avcorp will build the factory. UBC will build the research unit around it. Together, we imagine that, over the next decade or two, it will have a major impact on this particular type of manufacturing, while creating opportunities for our students and developing an entire new area of research on our campus.

I know we’re short on time but just to let you know where we’re at on this process. We are well advanced in our functional planning into what this would look like. From the UBC side and the Avcorp side, we have a very good idea. You have a bit of a conceptual drawing — it’s very conceptual, actually — of what it would like, but it gives you a sense of the types of space and the capacity that we’re going to require in this factory.

We’re here, really, informing you of where we’re at with this project. We anticipate that we’re going to be requiring funding from a variety of sources, including provincial sources, to allow this project to go forward. We’re really here to inform you of that ask coming down the road, both from an operational point of view, from a capital point of view, as well as from the point of view of developing new programs, particularly around advanced manufacturing that would be based out of our school of engineering.

R. Austin: This is a joint venture between a private company and the university. At the end of the day, once you’ve, hopefully, successfully conquered this challenge, who owns it? Does the private company end up being the sole proprietor of all of this knowledge, or is this knowledge then shared with multiple companies, who then can compete to build composites products?

P. Barker: Great question. The intellectual property issues around this are complex. I think the way to look at it is from a company versus a university point of view. What’s owned by the company stays owned by the company. What’s developed by the university stays owned by the university. In those interaction zones, we will have agreements that will allow information to pass in both directions.

From an academic point of view, what we’re interested in promoting is the development of new knowledge that can be broadly shared. That’s an operational principle we’ve had in our conversations with this company from the outset. They understand that this is an imperative for us — that we need to be able to create a situation that, on the one hand, allows them to develop technology that they can have confidence that they can move ahead with their own manufacturing process in some sort of protected domain.

On the other hand, from a generic point of view, solving these types of problems that can obviously have a broad impact, not only on the aeronautics industry but beyond, is something that, as an academic institution, we’re very keen to share and recognize the importance of sharing.

D. Buszard: We are at just about 98 per cent full enrolment, so we are very, very close to 100 percent enrolment. We had a small dip about three years ago where we went for what we call broad-based admissions, which means that in addition to applying, students have to actually write a statement about their personal lives and their ambitions. For us, that created a small dip. But we have the largest entering class ever this year, and we are just about recovered from that dip. Our ambition is to be just slightly over our target enrolment.
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S. Gibson: I’m glad the university I applied to didn’t ask me what my ambitions were.

My question is this. I had the privilege of teaching university students for 16 years. A lot of them, particularly mature students, were frustrated by the lack of flexibility that universities offer. I think all universities struggle with this.

If somebody wants to get a degree and they want to do it part-time…. They don’t want to take away from their work. For example, there’s no place in B.C. where somebody can do a law degree part-time. We have friends in California. One of their sons worked at a restaurant during the day and did his law degree at night.

I think this a real lament in Canada — perhaps more with our more free-enterprise cousins in the U.S. — where universities, like UBC and others, make it really difficult for mature students or others to go to school at night or flexibly — at any rate, not have to put their career on hold.

D. Buszard: I recognize that we have…. As UBC, that has not been part of what UBC has seen as the area that it plays in. There are other universities in British Columbia which are far more active in the role of continuing, professional and part-time. Of course, Thompson Rivers University is the open learning university for the province.

I do feel that British Columbians have a good choice of opportunities, but this is still a very young university network. Universities like UNBC, Thompson Rivers and ourselves are really at that initial start-up phase in terms of our programing and capacity. It is our ambition to continue to grow and to expand the kinds of offering and opportunities that we have and that we can give to people here. Our school of management….

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’re out of time. I’m sorry. MLA Ashton has one question that he wants to ask. I want to get it in there, if I could.

D. Ashton: Thank you very much for your presentation. A stat you mentioned, that 30 percent of the kids come from here and 60 percent stay…. One of the considerations from the president’s advisory committee, which I had association with when this all started, was that that institution was going to cater to those in the Interior — not wholly, but the opportunity was going to be given. I sure hope that stays.

D. Buszard: We are absolutely committed to that, but actually, the population here is relatively small.

D. Buszard: We are growing, and we are taking all qualified applicants from the region. That’s a core commitment.

Now, could I please call on Okanagan College. Allan Coyle, Connie Denesiuk and Jim Hamilton.

Thank you for coming. Good morning. You probably heard me say ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll give you a wave when time is waning, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

C. Denesiuk: Thank you Mr. Chair. I’d like to begin by acknowledging that we’re presenting today on the traditional territory of the Westbank First Nation.

I’d also like to thank the members of the committee for your service — we know it’s a huge job — and also for your interest in hearing from British Columbians around the areas of finance and government services.

I know that you’ve heard and will hear from other post-secondary institutions. I want to note that you’ll also hear our collective voice through presentations from organizations such as B.C. Colleges, which is working with research and teaching universities on a joint submission to your committee.

As I promised, Mr. Chair, I’m going to start with a story that gives you a sense of how and why we’re very interested in working with and learning from our indigenous community.

Tina Miller came to Okanagan College from the Nisga’a Nation as a mother of four who hadn’t completed her high school education. Returning to school was a frightening and foreign experience for her, but she found support and encouragement from staff in the aboriginal access and services department and from her instructors in adult basic education, business administration.

Fast forward a few years to today. Tina is in the last semester of her bachelor of business administration degree. She’s also an integral part of our indigenization task force, which is working to help OC build on its successes.

Last year we had more than 1,500 indigenous students come through our doors, more than triple the number we had just a decade ago. We want to further enhance and focus on ensuring those students’ success and are exploring ways the indigenous knowledge and culture can enrich our campuses and every student’s experience at Okanagan College.
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I’ll tell another story, too, that speaks to the excellence of what we have on offer for students and about how important access is to the citizens of this region.

I’ll pick up Zach Andrews’ story on June 29 of this year, a date he was a no-show for convocation ceremony where he was to collect his diploma in electronic engineering technology. Zach didn’t show because he was in Moncton at another ceremony, collecting the gold medal in electronics at Skills Canada. He was the best electronics technician at the daunting competition, coached by some of the best instructors in the country — Okanagan College’s.

Zach’s story goes further back than his diploma, though. Before that, he took and completed his apprenticeship and Red Seal in Okanagan College’s electrical program. He worked for a number of years as an electrician before returning to OC for our diploma program in electronic engineering technology. I’m pleased to report that Zach is back, this time taking an engineering bridge program that OC developed with UBC Okanagan to allow our diploma graduates to enter third-year engineering at the university.

These stories illustrate what is most important about Okanagan College and the other colleges in British Columbia, especially in the areas outside the Lower Mainland. We provide access to higher learning and the support for students to help each of them reach their career goal and educational goals. We are there for the many first-generation post-secondary students in our regions, for those who need to switch careers, for those who don’t have the luxury of being able to leave behind support networks to attend school elsewhere.

J. Hamilton: Good morning. I’m the president of the college, and Connie should have mentioned that she is our outstanding board chair and, as you can tell, a quite articulate advocate for not just Okanagan College but post-secondary in general.

Okanagan College has been tremendously successful. We’ve exceeded our government enrolment targets every year for the past 11 years, and today Okanagan College and our valued partners, UBC Okanagan — from whom you heard a moment ago — educate and train nearly twice as many students as our predecessor, Okanagan University College, did in its last years of operation.

In that achievement, we’ve worked very closely with government to implement policy, and we see, understand and have anticipated the skills gap that is unfolding. We are eager to continue meeting student, employer and community needs.

An example. This is our new trades building that will be opened officially tomorrow. It is part of the rejuvenation and expansion of our trades complex at the Kelowna campus, a $35 million project that will be home to 2,700 or more trades students annually. It’s intended to inspire students who learn there and signal to them and the employer community just how much our college values trades training. After all — little point — we are B.C.’s second-largest trades-training institution. BCIT is a little bit bigger than us, but they are in Vancouver.

We recognize there are some areas where we need to do more. We’ve had a significant record of service to the indigenous population, but we know we need to learn from and work with our indigenous communities to bolster student success and to create respectful context and culture for all students and staff.

We’re introducing a new aboriginal community support worker program at our Salmon Arm campus and have just launched, in partnership with the Westbank First Nation and B.C. Hydro, a construction craft worker bridging program for indigenous students. We’re signatories to the national indigenous education protocol, and we have agreements in place with more than 20 bands and other indigenous organizations and schools. We think it’s a good start, but it’s just the beginning.

We help build communities. Just last week Accelerate Okanagan disclosed that the economic impact of the tech community in the region has grown by 30 percent over the past two years. We’ve been part of that, with our faculty and students engaging in valuable research with industry to propel growth.

An example of our ongoing research work is with WTFast, a Kelowna company that’s grown into an international force in network optimization for gamers. I don’t know what that is exactly, but it’s important. One of our professors and several of our students are working with the company, through federally funded research, to help the company continue to evolve and grow.

We’re in the throes of finalizing curriculum for a digital animation diploma program, which we’ll be offering beginning in 2017 in the brand-new — to be opened in November — Okanagan innovation centre, of which we have been an important partner.

With provincial support, we’re once again offering a coding fundamental course this year. We’re also working with the grape and wine industry, and next year we’ll add a viticulture diploma program to the array of certificate programs we already offer in this area.

One of our professors and some of our students are finalizing a research project that may help British Columbia claim the mid-range portion of the wine consumption market that we’ve left to Chile, Australia and the U.S. until now. Exploiting that market could add millions in revenue to our province’s grape growers and winemakers and mean hundreds more jobs in our expanding wine-growing regions.

We’re working closely with the culinary and hospitality communities as well. One of my favourite parts of my job is those events.

C. Denesiuk: The opportunity and the need to introduce new programs, new opportunities and support services for students is clear. We can do more. Yes, it means more money. Of course, our board is going to ask for that. But it isn’t just the colleges saying: “Give us more.” This summer some of B.C.’s biggest and most promising tech companies sent an open letter to government asking it to invest another $100 million to expand technology-related post-secondary programs.

Okanagan College is here, poised and ready to do more. We are innovative and responsive to the labour markets. In short, like the tech community, we see the opportunity and the need for further government investment in post-secondary education in this region and throughout B.C. We also know that employers and the community will come to the table as well, but it requires a partnership.

We — and I mean government, institutions, community and employers — need to be working together to ensure people like Tina and Zach find the programs they need to take advantage of the career opportunities that will be unfolding not just in the Okanagan but across the province and the country. If Tina has a message for us and you, it’s to find more money for student support — and not just indigenous students but all students as they experience the transformative effects of higher learning.

One of the many reasons British Columbia is doing well today is because there was a decision made in 2005 to invest in 25,000 more post-secondary seats over five years. As a consequence, we have more educated, trained, productive citizens earning more money and demanding less of our social safety net.

When you review our student outcomes and data and see Okanagan College’s degree students earning nearly $50,000 annually after two years or our Red Seal journeypeople earning an average of $28 an hour, you know that those investments are paying off.

It may well be time to consider that kind of targeted investment again, leveraging community and industry support, recognizing that today’s students are tomorrow’s tech innovators and taxpayers and that students such as Tina and Zach will become our society’s leaders.

I’d like to thank you for the opportunity that you’ve given us to present this morning.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. We appreciate that. I’m going to go to the committee.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much. You really didn’t leave a lot of room for questions, because you laid out very clearly what you’ve accomplished, where your growth opportunities are and where the needs are.

I’ve visited the Penticton campus twice. Thank you, Allan, for showing me the LEED platinum building, the sustainable construction management program. Dan is very lucky to have that in his constituency. I think the contributions that students who graduate from that program will make are tremendous.

I just wanted to touch on…. I’m glad to hear that you’re establishing a digital animation program. I know, from talking to people in the industry in Vancouver, that just one company told me they could snap up everybody who graduated from the Vancouver program in one year and they still wouldn’t have nearly enough graduates. They’re having to look outside of B.C. instead of filling those jobs here. We all know that the tech sector in Kelowna is booming, so the work you’re doing there is great.

The only question I have for you is…. I’ve heard the ask about funding. Is there any very specific thing you want us to focus on in terms of our deliberations for recommendations? Again, thank you for the great contribution to B.C., the region and the economy, as well as innovation — particularly what I saw in Penticton — that’s coming from Okanagan College.

J. Hamilton: Thank you for your kind comments. We do appreciate the support of all of our MLAs and the provincial government for what we do. I think I’m not going to give you a specific dollar amount. I prefer to leave that to the combined presentation you’ll receive. We try to work as a sector, not just present our own — well, we do that too — list of needs and desires. I think you’re going to get those numbers out of our sector organizations when they do their joint presentation.

C. Denesiuk: That being said, we do meet with…. We’re lucky that we have a good relationship with the MLAs who work within the college region. We are on the doorstep of Eric and Dan on a regular basis about specific programs. I’ll just add that.

J. Hamilton: I would put this forward, though, while we have the opportunity. One of the things we’ve done successfully at Okanagan College, as our local MLAs know, is that we always find ways to leverage employer contributions, industry contributions, with government contributions when we’re launching new programs.

One of the things I’ve asked or suggested in the past is that you consider an innovation fund. An innovation fund would be something where government incents that kind of collaboration.

I think the employer community is — we know this from our own experience — becoming more and more interested in coming to the table to invest, along with government and, of course, student contributions as well. So it’s something to think about. We’ve talked about that in the past. I do think that would be a good way of maybe helping us move forward on some of the fronts where we’re challenged at the moment.
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J. Hamilton: All of our academic courses are transferable to programs that are relevant at UBC Okanagan and, through BCCAT, all the other post-secondary institutions in the province. I would like to say that it’s interesting that when I started… I’m the longest-serving post-secondary president in the province, so I’ve been around a while. When I first started with Okanagan College, most of our students went to UVic when they transferred out of the region. Today the highest percentage of our transferring students just go down the road to UBC Okanagan. So we’re really pleased the way that’s playing out.

D. Ashton: That’s because you’re good at it, Jim. So keep up the good work, along with the team sitting beside you. Thank you very much for coming today.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next we have the Child Obesity Foundation — Dr. Tom Warshawski.

Dr. Warshawski, come on up. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a heads-up when the time is waning. Then we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

T. Warshawski: There is a presentation, and I think that’s going to be distributed right now. In fact, I presented before this committee last year, and I think, amongst others from the NGO community, that was well received. What’s the value-add today? I’ve got new nice graphs to show you and a little bit different ask. Just because I tend to be a bit long-winded on things, I’ll get to the point, and then, hopefully, I’ll get all the rest done in my allotted time.

Thanks again for allowing me to present again. I appreciate that I had a chance to do this about one year ago. This presentation has got some new graphs and some new information.

One thing is that we formed a Rethink Sugary Drinks Coalition, which is a coalition of all the health-minded NGOs in British Columbia — so that’s our organization, Heart and Stroke Foundation, Canadian Diabetes, Dietitians of Canada — to look at ways, policy levers and practice points we can exercise across the province to reduce consumption of these products.

Why are we doing this? It’s because there is strong scientific evidence that sugary drink intake is a major risk factor for obesity and all the resultant chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke and now 13 different cancers. The list of cancers associated with obesity is growing.

