Finance and Government Services — Issue No. 113 — Tuesday, November 1, 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; Jennifer Rice, MLA; Jackie Tegart, MLA; John Yap, MLA

2. Resolved, that the Committee meet in-camera to deliberate on its draft report to the House. (Simon Gibson, MLA)

6. Pursuant to its terms of reference, the Committee began its review of the three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budget estimates of the statutory offices.

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

Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia and Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists

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

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

13. 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
Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner and Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists	2797
D. McArthur
J. Fedorak
Elections B.C.	2802
K. Archer
N. Western
A. Boegman
Office of the Auditor General	2810
C. Bellringer
Office of the Ombudsperson	2815
J. Chalke

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good morning, everyone. The Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services will continue our budget deliberations on our submissions.

I call for a motion to go in camera. Moved by Simon and seconded by Robin. Thank you.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Good afternoon. Now we’re here to proceed with the annual review of statutory officers, their three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budgetary estimates for fiscal 2017-2018. It’s my pleasure to welcome the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia and the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists. We have Drew McArthur, Jay Fedorak and Dave Van Swieten.

Gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome back. It’s good to see you again. I will turn the floor over to you. You might want to actually start by introducing the company that’s behind you, for the record, as well.

Office of the
Information and
Privacy Commissioner and
Office of
the Registrar of Lobbyists

Good afternoon, hon. Chair and members of the committee. Joining me today are Jay Fedorak, deputy registrar and assistant commissioner; Dave Van Swieten, who you all know, executive director of shared services; Erin Beattie, director of communications, OIPC; and Elissa Hintz, manager of human resources.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Welcome. As you know, I think for the first 20 minutes or so you can give your presentation, and after that we’ve got plenty of time to go to the committee to ask questions and have a little bit of banter back and forth. If that suits you, then the floor is all yours.

D. McArthur: Excellent. Thank you very much. In accordance with y our previous request, I’ll keep my remarks brief to allow more time for questions. I will briefly highlight some of our key accomplishments and outline our priorities for the coming fiscal year.

I am aware that the officers began meeting with this committee on a semi-annual basis in 2015, and I wish to indicate my ongoing support for that practice. It gives us the opportunity to provide the committee with more detailed information about how we are fulfilling our mandate and how we are accountable, as well, to this committee.

I’ll begin with a brief overview of the key priorities of the coming year for my two core functions, and then I’ll move on to my budget proposal. As you know, on an interim basis, I fulfil two roles: the registrar of lobbyists and the Information and Privacy Commissioner.

I’ll begin with the registrar of lobbyists. The job is to monitor and enforce the Lobbyists Registration Act, or the LRA. In the first six months of this year, we conducted 56 compliance reviews, which are reviews of a lobbyist’s activity, identified either through a complaint, inquiry or an environmental scan by our staff. Of those 56 reviews, five went to formal investigations. One resulted in the application of an administrative penalty, and one, although non-compliant, did not result in an administrative penalty.

As I’ve outlined in the budget submission, my first priority as registrar for the coming year will be to continue with our enhanced enforcement program, as it is proving successful in promoting compliance with the legislation.

The second priority as registrar is to implement the public education plan that we developed last year to meet the needs of lobbyists, stakeholders and the public. We intend to use a variety of strategies, including conferences, training workshops, speaking engagements, webinars, articles in newsletters and journals, toolkits and our e-newsletter Influencing B.C.

I am pleased to report that there has been a significant decrease this year in non-compliant registrations and other evidence of failure to register appropriately. It appears that lobbyists are becoming more familiar with the rules and how to register properly and on time. I believe that our focus on public education and increased enforcement has been successful in promoting the increased levels of compliance.

As committee members may recall, we have recommended legislative change to the Lobbyists Registration Act that would make it easier for lobbyists to comply with the law and provide more transparency in lobbying, as well as save both them and my office money. These changes include requiring the registering of actual rather than
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anticipated lobbying, eliminating the 100-hour threshold for organizations with in-house lobbyists and requiring lobbyists to register third-party interests that have a stake in the outcome of their lobbying activities. These legislative proposals remain with government, and once again, I bring them to your attention.

Now, I turn to my duties as the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Pages 7 through 11 of my budget submission outline the OIPC’s major accomplishments since the beginning of the fiscal year, so I will not repeat them here. The major priority for the next fiscal year is to address the significant growth in demand for our services and reduce the wait times facing citizens and consumers seeking redress from our office.

Investigation is the first stage of our process when we receive a complaint or an appeal. Our investigators will attempt to resolve the matter by working with the parties or by issuing formal findings. They resolved 96 percent of the 1,500 complaints and appeals last year. There are 13 staff and two part-time contractors on our investigation team.

Adjudication is the second stage of our process, which involves a formal written hearing or inquiry when a complaint cannot be resolved through mediation. The lion’s share of adjudications is appeals of access-to-information requests. The adjudicators issue binding written orders.

There are four staff and one part-time contract employee on the adjudication team. Should one of the parties disagree with an adjudicator’s decision, they can seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of British Columbia. There are currently eight outstanding judicial reviews, most of which commenced during fiscal year 2015-2016. We also had nine outstanding judicial reviews at this time last year.

In my office’s presentation to this committee in November 2015, we indicated that the number of files awaiting assignment to an investigator had decreased over the previous six months from 300 to 240. I am pleased to announce that as of November 2016, what we had originally put in here was reduced to 95. It is actually now down to 65.

We are committed to making further reductions to ensure better service for those who are waiting to have their complaint investigated. I am grateful that the committee recognized last year the need for increasing resources to deal with our increased workload and recommended funding for an additional investigator.

In addition to obtaining increased resources, we have initiated an ongoing, continuous improvement process review to ensure that we are working as efficiently and effectively as possible. This new process has streamlined our case file management from when a complaint or appeal file arrives in our in-basket through to when it is resolved or discontinued by an investigator.

We have new policies with respect to the opening and closing of files and strategies to ensure that all citizens have fair and timely access to our resources. We have established performance targets and measures to evaluate our success, and I’ll be reporting to you in future presentations.

We’ve also taken measures to streamline our adjudication process. Changes to our processes were implemented in October 2015, and our significant reduction in the file backlog is a testament to the success of the project and to the additional resources recommended by this committee.

I’m pleased to report that I believe we can accomplish the goals in our service plan with our current allotment of permanent staff. So my budget request for this year is framed around, first, addressing ongoing and unavoidable cost pressures, such as mandated increases to salary and benefits and, secondly, a modest temporary lift to assist us with managing the association of privacy authorities in the Asia-Pacific region, which I’ll expand on in a minute.

On the topic of cost pressures, 68 percent of my budget is for salaries and benefits; 8 percent is for professional services such as technological and legal advice; 18 percent is for fixed costs such as our shared-service costs, rent and utilities; 5 percent is for operating expenses such as amortization and office expenses; and 1 percent is for travel.

We have a staff complement of 37 positions, plus myself. This means that the management of mandated cost increases must come from salaries — that is, not hiring staff — or a reduction in outside professional advice, such as legal advice.

For the forthcoming fiscal year, my office is again faced with an adjustment to cover government-mandated salary increments and adjustments for schedule A, shared services, IT building and other increases. This amounts to unavoidable increases netting out at $50,000 compared to our 2016-2017 estimates.

We have exhausted the flexibility in our budget to address these cost pressures over the course of the last three years. In fact, in the last three years, this office has been able to come within 0.2 percent of our allocated budget. We are very close to the edge in managing that budget. In order to meet any government-mandated increases, the only option available to me going forward would be to not hire for any vacant positions. So for these reasons, I am requesting a funding increase to cover new and ongoing cost pressures totalling $50,000.

As a member of the Asia-Pacific Privacy Authorities, or APPA, which includes 19 agencies from 13 different countries in the Asia-Pacific region, we have an opportunity to promote the interests of British Columbians in a region that is critical to the province’s economic success. We’ve been taking a leadership role in this forum, which requires us to take our turn at fulfilling the secretariat function. The secretariat is a three-year assignment
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that rotates among leading members of the forum. We assumed this role in July of 2016.

The digital economy is becoming an increasingly important part of B.C.’s crucial ties with the Asia-Pacific. It is essential for personal data to be able to flow for commercial purposes freely but securely across boundaries. To properly protect and regulate these data movements, we must work together with fellow regulators to share best practices; to ensure consistent regulatory processes where possible; or in some instances, to engage in joint enforcement work, such as the now-famous, or infamous, Ashley Madison breach, which saw Canada’s and Australia’s privacy commissioners cooperate on an investigation.

The secretariat function further strengthens our relationship with each member of APPA and contributes to B.C.’s reputation for leadership in this region. The activities of the secretariat include setting the agenda for and organizing twice-yearly APPA forums. This involves managing and disseminating all documents related to the forums and collecting forum membership fees. We also deal with member requests and concerns, and we chair eight APPA governance committee meetings annually.

Through this forum, we are in a position to showcase B.C.’s laws to the world. We have greater influence in the forum with respect to raising privacy issues of particular interest to British Columbians, including breach reporting and de-identification of data. We are currently working towards holding another biannual meeting in Vancouver in 2017. This would showcase the province to people who work with both the private and public sectors in regions of the world critical to B.C.’s economic success.

I believe this will facilitate opportunities for B.C. companies in the digital economy and will create greater awareness that B.C. is a good place to do business. This will have concrete benefits.

This new role will place temporary additional financial burdens on our office. Our predecessor secretariat, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, indicated that their expenses were approximately $70,000 Canadian per year. These costs involve mostly staff time but also include travel and materials. We will receive about $20,000 per year from membership fees to cover part of that cost, leaving a shortfall of about $50,000 for each of the three years we are secretariat.

We are able to cover this $50,000 cost for the current fiscal year with existing funds. Therefore, I am requesting a budget lift of $50,000 per year for the next two fiscal years to cover this temporary extraordinary cost. I believe that’s a good investment for the economic future of B.C.

So in order of priority, I ask consideration of the committee for funding to cover unavoidable expenses in salary, benefits, shared services, information technology, building and other costs, netting at $50,000, and funding to partially offset the costs of administering the APPA secretariat in the amount of $50,000. In total, for 2017-2018, this represents a requested operating budget of $6.064 million, or a 1.7 percent increase, and a stand-pat capital budget of $45,000.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Just as a point of interest, MLA Yap had to leave for an LRC meeting over in the chambers. He’ll be back a little later on today, so he sends his regrets.

E. Foster: Thanks for the presentation. I asked this question last year, and I never really did get an answer, so I’ll ask it again. The professional services run about half a million dollars a year. Is there any way we could get an actual breakdown of what those are?

D. McArthur: We could provide you which ones were related to legal services and which ones were related to technological advice. For example, last year in some significant investigations, we required forensic investigators in order to examine the contents of hard drives or information like that. We do not have those skills within office. And quite often we need to seek legal opinions. But if you wish a breakdown of how those services are used, by all means.

Just so I’m clear, the issue of the cost for the secretariat. That’s a two-year request? Have I read that correctly here? It’s two fiscal years. You’re looking for $50,000 in each year, and then you expect that $50,000 not to be needed after the two years?

D. McArthur: That’s correct. It’s actually a three-year term. We can cover the costs for the first year, d so we’re asking for assistance, the $50,000, for the following two years, 2017-18 and 2018-19.

S. Gibson: Under other expenses, $484,000, my question is: you don’t have your own information technology, finance, human resources, facilities or reception? You don’t have any of those departments in your own?

D. McArthur: That’s correct. We use a shared-services model. Dave Van Swieten is in charge of our shared services. We share those services with three other offices of the Legislature.

D. McArthur: It’s allocated on a head-count basis for the services that we use. So between each of the different offices, the head-count numbers are how those costs are shared.

S. Gibson: I reviewed your site. I thought it’s quite good. It’s quite communicative and quite welcoming, unlike…. Sometimes you’ll see a site that appears to be welcoming but isn’t. I want to compliment you on that.

My question is: as far as the complaints coming through the process, do you track the time? Some other statutory officers track their time between the time when the actual complaint is received and processed and closed. Do you see some positive thoughts there? I don’t see that in your analysis. That would be a good thing to share, I think.

D. McArthur: Well, let me share the first part of that. Yes, we do track that information. At this time last year, from the time a complaint was received to the time it was assigned to an investigator was 24 weeks. I’m pleased to say that we are now down to less than seven weeks between the time that a complaint is received and the time that it’s assigned to an investigator.

I believe Jay can inform us on the overall time that a complaint is resolved in. I think we resolve about 96 percent within 90 days. I might be a little wrong on that. We have the information.

J. Fedorak: We have our performance measures in our service plan. If you go to page 13, you will see that we’re now resolving, with respect to what we call a request for review…. That’s an appeal with respect to someone’s freedom-of-information request. We are now closing 77 percent of those files within 90 days or within three months. With respect to complaints, where we’ve set ourselves a target of 120 days or four months, we’re resolving 90 percent of the complaints within that time. This is a significant increase over the performance times that we had last year.

A further question, if I may. Do you create a template? For example, if I had a complaint and my colleague here had a similar complaint, do you set up templates so you don’t have to kind of go back and reinvent things each time but you’ve got some kind of commonalities or consistency so you can expedite the approval or the processing of these complaints?

