Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 101 — Wednesday, September 21, 2016 (HTML)

Cypress/Grouse Room, Vancouver Airport Marriott
7571 Westminster Highway, Richmond, B.C.

Present: Wm. Scott Hamilton, MLA (Chair); Carole James, MLA (Deputy Chair); Dan Ashton, MLA; Robin Austin, 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	2369
R. Lindstrom
A. Kammenos
M. Angelo
A. Martin
B. Barrable
P. Clarke-Richardson
J. Robinson
K. Palmer Isaak
I. Humphreys
B. Leadlay
G. Hansman
G. Wilson
A. McGowan
T. Van Steinburg
M. Lombardi
P. Kariya
F. Bodnar
A. Delaplace
Y. Kajiwara
D. Nixdorf
G. Eisler

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good afternoon, 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 coming out and participating. All public input will be carefully considered by this 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’ll also have an open-mike period at the end of the meeting. Five minutes are allotted for each presenter at the open-mike period, and 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 the proceedings will be posted to the committee’s website. All of the meetings are also broadcast as live audio via our website.

Now I’ll ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves, and I’ll start to my right with John, please.

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

Without further delay, I’ll go to our first presenter, and that is the B.C. Pulp and Paper Coalition — Mr. Robert Lindstrom.

Mr. Lindstrom, good afternoon. And you are joined by Mr. Andreas Kammenos. Pleased to have you here. Ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a little warning as the time winds down so you can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

R. Lindstrom: Thank you. Just to let you know who I am, I’ve got over 30 years experience in the forest sector in a number of different companies and have held many senior executive positions.

With me today is Andreas Kammenos, who’s with Paper Excellence. He’s a senior executive with that firm. They have several mills in B.C.

If you go to page 3, the B.C. Pulp and Paper Coalition is somewhat unique in that it is a coalition of all nine pulp and paper companies in British Columbia, several government ministries, UBC and FPInnovations. It’s a group of companies and institutions that are trying to address the issues and challenges of our sector. Our report was issued on August 31, and if you’d like a copy of that, we can send that to you later.

Just for reference here, this is a submission by industry, from this committee, because it’s a joint industry committee that I deal with. We can’t have government talking to government, so this is an industry submission.

Next, page 4 is just to the importance of the pulp and paper industry. The first set of bullets you’ll see there just really describes that we are a major generator of jobs and economic activity here in British Columbia. Also, these jobs are basically in rural areas and, really, the backbones of these communities that we serve with good-paying jobs.
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The last set of bullets — the second set, there — really indicate how large we are to different institutions and service organizations in the province. For instance, we’re 30 percent of B.C. Hydro’s industrial load, as a sector. Without us, the loss to B.C. Hydro would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, because they would have no place else to go with their load.

Then the next page, page 5, just gives you a sense of where our mills are throughout the province. You can see we’re quite scattered throughout the province here, in the various areas. Again, we’re heavy to the rural communities, the smaller communities. We’re an integrated industry, so we are definitely dependent upon each sector — whether it’s sawmill or logging and pulp and paper — all working together.

I will say one thing, though. If you think about every tree that’s harvested in this province — and there are hundreds of millions; there’s lot’s of them, right? — we use 50 percent of all that fibre in our mills. So half of the fibre harvest in the province goes through our mills. That’s the size we are.

In our report, the next page just talks about our competitiveness. We’ve got lots of challenges ahead of us: low-cost competitors, demand for paper declines as electronic media comes into play, fibre supply issues, hosting conditions. In any case, we’ve got a report that came out, as I mentioned, on August 31. It addresses those challenges, and it sets a pathway forward — which is really the new economy — making bioproducts, bioenergy, moving our products to more sustainable areas. So we’ve got a good strategy ahead of us. We just want a competitive playing field, and that’s what we’re after today.

The next point, which is slide 7. Here, just to be clear, are our three points we’ll make today.

We believe that the PST, which is provincial sales tax — it’s applied against the electricity we use for industrial processing — should be eliminated. I’ve got a slide on that, so I’ll come to that, but that’s our main point there. There is the ICE fund, which is an innovative fund that’s, again, a tax that goes on fossil fuels. It’s a small fund, but we believe that should also be eliminated. It does not serve its purpose. Also, there should be no increase in corporate income tax. Those are our three points, and I’ve got a slide on each one of those.

The next slide is just on PST. This one here is very dear to us, and it’s an urgent issue for us. B.C. is the only province that puts a sales tax on electricity, of 7 percent, that’s used on electricity for processing. This is a definite competitive issue for our sector.

If you think about our paper sector, our TMP sector, about 30 percent of the cost structure is power, for instance. If you are buying $15 million of power a year as a mill, you’re spending $3½ million a year just on PST. That’s a competitive disadvantage that no other province has — that no other jurisdiction in North America has, to our knowledge. And we’ve got a PwC report that’s done a fairly extensive search around North America and abroad and can’t find anything comparable to what we do here.

That’s our key point. This is a tax that makes us uncompetitive. It’s very significant. All that money needs to go back into reinvestment, because our strategy says we need to reinvest in our mills. It’s required money, it’s needed money, and that’s where we think it should be directed — not into the government where…. And we can’t get it back. So that’s our primary point here. We think, in fact, that it should be put into the next year’s budget. We feel that strongly about it.

Maybe we’ll just move on to the next page — ICE fund. The ICE fund tax was actually brought in just prior, I think, to the carbon tax. I was around when it was first brought in. Its moneys were intended to go towards innovation in the clean energy area, and it has put some money there. We don’t disagree with that. The issue, though, is that the carbon tax has come into play now.

The carbon tax has really overshadowed this tax. It really does what this tax is supposed to do. It really should help us reduce greenhouse gases and change our behaviour for fossil fuels. That’s where our emphasis should be. We’ve already made our inputs to the Climate Action Team, so we’re well on that track. We have an excellent track record for clean energy. Our sector does. We’ve actually eliminated 62 percent of our greenhouse gases in the last 15 years. So we’ve got an excellent track record here. We understand the role that we need to play.

This tax, though, is unnecessary. It’s outlived its purpose. It’s overshadowed by carbon tax. It should just be eliminated. And even though it’s only $100,000 per company, maximum, because we pay for the fuel of all of our suppliers that we use for transportation, you probably multiply that by 50 percent, so probably between $100,000 and $200,000 per company — again, significant dollars that we don’t see fit a useful purpose. Some of this should carried over and used by the carbon tax. We see that role being there.

The last slide I’ve got here is on income tax. Again, you can see…. The graph we’ve got here, which is the marginal tax rate here, shows that B.C.’s is the second highest. We don’t believe there should be an increase in income tax. Income tax is probably way down the list as far as our priorities, but we just don’t think there should be one.

Our second point here is that if there are going to be any kind of income tax allowances or programs that come into effect to help our sector, they should be refundable income-tax-type products. We probably have got enough tax losses to carry us for quite a few years through the industry.

We need cash, okay, which is why the PST and these other taxes are important to us. We need cash for this sector to reinvest, and the only way to get cash would be a refundable tax credit, if there is any kind of tax program being considered by government.
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In summary, we want to reinvest in B.C. as a sector, but we do want a level playing field. We’re trying to point out areas which we believe were off base and should be corrected — in fact, should be corrected in this year’s budget.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for the presentation. Also, thank you to you and many members of your industry that I know have taken some significant steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the past decade.

I have a couple of questions of clarification. In your comments about removing the PST from industrial processes, are you basically mirroring the recommendation of the climate leadership team, or do you believe you’re going beyond that recommendation, the one that specifically had to do with PST on electricity used for…? I don’t have it in front of me.

There are two points to that question. The first one is that the Climate Action Team recommended to offset the PST — so we don’t pay it — with the carbon tax. In theory, that works, but we don’t want it to be offset by the carbon tax. We don’t want that future carbon tax to offset PST.

We want the PST to be reduced because it’s unfair and uncompetitive — period. That’s what we would like. The carbon tax should go back into reducing greenhouse gases. Our electricity today is 98 percent clean here. There should be no tax on it anyway. We don’t want to link PST to the carbon. We think those are two separate issues.

We’d like to see PST reduced because of the competitiveness reasons. The point that came out in the carbon plan confirms that it should be reduced. We just don’t think making it part of the carbon plan is the issue. That’s a separate issue, if that satisfies you.

A. Kammenos: Yeah, a little bit different structure. I think the main point there is that the PST actually becomes an obstacle for us using probably some cleaner energy sources here.

In a competitive global environment, most of our product is exported outside of Canada, let alone B.C. But essentially, we’re actually led to other places to manufacture this product that actually use dirtier forms of energy. The PST becomes an obstacle in actually what the overall goal should be of even some climate change. What we’re recommending right now is that the cleanest way to do it is to remove the PST from industrial processes.

G. Heyman: I understand that, and I think that is why the climate leadership team made that recommendation. I understand you may or may not agree with all of them. They offered it in a context, but they essentially agreed with you.

The other question I have is…. You’re suggesting that the carbon tax is effective in incenting greener, cleaner behaviours, processes, etc., to remove GHGs. Are you suggesting that it does that in and of itself or that some of the tax revenues should also be used for measures that hasten that?

R. Lindstrom: I think, obviously, we pay a lot of money in the carbon tax every year, $36 million as a sector. Plus, you can add in our indirects, again, for transportation fuels. You could put down another 50 percent on that.

We believe the carbon tax has a role. However, we believe that some of that money — in fact, we believe that all the money our sector pays — should come back to the sector for greenhouse gas reductions. If you want have it fulfil its purpose, which is improving the climate, then we think a good portion of that should go back for that purpose.

We understand that’s not the way the regulations are written today. It’s meant to be tax-neutral. We understand that, but we don’t necessarily think….

G. Heyman: You’ve clarified my question. So either as incentives or as targeted tax credits.

A. Kammenos: I would like to add that a great point, one that we talk about quite a bit, is that we are paying a lot into carbon tax, but the measures that are meant to be revenue-neutral do not actually impact the pulp and paper sector. The pulp and paper sector, we believe, can be an excellent platform for green energy projects, but the money is not being redirected back into the pulp and paper sector.

We would like to see some changes about how it’s applied. Specifically, we feel that we are the platform for a lot of these clean energy programs, but it being redirected to other projects doesn’t necessarily help the people that are actually funding it. We think it could provide a bigger bang for the climate as well.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time to present. It’s the first time we’ve heard from the Pulp and Paper Coalition in this tour, or anybody that represents the industry. It’s always unique and always nice to hear something different. Thank you very much for taking the time. We very much appreciate it.

Next we have the Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C. — Mark Angelo and Al Martin. Gentlemen, good afternoon. As you’re settling in, I’ll let you know: ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll get your attention with a couple of minutes left, and you can conclude your thoughts.
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Then we’ll go to committee for questions. The floor is yours.

M. Angelo: Thank you for the opportunity to be here. I’m Mark Angelo. I’m the rivers chair of the Outdoor Recreation Council. I’m also the chair of both B.C. and World Rivers Day. My colleague Al Martin is a director with the B.C. Wildlife Federation.

Al and I are here today representing a coalition of B.C.’s biggest recreation and conservation groups, which now number in excess of 225,000 people. Ours is a coalition that was formed initially to get rivers and water on the political radar in the run-up to the upcoming provincial election and also to establish it as one of government’s priority budget items.

We think there’s a great need to address rivers and water to a greater degree. Rivers are close to the heart of many British Columbians, as all of you know. I think all you have to do is look at what’s in store for this coming Sunday on B.C. Rivers Day and World Rivers Day. There are events in communities around the province. Tens of thousands of British Columbians will be involved, and I think that provides further evidence as to how much British Columbians value our waterways.

We believe the proper care and management of our waterways and our water resources in general is our most important and pressing environmental issue. In that regard, we have proposed a whole series of very doable policies. You’ve got ten of them in front of you, much needed but all very doable.

Key among those, which is touched on in points 1 and 2, is a new funding program that would host a whole array of important projects — whether dealing with low flows in the Cowichan River on the Island; whether dealing with fish passage on the Seymour River in North Vancouver; whether that be establishing a process by which we can develop a collaborative management plan for the heart of the Fraser from Hope to Mission, one of the most productive stretches of river in the world. I might also add that the fact that you’re holding this meeting here in Richmond, just a stone’s throw from the great Fraser River, is very, very appropriate.

Now, we are aware that government made a recent major funding announcement pertaining to forest enhancement. We believe that rivers, water and water resources are just as deserving.

A. Martin: Good afternoon. The context for a B.C. watershed sustainability fund, I think, can be found in a lot of the work that led up to the Water Sustainability Act and Water Smart. I think the details in terms of how important watersheds are to B.C. for social, cultural, economic and other reasons are very clear, To use the motto of the province on the coat of arms, “Splendour undiminished” — that’s what we want to see supported through a B.C. watershed sustainability fund.

I think a fund such as that would have three major purposes: first of all, understanding B.C.’s watersheds; sustaining watershed functioning; and building watershed resilience to climate change. I think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we are able to maintain watershed functioning and all the benefits it brings, I think that is a laudable goal and one that can be achieved.

On our recommendations to this committee is that a watershed sustainability society of B.C. be established in the Societies Act to advance environmental and water stewardship in B.C.’s watersheds by providing funding from the fund for four major purposes.

Those purposes are outlined on your paper. I really don’t need to read them to you, but I think that those purposes are fundamental to maintaining watersheds in the province. I think the objective 4 — to leverage financial, technical and community support to maintain the stewardship of rivers and watersheds through community-based initiatives that include provincial, federal, First Nations and local governments, industry and NGOs — is critically important.

For these programs to be effective, they need to be place-based, they need to have clear objectives, they have to involve the community in order to be sustainable over the longer term and they need an ongoing level of support, apart from including the support within those watersheds.

A recommendation to this committee is to establish a $75 million fund to support the functions of the society and link the long-term funding of the society to water pricing at a rate of $5 million a year. That could be done initially through policy or, secondly, through changes in the Water Act.

I would envision the society to be a funding agency, not a delivery agency. There are a lot of First Nations community groups and others out there that are quite capable of engaging these sorts of issues on the ground. We don’t need to duplicate that effort. What we need to do is catalyze that effort to make sure it’s focused in areas where the threats are greatest and the returns on investments are large.

The outcomes that we see are improved water quality, water quantity; and watershed and rivershed functioning that balance environmental, social and economic values through public engagement; improved knowledge and public support for watershed and river sustainability; and the development of clear objectives for watersheds at local, regional and provincial scales. This would provide a sustainable and adaptable funding model where government and the other partners with interests in those watersheds — internationally, nationally and locally — can contribute.

That’s our vision. I think it is a doable one. I’ve been involved in watershed funding initiatives in the past. I think
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the big thing that is missing is that it needs to be provincial in scope, it needs to be sustainable in terms of the funding model, and it needs to engage people at a community level and a watershed level so that those people that have an interest in those watersheds are actually involved in sustaining them and nobody’s just looking to government to do it. I think this provides an opportunity to do things beyond regulatory and other measures that in some cases aren’t that effective.

G. Heyman: Thank you both very much. I’ll be quick because I’ve met with both of you separately at different times.

Twice in the last two weeks I’ve…. I raise this because you suggest a water stewardship society, and we’ve had presentations for other societies similar to Freshwater Fisheries Society — for conservation generally or for wildlife.

Recently I’ve had two different people suggest that we establish — along the lines of the Forest Practices Board — a natural resources practices board that would have some overarching role in all aspects that impact ecosystems — and that they work through regional bodies. They could be based on ecosystems or watersheds. I’m wondering what your reaction to that suggestion would be.

A. Martin: I firmly support the development of a natural resources practices board. It basically would do two things. It would say that the rules that have been put in place across natural resource agencies are being effective in maintaining the natural capital of the province and/or that the rules are being followed. Where they’re not being effective, because they’ve got the professional, technical and auditing expertise, they would be able to report back to government on the appropriate changes to adapt those practices.

That natural resources practices board would be more focused on the regulatory aspects of what the rules are around natural resource management and looking for alignment so that it deals particularly with the larger issue of cumulative effects. Having a society to invest money in terms of watershed sustainability is an investment model that engages people at the community level, sets the clear objectives and implements the programs on the ground. One is a regulatory focus. The other is a collaborative focus.

S. Gibson: These are very important recommendations. In my riding, Abbotsford-Mission, I often tell people that if you’re going to make a movie about my riding, it would be called “A river runs through it.” You’ve heard that one before.

In my area, I think one of the concerns that I have — and you could maybe help me here — is a lot of our younger people don’t get how important these rivers are. I’ve got major creeks and all kinds of things going on. I sometimes get frustrated at how we older people value that resource but the young people…. The students that I taught at university: “Whatever. The Fraser is there.” They take it for granted.

I’d be interested in your comments on how we become cheerleaders for our waterways, I guess.

M. Angelo: I totally agree with you. As a longtime educator, I feel very strongly about linking our youth with the natural environment — with rivers and water, obviously.

You talk about a major river initiative. I think there’d be all kinds of benefits — certainly the ones that Al just laid out. Also, I think that from a public awareness point of view, there would be all kinds of spinoffs attached to that. So, yeah, I think initiatives and programs like this can help to achieve some of the very things you’re talking about, which I think are so important.

To this day…. I’ve been retired from BCIT for five years, but I still spend a lot of time with students, a lot of time with young people — taking them on trips along rivers and creeks. I’m on a creek almost every day with my grandkids. I totally agree with what you’re saying. That could be another spinoff of a river initiative like this.