I want to stress again that sugary drink consumption is an independent risk factor for all these conditions, so in and of itself, apart from its causing of obesity, even in people of normal weight, sugary drinks are a health risk.

British Columbians are heavy consumers of sugary drinks. There are some new numbers in this brief about that. Sugary drink consumption in British Columbia can be estimated to trigger about $90 million in excess health care costs. This is an initial number based on two studies. We’re working with researchers at the University of Waterloo to more precisely, I guess, calculate the cost to Canadian society in general based on sugary drink consumption, both in obese and in non-obese individuals. Then we can take that number and drill down to British Columbia.

Right now sugary drinks are not subject to the provincial sales tax, and as a result, heavy consumers are triggering excess or above average health care costs but not even paying their fair share of health care costs.

The Canadian Beverage Association has underrepresented the volume of sugary drinks sold to Canadians, and they refuse to acknowledge the link between their products and obesity and ill health. I have a graph to sort of talk about that.

There are effective policy levers that can address the problem of sugary drink overconsumption, and they are consistent with the values of British Columbians. The province of British Columbia, in our opinion, should extend the provincial sales tax to include sugary drinks. This measure will reduce consumption of the product. It will facilitate personal responsibility and garner over $36 million in revenue to partially recover the health care costs triggered by excessive sugary drink consumption.

I’m not just coming out here with my hand out for money like all the other presenters. I’m giving some ideas how to make some money, and this money could be used for health promotion.

The bottom-line ask will be on page 9. I should have put it at the front. We have had ongoing meetings — we are the reduce-the-sugary-drink-consumption coalition — with senior civil servants and cabinet ministers. There’s a growing awareness of the costly health impacts of sugary drinks and a new willingness in government and in civil service to extend the PST to include sugary drinks.

We would hope that the select standing committee will encourage the government of B.C. to extend the PST to cover all sugary drinks — that’s not just pop; it’s real-fruit drinks and iced teas, that sort of thing — because it will facilitate consumers taking responsibility for the extra health care costs associated with these products and it will help recoup a portion of the costs that they trig-
[ Page 2340 ]
ger. The proceeds can be used for health promotion — things like the MEND program, Shapedown and health programs for adults.

That, in a nutshell, is what I’m going to talk about. Maybe I’ll just go on to a couple of key points on page 2.

Sugary drinks are the largest single contributor of added sugar to the Canadian diet. The World Health Organization and the Heart and Stroke Foundation recommend limiting added sugars to no more than 5 to 10 percent of total daily caloric intake. What does that mean? Well, it means 100 to 200 calories per day, which is not all that much. The average adult is probably eating around 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day.

More than for any other food, there’s rigorous, consistent scientific data that overconsumption of sugary drinks is linked with heart disease, hypertension and diabetes — and again, associated with these risks, independent of weight.

On page 3, I’ve got a little graph here which just shows why sugary drink consumption has actually ballooned over the last 30 years. What this graph does is show you…. It’s a consumer price index. It’s American data, but it’s pretty good for Canada as well. The very bottom line there, in dark blue, is the price of soft drinks compared to the consumer price index over the last 30 years, between 1980 and 2010. You can see it gets relatively cheaper every year.

The consumer price index is flat, and then the price of fruits and vegetables gets more and more expensive every year. The reason why pop has gotten so much cheaper is that in the U.S., the corn industry is subsidized between $4 billion and $5 billion per year. That makes corn very cheap. At the same time, a new process was made to create high-fructose corn syrup. Corn in and of itself is not a good sweetener, but when you change it chemically, it tastes just like sugar. So all of a sudden you had huge volumes of cheap sweetener available.

What happened was…. Well, this is a great way to sell more product, so the average sizes of soft drinks ballooned as well, as did profits. So we have the free market being perturbed by subsidies with sort of unintended consequences.

Next page. Page 4 just talks about sugary drink consumption in B.C. The bottom line is Canadians drink about 110 litres per person per year. This is an average. So if you take in mind that probably half the population hardly drinks the stuff, those that drink it are drinking a lot. The numbers from B.C. are consistent with that. Teens in B.C. that drink the pop are probably drinking around 600 millilitres per day. For those aged 30 to 50, volumes are still around 500 millilitres. Even those above 70, those that drink it are drinking over 300 millilitres per day. So these are very sort of dangerous quantities.

The next page, page 5, just looks at some of the assertions by the Canadian Beverage Association. They’ve been fairly careful with the numbers that they’ll let out. What they will assert is that the consumption of soft drinks has been steadily falling, yet the rates of obesity have been growing, as have the rates of type 2 diabetes. No single statistic refutes the link more than this. This is their assertion.

However, they haven’t really been consistent with their numbers. If you look at the graph here, this is as of 2011. The blue line here is what they said soft drink consumption was in Canada. But they were very careful. They only talked about ready-to-drink pop — that is, pop that’s in cans, pop that’s in bottles and that’s carbonated. When we called them on it in an article in the Canadian Journal of Diabetes, they rejigged their numbers, came up with a new graph, which is the red line up top, which now includes fountain drinks. These are the drinks that you get at McDonald’s and other places like that.

It still excludes, however, a major sort of component of their sales, which is the sweetened fruit drinks — the SunnyDs, the iced teas, the lemonades, that sort of thing. So the number is definitely bigger than this. We just don’t know how big it is, not giving us that data. So when they say that soft drink sales are falling, I don’t necessarily believe it. We just don’t have the good data.

One thing they’ll also say — and this is the next graph on page 6 — is that: “Well, look, our soft drink numbers are falling” — maybe they are; maybe they’re not — “but the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes aren’t falling concomitant with that.” But that’s just not the way health works.

The graph here looks at rates of smoking. That’s the blue line here, which is steadily dropping between 1970 and 2020 because of the things that we’ve done to increase the price, and education. But actually, it takes a while for the rates of lung cancer to start dropping. There’s a lag between the change in consumption and the health impacts. I just wanted to refute some of big beverage’s major assertions.

Also, they say that the blame is really the caloric imbalance — kids are too lazy; they’re not moving their bodies enough — but in fact, it’s very, very difficult to run off the calories that you’ll drink in a bottle of pop. So the average teen who is drinking, when they drink it, around 700 millilitres of a soft drink — they’ve got to jog for 40 minutes to wear off those calories. Most kids just simply can’t do that.

We know, then, that policy levers do exist. We know that sugary drinks trigger at least $90 million per year. I’ll put an asterisk beside that, because we’re going to have better numbers, probably in November. Extending the PST then allows the province to recoup a share of those health care costs. Not all of it, because if you extend the PST to sugary drinks, the proceeds will probably be about $36 million to $40 million. Hard to know for sure, because we don’t have really good data on what sugary drink consumption is. But that would generate funds that can be used for health promotion.
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Sugary drink taxation is gaining favour worldwide. It’s been implemented in Mexico. When Mexico implemented about a 10 percent increase in their sugar-sweetened beverages, they saw around 10 percent reduction in consumption: higher reductions in lower socioeconomic groups — those with lower income, around 12 percent; and amongst the more wealthy, it was around 6 percent. So there was a little bit of difference according to your socioeconomic group.

Why does that work? Well, this is the graph on page 8. This graph, actually, just talks about tobacco. It shows that as the real price of tobacco increased over the years…. And there’s a little bit of a drop here. That was when there was a smuggling epidemic, and the provinces were persuaded to drop the taxes on tobacco. When that happened, the dropping rates increased again, because it was very price sensitive. This is a highly addictive product which is still very price sensitive, and when the taxes come back on, consumption drops.

This is why the Canadian Beverage Association wants to fight taxation on the product. They know that it’s quite price sensitive and that there’s price elasticity.

The bottom line, again, is that we encourage this committee to recommend to the province that the provincial sales tax be extended to cover all sugary drinks and that at least a portion of the proceeds be devoted towards health promotion.

I think that with the recent tax that’s been placed on foreign homebuyers, part of that has been earmarked to subsidize housing. I think that the fear the Finance Ministry has about earmarked or targeted taxation is a little bit allayed, and I think there’s room now, especially in a modest tax like this, to use the proceeds for health promotion.

G. Heyman: Thanks again for the presentation. I think we’ve all also had presentations in the Legislature, and many of us in our constituency offices. Could you remind me, and also for the record, what the relative danger of other sugar-intensive drinks like sports drinks — Powerade, Gatorade; I suppose I shouldn’t use brand names — or fruit juice are to pop?

T. Warshawski: Well, it’s probably related to the amount of what we call free sugars. Not to get too scientific on it, it’s how readily available the sugar is. When you eat an apple, it’s got sugars in it, but it’s bound to the cell wall, so it gets on board slowly. It doesn’t cause the same sort of disturbances. The more free sugar you have…. Teaspoons of sugar are added to the product, like what pop is. It gets on board very, very quickly, and then the way it’s metabolized causes blood lipids, blood fat, to rise and promotes heart disease and, also, type 2 diabetes.

In terms of those other products you mentioned, it’s the amount of sugar that’s in them that’s the bad thing. For fruit juices…. Some fruit juices, such as grape juice, actually have more free sugars than does pop. Some have less. For fruit juices as a whole, it’s hard to be categorical, because some have a lot of pulp and fibre, which slows down the absorption.

Quite clearly, pop is a health danger. Those other products, such as Gatorade, Powerade that have sugars…. Some don’t have sugars now. They have G2 and G3. I don’t know if you’ve seen the different products, but some are actually artificially sweetened. Those probably don’t have a health danger. The bottom line is that the risk is proportional to the amount of free sugar, so energy drinks are still bad, and many fruit juices are. But the only group that we have the best data on is the pop.

J. Yap: Thanks for coming again to be an advocate for a very important issue. You referred to big beverage. They, of course will have their arguments. My question is: what other organizations have you partnered with kind of as a coalition of advocacy for this important issue? Who’s with you in promoting this approach?

T. Warshawski: We’re working both at a provincial and national level. On the top of page 2 there’s a list. We have the B.C. branches of Canadian Cancer, Heart and Stroke, Canadian Diabetes, Dietitians of Canada — they’ve all come out with statements; our foundation; the B.C. Healthy Living Alliance; Doctors of B.C.; B.C. parks and rec; B.C. Pediatrics Society; and the First Nations Health Authority, because the First Nations are actually being devastated by type 2 diabetes. There was a thing on CBC the other day. Something like 80 percent of First Nations will get type 2 diabetes, 90 percent of First Nations women — in large part because of diet, and sugary drinks are a bad one.

We’ve got this group working at a provincial level. We also have the same group at a national level. You might have heard a while ago that the Finance Minister, Bill Morneau, had commissioned people to look at a federal excise tax. We think that’s also important. What B.C. has to do is get its house in order and extend the PST to this, but also, there needs to be a federal excise tax on the product. Then, quite frankly, I think large proceeds of that have to go back to the provinces, because they’re the ones that bear the health care costs.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’re skipping ahead hear, folks, because apparently our friends from the B.C. Fruit
[ Page 2342 ]
Growers Association are not ready. Brenton Froehlich, B.C. Wildlife Federation, Okanagan region, has offered to jump into this spot.

You were here nice and early. Thank you for that. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention just as the time is running out, and then we can go to the committee for questions after that. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

B. Froehlich: Thank you, sir. My name is Brenton Froehlich. I’m the past president of the Okanagan region of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, and I’m currently one of the two vice-presidents of the B.C. Wildlife Federation. On behalf of the 6,200 members that we have here in the Okanagan and the 50,000 members across the province, I welcome the opportunity to bring some issues to your attention.

I have had the privilege of living in the Okanagan for over 50 years and have experienced a lifetime with a deep connection to the land. Hunting, fishing, trapping and gathering is a way of life that has been passed on to me from my family and supported by my community. People like myself who receive from the land have a deep respect for what it offers and are passionate about responsible stewardship.

The indigenous Syilx people of the Okanagan have a saying about the land that means, translated into English: that which gives us life. This is what I believe, and I am here today because the land is in trouble.

Over my lifetime, I have seen firsthand the cumulative effects of urban, agricultural and industrial development and how a lack of funding to manage those impacts has resulted in a steady decline in wildlife populations and created the greatest concentration of species at risk found anywhere in the province. These impacts are not simply academic but have serious implications for the residents and the indigenous communities that depend upon the land.

As you may be aware, the B.C. Wildlife Federation is the oldest and largest conservation organization in B.C., with a mission to promote conservation and wise use of our fish, wildlife and habitat resources.

From 1974 to 2010, B.C.’s population nearly doubled from 2.4 million to 4.5 million people. While the provincial budget increased nearly five times, the budget for natural resources barely moved. When we bring this up to our elected officials, we are told that all the money goes to the big three things: health care, education and social services. Yet when we remove the big three from the budget, we find out that everything else has tripled.

From 1998 to 2011, the renewable resource ministry budgets declined by nearly 56 percent, and from 2002 to 2010, the number of full-time-equivalent employees declined by 27 percent. It isn’t that health care, education and social services are taking up the entire budget; it is that everything other than natural resource management takes up the entire budget.

We’re seeing a lack of investment in many of our fish and wildlife populations. Mountain caribou are in decline across the province — in some areas, so low that they will likely disappear. Chilcotin and Thompson steelhead, once iconic runs in B.C., have gone from 3,000 to 4,000 fish returning, with a catch-and-kill fishery, to less than 600 and a total closure. Moose populations are down by 50 to 70 percent across much of the province. Meanwhile, after years of decline, the number of people taking up hunting has skyrocketed, increasing from 86,000 people in 2005 to 112,000 people in 2015, with more than a 30 percent increase.

While most jurisdictions in North America have dedicated funding models, B.C. does not. Currently 100 percent of freshwater fishing licence fees are dedicated to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation and Freshwater Fisheries. Only $2.6 million of the $14½ million raised in hunting licence fees goes to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation.

B.C. Wildlife would encourage the government to look at revenues generated by wise use of our fish and wildlife resources beyond that of solely revenue from licence sales. Previous governments have regarded licence and tag fees as the only revenue generated by fish and wildlife, and there has been no recognition of revenue generated by anglers and hunters who spend on everything from vehicles, fuel, boats and motors to gear and clothing. In 2013, angling was worth nearly $1 billion, and in 2011 to 2012, expenditures by resident hunters generated $230 million in British Columbia, in addition to the hundreds of millions generated by visitors in ecotourism.

The following recommendations to the standing committee come at a critical time. I’m just going to fast-forward into those.

Number one, dedicate all hunting and angling licence fees as revenue to fish and wildlife. The budget of fish and wildlife within the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations should be increased by at least $6 million to reflect the difference between revenue collected through fees and actual program expenditures. This would meet the surcharge user-pay funding formula recommended by the 2002 recreation stewardship panel.

In the longer term, we suggest looking at moving both fish and wildlife delivery functions — apart from legislation, regulation and policy enforcement — outside of government to a model similar to the Freshwater Fisheries Society.

The B.C. Wildlife Federation believes that wildlife management delivery as a non-governmental organization will create an atmosphere where dollars can be leveraged through partners and create corporate sponsorship that could easily turn each licensed dollar into four.

