The committee met at 9:06 a.m.

[S. Bond in the chair.]

S. Bond (Chair): Good morning. I want to thank all of you for being here this morning, and as always, thank the Clerk of Committees and her team for an incredible job getting ready for today.

I want to also recognize that we have the soon-to-be Acting Auditor General — I guess it’s the end of December, Russ — with us today, because the Auditor General is unavailable. We’re glad to have you. It’s good practice for you, Russ, for the days that lie ahead, although you’ve done it before.

We also want to recognize Carl Fischer, the comptroller general. Thank you for being with us this morning.

We have two reports and then a number of other items of business this morning. We’re going to start with the report that was issued…. Both of these reports — one was issued in July, and one was issued in October.

I think it’s a really important place to thank the hard-working colleagues that I have on this committee. I think when we started working together, we were far behind. We had, literally, probably a couple dozen reports that had been received but not considered by Public Accounts. So thank you for your hard work. Here we are, almost a week before Christmas, and we’re still working. I really appreciate that. I think this will bring to a conclusion the reports that have been issued to date, so we’re caught up until the Office of the Auditor General continues to issue reports. I’m sure we’ll be hearing about those.

Thanks to my Deputy Chair and the committee for their hard work.

We’re going to start with a significant report this morning. It is the report that is related to drinking water, issued in July 2019: The Protection of Drinking Water: An Independent Audit. As I noted, in attendance we have Russ Jones. We also have Cornell Dover, one of our deputy auditors general, representing the Office of the Auditor General.

From the Ministry of Health, we’re very pleased today…. I know that the workload is heavy, so we’re very grateful to the Deputy Minister of Health for being here today, Stephen Brown.

Stephen, we’ll have you introduce your team when the time comes for you to present, but I should recognize the provincial health officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, who is with us this morning as well. We’re very grateful for senior executives that are here with us today.

With that, we’ll use our normal presentation procedure. We’ll start with the Office of the Auditor General. We’ll walk through the report, and then we’ll ask for the Ministry of Health and the provincial health officer to respond as well.

With that, over to you, Russ.

Consideration of
Auditor General Reports

The Protection of Drinking Water

R. Jones: Thank you, Chair. If you don’t mind, I would just like to acknowledge that we are on the lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

I’ve been a visitor on and off these lands for almost 30 years now, and I’m especially grateful to be a visitor and strive to conduct myself in a respectful manner to all my relations.

Thank you again, Chair and committee members, and thank you for the opportunity to present our report on protection of drinking water. With me today is Cornell Dover, Deputy Auditor General.

[9:10 a.m.]

We undertook this audit because of the considerable importance of safe drinking water and because the risks to drinking water are increasing. Climate change, industrial activities and a growing population all have an impact on B.C.’s drinking water.

The oversight of drinking water in B.C. is very complex. It involves many ministries, agencies and pieces of legislation. To ensure clear accountability, government stated that the Ministry of Health would provide the leadership and coordination of the many ministries involved. There’s a good graphic on page 21 of our report, showing Health’s role in the leadership and coordination for the protection of drinking water. Given the complexity of drinking water protection and the challenges faced by the Ministry of Health, it’s time for government to clearly articulate roles and ensure that ministries and agencies are held accountable.

Before I turn it over to Cornell for the presentation, I’d like to thank the Ministry of Health and the office of the provincial health officer for their cooperation during the course of this audit, and particularly acknowledge the help and assistance provided by staff. It was greatly appreciated.

Cornell.

C. Dover: Good morning, Madam Chair and committee members.

In this audit, we looked at whether the Ministry of Health and the provincial health officer were taking adequate action to protect drinking water for all British Columbians. We focused on three pillars that govern the protection of drinking water. Those pillars are (1) the leadership and coordination by Health, (2) the action by Health and the provincial health officer, and (3) the accountability of Health and the provincial health officer.

Overall, we concluded that Health and the provincial health officer were not sufficiently protecting drinking water. Safe drinking water is water that is fit for consumption and domestic purposes without further treatment.

Drinking water becomes unsafe when it is exposed to harmful pathogens or chemicals that are either naturally occurring or caused through human activity. If drinking water is exposed to harmful pathogens or chemicals without adequate treatment during its journey from source to tap, people can become sick with waterborne illness.

Thankfully, B.C. has not had a known outbreak of waterborne illness since 2004, but a single event that contaminates the drinking water system can cause serious health impacts for numerous people.

In our audit, we found room for improvement in all three pillars. The first pillar that we focused on was about Health’s leadership in coordination efforts. We found that the ministry has not been as vigilant about protecting our drinking water as it has been in the past. Its leadership has waned, and many of the committees that were formed to facilitate the protection of drinking water have disbanded.

Although the ministry has been providing guidance for the protection of drinking water, we found that Health had not developed a strategic plan to provide clear direction on the actions needed by the ministries and the regional health authorities to improve the protection of drinking water. Overall, we found that there is a need for a more comprehensive review of the legislation and regulations to ensure that government’s commitments that were made in the 2002 action plan in British Columbia are not compromised.

The second pillar that we looked at involved the actions taken by Health and the provincial health officer. We found that while Health had taken a number of actions, more needed to be done. The provincial health officer had not demonstrated adequate oversight of drinking water officers, nor had the office shown the tracking and resolution of significant impediments to drinking water protection.

The provincial health officer has the authority under the Drinking Water Protection Act to recommend to the Minister of Health a localized drinking water protection plan to prevent threats to a drinking water source. For example, the provincial health officer recommended a protection plan for the Comox Valley in 2008, 2010, 2015 and 2018. However, a plan was not established.

Finally, we found that efforts to protect small water systems have been limited, yet 90 percent of B.C.’s water systems are deemed small water systems. To give you a sense of scale, there are about 480,000 people in B.C. that rely on these small water systems.

Finally, for the third pillar that we looked at, we found that, overall, Health and the provincial health officer’s accountability to ensure drinking water was protected needed improvement. Neither organization has kept government sufficiently apprised of the ongoing risk to drinking water.

Health hasn’t provided information on drinking water in its annual service plan reports, and the provincial health officer has reported on drinking water and potential issues over the years but not annually, as required in the Drinking Water Protection Act.

[9:15 a.m.]

In June of this year, the provincial health officer provided its report for the years 2012 to 2017 and made 32 recommendations. Unfortunately, many of the provincial health officer’s recommendations from previous reports have seen limited or no progress.

In conclusion, we’ve found that Health and the provincial health officer were not sufficiently protecting drinking water for British Columbians. We made eight recommendations in the report. Five are to Health and include providing leadership to coordinate the ministry, undertaking a legislative review, identifying risk, developing a strategic plan and reporting out to public.

The other three recommendations are for the provincial health officer and include taking action to improve its oversight and reviewing legislation, monitoring progress and trends, and reporting out on a timely basis.

Given the complexity of drinking water protection and the challenges faced by the Ministry of Health, it’s important for government to clearly articulate roles and ensure that the ministries and agencies are held accountable. This concludes our presentation.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much, Cornell.

Stephen Brown, deputy minister, Ministry of Health, is going to start, and we’ll introduce anyone who speaks, just so we have it for the record.

Welcome, this morning.

S. Brown: Thank you, Chair and Members, for the chance to be here today. I’ll just introduce, on my right, Lorie Hrycuik, who is our assistant deputy minister for population and public health. She will have a key role in terms of leading the action plan that we’ve got before you today.

Also, colleague Dr. Bonnie Henry, who’s here as the provincial health officer that we work closely with in terms of moving this agenda forward. I also just want to acknowledge that with us in the room today are Tim Lambert, also from population and public health, who’s our executive director, and also Joanne Edwards, who’s from the office of the provincial health officer and who will also play key roles in terms of taking action with the report today.

We’ll walk through a deck in a second. I just wanted to say a couple of things in terms of starting. The first I wanted to say was that we welcome the report.

There’s been a history of development since 2002 which the Auditor canvassed with us and strongly felt that the role clarity, as various committees have come and gone and various initiatives have come and gone, isn’t there in terms of accountability.

They feel that, from a health perspective, that watch is a fundamental public health concern and that Health should have a clear and an articulated leadership role. As Cornell said in his presentation, that had evolved and, from the perspective of the Auditor General, had waned as various other ministries have taken on pieces of accountability. They felt that that review of roles and accountabilities would actually strengthen action going forward and needs to be done.

So in terms of taking the report, we accept it — all of the recommendations. What we have got in front of you today is…. We have tried to put forward an action plan that is focused over a two-year period — so it’s quite an aggressive action plan — to follow through on all of the recommendations that have been set out in the report.

That will also be done in close collaboration — Dr. Henry will talk in a moment — with the provincial health officer, the office, in terms of following through on the recommendations.

What we have tried to do is use the recommendations and align them, some of them, in parallel pieces of work so that we can actually complete. So starting immediately, in January, we will begin to put resources in place so that we can review the policy and legislation, as recommended in the document, and we will do a review. We will set out the timelines which are in the report shortly. With that, we will also, in parallel, clarify and describe the roles and accountabilities as currently established.

Through those two parallel processes, we want to have in front of government, before the end of the calendar year, recommendations on both roles and accountabilities that they can consider and, therefore, follow through on the recommendation to give clarity on who should be leading what and how that accountability should be set out.

[9:20 a.m.]

Secondly, we will have done a review of the legislation and then, based on the direction we get, we can begin to take action. In terms of if legislation is required or modifications are required, we can take that action to begin to do work on that in 2021, with a view that if legislation is required, modifications, that can be brought into play by the spring of 2022.

In the meantime, however, there’s a number of actions which the Auditor General recognizes that are underway, so we will not drop any of those. We have tried to articulate those in the action plan, of several streams of action, including the important area of concern with small water systems, which in B.C., as is stated by the Auditor, is a significant issue, particularly in rural and particularly in the Interior and the north. We’ll follow through on those actions and continue those actions with our colleagues in other ministries while we’re actually doing the review. We won’t stop action while we do this work. We will carry on with those steps.

Also we’ll be working with Bonnie’s office to look at the information systems that we require and that those information systems will be built out so that by the time we get into 2021 we can begin to fill gaps in the information systems and use that as the foundation for actually clearly articulating a strategic plan that can then come before government, in terms of a clear reporting out of what actions are planned. We’ll take direction on that strategic plan.

Then, last and not least in that, is also the issue that we took into account through the Auditor of increased public reporting, both in terms of following up on the provincial health officer’s reports and not letting those recommendations sit on a shelf but actually report out on the actions that we’re taking, as well as routine and regular reporting on water as part of our service plan overall.

With that, I’ll hand it over to Lorie and Bonnie, who will walk through the deck, and then we’ll take questions as soon as you see fit at the end of that.

L. Hrycuik: Okay. I’m going to skip the first slide just because Steve provided the overview for you.

Steve has basically said that we’ve accepted all of the recommendations for Health and that we are very committed to safe drinking water in B.C. and also the action plan. Also we can’t really do it without having a strong collaboration with the provincial health officer.

Just a couple of points. Steve had reiterated them, but we’re starting from the 2002 action plan. There has been a lot of changes in government and a lot of pieces of legislation that have occurred in between 2002 to now. That’s why the review is really critical, and the role and leadership…. Clarity is also really critical. The action plan…. We’re going to take you through how we’re actually going to achieve that clarity.

Interjections.

L. Hrycuik: We’re doing a share back and forth, and I’m trying to figure out when Bonnie….

B. Henry: I’ll just say…. It was two slides back. From our perspective, we also accept the recommendations of the OAG, and actually we’re quite happy that we did have this audit.

As Cornell knows, a number of the recommendations really align with the recommendations that have come out of our report. We recognize the complexity, and we’ve evolved into even more complexity over the number of years since 2002, as Lorie has outlined. It is absolutely time for a good legislative review and a review of who’s doing what and who’s leading which aspects of drinking water, so we’re very pleased with this report. I will say that many of the recommendations align with what we put in our most recent Clean, Safe and Reliable Drinking Water for B.C.

I do want to also say that while we do have many small water systems…. We also regulate water systems at a much smaller level than many of our counterparts across the country. The vast majority of people in B.C have clean, safe and reliable drinking water on a day-to-day basis. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to pay more attention to this. We do become complacent sometimes with the fact that we do have very good water here. There are areas that we need to improve, so this is a good impetus for us to move ahead with that.

[9:25 a.m.]

L. Hrycuik: What I’m going to do when I take you through the slides…. The slide is just a high-level overview of the actions that we’re going to be taking in the action plan. The action plan has a lot more detail. So I’m going to use them as a guide just to articulate the steps that we’re going to take for each of the recommendations.

What you’ll find is that for many of the recommendations, we actually have two actions, because they are fairly comprehensive recommendations. So we want to speak to the full breadth of the recommendation to ensure that you can see how we’re taking action on that. As Steve had indicated, the first one is that we want to lead a formal review of legislation and regulations. As the report has indicated, there are 23 different pieces of legislation, and right now we are the leadership of the Drinking Water Protection Act and Regulation.

We work very closely with the Ministry of Environment in source water protection and the quality of that, as well as the other Ministries of Transportation, Municipal Affairs and Housing, Energy and Mines. They all have pieces of legislation that speak to how we protect source water. So we are going to be bringing those deputy ministers together in early January that have pieces of legislation that do, in fact, impact water to actually frame out the work that we’re going to be doing.

Through the course of the year, we are going to be working, then, with the appropriate ministries to actually undertake the legislative review. There is a series of work that we’re going to do. We’re going to look at the pieces of legislation from March to April. We’re going to be reviewing it. We’ll be bringing back what we find for the review sometime in August, just to consult back with the deputy ministers.

If we’re going to make significant recommendations and changes, we want to make sure that we have a clear understanding of what the impact would potentially be to other ministries. Then we are going to bring that forward, as Steve indicated, sometime around November, for any recommendations to government to create that clarity that we’re looking for.

The next slide talks about… The recommendation has both the legislative review and…. Also, at the very end, it talks about controls for small water systems. The action that we’re taking here is to build and strengthen a network of support, expertise, training and resources for small water systems. As Bonnie had indicated, we do have quite a few small water systems in B.C. This work was already underway. We just want to highlight and showcase the continued work that we’re doing.

There has been work already done with about 100 small water systems that we actually tested out — a piece of work to do — where we are providing education, understanding, training and resources to small water systems to help them understand their accountability. As Bonnie said, we do regulate them. So we want them to understand what their role is and then to support them in that role that they play. We’re going to be expanding that work that we’re doing to eventually encompass all the 4,400-ish small water systems to build that network of support, peer-to-peer network, resources, trainings and supports that they would require. So we’re going to be rolling out, over the next year, to actually support the small water systems.

Then we’ll monitor the implementation and ensure that any changes that we need to do as we go along — that we modify it as are required…. We’re going to start out, in that piece, first of all…. We’re going to bring the stakeholders together on the small water systems to actually ensure that they can inform the work that we do.

Next slide. This one is going to be in partnership with the rest of the ministry. So as Steve had said, we have ongoing work that we’re doing already to strengthen the protection of drinking water. We’re not going to stop doing that work as we move forward on the action plan. So I just identified a few initiatives that I wanted to showcase that we already had in play on strengthening drinking water systems.

The first one is that Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy has source quality drinking water guide­lines that they put in place to protect source water. They are there under the Environment Management Act. They have the authority to create those guidelines. And they have both enumerative and narrative benchmarks that they put into place to protect source water. They’re very important in the areas where there’s multi-use watersheds.

[9:30 a.m.]

Those guidelines are used to support benchmarks, to support resource management decisions and also to protect drinking water quality. We support the development of those quality guidelines, and we do it in two ways. The first one is that Environment often adopts Health Canada’s guidelines. For example, they would have a guideline on selenium. They would have a guideline on molybdenum. So some of the metals that may occur around mining, those types of things.

We influence the Health Canada development of those national guidelines. We also consult with them to ensure that when those guidelines are implemented, they make sense for B.C. For example, a recent guideline that they wanted to put into place was selenium. The national guidelines on selenium were what we considered a little bit higher than we wanted in B.C. We tend to have higher selenium content in our food supply. So we wanted to ensure that there was an important balance in the source-water so that when we actually take the full human health into consideration, those decisions are made.

We’ll continue to be working with Environment on those source-water quality guidelines to ensure that the source-water is protected for drinking water. That source-water is the source-water before the treatment of drinking water. They don’t supersede or trump our drinking water quality objectives, which we develop under the Drinking Water Protection Act.

The other couple of initiatives that I think are really important…. There’s the Hullcar aquifer. There was contamination around agriculture, and there is fairly significant work that’s happening around multi agencies, with Environment and Municipal Affairs and Housing. We’ve got the Splatsin First Nation. We have us involved. We’re looking at a report that’s being developed on…. Recommendations will come forward on how to actually improve the protection of drinking water as it relates to the Hullcar aquifer. A plan will be coming forth from that.

We’re actually in the process of developing a one-water system risk management plan. It’s a new professional model. The concept is that…. Right now we have our legislation in place. There’s a bit of a gap for us on the professionals that could have a potential voice on identifying risks and supporting safe drinking water. We’re actually in the process of developing guidelines and supporting that professional reliance model to add that additional safety and support for drinking water in B.C.

We’re also in the process of working with the environmental assessment office. We have human health risk assessment guidance that is being developed for chemical risks that would also apply to water sources. We’re in the process right now of working with the environmental assessment office to ensure that guidance will be available for the proponents who are doing assessments on whether or not projects should move forward and that the protection of drinking water is considered.

Finally, just to highlight — I know there’s been a lot of media — we do have our guidelines on lead and drinking water. We focused particularly on schools and child care facilities because, of course, they’re a very vulnerable population. We know that lead can actually have a fairly significant impact. So we are continuing to work with Education and the health authorities on implementing those guidelines in schools and child care facilities.

Those are just examples of the kinds of initiatives that we are continuing to work on across government to strengthen the protection of drinking water.

As we’re doing that…. This is going to be, as Stephen said, the parallel process that we’re taking. As we’re doing our legislative review and a review of the regulations, we’re also going to work to clarify the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities of all the government agencies that are responsible for the protection of water. As we look at the legislation, as we look at who’s responsible and what those accountabilities are…. We’ll be doing that in tandem because it just makes sense for us to do that parallel process.

Again, in probably March, once we’ve started that legislative review, we’re going to start the roles and responsibilities. We’ll do that with the ministries, of course, that we’ve identified from the legislative review. We also have some other stakeholders that we’ll take a look at. The Environmental Operators Certification Program has a responsibility under our act and regulations. There are other agencies that have roles in water. So we won’t just look at our government but will look at all agencies because we want a clear understanding of those roles and responsibilities.

[9:35 a.m.]

We’ll parallel it forward. We’ll bring those recommendations forward to deputy ministers as well, just to confirm them. Then that will come to government at the same time as we’ll do the legislative reviews. It will be that package that we’ll bring forth for government consideration.

Out of that…. If there are legislative amendments that are required if we make those recommendations, then that would be the next step that would come after. Based on government direction, we would, actually, potentially, make some recommendations for change. That would be the next piece of work that would occur.

The next is the provincial interoperable data system and the provincial strategic plan. The recommendation focuses on the development of a provincial strategic plan based on the interoperable data system. The first action will be for us to create that data system.

We’re going to build on work that’s already underway. We already have work happening with the health authorities right now on the development of business processes for drinking water systems. That will happen over the course of the next year.

