The committee met at 8:05 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Today we are doing an annual review of the statutory offices of British Columbia — three-year rolling plans, annual reports and budgetary estimates for fiscal 2019 and 2020.

First up we have the Office of the Auditor General.

Welcome, Carol. If you want to maybe also introduce who is with you, and we’d love to hear your report.

Review of Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

C. Bellringer: Thanks so much. I am happy to introduce…. Actually, I’m sure all of you know Russ Jones, who’s the Deputy Auditor General and runs all of the corporate services areas in our office, and Stephen Kearsey, who directs our human resources area. Absent today is our interim comptroller, John McNeill, who was instrumental in putting documents together.

We, sadly, through this past year, lost our comptroller. She passed away last June or July, so we’ve certainly been going through a transition in the office with her loss. It’s a big loss to us. Here’s to Katrina.

In terms of what we’ve presented, we don’t have a big ask for you, but I will just quickly run through the background of our estimates.

We started a comprehensive planning exercise when I joined the office. I mean, it’s something that’s pretty common to a new Auditor General coming in. It’s something we’ve maintained, and annually, we do an update to it.

In the performance audit coverage plan, it was a bit of a shock to recognize that it would be the last one that I would be preparing, that it would take it up to the end of my term. Where does time go? It certainly flies by quickly.

We issued two coverage plans. The plans help us make sure that we are maintaining coverage across the full government reporting entity. We rotate the financial audits, and we try to maximize the effectiveness of the performance audits.

The financial audits are included in a financial statement audit coverage plan, and that is required by the Auditor General Act to be presented to the Public Accounts Committee. That was done on November 5.

In that plan, we’ve made a recommendation that we continue as the direct auditor of 18 organizations. That does include the fact that we do the full financial statement audit of the Public Accounts, which is the rollup of absolutely everything that the government is controlling. It’s somewhere around 140 organizations in total.

When you break it down to the components, 18 of them we are recommending we audit ourselves. Twenty-four of them are audited by external accounting firms, but we do oversight procedures. They are the more significant ones. We do things like attend the audit committee meetings, and we get access to all of the various board and audit committee materials and go through them in quite a lot of detail. Between the direct audits and the oversight, that represents about 84 percent of government’s total revenue and ex­pen­ditures.

Last year we came to both the Public Accounts Committee and to you with the request to have us start the direct audit of two very large audits in 2019-20. That’s the University of British Columbia, UBC, and B.C. Hydro. So this plan continues with what we had recommended last year, and it’s been incorporated. The budget increase that you provided the office last year and then with an indication of what that number would be for the current year are what we’ve carried forward for the staffing that would enable us to do all of the audits that are in that coverage plan.

[8:10 a.m.]

The performance audit coverage plan — we have a little more flexibility with that one. It’s a plan that we put together. We choose those areas where it has the greatest residual risk and is of significance. They are the performance audits that we select, based on quite an intensive planning process that we do by sector, and we do quite a lot of outreach with government officials as well as those that reach out to us through our citizen inquiry process.

In that coverage plan, that’s the one where it takes it out to 2022. That’s the list of audits that we will start in that period. They may not necessarily all get finished. It includes 19 projects that we’re currently working on. They’re in various stages. Some are just starting, and some are about to be released.

Then there are 50 new projects, on top of the 19, that will get started between now and March 2022. We’ll continue to go on with our planning so that we have a lot of internally available information for whoever comes in. But it is an important thing to allow the next Auditor General to make the final selection of what they’d like to propose. We’ll update the plan each year to make sure that anything that drops off is removed. Anything that we have a story to tell or something that is an immediate need…. We certainly will continue to add the odd thing, but this will be the last full plan that we’ll try to put together publicly.

With all of this, the operating budget is…. There is an increase to the budget. It’s all related to non-salary items — 3.1 percent total over the last fiscal. It’s a 1.8 percent increase over what the committee recommended for our ’19-20 — for that year budget, which you recommended last year. The total budget is $18.2 million for the ’19-20 fiscal year. That compares to $17.7 million in the ’18-19 current fiscal year.

In table 1, we show the difference in the budget that was recommended by the committee last year and the budget we’re requesting. We did follow the recommendation of the committee and have not asked for a further increase for salaries and wages. We had, last year, asked for salaries and wages for some IT positions. It’s still somewhat of a challenge. I mean, it’s not an easy thing for us to do, but we still continue to manage the salaries and wages within the envelope that’s been provided, and we’ll move things around to accommodate that for the IT needs.

The increases are largely due to non-salary-related ex­penses. One is a $50,000 increase, specifically for professional services. One of the external firms does the audit of the Liquor Distribution Branch on our behalf. They’ve done that for a couple of years now. That’s included in the financial statement coverage plan. But they’ve notified us that they will require an additional $50,000 related to the increase in their fee related to the legalization of cannabis. There’s quite a lot of extra work that they will have to do within the Liquor Distribution Branch. That gets passed on through us. It’s paid for by the Liquor Distribution Branch, but it flows through our budget.

The occupancy costs. There’s an increase there of $35,000 that we weren’t expecting for the annual increase in the rent tied to the city of Victoria consumer price index.

In travel, we did underestimate the costs last year. Now that we’ve got more specifics pulled together, we added $55,000 to account for the change in our audit location mix. It’s not just UBC and B.C. Hydro. Some of the audit jobs are outside of Victoria, and we’ve moved it to 75 percent now, up from 66 percent of the work. That 75 percent will be outside of Victoria, our non-CRF…

R. Jones: CRF is the consolidated revenue fund — ministries and stuff.

C. Bellringer: …the non–public accounts audit.

[8:15 a.m.]

Information technology. There’s a one-time increase to replace essential software and hardware, for $130,000, and $45,000 for recurring expenses for new data analytics and applicant-tracking software subscriptions. Those are pro­ducts that we’re currently using, and there are all kinds of changes with the subscriptions for them.

On the other side, in our capital budget, we have a decrease of $65,000. The majority of that are IT-related capital costs. Rather than needing equipment, we need items that are classified as operating expenses. That’s part of the explanation for the increase in IT in the operating; it’s reduced in the capital. Then there are just ongoing, normal operations for furniture and a refresh of IT. The anticipated costs for that capital line is $185,000, for ’19-20.

We’re asking for…. Overall, the request is for a budget, for 2019-20, of $18.22 million to fund the operations of our office for the year ending March 31, 2020, and $185,000 to fund the capital expenditures for that year.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much.

I apologize. I just used your first name when I introduced you as Carol Bellringer. I appreciate your presentation.

Just before we get started, I had a question. I know that the last time that you presented, there were issues around staffing and things. From your letter at the beginning, that seems to be working better now. You seem to have figured that out. I know there were a couple years where there was money coming back because of the staffing. Maybe if you could just expand a little bit on that, because it seems that that’s working much better right now.

C. Bellringer: I’ll start with it, and I could ask both Russ and Stephen to add to it. It is one of the more critical areas in the office. It is definitely working better. We’ve had a lot of hirings. The problem with having vacancies that weren’t filled is the part that is fixed, but we still have a steady outflow — in particular, in financial audit.

We hire students. We train them, and then they leave for jobs where they can get promotions quite quickly when they leave the office. That continues to be something that’s quite common right across Canada in legislative audit offices, and it’s quite common, as well, within the accounting firms. We don’t see it as something that’s indicating a particular problem in our office, other than that we have to expect that that is what’s going to happen.

It’s also important to continue to hire those students. We’ve been hiring more in number because we know we’ll lose some, but if we don’t, we’re going to be a few years down the road where we won’t have people at the more senior level who’ve trained through the office, understand our operation and have continued to stay. We’re still working with the student program. Stephen can talk a bit more about some of the things that we’re doing to continue to attract good students — and the retention as well.

We lapsed again last year. We tried so hard to spend money. Two years ago we realized that if we started the year only hiring to the budget level, as people left and then there was a lag in hiring them, you’d obviously lapse at the end of the year. We didn’t think that that was going to be the best way to accomplish our plans, so we overbudgeted two years ago. We brought in a little bit more each quarter as we realized we were fine, and we made sure that we were hiring in anticipation of people leaving.

Well, last year we did the same, and we really took a chance. We decided that it was a risk worth taking, and we did overspend significantly — if you looked at it from the perspective of what budget we put in place on the first day of the year — anticipating that people would leave during the year. We still didn’t spend it all. It’s quite a bit. I think it’s $900,000 that we ended up lapsing. Some of it came as a surprise at the end, from some of the contract amounts with professional services. We didn’t need to use as many as we had budgeted for.

[8:20 a.m.]

We’re doing the same thing this year. We start the year being prepared to hire people. If you were to look at the budget on day one, it would be higher than our total budget for the year, but we anticipate ending the year on budget. That’s the case for the year that we’re in now. We’re tracking to be pretty close to break-even.

R. Jones: One of the other things we’ve done to try and attract people is…. Because we’ve got such large audits coming up in Vancouver, we’re starting to hire people that we’re going to allow to live in Vancouver, which really does help bring them back into the office. We’ve been able to get two or three people that used to be with the office that now want to come back. They live in Vancouver, and if they can work completely out of Vancouver, it certainly makes it more attractive for them. It also helps reduce some of the travel that we would have anticipated for UBC and B.C. Hydro.

We’ve also kept a number of our competitions open. For instance, we have a competition to hire auditors, which are pretty much the basic…. Once you’ve got your CPA designation, we classify them as auditors. We keep that competition open now. Instead of just having one for three months, we’re keeping it open throughout the year to try and hire people as they become available, and it seems to be working.

As we move people up within the organization to, say, manager or senior manager or executive director, we then have vacancies down below that we can fill with the auditor positions, which is really important for training in the office. We’ve been very, very proactive this year for the financial area, trying to bring people in, because it is a very competitive market out there — really, really competitive. CPAs are in demand, which is nice, but at the same time, it makes it very difficult for us to hire them. So we’re trying all sorts of innovative ways to keep the staffing up.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great.

S. Cadieux: I just have a couple of questions, and they all are kind of related to staffing. I’ll pose them all, and you can handle them in any order.

What is the total staff of the office, again, to update my memory?

S. Kearsey: One hundred and twenty.

S. Cadieux: How large is the HR team to manage that staff?

S. Kearsey: Three.

S. Cadieux: If you’re saying piloting the work from home, or out of Vancouver, should save some travel, then are you saying that you would have been asking for even more travel money if that wasn’t the case?

R. Jones: Yes, that would have been the case.

C. Bellringer: If I could add on that. Having said that, our interim comptroller is actually looking quite carefully at the travel expense line to say: “Are there ways we can continue…?” It’s a large line item even before the increase, and he’s looking at it very carefully to see if there are other ways we can cut it back.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Because it is a relatively big increase in the travel, could you maybe elaborate a little bit more on that and the need for the extra money?

C. Bellringer: Other than a couple of the folks that we’re now able to bring in through Vancouver, all of our staff operate out of Victoria. A lot of the audits that we do are in Vancouver. Some of them are in other communities, including Kelowna…. Russ can rattle them off better than I. He’s usually at most of them.

R. Jones: We have a health authority in Kelowna, of course. We have a number of them in Vancouver. We’ve also taken on, this year and in the future, Columbia Basin Trust, which is connected with Columbia Power Corp. Because Columbia Power Corp. has reduced their operations and Columbia Basin Trust is one audit we’ve never ever done, and it’s very, very important to the economic development of the southeastern part of the province, we felt it would be good do to that. There are travel expenses there. Also, when we do oversights of school districts across the province, we have to go to some of those audit committee meetings once or twice a year.

[8:25 a.m.]

We cover a fair amount of the province, and as Carol alluded to earlier, because we had done a number of audits in Victoria for more than the five, six, seven years, we felt it was time to switch off some of them, like B.C. Transit and a couple of others. So now we have a few more outside.

What we used to be able to do was charge for travel and then recover it from the entities and apply it against our budget. We don’t do that anymore. Whatever we charge just flows through to the government from those entities, so there are no offsets available.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much for that explanation.

N. Simons: There is some discussion around possibly having a satellite office in Vancouver. Would that address some of the issues around the travel costs?

C. Bellringer: To a degree, it would. In fact, we’re looking at whether we even need an office. We’ve had some fairly informal conversations at this point with other independent offices — as well, though, with the Office of the Auditor General of Canada, who do have an office in Vancouver.

And it isn’t just Vancouver. That’s the other…. I mean, Vancouver is a big part of it, definitely, especially with the two big audits, but the travel is not in any one place, so that becomes a problem for us with having a satellite office. We wouldn’t have enough staff in any one location to really change the travel dynamic. It would be that then they’d be travelling from a different place. If you do go through the list of the direct audits and the oversights, there really are…. We attempt deliberately to make sure that we get pretty good coverage right across the province.

R. Jones: If I may add. As well, if we were to set up a satellite office, that would then increase our operating expenses, under the rent and building expenses. So we have had, as Carol mentioned, informal chats with the Office of the Auditor General over in Vancouver. If we need to use some space, they will allow us to use it, which is good.

The other thing, I think, which is important to bring up is that not only have we got a few more audits outside of Victoria, but the number of weeks of travel out of town has increased because of UBC and BC Hydro, as you can imagine. They’re very big audits, so that tends to push up the amount a bit too.

C. Bellringer: One of the opportunities for the cost savings is in trying to use electronic communication, as opposed to being there in person. We can’t eliminate being there in person; that’s an important part of the audit process, in particular for the field staff. You have to look the auditee in the eye when you’re auditing, especially for us older folks who learned how to audit before there was an electronic alternative.

Having said that, I’ve been attending a number of the audit committee meetings by just phoning in, and it’s actually quite an effective way for me to use my time. The meetings aren’t that long. They’re not the full day. So we’re looking at ways to also cut back on some of the travel and just substitute it with something that we can do remotely.

R. Leonard: First of all, I want to extend my condolences to all of you with the loss of your colleague. I know it’s very disruptive as well, quite apart from the personal toll it takes. But to replace somebody that you’ve worked with as part of a team — that’s a big thing.

In looking at the whole issue…. I remember, last year, talking about the challenges you face with getting a full complement of staff and retaining them. I appreciate that it seems to be endemic in auditor general offices across Canada. What are some of the opportunities that might be considered, in a move going forward, to make it a workplace of choice, for employees to want to stay? Or is it a perception that is unassailable that you have to move on to be able to move ahead?

C. Bellringer: I’m going to ask Stephen to give you a few of the examples of…. His department has been quite busy trying to think of those things, and we’ve done quite a few things over this last year that have started. We’re starting to see some traction.

[8:30 a.m.]

S. Kearsey: The office does conduct exit interviews to find out. The reality is that the Office of the Auditor General is very small. We grow a very valuable commodity: accountants and IT security professionals. However, what that means is that while we do a great job — we’re a greenhouse of growing these young professionals — the career advancement is very limited when there are only a couple of directors or executive directors that they can look at.

However, there are 19 ministry finance shops. So to find a positive in this, they’re not jumping out to firms for the big money; they’re staying with government. But they’re moving to ministry finance shops, school districts, etc. To find a positive there, the number one reason for our people leaving is promotional opportunity within government. It’s kind of like Treasury Board. To be a Treasury Board analyst was quite a good thing. To come from the Auditor General office is quite a good thing.

What we’re doing is just trying to address some issues around how we can give people a sense of further career. Right now they can progress through the lower levels quite quickly, strongly, but then there’s this sense that you’re going to hit a ceiling quite quickly — again, because our office is small. But through other career projects, use of temporary assignments, secondments, we’re trying to give these people a sense that there’s a career here for them, a long and productive career in the office, as well as interesting projects to work on.

M. Dean: I was also interested in staff and training and travel, so I’m going to go a little bit into some more detail. Can you just explain a little bit about the petty cash — how much you have and how it’s managed — and, also, the miscellaneous receipts?

R. Jones: We don’t have a lot of petty cash, but we do have some available, just in terms of: if there are local purchases that need to be made below a certain dollar amount, people can flow it through petty cash. But it’s a very small amount.

Sorry. What was the second question?

M. Dean: Miscellaneous receipts.

R. Jones: Sometimes we’ll receive funds from, like, the Canadian Council of Legislative Auditors for when we go to a conference. So we receive those back from them to pay for our travel and whatnot.

T. Redies: Thank you, Mr. Chair, and apologies for coming in late. I hope this question hasn’t been asked.

I was curious how the B.C. Hydro audit was going. It commenced last year, and you were managing, I think, finding the right balance between outside talent and internal talent. Maybe you could just comment on that.

C. Bellringer: In fact, we have provided a transitional plan to B.C. Hydro to give them an outline of everything that we’ll be doing for next year’s audit. We’ll be presenting that to their audit committee this week.

We did hire one external director who will work on the B.C. Hydro audit. The executive director in charge of the audit is internal. She’s one of our strongest auditors, so we put her onto that job, and then we’ll backfill the rest of the things that she used to be working on.

The rest of the staffing are internal, people who are already working with our office, including our professional practices people. I’ll be signing the opinion on the audit, Russ is the quality control review, and we are bringing in external support for any of the specialty areas, like some of the hedging transactions and that kind of thing.

We’re auditing the B.C. Hydro statements but not the subsidiaries. So B.C. Hydro will continue to appoint an external auditor for Powerex and for the pension plans. We’re coordinating the work with them, as we speak, to work through avoiding any duplication.

R. Jones: As Carol mentioned, the director that we were able to hire is an ex-KPMG. He worked on the audit of FortisBC, so he brings some significant knowledge to help us out.

[8:35 a.m.]

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation so far this morning.

Just further to what you had said, from my past experience, having CRA or having PST auditors inside your business is very important, in my way of looking at it. I really do hope that a lot of….

You had mentioned that a lot of it can be done electronically these days with the transfer of information back and forth. I think somebody in the position of the Auditor General’s office, being inside these various entities on a full-time basis…. We had to make space all the time in our offices for auditors from government agencies.

I really think it’s important that your staff or your associate staff that you’re bringing in to have a look at this are in those offices during this audit on a continual basis. There are an awful lot of nooks and crannies in all of these organizations, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to take the dust off some of those cupboards and have a look inside.

C. Bellringer: Your comments are extremely well…. We very much appreciate them, and we’ll be echoing them to supplement the things that we believe in as well.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Any more questions? Seeing none….

Thank you very much, Auditor General. We really appreciate you coming in, and Russ and Stephen. We appreciate the very thorough explanations and answers to the questions.

We’ll just take a short recess while we wait for the Office of the Conflict of Interest Commissioner.

The committee recessed from 8:36 a.m. to 8:54 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the Office of the Conflict of Interest Commissioner — Paul Fraser.

Please go ahead.

OFFICE OF THE CONFLICT
OF INTEREST COMMISSIONER

P. Fraser: Can I introduce Carol Hoyer, who is our new executive coordinator. Carol comes from the Ministry of Health and has yet to be heard on whether this is a promotion or not.

[8:55 a.m.]

She succeeds Linda Pink, who some of you will have known over the years. Linda retired in July, happily, and we’re grateful to her for her service.

Carol has assisted me, as Linda did before, in preparing all of the notes that you have. So if there’s anything that’s gone wrong, we’ll be turning to Carol to explain that. If there’s any praise, you can guess who will field that. I’m not going to take any more of your time than you want me to take.

You know that ours is the smallest of the statutory officers’ budgets. I think it’s worth observing — for you and to others who may be seeing either the transcript or the broadcast of what we have to say — that part of the reason that it is the smallest has to do with the vision that the Legislative Assembly has shown in the past. By that, I mean that the Legislative Assembly, a few years ago, took the plunge and bought the red brick buildings that we inhabit — the buildings that have an expected life expectancy of seven seconds when the big one hits.

In any event, the Legislature owns the building. That means that the Legislature is our landlord. That means that we have very pleasant landlord-tenant relationships, and we don’t have to go into the commercial market in order to house ourselves. The reason we’re there and not elsewhere, ostensibly, is that, as some of you will have recently discovered, the bells work in our office so that if people are called to a vote, they can, if they’re not wearing high heels, make it back to the chamber in time to take the vote.

In any event, all I want to say is that in an effort to make sure that we spend our funds wisely, we are careful, as you would hope and, certainly, expect of any office. That includes, for example, being able to recycle and have access to all of the furnishings that are in our office. We don’t, in that sense, have to budget for any of those kinds of expenses. That, it seems to me, is a benefit to all of us, in terms of showing economies where we can.

The budget request this year, coming to the point, is exactly the same as the budget request was for last year. The only thing that has happened is that there’s been a movement of $5,000 in two STOBs: one up, one down. We expect that we are going to be able to live within our current budget allotment for this current fiscal year and that we can live within the budget request.

That’s always subject to a caveat that we have to issue. That is because we are responsible for what is essentially a complaint-driven process. If we find ourselves unexpectedly in a situation where we have a request for an opinion or an investigation leading from that that requires us to, for example, engage counsel, then under those circumstances….

We consider those to be exceptional circumstances, because we have in our office two people, our legal officer and myself, who are legally trained and are lawyers. To that extent, we achieve a savings on a year-over-year basis by effectively doing what legal work is required. But as has happened, if we find ourselves in court and if we need representation, I think it’s inappropriate for us to appear in that forum, given the separation of powers and so on. In those circumstances, we will retain outside counsel.

[9:00 a.m.]

The caveat really extends to this: if we need help, unexpectedly, then we know that we can come back to the committee with an explanation and request your assistance. Otherwise, we anticipate that we will be able to live within the requested budget.

You have, I think, in your materials our latest annual report. There’s a certain sort of symmetry about the process that we go through every year here, because essentially, I find myself talking to my consumers as well as the Finance Committee. It’s really very difficult for me to embroider on anything, given that all of you have gone through the process that we have for each and every one of the 87 members.

We operate on a basis that we don’t want to acquire a reputation as a scold. We want to dispense what Aristotle once referred to as practical wisdom. We don’t want to be pushovers. We do want to be firm in terms of what we do and how we do it and the demands that we make and must make under the statute.

As I think all of you will have individually heard me say that the process that we administer is a process that has no moral imperatives, in the sense that if you look through our act, you won’t find the word “morality.” You won’t find the word “conscience.” You won’t find anything that would require someone in our position to judge a person’s conduct as a matter of fact.

The reason for that is that 26 years ago, when the act was introduced and passed and other acts similar to it followed across the country…. The thesis, based on experience elsewhere, was that if you require elected officials, elected Members of the Legislative Assembly, to disclose their assets and their liabilities, that requirement — assuming that it’s enforced and is reasonable — will, by itself, given the conscience of people who attain high office, result in them disclosing what they have done.

Further, what happens is that under the act, if a member either acquires something or disposes of something, then within 30 days of that event occurring, it’s necessary for a notice of material change to be filed with our office. That’s a bit annoying, in the sense that 30 days is a rather short time — or can be. In some circumstances, however, 30 days would be quite appropriate — if we’re talking about a transaction of stocks, for example, in circumstances where there were debates going on in the House and so on.

The policy that informs the act is that a citizen, a constituent — anybody in British Columbia who’s interested — should be able to tell on a 30-day-cycle basis what a particular member has or used to have and then make their own judgment as to whether or not the conduct of that member has apparently been influenced by that particular transaction. It follows that if we don’t have that essential base information, the system is not working well. So we are careful to make sure that that is enforced without being absurd about it and, hopefully, while always being vigilant that what we need to have happen, has happened.

I don’t propose, Mr. Chair, to go into the line-by-line items in the budget. All I’ll say is that it assumes that the three staff members, two of whom are part-time, and our full-time member, who is Carol, would receive a 1.5 percent cost-of-living increase, as is the case, I think, across the landscape.

[9:05 a.m.]

It also assumes that there would be 2 percent — what I’m referring to as a retention payment — to the two senior staff members: our legal officer and our executive coordinator, who have been with the office now for some years. I say “retention agreement” because the nature of our work, which is highly confidential, is such that one doesn’t want people coming and going in terms of our staff. We’re obviously very careful about how we monitor the information we receive and so on.

We have been able to, over the years, attract talented people and keep them. Part of that has been, in our experience, showing our approval of the valuable work that they’ve done by modest retention payments — in this case, 2 percent — which would be added to their base salary.

That is really all I think I need to say about the line items. They speak for themselves, and there are only two that have been changed, up five and down five, in terms of some benefits STOB and a staff salary STOB.

I’m open to your questions, Mr. Chair. I’m aware of your schedule today and how busy the committee is. I’m also aware, if I may say so, that the committee has done its work again this year in a fashion that I believe most British Columbians don’t perhaps fully understand. My spies tell me — and they’re all sitting in this room — that you’ve travelled a fair amount as usual. But the idea of having a committee of the Legislative Assembly, charged with the responsibilities that you have, going out into the community is exactly what this democracy needs.

I feel keenly about it, as well, because our office has jurisdiction that is limited to only British Columbia, Alberta and New Brunswick and that gives members of the public the status and the standing to make requests of us and to engage our process. So every day, essentially, in the work we do, we hear from members of the public who want advice, who have questions.

One of the things that our experienced staff does is to not only indicate what our limitations are but to be as helpful as possible in terms of redirecting inquiries that we receive. We keep track of all of these calls. We deal with them quickly — not so quickly that we’re being either abrupt or hurtful. But we try to get our work done in a timely way. As far as the work for members is concerned, we have a two-day absolute turnaround, and we try to get things done faster than that.

I don’t know whether there are any questions. If there are, I’m pleased to answer them and to engage with you as you wish.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, and thanks for your kind words in regards to the work of the committee. I can probably speak for all the members. We really appreciate that.

I just have a quick question in regards to…. How is it that you can increase salaries and decrease benefits? I’m just wondering. Is it newer staff? I’m just curious how that worked.

P. Fraser: On the benefits side, it’s a little bit complicated in the sense that the STOB 4 benefits includes my benefit package. As some of you will know, I was recently reappointed to a third term, for which I’m grateful, but there have been changes in the terms and conditions that surround my appointment, and some of those changes have yet, ultimately, to be costed out.

[9:10 a.m.]

One of them has to do with the fact that the Legislative Assembly, through the government, which negotiated my terms and conditions and put them into an OIC, will be providing a policy of insurance — or coverage, whatever, of insurance — equal to one year’s salary. That, I’m told, is something that this budget will have to bear, or at some point, it will have to be costed out and attributed. But we don’t know yet how that is going to work, because so far as I know, the coverage has not yet been arranged. It’s in process.

At the moment, when we look at the benefits STOB from past years, that benefits STOB included payments that were made directly to an insurer on my behalf, with me at least as the insured. That’s changing. How that’s going to be absorbed has yet to be seen. I think, with the tolerances being sufficiently large, that we’re going to be able to absorb it without having to come back here. But I’m not entirely sure of that.

As far as the salaries are concerned, we have had, in this past year, a larger salary commitment than we will have going forward this year. Ms. Pink was a more senior employee, and her salary was correspondingly higher than Carol’s is. So there’s a difference there, in terms of what we have to put out. As you can see, the numbers are very small, but they need to be explained.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much.

M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation. I had a small question of clarification and then a question in a bit more detail around salaries.

You described the salary increase of 1.5 percent, but then in here it says “plus 2 percent increase.” So does the 1.5 percent apply to one staff member, and then the 2 percent applies to the two part-timers? Is that correct? It’s not both added up together.

P. Fraser: The 1.5 increase applies to all staffers, all three people, not to me. That’s the cost-of-living increase that the employees across the government have been receiving. The 2 percent is reserved for the legal officer and the other senior coordinator.

M. Dean: I remember previously we talked about how there was a payment in lieu of pension for you, for your position. I don’t see that in the figures here, so I’m just wondering what arrangements have been reached with your third term — congratulations. I’m hoping that that’s not going to be a surprise coming up in years ahead.

P. Fraser: No, those surprises were unfortunate when they occurred before. There is no pension benefit being paid to me under the new terms and conditions that I have agreed to.

I can also tell you that my salary has been frozen for the next five years, so to the extent that in past years, the increase that the Chief Judge of the Provincial Court received was passed on to all of the officers of the Legislature, that still applies, except to me.

My salary will remain frozen, and the arrangements that we had anticipated in the past aren’t reflected in this new document. That’s really part of the answer I should’ve given to the Chair, for the savings that we expect will occur.

B. D’Eith (Chair): That piece actually really helps. Thank you very much.

Are there any other questions at all?

Well, thank you very much, and yes, of course, congratulations again. Thank you for your presentation.

Welcome, Carol. We love having you on board.

I think that’s it. If we could have a short recess…. Don’t go away, just for committee members. That’d be great.

The committee recessed from 9:14 a.m. to 9:16 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): If I could have a motion to go in camera.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): So moved.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 9:16 a.m. to 9:41 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, we’re on the air.

Move to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:41 a.m.