The committee met at 1:04 p.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Welcome everyone. I’d like to welcome the…. Sorry I’m peering at the screen like this.

[1:05 p.m.]

We have four commissioners with us. I’d like to welcome Jay Chalke, the Ombudsperson; Michael McEvoy, who was with us this morning, the Information and Privacy Commissioner; Maureen Baird, the Merit Commissioner; and Clayton Pecknold, the police commissioner. I see that Dave Van Swieten is with us, again, as well.

Welcome.

Just before we get started, I think our first item of business is to review your proposal, your budget, with regard to transitioning to a new, shared case-tracking system. Anyone who is listening in to our meeting, anyone from the public listening in to our meeting, to remind you that what we’re gathered here to do is to review the budgets of the statutory officers.

Just before we begin, I’ll introduce the members of the committee.

I also would like to acknowledge that I’m joining you from the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish people, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.

The members of the committee are — I’ll just say it in the order in which I see you on the screen — MLA Grace Lore, MLA and Deputy Chair Ben Stewart, MLA Pam Alexis, MLA Mike Starchuk, MLA Lorne Doerkson, MLA Megan Dykeman, MLA Harwinder Sandhu and MLA Greg Kyllo.

Thank you, everyone. If you’d like to begin your presentation, please take the floor.

Review of Statutory Officers

JOINT PRESENTATION BY OMBUDSPERSON,
INFORMATION AND PRIVACY COMMISSIONER,
MERIT COMMISSIONER AND
POLICE COMPLAINT COMMISSIONER

J. Chalke: For those of you looking at which box is speaking, it’s Jay Chalke. I’m the Ombudsperson. Thank you very much, Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the committee. I’m pleased to be before you, if virtually, for the very first time in this parliament and want to take this opportunity to congratulate all of you on your appointment to this important select standing committee.

I certainly look forward to a productive working relationship between my office and the committee, and I’m always available to you collectively or individually to support your important work on this committee and as MLAs.

I’m joining you today from our office located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations, and I certainly acknowledge with respect their stewardship of these lands.

I want to thank the committee and staff for accommodating this particular agenda item, which is a bit unusual in that it departs from our office-by-office presentation and involves a joint presentation from a number of us. It’s a bit atypical in that regard.

It was clear to us that this once-in-27-year event merited its own presentation, and the four of us appreciate that you’ve agreed to hear from us in this format. I think it’ll lead to a more coordinated presentation and way for you to consider our request.

As the Chair noted, today I’m joined by three of my colleagues, who are partners in this renewal project, each of whom will be making short supplementary comments after I provide you with an overview of the project. As the Chair noted, they are the Information and Privacy Commissioner, the Merit Commissioner and the Police Complaint Commissioner. With us, as well, is Dave Van Swieten, who you will come to see more of than any one of us because of his work as the executive director of corporate shared services.

Just a word about that corporate shared service model, because I know it’s always of interest to this committee. It’s an integral part of this particular submission. The origins of our corporate shared service model go back 18 years, and our offices have worked together to create efficiencies and economies of scale by collaborating through a single support service that provides human resource, finance, information technology, facilities and administration to all four of our offices.

The office is a section of the Office of the Ombudsperson, and it’s funded on a chargeback basis to the other three offices on the number of supported positions in each office. Our corporate shared service model has always been supported by this committee, so a thank-you from my colleagues and me for that.

[1:10 p.m.]

Recently I see that some of our other officer colleagues…. The Representative for Children and Youth and the Human Rights Commissioner come to mind, because they’re working together on a shared-services approach. I’m very proud of the often unheralded work that my staff in corporate shared services do to support the four offices. As well, I very much appreciate the collaborative relationship that the other three officers and I bring to make this shared service operate efficiently and effectively for all four of us.

What we have before you today is a matter that I have certainly foreshadowed in some of my previous presentations to this committee. That’s the replacement of our nearly three-decades-old Case Tracker System. Case Tracker is a core piece of technology that supports the mission-critical IT structure platform for each of the four offices.

What does CTS, or Case Tracker, do for us? Well, in the Office of the Ombudsperson, it tracks the complaints and disclosures made to our office. It’s a repository for evidence. It provides a history on how cases are resolved, so that we can look back and collect information from prior complaints. It tracks our file activity, and it provides management reporting. My colleagues will speak to the importance of CTS to their operations in a few minutes.

CTS was built in-house for the Office of the Ombudsperson 27 years ago, and over time it was expanded to include the other offices supported in the shared-services model. The hardware hosting CTS is managed in-house, and modifications over the years have been made to the system by a shared in-house resource in corporate shared services.

Why are we proposing to update our technology backbone? Well, really, there are two main reasons for the update. The first is that, perhaps not surprisingly, given the program’s age, it no longer really meets our business needs. The original program was built at a time when physical evidence, for example, was mostly paper records. That was really the way in which investigations were carried out. Over time — I’m sure I don’t need to tell you — in the last three decades, the information landscape has just changed incredibly to now, where electronic records are the rule, and they come in dozens of formats. It’s far more common that we receive electronic records than that we receive paper ones. That’s an important element.

The public, as well, rely more and more on digital technology. It’s how they want to interact with us, mostly. Now, not everyone, of course, wants to interact with us electronically. So we provide ways for people to do so otherwise. But certainly, they represent a significant and growing proportion of the public’s demand for how they would like to connect with us. With CTS, there are many workarounds requiring manual processes that require updating. For example, letters have to be scanned and saved to the system, versus a web form that can be imported directly into our IT system.

The second main reason for the change is that the technology underlying CTS is becoming and will become increasingly difficult to support. The technology platform is based on a product called Oracle Forms and Reports. It’s aging, and it’s no longer used as widely as it once was. Based on our experience, the support for such aging software will eventually be discontinued. What that typically means is that, for example, security patch updates or updates to integrate with other technology and hardware will decrease in frequency and will eventually stop.

The staff person who has been supporting this application at our office is scheduled for retirement in two years. There are fewer and fewer individuals available in the workplace that have the skill set to support this old technology. So the result will be a substantial increase in costs for us to maintain the system if we have to contract out that support, with all the attendant difficulties that will no doubt arise in terms of availability, timing, quality, etc.

So what’s our plan? Well, last year, we carried out a joint request for proposals between our four offices, and we released it last summer. By going to market in this way, we’ve ensured the most competitive pricing for a replacement and the product that best meets our needs. We’re also able to confirm that there are products available that would be able to support all four of our offices and use the same technology for central support from corporate shared services — simple and cost-effective on a going-forward basis.

[1:15 p.m.]

Having completed the RFP already, that has allowed us to refine our budget request to the minimum necessary to proceed with a vendor. The total budget request across the two years for all our offices is $2.5 million to implement four systems for the respective offices. Each office has a share of the total that’s described in each of the four budget submissions before you.

This plan is premised on a heavy reliance on our in-house staff resources to assist with the implementation and thus retain corporate knowledge gained in the process, as opposed to completely outsourcing that transition and then a contractor leaving us to learn a system on our own. We’re trying to maximize the value of our important IT staff, again, from this transition, by a heavy reliance on them.

That’s the upside of the approach. It’s an efficient way to use that funded resource. It mitigates the cost of the project, and it provides long-term benefits to us, but it will limit our ability to carry out other IT projects over the period of time. So we’ve planned for that. Simply put, CTS replacement is going to be, with the four of us, the Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 priorities for us over the next couple of years.

To summarize, the time is right to replace this mission-critical IT backbone for us. By approaching this as a group, we’ve gained efficiencies through sharing a common infrastructure for four customized applications, because we’re in four different lines of business. The result of this approach is cost savings, compared to us doing it individually. For example, we only need two servers, instead of needing eight if we were to approach it separately. We only need one program assistant instead of four. The learning curve will be reduced as familiarity with the software is developed for the four offices. I think further efficiencies will be achieved overall, as the software is modernized and we eliminate manual processes, which allows us to focus on more substantive matters.

With that background, I’d like to turn it over to my colleagues. When they’re done, we’ll be happy to answer your questions. I think we’ll start with the Information and Privacy Commissioner and registrar of lobbyists Michael McEvoy.

M. McEvoy: Thank you, Jay, and thank you, Chair, Deputy Chair and committee members for providing us with this additional time this afternoon to discuss this important matter.

My office uses Case Tracker System to manage both our files for my OIPC work as well as the registry of lobbyists. It does everything from cataloguing complaints to receiving breach reports. Among the numerous problems with the existing CTS platform is that it’s just simply not keeping up with the current technological capabilities that could support operational efficiencies for our office.

It is not capable, for example, of integrating any other system, which means my staff are required to manually enter data from any other forms that come in to us through our website, for example, or submitted to us by organizations or public bodies. A new system will put an end to this wasteful, time-consuming cutting and pasting that our team does every day. A new system will also enable forms to auto-populate in a digital file, which in turn gives our front-line staff more time to deal with the things that they should be dealing with, which are the people that we’re actually here to serve.

The proposed new system, to steal Jay’s words, really is mission-critical for us as well, for managing our core services. I do join with my fellow officers in respectfully requesting the committee, Chair, to recommend this overhaul, and specifically my office’s share of the cost to replace the Case Tracker System. Just to remind you, the OIPC’s and ORL’s share of the CTS replacement in the coming fiscal year is $72,000 in operating costs and $18,000 in capital. You will see that the plan proposes that my offices will undergo the replacement largely in 2022-23, when our request is, as you see it there, $363,000 in operating costs and $275,000 in capital costs.

That summarizes our position. I’m not sure, but it may be over to Maureen, if I’m not mistaken.

M. Baird: Thanks very much, Michael. I’ll be short. The purpose of my very brief presentation is to acquaint you with how we use Case Tracker in the Office of the Merit Commissioner and how integral it is to the work we do and the service we provide.

[1:20 p.m.]

How do we use it? First, it embeds the comprehensive audit matrix, which is the foundational tool that supports the conduct of the audit process. It provides a structured tool for internal and external auditors to capture audit information, facilitating efficiency and ensuring a thorough and consistent audit process. You’ll recall from my presentation this morning that we conduct 280 of these audits every year.

It also acts as the primary recordkeeping tool for the audit process and results and includes detailed and comprehensive information on all staffing audits since the inception of the independent office in 2006. It provides the source data used to generate individual audit reports, summary tables and letters for deputy ministers and organization heads. This streamlines our process, increases efficiency and improves consistency. It’s also routinely used to create summary reports to track information for planning and updating the British Columbia Public Service Agency.

Generally, the Case Tracker System is used extensively for the merit performance audits, special studies and identifying trends and issues in hiring. It’s routinely used to generate tables and spreadsheets for both routine and custom analysis. The system has become an integral and essential part of our work flow and processing.

Lastly, in the last year, it’s been instrumental in facilitating our staff working remotely and being able to meet service and other deadlines.

I already talked to you earlier this morning about the numbers insofar as they affect the budget of my office. I’ll wait and see if there are any questions at the end of this presentation.

C. Pecknold: Good afternoon, committee members. I think I’m next. I’m Clayton Pecknold. I’m the Police Complaint Commissioner.

I will just reiterate a couple of points that my colleagues have already mentioned. That’s, in particular, with respect to the mission criticality of CTS in the work that we do.

To explain that a little bit more specifically to our office, when we are conducting our responsibilities to oversee and monitor complaints and investigations concerning allegations of misconduct involving police officers, we are not the investigative agency. We are the oversight agency. The investigations are conducted by the police themselves and adjudicated, in the first instance, by senior police officers and, if required, adjudicated arm’s length from this office by retired members of the judiciary, appointed by the Associate Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

We are required to follow a number of mandatory and sometimes overlapping timelines. The CTS system is critical to us meeting those legislative timelines and helps us essentially avoid the situation where a matter may become bogged down or otherwise delayed because we haven’t met particular timelines. The legislation is very specific, many mandatory timelines that we must adhere to.

The other quick point I would make is that we are operating in an environment where the police are collecting more and more digital evidence — large files, large volumes of files, mostly with respect to video evidence. As a result, that evidence is contained within the investigations that must be provided to our office. We must examine that evidence. We must sift through it, retain it in many situations, and that volume is going to continue to increase.

I would note that within the broader criminal justice system, the police and the prosecution service are looking at broad evidence management systems to meet this growing requirement of digital evidence management.

You may also be aware, for example, of the discussion involving body-worn cameras in police. While there is some debate as to whether or not those will proceed in particular organizations, the reality is that will increase the amount of digital evidence we must receive and manage.

[1:25 p.m.]

I suppose the last point I would make is that there is an increasing need and expectation on our office to produce timely statistical reporting, to assist in the prevention and remediation of allegations of misconduct and to report to you about the state of police accountability within the province. We have a limited ability to do that right now, in terms of our statistical gathering, and renewing CTS is critical to us improving that capability and telling the story, as it were, of the work we do.

I am appearing before you tomorrow with more detail in terms of what we do more globally, but I’m happy to answer any questions on this matter.

J. Chalke: Chair, I think that completes it from the four of us. We’re pleased to take the committee’s questions.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you very much.

Committee, any questions?

The first question is from Deputy Chair Stewart.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon, and thank you for taking the time to present to us today. I’m seeing some of you for the first time and others a second time today.

This particular project, in defining…. I understand how you’re using it in your different responsibilities. I guess the question is: when it was being put together — about what this new product would look like — what efforts went into looking at what other software exists elsewhere in other provinces or jurisdictions that you may have looked at? Maybe it was part of the RFP process.

J. Chalke: Thank you, Deputy Chair. Maybe I’ll ask Dave to comment on that. We did go through a process, even before the RFP. That might be helpful to the committee.

D. Van Swieten: Thank you, Jay, and thank you, committee. It would be a big towel we’d have to cast to get all of the history behind this, but it’s safe to say that we did do some market analysis. The software solutions provided led us to the RFP path because the cost of those solutions, of course, crossed the thresholds for direct awarding.

In terms of other jurisdictions, we checked with other independent offices. We checked with the provincial government. There was nothing that would meet our needs. Checking with some of the other jurisdictions, we didn’t see anything there either. So it led to the RFP path, to where we are right now.

J. Routledge (Chair): Do you have a follow-up?

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I do. Thank you, Dave, for that. I don’t know if you were around when ICM came through Citizens’ Services, MCFD and Social Development, but Jill Kot, who you probably do know, was on the front lines of that project. I didn’t end up hearing the final outcome of that, but there was a lot of debate about why…. I mean, that project — the magnitude of it was huge. We went through significant pushback on that.

Did we learn anything going through a process like that, where we went from green screen technology to something that was in the field, working, supposedly there to help the field workers have an integrated viewpoint of the customers they were dealing with? I realize the scale was quite different. I hope that we, from that project…. I mean, that was just south of $200 million and maybe more by the time it was done.

Anyway, is there anything from that project and the experience that your departments had that we’ve learned and been able to make certain that we improve? Obviously, this is a once-off project, and I always thought at the time that ICM was going to be this thing that we could market and sell to other jurisdictions. It never seemed like we could work together. I still believe that collaboration is the better part of trying to find best value in these situations.

[1:30 p.m.]

J. Chalke: Maybe I’ll just say a few things, and then I’ll turn it over to Dave and any of my colleagues. Just in terms, I think…. Deputy Chair, as you pointed out, the scale of this is dramatically different, just from a budgetary level. You mentioned over $200 million, so roughly 1/100 the size from a budgetary perspective. But there are still important lessons to learn — good project management, number one.

I also believe that, having gone through the RFP process, we certainly feel — in terms of where we think we’re headed and in terms of the prospectively successful vendor — that there are high prospects for having a product that…. We’re not starting from a green screen, to use your expression. We’re well on the way to having something that will be useable in a relatively short period of time with relatively…. It’s not to say that the amount we’re asking for isn’t significant, but it’s not like it would be if you were creating something from whole cloth. We’re certainly, I think, feeling much supported by the outcome of the RFP.

I think I’ll turn it over to Dave if he has any other observations, but I think that our feeling at this point is that this is a project that has a high prospect to be successful, is relatively modest in overall scale in the context of IT projects, but also does address that collaboration point you made, because you’ve got four different business lines that will benefit from mutual learning. There will be economies of scale that are derived from that. So while it doesn’t necessarily involve purchasing or partnering with another jurisdiction, say, it does involve that collaboration between the four of us that I think leads to the same sorts of efficiencies that you’re referring to.

Anyway, over to Dave, if he has any comments.

D. Van Swieten: A few things to add on there, Jay. Thank you.

The first is that the ombuds application we built in Oracle Forms and Reports has a history of us sharing that application with other jurisdictions. There’s definitely some cross-pollination of ideas and thoughts on how systems should be built.

The second point to make: the RFP was structured as such that if there are other offices out there that want to join in with the software solution we found, there is a window open for them to do so. It wasn’t a completely closed RFP, if that helps.

Those are my comments.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you. We have four more questions, from Greg, then Mike, then Grace and then Megan.

G. Kyllo: I’ve got a number of questions. I know that when we spoke earlier today, the Merit Commissioner indicated that there were about six individuals, I think, working in that organization. I think it was four full-time and two part-time. Just to get a bit of scope as far as the number of people using it, could you just kind of share with me how many individuals in the other offices would actually be using this platform in a typical week?

J. Chalke: So my office net of corporate shared service staff…. It would be about 55.

G. Kyllo: Clayton?

C. Pecknold: Yes, good afternoon. We’re sitting at about 20 FTEs right now, with — obviously, subject to our discussion — the potential for new growth.

G. Kyllo: And Michael?

M. McEvoy: So 41 is where we’re sitting. That’s where we want to be.

G. Kyllo: Okay. So about 125, plus or minus, individuals will be using the program. I haven’t seen the RFP, so if you did provide any information on that with the information that was provided, I guess, in preparation for today’s meeting, my apologies. I haven’t had a look at it yet.

Were there any B.C. companies? Was there a focus on trying to find support for IT companies within British Columbia? Or was it just kind of a general, broad RFP that went out? How did you actually advertise or send it out? Were there specific companies that were requested to participate, or was it very general and open?

[1:35 p.m.]

J. Chalke: Dave, do you want to talk about the mechanics of the RFP process? We did include, in the materials…. We didn’t include the entire RFP. It’s got lots of…. I don’t want to say boilerplate. There are a lot of things in an RFP, but we did include the deliverables portion. That’s in your material. Dave, do you want to talk about just placing the RFP?

D. Van Swieten: Sure. I think it’s a simple one. We basically were following government procurement processes and posted it on BC Bid, so it was open to virtually anyone on the planet that met the criteria. There wasn’t any sort of local, targeted company or anything like that. It was posted on B.C. Bid, and companies who select to receive notifications from B.C. Bid would have known about it as soon as it was posted.

G. Kyllo: Great. Thank you very much, David.

Just, I guess, one last question, if I may, Madam Chair. It has to do with….

David, I believe you indicated that you weren’t able to find any other programs or any other jurisdictions that had the same needs, I guess, of British Columbia. I find that interesting, in that I would imagine that other provinces must have very similar organizations that we operate here in B.C. I’m just wondering what programs or other jurisdictions around British Columbia, or maybe south of the border, are utilizing for management. I can’t see that the case management requirements of B.C. are that different from other jurisdictions.

So just wondering if there are any kind of off-the-shelf programs that other companies have found that they can actually utilize to adapt to meet their specific needs without having to go out and actually create brand-new IT software.

J. Chalke: I’ll just mention a few things and then if anyone has anything to add. One of the things we’re looking for in proponents who were bidding certainly involved having done work in this area. That’s important. Without getting into the details of the RFP at this point in time, what I can tell you is that that was certainly a consideration to us, and I want to assure the committee that this is not a starting from scratch kind of development. We’re not starting, to use the Deputy Chair’s words, with a green screen. We consciously structured the request for proposals so as to have confidence that the potential, prospective successful vendor was experienced in this kind of work, generally, in terms of oversight kinds of roles.

Dave, do you want to mention anything else?

D. Van Swieten: The other piece I’ll mention is that there is absolutely some other software used by other jurisdictions, commercial software, but of course through procurement rules, direct awarding with that kind of software to a commercial vendor wouldn’t be a practice that we would engage in. Such companies that do provide that software to other jurisdictions would have seen our request for proposal and provided a response to be evaluated with all the others as well.

G. Kyllo: Madam Chair, if I may, just one last question.

J. Routledge (Chair): Go ahead.

G. Kyllo: How did you determine the budget amount? Was it an estimation based on the request for proposals that came in, in identifying the budget? Or how were you able to ascertain the size and the magnitude of the budget this early on in the process?

J. Chalke: Mostly the former, mostly based on the request for proposals that were received.

Dave, do you want to talk a little bit more about how we built the budget?

D. Van Swieten: That’s exactly the answer. The lead proponent we have right now submitted estimates on what they thought it would cost for the conversion. We added some contingency amounts to it, and then built our budget from there.

The challenge we have going forward is until the contractor comes in and actually looks under the hood, so to speak…. There may be some adjustments needed to that. But we’re as confident as we can be with the budget we’ve submitted and the information we have right now.

G. Kyllo: Thank you.

M. Starchuk: Thank you to the delegation for their input. This is mission critical. To get it in perspective, it’s like going from a Betamax to live streaming, and you’ve missed VHS and Blu-ray all in the middle of everything that’s there.

[1:40 p.m.]

When I take a look at what’s there, I love the fact that inside of your document, a lot of questions were being asked in the RFP process. “Will it do this? Can we do this? Will it share amongst the groups that are there?” That part of detail is very heartening, to know that it’s kind of end-user-driven, for those people that are doing the case files. “Will it be able to do all of those things for me?”

My only question, inside of the budget…. It seems that, from what I read, there’s a bunch of historical data — or because it’s 1992, it’s almost prehistorical data — that needs to migrate itself into the new system. Is there enough built into the RFP for the data migration, for that labour-intensive portion of how this is going to work?

J. Chalke: Dave, do you want to talk about the data migration estimates?

I mean, certainly we’re conscious of that issue, but one advantage we do have in terms of data migration is that we’re mostly going to be migrating data from one existing system. That has allowed us to be a little more precise than sometimes when you’re installing a new system. When you’ve got five or six different major systems that you’re amalgamating, data migration can become its own question. But fortunately for us, it’s one to one, mostly. So that’s a help.

Anyway, Dave, do you want to add anything else in terms of how we built the data migration budget?

D. Van Swieten: Sure. Again, we built on the RFP response from the lead proponent and their extensive experience in doing data migration. We shared how much data we have, under the RFP, generally, and they came up with an estimate. When you combine that with…. We’re hoping that a good chunk of that work can be done by internal staff as well. We’re able to keep those costs down.

And there are budget line items in appendix 1 that show the cost we have estimated for data migration, costs that would be paid to the vendor. Of course, the staff we’re targeting to hire to assist us would be the other cost of that.

M. Starchuk: If I may, I’m hoping this is the biggest rhetorical question you could answer. But with data migration, having it all in one spot is great. And I assume, inside of the RFP, that those two languages will be able to talk to each other. Has it been tested?

D. Van Swieten: I can jump in and take that one, Jay.

The lead proponent we have right now has a demonstrated history of doing data migration, testing it and having it work in other similar jurisdictions. We don’t have any lack of confidence that we won’t be able to get there. It’s so important to have that historical information for all the investigative reasons the former commissioner has said. Without it, it would just be a no-go for a system not to have that information.

J. Chalke: Plus, I would just add that the business analyst that has supported CTS for many years is still with us for the next couple of years. She will be a key player in that migration because she has an unparalleled understanding of how our current data is structured and how it relates internally, one piece of data to another. It’s really a prime opportunity to utilize her skills and experience while she’s with us.

M. McEvoy: I would also just add, being also interested in this from the information-access sides of records and the archival information angle, that it’s also a time, I think, for all the offices to reflect on issues of record retention — what’s archivable, what is no longer of any use at all in terms of the life cycle of records. We’re in fact going through that process right now with investigative records that have no real historical or archival value and that would be securely disposed of. But it’s an opportunity for all of us to reflect on what needs to actually be migrated into the new system.

[1:45 p.m.]

G. Lore: Thank you very much, everybody. This has been extremely helpful in understanding what your offices are navigating and what you’re hoping to do.

If it’s okay, I have two questions. I’ll pose them at the same time because the second I think is fairly straightforward.

It sounds like the current software you’re dealing with requires a lot of staff time and heavy lifting to make it work for you. I wonder if you could speak to the benefits for either the budget of your office or the ability to deliver service for folks on the other side of this shift.

Then my second question is…. I’m not sure if any of your offices keep information about folks or individual identity and, if so, if the software allows and incorporates the inclusion of an X gender identifier as part of the shift over.

J. Chalke: With respect to the second question, we would, obviously, need to make sure that that is the case. That would be something that…. Once we get to the detail of actual implementation, that’s clearly something we’ll need to incorporate.

We have complainants to the office, for example, who don’t identify as male or female currently and identify in other manners. So we want to make sure that we can accurately reflect that.

In terms of going forward efficiencies, yes, I think there are opportunities. I think it’s a bit early for us to identify what that is without going a little further down the path and being closer to implementation. It’s certainly our hope that some of the work that we currently need to do…. The Information and Privacy Commissioner, for example, identified the cut and paste kind of stuff — that we can get that out of the system. So that would be one.

The other thing that I’m certainly hoping for is better management reporting and better reporting to the public and to you, as legislators, and, as well, to be able to deal…. For public authorities, they can see more information, for example, about the status of an investigation. A number of things that we hope to be able to do for them. Identify emerging issues and trends. In my world related to fairness but, obviously, in my colleagues’ worlds related to issues of concern to them. I think there are both efficiencies but also actual service gains that we can make.

My colleagues may also have things in mind that they want to mention. I’ll leave it up to any of them.

M. Baird: I might add that my office is very enthusiastic about the project. They see the potential for efficiencies. As you know, we do these really quite complex audits. The benefit of the work that we do is really in our reporting out of the work.

Our office is very, as I said, enthusiastic about potential applications that will make our work more efficient, especially with the small staff that we have.

C. Pecknold: If I may, I’d just add…. Because we conduct our oversight in real time, with professional standards, investigators and municipal police services, any efficiencies that we can gain in terms of that interaction and inter-operability have a direct downstream efficiency on to those police agencies and municipal governments.

Obviously, we’re at the RFP process. I can tell you, because I have a particular interest in this, that I went through every proponent personally and looked at all of these angles, in terms of legacy data, in terms of efficiencies, in terms of improving our work flows. That’s very much on our minds as we plan to go towards implementation.

M. McEvoy: Yes. At our end, our investigators are case review officers. The meat and potatoes of what they do is communicating with the public. Emails come in. The systems don’t talk to one another. So to properly log a complaint or a case from somebody, again, it’s the cutting and pasting and putting things in.

People shouldn’t have to worry about that. What they need to be worrying about is spending time on the phone talking to the parties and resolving disputes. We do that for about 90 percent of the cases, but I think we need to do it, and can do it, more quickly with a more efficient system, which I think this promises to all of us.

G. Lore: Thank you.

[1:50 p.m.]

M. Dykeman: I realized this morning that I actually didn’t mention my riding. I’m Megan Dykeman, and I’m Langley East. It’s a pleasure to meet you all. I really enjoyed listening to this presentation. It’s a fascinating conversation, looking at all of the different angles you can take in creating a more efficient, more functional office through shared services.

One of the questions, though…. It goes along the same vein as some of the other questions that have been asked, but it’s more under the lens of a contingency plan. Sometimes projects where a government department is taking it on can take on a little bit of a life of their own. Where it seems like you’re going to have a lot of efficiencies, they can actually become a little bit more work.

As I was reading through the report, I noticed mention of a requirement to backfill positions because there wouldn’t be enough people within the organization to keep it running at even the efficiency that they were while this project was being implemented.

What I’m wondering is: as you’ve worked with the vendor, has there been discussion — and I’m sure there has been, but what type of discussion? — related to if the project just became too much for capacity, where you were now seeing diminishing returns in the area of running it on your own? I’m not sure what sort of thoughts have been put into that, but I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to that, if it started to actually just be a negative return position.

J. Chalke: Thanks for the question. I would say that there are some advantages from the gated approach that we’re going to be using. We’re not going to try to do all four offices at the same time, so that’ll help. Maybe I’ll pass this one to the Police Complaint Commissioner, because he’s quite experienced in a number of quite significant IT implementation projects, to just talk about the risk management and risk mitigation steps that IT projects have to kind of reduce the possibility of the sort of thing that you’re concerned about.

C. Pecknold: I think that’s putting me on the spot there, Jay, but thank you very much for that. I appreciate it.

I do have a little bit of background. I was the chair of the board for the B.C. PRIMECorp, which is the records management system for police in British Columbia. That’s part of the reason I went through the RFPs completely. It’s because I have a particular interest in it.

Not speaking to the RFP process specifically, because that’s obviously within Mr. Van Swieten’s purview, but I was satisfied in reviewing this that there was sufficient attention to the project management processes and all the appropriate milestones required and the phased approach to avoid that sort of scope creep and function creep that is very risky in terms of large IT projects.

I also looked very carefully at making sure that the proponents had sufficient experience in avoiding those sorts of function creeps and scope creeps and unanticipated…. I would expect that through the awarding process, that would be well laid out in any contract award.

I’m being a little careful because I’m not handling the RFP, and I don’t want to step on any RFP rules here.

J. Chalke: Thank you, Clayton.

Dave, anything else on that?

D. Van Swieten: The other comment I would add to that is that you’re correct in identifying documentation that speaks about backfills for staff. What that’s really speaking to is how small the offices are. When we go through user acceptance testing, to pull someone off the line to test the system to make sure it’s working is going to mean that there are going to be some complaints or investigations that don’t happen.

To minimize that disruption to the front-line business, we made a recommendation in this budget to the commissioners, which they accepted, which was, “Let’s backfill your senior staff, so your senior staff can be freed up to actually test the system thoroughly,” versus implementing something that’s not tested as thoroughly and then have to fix it later.

[1:55 p.m.]

M. Dykeman: May I please follow up on that point? You feel confident that’s a temporary measure — the need to backfill it — and that the management, going forward, wouldn’t require significant oversight and would be able to move forward.

D. Van Swieten: Absolutely. You’ll see that in year 3 of all the budget submissions from the four offices, even if resources drop down in year 3, when the project’s projected to be finished.

M. Dykeman: Well, thank you. It was a really interesting report to read, and I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.

J. Routledge (Chair): We have a question from MLA Alexis.

P. Alexis: It’s more of a comment than a question — and I represent Abbotsford-Mission.

A very comprehensive report. I did appreciate the alternatives explored to replacing the system. I think you’ve done all the work that’s necessary. The public expects the efficiencies to be there. So many entities and local governments are struggling with the volume and the lack of communication within departments and all of this. We’re all struggling with these issues. Yet the public, as I said earlier, has high expectations and thinks that we’re already there. But I know how difficult it is for staff to have to go through very labour-intensive processes when you’re dealing with some paper copies, some not, and on and on.

Anyway, I appreciate all the work. It was a very, very comprehensive report, so thank you for that. I don’t really have any further questions.

G. Kyllo: With respect to the existing software that you have, how much…? What’s the annual cost of dealing with…? I think you indicated that there is one individual. I believe you mentioned that it was a female who is retiring in a couple of years, and she largely has been the one responsible for doing any updates or any internal changes to the program. What’s the annual cost of the fee? What’s the annual cost associated with the individual that’s currently looking after the program?

J. Chalke: In terms of the fee, we pay a licensing fee to Oracle. It is, in terms of looking back and at our current budget, fortunately quite low. Obviously, going forward, software licensing costs for up-to-date software are more. But we currently pay a licensing fee of $30,000 per year to Oracle to license that, so quite reasonable. The office has benefited from a provincial public sector–wide arrangement to license that software for many years. So it’s been quite reasonable in the past.

In terms of staffing costs, I’ll defer to Dave on more precise numbers. It really involves one staff member — salary plus benefits.

D. Van Swieten: That figure, to give you a direct answer, is about $130,000 a year.

L. Doerkson: I’m Lorne Doerkson. I’m the MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin. My question was around licensing as well. I guess maybe I’m a little bit confused by it. I am grateful for the presentation.

I see in the first year, we’ve got $104,000 and $61,000, for a total of $165,000. Then, obviously, OIPC and OMC are not using, perhaps, the programming until the second year, when that sort of ramps up. My question was: how much is the licensing per unit, and how does it work? It is per desk, per person? How does that roll out?

J. Chalke: Dave, do you want to speak to that?

D. Van Swieten: Yeah. I can say that the proposal that was before us, and the one that we built the budget on, is a per-seat licence, so based on concurrent users — how many people are logged onto the system at any one time. I think, to keep it apples to apples, it’s important to note that the existing software is only for the Oracle forms and reports backbone. The actual software that the staff sit down and use and type in and track cases was developed in-house, so there is no licensing fee for that.

[2:00 p.m.]

Moving forward with the model we’ve got, we’re actually paying a vendor for licensing their product that they’ve developed and customizing it or making it work for us here. So that’s why you’re seeing that increase in licensing costs that you’ve picked up there.

L. Doerkson: So it is based on how many people could actually log in at the same time. Is there any way to get any extra value out of that, meaning that, certainly, they wouldn’t all be logged in at the same time? Is there a way to get more users into the system for the same price type of thing? I guess, then, that would lead to the next question, which would be: who else might be able to make use of this?

Thank you. That will be all.

D. Van Swieten: To cover that answer, the answer is baked into the budget numbers already. So we looked at current stats to see how many people are logged in at any given time, and that’s what we based our user seats on for this budget that we’ve projected here. We didn’t count all the staff and say we need a licence for all the staff, or the proposal would cost us more. We have considered those things and built them here.

Good question.

J. Routledge (Chair): I see no more questions. I appreciate you coming and taking the time to explain this new process to us and fielding our questions.

And thank you to MLAs for asking questions.

I note that we are about half an hour behind time. I’m wondering if we should take a five-minute break and regroup. Let’s do that. We’ll take a break. We’ll take a recess and regroup.

The committee recessed from 2:01 p.m. to 2:10 p.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): I’d like to welcome our Ombudsperson, Jay Chalke, and the staff that is with him. To remind those members of the public who are joining by phone, we are here today to review the budget of the statutory officers. I’ll take a moment to introduce members of the committee.

I’ll introduce you in the order in which I see you on my screen: MLA Pam Alexis; MLA Megan Dykeman; MLA Grace Lore; Deputy Chair, MLA Ben Stewart; MLA Harwinder Sandhu; MLA Mike Starchuk; MLA Greg Kyllo; and MLA Lorne Doerkson.

Over to you, Mr. Chalke.

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Thank you, Chair, and hello again, Members.

As I indicated earlier, I’m joining you today from our office, which is located on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations. We acknowledge with respect their stewardship of the lands we’re on.

With me today is Deputy Ombudsperson David Paradiso; and expected is John Greschner, although I don’t see him online yet, but we’ll carry on; as well as the executive director of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten.

I’m pleased to take this opportunity to speak to you today regarding my office’s three-year service plan and budget request for the fiscal year 2021-2022. In front of you are a number of documents and an electronic copy of our most recent, ’19-20, annual report; my office’s budget submission; a summary of incremental funding requests; our office’s service plan; and some detailed financial breakdowns.

Before we get into the details of our budget requests, I want to provide you with a little bit of background about our office, given that it’s the first time that I’m before this committee during this parliament. I know a number of you attended the orientation session for MLAs related to the independent officers on January 18, so I’ll not repeat the very brief outline provided at that time. Rather, I’ll go a little deeper about our office. That’s intended to put our budget request into better context for you and assist with your consideration of that request.

As I indicated on January 18, we’re B.C.’s independent voice for fairness. We’re charged with the responsibility under the Ombudsperson Act to receive and, where appropriate, investigate complaints from individual British Columbians who believe that they’ve been treated unfairly or unreasonably by one of over 1,000 public bodies in the province.

This general fairness jurisdiction encompasses all manner of the broader provincial and local public sector. Thus, our staff need to maintain a broad and deep knowledge of public administration throughout the province. However, our complaints are not evenly distributed across public bodies. About half of the complaints we receive are about one of 20 public bodies in the province. For some of those public bodies, we receive hundreds of complaints and inquiries each year.

We’re here for everybody who has a problem with the fairness of public services that they’ve received. So any British Columbian — indeed, anybody in the world — who has an issue with a British Columbia public body under our jurisdiction can complain to us.

However, those who need government the most — people who are vulnerable and whose lives have been affected by poverty, family dysfunction, illness and disability — often are the people who need government the most. For those individuals, fair treatment by the government isn’t simply an administrative law problem. It’s about having a roof over their heads and food to eat. It’s about having access to health care on an equitable basis or assistance with activities of daily living. As those individuals need government more, in the event of unfairness, they need us more.

[2:15 p.m.]

We’ve been quite active over the nine months since we were last before this committee in the last parliament. Since then, we’ve tabled five reports with the Speaker, including annual reports for both our statutory functions under the Ombudsperson Act and under the new Public Interest Disclosure Act, as well as three special reports, which were about diverse issues of public administration.

One such report released last June was about the Solicitor General’s exercise of his powers to make orders under the Emergency Program Act during the pandemic. The report found that the content of two such orders were contrary to law. The report was followed immediately by government introducing Bill 19, which addressed most of our concerns. During debate of Bill 19, there was considerable discussion of the issues that we had reported on.

Another report detailed the Ministry of Education’s grade 12 examination tabulation error that had occurred in the summer of 2019. Our investigation resulted in government committing to a compensation fund for any students who were adversely impacted by the error, and the ministry also committed to formally apologizing to those students who had been impacted.

In December, we released a complaint-handling guide to help public bodies across the province as they established their own internal procedures for appropriately addressing complaints from the public. I believe that public bodies enhancing their complaint-handling practices is a win-win-win approach. It’s good for public bodies. It’s good for the public. It’s good for the public authorities. And it’s good for our office. We issued this guide this year recognizing that the pandemic has caused unprecedented changes to how public services are being delivered, and, not surprisingly, that has caused frustration and more complaints from the public.

Interest in the report from public organizations has been tremendous. Just last week we held a webinar based on this guide, and over 400 public employees from a wide range of public bodies attended. Obviously, there’s a real need to share our expertise and advice in this area, and good work ahead, hopefully, for public bodies as they improve their internal complaint handling.

I want to take a couple of minutes to highlight our current initiatives and some of the challenges we’re facing. As you can imagine, with the introduction of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which came into force just a little over a year ago, we’ve been very busy with the rollout of the new law with the public service.

We’ve been continuing to develop and refine our investigative policies and procedures as well as to make sure there’s awareness of the new law, not just with current employees but former employees, as the law covers them as well. This was a big task, considering there are 30,000 current public service employees, not to mention targeting the public at large, because that’s where former employees are. It will be an even bigger task, as the new law rolls out over the next five years, to cover a third of a million public employees.

As we’ve seen in the first wave of this new law, there are many steps public bodies have to take to make sure they’re receiving and investigating disclosures in compliance with the new law. As the new act rolls out further, we’ll need to share the expertise that we have to help develop processes and procedures that will be very new to public bodies. This will take time and resources, and you’ll see some of that reflected in our budget request. I’ll have more to say about public interest disclosure in the context of that request.

We received funding last year from this committee to hire an Indigenous liaison officer, a two-year position, who has been working with my staff in Indigenous communities to develop an Indigenous community service plan. We know, as we continue our reconciliation journey, that we have much work to do to make sure our organization is meeting the needs of Indigenous people across the province. We know these needs are unique, complex and often nuanced, and we want to make sure we have the right skills and the right approaches in place to help serve complainants who are Indigenous people and to investigate those complaints appropriately.

Development of the plan includes broad engagement with Indigenous service providers and individual Indigenous communities across the province. We’re also focusing internally, as well, reviewing how we recruit and train staff and determining where our practices need to be changed or strengthened. Our engagement in relation to this project is happening in addition to targeted outreach that we continue to do to ensure British Columbians who need our services the most know that we’re here.

Our plan is to return this coming fall to this committee with that Indigenous community services plan. I’ll have a little more to say about that when we get to the details of our budget request for this year. We now have a diversity and inclusion initiative that has both external and internal aspects to ensure that we’re understanding the realities of all British Columbians when they complain to us about the public services they receive.

[2:20 p.m.]

Our public authority consultation and training team’s work, which began as a pilot project and now is an ongoing part of our services, continues to expand. Requests for tailored workshops and webinars on fairness topics — from complaint handling, as I’ve already mentioned, to how to conduct fair investigations, to how to deal fairly with unreasonable conduct from the public — continue to increase.

The team is also receiving a growing number of requests for our consultation services in relation to how to strengthen aspects of fairness in new policies and practices. It’s encouraging that public bodies are seeing our office as an education and consultation resource that they can rely on to prevent unfairness from happening in the first place.

Turning now to another initiative. As you’ve heard in the previous half-hour, a large initiative that we have underway, pending funding, is the replacement of our case-tracking and information system that we’ve used since 1993. As you can imagine, our office has grown over time. Our need to track and organize our work has become more complex, and we look forward, this coming year, to having a replacement project underway.

In terms of challenges, as I think my fellow officers would agree, as public services continue to grow and change, the complaints we receive are also becoming more complex, meaning our investigations are as well. Single issues often have multiple dimensions. Other times there are multiple issues of unfairness relating to one public body, and other times one person can have a complaint that intersects with numerous public bodies.

Although some matters that come to us continue to be straightforward to resolve, many are not. This continues to put workload pressures on my team. The strength of our office is that we’re rigorous in our investigations. That rigour takes time, and it takes resources.

Obviously, the pandemic has had a significant impact as well. Of course, the public bodies that are at the heart of the pandemic, such as the regional health authorities, the Ministry of Health, the Provincial Health Services Authority, the patient care quality offices and review board and others have been the subject of complaints and inquiries to our office. But the impact of the pandemic goes far, far beyond that.

Virtually every public body in the province — as I’ve said, we have jurisdiction over, over 1,000 — has changed its services over the past year because of the pandemic. So we put an internal team in place to monitor these changes, ensuring that our understanding of public administration across the province is up to date and determining if there are any systemic issues that we should be investigating or taking other action on.

Some services by public bodies under our jurisdiction have moved online. Other services have been outright suspended, while still others have been enhanced.

With these unprecedented changes, the role of oversight offices like mine and my colleagues’ is more important than ever. The Supreme Court of Canada said about the role of the British Columbia Ombudsman that it was to “bring the lamp of scrutiny to otherwise dark places, even over the resistance of those who would draw the blinds.” So shining that oversight lamp is doubly critical now, as government concurrently does less during the pandemic, as services are reduced, but does more by giving themselves extraordinary emergency powers.

To date, we have received more than 600 complaints and inquiries about many of these changes during the pandemic. When we investigate, we’ve had to apply the thresholds in the Ombudsperson Act to whole new schemes of pandemic-induced public administration.

These are, obviously, uncharted waters for us, and while our work during the pandemic has not been without challenges, we’re managing to meet the demands within our existing budget envelope. It has, however, not been easy, given that, even in the best of times, our resourcing is very tight.

It’s been an extraordinary year in public administration, and we’ve likewise experienced an extraordinary year in public administration oversight. But it’s not over yet. Like everyone else, we look forward to the end of the pandemic and returning to a more normal environment. We have many months to go yet and many lessons to learn.

Significantly, we anticipate that public administration in the post-pandemic era will be subject to further substantial change. Some services will return to their pre-pandemic status quo. I’ve talked to some public sector leaders, and they’ve indicated that they’re going to continue with these pandemic adaptations after the pandemic. Still others will move to a sort of third reality, a post-pandemic new reality.

Public sector leader after public sector leader talks about falling forward, not falling back, when talking about the post-pandemic time. This represents a significant challenge for us in the months and years ahead, as we exercise oversight of those new and impending changes.

It’s against that backdrop that we’ve prepared the budget and service plan that’s before you. I’m going to turn to that now.

[2:25 p.m.]

Our budget request for the upcoming fiscal year is for $10.802 million. This is a 15.3 percent increase over the prior fiscal year. However, that figure is somewhat deceptive, and I want to describe why. Almost 60 percent of that increase is made up of two things: inflation and annualizing prior year approvals from this committee and the case-tracker replacement costs that we discussed in the previous half-hour. Something that comes up once every three decades.

Of the remaining lift, two of the three items are only for temporary funding. One for one year and the other for two years. Only one of the three items is for permanent funding. So let’s turn to those three items now.

The first item relates to staffing costs associated with government’s decision to expand the coverage of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, British Columbia’s new whistleblowing scheme. The first phase of the new act came into force, as I said, just over a year ago and gave some 30,000 public servants, plus former public servants, the right to disclose wrongdoing occurring in their ministry or office and to be protected from reprisal for doing so. The disclosure, under the act, can be made internally to their employer or externally to us.

This new statutory function represents the most substantial change to our mandate in our 40-year history. Our office has mandatory duties with respect to providing advice to prospective disclosers, receiving unfairly investigating disclosures to determine whether allegations of wrongdoing are substantiated. We also have the sole responsibility for investigating allegations that a person was reprised against for either disclosing wrongdoing or cooperating with an investigation.

We’ve seen south of the border, over the past couple of years, the key role that whistleblowers play in ensuring that unethical conduct of government affairs is brought to light.

B.C.’s new law is focused on encouraging ethical conduct and enhancing transparency, accountability and integrity in public services.

This committee, over the past two years, funded the team that has been responsible for investigations since December 2019.

Our first annual report, which covered just the four months ending March 31, 2020, indicated that my office received 57 public interest disclosure-related matters, which included inquiries and requests for advice, and 16 formal disclosures. But it’s important to remember that the 30,000 current public servants that were covered by phase 1 represent less than 10 percent of the public employees that work in the broader provincial and local public sector.

Government has expressed the policy intention that, over the next four years, coverage of the Public Interest Disclosure Act would be expanded in phases to roughly parallel that to which the Ombudsperson Act or the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act apply. This represents in the range of a third of a million public servants.

Government is committed to extending coverage of the Public Interest Disclosure Act to other public sector organizations such as schools, universities, Crown corporations and the health sector. While the pandemic has caused some delay, the government has advised us that feedback from consultation with public bodies, “along with government’s public commitment to expand PIDA’s application across the broader public sector, supports an expectation that the Ombudsperson’s office will need to allocate resources to support implementation in the coming year.”

To accomplish government’s intention to cover the broader public sector, more than 50,000 public servants would need to be added every year, with the resulting workload impacts on our office. This is not an optional service for us to deliver. I’m under statutory duties under the act, and the nature of whistleblowing is such that disclosures cannot be subject to delay for reasons of workload.

Furthermore, we cannot control the timing of the expansion, given that this will be a cabinet decision. While we are consulted as government readies itself for the next phase, the precise timing and selection of those sectors to be covered, and in what sequence, is controlled by government, not by us.

We, therefore, have a modest request of 2.5 staff for the next fiscal year to supplement our capacity in this regard and have staggered the hiring to mitigate costs in 2021-2022. This annualizes to three staff the following year. The total request for next year is $327,000. Once we see the details of government’s expansion, we’ll report back to this committee on the precise impact.

The next area involves our second year of Indigenous community engagement. As I indicated earlier in my remarks, last year this committee funded an Indigenous liaison officer for two years, who is to lead consultations, discussions and dialogues with Indigenous communities and public authorities as we develop our office’s Indigenous service plan and return with that to this committee in the fall of this year.

[2:30 p.m.]

We’ve started our work on this initiative internally with cultural competency training for our staff, reviewing our practices and looking at how the Ombudsperson Act will interface with both Indigenous law and the new DRIPA legislation in the province. As you can imagine, this work takes time and careful thought.

By the end of this week, my office will have completed five provincial engagement roundtables with Indigenous service providers, including housing, health, education, justice, child and youth, and resource sector service providers. We’ve had a terrific turnout to date, and what we’ve heard in these initial sessions was incredibly thought-provoking and also humbling. We’re committed to looking deeply at how we deliver our services to Indigenous people both on and off reserve, and we know that the changes we make must be informed by the knowledge and experience of Indigenous people.

We’re underway with initial discussions, starting with Indigenous service providers, and through our work to date developing the plan, it’s evident that in order to respectfully consult and work with Indigenous communities, we need some additional resources. After our first round of engagement with Indigenous service providers, we received requests for additional information about our office and resources that would be Indigenous-focused that we are currently creating.

During these consultations, it is becoming evident that there’s a need to plan and organize targeted focus groups on key issues that are emerging in our discussions, like accessibility challenges Indigenous people face or the role of elders in the delivery of public services. Furthermore, in order to respect and honour the time of those that we engage with, particularly the leadership of individual nations, we will need to offer not just information about our office but honoraria as well. At the same time, we have a commitment to you to return this fall with a plan.

As a result, we require some non-salary dollars in order that we’re able to conduct these consultations in a more compressed time frame than we had originally anticipated — as a result of the pandemic — and are requesting a one-time funding of $150,000 to avoid any delay in completing the plan in a manner that’s respectful and consistent with the principles in the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.

The third and final budget request that I want to highlight for funding relates to British Columbia’s changes to auto insurance. As you know, on May 1, the entire system for motor vehicle accident compensation will change from a tort system, where disputes between an injured person and the party who caused the injury — represented by their insurer or ICBC — are decided in court.

Courts are, of course, outside the Ombudsperson’s jurisdiction. Under the new scheme, after May 1, an enhanced care or no-fault compensation system will be decided by various public officials, including ICBC staff, a new fairness commissioner and the civil resolution tribunal, all of whom are under Ombudsperson jurisdiction.

I’m hoping that most of you have had a chance to look at our most recent annual report. In that, you’ll see that ICBC is already sitting in third place in terms of the number of complaints and inquiries that come to our office, with over 500 per year. I say this to underscore that my office is already busy responding to and investigating complaints regarding auto insurance.

We know that the change in the system will result in greater workload. While considerable time has been spent on this issue thus far, no reliable estimate has been provided to us on what the additional volume may be. That will become clearer as the new scheme continues to take hold. For now, though, to risk-manage through this transition, we’re asking for only a single investigator position for the next two years to support timely investigation of complaints arising from the new enhanced care model.

We will update this committee next year and return as part of the 2023-2024 budget submission with a full report on the deployment of that resource as well as our assessment of the ongoing impact with the new motor vehicle accident compensation scheme. Given British Columbia’s history of high political and public policy attention to auto insurance over many decades and the strong adversarial relationships that exist in the legal culture of this province concerning ICBC, I anticipate that we will be reporting to you consistently over the next few years on this question as the new scheme takes effect, is challenged in various ways and adjusted.

Again, like the rollout of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, auto insurance reform is an area in which my office is not, if you’ll pardon the pun, in the driver’s seat. It’s the government and ICBC that have selected the May 1 date. It’s a government priority to change the scheme of motor vehicle accident compensation. We’re simply in the position of potentially receiving more complaints as more disputes are moved to public bodies that are under our jurisdiction.

I think that concludes my remarks. Now I’d be happy to take your questions. Just a note for the record. I note that Deputy Ombudsperson John Greschner has also joined us.

[2:35 p.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Chalke.

I will open it up to questions from the committee. Before we take our first question, I would remind everyone that we have roughly half an hour before we move on to our next statutory officer.

Questions?

G. Kyllo: Thanks, Jay, for your presentation. I certainly can appreciate the challenge that you have in front of you with an increasing number of complaints that likely will be lodged, especially with respect to ICBC. So I certainly sympathize with the challenge you have in front of you with trying to determine in advance what those costs might be.

I’m just wondering. Should you have additional cost pressures over the course of the summer, which are even in excess of the budgetary lift that you’ve asked for, because of your statutory obligation…? What are your remedies to try to deal with what is a yet undetermined number of complaints that may be coming forward?

J. Chalke: Thank you very much for the question. I’ve been responsible for public organizations of various ilk for about 20 years. It’s something that has kept me awake a lot of nights over the years.

Certainly, my commitment to you is that with the budget that you allocate to me, I will do everything possible to manage that budget, in year, in a way that means that I’m not back to you during the year. There are, of course, occasions on which that can be required. In the event that it turns out that, particularly on that file….

Really, I suppose there are any manner of public service changes, but let’s just take that one as an example. If it turns out to be much more looking like, just for the sake of a discussion right now, five staff as opposed to one staff — and it would, obviously, be impacting the whole organization if that were to be the case — then we may find ourselves at the point of returning to you with respect to a supplementary budget request. It would certainly be my hope not to do so.

We typically do have an opportunity to see the committee in May. That will be, obviously, just as the new scheme is coming into force. So I don’t anticipate that we would have any reliable information at that point. By the time we get to November, I expect we’ll be in a position to report to you about how we’re doing, in year, on that question.

The new scheme does come into force gradually. So just to say that the accident date will prevail. It will take a while for the full effect of the new scheme to start to be in effect, in terms of people who go through that process and then are dissatisfied at the end of it, and they are coming to us at the back end.

I’m hopeful that it’ll be a relatively modest impact, but we don’t want to be in the situation — you all know that rather unfortunate metaphor of boiling the frog — where we find ourselves two, three or four years from now with a significant increase in work related to this one initiative, and we haven’t been tracking it specifically. We want to be on it right from day one and be clear about where we’re seeing volume changes or complexity changes related to it.

We’re aware of it. We’re certainly hopeful that this one resource will be sufficient in the first year, but it’s something we’ll be monitoring carefully.

G. Kyllo: Thank you very much.

J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions? I don’t see any other questions. Is that correct? No other questions?

Well, you’ve clearly given a very thorough presentation about your role as the Ombudsperson, the role of your office.

[2:40 p.m.]

I want to thank you for anticipating and for making the connection between the role of your office and some of the initiatives that have been introduced by our government and for trying to anticipate and stay ahead of that so that there are not unnecessary logjams and blocks along the way. Thank you for making those connections for us.

One last opportunity for members of the committee to ask questions and make comments.

P. Alexis: Just a comment with respect to how much we appreciate, because we’re all in this new environment. I can’t imagine being in your position through this pandemic, because I know we’re inundated with emails. I think people have more time to express themselves these days as well. On Friday I think I had a four-hour span where there were over 600 emails received. It’s remarkable — the volumes that have been created, the volumes that we now receive through this pandemic. I’ve never seen anything like it as far as the level of communication.

Anyways, I take my hat off to you. Good luck with everything.

J. Chalke: Thank you for the comment. One thing I would like to mention for the benefit of the members of the committee and for all MLAs…. Later this month or early next month — I think it’s later this month — we’re going to be holding a session for your constituency office staff, a virtual session on when you get complaints, the kinds of complaints you’re speaking about at your constituency office, when you probably should be sending those to us or what assistance we can provide you with those. Some of those matters turn out to be more difficult, more complex, and sometimes it’s hard for constituency office staff to deal with those. We certainly find that we get those enquiries from your offices, and we’d be happy to assist in any way we can.

J. Routledge (Chair): That’s great. I think that will be very helpful to us doing our work in constituencies. I think that, just to pick up on that, it will be a big relief to a lot of our constituents. They would be reassured that there is an independent, neutral office that will address their concerns about fairness. More people need to know about the work that you do.

J. Chalke: Thank you very much, Chair.

J. Routledge (Chair): We’ll call a recess, and we’ll reconvene with the Human Rights Commissioner at 2:50.

The committee recessed from 2:42 p.m. to 2:50 p.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): I’d like to welcome our Human Rights Commissioner, Kasari Govender, and her staff who’ve joined her. For those members of the public who may be listening by phone, we are here today to review the budgets of the statutory officers.

Just before I introduce the members of the committee and turn it over to the Human Rights Commissioner, I’d like to acknowledge that I’m joining you today from the traditional, unceded territory of the Coast Salish people, the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people. I thank them for their stewardship of the land.

The committee members I’ll introduce to you. There is Megan Dykeman, member for Langley East; Pam Alexis, member for Abbotsford-Mission; Lorne Doerkson, member for Cariboo-Chilcotin; Greg Kyllo, Shuswap; Ben Stewart, who is also the Deputy Chair of the committee, Kelowna West; Mike Starchuk, Surrey-Cloverdale; Grace Lore, Victoria–Beacon Hill; and Harwinder Sandhu, the member for Vernon-Monashee.

All welcome to the committee, to this meeting.

Over to you, Commissioner.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Good afternoon, Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the committee. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about our budget for the B.C. Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, BCOHRC for short.

I am speaking to you today from the unceded and traditional homelands of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I’m thankful for the opportunity to work together on these Indigenous lands now known as British Columbia.

I’m before you, or before the committee — not actually you as individuals — for the second time, making budget submissions as B.C.’s Human Rights Commissioner. I’m proud to share the major accomplishments my office has achieved in its first year of operations, and I’m thankful to lead a team of incredibly passionate and dedicated professionals in this urgent human rights work. On that note, I’m supported today by Deputy Commissioner Stephanie Garrett as well as our chief financial officer, as part of our shared corporate services, Dianne Buljat.

Please find before you — you should have before you — the BCOHRC’s annual report and service plan, as well as our budget. Our budgetary ask for the coming year is $6.8 million for fiscal 2021-22. This figure represents the responsible use of public dollars while providing the resources necessary for our growing office to enact our legislative powers of conducting inquiries, which came into force this past fall, along with fulfilling our other legislative functions.

As you know, we are in start-up mode. During my first budget submission last year, we noted to the committee that we anticipated making a $6.8 million request for the fiscal year 2021-22 to align our funding with the trajectory of building an organization. One year in, I am pleased to be presenting a budget to you that is completely aligned with that original request.

Before going deeper into the budget, I’d like to take some time to share some of our history and some highlights from our first full year of operations. Last year I explained how my vision of BCOHRC is to foster a culture of human rights in our province, to shift people’s hearts and minds. Now I’d like to share with you how we are implementing that vision.

[2:55 p.m.]

My office was established in fall 2018 after Bill 50 restored a Human Rights Commissioner to B.C. with a broad mandate to promote and protect human rights across our province and, actually, to promote compliance not only with domestic human rights legislation but also international human rights law obligations.

My role is to provide provincial oversight for human rights and to hold our institutions to account to ensure that these rights, particularly those of our most marginalized citizens, are respected and promoted. In contrast to B.C.’s Human Rights Tribunal, which adjudicates disputes between individuals or organizations about human rights, my job focuses on systemic human rights issues. In other words, my office addresses the root causes of inequality, injustice and discrimination in B.C. by shifting laws, policies, practices and cultures.

Where the tribunal might deal with a complaint from a person with disabilities who feels they’ve been discriminated against by their employer and the tribunal might resolve that kind of dispute, for example, by negotiating a settlement between the employer and employee, my office produces educational materials, like fact sheets and short videos, to help employers understand their obligation towards their employees. Or we might make recommendations to the Legislature about how to prevent this kind of discrimination from happening in the first place. Or we might conduct research or an inquiry to better understand what is giving rise to a pattern of discrimination in a particular sector.

The legislation outlines a number of tools that we can use to further my mandate — education, community engagement, conducting research and making recommendations for law and policy reform, conducting inquiries and doing legal interventions and other systemic casework.

My power to conduct inquiries, as I mentioned, came into force this last fall, in September 2020. We plan to launch our first full inquiry in this coming year. This could include, for example, an investigation into how a public institution is addressing a pattern of discrimination or injustices or why a particular public policy scheme might have disproportionate impacts on one group.

This is a significant piece of work, and it will require a significant budget to make sure that we can do good on our word to act as a watchdog and to hold discriminatory systems accountable. As we anticipated, funding for this new legislative mandate is a critical component of our budget request this year.

I also want to take a moment to talk about our jurisdiction, which is broad and deep. We are committed to upholding the human rights of all rights holders of all races, ethnicities, religions, cultures, gender and sexual identities, ages, abilities and income levels, as well as, of course, Indigenous people across B.C., including First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. This really means every person living in British Columbia is within my jurisdiction.

We have a keen focus on duty-bearers, those who have responsibility under the human rights code to uphold human rights, including landlords and businesses, service providers and public agencies, to ensure that they are aware of their responsibilities under the law. There are some duty-bearers that fall within the jurisdiction of the Canadian Human Rights Act, but most of those that we, as the public, interact with on a daily basis fall within provincial jurisdiction, so within my jurisdiction.

Our stakeholders also span all sectors, both public and private — government, education, health care, business, labour, community, social services. All of it. The scope of my jurisdiction in terms of people, sectors, rights, regions and tools to make change requires us to build a diverse and expert team, along with a commensurate budget, to fulfil my mandate.

Turning, then, to the impact of COVID. Since our last budget submissions, the world has changed. None of us predicted this pandemic, which, as we speak, has infected more than 103 million people worldwide and killed over 2.2 million people. COVID-19 has amplified racial tensions and fueled hatred, extremism and the rise of authoritarianism. The virus is exacerbating poverty, homelessness, hunger, mental illness and domestic violence. Unemployment has spiked, and data shows that young people and women, particularly women of colour, are bearing the brunt. In B.C., this crisis is playing out against the already grim backdrop of our worsening opioid overdose emergency.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has spread hate along with the virus. We have witnessed an increase in violent acts rooted in ignorance and discrimination against marginalized communities, specifically Asian and Indigenous communities.

[3:00 p.m.]

Police forces are noting dramatic increases in hate. The Vancouver police department revealed a nearly 900 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the first nine months of 2020 compared to that same time last year.

The rise in hate this past year has been provincewide. In Vernon this fall, as members of this committee might well know, candidates had their election signs defaced with racist and sexist graffiti. In Summerland, an Indo-Canadian family’s home was defaced with swastikas, and a later community parade to support them was spoiled by the inclusion of a Confederate flag.

In Langley, an Asian teen was struck by a car and injured in a hit-and-run after the driver swore a racist slur. In Victoria, a Black man was attacked as he rode a B.C. Transit bus. In Burnaby, a SkyTrain commuter faced three attackers who shouted, “Go back to your own country,” and poured coffee on his head.

These reports are starting to lose their shock value as they come up more and more frequently in the news. The acceleration we have witnessed in the past year builds on the rise of hate in B.C. that was already happening pre-COVID. Hate crime reports had gone up 55 percent between 2015 and 2017 in the province.

We know, as well, that the rise in discrimination and widening inequalities during this time is not only on the basis of race and Indigeneity. For example, people with disabilities have also faced a rise in harassment around mandatory masking policies. Additionally, people with disabilities have been distanced, in some cases isolated, from their health care and service providers, upon which they may rely for essential daily care.

Thankfully, our province’s public health leadership has been strong, but still, COVID-19 has deepened existing inequalities and dramatically reinforced the need for our office.

Since March, I have issued a number of recommendations related to the pandemic, raising concerns about prisoner rights during the pandemic, publishing COVID-19 human rights FAQs on our website for the public and making recommendations to government on balancing COVID-19 safety concerns with human rights around housing, income support, food security, health care, child care and harm reduction services.

Working with the Representative for Children and Youth, we’ve brought attention to the rise of domestic and gender-based violence during lockdown, increasing access to information for those looking for safe spaces and anti-violence services. Within a week of the declaration of the public health emergency in B.C., we published guidance for employers, landlords and service providers, translated into seven languages, including American Sign Language.

More recently we published guidance for both duty-bearers and rights holders about the human rights implications of mandatory masking policies. Our guidance on mask-wearing, as well as the accompanying poster that we produced for businesses to put up, is particularly focused on the rights of people with disabilities. Ultimately, no one should experience harassment or other discrimination due to a disability or a medical condition that prevents them from being able to wear a mask. Both sets of COVID guidance have been cited by parties in human rights disputes, showing the importance of this kind of guidance in a very fast-changing environment with significant human rights implications.

I’m proud that my team has adapted quickly. We did not have the luxury of a smooth first year spent planning and consulting, because of the pandemic. We reprioritized work and rescheduled projects to meet increased demands from COVID while we stayed on course with strategic planning and public engagement, all within our current budget and staffing.

I turn now to our strategic priorities as an office. We’ve organized our work around five strategic priorities to ensure that we remain focused, that we can set attainable goals and that we can deliver measurable results. Our top priority is preventing and addressing discrimination as defined by B.C.’s human rights code. We expect this to remain a standing priority for the office going forward.

Our other priorities are addressing decolonization, hate and the rise of white supremacy, poverty as both a cause and effect of inequality and injustice, and the rights of those detained by the state, both in the context of the criminal justice system and the mental health system.

I’d like to share some highlights now on how we are delivering on each of those priorities and to share with you some major accomplishments to date, starting with our education work. We are set on delivering bold, innovative and transformative educational initiatives.

[3:05 p.m.]

You may have seen our first big public awareness campaign in your community, because on November 16, we launched our “Am I racist?” campaign in 24 communities across B.C., on billboards, transit shelters and buses.

We recognize that the rise of hate that we’ve seen in the province both before and during the pandemic did not arise out of nowhere. In realizing our strategic priority to address the rise of hate, we recognize that racism exists on a continuum and that we need to tackle it at its roots. So we aimed this campaign at those forms of racism that are often more invisible and insidious than overt hate — indeed, those stereotypes and biases that we all hold inside of us.

The campaign empowered citizens to address racism starting from a point of self-reflection rather than shame. This campaign leads viewers to an interactive experience on our website, bchumanrights.ca, which has a number of learning tools to encourage viewers to become actively antiracist, for example, by learning about B.C.’s history.

On the day we launched the second part of our campaign and spoke to media outlets across the province about the importance of tackling racism in this way, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond released her report In Plain Sight. She reported that 84 percent of the Indigenous people she spoke to experienced racism when trying to access medical services. This shocking statistic further reveals how widespread and insidious racism is in our society and our institutions and bolsters the need for education initiatives like the “Am I racist?” campaign.

In February, we launched our regional engagements, starting with Prince George. With the onset of the pandemic, we pivoted to online events, and over the course of seven engagements, I was able to meet with hundreds of people across the province in both urban and rural locations, including Fort St. John, Cranbrook, Nelson, Nanaimo and 100 Mile House, about the specific issues of people in those communities.

In our next round of community engagements across the province, we will be hosting a series of workshops to help duty-bearers, such as landlords and employers, as well as helping rights holders — really, all of us with human rights — better understand human rights law here in B.C. This is part of our strategic priority to address discrimination as defined by the human rights code, which is primarily focused on employment, housing and services available to the public.

We’re reaching out to diverse audiences, including youth. This requires speaking their language online. So we launched a modern, accessible, multilingual website and a suite of social media channels and content, as well as developing a series of human rights videos to share on social media to educate the human rights leaders of tomorrow.

I had the pleasure of virtually meeting with large high school classes across the province in June and was struck by their engagement with human rights issues and their deep concern, in particular, for the rise of racism and hate in their communities.

Last month we launched a new animated video across our channels aimed at educating people about the basics of human rights protections in an accessible way. We launched it to mark International Human Rights Day on December 10.

These are just a few of the ways we are building a new curriculum of human rights in B.C. We want to ensure that all aspects of the population in B.C. — individual, governments, businesses, civil society organizations — know their rights and are able to act on their responsibilities.

Much of our engagement takes place through my direct outreach as commissioner. Since I took office, I have presented at nearly 50 events to over 4,000 people, giving public talks and virtual conferences, speaking to poverty and family law advocates, employers, lawmakers, high-schoolers, community members and leaders working against hate. Along the way, I’ve answered hundreds of questions about human rights, the work of my office and the impact of inequality and injustice in our communities.

We’re optimizing our use of traditional and social media to reach British Columbians, and news of our office has appeared more than 1,500 times in the media since I took office, including Indigenous outlets and media outlets catering to immigrant and non-English-speaking audiences.

Our social media and web materials are developed and distributed with an eye to reaching a wide and diverse audience. Accessibility is key. Our messages go out across multiple channels in a variety of multimedia formats and languages, with attention to plain language and providing accommodation such as ASL, large text and described video. These accommodations matter, and our stakeholders notice. We’ve had organizations reaching out to us to start to learn about the accessibility measures that we’ve taken as we try to model best practices in our work.

[3:10 p.m.]

Turning, then, to research and policy, in September, my office published our first major research report, Disaggregated Demographic Data Collection in British Columbia: The Grandmother Perspective. It called for the collection of demographic information stripped of personal identifiers and analyzed to reveal inequalities. This is important, because when policy and law are predicated on statistics, omissions in data can cost lives and human rights. We can’t address what we can’t see.

The overwhelmingly positive response to our work demonstrated that many others share this vision. One letter I received from a citizen working at B.C.’s independent investigations office said: “As a citizen who works in police oversight and who is deeply moved by the injustice in front of our eyes, this report was like a balm to my heart and mind. I have shared it with family and friends and with colleagues. This report made me proud to live in B.C. and to be a public servant.”

June Francis, the director of the Institute for Diaspora Research and Engagement at SFU, called this a “landmark report” that “grapples with the complex history of race-based data collection and its deeply racist and colonial roots, while setting the stage for truly transformative approaches” to data collection. Indeed, this work has been key for us in delivering on our strategic priority around decolonization.

Data collection is also key to our human rights baseline project. The baseline project is designed to give us a strong understanding of the state of human rights in the province in order to effectively promote human rights for all. We will focus on eight regions of B.C. to pilot community participatory processes to explore the breadth and depth of human rights issues that people are facing.

We will map what we learn onto existing data and the results of surveys that we conduct over this year as well. This will create a baseline of information for us that we will use to produce a report card on human rights in the province, as well as a tool to measure our progress as a commission as we work on addressing these human rights issues. This approach is particularly important in terms of monitoring conditions in rural and remote areas of the province, and we plan to launch this project in the spring.

In addition to the policy guidance I mentioned earlier in relation to COVID, I have made additional law and policy reform recommendations, including concerning amendments to the human rights code itself. Currently, neither indigeneity nor poverty are named as prohibited grounds of discrimination under the code, and I have recommended the inclusion of both. These recommendations flow directly from our strategic priorities of decolonization and addressing poverty as a human rights issue.

On our inquiry tool, as I mentioned, in 2021 you will see a whole new stream of work come out of our office as we launch our first public inquiry. In preparation, our legal team has focused on laying out the groundwork for our inquiry procedures. We are developing a framework for our inquiries that ensures access to justice for historically marginalized groups. Because of the way the human rights code is drafted, we are able to take a creative and purposeful approach to building inquiry processes that are genuinely inclusive and accessible while not compromising procedural fairness.

In sum, we have used our first year widely and deeply to ensure that our work is rooted in the experiences of people across the province — young and old, rural and urban, Indigenous and settlers, newcomers and longtime residents. In addition, we have produced numerous public guidance documents and submissions regarding human rights during the time of COVID, a key research report on the collection of race-based and other disaggregated data, a provincewide public awareness campaign on internalized racism, and a series of small educational videos aimed at raising awareness and educating the public.

We are staffing up in all departments while building best practices about diversity and inclusion in our human resources. This is an expression I use often: we are building the bicycle while riding it. I hope this gives you a sense of the sheer volume of strategic work that my office has produced in our first full year of operations. I hope I’ve also given you a sense of all that we’ve done to build this office from words on paper to a robust and respective human rights commission.

I’d like now to turn to provide you with some more details on how I’m ensuring value in the efficient operation of our office. We’ve been working closely with RCY for over a year on developing a corporate shared-services arrangement for human resources, financial and IT services. We are continuing to build on this venture in the years to come. I’m grateful to Representative Jennifer Charlesworth and her hard-working staff team for their partnership and support.

[3:15 p.m.]

We also maintain a shared-services agreement with the Office of the Auditor General for shared facilities in their Victoria office. This enables us to have a presence in both the Lower Mainland and Victoria with no additional cost. I’m also grateful to Michael Pickup and his team for their generosity.

To extend and maximize our reach, we are currently in discussions with the University of Northern British Columbia to secure a northern presence within that hub, and we have similar plans in the Interior.

In a spirit of reciprocity with other independent offices of the Legislature, we are ensuring that these organizations are able to use our multi-use spaces, such as meeting rooms and hot desks, in our Vancouver offices when they are in town. In addition, we’ve been collaborating with both the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal and legal clinics to build an easily accessible, central, no-wrong-door approach to human rights services and information. This initiative will increase understanding of how people can file a human rights complaint, who is there to help them do so and what rights they have under the law. We hope this will lead to increased access to justice as well as to efficiencies.

Now I would like to speak directly to the financial resources that we need to make all of this a reality. If you recall, the Attorney General was granted $2 million in operating funds, along with $1 million in capital funds, to initiate the implementation of the amendments to the human rights code. The $1 million in capital was not spent in the year it was granted but was deferred to the current year. Our office was formally launched when I started in my role in September 2019.

Last year this committee granted my office $5.5 million operating in fiscal 2020-21, and $1.2 million in capital funds for the establishment of our office. To be clear, those capital funds were deferred capital from the previous year. Members of the committee indicated to us, in granting that operational budget, that this was start-up funding and acknowledged that the vision for the office, and the budget along with it, would grow in the coming year. BCOHRC’s expansive and critical mandate, to scour discrimination from B.C. society, requires a proportionate budget. For this reason, I’m asking for $6.815 million for our operating budget for fiscal year 2021-22, and $35,000 in capital funds.

I want to stress that we don’t put this request forward lightly. I know that we have to be fiscally prudent at all times, and especially now. But rooting out systemic discrimination will always be a good investment. The opportunity cost of the alternative is just too high to bear. We are at a critical time globally and locally to turn the tide on the rise of hate and tyranny and the inequality and fear that underlie them. Without these resources, we will have no choice but to delay projects, postpone planned initiatives and scale back my outreach. We would also be forced to constrain our inquiry function, limiting the systemic function of our work.

Looking ahead, the 2021-22 budget will allow us to continue to grow into an effective Human Rights Commission. In our first year, we have laid the foundation for future work through hiring, strategic planning and initial program development, such as the “Am I racist?” campaign. In the year ahead, we will scale up by completing hiring, developing policy and building on our programmatic successes, like launching further public awareness campaigns, our first inquiry and the human rights baseline project.

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

I want to wrap up by thanking all of you for your part in restoring the role of the Human Rights Commissioner to our province and ensuring that all British Columbians have the opportunity to live free from oppression and discrimination, with full enjoyment of their human rights. Thank you.

Of course, I’m happy to take any questions that you have at this point.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Commissioner. That’s a very full and detailed report. I’m sure that there are lots of questions. I have one.

[3:20 p.m.]

I’m very interested in the priorities that you set with regard to hate crimes and white supremacy. That’s so connected with what’s been happening lately and what we see in terms of the rise of white supremacist groups. Is that something that the commission sees within your purview? Do you have a plan? Do you even see it as rightly the role of the commission to have a plan to identify, respond to, do some preventative work in the institutions where those groups might grow?

K. Govender: Absolutely. Thank you for your question. I very much see it as rightly belonging within the role of the human rights commission. We are here to try to address some of these deep, underlying issues, and we have been doing some of this work in our first full year, as I mentioned, starting on a different side of the spectrum, in terms of the rise of racism but, I think, an important piece of the larger puzzle around tackling the rise of racism and hate.

Also, I think our education work going forward will be very focused on this as well as looking at…. Every tool we have in our toolbox will be used on this strategic priority. For example, we have a fact sheet that is in process right now, looking at the different ways the law tackles hate speech and the different remedies that people have available to them if they experience this kind of behaviour. So we’re talking about human rights law versus criminal law and what the different avenues are for people to address this. Really, across the board, this will be a priority of ours.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you.

Next we have a question from MLA Sandhu, followed by MLA Kyllo.

H. Sandhu: Thank you, Commissioner Govender. What a powerful and great presentation. I would say thank you so much, because you were giving many of our lived experiences, not just by me and my kids and the communities around me. When this campaign “Am I racist?” was launched…. What plan do we have for people who are…? If you see on social media…. You can read many posts opposing that and calling it divisive when it’s not, actually.

There are many people I talked to. I worked with human rights and equity for years with another organization, as a provincial chair, and we worked along with Indigenous People, people with disabilities, people of colour, LGBTQ+. Even within the powerful, like our, say, public sector, and I would see even in health care, a lot of people are in denial. I even heard, along with my colleagues: “Why do we need these caucuses?” My reply was: “We have these caucuses. We wish that one day we don’t need them.” The work that we need to do….

It’s just actually very discouraging to see the amount of people I come across — that they’re reluctant to come forward. I would admit myself to sometimes share our concerns, because often we hear…. You’re labelled as playing the race card, or you’re labelled as playing…. You just kind of let it go and go with the flow. But what helps…. How can we encourage those people to come forward, even if they want to stay anonymous? It’s a big problem and not just with one group of marginalized people. There are people living with addictions and whatnot. So if you can highlight that there’s some work we’re going to do.

Certainly, yes, in some communities, we have seen increased white supremacy. Even in my community, even the schools were getting littered, before our election campaign and the other incidents, weekly or regularly with these very hateful comments in schools. Kids come home very torn, especially kids if they belong to certain groups. Sometimes people in power are even in denial, and that’s where it’s concerning, not just for me as a British Columbian and Canadian but for our kids or for our society.

I wonder if you can highlight some of the points or if you’re aware of these issues. Thank you for the work that you’re doing.

[3:25 p.m.]

K. Govender: Thank you for your comments and for your question. I’ll give a few examples of some work that we’re doing to try to bring these issues to light in order that we may address them, because that’s what I hear in some of what you’ve talked about. How do we ensure that we can recognize that this is actually happening in order to address it?

One of those areas of work is in the desegregated data work that we did. It really is very much…. Data is required in order to make this change. We really can’t address it, and policy and lawmakers can’t address it, unless they have the data to rely on. That also brings it out of the subjective experience.

As important as the subjective experience is, it brings it into the objective realm that we can then make an advocate for good policy as a result of that. So as I mentioned, our desegregated data research that we did over the summer and produced a report in September really delves into how important this data is but how important this data is to collect well in a way that doesn’t really perpetuate stigma and stereotype and harm of the very communities that the data is being collected on. So that’s one big area of work that we’ve done.

We’ve put a lot of work into communications work as well around dismantling the role of shame and guilt on all sides of the equation, so that those of us who…. All of us harbour stereotypes in ourselves, and to be able to acknowledge that and be able to, in the end, dismantle that, we have to start first saying: “We all have this. Let’s work together to dismantle those stereotypes.” This isn’t a matter of shame, but it is a matter to be taken very seriously. That’s another area.

We’ve also been working on access to justice for these issues, complaints, to ensure that people who want to bring a complaint forward are able to do that. So both through the No Wrong Door project that I mentioned briefly at the end, working with the Human Rights Clinic at Community Legal Assistance Society, which is the human rights clinic that’s funded in order to represent complainants before the tribunal and provide legal support to them, as well as the Human Rights Tribunal, to try to reduce obstacles for people looking to seek justice through that realm.

We have been relationship-building with the hate crimes unit at the Vancouver police department, for example — producing frequently asked questions on the law around hate speech to try to, again, reduce obstacles for people who want to be able to bring these complaints forward.

Also, our education work is key to this, working with younger people, trying to have these conversations in an age-appropriate way as early as possible so that we can, again, identify the issue in order to address it.

H. Sandhu: Thank you. Just a quick follow-up question about the hate speech online. The problem, the biggest challenge, is that some people have fake profiles, and it’s hard to pinpoint, but not realizing that when they are spewing this hate online, the person — whoever they are targeting — has kids, or they have friends or family. It impacts them all. So it’s kind of cyberbullying or cyber hate crime. Any work or any awareness about that? How can we address that?

Again, we’re adults, and we all learn and unlearn, and we all have biases. You see that it’s upsetting for the younger generations. I know the schools are doing a great job. So often, I get asked by teenagers, including my daughters, what can people in power do to address this? You know, it’s really taking a toll on some people’s mental health.

K. Govender: Yes, that’s an area that I’m very passionate about, including in my previous work before taking on this role. I did quite a bit of work on online hate, so it’s certainly a deep concern that I have.

There are some limitations as to the way the law stands right now in terms of how much of that is within provincial jurisdiction and how much is within federal jurisdiction. The federal regulation around online hate speech in the human rights context was repealed some years ago, so we actually have no protections written down in human rights law, provincially or federally, to tackle online hate. The Criminal Code applies, but there are some limitations, very important limitations, in how the Criminal Code applies.

We are thinking quite a bit about how we can start to chip away at that problem and perhaps carve out places that are within provincial jurisdiction that can make a difference on those issues. I will say that it’s very much present in my mind that as we build an online presence for this office and for my role as Human Rights Commissioner, we face quite a high level of abuse and vitriol on line. We’re also dealing with it in a very real, immediate way as we launch these projects and face some of that from that as well.

[3:30 p.m.]

G. Kyllo: Well, hi, Kasari. It’s good to see you. It’s been a few years, I think, since I was fortunate enough to be part of the interview team. Great presentation. You’re extremely articulate, and you’ve done a great job of laying out before the committee what your plan is.

Kasari, I’m just wondering. I think that back a few years ago, when we were doing our interviews, you’d indicated that you’d reached out to a number of the different other human rights commissioners across the province, and I believe there is an organization of which you are a part. Just wondering if you could share with us how the budget ask that you have of British Columbia compares to other jurisdictions based on the population. Certainly not indicating or in any way trying to tie us in that other provinces are doing a better job than us, but just if you could put into context for us how your funding ask is, as compared to other provinces across Canada.

K. Govender: Thank you for the question, Greg, and it’s great to see you as well, if only virtually.

To back up for a moment, we are a member of the Canadian Association of Statutory Human Rights Agencies, CASHRA for short, and that is the organization that Greg was referring to, which is all the human rights commissions from every jurisdiction in the country. As you know, B.C. was the only jurisdiction without a commission for some time, so our reappearance on the scene was a cause for celebration.

Before we’d even really formally launched, our deputy commissioner, in the role of building the operations of the office before I was hired, had done quite a bit of outreach to those other offices to learn about how they are built.

I think it’s important to note that we are unique as a human rights commission in the country. We’re unique for a few different reasons. One is that there’s only one other human rights commission in the country — that’s Ontario — that has an entirely systemic mandate. All the other commissions have quite an in-depth role in terms of managing individual complaints. So they’re a bit of apples and oranges in terms of comparison, and much of their resources go towards that triage function, which is the role that the previous human rights commission in B.C. played.

There are also a couple of other significant differences, including that other than the Northwest Territories, which operates in a very different context, we are the only one that’s set up as an independent officer of the Legislature. So those are the two differences that might be the most related to the funding differences. But we are, I think, fairly commensurate, given those differences, Ontario being our closest comparator. But, again, they’re not an independent office. They’re set up within the ministry of justice. So that’s a pretty key difference in terms of operations.

If we can try to control for some of that, I would say that we’re fairly on par with the way their spending is done, although I can’t scientifically say, controlling for those factors, but I can say that we did a comparison across the country. We also looked at international human rights commissions and tried to build the functions of the office and the structure of the office according to some of the best practices that we saw in human rights commissions around the world as well.

G. Kyllo: If I may, just as a bit of a follow-up.

Kasari, obviously Ontario’s population is far greater than ours. Do you have any context on what their annual budget is and how that might compare to B.C. based on the size of the population of each province?

K. Govender: I don’t have that information at my fingertips, although I’m happy to get it and provide that information in more detail.

G. Kyllo: Great. That would be helpful. Thank you.

L. Doerkson: A couple of questions for you. The first one is: once you’ve identified — and I can only appreciate how busy your office is right now — a human rights offence, what then? What can you do after you’ve identified it? I hear all the time that this has been done, this has come from the Human Rights Tribunal, but what then?

K. Govender: I want to be clear that our function is quite distinct from the Human Rights Tribunal. So when an individual has a complaint to bring, they may seek out legal services from the Human Rights Clinic or other clinical services across the province, and they will bring their complaint to the tribunal. We do not have any adjudicative role or mediation role in those complaints, nor do we have any role in enforcing settlement or enforcing the rulings of the tribunal.

[3:35 p.m.]

The interactions we do have with individual complaints are — a few of them. We are able to intervene in cases, which we’re just building our capacity to do at this point. So intervening is getting involved in a case as a third party to talk about the systemic implications of a dispute between two parties. Another way that we can get involved, or that our work is related to the work of the tribunal, is to identify patterns in tribunal cases and be able to address those through some of our tools. A good example of that is that there has been a rise in complaints at the tribunal around the intersection of disability rights and the mandatory masking policies, both the ones that were in effect with private entities and then the mandatory provincial masking policy that came into effect.

It was through identifying that trend at the tribunal that we said: “Okay, we need to take action on this.” We developed some policy guidance, as well as the poster that I mentioned that businesses could use to communicate to their public that masks are required but not with these certain exemptions. That has been continually cited. There was a news story now, today, where I was cited for that from a woman who has disabilities who was talking about why she can’t wear it and how she gets harassed for not wearing one.

Those are the ways that we can be involved with the tribunal. I don’t know if that answers your question, Lorne.

L. Doerkson: I guess it sort of referred to the poster that you’re talking about.

I forgot to say that I represent the Cariboo-Chilcotin, and of course, the southern part of my riding has been very actively anti-mask. They’ve been protesting on Saturdays and Sundays here. They’ve been, obviously…. I have seen that poster a lot around town. In fact, I have a copy of it in my desk here.

But it’s created quite a few issues for the RCMP as well, right? One of the comments on that poster refers to “taking me at my word for my inability to wear a mask.” So it’s taken a bit of an opportunity for fines, etc., and created a little bit more confusion. I wondered if the PHO, at the same time, could come out with consistent messages.

K. Govender: Yes, absolutely. We have been in contact with Dr. Bonnie Henry throughout the development of our work on COVID. She has been generous in her time in ensuring that we can be coordinated and come up with…. We can both inform the work of the other office as we roll out, of course, the massive health implications of this moment we’re in and the attendant human rights issues that have happened at the same time — the rise in hate, the rise in harassment of people with disabilities, the poverty issues, and so on. We’ve been able to coordinate that.

I apologize. There are a lot of birds outside my window. So if you hear that, that’s one of the risks of working from home.

So we have developed that message in accordance with the PHO’s office. I had that conversation before we developed the poster — in fact, before we developed the guidance and then before we developed the poster. It very much builds on Dr. Henry’s guidance, where she said exactly that you need to take people’s word for it. We do not want the police…. She used these words. She said: “You must take people’s word for it. They shouldn’t be required to provide proof.” Again, totally in accordance with what the PHO’s office has been saying.

L. Doerkson: It just brings question around the event of an RCMP officer trying to [inaudible recording] not wearing your mask when somebody holds up a poster from the B.C. human rights office saying: “I don’t have to prove that I don’t need to wear it.” I get what you’re saying. I’ve just had a number of questions around that here in 100 Mile House.

K. Govender: Well, thank you for sharing that. It’s a hard one. There’s not a perfect answer, in my mind, to whether we require proof from every single person who has a disability. That felt like more risk than risking that some anti-maskers might fall back on perhaps claiming that they have some disability-related reasons that they don’t have to wear the mask. That’s really what we are balancing. In the interests of the human rights of people with disabilities, we felt it was more important to value taking people at their word, knowing that we were running some risk that that would be abused.

[3:40 p.m.]

We’ve received some of the same comments, for sure. We’ve had lots of people call our office saying: “Thank you so much for this clarity. It’s made it so much easier that I can tell people and I can see this poster on the walls of the businesses that I go to.” But we’ve certainly had some people call us saying that it’s added to the confusion. Certainly the first group outweighs the second group, but I recognize that we had to do some balancing there.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our Deputy Chair has a question.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon, Kasari and Commissioner.

I wanted to ask about your budget. I know you had a way of explaining some of the funds that were put into this project and how it kind of was still sitting there. But more importantly, going ahead, if the budget is approved as presented by this committee…. You’ve proposed a budget for the next two years at the same level. Is that your intention?

K. Govender: Perhaps, actually, I could refer to you, Dianne, and I can add anything after you’ve had a moment to speak.

D. Buljat: The budget actually varies between fiscal years. The proposal for the coming fiscal year is matching the proposal that was made last October, 2019. It’s $6.815 million. The request for ’22-23 is $6.703 million, and the request for ’23-24 is $6.72 million. The consistent amount across all three fiscal years is the capital request, which is $35,000.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Okay. Just going back to that, I guess my question is…. Or you’ve confirmed that essentially, it’s going up and it’s slightly higher in this fiscal year and then down very slightly.

With the head count going up almost 40 percent…. I’m assuming that you’ve kind of divided things up in terms of the priorities, etc. I can imagine that it’s a very challenging question, but what do you define as success in terms of your goals, in terms of what you’re trying to do?

Obviously, it’s not a profit-driven organization. This is something that’s very much different than that. I guess the question, really, for not only ourselves but for future committees, is: what would be your definition of the key performance indicators?

I look at this chart in the back, on page 66 of your annual report. That’s just on evaluating human rights, but, I mean, that’s such a large part of it. How do you measure success with those somewhat esoteric…? They are. How do you get people understanding? I guess that’s the best way…. I’d be appreciative if you could provide any insight on that.

K. Govender: Thank you for this question. I think it’s a really important one, about evaluation.

We are putting a great deal of work and thought into this. For sure there are some esoteric aspects of rights enforcement, and it is difficult to measure huge societal change over time, but there are some important ways that we can boil that down to key performance indicators and also set up a system by which we could do this year over year.

Some of the change that we can see is quite concrete — for example, knowing that we saw a lack of information out in the world about domestic violence services and whether they were still serving women experiencing violence during COVID. Right at the beginning, Jennifer Charlesworth and I both identified how that would impact our mandates in different ways and joined forces to try to raise awareness and were very pleased to see the public health officer start including announcements about what services were available into her public health daily announcements.

That was just one example, and they were included on the Centre for Disease Control…. A concrete, small example, but there are some other concrete ways that we can start to see the change that we’re trying to make.

[3:45 p.m.]

In terms of the larger societal change, the baseline project that I spoke about is key to this. We are working to set up this project by which we do participatory community processes, coupled with surveys, coupled with a quite extensive literature review, to put together a report card of where we are in B.C. — what are the successes and what are the issues we’re facing? — based on what we’re collecting from all of these sources of information. That will be used both to communicate to the public that this is the state of human rights in the province — that will raise awareness and educate — but also to create a baseline by which we can measure our progress year over year as we roll out our initiatives.

We also have hired an outside evaluator to provide us with guidance to ensure that our evaluation is across the board about the specific projects that I’ve mentioned as well as, as you mentioned, strategic priorities — how we measure change and progress over time on these strategic priorities.

Those are some of the answers to your question. I hope that goes some way to answering it.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Okay. Thank you. I know that this isn’t an easy task. I was the Minister Responsible for Multiculturalism years back. For me, it was something, coming from the diverse background in British Columbia, seeing how the diversity is exponentially growing and the different cultures that are here…. Trying to get everybody on the same page to understand. Anyways. I don’t envy your challenge.

I do think about British Columbia…. Maybe you know this better than I do about other jurisdictions, but I do see that…. I don’t know if we have more diversity. Well, no. I know we have more diversity. The real question is, do we have very distinct challenges compared to other provinces? Maybe Ontario is the closest aligned, or maybe Quebec, a little bit, in terms of their ethnic mix and understanding.

Having grown up and spent my entire life as an immigrant in terms of arriving here, or my grandfather did…. But the fact that so many people migrated to the Okanagan…. By the way, I’m from Kelowna. But so many came, and it was very normal for us to have five or six different ethnicities working on our farm and understanding. Actually, it really opens up your eyes when you start to see people that are Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Slavic — you know, the whole spectrum. But it doesn’t come back to the challenges that we seem to face today.

Anyways. That’s maybe more of a comment. I just hope that we can land on some meaningful measurements — that we can suggest that we’ve made progress. It obviously sounds like you’re making progress in terms of the speed at which you’ve rolled things out, so thank you.

K. Govender: Thank you for that. I would agree that we have some significant issues here in B.C. that are unique, or at least at a higher level, than other provinces, including the rise of hate and white supremacy. We are one of the worst jurisdictions in terms of the statistical analysis of the rise of hate — particularly in the Lower Mainland, actually — as a province. We are particularly bad in terms of Indigenous missing and murdered women and girls. About a third of the cases of missing and murdered women and girls that have been recorded are from British Columbia.

These are some key issues that I think raise the urgency and raise the bar for us as a human rights commission in terms of what we’re trying to achieve and the motivation for why we’re trying to achieve it. It really does focus our gaze on ensuring that we are spending precious public dollars as well as devoting our energy and resources towards making real change.

We started with a theory of change. We’ve built process indicators, outcome indicators, output indicators. We really have a lot of evaluation expertise in our team. I think that five of the six of our senior team have all run organizations and run evaluation initiatives in those organizations. We’ve put a real focus on ensuring that we can understand if what we’re doing is making a difference and then, if not, changing our policies as we go.

In fact, we built it into the guiding principles of our organization that we’re going to be bold. And in recognizing that we are going to be bold, we recognize that we’re going to make mistakes and we need to learn from those mistakes. So we built it into the fabric of our organization.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you.

We have another question from Mr. Kyllo.

[3:50 p.m.]

G. Kyllo: Kasari, I don’t want to add too much work to your schedule, but when you’re looking to report back to us on the comparative with Ontario as an example, are you able to provide us…? I appreciate it’s outside of your budgetary requirement, but the tribunal itself in British Columbia. I think in Ontario, is it not the commission and the tribunal are together as one organization?

K. Govender: No, not in Ontario, but in every other province, they are. I mean, they’re separate organizations, but they have an overlapping function in terms of the individual complaints. Often the commission is the one taking the complaints. They’re the ones doing triage. Some provinces, they’re the ones doing settlement and mediation. The tribunal is only doing the actual adjudication, and some provinces, it’s all wrapped into one. Ontario — it’s the only province that they are entirely separate like ours.

G. Kyllo: Okay, I guess if you were able to provide that comparative, if you could include what the budget is in B.C. for the tribunal just to put some context so it would be easier to do that comparison.

K. Govender: Sure. So the budget of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal versus the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal?

G. Kyllo: Yes. As well as the commission offices.

K. Govender: Okay. Absolutely. Thank you.

J. Routledge (Chair): Lorne, you have a question.

L. Doerkson: Yes. Pardon my confusion. There are two separate offices. Obviously, you don’t represent the Human Rights Tribunal.

K. Govender: That’s right.

L. Doerkson: Thank you. That’s all I needed to know. I’m a new MLA. That was a straight, over-the-plate one for you.

K. Govender: No problem. Yes. Entirely separate entities.

Again, to further the comparison around Ontario, they are separate entities, but both within government, as opposed to an independent office. They share many resources with government, whereas, of course, we do not. We have all our own systems and operations as part of that.

L. Doerkson: Perhaps that’s a question for the Chair, as well, but how long will it take to get those comparisons?

K. Govender: Perhaps we can work with the Clerk’s office to ensure that we get that to you in a timely way so that you can include any considerations in your deliberations.

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay, I’m not seeing any other questions. Commissioner, I really want to thank you for your time, and I really want to thank you on behalf of the committee for your leadership in the area of human rights and wish you well with what you’re engaging in. It’s really, really important work. Thank you.

K. Govender: Thank you so much.

J. Routledge (Chair): That draws our meeting today to a conclusion. I would ask for a motion to adjourn. Looks like we’ve got seconders as well.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 3:53 p.m.