Third Session, 41st Parliament (2019)
Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts
Vancouver
Thursday, February 7, 2019
Issue No. 14
ISSN 1499-4259
The HTML transcript is provided for informational purposes only.
The
PDF transcript remains the official digital version.
Membership
Chair: |
Shirley Bond (Prince George–Valemount, BC Liberal) |
Deputy Chair: |
Mitzi Dean (Esquimalt-Metchosin, NDP) |
Members: |
Garry Begg (Surrey-Guildford, NDP) |
|
Rick Glumac (Port Moody–Coquitlam, NDP) |
|
Bowinn Ma (North Vancouver–Lonsdale, NDP) |
|
Adam Olsen (Saanich North and the Islands, BC Green Party) |
|
Ralph Sultan (West Vancouver–Capilano, BC Liberal) |
|
Jane Thornthwaite (North Vancouver–Seymour, BC Liberal) |
|
John Yap (Richmond-Steveston, BC Liberal) |
Clerk: |
Kate Ryan-Lloyd |
CONTENTS
Minutes
Thursday, February 7, 2019
10:00 a.m.
Rooms 1300-1500, Segal Graduate School of Business
500 Granville Street,
Vancouver, B.C.
Office of the Auditor General:
• Carol Bellringer, Auditor General
• Morris Sydor, Deputy Auditor General
• Chris Thomas, Senior Manager Financial Audit
BC Hydro:
• Ajay Kumar, Director, Lines Asset Planning
• Andy Darby, Director, Stations Asset Planning
Office of the Auditor General:
• Carol Bellringer, Auditor General
• Malcolm Gaston, Deputy Auditor General
• Jessica Schafer, Manager Performance Audit
• Alexander Gunn, Performance Auditor
Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure:
• Kevin Richter, Associate Deputy Minister
• Steven Haywood, Executive Lead
Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General:
• Steven Roberts, Executive Director, Strategic Initiatives
Insurance Corporation of British Columbia:
• Glenn Anness, Manager, Licensing Policy and Standards
Office of the Auditor General:
• Carol Bellringer, Auditor General
• Denver Wigg, Senior Manager, Financial Audit
Chair
Acting Clerk of the Legislative Assembly
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2019
The committee met at 10:01 a.m.
[S. Bond in the chair.]
S. Bond (Chair): Good morning. I want to thank each of you for being here today. We have today before us two reports and then just a piece of correspondence that we’ll look at. I want to thank you all for being here and for the work that we’re going to conduct.
Before we begin — we’ll follow our normal pattern of meetings — I do want to express, I know, the regrets of my colleagues and certainly our condolences. We know that just recently the Auditor General of Canada passed away, Michael Ferguson, and we know in particular that our Auditor General and her team would have worked very closely. I know that we recently had the opportunity to meet. In fact, John served on a panel with both our Auditor General and the Auditor General of Canada.
Certainly, to you, Carol, and your team and to those who have been associated, we do want to express our since regrets on the passing of Michael Ferguson. He has left a legacy of hard and important work at the national level. We just wanted to express our sincere condolences to you, to the team that’s worked with him and certainly to his family and colleagues.
We’re going to begin this morning with the Independent Audit of Capital Asset Management in B.C. Hydro. This audit focuses on the asset management process that is undertaken by B.C. Hydro. We’re going to begin in the way that we normally do. We’re going to have the Auditor General make some opening comments, and then of course, she has members of her team here today that have worked on this audit who will be presenting a PowerPoint to us, walking through those particular items.
We also have representatives, obviously, from B.C. Hydro here this morning. We will ask them to respond, and then the committee will have the opportunity to ask questions.
With that, to the Auditor General: we’d ask you to begin with your remarks, please.
C. Bellringer: Thank you, Madam Chair, for the comments. I thought I’d just start with a couple of introductory comments, and then I’ll be passing it along to one of our Deputy Auditors General.
Everyone will know there’s been a great deal of public discussion lately about the nature of an audit — what it is, what it isn’t — and this committee knows we do many different types of audits. Typically, we have two kinds. We do financial statement audits, and this committee approves the coverage plan for that.
The last item on the agenda today refers to the ten-year history of those financial statement audits. They enable us to express an opinion on the government’s summary financial statements as to whether or not those statements present fairly the financial position and financial results of operations.
We then select other areas within the government reporting entity for broader performance audits, and two of those are on the agenda today. Each audit is scoped uniquely, so it’s important, with those audits, to fully explore what it is we set out to do and our conclusion on that particular area. Often we’re asked questions that go beyond the scope of the audit, and we’re having to explain that the objective that we include in our report is an important part of understanding the audit itself.
Morris Sydor, Deputy Auditor General in performance audit, is here to guide you through the first agenda item, the B.C. Hydro audit. Malcolm Gaston is another of the Deputy Auditors General in the office. He’ll be guiding you through commercial vehicle safety.
I’ll hand it over now to Morris to introduce the topic and to introduce the staff.
Consideration of
Auditor General Reports
Independent Audit of
Capital Asset Management
in B.C. Hydro
M. Sydor: Good morning, Madam Chair and committee members.
As the main supplier of the electricity used in the province, B.C. Hydro is arguably the most significant Crown corporation in British Columbia. The audit report we’re going to be covering this morning is but one part of the B.C. Hydro story.
Yesterday we released a report on rate-regulated accounting at B.C. Hydro. In March, we plan to report on how B.C. Hydro deals with cybersecurity threats to its industrial control systems. As well, our recently released performance audit coverage plan identifies two more projects we’re going to be undertaking — managing costs and scheduling risks for Site C and managing independent power producer contracts. There’s a significant focus by our office on B.C. Hydro currently and over the next few years.
Today we’re here to present an overview of our report on capital asset management in B.C. Hydro. B.C. Hydro has an immense asset base to maintain — dams, generators, transmission lines, distribution lines, transformers. They all require maintenance and refurbishment over time. In this audit, we looked at whether B.C. Hydro was managing these assets well. The audit is a good-news story. B.C. Hydro is managing its billions in capital assets well.
Today two members of the audit team are with us. In the room, we have Denver Wigg, a senior member of the audit team. With me at the table, I have Chris Thomas. Chris was the engagement manager for this audit, and he will provide the committee with an overview of the audit and its findings.
C. Thomas: Thank you, Morris.
Good morning, Madam Chair and committee members.
In this audit, we looked at capital asset management at B.C. Hydro. Specifically, we looked at whether B.C. Hydro was managing its assets well through appropriate information practices, processes and systems, and we found that it is.
We undertook this audit because good asset management is critical to B.C. Hydro’s success as a reliable energy provider. They manage approximately 35 percent of all of government’s assets, worth a total of approximately $25 billion. In comparison, the remainder of government has about $47 billion in assets. These assets include groups of assets such as highways, bridges, schools and hospitals as well as notable individual facilities like B.C. Place and the Vancouver Convention Centre.
Largely as a result of a decade-long plan and associated efforts, B.C. Hydro demonstrates overall good practices managing its assets. As such, we did not make any recommendations in this report.
What we looked at were approximately 80 percent of B.C. Hydro’s assets, worth around $19 billion. In particular, these were dams, generators, power lines, poles, substations and transformers. These assets make up an extensive provincewide generation, transmission and distribution system that provides more than 90 percent of the electricity in B.C. The other 20 percent of Hydro’s assets, which we did not look at in this project, include vehicles, buildings, computers.
Of the 80 percent we looked at, we found that the asset mix has a lot of old and new, with some approaching 100 years of service and nearing the end of useful life and with others coming on line just in the current year. For this last fiscal year — from April 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018 — B.C. Hydro invested almost $2.5 billion to renew, repair or replace its assets. This included, for example, the John Hart generating station replacement near Campbell River, the Ruskin dam safety and powerhouse upgrade near Mission and the upgrade of the Horne Payne substation in Burnaby.
What is asset management? Asset management is the purposeful and long-term processes that aim to get the greatest efficiency for the lowest cost out of an asset over its lifetime. These processes help organizations to achieve their objectives.
In order to assess these processes, we developed our criteria from the International Infrastructure Management Manual, and we looked at the maturity of Hydro’s processes in 16 areas in the categories of information and life-cycle cost management systems and practices. Hydro’s good asset management practices give it the best chance of meeting its organizational mission to safely provide reliable, affordable, clean electricity throughout British Columbia.
Again, we did not make any recommendations in this audit, because we found B.C. Hydro is managing its assets well, and there were no significant deficiencies in its systems, activities or practices. We found that overall, B.C. Hydro demonstrates good practice as a result of a decade-long plan and associated efforts, and not by accident.
Over ten years ago, B.C. Hydro made asset management an organizational priority. Since then, it has worked to implement international guidelines and good practice standards. It has also had its practices verified by independent audits.
We believe that the success of this ongoing plan is the most important lesson for other government agencies to take from this audit.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you, Morris and Chris. We appreciate that.
We’re going to now ask for B.C. Hydro’s response. I’d ask that you introduce yourselves for the record. That’s an important part of the process. Then we’ll make a shift so that your PowerPoint can appear up on the screen.
A. Kumar: Good morning, Madam Chair and the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to present B.C. Hydro’s perspective on the recently completed audit of the capital asset management at B.C. Hydro.
I would like to introduce my colleague Andy Darby, who is the director of stations asset planning in B.C. Hydro, and myself, Ajay Kumar. I’m director of line asset planning at B.C. Hydro. Both Andy and I have been in capital planning for over ten years at B.C. Hydro.
As the OAG mentioned, the scope of the audit was the asset management practices and systems across B.C. Hydro, which included the generation, transmission, substations and distribution assets. There were no recommendations from the audit, and this is reflective of the effort that B.C. Hydro has put into asset management over the last ten years.
There are a number of asset management frameworks in the industry. For this audit, the OAG chose the International Infrastructure Management Manual, which focuses on how companies do asset management within their organization.
Over the course of the audit, B.C. Hydro shared over 300 documents with the audit team that were reflective of all the different asset management perspectives that B.C. Hydro has implemented. These included asset strategies, facility plans, area studies, business cases and balance scorecards, to name a few.
Over the course of the audit, several dozen B.C. Hydro staff were involved in the audit. Their involvement was with respect to mapping the B.C. Hydro asset management practices to the IIMM framework, gathering all the information that was required as part of the audit and also meeting with the OAG staff on several occasions to talk about asset management in B.C. Hydro.
As Chris mentioned, the IIMM framework is comprised of 16 different elements. According to the findings of the audit, B.C. Hydro has reached an advanced level of maturity in 13 of the 16 elements that were chosen for the audit.
The audit concluded that B.C. Hydro’s capital planning management system and practices generally reached an advanced level of maturity. B.C. Hydro is very proud of this achievement and will continue to make asset management a key priority in the organization.
Looking forward, although there were no recommendations in the audit, there are a number of different improvements that B.C. Hydro will be making to the asset management practices within its organization.
There are three key items I wanted to highlight today. This includes the recent alignment of the planning, build and operate function within B.C. Hydro. This will further strengthen the B.C. Hydro asset management maturity in the organization.
We have established an enterprise capital planning process which will allow a common approach for the planning, prioritization and governing of investments across the company. B.C. Hydro uses this process to develop the ten-year capital plan on an annual basis. Lastly, for the prioritization of our capital investments, we are going to be moving from a risk-based framework to a value-based framework, which is leading edge in the industry.
In summary, there were no recommendations made as a result of the audit. B.C. Hydro has ongoing initiatives to improve the asset management practices, supporting the continuous delivery of clean, reliable, affordable electricity to our customers. B.C. Hydro appreciates the effort on the part of OAG in conducting the audit and recognizes the amount of work required to define the audit criteria, review the documentation and conduct interviews with the staff.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you, Ajay. We appreciate that. And Andy, thank you for the presentation.
Just a gentle reminder to the committee that the scope of our discussion today is around asset management. As Morris pointed out, we’re going to have lots of opportunities to discuss B.C. Hydro over the next number of months and years, so today we want to talk about asset management.
I just want to ask the Auditor General, before my colleagues get their names on the list — if you have questions, please put your hand up: how often do you present a report that has no recommendations attached to it? I’m not sure we’ve ever seen one, have we?
C. Bellringer: That’s a fabulous question. We really try hard to find them. There’ve been a few. I’m thinking there’ve been a few others. They do tend to be around smaller topics, where it might be fairly narrow, and we don’t find anything. For something this large….
I have had people ask me: “Oh, so everything at Hydro is fine, then?” It is important to note what we looked at.
S. Bond (Chair): Exactly.
C. Bellringer: We draw out in the report one area that we did not look at, and it’s around the actual decision-making side of things. This is the information that’s used in the decision-making, not the decisions themselves. I think that’s an important distinction. I’m not saying it was good or bad on the decision side. We’re just saying that’s not what we looked at here.
It is a good question around…. It is a very good news story to not have any major recommendations.
S. Bond (Chair): I thank you for that. I assumed that was the case, because I can’t remember…. I’m sure that there is extreme diligence done here, so it’s not about that.
Do any members have questions?
R. Sultan: Well, let me add that in my rather long experience on this committee, I’ve never heard such a glowing report, a positive report, in my career, you might say, as a member of the Public Accounts Committee. So congratulations, B.C. Hydro. I mean, lots of rocks get thrown, but in this case, bouquets should be — rose petals, whatever. This is unusual, and perhaps your annual report should note that.
I do have a question. I’m just curious, my engineering curiosity more than anything really substantive. We have these like the Ruskin facility — what? — almost 100 years old, or maybe it is 100 years old. They have these tremendous transformers to step up and step down the voltages, and the same piece of equipment may be found in these stations at the termination of major transmission lines all over the province. How long do these huge chunks of metal and electrical apparatus last? Do they last forever, or do they have to be replaced on some schedule?
A. Kumar: Excellent question. B.C. Hydro has many different asset classes. One of the things that we’ve taken is an asset management approach towards each one of those classes. For example, the equipment that you are talking about is the transformer. The one we have at the generation station is the step-up transformer, because you’re increasing the voltage, and the ones you’re talking about at the end are the step-down transformers. But the intent or the function of that equipment is the same.
Those typically tend to be very long-lasting assets. Anywhere from 70 to 80 years is what we can get out of those transformers. The reason for that is in the majority of those substations, we have redundancy built into that equipment because if you lose one transformer, your load is going to be at risk.
Our planning criteria is such that we would have an extra transformer at each one of those substations so that if you have one system element out of service, the load can be carried by the remaining transformers. As a result, the loading on those transformers tends to be lower than what the capacity is, which tends to increase the length of the life of those transformers. We have what we call passive condition that we monitor for each one of those equipments.
Andy and my group would look at the condition of those assets. As the assets go from very good to, I guess, fair to poor, we would then replace them as those assets are reaching the end of life.
Typically for transformer assets, that would be somewhere from 60 to 70 years, depending on the loading, location and the size. So they are quite long-lasting.
R. Sultan: Thank you. I have a second question. As your report highlights and emphasizes, more than 90 percent of B.C. electricity is provided by B.C. Hydro. The flip side, of course, is that 8 or 9 percent of British Columbia’s electricity is provided by other entities outside the B.C. Hydro management domain. That situation has arisen, in part, through legislation by past governments compelling B.C. Hydro to follow this path.
Did the audit have any attempt to assess the asset management performance of these non-Hydro entities that are quite critically important to our overall supply?
C. Bellringer: I’m going to answer, only because I just remembered another audit where we didn’t have any recommendations. I think it was in the budget preparation. If you’ll remember, the Treasury Board people that were here — they were getting some pretty glowing comments from the members.
A Voice: That’s good.
C. Bellringer: So no, we did not go beyond looking at the asset management practices at Hydro.
R. Sultan: I mean, if we lost, and heaven forbid it should ever happen, 8 or 9 percent of our supply capability — and that would be, of course, extremely unlikely — it could be quite embarrassing to round up B.C. Hydro and say: “Please pick up the deficit.” So it seemed to me equally important, in the overall supply picture, to understand what those entities are up to.
C. Bellringer: By not selecting it, we weren’t suggesting otherwise. When we scoped it, we would have to actually analyze the extent to which we’d have the ability to look at an outside organization, if we’re referring to those. So we’d have to look…. It would just be a different audit, and it would be more around the oversight taking place by the province around those other organizations. It would have been a different audit.
It wasn’t because we didn’t think it was not important. We just didn’t scope it in.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you, Ralph. I think it was great. You could probably write a book on aging well, so there you go. I thought that was a very appropriate question for you to ask, about assets.
M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Congratulations. Thank you for all the work. I was interested in the response from the ministry at the end. You said you’re moving from a risk-based framework to a values-based framework. This has clearly been a successful method that you’ve had. You said that the value-based framework was leading edge in the industry.
I’m wondering if you can just kind of reassure us. It’s great to see such a positive audit, and we wouldn’t want to have, you know, the good work and the maturity and the development that’s all been successful to this point be put at risk.
A. Kumar: I will start off on that answer, and then I’ll pass it over to my colleague Andy, who’s actually heavily involved in that project.
If you look at the history of how utilities have spent their capital, 15 years ago, it was based on whoever came knocking on the door first got the capital. There was no framework in place for them to actually figure out how best to prioritize their investments.
The utilities then started looking at a framework that would allow them to prioritize. Risk was the thing that was in vogue about 12 years ago, in terms of defining how to prioritize. The way you look at risk is: “If I don’t do a project, what is the risk for the organization?” So you quantify this based on a deferral of a project that you are potentially planning to go ahead with.
Now, the challenge with the risk deferral approach is that it obviously biases the risk analysis towards large projects, because the risk associated with large projects is commensurately higher than the risk associated with small projects. Over the last ten years, the utility industry has been looking at how best to level the playing field across the different types of capital expenditures, whether they’re large or small, and trying to figure out how best a utility moves forward.
A utility is based on generation stations, transmission lines and distribution projects, and they vary in size and complexity. A lot of the utilities are now exploring what’s called a value-based framework, in which, instead of looking at the risk of deferring a project, it is looking at the value of moving forward with a project. Because you can quantify value in different ways and you can also look at it on a per-unit basis, it allows you to compare projects that may have different capitals associated with them. But because you are looking at it from the value it’s adding to the organization and you are looking at it on a per-unit basis, it allows you to compare the large projects to the smaller projects in a more cohesive manner.
That is something we are exploring at this point. Our next two capital plans are still going to be based on a risk framework, and we are hoping that in three to four years, we would have transitioned into a value-based framework. Then we’ll start looking at how the capital plan would be based on that.
A. Darby: The bit I can add to it…. The approach we’re taking is more of an evolution and an enhancement to where we are. It’s not a fundamental difference. So as we develop a value-based…. I mean, it’s called a value-based framework, but it’s heavily integrated with risk. In fact, some of the key dimensions in that is the risk-based approach that we’re already taking. This is evolving it to see how we can look at that, as well as other dimensions, to help with the decision-making. It’s very complementary to where we are, and it’s a natural evolution that a lot of different players in the industry have taken.
The one thing we’ve done slightly differently, I’d say, at B.C. Hydro is we’ve taken a very deliberate approach to try and get consistency across the business, with multiple business units and how we apply risk, before we go to enhancing the value framework. Other businesses may have chosen to advance the framework and then get consistency across the businesses, but we’ve taken that step to get there. Step 1, for us, was to look across the enterprise and use things in a consistent way and then evolve after that.
We’re anticipating it’s going to be complementary. It’s going to enhance what we do, and it’s based on the foundation we already have.
S. Bond (Chair): To paraphrase Mitzi, it’s basically: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That’s, I think, where you’re…. What you’re telling us, though, is that it builds on the principle of risk and what has led to a successful audit today — so not abandoning that principle.
Rick, you’re up next.
R. Glumac: A question. When we’re talking about asset management, we’re not considering the privately owned electricity generation facilities — correct?
M. Sydor: That wasn’t part of what we looked at, no. You mean like Fortis and such?
R. Glumac: No, I mean like run of river and all that.
M. Sydor: Okay. That’s one of the audits that I identified we’re going to be looking at within our next coverage plan — independent power producers, either run of the river, wind power, etc. So we’ll be looking at that. That wasn’t part of what we looked at here. We looked at what B.C. Hydro is doing by way of managing its assets.
R. Glumac: Well, I guess my question is…. You know, we talk about load forecasting and how…. In the audit, it’s saying that it’s robust and all that, but that seems to be only in relation to the public assets. Load forecasting also takes into account the privately owned assets. So how do we have a clear picture of the success of the asset management when we’re excluding those privately owned assets from the picture? How do we really evaluate whether….? What data are we using to evaluate that we’re doing the best job in managing those assets in that context?
There are things, in my mind, indicators like…. If we’re purchasing a lot of electricity, are we managing our assets correctly? If we’re spilling a lot of water over the dams and not using it to generate electricity, are we managing our assets correctly? But I don’t see any of those in this audit — any of those things that give an indication whether we have the appropriate amount of assets.
Currently, historically, going forward — I don’t see that in there. I’m wondering. Does that factor into it, and if not, why not?
M. Sydor: No, it’s not something we’ve factored in entirely. I think that strays into the audit that we’ll be looking at going forward — independent power producers. Part of what we’d probably consider looking at…. That audit is in the future, so I can’t speak specifically at it. But part of it is: how does that fit into the mix overall in terms of assets that B.C. Hydro owns? How much capacity, how much electricity, is being generated through its own assets, and how much it decides it needs from independent power producers.
As you’re aware, a lot of that was brought into the system a decade ago, and recently the government basically closed that down for the time being to see what the future needs may be. So those assets are in place. They’re available. I think that’s part of the decision-making that we didn’t look at. It’s not so much asset condition. It’s more: which portions of the system are we going to use to generate electricity?
I agree it’s a valid question. I’m sure that there are groups within B.C. Hydro that are looking at that. I don’t think all the capacity available through the private producers is being used. There is a certain…. I think the figure is like 28 percent of the electricity provided by B.C. Hydro is from independent power producers. There’s probably more that could be used.
I would assume that Hydro is making the sorts of decisions that you’re inquiring about, but it wasn’t part of this audit. It was focusing on managing assets. If the condition of the assets is poor — if the turbines are running down, if they’re in a poor classification — do we recognize that they’re poor, and do we have steps in place to refurbish them, replace them, whatever is necessary?
The focus was on B.C. Hydro’s assets. It wasn’t looking at the decisions as to which parts of the system we are going to use to generate electricity at different times, which is kind of a different question. It’s a valid question, and I think, as I say, it’s an interesting one and one we’ll probably think about seriously when we look at independent power producers. What is their role in the entire system, and what does it mean to the public?
R. Glumac: Yeah. That’s great to hear. In the report, it says that B.C. Hydro uses electricity load forecasting to estimate the timing, location, size of capital projects needed to meet anticipated electricity demand. It just seems that there’s a big part missing in terms of that load forecasting when 28 percent of our electricity comes from private sources. I’m not sure how the load forecasting can not consider that.
That’s just, I guess, my comment. I’m glad to hear that that’s going to be looked into more in depth with that next report.
S. Bond (Chair): Other questions from members? If not, I have a couple.
John, go ahead first.
J. Yap: Thank you. Congratulations to Hydro. Thank you for what you do in managing this very important asset for the province.
I’m curious about the cybersecurity, if that was captured within the asset management by Hydro. Or was that something separate that would be audited separately?
C. Bellringer: I think Morris mentioned in the introductory comments that we are issuing a report specifically on cybersecurity at Hydro. It should be out in March, so it’s scheduled already. I can’t remember what date, but we are just finalizing it now.
As you can imagine, it will be one of those IT reports where you won’t get all of the detail, but you’ll get a good picture of what we found. The further detail will be provided to the staff within Hydro. It’s another audit that is associated with the one today. Sorry, I don’t mean to steer off from the question you were just asking.
We do have another capital asset management audit on our schedule within the Ministry of Transportation. It would take a similar form, in terms of the audit, as this one, but be directed within the ministry.
J. Yap: Thank you for that. I raised a question, and I appreciate that there will be that separate audit. It’s great to have a great handle on the hard assets that have such value in producing energy in today’s world where we are reliant on information systems and how they relate to the Internet.
That might be a different form of risk that would need to be managed. We look forward to that review.
M. Sydor: Clearly, electrical systems globally are at risk from cybersecurity threats. You’re probably all familiar with the story in Russia and the Ukraine. There’s evidence that some of the utilities in the U.S. have been infiltrated, and you’ve had malicious actors just sitting there.
There was a recent report issued by the security people in the U.S. government that talked about major threats. It was only issued about a week or two ago. It’s available very easily. It talks about Russia and China and other players focusing on infrastructure systems — you know, utilities, railroads, those sorts of things that can disrupt economies and societies.
Clearly, B.C. Hydro — and British Columbia — is also susceptible to those sorts of threats. Yes, we did initiate an audit some time ago, and as Carol indicated, we’re in the process of wrapping that up. Unless something changes, it will be out in March. It’s one of those areas that we recognized.
Yeah, I mean, there are risks to the physical assets, but the systems assets are also at risk. There are systems that we can put in place to protect ourselves, so how is B.C. Hydro doing in protecting those industrial control systems that support the generation of electricity and its distribution? Stay tuned. That’s coming soon.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you. All of us, of course, recognize the need for caution when we report out on those things. We don’t want to create vulnerability ourselves by having those conversations in public. Those parameters are obviously well understood by us and by the Auditor General.
I just have a couple of questions, because I was really interested in how this audit was done. Rick asked my question, a similar one, around robust load forecasting. Obviously, that’s going to have an impact, and there have been capital decisions made based on load forecasts, so I’m sure we’ll hear about that in future visits by B.C. Hydro.
It was interesting that ten years ago B.C. Hydro had the foresight to start looking at this in a very systematic way. I think that’s reflected throughout the report — that it didn’t happen by accident. There was a conscious decision to look at asset management. I can imagine that’s partly driven by the fact that some of the assets are 100 years old. We probably need to be figuring out what we’re going to do with that age of asset.
To the Auditor General’s office, it was interesting that B.C. Hydro was asked to self-assess first, and then that was compared to your own work, as I understand it. Maybe just briefly walk us through how that works. I just thought it was an interesting thing — a really good self-assessment done and then the partner work that was done by the Auditor. Is that a common practice, and was that method chosen for a reason? Maybe if you could speak to that.
C. Bellringer: I’ll make a couple of comments around that as a process and where we’ve used it in other audits, and then the team can think through some specific comments about this one.
We used that a couple of years back on the IT general controls. We did it right across the board and had self-assessments come in. That was of all of the organizations within the government reporting entity. We selected six or seven of those, and we verified those. In that case, what we found was an inconsistency between the self-assessment and our assessment. So we were concerned about that.
It certainly has been communicated to the governing bodies of those organizations to keep a better look. The honesty, if you will, in the self-assessment is a component of what we’re looking for, as well as what the actual assessment is. We found consistencies in this case, which is another element of the good-news story that the assessment processes in place at Hydro are robust.
I’ll let Morris and Chris speak more to the details here.
C. Thomas: Part of the thinking in the approach that we took was that…. We did end up choosing the International Infrastructure Management Manual as the basis of our criteria. It tied in nicely with other international standards.
We found other jurisdictions that had used it in a similar fashion. Some of the long-term thinking of the team, at least, was that while the initial subjects of B.C. Hydro and Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure capital asset management would be extremely intensive, it was also potentially an approach that we could use later on, on a broader basis with a number of organizations.
There was some thought that we could do it on a large scale with a couple of organizations and then potentially refine it and repeat it across health authorities, school districts. That was the team’s thinking.
S. Bond (Chair): Well, I think the key point made by the Auditor is that it lined up when Hydro looked at itself. Then the work that was done by the Auditor’s office actually confirmed the work that had been done. I think that is worthy of recognition. Often people, when they’re asked to self-assess, probably have a rosier picture of what is actually happening than may be the case.
I think that is a strength of this audit. B.C. Hydro was asked to look at themselves and say: “Okay, what are the challenges and weaknesses?” From the Auditor’s comment, it lined up pretty nicely with the work that you were doing. Is that fair to say, Chris?
C. Thomas: Yes. I think the other thing to point out is that from Hydro’s perspective, it was also a bit of progression, in that they had been assessing themselves against a different international standard — but quite closely related — and had first done their own internal assessments. Then they had an external assessment. Then us coming in and doing a third one was also kind of a logical progression.
S. Bond (Chair): Two other questions and a comment. I really appreciated reading the work that is done to support leadership and the teams in terms of development and trades-training strategies — those kinds of things. I think often we see that’s missing. I think, actually, in our next report, we’re going to hear about how there needs to be more support for staff. I think that also is something to be noted.
