The committee met at 9:01 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Hi, everybody. I’d like to bring the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services together on Wednesday, April 29, 2020. We are hearing from statutory offices, financial and operational updates.

Today we’re very pleased to have the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth — Dr. Jennifer Charles­worth, Representative for Children and Youth.

If you’d like to go ahead and give us your report and perhaps just introduce your staff, we’ll go from there. Thank you.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE REPRESENTATIVE
FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

J. Charlesworth: Definitely. Thank you very much. Good morning.

As a way of beginning in a good way today, I’d like to acknowledge that I’m doing my work from the traditional unceded territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ people, who have close ties with the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking peoples on whose lands our main office and the Legislature sit.

Stories of the great flood that engulfed these territories many generations ago have been shared with me by a number of Elders up and down the Island. They seem to have particular significance in these times. The name W̱SÁNEĆ has translated as “the emerging people,” or the people they became when the flood waters receded and they had to find a new state of being in harmony. Certainly, we’re all individually and organizationally in that state of emergence right now.

I’m very pleased to be able to meet with you today — while not in person, for obvious reasons, then thankfully via this technology that we’re becoming very adept at. I’d like to provide the committee with an update on the work of our office, and then I’m happy to answer any questions members have about the RCY.

I’ll begin by introducing the staff who are supporting me today via Zoom: the deputy representative for operations, Alan Markwart, and the chief financial officer, Dianne Buljat. We have been ably supported by many other staff who have prepared material for us today.

I’m going to divide my presentation into two parts. To start, I’m going to give a brief overview of our office’s work since we last met with you in the fall. Following that, I’ll outline how the RCY has adapted during the current COVID-19 pandemic in order to continue to work effectively on behalf of children, youth and families in B.C.

I know that you’re familiar, to some extent, with the work of our office. As a quick summary, the Representative for Children and Youth is responsible for assisting children, youth and young adults and their families in dealing with child- and youth-serving systems, including the Ministry of Children and Family Development, Community Living B.C. and the health authorities; and advocating for improvements to those systems and providing oversight of MCFD and other public bodies that deliver services and programs to children and youth.

Our budget for 2020-21 is $10.41 million. For the committee’s information, we completed the fiscal year that recently ended with a small surplus of $69,000, which was less than 1 percent of our budget.

Our organization has 74 FTEs working out of four locations in Victoria, Vancouver, Prince George and Burnaby.

[9:05 a.m.]

For your information, the Vancouver location is the result of a corporate shared-services agreement with the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. That covers information technology, human resources and financial services, so our FTE count includes the positions that are funded through shared-services arrangements.

I’m going to go more deeply into the three areas that are our legislative mandate. The first is advocacy. Our advocates, as you know, provide information, advice and assistance to children, youth, young adults and their families who need help in dealing with designated services or programs provided or funded by government.

Our advocacy team dealt with 1,583 individual cases during the last year. Of course, there were many more calls than that, but those cases came before our advocates. In general, these cases have become increasingly complex, particularly in the last few years, necessitating much longer length and depth of involvement.

That complexity consists of things such as the number of service lines involved, the number of agencies, the number of people that are involved in the child’s life, the number of challenges that the young person is facing. That necessitates a greater investment of time and energy to pull people together and to find the right solutions. That complexity has influenced the way in which our advocates do our work and the amount of time that it takes.

Also, as you know, regulatory changes took place in July 2019 that expanded the jurisdiction of the RCY to include young adults aged 19 to 23 who are eligible for agreements as young adults and for our tuition waivers. I’m grateful for the committee’s support for the addition of two FTEs to our advocacy staffing to address both case complexity and workload, as well as this expanded mandate for vulnerable young adults. Those two new staff are now in place.

Prior to the restrictions on travel and events necessitated by COVID, they were doing a great deal of outreach work to raise awareness and connections around the expanded mandate and our pivoting in other ways to ensure that that connection continues. We expect our young adult caseload to grow as awareness of the expanded role increases. Indeed, through the COVID pandemic, we had a number of young people and adults reach out to us because they were confused about what was available and what would happen for them in these times.

We also expect amendments to the RCY Act that were actually recommended by the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth in 2018. We expect they will eventually be enacted, and these will further expand our advocacy jurisdiction by broadening the age range of young adults formerly in care and young adults with special needs to include those up to their 27th birthday as well as potentially broadening the range of eligible services, creating additional workload demands. However, we don’t anticipate, for obvious reasons, those legislative changes to come into effect during this fiscal year.

In addition to handling a highly complex caseload last fiscal, the RCY advocacy team continued community outreach efforts to raise awareness of the office and also to educate children and youth about their rights. They also helped to amplify the voices of youth and young adults with lived experience in a systemic way and assisted in the creation of a report on youth homelessness entitled From Marginalized to Magnified: Youth Homelessness Solutions from Those with Lived Expertise. That report was released in February by Kamloops-based youth homelessness advocate Katherine McParland with the support of our organization and also came before the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth. It was a new way of doing our work but also one that we’re proud of in terms of amplifying young people’s voices.

Moving on from advocacy, our critical injury and death reviews and investigations team — or CID, as it is known internally — continues to be extremely busy. As you know, this team conducts reviews and undertakes investigations of critical injuries and deaths of children and youth who have received reviewable services and identifies and makes recommendations for improvements to services to help prevent similar injuries and deaths in the future.

During fiscal year 2019-20, the RCY received a record high of 3,185 reports, which was a 16 percent increase over the previous year, which was also a peak year. These reports included a record high of 1,330 that were determined to be squarely within our legislative mandate. That was 1,235 critical injuries and 95 deaths of children and youth. These in-mandate reports have increased by 65 percent during the last five-year period — four-year period, actually.

[9:10 a.m.]

We also appreciate your support for one additional FTE to add an investigations analyst to help address the substantial CID workload increases. That new staff member is also now in place, and we’re delighted to welcome her.

We expect to see an even greater increase in CID’s workload with the advent of health authorities reporting critical injuries and deaths in relation to mental health and addiction services for children and youth. It was planned for such reporting to begin this fiscal year, but implementation will now likely be delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In November after we met with you, our CID team released Caught in the Middle, an investigative report into the circumstances leading up to the overdose death of a teenager who came into contact with the Alberta and B.C. child-serving systems.

Our team currently has one full investigative report near completion. This investigation focuses on the effects of intergenerational trauma in the areas of permanency, including legal, physical, cultural, relational and identity permanency in the life of an Indigenous young person.

Other CID work that continues is we have two special three-year statistical reports on critical injuries and deaths that take a very clear focus on First Nations and Métis as well as non-Indigenous children and youth.

We have an aggregate report on deliberate self-harm critical injuries, something that is of great concern to many practitioners within the health and social care sector.

We have two special reports on child participation in important decisions that impact their lives. The first, which is nearing completion, pertains to child participation in mental health detentions — again, a novel approach that we’ve taken with that report. The second report will focus on child participation in protection and family law proceedings.

Of course, we continue to do comprehensive case reviews which result in reports that are not provided publicly but are provided to the service delivery system to learn from. Our findings are shared with them.

Our third mandated area in the RCY is monitoring. This team monitors, reviews, audits and conducts research on the provision of government-funded designated services or programs for children and youth and their families, and then they, too, identify opportunities for change to improve those services.

Monitoring released two public reports in the last fiscal: the B.C. Adoption and Permanency Options Update, fifth in a series of reports on adoptions and permanency planning for children in care; and the second, released in March, was Youth Substance Use Services in B.C.: An Update. This was an inventory of all current publicly funded substance use services for youth and young adults in B.C. This report, while informative to the public, of course, serves a longer-term purpose by establishing the current baseline of services so that government’s progress in improving substance use services for youth can be accurately measured going forward.

I should say we released that at a time that was particularly important for Mental Health and Addictions, and they were grateful to have that, as was MCFD, because it provides them with a very thorough inventory of services that they did not previously have.

In addition to ongoing monitoring of a broad range of programs, the monitoring team is currently engaged in a review of services and supports for children and youth with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and their families that highlights their lived experiences, a strong community engagement process that has been undertaken there; a multi-year quantitative and qualitative review of care planning for children in care that focuses on cultural planning for Indigenous children, transitional planning for youth aging into adulthood and permanency planning; and a review of the system of transitional and post-majority services and supports for youth and young adults who were previously in care.

Additional major activities that we will begin this fiscal include research and reports on early years programs, as well as contracted residential services for children and youth.

It’s expected that an expansion of RCY’s monitoring mandate will arise, again out of the prospective amendments to the RCY Act recommended by the select standing committee in 2018, specifically in relation to the authority and responsibility to monitor post-majority services and supports with the young adults who were formally in care. However, as with the expected changes to our advocacy mandates, it’s unlikely these changes will come into effect this fiscal.

I want to highlight that in addition to the three areas defined in our legislation, we’ve established a dedicated First Nations, Métis and Inuit relations team, known as FNMIR internally.

[9:15 a.m.]

That team gives special attention to achieving RCY’s goal of improving services to Indigenous children, youth and young adults; engages extensively with Indigenous communities, agencies and service providers throughout the province, with a focus on building relationships; and supports the resumption of jurisdiction over child and family services by First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities.

Finally, it’s also monitoring the progress towards implementation of key recommendations related to children and youth and families in B.C. from such transformational reports as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and their Calls to Action; The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Indigenous Resilience, Connectedness and Reunification: From Root Causes to Root Solutions by Grand Chief Ed John. The FNMIR team helps us become a more culturally attuned and responsive organization.

Related to this, in keeping with the Hon. Ted Hughes, our great mentor, original 2006 recommendation for RCY to have two deputy representatives, one of whom should be Indigenous, we reorganized, as we mentioned, in the fall. We’ve established a second deputy representative position, who will be responsible for both advocacy and FNMIR. We are now well along in recruiting for that position.

Before moving on to discuss how our organization has pivoted during the COVID outbreak, I’d like to address one other significant change in our work. In consultation with affected ministries, we’ve initiated a new process for the development and monitoring of the recommendations in our public reports. The key change with respect to the development of recommendations is the direct engagement of affected ministries and public bodies as the recommendations that affect them are being developed.

That’s important. As we bring forward our findings and our recommendations, it’s important that we understand the implications and any unintended impact that those recommendations might have. Of course, we retain full responsibility and authority over the recommendations that we put forward, but that consultative process enables us to refine and ensure that they’re as solid as they possibly can be.

The key change with respect to monitoring responses to RCY recommendations is that our organization has begun to publish annual assessments of the progress made by ministries and public bodies in implementing recommendations from recent RCY reports. The first set of annual assessments were published on the RCY website earlier this week, and it’s accessible for anybody to take a look at.

Those are a few of the updates and things that we’re working on now. The topic of recommendations is a good way to segue into the second part of my presentation, which is our work during the pandemic.

We recognize that government and public bodies are greatly challenged during this time to maintain services to children and youth and families and, in many cases, implementing alternative approaches made necessary.

I want to begin by acknowledging and holding my hands up in respect for the extraordinary work being done by front-line workers in health and social care, other essential workers, the leadership throughout government and legislators such as yourselves and, of course, the provincial health officer and her team. I’m incredibly proud to be a B.C.’er at this time and to experience and to observe the extraordinary and wide-reaching non-partisan commitment to do the best we can for citizens in the midst of unprecedented complexity and uncertainty.

We decided early on that we needed to determine how to be relevant and responsive and helpful. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. One of the first things we did was we took a look at what we had on our plate, and we decided that it would not be appropriate or helpful at this time to add to the current extraordinary pressures on government and service systems by making recommendations for systemic improvements. We deferred, until the fall of 2020, the previously planned public release of a number of reports that included recommendations to government. This is not the time for us to be distracted on that. That includes most of the reports I’ve mentioned previously.

The release of reports that are informative and useful to service systems but do not include recommendations, such as the substance use services report and the report of statistical review of services to First Nations and Métis children, for example, are proceeding. Of course, we have a significant oversight role to play during a time in which the public’s confidence in and trust of their government is vital. The public needs to know that in the midst of all of this uncertainty and change, independent oversight and advocacy is being undertaken.

[9:20 a.m.]

As I said, it’s also a time to take an all-hands-on-deck approach. Therefore, our contribution is that we have enhanced advocacy efforts and virtual outreach. We are contributing information and counsel to assist decision-makers to make well-informed decisions; we are undertaking rapid research on such issues as the impact of the emergency and crisis situations on family violence and how to respond — in mental health, for example; and we are monitoring the significant impacts of isolation and social distancing on service systems and on the lives of young people and their families so that we can learn as much as we can to inform future actions.

To support this work, we reallocated internal resources to create a COVID-19 response team. The key functions of that team are, first, to ensure our advocates have the most current information available on constantly evolving policies and programs so that they can provide the most helpful support to young people and their families. As you can appreciate, when people contact us, they’re confused, they’re frightened, they’re stressed, they’re scared, so it’s our responsibility to ensure that they have the most current information. That’s required us to dig deeply into our relationships with government to ensure that we have that.

The second duty is to review, analyze and summarize COVID-related reports of critical injuries and deaths, COVID-related advocacy cases, reports from service providers and stakeholders and other information sources so that we can identify service-related issues and themes. These issues and themes are then being brought forward by myself and other RCY executives to leadership in MCFD and other ministries and public bodies through regular meetings and discussions to assist and inform those decision-makers about matters that require attention and action.

For example, one of the biggest concerns we heard as the pandemic began was regarding children in care who would age out of services during this very uncertain time. Of course, we began discussions with MCFD immediately on this topic, and the advice and information we provided helped government to make quick changes to ensure that vulnerable youth in B.C. would not lose their placements and supports during this pandemic.

We’ve also regularly advised MCFD and other bodies, including the provincial health officer, about various issues and concerns ranging from access to technology to the risks and response to family violence during the pandemic. This afternoon, in fact, we’ll be presenting to the Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth and advising members of the trends we are seeing in the primary areas of concern.

We are also being proactive in the spirit of supporting and amplifying the work that is being done by the public bodies and community service providers. For example, as the mental health of children and youth is a fundamental concern for all of us, we’re working right now with the centre for children’s health policy research on several timely research projects — as they say, rapid research — that will inform practices on children and youth and their mental health in these times.

RCY staff have been able to continue their regular work from home, although our in-person advocacy and youth and community engagement activities have been curtailed, for good reason. Our advocates continue to work with children and youth, young adults, caregivers and community services providers via telephone and tools such as Skype and Zoom and recorded messages to young people.

Although our normal outreach work in communities has been curtailed, we’ve developed and implemented a social media outreach campaign with the significant help of community partners to deliver useful information and advice to help young people and their caregivers stay safe and informed. We have covered COVID basics, substance use and family violence, to name a few.

With regard to engagement, I should also mention that we are taking steps in the short term to make our website materials more accessible to youth and to those for whom English is not a first language. We’ve begun the process of translating our key materials into the ten languages most commonly spoken in the province as well as a number of Indigenous languages, and we’re adding the Google translate function to our website. We’re exploring the use of Facebook to directly communicate with young people, and we’re expecting to be up and running in the next few weeks with a chat and text function that will allow us to connect more immediately with youth.

Those are some of highlights of what we’ve been doing at the RCY and how we’ve been shifting to be effective during this uncertain time.

Of course, the COVID pandemic demands our attention every minute; however, we must also keep our eye on what lies ahead, and we’re guided by our strategic plan. The written submission that we provided to the members of this committee provides more specific information with respect to our organization’s strategic priorities and implementation and accomplishments. I have not directly addressed those during my presentation; however, I am pleased to address this in the Q and A.

[9:25 a.m.]

We also recognize that we will all need to reimagine and reform at least some of what we do and how we do it going forward. As challenging as this time has been, there is a great deal that can be learned about interventions, policies and practices, and we will be monitoring our own practice and those bodies that we provide oversight for.

That concludes my presentation, and I’d be happy to answer any questions the committee has.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation and for everything you’re doing for our children and youth. I was particularly interested in how you were dealing with things in the midst of the pandemic. It’s great to hear how you have managed to pivot — sort of keep doing what you’re doing but be able to pivot on to the pressing issues of right now. I appreciate the balance that you’re trying to find in this very difficult time.

I’m curious about the effect of isolation on children and whether or not you’ve had a chance to look at that, because I know…. Well, I guess my own personal experience with three kids at home between the ages of 17 and 23, and all of their friends and all the dynamics that are going on…. It’s a very difficult time, particularly for grads, particularly for anybody in isolation. I think particularly teenagers have a very difficult time in isolation psychologically.

I’d love to hear a little bit more about the work that you’re doing on that, because it’s new territory, I think. I appreciate that you have to continue with the mandate but that, at the same time, this is an extraordinary circumstance.

I appreciate everything that you’re doing. I’m sure that we’ll have lots of questions, because there’s so much that work needs to be done in this area.

Mitzi, please go ahead.

M. Dean: Thank you, Jennifer. Thanks to all of your team for all of the work and for being so thoughtful. Thank you for taking the time to update us in this committee today. I will listen to or I’ll read your more detailed submission to the Children and Youth Committee, because this committee isn’t the place to get into the details, I suppose.

I have just a couple questions, though. The national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and the calls for justice…. they particularly talk about distinction as well, making sure that we address Métis and Indigenous and First Nations and pay attention to that.

I wonder what conversations you’ve had with government — not necessarily with MCFD, maybe with PSSG — from your perspective and your unique position of understanding. Then my second question is: have you given any advice or are you making any recommendations around child protection and the particular risks that this current situation creates and whether government could be doing more? The Alberta government, for example, sent a letter out to all educators, because educators are still having that contact with kids.

I’m just interested in what your perspective and recommendations are around reporting abuse and what have you — and recognizing it.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you. I’m going to….

N. Simons: I just wanted to say that there is also a meeting this afternoon where some of this is probably going to be discussed at length.

Sorry, Jennifer.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you, Nicholas.

With respect to the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and the calls for justice, one of the things we’ve done is that we’ve identified and have a very — it’s recently completed — robust review of the recommendations that have arisen from a whole series of reports that particularly pertain to children and youth, young adults and families of Indigenous — First Nations, Inuit and urban Indigenous. What that has enabled us to do is to identify what some of the key themes are that are across all of those reports.

Now what we’re…. Had we not been in the COVID situation, our next step would have been to reach out to the various bodies that would have some responsibility for those to say: “Here are some of the things that are overarching themes and where we think some attention and care needs to be taken, and here is a resource for you to manage and to put, essentially, a lens…. Similar to the GBA+ lens, there’s another lens here through which to look at your policies, your programs and your decision-making.”

[9:30 a.m.]

We have had recent discussions with the PSSG deputy, for example, with respect to domestic violence as a particular area, because we’re very concerned during the pandemic of the implications of pandemic for family violence. We’re in the early stages with respect to ensuring that government is well aware of the recommendations across these transformational reports and what we’ll be monitoring them on, going forward.

I don’t know if that fully answers your question. Please come back to me if I need to add more.

The other thing is with respect to child protection. You raise a very important point. One of the first things we did is we took a look at where, typically, calls come in to the Ministry of Children and Families with respect to child protection. The most frequent callers are police. The second most are educators. One of the things that’s really important is to recognize that some of the eyes, in fact, most of the eyes on children who are vulnerable are not having eyes on right now.

So we did a number of things. We spoke with the provincial health officer in collaboration with the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. We presented research and shared information about the implications of crises, emergencies, on family violence. We identified a number of opportunities to effect some change, and then we also undertook some social media work as well.

What was interesting is that there were a number of things that were done in collaboration with government and the provincial health officer. What the Ministry of Children and Family Development reported to us is that prior to that initiative, the calls were significantly down. During that — in fact, in the three days that we had the major press and push on this — the calls went back to what they were a year ago this time. So that’s encouraging.

We also shared the example from Alberta, where there was a joint letter from the Ministers of Children’s Services and Education to educators themselves to say: “Here are some things that, in this virtual time, you should be looking out for. You knew that those kids were vulnerable before. Here are some other indicators.” My understanding is that that was taken forward as well. I don’t know what the status of that is.

So those are a few things. That is probably my greatest fear: what we don’t know because we don’t have eyes on children in the way that we used to through our community sector and through educators.

The other thing I should mention, and it ties into the question around mental health, is working with the centre for Children’s Health Policy research and, within the next month, having a report from them about the impacts of pandemic on mental health. Family violence is intertwined in that. What would be some appropriate interventions?

Hopefully, that answers your questions.

M. Dean: Yes, thank you. As I say, I will follow the committee and read up in detail. I’m sure you’ll present more in detail. In fact, this morning a statement was put out by the gender equity office about family violence, because we really want to make sure that people are calling into VictimLink. There’s going to be a lot of media on that later on today as well. Family violence — we have a significant concern. Thanks for all of your work, Jennifer.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks. Just before I move to Ronna-Rae, I have a quick question.

Jennifer, you referenced some documents that supported this presentation. I just checked with Kate, and I don’t believe we received any documents. Was there a report that was sent in that we missed? There are no supporting documents, at least in our package. So I just want to make sure that maybe we could follow up on that and make sure we get that, because we would be very anxious to see what your thoughts are.

Of course, you know, you’ve presented it all, so we know what you’re saying. But it’d be really nice to have that as well.

J. Charlesworth: Okay.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you, Jennifer.

R. Leonard: Thank you very much for your presentation. I think you’re hearing some of the questions and concerns that everybody is sharing around health and the impacts of isolation, particularly on your target population, which is children and youth.

I guess the question I have, since we’re the Finance Committee, is around costs. What are the implications? I know that your investigators would go around to different communities and make those contacts, so there would have been travel costs. How is that impacting your budget? What’s the yang of it? How are you spending money to try and effect those investigations in a way that’s meaningful?

[9:35 a.m.]

J. Charlesworth: Alan, would you like to step in on the travel piece?

A. Markwart: Obviously, travel is severely constrained right now. We’re simply having to make contacts by other means — telephone, Skype, Zoom. If the current circumstances remain, in fact, there’s going to be some under-expenditure in travel this fiscal year.

I would expect that it will probably resume in the fall, but even then, maybe not to the same degree as normal. We simply have to adapt to the circumstances and try and connect with people by other means.

R. Leonard: If I may do a follow-up question. Assuming that this is a long-term thing — you know, up to two years, perhaps — are there other alternative ways of getting a more personal contact, like by proxy with somebody in community?

J. Charlesworth: Maybe I’ll take a stab at that one.

We talk about reimagining and reforming the ways in which we do our work. One of those will absolutely be around how we engage, how we connect and how we be in relationship with young people.

One of the things is that a lot of our work already through advocacy is done through telephone or through proxy. For example, it might be…. We often get calls from front-line workers that are in relationship with those children, and then the advocacy would be supporting that dyad — that front-line worker with the child. That would obviously continue, and it could continue remotely. So it’s not unfamiliar territory for us, for sure.

Having said that, there are all sorts of things that we had envisioned and imagined with respect to youth and community engagement that are going to have to look very different, especially around our reports and how best to really tap into and be in relationship with those that are being affected most.

In fact, one of the areas that we’re looking at within our organization is how we work in highly complex situations, and we are doing some learning and development work. The challenge that will be issued, as we do this learning, is: what are the different ways that we could effectively engage in a virtual world? Or what are the different ways that we could engage without large group gatherings, for example? What’s that going to look like? How do we use social media? How do we use visuals? All of those kinds of things.

So that’s actually a major initiative for us going forward as an organization. The whole circumstance is challenging all of us, but it calls upon us to get very creative and start to think about different ways. It won’t mean that we let up on trying to figure out how to be in relationship in an important and significant way with people. We just have to do it differently.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. I don’t see any other questions, any hands from anybody.

Thank you, Jennifer, and your staff and everybody for all the wonderful work you’re doing in a very, very difficult time. I know that our children and youth are in very good hands with you and that your passion to what’s happening is going to carry us forward.

I’d be very interested to hear what the Committee on Children and Youth presentation digs into, because I’m sure it’ll be even more in-depth than what you’re able to present today. I’ll look forward to that.

Thanks again. Was there anything else you wanted to add, or are we good to go?

J. Charlesworth: No, other than my gratitude to all of you for doing the work that you’re doing and to come together in unprecedented ways. So hands up to all of you. This is an extraordinary time. Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, folks, we’ll take a short recess and be back for 9:45.

The committee recessed from 9:39 a.m. to 9:45 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Kate, do we have our next presenter?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of the Legislative Assembly): Yes. I’ll just invite Kasari and Stephanie in.

I’ll also advise members that I have just sent to each of you by email the meeting documents that were provided by the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth. I sincerely apologize for the oversight in sharing them with you prior to their appearance a few moments ago. They are in your email accounts at this time.

At this stage, with that, again I apologize. We’ll proceed now to the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Welcome to the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. Kasari Govender, the Human Rights Commissioner, is presenting to us the spring report.

It’s so nice to see you. I know it’s not in person, which we would much prefer, but at least we can do the Zoom thing.

If you want to please proceed and maybe tell us about the staff that are also with you.

K. Govender: Sure, thank you. Good morning. Good to see all of you in these strange circumstances. Good to see your faces virtually, at least. I am so pleased to be here with the committee to present this update and, of course, to answer any questions about the work we are doing or undertaking or planning ahead.

I’m going to begin by acknowledging that I am here on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.

I’d also like to introduce my colleagues. I have with me Stephanie Garrett, who is our Deputy Commissioner; and I have Dianne Buljat, who was just with you, I guess, as well, who is our chief financial officer.

I also want to just say a big thank-you to all of you who are doing such challenging policy work in such challenging circumstances, as well as to all of our essential workers across the province, from health care aides to hospital cleaners to doctors and nurses to grocery store workers. None of us could be doing this work without them.

I do have a slide presentation.

Kate, I’m not sure if we can get that up on the screen.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of the Legislative Assembly): Good morning. I’ll bring it up in just a moment, and it should be visible shortly.

K. Govender: Wonderful. If I could get you to go to the next slide, that would be great. Thank you.

As you know, the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner was newly re-established in September of 2019. I want to provide you with an overview of our office and what we have been up to since then.

The way that this office was created made history. It is the only fully independent human rights commission in Canada charged with a broad systemic mandate to apply both domestic and international human rights law.

We now have a tripartite system for human rights in B.C. We have the Human Rights Tribunal, which does the processing of individual complaints and individual dispute resolution, and the Human Rights Clinic, which continues to provide legal services for those people who are going through the individual complaint system. What has been missing from that system for nearly two decades has been the means to address systemic concerns. In many ways, the role of the Human Rights Commissioner is to provide access to justice for those issues that the individual complaint system really can’t address.

My role as commissioner is to be a watchdog for human rights in the province, working to dismantle the kind of bias, hate, stereotypes and misinformation that fuels human rights abuses in the first place.

[9:50 a.m.]

Since I spoke to you last, we have put significant energy into strategic planning. In that process, we have developed our vision and mandate, which you see in front of you now. We’ve based this on the goals of the legislation and the tools at our disposal.

Our office’s vision is a province in which everyone’s human rights are realized and our responsibilities to one another are fulfilled. We seek to address the root causes of inequality, discrimination and injustice in B.C. by shifting laws, policies, practices and cultures. We do this work through education, research, advocacy, inquiry and monitoring. The formation of this office marks an important moment in our province and presents a unique opportunity to shift the culture of human rights.

In October, in order to fulfil the significant tasks we have been charged with under the legislation, I made a budgetary request of $6.2 million in operating funding. In response to a request by the committee for potential alternative approaches, my office provided a revised budget proposal of $5.7 million in 2020-21, $6.8 million in 2021-22 and $6.6 million in 2022-23.

In December of 2019, the committee allocated a budget envelope of $5.5 million in operational funding for the current fiscal year, with a recommendation of the same envelope for the two subsequent years. I want to thank the committee, again, for your thoughtful consideration of our budget submissions in the fall.

During the 2020-21 fiscal year, this budget allocation of $5.5 million allows us to continue with the phased operational approach submitted to the committee in the fall of 2019. We are pleased to report that we are on track with operational timelines for the current year. However, the recommendation issued by the committee in the fall that saw our budget envelope remain the same for the next two years will constrain our ability to fulfil our mandate as outlined by the legislation.

In addition, we, of course, are in unprecedented times. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased demand for our work, adding pressures to the limited capacity and resources. Human rights are never more important than in times of crisis. It is in these challenging times that it becomes critical for us all to know our human rights and to place human rights at the centre of our decision-making. That’s the role of my office.

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, my office has provided significant policy guidance in human rights law, especially in the areas of employment, service provision and housing. I’ll share more details about our response to the pandemic later in my presentation. Suffice it to say that the crisis has only increased the need for human rights oversight, and I anticipate that this need will be further increased in the fallout from the crisis.

Since we last spoke in the fall, the BCOHRC has hired and on-boarded our lead staff in each department. We are now at nine full-time staff as well as two temporary staff members, and we are scheduled to add eight to nine more people by the end of June of this year. While we were on track for the hiring we had planned to do by the end of fiscal 2021 prior to the pandemic, we are now anticipating that there may be some delays as a result of the crisis. The scope of these delays is yet to be seen. We’re working hard, of course, to avoid any significant disruptions to our start-up plans.

In line with our mandate and our values, the B.C. Office of the Human Rights Commissioner continues to set very high standards for equity and inclusion in our hiring practices, and we are very pleased by the quality and diversity of the candidates we’ve been able to attract in every hiring competition so far. When we first came out of the gate in September of 2019, there was a significant buzz about the possibilities of our office. The evidence shows that the enthusiasm continues. There has been a very high quality and quantity of applicants that we’ve received for every position that we’ve posted.

Our staff work in our main office in Vancouver as well as our satellite office in Victoria. It is our intention to create some remote positions across the province, as we grow, in order to ensure that we have that cross-provincial representation.

[9:55 a.m.]

I’d like to once again thank the Office of the Auditor General for providing our office space in Victoria and the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth for providing shared services for the finance, human resources and IT functions. These collaborations have allowed our office to be set up in a way that’s truly efficient, effective and innovative, while dedicating an increased percentage of our budget to the actual program delivery.

We’re very pleased by how the shared corporate services pilot has rolled out, and we look forward to continuing with it in the future.

Well, of course, we are all now working from home. Prior to staying at home, we have been in the temporary office in Vancouver, since November 2019, in the same building as the permanent space we’ve leased. We are working with the real property division to complete the build on our permanent office space, and we’re on track to move in by November 1, 2020.

Today I’m pleased to share with you the outcomes of our first strategic planning cycle, where we have set the priority issues that will guide my office’s work from 2020 to 2024. While I won’t go into detail on all the goals and objectives we’ve established under each of these priority areas, I of course will be pleased to present that information in the service plans that we will be giving you in the fall.

In addition to monitoring and responding to the critical human rights issues of our day, my office will focus on the following priorities. The first, as you see in front of you, is that we have a standing priority which is to grapple with the discrimination faced by people across the province in relation to the human rights code itself. That includes discrimination in service provision, employment and housing. Working to change the systems that contribute to these everyday human rights violations will always be the foundation of the work of the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

In addition to this ongoing priority, we have identified four strategic priority areas to work on over the course of our strategic planning cycle. These are listed on the slide in front of you: decolonization, hate and the rise of white supremacy, poverty, and human rights for those detained by the state in places like prisons and mental health institutions. For example, in regard to our strategic priority for decolonization, we know that Indigenous people face significant human rights issues, yet they largely don’t access the individual complaint process within the human rights tribunal system.

That’s really a disconnect that we need to be paying attention to. We’re not alone in needing to pay attention to that issue. In fact, earlier this year the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal released their report entitled Expanding Our Vision. That report looked squarely at some of the challenges facing Indigenous people and accessing the human rights system in B.C., and it reveals that Indigenous people carry an abiding sense of exclusion from the complaint process.

As Human Rights Commissioner, I’m working in collaboration with the tribunal and other actors in the human rights system to implement the key systemic recommendations of that report — to make the human rights complaint system more relevant and useful to Indigenous people, including policy and legislative change and public education.

We’re currently in the process of validating the priorities that you see in front of you through public and stakeholder engagement. The priorities will be finalized this year and form a key part of our service plans, as I’ve mentioned, which, again, we’re looking forward to presenting to you in the fall. These five priorities will guide the projects that we undertake for the next five years.

As part of our commitment to serving all regions in British Columbia, we have begun to connect and engage on these strategic priorities with people across the province, including round tables and events in the Lower Mainland and capital region and a public town hall we hosted in Prince George earlier this spring.

My office also had an opportunity to visit Mr. Simon’s beautiful constituency and to connect with the shíshálh Nation and area residents, and we look forward to building on the connections that we’ve made there.

Unfortunately, our next scheduled public engagements, which were in Kamloops and Kelowna in mid-March, were prevented, of course, by the changes brought on by COVID-19. But I’m very pleased to report that our team has swiftly adapted to delivering our outreach and engagement strategy digitally. During this time of crisis, we’ve launched two public surveys — one to better understand the human rights violations people are experiencing over the pandemic and another to better understand what obstacles duty-bearers face in respecting and fulfilling human rights over this time.

[10:00 a.m.]

We’ve received dozens of responses, and I’d like to share with you a couple of examples of what we’ve been hearing. One asked: “Have you witnessed or experienced discrimination on the basis of COVID-19?” Here is a bit of what we heard. One person described how an Asian-Canadian driver they worked with had been discriminated against during his routes, being kept out of customer buildings due to his ethnicity.

Another person, a resident of the Downtown Eastside, described the distress they were in because the building they lived in wouldn’t allow their mental health supports to enter the building.

Others told us about the difficulty in accessing public health information and medical help in a timely way, especially for those who have English as a second language and for those without reliable access to the Internet.

The examples we received, along with other research and analysis, are informing the policy recommendations that we produce as we continue to work with government and with private sector duty-bearers.

We have launched a video message to draw attention to human rights related to the public health crisis, and across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the video has been watched more than 11,000 times.

My team and I are hosting biweekly online community meetings with organizations serving people across the province to ensure that we are staying plugged in and informed about the issues that British Columbians are facing during the shutdown.

We are continuing our engagement about human rights in the province more generally as well. We hosted a Twitter town hall in which we answered questions from British Columbians live on Twitter, and we are planning two Facebook Live events in the next month to answer questions — first a session focused on youth, to answer their questions about human rights and the role of the commission, and another session focused on Indigenous people across the province.

Whether in person or digitally, these outreach opportunities reflect our office’s basic approach to going forward. We aim to be open, accessible, easy to connect with and to be a hub for human rights information, education and promotion.

In the Kahlon report, Grand Chief Doug Kelly, presi­dent of the Stó:lō Tribal Council, advised that the human rights commission must listen, learn and then act — always in that order. That is exactly the approach we are undertaking.

Since taking office in September of 2019 — you have some of the numbers in front of you — I’ve spoken to hundreds of people at 18 events, raising awareness about why human rights matter, the role of the office and specific human rights issues like the rise of hate, impediments to access to justice, the rights of migrant workers, accessibility for people with disabilities, and more.

I’ve had more than 30 roundtables and stakeholder meetings with rights-holders, duty-bearers and decision-makers, connecting with more than 200 people individually. I’ve heard about the experiences of people with disabilities trying to get access to everyday services like transportation, the impacts of anti-Semitism in our community, about the struggles of people with mental illnesses who are detained in hospitals and prisons, and I’ve heard from both complainants and respondents about the obstacles they are facing with resolving their individual human rights complaints.

We know that this work has helped to raise the visibility of our office and that we are connecting with people about the important issues of the day because, to date, our impact on the media landscape has been very significant. We’ve generated more than 930 stories since September 3, including significant outreach into Punjabi, Chinese and Indigenous media outlets.

We have committed to ambitious goals to build relationships with First Nations governments and Indigenous communities, seeking to connect with dozens of nations per year in the hope of meeting with representatives from nearly all the nations in B.C. over the course of my five-year term, as well as developing relationships with Indigenous people living in both rural and urban settings.

We have engaged in extensive relationship-building with other independent officers and human rights commissions across the country, including creating opportunities for interprovincial collaboration such as through our participation in the Canadian Association of Statutory Human Rights Agencies, or CASHRA for short.

In all that we do, we are attentive to the importance of outreach in both rights-holders and duty-bearer communities, and we are committed to centring the needs of those facing human rights abuses across the province. These commitments are reflected in our intake process, where we accept and respond to questions and comments from the public via a 1-800 number, email and mail itself.

[10:05 a.m.]

To date, we have received roughly 250 questions from the public on topics from service animals to family violence, bullying and harassment, police violence and discrimination in family law. Using a trauma-informed, rights-based, decolonizing approach, we speak with or respond to people directly, offering referrals to services like legal support, complaint legal assistance and the crisis lines.

We also work to integrate systemic issues that we hear back through the public into our work on advocacy, inquiry, research and policy. The demand for human rights information from the public reconfirms the need for both robust educational services as well as trauma-sensitive and well-informed referral services in our office.

We know that with the establishment of my office, the tribunal and the clinic have seen an increase in calls. We are working with both those entities to improve access to the human rights system in B.C. We are seeking to establish a coordinated approach to responding to the public in order to reduce the number of doors that people have to knock on in order to get their challenges resolved, and we are establishing systems to work collaboratively in an ongoing way. For example, we are working with the tribunal to support their design of a new case management structure so that we will have better access to data and demographic information and trends related to complaints.

In addition to these projects with the clinic and tribunal, we’ve now taken over the power to approve special programs as provided for under the human rights code. Special programs, as you may know, are programs such as employment equity programs which aim to improve the conditions for an individual or a group that has faced disadvantage — for example, allowing an employer to hire for a position for Indigenous candidates only. The provisions of the human rights code granting us authority over special programs have now come into force, and we look forward to the addition of our powers in inquiry and investigation, which are scheduled to come on line in September of 2020.

As you know, education is central to our mandate, and we are enthusiastic about the big plans that we have in this regard. Through our outreach and engagement work, we have collected information about the issues that are most important to British Columbians. We have begun to produce educational materials to fill these important gaps, including fact sheets for small businesses on their obligations as employers under the human rights code and policy guidance for public institutions like libraries and community centres on hate speech laws and room-booking policies.

We are excited about an ongoing project we have that we’re calling the storytelling project, which features the stories of everyday human rights champions from across B.C. as a means to educate on human rights issues and to build empathy and break down stereotypes. I’ve included a link to one of those videos featuring disability advocate and activist Teresa Pocock in the materials we circulated to the committee prior to the meeting. I hope you can maybe find the time to take a look at it. We look forward to featuring this kind of person-centred storytelling in our education materials as we roll out our permanent website, which is currently under development.

We are also working to establish the advisory council provided for in the legislation, and we’re working with experts at SFU’s Wosk Centre for Dialogue to establish best practices in participatory advisory councils premised on diversity, inclusion and the human rights approach. This collaboration will develop a set of best practices that can be used not only by our office but by other independent offices and organizations across B.C.

Our research and policy teams have also gotten off to a quick start, making their first international submission on February 7 to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as part of Canada’s periodic review. The submission considers economic rights in the B.C. context, such as the right to an adequate standard of living. A link to the full report is also included in your materials.

In our first year, an essential project we are working on is called the baseline project, which will establish a set of key performance indicators by which to measure, year over year, the impact of improvements to human rights within the province, including but not limited to the impact of our office. This will be absolutely key to establishing effective evaluation of our work, going forward.

[10:10 a.m.]

A major piece of research and policy that we have undertaken in these first few months is preparing recommendations on amending the B.C. human rights code itself, with a focus on discrimination on the basis of poverty. Our intent was to release this research and attendant recommendations as a report to the Legislature this spring, but in context of the current crisis, we are reworking our timelines for that work.

Finally, I want to highlight the significant amount of work that my office has done related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the work I’ve already highlighted — issuing policy guidance to employers, service providers and landlords during this time; engaging with the public directly; and sharing critical information about human rights in seven languages — we have also been engaging across government in targeted ways to support the protection of human rights during this fast-changing public health emergency.

This has included issuing policy recommendations to correctional services, working with public health officials to protect the safety of those impacted by domestic and gender-based violence and ensuring that the needs of the disability community are met in the communication of critical public health information.

I’ll just note with gratitude, of course, that much of the work…. There is so much work happening within government and by policy and legislators, as well, over this time, including the document that was released today by the gender equity office in relation to gender-based violence. I see this very much as a collaborative approach, as much as possible, during this time.

My office has played an important role in educating the public, supporting duty-bearers to fulfil their human rights obligations and to monitor and support government agencies in the protections of human rights over this time. We anticipate that this work will continue as we continue to deal with the impacts of the pandemic over the months and years to come.

This work is, of course, in addition to everything we already had planned and underway. We anticipate that it has diverted between 30 percent to 50 percent of our staff time in the last month and a half, but it is a critical void to be filled. I’m so pleased with the ability of our team to step up to fill it.

In conclusion, I’m very pleased with the significant progress that we have made in the development of our office, being able to respond to issues as they arise and to the implementation of our programs. I’m happy to have had this opportunity to share with you today and, of course, I’d be very pleased to answer any questions that you may have.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thank you very much, Kasari. We really appreciate all the work you’re doing, and in a very challenging time, of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic. I appreciate your thoughts in regards to your ability to be able to pivot a bit during the crisis to deal with some very critical issues around human rights during this period. Thank you very much for that.

Just before we go to questions, I did want to address your earlier comments around budgeting. We do actually look forward to your fall submission for the budget. Just so you’re aware in terms of how the committee is approaching this, as you mentioned, a historic and brand-new commission is taking a cautious approach in terms of budgeting and making sure that as we move forward, there is prudence built in. We’re trying to find that balance.

We do certainly look forward to your presentation in the fall. I’m sure members will have more questions as to how things roll out, but I just wanted you to know that this is part of a process we’re doing, especially with a brand-new commission like this. Again, thank you for all the work that you’re doing.

Does anyone have any questions at all?

R. Leonard: Thank you, Kasari. I appreciate you giving us this view of where you’ve gone so far and talking, too, about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on your office. That’s obviously a concern for this organization, this committee, to be able to know that you’re there at this particular time, but also the concerns around how you can engage and move forward and the cost implications of pivoting to new ways of doing things.

[10:15 a.m.]

I notice that you have some survey tools, which are a great outreach tool. I’m wondering if, as you talked about public engagement and talking particularly around stakeholders, you are considering using those kinds of tools to refine your engagement process. The way I see them right now, they look pretty general. I’m just trying to get a sense of how you can reinvent yourself for the next few years on engaging and being the most effective and what kind of cost implications there are to that.

K. Govender: Thank you for the question. It’s very much a work in progress, as you might imagine. I think some of the pieces that we’ve been able to put in place quickly in response to the need to engage digitally…. We were very much in this ramp-up phase. We had two full days in Kamloops and Kelowna packed with meetings and town halls and speeches just after we had to move home. It was an immediate impact of cancelling those. How do we continue to engage with people? Of course, that’s been an evolving picture.

Some of the tools we’ve already developed. We’ve got the surveys. We did quite a successful Twitter town hall. For those who may not be familiar with that tool, that’s where we advertised ahead of time. We got considerable community pickup and retweetings and commissioners available for this period of time. We took questions ahead as well as questions that people wanted to pose to our office through Twitter, and we were able to answer all of those in real-time.

While some of those were COVID-related, we were also really pleased to see that we were able to take the reach beyond that and reach some of the bigger human rights issues on people’s minds, just different human rights issues on people’s minds. So that’s likely a tool that we will continue to use as a way to engage with me in real-time as opposed to too much of the distance that engaging digitally can create.

We’re doing the same thing, as I mentioned, on Facebook. We have a session planned with… I think it’s somewhere between 20 and 30 classes, actually. It’s a very high number, anyway. Maybe it’s closer to ten to 15. But it’s connecting with hundreds of high school students, connecting with students around their human rights questions and explaining the role of the commission. So that’s in coming weeks. We also are planning, after that, a Facebook engagement session with Indigenous people who are engaged on Facebook to answer their questions.

We are doing these cross-provincial community meetings every two weeks. We’re using Zoom as a tool to connect with people from organizations working across the province to stay plugged in to what they are doing and what they’re seeing their clients are facing so that we can ensure we’re getting that information in the door.

Those are some of the tools that we’ve been developing and have used to great effect and will continue to. We have a number of other tools at our disposal that we’re kind of thinking through how to use.

We don’t yet know what all the cost implications of that will be. There will certainly be some increased technology needed as I get more and more established in my home office here and get better tools so that I can be more and more present with people even through a screen. So we are in the process of developing what technology we’ll need and buying that.

I’m not sure, Diane, whether you have anything to add, in terms of the budget implications — or Stephanie, on the line.

A Voice: I don’t think so. I see none.

R. Leonard: Can I ask just one quick other question? You say that there is certainly a rise in some of the inci­dents around racism and discrimination during this pandemic. I’m wondering if you are in a position to be monitoring the tribunal to see that they have capacity to deal with an increase, just to make sure that these issues are being dealt with. Is that part of your mandate? I can’t remember.

[10:20 a.m.]

K. Govender: Yeah. I mean, our mandate isn’t as an oversight body for the tribunal, but it is to work closely with the tribunal. I envision our role as helping to improve access to justice, generally, to resolve human rights issues kind of writ large. That includes some of the more targeted pieces that the tribunal deals with.

We’ve developed a really strong relationship with the tribunal. We’re in regular contact with them and are able to work collaboratively with them. They have developed a model that seems to be working very well to resolve COVID-related human rights complaints as they come in the door. It’s an expedited process.

I will say, from my interactions with CASHRA, with the other statutory human rights bodies across the country, that not all of them have had the technology or capacity to be able to develop so quickly, to be able to respond to complaints through digital formats. Our tribunal seems to be doing very well in that regard.

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

D. Barnett: I have a few questions. Some of them, I guess, are in too much detail. So maybe I’ll just send some letters.

I would like to know where you’ve been in rural British Columbia. We do have some human rights issues in some of our rural communities. Who have you reached out to in rural British Columbia, and how are you reaching out to rural British Columbia?

K. Govender: It’s a significant concern for us to ensure that we are reaching rural B.C. and all corners of the province. We had a tour kind of planned and in progress for the year. That, of course, involved real travel. So we are rapidly reassessing how we do that.

One concern with the rural engagement digitally, of course, is not everyone has reliable access to the Internet. So we are still working through our strategy of how to deal with that where there isn’t access to the Internet.

One of the ways that we’ve done that is to try to connect with organizations that work across the province. They are able to disseminate the information in hard copy through to their clients, which is one strategy. I think it’s just one piece of the puzzle. It’s not the end answer, for sure, but it’s one way to ensure that some of the public information that we produce, particularly education about what peoples’ rights are and how to access remedies in that context, can get out there.

We are designing, right now, a digital engagement strategy specifically aimed at rural communities. I’ll be able to tell you more about that in the fall.

D. Barnett: Thank you.

K. Govender: Sorry. I’ll just add one last thing, which is the baseline project that I mentioned. That is looking at developing…. What are the indicators across the province right now around human rights? What’s the state of human rights in the province? So we can start measuring progress as it changes. We’ve developed a relationship with Rural Health Research Network in order to ensure that we’re reaching rural communities in that process and to be really intentional about that.

D. Barnett: If I could, Bob. I have another question, if that’s okay.

In your mandate, in my opinion, there is something missing. I have a community that went to the human rights commission with a big case, and they won their case. It was dealing with a financial matter, such as labour. Of course, they won their case — great — but they have no way of collecting what they won from the human rights. They have to go hire the lawyer. Well, they don’t have any money.

I think that if we’re going to really help people, we need the other piece within your mandate — that is, some way to help people. If they win a financial case through the human rights commission, how do they collect? It’s not there.

K. Govender: Thanks for that point. I think it is a gap. Some of the enforcement abilities of the tribunal, or lack thereof, do pose a problem for some people, both for respondents and complainants but mostly for complainants.

We’ve had an opportunity to speak to a number of people about this and think through some of the remedies for this problem that you’re pointing out because of the work that we’ve been doing around making recommendations about amendments to the human rights code itself.

[10:25 a.m.]

In that process, we’ve had a focus, for ourselves, on how to build poverty and discrimination on the basis of poverty into the human rights code and ensure discrimination on the basis of poverty is prohibited and, in that process, have put together a master list of some of the issues we’ve been hearing about so that we could talk to a whole range of stakeholders.

In that process, we spoke to, for example, a group of complainant-side lawyers. We did a consultation with com­plainant-side lawyers, meaning people who represent people who are bringing human rights complaints.

We also did a consultation session with respondent-side lawyers. There was a collaboration with a large firm who does that work, and they were able to help us pull together a range of respondent-side counsel so that we ensured that we were hearing from employers as well as some service providers and housing providers, although most of the human rights complaints are related to employment. So that was the majority of the kinds of cases we were hearing about.

In that process, we had quite a lot of conversation about enforcement and how to make that better. That’s very much a work in progress about recommendations we may come up with for changes to the human rights code in that regard.

D. Barnett: Yes. There is no enforcement side. Unfortunately, these people that have taken this case to the human rights won their case. They cannot afford a lawyer. We have searched everywhere. There is no help for these people. I think it’s very important that…. If you’re not going to have enforcement, then a lot of these cases…. To me, there really is no point in the people coming forward if, at the end of the day, we’re not going to follow through right to the end.

K. Govender: Well, it does raise, I think, one of the reasons that the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner is so important, that the work we do is so important. While the work of the Human Rights Tribunal is incredibly important to resolve those issues it can resolve, it has a lot of limitations on what issues it can resolve and how it resolves that. What it leaves undone are the underlying reasons for human rights issues to arise in the first place — the hate, the stereotypes, the fear, the power imbalances that lead to these problems coming up in the first place.

That’s our role — to be here to deal with things that really fall outside of what the tribunal can grapple with. It gets at some of our preventative work, our education work and the changes we want to do on policy and legislation. It speaks to the need for my office to exist.

D. Barnett: Thank you.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Did you have anything else, Donna? You’re good.

Right. Were there any other questions at all? Okay.

Well, thank you very much, to you and your staff, for all the hard work you’re doing setting up. I know it’s particularly difficult, in a start-up phase, to be hit by the pandemic. We certainly appreciate the…. You already had a challenge. Now you have a double challenge, and I know you’re rising to the occasion.

I can probably speak for all the committee members. We really appreciate all that you’re doing in this difficult time to fight for human rights in this province.

Thank you so much. Thanks to the staff.

If we could take…. Well, we don’t need to take a recess. We can go straight into the next one.

K. Govender: Thank you so much to all of you. Take care.

B. D’Eith (Chair): We might as well just stay on, folks, because the next one starts in two minutes — Elections B.C.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of the Legislative Assembly): Mr. Chair, the Elections B.C. officials have arrived, and I can invite them into the meeting now, if you like.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Sure, let’s do that.

Welcome. This is the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. We’re getting reviews from all of the statutory officers, as we do in the spring. While we’re not in person, we are meeting on Zoom, and we’re very pleased to have Anton Boegman, the Chief Electoral Officer, and his staff.

Welcome again. Thank you very much for your presentation. We look forward to your update.

[10:30 a.m.]

ELECTIONS B.C.

A. Boegman: Good morning, Mr. Chair, Mr. Deputy Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for this opportunity to meet via Zoom today. I’m joined on this video conference by my two deputies, Charles Porter, deputy chief electoral officer for electoral finance and operations, and Yvonne Koehn, deputy chief electoral officer for corporate services, as well as Tanya Ackinclose, director of finance.

This is our second meeting with the committee under this new model, as we met on April 8 to discuss the supplemental funding necessary this fiscal year to begin implementation of the voting modernization provisions of Bill 43, the Election Amendment Act, 2019. This meeting today will allow for a further report on Elections B.C.’s progress in that critical project as well as allow me to provide comments on other aspects of our operations. I am mindful that during the debate on Bill 43 in the Legislature, it was made clear that this committee was to be an important forum for Elections B.C. to engage with legislators on the implementation of that bill, and I’m pleased to continue that process.

My overall presentation should take approximately 15 minutes, after which I’ll have time to respond to any questions or comments from committee members. My presentation will focus on four areas.

First, as I mentioned, I will provide a summary update on our current progress in implementing Bill 43. When Bill 43 was passed unanimously by the Legislature and received royal assent last fall, it represented the most significant enhancement of electoral administration in the last 25 years. The new legislation is enabling Elections B.C. to modernize how voting and counting is administered as well as providing us with the ability to greatly improve accessibility and service to voters, parties and candidates.

Implementing the changes brought about by Bill 43 requires a minimum of 18 months. Therefore, Elections B.C. began work on this project immediately following royal assent. We are grateful that the committee, following the April 8 meeting, recommended that Elections B.C. receive supplemental funding this year to begin implementing these changes.

Next, in line with my understanding of the committee’s interest in operational updates, I’ll provide a status and financial update on our ongoing strategic and capital projects.

Third, I would like to highlight our upcoming report on priority recommendations for legislative change in relation to preventing disinformation or interference and other digital threats to electoral integrity. For the past 18 months, Elections B.C. has been researching this topic, and the report will represent our best thinking on how the Election Act should be amended to ensure that it remains fit for purpose in maintaining campaign transparency and a level playing field in a digital campaign environment.

Last, given our current situation, I will close with some comments on how this unprecedented pandemic has impacted the mandate of Elections B.C. As part of these comments, I will include a summary of our current contingency planning for how an election or by-election could be administered, if Elections B.C. was required to do so, under some level of COVID-19 public health restrictions. It is likely that elements of this contingency plan will be brought forward in our election year budget presentation to the committee in the fall.

To begin, the update on administering Bill 43. The Election Amendment Act, 2019, included changes to address a number of priority recommendations by the Chief Electoral Officer. A major focus in the legislation was to allow Elections B.C. to use technology in the voting place to strike off voters when they vote, such that this strike-off information can be passed to candidates and parties to help get the vote out, and to use tabulators to automatically count the voter-marked paper ballots at the close of voting.

[10:35 a.m.]

The voter modernization project is complex and includes interrelated elements such as voting process redesign, regulation development, technology procurement, software solution design and development for the electronic voting book and tabulators, modification of existing Elections B.C. systems to integrate with the new solutions, election official training, and voter system testing and simulations. Work began on this project in December and has continued at pace, even as Elections B.C. transitioned to a remote working environment.

From an overall perspective, to borrow a project management phrase, we are on track. Key milestones that have been achieved include completion of a contract with the electronic voting book solution vendor. This is the Canadian firm DataFix, which has extensive experience providing these kinds of services at the provincial and municipal levels in Canada. Purchase of a small number of tabulators from Dominion Voting Systems Canada — this will enable testing and simulations and provide Elections B.C. with sufficient stock to administer a by-election, if necessary. The negotiation of an agreement to lease tabulators from Elections Ontario for the next scheduled provincial election in October 2021 — this approach will provide significant cost savings over a purchased option at this time.

The work necessary to redesign the voting and counting processes and develop the associated new regulations is ongoing. These are medium term aspects of the project, however, that are not scheduled to be complete until spring 2021. We anticipate that we will be in a position to provide initial demonstrations of these aspects to electoral stakeholders at some point in the fall.

Progress has also been steady on two of the other priority recommendations that were part of Bill 43. These were the development of a list of future voters, for 16- and 17-year-olds, to enhance accessibility to voter registration and providing the Chief Electoral Officer with greater access to personal information held by public bodies — for example, name, address, date of birth, ID card number — to improve our ability to maintain an accurate voters list.

The authority to create and maintain a list of future voters came into effect on royal assent. Last month we implemented the ability to collect applications for registration as a future voter through our online voter registration system as well as by telephone. Despite the soft launch of that system, we have already received a small number of applications from eligible youth.

We are planning to develop informational and promotional materials to share with high school students this spring about registering as a future voter. These materials would be available on line, promoted by social media, as well as through partnerships with the B.C. Social Studies Teachers Association and the Ministry of Education.

In August, we will receive our first extract of Elections Canada’s register of future electors and will add those youths to the provincial list of future voters.

Regarding access to additional provincial data sources, negotiations are currently underway with ICBC, the Ministry of Citizens’ Services and the Ministry of Health to finalize an information-sharing agreement that sets out how information from those who hold a driver’s licence, BCID or B.C. Services Card can be shared. The ISA is required prior to any new information being shared. It is anticipated that will, ultimately, provide more accurate information to Elections B.C. when voters move as well as enable us to proactively reach out to individuals who are eligible to register as future voters.

I’d now like to provide the committee with a high-level update on Elections B.C.’s current capital spending plan. The capital budget of $805,000 presented in the fall has been re-evaluated in light of Bill 43. Our goal was to ensure that we could deliver all the capital program projects identified as a result of the new legislation within the capital envelope that had been approved for 2020-2021.

The top three priorities that were presented in October were to develop an improved vote-by-mail tracking system, to expand online services for our clients through a client portal and to build a system to assign and manage general election readiness planning assignments that our district electoral officers complete between elections. This we called the GERPA project.

[10:40 a.m.]

Our planning adjustments enabled us to advance the delivery of the GERPA project to fiscal year 2019-2020, to reduce the scope of the client portal to ensure that a viable product can be released this year with some enhancements to functionality pushed out to future years and to earmark the remaining capital funding to deliver the system changes necessary to support Bill 43.

These changes included system modifications to enable data integration between our core systems and the new electronic voting book and tabulator software solutions, as well as changes to our voter databases to accept registration information from new public sources. A project to develop and improve a vote-by-mail tracking system will be delivered this fiscal year as well.

The next item that I will comment on stems from section 12(2) of the Election Act, which enables the Chief Electoral Officer to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on amendments to the Election Act or other enactments related to election matters.

As you know, for the past 18 months, Elections B.C. has been researching the issue of digital threats to campaign integrity. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and substantiated reports of significant foreign interference in electoral events in the U.S. and the U.K., there is real concern about potential interference with electoral campaigning and processes through digital disinformation, non-transparent digital political advertising and cyberattacks. This is potentially the biggest future challenge to our democratic institutions.

The end goal of these activities by malicious actors is a reduction in trust of electoral processes and decreased voter participation. Therefore, the scale of this threat is significant and our knowledge and ability to meaningfully respond to this challenge is only developing.

A number of jurisdictions have started to address these challenges, both internationally and nationally. In the U.K., the Parliament has thoroughly investigated these risks and proposed legislative changes to both privacy and electoral laws. Many other European nations have also taken meaningful steps to address disinformation.

Federally in Canada, the changes to election law established in Bill C-76 included a range of measures to counter disinformation, to prevent foreign interference and to increase transparency of digital campaign ads. These have already been tested in a federal election, and as part of our research, we consulted both Elections Canada and the Commissioner of Canada Elections to better understand their experience administering the October 2019 federal election with the new laws in place and to identify their best-practice recommendations related to compliance and enforcement.

Elections B.C.’s work in this area has been to fully understand the extend of digital disinformation risks to B.C. elections, to assess how the Election Act currently addresses these risks and to identify possible solutions, including recommendations for legislative change.

At a high level, the key areas that the report addresses are: preventing misleading advertising, disinformation and impersonation; increasing transparency around the use of artificial intelligence such as social media bots; preventing foreign and out-of-province campaign interference; expanding the transparency of digital election advertising; and ensuring digital platform compliance with the Election Act.

Elections B.C. has already concluded consultation with the Election Advisory Committee on this report, and I anticipate that the report will be tabled with the Speaker within the coming weeks. After the report is tabled, if you would like to learn more on the topic, I will be pleased to have further discussion on these issues with committee members or your respective caucuses.

Last, I would like to comment on the COVID-19 pandemic and election contingency planning. COVID-19 has significantly affected and will continue to impact all individuals and organizations in the province. I recognize you may have questions and concerns in relation to how Elections B.C.’s mandate has been affected by the pande­mic.

To state the obvious, our current situation is very complex and without precedent, in our experience. Like all organizations, Elections B.C. is operating under the directives and guidelines of the office of the provincial health officer. We’ve been in contact with that office to better understand the current situation, how it may evolve and how it has impacted our mandate.

[10:45 a.m.]

Given current public health restrictions, their guidance at this time is that elections represent a significant public health risk and that they should be deferred until such time in the future that they can safely be held. This guidance has already been implemented at the local level in British Columbia, with a number of pending by-elections being cancelled on order of the appropriate minister. Worldwide the trend is the same, with many scheduled elections having already been postponed.

What an election may look like in six, 12 or 18 months, for example, will of course be directly impacted by how the pandemic has progressed, by the potential effect of a second or third wave and whether a vaccine is available and widely administered. Any electoral activities would necessarily be modified by the public health directives that are in place at that time.

Elections B.C. has begun initial planning on how electoral processes could be adapted to permit voting and counting at varying stages of restrictions. As mentioned, the starting point for our planning is the guidance from the provincial health officer. Elections B.C. is also collaborating with other Canadian election management bodies, assessing international best practices and reviewing protective measures implemented in those countries such as South Korea, where elections have proceeded during the pandemic.

Some of the adaptations being considered include modification of staffing and processes to ensure physical distancing, provision of sanitation stations and protective equipment to election workers — at the current time, however, procurement of these items is dedicated to health care workers; expanded use of remote options such as vote-by-mail and telephone voting, especially for at-risk voters; and more options for in-person early voting to reduce numbers on voting days, and this could look like an expansion of the advanced voting period.

As mentioned at the April 8 meeting, some of the provisions of Bill 43 currently being implemented by Elections B.C. would support voting under physical distancing, like the ability to have one official per voting station and the use of tabulators to count paper ballots.

As Elections B.C. moves ahead with this planning, continued consultation will be part of the process, along with our ongoing discussion with the provincial health officer, by meeting with caucus chairs, and we intend to engage more broadly with the Election Advisory Committee at the appropriate time. We will also look at surveying voters, including specific communities with unique needs, to understand what their concerns are. As Chief Electoral Officer, I want to ensure that the next provincial election, when it occurs, is safe, accessible, and free and fair.

That brings my formal presentation to a close. I’d now like to turn the floor back over to you, Mr. Chair, and we will be pleased to respond any questions or comments that committee members may have.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you so much, Anton. I appreciate how difficult things are, given the pandemic and you are having to pivot, like many of the other officers who have been presenting have had to. And also planning for the unknown — I guess that’s part of the problem. We don’t know what the next six, eight, 12, 18 months look like. I appreciate that it’s about contingencies and plan As and plan Bs and plan Cs.

I’m curious. Have any jurisdictions looked at, for example, things like a mail-in-only vote for a general election? I know that sounds crazy, but are there any alternate ways to do elections that are being looked at, if getting large groups of people together are just impractical? I’m just curious about that.

A. Boegman: Certainly. I know that all election administrators are looking closely right now at what is currently happening in the United States and their plans for their November election. Certainly in the United States, there has been an increased focus on vote by mail. There are a number of states, five states in the U.S. that offer primarily vote-by-mail elections. There is experience and expertise there.

Obviously, the vote-by-mail process and the way that it works in the States is set up for that type of a system, but it will place a lot of pressure on administrators who are not used to that, on suppliers. If everybody is asking for paper products to make ballots and voting packages at the same time, there’s a big strain there.

[10:50 a.m.]

Elections B.C. is unique in Canada in that we have administered a number of entirely vote-by-mail events. Provincially we have administered three referendums and a plebiscite in the Metro Vancouver area using vote by mail. We have had a number of conversations with other jurisdictions in Canada about vote by mail — what it looks like, what the challenges are and how it would be implemented.

Currently within the Election Act, there is the ability of every voter to request a vote-by-mail package, but to administer one fully under vote by mail would require other concerns. For instance, having a clear ballot is very important to voters, and currently vote by mail uses a write-in ballot and a list of candidates when that is available.

For example, it might be preferable under vote by mail to use an ordinary ballot which clearly lists the candidates that have been nominated in each district. In order to do that, you would have to adjust the timeline to allow for ballot packages to be mailed out, for example, following the close of nominations — or potentially looking at closing nominations earlier.

There are adjustments, of course, that would need to be considered. But it is possible to have an election entirely through vote by mail. Obviously, significant planning needs to go into that. The procurement of supplies is different. Like all, timing is essential in terms of any decisions to move in that direction.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Thanks, Anton. It seems wild that we’re actually even contemplating this type of situation. But I appreciate all of the work that you’re doing and also on the changes and how much work is going to go into these sorts of unprecedented changes to how we carry out elections.

Is there anyone who has any questions at all?

D. Clovechok (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation, Anton. Good to see you, buddy. Listen, I’d just like to talk about the potential of online voting. Is that something that is possible? Or is it just too easy to hack through?

A. Boegman: Well, it is possible, but it’s not recommended. I think we had a question about this at the earlier meeting. At the risk of repeating myself, the Chief Electoral Officer before me, Dr. Keith Archer, chaired a panel in 2014 that included computer science experts, public administrators, a former Auditor General of B.C.

The panel looked at the issue in a lot of detail and recommended against using Internet voting for provincial and local elections at that time. And really, since then, the fundamentals haven’t changed. The Internet is not secure. I think we all know, seeing all the kinds of attacks that happen, that the fundamentals haven’t changed. It’s not really secure enough for a provincial election currently.

There has been some debate in the United States. Some states are looking at using some type of online portal option either where a voter downloads a ballot and completes it and then uploads the ballot…. But they’re focusing on very specific communities — disabled voters and overseas voters who may have challenges in meeting the legislated timelines for their vote-by-mail option.

I think, fundamentally, trust in an election is paramount. And given security concerns, it’s questionable, I believe, whether an election conducted solely through Internet voting would provide the level of trust that British Columbians have come to expect. I think the other question is that it would take a lot of effort, planning and time to implement such a system prior to our next scheduled election date, although we haven’t done any analysis on that. So it is possible, but I strongly do not recommend moving in that direction.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Anyone else? Okay.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the presentation and all the work you’re doing in these unprecedented times. I’m sure I speak for everybody on the committee that we appreciate everything you and your staff are doing and wish you the best in this difficult time.

A. Boegman: Thank you very much. Thank you, committee members.

B. D’Eith (Chair): When is the next…?

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk of the Legislative Assembly): Our next office would be the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, and they are not expected to connect until 11:15 a.m.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Let’s take a recess. If everyone could be back at, let’s say, ten after, just in case they’re a little bit early.

The committee recessed from 10:55 a.m. to 11:13 a.m.

[B. D’Eith in the chair.]

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, we’re back with the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

Welcome, Clayton Pecknold, the Police Complaint Commissioner. Thank you so much for being here. If you could please give us your presentation and tell us which staff you have, for the record, we would really appreciate that.

OFFICE OF THE
POLICE COMPLAINT COMMISSIONER

C. Pecknold: Good morning. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I will endeavour to do this well with this electronic technology. I’m a bit of an old dog, and this is a new trick for me, so we’ll see how it goes.

With me remotely, with appropriate social distancing, is Deputy Commissioner Andrea Spindler and Mr. Dave Van Swieten, who is the executive director of our corporate management services.

I understand you’d like me to speak for about 15 minutes or so, and then there may be some questions. With that, I will proceed.

I submitted a couple of documents — one, our written interim update to the committee, but also an amended service plan.

[11:15 a.m.]

The committee may recall that in our fall presentation, we had not updated our service plan, and I committed to the committee that we would update it. I had hoped by now to have completed a full strategic planning process, but circumstances have intervened, and we’re a little bit behind in terms of doing that sort of planning.

We’re going to have to turn our mind, obviously, to how we’re going to do broader strategic planning in this virtual environment in the coming months. But we are turning our mind to that right now.

I plan to just touch on a few areas and, obviously, accept any questions you may have. I thought I’d give you a little bit of update on how we’re responding in this state of emergency and pandemic in terms of our operations both internally and externally. I’d also like to give you a bit of an update on our planning for the potential Surrey police transition — the transition to a municipal police department in the city of Surrey, which is a pretty significant driver for us — and a little bit of a grab-bag of general items that would be more fulsomely fleshed out in our submission to you, just so I can highlight them for you.

First, just quickly on our budget. You’ll see on page six of our submission that we ended up with a significant operating surplus of $697 for the year. Like last year — I think it was 800 and something — we take it pretty close to the wire. You’ll notice that we provided you with a bit of an overview on our adjudicative funding. You will recall that this is an area that’s been of interest to the committee over the years. You’ll note that we did have an overage, but we managed to handle that overage within our operating budget.

Just as a reminder, this dedicated adjudicative funding funds the retired judges who act as adjudicators in police discipline hearings, the legal counsel who must conduct those hearings and also any challenges that we may get through the courts under judicial reviews, for example, of our decisions and other things.

It’s largely externally driven, and it often depends on what types of files come to fruition in a given year. For example, police officers have a right to request a public hearing, and they have a right to a public hearing where they are facing either dismissal from a police department or reduction in rank. So as a matter of right, and as those matters sort of come to that point in the process, if a police officer requests it, they have a right to those proceedings. In addition, I may call public hearings where I consider it best serving the public interest, and we have two presently ongoing that relate to that.

We’re not sure how this year will pan out, but I’ll give the committee a little bit of another update in the fall on how we’re tracking this year. As I say, we have two adjudicative proceedings up and running. Historically, we’ve had more judicial reviews prior to my tenure, and, so far, we haven’t had a significant amount of challenges to our legislative authorities, but those certainly remain a possibility.

Moving on, just quickly, to what we’re doing in response to the state of emergency. We acted pretty quickly in the whole building. As you know, we share space with the Ombudsperson, and we share space with the Privacy Commissioner and the Merit Commissioner. We collectively acted very quickly to limit access to our building from non-employees and to implement the early advice of the public health officer.

And then it became very apparent as this matter continued that we had to take more action. So we moved to a virtual work-at-home arrangement but kept a skeleton crew here at the offices — working in different parts of the office, obviously, under enclosed offices. Mostly all our staff are working remotely. That has come with some technical challenges, but I’m happy to say that our corporate management service’s IT department elevated to the occasion and have just done a terrific job in making sure that we can connect and stay connected.

[11:20 a.m.]

You will know, of course, that the challenge with this piece of legislation is that once an investigation is initiated or a complaint is initiated, there are very many statutory requirements and timelines that must be met. Our staff don’t have the luxury of sort of down-tooling on a particular file and putting it aside. They must continue their operations. So continuity of operations is a major concern for us as a result of the pandemic.

We monitor the health and wellness of our employees weekly. I have twice weekly calls, and the deputy has several calls a week, with staff. We’re monitoring them. We’re adjusting where we can. We’ve been supportive — for example, where they have child care needs, supporting modified work schedules. Generally, our check-ins show that they’re adapting well. It’s good to see that. It continues to be something we’re monitoring closely, though. We do think that there’s a new reality to this — that we’ll have to bring in some of these programs, I think, a little bit more semi-permanently or holistically.

Externally, we’re tracking COVID-related complaints, or pandemic-related complaints, and those include, for example, concerns from the public with respect to officers not appropriately socially distancing in interactions. Those complaints also may relate to persons who are vulnerable on the Downtown Eastside, feeling they’re not being appropriately treated by the police — things like that. Our stats aren’t showing that we are seeing a significant uptick in those. We just decided to track them and classify them based on the unique circumstances of the pandemic.

Early on, we liaised with police agencies, because as you know, they conduct the investigations, and we oversee them. There was some concern that they were going to have to deploy their professional standards resources and investigative resources — redeploy them quickly. So we worked closely with them on an ongoing basis to make sure we understood their capacity to do things so we could adjust our processes. We issued a bulletin with respect to that.

It was helpful to receive the ministerial order that allowed its statutory decision-makers to waive some of the timelines. Our legal advice was to be careful with that, but that’s given us some flexibility with departments. By and large, though, they’ve been able to adjust their approaches to things. We’ve been able to give them extensions to allow investigations to continue. In some cases, of course, we’re providing more flexibility. We’re not requiring them to do face-to-face interviews, as a small example.

We also implemented a bit of a no-wrong-door ap­proach in outreach. We were concerned that our normal outreach channels may not be as accessible to the public, given that we were not permitting walk-ins and some police agencies were closing their access to their buildings. So we did some outreach through the law foundation to make sure there were pathways into our office, especially with respect to persons who are vulnerable, living on the streets or otherwise can’t access our processes.

We also, in consultations with the RCMP civilian review commission, agreed that if matters came in concerning the RCMP, we would take the complaint and make sure that it was forwarded it on to the CRC. They were working remotely, as well, and they were challenged with the same thing that we were challenged with — accessibility of the public to our services.

We also worked with the Ombudsperson’s office to make sure that any complaints about some of the enhanced powers that were being given to compliance and enforcement officers, for example…. The Ombudsperson has responsibility for that, and we were able to make sure that we were in a position to move those complaints to their jurisdiction.

Really, at the end of the day, it was to give the public an appropriate level, maintaining an appropriate level, of access to redress for their concerns. I viewed this as especially important, given that there are enhancements occurring with respect to enforcement officers and their authorities and also given the quite extraordinary powers under the Quarantine Act, for example, and the extraordinary government powers that are being implemented that can restrict a person’s liberties. Again, so far our stats aren’t showing that there’s been a significant uptick, but we are monitoring those.

[11:25 a.m.]

Moving on quickly to the Surrey transition, the committee will know that government has approved the transition of the city of Surrey to a municipal police agency. As of this morning, I checked with the ministry, and they are continuing to vet potential police board appointments. Our expectation is that that police board will be fully appointed. I don’t have a timeline on that, and they didn’t offer one.

Once the board is appointed, the committee will know that the Police Act automatically brings us into jurisdictional authority. Now, what that means practically is that it depends on how quickly they appoint senior police officers or front-line police officers. Our jurisdiction starts with respect to conduct matters but also starts with respect to service and policy matters that may come to the attention of the police board.

I think it’s possible, given the controversy in Surrey, that we will see some complaints early on going to the police board about matters of service and policy. Service and policy can include, for example, deployment of resources and structure and issues related to access to communities and education and all sorts of broad areas. We need to be prepared, I think, to take on those matters. They’re not as labour-intensive for our office, but they are important matters that we pay attention to.

We have hired a resource, based on the funding that the committee granted us this fiscal. This contracted resource is actively planning our response to the increased workload of Surrey. This will include, for example, working with our corporate management services on ensuring that our IT systems can support the extra work, that our organizational structure can support the extra work, our HR structure, and that our outreach and education components are prepared for this increase.

I anticipate providing the committee with a comprehensive update in the fall and a more detailed budget submission in the fall with respect to that, so that’s ongoing, as we speak.

One thing I would note, of course, and I’ll have more detail for you in the fall, is that as this progresses, as I’ve said, in terms of ramping up the Surrey police department, we will have to make sure we…. There’s a time lag for us to train staff to provide oversight. We need to be a little bit ahead of that and somehow gauge the expected workload and have the staff in place early on. That’s the type of sequencing we’re thinking about.

I’ll just move on briefly then, if you don’t mind, to a few items under our general updates. We’ve provided some stats in our submission to you. There’s a couple that I think…. I’m careful to read too much into our stats, because at the end of the day, we deal with what comes to our attention, either through complaints or reports from the police department, so we have a limited data set, in that sense. We’re examining what comes to our attention. We’re not doing a broad examination of broader stats.

We have seen an increase in ordered investigations. What I find encouraging about that increase is that 68 percent of those ordered investigations are self-disclosures by the police agencies. That’s the police agencies coming forward to us and saying: “We’ve got an issue of misconduct; we’re asking you to order an investigation.” That tells me that they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re monitoring the conduct of their officers, they’re monitoring their organizations, and they’re bringing it to our attention and asking us to order the investigations, as opposed to us having to actively pursue them.

We have the habit and process of asking the police agency, when they report something to us — say, for us to monitor, because they’re not sure if there’s been misconduct…. We ask them what they want us to do on it. Do they want us to make an order? Do they want to handle it internally? We try to have a dialogue with them about what the best process is to achieve the appropriate outcome on the particular matter. It really, in some way, will depend.

[11:30 a.m.]

In the past, matters of, say, bullying or harassment in the organization may have been dealt with…. There may have been a preference, in the police communities, to deal with it internally. I generally don’t take that position. It really would kind of depend on the severity. But I believe that these things need a proper level of scrutiny, so I’m more inclined to bring the full force of our scrutiny on those types of matters when they rise to a level of severity. Of course, that’s a case-by-case basis.

We started collecting self-identified demographics. If there are any questions on our stats more globally and more specifically on that initiative, Deputy Commissioner Spindler can provide that to you. Again, I’m hesitant to…. This is early, and it’s self-identified statistics, so unverified independently, but I am struck a little bit that 12 percent of our complainants are self-identifying as Indigenous. Given that our catch basin is urban municipalities, I think we want to spend some time understanding that demographic a little bit and why that is. We suspect, of course, that it relates to complaints from the Downtown Eastside, but we haven’t dug into any level of detail at this point.

The committee will recall that the special committee of the Legislature sat and delivered their report, in the fall, with respect to the audit and review of selected cases and of this office. MNP was hired to do both a performance audit and a compliance audit. That report has come out and is available, with some 38 recommendations, which include a subset of the recommendations from MNP. We accepted all of the recommendations from MNP, and we’ve incorporated the recommendations of the committee’s report into our service plan. You’ll see in our amended service plan that we make reference to the various recommendations.

We had a meeting with the ministry today to go over the report and to talk about those recommendations that are directed at the ministry and at government and those that are directed at us and where we could collaborate. We had a meeting today with the staff of the director of police services to discuss how we can collaborate on implementing some of those recommendations.

Both in this audit and in the prior audit, six years prior, the issue of timeliness continues to be raised — timeliness in the sense of how long these matters take to go from implementation of complaint to final resolution. That’s an area that we’ve been spending some time on trying to improve, and I’ll just speak to that briefly in a moment.