A. Martin: I can give you a brief case example on the Kettle River. There are a number of projects on the Kettle River around watershed functioning. There are also in-school programs that are supported. During the low flows of the previous year, there was community support for a watershed management plan that, because it was so instilled through the schools and through the communities, was put in voluntarily, and people ramped back on their water use.

The regulatory whip is one approach. But I think public involvement and engagement and understanding the context of the watershed that you’re living in is probably much more powerful, less expensive and more sustainable.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation, and thank you for your work. Both of you have spent a large portion of your career in this area, and we appreciate it.

I really like the model — I think, Al, you described it well — of connecting with people who are already committed, in communities, and spreading the knowledge base and the education. You mentioned it would be a funding organization. Would you picture the funding being matched, or would you picture the communities doing the work as their commitment to this?

Then my second question would be…. You mention long-term stable funding. I think that’s critical. I think
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one-time funding or project funding or pilot project funding doesn’t often give you the kind of long-term stability that you’ve been talking about. Do you see that $75 million as a yearly amount coming to the fund, or the establishment of the fund, and then a plan for what the funding would be?

A. Martin: I see the $75 million as a start. I think annual funding should be established through the Water Act so that there’s stable funding into that, that could vary and increase over time.

In terms of projects, I would expect that you should be able to leverage that money up to 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 through organizations such as the Pacific Salmon Foundation, Ducks Unlimited, the federal habitat wetlands program, which is being designed at this time, and other sources of revenue. Nobody gives government money to do their job. But if there is an opportunity to leverage money and collaborate, I think it’s a much more stable and resilient organization that will bring the same to your watersheds.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We’re just about out of time. John has one more question. So can we just move on to John, please? Thanks.

J. Yap: Mark, I was in the audience when you were honoured at BCIT, so I just wanted to say thank you for your lifelong commitment to rivers and waterways.

Just a quick comment. We had a hearing earlier today. We heard from the B.C. Fruit Growers Association, and they had a similar issue with the decommissioning of dams. Just more an observation that there are other stakeholders — that’s just one example — that, no doubt, in your deliberations you will be considering because there may be similarities of interests among other stakeholders.

M. Angelo: John, that’s a great point. Once again, on a dam decommissioning front, I look at the great work that’s been done on Britannia Creek, as an example. I think that opens the door for looking at potential to do other kinds of projects where it’s appropriate.

M. Angelo: Just a quick comment. I know we have to go but back to Carole’s point. In terms of how this program unfolds — how it would be administered, the potential to leverage funds — I think we can learn a lot from past programs.

I think of living rivers a number of years ago. I think the urban salmon habitat program, even before that, had a lot of merit. In hindsight, we look back, and we say: “Hey, there are things we could do better in terms of leveraging funds, in terms of administering those funds.” I think, learning from that, we could make a program like this function incredibly well and do so much for our province.

Next we have, from the Rick Hansen Institute, Bill Barrable and Penny Clarke-Richardson. Welcome.

Ten minutes for your presentation. Come on up. I’ll try to give you a wave when time is winding down so you can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go to the committee for questions after that. The floor is yours.

B. Barrable: Very good. Well, thank you very much for having us again. I’m Bill. This is Penny. We’re from the Rick Hansen Institute.

I think some slides have been circulated. You may have those already. I know time is limited, so we’ll try and whip through these fast enough that you can have questions, and we can try and address those as best we can.

I think many of you would be familiar with Rick Hansen, I’m sure, and particularly his foundation, which is actually very close by here. It’s in Richmond. The foundation addresses a broader disability continuum mission, which is really about accessibility inclusivity.

The spinal cord component is really the focus of the Rick Hansen Institute. We’re a separate organization, closely related to Rick. It was a spinoff of the foundation about six years ago. Our focus is translational research, best practice implementation for people with spinal cord injury, a pan-Canadian mandate as well as international members in our network.

In fact, we’re called an institute, but we’re really a network — 31 sites in Canada that participate in our registry for clinical trials, clinical research, best practice implementation, quality assurance, quality improvements.

We have sites as well in Beijing now, Peking University Third Hospital, and Princess Alexandra in Brisbane.

On August 1, New Zealand adopted our registry platform as its national system and did that in partnership with their Minister of Health and Minister for Accident Compensation.

We have two sites in the Bay Area that participate in our network — Stanford and San Francisco General. One of our board members is the head of the program at Stanford. Another board member is head of the translational pain research at Harvard. We’ve got a venture philanthropist from Atlanta.

It’s a pan-Canadian and international role. Our base is British Columbia, and we have some amazing leadership in the clinical research area here.
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With that, I’d like to begin to take you through some of the slides. The overview is just a description of the things that we’d like to cover in our short time.

Slide 3 is just a graphic that describes in a very succinct way, we hope, the effects on the physiological system of spinal cord injury. You can see the kinds of things that emanate from it. People see the paralysis. They see someone in a chair, but what they don’t realize is that it’s a chronic condition. It’s something that somebody is dealing with their whole life, and it affects them in the form of secondary complications — as many as 35 of them.

They are chronic, complex conditions. So it’s pressure ulcers, bladder infections, neuropathic pain, these kinds of things. Bladder and bowel management. These are really significant things that affect people’s quality of life and also lead to significant readmissions to hospital, which drive up the costs. So they have huge costs in human and financial terms.

On page 4, fourth slide. It’s the annual cost of spinal cord injury in British Columbia. You can see that the annual costs are in the order of $350 million a year, and some of the secondary complications that make up some of that follow underneath.

The important point here is that it affects 12,000 people, but that’s only those who have received a traumatic spinal cord injury from an injury or a car accident, falling out of a tree, falling off a roof — any number of different misadventures of that type.

It doesn’t actually include non-traumatic spinal cord injury, which is the fastest-growing component of that. Those would be SCI from disease processes. If you had an infection that led to compression or if you had a cancer, for example, that impacted on the spine, those would be considered disease processes. As we get older, the likelihood of that happening is much, much higher, so we’re going to see a significant increase in those numbers over a period of time. Again, the 200 new traumatic injuries is not inclusive of the non-traumatic variety.

On slide 5, just a little history of the institute. Established in 2009. A little bit about Rick’s foundation. The bolus of our funding has come from federal sources — from, first, Health Canada, the first five years; the second five years, Western Economic Diversification — and the provinces. British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba provided the bulk of the funding, as well as the Rick Hansen foundation itself. What we’ve done is really try to deliver the funding and the support from those sources.

We’re obviously linking national and international scientists. Really, the focus is on trying to reduce these costs and improve the quality of life for people in Canada but also internationally. It’s really important for us to have international nodes as well.

China, for example. The numbers of people with spinal cord injuries is just staggering, absolutely staggering. The hospital we work with is the pre-eminent trauma hospital in China. To have them involved is huge because we’ll be able to create controlled study groups for studies. We’ll be able to run studies faster and more effectively if we involve those kinds of numbers.

Israel has an incredible track record of innovation, and there are a lot of spinal cord injuries there because of military conflicts and so forth. United States, obviously, is a great engine for innovation, particularly in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, which we’re involved with. So for different reasons, we’re involved with different groups.

You can see our mission on slide 6. It’s really about collaboration, bringing groups together and focusing on network. We’re a network. We want to dock with other networks. We want to become a network of networks. Much of the innovation out there is not actually developed within the field itself. It may be developed in engineering, in labs across the world. Our job is to get our problems on the horizon of smart, innovative people who can help us solve our problems.

There’s tons of innovation that we believe can be repurposed to solve some of these secondary complications. Some of it’s commercial, and we’re working on it already with local companies like viDA Therapeutics, which has developed a topical for non-healing wounds, as well as other companies across Canada that we’ve had a hand in establishing.

Our focus is on funding, providing help with operating research studies and developing the research translation in nature. We have an informatics platform, which is our registry platform, which has become quite popular internationally.

Again, we’re trying to champion change for an identifiable group of people with predictable needs, with problems that are not unique to spinal cord injury. But if we can solve them in SCI, they can also be shared across the health care system.

Pressure ulcers — the number one, most expensive preventable medical error in the health care system. Probably half a billion, at least, a year in Canada. Ten billion a year in the United States. A lot of those now occur in the community.

That’s part of what we wanted to share with you today: that we need to develop our network in this province in a more robust way so that we can involve the community and people with SCI more significantly.

I’m going to ask Penny, maybe, to take us through slide 8, through the remainder. Part of her role is to lead the development of a network provincially. She’s had her own experience with paralysis.

Thank you very much. I think I’m taking too long, is the underlying message. So Penny, it’s all up to you now.

P. Clarke-Richardson: Thank you very much. Slide 8 looks at some of the challenges in the current state of spinal cord injury in B.C. Spinal cord injury, as a chron-
[ Page 2376 ]
ic condition, has not come together. They’ve not evolved in the way that cardiac care or renal care or heart and stroke…. They’ve not had a catalyst to bring them together. So what we find is there’s quite a lack of integration of services between the acute, the rehab and the community.

We have many specialists working in silos. There’s inequitable access. Certainly, indigenous, rural and remote populations…. Everything is centred, currently, in Vancouver. We have a lack of leading practices implemented throughout the province. There are missed opportunities for collaboration, as Bill mentioned, with other disease models.

So there’s nothing unique in a spinal cord injured–patient in their secondary complications. Everything that happens in a person with a spinal cord injury happens somewhere else in the population. The uniqueness comes from…. This person can have up to 30 of those conditions in one person. So they are very complex.

What’s happened is, over the years, the other areas, such as cardiovascular, respiratory, bladder and bowel incontinence, wound management and burns, have made great advances. One of our hopes is that we can achieve greater integration and learn from what they have learned and apply it to this population.

One of the areas we also want to look at is increasing consumer engagement, so having the voice of the patient heard. On slides 9 and 10, I go through some of the opportunities for improvement. To evolve further, spinal cord injury is very much about bricks and mortar. The acute care hospital here in Vancouver, the rehab facility….

Patients are discharged, and they say they feel completely lost. They’re passed along in the system. No one quite knows what to do with them. They see a physician who’s not sure, so then they’re flown down here.

It’s very disjointed for the patients, and what we find is that they come back into the very expensive acute care system, through the emergency department, for preventable secondary complications.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just so you know, you’re about a minute into the question period time. I’m going to let you use the time however you want to. It’s up to you.

P. Clarke-Richardson: No, I think that’s…. What we hope to achieve — I’ll jump right to slide 11 — is to build on the generous funding that was provided by the provincial government in 2010. It was seven-year funding. It allowed us to establish the institute, develop the registry and do the patient mapping and modelling for traumatic injuries.

We want to continue to generate new knowledge, engage the provincial partners throughout B.C. in change implementation and distribute the collaborative one-stop shopping that we have at the Blusson Centre in Vancouver throughout the province.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I’ll go to the committee for questions. I’ll take one question from each member, in case there’s a whole lot.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I just wanted to expand a little bit on the integrated model and your approach of looking and how that could be replicated across the province. It’s probably the….

I think there’s fairly good care right at the beginning for people when they’re injured, and I think most people would say that. But we certainly hear in our communities from people who come back to the community, as you have described well, and don’t have the service, don’t have the supports, don’t have the housing or don’t have the physiotherapy that they need. I wondered if you could just talk a little bit more about that integrated model.

P. Clarke-Richardson: It’s twofold. I think the approach is twofold. One is patient education and providing them with the resources they need to self-manage and the information they need to give their primary care physician. And the other is ensuring that in each of the host communities, they are prepared to receive these patients back. That is all of the services from the peer counselling that our colleagues at SCIBC do, to the retraining, the comfort technology and computer adapted technology of the Neil Squire Foundation and also, then, your complications, such as mental health and substance use.

We’ve been working very closely with Northern Health and looking at their primary care teams. We’re looking at a pilot project with them. That is due to the fact that three instances have come across our desk in the last month of people being forced to relocate to Vancouver because of the lack of services. So we need to look at what’s reasonable.

We work closely with Doctors of B.C., the divisions of family practice, with the colleges — for example, with UNBC and College of New Caledonia — identifying all of the service mapping that exists in the area and seeing where the gaps are.

B. Barrable: Yesterday we met with the Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation. One of the key components of what we would like to do is get a better understanding of what’s happening on reserve.
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We have every reason to believe that the higher disease and injury in the province…. But we just don’t actually have the facts. We don’t know what the problems are, and we’re not actually the right ones to be going in there and making that judgment. But we need to work in partnership. That, I think, is a key component of understanding what’s happening and developing a strategy.

D. Ashton: Just real quick. You said you were looking at the gaps. Are you looking where there’s duplication?

P. Clarke-Richardson: It would be a nice problem. We have quite detailed patient mapping along every step of the way. We’ve worked with the Emergency and Health Services Commission and the B.C. Trauma Services and all of the health care providers along the way. There doesn’t seem to be any duplication.

D. Ashton: That’s good to hear. I just wondered if there was overlap or, you know, something could be directed.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time. We’re right on time now. Perfect. I appreciate it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m a bit of a taskmaster that way. I’m sorry. I have to apologize.

Next we have the B.C. Chiropractic Association — Dr. Jay Robinson, and I think it’s Liza Kallstrom. Just to let you know, you have ten minutes for your presentation and five minutes for questions from the committee. I’ll let you know when your time is winding down so you can conclude your thoughts. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

J. Robinson: Thanks for letting us speak, and thanks for being here. I appreciate the time you all put into these committees and this kind of stuff for all of us.

Two billion extra, huh? Yes, there you go. Let me put it straight. I’ll help you with that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Let me mark that number down — how many times you said that.

J. Robinson: Well, we’re not asking for money. We’re going to do the thing that we often do and suggest that maybe we can save a little and help the people of B.C. at the same time.

As most of you are aware, B.C. Chiropractic Association represents almost all of the chiropractors in the province. There are about 1,200 of us. We’ve been around since the ’30s, and we do this every year.

What’s gone on since the last time we saw you? About a million things. It’s about a million patients that have seen a chiropractor in the last year, since we last saw you. On average, they see patients about seven times each. They’re voting with their feet by coming to pay for care by themselves, and it’s working for them because they think that’s the best use of their time and money.

We know that 61 percent of the province has seen a chiropractor. We’ve got really strong statistics that show that well over 80 percent of the people would go and refer a friend to a chiropractor. We know there’s a lot of need and a lot of use for us.

Just how big is musculoskeletal care? That’s what chiropractors treat: the muscles, joints, that kind of stuff for your body. It’s what a lot of us in this industry treat. Here in Canada, it’s worth about $22 billion. It’s been described variously, but it’s often the largest economic burden in the world. It’s the leading cause of workplace absenteeism — 50 percent of all lost time work claims.

One-third of Canadians have a musculoskeletal condition. It accounts for almost a third of all the visits to physicians. It’s 9 percent of emergency room visits, and it’s 5 percent of in-patient hospitalizations. We know it’s going up because everybody is getting older and having more troubles.

Of musculoskeletal conditions, low back pain is the biggest one by a long shot, and 85 percent of us will have a low back pain problem in our lives. It’s estimated, here in B.C., that’s worth about $1 billion.

The workforce is aging, and it’s only going to get worse. We know that as we get older, it takes more care to fix the same thing that we had when we were 25 or younger. We also know from our WorkSafe B.C. statistics that injured workers visiting chiropractors as their first provider have lower work disability and they have fewer days out of work.

We know chiropractic is cost-effective. We know it’s working. We know it’s non-invasive. We know it is in a unique position to help. We’ve got large medicare studies that show that when a chiropractor is involved, there are lower overall health care costs.

For those of you that are following along, this is the page with the money on it. I couldn’t resist that. There are lower ambulatory costs, there’s lower use of X-rays, and there are fewer hospitalizations. We’ve got the research on all that stuff now. When I spoke to you a year ago, we didn’t have all the research in place. We hadn’t
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found some of it. Some of it hadn’t completed — one thing and another.

One of the big pieces we now have is an Ontario study showing that MRI requests go down by about a third when chiropractors are involved in care. We know that MRI costs are a big deal and that MRI overuse is a big deal. We know from a B.C. study that if a chiropractor is involved, there are about 28 percent fewer physician visits required.

We also have a role to play in the opioid crisis. We know that opioid prescription use has gone way up, and we know that a little over half of everyone who’s using opioids is on them for low back pain. When chiropractic care is involved, we’ve got studies, again, that show that opioid care either completely disappears or it goes way down. It’s a way of getting people back functioning, alongside their medical care, and back into their lives.

We’re well aligned with the health care system priorities in this province, and we’ve been actively working to stay well aligned. We are ready to sit in and take care of our position on the team, which takes us to interdisciplinary teams.

Throughout North America, the world, other parts of Canada, chiropractors are part of interdisciplinary teams. The hospitals in the greater Toronto area all have chiropractors on staff. We’re way behind here in B.C. — way behind. We’re ready to be helping out. We can do it cheaper.

An examination done by a chiropractor versus an orthopedic surgeon is the same intake examination, but it’s infinitely cheaper to have a chiropractor, with his level of training and the years that it takes him to expect dollars to pay, than it is to have the surgeon do it. In fact, we’re involved at VGH at ICORD. That’s Canada’s premier spine treatment centre. We’re involved doing exactly that there on a chiropractor-volunteer basis.

This gets into one of the things we need. We need to be able to hold the jobs that can do the work, but so far, no one has given us permission to even be able to be paid. But we’re able to do it for less money, and we’re doing it there right now for free, on a volunteer basis.

With the diagnostic imaging issue, we’ve heard about this…. I think I’ve told most of you this at one point or another, so take a deep breath. Here we go again. Diagnostic imaging — that’s the X-rays and MRIs and CTs and all that. It’s part of a chiropractor’s scope of practice. It has been since X-rays first were melting people’s hearts when they didn’t know how to use them.

Chiropractors should have access to all the resources to do with this. We should have access to the patient information. Currently we are being blocked from that information. We should also have access to direct referrals.

It goes like this. A patient comes in to see a chiropractor. They fell off their ladder. They’ve done whatever people do all the time. You look at them and go: “You’re going to have to have an X-ray. You could have a fracture.” Just an example.

They’ll have to go back to their medical doctor. The medical doctor will then refer them for the X-ray. They have to go back to the medical doctor to get the result and then come back to the chiropractor. That’s a delay of generally about a month. That person cannot work. They may have a suspected fracture in their back. They are out of every kind of care and out of everything, waiting for that system.

Let me be clear about this. The government is paying for that X-ray anyway. They’re going to pay for it. If the chiropractor sends the person off, they’re turned around in a week, and they’re back in the game quickly. That’s what we do. If there is a finding on that X-ray, now they show up at the medical doctor’s office as a qualified patient, truly requiring medical care, not wasting their time looking for another referral for something they may or may not need.

On top of it, by having a chiropractor refer the person in, in the first place, we save one visit. It’s not a lot, but when you get that from one million people, that’s a lot of one visits. Not every person gets an X-ray, not even close. It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of that. But still, it opens up more medical care for people who actually need it. There’s a big demand for that, as we know from waiting lists.

We’d like to help give a better future for B.C.’s patients. We’d like you to help us with that. Like I said, we’re not asking for money. We’re asking for you to put the word in for us, to let the rest of health care and the rest of the people of B.C. know that it’s okay to work with a chiropractor. We’re ready to fund pilot studies, but we have to have people who know that it’s okay to work with us. So far, they don’t think it really is, because for a long time, we haven’t been part of the system. We need a nudge.

We’re ready to prototype in urban, rural, underserved areas. We’re speaking to health units. We’re speaking to divisions. We’re doing all kinds of things like that. We need a nudge for them to go: “Yeah, okay. Let’s give it a shot.” We’re looking to fund it ourselves to get it going.

We’d like to refer patients directly for X-ray. This will save money — we’ve got the research that shows it — and it’s being done elsewhere in Canada. We need a nudge to say that’s okay.

As our last little thing, we believe that all patients and health care providers in B.C. should be getting the same information from their health care providers. The group that puts that out for us all is the Healthy Living Alliance, which we’re part of, and so is just about everybody else. If you’re funding them, you’re helping us all get the same message out to the patients of B.C., to be sure that they get the right treatment at the right time. We are part of that goal.

The second-last page in your little document there is some of the references. If you want to look something up, you’re more than welcome. You’re more than welcome to ask us how we figured that out.
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I’d like to thank you all for listening to us. I’ve never finished short of time before.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You’re dead-on ten minutes. There you go. Well done. Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

G. Heyman: Thank you for the presentation. You’ve offered evidence and studies that bear out what I believe to be true. I’ve been using chiropractic services since a back injury in my 20s.

I’m just wondering if you could tell us what response you’ve had from officials in the Ministries of Finance and Health — the Minister of Health or the Minister of Finance — with respect to reasons why this coverage, which was once listed, continues to be delisted. Do they offer a rationale that we should know about as we consider your recommendations?

J. Robinson: That’s a great question. I’m not asking you to re-list chiropractic as a fully listed benefit. We haven’t actually asked that question of anyone in the last several years.

Really, we’re looking to be part of systems that deal with people in higher-need or underserved populations or in different areas, rather than just a blanket coverage. I don’t think the blanket coverage thing really served us as chiropractors or the population adequately. There are better ways to help the people of B.C. with those dollars that get us what we need.

When we talk to the Ministry of Health, for example, on these kinds of things, we hear back consistent stories, which are: “Do you have anyone from the Doctors of B.C. that wants to do this with you?” So we went to the Doctors of B.C., who promptly told us: “Well, the college doesn’t allow us to work with chiropractors.” So we went to the college, who said, “Well, that hasn’t been in place for a very long time,” and they gave us a letter saying that. There’s this kind of circle where it was once not okay to work with us; now it is, but everyone’s nervous.

It’s happening all over the rest of Canada, the United States. I think there are 1,000 hospitals in Mexico with chiropractors. We just need someone to give it their blessing, say: “Yeah, go ahead. Work with them. Sort it out.” We’ll sort it out. We’ve got all the studies that show that everybody likes it when we work together that way. We’re trained in teams, interdisciplinary health care teams, so it’s kind of the way we need to go. I don’t mean…. It’s not the way chiropractors need to go; it’s the way the population needs to go. It’s the patients who want to see that. Patients want to know that all their health care providers are on the same page.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time and coming out and presenting. It’s always an interesting subject, and you present it in a very interesting way.

J. Robinson: Well, thanks very much. I’ll look forward to seeing you throughout the year and next year at the same panel.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m sure we will. Well, who knows who’ll be on this committee next year, but I’m sure you’ll be at the committee next year, for sure.

Okay, next we have Kerri Palmer Isaak from the board of education, school district No. 43, Coquitlam.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Welcome. Just as you’re settling in there, I’ll let you know that you have ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes so you don’t have to watch the clock yourself.

K. Palmer Isaak: You know what? Not to worry. I’m going to be well under my ten minutes.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. Well, as soon as you’re ready, you’re settled in, then the floor is yours.

K. Palmer Isaak: Perfect. I will be brief today. I had a feeling I was at the end of a very long day for you, so I wanted to do that.

On behalf of school district 43 and the municipalities that we represent — which are Port Coquitlam, Coquitlam, Port Moody, Anmore and Belcarra — I want to thank you for this opportunity.

First, I’d like to actually draw your attention to the last page of my presentation, which might be kind of odd. I want to actually make a note of the five groups that I have listed here. All five of SD 43’s partner groups — the board of education, the Coquitlam Teachers Association, CUPE Local 561, Coquitlam Principals and Vice-Principals
[ Page 2380 ]
Association and our district parent advisory — supported, provided and helped me prepare the information that you have in front of you today. I know that this type of collaboration and united voice doesn’t happen very often, so I wanted to emphasize how strongly we all feel about these three requests.

I’m not going to read to you. I’m just going to provide you a few highlights.

The first one that we have noted here is educational underfunding. I bring this with deep frustration.

We are the third-largest district in the province. We, thankfully, rose from the very bottom of the pile for funding last year. We have been promoted to No. 3 at the bottom of the pile for funding for the province for this year. I’m hoping that we can have someone make a note of that. We would love to actually just make it to the [inaudible recording]. I don’t think you get a lot of requests to actually just move to average. That’s our big goal for funding there.

The next one I’ll draw your attention to is CommunityLINK funding. CommunityLINK and vulnerable student supplement funding are important for supporting vulnerable students. I brought this issue last year as well. Our CommunityLINK funding is frozen. Our enrolment goes up, but our funding does not.

I talked to my partner groups for some examples for CommunityLINK funding. The ones that stood out to me are…. CommunityLINK funding supports but does not fully fund 400 elementary school lunches. This isn’t in your notes; I stole this from my partner groups.

So 400 elementary school lunches in our district daily — 100 lunches for our CABE school, which is our youth-at-risk school, daily — plus it helps to fund our district youth workers and our Healthy Schools coordinator. This year — and this is much to my dismay and embarrassment — we have asked families in our food program, our most needy families, for $5 a month as a donation to help offset the increase in enrolment, in food costs and in staff costs. Our LINK program is only able provide these services with a healthy subsidy from SD 43.

I’d like to direct you to the table on page 3 of the presentation. Note the comparison between Coquitlam school district at 1,200 students, with funding at $2 million or just over, and Richmond, at 517 students, with funding of $4.145 million and change…. Sorry, a per capita of $4,000. This is double the funding that we have as per-capita funding per student. With LINK funding, we struggle to explain the formula for why.

I would like to move on to my third item as a request, which is mental health. The Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth has identified that the support for students with mental health and related challenges should be our number one priority. I’m going to draw your attention now to the second-to-last page. There’s a very small, one-line paragraph in the middle: “As part of our solution, SD 43 has proposed to the Ministry of Education to develop and run a provincially funded pilot program in this area.”

We are waiting to hear back on our proposal. We have been doing our homework. We have developed this pilot program, and we are asking for funding to build a plan that develops staff expertise around anxiety and depression, that helps reintegrate students after hospitalization and absenteeism due to mental health issues and that develops a single, centralized, accountable role — a district mental health co-ordinator — to oversee, to liaise and to provide consistency and follow-up, along with prevention. We would like to wrap services for mental health around our youth.

You have our three requests. You have our three recommendations. I’m going to close with our last page. When compared to much smaller school districts with fewer schools, lower enrolment and fewer challenges such as significant population growth; diverse, complex demography; increasing mental illness and related social issues in our region and schools, SD 43 is not adequately or equitably funded. We encourage the committee to consider modifications to the funding allocation system formula and to bring added fairness and equity to the system as well.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That was very brief but very succinct. Thank you very much. Now, just for clarification before we go to questions, Ms. Palmer Isaak, can you…? You probably said it earlier, and I missed it. Your capacity with the school district is…?

S. Hamilton (Chair): No, I meant your personal capacity — what you do for the school district.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You’re the board of education. I’m sorry. I apologize. You probably said it, and I missed it. Once again, thank you very much. I will now go to the committee for questions.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your work. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the mental health issue. I also sit on the Select Standing Committee for Children and Youth. It’s an area that we worked hard on for the report and, as you point out, really pushed for the move to a “one file, one child” system. I just wondered: is the school district already doing some work in this area and wanting to take it on? I’m just curious why it has come forward as part of the proposal.

K. Palmer Isaak: Yes. We have put forward a pilot program. We are waiting to hear back. I’m happy to follow up with you and give you as much information as you’d like about that pilot program. We would love to develop this program and then share it with other districts, if possible. We realize that the model that exists right now is not really functioning in our district, and we need to deliver a more consistent service.

One of the issues that we’re really seeing is that young people that are hospitalized or away from school for a period of time are then reinserted back into the system without any follow-up care, and they are greatly at risk. That’s one of the minor items that we are dealing with. Well, there’s a whole contingent of others, but that tends to be one that sticks out — the follow-up.

Let me know if you would like the package of the program. I can easily send that.

Actually, when you drew our attention to that table, that did jump off the page to me, in terms of the inequity in funding there. I would like to follow up there or at least have the committee follow up, if we can possibly get a hold of the appropriate ministry and find out why that is. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me.

K. Palmer Isaak: Yes. I think that you will also be able to note that our funding has actually stayed around this dollar figure for the last, I think, seven years. So with our enrolment increase — and you can anticipate with enrolment increase as a percentage of population — you’re going to have more youth with needs. The numbers should increase exponentially, but they don’t.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You would think they would. I look at Surrey, which I would think probably has the same makeup, although more students, and it is a real inequity.

K. Palmer Isaak: There appears to be. I think that a number of these districts have just seen a freeze in their LINK funding or a freeze in this type of funding. So while the districts have grown, the funding has just stayed the same.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Is it pass-through funding, or is it funding that’s approved by the board at a certain amount of money?

K. Palmer Isaak: Yes. The challenge is that it has been frozen, and we haven’t seen any addition to it. It was brought to my attention that some of it is legacy funding — so funding that has been passed along over a period of time. But that’s the only other interesting note.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I think it’s a very good question for the Ministry of Education.

Okay. If there are no other questions of the committee, thank you, again, for coming all the way out here on a busy school day. We do appreciate you taking the time to present to the committee.

K. Palmer Isaak: Thank you. We’ll get more information to you. Would you like more information about our table with regards to our LINK funding?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Yes, by all means. If you can submit it through the Committee Clerk’s office, then they can pass it through to all the members.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Your pilot proposal as well. That would be great. Thank you.

K. Palmer Isaak: And the pilot program. It’s very interesting. Our team has put a lot of work into it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Before October 14, please. That’s the cutoff for submissions. We can’t take any more material after that date.

Okay. I’m going to guess we have our next presenters here, and I’m going to guess, again, it’s Langara College, Dr. Ian Humphreys and Viktor Sokha.

S. Hamilton (Chair): My pleasure. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave when there are a couple of minutes left.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. But I’m putting the stopwatch on anyway. So the floor is yours.

I. Humphreys: Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for providing this opportunity for me to present to the committee on behalf of Langara College.

As the Chair said, my name is Ian Humphreys. I’m the provost and vice-president academic at the college. I’m joined by Viktor Sokha, who is our vice-president of administration and finance.

For those of you who don’t know, Langara College is located right in the heart of Vancouver. We serve approximately 21,000 students annually, providing a combination of university transfer, career and continuing education programs. The college is also currently known as snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓, a name that was given to us earlier this year by the Musqueam First Nation, whose unceded traditional territory the college sits on.

As you’ll see in the materials that we provided to you, we believe our programming is very well aligned to meet the needs of our Lower Mainland communities and the local industries that we serve, including business, health, technology and the creative sectors.

However, like many public post-secondary institutions in the province, we have faced challenges in maintaining financial sustainability while, at the same time, trying to modernize our facilities and operations. This is a good-news story, though.

Through entrepreneurial efforts and reasonable fiscal discipline, we’ve managed our way through these challenges by growing our international student numbers and our continuing education enrolments. We’ve increased revenues from those sources in order to maintain balanced budgets and, in fact, to generate surpluses.

Also, through the introduction of a capital legacy student fee many years ago, and through the use of some of the accumulated surpluses that we generated over those years, we were able just earlier this month to open quite an outstanding new LEED gold standard science and technology building. I’m sure some of you might be there at the grand opening at some point in the very near future. That was part of our 20-year master plan.

As I said, this is a good-news story. We think we’ve demonstrated our ability to be sound financial stewards and fairly innovative entrepreneurs. So why am I here, you might ask? Well, we have three things that we would like to ask of the committee and bring to the attention of government.

The first is that, currently, more than 50 percent of our operating budget is reliant on variable sources of income — most notably on tuition from international students. Those revenues come with fairly significant risk. Anything that might disrupt those revenues that might be out of our control could cause serious impacts on our abilities to deliver programming.

With that in mind, the average per-capita payment by government to post-secondary institutions is approximately $10,000. For Langara, however, we receive only $6,100. At the same time, we have the second-lowest per credit tuition fees in the post-secondary education system. Combined together, we are actually the lowest recipients of funding in the province. Unless that imbalance is addressed — certainly, possibly, to bring us at least close to the next lowest on the totem pole — we think that we might be at risk in the future.

The second thing I’d like to mention is that we have worked incredibly hard to collaborate with our host First Nation, the Musqueam — again, on whose unceded territories we live. That is evidenced by the fact that they did bestow upon us the honorary name of snəw̓eyəɬleləm̓, which translates to “house of teaching.”

We’re committed to expanding aboriginal recruitment and services for those students and meeting the important recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, despite serving the province’s largest urban aboriginal population, Langara does not receive aboriginal service plan funding. We believe that all aboriginal students in B.C. deserve equal programs and supports. In order for us to deliver those, it is our belief that all B.C. institutions need to be funded equally under the program. We would very much like to see the 14 institutions, including Langara, that are not currently part of the aboriginal service plan program actually be included in the program.

Finally, I feel as though I’m a broken record on this one. Each of the last four years I’ve been to the committee, I have brought this point up. We are continuing the important work of modernizing our facilities, both the physical facilities of buildings and also information technology infrastructure.

Our main classroom building, the A building — wonderfully inventive naming — was opened in 1970. It’s the largest building of its type created at the time. As I have pointed out to the committee on previous occasions, that building is past its useful life. Engineering reports have indicated that it will suffer significant damage in the event of an earthquake.

As I’ve mentioned, through self-funding our new science and technology building, we’ve been able to move programming out of the A building. But we still need to move more programming out of the building so that we can continue the work of modernizing the building or, in fact, replacing it at some point. This is where we hope the committee can help.

We have expressed interest in potentially acquiring the Emily Carr University of Art and Design south building on Granville Island, which also happens to be in the heart of our catchment area. We would hope that the committee might support us in that endeavour, should there be a suitable building for us to use. We would house our cre-
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ative arts programs there, which seems very appropriate given that it’s a creative arts building.

Finally, as with many post-secondary education institutions, IT infrastructure is very important to us. Ours is, unfortunately, aging, and we do need some help in that regard. The help that we’re looking for is for the government to allow us to use accumulated surpluses to actually contribute to rejuvenating many of our IT service functions.

Again, this is a good-news story. But there are things that the government can do to help us.

D. Ashton: Doctor, Viktor, thank you for your presentation. You’re not the only ones looking at that building on Granville.

I. Humphreys: Yeah, absolutely. We hope that we will be able to make a significant business case as to why it would be in the best interest of government to allow us to actually acquire the building.

D. Ashton: But it was another arts group also, so I hope there’s just not silos. I hope there’s an opportunity to work together.

I. Humphreys: We would be more than happy to collaborate with other groups, should that prove to be beneficial.

I. Humphreys: Well, it’s interesting, because we’re not sure how this process will unfold.

I. Humphreys: There is some lack of transparency in this regard. But we’d be happy to entertain any….

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your work, and I guess a big thank you, as well, for the work you’ve done around aboriginal learners, particularly, without the funding and without the support that’s come in. I think the partnership and the name speaks volumes to the relationships you’re building.

When you’ve discussed the issue around support for aboriginal funding, is the response that it’s historic or that they haven’t expanded the funding, or is there any kind of rationale you get back around why you haven’t received any funding?

I. Humphreys: I don’t believe there’s a rationale. I think that this is a status quo situation. I mean, the ASP program goes back more than a decade, and it’s the same participants from day one. Really, there has been no attempt to expand the program, and I think that’s what we’re asking for. We’re saying: “We have aboriginal students as well, and they deserve equal treatment from that program.”

S. Gibson: Your college, unlike universities in the area, has more mature students, as I understand it. The age of your students is somewhat older. Is that…? That’s not correct?

I. Humphreys: That’s not necessarily true. The average age of our university transfer students, which would be the bulk of our students, is 22. So this would be a group of school-age leavers — a population that is declining, by the way.

When I first came to the college ten years ago, the average age of a student in continuing education was 50. The average age of a continuing education student today is 32. What we’ve seen in that decade is an increasing earlier return of students to post-secondary education to do skills upgrading and retrain them. So the average age of the population of students has actually declined.

S. Gibson: I guess the reason I ask that…. I taught at a university in the valley for many years, a number of years, and the delightful thing was having that mixture of the mature students who almost nurtured some of the younger students who were coming in, especially students from other cultures who were anxious and perhaps nervous about beginning their educational experience.

But you as an urban university, how do you deal with that? How do you avoid people dropping out? That’s an issue, as you know. People will start, and then they’ll drop out and feel defeated. How do you work with those kinds of students?

I. Humphreys: It’s a great question. I’m really glad that somebody has brought this up.

I noted earlier that we’ve seen a very big increase in international student numbers, which has helped us fi-
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nancially. There’s no question. But the reality is that we have had to increase the services that we provide to students both domestic and international to do the very things that you’re talking about, which is to encourage them, to identify them early. So we have early alert systems in place that identify students who are struggling by providing more student services, counselling services, academic advising services. All of those things have been increasing in lockstep with the student numbers we’ve had as well.

This is not a case of us saying: “This is great — more students, more revenue.” It’s a case of us saying: “More students, more revenue, more and improved services.” We have been working very hard to actually increase those services.

I would say, as well, that one area that we are challenged with is in mental health. The number of students for which we have to provide accommodations now is increasing exponentially. Traditionally, those accommodations would be for physical disabilities and for hearing and sight. But now, increasingly, the accommodations are for learning disability and for mental health.

I. Humphreys: So this is another area where we have increased resources to actually accommodate those changes.

Seeing none, gentlemen, thank you very much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Have a good evening.

Welcome. Good evening. As you’re settling in there, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left. You can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go straight to the committee for the questions they might have. So if you’re ready, the floor is yours.

B. Leadlay: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity to make this presentation on behalf of the B.C. Alliance for Arts and Culture, an arts service organization that serves over 425 members across the province.

My name is Brenda Leadlay. I’m the newly appointed executive director, replacing Rob Gloor. I have worked as a professional theatre artist, arts administrator and arts educator for over 35 years, primarily in B.C., although for the last five years I was the artistic executive director at Canada’s Magnetic North Theatre Festival at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. I’m thrilled to be back here in B.C., and I aim to work diligently to improve the financial conditions for all the artists in the province.

In its last two annual reports to the Legislative Assembly, this Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services recommended that the provincial government increase their investment in the arts through (1) a commitment to multi-year funding for arts, culture and heritage; (2) an increase to the budget of the B.C. Arts Council; (3) an investment in cultural facilities capital infrastructure programs; and (4) the restoration of community gaming grants to 2008 levels, with incremental increases as gaming revenues increase.

We thank you for that. However, despite these recommendations and similar objectives set forth as the goals of the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development as well as a budget surplus, this government did not see fit to increase these budgets, which have virtually remained the same. So we’re wondering. What’s it going to take to convince the government that the time has come for an increased investment in the arts and culture sector? Will this government follow the lead of Justin Trudeau and the federal Liberals by doubling the budget of the B.C. Arts Council?

Because this is one of the things we’re asking for again…. We asked for it many years, and we will keep asking and getting more vocal and more proactive about it until we are heard by the decision-makers. That is why they’ve hired me.

There is some existing statistical information on the economic impact of the arts. This is limited knowledge due to the lack of funding for research, but it does still make a solid case for investment.

According to data collected through the cultural satellite account in the provincial and territorial cultural indicators between 2010 and 2014 produced by Stats Canada with the support of several partners, including the B.C. Alliance for Arts and Culture, we know that British Columbia’s growth in culture GDP was higher than the national average at $6.7 billion, an increase of $1 billion since 2010.

B.C. consistently has the third-highest culture GDP and jobs in the country, behind Ontario and Quebec. Our culture GDP represents 3 percent of B.C.’s total economy and 12.2 percent of culture GDP in Canada.

The United Nations has identified the creative economy as one of the world’s fastest-growing sectors for income generation, job creation and export earnings. A recent UNESCO report also noted that creative industries and cultural tourism have become strategic assets for local economies. Yet British Columbia has more artists per capita than any other province but remains the province with the lowest cultural funding per capita, despite the fact that B.C. residents rank in the top three provinces with the highest cultural consumption rates of arts and culture.

B.C. also has the highest volunteer rate per capita than any other province and the second-highest number of
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donors. Yet according to CADAC stats, B.C. arts and culture organizations receive comparatively lower revenues from provincial and federal public revenue sources than other provinces.

Clearly, the people of B.C. are becoming more aware of the significant role that the arts play in their lives. They know that arts and culture organizations help attract skilled workers. They enhance the mental health and well-being of both individuals and neighbourhoods and contribute to economic development.

In a recent report by Business for the Arts, in Ontario, in June of this year, 65 percent of people surveyed said that a thriving arts and culture scene is something they look for when moving to a new place. In fact, arts and culture ranked fourth, fifth and sixth after parks and recreation activities, proximity to nature, and restaurants and cafes. Sports facilities ranked seventh.

With an emphasis on self-expression, innovation, creativity, enjoyment and social inclusion, the arts are getting more attention than ever from health professionals, researchers, clinicians, policy-makers and the general public as a means of improving health and mental well-being.

In a recent study from Australia that attempted to quantify the relationship between arts engagement and mental well-being, they found that people with high arts engagement of only 100 hours per year report better mental health. Just think of the money you could save on health care if you invested more strategically in arts and culture.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council, in the U.K., and the cultural value project, which was released in March of this year, summarize the findings of 70 specifically commissioned research studies regarding the value of culture in the U.K., according to the difference that engagement with arts and culture makes to individuals, society and the economy.

This cultural value project put the experience of the individual at the heart of ideas about cultural value, arguing that if we start with individual experience and work outwards, we can better understand the kinds of benefits that culture may have for society, for communities, for democracy, for public health and well-being, for urban life and regional economic growth.

Here are just five things that that report noted that culture can do for people. It can generate a greater understanding of ourselves and our lives, increase empathy with respect to others and appreciate the diversity of human experience. It can produce engaged citizens who vote, volunteer, articulate alternatives to current assumptions and fuel a broader public imagination — all fundamental to the effectiveness of democratic political and social systems.

It can affect peacebuilding and healing after armed conflict, helping communities bring about reconciliation, which is so important in British Columbia. It can improve health and well-being by producing better health care environments that improve social inclusion and mental health and engagement of seniors with dementia. It determines how arts and education underpin learning, such as cognitive abilities, confidence, motivation, problem-solving and communication skills.

By working outwards from the individual in this way, we can talk about the concept of cultural value and evaluate it meaningfully. We need to develop a wider repertoire of methodologies to capture that information, and we need your help.

According to the 2016 Hill Strategies research study on B.C.’s cultural ecology, which was commissioned by the B.C. Alliance for Arts and Culture, arts and culture organizations in our province have specifically designed programs for a wide range of people and perspectives, including youth, indigenous people, economic and social diversity, mental and physical ability, cultural diversity and geographic communities.

But most arts organizations in B.C. still face three basic issues: lack of capacity for staff, lack of facilities and financial stability. If provincial arts organizations were funded by the B.C. government at the same level as their peers in other provinces, excluding Quebec, it would require an immediate 34 percent increase to the B.C. Arts Council — $8.1 million in additional funding just to get on par with other provinces.

The top B.C. government priorities in 2015-16 were to continue to diversify the economy, so let’s see a real investment in British Columbia’s creative economy. Show us that the B.C. government is smart, savvy and understands both the economic and social benefits of arts and culture.

As in past years, we’re asking for these five things: to double the investment in the B.C. Arts Council so that our artists have the same opportunities as artists in other provinces, so that we can serve underserved communities more; to increase funding for arts education to enable access for youth; to invest in a cultural facilities infrastructure program; to enable B.C. organizations to leverage federal funding from the department of Canadian Heritage; and to restore gaming levels to the 2008 levels.

We need increased funding for the arts so everyone can have access to the arts, not just those who can afford to purchase tickets.

The arts affect almost every aspect of public life, from schools and health, to prisons and probation, to tourism and the economy, to urban regenerations, to museums, heritage and Canada’s standing on the international stage. We need to start arguing for the multiplicity of currencies by which our work ought to be assessed, for its value as well as its cost.

What if there was a currency to measure a young person’s self-confidence, a convict’s understanding of their actions, another country’s view of who we are or our own
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understanding of ourselves? The arts tell our stories and shape our identities. Individual creative expression is integral to the health and well-being of our communities. The arts have a significant economic impact and social benefit, and the arts are a tool for reconciliation.

The question is not: can you afford to increase your investment in B.C.’s arts and culture and heritage? But rather: how can you afford not to?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. We cut in a little bit into the question period, but that’s okay. I’ll go to the committee.

C. James (Deputy Chair): More a comment. I think you presented so thoroughly, the argument, I don’t think there’s a lot of room for questions. It was a great presentation. Thank you. I really appreciate it, and welcome to British Columbia. We’re fortunate to have you.

G. Heyman: I just echo Carole’s words. Thank you very much for a strong presentation. I’m sure, in your time in B.C., you’ve been studying what’s been happening in recent years, as well as the very compelling arguments put forward by groups like B.C. Creates, which cross disciplines and highlight the very important economic contributions of the arts, as well as the cultural ones, that both can be measured in quantifiable ways but also have value far beyond what is measured quantifiably.

B. Leadlay: Well, it’s really hard to measure. There are so few studies, and they’re so infrequent. But I can tell you that I undertook a study when I was at Magnetic North in Ottawa. I tracked the economic outcomes of four years of the festival, which presents work from across the country and invites international and national presenters to see the work and bring it to their own cities.

We found that over four years, the ten mainstage shows and the ten people who pitched their shows generated over $9½ million in revenue for those companies. We also found that over half a million people saw that work around the country and across the world.

So just in collecting those stats, which I shared with the federal funders — the Canada Council, Heritage Canada…. They were so excited about those stats. They said: “We need more stats.” And we do need more stats, and that’s part of the work that I want to do at the Alliance.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Terrific. Thank you. I’ve got a question for you. I usually wait until last before I ask questions, just in case someone else asks them.

During your presentation, you talked about provincial averages — other provinces as opposed to British Columbia. Can you give us some examples? I know it’s really hard to measure because every province funds in different ways with a bit different organizations. But if you were to pull a number out of the air, as a percentage, how would you rate British Columbia in terms of their contributions to the arts — and the Arts Council, for example — as opposed to other provinces?

B. Leadlay: Well, we used to be at the bottom, and now we’re not quite at the bottom. We’re probably about three up. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I can get those for you. I chose not to focus on statistics, because I know all my predecessors have just been bleeding those out for years. I believe in the social value of the arts as equally as the economic value, and I think that it’s becoming more known, as we can see from the studies in the U.K. and Australia and all over the world. The arts are a great investment because they produce great results.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Yeah, they do. I can’t say enough. Even in my own community — and I know all other communities around the province were the same — we hit economically disastrous times, and there were funding cuts. It hurt. It bled badly. But the stakeholders just stepped right up. They figured out a way around it, and you’re still here as strong as ever. So I appreciate all the efforts everybody put into maintaining at least what we have now — and, hopefully, keep ramping it up.

B. Leadlay: Thank you so much. And thank you for the support of the Finance Committee over the years as well.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Our pleasure. Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate that.

Okay. We do not have anyone here yet from the Retail Council of Canada. We’re running a little bit early. But fortunately, we do have some early birds in the form of the British Columbia Teachers Federation.

Glen Hansman and — you brought a colleague — Dr. Sherri Brown, we’re very pleased to see you. Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate you taking the time. Seeing as you just walked in, I’ll let you know that we have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes to spare, and that way you can conclude your thoughts. We go to the committee for questions after that.

G. Hansman: Don’t worry. We’re pretty good at pacing ourselves, so all is well.

G. Hansman: We’ll see. It’s a test, but I’ll look for the hook.
[ Page 2387 ]

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m starting the old stopwatch. Okay. The floor is yours.

G. Hansman: Thanks for having us today. I know that you’ve been hearing from quite a few different organizations and individuals. I’ve been reading the Hansard Services good work over the past few days just to get a feel for what folks have been saying. Just so you know who I am, I’m the current president of the B.C. Teachers Federation, but I’m a Vancouver teacher. I’m on leave from my grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 special ed class.

I’m here today in part to echo some of the recommendations that the select standing committee has made in the past few years. There have been very good recommendations that have come out of the select standing committee, in particular in reference to funding for public education.

The repeated call that the standing committee has made for predictable, stable and increased funding is one that we have commended previous iterations of the standing committee for doing last year, the year before and the year before that. We and the various other provincial education organizations in British Columbia have used a lot of that language in our own correspondence and advocacy over the past few years. It comes at a time where it is very desperately needed.

I want, at the outset here, just to let you know that we have nine recommendations in this printed package for you and quite a bit of background material. So I would encourage you, when you have time, just to go through it in detail.

I wanted to use our ten minutes — the eight I have left remaining — just to give you a high-level overview of some of the recommendations in here and give you sort of a snapshot of what’s included in some of the other ones.

If you go to pages 3 and 4, you’ll see that the nine recommendations are summarized. To those of you who have been on this standing committee before, many of them will seem familiar, though we’ve incorporated a few new pieces in here this year that speak to the current context of the curriculum implementation that is rolling in — a shared concern between the province and various stakeholders in both the education and health sectors around the mental health of our students and youth population in particular.

But there are other pieces in here that talk specifically to the supports needed for students with special needs that we strongly believe the province needs to move forward in addressing. That’s going to take some new funding.

If we could go to page 5, this is a recap here in terms of the recommendations that the standing committee has made in the past.

As in previous years, B.C.’s teachers are strongly concerned about the effects of chronic underfunding of the system. With a $1.9 billion surplus, there’s an opportunity here for a substantial reinvestment. We want to say strongly that we feel the province has, can and must be doing more for the public K-to-12 system, and we urge the committee to bring forward, once again, recommendations from its previous two reports and replicate those going forward.

We’ve reproduced those here for you and given some of the updated stats on funding. We’ll get into a bit of some of the interprovincial comparisons later on here.

If you go to recommendation 2, we’ve talked in previous years about the need, specifically, to ensure that the front-line supports are there for all students in the classroom. While the province and the teaching profession are right to celebrate our remarkable graduation rates in this province and the fact that they’re going up for all segments of the student population, there are many subsets of the student population — particularly aboriginal students, students with special needs and our English language learners — for whom the graduation rates are not what they ought to be. That’s not the fault of those students. That’s a system failure to address properly.

That’s going to take restoration of a lot of the specialist teacher positions and others — direct, front-line supports in the system — that have been eliminated or have been disappearing over the past decade or so.

In our last round of collective bargaining, teachers did negotiate with the B.C. Public School Employers Association the teacher education fund that was meant to sort of top up and alleviate high-pressure situations in the system. But with the overall base funding for education not keeping pace with inflation and downloaded costs to school districts, you end up filling holes that ought not have been there in the first place, rather than using that teacher education fund in a way that will be meaningful and really address acute needs in the system. We provide some suggestions in here as to how that might be alleviated.

Recommendation 3 speaks to the downloaded costs that have been a continued problem, things that are passed along to school districts, coupled with unfunded changes. Whether we’re talking about MSP premiums, inflation, funding for the next-generation network or provincially negotiated agreements, not just with teachers but with other workers in the system, we have to make sure that the dollars to school districts match what the province is committing to so that we don’t end up inadvertently eroding services to students.

Recommendation 4 is a new one. It’s speaking to the current context of the rollout of the new curriculum. We’ve been going back through, looking at some of the documents from the late ’80s when the Year 2000 program was being rolled out by the province. This was a couple of different governments ago that was rolling that
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out, but the hundreds of millions of dollars that were committed over a ten-year period to help make that happen represented a substantive investment.

We’re not recommending anywhere near that, but we are encouraging the province to make use of the surplus right now to have a more realistic look at the fact that this is the first time in British Columbia history where we’re changing all the curriculum simultaneously.

This has been a very positive project between ourselves — the BCTF — and the staff of the Ministry of Education in a way that’s quite unprecedented for a number of reasons. We’re solidly behind the curriculum that is being brought in, particularly all the good work that’s been put into infusing aboriginal content throughout the curriculum and opening up space so that teachers and students can pursue topics that are relevant to the local communities.

But the magnitude of the change, coupled with working conditions such as they are and the inability of many school districts around the province to procure up-to-date science equipment, auto hoists for tech labs, all the sorts of trades and technology pieces that we’re all enthusiastic about and which the province has identified as being an economic and social strategy that it wants to pursue…. We have to make sure that the resources are there for people to do their jobs and help all students reach their potential in their neighbourhood public school, regardless of where they are around the province.

If a student is in Revelstoke, Fort St. John, Dease Lake, Prince Rupert or Telegraph Creek, we want to make sure that there’s something available to them in a wide range of diverse programs to meet all their needs and that teachers have the tools to make sure that this curriculum project is both successful and sustained over the period of time as we go forward. So we provide some monetized amounts in there, some suggestions about how we might do that.

Recommendation 5 touches on this: the need, in particular, to make sure that with the introduction of all the aboriginal content and the curriculum, which we’re 100 percent supportive of and championed for many years, we have available to us, in English and in French — and in First Nations languages, additionally — teaching materials and in-service opportunities that are reflective of all of our First Nations across British Columbia. Where a child is learning, what they’re learning, what the teachers are able to deliver — done in a way that’s culturally appropriate, has involved the local First Nations and is available at a variety of grade levels.

We’ve had some good conversations with the deputy minister and the staff at the Ministry of Education about, potentially, working collaboratively on this and filling gaps over the next few years. But there needs to be dollars behind that. Everyone recognizes that.

And 6 and 7 you’ve seen before as well — mental health. We’ve reproduced, in recommendation 7, the advice that we gave to the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth when there was an entire review of mental health services a year and a half ago. We stand by those recommendations, and we’d ask that you take them into consideration as well, in your deliberations around funding.

Then 8 is trying to drive home all the concerns that we have around services for students with special needs. We’re extremely concerned, still, about the long wait-list for students in school districts around the province — the inability of many school districts to make available the necessary number of psychometricians and speech-language pathologists that would provide the assessments in the first place and, where a student is identified, making sure that the services are there for those kids. We have a professional and moral responsibility as a society to make sure that we’re attending to that, and there are some realistic solutions that we can do there.

Finally, I will conclude on repeating our recommendation from last year around independent schools. It’s the federation’s position, like the B.C. School Trustees Association and others, that public funding for independent schools should be eliminated and redirected to the public system. Herein we provide a proposal for how that might be done, phased in over a four-year timeline.

R. Austin: Thanks, Glen, for your presentation. This will come as no surprise to you, because you’ve heard some of the other comments that came yesterday. You are, I think, bringing together, on a provincial level, themes from multiple school districts that have already presented, and I’m sure we’ll hear more as we travel around the province.

As you’ve recognized, this committee, in the past, has, I think, done a fair job of coming forward and pushing many of your recommendations. I think there is a recognition now. I don’t want to get into the sort of battle that happens in the Legislature. This is not the place for it. I think there is a recognition that the system has been underfunded. It’s not just advocates like yourself coming forward, but it’s the stories we hear from parents and those who come speaking on behalf of children and just telling the little stories of each individual case around the province that has happened from underfunding.

I think it’s very important that you have included mental health. We’re hearing this not just from you folks who work with kids in the K-to-12 system; we’re hearing it — if you’d been here earlier you’d have heard it — from people who speak to mental health issues in the post-secondary system. There is a recognition that a child’s ability to learn isn’t just dependent on all the stuff you do in school and the fact that they have to be fed properly.
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Someone spoke earlier about the LINK funding and the lack of ability to support kids coming from vulnerable families. We’re now, I think, seeing a greater emphasis on the whole mental health issue. I know that the governments and the child and family commissioner has come forward. So I just thank you for this. I’m sure that when we have our deliberations…. I’m hoping that you’ll see a fairly positive outcome from this.

S. Gibson: Thank you very much for your presentation. We’re all fans of public education. My wife was a public school teacher her entire career, and I had the privilege of taking a graduate degree in education at SFU. So we’re all in this together.

I guess I did want to hit recommendation 9, because that’s an interest I have. In terms of choice, you talk about underfunding or defunding independent schools. One of the things I think we value in our province…. I don’t want to turn this into kind of an argument, but it’s just my observation. The No. 1 indicator of student success in schools — and, Glen, and you know it too, Doctor — is parental interest.

When you have parental interest in independent schools…. We have about 80,000 students in 350 independent schools. The funding — the 50 percent operating, which most of the schools get — really doesn’t do a lot when you compare, when you drive by, those incredible facilities all paid for by parents and supporters. So the saving to us — you, me and government — with independent schools for those facilities is incredible.

I just want to make that offset. This is not to disagree with you. I think there’s, obviously, always that tension between public and independent schools, and it’ll remain. It’s a part of the dichotomy of our province.

But parents like to make a choice. They like to pick the school, and sometimes it’s an independent school. Sometimes it’s a home school. Sometimes it’s not even a school in their catchment area.

In Abbotsford, where I live, 24 percent of the students go to schools of choice in the public model. I just wanted to make that remark. You did a great job presenting it. I know, as Robin said, we’ll be deliberating very carefully on your recommendations.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I’m really glad you brought up the new curriculum and the support issue because I think that, having gone through the Year 2000 and been involved in the system when that was happening…. It was exciting, it was incredible, and it needed supports to be able to really take off.

I think you’ve reminded us about the importance of that. I’d hate to see a great new curriculum that’s been developed co-operatively, that has been agreed upon and supported, not move ahead in a positive way because of a lack of support or resources. I think that’s a particular area for us to pay attention to.

I just want to touch on the aboriginal issue because it’s been raised to me by a number of folks who’ve talked about the importance of engaging community. I think you’ve described it well, Glen, about the importance of talking with local First Nations, the importance of reflecting the diversity across British Columbia. British Columbia has a more diverse First Nations population than many other places do. So it’s not a matter of teaching one curriculum.

I think the recognition is that that takes time, that it’s not simply inviting a guest to come in and expecting that that’s going to resolve the issue of teaching curriculum that’s going to really meet the Truth and Reconciliation recommendations.

I appreciate your raising it. I think that the time and building those relationships is something that takes resources and is going to take time that teachers are going to need and that communities are going to need to be able to engage in that process. Thanks for raising it.

G. Heyman: Just very quickly, I’d like to pass on to teachers, through you, comments that I hear on a regular basis from parents in my constituency appreciative of the tremendous work that teachers do to keep the education completion rates of children high under circumstances that they believe are trying and under-resourced and underfunded and also, personally, to thank you as a federation and as teachers continuing, as Carole said, to look at the needs of a modern, relevant curriculum, not just today, but in the future.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’ll conclude by saying to you what I said to Mr. Iker in Nanaimo a year ago with respect to independent schools and public schools. Both of my daughters, and many people here can say the same thing, went through the public school system and were exceptionally well served by dedicated and caring teachers. I just wanted to put that out there, too.

Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate you taking the time out of a busy day.

Now we’re going to go backwards again because Greg Wilson is here from the Retail Council of Canada. Mr. Wilson, welcome. We were able to jump ahead a little bit and see our friends through, so we’re running a little bit late with you but actually ahead of schedule. It works for us.

Nevertheless, ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to wave you down with a couple of minutes left so you can conclude your thoughts, and then we can go to the committee.

G. Wilson: I’m Greg Wilson. I’m the director of government relations for the Retail Council of Canada. I work from our Vancouver office. RCC has been the voice of retail since 1963.

I’d like to thank the committee once again for the opportunity to address you on behalf of Canadian retailers. We’re B.C.’s largest private sector employer.

This year we’re particularly thankful for British Columbia’s support for two projects. I mentioned them both last year, so I wanted to be very careful to make sure that I thanked the committee this year for the interprovincial trade agreement and for CPP expansion. We’re looking forward to both of those important projects happening. In particular, the interprovincial trade agreement will not only reduce the costs and paper burden of doing business; it will also create jobs and improve the sale of Canadian products in our home marketplace.

Today I want to bring to your attention another important federal-provincial issue. U.S.-based on-line merchants and couriers have been pushing hard for an increase in the de minimis level, below which courier or postal shipments into Canada are exempt from sales taxes and customs duties. Changes to the de minimis level can be devastating to retail merchants in Canada and to our 2-million-plus employees.

Under Canada’s Postal Imports Remission Order and the Courier Imports Remission Order, the de minimis level is currently set at $20 Canadian. The rationale is that the administrative burden and processing cost does not justify collecting taxes on very small individual shipments. It’s also expected that the shipments will face shipping and handling costs that could exceed the savings in tax and duty. Some proponents of change go so far as to suggest that Canada match the U.S. de minimis level of $800 U.S.

Why is this important to British Columbia? It’s important to British Columbia because of its impact on British Columbia’s coffers. None of the imported goods falling under a higher de minimis level would be subject to our provincial sales tax or other measures such as environmental handling fees.

British Columbia, along with other provinces, would forgo significant tax revenues. For every 1 percent that consumer behaviour changes as a consequence of foreign tax advantages, British Columbia would lose $8.4 million. A 5 percent diversion from Canadian sales to foreign on-line sales would cost British Columbia $41.9 million annually. A 10 percent diversion would cost British Columbia $83.9 million annually, and so on.

While there’s no easy way to model how much consumer behaviour would change with a significant price advantage, given consumers’ demonstrated price sensitivity and British Columbians’ proven inclination to cross-border shop for a better price, we do not believe that a 20 percent diversion over time would be implausible, which would cost British Columbia $167.7 million annually.

The impact to retail, particularly to small, family-run merchants, would be acute. This would give American merchants more than a 12 percent price advantage on taxes alone. That’s apart from any additional advantage of being able to avoid any customs duties that merchants in Canada are required to pay on imported goods. Retail jobs and, particularly, retail independent stores would disappear at a dramatic rate.

Why should the government of British Columbia get involved? Because our consumers will pay up to 15 percent more to buy goods in B.C. They will shop in B.C. less often. Fewer goods sold will mean significantly less tax revenue. And British Columbia retail jobs will disappear.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, you didn’t lie to me. You definitely did not take ten minutes. You were very succinct. The committee appreciates that too.

Nevertheless, I will ask if anyone has any questions regarding the presentation.

I’ll jump in. I actually live very close to the border, as many people do. I find myself down in Washington state more frequently than most — not for any particular reason other than going down to Sudden Valley, popping in just for fun.

How much bleed is there really? Has it been estimated? What sort of bleed do we have when it comes to cross-border shopping? Not just in a retail sense, dollars-and-cents-wise, but even after taxes, how much tax revenue do you think this province, particularly, is losing to cross-border shopping?

G. Wilson: British Columbia has actually been a net beneficiary in the last three or four years as the dollar has decreased in value since 2013. It’s probably been a beneficiary to the tune of $100 million or so — just pulling a number.

The difficulty is that that’s something that comes and goes. What will happen is prices on this side of the border are rising. They’re rising because…. What happened is that merchants ate the margin initially, and what’s happening is they’re now adjusting their prices so that they can keep competitive and keep in business.

Once the prices rebalance, what we’ll probably see is an increase in cross-border shopping naturally anyway. We’ll go closer, perhaps not to 2011, 2012, 2013 levels — I can’t compete with that — but at least higher. That’s a worry, but it would be exacerbated by a change to the de minimis levels.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Oh wow. Okay. Well, I know over the last three days, we lost about 70,000 Canadians to the Blue Jays games in Seattle — the three-game homestand.
[ Page 2391 ]

S. Hamilton (Chair): They probably did. That would be my guess. I couldn’t believe the television set. It was just full of Blue Jays fans.

Thanks, Greg, for the presentation. I think maintaining a strong retail sector, small business sector, in communities throughout B.C. is critically important to the local economy. We see it under threat all the time, whether it’s by foreign-owned big-box stores that just push retailers out of the market or issues like the ones that you’re bringing to us today.

In my own constituency, as you know because your office is there, there are small businesses and retailers everywhere. They contribute tremendously to the life of the community, including sponsoring and regularly being part of street fairs in the spring and summer months.

D. Ashton: I appreciate it. Coming in as a former retailer in a family of retail business, times have changed a lot. But to touch on what George just said — that definition of shop local…. Because of the contributions that those local merchants and retailers make back to the community, sometimes I think there isn’t enough onus on not yourself but on councils and agencies to lay this out.

I’m just throwing it out. Maybe it’s time for a little bit more of a hard sell on what a local business or a local retailer actually does for the community.

G. Wilson: There are several prominent — and we run one of them — shop-in campaigns, but the difficulty is that the pressures upon those small independent merchants are greater and greater. I sat with four of them at a lunch on Monday. They made me change my remarks today.

It’s not lost on me that these are people who are my age. They’re 15 years from retirement, or normal retirement, and thinking they’re going to have to sell their business. I think of the four of them, three of them would answer me today that they will close the business…

G. Wilson: …rather than be able to sell it because they won’t be able to sell it.

You’re right that every municipal leader who I speak with says: “What do we do?” The difficulty is that all of these issues…. I talked last year about pension adequacy, the year before about environmental handling fees and the bureaucracy that comes with that. These are things that independent businesses feel very, very personally and closely. They impact their ability to operate, and the cumulative impact is what’s going to dramatically hurt them.

I represent big-box stores also. We represent all formats of retail. But even most of my big-box merchants started somewhere else, and they’re just as concerned about independent retail’s survival.

Seeing none, Mr. Wilson, thank you very much for taking the time to come before us and present your case. It’s one that we like to hear every once in a while too and remind us of what keeps our economy ticking.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Fortunately, we have another early bird here. We have Alex McGowan from the Alliance of B.C. Students here to present.

Welcome, Mr. McGowan. Thank you for being a little early. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention in the last couple of minutes to go, and you can conclude your thoughts. Then we go to the committee for questions after that. The floor is yours.

A. McGowan: Thank you very much. I’ll probably make this a little bit shorter than the ten minutes.

The Alliance of B.C. Students is a post-secondary student advocacy organization in this province, representing over 60,000 from across the province. It’s amazing to me how many issues students in this province can unite around. We represent students, graduate students, trades, undergraduates, vocational students from design to fine arts and everything in between, but still there are so many issues that we can unite around and that we can find in common.

The list is very long. From adult basic education, which we need to be offering for all British Columbians…. At a small price tag, we could be offering it for free. I find it is shameful that the interest rates we charge for student loans in this province are among the highest in the country. We are the only province without a needs-based grants program. These are critical issues that all students have agreed are important.

But I want to talk to you today about housing. This is something that the Alliance of B.C. Students has found to be extremely important. We’ve put together this white paper, which is in front of you, on the need for student housing in this province.

In conducting our research, we found there are just under 20,000 units of student housing currently in this
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province, located primarily at UBC, SFU and University of Victoria, with a smattering of, essentially, negligible housing at a number of other institutions in the province. In looking at this, there has been no new student housing outside of UBC in the province in the past ten years. What that has meant is that we’ve fallen far behind where we need to be in terms of providing on-campus housing for our students.

In doing our research, pulling together what UBC, SFU and UVic have said…. They’ve done fairly extensive analyses of what they could provide quite reasonably. Then, in doing an analysis of what could be provided by many other institutions in this province — including a number of institutions which have become degree-granting universities in the last ten years — and estimating they could house at least 10 percent of their students on campus, which is based on what is provided elsewhere in this country, we believe that we can double the amount of student housing in this province.

Twenty thousand units of housing is a lot of housing. Assuming that these are students who are coming out of the rental market or coming out of social housing, we’re freeing up a lot of space for everyone else.

Students are traditionally, are generally, lower-income earners, which means often they’re living in social housing, and often they are taking up the lower end of the rental market, which is space that we could be leaving open for other people.

If you look at the cost of building social housing, the cost of building 20,000 units of social housing could be upwards of $10 billion. The cost of building 20,000 units of student housing is under $2 billion. That could be built by universities taking on loans. The reason the cost is so much lower is because the land is already there. The universities already have the land. There’s no need to acquire new land, and often the housing can be built at a lower cost because less space is needed in residence.

Our ask is that the provincial government not only allow universities to take on debt for the purpose of building housing, but recognizing that this is an issue that has been drawn out for too long, we are asking that the government make an investment in the student housing to accelerate the process of constructing new student housing. We’ve estimated that an investment of 10 percent of new student housing projects would allow these construction projects to get underway.

At my home institution, at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, they have begun the process of looking into building student housing. They have expressed a willingness to go down that path. But they would need a commitment from the government in order to accelerate that and devote more resources to it. So the government putting up an investment would allow them to speed that up and would allow us to put in new student housing that is direly needed.

That’s our number one priority — student housing — right now, and that’s the thing I want to draw the most attention to today.

I will go to questions from the committee. I know this is something that this committee has had discussions about over the last couple of terms, a couple of years. It’s an important issue, and it’s something that we have forwarded as recommendation — to at least look at a way to allow this to happen. I know there are complexities associated with it.

D. Ashton: Alex, good presentation — very well spoken, brought forward. Thank you.

What concerns me is…. I don’t want to single out an institution, but I will. I come from retail. It’s not only what you sell that garners your success; it’s how you look after your customers. For the life of me…. I’m being very frank. I look at our largest institution in the province, for the legacy funds that they have in their hands at this point in time. It’s not only what they deliver in education; it’s how they look after their students. I, for one, cannot fathom why they are not more involved in meeting the needs and the demands of their customers, which are people like you.

Granted, governments have to take a look and maybe lend a helping hand. As you probably know, there were concerns about the debt loads, etc. But one of the issues that we hear on a continual basis on this committee, and this is my fourth year around on it, is the needs of people like yourself.

It’s time that government starts to look at this, but it’s a three-legged stool. We need people to step up, students — i.e., the renters — to be there. And it’s not just for the time from September until the end of March; it’s that whole year basis, where you can get investors in there. Institutions need to step forward with the funding that they have available, and also the province.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. We certainly agree that there is an opportunity, and it is a partnership that government needs to take a look at — allowing post-secondary institutions to be able take this on. They’re ready. They’re willing. Many of them, as you point out, have looked at the planning, have land available, have talked about the ability to move forward. They just need the change so that they’re able to borrow the money and to be able to move ahead.

I appreciate, as well, that you included the Alberta comparison. That’s, again, helpful — just to look at other jurisdictions and the number of students compared to residence.

I’ll just speak for my own community. When you’re looking at Victoria, with a 0.06 vacancy rate — impos-
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sible for students to be able to find housing, ridiculous situations.

I think the examples you pointed out and the priority you’ve given it are really critical. Thank you for your presentation.

Well, thank you for the presentation, Mr. McGowan. I’m certain we’re going to continue to have this same discussion when we meet again for deliberations, after we finish our tour.

It’s my hope, personally, that we can do something. I’m not sure exactly what it is or what it’s going to look like. There are complexities, but maybe there’s a way around them. It’s a very important issue, and I’m glad you brought it back to us. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

A. McGowan: I’ll be seeing you all tomorrow. I’ll be representing the Kwantlen Student Association. A slightly different set of asks, but some of the same.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right, we’ll look forward to it. Take care. Have a good evening.

Now we’re going to jump back up, I think, to Terri Van Steinburg of the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of B.C. We’re back on schedule.

Ms. Van Steinburg, welcome. Just to let you know, you have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll give you a wave with a couple of minutes left so that you can conclude your thoughts. Then we’ll go to the committee for a smack of questions, if they have them. The floor is all yours.

T. Van Steinburg: Sounds good. I think I might be a little bit over ten minutes, so I will definitely look at you.

Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee about your priorities for the 2017 provincial budget. The Federation of Post-Secondary Educators represents over 10,000 faculty and staff who teach in B.C.’s colleges, universities and institutes. Our members teach in everything from liberal arts programs to trades training. They’re librarians, archivists and researchers. Our members are actively engaged in programs designed to bring post-secondary education closer to the communities in which public institutions operate.

I want to cover a number of areas in my time before the committee this evening. My comments will not be new to you. FPSE representatives and other faculty and student delegations have made the same points many times over many years.

I do want to say I appreciate that over all these years, this committee has included many of our recommendations among your own in your reports. It’s encouraging to know that so many of you recognize the important role post-secondary education plays in building our communities, our society and our economy. But it’s also very discouraging that despite the inclusion of these recommendations in your report year after year, we have not seen any positive changes in the provincial budgets.

So once again I’m here to talk about the declining investment in post-secondary education and the need to address it. The single largest investment the provincial government makes every year in our institutions, the per-student operating grants, is actually $65 million lower than it was two years ago. That’s like taking a College of New Caledonia out of the post-secondary system every two years.

That public investment is 20 percent lower than it was 15 years ago, after inflation. Twenty-five years ago institutions received grants of 80 percent; now several receive less than 50 percent. Projected student enrolment is also declining. At a time when the jobs plan stresses the importance of skills training and post-secondary education, the Ministry of Advanced Education forecasts a drop in post-secondary enrolments in addition to the decline in provincial funding.

Where we do see an increase is in the number of international students, which is now almost three-quarters of the domestic student population. To put that in context, Langara College will receive more funding this year from international student tuition revenue than from the government grant.

The only other number forecast to increase in this year’s post-secondary education budget was tuition fee revenue. The budget documents estimated that tuition fee revenues will go up by more than 15 percent by 2018, even with enrolment numbers going down. Since 2001, tuition fee revenues in B.C. have increased 400 percent.

A 2013 BMO student survey showed that the average student debt load in B.C. is $35,000 — nearly $10,000 higher than the national average and a considerable disadvantage to someone trying to start a career and a family. As educators, members of our federation are deeply concerned about the shifting burden onto students. What we are seeing in our classrooms is that as tuition fees and the accompanying student debt rise so dramatically, so does the level of stress and anxiety among our students.

The more students have to worry about — whether they can afford their tuition, their rent, their food — the more difficult it is for them to concentrate on their studies. Consequently, it’s taking longer for students to complete their programs.

The truth is that the public operating grants are no longer adequate to meet the underlying cost pressures facing post-secondary institutions in B.C. Institutions now rely on tuition fees, international student revenues and other outside income to meet their own basic operating grants.
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These kinds of shifts raise serious concerns about the accessibility of our public post-secondary system. Affordable access to public institutions has a significant implication for students but also for the growth and success of our province. As our public institutions are increasingly driven by budgets and government mandates, they are no longer fulfilling their community mandates.

The funding formula is not adapted for specific community needs. Rural colleges and large urban ones, teaching universities and research universities are all funded based on estimates of student numbers. This requires the institution to view students as revenue-generating units rather than participants in an education community and, beyond that, economic and social contributors to the communities in which they live.

B.C.’s 2024 labour market outlook predicts close to 80 percent of jobs will require some form of post-secondary education. But if the province doesn’t provide for accessible, affordable post-secondary institutions, there won’t be a workforce with the necessary education to meet those requirements.

We also remain concerned that the government is making some problematic assumptions about what those educational needs and jobs will be. The minister has talked about targeted funding for high-priority jobs, as outlined in the 2014 skills-for-jobs blueprint. At its core, the blueprint views post-secondary education only as job training, devaluing its critical role in developing engaged citizens.

The blueprint requires institutions to direct up to 25 percent of their operating grants to programs on their top-100-jobs list. But when this mandate is combined with the funding squeeze, the outcome is the reduction or even elimination of other important programs. The blueprint doesn’t seem to recognize the very real need for strong communications and critical thinking skills or for problem-solving and analytical skills — skills which are learned and refined in programs like the liberal arts, social sciences and the humanities.

We hear too many stories from our members now about fundamental courses like second-year English or history being cancelled at their institutions. Students need choices in course offerings and program options. More choices means more opportunities, and diversity among our students will lead to more diversity across British Columbia.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You can burn into the question period time, if you’d rather communicate the message, then.

Once again, on behalf of our federation and the 10,000 educators we represent, I ask you to consider the following recommendations.

First, we again call for the reinstatement of tuition-free ESL, adult basic education and adult special education programs at all of our post-secondary institutions and an ongoing commitment to provide an envelope of funds designated specifically for developmental programs. If you want to ask me a question about that, I’ll tell you why.

Second, we recommend implementing improved funding support for students, both in terms of a revitalized student grant program and through the introduction of interest-free student loans to ensure that students can complete programs and degrees in a timely way and without the burden of a heavy debt load.

I would encourage you to examine the recent initiatives in other provinces — Alberta, which has implemented a tuition freeze; and Ontario and New Brunswick, which are offering improved student grants and free tuition for lower-income students. I will say that these two latter programs are not without their problems and limitations, but there are certainly aspects worth considering.

Finally, a funding formula — a better response to the cost pressures faced by B.C.’s post-secondary institutions. Specifically, we once again recommend a comprehensive consultative review of funding to address regional inequities and core funding needs for B.C.’s public colleges, institutes and regional universities.

I’m going to start by letting you expand on what you wanted to talk about with respect to the ABE funding.

I guess the point I wanted to make, really, about the
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adult basic upgrading grant is that the ABE tuition was cut, and the government spent $6.9 million on free tuition, and now they’re spending more money on the grant. But the problem is — the adult upgrading grant, if people don’t know — that not everybody qualifies for that grant that previously qualified for the free tuition. So what’s happening is if you make more than $11 an hour, you can’t access the grant, but you don’t have enough money to pay your own tuition. So that’s the problem with that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s pretty much the same message we heard in the last couple of days. So thank you for clarifying that.

C. James (Deputy Chair): I just want to echo that. Thank you. The issues have been very well represented in the few days that we’ve been on the road this week, and I expect we’ll see them in the next round as well. People have described, really well, the pressures that post-secondary institutions are under and, therefore, pressures that students are under because of that — and the link to the economy; the link to jobs; the link to, as you say, the strength of a community — not simply the issue of employment but the larger issue as well. So thank you for your presentation and thank you for being so clear.

S. Hamilton (Chair): On that note, yes, don’t take the lack of questions as disinterest or indifference. We’ve asked a bunch of questions regarding the same subject over the last three days, so they’ve all been pretty much answered.

Okay. Onward and upward. Here we go. board of education, school district 39 — Mr. Mike Lombardi.

Welcome, Mr. Lombardi. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for coming out today. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll give you the wave with a couple of minutes left, you can wind down on your thoughts, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions, if they have any.

M. Lombardi: Thank you very much, Chair Scott Hamilton and members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. I’m pleased to be here today, speaking on behalf of the Vancouver board of education. Due to meetings of the VSB education services and finance committees this evening, other trustees and members of our staff couldn’t be here, but they send their regards. I believe we have copies of our submission, which have been circulated. We’ve also provided them on line to your staff.

In my presentation tonight, I’m going to try to focus on four key themes: (1) VSB context in student achievement, (2) funding issues, (3) provincial comparisons and (4) recommendations.

As you know, the Vancouver School Board is one of the most diverse public school systems in Canada, with an annual enrolment of 50,000 students from kindergarten to grade 12. In addition, the VSB provides educational programs and services to 600 adult students. The VSB invests significant resources in a broad range of programs and services to meet our learners’ diverse needs.

In terms of student achievement, which is our big focus and why we exist, the district continues to focus on our strategic plan goal of increasing student engagement and ensuring that all students are included and have an opportunity to succeed. The VSB offers a broad offering of speciality programs to support learners in a variety of ways, addressing a range of needs.

There is a clear focus on improving the graduation rates for all students and, in particular, our aboriginal learners. That begins with an emphasis on providing supportive learning experiences and interventions as kids transition from pre-K to kindergarten through to grade 12 and on to post-secondary life. On pages 2 to 4 of your brief, you’ll find examples and information about the kinds of initiatives that we have underway to help us with our students’ success.

In terms of education funding, I would like to turn to probably one of the most significant issues not only facing the VSB but many boards in British Columbia. Like many other districts in the province, the VSB relies on provincial funding to provide 92 percent of our annual revenues. This means that the education services and programs that are provided to students are significant.

As you can see from the chart on page 5, 83 percent of VSB expenditures are directly related to providing instruction to kids. Building operations and maintenance of our 110 schools is the second-largest expenditure.

The VSB, like other school boards in the province, has faced significant funding shortfalls and downloading of costs over the past decade. As a result, school districts and Vancouver have had to make cuts and reductions to the level of services provided in order to achieve balanced budgets.

Since 2002, if you take into account declining enrolment as well as inflation, the VSB has had to make more than $80 million in cuts in programs and services. The details of these cuts, which are mostly staff and programs and services, are highlighted annually in the board’s restoration budget, which is posted on our website.

Last year, due to chronic underfunding, the VSB was faced with an additional shortfall of $22 million. As
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you know, with the support of our parents, stakeholder groups and the community, the VSB said, “Enough is enough,” and we refused to adopt a 2016-17 balanced budget containing another $22 million worth of cuts to programs and services to our kids.

In terms of provincial comparisons, although Stats Canada has not updated the provincial comparison stats found on the charts on pages 6 and 7, the data has not changed appreciably in the interim. We’re hoping we’ll get more data now that the Stats Canada survey has been completed, and we’re expecting that in November of this year. The most recent charts are included in the context of the submission for your information.

B.C. lags behind the rest of Canada in terms of spending per student, growth in education expenditure since 2008-09, and in student-educator ratios. B.C.’s spending, again, lags the Canadian average, and the details are laid out in the charts for you. In the five-year period from 2008 to 2013, the average expenditure per student in Canada increased 14.1 percent during that four-year period. In B.C., the lag was at 6.5 percent. The average expenditure per student nationally for 2012-13 was $12,377. B.C. remains at $12,113.

If B.C. matched the national average, it would translate into an additional $143 million to the budgets of B.C.’s school districts and, in Vancouver’s case, would give us about $15 million more — which, coincidentally, is our projected budget shortfall for next year. We have a projected budget shortfall of $15 million for the ’17-18 year after those $80 million worth of cuts and the $22 million of last year.

B.C. growth in public education expenditures obviously lacks the national average. The chart on the bottom of page 6 shows you that we’ve had the lowest growth in public K-to-12 education expenditures in Canada. Between ’08 and ’13, our expenditures grew by 12 percent. Operating expenditures for public K to 12 in B.C. over this time period grew by 1.2 percent, while expenditures for private schools grew by 4.9 percent.

Student-educator ratio. The chart on page 7 shows that B.C.’s student-educator ratios are the second-highest in Canada. The average educator in Canada supports 14.6 students. In B.C., that figure is 16.5. Said another way, the average educator in Canada supports 14.6 students. In B.C., educators serve two more students, on average, for a total of 16.5 students when you factor it all out.

I will now move on to the recommendations, which you’ll find on page 7. Recommendation 1. The VSB recommends that the provincial government provide stable, predictable and adequate funding to enable school districts to fulfil their responsibility to provide continued, equitable access to quality public education.

Unpredictable funding and unfunded cost increases require school districts to spend significant time and resources on balancing budgets each year instead of strategically planning the most effective use of how we can support our kids. This continued underfunding and downloading of costs also makes it increasingly difficult to fully support success for students, as valuable programs and staff positions are further reduced in order to balance budgets.

Successful implementation of the new B.C. Ed curriculum will require funding to support in-service collaboration time and learning resources. School libraries are playing an increasingly important role with personalized learning and require adequate funding for staffing and resources.

Recommendation 2. The provincial government should fully fund cost increases negotiated by or mandated by the province. The province does not provide funding for net cost increases of employee salary benefits for teachers, administrators or excluded staff as they gain experience and progress through the steps on their scales, or increased costs of benefits such as the Canada Pension Plan, employment insurance, WCB, extended health and MSP.

Additionally, the provision for basic inflation is not made in the calculation. Inflation slowly eats away at the purchasing power of our education grant. The freeze on salaries for exempt staff has been lifted, but school districts did not receive any funding to pay that, and the province did not fund the previous provincially negotiated agreement with support staff. All in all, boards, through the downloading of costs, are forced to make decisions which cut programs and services.

Recommendation 3. The provincial government should review and increase supplemental funding grants for students with special needs. The VSB spends more in supporting students with special needs than is provided by the province in special needs operating grants. We spend approximately $60 million, and we get about $30 million. Grant amounts should be based on functional assessments of learning needs — in other words, based on what specific support students need to be successful and to access our educational programming.

Recommendation 4. The provincial government should provide funding for increased maintenance and upgrades to address the needs of aging school facilities. The province needs to increase funding for ongoing maintenance and should employ industry maintenance standards as a guide. Funding for school building maintenance is only 25 percent of the industry standards recommended by the Building Owners and Managers Association.

The VSB’s aging stock of buildings is at risk of accelerating deterioration due to insufficient maintenance levels. The VSB has accumulated more than $750 million of deferred maintenance costs because of the underfunding of the annual facilities grant which comes to school boards.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Mr. Lombardi, you’re into the ten now, but I want you to use the time how you want to use it.
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Recommendation 5. The provincial government should provide sufficient capital funding to honour the provincial government’s commitment to upgrade or replace high-risk schools by 2020. We now have 60 more schools for seismically upgrading. We’ve done 25, and we’re doing five right now. We need to expedite those schools so that kids can be in safe environments.

Recommendation 6. The provincial government should, as a priority, develop and implement a poverty reduction strategy to ensure that all families have access to affordable quality child care. As you know, B.C. is the only province with no poverty reduction strategy, and we think it’s time for the province to adopt one.

Recommendation 7. The provincial government should provide adequate provincial funding that fully supports adult education programs. In past years, the provincial government has reversed the education guarantee for adult learners, and this is having a significant impact on some of our most vulnerable adults in our community.

In conclusion, chronic underfunding has reached a crisis in Vancouver, and it’s putting our world-class public education system at risk. Additionally, the inflexible policies of the provincial government around seismic upgrading in Vancouver are forcing school boards to make decisions that are not in the best interests of students and their communities. Yet British Columbia has a growing economy, a significant budget surplus and a prosperity fund. It’s time for the B.C. government to reinvest in education. We can do better by reinvesting in our kids, because they deserve it.

Thank you very much. We’ll keep focused on making sure that our kids get a high-quality education program. What we would like is the provincial government to support us with the funding to make that happen.

I’m speaking to your last point. I’ve heard lots from…. Even though no schools from Vancouver-Fairview were slated for closure, there are parents who have children in some of the schools that were, and I’ve been hearing about the 95 percent utilization tide of the seismic upgrading for quite a long time now.

I notice that very recently the Education Minister has removed that stipulation — or in some form or other. I’m wondering if you’ve had time to consider how that might impact the deliberations that the VSB is currently undergoing around schools that are on a list for closure.

M. Lombardi: That’s a question I’ve had thrown at me many, many times since three o’clock this afternoon. Because of the advocacy of trustees, parents, community groups, Mayor Robertson, our city council and our whole ed community, we’ve been advocating for the elimination of that arbitrary 95 percent capacity utilization, which had no grounding in research or anything to do with making kids safe in seismically upgraded schools.

We’re glad the minister has listened and has backed off that. It will now allow us to go back and review the data and look at where we’re going, because our long-range facilities plan and our school closure plan was grounded on that requirement with the Ministry of Education. So my hope is that it will open up other possible scenarios for us.

We’ll have to look at that over the next couple of days because on Monday, we’ve got a school board meeting where we’re supposed to be acting on the committee recommendation with the potential movement of 12 schools onto a closure list for consideration.

Our hope is that it will help us. It certainly unties one hand behind our back. The other hand is underfunding, and we need to get our seismically upgraded schools in place as soon as possible.

We’re hopeful that it may lead to a second look at some of those decisions which were made because of the pressure of the arbitrary limit of 95 percent.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Just a thank-you, having sat on a school board, to you and the board. I think you’ve described well the advocacy from the entire community that really makes the difference. That happens with an active board, so thank you for your work, and thank you to your colleagues.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Lombardi. I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day, and good luck with deliberations on Monday. All right. Thank you very much for coming out. Have a good night.

Come on up, Paul. I’m sure you’ve been here before, so you know ten minutes for the presentation, five minutes for questions. I’ll just give you the signal when you get close to your ten minutes. Thank you for being here tonight.

P. Kariya: Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, committee. I think it is six times, or something like that, in a row. Thanks for this opportunity.

In the kit of material that I’ve handed out, given to you, there’s a map. I won’t refer to it. It shows the spread in development of clean energy in the province. There is also a graphic that shows the cost of electricity compared against other goods like hockey tickets and things like that. You’ll see that electricity is actually quite inexpensive, and we can get into that during questions if you wish.

I also have given you a copy of a study that we had done this year on economic impacts and the benefits of the clean energy sector in the province of British Columbia.

I represent the Clean Energy association, which is comprised of 160 operators, developers, and a supply chain of engineers, lawyers, environmental monitors and contractors. When I joined this association, we had 225 members. You might very well want to ask me later why that difference between the 225-plus and the 160 today.

We are the private sector whose sole business is power generation. Our members are not forest and mining companies, who also sell power to B.C. Hydro as a second line of business. I mention that because the numbers get confused out there. Indeed, my members provide about 14 percent of the power on the B.C. grid via B.C. Hydro, the only buyer of our product.

Our membership also includes 12 First Nations, and my hope is that as an industry association, we’ll continue to grow that number. I’m quite proud that there are…. Really, industry associations aren’t the place where First Nations like to join up. But they see an opportunity in working with us, so I’m proud of that.

To date, CEBC members have invested $8.6 billion in capital investments in B.C., which is more than 1½ times the total projected capital investments of B.C. ports and harbour facilities and more than double the projected capital investment in B.C. mining projects. We’re a big player. We’re a player that is not brand new but a player that I would say doesn’t get the respect that we think we deserve.

And 20,000 construction jobs have been created by these numbers, but they do not appear in the B.C. jobs plan report as coming from the clean energy sector. Again, a question I’d ask you to ask me is why that’s so — why not in the jobs plan.

The last power call in this province was in 2008. Contrary to the myth, we are not expensive. From B.C. Hydro’s most annual report, the price of power from IPPs is something like $82 per megawatt hour, or 8.2 cents per kilowatt hour. Apart from a very small standing offer program, there are no other procurements planned by B.C. Hydro, and there may well not be again until past 2030. Even the small standing offer program is now being cut back by the government and B.C. Hydro. My challenge and frustration is: how do I keep this sector alive? How do I keep it growing in B.C. — making investments, creating jobs and paying taxes in the communities that you represent?

We are a sector, across the board, that First Nations want to see more of. I believe it can transform their economic development and their economies — indeed, be part of economic reconciliation.

My problem isn’t a partisan political one. What’s missing is a vision for B.C. What can be done with B.C.’s clean energy assets, the private sector working with the public sector together to develop and sell our product, clean and renewable electricity? Let’s grow the market. Let’s attract companies to B.C. and use low-cost electricity to do so. Let’s prepare an export strategy to use our power, to sell our power to the east and to the south. We need a plan.

Let’s utilize B.C.’s natural resource assets — clean and renewable electricity — for investment and job creation. Let’s invest in developing a strategy to attract clean energy and load customers to B.C. I sat yesterday, during the Cascadia conference, with representatives from Amazon. They were telling me that they’re opening a data centre in Quebec. I said: “What would it take to open one here?” They’re saying: “Well, ask us. We’re exploring north of the border.” Why couldn’t we do that? These plants could take up to 25 or 50 megawatts of power.

Invest in developing an export strategy. It may seem strange to be talking about export when we’re told that our market and the U.S. market is awash in surplus power, but I believe it’s the time right now to be looking for creative ways to do so. I think utilizing B.C. Hydro’s storage, coupled with B.C.’s renewables…. We could think about selling long term into the U.S. market.

Think about it now. We have Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, who have all agreed that they would like to get to a North American situation where it’s 50 percent clean energy–powered by 2025. That’s not too far away. This could be an investment opportunity that capitalizes upon the best of the private and public sectors working together for B.C. jobs.

Let’s reinstitute the retail access program that was cancelled by the government and permit my members to be able to sell power directly to customers. These corporate PPAs are changing the landscape in Europe and the U.S.

Start tracking clean and renewable energy jobs in this market, something that, as I mentioned earlier, is not being done. That’s a recommendation that’s not very costly and is something that I think would put us on the map in terms of: what else is being done? What is this opportunity like in British Columbia? Track the jobs that are being created.

Let’s increase clean electrification opportunities under B.C.’s climate action plan. The plan that was tabled in August is a good start, but it doesn’t respond to all 32 recommendations tabled by the government’s appointed climate leadership team. What more needs to be done?

Well, for example, let’s establish a legislated 2030 target of 40 percent GHG reductions below the 2007 levels. Let’s
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amend the Environmental Assessment Act to include the social cost of carbon. Let’s phase out diesel in remote communities with low GHG electricity by — pick a date — 2025. Let’s instruct B.C. Hydro to develop a strategy to supply, in a competitive and timely manner, the clean electricity requirements to facilitate upstream natural gas, LNG and other associated infrastructure. Let’s use traditional knowledge and allocate resources to analyze the impact of climate change on inherent and treaty rights.

Another recommendation would be thinking about amending the B.C. Utilities Commission Act. When undertaking its reviews, mandate the BCUC to review social economic factors and lowest carbon emissions as well as lowest costs, which they are currently mandated to do and which doesn’t account for externalities.

Establish under B.C.’s competitiveness agenda, including clean energy that needs to compete in a wider market…. Let’s look at what the challenges are. For example, currently the U.S. subsidizes its renewable electricity sector to incentivize the transition to clean. There are myriad state subsidies, but the big drivers are two federal ones: an investment tax credit and a production tax credit for things like wind and solar.

I’m not suggesting that we be subsidized. We haven’t been subsidized, and that’s not something we want. But to be competitive, I guess our recommendation would be for B.C. to work with Canada on tax policy and to consider a package of credits that would be matched to what the U.S. provides and eliminated as the U.S. reduces them. So if the U.S…. In one of the cases, I think in 2019 one of the taxes will come off. Well, there shouldn’t be anything there from Canada, if indeed it’s not there in the U.S. Let’s have a fair playing field.

My final recommendation would be to ask that B.C. Hydro reinstate the standing offer program to its promised volume of a modest 150 gigawatt hours annually. This will keep investment and job creation alive in clean energy with first nations and regional communities in B.C.

Riffing off of someone a little bit more famous than me, it is 2016, and the Clean Energy Association and its members are here to help.

We’ll now move into questions. That was just a little under ten minutes, so we’ll get a good five minutes for questions.

You said no new projects coming on, but there’s a brand-new project being built at the top of the Coquihalla with two turbines going on it. So that’s a past one in…?

P. Kariya: It was contracted for…. I think it would be two years ago, three years ago. It was under the standing offer program, which, under B.C. Hydro’s ten-year rates plan…. We’ve been told they need to cut $65 million net from the period 2020 to 2024, which, depending on how the numbers are worked, is a program cut of between one-third and two-thirds.

They won’t deny that. I was meeting with them today. They’re not happy about the cut. They’re saying: “This is mandated from government. We must institute the rates plan. We’ve done all the capital cuts we can. Sorry, Paul. We’re not going to leave your little program harmless. We need to cut that too.”

My request is that…. It’s such a piddling, tiny program that really favours first nations and regional communities. Can we not keep that going?

D. Ashton: Thank you for that. I was just going to say. There are two new wind turbines being erected at this point in time on the Coquihalla summit.

G. Heyman: Thank you, Paul, for the presentation. I can’t resist a comment on your comment that the climate action plan is a good start. If it is, that start actually doesn’t happen till 2029 or 2030, according to most knowledgable commentators.

I have a question for you. My understanding, or reading, of the integrated resource plan is that if you take all of the existing wind in B.C., including Meikle, which is not yet on line, there’s enough firm power in B.C. today without Site C for four times that amount of wind to firm it up. You’ll correct me if I’m wrong.

I’m wondering what you see as the role of solar or large-scale community solar or solar farms in a mix of renewables and what opportunities that might open up for the manufacturing of both solar panels or, potentially, wind turbines, if there was a greater call and market for renewables in B.C.

P. Kariya: I think there is a tremendous opportunity for us to use the B.C. Hydro storage system to firm and
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shape variable, intermittent renewables. We have that dialogue ongoing right now with B.C. Hydro. They would admit that they reserve some of that capacity for arbitrage and trading for Powerex south of the line.

Our request to them is: “If you could set that aside…. Let’s do some modelling to see…. If you took the whole storage, how much wind, solar and whatnot could you take on?” And they’ve politely said: “Well, that’s kind of not our mandate, Paul.” The government does derive a benefit and a dividend, and my point was that it’s a declining benefit if you look at what’s happening over time, because that utility model is changing.

To your question, George…. There’s lots of opportunity, lots of capacity. I have to say that the marketplace is awash in power, be it in the U.S., whatever, and we have some other challenges there. Let’s frame that strategy now and work on it as we do anything else — trade missions and selling what we do to other countries. Let’s do it with power. If we do that, then we can consider whether there’s opportunity to have manufacturing of solar panels or wind turbines and that.

B.C. is no different than anywhere else. If we market it, and we come forward with options…. Sure, those companies are going to ask for property tax, this and that and whatever. I think other jurisdictions have done that. We’re not advocating one mechanism or another, but let’s look at the whole jobs and investments. If there is a net benefit, a positive benefit for us, then we should be exploring those.

As an MLA for a constituency that’s primarily rural and remote…. Almost half of the population I represent is First Nations. First of all, I appreciate the leadership that a lot of the coastal First Nations have been taking as far as clean energy projects go. I wanted to know if you could just speak a bit about the community economic development opportunities and benefits with distributed power generation.

P. Kariya: Sure. First off, anchored by long-term contracts, the benefits that flow to First Nations, be they directly if they’re the developer or indirectly if they have a portion of the revenue-sharing — the royalty sharing — and if they have an equity state, can be significant.

The example I would use that’s, maybe, current, in Jackie Tegart’s riding, is the Kanaka Bar First Nation. A 50-megawatt hydro project. They own a 50 percent share. They are a fortunate First Nation in that they hold the water licence. So that was their equity into it. Their annual revenues — they don’t hide in any secretive way — are in the neighbourhood of $2 million per year. So for a community of 300, for the 40-year length of the contract, they’re going to receive 2 million bucks a year.

If you talk to Chief Michell there, he’ll say: “You know Paul, we’re inefficient. I’ve got 36 people on my payroll. Do I need 36 people? No. But I can do this, and I’m not hurting the community in terms of our finances, because I can afford to do it.” And this breeds, then, kids who want to go school. It’s a paycheque. It’s training. It’s all of that.

Can that be replicated elsewhere? Sure. On the north coast, I know that the Gitga’at will have a one-megawatt plant. There’s talk with CFN, should LNG happen, about a dose of renewables. Mt. Hayes is on the table. The folks in Haida Gwaii are looking at options. There’s tremendous opportunity from there through down into the central coast where the Kitasoo are upgrading a plant. Wuikinuxv has a little plant going in.

These are transformative because they’re anchored by these contracts and because — credit to the province — we have revenue-sharing. This is one industry that has revenue-sharing from the province with the water licences and that, that they get. This is a tremendous win-win. When I say that I approach this in a non-partisan way, it’s because I think it’s such a winner for British Columbia, and it particularly can help First Nation communities.

C. James (Deputy Chair): We’re running out of time, but thank you, Paul. Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm and information. We appreciate it.

Next we have Inclusion B.C. We’re a little ahead of schedule, so thank you for being here. We appreciate that.

Faith Bodnar, come on up. Annette Delaplace and Yuji Kajiwara. You have ten minutes for the presentation — I know you’ve done this before, Faith — and five minutes for questions.

F. Bodnar: We have brought for you background packages that include both annual reports from this year and the prior year and some background information that we wanted to give you. I’m not going to go into a lot of background around Inclusion B.C. We have a good website and lots of other information. We thought it was more important to talk.

I’d like to introduce you to Annette Delaplace, who is the past president of Inclusion B.C. She’s also currently the president of the Inclusion B.C. Foundation. On my right is Yuji Kajiwara. Yuji is a person who lives on PWD and is served by Spectrum Society for Community Living, one of our member agencies.

The purpose of early intervention is to identify children with special needs as early as possible and to provide them with the supports and services they need to meet their physical growth and their social, emotional and intellectual development needs. Some of the early intervention services provided by government include the infant development program, which serves children from birth to three years of age who are at risk for, or who already
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have, a delay in development; the supported child development program, which provides a range of consulting and support services to children, families and child care centres so that children with extra support needs can participate in fully inclusive child care centres; and early intervention therapies, which include community-based occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech-language pathology and family support services.

I am the parent of a young adult who lives with developmental disabilities and complex health care needs. My daughter was well supported through her childhood, as was our family. I can tell you without hesitation that when the system of supports and services is properly in place for children and families, they are very successful. They provide improved health and learning outcomes and a very good life in community.

I also think what is so important here is that these programs did not only make it possible for our daughter to experience better outcomes, but they also developed the capacity of child care givers and child care centres. It is this building of capacity and knowledge that grows with each child supported that makes inclusion ever more successful.

However, many children across this province are aging out of supports before they are able to receive what they need. The wait-lists are long and growing. As we fail to provide children with the supports they need at a young age, we pay more for the additional services they require as they enter the school system and as they transition into adulthood.

Many children access early intervention services through community living organizations across the province. Working in partnership with community living organizations, government would realize the benefits of planning with a family-centred lens. The experiences of these organizations, grounded in community and built with families’ caring and expertise, are invaluable in understanding how to most effectively and efficiently provide these services.

Children with developmental disabilities, and their families, are vibrant, contributing members of our society, and they deserve the opportunities that timely, well-funded supports provide. When supports and services are timely and well funded, it takes a system from being one that has to react to crisis — and there isn’t anything more costly than crisis — into a system that is sustainable and one that has enormous, lifelong impact for our children and ensures stability for our families. There are real personal and economic benefits, not just for our children and families but also for the province.

Together with our community living partners, we are gathering data from across the province in order to have a better understanding of how wait-lists keep those who need support from accessing early childhood development services. We will be inviting executive members of the ministry and program leads to discuss the results of the data and how we can move forward to ensure that no child or family is left behind in B.C.

F. Bodnar: I’m going to cover a couple of other issues, and then Yuji is going to speak last.

It’s important that in B.C. we address the crisis of families, communities and government with a focus on youth transitioning to CLBC, because this is where the greatest pressure is and where the investment will have the greatest impact — allocating sufficient funds to meet the needs of those who are turning 19 years old and who are eligible for Community Living British Columbia supports.

In 2012, Inclusion B.C. estimated that an investment every year of $45 million to $50 million would address the some 500 to 700 transitioning youth who are turning 19 and eligible for CLBC. That includes the 150 to 200 children in care who are also eligible for CLBC.

CLBC requires a consistent and adequate increase in annualized funding to address what are well-known needs and documented in multiple service plans within Community Living B.C. Inclusion B.C. is in regular contact with families across B.C., and many are on the edge of crisis or being crushed by the pressure of endlessly waiting for services for their adult sons and daughters.

We remember Angie and Robert Robinson of Prince Rupert and their deaths in 2014. This tragedy underscores the ongoing failure of government systems to respond to the needs of families, and that lack of response contributed significantly to their despair and their deaths. Angie and Robert spiralled down into an abyss and a black hole without hope.

Inclusion B.C. is seeing more and more families in crisis and despair. We issued a survey in July of last year, and over a two-week period, 650 families told us what they needed, what they saw as gaps and what they felt the future held for them and their sons and daughters with the developmental disabilities. What they told us was that wait-lists are real, despite having trouble getting those data from government departments, and that they seem endless for everything from respite, community supports, residential services, mental health, behaviour supports and medical supports.

Families whose children are or who have transitioned to CLBC eligibility told us that they are on the brink, just barely holding on, quitting jobs to stay home as their children age out of school with no hope of funding from CLBC — of not being able to sleep, of being under prolonged and severe financial pressure, of being frightened not only about the present but about the future and of systems they do not trust.

While some of these issues cross the lifespan, they are most acute for families of a transitioning youth. This is the time when the burdens of underfunded early childhood programs and school programs pile up, and the
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pressure hits the wall for families. This is when families’ lives unravel.

Not only are their personal costs astronomical and often unrecoverable, but the fiscal costs are high. It costs more money not to support people than it does to serve them. Parents told us that they quit jobs to stay home. Single parents lose their jobs to a life on welfare. Health and social costs increase.

What’s different between July 2015 and now? When we did our survey, a growing number of those families are mobilizing across our province. They are efficient, they are connected, they’re strategic, and they’re coordinated in their efforts. And they are speaking out.

The times we are in, in B.C. is not lost on them. They know they must act, and they are. Inclusion B.C. has been talking to them for more than six months, asking them what we can do and what they need. While I hear their desperation, I also see their resolve, and we will support them as they bring their voices forward.

I’d also like to talk about housing. The community living sector has tremendous assets and experience, as well as land and buildings that have grown in both number and unprecedented value in the past 60 years. Our sector is unique in that it owns homes, offices and other property, and some are already being strategically leveraged for innovative residential projects with public and private investors. In particular, there’s a wonderful one in Semiahmoo House.

C. James (Deputy Chair): You can eat into the question time as well, Faith. I think we want to make sure that Yuji speaks.

F. Bodnar: Thanks, Carole. Okay, I’ll speed up, and I want Yuji to have a chance.

With the $500 million investment in affordable and social housing, Canada is leading in the housing file. It is essential that some of this money be allocated for people with intellectual disabilities. Speaking with a group of executive directors this morning, we are asking that $50 million of the $500 million be set aside to develop inclusive housing for people with developmental disabilities.

Housing is a key component for who receive PWD and those who are eligible for receiving CLBC funding as they transition. We need a coordinated and efficient approach and an alignment of ministries, programs, funding and policies that allow government, community agencies and private business to come together to address B.C.’s most pressing issue, affordable housing.

I’d also like to link to PWD. Inclusion B.C. is recommending that PWD be immediately boosted to $1,500 a month, with a plan to raise them to $1,800 a month plus indexing so that we catch up and don’t end up, in a few years, where we are today. Inclusion B.C. has supported and continues to support the minister and her ministry in shifting the focus and public dialogue towards raising the rates and away from how the bus pass is administered.

We have a landmark opportunity to seize this moment to address income for people with disabilities in B.C. in a way that acknowledges their vulnerability and their fundamental dignity. The promise to be the best jurisdiction in Canada for people with disabilities cannot be met without a serious plan to address PWD. Hundreds of thousands of people have registered their unwillingness to wait any longer, and we’re looking to action now.

It’s my pleasure to turn it over to Yuji, who’s going to talk about his experiences with PWD.

Y. Kajiwara: I would like to talk about the disability rate and transportation bus pass support for persons with disabilities, PWD. As I am a self-advocate and a person with a disability, a PWD client supported by Spectrum Society for Community Living in Vancouver, B.C., I am advocating how critical these supports are for us. Now, with the low rates, we can’t afford the rent, food and are living in places that are not okay.

First, disability rates supports. In order to enable us to contribute and socialize physically and financially in our community, first, we need to be financially secure in our day-to-day living. There are increasing living costs, especially food and medication. Plus, there has been a long-overdue need for a PWD increase. As a result, I have been getting mentally and financially more stressed and anxious, and I believe this is also serious for senior PWDs.

Personally, I have been spending more for my non-prescription medication for my eye and skin. This is also very serious for me, but I am slowly getting better. If we were more financially secure in our day-to-day living, we could afford to participate in community activities and socialize, such as meeting with people and going to movies, which is important for our mental and physical well-being, while keeping ourselves mentally and financially less stressed and anxious.

By helping us to stay active, to get to and from work, to buy enough and better-quality food, this support would be a preventative measure. I sincerely believe and hope this will lead to reducing government and medical expenses and relieving a fast-growing PWD population, which is 22.5 times up from 2001 and currently 100,000.

Plus, I hope the support will serve as supporting and growing our future social innovation sectors.

Next is transportation, bus pass support for PWD. In order to travel around affordably in our community for our day-to-day living, contributing and socializing, and a local getaway trip for our mental and physical well-being, this support is also very important for senior PWDs.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Sorry to have to ask you to wrap up, Yuji. We’re getting right near the end of our time.

Y. Kajiwara: By having affordable transportation, we’ll be able to perform our daily tasks better in our area. Potentially, I hope this will be a beneficial economic investment for our future society and for our future social innovation sectors, where we can be an active community contributor.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much, and thank you to Inclusion B.C. We’ve run out of time for questions, but I want to say how important that it was for all of us, Yuji, on this committee to be able to hear the voice of someone living on PWD and to be able to put that into the record. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate you coming forward and speaking to us tonight. Thank you so much, and thank you, Faith, as well.

Next we have the Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic. We have two guests tonight, Dr. George Eisler and Dr. Don Nixdorf.

Just so you know, we have ten minutes for the presentation and five minutes for questions. If you go a little over, you just take up the question time. But that’s all right, too. That’s up to you.

D. Nixdorf: Thank you, Madam Chair and committee. We appreciate the time to present to you. We’re also mindful that we’re the last presenters, so we won’t try your patience.

It’s a pleasure to see Mr. Heyman and Mr. Yap. I know Mr. Heyman and I have met before.

Getting right on to it. We represent the Pacific Spine Research and Education Foundation and the Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic.

I’d like to thank the Chair. As I mentioned, in my previous role as executive director for the B.C. Chiropractic Association and college, I’ve had the privilege to present previously both to this select standing committee as well as the Select Standing Committee on Health.

My colleague with me today is Mr. George Eisler. His credentials you’ll see in the page titled “Submission.” George is the CEO of the school-founding board, Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic.

We’ve spoken in the past on the government’s efforts and supported primary care, strengthening collaborative practice and broadening the health care system. We’ve advocated for and supported efforts in prevention and further empowerment of health care consumers.

Today, however, we want to be more specific on previous comments we’ve made regarding academic, research and education. We note the B.C. government’s statement, the Ministry of Health 2014, which I won’t read. It’s before you.

Government is creating and supporting many initiatives for employment and the economy. Health care is a cornerstone of all planning, since the most important infrastructure is the health of each British Columbian.

B.C. chiropractic doctors recognize the need to support the B.C. health care system through education and research. To this end, B.C. chiropractors will donate $6 million for the infrastructure and development of the education and research capacity in B.C. at Simon Fraser University. B.C. chiropractors have previously supported research funding, specifically, at the University of British Columbia, in the amounts of $750,000.

The benefits to the province are specific and important — from a new chiropractic institute and broad access to necessary health care, enhanced primary care for a healthier population, new jobs supporting education and research with partners in China and India, and an annual economic input to B.C. estimated at $60 million per year from the operations of the school; in addition, a research network expanding B.C. innovation and technology.

The Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic at SFU Burnaby underwent community consultations in February 2014. Those consultations also resulted in a report and a letter of intent by Simon Fraser University on behalf of the school and its developers to proceed with the use and development on four acres of SFU land immediate beside Discovery Parks, if you’re familiar with that area.

The institute will partner with established interdisciplinary research in 12 universities that have chiropractic research chairs across Canada. The institute, of course, will be not-for-profit and will be the only school in western Canada. My colleague George and I will expand on that a little bit more.

In the environmental scan, we briefly want to touch on some of the criteria we think are important for you to consider and, hopefully, recommend our recommendation at the end of this report.

Government expenditures, as you all well know, are approximately 40 percent going for the Ministry of Health, and that increases annually, with no end in sight, in that escalation, that we’re aware of.

With regards to spine and related conditions, these occupy at least one-third of all the daily utilization of health care under medicare. Cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer’s are more expensive and more visible, but the utilization of one-third of all the resources — just for low back, I would stress, just one part of spine-related conditions — is an important consideration.

The B.C. profession’s initial legislation was 1933, so we’re a core of the mainstream of health care in British Columbia. I would make reference briefly to the Canada Health Act, under recognition for funding under comprehensiveness, noting that the last two lines of this comprehensiveness are often omitted in reports from health care in Canada and elsewhere. I would recommend a reminder to read those last two sentences into these reports.
[ Page 2404 ]

The World Health Organization reported in 2013, as I mentioned, low back conditions alone are among the top ten reasons, worldwide, of chronic pain and disability. The economic impact of spine and related conditions on government and related agencies, including WorkSafe B.C. and ICBC — health costs, worker time loss and employment — is estimated at 30 percent, affecting employer as well as public insurance rates.

Each year over 600,000 British Columbians will see a chiropractic clinic. This is not visits; this is individual people. The demographic is, roughly, between the ages of 25 and 65.

The school will provide needed capacity for health workforce planning and research in B.C. and, as we mentioned, western Canada. And 80 percent of students currently have to go to the United States for education, so you can imagine the economic and intellectual capacity that we’re missing out on here.

Work B.C., one of the government websites, has an employment outlook forecast. From 2015 to 2025, Work B.C. estimates 440 positions being required from chiropractic doctors in B.C. alone.

PAIC, as we call it — the Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic — is estimated to graduate 45 doctors a year for British Columbia. Our resource planning meets the graduating and entry-to-practise requirements of B.C. and the western provinces, avoiding a surplus of practitioners and the issues that may arise from that. PAIC will provide new economic growth, as we’ve said — estimated at 100 new jobs in Burnaby, where the school would be — and as I mentioned previously, an average annual economic input to the province of $60 million.

Operating costs will be tuition-based. We will not be funded by the Ministry of Education or Advanced Education or SFU budget. This will be built into our budget and planning, going forward, as self-sustaining by the end of the third year.

I won’t go into too much detail, but the background, as I’ve already mentioned, is supported by studies from the World Health Organization on the magnitude of health problems that affect B.C., Canada and the rest of the world.

It should also be noted that, as I said before, when we’re talking about these common spine problems, they affect the quality of life, a major cost experienced in every family. This is well documented in primary care, affecting medicare and B.C. government agencies, as I mentioned, including WorkSafe B.C. and ICBC.

One of our initiatives, going forward, is to be aware of the interests of the province of B.C. and the federal government in developing relations and education and research with China and India. So I’ll ask my colleague Dr. Eisler just to briefly comment on one of our initiatives.

G. Eisler: International education will be a very significant component of this initiative. India and China are examples. We are looking to work with the Canada Global Culture and Education Association, as an example of an institution that has direct relationships with Chinese universities who are looking to partner with us and other existing research facilities on spine health and chiropractic in Canada with respect to establishing research relationships that could and will also relate to education activities and expansion of related education here as well as in China.

One important aspect is that all international schools — and they’re all over the world — graduating chiropractors have to meet very stringent accreditation requirements. Graduates then can practise anywhere in the world. That’s very unique to this profession.

I come into this project this past 16 years as dean of health sciences at BCIT. I’m not a chiropractor. I come out of educational administration. I was a chair, a vice-chair of the VGH board. So I’ve dealt with many human resource planning initiatives in the province and, certainly through this project, have become aware how many people love their chiropractors — everyone we meet. There are 600-some people annually who love their chiropractors. Every sports team, every high-performance athlete, every professional team has chiropractors on staff.

We don’t train these people. They have to go to the States for training. There are initiatives, such as one that’s being planned not by us but by another organization, for high-performance training, athletic activity, in the lower Fraser Valley, Langley area, and so on. We will be collaborating with those kinds of folks on research, on sports athletics, anything related to spine health. So partnerships as well as international education will be a very significant part of this.

D. Nixdorf: The reference to China. We are working with an organization in developing an MOU with the Canada Global Culture and Education Association, which has an MOU with the city of Zhongshan in the province of Guangdong, China, and we’ll be advancing these MOU discussions in more detail as well.

Mindful of the two minutes that we have left, I’ll just briefly say that we have numerous studies which help this committee and government in terms of delivering health care. We see these in hospital-based studies in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, and I was a participant in B.C.’s Vancouver General Hospital program in 2007 for this purpose as well.

Health provider resources and training — I’ll let you read through that in more detail. At the end of our brief, there’s a separate tab. This tab gives you more detailed information, including support that we note from the Rick Hansen Institute and other community leaders that recognize the role of health care and how this initiative can expand health care for British Columbians.

In the last moment that I have left, I’d like to address Mr. Heyman’s question to me two years ago, which spe-
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cifically was: “Thank you, Don. How much money are you asking for?”

Well, Mr. Heyman, I’m pleased to say I have an answer today. I respectfully and politely draw your attention to the last page before the tab, and this is where the hard part comes. As I said, B.C. chiropractors are prepared to donate $6 million to the province’s well-being for infrastructure, technology, health and education. In planning this process forward, we require help with the start-up and the initial construction. The operating costs and final construction of $50 million is in our budget, and the banks have indicated they will mortgage that upon completion.

The start-up initiative that we are funding now is a total of $30 million, and as I’ve mentioned, B.C. chiropractors will donate to the province and British Columbians $6 million for this initiative. So our ask to this committee is a recommendation to government to fund $24 million, which does not have to be, obviously, delivered today but can be budgeted in whatever manner you choose. That money would then be advanced for technology, innovation, research and education.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Great. Thank you so much. We have a couple of minutes for questions.

G. Heyman: Just a very, very quick question. You said the $24 million could be budgeted any way we wish. Over what time frame would it need to be budgeted in order to achieve the result?

D. Nixdorf: I think we can easily negotiate three to four years, as long as government indicated there was a commitment to whatever time period government felt comfortable — obviously, the financing and funding of this in addition to our moneys. As long as people know the money is secure and there, they will work with the time frame that is most applicable for yourselves.

S. Gibson: Thank you for your presentation — very interesting. I read through all of the materials. Dr. Robinson was here earlier, representing the B.C. Chiropractic Association. It was his view that he wanted to have chiropractors more involved in the general medical community in our province. He made some interesting cases showing that the greater involvement of chiropractic folks like yourself would save the province money.

It seems like there’s a shortage of doctors in our province. I think we acknowledge that — general practitioners. But there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of chiropractors, based on his presentation. How does this tie in with this proposal, in light of the fact that there seems to be, at this point, sufficient chiropractors? That’s my question.

D. Nixdorf: Sure. That’s a great question. Over the years, I’ve had to address that as executive director up until 2013. The challenge has two parts. There are two parts to this.

As you mentioned, there’s a shortage of physicians to treat British Columbians. But if you recall in the report that we made, it has been consistently shown in reports to the Select Standing Committees on Health and Finance, as well as caucus for NDP and the current government, that one-third of all the visits to physicians, chiros and others — one-third of all the daily billable medical visits — are for low-back pain. If you consider public awareness of the utilization of health resources, we will not have sufficient chiropractors, No. 1.

Number 2, the workplace report — the Work B.C. report — forecast that we will need an additional 440 doctors over the next ten years — chiropractors. These chiropractic doctors will all have to go to the United States for education. We have one school in Toronto. We have one in Trois-Rivières, which primarily serves Quebec.

So the issue of utilization is not that we have too many chiropractors or too few physicians. What we have is a public that is not fully aware of the resources available to them for health and recovery.

C. James (Deputy Chair): We’ve just got a minute, so I’ll just get the next two questions, and maybe you can respond in the end.

D. Nixdorf: That’s right. With this kind of commitment, then the agreements can be entered into with Simon Fraser. We will fulfil our obligations, and the bulldozers will roll up the hill beside the Discovery Parks.

D. Nixdorf: The construction on top of this. We will be financed and funded through the construction consortium for the $50 million plus. George has done a wonderful job on our business model. We’ve been to three banks. Every one of them wants to lend us money, as soon as there’s some evidence of a building, security and full operating revenue.
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D. Ashton: That sounds like a bank. Get it up, standing, and then we’ll lend you money for it.

D. Nixdorf: Yeah. Well, that’s why we put up the first $6 million. We need to know that we have to show sincerity and capacity.

G. Eisler: One addendum. Our target is not to create more chiropractors, but our target are the students that are currently going to the States. And 80 percent of all new chiropractors who come into the province have been trained in the United States because the one school in Toronto can’t handle the volume. That’s our primary target market.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Great. Thank you so much, doctors, for your presentation. We very much appreciate it.

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) B.C. Pulp and Paper Coalition	Robert Lindstrom
	Andreas Kammenos
2) B.C. Wildlife Federation; Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia	Al Martin
	Mark Angelo
3) Rick Hansen Institute	Bill Barrable
	Penny Clarke-Richardson
4) BC Chiropractic Association	Dr. Jay Robinson
	Liza Kallstrom
5) Board of Education, School District No. 43 (Coquitlam)	Kerri Palmer Isaak
6) Langara College	Dr. Ian Humphreys
	Viktor Sokha
7) Alliance for Arts and Culture	Brenda Leadlay
8) British Columbia Teachers’ Federation	Glen Hansman
	Dr. Sherri Brown
9) Retail Council of Canada	Greg Wilson

10) Alliance of BC Students	Alex McGowan
11) Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC	Terri Van Steinburg
12) Board of Education, School District No. 39 (Vancouver)	Mike Lombardi
13) Clean Energy BC	Paul Kariya
14) Inclusion BC	Faith Bodnar
	Annette Delaplace
	Yuji Kajiwara
15) Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic	Dr. Don Nixdorf
	Dr. George Eisler

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES