Third Session, 41st Parliament (2018)
Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services
Mission
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Issue No. 49
ISSN 1499-4178
The HTML transcript is provided for informational purposes only.
The
PDF transcript remains the official digital version.
Membership
Chair: |
Bob D’Eith (Maple Ridge–Mission, NDP) |
Deputy Chair: |
Dan Ashton (Penticton, BC Liberal) |
Members: |
Stephanie Cadieux (Surrey South, BC Liberal) |
|
Mitzi Dean (Esquimalt-Metchosin, NDP) |
|
Sonia Furstenau (Cowichan Valley, BC Green Party) |
|
Ronna-Rae Leonard (Courtenay-Comox, NDP) |
|
Peter Milobar (Kamloops–North Thompson, BC Liberal) |
|
Tracy Redies (Surrey–White Rock, BC Liberal) |
|
Nicholas Simons (Powell River–Sunshine Coast, NDP) |
Clerk: |
Jennifer Arril |
CONTENTS
Minutes
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
9:00 a.m.
Meeting Room, Mission Library
33247 2nd Avenue, Mission, B.C.
1)British Columbia Real Estate Association |
Corinne Caldwell |
Ray Harris |
|
2)BC Association of Community Response Networks |
Sherry Baker |
Ward Bertram |
|
3)Foundry |
Krista Gerty |
Pamela Liversidge |
|
4)BC Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation |
Sydney Massey |
Pat Tonn |
|
5)IVF4BC |
Nicole Nouch |
6)Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia |
Scott Ellis |
7)Tourism Industry Association of BC |
Walt Judas |
8)New Car Dealers Association of BC |
Blair Qualey |
9)Mission Hospice Society |
Angel Elias |
10)Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC |
Sharon Gregson |
11)Canada West Ski Areas Association |
Christopher Nicolson |
12)Retail Council of Canada |
Avery Bruenjes |
Greg Wilson |
|
13)Health Sciences Association of BC |
Val Avery |
Andy Longhurst |
|
14)BC Chiropractic Association |
Dr. Jay Robinson |
15)Restaurants Canada |
Mark von Schellwitz |
16)West Coast Kids Cancer Foundation |
Colin Worth |
17)British Columbia Stone, Sand and Gravel Association |
Derek Holmes |
18)BC SCRAP-IT Program |
Dennis Rogoza |
19)BC Notaries |
Daniel Boisvert |
Rhoda Witherly |
|
20)PacificSport Fraser Valley |
Jared Kope |
21)Abbotsford Community Services |
Rod Santiago |
Shairose Jinnah |
|
22)Motion Picture Production Industry Association of BC |
Phil Klapwyk |
Peter Leitch |
|
23)Melody Burns |
|
24)David Suzuki Foundation |
Tom Green |
Patricia Lightburn |
|
25)BC Agriculture Council |
Jared DeJong |
Reg Ens |
|
Stan Vander Waal |
|
26)British Columbia Lung Association |
Chris Lam |
27)Manufacturing Safety Alliance of BC |
Lisa McGuire |
28)District of Mission |
Mayor Randy Hawes |
29)Chilliwack & District Seniors’ Resources Society |
Coletta Holmes |
30)Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic |
Dr. Howard Green |
Dr. Don Nixdorf |
|
31)Fort Nelson & District Chamber of Commerce |
Bev Vandersteen |
32)Alliance of BC Students |
Patrick Meehan |
Noah Berson |
|
33)Forrest Smith |
|
34)BCGEU |
Robert Duffy |
Stephanie Smith |
|
35)British Columbia Federation of Students |
Aran Armutlu |
Michael Olson |
|
36)Richard A. McWhinney |
|
37)Wes Pidgeon |
|
38)Clean Energy BC |
Jae Mather |
Chair
Committee Clerk
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2018
The committee met at 9 a.m.
[B. D’Eith in the chair.]
B. D’Eith (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Bob D’Eith. I’m the MLA for Maple Ridge–Mission, and I did want to recognize Simon Gibson, who is the MLA for Mission and Abbotsford. Thank you very much for coming out today. I will note it is on his side of the riding, but we both share Mission.
Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it.
We’re pleased today to be here in Mission and would like to begin by recognizing that the meeting is taking place on the traditional territory of the Stó:lō peoples.
On behalf of the committee, I would like to acknowledge everyone impacted in British Columbia by the wildfires and floods this year and to extend our gratitude and appreciation to the first responders, volunteers and many others who supported the evacuees and the response.
We are a committee of the Legislative Assembly, and our membership includes MLAs from all three parties of the Legislature. Every fall we visit communities around the province to meet with British Columbians and hear their priorities and ideas for the next provincial budget. This consultation is based on the budget consultation paper that was recently released by the Minister of Finance. If you would like a copy of that budget consultation paper, there are some copies in the back.
In addition to these in-person meetings, British Columbians can also provide their thoughts in writing or fill out an on-line survey, and the deadline is coming up quickly. It’s 5 p.m., Monday, October 15, 2018. For more information, you can go to our website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/finance. We carefully consider all the input we receive and use it to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be prioritized in the next provincial budget. Our report will be available in writing on November 15, 2018.
For those of you who are here today, thank you very much for taking the time to participate. This is my second time around with this process, and I can truly say that your comments are absolutely at the heart of what we do here.
As far as the meeting format, we have a lot of registered speakers today, and each will have five minutes to speak followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. There’s also a first-come, first-served open-mike period at the end of the meeting, but we would ask that if anyone wanted to take advantage of that, they register now. Please see Stephanie at the back if you’d like to participate in that.
Today’s meeting is recorded and transcribed by Hansard, who are in front of me over there. All audio from our meetings is broadcast live via our website, and a complete transcript is also posted.
Now I’d actually like to allow the members of the committee to introduce themselves. We start with Dan Ashton, the Deputy Chair.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Thanks for having us here in Mission. It’s good to be back. My name is Dan Ashton. I’m the MLA for Penticton to Peachland.
P. Milobar: Peter Milobar, MLA, Kamloops–North Thompson.
T. Redies: Tracy Redies, Surrey–White Rock.
S. Cadieux: Stephanie Cadieux, Surrey South.
S. Furstenau: Sonia Furstenau, Cowichan Valley.
M. Dean: Mitzi Dean, Esquimalt-Metchosin.
R. Leonard: I’m Ronna-Rae Leonard. I’m from Courtenay-Comox, on Vancouver Island.
B. D’Eith (Chair): We also have Jennifer Arril and Stephanie Raymond, at the back, from the Parliamentary Committees Office, who basically organize all of this and do an enormous amount of work for us to make sure that we’re able to be here and to do the job that we’re doing. Also, we have Amanda Heffelfinger and Simon DeLaat from Hansard. They will be recording the proceedings.
So here we go. First up we have Ray Harris and Corinne Caldwell.
This is our guide. If we can keep the initial comments to five minutes, it allows a chance for the committee to ask questions. The floor is yours.
Budget Consultation Presentations
B.C. REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATION
C. Caldwell: Thank you for the opportunity to present the B.C. Real Estate Association’s recommendations on making life more affordable in B.C. We appreciate your time and commitment to this consultation process.
My name is Corinne Caldwell, and I’m the chief operating officer at the B.C. Real Estate Association. I’m joined today by Ray Harris, an experienced realtor in the Lower Mainland and a director of the B.C. Real Estate Association. The association represents 11 member boards and more than 23,000 realtors across B.C., providing continuing education, advocacy, economic research and standard forms to help realtors provide value for their clients.
When it comes to affordability, housing is a major concern. A home is a critical foundation for a good quality of life, and we believe British Columbians should have access to appropriate and affordable housing choices. We also believe it’s necessary for consumers to have confidence in the housing market and to have access to professionals who can represent their interests. To achieve these aims, we have five recommendations.
Our first bundle of recommendations focuses on the property transfer tax. B.C. has the highest provincial land transfer tax in Canada, placing an unfair burden on homebuyers. In 2017-2018, revenue from the property transfer tax totalled over $2.1 billion, a new record. The formula for the tax has changed significantly and become quite complicated in the last few years. We describe the PTT structure in our handout.
I won’t go into a lot of detail, but we recommend several changes to ensure that the property transfer tax better reflects the real estate market. The housing market changes all the time, but the thresholds are constant. That just doesn’t make sense, so we recommend that the government index the thresholds and make adjustments every year. Also, first-time buyers are currently exempt if they buy homes up to $500,000. This should increase to $750,000. This makes common sense because we’d help to ensure that the property transfer tax keeps up with the market and doesn’t unfairly burden homebuyers.
Our second set of recommendations is also focused on tax fairness, this time related to the proposed speculation tax. If the true purpose of the tax is to curb speculation, then our suggestions are in line with what we’ve heard about the tax. First, we strongly believe that all homeowners who pay income tax should be exempt. Homeowners who are subject to Vancouver’s empty homes tax shouldn’t have to pay a provincial tax as well. Third, we prefer to see incentives for long-term rentals, rather than punishing people for not renting out their properties. Finally, development properties should also be exempt, to help encourage more housing supply.
That leads me to our third key recommendation, which is that developments should be exempt from additional school tax that takes effect next year. The rationale is the same for both the speculation tax and the school tax: let’s encourage supply.
That relates to our fourth bundle of recommendations, which is about encouraging greater density in urban areas. We recommend increasing the supply of smaller market homes in low-density neighbourhoods, especially along transit corridors. Gentle density is a strategic way to increase the capacity of urban spaces while retaining the charm of each neighbourhood.
Our final group of recommendations focuses on the functioning of the real estate market. We urge the creation of real estate practice rules that benefit small communities and commercial transactions. In June, a ban on limited dual agency took effect. Limited dual agency occurs when a realtor represents more than one party in a real estate transaction.
The ban is a problem in communities where there aren’t many realtors and in specialty areas like commercial real estate. We’re seeing more buyers being unrepresented, and some real estate offices in small communities are even closing because they can’t make a living under the new rules. This has an economic impact on certain areas of the province, and we believe changes are needed. There is an exemption to the limited-dual-agency ban, but it’s very narrow.
To make sure consumers are protected and communities are adequately served by real estate professionals, we recommend that the exemption from the limited-dual-agency ban be clarified. We also believe a new exemption should be created for commercial transactions. To avoid this kind of confusion and difficulty in the future, more realtors must be appointed to the Real Estate Council of B.C.
Our provincial real estate market and economy are thriving, which means the government is well positioned to prioritize affordability. BCREA’s recommendations will best assist those who struggle to enter the housing market, while providing support for homeowners and renters now and into the future. More details are available in our written submission.
Thank you for the opportunity to present our recommendations.
P. Milobar: Unicorns seem to get mentioned in provincial politics a lot these days. With the exemption, I’ve heard it conveyed to me, from others in the real estate industry, that it’s an exemption on paper but that in practice, it’s a unicorn. Are you aware of anyone that has actually qualified for this exemption yet?
C. Caldwell: We’re not aware of anyone who has qualified for it. There is a huge amount of risk for it, as well, given the penalty. The Real Estate Council of B.C.’s CEO has actually made multiple presentations across the province, saying that it is a unicorn and that they don’t expect it to be used.
T. Redies: Thank you for your presentation. Yesterday we heard some relatively negative statistics about the housing starts in B.C. dropping 43 percent. Could you comment on that with respect to what you’re seeing in the market and why you think this might be happening?
C. Caldwell: Ray, if I could ask you to comment on the market.
R. Harris: Yeah, the market conditions. There’s been a lot of uncertainty based on what’s been going on with the stress test. The stress test has had an effect, along with the uncertainty that has been added through the government action. Between the two, we’ve seen a slowdown. Usually, the people that are starting homes are going to wait for another cycle. I think we could be looking at an opportunity or a situation where we’re waiting for another section — let’s put it that way — a downturn.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it.
Next up we have the B.C. Association of Community Response Networks — Sherry Baker.
We’re using this as a little guide. What we’re trying to do…. If we can keep the initial comments to five minutes, then there’s time for questions. Please go ahead.
B.C. ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY
RESPONSE
NETWORKS
S. Baker: Good morning, everybody. I don’t think this will be an extremely long presentation. My purpose here is to bring your attention to some activities that are taking place across our province to raise the awareness of abuse, neglect and self-neglect of vulnerable adults in our communities. I’ll read through this one-page presentation, and I’d be happy to answer any questions.
We’d like to, first of all, acknowledge the financial support of the government of British Columbia to the B.C. community response networks since 2012, and we urge that the government will continue this support for the next three years and, hopefully, beyond.
Elder abuse occurs much more frequently than the data would suggest: at the moment, around 8 to 10 percent of seniors. That data is based on questionable activities, in that they phone people with questionnaires or attend at care facilities, where many of the people living in the care facilities have a diminished mental capacity. Then you get these odd — I think they’re rather odd — statistics attached to it.
When we talk to people in the communities, we know that almost everybody is aware in one way or another of some form of abuse that’s taking place to a relative or a friend, often financial abuse. If you go into a bank, they are just overwhelmed sometimes by what they’re seeing happening in their banks, with people coming in and receiving funds from vulnerable adults who may or may not know what they’re doing. Mainly, it is hidden. The whole issue of elder abuse is hidden, and it’s considered to be really shameful to disclose to anybody around that you are being abused.
The mandate of the B.C. CRN, our organization, is to support a coordinated community response to abuse, neglect and self-neglect, as outlined in the Adult Guardianship Act. It is specifically in the Adult Guardianship Act that the health authorities and Community Living B.C. are the designated responders. We bring together the communities, the service providers, the agencies and the volunteers in the communities, who are seeing this happening around them — and the banks, the lawyers and the pharmacists.
It’s everywhere. They need to know, and we help them understand, what the signs and symptoms are, what they can do and what resources are available in the community to address them. We also raise the awareness of the issue by supporting community initiatives, providing workshops and distributing a wide range of materials and information throughout the province. The following table describes the growth since the first grant was awarded in 2012.
I’m sorry. I didn’t acknowledge my board chair. Ward Bertram has been the chair of our board for about three years. We are a non-profit registered society, and we have a board of ten people. The second handout you received describes all the communities that we are active in, in British Columbia. It gives the members of our board and our structure.
Our structure is quite unique in that we are working now in 204 communities in B.C., with 74 community response networks. We all are on contract, and we all work from our homes, so we’re not spending any money on offices or other administrative infrastructure. The money that we receive from our funders goes right into the community, to ensure that this activity is maximized to its fullest degree.
The annual report. All of our material is on the website. Our annual report says — it’s described here — that we had 69 community response networks, with 190 communities at the end of March. Today we have 74, with 204 communities. We just had a staff meeting yesterday on the phone, and there’s some real interest showing up in Fort Nelson. We’ve had somebody over on Haida Gwaii, looking at a couple of networks there. So we have a huge penetration around the province.
Some of you, I hope, know about your community response networks in your communities.
Good, thank you. Are you from Vancouver Island?
Interjection.
S. Baker: Yeah, you know Jane Osborne. She’s one of our mentors.
I just wanted not to particularly change anything that’s been going on now. We just want to make sure that our funding is continued and in the budget. We’ve been getting three years of funding, and we would like to have another three years at the end of the next fiscal so that we can continue the work that we’re doing.
Are there any questions?
S. Cadieux: Thank you for your presentation. I do know of my community response group, but I am not really clear on what the funding is for. How does the funding get distributed? What it is used for, specifically?
S. Baker: We do pay our mentors. We have 15 regional mentors in the province, whose responsibility is to go with the communities in their region and support these networks. They average about 40 hours a month; some are more. In Vancouver, our mentor there has 110 hours. I’m paid, of course. We have about 2½ FTEs that are doing the administrative piece of this. You can imagine that it’s quite complicated keeping track of everything in the province. We have to travel. Those are important.
We also distribute small grants to all the communities that are members, if they apply, and we track the expenditure of those grants. Each community response network has access to about $5,000 a year, which we monitor.
S. Cadieux: What would they use that for?
S. Baker: They would use it for putting on the seniors teas, doing community events, doing World Elder Abuse Awareness Day things — all those things in the province.
You can see, on the website, all those activities that are taking place. If you multiply that by 204 communities, it’s not hard to spend about $1.1 million a year of all of our hard-earned money.
I think that the value has been really demonstrated. We have a developmental evaluation that we’ve been doing, now into our seventh year, to try and assess whether or not what we’re doing and what we’ve been asked to do by the government to raise this awareness — that’s what we’ve been asked to do — is actually happening, and it is. That is on our website. We have a very strong infrastructure in place to do this.
T. Redies: Thank you for your presentation. As someone who’s been involved in the financial services sector for quite a long period of time, this is one of the things that was very near and dear to my heart. I’ve been out of it for a few years.
My question is: what are you doing with the financial services sector to maybe establish some common programs that can help identify these issues both internally but also externally for people who might not, maybe, be in a position at that point to say that they’re being abused?
S. Baker: We have some materials that we provide to them. We have a workshop that’s called “It’s Not Right! Neighbours, Friends and Family,” which was developed nationally. We provide that to anyone who wishes to have it. Our work is at the ground level, so many of the community response networks have members from their local banks and credit unions on the community response networks themselves.
We are looking at, talking with Vancity and some of the others, training in-house trainers to deliver “It’s Not Right!” to their personnel. They are also doing some internal work which we are involved in helping them with.
You’re one of the financial….
W. Bertram: Yeah. I worked for a long time in the credit union system as well, so I have some on-the-ground insight there. Just to maybe provide a couple of practical examples or some specific examples, our mentor in the South Surrey region recently delivered “It’s Not Right! Friends and Family” to the Royal Bank branch there. So where we don’t have presence in the institution specifically, the mentors are coming in and delivering that material so that the employees of those institutions have a better understanding of how to respond to that.
We’re using the decision tree that was developed by the…. Who was it developed by again?
S. Baker: It was a consortium with the Public Guardian and Trustee…
W. Bertram: …and the B.C. Law Institute, right.
So a sort of decision-making framework on how to address those issues. The B.C. CRN, as well, is listed as a resource for elder abuse with the Canadian Credit Union Association on the national website there. And we have representation from myself, as well as another member of the credit union. That’s an initiative that we’ve been working on as an organization — to try to expand the presence of financial services, its members, lawyers, accountants, other individuals beyond our health care provincials….
B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re out of time, but thank you very much for your presentation.
Next up we have Foundry — Krista Gerty and Pamela Liversidge.
FOUNDRY
P. Liversidge: Thank you. We’ve got a PowerPoint presentation. I’ll let you know when I’m flipping through it.
I’m Pamela Liversidge, acting executive director of Foundry. This is my colleague Krista Gerty. Foundry is an initiative looking to establish integrated health and social service centres across British Columbia. We serve young people between the ages of 12 and 24 and provide the services of primary care, mental health, substance use, social services and peer support and navigation.
Starting on this slide, this is just an image demonstrating the age range in which mental health impacts people the most. You can see, between the ages of 14 and 25, 26…. This is a measure of impacts to mental wellness measured by days, by age. You can see that mental wellness improves as people age.
Turning to the next slide here, this is another measure of the burden of disease. You can see again…. The orange graph here is where young people are impacted the most in terms of mental health and substance use challenges.
I think what’s important here is that currently we’re not investing very heavily in that age range. My understanding is that the Ministry of Children and Family Development, which provides child and youth mental health services, has a budget of approximately $96 million, but that age range between sort of 18 to 24 is really…. There’s early psychosis intervention, and there’s what we’ve been able to do through Foundry so far.
We know that this is the age range when young people are most vulnerable, and they’re going through life stresses in terms of leaving home, starting school or employment, yet that’s the point in time where our system is not funded and the most fragmented.
Moving to the next slide. We see that the effects of not funding this age range in this area have been pretty detrimental. We have seen — and this data is getting a little bit old now — between a 50 percent and 85 percent increase in young people appearing and presenting at emergency departments, which of course is a very costly way to serve them and doesn’t serve them very well. Increasing admissions to in-patient units….
Of course, we’ve got a stat here on return on investment. We know there have been several pieces of work done to measure what our economic analysis would tell us, in terms of health economics as far as trying to intervene earlier and younger.
Moving on, we here in B.C…. Foundry has been leading this work across the nation. We now have seven centres open, and we have some interesting data that we’re just now starting to collect. We have four more on the go, and some of them that have been opened or are developing are in communities that you folks represent today.
We have pulled together over 120 community and government partners in this initiative. I think it’s important to know that Foundry is predicated on intentional partnerships. With the amount of funding that we are able to receive from philanthropy and, of course, from government, we leverage significant in-kind resources that are already existing in communities.
I think one of the other major aspects of Foundry is our on-line presence, and we’re seeing lots of young people starting to receive information and understanding where to go for help through foundrybc.ca.
Moving on, in April, we started to roll out our information technology system, which we’re calling Toolbox — a little bit of a nod to Foundry. You can see, I think, what’s important to note. The data here on this table is from the end of April to the end of September. You can see the significant number of young people coming into Foundry centres — specifically in the larger communities, including Kelowna, Abbotsford, the North Shore — and the number of unique visits.
We’ve had centres starting to open since May of 2017, so as people start to adopt this system, we’ll see those numbers increase really significantly. This doesn’t include the numbers of young people coming in prior to April 2018.
Moving to the next slide here. This is exactly what we were hoping we would see in terms of the age of young people coming into centres. We’re seeing the bell curve here really between the ages of 17 and 21, the transition-aged youth, where really there’s not a lot out there for them.
Moving to the next slide, we know that this is still only meeting a fraction of the need that’s out there. We know through data that’s a couple of years old now that 130,000 young people were trying to access mental health or substance use services through the health system. We know through the literature and prevalence studies that the need is actually probably double that or more.
We are getting significant interest from other communities, asking how they can get a Foundry centre. You’ll see some of the communities listed here who have reached out to us directly. Other provinces are looking to us to really understand what we’re doing here. Those are listed. Just in the interest of time, I’ll move on.
Quickly, the next graph here shows you where we asked folks: “Where would you go if there wasn’t a Foundry in your community?” This is what they’re telling us. I think it’s important to note here that almost a quarter of young people are telling us that they wouldn’t go anywhere.
Then this gets into our recommendations here. On slide No. 10, what we’re looking for…. We know that a significant cost for government is health care. We know that. Just in terms of some comparisons here for you: $19.5 billion annually on health care is primarily directed on the needs of older adults, including $179 million for cardiac procedures and $173 million for renal care.
What we’re asking for is an estimated $23.2 million in one-time funding for start-up and about $33 million annually to serve a significant number — all of our young people — all across this province. This would be looking to scale up to 30 full-fidelity centres in larger communities and 20 spoke-type models that would serve more rural and remote communities, including First Nations communities. That would really serve to increase our service reach.
Lastly, our recommendation here just sort of lays out what I just said in a little bit more detail. The three main areas of our recommendations are around, of course, the on-the-ground operation of Foundry centres and spokes. That’s the majority of the budget here. Our central office team is what’s necessary to get these things up and running and ensure fidelity to a model, and evaluation and quality improvements.
Then lastly, we are working with B.C. Children’s Hospital to develop a very comprehensive on-line resource, in the form of a virtual clinic, so that young people living outside of communities where Foundry centres belong can also access care virtually.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. I just wanted to first say thank you from my riding, Maple Ridge–Mission. We’re going to have a Foundry there. I wanted to thank you for your flexibility, because I know that in some communities, space is a real issue.
P. Liversidge: Yeah, it is.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I just wanted to say thank you for allowing that flexibility, because we really, really need it.
I appreciate what you’re saying around the province. We’ve actually heard a number of presenters say how important it is to deal with many issues early on. Whatever you’re dealing with — whether that’s speech therapy or early development issues or mental health issues — if we can prevent early on, then a lot of those problems that we have to deal with later in life might be avoided.
I know from my own personal…. My brother became schizophrenic at around 17, 18. As a family, we had nothing back then. It was 35 years ago. I mean, there was nowhere to go, and I really think that, perhaps, if he had had this kind of help, maybe he wouldn’t have had as tough a time as he has had.
So thank you. I appreciate that.
T. Redies: Thank you for all the work that you…. Having been a part of an organization that’s worked with you guys in the past, I’ve had a lot of positive impressions in terms of the organization.
I’m just curious about the 3.26 to $5.60 ROI. Can you give us a little bit more context on how that was arrived at?
P. Liversidge: Sure. This is data that’s from the academic literature. It’s been around for a long time.
Previous to Foundry, I worked in the Ministry of Health. We looked to this data all the time in terms of policy decisions around where to…. Acute services always have a need, so that’s where the funding typically goes.
That’s from international literature that we can pull together for you. But basically, the premise there is that if you’re funding earlier upstream, when symptoms are just starting to occur, or even providing more funding in the form of health promotion to really establish those resilience factors for young people, we know that down the road it will save the system pretty significant dollars.
I’m happy to provide you with the literature that we use, which has been around for quite some time.
M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation and for all of the work that your organization does. We know we need non-stigmatizing, accessible places for youth with issues to be able to come and get help, and we need that collaborative approach as well. It’s the best way to serve children and families.
I’m interested in the finances. You said that the funding has been able to leverage other sources of funding. I’m wondering whether you can give us a little bit more detail on that and if you can point me to where I could see your financial audited statements or summary for the year.
P. Liversidge: Sure. I’ll start, and I’ll let Krista join in here too.
Thank you for that, because I did forget to mention…. I think one of the novel and innovative things about Foundry is that to date we have been the recipient of over $20 million in philanthropic gifts. That’s both from a central perspective — and that’s been a lot of what Krista’s work has entailed — but also local fundraising campaigns. We’re really seeing families who have been impacted by this throughout the years — and also just foundations who see this is a really significant need and an innovative way to do the work.
We know that there are foundations and private family donors that are interested to see what comes next in terms of a possible expansion from government and are sort of waiting in the wings to start work around continuing to fundraise to support Foundry.
I think that’s an important point. Thank you for asking the question.
We report through…. We are employees of Providence Health Care. Of course, every Foundry centre has its own auditing and budgetary financial system, checks and balances. For what we’re spending, in terms of a central office perspective, that goes through Providence Health Care finance and accounting and all of those sort of rigorous….
We actually have a bit of a double-counting. We have St. Paul’s Foundation, which is a steward of the philanthropic funds and some of the government funds as well. Then, of course, that goes through Providence Health Care. So it’s a bit of a double measure there.
I don’t know if you had anything to add?
B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re just getting over time now, so if you could answer quickly, that’d be great.
K. Gerty: One last comment. We see on the ground in the Foundry communities that there’ll be agencies — the non-profit or the health authority that’s leading the centre — pull together about $1 million to $2 million in in-kind resources. People who are already working but may be in very separate places across the community all then get coalesced into one place. They start to integrate their services and work together so the system becomes less fragmented.
P. Milobar: Just really quickly, we obviously, as the Chair has mentioned many times, make recommendations. We don’t get to make the final funding approvals.
I’m wondering. Have you had preliminary discussions with the Minister of Mental Health, and where do you see this already headed — or not?
P. Liversidge: Great question. They’ve been very collaborative and inclusive. They’ve been doing their own work across their counterparts, of course, in other ministries. They’ve been sort of validating some of their thinking with us.
We do know that there’s been a briefing with Minister Judy Darcy around a number of different options for expansion and understand that there will be a conversation with the cabinet working group. We don’t know exactly what will be going forward, but we do know that they’re strongly supporting some form of expansion. We’re hopeful.
We do definitely work very closely with them through this.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much for your presentation.
Next up we have B.C. Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation — Sydney Massey and Pat Tonn.
We try to keep the comments to five minutes so we have time for questions.
B.C. AGRICULTURE IN THE
CLASSROOM
FOUNDATION
P. Tonn: Good morning. My name is Pat Tonn. I’m the executive director for B.C. Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation. My colleague and board of directors member Sydney Massey is joining me today.
It’s my pleasure to talk to you about the B.C. school fruit and vegetable nutritional program. It was created in partnership with the B.C. Ministries of Health, Agriculture and Education. In front of you, you have extensive program pages of information, but I’m just going to hit the highlights for you today.
We believe together, B.C. Agriculture in the Classroom Foundation and those ministries, that students need a healthy, balanced diet to learn, to grow and to prevent health concerns like chronic disease later in life. This program was started to bring a variety of B.C. fruits and vegetables right into the classroom for students to try and to make healthy eating part of a routine that can last a lifetime.
Our objectives are to increase the acceptability, exposure and willingness to try fruits, vegetables and milk; to increase the awareness of local fruits and vegetables and milk and where they come from on our farms in B.C.; to increase the awareness of safe handling practices for fresh fruit, vegetables and milk, so it’s safe; to support the local economy through business for farmers and distributors; and to build relationships within the produce industry, the marketers and the retailers.
In terms of background, on the bottom of the first page, it started out with just ten schools as a pilot project in 2006. We increased those schools and the participation each year. Now, in 2018, we’re in 1,456 public and First Nations schools around the province, in grades K to 12. That’s about 90 percent of schools in British Columbia.
B.C. products, like apples and plums and kiwis and pears and mini cucumbers and peppers, all go into the classrooms. Students try them together. The students have a opportunity to learn about where they came from on our farms through a teacher’s lesson that comes to the classroom with those products.
Milk and its nutritional benefits were added to the program in 2013, thanks to a 50-50 partnership funding agreement between the Ministry of Health and the B.C. Dairy Association. The milk is delivered only in K to 5, in classrooms in B.C. That’s 156,000 students. It’s most definitely a prevention program in our province for students.
Then families wanted to get involved. They saw the goodness of the program. In the centre of the second page, you’ll notice that we added a Fresh to You fundraiser in 2014.
That fundraiser was added to the program so young people with their parents can do a fundraiser, with their classes, of locally grown fresh products. Students prearrange the products, like a bundle of apples or a bundle of squash and potatoes and carrots and onions. They sell those products in the fall season when they’re fresh, and they can experience a profit of 40 percent on those goods. It creates partnerships with parents, with schools, with food producers while supporting the healthy-eating messages in school food in our province.
Is the program effective? Yes. We’re reaching the corners of the province and the centre too, including First Nations schools. We know by evaluation that students are more willing to try fruits and vegetable snacks and increase their intake while enjoying the variety they have through the B.C. school fruit and vegetable program. We know from our grocery store and producer partners that these same B.C. fruits and vegetables are requested by children and their parents at the retail level.
Farmers are producing 8.8 million servings of fruit, vegetables and milk. Teachers have the opportunity to educate with a real product in the students’ hand. It’s easy to say, “Eat your fruits and vegetables,” but it’s real when they’re actually eating them and sharing them together positively.
On the top of page 3, you can see the infographic that shows how involved our province is, from volunteers to distributors to carriers to producers to families.
This program costs $4.8 million to deliver in the schools in a school year. Currently, the annual budget contributions are $2.5 million from the province of British Columbia and the Provincial Health Services Authority; about $350,000 to $400,000 from the B.C. Dairy Association, because they contribute half of the cost of the milk program; and about $86,000 from the First Nations Health Authority, because they pay for the second servings that go to First Nations schools throughout the province.
That’s $2.9 million, but it’s not $4.8 million. What we’re requesting in terms of a recommendation is $2 million annually to add to this program to make it successful in classes. Our hope is that there’s a three-year commitment so that we can improve the education and the prevention in this program consistently over three years for a total of $6 million.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much. Just a clarification, in terms of the ask. You’re already getting $2.5 million from the province, correct?
P. Tonn: That’s correct, through the ministry.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Then you’re asking for another $2 million, so you would like to see $4.5 million, but the present program is running at $4.8 million. I’m wondering, just so I understand, what the extra $2 million would be needed for.
P. Tonn: Right now all of the money that has come to us all through years of contributions is gone. It will be gone at the end of January of 2019. So there’s no surplus left to top-up that $2.5 million. To run the program at $4.8 million, we still continue to need that top-up.
B. D’Eith (Chair): That’s where I’m confused. Are you asking for $4.5 million from the province, or are you asking for $2 million from the province? I don’t understand the ask. I’m just trying to get my head around the ask.
P. Tonn: I got it. Well, $2.5 million is already confirmed in the Ministry of Health budget, so the additional top-up would be $2 million.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Thanks.
M. Dean: Thanks for this important program.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, and thanks. Sorry. I didn’t even thank them for that. I appreciate that.
M. Dean: I’m interested in what percentage of children are already reached with this proposal around the $4.8 million. What will you do if the province can still only give you $2.5 million and can’t give you the $4.5 million?
P. Tonn: Currently the reach is 90 percent of schools in British Columbia. If the money doesn’t come through, we’ll have to meet with, again, the Ministries of Agriculture, Education and Health and talk about how we need to reduce the delivery of the program.
It’s based on the objectives and the priorities in the Ministry of Health and their school food programs, so we would also turn to their expertise. There’s some research that supports why it’s going to all schools.
S. Massey: My background is as a registered dietitian and a nutrition educator. It’s been shown, for decades, actually, in many countries in the world that the best way to reach our vulnerable children populations is to make a program universal.
For example, the school lunch program in the U.S. started out as a program only for the vulnerable children, and they found that the stigmatization that children experienced meant that those kids weren’t reached by the program. It became universal.
When we started this program here in B.C., we right away took as the foundational approach that we wanted it to be a universal program. We were basing our choice of reaching them with fruits and vegetables on the Canadian community health survey, which showed that the two most underconsumed food groups were vegetables and fruit and milk and alternatives.
The province, the Ministry of Health, chose to start with fruits and vegetables. That’s what we did for about, I don’t know, seven or eight years before we finally added the milk as the second.
We now have 2015 data from the Canadian community health survey that’s just starting to be analyzed by researchers, and the most recent data I saw showed a comparison for school children in 2004 with the school children during the school hours in 2015.
We have seen that there is improvements in both of those areas, but we still have a long road to hoe. This program is still very important to help improve the dietary intake of children.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much for all your work. A wonderful program. We really appreciate you coming in.
Next up we have IVF4BC — Nicole Nouch.
N. Nouch: I did email a PowerPoint presentation last night that I think you would have.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I’ll just check to see if we have it.
Oh, there it is.
IVF4BC
N. Nouch: My name is Nicole Nouch. I am the founder and patient advocate for IVF4BC.
One in six British Columbian families are affected by infertility, a serious medical condition that does have a high-cost, high-effective treatment that is out of reach for many British Columbians due to the issues of access and cost. Public funding of IVF treatment would empower British Columbians in all corners of the province to start and build families safely. It is a matter of giving couples and individuals, regardless of income or geography, the opportunity to receive safe and affordable family-building treatments, which will ultimately enhance equal access to life-changing treatment.
To put it into context for you, our unfunded model for IVF treatment in B.C. is resulting in limited access to treatment. Only a small percentage of British Columbians who require IVF have the funds to afford treatment.
This is supported by the fact that IVF in jurisdictions across the western and free world provide IVF services to their citizens at 1,500 to 2,200 IVF cycles per million population. Whereas in Canada, even with one form or another of funding in four of our provinces, we only provide 500 cycles per million.
It provides an emotional and financial burden to families. It’s a higher risk for health complications for women and children, and it creates anguish for families who cannot afford it.
Providing public funding would provide equal access and opportunity for all British Columbians to build a family, regardless of their income or geography. It would support B.C. families and help manage hospital costs and improve hospital utilization by eliminating some government-funded treatments that are less effective than IVF — for example, second or third procedures for endometriosis, which has a very low success rate compared to IVF treatment.
Infertility is a medical condition. It is recognized by the World Health Organization as denying people the ability to become parents and raise a family. Infertility is defined as a disease of the reproductive system, defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after 12 months of regular, unprotected sexual intercourse.
Half of British Columbian women have been affected by infertility, either personally or through a family member or a friend. It is important to note, however, that infertility can affect both the male and the female partner, and sometimes both.
Who is IVF4BC? We are made up of patient advocates having experienced infertility and financial hardship due to IVF treatment. We are disappointed by the lack of support for our medical condition and think B.C. can do better. As a result, on behalf of the one in six couples that have this medical condition, we are here to ask you to publicly fund treatment and have it available here in B.C.
By publicly funding IVF treatments in B.C., we can bridge the gap between our citizens, we can provide equal access and opportunity to British Columbians to build a family, regardless of income, and we can support B.C. families in growing our population and bringing more people to the workforce in the future. Families are B.C.’s foundation, and I think we can agree that strong families build strong communities, a thriving economy and a more secure future for the next generations.
You, as legislators and our current government, have committed to making life as easy and as affordable as possible for families in B.C. by placing a high priority on addressing the biggest challenges facing them today. It has been proven that those facing infertility are stressed and more depressed and are often less productive at work. Public funding of IVF will help those individuals overcome such challenging situations.
There are some stats on your PowerPoint and the submission about other jurisdictions and other places in the world that cover IVF fully. For the sake of time, I’m going to go through just the provinces that we have in our county.
Quebec has a sliding tax credit right now. They used to fund three full cycles, but there were some issues with that, so they went to a tax credit. Manitoba has a refundable tax credit. New Brunswick provides a $5,000 one-time grant. Ontario has now been running a program for almost two years where they provide one fully funded cycle and unlimited IUI treatments.
The cost of IVF in B.C. varies from clinic to clinic but usually lands between $7,500 and $10,000 per cycle. That does not include medications, which can cost $3,000 to $6,000 per cycle. On top of that, for people that live in the Interior or other places where they cannot access the clinics, they have to take time off from work and travel. That can be very stressful as well.
IVF4BC’s recommendation, along with other B.C. fertility specialists and doctors in our communities, is that we have…. For low-income families, we recommend offering a full-funded cycle. For families earning above a certain income threshold, we recommend a refundable tax credit. Essentially, the full-funded IVF cycle would be offered to British Columbians under a certain income threshold, to be determined based on government input, while a tax credit would be offered to those over the threshold.
I would just like to say, as well, that this model would offer public assistance to all British Columbians and offer direct coverage to those that don’t have the ability to fund the treatment up front. The tax credit would also offer support to those that can temporarily afford to dip into their savings.
IVF4BC is asking the B.C. government to adopt and fund a policy that results in an equitable IVF treatment process, creating a fair system that is accessible to all British Columbians regardless of their income level. Public funding of this treatment would provide quality, accessible care for British Columbians in all areas of our province.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Just a couple of clarifications. You said at the beginning that there was some…. It’s limited, you said. I’m just wondering: what are the criteria for getting access? You said there is limited access.
N. Nouch: Limited access, from the fact that people can’t afford it. There are five clinics in….
B. D’Eith (Chair): Ah, you’re saying there is no public….
N. Nouch: There’s no public funding whatsoever.
B. D’Eith (Chair): They’re limited because it’s not public, but they can pay. Okay, I got it. That’s why I was just clarifying.
Did you have a total amount? You’ve done some per-person or per-treatment things.
N. Nouch: Right now there are, on average, 1,500 cycles done per year in British Columbia. There are only five clinics. For example, in Ontario, there are 40. It’s a big difference. In our province, we have five, and they do about 1,500 cycles, at $10,000 per cycle. We aren’t asking for prescriptions or anything of that nature to be covered, just the actual cycle itself.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great.
Any questions at all?
N. Nouch: Before I let you go, in the PowerPoint presentation in the back there, there are a lot of stories and pictures we’ve provided for you — as well as of my little 15-month-old daughter.
We spent $35,000 to have our daughter. I just wanted you guys to maybe take a moment to go through those pictures and their stories that they’ve provided to us.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much.
Next up we have Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia — Scott Ellis.
Hello, Scott. How are you?
GUIDE OUTFITTERS
ASSOCIATION OF B.C.
S. Ellis: Good morning. Very good. It’s good to be in front of this standing committee again. I see some familiar faces.
Just a little bit as a refresher on the guide-outfitting industry and the Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia — who we are and, really, who we try to speak for. We have a proud heritage of outfitting in British Columbia. It came right behind the fur trade as people realized that we had a truly amazing place. Today, Destination B.C. talks about The Wild Within, and if you’ve ever seen those Wild Within photos, that’s the image we market. We basically market British Columbia to the world. We have a lot of proud things to offer.
The first slide here, of the pioneer outfitters, is from 1874. The Callbreath brothers are a First Nations family. They’re still in guide-outfitting today. The Guide Outfitters Association is pretty proud to have the Tahltan First Nation as a part of our organization. That’s in a big community called Telegraph Creek.
The reason, I think, that the province of British Columbia — and outfitting, specifically — has been successful is really because of government legislation. In 1913, government came in with licences for non-residents. They came in with rules for guides. In the ’60s, they developed dedicated guide territories. What that means is that you have a sense of ownership. You buy an asset, and within that area, you have the exclusive right to guide non-residents for big game.
What does that do? Why is that important? It’s important because it really creates a position of stewardship. You can’t move, and you’re concerned about if there are wildfires in your area, or you’re concerned about rainfall or flooding in your area. You’re concerned about exactly what’s going on — what kinds of resource activities happen. If they impact your wildlife, they impact your livelihood, and you don’t have the opportunity to move. We kind of think of ourselves as wildlife ranchers, but we can’t really control all the factors. Our ask today, which we’re going to talk about, is really about raising the awareness of the factors that affect wildlife. It’s really around their habitat and the environment.
The province of British Columbia is divided into 245 guide territories. The smallest one, in the Kootenays, is about 400 square kilometres, and the largest one is owned by the Nisga’a. It’s 26,000 square kilometres. Depending on the game and the abundance in the region, they range in size. They’re very, very important and a very, very successful business model. We appreciate the history there.
As you go through the slides…. I’m going to go quickly through it. The last presenter talked about a story, and I’m going to try to get to a story for you. About 4,500 clients come to British Columbia every year, contributing about $116 million. That’s just for big game hunting. For freshwater fishing and hunting nationally, it’s $10 billion. So I think it’s something that we really almost manage by accident, and I think a little bit more focus on wildlife and our environment will pay dividends to all British Columbians in the future.
GOABC has been around since 1966. We’re a non-profit organization, and we really represent small family businesses throughout rural British Columbia. Obviously, we advocate for a strong and stable guiding industry. I’ve heard many other advocates advocate for what they’re looking for, but really, without good environment and good, abundant game populations for the long term, there is no viability.
The state of our wildlife is really not as good as it could be. We’re seeing declines of 50 to 70 percent in moose in some areas, and it’s resulting in roadblocks from several First Nations. I think that if we took a little more attention to the land and what’s needed on the land, we’d get to a place where we could have abundant resource extraction and have a safe and good environment. Therefore, by default, you’d have strong wildlife populations as well.
We really encourage a more aggressive review of the professional reliance. We want to look at the free-to-grow legislation. We’re not happy with the way we spray glyphosates on our forests and kill the food for many of our wildlife species. I get phone call after phone call from people quite upset about what they see on the land, which should be very lush and very green and very vivacious. It’s brown, and it’s dead, and there’s no wildlife. There’s nothing on it, because it has been sprayed. I just think there’s a better way to get there.
The First Nations are frustrated. Quite a few in the guide-outfitting community are frustrated. If we put a value on wildlife rather than just make it a hindrance, if we think about how we can improve the habitat…. Stop spraying these things on our forests that are poisons. Really try to have a level playing field for all guiding businesses and all adventure tourism, regardless of whether you’re guiding for wildlife or not. A level playing field — I think we’ve started down that path with some of the land use planning that’s been promised.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much.
Tracy, go ahead.
T. Redies: Thanks, Scott, for your presentation. Can you speak a little bit more to the comment in terms of the professional reliance being broken in the forest industry? What are you getting at there?
S. Ellis: I’ve said that for a while. Number one, it’s a conflict of interest. Professional reliance, the review that’s been done…. They’re really tackling setting up an office and doing the first and second recommendations. Our issues with professional reliance are really around the forest — not necessarily the professionals themselves. It’s the legislation that is before them. They’re in a bit of a conflict position. We don’t think that’s right. We think that if there were to be real changes to FRPA…. I forget what recommendations are there in the report, but if there were changes made there…. I think that professional reliance, from what we’ve experienced, really hasn’t worked.
S. Furstenau: To follow up on that, I’m quite interested in that report, and I’ve done a bit of work on it. In terms of taking it further, do you have specific recommendations from the report that you have identified as essential for moving forward?
S. Ellis: FRPA, when it was brought in, was a minimum standard. Then I think it was in 2008 with the markets, everything went out the window for FRPA being a minimum standard. Now you’ve got forest stewardship plans that really are nice but have no meat. There’s no improvement. There’s nothing in them, right? They don’t communicate with other stakeholders on the land. They tell people what they’re going to do, and they meet the obligations of FRPA. Well, if that’s the case, FRPA is broken.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much, Scott. No other questions. We really appreciate your presentation.
Next up we have the Tourism Industry Association of British Columbia — Walt Judas.
Hello, Walt.
TOURISM INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION OF B.C.
W. Judas: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning on the need for formula funding for Destination British Columbia.
Many of you are aware of the Tourism Industry Association of B.C. We advocate on behalf of private sector tourism businesses as well as destination marketing organizations and sector associations like guide-outfitters, who you just met. Our vision is for tourism to be recognized as one of B.C.’s leading and sustainable industries.
You may be familiar with the movie Field of Dreams. There’s a line in that movie that’s often echoed by economic development officers around the world: “If you build it, they will come.” In tourism, we kind of take that one step further. We say: “If you build it and market it, they will come.”
The collective marketing efforts of Destination British Columbia, community destination marketing organizations, regional marketing organization sectors and individual businesses amount to well over $100 million invested annually. The return is substantial. Tourism is B.C.’s second-largest industry. In 2016, the industry generated $17 billion in revenue. It contributed $7.9 billion to provincial GDP and employed over 133,000 people. In spite of recent challenges with wildfires and flooding, B.C.’s visitor economy has enjoyed record results in many regions due to increasing demand for British Columbia’s tourism products and services. And yes, it’s because we do provide world-class experiences and enjoy a stellar reputation.
Make no mistake about it. The driving force is regular and long-term investments in marketing B.C. to the world under the leadership of Destination B.C. and its community and sector partners. Destination B.C. plays a critical role in maximizing long-term industry growth by providing a unifying and consistent brand and marketing strategy for the province, which in turn motivates travellers from around the world to visit and encourages residents to explore every region of B.C.
On the supply side, DBC also provides leadership for the expansion and strengthening of British Columbia’s tourism products and experiences. Importantly, the organization is committed to working with the minister to achieve the specific priorities outlined in the 2018-19 mandate letter, including but not limited to: champion tourism as a job creator, drive strategic alignment of marketing and data technologies across tourism organizations and businesses in all regions of B.C. to advance marketing capabilities and strengthen B.C.’s brand in the global marketplace, as well as foster alignment with the Indigenous tourism association of B.C. to build and implement a robust Indigenous tourism strategy.
The province of B.C. has ambitious goals to grow the visitor economy through its impending new tourism strategy. Therefore, destination marketing needs to be adequately resourced to support the achievement of these goals. It is vital that Destination B.C. is equipped with a success-based model and is able to keep up with inflation and competition.
Many governments like B.C. choose to finance their destination marketing through core appropriation. This is not acceptable to industry, because this appropriation will have marketing impact and effectiveness eroded over time due to inflation and other budgetary pressures. In the view of the tourism industry, formula funding needs to be protected in legislation, making it stable, reliable and predictable, and also allowing DBC to make long-term, multi-year commitments to marketing and destination development activities alongside the other destination marketing organizations.
TIABC believes the best option is an annual fixed percentage of the gross PST receipts generated through revenues by commercial accommodation providers. This option meets Destination British Columbia’s funding requirements, provides certainty and accountability for industry and allows government to effectively and efficiently budget annually.
With a new service plan in development as well as a new provincial tourism strategy to be introduced in the coming months, it is imperative that formula funding for Destination British Columbia finally be put in place as part of government’s 2019-2020 budget.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much.
M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation. You mentioned 133,000 people employed. Could you give us a bit more detail about the distribution of those jobs? Are they seasonal? Are they full-time, part-time, family-supporting, mainly women, mainly men? Do you have any more detail on those?
W. Judas: They are full-time-equivalent jobs. In fact, the tourism industry technically employs close to 300,000 people, but half of those service the tourism industry. They’re in businesses that welcome both residents and visitors.
Sure, there are seasonal jobs, and those are largely in the rural communities, with ski resorts and other resort properties. But many of those jobs, of course, are in the major centres: Metro Vancouver area, Whistler, Victoria, Kelowna — those places that generate a lot of tourism.
They do support families. There’s a misnomer, which we’ve been trying to eliminate from the industry, that it’s an industry of only low-paying, low-skilled jobs. In fact, there are many high-skilled jobs required in tourism that provide a living to people. So it’s something that we’re trying to champion as well — encouraging more people to get into the industry. We are short tens of thousands of individuals in tourism now, from a labour perspective.
P. Milobar: Just to get an idea, when you say a percentage of the PST revenues…. A lot of times when we talk tourism marketing, it’s always around hotels and a hotel stay. But, obviously, there are precious few hotels in British Columbia that people holiday specifically to go to that hotel. They’re usually holidaying to go to a region to enjoy all different parts of the tourism experience.
Are you saying that…? Is your suggestion that instead of the 8 percent that’s charged on a hotel room right now, and the PST for everything else is 7 percent, that 1 percent be dedicated to Destination B.C.? Or are you saying that there should be a percentage of the PST collected by ski hills, golf courses and the more tourism-related industries and that’s where that percentage calculation comes from?
W. Judas: The previous model was based on hotels because, really, 92 percent of people that stay in hotels are visitors. They’re actual tourists. The other industries or sectors connected to tourism are much harder to measure. For example, 77 percent of people that go to restaurants are locals. So what we’re looking at is a consumer-tourist model to help pay for tourism marketing.
Hotels are the best measure. It was a previous model that was in place, initially at 1.5 percent. Then it went up to 3 percent. It’s the easiest one to track and measure. You can certainly use other industries, but you have no idea, really, what percentage of their business is generated by the visitor economy.
It exists now, to a degree, by ministerial directive. There’s a percentage, a 1 percent increase that Destination B.C. can achieve to their budget by four PST measures, but they’re much harder for the tourism industry to control — restaurants, bars, etc. Hence the reason for the focus on the accommodation community.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Can you give us an example of…? If there was more funding into Destination B.C., what sorts of things they might do to improve or enhance the industry?
W. Judas: Very much, now, there’s a focus on destination development, and that has been given to the regions. There are regional destination development plans that have been developed all over the province and are now going through the process of implementation. Destination B.C. can support those plans, particularly allocations to regional marketing organizations.
There are new markets to be explored and new partnerships to develop. Right now the budget is good. However, we are seeing, increasingly, budgets being increased by other jurisdictions that we compete directly against, and we need to remain active in those key markets. Costs are going up every year, and we have to account for that, particularly where there’s a discrepancy in the Canadian dollar against other currencies. We need to be able to continue to invest the same amount or a similar amount, in spite of those financial pressures against our dollar.
There are many more opportunities to be had, for sure.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Walt. We appreciate the presentation.
W. Judas: My pleasure. Thank you.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the New Car Dealers Association of British Columbia — Blair Qualey.
Hi, Blair. Good to see you.
NEW CAR DEALERS ASSOCIATION OF B.C.
B. Qualey: Good morning. It’s terrific to be out in Mission amongst some terrific new car dealers out this way.
I represent B.C.’s new car dealers, about 392 of them that do business in 55 communities around the province. This small group of mostly small businesses generates $16 billion in economic activity in the province every year; contributes about $2.9 billion net GDP directly into the economy; and employs, directly and indirectly, some 30,000 people in high-paying, full-time, family-supporting positions. In the package which you have before you, you’ll see some examples of dealer logos that may be familiar from your communities.
Further, 1.1 in 7 jobs in Canada are tied to the auto sector. Most folks in British Columbia wouldn’t think that the auto sector is as big and important to the economy here as it is. Last year we sold yet another record number of vehicles into the province, over 200,000. Nineteen percent of total retail sales in British Columbia are made up by the sale of new cars by our members, and $675 million of total tax revenue for all three levels of government comes from our members.
I’m going to talk about three main areas very quickly: the economy and taxation issues, the whole conversation around electric vehicles and, finally, jobs and labour attraction.
Our first industry challenge I want to mention to you today relates to the tax situation in the province at the moment, provincial taxes. There’s grave concern on the part of our members of a growing layering of taxes. Individual ones on their own might not be too bad, but as you layer them together, it becomes quite onerous.
Speaking to this committee, I’ve in the past talked about the so-called luxury tax on vehicles, which begins at $55,000. That threshold has not been raised over the years to take into account that everything has gone up in value. Regrettably now, we have a number of work trucks, people’s trucks, particularly in northern B.C. and around the province, that capture the luxury tax. I don’t think the intent was that these things would be seen as a luxury item for people.
The recent addition of a luxury surtax in the province on high-end vehicles over $125,000…. In talking to our members, a number of the large ones who sell those high-end luxury vehicles…. I understand that this has resulted in a 33 percent decrease in PST collected for the government by those folks. What’s happening is either their customers are buying them and registering them in other jurisdictions, or they are going to other jurisdictions to purchase these vehicles. I don’t think, when government introduced the tax, they actually expected to bring in less PST, but that’s exactly what’s happening as a result of that.
We would ask again that, broadly, in the luxury tax, the threshold be raised to more of what people would consider a luxury level. Eliminate it from pickup trucks and work trucks immediately. Perhaps look to expand the luxury tax to actual luxury items like boats and RVs, jewelry and other things like that. In your package, you’ll see an example of a boat that’s priced at $88,000 that does not capture the luxury tax, whereas a Ram 2500 pickup truck at $60,000 gets the luxury tax. It doesn’t quite make sense.
On to the next topic of the electrification of British Columbia. We’ve got a little bit of a show and tell here for you, which we’ll show you in just a second. As you’ll see, there’s a number of balloons there representing the GHGs of British Columbia. Many people don’t understand what percentage of those GHGs are made up by light-duty vehicles — vehicles that people drive, cars and pickup trucks.
You see a whole bunch of black ones, and then there are three white ones. The three white ones represent about 16 percent — it should be about 14 percent — of the overall GHGs of the province. That’s the area in which we can help and have been working very closely with government for many years to try and achieve. Hopefully, over time we’ll burst one or two of those balloons to help deal with the overall GHG targets of the province.
The point is that many people think that cars are this huge part of the GHG problem in this province, when in fact…. Transportation is 30 to 40 percent, depending on who you talk to, but light-duty vehicles is a smaller portion of about 14 percent, which we can help with.
Just quickly, British Columbia has been working very hard in cooperation with, of course, our dealer members around the province to help people find their way into electric vehicles. The government has, for many years, very smartly had an incentive, as new technology is more expensive. We’re looking forward to the continuation of those incentives to help people put their toe in the water in electric vehicles.
EV adoption in British Columbia is 3.7 percent per capita, which is the highest rate in Canada and, I’d likely say, in North America…. We haven’t beat out California; that’s at 6.1 percent. Many folks hold California up as a shining example.
British Columbia is doing better, and we haven’t had to put in a lot of the onerous and expensive regulations, such as vehicle mandates, etc., that they have. We’ve achieved better with carrots, not sticks.
There are statistics here around how many vehicles have been sold through the program. I won’t get into it all at the moment. We’ll let you digest that over time. There are a number of statistics here. We did a survey around electric vehicles, and clearly, electric vehicles are in the minds of people more and more every year.
The work that the dealers have done, the work that the government has done, the association and others, to promote this opportunity has been very successful. We’re very grateful that government recently added another $10 million to the clean energy vehicle program. It was quickly running out of gas, as it were — a mixed metaphor. But clearly, British Columbians are taking this very seriously and looking forward to the coming years.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Blair, we’re at about 7½ minutes now.
B. Qualey: Great. I’m just going to finish up here.
The clean energy vehicle program is very important to the success of getting people into their electric vehicles, and we would ask that the government continue to support not only that program but also the electric vehicle charging infrastructure and incentives for that.
Finally, we wanted to just touch on careers and labour attraction in our industry. Like most sectors of the province, we have a grey tsunami rolling through. The average age of a service technician in this province in automotive is 55 years old. We have a crisis of finding people and getting them into these jobs.
It’s terrific to have big projects, like LNG and so on, that will help grow this province, but if we can’t fix the cars and trucks that people are driving, we have a problem. I strongly encourage government to make further investments in job and apprenticeship training in automotive around British Columbia.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much, Blair.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation. Quickly, one-tonne trucks do not have tax on them?
B. Qualey: That’s correct. What happens is many people may be looking at a smaller pickup truck, but because a bigger….
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): They step up.
B. Qualey: They step up, which increases GHGs, gas consumption, weight on the roads and so on.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): So remove it from work trucks, but put it on other luxury items. That’s what you’re…?
B. Qualey: Well, if we’re trying to tax luxury items, then let’s do that. Let’s not just pick on automotive.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Okay. The last question. Lease or purchase — what’s the split these days on vehicle sales?
B. Qualey: Lease is growing considerably for folks.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Do you have a number?
B. Qualey: I don’t have an exact percentage, but anecdotally, I’ve heard it’s almost half and half in some circumstances. It’s all about monthly payments for most consumers, and you can get a lower monthly payment with a lease more often than not.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): That’s a warning flag on the field.
M. Dean: Do you anticipate any implications or benefits from the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement?
B. Qualey: Well, the best news is there was an agreement, and the protection’s, apparently, from tariffs from the United States. This was a huge black cloud over our industry on both sides of the border. Everybody was chewing their fingers to the bone worrying about that. So this was terrific news, the day before getting the terrific LNG news. It’s something that we’re feeling much better about.
Automotive. The tentacles of this sector extend so far and wide. The downstreet implications of those big tariffs…. I mean, in the United States, they estimated 197,000 people would lose their jobs if that 25 percent tariff came in. You take the equivalent in Canada, and it’s a lot of jobs that would have been impacted. So we’re very pleased. It was terrific, good news.
T. Redies: Thanks, Blair, for your presentation. In your presentation, you mentioned that, I think, over 40 percent of people are worried about buying an electric car because of the fear of being stranded. What are your thoughts around…? How does government help increase the number of charging stations available to electric vehicle owners?
B. Qualey: It’s twofold. It’s an education opportunity — helping people understand exactly how far they drive and what the range of their vehicle is. The average commute in the Lower Mainland is about 30 kilometres. Most people think they drive way farther than they do. The key is that where people live, work and play, they need to know that there’s a place to charge the vehicle.
Fortunately, battery size is growing. Over time, in the next few years, we’ll see much more growth in range. However, everybody you talk to and every time you survey people, it’s all about range anxiety. “Am I going to get trapped out on the freeway with my kids and the dog and whatever else?” It’s not like you can run and get a gas can and fill it up, right? You have to get towed somewhere. It’s a scary experience for people.
The education is important to help them understand how it works but also having infrastructure available and incentives to allow people to put infrastructure into their homes. Now many municipalities are prewiring multi-unit residence buildings to allow people to charge at home. All of those kinds of things are very helpful to make sure that people feel comfortable.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thanks, Blair. We’re over time, but thank you very much for your presentation.
Next up we have the Mission Hospice Society — Angel Elias.
Hi, Angel. How are you?
A. Elias: Good. How are you?
B. D’Eith (Chair): Excellent.
Okay. Go right ahead, Angel.
MISSION HOSPICE SOCIETY
A. Elias: Thank you for having me. My name is Angel Elias. I’m the executive director of the Mission Hospice Society, but most importantly, I’m a resident of Mission. I’m a mother of two teenaged kids in our school system. Of course, I have a husband at home, so I guess I’m a mother of three.
I’m here today to speak with you about two different issues that require funding and that need to be advocated for within our community. My first area of interest, which I’d like to bring to you attention, of course, is more funding to help support our end-of-life-care bereavement programs.
As you know, there are 11 hospice societies within the Fraser Health region. We all offer similar programs and support services within our communities. We receive a small contract amount for our volunteer palliative services from Fraser Health. However, we receive no funding for our bereavement support services. As we enter into an era of high psychosocial issues such as mental health and addiction, more and more grief is at our doorsteps, and people need help.
When someone dies, few of us are wired to just get over it. Research shows that, in fact, grief reduces cognitive abilities in a measurable way. Due to this increase of bereavement services, we have hired a full-time program coordinator to help meet the demands and needs in our community. Her focus is children and youth bereavement. Plus I have a specialized bereavement coordinator for adults’ grief, which is a 30-hours-a-week position.
Sustaining this is not easy as a non-profit, because that means I need to fundraise more to cover this expense. However, the demand is here. I’m trying to do my best to keep up with the demand, but I could use some help and so can other hospice societies across the Fraser Health region — in fact, across B.C., for that matter.
It’s important to note here that Mission Hospice Society has the second-lowest operating budget within the Fraser Health region, but I offer just as many, if not more, bereavement services than the hospice that has triple my budget, so I’m pretty happy to report that.
At this point, I was supposed to show you two, two-minute videos, but unfortunately, due to time constraints, I’m not able to do that. I have emailed those videos, and I do ask that you take the time to, please, look at those videos, because they’re very impactful and powerful in regards to the bereavement services that we support. It’s very similar with most hospice societies as well.
From the video, you’ll see our services are life-changing and needed and that we need more help. We need funding for our bereavement services. Fundraising is harder and harder ever year. Every non-profit has their hand out. Everybody that knows me in this community…. Bob and Simon can speak to this. I pull every penny out of this community, and it’s just not enough.
Mission has grown in the past two years at a rate that has stretched our infrastructure and capacity in our schools and hospitals, and services in general. We are a community with a high poverty rate for many reasons. One is that we have two prisons here, so we have a lot of single moms that have moved here to be close to their loved one that is incarcerated.
Now, with Mission’s growth issues and homelessness, etc., which are nothing new — and I’m sure all communities are seeing the same — I’m here to ask you today to help Mission so we can grow into a compassionate community with services to provide quality, compassionate care to all.
How can we do this? Well, we can ensure that I have some extra funding to provide quality bereavement services, actually, in all of our communities. So, like the contract that we have with Fraser Health for our palliative services, it would be really nice to be on contract with them for our bereavement services, because without those bereavement services, the cycle of social issues that would happen in each community would be devastating.
Right now I have a three-week waiting list for our bereavement services and for an intake, which, in my mind, is unacceptable. With an increase in funding to support those services, I can alleviate pressure on mental health, home health, doctors and in our school systems.
Then, of course, because I’m here, I have to advocate for this. I have two children that are in the high schools, and we have one high school in this community. We need another high school for our growing community, as we currently only have one, which brings many social issues and other issues that fall onto our doorsteps at the Mission Hospice Society. Currently, we’re in the middle schools and high schools, providing grief support to the many children who are suffering from mental health issues and grief themselves.
All of our schools are at max capacity. I was just told in a meeting that I attended at Mission Secondary that in two years, when my daughter graduates, our high school will be beyond capacity, and there’ll be not enough room for all the children, which means not enough teachers nor classrooms. Grade 12 is hard enough as it is, and now the social issues around being so full will also cause so much anxiety in our kids. And the drug use and the attempted suicide that we hear about now will be insane by then. The increase to the students in one school is just…. We need to do something. You guys need to give some funding into this community.
Mission is becoming one of the most sought-out cities to move to, so it’s time our provincial government steps in and helps our community with this growth — a new high school to meet the needs and demands of our students so they can have a quality education, and assisting hospice societies with bereavement funding so we can continue to support the ever-growing needs.
I thank you for your time. Does anybody have any questions?
B. D’Eith (Chair): I just have a quick clarification, Angel. You say that you need funding. Do you have a specific amount? Is it more tying into existing services, or is it a combination?
A. Elias: For the bereavement side, I mean, right now we receive $49,000 for our palliative services. To me, if I was to receive the same amount to that…. That rate there covers my bereavement coordinator and then some, and I could do so much with that. I know other hospice societies could too. I’m not asking for a lot of money. I’m just starting to ask to recognize that the bereavement services need to be funded. They need to be recognized. They need to be in each community, and we need help. Securing that wage — so that when I’m fundraising, I’m just fundraising for some program costs — helps alleviate some of those stressors so that we’re able to help.
All the patients that are coming through mental health and addictions are all coming to our doorsteps because they’re falling through the cracks. Everybody is suffering from grief. A loss has happened in everybody’s life. Everybody has lost somebody. People die.
Now we’ve got new grief on our doorstep, with medical assistance in dying. To clarify, we support this. It’s not that this is new grief; it’s just a different type of grief that we are now having to assist with and support.
Even with the child and youth…. You know, six years ago when I started this position, I didn’t have a child and youth coordinator for grief. Now I could have two coordinators for grief. I have every counsellor in this school contacting us at the beginning of the year, asking what help we can provide for our students, because there are so many lost moms and dads from fentanyl overdoses, car accidents, cancer. It’s an everyday thing now. There are so many losses, and there’s so much grief that it’s needed to help these kids, and adults, get through day to day so that they’re able to function.
The focus was always palliative services. “We have to help palliative.” The focus is still there, but we need to have some focus on bereavement services. I’m not the only hospice society that’s faced with this, and I am here representing all hospice societies within the Fraser Health region. I just think that it’s time to work with Fraser Health and work with us, as a whole, to be able to see what we can do to support.
With the bereavement support, we are alleviating stress off of mental health, off of doctors, home health. It’s helping.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, thanks.
M. Dean: Just on the high school matter, I wanted to check that your school district is liaising with the ministry about that.
A. Elias: Well, I would sure hope so. I know that our principal there is amazing, and I know that he, of course, is having some conversations. Our school was built — don’t quote me on this — I think in the ’40s, ’50s. It’s old; it’s horrible. We need a new school, and I know that they just started to put some stuff on the radar. But he’s got 1,500 kids to worry about right now. He’s trying to do as best he can with advocating, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to kind of just throw that in there, because it’s really needed. Our schools need some help here. We’re growing at a massive rate. So yeah, we need help.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much, Angel. We really appreciate it, and of course, we appreciate everything you do in our community. Thanks.
Next up we have the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C. — Sharon Gregson.
Hi Sharon. Where’s the LEGO? I heard you had LEGO. This is awesome — lots of good stuff today, apples and balloons and LEGO, pens.
S. Gregson: It’s all about keeping you interested.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I know. It’s fantastic.
COALITION OF CHILD CARE
ADVOCATES OF
B.C.
S. Gregson: Before my time starts, I just want to acknowledge that, I think, for the first time in my many years of presenting to this committee, I see a majority of women. What a great thing that is to see. So thank you very much, and thank you to all of you for leaving Victoria and your home constituencies and travelling around the province for this very important process. I think those of us who present to you really appreciate your time, so thank you.
I am here from the Coalition of Child Care Advocates, talking to you about how to further improve child care in British Columbia. You have before you a one-pager, which is just a summary of the recommendations. The full costed presentation will reach you before the deadline.
In Budget 2018, in February of this year, government took bold, initial steps to address the child care chaos across our province. With a funding commitment of $1 billion over three years, complemented by new federal funding of $153 million, government has already lowered parent fees. There are the families of 50,000 children in British Columbia who now are paying lower fees — the first time in a generation child care fees have gone down and not up. We’re seeing raised educator wages and enhanced professional development, and applications for 24,000 new licensed child care spaces are coming in.
We congratulate the B.C. government for having listened to the needs of families and the evidence of economists by starting to build the quality, affordable child care system that will benefit British Columbians into the future.
Our recommendations for Budget 2019 are to build on that solid foundation already established and to nuance government’s child care B.C. plan to ensure that the implementation of quality universal child care is carried out with maximum effectiveness and public accountability. There are five key recommendations for you today.
On the affordability front, to ensure that child care becomes affordable for all, we recommend that government reallocate funding within the affordability envelope to expand access to the fee reduction initiative, rather than the affordable child care benefit. The FRI is an effective and popular policy, as the vast majority of eligible child care providers are now committed to utilizing new public funds to lower parent fees for all families and limit overall fee increases.
While the affordable child care benefit can complement the FRI by ensuring that low-income families pay no parent fees, evidence from other jurisdictions is clear and shows that substantial reliance on a subsidy approach, like the affordable child care benefit, will not achieve affordable child care.
Specifically, we recommend the government reallocate the funding plan for the expansion of the affordable child care benefit in the next two years: to invite school-age and preschool programs to participate in the FRI for the first time; to increase the fee reduction initiative for families of three- to five-year-olds in licensed programs; and to ensure that all families earning less than $45,000 annually pay no child care fees in licensed spaces.
On the access front. It was interesting to hear the presentations before me that talked about the grey tsunami and the labour shortages happening. Well, access to child care will help with that labour shortage.
To ensure public funding for new child care spaces creates publicly owned assets with a sustained commitment to child care, we recommend that government shift away from its current practice of providing reactive capital grants to third parties, often to purchase and build privately owned facilities. Rather, we recommend government transfer the balance of the existing grant funding in the current budget, currently in the operating budget, to start the development of a comprehensive provincial child care capital budget, just as government develops capital budgets for schools.
I ask members of the committee to imagine that if we relied on reactive capital grants to fund schools — expecting groups of parents or teachers to identify and justify the need, find the location, develop and oversee the construction process and come up with some of the required funding themselves for new schools — we would find that unacceptable. The same should apply for child care.
Given the urgent need for and government’s commitment to promptly increase the number of licensed child care spaces, we also recommend that government initiate the bulk purchase of quality modular child care facilities which can be quickly located on public grounds across the province. This action can be undertaken alongside the planning required locally and provincially to develop a comprehensive capital budget for all and full implementation of universal child care.
On the quality front. To more substantially address the current recruitment and retention crisis of early childhood educators, which is essential to ensuring quality child care, we recommend an additional wage lift of $1 an hour, effective April 1, 2019, in addition to the $1 an hour already committed in the 2018-19 fiscal year and ’20-21 fiscal year. The increase in operating costs associated with this recommendation can be offset by the reduction in operating costs associated with establishing a capital budget for child care spaces, as I’ve previously described.
The fourth recommendation is on infrastructure. To align government’s commitment to universal child care with B.C.’s existing system of universal public K to 12, we recommend that government initiate the transfer of the child care branch out of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, where it sits now, and into the Ministry of Education, in fiscal ’19-20. This approach — moving child care into the Ministry of Education — is consistent with the evidence and the majority of Canadian provinces and territories and is incorporated into the $10-a-day child care plan. B.C. is actually a laggard not to have moved child care into the Ministry of Education already.
The fifth recommendation. To ensure that the number of families that have access to quality, affordable licensed child care continues to grow and the projected social and economic benefits are realized, we recommend an increase in the operating funding for the ’21-22 fiscal year of $200 million.
This recommendation is consistent with the implementation modelling carried out for the $10-a-day plan by several economists, which projects full implementation of a quality, affordable, universally available child care system within eight to ten years in British Columbia.
That is a snapshot of the five recommendations. I’m sure you all stayed with me during that, so I’m happy to take questions.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Any questions?
That was very thorough. Thank you very much. We very much appreciate your presentation.
A short recess.
The committee recessed from 10:45 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.
[B. D’Eith in the chair.]
B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re back with the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. If I could please call Canada West Ski Areas Association — Christopher Nicolson.
CANADA WEST SKI AREAS ASSOCIATION
C. Nicolson: My name is Christopher Nicolson, with Canada West Ski Areas. I live in Heffley Creek, in between Kamloops and Barriere. I’ll reference skiing, but actually my presentation has a little bit more of a lens on rural B.C. as it pertains to wildfire mitigation.
Quickly, very much with the ski industry and sector, I just wanted to touch on a couple of things for context. It’s a big driver — 15,000 employees around the province. There are two levels to the ski industry. One, which is often known, is the economic driver. Often you’ll see pictures of that in the news and so forth. What’s lesser known is that of the 37 ski areas around British Columbia, most of them are community areas. They’re akin to skating rinks and sports centres within the province. A lot of families and a lot of volunteer time — they really are a big part of the social fabric of rural B.C. That’s a big part of it.
My message here, and presentation, is more to touch on the wildfire vulnerability within the province. The current situation is that most ski areas exist on Crown land. Within the province, the Crown has got a big vested interest in this. There are billions in fixed assets within these properties. Right now there’s a channel, and continues to be — something called the Forest Enhancement Society, which is a channel that funding for these rural areas can tap into, next point, for the backlog of fuel buildup within the province.
Lori Daniels, who’s a prof out of UBC, estimates that in numeric numbers, about $3.5 billion of effort is out there lying around the forests. This is just fuel ready to go. I don’t think I have to elaborate on that.
The Abbott and Chapman recommendation. Definitely, one of their recommendations, of the multiple pages, was to establish a predictable and stable revenue stream or funding for the management of these areas.
The wildfire mitigation programs. As you’re well aware, the Premier announced $50 million, which is spread over three years, on top of the programs that already exist. UBCM administers what was SWPI, which is now the community resiliency initiative. This is the key distinction here. The CRI is geared around communities; rural B.C. isn’t in communities. Of ski areas, as an example, there are only two that are in municipalities. There’s a lot of British Columbia that resides outside these areas.
The Forest Enhancement Society of B.C. was established in 2016. It has been a big part, one of the two — SWPI being the other — key deliverables for management. Over the last two years, they’ve allocated about $25 million to $30 million per year for different kinds of preventative techniques, particularly around fuel management. Many of these also involve First Nations — perhaps not surprising, given the geographic location.
My ask is, looking at the coming years, the $50 million allocation, which is designed on two fronts. One is to catch up on the backlog of the fuel within the forests, not just in raw land but around communities. This will be invested into three particular areas: the risk mapping; the planning and, particularly, the treatment for removing these fuels; and reducing the vulnerability of areas.
The administration of the recommendation is through the Forest Enhancement Society of B.C. This is in addition to CRI and the programs that are funded through there, but the Forest Enhancement Society of B.C. has specialized expertise with Crown land, rural jurisdictions and a proven track record with First Nations.
That’s the ask on behalf of rural B.C.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much, Christopher. We appreciate that.
Any questions at all?
P. Milobar: Do you see, given that a lot of these…? I mean, they would still fall within a regional district, say, but obviously not within a municipality. But a lot are run by volunteer groups — a lot of these ski hills. So you would see that the ask would have to ensure that volunteer groups would have access. A lot of times grants say: “Well, if you’re not a government, you don’t get it. If you’re not a regional district, you don’t get it.” So you see that the volunteer group that’s managing that Crown area for that ski operation should have some access to these funds as well?
C. Nicolson: I’d suggest it’s a combination of both. You’ve seen in some areas where they’re outside a municipality that the regional district…. It’s complex. There are a lot of different factors in a regional district.
What Forest Enhancement Society is made up of is primarily those with forestry experience. I shouldn’t say a majority, but there’s a strong forestry lens as well as…. Being able to parlay that with, in the case of ski areas…. This is far beyond just ski; ski’s just one sector. In the case of that, a volunteer group, a non-profit society partnered with local First Nations….
Between the new community resilience initiative program and Forest Enhancement, there are linkages that may work in some scenarios. Each of the applications through FES is sort of customized. There’s a template, but there are individuals. So it may well work where a non-profit society, presumably, would be working with others in the area.
Again, perhaps just to emphasize, this is not just ski; ski is just one of many stakeholders in rural B.C. that would look at FES and then apply through. But many of the other different operators and sectors would be part of that.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much, Christopher, for your presentation. When we were up north, we did hear similar issues, especially around the buildup of fuel and, also, habitat issues. There’s a whole bunch of very complex but important issues.
Next up we have the Retail Council of Canada. That is Greg Wilson and Avery Bruenjes.
Welcome.
RETAIL COUNCIL OF CANADA
A. Bruenjes: Good morning, hon. Members of the Finance Committee. My name is Avery Bruenjes. I’m a policy analyst with the Retail Council of Canada, working from our Vancouver office. With me today is Greg Wilson, our director of government relations, B.C., for the Retail Council of Canada. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this committee on some of the issues of current importance to B.C. retailers.
The retail industry is both Canada and British Columbia’s largest private sector employer. Retail stores alone employ 285,000 British Columbians, and our industry also has a significant impact on jobs in warehousing, transportation, IT, real estate and other industries. Every retail job creates four supporting jobs in these sectors.
B.C.’s retail industry is directly impacted by many of the concerns shared by other sectors, such as the lack of affordable housing, out-of-date transportation infrastructure and an ever-changing political relationship with the United States, among other trading partners.
This government has committed to making life more affordable for all British Columbians by cutting MSP premiums by 50 percent as of January 2018 and eliminating them by 2020, moving to an employer-funded health tax. However, RCC is disheartened to point out that, in this process, this government will in effect be double-taxing the most progressive employers: those who currently pay for their employees’ MSP premiums. For 13 months beginning on January 1, 2019, these employers will be responsible for paying both MSP premiums and the employer health tax, effectively paying twice for the same service.
The payroll tax penalizes those who employ British Columbians over those who sell goods into B.C. from other jurisdictions. RCC urges government to drop the double-taxing of B.C.’s most progressive employers, jeopardizing the growth and employment of British Columbia retailers.
British Columbia continues to benefit from strong retail sales. In recent years, government revenues have also benefited from the increased sales tax that comes with these sales.
However, RCC is compelled to note that two recent federal changes will undoubtedly have an impact on consumer spending and, thus, the retail industry. The first change is, of course, the replacement of NAFTA. While we are relieved that the agreement has avoided many of the worst possible outcomes, the federal government has given foreign retailers an undeniable advantage by raising the duty-free limit for postal and courier shipments from $20 to $150. This will impact not only retailers based in British Columbia but will also impact the province by way of sales tax revenues and eco-fees.
The second change is that the Bank of Canada has been very strongly hinting that it plans to raise interest rates in the very near future. Consumer spending will inevitably fall as Canadians are compelled to tighten their financial belts.
With the duty-free and sales tax limits so recently increased, combined with the fact that foreign retailers already compete on an unlevel playing field with British Columbian retailers — by failing to pay the eco-fees that are now mandated on many consumer products sold in B.C. — it is highly probable that buying from the United States will be more appealing to consumers than ever before, to the detriment of British Columbia’s retail employers.
Retail sales have long been very strong in British Columbia in particular, within Canada, and the industry has grown by 1.2 percent in 2018. This is, however, a lower growth rate than in previous years, signifying a slowdown. It is also important to note that retail sales in Vancouver, by far the largest market in the province, have decreased in 2018 by 2.2 percent. This decrease is at least in part reflective of the continued high cost of living in the Lower Mainland.
Cognizant of the fact that this government has a policy directive to raise the minimum wage to $15, RCC would like to point out that the minimum wage change alone will increase labour costs in British Columbia by about 2 percent each year for four years. This is on top of the labour costs that will already be raised on account of inflation and other factors. At the same time, the employer health tax and other changes are also increasing labour costs.
Government needs to be very careful to not allow these significant rises in labour costs to negatively impact employment. RCC urges this committee to make access to affordable housing and transportation their priority in its budget recommendations, for the benefit of all British Columbians, and asks that committee members be mindful of the impacts to employment that are resulting from cost increases placed on business by government.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I have a quick question, just in regards to on-line sales and their impact on retail, generally. How are you finding the impact of on-line — something like Amazon or something like that — on retail, when you’re talking about some of the figures that you’re…?
G. Wilson: I’d say that one of the things to be mindful of is that Amazon doesn’t pay most eco-fees. That means that in the end, British Columbians are paying for the management of those products at their end of life. Amazon is actually registered now, I think, for a third of the programs; but they’re not registered for two-thirds of the programs, and most of the other American foreign-based on-line sellers aren’t registered. So those costs inevitably fall onto local governments and onto the environmental programs.
The second thing is that this is, depending on your sector, an area that consumes between 10 percent and 50 percent of the retail market. It’s more impactful to certain types of sellers. For example, it’s more impactful to jobs in fashion retailers and bookstores than it is to some home improvement sectors, where you have larger items.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah, that makes sense. Fantastic.
Questions?
Well, thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate you coming in.
Next up we have Health Sciences Association of British Columbia — Val Avery and Andy Longhurst.
Just a reminder that we’re trying to keep the initial comments, if we can, to five minutes so we have time for questions. That would be great. Go ahead.
HEALTH SCIENCES ASSOCIATION OF B.C.
V. Avery: Thank you, Chair D’Eith and members of the committee, for the opportunity to present to you today. My name is Val Avery. I’m president of the Health Sciences Association of B.C., commonly known as HSA. I’m here with Andy Longhurst, who is our researcher and policy analyst.
HSA is a union that represents more than 18,000 health science and social service professionals in over 60 disciplines, who deliver specialized services to some 250 hospitals, residential care homes, child development centres, community health and social service agencies. HSA is also the leading union in the child development sector, representing almost 1,000 members at more than 15 agencies across the province.
Today’s successful delivery of care depends on a multidisciplinary team approach involving many professionals working together. Patients who are dealing with a chronic disease, an acute illness or a serious injury may receive care from several different health science professionals in their journey to recovery and rehabilitation.
You can find all of our recommendations in our written submission, but today I’m going to focus on one issue that all other improvements to public health care and social services depend upon. The issue is the urgency of health human resources planning to address shortages and recruitment and retention challenges facing health science professionals. This is section 1 in our written submission.
Based on the Ministry of Health’s provincial health workforce strategy, the majority of current and future priority professions that have labour market challenges that require provincial attention and monitoring are health science professions. If you turn to appendix B, which is the last page of our submission, you’ll see that health science professions highlighted in yellow make up the majority of Ministry of Health–designated priority professions.
The lack of health human resources planning in our province negatively affects timely access to medically necessary patient care. For example, a persistent shortage of stenographers in the public system can cause delays in patients receiving a diagnosis beyond what is clinically recommended. A greater focus on workforce planning and development would seek to identify the reasons for these challenges and develop proactive solutions to these problems rather than the current orientation, which can be described as ad hoc and crisis driven.
HSA is encouraged that the Ministry of Health acknowledges these challenges and is working to address them. In early 2018, the Ministry of Health released a high-level provincial health human resources strategy to guide future action. In addition, thanks to a Ministry of Health contribution, a $3 million professional development fund was established this year for health science professionals.
However, the lack of staffing and expertise within the Ministry of Health to focus on health science professionals will remain a limiting factor in making progress in this complex area where different disciplines may have a variety of distinct reasons for recruitment and retention challenges. This requires focused attention on the distinct challenges facing the over 60 different health science disciplines.
The provincial government’s promising and ambitious new health care directions will require health human resources planning for health science professionals and should not be limited to one or two professionals, such as nursing and medicine, where the greatest focus remains.
We believe that a health science professions policy secretariat similar to the existing nursing policy secretariat within the Ministry of Health is necessary to make concrete progress on workforce challenges facing health science professionals, which are the second-largest health professional group, with the greatest number of distinct disciplines.
The secretariat would ensure focused and ongoing attention at a senior Ministry of Health level on policy and practice issues. Unlike physicians and nurses, health science professionals do not have specific representation or voice at senior-level policy and decision-making tables at the Ministry of Health or in the health authorities. A health science professions policy secretariat would modernize B.C.’s approach to health workforce planning and align B.C. with emerging best practice internationally.
Senior level policy secretariats for the health science professions have been established in Australia, England and Scotland. Therefore, we respectfully make the following two recommendations to the committee: the first being to establish a health science professions policy secretariat to support and develop health science professionals who face some of the greatest workforce challenges.
Second, to increase Ministry of Advanced Education funding to support the expansion of additional training capacity for current priority health science professions that are identified by the Ministry of Health in its 2018 B.C. provincial health workforce strategy, including public practice physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech language pathology, stenography, MRI technologists and perfusionists.
I’d like to thank the committee for their important work and for considering our recommendations. We’re happy to take any questions you might have.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much.
Questions from the committee?
In your presentation, you got to about No. 4 or 5. I thought there was a last one. Maybe I was just missing there.
In other words, did you want to elaborate on the health care capital funding a little bit more so that I can get my head around what the needs are?
V. Avery: Okay. I’ll let Andy address that for you.
A. Longhurst: Sure. We’ve touched on just one of the main thematic recommendations. Certainly, on health sector capital funding, it has maintained a 5.5 percent annual increase, but from year to year, it’s varied considerably.
Certainly, with our aging infrastructure in the province, there’s a greater and greater need to ensure that we’re proactively maintaining existing health sector capital infrastructure and also having the resources available to expand to meet our growing population needs.
In particular, we’ve made the point around long-term residential care, where we’ve seen a lot of this capital stock aging. It’s an opportunity to really invest in a sector where we know that the returns are greatest for health authority owned-and-operated care homes.
It’s a real opportunity to ensure that a team-based approach is there, but we know that the health sector capital funding needs to be available going forward across all areas.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Right. Well, thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it.
Next up we have B.C. Chiropractic Association — Dr. Jay Robinson.
B.C. CHIROPRACTIC ASSOCIATION
J. Robinson: Thanks for being here today, and thanks for having me speak to you. Appreciate it.
I’m the president of the B.C. Chiropractic Association. I’m Dr. Jay Robinson. Just briefly about us, we’re the voluntary professional association that looks after B.C.’s chiropractors, including professional development and health policy and public education and speaking to the government and WorkSafe and ICBC and all that. About 90 percent of chiropractors are in the association, and there’s about 1,100 of us in the province here.
We treat approximately a million individual British Columbians every year. That’s a significant chunk of the population. About 60 percent of the population of British Columbia has seen a chiropractor at some point. We enjoy very high success rates. People see chiropractors, when they do see them, an average of about seven visits at a time.
The total cost of B.C.’s musculoskeletal health care system is $22 billion a year in musculoskeletal conditions. Here in B.C., it’s about a billion dollars just in low back care itself.
Musculoskeletal causes are the leading cause of workplace absenteeism, and about a third of Canadians have an MSK condition. Almost a third of all visits to the family doctor are for an MSK condition. These are the conditions that chiropractors treat in our scope of practice the same as a family doc.
We know that MSK goes up as people age. We know that low back pain is the most popular of them. We know that 85 percent of people have a low back pain at some point in their life.
We know that chiropractors are cost-effective. We’re trained in diagnosis, treatment, management, prevention of these types of conditions. When a patient goes into a chiropractor, they get the same level of exam, similar as found when you go to your orthopedic surgeon — minus the surgical consult part.
The non-invasive, hands-on chiropractic care is effective in both acute and chronic MSK positions. We’re uniquely positioned to help here in the province. We have large-scale medicare studies that show that patients who have chiropractic insurance coverage have lower overall health care costs, lower ambulatory costs, lower use of X-rays, fewer hospitalizations, etc. There’s lower core morbidities associated every time you have a chiropractor involved.
Ontario studies show that MRI requests are reduced by about a third by family physicians when a chiropractor is involved in the team. A B.C. study showed that if a chiropractor is involved, there’s 28 percent fewer physician visits overall.
We know the opioid prescription crisis that…. Prior to the delisting of chiropractors and physiotherapists for their musculoskeletal care, we really didn’t have an opioid crisis, because 50 percent of all the opioid crisis starts with a low back pain. When chiropractors are involved with this, we know that opioid prescriptions approach zero, and we know that when chiropractors aren’t, they are up around 78 percent. There are some obvious conclusions to be drawn there.
We know that the B.C. health system priorities involve primary and community care, rural service delivery and health human resources strategies, as we just heard. We know that nationally we are trying to strengthen primary care. We know that B.C.’s chiropractors are key partners in these areas, and we can help.
We’re involved throughout the nation in collaboratory interdisciplinary team approaches in primary care centres. We’ve started one here in B.C., in Ladysmith, that is funded by ourselves and is through Island Health and the Ladysmith community centre, where we’ve got chiropractors working on underserved populations together with family docs. This is funded by ourselves, unlike the rest of them in the nation, which are funded by government.
We know that when chiropractors are involved, there are significant reduced wait times involved for our GPs.
Another thing we have is diagnostic imaging. That’s X-rays and things like that. They’re part of the chiropractic scope of practice. It’s part of our education. We currently refer people out. We can own X-rays, take X-ray pictures, diagnose off an X-ray — all that kind of thing.
Unlike many other provinces, here in B.C., we cannot receive X-ray funding. So a patient who needs an X-ray…. If they have a medically required X-ray before they can receive care, we have to send them back to their medical doctor for that rubber-stamp visit in order that they go to the X-ray lab to get the care, and MSP funds it.
This is a needless duplication in services. If the chiropractor refers the patient directly, we’ve saved two doctor visits and about a month of patient time. Keeping in mind that if a patient has to wait a month before they can receive care, they are on medication throughout that time. We know from statistics that if you are on medication, opioids, for more than a week, you are now an opioid casualty in our system.
Our ability to help is dramatic in this area — just by referring in for X-rays alone. We know that chiropractors, when they take X-rays, show a lower use of X-rays than medical doctors in the same environment, typically because there is a skill set involved that you can treat people or do a different exam right there.
We will see a decrease in costs. Studies in Ontario show that the use of X-rays drops by over a percentage point. Saskatchewan showed that it dropped by three percentage points for the same type of thing. We’re talking about a usage of 3.3 percent overall.
Over the same seven-year time that this study went, the average chiropractor sent someone for X-ray 55 times; the average medical doctor sent them 176 times. That’s a huge decrease to our system and a huge cost savings.
We’re looking for a better future for B.C.’s patients, and we believe that by integrating chiropractors more effectively — as we are doing in our pilot here in Ladysmith, as we are talking about with these X-ray initiatives — we can lower costs and create better services to British Columbians.
We recommend that we be integrated into these new urgent primary care centres in all the health regions. It works everywhere else. Why shouldn’t it work here?
Chiropractors should be permitted to refer patients directly for the diagnostic imaging tests. The research shows that it decreased costs and increased patient access. And chiropractors should be permitted to have access to the Ministry of Health’s picture archiving and communication system — that’s PACS.
Right now if a patient goes to get their record, they have to pay like 60 bucks at VGH to get their record. Chiropractors should have access to that. The patient shouldn’t be penalized for getting their own information.
Of course, we always like to ask that the Healthy Living Alliance be funded, because they support all of us in health care in creating better health care for all British Columbians.
I’m a little over five minutes, but I came in under seven and a half, so it’s a good day.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. I just wanted to clarify on the testing. You’ve mentioned X-rays, but are you also talking about MRIs and things or primarily X-rays at this point? Are there other types of diagnostic testing?
J. Robinson: We primarily send people for X-rays. Occasionally we do send people for MRIs. When that happens, it’s typically because they’re waiting in line to see their orthopod, and we’ll send them off to the private system because there’s too much of a wait in the public system.
Yeah, we do send people for those kinds of things. Not as much for CTs.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. I just wanted to clarify that.
M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation.
Are there enough chiropractors? Would it be that chiropractors who are practising in community would move into new urgent primary care centres, or are there other barriers that exist that are preventing that integration?
J. Robinson: The only barriers that currently exist on this is funding coming from government. We were even asked, a little over a year ago, by Fraser Health, if we could participate, and there was no existing funding model for us to be able to participate.
We have enough chiropractors.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Just to clarify, you actually need a funding model with Fraser Health. You say, “integrate into the team,” and I get that. But as Mitzi said, is there resistance from the ministry? I mean, you seem to suggest that there was some request to actually integrate, so where are those barriers? What’s holding back chiros from getting into these teams?
J. Robinson: The primary one that we have seen is funding. We have participated in some teams, but, as you can imagine, from the patient point of view, if everyone else on the team is funded by the government, except chiropractic, what will the patient do?
B. D’Eith (Chair): Right. Got it. Well, thank you very much for your presentation. It was great seeing you again. Thanks.
J. Robinson: Thank you. Likewise.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have Restaurants Canada — Mark von Schellwitz.
RESTAURANTS CANADA
M. von Schellwitz: Thank you very much for the opportunity to present this morning. My name is Mark von Schellwitz, and I am the vice-president for western Canada, for Restaurants Canada. Restaurants Canada is the largest hospitality industry association in Canada. We represent about 30,000 members in every community across British Columbia and across Canada.
As you can see from our infographic here, British Columbia’s $14 billion restaurant industry is a highly competitive, labour-intensive, low-margin industry with average pre-tax profitability of only 4.3 percent. Our industry is the third-largest private sector employer, and it’s certainly the largest youth employer as well, employing over 80,000 youth alone under the age of 25.
The restaurant and food service industry brings jobs, investment, innovation and tourism to every community across the province. And a business climate that enables this important industry to compete and succeed should be a top public policy priority for the provincial government. Following five years of solid growth and employment growth, many small businesses in British Columbia’s hospitality industry are concerned about the cumulative impact of several new mandated government policies that are raising operating costs to a level that will slow growth and stymie industry job creation.
The focus of our submission is to highlight some of these policies and some of the increased costs that go along with them and to provide some solutions that will help mitigate these cost increases and help the province’s more than 14,000 restaurant businesses remain viable. Our submission makes 12 recommendations in the areas of taxation, labour, municipal fees, labour shortage and liquor, but I’m going to focus on the last two.
As the largest employer of youth in British Columbia, employing 81,200 youth under the age of 25, the hospitality industry is being increasingly challenged by both demographic and geographic trends that are reducing the number of youth entering the workforce. Many rural members cannot find enough youth in their area to fill their needs, as many have moved to large urban centres. And even in large urban centres, the booming economy and shrinking unemployment rate have made attracting and retaining unskilled and skilled labour difficult.
A lack of housing and transportation options for young people also contributes to the labour shortage in the hospitality industry. It’s now so acute that restaurants simply do not have the staff to stay open for the hours that they’d like to stay open. They have to close certain hours of the day. As a result of this, you’ve got a situation where we’ve got employees not getting the hours that they deserve. Small businesses are not generating the revenue that they can, which also, then, affects the tax that is collected from these things. It is a real problem that is actually curtailing growth in the industry.
We made a presentation, as well, to the Small Business Task Force. In their engagement report, they came up with a number of recommendations, including streamlining foreign and interprovincial credential recognition processes, longer work terms and special consideration for northern and remote communities under both the provincial nominee program and the temporary foreign worker program. Also, we need better access to those underrepresented groups.
With respect to liquor, for years, our members have been complaining about the high cost of liquor in licensed restaurants and bars. They’re the only sector that receive no wholesale discount when purchasing beverage alcohol. They also pay much higher costs associated with the purchase and sale of beverage alcohol in the province.
Our industry is the largest liquor stakeholder in terms of economic and employment contributions and the number of licensed stakeholder businesses. As well, it’s something that…. We also pay PST on our liquor sales, which is actually significant. When you take that into consideration compared to retail sales, the hospitality industry is actually generating a lot more tax revenue for the provincial government.
We believe the previous government missed a significant modernization opportunity by excluding major wholesale customers in their wholesale pricing changes. We just want a level playing field where all liquor wholesale purchasers can get access to wholesale pricing. As well, we want to see licensee-to-licensee sales. We also want to see the whole special-order process — I don’t know how familiar you are with that — changed so that it’s a lot more efficient and a lot more cost-effective.
Much to Minister Eby’s credit, he did appoint Mark Hicken to conduct a review. He was mandated to put together a business technical advisory panel. Restaurants Canada was part of that panel. We came up with 24 recommendations — a great report. I certainly would move, as one of our priority recommendations to the Finance Committee to pass along, to implement all 24 of those recommendations. It’s the first time that all liquor stakeholders — upstream, downstream — agreed with all 24 liquor recommendations.
I will conclude my remarks there and open for questions. I trust you all did receive the submission.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Yes. I didn’t get that infographic, though, but I wouldn’t mind having a look at that.
M. von Schellwitz: Sure. It was an attachment, as well, to the submission.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, maybe I just didn’t go below. I apologize.
M. von Schellwitz: No problem. I’m happy to answer any questions you have, as I mentioned. I didn’t have enough time to get into some of our other recommendations.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I’d be curious to know maybe a couple of the highlights of the AG’s report. I mean, we’ll review it, but I was just wondering if you could highlight a couple of those for me.
M. von Schellwitz: Certainly. As I mentioned, in there, there’s a wholesale change to the Liquor Distribution Branch and the roles and responsibilities that they have. It changes a little bit, because right now, you’ve got the LDB that is both a regulator and a competitor with some of the small retailers.
Also, you have a process right now as far as special-ordering that licensees have to do — something that doesn’t appear in a liquor store, for example, because the liquor store is mostly for that lower-end retail model. A lot of liquor products that restaurateurs want to see on their shelves aren’t available, so you have to go through the special-order process. It goes from one warehouse to another warehouse back to another warehouse. It is extremely….
As one of the examples the report mentioned, I can get fresh tuna from Japan — order it on Friday and get it on Tuesday. If I want to order a special-order liquor product, it takes me three weeks to get that product, and it’s literally going from the Fraser Valley to one warehouse and then back again. There are some inefficiencies that could definitely be improved upon. But most important is the recommendation to offer licensees a wholesale price discount — which, of course, Alberta has done for more than two decades now and other provinces across the country are now implementing — as well as licensee-to-licensee sales, which are happening in the black market anyway. I shouldn’t admit that.
There are certain things that private retailers have — certain wines, certain things that the government liquor store just doesn’t have in their system. It’s just a lot easier for that person to purchase it from the small liquor retailer, many of whom specialize in wine and specialty spirits. Those are two really important recommendations in the report that are hugely important to our licensed members.
T. Redies: Thanks, Mark, for your presentation. I’m wondering if you could just provide a little bit more context around the issues or opportunities around streamlining the foreign worker process. I think you mentioned interprovincial issues as well. If you could just maybe give us a little bit more colour around that.
M. von Schellwitz: First of all, I want to commend the provincial government. The provincial nominee program has made a number of adjustments over the years to help our industry specifically. It’s focusing not just on skilled labour but also unskilled labour. Really, we have a labour shortage, not just a skills shortage, in the province, simply because of that demographic trend.
What we want to see is more flexibility, and the government put a lot of pressure. We’ve been working hard with the federal government to try and get some changes. I mean, even scrap the whole temporary foreign worker program, as far as we’re concerned, but come up with some programs that actually help.
One of the examples is the seasonal agricultural workers program. We have a lot of seasonal challenges with young workers here in Whistler and certain places where they just can’t…. They’re basically relying on the students working abroad program to bring in enough labour to actually go functionally on there. But right now, under the temporary foreign worker program, you cannot have seasonal workers.
We’d like to see the federal government…. We’d love the provincial government to help us promote with the federal government a seasonal sort of tourism worker program as well. I think there are some more things that we can do with the provincial nominee program internally that will help, as well, get the people where they want.
Right now the problem with immigration is it’s all focused on three major centres in Canada — Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — and where the real shortages are most acute is in the small towns across rural areas.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I remember — I don’t know if it was last year we heard, because of the wildfires — that some people ended up leaving places like Williams Lake and never coming back. So there are those types of things — other influences, other than just, let’s say, wages or whatever. There are a lot of challenges.
M. von Schellwitz: Yeah, simply people not being there. It’s not a question of how much you’re paying them. It’s just that they’re not there. In many cases, it’s not the wage as well. It’s also the accommodation and transportation problems.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Right. Great. Thank you very much, Mark. We appreciate your presentation.
Next up we have West Coast Kids Cancer Foundation — Colin Worth.
All right. The floor is yours.
WEST COAST KIDS CANCER FOUNDATION
C. Worth: Mr. Chairman, hon. Members, thank you very much for having me here today to talk to you about something that’s very near and dear to my heart.
My name is Colin Worth, and I sit on the board of the West Coast Kids Cancer Foundation. We started just about 18 months ago to address a need here in the province of British Columbia, and that is to look after kids and their families that are going through this horrendous disease.
We’re a registered Canadian charity, and we’re based in Vancouver. Our mission is to cultivate joy, foster connection and reduce isolation for children who have been diagnosed with cancer, and more particularly their families.
Here in B.C., I think we enjoy this fantastic care for kids that are actually in hospital. Children’s Hospital does a fantastic job. If somebody is sick here in this province, I think their treatment is second to none.
What is missing is that social support network. As ironic as it sounds, we’ve run into families over and over again that feel lucky to have their kid have cancer and actually live in the greater Vancouver area. It means they can be home every night. It means that both parents can visit their sick child, and both parents get to remain in contact with siblings that are at home.
If you’re in Prince George, if you’re in Prince Rupert, if you’re in the Kootenays, that isn’t possible. It’s almost unbelievably impossible for parents to maintain two residences to be with their child.
Typically, a childhood cancer diagnosis is a two-year process. Having said that, a good friend of mine…. His daughter is now in her fifth year. She was diagnosed as an 11-year-old and is in her fifth year of treatment. Again, that family is a lucky family because they live in the greater Vancouver area, and both parents are at home. Both parents can be in hospital. But it is a tremendous strain on families that live elsewhere in this province.
On average, about 170 children and adolescents from the ages zero to 19 are diagnosed with cancer in B.C. each year. That means that we’ve got almost 500 kids that are receiving cancer treatment in B.C. each year.
I know you’ve heard a couple of comparisons to Alberta. It’s not always great, but Alberta just does a fantastic job. Kids Cancer Care, based in Calgary, has a huge budget that they generate on their own. They have a huge amount of support. I think the most telling thing for Kids Cancer Care in Alberta is that they have 650 volunteers. So 125 of those volunteers go to camp, which really means that they have over 500 volunteers that work year-round to support kids and their families throughout the province of Alberta.
That’s where we’re headed. We’ve had the opportunity to go to the Oncology Camps Association meeting in Ontario in March of this year. We have spent several days working with Kids Cancer Care in Alberta and learning how they do things and how they operate their volunteer program. We’ve come away with a ton of specific knowledge about how they implement those programs.
The group that we’ve brought together as a board have been volunteers in different organizations. I’ve volunteered with the cancer society since 2001. So we’re not neophytes, although this is a brand-new organization. What seems to be the jewel or the focus of the organizations that are doing a fantastic job across Canada has always been a summer camp or a facility that allows families to reconnect and for kids to get away from their cancer treatment and just be kids, to hang out with kids that are normal — their normal, their term of normal.
We’ve worked closely with the district of Mission and the Kwantlen First Nation — and with your help, Mr. Chairman — to identify a piece of property here on Stave Lake. We have applied, through the Ministry of Forests and Lands, for that property to develop into our jewel, to be that place where kids and families can reconnect.
Our hope is to partner with the three levels of government — here in the district, the provincial government and the federal government — to obtain the capital funding to launch that program. We have a $15 million budget for phase 1 of building out our camp.
In your package, there’s a whole bunch of information — most of which might help put you to sleep tonight — about who we are and what we’re doing. The most important pieces, I think, are the first two pages. They show the comparison to what Alberta is doing in their organization in that province.
Alberta is not the only province. Ontario and Quebec both have fantastic programs. Our $15 million budget for stage 1 is very modest. Ontario just did a $32 million renovation to their camp. They may have a larger population but no less need than we have here in B.C.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. I’ll just make one comment. Just for the committee, I’ve actually toured this potential spot, and it’s absolutely gorgeous, up on Stave Lake. There’s some synergy too, because there’s the Zajac Ranch up there for sick kids as well. There’s already sort of a tradition in that area for that.
The one thing I would love is if you could talk about the amazing interaction with First Nations, with this site, and how special a spot it is.
C. Worth: The part that we picked is at a place called…. When I say “we picked,” we had a ton of help, both from the Kwantlen First Nation and the district of Mission, in identifying an area called Rockwell Delta. Just around the small bay on Rockwell Delta is a place called Devil’s Point. It has some significant cultural importance to the Kwantlen First Nation.
We’ve been very fortunate in being able to speak with the Kwantlen First Nation from the outset. We’ve walked the property with them. They’ve pointed out those things that are important. We have a commitment from our organization that as we go through the archeological process, if we identify specific sites, we can alter our construction and highlight those areas, rather than building over them or ignoring those things.
We’ve reached an agreement with the Kwantlen to highlight Devil’s Point, which is their sacred area, to be a place of reflection for all of us.
S. Cadieux: No doubt kids deserve the opportunity to play, but there are a number of camps already built — designed, built and operational — for kids with disabilities and high medical needs across the province. Some of those are actually not able to raise enough money now to operate on a regular or year-round basis and have shuttered, for the time being, some of their facilities. How thorough were your conversations with groups like Zajac, with Easter Seals, with others about the opportunity to partner and use the same space, rather than start from scratch and create an entirely new organization and camp that requires a huge operating budget?
C. Worth: That’s a great question. We have reached out to a number of organizations. Most of them have been involved in wrapping up their camps or doing that stuff. It’s almost like they’ve been preoccupied, rather than speaking about the possibility of moving on.
A couple of those camps are in urban settings, and they’re not suitable for what we’re doing. They don’t have some of the facilities available. But I toured the Easter Seals Camp on Vancouver Island just two weeks ago, and their response was they have found a plan for that already so weren’t interested in continuing the discussion.
It is a concern. It is something we are very much aware of in our planning and as we have brought people in. What I can tell you is that in addition to some that are wrapping up, there are a number of camps in this province, like the Burn Camp that the Fire Fighters Burn Fund runs, that I have referred to or have had other people refer to as orphan camps. They’ve moved from place to place throughout the years, trying to find a suitable location, and they haven’t found one. There is a list that we have accumulated of probably 12 organizations that today are looking for suitable camps.
As we enter into our design phase, we have actually reached out to those organizations, including the burn fund, most notably, to sit and be a part of that design fund so that now it will share our facility as a permanent home.
T. Redies: Probably it’s a little bit on the same line. What’s the difference between what you’re proposing and, say, a camp like Camp Good Times?
C. Worth: That’s a great question. I’ll try and be as apolitical as possible. I get lots of trouble for not. Here in British Columbia, the Cancer Society is…. Camp Good Times is the only camp they run across Canada. Every other camp has been taken over by a foundation like ours. What we see from that is a dramatic increase in funding, because their sole purpose is looking after families and kids.
Here Camp Good Times is a program of the Cancer Society, and they’re on a leased facility. They lease their space at Loon Lake, and there’s no more space to lease to them, so they are restricted. I know that they have turned away families and kids from that support over the last number of years. They are actually looking for a place to expand to and just this past summer went to Shawnigan Lake to have a week because the demand had increased to where they needed an extra week.
I want to make something really clear — that our foundation and what we’re doing is not about eight weeks of camp. It’s about supporting kids and their families, so siblings and parents. We’re looking at having this as the centrepiece of providing that support so when families have to travel to Vancouver, they’ve got a place that becomes home for them or becomes a second home for them. This isn’t just about camp for eight or ten weeks. This is about a place, a facility, that provides support for kids and families year-round. That’s how we’re planning our facility.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Colin. We really appreciate your presentation. It was nice to see you.
Next up we have the B.C. Stone, Sand and Gravel Association — Derek Holmes.
B.C. STONE, SAND
AND GRAVEL
ASSOCIATION
D. Holmes: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your time. My name is Derek Holmes, and I’m the president of the B.C. Stone, Sand and Gravel Association. We are a volunteer association representing over 200 members within the province and supplying over 80 percent of the aggregate used within the province. I want to make a couple of points today about construction and affordability.
B.C. is a growing economy. Today I want to mention two things that are critical to that growing economy — that is, infrastructure and housing, and sustainable growth.
Aggregate is used for every single construction project within the province, from the largest dams that are built to the backyard trenches requiring drain tile to the kids’ camp facility that the gentleman before me had mentioned. Over 50 million tons of gravel is used provincewide every single year. The infographic that you have in front of you shows you some of the different projects and the amount of gravel that’s used in every single one of these.
The budget from the government was focused around affordability. The association definitely supports affordability for all British Columbians but also affordability for the government. That leads to lower taxes and more efficiency.
Housing affordability is a problem. One of the key pieces of that is construction costs that are rising well above any core inflation rates that are used. Construction costs are on the rise, in some part because of a labour shortage availability and because of raw materials used within the construction industry.
Two particular levers that government has in order to make construction costs more affordable is training for the workforce so that construction can be delivered safely and efficiently, and also a ready and competitive supply of aggregate as one of the main construction materials that government can control. It’s a provincially controlled resource.
Infrastructure investment is lagging behind the growth curve and needs a long-term strategy to develop and maintain the highways that can efficiently deliver aggregate to the construction sites. One of the keys to the B.C. Stone, Sand and Gravel Association strategy for sustainable and safe supply of aggregates to the jobsite is a good infrastructure network.
Another key piece for the association is the regulatory environment. B.C. has many competitive disadvantages in terms of regulation for the industry, from taxes to gas to carbon taxes and PST. It’s also becoming increasingly difficult for small businesses to get through the regulatory environment to bring aggregate resources to market. Only the largest companies now are able to invest the dollars required to work through the various processes and permitting schemes to get these resources to market.
In closing, investment in infrastructure, training for the workforce, and regulatory and permitting resources to get aggregate pits to market to make the resource competitive should be keys for government. You cannot build a sustainable and affordable economy without ensuring there is a competitive and available supply of aggregate for the province.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much.
T. Redies: Thanks for your presentation. You mentioned regulatory and permitting resources being an issue. Is it the resources themselves that are slowing up the process or the process or a combination of both?
D. Holmes: It’s a combination of both. Our members are telling us they can’t permit new aggregate resources in order to keep up with the demand and requirement. Part of that is within the ministry. Those are directly controllable variables there — processing applications and also the number of permits that are required in order to do this.
T. Redies: Just a follow-up question. I know your industry, I believe, has been having some challenges around the application of PST. I feel like it’s on the trucking of aggregate. Can you provide a little bit of colour around that?
D. Holmes: One of the largest cost components of delivering the gravel to market is the trucking component. It often eclipses the cost of the resource itself. Part of that is because it takes so long to get into the market, but also the taxation was a piece as well. That has recently been rectified, actually, by the government.
T. Redies: You said it was rectified?
D. Holmes: It has been — the PST on delivery, yes.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your presentation, Derek.
Next up we have B.C. SCRAP-IT program — Dennis Rogoza.
Hi, Dennis. How are you? We have a little thing here, if you can see it all right, to keep us on track. Go right ahead.
B.C. SCRAP-IT PROGRAM
D. Rogoza: Good morning, everybody. My name is Dennis Rogoza. I’m the CEO of the B.C. SCRAP-IT program.
One of the questions always is: what is a tonne of carbon? What does it look like? I direct your attention, really, to the three graphics over there on the chair to give you a physical sense of what a tonne looks like, because you hear that word all the time. Clearly, it’s large. The way to think about….
Our focus is in the transportation sector and vehicles. You either take the balloon example or the house example. The typical car you might be driving, for example, emits between four and ten tonnes of carbon a year. If you multiply it by the millions, that’s how you get to the big numbers, when you hear the big numbers in carbon reductions. We thought that graphically, it would be interesting to kind of see that, just how big this is, and it’s pretty compelling.
SCRAP-IT is a non-profit society. We’re based in Richmond. We do something quite simple, and that is we offer incentives that are provided to owners of vehicles who want to have those vehicles scrapped. Those incentives are then used to replace that vehicle with a lower carbon form of transportation. It could be a car, like an electric vehicle. It could be car-share. It could be B.C. Transit, whatever. That’s the key of what our business has been.
We’ve been around since 1996. The program was originally designed by the B.C. Ministry of Environment. We’re fully operational. We scrap cars, and we replace those with electric vehicles every day. To date, since ’96, we’ve scrapped 44,000 vehicles and reduced about one million tonnes.
It’s important to note here that we’re not a recycle program. We’re a scrap program. If you gave us your vehicle as part of the transaction, we shred it. The philosophy of the program always has been that we don’t want to take parts off that old vehicle supply to allow the older vehicle fleet to stay on the road longer. Let’s accelerate this to get a cleaner fleet and a lower-carbon fleet. That’s basically how we work.
The big carbon challenge in transportation, of course, is the size of the problem. We’re looking at significant targets here in the future. We have about 3.1 million vehicles on the road, and they’re growing. But how they’re growing also has an impact — that is, we’re putting more trucks and SUVs on the road rather than cars.
We also have an old fleet in B.C. because of the milder weather here, and no salt. For example, in the greater Metro Vancouver area, there’s a quarter of a million vehicles alone that were built in the last century. These have higher smog-related emissions and poorer carbon emissions.
I point out chart No. 5 here in the presentation. This is an analysis done by Metro Vancouver looking at the light-duty vehicle fleet that said: “What is it going to take to actually achieve dramatic reductions in carbon within the time frame that the B.C. government has laid out?” I just point this out to you.
The top line is what I call business as usual. That is, if there are no changes or intervention of any kind, this is what you see — a slow improvement in mpg and a slow reduction in carbon.
The next line down is an aggressive, I’ll call it, transit program. This aggressive program really hasn’t ever been announced, because it’s way beyond what has ever been announced so far.
The third line down is what’s called the Obama line. This is the improved mpg standards proposed by the U.S. federal government, which has just been killed by President Trump — right? The third one, of course, is an aggressive program to put electric vehicles on the road. That program really doesn’t exist today.
We’re faced with significant challenges in B.C. in the transportation sector to get to where we want to get to.
I point out the next chart here, which is to look at this issue from a family point of view. This is a chart that was created by the B.C. Ministry of Environment. What this shows is a big piece of green down there that looks like an elephant or whatever. That’s about 45 percent of a family’s greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation. If you look at where the opportunities are to reduce carbon emissions for a family, they are in a vehicle. If you took that vehicle today and made it electric, that entire bar chart goes away because we’re in a renewable-based fuel system here. If you went to a pure EV, you’d have a dramatic reduction in a family’s carbon emissions.
The other side of this issue is: “Okay, what does the market look like today?” This chart, I apologize, is a little bit dated, but it’s no different. If you look at B.C.’s fleet today and the number of new vehicles that are being purchased above the historic average, we’re getting what is called behinder and behinder. There are actually fewer electric vehicles being purchased and used on the market than the increase in the actual number of new vehicles being purchased. This is a big, big challenge for us and our program.
Our program today really consists of two sets of initiatives. One is a scrap-to-EV vehicle initiative. We have significant funding, really, from a private oil company and the B.C. Ministry of Energy’s low-carbon fuel regulation to put 10,000 electric vehicles on the road over the next five years. It’s 10,000. It’s about 1,500 a year. We’ve got great, great consumer interest in that, and we’re doing this every day.
The other program is an EV charging program. You can’t have EVs on the road, and a large-scale number of EVs, without associated charging. Most people want to see either home charging or work charging. But they also want to have access to public charging. That infrastructure doesn’t exist in B.C. today in order to offer EVs as a solution. That’s the companion piece required here.
We’re coming to the market, actually, next week, with a fundamentally at-home-based charging program where we offer a free, sophisticated level 2 charger for homeowners in B.C.
The big challenge here, as I just laid out, needs a really big solution. We’ve been engaged in discussion with all kinds of folks [inaudible recording.] We said: “Well, we need to have a large-scale, scrap-to-EV program that’s provincewide and that would scrap a significant number of vehicles.” But you have to have a level incentive, really, to attract a lot of people to do that because of the incremental cost.
To give you an example of this, everybody has heard about the Tesla product. Tesla has come to our program as an incentive. The average cost of a Tesla 3 is $69,000, so this is basically in the category of a luxury vehicle. Within the invoice itself, the battery cost is $12,000. We’re faced, really, with upfront impediments with respect to moving our fleet to the electric vehicle side because of costs.
We think that if you have an EV program and offer significant government incentives, we can have a pretty large program to do this, but of course, we need the funding to do that. The same is true of EV charging. It’s the companion program, if you will, to EV vehicles on the road.
The other thing that happens, of course, is that a big market of both of those will attract green jobs. I’ve been talking to a large EV manufacturer about coming to B.C., but their question is: “Where’s the market?”
The funding option for us is the carbon tax, if you will, through government funding. The other is to take our existing programs and enlarge them under the low-carbon fuel regulation.
A quick summary here is that we’re a carbon solution today. This is what we do every day. We have a big, effective solution for families. SCRAP-IT is ready to go. We’re in business today to do this. We can help achieve climate goals. But we can’t do this. We’re basically a flow-through organization. We flow incentives to customers, but we have to have the incentives to flow to them.
Our recommendation to the government is, really, to support a large-scale scrap-to-EV program as part of an effort to address climate change.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much. We only have time for a couple of quick questions.
Sonia, do you want to go ahead?
S. Furstenau: Thanks for this. When you say you’re not a recycle program, and you just shred it…. This is one of the sort of psychological impediments that I’ve encountered when SCRAP-IT comes up.
There’s all this material that will take other carbon to manufacture elsewhere. When you shred it, where is it going? Is it to a landfill?
D. Rogoza: No. These are valuable materials, right? You can go on line to YouTube and see a shredder in operation. All the pieces are separated out. They’re valuable. Steel is valuable; aluminum is valuable, right? Ferrous and non-ferrous, copper wires, and so on — all those things have definite market value. It all goes into the steel system, if you will, and it comes back as a toaster or something like that eventually.
S. Furstenau: Okay, so there is recycling happening. When you said you were not a recycling program…. You don’t recycle the car parts, but you are recycling the metals and the steel and all that.
D. Rogoza: Absolutely. And just to be clear about this, at the beginning of the process, if you went to our scrap yard and surrendered your vehicle as part of our program, what happens first is that at the back end of that, your vehicle is put up on hoist, all the fluids are removed and the tires are removed. All those environmental issues at the front end are taken care of to make for a clean vehicle, right? That then goes through the shredder, and out comes this massive amount of metal and steel — the engine, the frame and all those kinds of things. Yup.
I think you raised another point, if I could do this. Studies I’ve seen on the carbon calculation about keeping your vehicle for another 30 or 40 years, versus scrapping it earlier — it’s positive to scrap it earlier.
One of the things that comes out of that — I haven’t really talked about it today — is smog emissions. If you look at the smog profile of a vehicle that’s 20 years old, it’s about 30 to 60 times more polluting than a new gasoline vehicle going on the road. So we’ve had a significant impact on improving air quality in the greater Vancouver region, just by scrapping so many vehicles, because of course, the tailpipe from the old vehicle is a lot more polluting.
S. Furstenau: Okay. We’re just going to dent ours up in the driveway a bit more before we hand it over to you.
R. Leonard: Thank you for that. That was kind of my question, and your last comments are certainly fitting into that question.
Given the big fire that just happened on the barge yesterday, my question is: is that taking a part in the recycling of the materials happening here at home in B.C., or are they being barged to China?
D. Rogoza: They’re actually barged to Washington state, where there’s a steel mill. That’s where they go. They might go to China as a finished steel product. I don’t know about the markets for that. But it’s locally barged that way.
R. Leonard: It goes to Washington state.
D. Rogoza: Yeah.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it.
We are recessed until one o’clock.
The committee recessed from 12:07 p.m. to 1 p.m.
[B. D’Eith in the chair.]
B. D’Eith (Chair): First up we have B.C. Notaries — Daniel Boisvert and Rhoda Witherly.
B.C. NOTARIES
R. Witherly: First of all, I’d like to thank you very much for having us come to speak to you today.
My name is Rhoda Witherly. I’m a notary public, and I practise in Prince Rupert. I’m here representing the Society of Notaries Public. We are the regulators for notaries around the province.
With me is Dan Boisvert. He is representing the B.C. notaries association, which is sort of the separate arm or association, which is the advocacy arm of the notaries.
Today we just wanted to talk to you a little bit about what we do. We have printed material which we have passed out to all of you and, clearly, we don’t need to read it through word for word. I’m sure you’re quite capable of doing that.
We just have a couple of things we’d like to highlight. First of all, we’d like to talk about consumer perception and the Mortgage Brokers Act. This is a very specific request that we have.
I think I’ll ask Dan to maybe just go through and say why we’re talking about this and why we’re talking about it to you.
D. Boisvert: One of the main functions of a notary when we’re in our office working with clients is that we prepare the mortgages for the banks that securitizes their loans. Those loans can be, and often are, very complicated, with a number of different provisions, be it penalty or payment provisions, interest rates and interest rates that may change or fluctuate.
The Mortgage Brokers Act is where you need to be registered to be able to have those discussions. The Law Society has a specific exemption under that Mortgage Brokers Act, and I would suspect that when the act was written, the notaries just kind of got missed.
The work that we do as it pertains to mortgages and loans for consumers is exactly and identically the same. Under the common law, the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that we have exactly the same duties and obligations as lawyers do when we are discussing mortgage terms and financing with clients.
Specifically, what we are asking for is for an exemption identical to the one that the Law Society has to be added to the Mortgage Brokers Act, so that notaries are exempt from registration under that act so that we can discuss exactly the same principles that they currently do. It’s not that we don’t, because we need to protect the consumer. The Supreme Court certainly gives us adequate leeway to do that. We just want it codified it in the statute that we are exempt from that. Okay?
R. Witherly: That’s one thing that’s very specific, and it’s something that’s certainly within the purview of the Standing Committee on Finance. So we certainly hope that we’ll be able to get that put through as a whatever you call it. I don’t know if it’s inconsequential or a consequential amendment to the act, but it would fix it up.
The other thing we wanted to talk a bit about was the access to legal services non-contentious, which is a hallmark of what the notaries do — providing non-contentious legal services.
We also find that we’re quite constrained by our act, because what we are able to do for the public is defined within the Notaries Act, which was first enacted in about — I don’t know — 1929. It’s been amended since then. But the basic framework of it is still the same as that act. Obviously, times have changed, and the kinds of things we do have changed.
We have, over the years, been making a number of presentations to governments of various stripes to expand the scope of services that we provide to consumers to include these non-contentious things. Certainly, with the administration currently very interested in improving access to justice, we certainly think that that fits well within the scope of that government initiative.
We would look forward to working through the ministries to expand our services to include non-contentious things, primarily in the area of family law and, also, some very basic services within the idea of companies and incorporations, some of those things, and basic probate services. We’ve been working on that for quite a long time, and we continue to do that. We just would like to put it out to you as something that we’d like to consider.
We have a very robust training program for our notaries, and we certainly could incorporate that into the program, because we don’t want to unleash our members to do things they’re not qualified to do. But we have a very qualified group of notaries that certainly can take on some additional tasks, and I certainly think it would fit very well with the objectives and aims that your government has introduced and suggested would be needed.
D. Boisvert: One of the ones that I’d like to commend the government on is the anti-money-laundering changes that they’ve undertaken. Just so you know, notaries have to comply with FINTRAC rules and regulations in terms of anti-money-laundering and terrorism financing. Lawyers do not. So we are at the forefront of that work, and as notaries we’re committed to continuing to do that.
In the last 12 months, just so you know, notaries have done about 70 percent of all residential conveyancing in the province, over 180,000 transactions, and have processed more than $40 billion of trust funds through our accounts. We are a small group, but I like to say we pack a pretty big punch when it comes to drivers, certainly in the residential conveyancing market.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I just…. Are you finished now?
R. Witherly: Yeah, I think so. We’d be happy to answer any questions people may have.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I just wanted to clarify something. In regards to the Mortgage Brokers Act and the exemption, I’m just wondering if the intent of that might have been in regards to not providing legal advice. I did quite a long-time practice in real estate law and dealt with notaries quite a bit as a lawyer, and then whenever it got to the legal advice time, when you had a dispute, generally the notary’s client would go out to a lawyer. So I’m just wondering. Is that exemption…? What type of services would you provide?
D. Boisvert: Notaries are authorized to provide legal advice. The Legal Professions Act does not provide a monopoly on legal advice. The definition of what constitutes the practice of law specifically exempts the lawful practice of a notary public. So the Supreme Court has, in many decisions, made it abundantly clear that when a notary is practising in the same area that a lawyer is, the client is entitled to rely on that independent legal advice just as if it was given by a lawyer as it was given by a notary. As long as we’re practising within our mandate, the advice that we give is the same as a lawyer’s advice.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. I just wanted to clarify that.
D. Boisvert: Yeah. It’s a good question.
B. D’Eith (Chair): As far as the Law Society, I know they presented to us in regards to the administration of justice and some issues there in expanding the role of paralegals and other non-lawyer staff to do similar — well, maybe not similar but…. How do the notaries feel in terms of those expanded practices? Do you feel they’re complementary or competitive?
D. Boisvert: I think in some ways it’s more complementary. The ones that we’ve really been after are ones that you can…. I’ll just use probate as a very simple example. On your own ministry’s website, the Ministry of Attorney General’s website, you can download and fill in probate documents so that people can do their own probate. But if they actually had a question about that process or that procedure, the only person they could ask is a lawyer. They couldn’t ask a notary.
We frequently get asked all the time, because we write wills. You come into my office, and I prepare your will and your power of attorney representation agreement. Then mom passes away, and they come back to me to say: “Now could you just get the probate done?” I say: “No. You can only do that through a lawyer.” They go: “Well, why? I can go on the website, and I can get the forms.” I say: “Well, that’s right. If you can manage your way through the website, you can do it on your own, but if you need help, the only person you can ask is a lawyer.”
That oftentimes shuts people down, for various reasons, so we want to be able to provide that. That’s just one example of something that we were asking for.
R. Witherly: As a regulator, we want to be sure that our members are trained to provide that kind of service to the people.
D. Boisvert: Absolutely. It’s not willy-nilly.
R. Witherly: It’s not just like: “Oh, well, let’s help you fill in the website.” We need to be sure that our members have the appropriate background and training to do that. So our response, I think, to the Law Society’s initiative on paralegals is that we, as a society, have taken the position that we really probably don’t want to be regulated by the Law Society because we have our own robust regulatory scheme.
What we would do in parallel — in conjunction, probably, with their program — is look at running a similar kind of program for our members who might be interested in doing that kind of work without necessarily…. You know, we don’t go to court, so we have to tailor our programs to do that.
D. Boisvert: The public has to be protected.
R. Witherly: It’s a public protection issue.
D. Boisvert: Yeah. We’re not asking for something just: “Oh, go ahead and do it.” It would be properly educated and properly regulated, absolutely.
Were there questions?
P. Milobar: Just when you mentioned the money-laundering stuff, and seeing as you’re wanting more parity with what lawyers can do or not…. My understanding is that FINTRAC kicks in over $10,000 and that lawyers aren’t able to take more than $7,500 in cash for any type of trust funds or holding of funds. So are you saying that you can’t take up to the $7,500 cap the lawyers have? Or you want higher than the lawyer cap or…?
R. Witherly: No, none of that.
D. Boisvert: None of those questions…. Our limit is $2,500. The most a notary can take is $2,500 in cash. But there are still suspicious activities and suspicious transactions that you have to report. So if the client in front of you is suspicious…. If you think that even though the proceeds that are coming in are all certified funds but you are suspicious that this could be a money-laundering action, you are still obligated to report it under FINTRAC rules.
R. Witherly: Lawyers are not obligated to report under FINTRAC. The law societies made a deal with the feds about that.
D. Boisvert: In other words, if you are a money-laundering professional, if that’s what your job was, you would want to use a lawyer because they don’t have to report you under FINTRAC, whereas we do. We’re participating in that because we want to be a part of that solution.
P. Milobar: I just want to be clear. I mean, it’s the reporting of electronic-certified funds, not because you can’t accept funds over…. FINTRAC kicks in over $10,000. Lawyers can’t take more than $7,500….
R. Witherly: You’re talking about cash.
P. Milobar: Right. So you’re talking about electronic reporting of funds being transferred around electronically, not someone walking in with cash over….
R. Witherly: No.
D. Boisvert: No. I’m talking about any suspicious transaction that we think may be related to terrorism or money laundering. All the provisions that FINTRAC provides that banks and other institutions have to follow…. We have to follow those as well. Lawyers do not.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, we’re out of time, but thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it.
Next up we have PacificSport Fraser Valley — Jared Kope.
Hi Jared, how are you? We’re just keeping this as a guide. Were just trying to keep it under five for the initial presentation, if we could.
PACIFICSPORT FRASER VALLEY
J. Kope: Sounds good. Thank you to the committee for the opportunity to present today. Sorry about my voice. It’s going, but I’ll make it through. And thank you to the provincial government for its recognition of the important role sport plays in building connected, safe and healthy communities across the province by investing in sport and, specifically, PacificSport Fraser Valley. My name is Jared Kope, and I am the executive director at PacificSport.
PacificSport Fraser Valley and the regional delivery model was a provincial government initiative. We are pleased to be part of the nine associations that formed the viaSport Regional Alliance in the province of B.C. The viaSport Regional Alliance is about enriching lives and energizing communities via sport. We believe in the purpose of the regional alliance as it complements our own vision to champion quality sport.
What are some of the top priorities for us to help make life more affordable in British Columbia? Make physical literacy accessible and affordable for every British Columbian by leveraging the expertise, reach and experience of the B.C. sports sector. Investing in preventative health care measures such as physical literacy and sport will also contribute to a reduction in the health care cost to the province and the burden on the B.C. taxpayers.
For those not familiar with the term physical literacy — I know you’ve been hearing from a few of my colleagues — it is the gateway into an active life. Those who are physically literate are motivated and confident, physically competent and have the knowledge and understanding to engage in physical activity for life.
We know that this generation has, potentially, a life expectancy of less than their parents, and this is a cause for global action. If this isn’t addressed, our health care system will be even more burdened. The 2018 ParticipACTION Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth received a D-plus in Canada — again, another statistic that calls for collective action — of which the D has been the same for the last decade.
Locally and regionally, we are working hard to build cross-sectoral partnerships with recreation, education, health, Indigenous people and more. To have more collective impact with physical literacy and sport development, the regional alliance is ready to build on the training and education we have executed in our communities.
This is why we have created the MOVE program. What is MOVE? MOVE is a provincially standardized capacity-building program. The objective is to deliver a portfolio of services, mentorships, training, resources and programs for the education, recreation, sport and early childhood education sectors. MOVE provides leaders the skills to deliver quality physical literacy opportunities which will have an impact across British Columbia, with a goal to create self-sufficient, locally funded programming.
What makes MOVE different? Organizations working in the physical literacy space have done a great job to increase awareness and training opportunities. That goes for the last 50 years. When we talk about ParticipACTION and we talk about all these different things of getting people active, it’s not working.
One-off trainings typically do little to change program delivery. Yes, education is a key component, but for there to be change, we need to do more to create job-embedded professional development. This is not typically done because of the increase in the necessary resources — funding, expertise and time. The viaSport Regional Alliance is uniquely situated to create and implement a comprehensive program such as MOVE because of the expertise, current cross-sectoral partnerships and programs and the regional alliance’s reach across the province.
What have we done to date? We have developed education and recreation sector programs. That’s Move to Learn and Move to Connect. These programs were developed and piloted right here in the valley. Myself and my colleagues are the ones that have created those and that are implementing them across the valley.
Move to Learn and Move to Connect will be expanded, starting in January 2019, in northern B.C., the interior of B.C., the Okanagan and Vancouver Island. With our current projections and funding, MOVE will reach 10,000 participants and have trained 665 recreational leaders and teachers by September 2019.
As the go-to experts around the province on physical literacy, we would like the provincial government to invest $500,000 to the viaSport Regional Alliance. With this investment, we can expand MOVE. An investment in MOVE is an investment in a comprehensive program that will lead to communities being more active for life.
What would we accomplish with the $500,000 investment? We know, with a $500,000 investment from the province, we can substantially grow MOVE. In phase 2, we will develop programs for the sport and early childhood sectors and pilot these programs in specific regions. Some of that work we’re actually doing right now in Mission and have had great success with. We’d also expand Move to Learn and Move to Connect to all regions in B.C. and substantially increase the number of communities and regions already implementing MOVE.
It is also important to note that MOVE will be a self-sufficient program, once built and implemented, through local investment and through the existing pilot projects local school districts and recreation departments have invested in. Through the development and implementation of phase 2, we will impact 100,000 participants and 10,000 educators, recreation leaders, coaches and early childhood educators by the end of 2020.
Thank you for the time.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thanks, Jared.
Any questions at all?
M. Dean: Thanks for all your work and the presentation.
You’re targeting early years and youth. Are there particular groups that need more attention, as well, and need some additional resources? Do you have a plan for that?
J. Kope: In working with the different sectors…. When we’re working with education, we want to work with every student coming through. It’s not just a specific group but actually the full spectrum. Right now, say, in the education sector, we have to work with everyone in it. There’s not really an easy way to answer it, other than to say we want to work with the system. Then those we’re identifying are working with all the individuals that need the most help, the most support.
T. Redies: Thanks, Jared, for your presentation.
Now, I’m not an expert on this, but I believe there were tax credits that were provided to families previously by the federal and the provincial governments, in terms of helping pay for sports and that. Since they have been taken away, has there been any substantial difference in the reduction of people accessing sports?
J. Kope: Honestly, I think it’s too early to tell in those specific numbers. It wasn’t enough of a tax to really make a huge shift anyway.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, thank you very much, Jared. We appreciate all the work you do for sport. Thanks for your presentation.
Next up we have Abbotsford Community Services — Rod Santiago and Shairose Jinnah.
Very nice to have you. Come on up. We have this little timer here. It’s more of a guide. We’re trying, if you can, to keep the initial presentation to about five minutes so that we have time for questions. That would be wonderful.
ABBOTSFORD COMMUNITY SERVICES
S. Jinnah: Hello. Thank you for having us today. We would like to acknowledge that we are on the unceded territory of the Stó:lô First Nations and the Leq’á:mel, Leq’á:mel meaning “the level place where people meet.” It used to be one of the most popular trading spots in Stó:lô territory. The Stó:lô, the people of the river, have been in the Fraser Valley for 10,000 years, and we are grateful to live and work in their traditional ancestral territory.
We speak gratitude, as well, for the select standing committee’s work in 2017 that displayed an astute capacity to hear and respond to the recommendations of the social service sectors, a voice 15,000 strong.
Already you are making affordable child care more readily available to thousands of families. Very quickly B.C. is finally building a poverty reduction strategy, with plans of addressing the child poverty rate by 50 percent in the next five years.
This year the social services sector collective agreement will begin to address a number of wage inequity issues that have been long overdue. Thank you for being a committee of action.
We are Shairose Jinnah, director of counselling, child, youth and family services; and Rod Santiago, executive director for Abbotsford Community Services. ACS is a non-profit, multiservice, multi-funded, community-based social service agency providing services in Abbotsford, Mission, Chilliwack, Langley and Chandigarh, India.
Each year thousands of individuals and families receive help through one or more of our 90-plus programs. Our mission is fostering community well-being and social justice through positive action and leadership. Our vision is justice, opportunities and equitable access for all.
Among the 90-plus services that ACS provides to families, let us point out just a few ACS initiatives which support the provincial government’s mandates.
Health care and youth. ACS is the lead organization for Foundry Abbotsford, an integrated hub for youth 12 to 24 years old and their families, with evidence-based, wraparound supports in mental health, primary care, substance use, social services, employment, peer support and more. Sixteen ministries and organizations all under one roof to provide youth-centred, youth-involved services continue to fund the development of Foundry sites throughout the province.
Health care addictions and mental health mandate. ACS runs the opioid agonist treatment centre for Fraser Health Authority in Abbotsford — the OAT Centre, alongside our Abbotsford Addictions Centre, to be a safe space providing methadone and Suboxone treatment under the direction of a physician. A mental health support worker is also available on site.
Under employment, in partnership with four other organizations, ACS leads the Work B.C. employment program for Abbotsford. We provide the full spectrum of supports to help Abbotsford job seekers find and maintain employment and improve their employment readiness.
Within public safety, ACS partners with the Abbotsford police department, Abbotsford school district and John Howard Society to lead the In It Together program — our community’s comprehensive youth gang prevention program for all youth, including South Asian and Indigenous youth. In It Together provides support for youth ages ten to 24 at risk of gang involvement and their families through outreach services, skill building, counselling and recreation as well as preventative services such as parent education.
Under housing, ACS works with B.C. Housing and the city of Abbotsford to run our city’s first low-barrier, housing-first initiative. Thirty men and women at a time, who were homeless or at risk, are now the residents of our supportive housing facility and are assisted with issues like mental health, substance use and essential life skills training.
R. Santiago: ACS is but one amongst hundreds of dedicated, skilled and networked organizations throughout the province that is equipped to work alongside our provincial government to help achieve shared provincial goals.
Having identified these examples of successful partnerships, let us speak to some of the primary areas that require ongoing attention.
Mental health. An estimated 84,000 children and youth in B.C. have a diagnosed mental health disorder, yet less than one-third receive mental health services. Almost 60,000 do not receive treatment. Within this group, Indigenous youth ten to 19 years old are four to five times more likely to take their own lives, compared with non-Indigenous youth.
In the top ten reasons for hospital admissions, most provinces cite at least one mental health condition. B.C. stands out with three. This is double the national rate. Every day, we witness the growing complexity of mental health issues with many of our clients and their families. We recommend ongoing attention towards the many community mental health supports required, such as free counselling, life skills training or group involvement — which, though crucial and cost-effective, are limited in availability or not offered at all.
Additionally, as our staff continue to work with extremely complex cases, the daily toll of being present for others, with limited resources, is impacting staff wellness and mental health.
Our own staff experience compounding mental fatigue, which results in staff needing their own mental health supports. From our street outreach workers to addiction counsellors, receptionists, the low-barrier housing team, immigrant settlement workers, employment case managers, to community legal advocates — all social service workers should be provided appropriate, funded therapeutic counselling at work. It is unfair and unjust to ask staff to witness so much pain and take on so much secondary trauma and work under such intense pressure without appropriate, funded supports.
In the area of recruitment and retention, further to the comments above, we wish to emphasize that the workforce that makes up the non-profit sector, to fulfil the provincial government’s mandate…. This workforce, though highly skilled, is undercompensated. Our qualified staff work with vulnerable individuals, and they give everything they have for those they serve. They require specific and desirable skills and experiences to help clients and their families navigate current stresses and arrive at solutions to wicked problems in their lives.
Our staff have invested in university degrees at undergraduate and graduate levels. They work with clients all day or night, only to go home and face their own uncertainty — of shouldering educational debts, maintaining stable rental housing, balancing life as a single parent and/or having enough paycheque to put food on the table that week.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Rod, we’re over seven minutes now. So if you wouldn’t mind wrapping it up, that would be great.
R. Santiago: Sure. The recommendation there is that, along with wages, additional funding needs to be considered for adequate training and professional development, compensation, equipment and other forms of incentive for staff as well as management.
And then the recommendation for seniors. Seniors, particularly those 85 years or older, and including newcomers to Canada, Indigenous elders, LGBTQ and those living rough, require a broad range of well-funded support services, including medical transportation, safe and affordable housing, and social and recreational opportunities. In addition, staff and volunteers providing supports to frail seniors need proper training on how to work with and support an aging population.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much.
Questions?
I just had a question about the mental health aspect in regards to…. Not so much the training. I can understand the training for…. You’re talking about front-line people who aren’t being trained to deal with what they’re facing every day. Is that what we’re talking about?
R. Santiago: Yes.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah. That makes total sense.
Who would provide that training? Who do you see providing that training — which department? Would it be Fraser Health?
S. Jinnah: I think it’s a collaboration, because we’re seeing it in all the sectors. I think it’s the community partners coming together and deciding whether it’s mental health, first aid training, or whether it’s something else that’s more relevant to what we’re working with. It could be the abuse counselling, trauma-informed services, or it could be something else along the lines of what’s needed.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. In regards to the actual community health supports, could you be a little bit more specific as to what specific requirements you feel Abbotsford needs — for example, for mental health community services, community supports? You say counselling. Could you be a little bit more specific with that?
R. Santiago: Maybe I’ll identify here that it’s not only Abbotsford. I would speak to that as a provincewide need.
S. Jinnah: Provincewide, yeah.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Provincewide. Yeah, okay. Absolutely.
S. Jinnah: I think what we’re seeing is that there’s just not enough counselling to be provided to our single parents, young women. We’re finding that we’re getting younger and younger — middle years — and we’re finding that the mental health issues are escalating. But again, there is a lack of resources to support them.
Our staff themselves are unable to refer clients to appropriate services. We’re noticing the parenting groups that are out there — that there’s just a lack in terms of providing group services for mental health supports. We’re seeing increased anxiety, depression, trauma. We’re finding that the domestic violence is increasing in terms of how families are working within their own structure and working externally. So the safety pieces are huge. They’re increasing the overall mental health and anxiety issues that we’re seeing every day.
We’re seeing more and more need for resources around mental health for men. We have very limited available for them — and the newcomers. We’re noticing that we’re getting newly arrived families that are really struggling with post-traumatic stress. How do we work with that with no services available, or resources or training?
R. Santiago: What I’ll identify, as well, is the complexity of this world that we’re living in. It isn’t mental health on its own, but it’s mental health along with addictions. Then it’s mental health and addictions that a parent is dealing with, but it’s the child who’s now parenting that adult, or then it’s the child parenting that adult, and they’re living in a car. This world we’re living in is just getting tougher and tougher to navigate. It’s that kind of world that we’re living in.
S. Jinnah: If I can take that a step further. We’re dealing with a lot of grandparents taking care of their children. Again, they don’t have the supports in terms of how they’re going to cope with their mental wellness and then support the children that are addicted, and their children. It’s just a domino effect.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate everything you do for the community. Thank you.
R. Santiago: Thank you for your time and your considerations.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C., MPPIA — Phil Klapwyk and Peter Leitch.
Hello, gentlemen. Nice to see you. We’re just trying, if we can, gentlemen, to keep the initial comments to five minutes. If we have time for questions, that’d be great.
MOTION PICTURE PRODUCTION INDUSTRY
ASSOCIATION OF
B.C.
P. Leitch: My name is Peter Leitch. I’m the chair of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association and president of North Shore Studios and Mammoth Studios. My colleague Phil….
P. Klapwyk: I’m vice-chair of MPPIA as well as the business representative for IATSI Local 891, film and television workers in B.C.
P. Leitch: This is a pretty easy story to tell. This is a success story in British Columbia. The film and television industry — which comprises physical production, animation, visual effects and post-production — is one of the fastest-growing industries in British Columbia. We now employ around 42,000 British Columbians. Plus we do have our temporary foreign workers, especially in the visual effects and animation side, that have come in because of the rapid growth, where we need that level of skill as we train more British Columbians to be involved in the industry.
The GDP is now in excess of $3 billion for the industry, and the demand for content, worldwide, is over $1 trillion. You’ve probably seen the streamers — like Netflix and Hulu and others, Amazon and Apple — all getting into the business. Phil and I and our colleagues have all gone down to Los Angeles to visit them and try to attract some of that business up here.
The climate is very good for us. We’ve had great, stable policy from the government in terms of tax credits, which is super helpful to the industry. We’ve had great support with Creative B.C., which is a government-funded agency responsible for the creative sector. We’ve had such rapid growth that we see a little bit of stabilization in 2016, ’17, ’18.
Hopefully, going forward, we’re going to have managed growth. It is sometimes challenging. It’s a nice problem to have, but it is challenging with the level of growth in content over the last number of years. But I think things are going to settle out a little bit.
These companies are shooting all over the world. When we look at the competitive landscape, we think of the cities in North America — Toronto; New York; Atlanta, Georgia; Los Angeles; and Montreal, now, especially with visual effects and animation — as our significant competitors, but I can’t think of a better place I’d want to be than British Columbia. Even though we’re based in the Lower Mainland, and Vancouver’s been the hub, it’s nice to see, also, the expansion of the industry broaden over the last number of years.
Studio facilities. I think there’s around 2½ million square feet of purpose-built or converted warehouse studio space now in British Columbia. We are definitely the leader in Canada on that end of things. All good-news stories. Lots of benefits.
Phil, maybe you want to talk about the labour side of things.
P. Klapwyk: Yeah. One of the things I can talk about is the fact that this industry supports a lot of unionized workers, highly skilled workers. It’s pretty much the only industry where you can take a professional artist and pay them $120,000 a year to sculpt. That doesn’t happen. Usually people don’t get paid like that until after they pass away, when they’re artists, as we know.
We support…. My local has over 8,400 full-time members who work actively and make their living in this industry. We have about 6,000 people that are permittees that are working into memberships, so that’s 14,000 of the 42,000 quality jobs. It’s constantly growing. We’re always looking for ways to incorporate the skill set from other industries in decline because we need pipefitters. We need electricians. We need welders. We can support all of the other industries throughout the province of B.C.
We have grown to meet the demand of the content that’s being produced throughout the world. Our members are among the top rank of professionals that work in the industry. It’s kind of something when you go to the grocery store and you can bet that you’re going to run into a film worker, because they’re everywhere.
It’s not even the people that are just in the union, because there are all sorts of companies that work and support the industry, like lumber mills or people that actually create high-tech props for the industry, that are not unionized. Those figures never get counted, but a lot of those people factor into the benefits for this industry, that this industry provides.
As Peter was saying, there’s been a ton of investment. All of these local…. In B.C., our industry is created by entrepreneurs who are building stages or are creating new ways of innovating technologies for the industry. As he said, it’s a cornerstone of the industry.
About the growth throughout the province. We often hear: “Oh, it’s just a Lower Mainland thing.” We talk a lot about the 250s and making sure that our presence is felt out there. This past year, one of the brand-new media companies, Apple…. Maybe you’ve heard of it. They’re doing a new series. They’ve entered into this area as well. They’re producing directly for release on Apple Television.
The very first series that they produced is a show called See, which they decided to produce here in British Columbia. The very first place that they decided to shoot is on north Vancouver Island, because the locations are stunning. They also have the availability of a crew base up there. The only reason they have a crew base up there is because the government partnered with the local film commission to create a pilot project to train people that were in other trades and get them ready to work in the film industry.
It’s projects like that where our industry works with government to solve problems that lead to giant investment like that. It’s a huge show. It’s budgeted at over $12 million an episode for ten episodes only. They’re going to drop a ton of money on this in an area that wouldn’t normally see filmmaking. That’s spreading all throughout the regions of British Columbia.
P. Leitch: One of the interesting studies that was undertaken by the Motion Picture Association was on vendor activity with their members. The Motion Picture Association represents six major studios. Their spend was $75 million in 5,000 vendors. That shows you some of the impact.
I know the CMPA made a presentation on the domestic industry. We’re all very supportive of the domestic industry. They represent about 20 percent of the business in B.C. These are companies that generally are involved in the service side, servicing Los Angeles companies but also building their own IP. Our end goal….
All the industry members are very interested in growing that side of the business, so we are constantly working with Creative B.C., who does a great job, and introducing some programs there.
I guess we’re kind of out of time.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Well, can I ask a quick question? Just in regard to the tax credit, is the ask to maintain the tax credit the way it is? Also, in some respects, the industry has been so successful that it seems to be putting pressure on that tax credit. Do you mind talking to that a bit for the committee? I’d appreciate it.
P. Leitch: Yeah. I mean, it’s a labour-based tax credit. It’s integral to being engaged in the industry, especially when you’re talking about Los Angeles–based productions. Any jurisdiction around the world that’s involved in the industry in any significant way has a significant tax credit. Ours isn’t the highest, but it is very competitive, and certainly, we’re not asking for more on the tax credit side of things.
In terms of managing that level of growth, I do see it, again, flattening and evening off a little bit. We’re actually going to be doing a study in the next couple of months with MNP, which has done a number of these studies, to get an idea, get a sense, of the growth trajectory of the industry. We’re working very closely, actually, with the government to manage that part of it and if there are ways that we can do it.
Again, it’s labour-based, so we don’t pay any tax credits out until taxes are paid by the labour, and there’s a bit of a delay on that. But it’s certainly something that we’re interested in working closely with government on, to be able to manage that program, because the sustainability of that program is critically important to the success of the industry.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Thank you, Peter.
M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation. I’m interested in the bullet point where you talk about gender, ethnicity and inclusivity, because we’re still doing really poorly in terms of numbers of women directors, for example, and we know that that has a trickle-down effect in terms of content and careers and professions for women, just as an example.
I know sometimes tax breaks are actually linked to targets and measures and expectations, so it can actually influence the social policy, for example. Could you just give us a little bit more detail around how the industry and the sector are measuring this and what targets you have? What’s proactively happening in the industry to make sure that we do increase diversity?
P. Klapwyk: Well, from my perspective as a representative of the trades in the industry, we directly support the women-in-trades foundation that the B.C. Fed has created. That’s working with the ITA to actually provide education to women in trades.
We’re currently 33.8 percent female, which is a sad statistic. We have seven departments within my organization that are over 80 percent male, but then again, we have six departments that are over 80 percent female. So we have traditional roles that are just not being crossed.
From our perspective, a lot of what we have to do has to do with communication and making the career possibilities happen. Bringing in directors is great, but if there’s nobody there to supply the labour in those positions, it’s not going to actually happen. We are trying to put it in the minds of the future workers that this is a possible career. To that end, we’ve revised our motion picture industry orientation course, and we hope to roll that out very shortly. That has a strong component that is about equity and leaning towards providing opportunities for women in the film industry.
P. Leitch: Last week the chair of Creative B.C., Gordon Esau; myself; the chair of the Directors Guild, Kendrie Upton; and Sharon — I can’t remember her last name — met on that specific issue. It was actually eye-opening to me in terms of some of the statistics and some of those positions that you’re talking about. As somebody that works within the industry, we’re seeing a lot of leadership positions with women, and a lot of the production managers and producers are women. Grace Gilroy and her daughter Kathy are two producers that are our best customers, certainly at North Shore Studios, and have been historically.
It was interesting. We’re now going to engage our associations in this in a more open way and literally start measuring that. It was interesting. I think both Gordon and I sort of said: “Hey, have we got some good statistics on this?” Because it’s a bit shocking to us that there weren’t more of these positions. I mean, part of it was the nature of the business, where you’re working these extremely long hours, and the women traditionally have been the caretakers of the family. That’s been just a part of it, though. A lot of it is they don’t seem to get the same opportunities as men have historically, so we want to change that.
There are a lot of changes that have been going on in the last couple of years in this industry that way. So stay tuned, because we’re going to make it a standing part of our meetings, at least every six months, to talk about the statistics. Are we going in the right direction? Are we improving? Are those opportunities coming about now more so than they did before? Because it’s my understanding it really hasn’t changed materially in some of those positions, and I wasn’t really aware that the problem was quite like that.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, we’re over time, but thank you very much, Peter and Phil. We appreciate you coming in, coming all the way out to Mission. We really appreciate it. You can visit me any time.
P. Leitch: I will.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I can’t promise I’ll be there, but you can visit any time.
Next up we actually have a teleconference with Melody Burns.
If you want to go ahead. If you could try to keep your comments to five minutes, then we have time for questions.
MELODY BURNS
M. Burns: Hi. I’m Melody Burns, and I wish that I could have been in Esquimalt yesterday. I am in Victoria. However, my child care needs and my work schedule wouldn’t allow for it. So thank you so much for allowing me to speak to you and to hear from the public regarding the needs for public services and where to put our tax dollars.
I wanted to share with you my story, which is not unlike many stories within the disability community. My son James is affected with autism quite severely. He’s non-verbal. While we’re working to get his executive functioning up, he’s far behind his peer group. James is a warm and loving ten-year-old with a heart of gold. His education and support journey started in preschool, where he was supported through the Queen Alexandra supported childhood development program, which provided him with a one-to-one assistant to help include him in the preschool program.
The program changed into out-of-school care when he moved into kindergarten, while I worked. This out-of-school care has been the lifeblood to our family. It is also deeply underfunded and holds a multi-year wait-list for families. This program has ensured that my partner and I can continue to work to provide a better future for both of our children, be taxpaying citizens and break the cycle of poverty that I had to fight, as a single mother, to get out of.
Let me clear. Without our ability to work, James would be destined for a life living on PWD with limited housing options, as is the case for many adults who need a high ratio of support. Our ability to work is essential to a good future for my son.
The next step for James comes when he turns 12 in less than two years — always something changing. He shifts out of the out-of-school care program, and there are limited resources for this next step. Currently there is only one program offering these services in the CRD. The teen community connections program that is run by Community Living Victoria. This provides a ratio of three-to-one support and is available for only a maximum of three days a week.
Clearly, there’s a huge gap in the service. As working parents, we need to have James in quality care, where he continues to grow and to be able to achieve his full potential while still maintaining our working status so we can pay our bills.
We’re also affected by the housing crisis and have a rent percentage of over 30 percent of our income, along with added costs for James.
Today I’m coming to you to shed light on the parents and adult caregivers who stand behind dependants with disabilities. We want the absolute best for our teens, kids and adults who take hours out of our day to dedicate and plan activities and plan for their well-being. We also spend countless hours of worrying for their future. While worrying is natural for parents, it is extreme for kids with different needs.
Inclusion is a big topic, and I’ve come across it frequently as a working parent. My ability to work is becoming increasingly limited due to having a child with a disability. Isn’t inclusion for all?
By putting funds toward a specialized program for this demographic, you’re making a lifelong investment to ensure both the caregiver and the child with the disability are not taking up increasingly more resources as the years go by. I think we should be smart with our investment and plan for the long term.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Melody. Any questions from the committee?
Just so you’re aware, I really appreciate you telling us your story. We’ve had a few people who have presented to us in regards to, especially, children with disabilities and families having to deal with that. We really appreciate that, because hearing from families really makes an impact on the committee, and we appreciate you taking the time to present.
Next up we have the David Suzuki Foundation. That’s Tom Green and Patricia Lightburn.
If we can, try to keep…. We’ve sort of had presentation creep today, so we’re going to try to keep it to five minutes, if we can, so we have time for questions. That’d be great.
DAVID SUZUKI FOUNDATION
P. Lightburn: Thank you for having us here today. My name is Patricia Lightburn, and this is my colleague Tom Green. We’re both with the David Suzuki Foundation.
This week the world’s leading climate scientists issued the latest IPCC report, which shows that climate change will dramatically affect community safety and the future of young people unless far-reaching action is taken.
Climate change is more than just an environmental issue. It’s an economic, health and public safety issue that will affect everyone, from people in the biggest cities to the smallest towns across the province. Budget 2019 should reflect the urgent need to take action on climate and build healthy, resilient and sustainable communities for current and future generations of British Columbians.
B.C. has already shown leadership in Canada and the world with its carbon tax. The province has benefited from its reputation as a climate leader in building a clean growth economy through strategic partnerships and by attracting cutting-edge clean tech businesses.
The David Suzuki Foundation recommends a commitment to increasing the carbon tax beyond 2021 through a carbon-pricing plan. The sooner a long-term carbon-pricing plan is announced, the sooner businesses can incorporate the carbon price into business investment decisions, develop strategies to reduce emissions and identify new business opportunities.
Following the recent transportation funding agreements and a funding mechanism for the Metro Vancouver region, the B.C. government now has an opportunity to strengthen its provincewide plan for clean transportation. Shifting to zero-emission vehicles — electric vehicles — and active transportation improves human health, supports B.C.’s climate targets and improves quality of life.
The provincial government should maintain its commitment to financial and non-monetary incentives to help increase demand for electric and other low-emission vehicles. Rebates should be maintained until zero-emission vehicles reach 7.5 percent of new vehicle sales and then be phased out over a two-year period.
The policy most likely to lead to the rapid acceleration of EVs in the province, however, is the proposal to implement a mandate for automobile manufacturers. Following the lead of jurisdictions such as California and Quebec, the B.C. government should enact a policy that ensures 40 to 45 percent of new vehicles sold in the province are electric by 2030.
Arguably, the most important policy area to focus on, with respect to improving the day-to-day lives of British Columbians, is creating a clean transportation system. Metro Vancouver, for example, has a focus on prioritizing active transportation — bike lanes, for example — and public transit and the need to improve the frequency and reliability of public transit.
The city of Vancouver has made impressive strides in implementing policies that enable shared mobility through bicycle- and car-shares, allowing many families to forgo owning a second car or even any car.
A critical component to ensure that municipalities can build out the necessary active transport, public transit and low-carbon transportation infrastructure is a predictable source of funding. In the case of Metro Vancouver, the Mayors Council struggled for too long to develop a new funding mechanism. B.C. needs a stable funding mechanism to partner with municipalities to support investments in clean transportation systems.
Despite B.C.’s abundant supply of clean electricity, TransLink and B.C. Transit lag behind their counterparts in other North American cities and provinces in adopting EV buses. EV buses are cost-effective on a life-cycle basis but at present entail greater upfront investment. Therefore, B.C. should support the accelerated deployment of electric buses throughout the province, including the necessary charging infrastructure.
Congestion pricing has been used by cities like London, Stockholm and Singapore to encourage more efficient use of transportation infrastructure and reduce traffic. The Mayors Council has initiated important work into how mobility pricing could fairly and equitably address Metro Vancouver’s growing challenges with congestion, all the while creating new abilities to invest in a sustainable transportation system. The foundation therefore recommends that the province should foster and enable creative approaches to addressing congestion that draw on best practices from around the globe.
With the recent LNG announcement, it is more important than ever to implement measures to reduce emissions from the oil and gas industry. The oil and gas sector is B.C.’s largest industrial polluter, and peer-reviewed research suggests that fugitive and vented methane emissions from B.C.’s oil and gas sector are at least 2.5 times greater than reported. Actions to reduce these emissions are generally considered to be some of the cheapest, easiest and most effective ways for government and industry to combat climate change quickly. Indeed, the International Energy Agency has found that half or more of global oil and gas methane emissions can be reduced at no net cost.
Budget 2019 should send a clear signal that government is going to act on its commitment to implement strong regulations and apply the carbon tax to methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. With added emissions from LNG facilities, and the associated upstream reported and unreported methane pollution from oil and gas, B.C. will need to exceed the federal benchmark to put B.C. on track to reach the province’s legislated GHG targets.
Finally, in addition to investing in clean industry and clean transportation, the foundation recommends that B.C. take responsible action to help prepare communities for extreme and unpredictable weather. We can make our communities safer today by investing in and restoring natural infrastructure such as natural watersheds, wetlands and coastal marshes that can shield our homes from the risk of more extreme weather and flooding events.
Along with the anticipated provincial clean growth strategy, Budget 2019 is an opportunity for the B.C. government to demonstrate that it is serious about taking meaningful climate action. Such leadership is critical to mitigate our emissions, to seize opportunities in the clean economy and to ensure that the quality of life, the environment and the values we cherish in British Columbia are not overwhelmed by a destabilized climate. We encourage the provincial government to seize that opportunity, and we look forward to the actions yet to come.
P. Milobar: Thanks for the presentation. The Environment Minister has made it clear that the plan is to go to $50 carbon by 2021. I think yourselves, the Sierra Club and maybe some others have called for $100 by 2022. There’s obviously a one-year difference there. As your recommendation, are you advocating that we should go from $50 to $100 from 2021 to 2022?
P. Lightburn: At this point, we’re not suggesting a specific number. We would recommend that a plan be put in place to see what the appropriate level would be past 2021.
Did you want to add to that?
T. Green: If I could just add one thing, what works really well in carbon pricing is just to have a regular price increase on a schedule that you announce far ahead, so that firms can adapt, both to take advantage of the upcoming business opportunities in the clean energy economy and also to factor it into their decisions about what to invest in — in terms of what vehicle to buy and that kind of thing.
R. Leonard: Thanks very much for your presentation. Some of the things that you were talking about are things we’ve talked about for decades, so we’re getting to the crunch.
My question is around one of the early recommendations you made around developing policy to ensure that 40 to 45 percent of new cars sold in the province would be net zero by 2030. What kinds of policies are Quebec and California doing that can manipulate the market that way?
T. Green: The key thing they have is a mandate where the manufacturers who are selling into that jurisdiction have to actually meet a quota of a certain percentage being zero-emission vehicles.
R. Leonard: Or what?
T. Green: They have a penalty, or they have to buy credits from another company. If one company is overperforming — say, Tesla…. They only sell electric vehicles, so they’re always above the 45 percent requirement. This would be in 2030; it wouldn’t be immediately. Then, they can sell those credits to another company. Without putting any costs on the public treasury, it does create this incentive and drives companies to put out more electric vehicles. It has been working very well in California and was recently implemented in Quebec.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I gather that when governments show leadership, like in California, manufacturers tend to manufacture to that standard. Why have a different standard for California and another one for New York and another one for Florida? I’ve heard that one of the arguments is that by creating policy, it tends to push manufacturers to go to the highest common denominator, so to speak, because it’s cheaper.
P. Lightburn: Especially when it’s such a large a market as California leading the way.
T. Green: Right. They’ve definitely led. As a result of California’s policy, technologies have advanced, leapfrogged. And that’s why we have a lot of the electric vehicles we have now.
R. Leonard: A follow-up question, just because it strikes me…. You say that it’s a big market in California. Earlier we heard about how cars are kept longer in British Columbia because we don’t have the salt and the bad winters, whereas Quebec has obviously got more turnover. I’m just wondering if it makes it more feasible to have those kinds of programs in place in those kinds of jurisdictions, as opposed to B.C., which isn’t as big. It doesn’t have as much turnover.
T. Green: Right. But that wouldn’t change anything. If you set the mandate, it’s new vehicle sales, right? So it’s just anything new coming off the lot, you have to have a certain percentage.
R. Leonard: A percentage, not an absolute number.
T. Redies: Last year the government removed the revenue neutrality on the carbon tax. The David Suzuki Foundation — are there any studies or insight on that? Does that inhibit the adoption of more carbon-reducing activities? Does it make any difference — I guess that’s what I’m curious about — based on your research?
T. Green: Well, it depends how the revenues are spent. One thing the government has done is it’s got the new clean growth incentive program so that industry will be getting some rebates from carbon tax payments. That will enable them to actually put in place more clean technologies. If the government were to take that money and just burn it, that would not work.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Plus it’d be bad for the environment.
T. Green: It’d be bad for the environment — exactly. But if it’s investing it in public transit, if it’s helping families out, if it’s doing energy efficiency programs, then it’s not a problem at all. So it’s a public policy decision.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, we’re out of time, but thank you very much for your presentation.
Next up we have the B.C. Agriculture Council. We have Jared DeJong, Reg Ens and Stan Vander Waal.
I’m just trying to remind our witnesses that we’re trying to keep the initial comments to about five minutes so we actually have time for questions. We have lots of great questions today, so we want to make sure our committee has time. If you would like to go ahead, that’d be great.
B.C. AGRICULTURE COUNCIL
S. Vander Waal: Thanks for the opportunity to present today. We stand here — Reg, Jared and myself — on behalf of agriculture in the province.
Myself, I’m a flower grower in Chilliwack. We employ I guess upwards of 400 people now. We’re actually a family business, started with my wife and I, 30 years ago. The biggest concerns we have are just simply getting people in the door these days.
Opportunities for growth — lots. As you know, there’s some legalization of cannabis happening, so in the greenhouse business, that means there is lots of opportunity if you do other than cannabis as well.
With that, I’d like to introduce Jared. Jared is a farmer from Abbotsford.
Jared, you can speak for yourself.
J. DeJong: Hello. Thanks for having me here today. I have a third-generation dairy farm. For anyone here who took the Abbotsford-Mission Highway to get to the library today, you drove by my farm.
Interjection.
J. DeJong: Well, I tried to wave. I don’t know if I saw you.
Anyways, I am involved with the B.C. Dairy Association at the B.C. Agriculture Council. I’ve been doing that for about three years now. There are, obviously, concerns with the dairy industry right now. If you haven’t heard about them, you haven’t heard about Trump, I suppose.
Opportunities. There are still plenty of opportunities for us, but I’ll talk about those another time. Today I’d like to thank you for having the B.C. Agriculture Council here to provide some input for the budget coming up.
A little bit about us. We are a council of associations. We represent nearly 30 different commodity associations, which is about 96 percent of the farm-gate sales in British Columbia. The objective of our council is to help B.C. farmers to be successful members of local communities.
Today we’re here with two recommendations for you all to consider that will support B.C. farmers and ranchers and also help with the government’s objective to improve utilization of farmland for farming. Our first recommendation we have is to increase the threshold required to be bona fide farmer and to access the reduced property taxes. The current income threshold to be recognized as a farmer in B.C. is quite low. It’s been the same for as long as Stan can remember, and that’s a lot longer than I can remember.
We provide a lot of details in our submission, for context. This low threshold, though, is a real threat to agriculture, in that it allows lifestyle farmers estates just to buy up farmland and to essentially keep it out of production.
As a young farmer, I want to be able to have opportunities to grow my business, especially locally. But if I’m competing with someone who sold a condo in Vancouver or a townhouse in Surrey and moved to Abbotsford to buy an estate, I’m not going to be able to compete, unfortunately. It just doesn’t help. Our desired outcome from this is that farmland is going to be actively utilized by farmers to grow and raise healthy products and support sustainable local communities.
We’re even offering to help with this. B.C. Agriculture Council is willing to take an active role in coordinating a committee to work over this issue and to figure out what would be the appropriate threshold to put the tax at, because this is an important decision. It is something that affects farmers, especially the young farmer. I’m talking with anyone, trying to go to quite a few events and speak with young farmers. If we want to be able to purchase land, we’re not looking in the Lower Mainland or the Fraser Valley. We’re looking out in Smithers or areas out there where the land price is a lot cheaper because there’s no pressure from, essentially, the urban sprawl creeping out into ag land.
I’ll turn it back over to Stan now for our next recommendation.
S. Vander Waal: A second recommendation is an ask for the government to exempt wages paid by farmers to temporary foreign workers from the new Minister of Finance’s employer health tax. The reason why we’re asking that is because currently we would see that as double-dipping, as these seasonal workers are actually covered under third-party insurance.
A little background on that. It’s a $500,000 threshold. A lot of farms are actually paying up to $500,000 in wages, so it affects a lot more farmers than what you think. There are 24,000 employees that are employed by farmers. A lot of these workers are here only for six months, so we ask consideration for that. We say that as far as a desired outcome, farmers and farm workers are not double-charged health care. That’s what would be under the current plan.
I’d just like to wrap up with a little bit of a conclusion here. We understand there are many high priorities and demands that require an investment within the province, and we believe that our recommendations today align with many of the government’s priorities. Like you, B.C. farmers and ranchers want to see a sustainable, healthy and vibrant industry.
Between 2005 and 2008, a collaborative review between BCAC and the province identified several opportunities to stimulate economic activity through amendments to certain agriculture tax policies. However, recommendations were not implemented. It is time to review and update these recommendations.
We trust the select standing committee supports our request to take more of a leadership role in updating the provincial farm tax legislation and also considers the recommendations around the exemption of the medical services tax for SAWP workers.
We appreciate the opportunity to present and provide recommendations for the 2019 budget.
Also, I’d like to remind you that we do have Ag Day coming up in Victoria on November 6, and we look forward to seeing you all there.
Thank you. We’re open for questions.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, of course, Dan Ashton has an apple there and everything.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Yeah, it was a gift. We don’t grow these ones. We grow a different variety.
Just a question, guys, and thanks for the presentation. This is an issue that’s been faced a lot, and you brought it up — the land values. Come to the Okanagan. We’re paying $175,000 an acre. Try and make a living off of that.
If you want to raise the farm income levels, for a disposition on it, are you prepared to take a look at the taxation the government also gives for the substantially reduced amount that farmers are charged? Because those levels should come up also.
My family has a small farm, where you struggle sometimes because of weather, etc., to meet the limits and carry on. But when I take a look at what the assessment value is, what the farmer actually pays taxes on, that assessment value is substantially less than the real net worth of the property.
If you want this, are you prepared to start raising the real land values in those farms?
S. Vander Waal: I’d say no. Here’s the reason why. The biggest reason why farmers have that exemption is because farmers do not benefit, under agricultural land, from the same land appreciation as others do. Farmland is much more restrictive. You can only do certain things with it. You’re very limited to production-type business on there, which means I can’t capitalize to the highest level that many other businesses can. I can’t subdivide. I can’t do all these different things.
Those are some of the reasons why the government has, in its wisdom, put together, you could say, an exemption for farmers. What we’re actually proposing here is to increase the threshold of total farm-gate sales off of a farm. Basically, we’re suggesting that municipalities are kind of getting ripped off, because they’re not getting their share of tax, and government, with regards, basically, to the tax that’s being proposed for that value.
D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Just in conclusion to that, then, are you prepared to sell your land for what the actual tax value taxation is on it? No, you’re not. You’re only prepared to sell it at what the market value is, which is substantially greater than the tax value set by the municipalities or B.C. Assessment.
It’s just something to take a look at. It has to be a two-way street, you know — from one farmer to another.
S. Vander Waal: Right. But you recognize that our proposal is not to decrease taxes. It’s actually to increase taxes on non-farm-based ag land.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Very interesting.
I do have a question, and I apologize that it’s not about the two points. I’m curious. On October 17, we have the legalization of cannabis. There seems to be a concern about food security in terms of cannabis growers taking over farmland because it may be a more profitable crop, potentially. One would think; I don’t know. Maybe more profitable than….
My whole point: is that something that the council has any thoughts about? I mean, there’s a lot of agriculture in my riding, for example, and there’s been concern that a lot of that food production will turn to other types of production like cannabis, let’s say. I’m wondering whether the council has any thoughts on that.
J. DeJong: We haven’t been approached by any cannabis growers association to really become a part of our council. Our policy on it would be to consult with the experts on it, essentially, but we don’t have any members….
The biggest effect for us, I believe, is the greenhouse growers. They’re the ones that are going to be seeing a huge decrease.
It’s a complicated issue. We’re aware of it and are not working on it but just monitoring it as it kind of goes, because we’re not really….
R. Ens: I would say that in a free market, if we need more food, then people should be willing to pay for more food. These are entrepreneurs that, if it’s a legal crop…. We have Christmas trees and we have echinacea that’s grown on farmland, which are legal crops.
Is there going to be transition? Yes, and as a society, we have to deem what’s most important. If tomatoes are more important than cannabis, then people should be willing to pay more for tomatoes so that it’s incentive for the farmer to grow tomatoes.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I’m not sure it’s that simple. Certainly, in some of the cities I’ve talked to….
Anyway, thank you. I apologize, because that was off your two points.
We’re a bit over time, but thank you very much, gentlemen. We appreciate your comments.
Next up we have B.C. Lung Association — Chris Lam.
C. Lam: Let’s follow up the marijuana discussion with the lung guy.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, we’ve got some questions for you. We’ve had a couple of meetings. I’ve been saving up the questions for you.
C. Lam: No doubt.
B. D’Eith (Chair): What we’re trying to do is keep the initial comments to five minutes. If we can, that would be great.
B.C. LUNG ASSOCIATION
C. Lam: Thanks for having me. I guess this is kind of what it’s like being the Chair of the House — eh? — with the two sides. This is very nice. This is very good.
Thank you for having me, and thank you for having the Lung Association here. This is important for us, because lung health sort of affects everybody in the province. It doesn’t really matter where you live. It really does affect….
The slides that I’ve handed out there we’ll use as a framework for our discussion today. You can see on there that one in five British Columbians suffers from some sort of lung disease. That’s a lot. That means if you don’t suffer from it yourself, you are definitely going to know somebody who does. That’s a guarantee.
That can be asthma. I have a four-month-old at home. Thirteen percent of kids today are being diagnosed with some form of asthma. Every time he takes a deep breath, I’m kind of worried about him. Maybe he’s in that one in ten — at this point, really what it is.
It could be asthma. It could be COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which I know a lot of you are familiar with. It is the leading cause of hospitalization in British Columbia right now, just simply from not being able to manage that. So that’s a big deal for us. Even lung cancer, which is going to kill more people — sorry to be blunt — than all the other cancers combined in our province this year. That’s a scary stat. I mean, those are all things that we, as the Lung Association, are trying to look at and take care of.
You can see that one of the things we really want to do is look at breathing breakthroughs. It all has to do with the air that we have. Here in British Columbia, the air is something that we are just so proud of, right? We have clean air here in British Columbia, and that’s something that we should protect and continue to protect and worry about those that breathe. Right now we sort of do take that for granted.
We’ll talk about what the wildfires have meant shortly, and even things like wood smoke in those communities. Even around this table I see there’s great representation from right across the province. A lot of you do live in communities where wood smoke from wood stoves just sort of sits on top of your communities. For those affected by some sort of lung disease, without exaggeration, that’s like having somebody sit on your chest all day long. That’s scary for those people, as you can sort of imagine.
The Lung Association, as it relates to the budget. The thing that we want to invest in, that we want the province to invest in, is research. Research is the best thing that we could possibly do for everybody who’s involved. The Lung Association alone this year is going to do a $1 million contribution to the research community. What that does is it keeps the research here in this province, it makes sure that communities are being monitored that are here in this province, and it makes it relatable to our people. That’s really important.
The other thing is that in our communities, we want to continue to do the education programs that we have. We want to educate people about certain things. That sort of leads into the recommendations that we have for you guys today. There are basically four them.
Two of them are things that you’re already currently doing with us, and we want to ensure that those things are maintained. The first of those things is our QuitNow program. That is the province’s smoking cessation program.
I was recently at the world lung conference on tobacco, a very fancy name. It was in Cape Town. Without prompting them, they all pointed to our program — and I say our program, because this is our collective program — as the gold standard. That is something that we need to maintain.
Now, here in British Columbia, we’re down to about 11 percent in our smoking rate. That is absolutely fantastic. But what that sort of demonstrates is that 11 percent is now also the hardest 11 percent to convert. We’ve got to get innovative. We’ve got to get creative. We have to spend money on innovation and creative ways to do this, and that’s important.
Coupled with that, of course, is the marijuana case. How does that affect what’s going on? How does cannabis use affect smoking? What we’re seeing with cannabis is something that we’re calling co-use. While our smoking rates are decreasing, cannabis rates of smoking are going up.
That’s actually opening the door to people thinking: “Well, if I can smoke cannabis, I must be okay to smoke tobacco again.” So we’re actually seeing a reversal on that. We really need to stay on top of that. That’s a program that’s being so fantastically funded, and we need to keep that going.
The other thing is the provincial wood stove exchange program. I had sort of mentioned earlier the wood stoves in communities. We live in this reality where in a lot of communities right around the province, you have to have a wood stove. It’s the only feasible way to heat your home in the winters. We need to burn smarter, burn cleaner, burn better. That’s if you have to burn at all. The wood stove exchange program allows us to offer rebates for better burning or more fuel-efficient types of burning in your home, so we need to keep that going.
That sort of relates to the next two recommendations. It’s so unfortunate the last few summers have been the worst that we’ve seen for fires. The unfortunate case is it’s not going to get any better any time soon. So what we really need to have is better education on what people in those communities need to do to take care of their lung health.
There has been a lot of misinformation. We call it myth-busting here at the office. In front of you, you guys were all handed a surgical mask. Hopefully, you’re not afraid that we’re suddenly going to fill the room with smoke or anything like that. But that surgical mask…. How many of you guys saw, in your own communities during wildfires, people with those surgical masks on, continuing around their regular routine?
The truth of the matter is that surgical mask does not help you. That is something that people who are suffering from some sort of lung disease need to be made aware of. All sorts of different myths such as, “If I wet a blanket and I cover my face with it, that’ll protect me….” These things are all false. We need to be able to educate the people of British Columbia a little bit better. It is going to affect the entire province.
We would recommend that we have an education program around wildfire and protecting your health. That would be something that I think would be so immensely important for the people of British Columbia.
The last recommendation that I’ll make is around radon. I’m not sure how many of you are aware of radon. I know in some of your ridings, radon is a big deal.
Radon is a colourless, odourless gas that actually is naturally occurring. It comes up from the rock. It is the leading cause of lung cancer after tobacco smoke. It’s a big deal.
To put it in context — and I don’t want to exaggerate the case — what’s happening is it’s coming up through the rock and into your basements. Your basements aren’t remediated properly. For a lot of you, probably, your basement is a playroom for your children or maybe a poolroom. If you have your child in there watching TV for even a few hours a day, that is the equivalent of a chest X-ray a day. That’s an immense amount of radiation if that’s not looked after.
Radon testing needs to happen right across the province. I would recommend to include in the budget some sort of remediation right across the province. There are hot spots in the province: Prince George, Kamloops. South Surrey is one of those areas. On the Island, north Island is another spot. I know right at this table…. I didn’t point you guys out for that exact purpose. It is happening in those neighbourhoods. That needs to be looked at. That’s radon.
To recap, in order for us to invest in B.C.’s future, continue support of our QuitNow program as well as the wood stove exchange. Wildfire education and awareness right across the province is important as well as the radon testing. Reinvigorating that would be great.
Thank you guys for your time. I’m open to any questions.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. I just had one quick question, and then we’ll go to Sonia and anyone else.
We did get a presentation from the tobacco industry. It was interesting that the advocacy was around vaping and around the fact that the claim is that it’s 95 percent less harmful than tobacco and that we should encourage, I guess, vaping over tobacco. But I’m just curious about the Lung Association’s point of view as to vaping — any studies that you have.
I do remember my grandmother telling me when she started smoking — and she eventually died of smoking, lung cancer — that it was good for you. It was being billed, being advertised, as it was good for you. “Smoke menthol. It will make you healthier.”
The point is that I’m not sure I buy it. I’m just wondering if you might be able to speak to that — not to get off your wonderful other topics.
C. Lam: For sure. I mean, it’s such a fantastic topic. Vaping is one of those issues. Bluntly put, the Lung Association…. If you have to smoke it in any way, don’t do it. It’s not going to be good for you. The part that’s sort of hidden from you…. I’m not trying to put them on the spot. Actually, I’m going to put them on the spot. They’re lying to you about it, straight up.
Let’s be clear. A lot of what they do with the vaping…. A lot of you have seen puffs of smoke in cars. You can smell it quite clearly with the flavours. It’s the flavours that have carcinogens that are through the roof. Those continue to be tested. Those are things that you have to be aware of. Basically, if you have to combust it and put it in your lungs, bad idea. It’s a terrible, terrible idea.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Interesting.
S. Furstenau: You know, this summer, when we had the wildfires, we would get these reports that the air quality index was 10 plus. Our air quality index goes from zero to 10, whereas in other countries…. I understand China has an air quality index that goes to 500, which really actually measures, I understand, the PM2.5.
I’m curious as to whether the B.C. Lung Association would be advocating for us to bring in a more accurate air quality index so that we actually know. Once you’re over 10, is it 11, or is it 621?
C. Lam: I love that you brought that up, Sonia. You’re probably referencing the fact that at one point this summer, the air quality rating in British Columbia was the worst in the world. It was off the charts. It was 1,000-something. We would advocate for that. I think it’s important for people to really understand what those numbers mean as a baseline.
I love the fact that you brought up PM2.5. That’s something, as an education piece for the entire province, I think is important as well. That relates to that number as well. PM2.5, obviously, is a particle that can get through those masks that we handed out. That is freakishly scary, because what it does is stick to your lungs. It’s like a balloon that you’re trying to blow up but someone’s just holding it. That’s what it’s like.
So PM2.5 — we would definitely advocate for a better scale that can read better.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Chris. We appreciate your coming and protecting our lungs. Fantastic.
Next up we have the Manufacturing Safety Alliance of British Columbia — Lisa McGuire.
We’re trying to keep people to five minutes, if we can. That would be great.
MANUFACTURING SAFETY
ALLIANCE OF B.C.
L. McGuire: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. I’m Lisa McGuire, CEO of the Manufacturing Safety Alliance of B.C. The packages being handed…. I have a PowerPoint in there that I’ll be reviewing.
Our organization is a provincewide industry-led, industry-funded organization providing health and safety support to the manufacturing sector. Our vision is to partner with B.C. leaders to create cultural change that ensures safe workplaces for all employees. We serve approximately 20 percent of B.C. manufacturers, with 15 percent located on Vancouver Island, 24 percent in the B.C. interior and northern region and 61 percent on the Lower Mainland. Our company is constituted of 2,266 that employ over 49,000 British Columbians.
The injury rate in manufacturing has dropped 17 percent over the past five years, compared to a consistent B.C. overall injury rate. The manufacturing sector saw the largest injury rate decrease, with over two times that compared to any other sector, between 2014 and 2016.
Members working most closely with us, using our programs and services, saw almost three times the injury rate reduction compared to manufacturers not working with us. Companies working with us over the period of time have seen a steady decline in the injury rate and up to 50 percent injury rate reduction for companies working with us for five years. The results are significant and impactful, with 3,624 time-loss injuries avoided between 2010 and 2017 for our members on an annual basis.
The financial performance outcomes are also significant, with WorkSafeBC premiums avoided by our members of $29.4 million between 2012 and 2017. These results are working towards a B.C. provincial goal of being the safest province to live and work in, in Canada.
Our target injury reduction strategy is to help our members put in a health and safety system to OSSE certification standards. The reason is academia supports higher safety performance in companies with OSSE certification, as research has been done by the University of British Columbia and the University of Regina.
We help manufacturers by building resources, tools and training, both on line and on site, and providing health and safety adviser support. This has increased their health and safety knowledge and the demand for qualified health and safety professionals in the manufacturing industry.
The impact to manufacturing is we’ve seen an inconsistent health and safety curriculum across academic institutions regarding the health and safety profession and a shortage of qualified health and safety professionals with and without experience, with a limited practical component within the program. To address these challenges, we’ve engaged in a labour market partnership to identify the future occupational health and safety demands of the manufacturing sector.
We moved forward with phase 2 and completed an occupational health and safety labour market research report, with a key outcome of recommending the standardization of the health and safety qualifications in the health and safety profession with the manufacturing industry to address these challenges.
We moved forward with phase 3 last year to define a strategy and sustainability plan to develop a standard for an occupational health and safety professional in the manufacturing industry. We’re leading the nation with this initiative. We have a commitment to provincial participation from health and safety associations from Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
We are putting in an application for phase 4 implementation of a certification program for the health and safety professional in manufacturing and, in doing so, building for the future. Ensuring that we have effective health and safety professionals for the industry will provide resources to ensure safe workplaces which are profitable and sustainable.
My key recommendations for consideration are, No. 1, to provide more funds to the Canada-B.C. job grant training program that will allow employers across the province to invest more money in their people, because skilled workers are safe workers. Funds will allow companies to make a valuable investment in the occupational health and safety training that we and other similar health and safety associations are providing.
Our second recommendation is to continue to fund labour market studies to provide a research-based approach in making decisions to invest in post-secondary institutions for B.C., to ensure that people obtain the right competencies to support their role. This program has helped to address the occupational health and safety resource shortfall that will benefit many, both within and outside the manufacturing industry.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much.
Any questions at all?
M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation. I’m really curious about the 80 percent that aren’t members. Do they get lifted by your work anyway because all the standards get lifted, or do you have a strategy for trying to bring them into membership?
L. McGuire: Absolutely. We’re funded primarily through a levy applied to WorkSafeBC premiums, so the mechanism for us to get additional members is they have to garner endorsement or support the levy on their premiums. We need to get over 50 percent within the accessible payroll of a classification unit that WorkSafeBC has defined within their process, so it is difficult. We put forward a recommendation to WorkSafeBC to consider another mechanism because it takes time.
We’ve expanded since we started as an organization in 2010. We started with 1,200, and we’re over 2,000 now. We certainly are expanding, but it just takes a long time to do so with this mechanism.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it, Lisa.
I did want to say…. I’ve been holding this off. We do have some people in the room, Councillors Carol Hamilton, Jim Hinds and Pam Alexis — thank you so much, councillors, for coming today; we really appreciate it — and, of course, former MLA and mayor of Mission Randy Hawes. Welcome.
DISTRICT OF MISSION
R. Hawes: Thank you. I spent maybe too much time sitting in the chairs you’re sitting in, and I have to congratulate you for being as patient as you are. I know how hard it is to sit through all of these presentations day after day.
B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re trying to just, if we can, Randy, keep it to five minutes, and I mean it.
R. Hawes: I did have three things I wanted to talk to you about. But because it’s five minutes, I’m going to cut it back to two.
The first one, and I’m going to make it very quick. We are building a very large recreation area here that’s called Stave West. Many of you may have heard of the Zajac Ranch for kids. It’s along that same route.
Beyond that, last year, the government funded three new campgrounds that have been built there. But when you get past where Zajac Ranch is, the road to go in is almost impassable. So I know our current MLA has been up there. I think he’s probably quite happy to help us get funding to fix that road. Oh, it’s you, Bob. Sorry.
We are looking for…. And it’s a Forestry road. The road was fixed a few years ago up to Zajac Ranch by the Ministry of Forests. They’ve done a pretty good job. But beyond that, like I said, it’s almost impassable.
We’ve got families trying to go up there now, into these new campgrounds, having a really difficult time. So what we need is Forestry, once again, or Ministry of Transportation — we’re happy with either — to pitch in and do some work to fix up that road so that it’ll get at least to the three new campgrounds. That’s our first ask.
The second one, though, is a little bit more…. Let me start by saying that our community is not unlike many others in the Lower Mainland, particularly. We have a homelessness problem and an addiction problem. What we see — and I think that’s going on in almost every community — is that year after year, it seems to be getting worse. It is getting worse.
I don’t think there are many people that can deny that what they see out on the street is not better today than it was last year or the year before. It seems to me that what we have is…. Our health authorities seem to want to do a little more of what hasn’t been working year after year. They’re not doing, in my view, what should be happening.
Here we don’t have detox. There’s no detox. If you want to get people off drugs, the first step’s got to be…. You’ve really got to get them into detox. We’ve got 30-something beds in Surrey, and there’s a very small handful of beds in Abbotsford for over half a million people. I mean, Surrey is huge, and 30-something beds…. For our people, it’s a six-week wait to get into detox.
I think everybody who’s sitting here is quite aware that when people ask to go to detox, they have to go right now, or you miss the opportunity. That’s what’s happening here.
We want detox. But once you get into detox, you’ve got to get into some kind of a treatment facility. I’m talking about the homeless people. Today we have home detox, and we have mobile detox for homeless people. How does that work — mobile detox? Well, I know what it is. It’s “let’s put you on methadone and hope,” and it’s not working.
What we’re looking for is, first, the detox, and second, ready access to treatment — short-term treatment — and then no release from that out to back where you came from, which is also what happens today. This means it’s just a revolving door. Within a week, most of those people are back where they came from.
We need long-term recovery. Long-term recovery today in British Columbia mostly is provided by non-profits. Those non-profits get from the government, if they’re on the registry, a top-up from what welfare would otherwise have paid.
They get a top-up to $30.70 a day. They can’t expand on $30.70 a day. That’s not enough money. They need to have a lift. They need to probably get, somewhere, $50 to $60 a day. If they have that, I know that they’re going to expand.
In this community, in fact, we met with the Premier at UBCM. Bob, you were there. We suggested that we would like to be a pilot project here in Mission. Like, we want to partner with the government. We’re not saying: “Do this for us.” We’re saying: “Work with us.” Give us the ability to have some of these non-profits expand in our community.
We have a large part of our community where you don’t need zoning. We know what happens. If you want to zone for a treatment facility or long-term recovery, we know exactly what’s going to happen. The lineups and the NIMBYs will stop you.
What we have already here is…. You can open a facility. Nobody ever notices the good ones, but they need funding to expand. So what I’m asking for is….
I’m going to say one more thing. The Premier did say that the government today is concentrating so much on keeping people alive that they’re not looking hard enough yet — and he knows that — at how you treat people and get them out of the ditch they’re in. Right now everything is about naloxone and keeping people alive in the big fentanyl crisis. Why don’t we work on at least stopping them from falling into that trap to start with by getting some treatment going?
That’s what we’re asking for, funding for the non-profits. And for God’s sake, fund some detox in the valley here. We would like it here. We’ll find a place for it. But we need detox.
This crisis is destroying communities all over. You hear…. Every one of you live in a community, I’m sure, that has a problem, and we’re not dealing with it the right way. Let’s get smart and deal with it the way we should deal with it.
That’s pretty much it.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Was there a third…?
R. Hawes: It was six minutes. There was a third.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah. What was the third thing, Randy? That will be my question.
R. Hawes: The third was about…. We have the West Coast Express here. They are…. Actually, TransLink runs it. To be honest, they’re ripping us off, in our opinion. They’re charging us $800,000 a year to have that train. It’s a regional ride. The regional ride across the river — 53 percent of that is paid for by B.C. Transit. They’re telling us that they can’t pay anything for our West Coast Express — a regional ride, the same thing — because it’s TransLink.
It’s just not right. What’s happening here…. Our taxpayers are burdened with the full expense of that train. West Coast Express says that if we don’t pay the money, they won’t run a station here. But they overnight the trains here, and they will anyway. What’s going on is ridiculous.
We talk to TransLink, and they say: “Well, that’s not our problem. That’s Transit.” And Transit says: “Well, that’s not us. That’s TransLink.” We need somebody to step into the middle of this and at least help us fix the situation.
That was the third thing. I’d be happy if you fix the first two, and we’ll arm wrestle with TransLink.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Any questions for Mayor Hawes?
Well, thank you very much for presenting. We really appreciate it. It’s great to have you out, and it’s great to be in the riding. Fantastic.
We’ll take a five-minute recess.
The committee recessed from 2:43 p.m. to 2:51 p.m.
[B. D’Eith in the chair.]
B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up if we could have Chilliwack and District Seniors Resources Society — Coletta Holmes.
If we can try and keep the comments to about five minutes, that’d be great.
CHILLIWACK AND DISTRICT
SENIORS RESOURCES
SOCIETY
C. Holmes: Good afternoon. My name is Coletta Holmes. I’m the executive director with the Chilliwack and District Seniors Resources Society. Thank you for the opportunity for me to present today.
The Chilliwack and District Seniors Resources Society is a registered charity providing programs and services to adults 55-plus which enhance wellness, increase independence and reduce social isolation. In addition to program delivery, we advocate on behalf of older adults and act as a resource and referral agency providing information and community supports for seniors, caregivers, service agencies and health care professionals.
One of the most frequent requests for assistance we receive is for funding or information on how to access dental care for individuals who are unable to eat due to broken teeth, missing teeth, abscess, or broken or ill-fitting dentures as the shape of an aging person’s mouth changes. It is one of the few areas where we are not able to offer any support other than assistance in writing a request for support from a service club.
Dental care is not funded or subsidized for seniors 65-plus in this province unless they were in receipt of disability benefits prior to the age of 65. For individuals who worked until retirement or beyond but did not have extended health benefits past the age of retirement, there is no subsidized or provincial coverage of any kind. There are insurance companies who will provide dental coverage with monthly premiums. However, the annual premium is usually more than the maximum coverage.
The Canadian Dental Association defines oral health as “a state of the oral and related tissues and structures that contributes positively to the physical, mental and social well-being and enjoyment of life’s possibilities by allowing the individuals to speak, eat and socialize unhindered by pain, discomfort or embarrassment.”
In Canada, more than 80 percent of elderly people have chronic health conditions, including arthritis, cataracts, back pain, cardiovascular disorders and diabetes mellitus. These conditions typically worsen with advancing age, eventually restricting daily activities, including oral hygiene activities and regular access to dental care.
As a result, even though utilization of medical services rises with increasing age, the opposite occurs with dental services. In particular, elderly people face inequity in oral health care, especially within a fee-for-service system.
Although all permanent residents in Canada have prepaid access to a general health care plan administered by a provincial or territorial government, the legislation for these plans does not cover dental services.
The elderly often require multiple medications, and a common side effect of more than 500 medications is reduced salivary flow. A reduction in saliva can adversely affect quality of life, reduce the efficiency of chewing and lead to significant problems of the teeth and their supporting structures.
Among those 60 to 79 years of age, more than a tenth, 13 percent, avoided dentists, and even more, 16 percent, declined treatment because of the cost. Thirteen percent of this age group and nearly a quarter, 23 percent, of those without natural teeth reported they avoided certain foods because of oral problems, while about one-tenth, 7 percent, of the participants reported persistent pain.
In Canada, 45 percent, and in B.C., 55 percent of older adults who were admitted to hospital medical and surgical units are malnourished, which increases length of stay and associated health care costs.
Currently there is limited coverage available under MSP for admitted emergency patients or outpatients of a department when a specialist has been requested on referral of a physician or a dentist. Extractions, removal of teeth, are also an MSP-insured service when done in a hospital, although this option is used more frequently for children, not for older adults.
An additional challenge is that, even if it is reasonable to do the extraction in-hospital, referrals are not made. In a dental office setting, where the overall operational costs for services are lower, these fees are not covered under MSP.
The reality is that most suffering oral pain do not seek treatment in a hospital setting, but they take regular pain medication and stop eating hot, cold or solid foods. Those suffering the symptoms of infection after an abscess are prescribed oral antibiotics and often on a long-term basis. Typically, a physician would not admit or refer unless the infection is serious and cannot be managed at home.
Based on low-income measure after tax, there were 70,990 poor seniors in British Columbia in 2015. In 2017, rates for dental care were increased to $2,000 every two years for 166,000 eligible children under the B.C. healthy kids program.
To conclude, we offer the following recommendations:
(1) Engage in a prevention campaign to inform and educate adults of all ages on the importance of oral hygiene throughout one’s lifespan. Include information on the potential risks of poor oral care.
(2) Provide incentives to B.C. dentists who provide charitable dentistry.
(3) Develop an information bulletin for health care professionals on MSP-insured benefits for oral care provided in a hospital setting.
(4) Establish a program similar to healthy kids, providing funding for restorative oral care in a dentist’s or oral surgeon’s office for root canals, extractions, fillings and repairs to dentures.
(5) Extend the same dental benefits to seniors who receive the guaranteed income supplement as are offered to individuals in receipt of income assistance and/or hardship assistance.
T. Redies: Thanks, Coletta, for your presentation. I know this is an area of issue for seniors. Are any provinces in Canada providing some of the programs that you’re suggesting?
C. Holmes: We have not researched that, though I have heard that it is available in Ontario, in some part — limited.
M. Dean: Thanks for your work and your presentation.
How does your organization collaborate with the advocate for seniors? I would have thought that this is a provincial matter, in terms of seniors’ rights and care, and that it would also be something that would fall under the purview of that office.
C. Holmes: Yes. Well, as you know, the office of the seniors advocate is actually relatively new. She first worked on some core issues — transportation, residential care, prescription medication in residential care.
Dental care is something that they’re aware of. However, it’s not something that is being addressed, to our knowledge. I wouldn’t say that it’s not proactive, but it’s not one of the top issues right now. Medical transportation is a huge issue, and I think that right now that and housing are taking precedence.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it. Wonderful.
Next up we have the Pacific Academic Institute of Chiropractic — Howard Green and Dr. Don Nixdorf.
We had the B.C. Chiropractic Association earlier today, just so you’re aware.
PACIFIC ACADEMIC
INSTITUTE OF
CHIROPRACTIC
D. Nixdorf: I’d like to thank the Chair and the committee for the opportunity to present today.
With me today is Dr. Howard Green. He’s the president of the B.C. Podiatric Medical Association. Dr. Green will speak to some of the elements of the documents that are in front of you. Briefly, what we’ve provided you and will provide you today is an update of the last submission we made to this select standing committee in September of 2016.
In the interest of the time that you’ve provided — which, I think, is an extremely efficient use — in the document you have in front of you, the red folder on the left page, we’ll go over this. These are some of the features of what an academic institute in Burnaby, in British Columbia, will provide. Behind it is a copy of the September 2016 submission to the select standing committee. On the right — we’ll speak to that in a moment — and behind that are three letters of indication of support from the community: the mayor of Burnaby, the Rick Hansen Foundation, as well as Fortius.
Our submission today is just basically an update on a program that’s been involved with Simon Fraser University. Chiropractic doctors have to go to the United States, primarily, or Toronto. A few go to universities in Australia or to a school in England. Dr. Green will outline his profession’s education opportunities as well. We’ve been working with Simon Fraser University for about eight years. Substantive events, including their public consultation, the board of governors’ letter of intent and other activities, have led us to continue to develop a program and plan for an academic institute — at which now, with Dr. Green’s profession, we plan to offer two professions for, basically, the price of one — in the province of British Columbia.
The government has an opportunity to increase needed health care, provide B.C.-based education and health research capacity, and help the regulatory colleges fulfil their mandate under the Health Professions Act, section 16(2)(k). As I mentioned, there are no chiropractic-podiatric medicine education opportunities, and Dr. Green will elaborate more on that as well.
As B.C. chiropractors, we recognized this process in 2008, prior to the Health Professions Act. Then, subsequent to the professions act, we developed what is now estimated to be a $6 million fund, which is to be used for the start-up construction costs of the school itself. That’s not to imply that the school will only cost $6 million — far from it.
In the previous submissions to the select standing committee, I was asked, basically, how much money the grant being asked for was and was it an operating grant or a capital grant. The reply is that it’s exclusively a capital grant. The school is self-funding with tuition. The only other aspect to the question was: would the money be needed in one fiscal year, from government? We said no. It could be for as many years as government chose to budget.
I’ll stop here and let Dr. Green speak to his profession’s interest in the education institute.
H. Green: Like Don said, my name is Dr. Howard Green, the president of the B.C. Podiatric Medical Association. My purpose here was just two things. I wanted to support the institute of chiropractic medicine in their endeavour to establish a school here in B.C. and to sort of sweeten the pot for the government, in that if we are able to go ahead with this project, we can actually include podiatric medicine at the same time and essentially integrate the two, as far as they can be integrated, and have two professional schools, really, for the cost of one. I think it’s a great benefit to the province to have something like that.
The population in B.C. right now would really, I think, benefit from having local talent, local professional support here. As Don mentioned, right now, all the podiatric medical students have to go to the United States for their education. They do four years of graduate training there, and they do three years of post-graduate training there before going on to private practice.
There’s one opportunity in Canada right now, but it’s kind of limited. It’s offered only in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. It’s offered in the French language only and is very limited for the rest of the country. Having the ability to join with the Pacific Academic Institute would be a great opportunity for the population here in B.C. and Canada.
D. Nixdorf: Just turning briefly to the aspects of this initiative, the program would have approximately 600 students. It would provide an economic benefit to the province of British Columbia each year, estimated at $44 million. The institute itself would be a permanent employer, with new employment opportunities estimated at 100 persons. Education research will increase opportunity for B.C. students and health care for the population in general.
As I mentioned, this has gone through the SFU board of governors in 2014. We will also be leaving the school, if it’s built on the SFU land, as a legacy structure built by the profession, which will become, eventually, the property of Simon Fraser University at the conclusion of the 65-year land lease.
The institute will provide the needed capacity already identified by Work B.C. government documents for the future. We estimate 150 doctors of chiropractic for the western provinces, 20 each year for podiatric medicine. The issue is important, as the World Health Organization reports that one of the top ten reasons worldwide for chronic pain and disability occurs with spines. Dr. Green has pointed out the risk of diabetes and podiatric medicine. Thank you.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much.
Just a quick question of clarification. Are you looking…? Is it $6 million? How much capital, specifically, are you needing for this project?
D. Nixdorf: The capital grant we requested in September of 2016 was $24 million. It was in recognition that the economic benefit to the province of British Columbia would be $44 million every year. So our request for a conversation and meeting with the school officials is to determine today, in 2018, what the construction needs are going to be and revise those numbers. Our $6 million continues to be invested, and that money will stay invested.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, that’s your $6 million. My apologies.
D. Nixdorf: The $6 million is from the B.C. chiropractors. We’re donating that as our contribution to the construction.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Right. Got it. So it’s $6 million from chiropractors. But there’s a need for $24 million, approximately, in addition to that?
D. Nixdorf: Right. That would take us through the construction. The three B.C. banks we’ve been to have all said that once the building is up, the cash flow is proven, and the land is secured as equity, they’re willing to look at a $50 million to $60 million mortgage to the school over a 25-year period. So we’re fine on the start-up costs that we’ve provided $6 million for. The banks are prepared to look at the program once the equity can be realized — the land, the building and the cash flow. We, frankly, just need a little help to get across the finish line so we can deliver to British Columbia education, health care and economic development.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Just to clarify, too, about the role of what we are doing here as the Finance Committee: we recommend. This isn’t Treasury Board. This isn’t the Ministry of Finance. This isn’t the ministry of post-secondary…. In that respect, I assume there’s been a lot of dialogue with the Ministry of Advanced Education on this.
D. Nixdorf: The Ministry of Advanced Education has been very, very helpful for the last four years, helping us with guidance on the changing standards for public and private institutions so that all of them meet the same standard. We’re quite aware of that in accreditation of chiropractic programs in North America as well as in the United States. So we’re looking forward to that.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks for those clarifications.
T. Redies: Thanks. Now, as Bob mentioned, we had a presentation from the chiropractors, who talked about the need and demand going forward for chiropractic services, but we haven’t really heard too much about the need and demand on podiatry. So maybe, Dr. Green, could you speak to that a little bit?
H. Green: Sure. Right now the population of B.C., I believe, is just under five million people — 4.7 million, 4.8 million, something like that.
B. D’Eith (Chair): That’s a lot of feet.
H. Green: It’s a lot of feet. Exactly. So double that. Most people have two.
Right now there are 79 podiatrists registered in the province of B.C. to serve that population, so it’s extremely underserved. There’s a diversity of the population that need podiatric care. There’s the at-risk population, which are more the diabetics, and there’s just the rest of the population that needs serving as well.
There are lot of people that tend to move to B.C. for the obvious climate issues and the outdoors issues. We have an aging population. We have an active population. They need podiatric care. They’re going to need podiatric care at some point.
It would be great to have an educational facility here in western Canada to train people locally, to either stay in practice in B.C. or stay in Canada as well, if they want to go back to their home provinces. But right now there is none, other than the one I mentioned in Quebec, which is a little bit self-serving for the province of Quebec. It’s not that I’m slamming it at all, but it is taught in the French language, so it is only really for Quebec students. We don’t have anything like that in the rest of Canada right now. So yeah, there’s a need for it.
D. Nixdorf: I should point out that the intake of these students meets the last 15-year history of the replenishment of doctors in B.C. This was not going to increase the supply of chiropody doctors, so you still have that to contend with. But we license approximately 45 doctors every year, and the intake of this program would meet B.C.’s needs as well as the western provinces. So just to clarify that we’re not expanding the population.
P. Milobar: I come from a city where we have a brand-new law school at our university, the first one in 35 years, I think it was, when it finally got approved. But it got approved with zero operational dollars, going into it knowing that they would have to fund it all through tuition, and it’s now one of the more expensive, if not the most expensive, law school in Canada, even though it’s brand-new. Thankfully, it’s oversubscribed every year for people wanting to get in.
What would be the tuition? If you’re not looking for any operational dollars, what would be the tuition range that you’re looking for to make this work?
D. Nixdorf: All chiropractic schools are self-funding. The average tuition right now, I’d say, is about $30,000 or $35,000 Canadian. If the school gets under construction in the spring and we open up in two years, we would be market-driven, along with all the other schools.
Our budget forecasts show us we’re probably $4 million on the positive side, with a 600 student population and the economies that we can deliver education, looking forward.
P. Milobar: So you’d still be on the same footing as all the American schools?
D. Nixdorf: Oh, we’ll be better. I was chair of the Commission on Accreditation for Canada. I’m confident to say we’d be better, based on my experience with the American schools, their budgets and their programs. Basically, with the opportunity we have…. I don’t want to say we can do it better, but we can.
H. Green: Yeah, I’d say in podiatry it’s very similar. The tuition in the United States right now will range, depending on the school…. Some of the schools affiliated with the universities have a little bit of a buffer there. They’re probably on the low end, probably around $30,000 a year. There are some independent schools that are up around $50,000 or $52,000 a year. So probably in that ballpark as well.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. My wife works at Fortius Sport and Health, so it’s actually really interesting to see how integrated services can work with chiro and podiatrists, and all those together. It all kind of works together.
Thank you very much for your presentation. We really appreciate it.
D. Nixdorf: Thank you very much for your time, and I’d invite you to wish Dr. Green a happy birthday today.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, happy birthday.
Next up we have Fort Nelson and District Chamber of Commerce, via teleconference.
If you could try to keep your comments to five minutes, I’d appreciate it.
B. Vandersteen: I will try to keep them to less than that.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Thank you.
FORT NELSON AND DISTRICT
CHAMBER OF
COMMERCE
B. Vandersteen: Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you today. I did provide a written submission that has a fair amount of detail in it. I’ll leave that with you. I’m not going to touch on too much of it, because I think it speaks for itself.
Some of the items on there are items that I have consistently brought forward to the standing Finance Committee, such as support in offsetting the carbon tax, for instance, for northern and rural residents.
I know that the carbon tax is here to stay in Canada and in the province, but I do think that we need to look at our regional areas, such as the north, where options to reduce our carbon footprint don’t exist. In a community like Fort Nelson, there’s no public transportation, so not driving a car is not one of our options. When it’s minus 40 out, turning down our heat is not one of our options.
Our lodges and things that are along the highway in the north have to power themselves. They have to run diesel generators, etc. It’s the only way for them to have power. They’re off the grid entirely, and the province is not making the option of B.C. hydro or natural gas available to them at this time. To then penalize them with a high carbon tax, as well, is not fair, and we should be looking at a situation similar to the offset that is seen in some of the agricultural communities.
The next big one for us is medevac and air ambulance services and the ability to have equitable medical access in small and remote communities.
Currently in Fort Nelson, women can’t have families, can’t have babies here. This puts a price tag of about $10,000 on a young family that’s starting out. It splits families apart. Often the husband can’t go because he has to stay and work. It puts moms, often, in hotels, sometimes with extended family but not always. There’s no offset to that money, to that $10,000 that’s coming out of their pocket or that extra child care and the additional stress.
There needs to be something looked at to make things, particularly like having babies or cancer treatments, equitable in the province. We should be able to have babies at home. If we can’t, we should not be penalized with a huge financial burden as well.
Then when we look at the medevac system, for instance…. I’m not sure if the committee is aware. If someone is medevacked out of Fort Nelson — for instance, a heart condition, a stroke, anything like that — and then they get released in Vancouver, they’re on their own. They have to fund their own way back. They’re often released from hospital without things like a change of clothes, finances in place or accommodation. There’s no accommodation arranged. It’s really, “Okay, you’re better now, so see you later,” and they’re stranded in a community that isn’t their own. Things like that really do need to be looked at, across the province.
My last big one, really, is regarding the new employer health tax. We know that the new employer health tax is going to take effect in January of 2019. I’m asking that the province really look closely at this and consider, at the very least if we’re going ahead with this, that they increase the payroll threshold.
Right now it’s sitting at $500,000, with the idea that this is supposed to help small business. But a $500,000 payroll really is only five to ten employees. That’s a small business. This is going to cause harm to those small businesses, either in their being unable to grow their business or in them having to potentially make decisions to lay employees off.
The other piece of that is that in 2019 those larger employers that are currently paying MSP for their employees as an employee benefit are going to be hit twice. They’re going to be charged for the MSP premium for 2019 as well as the employer health tax for 2019. That’s not fair. I don’t believe we should be double-dipping, if you will. I would even question how legal that is, to charge a company or a person twice for exactly the same service — in this case, MSP.
I would really request that the committee and the government look closely at that tax and how it can best work to serve the purpose that they’re intending but not hit businesses so hard.
We’re also seeing, with that MSP premium, that businesses that are paying it for their employees right now are going to be hit twice with the employer health tax and the MSP, but the businesses that aren’t are just getting the one tax. We’re really setting up an unfair standard for 2019, recognizing that it would drop in 2020. But how many businesses are we going to kill in the process?
I think I’ll leave it there. Thanks very much for the opportunity to put this in front of you. Again, you have my written submission, which is a little more detailed. It has a few other items in it. Happy to take any questions if you have any.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I just have a quick question for you in regards to the medevac and the ambulance services. Could you just maybe run through what you would like to see. I know you talked about it. But, you know, someone walks out of the hospital, what services should they have or what amenities should they be given?
B. Vandersteen: Well, I think if we medevac them out, if we’re actually taking provincial medevac services, because their situation is so serious, to get them out of the community, we need to get them home.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Right, so getting them home.
B. Vandersteen: Either through a medevac service back, hospital to hospital, whatever the case may be. We often have patients that aren’t considered ambulatory anymore, but they’re also not well enough to be dumped in a strange community, often without resources, and told: “Okay, now you’re on your own.”
B. D’Eith (Chair): So they may be in recovery and still have issues that they’re dealing with as well. That’s a very interesting point. Thank you very much.
T. Redies: Thanks for your presentation. I’m just curious. In terms of the EHT, what level do you think the payroll should be raised to, to make it more reasonable for small businesses?
B. Vandersteen: Off the top of my head, I would say that rate needs to be at least doubled, because we look at a small to medium business being under 50 employees, and when you consider wages in the range of $60,000 to $100,000 per employee, you’re really looking at less than ten employees at $500,000. You’re looking at roughly 20 employees, if you’re at a million-dollar payroll.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, that’s it. Thank you very much for phoning in. We appreciate you taking the time.
Next up we have Alliance of B.C. Students — Patrick Meehan and Noah Berson.
What we’ll try to do, if we can, is to keep our initial comments to about five minutes so that we have time for questions.
ALLIANCE OF B.C. STUDENTS
N. Berson: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for having us this afternoon. We really appreciate the chance to talk to you. First, a little bit about myself. My name is Noah Berson. I’m a student at Capilano University, but I’m here in my capacity as the chair of the Alliance of B.C. Students. We represent over 70,000 students across the province. I just wanted to come and talk to you and kind of give our perspective on a couple of issues in B.C. The one today we’re here talking about is needs-based grants for low- and middle-income students.
Anywhere else in Canada, across any of the provinces, if someone’s looking at going into post-secondary education, they will look and apply for grants not only at a federal level but at a provincial level. In B.C., that isn’t the case. We’re the only province across Canada that doesn’t provide any support for our low-income students at a provincial level.
I’ve had friends coming out of high school, have had friends who are older in life looking at going into university and not actually being able to afford that. Then I’ve had friends who’ve actually made the choice to go into university and are now in massive piles of debt, which really adversely affects you later on in life.
You don’t just have to hear my anecdotes. Patrick has a whole bunch of actual facts. We’ve run the figures on this and can prove how much this doesn’t give you a leg up in life, how much this actually pushes you back in terms of going forward in your education and going forward in getting your life developed.
P. Meehan: I think oftentimes when we talk about needs-based grants and the importance of them, it’s to ensure, for people who want to go to post-secondary education, that the math will work when they look at how much it will cost, what the value is and the risk that they’re taking on. That risk-reward ratio is something that is very important, but then you factor in how much it’s going to cost, after you graduate, to pay off those student loans.
I think that looking at the numbers is one thing, but looking at the numbers as a percentage of how much money you take home after you pay for taxes, transportation, housing and groceries…. When we take a look at it, we know that the median income earner, after a bachelor’s degree, in British Columbia earns about $50,000 a year. That’s from the B.C. student outcomes survey.
If you take a look at that and you subtract taxes, you subtract about $1,200 — which is the median price of a one-bedroom apartment to rent per month in Metro Vancouver — and then you subtract the cost of a two-zone bus pass and you subtract the StatsCan figure for how much a household of one would spend on groceries in a month, that income earner then has $1,881 left to spend per month.
That money goes towards raising a family, paying for a down payment, going out from time to time, paying for clothes, furniture, replacing the Ikea furniture you got in undergrad and so on. That’s a reasonable amount of money. I think that’s not a terrible amount of money. But if you’re an individual who has taken on the median amount of student loan, you’re going to have $261 of that clawed back, which works out to about 18 percent of your after-basics income.
If you’re a low-income earner who has to rely on the loans and take out the maximum loan amount for your four-year bachelor’s degree, you will then be paying about 35 percent of your income on your loans, after you account for taxes, etc.
We know that there’s a gender gap in terms of wages, and we know that the average woman earns about 90 cents on the dollar to what a man makes after a bachelor’s degree. With a bachelor’s degree, it helps, because there are various different levels of wage gap. When you then factor that in, a woman that takes a bachelor’s degree and is reliant on loans, because she comes from a low-income background, is going to have 44 percent — after taxes, housing, groceries and transportation — of her income clawed back in the form of a loan.
What that does. It takes that low-income individual — who is then moving forward in life and taking on a risk to then further themselves and improve themselves — and it’s asking them to then, for however many years after their bachelor’s degree, have between 30 and 40 or even 50 percent of their income clawed back. That’s only if you make the median income after you graduate. We know the median is going to be what most of the people are going to be making, but that’s not all. We also know that, for example, if you come from a higher-income background, you’re more likely to have a higher-income wage afterwards, skewing that median upwards.
When we look at these needs-based grants and the importance of them, what we’d like to see is the provincial government match the federal government low- and middle-income grants program. What that would do, for that woman that’s paying back 44 percent of her after-basics income into student loans, is that it would reduce that to 16 percent, which is a much more manageable amount.
We’ve estimated this amount would cost about $80 million per year for the provincial government, but the amount that that would do in terms of its impacts to students and to people after they graduate — and their ability to find a down payment, raise a family and all the other things that we like to do in our lives — would be immense.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Questions? We have heard from a number of student organizations, and there have been a number of slightly different proposals, which is great, which is fine. We’ve heard the need for needs-based grants. One of the asks has been to get rid of interest on student loans. Right now it’s at prime. I’m just wondering how that might fit into this overall strategy. Would you advocate for both, one or a combination? I’m just curious about that.
N. Berson: I think we’d absolutely advocate for both. I mean, the reduction to zero is something that this government is already committed to — and this document isn’t, at this point. We’re going to continue pushing for that reduction to zero percent on student loans. I think this goes a step further in really making sure that anyone who wants to go to school can go to school and then succeed afterwards.
P. Meehan: That reduction in interest rate would, obviously, reduce the amount of clawback that you would see, but it wouldn’t reduce it by as huge an amount. When you’re looking at prime, you’re looking at 2½ or 3 percent interest rates. The amount of that component…. Most of that’s going into the base of the loan.
S. Cadieux: Just a point of clarity on your document. In your speaking, you referenced after-basics income percentage, and on your document it says the percentage of after-tax income. I would just recommend fixing that. It’s not after-tax income; it’s after-tax-and-basics income. Otherwise, it’s 7 percent, 17 percent accordingly. So it changes the numbers.
To be clear, you’re still advocating that the government keep to its promise to eliminate interest, and you’re advocating for the changes to the granting program. Is that correct? Okay, thank you.
B. D’Eith (Chair): All right. Well, thank you very much for coming in. We really appreciate it.
Next up we have a hearing-impaired person who’s coming. I’m going to read this out into Hansard so that we can address some of these issues.
Thank you for being here today, Forrest.
Forrest Smith is our presenter.
Please accept our apologies for being unable to secure an interpreter today. We’ll work to ensure that we’re able to understand each other. Thank you again, and please go ahead with your presentation. We will ask questions afterwards.
FORREST SMITH
F. Smith: Hello. Forrest Smith from Surrey — deaf.
Sorry, no interpreter. No problem. No more talking heads.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Got it.
Do you want me to read it for Hansard? Is that what you want me to do?
A Voice: Yeah, sure.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay.
F. Smith: How do you feel if you turn the TV on and watch your favourite TV show, but the sound is broken?
One of the topics, only one topic for today: medical interpreting service. Deaf, hard of hearing and signers, etc., make a doctor’s appointment and a request for an interpreter — since 1998 in B.C.
MSP act and Hospital Insurance Act. It’s covered, but funeral, hospice, chiropractic, physio, health information sessions, hearing family in emergency are not covered. No money.
Chief Len George, father of Chief Dan George, passed away six months ago, and he was very well known in the deaf community.
A Voice: No interpreter.
F. Smith: There is an interpreter shortage.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, Forrest has drawn a diagram with the Ministry of Health at the top and PHSA. This is the money flowing from the Ministry of Health down to PHSA, flowing down to the provincial languages service, flowing down to the medical interpreter service. That creates a limited budget for the medical interpreter services.
Forrest is asking to expand the services. He’d like to see the addition….
Sorry, is this interpretive services at funerals? That’s the idea? Okay. Physio. Interpretive services.
S. Cadieux: Anything that’s not currently covered by the MSP act or the Hospital Act.
A Voice: Could you say it one more time?
S. Cadieux: Anything not covered by the Medical Service Act or the Hospital Act, where interpreting services are covered.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Bingo. There we go. Thank you.
So deaf, deaf-blind, hard of hearing, deafened and hearing loss — about 10 percent of the B.C. population.
P. Milobar: He’s saying they should qualify.
B. D’Eith (Chair): That’s who should qualify.
S. Cadieux: Currently 10 percent of British Columbians are either deaf, deaf-blind, hard of hearing, deafened or have hearing loss and do not have interpreting services or hearing services covered.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you, Stephanie.
J. Arril (Committee Clerk): If anyone has questions, we will record it into Steph’s phone, and then Forrest will be able to read it.
S. Cadieux: Forrest, what services are covered, outside of medical services, for interpreters for people who are deaf or need interpreting service? What is eligible, outside of medical, for interpreting services for those who need them? Is any interpreting covered?
B. D’Eith (Chair): Forrest just said: “Imagine being in a doctor’s office with no interpreter or having to use this phone, and how difficult that would be.”
A Voice: He can’t speak clearly into it anyway.
A Voice: No, he has to type.
B. D’Eith (Chair): There are some services for community and some for court services. In Washington state there are many high schools that have ASL courses. Here, there’s only one in British Columbia.
A Voice: Where?
B. D’Eith (Chair): So the question is: where is this school? It’s in Burnaby South. Okay. Great.
How do you do thank you? Is that thank you? Thank you very much, Forrest Smith, and thank you, Stephanie, for helping interpret all that. Appreciated that.
Thanks, everyone, for your patience with that — also, the audience and Hansard. It was a really interesting presentation.
Next up we have BCGEU, and that’s Robert Duffy and Stephanie Smith.
BCGEU
S. Smith: I’m going to be honest. I think that’s a very hard presentation to follow. I’m glad everybody learned how to applaud in sign language. That’s fantastic.
Good afternoon. Thanks very much for the opportunity to present to you and to speak to the committee this afternoon. I am Stephanie Smith, and I am the president of the B.C. Government and Service Employees Union — another Stephanie. There are three Stephanies in the room today. I’m pretty impressed.
The BCGEU is actually one of the fastest-, largest-growing unions in British Columbia. We currently represent over 77,000 members in almost every sector of the economy and in every community in B.C. They provide very critical programs and services that make our province a safer, healthier and more prosperous place to live. But we’re more than a union. We’re also part of a larger movement to create the same prosperous, compassionate, inclusive and diverse society where all of our people can thrive.
Since first being elected as president in 2014, I’ve made it a point to spend as much time as I possibly can travelling all over B.C. to spend time with my members. I see and hear about the conditions at their worksites, in their communities and in their lives. They talk to me about the challenges that they face and the opportunities that they see to make their communities and their province work better for working people.
My presentation today, and the detailed written submission that supports it, reflect the priorities and the interests of our members and the individuals and families they serve in communities across B.C. It focuses on key policy areas that we believe should feature prominently in Budget 2019 in order for the government to build on the bold, innovative measures undertaken in the previous budget and throughout their time in office. These areas include poverty reduction, housing affordability and environmental protection.
Since 2017, the current government has pursued an ambitious and progressive agenda that aims to put people first and make B.C. work for people. The BCGEU has supported that agenda by working closely with the government on policies and initiatives such as affordable child care; socially responsible cannabis sales; taking steps towards a provincial poverty reduction strategy; launching advocacy campaigns to mobilize the people of B.C. and influence the government’s actions on issues such as affordable housing, including implementing protections for rental affordability and electoral reform; advancing the critical work of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in B.C.; increasing the minimum wage; and publicly acknowledging the government’s accomplishments in many other areas.
At the same time, we have not shied away from speaking up when we believe the government’s agenda could and should be going further, faster or in an alternate direction. And it is in the spirit of speaking up that I’m here today on behalf of BCGEU members to acknowledge that our province’s key macroeconomic indicators show that our fiscal and economic position is strong and to urge the government to address the persistent and worsening affordability challenges faced by working people in B.C. and to continue working to reverse the damage done by years of underinvestment.
We need to build up the social services, regulatory and educational capacity necessary to support an effective and sustainable poverty reduction strategy; address B.C.’s ongoing housing crisis by increasing public investments in affordable housing; protect B.C.’s environment and natural resources through increased investment in the Wildfire Service and B.C. Parks, coupled with improvements to environmental oversight and management of natural resources.
Our proposals. We ask the committee to consider adopting the following recommendations.
First, budget for an effective poverty reduction strategy, including moving forward with accessible and affordable child care. The BCGEU supports the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C. and their call for increased capital support for publicly owned child care assets, including child care spaces in new affordable housing construction and new school construction. The BCGEU supports the $10-a-day campaign’s call to add another $1-an-hour wage increase for early childhood educators in 2019.
Increase funding, staffing levels and service delivery in key ministries, such as MSDPR, MCFD, Mental Health, and Advanced Education, and key programs such as the residential tenancy branch, employment standards branch and the Labour Relations Board. Reopen those closed offices. Re-establish full operating hours, and increase front-line staff to ensure effective, accessible, in-person service.
Increase welfare and disability rates. Index them to the cost of living. Increase earnings exemptions. Reduce barriers to access, and clawbacks.
Make education, apprenticeship and training opportunities accessible for key groups such as low-income, vulnerable youth; rural and northern residents; the differently abled; and Indigenous peoples across B.C.
Ensure that mental health and addictions services are available whenever and wherever they are needed, including updating the Healthy Minds, Healthy People plan.
Second, address the scale and depth of the housing crisis by accelerating direct provincial investments in public and non-profit sector housing. The housing sector is a major contributor to our province’s overall economic growth, yet housing affordability and availability are also a major crisis for working people in communities across B.C. We’ve learned from experience that market incentives and partnerships are not sufficient to address the crisis. A major public sector investment in general, mixed-income affordable housing construction is the only way to guarantee that new, affordable, public and non-market-rental housing is available when and where British Columbians need it.
Finally, protect B.C.’s environment and natural resources by investing in the Wildfire Service, B.C. Parks and improved oversight. The economic, human and health impacts of B.C.’s wildfires are getting more severe every year and are predicted to get worse. The government needs to increase the functional capacity of the B.C. Wildfire Service in all areas, from front-line firefighting response and planning to prevention, direction and prediction of fire activity.
Continue reforming the professional reliance system for environmental management, and fundamentally rebuild the public agencies mandated to protect our land, water and natural resources. Restore staffing and resource levels in key ministries responsible for research, analysis, compliance and enforcement related to environmental protection and natural resource management.
To support these priorities, the BCGEU recommends the government consider the following revenue-generating opportunities to ensure stable, ongoing funding for core programs and services, including eliminating costly oil and gas subsidies, implementing a 22 percent tax bracket for individuals earning $200,000 a year and above, restoring the corporate tax rate to 13.5 percent and investigating the feasibility of the BCGEU’s proposed land-value taxation as a potential source of new public revenue.
In summary, our written proposal contains more detailed analysis and additional recommendations. The BCGEU urges the B.C. government to implement meaningful revenue improvements in key areas of the economy to reduce poverty, take action on housing affordability and protect our province’s environment and natural resources.
Thank you very much for your time this afternoon.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you, Stephanie.
P. Milobar: It’s been a few years there, Robert. It took me a second there.
R. Duffy: We were in high school together.
P. Milobar: We’ll just agree to not have any stories. Keep us both credible.
One question for you. Scanning through this very quickly, you’ve obviously been supportive of the recent tax changes. You reference how you’ve been asking for a lot of those tax changes over the last few years. I commend you. Usually we get asked for things with no revenue stream.
I want to make sure I understand the presentation within the document you gave us, the different areas you’re saying to increase spending in. You also suggest to increase taxation by $1 billion. That’s in addition to all those other taxes that have already gone up. You’re saying, “Increase some of the other taxes by an additional $1 billion,” not reshape the existing tax increases that have taken place. Have I read that properly?
R. Duffy: I think, in essence. We identified some opportunities for savings as well. But yeah, the increase to the top income tax bracket and cancelling subsidies to the oil and gas sector would account for the bulk of that. Then there would be some other revenue generated as well.
M. Dean: Thank you for your thorough analysis and all the recommendations here. As you understand, it’s a big, comprehensive agenda, so there’s a lot of juggling of priorities. I’d like to just have a little bit of a look at some of the detail, especially because so many of your members are across lots of different ministries and sectors.
You’ve talked a little bit in here about the Ministry of Children and Family Development. Can you give us some understanding of what the scale of the high turnover is, relative to other areas of employment in the sector, and any other ideas or strategies about how we can actually — it’s not necessarily going to take money — increase the stability in that ministry? Because it’s all about the quality of services, at the end of the day, and taking care of our people who are taking care of our children.
S. Smith: Thank you for that. I don’t have the actual attrition rates. We can certainly get those for the committee. We do know that the retention of those who work particularly in child protection social work has been very, very challenging. It’s been difficult to recruit people, particularly in rural areas. Through the bargaining process, I think we’ve tried to address some of that. I don’t know that that’s fully….
I think what I hear from members…. Truly in a non-cost manner, it’s a morale issue in terms of both the perception of the work that they do and feeling that over a number of years now, it hasn’t been necessarily about helping and supporting families in crisis. It’s always been at that high-crisis intervention level rather than the supports that were provided to families to assist them through crisis moments not resulting in, perhaps, child apprehensions but building a stronger family and community.
I think that there’s a lot of work that can be done there. We hear from members on a regular basis that they could, working in Cranbrook, cross the border into Alberta and do the same work but do it with better compensation and what they feel would be better support.
B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re out of time. I was enjoying that so much, I didn’t look at the clock. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this very detailed presentation.
Next up we have B.C. Federation of Students. We have Aran Armutlu and Michael Olson.
Thank you so much for coming. If we can try to keep the comments to about five minutes so we have time for questions, that would be great.
B.C. FEDERATION OF STUDENTS
A. Armutlu: Hi. My name is Aran Armutlu. I’m the chairperson of the British Columbia Federation of Students, and this is Michael Olson, our executive officer. Before beginning, I would like to acknowledge that today’s hearing is on the traditional territory of the Stó:lō Nation.
The BCFS represents over 130,000 students from 13 institutions in every region of the province and advocates for high-quality, publicly funded and accessible post-secondary education. I know that you’ve already heard from many of our member organizations a few times over the past number of weeks.
While you may have heard much of what I’m going to say in some form or another, I’m confident I will be providing new information and fresh perspective. I’d like to start by telling you that the B.C. Federation of Students is no longer affiliated with the Canadian Federation of Students. In fact, no students union in B.C. is affiliated with the CFS, except the student association at Kwantlen.
We want to be clear that we are not tied to advocacy initiatives that are not in line with our own, and we are not here to ask for free education, though as a fundamental principle, our organization is dedicated to the removal of all financial barriers to post-secondary education. Recognizing the political landscape in which we operate, our intent is to take a pragmatic approach to advocating for real change towards our ultimate goal.
I’m here to talk about those realistic steps we can take today to guide us towards a better future for students in British Columbia. Those steps are, very simply, the elimination of interest charged on student loans, the implementation of a B.C. student grants program and an investment in open educational resources.
As tuition fees increase in British Columbia, student debt continues to be a major concern for students and their families. Financial stress has a statistically significant negative impact on students’ performance for multiple reasons, such as the inability to purchase required texts or the requirement to work more hours to meet financial obligations. A study from the Millennium Scholarship Foundation found that students with large amounts of student loan debt are more likely to drop out. Yet if even a part of their financial aid was non-repayable grants, it had a positive impact on their likelihood of staying in school.
The average student loan debt in B.C. is over $30,000. To make matters worse, those who can’t afford to pay their education costs up front are forced to pay more than those who can. With an interest rate of prime, borrowers currently pay an additional 3.6 percent on their B.C. student loans and more on their federal portion. Interest charged on a student loan of $30,000 adds an additional $9,000 over a ten-year repayment period.
Student debt has serious repercussions on completion rates, but it also delays important milestones. A 2018 RBC report shows that 50 percent of recent graduates report not saving enough for emergencies. Forty-five percent are delaying home purchases, and 25 percent delay having children.
The completion grant proposed by this government does nothing to alleviate any barrier to accessing education, nor is the value significant enough to affect graduate debt levels in a meaningful way. What students need is a system of non-repayable, upfront, needs-based grants to ensure that access to education is equitable for those from low- and middle-income families. It is for those reasons and more, that we have two recommendations regarding student financial assistance: the elimination of interest on all B.C. student loans and the establishment of a comprehensive, upfront, needs-based student grant program.
Now, one of the costs of education that is commonly overlooked is the cost of textbooks, often an expense only realized by students once in the first week of classes. Traditional print textbooks can be extremely expensive. Publishing companies engage in predatory gouging of students. While textbook prices continue to rise, textbook sales are declining. Students are choosing not to buy textbooks because we can’t afford them. That is having a negative impact on student success. If we believe in student success as a priority at our institutions, then the costs of textbooks and accessing course materials are barriers to that success.
The government has already identified OERs as a solution to the textbook dilemma and has empowered BCcampus to oversee provincewide implementation. Since the creation of BCcampus open education in 2012, open educational resource development has saved students nearly $9 million. Our recommendation is for the government to inject $5 million of one-time additional funding to BCcampus. The funding would allow the creation of more resources, the maintenance of already created resources and the creation of ancillary resources like test banks and assignments.
Many students in B.C. are barely scraping by as costs for housing, food and tuition fees continue to rise. Students are those who will be the teachers, doctors, scientists, trade workers and child care providers of the future. They will be the ones to contribute to our economies and shape our societies. Post-secondary education is the platform on which they will launch into all of those things. They cannot do that effectively with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on their backs, delaying all of the life choices they want to make.
Our government has the ability to support the launch and growth of these students and citizens in B.C. by taking pragmatic, realistic steps towards making post-secondary education more affordable for students.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today. We look forward to answering some of your questions.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you so much. And you are right. We’ve had a number of different student groups come, and some have actually advocated for different issues. For some, it’s student housing. For some, it’s getting rid of the interest. For some, it’s the grants. But normally, when asked, it’s like…. “Well, would you want both?” The answer is yes.
We’ve had various presentations in that regard. I do appreciate the fact that you are being pragmatic and that you’re coming at this from a point of view of: what can we try to do within the resources that we have?
I was trying to look through here. Do you have an idea of the cost if we went to…? What kinds of funding levels are you asking for in terms of the grant program? What does that look like in terms of the budget?
M. Olson: That’s a great question. In 2004, when the B.C. grant program was eliminated, it was about an $80 million program. Just alone, thinking about the inflation over the last 14 years, we would be looking at a $100 million grant program as a base point, not even taking into account the expansion of tuition fees and of student enrolment increases over the last 14 years as well. So as a starting point, we would be looking at a $100 million program.
Now, there are a lot of things that can be done to mitigate those costs — that’s not a direct increase in costs to the government — through the redirection of funds that are otherwise allocated to the completion grants, as well as other financial assistance measures that can be redirected accordingly to help to soften that blow in the budget.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. We really appreciate the very…. I like the endnotes. That’s awesome. Reminded me of university. It’s pretty cool. A lot of research.
We are actually going to go right to the open mike. If we could ask Richard A. McWhinney to come on up.
Richard, just so you’re aware, the open-mike portion is basically a straight five-minute, no-question type of approach, if that’s okay. If you wouldn’t mind just keeping your comments to five minutes, that would be wonderful.
RICHARD McWHINNEY
R. McWhinney: Certainly. Bob, my MLA, and the rest of the committee, thank you very much. All afternoon, I’ve heard a wish list from various people. They’re all worthy. I want to change that around. John Lennon didn’t say it first, but he probably said it best: “Imagine.” I want to give this committee the other side of that.
You can, in reality, give $1 billion a year to social services in this province. Everything we’ve heard about, from Fort Nelson to Port Renfrew to Elkford…. I’ve worked in them all in my background in consulting engineering. Where I’m coming from is how we should and how we should not fight forest fires. I’m including changes to the B.C. building code. I was on a B.C. building code committee for ten years, and we didn’t make the changes we should have.
In urban forest interfaces, we should go to non-combustible construction. That means no vinyl siding, and it’s metal roofs and operable shutters on the windows. So whoosh, the fire can go by. Part of that, around every rural community, we need — I’m not going to give you the dimensions — somewhere between half a mile and a mile where we take out the fuel, the dead-and-down. Then maybe we go five miles or four miles, and we take out the dead-and-down. We create a buffer zone.
Besides that, I’m going to suggest that the people that live in these rural communities need these jobs in the middle of the winter. That’s when we can do this the best. It doesn’t matter whether it’s frozen or it’s snowing. If you don’t believe me, go check northern Saskatchewan, because that’s when they cut that small timber.
You may ask: where do I get a billion bucks? We’re not paying for it with cash we have if we’re borrowing it. I don’t care whether we borrow it by selling B.C. Gas or selling $100 million off of B.C. Hydro’s contingency fund. That’s a billion bucks.
You might say I represent one person. I don’t. I represent five million people. I represent the people in Telegraph Creek. I represent the people that had to leave home.
I can’t think of anything more destructive than losing your home, losing your community and having nothing to go back to. There is no dollar sign on that. Unfortunately, a lot of that is the small Indigenous res and rural communities.
I want to leave with you that it is possible, and this committee has the possibility. Yes, don’t let the hair fool you. For 45 years, I looked like Bob. The day I retired I quit cutting my hair. But my brain didn’t retire.
I sit here, and I look at it. I’m not taking notes. I’ve given this presentation before. I gave it after the Kelowna fire. When I look at the houses that survived and the houses that burned, some of it saved were pyramid cedars that ran up to the houses. The core of them are absolutely dry and dead. Those houses burned.
You can control this with all sorts of things that we are part of — part of our environment, part of our building code and part of how we create work in these small communities in the wintertime. We cut the dead ones down. We get rid of the fuel. In these spaces, we create a belt where there is no fuel. That’s where we burn the piles of fuel in the wintertime.
I thank you all for hanging around and listening to me last. But I hope I’m not the least. Okay? I want to say that Forrest Smith said something wonderful. You and I both heard and saw him. I live in this community where Jenny Stevens has given 50 years of her life to public service. She’s blind. She has the best vision and wisdom on that municipal council. So yes, I’m happy to live here — 50 years.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much, Richard. We really appreciate it. We were just saying how we did hear some of that echoed from when we were up north, about the fuel that’s sitting there too. So we really appreciate your comments. Thanks.
R. McWhinney: Like I say, I worked in those communities, from Fort Nelson and all around.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thanks so much.
All right. We’re waiting for one of our presenters who’s coming on as a teleconference. In the meantime, if we could have Wes Pidgeon.
Wes, just to reiterate, the format for the open-mike part is five minutes. Go for it, kind of thing. There’s no time for questions, unfortunately.
WES PIDGEON
W. Pidgeon: I’ve had a very unique career. Some would consider it being…. Well, I’ll just call it unique. I was the day program coordinator in the Chilliwack school district. That’s where a lot of the gangs got their foothold. Those kids that were coming up, for every one that didn’t do well, 20 did. That was my program. When I left the community, it fell.
I ended up working for the province of British Columbia’s psychiatric and forensics, the Maples Adolescent Treatment Centre. There’s nothing higher — that is, the province of British Columbia — in this province. Every community that needs help working with children and they’re not sure how to do it came to us. You had a 28-day assessment, but you also had the “unfit for trial,” the “thought disorder” and the “not criminally responsible due to mental disorder.”
The problem we have with the Maples…. It’s been there for almost 50 years, and there is no political will to walk into that institution and do a proper investigation on the abuse these kids are having to put up with daily.
When you’re working side by side with someone that punches a kid in the head and they promote him…. When you’re working with somebody who’s driving the kids…. Well, we’ll bring witnesses that were in the vehicle where they were being driven to by staff. That was really interesting. We’ll call it “when you blow the whistle.” The only person that gets the grief is the one that opens their mouth.
Unfortunately, there was a little girl named Serena Fry. I’ll quote this one. In the 1990s, she was suicidal, and she was 12. Staff let her walk around Vancouver by herself on a Friday night. A 27-year-old picked her up, took her to his apartment and raped her. She came back and told staff what happened. Everybody circled the wagons, because they all knew they were in trouble.
This one got a lot of press, and the reporter won awards across Canada but did not get the story. That’s why she won the awards, for not getting the story, for your information concerns. The bottom line is the RCMP were called off, and they let the guy off the hook. Everybody thought they were home free, and they got away with it. Shortly after that, Serena committed suicide. She hung herself in there.
To this day, nobody will touch it. When I walk into offices, and I’ll say MLA offices, the abuse I’ve taken, the slander….
The protective services in Victoria have been used as a weapon. When I actually spoke to one of the inspectors, not only did he misrepresent himself, but when he found out what this was really about, he said: “You’ve got to be kidding. No one has investigated this?” Last December he referred that…. Well, at first he was going to do Children and Families. I said: “You can’t do that, because they would be in conflict. They’re investigating themselves.” He said he was going to go look for an independent investigator.
Nobody has contacted me since last December. Now, I have spoken to five people on this board, this committee, about this. For the other four, I spoke with their representatives. Nothing.
In fact, on my phone…. I can pull it out right now, and I can show you five calls from somebody’s office. One was on Sunday morning, Thanksgiving weekend. There’s a staff member that’s doing a really good job trying to help. But the individual I spoke with…. I had to go all the way downtown, Burrard Street in Vancouver, for a half an hour meeting, and I haven’t heard from them since.
Then we’re told that they can’t make a recommendation and set up a meeting to talk to the current children’s representative. They tried with the last one, so now they can’t? We have emails coming out of the children’s representative’s office basically saying it’s not their obligation to protect these children.
We got an email a couple of days later saying that we’re going to have legal problems if we show anybody these emails, which we are told we’re going to be in trouble for. You’re not going to do your job, and I’m not allowed to tell anybody that you’re not protecting children. Are you kidding? We’ll get into that on another date, as to who sent me that because they are in conflict. They were never supposed to see that paperwork. That was a direct, distinct conversation I had with them.
How does a guy who has a background like mine that can’t be duplicated…? I walked out of that psych ward, and I took them on. I came back to the Abbotsford-Mission district. I was a community service officer with probation. This is considered one of the biggest, if not the second-biggest, offices in the province, and I ran it seamlessly. So I do have that legal component.
Still, anybody in this room that makes an allegation about protecting children…. Sections 14(1) and 14(2) of the children and families protection act says that if you know of a child being abused and you do nothing about it, you can get six months in jail, a $10,000 fine or both. All you have to do is make that comment, and if nobody investigates it, they’re liable.
How does a guy with my background…? And that’s not counting my volunteer work. I spent six years volunteering on a crisis line. That’s only the tip of it. I served this community tirelessly, and pretty much any community I’ve been in. This isn’t my hometown. I lived here for a short time. My grandfather worked for this district for almost 40 years with a grade 6 education. You’re supposed to take care of your neighbour. That’s what I was taught. You’re supposed to look after each other. You’re supposed to tell the truth, but unfortunately, there’s a big price to pay when you do that.
Now, if a potential employer wants to find out about me, they will phone the Maples. The Maples…. We had to stop using them because they won’t even admit that I worked there. This is pretty disgusting. We’ve turned over just about every stone imaginable, and nothing.
So here I sit, not giving up. I’m going to keep on trying. We’re supposed to protect those who can’t protect themselves. We’re supposed to stand up for them. I’ve been bullied. People have tried to intimidate me. You put your hands in your pocket, you duck your head down and slope your shoulders over, and you walk out the door quietly.
I have had one of the political parties, at a public forum…. They had seven members of that party surrounding me, as I sat at the back of it. That was about having religion in politics. That’s what this little presentation was about, 140 people in the room.
The man that actually sat down beside me, who was supporting them, has his own little news site on the Internet. He sits beside me and takes my picture. I smiled for him. He goes: “What do you think of that?” I said: “Post it on your site.” He says: “Why would I do that?” I said: “It’s evidence.” He cussed me out and got up, and he took a man in the back room to tell him everything they were going to do to me, so they would provoke me and that I would punch him in the head. Those are the words.
The man they took in the back room….
B. D’Eith (Chair): Wes, I just want to say we’re at seven minutes now, so two minutes over. If you could wrap it up, I’d appreciate it.
W. Pidgeon: Okay, I’ll tie it up real quick here.
The man in the room — I had dinner with him two nights before, at a little community dinner in a small town. I gave the prayer. He’s already given a statement. He’ll testify. I guess the bottom line is: I need to know when we’re going to get proper investigation. You don’t need any more money. You need someone to tell the truth.
This isn’t a unique story. Serena Fry is not unique. This is going on in all your communities. This is going on throughout this province of British Columbia. And unfortunately, these kids aren’t getting the help they need. Now, I don’t know if I’m going to get more grief out of this, but you know, nothing surprises me anymore.
Thank you for your time. Thank you for your patience. I’ve sat here all day, and I’ve listened. There have been some really good things said in this room by some of the canvassers. Several of them, I do know. In fact, my work greatly affected their communities and their jobs, so they could do their job just a little bit better. But you do it quietly because it’s not supposed to be about us.
Sorry that I went over.
B. D’Eith (Chair): No, that’s fine. Thank you for talking to us.
W. Pidgeon: I’ve left my phone number. If anybody wants to do the right thing, we’d be more than glad to hear it.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you.
Have we had better luck with the teleconference? We are good. Do we have Clean Energy B.C. on the line?
J. Mather: Yes, Jae Mather here.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, Jae. I’ll get right to it. If you could please limit your comments to about five minutes, and then we’ll have some questions.
CLEAN ENERGY B.C.
J. Mather: What I’m wanting to talk to you about is our new white paper, which we are going to be releasing next week, which is electrification of British Columbia. The reason why Clean Energy B.C. has written this paper is because it’s come to our attention that in order to meet the climate targets of British Columbia, there is a grave need for a lot more electricity.
Basically, about one-third of all our energy in British Columbia comes from electricity and two-thirds is delivered by fossil fuels. The only way to meet our climate targets, a 40 percent reduction in 2030 and 80 percent by 2050, is to transition that energy that’s in fossil fuels over to clean electricity.
Currently the B.C. government and B.C. Hydro have low load growth forecasting going forward. All of our research is showing that that’s not something we can replicate anywhere. Also, there’s only one other place in the world that’s expecting low load growth, and that’s Syria. There seems to be a disconnect with what’s happening in the global trends as well as our local trends.
The reason why that’s the case, the low load forecast, is because B.C. Hydro is currently not taking climate change into account when it’s doing its electricity assessments for the future. We decided to look at this from the perspective of: “Okay, how can we hypothetically meet those targets?” We split it off into three different sections: transportation, the built environment and industry.
The white paper has been developed over the last nine months. The results which are quite interesting are that if we were to transition to about 30 percent of buildings in British Columbia being heated from gas over to air-source heat pumps, we would be able to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of those heating systems by almost nine million tonnes a year, which is quite significant, considering the total emissions in B.C. are 62 million tonnes.
It’s a significant dent in the marketplace and our carbon. We would require for that around 21 percent growth in electricity production. To put things in perspective, Site C will generate around 7 percent additional power in B.C. So it starts to show that just heat pumps alone could consume three Site Cs’ worth of energy by 2030.
We look at transportation, and it becomes quite interesting too. By 2030, we would possibly be able to displace about three million tonnes of carbon, which would require about 1¼ Site Cs’ worth of electricity generation, or 8 percent additional power.
The other thing that’s interesting about the electric transportation transition is that 84 percent of all the CO2 reduction comes from light-duty and medium-duty trucks. Cars only make up 15 percent of that total. Currently, the large focus is on the electrification of the car fleets, in the current plans, and what we’re trying to show is that actually, it’s the light- and medium-duty trucks which are far more important and that we need to be definitely focusing in on, especially when it comes to mandates for new vehicles.
It also presents us with some great opportunities. By 2040, we could reduce our carbon emissions by 11 million tonnes as opposed to three million at 2030, because as vehicles go out of the fleet and are replaced, that creates a massive opportunity.
If we look at industry…. Looking at what LNG Canada has got planned, it is about two billion cubic feet of natural gas per day that’s converted into 13 million tonnes of LNG. That alone, if it was extensively electrified…. This is the LNG facility, the transmission and the upstream elements, which could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 72 percent or just over five million tonnes. Currently it’s not possible to do that, because we’ve already got the lock-in for the gas processing to be done by burning gas at the LNG facility.
With LNG Canada’s proposed approach, they’re going to reduce the emissions by about 22 percent, with what they’re planning on doing, versus conventional. Whereas what we are showing is that the 72 percent reduction is possible — not in the LNG element but in the transmission and the upstream — if we were to electrify. This is basically the compression stations that move the gas down the gas line. This is the drilling rigs that are throughout the Montney region.
We could reduce those emissions by a total of 63 percent with the LNG Canada processing. It’s quite an interesting amount, and that could amount to a 14 percent increase in electricity in B.C. Putting things in perspective, that’s only two billion cubic feet of gas per day at that facility.
The estimates are that by 2030, we’re going to have 11 billion cubic feet of gas being processed in British Columbia. If we were to electrify the entire upstream element of that, we could reduce those emissions by about 16 million tonnes of our current 63. If we don’t, we’ll be adding 30 million tonnes to our carbon emissions.
This is the key point. We’re trying to draw attention to the fact that electrification presents B.C. with a gigantic opportunity for onward investment. Our members have over $10 billion of capital that they have ready to invest in B.C.’s renewable energy sector. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for what could be possible.
At the same time, we can not only meet our carbon emission reductions; we can build in resilience and build significant amounts of local economy. Because if you start putting in heat pumps and electrified transport and electrifying industry throughout the province, it cascades those economic impacts and the values throughout the entire province, not just concentrated into single areas.
The other thing that we wanted to mention is there’s a RECSI fund from the federal government. RECSI stands for Regional Electricity Cooperation and Strategic Infrastructure Initiative. They — the federal government — have allocated $1.2 billion towards carbon reduction infrastructure in British Columbia, and they have identified electrifying gas and LNG as the number one priorities. So it all aligns.
B. D’Eith (Chair): I wanted to say we’re at about seven minutes now. If you wouldn’t mind wrapping it up, that would be great.
J. Mather: Yep. That’s it. I’m done.
B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Thanks so much.
I have a quick question for you in regards to trucks. We hear, especially up north and in some of the rural areas that transitioning trucks to electric is a challenge because of the cold and because of the distances — especially in some of the northern areas.
I’m wondering. Are you confident that the technology will catch up or that there will be alternatives?
As you said, most of the EV vehicles are cars. That seems to be the big push right now. But you said that trucks are causing a lot of the emissions. Could you just talk to that?
J. Mather: Absolutely. The vast majority of light-duty and medium-duty truck movement in major port facilities and logistics infrastructure sites in B.C…. They actually only travel less than 200 kilometres a day. They’re coming from ports to the local distribution areas — in Vancouver, the Port of Vancouver — and would then go down to Cloverdale, where the largest logistics centre is based on the Lower Mainland. Actually, a vast majority of the light- and medium-duty truck transport ranges are already able to be met with existing technology that’s already been out there.
If you think of a 1920s electric milk float that was driving around in the old days — those things could actually deliver that job right now, already. With what Tesla’s doing…. In 2019, 2020, they’re going to be launching their 18-wheeler, which will have an 800-kilometre range, which will basically be perfect. The reality is that even though the diesel trucks have a longer range, around 1,100 kilometres, the drivers aren’t allowed to drive more than eight hours a day anyway. Ironically, the drivers themselves are the limitation. The Tesla trucks are designed to meet that requirement.
You’ve also got….
B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, we lost you. We can’t hear you, I’m afraid. Oh well. Thank you very much.
That is our last presentation for the day. If there were any other comments and you can hear us, please send them in writing. We’ll be happy to look at those.
If I could have a motion to adjourn.
Motion approved.
The committee adjourned at 4:32 p.m.
Copyright © 2018: British Columbia Hansard Services, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada