The committee met at 8:47 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Welcome. Today we have statutory offices’ finance and operational updates. We’re very pleased to have the Office of the Ombudsperson — and the Ombuds­person.

It’s your floor, so go ahead. Thank you very much.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Thank you, Chair. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to take a few minutes to tell you about the work of the Office of the Ombudsperson. With me this morning are Deputy Ombudsperson David Paradiso; Bruce Clarke, the executive director of investigations; and a face familiar to all of you, Dave Van Swieten, the executive director of corporate shared services.

I very much appreciate this opportunity at this point in the year to speak to you about the work of our office, in addition to our budget appearance in the fall. I’m aware that this round of meetings adds to an already very heavy workload for the committee, so I trust that you find these discussions worthwhile. If you have any suggestions for improvement about how we can make this spring round of presentations more effective or provide greater value, please let myself or the other officers know. We’re anxious to help.

I want to say to each member of the committee that I’d be pleased to meet with you or your constituency staff to provide further background about the work of our office. We make a point of visiting communities across the province. We set up an ombuds office for the day in those communities, and we include meetings with constituency offices when we do that. So if we’re going to be in an area near your electoral district at some point, we’ll be in touch and would be happy to sit down with your constituency staff and talk about what we do, because often it can fit well with the work that you’re doing locally.

This morning I intend to update you on current and some recent work of the office. Specifically, I’ll be providing a snapshot of our budget and workload, giving an overview of recent investigations concluded and special reports that were tabled in the Legislative Assembly in the past few months and highlighting a few investigations reported in our recent annual report.

[8:50 a.m.]

I’ll be providing a brief update on the status of our analysis of government’s implementation of recommendations made in our Misfire report, resulting from this committee’s 2015 referral to our office; updating the committee on the first year of our three-year preventative ombudship pilot project and making a few introductory comments about Bill 28, which, if passed, will bring public interest disclosure legislation to the province.

First, a quick review of our financial and workload picture. Last year our budget was $6.653 million. We optimized that budget using 97.2 percent of the funds available, leaving a small surplus of $188,595, or 2.8 percent. We received about 8,400 complaints and inquiries last year. That was an increase of 400 over the prior year, a year-over-year increase of about 5 percent. So quite significant, actually.

We provide assistance to everyone who contacts us, although that assistance is not always to conduct an investigation. Frequently, we inform individuals that whatever public body they’re concerned about has an internal review or appeal process and point them to that process. In this regard, that’s something that members of the assembly, through your constituency offices, do from time to time as well. But about 2,000 times a year, the matter is referred to one of early resolution officers or to an investigator to determine whether to commence an investigation.

When I was last in front of this committee, I gave an overview of the range of those individual investigations and the distribution among the many public authorities that we have jurisdiction over. Just to remind you, it’s every ministry of the provincial government. It encompasses the Crown corporations, every public school in the province, all the public universities and colleges in the province, all the local governments in the province, all the tribunals established under provincial law and the professional regulatory bodies — oh, and the health authorities, as well.

It’s quite a wide range. The advantage of that wide range is that it gives people a one-stop shop if they have concerns about the fairness of a provincial or local government body — a one-stop shop for them to go to. The challenge of that, of course, is that it’s an incredibly broad jurisdiction for us.

We continue to make progress on reducing the files-awaiting-assignment list. These are matters that have been through our intake screening and our assessment process and are awaiting assignment to an investigator. Our tight resourcing limits the pace of that improvement, but the good news is that it’s headed in the right direction. I’ll have a specific update on this when we present our 2019-2020 budget submission in the fall.

From within the Ombudsperson budget, our office delivers the corporate shared services, led by Dave, to three other officers of the Legislature — the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the Merit Commissioner and the Police Complaint Commissioner — as well as, of course, to staff of the Office of the Ombudsperson. We charge back the other three officers for their share of the corporate shared services costs.

For the four legislative officers, corporate shared services reflects our mutual commitment to efficiency and utilizing economies-of-scale benefits. Dave Van Swieten and I are looking forward very much to your visit tomorrow to explain corporate shared services and give you an opportunity to see it in action.

Turning to this year’s budget, our allocation at this time is $6.968 million. This represents a 3.6 percent increase for base cost increases. You may recall two specific initiatives were not funded. I want to briefly mention that in your materials today is our amended 2018-2021 service plan. By and large, it’s the same as the plan that you reviewed last November.

There are, however, two changes. First, I’ve adjusted the service plan to reflect the funding allocated. Two initiatives for which we would require new funding were removed. Those two initiatives were to fund an Aboriginal liaison officer and to increase our systemic investigation capacity. The second change is to identify, for the current fiscal year, the most significant change since last November, when I was last in front of this committee — namely, the preparatory work that our office must do to be ready to undertake the responsibility assigned to us by Bill 28, if that legislation is passed by the Legislature.

One of our strategic plan initiatives is to make sure that people who need us are aware of us and are able to reach us. We’re developing strategies to reach underserved populations so that everybody who needs our help is aware of our office and can reach out to us. We’ve identified a number of underserved populations and are now establishing a multi-year plan with annual priorities within each year. I look forward to updating the committee as that plan progresses.

[8:55 a.m.]

In January, the Speaker tabled our report Stem to Stern: Crown Land Allocation and the Victoria International Marina. That report is in your materials. Stem to Stern resulted from our investigation into complaints we had received from members of the public. The complaints were about the decisions of what is now the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development to allocate two Crown water lots to a private marina developer by way of a 45-year lease.

The investigation was into complaints from the public that the ministry did not adequately consider Crown land allocation principles in their decision-making, approved the application when other approvals were still pending and made the decision without adequate public consultation.

I said at the time the report was released that Stem to Stern highlights how important it is that decisions about Crown land management be made in a manner that is transparent, consultative and evidence-based. Much of British Columbia is Crown land, and government’s decision about Crown land needs to be made in a manner that is, and is seen to be, administratively fair and reasonable.

Stem to Stern is about how decisions are made about valued public assets. Transparent and clear processes contribute to public understanding and acceptance of government decisions. The public should be provided with sufficient information to understand a decision and how it was made, even if they disagree with it.

The ministry’s decision-making process in this case had a number of shortcomings. Specifically, the ministry did not provide sufficient information to the public about the decision government had to make — what factors it would and would not consider. Furthermore, it did not meet its own policy to post decisions on its website until five years after the decision was made, and following the decision, the government did not provide adequate reasons to show how the decision was in the public interest.

The report resulted in eight recommendations to the ministry. This included a number of recommendations about the process and substance of public consultation, the transparency of its decision-making, and demonstrating Crown land allocation principles were applied.

The good news is that the ministry accepted all eight of the recommendations and has developed an action plan to implement them. Some of the recommendations are scheduled to complete by October of this year.

We’ll be monitoring the ministry’s implementation of those eight recommendations and publicly report our assessment. That’s a standard practice we have when we provide a report to legislators. In the event that the public authority in question accepts one or more of those recommendations, we monitor to ensure that the authority then lives up to that commitment that it made at the time the report was released.

Turning to another report. Last month the Speaker tabled our most recent report, entitled Holding Pattern: Call Wait Times for Income and Disability Assistance. Holding Pattern is the report of the Ombudsperson’s investigation into the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction’s centralized telephone system and its impact on the applicants and recipients of income and disability assistance.

As I indicated when the report was released, the ministry’s telephone-based service has been chronically slow for a number of years. Income and disability assistance applicants and recipients include some of the most vulnerable people in the province. The ministry needs to ensure that its services are timely and meet the needs of the people it serves.

We initiated the systemic investigation in response to a range of complaints that we received about long wait times, disconnected calls, call time limits, and other challenges recipients of income and disability assistance face in communicating with the ministry by telephone.

We made five key findings. The first and most fundamental was that the average call wait times at the ministry’s provincial contact centre were chronically and consistently unreasonably long.

Second, the ministry does not provide a reasonable level of service via its centralized telephone line because it does not employ a sufficient number of employment and assistance workers in the provincial contact centre.

Third, the ministry’s regular use of its tier 1 strategy is unreasonable, because it results in an inadequate level of service and creates a delay in the resolution of service requests. I pause here and point out, by way of background, that the tier 1 strategy is when ministry staff only action phone inquiries that can be addressed in under five minutes. For inquiries anticipated to take longer, staff take enough information to build a service request, which goes into the ministry’s provincial queue for later action.

Fourth, the ministry does not inform callers when the provincial contact centre is operating in tier 1 mode. So this approach lacks transparency and is unreasonable because callers lack information about why the ministry is not resolving their service requests.

[9:00 a.m.]

Fifth, the ministry’s failure to monitor its set service delivery standards for in-person wait times at local offices is unreasonable.

As I said, the central finding was that the call centre telephone service was chronically slow. We set out, in great detail, the time taken to serve the public and traced the various wait-time history over the past few years. As recently as December 2017, the average was still over 30 minutes.

As we detailed in this report, the ministry had, over the years, been creative in the mitigation measures it had taken in an attempt to squeeze a bit more service from its resource envelope. However, these measures, while designed to speed up telephone response times, in fact also had a negative impact on the quality of the service. The ministry itself acknow­ledged the measures reduced the ministry’s ability to complete service requests, resulted in reduced employee engagement, frustrated clients and reduced the ministry’s credibility.

We made nine recommendations. The ministry fully accepted six of them and will be taking some action on the other three. The recommendations were directed in three areas — transparency, service quality and timeliness.

We made a number of recommendations to the ministry about making the telephone service more transparent. These included posting on its website the daily speed-of-answer statistics; advising the public when it is operating an expedited but limited phone service — namely, tier 1, until it’s phased out next year; making public the report of an independent performance audit on call-answer timeliness for each of the next three years; and making public new service standards for in-person service at local ministry offices. The ministry accepted all of these transparency recommendations.

We also made recommendations to improve service quality. These recommendations focus on phasing out various strategies, such as tier 1, that the ministry had developed to expedite call centre answer but that unfortunately did so at the expense of service quality. I’m pleased that in regards to those service quality recommendations, the ministry also agreed to all of those.

Finally, we made some recommendations about a new service standard to make the ministry’s telephone wait times shorter. We parted company, to some degree, with the ministry on this issue though. We recommended that the ministry achieve a daily average speed of answer of ten minutes or less and that the wait time for no call exceeds 30 minutes. In order to accommodate the unique circumstances of the monthly cheque-issue day, we said this standard need only be achieved 95 percent of the days each month.

The ministry decided to go a different route and has set a different standard committing to answering 80 percent of calls within ten minutes, but it declined to set any service standard for the longest call each day. The ministry, utilizing some of the new funding reserved in the 2018 provincial budget, is increasing the call centre staffing by some 20 positions.

Overall, it’s a positive start, but we’ll continue to monitor wait times over the coming years and report on whether the ministry has been able to meet the standard. The first public posting of call centre wait times will be at the end of this month in respect of the month of April.

I do want to mention that we just deposited our latest special report with the Speaker, and I expect he’ll be tabling that report later today. I’ll be pleased to update you on that report when we meet next.

While Stem to Stern and Holding Pattern are examples of investigations in stand-alone special reports to the Legislature, that’s far from the norm. Most of the improvements that are made to public administration are not in those stand-alone reports. They’re in the everyday investigations that we conduct. While most are not publicly reported, we do, however, report on a selection of those cases in our annual report. Here are a few examples from our most recent annual report.

We conducted an investigation into complaints that we received about whether the separate confinement in the Burnaby Youth Custody Services Centre was being operated in accordance with statutory and policy requirements for the separate confinement of youth. We noted shortcomings in the processes used in the centre and the resulting documentation. The ministry has agreed to take steps to comply with the law and ministry policy, and we’re continuing to monitor the conditions in separate confinement at that facility.

We conducted an investigation into the damage claim process used by B.C. Hydro when their operations mistakenly or accidently impact the public — causing property damage, for example, to customers. Our investigations resulted in financial redress for the complainant who came to us. Also, B.C. Hydro took steps to improve how damage claims are handled in the future, including assessment, communication and processing claims.

[9:05 a.m.]

We conducted an investigation that resulted in B.C. Assess­ment making changes to their communications to allow property owners to better see changes to assessments, identify discrepancy and correct errors promptly.

We investigated a complaint about disruption and disability assistance for recipients who move on or off First Nations reserves, and as a result, move between provincial and federal responsibility for that assistance. As a result of our investigations, the Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction took steps to work with Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada to prevent the same disruption from happening to others.

As a result of an investigation we conducted into procurement practices for a large capital project in a small local government, a number of changes were made to ensure fair, consistent and transparent contracting practices on future capital projects.

Following an investigation we carried out into problems for a retiring Armed Forces member obtaining immediate provincial health coverage, Health Insurance B.C. improved its processes so that the transition to provincial health coverage for future veterans would be seamless.

Of course, we do not always find that a public body acted unfairly. As an independent and impartial investigator, often the result is that the public authority acted fairly. Arriving at such a determination has been recognized by the courts as an essential hallmark of our impartial role.

An example of this in our most recent annual report involved an investigation into the professional regulatory body for insurance licensees. We investigated a complaint about the regulatory body and came to the conclusion that the procedure that the regulators had used was not unreasonable and that an appropriate balance had been struck.

I want to turn from the everyday to the far less everyday and turn to the referral report we completed early last fiscal year. In April 2017, the Speaker deposited our report entitled Misfire, which was the result of the investigation we conducted into the 2012 Ministry of Health employment terminations. That investigation and report was conducted at the direction of this committee, issued in 2015 — the first time in the history of the Ombudsperson Act that the statutory power to refer a matter to us was exercised by legislators.

Our report contained 41 recommendations, all of which were accepted in writing by the head of the public service. One of the recommendations we made was that government provide our office and make public a report by the end of last month on the status of implementations of all the other recommendations one year later.

The government also appointed Thomas Cromwell, formerly a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada, to monitor and publicly report on implementation during that interim one-year period until government’s April 30, 2018, report to us was due. Mr. Cromwell filed three reports during the year before government’s report to us.

The head of the public service did report to us on time two weeks ago, on April 30. That report was made public on government’s Misfire response website. A message from the head of the public service was posted on the government em­ployee intranet.

While government’s implementation update report in this case is more high profile than others, it follows, as I said earlier, a practice that we employ in all our public and special reports. We seek such implementation reports from public authorities on all the recommendations that have been accepted, and we do so, typically, for a period of up to five years following the completion of a report or less than five years if we’re satisfied that the government has implemented all the recommendations.

This monitoring assessment ensures that where a public body agrees to implement a recommendation, such commitment is not forgotten. Public authorities are not required to accept our recommendations. They are recommendations, not orders, but when they do so, our monitoring ensures public accountability for that commitment.

We analyze these reports and assess whether we’re of the view that the recommendation is fully implemented, partially implemented, in progress or not implemented. We’ll be carrying out the same analysis and assessment for the Misfire recommendations, and we’ll be making that assessment public when it’s complete. At that time, we’ll also set the date for government’s next implementation report on the matter.

I want to leave the investigation realm and turn to the area of preventative ombudship. This involves applying our expertise in administrative fairness to assist public authorities to proactively address fairness issues. The idea is to prevent problems from arising in the first place, because after all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

This has great potential for benefit to members of the public, since their dealings will look and feel and be more fair. It benefits the public body, because an agreeable relationship with clients and customers is more efficient and satisfying than an acrimonious one. It could benefit our office by addressing common problems of unfairness once and for all, and thus, in the long run, should allow us to reallocate resources to serve people facing other problems, just as it can permit public authorities to better use their resources.

[9:10 a.m.]

Routinely, public authorities ask our investigators for assistance while developing complaint-response mechanisms, amending policies or training their staff. Where possible, my office has made efforts to meet those requests. When I joined the office, I quickly came to the view that this preventative work is underdeveloped, not through lack of interest in our office or in public bodies but mainly due to resource pressure.

In our 2016-17 budget submission, we presented a plan for a three-year prevention initiatives pilot program. This committee approved the pilot program, and we’ve just started year 2 of that pilot. We’ll be returning in the fall of 2019 with the result of an external evaluation and a recommendation about whether the program ought to continue beyond the pilot.

In the meantime, I want to mention some of the prevention initiative highlights to date. Training and awareness around administrative fairness for public sector employees is one main feature. We’ve initiated a regular series of fairness webinars for public servants. These one-hour sessions have proved to be very popular. We’ve had over 600 registrants during our three live webinars and over 1,200 subsequent additional YouTube views. We’re busy planning our next webinar on fairness, this one on statutory decision–making.

We’ve started a one-day, in-person fairness workshop for public servants. Initial workshops for Victoria and Vancouver filled up within three hours of being advertised. It’s not quite how quickly things seem to sell out at the local arena here, what with ticket bots and everything, but it was pretty quick. Second workshops were added in both cities, in response to demand. Both also immediately filled up, with full wait-lists planned for both sessions. Additional workshops will be planned for the fall in Victoria, Vancouver and Prince George, and we plan one in the Interior in the spring.

Workshops offer a full day of cross-sector learning about administrative fairness principles, providing participants with an opportunity to learn more about the role of our office and why fairness matters in public service delivery. By complete coincidence, when you visit our office tomorrow you’ll likely see one of those classes in action, because it happens to be taking place tomorrow.

In response from several public authorities, we’ve been delivering customized training to their staff. We’re currently developing an on-line training program to be launched this summer. The program will be a one-hour, interactive, introductory course on administrative fairness, principles in public service delivery specially geared towards staff who are new to the public service. The program will be accessible to all parts of the broader public sector.

We’ve also made changes in areas other than training. We made changes to our quarterly reporting to public authorities to give them more information about the general subject matter of complaints of unfairness about their organization, whether or not we’ve investigated those complaints. This is something many organizations ask for. They said: “Even if you don’t investigate, we’d like to know what the general nature was of the kinds of complaints that were presented to you.”

We’re engaged one-on-one with a number of public authorities to give them advice about fairness, as they review and amend specific programs. Building fairness in at the start is a great and cost-efficient way when designing new programs or when redesigning existing ones.

It’s early days yet, but I’m very pleased with the quality and utility of the prevention services that we’ve developed. But I’m also equally pleased by the enthusiastic response we’ve received from across the public sector.

The last thing I just want to touch on before concluding my remarks relates to Bill 28. Bill 28, the Public Interest Disclosure Act, 2018, was introduced in the Legislative Assembly by the Attorney General on April 25. If passed, it will provide public servants with protection for making disclosures about wrongdoing in government and against any reprisal for doing so.

It will also ensure that any resulting investigation into such wrongdoing is conducted in a manner that is fair. Public servants will be able to disclose to a senior official within their organizations or to my office for investigation. As the Attorney General has indicated, my office was consulted in the development of the legislation.

This is a welcome development, but it will have a significant workload impact on our office, which is already operating at capacity in delivering our existing statutory responsibilities. I welcome this opportunity to deliver this important new service and look forward to discussing with you the impact of the legislation in a few weeks, if Bill 28 completes its legislative journey this month.

That completes my remarks. My team and I would be happy to answer any questions you have.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Mr. Chalke, and to your staff. We really appreciate all the work that you do.

[9:15 a.m.]

You’d mentioned that you’d had to make adjustments to the service plan. We haven’t had a chance to really talk about that in a formal setting at all. But as you probably are aware, this year all of the statutory officers, except one, asked for increased funding — in some cases, quite a lot of increased funding. It’s our job, of course, to balance budgeting while ensuring that statutory officers fulfil their duties. While we certainly appreciate the enthusiasm for new programs and the things that you want to do, we feel that those decisions had to be made, and they’ve been made.

I’d like to thank you for your work to ensure that there is public accountability. We can see by the pickup from the reports — such as the disability wait time or the Crown lands or the Misfire report — that your work is having a huge impact, and we want to thank you very much for that.

Actually, I’m sure that I can speak for all of us in that we’re very much looking forward to the results of the prevention pilot. Obviously, prevention is…. Getting in front of these issues avoids having to deal with the numbers that you’re dealing with. So we’re really excited about that. Also, I’m sure we will probably see you in regards to Bill 28 and what further pressure that might have on your office. We look forward to that as well.

Does anyone have any questions?

M. Dean: Yes. Thank you for your important work. I’m interested in the prevention pilot and the diversity training. I’m just wondering, given the global context of the Me Too movement, etc., whether you’re seeing an increase or a trend with regard to sexual harassment and how you might be anticipating anything like that in the pilot.

J. Chalke: That’s a great question. I would say not to date have we seen any material or noticeable change, but I’m happy to go back and talk to my prevention team about whether they’ve heard that from any of the authorities that are wondering how they can better adapt their processes to make sure that women are safe both in the workplace and as recipients of public services.

M. Dean: I wonder with Bill 28, as well, whether that’s going to create more safety for that to arise. If you do identify anything, I’d be interesting in hearing about it.

J. Chalke: Absolutely. In the context of Bill 28, I’d be happy to talk about that.

J. Brar: Thanks, once again, for coming and reporting to the committee. This is a lot of work, particularly when you go into a particular ministry or organization to look at and find the shortcomings and make recommendations.

I just want to know: what percentage of your complaints are individual, and then what are these ones which are organizational in nature? What percentage of your resources are consumed on these reports or on the complaints made by individuals?

J. Chalke: The vast majority of the work we do involves the conduct of investigations that are the result of complaints from individuals. We typically will produce one or two reports that are initiated on my own motion. At the same time, we’re conducting 1,000 or more each year that relate to investigations that were precipitated by individual complaints.

Some of those individual complaint investigations end up being public reports. Stem to Stern, for example, was the result of an individual complaint, not a complaint that was initiated at our own motion, as well as the report that we’ve provided to the Speaker and that we expect he’ll be tabling later today.

B. D’Eith (Chair): No follow-up, Jagrup?

J. Brar: It’s a new question.

The work you do is very, very important. But it’s my assumption — I think I asked you the same question, maybe, earlier too — that the new ethnic communities probably have a complete lack of understanding that this office even exists. Whether it’s the South Asian community or even the Chinese community, those are significant communities we have in the province — and Korean and Japanese, other communities.

I don’t know if you look at the nature of complaints as to where they’re coming from and if you have any stats or not on that one. Do you do any kind of proactive work to educate those communities that “my office exists, and this is what you can do”?

[9:20 a.m.]

J. Chalke: Absolutely. It’s a concern that I have as well, I would say. We’re trying a number of things, but we do have an initiative to identify demographic groups that we believe are underserved. By underserved, we mean that are not resorting to our office in proportion as we would expect. That may be ethnic background. It may be age. It may be location in the province. It may be related to a range of factors, such as social isolation. It’s not a one-dimensional kind of analysis that we’ve been doing.

We’re just completing an assessment of our underserved communities and setting priorities for this year. Once we’re done that, I’d be happy to come back to the committee and talk about how we set those priorities and do that.

I generally am of the view that most of our focus should be on trying to focus that outreach to have a material change in awareness. It is true, though, that other platforms, such as social media, can provide an inexpensive way of generally increasing awareness, which is also an important thing to do, and the two can work hand in hand.

T. Redies: Thank you, Mr. Chalke, for your presentation and for the work that you and your team are doing. It is very important work.

I just had a question, and it was kind of stimulated by the review on the call centre and wait times. As you and your team are looking into ministries, I’m just curious about what the process is or how you go about balancing your recommendations with the fiscal capacity of government. Or do you look at that as part of the process?

J. Chalke: Of course, when we commence an investigation, we give notice to the public authority involved. They’re often very aware, particularly on some of our systemic investigations, that we’re conducting that.

We are very interested in the whole picture. We go and we say we’re interested in these records, but we’re also interested in anything else you want to tell us about this issue. What are the pressures? We feel that we write a better report if we have a better understanding of all the pressures that a particular public authority is addressing or is managing. We want to hear that feedback, and we’ll often say to them: “What else are you trying to accomplish as a priority?”

The other thing we do is that…. We have an obligation to be fair, too, so we’ll give notice to the public authority. “Here are our tentative recommendations. Here’s where we’re inclined to go with this report.” And they have an opportunity to provide feedback back to us.

We’re interested in a dialogue. I’m particularly interested at that stage in saying…. If we say, “We’d like you do to A, B, C and D,” and the authority comes back and says, “Well, A, B and C are fine, but D is a problem, and here’s why D is a problem,” that’s a good opportunity for us to have a dialogue with the authority. Sometimes it’s maybe not D but D.1 that they can do and get 80 percent of the bang for 20 percent of the dollar. That’s the kind of discussion that we’re always happy to have.

You know, it’s also true…. I’m not unaware of the phenomena that we do a report, and it heightens an issue where some of the public officials have been trying to seek budgetary support for resolving a particular problem. It ends up going to us, and perhaps that provides some extra stimulus in terms of addressing that problem. But it’s not something that we set out to do. It’s just an effect of the work that we do.

R. Leonard: Thank you, Mr. Chalke. As everybody says, it’s very important work that you do. It’s a good mirror for the public service to be able to reflect on how they interact with the public.

On the issue of your prevention pilot, I’m wondering what you’re doing to measure the success of it. It’s one thing to teach people about fairness. But how does it actually play out on the ground?

J. Chalke: It’s actually quite complicated to do that. You know, fairness is something that’s easy to say, but it’s actually quite hard to measure. It’s a challenge.

[9:25 a.m.]

As part of the funding proposal that I brought to this committee in the fall of 2016, we included a commitment to have a third-party evaluator conduct an evaluation. We’ve tendered that. We have an evaluator who’s working on that, so we’re relying on their evaluation expertise. We’ll have a report when we come back in November of next year — not this year but November of next year — from the evaluator.

Really, it’s going to assess a number of things, such as awareness of public servants, of what good fairness principles are. Are they able to put them into action? Having gone through, say, one of our fairness workshops, has it changed how they’re delivering service? Really, it’s trying to measure the impact of what we’re doing as opposed to the output of what we’re doing.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Anyone else? Okay.

Once again, I want to thank you for all your work — and also Mr. Paradiso, Mr. Clarke and Mr. Van Swieten for coming today. We really appreciate all the work that you do on behalf of the province. It’s obviously very, very important work to make sure that there’s accountability — having that independent accountability. Thank you so much for everything you do.

With that, that comes to the end of that part. I just wanted to mention….

Kate, if you wanted to mention about tomorrow.

Other Business

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Yes, just a reminder for those members who are going to be participating in a site visit to the offices on Fort Street, we will be assembling at 8:20 down by the kiosk just on this side of the buildings. We’ll prearrange for some taxis to help facilitate transportation.

If anything changes with your plans, if you could let me know. I think we’ve got a list in my office that everybody had expressed interest in. I know Peter was not sure if he would be able to attend. I’m anticipating everyone else will be there. Mitzi, you’re making your own way there, if I recall. And then you two are driving. Okay, that’s great.

I’ll make a note of all of that, but if anything does change between now and tomorrow morning, just let me know.

P. Milobar: I’ll make my own way there.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of Committees): You will. Excellent. Thank you so much, Peter.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Unless there’s anything else, a motion to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:27 a.m.