The committee met at 8:03 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Good morning. I’d like to bring the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services to order, Monday, May 6, bright and early, eight in the morning. Welcome, everyone.

First up we have statutory offices finance and operations update and the Office of the Auditor General — Carol Bellringer, Auditor General.

Welcome on this beautiful Monday morning.

C. Bellringer: Thank you so much. Other than the smoke, it’s a beautiful morning.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, I know.

It’s all yours. I’ll let you introduce your staff.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

C. Bellringer: Thanks so much. I am joined by Russ Jones, Deputy Auditor General, who’s in charge of our corporate services, including finance; and John McNeill, who’s our newly appointed comptroller for the office. We’ll spell each other off a little bit here in the presentation, and we’ll just give you an update, because there’s really nothing, other than letting you know how things are going, to share.

You appointed a new auditor of our financial statements, BDO, and they have been in our office and completed their field work April 23 to 27, so they will be corresponding directly to you with the results of the audit. Just to note, they only are doing a financial statement audit, and they also look at our key performance indicators to put an opinion on the extent to which they say that we’re reporting on those appropriately.

We continue to have a struggle under…. We’re underspending our appropriation. We’ve been doing quite a lot to try to spend it all. We’re not worried about being over budget, but it’s equally as important for us to get as many audits as we can get done by spending the money.

[8:05 a.m.]

Now, the key is that it’s almost all salaries. If we have any turnover, then as soon as you have a time lag between when somebody leaves and when we hire the replacement staff, we’re going to have a lapse. We have had just a couple of years now — probably three — where we’ve very strategically started the year over budget, knowing what the pattern is and what we expect to have happen around an underspend, and we’re still underspending, even doing that.

Last year we underspent the appropriation — last year being fiscal year ’18 — by 4.5 percent, or $785,000, and the salaries were $525,000 of that amount. Then the year that we just completed, fiscal year ’19, we underspent our budget by 2.2 percent, or $393,000, and we tightly controlled the salaries. That was only $88,000 of that amount.

We’re noting the improvement, and we’re seeing that what we’re doing, around trying to start the year over budget, is working. John has some very detailed graphs that he monitors on a regular basis. As people leave, we see what that’s going to do, to track us to the end of the year so that we’re doing what we can to spend the full budget.

The $305,000 underspend, in addition to the salaries for the current year, is related to IT projects that we deferred. We need to prepare a new desktop Citrix for CaseWare for 2018 — this is probably getting too technical — because I’m looking at it, going: “Okay, I’m going to have to work through, in my head, what all of this means.” It’s a $120,000 underspend on our IT professional services fees because our senior staff were unable to get to the activity. Those projects will be included in our fiscal year ’20 activity.

We also saved some money in our IT audit group. We were able to use our own staff to do some general control testing. We had previously been hiring contractors to do that. That resulted in a $54,000 savings. That group also used less subject-matter expert contractors’ resources — again, due to the delay on some of the projects.

We’re under budget by $20,000 for professional dues — again, related to turnover; we pay the professional dues for our professional accountants — and $40,000 for CPA student training fees. We are a training office for certified professional accountants, and we continue to do so, but we’ve just spent a little less on that than expected.

The last thing is that we are watching our travel closely, because it’s a big budget line. We did have less than expected travel, resulting in savings of $31,000. That’s related to our financial statement audits, where we attend audit committee meetings right through the province, as well as doing in-field work on the audits that we’re doing where we express the audit opinion.

On a staffing update, we had 18 competitions last year and 32 hires. We keep our competition for the financial auditor group open all year round. It’s a position that experiences a higher turnover. We had five new FTEs during the year from the competition, and currently we have two vacancies that we’re in the position of filling in that area.

The three pools of staffing that we’re always keeping an eye on are financial statement auditors — there’s a very attractive market for them outside of our office after we’ve trained them; our performance auditors, who come in with an expertise, usually an MPA or a PhD, and then we train them in auditing; and our corporate services support people, who have different specialties. The highest turnover is in financial audit. We expect that to continue. We built that into the budgeting again this year — overhiring at the start of the year, in anticipation. Of course, by the end of the year, it has averaged out to the expected FTEs.

[8:10 a.m.]

We are looking at whether there are some causes for some of the departures. We have noted that Victoria is one of the factors, and we’ve started hiring individuals to work in Vancouver. Everybody previously had worked in Victoria. Russ is going to get into more detail about how we’re making those arrangements in Vancouver.

We, as I pointed out, are working in an already tight local market. Being a training office, the non-CPAs — we’re training them in audit. We have done an analysis of where everybody is going, and 66 percent of those who resigned this year left to fill positions elsewhere in the provincial government. Primarily it’s because we’re unable to promote them all, or you’d have 120 Auditors General. We hire a lot of very talented, ambitious people, so they are attractive to the positions that open up elsewhere. We’ll get into the expansion of the hiring outside of Victoria in a second.

We do have a new applicant tracking system that we’re putting in place. Again, with all of the frequent needing to fill vacancies, it’s a lot of hard work for our HR people as well as for the staff that assist. For each position we’re hiring, we go through a competitive process. We’re using a new software that we expect to be a big time saver for HR.

We did have some trouble hiring, attracting and retaining specialized IT — information technology — audit staff during the fiscal year. We were fortunate. Looking further afield, we were able to find the qualified staff to move to Victoria near the end of the fiscal year. We just hired two new IT auditors, who both come to us through Halifax.