Recommendation No. 2, that all natural resource users contribute. Natural resource use and extraction
[ Page 2343 ]
has an impact on the landscape. 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, oil and gas, and logging should all be contributing to natural resource conservation. In particular, non-renewable natural resource extraction will have a long-term negative effect on biodiversity, and there is currently no mechanism to compensate for these losses.

Recommendation No. 3 is to put in place a natural resources board, reporting to the Legislature, that expands on the role of the Forest Practices Board to cover all legislation administered by the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

Recommendation No. 4, complete and implement the draft provincial conservation offset policy and related funding mechanisms to address cumulative effects at a watershed and landscape level.

Recommendation No. 5 is that we encourage the B.C. government to appoint a parliamentary secretary to provide leadership on marine and freshwater fisheries policies within the province. This is required at the present time with the passage of Bill C-38, the federal Budget Implementation Act, and changes to the provisions of the Fisheries Act, particularly habitat provisions. There are also key issues with respect to allocation of halibut and other species that are key to the economic viability of recreational fisheries.

Recommendation No. 6 pertains to the Water Act. B.C. is at the tipping point in terms of public expectations of watersheds and landscapes that natural capital will be managed sustainably. The new Water Act must strive for a high level of collaboration to improve the health of B.C. watersheds among multiple interests by regulating groundwater, protecting environmental flows, changing the allocation system and addressing water supply, drought and watershed planning.

In summary, we’re fortunate to have a rich diversity of wildlife in our province, but we’re adding more people to the population and putting more stress on our natural resources. At the same time, we’re cutting funding and capacity. The B.C. Wildlife Federation firmly believes it is our collective responsibility to conserve these resources, and it’s critical that we recognize the challenges and opportunities in maintaining B.C.’s diversity of species.

I’m going to move away from my notes and just say that I am very passionate about the land. Really, why I’m here and why I’m involved with the B.C. Wildlife Federation is that I want my kids and my grandchildren and your children and your great-grandchildren to have the same opportunities — to receive from the land and partake in that as I’ve had, hunting and fishing and all of the things that go out there.

It’s not about economic dollars all the way down the pike. There’s an intrinsic culture value to what we’re talking about. I’ve seen our populations of mule deer in the Okanagan drastically reduced over the last 50 years of my lifetime, and I see that it’s not getting better unless we put money back into the pot.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I do have questions. I’m going to start right away with George, please.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for a well-rounded and thoughtful presentation as well as for your advocacy work for the natural environment and your concern about ecosystems and species.

I have a couple of questions of clarification. You are suggesting that responsibility for monitoring conservation or conservation programs in some way be moved outside of government and into a society that would mirror the Freshwater Fisheries Society, I believe you said. I’m just wondering if you can expand on the reasons for that and how you think, in that context, government plays a role in ensuring that the broad public interest is maintained.

I also just wanted to comment that this is the second time in two weeks I’ve heard somebody advocate for an expanded natural resources board that takes the mandate of the Forest Practices Board and makes it broader. It’s intriguing. I wonder if part of your answer to the public interest oversight is through a mechanism like that.

Our interest in pursuing a model for funding wildlife management in the province, similar to the freshwater fisheries…. The reason we would like it to be removed from government, in terms of how the dollars are actually spent, is that government does have a history of keeping their finger in the pot and changing their mind on how moneys are spent — so in order to secure a dedicated funding model, which would have, obviously, legislative oversight, policy oversight and enforcement oversight from the government. That side would not change. But just to have an agreed-upon mechanism where, similar to the Freshwater Fisheries Society, the funding goes there. Government can’t come back and say: “You know what? We want to build a bridge,” or “We want to build a statue for a former Premier or whatever, so we want your cash.” We want to prevent that from happening.

It does have broad support among stakeholders. I know that the B.C. Guide Outfitters Association is supportive of some sort of a model away from government. At least, that’s my understanding. I can’t speak for them directly. But I know there is support from other groups.

D. Ashton: A very good presentation, thank you very much. I, like you, have spent my life in the bush. Lots of changes out there, unfortunately.
[ Page 2344 ]

Good points on some of the other aspects of revenue generation — i.e., these quads and these other vehicles. I have to be careful, I guess. They are utilizing the bush sometimes in not the way that you and I were brought up to do it.

D. Ashton: Zeman, that’s it. He’s very passionate. He’s been down to see me. Those thoughts of his…. I’m assuming yours have been passed along. We had a very good presentation, also, in Cranbrook yesterday from one of your peers.

We’ll pass this, and it’ll come up for discussion around the table as we present our report. But thank you for coming today — appreciate it.

B. Froehlich: My final comment, just spinning off on what you’re saying, is that at the end of the day, everybody has an impact on the landscape, whether they’re a quadder or a logging truck driver.

D. Ashton: I wasn’t singling them out. But it should be positive; it shouldn’t be negative. That’s what I was trying to say. It should be a positive impact.

B. Froehlich: But we do have a negative impact, and cumulatively, we’re just looking…. Hey, if we’re all using the resource, everyone should contribute and pay. We want to have stuff there for future generations.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for all the work that you do, your advocacy. It’s very important. I acknowledge that as well. There’s not a lot of people looking after an awfully big landscape, so it’s very much appreciated.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next we have the Starbright Children’s Development Centre — Carol Meise and Dr. Rhonda Nelson. Come on up.

Welcome. Good morning. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes to go, and then you can conclude your thoughts and gladly go to the committee for questions after that. As soon as you’re ready, the floor is yours.

R. Nelson: Well, good morning. I’m Rhonda Nelson, and Carol Meise, our board chair. We are representatives of Starbright Children’s Development Centre.

Our agency is a registered charity, a non-profit that was started 50 years ago by parents of children with cerebral palsy, a physiotherapist and a very dedicated and compassionate pediatrician.

Their mission was to provide needed services within their region. As we have throughout our 50 years, our centre provides therapy and programming for infants, toddlers and preschool children who are at risk for or who have a developmental disability.

We employ occupational therapists, physiotherapists, speech and language pathologist consultants and supported child development assistants. Every one of those people are devoted to serving the needs of children with developmental delays.

The children we serve come to us through referrals — Kelowna General Hospital, pediatricians, family physicians, public health nurses, social workers and family members themselves. We’re located in Kelowna, but we serve the Central Okanagan from Oyama to Peachland.

Early intervention for children with developmental delays is well supported in the research. Research is used as the basis, of course, for decision-making. Neurological evidence supports the provision of early intervention in a child’s life when the brain is creating those connections that will later serve as the basis for all behaviour and skills. It enhances short-term and long-term physical, cognitive, behavioural, social, emotional and language development, and it reduces the incidence of developmental delays for biologically at-risk children.

Early intervention matters, because these experiences and stimulation are critical for optimal brain development. Experiences early in life create the foundation for all the subsequent development that children experience. For a child to wait for services means missed opportunities. Staff of child development centres are acutely aware of the why of early intervention.

This government recognizes the importance of early childhood broadly and has made significant investment in this area. That is laudable, and it’s very important. But there’s a further investment that’s needed to increase the capacity in early intervention with children with developmental disabilities. To leave them out means passing over a critical component of our population.

Since 2009, there has not been an increase to the base funding that determines the number of professionals that child development centres can hire to meet the needs of the population they serve. Population increases in various centres and towns means a corresponding increase in the number of infants, toddlers and preschool children waiting. For example, looking at two-year increments, in 2010, the wait time for a child who required occupational therapy support was 11 months and one week. In 2012,
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it was one year, 11 months. In 2014, it was one year, four months. When 2016 is over, without additional funding, that wait time will not reduce.

The wait times have an effect on both the child and the family. A child needing the services of an occupational therapist due to, for example, a sensory processing disorder will present challenging behaviours that have a significant effect on family dynamics. They may not be willing to have a bath because of the feel of the water. They won’t get dressed because of the pressure of the clothes or the texture of the cloth. They won’t eat particular foods because of the feel within their mouths, or they’ll refuse to use a potty or a toilet due to the temperature or the pressure of a toilet seat. These children are hard to manage, making acceptance into daycare or preschool difficult.

It is easy to feel the angst of the family in trying to meet their child’s needs. To predict the effects on the parental relationship is not difficult, and expect the extra pressure placed on social services when the family cannot cope. For families such as these, being placed on the wait-list affects both their present and their future.

You may say: “Well, of course all these issues are important, but why increase funding to child development centres?” Not only are we part of the system through fulfilling government’s contractual services; we are also part of the success of other complementary programs. Sometimes supports are put in place that actually exclude those who need them the most when child development centres are not part of the equation — for example, the single-parent employment program.

Coverage of the cost of child care during the training or work placement of a parent and for the first year of employment is huge and of great, great benefit, but it’s not accessible to a parent with a child who has a disability and who requires a high level of support in order to be included in those child care settings. These children may have Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, acquired brain injuries, neuromuscular diseases, spina bifida, hearing loss or deafness, or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, among many others. Without the extra support provided through the supported child development program that we provide, these parents cannot access what you’ve put in place to support them.

We’re not simply an outstretched hand. There is also a need to recognize local differences. The needs of families, children and communities vary, as do the services that are available. We, with our centre here in the Central Okanagan, need the ability to respond with the trained personnel necessary. We need options and dollars added to our contracts that allow for local determination of response to need.

For our centre, we need to be able to have clinical counselling as part of our MCFD-contracted services. There is additional stress involved when one has a child with a disability. There’s the adjustment that has to be made within family life, the grieving for the loss of dreams, and the frustration of not knowing how best to support your child. To not provide for this critical emotional component is to tell those families that their struggles are invisible and unimportant.

Other centres may need a family support worker or a psychologist or a social worker. For our struggling families, we need a clinical counsellor. Each child development centre in the province will have their own mismatch between the need for services and the ability to provide services through the necessary trained personnel.

What would make an enormous difference would be to provide the dollars for each that respects the level of demand for service as well as the inflationary increases in operational costs to provide those services. We would ask that there be a concerted effort to meet head-on the provincial issue of children having their futures placed on the wait-list.

There are two concrete steps that would make a huge difference. Each is achievable, each will build local capacity, and each will lead to supports that strengthen families. One would be to increase the base contract funding for non-profit agencies providing these supports to children and families. This will allow the additional professionals to be hired and decrease significantly the necessity of infants, toddlers and children waiting for supports.

The second would be to include that local-determination clause. That would allow an additional value-added component to meet needs that are specific to the clientele being served. Having these additional dollars available will enable us to put into place the needed supports to respond to local need. This government has shown itself to be responsive and focused on creating opportunities and building for the future. A response is now needed for babies and toddlers with developmental disabilities to have a better future.

In its report The State of the World’s Children 2013, UNICEF stated: “Given opportunities to flourish as others might, children with disabilities have the potential to lead fulfilling lives and to contribute to the social, cultural and economic vitality of their communities.” We know that you know this. We trust you believe this. We now ask you to show this for the youngest among us, whose futures should not be placed on a wait-list and for whom support should include them and their families as whole entities.

Thank you for your attention. We’d be most pleased to respond to any questions.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. You obviously practised that. You were right down on ten minutes. That was perfect. Very good.

R. Austin: That was a great presentation. I can say, speaking from my experience with the CDC both in
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Terrace and in Kitimat, that the issues you bring forward are certainly things that I’ve heard and, I suspect, a lot of my colleagues have heard in their local offices as well.

I think the most powerful argument you make, and you make it continually, is that timeliness is of the most importance. To allow a child who has a diagnosis to not immediately get the help simply rolls the problem on into the school system, which costs us huge amounts of resources in the school system, and never mind what happens in adulthood. So I’m sure there’ll be a very lively discussion when we do our deliberations.

Thank you for bringing this forward, and thanks for all the work you do. I know that for any families who have a loved one, who have a child with a disability, without you and others around the province, their lives would be absolutely even worse than they are, so thank you.

I know in Delta, we have the Reach foundation. They do incredible work with kids in and around our community. I can also echo Robin’s comments. I can’t say enough about the work that you do and the impact that you have, not just on the children but their families. It’s important to them, as well, to get that extra help and those extra resources.

Oh, I do have another question. Good, good, good. Carole, sorry. I’m sitting here, yacking away.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, and I echo everyone’s comments as well. I also want to say thank you for bringing up the issue of accessing government programs, because I think it’s an important piece that sometimes gets missed — a program that we agreed with, which was to allow people to be able to go to school and have their child care costs covered.

For people to not be able to access that, who have a child with special needs, makes no sense. It makes no sense for the program not to be accessible by all and, in fact, by people who particularly may be in need of those extra supports.

So I want to thank you for raising that to the attention of the committee, because I think it’s another important piece to bring forward around the child development issue.

J. Rice: I’m curious what your thoughts are. I know this is Kelowna, and we’re talking about Kelowna here. Specifically, for communities where children with special needs don’t have access to the special services they might need — like a behavioural consultant, for example — what do you feel the solution is for a lot of the rural communities where they can’t access the professionals?

R. Nelson: Well, I know that there have been significant talks about teletherapy, having remote access for people. It’s not the same as being present, most definitely. With behaviour, that’s even more complicated, because it is that direct intervention.

Potentially, having within remote communities the ability for people to recruit people who wish to further their education — to go get the credentials and then come back — that may be something that could be considered. They are invested in their community. That is where they choose to live. It would potentially be a way of ensuring those communities have those supports where they absolutely need it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you again, ladies. Thank you very much for coming forward. We do appreciate your time.

Next we have the B.C. Association for Child Development and Intervention — Jason Gordon.

E. Foster: I think so. My wife’s the chairman of the board of the child development centre.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I knew that. I just thought we’d better set the record straight.

Mr. Gordon, thank you very much for being here. Ten minutes for your presentation. About the two-minute mark, I’ll let you know when time is waning down, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. So the floor is yours.

J. Gordon: My name is Jason Gordon. I’m here to represent the B.C. Association for Child Development and Intervention, BCACDI. Thanks for this opportunity.

We have 29 member agencies across the province that contract with MCFD to deliver services for children and youth with special needs. Starbright, who you just heard from, is one of our member agencies, as is Terrace — I heard your question there — and Reach as well.

I’m hopefully here to provide a bit of a provincial perspective on some of the challenges and issues facing CDC’s across the province.

Rhonda may have mentioned the programs. We’re just going to give a bit of a taste of the programs our agencies deliver. Infant development program is for a child who has a developmental delay from birth to age three. Supported child development is to provide that support
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so that they can access community-based preschool or child care settings. We have early intervention therapies — which is more physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy — for kids who have a delay or with special needs. Those are the programs we deliver. We’ve been doing it in some communities for more than 40 years now. That infrastructure’s been in place and those contracts have been in place.

I want to start just by talking a little bit about some of the things we’re doing as an association to make sure we’re able to deliver services effectively and efficiently.

First of all, in terms of evidence-based practice, I heard a question about rural-remote communities and some of those challenges we have. As an association, we are involved with the Ministry of Children and Family Development on a couple of initiatives, looking at using technology to provide services in rural-remote areas, how to support service delivery in those areas.

