The committee met at 8:02 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We are in the annual review of statutory offices for British Columbia, three-year rolling service plans and annual reports and budgetary estimates for fiscal 2020 and 2021.

Today, first up, we have the Office of the Ombudsperson — Jay Chalke.

Welcome. If you’d like to introduce your members, as well, that’d be fantastic.

Review of Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Thank you, Chair. Good morning, Chair, Deputy Chair, members of the committee. With me today are two people who will be familiar to all of you, and a new person. First, the familiar faces: Deputy Ombudsperson John Greschner, and executive director of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten. The new person in front of you is Rachel Warren. Rachel is the manager of the prevention initiatives pilot program that we’re going to be discussing a bit today.

Just a reminder that corporate shared services, of course, is operated by our office on behalf of not just ourselves but also three other officers of the Legislature, on a chargeback basis.

I’m pleased to take this opportunity to speak to you this morning about our office’s budget request for the fiscal year ’20-21 and associated service plan. In front of you are four documents: our budget request, our three-year service plan, our annual report from last year and a third-party evaluation of our prevention program.

Before I begin, just a brief update on activity since I was last in front of you in May. We continue to be a very busy place. The vast majority of our work — at any given time, hundreds of ongoing individual complaint investigations — is like the proverbial iceberg beneath the surface.

There are some matters in the public domain that you’ll be aware of. For example, the new rate structure at ICBC, impacting some three million insurance policies over the next year, will continue to put caseload pressure on us. We’re actively monitoring the use of separate confinement in youth custody. And as we publicly indicated in July, we’re looking into the Ministry of Education’s response to the grade 12 grade tabulation error.

[8:05 a.m.]

We continue to publicly release monitoring updates and operate an active recommendations monitoring program to ensure that public bodies are actually implementing our recommendations that they’ve accepted but not yet put in place. Our prevention initiatives program is very busy assisting public bodies to proactively be fair when interacting with British Columbians.

In addition to all of these and other activities relating to our existing role, we’re readying our office to take on the first material additional statutory role in our 40-year history with the coming into force of the Public Interest Disclosure Act.

It’s against that backdrop that we’ve prepared the budget and service plan before you. Our budget request for 2020-​2021 is for a total of $9.746 million. This request is a 9.8 percent lift from the current year. Almost a third of that lift are inflation adjustment costs. After adjustment for inflation, the lift is $590,000, or 6.7 percent. The lift is comprised of two requests, which I’ll describe shortly — namely, anticipated caseload-driven, whistle-blowing investigators; and an Indigenous liaison officer.

Before turning to our two budget lift requests, I want to report back to this committee on our prevention initiatives pilot program. You will recall that in the 2017-2018 budget process, this committee funded a three-year prevention initiatives pilot project for us to work with public authorities to prevent unfairness from arising in the first place — in other words, that allow us to take our 40 years of fairness expertise and move it from a reactive footing to a proactive one, working with authorities on program design or redesign, on public servant education, on the promulgation of best practices and on tools that foster authorities to foster a “be fair” culture.

With that funding, we established a small team dedicated to this proactive work rather than our traditional reactive, complaint-based investigation, so a different way of working for us. I’d like to ask the manager of that team, Rachel Warren, to outline the main features of the pilot project and the evaluation that we promised when we were in front of this committee three years ago.

R. Warren: Good morning. Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to tell you a little bit about our office’s pilot project.

Over the past three years, the prevention initiatives team has developed a variety of practical tools for public servants to help ensure fairness in service delivery. For example, we produced a fairness self-assessment guide, which was a sort of guidebook for public bodies to proactively assess the fairness of their own programs and services as well as a number of webinars that are on our website on key aspects of administrative fairness and a suite of fact sheets that we call the fairness quick tips that serve as quick reference materials for busy public servants to help them be fair in their work.

In addition, we delivered in-person training through our Fairness in Practice workshops, which have been extremely popular and well attended by public servants from a wide range of different organizations. Registrations for these sessions typically fill up within a day or two of being advertised, so there’s a high demand. We have a wait-list for each workshop we’ve held since we started offering them in April of 2018.

Also, we recently released our on-line training program. We call it fairness 101, which is a one-hour introductory course in administrative fairness, designed, really, and geared for a new public servant. We’ve already had 300 registrations for this course, and many organizations are telling us that they’re using this as on-boarding for new staff, sort of a primer for administrative fairness, and we’ve also received a request to develop a more advanced course as well. So there’s clear demand and interest for these various methods of educational outreach to be offered by our office and to continued to be offered, and we’re receiving multiple requests to deliver training all around the province from various different organizations.

The prevention team also enhanced our office’s quarterly statistical reporting to give public authority leaders richer and more useful information about the fairness issues that were arising in their organizations, with the goal of working more proactively with us — ideally, to address them and, ideally, prevent them from recurring. We’ve engaged in in-depth consultations with specific public authorities as they develop or redevelop their policies and procedures to help them build fairness in from the start.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. We worked with the community safety unit of the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General to assist them in developing their administrative hearing process under the Cannabis Control and Licensing Act relating to their new enforcement powers such as inspection, seizure and issuing penalties to unlicensed cannabis retailers.

[8:10 a.m.]

We also worked closely with the Mental Health Review Board to revise their hearing procedures to ensure that patients who are involuntarily detained under the Mental Health Act, who are arguably the most vulnerable members of our society facing significant loss of liberty, have access to a fair hearing to determine whether their detention should continue.

The result is that the board’s new procedures have far more procedural safeguards and fairness built in — for example, ensuring that the board is providing patients with adequate notice in advance of a hearing and disclosure of evidence that will be considered by the panel, as well as an opportunity to be heard before the panel makes their decision and access to legal representation.

As part of our budget request three years ago, the Ombudsperson indicated that he would return to this committee in our 2020-2021 budget request with an evaluation report by a third-party evaluator. That evaluation was carried out by Malatest, and it’s in your materials. It builds on the interim evaluation report that was shared with you when our office was here in May.

The comprehensive evaluation report is very positive, and it showed that a significant majority of respondents told us that the information received from the pilot program helped them deliver their services more fairly to the public. Many reported having made improvements to their practices and processes to ensure they comply with administrative fairness standards, such as increasing the transparency of their process and improving their internal complaints procedures to better respond to complaints and concerns when they arise and also to prevent them from escalating.

Of respondents, 83 percent said they would recommend the prevention program to others, and the report recommends strongly that our office continue to deliver prevention-focused programming to members of B.C.’s public service.

In terms of program enhancements, the report recommends increasing the availability of in-person fairness training. Now, that’s the most resource-intensive aspect of our program, so any implementation of that recommendation, even if it is merited, will require careful analysis. For that reason, this year we are recommending only that the existing program be transitioned from pilot phase to a continuing program of our office. We’ll take the next year to look at the issues of enhancements or accelerations raised by the evaluation findings, including one further Malatest report that we’re expecting in the spring.

I want to close by just saying that having done this preventative report for almost three years now, I feel strongly that our office has an important role and maybe even a duty to proactively support good public administration in our province. Public organizations are now seeing our office as a resource that can assist them in achieving their goal of providing high-quality services to the public. Using a proactive, preventative approach to embed fairness into public programs and services ultimately ends up as a cost savings for us all and a better public service.

J. Chalke: Thank you, Rachel.

I want to express my thanks to the committee for its support of this pilot project. It’s met my high expectations over the past three years and, I hope, yours as well. We’d be happy to answer any questions about it, following my remarks.

Just to clarify, what we see as the next steps in this program are that we’re seeking, in this budget request, simply to retain the existing funding approved previously by this committee, going forward. We’re not seeking an increase to that funding envelope, but simply the ability to maintain the current service. And we’ll look at some of the suggestions about enhancements over the next year, in light of that final report that we’re expecting in the spring.

Now I want to turn to our two requests for a budgetary lift. First I want to turn to the request related to whistle-blowing, also known as public interest disclosure. A quick refresh on our roles under the Public Interest Disclosure Act may be of benefit to the committee.

You’ll recall that the act was passed in 2018 and is expected to come into force very shortly for staff of ministries, including ministerial staff and the independent offices of the Legislature. The act provides for safe pathways for employees and former employees of ministries and officers to make a disclosure of workplace wrongdoing. In providing for these safe pathways, the Public Interest Disclosure Act enhances key public sector values of transparency, accountability and integrity.

As you may recall from prior discussions of this legislation, there are two types of impact on our office: a fixed-cost component related to implementation support for the various public authorities that will be covered by the act over the next five years and a variable-cost component related to our office’s investigatory and other duties under the act.

[8:15 a.m.]

The first fixed-cost aspects relate to implementation support. As you’re aware, phase 1 of implementation of the act will apply the act to ministries and independent officers of the Legislature. That will give whistle-blowing rights to over 30,000 current public servants in a few weeks, when the act comes into force.

The act will then be expanded in subsequent phases to apply to staff of public authorities, such as Crown corporations, tribunals, school districts, health authorities, local governments and universities. Those phases will roll out over the next five years so that by the end of that time, the act will apply to roughly a third of a million public servants in the broader provincial and local public sectors. This would make coverage of the Public Interest Disclosure Act roughly similar to coverage of the Ombudsperson Act or the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

Our support role, comprised of five staff, will be fully occupied for up to five years, although we’ll monitor that resource need as the phases roll out. I think of that implementation support function as that fixed cost, although time-limited for the next five years. This committee funded that aspect previously, and it simply continues with no change in this plan. The variable-cost component has been much more complicated to estimate.

Under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, our office has four functions: providing advice to prospective disclosers; investigating disclosures of wrongdoing to determine whether the disclosure is substantiated — that’s obviously the most significant role; investigating complaints from public servants who believe that they’ve been the subject of reprisal for making a disclosure or cooperating with an investigation under the act — the protection from reprisal is currently the subject of some strengthening in Bill 35, which is in front of you down the hall; and assisting designated officers within public bodies with their internal disclosure investigations. The act imposes some duties on us in that regard as well.

Estimating the volume of each of those activities is key to determining the resources we require to properly discharge those functions in a thorough, expeditious and fair manner. Last year at this time, we estimated that the volume-depen­dent work would require six staff. That estimate was arrived at by looking at, really, three things: the experience of other jurisdictions in Canada; British Columbia’s laws — the specific features of the law that are different than in some other jurisdictions; and awareness of public interest disclosures and related reporting pathways — in other words, just the general level of awareness out there that people would have those rights.

Since providing that estimate a year ago, the information supporting those first and third criteria really has changed. The experience of our office’s counterparts in the other larg­est Canadian jurisdictions indicates…. For example, if you look at some of the other main jurisdictions in Canada, in Alberta, a year-over-year increase in public interest disclosure complaints of 66 percent. In Quebec, a disclosure rate that rose 35 percent from their first year, 2017-18, to their second year, last year — 135 disclosures up to 182. That disclosure rate continues to climb this year. Ontario saw an increase in the number of public servants who are inquiring about it and making disclosures.

At the federal level, the public service integrity commissioner, which has been in place for 12 years now, had a record number of disclosures this past year and a record number of reprisal complaints. The federal commissioner has attributed this increase, in part, to an increased support for whistle-blowing in Canadian public service culture. He also notes the impact of the Me Too movement and coverage of whistle-blowers in the media as factors contributing to the normalization of whistle-blowing.

It’s noteworthy that many of those increases were for fiscal year 2018-19. That is before much of the current media attention to whistle-blowing.

As any follower of current events would be aware, the third criteria on which our prior workload estimates were based, awareness of whistle-blowing, has dramatically increased over the past year. Over that period of time, public sector wrongdoing in British Columbia, in part arising from revelations from this building but also from high-profile whistle-blowing in the United States, has resulted in whistle-blowing being in the news weekly, if not daily, and has often been a page 1 headline.

[8:20 a.m.]

Some statistics. The Legislative Library, at our request, compared media use of the term “whistle-blowing” in the year ending October 1, 2018, with October 1, 2019. There was a year-over-year increase of 152 percent in Canadian media and a 123 percent increase in American media. The Today’s News Online database advised of a 109 percent in­crease in references to whistle-blowing over the same period.

I noted yesterday that the Auditor General, in her remarks to this committee, highlighted the workload pressure that citizen reports put on her office. So indications are coming from many sources that there is an interest in such reporting.

Having said that, it’s not possible yet to say by precisely how much whistle-blowing caseloads will increase as a result of this explosion of interest and awareness. However, I think it would be a mistake to ignore this reality simply because we don’t yet know the precise magnitude of the higher wave of statutorily imposed mandatory duties that are headed our way.

Even if we could estimate case volumes, simply counting the number of cases is not the whole story. Many disclosures contain multiple allegations, at least as we’re advised by commissioners from across the country. As another commissioner in Canada noted in a recent report, whistle-blowing matters have proved to be “extremely complex and resource-intensive.”

Finally, I would mention that we’ve received a number of inquiries from individuals about making a disclosure under the act. We’ve advised them, of course, that the act is not yet in force. However, this highlights in another way the interest in the new law.

Having said all that, I appreciate the fiscal times we’re in. So I’ve thought very carefully about how to address the risks that this issue presents while ensuring prudent stewardship of public funds that you’re concerned about, and so am I.

One answer that may occur to some would simply be to monitor the workload and ask us to return to this committee once it becomes unworkable. With respect, that outcome would have unacceptable negative impacts on timeliness of our investigations. From the time we’re allocated funding to the time a new investigator is recruited, comes on board and is trained in our unique statutory framework for investigations, it takes approximately nine months. To postpone wrongdoing investigations for such a time period would be an unacceptable outcome for the reputation and credibility of a brand-new statutory function.

Furthermore, as I said here last year, the advice we’ve received from public interest disclosure commissioners across Canada is that whistle-blowing allegations, by their nature, require that investigations be initiated promptly. The reason for this is self-evident: if the wrongdoing is substantiated, it is important that it be addressed as soon as possible, and there can be significant costs associated with failure to do so.

In addition, the new law requires that persons involved in receiving, reviewing and investigating disclosures — namely, our office — do so expeditiously. While this statutory requirement is, of course, good public policy, it also limits our flexibility by requiring that in PID cases we get on with the job. So a wait-and-see approach would put my office in an untenable position, because the act specifically requires that we investigate these matters in an expeditious way. Incurring a caseload-driven delay puts our legal compliance for the brand-new act in jeopardy as well.

Even more crucially, a delay in investigation puts public and public servant confidence in a new and untried legislative scheme at risk. In order to come forward with concerns, employees need to know that their allegations will be responded to effectively. The degree to which disclosures over the first year are investigated promptly, thoroughly and fairly will largely determine the reputation and success of the legislation for years to come.

A second answer would be to transfer existing Ombudsperson Act investigators to public interest disclosure work, so reduce the complement on one side in order to fund the other. The difficulty with that approach is that our Ombudsperson Act complaint investigators are at capacity already. As I said to this committee last year, it would be, I think, unacceptable to concerned members of the public if investigations of their complaints under the Ombudsperson Act were delayed because they were viewed as being less of a priority than whistle-blowing concerns raised by public servants.

Simply put, we’re at capacity on Ombudsperson Act inves­tigations, and thus, robbing Peter to pay Paul would be inconsistent with everything we, with the support of this committee, have been working very hard to achieve. You will note on page 8 of our service plan that the one performance measure in our service plan that we did not achieve last year related to the timeliness of completed Ombudsperson Act investigations.

Our service target is that 80 percent of investigations are concluded within 180 days, and we did not meet that target. I’m committed to bringing that performance measure back into the black within our current Ombudsperson Act resource envelope, but it’s untenable at the same time to reduce that resourcing to fund whistle-blowing, a new service that the Legislature has mandated us to undertake.

[8:25 a.m.]

Rather than either of those responses, I’m suggesting a modest incremental resourcing to our public interest disclosure envelope, bounded by various conditions. I think the following model is one that achieves a sufficient measure of risk mitigation of our amended view of what the workload looks like but also sufficient assurances to this committee that funds are effectively and efficiently deployed.

The proposal in this year’s request is that we be funded for four investigator positions subject to the following conditions. First, the positions would be partial-year positions, with a delayed hiring date of July 1, 2020, given that the existing public interest disclosure investigator complement will, as of the coming-into-force date, which will be coming very soon — we anticipate December 1 — start with a new statute and new cases. In my view, we can risk-manage the first seven months of the new law, including the first three months of the new fiscal year, while that workload develops. That delay reduces the 2020-2021 expenditure by 25 percent.

Second, I’d be happy to provide a workload status report at this committee’s May meeting prior to the start date of the incremental positions.

Third, we would monitor the deployment of the supplementary resources and return with a report on their deployment with next year’s budget interim report at this time next year. That would just be 12 to 16 weeks after the expenditure started and, I think, would give this committee an early opportunity to review the need for the continuation of those supplementary resources. Furthermore, at that time, I’d be in a position to more precisely advise the committee when the next phases of the act would be coming into force. As I mentioned last year, the projected incremental annual coverage of the new act will add about 50,000 to 80,000 public servants each year of the five-year rollout. Next year we’ll be able to fine-tune what the resourcing and workload impact looks like in that context.

Fourth, it maybe goes without saying, but I want to assure the committee that while we gain experience with the public interest disclosure caseload volume, in the event that all of the additional positions are not fully required for PID matters at all times, they would be kept very busy assigned to Ombudsperson Act functions. As I indicated a moment ago, we have significant pressure on those services, so absolutely no resources will be less than fully occupied.

I want to turn to our other budget lift request, that of an Indigenous liaison officer. Our 2016-2021 strategic plan identifies improving the accessibility of our services to people who need us as one of our strategic goals. It’s apparent to us that our services are underaccessed by Indigenous British Columbians. Some Indigenous communities have ex­pressed interest in improving awareness of our role and services.

We need to address that. First we need to learn and we need to understand better the context in which our services are understood in Indigenous communities and what ap­proaches we can take that would be effective while maintain­ing impartial and independent, as mandated by the Om­budsperson Act. Furthermore, the anticipated requirement that B.C. law be interpreted in accordance with the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples may well mean that we have to look at some investigations through a different lens, informed by a new perspective.

To support that learning, I’m requesting this committee support the addition of one staff person to be an Indigenous liaison officer to work in partnership with communities, First Nations and others in a respectful manner in developing an Indigenous community service plan, which we would intend to return with to this committee in the fall of 2021.

There may or may not be budget implications for that plan two years from now, but that’s for another day. At this time, we’re simply requesting funding for one person plus some modest associated travel and planning costs, totalling $125,000. I believe it’s a critical first step to take as part of our reconciliation with Indigenous people.

Given those two requests, I want to assure the committee we’re managing a number of other workload pressures from within existing allocations and not seeking incremental funding. In some cases, we’re deferring requests. These pressures and deferrals include implementing an investigative process redesigned to improve the efficiency and impact of our investigative work. We’ve been doing that over the last two years and then implementing this past year.

It’s axiomatic that the best workflow redesign is by the people who do the work, and that’s what we’ve done in our office. But, while I agree it’s the best approach, it does come at the expense of time spent by front-line staff carrying out statutory duties. So we’re managing that.

You will recall my interest, in prior meetings, and commitment to developing outcome rather than output performance measures for our services, despite the challenges of doing so. We’ve made very good progress over the past year, and a leading expert prepared a report for us, including consultation with some members of this committee. That report is assisting us in developing the necessary management information reports and public-based survey information that would be the foundation of developing those outcome measures.

[8:30 a.m.]

We’ve internally reallocated some funding for the upcoming year to give us capacity to manage this work over the next year, and we’ll return next year to this committee with our recommendations on that front.

Our 2016-2021 five-year strategic plan has served us well in maintaining our focus and priorities, and that plan ends at the end of the 2020-2021 budget year. I’m a strong proponent of strategic planning, and we’ll be developing a new strategic plan to start immediately upon the completion of the next year. That means that in the upcoming year, we’ll be managing that strategic planning work through that upcoming year within our allocation, including public consultation, discussion with public authorities and Indigenous communities and inter-jurisdictional research. In short, we’re managing a number of workload pressures and have restricted our requests to just two incremental requests.

In closing, I would note that the coming into force of the Public Interest Disclosure Act represents the single largest change in our statutory mandate in our 40-year history. Implementing our responsibilities in a manner that promotes public confidence in the new law, as well as supporting the public bodies subject to the act to do so as well, is a tremendous challenge. The value and increased public confidence in this process will be lost if we’re not able to deliver on this mandate with adequate resources. Notwithstanding the challenge, it’s a task that our staff and I very much look forward to as we carry out our roles to promote and enhance ethical public administration in the province.

I think that completes my remarks, and together with my team, we’d be happy to take your questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Jay, for all the work that you do and your staff.

Rachel, thank you so much for the presentation and the report. We were looking forward to seeing how the pilot program was working, and it looks like it’s going very well. Thanks for that.

Just before we go to members, I just had a quick question in regards to the future. You talked about the increase for the public interest disclosure and how you’re trying to mitigate that and balance it and stagger the funding. Am I right to assume that the next two fiscal years anticipate full-time? Does that explain the increase in the salaries for those two years?

J. Chalke: Correct. They’re funded at nine months for the upcoming year. We’ve anticipated, but it’s all subject to us coming back through those two reports in the upcoming year.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, great.

Rich and then Mitzi.

R. Coleman: Jay, your first $30,000…. Is the assembly covering your first $30,000 when this act gets implemented on December 1?

J. Chalke: Staff of the assembly are not. In February, the Merit Commissioner, the Information and Privacy Commissioner and myself wrote to the House leaders and noted that the act does not cover the assembly staff — not only the public interest disclosure but also freedom-of-information laws and the merit principle that is protected by the Merit Commissioner. We made recommendations that all of that happen, but that would require a statutory amendment. So the answer is no. But ministerial staff are, so staff of ministers.

R. Coleman: So those who work in the building that work in a minister’s office but not in a caucus office and not in the Legislative Assembly staff.

J. Chalke: Correct.

R. Coleman: Okay. The other question I had: how are you making out getting people qualified to investigate? How is your recruitment side? Is it tough?

J. Chalke: In the context of our investigative teams, on the Ombudsperson Act, we’ve broadened that capacity, or that job description, to include public interest disclosure investigations. So we’ll rotate staff in order to enrich their career and give them career development over the years they hopefully spend with our office.

Historically we’ve had great success in attracting highly qualified Ombudsperson Act investigators. We’re really wor­king from that base to add public interest disclosure inves­tigators. Our staff complement, in terms of backgrounds, includes…. A significant number of our investigators have law degrees, people with social work backgrounds, law enforcement backgrounds, coroner, public administration, senior public administration officials. Really, it’s an expansion of that same requirement.

M. Dean: Thanks for all your work throughout the year. Thank you for all of the information we’ve received today.

[8:35 a.m.]

I was a little bit disappointed in the evaluation report, in that it said that the evaluation was somewhat mixed. On page 39 and page 41, they couldn’t attribute the reduction of complaints to the prevention pilot. Could you give us a little bit more detail about what you think the benefits are of the prevention pilot to government and to your office as well, so that we understand the value of it?

J. Chalke: Right. For the benefit of the rest of the committee, I think what’s being referred to is that the year-over-year number of complaints that were received by our office, when compared to the last two fiscal years, decreased last year compared to the year prior. The question was attribution — why that happened.

One thing to note about that is that what we really saw was not a decrease in the number of people who came to our office with a complaint that merited an investigation but, rather, in the number of people who came to our office with a complaint that didn’t necessarily merit an investigation.

One of the things that we do very much try to do in our prevention training is to reinforce for authorities to tell the public. If they’re making a decision that’s going to disappoint a member of the public and there is some sort of review or internal appeal process that exists within that authority — to be telling the person about that. Because sometimes people come to us and express a concern, and we say: “Well, have you gone through the appeal process that applies at that particular authority?” They go, “I didn’t know that existed,” right?

Part of our training is very much trying to make sure that happens so that when people do come to us, it’s a matter that is more likely going to be something that we’re going to investigate, rather than us redirecting them back to that authority.

That’s possible, but it’s very early to tell. It was one year. So I think, really, what they’re expressing is that from an evaluator’s perspective — attribution of any change in complaint volume — it’s premature to link A to B and suggest that there’s a causal linkage. But over time, I think that is something that we’re obviously interested in.

Ideally, if all public authorities were being fair…. I think this even came up in this committee. It might have been in the previous parliament. Ultimately, if we do a great job at encouraging public authorities to prevent unfairness in the first place, our caseload volumes will go down. So that’s distinctly a possibility. Nothing would make us happier.

Really, avoiding unfairness in the first place, hopefully, is a win-win-win. It’s good for the public. It’s good for the authority, because then they’re not being subject to investigation by us, which is disruptive and not necessarily what they want to do every day. And it would be good for us, because we can focus our resources on more systemic kinds of problems, where we see a public authority is consciously acting in a particular manner that maybe we should be addressing.

B. D’Eith (Chair): I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind just going through the capital side of the equation, just in terms of…. There seems to be a significant decrease for the following two years in the request. I’m just wondering if you could talk through that a bit.

J. Chalke: Sure.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Or maybe Dave…?

D. Van Swieten: Sure. The primary reason for the decrease is that this past fiscal year, we had to buy a new SAN, a huge piece of equipment that coordinates all the servers in the office. It’s probably the most expensive piece of equipment that we have in the office. With that being purchased in this fiscal year, you’re going to see the cost go down in future fiscal years. In fact, for the Ombudsperson office, because we share the infrastructure — because the Ombudsperson is kind enough to buy the big, expensive piece of equipment and incur the amortization — there’s actually no shared infrastructure costs next year for the Ombudsperson. So the capital costs do decrease over time.

B. D’Eith (Chair): In regards to the shared space, now that I’ve talked to you, Dave, one of the things that we heard yesterday was interesting. It’s wonderful that the different offices share. This is great, but there’s always that risk for…. You know, if somebody needs more space, then it might push one of the other officers out and things like that. Then they have to come back to us. I’m just wondering if you could say how things are looking with the shared space, generally. First time we’ve had you in front us.

Are the agreements long term? Are they stable? How are things going with that?

D. Van Swieten: The current lease on our building goes for another six years, and within the footprint, I think we’re doing okay. It’s subject to, of course, new resources coming in. I know — not just looking at the straight facilities side — through our strategic HR office, that we’re looking at alternate arrangements like working from home, shared office space. So I think it’s going okay.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Excellent.

[8:40 a.m.]

J. Chalke: I’ll just jump in on the question of space, because it would be a natural question given that we’re seeking some incremental staff on the public interest disclosure side. We’re going to accommodate that within our existing footprint. You’ve been there. You’ve seen. We don’t have a ton of room, but we’re going to make do.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah. That was what I was concerned about, because if officers have increased responsibilities, that means more staff, which means more pressure on the shared office. I was just making sure that that can all be accommodated and we aren’t going to get people having to move out.

You mentioned one shared resource. Now, if that officer had to move to another building, all of a sudden they’d have to get those pieces of equipment or things. So that’s good.

J. Chalke: I can assure the other three officers of the Legislature who are in our building that I will not be impinging on their footprint.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks, Jay. Wonderful.

J. Chalke: We’ll be dealing with it inside our walls.

B. D’Eith (Chair): It’s all good.

Any other questions from the members?

Great. Well, thank you very much to you and your team. We really appreciated the presentation.

J. Chalke: Great. Thank you very much for your attention.

B. D’Eith (Chair): So just a five-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 8:41 a.m. to 8:48 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth, Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth.

Welcome. If you could introduce your people, that’d be wonderful.

OFFICE OF THE REPRESENTATIVE
FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

J. Charlesworth: Great. Thank you very much.

Good morning. I’m pleased to be here to meet with members of the committee and to present the budget submission for fiscal years ’20-21 to ’22-23 for the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth.

As a way of beginning, I’d like to acknowledge that we’re on the traditional and unceded territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-​speaking peoples, the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations. I’m very grateful that we’re able to do our work together today on these lands.

I’ve been on the job now as the representative for just under 14 months. I’m thankful every day for the opportunity to lead an amazing group of people in the Office of the Representative, a team that’s dedicated to advocating for children and youth and to helping improve government services for those young people and their families.

I’m honoured today to be supported by several of those staff. I’d like to begin by introducing deputy Alan Markwart — he’s been with our office, and we have worked alongside each other very closely since my appointment; chief financial officer, Dianne Buljat; executive director of advocacy, Blair Mitchell; and, always in the background with his devices, monitoring all the things that we are doing, executive director of strategy and communications, Jeff Rud.

I’d also like to acknowledge the new Human Rights Commissioner, Kasari Govender, and the executive director, Stephanie Garrett. It’s a delight to have another rights-based organization to work with. In fact, we’ve been working very closely with them on an interim shared services arrangement, supporting them in a number of ways.

[8:50 a.m.]

As an office overview way to start, I provided you with an extensive description of our work in May of this year, and I won’t repeat all of that today. However, I’d be happy answer any questions that have arisen about the work that we’ve been doing in this period of time.

Just as a way of summary, RCY is responsible for assisting children, youth, young adults and their families who need help in dealing with child-and-youth-serving systems. That includes 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. We have 66 FTE employees, and we are spread into three offices: Burnaby, Prince George and, of course, our headquarters in Victoria.

We have three legislatively mandated program areas. The top is advocacy. Despite flying a bit under the radar — because it’s so focused on the individual children and youth, young adults and the people who love and care for them — it’s truly at the heart of the work we do.

Advocates are our front-line folks who meet with and take calls from young people, families, social workers, caregivers, teachers, pediatricians, lawyers and other concerned adults every single day. They help people navigate what can be a confusing web of government services. They teach youth how to speak up for themselves, and they advocate directly on behalf of children and youth and young adults when necessary. I’ll speak more about our advocacy work as I get into the details of our budget submission.

Our second program is our critical injury and death reviews and investigations unit, known as CID. This team is responsible for reviewing and investigating the critical injuries and deaths of children and youth in government care or those who have received reviewable services, which include child welfare, youth justice, mental health and addictions services, early years, etc. I’ll get into more depth on CID and CID’s work a little later in my presentation.

The third statutorily mandated area at our office is monitoring, a team which monitors, reviews and conducts research and analysis on designated government programs and services for children and youth and monitors the implementation of our recommendations. A great example of monitoring’s valuable work is a major project that’s currently underway, a review of the cross-ministry services and supports for children and youth with fetal alcohol syndrome disorder.

This review includes participation by children and youth who are sharing their lived experience with FASD. It also highlights the experience of families as they attempt to access services within the system for their children and youth with FASD.

I want to emphasize that the work of these three mandated areas — and, indeed, the entire RCY — is supplemented and buoyed up by another team, the Indigenous Strategies and Partnerships team, also known as ISP. Given the overrepresentation of Indigenous children and youth in the child welfare system, we know it’s critical that we bring an Indigenous lens to all of the work that we do. Indigenous child well-being remains the top priority of my office. Therefore, it makes sense to have a dedicated team focusing on this area.

Indeed, since I was here in May, that team has grown. We have recruited staff into a monitoring and research hub. They’re actively monitoring the shifting Indigenous child welfare landscape on both provincial and national levels.

Ongoing issues in which we’re watching government’s progress include Grand Chief Ed John’s report of 2016 on Indigenous child welfare in British Columbia, the calls for justice in the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the calls for action in the TRC, the uptake on Jordan’s principle and, of course, very significantly, the new federal and provincial legislation on Indigenous child welfare. The federal legislation is due to come into play in January of this next year.

I’m going to move on to our budget request now. I’d like to talk about the budget. As you’ve seen in our detailed submission, we’re requesting a budget of $10.471 million for fiscal year ’20-21. It represents a net increase of $684,000, or 7 percent, over previously approved amounts.

I’d like to talk about the two elements of that budget request. So $229,000 of this is to maintain current staffing and service levels as a result of cost increases that are out of our control, and $455,000 of this is for three additional FTEs to address significant caseload pressures in our areas of advocacy and critical injury and death reviews and investi­gations. I’ll unpack each one of them.

[8:55 a.m.]

The first component of the requested increase is simply to offset unavoidable cost pressures, including $169,000 to cover an expected 2 percent increase in excluded management compensation in 2020 as well as a 1 percent catch-up due to a previous government rate increase this fiscal year to the same salaries. We are particularly impacted by this in the RCY because about 80 percent of our staff fall into the management exclusion area because of the highly confidential nature of the work that we do.

Further, on the unavoidable cost pressures, $40,000 is for information technology costs. These are chargebacks from the office of the chief information officer. There is $20,000 in one-time costs for transitioning to the PSA’s time and leave. That’s for payroll and leave processing.

The second component of our requested increase is for $455,000. That would allow us to add three full-time employees to address serious caseload pressures. That’s broken down into two advocates who’ll address an expansion of our advocacy mandate, which came into effect on July 3 of this year, as well as address advocacy workload increases due to the increasing complexity of the cases that we’re receiving in the RCY.

It’s also one investigations analyst that will be added to our CID team, and that addresses workload pressures related to huge increases, which I will go into, in critical injuries and death reports being received by our team and to meet our commitments under shared joint commitments with First Nations Leadership Council, Métis Nation B.C., delegated aboriginal agencies and to-be-developed arrangements with urban Indigenous organizations.

I’d like to expand now on that second component. I’ll start with advocacy. Over the past seven years, there’s been a considerable increase in the complexity of cases coming before our advocates. These include young people and families dealing with acute and multiple issues and multiple service providers. Just as a comment, it’s actually good news, in my view, when the complexity is going up, in that when we are dealing effectively in transmitting rights-based information out into community, there are more of the simpler cases where people are able self-advocate and to work with our intake advocates and to address those.

Those cases that come before us are the ones where the expertise that our advocates have is best utilized. As you’ll see in the data provided in our submission, there’s been a significant increase in the average length of time spent by an advocate on a case, from 4.1 months in 2011-12 to 7.2 months last year. More recently there’s been a 13 percent increase since 2016-17 in the number of cases that are being handled by advocates rather than our intake advocates.

These statistics indicate an increase in complexity over the years in the cases RCY is seeing. It’s measured by several indicators, including the number of service providers involved, the number of case meetings held, the number of service lines, the number of people associated with the case and the volume of correspondence and supporting documents that our advocates review.

Often children and youth who are the subject of complex cases are at significant risk of harm, and it’s imperative that we are able to help these children and their families find their footing in what can be a confusing array of services. I’ll give you an example now of a complex case. I’ve changed a number of the details, as you can appreciate, to ensure that confidentiality is protected. But it will provide you with a glimpse of the kinds of situations we deal with.

Our advocates have been helping a high-risk youth with significant mental health, self-harm and substance use issues. Upon coming into care as a 16-year-old, this young woman lived in multiple placements — mostly residential, group care and shelters. MCFD placed her on a special needs agreement, even though there were no prospects of a return to her family. Over a two-year period, RCY provided direct advocacy in support of this youth, as well as engaging with her social worker, the social worker’s supervisor and MCFD senior staff.

The youth did stabilize in one placement, which was established specifically for her. Specialized behavioural consultants became involved to assist caregivers with strategies in order to support and maintain that placement. Better mental health supports were established for her as part of that overall plan. MCFD applied to the court, and the youth was placed in continuing care of the director.

[9:00 a.m.]

These plans and supports were established for the youth after significant advocacy by RCY. However, her self-injurious behaviour continued and increased with increased drug use. The situation became further complicated after the youth became pregnant. Our advocacy efforts then had to balance the rights of the baby to safety with the baby’s rights to be with the mom.

Such cases, you can appreciate, can be very complex and time-consuming. Advocating for this particular youth, the RCY advocate dealt with seven service providers and four lines of service over which we have an advocacy mandate.

Essentially, increased complexity of advocacy cases translates into increased workload for our advocates. This workload has been further heightened by the previously mentioned regulatory change of July of this year, which expanded our advocacy mandate to include young adults between the ages of 19 and 23 who were formerly in care and eligible for an agreement with young adults for a provincial tuition waiver.

This expansion opened up our services to a highly vulnerable population that’s typically in need of ongoing services and supports as well as active outreach. We estimate that at any given time, there are about 4,400 young adults in this cohort. Between July 3, when our mandate was expanded, and September 30 of this year, we’ve opened 14 advocacy files for this cohort. Twelve of the youth are eligible for agreements with young adults, and two are related to tuition waiver issues.

While that doesn’t seem like a huge number, it translates into a rate of 56 new cases per year, or a 3.5 percent increase in our overall advocacy caseload. And — this is what’s most important — this was done without any notification, any outreach, whatsoever. When you think of the potential if we are to do outreach and connect with young people, then of course that number will be far greater.

This young adult population often doesn’t access needed support services on a regular basis, and they can be difficult to reach and engage. For example, according to MCFD, only 13½ percent of the young adults who are actually eligible for agreements with young adults have an open ministry file, meaning our office will need to dedicate considerable efforts to reach out to this population and to the many service providers who may be involved with them, especially in these initial stages of the expanded mandate.

As you’ll recall, we made a supplementary budget request in May to this committee for additional staffing to address the then prospective expanded advocacy mandate for young adults. That request was not supported as the expansion hadn’t yet occurred, but the regulation change came into effect not long after.

As part of our expanded mandate, we have an obligation to make potential clients and their service providers aware of our advocacy services. In order to do this, we have deployed two experienced advocates this month to begin the process of engagement with service providers, communities and young adults in relation to this expansion, and we fully expect that as greater awareness is created through this outreach, cases in this new mandate cohort will rise significantly.

We’re noticing that this age cohort is particularly vulnerable. Of the 14 cases we have thus far, three of the youth identify as gender-diverse. One was a victim of alleged fraud by a social worker, and our advocate has pushed for an exception and extension to the youth’s AYA because of the traumatic circumstances of that case.

Some of these youth are telling us that the social workers who administer their AYAs are hands-off or simply transactional in nature, and these youth are unsure how to approach MCFD, in fear that if they ask for too much change to their plans, they will lose their funding. For example, one young person wanted to withdraw from post-secondary education to seek mental health supports for grief and loss and is fearful of losing AYA funding because they’re not continuing with their education program.

Advocacy services for these clients can be extremely beneficial to them. In one case, our advocate identified that a particular young adult could be eligible for CLBC support. That’s a potential massive, lifelong support that without the RCY advocacy services, this youth might never have known about. So that’s a little bit on advocacy.

I just want to make a note that in listening in to the Ombudsperson talk about the activities that they’ve been able to undertake in association with the planned implementation of PIDA, those are valuable lessons for us to learn about what it takes to ramp up and prepare for a mandate expansion. That’s what we’re asking for here — to be able to do our job in order to ensure that these young people have access to what is their right.

I’m going to move on to our CID team. As mentioned, we’re asking for the addition of one FTE. That’s for an investigations analyst, and that’s required to address the significant growth of in-mandate critical injuries and deaths that must be screened and reviewed by our CID staff.

[9:05 a.m.]

To give you a sense of magnitude, in 2018-19, we received 2,735 reportable circumstance reports from MCFD. Of these, 1,146 were in mandate. I could explain that, if you wish, later. Both these figures are record highs for our office. To put that in perspective, the in-mandate reportables we received were 43 percent higher last year than they were in 2014-15. And we are projecting that they will be 23 percent higher again this fiscal over last. The dramatic growth in recent years has left CID staff overwhelmed, and we only expect reportables to rise further with the expected advent of reporting by health authorities to RCY in 2020.

The review of critical injury and death reports is vital to the effective functioning of the RCY, and not just because it ultimately leads us to investigative reports, through which we make formal recommendations to government and the child-and-youth-serving system. As mentioned in our submission, the review of critical injury and death reports and related case files often leads to behind-the-scenes communication with MCFD about individual cases of concern and systemic issues, as well as internal referrals to our RCY advocates for follow-up.

That’s a very important area, because when we see things that are emerging for young people and we’re able to have those quiet conversations, to nudge the system to ensure that those youth who are at the greatest risk are receiving the services that they need, then we can prevent tragic outcomes. These reviews that we do lead to help for children currently in need, and they help prevent the injuries and deaths from occurring. They also enable us to report on themes and trends in injury and death data and to make better-informed recommendations that improve the effectiveness and responsiveness of services to children and youth.

In addition, these reviews are critical to our research and meeting commitments to share aggregated information with stakeholders — notably the First Nations Leadership Council, the Métis Nation B.C. and delegated Aboriginal agencies. This is by way of the joint commitments that we have signed off.

In conclusion, I want to say that we don’t put this request forward lightly. I know that we have to be very fiscally prudent at all times, and particularly now. Since the beginning of my term, we’ve taken a look at many of our office processes in efforts to try and streamline or to figure out how to become more effective, efficient and impactful. We have looked at all of the opportunities and addressed, wherever we could, those opportunities to streamline. I’d like to conclude my presentation with some thoughts on what the repercussions will be if our request is denied.

Without the additional advocates, given our expanded mandate and the current complexity of caseloads, we would have no choice but to create wait-lists for advocacy services. That would mean that children and youth looking to us for help — some of them in very precarious, immediately urgent situations in which they feel unsafe or unheard — would have to wait. In many cases, these children and youth already feel failed by the system, victims of confusing rules and seemingly bureaucratic roadblocks. They would be coming to their advocate, their representative, for help, and we would have no choice but to tell some of them to wait.

Our advocates are already stretched to nearly unimaginable caseloads, and we are looking at the certainty of an increase in cases due to our expanded mandate. Without additional advocates, in addition to wait-lists, we face the reality of staff burnout, and we will have extremely limited capacity to operationalize our expanded mandate.

With respect to CID, our current CID staff members are also extremely stretched with the recent monumental increase in injury and death reports. They’ve struggled in recent months to keep up with the influx, and staff burnout is an all-too-real concern in this area as well. You can appreciate that the expertise required to do this work is significant. Without an additional investigative analyst to alleviate some pressure, we will have difficulty following through on our commitments to produce and share valuable data with First Nations and Métis leadership and communities to help in­form their planned resumption of jurisdiction — what promises to be a time of unprecedented changes in Indigenous child welfare.

We’ll also be forced to limit the scope of our reviews of critical injury and death reportables, which would impact our ability to detect trends in the data, bring cases of concern to MCFD’s attention, make referrals for advocacy and produce reports that serve to improve the system. In short, our ability to provide oversight of the child welfare system would be negatively impacted.

[9:10 a.m.]

That concludes my formal presentation to you today. I’m pleased, with our team, to provide any further clarification on our budget request.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Dr. Charlesworth, and thank you for all the work you and your team do. It’s very, very important work for our province.

Just before we go to the members, I had a couple of clarifications I wanted to make. In regards to the supplementary requests that have been made before, part of the reason why that wasn’t approved is because there was this uncertainty as to the volume. I think now we’re seeing where that volume is, so we appreciate what you’re saying in terms of where you are with the increased responsibilities. So thanks for that.

Then I just had a quick question about the grants, which are on table 2. That was increased by 5,580 percent. So I’m just wondering if you could explain that and what the grants line is. That was an interesting number.

J. Charlesworth: Would you like to handle that one?

A. Markwart: Yeah. I think you need to…. It depends on what envelope it comes out of. If you look at the grants, the substantial majority of the grants actually go to two organizations. One is the McCreary Centre Society. That’s a well-established, very well-known, very highly reputable organization that does research with youth, typically engaging youth. We engage McCreary by way of grants instead of professional services contracts. If you look at our expenditure on professional services contracts, we actually underspent in that area, but we overspent in grants. So it’s really a question of which envelope it comes out of.

The second major aspect of our grant expenditures was to the University of Victoria. I think it was $127,500. That is actually for co-op students — law co-op students, students in graduate-level social sciences — who are actually providing services to us on a semester-wise basis. So again, it amounts to the purchase of ongoing services. There are some other smaller grants — the Janusz Korczak Association — but those are minor grants really.

Does that help?

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

M. Dean: Thank you so much for all of your work. I really appreciate it. I just have a couple of questions.

In the section in your report around being culturally responsive, I really appreciate the attention to Indigenous and Métis culture. I didn’t really feel that I got a sense of what you were doing in terms of other cultures in the province. So could you just give us a little bit more detail around what kind of expertise you have and what kind of priorities you’ve identified that are broader in terms of culture?

J. Charlesworth: Thank you for that question too. We have focused primarily on Indigenous children and youth because of the overrepresentation or the overinvolvement of the child welfare system in the lives of Indigenous children, youth and families. So that is our top priority for sure.

With respect to other cultural groups, one of the things we’re able to do through our CID reporting is to take a look at different kinds of characteristics, identity factors that are of significance to the young people, and what is emerging there is helping us understand some of the patterns.

From a point of view of culture, there’s of course ethnicity and race, but there’s also: how do people identify themselves? An area of development for us is around gender-fluid, gender-diverse and trans young people, so we have been monitoring that, including sending one of our CID investigative analysts to Toronto for some very important meetings with trans youth, gender-diverse youth and researchers to better understand the phenomenon for them. In fact, in our reportable circumstances every month, we get reports that speak to a number of those other identity factors, including the gender-diverse population.

What’s interesting for us there is beginning to see how it is that we need to be more responsive as an organization so that we can address those diversity factors. So we’re early stages in that. We’re focusing on Indigenous.

[9:15 a.m.]

Then through that and through some of the work that we’re understanding about what cultural safety means writ large, that’s infusing some of the work that we’re doing with other ethnicities.

The other thing that’s been asked for by the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth is for us to consider translating our products and our services into diverse languages. We’re looking into that, and that would be a 2020-2021 pursuit as well. Does that answer your question?

M. Dean: Yes, thank you. I really appreciate the attention on gender diversity as well. We know that can be a vulnerability factor for children and youth for sure.

I’m really concerned about the increase in critical injuries. But it looked like that was partly to do with protocols and reporting. I’m wondering if you can explain to us whether you actually think there’s an increase in critical injuries, or is it that they weren’t getting reported properly before? Can you just help me understand that?

J. Charlesworth: Yes. It’s a good question. It’s one that many people ask when they see that precipitous rise. I would say it’s our sense that it’s primarily because of improved reporting from the ministry. It’s also a recognition of what a critical injury is.

As an example, one of the critical injuries that we code for is emotional harm. What’s showing up there, for example, is a number of young people whose parents are dying as a result of the opioid epidemic and the overdose crisis. When we start to think…. We’ve had a slight expansion in understanding what a critical injury is. I think it’s much more accurate. But I think it’s primarily due to the improved reporting and, frankly, the improved trust that the Ministry of Children and Family Development has in the office and our ability to do good work.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Doctor and Alan, thank you to you and your team for everything that you do. Greatly appreciated. A lot of it is what many of us don’t see. So thank you.

In your summation, you talked about confusing rules and bureaucratic roadblocks. Are we addressing those to help look at the efficiencies and the productivity gains that may take place if those are addressed, not only through your organization but also MCFD and elsewhere in government? There are only so many dollars that I see floating around. If that is an ability that could be addressed, greatly appreciated to the taxpayers of British Columbia.

J. Charlesworth: Yes. I really appreciate that. In the last year, we released a report called Alone and Afraid, which was pertaining to a child and family. The child had significant special needs and suffered from profound neglect. One of the things that came out of that report was a review of the children and youth with special needs. When we presented to the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth on that, we actually provided information, a visual that showed the complexity of the CYSN service delivery system. That was shocking, when you take a look at how difficult it is to navigate.

What I’m pleased to report is that the ministry accepted wholeheartedly all of the recommendations in that report and is undertaking a substantial review and a reconceptualization of children and youth with special needs services with the intention of reducing that complexity and the multitude of closed doors and unclear doors in the CYSN.

There is an example where I think the work that we do is actually benefiting government, because we take a different look at service delivery and say: “Hey, this is not working for families. This is far too complex. It doesn’t make sense.” It has been a system that has developed as a hodgepodge over time, and now they are taking a look at it as a broader system of services.

That’s my hope with other reports that we have coming down the pipe. We have about eight, I think, coming down the pipe in about the next six months. Many of those speak to those issues that you raise very rightly. How is it that our system can be more responsive and clearer to understand?

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): So is there implementation taking place in the ministry, of these reports?

J. Charlesworth: Yes.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation. Again, all the work that you’re doing is extremely important, especially in regard to our Indigenous peoples. Thank you so much for that work.

Was there anything else before we close at all?

Okay. Could I have a motion to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:20 a.m.