We’ve revamped our accessibility and outreach through internal reorganizations, and we now have a dedicated person reaching out to various community organizations, establishing more comprehensive relationships with these non-governmental support agencies. That’s become very, very useful during this COVID crisis — establishing relationships on an ongoing basis. We get a weekly log, myself and the deputy, on those outreach activities. That allowed us, for example, then to reach out to the Law Foundation to get information out through their various structures.

We’re going to continue to encourage and improve that outreach and accessibility. That was reflected in some of the recommendations of the committee report as well as the special committee report — our need to improve that. The committee will know that we have a statutory obligation to advise and assist and to provide educational outreach and outreach activities. It’s an area that we would like to continue to improve and work on, and you’re going to see us continue to expand our outreach efforts. That will also become a very significant part of our submission to you with respect to Surrey.

[11:35 a.m.]

We spent some time working with the RCMP civilian review commission, discussing the calls for justice from the national inquiry. We’ve also had some referrals from that inquiry before it concluded its proceedings. Those referrals actually went to the police agencies to look into matters that had been brought to the committee’s attention or to the inquiry’s attention, and we were monitoring those. We continue to monitor those, and the deputy goes to various meetings.

With respect to the outcome of those matters, I will say that I think there are some lessons we can glean from those referrals that we hope to incorporate into our outreach and accessibility activities.

On that point, on a particular high-profile file, we recently engaged, with the assistance of the Representative for Children and Youth, a cultural safety adviser for that specific investigation to provide advice on the investigation. The advice was so well received, frankly, from the police agency that was doing the investigation and from all concerned that we have offered this individual a small contract. We’re going to try to incorporate that sort of cultural safety advice on the various investigations, where it’s appropriate, on an ongoing basis.

Not to go too deeply into this, but the Police Act pro­vides that we may, for example, observe an investigation more closely or we may take other mechanisms to make sure that the investigation is thorough, complete and impartial and, particularly when we’re talking about an issue involving an Indigenous complainant, that it’s culturally appropriate. We’re going to do some work on that, and so far, that’s been very well received.

A quick note again on timeliness. One of the highly challenging aspects of this act is that there are many steps in the process that are beyond our ability to influence in terms of the timeliness of those processes. Specifically, I’ll give the example of when a discipline proceeding is being held, a discipline authority is perhaps a chief of police, and there is difficulty finding time on the legal counsel’s calendar. We have no ability to force that matter to proceed more quickly except to try to hold the discipline authority to account for the reasons why it’s continually adjourning.

This issue of accessibility of counsel for individual officers and the availability of those counsels for proceedings continues to be a challenge for us. I think what happens is that when these investigations and proceedings take so long, we often see the complainants disengage from the process. They don’t understand why their complaint took two years to come to fruition.

We’re doing some work on trying to improve the language in terms of our communication with complainants — make it less legal-oriented, demystify some of the process a little bit to them — to assist them in at least feeling that they’re a part of the proceedings and the outcome.

Frankly, it needs a legislative fix. I think the special committee recommended that, and the ministry recognizes that. As I say, we met with them today. When that will happen, obviously, is up to folks like yourselves. But we’ll continue to work on that.

I have taken the position early on in my tenure that we would really try to increase our focus to the front end of things, to try to move investigations along in a more timely way, to try to make sure that complainants are being consulted, engaged and informed, I should say, and to make sure that whatever authorities we have to move things through the system in way that continues to be meaningful to the complainants, we use those authorities. Often, by the time that the investigation is completed and there are inadequacies in it, it’s difficult to fix it through an expensive adjudicative proceeding.

Along that line, we’re increasing our recommendations to governments and to police boards. I strongly believe that police boards have a fundamental role in preventing misconduct and setting the culture of their organization. We are trying to work with those police boards and, through the ministry, to assist them in paying attention to that type of preventative work that they need to pay attention to.

[11:40 a.m.]

It’s a challenge, of course, because, as you know, police boards are part-time folks, and they don’t always have the resources. They have to rely on the police agency’s resources for those. So we’re working on that, really with the goal to improve outcomes.

I think I’ll close with noting that looking ahead, as I had mentioned, we’re going to complete a more comprehensive strategic planning process. We will have the presentation to you in the fall. We’re working very closely with government and with the ministry on the recommendations of the committee report and on how we can support each other in achieving the ultimate aims of our regime and our office, and that’s to uphold confidence in policing in the province.

If you look at the way that part 11, which we work under in the Police Act, is structured, its relationship with the ministry and the director of police services and its relationship with the police boards and the independent investigation office, we all have a role in upholding that public confidence.

I don’t believe that we can do that in silos and in isolation. Yes, we are independent, and I think that, as I said previously, independence doesn’t necessarily mean isolation. So we are trying to work closely with those various bodies to really achieve what we’re supposed to achieve, and that’s supporting the institutions and public trust in those institutions.

I’ll pause there and go to any questions.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great. Thank you very much for your presentation and, in particular, in these trying and difficult times that we’re living in, with the pandemic and the impact that that must be having on the whole police system, generally. Obviously, significant challenges. It’s very interesting to see how you, as well as all the other statutory officers, have had to pivot to deal with these extraordinary circumstances that we’re living in.

I appreciate all the effort that you and your staff are doing in that regard and also trying to navigate something as large as moving to a Surrey police force in the midst of all of these challenges. So thank you for all of your work on that.

I was curious about a couple things, just in terms of the complaints in regards to complaints around COVID-19 and how the police are responding to it. With the social distancing guidelines, how are police protecting themselves but also being able to fulfil their duties? It seems very difficult in this time. I’m just curious how police….

I’ve been hearing in my area — now, mind you, it’s RCMP — of some RCMP officers getting infections, COVID-19 infections and whatnot. I’m just curious. I know it’s a complaints commission, but also, it seems, as you said, that it might be independent, but we’re not in isolation. I think that’s the quote of the day. So if you wouldn’t mind commenting on that, I’d appreciate it.

C. Pecknold: Yes, absolutely. Well, I’ll start by commenting that we tried initially to do our part to make sure that we were being flexible enough to allow investigators to properly social distance and conduct their investigations in a way that was safe for all parties. For example, where we would normally require them to do a face-to-face interview with a particular individual or officer, we were not requiring that. If we really thought that it was critical to the investigation, we would be more likely to give extensions to the investigation until such time as that could be conducted.

We worked quickly, and we directed staff to be very flexible with respect to how these investigations were conducted, because we want to ensure that everybody was both in compliance with the public health officer’s direction but, equally importantly, keeping safe.

We also encouraged them to provide us very early on the directions that they’re giving to their staff around modifications to how they were approaching their duties, for a couple reasons. We wanted to make sure that we were contextualizing any complaints that come to our office against those policies.

[11:45 a.m.]

I alluded to complaints, for example, about a lack of social distancing in a particular case, such as pulling the person over for speeding. Given how early it was in everyone’s adjustment to this new reality, it seemed unfair to us to hold an officer to a new standard, which he or she wasn’t held to previously, without some sort of understanding of the guidance they’re getting under the department. What we found was departments were scrambling to get guidance, frankly.

Rather than make them complaints, we found a way to try to resolve, informally, the concerns of the public and address them from a more policy-oriented perspective, as opposed to trying to deal with them through individual officer misconduct.

Now, I will say there are those that come forward that have an added dimension to them that make them concerning from a conduct perspective, regardless of whether they occurred in a COVID-19 or a pandemic environment.

I think it’s fair to say the ministry has frequent calls, weekly calls, with the police agencies. We have people not connecting into those calls but connecting into the various parts of government to try to understand what policies and ministerial orders are coming forward so that we can, as I say, contextualize our decisions around those.

I think it’s fair to say, though, that the police agencies scrambled to adjust their processes. Over time, we saw that they were giving direction with respect to the use of personal protective equipment, when to go into a particular environment, when not to, how to protect themselves and, also, how to protect the individuals that they’re working with — in particular, when we’re talking about people living on the streets in the Downtown Eastside.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Great.

Did anyone have questions at all? I’m looking around.

Yeah. Mitzi, go ahead.

M. Dean: Thanks, Clayton, for all of your work and for taking the time to update us today. I was looking through your updated report, and I liked what I saw of your priority one and what you’re moving ahead. I’m really interested in seeing what conclusions you’re going to draw from your analysis and how that’s going to inform your work. I’m sure that will also have an influence across the different ministries as well.

One of your achievements, No. 6, that you were reporting on over the past year, on page 16, was related to outreach with representatives and Indigenous organizations in relation to the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. So I just wondered…. That was a highlight that you’d put of last year. Is that something that’s going to be continuing?

C. Pecknold: Yes, absolutely. In fact, I obviously, probably can’t disclose my list, but there’s our new outreach list and our activity list. I was anticipating you might be interested in discussing this.

I think Deputy Spindler, actually…. She’s leading our outreach activities. I’ll give her the opportunity to fill you in on those specific issues.

A. Spindler: Thank you, Mitzi, for your question.

The area of outreach is a particular focus for us. We had started that process earlier this year, when we had hired a dedicated outreach person who could dedicate that time to connecting with a number of community-based organizations and start to make those linkages with our office, to provide information about our outreach services and to assist with accessing the complaints process.

Specific to No. 6, this is very much going to be a continued focus for us through into the new fiscal year and beyond. This is an area where we want to devote considerable attention in light of the calls for justice, in light of the recommendations that arose out of the special committee.

I have been part of regular meetings with the coalition of the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. I am now bringing our outreach coordinator along to attend those with me.

[11:50 a.m.]

We’re also making connections with the family information liaison unit, the FILU, who are in connection with those families so that they can know about our office. A lot of people just don’t understand and aren’t aware of the existence of the OPCC. It’s an opportunity for us to discuss what our office is, what our mandate is and what we do.

We’ve also done educational presentations to the Native Courtworker and Counselling Association. That was not only another opportunity to talk to them about what our office does, but it’s also an opportunity, really primarily, to listen to them, to hear from their perspectives. What are those barriers to access the complaint system?

As we move forward into this new year, we are going to be looking at other dedicated outreach opportunities. We have to obviously do things a little bit differently now than we would in the past in terms of getting together in person.

One other area that we’re looking at is in the area of our alternative dispute resolution. If you recall, one of the recommendations from the committee was to partner with Indigenous organizations and communities to look at incorporating Indigenous cultural practices into a resolution process. So we’re going to be looking at those opportunities, as well, because alternative dispute resolution, we have found, has been a very positive outcome for complainants to engage in.

This is a particular area in looking at those reconciliation and transformative types of practices, restorative practices, when it comes to repairing that relationship between a complainant and the police agency. This is in connection with partnering with Indigenous communities. This is also another area that we want to be paying particular attention to in our outreach efforts.

B. D’Eith (Chair): Okay, thank you very much. Were there any other questions from members at all? All right.

Seeing none, thank you very much, Clayton, for your very thorough discussion and presentation to us. We really appreciate the update and all of the work that you’re doing. Once again, thank you to you and your staff for navigating this very difficult time and being responsive and being able to pivot and deal with some very difficult and challenging issues at this time. Thanks again, and we wish you all the best in the coming weeks.

If the members could just stay on, we are going to do a quick picture because we absolutely have everybody on. we should maybe adjourn first.

Motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:53 a.m.