We’re on the leadership table for the province’s Innovation and Sustainability Roundtable, which is an MCFD– and Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation–led initiative. We’re on a couple of pilots looking at outcome measures in that regard. Also, just being a member of our association helps provide those learning and sharing opportunities amongst leaders. If there’s something innovative happening in one community, they can quickly implement that in another, so it helps us to keep on the ground running and making sure things are doing things effectively.

Now, in addition, we also have accreditation, so our services that our agencies deliver are accountable. Every three years the Commission on Accreditation for Rehabilitation Facilities, an internationally recognized accreditor, accredits our agencies to make sure that services are safe, effective and accountable and that the public can be assured that the public dollars being spent on these contracts are, again, being spent effectively and are being accountable.

We have 29 member agencies now across the province. In 2015, we provided services to more than 15,000 children and youth in British Columbia. We have these multidisciplinary teams in place. We have agencies that are delivering services that are safe, effective and accountable.

We are building capacity in families, but as Rhonda alluded to, since 2009 in particular, there have been some real struggles to meet the needs of our communities. So 2009 was roughly the last time the base contract funding for those programs we discussed earlier have seen a significant increase. There was a modest increase in 2015 that was strictly for wages and benefits only, realized through a collective agreement. There haven’t been any new resources coming in to help deal with things like wait times, access issues, to help expand programs or to implement innovative, new activities that might help to service delivery on the ground.

I want to talk a little bit about wait times. As Rhonda alluded to, we’re fortunate, as an association, where 75 percent of our agencies actually have the same client-management software. We have started a dashboard. As an association, we can now track things like the number of referrals for a program, number of children served and also average wait time to access the program, both regionally and provincially, for, again, 75 percent of our agencies. We’re hoping to get that to 100 percent shortly.

Just to give you an idea of the waits people are facing across the province, it does vary a bit region to region. The average wait right now for accessing the infant development program is four months, accessing support in a child development program is five months, and access to the early intervention rehab therapies such as speech language pathology is 7½ months.

As you can imagine, it’s pretty challenging for access issues for parents. If you have a six-month-old with a developmental delay, a four-month wait for service can seem like an eternity when you know the services are there in your community to help make a difference. A 7½-, eight-month wait for something like speech therapy is a real challenging issue.

Certainly, we see kids referred to early intervention services at age four, 4½, before they enter kindergarten, and they don’t have an opportunity to actually receive an intervention before they transition into the school system. They’re coming into the school system even further behind than they would be had they had that opportunity.

In terms of wait times, another interesting development is government has their own service indicators reporting framework, they call it, or SIRF, which the ministry uses to track different data elements amongst their contracted agencies.

They’ve revamped SIRF, and they’ve actually gotten rid of any access or wait-type-issue data elements. They used to look at how many kids were waiting more than 90 days for a service, for example. In their new data elements now, nothing is looking at wait time or how many kids are waiting. We’re going to have to rely even more and more on an organization such as ourselves to actually really monitor effectively the access issues we see for these government programs.

I thought I’d just wrap up talking a bit about the impacts on society. Rhonda alluded to this already, but I think all of you understand. First of all, the research is out there showing the positive impact on early intervention services — depending on what paper you read, anywhere from about $3 to $17 positive return on the investment. We always average it out and say about $10. Anyways, there’s that regard.

The other issue on society is that we know that if these kids are entering the school system at their full developmental potential, they’re going to require less services and supports in the school systems, and they’re going to
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graduate and become adults who are going to require less services and supports. If we have that strategic, effective investment in their early years, it’s actually going to save governments money in the long run.

However, in the last budget, what we saw was…. In the teacher labour dispute, there was a really big theme on services for children with special needs, extra supports for children in the classroom. We heard that. The response in the budget 2015 was $69 million for a learning improvement fund — great, an excellent investment that was necessary and needed.

We had a lot of talk about wait times for adults with developmental disabilities to access services. In that budget, CLBC received $71 million to help address some of the waits in those areas. Again, really effective investments that are necessary at that education level and that adult level. However, what we’re missing the boat on is the strategic investment in the early years, which is going to help mitigate the need for such massive investments later on.

What we are here today to request in the budget process is just that we start to turn around and make an effective investment in these early intervention services. British Columbia has the infrastructure in place, and has had it in place for over 40 years now. We have agencies that are delivering accountable services effectively. All we need is effective investment to make sure that the outcomes and these kids entering the school system are at their full developmental potential.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your work and for all of the organizations that belong to your association, as well, for their work.

You mention the issue of wait-lists. Save the debate for another day, around government removing wait-list information. But the other thing I hear from parents is it’s not simply the wait-list once they’ve been referred for service. It’s the wait-list, as well, to get the referral to be able to access support.

Even though these wait times…. People may look and say: “Oh, it’s six months or it’s four months.” They may have waited a long period of time to be able to see a doctor to be able to suggest that they go to a child development centre to be able to get the access. Are you hearing that from parents as well, just around being able to even get the referral or know that they should be accessing supports from a child development centre?

J. Gordon: Yes, for sure. I mean, a lot of those programs that require some type of a diagnosis, for example — there is definitely the wait for the assessment process, and then, again, the wait to actually receive intervention. That is another layer.

Many of the programs we deliver are self-referral. There may not even be a need for a formal assessment. But there is still some work to be done, I think, on just making sure there’s general awareness in the public of: “What do I do if my child is showing a bit of a delay, and where can I go for help, and where can I go for service?”

Theoretically, I think the early-years centres may have some potential to help mitigate that issue. But yes, for sure.

J. Gordon: Again, with the contracts, some of our agencies would be involved, and some wouldn’t. We have those core contracts I mentioned earlier. Some of our larger agencies might use residential services and be involved in respite as well. But that’s a really good point, because that’s another area of need that we see a real huge issue in terms of wait times and access to get at. I think if we have the….

One of the things we talked about as an organization is when we have the ability to build capacity within families through these early intervention programs, then we actually are going to potentially see less of a demand for respite services and also things like keeping children in care. If we can build that family capacity, children are going to be able to stay in their own families longer and maybe mitigate some of those issues of requiring so much respite or requiring children in care.

S. Gibson: I have an awareness of that. I think that respite program is extremely important.

We’re back on track here. Next we have the B.C. Fruit Growers Association — Glen Lucas and Fred Steele.

Gentlemen, good morning. Welcome. You have ten minutes for presentation. I’ll try to give you, in the waning moments, a little sign to conclude your thoughts. Then we’ll go to committee for questions.

F. Steele: I hope to be done before that. Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the 2017 provincial budget. My name is Fred Steele. I’m president of the B.C. Fruit Growers.

When we presented to the committee last year, the industry was running about two to three weeks ahead of schedule with harvesting. It’s now three to four weeks, so I think it’s safe to say climate change might have arrived.

Today we want to take an organized look at the budget and address some of the items in the prebudget consultation. I brought with me Glen Lucas to share the duties today. I think it’s much more interesting that way.
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G. Lucas: The BCFGA has had the privilege of presenting a brief to the prebudget consultation each year since 2002, so this is No. 14.

Our association represents 520 commercial tree fruit growers in the Okanagan, Similkameen, Shuswap and Creston valleys. We generate about $74½ million per year, based on most recent statistics, which are now five years out of date, from Stats Canada, and about half a billion of economic activity annually.

Next year when we come, you’ll see a big jump in those numbers and, in fact, the Minister of Agriculture recently announced the record-breaking value of the B.C. agriculture and food industry in terms of the value of production.

F. Steele: The replant program funded by the province is revitalizing the tree fruit industry. In fact, the program has been so successful that the government has increased the amount of that fund from $8½ million to $9½ million over a seven-year period. That period runs from 2015 to 2021.

The replant program is a key part of our industry strategy. We are increasing our production and value in producing specialty, high-quality products. Exports of cherries have increased dramatically and were projected to continue to grow. The new apple varieties such as Ambrosia lead the way in the apple sector.

On the environmental side, the B.C. tree fruit industry uses advanced irrigation technology to make efficient use of water. We employ integrated pest management practices as well. Here’s one for you, the Sterile Insect Release program. It’s unique in the world, and it is a collaboration of regional governments and growers enabled through the provincial legislation. The program has reared hundreds of millions of codling moth over the last 20 years to be released in orchards for mating disruption. The damage — we have reduced it from about 5 percent to 0.2 percent over that period of time with the SIR program.

We’ve also lessened the use of pesticides. Here’s one example. For codling moth over the last 20 years, we’ve reduced the amount of pesticide by 96 percent.

This brings us to our request for the committee to consider. We need the ability to expand the role of the SIR program, sterile insect release, to other insects and pests on apples and tree fruits and possibly even grapes. In order to change the scope of the SIR program, the provincial legislation called — and you probably don’t know this exists, as I didn’t either — Municipal Enabling Validation Act, sometimes known as MEVA — I knew that existed, but I didn’t know what it meant — which establishes the Okanagan-Kootenay Sterile Insect Release program.

Our request will not have much effect on the impact of the budget, as it operates with growers and municipalities primarily, but we do need the legislative change.

G. Lucas: The next section here is prebudget questions, which were in a consultation paper that was released recently. The first question is: “What further suggestions can government consider that will help make more affordable housing and rental supply within the reach of more British Columbians?”

F. Steele: One of the things that we can actually do, as a province, is support more economic growth in rural areas and restrict the foreign purchase of farms.

G. Lucas: The second question is: “What are the priorities that you want government to consider?”

F. Steele: Increase program and funding for environmental protection and climate change. Climate change and more open trading patterns are leading to the introduction of new pests. I’ll give you an example. It used to be every five to ten years we had a new pest. Now we have them every three to five. We need substantial new investment in reducing pesticide use. That’s a priority for the tree fruit industry.

We need government investment in monitoring and protection from invasive pests. Investments in integrated pest management will save money in the long run and the need for future investments by government.

G. Lucas: Another priority: more hospitals, health care facilities and health care programs, including mental health. The BCFGA feels there is an opportunity to introduce healthier, more palatable meals through the use of locally produced fruit and vegetables in hospitals and health care situations. The health districts have gone too far by cutting expenses for meals in hospitals. Food is an important contributor to a healthy recovery and should not be treated as a factory product churning out prepackaged, heavily processed and cheap-ingredient meals.

Secondly, more schools and funding for the K-to-12 education. The tree fruit sector appreciates the investment in the school fruit and vegetable nutritional program. This is one thing that government really has done and has stepped up to the plate on. It’s mainly funded by the Ministry of Health but involves the Ministry of Education. This is a great disease prevention program by introducing healthy foods to our youth and establishing those healthy eating patterns early in life.

F. Steele: The Agriculture budget has fallen by 50 percent, in normal terms, in the past 25 years, which is the equivalent to about 75 percent in real terms. Let’s be real about providing programs that allow farmers to reinvest and grow production and jobs in British Columbia.

We have seen what the replant program can do. It’s a prime example. It should be expanded to programs such as integrated pest management and environmental and climate change programs, such as water, infrastructure and innovation programs, to renew the tree fruit packing houses and the food-processing capabilities in general.
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G. Lucas: What further funding initiatives can we take to continue to grow the economy and sustain family-supporting jobs?

F. Steele: Well, we can increase investments in manufacturing, especially in the fruit and vegetable packing and processing, and increase investment in small business. When I say small business, most farms in British Columbia are small business. They invest locally in production as well.

G. Lucas: One of the last questions. Given B.C.’s broad geography and society representing diverse sectors, people and cultures, what should government priorities be in the area of investment in your region?

F. Steele: Well, for example, natural resource and economic development is extremely important in all regions.

G. Lucas: Getting close to the end here. One final item of importance is the Columbia River treaty. We’ve spoken to you about this in previous years. We are pleased that the province’s position on the Columbia River treaty recognizes both the value of other uses of CRT waters to the U.S. as well as the negative impacts on B.C. producers.

We encourage the province to continue to work with the federal government to ensure that B.C. receives full value for the water that it stores for the U.S. In time, we hope that this effort will assist B.C. producers negatively impacted by the massive post-CRT growth of the tree fruit and vegetable sector in Washington state.

F. Steele: In conclusion, thank you for allowing us to contribute to the 2017 provincial budget consultation. B.C. tree fruit growers themselves contribute to the regional and the B.C. economy. We create value and jobs. We need government to provide infrastructure investment to help us with invasive pests against tree fruits. Together we can grow this industry and increase revenues for the province.

D. Ashton: Are you? Good. That’s always a pleasant sight, isn’t it — that last apple to pick.

D. Ashton: If you started with that one first of all, you wouldn’t have to work so hard.

Just really quickly, Columbia Basin. Guys, I don’t want to combine food production and agriculture and the different variances.

Agriculture has blossomed in our valley, in the Okanagan. Yes, our food producing — i.e., through apples, soft fruit — has depreciated. But when I take a look at the vineyards and the value-added that comes back to B.C. and the tourism and everything else, there are these counterbalances.

I thank you very much for bringing them forward, but I also think there needs to be a little checkmark on the good side about other forms of agriculture that have really exploded. There are 250-plus vineyards in the valley now, almost 300 wineries in the province. It’s added a lot to it.

It’s not your side of the fence, but in agriculture total, it’s been phenomenal. I mean, the 100-mile diet — or whatever they call it now; they’ve reduced it — and the opportunities that are there…. I think we need a bit more of a balance.

I really appreciate how you lobby and really come forward for the fruit-growing industry, but collectively, we’re not doing bad in the valley. We’re not doing bad at all.

F. Steele: Well, through the Interior hort council, on the B.C. Ag Council, I represent the grape industry, as well, and all portions.

And we want no poor cousins — cherry industry, the tree fruit industry as apples and peaches and soft fruit, and the grape industry.

One of the things that’s happening is, in fact, that the apple industry is increasing. We’re not looking at taking money from the Columbia River trust. We’re looking at a companion trust program that would allow us, as we redevelop, to reinvest that money into infrastructure and packing houses. As you can appreciate, as we increase the volume of production, we’ve got 60-year-old equipment. And you know what happens if you increase that by 25, 30 or 50 percent. You’ve got other problems that are coming.

F. Steele: That’s what we’re talking about and looking for revenue ways to offset that in companionship to the investment that the industry is going to put into it. I don’t believe we should take the route of subsidies. I believe that there are companion programs — that we can work together and have the government invest in partnerships with us to redevelop and invest ourselves in our future.
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D. Ashton: I think you’re doing a great job. One quick thing is sterile insect, maybe working together. One of the issues is the weeds, the problem that we’re having with grazing lands and everything else. I know there was talk at our regional district about opportunities with sterile insect for a boll weevil or something that actually targets knapweed. Could there be association with that? It might be something in the future.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I’ll echo that huge appreciation for the support you provide not only in your region but across the province.

Just a couple of quick questions. You’ve kind of touched a little bit on it, but I wondered. Your recommendation around expanding manufacturing and looking at that value-added and the opportunities there — are there any specifics that you think that government could play a role in that would provide support, those companion programs, as you talked about, Fred?

Then the second question is…. You mentioned restrict foreign ownership or foreign purchase of farms. I just wondered if you want to talk a little bit more about that and the challenges that you see growing in the province.

G. Lucas: The first question was on the manufacturing. Tree fruit is interesting. Our value-added is really that apple that you eat out of hand or the table grapes that you eat out of hand. When we make other things out of it, it tends to reduce the value for the grower.

Exceptions. The cider industry is exploding right now. Support for that would be good. It’s in its infancy, and it really needs a helping hand. They’re doing many good things, but just a little bit of help would make them even more successful.

Certainly, there’s some value-added, I think, even with apples that we could do that would be of interest. That would be through the co-op, making apple pies or further value-added things. I think you’ll hear from the food council later on today. I think that’s another value-added. Let’s get the product out there to hospitals and institutions.

Just before we get to that, just to add to Glen, one of the reasons that we’re looking at this is it’s looking ahead. It’s looking five years ahead. Within the next five years…. For example, Korea is a prime example of where right now the tariff is, I think, 45 percent. It used to be 47 percent, or something like that.

Within the five-year period, there will be no tariffs, so it just suddenly got 45 percent cheaper to ship there. This is happening in other Asian markets. This is what we have to prepare for so that we can be ready with the trees that have to be planted, which take five years, and the investment in the infrastructure.

As for the foreign ownership, I think there is an example of what can happen if it gets out of hand, and that is Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a land that has seen famine. It has also seen where the Europeans bought up the farmland and, at one point, were shipping the food to overseas markets while the people at home maybe didn’t have enough. That is one of the things that we want to make sure doesn’t happen before it becomes a problem. It’s not saying they can’t. It’s saying: what are the regulations going to be in the shipping of food?

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m sorry. I’m going to have to cut you off. Now we’re over time. We have somebody else that’s waiting. But I do appreciate you taking the time, appreciate the questions from the committee and look forward to continuing the discussions when we deliberate about the issues that you’ve brought up. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Good morning. As you’re working your way up, I’ll let you know it’s ten minutes for the presentation and five minutes to the committee for questions. Whenever you’re ready, the floor is yours.

T. Dyas: To start, with the presentation, I think what I’ll do is just probably read it through. That way it ends up being that I touch upon all the points that I intended to touch upon and then go from there, if that’s okay with everyone.

On behalf of the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce, we thank you for putting aside the time to allow us to make this submission, our 2016 submission to the provincial Select Standing Committee on Finance. We have focused on three key initiatives. Those three key initiatives that we’ve focused on are the current situation and revisions with respect to the invasive zebra mussels; affordable rental housing as it applies to homelessness and, also, the property transfer tax; and physician extenders for improved primary health care.

I will start with invasive mussels. The rapid spread of invasive zebra and quagga mussels through fresh waters east of Saskatchewan has had devastating effects on hydroelectric power, marine shipping and fishing and tourism industries throughout these regions. These species have recently spread throughout waterways in the southwest United States and now pose an imminent threat to fresh waters in British Columbia. The provincial government must take decisive action now to avoid irreversible damage to our marine and tourism industries.
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The chamber of commerce position and recommendations have been in the past and are: follow-up legislation that is complementary to the federal aquatic invasive species regulations that aggressively meets the risk that invasive mussels pose to British Columbia’s waters — and appropriate funding and staff resources to prevent this; continue to cooperate with states and provinces already engaged in the fight against the zebra and quagga mussels; coordinate responses and develop best practices; strengthen its work with the states and provinces of the Pacific Northwest region to establish and defend non-contaminated perimeters; ensure that British Columbia’s waters remain free of invasive mussels by providing appropriate resources to implement a compulsory watercraft inspection regime on a 24-hour basis; and build on the federal regulations where each boat that crosses the international border needs to be inspected.

The next item that I will discuss is affordable housing, how it ties to homelessness and, also, with respect to the property transfer tax. To thrive and grow businesses, industries need to locate in areas that provide access to resources, transportation hubs and employees. Employees look to locate close to employment and in areas that they can afford.

Whether it is in the Lower Mainland or in other areas of the province, affordable housing choices are required in order to be economically competitive and to attract and keep skilled workers. An adequate supply of housing, with reasonable transportation costs, is critical for economic growth.

The solution is for the province of British Columbia to work with federal and local municipal colleagues and find ways to create incentives and opportunities to save and increase the current rental stock, protect and expand co-ops and co-op housing units and encourage innovative solutions.

British Columbia is doing well economically. However, to continue to do so, we need to ensure that the lack of housing for skilled labour does not become a barrier to future economic growth.

Recognizing the most recent announcements that the province will spend $500 million of the property transfer tax that came from foreign ownership on 2,900 rental units, in partnership with non-profit, local government community agencies, the request is that, obviously, it be taken into account that that development and those 2,900 units are spread equally throughout the province.

The chamber recommends, with regards to that, that we continue to work with the federal government and municipalities to develop a tax and other incentives for purpose-built market rental housing units for low- to mid-range income levels and to work to combine with other social programs to support and help support those in lower-income ranges to access house rental markets, such as expanding the SAFER program and other valuable populations.

The aspect of homelessness…. I don’t think any of us really took a look at it, but the idea of the homelessness and how it affects all of our communities and the integration of, potentially, the property transfer tax — as using some of that to offset or allow for the offset of some of those costs — is interesting. It was about four years ago, I think, or five years ago, working with the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, that we initially put forward the idea of looking at revamping the property transfer tax. At that point in time, it was something that didn’t want to be discussed at all or didn’t want to be touched. It’s amazing how it’s kind of come around now and possibly could be used in assistance to work against homelessness.

The chamber of commerce is still, with the recent changes that have happened, requesting or looking at the position that there be an increase in the basic thresholds of the 1 percent, which was implemented back in 1987 when a property value in Vancouver was around about $147,000. That 1 percent on the first $200,000 has not changed. That there look at being an indexing on that to bring it up to more of the current values, as that would assist in some additional…. It definitely slows down on the revenue that comes in from the property transfer tax but also assists in growth outside of that $750,000 or the first-time purchaser that was changed just recently in that act.

Also, it’s to introduce mechanisms to eliminate double taxation when properties are transferred between common owners. That also deals with families and businesses that transfer properties from one owner to another.

The final item is with respect to physician extenders. There is clear evidence that availability of primary care has significant implications for British Columbia’s economy in terms of overpopulation, health, and impact on employee’s productivity and absences on business.

Though our government has made expanding efforts to the availability of primary care, British Columbia still suffers from a lack of primary care. In other jurisdictions, the shortage of primary care has been addressed successfully with the introduction of physician extenders. The British Columbia government should embrace the physician extender model so that the economy reap the benefits of primary care and create new efficiencies in our health care system.

A solution is to permit British Columbia doctors to use their Medical Services Plan billing numbers to bill for services provided by a physician extenders. The advantages of this solution include the following.

Linking the physician extender billing to a supervising physician provides unambiguous indication of the physician’s professional and legal responsibility for the physician extender’s practice. Service provided by the physician extender can be billable at a lower rate than equivalent services performed by a physician, which creates a potential for efficiencies and a greater return on
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health care dollars. Enabling physicians to profit from physician extenders provides a financial incentive for enterprising medical school graduates to choose family practice over the traditionally more lucrative specialty practices, which will ultimately increase the supply of family physicians in British Columbia.

A recent study has shown that physicians are motivated to hire physician assistants to help deal with long wait times and long hours, which suggests that the physician extender model may help ease the burden on British Columbia’s care physicians.

The chamber recommends: integrate the role of physician extenders as an additional solution to the primary care shortage in British Columbia; provide British Columbia family physicians with the ability and incentives to financially integrate physician extenders into their practices; and support necessary training and regulation of physician extenders to ensure that British Columbia receives the best-quality, cost-efficient health care.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much. I will go to the committee, if we have any questions.

D. Ashton: Just to correct you, they’re not in Saskatchewan yet — the invasive species. We’ve got them stopped at the border.

T. Dyas: Yeah. The border south. Exactly. Saskatchewan east. I forgot that part.

D. Ashton: That’s right. We’re building a wall, so touch wood. I got a little heart attack.

Second of all, on the physician extenders, is that like a nurse practitioner? Is that the same, that you’re speaking of?

T. Dyas: It’s not the same. It’s along that line. But I guess probably to describe what the physicians have, and we had a number of physicians that helped us work with this…. What the physicians were asking for is…. In their practices, there are a certain number of individuals that they can see within the period of a day. They’re allowed to see a certain number of individuals and bill for those certain number of individuals.

There are a number of those individuals within their operations that they possibly would be able to work with a nurse practitioner — or somewhere along that line within their office — and say: “You know what? You can start to see them.”

If it ends up being that they could deal with it under that doctor’s supervision, then they can deal with that. Maybe it’s a blood pressure check. Maybe it’s possibly a renewal of a prescription. I don’t know what the duty lines would be, but it would be something along that line.

It goes back to an idea, I think, of…. The majority of professionals that we have — lawyers, yourselves, myself — all have assistants that work alongside of us, that do work for us and that make us more efficient. The doctor, at this point in time, is not allowed to have that physician to work alongside him to increase the number the individuals he can see within the normal time frame of a day.

I would love the idea of…. I know that there’s been a number of different things that have about — GP for Me and all the rest of those — over a period of time. I’d love that there’d be the ability to fill those roles by more physicians coming on board.

But what we understand is happening is when doctors are starting to go train and they’re going through their schooling, they’re going to the specialty route and they’re not going to the GP. So it’s a combination. There just isn’t the number that are there. And if they are there, our community, our province and every other province around, and states, would like them to be in their community.

J. Rice: Just a comment. I don’t hear, actually, a lot of people use the term physician extenders, because in British Columbia, we have nurse practitioners. We don’t use physician assistants, which is a position that the United States has. But I just wanted to echo that that is a challenge — that everyone is specializing and we have such a decrease in family physicians.

I do agree that — well, in my opinion — nurse practitioners are a much underutilized asset that we have in British Columbia. We could do a better job of serving people as well as saving substantial amounts of money.

T. Dyas: It’s not a criticism at all — it’s just in conversations with the physicians — but a physician can, for example, stay at home and give a health diagnosis or recommendation over the phone and be able to bill more for that than if they’re at their walk-in clinic.

So there are certain things. Again, there’s no criticism with regards to it. It’s all working towards what is the best process to move forward. That just came about through our discovery.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Tom. I appreciate you taking the time and bringing up some very topical issues.

All right. Moving along on our agenda, we have the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff at UBC — Sarah Muff and Joey Hansen.

Welcome. Good morning. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left, so you can conclude your thoughts. Then we’ll go to the committee for their questions. So if you’re ready, the floor is yours.
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J. Hansen: Thanks very much for this opportunity. My name is Joey Hansen. I’m the executive director of the Association of Administrative and Professional Staff at UBC. We represent about 4,000 UBC employees. We define them as the non-faculty professionals on campus — the counsellors, the IT professionals, the folks that manage the research infrastructure and the like.

We represent folks at the Point Grey campus, here at the Kelowna campus, a lot of the folks involved in medical research at hospitals around the province. UBC also operates a number of farms and other research sites around the province, and we have members at those sites, as well, assisting with the coordination of research.

Our members work on improving learning outcomes. They provide counselling services to students, they provide advice to students to help them be academically successful, and they drive research in fields as wide as science, technology, medicine, forestry, business and agriculture.

We’re here to talk a little bit about the critical role that the university and our members play in the province and specifically to ask the province to restore the $31 million in funding that’s been cut from UBC over the last number of years. We’re asking that it be restored to the university’s operating budget, not earmarked for specific projects. We know that it doesn’t drive headlines in the same way that making an announcement about a building or a particular research project does. But as I think our presentation will sort of show, that’s the best value for the dollar that the province can get.

B.C. deserves a world-class university because a world-class university is what will help drive a world-class economy. To have a world-class economy, B.C. needs to be a world leader in innovation.

Recently the Conference Board of Canada took a look at how prepared various provinces in the country were for innovation and for an innovation economy, and B.C. scored quite poorly. One of the reasons B.C. scored poorly was specifically around a lack of funding in the area of research. B.C. just wasn’t as prepared as other jurisdictions when it comes to research.

Part of the reason we’re arguing for the restoration of funding is that research leads to the innovation that boosts our economy. We’d note that with increased research come various increased infrastructure costs. So it’s not just the cost of buying the supplies or the lab, in terms of research, but there are increased costs for things like utilities and for things like staff that go along with research.

That is why we’re arguing that the money that gets allocated to the university should be allocated specifically to the university’s operating budget, as opposed to sort of earmarked for special projects.

We also think access is important, and Sarah is going to talk a little bit about the fact that contributions to the operating budget also improve access for students.

S. Muff: Funding cuts negatively impact access to the university. The challenges created by operational funding cuts are exacerbated, particularly at UBC, with the university’s growing enrolment. In the last decade, UBC’s enrolment has increased by more than 11,000 full-time-equivalents. That mirrors the entire full-time-equivalents of the population of all the campuses of Kwantlen University.

Tuition fees at UBC are already too high. They have priced many, many qualified students out of attending UBC. The B.C. government is the only immediate source of funding that can ensure increasing enrolment doesn’t lead to service shortfalls. We must ensure that all qualified students have access to UBC and ensure that they are able to stay in B.C. and contribute to the B.C. economy.

UBC’s high tuition fees are already contributing to students’ astronomical debt. Metro Vancouver’s high cost of living and lower wages create a near impossibility for recent graduates to stay in the Lower Mainland, and the ripple effects contribute around the province. UBC is a world-class university. To remain a world-class university, we need to make sure the student body is there because they have world-class minds, not world-class bank accounts.

J. Hansen: Our last piece is that we know we’re talking about a significant investment in UBC, and we’re talking about it being allocated to UBC’s general operating accounts, not for specific projects. But we do believe that with that increased funding, the university should have increased accountability to you and to the public.

Obviously, we have a new president at the university, and he seems, so far, very dedicated to openness and transparency. But we think that in addition to that increased funding, rules around the University Act should change.

Frankly, there should be an expectation that a university conduct much more of its affairs openly and publicly and be subjected to government and public scrutiny. There should be fewer decisions made behind closed doors, because we think, frankly, with the benefit of greater funding should also come the obligation for greater accountability.

We’d like to thank you for your time, and we’d be happy to take your questions.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I was just going to say thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your clear recommendation around support for students.

I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about the accountability issue. I wonder if there are any specific areas that you feel need to be emphasized as public decisions. I
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think that your link around the public money and disclosure is a good one, and I’m just curious if there are particular areas that you think need to be focused on first.

J. Hansen: Sure. Before I took this position, I actually worked in Massachusetts for a similar organization in public higher ed there. I don’t recommend necessarily stealing a lot of ideas from the U.S., but an area that I thought that they were particularly far ahead on was that Massachusetts has something called an open-meeting law that public institutions were required to follow.

What it basically did was it set out that all decisions by, in this case, university bodies must occur at public meetings that are announced in advance, that are minuted, that the public can attend, except for certain prescribed kinds of events. They usually involved personnel matters or legal matters, if somebody was suing the university for something. Obviously, those are appropriately held in closed session.

Essentially, if it’s not a decision that would involve something that would sort of trigger a freedom-of-information and protection-of-privacy matter, that should be held in open session, and the public should be able to attend. They should know in advance when the meeting is happening, and detailed minutes should be available after the meetings so that you can see what the rationale was, even if you can’t attend the meeting.

