The committee met at 4:01 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Bob D’Eith. I’m the MLA for Maple Ridge–​Mission and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

We’re very thankful to be here in Qualicum on the traditional territory of the Qualicum First Nation.

We are a committee of the Legislative Assembly that includes MLAs from the government and opposition parties. Normally, we travel in the fall, and we hold public consultations and visit different regions of the province to hear directly from British Columbians about their priorities and ideas for the next provincial budget. This year we moved our consultation to June to enable the committee to deliver a final report to the Legislative Assembly earlier in the budget process. We’ll be reviewing this timeline and welcome feedback on the change.

Our consultation is based on the budget consultation paper prepared by the Minister of Finance. She actually delivered that on Monday. There are copies of the paper available here today for anyone interested in reading it.

In addition to these public hearings, British Columbians can participate in the consultation by sending written comments or by filling out the on-line survey. Details are available on our website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/finance. The deadline for input is 5 p.m. on Friday, June 28, 2019.

All of the input that we receive is considered carefully and used to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be in the next provincial budget. Our report will be available in late July or early August. For those of you here today, thank you for taking the time to appear.

As far as the format, I’d kindly ask that everybody respect the following time limits. Each presenter is given five minutes to share their input, followed by five minutes for questions from the committee. You are welcome to provide any information that you’re not able to share in your presentation in writing.

If there’s anyone who hasn’t registered in advance but would like to speak to the committee, please see Stephanie, who’s at the back there at the information table, and we will do our best to accommodate you.

Today’s meeting is being recorded and transcribed, and all audio from our meetings is broadcast live via our website. A complete transcript will also be posted.

Now I’d like to take some time to allow our members to introduce themselves. We’ll start with MLA Doug Clovechok.

D. Clovechok: I’m Doug Clovechok. I’m the MLA for Columbia River–Revelstoke.

R. Leonard: I’m Ronna-Rae Leonard. I’m the MLA for Courtenay-Comox.

M. Dean: I’m Mitzi Dean. I’m the MLA for Esquimalt-Metchosin.

R. Coleman: I’m Rich Coleman. I’m the MLA for Langley East.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon. My name is Dan Ashton. I represent Penticton to Peachland.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Assisting the committee today, from the Parliamentary Committees Office, are Susan Sourial and Stephanie Raymond.

Also, we have Simon DeLaat and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard Services, who are recording the proceedings. And you can’t see them, but in Victoria we actually have a team working behind the scenes to broadcast and deal with all of these matters. So thank you very much to Hansard Services for all the hard work.

I’m very pleased to bring up the B.C. School Trustees Association — Stephanie Higginson.

Budget Consultation Presentations

B.C. SCHOOL TRUSTEES ASSOCIATION

S. Higginson: Uy’skweyul. En:nthe pe Stephanie Higginson. Tu ni cun utl Snuneymux.

[Good day. My name is Stephanie Higginson. I am from the land of the Snuneymuxw.]

[Hul’q’umi’num text and translation provided by S. Higginson.]

I’ve just introduced myself in Hul’q’umi’num, the language of the land upon which we are situated today.

I’m Stephanie Higginson. I’m the president of the B.C. School Trustees Association and a trustee just down the road on the Nanaimo-Ladysmith public school board. I’m here to present to you on behalf of trustees across the province.

[4:05 p.m.]

Trustees are enlisted to help develop and shape their school district budgets out of the provincial allocations provided, in a manner that reflects the local needs and priorities of the students and the communities they serve. Boards of education are grateful to be going through a current bud­get cycle where, for the most part, we have experienced a level of budgetary stability unlike previous years. We attribute this to a number of factors, including the prioritizing of public education by this government. For this, BCSTA would like to express our gratitude.

While things are certainly feeling different and better, we believe that there is still room for improvement in the provincial budget in order for boards of education to meet the complex needs of the communities they serve. BCSTA and school trustees across the province recognize that there is a limited amount of provincial money to be allocated, and we are committed to ensuring that the money we have is spent in the most effective and efficient way possible in order to make the most of our taxpayer dollars.

With this in mind, we ask that funding for B.C. school districts must be stable, predictable and adequate in order to provide for the education services needed to maintain a strong and vibrant public education system. The current funding distribution model must be modernized to ensure that funding can be effectively and efficiently directed towards locally established programming and priorities.

Greater flexibility must be provided to boards of education so that they may direct funding to the resources needed to best meet the needs of the students in their communities — a recognition and acknowledgment of the need for school districts to create and hold appropriate financial reserves in order to make and carry out long-range plans and goals. The B.C. School Trustees Association believes that the allocation of a significant portion of the provincial budget to K-to-12 education is a wise investment of taxpayer dollars.

We also note the need for changes in the way these resources are distributed and utilized. For boards of education to be able to allocate resources to meet the locally and provincially determined needs of students, we believe that there must be an equity of funding across all school districts in order to ensure equal opportunity for success for students across B.C.

Funding directed to the needs of Indigenous students must be protected. The way in which we allocate funding to students with diverse learning needs must be updated to be reflective of current provincial and local policies related to inclusive education. School districts and communities with declining enrolment must have the ability to continue to meet the programming needs of their students. School districts with growing student populations must see their increasing needs adequately met.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a few specific requests on funding allocation. We would like the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services to publicly support the funding model review underway to modernize the Ministry of Education funding distribution formula.

We ask that boards of education be provided significantly more flexibility to assign the funds they are provided in order to better address local school district priorities. We must reduce the current limitations on local decision-making and allocation.

We ask the government to develop a provincewide mental health strategy that incorporates the needs of school boards as well as the students that they represent, and provide funding necessary to implement an integrated program across education, health and social services.

Our final request for you is support in promoting a clear understanding of why school districts maintain prudent fiscal reserves as part of a well-planned strategic direction to achieve long-term goals that meet the needs and priorities for student achievement. School trustees across this province believe that there is no other commitment that is more important towards ensuring a successful future for our children, their families and the communities they live in than a fully funded public education system. We recognize the limitations of public spending and taxation, but we also believe that funding a broad-reaching, effective public education system is truly an investment in our future, which will pay us back many times over.

Thank you for the opportunity.

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

Just before we get started, I did want to say that we have MLA Michelle Stilwell, the MLA for Parksville-Qualicum.

Welcome. Very nice to see you. We’re really pleased to be here.

S. Higginson: I just left Michelle. We met this morning.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Wonderful. Great to see you. Thanks for coming out. We really appreciate it.

Any questions?

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation, and thanks for your dedication to this very complex world of education. It’s one area of politics I was never interested in getting involved in.

[4:10 p.m.]

S. Higginson: It’s the only one I want to be involved in. So I thank you for taking on all the other responsibilities.

R. Leonard: I guess my question is probably out of ignorance here. Is it right that school districts are not allowed to maintain reserves? Is that…? In your last request…. I’m just trying to gain a better understanding of what it is that you’re going for there. Then I’ll follow up, if I need to.

S. Higginson: Yes. School districts are currently the only public sector, I believe, that is allowed to hold on to our operating surpluses and carry them forward for the next year to create reserves. So while every sector can have reserves, we’re the only ones that can take a surplus from the year, can hold on to it and then create reserves that we use for long-term planning and long-range planning.

We use those reserves…. We utilize our surpluses from the previous year — that’s how we build our reserves — and we use those for things that are not currently covered under provincial allocations. The operating budgets and the capital budgets don’t cover things like computers. They don’t cover things like the hardware that’s required to continue the learning transformation that B.C. is leading around the world.

We use our surpluses in order to fill in some gaps and create long-term plans that are…. The only ability that we have to really have a local influence right now and do long-term local planning is to utilize that money.

Our concern is that there’s a misunderstanding of what those surpluses and those reserves are and that, as a result of that, they’ll get clawed back and utilized at the provincial level.

We really want the ability to be able to maintain those reserves to do long-term strategic planning that will benefit the students in your communities.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Well, thank you very much for your presentation. I very much appreciate it. Thank you so much. I was very impressed with the Hul’qumi’num. That was awesome.

Next up we have the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association — Taryn Thomson.

Hello. How are you? I’m still trying to get my son to finish his degree at VCC. He’s having too much fun doing what he was being trained to do in music, which is okay.

T. Thomson: Is he in music at VCC?

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah.

T. Thomson: Oh, that’s great.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Wonderful program. Absolutely wonderful. Anyway, sorry.

VANCOUVER COMMUNITY COLLEGE
FACULTY ASSOCIATION

T. Thomson: I acknowledge that Qualicum Beach is within the traditional territory of the Qualicum First Nation.

My name is Taryn Thomson, and I’m the president of the Vancouver Community College Faculty Association. I have three points I’m going to make today. First of all is about secondary scales. I know my colleagues from the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators across the province have been speaking with you about the need to solve the problem of secondary scales. I want to echo that call for action.

At VCC, we don’t actually have secondary scales, so we are a testament to the fact that this actually can be done. It is shameful that two people teaching the same course with the same amount of preparation and marking and the same qualifications are paid vastly different amounts. It is horrendous that some faculty are living lives of precarity in this province.

This is an affordable financial ask to solve a pervasive system-wide problem. So I stand in solidarity with my colleagues across the province in asking that this issue of secondary scales and precarious work for faculty in colleges and teaching universities be addressed.

Point 2 is about adult basic education and the issue of time. I want to, first of all, recognize the good work of the current government in removing tuition from adult basic education and for recently raising the thresholds for the adult upgrading grant. These positive changes have removed barriers and made ABE much more accessible.

ABE students are generally living in poverty and have been negatively impacted by nearly 20 years of cuts to the province’s social safety net at the same time as the cost of living has skyrocketed.

Free tuition for ABE students is one important piece of the puzzle, and there’s another improvement I will suggest. The 2018 policy framework document gave provision for students under certain circumstances to have more time to complete courses.

[4:15 p.m.]

Time restrictions are a barrier for our most vulnerable students — sequential K-to-12 youth, Indigenous students, students with disabilities, and women. For a variety of rea­sons, these students may require more time to complete a course. The current language gives discretion and decision-making power to administrators such as FAOs or deans. An improvement would be to give educators — the ones who work with the students and know the complexities of individual situations — the ability to grant more time. This fix would greatly improve access for those who need it most.

The current policy framework document retains much of the flavour of its predecessor in focusing on progression and completion. While these ideas are important, they must be taken in the context of the complex lives of ABE learners, learners often juggling multiple jobs and family responsibilities as well as facing barriers such as disabilities, poverty, housing, inadequate child care and mental health issues. Providing educators with the ability to provide extra time to this group of students would make the first rung of the ladder of post-secondary education and a better-paying job more accessible.

Finally, base funding. In 1996, base funding at VCC was 85 percent of the cost of running the college. Now base funding is about 50 percent of what it takes to run the college. Given this shortfall, colleges have no choice but to operate like businesses. The common good and the province’s needs are secondary to what will turn a profit. There’s increased reliance on international enrolment, impacting everything from programming to student services.

Tuition is on the rise. There’s a 2 percent cap on tuition, but colleges get around this by renewing a program’s curriculum, by maybe adding a course or two and then reintroducing the nominally new program with tuition as high as the market will bear. It’s the renoviction of education, and it’s happening all over the province, because institutions need to balance the books somehow. At a time when many countries are moving in the direction of removing tuition altogether, our institutions are forced to place an increasing burden on the backs of students and their families.

Funding for community colleges should be unique to the college and appropriate to the institutional mandates. VCC, for example, is one of the last remaining community colleges to retain its developmental programming at a high level — roughly 25 percent to 30 percent. Developmental programming is never going to be a profit-driver, but it is essential to our province’s future.

Our province needs Canadians who can speak English and citizens who can write and are numerate. Community college funding should be reflective of this unique character, role and mandate. I urge the government to review how VCC and other community colleges are funded.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. We have actually heard from a number of faculty associations across the province already in regards to, in particular, the secondary scale issue. We’ve gotten slightly different perspectives.

I guess at VCC, the contracted faculty is on the same scale as the…. Is that what you’re saying, that it’s on the same scale as the regular faculty?

T. Thomson: Yeah. We have one scale.

B. D’Eith (Chair): One scale. Okay. It’s interesting that VCC is able to operate like that, whereas other institutions aren’t. That’s something that is interesting to me, because one of the things…. Part of this ask that keeps coming back is the government is being asked to come up with money in advance so that in the collective bargaining, there can be some money there to deal with this issue.

If VCC can manage that, then certainly couldn’t this be part of the collective bargaining between the faculty and the…? That’s something that I’m trying to get my head around.

T. Thomson: Well, the scale of the problem, at this point, is outside of the mandate — the 2, 2 and 2 mandate, right? It’s not going to fix it. But certainly, we’ve never understood. It is not more costly for all PAC faculty to be paid on the same salary scale going forward. It’s not more expensive. There are going to be some initial costs to redress the situation as it is.

[4:20 p.m.]

Going forward, at our college, we see there’s no difference between…. The only difference is the precarity for the faculty — them not having stability, students not having stability, not knowing who’s there, people not being able to commit, be on committees. All of that kind of important work that comes with being a regular faculty. But the cost is not an issue.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Interesting.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): I would say the cost is an issue. Somebody has to pay, and that’s one of the issues. And as the Chair has just said, we’ve heard about this. Everybody’s looking for fairness and equity, but there is a cost involved in it. And where is that going to come from? Well, it’s going to come from the people of British Columbia, so there’s that balance that has to be taken.

As the Chair has said, we’re getting different perspectives. In one of the comments that you had made about courses and about foreign students coming in, the inclination that I got from what you had said was that there are adjustments that take place, while we hear elsewhere that there are no adjustments taking place. So there are a lot of things that we have to take under consideration in the recommendations.

T. Thomson: I understand. That’s why you’re here, and that’s why I’m here.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): And it’s very good to get this type of information and get that balance from around the province. We are hearing…. The direction is similar, but there seem to be a bunch of different branches depending on the institutions of who is presenting.

T. Thomson: Yeah, it’s true. And just so that you know, Langara also does not have secondary scales.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Yes, there are two in the prov­ince. Am I correct?

T. Thomson: Yes.

B. D’Eith (Chair): I thought Selkirk said they….

D. Clovechok: They said that they didn’t either, Bob.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah, remember?

D. Clovechok: Yeah, that was clear. They said that.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): All three of them.

B. D’Eith (Chair): We’ve heard, too…. I remember them saying Selkirk. Interesting.

R. Leonard: Thank you for your presentation. Since there are only two of you, can you tell us how VCC got to a place where there is no disparity?

T. Thomson: It’s way before my time — getting there.

R. Leonard: So are they included in your bargaining?

T. Thomson: They meaning…?

R. Leonard: The secondary…. The sessionals, the contract workers.

T. Thomson: Yes. We have very good regularization language. What happens is a person is a term faculty for a certain amount of time. You just put in your time, and once that time is done, then you become regular. So it’s not up to anybody’s discretion or choice. Those are the kinds of things that happen at the institutions where there are secondary scales. They’re paid on the same scale from the beginning, but they become a regular faculty after a period of two times of regular contracts.

R. Leonard: So it’s covered within your collective agreement?

T. Thomson: It is, yes.

B. D’Eith (Chair): This is something I think you brought up this morning, Rich, this idea of having a pathway from…. I can’t remember who it was this morning that mentioned that there used to be this implied pathway. You start as a temporary contract faculty, and then after, let’s say, two or three years, you pay your dues and then you become a full faculty. And it sounds like at VCC that practice, that pathway is there. Is that correct?

T. Thomson: It’s very much there.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Whereas it was clear from other institutions that that’s just not the case. I know from my own experience at Douglas, for example, one of the faculty was there for 17 years as a precarious contract…. Finally we had a big party for him because he got full faculty. But it took 17 years. It was unbelievable.

T. Thomson: That is unbelievable.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Nothing against Douglas. I loved working there. It was just…. It just seems like between the different institutions, we’re getting different stories. And in regards to the foreign students, like one….

R. Coleman: It’s actually kind of refreshing compared with some of the stories we’ve heard — what we’ve heard here now from you.

T. Thomson: Right. Oh well, I’m glad to be refreshing.

R. Coleman: Well, you are.

B. D’Eith (Chair): It sounds like VCC would be a good model for other institutions to follow.

T. Thomson: We like to think we’re a good model, yes.

B. D’Eith (Chair): No. I mean maybe in other things. There are other institutions that have other things to look at. But this particular issue…. It sounds like there’s a clear pathway. During that pathway, the scale is the same, and there is an expectation — it sounds like even more than an expectation — that if you put in the time, it will lead to full-time.

T. Thomson: You would definitely get regularized. You just need to….

B. D’Eith (Chair): Which wasn’t the case with some of the other institutions.

R. Coleman: Most of the other ones.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Right.

Well, thank you. It’s good to know this, because we are getting the same ask but in different contexts, in different practices. So it’s interesting to hear it.

T. Thomson: Yeah. Lots of diverse institutions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah. And how they balance the books. It all depends.

Well, thank you so much. Actually, it was very enlightening on this issue. We really appreciate it.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Taryn.

T. Thomson: Great. Thank you.

[4:25 p.m.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have Scott Harrison from the town of Qualicum Beach.

Scott, do you have a title?

S. Harrison: I’m just a councillor.

B. D’Eith (Chair): A councillor. Not just a councillor. Scott Harrison is a councillor with the town of Qualicum Beach.

SCOTT HARRISON

S. Harrison: I don’t think you do the whole orthodox church, first among equals. So it’s just a councillor. That’s it.

Yes, my name is Scott Harrison. Firstly, I just want to say thank you all for coming here. It’s a real pleasure to have people from around the province coming to our community, and it’s genuinely an honour to have you here to talk about something that is incredibly important in our community.

I’m speaking, perhaps, from my context as a municipal politician. The issues which were raised in the recent election focused on the interaction between provincial government priorities and the needs in our community. Primarily, it was looking at affordable housing and health care.

One of the unique things about our region is that we are by far the most demographically aged community in all of Canada. That’s not even close. A quarter of our citizens are over 75, and 52.1 percent of our citizens are over 65. Four of the seven communities in British Columbia with the most seniors are in a ten-minute drive of where we are right now.

I do find it shocking when I’m looking at things like Google Scholar, looking at research in geriatric medicine, looking at research in dementia, that there have been three articles that show up for Qualicum Beach in the last 25 years plus, and one of them is on tourism from 1991.

There’s a lack, I think, of looking at what this community is doing well in terms of care for seniors. We actually have relatively high life expectancies — about 89, 88 for women and 86 for men. We have rela­tively low rates of dementia relative to our population. Cross-referencing our demographics with the Canadian Alzheimer Society data — forgive me; I’m speaking extemporaneously, so it might not be exactly perfect — we should have 475 citizens with dementia today, with 370 women, I believe, and about 120-odd men. It’s roughly a 2-to-1 ratio. When you reach age 85 in Canada, there’s a roughly one in three chance a woman will develop dementia.

We have rates that are much lower than that, partly owing to a higher standard of living through most of your life and a lot of activities which keep people active and engaged.

There’s a strong correlation, from a paper from the University of Calgary, about the correlation between volunteerism and staving off the onset of dementia. But I do feel that by not having a research-based component to looking at care for seniors, there’s not only gaps that are forming in our community, but more broadly for the province, we’re missing out on the opportunity to learn what we’re doing well and what we’re doing right, and we might not even know that we’re doing well.

To put this in the perspective of your provincial budget, two out of every five dollars you’re going to spend next year are going to be on health care. Almost one out of every five dollars will be on seniors health care. Roughly 45 percent, according to 2016 Canadian Institute for Health Information data, is allocated for citizens 65 and older. In British Columbia, in the same data set, you spend as much money on citizens over the age of 90 as you do for citizens between the ages of ten and 20. There are 12 citizens between ten and 20 for every nonagenarian in British Columbia.

I cannot stress strongly enough that one of the largest drivers for health care expenditures as we move forward will be the continued shift in demographics. This is reflected also in Quebec and Atlantic Canada. There is something which is going forward to UBCM to have demographics included in Canada health transfer amounts. I would strongly recommend that you continue that fight. I do recall seeing CBC articles that this came up previously in meetings of health care ministers from around Canada during the debates surrounding how the Canada health transfer was going to be allocated with the current government. But as of right now, it is done on a strict per-capita basis, and this disadvantages our province.

The rough amount, I believe…. It went live about three years ago. I think about $250 million a year or so is the difference. So it is quite significant.

There were also some discussions about education more broadly. I do think that when you’re juxtaposing this demand for health care, also look at what the future ways are of rolling out health care in such a way that it will actually reduce per-capita costs, particularly for helping people age in place. Moving away from having people go to emergency rooms and seeing general practitioners and empowering caregivers, more focus on nurse practitioners, and even LPNs and RNs, helping them practice to the fullest extent of their scope. That will not only result in better quality care and better outcomes statistically but also significantly reduce costs. It’s actually a win for everyone.

[4:30 p.m.]

This is actually an area where Canada is starting to lag behind. We have a good system. It’s not perfect, it’s not excellent, but it’s good. It’s solid. But countries which have poor systems are actually innovating. In China, in particular, there are some things happening with tents that they’re doing. The new Babylon system coming out, I believe, from Telus. I haven’t looked into it fully enough. That might be a start. But looking at wearable technology, remote diagnostics, being able to have a brief consultation — “everything is fine” — with your doctor over Skype or some other communication technology.

This is not going to replace primary care altogether — you don’t want to do that — but just take some of the routine work away and lessen the burden on the most expensive parts of our health care system. If you’re looking at annual cost increases, GPs are even a stronger factor than demographics, despite the fact that you have a bit of lag in how many GPs have been trained.

I do also want to speak to burnout in the health care sector more broadly. This is a conversation I’ve had with a few local health care providers. Male doctors commit suicide at a rate 40 percent higher than the rest of the male population. That’s also reflective of female doctors to a lesser extent, and also nurses. You have very long work days and a great deal of stress. There’s also a huge correlation between malpractice suits and a spike in suicide rates in doctors. They fear that if they go to someone and ask for help, they’ll lose their hospital privileges. They’ll lose their ability to practise because that psychologist or psychiatrist now has to report them, owing to the work they do.

Looking at how we can have a healthier practice of medicine in British Columbia would be something where I don’t know the answer, but I do realize that there’s a problem. There’s also stuff for economic development and housing. Just two seconds for housing. Do try to look at what’s going to scale up organizational capacity in more remote rural areas. If it’s just about a ribbon-cutting, you’re not going to address the whole problem. But if you get the organizational capacity set up so that we can scale ourselves, that will be much more effective in the long run.

Economic diversification. Try not to focus all the new high-tech jobs just in large metropolitan centres. Look at hub-and-spoke models in conjunction with post-secondary education institutions, because the housing that’s more affordable is in rural areas. That allows you to have more economic growth.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Very interesting thoughts there. You said a lot of things there. Could you maybe just articulate…? There were, it seems, three main things. Could you do a one-sentence articulation of those things so we’re very clear?

S. Harrison: We need to prepare for the cost of seniors health care and look at ways to innovate, deliver care more effectively.

B. D’Eith (Chair): In that piece, you were talking about this area, particularly. You basically said there’s an opportunity here, but I’m not sure I quite got what that specific opportunity was. Is it for study?

S. Harrison: I would say it’s twofold, if I may. I think it’s firstly an opportunity to study what is actually happening. What are some of the demographic data? What are some of the health outcomes? At the same time, if you’re going to roll out innovation, you have a relatively high quality of life already, and you have people with means.

A lot of the seniors in this community actually do have means. This might be an area where you could actually roll something out and test it in an area where there’s such a high population of seniors. You’ll have better data than if you were in, say, West Vancouver or something.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Excellent.

Any questions for Scott at all?

S. Harrison: Sorry it was a bit disorganized. It’s all extemporaneous.

B. D’Eith (Chair): It’s fine. There were some really, really interesting points there, definitely around…. There’s a lot of effort being put into trying to get high-speed Internet into rural and remote areas. It’s very difficult for the big companies because it’s very difficult to justify the cost of a cell tower, for example, when there are only, like, ten people in a 50-mile radius, which is part of the challenge. So it does need some intervention.

S. Harrison: Absolutely. I would say, though…. The neighbour who lives across from me does the IT infrastructure for VIU. He’s a handy contact. He did say that for a lot of Vancouver Island, there’s a fair bit of fibre that has been rolled out. But certainly, you start going to the regional district areas, the more rural areas, and then they’re just dead zones. The coverage is abysmal. That is a problem for some. This is not really our community, but some farmers in rural areas don’t have the ability to roll out some of the innovation they want to do.

There was a business, I believe near Courtenay. I think they actually had to go down south because the Internet connectivity was actually impairing this new technology they were rolling out to — I think it was goats or cows — basically, milking animals. It would reduce the rates of infection significantly and have better output. They had to move somewhere else because the technology needed Internet connectivity.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much, Councillor. We really appreciate you coming in. It’s wonderful being here in Qualicum Beach. I haven’t been here in a long time. One of my best friends’ parents used to live here. I really miss coming here. Now that I’m here, I want to come back. It’s very wonderful.

[4:35 p.m.]

S. Harrison: You’re welcome any time. It’s always great to be in a community where you’re the young kids again. It’s one of the reasons I stay. “Oh, you’re so young.” Yes, you’re right.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have British Columbia Federation of Students — Tanysha Klassen and Michael Olson.

If I could just ask if we could keep the initial comments to about five minutes so that we have time for questions. Thank you so much.

B.C. FEDERATION OF STUDENTS

T. Klassen: Hello, everybody. My name is Tanysha Klassen, and I am the chairperson of the British Columbia Federation of Students. This is Michael Olson, our executive director. Before beginning, I’d just like to acknowledge that today’s hearing is on the traditional territory of the Qualicum First Nation and the Coast Salish peoples.

The BCFS represents over 170,000 students from 13 institutions in every region across the province. We advocate for high-quality, publically funded and accessible post-secondary education.

When we were preparing this speech for today, we went back to last year and thought we were just going to have a few little things to update. It turns out we had to rewrite the whole thing, because almost everything we asked for last year has happened, which has been amazing — the elimination of interest on student loans, $3 million invested into open educational resources and the money for the implementation of the Sexual Violence and Misconduct Act. So we want to start by saying thank you to this committee for hearing the issues brought forward from students and also to the government for enacting many of the recommendations from this committee.

Post-secondary education is a vital component to B.C.’s economic growth. By the government’s own numbers, 77 percent of new jobs being created will require some form of post-secondary education or training. We need to ensure that British Columbians are able to access and participate in the labour market, now and in the years to come. In order to accomplish this, we must take bold actions in addressing the key barriers in accessing education. Those are the upfront costs and resulting student debt. To that end, today we’ll be speaking about the need for a comprehensive, upfront, needs-based grants program, improving institutional funding and curbing tuition fee increases across the province.

Financial stress has a statistically significant negative impact on students’ performance for multiple reasons, such as the inability to purchase required texts or the requirement to work more hours to meet financial obligations. A study from the Millennium Scholarship Foundation found that students with large amounts of student loan debt are more likely to drop out, yet if even part of their financial aid is in non-repayable grants, it had a positive impact on their likelihood of staying in school.

The current government has acknowledged that student debt is an issue in B.C. by including in Minister Mark’s mandate letter the directive to establish a $1,000 completion grant to alleviate some student loan debt for graduates. With respect, this isn’t what students want or need. The average student loan debt for B.C. undergraduates is over $30,000. So a $1,000 grant at the end of your studies doesn’t create access to education, nor does it help to alleviate the burden of student loan debt in a meaningful way. We’re recommending that the government establish a comprehensive, upfront, needs-based student grant program. Such a program will help ensure that access to education is equitable for those from low- and middle-income families.

With all that being said, we acknowledge that ballooning student loan debt isn’t happening in a silo. It’s a direct result of the dramatic increase in tuition fees over the last 18 years due to government policies and budgeting priorities. In recent years, the proportion of public funding to B.C. colleges and universities has dropped to near 50 percent of total operating revenue, which is down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s and more than 90 percent in the 1970s.

As institutions have grown in population and complexity, the funding from the government has failed to keep pace. This lack of funding has left B.C.’s colleges and universities saddled with program cuts, increasing wait-lists for programs and courses, deteriorating equipment and long wait times for counselling services. Furthermore, the lack of sufficient government funding has incentivized colleges and universities to rely heavily on increasing tuition fees and the implementation of numerous unregulated ancillary fees. In B.C., the average tuition fees for an undergraduate education in 1990 were $1,808. Compare that with an average of $5,635 in 2017, and it’s an increase of 212 percent.

[4:40 p.m.]

To that end, we have the following two recommendations: increasing base funding to colleges and universities by at least $200 million, starting in the 2020-2021 year; and freezing tuition fees and developing a plan to progressively reduce them at public colleges, institutes and universities.

The public supports our recommendations. Recent public polling shows that 87 percent of British Columbians oppose further increases in tuition fees, and 43 percent support a reduction in fees from their current levels. In fact, one in two British Columbians agreed that at least one year of college, university or vocational programs should be tuition fee–free.

There have been important actions taken this year to address many aspects of the quality and affordability of post-secondary education in our province, and these have not gone unnoticed by students. But with access to jobs increasingly relying on access to post-secondary education, we must take action to reduce the financial barriers that hamper participation and success at colleges and universities.

We thank you for this opportunity to speak with you today, and we look forward to answering your questions.

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

Questions?

M. Dean: Thanks for your presentation. Just going back to one of the successes, which was the investment in prevention of sexual assaults on campuses, I’m interested in where and how you think that has been successful.

M. Olson: This is an investment that was announced just a couple of weeks ago by Minister Mark at a BCcampus function. The ministry has indicated that they plan on putting that funding towards centralization of some training programs and helping some of the more rural and smaller institutions be able to implement the policies on their campuses. We see that as, certainly, a really positive initiative, especially to help those smaller institutions that don’t have stand-alone centres or departments that can do this work on their own.

M. Dean: Sorry. I was also referring to the investment in the campaign as well, like in freshers season. There was some investment in campaigns to actually try and change the culture, because that was a particularly high-risk time for students.

M. Olson: Those campaign materials that came out, first in September and then again in the January semester, were, I think, reasonably well received. What we thought was quite good on the part of the ministry was that they chose some platforms that are not typically what you see for the government to be advertising on — social media platforms, dating platforms — to be trying to reach out to people where they are, rather than just poster campaigns and Facebook campaigns. We thought that, specifically, was a really good way of trying to reach out to students.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Excellent. Any other questions? Well, thank you very much for your continued advocacy for students. We appreciate everything that you continue to do on behalf of students. Keep coming back. We really appreciate your being here. Thank you very much.

Next up we have the British Columbia Yacht Brokers Association — Rom Van Stolk.

B.C. YACHT BROKERS ASSOCIATION

R. Van Stolk: Thank you all for having me here. I’ll read from of a kind of very hastily prepared presentation, if I may.

My name is Rom Van Stolk. I’m presently the president of the British Columbia Yacht Brokers Association. I will continue to refer to them as the BCYBA.

The BCYBA is a not-for-profit organization. We are a self-governing body. Much like the real estate board, we create common documentation, have a code of ethics, oversee complaints that are brought from the public back to our association, work with other associations in the United States and across Canada. We were established back in the mid-’80s, so we’ve been around for quite a few years.

Today I’d like to talk to you about a current tax policy as it relates to the delivery of vessels outside the province. It’s a source of frustration for the industry and is negatively impacting B.C.-based businesses, tourism, the provincial economy and the provincial treasury. Recreational boating is a key economic driver, employing over 17,000 full-time individuals and contributing $2.2 billion annually to the revenue of the provincial economy.

[4:45 p.m.]

As part of our business activity, it is not uncommon for an owner of any boat that has now decided to sell it to expect a BCYBA member broker to market their boat worldwide. Thus, we do expect buyers to come from outside the province.

As per the current tax policy, we, as brokers, work under the provincial sales tax Bulletin PST 108. A non-resident is non-liable for PST, provided the seller delivers the vessel to the purchaser outside the province of B.C. On vessels that can only be moved by water, this policy forces the sale to conclude in the state of Washington.

By forcing the delivery out of the province and to the U.S., the province is missing out on a considerable economic stimulus. Research in other jurisdictions has found that when a boat changes hands, the new owners will spend, on average, an additional $35,000 on their vessel for repairs, modifications. These items should be supplied, and the work should be performed, by B.C. workers and B.C. companies. The marine sector and related businesses are missing out on these potential expenditures.

The current tax policy also puts the completion of the sale at risk, as there could be considerable time and distance between the location of the purchase and the location of the delivery in the U.S. If there were mechanical issues on the way or the vessel were to sustain damage en route, the purchaser could refuse to accept the vessel.

For example, it’s approximately 70 nautical miles from the Port of Nanaimo to the Port of Anacortes in the state of Washington, with many potential hazards along the way. Yacht brokers are selling boats throughout the year. Many sales under the current policy put the boat seller, who is most likely a B.C. resident and/or a B.C. company, and the vessel at additional risk in severe weather, trying to accommodate an out-of-province delivery at a coordinated time and place.

Simply put, a non-resident buyer should be encouraged to come to B.C., purchase a boat, conclude the sale and take delivery of the vessel, and, in that process, be allowed to carry out repairs, modifications, upgrades here in the province and export said vessel at a later date, possibly 45 to 60 days after the purchase.

The BCYBA is asking the committee to examine and make changes to portions of the Bulletin PST 108. There are two examples of the tax exemption for the committee to consider.

One is a certificate of exemption for purchase of vehicle or aircraft for use outside B.C. This form is used by the Recreational Vehicle Owners Association. The second is the state of Washington’s sales tax exemption for vessels purchased in the state by non-residents. This form gives the purchaser 45 days to remove the vessel before taxes would be payable. The purchaser would provide supporting documentation at the time of export as proof the vessel leaves the province, eliminating the requirement for the seller to deliver the vessel outside the province.

To summarize, the current policy puts undue burden and risk on B.C. businesses and individuals, causes significant loss of revenue to the province and creates a disincentive to purchase goods and carry out business in the province of B.C.

There’s one other thing I’d like to add here, and it just came to me as I was driving up. It also puts us, as brokers, at risk, because we may be deemed to be carrying out business in the United States, and that is a problem for U.S. Customs. When we go in there, to be perfectly clear, there’s a sale transaction going on. Now, what is our role in the States? What do we say to U.S. Customs if questioned? That’s an additional burden upon us and can create a real problem.

The documentation that we provide to our delivery skippers is clearly that our company or a Canadian company is paying for that delivery to get that vessel out of the province, but in fact, it’s certainly being organized on behalf of the purchaser, who is a non-resident. So it creates a tremendous grey area, which we would like to avoid, obviously.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you, Rom. I just had a question in regard to revenues. Do you know approximately how much PST is being brought in by these sales? I’m sure the minister, if she looked at this, would probably say: “Okay, what’s the cost? How much money would be given up?” Do you have any idea how much?

R. Van Stolk: Well, the provincial government is not collecting the money right now, because we’re following this policy. So what’s happened is that throughout the year, we’re essentially making arrangements to deliver these vessels to U.S. ports, the closest being….

[4:50 p.m.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): So the point is we’re not getting the revenue anyway.

R. Van Stolk: You’re not getting the revenue now.

B. D’Eith (Chair): There’s a workaround, and the workaround is going to Washington.

R. Van Stolk: Correct.

B. D’Eith (Chair): What about…? Now, we’ve met with people from eastern British Columbia who sell 70 percent or 80 percent of their vessels to Albertans. In that case, the Albertans are paying the PST, or at least the impression was they’re actually paying it. You’re saying they’re not?

