Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 110 — Tuesday, October 11, 2016 (HTML)

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

2. Due to the initial absence of the Chair, opening remarks by Carole James, MLA, Deputy Chair.

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	2725
C. Newman
H. Lindsay
S. Arnett
M. Bonkowski
C. Lewis
C. Edge
M. Collins
D. Baxter
J. Cassels
A. Cahoon
L. Skinner
J. Leech
M. Whitemarsh
M. Nicholson
A. Davis
L. Trotter
A. Morrison
S. Hollingsworth
B. Smith
M. McLoughlin
K. McKeen
J. Tupper
B. Till
G. Avrahami
S. Berringer
A. Sutherland
M. Lee
P. Shaw
T. Armstrong
S. Charbonneau
A. Martin
S. Corbeil
E. Stensholt
W. Pattenden
M. Lukan
A. Hasham
C. Holt
E. Elliot
J. Hrechka Fee
J. Blake
P. Wood
G. Sing
G. Oates
C. Burger
R. Bettauer
S. Lund

C. James (Deputy Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Carole James. I’m the MLA for Victoria–Beacon Hill, and I’m the Deputy Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

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

We’re holding a number of public hearings in communities around the province, and British Columbians can participate via teleconference, video conference or Skype. There are also 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, www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/finance.

We’re inviting all British Columbians to contribute to this important process. For those of you who are in attendance today, we thank you for taking the time to participate. All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as we prepare our final report to the Legislative Assembly. Just a reminder for anyone who is listening, if you’re interested in submitting something, it has to be in by midnight, Friday, October 14.

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak and then will be followed by five minutes of questions from the committee.

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

I’d now like to ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves. I’ll start with Robin.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Also assisting our committee today are Susan Sourial, Lisa Hill and Stephanie Raymond from the Parliamentary Committees Office, and Alexandrea Hursey and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard are here to record the proceedings.

With that, I’d like to move to our first presenters and ask the Professional Arts Alliance of Greater Victoria — Heather Lindsay and Carey Newman — to please come on up.

Welcome. As you heard, ten minutes for the presentation — I’ll just give you a wave when you are getting close to your ten minutes — and then up to five minutes for questions. I’ll turn it over to you.

C. Newman: Good morning. Thank you for having us. I’d like to start by acknowledging that we stand on the traditional unceded territories of the Coast Salish people and thank the Lekwungen Nation for allowing us onto their ancestral homeland. My name is Carey Newman. My traditional name is Ha-yalth-kin-geme. On my grandfather’s side, I am Kwakwaka’wakw from the Kukwakum, Gyeksem and Wa’welibayi clans of Fort Rupert, here on Vancouver Island.

My grandmother was Salish from Cheam of the Stó:lō Nation along the upper Fraser Valley. I am also, through my mother, varied percentages of English, Irish and Scottish. I’m an artist, a master carver and a board member of Pacific Opera and Victoria Foundation. I believe in the importance of giving and the power of art.

H. Lindsay: Good morning, everyone. It’s nice to see you again. Thank you, Carole. As our MLA in Victoria, thank you for all your ongoing support in arts and culture.

I’d like to thank the committee for the opportunity to make this presentation to you this morning. My name is Heather Lindsay. I am vice-chair of the board directors of the Professional Arts Alliance of Greater Victoria. ProArt represents 20 professional arts organizations in Victoria and was formed to advance the important role the arts play in the life of our community and to advocate for public sector support.

I’m also the executive director of Intrepid Theatre Company — producers of three major theatre festivals here in Victoria, presenters of a series of international productions, developers of numerous emerging and young artist outreach programs and the creators and
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operators of two of Victoria’s very much-needed mid-size performance venues.

There are four of us on staff. We work tirelessly, passionately. I feel very blessed to be working in the arts for over 15 years at this point. I was born and raised in British Columbia, and I’ve worked with numerous performing art companies in Vancouver, the Okanagan and now Victoria, large and small, as well as across the country. I said I feel very lucky, but I feel very honoured to be working in the arts. It’s something that…. A lot of my colleagues still strive as emerging artists. As I stand here as a 40-year-old woman in front of you, being considered an emerging artist is still something that a lot of my colleagues are facing every day in trying to become professional artists.

The arts are essential to society. We believe strongly in the positive social and economic contributions that the arts make to our society and that funding for the arts is one of the best investments that the province of British Columbia can make. As of 2014, 3.5 percent of all jobs in British Columbia were in culture, while arts and culture industries represented 3 percent of the total provincial economy.

In addition to creating and attracting jobs, investment in the arts drives economic growth. In greater Victoria, for example, the economic impact of one dollar of public investment in arts and culture creates $33 of economic impact, based on a 2012 study. The B.C. creative economy strategy further supports the contribution that creative activity makes to attracting talent and visitors to British Columbia.

We acknowledge your continued budget recommendations to the Legislative Assembly that relate to our continued priorities. We thank you for taking this stand and having similar goals as we do. Yet despite these recommendations year after year and the goals of the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development, as well as a budget surplus, the government did not see fit to increase these budgets.

ProArt sits in front of you today with our recommendations for the 2017-18 budget. The top B.C. government priorities in 2015-16 were to continue diversifying the economy. So with that, we are asking the B.C. government to show a real investment in British Columbia’s creative economy. We are asking the B.C. government to double the investment in the B.C. Arts Council.

With the number of artists and arts organizations in B.C. growing steadily and rapidly, British Columbia currently has more artists per capita than any other province. We need now, more than ever, to invest in these artists and arts and culture organizations in our province that have specifically designed programs for a wide range of people and perspectives — including youth, indigenous peoples and economic, social and cultural diversity.

Our second recommendation: restore gaming grant levels to the 2008 levels, provide incremental increases as gaming revenue increases, and engage in stable, multi-year funding following the suit of the B.C. Arts Council’s implementation of multi-year funding. Speaking personally from a mid-size company, this really is wonderful in impacting our sustainability and forward thinking of the years ahead of us.

I sit in front of you today to express that in order to support a critical component of B.C.’s growing economy and to maintain affordable access for activities in our communities across the province, the government’s support is a cornerstone of stability and accessibility for arts and culture. We need to see this increase in the sector now.

C. Newman: There’s the business case for art, and then there’s the art case for art, and that’s what I’m going to talk about now.

In our daily existence, on the walls of our homes, in public spaces, in theatres and as the sound track of our lives, art is omnipresent. It commemorates our loved ones, celebrates our heroes, challenges our minds and inspires us to action. It is the innocence of a child at their first recital and the grace of a fading virtuoso taking their final curtain. It is beauty and despair, inertia and initiative, commentary and oblivion. It is everything and nothing to anyone at any time. Art is vital to our lives, and whether we acknowledge it or not, it forms a part of every single person in this room.

My first experience with art bringing community together came as the carver of the BC150 North American Indigenous Games spirit pole in 2008. That summer, 10,499 people from over 50 communities in British Columbia helped me carve a totem. From classes of school children to a woman in Fort Nelson on her 100th birthday, they stood in line, rain or shine, to take part in something larger than themselves. That experience awoke a sense of purpose and community that I previously hadn’t known, and once I felt that connection, it changed me as a person and altered my pathway as an artist.

More recently, in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for commemoration initiatives, I came up with a project called the Witness Blanket. Now complete, it is made out of over 800 items collected from residential schools, churches, government buildings and cultural structures from across Canada. It stands as a national monument to recognize the atrocities of the Indian residential school era, honour the children who didn’t come home and symbolize ongoing reconciliation.

The Witness Blanket takes hundreds of everyday objects that communicate at an instinctual level and makes residential schools more tangible by their presence. The idea was that at least one of these pieces would connect
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with each of us through our own memories and our own experience and, with that simple feat, form something undeniable: a heartbeat that gently and resolutely commands our attention, pushing us toward change.

Now 2½ years into a national tour, the Witness Blanket has taken on a life of its own. This is evident in the growing collection of pieces and traditional medicine left at each stop, in the conversations it starts and by the wide cross-section of people who take the time to see it. I think it is worth noting that of the $20 million that were set aside for the truth and reconciliation commemoration initiative, this and Project of Heart were the only art-based national projects. They are also the two projects that reach the largest number of people.

Neither the spirit pole nor the Witness Blanket are the kinds of artwork that can happen by inspiration alone. Aside from an enormous amount of community participation, both required a good deal of financial backing and political will. They also achieved a legacy, reach and impact that far exceed that monetary investment. Objectively, they are nothing more or less than a 20-foot totem and a collection of assorted items and individual stories. But through a process that brought people together, both became larger than the sum of their parts. That is the power and intangibility of arts investment, and it’s how art justifies itself.

I don’t have enough weeks or years to accomplish everything that I want. Sometimes that fills me with an overwhelming sense of the finite nature of life. Faced with this reality, my days are filled with what matters most: spending time with my wife and daughter and following my creative vision; racing against time, trying to make as much art as I can before I die; trying to leave this world incrementally better than the one I was born into.

In coming here today, I was looking for a way to share that sense of urgency with each of you, to offer a glimpse of the passion that motivates me, to leave an imprint on your soul. Eventually, I realized that what I was looking for was the kind of experience that only art itself can offer.

So I leave you with this thought: as you consider our recommendations to double the B.C. Arts Council budget and restore gaming funds to 2008 levels, take a moment or three to intentionally experience art. You don’t have to look far. Listen to your favourite music. Take in a performance. Take in an exhibit. Share it with family and friends. And while it’s still fresh and reverberates through your being, consider the exponential potential of additional investment.

With the diverse and robust arts infrastructure and organizations that we have in this province, the impact of each additional dollar is the direct creation of more art in more communities across B.C.

In a world overloaded with data, the power of art is found in the moments when it grasps our heart or activates our mind, when it is heard above the clamour or draws focus amid the blur. When it finds its way inside, it brings us closer together. Amongst all of the other important work and difficult decisions that we face today, that matters more than ever. Gilakas’la. Hi sa’ ap ca. Thank you all.

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

G. Heyman: I want to thank you both for so elegantly covering the economic and cultural…. In the interests of disclosure, I should say that I am coming to the end of a four-year term on the board of a theatre company, and a number of family members have spent their life work in the arts, so I wouldn’t say I come to this question without some internal bias.

I have had far too many conversations with artists, including family members, who tug at their hair wondering why governments and others think that contributions to the arts are a luxury as opposed to supporting a vibrant part of the economy that just happens to enrich us culturally.

My question is: how did you arrive at the figure of doubling — I think you said — the B.C. Arts Council budget? Is that because you thought that was the most you could ask for, or do you see that as the adequate amount to get you at least partway to where you think funding should be?

H. Lindsay: Yes, I think it is about…. Our colleagues the Alliance for Arts and Culture in Vancouver and other member-driven, pro-art societies have all discussed what our recommendations are so we stand in solidarity with each other and make these recommendations.

We are looking at the growth of the artists per capita in British Columbia being the largest in Canada currently. Within that growth…. That is about looking at the growth of artists in Canada right now in relationship to that growth in the budget. It is in relationship to the artists-per-capita growth equalling the growth that we need to see from the B.C. Arts Council. So doubling the investment in the B.C. Arts Council is a great start to catch up with where, already, the absolute spike of artists and work is happening in British Columbia right now.

S. Gibson: I just want to affirm you and thank you very much. My daughter just published her second art book, so I’m very proud of that. I think art is something that, as you say, we do take for granted, but it’s often the foundation of modern civilization that flourishes and cares for each other. I want to affirm what you’re doing. However it’s manifest — in drama or dance or carving or whatever — it’s an important part of our legacy that we leave be-
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hind. You know that the committee has been supportive, so we’ll continue to be that way.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, both of you, for your presentation, and thank you for sharing your gifts with all of us. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing both your art in action. I really appreciate it.

Next we have the Nanaimo Youth Services Association — Chris Lewis, Steven Arnett and Mike Bonkowski.

Come on up. As you’ve heard, ten minutes for the presentation and five minutes for questions. With that, I’ll turn it over to you. Welcome.

S. Arnett: Thank you, Chair. My name is Steve Arnett. I’m the CEO of Nanaimo Youth Services Association. I do want to acknowledge Carey.

We still have the shavings from the carving that we did on the pole — my wife and I — when you brought it to our community. Hychka siem.

We’re here today to ask a question, and we hope with the information we give you that it will lead to some speculation on the answer. Today Nanaimo Youth Services comes to you to talk about some young people in all of our communities across the province and the nation as a whole. We ask this question: is B.C.’s current policy approach to the province’s vulnerable, unemployed youth, as a specialized population, appropriately aligned with the Premier and her ministers’ latest statements on where the provincial and national economy is headed? After we’re finished, we hope that some of that answer will come to you.

We will start telling you a little bit about who we are, with Mike Bonkowski, our president.

M. Bonkowski: Good morning. I’m board chair for Nanaimo Youth Services Association. We are a registered charitable organization.

We provide a comprehensive, one-stop suite of community-based, free, core services for youth in the Nanaimo area, since 1969. Our operations focus on measurable service efficiency and effectiveness so that all vulnerable youth can be included and contribute to and benefit from living and working in our communities.

Nanaimo Youth Services Association’s mission is to provide opportunities for youth to gain knowledge, life and employment skills, and to allow them to reach their full potential as productive citizens in their community.

As a youth-serving organization, we subscribe to the fundamental belief that the best income security in a market-based economy is a meaningful job. That is the single best social program that society can offer to at-risk youth and young adults in order to achieve a bright and positive future.

Nanaimo Youth Services Association provides services in active collaboration with all three levels of government; publicly-funded institutions; chambers of commerce; district labour councils; businesses; professional groups; other community-based, not-for-profit organizations; service clubs, such as Rotary and Altrusa; and corporate donor bodies, such as Home Depot and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

S. Arnett: Today we’ve come to talk to you about vulnerable youth who must remain, in our mind, a public policy priority in addressing the growing digital divide in Canadian society, which is dividing those who have from those who don’t. It is one that we will pay a price for, in the next decade or two, in terms of our gross national product, our productivity and, quite frankly, a waste of the potential of many young people today.

So who are we talking about? We’ve given you a 25-page document. I don’t expect you to read it all. I’ll do the highlights.

From page 8 through to page 13 — and, most particularly, on page 11 — you will see the graphs of 286 young people that went through one of the employment programs that NYSA has offered over the last six years — and we offer quite a number.

It is based on the original BladeRunners program that was brought in, in 1998, by the government, and then successive governments have revised it some and brought it forward. It was based on an investment in young people.

The majority of young people who come through Nanaimo Youth Services is a population of disadvantaged youth who haven’t completed high school. In these days and times, that is really — after a decade of being out of high school — a huge price to pay.

A number of these young people have never been in the labour market. They are out of the labour market on a long-term basis, or they’re unable to successfully access the labour market.

They often are experiencing homelessness or close to. There are 40,000 young people between 13 and 19 in this country homeless today.

They’re deemed to be at risk of homelessness. They’re involved in child welfare or the criminal justice system. They’re in the throes, unfortunately, of active drug addiction. This latest killer — we’ve lost two children in the last two years. And when I say children, they’re 17, 18, 19 — they’re still children. On many occasions, they’re experiencing mental health….

Since 2000 we’ve documented that 60 percent of kids come from the general population, and 40 percent come from a variety of the aboriginal nations. In 2013, 72.3 percent of all students and 56 percent of aboriginal students in the Nanaimo-Ladysmith school district completed their high school diploma. That’s out of the Nanaimo’s Vital Signs report. That means 27.7 percent of youth did not complete.

Those are the young people that we have been dealing with for many, many years, and we’ve documented over
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the past couple years. On page 11 through to page 13, you will see those 286 kids that came from that population — what their demographics look like, what the issues are that they face and what’s happened to them going through a very traditional kind of upskilling that we do to make up for the grade 12 that they don’t have.

Those stats show that 97 seem to have passed through grade 12. In fact, the majority of them got a grade 12 leaving certificate. They did not do the Dogwood.

When I showed Ralph Nilson some of the stats and the education outcomes of the province, he was amazed that a significant portion hadn’t written the math 30 or English 30 exam.

As we go through a change in society…. On page 15, we have Premier Clark — who, I think, along with the opposition and her ministers, knows that our economy is changing — saying that: “Every kindergarten to grade 12 student will have the opportunity to learn the basics of coding.” Minister Bond says: “The province plans to focus on clean-tech, advanced manufacturing and digital media to provide high-paying jobs for young people.” Minister Bernier says that we’ll bring “a new core skill into schools — coding.”

These plans focus — if I may be so bold to say — generally on the solid middle class and upwardly mobile. The majority of these children are in stable home situations. They attend school regularly. And they stay enrolled until completion of some level of post-secondary education, thankfully. They’re much more fortunate than the group that we’re talking about and who we’ve come to advocate for.

I’ll just let Chris Lewis, from his IT background, address you for a quick minute. Then I’ll bring my comments to a close.

C. Lewis: Good morning. I’ve worked at NYSA for 16 years now. From the day I started to today, our technology has advanced exponentially — to the point where we can offer products that we couldn’t offer before. The client base that we have coming in have never used some of the information systems that we have available to them. So they need a way to learn that information.

My own son, who is in grade 5, has been using computers for three years in schools, now, and probably next year will start to code. In the summertime he was in a course learning how to code. We have kids coming in with technology that they use, but they don’t understand how it works. Through some of the courses that we offer, we try to open that door to see if it’s something that they would be interested in to help them move on to something more that they can aspire towards.

S. Arnett: If you go through pages 20 to 25, which is the evidence of sub-regional and provincial market labour demand for youth with digital literacy to get them across that digital divide. In the mid-Island — Nanaimo and region — the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation, in 2014, stated that 350-plus businesses driving our technology industry in that region created $204 million in revenue and had a total impact of nearly 2,800 jobs.

Along with that is the study that came out, from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, that pointed out that 70 percent of small and medium businesses in Canada don’t have a website. Yet they’re responsible for 31 percent of B.C.’s GDP, 33 percent of the wages paid to workers in the province, 55 percent of the jobs in the province, and of the nine top small business sectors growing in B.C., it’s food services, tourism, high-tech and secondary manufacturing. That’s our small business profile 2014.

On pages 21 and 22, I cut out an article for you where small business was talking about…. They know that they need to get into digital literacy themselves, but they don’t know how.

This young group of people that we’ve come to talk to you about, who are out of school and in ten years are going to be out of the economy…. If we do not get some coding to them — the way that we’re intending to for children who are more fortunate — and in a hands-on, kinesthetic learning, experiential education way, we’re going to lose a lot of productivity and contribution.

We can upskill the retail sector by adding some kind of training to them that gives them industry-accepted certifications — WHMIS, FoodSafe, a number of other things — and we add a three- to six-month coding training for them. What it will take is a program somewhat like the one that the interministry group has done under Minister Stilwell for single parents, which is not penalizing you for being a single parent but is actually trying to help you. I know that you, Carole, and other people fed into that idea as well.

Under the evidence that we have gathered, in terms of four studies we’ve done with McCreary and the B.C. centre for employment excellence and also working with the Home Depot homelessness foundation, it’s become clear that the thing that needs to happen for these young people is that these young people need to be brought into the economy in a way that will leverage them as future citizens.

What I want to say to you is that if we could provide a program that had longer-term digital literacy investment as a strategy, young people that we serve, who haven’t finished high school, could receive up to six to 12 months of community-based and -funded training for in-demand small business retail customer service and social media marketing jobs through coding and enterprise training.

We could give them a training period where they would receive a modest but sufficient weekly living stipend — because then you don’t have to be selling drugs or doing other things while you’re trying desperately to
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survive. In some cases, we might support with child care, because most of these are males, and unfortunately, they don’t generally take responsibility for their children at that age.

We would provide ongoing employment maintenance support, on an as-needed basis, that would offer them a meaningful route to full citizenship, inclusion in the social and economic life of our communities and would help create wealth. In the end, we won’t get them all through, but we will get a large portion of them across the digital divide that is growing every day, folks.

R. Austin: Thanks very much for your presentation. Of course, I took note of Chris’s comment about people who use technology but haven’t the faintest idea how it works. I would suggest that you’re speaking to that kind of clientele right here.

My question is…. You seem to have picked up a specific thing — coding. In your experience, is this something that kids who are vulnerable and may have dropped out of school, etc…? Is there a natural affinity for them to pick this? Like, why did you pick coding? Out of all the things that you want to teach kids to learn, to go and have a better life for themselves, how come coding?

S. Arnett: Well, 2½ years ago I wrote a paper on the revolution in coding that will come to children. It was internal to our sector, so to speak. We did two beta tests with young people. We have designed our BladeRunners curriculum and other employment programs on the basis that the majority of these children…. It’s not that they’re not bright, but they’re not traditional academic learners. They’re hands-on, experiential, kinesthetic learners.

So coding. They were growing up in that they’re surrounded by technology, but they don’t necessarily understand it — how it works. You need to learn how to use it, understand it, and then you can create. A lot of that can even be in the arts community, in terms of our former presentation.

We picked coding because it is something that is creative, and it’s interesting to these young people. Much of the coding training in the beginning is game-based, so it grabs them that way. We were one of the first investors in the crowdfunding for Kano computers. We started a course to beta-test to help kids build the computer — so learn how to build the hardware — and then take them through a number of software programs that we accessed through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other places, and we taught them coding.

We didn’t have long enough to teach them to really apply it, to go in and use social media in the small businesses — enterprising young individuals. But we saw that there’s a natural affinity for them. If you think about it, if we’re going to bring a generation of kids up from kindergarten, grade 1, to learn coding, by the time they’re in grades 5 or 6, we’re going to be dinosaurs. But these kids, and the kids this year and the year after and the year after that, who don’t graduate with at least a grade 12 education, after ten years will be pushed out of the economy. Why? Because they don’t know how to use technology, they don’t understand it, and they certainly couldn’t create with it.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you so much, gentlemen, for your presentation. Most importantly, thank you for your work. I think many of us know well the BladeRunners program that really started with construction and contracting. It’s wonderful to see that it’s taking shape around employment for today’s reality as well. We really appreciate your presentation.

S. Arnett: I’ll just leave you with…. In the back, the president of Inuktun and other people have given comments about this to support our position.

Welcome. As you heard, Casey, ten minutes for the presentation and up to five minutes for questions. I’ll turn it over to you. Thanks for coming.

C. Edge: First, I want to thank the Chair and committee members for this opportunity. My name is Casey Edge. I’m the executive director of VRBA, representing 100 builders in the capital region constructing the majority of new single-family homes.

We run a column on housing issues every Wednesday in the Times Colonist and on line at vrba.ca. Some of these columns are available with my presentation today, being distributed. My presentation covers all three questions posed in the pre-budget consultation paper.

The first question on housing affordability requires an understanding of the market. Our high housing costs are due to a lack of housing supply linked to a layering of regulations at all government levels. Building codes, land use restrictions, permit fees and processes, and title lending rules all contribute to a limited supply and higher prices.

Some regulation is necessary for consumer protection, but many regulations are driven by policies offering little or no benefit to consumers. An obvious example is the property transfer tax, charged whenever land is transferred. A developer buys land from an owner and pays the tax. The land is subdivided, a builder buys a lot, and the tax is paid again. The builder sells the home to a purchaser, and the tax is paid a third time. Three taxes are
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embedded in the price of one new home. Property transfer tax is a tax on tax, which is neither transparent nor fair. It drives up housing costs and limits supply.

Another example is development cost charges, where a local municipality is proposing raising fees by 130 to 157 percent. DCCs for a single-family home will jump from $4,000 to $9,000. These costs are driven by government’s demand for revenue.

To achieve affordability, contractors must counter these charges by building ever-smaller homes on smaller lots. But that’s a limited opportunity, since among the 13 municipalities in the CRD, only a few accept small lots.

One of these is Langford, which also, not surprisingly, accommodates the vast majority of the region’s population growth, about 30 percent — or they’ve increased theirs by 30 percent. Others have increased theirs by 1 or 2 percent, and some actually have declining populations. In addition, they have efficient development processes to keep homes affordable. Most other communities oppose more density and tend to discourage development. Some have not approved a multi-family project in years and have declining populations, eroding their ability to pay for infrastructure and services.

Housing affordability can be greatly assisted by a provincial requirement, or at least incentives, for small-lot rezonings, efficient and affordable application processes and a mandatory best-practices standard for community association land use committees, also known as CALUCs. This would increase their accountability and reduce bias against development. Victoria has a best-practices policy in place, but there are no tools for enforcement.

B.C.’s proposed stretch code is another example of a regulation that erodes affordability and offers little benefit to consumers. The most affordable homes for young families in our region are very energy efficient and located on small lots in Langford. They are between 1,100 and 1,500 square feet with three bedrooms and sell for as low as $355,000, including GST. That price is the upper qualifying limit for the average family in our region.

Our Built Green contractors are building these affordable EnerGuide homes that have only 3.5 air changes per hour. I’m going to talk about air changes here, because it’s really important to my presentation. The upper tiers of the stretch code, passive and net-zero homes, will add at least $40,000 and as much as $100,000 to achieve the goal of reducing air changes to 1.5. That’s a saving of two air changes per hour. Of course, most homes are purchased with a mortgage, so add $27,000 in interest over 25 years to the initial $40,000 investment, and that’s a total of $67,000. That’s what comes out of the consumer’s pocket.

So the real cost of the stretch code’s upper tiers on a mortgage is at least $67,000 to reduce air changes by two in an already energy-efficient and affordable new home. Some may say the additional cost is recaptured by energy savings. Well, let’s look at that.

Today’s affordable Built Green home costs about $800 to $1,000 annually to heat. Even if a stretch code home is zero to heat, at a cost of $67,000, it will take the purchaser 67 years to recoup their investment. That’s assuming the average family hasn’t been knocked out of the market, unable to qualify due to the additional $40,000 initial price. This is in addition to the new burden of Ottawa’s mortgage rules, expected to reduce affordability by a whopping 18 percent as of October 17.

The stretch code is only one example of layering new regulations on small affordable homes. UBCM passed a resolution last week asking for a third-party cost-benefit analysis of new building code regulations on homes under 2,000 square feet. We would take it a step further. Aside from exceptional circumstances involving health and safety, we suggest a moratorium on all new regulations, including the stretch code, for these affordable homes, which are already energy efficient, safe and healthy.

Let’s talk about homes that are not energy efficient, safe and healthy — older homes, the vast majority of our housing stock. The real gains in energy efficiency and reductions to greenhouse gases are made by retrofitting existing stock, where air changes may range from ten to 40.

CMHC studies have shown that $40,000 invested in a retrofit can reduce the air changes from 25 to 3.5, a saving of 22 air changes per hour. Even an investment of $10,000 can significantly improve energy efficiency in an older home, yet it seems we are inclined to have consumers spend an additional $40,000 to save two air changes per hour in a new home. Neither significant greenhouse gas reduction nor housing affordability is accomplished, so we ask: what are the goals?

While some may be concerned about not capturing the remaining two or three air changes in new housing, the reality is that the industry is moving forward towards Passive House and net-zero standards anyway. Our progress is grounded in affordability, market acceptance and proven practice. Five years ago EnerGuide 80 homes, the homes we’re building now, were not affordable, but they are today due to advances in materials and construction practices.

This will continue, and we may even achieve the government’s goal of net-zero homes by 2030. But this should be accomplished together, through provincewide standards based on periodic reviews establishing affordability and proven practice, not haphazardly, municipality by municipality, as proposed by the stretch code.

The stretch code actually undermines the purpose of a standard, which establishes accepted practices supported by education and training. In addition, the stretch code is being submitted for the minister’s approval with no cost-benefit analysis, in a province where the average cost of a home is $100,000 more than the national average.
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That brings us to the consult papers — expanded choice and priorities. A home-renovation tax credit, which was also passed as a UBCM resolution last week, accomplishes many goals. It offers real gains in energy efficiency and encourages homeowners to hire professionals to manage asbestos mitigation for renovations. Most are aware of the dangers of asbestos, yet B.C. has safety regulations only for contractors, through WorkSafe B.C. There are no regulations protecting the health of homeowners and their families doing their own renovations.

A renovation tax credit would also encourage homeowners to get receipts, discouraging illegal contractors and the underground economy. It creates skilled jobs and apprenticeships in every municipality across British Columbia.

The third question in the consultation paper is job creation. A moratorium on regulations like the stretch code for affordable homes will increase supply, slow rising prices and create skilled jobs throughout B.C., important for millennials looking to get traction in our economy.

A tax credit, in addition, will assist climate leadership, add jobs for every community. As an example, I had the opportunity to listen to many different voices at the UBCM convention. We had a booth there. A Cowichan councillor said the average income in his region was $28,000 annually. A tax credit would assist this community with upgrading their existing homes and create jobs in their community.

Some believe a tax credit is the responsibility of the federal government. There’s no doubt that they bear some responsibility for asbestos in building materials. Installing Zonolite insulation through a CMHC program in the ’70s, Ottawa has a moral obligation to help pay for the removal of this hazardous material.

That said, it can and has been done without them. The province of Quebec embarked on its own renovation tax credit program a couple of years ago. My favourite example is Brandon, Manitoba — a small municipality that launched a renovation tax credit by reducing property taxes. That’s impressive climate action leadership.

To sum up: reduce layered taxes, like the property transfer tax, and extreme tax hikes like DCCs; improve efficiency and affordability of development application processes; encourage rezoning of small lots in established neighbourhoods; require community association land use committees to have best practices; and most importantly, place a moratorium on new building code regulations for affordable homes, those under 2,000 square feet.

For expanded choices and priorities, climate action leadership is best demonstrated by a home-renovation tax credit, saving all those air changes. And by implementing points 1 and 2, we create jobs in every B.C. municipality.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much, Casey. You came in within one minute. A lot of information. We appreciate that.

I’m going to find myself in unfamiliar territory. Having come out of local government for many years, I’ve seen the results of DCCs being kept artificially low over the years. Now communities — and we’ll use Victoria as a prime example — have a huge cost to put in sewage treatment. Tax is being raised exponentially to the existing homes because the DCCs weren’t charged.

Development cost charges are designed for the future of the community. Developers were allowed to — on their part, good negotiations, strong negotiations — get DCCs kept low, and so on.

My question is: how do communities, municipalities, pay for all the infrastructure upgrades that they need to put in without sufficient DCCs?

C. Edge: On your first point, if there’s been financial mismanagement on the part of a municipality, I’m not sure why new-home buyers should have to pay for it in these extreme ways. Suddenly you’re getting hammered with a 157 percent increase in the cost of your home for DCCs because you’ve had financial mismanagement on the part of the municipality. In fact, those elected officials were elected by the people in that community, the property tax payers. There should be greater ownership taken in terms of those kinds of financial challenges.

In addition, municipalities throughout the CRD love to compare themselves to Langford. Langford actually does not charge cheap DCCs. They’re up around $10,000 to $15,000. But what Langford has is certainty in terms of reviewing a development process. It’s not guaranteed you’re going to get that development application approved, but you will have certainty about whether it’s going to move forward or not.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars in other municipalities and have no idea what’s going to happen at the end of the day. So if they want to compare themselves to Langford and get the DCCs Langford has, create the small lot…. I just gave an example of small-lot subdivision for young families that are able to afford it. Other municipalities are putting up roadblocks, refuse to agree to small-lot subdivisions.

They have three-day building permit approval in Langford, six to eight weeks in Saanich. The only reason there would be a difference for a building permit — we’re not asking for variances here — would be just different cultures.

So step up, provide the efficiency and certainty for the development community, and then maybe you can talk about DCCs on Langford’s scale.

E. Foster: Just a quick follow-up. I have absolutely no issue with the small lots and building up instead of out. I think those are all innovative ideas, and they’ve been introduced in other communities. But at the end of the
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day…. You’re correct about municipalities keeping it artificially low, and now the new development has to pay for it. It has to be paid for somehow. You can triple the cost of water or quadruple the cost of drainage. You have to get the money somewhere. You can’t borrow it. You can’t deficit finance.

C. Edge: Property taxes. Well, there’s the thing. Here’s my point. If you tried to raise property taxes by 157 percent, you’d be out of there so fast. The reason they ratchet up the costs — DCCs and housing costs — on new-home owners is because nobody lives in that home yet. Nobody’s there to vote them out.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Casey. We’ve come to the end of our time. We appreciate your presentation. Thank you for attending today.

Welcome. I know you know the drill from other years: ten minutes for the presentation and up to five minutes for questions. We’ll turn it over to you. Thank you for being here.

M. Collins: Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members of the committee. We really appreciate again this opportunity to present to you the views of the B.C. Healthy Living Alliance with respect to the 2017 provincial budget.

As many of you will know, the B.C. Health Living Alliance was formed in 2003. Originally nine members, we’re actually now at 12, plus representation from all the health authorities, and some national — Public Health Agency of Canada — sit at our table as well. Our vision is a healthy British Columbia, and our focus is on the risk factors and the inequities that contribute significantly to chronic disease.

I know that you’ve also heard from a number of our members during your time throughout the province, and I thank you for all the great work that you’re doing. It must be an exhausting schedule, I’m sure.

This year we’re doing something a little bit different. We’re taking all of our policies and focusing them on children and youth to look at what could make a difference. What kinds of significant investments could be made that could assist in improving the health outcomes of children and youth, both as children and then, later on, as adults?

We know that preventable chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease and respiratory diseases affect about one-third of British Columbians, and much of this disease burden is avoidable if action is taken early in life to ensure that children have supportive conditions for leading healthy lives.

Now, I distributed a brochure that we produced this year that takes all of our policies and puts them within that framework of children and youth. I’m not going to be able to go through all of them, and not all of them have budgetary implications, but what I’d like to do is just highlight some of the ones that we think would be good investments to make sure that children in B.C. have a healthy start to life.

Certainly, children’s health and well-being starts with a supportive family — families of all kinds. Families, in turn, need basic resources such as affordable housing, quality child care and income security to support their children’s well-being.

I know you’ve heard a lot about housing during your discussions around the province. Certainly, affordable housing is one of the basic essentials for a healthy life. We all know that.

BCHLA has been really encouraged by the recent announcements by the government to invest $500 million in affordable housing. That’s a great start, and we urge you to continue investing to expand the stock of affordable rentals for families with low to middle incomes, as well as emergency, transition and supportive housing for those who are experiencing homelessness, fleeing violence and struggling with mental health problems and/or addictions.

Quality child care. We know that providing early learning opportunities which allow parents to pursue employment or education or training is critical, and early childhood education establishes a foundation that leads to school readiness and educational achievement, which ultimately contributes to employment, income and security.

I can just say, from a personal point of view, that I moved to Victoria last year because my daughter has a little grandson who is now turning two, and he’s in this wonderful early child program at UVic. I just see what a difference it makes, being able to interact, having that kind of support. It’s just so exciting. So I feel quite passionate at this point about those…. Those of you who may be grandparents or will be grandparents will understand that.

We ask you to build on the provincial early-years strategy to provide families across B.C. with high-quality, affordable early care and learning programs.

Child care costs, we believe, should be prorated according to family income, ensuring that fees are kept low or waived for low-income families. This kind of investment in human capital is also, of course, great for the B.C. economy. It’s estimated that $1 invested in early childhood development generates $2 for the economy.

That brings me to income security. If you’ve got a secure income, you have access to adequate housing, nutritious food, safe communities and participation in recreational, educational and cultural opportunities — essential for a healthy life. Children who grow up in low-income families have increased susceptibility to a broad range of chronic conditions, which is why BCHLA sup-
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ports a provincial poverty reduction strategy. B.C. is in a good position to embark on this now, and we can learn from the experiences of other provinces.

I was at UBCM a couple of weeks ago, where we heard Premier Clark talk about the success of the single-parent employment initiative. It certainly underscores how a coordinated approach across ministries can help to deliver real change and break the intergenerational cycle of poverty. We’d just like to see more of that.

Now, some specifics. Discourage sugary drinks. There’s been a lot in the media about that recently, and we’ve explained to this committee before how detrimental sugary drinks are to the health of our children. They’re associated with unhealthy weight, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Mexico and a number of other nations, and states and cities in the USA as well, are looking to discourage overconsumption with warning labels and/or taxation. This tax revenue can also generate revenue for health programs.

We’ve been working with other organizations across Canada to promote a federal excise tax as well as warning labels to curb consumption, but here in B.C., we urge you to take a leadership role on this issue, starting with applying the provincial sales tax. I don’t know if you’re aware that there’s no PST on pop and Coke and these sugary drinks because they’re treated as groceries. We’re saying at least do that, and then work with the federal government to implement an excise tax of, we’re saying, 30 cents a litre.

Increase tobacco taxes. I know you’ve heard this from our partners as well. Nobody likes taxation, but there are some taxes that really do have an impact on behaviour, and certainly tobacco tax has. We see that the increase in the price of tobacco has been a proven method for getting smokers to quit or reduce the amount they smoke, and it’s particularly effective for youth, who are even more price-sensitive.

In fact, studies demonstrate that a 10 percent increase in the per-package cost of cigarettes reduces smoking between 3 and 5 percent. While B.C. has the lowest smoking rates in Canada — and we certainly are happy about that — according to a recent StatsCan survey, 20 percent of B.C. youth in grades 10 to 12 report smoking at least once a month. So we urge the government to raise the total tax on a carton of cigarettes by at least $7 to match the tax rate in other western provinces and, indeed, as recommended by our members such as Canadian Cancer, B.C. Lung and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.

Then, investing in healthier communities. I know many of you have long service as local councillors and mayors. You know this topic very well. We know how important that…. Community planning and infrastructure has a significant influence on whether families can be regularly active. Physical activity is increasingly coming to the fore as an important factor related to chronic disease, whether that’s for children, adults or elderly folks.

Child-friendly communities which are safe and easy to get around on foot, by bike or on transit are so important. These active forms of transportation give children the opportunity to explore their neighbourhoods and grow their independence.

The province can support local governments to design active communities by leading an active transportation strategy for B.C. which, we would suggest, would invest $100 million annually to build cycling and walking infrastructure as well as active school travel planning and cycling education. This may seem like a large request. But based on what other leading jurisdictions are spending and close to what the Ministry of Transportation is already spending to renovate a single interchange on Highway 1, we think it’s fairly reasonable.

Transit is also critical for mobility and air quality in communities as well. Again, we think the province can build on the federal commitment by providing the full funding of $400 million a year for implementation of the B.C. Transit strategic plan, the 2030 plan, and the mayors’ plan in Metro Vancouver. I know you’ve already been responding positively, in many ways, to that.

Finally, other ways to improve children’s health — and I won’t get into detail of these at the community level — are to invest in healthy school meal programs; to increase funding to the successful settlement and integration of refugees; and, we say, given the issues around mental health and addictions these days, which are so worrisome, to double the mental health funding that the Ministry of Children and Family Development allocates to community-based care.

We know that our future prosperity depends on the healthy development of the next generation and that working together, we can ensure that our children are equipped to develop the critical skills and abilities that start in early childhood and lead them to achieve as adults. When we invest in the health of our children, we are investing in B.C.’s future success.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much, Mary, for this presentation, your presence at UBCM and many constituency offices and all the work you do not just with the Healthy Living Alliance but in other ways.

You raised a number of important issues, as have others both in this set of hearings and in hearings this year around the province, with respect to the increased health, social assistance and, sometimes, correctional service costs that could be avoided with an upfront investment in a number of initiatives, whether it’s dealing with sugary drinks, whether it’s early childhood education, whether it’s transit or healthy living.

I guess I want to ask you a question that’s a little to the side of your presentation. What more do you think
[ Page 2735 ]
groups like the B.C. Healthy Living Alliance and advocates for health care, amateur fitness and investment in child care could do, working with government, to address the issue that you raised, which is that nobody likes taxes? I think that’s probably true, although I think people accept taxes when they see the purpose and the benefit of it. What can we do to change the frame of the debate?

G. Heyman: The importance, as well as the economic benefit, of spending the money up front to avoid other costs down the road that are not productive costs.

M. Collins: I haven’t presented that data this year. We have presented, in earlier years, some of the data that show the investment in prevention of chronic disease and what the outcomes are in terms of reduced hospitalization, medical care and long-term improvement. There are some good studies. Hans Krueger has done some great work in that area. Certainly, you can pass that on.

It’s not an easy sell, because you start getting into the granular detail and people kind of lose attention. That’s why we thought this year we wouldn’t quite go that way. We would sort of go more the broader focus around children and youth and the broader issues, but we will continue to work on those other issues as an alliance, as our individual members do.

We’re not big public advocates, as you know. That’s not really our role. We work together with our members to support them, and some of them do much more public advocacy than we do. We try to help provide the information, the support and some of the programming that we’ve been involved in that has some very positive results, to share that and get that information out to the public and out to those groups and organizations that can use it effectively as well.

If I was to take it just from my own personal view, in terms of the issues we’ve raised, what I would like to focus on — in addition to things like a tax on sugary drinks, which is very specific — I think is really around early child care. I just think that makes such a huge difference, to enable children from all income levels to have access to quality early childhood education.

My question is on increased tobacco taxes. We’ve heard this recommendation before, and certainly your partners have talked about the importance of taxation on tobacco.

You’ve referenced cigarettes, but what about e-cigarettes, vaping? Those are increasingly out in the marketplace.

M. Collins: That’s a really controversial issue, as you know. I mean, there have been regulations being brought in to basically treat them as cigarettes in terms of where you can use them. That’s really been our view.

There is some evidence that shows that in some cases they can be supportive in smoking cessation, so we don’t want to rule that out entirely. But I think there’s a real concern — and if you talk to B.C. Lung as well — that anything you ingest into your lungs, whether it’s tobacco or other things, is not good for you. So it’s certainly not something we would like to encourage. We would like to see, certainly, not allowing it with nicotine and keeping it away from children and youth as much as possible. Again, no vaping in school areas and no selling it within — whatever it is — yards of schools. Those kinds of things are important.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, again, for the presentation, for the holistic approach that I think your alliance always brings and for your ongoing work. We appreciate it.

We now have a conference call. We have them on the line. We have the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, Dan Baxter. Dan, are you there?

C. James (Deputy Chair): Wonderful. Dan, we have ten minutes for the presentation and up to five minutes for questions. With that, I will turn it over to you.

D. Baxter: Perfect. Thank you so much. I just want to start by thanking the committee for your flexibility. As you might have heard, my wife just gave birth to our third child yesterday.

D. Baxter: Thank you so much. I obviously appreciate that technology does work and I have the ability to be here to present on behalf of the chamber.

Val Litwin, our president and CEO, sends his regrets. He’s touring the province as we speak, and the schedule just didn’t work for him to make it down to Victoria in time to present. I’m obviously on the call here to express the views of our membership.

With that being said, I’d like to start by thanking everyone for allowing the B.C. chamber this opportunity to present the views of our 120 local chambers of commerce and boards of trade, who represent 36,000 businesses of every size, sector and region of the province. We have again provided a written submission that highlights a full range of recommendations for both the committee and government to consider for Budget 2017. After you review the submission, we would be happy to answer any follow-up questions on our recommendations.
[ Page 2736 ]

Our written submission looks to address a number of issues that help the business community and that the business community feel will help grow their business and thus further grow our economy — including the eventual creation of a clean, green economy, along with a number of further recommendations to address housing affordability.

Of course, for the B.C. chamber, our comments today will focus again largely on a number of key taxation recommendations that will build on B.C.’s tax competitiveness. These recommendations build on what the B.C. chamber has presented to the Commission on Tax Competitiveness. However, the foundation of any budget must be fiscal responsibility.

The ongoing global malaise continues to cause governments to face strong fiscal pressures. We have to look no further than the federal government or a number of our provincial counterparts to see the challenges on the fiscal side of things.

Governments do not always control their fiscal fate. This is why the B.C. chamber continually advocates that governments remain focused on the basic fundamentals of fiscal responsibility. It is only through fiscal discipline that a government can achieve surplus. Thanks to the government achieving this position for four consecutive years, we’re able to look to potential funding opportunities that can grow our economy even further.

However, while these surpluses are gradually increasing over time, we know they remain subject to fluctuations in the global economy. We must, therefore, invest these surpluses wisely so that we provide the greatest return to our province. To maintain this fiscal discipline and provide a long-term return to the province, the B.C. chamber still recommends that government continue to maintain its campaign commitment with British Columbians by dedicating 50 percent of B.C. surpluses directly to debt reduction in Budget 2017.

While this does impact the government’s ability to make investments, it is important for government to reduce the debt burden when conditions allow, not only so we don’t burden our future generations but also to help reduce the interest we pay on that debt, thus freeing up more funds for other key spending priorities.

As we said earlier, a key focus for the B.C. chamber and our recommendations is on the taxation side of the equation. With a surplus, even one where 50 percent is dedicated to debt repayment, government has some room to focus on a number of tax initiatives that might not have been possible to deal with before today.

In terms of specific tax measures, the B.C. chamber wants to flag a few key initiatives briefly but does want to highlight that further detail is in our written submission.

First off, carbon tax. The B.C. chamber continues to advocate for a move back to a more broad-based tax reduction rather than the targeted tax credit. In particular, this renewed focus on using carbon tax revenue for broad-based tax relief can allow the government to return its corporate rate to 10 percent in a continued effort to attract corporate investment to British Columbia.

Credit unions. Government has continually placed much-appreciated emphasis on encouraging small businesses. The change in the tax status of credit unions works to counter this effort by reducing credit unions’ ability to invest in communities and small business. While we understand this change was precipitated by a change at the federal level, our members think it is worth the provincial government making a change independent of the federal government.

Local government taxation. Local government is the key driver of economic growth throughout our province, so we need the discussion as to a more sustainable funding mechanism for local government. The B.C. chamber recognizes that this dialogue must address local government’s ability to invest in infrastructure and other services while also recognizing the need to protect businesses from increasing property taxes.

While these are a few of the many important issues our province faces, they are not the most important issue for our members, which is a need for a made-in-B.C. value-added tax, or VAT. As we explain in our written submission, the lack of a VAT is not only impacting B.C. business but is also continuing to affect B.C.’s competitiveness. Its impact on competitiveness can largely be attributed to the return to the PST.

It is important to recognize that B.C. already has some of the lowest tax rates for both personal and business income in Canada, if not the world. Indeed, the government is to be commended for those actions. While our province has competitive tax rates, the fact is a value-added tax will make us even more competitive.

For the B.C. chamber, the choice of voters to return to the PST was the wrong choice, but we don’t want to relive or refight the HST. Our members, though, have been clear — so much so that they recently renewed their recommendation, at our recent AGM in Kelowna, for a move to a value-added-tax system in the best interest of the B.C. economy. A VAT is good for business, good for creating jobs, and ultimately, it’s good for consumers because it will remove tax on tax we all pay under the current PST while creating jobs and economic opportunity.

The move by virtually all provinces in Canada and the growing shift to the value-added tax globally means we cannot and should not stand alone. Now is the time for a dialogue with British Columbians around the development of a made-in-B.C. value-added tax system. In the absence of comprehensive reform measures, we must introduce other measures to address some of the more damaging aspects of the return to the PST.

While the chamber recognizes that the PST already exempts certain machinery and processing equipment, we need to widen this to cover all acquisition of ma-
[ Page 2737 ]
chinery and equipment. This will be a significant boost to our productivity and competitiveness and will facilitate business investment in growing their business and creating jobs.

The importance of this dialogue with British Columbians cannot be overstated. Businesses are seeing increased challenges on a range of fronts. For small businesses in particular, we are seeing a range of costs that are undercutting their ability to grow and create jobs. These range from higher payroll taxes — such as EI, WorkSafe and MSP premiums — to increases to minimum wage, uncompetitive property taxes and increases to utilities such as B.C. Hydro. To address these challenges, we need to reset our tax approach.

We saw the public react to the MSP increases found in previous budgets. Given that many businesses cover MSP premiums as an employment benefit, the increase in premiums affects business owners. While the B.C. chamber appreciates the recent announcement not to proceed with previously announced increases in Budget 2016, the B.C. chamber does recommend looking at income tax surcharges, like other provinces, in place of MSP.

Given the time constraint we have, I want to leave my comments there, and I would be happy to take questions from the committee.

In regards to a tax credit or exemption of PST on production equipment, has the chamber or anyone crunched the numbers to show what the cost benefit to the province would be, to take that approach, in terms of productivity and impact on the economy?

D. Baxter: That’s a great question. The numbers that we gave are actually from a recent study, a few years ago, from the tax expert panel, the panel on taxation. Cost, once it’s fully factored in, would be in the order of about $400 million to $450 million to the government. So it is a sizeable hit on the budget.

We haven’t taken the next step yet to actually understand what that impact would be, but knowing the fact that businesses can reinvest that $450 million…. That either gets passed on in terms of having the ability to create more jobs or to lower the prices of consumer products that people are purchasing. So even though we don’t have a direct number as to what the actual impact would be, we do feel it would be a sizeable impact.

J. Yap: That would be, in terms of the spinoff benefit, in effect, returning that $450 million for reinvestment and the leveraging of that through the economy. Yes, it would be interesting to see, on the plus side, what that would look like. I agree with you. We don’t want to revisit the HST as it was, but we do need to address productivity.

D. Baxter: Definitely. We’ll try to take that back and maybe get some of those numbers crunched for the committee, as well, to provide a little bit more context.

Two questions. I guess one to follow up on John’s point. You mentioned that, obviously, the move to HST or VAT would be your ideal. But if not going there…. You mentioned the manufacturing issue. Are there other areas that you feel could be dealt with around the PST and the GST? I know the committee last year certainly recommended that those areas around border communities be addressed so you didn’t find some additional support for people in Alberta coming into British Columbia. I just wondered if there were any other areas.

Then the second piece I just wanted to ask about was the issue of MSP. You mentioned you supported a move of MSP into the tax system rather than premiums. I wondered if your organization has taken a look at any of the models across the country. There are various models that use the tax system, some that use a payroll tax as well as the tax system. I just wondered if the chamber has looked at any of those kinds of options.

First, on the PST. Obviously, we are focused on trying to get rid of that tax-on-tax system that has crept itself into the PST. It is, obviously, a big hit on productivity when people from…. Whether the product is first taken out of the ground to it being value-added along the way to a final end product, we’re paying PST on PST on PST.

That’s why we focus more on machinery and equipment as a possibility — to try to take out some of those taxes on inputs. With that being said, I think you raise a great issue around taxation, not even just across borders. One of our chambers up in the northeast, the Fort St. John Chamber of Commerce, highlighted…. Obviously, they have a competitive disadvantage because they’re paying PST. Small business operators coming over into the Peace can offer a bit of a lower rate because they don’t have the same sales tax requirements.

We do have some recommendations. I can actually pass that along as a separate recommendation to government on how we can try to smooth out some of those issues around PST so that our businesses are competing on a level playing field with businesses in Alberta.

I think that’s a fair point for exports as well. We’d probably want to look at how we can shave off some of that competitive disadvantage that we have when we are com-
[ Page 2738 ]
peting in a global world where other jurisdictions are using a value-added tax system. They’re not paying the inputs on the goods that they are creating, which means that there’s basically a 7 percent extra charge put on our businesses.

We do look at ways around that as well. That would probably be where the chamber would also want to go, but we haven’t done a lot of number crunching on that yet either.

Then, on the MSP. If we had to pick one model…. You’re right. There are, obviously, different models across Canada. The one that our recommendation highlights has been more the Ontario model, which is an income tax surcharge that is based on how much income you report to Revenue Canada. Then you get slotted into a scale according to that.

The beauty of that system is that it adds progressivity to the system so that people who…. You pay a little bit more if you can afford it. Everyone, for the most part, reports their taxation to Revenue Canada. Therefore, in terms of the collection of that tax or that surcharge, it’s a lot more clean and a lot more efficient, instead of the current model we have, where we have…. Right now I think it’s closing on over $500 million worth of uncollected fees — and growing.

If we could do it through the tax system, there’s probably a cost savings, because we wouldn’t necessarily have to have so many of our civil servants collecting it and trying to track people down. Most people would be submitting their taxes, and we can collect it that way.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Great. Thank you so much, Dan, and thank you very much for the presentation. We’ve come to the end of our time.

Congratulations on the new family member. You made the right choice to stay home, I would suggest.

D. Baxter: Thank you, Carole, and thank you to the committee. Again, if anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the chamber.

Next we have the University of Victoria — Jamie Cassels. Welcome. Just so you know the routine, the presentation is up to ten minutes, and then up to five minutes for questions, as well. Welcome. We appreciate you coming today.

J. Cassels: Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, everyone. I’ve been looking forward to meeting with your committee this morning. On behalf of the University of Victoria, I welcome this opportunity to showcase some of our recent successes and to share with you some ideas for building on a successful post-secondary system for our province.

To begin with, I join with many other voices in stating that it’s clear that B.C. is home to a world-class post-secondary system, including research-based universities like the University of Victoria.

We in the post-secondary sector have worked together to ensure that B.C. continues to attract talent, educate people and generate innovation and ideas to contribute to the province’s social and economic prosperity. We want to continue to build on that work, to pave the way towards a strong economy and a strong province.

In my remarks today, I’m going to provide an outline of the University of Victoria and the vital impact that it has across our province, across the country and, indeed, around the world.

With the province’s support, the University of Victoria provides a world-class education to more than 22,000 students a year, making UVic the province’s third-largest university.

As a destination university, more than 70 percent of our students come from outside the Victoria area. Indeed, on a quick calculation, we determined that about 3,600 of our students come from the ridings represented by members of this committee. Indeed, even excluding our friends from Victoria, over 1,500 of our students, about 10 percent of our student body, come from your collective ridings.

We’re focused on quality and student success and ensuring that we provide the right combination of knowledge, talent, skills and ideas for future generations. Our commitment to dynamic learning involves research-inspired teaching, integrated with hands-on experiences.

We have the second-largest co-op program in Canada, where our students participate in work-integrated learning, and 3,000 students a year participate in co-op, and almost 50 percent of our students have some form of work-integrated learning experience.

We have more than 1,200 employer partners in the province, across Canada and indeed around the world. Our students seek out work-integrated learning experiences — locally, across Canada, in Silicon Valley, in China and in the rest of the Asia-Pacific region.

UVic graduates fuel B.C.’s social, cultural and economic growth. Many of our programs align directly with the B.C. jobs plan, and we’re continually responding to meet changes in student interests and the needs of B.C.’s very dynamic labour market.

Close to 80 percent of all anticipated job openings over the next decade will require students with some kind of post-secondary education. Post-secondary education, clearly, is the most significant pathway to personal success.

Moving on to research for a moment, I’d like to point out that the research happening at UVic is vital to the de-
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velopment of social, economic, technological and environmental innovation and, indeed, to our province’s future.

In addition to teaching and learning, we are one of B.C.’s top research universities, with research accomplishments recognized across Canada and around the world. Working with many partners in the public and private sectors, including the government of British Columbia, we attract significant research investments. At UVic, we bring in over $100 million a year to support research, training, skills development and the next generation of doers, thinkers and innovators.

I want to emphasize that the province and the province’s investment in the B.C. knowledge development fund is an absolutely critical element of bringing those research funds into our province, and I want to thank the province for its continued support for BCKDF.

Just last week we hosted Minister Virk on our campus to announce and celebrate BCKDF’s $8.7 million investment in the ARIEL2 component of the TRIUMF particle accelerator. The ARIEL project is a two-phase multidisciplinary research facility that will both advance our fundamental understanding of the universe and will also produce rare isotopes for medical purposes such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

At UVic, we continue to challenge ourselves in new and important ways, always thinking about how to bring better ideas and people to our province’s — and indeed, our country’s — greatest challenges. Our researchers tackle the full range of health challenges, addictions, homelessness, aging, and intercultural issues. We have globally leading research programs in oceans and climate and are contributing to the development of clean technologies, such as wave and tidal energy in a project we also launched just last week, again with support from the province.

Consider the following. With support from Transport Canada and in partnership with B.C. Ferries, our researchers have developed a design and optimization tool for hybrid electric marine vehicles. Working with B.C. Ferries and putting trace sensors on the new hybrid electric ferry that goes between Quadra and Cortes, our research team is developing the field knowledge and the field testing that is going to be required to create an entire fleet of hybrid electric vehicles up and the down the coast.

Research like this, with a vital impact, extends beyond oceans and climate, as I said, to health sciences, engineering, physics and astronomy — areas that are all crucial to our future success.

The third element of the University of Victoria experience that I want to refer to is simply the extraordinary environment that we offer for learning and discovery. Place matters. Place makes a difference. We’re a vibrant Pacific Rim community on indigenous territory on Canada’s west coast. Discovery, creativity and innovation come naturally. It’s certainly no accident that our students and our faculty members lead in areas like oceans, environment, climate change, sustainability, Pacific and Asian studies. We take advantage of place to develop expertise and capacity in areas that matter.

In particular, UVic is a national leader in closing the educational gap for indigenous students, with over 1,000 indigenous students on our campus each year. We’re very strong in our resolve to advance reconciliation with Canada’s First People through the use and deployment of research and education. We share the government’s commitment to strengthen our indigenous communities and provide the talent and energy to ensure that indigenous people can share in a social, cultural and economically viable future for all of us.

In closing, I want to emphasize three significant directions and opportunities whereby the University of Victoria hopes to continue to contribute to an excellent post-secondary system and superb education for our students.

First, we plan to continue to build on our success in growing integrated programs in high-demand areas like computer science, computer and electrical engineering, software engineering, green and sustainable engineering and mechanical engineering. A provincial investment at this time would amplify and accelerate that growth. Over the past four years, even without any new operating funding, we’ve grown our programs in these areas by almost 80 percent. We have 1,000 more students in these programs today than we did four years ago.

Student, community and industry demand for these types of programs has been exceptionally strong. Applications are up 100 percent for the current academic year. We had 2,616 applications for just 675 spaces. There’s a tremendous appetite for education in these areas. We can do more, but not without additional classrooms, labs, operating funding. Recent government support for renovations to our last wartime hut are going to permit us some surge space, but a more significant investment would really allow us to move forward in this direction.

Secondly, UVic’s commitment to learning begins and ends with our students. As a destination university, housing for our students is a critical part of student success. The combination of designated study space, academic skills programming, scholastic role models and residence life programs is a proven platform for student academic success. So along with many British Columbians, we were very pleased to hear the announcement on housing affordability, coupled with the concept that student housing would be part of that program.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Cassels, but you have to conclude your thoughts. We’re out of time now.

Finally, the third initiative, which we’re very excited about, is continuing to build on our success in relation to indigenous education. Thank you very much for your time.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, and sorry for rushing you through that. We have lots of other presenters here. I will go to the committee for questions.

S. Gibson: I’m a UVic grad, so it’s good to see you again, Doctor. My query. It seems like our U.S. cousins have become much more flexible than Canadian universities. When I talk to relatives in the U.S…. For example, students can’t really go in the evening, taking a program only evenings. It seems like our Canadian universities have fallen behind in that area. That’s just my personal, anecdotal observation. If I come to UVic and want to do a law degree part-time in the evenings, I can’t do it.

What is your comment on that? It seems like we just don’t have the flexibility that U.S. universities do.

J. Cassels: Some U.S. universities do. There’s an amazing spectrum of universities in the U.S., but there are certainly some that are entirely part-time adult-focused institutions, and we are not.

That said, we have harnessed technology to create a much more flexible learning platform for students. We have a number of faculties, for example, where 80 percent of the student enrolments are individuals who are working full-time, never are able to come onto campus but are doing their education through that form of learning. We are trying to build flexibility into our programs to allow the whole spectrum of learners to access education.

D. Ashton: Thank you for your presentation. UVic’s endowment fund — what does it sit at?

J. Cassels: Largely student scholarships and some faculty chairs. But I’d say the majority of it is for student awards.

J. Cassels: No, you’re not able to use the endowment for capital. We do receive donations outside of the endowment.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Dr. Cassels. The area I just wanted to ask a quick question on…. We’ve heard a lot about housing, and I want to echo that, because I think it’s a huge issue, particularly in the Lower Mainland and the Island, where housing is a big challenge to begin with.

I just wanted to ask about indigenous education. Certainly, from the community’s point of view, we’ve heard some great positives. I just wondered if you had numbers around the increase in the number of First Nations students or indigenous students coming to UVic, and how well that recruitment is working.

J. Cassels: Thank you for that question. We have doubled the enrolment of indigenous students over the past ten years. Of our 20,000 students, we now enrol roughly 1,000 indigenous students. It is in our DNA to make a significant contribution towards reconciliation through education, building programs that are relevant to communities, working with community partners, providing programs outside of the community.

We’ve got some very exciting entrepreneurship programs happening in Haida Gwaii and Prince Rupert right now, for example, and language revitalization programs happening in other communities. We’re very positive and very committed to growing that success.

Seeing none, thank you very much for sharing your views. We appreciate you coming forward today.

Doctor, good morning. Welcome. In case you don’t know, ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left. You can conclude your thoughts, and we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

A. Cahoon: Thanks very much. I appreciate the opportunity to stand before the committee again. As a professor of public administration, I appreciate the work you do and the importance that this has for our system. I also want to thank you for your vision and wisdom in creating Royal Roads University 21 years ago. I wanted to come and have a bit of a conversation about that.

I also want to make the same offer I made last time, four years ago, as we were getting ready for an election — that members of this committee may want to consider enrolling in one of our 40-some-odd master’s programs that are delivered in a blended learning approach so you can work and study at the same time. If in the next five
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months, two weeks and three days your circumstances allow you to come to Royal Roads, we certainly are interested in having you.

By the way, we have an interdisciplinary doctoral program, a DSocSci, that requires ten years of work experience. It will be finished in four years, which would prepare you again for another election. I leave that offer to you.

There is no operational, financial ask in my presentation — not that we couldn’t do with either. The purpose of this is really to solicit feedback, to get some advice about what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong.

When we were created 21 years ago, the mandate of Royal Roads was to serve the labour market needs of B.C., to focus on applied and professional programs and to serve as a special purpose university. I want your advice on how we’re doing on that and what we could do to serve the government more effectively.

We deliberately offer programs that other institutions don’t. I endorse Professor Cassel’s commitment and support for University of Victoria. We are honoured to have a strong research university in our community. We work closely with them.

What Royal Roads does is to try to offer programs that other institutions aren’t able to do. For example, we don’t have any departments, we don’t have any traditional programs, and we don’t have traditional students in the same way that other institutions do. We offer programs and degree specializations in areas like leadership, human security and peace building, disaster and emergency management, global management, etc.

Seventy percent of our students are graduates. Seventy percent are working professionals who work and study at the same time in a process of blended learning that we pioneered 21 years ago where people can come for two or three weeks in a residence, an intensive kind of format, go back to work and stay in their study groups and continue on their program. We have a unicameral governance system that gives us integrated decision-making, with no independent academic senate.

We were created to be different, a 21st-century university. We feel the need to earn the right to serve the needs of B.C. by the successful completion and contributions we make to the post-secondary landscape in the province, by what we deliver, how we do it and the economic educational success we achieve.

We feel strongly the need to deliver high-quality, innovative, demand-driven learning and teaching for the people of B.C.

What else distinguishes Royal Roads? We operate on a very efficient business model. We balance our budgets and have been doing so for two decades. We annually exceed the ministry targets, operate with no deficit or debt. In fact, our board requires the administration to prepare its annual operating plan that shows expenses at 95 percent of revenues. Mary Collins, who just stepped down six years on our board, held us to that.

Since 2007, we’ve been funded for 1,980 full-time-equivalent students. We have consistently exceeded that target, and at the end of the fiscal year this year, we had 2,877 FTEs.

Now, what does that translate into? It is always an interesting one, because we admit students at 88 times during the year, so they’re constantly coming. It’s about 5,300 card-carrying Royal Roads students currently.

As I said, we pioneered blended learning. These are short and intensive on-campus residences, followed by on-line cohort instruction. It ensures the most efficient use of our facilities for teaching. We’re operational 12 months a year. We have 67 core faculty, with annual performance-based targets. These are not tenured faculty. They’re not entitled to sabbaticals. They are entitled to research leaves, which they earn.

We have over 400 associate faculty — we call them scholar practitioners — from industry, from government, from special backgrounds. No permanent employment contracts allows us to not be supply-driven, in terms of faculty, but demand-driven. We can mobilize faculty around programs.

Eighty-two percent of our employees are non-union staff. We do this because we believe that staff is critical to what we do, and we believe that they should be strongly supported, engaged, trusted, empowered and respected.

The ratio of executive to staff is under 13 percent. I assure you there is no administrative bloat at Hatley Castle.

Uniquely, all 58 credentialed programs have financial margins to meet, with a business case required. I monitor those, as do faculty.

Since we started in 1995, we have grown because of the contribution we’ve made. We are the only university to operate in a national historical site. Our landlord is DND.

Accessibility and relevance is important. It’s one of our key differentials. We embrace flexible admission. Students make the case for why them, why now and why Royal Roads. Royal Roads, as I said, is efficient. It has 88 entry points throughout the year. Our model and various entry points make it convenient to students, in particular those who are already in the workplace and who cannot justify and take two years or more to pursue their education.

Average age of our students, for graduate students, is 41. Approximately 12 percent of our doctoral students in our social science program identify as indigenous students. It’s due to the relevancy of the content and the ability to live in their communities and complete their programs.

We have four Canada research chairs, including one tier 1 chair. That’s based on 67 core faculty, which gives us a ratio of one Canada research chair to 17 faculty, which is, I think, a very good ratio in Canada.

Our research is consistent with applied and professional mandate and is expected to be used in the class-
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room and to assist in the workplace and in the profession. I remind you that a thematic, proactive approach to research is not the norm. Uniquely a research university — although the ministry would disagree sometimes — with 70 percent of our students undertaking a thesis, dissertation or graduate project, we are second only to UBC in terms of ethical reviews.

Our interdisciplinary approach to research, programming and teaching takes the best ideas from multiple perspectives and applies them in unique ways to provide solutions to the world’s most difficult problems. The idea of interdisciplinarity is really about the challenge.

We operate, as I said, in the…. We’re stewards of the Hatley Park National Historic Site. We’ve reduced greenhouse emissions by 29 percent since 2007.

You know, it is an interesting time in the sector. I think Jamie’s talked a little bit about some of the challenges we have. Collectively, we seek out opportunities that transform the way we do business and that serve the needs of the province.

At the Cascadia conference in Vancouver last month, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith spoke about the important role that higher education plays in innovation. He highlighted key universities that he thought were supporting the notion and were doing it right.

The U.S. business and political leaders recognize that innovation is driven by highly recognized research universities. You should be proud of your system, your college system — in B.C., your university system.

We work collectively in support of the government’s agenda. It’s a privilege to be here and to be the most innovative, demand-driven and successful member of that group.

I know that the program offerings change, as you say, depending on the interest and the students coming forward and the faculty coming forward. I wonder if there’s a particular area that you’re seeing higher demand on in the kinds of programs that you’re providing right now or that you’re anticipating to provide. Is there a demographic or is there an area that’s really being pushed right now?

A. Cahoon: Well, I would say, generally, that things like leadership and sustainability are high demand and our business programs.

What’s happening more these days, Carole, is more interest in individually determined education. People who are 41 and decide to come back to university aren’t necessarily interested in taking four years of X or Y. What they want to do is acquire some competency in certain areas. They’re more defined in that.

We started an interdisciplinary program — a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies — with eight students. We now have about 280 in that program. They want to choose what it is and then with a packet and advice of how that fits together for them.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I have a question. As a percentage of enrolment, how many students do you see coming straight into the university from secondary schools, high schools?

A. Cahoon: Zero, because we typically accept students in year 3. We have a process for accepting students in year 2. Students who come in year 3 can complete an undergraduate degree in 12 months. They do six months of year 3, have a week off and then complete year 4. Or they can do it over two years on a blended approach. It is, again, an intensive way to be convenient to working professionals.

We do have an international pathway program for some international students to join in that program. But we don’t admit students directly in year 1.

On that, then, how many students do you see coming in without the practical life experience? You’ve mentioned the 41-year-old average graduation age. What percentage of students without that practical experience are coming into the universities?

A. Cahoon: If your average is 41, the experience you’ve had since 18 or 22 may be different. About 20 percent, I would say, would be an average of people who come in on some form of flexible admission. They have to make the case why. We determine whether or not they have the kinds of skills.

If they’re trying a business program and haven’t taken accounting, then we would require them to do an accounting on-line program in preparation for that, to be able to see that they have that skill — so around 20 percent.

S. Gibson: What is your relationship, in terms of transferability, between yourselves, your programs, Camosun and UVic?

A. Cahoon: We have a really positive relationship. We sit as five presidents on Vancouver Island between UVic, Royal Roads, Camosun, Vancouver Island University and North Island College. Some research that UVic did showed the transferability.

Students come. We have joint agreements with Camosun for degree completion. For example, we have a bachelor’s degree in justice studies. They have an undergraduate or diploma in justice studies. Those students can transfer into our program. Similar in professional communication, similar in environmental studies.
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We work with the colleges and the university. Our students…. We have associate faculty members from the University of Victoria. We work in research teams with them. So as I said, we have a great collaboration amongst the institutions on the Island.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for taking the time. We appreciate it. All the best, and good luck in the future.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll get your attention with a couple of minutes left, and then we can go to the committee. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

L. Skinner: Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for having me here to provide testimony on the 2017 provincial budget. My name is Launi Skinner, and I’m the CEO of First West Credit, although you may recognize us more locally as Island Savings, Envision Financial, Valley First or Enderby and District Financial.

With a proud 70-year history of contributing to and growing B.C.’s economy, First West has a simple but urgent request. We ask that this committee recommend once more that credit unions be taxed fairly, with tax rates restored to 2015 levels.

Most members of this committee are familiar with credit unions and this request. As a system, we have asked yearly for tax fairness, and this committee has supported us with a strong recommendation to that effect three years in a row. Thank you for your efforts. We appreciate it.

We return to you again this year because First West’s quarter of a million members, including our 18,000 small and medium-sized business members, are impacted by the province’s decision to raise taxes on their financial institution of choice. Unfair taxes will have a direct impact on our ability and on our members’ ability to grow and invest in B.C.’s economy and communities.

Here’s how we came to this juncture. In 2013, the previous federal government made controversial changes to the way credit unions were taxed. For 40 years prior, successive federal governments recognized the important differences between cooperatively owned credit unions and shareholder-owned banks by providing a specific deduction to credit unions.

This treatment balanced some of the ways in which the tax system favours large banks. For example, as cooperatives, credit unions don’t issue shares like the banks so aren’t able benefit from the generous federal tax incentives, like the 50 percent capital gains exemption, to help build the capital we need to support our growth, particularly the loan growth. You can appreciate our shock, then, when in 2013, without consultation and with no conversation, this historic acknowledgement of these critical differences were thrown out by the previous federal government.

Here’s why this matters. Like other B.C. credit unions, First West relies almost entirely on retained earnings to grow our capital. For First West, our capital base is approximately 90 percent retained earnings, a high quality of capital that is well above the average of 45 percent that banks maintain. Taxes are paid out of a credit union’s retained earnings and, in turn, affect the amount credit unions can lend. In short, the fewer retained earnings First West has, the less we can lend competitively to working families and small businesses in our communities.

Members of this committee have heard the argument that the increase in B.C.’s tax rate for credit unions is a direct result of a decision made by the past federal government and, as such, the conversation rests with the federal government. The truth is, however, that provincial tax policy is a provincial matter.

When the previous federal government changed its tax approach for credit unions, it triggered changes in both Saskatchewan’s and B.C.’s tax legislation. At the time, both Saskatchewan and B.C. gave credit unions a reprieve. In 2014, Saskatchewan’s Finance Minister, Ken Krawetz, acknowledged the important role that credit unions play in that province’s economy. In the 2014-15 budget, Mr. Krawetz stated: “Our government will not follow the federal measure and will instead retain, for provincial tax purposes, the special income-tax reduction for credit unions.”

In British Columbia, which has the largest credit union system in the country, no intervening action on taxation was taken by government, so beginning in 2016, the provincial tax burden for credit unions began to increase. B.C. credit unions are now uniquely disadvantaged in Canada by burdensome tax rates.

For example, Saskatchewan maintained its 2 percent tax rate for credit unions, and in Ontario, credit unions qualify for the small business tax rate of 4½ percent. In Manitoba, credit unions and caisses populaires with a permanent establishment are only subject to a 1 percent profit tax on taxable income in excess of $400,000.

Once phased out, B.C. credit unions will pay 11 percent provincial tax. All this comprises a significant tax hike on First West and all B.C. credit unions. Credit unions are a homegrown B.C. success story that employ thousands of British Columbians throughout all corners of the province with well-paying career jobs. In the government’s latest economic update, it was revealed that the government exceeded its surplus estimates, due in large part to the increase in income taxes from B.C.’s growth
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and job creation. In fact, more people are working, receiving raises and paying their taxes.

Credit unions like First West have helped create a portion of those very jobs and promotions that have led to the surplus. First West employs roughly 1,700 staff members in small and mid-sized communities across the province. In many of the communities where we operate, especially in our regional centres of Duncan, Penticton and Langley, our employees are paid a higher-than-average salary for the area. Further, in 2015, First West created 311 growth opportunities for our employees.

However, our ability to fully contribute to the B.C. economy in this way is significantly impacted when we are forced to pay unfair and disproportionately high levels of taxes. We are not a big bank. We cannot easily absorb such large tax increases. It impacts our ability to lend, thrive and further grow B.C.’s economy in small and rural communities.

We’re not alone in our concerns about the effect of burdensome tax rates for credit unions. The B.C. Chamber of Commerce, in its submission to the B.C. Commission on Tax Competitiveness, stated that the increase in provincial taxes on credit unions “will have a significant impact on B.C.’s small business community, who rely on credit unions’ ability to provide credit to facilitate their business growth.”

As you know, access to capital is a key barrier for small and medium-sized businesses. Recently, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business released a study assessing financial institution market share for small and medium-sized businesses. CFIB recognized that in B.C., credit unions are the number one choice for small and medium-sized businesses, with 23 percent of the market share, while the big five banks only reach numbers in the teens. Because we are local and know the economy in the communities where we live and work, credit unions like First West are better equipped than most banks to assess risk and lend to small and medium-sized businesses.

The B.C. Chamber of Commerce has been a strong advocate for credit unions, because they know that disproportionately high taxes impact small and medium-sized businesses. To this end, the chamber has stated that we encourage the B.C. government to continue this strong record of supporting B.C.’s small business community “by amending the provincial Income Tax Act to ensure that credit unions continue to be taxed at the small business rate.”

CFIB’s study and the B.C. Chamber’s testimony clearly demonstrate that credit unions play an integral role in facilitating small and medium-sized business growth. When credit unions are saddled with unfair taxes that eat away at their retained earnings, they are less able to support small and medium-sized businesses with the access to capital that they need to grow the B.C. economy.

Mr. Chair and committee members, I believe our goals are shared. We desire to see this province remain fiscally strong, economically healthy and socially vibrant. Credit unions are a key player in helping achieve this goal. Policies like fair taxation that enable credit unions to continue growing the economy, creating well-paying local jobs and giving back to the B.C. community only make sense.

That’s why I am here today asking this committee to recommend that tax levels be restored to 2015 levels for credit unions.

Thank you. I’m more than happy to answer any questions that you have at this point in time.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for that. I have to say, I think it’s the first time I’ve heard the comparisons with the other provinces — in the other presentations that we’ve had from credit unions.

E. Foster: Thanks for your presentation. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a member of the Armstrong Spallumcheen Credit Union, which became Valley First, which is now First West, and I am still a member.

E. Foster: A couple of things. One, have the credit union organizations approached the new federal government? I’m wondering where they might be on this as well.

I think, probably, as we go through the presentation, maybe the other questions will be answered. The comparison to other provinces was great.

Could you submit, just for your organization, some actual numbers? What we’re looking at as far as…. We’ll need those by Friday, by the 14th. Just to give us an idea — I mean, there are percentages and so on — what that additional cost burden is going to be to you.

L. Skinner: Yeah, I can actually give you the exact numbers. First West estimates — on a provincial level — that it will pay an additional $4.3 million taxes during the phase-out period, and an additional $2.5 million annually after that.

On top of that, because of the federal elimination, we estimate that we’ll federally pay $3.1 million through the transition and roughly $1.8 million every year after 2016, so it’s an over $7 million cost to us through the phase-out periods of both the provincial and federal taxes, and then it’s about an additional $4.3 million every single year after that. It’s a significant amount.

D. Ashton: Thanks, Ms. Skinner, for your presentation today. Just quickly, would the 30 percent cap — raising that cap — help credit unions in business loans?

L. Skinner: That’s a great question, Dan. We do support Central 1 and other…. I think other peers through-
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out the province have presented on increasing the small business lending cap, and we are absolutely a support and an advocate of that. We believe that it will help small business in the communities in which we do business, but again, you also need capital in order to be able to fund that increased cap. Of course, capital comes from retained earnings, and if the retained earnings continue to be diminished through unfair taxation, that can also…. They go hand in hand, both of those conversations, I believe.

G. Heyman: Thank you very much for the presentation. As you know, successive iterations of the committee have been supportive. I just have a question. You pointed out the different tax rates in different provinces, and I’m wondering if, either today or with a subsequent written submission, the rates are a matter of provincial choice or if there are other factors in those provincial taxation systems that led to those differentials.

L. Skinner: We can definitely get something back to you in more specifics than that. Do you need that by Friday as well as what Eric had mentioned?

R. Austin: Thanks for your presentation. I think we’ve heard a lot from around the province around the issues that you bring to the table today. But my question is…. And I don’t want to bring up another problem. The changes in mortgage lending rules that are being brought down by the federal government — how will that affect your members? My understanding is that the big banks, of course, were able to share the risk. What’s going to happen in terms of your ability to lend mortgages as a result of these changes?

L. Skinner: The new mortgage lending guidelines were just released last week, so our organization is in the process of understanding exactly how that will impact us.

Typically, credit unions — our loan-loss provisions are almost half of what the banks are, so we are still very well-known for our smart, risk-based, relationship-based, community-based lending that we’ve always had. But we’re in the process of evaluating that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, Ms. Skinner, for taking the time to present.

Okay. Moving on. We have Mr. John Leech, Applied Science Technologists and Technicians of B.C.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You probably know the routine. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention when time is winding down, and then we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

J. Leech: Superb. Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before the committee again. It’s certainly an opportunity for ASTTBC to highlight a few elements that may not be front of mind for each of you.

I won’t spend too much time talking about the association, because I think we’re well-known to the members of the committee. Good to see you all.

Just a quick couple of words as a reminder. ASTTBC is a self-governing professional regulatory body. In fact, it was in 1985 — maybe not in this very room but before a committee — that a private bill was offered up and the full Legislature supported the Applied Science Technologists and Technicians Act. That’s almost six decades.

We’re now an association of over 10,000 engineering and applied science technologists. These are, along with others, many of the people that help us get through our day each and every day. From the time you get up in the morning until the time you go to bed at night, you’re coming into contact with work that technologists and technicians have been involved with.

The good news in British Columbia today is that we enjoy a very diversified economy, a growing economy, an economy that needs growing numbers of engineering technologists and technicians. The demand is at an all-time high.

One piece of information the committee may not be aware of is that ASTT, with our sister associations, commissioned the Conference Board of Canada to look at the economic contribution of technologists and technicians. They came up with a number — just under $55 billion contribution at the national level. In British Columbia, it’s over $6 billion.

This is an occupation that grows, according to the Conference Board of Canada, by 3.5 percent a year, compared to all other occupations’ average of 1.7 percent. They are well paid, and they have recession-proof jobs and careers.
[ Page 2746 ]

ASTT’s ongoing commitment to government includes support in growing technology jobs; supporting labour market initiatives, innovation and productivity; environmental protection; and furthering the many benefits of professional reliance.

I’ve got five key points that I would like to talk with you today about. One is the implementation of professional technologist in the province of British Columbia, something that we’ve chatted about in other meetings; secondly, briefly, red-tape reduction; thirdly, the current and ongoing opportunities we have to support people with disabilities — or, a term that we’re using in our paper, diverseabilities — to try and engage and embrace many who are not as well engaged in the marketplace as they could be today.

Fourth, we’re pretty excited about a concept. We’re not sure what it’s going to be called yet. Maybe you’ve got the idea for us. It’s a technology workforce resource centre that we anticipate in Surrey. Finally is the growth of engineering technologists and technicians in B.C.

I’ve talked with each of you, I think, in the past about the time to move ahead in introducing professional technologist in the province of British Columbia. ASTT council has initiated the professional technologist, building on a model similar to Alberta. In Alberta today, there are over 600 registered professional technologists.

Our ask of the province is to work with ASTTBC as we engage with, in particular, a key partner, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C., to look for appropriate legislative change that will fully embrace and engage and put in place all of the rights and privileges appropriate and very much consistent with the competencies of this senior technologist.

Tomorrow I’m meeting with senior representatives in the health care field, looking at the model there. Certainly, as we’ve talked to people in government, we’ve aligned the professional technologist similar to the nurse practitioner and some of their challenges and opportunities in terms of engaging and enabling these senior members of the engineering team.

The second area that I mentioned, very briefly in the papers, is about red-tape reduction. We have been working with the ministry and anticipate further work to outline for government the areas of concern where individuals are shackled, dare I say, in their ability to fully engage and fully offer up their expertise to the province to enhance growth and productivity.

I mentioned people with diverseabilities. I’m pleased to report that we very recently announced a new project in concert with the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation. This project will have ASTTBC — in concert with partners such as APEGBC, the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies, BIM and a number of other groups — look at what’s going on today, in term of employment of people with diverseabilities. We will be working with various groups to interview and come to better appreciate the skill sets that are out there.

In the long haul, ASTT can be a catalyst and a facilitator for bringing people with disabilities, diverseabilities, to the table and engage in meaningful employment. I might add to the committee that, as you’re well aware, these are well-paying jobs — so some great opportunities in that area.

The fourth area I mentioned is the notion of a technology workforce resource centre in British Columbia. What we envisage is a hub where ASTT will coalesce with other partners and stakeholders to support First Nations, to support people with diverseabilities, youth and women and to support single parents as they seek to enter into the workforce.

I think members of the committee are well aware that ASTT leads by example. For example, in 2008, we created the First Nations Careers Council. Since then, this council and the First Nations members of ASTT have attended career fairs. We offer our bursaries and provide a myriad of supports.

We’re innovative. When the unfortunate accident in Tofino occurred, we approached the Ahousaht First Nation, and we put a modest $2,000 into the school system to allow students to take a bus trip up and down the Island to meet with the educators and, also, with employers.

ASTT, in this particular initiative, is not coming empty-handed. Our association is in a position to contribute and to put in place about $2 million to get a centre like this up and running. I anticipate that as a result of a meeting we’ve got coming up in a couple of weeks, industry leaders in the province will give us their blessing, one might hope, or alternatively, some counsel as we look to move this initiative along.

Finally, Mr. Chair and members of the committee — technologists and technicians. We have noted, as a result of study, that the growth of technologists and technicians in the province of British Columbia has been relatively flat for a decade, yet you just heard me say that this occupation grows by 3.5 percent a year and is projected to grow at a similar rate for the next ten years.

There is an urgent need, in our view, to provide maybe even targeted funding to ratchet up the number of technology graduates across this province. In the No. 5 in our paper, we do make a couple of suggestions. One is, for example, to make sure that the sustainable construction management technology program in Penticton, at Okanagan College, is retained and that we put new programming into the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, which used to have three technology programs. There’s a real need to provide this training throughout the province. Let’s train them in their local commun-
[ Page 2747 ]
ity and with the expectation that they’ll stay in the local community.

We anticipate further growth — in our discussion with Camosun College — of the current engineering technology programs, expanding opportunities at North Island College and, most certainly, at the prize ship the Polytech — increasing numbers at BCIT.

ASTTBC and the over 10,000 members of this association are making a significant contribution to the growth and development of this province. ASTTBC, in partnership with government, in partnership with other stakeholders, is leading by example. We anticipate that these five initiatives, with your support and assistance, will be realized.

I’m reminded every now and again, when someone says to me, “John, I know that you’d like to get this done in two years, but think of the magic that can happen in ten….” I would return, certainly, to the professional technologists and some of these other areas — certainly, the need to grow the number of technology graduates. These are matters that require urgent attention.

On the PTech thing, very briefly, again, we’ve got 600 registered PTechs in Alberta. We are reworking our policies to align with the Alberta model and anticipate that we’ll see the full realization of that professional designation, hopefully in the near term.

Thank you for your time. I’d be glad to take any questions the committee might have.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation — thorough, as always, John.

I wondered: is there an education component to your recruiting and looking at programs that are existing? You’ve described really well the diverse work that’s done by technologists. I wonder if part of the challenge for people is not knowing, or not being aware, that it’s a career choice or not being clear about what the career choice is. I wondered if there’s an education component that you’re putting in there for either high schools or parents of kids in high school so they’re aware of what kinds of opportunities are there.

J. Leech: Thanks, Carole. An ongoing challenge. I think we’re all aware — great teachers in the province. Teaching is embedded in the family. My wife is a retired elementary school principal. My daughter-in-law is a teacher. The teachers do a great job. But they know university well, so you see stats where 80 percent of parents of kids in grade 8 believe their child is going to university. The reality is much lower than that. Certainly, that’s a challenge — getting that out there.

But we’re active. At Okanagan College, for example, we support Spaghetti Bridge, and we support RoboCups — a number of initiatives that help the system come to better know the career opportunities.

I would be remiss in not mentioning that on the front page of our next hard copy newsletter, which you’ll get…. We signed an agreement with Science World — Bryan Tisdall, now retired from Science World — to work collaboratively during Canada 150. So Science World and ASTTBC will be reaching across this province with a package to help elevate awareness of career potential with technologists and technicians.

It gives me, maybe, an opportunity to mention one other quick thing. Again in partnership with the B.C. government, we will be training up 48 fire protection technicians — a grant that will allow us the opportunity to fill a desperate need, certainly in Metro Vancouver and other areas of the province.

We have a myriad of opportunities but also initiatives to grow the number of technicians and technologists — in particular, when it comes to those who are not part of that main stream.

R. Austin: Thanks, John, for your presentation. I’m just surprised at something in your presentation here. You say that technology programming at some institutions has dropped dramatically. I’m surprised, based on the labour demand you’re telling us about and that government has changed the focus of post-secondary education to demand that at least a quarter of all programs go specifically to jobs that are in demand. Why is this happening, then?

J. Leech: You’ll notice, Robin, on the table that the numbers go up and then drop dramatically down. I point in the paper to…. For example, at the College of New Caledonia, they used to have civil, architectural and building and electronics programs. These are decisions that were taken quite some time ago, so it doesn’t reflect current activity. Kwantlen College, at the time, used to have four technology programs.

It goes back to Carole’s comment, to some extent, or question. That is, that if you can’t keep the bums in the seats, the educational institutions, for high-cost programs…. The government has done a remarkably good job — both federal and provincial, in my view — in promoting trades, and the government has included technical careers in the B.C. jobs plan. So there’s a lot of effort being made to enhance the level of awareness around technical careers.

Much more needs to be done. I’m convinced that with the support of this committee, in particular, going forward and initiatives that, I dare say, even target funding specifically — new initiatives to get at the additional technology programs….

I don’t know the correlation between the number of engineer grads and technologists. That’s something we are going to look into.
[ Page 2748 ]

S. Hamilton (Chair): Before you go on, I’m going to interrupt because we’ve got one minute left, and we’ve got one more question.

G. Heyman: Thank you, John, and thank you for your and the association’s work to both promote the sector and to be inclusive to women, First Nations and people with diverse abilities.

My question. I haven’t had a chance to read your submission yet. One of your recommendations was to remove red tape — or, as you referred to it, “shackles.” Is that related strictly to professional reliance, or does it go beyond that?

J. Leech: It’s largely part of the tradition in our society, like with the health care area, when you’ve got new competencies available on the marketplace — as the case with engineering technologists. At times, regulatory impediments have not yet been addressed, but we’re working with government to try and reduce those impediments to make sure we enable rather than restrict our workforce.

Much work to be done, but we’re making progress. It could be a little faster than, maybe, I would like.

S. Hamilton (Chair): And that’s 15 minutes. Mr. Leech, thank you very much. Appreciate you taking the time. Enjoy your day.

Good morning. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention when time is winding down. Then we can go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

M. Whitemarsh: The B.C. Common Ground Alliance is a multifaceted stakeholder group involved in ground disturbance. Our members include companies like WorkSafe, B.C. Hydro, Telus, Fortis, B.C. Safety Authority and then people like roadbuilders, homebuilders, construction groups — Kiewit, all those. That’s who the B.C. Common Ground is.

I think you’re all familiar with the B.C. one-call system. B.C. One Call is also a member of BCCGA. It’s the universal trust that most people have in making that one call before they commit themselves to any kind of ground disturbance. Unfortunately, it’s not the case.

An excavator may have to make up to 20 calls to find out all the information that he needs about all the pipelines, all the wires, all the accoutrements that are underneath the ground as that hole is being dug.

There are over 2,000 documented hits each year, with many more that don’t get reported. Digging in B.C., we tell people, is effectively a calculated gamble in a very, very confusing landscape. In B.C., there’s a requirement for all pipeline companies to belong to B.C. One Call, and the Canadian Senate now has a private member’s bill before it to ensure that all federal lands are mandated to use B.C. One Call.

In British Columbia, the problem that we have here is that municipalities, utilities and most communications do not belong to B.C. One Call. They have their own systems, or they belong to another group that may have that. There are several of them. They’re fractured. What I talk about here in the paper is the safety and prevention that needs to happen when all those people need to come together.

If we ever had a major catastrophe with an underground dig, damage to buried utilities would lead to fatalities, personal injuries, environmental contamination, lawsuits, repairs, product losses and disruptions of essential services like ambulance, hospital, police, fire. It could be extremely, extremely dangerous to British Columbians.

What I’m here to tell you today is to inform you of all these things that could go wrong. In a province where there’s little or no appetite for red tape or mandating, I’m not so sure that we would want to go before government and ask that it be mandated that everyone subscribe to B.C. One Call. But I do believe there’s another answer.

I believe that these other systems that are out there could all be brought together in an area of inter-operability so that B.C. One Call, B.C. Common Ground Alliance, ICI Society, to whom the British Columbia government belongs and all the municipalities in B.C., with the exception of four tiny ones…. There are other systems out there. I believe that if B.C. Common Ground were given the opportunity to bring them all together in one room, one table, to look at the benefits and the abilities that inter-operability would bring, then British Columbians would be far safer.

Growth in B.C. will continue. We will see infrastructure projects expand, and the dangers that lie under the ground will grow as that happens. I think BCCGA could be the catalyst that would help to make that difference. What we’re asking for here is funding from the B.C. government in the amount of $90,000 to pursue and engage a process of inter-operability that will bring all those entities together so that we can have one safe system.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Yes, significantly, but you certainly got your point across.

J. Tegart: Good morning. I just wonder what the barriers are. Why haven’t you traditionally come together?

M. Whitemarsh: The capital regional district and the city of Vancouver are the two biggest areas. They operate under the ICIS, the ICI Society — the integrated cadas-
[ Page 2749 ]
tral association. They do all the mapping for all the municipalities.

If you go to the city of Victoria and you want to pull a building permit, they’ll pull up their ICI entity, which is a really good entity to use. However, it’s only as good as the information that goes into it, as is any other system. There’s never been anyone before that’s come forward and said: “We need to look at everything that’s out there, and we need to bring them together.” Everybody has just operated in silos. It’s time to change.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for raising something that I think probably most of us aren’t aware of. Certainly I’ve seen the ads, and I always presume that if you phone the number, you have one system. I would have just guessed that, so I appreciate it.

I also appreciate the approach that you’re bringing forward, which is that if there’s a barrier that people don’t want to join one system, then let’s get one contact so that the public isn’t having to go through a bunch of hoops, that the institutions go through the hoops and provide it to the public. A great suggestion on something new that we hadn’t heard of, so thank you. I really appreciate it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I have one question. This $90,000 grant would be to facilitate the production of a system that will go provincewide, I assume. But what about the maintenance of that system? How do you keep it up to date? How do you upgrade it?

M. Whitemarsh: That’s what we would need to look at. It’s got to be an holistic approach so that we are sure that when you make a call, you are getting everything that you need. I don’t have an answer to what it will look like, but I think it can be done.

Seeing none, enjoy your day. Thank you very much for taking the time — very much appreciated.

Next we’re just going to skip ahead here, because we had a bit of a scheduling snafu. We are 15 minutes ahead of schedule right now, so I’m going to call on the University of Victoria Students Society. They were actually told 11:20, but they’re down for 1:20.

So Maxwell Nicholson, if you’d come up, I’ll get you underway here. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left, and then we can go to the committee for some questions. The floor is yours.

M. Nicholson: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for letting us present on behalf of the University of Victoria Students Society. My name is Maxwell Nicholson, and I’m the director of campaigns and community relations for the society. We have our communications staff, our executive director and our chairperson, as well, here with us in the gallery.

Today we want to bring forward four recommendations under the theme that UVic brought forward earlier today around student experience, with a special focus on student affordability. As a student leader, the student experience is something that’s very, very important to myself and to the 18,000 students we represent as the students society.

Affordability is a key factor in the student experience. It helps promote diversity among students. It takes away some of the mental strain that students have, focusing on both affording their education and on academic excellence. It also helps students compete and integrate into the job market afterwards without having to carry as much debt.

Segueing off of that are the four recommendations we want to bring forward today.

One is to increase the funding of the open educational resources BCcampus program, which provides free high-quality open textbooks to students.

Secondly, we recommend that the government remove barriers that universities face on constructing on-campus residences, helping both students and low-income residents compete and work and live in Victoria with the competitive housing market.

Thirdly, we want to recommend that you increase the core funding back to the $50 million to provide much-needed mental health services for students on campus.

Finally, adopt a similar model to the needs-based grants system out in Ontario, which has provided the opportunity for many low-income students and people from many diverse backgrounds to have a high-quality education in our lovely province.

Starting off with the first recommendation — that you increase the funding for open educational resources under the government-sponsored BCcampus program. Over the past ten years, the prices of textbooks have risen four times the rate of inflation and continue to rise. The problem continues to get worse. Whether that be the publishers using practices like shrink-wrapping a new textbook with mandatory course materials, which restricts students from accessing the used market for more affordable textbooks….

Two to three years ago the government came forward with the solution of the open textbook project. Now, over that time frame, the project has expanded drastically. It has resulted in up to $2.5 million in cost savings. They have about 650 textbooks in the inventory of the on-line database. Students are able to access these at no cost on line or print them for only about $30, which just covers the print material.

This also allows B.C. to be a very high-quality educational system, in that open textbooks and the open educational resources can be updated year to year. They can be changed to follow the sort of changing practices
[ Page 2750 ]
in the different educational structures and really allow professors to tailor their course material specifically to the students. So it has benefits from both an affordability component and also as far as equality and open pedagogy components there.

One of the main barriers restricting professors from pursuing these open educational resources is resource constraints of both time and cost. In my work with one professor, an economics professor…. She’d been looking at this project for the last two years and had not gone forward with it due to these constraints. This year, due to a $5,000 grant from the BCcampus program, she’s moving forward to adopt an open textbook for economics 103, microeconomics, that’s going to result in $80,000 of cost saving, collectively, per year. So a huge return on investment.

BCcampus does have plans in place for an expansion. Increasing funding to that program would be hugely substantial for students.

Our second recommendation is in regards to removing the restrictions universities face on building on-campus housing. I’m sure many of you are aware of the housing crisis in Victoria and the greater Victoria region and of vacancy rates as low as 0.6 percent. So much so that at the Union of B.C. Municipalities, Fred Haynes and Jeremy Loveday brought forward a motion for the UBCM to support the removal of restrictions. We’ve also been collaborating with the SFU and UBC student societies.