You talked about enrolment increases — 11,000 FTEs over the last decade. Are you combining your campuses?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Because UBCO is ten years old. So I just wanted to add a little clarity to that. You talk about 11,000, so we can take that enrolment…. We’re not ballooning just the campus in Vancouver by 11,000. We’re including a brand-new campus in that same period of time, right?

S. Gibson: Are you saying that UBC could have more open meetings at their own discretion right now? I’m hearing….

J. Hansen: Yeah. I don’t work for the university. We’re an outside professional advocacy organization. I don’t see that….

From my standpoint as an interested third party, I don’t see any reason that the university couldn’t do that now. But I think that in addition to there being a need for greater funding for the university, I don’t see any reason why, with that greater funding, the province wouldn’t want to consider imposing that as a requirement as opposed to an option for the university.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just for clarity on that same question I asked, what is the enrolment at UBCO at this stage?

S. Muff: At UBCO? I believe it is approximately 8,000, but I can’t be certain on that particular statistic.

A Voice: I’ve seen that number. I think it’s in the first presentation. That’s the only one we have.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Is it? Oh, I’m sorry. It is in there. All right. Oh, sorry, I don’t think I got that. That’s okay.

Seeing none, thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it — always enlightening.

You have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with the time winding down, and then we can go to the committee for questions right after that. The floor is yours.

L. Trepanier: I wasn’t going to read my presentation, but a flood in my basement last night interfered with my best-laid plans, so you can follow along if you want.

I’m Linda Trepanier, and I am the current chair of the Central Okanagan Food Policy Council. I am a retired registered dietitian and somehow am finding my way into food activism.

The Central Okanagan Food Policy Council is a non-profit organization open to all residents of the Central Okanagan. Our current board of directors includes individuals from the health professions as well as entrepreneurs from the agricultural sector and concerned citizens.

As board members, we all share the belief that a healthy food and agriculture system underpins individual and community health, including social, environmental and economic.
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What we are asking the committee to consider is financially supporting a shift towards bioregional, also known as local, food systems. You’re probably aware that over the last 60 years, agriculture has become progressively more and more dependent upon fossil fuel inputs. Initially, this approach was highly profitable, but competitive market forces gradually eroded profitability, and it became difficult for all but the largest farms to survive. Farming jobs disappeared as humans were replaced by machinery.

With fossil fuel inputs, agricultural yields initially increased, but this is no longer the case. We’re now in a situation where net farm income in Canada is zero or below zero and has been for the last five years.

I’m just going to interject here. I speak from personal experience as well on this. My great-grandfather started farming in the Okanagan in the late 1800s, and it was always profitable up until the ’60s, when my uncles switched from polycultural farming — animals and vegetables and grapes and fruit — to monoculture farming. In this past year, the last remaining segment of the farm was sold off, because net income had been below zero for close to ten years, particularly in the last three years.

Most farmers and their spouses hold off-farm jobs to survive financially, and many are reliant on farm credit. Understandably, the offspring of farmers are not interested in farming, so valuable skills are no longer being passed from one generation to the next. These problems cannot be solved by the very system that created them, so new solutions must be found.

In her recent campaign, our Premier, Christy Clark, has been focusing on job creation. A revitalization of local food systems has the potential to create a tremendous number of jobs. This is especially true if these jobs help to shift agriculture away from fossil fuel dependence. Initially a return to what I call “many strong backs agriculture” may seem regressive, but in fact, this move is in line with global agricultural movements.

The spinoff economic potential is staggering and includes the multiplier effect of dollars staying at home. A move back to the future, as it will, also opens the door to social innovation. Localizing food systems in northern climates requires creation of food processing, storage and distribution businesses that are appropriately scaled and flexible as well as profitable.

Providing training for new entrants to ecologically sustainable agriculture and funding to help them through the start-up phases will be important. We’re recommending that the government provide programs, policies and financial incentives that support a shift towards more sustainable agriculture — and we mean sustainability in all respects, including economic. This would include training for new farmers, perhaps a trade model, and ensuring land is affordable for all new farmers.

Our second point is: please make sure that people can still afford to eat. A report released August 2016 indicates that one in six children in B.C. live in households that experience some level of food insecurity. With the goal of a more regionalized food system where farmers are making a living wage, the cost of food is, for sure, going to increase.

There are many people who cannot afford to buy local food, and poverty needs to be addressed to ensure a sustainable regional food system. Our government can help with a poverty reduction plan that includes funding towards affordable housing and help with child care costs.

The feasibility of implementing a guaranteed annual income needs to be considered as well, so we are recommending the development and implementing of a poverty reduction strategy.

Our third point: please protect ALR land. We acknowledge that even if all the provincial ALR land was devoted to growing food for British Columbians, we’d still need to import food. However, strong local food systems can reduce reliance on imported produce, vegetables in particular, of which 40 to 50 percent are grown outside of Canada.

This leaves British Columbians vulnerable to price shocks from currency devaluation. As well, shortages may become customary, as evidenced this past winter when drought in California and Arizona left grocery stores without sufficient stock of key vegetables.

The possibility exists that as climate change diminishes the capacity of many nations to grow sufficient food, they’ll begin shopping the globe for arable land, if this isn’t already happening. To ensure a viable agricultural future in British Columbia, it’s going to be imperative to conserve our ALR land. Several provinces, including Alberta, already have policies in place limiting foreign ownership of agricultural land. The Central Okanagan Food Policy Council requests that an inventory be created and maintained of foreign-owned agricultural land.

Sound decisions can only be made if there’s accurate and timely data available. We request that all manner of agricultural maps currently being utilized in B.C. be reviewed to ensure they’re relevant, reliable and accurate. This includes updating and accurate mapping, including soil, agricultural capability, etc., as well as the creation of an inventory of foreign-owned land.

Our last point: please support food policy councils. Food systems are unbelievably complicated, if you haven’t figured that out already. A change in one part of the system reverberates through a web of interconnected actors and organizations. The full extent of the implications of change can be difficult to anticipate.

Agricultural policy is considered to be under the jurisdiction of federal and provincial governments, mostly. However, municipalities are tasked with implementing these policies and with solving the inevitable challenges that arise from change in a complex system. In towns and cities across Canada, citizens are coming together to form food policy councils. These are largely volunteer-run organizations that strive to bring together people, including
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consumers, from all aspects of the food system to discuss and strategize solutions to problems.

By their very nature, food policy councils are poised to facilitate food systems thinking. In this way, we can be helpful to governments in planning and implementing policy change as well as in mitigating the consequences of these changes.

Supporting food policy councils will tie directly into the healthy communities program of HealthyFamilies B.C. and is also in line with several provincial policies around agriculture, education and health. We’re recommending that you leverage the efforts, experience and food systems thinking of food policy councils by providing a small amount of stable, targeted funding.

E. Foster: I’ll start this by saying that I certainly knowingly have not eaten an apple that wasn’t grown in B.C. for many years. We support our local farmers. We buy all our vegetables, in the summertime, from local farmers. Having said that, we can afford to, so we do. It’s better. I know it’s clean.

The challenge is twofold. You’ve mentioned this — that farmers need to make a living. A farmworker here is making, at worst, minimum wage, and if they’re good, that’s when they make more. We’re competing with our neighbours a few hours’ south of here that are paying a quarter of what we pay. It’s been my experience, and I ask you to speak to this, that folks…. It’s not necessarily people on lower incomes. They’ll just buy it if it’s cheaper. They don’t look. They don’t care.

We’ve tried all kinds of…. The previous administration did it. We’ve done it, trying to get people to support local. I go into a Safeway store, and I see an apple that’s grown in the Okanagan that’s selling for $1 a pound, and I see one coming out of Washington selling for 35 cents, and it’s tough.

But keep it up. Don’t give up on it, because it’s hugely important. I don’t want to have to buy my food from Chile.

The other question I have is…. You talked about your family farm. How big was the property?

L. Trepanier: That was part of the problem. Initially, it was about 150 acres. Then it was split into two, and my two uncles farmed half. And then the remaining piece, eventually part of it got subdivided off. So it was 50 acres, which is the tough spot, right? Those family farms, ten to 70 acres, are a really, really hard go, for sure. That was part of the problem.

My grandfather, when my uncles took over and took away all of the polyculture crops, he said to them: “You’re going to live to rue this. You’re going to live to regret this decision.” And he was so right about that. When they went to apples and cherries almost exclusively, that’s when things started getting really, really tough.

E. Foster: If I could, one more comment on that. We are challenged constantly, especially properties that have been in the family for some years, to support people subdividing their properties up. There are kids. There are all the reasons. Pretty soon you’re down to five- to ten-acre parcels, and you can’t make a living on them. And it’s a huge challenge.

L. Trepanier: I think, though, that those smaller operations are turning out to be highly profitable — under ten acres. You get the market farming thing going and the…. The community really supports those small producers. Then the huge producers are supported by you guys, right? It’s the ones in the middle, those family farms, that are really, really struggling.

I think probably what we can do is support more of those smaller operations that are trying to move away from so much of the fossil fuel input. That was part of the problem in the middle too. The cost of inputs was staggering compared to…. My cousin was spending $40,000 a year to ship his cherries to Asia. That was crazy for the situation.

What we’re probably asking for is more government support for those little guys. There is a lot of community engagement. This is where the food policy councils come in. We have a three-pronged approach. We provide a lot of education around local food systems. We take that buy-local message…. We’re the boots on the ground, telling people and explaining and educating. We have a food forest over at Mission Creek Park where we’re growing perennial edible crops. We bring people in, in droves and educate them about growing your own food, supporting local food systems.

If we had some stable funding, we would be able to multiply that. It would be enormous leverage is what I’m saying that we could do. We still have tons of volunteer input, but we need, actually, to have some money behind us as well to really get going.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’re just about out of time, but I want to get one more question in.

R. Austin: Thanks, Linda, for your presentation. I also sit on a committee that specializes in agriculture. So I’ve heard a lot, in far greater detail, of the kinds of things you’re talking about.

I’m going to ask you a question and then ask that you send the reply to this afterwards because it’s just too complicated. I don’t think many of us here would necessarily know what food systems thinking is. Can you put down on paper what food systems thinking is so we all understand that?
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R. Austin: Secondly, you ask about support for local food policy councils. Can you let us know a dollar figure? What are you looking at in terms of each of the food policy councils around the province so we have something specific to discuss when we go into our deliberations?

R. Austin: I know. I agree. It’s a discussion that would take an hour and a half here.

That would be it. If you can get it to our committees office, then we’ll make sure that every member gets a copy.

L. Trepanier: Okay. So the same lady, Mary, who organized this? I’ll do that. Okay.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. Appreciate it. And if you could just reference your presentation here today, then she knows where to slot it. That would be great.

Let’s see now. Our friends from PacificSport aren’t here yet, so we’ll hold a recess briefly.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m going to guess this is Dr. Shaunna Taylor, PacificSport Okanagan.

S. Taylor: Thank you very much. Now, do I wait until my written materials are dispersed, or do I warm you up?

S. Hamilton (Chair): No. You can warm us up. You can get started. You’ve got ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left, and then we can conclude your thoughts and go to the committee for questions.

S. Taylor: Thanks to all of you for the opportunity to present today here in Kelowna. Thank you also to our provincial government for the history of investing in sport and, specifically, in our organization, PacificSport Okanagan. I am the executive director of PacificSport Okanagan, and we represent the entire valley, from north through central and south Okanagan, as well. I’m here to share some stories of successes of our organization but also the importance of investing in our sector — the sports sector here in British Columbia.

A little bit of background first, maybe, on me. I am here as a result of a child of the — I won’t say my exact age — 1970s’ and 80s’ very robust sports system here in the province of British Columbia. I was born and raised right here in orchard country as a third-generation apple grower.

However, as a multisport athlete, my participation in sport, and in a wide variety of sports, provided me, I think, with a lot of the physical and mental confidence, the skill, the public speaking ability, the understanding of teamwork and a wide variety of personal skills that set me on a course to continue my athletic experience throughout the rest of my young and then adult life.

For me, sports served as an important way to illustrate to myself and my peers what my body can do versus just what it looked like. As a young woman, that was particularly important to me and now as a woman leader in sport as well. Through things like the B.C. Games and going on to compete for Canada here and abroad, sport was my springboard into what I think has been a successful career ever since.

For two decades, I lived in Ottawa. And so, coming from a government town and being quite passionate about government and the responsibility of public policy, I came to my senses and moved back to B.C., after enduring two decades of Ottawa winters. I’m here to raise my children in my province, which was my home. I’m here to share the passion that I have for sport, again, as a powerful force for social change.

I now lead a regional sports centre, and it’s about that centre and its future that I would like to share with you today. At its core, we’re a not-for-profit service organization. We’re dedicated to providing affordable and very enriching programs for members of our community across the landscape, from grassroots children all the way through to Active for Life in our seniors.

We develop sports camps. We integrate what we call physical literacy — your body’s ability to move through space and to be very physically confident with who you are and what the body’s built to do. We deliver all kinds of grants, as well, to help support Canada’s next generation of athletes on the Olympic and Paralympic stages. I myself have provided support to six Olympic Games and four Paralympic Games, including the past Rio Paralympics.

Each year our organization joins our provincial sport alliance. It’s what we call ourselves. We support schools, recreation centres, other community groups, local sport organizations. We host successful education conferences. We support coaches. We support every member of our sector and then beyond.

This week we celebrate coaches across Canada for National Coaches Week, as I believe coaches are truly the pillars of our Canadian sports system.

In an Olympic and Paralympic year, with the close of the Rio games just behind us, the focus of amateur sport in the media has often been on the medals and some of those outcome goals. But for me, in a recent CBC radio series of interviews — 12 of them across Canada waking up at 2:30 in the morning, starting with Halifax — I also gave my views on the power of sport, which extends far beyond those medals. Of course, it ignites the imagination of all Canadians, particularly children and families.

We’re very proud of our athletes and coaches, but we know sport is more than this. It’s more than medals. We hope that you’ll continue to invest in the “what’s more” part — the perseverance, the community support, the grit, the pride in having a work ethic, being part of a greater social movement that’s dedicated to building healthy, sustainable communities.

It’s a means to healthy lives, healthy communities. Sport is also a mechanism for advancing broad public policy in such areas as mental and physical health, as well as a community and economic development system.

Really, what I hope to leave you with today is that sport matters. It’s more than just a frivolous leisure activity. It’s really, truly a movement for social change. It has an environment rich with potential to develop healthier and more active communities, and our sector attracts a higher number of volunteers in British Columbia than any other sector.

Harmonious, inclusive and diverse communities are also of extreme importance, and I think a part of the fabric of who I am is a result of sport. It’s a beacon of peace, of non-partisan community bonding and an environment to serve as a platform, again, for positive social change.

Sport has been my personal United Nations. I believe it serves now, in the Central Okanagan and beyond, as our little mini-U.N. here, where we represent a broad range of religious, political, socio and ethnic and even income….Very diverse views all come together on the field of play in a very harmonious, peaceful place.

I sit on the international Paralympic committee for women and girls, and I see what it has done for the movement for women with disabilities throughout the world — and, of course, the broader Paralympic movement, as well, for people with disabilities abroad. It’s more than racing wheelchairs and aerodynamic prosthetics. It’s what human movement is for anyone of any ability — empowerment, freedom and, at times, pure, unbridled joy.

Now, just looking quickly at the symbolic power of sport, again bringing you back to Rio, we saw many high-profile examples of sexist language and devaluing female performances in the broader international media. Our national broadcaster, CBC, and here in B.C., our affiliates…. I was very proud to say they righted the ship to attribute, and rightly so, many of our most outstanding performances to the female athletes that actually took part in them.

Instead of falling into the trap of the usual 4 percent that women get in our exposure in the media, they actually had a full, complete balance and went over to almost 75 percent of the coverage being directly attributed to female athletes, which is about right. We had an amazing performance.

Here in British Columbia now, let’s look closer at our low physical literacy rates, which are at what I can only describe as an epidemic. We have the least physically literate generation of children in British Columbia that we’ve ever had. What that means is that these children have the least amount of confidence with the way their bodies move through space.

This is a very complex conversation. I need a lot more than ten minutes of your time, but I’d encourage you to see a film called No Running. It’s on the website for Canadian Sport for Life. It talks about the decline of physical activity and physical education in our schools and also the embracing of sport as a culture and a right for children in this country, in particular in our province. We believe that you…. In collaboration with our strategic alliance with ViaSport, we can change this, and we can right the ship.

We know that individuals who are more physically literate or more active for life are more likely to participate in sport and feel engaged in their community. We know that this will then have a trickle-down effect on things like their mental health, their physical health and their social engagement.

What we’ve learned through the initiatives that we take part in through the funding of you, the provincial gov-
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ernment, and also organizations like the Royal Bank of Canada is that when we do these interventions young — pre-kindergarten or grade 1— these children now have a broader range of skills and they feel more engaged. They feel more likely to be confident enough to step outside their comfort zone and to try new activities and to be active for life and active citizens of our community.

Now we’ll look a little bit, just in closing…. I’m not sure how many minutes I have left.

Really looking at the return on investment — dollar for dollar — the investment in…. Whether it’s some of our broader volunteer mechanisms that we have in place here in the Okanagan and beyond; or to grants that are looking at programs that really inject more support for our school boards and school system; or through our health authorities, our partnerships with health authorities, we believe that…. You can read it at your leisure. I don’t want to throw a bunch of facts at you there. We know that you have an excellent return on investment from a fiscal point of view but also a social return on investment in sport.

For me, I just want to close with probably a more impassioned than fact-based — though, of course, it’s driven in fact — plea to you. That’s the following: that sport matters.

Our community is very passionate. I hope my passion came through today. I’m a hand talker. We’re also very loyal. Most of us are quite tireless. I certainly don’t do this for the money. I’d have a lot more money in my pocket if I were working in clinical psychology. At times, we’re brazen. We don’t take no for an answer, so this isn’t the last time you’re going to hear from me.

We’re also slightly broken in our sports sector. We’ve lost some important funders over the years. Unfortunately, through a focus on some very high profile, unethical, high performance sport stories like doping or the corruption in the International Olympic Committee, it’s turned a lot of people away from sport.

I’d like to attract you back and appreciate the fact that we treasure this investment that you’ve made in our sector. We’ll work tirelessly to ensure that it continues to play an important role in sustaining and developing healthy communities across British Columbia. I ask you to help us meet those goals.

I certainly think physical literacy, activity and fitness are important at every age level. I think, particularly for adults, building the base of that to help us deal with the normal stresses of work is very useful and certainly has helped me.

We live in a society where, on the one hand, we put highly successful athletes on a pedestal. But for the bulk of the population, as you say, there’s just much less activity in general.

I’m going to ask you a question that stems from my experience talking to a teacher — probably late 40s, early 50s — in Vancouver, in my constituency, who was talking about team sports and athletics training in the school system. He said he was basically the last coach, the last high school team coach, in a school that…. It used to be common. There were a number of coaches. People shared the duties. As people retired from teaching who were doing those jobs, fewer and fewer teachers were willing to or had the background to take on that additional, largely extracurricular role for most of them in the school.

I’m wondering if you have noticed that as a trend throughout the province or in the Okanagan and if you have any recommendations to address that because that’s where kids spend most of their time.

S. Taylor: That is an excellent question and very timely because it is National Coaches Week.

Part of our mandate is to educate coaches across the spectrum. One place where we’ve really seen an atrophying of talent and expertise is in the school system, and that’s the system that nurtured me.

It’s for a few reasons. Like you said, there are lots of folks that either don’t have the will or they don’t have the confidence to coach anymore, so they’re not taking the courses. They don’t have the time or the funding. We try to do that. We provide them free of charge or at very low cost.

But also, there’s an increased privatization of sport in this country and in this province. That privatization has priced out a significant proportion of families in many communities.

I’ll give you an example. Here in the Okanagan, to be a member of a hockey academy, it costs about $30,000 a year. I don’t know about you, but most average Canadian households do not have an extra $30,000 to put their son or daughter into a hockey academy.

Our multi-sport sport school, we call it — and we’re not-for-profit — provides the kids with the same amount of training. We give them also some courses like human kinetics and nutrition and human movement, kinesiology. It’s $2,000, and it’s heavily subsidized. You can be from any sport. And we include teachers in the program.

So we, in the not-for-profit sector…. I feel, at times, like we’re moving at glacial pace. The capitalism in the private sector has taken over and has seen a niche mar-
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ket that’s no longer a niche. It’s now the backbone of their business model, a business model made on making money and not on what’s right for children.

The private sector has to wake up, take responsibility, partner with not-for-profit regional organizations — like my own and the rest of my regional alliance, as well as school boards — to right this ship and get more coaches like your friend who’s retiring. Get him back in, even once he does retire, or inspire the next generation of potential school coaches as well.

E. Foster: Looking through your presentation and also through your bio and your website, I didn’t see anywhere in any of this where you mention any other community other than Kelowna — what you call Okanagan.

S. Taylor: Right. So for Vernon…. We have an office in the North Okanagan, and we have one in the South Okanagan as well, in Penticton. In Vernon, we partner with the city of Vernon. We run both lunchtime programs, after-school programs and something we call Xplore SportZ.

Xplore SportZ is an affordable program that isn’t partisan in any way to one particular sport organization. Through the course of a week, we’ll provide kids — whether it’s in school or after school or on a March break, for example — exposure to up 15 sports in one week, with the hope being that at some point, one of those activities is going to be a spark for that kid.

I don’t mean to slam hockey here today, because I love hockey, and I worked for Hockey Canada for 12 years.

But the reality is there’s a vast array of programs and local sport organizations in the North Okanagan that would love to be able to have kids enrolled in them. They’re very affordable, but they don’t have the exposure. We help to do that. We’re very excited to grow our program in the North Okanagan. It’s small, but it’s growing.

Thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time. That was a very enlightening presentation. I think people around the table here learned a lot.

Next, we have the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia branch. Mr. Michael Welsh.

Mr. Welsh, welcome. You have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention in time to conclude your thoughts. We can go then to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

M. Welsh: Thank you, Mr. Chair, committee members. My name is Michael Welsh. I’m here today in my capacity as president of the B.C. branch of the Canadian Bar Association. I thank you for hosting these consultations. We welcome the opportunity to appear here.

Just by way of background, the B.C. branch of the Canadian Bar Association is the voice of this province’s law profession on matters of law and justice. We advocate on behalf of both a fair, just and affordable justice system and the concerns of our members. We are member-funded, not-for-profit, and we have some 7,000 lawyers, judges and law students in every region of this province. The Canadian Bar Association is a national network of provincial and territorial bar associations that, together, represent more than 36,000 members.

Our varied membership includes major firms in Vancouver and Victoria and other larger B.C. cities, such as Kelowna, as well as sole practitioners in small firms across the province. In fact, I am from one of those small firms, comprising three lawyers in Mr. Ashton’s constituency of Penticton. As the only president of our branch from the Okanagan in over a decade, but also having worked in Vancouver for the first decade of my practice, I’ve witnessed the problems we face across this province.

Over the years, we’ve had a history of collaboration with government and have made some substantial submissions. We hope that that process will continue. Government has implemented some of our recommendations, including the Wills, Estates and Succession Act, amendments to the Franchises Act and modernizing of the Society Act. We will be presenting a new agenda for justice later this year, which will highlight the justice and legislative issues we feel need addressing in this province.

We were pleased when Premier Clark announced the justice innovation and transformation initiatives in 2012, encouraged by the findings of the initiative’s pilot projects to date, and we support their expansion. We were also pleased when the government implemented
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its rural dividend program several months ago, to build infrastructure in small communities and rural areas. I will return to this initiative and our vision to add to it. We appreciate these actions but know there is more that needs to be done.

We are mindful that you need to control spending and maintain a balanced budget, but we need to ensure access to justice for all British Columbians. Communities cannot thrive unless the residents have speedy and affordable access to justice, and we need investments in legal aid and court resources to ensure that all British Columbians have adequate representation, particularly when it comes to family law and criminal law.

Families are the basis of our society, and we cannot be a strong society without strong support to families. Persons charged are not thereby guilty, and they and we need a system that provides adequate support so that their cases are resolved correctly and our courts have adequate time for all disputes that come to them.

In the past, members of our association have spoken to this committee about these issues. Some of you, I know, have been on the committee in those past years. We appreciate your understanding and previous support of the need for increased legal aid funding, but the issue still remains. We are still far behind 2002 funding levels, and this is hurting many residents throughout our province.

I mentioned family law, and I want to speak more about that. In 2002, the government reduced overall legal aid funding by 40 percent and limited legal representation and counsel on family law cases to emergency situations where there was domestic violence or a crisis involving children.

According to the Legal Services Society, approximately 60 percent of legal aid applicants in family law matters — the majority of them being female — are now rejected due to this limited scope of representation, which creates unjust situations and takes up more resources in our court system. These individuals are in court not knowing how to tell their stories or how to present their case, without any real knowledge of the law that applies or even of what they should be asking for. Even more tragically, many of these cases involve children.

This causes unnecessary delay, takes up further court time as they struggle through, and leaves judges trying to assist them while remaining impartial, which is often onerous. Families — whole or broken — and children deserve a system that works and resolves these problems expeditiously.

Prior to 2002, legal representation for family law services included child custody and access, and financial support and maintenance. Legal Aid Alberta and Legal Aid Ontario have a far greater scope that includes custody, access, child maintenance and support, and spousal support.

We are the second-lowest-paying legal aid system in Canada. At $84 per hour, we pay so little to represent our neediest that most lawyers simply cannot afford to act for them. Their overhead in almost all cases vastly exceeds that amount. Most other provinces such as Ontario or Newfoundland pay in the area of $135 per hour. Even this province pays the lawyers acting for the government in child protection cases that same amount, while the lawyers acting for the families get some two-thirds of that amount.

We have a crisis in our child care system, and we need to invest money for families caught in it. That is why we need to increase per-capita funding for legal aid. This continues to be a top priority of our association.

As I intimated earlier, another area we would like to talk to you about today is access to justice in our smaller communities. This is a problem we recognized years ago. It led to the creation of our rural education and access to lawyers, or REAL, program. REAL is a coordinated set of programs that addresses the current and projected shortage of lawyers practising in small communities and rural areas of British Columbia. We deliver this initiative thanks to assistance and funding from the Law Society and the Law Foundation of B.C.

We have looked carefully at where there is a crisis in access to legal services in our communities and have found a number of them — many of them the same ones that the rural dividend program is set to assist — that have no lawyers setting up practice. There was one right here in Princeton where one of the lawyers retired recently and the other died tragically — in that town of a couple of thousand residents, 100 kilometres from anywhere. It has no lawyers.

When we think about it, this is not surprising. When the costs to get by are calculated — especially in these times, when student debt is in the six figures — what student would consider it financially prudent to start a practice from scratch in a rural area or a small town? They need steady and reasonable incomes from the time they start a practice to pay back that debt to government. The easiest path is to work for established firms in large urban centres, and our smaller communities suffer — just as they do when doctors, nurses and other health professionals do not come because they simply cannot afford it. In those cases, this government has offered a solution to bring them where they are most needed.

This lack of access to lawyers in our smaller communities affects many areas, including family law, criminal law, wills and estates, corporate matters and real estate transactions, and the list goes on.

Our REAL program is trying to ensure that British Columbia residents have access to legal representation through the province. In my submission, I outline some ways we are doing that — and I won’t repeat them today — but we need to do more. Government must also help, as governments with similar problems in many jurisdictions are already doing, to keep their rural communities vibrant.
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In early August, we made a submission to the government to do something significant for communities that need legal services for small local businesses, families and citizens. Just as we do now with health professionals, we made a detailed, evidence-based proposal for a student loan forgiveness program for lawyers who commit themselves to living and working in our small communities recognized as needing lawyers. That program is to have their provincial share of the debt forgiven on a 5-year timeline.

Expanding this existing program is a win for both the communities and the professionals who commit to them, whether they are doctors, lawyers, civil servants or other needed professions. They will then live, work, buy homes, raise families and make those communities strong.

As a profession, we uphold a belief that we have a responsibility to British Columbians to ensure accessibility to the justice system. As president, I am committed to finding solutions that will ensure that all British Columbians have access to justice. It is too easy to sit back and criticize, but if we work together, we can find solutions.

While many jurisdictions are facing uncertain economic times, B.C. is the only province with a balanced budget, and we commend this. But investment in our communities, our citizens and our justice system ensures that we have a just, democratic and fair society. This is important.

We understand fiscal realities, but we believe this investment is one that will help resolve our problems, allow people to plan lives in business and estates, and resolve more and move on with their lives when conflict arises. We are steadfastly committed to working towards solutions collaboratively and with this committee’s support. We urge the government to match our determination to resolve these challenges.

In conclusion, I thank you for your time and your consideration of our ideas today. I am pleased to take any questions.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. Just one issue that I just wanted to touch on and wondered if you wanted to add anything. I think the other challenge that I hear around access to justice, particularly in the child welfare work and the issue of individuals appearing in court without any representation, is the issue of court delays that we talk a lot about — the backlog in the court system and the challenges we have there and that a great deal of that could be related to the issue of not having access to justice and the delays that that causes. I wonder if you just had anything to add.

Then the last piece was just the whole issue of mediation and whether you’re involved in opportunities to look at, again, legal support for people going into mediation to be able to address, particularly, the issue of child protection.

The court delay, of course, is just caught up with everything else that I’ve been talking about. When you have people who are going into court and don’t know what they’re doing, it takes more time, generally. That is because we have inadequate funding for legal aid for lawyers to assist them.

We also have constraints within the court system. We have had an increase in our complement of judges in B.C. in recent years, which has been helpful. But we need increases in complements of court staff as well. We need more court rooms. We have some courthouses that I know of in this province where, in fact, they’ve been cutting back the amount of space that’s dedicated to court services and turning it to other government services in those buildings. It means that there aren’t places for lawyers to meet with their clients and there aren’t areas that could be expanded for other court purposes. So that is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed, along with the legal aid system.

As far as mediation goes, I am actually a certified family law mediator. I do a lot of mediation work. That is an integral part of our system. The more we can get people into other areas of resolving conflict, particularly where they can resolve it themselves with an impartial third party, we’re creating a better system, and we’re taking them out of the court system.

However, there’s very little support at this point for that process. In family law, we amended our family law with the Family Law Act a couple of years back, where it emphasized that court was a last resort and that services like mediation should be utilized. But there’s no money that’s going into that. Unless you can afford to pay for a mediator, in most cases you’re not going to get that service. So we need to put money into those types of alternative dispute-resolution areas as part of that overall funding.

S. Gibson: I know we’re running out of time. Three super-quick questions. Just capsule responses would be fine.

S. Gibson: In other jurisdictions, retired professionals are coming back and being helpful and giving more credibility, perhaps, to the altruistic side of a discipline or a profession. How do you feel about retired lawyers coming back and doing pro bono work? They’ve had a satisfactory career, but now they can help out a little bit more. What do you think about that?
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M. Welsh: Well, lawyers already, whether they’re retired or practising, do a tremendous amount of pro bono work, especially in the family law area. A lot of the people who are getting help are getting it for free because of lawyers who just feel they have that commitment.

I think it’s a good idea if we can do it, but it’s not a substitute for the proper funding, of course.

S. Gibson: What about just your comments on restorative justice as an alternative to some of the combative life we see in some settings in our legal system?

M. Welsh: It’s being done, and it needs to be expanded, particularly in the area of indigenous peoples and First Nations. We have the First Nations courts, which are growing and which we support. It’s a restorative justice model.

There are many areas where I think that can be used, particularly where the offender is not…. It’s not a violent offence. It’s maybe an administrative offence, like failing to come to court in time or breaching a probation order. I think those things can be done, and also in areas of theft and other types of crimes of that nature.

Those things all need to be done, but again, it has to be part of a properly funded system.

S. Gibson: In terms of access — you mentioned, I think, well taken — what about access in terms of hours? Like, for example, night courts, that kind of thing. Would you be supportive of that, if government looked at that?

M. Welsh: Absolutely. We’re too much a nine-to-five situation in B.C. Other jurisdictions have night courts, weekend courts, alternative types of courts. We need to have a proper plan, and there are groups looking at that within the justice system. We have an access to justice committee that comprises many players in the system looking at those things.

Again, it’ll only work if there’s proper funding — if those buildings that sit empty all night and all weekend are opened up and the lights are turned on, you know.

J. Rice: Thank you for your submission. I particularly appreciated your suggestions around recruiting and retaining legal professionals in the rural communities. I represent rural and remote communities.

I was wondering if you could identify some of the rural communities in B.C. that are in need.

M. Welsh: Through our REAL program, we’ve done an analysis of that. We see communities on the north end of Vancouver Island. That’s certainly one area. There are communities in the Kootenays. There are communities in the Cariboo and in the north, when you get away from Prince George and into the smaller centres.

We’ve identified probably about…. I think it’s about a dozen, in particular, that are at particularly high need. I can certainly give you those communities, if you wish. Afterwards, I can give you that information.

J. Rice: Yeah, that would be great if you worked that out with our staff here. You can email it. Thank you.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Terrific. Well, thank you, Mr. Welsh. I appreciate you taking the time. Enjoy the rest of your day. All the information you imparted on us I’m sure will be deliberated as the committee goes forward.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Finally, our last presenter of the day, Mr. Blair Qualey of the New Car Dealers Association of B.C.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. I’m not even going to go over it. It’s all yours.

B. Qualey: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here on behalf of the 370-some new car dealers around the province that do business in 55 different communities. I recognize that I am your last presenter and likely standing between you and lunch and perhaps travel to the Lower Mainland, so I’ll keep this as quick and brief as I can.

Just a couple of quick things. For those of you that may not know much about B.C.’s new car dealers, this little group of 370 new car dealers generates about $11 billion in economic activity every year, generates about $1.8 billion in net GDP into the B.C. economy and employs directly and indirectly some 37,000 high-paying, full-time positions, as I mentioned, in 55 communities around the province.

Total provincial sales tax collected per year — we estimate about $679 million. In Canada, about one in seven jobs are somehow tied to the automotive sector between the manufacture, sales, service and other related parts of the industry. As I mentioned, almost $11 billion in sales by B.C.’s dealers and activities.

Last year was another record year. Over 200,000 vehicles sold in British Columbia — new vehicles, cars and trucks — very reflective of the strong economy in
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British Columbia and the hard work of B.C.’s dealers and their employees.

We as an association, on behalf of the dealers in British Columbia, also put on the Vancouver International Auto Show. It’s the most well-attended consumer show in western Canada. We’re the largest customer of PavCo. I encourage you all to come and see us March 28 to April 22 next year at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre. In the package, there is a couple samples of some dealers in communities, dealers that some of you folks around this committee may be familiar with.

I want to commend the government in its continued strong fiscal management, this great habit of balanced budgets. Keep up the good work on that. As I mentioned, we’ve had record years of vehicle sales, and consumer confidence is strong. People aren’t buying cars if they’re not confident in where we’re going in the economy.

I’d also mention that B.C.’s dealers are in a record spurt of building new dealerships, improving dealerships, adding equipment and hiring new people. Every time I go to UBCM, which I guess is next week, I am always interested to see how many councillors and mayors around British Columbia come to me and ask: “Geez, how do I get a new car dealer in my community?” We’re pleased to see there’s an interest in that.

Just a couple of quick things I’ll bring to your attention. The whole idea of reducing red tape — we’re very strong supporters of the work that’s being done on the red tape reduction process. We’ll continue to make some suggestions on that, and I’ll have one shortly.

I’m not going to say much about ICBC, because we don’t have that much time, but one thing I’ll mention is that we’ve been working as an industry with ICBC and the minister responsible on a study of the collision repair industry in the province, which is a big contributor not only on the jobs front but also in making sure vehicles in British Columbia can stay on the road once they’ve been in accidents.

I’m not going to scoop the report nor the minister on that, but just to tell you that it’s been some terrific work, and we look forward to seeing that report come out shortly.

The biggest challenge in our industry continues to be finding people. We have lots of jobs available coming up but not enough people — somewhere in the order of 20,000 jobs in the next ten years in our sector, particularly trying to find people who have skills — apprentices, people that can fix the never-ending new technology that seems to be coming along.

We as an industry have developed a sort of one-stop shop, the B.C. Auto Sector Alliance, and a website called bcautocareers.ca. I encourage you to have a look at that and encourage people that you may come across in your work to check that out if they’re looking for a good career in our province.

Now, just a couple of quick recommendations. We’ve had this conversation before, but it bears repeating. Luxury tax continues to be something our members are concerned about. Vehicles sold with a price in excess of $55,000 capture the luxury tax, which is the qualifying threshold. It has been that way for many, many years and hasn’t been adjusted as most vehicles have gone up in price. The challenge is that it now captures trucks — work trucks, pickup trucks — that people throughout this province use. A lot of entrepreneurs and business people are now paying a luxury tax on what really is not a luxury by virtue of a threshold that’s been locked in for some time.

I’ll give you a comparison. You can buy an $88,000 boat in this province and not pay a luxury tax. But if you buy a $56,000 pickup truck that you use on your job in northern British Columbia, you have to pay luxury tax. The same thing with RVs. They don’t capture luxury tax. You can have multi-million-dollar RVs, almost the price of a house these days, that don’t capture luxury tax, yet the pickup trucks do.

We’d encourage government to finally do something about that. We’re not saying do it overnight. It could be transitioned over time. But I think it’s time for the luxury tax to go on the scrap heap.

There’s an issue around PST on leased vehicles that we’ve raised, I think, in the past. It continues to be…. We’re the only jurisdiction in this country where if you own a vehicle and you want to trade it on a leased vehicle, you actually get charged PST on the value of the trade. Nowhere else is that done. So it’s a bit of a double dip. You’ve already paid tax on the vehicle that you own. When you bring it to a dealership to turn it in on a lease, you get taxed on that. We’ve given you a little example there.

Lastly, on the environmental front, an area that’s incredibly important to our members and our industry, we’ve had the honour of being the managers of the clean energy vehicle program for the province of British Columbia for several years, since fall of 2010. The program has been incredibly successful. In the presentation, I’ve just summarized some of that for you. Basically, there’s an incentive available, up to $6,000 if you purchase a qualifying electric or fuel cell vehicle under the program.

Just to let you know, we’re doing about 100 vehicles a month in that program, which is terrific. We have the highest per-capita uptake of clean energy vehicles in the country, which is terrific. But there’s more work to do, more opportunities there. Given the rate of takeup on this program, by the end of this fiscal year for government, the tank will run dry. The battery will be dead, as I should say, on the electric vehicle program.

We’d encourage government…. We were pleased to see in the climate leadership plan that there was discussion of an expanded clean energy vehicle program. We’d fully
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support that. There’s a lot of opportunity there for the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Speaking of that, we just had the pleasure of celebrating that 40,000 vehicles have been scraped under the B.C. SCRAP-IT program. That’s the equivalent of about a million tonnes of GHGs. The provincial government has some strong targets in that area. The SCRAP-IT program is a tremendous opportunity to get some of the older, more polluting vehicles off the roads in British Columbia.

We have one of the oldest, if not the oldest, fleet of vehicles on the roads. It’s over nine years old, the average age of a vehicle. Vehicles of that age pollute anywhere from 16 to 60 times more than a new vehicle. So the opportunity to encourage people to move out of one of those older, more polluting vehicles into a newer, even a gas-powered vehicle, which is way more fuel efficient and less polluting these days, or an electric vehicle…. That opportunity exists.

Government has been a strong supporter for many, many years but hasn’t contributed to the kitty for some time now — since, actually, 2012. The SCRAP-IT program could use some support and funding to really have a go at getting some of those older vehicles off the road.

Those are my quick comments. I wanted to keep it tight so that you could get on your way to lunch.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. Well, you’re dead-on ten minutes, so not a problem at all. Thank you very much for the presentation.

J. Yap: Thank you, Blair, for your presentation. A question on what seems like a technological change that’s coming to the industry, and that’s driverless cars. What is your industry thinking? What are your thoughts on that potential? I’ve heard it said that this is coming at us sooner rather than later. Give us your comments on that.

B. Qualey: Sure. Thanks for the question. That question we could be here all afternoon chatting about, but I’ll try and give you a quick thumbnail. Autonomous vehicles like electric vehicles and many of the other things we’re seeing today are a result of the tremendous advances in technology. Technology is revolutionizing our industry — not just the product but the way it’s sold and how it’s serviced.

Many new vehicles today contain some autonomous features already built into them. They may or may not be turned on, but most new vehicles have some form of that. A vehicle I drive has lane warnings and things that will tell you if you’re driving over the line. If you’re coming up too quickly on someone now, they’ll automatically brake if you’re not paying attention.

Those things are coming fast and furious. Autonomous vehicles are here today. I think there are a number of issues that government and the legal system and others will have to work through around: can you actually mix human beings driving vehicles and autonomous vehicles without all sorts of problems?

I think, societally, we will have an issue of whether or not people will be able to actually drive anymore. Driving a vehicle may actually now become something very special, to be done on tracks somewhere, where you’ll go out on a Sunday and be able to drive your car around a track somewhere but not on the streets.

Mary Barra, who’s the CEO, the head, of GM, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January of this year said: “We will see more change in this industry in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 50.” So it’s coming fast and furious.

G. Heyman: Hi, Blair, and thanks. I’d just like to ask a question of clarification on the leased vehicle tax. On a trade-in, I think you just pay tax on the added value. Are you saying that for a leased vehicle, you’re paying tax on the full value of the new vehicle?

B. Qualey: Of the trade. So if you’re trading in a vehicle on a lease, you will wind up paying PST on the value of that trade. In the example that we have here, I think we calculated it out to be $9,200, so your PST is calculated on that.

B. Qualey: That only happens here in British Columbia. Any other jurisdiction, that doesn’t happen with a provincial tax.

G. Heyman: And the reason for that is that it’s considered to have already been paid.

B. Qualey: Yeah. Because if you own the vehicle which you’re trading in, you’ve already paid taxes on it, one would assume.

G. Heyman: My other question is…. I’m interested in your opinion on a California program, I believe it is, where either dealers or manufacturers are required to have a certain and escalating percentage of their vehicle sales be clean energy vehicles.

B. Qualey: Those are known as zero emission vehicle mandates, I think. California has one.

G. Heyman: They’re able to trade those off with, for instance, a company that is producing only electric vehicles. They can make an arrangement with them to borrow some of their quota, because they’re over it. Have you studied how that’s working, how it’s affecting the industry?
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B. Qualey: The California system has been changed many, many times. They haven’t seemed to be able to get it quite right yet. When the climate leadership team was looking at that particular issue as one of the recommendations towards the report, our position was: let’s use carrots, not sticks. The incentive programs that we have now, today, have been working very, very well to encourage people to….

We really don’t have the market here to be telling people what they can drive, particularly in a province where people require trucks. Our estimates were that 100,000 to 200,000 British Columbians could not purchase the vehicle that they wanted and needed for their lives in British Columbia should this kind of California mandate be put into place in British Columbia.

That would put multiple dealers out of business. I’m sure we’d have a pretty angry electorate around not being able to purchase a pickup truck or otherwise because of the limitations. Manufacturers would, in order to meet those ratios, have to restrict the amount of vehicles that were available for sale that were not electric, which means many, many trucks and other things wouldn’t be available in various parts of this province.

B. Qualey: Yeah, the incentives have worked extremely well. One of the reasons, when we were asked by government if we’d help out and manage that, was that we wanted to send a strong message to the vehicle manufacturers: “Excuse me. Over here in British Columbia, there’s a market here, and we’re going to help facilitate it as an industry of dealers here in British Columbia.” I think it’s worked well.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Terrific. Thank you, Mr. Qualey, for your presentation. As always, very informative.

B. Qualey: Thank you very much for your time, and safe travels. Enjoy your lunch.

The committee stands adjourned until we reconvene in Richmond a little later today.

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) Leona Hawker, David Hawker
2) University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus	Dr. Philip Barker
	Deborah Buszard
3) Okanagan College	Allan Coyle
	Connie Denesiuk
	Jim Hamilton
4) Childhood Obesity Foundation	Dr. Tom Warshawski
5) BC Wildlife Federation – Okanagan Region	Brenton Froehlich
6) Starbright Children’s Development Centre	Dr. Rhonda Nelson
	Carol Meise
7) BC Association for Child Development and Intervention	Jason Gordon
8) BC Fruit Growers’ Association	Fred Steele
	Glen Lucas
9) Kelowna Chamber of Commerce	Tom Dyas
10) Association of Administrative and Professional Staff at UBC	Joey Hansen
	Sarah Muff

12) PacificSport Okanagan	Dr. Shaunna Taylor
13) Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch	Michael Welsh
14) New Car Dealers Association of BC	Blair Qualey

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES