The committee met at 7:59 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We are in the middle of our annual review of statutory offices of British Columbia — three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budgetary estimates for fiscal ’20-21. First up we have our new Human Rights Commissioner.

[8:00 a.m.]

We’re very excited to have you here, and we’d love you to tell us about what you’d like in terms of your budget and what your plans are — very excited.

Review of Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Well, thank you so much, and thank you for all coming out so very early in the morning.

Good morning. With me today is Deputy Commissioner Stephanie Garrett and Dianne Buljat, who you have seen at least a couple of times so far, who is the chief financial officer for the Representative for Children and Youth and who manages our shared financial services.

I want to recognize that we are meeting here today on the territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ people and the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations.

I’m grateful to be here on these lands, appearing before you. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here in the role of B.C.’s new Human Rights Commissioner.

The formation of this office marks an important moment in our province and presents a unique opportunity to shift the culture of human rights. As this is my first opportunity to speak with you, I would like to take some time to tell you about our mandate, to provide a rough sketch of our strategic plan as it is developing and to detail the budget ask that’s in front of you.

I should note that you do not have a three-year service plan or an annual report in front of you because we are just getting started. I’ve been in the role for less than two months. But I do intend to spend some time today telling you what we’ve been up to and what lies ahead for us.

Unfortunately, British Columbia is far from immune to the important human rights issues of our time. The rising tide of hate is awash on our shores. In 2017, there was a total of 255 police-reported hate crimes in British Columbia, an increase of 55 percent compared to just two years earlier, most commonly motivated by race and ethnicity, by religion and, thirdly, by sexual orientation.

Hate crimes in Canada shot up by 47 percent in 2017. In 2018, Metro Vancouver had the highest rate of hate crimes reported to police in any of Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas, according to StatsCan. All of this is happening in the context of the largest displacement and movement of people in any period since the Second World War, and Canada is resettling the largest number of these displaced people.

Violence against Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people is also disproportionately prevalent in B.C. About a third of the recorded numbers, or at least some of the last statistics we have on this, of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls are from British Columbia. The crisis is what the national inquiry into missing and murdered women and girls called a genocide of gendered and racialized violence.

The inquiry identified some important root causes of this violence, including the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in care and the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prison. In B.C., while Indigenous people make up about 5 percent of the population, 44 percent of the male youth in custody and 32 percent of imprisoned girls in 2017 were Indigenous. Indigenous children make up a staggering 63 percent of the numbers of children in care in the province.

Poverty is often cited as a root cause of systemic violence and inequality. In B.C., one in five children live in poverty. Poverty disproportionately impacts women, Indigenous people, newcomers and people living with disabilities. Indeed, B.C. has the largest gender pay gap in Canada, where women, on average, make about 20 percent less an hour than men, a gap that grows significantly larger if the comparison is between men and women of colour, women with disabilities or Indigenous women. These are but just a few of the examples of human rights concerns facing British Columbia.

As you know, the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner was formed in response to these issues and others. In August 2017, Premier John Horgan called for the re-establishment of the Human Rights Commission. In the fall of that year, Parliamentary Secretary Ravi Kahlon led an eight-week consultation process with community members and stakeholders to get feedback on the proposed commission. The result was a report with 25 recommendations, which formed the basis to the revisions of the human rights code.

[8:05 a.m.]

In the fall of 2018, Bill 50 went through the legislative process and was passed into law in November 2018. The bill contained provisions establishing the role of the Human Rights Commissioner as an independent officer of the Legislature, with the mandate to protect and promote human rights in the province. Bill 50 applied most of the recommendations in the Kahlon report.

The way that this office was established made history. It is the most independent human rights commission ever to be established in Canada and has a broad, systemic mandate to apply both domestic and international human rights law.

Following the passage of Bill 50 into law, the Legislature struck an all-party committee to hire for the role of the Human Rights Commissioner, a process which culminated in me being appointed in May of this year and sworn in on September 3.

I am incredibly honoured to be charged with both the creation of this new office and the fulfilment of the legislative mandate, a mandate that is nothing short of shifting the culture of human rights in the province. Before I was appointed, the Ministry of Attorney General put together a transition team to deal with the early logistics of getting this office off the ground.

Stephanie Garrett, now deputy commissioner, was hired in February of this year as the chief operating officer. Alongside colleagues at the AG’s offices, Ms. Garrett worked to get the initial pieces of the enterprise underway, including posting for priority jobs; lining up potential rental properties in Vancouver; establishing a relationship with the Office of the Auditor General, who has kindly given us a small office based in Victoria; establishing a relationship with the Representative for Children and Youth, who has generously loaned us office space in Vancouver; and creating a pilot model of shared corporate services with RCY.

After the legislation was passed, budget submissions were made before this committee, and start-up funds of $2 million were granted for this current fiscal year, along with $1 million in capital funds. These initial steps have set us up well, but it’s important to note that there was no such entity as the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner until I started on September 3. So many aspects our launch could not begin until then.

This tells the story of our office until September 3. Since then our small but mighty team has been busy setting up systems, hiring, budgeting and much more. I have been focused on building a vision for the organization and building key relationships that will help this work thrive. This vision is rooted in the powers under the legislation and focused on adding a systemic component to the human rights infrastructure that already exists in the province.

How will we tackle the human rights issues of the day? We now have a tripartite system for human rights in B.C. The human rights tribunal will continue to process individual complaints, and the human rights clinic will continue to provide legal services to assist with those complaints. We will be working with both of these bodies to build a no-wrong-door approach so that those seeking help with human rights issues will be able to navigate the human rights system effectively and efficiently.

However, what’s been missing from that system for nearly two decades has been the means to redress systemic concerns. How do we resolve the roots of the problems of discrimination and inequality, the forces giving rise to the individual complaints, unless we are able to be proactive and prevention-oriented? How do we work on dismantling systems of inequality if we only have the means to react to incidences of discrimination after they happen?

My role as commissioner is to work on the big picture, the systemic issues which underlie the day-to-day human rights problems that too many of us experience as we go about our lives. I’m charged with being a watchdog for human rights in the province and holding the government and others to account to ensure that the rights of all of us, particularly those most marginalized, are respected.

In many ways, the role of the Human Rights Commissioner is to provide access to justice for those issues that the individual complaint system can never truly address. For example, in a case in recent years, a B.C. legal clinic took on the case of a woman who was fired by her employer after she went on medical leave, due to depression caused by workplace bullying. With the clinic’s help, the complainant was ultimately successful in getting significant compensation awarded by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, a win for fairness and treatment of employees with mental illnesses. But not everyone suffering from disabilities, especially mental illness, gets that kind of fairness.

This case is an example of the kind of issue that concerns me and my office — the story of one person that may illustrate a larger problem with the system. What is the structure behind this discriminatory event? What do we need to prevent this kind of discrimination from happening in the first place? Indeed, the Human Rights Commission is charged with examining the underlying causes of discrimination rather than the individual manifestations of it.

[8:10 a.m.]

We have a number of tools available to us to fulfil our systemic mandate, and I’ll highlight just a few of the ones that are the most significant.