R. Van Stolk: They’re not, no. So in that example, those companies are…. Those are smaller boats. They’re typically trailer boats. They’re being delivered outside the province. So they would be presumed exempt from the tax. If it’s a GST-registered…. They would pay the GST portion of that. But then those boats are typically being brought back into B.C. to be used, okay? So these boats are being exported. These are boats that are, for us, typically being bought by Americans but sometimes by people from Europe or Australia — from around the world.

B. D’Eith (Chair): This is a different issue.

R. Van Stolk: Yeah. Essentially, what happens is: at the time of delivery, whenever the purchaser would arrange that, that boat now is being exported outside the province. So they would then need to import it. They’d make their arrangements with U.S. Customs and a U.S. Customs broker to import that boat.

When they come back to Canada, they are clearing in with CBSA. So it’s no longer a Canadian licensed or registered vessel. It becomes a foreign-flagged vessel, and it falls under federal jurisdiction under Canada Border Services. So they could come, and, legally, they can keep their boat stored in Canada for up to one year, as far as Canada Customs are concerned, but they must declare that at the time of entry. Okay?

M. Dean: I imported a boat from Taiwan, which I bought when I was a resident and a citizen of the U.K. It can be super complicated.

I’m interested in: do we understand the origins of why this exemption was put in place? If it’s reversed, will we then be sitting here at the committee and having people from the industry coming to us and saying: “We put the tax on, and now our sales are down”?

R. Van Stolk: We’re not asking you to put the tax on. That’s not what we’re suggesting at all. We’re simply saying that there exists….

Let me use the state of Washington as an example, okay? If I go to the state of Washington, I can go in and purchase any boat I wish. I simply sign a form. I give them a copy of my driver’s licence. It shows that I’m a non-resident of the state of Washington. I can hook up to that boat, or I can jump in the boat by water and drive it into B.C. When I call in to B.C., I would then pay the two taxes that would come due upon importation.

These are vessels that are being sold to non-residents. The way the tax has been historically is that non-residents are not liable for either tax, either the GST or the PST. Okay? At some point — and I don’t know the exact date — there was an amendment to the tax code that said the boats, in order for…. The boat must be delivered outside the province to be exempt of that tax. When they introduced that, it made it very prohibitive for us and adds complication and cost.

R. Leonard: When was that bulletin issued? My sense is that if you buy something out of a jurisdiction’s tax — if you live outside a jurisdiction, taxation area — you don’t pay their tax.

R. Van Stolk: That’s correct.

R. Leonard: So that’s everything, not just boats. But my sense is that this bulletin specifically targeted boats. Is that what you’re saying?

R. Van Stolk: Yeah. It targeted boats. I think it was not really reflective of boats of larger sizes. So if the boats would get on a trailer, it would be easily transported, not at the same risk as boats that are on the water.

R. Leonard: So was the intention — I don’t know if “fraud” is the right word — for people to try to have a workaround, to not be paying a tax that really should be paying a tax?

[4:55 p.m.]

R. Van Stolk: Well, interestingly enough…. The onus — it’s we, as agents, to collect the PST for the provincial government when we sell a boat. But when this was introduced, they also removed that from one of the jobs that was for our industry to collect the tax and left the onus on the purchaser. I think they created a bigger loophole, because now there is….

The way the provincial government tracks it is when a vessel licence changes hands. Transport Canada is now working on modifying that and trying to create a database so they can more accurately track. What happened, historically, was an individual would have a boat, and then you have a stack of bills of sale — the most recent one, hopefully, being to that individual. But all of those transactions were carried on to avoid the sales tax — at both levels, if the boat was at GST….

We tend to collect, wherever possible, all the tax when we do a sale and then remit it with our monthly remittance. This isn’t going to offer a…. This is not available for B.C. residents. This would not affect a B.C. resident, and a non-resident is not liable for our tax anyway.

Once the boat is delivered outside the country — in these cases, it’s to the state of Washington — it has to be exported to that country. The only way for them to come back in to the country legally is to report to Canada Customs. They would be coming in and saying, “Look, I have a new official number,” or a new Washington state licence, “and I’d like to report here. I’m here to cruise the beautiful waters of B.C. I’d like to stay for a few weeks or a few months” — possibly a year, if they have obtained annual moorage at a marina. But I don’t think there’s any way for them to…. They’re not liable for our tax anyway.

We’re not trying to create a loophole for anybody to escape tax. We’re just trying to simplify a system and put in a modification that would benefit our industry and our related industries. I hope that answers your question.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Wonderful. Well, thank you very much, Rom. Very interesting. We’ve heard different issues around vessels and PST, and this is another angle. I appreciate your time.

R. Van Stolk: My pleasure. Thank you all very much.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. So we have the Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence.

Robert and Stacey, just to give you an idea of how we’re doing things, if we could keep the initial comments to about five minutes, that would be great. Then we’d have time for some questions.

R. Bettauer: We’ll read as quickly as we can.

B. D’Eith (Chair): That’s fine. Well, actually, don’t read quickly. We do want to be able to understand it. Just take your time. If it goes a little bit over, that’s okay. But not too far over.

R. Bettauer: All good. Got it.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks. Go ahead.

PACIFIC INSTITUTE
FOR SPORT EXCELLENCE

R. Bettauer: Thank you for the opportunity to present to you again today. I would like to begin by acknowledging that PISE is located on the territories of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples, including the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, with whom we enjoy a strong and collaborative relationship.

My name is Robert Bettauer. I am the CEO of PISE, the Pacific Institute for Sport Excellence. As you know, joining me is my colleague, Stacey Lund, our business development manager.

PISE is a not-for-profit organization, opened in Victoria in 2008, in large part through a major capital contribution from the B.C. government. We are celebrating our ten-year anniversary this year. For the past two years, we are also a recognized charitable organization in health and education.

PISE’s purpose statement is “Transforming lives through healthy activity and sport.” We achieve this through the community and across the province with our highly qualified and passionate team. We enjoy a collaborative model of successful partnerships with the public and private sectors, including our founding partners, Camosun College and Canadian Sport Institute Pacific, contributing to the enhancement of post-secondary sport and exercise, wellness education, a world-class training environment for our Olympic and Paralympic athletes and the overall health and well-being of citizens in our community.

[5:00 p.m.]

Your investment in PISE and your ongoing support of sport and physical activity is being levered multiple times not only in our region but across the province through our partnership with viaSport and membership in the regional alliance, which has the capacity to reach all British Colum­bians.

The alarming social trend of inactivity has resulted in 26 percent of youth age 12 to 17 being overweight or obese, consequently leading to more obese adults and related health issues. We support the Ministry of Health’s emphasis on preventative health initiatives and services and strongly believe that we are contributing to health in our province through such a preventative, proactive approach that links daily physical activity with physical, mental and emotional health.

PISE plays a physical literacy leadership role in the training of practitioners and delivery of programs, directly reaching over 5,000 children and youth annually, including many marginalized children. We’ve established strong partnerships with the education, health and early childhood education sectors, leveraging our expertise and resources with a particular focus on our common goal of healthy, active children.

We want to reinforce our support for the ask that viaSport has put forward to the provincial government to invest in the expansion of the physical literacy MOVE program. Throughout the province, the associated benefits to children will be profound through this work in partnership with multiple sectors.

S. Lund: PISE’s work at the regional level to achieve this collective impact continues to grow and includes working with all three school districts, Island Health, recreation centres and other community organizations. This year saw expansion of physical literacy teacher mentorship in school district 62, working with four elementary schools. School district 61 expanded delivery into middle schools in support of mental health and well-being.

The success of this initiative has resulted in expansion to all middle schools in the district next year. In partnership with Sport for Life, we continued delivery in ȽÁU,​WELṈEW̱ Tribal School through a federally funded physical literacy program designed to improve overall school effectiveness through quality physical education and traditional games.

Our approach to developing physical literacy is much more than skill development. It is about diversity and inclusion through an approach that inspires creative movement exploration and helps develop confidence, respect, fun, cooperation and fundamental skills. We have the joy of working with people from so many backgrounds and would like to share a couple of examples.

We met Ethan when he was three. Ethan explores his world with his power wheelchair because he has a debilitating disease which causes his muscles to be weak, resulting in him being unable to walk or stand independently. Breathing, swallowing and just moving are extremely difficult for him. In our power physical literacy program, he was able to play with other children with numerous health issues that result in the use of a power chair, enjoying obstacle courses in our gymnasium with our leaders. Ethan is now a confident and funny six-year-old and has moved to the Sunshine Coast, where his school has been able to facilitate activities for him with the advice and support of our team.

Shauntelle has her sights on earning a place on the Canadian women’s soccer team. She trains in PISE’s fuelling youth performance program for Indigenous youth. While she credits her coaches for helping her to become a stronger athlete and rehabilitate from an injury, she also describes a new motivation to push through when things get tough. While competitive sport is second nature and third generation, Shauntelle is also a talented poet sharing her perspectives on Indigenous issues that are close to her heart. She showed her amazing leadership as a youth representative during the Songhees Nation’s 2020 North American Indigenous Games bid. Although the games will be in Halifax, we look forward to seeing Shauntelle compete.

These are just a couple of examples that represent the thousands of lives we get to be a part of each year. These people inspire us to provide the best we can and ensure access to physical activity for everyone.

This is our plan. Our field of dreams capital campaign begins now with several enhancements that improve the accessibility of the building, including conversion of the front cobblestone courtyard to a multisport, fully accessible surface; additional automatic door openers throughout the facilities; resurfacing of the gymnasium floor and new spectator stands with accessible seating; and, finally, resurfacing of the Alex Campbell field turf, which is used on average by 225 people daily, with an environmentally friendly and non-toxic high-quality artificial turf resulting in a 30 percent reduction in surface temperature.

[5:05 p.m.]

The impact of these improvements will reach thousands not only in our community but also nationally, as we are the training ground for Canada’s high-performance athletes en route to international competitions, including the Invictus, Olympic and Paralympic Games. The $2 million campaign is already supported by the Rick Hansen Foundation, 94 Forward and Camosun College, with a contribution of $750,000, or one-third of the project cost, from the province of British Columbia towards the field of dreams campaign. We will achieve our goal of making these renovations and enhancements, thereby continuing to provide an environment that is affordable, inclusive and supportive of health and well-being.

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

Questions?

M. Dean: Hi. Thank you for all of your work. I’m actually coming at the weekend. There’s a kids birthday party that I’m coming to. So looking forward to being back at PISE. Been there a few times before.

I’m just interested if you can give us a breakdown of figures. How many participants annually are Indigenous, and what’s the balance between boys, girls and gender-diverse participants?

S. Lund: In terms of Indigenous, we work with 150 children at a local tribal school, and then we also have an Indigenous program where we reach probably about 20 kids weekly. That’s for youth training. So we reach close to 200 Indigenous every year.

Oh, and then also Craigflower Elementary School, which has a very high population of Indigenous children. There are a few hundred kids in that school.

R. Bettauer: Our estimate is that we work with close to 500 Indigenous youth in our physical literacy programs, and then we started an Indigenous high performance training program last year, where we have, I think, about 16 of the top young athletes that train here on a weekly basis.

M. Dean: Can you give us a sense of the proportion that that is of the overall programs?

R. Bettauer: Well, when we say 500 Indigenous youth, that’s out of about 5,000 in total that we deliver to throughout the south Island region.

M. Dean: Okay. Do you have a breakdown by gender?

S. Lund: By gender, it would be…. We service youth, adults. We service everyone. It would probably be 65 percent male.

R. Bettauer: It probably…. It’s the same distribution that we would have in our school system, right? One of the great things about physical literacy is that you’re reaching children before decisions are made about whether they want to even participate in sport or not. That’s the great strength of physical literacy. You’re providing the opportunity early in their development to learn the fundamental movement skills, get comfortable with their bodies and gain confidence when they try a sport or physical activity.

I think the demographic or the split between gender is probably equal to what it is in our school system, so it shouldn’t be far off 50-50 or 55-45. What we’re hopeful of is that as the physical literacy takes root across the country, the decisions often young girls make when they hit puberty to not be engaged in sport — that that number will start to shift dramatically.

R. Coleman: Thank you. Do you work with groups like Right to Play?

S. Lund: We do not work with Right to Play, but we work with Power to Be and some more local community organizations.

R. Bettauer: One of our main partners is Sport for Life, who have a very strong relationship with the Health Ministry, so we do a lot of work with them.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation and all of the work that you do for physical literacy. It’s wonderful to see all the things that PISE’s doing. So best of luck with everything, and thanks for the presentation.

R. Bettauer: Thank you for the opportunity to present. Appreciate it.

B. D’Eith (Chair): We’re going to take a short recess while we…. There’s one last presentation. We can recess.

The committee recessed from 5:09 p.m. to 5:12 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We are now back on the air with the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. We’re very happy to have Bruce Curtis here from the Vancouver Island Region Restorative Justice Association.

Bruce, we try to keep the comments, if we can, to about five minutes so we have time for some questions. I appreciate you coming in. Take it away.

VANCOUVER ISLAND REGION
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ASSOCIATION

B. Curtis: For those of you I met last year when I was in Campbell River, I was there representing the Community Justice Centre of the Comox Valley. This year I have been promoted to representing the Vancouver Island region of the Restorative Justice Association.

We would really like to report that as a result of our intervention last year, massive resources were allocated to restorative justice and we’re flowing in money, and everybody’s happy and crime has all been solved. Unfortunately, we can’t do that. We’re in much the same situation we were last year, both as an individual program in the Comox Valley and as a consortium or an association of, I think, 20 or 21 associations doing restorative justice work in the Vancouver Island region, which includes Powell River, Texada and the Upper Sunshine Coast, the part before the second ferry.

We, as an association, are bound together to provide mutual assistance to one another, to help with each other’s training and programs and services. We represent a wide range of restorative justice programs, some very complex and large, such as Victoria, Nanaimo and Comox, and some very small, such as Ladysmith, Port Hardy, Port McNeill and Ahousaht.

We work very closely with the Aboriginal Restorative Justice Association, and a number of their members are members of VIRRJA as well.

[5:15 p.m.]

The gist of our work is, in all cases, to provide assistance to communities to come to a resolution on matters that are arriving as a result of conflict. The majority of the programs in VIRRJA are receiving referrals strictly from the RCMP and strictly on a pre-charge basis, mostly for category 3 and 4 offences, which are things like shoplifting and petty mischief and property damage — that sort of thing.

Some of our programs are much more capable of dealing with complex files and higher levels of offence and so on. So they receive files referring to category 3 and even occasionally category 4 offences. Most of the programs in VIRRJA operate under the community accountability program, the CAP program. We certainly do that for a portion of our files.

Victoria is a highly specialized program, which accepts referrals from a wider variety of referral agencies. I think they have about five or six, including UVic and some community services organizations. They also do environmental disputes with DFO and conservation….

Nanaimo has a very strong mentoring program in addition to its RJ program. The Comox Valley has a very strong referral source. We have 23 sources of referral, including CFB Comox, minor sports leagues, municipal bylaw officers, Island Health for matters involving elder abuse, ICBC for matters involving automobile insurance fraud. So we take a wider range of files.

All of the programs in VIRRJA are experiencing an increasing level of underlying co-factors. An individual might be apprehended and referred to restorative justice for a matter such as shoplifting or petty property damage or something like that. But it’s very clear as soon as you start to talk to the respondent that there’s a considerably deeper level of concern that’s there.

Very often, in the Community Justice Centre’s case, we’re now experiencing something on the order of 45 percent of our files that have an underlying homelessness, poverty, alcoholism, mental health issue that’s underlying it. Those need to be addressed during the restorative justice process and afterwards in order to bring a satisfactory conclusion to those files.

For some reason or another, in our program, we’ve had a sudden rise in the referral of incredibly complex cases — cases of neighbour disputes involving advanced and progressive PTSD, youth…. We just had a file that was referred involving a youth access through something called the dark web, which I’d heard about. But I don’t know how to get there.

B. D’Eith (Chair): I think that’s the point.

B. Curtis: Well, this 14-year-old is able to get in there, and he’s posting on a pornographic website there calling for people who live in the Comox Valley who are equally concerned with young high school women. He alleges considerable sexual improprieties, and so on, and calls for men to go out and apprehend, surveil, abuse, beat, torture, molest, rape, sexually assault, chop off heads — a number of other things. If any of you know how to get to the dark web, you can easily look up all these allegations yourself. I haven’t managed to figure out how to do it yet.

This is the kind of difficulty that is increasing in communities. It’s going on behind regular citizens’ eyes. They’re not seeing it. They’re unaware of it. They don’t know about it. It is profoundly, profoundly disturbing.

[5:20 p.m.]

These are individuals who are in profound need of huge amounts of social services support. We’re not in any way suggesting that you reduce the social services budget or the mental health budget or the alcoholism budget or the drug addiction budget or any of those. We’re just thinking that what we would like to do is have some additional resources for restorative justice programs.

Restorative justice programs operate in a couple of ways. Some operate virtually entirely with volunteers, highly trained, specialized volunteers. Others operate with paid staff. And some have a minor mix of both. RJ Victoria, for example, has, I think, something in excess of 40 volunteers working for it who do the resolution conferences, who assist and support and mentor the complainants and the respondents, or the victims and the offenders. We have 150 volunteers, because we don’t have paid staff. Ladysmith has four staff for a very, very small community with a very, very low incidence of referrals.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Bruce, we’re at about 8½ minutes. So if you wouldn’t mind….

B. Curtis: Oh, wind it up.

We would like more money. We would like it to be allocated to the Solicitor General for delivery to restorative justice, to the Attorney General for dealing with the issue of Crown referrals. We would like it allocated to the Ministry of Health to support elder abuse RJ. We would like it to be allocated to the Ministry of Education for a broad, widespread public education program around restorative justice.

RJ, because it is confidential, operates very much in a black environment, so the public is not very understanding and not very well-informed about RJ. The Ministry of Education should be encouraged and funded to incorporate RJ into school curriculums so that they’re aware of it there and also into public education programs, primarily run by the local RJ programs, to reach the community and increase support.

Thank you very much for your additional funding.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Just before we move to the members, can I ask you a couple of quick questions? Is there a quantum…? Is there an amount that you believe is required — for example, for Vancouver Island Restorative Justice? Or have you thought about the quantum or…?

B. Curtis: We haven’t specifically identified a quantum, but currently each program receives $2,500 regardless of what they’re doing and how many program files they have and so on. Obviously, the paid staff programs require much more additional support to cover their staffing costs. When we have 150 volunteers, we need much more support to cover our training costs.

B. D’Eith (Chair): The other little question was just in regards to the dark web and the more…. It seemed much more…. It seemed to me outside of what restorative justice would normally deal with. It seemed much more profound in terms of…. That’s where I was a little bit confused as to…. You know, where do you draw the line?

B. Curtis: It is much more profound than restorative justice is presumed by the general public to be dealing with. The presumption is always that RJ works for youth — minor shoplifting, petty mischief and that sort of thing. Virtually all of the truly thoughtful research and careful research demonstrates that RJ is much more effective at far higher levels of offence and far more profound cases. For example, the program in Langley specializes in post-release murder cases, in which they deal with a victim-offender mediation program that brings together the family of the victims and the offender, who is pending release or has been released, to do some work in reconciliation.

The fact is that restorative justice has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s been used in truly profound cases and what some might think are fairly trivial cases. The fact is that it works. Some people experience it as magic, but it’s not.

[5:25 p.m.]

What it is, is the opportunity for truth to be told, for truth to be shared without the intervention of rules of evidence and cross-examining lawyers and fearful, frightening environments like courtrooms. It is done in a way in which people are always treated respectfully and are feeling safe in that environment. They can then share that truth.

It has a profound effect on offenders — respondents — and it has a huge release for victims, or complainants. It’s healing for both sides, and that’s not something that the courts are set up to do.

M. Dean: Thank you for your work and your presentation, Bruce.

I’ve worked closely with Restorative Justice Victoria for many years. The current critical issue is that, with all the issues going on with the Victoria-Esquimalt police board, the police are now saying that they’re not going to provide their funding in the next fiscal, which is significant enough that it puts them across the precipice, which is obviously something that we need to have a look at in our region.

But my question to you, from a Vancouver Island perspective, is: is that happening elsewhere? Are we seeing that other associations are being put in a state of jeopardy? Or is it the ongoing death by a thousand cuts? Or is it the ongoing, low-lying, not enough investment? Is this a trend that we’re seeing — that actually there are other partners that are backing away as well?

B. Curtis: I would have to say yes. We are seeing partners backing away in some programs. In other programs, we’re seeing partners stepping up and enhancing it.

We’re seeing, in a number of cases, lowered levels of support through the gaming funds, the lottery money. There’s been a lowering of the return for applications to the lottery funds. In a number of cases, there has been an increase in funding from private foundations for some programs. In our case, we’ve just had our municipal funding increased last year, and we’ll see it again increase this coming year.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. We’re way over time.

R. Leonard: I get to say thank you very much to Bruce for coming down to Qualicum Beach and sing the praises of both him, as the executive director, as well as the program. It’s very robust, and it’s very all-encompassing, and he does a tremendous job with the Iona Campagnolo lecture series to help raise awareness around restorative justice and the breadth and depth of what can happen.

I really appreciate you coming and sharing with us.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you so much, Bruce. We really appreciate it.

Motion to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 5:28 p.m.