That’s the update on the staffing. John will get into how this is impacting our fiscal year ’20 plan.

J. McNeill: In the plan for fiscal ’20, this fiscal year coming up, we requested $18.2 million from the committee and were granted that request. We don’t anticipate the need for any additional funding for the fiscal year on top of that.

As Carol mentioned, we continue to use our appropriation. We overbudget for salaries and benefits. That’s about 80 percent of our budget. We do that overbudgeting so that we can cover for any of the vacancies that are created by turnover during the year. We’ve been doing this to one degree or another over the last three years.

There is a small risk that this could result in a deficit. However, based on our historical turnover rate at our office, the risk is low. To mitigate this risk, we monitor and update our forecast for salaries and benefits every pay period. That’s every two weeks.

What’s built into our overage is extra FTEs, spread out across the audit portfolios, as well as our 2 percent salary increase for staff, contingent on their performance. Last year, we started the year $900,000 overbudget. Halfway through the year, we knew that we were going to be underspent, so we added $275,000 to that. As Carol mentioned, the result was that we were still $390,000 under budget.

Two years ago was our first time trying to overbudget. We just started conservatively, with $300,000 overbudget during the start of the year, and added $300,000 to the overbudget amount at least two times during the year, but that year, we were $1 million underspent on salaries. So you can see why we’re pretty comfortable starting the year with $1.2 million over budget.

Our office will continue with its current financial statement audit coverage plan and performance audit coverage plan. In terms of extra things that we’re doing in addition to the performance audit coverage plan, our audit of the Legislature continues. We have incurred additional expenses in relation to that audit, but they too will be included in our approved budget, or we’re going to absorb those expenses. Costs were about $50,000 extra in fiscal 2019, and we expect to spend about $100,000 extra or unplanned in fiscal ’20. That’s for two experienced fraud auditors with experience doing legislative audits and a few other costs.

[8:15 a.m.]

Overall, the extra costs that we’re expecting — about $150,000 over two years. As I mentioned, we don’t expect a need for supplemental funding at this time. I’ll pass it over to Russ.

R. Jones: Great. I’m just going to update everybody on four key things that we touched on, I think, a bit in the fall, when we brought our budget to you. The first one was about trying to find some work arrangements over in Vancouver. We’ve got three staff now that are working full time out of Vancouver, not even based here in Victoria.

When we arranged for that remote working arrangement, we also went and talked to OAG Canada, which has an office over in Vancouver. They’ve been nice enough to provide us with some working space for whenever we’re over there, a meeting place to meet with the staff that we have working out of there at no charge, which is even better. It’s really good.

They also have some staff that they might be able to share with us to do Hydro and UBC, because a lot of their work is just slightly off season to when we do our work, and most of their audits currently are up in the Northwest Territories, out of the Vancouver office. We’ll see how it works, but I think it should be really good.

Then speaking of the two major audits that we are taking on this coming year, Hydro and UBC, we’ve staffed up for both of those. Having these three staff over in Vancouver really helps because it’ll cut down on our travel time, as well as not having all of the Victoria staff having to go over to Vancouver for umpteen weeks in a year. I think this should work out quite well.

I think we mentioned in the fall that we have a new group that we set up, about two years old now. It’s called the compliance, controls and research groups in the office. If anybody’s been following the reports that we’ve put out, we put out about four reports last year. One was on school district executive expenses in school district 61, Understanding Tax Expenditures, Master Supplier File Maintenance and The Short Term Illness and Injury Plan. These are much shorter than our regular performance audits. It’s a good way to get a number of our financial staff involved, as well, in the performance auditing area throughout the year.

There are a couple coming out fairly soon, which you might want to take a look at. B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch — we looked at direct awards over there. School district 36 — we looked at executive expenses as well. Stay tuned. They’re both really good. The CCR audits focused on controls and compliance with policy have been well received, I think, because they are nice and short and easy to look at.

We’ve got a couple of key corporate projects that we’re continuing on. Carol mentioned one, which is our financial audit methodology. We’re revising it, making it more streamlined. We’re behind times. We use something called CaseWare to prepare all of our financial statement audit files and performance audit files. It’s about five years old. Surprise, surprise — there’s no support for it anymore, so we’re having to update. It’s an update to the current CaseWare 2018, which is what the comptroller general’s office also uses to prepare the public accounts for the province. It keeps us in touch with that.

We’re also putting in a brand-new time and project management system. Again, the system we use for recording time in the office seems to be out of date as well. It’s no longer supported. It was costing us more and more money to try and keep it up and running, so we’re taking a look, right now, at how we can streamline both the project management system that we have in place as well as including a time and scheduling system.

The good thing about the time and scheduling system is it will also dovetail with what OAG Canada uses and a number of the audit firms as well. It will be really good.

We’re also reorganizing our HR function. I had three people in HR. As of the end of May, I’ll have one. We are looking for a new director of strategic HR planning and sort of reorganizing that area a bit right at the moment. Lots going on. I’ll let Carol finish off.

C. Bellringer: Well, that really, actually, summed it up.

[8:20 a.m.]

Every two years we do the WES survey, the workplace engagement survey that is common across the public service. On the HR area, we have done a special survey just for that area.

I will say, on the time and project management system, I was smiling when Russ was mentioning it because the staff do not hold back when they provide us with the feedback when we send the surveys around. To quote that survey, they said: “Tenrox should be blown up.” So we know that it’s not something that staff like to use.

We actually track all of our time in the office. It’s a little bit because a number of us have come out of the private sector accounting firms, where you’re tracking time by the 15-minute slices. We actually make all staff fill in a time sheet. It’s produced every week. It allows us to know how long it’s taking us to do regularly recurring audits. We can use that information to really give us a good handle on how long it’s going to take to do one that’s a one-off.

It sounds like something fairly mechanical, but it’s a pretty important process within the office. In addition to the software, it will probably require us to change some of the way we’re looking at it. We are trying to lighten it up a little bit because it can get quite complex to fill this in, down to the detail, if you imagine a 4,000-hour audit, breaking it down into every time period. People are breaking it down into which area of the audit they’ve been working on. We’re looking forward to seeing the change for that one.

As mentioned already, we’re not expecting additional costs over and above the budget that has been approved, but we’ve pointed out to you what the risks are around it. We do know that going into the year over budget does open up that risk area. But we’re quite confident that based on…. We don’t see any reason why the patterns that we’ve observed over the last couple of years wouldn’t continue. We’re already in May, and we’ve already actually exceeded what we expected to see, as to some changes to the staffing where we’re going to be under budget already. We’ll just keep a really close eye on that. We’ll let you know, when we come in for the budget submission for next year, exactly where we’re at with that tracking.

We have a pretty strict rule in the office that if somebody leaves, we’re not allowed to fill that job until we know that we’ve tracked on budget. It’s also a good motivator for the managers in the office to keep staff. They don’t want to be the one that loses somebody, because they don’t get to fill it until we know that we can.

We welcome your questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, thank you very much.

I mean, I can understand the measures that have been taken to try to mitigate the issue that we’ve dealt with over the last couple of years with the staffing, so it makes sense. But of course, as you mentioned, there’s always that risk that, well, if the pattern changes, now we’re over budget. But I can see that the pattern seems to be consistent because every time we talk about this, it’s a similar pattern. Good for you for coming up with some plans to mitigate that.

My question is just around how that is affecting the audits. When you have staff leaving, I’m just curious. Are your audits on schedule? Are you finding that you’re able to stay on course with the staffing changes?

C. Bellringer: The performance audits and the financial audits are somewhat different. The financial audits are quite busy for a short period of time throughout the year, and then it eases off after year-end. So we call it the busy season. During the busy season, we don’t often see a staff member leave. In fact, we have a couple of people who’ve already indicated to us that as soon as busy season is over, they’re going to be leaving. But they will stick around until those audits are finished.

In that down period, it gives us time to not have to hire until a little later. What gets impacted, though, are those CCR smaller projects, because that’s what the financial auditors are doing in the off-season. They’ll be assigned to these shorter audits that they can get done before the busy season starts up again.

We know, going into the year, that if everybody stayed the whole year, we’re going to be over budget, but we don’t expect that to happen. It has been reasonably even across the portfolios. That’s what happens in the pattern of work for financial audit.

[8:25 a.m.]

In performance audit, we can just drop a whole audit. The financial audits are done to meet the reporting deadlines of the various organizations that we’re auditing, including the public accounts. So we have to keep those staffed up, and we can move people in. If we don’t have enough financial auditors for a short period of time, that’s when we hire contractors. The CPA firms, the big four — we’ve hired staff from them and from smaller audit practices in Victoria. We had some people in last year to fill those small gaps.

A performance audit, as I mentioned, is at our discretion as to the timing. So some will just get delayed.

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

Ronna-Rae, you had a question?

R. Leonard: I didn’t quite capture what you were talking about earlier, John. You have hired fraud auditors, specialists in fraud audits?

C. Bellringer: I’ll cover it, because I’m managing the audit myself. It’s for the Leg. Assembly, the audit that we’re doing.

They’re fraud auditors. They’re two individuals — one from Alberta, one from Manitoba — who are experienced in…. They have both audited the parliamentary system. They’ve both done audits within Legislative Assembly areas. As well, they’ve done work that involves the RCMP. So they know how to manage paper, process, access to data, and that kind of thing.

They’ve been here. In addition to that, we have quite a few staff members who are assisting. They’ve guided the staff to now carry on for a while, and they’ll be doing it at a more oversight level.

R. Leonard: So they’ll be continuing on; it’s not just a special project. It’ll be part of the repertoire of your office.

C. Bellringer: No. The two individuals that we contracted for that are only working on the Leg. Assembly.

M. Dean: Thanks, Carol. I was interested in the audit of the Leg. Assembly and the impact that that might be having on the rest of your work. Has it had a knock-on effect for other audits? Will you be doing it annually? Is it going to be something that’s going to be done regularly, or does it now get put in for five years?

As much as you can say, obviously.

C. Bellringer: That’s a great question. I’m seeing a few people looking at me, looking for that answer.

The audit that we’re doing right now is not something I would expect should be done regularly. It’s a one-off. It’s unusually deep.

We have been doing the financial statement audit of the Leg. Assembly now for quite a few years. We didn’t issue the audit opinion on those statements last year, and that’s something that still needs to be closed off. The staff that were going to be working on the financial statement audit for the year coming up are currently working on this deeper look at….

In effect, which I can speak to, we’re doing a 100 percent audit of groups of expenses, when under a financial statement audit, we would have a selection and do a sample, which would be quite small. We’re doing 100 percent of whatever account it is we’re looking at.

That’s something you would not…. The piece that I sort of get people to envision is…. There’s $80 billion being spent in all of the public sector — in government, in its broadest sense. If anyone thinks that we’re looking at all $80 billion every year…. We just are not. We select a dozen or so areas where we’re going to look at something in depth. It tends to be more around…. It can be any aspect of that organization’s management. How well has it been managed? We rarely go into the detailed expenditures for a particular expense area, down to every single item.

[8:30 a.m.]

We might do a few more of those over the course of time. We are looking at whether we should build that kind of…. We didn’t have that practice built up as something we were doing regularly. By bringing the staff in to work on the Leg. Assembly, we thought: “Yeah, it might be something that we build into the CCR area.” When we decided to do the executive expenses…. We’re still not doing 100 percent, but we’re doing a deeper look at just that one little area.

In terms of Leg. Assembly, we have not worked out with the committee what they’d like us to do on an ongoing basis. There are several options. We could continue with the financial statement audit. We did take a quick look at what’s going on in other jurisdictions. Some are doing an annual compliance audit, giving an opinion publicly on whether or not the major expense areas have been taking place within the policy and procedure framework that’s in place. There are several different versions of how that work is done.

Once things are starting to settle down, we’d very much like that conversation with LAMC to see what’s the best use of our time for the work in the assembly.

R. Leonard: Thanks for that. It occurred to me, as you were talking, that one of the challenges you have…. You talked about if you don’t have enough people, you don’t get all the audits done. Here we have something that’s kind of inserted itself into your budget this year. Is something getting put on the shelf for a future date because of this particular thing? How do you prioritize which projects are going to have to sort of go down the queue?

C. Bellringer: We’re doing that balancing act quite frequently right throughout the whole year. Yes, something in the…. It would be affecting…. The performance audit group, who ended up working on this, won’t have started something.

But everything that’s in our performance audit coverage plan is considered, if you will, a priority. We don’t narrow it down to which one is going to get done before the other. They’re all on the shelf ready to go. So I can’t pinpoint which one didn’t get done. But something from that plan will be delayed more than it otherwise would’ve.

It also fit in neatly with the…. The people that were available to work on the Leg. Assembly work weren’t currently in the middle of something, so they didn’t have to drop anything. It did actually work quite nicely with the schedule. It’s not as much of a time-consuming activity, especially because we needed the contractors in to sort of figure out how long this is going to take. Then we can make some decisions about how much more we want to do going forward. So the staff that worked on that weren’t otherwise busy.

There were a few financial auditors that were between…. They had some downtime waiting for some things on their financial audits, so they were available as well. It didn’t have as big of an impact as we thought it might.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Any other questions?

R. Coleman: First of all, to be honest with you, I thought you’d be coming and asking for more money this morning. This is the additional work you’ve been handed, so congratulations on that.

You talked about short-term injury plans and stuff like that. Do you ever get into the sustainability of things like our pension plans and stuff like that when you start to do any audits? Have you been asked to do anything like that? Because you read that a lot of public service pension plans are actually at significant risk. I’m just wondering if you do a dive into that, or whether it’s BCIMC that would be dealing with that.

C. Bellringer: No, we haven’t come in asking for more money. But we did come in with an amount that we’re overbudgeting to the start of the year that’s higher than it otherwise would’ve been. That $1.2 million — I think we’ve added, basically, $2 million to that. It was at about $1 million before we realized, okay, we’ll do all this within the current budget and see where we land at the end of the year and hopefully not have the underspend that we had in the current year.

[8:35 a.m.]

We do have pension plans in the performance audit coverage plan. I can’t remember how we have written that up. It hasn’t yet been planned, so we don’t know which aspect we’re going to look at. I think it’s around governance and oversight of the pension plans by the province. There’s a real question as to how much of it we can get into because it’s an external body, in effect. But the province does have oversight capacity, and there are individuals who participate on the investment committee and in other ways. So that one’s on the list, but we haven’t started it yet.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, thank you very much for the update. Appreciate all the work that you’re doing.

Is there anything else before you…? We’re all good? Anything to close on?

C. Bellringer: The only thing I will say…. I mean, we made this…. And I’ll take the blame for it. I felt it wasn’t appropriate to come and ask for more money — whenever it was, you know, a couple of years ago — when we kept lapsing funds. And we needed to figure out how to spend it all. I said that I’m not prepared to go in and ask for more money until such time as we’ve managed to spend what we’ve already got.

I did give them…. There are probably a few ulcers and headaches that it causes because it’s really not easy. You know, it is a lot easier to have plenty of money and not have to worry about it. So it is a bit of a difficult way to do budgeting because you do have to monitor it constantly, but I’m a believer in that’s the way it should be done. So that’s the way we’re doing it.

At some point, and maybe in this next cycle, I think we should give you some more information about how our office is funded in relation to other…. It’s quite difficult to do the comparison across Canada because not everybody does it the same way.

For some jurisdictions, they audit all of the financial statements. We audit just a portion. They don’t all do them themselves. They’ll hire contractors, but they’re focused more on financial statement audit. Other offices do very little financial statement audit and have a very heavy performance audit portfolio. So it’s hard to compare us, but in comparison to the per-capita spending, we’re a lean office.

Are we doing enough work to satisfy your needs? Because the work that we’re doing is there for the assembly to use the information to have a depth of knowledge about what’s going on and how certain projects are being managed. We can go in and do that independently. So do you want more? Obviously, if you want more, then we have a restructuring to do.

It was a big job to do the restructuring around picking up the Hydro and UBC audits, and that’s been very successful. We didn’t hire people to go do it. We reorganized the best of our staff to be working on that and doing some backfill and moving around. So there’s still plenty to talk about, if you want more.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, we’re just butting up on the next meeting now, but we really….

C. Bellringer: Oh, sorry.

B. D’Eith (Chair): No, no. Thank you very much for your detailed report. We look forward to seeing you again, and thanks for everything that you’re doing. Welcome to the job as a comptroller.

C. Bellringer: Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Let’s just take a short recess.

The committee recessed from 8:38 a.m. to 8:43 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We are getting updates from the independent officers. Up next we have the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth — Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth.

Welcome. I’ll let you introduce your staff, and off we go.

OFFICE OF THE REPRESENTATIVE
FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

J. Charlesworth: Thank you very much, and as a way of beginning on this beautiful, beautiful day, I’d like to acknowledge that we have the tremendous gift of being able to do our work today on the traditional and unceded territories of the Lkwungen-speaking peoples, otherwise known as Songhees and Esquimalt nations.

Good morning. I’m pleased to be here today to provide the committee with an update on the work of our office and to make a supplementary budget request, and of course, to answer any questions that you have about the RCY and the direction that we’re headed.

I’ll begin by introducing members of our team. With me today is the deputy representative, Alan Markwart; the chief financial officer, Dianne Buljat; the executive director of advocacy, Blair Mitchell; and back there, the executive director of communications, Jeff Rud.

Most of you, I’m sure, are familiar, to some extent, with the work of our office. In fact, some of you are very familiar with the work of our office. But I’d like to provide just a bit of an overview.

[8:45 a.m.]

We are responsible for assisting children and youth, young adults and their families who need help in dealing with child- and youth-serving systems, including the Ministry of Children and Family Development, health authorities and Community Living B.C. We’re responsible for advocating for improvements to those systems and providing oversight of MCFD and other public bodies that deliver services and programs to children and youth.

Our budget for 2019-20 is $9.75 million, and for the committee’s information, we fully spent our budget for the fiscal year just concluded, with a tiny surplus of $11,303. I’ll come back to the budget a little later in my presentation. Our organization has 66 FTEs, and those are spread between three offices. Our main office is here in Victoria, and we have an office in Burnaby and another one in Prince George.

We have three legislatively mandated program areas, and I refer to them as AIM: advocacy, investigations and monitoring. At the top is advocacy, and you’ll hear a lot more about that today. We get a lot of attention, obviously, for our investigations and those reports, but advocacy, I think, is truly at the heart of what we do, and it is our front face out into community. Advocates are our front-line workers who meet with and take calls from young people, families, social workers, caregivers, teachers, nurses, pediatricians, lawyers and concerned adults every single day.

They help people navigate what can seem like a labyrinth of government services. They teach youth how to speak up for themselves, and they advocate directly on behalf of children and youth when necessary. They also carry out outreach functions and rights education across the province. We’ve been specifically focusing on delegated Aboriginal agencies, friendship centres, custody centres, as well as meeting with the adults who support them and other stakeholder groups that are connected to MCFD, the DAAs and CLBC.

Since our office was created, we’ve opened more than 20,000 advocacy cases, and they range in complexity from fairly straightforward to highly complex, in which we’re involved for many, many years with these young people.

Our second program is critical injury and death reviews. I refer to it as the investigation side of things. It’s responsible for reviewing and investigating critical injuries and deaths of children and youth in government care or those who receive reviewable services as defined under our act. It includes services delivered by MCFD, mental health and addictions services to children and youth. We get — it says here — 200, but, actually, more recently, we’ve been getting more and more reportable circumstances. I can speak to that. In the last few months, it’s between 220 and 240 of such reports each month.

What happens with those is they each receive an initial screening from our staff and whether they fall within our legislated mandate. Then if they do, they go through a further screening process to determine whether they will proceed to a comprehensive review or a full investigation and whether we should include the incident in an aggregate report of some nature — in which we would take a look at recurring trends or analyses or issues — or whether we should refer that child to advocacy services, reach out to the government to identify that this is a case of concern or what else we might do in order to honour the stories that are being brought before us through these reportable circumstances.

Now as you know well, our investigations result in public reports on our findings and include recommendations intended to prevent similar incidents in the future. Our most recent investigative report Alone and Afraid was released in December. It told the story of a child with complex special needs who was found alone in a state of profound neglect.

As a result of our investigation, I made several recommendations to MCFD but also to the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, because a child is not just the responsibility of MCFD. The responsibility that we have is broader in other ministries as well, and we address such issues as reviewing and overhauling the service delivery framework for CYSN services, information-sharing between ministries, early identification and supports for children with developmental delays, reducing wait-lists for assessments and for parental respite, addressing unexplained school absences and ensuring social workers laid eyes on children during child protection responses.

[8:50 a.m.]

I’m pleased to say that those recommendations were received positively by government, and we are working with them to monitor the status going forward.

An example of an aggregate report that came out of investigations that examines types of critical injuries and deaths of children and youth is the report that we released last November, Time to Listen: Youth Voices on Substance Use. Importantly, that report also featured the voices of 100 young people who we connected with to learn firsthand what their lived expertise and experience was in terms of the use of substances and what they felt was needed in order to ensure that they were safe.

Those recommendations from that report called for a comprehensive array of substance use services to serve the complex and diverse needs of youth who are using substances. Certainly, that report pointed out the complexity and the impact of trauma on many young people. Included within that were youth-specific spaces for supervised consumption and harm reduction. We timed this report to help inform the mental health and substance use strategy currently being developed by the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions.

Now we’re currently working on a number of reports: a statistical overview of injuries and deaths reported to our office between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2017. This quantitative analysis highlights trends and includes distinct Indigenous and Métis report-outs using Indigenous research methodologies and, I would like to add, based on a question that was asked the last time we were here, using gender-based, GBA+, analysis as well.

A special report on the rates of children to participate in significant decisions that impact them, including looking at access to legal representation, is another report that we are developing. We’re doing an investigation into the circumstances leading to the overdose death of a male youth in B.C. who was originally from Alberta and spent time in the child protection stream in both of these provinces. We’re looking at what role government services and the interactions between those two provincial governments may have played in his outcome.

We’re also dealing with a very heartbreaking death, an investigation into the death of a young Indigenous woman. There, we’re looking at the effects of intergenerational trauma and related issues, including permanency, sexual exploitation, substance use and the lack of access to services in some of the communities in which she lived.

Our third area mandated is monitoring. There we monitor, review and conduct research and analysis on government programs and services and monitor the implementation of our recommendations. The current work that is underway is a review of cross-ministry services and supports for children and youth with fetal alcohol syndrome disorder. The review is quite unique in its methodology — we’re excited about that — including participation by children and youth who will share their lived experience and the experience of their families and caregivers, including their attempts to access services in the system for their children with FASD.

Monitoring has also begun in a project to review significant elements of the quality of care planning for children and youth in provincial care, with a particular focus on permanency planning, cultural planning and planning for youth transitioning out of care. We’re doing research and preparing a public report for later this year on agreements with young adults. And finally, we’re doing work on a final update to our Finding Forever Families report from 2014. We’re taking a look at trends on adoption, and we’re taking a specific look at reimagining what permanency is from the perspective of the young people that are in care.

Finally, advocacy is leading a project in which advocacy, monitoring and communications staff are mentoring and supporting a practicum student, Advocate Katherine McParland, as she compiles data for a youth-led report on youth homelessness in British Columbia.

Those are the three mandated areas, but I think it’s important that we emphasize that all of these are nested, if you will, in Indigenous strategies and partnerships, also known as ISP, within our organization. And because of the unacceptable overrepresentation of Indigenous children and youth in care in the child welfare system, we know it’s critical to bring an Indigenous lens to all of our work. Our ISP team does that.

[8:55 a.m.]

As I reported out the last time I was before this committee, we were building that team and putting a significant focus on that by having a dedicated deputy representative, Dawn Thomas, on that, and then building a team around that to take a look both at the ways in which we build relationships with Indigenous communities, Indigenous organizations, children, youth and families, and also how we monitor and research the various reports that are underway and recommendations that are before government. So this is a top priority for our office. It has been for many years, of course, with the RCY, but we are putting even more focus on it in my tenure.

I want to speak to one of the areas that we’re looking at in terms of the integration of those various mandated areas with the Indigenous strategies and partnerships. A particular area of concern for us is the young girls — often Indigenous, primarily Indigenous — who are simultaneously dealing with addictions, sexual exploitation, mental health issues without adequate support and inadequate or no housing. We’re losing these young women in many, many ways.

This is an urgent priority in one area that our ISP team is focusing, but it’s also working across our whole organization to take a look at: what can we learn through advocacy, investigations and monitoring, and what are those kinds of relationships that we need to bring forward to understand better what to do on behalf of these young women?

ISP staff is also actively monitoring the shifting child welfare landscape on both provincial and national levels. There have been amendments to the CFCSA Act in British Columbia and, of course, federal legislation is before the House in Ottawa.

Ongoing issues which we’re closely watching and monitoring — Grand Chief Ed John’s 2016 report on Indigenous child welfare, the Human Rights Tribunal ruling of 2016 on Ottawa’s discriminatory funding of the First Nations child welfare. The missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls report will be released, I believe, on June 4. The uptake on Jordan’s principle. As an aside, B.C. has the lowest uptake of all provinces in Canada, so what can be done to improve that? The calls to action in the TRC and, of course, our new federal legislation that I’ve spoken about.

Since becoming representative, I’ve made a point of saying yes to just about every request for me to appear before, speak with, meet with or listen to children and youth community and stakeholder groups, and to date, that’s resulted in 121 external meetings, 52 events and 47 presentations. Through that, the beauty of that is I’ve collected a lot of information from people about their concerns when it comes to child well-being, and of course, I’ve tried to raise awareness about the RCY and our services.

Through that, I like to say I’ve amassed thousands of sticky notes, data points on what the critical issues are for B.C.’s vulnerable children and youth, and I can assure you that in the top three, everywhere I go, is the provision of supports and advocacy to young adults who are transitioning into adulthood after having been in care and are receiving services from MCFD and other ministries and community programs.

Just on Saturday, I met with close to 100 youth in and from care from around B.C., and this was their most significant ask. Meanwhile, our advocates and ISP team members have also been busy on an 18-month provincial child rights tour, speaking to young people and the adults around them about rights, advocacy and how we can help. For example, this month alone, we’ve got stops in Surrey, Merritt, Lillooet, Ashcroft and Kamloops. To date, we’ve delivered these workshops to more than 600 people.

All of this leads me to the point that we have a supplementary budget request to bring before you today. As I say, when we have been gathering this information, it’s been clear that we need to ensure that we have the capacity to deliver, especially to the young people that are coming before us and saying that they need some support.

I want to remind you that when we came before you in the fall, we did not ask for any additional funds, other than to cover the mandatory staff increases. This allowed me, as a new representative, and our leadership team to do a deep dive into: where were we spending money, what was going on, and what do we need to do in order to ensure that our resources are used to the best of our ability in a good way?

We did provide a heads-up, though, at that point that amendments to the Representative for Children and Youth Act had been recommended by the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. Since then, we’ve been working with the Ministry of Attorney General, and we expect that regulatory changes will be in force by or before the end of June.

[9:00 a.m.]

These amendments will expand our advocacy mandate to include an additional estimated 4,400 young adults aged 19 to 23 inclusive who’ve aged out of the care of MCFD. This reflects a recommendation from the review of the Representative for Children and Youth Act that was completed by the select standing committee and submitted to the Legislative Assembly.

Among other matters, that committee recommended that our office’s mandate be expanded to provide advocacy services to include young adults, aged 19 to 26 years inclusive, who’d previously been in care. They also recommended that advocacy for this population include a broad range of services, such as agreements with young adults, tuition waiver for post-secondary education, mental health and addiction services, housing and social assistance.

Amendments to the act itself are expected sometime in 2020. As an initial step in extending our advocacy services to this young adult population, regulatory changes are coming in the short term — although it’s a narrower scope than what was envisioned by the committee, because it will be limited to the age group of 19 to 23 who were in continuing custody or in youth agreements when they aged out at 19. However, this interim regulatory step will be limited to agreements with young adults or tuition waivers. Our budget request before you today is to cover the costs of that interim expansion and to ensure that we can provide the necessary advocacy services for this very vulnerable young adult population.

The details. It will require three FTEs at an annualized cost of $389,000 and one-time costs for us of $30,000 for communications and outreach materials and services. One of the things to note is that this population often doesn’t access the needed support services on a regular basis, because there’s actually very little available for them. So they can be difficult to reach and engage. According to MCFD, only 13.5 percent of young adults who are eligible for agreements with young adults actually have an open ministry file.

We will have to dedicate considerable efforts to reach out to this young adult population — and to the many service providers and caregivers that continue to have some involvement with them — to create awareness of the availability of our advocacy services, especially in the initial stages of the expanded advocacy mandate. Since implementation is expected to begin partway through this fiscal year, costs for the fiscal are prorated, assuming a July 1 start date. One-time costs of $30,000 are related to the communication materials. That’ll include new brochures, posters, advertising on social media and transit, etc., to create awareness.

That’s some information about our office, where we’re headed and our supplementary request, and I’m happy to take any questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much for the update, particularly in regard to the obvious great amount of outreach you’ve been doing. That’s wonderful. Thank you for that, and also for your work with our Indigenous youth at risk, particularly our young women. Thank you very much for that additional work.

R. Leonard: Thank you for your presentation. For clarification, did you say that this expanded role is just for children who have aged out of care and who have had youth agreements? Can you just clarify that for me? Then I have a supplementary question.

A. Markwart: It’s for youth who have aged out of continuing custody or youth agreements, but it excludes some youth — for example, who have been in a voluntary care agreement, in a special needs agreement or in temporary care. It’s a narrower population than all of those who have been previously in care. That aligns with the criteria for eligibility for agreements with young adults.

R. Leonard: I wanted to note, from a recent meeting with my local college, that the number of former youth in care who have registered for college has increased fourfold, from five to nearly 20. There’s a huge uptake already.

[9:05 a.m.]

I know we’re in kind of a grey area, where we don’t really know — this is new territory for us to be exploring, to see — what kind of understanding there is out in the community and how much uptake there’s going to be. I recognize that you’re being proactive here and ready to go.

My question, actually, is around process. With Elections B.C., they don’t come until the act is in place. Can we make approvals subject to the regulation coming into place?

B. D’Eith (Chair): We’ve actually anticipated that, and we’ll deal with that in camera.

R. Leonard: Okay.

J. Charlesworth: Yes, I just wanted to speak to one of your points. Thank you for that. It is very encouraging to see the increased uptake in tuition fee waivers. When I was with young people on the weekend, the youth in from care, there were a number of young people that were 21 to 23 years of age and that had no idea how they might access it.

It’s one thing when that’s been built into the transition plan as they age into adulthood — they’ve got a good transition plan, they’ve got the supports from the social worker prior to turning 19, they know what their options are, and then that’s sustained — but many, many young people, especially the most vulnerable, want to get so far away from MCFD upon age 19 that they don’t have any kind of ongoing contact.

There were a number of young people that came to me and said: “I’d kind of heard that there might be some supports, but I don’t know what that is.” At 22 or 23, they’re now ready. When we think of it developmentally — for any of the young people that are in our lives — we know that sometimes people are more ready when they’re a little bit older. That’s a really critical part, too — that for those who are most vulnerable, they often don’t know what might be available. That’s an important part of our advocacy and outreach as well.

N. Simons: Thank you very much, Jennifer. My question is about how you estimate what your increased caseload will be. You’re basing it on the narrower definition of “young adult” and the advocacy role.

It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to conclude, when the legislative changes are made…. It’s not simply going to be an increase in the number of young people that you potentially would serve. This amount will increase significantly because of the breadth of touchpoints that the child might have had with the ministry throughout their life. It’s kids who might have had a temporary care order when they were six to eight. It could be anybody who received a child care worker for any number, like, any repeat…. That is going to be a huge…. This is a very narrow…. For most kids who are aging out through continuing care, that’s a very measurable number.

What should we look for, in anticipation of the legislative changes, in terms of increase?

J. Charlesworth: You ask an excellent question. We’ve been wrestling with: how do you estimate that? I’m going to ask Alan to speak to that.

A. Markwart: To explain, if you look at those who have aged out of care, because the age eligibility increases from going to the 24th birthday to the 27th birthday, you’re roughly doubling the population. Those alone would be more than 8,000. You take it from there, but that also does not include the population who may have previously been in care, which is almost impossible to estimate. Beyond that, there is a broader scope of services around which we can advocate — for example, housing, social assistance or mental health and addiction. The potential for demand is appreciable.

At this point, we’ve estimated a total of seven FTEs, which is inclusive of the three we’re asking for today as an interim step. That’s something we would have to just monitor, what the uptake is. Actually, there’s a certain advantage in having this interim step. At least, we’ll get a better indication of what the uptake is so that when the full legislative change comes into effect in 2020, we may be better positioned to have a more precise estimate, bearing in mind that estimates are estimates.

N. Simons: There’s a potential explanation for the decline or the lack of access. They’re very different types of kids that are coming out of the system.

[9:10 a.m.]

I’m wondering if some of the old…. It’s possible that the need for advocacy…. Their own skill set might have im­proved; their own self-advocacy could have been improved.

I’m interested in those estimates. I think we’re probably going to be interested in seeing a fairly — I don’t know — detailed breakdown of what kinds of calls you get and what kind of uptake on that expanded advocacy.

J. Charlesworth: Yeah, and we have a number of things in mind. In fact, Blair and I are meeting later today. We’re developing a new strategy around youth and community engagement and being much more strategic about how we do that.

One of the elements that’s important, and you referred to that, is: how do we build the self-advocacy capacity of young people as well? Obviously, there’s a significant role for advocates in those very messy, complex cases, and we’ve got lots of those. But we also want to build the capacity of young people to self-advocate and to ensure that they gain access to the services and resources that are necessary.

It’s important that we figure out how to do that with this population and how to ensure that the kinds of resources that are available to them are things that enable them to go and speak truth to power, so to speak, on their own behalf. There are a number of things that will dovetail, including these estimates — what’s the uptake? — and then also what we’re learning through our youth and community engagement strategies.

M. Dean: Thanks for all your work. Just going back to some of your introductory comments, you mentioned you’re doing a research project with kids affected by fetal alcohol syndrome disorder. Have you put in wraparound supports around the people and families who are involved? You’ve managed to accommodate that in the budget as well.

J. Charlesworth: Yes, exactly. For everyone’s benefit, with any of our investigations or these kinds of significant reviews that we’re doing, in which we are asking people about some very, very difficult issues, we are able to make available supports and counselling should the interactions that people have with us create some trauma.

Having said that, we’re also trying to be much more proactive and preventive. For example, we’re reaching out to meet with community long before we begin the investigative process, particularly if they’re workers, Indigenous community members, etc., so that they better understand who we are, what our intentions are and how we might do this and learn from them so that we can do it the most trauma-informed way possible.

R. Coleman: I just want to sort of get an understanding of how you see this.

That 13.5 percent number is a little disturbing, to start with. But the number…. The people who actually deliver the service is the Ministry of Children and Family Development. You, as the representative, have a role to play. How do you see yourself integrating with the ministry to increase those numbers, and how do you see them being able to increase, effectively, the intake? Because the intake, obviously…. Sometimes it can be illiteracy issues. Sometimes it can be access-to-communications issues for that percentage of youth.

The worst thing that could happen is if there are two streams of communications to that age group of youth and they’re confused of who they’re doing business with. How do you plan to integrate that relationship with the ministry?

J. Charlesworth: Excellent question. There are a couple of things that relate to that.

One is that the ministry is undertaking a significant review of their transitions into adulthood right now. We get regular briefings from them on that and also have provided information to them about the areas where we have concerns. It’s a wide-open conversation about where they’re going and also what we’re looking for or what we’re attentive to.

That’s a key thing — that we’re not trying to work in silos. We’re trying to figure out…. We both care about this population, so what are you doing in order to ensure that young people understand AYA and the access to that and the tuition waivers, etc.? That’s one thing — open lines of communication.

The other thing is that we are doing a review right now on the transitions into adulthood, particularly the agreements with young adults. In doing that, it will better inform us as to what some of those issues and barriers are to uptake. And then, of course, through our process — our administrative review and our due process with the ministry — that information will be shared with them. Hopefully, it will inform their plan.

Then over time, we will figure out the best ways of ensuring that the communication is not muddled between the two. I think, fundamentally, as you’ve said, it’s the ministry’s responsibility to ensure that young people know. The reality is that for many young people, that’s not working particularly well. So it’s also our responsibility to ensure, as advocates, that young people have access to information. Rather than muddy the waters, we simply want to broadcast more thoroughly through our engagement process.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Any other questions?

Okay. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Charlesworth. That was wonderful. Thank you for the update. Thanks for all the work you do, and your staff. Thanks for coming.

We’ll take a short recess, and then we’ll come back and discuss the supplementary proposal in camera.

The committee recessed from 9:15 a.m. to 9:18 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Let’s come back into order.

Could I have a motion to go into in camera?

N. Simons: So moved.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 9:18 a.m. to 9:35 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re back again.

A motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:35 a.m.