First, we can educate. We want to ensure that all aspects of society in B.C. — individuals, government, businesses, civil society organizations and others — know their rights and act on their responsibilities. This tool includes programming such as public awareness campaigns and workshops to help British Columbians understand human rights law better. We have built into our budget the capacity to do provincewide awareness campaigns to increase public knowledge of what rights and responsibilities are under human rights law, for example, through ads on public transit.

We have also built in the capacity to do education through accessible on-line and printed materials aimed at duty-bearers so that employers, landlords, service providers, educators and others understand their human rights obligations towards those they employ, serve, teach, rent to, etc. The lack of a commission has been a detriment to duty-bearers who have nowhere to turn to understand the law. We aim to remedy this through accessible, accurate and widely distributed learning mechanisms. These are just a couple of examples of how education will be rolled out across the province.

We also have the power to inquire. Although my investigatory and inquiry powers are not yet in force, an important tool that will be at my disposal is the power to investigate potential systemic human rights violations and to make recommendations for change.

For example, the Ombudsperson presented his report to the Legislature on an unfair and unlawful practice in the administration of the income assistance scheme a couple of years ago. The result of that inquiry was that the government accepted his recommendation to provide additional income assistance to nearly 4,000 people who, over the years, received less income assistance than they should have due to the impugned practice. This is the kind of work we will undertake on human rights issues at the commission.

We also have the power to litigate. In appropriate circumstances, after the relevant provisions of the act come into force, we are also able to litigate to push for systemic change or to shift the law through impacting precedent-setting cases. Where we see an individual case which our office believes speaks to those broader systemic issues, we will have the ability to intervene as a third party before the tribunal or to draw the tribunal’s or court’s attention to systemic issues at stake in the proceeding beyond those issues that are at stake for the individual parties.

We also have the ability to represent individuals who are bringing systemic cases forward, kind of a test case function, which is another means to use individual litigation to create systemic change.

We also have the power to delve deeply into an issue through research and make recommendations for change directly to the Legislature. Whether we gather the evidence through an inquiry, through outreach and engagement or through other means of research, we can make recommendations on how systems need to shift and change to implement human rights. For example, we are likely to engage early in making recommendations for change to the human rights system to improve access to justice for all parties and to improve enforcement and compliance with the code.

These tools and others listed in the code very much inform our structure and my vision of how our work will unfold. On page 10 of our materials, we’ve provided our organizational chart, which I think may be a useful visual to illustrate the work ahead. As you can see from this map, we are envisioning an organization with teams focused on engagement and education, policy and research and legal strategies such as interventions and inquiries. So the structure really reflects the tools in our toolbox.

We have built in Indigenous expertise at multiple levels of the organization to ensure that we are not only engaging in Indigenous rights in a meaningful way but also building an organizational structure and approach to the work that is culturally safe and accessible.

We have built in subject-matter experts in the research and policy team to ensure that we have in-house expertise in the areas covered by the human rights code. You will also see that we are building a strong leadership team in order to ensure that we are developing our strategic plan with the benefit of those with extensive experience in the field and strong analytical reasoning, and also to ensure a sustainable, responsible structure beyond this start-up phase.

We are also building in two advisory committees, one as required by the legislation, to ensure that we are receiving advice from diverse experts in the field who also have diverse lived experience of their own. The second is a committee of Elders who we are hoping can guide our work to ensure that we are being culturally safe, inclusive and accessible in our approach.

[8:15 a.m.]

While much of our strategic plan remains to be built, I see our work as falling largely within two big buckets. The first is the everyday human rights issues faced by people in the province, like discrimination in the context of employment or access to services or tenancy. We know that complaints about discriminatory treatment on the basis of disability continue to form the largest single source of cases before the human rights tribunal — indeed, more than 30 percent.

Despite decades of activism from individuals and organizations, people with disabilities continue to be excluded from employment opportunities, housing and publically accessible services on a routine basis, as do others. I see education as being particularly important on this first bucket. How do we raise awareness of our rights and responsibilities under the law? How do employers, particularly small businesses and organizations, learn about what their responsibilities are? How do advocates help their clients address or seek redress for the discrimination they face? Those are the questions that we want to help answer.

The second big bucket of our work is the pressing systemic issues impacting human rights in the world, concerns which address the larger global issues threatening human rights today, such as ongoing colonization and the rise of hate crimes. An early part of our work will be looking at how we indigenize human rights frameworks, applying the concepts of rights and responsibilities and remedies in ways that make sense and that can be a force for good in Indigenous com­munities.

With the introduction of legislation implementing the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples, UNDRIP, last week, we are in a new era of reconciliation and decolonization in B.C. The widespread support among First Nations, civil society, organized labour and the business community is inspiring. However, the general public lacks understanding of what this new law is all about and why it matters, and such misunderstandings can lead to fear and racial tension. An office like ours is an important mechanism for operationalizing and monitoring these commitments as well as educating British Columbians about the meaning of the law.

Another overarching theme I see in my work ahead is addressing hate speech and the continuum from hate speech to hate violence. In my view, it is clear that hate speech often underlies terrorist violence and that both hate speech and violence are often rooted in racism and misogyny. For this reason, I see a key element of our approach to examining hate as examining the rise of hate on line. This is a pervasive problem and one that seriously raises the spectre of silencing the diversity of voices on line.

So far, I’ve been focused on developing our strategic vision, building relationships and educating the public about the role of the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. To this end, over the last two months, I have met with 13 senior government officials, including the Premier; 14 community leaders; all eight of the independent offices of the Legislature; the chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission; and the chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

I have started doing outreach to First Nations leadership in the province, including umbrella organizations and those nations on whose land we have begun our initial work. I’m working on establishing respectful, productive relationships as a basis for collaboration on future work. I’ve done a number of public talks reaching hundreds of people, including poverty and family law advocates, members of the employer community, members of the legal community and community members and leaders engaged in working against hate.

This is just the beginning of our engagement process. Staff and I will be travelling across British Columbia, listening and learning about diverse people’s lived experiences of human rights. I will also continue to speak to diverse audiences about the role of the commission and how it may relate to their work and their lives. These conversations will be essential to our strategic planning process as well as to our evaluation of that strategic plan. We know that evaluation must be built into our processes early and that our engagement processes will be key to identifying the markers and measures of success, such as key performance indicators.

Our team has been focused on the operational side of this start-up enterprise. As I mentioned previously, we have established two shared-services agreements with RCY and OAG to share space and, in the case of RCY, to share corporate services, including financial oversight, human resource management and IT management. In addition to the longer-term space-sharing arrangement with OAG for office space in Victoria, we have secured long-term office space in Vancouver and will be moving into it at the end of this month.

[8:20 a.m.]

We are moving expeditiously with hiring. To date, we have hired an executive assistant and three more members of our senior team and have two executive searches underway. It is for all these reasons that we are asking for $6.21 million for our operating budget for 2020 and 2021 and $1.21 million in capital funds. In order to fulfil the significant tasks we have been charged with under the legislation, we need to hire the right people and provide the right supports for those people.

In regard to the capital budget, please note that the bulk of this ask is a request to defer the $1 million that we were granted this year in capital funds, since renovations to the new office space will not occur until the new fiscal.

Under the code, I have a wide range of responsibilities to address and combat systemic human rights issues in the province as well as a range of weighty tools at my disposal to fulfil those responsibilities. This vast mandate stretches across British Columbia, both geographically and sectorally, to ensure the protection of the rights of everyone in the province, with a particular focus on marginalized groups, and to ensure that duty-bearers, from landlords to businesses to government and public bodies, are aware of their responsibilities and uphold and respect human rights.

Such an expansive and critical mandate requires a proportionate budget. This includes operating expenses for an aligned organizational structure, infrastructure to support best-in-class education and engagement on human rights and an office setup capable of providing an inclusive model of human rights promotion and protection. The budget request is both conservative and attentive to fiscal responsibility while reflective of the enormous gap in human rights protection and promotion in the province. The budget represents the minimum required to fill that gap and to create a new culture of human rights in the province.

The budget is also required in order to build long-term sustainability. Building a new office of the Legislature from the ground up requires a significant attention to balancing immediate public expectations with long-term sustainability considerations so that this office can make a significant impact in the province for future generations.

Early investment in the office, through the requested operational and capital budget requests, will ensure economic, social and cultural returns on this investment in the years to come. Impact evaluation has been integrated into early planning to ensure this return on investment is measurable and that the office remains accountable to the Legislative Assembly and all people in the province.

We have built this budget in the context of a time of fiscal restraint, and we are being prudent in our planning and in our budget request. Since the primary costs of the office lie in staff salaries, any shortfall in the budget allocation would result in fewer staff and, therefore, insufficient human resources to get the work done. Simply put, this budget is essential to us fulfilling our significant legislative mandate.

We are aiming to work as collaboratively as possible while maintaining our independence, which is essential to our credibility in the community. We are aiming to fill the gaps left by the absence of a commissioner role and to honour the work that is already being done to protect and promote human rights by civil society and public bodies across the province.

In setting us up for success, we are committed to being as efficient as possible while making the best use of the tools available to us under the legislation to tackle some of the big human rights issues of our time. We are ensuring that we are both following best practices demonstrated in other jurisdictions and forging the way for new and innovative approaches to dismantling discrimination. We are committed to doing this work in a way that realizes the values of human rights, both inside and outside the organization.

I want to assure you that this will be money well spent. These resources will be directly channelled into shifting the culture of human rights in the province. Thank you.

I’m happy, of course, to answer any questions you may have.

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

Just as far as…. For us, this is a new budget, the first time we’ve seen this sort of level. I guess the last time we approved the interim budget, it was $2 million for operating and then $1 million for capital. Now we’re being asked to approve $6 million plus. So we really should probably dig into this a little bit just to make sure that when we look at this, we have all the facts.

One of the things…. When looking at this scale and the budget, were you able to look at other jurisdictions at all? I know this is a different model than other human rights commissions. But were you able to look at that in order to inform this work flow and the staff that you need to hire?

[8:25 a.m.]

K. Govender: Yes, we were. We spoke to, as I mentioned, other commissions across the country, particularly those who have a more systemic mandate like we do. Some of them are quite different, in other parts of the country, because they also run the individual dispute resolution piece.

We talked to the ones that had a more similar function, and we asked a couple of questions. We asked: “What’s your structure now?” We asked: “What works about it and what doesn’t?” Also: “If you could do it again, if you were starting from scratch, what would you do?” The staffing decisions and the staff structure that we’ve built is very much based on those conversations. I can assure you that they are comparative across the country with what other human rights commissions are doing.

B. D’Eith (Chair): How did you come up with the FTEs, then? Obviously, the biggest part of this budget is your staff, and that’s totally understandable, but how did you arrive at that number in terms of the number of FTEs that you needed?

K. Govender: We didn’t start with the number. We started with the map. So started looking at what…. You’ll notice that there is…. It kind of breaks down into three teams. There’s the education engagement team, there’s research and policy team, and then there’s legal. That really maps across the legislation. The tools that we have available under the revised code fall within those three areas. That’s how we started.

We looked at what the powers are that we have under the code, pulled those sections of the code out and thought: “Okay. How do we actually achieve these really broad mandates that we’ve been given?” And then, also, some of the more specific powers. For example, there’s a staff person built in to do approvals of special programs, which is a specific function. I didn’t talk about it because it’s quite specific, but it’s one of the specific powers we have, so we needed to build in staff to do that. So it’s very much mapped against the legislation that we are working with.

B. D’Eith (Chair): If the members could bear with me. I just wanted to clarify a few things, and then we’ll move into questions with everybody.

You had mentioned about how important education was, and I notice that you have $100,000 for informational advertising and publications. I’m just wondering. Is that enough? Do you feel that in order to get the word out…? How do you expect to get the word out in terms of education? Where in the budget…? I see a $6.2 million budget, and you said education was a very important part of that. I’m just wondering. Where in this budget is the meat of your education piece?

K. Govender: Thank you for the question. It’s very much in staff, as you pointed out in your last question. So in my view…. Certainly, there are publications built in, which I think will be very important.

As I mentioned in my notes, we’re trying to do a really multifaceted approach to education so that we can reach people with all different learning styles, education styles, language needs and accessibility needs. That means creating materials in a bunch of different ways. Some of them will be on line, and there’ll be visuals associated with those on-line materials, so that’s part of where our IT budget comes in, in publications.

Part of it is through videos. We’ve built in a video production budget so that we can have different means to reach people. But the biggest chunk falls under staffing, because it’s done through workshops and the producing of those materials, and that really requires people to do that work. The big expenses are for the people to do that work.

The idea is that they will work across the province. We’re figuring out the most efficient way, still, to do that staffing and whether we locate everybody in one office and send people out, but very much thinking about efficiency in that regard. But the presence is provincial. Certainly, it is not Lower Mainland.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Two more quick things, Members. Bear with me.

Under “Other,” you’ve got “corporate shared services.” I’m just wondering why it’s under “Other.” What are the specific corporate services that would prompt it to be under an “Other” category?

K. Govender: Perhaps I can refer to Dianne about why it’s in the “Other” category.

D. Buljat: Good morning. Thank you for the question. It’s in the “Other” category…. I was simply following the same way of presentation that’s used by the four independent offices that are using the corporate services structure to clearly identify the costs so that you could see them.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. Finally, you’d mentioned that the $1 million for capital appropriation would be deferred. The way that the process works, you can’t really defer capital spending. It goes back, and then you can ask for it again.

I think what you’re saying is that you’re not going to use it this year or you’re going to use part of it this year. It confused me, because when you said it was going to be deferred, I just…. What did you mean by that?

[8:30 a.m.]

K. Govender: Sure. We are not using it this year. The space that we are moving into…. We are moving into temporary space soon. We don’t get access to the new space until May, and then we have a four-month fixturing period to do the renovations. All that work that will need to happen to make it into an accessible, workable space for us will all happen in the next fiscal.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. So that appropriation will not be used in this fiscal. It’s going to be approved for next fiscal.

K. Govender: Yes. Thank you for the clarification.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. I just wanted to clarify that because you can’t move things into the next fiscal.

K. Govender: Thank you for that.

B. D’Eith (Chair): No problem.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Good morning. Congratulations, again, on your position. Lots of work to do.

K. Govender: Yes.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): This committee allows us to ask questions, so please do not take me wrong as I ask. We have the freedom here to ask some very pointed and personal questions, not individually but about the organizational charts.

I come from private business with a multitude of employees and multitude of locations, and to be frank with you, I see literally 12 managers or executive assistants and eight people on the ground as individuals you’ve hired for specific functions. Is there no way…? I understand that the individuals here listed as managers and executive directors all have jobs to do and that. But for such an important new entity in the province, are you not quite heavy on the management capabilities of this, other than the individuals that are out there on a continual basis trying to address the wrongs that are prevalent all through this country and elsewhere in the world?

K. Govender: Thank you for the question. It’s something we have thought long and hard about — that part of the structure.

One of the things that we heard really loud and clear in doing our comparisons and talking to other similar bodies and other human rights commissions — that last question that I said we asked them: what would you do differently? — was: “We would build in more at the executive level. We’d build in more structure there, because that’s what makes us sustainable. On the systemic issues, we need the deeper thinkers. We need the people with the deeper expertise who are going to stay for a while, who aren’t turning over quickly, to do this work. We’re suffering because it’s the more junior people who are expected to do this very high-level work, and it’s not working as well as it could.” So that’s a big part of the reason why we built in more at the executive level.

The other piece is sustainability beyond, certainly, my five-year mandate, but also building a new start-up enterprise. An organization that has deeper roots on that more senior level, in my view, is going to be a more sustainable organization. And we are keen to build this, at this point, thinking about what will work for the long term.

D. Ashton (Deputy Chair): Okay. Again, you have the expertise, and you had the opportunity to talk to others in Canada that have similar entities. It’s just that, to be very frank, this seems very, very, very top-heavy.

I would also ask…. As I said, coming from an organization that had multiple locations and multiple, multiple staff members, in discussing human rights with my peers across this country — and I hate to say it this way — they were always told: “If you ever get a human complaints issue, pay it. Don’t fight it.” I’m not so sure that’s right. It was a long, drawn-out process and a court process, and it was cheaper for companies just to address it financially than to get to the root of the issue.

I would hope that there’s fairness and equity on both sides of the equation through the entity that you are now creating and will run, hopefully, more than five years. But that fairness and equity is a two-way street, and I just hope it comes out prevalent in your organization.

K. Govender: Yes. Absolutely, it will.

To your previous question, I want to just clarify that the structure is quite similar to the other independent offices in terms of the senior team. I just wanted to get that clarity out there.

The body of the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner won’t be working on resolving any of those individual complaints. Our function really is to get at exactly what you’re pointing at, get at those underlying issues, rather than…. It’s not a blame game. This is not about going after certain groups, going after business or duty-bearers. This is about education and raising us all up.

[8:35 a.m.]

Part of that, I very much believe, is that duty-bearers — employers, for example — haven’t been well served by not having a commission office. I can say that with my previous hat on — and not, of course, knowing I would be here today — I attended some of Ravi Kahlon’s consultation sessions in the lead-up to the code. The employers that I heard from there were saying: “We want this body because we have nowhere to turn.” Especially small businesses, especially umbrella organizations for small businesses, were saying: “Our members have nowhere to turn to find out what their responsibilities are.”

They’re having to go through the individual complaint process when they do something wrong. If they just knew, if they had somewhere to go — to be able to work with a body to say: “Here’s our policy. Can we learn to do better? Here’s what we’re doing. How can we improve this practice?” — employers and others like them would be well served by that. We are very much keeping that in mind in the structure of what we’re doing here, because I think that serves everybody.

M. Dean: Thank you so much for all of your work and for your presentation. I just have a couple of little questions, just digging a bit more deeply. You said you had an advisory group of elders. Are they all Indigenous Elders, or is it a…? I know you have the other advisory group as well, so is that just Indigenous Elders?

K. Govender: That’s the idea at this point. All of what I’m saying is still subject to some consultations and conversations. What I imagine that elder group to be is an Indigenous advisory group. But having put something like together in my previous role, some of the feedback we had in response to doing that was that this actually should be an elders committee as opposed to a more diverse Indigenous advisory, because many Indigenous cultures really rely on the advice of Elders and need Elders to move first. That’s where that is coming from, to put together that kind of advisory.

I think it will also, of course, serve a function in terms of advising on issues for older people, which is an important piece. You can see that age-based discrimination is built in as well, in terms of the subject matter.

M. Dean: Have you built honoraria, travel costs and those kinds of things into the budget?

K. Govender: Yes, we have. Thank you for that question. Yes. Absolutely, we’ve built in supports to ensure that anybody we consult with, including advisory, is well supported to make that process accessible for them.

M. Dean: Regarding languages, how many languages do you think that you’ll be translating materials into? And have you put that into the budget as well?

K. Govender: We have put that into the budget.

Dianne, I don’t know if you remember how many languages we’ve built in.

We absolutely did build that in, and we also built in accessibility audits of our website — not just non-English languages but ASL, for example, on events.

D. Buljat: Yeah. We didn’t bring the documentation.

K. Govender: We didn’t bring that level of detail, but we can get that to you, if you’d like. We do intend to translate into Indigenous languages as well. We just haven’t made decisions about what exactly that will look like, given that there are so many of them.

M. Dean: I was going to ask that, because we have so many Indigenous languages. So you’re still…

K. Govender: …in the process of working that out, yes.

M. Dean: Okay. What percentage of your draft budget is already committed? What percentage of staff is already hired, for example?

K. Govender: I don’t know if I can give you the exact percentage. There are five of us on the team now. We have two other executive searches underway at the moment. So we’re still pretty small. I can get you the percentages. If you’d like that number, we can follow up with that.

M. Dean: I’d be interested in knowing what percentage you will have projected for the end of March, this fiscal, so that we can make really informed decisions.

Would that be helpful for us, for the committee, Chair, in terms of timelines?

B. D’Eith (Chair): I was thinking…. There was $2 million approved for operational until the end of March. Is that going to be sufficient as you ramp up?

K. Govender: Yes, we expect that to be sufficient for this year.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay. I guess if the $2 million is enough to sort of ramp up, then there’ll be more hires in the new year. Is that…?

K. Govender: That’s right. Actually, on the organizational chart, it’s colour-coded by dates. I believe that’s in yours.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yes, it is.

K. Govender: It gives you the expected hiring timelines there.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Just make sure the Premier doesn’t get this, because he’s colour-blind. Just a heads-up.

K. Govender: Thank you. I’ll file that away.

[8:40 a.m.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): I had to do that with one of our cities. They had this whole beautiful colour-coded thing for their meeting with the Premier. It was like: “Yeah. That’s not going to work.”

N. Simons: It’s good to see you here, and it’s nice to hear about the cooperation with the other independent offices. In your narrative, you mentioned that one of your budget considerations was the fiscal situation that we’re in and the possibility of looking for restraint. How is that considered in your budget proposal?

The second part of that question is: how did you arrive at 37 FTEs? Where was that recommendation from? Is it a little bit…? I wouldn’t say premature, because I don’t know. But when you look at the scope of the work that you’re going to do, do you already have that very well established? Do you know exactly what your mandate is, obviously, and what that will look like in that practical application? Really, the question is around how the fiscal situation was worked into this budget proposal. It’s not indicated here. Maybe you could just let us know that.

K. Govender: The concept of fiscal restraint, or the understanding of the context in which we are operating, was really in every decision that we made. It’s a balance, of course, between that and being able to fulfil what I’ve described as a very large mandate with many tools available to us that, I think, really need to be exercised in order to fulfil the mandate.

As we were going through and developing this budget, we had decisions of what the scope is. Do we dream beyond what we think is reasonable just for the sake of hoping to build in a cushion so that if we don’t get the full amount…? We did not do that. We did not build in that extra cushion so that: “Oh, if we don’t get it, well, we’ll fall back on plan B.”

That’s not how we developed it. We came in knowing that that was not an appropriate argument in this context. Really, it’s that at every single stage of the budget, we made sure to pick the leaner options — again, with the context that we want to be able to fulfil this mandate in a way that’s innovative and at least meeting best practices.

The second part of your question was around how we arrived at the number of FTEs. Again, that was really not “come up with a number and then work backwards.” It was mapping directly onto the legislation and what we knew we had to achieve in order to come up with this structure and the number of people it would actually take to fulfil the kinds of tasks that we have been charged with doing.

On your third question, we are in the process of strategic planning. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg process, but I very much want to do that with the benefit of having the executive team in place in order to be able to bring all those brains into one place to have that strategic plan. I also want to do that with the benefit of the engagement process that we’re undertaking.

At the same time, what I’ve described to you already is the overall vision that I’ve been working on developing in the last two months: these two large buckets of the kinds of patterns that emerge from everyday legal problems, human rights problems, and the other bucket being the larger global issues facing human rights and how those manifest here in British Columbia.

Keeping those in mind, we are then developing what we think that actually means. I’ve described some of those precise initiatives in my materials, in my notes today — for example, a public awareness campaign, developing workshops and rolling those out across the province, being able to do inquiries and interventions as appropriate.

I hope that answers your question.

N. Simons: Can I just follow up? The “Inquiries and interventions as appropriate.” Have you been able to actually predict exactly what that will look like — how many inquiries, how you determine what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do?

K. Govender: We’ve looked at about…. Those provisions are not yet in force. They will be sometime over the next number of months. There is a little bit of uncertainty in the context of months, but we’re looking at being able to do them, perhaps one a year. The context of inquiries and interventions is that there are many legal tools. You don’t always have to roll out the full tool belt to be able to get at the goal, but you still might have the same people working on that goal.

[8:45 a.m.]

For example, some time ago the Ontario Human Rights Commission was working with the police, who were setting up a memorial for police officers who had fallen in the line of duty, and there was some controversy among police officers around memorializing those who had committed suicide in the context of depression caused by their jobs. The Ontario Human Rights Commission didn’t end up doing any litigation about that on behalf of the families of the officers who had fallen in regard to mental health issues, but they had some tools to be able to make that happen if need be.

I think that’s part of…. There’s a bit of carrot and stick going on, if I can be more precise about it, having that many tools at our disposal. So when we’ll use them…. I think it can’t be a matter of complete planning. It has to be responsive to what the actual issue is and who the parties are that are there before us.

D. Clovechok: Thank you for the work that you’re doing and, obviously, the effort and energy that’s gone into this. It’s certainly an entity that is desperately needed in this province. So I’m excited.

I’m just going to kind of reflect back to what my colleague said around your organizational process, certainly understanding that you’ve put a lot of thought into this. It’s geared towards what you’ve already heard. But again, coming from a private sector background, I look at this, and it’s top-heavy. That’s not a criticism; it’s just something you can see here.

I don’t want to get into the minutiae, but you’ve got executive directors having managers report to you than boots on the ground. I’m not really sure, and I don’t need an answer to that. But when I look at this organizational structure, I’m not sure why they wouldn’t be reporting to the executive director, and that gives you more boots on the ground, because you’ve eliminated the manager’s position, which I think you probably need more of.

My comment is that given the work that you’ve already done, I would be really excited to see a plan B around the structure. You’re learning to walk, but I think you’re already running. That’s my comment.

R. Leonard: Thank you for that comprehensive presentation. You mentioned your deputy commissioner, and I want to acknowledge the work that she did in bringing you into a good place to start your work, and obviously a lot of work done. So thank you for that.

We did have a presentation by the Attorney General’s office last year around the budget, and this has similarities, but it also has some differences as well. If I can use the term, it’s a richer budget than was presented by the Attorney General, with more people in the office. You’ve had the advantage of now going through and looking at what you want to be doing, and that was what we wanted — to give you that freedom to develop the framework as you saw fit.

You mentioned there are a couple of pieces where your mandate is anticipated to be expanded but it hasn’t yet, and I wanted to know if that was built in to this budget or if you anticipate that you’ll be coming and it’ll be expanded that much more to accommodate the new mandates. That’s often what happens.

Also, maybe because there is obviously some question around the structure with management and different levels…. I recognize that you get longevity in an organization when there’s room for people to grow. Are you intending to fill — well, obviously — these positions over time as people move up the ladder? Is that part of the idea around sustainability? I can’t quite grasp the sustainability aspect of it with management, and I’m hearing other members grappling with that. So maybe if you could help explain it a little more.

K. Govender: Sure. And sorry. That was your second question. Your first question?

R. Leonard: It was around expanding the mandate and the impact on the budget.

K. Govender: Right. Thank you. On the first question, we have built in, absolutely, the full mandate to this budget. The timing really makes a difference whether we are doing more in this current fiscal to prepare for the coming into force of the provisions in April or whether it’s going to be a bit later next year, in which case some of the preparation will happen next fiscal.

[8:50 a.m.]

It doesn’t make a huge impact on the overall budget for next fiscal. It does a little bit in terms of how much of our current budget we spend or not. It certainly makes a difference to our planning processes. But in terms of the actual numbers, it doesn’t. It’s not anticipated that we’d come back to you saying: “Now we have the inquiry powers. Now we need another $1 million.” That’s not the approach we’ve taken. We’ve built it all into the next year’s budget because we anticipate, if we get that budget, that we would be doing that hiring next year, anyway. We’d have the staff in place next year, whether we do the hiring this year or early in the new fiscal.

I hope that answers your first question. In terms of the sustainability, if you imagine an organization that’s mostly more junior roles and then the senior leadership changes in five years…. I think you are creating a lot more instability in the organization. There won’t be the leadership built in. You’ll have a couple of people left but a new vision. I think the way these offices are designed, there’s a new vision when there’s a new officer. That’s part of what keeps them fresh and revitalized. It also creates some instability.

I think you can see from the other independent offices that they’ve also built in strong senior leadership teams in order to create that sustainability long term. It’s not junior people, whose role isn’t to create vision — it’s to do what’s being asked of them — and then the people who are responsible for the vision turning over. This is about having strong roles to hold that vision in place.

The other piece is that unlike some of the other independent offices — some of them are in this role, but others are not — we are not delivering direct services, and we are not adjudicating individual matters. The mandate really is these bigger philosophical issues around systemic change, and I think those kinds of issues lend themselves well to having a senior team as opposed to junior people that are supposed to be implementing those kinds of individual decisions or mandate.

B. D’Eith (Chair): All right, Members. We’ve actually got to wrap things up, I think. No more questions? Great.

Thank you very much, Kasari, for coming in and for spending a little bit of extra time with us today. It is important to really dig in, as we have. We really appreciate the thorough presentation. As Ronna-Rae said, we wanted to wait for you, for the commissioner…

K. Govender: Thank you very much for the questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): …in order to actually hear what the vision was. So thank you for your vision.

We’ll take a short recess. Thanks.

The committee recessed from 8:52 a.m. to 8:58 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner — Mike McEvoy.

Welcome. Nice to see you again.

OFFICE OF THE INFORMATION
AND PRIVACY COMMISSIONER

M. McEvoy: Nice to see the committee. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, hon. Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the committee. Joining me at the table this morning are Deputy Commissioner oline Twiss and the executive director of shared services, Dave Van Swieten, with whom I’m sure you are familiar by this point, who serves in the capacity for all four officers of the Legislature headquartered at 947 Fort Street. Also, immediately behind me are my deputy commissioner, Jeannette Van Den Bulk, and our senior communications director, Jane Zatylny.

Let me begin by thanking you for the opportunity to present the budget and service plan for the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia. This represents our third meeting this calendar year, having appeared here last May and then again in September via conference call about the capital budget adjustment request needed to complete the modification of the lobbyists’ registry work. That work, of course, is in preparation for the new lobbyist registration expected to come into force next year.

[9:00 a.m.]

Turning to today’s budget presentation, I would like to begin by summarizing the documents before you. They include the statutory officer cover memo, with the four enclosed budget tables; the three-year budget and service plan for both of my offices; the respective offices’ annual reports; and the four privacy activity sheets for B.C. students. As I serve both as registrar of lobbyists and Information and Privacy Commissioner, I will briefly highlight some of the key accomplishments of the two offices, outline our priorities for the coming fiscal year and detail our budget request.

I begin with my role as registrar of lobbyists. As registrar, I have the legislative duty to monitor and enforce the Lobbyists Registration Act, most commonly referred to as the LRA. That duty expanded when the Lobbyists Registration Amendment Act, 2017, came into force on May 1, 2018.

One of its main provisions is a two-year cooling-off period for lobbyists who are former public office holders. This was a response to one of five recommendations made by my office in a 2013 special report for improving lobbying transparency in B.C. Lobbyists subject to the cooling-off period can request that I exempt them from the two-year prohibition. I have received six such requests to date, and my decisions denying each can be found on the ORL website.

The registry’s most recent focus has been on implementing the Lobbyists Registration Amendment Act, 2018, which was approved by the Legislative Assembly last November but which has not yet been brought into force. These amendments, encompassing the remainder of our 2013 special report recommendations, set out significant changes that increase transparency for lobbying in British Columbia. They include a requirement for lobbyists to complete a monthly report of their activities. You can review the bill’s additional reforms in detail, beginning on page 6 of our budget submission.

I welcome these amendments. They will, amongst other things, bring greater transparency to the actual lobbying that is happening in B.C. through monthly reporting requirements. They will also provide greater transparency about gifts and who controls, directs or funds lobbying.

The ORL’s key priorities for the 2021 fiscal year are two-pronged. The first is to ensure the implementation of the Lobbyists Registration Act reforms I have just described. To successfully implement the reforms, we are adapting the federal lobbyists registry system. This work, which will be completed in the 2019-20 fiscal year, involves the design, development and testing of the ORL’s new lobbyists registry.

Once the new legislation comes into force in 2021, our focus will shift to monitoring the new system for any necessary improvements. As you know, the committee recommended $500,000 in capital funds to complete this registry system work. To date, we have spent just about the $200,000 allocated in this fiscal year.

In the 2021 fiscal year, we will prepare for the increases in compliance reviews and investigations that the new legislation is expected to bring. We anticipate these increases will result from the new monthly reporting as well as the new disclosure requirements for areas like political contributions and gifts promised or given.

Our second priority in 2020 will be to ensure that the new legislative changes are well understood so that lobbyists achieve a high rate of compliance with the act. We plan to target our stakeholders with an educational campaign that will ramp up at the end of the 2019-20 fiscal year and will continue into the following year.

I will now turn to my role as the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner.

You will see in our annual report that the demands in our office continue to increase dramatically. The total number of files handled by the office rose by 38 percent, from 8,791 to 12,148 files. Requests for information grew by 17 percent, privacy complaints increased by 22 percent, and our review and comment on privacy impact assessments increased by 96 percent.

It is easy to get lost in the sea of numbers and forget the stories behind them. It could be that of the distraught woman whose personal information has been improperly handled by a health authority or a journalist seeking records about an important investigative report on how a public body expended money on a public project.

These stories remind us of two important things. First, in the case of the patient, the public places great trust in private organizations and public bodies to use and protect their personal information. The second story reminds us that information public bodies possess belongs to the public, and subject to certain limitations, the public has a right to it.

Freedom-of-information legislation is one of democracy’s most important ways of holding our public bodies accountable. As commissioners have stressed on many past occasions, robust access to information laws is the oxygen of democracy.

[9:05 a.m.]

Does maintaining an access-to-information system mean resources are required? Of course it does. Just as elections cost money to conduct, these matters represent the cost of maintaining our democracy.

My office is aware of the pressures public bodies face when it comes to access to information. Increasingly, these relate to how technology is changing the nature of government information systems. This means that both my office and the public bodies we oversee need to continually adapt and find ways to ensure that we’re able to efficiently and effectively serve the public in this dynamic environment. My office is committed to this goal and also remains committed to helping B.C. public bodies and organizations do the same.

I’m now pleased to turn to the work of our office and some of our major accomplishments over the past year. I advised you last May about the findings of our investigation into the use of personal information by B.C.’s three main political parties. That investigation concluded that B.C.’s NDP, Liberal and Green parties are generally collecting too much information from potential voters without proper consent. I have made 17 recommendations to help them improve their practices, and I can now report to you that the parties have made much progress in responding to these recommendations, particularly in regard to training campaign volunteers.

I can also report to you that our office is working with B.C.’s Chief Electoral Officer and B.C.’s political parties to establish a code of practice that will clearly spell out the legal responsibilities of political parties when it comes to handling voters’ personal information. A successful outcome of this initiative, I believe, will undoubtedly enhance public trust in our political campaign system.

The Legislative Assembly itself also drew the attention of my office last year and that of my fellow officers of the Legislature, Ombudsperson Jay Chalke and former Merit Commissioner Fiona Spencer. In February 2019, we wrote jointly to the Legislative Assembly Management Committee urging the adoption of a modern transparency and accountability framework for the administrative aspects of the Legislative Assembly. If adopted, those recommendations would result in greater oversight of the Legislative Assembly’s administration through our public sector access-to-information legislation. This would promote public confidence in the administration of our Legislative Assembly.

We also partnered with Canada’s federal, territorial and provincial privacy regulators to build on our series of privacy awareness plans — lesson plans for teachers of grades 6 to 12 students — and introducing a new series of activity sheets for children in grades 1 to 3. These sheets were designed to help parents and teachers start conversations about protecting their personal information on line. As you can see from the samples I have included in your packages, the series puts a privacy twist on familiar children’s games and activities, including privacy Snakes and Ladders and a word jumble and privacy-related terms. Both the new activity sheets and lesson plans are available in English and in French.

In addition, we launched a comprehensive suite of educational products for B.C.’s private sector, fulfilling a goal from our last budget and service plan. PrivacyRight informs private organizations of all sizes about their obligations to properly protect people’s personal information. The resources we have prepared, which include monthly themed webinars, podcasts and guidance documents, have already been well utilized by British Columbians. PrivacyRight updates are now being spotlighted each month in the Better Business Bureau of B.C.’s accredited business newsletter, which is sent to more than 4,400 BBB members. They have also been shown on television screens in 60 Service B.C. locations.

Just last month I released an audit report on how well B.C. medical clinics are attending to patient privacy. These clinics hold some of our most sensitive personal information. Of the 22 clinics reviewed, I found that some were complying with their obligations to protect patient information, while others had gaps in their privacy management programs. We have made guidance available for all clinics to help them properly protect their patients’ information.

These three initiatives — activity sheets for children, a comprehensive educational initiative for B.C.’s private sector and a review of medical clinics in the province — exemplify the timely and relevant assistance we provide for British Columbians and B.C. organizations.

Now I would like to move to my priorities for the OIPC for the fiscal 2020-21 year. As public demand for service from my office grows, my priority remains the provision of timely responses to citizen complaints, reviews and adjudications. We currently have 130 investigation files awaiting assignment and 123 files moving through the inquiry process towards adjudication.

[9:10 a.m.]

Some historical perspective is in order. Between 2013-14 and ’14-15, our complaints and appeals jumped from 1,165 to 1,536, an increase of 32 percent. This caused an unprecedented backlog of 300 files that year. Since then, appeals and complaints have continued at this high level, reaching over 1,600 this year.

We have addressed the backlogs within our current resources by practising continuous improvement, realigning internal resources and streamlining case file management and administrative processes when possible. As a result, our investigation backlog has been cut by more than half and now sits at around 130. It is only through the efforts of an extraordinary team that we have been able to meet this growing demand within our existing resources.

My second priority is a campaign to strongly encourage B.C. businesses and other organizations to adopt robust privacy management programs. This is necessary because B.C. businesses increasingly operate beyond our province’s borders, and privacy laws outside B.C. are changing quickly.

Under the new laws in Europe, for example, organizations that do not follow mandatory breach notification requirements can be fined up to €10 million or 2 percent of worldwide turnover even if they operate outside of Europe.

In Canada, the new federal mandatory breach notification requirements have been adopted in Alberta and areas of Canada where the federal legislation applies. All of this puts increasing pressure on B.C. legislators to ensure that our privacy laws keep up. In this context, B.C. organizations must ready themselves to address statutory obligations both here and abroad. We are a trading province, and as I have noted on many previous occasions, our businesses operate nationally and globally, where personal information travels across borders in an instant, whether or not the business has a physical presence in other places.

If B.C. businesses do not keep up with the quickly developing environment, they will suffer financial and reputational consequences. Supporting B.C. organizations to adopt privacy management programs will assist them in developing and implementing practices that are compliant with existing and anticipated law. It will also help them meet the expectations of citizens in B.C. and beyond who expect proper management of their personal information and ensure that the public has trust in what they do.

I’d like to turn briefly now to our work with the Asia Pacific Privacy Authorities, which this committee has supported. APPA, as it’s called, is the principal forum for multiple privacy and data protection authorities in the Asia-Pacific region. The OIPC is a leading privacy authority in APPA as a result of our work for British Columbians and our role as the organization’s secretariat. Again, we are grateful for the committee’s support for this work, which began in December 2018.

Topics addressed at the APPA forum this past year included children’s privacy, artificial intelligence and ethics, implementation and global reach of Europe’s GDPR, and a discussion led by New Zealand’s privacy commissioner on ways to prevent on-line dissemination of terrorist and violent extremist content following the Christchurch event in May 2019.

I would like to spend my final minutes summarizing our budget request for 2021. But first I wish to acknowledge the teams I have worked with at the OIPC and the ORL. Every day they bring commitment and expertise to their work in service to the people of B.C., and I feel privileged to work with each and every one of them.

The budget for my two offices currently breaks down as follows: 67 percent for salaries and benefits; 5 percent for professional services; 18 percent for fixed costs, such as our shared cost services — rent, utilities, and so forth; 9 percent for operating expenses like amortization and office expenses; and 1 percent for travel. We have a complement in our office of 41 positions.

For the forthcoming fiscal year, my office is faced with an adjustment of $178,000 in inflationary cost, of which we are self-funding $46,000 after looking for savings within our budget. Our adjusted budget request to this committee is for $132,000 to cover inflation.

We have absorbed some of the cost pressures by exhausting most of the flexibility in our budget. We could not absorb more without reducing staffing resources and adding to case backlog. In addition, I expect the lobbyist registry to be complete in 2021, and at that time, $108,000 of the annual amortization charges of the capital investment will commence.

The combined operating budget request, then, to cover these new and ongoing cost pressures is $240,000, for a total operating budget of $6.942 million and a capital budget of $29,000 for the ’20-21 fiscal year. This represents an increase of only 1.97 percent for cost pressures and 1.61 percent for the amortization costs, for a total budget increase of 3.58 percent compared to the current fiscal year.

[9:15 a.m.]

Mr. Chair, this concludes my remarks. Thank you, again, for your attention this morning. We would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.

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

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation.

I have just one question. You made reference a few times…. I read and heard you today talking about how you’ve saved money through continuous improvement. I’m just very curious about what that actually looks like. It seems like it’s working very hard to meet your goals.

M. McEvoy: Yeah. It’s worked very well. There’s not a lot of rocket science in it. It essentially means taking apart every component, from the moment a phone call comes in from the public to the end result of closing a file. All of the components necessary to do that. Asking ourselves if we need each and every one of those components. Asking ourselves what is necessary to complete that job while still making sure that we treat each and every citizen, organization, public body fairly in what we do.

It’s not something you do in a month or two and then just leave it on the shelf. It has to be something you continually look at as things evolve, as technologies change. The way we collect information changes. You know, looking at issues about how much of the work we do is on line and so forth. It’s called continuous improvement because, again, after taking things apart, we don’t stop there. We review this stuff continually with our senior leadership team and go through with each staff member about what improvements can be made.

M. Dean: Thanks for all your work, and thank you for your presentation.

Just for the record, could you give us what the percentage is of the salary increments, in the budget for 2020-21, by each employee group?

M. McEvoy: I’m going to ask Dave to give us some assistance. By each employee group. I’m not sure that I have that particular number at my fingertips. If we don’t, we would absolutely, of course, get that to you.

By each employee group, you’re referring to….

M. Dean: You mention here union, classified and management.

M. McEvoy: Yes. Everybody is excluded. We have, I think, a couple of salaries that would be tied to what the union increases are. I believe that’s probably about two FTEs, if I’m not mistaken, of the 41. The rest are excluded employees. Of course, we look to government in terms of what the general wage increase is, in terms of giving us guidance about what the salary increases would be for the balance of those staff members.

M. Dean: Thank you. I think, just for the committee, we’d like it on the record. So if it’s not available today, then if it could be followed up, that would be helpful.

M. McEvoy: We will get that for you, of course.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Excellent. Thanks.

Interjection.

M. McEvoy: I’m sorry. Dave is actually in a position to answer that question now.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yeah. Go ahead, Dave. Then we’ve got it on the record today.

D. Van Swieten: The schedule A staff that Michael referred to are the excluded versions of positions that mirror union classifications. Because they mirror the union classifications…. That collective agreement goes for another two years, and there’s an increment scheduled for April 1 of each of the next two fiscal years equalling 2 percent.

Michael referred to the excluded management classifications. We don’t know until June of each year what the particular increment will be going forward. So in the budgets we present today…. We don’t put any lift in for those positions until we actually know what that increment will be.

Does that help?

M. Dean: Can I just clarify? The $143,000 is extra, though, in this budget proposal, even though you don’t know…. I’m sorry. I can’t reconcile that with not putting the lift in.

D. Van Swieten: The part I’ll add to that is…. If you think back to last year, we weren’t in a position to know what the increments were going to be for June of this year. So the inflation before you includes the increment given out this past June, which is based on the same parameters that government offers its excluded management positions.

M. Dean: When does it take effect? If it’s recommended in June, does it kick in, in the following April?

D. Van Swieten: July 1. We usually hear in….

M. Dean: Some of it is retro, then.

D. Van Swieten: We usually hear in June what the amount is, based on performance. Then it’s implemented for July 1.

[9:20 a.m.]

That 3 percent lift that was given this year…. We’re not asking for funding for that in the in-year, but we are asking for funding for that for April 1.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Could you explain the capital budget, just so we’re absolutely clear? You’ve mentioned that there’s a capital budget decrease in ’20-21, but then…. Could you just talk to the capital budget so I understand what you’re doing?

M. McEvoy: Right. Thank you for that question. The capital budget we originally asked for, for ’20-21…. The entire project was going to be rolled out over two years, but as you know from our conversation in September, through the work of our contractor, we’ve been able to advance that work to get it up sooner. This means that the capital we intended to spend next year is no longer going to appear in next year’s capital budget. It’s been moved up to this fiscal year.

Then, of course, once the project is complete, which we expect will be some time in this fiscal year…. The way government accounting systems work, that cost then becomes amortized. We, in effect, pay that cost back on a straight-line method over the next five years. That’s where the capital that we’re expending….

The repayment amortization payments on our operational side get rolled into next year’s budget. I think it’s about $108,000, if I’m not mistaken. That will continue over the five-year period until that capital has been repaid.

B. D’Eith (Chair): That’s what I thought. I just wanted to be very clear about that.

Any other questions from members at all?

Thank you very much, Michael, and your team. We really appreciate all the work that you do. I know it’s very complex.

M. McEvoy: It’s getting more complex, I might add.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Always love hearing your stories about what’s going on. Thank you so much for your time.

We’ll take a short recess. Actually, why don’t we not take a recess. We’ve got Dave. Do you mind just staying, Dave?

D. Van Swieten: I can stay behind. I think Commissioner McEvoy probably has some people to talk to after this.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Why don’t we give it a very short recess so that we have time, and then we have some questions for Dave on the Merit Commissioner.

The committee recessed from 9:22 a.m. to 9:25 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the Office of the Merit Commissioner. As we do not actually have a merit commissioner at this moment, we have Dave Van Swieten, who’s been very kind to come in and talk to the budget and give members a chance to ask any questions if they want.

Now, this is a stand-pat budget at this point. I don’t see any increases or whatnot. But maybe if you wouldn’t mind speaking to it, Dave, and then Mitzi will be asking a question.

OFFICE OF THE MERIT COMMISSIONER

D. Van Swieten: Sure. I’ve got a few sentences I’ll read off here, and that might help set some context.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, Deputy Chair and committee members for the invitation to respond to the budget submission made by the previous Merit Commissioner, Fiona Spencer. Commissioner Spencer had worked with corporate shared services per this submission before you, prior to her departure in September of this year.

The budget submission represents a stand-pat budget of $1.365 million in each of the next three years, reflecting a zero percentage increase from the current fiscal year. No budget has been requested through this submission, as inflationary pressures have been absorbed through the projected decreases in other costs in the upcoming fiscal years.

At this time, there’s not been an appointment of a new merit commissioner, so I’m here today to address any questions the committee may have. If there are any questions I’m not able to address, I will work with staff to respond promptly with written responses following today’s appearance. I look forward to assisting the new Merit Commissioner deliver on a mandate of the office once an appointment has been made.

Any questions you may have, I will do what I can.

M. Dean: Just as a member of the committee to recruit a new merit commissioner — and Kate, I’m sure, will give us an update — we’re at the stage where we’re seeking references for the selected candidate.

Can we say that?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk of the Legislative Assem­bly): The committee continues its work at this time and certainly does hope to present to the Legislative Assembly a recommendation as soon as possible.

M. Dean: Well said. Thank you. I just wanted to assure this committee that work was ongoing.

Okay. So can we talk about the change in the budget, then?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk): Yes.

M. Dean: Okay. All right.

A decision was taken in terms of the budget for this commissioner. Whereas there had been a per diem without a kind of capped limit on it — so the amount that was paid out to the commissioner in every year had kind of escalated — a cap has been put on it. So candidates applying for the new position have been advised that they will only be allowed to claim a certain number of per diems in the year, which is actually a change. You will have seen that in the budget submission.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Excellent. Did you have a question for Dave or just wanted to make the point about the per diem?

M. Dean: Yeah. I just wanted to….

B. D’Eith (Chair): Oh, okay.

Any questions from members at all? Okay.

Thank you very much, Dave. We just mainly wanted to have the opportunity to ask any questions we had.

I appreciate the clarification, Mitzi.

Thanks for all your work. It’s got to be getting up to — what? — your 30th presentation now.

D. Van Swieten: Thirty-seventh, but who’s counting.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thirty-seven — the new world record. Thanks so much.

If I could have a motion to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:29 a.m.