On page 17, it talks about some variation in procurement processes. It was raised as sort of a…. It wasn’t highlighted as a major issue. But I guess maybe just some reassurance from Hydro or maybe some comments from the Auditor’s office….
I’m assuming there is a process to align underway in terms of procurement. It pointed out that it wasn’t the same across a variety of groups within Hydro. Is there a plan to fix that? Obviously not significant enough to warrant a recommendation, but it is noted. Is there a comment on that in terms of procurement and a bit of inconsistency there?
A. Kumar: I think from B.C. Hydro’s perspective, there are a number of initiatives underway on the procurement side. We are undertaking category management for our key asset classes. For example, you mentioned about transformers. We are taking that approach towards the equipment that is absolutely key for B.C. Hydro to ensure that consistency. That’s being undertaken for circuit breakers, transformers, protection and control. This category management approach that we have started to go through is providing us with a lot of significant benefit.
In addition to that, we are looking at a corporate-wide supply chain application that is going to bring that consistency that is highlighted over here. So there are a number of key initiatives within B.C. Hydro that we are focusing on that’ll provide this consistency on procurement. Again, those are being managed a fairly high level.
One of them is actually a key initiative at a B.C. Hydro level, which is the supply chain application. Both last year and this year, it’s part of our four or five key initiatives at B.C. Hydro that we are focusing on. That’ll take care of the inconsistency of procurement practices that were highlighted as part of the audit.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that. Obviously, it didn’t raise enough concern that it was transformed into a recommendation, but it was just noted. Morris, did you want to comment on that?
M. Sydor: Well, you’re right. It didn’t raise enough concern. In fact, I think one of the reasons we probably put it in here is to recognize that there are areas they could improve. As we’ve pointed out, they did have a plan in place to alleviate the issues that were noted. We just put it in here, I guess, to try to get the report as comprehensive as we could.
There wasn’t a recommendation. It would’ve been: “Continue to do what you’re doing.” So we just wanted to provide legislators and readers with a full report and identify even those areas where things needed a bit of improvement. What we’re showing is that they are working on them on their own.
S. Bond (Chair): That they have a plan to manage that.
M. Sydor: Yeah.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that.
I guess the last thing is around the maturity score chart. I think most people would be pretty happy if they got 80-up on anything, but it does single out three areas that are at an 80. Again, to Morris’s point, it’s not like there’s a great deal of concern about that, but they are in some pretty key areas in terms of risk and a variety of other things.
Just so that B.C. Hydro has the chance to address that…. I’m assuming and the report points out that…. You’re working on the 80s, hoping to move them up into the category where most of your other scores are, which are pretty significantly positive results, other than those three areas. Although risk is there. Risk is noted, I think, at 80.
Maybe just a brief comment about those scores. Again, no huge concern but just room for ongoing improvement, perhaps, is how I would think of that.
A. Kumar: Absolutely. Let me start off with risk management. You’re absolutely right that it is a key area for us. The reason why the score for risk management was 80 — and we actually self-assessed ourselves very close to that number also — is that B.C. Hydro has a number of different repositories for managing risk.
Generation would manage risk in a certain way. Substations and transmission would manage it in a certain way. What we were lacking was a single repository of risk that we could look at and figure out how best to approach the risk profile that exists within B.C. Hydro.
That is something that we are going to be managing and challenging through the value framework that we talked about. That was the reason why we scored our maturity on the risk side on that level. It’s the recognition of the fact that we need to do more things, improving our ability to manage risk across B.C. Hydro.
If you remember, one of the things that I talked about as a future refinement is the new organization structure within B.C. Hydro. What we have done is we’ve gone to a plan-build-operate model. Within the planning, we have brought all the power system planning under one group. That will allow us to have that homogenous approach towards risk. That was done last year, and that has laid the foundation for us to now move into a single view of managing risk across the power system assets.
On the capital investment planning side, we had a lengthy discussion with OAG in terms of the self-evaluation and the ranking for that. One of the fundamental differences between Hydro’s approach versus what was in the IIMM framework is the level of cost estimation you require for a long period of time.
If you remember, I mentioned B.C. Hydro has a ten-year capital plan. In that ten-year capital plan, there’s more certainty on capital projects that are early on and less certainty on capital projects that are in the latter part of the capital plan. It is a dynamic environment that we operate in, and things do change from a load forecast perspective in terms of the generation and so forth.
Our focus in that capital plan from a cost-estimation perspective tends to be on the projects that are in the first three to four years of the capital plan. Whereas in the latter part of the capital plan, it’s based on our experience of similar projects and our understanding of the industry.
We don’t have a comprehensive, detailed cost estimation for the latter part of the capital plan. That is based on the fact that there are going to be changes, and it is a resource allocation that we don’t want to do towards something that may change in the future. Whereas in the capital planning framework, it talks about having cost estimates over a ten-year period.
That was something that we discussed. If you read the findings in the audit, it says that there’s a valid reason why B.C. Hydro has taken this approach, and it makes sense in our environment. That is the reason why we have that level of score on that.
On the management system side, the reason why the self-evaluation is in the 80-mark compared to the other categories is that this focused on process documentation within B.C. Hydro. Given the extent of B.C. Hydro’s business and process, there are extensive processes that we have. Some of those processes are reflective of current environments; some of them are a little outdated. The discussion we had with the audit team was that when we presented them with the evidence, some of those processes did not reflect the current organizational structure.
Given that we are dealing with hundreds and thousands of process documentations, that was a finding from the audit — that we could look at updating those documents in a more timely manner. That’s the reason why that is at that level.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you. I don’t think anyone is usually going to be complaining about an 80 percent mark. I think we’re now getting down to the nitty-gritty here.
Ralph, you had a question.
R. Sultan: Mr. Kumar, your reference to risk triggered immediately, in my mind, a huge topic. Perhaps off topic for this meeting. Nevertheless, it seems to me very germane to B.C. Hydro’s asset management — namely, the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric recently, in the last few days, as a result of the wildfires in California and their need to protect their assets from, probably, the most litigious environment in all the world.
To try and perhaps make this more relevant, are there…? It’s very early days, of course, but are there any asset management lessons to be learned from PG&E’s sudden bankruptcy?
A. Kumar: We have been discussing a lot about what’s happening in PG&E. Maybe I’ll just give you my perspective in terms of the differences between PG&E and the practices that we have in B.C. Hydro.
First of all, one of the things that contributed to the issue that PG&E faced was the high density of population in the areas that they operate in versus B.C. Hydro’s assets, which are quite diverse from a geographic perspective. In addition, we follow quite a strict maintenance standard towards our assets.
By maintenance standards, I mean that if you look at our 500 kV lines which run all the way from GMS down to the Lower Mainland, we have to make sure that the right-of-way of those lines is cleared as per the NERC standards. That is something that we follow very diligently on a yearly basis. Those standards are meant for making sure that any risks that we would face from any pole-top fire or any equipment failures will be mitigated by ensuring that we have enough clearances through the vegetation.
That is something that is within the purview of my group. I know how seriously we take our responsibilities in terms of making sure that those standards that are actually reflective of our practices are followed on a very strict basis. That allows us to mitigate any issues in terms of vegetation coming closer to our assets and if there’s any failure from that asset. That is one thing that we are very proud of.
I don’t have all the details of what happened at PG&E, but my understanding is that some of the assets failed. As result of that failure, it ended up impacting the vegetation close to the assets, which resulted in the fire. Whereas, in our case, vegetation management is a key area of ours. We spend about $50 million on a yearly basis on vegetation on our transmission and distribution system. We feel that that is adequate for managing our risk as long as we are following those standards that I talked about.
Talking about the standards, we actually get audited by the BCUC every three years. They actually subcontract that to WEC, out of the U.S. They will come and look at our ability to actually meet those standards on a three-year basis. It’s quite an extensive audit. B.C. Hydro has always been able to meet the requirements of those audits, and we’ve shown compliance to those standards. So there are many checks and balances built in, and I’m comfortable that the risk that our colleagues in PG&E faced is mitigated in B.C. Hydro.
S. Bond (Chair): Any other questions or comments from committee members?
B. Ma: I was going to say earlier, when Madam Chair mentioned that an 80 percent score is usually not something to complain about…. Well, clearly, she didn’t grow up with my parents. [Laughter.]
In the spirit of my parents, my question is going to be: what can we do to get to 100? Why didn’t we get to 100? Recognizing that it is a very good score, what kind of incremental steps or how much further is there for…? Recognizing of course that a perfect score is not likely to happen, but just kind of understanding what that gap is would be helpful.
A. Kumar: Before I hand it over to Andy, just one comment in terms of…. If you read any asset management framework, whether it’s the PAS 55 or it’s the ISO 55000 or the IIMM, the authors of those frameworks recognize that no utility will actually end up with 100 percent in those categories. The recognition is based on the fact that the cost to achieve that 100 percent compliance is prohibitive and not recommended. It all depends on the issues and the environment and the kind of business you are in, and that is recognized by the authors of all frameworks on asset management.
A. Darby: I was going to say that. I think that with anything like this…. Like, one part of an asset management framework is continuous improvement. I think if you look at it through that lens, I don’t think you’ll ever be 100 percent, purely because you can always do something to get better. I think getting 100 percent…. I’m not entirely positive whether that is truly achievable by any organization out there because you can always improve something.
To Ajay’s point, the thing we really have to do with this is try to figure out, when you look through the different areas of the framework…. Like the double-I, double-M framework — it’s a good framework. You have to pick. Do you want…? Where is 80 percent okay? Where do you want to be 85, where 90 percent? From a cost-benefit perspective, it may not be value-added to try and really get up to the 100 percent.
A good example, which we talked about, is in the capital investment. When you look further out, how much should we spend trying to get detailed cost estimates on a project that may not start until 15 years’ time? We have to try and figure out how we want to scale the different pieces within this to be appropriate.
That being said, if you look at the areas where we scored ourselves relatively lower, there are some things there that we do want to work on. Those are the things that Mr. Kumar pointed out. They’re areas that would be beneficial for us to enhance.
I don’t think we would ever get to 100 percent in any of these. But I think we’ve identified the right things within the framework where it will enhance the business to move them forward.
A. Kumar: I think if I had to pick from the three areas that Madam Chair talked about, I would say risk management is the one that we will move on, because of the fact that we are now looking at a different value framework and we have brought all the planning together under one organization structure. That has really made a big difference for us to now move the needle on the risk framework.
On the capital investment planning, I think we’ve reached a point where we get the best benefit of flexibility and making sure that the short-term investments are well understood. I don’t think we’ll be making an endeavor to have a ten-year estimate. It doesn’t make sense for B.C. Hydro to do that.
On the management systems side, as we go through reorganizations and changes, we will be updating. That will be the secondary focus, in my mind.
B. Ma: Thank you so much.
C. Thomas: On the flip side of that, you also have to consider that what is considered mature is going to change over time as well. So even areas that B.C. Hydro is scoring very well in will require continued efforts to stay at what is considered mature as the industry and understanding there evolve.
I think the example Andy gave earlier of evolving thinking over…. How do you add value to the calculation rather than the risk of just not doing projects? What’s the incremental value of doing projects and harmonizing so that you have smaller projects that can be considered on the same basis?
Going forward, I think that’s going to be necessary for B.C. Hydro to stay at a mature level because the industry is maturing and the knowledge base is maturing.
C. Bellringer: I was just going to say in terms of…. I’m reflecting on my biggest frustration with most audits is watching the look on the official’s face when they’ve made it through the day here, and they can sort of breathe a sigh of relief that that’s done now, and what we feel we need to do to keep up the momentum is the action plans that they have to provide back to the committee. Then there’s a recurring look at how progress is being made.
We won’t have that with this. Some of this is putting faith in the organization to maintain the good practices. You won’t have a natural loop back to the committee to see progress because it won’t now flow into the action-plan list because there are no actions to take against recommendations.
I think, in this particular case, what we’ll see are elements of it, and the load forecast piece being an important ongoing component for us to be looking at, in any event, and it will flow through some other audits and the ones that Morris mentioned. I guess if the committee could also add a reinforcement of “keep up the good work” so that we’re not having to go back in, in five years and find out that everything that was being done well disintegrated….
S. Bond (Chair): I think the Auditor makes a really good point. This committee, in particular, is very, very focused on action plans and follow-up. I think the committee also needs to have that sense that it isn’t over when this one meeting has taken place. And we want to be reassured that when comments or feedback have been provided, it’s taken seriously.
I think all of us here would want to say we don’t see an audit like this very often. I think that you should certainly take credit for, ten years ago, thinking about this and putting in place a systematic way of dealing with asset management. So, basically, keep up the good work. But as the Auditor said, make sure you keep up the good work, or you could find yourself back here at some point in time.
I’m sure that we’re going to have lots of discussions in the days and months ahead about B.C. Hydro, and I think it is important to recognize the good things, which we’re doing today. Then there are going to be more challenging discussions — I have no doubt of that — in the subsequent reports that we’ll receive.
Thank you for being here today. We very much appreciate it. And thank you for the work that’s been done and for your presentation today and also to the Auditor’s team for their work.
I was remiss in not recognizing that the comptroller general is here, as he regularly is. Carl Fischer is with us today. We tend to pay more attention when he’s on the hot seat. But he is here today, as he always is, and we appreciate that.
I’m going to ask that the committee just take a five- or ten-minute recess as we reset. We need to bring in the next group of witnesses, the next team that’s going to manage.
Thank you again. We’ll recess briefly.
The committee recessed from 11:02 a.m. to 11:21 a.m.
[S. Bond in the chair.]
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you and welcome back. We appreciate that we had to take a few minutes’ recess as we move on to our second report of the day.
We want to move on with the second item on the agenda, which is the consideration of the Office of the Auditor General’s report An Independent Audit of Commercial Vehicle Safety. It’s dated December of 2018. We’ll use the regular format, where we’ll ask our Auditor General to make some opening comments. We’ll have someone from her team walk through the presentation, and then we’re going to have the government’s and associated partners’ response. Hopefully, at that point, we’ll change the screen and put up the PowerPoint response. As each member speaks, it would be important that you introduce yourselves. We need to make sure that your name is on the public record.
We’re going to begin. There may be a slight interruption. We have one of the very dedicated staff from the Auditor General’s office phoning in from out of country. We’re just working on making that connection now. She did a lot of the detailed analysis on this audit. Hopefully, we can connect with Jessica. If not, I know that the Auditor and her team are quite capable of filling in the details.
With that, Auditor General, if you don’t mind beginning.
An Independent Audit of
Commercial Vehicle Safety
C. Bellringer: I’ll be passing this along to Malcolm Gaston. Malcolm is one of the Deputy Auditors General in performance audit as well.
The one comment I wanted to make about this particular performance audit: it’s very large, even for a performance audit, for our office. We decided to do that because of the nature of the interrelationships amongst various organizations. Also, in doing the planning, it was definitely the request, from the organizations we spoke to, to keep it big, as opposed to quite narrow. This is in fact quite a different scoping than the previous report we just saw, which was relatively narrow for an audit, whereas this one is extremely broad.
I’ll pass it over now to Malcolm for the introductory comments.
M. Gaston: Good morning, Madam Chair and committee members, and thank you for inviting us to present our report on commercial vehicle safety. With me today I have Alex Gunn. I realize your agenda has it as Jane Bryant. She wasn’t able to join us today, but we have an able replacement in Alex, and hopefully, we’ll have a connection with Jessica Schafer, another member of the audits team.
On average, over the last ten years, about 300 people each year have died in motor vehicle incidents in B.C. Of these 300 people, 61, or 19 percent, died in incidents involving a heavy commercial vehicle. The B.C. government’s road safety goal is zero fatal collisions.
Commercial vehicle safety involves many different issues and stakeholders. When we audited truck safety in 1996, we focused primarily on inspection and enforcement. As the Auditor General has just noted, this audit had a broader scope as a result of consultations with the various stakeholders and agencies.
Our audit findings touched on the following six areas: firstly, commercial driver licensing; second, education and awareness programs; third, the regulatory and administrative policy framework; fourth, consistency of the monitoring and enforcement of commercial vehicle safety across B.C.; fifth, the work of commercial vehicle safety and enforcement officers; and, finally, sixth, the data and analysis on how well these programs are working.
Overall, we found that the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia and the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General have taken steps to improve commercial vehicle safety. However, the ministries and ICBC need to do much more to effectively manage their respective programs to promote the safe operation of commercial vehicles on B.C. roads.
Before proceeding further, we would like to thank both the ministries and ICBC for their support and cooperation during the course of the audit and, particularly, acknowledge the help and assistance provided by commercial vehicle safety and enforcement branch staff. We were impressed with the dedication we saw from staff in the field in such a challenging job.
I’ll now turn the presentation over to Alex to provide a more detailed overview of our audit findings and recommendations.
A. Gunn: Thank you, Malcolm, and thank you, Madam Chair and committee members. It’s my pleasure to join you today and present an overview of our report.
Commercial vehicle transportation is key to the economies of Canada and British Columbia. While commercial vehicle transportation brings benefits to society, there are also risks. Though heavy commercial vehicles represent less than 3 percent of vehicles in B.C., they were, as Malcolm just mentioned, involved in almost 20 percent of fatal crashes over the past ten years. Motor vehicle fatalities are decreasing across the board, but the proportion of fatalities involving heavy commercial vehicles has remained fairly stable.
Commercial vehicle collision deaths are preventable. Coroners’ data showed that driver behaviour was a contributing factor in almost all deaths involving a commercial vehicle. The behaviour of non–commercial vehicle drivers was a contributing factor in more than half of these deaths, while the behaviour of commercial vehicle drivers or their vehicle condition was a factor in a third of the deaths.
The first area we looked at as a part of our audit was licensing. We found that government doesn’t know whether commercial driver licensing standards are adequate, but it has recently started to address this issue.
In B.C., drivers are not required to take specialized training to get their commercial licence. In comparison, Europe has had mandatory training for commercial drivers for more than ten years. Ontario brought it in, in 2017. The U.S.A. is phasing it in over three years, and Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta all have plans to do so soon.
We recommend that the government continue their review of the standards for commercial driver licensing to ensure that they’re adequate.
Safety education and awareness programs for road users and safe driving in and around commercial vehicles also can help to prevent crashes. In the majority of fatal collisions involving a commercial vehicle, the commercial driver is not at fault. However, in non-fatal collisions involving a commercial vehicle, the commercial driver is equally likely to be at fault. Road users need to know how to behave safely around heavy commercial vehicles, and commercial vehicle drivers also need safety education.
The graphic in this slide is from the government’s recent Be Truck Aware website. It illustrates the importance of education and the need, for example, to leave room when merging in front of a commercial vehicle because of their longer stopping distances.
Overall, commercial vehicle safety education and awareness programs are limited in B.C. because even though multiple organizations are involved, none have the budget or authority for overall responsibility.
In the report, we recommended that government establish clear responsibility for the promotion of road safety education and awareness related to commercial vehicles.
Some areas of the regulatory and administrative policy framework have limited the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure’s ability to ensure commercial vehicles are as safe as they could be. Commercial vehicles have to be inspected at a licensed private inspection facility either once or twice a year, depending on the type of vehicle.
DIFs, or designated inspection facilities, are private companies with a licence to inspect commercial vehicles. PMFs, meanwhile, or preventative maintenance facilities, have a licence to inspect their own vehicles.
In B.C., there are approximately 1,500 DIFs and 350 PMFs. These facilities help ensure that commercial vehicles are safe to operate by inspecting the vehicles according to provincial requirements. The photo in this slide shows a typical inspection facility that we visited during the course of our audit field work.
However, when the facilities don’t follow the rules, the ministry doesn’t have a clear and progressive system to hold facilities accountable. This means there could be vehicles on the road that haven’t been adequately inspected for meeting safety standards.
We found that the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure is challenged to ensure a consistent approach to inspection and enforcement with commercial vehicles across B.C. This includes not consistently enforcing standards at preventative maintenance facilities that are licensed to inspect their own vehicle fleets. It also includes not meeting ministry expectations for completing carrier safety audits in a timely way. This means that carriers with unsafe behaviour have been left without intervention for longer than the ministry’s expected time frame.
Commercial vehicle safety officers in the field also don’t directly report to the ministry’s commercial vehicle safety and enforcement branch, and this can make it hard to ensure that officers consistently follow headquarters policy and priorities. In the report, we recommend that the ministry look at its governance structure for commercial vehicle safety.
One of the things we really emphasize in this report and that we learned is that commercial vehicle safety and enforcement officers have a challenging job. The team had the opportunity to experience this firsthand while in the field. Officers work outdoors in all types of conditions, from rain and snow to stifling heat. They have to slide underneath trucks that can be dirty and dangerous. Officers also have to deal with challenging interactions with truck drivers and with commercial vehicle carriers who may be frustrated when their trip is delayed by an inspection or when they’re being ticketed for not complying with safety rules.
These two photos illustrate the challenging but vital role of commercial vehicle safety and enforcement officers on the roads. On the left, we see the officer having stopped a truck at the roadside after having noticed it was showing a significant imbalance while travelling on the highway. On the right, we see that the reason it was imbalanced was because it was missing an entire wheel. In response, the officer placed this particular vehicle out of service.
With better supports that enable officers to do thorough inspections in a safe environment, they could be more effective. Examples of these supports include infrastructure, such as inspection sheds to allow officers to inspect vehicles in all weather conditions, and timely access to information, like being able to access the inspection history of a commercial vehicle when it comes through the inspection station.
Right now government collects, but doesn’t sufficiently analyze, a lot of data that it could use to determine how well its safety programs and activities are meeting its safety goals. As part of our audit, we identified a statistical model that demonstrates the impact of roadside inspection and enforcement activities on commercial vehicle safety. This model is widely used throughout the United States.
Working closely with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure and with a subject matter expert out of the University of British Columbia, B.C. data was entered into this model. It showed that over the past three years, inspection and enforcement activities prevented an estimated 1,100 crashes, including four fatalities and more than 260 injuries. This saved an estimated $130 million in social costs, which include lost working days and medical costs, and around $18 million in ICBC insurance costs. Government can use this type of data analysis to set clear targets and allocate resources efficiently to meet its targets.
Purposely, and as Carol alluded to, this was a large audit. We wanted to look at significant aspects of commercial vehicle safety, from driver licensing through to the education of road users. We made nine recommendations in this report for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General and the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia.
In this presentation, we’ve talked about providing CVSE officers with better supports. The photo shown here is of the only CVSE covered inspection shed in the province. It shows the depression slot that allows inspectors to roll underneath the truck. Some of the team, myself included, had the pleasure of putting on coveralls and getting underneath some of these trucks and definitely appreciated the fact that the depression allowed them a little bit of distance from the hot, dripping and dirty underbelly of the truck.
Other recommendations that we made include improving licensing, clarifying responsibility for education and awareness programs, reviewing the regulatory and policy framework for vehicle inspection, improving the timeliness and consistency of carrier interventions and doing better data collection and analysis of how well safety programs are working.
This concludes our presentation, and we’re happy to take any questions you might have.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much, Alex. That was well done. We appreciated the photographs as well. We don’t often get those in our reports, so that gave us a firsthand sense of your in-the-field visits.
I should note that I think Jessica Schafer is on the line. She was manager of performance audit. We appreciate Jessica joining us. I believe she’s just arrived in Australia, quite literally. I think we discovered that it’s either five in the morning or six in the morning, depending upon where you are in Australia. So we very much appreciate that effort on your behalf, Jessica.
With that, I’m going to turn it over to the team of people that will respond on behalf of the government. Kevin Richter is the associate deputy minister, Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. Kevin, we’ll ask you to have team members introduce themselves if they’re going to speak.
K. Richter: Certainly. Good morning, Madam Chair, committee members, officials representing the Office of the Auditor General and the comptroller general. I’d like to thank the Auditor General and her staff for the presentation and the report. I’d also like to thank the Chair and the committee members for the opportunity to present today and to provide an update on the progress to date.
First, as indicated, my name is Kevin Richter, and I’m the associate deputy minister for the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. I’d like to introduce my colleagues that are joining me here today. I would also pass on the sincere apologies on behalf of our Deputy Minister, Grant Main. Unfortunately, he could not be here today due to other priorities, but he wanted me to assure all of you that you have the right people here today to answer your questions.
Of the following colleagues that I have with me today, to my left is Steve Haywood, from the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. He’s currently our executive lead on taxi modernization and ride-hailing. However, during the course of the audit, he was the director of the commercial vehicle and safety enforcement team. Next to him, to his left, is Steven Roberts, from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. He is the executive director of strategic initiatives and RoadSafetyBC. Then to his left is Glenn Anness, from the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia. He is the manager of licensing, policy and standards.
In addition, in the row behind, is Ian Pilkington, the acting assistant deputy minister of highway services, who is an additional subject matter expert. Assisting with the slide deck and also an additional subject area manager is Cole Delisle, the acting director of commercial vehicle safety enforcement. I’ll be going through the entire presentation and, at the end, be available for any questions, on which I may ask for the assistance of my colleagues and subject area managers to assist me in responding.
The Auditor General staff conducted an audit to determine whether the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General and the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia have effectively managed their road programs, respectively, to promote the safe operation of commercial vehicles. For brevity, I’ll be referring to the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure as Tran, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General as PSSG and the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia as ICBC for the rest of the presentation.
At the end of the audit, the Auditor General issued nine recommendations in a public report released in December that affected the three agencies. Five recommendations are the direct responsibility of Tran, two are a shared responsibility with Tran, PSSG and ICBC, and two are shared between PSSG and ICBC. Tran, PSSG and ICBC accept all the recommendations and have already made substantive progress in addressing the items.
I will now walk through the Auditor General’s recommendations and our respective responses.
With recommendation 1, the Auditor General recommends that “ICBC continue its recent work to evaluate the licensing strategies, including the effectiveness of B.C.’s commercial driver licensing standards, to improve road safety, and that it act upon the findings in coordination with PSSG. This should include a consideration of mandatory entry-level training.”
To address recommendation 1, ICBC has recently reviewed its driver licensing strategies and potential program changes to reduce crashes. While this work focused on all classes of drivers, it did include research on how best to reduce crashes among commercial drivers. This work identified mandatory entry-level training for class 1 commercial drivers.
Following this review, ICBC has been working with Tran and PSSG on the development of a mandatory entry-level training model for British Columbia. This includes working with other provinces, including Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to leverage existing developing programs.
The province recognizes the importance of effective and consistent programs to support both road safety and labour mobility. While it is too early to commit to specific timelines for the development and potential implementation of a program for British Columbia, we do expect that these decisions will be made in 2019.
Tran and ICBC will consult with the commercial driving and training industries prior to finalizing a program for B.C. ICBC, Tran and PSSG are also working on a federal standard for entry-level training programs for class 1 drivers. This work is being done through the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators and includes the federal government and all provinces and territories. This standard will be developed by January 2020, and the work currently underway in British Columbia will meet or exceed the new standard.
With recommendation 2, the Auditor General recommends that “government establish clear responsibility for the promotion of commercial vehicle road safety education and awareness.”
To address recommendation 2, Tran, PSSG and ICBC have established a permanent oversight committee to review commercial vehicle road safety education and awareness programs. The committee is reviewing commercial vehicle road safety education and awareness programs and will make enhancements to existing programs and establish a lead agency. This committee formalizes the ongoing joint work that has been accomplished on prior campaigns such as the B.C. road safety strategy for safe vehicles working committee and the Winter Driving Safety Alliance. The committee’s recommendations will be delivered by winter 2019.
With recommendation 3, the Auditor General recommends that “ICBC and PSSG ensure program evaluation is a key component of the design and implementation of future education and awareness campaigns related to commercial vehicles.”
To address recommendation 3, ICBC and PSSG are working with Tran through a committee established in recommendation 2 to research best practices and review existing evaluation programs to develop a framework that will be used in future campaigns. As well, commercial driver licensing programs will be evaluated, such as the mandatory entry-level training program currently under development. The best-practices review will be completed by summer of 2019, and the evaluation framework will be developed by fall of 2019.
With recommendation 4, the Auditor General recommends that Tran “consider reviewing and modernizing the regulations and administrative policy to ensure CVSE staff can efficiently and effectively assess whether designated inspection facilities have done inspections in compliance with program expectations and remove licences from non-compliant facilities where appropriate, address key safety risks not addressed under current policy and ensure only carriers that have demonstrated the knowledge and ability to operate safely are granted a national safety code certificate.”
To address recommendation 4, Tran has completed a review of division 25, “Vehicle Inspection and Maintenance,” in the Motor Vehicle Act, which includes such items as the general duties of operators and facilities, and inspections. From this review, Tran has established recommendations for updating and modernizing division 25.
Recommendations include updating the wording to more closely align with current technology, clarifying facility operator obligations and the ministry’s authorities, while also strengthening fine sections to deter those that are non-compliant and pose a risk to road safety. It is planned to see the regulations changed and enforced by fall of 2019. Tran is also assessing a new designated inspection facility compliance program which uses a bait vehicle with known deficiencies that is sent to a designated inspection facility to determine the facility’s inspection capabilities. This assessment should be completed by the fall of 2019.
Tran is also reviewing our internal policies, which will provide clarity to CVSE staff, to ensure that staff understand how the policies align with the Motor Vehicle Act regulations. Tran is also working with ICBC and Advanced Education to explore options for expanding and improving the delivery of the national safety code knowledge testing program, which will be completed in the spring of 2020.
With recommendation 5, the Auditor General recommends that Tran “review the structure of CVSE to ensure greater consistency in inspection and enforcement practices.”
To address recommendation 5, Tran has inventoried programs and reporting structure and has completed a jurisdictional review. With this information, Tran is developing a plan to improve consistency in inspection and enforcement practices. Items reviewed include, but are not limited to, training, policies and supervision practices across the province. This plan to improve consistency in inspection and enforcement and to implement it will be in place by spring of 2020.
With recommendation 6, the Auditor General recommends that Tran “ensure timely and consistent intervention with carriers.”
To address recommendation 6, Tran has taken steps to reduce intervention timelines by sharpening its focus on high-risk carriers to ensure that the most critical carriers are dealt with expeditiously. For example, high national-safety-code point carriers with the most serious infractions will be the priority focus to ensure resources target the most hazardous operators. Furthermore, Tran is seeking additional staff to improve intervention times, and Tran is assessing possible alternative program delivery options, including third-party auditing for strategic deployment as and when required.
With recommendation 7, the Auditor General recommends that Tran “assess whether commercial vehicle safety and enforcement officers have the equipment, infrastructure, information and training they need to do their job safely and effectively, to ensure they can operate at the level necessary to deter non-compliance and meet ministry safety goals.”
To address recommendation 7, Tran has inventoried equipment, infrastructure, information and training across the province and is updating an assessment of operations and officer safety to determine what changes to equipment, infrastructure, information, training and safety are required.
In addition, a comprehensive information technology project is underway to review and refresh the Legacy CVSE IT systems. The IT systems to be refreshed include the national safety code program, the vehicle inspection program, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance inspection program and the commercial transportation management system interface. The completion of the IT implementation plan is winter 2019.
With recommendation 8, the Auditor General recommends that Tran, ICBC and PSSG “ensure the sufficiency, reliability and accuracy of commercial vehicle safety data, and consider ways to integrate data sources to allow comprehensive analysis.”
To address recommendation 8, Tran, PSSG and ICBC are establishing a cross-sector working group to develop a coordinated data strategy and implementation plan to improve the sufficiency, reliability and accuracy of commercial vehicle safety data.
Invitations to participate in the working group will be extended to other government road safety partners, such as the B.C. Coroners Service. Furthermore, the working group will explore leveraging the expertise of the integrated data division to determine the value of creating a sector-specific data warehouse which can be accessed for more comprehensive analysis. The implementation plan will be completed by spring of 2020.
In the last recommendation, recommendation 9, the Auditor General recommends that Tran “collect and analyze data that enables it to develop appropriate targets and to evaluate the effectiveness of its commercial vehicle safety programs.”
To address recommendation 9, Tran is in the process of procuring an external expert to assist in determining which data is appropriate and how it should be collected. This work will inform the creation of appropriate targets that will directly correlate to the effectiveness of commercial vehicle safety programs, which will also complement existing targets that we have set. The date for completion of this work is winter 2019.
In conclusion, on behalf of our ministry and the executive of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, and the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia, we’d like to thank the Auditor General and her staff for the recommendations to improve our respective programs, to work together and to improve commercial vehicle safety in British Columbia.
The three agencies accept all of the recommendations. As we pointed out earlier in the presentation, we have been working collaboratively on completing some of the tasks, and action is well on the way on the development and implementation for others.
For Tran, these recommendations complement a ministry strategic plan, which was started in 2017, to improve commercial vehicle safety. The recommendations from this audit will assist us in focusing our efforts in pursuit of continual improvement.
The public can be confident that safety will always be government’s top priority, and we are absolutely committed to an ongoing protection of road users of British Columbia and the delivery of an effective program and programs to promote the safe operation of commercial vehicles on B.C. roads.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much, Kevin. We appreciate that.
Now we’re going to open the floor to questions. Obviously, as the Auditor General pointed out, a very broad scope, lots of issues and a response has been provided. But I think probably a number of you will have questions.
Who would like to begin?
M. Dean (Deputy Chair): I have a couple of questions. Thank you for the response. I see that there’s a lot of planning and committee work being organized and lots of cross-ministry work, which is really important to see. I haven’t heard, though, whether one ministry is going to take responsibility. I worry that there might still be a gap there in terms of accountability and motivation for keeping moving forward. Is it all going to be done through committee work, or is one ministry taking responsibility?
K. Richter: Some of the components, the recommendations, were specifically targeted — for example, in transportation. When it comes to the designated inspection facilities or consistency in the enforcement activities, that’s resident and we take ownership of that in Transportation and Infrastructure. For those components that directly reside with us, those would be our ownership.
When it comes to licensing, ICBC is taking a lead role in developing and evaluating that. Where we’re working collaboratively together and we’re working out who will be the lead is in the education and the awareness programs.
M. Dean (Deputy Chair): I understand that there’s going to be work done on reviewing data, doing some analysis, creating regulations and responding to the recommendations that have been made. I think the query, though — and it was in the report from the Auditor General — is: even if there are regulations and standards there, how does all of that get checked and tested?
I mean, I heard you say you’re going to test it with the bait vehicle, and you’re asking to increase staff. But how can you reassure this committee that once we have all of these regulations in place, they’re actually going to be enforced and, to a successful extent, that they’re actually going to improve safety?
K. Richter: I will start that off. Then perhaps I’ll ask, Steve, for you to complement or add to what I’m saying.
The Auditor General did identify the importance of evaluating whether it’s education or awareness programs. We’re looking at other agencies and developing, perhaps, a grown-in-B.C. way of evaluating the effectiveness, whether it be education or our enforcement practices.
We are taking steps to make sure that the work that we’re doing can be evaluated. Is it effective? Is it making a difference? We are doing some of that work. In the details of the effectiveness of the legislation, perhaps I’d ask you, Steve, to comment about how we evaluate the effectiveness of our legislation.
S. Haywood: Thank you, Kevin, and thank you for the question.
As Kevin noted, with the education awareness, obviously, we’ll have some analysis afterwards, and that will continue, as well, with our enforcement activities.
Part of the recommendations was for us to really use that data going forward and come up with measures that can be looked at after the fact, and that’s what our plan would be. As we develop these measures, as we make changes to regulations, as we continue improving that enforcement, we would then go back and look at those measurements and do that analysis after the fact.
M. Dean (Deputy Chair): So it’s all a kind of work in progress at the moment.
Then, just lastly, in the report, there was also a recommendation around matching the pattern of incidents to inform patterns of inspections as well, but I didn’t see that anywhere in your response to recommendation 8. Is that part of the data collection?
K. Richter: There are two parts to that. Perhaps I will seek clarity from you on the question, but I’ll try and answer it.
Recommendation 8. The way I interpret it is that it is the collection of data. Data is being collected in all different sources. So we need to make sure that the data, how it’s being collected…. What is the information that’s being collected? How can we best analyze it?
We’re certainly working together. That’s like where accident reports are collected by the RCMP. Also ICBC, when people make claims, has reports. Then the Coroners Service also makes a report. Transportation, for example, doesn’t make an accident report. We rely on the other data sources from other agencies. So we need to sit down and say: “How you collect the data — is this the right format?” Is there a timely way of doing it so we’re getting the right data sources?
Then recommendation 9 was: how do we analyze that data to make sure we’re getting the impacts? That’s where information provided by the Office of the Auditor General on this…. Experts are available out there to help us analyze the data, so we’re making sure we get the right data. We’re working collaboratively to get the right data and have access to the data in a timely manner. Then step 9 is analyzing it to see if we’re making progress.
M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Thank you. I look forward to a follow-up chat.
J. Yap: I want to start out with the same question that Mitzi asked, and I heard the answer. That’s in regards to this cross-ministry challenge, because there are three agencies involved here. It sounds like it’s accountability based on the individual area. But as we’ve seen in other situations, there can be….
Well, my question, then, would be: has there been any thought to having one lead agency for the whole area of commercial vehicle safety, as opposed to still maintaining silos of responsibility?
K. Richter: We do have working committees that work together.
Perhaps, Steve Haywood, could I ask you to talk about the committees and how we…?
S. Haywood: Yeah. As part of the action plan, we’ve developed a permanent committee that will look at the education awareness, come up with a plan, and through that plan, we’ll be identifying which agency will be the lead.
We haven’t provided that from the start, because we want to see what the plan will be and where it’s most appropriate. Is it going to be most appropriate in Tran, ICBC, Solicitor General? We don’t know yet, as we develop that. MLA, I think that will come as we work through the process.
J. Yap: So the working committee will be a cross-ministry, cross-agency committee that will have the ultimate responsibility for ensuring commercial vehicle safety. Would that be a way to look at it?
K. Richter: Yes. This committee will be instrumental in deciding and bringing us all together to make a decision. In some particular areas — for example, in the designated inspection things — Tran would have that authority. And the committee may make a decision about some that says, “Tran, you’re the lead for all these things,” or “We’ll own this.” The committee will be that focus for all the ministries to work together and define the lead agency.
J. Yap: Right. I think I share Mitzi’s concern, where you have different function areas that share different aspects of a responsibility.
I understand this joint committee — cross-ministry, cross-agency committee — is one way to manage this. Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I always think: “Where does the buck stop — with which ministry, which minister?” With what you’re proposing to handle this, it’s still within the realm of a committee and not one ministry.
C. Bellringer: I don’t normally ask a question, but I actually have one on that. I am wondering who’s going to chair the committee. It does sometimes end up, when there’s no single organization within a group, that the chair ends up with a different role. I am wondering if that element is part of the answer or if it has not been thought through.
K. Richter: Transportation is the chair of the committee. So I do think that for many of the activities, Transportation will, as the committee works through, have that leadership role. But as we’re working through it, I don’t want to presuppose where that may be. Right now it’s aligning. Transportation is the chair, and Transportation has breadth over many of these elements.
J. Yap: Okay. Thank you. A couple of more questions.
So 19 percent, almost 20 percent, of fatal accidents involve a commercial vehicle. That was the stat, right? What is the stat for total accidents involving commercial? Not all accidents involving commercial vehicles are fatal. I imagine it’s a much higher number. Do we have that?
S. Haywood: I don’t have that here with me today. I’m sorry, MLA Yap. We can provide that to the committee.
J. Yap: Okay. It’s really quite an impressive number — that 3 percent of the population of commercial vehicles are involved in 20 percent of fatal crashes. So what’s the involvement with the total population of crashes? That was my question as it relates to overall risk, not just for fatal accidents. Those, of course, we’re concerned about, but there are many, many accidents where it’s not fatal, which is still a concern.
S. Haywood: Just so I’m clear, that’s including both property damage and injury?
J. Yap: Sure, yeah.
How does the management of commercial vehicle safety relate to out-of-province licensed vehicles? Obviously, vehicles are going back and forth, and at any point in time, there are vehicles from south of the border, from other provinces, other jurisdictions. Did the review look at that aspect of commercial transportation?
A. Gunn: We did examine…. In terms of commercial vehicle data, we did try to break it down in terms of the jurisdiction of origin for the vehicles. But yeah, as you see, it can be complicated in that the vehicle may be registered in one jurisdiction; the driver may be registered in another. But yeah, we did try to look at that somewhat in our data analysis.
J. Yap: My follow-up to that question — thanks for the answer — is: did the analysis look at where the commercial vehicles involved in accidents were registered and where the drivers were licensed?
A. Gunn: I believe there was some analysis on that. I don’t believe it was necessarily disproportionately based on out of province; although we definitely did hear concerns that out-of-province drivers are less ill-equipped or certainly not as well trained or experienced in terms of dealing with British Columbia roads, particularly more mountainous terrain, and particularly in the winter. There was definitely some concern that out-of-province drivers could be at greater risk of an accident in that respect.
J. Yap: I have a few other questions, but I’ll leave it with the next one, which is regarding the officers. I didn’t find any comment in the report on whether the staffing level is adequate. There was a lot of reference to the need for more support and training. Did the audit find that we have enough CVSE officers, given the mandate?
M. Gaston: The staffing level and whether it was appropriate or not was not part of the scope of the audit. We had quite a large scope as it was. I think our view was that with many of the recommendations, it may be that staffing levels need to be reviewed as part of that.
It’s really for the ministries and ICBC and the work they’re talking about and that they’ve outlined in their action plan. That may be something that comes out of that.
J. Yap: Would the government have any thoughts on that? Do you feel that you have enough staff to do this important work?
K. Richter: In the area of looking at the national safety code reviews that are conducted of carriers, one of the things that we looked at was additional staff for looking at, at strategic times, perhaps third parties. In other jurisdictions, they have looked at that. That’s currently under review of what we’ll do, but we have indicated that perhaps staff could address and deal with the intervention times.
Just to an earlier question within the Auditor General’s report, if I understood the question, the question was: what is the number of heavy commercial vehicle collisions that occur per year? I refer to page 19, in which the number of collisions involving heavy commercial vehicles — and it’s defined by weight — in 2016 was 15,000 approximately. If the question was how many accidents involving commercial vehicles there were, I believe that that’s the table I’m looking at. That may be….
J. Yap: That is a percentage of…. What’s the grand total? Do we know?
K. Richter: The grand total of all collisions involving commercial vehicles and private smaller passenger vehicles?
I would ask…. Do you, Glenn, have any idea of what the total accident rates would be?
G. Anness: I don’t have the total numbers, and I’m not comfortable giving them off the top of my head. The other thing I would want to just make sure of before I respond to you is to understand the population used when determining the 19 percent to make sure that we’re comparing the same population so we’re giving you an accurate percentage.
I’m quite comfortable committing to getting back to the committee with that information.
J. Yap: That would be helpful.
That 20 percent is heavy commercial vehicles. Is that right? Or not all commercial vehicles.
G. Anness: That’s correct.
J. Yap: We need to be comfortable that we’re talking about the same comparison. Obviously, the courier trucks, which are commercial vehicles, present a different risk than the heavy tractor-trailers that are out there as well. But they’re all commercially licensed.
G. Anness: Yes. What we will do is make sure that when we’re doing the follow-up analysis, it’s comparable to the analysis that’s done in the Auditor General’s report. It’s a comparable number. The 19 percent and the number we’ll provide you are measuring the same population, both total and specific.
J. Yap: Thank you. If I may, were there any…? After that horrific accident in Saskatchewan, the Humboldt Broncos accident, the worst vehicle accident with loss of life involving a commercial vehicle, were there any lessons learned? Did a group or some folks from a ministry look at the circumstances as an opportunity for a check-in to understand the circumstances of that and whether the risk factors are applicable to our situation here in B.C.?
K. Richter: We’ve received the information from that very tragic accident in Humboldt, and we are reviewing what that means, whether it be in licensing or whether it be in hours of service. We right now have taken that information, and we’re assessing that and what our next steps would be in preventing another further tragic accident like that.
J. Yap: “We” meaning the committee or your ministry?
K. Richter: The committee. We’re looking at it because it would touch on whether it be licensing, whether it be hours of service or whatever the other factors would be.
J. Yap: Okay, good. I’m glad to hear that.
Thanks, Chair.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you, John. I’ll just make note, then, that there is a commitment here. We are very good at follow-up. We want to make sure that that data comes back to us that’s been requested by MLA Yap.
I think it’s clear that we’re going to be expecting to have an explanation about lead or not or how that’s going to be managed. You’ve seen the concern expressed by at least two members, and I’m sure everyone else shares that. Often the saying “joint accountability” means no accountability. We need to have a sense of who is going to pick this up and who is going to lead. So we’ll be looking for that in the action plans and the follow-ups that the committee does.
With that, Jane.
J. Thornthwaite: Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the question from MLA Yap. I did have a similar question with regards to the tragic situation in Humboldt. I think you said in the report that Saskatchewan was also working on something similar — and whether or not the provinces that had these safety factors in place, perhaps, would have prevented that accident. That was kind of the question I was going to have.
I understood when you mentioned licensing as well as hours of service, because if, in fact, it was…. It wasn’t weather or road conditions. It was the driver — and perhaps wasn’t properly trained. Could you expand on that at all?
K. Richter: Sure. Perhaps, Steve, you might be more attuned to what the outcomes of that review were.
S. Haywood: Yeah. The driver licensing component, I think, is the largest of what we’ve seen in that. It’s hard to say, at this point, because MELT, mandatory entry-level driver training, is still a fairly new concept in North America. As Alex pointed out, Ontario is currently the only province that has it implemented. The United States is moving towards it. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have all committed. You’ve heard here today that B.C. and ICBC are now working on that as well.
Across Canada, the Ministers of Transportation recently met in early January and committed to a cross-country standard or an entry-level minimum standard that would be looked at across…. It could be modelled after Ontario. I’m not sure what that’s going to look like. That process is in the works. But I think that’s probably the largest component.
Outside of that, through the Canadian Council of Motor Transport Administrators as well as Transport Canada, we’re looking at an introduction of electronic logging devices. So this is where some of the hours of service would come in.
An electronic logging device is one that captures the hours of the driver automatically, as opposed to using a paper logbook, which this driver was using in that case. That’s something that Transport Canada is looking at hopefully trying to implement in the coming months, if not later this year, across Canada. That would be a standard for all commercial vehicles across Canada.
J. Thornthwaite: Okay. Thank you very much for that clarification.
Chair, I’ve got a couple of other questions. Do you want me to continue?
S. Bond (Chair): Yes, just keep going. Please go ahead. We’re going to have a working lunch, if members want to pick up their lunch in between their slot.
J. Thornthwaite: So getting back. I was looking at the report. I don’t know why there was a difference in responsibility between the commercial driver and the regular car on the road with regards to fatal accidents and non-fatal. I didn’t quite understand why that was the case, because you did indicate that there was a difference in numbers. Can anybody comment on that?
A. Gunn: I believe in that case it was in terms of which driver was at fault. From what we were gathering, it seemed to be that there was perhaps a higher proportion of non-commercial drivers who were simply unaware or unfamiliar with driving around larger commercial vehicles and therefore were engaging in dangerous practices. Or perhaps there was some other sort of outside factor at play that led to the accident, in which case they were the main cause of the accident.
J. Thornthwaite: Yeah, I understand that. Thank you. But my question is: what’s the difference between the cause and effect to a fatal or a non-fatal?
A. Gunn: Oh, I see. In terms of….
J. Thornthwaite: Why is the non-commercial driver responsible for most of the fatal ones whereas the commercial driver has more responsibility for the non-fatal one? Did I read that right?
A. Gunn: Yeah. Although, I think it was more equally responsible in the non-fatal ones between commercial and non-commercial. But yeah, I’m not entirely certain why. I don’t think our analysis extended to the….
C. Bellringer: We don’t say why.
J. Thornthwaite: Okay. And then, of course, this goes to the follow-up from the ministries.
If in fact a lot of the problem is the non-commercial drivers getting in accidents, either fatal or non-fatal — causing them — what and how do we educate non-commercial drivers to be careful around trucks?
S. Roberts: Steve Roberts, from the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General.
In the Auditor General’s report, highlighted, was one of the campaigns, the Be Truck Aware campaign, which brought together the agencies you see here today, as well as industry and stakeholders, to do a public education campaign for non-commercial drivers around that behaviour around trucks.
I think there was a graphic in the report around passing distances and why. That’s part of that attempt to do that more general education for non-commercial drivers around their behaviour, their driving behaviour, around commercial vehicles.
Washington has done a very successful project, an enforcement campaign and education campaign, and that’s what the B.C. Be Truck Aware model was based on.
J. Thornthwaite: I think that’s a good idea. I noticed that, except I didn’t know about it until I read the report, so the general public doesn’t have a clue.
I just finished coming, funnily enough…. I drove, a couple of nights ago, from Kamloops to Vernon to Kelowna. The only people that are on the road…. It’s dark. It’s totally dark. My colleague said: “Welcome to rural British Columbia, Jane.” It’s totally dark — like, no lights or anything. Then I’m driving in my vehicle, my non-commercial vehicle, and all of these big trucks are screaming by me, coming in the opposite direction.
It was scary, because these things are hauling really, really fast. The roads are tiny, and they’re curvy. I don’t have any extra training on driving. I’m just a regular driver. But I would think that if you’ve got somebody that is not confident or is a new driver….
I would have appreciated some more aggressive education on what to do when you’re on the road with these big, big trucks, because they’re just hauling. If there’s a small distance between you and the truck going the opposite direction…. There are no barriers. Even if you’re paying 100 percent attention, which I think I was, I just can’t believe that we don’t even have more accidents.
My question is: how can we up the education to the public? I like your little diagrams and stuff, but we need to get a better…. That needs to get out to the general public so that people know. Now that you’ve got the stats, that it’s the non-commercial drivers that are causing the majority of these accidents, the general public has to step up and be really aware on the roads.
K. Richter: I think your comments…. I definitely heard them. With the statistics to support it, it’s like…. Providing the education and awareness for the commercial vehicles is one, but also, we need to step up our game with educating people that are non-commercial operators — for them to understand.
This working together in the education — that’s an area that we want to focus on, because that’s important. If the cause is a lot of non-commercial drivers causing these fatal accidents, then we need to step up our game in the awareness for non-commercial drivers in their interaction with commercial vehicles. We’re undertaking that.
S. Bond (Chair): Ralph, you’re up next.
R. Sultan: My attitude towards this entire subject is coloured by recent personal experience as well — namely, this morning, driving down Taylor Way, one of the characteristically very steep hills in West Vancouver, which I arrived at by driving along Highway 1 from Horseshoe Bay for, I don’t know, ten kilometres or so.
A great big, honking haul truck passes me in the fast lane, hauling a great big trailer — both of them empty, fortunately. He probably wasn’t exceeding the speed limit, but I would consider it aggressive driving. He stayed in the passing lane for most of the trip between Horseshoe Bay and Taylor Way. I tucked in behind him as he went down Taylor Way.
There’s a truck haulout or a brake test area at the top of Taylor Way. I was pleased to see that he pulled into it. He was in there for, I would say, at least 30 seconds. Then he pulled out and carried on down the hill. This is very typical of heavy equipment behaviour on the North Shore, I must say.
I guess my first question is: is it the responsibility of our local police department to police this kind of conduct, or is it one of the three or four agencies, presumably, involved opposite me? Who’s in charge of this kind of conduct and enforcement?
K. Richter: Enforcement is a priority for our ministry, so if there’s someone that’s bypassing a brake check, that’s very serious to us. We have the authority to enforce that, along with police services, whether that be RCMP or….
R. Sultan: Well, I don’t know if the West Van police department has too much to do with chasing bank robbers these days — they don’t seem to occur — so maybe you could delegate some of your responsibility to them, or maybe that’s not a good idea. I don’t know.
S. Haywood: The police, whether it’s the RCMP or a local municipal police, are the main purveyors of enforcement on our roadways. CVSE is a secondary. Our focus is on commercial vehicles. The police focus on everything. We work together, obviously, and have shared priorities. But the police were not part of the audit this time.
R. Sultan: Okay. Secondly, I have a bit of confusion on my part. I’m sure I don’t quite understand the data here. But in the Auditor General’s summary, it says that heavy commercial vehicles representing only 3 percent of vehicles on the road, as my friend John Yap has already pointed out, are yet involved in 19 percent of fatal collisions. But I go over to page 21, and there’s a chart of fatal collisions. It’s not 19 percent; it’s fluctuating somewhere between 22 and 30-plus percent. I’d say, in the most recent period, it measured 27 percent.
I’d say let’s round it up to 30, which would allow me to make the statement that these heavy vehicles are ten times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident, without too much exaggeration. Where am I misinterpreting the statistics here?
A. Gunn: I think the second table may only refer to provincial highways, whereas the first statistic might be for the provincial road system as a whole.
R. Sultan: Only provincial highways, and the paragraph refers to all roads. Okay, well that makes sense, since I think, probably, these heavy vehicles tend to be confined to the provincial highways. Thank you for clarifying that.
Secondly, the Auditor General says, almost hastily, that in the majority of those fatal collisions, the commercial driver is not at fault. On what basis does one reach that conclusion? What’s the evidence for that?
C. Bellringer: That one is coming out of exhibit 2 on page 19.
R. Sultan: A police report or something?
C. Bellringer: We sourced it from the Coroners Service report. When you go through the percentages on that chart, you’re going to note that they don’t add up to 100 percent because, in some cases, there are multiple causes.
R. Sultan: Okay, fair enough. Thank you for explaining that for me.
A third point. As, I think, the Chair has already intimated, I think we’ve been around this place long enough and interviewed enough hard-working civil servants to begin to appreciate that when something is referred to a committee, lots of cautionary lights should start blinking. The response of the ministries is that they are going to consider the idea that maybe there should be special licensing for the operators of these extremely heavy, and up to ten times more dangerous, rigs, in terms of fatalities on provincial highways.
They’re going to consider it. Well, what’s the main argument against doing what, it seems to be, most of the jurisdictions in Europe and in North America have already or are planning to adopt — namely, special training for these operators? What’s the biggest argument against it, and what’s the committee going to consider?
G. Anness: If I may back up a little bit, right now, to be a class 1 operator, you do have to have your class 5. You do have to meet provincial standards, including prescreening of a driving record. You do have to go through a class 1 knowledge and road test and, as well, a routine medical. So there already is a higher standard for a class 1 driver than a class 5 driver.
In the development of the mandatory entry-level training, we are absolutely in the midst of developing a model, so we’re not considering whether or not to develop a model. We are in the midst of developing a model. Of course, I cannot commit that that would be approved. It requires legislative and regulatory change, so there’s a process there.
Generally, though, if I were to say, “What is the largest concern we’ve seen with implementing a mandatory training model,” it is that there is some evidence that it is effective in reducing crashes, but to be honest, not a lot of evidence that it’s effective to reduce crashes. So there’s: how are people trained? There’s: how long does the training affect them when they’re a new driver? That’s where you get the vast majority of your benefit.
It generally takes about three or so years for experience driving the vehicle to start to overtake your training as a major factor. Then, generally, as you drive longer, you may develop bad habits, as your experience this morning showed.
There’s a question of: is this the most effective way to increase road safety for commercial vehicle drivers? There’s enough evidence to show that does have a positive impact — that we are absolutely going down the road of developing a model, working with both the Ministry of Transportation and Solicitor General. Obviously, we’ll be going forward to seek approvals once we have that development work done.
R. Sultan: Could I, with minimal trouble…? I’ve got a pretty clean record, and I’m only 85 years old. But I don’t run down too many people in a typical week. Could I, with a modest amount of training, get a licence — in case I get kicked out of office, as a second career — and learn how to drive one of these big rigs?
G. Anness: You absolutely are welcome to come and try the road tests and the knowledge test. Sorry if that’s a little disrespectful. I didn’t mean it to be that way.
Right now most commercial drivers do, in fact, take training. That can vary, though, from: “I basically rented the truck and a couple of hours with the truck….” Most people don’t have semi-trucks, so they generally have to arrange training schools to have those trucks. The training can vary from that all the way up to programs that absolutely meet and exceed what we are hoping to see in a MELT program and what Ontario has in a MELT program.
I’m hesitant to say exactly what the percentage that take training is. It’s over 50 percent, but I can’t remember the exact percentage off the top of my head, so I don’t want to put a number out.
R. Sultan: I’m surprised you don’t know.
G. Anness: It’s about…. It’s in the 60s.
R. Sultan: We’re talking human lives here, after all.
G. Anness: I appreciate that. That is why we are looking at this training program and why we are developing a model and why we are moving forward on working with the government to put forward that model.
We do appreciate the effectiveness of training. We also acknowledge, though, that the training will have an effectiveness, but it’s not the only piece. It’s one piece of a puzzle.
R. Sultan: Would I be allowed to suggest that the apparent delicacy and nervousness attending this subject might also be related to something that I could label the Uber effect and leave it go at that? There are other considerations at work here.
I won’t explore that further. No further questions.
S. Bond (Chair): I do think Jessica has some comments about the data. I don’t want to…. She’s made an enormous effort to call in.
Thank you for joining us and making the effort. We know that you have literally just arrived. I know that you wanted to make some comments about the data, I think some of the data questions. Would you mind just providing your input?
J. Schafer: Sure. There were a couple of questions on the data. I appreciate that ICBC has offered to follow up as well. I believe they’ll have, essentially, more recent data available since they saw that work was completed.
There was a question in terms of the proportion of commercial vehicle collisions — of the total collisions, not just fatal. The data that we have on that goes back to around 2015. It was around 5 percent of total collisions. I think it’s already been mentioned that the commercial vehicles are more likely to be involved in the fatal crashes because of their relative size and, potentially, also because of the collisions occurring on provincial highways in more remote locations, where it’s more difficult to get medical services that prevent an injury from becoming a fatality.
Then there was a question also around drivers from outside of B.C. and their contribution to collisions. We did do some analysis of the ICBC data on this. We looked at it for fatal collisions and for all collisions. Commercial vehicle drivers from outside of B.C. are at fault more than non-commercial drivers from outside of B.C. when it comes to all collisions, but particularly fatal collisions. So there is certainly an issue that is cross-jurisdictional. I do believe we’ve heard various times during this audit work that the Ministry of Transportation is working with other Canadian jurisdictions as part of their work on improving licensing requirements and mandatory training and testing.
S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that.
Does anyone who brought the issue up before have any questions for Jessica related to that?
R. Sultan: I’m finished. No more questions.
B. Ma: I have a few questions about the report and the way it’s written. I’m wondering whether great care was put into making sure that the terminology was consistent between the use of “heavy commercial vehicles” versus “commercial vehicles” — just so I know when I’m reading it that if it says “heavy commercial vehicles,” I understand what that means. Oftentimes it simply provides recommendations or refers to comments about “commercial vehicle” licensing. Am I safe to trust that when it only says “commercial vehicle” licensing, we’re talking class 1 through 4 and not just class 1?
A. Gunn: I think in most of those cases, yes, it would probably be for classes 1 through 4, although I believe in some situations where we are specifying heavy commercial vehicles, it is because we’re trying to indicate vehicles that are of a certain weight as well as a certain use within the wider commercial vehicle fleet.
B. Ma: I am interested in everything that’s been shared with us today and all the questions around heavy commercial vehicles. I’m also interested in, maybe, some of the information that you may have found that might not have been elaborated on in the report around the other classes of vehicles — namely, passenger transport vehicles. So taxis, buses, and so forth.
Actually, I’m disappointed that MLA Sultan didn’t elaborate on what he had meant by his last comment, because I am interested in knowing where he was going with that. There is a conversation right now happening in another committee, the Crown Corporations Committee, on the topic of transportation network services, as you all know. One of the questions that we were asked to explore was whether or not new entrants into the ride-hailing business by other transportation network services should be required to have a class 4 or a class 5 licence.
Some of the missing information that we’ve had — that you might have, actually, around this table, perhaps, through the work of the Auditor General’s office — is what evidence we have that drivers with class 4 licences are safer than drivers with class 5 licences when transporting passengers.
Is there any information there that you’ve come up with in your assessment of commercial licensing standards that might be relevant to that conversation?
M. Gaston: In terms of the way that we scoped the audit, we focused on the area that we’ve been discussing. It already ended up being quite a large audit, so taxis were not part of the scope of the audit.
Now, what I would point out, though, is that our performance audit coverage plan actually has a planned audit in there around road safety. We haven’t started planning that yet, but that’s one area that could possibly be addressed as a part of that. But as I say, we haven’t started planning that, and we’ve certainly learned a lot through the audit that we’re discussing today which will help feed into that.
C. Bellringer: I’ll just add that while no, we did not include in the audit the answer to that question, I’m wondering if there’s any data we came across that might happen to be relevant. We’d maybe need to hear some specific questions. We could go into our data to see if we’ve got anything. But it would be over and above what’s included in this audit.
B. Ma: Now, your audit and the report did, however, provide recommendations relating to overall commercial vehicle licensing. You kind of looked at it more broadly, and there are segments of the report that refer specifically to the importance of proper safety standards and vehicle licensing standards in the area of passenger transportation as well.
I’m curious: recognizing that you may not have gone through the data in detail enough in order to actually produce specific recommendations, do you have any comments or perspectives that you might want to share about the idea of allowing passenger transportation by transportation network service drivers? Uber and Lyft cater the non-professional full-time drivers to transport passengers without a commercial vehicle licence.
I recognize, of course, that some of the complications with that might be that drivers of those kinds of vehicles may be driving full-time, but they also might only be driving a few hours a week. Do you have any comments on that based on all the work that you’ve done around commercial licensing?
C. Bellringer: Somewhat. In fact, I was just asking Alex where it was in the report. It was partly in response to Dr. Sultan’s question around: “Can I go out and get a licence?” I’m going to say it the way I understand it but ask Alex to narrow that down to the precision of the report.
Within the range of what you’re now allowed to drive, you might be okay driving this vehicle, but you’re not so good at that one, and they’re all in the same class. So that’s my very general understanding of why there’s still some caution in…. A licence covers quite a few things.
Can you go into more…?
A. Gunn: No, that’s very true. The class 4 licence and many of the other commercial licences cover a wide variety of vehicles for a wide variety of uses. The training and experience you might bring in terms of getting that licence and then what you’re doing with it afterwards can be quite varied.
In particular, in relation to the class 1 licences, we were made aware of how, as part of the testing standards, you may not be required to have, say, a full load in the truck when you’re tested to drive it as part of the testing process. But then, obviously, that might be a key component of your job afterwards — to be transporting a full load. The vehicle that you’re tested in might be smaller than the vehicle that you end up driving in the future. So yeah, there are obviously some areas of discrepancy there.
B. Ma: May I offer, maybe, if Glenn or someone from the ministry has any comments about that particular topic, given that it is in the scope of commercial vehicle licensing?
G. Anness: My understanding is that there is a formal response going back to the committee on providing the information on 4 versus 5 and that ICBC as a corporation does not hold a stance on whether it should be a 4 or a 5 for operating a TNC vehicle. For whether the government would have a different perspective than ICBC, I’d have to defer to the Ministry of Solicitor General.
B. Ma: My apologies. My question wasn’t about what stance ICBC or the ministry might have on it but whether or not there is evidence or data that might help identify whether or not the class 4 is, in fact, producing safer drivers than a class 5 for those purposes.
G. Anness: ICBC is providing a response back to the committee with data that was requested by the committee.
B. Ma: Just as a final comment, if there is an opportunity to take a look at that question, given that, I think, it’s a topic of great interest to the public — if the upcoming road-safety audit might take a look at how that plays into safety for the public, the class 4, class 5 question. Not specifically that question for the purposes of policy-making, necessarily, but just so that we know, because it appears that the question continues to be brought up. There appears to be a lack of information to actually inform the response to that question so far.
S. Bond (Chair): Jessica, do you want to add your comments? You had a comment, I think, about the taxi situation.
J. Schafer: Sure. The licensing section of our audit work was primarily focused on heavy commercial drivers because of that disproportionate representation in fatalities, but we did look at ICBC’s data around the various classes of commercial vehicles in collisions and insurance costs. Taxis were very clearly overrepresented in collisions and ICBC insurance costs that weren’t necessarily fatal.
We did report on ICBC’s taxi pilot, where they were working with the taxi industry to encourage them to test out various electronic methods of addressing driving habits that were likely to lead to collisions. That did make it into the report.
But on the licensing side, our focus was on the heavy commercial drivers. I think that the work that Glenn is discussing — that they look at this licensing — would be where the broader focus on all different types of drivers and classes of licences would be providing data. So whatever they’re able to provide on that or what they’ve provided to the committee would be of most relevance to your question, Bowinn.
B. Ma: My follow-up question from that information would be whether or not there is a way for any of this data that shows a certain segment of vehicle on the road is representative or overrepresented or underrepresented in overall collisions, whether or not you’re able to adjust that information according to how many hours that vehicle is on the road or how many kilometres they drive.
I can imagine…. For instance, if you have a truck driver that is on the road full-time, like 12 hours a day or whatever is legal for them to drive, 365 days a year, and so forth, compared to a regular class 5 driver whose vehicle may only be on the road for an hour or two, five days a week, I imagine that there needs to be some way to adjust for that. Is that adjustment done? Just wondering if you might be able to comment and clarify a little bit more on that.
J. Schafer: That was one of the significant gaps that we identified in the availability of data with respect to road safety in general, and certainly, for commercial vehicles, it applies as well. There isn’t a good source of data currently on what was called exposure — the amount of times that the vehicles are being driven on the road — which, as you say, would put into a different context the data on collisions. So we are hopeful that’s something that the ministry will include in its work to improve the availability of data.
There is data from the ministry weigh stations that they could, potentially, be using to look at this. That wouldn’t give you the relative rate for passenger and certain commercial vehicles, but it would be a start. And hopefully, there are other ways, with telematics, that they’ll be able to explore, to encourage their data.
B. Ma: Thank you so much. I agree. Any sort of work that involves the assessment of vehicle safety, especially between different classes of not just licences but different classes of vehicles, must take into account exposure so that we can actually see not only what the absolute impact of those vehicles is on road safety but also, I guess, the rate — I’m not sure if that’s the right term, but I think you understand what I mean — according to their exposure on the road as well.
S. Bond (Chair): Jane, I think you had an additional question.
J. Thornthwaite: Yeah. I wanted to just clarify or put on the radar that there’s a big difference between a huge commercial truck bombing down the highway with a load of cows or pigs or horses and the calibre of that driver versus a taxi driver or an Uber driver. So if there’s no difference in the licensing, maybe that’s what the issue is. I mean, I would want these drivers of these big-haul trucks to get significant driving training on the volume of what they’re hauling. The distances that they’re going should be differentiated between me hopping in a cab or an Uber and going across town with just me and a friend. There needs to be, obviously, a differentiation on that.
I wanted to put that out in public — that we’re not talking about the same calibre of vehicle or the same calibre of drivers. We’ve got to talk about comparing apples to apples and not apples to melons or something like that.
S. Bond (Chair): All right. I have a few questions just to…. I hope others, if they have them, can put their hands up during the period of time as we sort of wrap this discussion.
This is a very serious discussion. Jane has given some description. I live in a part of British Columbia where, when you drive even to visit family, you’re probably on a highway that has a lot of heavy commercial traffic. So it really matters.
I know that all of you take this very seriously, and I think it is important to recognize the exceptional work done by the team that are out in the field. They do an incredible job. The focus of my thinking is that we need to make sure that they have everything they need to be able to do the job that we expect them to do, because if they don’t, then that’s not fair.
There have been a number of things raised in this report that speak to that. We’ve already talked about the specialized training piece. What we learned was that other Canadian jurisdictions have not been in that position either, but they’re moving in that direction. And what we’re hearing is that that is being considered for British Columbia. You heard in very powerful and emotional terms that we need to start thinking about how that’s going to take place in our province as we see other provinces think about that kind of specialized training.
We also heard that the ministry doesn’t assess data. Really, it’s an advantage to them to be able to assess the data, because what happened was that the Auditor General’s team took a model and input the data. What came out of it? Very powerful numbers — that 1,100 crashes were prevented, including four fatalities and more than 260 injuries. It saved $130 million, $18 million in ICBC costs.
Analyzing that data is incredibly important. If the Auditor General’s office can do it, I’m assuming that these agencies can do it. There’s a benefit to that, more than just: what do you do with the data? You’re telling British Columbians a story about the effectiveness of the work that’s being done.
I’m going to ask a question which we’ve sort of danced around here. Probably three people now have asked the question. In the report, it says clearly that one of the challenges, in terms of dealing with the effectiveness of the on-the-ground work, is that CVSE does not report directly to the Ministry of Transportation and that the ministry structure is a hindrance.
We’ve sat and watched four organizations — or three — attempt to answer questions about who’s in charge. Is it working? If it isn’t, is one of the considerations doing it differently? The report clearly points out that the ministry structure may well be an issue. Is that on the table? If it isn’t going to be three or four or multiple organizations, is there a thought about how we do this differently so that CVSE officers actually get the support they need and there is a clearly defined lead? Is that on the table?
K. Richter: With regard to the lead, that’s certainly on the table to figure out how we’re going to go forward and where the responsibility and leadership should come from. How I was interpreting, from the OAG report, the comment about the structure of CVSE was perhaps related to the consistency in the enforcement activities.
Perhaps what we interpreted, in talking with the members of the OAG, was that the concern over our structure in CVSE, in the Ministry of Transportation, was a consistency issue for enforcement, whether that be in the Lower Mainland or in northern British Columbia. We are looking at that structural component — or the policies or the training or the supervisory instruction — to deal with any inconsistencies on the enforcement side.
S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Your comment actually leads to one of the ones that I had. There was a comment — I think it was on page 10 — that officers in some regions of the province expressed concerns. “Officers in certain parts of the province weren’t able to meet ministry expectations for completing carrier safety audits in a timely way.”
I’m assuming that’s probably the more far-flung regions of British Columbia, or that could be incorrect. Have those regions been identified? What kind of work is going to be done to support those officers so that they’re actually successful in the audits, which are probably pretty necessary in every region of the province?
K. Richter: Yes. The areas…. We have a distribution of officers that do the carrier safety inspection activities. There are a few scattered around the province. I think, for example, there are two in Prince George, but the bulk are in the Lower Mainland.
I think there are 33,000 NSC carriers registered in British Columbia. What the Auditor General pointed out is the number of assessments that we’re doing. In looking at people and perhaps the ones that we’re taking enforcement action on, we need to step that up. We’re certainly looking at that through focusing and sharpening on those carriers that are really the bad apples, looking at our staffing complement and our deployment but then also looking at other models in other jurisdictions where we would get third parties to assist us, in very targeted areas, to look at carrier safety.
Steve, is there anything else?
S. Haywood: No, Kevin, I think you’ve answered the question.
S. Bond (Chair): Thanks, Kevin. One of the other challenges in the report talked about timely access to information for officers. It’s on page 10 of the report. Does that generally refer to technology? The lack of the ability of a person to be able to get the information they need…. They pull the truck into the shed, they’re sitting there, and they don’t actually know the driving record or what all the information is. Is that a technology gap?
K. Richter: Yes, exactly. It is the technology, whether it’s accessing those programs or when you’re in one program, you’ve got to shut down that program to get into another program and then, if the systems are being difficult, turn that off to bring on another one. So that’s where we currently have the IT work undergoing — to make information more readily accessible by the officers in the field.
S. Bond (Chair): Certainly, there’s been lots of progress in the sharing of information and being able to stand and get information wherever…. Well, not everywhere. In some regions of British Columbia, there’s still a challenge with Internet, and all of those get it with bandwidth. But I mean, obviously, that’s an important gap to close because if you’re going to do an efficient check, you actually need the information at your fingertips. Those are the kinds of practical things that, hopefully, we’ll see in a report back that says: “Okay, we’re starting to systematically close those gaps.” We understand it’s not going to happen overnight. But it is pretty important.
One of the other concerns, for example, was inspection sheds. How many are there now, and are there plans to do more or to find a way to facilitate the work? We’ve seen CVSE officers out on the side of the road in minus 30 weather and all of those kinds of things. We know there’s one in Golden. I don’t know…. Are there other ones? How many others…? Are there plans to look at additional ones?
K. Richter: Correct. Currently there’s only one in Golden. We are doing work for another potential site, on Nordel, in the Lower Mainland. As we’re doing our infrastructure review about the strategic location of our different scales, we’re looking at the suitability of putting in those other facilities at other locations. But we have one in Golden. We’re looking at one on Nordel.
S. Bond (Chair): The report and, also, the opening comments by the Auditor General’s team were very clear about the good work that’s done by officers. But again, on page 10, it talks about: “Better supports for officers would improve their effectiveness.” We understand that it’s a pretty challenging job. What kinds of supports are we talking about? I don’t know if it’s the Auditor General’s office that wants to answer that or one of you. But what are the kinds of things? Obviously, technological support, inspection sheds, those kinds of things. Are there other things that are contemplated when we talk about support? Is it training? Are there other things that are necessary?
A. Gunn: Just based in terms of our visits and seeing the officers in the field…. You’ve already highlighted many of them, in particular, yes, the technological, Internet connectivity and ready access to training, because this is a very technical job. You have to have skilled powers of observation.
The value of having that information readily available and the value of having colleagues around you who are skilled mentors and who can teach you all the little tricks of the trade in terms of identifying which truck you might want to inspect and which one looks like it might be all right — that can be invaluable to your day-to-day work. That was what was really emphasized a lot of the time — those sorts of additional supports.
K. Richter: To build on that, we’ve also recognized that…. We’re looking at, as you identified, the training, not only when we get initial recruits in but having refresher training for staff. The different infrastructure…. But even infrastructure, whether that be the computers or the vehicles or even looking at safety devices or stuff so that when officers are operating, they have the access to emergency services.
We’re looking at devices that, perhaps, capture images of people — some sort of camera system so that officers feel safe — and looking at updating, whether it be the regulations or our policies. We’re looking at our vehicle inspection manual and going through those courses with staff to make sure that they’re getting those tools, the education and the support that they need — you know, the IT systems and access to the programs.
It’s this big basket of several different elements that we’ve already started on. We’re undertaking these operational assessments and further safety assessments.
C. Bellringer: I just wanted to…. In terms of the structure of the report, that summary at the front is a direct parallel to pages 45 through 52 of all of the detail. There’s quite a lot of detail in there, even looking at things like inspection coverage.
They’re not operating 24 hours a day, so there’s random timing, but they’re rarely on the weekends. There are all kinds of very precise data around the training and the equipment and so on in that part.
S. Bond (Chair): I wanted to just, in essence, get it on the record, because most people aren’t going to read a 50-page report. I do appreciate that reminder, and I think that that is the point we’re making.
When you look at it, education matters, obviously. But the most important tools we have are the officers out in the field — making sure that they’re deployed and that they’re supported. The other tool we have is our designated inspection facilities. It is a significant concern that there are facilities that may not be compliant, that are not operating in the way that they should.
Could you just articulate, for the committee’s comfort level, what specifically is being done to deal with that issue of non-compliance? I get the bait car and all of that. What is the time frame that we’re going to see for some enhanced monitoring of what happens? I know this is an issue that’s been going on for quite some time. So what are we doing?
We’ve heard today that we’re going to support the CVSE officers, who do an incredibly good job on the ground. And then the designated inspection facility — could you just remind us of what you’re going to do to deal with the issue of non-compliance?
S. Haywood: Thank you for the question, Madam Chair. You mentioned the bait cars. That’s one of the items that we’re looking at bringing on board, as well as the regulations to support it. Where we’ve got some regulations that do need amending — we’ve identified those — we’re working through that process now, which will strengthen both the obligations on the DIF inspectors as well as the DIF operators.
In conjunction with that are policies that will support how we assess those DIFs and when we would take action. In one portion of our business, the DIF area…. The Auditor General saw this quite clearly. It needs work. In the other portion of our business, which is the national safety code, we have a very clear system of regulations and policy to support that.
What we’re looking at doing, or what we are doing, is modelling those two so that they are similar. We have those steps to take, and we have those policies and regulations to support the work that the officers are doing to then further target those DIFs and hold them more accountable.
S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Anyone else?
I think the other point that I hope you will take away with you is, as MLA Thornthwaite pointed out at the beginning, that there are awareness programs — although, as the report points out, they took a long time from discussion to getting implemented — and most of us don’t even know what they are. I’m thinking that is probably….
There needs to be some improvement in how the general public deals with the issue, especially when you think about the crash statistics. On the fatality side, when there is a large, heavy commercial vehicle involved, it’s somebody else that’s, you know…. And to the point that’s been made, it’s pretty intimidating, at times, driving on British Columbia highways, with the…. With a good economy, that’s what happens. Our goods get transported with heavy commercial vehicles.
Hopefully, we’re going to see a more robust and more publicly facing campaign that teaches people about what some of those risks are. I gather that’s some of the work that the cross-ministry committee will do.
With that, we do want to thank the Auditor General’s team.
We want to thank Jessica, who now can go and get some rest, we hope. Thank you for making the extra effort to contact us.
We want to end on that note that talks about the great work that CVSE officers do in the field, how important they are. We appreciate that.
We thank you, too — the organizations represented here. We’re going to be looking forward to your action plan updates, and obviously you now know what some of the very specific things we’ll be looking at will include. Thank you for that. We appreciate your time and your presentation this afternoon.
With that, the committee has one final item that we’d like to deal with. That is a report back from the Auditor. I have to say, I hope that did not take…. I know that your office has an awful lot on its plate at the moment. This is a very extensive report back to us — about a question that was responded to, which was asked.
Did you want to make some comments, Carol, about the document you’ve provided us with? Then if any members have questions, you may want to let us know.
Correspondence
OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL
C. Bellringer: This was the follow-up from when the committee had reviewed our three-year financial statement coverage plan. The question was asked: can you show us what you did over the last ten? Denver Wigg, who is sitting at the back, prepared it. I’m going to ask him to….
Did it take a huge amount of time?
D. Wigg: It took a meaningful amount of time, but I wouldn’t say huge.
C. Bellringer: It is data we had on hand. It wasn’t all in one place, because we didn’t have it rolling forward, but we were able to take it from our existing database.
In terms of coverage, we’re doing our coverage primarily to ensure that we have the information we need so that we can sign off on the public accounts. When it’s a high-risk area, we do it one of two ways. We either do it directly, ourselves, or we rely on the external auditors who are doing the work.
We’ll attend the audit committee meeting, even though they are the ones signing the audit opinion on those financial statements. We’ll obtain their audit plan. We’ll actually do file reviews at the end. They have a letter of instruction from us at the beginning of the year, telling them what we’re looking for — that kind of thing.
We also have to balance it out with our staffing availability, with our budget. It’s a bit of a circular exercise, so we do it within the envelope that we have available to us, but we also have to go forward with the request that reflects what we need. So it’s a bit of back and forth.
For example, in the school districts as a…. Let me start just with…. We’ll select some that aren’t in that high risk, high significance, in terms of how they impact the summary financial statements for different reasons. Part of it is staff training. We don’t hire a new auditor and expect them to run in and do the most complex audit. We have to train them up. So we start them on some simpler audits, and then they progress.
We have some in here that are quite simple. In fact, the school districts, individually, are quite small in relation to the full public account reporting, but they’re off-season, so they have a different year-end. We do those a little later than we do the audits that are ending all at the same time, at March 31. So there are different components to why we pick what we pick.
We do, for the school districts, have a pretty strict…. We went through this when we did the coverage plan, but we do five at a time, and we do them for five years. Then we’ll rotate through, but we’re not doing it with the intention of having rotated through. That’s not the intention.
The intention is to get enough coverage to understand what’s going on in the school districts. As I say, it’s in the right time of year, and it gives our staff some good preparation type of audit training.
You’ll see that throughout. We’ve split this up by sector, by type of audit, and it does…. I don’t know about the copy that others have produced to read, but mine is pretty tiny print, and it is difficult to go through, because we’ve got 150 or so organizations on this flow chart, showing where we’ve gone in and done them at the different levels — direct being us.
Where it says OAG…. There are very few. There are a couple where we have asked an external auditor to do the work for us, but we still sign the opinion. Then oversight are the ones where we’re relying on an external auditor and doing quite a lot of work.
Where you see a blank, it doesn’t mean we do nothing. We still have all of those organizations flowing into the consolidated set of financial statements for the public accounts, and we’ll have a look at things, but we’re not doing detailed work there.
S. Bond (Chair): It was very thorough. Thank you for the work that was done. I think it gives us an excellent overview of the work that’s done.
Ralph, did you have a comment to make?
R. Sultan: Yes. I had a question. I think it would be appropriate at this moment.
In terms of resources, we’re all aware of the great controversy and momentous happenings with respect to the Legislative Assembly itself. I see you have, on this long list of audit responsibilities, OAG direct after the Legislative Assembly. Is that a new addition, given your undertaking, as I understand it, to perform audits as wished by other eminent people?
C. Bellringer: This spreadsheet is only the financial statement audits, and we’ve been doing a financial statement audit of the Legislative Assembly for a couple of years now. You see where…. I think 2012 was the first year. It might have been before that — 2010, the financial statement.
Interjection.
C. Bellringer: In any event, we’re debating a bit when the start year was, but we’ve been doing it for a number of years. It’s not a very long, time-consuming exercise to do the financial statement audit.
The additional work that we have, and we’ve made it public that we are doing, is, if you will, a performance audit. It’s not a financial…. The financial statement audit is just the opinion on the numbers themselves, as to whether or not they fairly present the financial position and results of operations.
The operations themselves, and looking at the operations, is a broader audit we did not have on the original performance coverage plan. But before we issue that plan publicly, we always consider current situations, and it did occur before we publicly released the performance audit coverage plan. So we did indicate on there that we’ve already initiated an audit within the assembly.
R. Sultan: As a follow-up, then, given the high priority I think all of us around this table and our colleagues back in the Legislature attach to this topic and the importance of doing it well, thoroughly…. A deep dive, I think, is your expression, which, certainly, I endorse. I’d be surprised if anyone does not agree wholeheartedly with your plan.
Do you have the resources required to do a thorough, comprehensive job that will satisfy not just us but anybody with questions to ask?
C. Bellringer: At the moment, this is…. The Finance and Government Services committee does review our budget, and we have the approval for the budget for the year coming up.
We’ve had several years of lapsing funds. At the end of each fiscal year, we have not spent the entire budget that’s been allocated to us. That’s been a consistent situation, certainly since I’ve been there. We’ve been doing quite a bit.
Much of it’s due to turnover in the office. You have somebody leave. We would set the budget based on the number of people we need, the number of people we have, then somebody leaves. It then means that position needs to be filled. That takes a couple of months, so you end up not spending your full budget. It’s mostly salaries.
Two years ago we said: “Well, I believe that we’re provided with a budget to do audits, not to save money. I mean, if you don’t want us to spend that much, then give us a smaller budget.” We think it’s important to spend it, because that means we’re doing the work we’ve been asked to do.
We have ended up taking a chance, as we start into the year, by, in effect, overbudgeting on April 1, because we know we will have people leave through the year. It’s a vacancy management technique. We do that, and we still lapsed two years ago. We still lapsed a bit in the year that we’re about to complete, or we anticipate we will lapse a little bit.
So what we’ve committed to do for next year is…. We’ll do the same thing. We actually think that we are fine with the resources we’ve been provided with to do the work that we’re intending to do within the assembly. We’ve built it in to next year’s budget, but we are taking that same chance that we’ll start the year knowing we’re starting off a little bit over budget.
I’ve given the green light to hire one additional person we weren’t expecting to hire, and I’ve given the green light to hire some consultants that we’re bringing in with external expertise in areas we need for that particular audit. We still think we’ll be okay over the course of the year to manage that variance. If it does not occur….
For the last couple of years, we’ve been asked back to the Finance and Government Services Committee to provide an update midyear. We’ll let them know by then if there’s any concern that we’re now anticipating going over budget. So we’re not asking for additional funds at the start of the year.
S. Bond (Chair): Well, thank you, and thanks to everyone for a productive day today. As you can imagine, the Auditor and her team continue to do their work. We have received recently a number of reports that have been now tabled, and there will continue to be the release of those reports over the next period of time.
The subcommittee met recently to talk about how we schedule those moving forward and to talk about the communications plan, which we are working on. We also wanted to, at a future meeting — probably the next one, to let the Auditor know — talk a little bit about the work that’s been done on action plans and what it looks like when it comes back to us — the frequency and the content.
I think it’s fair to say to the Auditor General that we certainly have appreciated the professional and very, very diligent approach that has been taken here at Public Accounts. We have every confidence that that same degree of skill and expertise will be used in the work that the Auditor has been given here in British Columbia at the Legislative Assembly.
We see every single meeting the skill of your team and the work that you have done to lead that work. We know it will be a lot of work on your plate. We all support that work, and we think that you and your team are completely capable of doing that work. We see it every time we meet. We wanted to be sure that you knew that, and we thank you for the work that you’ve done.
With that, we will…. Do I have to do a motion to adjourn, or do we…?
K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk of the Legislative Assembly): One of the members can.
M. Dean (Deputy Chair): So moved, motion to adjourn.
S. Bond (Chair): With that, we’ll end the meeting. Thank you, all, for your work and for the time that you spent preparing for today. We really appreciate it.
Oh, do we have to vote?
Motion approved.
S. Bond (Chair): I knew no one would be opposed. I should have said.
Thank you all very much.
Thanks, Mitzi.
The committee adjourned at 1:17 p.m.
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