We also will have work that’s happening with other ministries. As you can imagine, all of them, if they have some role in source-water protection, will have data that we’ll be very interested in accessing. So that will be that piece of work.

Then we’re also going to do a piece a work on confirming our performance measures at the same time. That will come forth, or we’ll develop that proposal for the provincial interoperable data system.

Given that it’s going to take us a little bit of time to do that, we are going to create some information-sharing agreements in the interim, because we don’t want to lose the opportunity to share that data that’s already out there. As Stephen had said, we’re going to leverage existing data sources that are out there, and we’re going to look into how we can actually build that system as a process in leveraging rather than having to create this big data system at the very end.

That is going to influence the development of the provincial strategic plan. The provincial strategic plan will be based on our legislative review. It’ll be based on…. And I’ll speak to this. We’re going to be doing a risk assessment of the system. It’s going to be based on the data. We’re going to pull all of that information together to inform this provincial strategic plan, and then we’re going to confirm that with the deputy ministers prior to finalizing.

We’ll bring that forth to government for consideration, because our provincial strategic plan may require new commitments from government. We want to make sure that all the ministries are in alignment and we actually use all of the information that we’re pulling together over the next couple of years to really make sure that we have a comprehensive approach to the protection of drinking water.

Recommendation 4. This is a fairly short one, as you can see on the slide. As we do the work with the other ministries…. We’re going to be working with partner agencies to do risk identification and coordination with the ministries and agencies. This will be through the legislation review. It’ll be through our roles, responsibilities and accountabilities. We’ll look at the data project.

It’s also an opportunity to take a look at what we have working well right now. What are our successes? What are our challenges? It’s really pulling that together from a perspective of: what do the risks look like, and how do we best address them? Have we addressed them through the legislative review? Have we addressed them through the clarity of roles and responsibilities? And how do we bring that forth in the provincial strategic plan? In the interim, we’ll also create a risk mitigation strategy that will actually identify the resources and the infrastructure required for implementation.

Our second action on that is…. We do have provincial guidelines that we put into place. They are developed under the Drinking Water Protection Act. We have the authority to develop those guidelines, and they are then used to keep the drinking water safe in British Columbia. The recommendation suggested that we needed to strengthen our monitoring of the implementation of the guidelines. This is where our work with the provincial health officer will be very important, given her role in monitoring how effective we are in the system.

[9:40 a.m.]

We are going to develop an evaluation framework right now that includes implementation monitoring. Once we develop the evaluation framework, we’re going to take our guidelines through that and identify the risks and gaps and revise the guidelines, as required. Then once that happens, the evaluation framework will actually be put into place. It’s going to be in perpetuity once we have the evaluation in place. It’ll be there, and the guidelines will actually continue to be monitored accordingly.

We’ll also bring this forward into the provincial strategic plan, because all of these pieces need to come together as a comprehensive approach. So we’ll be developing all of these pieces with the idea that they all tie together.

Over to you, Bonnie.

B. Henry: With that, there were three recommendations that were directed to my office — two only to my office, and one to us together.

I do think it’s really important at the outset, as I said, that we do accept that the provincial health officer, under the Drinking Water Protection Act and the Public Health Act…. We do have oversight over all drinking water, from source to tap. That is part of our role — to report on and be able to provide guidance around issues that arise.

The recommendation around oversight refers specifically to when drinking water officers, who are in the health authorities…. I think that’s a very important part of this. Part of my role is to set standards for drinking water officers and medical health officers, who are also drinking water officers in their regions.

What we don’t have are specific, written-out processes for when they should report to me an incident or a situation where the protection of public health in relation to drinking water might be affected. We will be working with our colleagues in the health authorities to develop specific policies and procedures for reporting drinking water situations and guidance for drinking water officers — more specific guidance.

We do have general guidance that’s in the Drinking Water Officers Guide as well as the standards that we set for medical health officers but not specific about what things we expect them to be reporting to my office and how and when we’re going to do that. We’re also developing a tracking process for that. The Auditor rightly pointed out that while we do have situations reported to us on an ongoing basis, I don’t have a way of pulling those out specifically and saying: “Here’s what they were. Here’s the action that was taken. Here’s what the outcome was.” We have started that already, and we will be committed to making that much more transparent for people.

This next slide is a recommendation that we will work on together with Health. It’s really about the specific provisions under the Drinking Water Protection Act for drinking water protection plans. Those are a piece of direction that can come from the minister. It is incumbent on me to recommend them, on the advice of a drinking water officer, medical health officer, if there’s a situation that is, essentially, a last resort, and we feel that the source water is compromised or could be compromised unless we have a specifically directed drinking water protection plan.

We have never had a drinking water protection plan ordered in B.C. It’s an order of the ministry under the order-in-council. My office has recommended one in the Comox Valley four times, as the Auditor pointed out, but it has never been enacted. To me, that reflects the challenges with the legislation as it’s written. I’m really looking forward to reviewing this, because I think the intent of the legislation is to be able to be proactive in looking at communities and the issues around the watershed for the drinking water in those communities.

The way the legislation is written, it really makes it an issue of last resort or a measure of last resort. I don’t think that’s what we need in terms of how we can best protect drinking water more proactively. So we’ll be doing a review, together with Health, on that aspect particularly of the Drinking Water Protection Act.

The next recommendation is part of recommendation 5, and it’s around oversight. How do we, in my office, directly monitor drinking water officers’ compliance with the guidelines and directives? There is the Drinking Water Officers Guide that has been developed in recent years, and it’s quite detailed, but it is just that — a guide. We don’t have specific reporting indicators about how drinking water officers are complying with the recommendations in those guidelines.

[9:45 a.m.]

What we have recommended in our report and also the work that we’ve been doing with the drinking water officers around the province for the last, about, two or three years, mostly led by Joanne, in partnership with the regional health authorities, is developing a new set of indicators that allow us to understand the drinking water programs and the work of the drinking water officers in the health authorities in a much more relevant way.

Most of our reports in the past had focused on actions under the 2002 drinking water plan, and they’re very general actions, and they reflect the work of many, many ministries. A challenge for us in developing these reports has been getting information from those ministries that reflect the work that’s being done, and they weren’t particularly relevant to the work on the ground that each of the health authorities was doing.

So we’ve developed, in partnership with them, a whole suite of new indicators that actually reflect things like: how many different types of water systems do I have in my health authority? How many of them meet the standards that we have? How many are inspected? What types of conditions? Very particular things that better reflect the work of the drinking water programs in each of the health authorities. That allows us to understand how each of the health authorities and each of the drinking water programs is actually working to attain our goals of clean, safe and reliable drinking water for all.

Moving towards these new indicators, as we’ve planned in our report, is our way of moving forward. It is contingent, of course, on having data systems that allow us to collect that information, and that is a challenge that we’re working on. We’re phasing in these new indicators over the next five years as the health authorities are able to adjust their data systems to be able to collect that information.

Ideally what I would like to see within the next two to three years is having an understanding of every drinking water system in the province and what the risks are for those specific systems. I am confident that we have very good systems for the vast majority of people, but we need to be able to proactively target the areas where we think we might have problems in the future, where the infrastructure is aging, and be able to put in place forethinking measures about how we protect the water in those areas.

The next recommendation is back to you guys.

L. Hrycuik: Just to say that the audit report did identify that the Ministry of Health had not been reporting publicly on drinking water. As Bonnie had said, there is work going on with the indicators, and we’re also working very closely with the health authorities on their data sources.

One of the first actions we’re going to take is our role versus the PHO’s role and what that clarity of scope is on reporting, because I think it’s really important that we have clarity of roles in what we report as the Ministry of Health versus what the PHO reports. So that’ll be the first work that we undertake.

Then, based on that, we’re going to develop our reporting mechanism — how often, what measures we’re going to use, whether it’s going to be in the service plan, what that’s going to look like. I think that we have some work to do. I don’t think it’s going to take us a lot of time to do that, so we are going to release an interim report just with the new performance measures, and then we’ll set up an annual cycle of reporting after that. There’s just some early work that we need to do to clarify the rules of what we would report on.

B. Henry: We also have a recommendation around monitoring and reporting, so we will, of course, continue to refine that. As I’ve mentioned, we’re going to a new process with new indicators, and we’re not planning on doing the comprehensive reports that we have been doing, because it’s impossible to do them on an annual basis. So what we’re trying to do is pull out the key indicators that reflect the work of the health authorities and the drinking water officers and to report on those on an annual basis.

My vision would be to be able to report publicly and update it even in real time on our website or some other more accessible framework. Then we will do our more detailed reports using the full suite of indicators on probably a three- to five-year basis instead. We will continue, of course, to track activities that we talked about, of the actions of the drinking water officers’ problems, issues that have arisen and any complaints or reviews of decisions on an annual basis as well.

[9:50 a.m.]

L. Hrycuik: The last slide is really just a summary. We want to thank the Auditor General for the work they’ve taken to really highlight and showcase the recommendations and the work.

We’ve created a comprehensive action plan that will continue to advance the recommendations in a positive way, working very closely with…. You can hear that the provincial health officer and us have a really shared role and responsibility in supporting the protection of drinking water in B.C. We’re going to engage the senior executive to really clarify the roles and responsibilities and support that legislative review so that when we do bring forth our recommendations in government, we have a commitment for those other ministries who do have a role in water.

We continue to place a high priority. As Bonnie says, the majority of people in British Columbia have safe drinking water, and we want to continue to support that to continue.

I want to thank all of your time and open it up for questions.

S. Bond (Chair): All right. Thank you very much for the comprehensive response. We appreciate that very much. I think that members should also have a copy of the action plan that has been laid out very specifically for the recommendations of the Auditor General’s office.

I normally wait to have my questions at the end, but I hope my colleagues will indulge me in asking one question because I think it also reflects on the report that’s in front of us.

A number of times throughout the report, there is a comment about the shift in leadership on this file. I just want to be sure that…. What we’ve heard this morning is that this is a very complex file, and there are a whole lot of ministries engaged. There is language used about things being disbanded and changed and abandoned — all of those things.

In the response from the ministry in the report, it talks about the change in leadership responsibilities, which moved a significant set of responsibilities to the Ministry of Environment. Yet in many ways, that is underrepresented in this report. This really focuses specifically on Health but lays out a whole series of recommendations and commentary about lack of leadership. Yet if you read the report thoroughly and listen to both sides, there was a leadership shift, as I understand it.

I would just like to hear from both parties. This is not about not suggesting that there’s work to be done and that this isn’t relevant. But to me, it seems that there was a shift in responsibility that somewhat challenges the context of the report because Environment’s off doing something. I don’t know what that is, because it’s not captured here.

There seems to be a sense that Health is saying: “Yes, we accept the recommendations. We have responsibility. But by the way, there was significant shift in leadership on the water file to Environment.” So how do we get a full picture of what’s going on when we’re hearing about the Health side of it today?

I’d like to hear from both sides a little bit about the context of the report, when in fact, according to the ministry, there was a significant change in leadership responsibilities from Ministry of Health in the drinking water systems between 2002 and 2013. So we’re holding them accountable, potentially, for things where another ministry may have some leadership. It doesn’t mean that it’s not important.

Can you just give me some sense of the context of this report in light of that comment?

C. Dover: In our planning, we did meet with the Ministry of Environment, and at no time did they feel that they were assigned the leadership responsibility.

We looked at the MOU from October of 2006. We looked at the creation of the ADM interministry committee on water. We also had a review by our own legal staff and an external legal person. The end result of that was that it was felt, across the board, that it was still the responsibility of Health, because once the committee disbanded, then the responsibilities went back to the previous ministries, where it originated.

[9:55 a.m.]

The action plan pointed out that it was the Ministry of Health that was to take the leadership and coordination role. When the committee disbanded, then, in our view, it defaulted back to the Ministry of Health. The links that are on the website still refer to the action plan. In our view, it was the Ministry of Health that still had the responsibility for leadership and coordination.

S. Brown: We had a long discussion about this. Staff close to the file felt that the change had been clear and that it was a conscious shift. I think where we got to on the Health side — and Bonnie and Lorie can add commentary — was the very fact of the Auditor going through the material, finding a lack of clarity from the perspective of the Auditor General. Actually, it both reflects the complexity and also begs the question to actually review it and reaffirm or change the roles that are giving oversight to the water system.

We had quite a lot of debate about it, as is reflected slightly in the commentary at the back. We actually felt the very fact of the discussion showed the complexity of the shift that had taken place, and I think the point that was made to us was that lack of clarity, from the Auditor’s point of view, and we accepted that.

That could lead to gaps. Even though we think there’s lots of action…. Not think — there is a lot of action going on. But the very fact of that lack of clarity…. If nobody is in charge, who’s in charge?

It’s a matter of mutual influence. I think, from the Auditor General’s point of view, it was felt that that was worth government reviewing, considering and either reaffirming very clearly who’s on first base, who’s on second and who’s accountable for what, or shifting and changing it, which is why we accepted the recommendation.

You pick up, Chair, what was really a very big discussion that we had, because there was a sense from the staff who were close to this file, across the different ministries, that there was a conscious shift that took place, but the signifi­cance of that shift and the sustainability of it was questioned, I think, in terms of how that was handled.

B. Henry: I will say, as well, that the role of the PHO, in terms of having oversight, from source to tap, of drinking water has not changed, but we did, as well, recognize that this was really complex, and we, in some cases, perhaps got push-back from Environment around requirements and issues that we had wanted them to address. There was legislation — the new Water Sustainability Act that was passed under EMA recently — that, actually, in my opinion, has competing authorities over source protection. Drinking water officers at the regional health authority level definitely have activities that they can do and actions they can take to protect source water that may also compete with Environment authorities under EMA.

For us, it was really important that we do say yes. We want to take the lead, and we want to be on first on this, but we need to have all of those clarified, because the many different pieces of legislation I think are sometimes competing.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Well, I appreciate that. I think…. No one in this room wants to be finger-pointing. That’s not what this is about. It’s to, first of all, reassure British Columbians that the vast majority of people have safe drinking water and that there may be some legislative gaps.

But I totally agree. Joint accountability means no accountability.

My concern is that we have a report here that’s about the Ministry of Health, but somewhere along the way, there was apparently a shift in responsibility, and the Ministry of Environment isn’t mentioned at all. I get that they’re not the subject of this audit, but to me, in order to have a proper context for the work that’s being done, there needs to be a discussion about their role and whoever all else is engaged in this.

Anyway, I just thought it was important, from the beginning, to look at the context piece to say: “Okay. Who is in charge, and what happened?” When there is supposedly a shift in leadership, but then the other side doesn’t know they’re in charge — that is a problem. I think that’s what this report highlights.

To this point, Garry?

[10:00 a.m.]

Jane, we’re just going to let Garry speak to this point. If anyone else wants to speak to that…. Go ahead.

G. Begg: Just in the interest of clarity, I think it’s important that we acknowledge that the provincial officer of health is endowed or imbued with awesome responsibilities, right? There is a legislative advantage to the provincial officer of health. The person who occupies that role has a duty and obligation under law, which supersedes many other things.

The recurring theme in this report is a lack of leadership. I use a phrase often, which is: if you really want to get something done, you’ll find a way; if you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. I don’t say that in an accusatory way but in an observational way, about the whole landscape that has been described.

I don’t want the public to feel that the provincial officer of health’s power has been diminished or wasn’t fully exercised, because I think it’s an important point. You have awesome responsibilities that are statutory. You can order things to happen — which is, I suspect, the reason why the Ministry of Health is here, because that responsibility rests with your office.

I just want that to be noted. It’s a very important consideration.

S. Bond (Chair): Bonnie, did you want to respond?

B. Henry: I do appreciate that, because there are important and significant direct responsibilities and authorities that come under this act.

The way the act is written is actually a little bit tangled around some aspects — the proactive aspects that I was mentioning around drinking water protection plans, for example. I can identify the issues, but it is a ministerial decision to take action on them. I don’t think that was the intent. That’s my opinion.

I think we can do better — it’s one of the reasons that I really support this legislative review — to make it much clearer about what actions can be taken by whom and when.

J. Thornthwaite: Thank you for that initial clarification, because my questions relate to that.

Many times in government we see that there are a lot of ministries that are involved in a particular issue. Getting to the crux of the responsibility to actually act on whatever the issue is, is sometimes really difficult.

I appreciate the Ministry of Health is in the middle of that pie, on page 21, but there are all these other ministries that are affecting drinking water. I’ll qualify what people have said, that the majority of our drinking water is 100 percent safe. But there are issues that rise up.

I guess my question is more kind of a global question. When you identify these things…. I appreciated what the public health officer just said — can identify issues but that it’s up to the minister to act. Well, if the minister is not the actual minister responsible for the ministry that has the challenges going, I’m still kind of questioning the accountability and how ministries will be essentially forced to comply. That’s the first question.

The second one…. What I don’t really see too much on is the public. A lot of times what happens is: there’s a mandate that comes down on ministries to do or to act. But then, all of a sudden when that action affects people on the ground, and when you’ve got all these ministries involved….

You’ve got Highways. Could this affect a highway? Is this going to affect the mining? This is going to affect jobs in community A, because of the mining. With regards to agriculture, is the use of the water with the agriculture superseding the use of the drinking water? What about the forestry, up in the forests; is that affecting the runoff? All of these sorts of things start to come into play.

[10:05 a.m.]

I guess my question is…. When we determine, in this particular case, that it’s all about drinking water, how do we get the Ministry of Agriculture or municipalities to be able to tell Mrs. Jones in her farm in rural B.C. that she’s not allowed to do X? Then you’ve got a whole bunch of issues that come in the community.

We’ve seen this in other issues, right? Ralph and I just went through a whole series of a steelhead caucus. You talk about responsibility for steelhead. Not only is it cross-ministerial, but it’s cross-jurisdictional through the federal government. You think a lot of the issues are the same as steelhead and drinking water.

But anyway, I guess my question is: how can we ensure that there is somebody in charge that’s going to act when there are all these competing forces? I don’t know who wants to take that one on.

S. Brown: I think all the issues raised are key. The other piece I would also add into there, using my own reflection as we were kind of working our way through this, is for government. How do they get a holistic overview of the range of issues with the fragmentation that we have? To my knowledge, we have not. At least in my term as deputy, there hasn’t been that kind of holistic presentation to government over the last several years, where you’ve got a number of competing issues and you’ve got to make judgment and discernment about how to balance out those competing issues while actually protecting the water supply for drinking.

I think the opportunity that we’ve got is by actually carefully — to my knowledge, it’s not been done before — going through the legislation, which has evolved over time. Look at the legislation. Look at where there’s ambiguity and crossovers. Give the government an opportunity to look at that and make decisions about cleaning up the legislation where it may be required, or regulation. But also, in terms of the accountability, affirm where there should be a lead minister. How should that come to government, as well as to the public, in terms of when should it come and how it should be presented in a more holistic way, as opposed to the pieces?

The other thing that I’ve been genuinely impressed by is that there is a lot of work going on. It’s not that there isn’t significant work going on across multiple ministries in this area but how it comes together as a whole. This is the opportunity for us to look at how that could be managed across government better, in a clearer way.

B. Henry: If we look at one of the examples around Hullcar, where all of those came to light, that was around agriculture. But we see this in multiple…. Even building a subdivision — the issues around drinking water, the issues around watersheds, the multi-use watersheds…. The Comox Valley is a perfect example of that, where there is a single source of water for that community, which is a growing community, but it’s also a recreational lake. There are no other alternatives in terms of drinking water, but it’s used for many, many things, and everybody has their stake in it. It’s very complex.

I’m hopeful that this process will actually allow us to map it out. There are some things that I think are quite unusual that have been built into the legislation, probably for the right reasons at the time. But you have to have a referendum to improve your drinking water system in a community. You don’t have to have a referendum to raise the rates on sewage. That, to me, makes no sense. We need to highlight some of these incongruencies that make it really difficult to maintain and to improve the drinking water systems.

J. Thornthwaite: Can I have a follow-up, Chair?

S. Bond (Chair): Of course. Go ahead.

J. Thornthwaite: I’ll let others…. I do have some specific questions.

I would hope, then, with this holistic plan, moving forward, that it also involves not just informing the public through reports but, at the ground level, that the public is informed.

What’s going to happen is that there’s all this stuff happening at the high level and the ministry level, and everybody thinks that they’re all in a table here, making a decision that’s holistic. But when it comes down to the actual ground and how that affects people and people’s lives, as well as their livelihood, then that’s when things are going to blow up.

I would just hope that from the very beginning, there’s some sort of communication plan that will at least give the public an idea of what’s kind of going on.

[10:10 a.m.]

S. Bond (Chair): I just want to confirm, Stephen, that as you are looking at legislation and reviewing the legislation…. Your comment is completely accurate that it evolves over time. Will you be looking at legislation in other jurisdictions? Obviously, in the history of major water issues, we have a couple of examples in Canada — one in Ontario and one in Saskatchewan. One would have assumed that, since that time…. Will you be doing a cross-jurisdictional review as you…?

S. Brown: Lorie and I discussed that. Yes, that will be part of the overall review — to put our legislation into the context of other initiatives elsewhere in other jurisdictions.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you for those questions, Jane.

Ralph, you’re up next.

R. Sultan: My remarks will really be an extension, or perhaps an underlining, of what the Chair and my colleague Jane Thornthwaite have already stated.

I think if one were to write a manual, a civil servant survival guide, one would use this as a case study of how to deal with a complex issue. Step 1: you set up an interministerial committee to deal with the issue. That, first of all, kind of diffuses who’s actually responsible. There are probably six people showing up for those meetings. Secondly, you change the mandate of the committee so it’s not just water quality, but it’s agriculture, it’s the steelhead, and it’s how the water supply will survive global warning. It broadens out into some very big and important issues, of course. But it’s so big and important that step 3, as you say, is: “Well, this committee’s not really capable of dealing with those issues. We’ll just disband it.”

So poor old water quality and risk have somehow just disappeared. Nobody’s responsible. Ten years later, another Auditor General goes to work and says: “What happened?” And it’s: “Well, I don’t know. I mean, it just got lost in some sort of bureaucratic reshuffling.” I’m being a bit cynical, of course. But the report is really quite clear on that series of events having happened in this instance.

As the Chair has also pointed out, we don’t have to really look very far to be reminded of the drastic health consequences if we do not deal with these issues competently. Let me interject that it’s perhaps unfortunate that we’re here grilling Mr. Brown and Dr. Henry, who have key responsibilities for what I believe is probably just about the best health system in the world, anywhere. How in the heck did they get caught in the byte? Why isn’t the Minister of Environment here, for example? He’ll say: “Well, I’m so busy saving the world from global warming that I really don’t have time for these mundane issues.”

But to put names to the cases that the Chair has mentioned: Walkerton. The consequences of the failure of that small municipal system to protect the health of its inhabitants still has repercussions throughout the system, throughout governance, the municipal governance. I think seven people died and many, many were ill.

Flint, Michigan. This has changed the profile of politics in the state of Michigan, no small conglomeration of citizens, and at one time, the centre of the world’s automobile industry. They still don’t quite know what to do about the poor water quality in Flint. I think the scale of the problems just kind of overwhelmed the political system’s capacity to deal with it.

Shawnigan Lake. We have seen political careers in our own immediate personal experience built upon the issue of threat to a drinking supply. A determined politician — we see a good example of that in the Legislature today — can build a career on that single issue and, I’m sure, probably have a good chance of being re-elected. I’m not quite sure, you know, what the facts are. It’s a little bit vague, but nevertheless, it’s another example.

Then we have Ottawa, where this continual nagging concern about water quality in First Nations villages is thrown at the federal government, saying: “What are you doing about it?” This has been going on for years, which illustrates, of course, the fact that, as the report points out, we have 4,400 separate water supply systems in communities in British Columbia — 4,400 separate systems that we have to maintain the safety of.

[10:15 a.m.]

How in the heck can the chief medical officer be asked to be in charge of that? It’s just an impossible assignment, which brings to mind my basic point: who should really be held accountable. Well, I don’t think, given the cross-jurisdictional nature of the issues, which has already been pointed out, that any one ministry can be said, “Well, you’re lead on this” — least of all, Health. You shouldn’t be here. Mr. Heyman should be here, I suppose.

I would suggest, as a solution, we appoint…. Just as we have a chief medical officer for the province, we have a chief water quality officer for the province, and say this person has to deal with it. It wouldn’t be a health-trained person. It would be an engineer. These are engineering issues. Sanitary engineering, as a specialty, is well developed, though it was not necessarily the most popular choice of studies when I went to engineering school at UBC. Nevertheless, it’s vital to the health of our civilization, and we’d better worry about both the intake of the water and of the outtake — the consequences of human waste. These are engineering problems, and they will only be solved by engineers.

As a final comment, I would recall my experience many years ago in Prince George, bumping into a young engineer who was heading out to Vancouver. I was heading in to Fort Ware, which is probably 75 miles north of the north end of Williston Lake — rather remote, accessible only by aircraft. He had been working on a wastewater treatment plant for Ingenika — a similarly remote community, but it at least had the benefit of being located on the shores of Lake Williston at the very north end.

He was fed up. “I’m quitting this job,” he said. “I’ve been running a….” I don’t know. Let’s say it was a $3 million or $4 million installation of a new wastewater treatment plant in Ingenika, population of — I don’t know — 300 or 400 people at most, perhaps. He said: “I know that once this thing is built, it’ll operate just fine for about a year. There’ll be no maintenance. It will fail. There’ll be nobody on hand capable of maintaining it. If we come back in two, three years, it’ll be right back to the situation where we didn’t have any wastewater treatment plant at all.”

These are perplexing issues. When we have a population so dispersed throughout the province, to put in what can be somewhat sophisticated engineering systems to serve them — most basically, potable water — is not an easy assignment. To ask the leadership in these remote communities to be in charge, they say: “Well, what do I know about it?” These are political issues that we really have to think about in terms of viability of some of these communities, if they expect to live by 21st-century health standards.

As I said already, to me, the bureaucratic shuffling off of responsibility to somebody else down the row could, in my mind, be solved by appointing a person who has the title of chief water quality officer. Believe me, I think there’s enough work to keep that person quite busy. It’s going to cost a bit of money, but failure costs even more, I suspect, in the health system.

That’s my short, little rant. I have some other thoughts, but maybe that’s enough for now.

B. Henry: May I respond to that? I do appreciate that. I do want to say that we do actually have a provincial drinking water officer, Joanne Edwards, who is here. I actually do feel it’s a large part of the role of my office, and I do think it is an important responsibility for oversight of drinking water because it is such a basic health need.

Having said that, there is only Joanne and myself, so yes, we need some resources to be able to do our role better. We’ve had some issues over the last number of years, but we also have drinking water programs in each of the regional health authorities that are the face-to-face, on-the-ground people and that include engineers.

Your point is very well taken. A lot of the issues that we’re dealing with are technical engineering issues, but we do have a small cadre of those people. But we need to pay attention to the resources that we have to support the many small communities, particularly in the north and the Interior, where the vast majority of the small water systems are.

[10:20 a.m.]

L. Hrycuik: I’ll just make one additional comment. Given the amount of work that we have to advance the action plan, we’re actually going to be hiring four new staff. One of them is going to be a wastewater engineer to ensure that we continue to have the technical expertise available and that we’ll be working with the provincial health officer to move the action plan forward and have the expertise. We have one already, but we want to add an additional staff member, recognizing that.

S. Bond (Chair): Ralph, we can come back to you.

Now we’re going to hear from the other engineer, Bowinn, who’s going to, hopefully…. She’ll probably respond to what Ralph had to say about sanitary engineering, I’m sure.

B. Ma: Yeah. Actually, I was going to say that wastewater treatment and water quality — those courses I found extremely fascinating, actually, in addition to the transportation end of things. I do definitely agree with my colleague across the way that engineering is a big part of the work.

In response to the idea that engineers should be leading the charge, I agree that engineers should be on the team. I don’t necessarily see a problem with Health actually leading the charge on this. At the end of the day, it isn’t really about whether the systems are functioning properly or they’re maintained properly. It’s: what is the quality of the water actually doing to or for people? And that’s very much a health-related question. I do also acknowledge Ralph’s concerns about, like, the dissemination of accountability and what that might do at the end of the day.

My questions are actually in a little bit different direction. I’m wondering…. There have been several references…. I apologize. I’m feeling a little under the weather today, so my brain might be moving a little slower than it usually does. But there were several references to the vast majority of people having access to good-quality, clean, potable water. I’m wondering who doesn’t have access to good-quality, potable water here in B.C? Can you…?

B. Henry: I would say that there’s nobody that doesn’t have access. The issues are that the risks are different for a small group of people. So there are about 480,000 people who are served by these 4,400 small water systems. Those small water systems are the ones that we feel have the greatest risk because of the reasons that our colleague talked about. You may not have the expertise. There may be four or five families connected to a small water system, and they don’t have the expertise or the equipment or the finances to manage these small water systems.

One of the things we really need to think about is: should we be allowing more small water systems to be created? Every time you have a new subdivision, there’s a request for that subdivision, and it becomes a small water system. Should they be compelled to connect to a larger water system? Should we spend more time…? There’s a lot of information in this report if you want to look at it. I think it’s page 23. There’s a table that tells you the different types of water systems we have and the governance of them and the ability of those different….

Whether you’re an improvement district or a municipality or a regional system, your ability to get resources to support your drinking water system varies tremendously. That’s part of the complexity that, I think, we really need to look at. How do we stop creating more small water systems that may be at risk? And how do we merge the many small water systems into a large…? Here in the Lower Mainland, we have a very large water system that provides very good, safe, continuously monitored water. I have great confidence in the water that we have here and in Victoria. We were talking about that earlier.

Some of the smaller and medium-sized communities may not have everything they need to make sure that they, on an ongoing basis, have safe drinking water. There are some communities in the Interior — Summerland comes to mind — where every spring they have flooding and the flooding affects their drinking water quality. They’re often on boil-water advisories for a period of time, but the community has voted down developing a filtration system for their water system. So how do you balance these needs?

Jane was talking about how if it affects me as an individual, my relationship to it is different.

B. Ma: To be clear, then, there are no people in communities in B.C. that don’t have access to some sort of potable water system. Is that right?

B. Henry: I wouldn’t say it quite unequivocally that way. It comes and goes. We have a number of communities that have been on long-term boil-water advisories.

[10:25 a.m.]

Some of them are First Nations communities. Some of them are smaller communities. They can be for a variety of different reasons. There’s still overlap with the federal government around drinking water systems in First Nations communities — we are working very closely with them — and there are many reasons why they may be on a boil-water advisory. But for most, there are workarounds in place to help people get potable drinking water in those situations.

B. Ma: That was going to be my next question, then. How many communities are currently on boil-water advisories, and how many of them have been longer-term ones — you know, more than a few days or weeks? In addition to that, where does the federal government come into this? And in your action plan, how do they get worked into this plan, given that they do have responsibility on some of the reserves?

This somewhat adds to that dissemination, that disaggregation, of responsibility. But I think it’s important that we are clear about where they come in so that we don’t end up kind of passing the buck.

B. Henry: The numbers vary depending on the time of year and what’s going on. There are a number of water systems that may be on short-term boil-water advisories. There was one recently in, I think, Nanaimo because of a flooding event. Things happen, depending on weather and things like that.

There are a small number that have been on long-term boil-water advisories for a variety of reasons, sometimes because of chemical contamination. Mostly not biological contamination. Those numbers are in our report, and we report on them annually.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): There are a lot questions because there’s a lot of substance here, so thank you for all your work on it.

Going back, you said you were going to create a team of four people.

L. Hrycuik: No, we’re not going to create a team of four. We’re just hiring additional staff. We already have staff in the ministry. So we’re just going to increase the staffing capacity to be able to do the action plan work, also recognizing that we want to continue to have staff capacity to support drinking water in the province.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Okay. I appreciate that. It’s a pretty ambitious and comprehensive plan, and I appreciate that you’ve got start dates next month. I’d really like to see that, thank you. But does it mean that you’re reallocating resources within the ministry? Or does it mean that, as you go along, at key points, you’re going to be needing to ask for extra resources?

L. Hrycuik: We have a couple of contracts ready to be initiated. The one on the legislative review…. We have a contractor coming on who will be able to start in January to support that legislative review. We also have support for the small water systems support. We’ve got some dollars allocated to that. So we’ve got a few contracts ready to roll in anticipation of the work that we need to be advancing, as well as the four staff that are going to come on. We also have staff already in place.

What I would say to answer your question is that we’ll review, as we go forward, the work that needs to be done. We’ll look for additional resources where required. But I do think that with the plan that we have in place and that we are going to be doing in partnership with the PHO, as well, we’ve anticipated a lot of the work that needs to be done in a short period of time.

S. Brown: I think part of the thing they tried to do is…. Bonnie gave Lorie the go-ahead to start, now — as in a month ago — to begin to look at what resources she needs. Bonnie is also going to be coming to me with a request for some additional resources. Within the broader budget that I have access to within the Ministry of Health — both for contracted, as well as for staffing — we will be prioritizing. Each year we prioritize which are the key initiatives for working on, and this is obviously a key.

The debate that we had was…. If we actually don’t take the initiative and try and do this in a short period of time, the danger is it dissipates yet again. So we thought that it was better to really go at this in a focused way over a 24-month period. Clearly, the work won’t be finished; there’ll be more work to be done. But we thought that by getting some impetus behind it, that kind of respects the actual recommendation to take action on this. That was the commitment made to both Bonnie and Lorie — that we would resource appropriately to try to work against an initial 24-month plan.

[10:30 a.m.]

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Going back to the questions about communities, would you say that Indigenous communities are evenly represented or overrepresented amongst those communities where it’s the small-scale systems?

B. Henry: Actually, there’s been quite a lot of work done in First Nations communities in B.C., so the vast majority of them actually have very strong, good drinking water systems. They’re not overly represented in communities that have issues with drinking water and boil-water advisories.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Okay. But moving forwards, where there are Indigenous communities, then the First Nations Health Authority would be involved, and there’d be engagement with communities at a community level?

B. Henry: Yes. We work very closely with the First Nations Health Authority. There was a federal piece of legislation where they tried to renegotiate the relationship around drinking water with all Indigenous communities in Canada, but there was push-back from the First Nations communities because of lack of consultation, so that is not yet in place.

In the meantime, we have developed a very strong relationship, through the First Nations Health Authority, with the drinking water systems here in B.C. It’s mostly at the health authority level, each of the regional health authorities. Certainly at our level, we work very closely with the First Nations Health Authority.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Thank you. You were talking earlier on about identifying risks, and there’s going to have to be some prioritization, for sure. I was wondering whether a gender-based analysis plus lens had been applied to be able to kind of inform those priorities so that particularly vulnerable…. I’ll let you jump in, then.

B. Henry: Actually, that is one of the things that we are committing to when we’re doing this review. Certainly, something my office is committed to is making sure that we take that approach to all of the work that we’re doing. So yes, we are going to engage in that.

L. Hrycuik: Absolutely. From a population and public health perspective, we are very committed to the gender-based analysis. It’s critical for us to be able to really review that in order to understand how we’re affecting populations. So yes, we’d be taking that.

B. Henry: We’re taking both the approaches. I include the fact that we need to take an UNDRIP and Indigenous lens as well as the GBA+, so putting them together.

J. Yap: In the response from the Ministry of Health in the report, recommendation 1 and recommendation 6…. The paragraph starts out: “MOH acknowledges.” That’s recommendation 1. Recommendation 6 also refers to “acknowledge.”

I just wanted to be crystal clear. In your presentation, Stephen, you talked about accepting all recommendations. In the report, it was “acknowledge” versus “accept.”

S. Brown: Then typically we accepted. We were clear with the Auditor General that we accepted the recommendations and that we would take action to follow through with an action plan for those recommendations.

J. Yap: So all recommendations.

S. Brown: Yes, and Bonnie’s office did the same.

J. Yap: Good. Now, with respect to your action plan, which is very detailed, even at this high level — there will obviously be a lot of additional detail that will flow from it — it’s going to take resources. Have you given some thought to what scale of resources of people and budget would be required to implement your action plan?

S. Brown: No. What I’ve done is I agreed with Lorie to give some initial resources, and then as we jump into this, I’ve committed to Lorie that I’ll make accessible more resources as she requires. We’ll make a decision about whether that’s staffing or whether it’s contracts as we go along, but with the minister, we’ve identified this as a key priority to follow through on this, so that will evolve.

Also, I made a similar commitment to Bonnie. She’s immediately going to be asking for some resources. But as this evolves over the coming months, we can add resources as we go along to get….

J. Yap: I know it’s very early days. You’re just putting this plan together and implementing it over the next two years. But do you have a sense of what kind of a budget impact this would have? Would it be in the order of a few million dollars or tens of millions of dollars?

S. Brown: I would say a few. Not tens. By adding staff, in kind of crude terms, you can estimate about $100K per staff. With the initial allocation, we’ll probably be getting close to several hundred thousand to $1 million.

[10:35 a.m.]

As we move through with some of the contracting, you’d probably get up to about $1.5 million to $2 million, I would estimate. That would be a really kind of crude estimation at this stage. But it would be on that kind of magnitude, which is well within the capacity, within the kind of broader scope of the budget that we have, in terms of allocating contract dollars in staffing.

J. Yap: Thank you. I have one more question in regards to…. There was a comment made by the Auditor on page 7 of the report, and it refers to the last known outbreak of waterborne illness in British Columbia. It was in 2004. Then, at the end of the paragraph: “For every reported case of waterborne illness there may be hundreds of cases that go unreported.” What is the basis for that comment?

C. Dover: We got that from our subject-matter expert, who was on the advisory report for the Walkerton outbreak. He’s the one that provided us with that information.

J. Yap: So it’s possible that we’ve actually had waterborne illnesses happen since 2004…

C. Dover: It’s possible.

J. Yap: …but they just haven’t been documented?

C. Dover: Right. It could come across like a simple stomach illness that’s not necessarily identified as being related to the water. It could be that they feel like they have stomach flu or something like that.

B. Henry: I could probably speak to that, in that we do have reportable communicable diseases. Some of them are diseases that can be waterborne illnesses like salmonella, giardia, things that you get sick from, from your water. We monitor that on an ongoing basis around the province, and it’s usually from a lab report. So when somebody gets sick, they may or may not go see their physician. They may or may not get a laboratory test. They may or may not show up.

This is all collected at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control under the Public Health Act. We monitor those on an ongoing basis, and we investigate at the local level if we see a cluster of cases. We have not identified any clusters of cases that have been directly related to drinking water. There have been food-borne outbreaks and other things.

There are clearly people who get sick from their drinking water periodically around the province, and it’s really challenging to actually document them. We have done some research that shows that for every case of enteric illness — that’s stomach-related, so ongoing diarrhea — we actually get in the system, as many as 200 to 300 people may have been affected, in some cases.

But we actually are using whole genome sequencing to be better able to connect illnesses and to understand where they’re coming from. That’s another area that we need to pay some attention to. The public health lab has some resources to do that around drinking water and protection of our drinking water, but we need to pay more attention to being able to bolster that ability.

J. Yap: You mentioned earlier that there are communities right now that are under boil-water advisories. Would it be logical that to have that put in place, it meant that there would have had to be some concerns or some people reported feeling ill?

B. Henry: No. Generally, it’s because of the testing of the water that shows that there’s something in the water that you shouldn’t be consuming. Sometimes it’s what we call turbidity. In the spring, with the freshet and the flooding, some water systems that are reliant on surface water can have increased organic matter in the water. That means that things like chlorine don’t work as well, so they may be on a boil-water advisory for a period of time because we can’t effectively disinfect the water.

Most of the longer-term ones are around things like some of the chemicals that are in the water that may be too high for human consumption.

J. Yap: And the boiling will help to…?

B. Henry: No. In those cases…. There are different types of advisories that we have. That would be a “Don’t use it for drinking or cooking with it.” Actually, boiling can sometimes concentrate chemicals. The boiling is for the biological contaminants.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for those questions, John.

[10:40 a.m.]

G. Begg: Thank you all for your presentation today. I think I’m closing the loop on this, Lorie, and I hope your answer is shorter than my question, which is merely…. I realize this is not a comprehensive report. Metrics and timeline attached…. We use words like “work with,” “confirm,” “develop” — very nebulous wording. Can you confirm for me that you have a very rigorous process to make sure that this is thorough and quick and committed — with those metrics around it?

L. Hrycuik: So you’re asking me: do we have an action plan that has those metrics confirmed to advance?

G. Begg: Exactly.

L. Hrycuik: Yes.

S. Brown: I think the piece I would add to that, because then it torments Lorie, is that what we’ve done as a matter of course, where we identify a high-priority issue, is that we’ve actually gone down to period reporting so there can be no drift. So Lorie will be using the action plan, with the dates, and then be basically, in 12-week blocks, with regular routine reporting through to my office so that we can…. It’s not in terms of “Lorie won’t do it,” but in terms of then we can actually quickly pick up when we’re going off track or we’ve hit a block, and we don’t see drift. So that’s the kind of methodology that we’re trying to use to advance the agenda.

G. Begg: And you know, of course, that if you don’t have that set in stone, it takes on a life of its own. It becomes….

L. Hrycuik: It will.

S. Brown: It moves and drifts.

L Hrycuik: Yeah, we want to keep the scope tight to what we want to achieve. Absolutely.

S. Bond (Chair): We have Ralph before I ask some questions. Go ahead.

R. Sultan: Just as an observation, in terms of actions planned, this committee sees a great number of slides emphasizing words like “develop a framework,” “identify the risks,” “consult,” “review,” “work with,” “plan” and “ask government to consider.” I guess that’s the language of officials attempting to develop alternatives and consider all of the options. But they can also give the impression that, well, this creates an awful lot of busywork, but what is actually happening here? So a little bit of a caution, perhaps, in saying that this is really going to bowl them over, because “I’m going to work with, consult, ID the risk,” and so on and so forth doesn’t necessarily impress all of us.

Other words were used also in terms of producing greater accountability: “professional reliance.” That’s an interesting phrase, particularly in the context of the current government, which, I think perhaps with considerable justification, has cast doubt on the ability of government officials to say: “Well, look. This takes special expertise, and we’re going to hire some professional agent here,” for example, “to look into it. We will rely upon their professional judgment and skill” — in other words, professional reliance — “and if things go wrong, it’s not my fault. It’s that engineer’s fault.”

This theory of delegating accountability to engineering, in particular, but also foresters and a whole range of other officials has, I think, been brought into question by this current government — as I said, with perhaps some justification. So again, I would be cautious about saying, “We’re going to solve this by hiring some smart engineers,” and saying to them: “You’re responsible. Just do it.” They have to fit into the real world. Presumably, they’ll come running to you for resources or: “What do I do here, there, everywhere?” The world is not that simple. You just can’t hire a bunch of sanitary engineers. “Okay. Problem solved. Professional reliance will save the day.” I don’t think it quite works out very well in practice.

The final thought would be lack of data. Has anyone ever considered that each and every one of these 4,400 separate water supply systems in B.C. should submit an annual sample of their water, which could be processed on a mass production basis through some lab to test for goodness knows what creatures and microbes might reside, or nitrates or lead?

[10:45 a.m.]

Any number of tests could be run. I appreciate that this could produce lots of quality control problems, and they might just go down and buy some Perrier water at the corner store and send it in to you. But nevertheless, it’s such a simple thing — “Did you get a sample this year or not?” — and then require somebody to put their name on it. That, at least, would perhaps identify 4,400 people who are at least a first line of responsibility again.

It’s just a thought, because how on earth can we in fact draw conclusions, aside from these headline cases that several of us have mentioned, as to what purity…? Is it degrading over time? Are we getting better? Are we talking about a 1 percent incidence? We just don’t really know. I don’t think anybody around this table really knows.

B. Henry: Perhaps I can address that.

R. Sultan: Why not regularly sample? Maybe it’s going on. I stand to be enlightened.

B. Henry: It is. It is. We have a very robust drinking water testing program that’s done through a series of labs that are accredited by my office.

R. Sultan: I see.

B. Henry: So we do that on a more than annual basis. There’s a routine reporting basis.

R. Sultan: Okay. I didn’t know that.

B. Henry: Some of the challenges we have are recording the data, not for the biologics so much but for some of the chemical testing that’s done. So that’s something we need to improve. The 4,400 are only the small water systems. We actually have over 6,000 water systems in the province. All of them are required to test on a periodic basis, and we do have a very robust system for doing that. So that part…

R. Sultan: Good for you.

B. Henry: …I can reassure you about. It’s not perfect, but it is pretty robust.

The other piece. When you talk about relying on professionals, that is, apropos to your earlier comments, why I think it is really important that some of the authority still rests in my office, because my responsibility is, primarily, to have the health focus.

J. Thornthwaite: Just a comment and follow-up from what Ralph said, and then I’ve got one question. Then, for instance, if there’s this testing going on, and all of a sudden, in this community there’s glyphosate or pesticides or something, how would you communicate…? What would be the action plan for that? Given that the pesticide either is not supposed to be there or it’s not supposed to be there in the amounts that it is, how is that communicated to the community and, obviously, the farmers involved who are responsible for feeding not just the community but maybe British Columbia and beyond? How do they square that business and that local food security with the fact that there might be glyphosate or some sort of pesticide in the water?

That would be my first question, based on what Ralph has said. Then I’ve got a more specific question. What are the complaints to the actions of drinking water officials? Can you give us some examples?

B. Henry: To the first question, all of our drinking water systems are established so that we don’t have things like pesticides in the water. So if it is a groundwater system, there are measures that need to be taken to protect it from that. The testing we do is done by the regional health authorities at the front line, and there are processes in place for all the water systems to notify the people who are served by that water system if there is an issue.

Pesticides are not an issue that we have had in the drinking water. It certainly is an issue sometimes related to source water. And that’s where some of the challenges that we’ve come up with around overlapping authorities between Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Health around farming practices, industrial practices and potential to impact source water for a drinking water system…. Those are some of the things that I think we need to pay attention to.

I’m sorry. The second question was about…?

J. Thornthwaite: What are the complaints? Give me an example of what some of the complaints are of the actions of drinking water officials.

B. Henry: Anybody who has an order on them from a drinking water officer, whether it’s a drinking water system or whether it’s a farmer who has some action taken against them, can complain to my office about either reviewing or revising the order of the drinking water officer.

[10:50 a.m.]

Some of the ones that we’ve had, for example, have been farmers who’ve objected to drinking water officers putting restrictions on things that they can use in the fields that are adjacent to a drinking water source. Some of them are from drinking water systems or communities. I’ve had complaints from municipal drinking water systems that felt the drinking water officer’s restrictions on their permits were not in line, were too strong or too light. So there’s a variety of things.

The drinking water officers approve the permits for all of the drinking water systems. Sometimes they require things like additional disinfection, depending on the drinking water source. They may require measures to be taken to protect the drinking water source. I often get complaints from communities that it costs too much to do that.

J. Thornthwaite: Which is exactly the whole issue with these competing interests. So good luck with this. I know it’s going to be tough. I appreciated your comprehensive responses.

I guess, Chair, they’ll be back at another meeting. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

S. Bond (Chair): I have a number of questions, and I’ll just try to go through them quickly. Like others have said, we appreciate you being here and the work that’s being done. From my perspective, the report does make a statement which I disagree with. I can’t imagine…. I’m sure the ministry does as well. On page 9, it says that part of the reason there are challenges is that drinking water may not be a priority in the ministry. I would disagree with that. I can’t imagine that there isn’t a ministry or the provincial health officer or anyone else who doesn’t think that safe drinking water is important.

It may not have been reflected as a top priority in the work that the Ministry of Health is doing. But I just think that to suggest that it’s not a priority…. I mean, there are a lot of priorities in Health, having had a stint of time there.

I just want to begin by saying I think people are paying attention. I think the challenge is: who’s in charge, and where’s the clarity in that leadership? I think that making sure that government does respond to sorting out who’s responsible for what and that there’s someone that clearly can stand up and say, “That’s my job. I’m in charge of it, and I’m held accountable for that,” is a really critical outcome of this report.

I have a couple of questions related to topics that haven’t necessarily been raised. I’m assuming that there are legislated timelines for the provincial health officer to report on drinking water. I think it’s annual. Is it not?

B. Henry: It is in the act that I need to report annually on drinking water. The challenge has been that the act says that I have a requirement to report annually on activities that are taken under the act. What has evolved since 2002 was that the report became actions that were taken on the action plan, which is much, much broader. Activities under the act would be things like how many complaints we responded to, things like that.

What has happened is that the report has evolved into a very comprehensive report on what many, many different ministries are doing. For us to be able to obtain that information is just not possible to do in a year.

So what we’re proposing to do — what we had proposed to do, and the Auditor has reinforced that — is to go back to what the key things are that I need to report on every year under the act. Make those very simple, clear and ongoing reporting. Then the more comprehensive reporting, using the new suite of indicators that we’ve been working with the health authorities on, would happen on a more reasonable periodic basis — maybe three to five years.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Probably, to highlight Garry’s point about the significant role of the provincial health officer…. Legislative timelines, I believe, from my perspective, are not optional, are they? So would we agree that…? Has that commitment been met or not during that period of time? Is it a matter of definition, and what has been reported? Has something been reported in order to check the box where it comes to legislative accountability?

B. Henry: It doesn’t say “report annually.” It says “has to give an annual report.” I have done an annual report up to 2017, and we’re working on the 2018 report. But they’ve been put together in comprehensive reports.

[10:55 a.m.]

S. Bond (Chair): I would think that logically, people would assume that reporting annually means reporting annually, not reporting in 2017 for four years past, because if you’re going to actually do something or reflect on that, you’d want it to be more timely.

B. Henry: I absolutely agree.

S. Bond (Chair): I make that point only to recognize that that helps contribute to the concerns about this being a priority. When we see reports that are cumulative for four years instead of…. And it’s legislatively required. I mean, whether the law is imperfect or not really doesn’t matter. It is the law. It does matter. We’re going to look at that, but it is the law. So I wanted to highlight that.

In addition to that, one of the reasons stated for having challenges meeting legislative requirements was staffing. It was noted on page 10 of the report. Has that been communicated? And is that what Stephen is talking about when he says there are going to be additional resources? How are we suddenly going to see a change in reporting out that is more timely and based on legislative requirements when there has been expressed concern about the lack of resources in order to do that?

Information is one part of that, but there was a specific concern expressed about the resources in order to make that happen. How will that be fixed so that legislative requirements can be met?

S. Brown: To what you said earlier, Bonnie came and talked to me about the resource issue, and I invited Bonnie to give me what she required in terms of additional…. I think that, to the point you’re making also, Chair, we’re also going to have some interim…. Also, the discussion Lorie and I have had is about a sustained level of staffing.

To pick up on the priority point you made earlier, I think you’re absolutely right — it is a priority. The point that I took from the Auditor General, which is also correct, is that it’s a challenge, as you know. It’s: how do we profile this publicly in our service plans and make sure we’re profiling that so the public has a sense that this is a priority, not simply that we consider it a priority? I took that point from the Auditor and said we would look at how we’d better structure our service plan so that we, in a more structured way, reflect the population public health section of our service plan to reflect the priorities that we have.

B. Henry: Us reflecting it also signals to the other ministries who are involved that it’s a priority that we are still paying attention to.

S. Bond (Chair): Yes, and I think that’s a fair way to capture it. Stephen, I appreciate that. I read that and felt immediately…. I don’t believe that to be the case. I think the case is the profile and how it fits. Perhaps that’s what was meant in the report — in the way that it was written. I don’t think anyone would sit here and say that clean, safe drinking water isn’t a priority for anyone, including especially the Deputy Minister of Health and his team.

I think it’s also important to reflect…. We’ve talked a lot about the gaps and who’s in charge and all of those discussions. But the report does talk about good work that the ministry has done, and I think it is always important to provide that side of it — for example, water system risk management plans, those kinds of things.

On that note, I wanted to just ask a question about…. We got a copy of the action plan and target date document. In it, it talks about draft sample plans for, in this case, the city of Fort St. John, the regional district of Nanaimo, the city of Vancouver, the city of North Vancouver and that those ones are sort of anticipated in March of 2020. Maybe just tell us a little bit about those plans. Are they templates that would be expected to be expanded across the province? Are they the first of their kind? I’m just interested in the sample plans and how those are developed because that deals with the on-the-ground issues we’ve been talking about.

L Hrycuik: Can I pull somebody in who knows more in detail about that?

S. Bond (Chair): Sure. Whatever works.

L Hrycuik: He will know…. I don’t know the actual content of it. Tim Lambert is the executive director of health protection, so his staff is responsible for this. You might well get a much more comprehensive answer than I can give you.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you and welcome. We appreciate your time today.

T. Lambert: The system risk management concept is something that we developed ground-up by talking to all the engineers — you know, operators in the system — about where we needed to go to develop the system. So it’s a one-water concept — watershed to taps into watershed.

[11:00 a.m.]

It’s trying to take a community and get everyone in the whole community that’s touching water involved — finance, human resources, everything. What are you doing to manage water? How do you bring that together to talk about the risk to the water system?

We’ve developed that concept. We have a guideline on how to do this. That’s a draft guideline by Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. It was a recommendation from the internal audit in 2009 that we have to incorporate engineering into the water system. They’re not mentioned in the Drinking Water Protection Act right now.

We’ve developed a draft guideline, and then we’ve worked with those four communities who, to some degree, self-identify themselves as wanting to be proactive and move forward. We’ve piloted the workshops on those, and we’re just finalizing the reports. The Fort St. John report is finished. We’re in the process of finishing the Vancouver report, and then we’ll finish the other two. Then the concept is to go back and talk to everyone again about, “Here’s what the model looks like,” and expand the pilots to some more complex situations. Then we have, potentially, a different way to manage water.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you. You answered one of my questions in that they self-identified, which I think is important. Again, it’s Fort St. John, Nanaimo, Vancouver and the city of North Vancouver.

What is the end goal of the plan? Is it to help feed and shape some of the other work that’s being done? One of the factors in this report has been a lack of critical data. Is that part of this process? The city of Fort St. John will have a water management plan, or whatever it’s called. It would then be shared cross-ministry? Where does the report go, and what does it do?

T. Lambert: The report itself can inform a number of ministries about what’s needed. Here are some of the critical risks we’re facing: infrastructure risk, human resource risk — those types of questions. Then we have data in on where they need to go.

The concept also, if you think about emergencies, has built in it the concept of mutual aid between communities. How can we support each other in managing water? Everybody shares source water. There could be managing that. Somebody’s waste water is somebody else’s source water. How are we communicating between communities on those kinds of concepts?

S. Bond (Chair): The four are templates, and you would expect, then, to move on. Do you have a list of other communities that now know that work is underway? Are there other communities interested?

T. Lambert: A lot of communities know it’s underway. Certainly, we’ve presented on the concepts a number of times at conferences. Move the concept forward so a lot of people know. There have been some communities that are quite interested in developing that, going forward. I’ll note that it’s become legislated in the States to develop a similar kind of idea that’s relatively new, but we started it before they did. They’ve moved to…. It’s not quite as comprehensive as we’re doing.

It’s a concept catching on, this one-water notion.

S. Bond (Chair): To me, I think that’s a good piece of work. I think it’s work that, again, when you speak to the issue of: is it a priority for the ministry…? Yeah, I think it is. I think work is being done, but it’s how you profile that.

One of the thoughts around this whole issue of water. I don’t know that it’s been covered at…. But places like the Union of B.C. Municipalities, especially in the small communities forum — I’m assuming, since they have a lot of small water systems, there’s a great way to have conversations about this.

Anyway, I just wanted to highlight that. I appreciate that. It’s good for us to understand what’s going on, on the ground. Thank you for that.

A good segue to the other question I have about aging infrastructure. The report points out that there’s a lot of aging infrastructure, 50 years or older. Is there an inventory of that infrastructure? Do we have it rated on a sort of highest risk to lowest risk and some sense of where on earth the next problem is going to come? If we know the infrastructure is 50 years old, we know there are going to be emerging issues. Do we have a list of that infrastructure — that is, a list based on highest risk and highest need and where we can expect there to be problems?

B. Henry: I think the short answer is no. The longer answer is that that’s what we’ve been working with the regional health authorities to develop: the indicators that we’ve been talking about that define the different types of water systems that are in each community.

[11:05 a.m.]

What source water are they relying on? What types of barriers do they have in place to prevent contamination, etc.? And then understand where that water goes in their community and the age of the infrastructure, etc., etc. Those are all the things that we’re working towards, but we don’t at the moment.

L. Hrycuik: As part of our provincial strategic plan, one of our key actions that we were going to include in the provincial strategic plan is to, in fact, do that — to prioritize and also bring forth to government what the potential infrastructure might be so that there’s a clear understanding as to the commitments that might be needed. That is part of the provincial strategic plan that we’ve got.

S. Bond (Chair): One would think that would be a pretty important piece of work, understanding…. If we look at infrastructure broadly across the province because of all of the building that was done five decades ago, it’s not just water; it’s everything. It’s hospitals and schools. We are facing a tsunami of infrastructure challenges in the days ahead. I think the better we understand where those gaps are, the better whatever government it is will be able to work its way through how they address that.

Just a couple of other questions. There was a note about a shortage of workers in this sector. It’s not unlike other sectors, but this is a pretty critical one. I think it had something to do with Walkerton as well, if you look at staffing and how that was managed. There was a big issue around that.

If we don’t have enough people that are being trained and if we’ve got a proliferation of small water systems — not my words, but your words — what are we doing in terms of a proactive training strategy that gives people the tools they need to manage? I can’t imagine we want to be running out of workers who know how to work in this sector.

B. Henry: Engineers — water and wastewater engineers.

S. Bond (Chair): Yeah, it was the water waste management operators program.

B. Henry: There’s a whole section of that in our report. That is something that we’re very concerned about. That is at the regional health authority level, particularly the Interior and the north where it’s challenging getting people to move up there. That’s one of our big concerns. We need to really think, and part of what we’ve talked about is: are there provincial strategies that allow us to have the expertise that’s needed to be able to support more than one health authority perhaps? How do we look at maximizing the expertise that we have to support water systems across the province? It’s a very challenging question.

L. Hrycuik: I’ll add to that. We’re also in conversation with the Ministry of Advanced Education, recognizing that we need to do something on the human resource strategy. We are already engaging with them to support the work that we need to do in this particular area.

S. Bond (Chair): Just to be a bit parochial for a moment, when you mentioned the Interior and the north, it’s not just professionals here; it is professionals across the board. I know that Stephen is well aware of that.

From my perspective, the critical piece is identifying the demand and creating a strategy that actually fills that demand, and that is the Ministry of Advanced Education. Is there a connection between the demand that we’re seeing here and a plan, a request of the Ministry of Advanced Education to say: “Here’s what we anticipate the need will be in the future”? Is there that interministry discussion?

S. Brown: We’re working really closely with Advanced Education right now. We’ve been through a couple of iterations of a provincial health human resource plan. We’re getting more specific and also specific as it relates to specific regional disparities in terms of location. You’re well aware of that, Chair, in terms of the north.

S. Bond (Chair): And that would include water management professionals or whatever they’re called?

S. Brown: And then the population of public health…. We were just discussing this a couple of weeks ago, in terms of not losing focus on the needs in that area.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. I wanted to ask. I had it written here somewhere, but I have a big, long list. The regional water people responsible specifically — what are the requirements for a health authority, for example? Are there specific…? They have to have a person that’s in charge of that? Who are those people, and are they in place all across the province?

B. Henry: Under each health authority, there’s a drinking water program. They’re resourced differently in different health authorities, but they’re primarily environmental health officers with a special expertise in the drinking water, plus drinking water engineers that are hired as part of the program. They have a whole testing, inspection, permitting program for drinking water.

[11:10 a.m.]

Plus, the medical health officers are also designated drinking water officers in the health authorities. We have roles around making sure the water is safe from source to tap, looking at environmental issues. There’s a lot of overlap with the role of the medical health officer under the Public Health Act and environmental protection and the Drinking Water Protection Act.

S. Bond (Chair): So there are drinking water officers. Are health authorities required to have one?

B. Henry: Yes, absolutely. Oh yes.

S. Bond (Chair): All right. I guess my last….

B. Henry: I will say that there are challenges in resourcing drinking water programs, partly because of challenges in attracting people into those roles and the volume of drinking water systems that they have to deal with.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. And that’s monitored by your office, in terms of who’s…?

B. Henry: Partly by my office and partly through the ministry.

S. Bond (Chair): They’re funded under the…

B. Henry: …regional health authorities.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. So the last question that I have is one that really is more related to the audit and a comment that was made. To me, it speaks to a significant policy decision, and it has implications. So I’m wondering what it’s based on.

It’s on page 31, and it is noted that: “B.C. needs a user-pay model that reflects the true value of water to consumers.” That, to me, is a policy statement. Is that the view of the Ministry of Health or the Auditor General, or are we proceeding down a pathway that looks at a user-pay model?

C. Dover: That’s also combined with the fact that the public needs to be educated about what the actual, real cost of the water is. With some of these small water systems, the community is not necessarily willing to pay the money for the right treatment and the right protection. So what we identified is that there needs to be a mechanism to inform the public of what the true cost of that treatment is. One of the suggestions was that in other jurisdictions, they use a user-pay model. So that’s what the suggestion was in the report.

S. Bond (Chair): I think a reflection on the fact that people need to understand the cost of water…. But suggesting that B.C. needs a user-pay model is a very significant policy statement. I’m wondering if the Ministry of Health has given any thought. Was there a discussion about that? I personally think that’s a reflection that, candidly, is out of the scope of the audit. I think it’s a policy statement that has to have a lot of discussion.

I would heartily agree that people…. Just like the cost of electricity or anything else they’re doing, the use of medical services…. I know, Stephen, there has been lots of discussion about how people know what the costs of their services are. But I’m just wanting to get clarity. Is the ministry pursuing a user-pay model?

S. Brown: No. We have not, at this point, made any determination. We saw that as a comment coming from the Auditor. We are doing no work, currently, in terms of doing that. Now, Bonnie may have a perspective in terms of the report.

B. Henry: I will just say that the action plan that came out in 2002 did include, not a user-pay model, but a reflection that the public needed to understand the value of the water and to…. We do pay for water across the province, and that should reflect the true cost to the system, which it does not currently. So that is something that has been in the action plan from 15 years ago.

S. Bond (Chair): True. I think you can understand the reason I asked the question, because there would be a significant public reaction to whether or not the government was pursuing a user-pay model. Just go and have a shower in Europe. I know my aunt and uncle were pretty concerned about the use of my shower time. So you know, you think about….

I just wanted to clarify that I think that the following text is accurate, where it’s about the value, it’s about education, and it’s about how you actually know. We take for granted that every day, we’re going to have a full and abundant supply of safe, quality drinking water. I just think that suggesting we need a user-pay model has a lot of discussion to take place before that actually happens.

Anyway, anything else from my colleagues?

[11:15 a.m.]

R. Sultan: Well, just on the user-pay model, I would point out that in the community I live in, for example, all the houses are metered. We get a water bill. So this is not a foreign concept. We’ve become quite used to it. It’s just another bill we have to pay.

B. Henry: We just don’t call it user-pay, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the true cost of the system. That is the challenge.

S. Bond (Chair): That is my point. If you read the sentence, it goes on to say that it actually doesn’t capture the value of what we use. My point is that if you were to suddenly have a full, costed, user-pay model, that would be a significant public policy debate, and there would be a reaction to it. I just want us to be careful with the language we use in those reports, because this is about looking at how things are being done and not providing policy direction to government.

All right. Anything else?

Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your time this morning, and we look forward to following up on your action plan in the weeks and months ahead. We thank you for the specific details you’ve provided. Thank you for your time.

We’ll just take a brief recess while we shift to the next report.

The committee recessed from 11:16 a.m. to 11:24 a.m.

[S. Bond in the chair.]

S. Bond (Chair): We’ll reconvene this session of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts with our second report.

[11:25 a.m.]

Thanks to everyone and my colleagues for their thorough review of the previous report. I appreciate that was a very significant and very complex report.

Our second report. We’re going to consider the report of the Auditor General, Managing Human Resources at the B.C. Sheriff Service. It was published in October of 2019.

I want to welcome all our guests. Certainly, we want to begin by thanking sheriffs in British Columbia for their service. This isn’t about a criticism of the service that’s provided. For sure, we’re very grateful for the work that men and women do every day in our province in the role that they take on as sheriffs. I know all of my colleagues would want us to express our gratitude.

We are here to consider the report. With that, we’ll start with an overview from Russ Jones, who is Deputy Auditor General, soon to be acting Auditor General. He’ll introduce the staff that will then present the report. We’ll have an opportunity then for the Ministry of Attorney General to respond.

It’s nice to see you, Lynda. Lynda Cavanaugh is assistant deputy minister, director of sheriffs and chief court administrator for court services branch. I’ll just ask that when you speak, you introduce other speakers so that their names are on the Hansard record.

With that, we’ll start with Russ.

Managing Human Resources
at the B.C. Sheriff Service

R. Jones: We’re now moving on to a report on human resource practices at the B.C. sheriff services, a division of the court services branch at the Ministry of Attorney General. As we found out, sheriffs are an important part of the court system. A lack of sheriffs in the courtroom can delay and close courts. If cases are delayed too long, they can be dismissed.

With me today is the team who worked on the audit: Malcolm Gaston, Deputy Auditor General, and Lisa Sevigny, manager of performance audit. I’m going to let Malcolm lead us off with some opening remarks on the audit.

M. Gaston: Before I get into the findings of our work, I want to provide some context on how we arrived at the topic of sheriff services.

In 2015, we added justice reform to our performance audit coverage plan. At that time, access to justice had become an issue. An accessible justice system is one where the people of British Columbia can address their legal needs in a fair and timely manner. While there are many factors that drive an accessible system, sheriffs play an important role, as the courts typically won’t operate without a sheriff present. That is because their main duty is to provide for the safety and security of the courts.

We chose to focus our audit on the human resource practices of the B.C. sheriff service, or BCSS — specifically, how well BCSS is recruiting, retaining and training its staff.

Overall, we concluded that the BCSS had not implemented effective plans and strategies to recruit, retain and train the staff it needed to provide for the safety and security of the courts. But I want to stress that this does not mean the courts are not safe and secure, as there are many variables that contribute to the safety and security of the courts.

Before I turn it over to Lisa, I would like to sincerely thank the staff at the court services branch and the BCSS for their support and assistance during our audit work. A special thank you, as well, to the sheriffs we met with as part of the audit for their professionalism and contributions to the audit and for the services they provide to the people of this province.

Lisa will now go through the details of our work with you.

L. Sevigny: As Malcolm mentioned, sheriffs in B.C. provide for the safety and security of the courts. They do this, in large part, by supervising court hearings, searching courtrooms and courthouses and operating search gates. In 2016-17, sheriffs provided over 100,000 hours of in-court security.

Sheriffs are also responsible for a number of other activities, including transporting prisoners to and from the courthouse, holding prisoners in courthouse cells, conducting threat and risk assessments and executing warrants.

[11:30 a.m.]

Because sheriffs are so vital to achieving the BCSS’s mission, we decided to focus our audit on strategic HR practices at the BCSS — specifically, recruitment, retention and training. If done right, strategic HR planning can help ensure the BCSS has enough staff, both in terms of the number of staff and the types of positions, to provide for the safety and security of the courts.

I’ll now take you through in more detail what we found in terms of recruitment, retention and training. In terms of recruitment, we found that between 2012 and 2017, the BCSS lost more staff than it was able to recruit which, over time, led to an overall staffing shortage. In 2017, the BCSS launched a plan to overcome some of its HR challenges. As part of its plan, the BCSS increased the number of new sheriff recruits to try to resolve its staffing shortage.

This was a good step, but more needs to be done. For example, the BCSS does not know whether the staffing figure it is both targeting and recruiting to is sufficient to provide for the safety and security of the courts because it does not have the data and tools to estimate this number. However, we did find that the BCSS is in the process of updating two tools to help estimate its staffing needs. These tools are the staff planning technique and the sheriff planning and recruitment model.

While recruitment strategies bring people through the door, retention strategies help keep them there. For the BCSS, retention is especially important given the critical need for sheriffs and the time and cost that go into training them. We expected to find that the BCSS had examined the causes of staff attrition and then developed a strategy to address these. The BCSS had gathered some information on the reasons sheriffs leave for other jobs but not enough to determine the primary reasons or how to retain them.

For example, in 2004, the BCSS began conducting exit surveys among departing staff to understand the reasons for staff departures. While the survey provided insight into the factors influencing staff attrition, the BCSS had not ensured that all departing staff had an opportunity to complete the survey.

As of 2016, only 88 individuals had completed the survey, of the 311 deputies that the BCSS estimates left the organization between 2004 and 2016. We also found that the BCSS had not developed a retention strategy but had plans to do so in 2019.

In terms of training, the BCSS has two distinct training streams, one for new sheriff recruits and one for in-service staff. We found that new sheriff recruits receive considerable high-quality training that prepares them for the job, such as legal studies, firearms and use of force training. But we couldn’t see that ongoing training did the same.

Although the BCSS training policy outlines mandatory training expectations for firearms and the use of force, we found that the BCSS did not have a comprehensive training plan for its in-service staff that captured all training expectations. Further, when we first looked at the BCSS’s mandatory training in 2018, we found that less than 40 percent of sheriffs requalified on their firearm and use-of-force training on time.

However, during our audit, the BCSS relaxed its training requirements by allowing staff to go longer between requalifications. The BCSS made this change without examining the impact it would have on a sheriff’s ability to safely use their firearm or exert force. Even with this change, we found that 15 to 20 percent of staff had still not requalified on their firearm and use-of-force training on time.

Improper use of a firearm or force can have significant consequences for courthouse staff and the public. Failure to properly train sheriffs increases the risk of incidents, accidents and injuries, should a sheriff need to use their firearm or force.

In conclusion, we made eight recommendations in our report to improve HR planning and strategies at the BCSS. These include enhancing its business intelligence data, developing a retention strategy and overarching training plan, and monitoring the progress and effectiveness of its HR strategies and overall objective of providing for the safety and security of the courts.

That concludes our presentation.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much. We appreciate that. Lisa and Malcolm, thank you for your comments.

Now we’ll ask for a response from the Ministry of the Attorney General.

I assume, Lynda, you’re going to start that.

L. Cavanaugh: That’s correct. All right. I’ll begin. Thank you very much, Madam Chair, committee members, Auditor General team, for inviting us here today to speak to the recommendations out of the report from the B.C. sheriffs human resources.

[11:35 a.m.]

We are looking forward to the opportunity to discuss what’s occurring currently in the sheriff service and then answer any questions you might have.

I am Lynda Cavanaugh, the assistant deputy minister responsible for court services branch, which also encompasses the B.C. sheriffs and sits with the Ministry of Attorney General. Unfortunately, the Deputy Attorney General is on leave and wasn’t able to attend today.

However, I do have with me several staff members. I’m pleased to introduce executive director and chief sheriff, Paul Corrado, to my right; also, executive director of corporate support, Jenny Manton; and our acting director of policy legislation and planning, Erin Turner. We’re very pleased to be here today to present our action plan.

I thought I’d provide just a little bit of extra context to the work of the sheriffs. Very much appreciate the acknowledgment of the Chair and the committee members of this important work, so thank you so much for that.

The BCSS is a unit in the court services branch, which has over 1,400 staff. They’re made up of registry staff clerks, other support staff, headquarters and, of course, the sheriffs. We all work together to ensure the administration of justice and that the courts are safe and secure. We’re very proud of the services provided by the sheriff service, who’ve been operating in B.C. since 1857.

Each year the sheriff service facilitates about 830,000 court appearances. They make about 186,000 trips across the province with in-custody persons, and they ensure that about 37,000 individuals can attend court via video conference. While court security and prisoner transportation are our main duties, sheriffs are also responsible for lesser-known services such as jury management, court document service, civil warrant execution and overseeing the bailiff service across our province.

The sheriffs serve a diverse and complex clientele, many of whom are experiencing the most challenging time in their lives. This includes people attending court who are dealing with mental health disorders, substance abuse challenges, family matters such as divorce or child custody. There are thousands of people using courthouse services on a daily basis, some matters relatively routine, others with people in severe crisis. The sheriff service plays a critical role in ensuring that these individuals have safe, secure access to our justice system.

Overall, in response to the Auditor General’s report, we feel that the results of the audit have confirmed that for the most part, we are on the right track. In late 2016, our branch initiated an overarching strategic plan for sheriffs, which we called BCSS 2020. In 2016, 2020 seemed far away, but here we are now, right on the cusp.

The plan was developed in recognition of a need for continuous improvement throughout the organization, and it was implemented prior to the ministry receiving additional funding, which did occur later, to increase the number of sheriffs. Most importantly, all of the work related to this strategy is led by sheriffs.

BCSS 2020 has been focusing so far on recruitment, on internal and external communications and business intelligence. We can claim a number of successes on these fronts while acknowledging that there are still areas we need to work on.

Our action plan with the results of the audit will address the recommendations and continue to position the BCSS to achieve our vision of being an international leader in the provision of protection and enforcement services for the justice system.

We categorized the findings into three general areas, the first one being business intelligence. We need to improve sheriff service business intelligence so that we can make data-driven decisions. The challenges we face doing this thus far include the fact that sheriffs spend much of their time in motion, either in the court or in vehicles. Their assignments can switch frequently and suddenly. This means that they’re often entering data manually, when they get the opportunity. That can result in data that’s incomplete.

As well, tracking and monitoring of our training is also done manually, which again can result in a lack of reliability. As mentioned, one of the focuses of our BCSS 2020 strategy has been business intelligence, so we’re encouraged that the Auditor reinforced that we need to continue to work in this area.

The second category is on performance measures. We do need to improve documentation of our performance measures to accurately gauge how we are performing as an organization. While we do have a number of strategies underway, our recruitment strategy being one, we did not articulate specific measurable goals to support those strategies.

[11:40 a.m.]

Lastly, documentation. Finally, the audit found that the B.C. sheriff service lacked comprehensive, measurable stra­tegies for recruitment, retention, training and succession management. While the Auditor recognized that our BCSS 2020 strategy does include a number of initiatives in these areas, we have not fully documented our plans with specified performance goals, timelines and clearly defined lines of accountability.

In particular, training was identified as an issue, which we will speak to shortly. These findings are issues we intend to address as outlined in our action plan. We intend to take action on each of the recommendations, starting immediately and carrying through over the next few years. The audit recommendations line up well with BCSS 2020, which has already got strong support from sheriffs all across the province and all across the ranks.

The action items we have identified will be incorporated, when possible, into the current strategy, and implementing some of these recommendations will, of course, require additional funding. We will work to request resources where required, and we will prioritize our activities to support any funding requests.

In summary, the mandate of the sheriff services is to ensure the safety and security of courts and its users. Each day across the province, our professional, highly skilled staff demonstrate the dedication to this mandate. We are committed to implementing the Auditor’s recommendations, and we believe this will further strengthen the sheriff services as an organization.

In closing, I would like to extend our appreciation for the excellent working relationship between the auditors and our team. From the time the audit began in 2017 to the publication of the recommendations in October, the audit team communicated effectively, carried out their work with respect for all involved and were very patient with us as we worked to provide them with the information and documentation they required.

So thank you, Malcolm and team.

I’d also like to take a moment to acknowledge our court services branch staff who participated in this audit — in particular, the deputy sheriffs and sheriff managers across the province who put significant time into responding to inquiries from the audit team. We very much appreciate their participation.

We are pleased to address any questions the committee members may have.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you very much, Lynda. Welcome to the rest of the team that are here today.

Just as we had this conversation with the previous report, it’s really important to focus on the fact that the report itself, the work of the Auditor’s office, points out: “This does not mean that the courts are not safe and secure.” This is about enhanced…. How do we continuously improve the services that are provided?

I think we just want British Columbians to be assured that courtrooms are still safe places. There is some work to do on the human resources side.

With that, a speaking list. Do any of my colleagues have questions?

Jane, why don’t you start?

J. Thornthwaite: I have a bunch of questions. First of all, thank you very much for your work. I guess my issue is pertaining to mental health and addictions. What kind of training do the sheriffs have in dealing with folks with mental health and addictions?

L. Cavanaugh: There are modules within the training that they receive early on in their recruitment around dealing with people with addictions and mental health as well. There is ongoing training, as well, that occurs during a sheriff’s career. I might request that Paul Corrado speak in a little more detail on the type of training that they receive.

P. Corrado: There are various modules at the sheriff recruit training class at the academy that deal with and train our new staff on how to handle situations with people that certainly have mental health issues and substance abuse.

We’re also looking at, potentially, ongoing training for existing staff — it’s actually called mental health first aid — so they can have a better understanding of what goes on at various courthouses.

I mean, if you look at the Downtown Eastside’s 222 Main Street courthouse, that certainly deals mainly with people from the Downtown Eastside — mental health illness as well as substance abuse. We’re certainly looking at training our existing staff on furthering their education on mental health.

L. Cavanaugh: I just wanted to also add that the fentanyl crisis was another opportunity that the B.C. sheriffs took. In fact, I believe that we were one of the first within government to get familiar with that issue and to train our sheriffs, who were transporting people who often, unfortunately, might be in that category.

[11:45 a.m.]

We implemented a training course and also equipped every single sheriff court location in the province with Narcan. We try to stay current and on top of what emerging issues occur in the mental health and addictions field.

J. Thornthwaite: I’ve got a couple of follow-up questions. Have you seen a difference, say, obviously, with the opioid crisis, which was declared in 2016, and the measures that the government put forward — the harm reduction measures like the overdose prevention sites, etc.? What I’ve noticed, spending quite a bit of time down there, is that even in the last two years…. Even the mayor of Vancouver has said that the issue has gotten worse in the last two years.

So what I’m asking is, from the sheriff’s perspective, with regards to staffing and training to do with mental health and addictions: have you seen a greater percentage of those folks that you see that have mental health or addiction issues? Have you bumped up your training for that, to accommodate that? Are you missing staff? Also, has it affected your ability to recruit and retain staff because of the extra stress? What about PTSD with regards to your own members? I noticed that you’ve got an exit strategy, or whatever, to find out why people leave. Obviously, I’d be interested in that with regards to mental health and addictions.

I know I’ve asked a bunch of questions, but you get the feel of it, given the fact that what we’ve seen is worse, even in the last two years.

L. Cavanaugh: Well, within the sheriff services, we don’t track cross-jurisdictional instances, but we do track our own instances with mental health and addictions and our interactions. Not every one, because unless there’s an incident attached to that, it would somewhat be business as usual, just based on the way that the courts operate and the people that come into court.

You did ask a few questions, but I wanted to point out that with regard to our own staff and making sure that they’re equipped, first of all, I don’t believe it has impacted our recruitment. We don’t have data to support that it has or hasn’t, but we do look forward, with the exit survey’s implementation, to receiving more data about that.

By far, the sheriffs’ number one skill set is mitigation and avoiding confrontation. That’s something that they learn in recruit class and maintain ongoing.

Again, back to Paul Corrado to speak to the way that we support our staff when they’re dealing with either a critical incident that involves a mentally ill or addicted person or just the day-to-day grind of being in that environment which, as all of you can understand, is not a pleasant place to be very often.

If you have anything to add to that, Paul, in terms of the committee member’s questions.

P. Corrado: I don’t necessarily think that there’s been a recruiting issue in the sense that people are affected by working with people that have a mental illness. Sheriffs want to help people that are in crisis. That’s the type of people that we hire. But to answer your question about our own well-being and PTSD, as you’ve suggested, it’s a big part of what my whole senior management team has been trying to create, and that’s resilience in the workplace. We’re training our managers, we’re training our supervisors, and we’re even training our line staff on how to be resilient — mental health–resilient education.

Part of that is the creation of our critical incident stress management team. That’s made up of peers throughout the province. We have various teams throughout the various regions, and they’re acted upon on a regular basis anytime there’s a situation. It might be a serious assault, an overdose — any kind of critical incident that you can imagine. We do get them on a regular basis, of course. We have peer groups that are dispatched to certain areas to work with the staff, to talk to the staff and to listen to the staff to make sure that things are okay with them.

If it results to a point where those staff members can’t be effective, we do have a psychologist on staff, a police psychologist, that works with us, trains our CISM-member teams on a regular basis and provides training and education to them as well.

[11:50 a.m.]

J. Thornthwaite: One of the other questions that I asked is: have you seen an increase in these incidences over the last number of years? I’m also interested in this incident report, because one of the things that does happen, and you’re obviously very aware, is that if we don’t get to these first responders very shortly after the incidents, then things start to fester.

I would be interested in what kind of comprehensive help you have for members that are exposed to this trauma, and ongoing trauma. It could be assault, obviously, but also having to revive people who are overdosing or having to deal with calming down mental health patients — all of these things I know that you’re trained about.

My question is: have you noticed an increase in these incidences over the last number of years, and if that’s the case, are you looking for extra resources and training and, obviously, funds and staff to mitigate that?

L. Cavanaugh: I can speak to the last couple of years in terms of the number of incidents, and we do have data beyond that. I just don’t have it at my disposal, I don’t believe.

For example, between November 2017 and November 2018, the sheriffs service recorded 654 incidents in our IRS reporting system, which is an incident reporting system. In the following year, which we’re currently in — November 2018 to 2019 — there were 686. That would indicate not a dramatic increase, and it may be that that data is consistent prior to that.

Erin Turner, do you have a comment?

E. Turner: Yeah, it’s a fairly consistent number of incidents across the province.

L. Cavanaugh: Then the second part of your question was around how quickly we get to our people to make sure they’re okay and they can carry on. In response to what Paul was just speaking about, the critical incident stress management team is pulled together and sent to wherever they’re needed immediately, not to mention just the general debriefing that would occur on the site with the individuals who are involved in these instances, which you would expect out of any team, in terms of the supervisor drawing those people in, closing the door and having a discussion and assessing their state of well-being.

It really is part of the territory of this job, so it’s very important that people understand when they come into the court system and come in as a sheriff that this is what they’re going to encounter.

When we speak shortly about retention rates and other recruitment strategies, we can maybe get into a bit more detail on what that actually looks like holistically and how we manage that.

J. Thornthwaite: Yeah, I would obviously be interested in an answer to that question. I’ll just ask one more question and then let somebody else, but I do have others.

What percentage of the sheriff staffing would be devoted to the drug courts in Vancouver?

P. Corrado: You got me on that one. I can certainly find out for you. For the drug court, we do have one deputy sheriff that’s assigned to it. We have several that are trained to work in drug court. It’s a specific court, as I think everyone is aware. It’s a wonderful court to have at Main Street, and there’s certain training that goes along with it. But we do have one that’s assigned to it. We don’t have a series of sheriffs, other than ones ready to go in there if that person is not available.

S. Bond (Chair): You might as well ask another couple, and then we can…. Do you have one?

J. Thornthwaite: Yeah.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay, go ahead.

J. Thornthwaite: This is kind of a related question. Obviously, your answer to my previous question with regard to training to deal with mental health and addictions is significant. What about training to deal with trauma-informed people that are dealing with…? Say, sexual assault victims. Do you have anything specific to that?

E. Turner: That would be general training provided through their career training. Do we have specific ongoing training on that topic, other than what’s provided to the recruits?

P. Corrado: It’s certainly not just getting involved in certain situations. It’s sharing the evidence. It’s seeing the evidence in court. It’s certainly a concern for us, but we’re quite confident, with our citizen team that we have in place — we have an outlet for people to speak to their peers about situations that they’re not feeling comfortable with — that we can actually get them the help that they need.

[11:55 a.m.]

G. Begg: I’m interested in the recruitment and retention issue, as apparently are you, which is a good thing. There’s often a nexus between the two: the recruitment phase and then being able to retain that person. What would be the prevailing reasons why someone would take the training and be sworn in and then decide to go elsewhere?

L. Cavanaugh: I’ll start with that. Obviously, it was mentioned in the audit report that we were attempting to consistently get exit surveys, which is a great source of information. That dropped off our priority list as we were trying to maintain the courts and keep them open at one point. We will be revisiting that, and with some support and advice from the sheriffs, we’ll try to find a methodology whereby most people will complete it. The uptake wasn’t that great to begin with. So we’ll know more about that.

However, from the data we have gleaned from those, often they would move on to another job. I just want to say to the committee that I don’t necessarily consider — I don’t think any of us necessarily consider — that to be a sign of failure. We think that our training is world-class. When you train people that well, they may very well move on.

It was a different landscape about four or five years ago, when we were having people complete exit surveys, in terms of the number of staff we had. We heard from sheriffs that there weren’t enough people, that they were stressed out, that they were burned out.

Other reasons might be just the location of the work. For example, like many organizations, we have trouble recruiting to certain areas of the province. Although it’s a beautiful region, the north region is one of those where often people will go for a couple of years up to Fort St. John or Dawson Creek, but in their head, they want to go somewhere else. Sometimes in between those periods of time, they find other work.

Those are some of the reasons, and I’m sure there are others. But we certainly look forward to getting more solid data.

Lastly, Paul Corrado, who’s a very hands-on executive director, luckily and thankfully for us, does speak almost exclusively to every single person who’s leaving and gets anecdotal understanding of why they’re going. Vancouver, Lower Mainland, is challenging. There are lots of opportunities for people in the policing world or the law enforcement world. So those are some of the reasons.

G. Begg: What would be the average length of service before they decide to leave?

L. Cavanaugh: We do actually have that. I’ll just ask…. I believe we have that data. It’s just a question of putting our hands on it. We have data that shows the number of exits within the one-year, two-year, three-year and five-year….

J. Manton: We’ve got the retention for the first five years. If somebody is hired in year 1, we retain 92 percent of them. About 8 percent depart up to year 5, where we retain 68 percent of them, and 32 percent depart after five years of service.

G. Begg: Does a recruit to the Justice Institute pay for their training, or is it provided to them?

L. Cavanaugh: No. We hire recruits before they start their training as trainees. So they are hired public servants before they enter the course, and they get paid while they’re on it. They do not pay for their training. That’s just part of the job.

G. Begg: Final question. Is there an expectation? Do they sign a contract that says, “As a result of the training that you’ve received, the expectation is that you’ll complete two years of service” or five years of service?

L. Cavanaugh: You must have seen those contracts.

G. Begg: I have.

L. Cavanaugh: Yes, they do. We, to the best of our ability, commit them to repaying a percentage or a portion of their training fees if they move on. So they do sign.

G. Begg: You collect that, and it’s prorated?

L. Cavanaugh: It’s prorated, and we do collect that. Yes.

S. Bond (Chair): Just a quick follow-up on Garry’s question. You indicated that they move on to other jobs. Are you talking about in the policing world or some other similar line of work that they would move on to?

L. Cavanaugh: Yes, I’d say for 99 percent of the time, they’re moving on to bylaw enforcement, transit police, RCMP — usually within British Columbia but in one of those areas — Vancouver police, other police forces.

P. Corrado: Border Services and, strictly, other agencies. Like Lynda said, it’s bylaw, it’s Border Services, it’s police, and it’s various other agencies.

S. Bond (Chair): Is it working conditions, or is there a salary differential?

[12:00 p.m.]

P. Corrado: There’s a more attractive compensation package at these other agencies.

S. Bond (Chair): Thanks for those questions, Garry.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Thank you for all the service from all of the members as well.

In terms of recruitment and retention, how could a gender-based analysis plus lens be applied? Are you already doing that? I didn’t really get a full enough sense.

L. Cavanaugh: Well, that’s a great question. Thank you. We’re no different than the rest of the public service in terms of the application of GBA+. The requirements to integrate that into any Treasury Board submissions or cabinet submissions has been covered off as well.

The sort of mandatory or proposed training modules that exist for the public service, the sheriffs have taken. But there’s not really any sort of distinction between what the public service is trying to achieve through GBA+ and what the sheriff service is doing. It’s early days as well, so I appreciate that being on our radar in terms of something that we need to think about as we revise our mandatory training plan as well.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Yeah, I think GBA+ can be applied at all of the stages. How does the profession appeal? I don’t want to make any assumptions, but you need the stats to start with, to know what the gender balance is. Therefore, what gap do we need to close? Therefore, how do we present the profession in a way to engage underrepresented groups, for example? How’s that going to be tracked? Where are there going to be targets, and how is the performance going to be measured?

As you’re creating an ambitious improvement plan, having those metrics in there from the start would really make it much more comprehensive.

L. Cavanaugh: Absolutely. That’s something that we intend to do. We do know how many female sheriffs we have versus male. We do have a sense of the diversity across the sheriff service as well. But that suggestion and that sort of direction is something that we definitely would like to apply.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Thank you. It would be great to see that, because we see plans here, and it’s about projection forward. So getting things in, in the early stages would really enhance that.

A quick question about the training, and it kind of applies here as well. Is there training for the sheriffs on sexual assault, like the impact of sexual assault and how to manage the dynamics of that?

L. Cavanaugh: The sheriff recruit training, which the Auditor General has so nicely acknowledged as being very well done, is comprehensive in the sense that court users are going to come with all sorts of problems and issues. I’ll just confirm this with Paul or with Erin. I don’t believe there’s anything specific to sexual assault. The training is 14 weeks, and there’s a lot to get through. That’s not to say that there aren’t opportunities for us to create better understanding and awareness.

What we do, though, is we train and turn out sheriffs who are, as soon as they leave recruit training, ready to do what they need to do in terms of the safety and security of the court. So long answer to your question: nothing specific that I know of related to domestic or sexual assault or domestic violence — not to say that we can’t look at that in terms of a specialized module going forward.

S. Bond (Chair): Just to follow up on Mitzi’s question, how many women sheriffs are there?

J. Manton: Currently, the force is made up of 83 percent male and 17 percent female. Our latest recruit class is 72 percent male and 28 percent female.

S. Bond (Chair): We’re doing better in the Legislature, slightly. It’s taken a long time, though — more than 100 years — for us to get there. But I digress.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): In my notes, I was looking, in particular, at coaching and succession planning. But having heard your presentation today, I’m now thinking about all of the plan, because what you said was that you’ll be having to look for funding for it.

So my concern is we see this plan. The plan responds to the recommendations, but it’s not guaranteed, because I’m not getting a sense from the ministry that the money is guaranteed for you to fulfill the plan as it’s laid out. How can you help us be a bit more reassured?

L. Cavanaugh: Many of the recommendations do not require funding, and many of them are well underway. I just wanted to make sure that we distinguished from the ones that were easily within our control versus ones that might be a bit more challenging without funding.

[12:05 p.m.]

As an example, the business intelligence is one of those pieces. We’ve been wanting to have better BI for quite some time, and the Auditor team pointed out that that’s a very good idea. However, there are programs and software and computer things that have to happen. As you can tell, it’s not my area of expertise, so I will ask Jenny Manton just to speak a little bit more to what that might look like.

J. Manton: The Auditor General’s report references a couple of tools that we are developing. The first one is the staff planning technique, which is essentially a time and motion study of the sheriffs’ major duties. You look at the volumes and the time it takes for those major duties, and the output is an estimated number of sheriffs required. We’re working on that. It is a very complex technique because sheriffs’ duties are variable, and they’re always moving.

The other business intelligence is the sheriff planning and recruitment model, which is really a supply-and-demand-driven model, where we look at the funding we have and the number of sheriffs we have. We look at the capacity of the Justice Institute of B.C. as to how many recruits we can put through the Sheriff Academy there, and we can plan out the size of the recruit classes to meet our demands.

Those are two of the areas. We are also working on the sheriff scheduling system, which we’re hoping will further enhance our business intelligence. And we are also looking at developing a data warehouse so we can coordinate the information coming out of our sheriff custody system, as well as the jury management system, to be able to create analysis, reports and information for us to manage the service.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): So if there isn’t any extra funding available, are there portions of this plan that are at risk of not being completed or not being completed on time? What’s the magnitude of that?

J. Manton: Some of the business intelligence developments and progress we’d like to make is at risk if we don’t receive funding, yes.

R. Sultan: The data suggests an average turnover of around 10 percent a year. Is that a fair representation of what the sheriff service is…?

L. Cavanaugh: It’s actually lower than that. It’s closer to 7 percent over the last five years.

R. Sultan: Oh, I see. Well, I just looked — 469 staff. They seem to be losing 40 or 50 a year — economists’ rounding, and so on. But in comparison with other law enforcement agencies around the province, is that high, low, average? Is it typical?

L. Cavanaugh: I’m not sure that we have the data of other law enforcement. But I can tell you that within the B.C. public service, that’s pretty normal. A 7 percent attrition rate is not high. In fact, the court….

R. Sultan: In the public service generally.

L. Cavanaugh: In the public service generally. But I get that, yeah, it is somewhat apples to oranges.

I’ll just look to Erin and see if she has any data around corrections. I know it’s significantly lower than B.C. Corrections. And then outside, in terms of policing agencies…. Sorry, we don’t have that data.

R. Sultan: The reasons given in your exit interviews, to the degree data are available, and I gather the data is a little bit spotty, suggests wages, under-resourced…. I guess I interpret that as they feel harassed trying to do all the things that are demanded of them. Thirdly, insufficient support. I’m not quite sure how to interpret that, but I presume it’s backup, if needed, or the whole system. Or are they all out there by themselves as kind of the Lone Ranger? I envisage them as being more operating on the Lone Ranger model, frankly.

Given your description of the people you’re dealing with, who can often be drug-dependent, have mental issues, be violent people to start with, some of them extremely dangerous, I don’t know if this is the first job I would apply for, in terms of riskiness. But having said that, on the wage front, I gather that, particularly in the Vancouver Metro area, with a very high cost of living, you really are not competitive with what, say, Vancouver police department would pay.

L. Cavanaugh: That’s correct. And there are no Lone Rangers in the B.C. sheriff service. We do make sure that people are teamed up.

Did you want to add more?

R. Sultan: Well, there’s no such thing as a cost-of-living bonus to account for someone in a very low-cost rural area versus trying to live in downtown Vancouver.

[12:10 p.m.]

L. Cavanaugh: Yeah, it’s definitely a problem. But again, we’re not alone in that. Anybody who lives and works in downtown Vancouver, and many of my colleagues in other areas and ministries, face the same issues.

R. Sultan: So adding it all up, does this portray a government department that’s basically under-resourced?

L. Cavanaugh: No, I would say that’s not correct. We have significantly increased our sheriffs over the course of the last three years, and I think it’s pointed out in the audit. Certainly, since the end of the audit, we’ve also significantly increased our sheriffs. So we are aiming towards a number where we feel that, with the assistance of the Auditor team, we will be able to have an objective that we can support in terms of the numbers of staff.

We have increased to three recruit classes per year, compared to one, potentially, four or five years ago — one to two classes of 12 to 18 people. We are now recruiting 24 at a time, three times a year. We are significantly increasing our numbers. And even within the sheriff services, they will tell you they can feel that. The crisis that was described a few years back, in terms of courtroom closures, etc., has passed. That is, in no small part, due to a budget increase that we received in ’16-17.

R. Sultan: So you definitely feel you are not understaffed.

L. Cavanaugh: I think we can always use more people — always — and I think we’re getting there. I’d like to maybe provide some data, some stats, to you for that so that I’m not just….

R. Sultan: But how can you say that, when the main thrust of the report is that you do not have an analytical, thoughtful, even model-based — in practice, as opposed to theory — approach to determining your HR needs? Yet you stand here with great confidence saying: “No, no, no. We’re not understaffed at all.” Well, the report says you don’t know. That’s the thrust of the report. I take it you reject the report.

L. Cavanaugh: No, we accept all the recommendations, as I said at the outset. The report did find some improvements that we can do, but the report did not flat-out say that we weren’t doing anything and we had no responses. They did find — and this is something we accept — that our documentation of some of the decisions that we’ve made is lacking and that we need to quantify our work. But I can tell you I can quantify how many sheriffs we’ve recruited over the past three years. If you’d like me to provide those numbers, I will.

R. Sultan: Well, with respect, I’ve never seen an Auditor General’s report such as one which reports…. On page 28, it offers a simple example to help you understand how it works. “Simply stated, if an organization determined that it needed 100 staff to carry out its objective but had only 75, it could develop an HR plan and strategies to hire 25 staff and then request funding to execute the plan.” Now, that sounds like a very sophisticated idea, I say with a bit of sarcasm. Why would the Auditor General put a sentence like that in a report?

L. Cavanaugh: I’m going to ask Jenny Manton to speak to the numbers. Perhaps that will help you to understand where we’ve come to since where the Auditor spent their time, which was somewhat of a retrospective as well. Certainly, we’ve increased dramatically. So if you’d allow me to let Jenny speak to that.

J. Manton: There are other references in the audit report as to relying upon information that was obtained back in fiscal ’11-12. That’s when there was a detailed analysis done of sheriffs and the needs. It was agreed upon that a certain number of sheriffs was required at that time. We fell far below that number.

What we’ve done is looked at the capacity issue, because sheriffs also instruct the new recruits. So when your priority is maintaining the courts, the safety and security in the courts, we have to draw sheriffs to be the instructors in the recruit program. We also have to consider the capacity of the Justice Institute and the Sheriff Academy, because there are competing interests with the various academies there.

We looked at that baseline number that was agreed to between Treasury Board staff and the branch back in ’11-12 and determined that we would max out the number of recruits through the Justice Institute to get to a Treasury Board–approved number. So we’ve been working on that. I think one of the indications we have is that it’s working.

[12:15 p.m.]

We don’t have a fully confident number yet as to how many sheriffs are required, but there are other indicators, including the number of courtroom closures and the number of courtroom delays which have significantly reduced over the last couple of years. In fact, I think it was…. I want to make sure I quote the right number. In fiscal ’17-18, there were 30 in total between courtroom closures and delays. Last fiscal it was reduced to seven. So far, year to date, for this fiscal year, we’re at two. The increased sheriff complement is certainly assisting in keeping the justice system running.

R. Sultan: A follow-up question. I find it a very interesting report. It is a window on a world in which I confess complete ignorance. Maybe I should appear in court more often. I would understand these things. But it suggests that the sheriff services really has two bosses: the judiciary, on the one hand, and the government, on the other hand. Correct me if I am wrong on that rather fundamental point.

It further goes on to point out, understandably, that when it comes to the judiciary side of your governance structure, they are very concerned, and rightly so, about a lack of sheriffs being available to provide security during trials. In many cases, there are postponements, and there can even be dismissals through excessive delay, that occur through a lack of sheriff resources in the courtroom. It makes that point rather strongly.

But it also suggests, in pretty plain language, that beyond that, the judiciary is ignorant of, doesn’t think much about or doesn’t really care about the other duties of the sheriff services in transportation, maintaining security overall, intelligence and cell administration. I mean, you’re running a miniature prison system, as I see it. But the judges are just concerned about what happens when they’re behind the bench, I presume: is the courtroom secure, are the sheriffs present, and does the prisoner show up when required?

With that tug and haul between the government, which has the bigger picture, and the judiciary, which has a narrower focus, as the report suggests, is there a little bit of a contest? So if there is a need for more resources, the judiciary might, I presume, be inclined to say definitely — in fact, the report says so — that we have delays, we have cancelled trials and we have people being let go because they’ve been waiting three years or whatever for a trial. We should not have that happen in a well-run court system, I guess, is the obvious conclusion.

If there are, I presume, as a follow-on…. The judiciary, if they were sitting here, being represented, would say: “We certainly need more sheriffs in the courtroom. These delays are outrageous. It destroys public confidence in the justice system. We’ve got to put a stop to it. It has to be adequately staffed to maintain security.”

But meanwhile, the government has all these other responsibilities: cells, transportation and all that stuff. At a minimum, it would seem to me there’s kind of a contest between the big picture and the narrow focus on the court. Maybe one side wins, and the other side loses. I’m not sure. I’m interested in any thoughts you might offer on that subject.

When you say here, with some confidence, that, really, there is not a resources issue here — “We’re hiring lots of people. Don’t worry about it” — that seems to conflict with what the report says.

L. Cavanaugh: Well, I would not for a moment speak on behalf of the judiciary. I respect the independence of their office. However, I will say that….

R. Sultan: The report speaks for them.

L. Cavanaugh: I would say that we have a very productive relationship with the judiciary, notwithstanding their independence. I would not characterize their assessment of the situation with sheriffs as being narrow. We work every single day with judges and Crown on a very close basis.

Second, I would like to just once again stress that the courts are not shutting down. They are not in dire straits. The statistics that Jenny Manton just articulated show that things are improving. We have not had a court closure or delay of the extent that we had several years ago. It’s trending down.

[12:20 p.m.]

I don’t know if it’s appropriate or if the auditors can explain any further what they were observing in there, but I do not believe that it was that there was a crisis, necessarily. Now, the dialogue in the report that speaks to what could happen if training isn’t maintained or if funding isn’t maintained…. Yeah, it could, but it isn’t happening.

R. Sultan: Can you tell this committee, say for the last year, how many court proceedings were terminated because of excessive delay, or perhaps a planned trial just didn’t occur because there was not sufficient service from the sheriffs available?

L. Cavanaugh: We had mentioned earlier that there were six delays and one court closure that did not occur — I’ll let Jenny verify — as a result of a sheriff not being present, which is substantially reduced over the course of time.

R. Sultan: We don’t have any information about trials just being terminated, cases being dropped, because of excessive delay?

J. Manton: We do, yes. We do track judicial stays as a result of the Jordan decision, which puts time frames on both the Provincial Court, of 18 months, and Supreme Court, of 30 months. So far for the calendar year, there have been nine Provincial Court criminal cases stayed and three Supreme Court cases stayed for the calendar year 2019.

R. Sultan: In your view, that’s acceptable?

J. Manton: No, of course not. But there are many variables in terms of having a judicial stay. It’s both the timing of the matter…. It’s the Crown’s positions. It’s the defence positions, whether they request adjournments, whether there’s a disclosure that needs to be looked at. There are many factors that go into the timeliness of a court case being initiated and concluded.

S. Bond (Chair): I know that Jane has a follow up, but I actually do want to pursue a point here, because it is critical.

Trending downward is a good thing, and no one at this table or anywhere else disagrees with that. Trending down is good. Having said that, what this report tells this committee and the public of British Columbia is that there is more work to do. I will look to Malcolm and Lisa to confirm that what the report found was that even, to my colleague’s point, the work that was developed in 2017, not ’12 or ’19….

“We found that in 2017, headquarters and the BCSS developed an HR plan.” The plan set out work to be undertaken from 2017 to 2020. “However, the HR plan was not informed by an assessment of the staff BCSS needs to achieve its objective,” but rather the staff needed to maintain court sitting hours in 2011-2012.

What this report said, which is the point my colleague was making, was that yes, some work was done. The numbers are trending down. But the report points out that the way the data is collected and the way that it is utilized to generate…. Again, the discussion we had earlier, in the earlier report, was that you need to know the demand in order to provide the solution. This report says that you don’t know that, that it is not accurately being assessed at this point.

Work is being done. Things are trending down. But I’m assuming that pages 28, 29 and 30, which go to great lengths to describe how assumptions were made and that there is a gap…. Is that correct?

M. Gaston: Correct, Chair, yes. The baseline, if you like, hadn’t been confirmed, and so much of the work that needs to be done depends on that.

S. Bond (Chair): To the ministry, there has to be an acceptance. When you say you accept the recommendations…. What this report says is that the baseline data that’s used to generate an HR strategy needs work, because in fact, you’re basing it on 2011-2012 numbers. And not including…. It was only based on court sitting hours, providing…. It looked at court sitting hours in 2011-2012. So not only was this assessment dated, but it did not account for all the activities that sheriffs undertake.

[12:25 p.m.]

There needs to be a recognition by the ministry that yes, work is being done. We applaud that. We see numbers trending downward, but there is work to do, and the baseline data is the whole issue here. You can’t create an HR strategy if you actually don’t know what you need. So does the ministry accept the outline — three pages of work that my colleague was referencing — that says: “You’re not quite there yet”?

L. Cavanaugh: Absolutely. We do accept that.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. I think that’s what my colleague was looking for — basically, a recognition. We understand that you’ve got an HR strategy and that it’s reflected here. But what it tells us, as members of Public Accounts…. Our job is to say: “Well, wait a minute. They’ve got an HR strategy, but in fact, it’s based on sitting hours in 2011-2012, and it doesn’t include things like transporting prisoners, maintaining holding cells, conducting risk and threat assessments, and training to ensure that sheriffs can safely execute their responsibilities.”

If you don’t add all that in, there is no way that a human resources strategy is accurate. So all we’re saying is: trending downward is a good thing, but the report says that the ministry has to accept the fact that there’s work to do on the baseline data.

Sorry for interrupting, Jane. I know you were next, but I wanted to be sure the ministry understood and sort of acknowledged Ralph’s point.

J. Thornthwaite: Thank you for that clarification, as well. I appreciate that.

What I would like, with regards to the data, is…. We got an indication that there were 654 incidents to do with mental health or addictions in the ’17-18 year and 686 incidents in the ’18-19 year. What I would be interested in is previous years, because that really only gives us two years.

Interjections.

J. Thornthwaite: If you could provide that, then, it really gives us….

S. Bond (Chair): That’s right. I think there are two requests. There’s that request, and Ralph had one where the data wasn’t available either. So if we can get that response back to the committee, again, that would be good.

Sorry to interrupt, Jane.

J. Thornthwaite: That’s something that I think is going to be really key, right? I mean, it is trending upwards — 654 to 686 is trending upwards. What I’d want to know is: what happened before? It’s probably a huge jump. If it keeps going up and up, well then, my question would be, again, with regards to training and dealing with these instances and perhaps staffing as well.

I would assume, if you’re dealing a lot more with mental health and addiction issues, that’s going to affect…. If it hasn’t already, it’s going to eventually affect retention. If the folks aren’t getting properly trained on how to deal with these issues, then that’s really going to affect retention. Then you could be in a crisis.

I would really like to know how the numbers reflect, going years back.

L. Cavanaugh: We can provide that, but can I just clarify? That’s total incidents, not necessarily incidents specifically related to mental health and addictions.

J. Thornthwaite: Okay. What I really want is incidents — what’s the definition of “incidents”? — as well as mental health or addiction issues. Again, if we don’t really have that data, well then maybe we should be gathering that data.

The other issue is in response to our colleague, who asked — Mitzi Dean or, I guess, Shirley did — about the number of women that are getting recruited in the sheriff service. So 83 percent men — whoa. Is there a strategy to actually encourage more women to become interested in the sheriffs for a career? That would be my first question, and then I’ve got a follow up.

L. Cavanaugh: Over the past year or so, maybe a year and a half, we’ve really revised our marketing and recruitment strategy to get out into the community more often. The exit surveys that we referred to earlier would also — I think that’s the source of the data — have told you that most people come into the sheriff’s service by word of mouth — their brother or their uncle or their dad. Now we have a sort of road show, for lack of a better word, where we are out in all the communities, actively recruiting. Often a female deputy will be with us when that’s occurring.

[12:30 p.m.]

We’ve also, in the past, had what I would call targeted recruitment efforts, where we’ve worked with the Public Service Agency to encourage or prefer female applicants. So we’ve done that, and we need to do more. I always tell the female recruits to tell their friends and get them involved just by word of mouth, as well. Those are some of the strategies that we’re utilizing.

Is there anything I’ve missed, Paul?

P. Corrado: We have to realize and understand that we didn’t necessarily have an established recruiting office. Now that we do, we’re able to get out into the community. We’re able to go to the various job fairs that other agencies go to. We’re able to establish ourselves while in the community. We participate in community events all the time to promote who we are as sheriffs, but now that we have a recruiting office that is well established, they’re looking towards doing all the recruitment necessary to attract women to our job.

Our job does not consist of a lot of night shifts, does not consist of a lot of weekend work, and it’s mainly Monday to Friday, so it’s really a nice work-life balance that we can establish and really try to recruit people in. But again, as we start moving forward, we’re doing more and more recruiting that’ll help.

J. Thornthwaite: Me not being a total fan of affirmative action in that regard, I do think that if you can reach out, if you’re doing these job fairs, and be very vocal and say: “We want more women to apply….” Getting back to my other question with regards to sexual assault policy, the answer that I had in my previous question — then I think Mitzi asked the same question — is with regards to specific instruction or mandated training on sexual assault policies.

This is a huge issue. If you are interested, I would encourage everybody to read the book Putting Trials on Trial, by Elaine Craig. She is a lawyer, an academic, a professor, and she did a whole assessment on what happens to these victims of sexual assault within the Canadian judicial system.

That means what happens to them when they first report; obviously, what happens to them in hospital — don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about that, because that’s even worse; what happens to them when they come in contact with police, first responders, or when they come in contact with the judicial system, the court system, which of course this is related to; what happens to them with lawyers. That means not just defence lawyers but also Crown, as well as judges.

It’s absolutely deplorable what happens to these victims, and that is exactly why they call it “the second rape.” Quite frankly, with the experience that I’ve had with people that I know, and I hate myself for saying this, but I would probably recommend that people do not report because of what happens to these poor victims over and over and over again. They’re revictimized.

I would strongly suggest that anybody that comes in contact with sexual assault victims, including the sheriffs, get mandatory treatment so that they know what trauma-informed care is, so they know what these victims have been going through. That goes with the other issue with regards to encouraging more women, because just by their very nature, we would assume — it’s not a guarantee, but we would assume — that women would be more understanding.

It’s not a good situation with regards to what’s happening here in Canada. It’s not a good situation what’s happening in British Columbia. But at least if we can all talk about it…. I’ve done a lot of talking about this because I’ve talked to a lot of victims. The fact that these victims are revictimized in the court system…. Same with the families, because it’s the families that are there in an extremely stressful situation that has happened.

They’ve got the perpetrator, the rapist, right in front of them, and then they’ve got the family of the rapist that is basically defending them, because everything is all consent — ha ha ha — and then you’ve got the family of the victim who’s going through this equal trauma, and the sheriffs are right in the middle of it.

If we’re talking about retention, if we’re talking about training, then please put more emphasis on sexual assault victims and specific training to do with sexual assault victims, as opposed to just some basic training, because it’s different, and these victims are revictimized.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you, Jane. I know that’s a lot of passion around a very personal file that you’ve worked very hard on.

[12:35 p.m.]

G. Begg: I’m interested as an — I was going to say an old training officer — ex-training officer about the mandatory training. In my experience, many times the mandatory training wasn’t completed, not because of a lack of interest on the member to be trained, but there were other competing interests — like shifting or a lack of qualified firearms instructors or any one of a number of things.

Is that the case here? I know it’s anecdotal. Is that largely the reason why the training syllabus is not adhered to for requalification?

L. Cavanaugh: That definitely was a factor, in terms of the mandate to keep the courts open and running. There had been delays in sheriffs getting their mandatory training. That definitely is one of the reasons.

G. Begg: And the other reasons would be what?

L. Cavanaugh: Well, I think sometimes it’s just scheduling. Sometimes we need to schedule with the Justice Institute to get to the range, work around people’s vacations, etc., which is just an operational challenge that won’t go away and we’ll continue to address.

G. Begg: The only other comment I would make on that…. It’s not addressed in either report. It is addressed in the sense that there is a need for mandatory training and concurrence with the mandatory nature of it. But there is a legal liability that ensues, right? I think that’s an important consideration.

If we — or you, Paul; not you specifically — or you allow a member who is unqualified, basically, to attend to his duties and he does use excessive force or someone dies as a result of the use of his firearm, there is an incumbent legal liability upon the institution which, hopefully, you must protect yourself from.

P. Corrado: Of course.

S. Bond (Chair): I have just a couple of questions.

There was a disagreement — or at least a need for some clarity — around the relaxed training comment, related to the use of firearms. I would think we’d want to get this sorted out here.

I think in the Auditor General’s report, it talked about the fact that there’d been a change in expectation, that there had been a relaxation of the requirement in terms of how frequently the training took place. The ministry responded and said: “Well, no. That’s actually not the case. It’s been current practice.”

Could there just be some clarity around what the firearms certification process is? Can we be assured that it wasn’t relaxed, that in fact there is the same requirement? What exactly is that requirement? It was flagged as an issue in the Auditor’s report.

L. Cavanaugh: Yes, this definitely was an area that we spent much time speaking with the auditors about. When they presented the finding to us early on, before the audit was completed, that only 40 percent of our staff had requalified, we anecdotally felt that that was incorrect, especially in the superintendent of the training section.

We went back and found that — back to our recordkeeping and our data management — the CHIPS data had not been updated to reflect who’d actually taken the training. So that was one problem. We corrected that as quickly as we could.

There was also a policy decision made in 2017 whereby the sheriffs would requalify for firearms and use of force within — correct me if I’m wrong, Erin — a 12-month….

E. Turner: The policy had been once every 12 months. In 2017, the decision had been made for it to change to calendar year.

S. Bond (Chair): To change to what?

E. Turner: To once every calendar year. That policy decision had been made in 2017. When the auditors were conducting their review and they presented us with their findings, we looked into it and realized that they had been conducting their review based on the policy, which was in the manual, that hadn’t been updated.

There wasn’t actually a policy decision made in 2019. The decision was made, and the policy manual just hadn’t been updated.

[12:40 p.m.]

M. Gaston: When we got that feedback, we asked for some evidence of that policy decision. There was nothing that gave us enough documentation to back that up, so we were still working on the basis of what was in the policy manual around retraining requirements. That was in the spring, I think, of this year.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. All right. The issue is that the audit points out or suggests that a significant number of sheriffs had not re-qualified on firearm and use-of-force training on time. So what exactly is the standard, and where are we at now with people…?

I would think it’s a pretty important thing if you have to re-qualify for the use of your firearm. I think we’d want to know what the standard is and how many people have met it. At the time, in 2017-2018, it was 40 percent. I’m assuming we’d want 100 percent of people to re-qualify on time. And if we do want that, which I’m assuming we do, where are we at with that?

E. Turner: We’re currently at 91 percent. We did run an exception report, and the majority of the people who are not in compliance are on leave, so they’re away from the office. So we’re very close to it.

S. Bond (Chair): So you are at or near 100 percent.

E. Turner: Yes. Correct.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. Well, that is very good news. Again, the use of language really matters to people, and making sure you have the data to inform those kinds of decisions, because when we read that less than 40 percent qualified on time, one would be a bit concerned about that. We want to make sure that that 100 percent continues, for sure.

We talked about the issue of recruitment and retention and the fact that training is excellent. Many of us have been to the Justice Institute and toured and learned about it. The issue is ongoing training for people who are currently in the system. We’ve sort of skirted around the edges of that with some questions from my colleagues. What is being done to look at a comprehensive training plan for people who we want to retain and for whom practice may change or things may be different? We hear that going in, it’s good, but once you get there, there are some gaps. What is being done about ongoing, in-service training?

L. Cavanaugh: Yes, that was definitely something that the audit brought to our attention and that we intend to act on and are currently acting on. In our action plan, as well, we are going to spend a fair amount of time on this issue to make sure that there’s proper accountability in terms of the re-qualifications and that we can measure them. Currently the data is, again, entered in CHIPS, so it’s available to us to find out when somebody has been trained and whether they’re not in compliance.

We also have…. There was another point I was going to make.

Go ahead.

E. Turner: We are going to be developing a training committee that will be reviewing all of our training standards and policies to ensure they’re aligned with best-practice standards. That’s noted in the action plan. We’re also going to be creating comprehensive training plans for in-service staff, similar to our recruitment training — not to the extent, but to have specified training in terms of what’s required and what the expectations are.

Finally, as Lynda noted earlier, we do have situations that come up where specialized training is required. We’ll also have that documented, and the training committee will help inform what specialized training may be required to address a given training need. For example, the fentanyl crisis required additional training that wouldn’t originally be in a standard plan.

S. Bond (Chair): Right. I think that’s the point that’s been made by several of my colleagues here. As our world evolves and as various issues rise to the surface — sexual abuse, domestic abuse, fentanyl, opioids, you name it — there needs to be that ongoing in-service plan.

I think that was, for me, one of the key takeaways here. You train them well to begin with. They get in there, and if we’re finding that 60 percent or whatever are being retained up to five years or whatever the number was…. You know, wages are obviously a part of that, and other opportunities, but training also matters if you’re in the workplace and circumstances are continuing to repeat themselves and you need extra tools. I think it’s really important that we hear back from you at some point exactly what that retention strategy looks like.

[12:45 p.m.]

Is the problem exacerbated by…? Do we have enough long-term employees in the B.C. sheriff services where…? Like every other profession, people are, in essence, aging out. Is retirement and that demographic also causing a challenge as you look to the future?

L. Cavanaugh: Yes, definitely. I mean, I’m sure we do have data — again, I’m not sure if it’s at our fingertips; oh, it looks like it is at our fingertips — regarding the attrition and what category they’re in.

J. Manton: The average age in the sheriff services is 43 years, so we do have some more senior members to be able to help out the new recruits.

S. Bond (Chair): I think that’s an important thing from a mentorship perspective and sort of the way the organization works. But it also can exacerbate the problem that you need more sheriffs, because pretty soon you’re going to have an older demographic that is leaving, as is the case in every other profession and sector. As the HR strategy is taken into consideration, it’s not just about court sitting hours and transport and all of that. It’s also about who you have working for you right now and making sure that that transition is being noted.

One final question, and then I know John has a question. Can you just describe for us the regional disparity in terms of training? I know the answer to this, just as Garry knew the answers to some of the other questions. But I’m assuming it’s more acute in the north and the Interior. Is it? Is that correct?

L. Cavanaugh: Each region has a provincial training officer. I’m happy to have the opportunity to acknowledge them, because they are specialized trainers who are sheriffs as well. The north has a PTO, and the Lower Mainland does, and they have backups as well.

In terms of disparity or data or statistics that would show one area is less trained or out of compliance….

S. Bond (Chair): No, I meant in terms of the number of sheriffs required to fill the spaces. Is it harder to get sheriffs in the north and the Interior than anywhere else?

L. Cavanaugh: Oh, I see.

P. Corrado: It certainly is. I mean, the north is a challenge for us. Certainly, the north Island is a challenge for us, and really, work in downtown Vancouver is a challenge for us. When you look at trying to recruit in these areas…. Again, it was just putting a posting out years ago and not really working with the community to find out who would be interested in becoming sheriffs. Now that we’ve established a recruiting office that travels to Fort St. John, the Peace area, the Skeena area and actually participates in various community events, we can actually start showing people who we are and what we do and, hopefully, have them interested in applying for us.

L. Cavanaugh: Madam Chair, tell your friends.

S. Bond (Chair): Well, I certainly will be doing that.

Just a couple of final comments, and then we’ll let John have the last word. I think that certainly from my perspective — I don’t know what other communities are like — I have been very impressed with the visibility of sheriffs in my community. They’re at all kinds of events, and not just the ones where there are recruiting opportunities but community events where they are there to participate, support the community, show up, talk to kids. It’s very noticeable. As recently as a charity event at a hockey game, there were sheriffs there. They were there to talk about the good work they do. I do want you, Paul, to take back that message that, certainly in my neck of the woods, it’s been noticed.

We see different kinds of advertising. We see them in places where they typically haven’t been, and that’s how it’s going to change — by being present.

P. Corrado: Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

S. Bond (Chair): I think they actually had some beach balls they were playing with the other night with some kids or something. It was good.

P. Corrado: They do all sorts of things working in the communities. Even this morning they were bright and early, at four o’clock in the morning, down at the Pan Pacific Hotel, and they were delivering toys — sheriff truckloads full of toys — on their own time.

S. Bond (Chair): Yeah, at the Wish Breakfast. And I think they were at the one in Prince George. We do want to recognize that not only do they do great work in the courts and all of the transport — everything they do — but I’ve certainly seen a lot, and I’m sure my colleagues have as well. These men and women contribute in our community in many ways. Certainly their recruitment tools are becoming more diverse, shall we say, in the way they’re reaching out, and that is noticed and appreciated.

J. Yap: Unlike my great colleague here, I’ve had a chance over my life to be in court as a witness or as a potential juror. I know the vital work that you do, that sheriffs do, throughout the province.

[12:50 p.m.]

It struck me at the introduction that this should be a really treasured service, because it’s been around since the colony of British Columbia started, 1858 or thereabouts. It’s basically our provincial…. We don’t have a provincial police force, but it’s like a provincial law enforcement peace officer force — a service that all of us should be proud of and want to support.

I just want to follow along to the discussion on retaining your people. It was mentioned earlier that compensation is a challenge, right? Why aren’t we addressing that? Earlier the point was made….

I think, Lynda, you said you’ve got all the resources that you need, we think. You’re going to have improved data systems to confirm that. But if you know that they are being underpaid, if your people are being underpaid relative to other law enforcement services, let’s fix it. Let’s do a one-time lift and get everyone up the scale, up the grids, so that they won’t be attracted by RCMP or attracted by VPD or the soon-to-be-created Surrey PD. Why not fix that?

L. Cavanaugh: As all the committee members know, there’s a collective bargaining process whereby all of those issues are raised outside of our table.

J. Yap: What union are they members of?

L. Cavanaugh: They are BCGEU members. However, having said that, there were negotiations successfully concluded last round with a temporary market adjustment for sheriffs, which brings them up to on par with corrections service, so that’s something. We will never have the wage parity of a police force. Therefore, we try very hard to recruit the right people for this job in terms of the….

Paul has mentioned the work-life balance, the community feel. We’re trying to go where the people that like and want to be a sheriff come into the service. It’s noted. It’s certainly something that’s raised often — that the wages are not high enough — and we certainly know that’s not a surprise to the public service agency or the other negotiators, but there’s the process that needs to unfold in order for that to occur.

Thank you for those words. I think it’s very important for us to hear that.

J. Yap: You’re welcome. It’s interesting you mention parity with corrections. I understand that corrections feel that they’re underpaid as well. So you’ve caught up, but you need to, I think, continue to make it a priority and try for another market adjustment so that the overall working conditions and compensation, the desirability of a long-term career in the sheriff services, which we all should be proud of, is maintained and built on.

G. Begg: Can I say one thing before you go? And that is to thank you for what you do every day. I think — don’t tell me I’m wrong, please — that your corporate image has changed. You’ve been working on your branding. I think that’s very informative, and I think that will add to your recruitment and to your retention. It’s important that you have an identity, and you have a very good one, so keep it up.

L. Cavanaugh: We have been working on our branding. In fact, you may have noticed, if you’ve been around for a while, that one of the more important and very well-received branding changes was moving from the tan uniforms to the navy blue uniforms. It’s a small, subtle change, but the members feel huge pride in that, and that’s just one of many things. So thank you for that acknowledgment.

G. Begg: I think the branding, too, of the vehicles gives them a sense of pride and ownership, and I think that all contributes to the whole picture.

P. Corrado: And that was all done by working groups throughout the province that were involved in changing the uniform, looking at the various branding decals for the vehicles and what they feel proud of. It certainly has helped. There’s no question.

Getting out in the community and making sure that people understand the work that sheriffs do is so important, because throughout the years, you’ve always heard the question: “We have sheriffs here in Canada? I thought they were only in the United States.” It’s very important for everyone to understand the important work that we do throughout the province. We do travel across Canada and, certainly, just recently to Ukraine to work with their court security service — newly established, I should say.

S. Bond (Chair): Just a question. Is there a social media presence for the B.C. sheriff services?

[12:55 p.m.]

L. Cavanaugh: There certainly is. Please sign up for a BCSS Twitter feed. We have a very active Twitter feed right now.

S. Bond (Chair): Excellent. We have some very excellent tweeters around this table, so in a very non-partisan way, we can all help support the B.C. sheriff services.

L. Cavanaugh: That would be great. We’re always looking for followers.

S. Bond (Chair): Thanks for your time today. There will be a photo shortly for you. Real time.

I think that the most important thing is that these reports are about improving service to British Columbians and clarifying. It’s certainly not about being critical of the service. It’s about trying to find best value for money and best service for British Columbians. That’s why we do this in such a non-partisan way. We need to make progress.

We thank the Auditor General’s office for their report. And on that note, we want to thank you…. We noticed something about this report. Believe it or not, we actually do read them. The format changes were very appreciated. We found them…. It was more readable. The graphics were good. It was also noted that the history of the service, the B.C. sheriff services, and how the court system works…. If someone were inclined to read this report other than us, I think it gave them a really nice context piece.

We want to thank the Auditor General’s office for those innovations, and hopefully, that’ll spur on the other Deputy Auditors General and Auditors to help as we move forward. So thank you for that. It was well done. We appreciated it and noticed it.

Action Plan Progress Assessments

Progress Audit: Correctional
Facilities and Programs

S. Bond (Chair): All right. We’re going to move on to our last items of business, because I know that it is almost one o’clock, and I really know that everyone is busy and catching planes and all over the place. I’m not going to take a long time with these additional items.

You will have been given an update on two follow-up items, from the October 16 and November 7 meetings. One related to questions raised by MLA Thornthwaite about a report, a study that had been offered to be shared with us.

We did find out. The ministry then responded back to say that it has not been completed yet. The ministry clarified that the study did not concern program outcomes. Rather, it focused on appropriate data elements. MLA Thornthwaite felt that no further action was required, but we wanted to update the committee to make sure that people were aware of the fact that that has been handled.

Jane, did you want to comment?

J. Thornthwaite: Yeah. The question was a follow-up to statements that were made during the Public Accounts that were regarding recidivism and the benefits of the work that…. There were two instances, actually. One was the drug courts, and the other one was the Guthrie therapeutic community treatment. Given the response that I got back from the ministry, I decided we wouldn’t pursue it, because the data was not there yet. But that’s not to say we don’t want that data. I just wanted to clarify that.

When that study is available, or the survey, please can we get that information? Also, if there are any other studies talking about the benefits of the drug court or the therapeutic community at Guthrie’s with regards to the benefits of their programming and the reduction of recidivism, that would be extremely helpful.

I just want to clarify that it’s not that I’m dropping the ball and that I don’t want to know this information. It’s just that I know that the study that was referred to was a little bit different than what they had alluded to, but that’s not to suggest that I don’t want that information.

S. Bond (Chair): All right. I think we can make that clarification to the ministry — that the desire for that information still exists and that when it’s available, or whatever’s available, we would like that shared.

Oversight of Contracted
Residential Services for
Children and Youth in Care

S. Bond (Chair): The second issue was related to contracted residential services for children and youth in care. We certainly send our regards to MLA Glumac. I know he is not feeling well today, and we’re sorry that he’s not here. We hope he feels better. I think that the suggestion of asking for the additional information that he was looking for in writing is a good one. At that point, the committee can decide whether or not there is any further follow-up required. So I’d just like to suggest that we ask for that initial request of information to be made as a result of MLA Glumac’s request. Is everyone good with that?

Okay. Thank you for that, for those two.

[1:00 p.m.]

Canadian Council of Public Accounts
Committees Conference

S. Bond (Chair): Then the last item. We’re not going to take a long time, but it is an important item. Mitzi and I wanted you, and, of course, Kate’s office…. It will be Russ now that’ll be dealing with this as we move forward. We are on tap, as you know, to host the national conference between August 16 and 18, 2020. We’ve provided you with a very basic draft outline of what the period of time might look like, where we will have guests from across the country here.

Several people around this table have been to previous iterations of this conference, so we’ve attached a copy of two events — in both Charlottetown and Niagara-on-the-Lake — to give you a sense of what took place during the sessions. The reason we’re doing this is to give you an opportunity to provide some input.

I’m not going to ask for it at this moment in time. If you wanted to ask a question for clarity or something, we can certainly do that. But by mid-January, Mitzi and I would very much like to hear back from you with any input you might like to have. Of course, with it being in British Columbia, it’ll be easier for more of us to participate in that event. So the next steps would include providing us with some input on a theme, topic, any great speakers you would like to hear or see, panels you might like to think about. And by late January, the subcommittee will then put together another draft of the program and contact any potential speakers.

We just didn’t want this to come as a surprise next year, when — oh — August is quickly approaching. We leave this with you, then, to please take away and give it some consideration. It’s also really notice to the subcommittee that we’re going to need to meet probably in the third week of January or so to have a conversation about this.

Kate or Russ, did you want to add anything from your perspectives about the planning?

R. Jones: No, but we do need to get moving. You’re absolutely right.

S. Bond (Chair): Okay. So we are feeling a bit of a sense of urgency in terms of getting this underway here.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk of the Legislative Assem­bly): Yeah. We look forward to working with the audit office with respect to the combined conference plan. As the Chair mentioned, it is a joint conference with the Office of the Auditor General, so the Canadian Council of Legislative Auditors will also be sharing the business program and some of the planning responsibilities. We have hosted two conferences at the Legislature this year. The Canadian region of the CPA was held in October, and in the summer months, we held a conference for francophone parliamentarians in the month of August. We look forward to developing a work program.

As the Chair mentioned, it would be ideal to set a theme as early as possible so we can plan the details of the various panels. We also encourage members of this committee not only to attend the conference, but if you would like to play an active role in some of the panel discussions, it would be great to see British Columbia’s members profiled at the conference and to take a leading role.

With respect to conference themes, panel sessions and, as the Chair mentioned as well, a keynote speaker, a prominent speaker perhaps of national reputation would be ideal, as well, to try and set the stage at a plenary session to open the two-day discussions. The general outline as circulated in your agenda today is very general still, but we very much look forward to your input so we can fill in the details soon.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you for that.

Jane.

J. Thornthwaite: I just have a question, Chair.

I saw here that you did have…. The August 2019 had Peter Mansbridge as their, I guess…. Was that the keynote or…?

J. Yap: Lunch speaker.

S. Bond (Chair): He spoke at lunch.

J. Thornthwaite: I’m just wondering if you have some examples of other ones that have come and spoken that could kind of give us an idea of the calibre of the speakers you’re looking for.

S. Bond (Chair): Kate, maybe you could do a bit of a background at some point and just double-check.

I’m trying to think. We didn’t have a lunch speaker in Charlottetown. I’m trying to remember. I don’t think there was….

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): We had the director of CSIS do the other lunch one, on that one, but there were no lunch speakers in Charlottetown.

[1:05 p.m.]

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk): I think, in Charlottetown, the plenary session was led by a very experienced IT professional who set the stage with sort of an overview of social media trends and how they would impact most office environments and communications, whether it’s professional audit offices or legislatures. It was a good topic in that I think there were perspectives that each of the conference participants, regardless of the group — CCPAC or CCOLA — found to be resonating.

G. Begg: Peter Mansbridge and his wife, who is an actress, live in Niagara-on-the-Lake — so the perfect guest.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): A lot of the people on the panels and who do the presentations have previously been federal or provincial auditors general or Chair of PAC. We had a British MP who had been chairing the PAC in the British Parliament.

J. Yap: Was she re-elected?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk): Yes, she was. She was unsuccessful, though, in her bid for the speakership of the U.K. House of Commons.

S. Bond (Chair): That was a very interesting presentation. That was very interesting. She talked about how, and this should make you all feel really wonderful, being on the Public Accounts Committee is a highly sought-after…. People actually lobby one another to try to be on the Public Accounts Committee, especially to be the Chair. You get a giant office overlooking the Thames and a whole bunch of…. I assured her that nothing like that happened in British Columbia.

Anyway, Jane, that’s a good question. Nothing says it has to be a person whose name has been on a billboard somewhere. It needs to be relevant to whatever the theme is, that we have something that hopefully has a British Columbia–type flavour. Mitzi has been fantastic about reminding us around the participation of First Nations and looking at those kinds of issues. She’s been really wonderful.

We do want to showcase, obviously, our buildings, the Royal B.C. Museum potentially and a few other places that are within a close vicinity. Lots of interest. As you would know, Mitzi, myself and Carole did a promo video that we shared with our colleagues across the country. Invitations have gone out. I think we can rest assured there’ll be a good turnout.

B. Ma: I was thinking maybe Janet Austin, the Lieutenant-Governor, may be someone to consider.

S. Bond (Chair): Thank you. That’s a good idea. We did attempt to use the venue. Unfortunately, there was something else during that period of time. We would’ve loved to have shown off the people’s House.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): Government House is doing renovations pretty much all of next year. Janet has said she’ll join an event, but she can’t host it at Government House.

S. Bond (Chair): We couldn’t go to Government House. But we appreciate your interest. As Russ and Kate have both pointed out, we do need to get on with this. Between Mitzi and I, we are going to set a date in January. We’re going to do some preliminary work. So please, by mid-January, get in any ideas you might have. We’ll bring the subcommittee together. Then we’re going to have to start rolling on this. If there are invitations or looking at availability, we’ll have to do that in January.

J. Yap: The second-day speaker, the CSIS guy, was interesting.

S. Bond (Chair): Oh my goodness, yes. You literally had to check your cellphones at the door. It was like he came incognito. We weren’t really sure about…. That was quite an interesting presentation for sure.

Okay. I’m sorry. I skipped item 3 on our agenda, which we will do very quickly.

Why don’t you deal with that for me, Kate?

Information from Audited Organizations

LIQUOR DISTRIBUTION BRANCH

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Acting Clerk): Before the committee ad­journs, item 3 on your agenda was an update that we have received from the Liquor Distribution Branch. They were sim­ply providing the committee with the dates for upcoming procurement and contract management training for both employees and managers. Those dates have now been scheduled earlier this month, in December, for staff and for managers in February 2020. An information item to take note of.

S. Bond (Chair): I do recall those questions. I think I asked them. It was Ralph that grilled them that day, so they did get on more quickly with the training. That was a good thing.

With that, I thank you so much. I know this is not…. Sorry, Mitzi.

M. Dean (Deputy Chair): I just wanted to say thank you for that. As we said before, it’s really important that we have the follow-up, that it’s on the public record. I think that’s been really important, just to make sure that we….

S. Bond (Chair): Very important. I skipped right to No. 4, trying to get you out of here on time.

It was actually really good to have the follow-up on Jane’s question, Rick’s question and also the one that was asked around liquor distribution. As Mitzi pointed out, our whole goal is to make sure that the report just doesn’t appear here and then disappear into the Ethernet somewhere.

With that, thank you very much. This was a big ask, to have a meeting a week before Santa flies. We so appreciate it, and we wish you a wonderful holiday season with those that you love the most. We look forward to reconvening.

Russ, enjoy your last few days before you become the acting Auditor General. We know that you’ll do that very capably.

With that, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Thank you, Mitzi. Seconded by John.

Travel safely. Thank you for your hard work.

The committee adjourned at 1:10 p.m.