J. Fedorak: Yes. Over the last couple of years, we’ve been developing some template letters and some template reports, where there are certain standard types of information that will be in the final report of a complaint. We’ve produced these templates with the standard information in there and then spaces for the unique information that’s particular to each complaint.

Last year, when we conducted what we called our continuous improvement project, we looked at absolutely everything that we were doing from the perspective of: “How can we close more files faster?” We were looking at setting benchmarks for staff, saying, “You should have this activity done within so many days, this activity done within so many days,” and then we brainstormed around: “What can we do to make it easier and faster and more efficient for our investigators to complete the files?”

We identified: “Well, if we didn’t have to rewrite things from scratch….” What kinds of tools can we put in place so that we can speed things up? We used our own staff that have vast experience and knowledge of the process as part of that continuous improvement process. I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s been so successful this year.

S. Gibson: That sounds very good. My only other query is: how do you discourage frivolous inquiries at the start? How do you process those? Even though you don’t want to offend people, you can just sense that they’re frivolous. How do you deal with those in a sensitive way yet in ways that are efficient for your system?

J. Fedorak: As part of the continuous improvement process, we were looking at the issue of whether we should continue to open files every time somebody makes a complaint. That was the way we used to do business.

We’ve found that there were not a large number of files but enough files where people were coming back, basically, for the same issue. They have the same problem with the same public body — they word it slightly differently — or it’s something that’s not entirely within our jurisdiction. So we decided to adopt a policy whereby we would screen all the complaints that came in, in the first place. If we did not see that the investigation of the complaint would further the purposes of the legislation….

If it was, in our opinion, not going to be a good use of public funds to pursue something that seemed of a trivial nature…. There are certain individuals that have ongoing issues with public bodies or organizations, and they have difficulty letting go of those issues. They will keep coming back. So we decided to implement a policy where we would, as you say, respectfully decline to investigate.

We give the people an opportunity to have that decision appealed within the office so that in the event that one was incorrectly turned down, there’s a chance it could be reopened.

G. Heyman: I have two questions. First of all, thank you for the presentation, and welcome.

Your predecessor, Elizabeth Denham, on a couple of occasions over the last three-plus years issued decisions, interpretations, around the duty of government under the act to proactively disclose information, even if there was no request for information, where there was a potential threat to public safety, health or the environment. One of them was with respect to the Testalinden dam failure.

More recently, it was in response to a complaint that was filed when the Ministry of Environment refused to release some test results with respect to pollution of the Hullcar aquifer, claiming that even though the ministry had required the tests to be done, they were done under ministry policy by a qualified professional, at arm’s length, hired by the person whose land was being tested.

For that reason, the ministry said: “Even though we required the information and we possess it, it’s not ours.” The commissioner rejected that interpretation and issued a very strong interpretation that there is, in fact, a duty of government ministries to proactively release information and, certainly, release information on request when it pertains to public health and safety.

My question is: are you in receipt of any report from government or ministries about how they plan to change practice to implement that requirement? Are you monitoring in any way to ensure that they’re implementing that requirement? How would you respond to complaints or evidence that ministries were continuing to not meet that requirement?

D. McArthur: Let me start by saying one of the first steps that I took when I came into the office was to create, essentially, a 90-day plan. That 90-day plan set out the priorities in four areas of focus. One of them was, as we previously discussed, reducing the backlog. The other was to create an inventory of previous reports and recommendations that we want to follow up with the government on.

So we have developed a database of reports and recommendations. We do go back. In some cases, we go and proactively follow up on recommendations where they are significant and impactful. In other cases, we will ask the government for a status report on the implementation of those recommendations.

As you’re aware with the Mount Polley tailings mine failure, my predecessor reinterpreted a section of FIPPA, the legislation, that applies in the public interest, where a public body must disclose information that it has if it is clearly in the public interest. That interpretation was taken into account in the Hullcar Valley report. In our investigation — and Jay can correct me if I’m wrong — there was release of the information to interested individuals in the Hullcar Valley area, and we did not find them offside with that reinterpretation of the legislation.

But that continued to raise the threshold for all public bodies, to examine the information they had and to determine that if the information was in the public interest, it would be disclosed without delay.

G. Heyman: Thank you for the answer. It’s reassuring to know that you’re monitoring and that people can raise concerns they may have in future that relate to actions of government with respect to the interpretation and the duty to inform the public.

My second question. It’s fairly common with respect to requests for information that timelines will not be met, extensions will be requested. Often there are good reasons or grounds for the extension. Sometimes the extension requests tend to pile up on each other and become sequential.

My question is: are you satisfied that when issues or complaints about failure to meet timelines on requests for freedom of information are brought to your office that you’re able to deal with them (a) in a timely manner and (b) that you have the appropriate levers at your disposal to both correct the behaviour in the instance as well as to make the point or discourage — I’ll borrow a term from Simon at this point — frivolous requests for extension or groundless requests for extension?

D. McArthur: Let me start by saying one of the things that we routinely do in the office is a timeliness report, typically on an annual basis, where we review government’s response times in access-to-information requests. I will say not all access-to-information requests are created equal. Some are often quite easily responded to, and others, as you have noted, require significant search for records across broad sections of government. Those naturally take a little longer.

We continue to monitor government’s response times. They have an opportunity to request their own extension of 30 days. If they need more time, they can approach my office, and we can extend their time, depending on the complexity of the search. We review that with an independent perspective.

In terms of how they perform on a regular basis, as I say, we monitor their performance annually, and we produce a timeliness report. We are just undertaking another look at their annual response rates and times. I believe we put this into one of our sections.

J. Fedorak: On page 12. We receive information annually from government, and we report on the average number of processing days for processing requests and the percentage of access requests that were processed on time. You’ll see that chart at the very top of page 12 in the service plan.
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With respect to some of the other aspects of your question, when a public body comes to us for an extension, we deal with that immediately. It’s not put in the…. We talked about the backlog and the delays. That’s something that an intake officer will deal with absolutely immediately.

We first determine whether the public body is still on time, because if they’ve gone overtime, we will not grant an extension. We determine whether they’re on time, and then they have to provide evidence of meeting the criteria for an extension. Extensions aren’t just granted because people want them. They have to demonstrate based on volume of records or having to consult with other public bodies or other bodies before releasing the record.

They have to meet the criteria. We evaluate that, and we determine, based on their evidence, whether the amount of time that they have requested is reasonable. Sometimes we grant them what they ask. Sometimes we give them less. Sometimes we turn them down. It depends on the circumstances of the case.

Now, when we get a complaint that a public body is overtime — they’ve failed to respond to the timelines — that’s also a file that we will deal with immediately, through what we call our deemed refusal process. They’re deemed to have refused access because they failed to meet the times. In those cases, we have an investigator deal with it very expeditiously and basically get the public body to commit to a time for disclosing the records.

If they won’t commit, the issue proceeds to a formal adjudication, where an adjudicator can order a disclosure by a certain date. Now, that happens occasionally, but it’s not very common that we get there. Most of the time, once we open that deemed refusal file, we get a commitment from the public body to release by a reasonable timeline.

Well, thank you, gentlemen. From what I see in the reports, it looks like you’ve made great strides in the last year to really streamline your processes. I imagine triage, as it was talked about a little earlier, is a big part of that. But yeah, it sounds to me like you’re going great speeds. Congratulations on that. You’ve done a great job.

D. McArthur: If I might, I would like to add my thanks to the staff for their resourcefulness and diligence in terms of assessing and developing programs and policies and procedures in order to reduce the backlog in order to give better service to B.C. citizens.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Fantastic. Okay, well thank you again, very much, for coming, gentlemen and ladies. Keep up the great work. I look forward to your interim reports in the near future, and I’m sure we’ll be deliberating in great detail your presentation today.

S. Hamilton (Chair): The committee will stand in recess until our next presentation, which is actually in about 25 minutes. Maybe if we could be back a few minutes before that, just in case we have an opportunity to start early.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We are now back in session and on the record, welcoming the Elections B.C. office. Dr. Keith Archer, welcome back. I see a few other familiar faces. I’ll turn the floor over to you, Dr. Archer, and you can dispense with the introductions and then your presentation. It’s all yours.

K. Archer: Great, thanks very much Mr. Chair, Madam Vice-Chair and members of the committee.

I’m joined today at the table by Nola Western, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer for funding and disclosure, and Anton Boegman, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer for electoral operations.

Also in attendance are Tanya Ackinclose, manager of finance, Amie Foster, manager of executive services and corporate administration, Andrew Watson, communications manager, and Yvonne Koehn, director of information technology.

Each year at this time, we look forward to meeting with the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services to update you and, through you, the Legislative Assembly and the people of British Columbia about our activities and our spending requirements.

We provided our budget document to you last week, and in that document, we review, amongst other things, our guiding principles. Two of those principles are accountability and transparency, and this annual meeting provides us with an opportunity to reflect those values.

I would also say that, while I look forward to this meeting each year, this is especially the case in our meeting before a general election. This is true in part because the dollar figures that we put before the committee are larger in our election year budget, but it’s also due to the fact that general elections are the principle raison d’être of Elections B.C.

To encapsulate this in a single number, we transform from being an organization with 56 full-time staff to having more than 23,000 staff members working for us during the event period. I should note parenthetically that this compares to more than 33,000 staff in the last general election. The transformation of our
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organization is profound and so, too, is the role that we perform for British Columbians to enable our citizens to freely choose those who represent them in our Legislative Assembly.

There’s another reason why our budget presentation is more notable in a year with a provincial general election, and that is because, metaphorically, it’s the year when the rubber hits the road. In our mission statement, we refer to ourselves as being leaders in election administration, and in our value statement, we embrace the values of innovation and service to our stakeholders.

As a planning organization, we strive for continuous improvement and are continually seeking new and better ways of responding to our stakeholder needs. Thus, we’re continually changing and improving our processes, sometimes in response to legislative changes and sometimes simply for improved performance.

It often is the case that changes that have been underway for several years become manifest as we administer a general election. Therefore, this budget presentation provides an opportunity to share with the committee some of the exciting changes ahead for the 41st provincial general election.

Before I do so, however, I’d like to provide the committee with an encapsulation of our budget submission for 2017-18 and for the two out-years of ’18-19 and ’19-20.

Our budget request has three elements, including the operating budget, the capital budget and the event budgets. Our operating budget request for 2017-18 is $9.687 million. This figure is up by just over $300,000 compared to the operating budget that we were allocated in 2016-17. Secondly, our capital budget request is $550,000. This is down $150,000 from the $700,000 allocated for our capital budget in 2016-17.

The third budget request is our event budgets, which, for 2017-18, includes four elements. The lion’s share is the request of $36.16 million to administer the 41st provincial general election. We are also requesting $103,000 in 2017-18 to complete the pre-election enumeration, which is mainly occurring in and is largely funded in the current fiscal year.

Similarly, there will be some residual work remaining to complete the electoral boundaries redistribution project in 2017-18, for which we require $68,000 in the next fiscal year. The electoral boundaries redistribution is largely taking place in 2016-17, our current year, and the vast majority of the funds for the project are being spent in the current fiscal year.

While the latter two projects will require modest funds to bring them to completion, we’re also requesting funding for a fourth scheduled event, the 2018 general local elections, totalling $136,000. With this latter funding request, however, the larger requirement will be in the subsequent fiscal year in 2018-19, when the general local elections will take place.

Now, since I expect many members of the committee are especially interested in the budget amounts for the general election, allow me to put this request into context by comparing our total budget spending for the 40th provincial general election in 2013 with the budgeted spending for the 41st general election.

We spend funds on general election preparations in the two years in advance of the election year in addition to the election year spending. Thus, for the 40th general election, the total budgeted amount for the election was $37.776 million over three fiscal years — that is, from 2011-12 to 2013-14. For the 41st general election, the total budgeted amount is $44.466 million for the three years from 2015-16 to 2017-18. As indicated in our written report, this represents an increase of 17.7 percent in total budgeted funds across these two elections.

In the written report, we highlight some of the factors that have led to these increases over the four-year period. Let me review some of these with you at this time.

Firstly, the number of electoral districts has increased from 85 to 87. As well, the number of days of advanced voting has increased from four days to six days, which, of course, impacts staffing as well as facility rental costs. There have been some modest pay increases for some of our election official positions.

As you all know, the rental market in parts of the province has led, in some instances, to very significant increases in rental fees for our DEO offices as well as for voting places. We’ve also introduced technology into the voting place, providing the ability to maintain electronic records of participation at advanced voting and to print labels for certification envelopes. Our business plan calls for the reuse of this equipment through events leading up to but not including the 43rd provincial general election, scheduled for 2025. That technology is going to have a life beyond this event.

As well, our planning assumption, based on population growth, is that there will be about 100,000 additional eligible voters for this general election, compared to the last general election.

Postage fees for the 3.2 million where-to-vote cards and other materials have increased significantly since the last general election — in terms of postage fees themselves, by 27 percent.

Each of these factors has led to increased costs for the general election. However, we’ve also introduced an important change to our staffing complement and, thereby, have limited staffing cost increases. This concerns the number of voters assigned to a polling place, or what we call our voting area distributions. We’ve increased the number of voters that can be assigned to a voting area, from 400 to up to 700 in urban areas and up to 600 in suburban areas. The number remains at 400 for rural areas.

As a result, staffing costs have gone down for many em-
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ployment categories. In the absence of this latter change, our costs for this event would have increased considerably more.

These comments provide you with a snapshot comparison of the budgeted cost differences between the 40th and the 41st general elections. I’ve got a few more comments to make about our election preparation, but before doing so, I’d like to turn briefly to our operating and capital budget requests.

On the operating budget, the one expenditure change I’d like to highlight is the proposed increase to our voter education budget. Now, my authority in this area stems from section 12(1)(c) of the Election Act. That section states that it is a duty of the Chief Electoral Officer “to provide information to the public regarding the voter registration and other electoral processes under this Act.”

This section reminds us that there are shared responsibilities in our democracy to ensure that our citizens are aware of how their democratic system works, and also that they are aware of how they can play a meaningful role as full participants in the democratic process. Information in this regard is provided in families, in schools, through voluntary associations, by our political parties and candidates, and by the election agency.

Our plan is to target our efforts on young people, who have been shown to have much lower levels of voter registration than other British Columbians, and to encourage them to register as soon as possible once they become eligible to vote. We expect to work with a number of partners, such as CIVIX, which is the group that develops and offers the student vote program in the Democracy Bootcamp to strengthen our efforts in this regard.

With respect to our capital budget request, the committee will note that our request for 2017-18 is less than the $700,000 Elections B.C. typically requests in capital funding. It’s worth pointing out that our capital funds really involve borrowing forward on future operating dollars, since capital assets are amortized and, hence, repaid from our operating funds over the next five years.

We have found that during years in which there is a provincial general election, our operational requirements effectively prevent us from undertaking as much capital work. Therefore, the request this year is more modest. The projects that we’re engaged in are described in the document that we have circulated to you previously.

I’ll now return to the discussion of the general election and highlight a number of the changes that have introduced for this event.

Following the 40th general election in 2013, Elections B.C. initiated a planning process that looked at enhancing and modernizing voting processes and voter and other stakeholder services. The idea was to identify changes and enhancements that could be accomplished without legislative change — in short, those things that we could do on our own — followed by changes that could come about only with legislative change.

The former were included in a planning process that we called Vision 2017 and the latter in one that we called Vision 2021. A report on how the voting process could be modernized with legislative change, coming out of our Vision 2021 project, is being prepared for submission to the Legislative Assembly following the election.

Due to time constraints, I’ll provide just a brief glimpse into a number of the changes introduced for this general election. The most significant change, first used in by-elections in February of this year, concerns the introduction of technology into the voting place. I discussed this change with the committee in the spring meeting that we had, so I’ll emphasize only a few points at this meeting.

We introduced automatic strike-off of electors voting in advance voting places by having laptop computers for the use of election officials at the voting station. We also introduced label printers for the printing of labels that are affixed to certification envelopes. The use of computers for strike-off of voters in advance voting enables us to provide candidates with a list of electors who voted in the electoral district following each day of advance voting — a requirement put in place by changes to the Election Act in 2015.

This change enables us to upload information of who voted advance each night, after the close of voting. It also enables the printing of voting books at the end of advance voting, with the ability to strike off voters who cast a ballot in advance voting. This produces a much more efficient solution to the need to produce struck-off voting books for the start of general voting. In short, what had been a remarkably labour-intensive process for our district electoral officers and their staff is now fully automated.

With changes in the use of technology, there are downstream changes in our staffing requirements. The by-elections demonstrated the value of having appropriate personnel who can handle the more complex technology challenges that arise in the new voting environment, and our recruitment is being adjusted accordingly. We’ll be hiring more technology-savvy and, in many cases, younger voting officials both in the DEO offices and in voting places. We’re training our staff using new blended-learning approaches.

These changes will reduce errors and improve efficiency in the voting process and provide improved and enhanced services for voters and other stakeholders. We’re very proud of the extent to which we have introduced such changes while remaining mindful of the need to be prudent with the expenditure of public funds and compliant with new legislative changes.

I’ll now turn to my colleagues — first Nola Western and then Anton Boegman — for their more specific and detailed comments on our budget requirements.

Good afternoon. My comments today are going to be very brief. Our operating budget request by business line is on page 11 of the document that you have. The request, as Keith said, is $9.687 million. That represents an increase of just over $300,000 or 3.2 percent from the current fiscal year. Over one-third of this increase is in the area of voter education, and you’ve already heard Keith discuss our mandate and our plans in this area.

The remaining increase is largely due to governmentwide salary increases for non-management employees and corporate information systems that will rise next fiscal year and then decrease the following fiscal year. In ’17-18, next year, we must replace some of our aging office computers’ hardware and software. That’s a cost that won’t be necessary again in 2018-19. These increases will be partially offset by voters list maintenance decreases in the next fiscal year. This year, ’16-17, we replaced two servers. Again, that’s a cost that we won’t incur next year.

As usual, it’s the event budgets that fluctuate between fiscal years. These budgets vary enormously from year to year as the electoral events progress through the four-year electoral cycles, both provincial and local. Anton is going to address these events and the related budget requests in just a moment.

Before I finish, I want to refer briefly to table 3 on page 19. It shows the actual expenditures for the last five fiscal years. As I noted last year at our presentation, at the end of each fiscal year, the Ministry of Finance actually allocates Elections B.C. the exact amount necessary up to the maximum of the budget approved by this committee and the Minister of Finance. The budget reflected in the public accounts equals exactly the amount that was spent on core services and events.

Hence, the variance to actuals to the appropriation is zero, and no surplus or deficit is reflected — even when the actual costs of those events are lower than the original budget that had been approved by this committee. You can see this illustrated in the public accounts for ’15-16, the most recent public accounts, on pages 22 and 23 of the Consolidated Revenue Fund Supplementary Schedules.

That concludes my remarks today. Anton will now provide some details about the event budget request.

Good afternoon, committee members. As both Keith and Nola have mentioned, my focus is on the event-related funding requirements for 2017-18. Given the time frame that we have available for this presentation, my comments are going to primarily focus on the specifics of these budgets.

Our total event-related funding requirements for ’17-18 are $36.467 million. This total is displayed on page 11 of your budget document, in lines 11 to 14 of the table.

As is likely anticipated, the vast majority — in fact, over 99 percent — of our event funding requirements are associated with the delivery of the 41st provincial general election. However, we are also requesting some event funding in ’17-18 to complete the work associated with the electoral boundaries redistribution and the pre-election enumeration, as well as to begin preparations to administer campaign financing for the 2018 general local elections.

You will note that the budget submission does not include any event funding for 2018-19 or 2019-20. That is because our event-planning methodology, which is based on proven project management best practices and standards, uses an effective bottom-up process whereby the specific deliverables that are necessary to administer an event are first identified, then costed and then scheduled. Therefore, the budgets for scheduled electoral events are not available until the detailed plans are completed in the fiscal year prior to that event.

Of course, if Elections B.C. is required to administer any on-demand events in the next fiscal year — such as an initiative petition or a by-election — when we are certain that these events will be required, per current practice, we will then follow up with this committee for additional event funding needs as soon as operationally possible.

To the event budgets. Our ’17-18 funding requirement for the general election is $36.160 million. This represents funding to deliver the election from writ to return across all 87 electoral districts in B.C.

As we begin the 2017-18 fiscal year, we will have just completed 12 months of intensive preparations for the election. We will have appointed and comprehensively trained a district electoral officer and deputies for each of the 87 districts. We will have stocked our warehouse with over 150 tonnes of forms, manuals and election supplies — from laptop computers and scanners to ballot boxes — and then shipped them throughout the province. We will have tested our information technology infrastructure that’s required to support event delivery. We will have planned and prepared an advertising campaign designed to inform voters of the new Election Act requirements that came about from Bill 20 in 2015 and the voters’ available voting opportunities.

Our work in ’17-18 will build on these intensive preparations and take us through the 51-day election period — from writ day on April 11, to return day on May 31 — and then beyond, to the financial filing deadline and the other post-event activities.

These activities and costs will, to a very large extent, centre on the work done by our district electoral officers in the districts throughout the province. They will be staffing and opening their offices, accepting nominations from candidates, printing ballots, organizing and staging their voting supplies and, most critically, hiring and training the over 22,000 voting place election offi-
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cials that will be providing the public face to voters at all voting opportunities during the election.

For this election, driven by the new electoral district boundaries and the additional voting opportunities in the act, we will have more offices, more voting supplies and more voting places than at any time in B.C.’s electoral history.

We will also be launching a comprehensive elections-related communications campaign, starting on April 1, 2017, and continuing through general voting day. Election-related advertising will include the use of traditional and new media and will focus on informing British Columbians of voter eligibility rules and requirements, available voting opportunities, timings and locations. The centrepiece of our elections communication program is the sending of the where-to-vote notices to all of our registered voters — as Keith mentioned, over 3.2 million of them. This mailing will arrive in voters’ mailboxes before advance voting begins on April 29.

After voting and counting has concluded, the election results certified, we will be preparing and distributing the Report of the Chief Electoral Officer, conducting our own lessons-learned reviews with our staff internally and with the district electoral officers, completing electoral finance reviews for candidates, registered political parties, registered constituency associations and the registered advertising sponsors. These latter activities will extend through the end of March 31, 2018.

Now, our budget requirements to complete the enumeration and redistribution, as well as to begin preparations for the 2018 general local elections, are much more modest. To complete the enumeration in ’17-18 will require $103,000. This will provide for temporary staff salaries and benefits for data processors, shared costs for our post-event review and our voters list quality assessment.

To complete the redistribution in ’17-18 will require $68,000. This will provide for the production of associated forms and guides, temporary staff salaries and benefits for the review of constituency association deregistration financial reports, which are required when we change to new electoral districts.

As we begin preparations for the 2018 general local elections, we will also require event funding for that event — $136,000. This funding will provide for the production and distribution of the revised forms and guides that include the new local election expense limits and the development and delivery of campaign finance training sessions for local government election officials.

To summarize, our total event-related funding requirements for the coming fiscal year are $36.467 million.

That concludes the Elections B.C. presentation, Mr. Chair. We would now be pleased to respond to any questions or comments that the committee may have.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Thank you very much, very thorough. I know I have questions.

E. Foster: Thanks for the presentation. As always, it’s very precise and greatly appreciated.

Dr. Archer, I have a couple of questions for you, more on the operational end, as opposed to the financial end. You spoke of having more people in polling places. Then you also talked about the technical challenges in the polling places with the new laptops and so on.

Do you have a concern that, by increasing the number of people at a polling station, our efficiency may suffer and that if there’s too long a lineup, people will go home? We’re doing everything we can to get more people out to vote, obviously. But the thought of this…. Can you kind of reassure us that you’ve got that in hand?

K. Archer: Thanks for the question, Eric. The change from our voting area distributions was based, in some ways, on changing voting patterns over the last — oh, I don’t know — generation or two, in which we’re finding increasingly that many of our voting places are a bit overstaffed, quite frankly, based on the formula that’s in the Election Act.

The Election Act says that each voting area — a voting area is a polling division, or has one ballot box associated with it — should have up to 400 voters, unless the Chief Electoral Officer establishes some other number.

If you assume that with those 400 voters we have a voter turnout — as we did historically in the postwar period — of about 75 percent, then you might expect that, well, 300 people, of those 400, will show up to vote on voting day. That’s particularly the case if most voters are voting in their assigned voting place on general voting day. Up until 2001, well over 95 percent of all voters were voting in their assigned voting location.

It’s a formula based upon the assumption that each of those two voting officials will be processing 285 or 290 voters a day. Well, we’re not seeing turnout of that level these days. In the last couple of elections, it’s been in the mid-50s. That means that rather than having an expectation that there would be 300 people showing up of this 400 people assigned to a voting area, it’s closer to about 220 or so.

The other big change that we’re seeing is a movement away from people voting at their assigned voting location on general voting day. Many people now are voting in advance. In one of the by-elections this past February, more than 32 percent of voters voted in advance. That’s been a big change in our experiences. It just means that the data are showing that we’re actually processing fewer than 200 people in many voting areas — sometimes maybe 170 or so.

Our sense is that let’s move the size of the voting area back to the standard it was previously. We believe that
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we’re processing voters as quickly or more quickly than we have done in the past. Consequently, we’re not expecting that this change will result in lineups for voters. It really has a lot to do with our observation about the work flow for our election officials.

With respect to the technology in the voting places, the experiences of the by-elections demonstrated that there are certainly important new requirements on our headquarters’ IT staff members to ensure that the technology that’s put into the voting places is easy to use and that we have some redundancy there as well. So if a machine goes out, as some do — like some printers failed, for example, in some voting places — we can replace that right away.

We also want to ensure that we have staff members in those voting places that aren’t intimidated by the technology. Again, the technology…. I wouldn’t describe it entirely as plug and play, but it’s not too far from that. It’s pretty seamless. There are a limited number of functions that each of these laptops are performing. Our sense is that it worked very well in the by-elections. We’re going into the general election with a lot of confidence in the model that we’ve put forward.

D. Ashton: Thank you again for the presentation. Just quickly, how do you hire the individuals that work in all the polling stations?

A. Boegman: It’s actually an area that all election agencies across Canada have been focusing on, because we’re all dealing with the same challenges, trying to find the right number of qualified individuals. In B.C., it’s a merit-based process, but we’ve developed a number of standardized tools that we give to our district electoral officers. They have standardized job descriptions. There are a number of standardized tests that they use to administer to the voters.

As Keith mentioned, we have a blended-learning model. There is an e-learning component for election officials, and their ability to navigate through that e-learning component forms part of the check of their ability to, say, use technology if they’re assigned to a position that requires technology.

We essentially accept applications from people through our central office, and we distribute those to all the districts. Then there are similar efforts by district electoral officers within their districts to recruit election workers. Once they’ve got their pool, there’s some screening through the testing that we have as well as through the e-learning program.

The final part is to bring them in for training, which is a hands-on session, approximately 2½ hours where they’re practising doing the work that they’ll actually be doing within their role at the voting opportunity. Then that last practical application provides for another opportunity for district electoral officers to observe how they behave. Should this person be assigned to that role? Should we think about giving them a less demanding role? That’s the case.

Overall, it’s a merit-based process. There are a number of standardized tests that we use and tools that we provide to the district electoral officers to find the best people that they can for those jobs.

D. Ashton: Were you in the black in the last election, financially, with your requests?

K. Archer: Yes. In the sense that…. Were the total expenditures less than the budgeted amount? Yes, they were.

K. Archer: I guess I would say a couple of things about that, Dan. One is on the technology issue. There are always going to be some upfront costs when you’re introducing some new technology. Those costs are going to be included very heavily in one budget, in one election year, and not included at all in another election year.

We have purchased over 2,000 laptop computers that we’ll be using in this event. Those computers will be used in the 2021 election as well. If there are by-elections or other electoral events held between now and then, this equipment will be used then as well. In fact, it’ll be used, at this point, all the way up through but not including 2025. The equipment will be used for at least two general elections.

We’ve adjusted staffing costs. Again, those adjustments are, in our view, intended to be fiscally accountable and responsible. The legislation hasn’t changed in that regard, so we could have gone forward with the same model of having a maximum of 400 voters assigned to every voting area, but that’s not the approach that we want to take in this office. I would say that we have been very mindful of our responsibilities, as stewards of public funds, in putting the budget forward.

D. Ashton: Dr. Archer, I appreciate that. It’s just that I, personally, have to ask. Four years, let alone eight years, are an eternity for a computer. It’s just that I’m wondering if there are opportunities to lease or if there are other things that you could look at. It’s just something to…. Future considerations. Thank you, again, for your presentation.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just on that, do you utilize the services of Shared Services? They have lots of leasing programs. You can speak to that better than I can, probably.

N. Western: Some of the services of Shared Services — but not for the laptops that’ll be used in the voting places. We considered leasing, but as the price of laptops is de-
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creasing so much, the cost to lease them for two general elections is actually more than buying them. The laptops and all the peripherals were less than $1,000 each, so they’ll be lower.

They’re not resource-heavy laptops, so they won’t go out of date for what we need them for in the voting place, which is the voter-lookup tool. They’re not running the resource-heavy processing, heavy software like Excel or databases or anything other than just the voter-lookup part of it. So they’ll last through to 2025 easily.

S. Hamilton (Chair): That’s a centralized database, so it’s a just a communications device, more than anything.

Just in a rundown, Anton, when you were going through the areas for the special projects and the additional pieces, I think one of the areas you mentioned was that we’ll have more opportunities for people to vote. I just wanted to make sure I heard that right. Is that talking about expanded access? Are you looking at expanding the voting places in communities? If so, have you looked at a particular area or a particular focus for expansion? Is it rural communities? Is it First Nations?

All of those issues come up, between elections, around where there’s a lack of access for people to vote. I wonder if you could just give an overview of some areas you might have been looking at in that area.

Certainly, accessibility is a key tenet to everything that we do around voting, and we recognize that opportunities are not necessarily equitable for all British Columbians. A fundamental part of the planning for the enumeration activities and for the general election has been a recognition that each electoral district is unique. A one-size-fits-all model, while working…. One-size-fits-most is not the best approach for every district.

So we’ve provided a lot of direction to our district electoral officers in their planning — to base their plans on the actual makeup of their district. The first activity they completed this summer was to do a detailed electoral district profile, which identified all the unique communities in their district, whether they were post-secondary, whether it was First Nations, whether it was ethnic communities, homeless communities — those sorts of things.

They’re using that information as an input into the enumeration planning as to: where are they going to have door-to-door registration activities, where are they going to have registration drives, and where are they going to do specific outreach?

Included in that was that we required them to contact every post-secondary institute in their districts and every First Nations band within their districts. So they have done that outreach. The enumeration activities reflect that but also the voting activities. Where the voting locations are is going to be a reflection of where the need is established.

Some of the things that we are doing differently around that. One is that the two extra days of advance voting provide us with more flexibility to look at, perhaps, some smaller communities where there was not the population base, the voter base, to have four days at one location and that. But perhaps now we can have one day or two days of advance voting in those smaller communities. That has been built into part of the program.

There are other ways that we look at that, but certainly, accessibility is a key criteria.

G. Heyman: As I’m sure you’re aware, nothing frustrates voters more than lineups at the polls. It often results in some of them turning away because of other requirements. I’m wondering if you have made any arrangements to analyze which times of the day are the most voter-heavy and to add staff for those times of day. I assume those would probably, generally, be early and later.

I’m also wondering if you’ve done any poll-by-poll analytics for historical voting intensity data and made arrangements to staff up accordingly.

I think the first one to look at is…. We’ll look at advance voting. Maybe I can speak a little bit about advance voting. I remember when we presented last year to this committee. It was right after the federal election, and there were many comments about the experience that voters had while doing advance voting federally.

I think I’d like to make very clear that we have a very different model provincially for advance voting. For one thing, we have more days of advance voting. We have six days versus four days federally. We have more hours in each day. We have 12 hours versus eight hours federally.

Second, we have what I’ll call an open advance voting process. A voter in British Columbia can vote at advance voting within their district or outside of their district at any of the advance voting locations in the province. If you happen to live in Prince George and you’re in Vancouver on business, you can vote at an advance voting location in Vancouver, rather than having to go to your assigned advance voting location in Prince George. It’s the federal model which limits voters to vote at their assigned advanced voting location.

The third part about advance voting is that we have the flexibility within our staffing model to assign sufficient voting teams at each advance voting location to meet demand, both what our planned demand is, based on previous voting patterns and analytics that we do, as well as if it happens that there is an additional great number of voters showing up during that day. We can place more teams in place during the advance voting window.
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So for advance voting, we have a lot more flexibility. We have more days, and we have more ways for voters to participate in advance voting.

I think the other aspect is in looking at general voting. In general voting, the way the legislation is written, there is less ability to add more teams because of the assignment of voters to a specific voting place. But we did do a lot of data analysis in making the decision to change the number of voters assigned to a voting area.

On average, in 2013, continuing a trend we’d seen since 2005, only approximately 40 percent of those voters who were assigned to each general voting location actually turned out to vote there. We know the times of days and the patterns that voters voted at those locations. So given that 40 percent turnout figure, in essence those teams were working at 40 percent capacity, and there was 60 percent unused capacity.

Part of the reason why there are differing numbers — urban, commuter and rural — is based on our analysis. Our analysis showed that in urban areas, voters tended to show up in uniform rates throughout the day, and that allowed us to suggest that perhaps the 700 number would work well in that scenario.

For the commuter districts, there tend to be more voters voting first thing in the morning and then in the evening. Those voters then travel to work and come back and vote either in the evening or before they vote, which was why we’ve specifically limited the increase in the voting areas’ numbers to 600 as opposed to the 700.

Then, of course, in the rural areas, simply because we don’t want voters to have to travel too far to go to their voting location, we’ve kept it at the 400 number.

To summarize, we very much do recognize that there are different turnout patterns. We’ve taken into account those turnout patterns in terms of designing the opportunities that we have for 2017.

G. Heyman: I appreciate the answer, but the question was fairly specifically geared toward whether you would have different numbers of staff on hand to handle voting lineups at particular times of day that might be unique and analytics you’d done with respect to either urban and rural polls or even different polls within a constituency, all of which should be available, I would think.

A. Boegman: Again, with respect to advance voting, we do have that flexibility. We have done that analysis, and we have made suggestions to our district electoral officers. For instance, generally speaking, there’s much greater advance voter turnout on the first day and the last day. In the by-elections, with the now six days of advance voting, the first weekend had particularly heavier turnout, and then the last Saturday had heavier turnout, with the turnout on the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at a much lower rate.

So we have adjusted staffing components. There will be more teams on the heavier days, the Saturday and Sunday two weeks prior to general voting day, as well as on the Saturday just preceding general voting day.

J. Rice: You spoke a few minutes ago about the hiring process for the staff. I’m wondering if you could outline the process of how you appoint the district electoral officers and the deputy electoral officers — the criteria and the selection process.

A. Boegman: In B.C., again, it’s a completely merit-based process, so there are no requirements other than that they meet our hiring standards. We have, again, job descriptions, professional standards, standards around non-partisanship that we place when we do our recruitment. We typically will start our recruitment looking at those who have previously successfully served in these positions, because in B.C. the appointment is really just for one election. It’s not for a longer period of time like they have in some other provinces and federally.

If you performed well in the previous election, you’re invited to respond to an expression of interest, which presents what some of the changes are. Do they still feel like they’re capable of doing that? There will then be an abridged interview process for those individuals.

There are a lot of places where we have complete vacancies, where either appointees have moved or they have retired — in which case, we’re going in with a blank slate. Then the interview process starts with advertisement that we do, an invitation for people to apply. We have a computer-based test that they must complete as a first part of that, and then there’s an interview process whereby members of our staff on the operations side, the human resources side and a field representative will interview that individual. There are a number of questions that we assess them on, scenario-based questions and questions just on their abilities, interests, and those types of things.

S. Hamilton (Chair): We have a few minutes left, so we’re going to have to exercise a little brevity here.

J. Rice: Okay. When did the DEOs and deputies get hired for this election process?

A. Boegman: Most of them were appointed last May. Then we had first on-boarding in June. There was work for them to complete over the summer. In September, we had them all here for six sessions of training.

S. Gibson: Mailing, postage, is a huge part of your process. Are you allowed, under the act, to use emailing as an alternative to postage mailing? I travel on a small airline, and they now send me my boarding pass on my iPhone. It’s a pretty secure environment. This is with all the se-
[ Page 2810 ]
curity folks and all the stuff that we have to go through in airports today. They just do this. They scan it, and I go right through.

Under the Election Act, are you allowed to use that kind of modern technology? Are you allowed to email people as opposed to the cumbersome, some would characterize as old-fashioned, postage means to communicate? That’s my question.

K. Archer: Thanks, Simon. The Election Act is silent on the use of email as a way of contacting electors. As a matter of course, we don’t collect email addresses of electors, and to this point we have not used that method of sending, particularly important documents like where-to-vote cards, to electors.

S. Gibson: If I may, one of the things is, of course, today all of us who are involved in the milieu of life…. You go to contact somebody by phone and they’ve cancelled their landline or they’ve gone strictly to cell phone. With emailing, even when people move their mailing addresses, often they still keep their email address. So my recommendation, for what it’s worth, is that we should go in that model. I think it’s going to be the one that will be very acceptable, particularly as you talk about trying to generate interest from young people.

I’ve seen your mailing cards piling up in apartment buildings. I think that there’s potentially a disconnect between the technology you’re embracing and the technology that much of the world is embracing. Just a thought.

S. Hamilton (Chair): With that, I’m just going to go straight to the one question I had. I guess it’s the one that leaps off the page for a lot of people. I look at 2012-2013, the last time there was a provincial general election, and the numbers that were provided there as compared to the numbers that are being requested here — being $46.154 million total operating funding request and the operating expenses, $38 million….

So that additional $12 million then is directly attributable to additional offices, supplies, staff, voting opportunities, hiring process. That’s basically what captures those additional moneys? Plus, obviously, normal inflationary considerations.

K. Archer: Yeah. I mean, you’re right. That combines our operating budget for last year, our proposed operating budget for next year and the additional event funding. I guess I wouldn’t use that to say that that difference of $21 million is the way that I would understand the cost of the general election, because there were other costs associated with the general election that are included in the $36 million GE budget. But all of those costs would be costs associated with delivering the event.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Okay. I have no further questions. So with that, thank you very much for taking the time. We appreciate it and look forward to the progress. I’m sure we’ll be hearing from you mid-term, early next year, as to how things are going.

S. Hamilton (Chair): The committee stands in recess for about ten minutes or so.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Welcome, Office of the Auditor General — Ms. Carol Bellringer.

Good afternoon. Good to see you again. I’ll turn the floor over to you. You can introduce your guests and our other participants here. As was mentioned — you probably know — we’ll get 20 minutes for your presentation, and then we go to the committee and start asking some questions.

To my left is Cornell Dover. Cornell is one of the assistant Auditors General, and he is responsible for all of our corporate services area, including the finance as well as HR.

Katrina Hall, who has been here before, is in charge of our finances and keeps us all both honest and within budget. She was very much one of the key writers of the document that you have today.

We have, new to the table, Stephen Kearsey. Stephen joined us this year as head of our HR department. Last year we pointed out that we had a number of vacancies. We’ll have an update on that, but Stephen and his team are working full force to make sure that that is no longer the case. He was busy. He pointed out that it was, I think, two hours after he got hired that we gave him a list of things — to go and fill all of those various vacancies. There was no rest for him when he joined the office.

I’ll go through the main points that are in the document we’ve given you. We don’t really have anything to add in addition to that. We can certainly answer your questions. I’m just going to go through things that already are before you.

There’s no change to the total appropriation that we’re requesting for the 2017-18 fiscal year, as compared to what we had presented to the committee last year for that year.

In 2015-16, we ended the year with a significant underspend. Some may look at that and say: “Well, that’s good news, because you didn’t spend everything.” We actually see it as not such good news. It’s not our goal to not spend what has been appropriated for our office. It was caused by high turnover in the office and extended delays in getting those positions recruited. I wouldn’t say all of it, but a significant portion of the underspend was from those vacancies.

We’ve put our attention to that. We are actively working to fill all of the vacancies. We have a renewed vacancy management strategy.

One of the main things that we’re doing differently is, where we can, we have a greater overlap period between the departing employees and their replacements. So if they’ve advised us that they are going to be retiring we start the recruitment process immediately — we will be lucky if we have no overlap — so that we have somebody in place when they go. We still, for the current year anyway, have sufficient funds to even get them in a little bit early and have an overlap in terms of training and so on.

We were looking at the numbers as to where we are at today. We still have some vacancies, but every single one of them is under active recruitment. The competitions are underway. For some of them, we’ve already had offers accepted, but the individuals haven’t yet started. In others, we’ve finished the competition; we’re waiting to make a decision. But they’re all now underway.

We’ve fully staffed our HR department. Last year when we came here, we were down 50 percent. We have four full-time positions, and we only had two in place. We now have all four.

One of the big areas that I will speak to. Last year the committee requested us to review our space utilization with a view to reducing occupancy costs. Now, we did do some work on that. We really can’t find a practical solution to reduce the total occupied space. We do remain committed to allowing other independent offices — in fact, anybody from a ministry or even broader public sector — to access our meeting rooms. We don’t charge them for that. We make the rooms available when we can.

I did have a little bit more to speak to the occupancy costs. We did hire an interior designer to look at alternative floor plans. The only thing that we could see working out to reduce the occupied square footage was to close off half the floor for one of the floors. There would need to be significant renovations done so that they couldn’t access the rest of our space, so that it would be a unique entrance and exit for them. It would require moving that half a floor off for the rest of our office and some redesign.

Given the original design of the building, we still can’t find a way to make that something that’s practical. There would be a challenge finding a co-tenant who we would feel comfortable that could be in our building, respecting our need for confidentiality of all of our documents and even the staff interactions. We do believe the cost of the renovations would be significant. And probably of most relevance — certainly something we’ve talked about and are considering — the disruption to staff right now would really be not a good idea.

We’re trying to work, as I mentioned, with filling all of these various vacancies and also being sensitive to our WES survey, the workforce engagement survey. All of government does do a WES survey, and we do one in our office.

We found that the staff have indicated there has been a lot of change. They’re not…. I was going to say “responding.” That’s the wrong word, because they are responding quite well with all the changes that we’re making. They’ve indicated that they really need us to kind of slow it down in terms of change and settle in and get the work done, so that is really our focus.

We do point it out as a significant risk if we were to do renovations. Katrina and her group end up being the general managers of the renovation project, and even small ones are very disruptive within the office and take up a lot of their time. We really are not in a position to propose anything in terms of the occupied space.

The work that we do. We have an unlimited number of audits we could select. We issue two coverage plans along with two lines of business for the office. That allows us to demonstrate publicly what we’ve selected to provide adequate oversight of the services and programs provided by government.

One of those plans is for a financial audit. That’s one that we’re required to produce each…. The Auditor General Act requires it. It must go to the Public Accounts Committee, and the Public Accounts Committee has to approve it. They did so on October 5.

The second plan is on performance audit, which is something that is our discretion. But at the same time, we want to have the public discussion around all of the projects that we’ve identified in that. That was made public last year, and there was an update to that in the fall.

The operating budget request — as I say, no change to what we thought it would be — is $17.3 million. That’s
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1 percent over the ’16-17 operating appropriation and, as mentioned, what we anticipated in last year’s submission. The capital appropriation is $350,000 — again, the same amount that we had predicted in last year’s for ’17-18.

Just a couple of things to note in there. We understand the Public Service Agency is in the process of implementing an updated management compensation and classification framework. The impact of that has not been built into our budget. We don’t know if there will be an impact. We haven’t been advised as to details around that yet. If there are any increases in salary costs — we always have changes, variances, that occur during the year — we would assume we would be able to absorb it. But if not, we would return to the committee to request additional resources specifically for that, if that were to happen.

We have made some changes from last year to this year in terms of how we’ve allocated the appropriation. The bottom line doesn’t change, but how we intend to spend it has slightly. It’s not a change to the total, but we have a few increases — for example, to travel. We’ve picked up two new audits. One is the B.C. Clinical and Support Services Society — BCCSSS. With that audit, we do two things. We do the audit of the financial statements, and we do a control audit. And Interior Health.

We added both of those to our audit list primarily because of feedback from the Public Accounts Committee, who were asking us to reassess the amount of work we’re doing in the health sector and suggesting that we should do more. So we’re choosing to do those audits in addition to the other ones we’d already been doing.

A couple of other increases. One is from software maintenance contracts. It shows up in the IT, because their contract is in U.S. funds, and we were getting hit a bit on the foreign exchange.

In the capital area, we haven’t increased the amount, but we’ve shifted what we planned to use the funds for. Last year we had identified two projects — one for data analysis and visual presentation of our reports and the other for mobile readable–ready reports. We’ve not done either of those projects. We’re still doing business cases for those and have not made a decision on what suppliers are the right ones.

On data analytics, for example, a lot of the firms of accountants have now entered into this in a big way and have made huge investments in doing data analytics. It’s something where, for example, you can do a 100 percent audit. You get the download of their general ledger, and you can audit the whole thing. That is something we’re trying to figure out if we have the capacity to do: how we would we get hold of that product and where we would get it from. We’re analyzing that, as well as the similar use of data analytics on performance audits to better analyze information.

It’s a big project. We did not, and don’t expect to, get it done in the current year. We’ll use the funds next year to do that. What we had anticipated to do next year was the change in methodology. That would follow the choice of something like that. So we wouldn’t be ready for that next year anyway. The number stays the same, but the use has changed.

In the financial statement area, just a quick summary on that. I mentioned that the plan was approved by the Public Accounts Committee in October. We directly audit the summary financial statements, the statements for the province as a whole. We directly audit 20 out of the 145 public sector entities of the broader public sector, and we oversee an additional 23 where the audits are conducted by private sector firms.

We do all of that to get enough assurance to be able to sign off on the summary financial statements. That activity doesn’t change significantly from year to year. The entities move around a little bit as to which we choose, but the level is approximately the same each year.

In the performance audit area, we have, in the list, 25 projects that we’re currently working on and 31 that we expect to start up before the end of 2019 — so over the three-year period. Those are the audits we would start, not the ones we would necessarily finish, within that period.

I went through the occupancy costs and the turnover. Just to give you a little bit more information about the turnover, it still does continue to be a challenge, and it is primarily in our financial audit area. We’re seeing our staff leave for better, higher-paying, more senior jobs within the broader public sector.

We’re seeing our junior auditors who come in…. They get trained, they get their designation, and then they leave — again, just to do other work. Some of them we have hired out of Vancouver, and then they choose not to live in Victoria but rather to return to Vancouver. There are different reasons, and we’re seeing it at all levels.

We anticipate six major retirements, within the next year, of senior people within the office who are just reaching that point. We’re working busily to make sure we replace all of them. We had a 13 percent turnover in ’15-16, and we’re expecting 17 percent this year. It’s much higher than we would like it to be.

That’s it for a summary of what’s in there. I can certainly get into any other area you’d like.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Certainly. Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. Is there anything else any of your folks would like to add? No, it’s all good?

I will go to the committee for questions at this point. It’s all pretty thorough. We’ve had a lot of engagement with your office over the last little while, as you know, and I’m always impressed by the work that you do.

E. Foster: Thanks for the presentation. Beyond Public Accounts asking you to do audits, do you randomly select others? I’ve seen a list of some of the things you find to audit, and I just wonder where you come up with the ideas.
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C. Bellringer: Indeed. We have an internal process and an external process. Internally, we have sector teams. Within the office, the staff who are familiar with various sectors do planning. They identify areas of risk, of significance, where we believe that there is some information, where we can add value to the discussion going on. We also track all of the external…. We get citizen concerns coming our way frequently. We get requests from members of the Legislature. All of that is pulled together.

For last year’s plan — it was July of ’15 that we issued it — we pulled together all of that information. We very carefully analyzed it and came up with what we thought we could fit into a three-year period, given our resources. The executive then made the final decision. We had about 150 to 200 projects on a list, and we narrowed that down to 50 or 60. That became much more of a judgmental exercise at that point, as to how to narrow that down.

This year we really made very little change to the plan. What we realized is…. Well, it was, some people pointed out, a very aggressive plan. There are quite a lot of projects on the list. The number is about right, but some of them turned out to be much bigger than we thought they would be. The audits are taking a lot of time. So we needed to find a few audits that were smaller — that could fit in between some of the bigger audits — so that we don’t burn out staff and we don’t burn out the ministries. We’ve done that and made a few changes to it. This year’s exercise was a much shorter analysis than last year’s.

D. Ashton: Carol, thank you very much. Appreciate you coming, as I always do. Thank you, again, for the tour.

I’m just going to be a bit brusque and a bit frank for a minute. You are the captain of the ship over there now. You were not involved in the ongoing leasing of that building when it started or how it was completed. In the tour, there was a substantial amount of space not being used in that. From my background….

My question to you is…. Maybe an interior designer wasn’t the right person. An efficiency expert in space would have been better. I’m just being upfront and frank.

D. Ashton: I also question the opportunity of additional space being made to different government organizations. We’re all in this together. Confidentiality in conversations takes place all the time, not just inside an office. I really think if there was a look-see at how we could incorporate additional resources into that building, not only for yourself but for other ministries, I think it would make it a lot more efficient. It’s a beautiful building — beautiful. But to me, there’s a lot of wasted space in that building.

Again, you were not at the helm at that time, but now you are. I think you have an opportunity to make a big difference on the space utilization and that. With all due respect to the staff — renovations, improvements — they are improvements. You know?

We’ve made a couple of changes since the tour. We did move our reception down to the front. If you remember, when you walked in the front door, it was all open space. We now have a reception desk down there.

We hired a commissionaire for a year to try to see if that would work out. We’ve now actually ended the contract with the commissionaire’s office, and we’ve moved our receptionist down to that space.

It changes a couple of things. It allows us — for any of the outside groups coming in — to have somebody secure at the front. That was one of the problems. Otherwise, it was quite wide open and we’d kind of lose people in the building. We have security on every floor and within the stairwells, but it still was a risk we didn’t want to take. So we’ve used that space better.

We did some small renovations up on the fourth floor, so on the top floor, to use all of the front area as a result of that. We’ve been able to build in an additional four work stations. Because to get to our…. To make sure that we’re filling all of the vacancies, we needed more work stations. We’ve managed to fit those into that fourth-floor area. So that’s been done.

We really did look at…. The only real alternative that we saw, and we did seriously consider it…. I mean, it’s not off the table. The catch would be that the only way to do it is to either move out an entire floor or at least half a floor.

The confidentiality issue for us is fairly significant, in particular, because of the Auditor General Act. It does not allow any of our working papers or documents or anything that we find in the course of our audit to be…. It’s against the law for that to be shared with anybody other than officials and through the formal process. So we do have a need for a bit of a tighter confidentiality of all of our work. We have our own server, for example, because we can’t even share government servers for that reason.

We don’t see an easy fix to it. What we would not see ever being the case is…. If we needed additional space, we most certainly can reallocate within the office. You saw the kitchen areas. Those can easily be turned into a different way of working.

We can move to more hotelling, if you will, where people don’t have a dedicated space and they can share office areas. Some of the work is done out in the field, but much of it is done in the office because of technology, and they can get into files from our location.

I hear you, very much so. I really don’t, at the moment…. We’ve been talking about this quite openly, within the office, to discover some ways to do it. We haven’t yet discovered one, so we have to get down to some detail that we’re, at the moment, unable to provide.
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S. Hamilton (Chair): Just before I go to George, to clarify something, are you suggesting you cannot access electronic files from outside your office?

C. Bellringer: No, I’m sorry. I’m saying we do. I have to admit, when I was saying that…. I’m imagining back to my first audit days, when we didn’t even have an Internet back then. Everything was done out in the field at the client offices, whereas nowadays some of it is done in the office because we can access the files.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just on the issue of space allocation…. Coming from an IT background, when we did take that tour, that was my biggest kick — to see that corner where your information technology group was. Everybody’s crammed into one…. Well, it’s just the way that they operate, right? That’s the way the environment tends to operate. But there was the best utilization of space. It was great.

C. Bellringer: Every audit is different in terms of how confidential the information is. It’s all confidential, but some is particularly sensitive. I’m thinking…. We have a couple of IT projects that are in areas where we cannot issue the entire audit findings report until we know that the ministry has already corrected certain of the weaknesses so that we don’t open them up and expose them. For some of those, they’re unable to provide us with any data. We have to do it at their premises because it’s that serious — that things can’t get out.

There’s a variety in how sensitive things are that do come into our office. Some is just your general: “Of course, you have to keep it confidential.” But some of it…. We do end up accessing cabinet and Treasury Board documents, many of which are in our possession and are not documents we can make public until we’ve had a final discussion to ensure that we’re not compromising public interest immunity issues.

I’d like to just start with a comment. While most members of the committee would support — we’ve had this discussion before — any efforts that you and your staff could find to allow other government usage of space, with the proviso that it’s actually practical to do that and cost-effective to do that…. I think we’ve said that before. But I think all members of the committee would agree with you that for your work to be effective, confidentiality actually has to be absolutely guaranteed. And you’ve added to that that it’s a legislated requirement as well. I think we appreciate that.

My question has to do with a bit of a follow-up on Eric’s question about choosing topics for audit. You’ve answered how that happens within British Columbia — the interests of the public, the interests of the Legislature and what you see. But I’m also curious whether that is influenced, or whether particular topics arise for you, as a result of conferences or communications between Auditors General throughout Canada or internationally, where there are trends identified that have become issues of public interest or issues worthy of scrutiny and that arise in other jurisdictions and lead to internal discussions in your office.

C. Bellringer: We have regular meetings with our colleagues across the country. We have a number of subcommittees of the legislative offices that deal with health care issues and the environment and education. I can’t remember which other groups we’ve got. We have an IT group and some administrative-related ones. One of the audits that we are working on right now — it will be out next fall — is an audit of climate change, which is taking place right across Canada.

Every legislative audit office provincially is doing something on climate change, and the federal commissioner for the environment is coordinating a compendium report that we’re all going to contribute to. We have to issue our individual provincial reports first so that they have public access to the information to pull it together into a national report.

That one was the first time where we’ve all done it at the same time. It was a big undertaking to agree to the criteria that we’re going to use. It’s a report that’s going to have answers to two questions, and it’s a minimum amount of information from every jurisdiction.

One is on mitigation — what the greenhouse gas emission targets are, that kind of thing. And what the adaptation programs are — for that one, we’ve chosen to go beyond the minimum. We’re doing an in-depth audit of the adaption programs.

That’s an example of it. Yes, it’s something that’s going on all the time.

G. Heyman: If I can just add a supplementary. Have you already set all of the terms of the B.C. audit, or is there an opportunity for members of the Legislature, Public Accounts, to have a discussion about things that we would like to see included in the audit?

C. Bellringer: We’re not finished, so there’s always room for listening to suggestions. We do get those. That was one of the reasons for going public with our audit plan — to give members that opportunity to let us know what was of interest to them.

Thank you so much, Carol, and thank you to your staff for the presentation today. We really appreciate it.
[ Page 2815 ]

C. James (Deputy Chair): We will take a brief recess until our next presenter comes at four o’clock. I’m not sure if we can get our presenter earlier, but we’ll do our best.

S. Hamilton (Chair): I acknowledge the arrival of our Ombudsperson, Mr. Jay Chalke. Greetings. Good to see you again, as always.

S. Hamilton (Chair): You have some company that I’ll let you introduce here in a moment. Thank you for responding at a moment’s notice. We were a little ahead of schedule, so we’re hoping that maybe we could scoot out of here a little early today.

So 20 minutes for your presentation, and then we can go to 40 minutes for questions after that, from the committee, and we’ll go from there. I’ll turn the floor over to you.

With me today are a couple of familiar faces: Deputy Ombudsperson David Paradiso and the ever-present executive director of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten.

I’m very pleased to have the opportunity this afternoon to speak to you in support of our office’s budget request for 2017-18. Having had the very welcome opportunity to speak to you back in May and, at that time, provide you with an overview of the office — our complainants, the public authorities in respect of whom we receive most of our complaints, the various types of investigations we do and an introduction to our strategic plan for the next five years — I’m going to limit my comments on those issues to new matters that have arisen since that appearance in May. Rather, most of today’s remarks will be about how our budget, current and proposed, impacts those services and enables us to implement our strategies going forward.

In your package today, there are five documents. Our budget submission. The three-year service plan. I brought, again, our five-year strategic plan that you saw in May. Our 2016 annual report, which we released at the end of June. And our report Under Inspection, which was also issued in June. In the course of my remarks, I’ll have a couple of PowerPoint slides where a visual is useful, but we promise just a few — not too many.

This afternoon I’ll be updating the committee on how we are implementing our five-year strategic plan. You’ll see in the course of the budget presentation that we’re really trying to turn that road map into a real journey; secondly, providing the committee with some brief highlights of our work since we were before you in May; and then thirdly and most significantly, outlining our budget request for 2017-18.

In the course of doing so, we will focus on three subjects: firstly, the files awaiting the assignment-backlog project and the impact of the funding that you provided to us last year to eliminate it over three years; secondly, the investigation referred to us by this committee on July 29, 2015; thirdly and most substantively, a three-year pilot project to deliver and evaluate a preventative ombudship program that would proactively help public authorities prevent administrative unfairness from arising in the first place.

With that, I’m going to turn to the strategic plan. In May, I shared with you that new five-year strategic plan that we tabled in the Legislature earlier that month. I’m not going to go through it, since we did that in May, but I am going to enumerate some of the initiatives that are already underway that fit under that plan. We’re already hard at work in the first six months of that five-year plan moving to implementation.

Some of the things that we have been working on include the development of an in-depth guide for our staff concerning the current dispute resolution policies and practices in public authorities under our jurisdiction across the province and a plan so that the guide is updated in real time when those policies and practices are changed by those public organizations.

Renewed efforts with the Government House Leader and the Opposition House Leader on developing a structure by which our reports would be considered by legislators rather than simply tabled.

Three week-long outreach clinics this year — two since the plan was tabled — that give ordinary British Columbians around the province a confidential opportunity to meet face to face with our staff to discuss their concern about a public body, as well as giving us the opportunity to meet with heads of public authorities and give public presentations and media appearances.

Next, a development of a social media policy to support an initiative that increases public awareness while, at the same time, supporting public confidence in our office.

A renewed focus on staff training and development, recognizing that retention and engagement are key building blocks in long-term service excellence, particularly in an organization such as ours, which is unique in the province and doesn’t have a lot of specific comparators.

And finally, the development of the preventative ombudship initiative that I mentioned before and to which I’ll return in a few minutes.
[ Page 2816 ]

A bit of an investigatory update since our discussion at this committee in May. Since that time, we released our systemic investigation report entitled Under Inspection, a copy of which, as I said, is in your materials. This is a report on the 12-year hiatus in the program of regular inspections of provincial correctional facilities and a call for improvement in the program of inspections that was put in place in 2012 after that hiatus ended.

We made seven recommendations in Under Inspection, including adherence to new United Nations–endorsed standards for prison inspections, and I’m pleased to report that all of the recommendations were accepted by government. We’ll monitor government’s implementation of those recommendations to make sure that government lives up to its commitment to implement all seven recommendations.

I’m also pleased with the broader impact of our individual investigations over the past year. Our individual investigations have led to many resolutions that benefited the individuals who complained to us, and perhaps of equal importance, our investigations have led to changes in public authority policy and practice for the future in ways that will prevent or reduce the likelihood of similar problems occurring in the future. I’m going to mention a few such outcomes from the over 50 investigations summarized in our annual report that you have there.

For example, we worked extensively with the Ministry of Children and Families towards better policy and better compliance with policy related to separate confinement of youth in custody at the Burnaby Youth Custody Centre. As you all know, segregation in custody has emerged nationally over the past year, and our work with the ministry on this issue related to youth in custody in Burnaby reflects this.

(1) a change in policy and practice at the residential tenancy branch so that the grounds for the review of an arbitrator’s decision are clear to everyone;

(2) a change in TransLink’s policy so that discretion may be exercised when determining whether to uphold a penalty imposed on a person with disability for failing to produce proof-of-fare payment;

(3) a change in ICBC’s policy so that someone who marries John Smith III doesn’t have to be identified as Jane Smith III on their driver’s licence;

(4) a change in Vital Statistics’ policy so that when a person requests the correction of an error, the Vital Statistics Agency first confirms the source of the error and determines whether the person is at fault before charging the person a fee for that correction.

Now I want to turn to the main part of my presentation today, that being our 2017-18 budget request. As you can see, our budget for the current year, 2016-17, is $7.117 million. Our request for the upcoming year, 2017-18, is $6.656 million.

If I can direct your attention to pages 2 and 3 of our budget request, you will see I have highlighted four items at the bottom of page 2 and the top of page 3 that represent the adjustments to our budget from the current year, 2016, to next year, 2017-18. With the exception of the minor adjustment related to inflation at the bottom of page 2, I’m going to spend a bit of time on each of the other three.

I’m going to start with the two items on page 3 for which we received incremental funding in 2016-17. I’ll provide a status update and describe how they’re treated for budgetary purposes for 2017-18.

First, the “files awaiting assignment” list. I want to turn to a progress report on that “files awaiting assignment” backlog reduction initiative. This is the initiative that you supported last year with funding for three years for one FTE that we’re combining with some process changes to reduce the time that a matter that has been through our initial triage steps waits before being assigned to an investigator.

When I was before you for last year’s budget request, the chronic backlog at that time was over 550 files awaiting assignment to an investigator. You’ll recall this chart up there — I’m sure every night since then you’ve gone to bed thinking about that — indicating the backlog at over 550 cases at that time. What you afforded with the funding you provided was that we would hopefully track the orange line, which is the most hopeful scenario of all of those.

As of September 30, 2016, halfway through this fiscal year, our “files awaiting assignment” is down to 339, which plots onto the chart that way. I would note that we’re tracking through the first half of the fiscal year an annualized increase in complaints and inquiries of about 400. So despite an increase in the number of people coming to us for assistance, we’re on target in terms of backlog reduction. As you’ll see, we’re right on target in terms of backlog reduction, but the number of people waiting for an investigation to start is still too high.

To remind you, as I said last year, our three-year plan is to reduce that list to about 50 files, which would be the bottom of that orange line. This would represent a one- to two-week assignment period, which I believe is completely appropriate and a good service standard to achieve.

You’ll note that as of early 2017, the curve slopes downward more gradually, indicating that we expect backlog reduction will slow as we go further into this backlog reduction exercise. Progress on reducing the backlog list will slow because the list tends to high-grade. With some of the measures that we’ve been developing, we’ve been able to get some of the more straightforward cases through the system, but the consequence of doing that is that further progress seems to slow a bit.

That’s why you’ll see the slope of that line slowing down a bit and becoming less steep as we reduce the size. On
[ Page 2817 ]
the other hand, any reduction in the backlog represents better service for those who require it, and the reduced time spent managing the backlog itself is a real savings for our office.

There’s no change to our request. We’re right on target. We’ll continue with year 2 of the project funding, utilizing the funding for the one FTE with, I expect, similar positive results, and I’ll report next year on our results.

You’ll note, if you follow the budget through to ’19-20, that I’ve eliminated the funding for this position, which reflects what I said last year in response to a question, I believe, from MLA Heyman about what happens after the three years. So unless we come up with another proposal, that position is then eliminated at that time.

I want to turn now to an update on the Health firings matter that you referred to us last summer. Because our investigation is ongoing at this time, my comments, by necessity, are going to be circumscribed. I won’t be talking about the content of our investigation — the evidence we’ve gathered, the witnesses we’ve heard from or anything of that nature. I’m sure the committee fully appreciates this and supports our independence in doing so while we’re before you in this budget presentation.

You’ll see on page 8 of the budget submission document, if you direct your attention to the third column titled “Committee referral,” that we’re seeking no funding for this investigation in 2017-18. This may raise some questions for you, as I have not yet delivered our report into this investigation. I’ll describe the reason for this in a moment. First I want to take this opportunity to correct the public record with respect to two matters that were the subject of discussion with this committee in July and September 2015 related to this referral from the committee, and then I want to talk about my plan for financial transparency of this investigation.

The first matter relates to timing. When I was before the committee in September 2015 for our 2015-16 supplementary budget request, I said that I thought that “barring unforeseen difficulties, we should aim to conduct an investigation and report in approximately a year from commencing our investigation.” I went on to say: “However, there are many things that could interfere with that timeline.” I then stated that my priority was a thorough investigation, not working to an arbitrary deadline set at that point with the highly imperfect information we had at the time.

The investigation is going very well, but it’s taking a few months longer than I anticipated some 14 months ago. The main reason for the longer duration has been the volume of records that we have been provided with in response to our requests for records — requests that, I would hasten to say, are all well within the four corners of the special directions that you provided to me.

Before I appeared in front of you last summer, I had been advised by government — who, of course, had had occasion before that time to compile related records for the various earlier reviews that had been done over the previous three years, and in response to numerous FOI requests — that their estimate of records was in the range of 200,000 records. I should note that this was based on the compilations government had done for very specific purposes. I described that volume in front of this committee as very, very large. Well, at the time, we were relying on those numbers given to us by government, and I had a far-from-perfect understanding of how voluminous it would turn out to be.

As of now, in the course of our investigation, we have obtained over four million records. I won’t get into, here, how it is that our records requests returned this volume, but I will do so in our report. Suffice it to say that breadth of the special directions has been one factor.

I would say at this time that we have no reason to believe that the large volume of records provided to us reflects an intention to give us a huge haystack in order to make it harder to find the needles. Rather, it’s a function of how records were collected and created over the years by the many government officials responsible for the matters that you have asked us to investigate.

The effect of this volume of records on our timeline is self-evident. In addition to the extra time required to obtain the records from any sources, more time has been required to engage in a structured process to identify duplicates; organize, categorize and retrieve directly relevant, meaningful records; to review and analyze those records and assess their impact on the investigation; and interview additional witnesses to inform our understanding of the records that we’ve obtained.

How has that affected the timeline? I said about a year ago that I anticipated it would take us about a year to investigate and report on this matter. Under that timeline, we would have reported about a month ago. The magnitude of the information obtained in the course of this investigation has extended the time required to complete our investigation by about four to five months beyond the original estimate.

Unfortunately, we will not be returning to normal operations as early as we had forecasted. However, the good news is that we’re still forecasting to complete this report this fiscal year, and thus I am not requesting any funding for this investigation into the next fiscal year.

The other matter to update you on relates to the role of Acting Deputy Attorney General. As you know, last summer I advised the committee that while formerly employed by the Ministry of Justice, I was not involved in the health firings matter, as my branch, the justice services branch, did not provide legal advice to line ministries on such matters.

That was and remains a true statement. But recently, during the course of our investigation, we came across a document which indicated that some months after the terminations, I was acting for a week as Deputy Attorney
[ Page 2818 ]
General while the deputy was away on holidays when this matter briefly crossed my desk.

More specifically, it appears, in that capacity, that I received an inquiry from a senior deputy minister about the matter. I made a preliminary inquiry of one or two senior officials, and then left the question for the Deputy Attorney General to address when he returned from holiday a couple of days later. Given how limited this involvement was, I simply had no recollection of it. In fact, I still do not recall it.

In any case, once the relevant document came to our attention, I wanted to take this first opportunity to share this information with you in the interests of full candour. I’m confident that this does not in any way affect my ability to complete this investigation.

In this regard, I note that I have consulted and received appropriate advice from senior legal counsel and I’ve consulted with former Ombudsman Stephen Owen, both of whom are of the view that this matter does not affect my ability to carry out this investigation. And my deputy has, through thorough discussions with justice officials, confirmed that I did not have any other involvement with the matter when I was acting Deputy Attorney General. I believe it would be appropriate to include reference to this issue in the final report, and I intend to do so.

Before I leave the referral investigation, I want to take a moment to describe my intention with respect to financial transparency. As soon as possible after the report is released, our windup activities are completed and the final bills received, we will compile an enumeration of the costs of this investigation. We’ve been tracking costs associated with this special project, and I’m confident we’ll be able to provide such a description fairly readily. We will make that costing public by reporting it to this committee.

I’m going to shift the focus of my remarks now to the preventative side of our work, a subject that has been raised with this committee before but perhaps not with the same emphasis that I would like to give it this afternoon. It’s the central feature of my budget request today.

As you will see, I’m proposing a three-year pilot project on preventative ombudship. This project will, by drawing on our decades of experience and expertise, proactively work with public authorities to prevent unfairness from happening in the first place. This is something I believe that will be effective, and it’s something that authorities have asked us to assist them with. We’ll evaluate the project and present the results of that evaluation to this committee.

We’ve had success with preventative initiatives, but we believe there’s an opportunity to do a lot more. We’ve been working on several fronts to develop our capacity to store, retrieve and analyze data in order to identify trends, problems and best practices and authorities. Our staff have a unique vantage point from which to determine where problems lie and what has been done or could be done to address those problems.

Our strategic plan that was tabled in the Legislature and that was discussed by this committee in May stated that I anticipated developing an effective advisory and preventative ombudship program. As part of our operational plan for 2016-17, I’ve committed to developing a framework for preventative ombudship.

That’s work we’re doing this year. That work has begun, and we’re developing a framework that builds on four primary objectives: educating and informing the public and public authorities, contributing to program design to support fairness, improving internal complaint-handling processes and authorities, and assisting public agencies to address gaps and deficiencies.

Why is this a good thing to do? Well, I’m going to identify ten compelling reasons why I believe this is a worthwhile initiative, and those will be up on the screen.

The first one is that it’s cost-effective. As Ben Franklin said: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” In fact, it’s hard to identify a context where the value of prevention hasn’t been espoused, often retrospectively in the aftermath of a problem coming to light. We’ve seen analysis and commentary on measures that could have been taken to prevent everything from the cost overruns related to the Rio Olympics, the recent train derailment in New Jersey, to the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that resulted from the blowout under the Deepwater Horizon.

The prevailing view seems to be that all of the problems could have been prevented or the impacts significantly reduced with some work ahead of time — not at no cost but not at nearly the costs that were incurred by not taking necessary prevention steps.

I mention this because it’s what we already intuitively know — that it’s often better and significantly less expensive to prevent problems than it is to hope that they don’t happen and then try as much possible to deal with consequences when they do.

Although the scale is different from some of the disasters I’ve mentioned, we’ve certainly seen problems and predicaments and crises in British Columbia that we believe could have been and should have been prevented. My colleague legislative officers and I frequently are reporting on problems where, I think we would agree, it would have been preferable had they not occurred in the first place.

There’s a significant body of research about the costs associated with substandard service and the strained relationships that often follow. There’s a widely held view that it’s significantly more efficient and cost-effective to maintain harmonious relationships with customers than to constantly break and rebuild that bond.

In the context of government services, there are often few alternatives for members of the public. People can’t choose to receive their income assistance from the competition. That lack of market choice makes it extra important to treat people properly.
[ Page 2819 ]

Strained relationships cost public authorities in many ways. They cost the time taken, often by senior staff, to handle complaints. They cost the price of any corrective measures that must be undertaken. They take a toll on public servants, which can then lead to more unhappy customers. That strain on staff can increase staff turnover, with all the associated recruitment and training costs and, most significantly, the cost to the public in time and additional expense in sorting out their difficulties with public bodies.

Secondly, public authorities have asked us for this help. Perhaps the most significant cost of poor service is that it undermines the strategic objectives of public authorities. In general, governments and public authorities aim to provide efficient, accessible, high-quality services that meet the demand of the public. Meeting those objectives requires the trust of the public, which can be eroded with every negative experience.

Public authorities recognize this and want to deliver high-quality service. Likely, because of the work and reputation of my predecessors, there has been a demand for us to do more coming from the public authorities we investigate. I mentioned our strategic planning process. In our meetings with public authorities to prepare that, one of the messages that came through clearly was that public authorities are interested in non-complaint-driven assistance from our office.

Public authorities want to hear about complaint trends we’ve observed and issues we’ve identified, and they want to have opportunities to obtain our feedback on initiatives they’re considering or challenges they’re facing. They’ve also expressed an interest in obtaining our assistance to improve their internal complaint-handling process and their understanding of administrative fairness. And they want to do these things proactively rather than only in the context of an investigation conducted in response to a complaint.

One of the measures that we can take to help public authorities is to proactively share information regarding the results of our investigation. At the conclusion of an investigation, we write the authority and summarize the complaint as well as our assessment of the matter we’ve investigated.

Sometimes those letters highlight things that were done well, and sometimes they point to things that were not, but they’re specific to that authority. It would be a relatively low-cost yet useful step to identify those case summaries with educational value and distribute them and train on them with respect to all or a broader group of public authorities. Here, technology can help mitigate that cost.

Thirdly, proactive prevention is complementary to our reactive complaint investigations. Thomas Edison said: “The doctor of the future will give no medicine but instead will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.” Prevention and cure — think of them as complementary. Often it’s because of our work on the cure that we learn about prevention.

The challenge is in striking the right balance and in ensuring that the lessons we learn from our analysis of problems that arise are shared with an appropriate and wide audience. In the ombudsperson context, we need to be as effective as we can be. To use our resources most efficiently, we need to strike a balance between the demand for investigations of individual complaints and the opportunities to prevent some of those problems that lead to complaints.

But our first obligation, coming directly from the Ombudsperson Act, is to investigate complaints from individuals. That’s where the vast majority of our resources go. Given the volume of complaints we receive annually, we simply aren’t in a position to give the preventative side of the work the resources to be as effective as it could be.

Individual complaint investigations represent our core mandate and will continue to be our primary focus. However, by focusing so heavily on those individual complaints, we limit the application of our expertise and the benefit to the public. We could reduce the likelihood of problems occurring if we were able to synthesize that experience from all our investigations over the years and then distribute the information about effective processes and, at the same time, help public authorities develop procedures that are fair and engender public trust.

Fourth, embed fairness from the start. It may be trite to say, but it’s worth stating that ensuring fairness and transparency are baked right into new programs or systems is much better than trying to fix those programs afterwards, to add them. It’s more efficient. It’s faster. It’s cheaper. It involves less conflict and has the most significant impact on organizational culture of the public authority. It ensures fairness is built into the foundation of a program, rather than treated as a decoration or a throw pillow tossed under the couch afterwards.

Supporting fairness by contributing to program design would include reviewing draft policy and, potentially, subordinate legislation. We’ve done a bit of this, with some success, and it has been done elsewhere in Canada, reportedly with excellent results. As you’re aware, it’s common for public authorities to conduct periodic reviews of their programs. Sometimes we’ve been invited to participate in those reviews, but we’ve declined due to insufficient resources.

Participating in that type of review allows us to share not only our experience dealing with complaints concerning the authority but also allows us to contribute our expertise with respect to administrative fairness. Not only do we want to participate and believe we’ll be able to share useful insights and suggestions from an informed position; I believe it’s important to be seen to be assisting public authorities to prevent and avoid problems, rather than only waiting for complaints and then being critical.
[ Page 2820 ]

From time to time, we’re contacted by employees or executives or even elected representatives of authorities asking us to investigate problems within their own organizations. Often those complaints are not about a single decision, act or omission, but rather, they’re commonly about what the caller perceives to be a deep-rooted structural organization or service delivery problem. Our resources and capacity are not the only factors we consider, but they’re sometimes the basis on which we choose not to investigate, instead focusing our resources on the complaints of ordinary British Columbians.

Fifthly, we can help public authorities ensure that their dispute resolution processes can address unfairness directly when it does occur. Ideally, prevention stops problems from arising in the first instance. The prevention theory can also be applied to resolve problems that do arise, by doing so quickly, cheaply and with minimum conflict.

Internal complaint-handling processes with public bodies serve a number of important functions. They are a key component of effective service delivery and provide tremendous opportunities to identify, understand and address problems.

Dealing with complainants directly, as opposed to dealing with an outside agency, such as my office or your constituency office, allows the public body to not only learn firsthand about the public’s experience — and to use that information with other corporate knowledge to identify trends and improve practices and influence change — but it also provides the opportunity to maintain and mend strained relationships. Above all, the citizen’s issue is resolved more quickly and more directly.

Through our investigations and more recently, as part of a special project, we’ve been acquiring and evaluating information about different complaint-review and appeal mechanisms and have significant experience in this area. As you might imagine, after responding to thousands of complaints every year for 37 years, complaint handling is something we understand pretty well.

We’ve shared some of that experience in a public report called Developing an Internal Complaint Mechanism. While the report still includes useful and relevant content, it was released over 15 years ago and needs to be updated.

Sixth, we know where the unfairness is. By now, you may be on side with the idea and the value of prevention, but you’re wondering why we should be the ones to do the work. It’s because we’re uniquely situated to see incidents of unfairness as well as high-performing public agencies, which can better model public administration. It comes from 8,000 complaints and inquiries a year for 36 years.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Mr. Chalke, if I can just interrupt, you’re five minutes past the presentation time. We’re cutting into question time, because we’re cutting this off at….

Seventh, we can draw on the experience of those who’ve gone before. My counterparts in other Canadian provinces and territories attest to the value of prevention. A number of them have preventative ombudship approaches. The Quebec Ombudsman carries out structured monitoring of draft legislation. The Saskatchewan Ombudsman delivers fair practices workshops both in person and on line to public agencies. The Ontario Ombudsman is currently in discussions to report information regarding their decisions concerning the closure of municipal council meetings and to distribute those widely.

Eighth, building on our existing work is efficient. I won’t go through that in any more detail, in order to be efficient myself with my time, but will simply say that by us doing it, basically, we’ll be drawing on a number of existing resources in addition to the incremental resources that would be required.

Ninth, this is a time-limited project which we intend to evaluate. I consider this sort of pilot exercise only to be of value if it’s evaluated. So we would commit to developing an evaluation framework as an initial priority and would evaluate the prevention program effectiveness at each appropriate stage, including at the end of the three-year period.

In order to keep costs down, we’d seek to partner with academics at B.C. universities. Based on some very preliminary discussions with them, we believe there’d be a strong interest in assisting us with the evaluation of the preventative projects that we envision.

Tenth, and topically for this year, implementation this year saves money. Our timing for leveraging the one-time expenditures made as part of the referral investigation allows us to undertake this initiative at a time, with savings, that would eliminate the start-up costs required to establish office space. As that project completes the referral investigation and this one is implemented, we can achieve some cost efficiencies that would not be available to us in a future year. So by approving the funding now, we’ll be able to provide this service with virtually no start-up costs.

Turning to corporate shared services, we offer this service on behalf of four of the officers. It comes out of, as you know, our budget, but it serves, also, the Merit Commissioner, the Police Complaint Commissioner and the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Those latter three offices reimburse the Ombudsperson budget on a pro rata basis.
[ Page 2821 ]

Services include information technology, human resources and corporate finance and facilities. We’re basically asking for a stand-pat budget in that area. How all that manifests itself. If you turn to the slide up on the screen, in the budget submission before you….

First, basically, Ombudsperson operations. It is essentially flatlined from last year, with a minor inflation adjustment. Secondly, corporate shared services, which, again, is essentially flatlined. Third, a reduction in the committee referral budget from $1.188 million to zero. Fourth, the preventative ombudship initiative of $693,000. This is time-limited for 2017-18 through ’19-20, and, as I indicated before, an evaluation would be prepared.

All of those adjustments, taken together, yield a 2017-18 budget request of $6.656 million, which is a reduction of $461,000 from the budget this committee approved last year.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. Three areas I want to touch on are in the area of the referral investigation. I think…. Well, anyway, I’ll leave it to you to make comment.

The first one that I just want to touch on is the documents issue. I recognize and appreciate that you’re not going to get into the debate or discussion about how the investigation is going and where that leads, but I think it wouldn’t be right not to make a comment on the difference in the numbers when we’re looking at 200,000 versus four million.

I think it speaks — which you don’t, obviously, need to comment on — to the importance of the investigation when it appeared that those were the only documents that were looked at previously. I think it does raise all kinds of questions about the information that’s out there.

The second piece I just wanted to touch on was the issue of the timeline. You mentioned that you hoped to get the report out this fiscal year. I just wondered if you had any timeline around that — before April, obviously. I wondered if there was an estimate that you had on that.

Then the last issue was the issue of the disclosure, as you mentioned — the involvement that you had while you were acting deputy for the week. Again, not for you to speak to, Mr. Chalke.

It’s a given around this committee that we had a good debate and discussion, a thorough debate and discussion, about whether this issue should be referred or not. Certainly, our position was that it should be an independent investigation. That’s mainly to build trust in a process that was not trusted by the individuals, in particular, and their families who were involved directly in this investigation.

I think that’s my concern. I appreciate that this was something, as you mentioned, that you weren’t aware of and that you didn’t remember. But I do have to express my concern that it raises, once again, a lack of trust in the process. You said the matter crossed your desk, and you made some inquiries. I wondered if you could — obviously not impacting on the investigation — tell us a little bit more about that — again, to try and build back some of the confidence that I think is struggling for people.

J. Chalke: Turning first to that, I would say that when one has the role of being the acting Deputy Attorney General, one often is in the position of being a bit of an air traffic controller with respect to matters that arise, particularly those that arise that are outside one’s own ambit.

As I said, this is a matter that apparently hit my desk, in the sense that I received an inquiry from a senior official. I did make at least one and possibly two inquiries of people about that, and then left it for Mr. Fyfe, the Deputy Attorney General, to deal with on his return a couple of days later. That was the entire extent of the involvement. Because it was transitory, it isn’t something that I recalled then — meaning last summer — or now.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Just a follow-up question, if I may. When did this occur? When were you acting?

With respect to the question about the timeline, I don’t have a more specific answer. We have a lot of work yet to do. We are very far into completing the interviews that we are doing. Then after that, under the Ombudsperson Act, we are required to give notice to any individual if the report may adversely affect them.

That’s a statutory requirement, so we have to go through that process, which is very important, and one to do quite completely. We will do so and then complete the writing of the report and the depositing of it.

You mentioned December 2012. Was this logged as a phone call? Was this logged as an inquiry? Again, I know there’s caution here about the investigation and not wanting to get into the investigation documents that were there. But was a memo written? Is that how…? And then the memo appeared in the documents? Or was this a log of a phone call to make the inquiry? I’m curious as to how this came forward, I guess.

J. Chalke: How it came forward was…. It was an email that made reference and which our investigators obtained just in the normal course of obtaining records for the
[ Page 2822 ]
purpose of the investigation. That led us to make some further inquiries.

G. Heyman: I have questions on two separate issues with respect to the referral investigation.

The first one is…. The initial estimate of records provided by the ministry was about 5 percent, or less than 5 percent, of the total number of records you eventually received. I assume, as Carole has said, that you don’t want to go into the details of that, but that seems — to me, at least — to be significant.

I think it’s fair to ask if that discrepancy is something that you will be investigating, that may form part of the report itself and that may result in some further questioning and/or recommendations. This is not a minor discrepancy, especially when records go to the heart of how the whole matter was handled. I’m interested in your response to that.

J. Chalke: The estimate that was provided to us by government was related to records they had compiled for various purposes. It wasn’t the records that they estimated would be necessary for our investigation.

For example, at that time, the special directions had not yet been concluded. The special directions do put upward pressure, without question, in terms of breadth, on the scope of records that we have accessed — with good reason. This committee adopted those special directions to ensure that we were able to leave no stone unturned. That’s the course of action we’ve adopted.

Having said that, we do intend to describe how we got the four million records, and what that is comprised of, when we complete our report. I think it’s best left to that point in time.

G. Heyman: Let me pursue that a bit further. It is true that the terms of reference and parameters had not yet been established by the committee. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the number of records required by more expansive parameters were double the amount that the ministry had actually considered originally relevant.

I, and many people, would consider even that a substantial increase. But a 20-fold increase in records to fit parameters that this committee established unanimously and thought were relevant, over what the ministry considered relevant, seems — to me, at least — to be quite pertinent to an investigation of how the ministry handled the issue in the first place.

J. Chalke: I’m not going to get into the contents of our investigatory process. But I will say that the difference may be attributable, at least in part, to what you just referred to, which was an assessment of what is relevant versus what we would ask for.

If we asked for somebody’s email in-box, there might be all kinds of records, some of which would be in that. Those records would have been provided to us. Many of those would be irrelevant for the purpose of our investigation. We didn’t want anybody else making that assessment about relevance. So we would ask for all of those records and then be able to determine relevance.

G. Heyman: Well, let me simply close my questioning on that issue by saying I think there will be great interest in reviewing your final report to see if you determine that the 20-fold increase was simply a result of a very expansive and broad request for information, or whether, in the course of your investigation, it actually reveals records turned over by the ministry that they didn’t consider relevant but which actually are. I think that is a matter of public interest.

I’d like to turn now to the issue that you raised about your time as acting Deputy Attorney General. To ask you this question and to discuss it appropriately, I think it’s important to just step back 14 months or so and look at the discussion we had here.

First of all, the referral, as we know, was unique. We know from your own statements that you weren’t eager to take it on because of your concern about the role of the office and how taking on this referral in what was a charged political issue — with some significant distrust of the process by the people most directly impacted — might affect you in your early days in the office.

We had lengthy discussion about that at the committee. We discussed with you statements that you’d made about what you considered would be necessary to conduct the role in a way that you believed would engender public trust and trust among the people who were impacted, as well as trust in the Legislature.

What you’ve told us today causes me significant concern, not necessarily because of the content of the contact you had with the issue as acting Deputy Attorney General but because of the fact that it’s surfacing at this late date. For instance, I don’t recall you ever actually revealing or telling the committee — nor did we ask, frankly — that you had spent some time as acting Deputy Attorney General. We discussed the fact that you were in a branch of the ministry that wouldn’t have had direct contact with the issue. Being acting Deputy Attorney General, obviously, is a different position, and that was, I think, relevant knowledge.

I can accept that the contact with the issue may have been in the context of contact with very many issues. You yourself have used the analogy of an air traffic controller. While you may have forgotten, I think that in the context of the highly charged political atmosphere and the issues of public trust and trust of the impacted fired employees….

I’m frankly at a loss why you, knowing that you’d been Deputy Attorney General on an acting basis, didn’t consider that due diligence required you to do a scan of any file you might have handled at that period of time — or
[ Page 2823 ]
at any other period of time in the ministry — to assure yourself and us that we had all the relevant information about your contact with the issue at the time.

It clearly would have been relevant to our considerations. It likely would have been relevant to the considerations of the fired employees in how they felt about their interaction with your inquiry as well as with your office. None of us had that information.

Did you conduct any form of scan of your contact with the issue during your time at the ministry, particularly during your time as acting Deputy Attorney General, or did you simply think that that wasn’t relevant?

J. Chalke: Well, I certainly wish that, last summer, I had recalled this issue and had been in a position to advise the committee of that at the time. Of course, I wasn’t at the Ministry of Justice. I didn’t have access to any of those records at that time, so there was no rigorous scan, as it were. I didn’t recall any incident in which I had had any involvement with this in any way whatsoever.

G. Heyman: If I may follow up. You may not personally have had access, but surely, in the context of assuring this committee, the public and the fired employees that you hadn’t had any contact…. Did you consider that it was an issue of due diligence to make a request to be able to assure us and everyone else that you had been completely free and clear of any contact with this issue during your time at Justice and especially during your time as acting Deputy Attorney General, or was that simply an oversight?

J. Chalke: I wouldn’t describe it as an oversight. I would describe it that I simply had no recollection, so I thought I had no reason to carry out the kind of request that you’re suggesting. Obviously, from my perspective, it would have been better had I done so.

I just want to touch base on what’s on the screen about preventative. I want to take it…. How about post…? An issue that happened in my area that I represent…. A report was sent out. Just on the follow-up, when a report is sent out to an agency or an individual regarding…. Is there personal contact other than a letter? Do staff talk to the agency, do staff talk to the complainant in person, or is it just done by a letter?

J. Chalke: If we can maybe talk about individual investigations systemically….

D. Ashton: I’m trying to stay away from that. Personally, I was just mentioning it. I was using one in my area as an example.

J. Chalke: In an individual investigation, we would have contact with complainants and with the authority, frequently verbally and in writing — both. Then, at the end of an investigation, we write, both to the authority and to the complainant, a letter that describes the outcome of an investigation.

With respect to systemic investigations, those would conclude with a public report — the corrections one, for example. Thereafter, we would then engage in monitoring the public authority’s commitment to implement the recommendations they’ve accepted. So we’re following up afterwards in that regard.

With respect to prevention, frankly, that work isn’t necessarily work that is, if I can describe it, report related. It may be helping a public authority create a new process, making sure that it’s fair — a new appeal process or a new scheme of public administration that they’re involved in. So it isn’t the same kind of work that involves post facto, if I can call it, monitoring so much as it would involve helping them. Certainly, organizations that are willing to or are interested in prevention work are the ones that are going to have the most success with this, but we would be trying to assist them in creating a more fair structure.

Having said all of that, none of that affects our ability to then go back in afterwards and conduct a fully impartial investigation. That’s part of creating that structure with the authority. They understand that we’re going to give them our best advice, but none of that impacts our ability to then go in subsequently and conduct an investigation. That’s the kind of work that a number of my colleagues around the country that do preventative work…. That’s the structure they have as well.

D. Ashton: Order a follow-up on a post-report if you don’t feel that there have been…. Where initialization of some of your recommendations should have taken place, do you still have the authority to go back in and say please reconsider this or please consider it?

J. Chalke: We do a couple of things. Firstly, when we do monitoring reports, we actually post those on our website. For five years, we post annual monitoring reports on all our systemic investigations.

You can go on and see how this ministry or that ministry or that organization is doing in terms of implementing the various recommendations that they’ve accepted to do. Then it’s just our job to ensure that they actually live up to that commitment.
[ Page 2824 ]

It’s certainly open to us to go back in and do another investigation, following up with respect to either a particular aspect or more holistically — for example, the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation. We did a major investigation a number of years ago. Then, two years ago, we went in and did a specific investigation around their reconsideration process, timeliness with respect to their reconsideration process and the fact that they were failing to meet their own service standards in there. That was going in on a specific matter after having done a much broader initial, original systemic investigation.

C. James (Deputy Chair): Just one other question on the issue. As I said, I recognize there’s caution around talking about the specific documents, but I also think it’s important. The last thing this investigation needs — and I think everybody would agree with this — is more concern or lack of trust in the process. The investigation is going on. I think all of us would hope that that doesn’t occur because I don’t think it’s good for anybody.

I just wondered. Is there…? You said it was an email that ended up showing that there was an inquiry made and that there’s been legal review of all of this. Is it possible to release the memo or release the description of what went on so that, again, we can take away any kind of belief that maybe there’s something more there that people may imagine if they’re not seeing what’s there?

I guess, as I said, I put this on the table in hopes of not adding to the mistrust that’s there around this whole investigation from the start — with government, not with your office.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Please keep in mind that we are on the public record right now. We’re not in camera. Thank you.

J. Chalke: I guess what I would say is that it’s our intention to provide that level of detail in our final report. We would do so. As I’ve said, the breadth of involvement was to receive that question and make one or two inquiries and then to leave it for Mr. Fyfe on his return. But we will provide a much more robust explanation when we complete our final report.

S. Hamilton (Chair): Just to confirm, Mr. Chalke, there were no decisions made. There was just an inquiry, questions asked, in order to clarify some content in the memo and then move it on to Mr. Fyfe. That’s my understanding — without compromising.

J. Chalke: That’s correct. I made no decisions. I set no direction in any way, shape or form. I simply asked some questions and identified the issue for Mr. Fyfe to deal with.

Seeing none, thank you very much, Mr. Chalke. I appreciate you coming by and giving us that update. I’m sure we’ll be talking to one another again soon in the future.

Is there any further business to come forward to the committee? Seeing none, I’ll look for a motion to adjourn.

S. Hamilton (Chair): The committee stands adjourned until Thursday, when we have our next meeting.

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)
Clerks:	Kate Ryan-Lloyd
	Susan Sourial

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES