The committee met at 10:09 a.m.

[S. Bond in the chair.]

S. Bond (Chair): Good morning. Thank you very much for joining us today for this meeting of the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

I want to thank my colleagues for being here today. I know that we are on a constituency week, and everyone keeps extremely busy, so I appreciate you taking some time out of your constituency work to be here. Also, it is, obviously, just before Easter, so very much appreciated.

To the Auditor General and her team and the comptroller general, as well, we appreciate the participation here today.

We have a number of items on our agenda. We’re going to concentrate on one of them this morning. Later this afternoon we have two other reports that we’ll be reviewing.

I again want to thank the committee for its hard work. When we became the new committee, there was a significant number of reports that had not been reviewed. We are almost caught up.

[10:10 a.m.]

I want to thank the Deputy Chair and others who’ve helped facilitate getting this much progress made and, obviously, the Auditor General’s office, which is required to be here every time we have one of these marathon meetings. Much appreciation to the Auditor and her staff.

We welcome the government officials that are here today. The process will be such that the Auditor will make some opening remarks about the audit that we’re going to look at. Today it is the Independent Audit of Grizzly Bear Management, which was released in October of 2017, an important and often emotional issue. So we’re hoping that we remember the scope of our discussions around this table. It’s important to do that.

We’ll have the Auditor and her team…. The Auditor will make some comments. Her team will present, and then, as I understand it, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations will lead the presentation. But we’re joined by members of the Ministry of Environment as well today, so they are more than welcome to participate.

I think one of the things I certainly found in my reading of the report is we’re going to need some time to walk through the presentation from Forests as they explain the processes behind the management issues that have been raised.

With that, over to the Auditor General for her opening comments.

Consideration of
Auditor General Reports

An Independent Audit of
Grizzly Bear Management

C. Bellringer: Good morning, Chair, Deputy Chair, committee members. We’re pleased to present our audit on grizzly bear management.

In 1995, the British Columbia government publicly committed in its grizzly bear conservation strategy to maintain healthy grizzly bear populations and the ecosystems that they depend on. While government has undertaken activities to conserve grizzly bears and their habitat, some other commitments have gone unfulfilled.

I do want to just emphasize in terms of our audit role that we audit against government policy to determine the extent to which, and how well, it’s been implemented. We’re not proposing a policy, in any way, throughout this report.

We’ve made ten recommendations in the report to improve government’s management of grizzly bears, including our recommendation for government to clarify the roles and responsibilities between the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

With me today are members of the audit team — Morris Sydor, the assistant Auditor General; and Ardice Todos­ichuk, who is the director and who will lead you through a summary of the report.

A. Todosichuk: Good morning, Chair and committee members.

In this audit, we examined whether the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations were meeting their objective of effectively managing grizzly bear populations throughout British Columbia. We expected the ministries to have instituted a program that includes a cycle of continuous improvement: planning, doing, checking and adjusting, and reporting out to the public on their performance. We found that the ministries did not meet many of our expectations or their efforts were limited.

British Columbia is one of the last areas in North America where grizzly bears live in their natural habitat. The health of grizzly bear populations is an indicator of how well the ecosystems and the species that live there are doing. In other words, if grizzly bears aren’t faring well, it’s a sign that the ecosystems as a whole are facing challenges. While grizzly bear populations are increasing in some areas, this is likely happening independent of an adequate management framework.

As the Auditor General noted, a grizzly bear strategy was developed in 1995. However, there is no grizzly bear management plan, and many of the ministry’s long-standing commitments have gone unfulfilled. This includes an organized inventory and monitoring strategy.

In addition, there have been limited actions taken for threatened grizzly bear populations. Out of the 56 grizzly bear populations, nine are threatened. The government’s primary objective for these is to recover them to a sustainable level. However, government has only created one plan for one population, and it has never been implemented.

We also examined how the ministries were managing human-related threats to grizzly bears by focusing on four key areas: reducing illegal activities and human-bear conflict, oversight of bear viewing and grizzly bear hunting.

The conservation officer service within the Ministry of Environment responds to calls related to human-bear conflict and works to reduce illegal activities such as poaching or failing to report a bear killed due to conflict. The number of incidents attended by the conservation officers is on the rise, and the conservation officer service has not evaluated whether it has sufficient resources or tools to meet this growing demand.

Also increasing is the number of grizzly bear–viewing operations. Bear viewing provides economic opportunities in B.C. but can have negative impacts on grizzly bears. It is currently not regulated.

[10:15 a.m.]

Over the years, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations has made advances in its hunting policy and procedures. However, reviews by external experts, both in 2003 and in 2016, of grizzly bear hunting indicated that government can still make improvements.

We found the greatest risk to grizzly bear population in B.C. isn’t from hunting. Rather, it is the degradation of grizzly bear habitats from human activities. For instance, the increasing length of resource roads in the province has allowed greater human access to grizzly bear habitats that can result in unregulated hunting activity and a growing number of human and grizzly bear conflicts.

Providing secure and connected habitat for grizzly bears is critical for conservation of this population. However, there is no connectivity strategy within B.C. parks and an overall lack of initiatives to address the need for wildlife corridors and safe transition areas.

The ministries have undertaken activities to reduce grizzly bear habitat degradation and provide secure habitats, but for most of these activities, they have not evaluated whether these efforts are effective. Without a process for reviewing and adjusting their activities, it is difficult for the ministries to ensure that grizzly bear populations throughout B.C. are being maintained.

We found that the government is publicly reporting on grizzly bear populations and mortalities on its website, in peer-reviewed scientific journals and through some First Nations consultation. The website, though, is incomplete as to the activities that have been undertaken and does not include activities related to performance measures.

We found that the underlying cause as to why the ministries had not met many of our expectations was an unclear organizational structure and unclear accountabilities. We recommended that government review its legislation and policies and clarify the responsibilities between these two ministries.

In addition, we made nine other recommendations, including creating a management plan for grizzly bears that is based on adequate inventory and monitoring, improving hunting policies, regulating bear viewing, ensuring that the conservation officer service has adequate tools and resources, and evaluating and adjusting activities that mitigate threats and protect grizzly bear habitat to ensure that they are effective.

That concludes our presentation.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you. We appreciate that.

I think, Tom, you’re going to begin the presentation. What we normally do is we’ll have you present, and then MLAs will ask their questions at the conclusion of your presentation. I expect there will be a fair number of them today.

Thank you for joining us. Maybe you could begin by introducing your team, and it would be great if the Environment staff could also introduce themselves.

T. Ethier: Sure. Thank you, Chair. My name is Tom Ethier. I’m the ADM of resource stewardship within the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. With me is the director of the fish and wildlife branch, Jennifer Psyllakis. I also will be partnering with my colleague Jennifer McGuire, the ADM in Environment with responsibilities around grizzly bears.

Maybe I’ll turn it to you, Jen, to introduce your team.

J. McGuire: Good morning, Chair and committee. The other members from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy team that are here are our deputy, Mark Zacharias, and my executive director, Alec Dale, with the ecosystems branch.

S. Bond (Chair): The committee certainly wants to thank the deputy for being here today. We’re very appreciative of his attendance. We always appreciate staff taking the time, but to have a deputy attend is always something we want to recognize. We appreciate that.

T. Ethier: Okay. Thank you for the opportunity to present on the findings and recommendations of the Independent Audit of Grizzly Bear Management. I’ll be speaking today to give a government response, with my colleague Jennifer, and a description of initiatives that have been done, are underway or are planned regarding the recommendations from the Independent Audit of Grizzly Bear Management.

B.C. is considered a world leader in the management of grizzly bears. Grizzly bears are extirpated — no longer occurring within their range — from most of their home range throughout North America. However, in B.C., they still occupy 90 percent of their historic range.

[10:20 a.m.]

In 1995, DNA-based grizzly bear inventory technique and technology was developed by provincial biologists, delivering the ability to confirm species, identify individuals and characterize relatedness. To date, B.C. has produced more DNA-based population estimates for grizzly bears than any similar jurisdiction — province or state — for any bear species anywhere in the world.

Two independent science reviews that we conducted of harvest management have stated that, with a high degree of confidence, the hunt was sustainable. The province has access to a group of engaged and qualified professionals that are committed to the long-term conservation of grizzly bears. Dr. Bruce McLellan, Dr. Garth Mowat, Dr. Doug Heard and Anthony Hamilton, all current or former government staff, are internationally recognized experts in the field of grizzly bear conservation and have published over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers on grizzly bears, the most recent being from March 2018.

The WildSafeBC and Bear Aware programs have effectively educated and cooperated with the public, communities and First Nations in mitigating human-wildlife conflict. Numerous parks and protected areas have been established that protect grizzly bear habitat.

Grizzly bears are iconic and a challenging species to manage, and as highlighted by the Office of the Auditor General, there is room for improvement to the province’s approach to grizzly bear management. I want to thank the Auditor and her team for the report that they have done.

There are an estimated 15,000 grizzly bears in B.C., and the population is considered stable throughout most of the province. The recommendations and risks identified in the audit give the province specific insights into the areas where we want to focus on continuous improvement, and there are several strong alignments to government’s mandate commitments. For reference, I will provide a brief overview of those commitments here, as it will help to provide context in how government plans to implement all ten of the Auditor’s recommendations. It is also an opportunity to introduce acronyms that I may slip into later on in the presentation.

All ministries have a requirement to meet the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. As part of government’s commitment to true, lasting reconciliation with First Nations of British Columbia, government will be fully adopting and implementing the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples and the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Within FLNRO, we have a couple of mandate commitments that we think are key new strategic lines of business that will support grizzly bear management. Modernizing land use planning, LUP. The mandate commitment is to work with the Minister of Indigenous Relations, First Nations and communities to modernize land use planning and sustainably manage B.C.’s ecosystems, rivers, lakes, watersheds, forests and old growth.

Another mandate commitment is to improve wildlife management and habitat conservation and collaborate with stakeholders to develop long- and short-term strategies to manage B.C.’s wildlife resources.

Within Environment, revitalize EAO, the environmental assessment office, and process and review the professional reliance model to ensure the legal rights of First Nations are respected, and the public’s expectation of a strong, transparent process is met.

Species-at-risk legislation — enact an endangered species law and harmonize other laws to ensure they are all working towards the goal of protecting the values of this province.

Throughout the presentation, I will note the mandates that are related to specific recommendations or category of recommendations.

Key Auditor General findings. With this slide, what we’ve done is taken the ten recommendations and grouped them into themes or categories that are highly linked. The order in our presentation is based on the governance of grizzly bear management, which includes recommendations Nos. 9 and 10; developing a grizzly bear management plan, so this goes to recommendations 1, 2, 5 and 6; grizzly bear habitat management includes recommendations Nos. 7 and 8; and mitigating human-caused grizzly bear mortality includes recommendations Nos. 3 and 4.

Governance was a strong recommendation that came from the Auditor. This category is directly related to the mandates to improve wildlife management, habitat protection and species-at-risk legislation — and, no doubt, probably modernizing land use planning.

[10:25 a.m.]

In the Auditor General’s comments on page 4, she states: “We have made ten recommendations in this report to improve government’s management of grizzly bears, including our recommendations for government to clarify roles and responsibilities between Environment and FLNRO. Without such clarity, the improvements necessary will be difficult to achieve.” We thought it important to start with this theme as it sets out the accountability of the work to come. We agree clear roles and responsibilities are necessary to grizzly bear management.

Maybe I’ll just pause there and say that internally, it did feel that there were clear roles and accountabilities, but it became clear, through the audit process, that for people looking into how we were managing grizzly bears, it wasn’t completely understandable. So we completely get this comment. For the major initiatives related to grizzly bear management, we expect there may be some refinements as the work for improving wildlife management and species-at-risk legislation matures.

Secondly, related to accountability, transparency to the public is key for trust and confidence in the work the province is undertaking. The province has and will continue to use web-based tools and social media to notify the public about key management directions for grizzly bears and ways to improve them, which will be reviewed and implemented in partnership with Environment, including the conservation officer service — additionally, further management activities and performance measures through the consultation process for the grizzly bear management plan and reporting on implementation of the detailed action plan.

The grizzly bear management plan, a key recommendation. Management plans provide the framework for species conservation and management in the province. The province has already started work on a new grizzly bear management plan. That plan will be informed by the recommendations of the audit and address the topics of inventory and monitoring, bear viewing and population management and augmentation. The management plan will set a foundation for developing objectives for grizzly bears at smaller geographic scales, including objectives determined through land use planning.

Also, the federal government is considering listing grizzly bears as a species of special concern. If it is listed under the federal Species at Risk Act, because of that, we will ensure that…. There is a requirement to have a management plan if it is listed as special concern.

Together we will commence consultation engagement early in the 2018-19 fiscal year. We will work with the viewing industry, which already has started. Meetings have been held with the Commercial Bear Viewing Association and support is coming from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture. It should be noted that with the closure of the grizzly bear hunt, government is already receiving correspondence that suggests there will be an increased demand for grizzly bear viewing.

The management plan is scheduled to be completed by December 2019. Timelines are subject to government’s ability and success in our engagement and collaboration with Indigenous people and communities. With that, I will turn it over to my colleague, Jennifer.

J. Psyllakis: Thank you. Slide 7 is providing some information around habitat management and protection. Over the years, approximately 150,000 square kilometres of high-quality grizzly bear habitat has been protected or managed in parks and other designations to mitigate potential impacts from industrial activities.

Government has also already approved “grizzly bear” as a cumulative effects framework value so that statutory decision-makers across the natural resource ministries are able to consider potential impacts to grizzly bear habitats and consider options to mitigate those impacts in individual decisions that are being made.

Recently this new guidance has been communicated to statutory decision-makers through the approval of the interim cumulative effects framework policy. Specific actions are also under review by the environmental assessment office, both from a compliance and monitoring perspective as well as part of the revitalization of the environmental assessment process.

With regards to mitigating human-caused mortality, the grizzly bear hunt has been closed provincewide, and this recommendation, recommendation No. 3, is considered fulfilled. However, there is a foundation of science and research that while it did inform management of the hunt, it will continue to be used to inform decisions that support other aspects of grizzly bear management.

That research will now focus on habitat protection and setting objectives for those populations designated for augmentation. The capacity for research will not decrease; it will just be shifted to other areas. It will also be foundational to managing human-bear conflicts and important to inform and communicate potential population responses as a result of the hunt closure. The partnerships with communities through the WildSafeBC program has been successful to date, and we are looking at leveraging opportunities from those foundational successes.

[10:30 a.m.]

Overall, the province does have a strong history to build on to improve wildlife management and habitat conservation for grizzly bear and other species. The recommendations and risks identified in the audit give the province specific insights into the areas where we want to focus continuous improvement. Over the coming months and years, through mandates and reports like this audit, there will be some significant shifts in the management of grizzly bears and habitat in B.C. In fact, these shifts will encompass all wildlife and habitat in the province.

The province accepts the recommendations from the Auditor General and also wishes to thank the Auditor General and her staff for their time and effort. This information is very valuable for helping to improve grizzly bear and all wildlife in the province of B.C.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for the presentations.

Did the Ministry of Environment want to say anything other than what’s been presented? You’re good? All right.

J. Yap: Thank you to the Auditor and the ministry for the presentations and responses.

My first question is in regards to the population. It’s estimated at 15,000 for British Columbia, and the population of grizzlies now is concentrated in B.C., Yukon and Alaska, from what I read in the report. What percentage of the remaining North American population is in B.C.? What does that 15,000 represent? Is it half, or is it a third, or is it 80 percent of the remaining grizzly bears? I’m wondering.

T. Ethier: I think 50 percent of grizzly bears in Canada are in B.C. and 25 percent of the North American population.

J. Yap: It’s quite a significant percentage of the remaining population. It’s interesting that contrary to what may be popular perception, it’s the roads that have had more impact than hunting on the population. I see one of the recommendations is to have better coordination between the part of government that is responsible for the roads and, of course, wildlife management.

I’m wondering. I hate to go into the concept of silos, but is this kind of one of those perennial challenges in government, trying to deal with silos — the silo of government that is looking at approving roads versus wildlife management? With the recommendations, how do you see this breaking down of the silos happening?

T. Ethier: I’ll give it a shot. The unintended consequences of one action of government impacting a value in another area has been pretty front and centre for quite a while within the Natural Resource Ministry sphere. There is the subcommittee of cabinet, the environmental land use committee, and then there’s the deputy committee on natural resources that try to make sure that the different parts of government are truly speaking to each other and identifying: what are the key issues to work on, what are some of the threats, and how are we essentially trying to reconcile the kinds of trade-offs that need to be made?

I would say the road infrastructure is one of the more challenging areas. Road infrastructure is important to the development of resources. The public likes to have access to Crown land. It’s always a very lively conversation. We have different strategies, considering the different values that we’re working with. In some areas, we want to see the road completely removed, once it’s been established. In other areas, we’ll bring enclosures — through the Wildlife Act, for example — to restrict motor vehicle use or snowmobile use and that kind of thing.

[10:35 a.m.]

I think the conversation is really quite good. We’re very aware of this. We understand what these different kinds of interests are. But it’s not an easy path forward to just say that we can bring in a particular statute that says here’s how we’re going to manage all the roads and all the values.

We are, right now, thinking that the opportunity through land use planning could be a place where we really get at access management. Honestly, we can say that and state it, but it brings out intense feelings amongst British Columbians around what we’re going to do around roads. It is not a completely siloed policy area.

J. Yap: It sounds like, through committees you reference, there’s a potential to try and facilitate coordination and a more central approach than one part of government.

As part of the grizzly management plan, is there a sense of how the population will grow, based on the current state — 15,000? Are there any signs or any endeavours or has there been any research done? Is the population going to be stable? Do we expect it to grow, especially now with the policy change on hunting?

J. Psyllakis: With the way that the hunt was managed in the past, very conservatively in terms of the percentage of the population of bears that were harvested, and given that bear populations are density dependent, meaning that in the habitat, there’s only so much room for so many bears…. With the removal of some bears through human-caused mortality, that space is filled but doesn’t necessarily grow. We don’t expect the policy change to end the grizzly bear hunt to have a large influence on the population.

Going back to the objective-setting commitments, based on the recommendations from government, those objectives would need to be in place to identify where population recovery is a goal of government. Then the actions and priorities would be established after that goal is set.

J. Thornthwaite: I probably have a theme of questions with my first questions. I’ll probably come back and let others….

If, in fact — with the report, and many others have identified — the grizzly bear population, and I’m just quoting this out of the report, is an indicator of how well the ecosystems and the species that live there are doing…. In other words, if grizzly bears aren’t faring well, it’s a sign that the ecosystem as a whole is facing challenges. I’m wondering why the Auditor General chose to deal exclusively with grizzly bears and not deal with an entire management diversity of other wildlife.

A. Todosichuk: I can answer that question. We actually looked at wildlife management back in 2010. We went quite a ways down looking at starting an audit in that area. We had identified certain species that we may want to have an exclusive look at within that, in 2010. But that was when the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations was just being created. There were things happening within the ministry, and we thought that wasn’t the time to come in and take a look at it.

We came back now to look at grizzly bears after we’d done a couple of other reports. One of them was biodiversity. We took a very broad look at what was happening on ecosystems across British Columbia, and that report was in 2013. This time we decided to come in and focus in on, again, an umbrella species, an iconic species, because we thought it would focus the attention around wildlife management, but take it from one species’ perspective. That’s why we chose grizzly bears.

[10:40 a.m.]

J. Thornthwaite: With regards to the grizzly bears, then, you have stated in the report — and I might be paraphrasing here — that land use, habitat loss and other forms of deaths of grizzly bears are more of an issue than the trophy hunt per se. Then, if we’re looking totally at the trophy hunt and now the benefits of, perhaps, the population either recovering or increasing…. I guess what I worry about is the effect on other wildlife that is directly or indirectly related to grizzly bear populations, either as prey or even livestock, and whether or not that sort of information will be monitored by either of these ministries. Or would the Auditor General choose to come back at a later date to see whether or not this new policy change has changed population levels of other species?

C. Bellringer: We don’t have a specific new audit on the plan — we’ll be talking about the plan a little bit more later — but we would be going back in to look at the action plans and see the progress, and we would expect that context to be considered. Even though the audit itself was focused on grizzly bears, it is obviously always within the context of the full wildlife management. We would expect an implication in one area to be considered in the others. So it can get picked up within the action plans and, therefore, within our follow-up work, but we weren’t planning to go beyond that.

S. Bond (Chair): Maybe, on the ecosystem management question, because it’s a very good one…. I don’t know who would like to answer that. Ultimately, we’ve eliminated the hunting of grizzly bears, but they are part of a larger ecosystem. The MLA’s question: is there a possibility that the ecosystem will face balance issues with the direction? I think that’s the question. Who would like to tackle that? It isn’t a stand-alone issue.

A. Dale: Sure, I’ll try. As Jen mentioned, I think, we’re not expecting a large increase in bears. Most of the areas, as she mentioned, are density-dependent and habitat-dependent. There are areas in the province where we know that some of the objectives will be to recover some of the bear populations. There are nine units right now where we would probably focus on that. Certainly, any of those kinds of interactions would be part of any of those management plans for those specific areas.

In terms of looking at what impacts we have broadly, in government, I think — both through Agriculture and, perhaps, the conservation officer service — we currently monitor human-wildlife interactions and conflicts. So for range cattle kills and things like that, we look at those predator interactions. I would just say that yeah, that would absolutely be part of what we’d be looking at in terms of monitoring, as team government.

J. Thornthwaite: Chair, if I could just ask one final follow-up question, then I’ll let somebody else take over, and I’ll probably come back. This question that I have is specifically to Forests, Lands and Natural Resources. This is about forestry practices.

We’ve seen some changes in maps over the decades with regards to forest management and not just clearcutting but also the demise of forests. Obviously, the demise of forests is increasing exponentially over the decades with various different forest practices. I’m wondering whether the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources is actually dealing with the issue of the devastation of wildlife populations — not just grizzly bears but all wildlife populations; fauna and flora, I guess you could say — with regards to these practices. Has there ever been a chance where something has been identified and forestry practices have had to cease because of a decrease or destruction of some sort in the ecosystem?

T. Ethier: There’s a good question. The Forest and Range Practices Act governs forestry within the province. The Forest and Range Practices Act does have 11 key values that are expected to be achieved, including wildlife as one of the key values.

[10:45 a.m.]

We spend a lot of time monitoring the performance of forest practices through our FREP program, the forest and range evaluation program. We also have a fairly rigorous overall monitoring scheme for key wildlife populations, of which the grizzly bear is one.

There are a number of controls that we have in place around grizzly bears, especially within the units where we’ve seen that there is a weakness in grizzly bears. Grizzly bears are not as vulnerable, for example, as, say, caribou are. They do have a better adaptive response to changing environment because of the kind of diet they have and the way they can move around. But where we do see the vulnerability, we have brought in either protected areas or other measures, under the Forest and Range Practices Act, around grizzly bear management areas and closing down roads.

So there is this willingness. There is this desire, there is this intent, and you can see it on the ground. I think we’ve got something like 340,000 square kilometres of habitat protected from forest harvesting in the province, and it’s mostly focused in areas where we think grizzly bears are most vulnerable, which tends to be in the southern part of the province.

It is always a very active conversation. Can we do more? Yes, we think we can do more, but we want to do it in a way that makes sure it’s a good investment and that we really do get the return on that and that the impacts on industry are sufficiently justified for taking that course of action.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Thank you so much to everybody for coming here and having this discussion. I appreciate that it’s a work in progress as well, but just some points of clarification to start with. The report, the management action plan — it looked like there were a couple of different target dates for that to be complete. When exactly is it meant to be complete, and what’s happening in the meantime, before you get sign-off on a final document?

J. Psyllakis: The two different dates represent phases of completing the report. The target date for completion is the latter — December 2019, I believe. There has been pre-planning work in this fiscal year where we’ve looked at the different management themes that need to be addressed so that we can come into an engagement and consultation process with some information, with First Nations, Indigenous communities, as well as organizations, stakeholders and the public.

The timeline is based on our experience with other management plans and recognizing that the grizzly bear, in particular, is a passionate, emotional, iconic species that many people will want to engage on, including members of the public. We felt that that timeline was a reasonable one to set as an expectation to get through a meaningful engagement and consultation process.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): And in the meantime, given what we have in the report and some other questions as well, there’s still this increasing growth in bear viewing, for example. There’s the impact of the new policy that was implemented. Are there enough operational resources to be able to be responsive in a timely way while — I understand, you know — the due process is gone through and there’s consultation to create a management plan that is meaningful?

J. Psyllakis: Yes. With the viewing component in particular, there had been a stakeholder interagency team that had been established some time ago. We’re really looking at that and engaging with the associations and, soon, First Nations to look at that policy and procedure option specifically around bear viewing. That is happening in parallel and will be incorporated with the management planning process, given its prominence and priority and, as you referenced, the policy changes on the hunt, as well as government’s commitment to support the guiding sector in particular in transitioning away from the hunt.

That is happening very much in parallel. If there are legislative changes that are needed, the process would need to continue — the request for legislation, regulation. We’re not at the point of knowing to say that that’s going to be required, so that could extend further past that.

[10:50 a.m.]

T. Ethier: To the budget question, the budget within FLNRO this year…. There’s $1 million of new money dedicated to wildlife management this year. It goes up to about $3 million in the following year and then $10 million the year after.

For example, on the inventory monitoring piece, the Auditor has recommended that we will be part of that grizzly bear management plan, building an inventory monitoring strategy to make sure we’re focusing our resources in places where we think there’s highest risk of threat to grizzly bears or highest risk maybe to communities or to other species at risk where we really want to understand the grizzly bear dynamics in those areas.

To the point where we don’t expect to see…. Grizzly bears don’t change radically in terms of their population. They’re slow reproducers and all that kind of stuff. So we think we have time to be able to get a thoughtful approach here together and see where we need to invest these dollars that are coming into the ministry.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): A specific question to you both about the budget for First Nation engagement. Could you just give me some detail on…? Do you have a line item, or specifically, what how much money have you budgeted for engagement, and what kinds of things have you identified that that money will need to be allocated to?

J. Psyllakis: For the short term, we’ve worked with the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation to support the engagement process with First Nations and Indigenous organizations. That budget commitment was approximately $160,000, if I’m recalling correctly. That was also shared with the Ministry of Environment and the engagement that they’re doing on their initiatives for species-at-risk legislation and with the caribou recovery program. We found that doing it that way, in a bundled approach, we could find efficiencies not only from a fiscal perspective but in people’s time. There are a lot of things going on.

As those engagement processes progress, we expect that there will be some divergence as we get more into the details of each one of those individual initiatives. We’ll need to go back and see where we’re at and look at what budget resources may be needed to continue the process.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Do you know what kind of items that the budget gets allocated to? Is it mostly to staff time? Do you know that level of detail?

J. Psyllakis: There are multiple aspects. It’s not staff time; it’s external. It helps bring people to the table. It helps support the facilitation needs that are there. It helps in those kinds of supporting ways and functions to make sure that the engagement is meaningful and people are able to come and provide their input. The staff time is provided through the ministries.

S. Bond (Chair): For the record, then, I just wanted to…. Because Mitzi’s point was well taken. The presentation that was made on the PowerPoint suggested that the management plan would be done in January of 2019. The action plan says March of 2019. So which is it, and are we at risk of seeing slippage? I think that’s Mitzi’s point here. It’s a pretty important file.

Did it change from the time of the presentation being made, or is there just a sense that it was too much work to get done by January? Why the difference?

J. Psyllakis: The action plan is the correct date. I’m sorry that that was a typo.

R. Sultan: I would like to give my synopsis of what the Auditor General appears to be reporting to us. And I would like to thank her, in particular, for focusing on an issue which, certainly, in urban areas is a very hot topic and continues to be — and, of course, in the rural parts of British Columbia as well. So thank you to the Auditor General for bringing forward a very thoughtful report.

Let me give you my synopsis, and I would like the officials to tell me where I’m wrong or maybe a little bit off base. The Auditor General has discovered that we have about 15,000 bears. The experts seem to think that a sustainable cull might be 6 percent or so, which is — what? — roughly 900 bears.

[10:55 a.m.]

The hunt, when it did exist, was causing the death of 250 to 300 a year, and we are killing…. We have about 50 reported conflicts a year. But I guess we should appreciate that the unreported might even be double that amount. Who knows? So if you speculate about unreported kills just being buried without telling anybody, we have perhaps liquidated something in the 400 range, which would still be about one-half of the allowable cull in the bad old days.

The Auditor, therefore, concludes that the problem isn’t and wasn’t really the hunt. The problem is the environment that we have created for the grizzly bears. It’s distressed with a number of resource roads, which today would encircle the earth between ten and 15 times. It’s astonishing to think that we have created these dirt roads everywhere, and I’m told there are really virtually no inviolate watersheds left in this wonderful province of ours. We have sent the bulldozers in and the graders and the gravel trucks, and they are everywhere.

The problem is, therefore — the Auditor General concludes, in the main — one of habitat. If I could extrapolate — she doesn’t use this language — I would suggest she is saying that we have really abused the habitat for grizzly bears, certainly. Despite all of this, however, the grizzly bear population seems to be growing, which seems to be contradictory. They are very resilient beasts, that’s for sure — if that is, in fact, a verifiable fact.

In terms of remedies, I don’t see anywhere in the report — perhaps I missed it — that banning the hunt would have a material impact. Nevertheless, we went ahead and did it anyway. By inference, the solution is to work on the habitat if we think there’s an issue at all. Certainly, as population grows, it would be my impression that conflicts with grizzly bears are going to grow and grow and grow, and we’re going to be killing more and more and more of them, because they’re showing up in people’s backyards and getting on their decks. Conservation officers will be called out to deal with them. The conflicts, it would seem to me, are bound to increase over time.

Finally, and this is not necessarily a focus of the report, we must recognize that grizzly bears are an iconic species. We are under the gaze of the world wildlife preservation community, and we have to be extra sensitive to living up to those, shall we say, public relations obligations.

Have I kind of got it right, or am I wrong?

S. Bond (Chair): There is silence at the other end of the table. Does someone have a response?

R. Sultan: More or less, approximately correct?

T. Ethier: Correct.

R. Sultan: If that’s true, then I have a few comments. As the Chair just pointed out, on page 3 of a ministerial response, the grand sum of $50,000 — wow — for the fiscal year 2017-2018 was used to support the preplanning stages and policy work of the management plan — referring to the grizzly bear management plan. Target date for completion, in this panel at least, was January of 2019.

I would ask the officials: what do you buy for $50,000? Is it like one-half of a receptionist, perhaps, at the current billing rate?

T. Ethier: It wasn’t that.

J. Psyllakis: There were three contracts, if I’m recalling correctly. One was to review the background, historic work done, and engage with bear-viewing individuals specifically and biologists internally and externally, to put together an early plan or implementation.

[11:00 a.m.]

There was a contract, as well, to summarize the past recommendations for grizzly bears, the sort of state of knowledge, which leveraged from the work on the cumulative effects framework and grizzly bear value.

I’m not recalling the third contract. I’d have to get back to the member to provide that information.

R. Sultan: If I could ask the officials…. If grizzly bears are a vital species, and I argue that they are, do you think spending $50,000 on preplanning for a grizzly bear management plan is sufficient and, in fact, on a sufficiently accelerated schedule? You’re not actually preparing the plan; you’re getting ready to prepare a plan.

T. Ethier: I guess, Member, what I would say in response is that we have implemented a lot around grizzly bear recovery over the last number of decades — 340,000 square kilometres of grizzly bear habitat. So 45 percent of grizzly bear habitat has been protected in some way. It has been an active area of ongoing management. We have really been, I think, working in an operational way on grizzly bears for a long time. What the Auditor General has brought to our attention — and what we definitely welcome — is the ability to become more strategic in our approach to grizzly bear management, and it is time for us to do that.

To do a thoughtful plan does take some care and attention. To be able to make sure we connect to the various interests here, we need to walk into it quite carefully, because emotions and interests — powerful interests — do show up in this conversation, and we want to manage it in a way that definitely incorporates all of those points of view and make sure we bring that information back to the decision-makers within government.

It isn’t something we are just going to run out and do. We think that we do have a good record on grizzly bears.

Maybe what I’ll do right now is just do a little bit more of a history around grizzly bears in this province. It might be helpful to think of it that way. It’s not my view. It’s the view of Dr. Bruce McLellan, an esteemed biologist who has worked for us for 40-plus years, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the working bear group.

Bruce’s view is that in British Columbia, in the early settlement days, grizzly bears were vermin. They were poisoned. There was a bounty. They were killed indiscriminately. That went on for a long time, to the point where, in the ’50s and ’60s, once poison started to be eliminated and the bounty was eliminated, we started to see a response of grizzly bears. So we’re not sure what population size was there, but the concern around the long-term trajectory of grizzly bears was valid.

Understanding what the true problems were was not always easily understood. Habitat was definitely an issue. But the fact that we’ve got 90 percent of the range still occupied — 15,000 bears — and the Auditor recognizes that there are areas in the province where we’re seeing an increase in grizzly bears, both in terms of its distribution and also a population increase in some of the southern units, suggests that there’s more going on than just a habitat approach here. Because they are slow reproducers, you don’t see the effect right away.

Other species that reproduce quite quickly, you just do the habitat, and they’re back — mule deer, for example. Well, maybe not the best example, but a better example. Grizzly bear females don’t start to reproduce until four or five. They’re very slow reproducers. We are seeing, probably, a population response more as a result of the kind of actions that were taken by government a long time ago. We’re starting to catch up to that now.

It doesn’t mean that the habitat question isn’t important, but it really does provide us context around just how vulnerable this species is. We can point to other species where if you look at them wrong, they seem to disappear.

This one does have resilience. It does have adaptive capacities. We know that they have a broad diet. They have a broad range of habitats they use. It is not listed as a species at risk, threatened or endangered. It may go to special concern. Of course, we welcome that, because it means that we need to bring more management to bear on it. We understand the world responsibility we have. But for me, it’s not at the same worrisome level as caribou, goshawk, murrelet, whatever we’ve got listed federally.

[11:05 a.m.]

R. Sultan: Madam Chair, if I may be allowed to paraphrase one of our colleagues, a former minister, Mike Morris, a very knowledgable person in the great outdoors…. I think for 30 years or so he has operated a trapline in the Prince George area. I attended a meeting that he invited me to tag along to, at the University of Victoria, with various environmental experts, so-called, in which Mike presented his views — which were quite harsh, you might say — on the land, particularly his trapline, which of course he knows very, very well, he says. And I’m sure he does know it very, very well.

He says our forestry practices have really eliminated many species. He never sees a marten. He never sees a whisky jack. Other little furry critters seem to have disappeared, and he wonders when they’ll come back. It may be a long time. His thesis is that our forestry practices need to be improved. He feels that the present Forest and Range Practices Act has many loopholes and that it’s not really an effective piece of legislation.

I’m sure Mike would probably correct my somewhat reckless characterization of his point of view, but he is going around giving this talk to various public audiences, so I don’t feel any reluctance in sharing it with you. Perhaps you’ve heard it directly.

Do you think Mike is kind of exaggerating the situation? He doesn’t profess to be a biologist, certainly, but he says these critters just have been extirpated.

T. Ethier: No. We are observing what Mike is observing — if I can call him Mike. Certainly, the pine beetle epidemic of 2003-2014, the forest policies and the choices that were made around forests that were dying were likely to have little ecological value through that state. It meant that there was a lot of harvesting. The AAC was lifted. The chief forester did it explicitly. That has had consequences, for sure.

That is why I think we are in a situation where we do have a real focus on improving wildlife management and habitat conservation. We recognize that we need to do things differently, and it may affect forest practices as we work our way through that policy area.

R. Sultan: Madam Chair, if I may ask one or two more questions.

S. Bond (Chair): Of course you can. We’re all spellbound. Keep going.

R. Sultan: Mike also suggests, as I think the Auditor General’s report also suggests, that silos, as my colleague Jane here has already pointed out, or bureaucratic divisions within the civil service and so on inhibit a holistic view of what’s going on and make it all too easy to say: “Well, that’s not really my department. You should go across the hall there and talk to the minister over there.” It does tempt one to shrug responsibilities.

Again to paraphrase my colleague Mike Morris, he feels that…. I believe he would suggest — consistent with the Auditor General’s report, which really says in pretty plain language that there’s overlap — there’s confusion as to mandate. People find it all too easy to say: “Yeah, there’s a problem there, but those folks in that other ministry certainly better deal with it.”

Mike would go on to say…. He tells me: “Ralph, you shouldn’t focus on the steelhead. Those grizzly bear people are well-intentioned, but that’s not the real problem. You have to look at the entire whole, and the government itself should be organized accordingly instead of chopped up into these little departments and ministries.”

[11:10 a.m.]

In other words, we need some restructuring of government if we’re really going to address this habitat issue, encompassing things ranging all the way from trapping to forestry effectively. Do you think some restructuring might be contemplated here effectively?

J. McGuire: With regards to wildlife, as Tom had mentioned earlier, inside the Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Ops and within the Ministry of Environment, we feel that we know who is doing what. Yes, there are hand-holding exercises at times, where we are jointly working on pieces, because we have unique skills and views that are being brought forward for either development of policy or operational activities that are happening on the ground.

We do recognize that, perhaps looking from an outside in, that’s not very clear. We do understand that we do need to make a better explanation of how, inside the provincial government house, we are managing all species in general. Alec, you might have some specifics.

A. Dale: Well, I would just add that I’ve been in government since 2000 now, so I’ve seen lots of organizational structures. I would say, from an Environment perspective and from my perspective, I think the natural resource ministries right now, internally, at least, are far more integrated than they have been in the past and far less siloed. I agree. I think there’s work to be done, but I think we’re moving in the right direction.

I think part of the perception outside of government, where it isn’t clear who is doing exactly what, is partly because we are working together far more than we, perhaps, have in the past. You do see Environment and Energy and Mines and FLNRO working on things like caribou recovery, for instance. That’s just kind of my perspective, internally. I think we are doing a better job of that.

I totally agree with the Auditor’s findings that the public perception of that is probably not…. We haven’t done a good job of explaining that process and how we’re working together and whose roles are what, specifically. So just internally, that’s part of that story.

R. Sultan: My last question is…. You are in the process of preplanning to develop a plan. What will the plan say? I mean, if I was going to prepare a plan, I’d pretty well know what it should contain. I’ve sort of thought it through before I sit down, putting words on a piece of paper. So what is the plan? You keep talking about plans, but what’s the content of the plan? What’s the philosophy? What’s the goal?

My frustrations are perhaps apparent, but after many years on this committee, I’ve heard people saying: “Well, we’re working on a plan. Don’t worry about it. The plan will be forthcoming, and it’ll probably be next January.” You must have some idea what the plan is or what the plan will say. Or are you really starting from ground zero?

J. Psyllakis: As mentioned in the presentation, we are taking the approach of ensuring that the management plan is compliant with the federal Species at Risk Act’s expectations, in case it is listed. Alec or Jennifer could speak to the specific template, which I cannot. I can speak to provincial management plans for species that we do and the content within them and the approach that we take.

Generally speaking, there is a background of information on the biology of the species and the current knowledge — the best available information from the science perspective. There’s also information specific to the populations in the province and the challenges and opportunities that may exist from multiple different perspectives, not only from the science but also from the economic, social or cultural perspectives, and that will form the context, setting and introduction to the plan.

[11:15 a.m.]

From that, then, it sets out the specific issues or threats and opportunities in a systematic way, which are structured around the goals, objectives and strategies to achieve the objectives that are set. At the provincial scale, that management plan then becomes a policy document for the province to operate within and under. The individual actions and strategies that sit underneath each of the goals, usually themed by habitat, if the species is hunted, population management, with grizzly bear viewing — those sorts of things. There’ll be management themes within it.

That then becomes a guidance document for prioritizing activities, making investments for management plans, as well as setting specific objectives at a regional scale that can be then implemented to look back to and see how we are doing and report back on. That kind of sets out the generalized framework and content.

R. Sultan: Okay, let me get it straight. Framework, guidance, strategies, data, goals — I think I understand where you’re headed, except I don’t.

Can I suggest a plan for you? Why don’t we plan to reduce the kilometres of resource roads by about 10 percent a year through decommissioning. That will certainly help wildlife, I would think, if I believe what the Auditor General has concluded. Why don’t we say we are, in fact, going to regulate bear viewing, and we’re going to do it in a very scientific way. We’re going to have a very results-based analysis of how to reduce the mortality of grizzlies in conflict situations.

These strike me as being practical things that you might plan to do and not be as mesmerized by strategies, goals, matrices, information, blah, blah, blah. I used to make my living doing that, and it’s quite profitable and certainly time-consuming. But I’m not sure it actually accomplishes very much at the end of the day.

Madam Chair, I think I’ve said enough.

S. Bond (Chair): I’m sure those kinds of elements are being contemplated, but they would not be without input. When I get to ask my questions, I will talk a little bit about resource roads where I live and what the reaction would be if we reduced them by 10 percent without a pretty significant conversation.

Thank you, Ralph. You always get the juices flowing, that’s for sure.

B. Ma: I think many of my questions have already been asked, so I’ll just ask a few specific ones from the report.

On page 52 of the report, exhibit 21, it says, “General locations of sampled B.C. parks,” and we see some red circles of areas that have been sampled. What does it mean to be sampling a park? What do those red circles actually signify?

J. Psyllakis: Could you repeat your page reference?

B. Ma: Page 52, exhibit 21.

A. Todosichuk: Did you want to know how we sample those?

B. Ma: Yeah, exactly. When it says that those are locations of sampled B.C. parks, what actually happened during that sampling?

A. Todosichuk: As mentioned in the report, on that page, we looked at eight parks that either had high grizzly bear density and, therefore, likely high-quality habitat or because they were located in a threatened GBPU.

What we looked at in those samples is we looked at the grizzly bear park plans. We were looking for: was there an inventory and monitoring strategy? What was being done to administer grizzly bears within those parks? We went through numerous amounts of questions, taking the park plan and then interviewing park staff to talk about the park plans from those areas that are indicated in the red circles on that exhibit.

B. Ma: In terms of the density of bears per thousand square kilometres, as shown on this map, that information comes from MFLNRO. Is that where the information comes from there?

A. Todosichuk: Correct.

B. Ma: How do we count bears? Are we physically going out there and tracking bears down? I’m just curious about the actual mechanics of this.

J. Psyllakis: There are different methods, from very intense to interpreted. And there’s a scale of investment that goes along with that. Intense methods of counting inventory include radio-collaring bears, following them, determining their home range size and making estimates from that, from a subpopulation of a population, of how many bears are in the area.

[11:20 a.m.]

Next to that is the DNA sampling technique that Tom referenced, where hair snares are set out along game trails and in areas that are expected to have grizzly bears — if there are grizzly bears there, so quality habitat and habitat features. Hair collected on those — it’s usually barbwire — is then analyzed to look at the individual. Then the number of individuals, based on the grid that is sampled, is extrapolated to estimate the population.

All of that information then has been used by the province to create a model that we can then apply broadly, based on habitat variables and other conditions, to estimate populations in areas that we haven’t individually sampled by either of those two techniques. So on that level of intensity, the investments are higher, and you’re more certain when you’re using the collars, etc. As you move up, it costs less and there’s more uncertainty around the population estimate.

B. Ma: Fantastic. What other species of animals do we do this level of monitoring on, aside from grizzly bears?

J. Psyllakis: Many, and not necessarily with those techniques. We monitor and estimate populations for many of the species of animals in the province, both systematically and on a regular basis — things like moose, deer, caribou — with different levels of investment, depending on the concerns and threats and risks or how closely we need to manage them based on our use — those types of things.

B. Ma: My next question is on the next page, page 53, exhibit 22: “Human-caused grizzly bear mortality in B.C. parks.” This is really just so I can understand this map. There’s “non-hunted within parks” and “hunted within parks.” Can you just explain what I’m looking at here a little bit more?

A. Todosichuk: What we’re looking at here is: the red squares are where there was an actual kill done by a hunter with a licence; then the non-hunted, the blue ones, is where there might be a conflict kill. A grizzly bear got into a park and got into trouble. A conservation officer might have been called in to have to euthanize that bear. That’s what you’re basically looking at. Those span the years 1997 to 2016.

B. Ma: My last question is…. I think it was on pages 37 and 39, exhibits 13 and 15. You may have referenced this previously, and I apologize if I’m asking you to repeat yourselves. What happened in 2001 to create the…?

T. Ethier: The hunt was closed.

B. Ma: The harvest closed. I wasn’t around in 2001. Why did the harvest close?

T. Ethier: It was just a significant policy debate around whether or not the grizzly bear hunt was sustainable. The government of the day chose to have a three-year moratorium brought in. So it was closed for one year. There was an election. The new government came in and reopened the season.

G. Begg: Thank you, experts. I want to harken back to something that both MLA Yap and MLA Sultan were concerned about, because I think it’s important. It’s at the macro rather than the micro level.

I think one of the observations of the Auditor General was that there…. She has some concerns about the unclear organizational structure and its impact on things. I think that’s important to be addressed.

The other thing that stands out for me…. Again, the response to MLA Sultan’s question was…. I think what you described was what he and I would describe as a SWOT analysis, which is something that he and I are experts at and we’re used to doing.

[11:25 a.m.]

The key, I think, to a SWOT analysis surrounds the metrics that come out of it. I’m concerned that there are no metrics around it. We talk about monitoring, but what does monitoring mean?

There is the saying that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. So harkening back to Ralph’s question, I guess I would repeat his question. Where are we going? What is the plan? And what are the metrics that surround the plan?

I know that’s a very macro question, but I would be reassured if I could hear you speak in a language that we all understand — that moving forward, we’re overcoming obstacles by doing specific things, around which, metrics will be attached so that we will constantly be able to measure the impact.

S. Bond (Chair): Both important questions. Let’s start with the first one in terms of the organizational question that Garry asked. The Auditor General pointed out that there were, at least from an outside observer’s perspective, not clear rules. Has that been sorted out?

Obviously, you’ve had a pretty opportune moment to do that with the transition to a new government. Have the organizational challenges been clarified? That would be Garry’s first question. The second one you heard very articulately what he would like an answer to.

So No. 1.

T. Ethier: I would say we are continually working on the roles and responsibilities between not just the two ministries but the other ministries within the natural resource sphere to understand who is doing what where and what the consequences are of those actions on, for example, grizzly bears.

I’ll point to one policy that has come in, in the last year. This is the cumulative effect value for grizzly bears. Every statutory decision–maker within the Natural Resource Ministry world are required to review the objective for grizzly bear management, which is sustaining grizzly bears throughout the province and to take management actions to mitigate the threat of any licence or permit that’s going out on the landscape so that the unintended consequences we have suffered in previous decades can start to be rectified so we can remove that cumulative unintended consequence of other decisions.

It’s been a significant amount of work, a significant amount of training, and it is one of our best examples to show that we are coordinating our actions as we think about different activities on the landscape.

Would you like me to go to the second question around…?

S. Bond (Chair): Sure. We have a sense that you’re working on it.

Garry, did you want to follow up on the first part?

G. Begg: I just want to clarify, perhaps, that oftentimes in situations like this, process trumps performance. We put in place all kinds of processes with little regard for the output at the end. Hopefully, in your next answer to the last question, you’ll answer that as well.

T. Ethier: The broad objective for grizzly bear management in the province is to sustain grizzly bears throughout their range. We’re not looking at repopulating them in areas that they’re extirpated.

You can look at that map that MLA Bowinn Ma pointed to earlier, around the distribution of grizzly bears. Areas in the central part of the province are not up for re-establishing grizzly bears in those areas. We want to focus on sustaining grizzly bears where they are currently at sustainable levels.

We are going to work through the management plan to arrive at: which of the threatened population units do we think we have a chance of recovery, and can we get the interests aligned across that landscape to achieve recovery there? Then we can invest in it.

As Jennifer pointed out, grizzly bears are an incredibly expensive species to manage. One of those hair snare inventories is around $300,000 to $400,000. So the choice of where we put them…. We want to make sure we’re doing it in the right area. It’s going to be well done, and it’s going to serve a number of management interests in that area. So we do have to work our way through this and make sure that the objective we’ve got for managing grizzly bears in any part of the province is justified and that we can justify the expense against it.

[11:30 a.m.]

I take the point of the committee around: “It looks like you’re planning to plan.” It’s important that we work our way through that plan, that we have those deep conversations with those communities that will be affected by a change in grizzly bear numbers, if that’s the choice that’s going to be made, and that government is made fully aware of what those changes are.

As attractive as it would be to come out with some bold statements and say, “This is what we’re going to do,” we also have the experience of knowing that that doesn’t always get buy-in. So we need to have those conversations with communities, with Indigenous people, about what they want to see on that landscape.

G. Begg: Just an observation, not a question. Again, you’re talking process. I’m talking performance, the metrics around which we can say: “We are successful.” What does success look like on a macro level — not on a micro level, not only about grizzly bear and the habitat but on a very macro level — between the ministries. What does success look like in light of some of the comments and some of the issues and concerns raised by the Auditor General?

T. Ethier: Thank you for that.

What we pay most attention to is the current status and listing of this species. The Ministry of Environment has the Conservation Data Centre that tracks and reports out on the current status of grizzly bears across the province. Federally, it’s….

A. Dale: The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

T. Ethier: These are two committees that are all about results. They look at the status, they look at the trend of key values, and they make a recommendation on what the current status of that species is. We take those observations extremely seriously.

Our fundamental goal is to keep species off those lists. Our fundamental goal when it comes to grizzly bears: keep it off a list. Keep it unthreatened. We are there now, and we want to keep it there. I mean, there are some units, for sure, in the province, where we’ve got some problems. But 15,000 — 90 percent of its historic range…. It is in a good place right now, and we’re optimistic that we can keep it there.

S. Bond (Chair): All right. I have some questions.

Jane, I’m going to let you go one more time. Then if anyone else wants on the list, you can let me know. But why don’t you finish yours, and then I’ll ask mine.

J. Thornthwaite: I’ve got a specific comment about the report here. Then to carry on with…. There seems to be a common theme.

In recommendation No. 7, it says: “We recommend that the Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations…evaluate and adjust, as needed, the tools used to mitigate industries’ impacts on grizzly bear habitats.” I wanted to focus on the industries’ impacts on the habitat of grizzly bears but, by nature, the habitat of other species as well. On page 45, a lot of those tools were listed: land use plans, forest stewardship plans, a proposed natural resource roads act, etc.

My question goes on to say that government response indicates that the chief forester has communicated guidance to forest companies to include this guidance in their forest stewardship plans. But the chief forester’s communication is guidance only and, I would assume, can be totally ignored.

I’ve been told, also, that in the forest and range planning regulations, “The objective set by government for wildlife is” — and this is the key sentence — “without unduly reducing the supply of timber from British Columbia’s forests, to conserve sufficient wildlife habitat,” blah, blah, blah. The point being that in the forest stewardship plans…. It would be implied by this statement that government cares about wildlife as long as it doesn’t unduly reduce the supply of timber.

[11:35 a.m.]

My question is: is there any way that this group, or even the Auditor General, could pressure industries to actually stop some of their activities, based on the demise, extinction or extirpation of certain levels of wildlife?

T. Ethier: To the point around the chief forester’s guidance to foresters, this is a very important message that the chief forester conveys to the foresters — that she has concerns, she’s noting them and she wants them to pay attention to this. It’s an early warning: “Take this as a serious piece of advice.” She’s watching this, and she’ll be reporting out on it. The belief is that by providing this advice, they can start to take corrective action now. If we can’t see a response through that, then there are other means that government has at its disposal to bring in greater prohibitions around the things that the chief forester has identified.

The piece around unduly constraining timber supply — I acknowledge it is a very hot item. It can be seen as a veto over any other values that are on the landscape. I think that that’s open to a very lively debate, if that is the actual interpretation of that. The interpretation that we use within FLNRORD is that this is a very necessary measure that a stat decision–maker needs to make when considering issuing permits or considering even establishing a wildlife habitat area — that where you’re doing this, you’re doing it in a way that’s not stranding timber that could be extracted without reducing the key value that you’re managing for.

It is pointed at as: this gives too much power to the forest interest. But it also, we think, can be used in terms of careful decision-making, where yes, it is a key interest of government to have fibre flowing to mills. At the same time, let’s do it in a way that we protect the key value but we’re not stranding.

For example, you could put a protection area in a place that means there are no other roads — I know the roads are already a hot item here — and you cannot gain access to any other fibre. That is meant for us to really think hard about where we are putting these things. We think we can put them in there. We do think we can have landscapes that can have both an active forest industry and grizzly bears. We think we’ve got examples of where that is occurring.

I acknowledge it’s a hot point. But we have a lot of policy guidance, and we think we do interpret that accurately so that we do get many values out of any system.

J. Psyllakis: Maybe just to add to that, specific to grizzly bear and the wildlife habitat areas that have been established, many of them are no harvest, no road building. Those activities are constrained.

J. Thornthwaite: Just one follow-up question, Chair.

I don’t want to beat this over. But given the fact that we are talking grizzly bears…. We were talking trophy hunt; now that’s a moot point. But certainly, the bears are getting killed by other sources than the trophy hunt. I was asked to ask a question about whether or not anybody knew how many bears were killed on the CN or the CP Rail. Obviously, that’s an area where the bears hang out because other animals are getting killed by trains.

Recognizing that there are a lot of issues here with regards to grizzly bear management and habitat and land use, one thing that we do have control over as government and people is the industries themselves that we allow to come in and utilize and take the resources.

The last question — maybe you don’t need anybody to answer it. Does the ministry, does government, believe that in light of the population decreases in many sorts of wildlife, including ungulates, fur-bearers — you mentioned salmon — steelhead and perhaps grizzly bears, adjustments to the forest practices needs may be considered?

[11:40 a.m.]

T. Ethier: Potentially. That’s as far as I can go. I think that there is still a…. It is certainly information that we’d want to bring to government and to say: “We think that this is the direction we need to go. Here are the risks. Here are the benefits.”

The Forest and Range Practices Act is a statute that was brought in…. As we acknowledge, it would need to be continuously improved as we understood its performance, and we’ve been monitoring its performance for a long time. There’s a fair amount of information now that tells us there are areas where we may want to think about amending to improve, generally, the environmental performance of that regulation.

A. Dale: If I could just add, I think we’re in a very reflective stage right now in government. The current government has provided some mandates for our ministries around land use planning, around wildlife management and habitat conservation, around species at risk, around professional reliance, around the environmental assessment process.

I think all of those things are in response to what we are seeing as…. You know, we are having impacts on our land base, and we have to get a handle on that. I think all of those pieces will help us really get that larger sort of cohesive picture around what we’re doing and really help us answer some of these questions.

S. Bond (Chair): I think the Auditor wanted to say something.

C. Bellringer: It’s tying together a couple of the previous questions with respect to, specifically, the forest stewardship plans. I wrote this down earlier. It was just around also tying this into recommendation 10, and it’s that point that we found missing throughout different parts of the audit around monitoring, evaluating and, ultimately, reporting.

You mention it more in the context of influence. But we saw it as something more precise than influence being…. I think the influence is taking place, but who’s got the ultimate responsibility for the monitoring, for doing a specific evaluation and monitoring? That was where there were blurry roles and responsibilities.

You’ll note the difference in our recommendations. Number 10 was directed to government as opposed to either of the ministries. It isn’t that there was a responsibility that remained unfulfilled specifically for one or the other of the ministries but, rather, no clarity on who had that bottom-line: “I have to do the final monitoring.” That’s what we’re aiming at in that recommendation 10. I’ll just leave it at that.

S. Bond (Chair): Is it fair to say that your concern was that joint accountability means, at times, no accountability?

C. Bellringer: To a degree. I mean, I certainly would go beyond just the two ministries. We didn’t aim the recommendation that way, but there are many responsibilities by various parties. Therefore, that oversight becomes even more crucial to ensure that even external parties are doing what they were mandated to do, all the way through to…. There was reference to professional reliance — it’s being reviewed — but there are, again, elements of that that also need to be monitored.

S. Bond (Chair): I think the key point there — and Tom made it much earlier in this discussion — is that from the inside, they had a sense of who was doing what, when, and why. The issue was the external review, and when you look from the outside, it’s very difficult to be able to lay that out. And to be honest, the transparency is important because we, and British Columbians, don’t get to see the inside. They only see the outside. I think that as you work through that clarity, that will be very important, to share that much more broadly.

So I think the point is that there did exist, at least from the ministry’s perspective and the other organizations, some form of process where people knew what they were doing. Externally, people couldn’t tell. I think that’s an important gap that needs to be closed, and I don’t think it should be that difficult. You’ve now realigned some of the ministries in the new government, so it should be a chance for that to take place in a quite straightforward way.

I think, Morris, you wanted to make a comment. Then we’re going to go to Rick, and then I’ll do my questions so that everyone’s had one round.

M. Sydor: I just want to follow up on the issue about forest practices and the impact on grizzlies and other wildlife. When the act did come in, the government did try to provide some checks and balances.

[11:45 a.m.]

The ministry does have a forest evaluation program. So there are resources that the ministry could direct to study this issue a little bit more if it wanted.

As well, I’ve got to put in a plug for the Forest Practices Board. They do a lot of good work. We communicate with them fairly regularly in terms of deciding what we might want to look at. They’re doing a lot of what we would probably do if they weren’t existing.

It’s unfortunate that they don’t get an opportunity like we do to bring their reports forward to legislative committee members. In our report, at the end, we have an appendix — I think it’s appendix B — which is actually a summary, an extract, from one of their reports which did look at grizzlies. It looked at the association between the impact of resource roads on grizzly populations and how that shifts where the populations are.

They are doing the sort of work that some of the members seem to be concerned with. It’s a question of: is that leading to sufficient change? As was indicated, the legislation came in some time ago.

Since then, there has been a number of studies. Professional reliance is part of that model as well. As you recall, MLA Mike Morris, a year or two ago, did write a report looking at professional reliance and asking the government to consider whether it’s working the way that it was expected. I think, again, that’s an issue that the Forest Practices Board has reported on.

Clearly, there is work going on, and there is opportunity for MLAs to look at those reports and see what sort of information and guidance it might provide.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you, Morris.

R. Glumac: When we’re talking about grizzlies, we’re talking about an entire ecosystem. I’m curious to know…. An ecosystem is the land in which the animal lives, but it’s also the foods that it eats. Along the coast, especially, what is the main food source of the grizzly bear?

J. Psyllakis: On salmon-bearing streams, certainly, coastal grizzly bears are very dependent on salmon. It’s a large portion of the protein in their diet. But they are quite flexible in what they eat: berries, vegetation, other small and medium mammals, often young ungulates — those sorts of things. But on the coast, I would say it’s more based on salmon, vegetation and berries.

R. Glumac: What is being done to look at that — like the availability of the food source, especially the salmon — given the concerns around dwindling salmon runs across the province?

What, specifically, is happening in the bigger context of the ecosystem to address the dwindling salmon stocks and how that affects the grizzly bears?

J. Psyllakis: The general interaction and relationship and the impacts of reduced salmon runs from a government perspective…. It’s not a question that we prioritized or looked at. There are a number of external organizations, largely driven through universities as well as ENGOs, that are assessing the abundance and distribution of salmon and the potential impacts of reduced runs, potentially, on populations.

I’d have to bring that back to the committee, unless there is somebody that can speak specifically to the outcomes of those reports. From a population perspective and looking at the numbers of grizzly bears — the work that we do within government — the coastal populations are considered quite secure.

R. Glumac: Well, they’re considered quite secure. But are we then just closing our eyes to that fact — that if the runs are going to be dwindling…? As it was stated earlier, there is a lag time with grizzly bear populations.

It seems to me to be a glaring deficit, when you’re talking about grizzly bear management, that we’re also not strongly considering the impact of salmon on grizzly bear populations now rather than later, like ten years down the road, when the coastal populations may start going down. We’re like: “Oh well, let’s make a plan to make a plan to deal with that.” This seems to me a big thing that’s missing in this.

J. Psyllakis: There is the land use plan that applies to the coast that now references the Great Bear Rainforest.

[11:50 a.m.]

Within those legal orders, under the Land Act — if that’s not correct, it’s the Environment and Land Use Act, but I believe it’s the Land Act — they consider multiple values, including grizzly bears. It also includes objectives that are established for high-value fish streams and watersheds.

Salmon are also an iconic species in the province — not directly under our jurisdiction, but from a habitat perspective. In that order, we have implemented actions to conserve, manage and protect salmon-bearing streams.

R. Glumac: That’s great. Why isn’t that part of…? My concern is that that’s something that’s missing in here. I would personally like to see more of a focus on that now, when we’re looking at this. The grizzly bear management, with not considering the impact of salmon — that’s a big thing that’s missing. Can we bring that back and bring that into it? If we don’t, we’re not looking ten, 20 years down the road.

A. Dale: I would just add that, certainly, in a management plan, part of what that looks at is what the key threats are to the species you’re actually looking at. Certainly, food sources and things like that would be part of that, so I think it will get captured in terms of a management plan.

We are, coming from Environment, looking at species at risk. There’s a handful of threats on the land base that impact many, many species, so part of the challenge there is trying to actually figure out what those threats are and what our mitigation activities are that we can use to reduce those unintended consequences, often, with regard to those threats.

It relates back to those species at risk in our environmental mitigation policy that we have, as well, as Tom mentioned earlier, as cumulative effects — trying to bring all those things together and making sure that we are addressing those ecosystem threats as well as the hunt or the roads. Roads are another good example of an ecosystem-level threat that we need to try and wrap our heads around and manage better.

T. Ethier: I’ll just add one thing to it. Jennifer mentioned the number of different tools that we’ve got in terms of managing habitat and riparian systems — riparian areas regulation, fisheries sensitive watersheds, temperature-sensitive stream designations — that we do use in important fisheries systems.

It does still fall to the federal government to manage those waterways. We are in active conversation with DFO around the current state of the runs and how both the fisheries are being managed but also what kind of contribution we can make to make these systems more productive.

Thank you for that comment. I’ll make sure that we bring back…. I’ve never brought up the issue of: “Hey, there are also grizzly bears that are dependent on these salmon, not just communities.” It’s an important point. Thanks.

R. Glumac: Just to close on that. In some of the comments that have been raised around wanting to see some specifics on what is going to be in this plan…. Maybe this is something we can point to as saying: “That should be in the plan.”

S. Bond (Chair): I think it’s apparent…. I have some questions I want to ask that are not necessarily on the same theme but captured in the report. I think we should probably give you advance notice. I think you can tell from the interest of committee members that we’re going to be asking you to come back, when the plan is ready, and outline for us how it lines up with the recommendations of the Auditor General — but just generally some of the concerns that have been expressed today.

I have just a number of questions. I’m acutely aware that lunch is in the offing, and it’s always dangerous to be in that position, but some important issues.

Actually, this one is for the Auditor General’s office. It was, I think, the first time I’ve seen it in a report. I was just interested in the concept and why it hasn’t been reflected in other reports. On page 6, it talks about how the cycle of continuous improvement is missing — obviously some sort of test that the Auditor General’s office uses.

I would venture to say that there is a sense of continuous improvement in the ministry. It may not have been as apparent as it should have been. I’m interested in that reference. We haven’t seen that in other reports. Could someone explain what that means and why it’s reflected here and hasn’t been in other ministries?

C. Bellringer: I’ll make a couple of comments and then pass it on to Ardice.

[11:55 a.m.]

That particular cycle — we have actually used it in other audits. In the compliance and enforcement in the mining sector we use that same concept. It’s a slightly different use of the term from: “Do you continually improve within your operation?” It’s specific to the words described in this report around plan, do, check, adjust.

Ardice, do you want to add a little bit?

A. Todosichuk: Sure. We also used it in the catastrophic earthquake report, this method. It’s, again, taking a program, what we were looking at, and looking at the cycle of what we’re trying to find out is happening. When you have a program, it’s basically kind of simple. It’s looking at: “Do you have a plan, are you doing stuff that’s actually meeting the objectives of that plan, and do you know if that’s effective?”

Again to that point of, “Do you have measures, do you have targets, do you have a way of measuring those activities, or are they just activities, or is there just a plan,” it’s taking it through the entire cycle and then finding out whether…. An important piece that sometimes is missing is that the things that you’re doing — do you know that they work? It’s that evaluating and adjusting to make sure that you are achieving that continuous improvement.

It’s a cycle that we’ve used, as Carol mentioned, a number of times in different audits because it allows us to create a framework for looking at it from an audit objective — down those pieces where we might see risks of things not happening within a management framework, which would get you to your objective of whatever you’re trying to achieve.

S. Bond (Chair): Certainly, it’s a straightforward principle, but my experience with the public service is that they probably do that fairly regularly or it is part of the practice of how the ministries are run. So I just thought it was interesting that it was highlighted here. I can’t imagine that they don’t plan. They do it, and then they check it and adjust it. That’s kind of how things work. So I was a bit surprised to see it sort of captured in that way.

I do want to just make a comment. I do live in a place that’s different than where all of you live. So my perspective on this report and the one this afternoon will likely be quite different than yours. We talk a lot about bear viewing. I bear-view regularly in my riding because I drive a distance that is probably the size of Belgium. And there is nothing more incredible than pulling one’s vehicle over…. After 16 years, now soon to be 17, of representing this riding, it is still unbelievable to be able to pull your vehicle over to the side of the road — and I still do it regularly — when I see either black bears or, if you are lucky enough, a grizzly bear.

Recently I saw a momma with two babies last year. It was a phenomenal sight. But the context of that is very different. I don’t need to go to a bear-viewing operation. I simply drive down the highway.

I do want to give some context to this discussion. The most significant issue that rural MLAs deal with is land use about who gets to do what on the land, when and how. How does it interrelate to how other people use the land? If you are a heli-skier or a snowmobiler, or if you are a hunter or a fisher, or if you like the use of back-country roads for tourism perspectives or back-country recreation — those are the values of British Columbians that these ministries are grappling with. And they are not simple. They are very complicated.

I can understand the complexity of the issue. I live it day to day in my constituency office. A day doesn’t go by where someone doesn’t call in to say: “How come so-and-so is doing this when we want do to that?” It is complex, and we do need to take time. I recognize that this species in particular has garnered a lot of emotional attention. But if you look at the math that our Harvard grad over here pointed out, the number of grizzly bears that are killed through hunting is very small compared to the other ways that bears lose their lives in British Columbia. Yet we’re not here to discuss the policy behind that. Just look at the math.

I’d like to just ask a couple of things that haven’t been mentioned. One of the things that’s important is conservation. If someone could just briefly explain the user-pay model. As we understand it, there is a surcharge that helps to fund conservation in British Columbia. And one of the dilemmas, I think, or one of the issues that will likely be faced, is that bear viewing does not currently have a surcharge that funds conservation. First of all, maybe just explain how the money is generated, because it isn’t a very big amount at the moment when we talk about….

[12:00 p.m.]

Conservation is funded by a user-pay model. It’s not a government line of funding. Is there a relationship between the work that’s being done with bear viewing now in terms of conservation and potential fees and surcharges related to that?

J. Psyllakis: I would start, if I may, by saying that there is a user-fee, user-pay model that, I believe, you’re referencing. That is a surcharge on licences for hunting, which goes to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation. But that’s a very small portion of the overall work that government does around conservation, both within our ministry as well as the Ministry of Environment. We have budgets that are not doing work that is related to that proportion of funding.

The Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation does receive surcharge amounts specifically for work on bears. That revenue is generated from licences on black bears and, in the past, grizzly bears as well. There’s a process which they go through to prioritize projects, to make those investments, on which we’re very closely involved with them as partners.

I’m forgetting the second part of your question.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Well, I can go back to the second part. But before we do that, maybe you need to perhaps clarify that for me, then. In the report of the Auditor General, on page 6, it talks about organized inventory and limited monitoring of grizzly bears, and it says: “We found that one of the reasons this work is not being carried out is that there is no dedicated ministry funding; instead, government has created a user-pay model for funding conservation efforts.”

Your last comment was in conflict, actually, with this. It says that one of the reasons inventories are not being carried out is because there isn’t adequate funding, because it’s funded through surcharges, a user-pay model. For example, if you’re going to hunt a grizzly bear — which we no longer are — you must pay $80, of which $16 is a surcharge. That was my concern: what is the model for funding conservation?

While we’re looking at it, I think either Tom or someone said that since the hunt has ended, there’s an inundation now around the bear-viewing side. How are we going to fund conservation efforts when there’s no longer grizzly bear hunting and, as the Auditor General points out, there’s no government funding? What is the answer, then?

J. Psyllakis: With due respect to the Office of the Auditor General, the inventory and monitoring work that is completed within the ministry at this time uses different funds, base funds that come through our budget. As well, we leverage from partnerships and funding proposals, etc. The adequacy of that funding has always been a challenge, and we go through the process of prioritizing to make those investments as wisely as possible. Recently, with the new budget announcement, there has been a commitment to increase the dedicated funds for improving wildlife management and habitat conservation. That’s looking forward.

S. Bond (Chair): Is the report inaccurate, then?

A. Todosichuk: I can answer that. What we were looking at here was an inventory and monitoring strategy, organized inventory and monitoring. As Jen was pointing out, there is inventory and monitoring that happens within government, but it’s ad hoc. It happens as funds are available. What we were looking for was an inventory and monitoring strategy where there was purposeful money actually set aside, in a more strategic way, to fund grizzly bear monitoring. That’s what we were looking for. The word we were more looking at was “organized.”

S. Bond (Chair): Well, it’s confusing when you outline the fact that the major issue is funding coming through a surcharge. Then on page 43, it reflects the fact that bear viewers actually…. It uses the Great Bear Rainforest as an example of how many people actually view, with no surcharge attached to it. From that perspective, is there contemplation of increasing conservation dollars through a surcharge to those people who view bears from a bear-viewing operation?

[12:05 p.m.]

J. Psyllakis: Our engagement on that, specifically, with the association, industry, other stakeholders, communities and the public has been that there’s a strong willingness from the viewing sector to pay, either through licence fees with surcharges or in other ways. Some organizations and businesses are already charging voluntary fees, essentially, to their clients and then donating that to grizzly bear research, grizzly bear conservation, etc.

There is a very high willingness to explore that from the stakeholders and the people engaged in that activity. And if we go down that route, it will require a legislative change if it’s under the Wildlife Act.

S. Bond (Chair): I’m just going to finish this. Then Jane, you can comment on that, and then I’ll just keep going. I don’t want to take too, too long. Go ahead.

A. Dale: I will just add that another source of revenue for inventory in a user-pay model has been mitigation funding from industrial development. Large sources of funds — millions of dollars — have come from various sectors in terms of processes through the EAO, where an industry has to create a fund for inventory for grizzly bears if they’re having an impact on grizzly bear habitat, per se.

S. Bond (Chair): I think that’s an important thing to add. Jane, did you want to add something before I go on to the next?

J. Thornthwaite: Thank you, Chair. I’d like to answer your question, which was a very good one. Because in preparation for today and looking at this report, I did reach out to the bear-viewing industry. I’ll just quote from one of the things that they sent me.

“One of the key issues that is important to us is conservation funding. According to the AG’s report, the total amount that hunters contributed to grizzly bear conservation was around $34,000 a year. We feel that, as an industry, we can do far better than that. It is also right now that there is no more grizzly bear hunting, we shoulder this cost, not the hunters.

“With that in mind, the bear-viewing industry association has committed to matching and exceeding the annual contributions made to grizzly bear conservation by hunters. This year contributions are voluntary, but we nevertheless expect to raise an amount of upwards of $50,000. From 2019, every Bear Viewing Association member will be mandated to make a contribution according to the point above. This may well push our contribution over $100,000, though the exact amount is not known.”

I just wanted to pass that on — that the Bear Viewing Association has stepped up in answer to the decrease in conservation funding from the hunters. They’re going to make that up.

S. Bond (Chair): Thanks for that input. I appreciate that.

I want to talk a little bit about the conservation service for a moment, because we’ve heard an awful lot about it in the past. The report, on page 7, talks about the fact that there’s no evaluation of tools to reduce illegal activities. I’m assuming, though, that while there may not be an evaluation of the tools, the conservation service is actually using the tools they have at their disposal.

M. Zacharias: The answer is yes. Conservation officer service does a number of things to mitigate human and wildlife conflicts. We have eight communities that are awarded the Bear Smart designation. We provide about $250,000, $275,000 each year to the WildSafe program to do just that.

In addition to that, we also have new funds for new conservation officers in this year’s budget. We’ll be moving from 148 to 168 boots on the ground, using that parlance.

Conservation officers are also starting to work with the B.C. Conservation Foundation to look at whether there are additional measures to reduce human and wildlife conflicts through relocating, particularly, bears that are only partially habituated to human activities rather than destroying them.

And to your question, Member, they are also using all the tools that they have at their disposal. We have new IMIT computer systems to track incidents. We’ll be taking better statistics in determining where the conflict areas are, what types of conflicts.

We’re also, for the first time over the last two or three years, now publishing all the violations under the Wildlife Act. We do have a public name and shame list, which, again, is another tool that we use to make sure that we correctly identify those that have violated.

S. Bond (Chair): So they are being used. The criticism of the Auditor General was basically that they haven’t evaluated the effectiveness. Will that be part of the ongoing work that you look at — with the new numbers of conservation officers — evaluating whether or not the tool was actually doing what it was meant to do?

[12:10 p.m.]

M. Zacharias: Correct. I would expect it’s through the management plans that’ll be created over the next year or so. Part of that will be an effectiveness evaluation on all aspects of what’s in the Auditor General report.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that. I appreciate the answer.

This is a very emotional issue. The report says that, basically, nine out of 50-plus units are at risk. The Auditor General’s report points out that there’s one plan been done. Yet the information, in the response from the ministry, talks about four units having had a focus, information, research. Could someone just explain the difference? There’s one plan, yet there are four of the grizzly bear units, according to the ministry, that actually have had a focus. It lists the geographic home of those units. Is there one plan but work being done on four out of nine?

A. Dale: I’ll try to answer that, and others can jump in.

I believe the plan that was referenced was for the North Cascades unit. That was done, I believe, back in 1995. It was a plan for that specific unit. There were various reasons why that hasn’t been fully implemented. It is and was very intensive, as you mentioned, because of all of the conflicts and things that we need to consider. I think having a plan for each of those threatened units, which are really more management units as opposed to biological units, per se, is resource intensive, but it doesn’t mean that we haven’t done the work on some of the other areas.

S. Bond (Chair): I guess that was my point, and I was trying to put some context. When it’s one out of nine, it sounds like: “Well, what happened to the other eight?” Your response actually said: “We’ve done a lot of research on at least four of those units.”

I think making sure we have both sides of the story is really important to British Columbians. While there may be one intensively laid-out, articulated plan, there’s been a lot of work done. In fact, the other units were noted, and I just wanted to help bring that information to the table. It’s not that eight were ignored. There is work going on, and in fact in a fairly intensive way, related to other geographies there.

Page 33. I wondered about the issue of DNA-based data. It was interesting to learn that we have the largest database related to DNA of anywhere, based on the scientific work that’s been done. Having said that, on page 33, it talks about the data as clustered in the south and that there are uninventoried areas in the province. It points that out as an issue. Could someone just explain why? That might have been relevant at one point in time because of urbanization, but now we’re watching other populations facing stress because of — we’ve heard about it here today — resource roads and all of those things. What will be done to deal with that imbalance of where the inventories have taken place previously?

A. Dale: I believe the report mentions that there had been a previous inventory plan that had been set up. I was actually part of that. It’s not currently being used for various reasons, so we do need a new inventory plan.

Certainly, the areas that are highlighted here were priority areas. A lot of those clusters are in the southeast and southwest of the province, where those areas of conservation concern are, as well as some in the north. The inventory plan that we had at the time looked at level of threat to the individual units and time since last inventory — basically, how old the information was. So we had prioritized areas in that sense.

Yes, there are gaps. There are gaps for a reason, because we have had to prioritize the resources that we have. As Tom mentioned earlier, a DNA study can be up to $300,000 to $400,000.

S. Bond (Chair): So the bottom line is that there is going to be a new inventory plan. The Auditor General has pointed out — not me; the Auditor General — that there are potentially high-risk activities that impact grizzly bear populations in some of these un-inventoried areas. You’re looking at a new plan that would, perhaps, address some of those things.

[12:15 p.m.]

A. Dale: Correct.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay.

Electric fencing. I have trouble visualizing. You’d have to have a very gigantic budget and a lot of fences too. The report talks about tools where there are grants for electric fencing, and that might be one of the tools to manage grizzly bear conflicts.

I don’t know about you, but I live in a pretty big part of the province. I can’t imagine that we’d want an electric fence. I assume that these are targeted areas. It just seemed an ironic suggestion that we’re going to look at electronic fencing. We use two other jurisdictions as examples. But it must be a minuscule….

Can you explain the issue of electric fencing and where it might be helpful?

M. Zacharias: Jennifer, do you want to jump in?

J. McGuire: Electronic fencing is used in places in order to keep bears out so they do not become habituated. Some of the key places that electric fences have been used are around landfills. Mackenzie landfill and other municipal landfills in the north do have electric fences around them.

That’s one example of places where those fences are being used in order to keep bears out of garbage and keep them eating natural foods.

S. Bond (Chair): Well, the point made was that other jurisdictions — like Washington, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming — all have government funding for those kinds of things. I mean, to suggest that it might be a provincewide tool would be a pretty massive investment of money in a gigantic geographic area. I understand the strategic targeting around orchards and places like that, but I don’t think it’s going to solve the grizzly bear problem anytime soon.

I guess the other couple of questions I wanted to ask are more broad in nature and have enormous potential for impact.

Perhaps it’s the deputy of environment…. I am interested in the comment, more than once, that there will be the enactment of an endangered species law. While that would have impacts, I’m assuming, with grizzly bears, it would also have broader impacts in British Columbia, particularly when it comes to the balance between the economy, the environment and all of those things.

How does it relate directly to the grizzly bear issue? And what are the other potential impacts and the timeline? More importantly, where I live, that matters a great deal in terms of the balance of the ability to use the land in British Columbia. Since it was used as one of the examples of how we might manage grizzly bears, what else is on the table? What is the timeline related to endangered species law?

M. Zacharias: Sure. Absolutely. I’d be happy to speak to that.

The way endangered species are managed currently in B.C…. This is important context. Right now, the federal Species at Risk Act applies on private and Crown lands in B.C. because the province does not have equivalent species-at-risk legislation at the provincial level.

The intent of our legislation, which we intend to bring forward into the House in 2019, is basically to have federal equivalency. The context behind that is that with a provincial species-at-risk act, we would have more tools. We would have something that’s fine-tuned towards how B.C.’s geography, climate and ecosystems work.

It also would allow B.C. to be able to do unique things to B.C. around species management that, probably, other provinces and territories don’t have in terms of geography, in terms of the types of environments and habitats we have in B.C. We have a desert. We have constrained watersheds. We have salmon-bearing watersheds. We have all sorts of ecological communities that aren’t found in the other parts of Canada.

As part of our species-at-risk work, we’ll be engaging this spring with First Nations communities, industry stakeholders and others. We’ll be having a fairly broad engagement that will kick off, I believe, in mid- to late April, if I have that correct. That will run through the summer.

We will have a publication of what we’ve heard towards the end of the summer, in terms of all the comments that have come back, and then we will continue to work with stakeholder groups, First Nations communities and others as we draft throughout the fall.

What will be different about B.C.’s act and what we’ll be proposing in our intentions papers as we come out through the spring, will be that we will be looking at some of the themes that have emerged this morning.

[12:20 p.m.]

One is ecosystem based — or doing multispecies at the same time. Two is that we’ve looked at the experience with the federal government and other jurisdictions around some of the issues they’ve had around permitting. We would like a regime that does not get stuck in process and confuses activity with achievement. But we do have an act that will come in and be much more, I would say, transactionally efficient than the federal act or other examples around British Columbia.

We’ll be having our own listing system, and we will list those species that we feel are important. We may be the first jurisdiction to actually include Indigenous or Aboriginal concerns around listing systems. We intend to have an act that’s going to be fairly unique.

We expect that once we have our own act, the federal government will remove themselves from the oversight of species at risk in B.C., and it’ll allow us a little bit more creativity and flexibility on the land base to address things like road density, to look at multispecies that use the same habitat in the same area. We’d be happy to provide a briefing further.

Jennifer or Alec, anything you want to add to that?

A. Dale: I would just add that one of the issues that every jurisdiction in Canada has had with the federal Species at Risk Act is the inability and inflexibility around actually looking at and addressing the socioeconomic environment trade-off. That is very much at the forefront in our mind in terms of: how do we in B.C., with a new piece of legislation, actually address that concern?

S. Bond (Chair): In the engagement process — I am relieved to hear there is one, a significant one — will industry be part of that discussion, people like tourism operators, all of the people for whom the land base is part of diversifying an economy in a region of the province where I live?

A. Dale: Absolutely. We are starting with First Nations and Indigenous communities. We will be following that up very shortly thereafter with a full consultation with…. I couldn’t list all the stakeholders, but certainly all the main inforestry, energy and mines, hydro, tourism, agriculture — the list goes on. So yes.

S. Bond (Chair): And intention papers will be published. Is that correct?

A. Dale: Correct.

S. Bond (Chair): All right. Does anyone have any other questions?

Well, I want to first of all thank the committee for doing their homework — those were all thoughtful and important questions. And, I think, the ministry representatives also — we appreciate you coming and answering questions. I know that it’s been a lot of your lives’ work, for many of you, and I know that it can be difficult to receive a report from the Auditor General. I’ve been on the other end of that, as well, and it’s not always a comfortable feeling.

Having said that, it is about improving processes. It’s making sure, as Garry pointed out, that it is outcomes-based. I think you’ve heard from all of us that a science-based approach is what matters here for most British Columbians — transparency, making sure that for what you understand to be happening on the inside, people can actually see that when they make observations of the work that you’ve done.

We really appreciate the candour of the discussion here today. I think the tone was great. We kept within the scope of discussion, so that is appreciated.

Just in terms of follow-up, we will be asking, and Kate will put it on the to-do list, that the plan…. As you work through it, we’re going to ask you to bring it back so that we can actually follow up. This is a committee that’s very interested in not seeing an end point once we have a discussion here, because it feels like there needs to be an ongoing process. That is evolving with our work. Mitzi and I will be working on that over the next few months in terms of how that might work.

We would like you to know that we look forward to having you come back when you have made progress on that report. So again, thank you to the Auditor and to her staff.

With that, we will take a break — a recess — and we will grab some lunch. You’re welcome to join us. Then we’ll return, with the next report, at one o’clock. We have two additional reports that we’ll consider at that time. So we’ll recess the committee until then.

The committee recessed from 12:24 p.m. to 1:04 p.m.

[S. Bond in the chair.]

S. Bond (Chair): Good afternoon, and welcome back to the afternoon session of the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts.

I neglected in the earlier session to thank the Clerk of Committees and her team for making it possible for us to meet here in Vancouver today — and obviously, the Hansard staff, who do such a fantastic job on the road for us. We very much appreciate their support.

We welcome back the Auditor General and her team. The first report that we’re going to consider this afternoon…. I don’t know. It’s like northern day, or something, for me here. We’re going to look at the Auditor General’s report An Independent Audit of the Recruitment and Retention of Rural and Remote Nurses in Northern B.C.

That report was released in February of 2018. It speaks, also, to the work that our committee has done to help us catch up and be dealing with these in a more timely way.

[1:05 p.m.]

To our guests who are here. The Auditor General will open with some comments of her own about the report more broadly. Then her staff — she’ll also introduce them — will speak specifically to the PowerPoint.

David, who is going to be the lead spokesperson?

D. Byres: I’ll start, and then some of my colleagues from Northern Health will jump in.

S. Bond (Chair): Perfect.

We have David here on behalf of the Ministry of Health. We appreciate you being here.

Obviously, members of Northern Health are here. We’ll ask you to introduce yourselves and your staff when the time comes, for the record. We need to make sure that your names are on the record for our meetings this afternoon.

We’re going to begin. We want to recognize the timelines that we’ve set for this afternoon. We hope to complete our work by three o’clock. Some people are flying, and others are returning to their communities.

With that, we’re going to turn it over to the Auditor General, and she will make her opening remarks.

An Independent Audit of the
Recruitment and Retention of Rural
and Remote Nurses in Northern B.C.

C. Bellringer: Thanks for inviting us to present this report. Morris Sydor is still with us, the assistant Auditor General. And Sarah Riddell was the senior manager who led this audit.

The objective of the audit was to determine if Northern Health was effectively recruiting and retaining enough registered nurses and nurse practitioners to fill the rural and remote RN and NP positions in its health human resources — or HHR — plan.

Overall, we concluded that Northern Health did not recruit and retain enough RNs and NPs to fill the rural and remote positions in its plan. It was short about 15 percent of its rural and remote RN workforce, and more than a quarter of NP positions were vacant. There are a number of reasons for this shortage and its impacts on patients and staff in the organization.

However, there was good news too. Northern Health has implemented or partially implemented many good recruitment, hiring and retention good practices. Performance monitoring was a gap. As a result, Northern Health was unable to show that these efforts have led to the increased recruitment and retention of these health professionals.

We would like to thank Northern Health for their support and cooperation throughout this audit. Staff at Northern Health were actively engaged throughout the process, responsive to the audit team and demonstrated commitment to improving practice and addressing challenges to recruitment and retention. It was greatly appreciated by the audit team.

I’ll turn it over now to Sarah to provide a more detailed overview of the audit findings and our recommendations.

S. Riddell: Nursing is the largest health profession in Canada. Regulated nurses make up almost half of Canada’s health care workforce, and they are highly trusted by the public. Globally, nurses are in short supply, and many western countries, including Canada, are reporting current, unpredicted shortages, particularly in rural and remote areas.

An aging workforce coupled with an aging population and a growing burden of chronic disease have created a difficult situation where demand for nursing services is increasing at the same time as many experienced nurses are retiring. In B.C., despite this growing demand and pending retirements, the number of new nursing graduates has remained relatively stable since 2010. There are currently no major planned expansions to undergraduate and diploma nursing programs.

Due to the isolation and geography, nurses working in northern rural and remote communities need to be skilled generalists with the experience and education to assess effectively, think critically and manage patients with unstable and emerging diseases, often in circumstances of limited resources and under difficult conditions.

The Northern Health Authority is responsible for planning and delivering health services to approximately 300,000 northern B.C. residents across a largely rural and remote territory covering approximately two-thirds of the province.

Our audit looked at whether Northern Health was effectively recruiting and retaining enough registered nurses and nurse practitioners to fill the rural and remote positions identified in its 2016-17 health human resources plan. We concluded that it was not. As of April 2017, more than a quarter of Northern Health’s rural and remote nurse practitioner positions were unfilled. It was short 121 registered nurses, or 15 percent of its rural and remote workforce.

Not having enough registered nurses and nurse practitioners can negatively impact patients, staff and the organization.

[1:10 p.m.]

We found that RNs were challenged to meet the needs of patients in the community as well as those of patients in acute and long-term care. RNs were also worried about patient safety. They were not always able to adequately supervise patients or perform regular equipment and medication checks. They were also tired due to working long hours, increasing the risk of medical error.

We found evidence of nurse burnout, by which we mean the effects of prolonged stress, including emotional exhaustion, disengagement and reduced performance. Finally, there were higher costs to fill shifts due to paying overtime and more expensive nurses via agencies.

Both external and internal factors contributed to the nursing shortage. Northern Health cannot influence external factors like weather and isolation, but it is directly responsible for or can influence internal factors like the implementation of interprofessional teams. RNs on interprofessional teams provide primary care nursing services, including public health and home health services. In the past, many RNs focused on just one of these areas. Some are not interested in or they don’t feel comfortable expanding their practice to other areas without additional training.

In terms of management, we heard examples of registered nurses choosing one community over another because a hiring manager was quick and attentive throughout the recruitment process. In other cases, RNs left their positions due to poor management.

Finally, there is evidence that areas close to a nursing school enjoy a greater supply of registered nurses. There isn’t an RN training program in the northeast part of our province, and many people we spoke with indicated that this contributed to a significant shortage of RNs in this region.

We made nine recommendations to address the root causes of the registered nurse and nurse practitioner shortage and to close gaps between good practice and Northern Health’s current state. These recommendations included developing comprehensive recruitment and retention strategies for registered nurses that have clear goals and performance measures to guide Northern Health’s activities and enable it to assess its progress; establishing clear responsibilities for all aspects of its recruitment and hiring processes, including oversight; and working with other organizations to develop recruitment and retention programs and to address systemic issues like housing availability and affordability and the distribution of nursing education programs in the north.

Thanks very much. That concludes our presentation.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Thank you for that. I think everyone had a copy of the presentation to follow along with as well. We’ll move over to David.

David, if you could introduce yourself and then the other members of the presenting team, that would be very helpful.

D. Byres: Good afternoon. Thanks to the Chair and the Deputy Chair and the committee members for allowing us to come and meet with you today. Myself and my colleagues do just want to take a moment to acknowledge that we are meeting today on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

I am David Byres. I am the assistant deputy minister responsible for clinical integration, regulation and education as well as the chief nurse executive within the Ministry of Health. I will turn it over to my colleagues to each introduce themselves for the record.

S. Rossi: Good afternoon. My name is Sandra Rossi. I am the regional director of recruitment and retention at Northern Health.

F. Bell: Hi. Fraser Bell, vice-president of planning, quality and information management with Northern Health. I’ve been with Northern Health about 13 years.

K. Brown: I’m Kevin Brown. I’m the executive director in the clinical integration, regulation and education branch, reporting to David Byres. I’ve been in the Ministry of Health for 19 years.

D. Blackie: Good afternoon. My name is Doug Blackie. I’m the director of recruitment and retention policy in the clinical integration, education and regulation division of the Ministry of Health. I report to Kevin Brown, and I’ve been involved with the ministry for almost four years now.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you. Why don’t we get started, David.

D. Byres: The ministry and Northern Health just want to thank the Auditor General and her staff for their comprehensive and insightful report. As she’s noted, she makes nine recommendations today. So we’re pleased to be here to talk about the work that’s already underway to address those nine recommendations, some of which are substantively complete and others where there is a plan for implementation to continue over the rest of this year that we will review with you today. That’s being led by Northern Health but certainly in partnership with the Ministry of Health, other post-secondary institutions, local and regional governments and other stakeholders that you will hear about this morning.

[1:15 p.m.]

In our work and collaboration with Northern Health…. Certainly, they take these recommendations very seriously. They have made significant progress already since receiving the report and implementing a number of actions. We’re going to talk about 22 actions today that are underway to meet those nine recommendations, as well as work they’ve done in terms of a number of processes and policies and programs underway to strengthen their recruitment and retention of rural and remote nurses.

You will hear about a number of partnerships that are also underway and making sure those move forward, and then you’ll hear about the remaining five actions that are planned. You will hear about the plan underway to complete those within the next year.

I will turn it over to my colleague Sandra Rossi to continue on to review those key findings and actions that they are currently leading and underway with.

S. Rossi: Thank you very much. I am pleased to be here to share with you Northern Health’s action plan related to the audit.

Recommendation 1 really refers to our health human resources planning. Northern Health is committed to creating an effective HHR plan. Part of that is to ensure that we integrate all of our community information with our organizational information. What we’re doing right now, and we initiated this in November of 2017, is rolling out what’s called our workforce planning toolkit, which will go to all locations of Northern Health and will be completed in December of 2018, to look at ensuring that we have all the right metrics for those locations.

That includes things like workforce profile, our churn-in areas, department analysis, supernumerary statistics, sick time statistics — so really looking at key metrics and focusing on those. Along with that, of course, is integrating that with community workforce planning. That’s getting stakeholder feedback, working really closely with our community partners. We are really fortunate in the north. We have wonderful community partners with all of our stakeholders across the north. We feel that that is going to be a really strong basis for us. That will inform our overarching plan and needs as we move forward.

Recommendation 2 focuses on affordable housing. That’s within the communities. It’s very important to recognize that we have a very diverse community when we’re looking at two-thirds of the population. In some communities, housing is very easy to get. There are lots of vacancies and affordability. In other locations, that is not the case. We’re looking at what we can be doing to be working with key stakeholders — that includes the Ministry of Health and the Nurses Bargaining Association — to offset housing challenges in those areas we’ve identified.

One pilot project that we’re really excited about, which will begin June 1 of this year, is a housing program. We are looking at several communities where we’ll ensure that there are short-term housing options for people who are being recruited to those locations. We see that as something that is innovative and dynamic.

We also have a long-standing practice, as I’ve mentioned, of engagement with our communities and stakeholders. One example that I want to draw your attention to is our Peace River regional district, who created a scholarship program. This also helps with new workers from those regions that are getting education in health care professions and also expanding the skills of current health care professionals. We see that as the type of innovation and partnership that is going to bode well for us to manage root causes of retention in the north.

We also want to strengthen our partnership with our First Nations Health Authority. Our First Nations communities are vibrant in the north, and we know that maintaining and improving those relationships — and again, working towards innovation — is going to be really important.

Northern Health has, as one of its key values, innovation and collaboration. I hope you will hear that throughout my presentation. That is something that we are highly focused on and is very close to all of the hearts of those that work in Northern Health.

Moving to recommendation 3, it really focuses on working with the University of Northern B.C., the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Advanced Education to ensure alignment of our nursing education programs.

[1:20 p.m.]

When we’re looking at that…. Northern Health is currently collaborating on a northeast nursing training program. I know that was mentioned earlier by Sarah — thank you so much — about how important that could be. I was just working on that this last week, and we are supporting this initiative with metrics and information and are excited about being involved in that.

In addition, we’re looking at expanding access to nursing education in other areas, and maximizing clinical practica for nurses is a focus that we have. We’re really focused on a practice-driven, rural nursing certificate program that was introduced at the University of Northern B.C. in 2006-2007, because it really is a key component for nurses who work in rural and remote communities and really helps with that specialization for that skill set.

Recommendation 4 really looks at how we can continue to work with our B.C. Nurses Union to develop new recruitment and retention strategies and build off of what we already currently have.

We are looking at strategies that are innovative. A pilot that is happening right now is a housing program that is underway. It has a timeline of June 1 to identify communities where we’ll have housing transition in place so that if we are recruiting to a specific location where there’s difficulty finding houses and we already have that in place, it’ll help them transition those positions, those nurses, into permanent housing but give them a place to start. We see that as really foundational.

We also are really excited about the nurses travel pool. This is a really unique rotation where we will have nurses that will be residing in Prince George, where we tend to have more availability of recruitment, but then they will travel to our rural and remote locations on a rotation — spend about half of their time in their discipline out in rural and remote locations and then the rest in Prince George.

We will have 13 positions. They are going to be posted on April 15, so they’re coming out. If anyone here knows people looking for adventures in the north, let them know to check out our website. We will have July 1 for our first placement. We see that as really key and unique, and it will also add to having that same pool of people going out to the same communities. We think the continuity of care is going to be really enhanced with that.

Recommendation 5 focuses on our nursing recruitment strategy. Although we have a recruitment strategy, as the Auditor General pointed out, having a complete, comprehensive, singular strategy is going to be really key for us. We will be focusing on ensuring that we get together with each community. We’ve already got events planned this spring where we’re going out to all of the health service delivery areas. We will be working not only with stakeholders within Northern Health, but we have got key community members, because it really is those key community members that help us sustain the work that we do. We will be identifying overarching strategies as a well as a philosophy of that nursing recruitment.

We also plan to expand some of our innovative programs and improve our human resources management alignment, expanding things like Grow Our Own, having more of those Grow Our Own activities take place. Adventures in Healthcare, which is a partnership that we currently are involved with, with a number of organizations locally, has expanded this year, so that’s great. And our roving recruiter — we’ve already had some really great ideas of how we can just expand that more and take advantage of the folks that are already involved in our recruitment efforts.

Northern Health is going to be establishing clear hiring responsibilities and processes, and although we currently have that, it’s a matter of implementing those metrics so that we can start measuring. We are looking at a few different things happening in this area. One is restructuring the HR leadership. That includes the regional director of recruitment and retention, which is the position that I took over last month. So I’m really excited and focused on helping Northern Health achieve the goals that were identified in these nine key areas that we can be looking at.

[1:25 p.m.]

Included in that is looking at engagement of our leaders through the recruitment and retention focus. One of the things that has been implemented already is meeting with all of our COOs on a monthly basis and really trying to be more proactive in our approach to recruitment and sharing data and information sooner and looking at our difficult-to-fill before positions get onto that registry. So we’re doing a fair bit of proactive work with our senior leaders in that area.

In addition, looking at oversight of recruitment and retention, the metrics and monitoring is something that is really key to us and was identified. I think that will allow us to ensure that our strategies are measured and we know which ones are working for us and where we might have to change or shift our priority or focus.

Training hiring managers to ensure all hiring managers receive comprehensive training in their roles and responsibility is another area. By March of 2019, we plan to provide a fresh recruitment and resource training for all of our managers at Northern Health. Although we have that, we think it can be improved. Of course, putting the metrics into place again is something that is really critical for us.

We also will be strengthening our leadership and management opportunities. One of the areas is expanded access to our leadership development in core links, where we’re going to have early access to some of the training manuals. This is going to be for our front-line managers and supervisors. We think the sooner that we can have people involved in that training, it’s going to be really helpful to all of Northern Health.

In addition to that, we are going to, by March of 2019, have a robust and really clear leadership pathway for nurses. That, as well, we believe, will help with nurse retention because it is going to support them in their development and particularly in the leadership capacities for them.

Developing standardized orientation for nurses was identified, and we see this as key. We will be working over the next several months, and in December of 2018, we will have a new standardized nursing orientation that will collate all of the pre-existing orientation that’s currently available at Northern Health into one key strategic strategy. In addition to that, we will continue to have more supports for new nurses that are practising in all of our locations across the Northern Health Authority.

We’re really excited, as well, about the refresh of our Northern Health on-boarding program. It is in its pilot stage right now, and it will go fully live on May 31 of this year. What is really exciting about the on-boarding program is that it will be comprehensive on-boarding that will take place for all new employees before they start working with Northern Health. We think that that’s going to be really critical and supportive of all of our nurses and nurse practitioners coming into the organization.

Along with that, what is really critical — and has been identified in the audit as well — is that we will have metrics on who is taking it and how quickly they’re taking it. We’ll be monitoring that as well. Again, looking at the metrics and monitoring will be a key focus for us.

The last recommendation is having Northern Health complete a full, comprehensive retention strategy for our nurses, with clear goals and performance measures to guide the work that we do. We will have this completed by April of 2019.

We would note that the Auditor General had identified that we have had a 43 percent decrease in exits over the past five years. We think that that retention piece…. We need to be capturing what we’re doing to keep those nurses. We need to add to that, because that’s one area that I think we have the greatest amount of leverage.

We know that there is a shortage of nursing — provincially, nationally, globally — and we need to start measuring and seeing what programs are really helping us, focusing more in those key areas while we continue to use our value of innovation and collaboration to ensure that we have the right set of people for our northern population.

D. Byres: Just as a couple of other points that I will add in, in terms of a summary, is also that the work of the Auditor General was limited to nurses within rural and remote communities, but we know there are other health professionals that work there and there are similar challenges across multiple health professions. Some of the work that the ministry is also supporting with not only Northern Health but all of the health authorities is work to look at all the health professions and how we actually think differently about scope of practice.

[1:30 p.m.]

There are certainly things that only a physician can do, only a registered nurse can do, only an NP can do, but there are many things that any of them can do. How do we begin to optimize the role and scope of the entire team and think about the work as an integrated team-based approach?

We are doing some work just in sharing this current status, for example. David Williams, a member of the senior executive team with Northern Health, has met with all the chief nursing officers in the province to review this report and begin some dialogue with all of them on how we can also incorporate some of these learnings across all of the health authorities — because there are similar issues in rural and remote communities elsewhere in the province — and what we can learn from this, as well as to begin some work with them to really take a different kind of approach around team-based care and optimizing the way the team actually functions.

I think the other part of the summary I’ll also highlight is that we know evidence is lacking. There’s not a huge plethora of information and evidence within the literature, as well, to guide our work and take a look at what the best practices are and what we can pull from.

I would also add, just in summarizing, that Northern Health is also leading the way in generating some of that evidence, in part because of their partnership with the University of Northern B.C., some academic communities — some led by Martha MacLeod — and others, which is also informing our work at the ministry. While they are implementing this work, wherever possible it’s also based on evidence, or their work itself is helping to inform questions for their researchers to look at. We can then use that evidence to better support work across the whole province.

Maybe I’ll just go to the next slide. We do recognize the number of challenges that are shared by all of the health authorities, especially those that have larger rural and remote areas, in terms of where they’re providing services. We do hope that we’re going to learn from a whole number of strategies that we’re collaborating with Northern Health on, and be able not only to support them in this work to address the recommendations that the Auditor General and her team have made, but also to support the other health authorities as we do this work and, wherever possible, also ensure that we’ve got strong relationships with our academic partners, which can begin to generate some evidence as we go.

The other piece of work, just in terms of some context, may be of interest to the committee, because there were some recommendations, including around a nursing program in the northeast corner of the health authority, and how that could move forward. We’ve also began a joint planning board that’s co-chaired with myself and another ADM from Advanced Education. We can do that work, actually, together and make sure that Advanced Education, Skills and Training and Health are aligned in supporting the work that Northern Health is doing with their post-secondary institutions to bring forth a proposal for us to consider.

We will stop there and return it to the Chair for any questions that the committee may have, or comments.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Questions?

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): It’s wonderful to see you all here today. I really appreciate that this is a lot of work. There’s a lot of work that has gone in from start to finish, and it’s going to roll forwards as well. There is going to be a lot of change coming up as well.

I think, just from the discussions we’ve had at this committee already today, there’s general appreciation for the facts that there are specific dates in here for implementation and also that people are talking about metrics and measurement. That’s really on your radar, and you’re going to be looking at that in creating that cycle of evaluation and improvement. Also, we do know that best practice, particularly in health care, is based on a team-based approach and collaboration. Moving forward with that as a key theme, I think, is really positive.

I have just a couple of questions. Given all of that context, that is a lot of change at a time of delivering that front-line service to people who are possibly in distress or in pain or whatever. Where’s the thinking in terms of managing how much change and at what time and how to make sure, with all of these great ideas, that there isn’t too much change going on at one time?

[1:35 p.m.]

F. Bell: Well, I think a lot of the focus that we spend as an executive is on prioritization. We’re getting much better. We can’t claim perfection, but I think, having set up a strategic plan, Northern Health has, for some years, been quite oriented toward establishing a strategic plan that’s derivative of government direction. We have a strategic plan that we’ve established. It’s quite clear and helps us to set priorities. From that plan, we do identify a number of priority action plans each year that help us to make sure that we’re not biting off more than we can chew and we’re resourcing those plans appropriately.

I think one of the recommendations here, and certainly something we’re working on quite hard, is front-line leadership support and development. I think that’s going to help a lot. It has helped a lot historically. The more we’re able to expand the skill sets, competencies and integration of our front-line managers, I think the more change we’re able to take on over time. Over the past years and over the next year, we’re continually fortifying that front-line management capacity so that we can kind of move strategic change through to operations.

Did that answer your question?

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): In parts, yes, thank you. Some of that’s reassuring. I think there’s no perfect answer, right? Otherwise, someone would be….

F. Bell: We have a number of supports, also, for change management. The reason I’m attending today is I’m responsible for planning, quality and information management. That really provides a lot of the infrastructure to support change. We have quality, education and information technology support that we line up to our strategic priorities and plans. That’s some of the support side of how we move change forward.

S. Rossi: I’ll just add to that, if I could. When we looked at our planning as well, something that we looked at is that in some places, we already had a number of things in place. It was just not a matter of having it comprehensive or having it rolled out across the entire organization. It’s not going to be a huge amount of change. What it’s going to be is it’s going to be more systematic. It’s going to ensure that we have metrics and that we’re starting to measure. Then we can start saying whether a strategy is linked to success.

When we look at the work of our recruiters, for example, integrating a candidate relationship system is going to make their work easier. Although it is change, they’re already doing a lot of that, but they’re doing it in paper and a lot in their head or in spreadsheets. Implementing a system is actually going to be something that they’re already really excited about and will allow for those metrics and measurements to come into play.

D. Byres: You’re right. There’s no perfect way to doing this, and we won’t always get it right. The only other part that I would add is that we’re also creating opportunities for nurses themselves to give feedback.

For example, at the end of May, Northern Health is pulling together a number of nurses and nursing leaders from across the entire health authority for the day. I get to spend some time with them and hear directly from them. Those periodic opportunities, as this implementation continues, to also seek feedback from them and think about how we could better support them are also part of how we manage against…. The metrics will tell us one thing, but we also, periodically, need to check back with the people who are actually providing the service at the point of care.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): That’s good to hear, thank you.

A question for the Auditor, and then maybe for a response, is: was there a gender dimension to this? I didn’t see anything that stood out in the report. There’s a mention of child care, for example. But I am wondering whether…. There is a particular disproportionate amount of women, for example, in this profession. Does that lead us to certain solutions that need to tackle issues for women as well as then need to increase proportionality between genders in the profession in this area?

C. Bellringer: We didn’t draw it out as a specific set of criteria, and you won’t find a section that focused on the gender issues. Interestingly, we were at a conference a couple of weeks ago of the Pacific Northwest Auditors General through the U.S. and Canada, and there was a presentation on gender issues. This report came out as one of the examples that one of the presenters selected and pointed to….

[1:40 p.m.]

The integration of the issues was here. I mean, it was something that was certainly front of mind. It’s in the appendices, in terms of practice, in terms of expectations and in terms of findings. But the presenter at this conference did say that a step forward for our office to consider — and we will — would be to more specifically draw out gender issues in future reports, where it’s obviously an element of the practice.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Is there anything, in terms of the response, that illustrates that there needs to be any attention to gender equity?

F. Bell: I can’t refer to anything specific where we’ve had discussions about gender equity within Northern Health, but I think it’s naive to think that there aren’t issues around gender, around power imbalances — that sort of thing — within health care. It’s certainly an area that bears scrutiny.

I don’t have anything to report specifically to say that we’re examining that in particular. I think our work around working with interprofessional teams to communicate and understand where they have imbalances — where there are assumptions that people are making that are affecting their interactions and practices — will help us, from a front-line, practical standpoint, to address issues around gender imbalance and power, but I can’t say that we’ve had a specific strategy related to that.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Just one last question, if that’s okay. Part of the action plan was to have regular — at least twice a year, I think it was — meetings with the First Nations Health Authority. I’m just wondering how those are going, and what outcomes you’re seeing as a result of those.

S. Rossi: We’ve just started our meetings with the First Nations Health Authority focused strictly on recruitment, although there are all kinds of partnerships across the health authority with First Nations communities. What we’re focused on, in those conversations…. Our first one was really just to review the report. We had met with them, and then we had another subsequent meeting to talk about the report and how we can be working together, particularly in areas such as housing and the interprofessional teams.

I know the travelling nurse pool was something that was really key and interesting to them, because what it will mean is a more stable set of people going in and out of the communities, where the communities get to know folks. So even if they’re not living in the community, you’re having the same rotation of people coming through — rather than the focus on agency nurse, where you might not feel that same connection. We’ve just initiated early stages with that, to continue to look at new ways to do that.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

J. Thornthwaite: Thank you for your presentation. I was interested in your comments about housing, because obviously that would be one of the key barriers. So perhaps a little bit more detail on the pilot that is starting this year and on what kind of plans you do have for the temporary and the long-term housing issues in the north.

S. Rossi: With the housing program, the communities have not yet been identified, but there is currently an assessment going on, on what will be happening with the housing and where that temporary housing will go. Of course, there’s also some work being done on the travelling nurse pool to ensure that there’s housing taking place.

I can tell you that we do have some housing already in place. I know in Burns Lake, we have owned staff residences. We also have, in Vanderhoof, owned staff residences. We’re looking at where that can be incorporated in other areas. Quesnel has a sleep room in the hospital. As well, McBride has a suite for Northern Health. So there’s already some in place. It’s, again, looking at: which ones are working? How can we expand it? What are our partnerships in doing that?

We have a number of initiatives taking place. Sometimes it’s the right initiative for the right time. I know, for example, in Fort St. John, when we’re working with the Northern Lights Community College up there, our nursing students who take the nursing student programs in the summer are able to access the residence. That helps support that program. Our employed student nurses who are going to that region then can access residences that aren’t being used by the community college, and then that does fill one specific need.

I think we’re going to be really focused on having many solutions for many communities, because they are that diverse.

[1:45 p.m.]

J. Thornthwaite: Just getting back to the pilot, you said that the communities had not been identified. Can you walk through what that actually is? You don’t have to tell us exactly what the community is, but what is the pilot that is going to help and attract nurses to that particular area and to stay there?

S. Rossi: That pilot will offer interim housing for anyone moving into a community. For example, if we were looking at that pilot, let’s say, in Fort St. John, what it would do is offer apartments and housing for a period of time — for, let’s say, six months — while they are waiting to find their own residency. It’s temporary housing so that we’re able to recruit to a position, have housing available immediate to them until they’re able to sustain long term.

There are other pilot projects that are working similarly like that. Kitimat, for example, currently has a program where we have new nurses or other health professionals moving into that community. They offer a subsidy for six months, and they also help with finding places for people and residences for them to live in. This takes it a step further, where we’ll already have secured those residences — again, making it easier to recruit, because they’re able to start the job, have a place to live immediately and then look for long-term, secured housing.

J. Thornthwaite: Can I ask another follow-up? You mentioned Fort St. John. I guess Fort St. John thinks that they’re rural, but they are a city, right? I wasn’t actually thinking about Fort St. John — I would assume that it’s expensive up there, because it’s a resource community — but really remote. How would you…? You had a neat little map here.

I like the definition of what “rural” is. I don’t think Prince George is classified as rural. Are you?

S. Bond (Chair): I consider myself rural, but it is the urban part of a rural riding, so there you go.

J. Thornthwaite: The urban part of rural. Okay.

You mentioned First Nations communities that, I guess, may or may not have a hospital, let alone a clinic. How are you organizing coverage there? I don’t know whether or not I’ve got it right about the travelling nurses program. When I’m thinking travelling, I’m thinking about fly in, fly out, like they do at the oil sands. I don’t know whether or not that’s the kind of thing that you’re talking about — to get the increased coverage of what is required or getting the First Nations community themselves to graduate their own nurses that can stay in their own community.

Again, can you walk me through how that pilot or how that process would work?

S. Rossi: How that process will work: there was money that was jointly agreed on to focus on this initiative with the Ministry of Health and the Nurses Bargaining Association, as well as Northern Health. They had decided to put money aside to secure housing. So Northern Health will be securing housing in a number of communities. We don’t have the communities assessed yet.

Right now I know there was a focus on Fort St. John, Dawson Creek and Kitimat, where we will actually rent housing or we’ll have housing available. We’ll be putting money in and securing housing. That will help with the recruitment, because when someone is ready to move into the community, housing is not going to be a barrier. We’re removing the barrier by allowing and having housing available until they can get their own permanent housing.

Now, the other nurse travel pool is a little bit different in the sense that, yes, we’ll ensure that we have housing or a residence available for people who are travelling, and they will be like a fly-in, fly-out. That’s exactly what that nurse travel pool will be.

Nurses. We’re looking at 13 FTEs for that program. Half of the time they will have a rotation in Prince George, where we have an easier time to recruit to, and then half of their rotation will be in remote communities. There will be different rotations, depending on where they’re going, and it will be a drive or a fly-in to a community. What we do think about that is that we’re going to, then, have continuity within those communities, because the same rotation and the same person will be rotating back into that same community wherever we can. We’ll be able to recruit to the specialty-type nursing that they may need.

Different programs, different approaches — but together we’ll allow for more sustainability of rural and remote nurses in those locations.

B. Ma: I’m wondering whether or not there has been any discussion in regard to foreign-trained nurses and whether or not that’s an opportunity for us in northern B.C.

[1:50 p.m.]

S. Rossi: Yeah, we do have a special recruiter that looks at internationally trained nurses. We do bring internationally trained nurses to Northern Health on a regular basis. Again, that is something that we work with Health Match B.C. on. We work with the province, often, on some of their big recruiting tours. I know that one of our recruiters is currently with Health Match in New Orleans — right now, as we speak — looking at how we recruit to Northern Health. I know I’m going down to the States for a graduation for my daughter. I will be recruiting while I’m on that campus as well.

I think that’s where we really have that innovation. When we’re looking at things like roving recruiter and looking at all of our folks at Northern Health, we’re all recruiters. How do we, when we’re travelling and we’re out and about, look? We are looking towards that. In the northeast, I know we just had two or three nurses that were recruited in from the international area.

We’re competing with a global market. At the same time, we’re really focused on ensuring, when we’re recruiting internationally, that we’re having the right person coming to the right community. Fit is really a key for us. We want to not just focus on the recruitment, but we do want the retention.

It was interesting. We just had a really great story where we were recruiting. The city of Fort St. John had just put out this beautiful view book — if you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to take a look at it — that really looked at the lifestyle in Fort St. John. We recruited someone, within two weeks of using that as a recruitment tool, from another area in B.C. where someone was thinking of coming. They just thought the fit with the community was better for them.

Again, when we’re doing this work, we’re doing it with our communities and with our partners.

B. Ma: There are new immigrants who come to Canada with international training that might not currently allow them to transition directly into the nursing field here in Canada, depending on where they were trained and so forth. I know that in a lot of professions, there are certain gaps that prevent people who were trained internationally from transitioning directly in, for a variety of reasons.

I’m wondering if there are programs. Which partners are you working with right now in order to try to maybe encourage a more smooth transition into the Canadian market? In addition to the work that you’re doing, are there licensing challenges that we’re faced with that are being worked on, in terms of bringing nurses out to Northern Health? Maybe I’m not asking the question very clearly.

D. Byres: I think your question is clear. I can start with answering it. Then, certainly, if my colleagues want to jump in, feel free to.

In terms of bringing in nurses from other jurisdictions or other countries, there is a formal process to assess that. It’s tied, also, to the regulator here in the province, the College of Registered Nurses. That assessment then determines, based on their skill and training and education, whether they fully meet the requirements for B.C. and can be licensed. Exactly as you indicate, if there actually is a gap in their education that needs to be addressed, then the college, through that assessment service, would make a recommendation, including what course or what would have to be done and in place to move them in.

Do I think that process is perfect? I do not. I think we still need to continue to do some work. We are doing that work to try and streamline it and make that assessment and entry into the community even quicker than it happens today. But there is a formal process that happens. If Sandra and her colleagues were recruiting someone from outside of Canada, they go through that process. It’s assessed if they meet the requirements. Then the college is able to proceed with licensing them for practice in British Columbia.

There are similar kinds of practice assessments that occur for a whole number of disciplines in the province, including our physicians, for example, who may come from other jurisdictions. There’s a similar process, also, to assess them and make sure they meet the requirements or if something else has to be in place for them to then be licensed for practice in B.C.

B. Ma: Has there been any consideration as to whether or not we can use that licensing program to actually encourage or maybe even offer Northern Health opportunities in order to help them go through the licensing? Like, if there are gaps, can we…? I guess I’m trying to marry two different issues here.

[1:55 p.m.]

D. Byres: That is actually part of what the role of Health Match should be. As Health Match is working with Sandra in Northern Health or any of the health authorities — looking at where we’re going to recruit to fill whatever is required…. If they’re looking for jurisdictions either outside of B.C. or outside of Canada, then they make sure those processes are in place and married so it functions smoothly.

I do think, however, there’s still work that we can do to shorten the amount of time it actually takes for that assessment to be complete for someone who meets or has completed the requirements to enter into the province to practise. I don’t want to suggest that I just think it’s a good idea to do. That’s actually work we are doing with the regulator. We’re already in process to streamline that work.

B. Ma: Wonderful. I’d also like to ask about a program that isn’t quite for nurses, but I see, maybe, some potential parallels. I understand the UBC Faculty of Medicine implemented the distributed medical program. I had worked with the consulting firm that helped them implement the teleconferencing systems required to enable the distributed medical program.

My understanding was that that program was actually brought in largely, in part, to encourage physicians to do the key parts of their training in rural areas in the hope that that actually encourages them to stay, because they’re building their lives during that time and so forth.

I guess I’m wondering whether you are able to speak a little bit to its success and whether or not that’s something that we might need to consider for nursing as well.

F. Bell: Absolutely. And long before the medical program, we were training nurses in the north as well, so there has been nurse training within the north for some time. The medical school in the north is absolutely a vital source for us. Because of the time it takes to train a physician, the data are just developing now about whether we’re actually able to retain in the north the physicians who are trained in the north. We’re getting an absolute sense that yes, they are — very, very positive results. Early days but positive results on retention of physicians in the north because they trained in the north.

What will be the cap on top of the…. Now I’ve got a metaphor that I’m going to end because I can’t figure out how to finish it. Anyway, the capping thing will be residencies. We are finding that of the physicians who take their final residency in the north, even more stay in the north. So the more we have that full program for medical training, the better off we’ll be. It’s absolutely analogous to nurse training, and that’s why we’ve had the nursing program within UNBC. The colleges and the OAG rightly and wisely flag the need to grow that kind of program, because we do see it as a vital component.

Absolutely, international graduates. I think maybe even more complementing would be that training of our own nurses, physiotherapists and physicians. It’s critical to our strategy. It’s just that people who were raised and live in the north have a tendency to want to practise and live in the north.

D. Byres: I’m familiar with the postgraduate medical education work, as well as the distributed medical program, because it falls under my area of responsibility. Separate to this but concurrent to this work, we have started a discussion with all the schools of nursing within the province to look at: what do the future curriculum and approach need to be around nursing education in B.C., and how may that need to be different in the future? That is, as you can imagine, a significant piece of work — to begin to transform that. And we have just begun our discussion with them.

We are looking at things like the distributed medical program and other things, other programs, other jurisdictions and what we can learn from them, along with what we know is happening within nursing — to think about what that future of nursing education looks like and what the communities actually need a nurse to do in the future so that we begin to rethink what entry to practice actually should be within the province. That involves discussions not only with our post-secondary institutions but our health authorities, our regulators, the educators themselves and a number of stakeholders.

So it’s a big piece of work but an important piece of work that actually all the stakeholders agree to and are committed to moving forward.

[2:00 p.m.]

J. Yap: Thank you for the presentations. Following on what MLA Ma asked about, I’m curious. Do you have a list of jurisdictions where there’s good compatibility of foreign-trained professionals, including all the nursing designations? It would seem to me that those jurisdictions — be it some states in the U.S., and certainly within Canada, but outside of North America — would be potential targets for recruiting. You mentioned Health Match.

I understand from past dealings with health authorities that there can be a fairly active level of recruiting internationally. I’ve heard South Africa is a good source of medical professionals for our health system. There’s compatibility there. I imagine other jurisdictions are also compatible. Is that something that you track?

S. Rossi: We are always looking and working with Health Match B.C. internationally. That tends to be our key partner for our international focus. As well, though, our recruiters will meet internationally trained nurses at conferences and events where they are recruiting. What we’re really wanting to do is get the metrics so that we can start having a better idea of what conferences we are getting our best return on investment from. How do we move forward with that?

We also are, with our sourcing, looking at where there may be layoffs somewhere in B.C. That hasn’t happened for many years, but it will happen where there are ebbs and flows across Canada or throughout the world. When we’re hearing about those, getting our ads out, getting our connections via Facebook and other recruitment strategies to those areas…. That is something that we do look at for sure.

J. Yap: With that international grad…. Let’s say you find a really good prospect. They would need to get a visa to come and work, right? Is it through the PNP program? How do you quickly secure a visa for them?

S. Rossi: Health Match helps with that. We do have an international recruiter that helps them with the process of what they need to be doing. We have a full package. We help them get their information in. We also sometimes will work with people while they’re waiting to get their formal completion so that they are able to practise, let’s say, as an RN.

They may be able to move and be able to work in Canada as a care aide, for example. We do that often when somebody has moved here with a partner. We’ve got a situation right now where someone has been hired with Northern Health. Their partner is trained in another country. They are trying to get their RN certification. They are going through that process. In the meantime, they are working as a care aide for the organization.

We’re, again, putting in a number of strategies, depending on what is occurring. I know we’ve had a little bit of success just south of the border, where we’re working with a few people that are internationally trained nurses that have moved to the U.S. and, just because of what’s happening in the U.S., have decided that it might be a nice time to move to Canada.

We take advantage of whatever we can when we’re looking at that. Again, that’s not nurses who are coming from the U.S. — U.S.-trained nurses to Canada. It’s internationally trained nurses working in the U.S. now looking to possibly come to Canada as a great fit for them.

J. Yap: How difficult is it for those nurses to get a work visa or a PR visa to come in to work?

S. Rossi: It really is a matter of what country their training was in and, again, working with the regulatory body to get them in. That is something that we work with the regulating bodies on.

J. Yap: That’s on the designation. As far as the immigration side, are there challenges to get a work visa or to get a PR visa for those qualified candidates?

S. Rossi: I couldn’t speak to where there have been issues getting the visas, because it’s a profession that’s hard to recruit to. I’d have to defer to somebody else.

D. Byres: I might just ask Kevin.

K. Brown: You’re right. There are challenges, depending on the profession. Again, that’s through the federal government, through the provincial nominee program.

J. Yap: So it’s through the PNP, provincial nominee program.

K. Brown: Yeah, it’s through the PNP process. We have to work through there.

J. Yap: Has it happened that you’ve not been able to nominate people because we’ve run out of room?

K. Brown: Not so much that we haven’t been able to nominate. It’s more the delay in the processing. It’s the speed, because the recruitment is such a competitive market. We want to be able to get people in, get them quickly. There’s a certain degree of frustration with the federal government, with that, but we are working through that.

That’s the same for all of our other provincial and territorial governments working together with the federal government to improve the processing. That applies to the foreign nurse licensure process, the national nursing assessment service.

[2:05 p.m.]

J. Yap: That delay you mentioned — is that at the federal level, or at the provincial immigration…?

K. Brown: Sorry?

J. Yap: The delays you mentioned. Is it because of a backlog at the federal level or the provincial PNP program?

K. Brown: It’s at the federal level.

J. Yap: Federal level.

If I may, a question regarding compensation.

I was intrigued to see that the loan forgiveness programs were very well received. That was the comment in the report. I assume the program is continuing. It’s not directly compensation, but it does provide an incentive.

I wonder: is there any opportunity — or is it contemplated within the collective bargaining agreement with the nurses union — that there may be some additional compensation in some circumstances to work in some remote communities? I mean beyond a loan forgiveness program. I’m wondering if that’s something that can be contemplated.

K. Brown: Sure. I can start it, and perhaps David can add in anything through the NBA.

You’re right. The loan forgiveness program is very successful. It’s very popular. It’s obvious. Of course, it’s run by our sister ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training. I think they’ve got a budget…. I probably shouldn’t it say it…. I think it’s about a $1.2 million approximate budget for it. It is very popular.

We have just begun working with them to look at a possibility of trying to expand that program with additional funding, and having a greater partnership with our health authorities to be able to target key professions for the LFP program, because it is very popular.

And then to your secondary question. David, do you want to answer if there’s anything like that coming through the NBA that targets specifically the rural recruitment? There was a $2 million fund that was agreed on at the last round of bargaining, and I know Northern Health is active with Health Match B.C. in terms of using the $2 million fund on innovative recruitment activities for the hard-to-recruit areas.

D. Byres: Yeah. Bargaining hasn’t begun yet with the NBA, but I would be surprised if they didn’t raise it as an issue.

The only thing I would add is…. I spent time travelling all over Northern Health before the Auditor General, as Sarah and other of the staff know, and spent time speaking with nurses myself. The loan forgiveness programs tend to be effective as long as the agreement is in place.

So if I am a registered nurse and I sign, and my loan is going to be forgiven in return for working somewhere in Northern Health for three years…. A large majority of those nurses, up until now, have remained in Northern Health for the three years. Then some leave to come to the Lower Mainland and other areas.

So it absolutely is a way to bring people into the health authority. Along with the other activity that Sandra has gone over, that will be equally as important to begin to help people integrate into the community and be able to stay there once that term of the agreement has ended, so that as many people aren’t leaving.

I will just say that in many small communities I was at, they were very, very creative. In fact, at first I thought they were joking. They were not joking, but they were very creative in some of the ways in which they integrated and made that nurse part of the community so that at the end of that program, they didn’t leave; they actually stayed.

A lot actually happened in terms of the staff making them feel like this was really their home and they were not just there to work for a specific term to meet an agreement. Many of the teams in Northern Health, in small communities like 100 Mile House and Williams Lake and others that I was travelling through, did a very good job.

J. Yap: Is there an opportunity to take that one step further and provide some kind of financial incentive — either a bonus or a slight pay increment — for the hard-to-recruit areas? Is that something that can be done?

S. Rossi: Something that I’ll speak to, which I’ve already raised, is our travel nurse pool. I think that shows real innovation. Part of that travel nurse pool…. An incentive for people to be involved in that is…. For every six months that they’re involved in the travel nurse pool, they’re provided $2,500, which they’ll be using for education and to better their skill set. Over the course of a year, that’s an incentive of about $5,000 while they’re in that nurse pool — again, to be looking at leadership development and nurse development as well.

[2:10 p.m.]

We see that as using two strategies at the same time, using the travel pool and using education and leadership to entice people to continue to stay. We’re thinking that with that nurse travel pool, we’ll be measuring and monitoring what’s happening and that it will give individuals the opportunities to be in different communities and then, perhaps, bid on something in a community where they see there’s going to be a good fit for them. We have yet to get the details on that, but that will be something that we can watch for in the coming years.

G. Begg: Thank you to the Auditor General for a very comprehensive report. More importantly, thank you to Northern Health and, by extension, the Ministry of Health, for being so responsive to our questions here today.

You’ve said things that at least assure me or give me some confidence that we’re on the verge of some very good change. Words like measurement — Sandra, you mentioned it time and time again — metrics, monitoring systems, integration and collaboration are all things that any forward-moving organization has to do. I think, and perhaps the Chair would agree with me, that Northern Health is in very good hands. By the representative that you presented today, I have no doubt that you are going to be managing the change very effectively.

Some of the words that I didn’t hear but that I’m confident you’re aware of, as a result of your conversation today…. I think, Sandra, in your case, they were evident in what you said. I would say that Northern Health is innovative, adaptive, responsive and forward-thinking. That is praise for the way that you go about what can sometimes be these very difficult issues.

In a former life, I was faced with some of the same circumstances — transferring people into places they didn’t necessarily want to go or didn’t necessarily want to leave. The north of this province is one of those areas that was always difficult to staff.

But we found — and I think you touched upon it as well — that once you had the people in place, many of them didn’t want to leave. So the key to recruitment is actually that: exposing them to the opportunities — professionally and personally — that may exist in small areas and that don’t exist in large, metropolitan areas.

Thank you very much for a comprehensive audit and an equally comprehensive response.

F. Bell: Thank you very much. I would like to mention, and Sandra and I were just speaking of it, that we recruit a lot of people in a given year, but I think the underlying principle — again, it’s reflected in this report — is the retention. We want to build an organization that people want to stay at. We believe that northern British Columbia is a great place to live. We don’t want to go from a weakness-based strategy; we want to go from a strength-based. I think you said that exactly.

D. Byres: I just also want to acknowledge the member’s praise and acknowledgment of the work that they’re doing. I’m going to take my ADM hat off and put my chief-nurse-for-the-province hat on, and I actually agree with you. They are leading a lot of work that, actually, other health authorities and the other CNOs are paying attention to around that implementation of that team-based-care approach.

When Sarah did that presentation, she acknowledged, absolutely accurately, some of the tension and anxiety the staff are experiencing, as to how that shift is going. But it is, I firmly believe, the right shift. They are on the right path, and that is what needs to happen. It is about your earlier question, too, around change management and how you support that staff through the transition.

Nurses who are newly educated and entering practice are much closer to that kind of training that is holistic and covers the full lifespan. But if you have been working in a single area of practice for a number of years, you’re not as familiar with that full area as you once were when you first graduated. They are doing lots of work to support that transition, but it is a process and a journey that the staff are on. They are really leading the way for the province, and we are learning from them. So thank you for that comment.

R. Sultan: I am fascinated by pages 16 and 17 of the Auditor General’s report — in particular, on page 16, the map showing what is described as more than 80 communities in the north.

[2:15 p.m.]

Many of them, looking at the little, tiny dots, would have populations of under 1,000 people, many of them First Nations communities, and the statistics quoted on page 17 indicating that Indigenous people make up roughly 20 percent of our northern population. And we have 54 Indigenous nations governing more than 80 communities.

My first question is: of the LPNs and RNs and similarly trained professionals in these communities, what percentage would you guesstimate are First Nations, by background?

F. Bell: I don’t actually have statistics. I would absolutely say that it is not fully reflective of the composition of our catchment communities.

R. Sultan: So 10 percent, maybe?

F. Bell: I can’t guess.

R. Sultan: You couldn’t guess.

F. Bell: No. I think hitting on the point that we need to be more reflective of our communities, absolutely.

R. Sultan: Well, you’ve anticipated my point. It would seem to me that the long-term solution for these communities…. I appreciate their deep attachment to the land and the unlikelihood of them wanting to shut down and move to the big city.

The long-term solution, it seems to me, is not to recruit people from foreign countries and parachute them in for a couple of years with some rather expensive bonus scheme or, for that matter, to recruit people from the big city here in Vancouver and use them to learn the pleasures of rural living. The most obvious pool of professionals are the people who live in those communities.

Have you any aggressive programs trying to develop that human resource?

S. Rossi: I’ll speak briefly to that. Prior to coming to Northern Health 14 months ago, I worked in post-secondary for about ten years, and I know that there are really strong, strong partnerships with post-secondary and also in our K-to-12 communities working with First Nations and doing whatever they can to support, for example, focusing on health professions very, very early on.

That’s why we think programs like Grow Our Own are really, really key in partnering with people so that we’re getting into First Nations communities and letting people know what the pathways are into all of the health services professions. Nursing is one of them, but there are all kinds of them — again, working with First Nations Health Authority in looking at what those stepping stones are that people can leverage.

I’m kind of putting on a little bit of a post-secondary hat, but I do know that the work that is being done in K-to-12 and the work with post-secondary is really ensuring that there is a focus on the educational components and requirements.

You are right: when we’re looking at forecasting out, our greatest strength is going to be our First Nations communities and the people who live in those communities. That’s something I know for myself. All of my work that I’ve done in the last 30 or 35 years has been really focused on those really strong partnerships with those communities.

R. Sultan: Reflecting the views of MLA Begg, which I support and endorse strongly, it seems to me that we lack metrics. And it would seem to me vital, if you’re planning HR. We do not really seem to have any grasp of the metrics of the key population we’re talking about, so I would encourage you to get some real fast.

Having visited and even worked, in a sense, in some of these communities — I refer to Fort Ware, McLeod Lake, Kitimat and Tsay Keh Dene — I can appreciate the complications. Having been married for 43 years to an RN and understanding that culture somewhat and having wooed a young nurse before we were married — that was many, many decades ago — the culture of these, in those days, frequently women…. Perhaps the demographics have changed drastically.

[2:20 p.m.]

To be parachuted into, say, Fort Ware, which I visited…. They did not have, at the time of my visit, which was perhaps 30 years ago, a resident nurse, but they did have two resident school teachers who were young ladies. They lived in a compound with a chain-link fence. The windows had protective screens on them so that nobody could throw a rock through. I talked to one of the young ladies, and she said that it was a rewarding life. The young people were almost like her family, and she felt very loyal to them. But after two years, she’d about had enough, and she was looking forward to an assignment in the south.

I don’t know if that case history would still be valid today, but I can appreciate the challenges of trying to recruit, particularly, younger people, unattached people, perhaps, to live in these remote communities. I come back to my point. I think in the long run, this strategy isn’t going to work very well. You have to start developing local assets. That’s the end of my comment.

F. Bell: I think you’re taking the grow-your-own strategy one step further, and I think you’re absolutely right that we need to be focusing on that. We are lining up. It’s fairly early days with the First Nations Health Authority. Whatever strategies we do within Northern Health, we need to align perfectly with the First Nations Health Authority as well. We have been working on that.

We’ve actually had the opportunity to look at Southcentral Foundation, a provider in Alaska. The ministry actually facilitated that opportunity to see the kinds of programs that they were looking at around recruitment and retention.

I would say that the human resource side needs to align with the service side. What we do for services in the north and among First Nations communities and non–First Nations communities, it needs to map with that service structure. The more we can work with First Nations health authorities to do exactly what you’re saying, identify the programs, get the measurement in place…. You’re absolutely correct.

D. Byres: In addition — I know they highlighted it already when Sandra presented, but just as a reminder — they are working in partnership with Northern Lights College and the University of Northern B.C. on a proposal to come forward to us and Advanced Education, Skills and Training about a nursing program within the northeast sector as a response to the Auditor General’s recommendation. We will review that with Advanced Ed when we receive it, which could be — I don’t know what will happen once it’s reviewed — an opportunity to increase the number of nursing graduates within that geography.

S. Bond (Chair): I have some questions as well. I just want to start with thanking my more urban colleagues on this committee for their insightful questions, because they’re important — that we actually understand each other’s worlds. They are very different.

Speech therapist, occupational therapist, pharmacist, physiotherapist — you’ve heard MLA Begg talk about police officers — all of them are in short supply where I live. I want to start by just expressing a bit of a concern about the Auditor General’s report, because the paragraph where we talk about…. It’s on page 19, where this statement is made: “We did not look at any other health authorities or jurisdictions. We did not audit other organizations that can impact the recruitment and retention of RNs.”

I am fully cognizant that the Auditor General’s office is not there to audit North America or the world, but the World Health Organization points out that the number one issue, or one of the number one issues, is professionals in rural settings. This is not unique to Northern Health. I think one of the things that…. I admit, when I read this, it was a significant concern to me. I understand the need to audit an organization, but this is in the context of a worldwide northern issue, a rural northern issue.

In Canada, across northern Canada, recruiting health care professionals is the biggest challenge that organizations face. The world health authority has…. It’s easy to do; just google it. Their number one issue is how you put in place recruitment and retention strategies in rural settings, whether that’s in Africa or northern Canada.

[2:25 p.m.]

What I’m concerned about is…. I want to say right off the top that we all need to be dealing with the issue of how nurses are feeling in this system. It’s not just in Northern Health. I’m sure that MLAs around this table have met with nurses. There are safety issues, and they are significant. I just met with my Nurses Union reps the other day. They are significant, and I am worried for them.

The shortages really create stressful circumstances over time. You name it. All of the issues in this report are rightly identified. I have deep concerns about nurses, not just in Northern Health, but every member at this table probably has them for the nurses in their own setting.

That is a legitimate issue, and we need to deal with that. I am not for a moment suggesting that Northern Health, like every other health authority, can’t improve their circumstances, but I do want to express the concern. This is a worldwide issue. It is a northern issue. It is a rural issue. I think it’s important that we use this as an example, but there would be recruitment issues, probably, in every other health authority in British Columbia, particularly in rural settings.

I am concerned when there is virtually no context in this report that basically makes it sound like if Northern Health just did a better job, we would solve the problem. They would solve the problem. Sadly, they can lead, and I really appreciate MLA Begg’s comments. You know, this is a leading health authority. Is there work to do? Absolutely. Are we worried about nurses’ health, safety and workloads? Absolutely, we are, but there does need to be context.

The other piece that my colleagues have really ably pursued here today…. I mean, the other paragraph that…. Honestly, I wrote in big, bold letters, which I don’t normally do, but it was like: “There has been little research on whether or not having local RNs who have lived and trained in their communities, has an impact on RN shortages.” Of course it does.

The World Health Organization, again, has pointed out that when you train people…. In fact, the language they use is: if you have a rural background, a positive clinical or educational experience and targeted training, the likelihood of you staying and working in a rural community is exponentially greater.

So for a report to suggest that (a) training doesn’t matter — yes, it does — and (b) that this is going to be solved in Northern Health…. Well, I’m sure the World Health Organization would be thrilled with the answers, because they haven’t been able to solve this for decades.

I just want to make sure that, on the record, we realize there is a very big problem with this — nurses’ safety, nurses’ burnout, the overload that they are facing, extra overtime costs. I know it exists in my health authority, and I’m very worried about it, but I know it exists elsewhere also. I get this was one organization, but context does matter. I just want to be on the record in expressing that.

I do want to ask a couple of specific questions about the report, because there are some things that I did find concerning. I don’t know if the Health Ministry staff can answer this. Maybe we need to speak to Advanced Education.

Training makes all the difference in the world, and one of the things that I’ve spent my almost two decades in public office in one form or another doing is making sure that we’re looking at training professionals closer to home. On page 15 of the report, it talks about future expanded nursing seats — a plan to add 611 more seats in 2018-2019. It looks to me like they’re being added at the B.C. Institute of Technology — BCIT.

That’s laudable, but the model is flawed. You can’t train people in urban centres, cross your fingers and hope they’re going to move to the places we need them in rural B.C. It hasn’t worked for decades, this model.

Can someone answer, are we going to see additional seats closer to where we need them in rural communities, or are we going to keep adding them…? Not that BCIT doesn’t probably need them too, but could someone just explain or answer whether or not there’s a plan to add nursing seats closer to where we need people? Not that we don’t need them elsewhere, but we’re not going to cross our fingers and hope they move. It just doesn’t work that way.

K. Brown: Sure. Thanks for the comment.

[2:30 p.m.]

That specific one…. Just so you’re aware, the 611 is part of a three-year commitment out of the NBA agreement between the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Advanced Education. This was to add additional surge supply for specialty nurses and the specialty nurse suites for perioperative critical care. There’s a number of them, 95 percent of which are trained at BCIT. So that’s what that refers to.

The comment that you’re making about adding additional supply…. You’re absolutely right. That’s where we rely on UNBC, their rural nursing certificate, and all of our other post-secondaries, as well as relying on post-secondaries outside of B.C. — looking at Athabasca and others that we know Northern Health and Interior Health are reliant on, just in terms of trying to get that additional capacity.

S. Bond (Chair): In terms of human health resources planning, it would be across two ministries, as I understand it. It comes from the Health Ministry, which in essence provides the blueprint, and that’s then given to Advanced Education to look at budgeting and allocations.

I guess my key question is: if Northern Health is working overtime to try to figure out how to get more nurses, is part of the health human resources plan to add seats, add capacity for other nursing spaces, for example, in northern B.C.?

D. Byres: Yes, but I want to just go back and add to what Kevin said around the 611. In addition to that work, because that was part of the collective bargaining agreement that is being implemented, there is also work to look at, exactly as you have noted, how we can begin to look at some of those specialty areas and ensure that training and education — both in terms of some of the didactic, the labs and the actual training within the clinical environment — occurs where people actually live and work.

One example of that would be perioperative. We have now created a new model around perioperative education for nurses who are working in the ORs. That’s been in partnership with all of the health authorities, including Northern Health, and the BCNU so that the education can actually happen at home within the health authorities. Northern Health is now implementing and working towards that model. They’re probably a year away but in transition from being able to move away from using people like BCIT and actually completely manage it themselves and at home.

What it also does, which the union asked us to do, is ensure that there is a standardized approach across the province. If I am a nurse who has the training, and I’m working in Vancouver Coastal but I am recruited, because now I want a different lifestyle or I want to work up in Prince George or Fort St. John, that is recognized across the province. You transfer with the same education and the same program. That’s actually in place, and the health authorities are rolling it out.

The second part of your question is about: “Is there an opportunity to look at actually having more of that education occur within the health authority?” That is the work that Northern Health is doing now in partnership with their post-secondary institutions to bring forward a proposal. It hasn’t come yet, but it’s close to coming within, maybe, the next month or so.

S. Rossi: Yeah, our piece was completed for April 6.

D. Byres: That will come forward to Advanced Education, and then we will review it with Advanced Education from Health to make a decision. That’s around the response to the recommendation from the Auditor General around a nursing program in the northeast quarter.

I haven’t seen the proposal yet, so I don’t want to put words into the mouth of those PSIs or Northern Health, but my understanding is they’re looking at a model that would allow for accelerated entry where you already come with a set of credits that could be completed at Northern Lights College — it could be completed at any college in British Columbia — and then UNBC would do the rest of the work in an accelerated five-semester, year-and-a-half process to create potential nursing seats in the province. We have to review that with Advanced Ed to get their input as well, but once the proposal is received — some time, I expect, in the next month….

S. Bond (Chair): That’s encouraging. I wondered…. The report reflects on the willingness of the B.C. Nurses Union, which I was very appreciative of, to look at a unique northern approach, including letters of agreement, in order to try to facilitate additional nursing recruitment. Has there been progress made in the discussions with the BCNU, or is Northern Health having that discussion about letters of agreement? I thought that was a very progressive approach from the BCNU.

S. Rossi: The current work with the BCNU has been focused around that travel nurse pool. They’ve been meeting and, I know, are very close to signing an agreement on all the details around that rotation — again, for the additional dollars that they would be able to use for education purposes — and around securing the housing.

[2:35 p.m.]

That’s where the time and energy has been spent, but again, then expanding that out and deciding what else could be done with the BCNU. There are regular meetings that happen with Northern Health and the B.C. Nurses Union.

I know that the other thing we have done with all of the unions…. We were just involved last month with meeting with all of our union stakeholders. HR met with the entire group. We got together for a day where we were able to talk about initiatives that we were working on, hear feedback from them. That’s something that is planned to continue so that we just have an opportunity to all get together in a room and brainstorm and also look at any issues that might be coming up and looking at removing barriers.

S. Bond (Chair): My last two areas are more on the administrative side. I’m just wondering how they’re going to be grappled with. The report outlined in pretty graphic ways that in the discussions with health care professionals across the north, there was some variation between the way hiring managers operate in various locations. In fact, it said that training for hiring managers was actually optional and that there is little uptake. Yet it looks like there isn’t a consistent practice when hiring is done, and the report laid out some pretty graphic ways that there was inconsistency.

Is there some work on behalf of either the Health Ministry generally, or the health authority, around a standard approach for hiring managers, no matter where they work in a region or in the province, so that it’s consistent when you’re trying to hire someone? It’s a pretty basic hiring process, yet the report seemed to imply that it wasn’t exactly uniform.

S. Rossi: I’ll speak to that. When they’re talking about hiring practices, we do have hiring core managers and training manuals for that. What the audit did identify, and rightly so, is that not all of the practices were followed. Again, looking at best practices, we are ensuring that all managers will have hiring and training around that. We are refreshing that, and we will have metrics to ensure that that’s taking place. That’s certainly an area where we can do better.

There are some areas that were unique to Northern Health, rural settings where good practice may not make sense. I’ll give you an example of that. It might be doing reference checks — doing three reference checks for someone you’re hiring. If you’re working, for example, in Dease Lake, you might be one of four people who have worked together for years. That reference isn’t happening, because you would be the reference for the person.

Some of it has to do with ensuring that we have hiring practices that fit for the location and the diversity of our sites but also making sure that we’re standardizing that so that we do have, for example, having reference checks. If they’re not, and there’s a reason for them not to take place, we’re tracking that and making sure that that makes sense. Again, it is getting a consistent approach and really monitoring and measuring that. We are committed to ensuring that that takes place.

F. Bell: We have undertaken a regionalization of our education services within Northern Health as well. Again, that’s something that we’ve undertaken fairly recently. But within the regionalized service, we have a management development capacity. Part of the role of that management development capacity is to be more standardized, more consistent, in how we’re supporting front-line leaders and managers in doing the jobs that they have to do.

We have developed the capacity for building those skills. I think that over the next year, that’s a very strong focus for us.

S. Bond (Chair): We appreciate the presentations this afternoon. We thank the ministry staff, as well, for being here and for the work that they’re doing. If nothing else, I think the report highlights issues that are far more broad in nature than a single health authority, although there is work to be done. I think you’ve heard from our colleagues that they’ve seen some very good progress.

I think it also highlights the need for us to concentrate on supporting nurses more broadly in British Columbia. There is a great deal of concern. Without great people in health care facilities, we just don’t get the quality of care, because the workload is extraordinary.

We do appreciate your making the trip here. I personally know what it takes to get here. I do appreciate that very much, and I know my colleagues do as well.

[2:40 p.m.]

Thank you very much for the report. We’ll look forward to being kept up to date on the action plan and how that works. I think, David, you said a very important thing — that there are lessons to be learned that can be shared more broadly across the province. We certainly hope that that will be the case with this report.

Thank you for your time this afternoon. We appreciate it.

D. Byres: Thanks to the Chair and the committee members for your thoughtful questions and to the Auditor General and her team for the report and all their work with us as well.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much for your time.

Our last report is one that will be presented by the Auditor General today. I assume that you all have copies of it. It basically lays out the workplan for the Auditor and her team, moving through to 2020. We’re going to take a quick look at the performance audit coverage plan. I think the Auditor will be presenting and walking through it so, hopefully, you have your copies of it. There it is on the screen. This is a chance for us to have a discussion about the workplan that the Auditor has laid out for the next several years.

You’re welcome to make your comments as soon as you’re ready.

Performance Audit
Coverage Plan 2017-18–2019-20

C. Bellringer: I’m left on my own for this. Although I have company in the room, I’m doing the presentation myself.

First of all, of course, thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss this plan. We haven’t done this in the past, but it’s a welcome opportunity to discuss the work we’ve planned and walk you through the approach in terms of how we select the topics that go into the plan.

When we came to the committee in November…. We are required by the Auditor General Act to bring the financial statement coverage plan to you for approval. That’s not the case for our performance audit coverage plan. We actually only started presenting it publicly three years ago. Previously, it was an internal document. We decided it was better for the conversation to have it issued publicly, although each year, as it changes, we outline what changes may be in the current plan as compared to the previous year.

About half of the staff in the office work on financial audits. A little more than half do the financial statement audits, and the other half work on performance audits — so a little less than half. This is only covering that second line of work, the performance audits.

It does include the projects that are currently underway, and it also includes those that we plan to start over the next three years. They won’t all be complete over that period, but our intention is to start them all. It is listing projects we’re going to also monitor and projects that we decided to remove.

It does definitely include change. It’s not definitive. We did list everything that reflects our current understanding of the environment, but the environment, of course, is subject to change. We do respond to that, and we aim to be flexible and target the areas with the greatest impact on the people of British Columbia and that the Members of the Legislative Assembly have identified as important to know more about.

I did mention that it’s not a requirement under the act for us to publish this. We have found that it has enabled us to get more feedback from Members of the Legislative Assembly, from the public and the organizations that we’re auditing, and we are seeing a great deal of value in that. There’s more transparency around the work that we’re doing, and it is encouraging organizations to be more proactive in the areas we’ve identified. Not to make light of it, but I was asked once by a group of deputy ministers: “Well, aren’t you afraid we’re going to go in and fix everything?” I said: “That would be ideal.” We haven’t found that yet to hold us back.

It’s an ongoing, iterative process. The staff in our office are assigned to sectors, and they work throughout the year to gather information to inform the project selection. We consider past and ongoing work. We discuss things on an ongoing basis from a number of stakeholders as well as keep in touch with what’s going on in other audit offices when we’re choosing our work.

[2:45 p.m.]

As you can imagine, there’s no shortage of topics to choose from. In fact, it’s literally infinite. Government has vast responsibilities, and we can go in and do an audit of pretty much any aspect of over 150 government organizations that are controlled by or accountable to the provincial government. In fact, our auditing scope goes beyond that. We can follow the dollar into organizations that receive moneys from government.

With limited resources, we have to prioritize our work based on significance and risk. We consider relevance, the likelihood of being able to influence positive change, the timing of work and the degree of changes in the sectors and programs.

I will say the one question that’s most often asked by those we audit is: why are your…? You know, what you’re going to find is always so negative. There is a bias towards the negative. There is a bias, in terms of significance and risk, towards selecting organizations that we believe have some aspect of them that requires some kind of change or that others have indicated to us needs that. We may, in fact…. You’ve seen some reports come here that are very positive in nature. That would be because there was concern around it. We go in. We find out there is no concern. We report accordingly.

Our reports are balanced in providing both the positive and the negative about what we have found once we get in, but that selection does lean towards organizations that are going to bring up some opportunities for improvement.

Everything that we have underway just now has been carried forward from last year’s plan. They’re in various stages of work. Some are just getting started. Others are actually close to reporting.

There are three that have been published since we released this plan in January — the rural nursing that you just heard of today; climate change went out, I believe, in February, and yesterday we issued a national summary report that was based on our February report; and the third one that was released was the British Columbia Utilities Commission.

In addition to the current projects, there are 35 that we plan to start between now and March 31, 2020. So 24 new projects — a figure that’s much higher than last year. We did more extensive planning this round to cover the progress we made against the first coverage plan.

Another highlight in this year’s plan is the new category that we have called “watching briefs.” Projects in there are on hold, because we’re monitoring if and when an audit would be appropriate. Most of those are in an organization that is currently undergoing change, which makes the timing and likelihood unclear. That’s including the B.C. Services Card, the George Massey Tunnel replacement project and ICBC capital reserves. ICBC’s doing quite a bit of work to take a look at that, so we’re waiting on that one.

Those that we have removed from the plan may look like a long list, but actually, only two have completely dropped off. One is B.C.’s post-secondary model, and the other is hospital-acquired infections. We determined our resources. We just chose other areas with higher risk and less oversight. There wasn’t any particular reason for shifting over. It was just a revision within those sectors.

Former projects that were removed haven’t actually gone completely. We’ve just put them into a smaller scope. We have a group called the compliance, controls and research team. They do more focused, smaller projects. They’ll look at the topic area, but it’ll be much less of a large scope audit than we had originally planned.

This year’s outreach was quite extensive. We did reach out across the government reporting entity. We presented the plan to the Deputy Ministers Council. We notified any minister, deputy minister, CEO or equivalent, or a board chair if they are included in…. We provided all of the deputies and ministers the full plan, but if there was an organization listed, then we also gave them the specifics about theirs.

In previous years, we had actually only targeted organizations that were likely to be included. We’ve made it a bit broader this year. Some of them cross over more than one ministry, so they’re made aware of it at this point. Until we finish the planning, we don’t know exactly where we’re going to focus it.

[2:50 p.m.]

The future projects will begin as our in-progress audits wind down and the resources become available. Until we’ve done the planning, we don’t disclose what the nature of…. We name the organization but not the nature of the project. We do update that on our work-in-progress site on our website once we’ve completed that planning and alerted the organization. So between these actual plans, if you do want to see what the progress is, if you go to the website and if it has been updated, it’ll be available there. Then we’ll continue to update you annually by refreshing this coverage plan.

That’s the presentation, but most certainly happy to take any questions.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much.

Questions?

R. Glumac: Maybe this is the time to ask a question about…. Early on, we talked about auditing B.C. Hydro. I know that there was a request for some more funding to be able to do that. Maybe you could give us an update on what’s happened with that.

C. Bellringer: The request that we had made was to do the financial statement audit for B.C. Hydro. Our budget request for that element was accepted, so we will be doing that for the March 31, 2019, year-end. The audit that is taking place right now is covering the March 2018 year-end, and that’s still by their external auditors. We’ll pick it up for the year that follows. We’re getting ready for it in terms of thinking about hiring staff — we haven’t done that yet — and reorganizing to be ready for that.

We also, on Hydro, have a project on the rate-regulated accounting in deferral accounts. It’s well underway. It should be finished by the fall of this year.

R. Glumac: B.C. Hydro is not listed in here.

C. Bellringer: No. The one that we asked for the funding for was for our financial statement coverage plan. That’s where we’re putting out an audit opinion on the set of financial statements that the organization releases. These are things that are similar to the reports we’ve covered today. So just the broader…. The financial statement ones we have — it’s set out in legislation as to who gets to do the financial statement audit. This is the blank page. Given that entire universe, which areas are we going to focus in on? That’s where we’ve landed.

You will see the rate-regulated accounting in this list, which is at Hydro. There are actually a few other projects on this list that are at Hydro. The asset management…. I’m looking at Morris because….

Is it just called asset management?

M. Sydor: It’s asset condition.

C. Bellringer: Asset condition management. There’s also one in cybersecurity that’s at Hydro. And there’s a third one.

M. Sydor: The independent power.

C. Bellringer: Independent power producers is an area we’re looking at, but we haven’t started that one yet. It’s on the list though.

R. Glumac: Independent power producers is on the list. Okay.

Just some feedback, I guess. In talking to a number of companies that work in clean energy, whether it be IPPs or other smaller organizations, there’s certainly been a lot of feedback that I’ve received about the challenges in working with B.C. Hydro. So just some feedback to pass on. I don’t know whether you can dig into that issue in some way, like make some commentary on the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization in working with our business sector, small businesses, in the province in a more collaborative way perhaps. I don’t know.

C. Bellringer: We certainly are also…. Any organization that wants to come and provide us with additional information is welcome to do so. We may or may not be able to incorporate it within the audit, but we certainly always welcome their views, and we will indeed consider it.

R. Glumac: Okay, so next time I’ll refer them to you.

C. Bellringer: They may already have found us.

[2:55 p.m.]

R. Glumac: I had another quick question. I don’t know if it’s anywhere on the horizon or if it’s…. I really don’t know very much about it. I do remember, in one of the reports that you wrote, that something stuck out to me about B.C. Rail and how that entity, or what’s left of it, is being used. In that case, it was being used to take on the risk of getting mining permits, to take the risk away from mining companies.

That struck me as kind of a strange practice. I’m curious about the oversight on that. What is being done to provide oversight on those kinds of things?

I’ve heard other things in terms of land sales in the Squamish area recently — some significant land sales. There was no public input opportunity provided in that regard. I don’t know if that’s anywhere on the horizon. But some more feedback….

C. Bellringer: I’m not thinking of anything specific to what you’re mentioning. But again, in addition to the larger audits that are on this list…. I mentioned that it’s called CCR, the compliance and controls risk area. If somebody comes to us with a single issue — again, assuming they are okay with us doing so — we’ll contact the organization that it involves and ask questions.

Sometimes it’s a matter of that organization providing them with additional information, which will solve the issue. Other times, we may do additional work. But if we were to do so, we would still publish it first with you. Then it would be available to them that way.

S. Bond (Chair): Other questions?

J. Thornthwaite: Just to follow up from the previous presentation that we just had, we are getting updates, right? People aren’t just coming here and then going away, and we never see them again.

S. Bond (Chair): Yeah.

J. Thornthwaite: Okay. When they do come back, just by the conversation that was occurring…. Certainly, I haven’t seen anything here about the First Nations Health Authority.

When you’re talking about the whole area of retention and recruitment, and our colleagues talked about trying to get people where they are, certainly it would be good to get the First Nations Health Authority — get that on their radar as well.

C. Bellringer: There’s a difference in the governance structure as far as….

Do you know anything about it, Sarah?

S. Riddell: Yes. I don’t know the exact percentage, but a substantial amount of funding for the First Nations Health Authority is federal. That’s still something that I think, internally, we are sorting out — where our role is in terms of auditing them directly on our health care projects.

We typically engage them. I can’t think of one recently where we haven’t. Still getting their input on the delivery of health services through the other health authorities and the work done by the Ministry of Health as well on all of those individual projects.

Any of the ones listed in health care — that’s something we’d certainly be thinking about and a group we’d be looking to engage.

J. Thornthwaite: On that note, I did notice something about First Nations housing. I think that’s what it was.

S. Bond (Chair): First Nations accommodation. I assume that’s to do with treaty.

J. Thornthwaite: Obviously, that would be off reserve. On reserve is federal, right?

C. Bellringer: Correct. That one hasn’t been…. We don’t have the planning complete on that yet, that I’m able to describe to you exactly what we are looking at in that one, but that would be updated on our website once we finish that. But it will be within the provincial control in terms of…. We are still looking at what the province is doing, as opposed to…. We can’t look at the outcomes for the federal government.

J. Thornthwaite: That just leads me to the next obvious question. Is the provincial Auditor General considering doing anything with the federal counterpart? There are so many things that are of double jurisdiction — triple, whatever — and to be auditing just one portion leads to the same issues that we’re dealing with. For instance, with different ministries within the province — FLNRO and the Ministry of Environment — there is not that accountability.

If we’re just auditing, say, the provincial counterpart, well, then all we have to do is just blame everything on the feds. They might do that to us too.

[3:00 p.m.]

Is there any movement to get it together with the auditors so that nobody can pass the buck?

C. Bellringer: Yes, we have a lot of conversations around how to do concurrent audits. It has been done in the past in a number of areas. It was done in British Columbia on some of the treaty land…. I was going to say that treaty land entitlements was the one we did in Manitoba. The negotiations process was looked at here with the federal government, as well as salmon farming. And there was one done across the country on PharmaCare.

This was a massive project. The report I mentioned that was issued yesterday on climate change was very specifically a concurrent audit that was done right across the country. Over an 18-month period, each of us, provincially, issued an audit report. Some of us looked more at adaptation than mitigation, but it was both aspects. Some basic questions around: what are the emission targets, and how are things going? On adaptation, what plans are in place to adapt to the changes in the climate?

We’ve all answered the basic questions across the country, including the commissioner for the environment, federally, who looked at the federal aspects of it, and the Territories were covered by the federal Auditor General. Those individual reports were issued by each of our jurisdictions, because we were looking at it from our local lens. Then the summary report, issued yesterday, did do the comparison right across the country and showed some of those contrasts as well as what needed to be done together in order to accomplish, for example, meeting the 2030 targets in the Paris accord.

They’re very time-consuming and very rewarding, of course, for our staff, because they get to work on a project with their counterparts right across the country. We will do them from time to time, and we’re always looking for examples. It is easier if we find a focused area where it’s, for example, B.C. and the federal government in joint delivery of something. It is easier in terms of how we get that done together. But it isn’t always their priority, because it may be small in their context but large in ours. So we don’t wait. We’ll go ahead and do our side of the audit.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that. I just have a quick question. I think all of us would agree that having a transparent process is really great, that you make it public so people have a sense of where you’re headed. I think that’s really important, so we appreciate that. As you said, it didn’t happen before, so I think that’s a really important step.

I just wanted to very quickly better understand the process of input. It was interesting to me to read that potential audit topics can come from virtually anywhere — Members of the Legislative Assembly, the opposition, the government — completely recognizing that, obviously, the Auditor General decides which ones are undertaken.

If there was a request, and I don’t know that there ever would be…. Apparently, no requests have been made from the Legislative Assembly or its committees, but there’s nothing to say that this committee, for example, could not, at some point, ask. Is there a formal process for that? Do you simply make a request to the Auditor General’s office? How do you convey that input to you or your team that there may be an area that we or an MLA might want to see considered?

C. Bellringer: I’m sure the Clerk will give you some specific advice on the form. It is something that’s prescribed within the Auditor General Act. That would be the place to look to, to see exactly what it is. It is a requirement. If there is a request, we must do it, unless there’s a problem interfering with the rest of our work. It’s not a “we may do it” or “we might consider it.” It’s a “we must do it.”

It’s a very strong and powerful tool that we would actually encourage you to use. I have, in the past but not in British Columbia, been asked to do something by the Public Accounts Committee. It was a little bit political in nature. Of course, we would encourage it to be a non-partisan request, because that is where we would see that all parties are really behind the improvement and what that would include.

[3:05 p.m.]

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Well, that was very helpful. And I know you’re not allowed to tell us, or you cannot tell us…. I just do want to, as Rick did…. I thought his interventions were helpful in terms of your work.

I note that you are doing a project on end-of-life care. I’m wondering about the scope of that, as you are looking at that — if you’re contemplating looking at medical assistance in dying as part of that process. I’m assuming you can’t tell us. But I certainly wanted to know whether or not that would…. Well, I just, as Rick did, think it’s an important element of end-of-life care, and it’s new.

C. Bellringer: The plan hasn’t been published yet and put on our website, but we have had some discussions in the office already to try to scope it. Medically assisted dying is, of course, being understood and is part of the context of the decision.

S. Bond (Chair): I appreciate that.

Interjection.

S. Bond (Chair): Oh, I’m sorry. There are others. I apologize. Oh goodness. Okay. We’ve only got five minutes before we have people running to planes. I didn’t know there were others on the list.

R. Sultan: First of all, let me congratulate the Auditor General on what I perceive, over an extended period of time, has been a superlative performance. In terms of value for money, I think the taxpayers are getting good value for money from the Auditor General’s work.

My only concern or comment — it’s not really a concern, but an observation — is that adding 35 new topics to be covered over the next three years is ambitious, and I hope you don’t spread your talented people too thinly, because each of them merits serious consideration.

It does also raise the question of — heaven forbid, for a public accounts committee to raise the possibility — if you have sufficient resources to do a good job. I guess this is not the time to discuss your budget, but it seems to me that at some point we should — and will, I’m sure — have a discussion about that.

Then if you’re looking at any further topics, as those of us from the big city well know, I think urban housing and urban congestion are two very, very important issues to those of us who live in the city. I see Bowinn knows exactly what I’m talking about.

J. Yap: Just a technical question. You’ve listed here the whole diversity of entities that you can review, can audit — basically, any entity within government within the province. How about officers of the Legislature? Are they captured within the province?

C. Bellringer: They are. We do the financial statement audit for the Representative for Children and Youth, and the rest of the offices, financially, are rolled up into the public accounts. So we look at it from that perspective. We don’t have anything on the list at the moment in terms of a broader performance audit. But we could.

J. Yap: You could. Has it ever been done before? I’m just curious, not thinking of any independent officer in particular.

C. Bellringer: I’m just thinking. Didn’t we do something in the police commissioner…?

M. Sydor: That was a request to do a compliance audit.

C. Bellringer: We did a compliance audit within the office of the police commissioner and at their request.

J. Yap: Good to know.

S. Bond (Chair): I apologize for jumping the queue. I normally wait until the end, but I didn’t know you were on it. So that was my fault.

Mitzi, did you have a comment?

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): No.

S. Bond (Chair): I think that Kate wanted to make a comment.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Deputy Clerk and Clerk of Committees): Just briefly, for the information of committee members, the provision of the Auditor General Act that was referenced a few moments ago, section 13.2, allows either the Legislature as a whole or any committee of it to adopt by motion a request for the Auditor General to undertake an audit. The last time that was used was actually in accordance with a special committee that was examining the work of the police complaints office.

As just was noted earlier, there was a formal motion adopted by that special committee, and as a result of that, the Auditor General conducted an audit to determine whether a random selection of complaints undertaken by that office — and investigations concluded — were, in all respects, completed in compliance with the provisions of that act.

[3:10 p.m.]

It’s a very powerful and unique provision and one that’s only been rarely used, but it’s certainly very much in the hands not of individual members per se but of the Legislature as a whole or a select standing or special committee.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that clarification.

C. Bellringer: This is just on a little bit of a different note. You’ll find in your mailboxes, when you open up your emails, an email from my office. I think it comes straight from me. It’s a link to a survey. You can trust that link. It’s just two quick survey questions that we’re asking to have input into our key performance indicators. It explains itself. I just wanted to let you know it’s the real thing.

S. Bond (Chair): Well, thank you for that. With the inundation of emails we get, we’re never quite sure, so it’s good to have that clarity.

I want to thank the Auditor General and her staff today, the other presenters at committee, obviously our Clerk and her staff and Hansard for a very productive meeting. We do appreciate it. I want to thank my colleagues for doing all of their homework.

With that, we will adjourn the meeting, wishing everyone a happy Easter and safe travels home. Thank you for your time this afternoon. Much appreciated.

The committee adjourned at 3:11 p.m.