The committee met at 3:08 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We are right now continuing consideration of the annual review of the statutory offices’ budgets in British Columbia, the three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budgetary estimates for ’20 and ’21. We really appreciate that we have Jay Chalke, the Ombudsperson, on the phone, and we’re very happy to have David Paradiso and Sara Darling here as well.

We really appreciate you coming back. I know you’ve already done a very fulsome presentation to the committee, and you’ve also taken the time to respond to us again with some questions. The committee had requested that we have a face to face or at least a phone call, Jay, on one issue.

It’d be really great if we could…. The main question that we really wanted to deal with was the request for the Indigenous liaison position. You have sent a supplementary funding request, a more fulsome discussion of that. Jay, or your staff, if you wouldn’t mind maybe running us through that, then if we had some questions…. We’d really appreciate that. Thanks so much.

[3:10 p.m.]

Review of Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Absolutely. Good afternoon, Chair, Deputy Chair and members. Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you again about our budget for next year and, specifically, the Indigenous liaison officer, albeit telephonically. I’m pleased to have this opportunity. With you, as the Chair noted, is our Deputy Ombudsperson, David Paradiso, and communications and outreach lead, Sara Darling.

We’re happy to answer your questions. Before doing so, I just thought I would take two to three minutes just outlining the underlying rationale for the position, the approach that we are proposing to take and the deliverables from that. To assist in that explanation we, as the Chair noted, created a short document specifically about this position. It’s standing on what was in front of you in our original budget request. I assume you have that in front of you now.

The bottom line is that the Indigenous liaison officer position will be an outward-facing position working with Indigenous communities in the province, carrying out three main tasks over the next two years — first, addressing the chronic and longstanding problem of underrepresentation of Indigenous people among the public who turn to us for assistance.

One of our six strategic priorities over the past five years or that we’re in the middle of, from 2016 to 2021, is to address such underserved communities. The people who need us the most are often living below the poverty line. They face multiple barriers to employment. They sometimes struggle with literacy and are generally unaware of the oversight services available to them when they encounter a problem with public bodies.

They need to know that we’re here to listen to their concerns, impartially, and that their concerns will be taken seriously and investigated where necessary. This part of the task over the next three years is a very practical, straightforward approach that will be directly delivering awareness sessions, meeting with individuals and organizations to leverage existing awareness-raising opportunities and, in consultation with Indigenous communities, developing communications materials and awareness-raising materials that have an Indigenous lens.

It’s quite evident to us from our work so far that, in Indigenous communities, this is a time-intensive exercise and, to be effective, requires a more concentrated effort than we’ve been able to present, given our current level of resources.

That’s sort of the first concentric circle. Stepping out a little bit further, the second and more developmental aspect involves deepening our relationships with Indigenous communities and understanding of Indigenous legal and governance practice, with a view to really doing two things.

First, to enrich our investigations, particularly when we’re reviewing whether a public authority acted fairly and reasonably when serving Indigenous people. I think we’re all aware that many public services are trying to improve their service to Indigenous people. So when we investigate government and investigate other public authorities under our jurisdiction, we want to be well informed by those practices.

Then the second aspect is to develop capacity. We are receiving requests, so far, from Indigenous governments to support First Nations governments or treaty self-governments on issues. They’re, in their own governance, developing a complaints process, strengthening their customer service relationships, developing dispute resolution within those communities and enhancing administrative fairness. We want our advice to be well informed and useful to them and not inconsistent with Indigenous practices and tradition.

Lastly, the third aspect is really, in the latter part of these two years, that the position will lead to preparation in consultation with Indigenous communities of a longer-term Indigenous community service plan for our office. This plan will serve as a blueprint to continue to effectively engage with communities to assess where we’re at and what we’ve been able to do and what strategies appear to be most promising and most cost-effective.

[3:15 p.m.]

If that plan has budget implications, it would be before this committee in the fall of 2021, as part of our ’22-23 budget process. It’s premature at this time to speculate on that. We really just feel the need to get going on this and to come back with a more informed plan.

In short, this is a single, outward-facing staff position that we think will have an immediate outreach focus but also a longer-term developmental aspect. Both of those aspects will allow us to address current service limitations, I think, by doing what we see as critically important work in Indigenous communities.

With that, my colleagues and I would be happy to answer your questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Jay. We appreciate the overview of that.

I’d like to open the floor to questions. Members, did you have any questions?

M. Dean: Thank you to everybody for taking more time and answering our questions here. Can I ask: do you know how many Indigenous staff are already in the office?

J. Chalke: We don’t know that. I think it’s fair to say that we’re not highly represented with Indigenous staff. That’s an important thing we need to address, but I can’t definitively…. Candidly, we don’t collect that information, in terms of the Indigenous status of our staff.

I would say that in respect to the Indigenous liaison officer, it would be our plan to seek the appropriate approvals from the Humans Rights Tribunal to focus this competition — to fill this position with someone of Indigenous background.

M. Dean: Okay. Thank you for that. Have you taken advantage of or benefited at all from any of the GBA+ training that’s being made available through the gender equity office to the public service as well as to independent officers?

J. Chalke: Yes, absolutely. We’re quite interested in that, and a number of our folks have already engaged in that. It certainly will be a process that has a high profile among the independent officers. Definitely, diversity in all its aspects is increasingly an issue for us to be better informed on. Yes, the GBA+ is a significant thing for us as well.

M. Dean: Okay, thanks. That should help to inform your planning, as well as in the office — in terms of your work, as well as your structure.

I guess the concern that I have is on creating a separate position. Originally, I think, we thought there was going to be a two-year position. They were going to write a plan, and then the plan was going to be more integrated across the whole of the office. But then your follow-up response indicated, well, no. That position would still be there.

I guess my concern is that having that as a separate position kind of puts everything as their responsibility. That could be pretty isolated, whereas I think our approach is absolute integration. I guess if you look at the approach that we’ve taken with the Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity, it is within an established ministry and works across all ministries. All ministers, in their mandate letters, were told to take into consideration their duties under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous people.

That’s my worry — that when you have something separate, it’s not all integrated. Really, this work should be integrated in every aspect of the operations of the office. I really need to understand the benefits of this model over another approach that is a much more integrated approach.

J. Chalke: I have absolutely no difficulty with what you’re saying, come two years from now. I just don’t think we have the current resources to actually, in a respectful way, in consultation with Indigenous communities…. We’re very thin on the ground. I’ve got staff that are investigating complaints from the public. I don’t have that kind of resource to do exactly what you’re saying.

[3:20 p.m.]

I hear what you’re saying. The longer-term plan isn’t to come back and create, if I can call it that, a parallel universe here. The longer-term plan is to kind of accomplish that notion that in all our work, we are applying this kind of lens but also learning how we can actually make our day-to-day work…. That is very much what we are seeking to do.

For example, when governments survey Indigenous people, it’s our job, and it’s our job to investigate that service. It’s important that we not only appreciate the service that’s delivered but also ensure that our investigation practices, outcomes and judgments about whether or not that service breached the Ombudsperson Act in some way, in terms of unfair or unreasonable — that we’re doing so in a way that’s well informed and quite nuanced and understands the Indigenous reality of those service recipients….

I think we need to do some intensive work to get there, but in the longer run, yes, I have no difficulty with what you’re saying. In fact, that’s the position I would like to be in. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I would like to get there.

R. Leonard: Hello, Jay, and welcome to the staff that have their smiling faces here.

You kind of started to touch on…. There are two aspects. There are people who have complaints who happen to be First Nations who are not accessing your service. But you also seem to be focusing on administrative fairness within First Nations communities.

The first thing that popped into my head was jurisdiction. If you have the authority to investigate something or the authority to make determinations, it should be with jurisdictions that you have authority over. I’m guessing that First Nations communities don’t rest there. I’m worried a bit about the idea of confusion about jurisdiction. I had originally noticed that there was this cross-jurisdictional question, and I was wondering: where is the crossover? Where is the intersection of jurisdiction? Just commenting on that.

J. Chalke: Certainly, the devolution of what have been public services delivered by public authorities to Indigenous communities, or the devolution, in some respects, from the federal government through now provincially delivered services, or Indigenous-delivered services with a provincial element to them, raises jurisdictional issues for us sometimes. But those are neutral to this budget request. We have those issues where we have to address those questions of jurisdiction every day, and do so.

I think the issue that we arrive at, assuming we have jurisdiction and are thus investigating, is to make sure that we understand the Indigenous context in which those services are being both delivered and received sometimes. That’s important for us. But absolutely. The jurisdictional questions aren’t getting any easier, but we have to face those regardless of whether we have an Indigenous liaison office or not.

R. Leonard: Okay. Thanks, Jay. I guess I maybe need an example of an instance where a First Nations community’s jurisdiction would fall under your purview.

J. Chalke: Okay. We can maybe get you a few of those. Certainly, in situations where communities maybe are delivering a public service on a delegated basis or on a contracted basis with a public authority, we often have issues where sometimes, even in those circumstances, we’ll still have jurisdiction to superintend or investigate those services. But every single one of those is an individual determination, because it has to do with what the legal and structural relationships are between the public entity and the contracted or delegated or sometimes empowered-by-statute other entity. So we have to look at those on a case-by-case basis.

[3:25 p.m.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks, Jay. I had a quick question. I think one of the members brought this up when we were discussing the budget.

One is just the idea that, normally, in the structure of employment, you wouldn’t necessarily have a liaison making the plan. Normally, a liaison would implement a plan. It just seems kind of cart before the horse, in a sense. I’m just wondering if you could address that. It seems to me that it might be more of a management planning that’s informed, as opposed to having a liaison make the plan. It kind of seems backwards to me.

Could you perhaps weigh in on that a bit?

J. Chalke: I think that’s a fair comment. Most of the planning exercises that we would do in the organization are team-based and will be informed by the Indigenous liaison officer. Obviously, the plan that comes back before you is ultimately my responsibility, and I’m accountable for the plan that we would promulgate as an organization.

Having said that, I think it’s pretty critically important that we do so in consultation with Indigenous communities and in consultation with the public authorities of all manner that are delivering services to Indigenous people. We need to do that work. The Indigenous liaison officer would be the individual who would be the arms and legs doing a lot of the preliminary work. But ultimately, it’s my responsibility.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Just a follow-up. One of the concerns, too, is the way of approaching this very important issue with nine offices. If we go down this path with your office, is this going to become a sort of precedent for other offices? If you multiply it out, we’re concerned about what that might be in terms of budgetary pressure on the offices, generally.

That also speaks to what Mitzi was talking about in regards to: shouldn’t this be integrated into everything already? Why are we having a separate liaison officer?

I just wanted to convey that concern. This is a very important priority for the government and for everybody in the House, to make sure that we embrace reconciliation. But the manner in which we do that is….

[The bells were rung.]

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

Recess. Thanks.

The committee recessed from 3:27 p.m. to 3:39 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We were right in the middle of questions when the bell rung, in terms of…. We’re with the Office of the Ombudsperson, and Doug Clovechok had a question.

D. Clovechok: Thanks, Jay. I appreciate you waiting and appreciate David and Sara being here again today.

Just a couple of clarification points. First of all, let me say to you that I completely agree with the position that you’re trying to establish. I think it’s important. But just for clarification for me, I’d just like you to run me through what your vision is in terms of the development of the process of the position and how that candidate selection will be made.

[3:40 p.m.]

J. Chalke: I’ve already asked our human resources person to explore, pending approval, the process by which one obtains the necessary approval from the Human Rights Tribunal to restrict the position to an Indigenous person.

I certainly believe that it’s critically important that this position be staffed in that manner. But as for the mechanics of it, we would be holding a competition no different than other public service competitions, and we’d make a point of making sure that we were reaching out to ensure that Indigenous British Columbians were aware. We might be doing some exploring and marketing of the position that’s unique, but the actual process would be a public service competition.

D. Clovechok: Thanks for that.

Just a thought. Would you be considering having an Indigenous person on that selection committee?

J. Chalke: Absolutely. In fact, I would insist on it. Yes.

D. Clovechok: Fantastic.

Just a point of clarification. Does the ILO position have the opportunity to participate in the development of the service plan?

J. Chalke: Yes, they would. Even during the two years, we’d be expecting them to participate in that development.

D. Clovechok: Would they be involved in the policy and the strategy and the process that you would try to employ throughout your organization to indigenize, if I can use the word, your processes?

J. Chalke: I think that’s part of their role. I want to very much focus much of the work on external awareness-raising. But obviously, I think it is all to the good to start and intensify efforts to bring an Indigenous focus within our organization. Our staff have all completed cultural literacy training over the past year. We did the Bridges program. A number also did the San’yas program.

Certainly, when I go out on tour, which I try to do a few times a year, we make efforts to connect increasingly with Indigenous communities when we’re out and about. I think all of that adds together. There’s no one thing. Certainly, in coordination with other efforts, I think it can help bring a more Indigenous lens to our organization.

D. Clovechok: That’s good. Thank you very much.

J. Chalke: If I could just go back to Ronna-Rae’s question about jurisdiction.

One of the things — and it’s an unfortunate kind of misconception — is that even people who live on reserve and are receiving a number of services from the federal government…. It’s critically important to recognize that those individuals still have lots of dealings with provincial entities — B.C. Hydro, ICBC, the people that administered the now-eliminated bridge tolls, for example, and lots of general public services.

Only afterwards, people have said: “We have this long-standing problem with a public authority.” We say: “Well, do you know we’re here to investigate that?” The reaction from some individuals who live on reserve is: “No, we didn’t know that.”

I think that it’s a bit of a misconception sometimes that people who are living on reserve are only getting their services from the federal government. That’s just not true, given the breadth of our jurisdiction.

The other is just a comment about integration. I would just like to say that Sara, who’s in front of you there, is our outreach lead. This position would be integrating, in terms of outreach, with a lot of our other outreach efforts and also with our prevention team, who you’re familiar with from Rachel’s appearance a few weeks ago, the lead on our prevention team. I certainly see this Indigenous liaison officer having links to and integrating both with that main-line, if I can call it that, or traditional outreach team as well as our prevention team.

[3:45 p.m.]

R. Leonard: Thank you. Jay, I just wanted to clarify that when I was asking, I was asking around the jurisdictional issues, not individual complaints. Absolutely, every single person who lives in British Columbia deserves the same rights and freedoms that we all seek to have and to have access to all of the services that are available.

It’s the last bullet in your phase 2 where you actually speak to having been approached by First Nation governments and treaty self-governments seeking our assistance. That was my question. It was around the jurisdiction to be able to be providing service in that way.

The question, then, is, if there are individual complainants who have complaints about their governments, whether or not you have the jurisdiction to be intervening on their behalf.

J. Chalke: Aha. Thank you for clarifying that. No, we don’t have jurisdiction over First Nations government exercising their authority as First Nations under the Indian Act, nor do we have jurisdiction where a treaty self-government is exercising their authority under a treaty. So in respect of those activities, those are outside our jurisdiction.

What we have had happen is that those governments have approached us and said, for example: “In our First Nation, we don’t have a complaints process. We haven’t ever collected information. We don’t have a procedure for how to deal with complaints. Will you help us with that?”

It’s not that that’s going to end up with a complaint to the Ombudsperson of British Columbia, but it is certainly…. You have governments who are trying to be fair in the province, and they’re trying to serve the people who are receiving services from that government in a manner that’s more fair.

It seems that part of reconciliation and part of promoting Indigenous governance is to help those governments when they ask for help — for us to be in a position to assist them with those efforts. It’s ultimately their call. It’s their government. But certainly a number of them are interested in help.

For us, it’s really a question of capacity, and we want to be able to do that in a way that is respectful of them but well informed by their traditions. It isn’t necessarily an ombuds answer. It’s not necessarily an Ombudsperson Act kind of answer. That may not work in this community. So we want to have sufficient expertise and develop sufficient understanding of both legal and governance traditions in Indigenous communities so that we can provide that assistance where necessary.

Absolutely outside our current jurisdiction, but I think it’s a relatively modest contribution to good Indigenous governance in the province when they’re asking for our assistance.

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

Are there any other questions from members at all?

We really appreciate, Jay, you taking the time to answer these questions and also just to walk us through this important consideration in terms of taking care of Indigenous issues within the Ombudsperson’s office.

Thank you, David and Sara, for coming. We really appreciate it.

If I could just take a short recess so that we can get to the next presenter.

The committee recessed from 3:48 p.m. to 3:50 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): We have Carol Bellringer here, the Auditor General. Thank you so much for coming back. We really appreciate it.

We are meeting with a few of the officers. We had a few questions that we did by correspondence, and then the members…. I couldn’t answer the questions, so we thought that it would be better to just invite you back. We really appreciate you spending the time to come back and answer some of the committee’s questions around some of the issues around your budget and what your plans are. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for your staff coming too. We really appreciate that.

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

C. Bellringer: Thank you. We’ll do our best.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Let’s open the floor to questions with members, unless there was anything that you wanted to start with.

Okay. There were some issues around trying to compare apples and apples. Did you maybe want to jump in…?

I think that was you, Rich, wasn’t it?

R. Coleman: I think where we weren’t satisfied in our questions the last time around — no reflection on you guys — was this whole thing about the Hydro audit, them paying into general revenue, but you’re absorbing costs.

Then the question in camera went to: who pays for the experts? The expertise is billed to an international accounting firm, but in order to handle the expertise of an audit this complicated, we assume you need to hire people. But you can’t get recompensed, and I’m thinking that’s why the cost is in here.

We’d like to get a better handle of what you think government gets out of this, gets back. That doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that we can look at it and say: “Okay, we know that this is the actual cost, and government is being recompensed on this.” Is there a loss leader here? If not, how are you going to handle the payment of experts, and what have you, in your budget? That was probably as succinctly as I could describe it.

When Nicholas Simons is nodding to me, I’ve got it wrong.

N. Simons: Let it be noted that in 15 years….

C. Bellringer: I’ll answer the question, how I’m seeing some elements of it. The one thing that…. We had some trouble pulling together answers to specific questions for one reason, which I just want to share as a bit of a background.

When we do our budget for the year, we have dozens of decisions that we can make about various areas, both within financial audit as well as performance audit. We did pull together…. Here’s the full budget — in order to do the two plans that we outlined. If you came back with a number different from what we requested, we would go back to both those plans, and we would have to pull apart the bits and pieces and say: “Well, we can skip this bit and do that instead.”

I will say that there’s one discussion that gets quite vigorous around our office, and that’s the extent to which we’re going to audit the school districts. We save a lot of money on travel if we don’t do the financial statement audit, but I have concerns around the oversight of 60 school districts, and we only audit five. I think there’s some work to be done there. I don’t know that it would, overall, save a lot of money, but there are different ways we can approach getting audit work done.

It is hard when we go down to the detail of a particular question, but I’ll do my best to try to answer the one on experts. When we picked up the Hydro audit, it was at the same time as we were at the tail end of doing the UVic audit. We wanted to do another university, and we decided to do UBC. It’s a lot bigger and has a lot more complex issues out there than at UVic, so it also included some areas that needed expert advice in terms of how the accounting should be handled.

[3:55 p.m.]

The other audit that has changed over…. Well, we were doing the Columbia Power Corp. audit. We decided to also do Columbia Basin Trust, because they’re associated in terms of how they’re organized. They also have entered into some significant transactions. As it turns out, that expert budget that we now know we need is not entirely for Hydro. Much of that is also for the Columbia Power Corp. aspects.

We can get the expertise several ways. We can hire someone who happens to know it really well, or we can contract for the services. Ideally, we want to have someone on staff who’s good enough to deal with any issue that could come up. It’s our long-term goal. We had someone who I would put into that category, and he left. He was given a partnership in one of the CPA firms. We can’t compete with that. It’s done. We’re having trouble hiring somebody else of that calibre who can just walk in and be a full-time staff person at the salaries that we give. So we are now into the next phase of: “We need to get the expertise.”

What I saw by proposing to do the Hydro audit was more than just: “Do we do it versus it gets contracted out?” That was a decision from…. It started two years ago, and it was ratified through the budget process last year.

That became a matter of…. I assessed the staff in the Office of the Auditor General of British Columbia, and they are far better at doing financial statement audits than the size of the audits that they were assigned to. They could do much, much more than they were doing, and it was a capacity-building exercise. I felt very strongly that they needed to be given a challenge. They needed to do that to grow that practice. There had been more and more taken away on the financial statements side. It was done to finance the performance audit work. It needed to be built up again.

To pick a big audit that I felt they were capable of doing was why we moved toward doing UBC and doing Hydro. I’ve seen that happening. It involved more than just hiring experts. It also involved a lot of training. Not that we weren’t training before, but we had to do additional training to make sure everybody was up to speed to do audits of that complexity. It involved a lot more time being out in the field and understanding exactly what was going on behind some of the transactions, including quite a bit of planning time at Hydro, for example, where they brought us out and made sure that we understood the way the business runs.

It’s a little bit of a…. Yes, there are dollars associated with the experts that we now have to hire in order to complete those audits. But it’s more than just Hydro. It is incorporating those larger ones, and it’s a shift in the industry from…. Not everything we audit is public sector accounting. The Crown corps. in British Columbia have to follow international financial accounting standards. Those standards are rapidly changing. You can’t actually sign an audit opinion on the statements for the public accounts without fully understanding the impact of IFRS.

Even when we don’t do the audit directly, we still have to rely on the work of the firms. We still have to make sure that we’re confident that the accounting standards that those organizations are applying are going to give you the appropriate results that should be incorporated into the province’s public accounts.

It’s more than just…. If we weren’t doing those audits, we’d still have to do the training. We’d still have to make sure that we have the expertise, and we’d still have to develop the capacity so that over the long term, we’re not running into the problem that we can’t hire. We have to grow people as opposed to being able to just pull them off a shelf outside, because we can’t afford that. We can only afford them if they’ve stayed with us and they have the dedication to the work that we do.

I know it’s not a precise answer to the question. But hopefully, it’s moving us a little bit more to…. Maybe if you can help me figure out what part you’re wanting to know more about.

R. Coleman: Carol, I get that part.

Part of the thing we struggled with was…. B.C. Hydro has been paying, for lack of a better description, probably one of the top seven or eight accounting firms to do their audit for the last however-many years. The struggle for us as a committee, because we don’t know the revenue, is…. In doing the Hydro audit, are you having to subsidize B.C. Hydro at a cheaper rate than they would have paid for the outside audit, when you take into account what they have to pay to government?

[4:00 p.m.]

Is it a net-net for you? In all fairness, you don’t get the revenue. But if you brought the revenue into the cost, would it wash?

C. Bellringer: Some of the complexities in analyzing the audit fee are…. The outside firm that was doing the financial statement audit was also billing for a significant list of other things, and it’s hard to tell what portion they might have…. They may have given up a bit of revenue over here to get it over there. We don’t have their billing information; we just know what they’ve billed. So we can’t do a direct compari­son.

I would say, hours-wise, we believe we are spending more hours than they were but for reasons that we’ve chosen to do so. Could we do it in less hours and still get the work done? Probably. Would we get as much information as we feel we need in order to make sure not only the financial statements are okay and we can sign the audit opinion but that there are no other areas that we think need to be looked into? I don’t know if that’s a fair comment. To a certain degree, there’s proprietary information that the firms haven’t given us permission to share, so we can’t give you all of the copies of their bills. We’re probably….

If you looked at all of our audits, we tend to bill the most recent billing that that organization has received from somebody outside, whether or not that reflects exactly how much time and cost it took us, so that they’re not penalized by moving to us.

The problem then becomes the reverse. When they’re now no longer using us and they now go out to tender, they sometimes end up with a big hit, because we’ve probably been charging less than it would have cost them to go outside, for some. It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other in terms of how many end up having to pay more afterwards, how many end up actually paying less because somebody has chosen to take on the work because they know there are other ways that they can earn revenue. We don’t go back and try to figure that out.

R. Coleman: What’s your comfort zone with the Hydro piece, dollar for dollar?

C. Bellringer: First of all, that expert cost…. As I say, only a small portion of that is actually Hydro specific. Was it 225? I got one memo saying that about 40 of that belonged to Hydro, and the rest belonged to everything else. I don’t think that’s a big portion of it.

The other thing is that we won’t know until we’ve gone through a full year exactly how much time it is going to take us. The individual that we lost, who went to the firm, has been replaced by more junior people but more of them, two of whom live in Vancouver. We previously would have been having people travel from Victoria to Vancouver, and now we’re able to use people who are already in Vancouver. It’s turning out to maybe not be as high as we thought it would be.

There are actually two budget comments I would make. One is that if you decided to not provide the amount that we requested, there are still things we could do to do less and not be in big trouble, but it is less. It’s likely on the performance audit side. We don’t have much room on the financial statements side. In order to stop doing something as big as Hydro or UBC would need…. I mean, they haven’t contracted out. They don’t have another firm standing there waiting to take on the work in the middle of the year.

The Hydro one is unique in not only being a year-end financial statement, but every quarter, you have to do a review of their quarterly numbers. That’s new for us to go through that process, so it’s four times a year that you’re out doing work. They wouldn’t be able to just replace that. It would be not this year. In the future, if it switched back to somebody else doing the work instead of us, would it be cheaper for them? My sense is it’s not that far off from being a wash, but I honestly can’t go down…. I can’t show you the numbers to prove that, but it’s definitely my instinct on it.

[4:05 p.m.]

I don’t know if we’ve looked at it closely enough to say one way or the other, as well, Russ.

R. Jones: Yeah. One of the things that came…. At the last audit and finance committee meeting I was at, the chair actually said…. We’ve done two quarters, and in each of those quarters, we have found some inconsistencies and errors that needed to be corrected. He said: “You know, it’s really good to have a new Auditor, because you’re looking at things that may not have been looked at before.” And I thought that that really sort of says it.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Can I just follow up on one thing? You invoiced about $1.6 million in 2019, according to…. And thank you for the letter saying those invoices have gone out. I know that goes back to general revenue. But how do you…?

When you presented to us last time, it was like: “Well, that goes back to general revenue.” So it was like: “Okay, that’s over here. This is our budget.” I guess, from our point of view, as this committee, it’d be helpful, obviously, in the future, to have those numbers. Then we can at least have that internal balance, and that’s helpful.

Also, just…. Are you charging enough? That’s the question. Should you be charging more? These are some of the questions. Because that could, in our minds, potentially balance it. Even though it was going back to general revenue, if the Auditor General’s budget is higher but the billing is also higher, then that might help us to justify a higher ask. I just want to make sure that you feel comfortable that the invoicing that’s being done is actually robust enough. Can you answer that?

C. Bellringer: On the billing question, if I was staying, I would have said that I actually would welcome the committee requesting a review of the billing practice overall. It hasn’t been looked at for years. And when we went back to try to figure out what the methodology was, we couldn’t find the original documents.

And it’s your approvals, I believe. We have to bring to you the methodology, and you have to approve it. It’s not our choice. I forget which part of the act indicates that you have to do it that way.

I don’t think we’re billing enough for any of the audits. I actually think it should be based on cost. I don’t think it should be based on: “Well, how much can we bill without them getting mad at us?” I mean, I hate to say it. A little bit of the methodology used is: “Well, if that’s what they’ve been paying…. Maybe they were underpaying, but we’re not going to charge them more.” I’m not going to say that’s exactly what happens, but that’s the philosophy and thinking.

We don’t push that envelope. I have never had a phone call from a single organization we audit in British Columbia who has phoned me to say: “Your bill is too high.” That’s a first in my career, in 40 years. I have dealt with angry clients forever who don’t like the bill. So that, to me, is an indicator that we’re not billing enough.

I think the quick answer to your question is: yeah, we’re not billing enough at Hydro, but we’re not billing enough on any of the work that we’re doing because of the methodology that we’re using.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you so much. That’s good. This is very helpful. If it’s something that we should be looking at, then we should look at that. So thank you very much for that.

These are the sorts of questions, you know, trying to compare the private audits to what you’re doing and trying to get an idea about value and transferring it over, now that you’re doing it: is that fair? Is it the same amount? Is it comparable?

These are some of the questions that we’ve had. How does that work? I think part of that is why the committee sent out the letter, in regards to some of the specificity of what…. You know: “You’re asking for more money for staffing, and specifically, why do you need those extra staff?” I think we asked about that. How does that compare to what would have happened if it was done privately? I think that’s something the committee has been struggling with.

It’s really two different issues. But I think that’s part of the concern or what we’re struggling with.

R. Jones: One of the key areas where we don’t bill and I think where the organizations feel they get a lot of benefit from us is in accounting issues. For them to pick up the phone with one of the accounting firms…. As soon as they do that and ask for help, they’re going to get billed.

[4:10 p.m.]

We get a lot of that, because there are a number of organizations that need a lot of help in terms of understanding the accounting standards.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Fair enough.

Any other questions, Members?

M. Dean: Just going back to Hydro — and it applies probably, but on a smaller scale, to UBC — did you have sight of the previous bills and invoices that Hydro had received for their previous private audits?

C. Bellringer: Yes, we’ve seen them.

M. Dean: Okay. Did you have them when you were building the original proposal for taking on Hydro? I guess I’m just trying to explore the…. It’s a big gap. There was an initial request for a certain amount, knowing you hadn’t gone into it yet, and there’d been a lift in the budget for doing some of that lead-in work and the preparatory work.

The ask coming back is so significant. That’s why we’re all asking questions about it.

R. Jones: I mean, as far as the firms went, we’re charging about the same amount, and we’re doing the same amount of work that we figured we would have to do.

One of the…. Again, it was the specialists that we had to bring in to help us do the audits, but the firms charge for that too. I think we’re pretty close to where we thought we would be at in terms of the number of hours that would be required, compared to what the firms were spending. It’s pretty close.

C. Bellringer: The big increase in the ask is not primarily Hydro. It’s in there.

The toughest part to explain — but I’m going to give it a try — is that whole period…. It’s five years’ worth where we were lapsing $1 million a year. I didn’t understand that. It’s a big percentage of our budget. It was a pattern that the office was quite comfortable with over a long period of time. I said: “We’ve got to draw that down.” We got tighter and tighter and tighter every year until last year and the year we’re in…. We’re hoping we can make it within the budget, but it’s really been fine-tuned.

If you took the organizational structure in order to do that…. You can’t put it on a piece of paper and say: “Here’s how many people you have in each layer.” You’re playing around with it every time something happens, and it’s a really tough system to budget within. I don’t think the office can sustain that methodology.

The amount of push-back from everybody there saying: “Well, what do you mean? I just had a vacancy, and I can’t fill it?” No. Now we need the money we’re saving from that vacancy to make sure we balance the budget at the end of the year. You don’t know the prediction or the pattern of how people are going to leave. So it makes it very hard to manage.

This budget that we put in for this year is a more structured budget around if you had these people at all these various levels. We did factor in a vacancy expectation, but it’s a fairly low number. We’re saying…. If the world goes by the way we think it will, we’re going to get to that bottom-line budget. But guess what. We’re going to go back to lapsing again. We will see lapses in those budgets. I can guarantee it, and I am fairly certain it’s going to be substantial amounts of money. The idea would not be to go and use it for something else.

It would be that that will just be the way it is. And the way it was…. Like I said, I don’t know how to explain this. The more we got into trying to explain that, the more complicated it got.

At the end of the day, yes, in order to get to a nice, neat organizational structure where when somebody leaves, you fill the job, and the only thing you…. That’s what that looks like, but reality could be slightly different from that. You could have more people leave more quickly. You can’t fill them as fast as you thought you could.

None of those parts are built in. If we build them in…. I don’t know how comfortable everybody would be if we suddenly get to the end of the year, and we’ve gone over budget. We’ve got this thing so tight that now you can’t hire enough people during the year to fill these vacancies. So we’re all going to live with that.

[4:15 p.m.]

It also shifts…. You might have hired them in financial audit, and you end up…. As you get vacancies, the two portfolios end up…. One loses people, and the other one needs them. You can’t just go and replace them.

It was a sitting back with that whole picture. If you did all of this work that’s in those two plans and you doled it out to the boxes of people in the organization, what would it cost? I forget what the vacancy rate is that we built in — 5 percent or something like that. That’s what the number adds up to. If the answer was that you don’t get that much, we can go back and we can tighten up the risks. As I say, there are dozens of things we could do differently and still get most of the planning done, but not absolutely everything.

We could figure out which parts not to do. I doubt whether there’d be any impact at all on the major Crown audits for the current year. We would make sure we get those done right and then assess at the end of the year whether or not we didn’t predict as accurately as we could have.

I don’t think there’s anything we can do to better predict what we think it will end up being, given the number of things that can change in the staff we’re using, where they’re located, the timing on all of this. If we run into a problem where we don’t agree on an accounting issue, that starts to factor in. We’ve had those.

R. Leonard: Thank you for that. This is our third go-round for budgets, and the issue around the staff turnover in your office has obviously been a driving force on how the budget rolls out. Obviously, you are doing a good job of the training ground, because people are scooping your good staff.

Interjection.

R. Leonard: Yeah, too good of a job.

I do know that the public really appreciates the Office of the Auditor General and has great trust in all that you’ve brought to the office over the years, and we’re going to miss you. I do appreciate the time that you’ve spent trying to explain things to the neophytes and the uninformed to understand.

Interjection.

R. Leonard: That’s me. I’m talking about myself. If you want, I can say it’s about you.

Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Any other questions at all, Members?

Interjection.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yes, it was very, very helpful. Thank you very much. We will look into taking you up on your advice on the invoicing. I just wanted to echo what Ronna-Rae said. We really appreciate everything you’ve done for the province and wish you the best of luck with your future endeavours. Thanks, Carol.

Thanks, everybody, for coming.

A short recess?

The committee recessed from 4:18 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Next up we have the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

Kasari Govender, thank you so much for coming in. We did try to deal with things via letter and phone. I couldn’t answer all the questions, so we thought: “Let’s get you in to just talk to the members directly.” We really appreciate you and your staff coming back in.

Part of the challenge that we have is that this is a new office. It’s, in some respects, unprecedented in the country as an independent office, so it’s important to start it correctly. Really, what we do here will probably be the direction for the next decade, so we feel a responsibility to get it right and to make sure we support you in that but also do our due diligence.

With that, there were a number of questions. We might want to just start with the organizational chart, because I know that the members had a lot of questions around that, if that’s all right with members. It might be a good place just to jump in so that we can understand it.

When you talked to Dan and me, you’d sort of gone through the chart. I know there were some questions about it being top-heavy, or the concern that it was top-heavy, and you had discussed that with Dan and me. But it’d be probably helpful to have that discussion with the whole committee so we can understand.

Did you want to start off, Doug, with some questions?

D. Clovechok: Sure.

Thank you for coming. It’s good to see you again.

To the Chair’s point, I would really like just kind of a Coles Notes version. For me, in my eyes, there’s a lot of management here. I’m not understanding how that is possible, especially for such a new organization. If you can walk us through the philosophy and the vision behind as many management positions as I see here, that would be very helpful.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify this.

For one thing, I want to apologize for colour-coding it in the first place, because I think it added to the confusion. So if you can ignore the colour-coding for a moment, because that goes more to the concern or goes to the question of timeline, as opposed to seniority level.

Putting colours aside for a moment, we have in the organizational chart, six people on the senior leadership team, including myself and the deputy. That’s commissioner, deputy commissioner and then four teams, and they have a lead in each one of those teams. We have three people in administrative or operational roles, and we have 26 people that are charged with program delivery.

Of those 26 people that are charged with program delivery, five are classified in a managerial role, and that’s for a couple of reasons. One is because we need to follow the management classification and compensation framework that applies to the public service. Generally, the office has followed this framework, and what that means is that there are some titles that go along with that. The managerial roles are connected. Anyone below the senior management levels is connected directly to program delivery. They have program deliverables attached to their roles.

[4:25 p.m.]

They’re not considered solely managers. They have both of those….Those five people in the managerial roles have program deliverables and have some supervisory roles. Also, part of their classification is around their strategic thinking — so contributing to the strategic planning for the organization, as I think is essential, particularly at this start-up mode. The remaining two positions that are part of it are subject matter advisers at different levels.

Again, that’s six people in the senior leadership; three in administrative and operational roles; 26 with direct program deliverables, five of which are called managers but have a mixed supervisory and program delivery model. Then the last two are subject matter experts. Does that help clarify?

D. Clovechok: Not really. I just would really like to be maybe given an opportunity to understand how this model developed. What was your strategy behind it? Where did you draw from? Is this new? Did you kind of dream it up on your own, which is fine and great? What was the genesis of this?

K. Govender: The genesis of it was entirely the legislation. We started with the human rights code, as amended, and we went through each of the powers that we have — what I’m calling the tools, what I called in my original submission to you the tools. We went through each of those tools and mapped it onto who we thought could do those roles.

You will see that the teams are…. A small communications team. The largest teams are education and engagement, and research and policy. The vast majority of the resources of the organization go into those two silos, if you can say it that way. That really is mapped onto the sections of the code that list off the tools that are available to me as commissioner to fulfil the mandate. Then the third piece is a small legal team to fulfil some of the legal roles.

The tools include doing education and engagement, and we’ve talked about that in some detail. I’m happy to go more into what we envision, then, if that’s helpful. We have research and policy advising roles. We have the ability to make recommendations directly to the Legislature. We have the ability to do inquiries and to do interventions and to assist with any aspect of a complaint when filed.

We’ve classified that into education and engagement, research and policy, and legal. That’s precisely where this map comes from. It does not come from a dream. It comes very much from the law as it was passed, and then we built down from there. You’ll see in the research and policy department, for example, that we built in a number of subject matter experts that are mapped directly onto the grounds that are listed under the code for each prohibited area of discrimination. We have age and accessibility, for example. We have a gender researcher. We have race and religion and so on. Those are mapped directly onto the responsibilities.

We’ve also built in a role to do with international law. We have a responsibility to enforce and help realize the international human rights obligations that Canada is a signatory to and, therefore, B.C. is bound by. We’ve built in a role to assist with that on the international human rights development.

S. Garrett: I’ll just add to that that prior to the commissioner’s appointment, there was a period from when I was brought on, around February, until this time. So we’re looking at nine months of deep levels of engagement, wherein there were engagements with human rights commissions across the country and internationally. By virtue of being an independent office, that afforded us additional opportunities to speak to individuals within those commissions and glean information that comes off of the page.

Those types of conversations were: “We’ll send you our organizational chart. Here’s the structure that we have. But we’d also like to discuss with you the structure we wish we had if we were starting up from scratch.” We had those conversations with other human rights commissions. Then we also worked closely with other independent offices of the Legislature through creative secondments.

We’ve been fortunate to have individuals with deep levels of expertise and years of service in Elections B.C., in the Office of the Ombudsperson, in the Representative for Children and Youth, and discussions with leaders and front-line staff in many of the other organizations to really understand not just the aspects of what exists today, but also, were they to start things fresh, knowing what they know about their organizations some decades into their existence, what would that look like? All of that was triangulated, in addition to what the commissioner has just described.

[4:30 p.m.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. If I may, one of the questions that came up, too, is that when the…. And fair enough, you did a deeper dive. That’s what I’m hearing in terms of the Attorney General’s analysis versus what we’re being presented now. But there still is a relatively significant increase in FTEs from the Attorney General’s plan versus this plan in terms of finally ending at 37. I can’t remember off the top of my head. I think it was 30, 31 for the Attorney General.

We’re talking about six or seven FTEs more, which adds significantly to the budget. Could you at least try to account for what the key reasons are for that discrepancy?

K. Govender: Yeah. There are a couple of things. Their structure was built alongside the development of the legislation, so they had to develop a budget and, therefore, develop an organizational chart without the benefit of the legislation, which, as I say, was really the driving force, given that the powers of the office are laid out there.

I think that accounts for some differences across the board. Their structure was very administrative heavy, whereas ours has whittled down the administration staff, partly through having this strong shared services model with RCY, to about 8 percent of our budget. So that means we have significantly more program staff and more boots on the ground, to use an expression that came up in the last committee, than the Attorney General budget. But I think one of the really key differences to realize is that theirs was developed without the benefit of the legislation.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Questions?

R. Leonard: Thank you for coming back again today to help us understand better your vision and how it’s going to roll out.

A question around the legal counsel. We’re dealing with another independent office and talking about contracting out versus having in-house. I’m just curious. You’ve chosen in-house, and I’m wondering how you made that decision rather than contracting services out of legal counsel.

K. Govender: Yes, thank you. Well, I should say that the model of the legal team that we have here is really based, again, on the powers under the act rather than having corporate services in house. So it’s not based on…. If I have a legal question related to something on the more corporate or administrative side of things, that’s not built into this model. But we have direct legal tools under the act.

We have the ability to do inquiries, as you know, and to do interventions, which is to get involved as a third party in an ongoing case in which we are not on either side. We don’t represent either party but become involved in a case before the tribunal to help the tribunal understand the systemic concerns. That’s an important tool, I think, to create systemic change through existing cases. It can be quite an efficient model to piggyback on an existing case and raise the systemic issues that go along with that.

Then we also have the ability to assist with any aspect of a complaint. That really is about assisting with complaints that have a systemic component. My interpretation of that is it’s not a sort of go-to, be a human rights clinic and start representing anybody who walks through the door. We certainly haven’t built in that kind of model at all. This is really about assisting with systemic aspects of a complaint.

For example, if someone is incarcerated and doesn’t have the ability to continue a complaint or the will to continue a complaint after they’ve finished their term, then we would be able to bring forward a complaint or continue that case if the case was systemic in nature and raised issues that we thought were significant enough that it was worth our resources.

There are some pretty significant tools built in. We also have…. The very large piece of our mandate is around education. Of course, that’s primarily legal education as well as…. Actually, maybe I shouldn’t say primarily, but there’s a significant legal aspect to that education. It’s also about shifting culture and changing understandings of human rights for sure. But I can say that a good deal of the questions that have come to our door already are very much: “Can you explain how the law works? Can you explain the human rights code?”

[4:35 p.m.]

That needs people to be able to inform all of our workshops, all of our engagement materials. All of the public awareness campaigns that we do need to have that legal lens as well. So there are quite a few aspects to our mandate that have to do with the law, and that’s why we built in the legal team. You will see that it is a smaller team than the other ones. Certainly, it’s not…. We understand that those are more expensive resources, and we’ve kept that as tight as possible.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Any other questions from members at all? Nicholas? Anybody?

Okay. Well, was there anything else that you wanted to add at all before we let you go?

K. Govender: If you would just give me a moment here. I just want to look through my notes to see if there’s anything.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Yes, of course.

Oh, one thing. You did actually send us a revised budget for this year. Maybe you could explain that to the members, because I think it was a staggered hiring process. You were able to deal with that. Maybe you could tell the members about that.

K. Govender: Yes, for sure. We heard the committee’s concerns around the budget that we were asking for, and what we did in response was figure out a way to slow down the hiring, which reduced the budget ask for next year by about half a million dollars. It doesn’t reduce the overall ask in future years. It doesn’t change the organizational chart, but what it does is stretch that out a little bit.

We heard from our call with the Chair and vice-Chair that we needed to…. The committee was concerned about timeline, so we heard those concerns and built in that slowdown. I will say that, of course, it will impact how quickly we can roll out the mandate, but that is the alternative budget that we’ve put forward, upon your request.

I think that’s all right. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Last question from Doug.

D. Clovechok: One last thought. If this is your planning, which is hopefully what you’ll end up with…. It’s your intent. Have you looked at a plan B as an alternative? If this doesn’t happen, what’s your plan?

K. Govender: Well, the plan, at this point, is to slow down the hiring if the amount was significantly lower. It’s hard to plan without an alternative number in mind.

D. Clovechok: But you could forecast that, if it was an alternative. No? Yes?

K. Govender: We would then do the forecasting, is my point with that. It’s just that without that number right now, coming up with an alternative is challenging to do. I remain very committed to the model that we’ve put forward. I think it is absolutely required to fulfil the legislative mandate and to have the impact that we think that this organization is being set up to have. If we get less budget, we will have less impact, but we will certainly figure out a way to do what we can and make the most of those dollars.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much. We’ll take a short recess.

The committee recessed from 4:38 p.m. to 4:41 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

Deliberations

B. D’Eith (Chair): All right, everyone. If I could have a motion to go in camera.

M. Dean: So moved.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 4:42 p.m. to 5:27 p.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Motion to adjourn?

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 5:27 p.m.