Removing these restrictions is a low-cost item that would have substantial benefits for both students and low-income residents. Currently, it’s gotten to the point where Camosun and other groups at UVic have had to turn away international students without being able to find housing. The problem just continues to get worse. Removing these restrictions and allowing the university to build…. I know they’ve already started on explorative plans. Taking away that red tape would allow students to get out of the competitive market, lower the prices and increase the availability for lower-income residents and increase affordability for all.

Our third recommendation is to increase the core funding back to the $50 million for core services like mental health. At the University of Victoria, in the UVic mental health strategy, a statistic showed that 9.1 percent of students over the last year have seriously considered suicide. That statistic, when I read it myself, was extremely impactful in our work moving forward around mental health.

We’ve been collaborating with the Canadian Mental Health Association, the NEED2 community organization and the UVic mental health leaders, but one of the main constraints we face is resources. Increasing the core funding back to $50 million would increase the quality of these services and increase the resources and the accessibility for students in much need of these mental health resources.

Finally, our fourth recommendation is to implement a needs-based grant program, similar to the model adopted in Ontario, that allows students with household incomes of less than $50,000 to have access to the needs-based grants. This is extremely important for promoting diversity on campus and in helping address the problem of perpetuating the income inequality of students who lack the opportunity to, perhaps, go to education.

This needs-based grant program allows students whose parents and grandparents haven’t been able to…. To go to our high-quality institutions here in B.C…. It allows them to get out of that perpetuating income disadvantage that they have and to rise up as academic leaders and as professional leaders in our great province.

In conclusion, our four recommendations: to increase funding for the open educational resources in the BCcampus program, to remove the barriers and red tape universities face on constructing on-campus housing, to increase core funding back to $50 million for mental health services and to implement a needs-based grant program on the model of Ontario. All of them are centred around the student experience, with a special focus on student affordability, which is hugely impactful for student life.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful. I’m going to go ask some, but you articulated your position quite succinctly, shall I say. A very good presentation.

J. Yap: Great presentation and, if I may say, practical, reasonable recommendations. So good on you.

Regarding the BCcampus open textbook project, do you have a number in mind? I’m just looking to see…. Have you crunched some numbers? What would you recommend would be a budget that would take this to the next level?

M. Nicholson: Absolutely. Unfortunately, I was unable to provide it in my presentation. I got off the phone with Amanda Coolidge, the executive director, about an hour ago. They have plans for a $340,000 increase over the next three years. We would recommend even higher, about $500,000 a year over the next three years, just because of the high return on investment and the high benefits for affordability.

Sorry that wasn’t in the presentation. It’ll make it into the email draft sent out. Our recommendation would be $500,000 a year over the next three years.

We’ve heard from a number of faculty associations and student societies at post-secondary institutions. Almost all
[ Page 2751 ]
of them have focused on overall core funding for the system and the institutions. You chose not to mention that. Is there a particular reason, or did you just choose to emphasize things that were very specifically important to UVic?

M. Nicholson: With our presentation, we definitely wanted to tailor some of the asks to more specific and urgent problems we face. I know the university and a lot of the other student societies do a lot of great work on core funding and trying to frame that under the theme of the student experience.

One of the things I do want to emphasize is that a lot of these asks are in collaboration with other student societies. The open textbook one is very similar to the presentation that Christine of the SFSS will have given, as well as the housing, as I mentioned, in collaboration with the UBC student society, SFU, ABCS, the university, the UBCM asks.

We aim to be more specific, with more of the urgent problems, in our asks. But we’re definitely supportive of the overall increase in funding for the student experience.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just to conclude, it’s my understanding that increases to funding and…. The whole open textbook program is going to be expanded wherever it can be. It obviously makes sense. We know how cost prohibitive books can be, especially now. Even 30-odd years ago they were awfully expensive. Trust me.

Nevertheless, thank you. That was a great presentation, Mr. Nicholson. Keep up the good work, and keep advocating for the people you do.

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. Now we’re going to go back up the list, folks. We’re still on time. The Research Universities Council of British Columbia, the B.C. Association of Institutes and Universities and B.C. Colleges, with Mr. Jamie Cassels, Dr. Alan Davis and Dr. Lane Trotter, respectively.

Gentlemen, welcome. Ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to give you a bit of a warning when we’re running out of time, and then we can go to the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is all yours.

J. Cassels: We are ready, Mr. Chair. I will begin on behalf of the three of us, representing British Columbia’s 25 post-secondary institutions. My name is Jamie Cassels, president of the University of Victoria and chair of the Research Universities Council of British Columbia. I’m joined by Lane Trotter, president of Langara College, and Alan Davis, president of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Thank you very much for your time today.

I think we can abbreviate what we have to say because our students make the case so well. We’re so proud of our students. Our joint submission, on behalf of the system, to the standing committee represents the high degree of collaboration among the three provincial post-secondary sectors, which include colleges, institutes, teaching universities and research universities.

A hallmark of the higher education system in British Columbia is the ability of students to move seamlessly between the different types of post-secondary institutions in the province through program partnerships and transfer credit pathways — differentiated institutions working toward the common purpose of providing a high-quality education for our students. B.C. is known to have the best-coordinated and -integrated post-secondary system in Canada.

Today my colleagues and I will speak about issues that are central to the success of young British Columbians who access our post-secondary system. Mental health and sexual violence, for example, have become more predominant and complex than 20 years ago, which you just heard from Maxwell. They require substantive responses and services.

Institutions are also committed to improving the levels of participation and success for aboriginal learners, consistent with the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Other supports, such as work-integrated learning, are key for students and also for prospective employers. Work-integrated learning, which is often referred to as co-op, includes internships, practicums and clinical placements, mentorship programs, community service and work study.

B.C. employers consistently agree that access to talent is the most significant challenge that they face. In 2015, 70 percent of all jobs in British Columbia were filled by workers with post-secondary education, and that percentage will continue to increase.

Employment outcomes for graduates across the system are very high. Five years after graduating, degree holders from the class of 2008 — not a good year to enter the workforce — had a 4.7 percent unemployment rate. Yet employer survey results indicate that graduates benefit even more with work-integrated learning, offering direct experience that provides employment relevance and strengthens linkages between industry and post-secondary institutions.

Forms of work-integrated learning are offered in every one of our institutions in the province. The number of co-op placements has grown from 10,000 to 14,000 students a year in the last five years. However, it’s increasingly challenging to offer new programs due to the lack of availability of employers and programmatic resources. Creative approaches are needed to increase placements and address barriers that face employers, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises. For example, grants or vouchers for employers for the costs associ-
[ Page 2752 ]
ated with placements in mentorships and financial assistance to students to travel to work placements could be introduced.

One new approach being introduced at UVic is an innovation acceleration co-op program to link students with mentors to support the design and launch of new technologies. There are so many more such possibilities to create new linkages for students with employers through targeted incentives and programmatic support.

I’ll now turn to my colleague Alan Davis, who will speak on other issues that are important to student success.

According to a 2013 survey of 34,000 students at 32 Canadian post-secondary institutions, 20 percent of students reported being diagnosed or treated by a professional for a mental health condition. In a 2016 follow-up survey of 43,000 students at 41 Canadian institutions, this metric increased to 26 percent. Conditions include anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders.

Personal counselling for students at one medium-sized B.C. institution has increased by 56 percent in the three years from 2012 to ’15. Counsellors at this institution are now each responsible for about a thousand student clients. Each.

Another B.C. institution reports that approximately 10 percent, as you heard earlier from the UVic students, of those seeking counselling support are assessed as high risk for suicide, while another institution reports that 29 percent of students who sought counselling considered withdrawing from a program due to the condition they were in.

By providing students with the skills and capacity to cope with stress and other challenges, institutions can contribute significantly to a student’s success and advancement. Our goal is that the number of students becoming mentally ill and requiring medical intervention and/or suffering adverse personal and academic impacts will be reduced as a result of early intervention.

One other area of focus in terms of enhanced student support pertains to the area of sexual violence. We all agree that safety from sexual violence is critical to a student’s success and the overall well-being of the student. B.C.’s post-secondary institutions do not tolerate sexual assault or any acts of sexual violence and are committed to making their campuses respectful environments where students can study and live free from concerns of sexual assault while also being more responsive to the needs of victims.

One of the key challenges institutions face in providing sexual violence supports for students is the lack of staffing in health, counselling and legal affairs. The complexity and difficulty of cases presented to university staff is manifold, increasing requirements for third-party investigations and balancing the needs of the victim and survivor with administrative fairness and the rights of the accused.

Institutions are undertaking consultations to improve policies and practices, and strategies will provide clear direction and a more coordinated approach to programs and resources in order to educate campus communities on the prevention of sexual assault and on resources and options available to those affected.

Initiatives would include sexual violence education and prevention initiatives, with the goals of increasing safety and security, making reporting easier, increasing understanding of consent, dispelling misinformation, informing how to support victims and promoting a culture that does not tolerate sexual violence.

I’ll now hand over to Dr. Trotter to conclude our presentation on high-priority areas needing government support.

As indicated, I’m Dr. Lane Trotter, chair of B.C. Colleges and president of Langara College. In our submission, we confirmed the commitment of B.C.’s public post-secondary institutions to the success of aboriginal and indigenous learners. Our post-secondary institutions have made significant increases to programs and initiatives developed in consultation with our aboriginal and indigenous partners, our students, our faculty and our staff.

In our submission, we reference innovative examples of support for aboriginal students like establishment of an indigenous support centre, an Academy of Indigenous Scholars and mentorship opportunities for prospective new and returning aboriginal and indigenous students.

Progress has been made, but more needs to be done. We know that connection to elders holds the key to success for many indigenous learners. The ability to enhance connections to First Nations and aboriginal communities, student advisers and culture would result in more students enrolling and completing a post-secondary education.

Investment in programs that include advocacy and advice for aboriginal students as well as dialogue and partnerships between aboriginal communities and public post-secondary institutions would also contribute directly to and enhance student success. The aboriginal and indigenous population in B.C. is growing at a significant rate. They are our future workers and community leaders, and we need to invest in their success.

I will close with the last part of our submission, which asks for reinvestment. We fully appreciate the need to maintain fiscal discipline and have undertaken numerous initiatives to increase efficiency and diversity of our revenue sources to support students. Programming has increased to address areas of greatest need, but funds have been diverted to meet complex non-educational
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challenges that we face in our institutions that have already been referenced.

In fiscal year 2013-14, there was an operating grant reduction of $50 million over three years, which presented a major challenge for the public post-secondary institutions to meet demands for increased student service supports while at the same time preserving access and quality.

We all know that a public post-secondary education is the path to economic and individual success. The labour market will increasingly turn to post-secondary-educated workers to meet its workforce needs. A high-quality post-secondary education is essential, and we propose that the $50 million reduction in funding be reinvested, specifically, in areas of greatest needs identified in this submission.

We, as public post-secondary institutions in B.C., are committed to working with the provincial government to continue to offer a high-quality education. But investment is needed to support aboriginal and indigenous learners, to assist with learners addressing mental health challenges and to assure that British Columbia and British Columbians continue to have access to one of the best educational systems in Canada.

On behalf of my colleagues, I thank you for the opportunity to present to this committee.

J. Yap: Thanks very much. I certainly appreciate that we do have a world-class post-secondary education system here in British Columbia.

On aboriginal learning, what are the trend numbers? I’m hearing that it’s slowly trending in the right direction. Say, over the last three years, participation rate and graduation rates — do you have that?

L. Trotter: We do have that information, and I can provide it. It’s not with me. But we have seen an increase.

The challenge that we have is that in Lower Mainland communities — for example, Langara — 2 percent of the community is First Nations; our percentage of that is 2.6 percent, so we’re above the average. But more needs to be done to ensure that we support First Nations learners coming from smaller communities and also those who are coming from urban communities.

J. Cassels: If I could add just a very brief supplementary, we’ve done research to determine what kinds of interventions are most effective at increasing indigenous student graduation rates. Elders programs, financial assistance, work opportunities, some kind of opportunity to engage with their communities — those interventions have very significantly increased retention and graduation rates.

J. Yap: Good. If you can provide us the numbers before Friday, that would be great — for the system.

Not really a question, but more a comment. I appreciate you identifying where you believe extra resources are critically needed in the system. Particularly, it comes across to me that really what we’re talking about is inclusiveness in post-secondary institutions — inclusiveness for aboriginal students, for students who may be going through mental health issues and for students who may have had a crisis in their lives, whether it’s sexual assault or otherwise.

I appreciate the clarity and the definition around where extra resources would go. I think it’s helpful to the committee, and it was very clear. Appreciate it.

Seeing none, gentlemen, thank you very much for presenting and taking the time today — and, Dr. Davis, for coming all the way over. That was a nice flight.

Finally, the morning wraps up with the Camosun College Faculty Association — Al Morrison.

Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes left. Then you can conclude your thoughts, and we go to the committee for the grilling. All right?

I don’t bring with me statistics, but a little bit of my background. I am the president of Camosun College Faculty Association, but I also participate in a larger umbrella group that I’m sure you’ve heard from — the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators. I’m also an instructor, a teacher in the School of Business.

I’ve been looking at what’s happening at our school. I have experience at other post-secondaries in Alberta — MacEwan University, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology — and I’m starting to see some of the trends.

Basically, what I’d hoped that I might be able to provide today is an opportunity to help. One of the things I teach in my School of Business programs is a course on change management. Kind of central to change management is including everyone in the conversation.

I’m just really here to say that as we go forward and decisions are being made about where money needs to go and support needs to take place, consider that instructors, as the front line…. Hearing my colleagues speak
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this morning, just a few moments ago…. Those are all things that present themselves, first and foremost, in the classroom. Whether it’s issues of mental health problems, whether it’s English-as-a-second-language students coming from other countries and struggling in the classroom, whether it’s students with financial debt trying to make ends meet while going to school, those things present themselves first and foremost in the classroom.

I think instructors really just want to be a part of arriving at solutions to help in that regard. We want to be at the table to discuss these things early so that we can be a part of the preparation rather than being part of repairing something that doesn’t work afterwards.

For me to come in here and expect to offer solutions, where money should go, here or there…. I think my colleagues ahead of me and many of the others that you have spoken to will have done a better job in that regard. My request is to think of organizations like the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators, like the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and include them in an early conversation as you think about where you may be wanting to make changes in post-secondary.

I thought about what I could bring to this conversation. That’s all I wanted to do, to just say: “We’d like to be involved. We’d like to be engaged. We want to be a part of the solution.” We don’t want to be a group that’s always on the outside saying, “This was done wrong,” or “This could be done better.” We want to be there with you, solving these problems.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Morrison. I appreciate that. I’m going to go to the committee with any questions they might have. That was very short and kind of a different presentation than what we’re used to. That’s certainly true. Nevertheless, we do appreciate it.

R. Austin: Well, I guess my question is…. Post-secondary institutions are, to a large extent, sort of self-governing. I’m surprised that you’re not at the table initiating or being part of those discussions. Is that widespread, or is that just something that you’ve experienced at Camosun?

A. Morrison: No, I think that’s widespread. My colleagues and I would have talked about decisions that are made. We kind of talk about them after the fact. But we’d really like to be there.

As the president of Camosun College Faculty Association, I sit with other presidents in the college and institute environment — there’s another group that represents universities — and we talk about the issues that students are having right now. In fact, we have a major campaign underway right now called Open the Doors, which is all about finding ways to provide more access for learners to our programs.

We understand that post-secondary is an investment in the future. We need to look at it that way. Rather than looking at it as an expense item, look at it as the positives that will come out of it down the way.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Any further questions? Seeing none, Mr. Morrison, thank you very much for taking the time. We appreciate it. Enjoy a beautiful afternoon.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you had a good lunch. Back to our agenda here, we have the Seymour Salmonid Society — Shaun Hollingsworth and Brian Smith.

Gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome. Just to let you know, you have ten minutes for the presentation. When time is waning down a little bit, I’ll get your attention and you can conclude your thoughts. Then I can go to the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is all yours.

S. Hollingsworth: Good afternoon, and thank you for allowing us to make this presentation. As my sign says in front of me, my name is Shaun Hollingsworth. I’m the president of the Seymour Salmonid Society. Today we have Brian Smith, our hatchery manager, with us. We represent approximately 800 volunteers and three full-time staff members, of which Brian is the senior staff member.

We are here today looking for the provincial government to help us clear a naturally occurred rock slide on the Seymour River by budgeting for and contributing $100,000 for 2017. As stewards for fish on the Seymour River, we are located in North Vancouver, and we like to think of ourselves as the jewel of the North Shore.

In December of 2014, just after I was elected president of the society, there was a rock slide of approximately 65,000 cubic metres of rock that came down. This rock slide, as I said earlier, was naturally occurring. It was 200 years in the making. It was ice and water opening a small crack, and down came the 65,000 cubic metres of rock. Approximately 50,000 cubic metres still remain in the river.

We had a gut feel that that rock slide was in fact an impediment for fish, both returning to spawn and juveniles out-migrating. We had to raise money and prove scientifically that, yes, indeed it is an impediment to fish mov-
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ing both ways on the river. At the same time, we’d hired a geotechnical engineer, and we formed a round table consisting of six levels of government — the federal government, the provincial government, Metro Vancouver, the district of North Vancouver, and the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

We had a presentation from the consultant, and the consultant gave us eight recommendations. We decided that reshaping the rock slide was the best way to go. This rock slide occurred in a 200-foot-deep canyon, so it’s not easy to get at, and there are residents down below. Although we are concerned for fish, we’re concerned for the human beings that live below the rock slide first.

In reshaping this rock slide, we have to be very cautious with the products that we use. So we’re using a low-velocity explosive that doesn’t explode with a large boom. It merely cracks the rock. We have to go in, similar to the way that you would if you were using large explosives. You have to drill the rock, and then you place this low-velocity explosive known as Nxburst into the holes that have been drilled. You tamp it with sand to keep the energy in, and then the blaster detonates this product.

We’ve just concluded — we’ve got washed out — for the season now. We’ve blasted five times at what they refer to as the toe of the slide, the bottom end. Now we’re waiting for Mother Nature to push that rock downstream into the deep pools within that 200-foot-deep canyon.

It costs us about $8,000 a day for the scalers, the blasters and the consultants and for the product to perform this work. We are hopeful that next summer we can have a larger window of opportunity and work for the entire summer when the water levels are low.

Just to give you an idea of what’s happening in there, all summer long the flows on that river have been about two cubic metres per second. On Thursday, they jumped to 50 cubic metres per second and it’s anticipated on Friday they’d go to 75. It will peak this winter at 500 cubic metres per second.

You talk about flashing. Metro Vancouver does have a reservoir, and that supplies about one-third of the domestic water for Vancouver, on this river.

The slide happened about four kilometres from tide line. The hatchery is located at kilometre 19. We have built off-channel spawning areas at kilometres 17 and 18, so today we are trapping and trucking fish around the slide. Last year, when we did that, we utilized about 3,000 volunteer hours, so it’s certainly not sustainable. We have undertaken this project, and we’re here asking that you please budget for some moneys to help us.

We have had a visit by Minister Steve Thomson. He agreed that this was certainly a worthwhile project, but the recommendation was that we come and make the presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance.

Our mission statement says that we’d like to restore the migration conditions for all species in the Seymour River that existed before the 2014 rock slide in a safe and sustainable manner. So we’re looking for you to help us with that.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much for that. I’ll go to the committee for questions, if they have any.

J. Tegart: Thank you very much, Shaun, for your presentation. I’ve learned a lot about fish in the last year and a half or so.

In regards to the federal government, is there a commitment from the feds to put dollars in?

S. Hollingsworth: Thank you very much for the question. Yes, there is. I should mention, for those of you that are keeping score, approximately 30 to 50 percent of the coho that return into Burrard Inlet do come up the Seymour River. There are about three or four rivers in British Columbia that have summer and winter steelhead, and we are one of those rivers. So truly a jewel on the north shore.

R. Austin: I don’t have a question, just a comment. I just want to say thank you for the presentation, but more so, thank you to all the amazing volunteers who do this kind of work. I don’t think a lot of British Columbians realize just the kinds of hours that people who are devoted to protecting the salmon habitat and the fisheries put in, so a thank-you to all of you.

I’m sure we’ll have good deliberations around this. It seems like a very small amount of money and a huge benefit to maintain this river and to maintain the species that are in it.

S. Hollingsworth: Thank you very much. There was a question with regard to the federal government. Yes, they have contributed. We also have other funding partners that we go to, and at $8,000 a day, it eats that money up rather quickly.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I have a question then. I apologize if I missed it early in your speech, if you did say it, but how much money are we looking at to complete the task?

S. Hollingsworth: It’s two to five years, and we’ve just completed the first year. I’m the most optimistic guy in the world, and when the engineer said to us two to five years, I thought: “Ah, one to two years, we’ll be done.” Having seen the amount of rock that’s been broken this year and the amount of effort and work that went into it, I’m thinking four to five years now.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s time, Mr. Hollingsworth. Money? You had an ask in there. I’m just trying to pin down a dollar amount.
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S. Hollingsworth: We’re asking you, through this committee, for $100,000. The original estimate from the consultants was $1.25 million to complete.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wow. Okay. This doesn’t involve removing or moving the debris. This also involves scaling, you said. You’re bringing down more rock and removing it, which would potentially come to fall into the Capilano, eventually.

S. Hollingsworth: Because it’s a 200-foot-deep canyon, you have to be a skilled individual. I refer to those skilled individuals as scalers. They’re tethered on ropes from the time they start in the morning till the time they go home at night. Those are the individuals I’m referring to as scalers.

The first task that we had to do was remove any danger trees in the area so that there was no danger for those employees. Then they did come down, utilizing bars, knocking any loose debris off the face of the rock slide.

Now, they’re actually standing on these rocks. Some of them are the size of your house. They’re that big. They’re standing there with air drills drilling the rocks. A big day is to drill 40 metres of holes. It just shows you. That’s a ten-hour shift, four guys.

Yes, I’ve been down on the rocks. I’ve been tethered. It’s not something a guy my age can consider as a full-time job nowadays.

S. Gibson: Great work. Good job, you guys. My question is coho, steelhead…. What other fish, other salmon species, are we talking about here?

B. Smith: The Seymour has runs of every species other than sockeye. We do see chum and chinook, winter and summer steelhead, and also cutthroat and Dolly Varden in there.

B. Smith: Sockeye is the only species that we don’t have on the Seymour. Sockeye require a lake to rear in for two years. There’s a man-made lake, the reservoir, but there’s no access for fish to get into there currently.

S. Hollingsworth: The wild stocks, of course, are the coho and the summer- and winter-run steelhead. The others we’ve enhanced.

B. Smith: The coho and the steelhead are unique to the Seymour. They’ve never been enhanced with stocks from another system, so they’re genetically distinct to the Seymour.

It’s estimated that if we don’t get these rocks moved, we’ll be down to just remnant populations by 2019.

S. Gibson: Well, we all know that steelhead is kind of a lightning rod species. When they’re flourishing, every other fish species seems to do well. So, good for you.

S. Hollingsworth: They are the Olympic athlete. I mean, they will jump, but it’s terrible when you see these things. The rock slide, as Brian indicated, put this new lake in place. It’s about ten metres, or 30 feet, deep, and it’s 850 metres long. The fish just can’t jump that to get up.

With the juveniles, we used acoustic tags about the size of a grain of rice. UBC helped us put those in. None of those fish made it down past the slide.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, gentlemen, for taking the time. We appreciate it. A very worthy cause, and topical.

We have actually reformed our steelhead caucus, as it’s called, within our group. We’ve heard from fishers from around the province. In particular, the two gentlemen that come to mind were in Kamloops a week or two ago — quite passionate about the work that they do. You instil the same values, so thank you very much for all the work that you do — appreciate it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next we’re going to jump ahead. I’m going to ask Dr. Katharine McKeen and Mike McLoughlin to come forward — the Walk-In Clinics of B.C. Association.

Good afternoon. While you’re making yourselves comfortable there, I’ll let you know you have ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention with a couple of minutes remaining so we can then go to the committee for any questions they might have. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

M. McLoughlin: Excellent. We’re just handing out some of the material. My name is Mike McLoughlin. I’m the founding director of Walk-In Clinics of B.C. Association. This is Dr. Katharine McKeen, who’s the co-chair of the Walk-In Clinics working group with the Victoria Division of Family Practice.

My wife and I own a walk-in clinic in Kelowna, British Columbia. Last year, in September, we launched a new organization — Walk-In Clinics of B.C. Association — and our inaugural event was to have a presentation to your committee.

That information I’ve just given you was last year’s presentation. I know that there are a couple of new members on the committee, so I thought we should distribute it again.

This afternoon we’re going to talk about the value of walk-in clinics. Our tag line is “A very valuable service.” That is a quote from our Health Minister regarding walk-in clinics. We want to talk about the value of the clinics, the social value and the economic value.

K. McKeen: Thank you, Mike. And thank you very much for inviting us this afternoon.

Good afternoon. I’m a family physician who’s very proud to provide walk-in clinic care in Victoria. I’m also the co-chair of the Victoria Division of Family Practice, as well as the chair of a walk-in clinic working group, a committee of walk-in clinic physicians in Victoria.

I see patients in walk-in clinics who are very complex. They see us because of a sudden change in their health, a crisis and, as well, for routine care. They include the elderly who do not know how to access our health system. Those with chronic disease, mental health and substance use issues. They’re the young, the not employed, the new-to-our community; it’s a wide range of people.

Health care access is a social determinant of health, and walk-in clinics offer a low-barrier access to timely health care to everyone.

Patients who are not attached to a family physician face multiple, systematic barriers to making attachment with a physician. Many family physicians are not able to accept new patients. And many of my patients cannot afford to take time away from work to see a family physician who works traditional hours.

My group of walk-in clinic physicians wanted to understand who our patients are; where they receive the majority of their care, if it’s not at the walk-in clinic; what type of medical problems, broadly, do they attend for.

We also wanted to understand: what is the health system impact of walk-in clinic closure? That’s happening in real time in many communities across British Columbia. We wanted to know: where would our patient go if this walk-in clinic was not available?

The Victoria Division of Family Practice and the Department of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria collaborated on a study of our walk-in clinic population.

Referring to my study, which you have received in your handout, 49 percent in walk-in clinics are not attached. They do not have a family doctor. They also tend to have other vulnerabilities. Forty-six percent of walk-in clinic attendees have a household income of less than $40,000 a year. And about 43 percent of those patients without a family doctor have children in their home.

Unattached patients often seek care for mental health and substance use issues, chronic diseases. They’re elderly, they’re socially isolated and many of them have a brand-new problem. They didn’t realize that they needed to have a family doctor until suddenly they were in a bad situation.

Also, 26 percent of the patients that we see are attached to a family physician. Their family doctor’s office was closed, the wait was too long to see a physician, their doctor is sick, their physician is retiring — suddenly, they feel vulnerable also.

When we asked our patients where they would go, our patients told us that if that walk-in clinic was closed on the day that they did the survey, they would go to the emergency room — regardless of the reason for seeking care.

Walk-in clinics impact the health system by preventing unnecessary visits to the emergency room. Our study, which is just preliminary in terms of the data that you have, demonstrates the need for walk-in clinics and the need for deliberate and conscientious incorporation of walk-in clinics into the primary care home model that’s being developed in British Columbia and, also, into the integrated primary community network of health and care.

The walk-in clinic providers that I work with in this walk-in clinic working group are thoughtfully considering how this can be accomplished. For example, walk-in clinics should be incorporated into neighbourhood networks of family practices.

We need to overcome system barriers by incorporating the walk-in clinics into primary care homes. That way, we can coordinate care between the patient, the walk-in clinic physician, the traditional family physician’s practice where that patient might belong or might belong to in the future, with the emergency room, with the hospital on discharge, with the health authority’s integrated primary community care services.

We know that walk-in clinics relieve the burden on family doctors and on patients. With better communication and coordination of care, family physicians will know that their patients are well cared for. There will be fewer duplications of tests and visits.

Allowing walk-in clinic doctors like myself to use attachment fees, so that the walk-in doctor can function as the patient’s primary care physician, will facilitate attachment, making it easier for those who are difficult to attach to receive a family physician and benefit from that.

It’s essential that walk-in clinics are built into the primary care home model. Walk-in clinics provide an important, timely and low-barrier model of care. This is an important social determinant of health and has huge health implications. Walk-in clinics serve everyone, especially the most vulnerable in our society, and developing the walk-in clinic model into the health system by design
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will improve patient-centred, person-focused care, continuity of care, coordination of care and improved quality. So strengthening access to low-barrier health care needs does need to be a health system priority.

M. McLoughlin: It is a conundrum for the health care system in B.C. that despite there being more physicians registered in the province than ever before, many British Columbians continue to lack attachment to a family physician. Our association supported the GP for Me initiative, sponsored by the General Practice Services Committee. This initiative had the worthy goal of providing a family doctor for everyone who needed a GP in British Columbia. Despite valiant efforts, the GPSC was unable to reach this goal. That leaves patients to rely on walk-in clinics or emergency departments for necessary primary care.

Walk-in clinics are a better option than emergency departments for several reasons. Not only does the College of Physicians and Surgeons require that walk-in clinics provide continuity of care, something that is difficult for emergency physicians to provide; it has been shown that for every $35 to $50 it costs to see a patient in a walk-in clinic, the system saves the cost of $185 for a non-urgent visit to an emergency department. These numbers derive from a study of non-urgent emergency department visits at the Richmond General Hospital in 2008.

Despite their importance, clinics are closing. There have been closures in Victoria, Vernon and Kelowna this past year. Our association has identified 25 walk-in clinics that have closed over the past five years in B.C. Factors most cited by clinic owners have been the lack of physician resources to cover the walk-in schedule and also the cap on the daily billings. Physicians who bill between 51 and 65 patients are subject to a 50 percent discount, and after 65 patients, they can’t bill for anything at all.

Clinics used to manage this cap by scheduling two or more doctors each day. However, there are not enough doctors to do this, and clinics cannot afford to operate on a reduced payment schedule. This means clinics must close early, post signs, saying, “The doctor has reached the government-mandated billing cap for the day,” and turn patients away. This results in early-morning lineups, with anxious patients waiting hours outside clinics, hoping to get on the daily register before clinics cut off registration.

Walk-in Clinics of B.C. Association recommends that the Medical Services Commission revisit the policy on the daily billing cap with the goal of providing incentive for family doctors to increase their capacity to see more patients on a daily basis. Specifically, we support the elimination of the 50 percent discount between 51 and 65 patient visits. We understand that the MSC may feel it important to maintain a cap at 65 per day. However, given that patients are being turned away at clinics and potentially ending up in emergency, full payment up to 65 is warranted.

This past May, during the debate on budget estimates, the opposition critic, Judy Darcy, asked Terry Lake, hon. Minister of Health, whether or not the government was considering revisiting the cap on daily billings. The minister replied: “Not at this time.” Our association would encourage the minister, the Medical Services Commission and the select standing committee to consider that there is no better time than right now for this change. By adding an additional 15 spots in a physician’s daily schedule, you will increase access to primary care services for unattached patients, reduce or eliminate early-morning lineups outside clinics, reduce the load on emergency departments and save the health care system money. This is the economic value walk-in clinics provide.

In conclusion, we commend the government initiative to increase the capacity for primary care recently announced in Kamloops. We believe our proposal would deliver increased capacity for access to primary care services throughout the province without requiring significant additional resources. Thank you for your consideration.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I’ll go to the committee for questions, if you have any.

J. Tegart: Thank you very much for your presentation. I live in a community that struggles finding doctors and certainly has no access to walk-in clinics.

As someone who is not very versed in the health care system…. The billing is a mystery to many people. If a family physician in my community…. How many patients are they allowed to bill a day?

M. McLoughlin: I think in your community they continue to be limited by the cap. There are, I think, 11 communities in northern British Columbia that are not subject to the cap because they are on a special list.

M. McLoughlin: Then, after that, they would be billing the full amount, but MSP only pays 50 percent of each billing.

Certainly, from my community and people in my community…. You’ve identified it — the strength of having hours outside of what people would think of as work hours. So people could go when they finish work or when their kids have ear infections in the middle of the night. I think all of those kinds of arguments are strong arguments. Certainly, the effectiveness of a walk-in clinic versus the emergency room…. I think there’s no question in all of that.

I’m curious about a couple of things. One is…. You mention more funds for attachment, for patients to attach to doctors and to attach to a clinic. Why would a physician choose…? I guess I’d ask both of you: why would you choose a walk-in clinic versus a family practice? If a doctor is at a walk-in clinic and they’re interested in attaching to patients and having a patient load, why would they choose a walk-in clinic versus a family practice, for example?

C. James (Deputy Chair): No, more why. Why would the physician choose to work at a walk-in clinic versus…? I’m sure there are reasons. I’m just curious.

K. McKeen: Yes. In fact, the Victoria Division of Family Practice is about to engage in a study that will ask that question of physicians who work in walk-in clinics. The question hasn’t ever been asked before.

Looking into what that study might say…. For myself, I have small children. The business model of working in a clinic and having my hours very clear is a tremendous advantage to me. So there’s a business model option for me. I’m not interested in the business of family medicine. I don’t want to hire staff. I want to see patients. I want to not be…. I’m not a business person. For me, it’s about the model. I’ve done this for about 15 or 20 years.

For a patient, the…. Some patients prefer to not be attached. Our study is trying to understand what some of those pieces are. Some people cannot be attached because they have some psychiatric problems or difficulty forming relationships with people. They’re not able to get into a practice. They’re not able to wait the months and months that a wait-list for a family physician would entail. There are many, many reasons why patients are not attached to physicians.

C. James (Deputy Chair): My second question, really quickly, if we’ve got time, is the issue of other practitioners. One of the things that’s being looked at, of course…. In family medicine, there are community health centres and nurse practitioners and other professionals involved in the medical practice. Are the walk-in clinics also looking at that model? Have there been discussions around walk-in clinics and around looking at that model?

M. McLoughlin: There are about 320 walk-in clinics in British Columbia. Many of these clinics operate both family practice and walk-in services. In those clinics, they have nurses and nurse practitioners that work alongside of the clinics. You’ll see that in Courtenay, for example. They’ll have that person there.

The government is training more nurse practitioners. But there could be more of those allied health professionals available for that kind of service.

S. Gibson: A quick question. You just said that you would like to have more opportunities to get greater billing. Then I just heard the doctor say she likes it because she has discrete hours. So I saw a disconnect there. One the one hand, Mike, you’re saying: “We want more opportunities to bill.” But then the doctor says: “I like it, because I’ve got kids at home and I don’t want to work outside my hours.” Is there a disconnect there?

M. McLoughlin: Well, I think the challenge is that it used to be that you could have several doctors on during the day, where you would be able to schedule fixed hours and have a morning shift and an afternoon shift. Now it’s coming to the point where you don’t have that flexibility. So instead of working, say, a six-hour shift, if the doctor worked an eight-hour shift, then they would still work just one shift in that particular day. But they wouldn’t….

M. McLoughlin: Yeah, they could start later. Right now that’s what we do. You know, they’re open from ten until six and other types of times.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s where we’re going to end it. We’re out of time. But thank you very much for taking the time to present. It’s very much appreciated — I think the first presentation of its kind so far this tour. Thank you for taking the time to come out. Take care.

J. Tupper: Thank you, Mr. Hamilton. It’s great to be here and have this opportunity to speak to the committee. I’m here with my curator of Asian art, Barry Till — he’s going to show a few objects later on, so that’ll make it a little more exciting for you — and the president of our board of directors, Ruth Wittenberg. I think this is
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the second time Ruth has been in this room today. She’s also going to help show some work.

I’m here representing the gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, which has been struggling for the last 30 years with the constraints of our physical space. We have developed what we know is an effective and sustainable solution that will improve our capacity to engage the community and to protect a vital collection.

The gallery was incorporated in 1947. It moved into its current location in 1951. Over the subsequent 30 years or so, it has incrementally added on to the gallery. Its last addition was put on in the mid-1980s, and we have grown in visitorship by 75 percent since that time.

The gallery has a staff of 26 people. We have about 3,500 members. We’ve got about 400 volunteers that work at the gallery. We have a board that’s made up of 18 individuals representing a variety of people from the local community, and all of them, I’m happy to say, are substantial donors of both time and funds to the gallery’s operation. Our operating budget averages, from year to year, about $2.3 million. We raise 60 percent of that ourselves. The other 40 percent comes from all three levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal.

One quarter of our members are youth — that’s a large number for an art museum — and we’ve made substantial efforts to increase that number. We do a lot of outreach programs. We have a program right now where we’re giving over 200 free family memberships to recent refugee arrivals from the Middle East to welcome them into our community. About 37 percent of our visitors are tourists to Victoria. That changes seasonally, so, like, in the winter, 50 percent will be tourists.

We circulate exhibitions across Canada and around the world. That’s something that we use to increase the reputation of the gallery and, by extension, the province. What really sets the gallery apart from any other art museum in Canada is our collection. We have 19,000 works in the collection. The most significant of that is the Asian collection.

Now I’m going to ask Barry to come and talk a little about the Asian collection and show some works. Then Ruth is going to give us a hand here.

B. Till: The Asian collection is considered the second-best in Canada. The very best is the Royal Ontario Museum. We haven’t been collecting as long, but we have got a lot of things that are very special. I’m going to show you a few of them now.

Over half the collection is now Asian art. We have things from China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Southeast Asia, India. Some of our things are among the best in the world. We’ve been very fortunate with our collectors.

When I first started work, when I arrived here, Colin Graham was the director. He said: “You’re never going to be able to buy anything. We have a very small collection. Japanese art is quite good; the rest is not.” He said: “What you have to learn to do is find out who collects and try and get them. In other words, collect collectors.” We’ve been very successful with that. We have got some of the most interesting things you’re going to see in Canada.

B. Till: We did get this past security, by the way. These are ge daggers. These particular ones here are placed in a tomb. They’re from the 14th century B.C., so roughly 3,400 years ago. These particular ones here were collected by a Canadian missionary who was in China in the 1920s, named James Menzies. There are three here which you can see. Some even have hemp around them. This hemp, again, would be 3,400 years old.

If you’d like to come up and have a look, there’s one that actually would have been used for sacrifices. That’s this one here.

J. Tupper: This was difficult to get through security, I have to say. I hope you appreciate it.

B. Till: Remember the dates. So 3,400 years ago. We also have a Syrian object up right now which is 6,000 years old.

Our collection is quite spectacular. If you come to the gallery right now, we have the best of the best of our Asian collection up. I’d say roughly $20 million worth of art is on display, a lot of very spectacular things, including paintings from Dunhuang. We have oracle bones, which is the beginning of the Chinese language. They were also given to us by the Menzies family. This makes up a major portion of our collection. We have very good archeological stuff. Ceramics. Bronzes. Paintings. Prints.

When it comes to things like Japan…. We do have the best collection in Canada of Japanese art. I’ve brought you a very simple piece right here. This is a print. Some of these here are worth in the tens of thousands. This print happens to be only worth $59. Why is it so special? Things are happening right now. Japan is letting a lot of these prints go because there are so many.

The Internet has brought the price down. Originally, when I first arrived about 35 years ago, that would have cost around $300. Now it’s $59. I actually just finished putting up an exhibition of all the things I’ve been buying on the Internet. We filled the whole room with about $15,000 worth of prints — it’s a whole exhibition — whereas one of these objects here is more like $20,000. We do run the gamut from very old and very expensive to very inexpensive.

That one there that you just saw, if you could show it Ruth, is a…. Japan was changing in the Meiji period. They were starting to modernize. They had isolated themselves for so many years, and now they were inviting the British and the Americans in to improve, civilize, westernize
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the nation so that they could compete. The British came in with a locomotive. If you notice, the locomotive has got square wheels. The artist didn’t understand about it. They also occasionally had two engines on the same track heading towards each other.

This is a very famous story. It happened in 1872. Two British railway engineers were supposed to take the emperor from Tokyo to Yokohama. It was going to be 53 minutes, the inaugural run. They thought this was so special, they wanted to do a really good job, so they went as fast as they could, and they arrived in 23 minutes. Instead of being praised, they almost lost their lives, because the Japanese hadn’t rolled out the red carpet for the emperor yet. So they thought they were doing something good. In the end, they were deported and told: “Don’t come back. You did something stupid.”

We have a huge range of artifacts. I can show exhibitions of Asian objects for about six years, changing every three months, and not show the same piece. So it’s very strong. We do rotate our shows because we are a smaller gallery. We need more space for exhibitions, and we need more space for storage because the collections are still coming in. We just finished getting 400 teapots, different shapes. There’s a whole bunch of Japanese ancient photographs coming in from about 1870 or so.

Things keep coming in great numbers to us. We get donations from across Canada. Part of the reason why we do so well is that we do exhibitions, do catalogues and share our collection with the rest of Canada.

We’ve done, since I’ve been here, about 15 different shows that have toured across Canada. Therefore, people see that we’re doing something with their collection, and that’s partly why they give to Victoria rather than Ontario or other places.

J. Tupper: You can tell how passionate Barry is about his field. He’s been with the gallery for 35 years now. We’re very lucky to have him.

Since I was here last, we have received all of our permits and permissions from the city for our redevelopment. We’ve completed the design. We’ve built our construction team through an open RFP process. We’ve built support in the community. We’ve got 83.83 percent of all the constituencies — we did some polling — in the lower Island, including…. Of course, it’s much higher around Victoria. But, for example, in Nanaimo and North Cowichan, 79 percent of the people polled support this development.

We’ve done a business case. This is a $21 million project — $7 million from the federal government, $7 million from the provincial government and $7 million from us. We’ve raised about 81 percent of our $7 million already, and we haven’t even launched our capital campaign. So we’re well on our way on this project. We’re developing construction drawings right at this moment.

The federal government has indicated that they will look favourably on our request. They’ve increased the amount of money in this program to fund cultural infrastructure. It used to be that you would have to have the province on side first, but they said now: “No, just put your submission in right away, because we’re trying to get this money rolled out as quickly as possible.” We’re looking to break ground next April.

I think we’ve clearly articulated we have a business case. We’ve clearly articulated the request and need for this. We’ve put a submission in to the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development. We’re hoping that we will be part of next year’s budget.

Thank you very much. Hope you’ve enjoyed our presentation. Are there questions?

S. Hamilton (Chair): I will go to the committee and ask if there are any questions.

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation. It was unique — mixing it up a little bit here. That was great.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Not a question, just a thank-you — first, for the amount of resources that you’ve already raised. I think that’s important for people to recognize. The broad community of greater Victoria and the Island really support the gallery, and I think you’ve shown that with the kind of resources that you’ve been able to raise. So I think this is a reasonable request.

And thank you for the show and tell. I think it was entertaining for the committee, but also a reminder to folks who aren’t from Victoria. I know everybody boasts about their own communities, but when the Legislature sits in February, the gallery will be open and people can have an opportunity to go down and see for themselves. I think it is one of the real jewels of Victoria. Appreciate it.

J. Tupper: Carole actually got the support of all the NDP MLAs in the region for our project, so I thank you for that.

S. Gibson: I appreciate the fact that I’ve had a couple of tours now through the gallery, and I’m very impressed with the vision that you have. How are you trying to engage young people? That’s always the lament that I have — that young people seem to be less interested in art than perhaps when I was a young boy. How are you engaging them?

J. Tupper: Well, of course, we have a lot of programs for children. We have Baby Picasso programs for kids that are under two years old. But we also use social media a lot, and when I say 25 percent of our memberships are youth, I think a lot of it has to do with that. We’re very wise in our use of social media.

We hold events specifically targeted towards youth of different demographics. When you say “youth,” you’re
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looking at teenagers or you’re looking at 20-year-olds or something like that. So it depends on the demographic. We do programs with local school divisions to bring kids in — intensive. Kids that show some sort of artistic promise, we focus on them. There’s a variety of different strategies.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Seeing no further questions, thank you, Mr. Tupper. Appreciate you taking the time. As always, a pleasure.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Our next presenters are coming on via conference call. We have the Parent Advocacy Network for Public Education and the Prince of Wales Mini School parent assistant coordination committee.

G. Avrahami: Not exactly. I’m representing today just the Prince of Wales Mini School, the parent assistant coordination committee. We are both representing the Prince of Wales Mini School.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Got it. I want to make sure we get it correct for the record. If I could just ask you to identify yourself when you speak, so we have it for the record, for Hansard, for the Legislature. As you may know, ten minutes for the presentation and up to five minutes for questions. With that, I will turn it over to you.

G. Avrahami: Thank you very much. Today we are here…. This is Sharon Berringer and myself, Gili Avrahami. I will be reading our statement. May I begin?

G. Avrahami: Hon. Scott Hamilton, Carole James and members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, I’m speaking today on behalf of the parent assistant coordination committee of Prince of Wales Mini School. Prince of Wales Mini School is a Vancouver school district alternative program provided to meet the academic and social needs of high-aptitude, highly motivated students. The school was established in 1973 and has become a model for high school enrichment programs in Vancouver and throughout the province.

We recognize the complex challenges that this committee faces. Funds are needed to support a wide range of programs and institutions in our province. While addressing all these demands is a challenge, we would suggest to the committee that a properly funded public education system will have enormous benefits for the health and economic prosperity of our province. Indeed, investing in public education is the solution to many of the challenges facing British Columbia.

Investing in education isn’t just the right thing to do; it’s smart economics. To quote the Global Economic Symposium: “The only thing more expensive than investing in education is not investing in education. Inadequate education produces high costs for society in terms of public spending, crime, health and economic growth.”

Back in 2009, the Lieutenant-Governor, the Hon. Steven Point, stated: “In tight economic times, it is smart to maintain and expand educational investments.” Education is proven to improve health, reduce poverty and crime, create jobs and increase employment, while generating tax revenues to fund health care, housing and infrastructure, etc.

B.C.’s public education system is one we can all be proud of. It is arguably one of the best in the world. However, chronic underfunding is threatening the quality of our schools and the achievements of our students, to the point where B.C. students start falling behind. I assume this committee is aware of the statistics of how B.C. is faring compared to other provinces when it comes to investment in education. B.C. is second lowest in funding for students in Canada and has a low percentage of GDP spent on education funding.

B.C. dedicates incremental per-student funding for special needs students and for a very small group of highly gifted students. There is no dedicated funding for formal programs in B.C. for high-aptitude, highly motivated students.

For 43 years, Vancouver school board management and teachers have understood the need for such programs and, together with parent fundraising efforts, have made the Prince of Wales Mini School program a success and a model for the province. Now with the chronic underfunding of education, mini-school alternative programs have been reduced to the point of existing in name only and may soon cease to exist.

Smart investment in education means better addressing the educational needs of all students, including providing suitable opportunities for the high-aptitude cohort of secondary school children. This cohort has great potential for major contributions to society, creating jobs, innovating and being leaders within their communities in addressing social issues. Sustainable funding will benefit all students in our school system.

The current funding model employed by the provincial government is broken. It creates annual budget shortfalls, which have a detrimental effect on the quality of educational services provided by the school districts.
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There needs to be secure and consistent funding in order to enable strategic planning and offer a range of services to meet the diverse needs of our students. The current situation is the opposite of what should be happening.

In closing, we strongly support the recommendations of the last two select standing committees to provide adequate, stable and sustainable funding to school boards and repair the broken funding formula to reflect the true costs of quality education and to provide the support and resources needed to meet the diverse educational needs of all students for a healthy future and the economic prosperity of British Columbia.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. I’ll now open it up to the committee for questions. Do we have any questions?

Perhaps you can tell us just a little bit more about the mini-school model. I think a number of us around the table understand — but perhaps, for the record, just a little bit about the strength, from your perspective, of the mini-school model.

S. Berringer: Sure. The mini-school at Prince of Wales serves 150 students from grades 8 to 12. Each grade has 15 girls and 15 boys. The main objective is to focus on strong community involvement and leadership for all the kids. The environment it gives for the kids is a safe place for them to thrive. They can feel safe to excel. They don’t have to be embarrassed about trying hard. They’re not bullied for being bright. And they tend to excel and reach fuller potential.

Well, thank you, both of you, for your presentation. Thank you for your advocacy. We appreciate it.

C. James (Deputy Chair): We’ll just take a brief recess while we wait for our next presenters.

C. James (Deputy Chair): We have our next presenters here. From the Insurance Bureau of Canada, Aaron Sutherland and Mike Lee.

Just so you know, it’s ten minutes for the presentation and up to five minutes for questions. With that, thank you, and I’ll turn it over to you.

As you can see, my name’s Aaron Sutherland, and with me today is Mike Lee. We’re from the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

In the interest of time, we’ve put a brief deck together summarizing our submission to the committee. We’ve included both the deck and our submission in packages for you today. We’ll try and go through the deck fairly quickly to allow as much time as possible at the end for discussion, but if you do have any questions as we go through it, feel free to jump in any time. We remain available any time after this for any questions you may have. Our contact info is also included in the package itself.

A little bit about IBC. We are the national association of Canada’s home, business and private auto insurers. We have 115 members operating here in B.C.

We really look at ourselves as experts in risk management, and that’s really what our submission focuses on. It’s how B.C. can mitigate the increasing impacts of climate change and earthquake for families and businesses in this province and ensure that we are as prepared — and resilient — as we can be for these events.

A little bit of an overview. We’ll talk a little bit about the leadership we saw in Budget 2016 and then the importance of continued investment in these areas — namely, in earthquake preparedness, flood mitigation and wildfire risk reduction.

Just beginning on slide 4. If we can leave you with one message today, it would be that Budget 2016 saw record investment in flood mitigation, wildfire prevention and earthquake preparedness. As the risk of these events increases, and as their impact on British Columbians increases, this type of investment and foresight is something that Canada’s insurers feel is vital going forward to ensure we are as prepared as we can be. In essence, we’re here to strongly recommend that the investment we saw in these areas last year be continued in Budget 2017 and in the years ahead.

The first thing we want talk about is earthquakes. It is one of the largest risks facing this province. There is a 30 percent chance of a major earthquake striking southwestern British Columbia in the next 50 years. That is a massive number that we feel, frankly, doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But it’s something, I can tell you, that keeps our industry’s CEOs up at night and dominates our board discussions because we know that the impacts of such an event would be massive.

While you can never be fully prepared, there are steps that can and should be taken now to improve our preparedness. They can begin with something as simple as just educating the public about this risk and what it means to be prepared.

B.C. has made great strides in this area in the past year, and we hope that will continue in Budget 2017. We’re recommending that there be continued investment in
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measures that promote public awareness of this risk and how British Columbians can best protect themselves from an earthquake. We’re also calling for the commitment to develop a culture of preparedness in this province, as recommended by the earthquake consultant report of 2015.

We also recognize that B.C. can’t do it alone. The impact of an earthquake won’t be localized in this province but will ripple right through the Canadian economy. That’s why IBC has been calling for increased federal engagement in this area. We hope that B.C., as well, will call for the feds to increasingly engage and join us at the table so we can bring a holistic approach to tackling this issue and really preparing this province for, frankly, something that’s inevitable.

That’s earthquakes. It’s a big issue that insurers are trying to grapple with, but it’s not something that we’re seeing the impacts of every day. With climate change, however, we do. We look at ourselves as canaries in the coal mine on this issue because we are seeing the financial impacts of climate change before anyone else. As climate change brings an increase in severity and frequency of severe weather events, insured losses have been rising greatly as a result.

If you look at the graph on page 8, you’ll see a little bit of what I’m talking about. This graph shows catastrophic losses, which we’ve tracked since 1983, and essentially shows insurance claims from severe weather events every year over that period. As you can see, they have risen rapidly from just a few hundred million dollars annually to being at or above $1 billion every year since 2009.

Those numbers are big, and they describe the financial impact they’re having on our industry. They’re also indicative of the impact climate change is having on British Columbian families and on households. I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of that is due to flood.

It’s the same story for government finances as well. If you look on page 9, you can see that federal disaster relief payments, just like insured losses, have risen greatly in recent years. Again, the majority is due to flood. We’re seeing warmer weather trapping more moisture in the air, resulting in more frequent and more severe storm events. While we don’t have B.C.-specific numbers, we do know that as the provinces are on the hook for the initial DFA dollars, it’s a similar trend in this province.

That’s why we’re recommending continued investment in storm sewer and stormwater infrastructure to improve our resiliency. We know these investments aren’t exciting. There is no ribbon cutting over a new storm drain.

I can tell you that, again, as climate change brings more intense storms, more rain over shorter periods of time, these kinds of investments are vital to ensuring we can withstand what’s to come, as is increased investment in flood mitigation and infrastructure activities — things like dike renewal, new waterways and even hazard and flood mapping — so that we know where we need to be focusing our precious investment dollars in this area. That’s really where we’re really looking for your help in Budget 2017 on climate change.

M. Lee: Switching gears from water to fire, I’d like to talk to you a bit about wildfire risk reduction. Experts predict severe wildfires will increase by 50 percent over the next 30 years.

This year we’ve been relatively lucky in terms of the wildfire activities in B.C. Just going back last year, in 2015, over 280 hectares of forest were lost. To put that into perspective, that’s the area equivalent of the greater Vancouver regional district. It’s a huge area, and in fighting that fire, over $270 million was spent on fighting the fires. These are resources that could have been better spent in health care, education or any other pressing matters.

Now, you don’t have to go too far to witness the devastation that went through. Just look at our neighbours in Fort McMurray. It was the most costly natural disaster in Canadian history. To tell you firsthand, from having been in Fort McMurray, it causes a lot of strain on the families, the individuals and the surrounding communities. This is a risk that cannot be taken lightly, and we should be taking measures.

Some of the recommendations that we are making are to increase efforts to inform British Columbians of the wildfire risk and educating them so that they can prevent the fires from actually happening. It is estimated that 40 percent of the wildfires that happen in B.C. are human-caused.

Secondly, it’s to promote the adaptation of FireSmart practices. These are simple steps that you can take. It’s using better building materials, such as fire-resistant roofs or sidings, or you can promote better design standards, such as eliminating areas where airborne sparks and embers can accumulate and ignite sidings, window sills or trims.

A. Sutherland: Again, a lot of information. There’s even more in our submission, but really, if we could leave you with one message today, it would be that Budget 2016 saw tremendous investment in wildfire risk reduction, flood prevention and earthquake preparedness. As the risk of these events increases — and, frankly, as their impact increasingly impacts British Columbians — we’re calling for increased investment in those areas in Budget 2017 to ensure we’re as prepared as we can be and to mitigate the impact on British Columbian families and households.

Thank you. We’ll open it up for questions. I know we went through that kind of fast.

S. Gibson: My wife and I live on the edge of a hill in Abbotsford, so of course we have earthquake insurance. We look over a precipice.

My question is: if we get this big one that you predict is going to happen within the next 50 years and the normal number of people are buying earthquake insurance, are we protected? In other words, do you have enough money on reserve? If the folks that need earthquake insurance buy it, I don’t have to worry. You’re going to replace my house. Is that right?

A. Sutherland: Absolutely. The insurance industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in this country. We are required by OSFI, the office of the federal superintendent of insurance, to have enough capital on hand, to have reserves in the bank, to cover a one-in-500-year earthquake event. It’s essentially a 9.0 event off of Vancouver Island.

I’ll be frank with you. If there is a cataclysmic event, something like we saw at the Fukushima earthquake in Japan just a few years ago, no amount of money is going to be able to shore up that kind of event. We will need some sort of partnership with the federal government to ensure that we can have an insurer of last resort — something insurers can draw on to pay for claims when they get in excess of that. We are talking hundreds of billions of dollars in damages.

Insurers have on hand, right now, about $35 billion in a kitty for an earthquake. We know that will take us right through that one-in-500-year event. But when you start talking about beyond that, something cataclysmic, the short answer is no. We’re engaged in active discussions with the federal government about how we manage that.

Again, there are only so many reserves you can keep on hand before it becomes impractical to try and manage that kind of finance. You need, just like something they have in the nuclear industry, a loan of last resort, where if something devastating were to happen, there are resources insurers can draw on to be able to pay the claims — some sort of a loan, similar to the 2009 financial crisis, that they could draw on to pay out and then pay back to government over a period of time.

That’s an area where I’m engaged right now with the federal government. Those conversations are ongoing.

The short answer is that in all but the most remote possibilities, absolutely, insurers are there to pay. In the event of something catastrophic, the way the legislation works is insurers have to pay out everything they have. Then if one insurer goes bankrupt, every other insurer has to pay those claims as well. Then it’s until that kitty runs dry. At that point, we’ll be looking around for assistance.

J. Yap: Thanks for your presentation, Mike and Aaron. I appreciate you commenting on the record levels of funding budgeted this fiscal year.

When you look across the country, is there a jurisdiction where your industry would say: “That’s a province that’s really taking the steps, making the investments that we think are needed”? Is there a particular jurisdiction that we can look at? Or here in B.C., are we leading the way?

A. Sutherland: Frankly, from a holistic approach, B.C. is a leader in this country, certainly, and in North America, on this issue. Certainly, in flood prevention, some of the prairie provinces spend a lot more and are taking a much more focused interest in that. But when you look at it holistically, whether it’s wildfire, flood or earthquake — the three key risks we see facing this country — B.C. is in a real leadership position.

We think a lot of that has to do with…. Obviously, I know this is talked about a lot. B.C. has the first and, frankly, from what we can see, the only minister responsible for emergency preparedness. We think that goes a long way. But from that holistic approach, we look at B.C. as, frankly, a real leader in this country. It’s something we’re very grateful to have and to be a part of.

G. Heyman: It has to do with earthquake insurance. I’m wondering if you consider B.C. home insurers to insure for earthquake at a lower level than other jurisdictions with similar risk and whether the percentage of people insuring for earthquake has been trending upward over the last, say, five years.

A. Sutherland: The trends are difficult, because after we have an event, you see an uptick, and then a couple of years go by, and people forget about it. So the trend sort of…. In and around 45 percent of this province has earthquake insurance. In the high-risk areas on the Island, it’s upwards of 70 percent. Those numbers fluctuate a little bit. When we see a magnitude 4 or 5 event in Victoria, like we saw a couple of years ago, there’s a bit of an uptick now. But we expect that’ll go back down and hover around 70 percent for the Island in terms of overall earthquake takeup on the insurance side.

Frankly, B.C. is much higher than almost anywhere else in North America. In California, it is much, much lower — in and around 10 percent — simply because there’s such a history there of government bailing individuals out. And when you create that kind of culture, where government will come to the forefront to help you…. Frankly, FEMA doesn’t have the greatest — let’s just call it — approval rating in the States right now. When you create that kind of culture — that they’ll be there — people start to depend on that.

When you look internationally at places like New Zealand and Japan, it’s a very different story. In New
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Zealand, it’s up around 90 percent in terms of earthquake insurance takeup. And that’s something we’d like to see here in this province as well.

A. Sutherland: The reason that we found people don’t purchase insurance isn’t because they think it’s expensive or it’s hard to find. It’s quite affordable and widely available. They just don’t perceive the risk to be real. They think an earthquake will happen; they just don’t think it’s going to happen in their lifetime. Frankly, that’s something that we all need to help — to try and change that dial and really ingrain into people’s minds a culture of preparedness and the fact that we need to take steps now to prepare ourselves.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Gentlemen, thank you so much for your presentation. We appreciate it. I can tell you as a Victorian, we pay attention. We pay attention probably more than some other areas of the province might.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Our next presenters are from the Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C. — Thom Armstrong and Patty Shaw.

Come on up. Just so you know, we have ten minutes for your presentation and five minutes for questions. With that, I’ll turn it over to you and say thank you for coming to present.

P. Shaw: Thank you. My name is Patty Shaw. I’m the president of the Co-operative Housing Federation of British Columbia. I have with me Thom Armstrong, who’s the executive director of CHF B.C. We very much appreciate the opportunity to come in today and speak about co-op housing and share our views with you.

CHF B.C. is a provincewide federation of non-profit housing co-ops. We have approximately 260 non-profit housing co-ops, and that makes up just about 15,000 co-op homes in British Columbia.

Today we’re here to request your support on a provincially delivered, cost-effective rental assistance program that will replace the expiring federal subsidies and co-op agreements for low-income co-op members.

We have a brief that’s been made available. It details the assistance that’s currently being delivered by the federal government to co-op members and the impact that thousands of co-op members will experience if that assistance ends. You have that with you now.

It also summarizes the costs of replacing that assistance as the federal agreements expire — and the predictable consequences of not acting and finding another program to replace those rental subsidies.

I just wanted to also acknowledge the recent announcement that the provincial government has put $500 million towards creating more affordable homes in B.C. That, roughly, will be about 3,000 units. We hope, at CHF B.C., to be part of that program and help build more affordable housing in B.C.

I just wanted to, before we get into the facts and figures, tell you my story and why I’m here. I’m a volunteer on the board of CHF B.C., and I was elected as president. But how I came into co-op housing and why I support it so strongly…. I came into co-op housing about — gosh, a long time — 25 years ago as a single parent. My marriage had broken up. It was not a good situation. I was looking for affordable housing, and I moved to Victoria because I had family here.

It was difficult to find anything. I ended up living in a two-bedroom basement suite with my two children, with no laundry, no parking, no yard for them to play in. This is 25 years ago. It’s much different now. It’s much worse. I was going broke trying to manage to get a job to pay for my rent and also support my children. I wasn’t able to do that, so I decided to go back to school. At the same time, I started applying to co-op housing and I got a couple of calls and a couple of interviews, and I was accepted into a housing co-op.

I applied and met the criteria to receive subsidy being a single parent in school. My rent went to less than a quarter of what I was paying previously. What I got for it was a three-bedroom unit — beautiful unit, safe, good area of town, with a yard and a playground for my kids to play with other children — but also a community that supported me, a community that was there for me when I needed them. So I was able to complete my schooling.

Within a year or two, I was off of subsidy. I had completed my schooling and was able to get into the workforce and really make a wage that I never needed to go back.

For me to think now, 25 years ago…. We all know the situation with affordable housing has become much more critical. I mean, it was bad 25 years ago in Victoria. Now it’s absolutely horrendous to try to find a place. Wages haven’t met that increase.

You’re looking at single parents, new Canadians, seniors that are trying to live in supportive housing where you have the support of your neighbours and good, decent homes, and they can’t afford them anymore because the subsidy that they’re receiving is ending. It’s already ended for some of the co-ops here in Victoria, as well as
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across British Columbia, but it’s ending peaks next year and ends in 2020 — when all of the co-ops that are currently receiving subsidy money from the federal government to top up those low-income people, those most vulnerable people in our society, will be ending.

Where are they to go? Really, there’s nowhere for them to go. The wait-list for affordable subsidized housing, through the city or the municipalities, is huge. It’s very difficult to get in.

That’s why I’m here to say that it works. It’s a hand up; it’s not a handout. Those people that are currently on it — and those people to come — need that assistance. It’s absolutely essential, I feel, that we provide that for them.

We need to take care of the people, our most vulnerable people in society, in so many ways, not just housing. But that’s what I’m here about — housing.

I’m going to turn it over to Thom, and Thom’s going to talk about facts and figures.

T. Armstrong: Thank you, Patty. And thank you so much for the time in front of the committee this afternoon.

Patty’s done an excellent job of putting a human face behind some of the drier numbers in the brief that you have. My job is to review a couple of those drier numbers. I don’t propose to read the brief.

I wanted to draw your attention to the charts on page 4. As you know, almost all of the housing co-ops in B.C. were developed under a series of federal co-op housing programs beginning in 1973 and ending in 1992. Those subsidies are delivered either unilaterally by CMHC or on a cost-shared basis between CMHC and B.C. Housing.

You can see on the top chart that units and associated subsidies have already begun to exit the programs, based on the expiry of the operating agreements they signed with CMHC. By 2020, you’ll see more than 8,600 co-op homes out of those agreements, and we estimate that about 2,600 of those homes are currently receiving rent-geared-to-income subsidy. By 2025, that number will rise to more than 12,000 homes exiting those agreements, and almost 3,800 homes receiving subsidies that currently make their homes affordable.

In terms of the cost to replace those subsidies, you can see that at the bottom of the page — beginning at the end of this year with just over $3.2 million and levelling off by 2025 at something just under $18.4 million a year. I contrast that with, as Patty said, the $500 million that we welcome seeing invested in the production of new affordable rental homes. But I ask the question as well. If we’re adding 2,900 units of affordable rental housing — which is what that program is estimated to add — and, at the same time, losing almost 4,000 affordable homes maintained under the current programs, that’s really a net loss in affordability.

The two questions we hear most frequently in response to the argument that these subsidies need to be retained are these. First of all, we hear: “Why doesn’t the federal government step up? These are, after all, federal housing programs.” Secondly: “Why don’t housing co-ops step up? After all, they’ve paid off the mortgages that were associated with their initial construction.”

The short answer to the first question is that in the intervening years since those agreements were signed with CMHC, housing constitutionally has been transferred as a jurisdiction to the provinces. Now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an opportunity here for a cost-sharing arrangement with the federal government. We think the recent federal re-engagement in housing actually represents an unprecedented opportunity to bring the federal government to the table to share some of the costs of these replacement subsidies.

In fact, they’ve already done that in one respect. The numbers that you see in the brief, beginning in 2016…. Actually, the effect of those withdrawals has recently been mitigated by a federal announcement to introduce transitional funding until the spring of 2018. That’s why, in the earlier part of the brief, we mention that we’re looking for a solution provincially that begins in the spring of 2018, because that’s when the federal transition measure ends.

The second question we often hear is: “Why aren’t housing co-ops stepping up to do more about this situation?” My response to that is: they are. Co-ops are now reinvesting in the assets they call home. They’re doing that by negotiating financing arrangements with private lenders. They’re shouldering the additional debt service to reinvest in their homes, because housing, as we know, is a depreciating asset. They’re doing that without asking the government for a nickel in subsidy.

What they can’t do is reinvest in the asset and subsidize their low-income neighbours at the same time. The math just doesn’t work. What, really, the co-op housing sector is saying to the province is, “We’ll take care of the buildings if you take care of the people who need help the most in finding an affordable place to stay” — and the people who make Patty’s story very common throughout the co-op housing sector.

That’s the request that we’re making of you — to support the introduction of a provincially funded, we hope cost-shared but provincially delivered rent supplement program for low-income co-op members to replace those federal subsidies as they expire at the end of their agreements between now and 2025.

E. Foster: I’m just trying to quickly read through some of your…. I’m trying to figure out…. If you look on page 3 and your numbers on 3, section 61 and section 95 in ILM…. I’m quickly trying to flash through your presen-
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tation here to find out what they are. For clarification, in co-op housing, a society is formed, they build the housing, and then people rent based on their income. Would that be the Reader’s Digest definition of it?

T. Armstrong: Pretty well. The best way to think of co-op housing is mixed-income housing. In any given co-op, roughly two-thirds of the members are paying the full break-even rent to keep the co-op going as a housing business, and up to a third of the members, on average, are receiving some form of rent-geared-to-income assistance from either the federal or the provincial government. It’s mixed-income housing operated on a non-profit basis.

E. Foster: People that are living in the co-op housing — do they qualify for rent subsidies from the province as everybody else, based on local rent?

T. Armstrong: No, because co-op members aren’t considered tenants, and most of the rent subsidies delivered directly by B.C. Housing are available to tenants. Co-op members are in that no-man’s land between renting and owning. They own the co-op that that owns the homes, but they own it on a non-equity basis. They pay a membership share to get into the co-op. They receive the value of that share at par when they leave. So if they put $1,000 in, they get $1,000 when they leave.

S. Gibson: I have quite a large co-op in my area, the Mission co-op. There are about a couple of hundred residents there. Unlike the paradigm you’re talking about — these were transitional, like your example, Patty, where you said you were a single mom, blah, blah, blah; things improved for you, and then you went into conventional housing — all the residents of my co-op are elderly people, some of them on extremely fixed incomes. So they’re there permanently. Can you comment on that paradigm?

T. Armstrong: There are many co-ops built with the needs of seniors in mind, many of them funded under these federal programs. They have perhaps a greater need than anyone to see the province step up and replace those expiring rental subsidies, because they are living on limited or fixed incomes. The cost of the housing, of course, is going up, as every cost does, but their incomes are entirely flat, and there’s nowhere else for them to go.

So in a co-op where perhaps up to a quarter or half of the seniors resident there are receiving rent-geared-to-income assistance under existing federal programs…. As those programs expire, we literally have no idea where they will go if the subsidy stream is not replaced with a provincial program.

S. Gibson: Yes. In many cases, this is the only housing option they have. I’ve been there a number of times.

P. Shaw: It’s their home as well. They’ve been there, often, for decades. To move these seniors at that late stage is very harmful for their well-being in general.

E. Foster: On the CMHC mortgages — I know from other types of housing that were funded, especially back in ’70s and early ’80s — have you run into problems? Some of those rates were probably good at the time, but they’re brutal now, and you can’t get out from under them. Have you run into that same situation?

T. Armstrong: The situation you’re referring to is, I think, the mortgages that were introduced between 1973 and 1978. They were 50-year terms at 8 percent. I started building co-ops in the early ’80s, and the first co-op I worked on was in Saskatoon. The take-out rate on a mortgage then was 19¾ in 1982, and the 8 percent 50-year mortgages looked pretty good then. But of course, recently they haven’t looked so good. So there’s been a real effort in the co-op housing sector to get CMHC to relax the prepayment provisions in those mortgages and allow co-ops to refinance on more affordable terms.

It’s a bigger problem outside B.C. than in B.C. because a lot of the earlier program co-ops in B.C. rolled their mortgages, many years ago, into another program that was more affordable, with more fluctuating interest rates and subsidies. It’s not an acute problem here in this province, but it’s something that we’re looking at for the few remaining co-ops that are financed under those long-term mortgages, including the biggest co-op here in Victoria, Marigold co-op.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you, both of you, for your presentation, and thank you for your work. Certainly, I live in a community, as you know, in Victoria that has a large number of co-ops. I admit frustration that this issue hasn’t been resolved yet, because I know you’ve been in conversations with both the federal and provincial governments for a number of years. I appreciate your flexibility and your ideas around looking at rent supplements as one possible way to try and address this issue. Thank you very much for your presentation. We appreciate it.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Next we have Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd. — Sébastien Charbonneau. Welcome. Come on up.

Sébastien, as you probably know from other presentations, ten minutes for the presentation and up to five
[ Page 2769 ]
minutes for questions. Thank you. Welcome. I’ll turn it over to you.

S. Charbonneau: Good afternoon, and thank you very much for the invitation to appear today in front of you.

My name is Sébastien Charbonneau, and I am the director of government and regulatory affairs for Imperial Tobacco Canada, which is the largest legal tobacco company in Canada. I did stress the term “legal” because, as many of you know, Canada has a thriving illegal tobacco market.

The most recent estimates suggest that 20 percent of cigarettes sold in Canada are illegal. Ontario is at the epicentre of this, both for consumption, at a rate up to 40 percent, and — and that’s where you should be concerned — for the production of those illegal cigarettes, which are manufactured in one of the more than 50 illegal factories located either in Ontario or in Quebec.

Those products are then shipped and sold illegally from coast to coast through organized crime networks. Their profits are then used to support other illicit activities such as trafficking guns, human smuggling, money laundering and other types of drugs.

While illegal tobacco used to be a central Canadian problem, it is now a national one. In fact, B.C. has a contraband rate of roughly 15 percent, which is on par with Quebec. That is of note when you consider that Quebec is home to about half of the illegal factories in Canada and there are none in B.C. that we know of.

According to the Western Convenience Stores Association, B.C. has the highest rate of illegal tobacco in western Canada. They estimate that this trade could cost more than $100 million in lost tax revenues for British Columbia. As we detailed in our written submission, we also have anecdotal evidence of aggressive sales tactics from illegal operators in downtown Vancouver.

In short, British Columbia has an illegal tobacco trade problem, and the only beneficiaries are the organized crime groups that are behind it.

Fortunately, there are proven measures and learnings from other jurisdictions that can be implemented here to address this problem. I’m here to offer four such recommendations that are in our submission.

First, it is critical to avoid the tax shocks that drive consumers to the illegal market. That said, this should not be misinterpreted as a call to lower or even freeze taxes.

Instead, we encourage you to look at the models that are in place in Ontario and federally, in which tobacco tax increases are now scheduled, moderate and predictable. Tying those annual increases to something like inflation is a proven model to contain demand for illegal tobacco. International experience has also shown that this model is more effective from a revenue standpoint than sporadic market shocks while helping contain demand for contraband products.

Secondly, we strongly encourage you to consider the enforcement model put in place in Quebec to curb the illegal tobacco trade. That province successfully decreased its illegal tobacco rate from over 40 percent in 2008 to 15 percent, roughly, through aggressive enforcement actions and empowerment of all peace officers, be it in the provincial police force or local enforcement agencies. You could easily look at Quebec’s legislation as a model to implement.

Third, the province should establish and adequately fund a dedicated contraband tobacco enforcement unit or program. Quebec has had such a program in place for over a decade. Within the past year, Ontario and New Brunswick established similar operations.

Quebec’s program is known as ACCES Tabac and is credited with reducing the province’s annual tax losses due to illegal tobacco by more than $180 million in their last fiscal year. That’s with an annual investment at this time in the program ACCES Tabac of $18 million. The province is clearly getting a solid return on its investment. Here again, that’s something that B.C. could look at to implement here.

We understand that B.C. may already have some resources in place to deal with illegal tobacco, but we could not find details on its mandate or operating budget. Either way, Quebec has set the standard here, and you should look at the model.

Still with enforcement, we strongly encourage you to be vocal in demanding federal action on dealing with illegal tobacco, particularly as it pertains to shutting down the illegal factories that are located on First Nation territories in Ontario and Quebec. These factories are supplying the national market for contraband. As long as Ottawa lets them operate with impunity, you will have illegal tobacco products on your streets.

Finally, Canada’s contraband realities require the province take a whole government approach to tobacco control and taxation policy. For example, you could have the best enforcement team in place, but if you shock the market with a major tobacco tax increase, all that work is quickly undermined.

In conclusion, all tobacco policy needs to be looked at through the lens of its impact on the legal versus the illegal market, as seemingly well-intentioned measures may serve only to give the illicit operators a further market advantage.

Thank you again for the opportunity to appear. I now look forward to your questions.

J. Yap: Thanks for your presentation. If I missed it, forgive me. What is the estimated loss in tax revenue that B.C. is experiencing with the estimated illegal tobacco?
[ Page 2770 ]

S. Charbonneau: I cited here the Western Convenience Stores Association. Last year, when they released their report on butt studies that they do every year, they estimated it at $120 million. That would be based on the percentage of illicit products they found.

You mentioned two other programs. Ontario and Quebec have introduced programs, and you suggested they were successful. Do you have the metrics on how much tax revenue they were able to recover?

S. Charbonneau: The only program that is successful, because it’s been in place for a decade, is the ACCES Tabac program in Quebec. The budget papers over the last few years in Quebec, issued by the Ministry of Finance in Quebec, are showing those metrics.

What I cited in my presentation is the last fiscal year, so that would be 2014-15. They estimated that they recuperated $180 million after an $18 million investment in the ACCES Tabac program.

Seeing none, Mr. Charbonneau, thank you. We appreciate you taking the time, as always.

Mr. Martin, good afternoon. It’s good to see you. Welcome. You probably know, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll get your attention with a couple of minutes to go, and then we can go to the committee for questions.

A. Martin: I am ready. Thank you again for the opportunity to address the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

I represent the B.C. Wildlife Federation, a conservation organization with 50,000 members throughout the province. What we’re trying to do is invest to create a legacy of fish and wildlife diversity and abundance.

As the coat of arms says: “Splendour undiminished.” That’s the ultimate outcome that we’d like to see.

Certainly, I think that there’s incredible landscape and biodiversity across the province. I believe you’ve heard this in regional presentations from our members. I think, clearly, there are challenges to this natural capital, in terms of increasing population, increasing development and demand on landscapes and watersheds, eroding budgets for management within government and then the externalities of climate change.

What this adds up to is there are some very real threats to landscape and watershed sustainability and erosion of natural capital. What the B.C. Wildlife Federation has are, in terms of the big picture, six recommendations with respect to either funding or governance mechanisms.

Certainly, recommendation 1 is to dedicate all hunting and angling licence and fee revenue to fish and wildlife management. That has been done for fisheries, through the Freshwater Fisheries Society. We’d like a similar mechanism for wildlife.

Recommendation 2 is that people who are licensed are not the only users of natural resources that have an effect on landscape and watershed sustainability, which has an implication on the erosion of natural capital. We’d like to see an approach where the load is spread more evenly across the users of that natural capital, to spread the load and also to…. I think if you invest in something over the longer term and have investment, then you have much more of an interest in those longer-term applications.

In terms of dealing with the regulatory framework, we certainly recommend the establishment of a natural resources practices board. At the moment, the natural resources board is a committee of deputies whose focus is on defending government policy. We believe a natural resources practices board should be there to say whether the policy framework is adequate, first of all, and second of all, if the regulatory framework that is implemented to achieve those policies is being adhered to and where, at both levels, the system could be adapted and improved in the public interest.

Recommendation 4 is to complete and implement the provincial compensation offset policy. Certainly this lies within the domain of the Ministry of Environment, but within the larger domain of cumulative effects, where you have multiple pieces of legislation looking at thresholds at which natural capital starts to diminish, we think there needs to be a very, very strong policy framework in terms of how to avoid, mitigate and offset these impacts for a range of values that are currently administered under a range of acts and regulations. Certainly, that is subservient to a natural resources practices board but I think essential in terms of being a very high priority that needs to be implemented by government.

Marine and freshwater fisheries are a key component of British Columbia’s history and future. We think that there needs to be much greater cooperation and collaboration between provincial agencies and federal agencies. This area — particularly with the marine protected area planning, the adoption of the Cohen commission recommendations and new initiatives on the part of the federal government to implement a national aquatic habitat conservation program — certainly needs a much greater degree of collaboration and communication between the federal and provincial governments and incorporation of regional and local partners and First Nations.
[ Page 2771 ]

My final recommendation is around the Water Act. I think we’re certainly at the tipping point in terms of public expectations that watersheds will be managed sustainably. There’s limited government capacity to manage them, and the social licence for resource development that may adversely impact watersheds and landscapes is a huge challenge. There are regulatory issues in terms of regulating groundwater, protecting environmental flows, changing the allocation system and adequately addressing drought and watershed planning in priority areas.

I previously stood before this committee with my colleague Mark Angelo and advocated for the establishment of a $75 million B.C. watershed sustainability fund.

This morning I went to a meeting that was hosted by Victoria Golden Rods and Reels’ Mick Collins, on Elk Lake. Elk Lake is a gem within the CRD. If there’s one area where the natural capital has been eroded in the capital regional district, it is Elk Lake. It provides a tremendous site for a variety of recreational activities. It’s the home of many Olympic rowers. And now it’s the home of toxic blue-green algae that in the later summer and fall basically restricts the use for swimming, potentially rowing, and just general recreation — people walking their dogs, and so on. Here’s an example where, appropriately invested in collaboration with federal, provincial and local groups, you could leverage community, technical and financial support to deal with this issue right in your backyard.

I would like to thank you. It’s a pleasure to speak to you, and I’d be happy to address any questions that you have.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Martin, for that. I will go to the committee and see if we have any questions. We’ve heard from several groups representing the B.C. Wildlife Federation, local groups. Spruce Mountain — was it? — last week in Prince George. I wasn’t there. But you’re very well represented as we travel around the province.

G. Heyman: Thank you, Mr. Martin, for the presentation. You took one of the questions out of my mouth by making the recommendation for the natural resources practices board, which a number of presenters have suggested we need to manage for landscaping cumulative impacts without suggesting that model as a way to address that. I think your recommendation specifically answers that.

A number of presenters have suggested that 100 percent of hunting licence fees go toward conservation. I think that’s pretty uniform, and I’ll ask you the same question I asked a couple of them, either directly during the hearing or off at the side after. Do you think that money will, then, be adequate for the conservation activity you think is needed throughout B.C.? The second part of the question is…. Some people have said that most hunters wouldn’t object to paying a higher licence fee if they knew the money was all going to conservation.

A. Martin: First of all, I think that the hunting licence fees would not be adequate to deal with the whole range of conservation. That’s why the secondary recommendation is to spread the funding sources to other users of the natural resources. That’s included in our presentation.

I think that if the funding model was that all licence and surcharge fees go to wildlife management, certainly hunters and anglers would be willing to invest more in a resource that they care passionately about and volunteer a lot of their personal time, effort and money over and above the licence fees to maintain.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Any other questions? Seeing none, thank you, Mr. Martin. I appreciate you taking the time, as always. It’s a pleasure.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I will call the committee back to order and welcome Serge Corbeil and Ellen Stensholt from the Canadian Diabetes Association.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Not a problem. You’ll get out early and enjoy this beautiful day.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just as a reminder, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention when time is winding down, and we can go to the committee and ask some questions.

S. Corbeil: Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you, again, for offering the Canadian Diabetes Association the opportunity to present our recommendations for Budget 2017.

My name is Serge Corbeil. I’m the director of government relations and advocacy for the CDA. With me
[ Page 2772 ]
today is the volunteer chair of our provincial advocacy committee, Ellen Stensholt. Ellen is also a member of our national board of directors.

The CDA is a registered charity. It was founded in 1953. We have a mission that’s both simple and ambitious. It is to lead the fight against diabetes by doing three main things: helping those affected by diabetes to live healthy lives, preventing the onset and consequences of diabetes, and discovering a cure. We couldn’t do it without the help of more than 20,000 volunteers.

Diabetes is a condition that usually becomes worse over time and cannot be reversed. Apart from the significant personal toll to people living with the disease, the financial burden to government is staggering, reaching into the billions of dollars. If we collectively don’t address the rising tide of diabetes, it will drive the health care budget over the financial cliff in the coming years.

Consider the following. Today an estimated 1.4 million British Columbians live with diabetes or prediabetes. That’s 28 percent of the population. For 463,000 of them, it’s too late. They have been diagnosed with diabetes.

What happens if we do nothing? Ten years from now the prevalence will increase by 46 percent, and diabetes and prediabetes combined will affect 1.8 million people and the equivalent of 31.9 percent of the population. It behooves all of us to take action.

Taking measures to help manage and prevent diabetes is not only the right thing to do on a human level, but it’s also fiscally prudent to do so. That’s because it has a considerable impact on the health care budget. We estimated the total direct cost of diabetes to be $400 million in 2016, including hospitalizations, medications and physician and specialist visits. By 2025, we estimate that it will rise to $560 million, a 40 percent increase.

Above and beyond the financial impact of diabetes is the human cost to those with diabetes. Poorly managed diabetes can lead to serious and potentially life-threatening complications. It causes 30 percent of all strokes, 40 percent of all heart attacks, 50 percent of kidney failure that requires dialysis and 70 percent of all lower limb non-traumatic amputations.

I will now speak to our first priority. Incidentally, today the World Health Organization came out with a recommendation that speaks directly to our first recommendation. It’s designed to increase the revenues of government in an effort to not only offset the necessary investments in initiatives that promote healthy living but also to discourage the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.

The health system cannot continue to carry the burden of both preventing and treating diabetes when many of these risks and solutions lie outside of the provision of health care. All sectors must systemically consider implementing policies aimed at improving overall population health.

It’s widely recognized that overweight and obesity are risk factors for the development of prediabetes, type 2 diabetes and gestational diabetes. However, as I just mentioned, they are risk factors and not necessarily the cause of type 2 diabetes.

It’s different for sugar-sweetened beverages. After a thorough review of the literature on the subject, it became clear that evidence-based studies conclusively demonstrate that excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages directly increases the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The science is very clear on that nowadays.

They contain large amounts of added sugars and are nutrition-poor. A single serving of soft drink, for example cola, contains approximately 40 grams of sugar. That’s ten teaspoons of sugar. One such beverage contains almost the maximum daily consumption of sugar as recommended by the World Health Organization.

Given the serious impact of diabetes and its complications on Canadians and the link between excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and type 2 diabetes, we recommend that the government of British Columbia introduce a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages to help in the fight against type 2 diabetes as well as other chronic diseases.

As health care spending continues to rise and absorb a disproportionately high percentage of the government’s overall budget, the revenues that a tax would provide are badly needed. In other words, this approach is not a sign of a nanny state but rather of a needy state.

The evidence is clear. The time to act is now. We do realize that there might be some complexities in introducing a new tax. For this reason, we believe that the province has the opportunity to recognize the adverse impact on its population’s health by immediately removing the provincial sales tax exemption which currently applies to a number of sugar-sweetened beverages such as soft drinks.

E. Stensholt: Members of the committee, I am a CDA volunteer because I know how serious and difficult it is to manage this disease. My daughter was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 21, living in Edinburgh and studying. She was a marathon runner.

Her doctor, as he delivered this devastating news, said to her: “Take off your shoes. I want to look at your feet.” So he took off her shoes. He looked at her feet. He said: “They’re fine now, but you need to know that diabetes is a leading cause of amputation of the foot in the United Kingdom.” You can imagine the phone call I got that night.

She has been fortunate. She has been able to look after her feet. She is still running marathons. She looks after her health. She’s in her 40s now. Not everyone is so fortunate. We’re here to speak for those who need PharmaCare to help them deal with managing their dia-
[ Page 2773 ]
betes. She got a big scare, and it was a good thing. I would like all people who get diagnosed with diabetes to have that same experience.

I’m here this afternoon to share with you our recommendations, which were carefully considered both with the well-being of people living with diabetes in mind and also with regard to the significant impact that diabetes is having on the provincial budget.

All people living with type 1 diabetes need insulin to survive. Many choose to deliver the insulin by manually injecting it several times a day, while others use an insulin pump to deliver the appropriate amount of insulin required throughout the day. There is compelling evidence of the medical benefits of insulin pumps versus multiple daily injections.

An insulin pump can offer better blood glucose control, reducing the likelihood of developing complications. The greatest impact as a result of the switch to a pump is on end-stage renal disease. However, there are high out-of-pocket costs associated with the use of a pump, which are a barrier to effective management of diabetes. Insulin pumps cost between $6,000 and $7,000 on average and need to be replaced every five years. In addition, annual pump supplies can cost up to $4,000 per person.

The government of British Columbia has recognized these benefits and currently funds the purchase of insulin pumps and supplies for eligible persons with type 1 diabetes who are aged 25 or younger. However, the reality remains that currently an estimated 19,300 people in B.C. are living with type 1 diabetes, including approximately 12,500 people over 26 who are currently not eligible for insulin pump coverage.

The seriousness of the condition and the dire consequences to individuals when insulin is not readily injected when needed require that we make it a priority to provide people with type 1 diabetes, no matter what their age, with the best possible therapies to help them.

It is for this reason that we recommend that the government expand the existing program to include all individuals with diabetes, regardless of age, if they meet the medical criteria.

Our next recommendation is meant to help prevent what can only be considered a very tragic complication due to diabetes — lower limb amputation. As Serge mentioned in his introduction, diabetes is the leading cause of non-traumatic lower limb amputation, which is one of the most debilitating and feared complications among people with diabetes.

The majority of amputations, 85 percent, that occur in people with diabetes follow foot ulcers, which are foot wounds that often are a result of diabetic neuropathy — nerve damage — and/or peripheral vascular disease, poor circulation of blood supply to the feet.

Diabetic foot ulcers pose a huge emotional burden on individuals and their families and are costly to the health care system. The CDA estimated between 5,000 and 8,300 people with diabetes in B.C. will have a diabetic foot ulcer in 2016. Of those, 590 are expected to undergo an amputation. That’s an awful number.

This is unacceptable. Diabetic foot ulcers are estimated at $98 million to $120 million a year in direct costs to B.C.’s health care system, with the majority of the cost due to lengthy hospital stays. Indirect costs, through disability and premature mortality, have been estimated at $11 million to $18 million a year.

But there is a way for government to save money. Clinical studies have shown that off-loading devices, proper footwear and timely access to foot specialists can help people with diabetes and foot complications avoid amputation. Publicly funded services and off-loading devices to promote healing of foot ulcers and to prevent amputation are essential to people living with diabetes.

By investing between $6 million and $10 million to cover off-loading devices and visits to foot care professionals, we estimate that the government could realize a net saving of up to $23 million. This is why we recommend that the government of B.C. fund off-loading devices to prevent diabetic foot ulcers and amputation and to improve health outcomes for people with diabetes and, also, allow visits to foot specialists to be covered under the Medical Services Plan.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just so you know, we’re cutting quite a bit into question period time. I’ll let you use the remaining time however you like, but….

E. Stensholt: In conclusion, the Canadian Diabetes Association respectfully requests the committee’s consideration of these and other recommendations that you will find in our written submission. Better diabetes management improves the overall health of people with diabetes, reduces the burden on the provincial health care system and directly contributes to building a stronger province.

Once again, thank you so very much for inviting us to come here today and for giving us the opportunity to provide our recommendations to your committee.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Wonderful. Thank you for that. We do a have a few minutes left for questions, so I’ll go to the committee.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you so much for your presentation. I know the issue of pumps. I think that’s something that’s well known to those of us around the committee. You mentioned the issue of foot clinics. Is there a cost to that? If an individual is not covered by extended health or something of the sort, is there a cost then for them to be able to access it, even with a doctor’s referral?
[ Page 2774 ]

S. Corbeil: Yes, there is. And that’s one of the barriers to accessing proper care. For example, if you have diabetes and you need to see an ophthalmologist, you’re covered for that visit because of the consequence of going blind if it’s not properly managed.

Seeing a podiatrist, the same principle doesn’t apply. We think that’s something that should be corrected.

S. Corbeil: There’s a range of them. They can be as simple as an insert in your shoe to a full-contact cast, and that’s determined by the health care professional. They help relieve the pressure on your feet or on your foot if your GP or a specialist has determined there’s a loss of sensation as an ulcer is developing. That’s when you don’t notice an ulcer and you’re walking on it. Because you’ve lost the sensation, oftentimes infection sets in — and, eventually, amputation. It helps prevent that.

R. Austin: A quick follow-up. They’re advertising a lot on television now with those machines that you put your foot into that sort of massages your feet or massages your veins to give you better circulation. Is that a serious thing, or is that just K-tel selling it?

J. Tegart: I’m going to show my ignorance about diabetes. You don’t talk about a day when we see no diabetes.

E. Stensholt: Oh, we are hoping for such a day. I think with respect to type 1, there is significant research going on in Canada, in Edmonton. You may know Edmonton has always been a leader in diabetes research. Canada has always been a leader.

There are projects. My daughter is making a documentary about one, as a matter of fact. I’m glad you asked. They are following a lab in Edmonton and one in California. They have obtained Canadian approval and FDA approval for clinical testing.

I don’t think it’s going to necessarily be in my lifetime, but I am convinced it will be in my daughter’s lifetime.

S. Gibson: I guess that relates to my query about prevention. You talk about obesity, and you talk about sugared drinks. What percentage of diabetes could be controlled dramatically through lifestyle changes?

E. Stensholt: I don’t know that we have a percentage. We know that for type 2 diabetes, its onset can be either delayed or prevented by taking preventative measures. Serge mentioned prediabetes. If people, when they are diagnosed with prediabetes, diet and exercise, often the onset can be prevented. But we don’t have statistics. I mean, who tells the honest truth about how much they exercise?

When you are really looking at trying to come out with hard facts on this, it’s a challenge. But we know it can be improved.

S. Corbeil: If I may. We know that in B.C., our population is well represented, and B.C.’s overall population is more at risk, genetically predisposed to diabetes, type 2 diabetes — South Asians, First Nations. Even with fairly good diet and exercise, eventually, as they age, they might still develop type 2 diabetes. But that’s where the management of the diabetes also plays a key role.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Next we have the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific — Wendy Pattenden and Megan Lukan.

Welcome. Just so you know, you have ten minutes for the presentation. When time gets close, I’ll give you a wave and we can go the committee for questions. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

W. Pattenden: Thank you. My name is Wendy Pattenden. I’m the CEO of the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific. I would like to introduce Megan Lukan here, who’s joined me today to discuss the positive impact of your investment in sport.

Megan is one of the members of Canada’s women’s rugby sevens team that trains right here in Victoria and that won a bronze medal in Rio. Megan is very happy to have you take a closer look at her medal. She’ll pass it around so you can touch and feel it, as long as you agree to give it back at the end of our presentation.

I just want to talk a little bit about the Canadian Sport Institute and our work. Really, we’re here to ensure athletes and coaches have every advantage to compete on the world stage and win medals for Canada. Think of us as the pit crew or the team behind the team.

I’d like to start by saying thank you for the opportunity to present to you today here in Victoria and for your continued support of sport in this province. This government’s commitment to sport has helped our athletes and coaches inspire a continued culture of excellence.

British Columbia’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes are vivid examples of excellence. B.C. was very well represented on Canada’s 2016 team in Rio, where athletes affili-
[ Page 2775 ]
ated with this province came home from the Rio games with 50 percent of Canada’s medals.

Just think about that 50 percent stat for a minute. When you look at our population, it’s roughly 13. On the Paralympic side, 34 percent of the medals were won by B.C.-affiliated athletes, including our very own MLA Michelle Stilwell.

The medals earned at these games showcase sport as a vehicle for health and success. As a result, strong and vibrant sport programming, from the playground to the podium, is critical to the health and happiness of all communities in British Columbia.

Leveraging government investment to expand revenue sources allows us to enhance our programming and services in every community in B.C. That is really, really important — that we’re around the province.

We are proud to say that we have been able to significantly leverage your provincial investment to receive triple the amount in federal contributions from Sport Canada and Own the Podium.

As we look forward to the future, what’s really important to us is identifying and developing B.C. athletes now that are the next generation that will represent Canada in 2022 and beyond. This is what we believe is necessary to ensure continued success.

Over the last few years, there’s been a reduction of government funding transferred through ViaSport to the sport sector as a result of the waning performance of the physical fitness and amateur sport fund. Over the last three years, there’s been over $1 million less for sport because of that fund.

I’m here today to ask you to restore and enhance this funding in support of two very critical programs for talented young athletes in this province.

The first one is the Canadian sport school. Currently it’s operating in Victoria, Kelowna and Prince George. A key component of this program is to provide personalized learning plans for young athletes so that they can successfully balance sport and academics. This model is definitely working in our province. In fact, one of Megan’s teammates, Charity Williams, went through our sport school very successfully when she relocated here to train in Victoria.

However, our aim is to have this program available provincewide. We are asking for $300,000 to support up to ten regions in the province. Think of it as $30,000 per sport school, in ten regions. Your investment will be leveraged three times that amount by the local school district and community partnerships.

As well, the second critical program we’re asking for is NextGen programming, for that next generation of developing athletes. Currently there are approximately 15 national sport organizations that said they would relocate and move their next-generation program here to B.C. to train, as this is the preferred training destination of choice.

Our ask is for $1.5 million to support the next generation of those 15 sports looking to relocate and train here in British Columbia because of the daily training environment that we provide through the institute. Again, your investment would be leveraged — two times, matched equally by the federal government and the private sector. British Columbia is a leader in Canada when it comes recognizing the power of sport and investing in a culture of excellence.

Thank you for your continued support for sport. Together I know we will help B.C. athletes win medals for Canada and inspire our citizens to use sport as a vehicle for health and excellence in their own lives and build vibrant communities from the ground up through Sport for Life.

M. Lukan: Hi. As you guys know, I’m a member of the women’s rugby sevens team. My journey to making the Olympic team was a little bit different than many of my teammates in that I crossed over approximately 17 months ago, after finishing my five-year basketball career at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.

Although I’m very proud to state that I was a member of the 2016 Rio Olympic team — and to show this to you, the bronze medal — what’s most memorable for me about this entire journey is the daily training. That’s what it’s always been for me, growing up. It’s the little things done every single day that I know had the biggest impact on our success at the Olympic Games.

It’s the financial support from you and the elite training environment created by CSI that allowed my teammates and myself to push the limits, to go above and beyond our perceived capabilities and to strive for great heights to be a top nation in the world.

It’s everything from the extra skill sessions with our coaches to our strength and conditioning coach’s genius idea. In order for us to be the most fit team at the games, running laps on laps on more laps was necessary. I don’t really like laps, as I’m sure you can tell.

It’s the support from our mental performance consultant offering positive advice and suggestions to sustain an edge, as well as the surprise checkups from our nutritionist, just to make sure we were eating smart.

It’s the efforts of our medical and support staff to make sure we were healthy and ready to compete, as well as the endless hours dedicated by the entire CSI staff, which did everything in their power to give us the best training environment possible.

It’s the partnerships created to give each individual the best opportunity to become the best athlete they can be — from the dental hygiene support to discounts to purchase equipment and training gear, as well as the assistance to plan our future career paths.
[ Page 2776 ]

Most importantly, above all the support you have given us, you gave us the opportunity to follow our hearts. You have allowed us to chase our dreams and become our very best. We get to do what we love every single day, and for that, I’m sincerely grateful. I can’t thank you enough for your continued support.

W. Pattenden: Yup. We’re short and brief. I knew the medal would have lots of attraction.

I was commenting that medal has a couple of scrapes on it. Were you partying afterwards with that medal hanging around your neck?

M. Lukan: No. I have younger siblings, so I let them run around with it. I let anyone hold it.

W. Pattenden: I should’ve warned you, though. There is a myth that you’re not to touch the medals if you’re wanting to win a medal of your own. It’s a bit of a superstition. I forgot. So I’m hoping your athletic careers are done. You’ve now touched a medal, so you’re jinxed.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You have nothing to worry about in that sense. No, nothing at all. Thank you very much for the presentation. I appreciate it.

Megan, watching the rugby sevens, I’m amazed at how brutal it was on television. I’m hoping it wasn’t that bad an experience on the field, You certainly did an excellent job. Thank you.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the regional approach that you mention. It looks like it supports athletes to be able to have a flexible, personalized learning experience. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about the approach.

W. Pattenden: Sure. The intent is to have it around the province. Athletes come from every corner in this province. They’re not just centralized in Victoria or Vancouver.

We do have a mechanism through ViaSport. It’s called the ViaSport regional sport centre alliance. We have ten entities. We’re together in this alliance. What we do, as the institute, is provide standardized programming on the performance side.

The Canadian sport school is one of those programs that then, regardless of whether you’re in Williams Lake or Prince George or Kelowna, you’ll get the same experience. So that’s the sports school. It’s a partnership with the local school districts and community partners. It’s for the identified athletes living in that region so they don’t have to move to Victoria or Vancouver to get the same experience at those critical high school ages. It’s for grades 10, 11 and 12.

S. Gibson: I have a question to Megan. I find a lot of young people to date — like students that I taught, especially the males — didn’t have the motivation that you’ve obviously exhibited through your competitive spirit as an athlete. How do you account for that?

Why do some young people your age just kind of wander aimlessly, not motivated, and here you are, going places? How do you account for that?

M. Lukan: For me, I was pretty fortunate in that I got recognized pretty early. Although I didn’t cross over to rugby until almost a year and a half ago, with basketball, I was recognized early as one of the top athletes. I was recruited to centralize in Hamilton when I was in grade 11 for the National Elite Development Academy. Unfortunately, that program got shut down after my grade 11 year, and I just went back to my regular high school. But I think knowing that I was already at that level just pushed me to keep going.

Obviously, a lot of it is your background and your experience. I had a lot of support from my family. My mom was my inspiration. I think it’s just knowing at that age that I already had that chance and to keep pushing from there.

W. Pattenden: A lot of it is that with athletes like Megan, they’re so talented, they could be successful in a number of sports. It’s when one road sort of ends in one sport, being able to do that transfer to another sport successfully.

The fact she could transfer from basketball to women’s rugby in a very short period of time and be successful on the world stage speaks to the value of those programs.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s not unlike Michelle Stilwell, you mentioned — started with basketball and crossed over to track.

W. Pattenden: Or a lot of — what is it? — the woman’s rugby…. I’m trying to think of her name. Switched over to bobsledding — Heather Moyse, the brakeman for Kaillie Humphries.
[ Page 2777 ]

S. Hamilton (Chair): All right. Well, once again, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time. A very interesting subject. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for all your hard work, Megan. Appreciate it.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good afternoon. Of course, we have our Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce.

Just so you recall, ten minutes for the presentation. I’ll try to get your attention when time is winding down, and we can go to the committee for their questions. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

A. Hasham: Good afternoon. I’m Al Hasham, chair of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce. Thank you for this opportunity to present our recommendation for the 2017 provincial budget.

The chamber has more than 1,400 members and is the largest business association in the region. We advocate to government on behalf of our members on ways to make our community better through helping businesses be sustainable and successful.

I’d like to recognize the province for making some decisions in 2016 that we advocated for. This includes the start of construction on the McKenzie interchange, which will improve the largest and most dangerous traffic bottleneck on the Island; funding for modernizing the Belleville International Terminal so it’s an appropriate gateway to our province; $30 million for affordable housing, in addition to the buildings purchased to resolve our tent-city dilemma; and the recent progress on the core area wastewater treatment project, thanks to the first-class project board recommended to the CRD by Minister Fassbender. Finally, we look forward to the positive outcomes from the Commission on Tax Competitiveness, appointed in July.

Greater Victoria is booming. We have the lowest unemployment rate in the country at 4.7 percent. We had a record-breaking number of visitors this summer. B.C. Ferries had its highest traffic levels since 2008. Our technology, construction and tourism sectors are flourishing. For example, in the same week last month, we hosted the Union of B.C. Municipalities, the royal visit and a PGA tournament — all at the same time and successfully. Our city was fully booked, and it did an outstanding job of hospitality.

But along with all that good news, there are some negative consequences. We have record-high housing prices and the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country at 0.6 percent. We have a labour shortage, especially in our most important economic sectors. For example, VIATeC, our technology advocacy organization, has had over 80 vacancies on its job board for months — not the same 80 jobs. Traffic congestion is pretty horrific. We’ve had too many local governments with too many processes slowing us down.

We’d like Budget 2017 to provide help with these issues. First, we need more affordable and available housing. The chamber has been advocating for some time for affordable housing for families because it’s a major factor in creating an attractive and livable city. Affordable housing is important to the business community as an economic driver and as a competitive advantage in the search for skilled workers. We are becoming a place where people will not take a job because they can’t afford a house. The average wage no longer buys the average home.

We appreciate the province allocating $30 million for housing in Victoria for this upcoming year. We recognize that that’s been matched by the CRD, for a total of $60 million.It is absolutely, as we have seen over the last year, important to focus on and help the homeless, but it’s also important to increase affordable rental housing for workers with low and moderate incomes. We do want to see a fair share of that $60 million in funding used for those workers and their housing.

We also encourage the province to advocate for federal participation in making housing available and affordable. A national affordability strategy would be nice. We encourage you to create additional market-based incentives for building rental accommodation in the greater Victoria area.

Secondly, we need more workers. The federal and provincial governments have identified immigration as a good way to increase labour supply in hard-to-fill occupations. The provincial nominee program assists immigrants in obtaining their permanent residence, and it helps business owners with succession planning.

We encourage the province to work with the federal government to make this program more effective. We’d like to see the province educate business owners on the process that they have to go through. We’d like more efficient processing times for applicants, and we’d like to improve the express entry process by awarding points for having a confirmed job offer and not having to also have the requirement of a labour market impact assessment.

In addition, we’d like help from the province to attract skilled workers to Victoria from other parts of Canada
[ Page 2778 ]
where the economy is not as strong. Of course, B.C. must ensure that post-secondary education remains affordable and available so we can attract, train and retain the workers that we need.

Third, we need better transportation planning and delivery. The strategic management of transportation is a regional issue. Currently, there is no strategy. The 13 greater Victoria municipalities are responsible for transportation within their boundaries, the capital regional district is responsible for unincorporated areas, and the B.C. ministry is responsible for highways and related infrastructure, some of which run through and between municipal areas.

Transportation and infrastructure projects that involve more than one municipality in this region are managed as one-off projects, and it requires that they have alignment with regard to the funding and where that project sits in their order of priorities. Regionally important infrastructure in a single municipality is left to that municipality alone to manage.

We’re asking the province, in consultation with local interests, to design and legislate a transportation authority with regional planning responsibility for all current and future modes of transportation. What that would mean is that it must have its own governance, taxation power, decision-making and zoning authority and project management capacity.

We need a major road network, strategic management of bridges and other infrastructure, integration of all transportation modes, incentives to reduce the use of the single-occupancy vehicle and planning for the connection between transit and land use over the long term and for the introduction of future rail-, water- and land-based modes of transit. This is how European cities are able to manage their traffic, and it’s how the Lower Mainland is building new, livable community centres at their SkyTrain stations. It’s essential to managing growth and building a modern, livable city.

Lastly, we need improved regional governance. Local government deeply impacts businesses. The more local governments there are, the bigger the impact. Businesses don’t operate within local government boundaries. When they operate in this region, they have to navigate processes of up to 14 different local governments. The province currently has the capital integrated services and governance initiative underway, and the initial recommendations from that study are due this month. We are looking for substantial recommendations for change.

We want improved governance through fewer governments. We don’t need more projects governed through the voluntary participation of local governments and designed to put a band-aid on major problems such as our fractured public safety services, the onerous effort it has taken to fund a regional economic development body, the unfair burden of one local government running the downtown centre that everyone uses and 13 different processes for business and building permits.

We have had dozens, if not hundreds, of volunteer efforts and multiparty agreements between the existing local governments to try to fix these problems, and we still have the problem. We ask the province to fund the development of viable options and a viable process to achieve better governance through fewer governments and the willingness to legislate the required changes.

That’s a very brief overview of issues the province could help us with in its upcoming budget: housing, workers, transportation and governance.

E. Foster: Just a couple of things. One, on the provincial nominee program. If you could get your members to lobby the federal government to give us more spaces in B.C. We’re oversubscribed by 100 percent. Other provinces aren’t even using their quota, and they won’t switch theirs to ours. For everybody to do that….

E. Foster: Then, on the governance issues, I think it would be easier to try to solve the problems in the Middle East. This is a tough call.

C. Holt: No, we are relying heavily on the provincial government to help us with that one. [Laughter.]

You realize, of course, that the legislation does not permit the province to dictate to municipalities to amalgamate.

C. Holt: No, but local governments are a creation of the provincial government. Nobody else is going to do it at the local level. Mayors are elected to be the mayors of what they are elected to be the mayors of. So we are hoping that the provincial government, because it has stepped in with this review of governance at the CRD in the region, will also step in with significant steps for improvement in that regard.

It’s because that study is underway that we take hope that the province will come up with some significant improvements. What we’re saying is don’t undertake that study and then just come up with more suggestions for volunteer committees to try to fix the problems that are created by having 13 governments.

E. Foster: You do realize that would be a major legislative change to do that.
[ Page 2779 ]

C. Holt: We’re not saying amalgamation. I’m not using the “a” word here.

As I’ve said there, better governance through fewer governments. That could be amalgamating the two big ones, joining the two big ones together. It could be just a step in the right direction with regard to a couple of them joining. It doesn’t have to be the whole 13. It’s not about a big bang amalgamation.

That’s one of the various solutions that could be pursued. There are many other options that would take us a significant way along the right path that don’t involve amalgamation of the 13 communities.

Just two quick questions. One is related to the governance issue. Is the chamber involved at all in the study that’s going on right now?

C. James (Deputy Chair): Then my second question is…. You mention market-based incentives for rental accommodation. I just wondered if you have any ideas, any specifics.

C. Holt: We don’t. We think that the province is probably much better positioned, through the Ministry of Finance and B.C. Housing, to come up with some ideas for what would incentivize private builders to build rental accommodation. We realize it’s tricky. It’s like pushing on the balloon. You push it in one area, and it pops out in another area. But we’re hoping that you can come up with some creative incentives because that’s a huge issue in Victoria.

I come out of a local government experience, as a number of us have here around the table. I come from Abbotsford. About 20 years ago, a community called Matsqui, which nobody ever remembers now, amalgamated with Abbotsford. It was because the public asked for it. It wasn’t from above. It wasn’t like you’re suggesting — the province. The public said: “This is ridiculous. We have two communities side by side.”

Most of the mailing addresses in Matsqui were Abbotsford, such as Saanich here. Many of the mailing addresses in Saanich are Victoria. So you’ve already got a de facto psychological amalgamation, in any event.

I just recommend that if you want to do it, it has to come from the bottom, not from the top.

C. Holt: It has come from the bottom. We’ve had a referendum. We had a question in the last local government election asking for the province to help with studies leading to amalgamation, and it was passed. We do have the public’s opinion, which is that progress needs to be made in this regard.

I think most of the examples I’ve seen of successful amalgamation are between two communities, and the thing that is thwarting us is that people think it has to be all 13. I do think that you could make some big progress, starting with two of the significant ones working together — as Abbotsford and Matsqui did, for example.

C. Holt: I know there are many good examples. People seem to tend towards the bad examples, but there are many successful examples of a couple of communities choosing to come together.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Could I then ask, with the minute we have remaining…? The question was resoundingly supported in the referendum.

S. Hamilton (Chair): What’s happening…? I mean, the provincial government can do so much, but it seems to me the question could have just been, “Do you want to amalgamate?” and then we go about putting those pieces together, rather than studies and bringing in different levels of government and so on.

C. Holt: Well, the question was for a study, which was why we ended up with a study. I think it’s a symptom of the disease — that every local government was allowed to come up with their own version of the question. The same question was not asked through all 13 municipalities, leaving room for interpretation of what the question and the answer meant.

Again, we would really like the provincial government to help us make some progress in that regard.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I understand. Okay, thank you very much for taking the time. I appreciate it. Enjoy your day.

Next, we have Dr. Enid Elliot, Greater Victoria Regional Child Care Council. Good afternoon.
[ Page 2780 ]

S. Hamilton (Chair): Oh, and you brought company with you. Maybe I’ll ask you to introduce your guest.

E. Elliot: I will. Toni Hoyland was going to come with me, who’s a colleague from Camosun College, so I have another colleague from Camosun College’s early learning and care program: Jessica Hrechka Fee.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Well, good afternoon and welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation. With a couple of minutes left, I’ll try to get your attention. You can wind down, and then we can go to the committee and ask some questions, if that works for you.

E. Elliot: Okay. That’s good. But before we start, I would really like to acknowledge that we’re on traditional Coast Salish territory, where children have been cared for and honoured for thousands of years.

We’re here representing the Greater Victoria Regional Child Care Council that was set up in 1999. For over ten years, we actively monitored and tracked our region’s early childhood system, and we researched and wrote two reports on the state of our region’s early childhood system for care and education and collected parents’ stories in this region. And we have continued to informally monitor this situation.

We know that there continues to be a crisis in child care. There are not enough regulated child care spaces for the children in our region, as well as in B.C. About three-quarters of women with small children are in the workforce currently. With more women working in the labour force, child care spaces have not increased to keep pace, and child care that is available is not affordable for most families.

As this year’s Vital Signs…. I’m hoping everyone has had a chance to look at this. Child care costs were second after the expensive housing in a family budget. Last year — I looked it up, and I did a little math — 45,000 babies were born, approximately, in B.C. With the living costs rising, most families need two incomes — if they’re lucky. With three-quarters of women in the workforce, that means 33,000 children need care. And with only 22 percent of our children having available spaces, which would mean 7,500 of those 33,000 children will have spaces, what happens to the other 25,000 children? We don’t have enough spaces to care for our children.

Parents, of course, are creative and find solutions, but they are not always good solutions. Parents have little choice with so few spaces available. We did several surveys. We know parents want to find good care that is licensed and offers a program with which they are comfortable. But in the end, they are desperate to find anything.

Finding a space is just one part of it. Then there’s the cost of the child care space. Suppose there are two children in a family, one age 18 months and the other, four. The cost for two children is approximately $1,000 for the toddler and $750 for the preschooler. That’s a total of $1,750 a month. In Victoria and Vancouver, that’s low, actually, and rents and mortgages in both those cities are climbing. It’s hard to imagine where food fits in and any other costs. It’s even more difficult for families with a lone parent. It may be clear why people have to settle for less than good care.

We’ve done parent surveys and collected stories, and we find that some families ask grandparents to come from Vancouver to Victoria or come from Duncan — or actually drive to Duncan to leave the baby, drive back to Victoria to work, drive back to pick up the baby, drive back to Victoria to have dinner.

Some other families arrange their shifts so that one parent works in the evening and the other during the day. Still other people are leaving their children with people that they found through the paper or on the Internet with no criminal record checks or any training.

These are the solutions of the affluent. Single mothers and fathers have to make more money just to make ends meet and have less available resources for finding child care. They may help each other when they can. For example, a woman who is being housed in a motel is looking after others’ children in a motel room. But is this a good situation for children or for families — being stretched and stressed to find child care, manage their jobs and maintain a home life? Some parents have told us they’ve decided not to have a second child, and some may even be deciding not to have a first.

Can we lower the costs of child care? The major cost of running child care is salaries. There is not a lot of elaborate technology needed to look after babies, toddlers or preschoolers, so salaries is the important piece. A good program is based on relationships with educators who are caring, committed and creative and have an education that prepares them to present learning opportunities to a group of children and provide small children with their first introduction to the larger community. You want good people for that job.

To have a good program, you need good staff, and good staff need good wages. If a child care program has rent-free space, more money can go to staff and chil-
[ Page 2781 ]
dren. But that is not usually the case, so salaries are cut so parent fees can stay lower. But this is a conundrum, as cheaper for parents does not mean livable for educators. If a program is a for-profit centre, one has to ask: what does the profit come out of?

We can control the cost by finding rent-free space with free janitorial and maintenance, and that does happen for some programs. Then the fees can cover adequate salaries. Cutting down on early childhood educators’ salaries won’t help stability of staff in the program or the quality of the program, but it might make it more affordable.

Another idea is to change some of the regulations and raise the number of children in the group. That will be more children in a room — bringing in more fees — and less educators in the room. It might make for chaos, but it will make it more affordable.

There’s also been the suggestion that we privatize child care and move to corporations running child care. It has been tried unsuccessfully in other countries. It seems like a solution. Crayons, paper and training programs can be offered in bulk. Across the country, the curriculum is standardized — the corporate model of child care. It might be spring in Victoria, but the lesson on snow is being offered everywhere.

The responsibility for corporate child care is to shareholders, and thus care becomes a marketable product. But shouldn’t care and education for our children be a public good, like elementary education?

Guaranteeing access to good early childhood programs should be a right, fundamental to how the society organizes itself and how many other societies do organize themselves. We see the government starting to become involved with all-day kindergarten and StrongStart, but these measures do not deal with the needs of parents for child care. Early Childhood Educators of B.C. and the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C. have designed a plan for a system of child care for B.C. — the $10aDay plan. We’ve passed out some information on that.

It’s a plan which is a beginning of a dialogue of how we might offer care for children and support young families at a vulnerable time in their family’s history. We can start this dialogue, perhaps, by beginning the system with families with infants and toddlers. These families have the most limited options, the fewest spaces available. A good beginning would be to focus on a system of infant-toddler care.

Research has shown that there are benefits to our economy by providing good quality child care. Mothers’ participation in the labour force increases with increased child care. Parents can go to work worry-free, and productivity is increased. Child care also increases the job pool by creating jobs. Children benefit from a good child care experience. There are many studies showing the effects of good child care on a child’s overall growth and development.

The lack of child care, the lack of a child care system affects our children and families. Parents who cannot feel comfortable with their child care, are stressed about its quality or the cost, are not as good parents as they could be.

A comprehensive child care system, including part-time and full-time opportunities for children to have quality early childhood experience, contributes to a healthy community. The Regional Child Care Council believes that all children in our province are entitled to an enriched, responsive and secure early childhood experience. The families of our community deserve recognition and support in their provision for their children’s well-being. Children are our youngest citizens, members of our community. What message do they receive about their value in our society?

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I will go to the committee for any questions they might have. We’ve heard a lot as we’ve travelled around with respect to this particular subject.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Yes, we have. You’ve been well represented as we’ve travelled the province.

E. Elliot: Good. We just want you to know that there’s support here, and it’s time for a change.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Not a really a question, just a thank-you. Thank you for laying out the approach clearly. I think people often forget, as well, that getting women back into the workforce is a good economic importance, as well as the social benefits to all children for child care.

I think people often think, sometimes, of families living in poverty. If you look at the statistics, it’s very clear. I don’t need to share with you about the importance of early childhood for all children regardless of their circumstances, but extra benefit for kids who are struggling. So thank you, and thank you for the work that you’ve done in the community for so many years. Appreciate it.

R. Austin: I just wanted to comment around the issue of wages, because I think that’s absolutely critical to getting a child care system going. Jessica would know this, because she used to teach at Northwest Community College. You have colleges providing ECE education, and then, because the system is looking for EAs to go into the school system to help the teachers, they get scooped up because they go to earn a living wage in the school system, thus leaving communities short of early childhood educators. It’s critical.
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I know the plan addresses this by trying to have meaningful wages, but that is really absolutely important. If we don’t pay a decent wage for somebody to go and look after our children, then no one is going to be attracted into this. My wife is a principal in Terrace. I can’t tell you the number of people who are working for her who initially went to school to do ECE and then realized they couldn’t live on it. And they say: “Okay. Well, I’ll go work in the school system.” It’s very problematic.

J. Hrechka Fee: I was one of those cases. I started in the early childhood education field. After I finished my first training, $10 an hour was the wage that I received. When I left the field, it doubled at $20 an hour.

Seeing none, ladies, thank you very much for taking the time to present. Once again, always topical and interesting subjects.

Next, we have the Parkinson Society British Columbia — Paddi Wood, Jean Blake and Brian Wood.

Good afternoon. Ten minutes for your presentation. When you get close, I’ll give you a wave, and then we can conclude and go to the committee for questions.

J. Blake: Great. Thank you. Thank you as well for allowing us to appear. As you can see from the tags, I’m Jean Blake, and this is Paddi Wood and her husband, Brian. Paddi has Parkinson’s disease.

I’m going to give you a bit of an overview, the impact of Parkinson’s disease and how a small, strategic investment could make a significant difference to patients and to the health system. The material you’re just getting handed has additional detail, but obviously, I’ve only got ten minutes.

I’m going to start out by just asking for a show of hands. How many of you have a family member or know someone with Parkinson’s disease? Yeah, so most of you. I’m not surprised. Many of us do have a connection to this pretty devastating disease.

I have a quick five points about it, though, that I’m going to give you. It’s caused by a lack of dopamine, which then impacts how the person moves. There isn’t any test, and only an experienced neurologist can accurately diagnose a case. Although a diagnosis can be frightening, life expectancy can be normal, and with early and appropriate treatment, people can live symptom-free for quite a few years. Appropriate treatment is critical, especially as the disease advances, and the choice of drug, dose and timing — again, as the disease advances — can mean the difference between independent living and a nursing home.

Options for patients with advanced Parkinson’s are pretty limited, but those that are there can be very effective at keeping people out of long-term care, as long as they’ve got support and a neurologist who is an expert in Parkinson’s disease.

In addition to these five quick points, I have a five-part request. Taken together, these things will make a huge difference to how we treat Parkinson’s disease in British Columbia.

The five requests are, first of all, to develop a provincial Parkinson’s disease strategy; second, to provide additional resources for the UBC movement disorders clinic; third, to provide one-time funding for the development of UBC’s CME program to train physiotherapists specialized in treating Parkinson’s disease; fourth, to fund Duodopa therapy for advanced Parkinson’s disease; and fifth, to expand the deep brain stimulation program. A rough estimate of this investment is $1.3 million a year, with the exception of the one-time funding for UBC’s physiotherapy-training program.

In terms of a provincial Parkinson’s disease strategy, right now we don’t have one. The creation of one would help to ensure that the system was delivering care based on best practices and that patients receive optimal care.

There are currently significant barriers and gaps in the provision of care in British Columbia. For example, here in Victoria, with 10 percent of people with Parkinson’s disease across the province, there is no neurologist that has a movement disorder specialization — and, obviously, no movement disorders clinic.

We propose that the development of such a strategy needs to be led by the Ministry of Health and that it needs input from clinical experts, those living with Parkinson’s and stakeholders from the various health authorities.

The second initiative is around the UBC movement disorders clinic. It’s an excellent facility, but it is stretched to the breaking point. Wait-lists to get into to see a movement disorder specialist can be as long as two to three years. During that time, the patient can deteriorate further, and the patient may not even have a diagnosis at that point or be on any therapy.

We have research — granted, based on Ontario — that shows that access to a movement disorder specialist can reduce length of stay when someone is hospitalized and reduce admission to long-term care by as much as 10 percent, compared to other patient groups.

The Ministry of Health here in B.C.’s own statistics show that people with Parkinson’s disease consume about $70 million of hospitalization costs every year, so a 10 percent reduction in that would more than easily pay for these strategies.

UBC’s continuing medical education program has recently added a physiotherapy continuing education piece.
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We know, from research in the last five to ten years in particular, that physical activity can be critical in assisting with symptom control and delaying the progression of this disease. There are over 3,500 physiotherapists in B.C., and only a few have specializing training in Parkinson’s disease. So $115,000 would create and allow for a continuing education program to provide this training to physiotherapists across British Columbia. It would be cost recovery after the program is developed.

Fourth, Duodopa therapy for advanced Parkinson’s disease patients. These patients often require very complex care. For a very small number of them — the movement disorder clinic estimates about ten per year — a very impactful therapy called Duodopa can give them their life back and allow them to live independently for many more years. Ontario, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba and the Yukon all provide access to this therapy, although B.C. does not — even Europe, the U.S., Australia, but not here in B.C.

In my materials, there’s an example of Mrs. Chris Olsen, who lives with advanced Parkinson’s disease. She has given me her permission to tell this story. Her life is not very pleasant. She is suffering incredibly, and she knows that Duodopa therapy could give her, her life back. It might be too late for her, but by providing access for the few others who would benefit, we can avoid this same story happening to them.

Fifth, expansion of the deep brain stimulation program. We’ve been very grateful for it being available here in B.C. Like Duodopa, it’s not for everyone. It’s for a very few who will benefit. But when they do get it, it gives them their life back. It allows certain patients to regain mobility, to reduce their need for medical and home supports and to be able to live independently. Sometimes — because often this is a procedure in early-onset Parkinson’s cases — they can go back to employment. Or they may have a spouse who has had to quit work to take care of them who can go back to work. They can live quite independently for a long time.

However, current funding is insufficient. The wait-list is up to four years. As people become increasingly disabled during this time, they may no longer meet the eligibility requirements when they finally get a surgical spot.

Current funding is through Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. Again, although we are grateful, more than half of the patients are from outside Vancouver Coastal. We recommend that this, therefore, be made a provincial program and that additional surgical sites be considered for Kelowna and Victoria. For the purpose of this budget ask, we have asked for at least enough funding for ten additional patient surgeries per year.

We have a couple of stories. But perhaps, before Paddi goes into those, I’ll pause and see, Mr. Chairman, if you would like to see if there are any questions from the MLAs.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I suppose I could go to some questions now. We have about 2½ minutes left to your presentation time, so if you want to….

J. Blake: Do you want to tell some quick stories? We’ve got two. We have one about a gentleman who has currently waited for 3½ years for DBS.

P. Wood: Yes. He goes to my ParkinGo class in Sidney, which is an exercise program — a strenuous exercise program, I might add — for people with Parkinson’s. Brian has been coming for the whole length of time that it has been going. He has just finally gotten in to see Dr. Honey to see about having the deep brain stimulation, and he now has to wait another year.

During that time, we’ve watched him gradually progress — his disease progress — to the point where it’s almost certain that by the time he gets the surgery date, he will no longer be eligible. I think that’s a shame because he’s only in his 40s. That hits home a bit.

J. Blake: We have one neurosurgeon in all of B.C. who can perform this procedure. In comparison even to our smaller sister province, Alberta, they’ve got two in Edmonton and one in Calgary.

P. Wood: The lack of neurologists on the Island who are Parkinson’s specialists is becoming critical. Somebody who was diagnosed at the same time as I was, was given a neurologist’s name. He apparently is a stroke specialist and a very good one, but he knew practically nothing about Parkinson’s. She suffered for three years. Within the first year of being diagnosed, she was hospitalized three times because she couldn’t tolerate the standard medication, which is Sinemet. He kept trying her on different strengths, different types, generic and everything else, the patch. She reacted really badly to all of these.

Finally, she went to a different neurologist, who had a little bit more knowledge of Parkinson’s. She was finally put back on track, but she shouldn’t have had to go through that. It’s probably set her back ten years, I would say, because her Parkinson’s is way more advanced than mine is, and we were diagnosed at the same time.

J. Blake: The disease is controllable. It does advance, but with appropriate medical care and exercise for symptom control, you can maintain a good quality of life for quite a long time. Without those supports, the disease progresses quite a bit faster.

P. Wood: We have absolutely nobody on the Island that we can phone and ask for help with our medications or anything. Most of the medical profession — I’m not trying to bad mouth them — are very, very ignorant in the sense of not being taught enough about Parkinson’s.
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My own family doctor told me, when I went to see him, that they are taught in medical school that Parkinson’s affects old people and they shake a lot. Well, I wasn’t old when I was diagnosed, and I never have had a tremor. When you’re dealing with something like that, it makes you reluctant to phone and ask for assistance because you know that they’re coming from a place where they don’t really know any more than you do.

It would be really nice to have someone we could phone. We are the only progressive disease in Canada that does not have some kind of centre that we can go to for information.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you. I will go to the committee for questions, if there are any.

I think you’ve explained it quite succinctly. There’s no doubt that there’s a problem. I was curious about your comment…. Alberta has three specialists that can do the deep brain therapy, and British Columbia only has one. It must be an awfully specific kind of therapy in terms of the talent it takes and probably the training it takes to be able to deliver it.

J. Blake: Yes, it is. You need to get your neurosurgery specialization and then a further…. I think it’s another two years before you can do deep brain stimulation.

Any questions from the committee? Seeing none, thank you for your time. I do appreciate it. It’s very enlightening. Hopefully, we can see some improvement on that front sometime soon.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Welcome. Ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll try to give you a wave when time is winding down, and then we’ll go to the committee for questions. The floor is yours.

G. Sing: It’s always tough. I presented to a committee this summer, and I had to follow those same three. It’s quite challenging for that disability.

Good afternoon. Thank you very much for this opportunity to share with you. Thank you to you, as committee members. I’ve seen your schedule for the last couple of weeks. Thank you for your commitment to the province and the people of B.C.

G. Sing: My name is Geoff Sing. I am the manager of brain injury services with the Cridge Centre for the Family. I was hoping to take a few minutes today to share with you about brain injury and where it is in our community.

Just to give you, to start with, some stats about brain injury. We look at a population in Canada of about 33 million. Each year there are about 165,000 new brain injuries per year. If we break that down into B.C., we’re looking at about 22,000 per year, 60 new brain injuries per day. If we break it down further into greater Victoria, we’ve got just over 1,760 in greater Victoria. That’s five new brain injuries per day.

By comparison, if we look at the disabilities or impairments of breast cancer, HIV, spinal cord and multiple sclerosis — if you put those four together — we still have significantly more brain injuries.

Who are the brain-injured? Brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability throughout the world. We look at the leading causes of brain injury — motor vehicle crash, work-related, assault or violence, sport, recreation, falls. The lady before me asked if any of you knew anybody with Parkinson’s. I’m pretty well guaranteeing you that you know someone — a loved one or a friend or a colleague — who has suffered a brain injury. Unfortunately, it touches our whole community.

Who are the survivors? Brain injury hits anybody — rich, poor, young, old. It’s our whole community that it touches. The highest proportion of brain injury are the young adults or adolescents. We call it people crossing the stupid line. I’m your stereotypical survivor. I was 18, living up north…. This is many moons ago, trust me. Stereotypical survivor — young, male, aggressive, unstoppable and crossing the stupid line, drinking and driving, getting into fights, roughhousing, falls. Unfortunately, those are the majority of survivors. But again, it touches everybody.

If we look at brain injury, we look at the difference between traumatic injury — a blow to the head such as a fall, such as a car crash — versus acquired brain injury — and those numbers are becoming more prevalent now — of stroke or aneurisms. Those people who have suffered a stroke often suffer some brain injury, brain impairments, as a result of it.

Some other stats for you. Generally, the ratio of male to female stats is about 2 to 1. As I alluded to earlier, young men, silly men, crossing that stupid line. We look at the prison population. It’s estimated 60 to 80 percent of our prison population has a brain injury. Divorce after brain injury. It’s documented that for well over 90 percent of those who have a brain injury, their marriages will end up in divorce.

There are some new studies that are happening now. It’s becoming aware about the incidence of intimate-partner
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violence and domestic abuse. It’s documented that well over 60 to 90 percent of those women who are abused suffered a brain injury. We could think about some of the negative ramifications — I’ll touch upon it later — that could happen to a spouse with a brain injury looking after children, and some of the things that spiral down.

Brain injury is often cumulative. People who’ve suffered a first brain injury are three times more likely to suffer subsequent brain injury. It’s just come on the news recently. Sidney Crosby — this is a high-profile one, understood — suffered a concussion about four years ago. He’s just suffered his fourth one now, and we’re going to see a decline in his career. You can see it.

You look at some of those mixed martial arts — I know you guys don’t watch that — wrestling and the football players. The CTE is cumulative. The brain injury is cumulative. The results are some of the…. If we don’t address and support, we could have some challenges for survivors.

We look at the road to recovery from brain injury. They go to the hospitalization. Hospitalization is the sprint, right? You’re in hospital. You want to get out of hospital. You suffered a crash or you suffered an aneurism, and you want to get out of the hospital.

The next step would be moving along to rehabilitation, back into community. That’s where I’m hoping to bring greater awareness about…. The medical system is very good at saving lives. The challenge is when people depart the hospital, are discharged from hospitals. What type of support is in the community for them?

One of my other hats…. I’m the president of the B.C. Brain Injury Association. I was asking my colleagues: “What do you guys need? What do we need more of? What could we have better supported?” There are three key areas that arose: increased need for one-on-one and family support once they’re discharged; increased need for affordable housing and support — I’ll touch upon it a little bit later here; and coordinated and equal access for services throughout the provinces.

There’s no doubt what we have here in greater Victoria and greater Vancouver is pretty good, but when we go into the outskirts of the rural areas, it’s a challenge for some. I’m sure you guys have heard it over the last couple or three weeks. It’s investing now, paying now. Invest now, or we pay later.

I’ve shared with you a position paper that the Cridge Centre for the Family put out about the mind of homelessness. I think there are two key stats in there. You’ve probably had oodles of reading over the last few weeks given to you. If we look at brain injury and homelessness, 52 percent — we did a study; this is the greater Victoria study — of the people who were homeless had a brain injury. An even worse stat is that of those people who are brain-injured and homeless, 70 percent had a brain injury and then became homeless.

What I also share with you…. If we look at putting supports in for survivors…. We look at some of the costs of care. We know the acute care system is about $1,500 a day. We look at the prison system, as I alluded to earlier, the cost is about $323 per day.

And then we look at community residential supports. The Cridge works on a basis of continuing care. We have a 24-7 community support, which is MacDonald House, but then we move survivors along this continuum of care to Mary Cridge Manor. Ultimately, what we try and do is work ourselves out of a job.

But you look at it. Each stage is less cost to the taxpayer. There’s value of the investment upfront, as opposed to being reactionary and trying to pay for it later.

I think we just saw it this past summer. We had a tent city on the courthouse lawns, and the cost there. It’s sort of a little bit of a red herring, but the cost was $1.6 million to the city of Victoria. Perhaps if we had invested those funds earlier, up front, in terms of rehabilitation and community support, we wouldn’t have had the problem down the road of the tent city and those costs. Perhaps a good investment — early, up front and less cost down the road.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Mr. Sing, just about out of time. I don’t know how much time you feel we need to keep for questions, but you may use the remaining five minutes however you like. If you have more to say….

G. Sing: The funds are not unlimited. We know that. So we’re just asking…. We look at how we can invest our funds to use to support survivors in community.

I’ll take questions, but I do have the picture, an example, of a good use of funds versus not so good. The gentleman and couple on the right…. Joseph Centis and…. They were up in Nanaimo. This was about 12 years ago. You may have heard the story. He murdered his wife. The gist of it was….

We had interviewed him to come and live at MacDonald House, but they chose not to, because they were living up in Nanaimo, and it wouldn’t have worked for them. But what happened was the downward cycle that we see for couples. They filed for divorce. She asked for sole custody of the children and the resources of the family. So he got so angry, he went out and murdered his wife.

Perhaps if we would have had services and support up in Nanaimo for him, we wouldn’t have had the problems we did. What do we have? We have a murdered woman. We have a man convicted of murder. We have six children in foster care. How does our community benefit?

The young woman in the other picture, Shannon, suffered a brain injury as a result of snowboarding. She was put in a family care home and given three years of support in community. Now she’s back working as a paramedic. That is the value of good investment for survivors.
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We still have time left for questions, if there are any. I’ll go to Robin first, please.

R. Austin: Thank you for your presentation. We’ve heard from other groups around the province.

My question is: how are you currently funded down here? Are you funded mostly through VIHA? Can you explain that?

G. Sing: Yes. The majority of our funding is through the health authority, which is VIHA — the Ministry of Health. One of the things we’d be advocating for is…. It’s just not a health issue. If we look at some of the services that survivors need, it’s social development. It’s the justice system. To a point, some of these ministries are working in silos, so we can’t tap into services.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some really innovative things going on, some diversion courts and such. But addressing supports and services for survivors through the ministry pooling their money for brain injury would be really beneficial. Yes.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. We have three presentations remaining, each with a duration of ten minutes. First, I’ll call on B.C. Seniors Games Society — Mr. Gordon Oates.

Up to ten minutes for your presentation. I’ll give you a wave at about the eight-minute mark or so — the seven-minute mark. If you want to keep talking, that’s fine. Otherwise, we’ll go to the committee for a couple of questions, if they have any.

G. Oates: I’d like to first of all thank everybody for allowing us to come. We’re sort of a last-minute group that got tossed in because we were a little bit late in getting our application in. I’m glad to see Robin. I know Robin from Terrace. I used to live up there. Nice to see him again.

We’ll just get started, rather than wasting a lot of time. First of all, I’m going to take just a couple of minutes to introduce or to take this opportunity to familiarize you with the B.C. Seniors Games Society. We operate under the name of the 55-Plus B.C. Games. That started about two years ago when we converted our name over to try to get a broader spectrum for the age population that we’re dealing with, which is 55 plus.

The 55-plus population represents about 30 percent of the population of B.C., based on the 2015 census. The B.C. Seniors Games Society impacts basically two ministries — three, maybe, if you really want to stretch it. One is Health, and the other is Community, Sport and Cultural Development. Also, we do impact somewhat on the municipal involvement, but I know that’s really not one of the ministries that we’re looking at.

First of all, B.C. Seniors Games Society was founded in 1987 as a registered charity organization. It serves all British Columbians aged 55 and over. This coming year, in 2017, we’re going to be holding our games in Vernon. It is our 30th anniversary of consecutive years. We haven’t had a break in there at all, so that’s sort of a feather in our hat.

The B.C. Seniors Games Society is run and operated by over 500 volunteers in 12 geographical zones, with one part-time paid employee, which is operated out of Sidney. The volunteers contribute over 45,000 volunteer hours annually to the society. This is an addition to the 3,000 volunteers that are needed annually by the host society to support the 55-Plus Games.

The BCSGS is an important member of the provincial sports sector, supporting the Active for Life stage of the Canadian Sport for Life model in B.C. by championing lifelong participation. The BCSGS is the only adult multisport provider in B.C. and runs the largest multisport games in B.C.

Just for comparison purposes, you’re all aware of the B.C. Games, which is a Crown corporation. They run two games. They run the Winter Games and Summer Games. Their games average about 1,700 participants per year — 3,700 every two years, because they only run every two years. We run annually, and we run 3,700 people annually. So we are twice the size of the B.C. Games and operate on one part-time employee.

Now, the B.C. Games operates on a budget of $2.2 million from the ministry. In turn, ViaSport, which is also operated through the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development, receives $14½ million a year to fund their operations.

We receive from the government a total of $5,000 to run our games. In addition to that, there’s another $85,000 which is granted to us that goes on to the host society to actually put the games on. But BCSGS itself receives $5,000.

Let me see what else I can tell you. Out of that $90,000 that we receive, I said we receive $5,000. The other $85,000 goes directly to the host community. In addition, the host societies receive about $60,000 in direct funding from the municipalities in which they operate, along with another $55,000 of in-kind support. So they get $115,000 from the local municipality and $85,000 from the ministry.

During the past two years, the B.C. Seniors Games Society has provided increased funding to the B.C. Games Society for event management in the amount of $30,000 annually. And the B.C. Seniors Games Society has increased funding to the host communities in the
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amount of $47,000. Between the two of them, the B.C. Seniors Games Society has kicked in another $77,000 in direct funding to B.C. Games and to the host society. That has all come out of our operating money.

In March of 2016, the board of directors of the B.C. Games elected to cease providing event management services to the 55-Plus B.C. Games, and in May of 2016, the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development engaged the services of KPMG to conduct an audit of the costs associated with providing event management services to the 55-Plus B.C. Games by B.C. Games. This report indicated the total cost of providing these services was $122,934. As I said before, at the present time, the ministry provides to B.C. Games funding in the amount of $85,000, of which $30,000 came from our own society back to them.

The B.C. Seniors Games Society is currently in the process of hiring a part-time operations manager to assist with several key areas of operations, including our relationship with the various provincial sport organizations and the transfer of knowledge from the B.C. Games relative to the ongoing event management.

We are uniquely positioned to serve the population of B.C. as an organization created to promote physical, social and creative achievement through participation in friendly competition. As we move ahead to next year’s Community, Sport and Cultural Development budget, we would ask for the following considerations.

That the direct funding to the B.C. Seniors Games, for operating usage, be restored to the $35,000 that it was prior to us giving $30,000 to B.C. Games; increased funding to the host communities of $50,000 per annum, which will match the amount of funding that the B.C. Seniors Games has provided to the host societies annually over the past two years and match the funding increases provided by the host municipalities. Thirdly, increased funding to the B.C. Seniors Games Society of $40,000, from the current $85,000 provided to B.C. Games for event management, to meet the KPMG-audited costs of $122,000.

In summary, what we’re looking for is total funding of $300,000, which is an increase of $125,000 from the current levels, to assist with the above-noted costs associated with event management services, hosting costs and some general operating costs.

That’s all I have to say to you. I have also given you some pictures of some of the participants at this last games in Coquitlam, so you can have a look at some of the age groups that we’re looking at. You can see from the pictures that these people are all enjoying what they’re doing and having a great time.

S. Gibson: Hi. Thank you, sir, for coming out today. I appreciate your presentation.

Is there a national dimension to these games? If people do well here provincially, can they participate nationally?

G. Oates: Yes, we have an affiliation with the Canada 55+ Games. As a matter of fact, they’re held every two years, on a biennial basis. The last games were just held in Brampton, Ontario, in 2016. The next games are coming up in Saint John in 2018, and then in 2020, B.C. is in the rotation to host those games here.

R. Austin: Thanks, Gordon, for your presentation. I still know quite a few people from Terrace who got to the B.C. Seniors Games.

I would just add to your presentation by saying this. We’ve heard a lot on this committee from people coming here and advocating the link between physical activity and health care costs. I would say that for the amount of money that you’re requesting here for our committee to deliberate about, the savings to the health care system — for seniors to remain active doing stuff like this, compared to sitting at home and not being active — would be just of a greater magnitude.

You can’t even imagine how the data would be. I just think that’s another reason that you should be pushing as you’re advocating for this kind of funding. It saves a lot of money in the health care system.

G. Oates: We didn’t bring that in, because we don’t know how much it does, right?

G. Oates: But we do know there is a cost savings to both health and the general well-being of the population.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Oates. We appreciate it. Take good care, and enjoy your evening.

Okay. Next we have the Greater Victoria Cycling Association — Mr. Corey Burger. Good evening. Ten minutes for your presentation, and I’ll try to get your attention maybe just with a couple of minutes left. Then if there are any questions from the committee, we can go to them. If you’re ready, the floor is yours.

C. Burger: My name is Corey Burger, and I’m here today speaking on behalf of the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition. Our mission is to encourage more people to bike more places more often. We do this in a number of different ways.

We work directly with municipalities in the capital regional district here to build more bikeways, to work with them on designing good bikeways. We also work by celebrating that biking — running rides and events, those kinds of things. I’m here to ask you today to help fund
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the expansion of those bikeways throughout the province.

A little bit about why. We know that throughout the capital region and the whole of B.C., people want to bike more. Vancouver has seen a massive growth in bikingsince installing their triple-A network in the last few years. The fastest-growing mode of transportation in the city of Vancouver is in fact biking. That was done through the 2015 panel study the city of Vancouver commissioned.

We know that when the province asked the people of B.C., “What would you like in B.C. on the Move?” 72 percent said they wanted more bikeways. That isn’t the end of it. We know that poll after poll in municipalities, provinces, states — anywhere across North America…. Ask people, “What would you like your government to spend more money on when it comes to transportation?” biking floats to near the top of that list.

More and more people are choosing to bike to places — for transportation to work, to school, to the shops, places like that — and they want their government to prioritize that as a means of transportation and for their budget to reflect that priority.

In the last few years, there’s been a bit of a revolution in how we build bikeways. Not only are municipal governments adding more in terms of pure laneway kilometres; they’re also building complete networks.

There’s a little bit of an analogy to the early days of motor vehicle infrastructure. In the early days, in the 1920s and ’30s, roads were built ad hoc, piecemeal, little bits here and there. It wasn’t really until they came along with large federal dollars and started knitting them together as a large network that we saw a massive explosion in the number of people driving cars.

Today a very similar thing is happening in terms of bikeways, what we’re discovering. In fact, today the city of Edmonton approved a $7.1 million five-kilometre bikeway grid for downtown Edmonton. It’s very similar to what the city of Vancouver has, what Calgary built two years ago, what the city of Victoria is proposing.

The other major change that’s happening is that we’re going from just a few painted lanes on the road and a few signs to what we call triple-A. This means all ages and abilities. This means that this is a bikeway that you, me, my kids — and, potentially, in the future, my grandkids — can ride on. This means something my grandmother can ride on.

This is seen, in Victoria, where you have the Biketoria project, a very ambitious project. Victoria’s pretty good for biking, but we know that we lack the places that are safe enough for kids and seniors and everyone else to ride.

The Victoria plan is 24 kilometres throughout the city. It comes with a price tag of about $1 million a kilometre. That’s just one municipality of the 13 here in the capital region and the hundreds throughout the province.

One of the challenges we also know is that when you’re building better bikeways…. When you’re just painting a line on the road, that’s relatively cheap. But you get what you invest for.

The city of Vancouver is investing more money, and as a consequence, they’re getting more riders. So it’s important to understand that there needs to be a balance of investment to return. The return is there on triple-A bikeways.

Many people wonder why. In many cases, you’ve just spent many days being asked for money. Why support bicycle infrastructure? The province has a whole host of priorities: health care, economic development, making sure kids succeed in school, tackling climate change — a whole host of them. In many of those places, bicycling can help. We’ve already talked — actually, just talked — about sedentary people and the health care impacts of that.

The 30 minutes a day that someone generally rides a bike if they choose to ride a bike satisfies 100 percent of your basic needs for exercise. Just by people choosing to get somewhere as a totally incidental part of their day, they’re meeting their needs for exercise.

What’s happening in tech companies? Tech companies are increasingly choosing places to pick. They can go anywhere they want in the world. Microsoft opened an office here in Victoria because one of their managers wanted to live in Victoria because of our bicycle infrastructure.

If you want to start attracting those kinds of people…. Kids. If you want kids to do well in school, one of the best ways to do that is to get them to walk or bike to school in the morning. There’s statistically proven evidence that these things happen.

And the great thing is a bicycle also emits basically no carbon. It takes up a fraction of the space of a motor vehicle. So when it comes to building infrastructure for them, yes, there’s a price tag up front, but there’s much lower costs down the road. There’s much lower costs in terms of our carbon emissions, in our carbon taxes, much lower costs in terms of road maintenance and those kinds of things.

So at the end of the day, what you actually discover when organizations and cities do the math is that bicycling actually makes money. When you roll together all of the costs that a government needs to spend on bicycling and all the costs that a government needs to spend on all those people, what happens is that bicycling is estimated to make the government about ten cents a kilometre compared to about $1 a kilometre for driving.

The other thing is, it’s not just about here in Victoria. We’re sitting in the middle of a city. I’ve talked a lot about the urban areas and those kinds of things. But B.C. is a much bigger place than this committee room, this city or even this region.

One of the key things we’ve seen to our two neighbours to the south is that rural biking is very important economically. Last year I rode on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail. It’s an ex-rail trail. It’s out of Seattle. It was fantastic. It’s very similar to our Kettle Valley Trail. It is 100 per-
[ Page 2789 ]
cent bike/walk only. My brother and I chose to go down there and ride because it was 100 percent bike/walk only.

We know that people — again, destination tourists — can go anywhere in the world. They’re choosing places they can go to bike because they want to bike.

In Oregon, one state to the south, what they’ve found is…. Eastern Oregon is very poor. It’s largely rural resource towns. They’ve been really hard hit by the change in forestry. Very similar story to some B.C. towns. What they’ve created are these scenic bikeways. They’ve created these low-traffic nice places to ride. Eastern Oregon happens to be very beautiful, as well, in terms of sunshine. What they’re finding is that they can’t answer the demand fast enough anymore for these.

Cities, towns, are hearing about the next town over getting a huge influx of people just because they’re on a scenic bikeway. They’re like: “We need that here. How do I get that here in my town?” The demand started from Portland and from Eugene out. What’s turned around is…. Now they can’t answer the requests fast enough.

What are we looking for in terms of dollars and in terms of policy from the provincial government? There’s a couple of big pieces. The first big piece is we’re looking to expand the Bike B.C. infrastructure sharing program.

This is a great program. It already exists. Municipalities or regional districts can ask for money. In return, they get 50 percent matching. That’s currently just expanded to $8 million a year, which is not a lot of money when you start thinking about large grids of bikeways that cost about $1 million a kilometre to construct. We’re asking for a much larger increase, upwards of about $20 per person per year, which works out to about $100 million a year.

We’re looking to be able to expand that pot, because one of the things we know from talking to municipalities is that the small municipalities have trouble. If they bid on it, if they put a grant application in and they don’t get it, there’s no return for them. They may have spent tens of thousands of very limited taxpayer dollars and get nothing in return.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I’m just going to wait. I do have a question from George. We’re just about out of time here. Do you want to go on to your second item?

C. Burger: Yeah, and I just want to say that the big municipalities have the reverse problem. It’s not a big enough pot for them. They don’t even bother applying anymore.

There are a couple of other pieces, but those can be answered in policy. I guess I’ll wrap up by saying biking makes the province money in a whole host of ways, and it’s a great investment opportunity for the province.

G. Heyman: A quick question of clarification. You said that spending money on bikeways returns about ten cents on the dollar to the provincial government, whereas automobile infrastructure…. I wasn’t clear if it was returns a dollar or costs a dollar.

C. Burger: That’s a Danish study. What they did is they summed up all of the costs of transportation, whether or not it was providing that transportation. This is public costs of transportation — providing the road or the bikeway, the health care costs of the person choosing that mode, the pollution costs, the cost of importing whatever the material was.

When you sum it all up, what they found was that a motor vehicle in Denmark — assuredly it would be more here — costs the entire government of Denmark and all its municipalities about a dollar per kilometre driven, and a bike, once you add up the health care impacts and the costs of building the bikeway, etc., turns to about a ten cent return on investment.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Burger. Thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. Have a good evening.

Finally, we have the Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence — Stacey Lund and Robert Bettauer.

Good evening. Welcome. Ten minutes. I’ll give you a little wave with a minute or two left. If there are any questions, we can get the committee to ask them then. The floor is yours.

R. Bettauer: Great. Thank you very much for providing us the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Robert Bettauer. I am the CEO of PISE, the Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence. With me is my colleague Stacey Lund, who is our business development manager.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to present to you, which was the first time I had done it, talking to you about PISE. For many of you, I think that might have been the first time you’d heard about our sport institute. So a few updates.

First of all, we were built in 2008 here in Victoria, in large part through a major capital contribution from the provincial government. We always make a real point of thanking the provincial government for that investment in PISE. We’re built on an excellent partnership that involves Camosun College, Canadian Sport Institute Pacific and PacificSport Victoria.

Through that collaborative partnership, we’ve been able to contribute successfully to the enhancement of post-secondary sport and exercise wellness education, create a world-class training environment for our Olympic and Paralympic athletes here in Victoria and, maybe most importantly, contribute to the overall health and well-being for the citizens in our community. Our vision is to improve the quality of life for our citizens through sport and physical activity.

We think we’re unique in the sport world in that we’re a financially self-sustaining organization, not reliant on
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government funding or any specific funding. We’ve actually had to create a business model and develop the business skills to be self-sustaining.

I guess what I would like to say within that is that we’ve been able to lever the investments that have been made. We receive about $100,000 a year from ViaSport out of a $2.8 million budget. But in that, all the resources that we receive, we’ve been able to lever that multiple times in partnerships to the benefit of the community.

A few examples of that impact. Recently we all enjoyed the Olympics and the Paralympics. A number of the performances that we enjoyed came from the environment produced here at PISE but also with some of our partners.

The women’s sevens Olympic medal, which I think everybody is very proud of. Also, a number of the Paralympic results, the rowing para team — first medal ever. The medal we won in a triathlon and also the sailing tandem — all breakthrough and new results and part of a collaborative partnership that includes not only ourselves and the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific but the University of Victoria, Saanich Commonwealth Place. The city of Langford, as you may know, has become heavily invested in providing support in this area and now Bear Mountain as well. So we work very closely with that group and Camosun College to lever our resources and not duplicate anything, and it has made a profound impact.

When I spoke to you two years ago, we were in the process of raising funding to build a brand-new track. We have a very limited number of training tracks in the province and certainly also in Victoria. We started the process of raising $1.2 million, which we accomplished earlier this year, and this summer we were able to construct a world-class, 400-metre, four-lane training track, with six 100-metre sprint lanes in the back and a 100-metre incline, which is very unique. Athletics Canada has announced that they will set up their western national training hub. They only have two. The other one is in Toronto at PISE and in Victoria, and we’ll be opening. Our grand opening is next week, the 18th, and in that, we will recognize, again, the provincial government. You made a substantial investment of $250,000, which allowed us to lever that to raise the full amount of $1.2 million.

What I think is important to know about the track as well is it is not only for Olympic and Paralympic athletes. It’s been built to be fully accessible, and it will be open to the students, to athletes from other sports and maybe — again, most importantly — to all members of the community. So when I say that our name includes the term “sport,” of course, that is a major part of what we’re involved in, but it’s actually not the most important part. We’re actually about a healthy, active community, and we build all our programs around the Active for Life model, of which performance sport is a relatively small component.

Active for Life is about physical activity. It’s about quality physical activity, and sport is a subset of that. It’s an organized, sustainable form of it. And the foundation of that is physical literacy, a term you’ve probably heard now a number of times. Physical literacy is building the foundation of movement skills, which lead to building confidence in individuals to get engaged in physical activity, so physical literacy leads to quality physical activity.

This is how we believe we contribute to health in our province. We partner with the other regional centres. I believe that you have heard from a number of our colleagues throughout the province, this great network of nine regional alliance centres. We work in very close collaboration, together with ViaSport, who is providing some great leadership. This model is going to have profound impact. It already is, but what our mission and vision is isn’t just in the sport world. It’s in the community health world. The nine centres. We have the direct relationships with the municipalities, with the recreation centres, with First Nations, to be able to engage in sharing of resources and programs to make that kind of a substantial difference.

We’ve worked, on an annual basis, with over 4,000 children a year in our physical literacy programs. We have over 32 partnerships, and most of those programs are now delivered outside of PISE. We figured out a long time ago that to be successful, we couldn’t limit ourselves just to offering our programs within our impressive facility. So our partnerships include delivery in eight schools, two school districts, one First Nations and six rec centres, now including Bear Mountain as well. This is a model that really focuses on the collaboration opportunities. The common language of: “We’re all in the same business of wanting to create healthy, active communities” — health wants that, education wants that, recreation wants that, and sport wants that.

I think that that’s what’s unique about PISE and the regional alliance. That’s our vision. That’s our mission.

I also wanted to mention that we understand that we need to be able to prove the effectiveness of our programs. It’s one thing to speak to you with passion. You’ll go: “Yeah, of course you’re passionate. We get it. You love sport. You love people being physically active.”

This year we started a process of a collaborative research project with the University of Victoria and with Sport for Life, and we assessed the literacy skills of 450 students over a ten-week program. We measured their progress not only in physical skills but also in areas such as self-esteem and feedback from the teachers in terms of if there was an impact in terms of behaviour and overall involvement in the classroom. The results were very significant, very positive.

What we’re doing now is working together with our partners to create a standardized framework for gathering this information so that we can provide you evidence,
[ Page 2791 ]
not only to enhance the effectiveness of our programs but also to make the argument for greater investment because of the profound impact.

We also believe very strongly in working collaboratively with our indigenous communities. Highlights from our year include delivering physical literacy programs to over 400 indigenous children and youth at Lau Welnew Tribal School, Songhees Wellness Centre and other organizations in the community. We were very excited, in March, to host workshops for the recipients of the Premier’s Awards for Aboriginal Youth Excellence in Sport. We’re deeply committed to continuing and growing our collaborative support of indigenous peoples and contributing in a meaningful way to reconciliation.

Furthermore, PISE plays a leading role in accessibility in sport and physical activity. We are a founding member of OneAbility, a collaborative of over 20 organizations dedicated to working together to increase participation in sport and recreation for people of all abilities. We also offer a number of services and programs, from adapted physical literacy programs to national Paralympic training services, to people with disabilities.

Last year, PISE provided a very meaningful program to families with children undergoing cancer treatment. Peninsula Co-op joined forces with us and provided a donation of $6,500 to the families, in the form of gift certificates for food and gas, to assist them over the holidays.

We were successful last year in securing over $150,000 in grants to support our work in physical literacy — the majority provided for our work in schools and for children with disabilities. Sources of funding came from the private sector, including RBC, Island Savings, the Victoria Foundation and the Telus Community board. These grants have also enabled us to work with over 110 coaches in our community, during Coaches Week, and to provide a physical literacy symposium to 120 individuals from the health, education, recreation and sport sectors.

R. Bettauer: Thank you for providing the opportunity. We just want to recommend that you increase your investment in the sport and physical activity sector because, I think, of the evidence we’re providing of how we can lever, together with our other partners, and provide a tremendous levered bang for the dollars that are invested.

In particular, we want to encourage the provincial government to consider establishing a targeted fund of $500,000 to grant to communities that bring matching funds to the table and enable cross-sector collaboration of physical literacy programming. That’s the other part. We’d like you to bring your influence to the table to recommend that health, education, recreation and sport continue and to grow the collaboration and sharing of resources.

As I said at the beginning, we all have the same goal, the same vision — healthy, active communities.

We’re out of time, but we’re at the end here, so I will go to the committee to see if there are any questions.

J. Yap: Thank you for your presentation. The new track — is it at Camosun, a new Camosun College…?

R. Bettauer: Yes. Our location is Interurban campus, and the south end is where the track has been built.

R. Bettauer: Yeah, it pretty much is already operational. It doesn’t take long. It’s not a well-kept secret that there’s a new track in town and folks can come there.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Just a quick question around the collaboration. I’d asked, in the regions, your regional partners, as well, what kind of work you’re doing with teachers in school around physical education. I think one of the big gaps…. We used to have physical education specialists who used to provide that support and who were trained in that area, but a lot of those specialist teachers have disappeared from the education system. So I wonder what kind of work you’re doing with teachers around providing them with support.

S. Lund: Absolutely. We offer a teacher mentorship program that is supported by the private sector, as well as ViaSport and the school districts.

We go in, and we mentor the teachers to teach the physical literacy activities to the students. It has been a great success. We can’t keep up with the demand.

R. Bettauer: What’s unique is that the school districts are actually investing in this as well. That’s a real sign that they’re seeing the value in it.
[ Page 2792 ]

Now, to build on that, we held our physical literacy symposium last October. We held it on a pro-D day. We had over 90 teachers take part in it. Many of them then went on…. We also run a lot of the community coaching courses. We just had a coaching week a couple of weeks ago. I think we had 110…. Many of them were teachers who had been at our physical literacy symposium, wanting to continue to upgrade their skills and take physical literacy in the physical activity area.

Seeing none, thank you very much. Appreciate you taking the time. Have a good evening.

With that, ladies and gentlemen, Members, we end the public hearing component of our Finance Committee responsibilities this fall. Have a good night.

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) Professional Arts Alliance of Greater Victoria	Carey Newman
	Heather Lindsay
2) Nanaimo Youth Services Association	Chris Lewis
	Steve Arnett
	Mike Bonkowski
3) Victoria Residential Builders Association	Casey Edge
4) BC Healthy Living Alliance	Mary Collins
5) British Columbia Chamber of Commerce	Dan Baxter
6) University of Victoria	Jamie Cassels
7) Royal Roads University	Dr. Allan Cahoon
8) First West Credit Union	Launi Skinner
9) Applied Science Technologists and Technicians of BC	John Leech
10) British Columbia Common Ground Alliance	M.J. Whitemarsh
11) University of Victoria Students’ Society	Maxwell Nicholson
12) BC Colleges	Dr. Lane Trotter
The Research Universities’ Council of British Columbia	Jamie Cassels
B.C. Association of Institutes and Universities	Dr. Alan Davis
13) Camosun College Faculty Association	Al Morrison

14) Seymour Salmonid Society	Shaun Hollingsworth
	Brian Smith
15) Walk-in Clinics of BC Association and	Mike McLoughlin
Victoria Division of Family Practice	Dr. Katharine McKeen
16) Art Gallery of Greater Victoria	Jon Tupper
	Ruth Wittenberg
	Barry Till

17) Prince of Wales Mini School Parent Assistance Coordination Committee	Gili Avrahami
	Sharon Berringer

18) Insurance Bureau of Canada	Aaron Sutherland
	Mike Lee
19) Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C.	Thom Armstrong
	Patty Shaw
20) Imperial Tobacco Canada Ltd.	Sébastien Charbonneau
21) B.C. Wildlife Federation	Alan Martin

22) Canadian Diabetes Association	Ellen Stensholt
	Serge Corbeil
23) Canadian Sport Institute Pacific	Wendy Pattenden
	Megan Lukan

24) Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce	Catherine Holt
	Al Hasham
25) Greater Victoria Regional Child Care Council	Dr. Enid Elliot
	Jessica Hrechka Fee
26) Parkinson Society British Columbia	Paddi Wood
	Jean Blake
	Brian Wood
27) The Cridge Centre for the Family	Geoff Sing
28) BC Seniors Games Society	Gordon Oates
29) Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition	Corey Burger
30) PISE (Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence)	Stacey Lund
	Robert Bettauer

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES