The committee met at 8:04 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): This is a continuation of the an­nual review of the statutory officers of British Columbia — three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budgetary estimates for fiscal 2022-2023.

[8:05 a.m.]

I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the unceded, traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, today known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.

Our first presenter for today is Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth, Representative for Children and Youth.

Over to you, Dr. Charlesworth.

Review of Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE REPRESENTATIVE
FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

J. Charlesworth: Good morning. Thank you so much.

I’m pleased today to once again have the opportunity to appear before the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. How beautiful it is to be here in person.

Before I proceed, I’d like to just acknowledge the terri­tories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ people — the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations — and the territories that I come from, the W̱SÁNEĆ territories, just north of here. I’m grateful to the keepers of these lands and for holding us in such tumultuous times.

I’d also like to begin by acknowledging the tremendous pain that so many B.C. citizens are experiencing at this time as a result of the catastrophic weather events of the past week and to thank you, as Members of the Legislative Assembly, for the work that you’re doing to try and support communities.

I know, too, that several of you have been or are steeped in agricultural work and serve communities that have been deeply impacted. This must be particularly devastating for you, and I thank you for the work that you’re doing to support your communities.

I’d like to take a moment to introduce my colleagues that are joining me today. Alan Markwart, whom you will know. He’s been the deputy representative for some time. More on that a little bit later. He is joining me to support this process.

Dianne Buljat, who is the chief financial officer not only for us but also for the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. You will be seeing more of her today as we proceed. Also, Jeff Rud, who is the executive director of communications and knowledge mobilization. Joining us on the screen is Pippa Rowcliffe, who is the deputy representative for reviews, investigations and corporate services.

Perhaps Samantha Cocker will be joining us, as well, who’s the deputy representative for…. Well, she will be the deputy representative for individual advocacy and systemic advocacy. More to that in a few minutes.

Let’s talk about the budget request. As members will have seen in our written submission, my office is requesting an operating budget of $10.982 million for fiscal year 2022-23. This request represents a net increase of $333,000, or 3.1 percent, over our previously approved operating budget.

This increase would fund one additional FTE, an investigations analyst, to help deal with the continuing dramatic increase in the number of injuries and deaths of children and youth that are reported to the office. It would also allow us to absorb inflationary costs that are unavoidable, including an expected salary increase of 2 percent for both excluded management and schedule A staff in 2022; the elimination of salary grid 14 in April of 2020, which affected four of our employees; and a 2.5 percent increase in office lease costs.

I will go into more detail on the caseload pressures shortly that necessitate this request, but first I want to provide the committee with some context of our work and the reorganization that’s underway in the RCY.

Our office’s role and jurisdiction are set out, as you know, in the Representative for Children and Youth Act and include three primary statutory functions. In summary, these are providing individual advocacy for children, youth, young adults and their families; monitoring, reviewing, auditing and conducting research on the provision of designated services to children and youth; and reviewing, investigating and reporting on the critical injuries and deaths of children in receipt of reviewable services.

I am three years into this role and have now spent more time leading in a pandemic than leading outside of it. I have taken time to review our work, past and present; our impact; and what is being called for, based on diverse evidence. We’ve tapped into many learnings from the pandemic.

We have developed a clear vision and direction — we call it our paddling forward plan — and as form follows function, we are undertaking a modest restructuring of the functions and reporting relationships of our teams. This will better enable us to address our priority areas for action and to improve alignment and coordination and better balance the scope and responsibilities for our two deputy representatives.

These changes are designed to make the RCY more ef­fective in advocating for children, youth, young adults and families and encouraging improvements to British Columbia’s child-, youth- and young adult–serving systems.

[8:10 a.m.]

Under our revised structure, which will be fully in place by early in the new year, Deputy Representative Samantha Cocker will be responsible for two teams, including what we are now calling individual advocacy and First Nations, Métis and Inuit engagement. The engagement this team will take on includes activities such as youth and community outreach and the continuing development and implementation of an engagement strategy and working agreements with First Nations, Métis and urban Indigenous organizations and entities.

The other team under Samantha’s leadership will be what we call systemic advocacy and First Nations, Métis and Inuit research. Systemic advocacy is the term we are now using for the RCY monitoring function that is de­scribed in our act. The First Nations, Métis and Inuit research function also involves systemic advocacy, with a sole focus on designated services for Indigenous children and families.

Our other deputy representative, Pippa Rowcliffe, will be responsible for the following teams: reviews and investigations, which I’ll go into detail in a bit, and corporate shared services, which is hosted by the RCY and which provides finance, human resources, information technology and privacy support services to both RCY and the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

We are also in the process of developing a knowledge mobilization component at the RCY. This is new for us, and I’m very excited about it. This will promote the dissemination of learnings from our research, investigations and reports to help advance improvements to services and practices. Responsibility for that function will be held by our communications team, led by Jeff. Under the new structure, the executive director of communications and knowledge mobilization will report directly to me.

I am really excited about the knowledge mobilization, and we’ve already begun the work. For example, to spread information about our April report on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, we’re in the final stages of creating a video featuring our external researcher from that project, who offers valuable and accessible perspectives as somebody who has FASD.

We’re also working on a short, plain-language version of the report that will help those working with children and youth with FASD to better understand how they can be of service, and we’ve already delivered a number of workshops, including to school counsellors and school personnel, on FASD and how they can be more attentive to the children in their classrooms.

To spread knowledge from our June report, Skye’s Legacy, we’re working to assist MCFD in engaging its leaders and staff in learning about the importance of belonging for children and youth, particularly for Indigenous children and youth, and how they can foster that belonging.

All the changes I’ve outlined above will help to focus RCY’s work as we address the following priority areas during the final two years of what I hope will be my first term, not my last term.

Early years and families. How can early interventions help the healthy development of young children and keep families safely together? Too often I’m seeing 16-, 17-, 18-​year-olds come before us with critical injuries and deaths. We can see that if interventions had been happening for their families and those little ones in the early years, we’d be in a much better state.

Next priority is children and youth with support needs and families, advocating for access and equity in supports for families whose children have special needs.

The third area is complex lives. We see so many children and youth who are dealing with myriad challenges — mental health, substance use, housing instability, developmental challenges. How can we best advocate for a whole-system approach to ensure they are cared for and that a sense of belonging is fostered for them?

The fourth area is residential care. When children and youth can’t live in a family home, we have to advocate for improvement toward a residential services system that supports connection and belonging — again, effective treatment, rather than adding to their trauma.

The fifth area is youth and young adult transitions. You heard a lot about this when you were doing your budget consultations. In the absence of family privilege, sufficient supports must be provided along the way for young people at this key transitional stage in their lives.

The next area is drug toxicity and substance use. We will continue to advocate for effective harm reduction and treatment options for young people.

The next area is mental health and our focusing on the COVID-related impacts on mental health and enhancing B.C.’s voluntary system of care.

There are other areas, but those are the areas where we’re focusing a tremendous amount of care and attention.

[8:15 a.m.]

Shifting from our priorities, I want to speak about our reviews and investigations, because that’s at the heart of one of our budget requests. This is the area of RCY’s work most relevant to our current budget request. As mentioned, there has been a trend of consistent and significant increases in the number of in-mandate critical injuries reported to RCY over the past several years, resulting in an often overwhelming net increase. Based on the first six months of ’21-22….

[Interruption.]

Siri has a view about things, clearly. She wants to help — exactly. Goodbye, Siri. I often need Siri’s help, but not right now.

As mentioned, there’s been a considerable increase, and in the first six months of ’21-22, we’re projecting a 34 percent increase in such reports during this past year. That means the number of these reports will have nearly tripled since 2016-17, to a projected 2,360 this fiscal year. In fact, there were more in-mandate deaths and critical injuries reported during the first half of this fiscal year, 1,180, than there were for the entire fiscal year just three years ago, 1,146.

Now, where do these increases come from? They are likely due, in large part, to better reporting by MCFD services, but they are also attributable to an overall increase in critical injuries and deaths, mostly critical injuries, attributable to such factors as the opioid crisis and the toxic drug supply, impacts of the pandemic on mental health, increased sexual exploitation and violence, and gang-related activity. We’re seeing increases in all of those areas.

Now, we expect even greater growth in these reports in the coming months. Reporting of critical injuries and deaths from health authorities in relation to mental health and substance use services for children and youth, which is required by law in our legislation, is just beginning, after being delayed by what I will characterize as resistance from health authorities. We’ve reported to you before that they were supposed to be reporting, and we thought that they were going to be reporting before now. We’re still trying to make that work, and I can happily say that we have been making progress in the last few weeks.

In addition, a recent Ombudsman recommendation for MCFD youth custody services is requiring reporting in­stances of seclusion, of the use of seclusion, to RCY. That could add a small amount, a modest amount, to the workload in this area — but clearly an important area.

Earlier in the current fiscal year, as approved by this committee, we used some of the savings from the closure of our Burnaby office to fund the addition of an investigations analyst to help ease the workload that had risen up to last fiscal year, instead of asking you for additional funding.

However, as noted, we’ve experienced yet another very substantial increase, a projected 34 percent, in reports this fiscal year. So we’ve also added an additional investigations analyst, which has been funded from temporary pandemic-related savings in, for example, travel. We’re trying to be creative, but ongoing funding for that temporary position is what we’re asking you for so that we can make that a permanent position.

The same opportunity as we had last year for reallocating some of our savings isn’t going to be available. As office space–related costs…. Burnaby is gone. We don’t have another office to close, and we can’t assume and rely on continuing pandemic-related underexpenditures as a means of underwriting the costs of addressing these service pressures.

As our written budget request details, the pressures continue to mount on this team, and we require more capacity. As you can appreciate, we see 400 cases per month. That’s a tremendous toll, and we have to make sure that we’re taking care of staff who are dealing with that kind of trauma as well.

I must emphasize that every child’s or youth’s critical injury or death is deserving of review by our office. It’s not like I can say we’re going to reduce the number of cases that we look at. While we’re constantly searching for efficiencies and re-evaluating the way we do our work, there is no magic solution to address those massive increases in volume.

To give you a sense, we have six permanent and one temporary investigative analyst position. They screen, as I said, more than 400 reports from MCFD every month and conduct initial reviews on our in-mandate reports. They also conduct comprehensive case reviews and undertake full investigations on highly complex cases as well as conducting other project-related work.

[8:20 a.m.]

In addition to that, let me tell you what this team is going to be working on over this next period of time, be­cause they also do project-based work. They’re going to be releasing a special report on child participation in hearing the voice of the child and child protection and family law proceedings. They’re preparing an aggregate report on critical injuries and deaths in relation to girls with complex needs. Most of those are Indigenous girls.

They’re developing a niche report on intimate partner violence experienced by female identifying in gender-diverse youth. We’re seeing an increase in the number of young girls that are being preyed upon by much older partners and experiencing intimate partner violence.

They’re beginning an aggregate review to better understand the experiences of children in out-of-care and extended family placements, of which there are well over 1,000, and initiating a new investigation report. So those are our reviews and investigations.

Just to give you some update on our individual advocacy and First Nations, Métis and Inuit engagement, after three consecutive years of stability in volumes, the total number of new individual advocacy cases declined by 14 percent last fiscal. Decline was heightened in the early months of the pandemic, but we’ve experienced a slow recovery since then. Projections based on the first half of this fiscal year indicate that the total number of new advocacy cases will approach previous recent yearly levels of around 1,500.

A slight decline in the volume of individual advocacy cases has not, unfortunately, translated into an equivalent reduction in the workload. That’s because of the complexity, which I’ve brought before this committee before. An indicator, for example, of that complexity is that the number of cases with more than nine months’ advocacy in­volvement has more than doubled in the last five years, and many of our cases involve multiple service lines and require multiple engagements with service providers.

Many of our files we call one file, but it could have multiple children, and approximately a quarter of our files have two or more children involved. So that number is significantly higher when we start to take a look at children.

Adding to this complexity is the influence of the federal act, An Act Respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis Children and Families on rights and decision-making with respect to Indigenous children and youth. As nations and communities establish their own laws and Indigenous governing bodies in order to resume jurisdiction over child welfare, there are different interpretations on best interests of the child, the individual rights of the child, the collective rights of the community, and all of those need to be thoughtfully considered and navigated.

These situations typically take a great deal of time of not only the advocates, the managers, the executive director and myself. To support RCY staff to undertake this highly complex advocacy work in a way that’s aligned with what we call our six R’s — values of relationship, respect, reciprocity, responsiveness and repair — the RCY has, thanks to you and the approval of reallocating the Burnaby office savings, hired a knowledge-keeper, Yux’wey’lupton, who among other things is developing a roster of Elders and matriarchs who may be called in to assist advocates in community decision-making and planning processes.

As an aside, Yux’wey’lupton is the son of Butch Dick, who you in the Legislative Assembly know so well. We are very blessed to be working with Yux’wey’lupton.

Our office has also retained legal counsel with specialized expertise in Indigenous child welfare and the federal act, and most of our RCY staff have recently completed Wrapping our Ways Around Them: Indigenous Commun­ities and Child Welfare training, to enhance our capacity to serve and support Indigenous children in the context of their family, community and culture.

Our advocacy jurisdiction in relation to young adults also continues to expand, which will add to our future workload in this area. Previously, as you know, our young adult advocacy was limited to helping those between the ages of 19 and 23, inclusive, in receipt of or eligible for community living services.

Then changes in July of 2019 expanded the jurisdiction to include young adults who are receiving agreements with young adults or in the tuition waiver program. And a recent amendment that’s been passed in the Legislative Assembly, which we are anticipating proclamation in February, will increase the range of eligible young adults to under the age of 27. That’s a huge and exciting change. But this change will increase the population of young people that are eligible for our advocacy services by about 60 percent.

[8:25 a.m.]

With another expansion of the young adult advocacy mandate on the near horizon, together with an easing of the constraints in the pandemic, the advocacy team is developing an assertive approach to outreach and engagement, to engage youth and community service providers and promote greater awareness of the availability and the scope of our advocacy services. These will be supported by the First Nations, Métis and Inuit engagement team as well. We will be welcoming a new youth community en­gagement coordinator onto that team shortly also.

The advocacy team will also be undertaking ongoing work on the children and youth with support needs. We’ve issued three reports in my tenure, and they will be doing an overview of what progress has been made with respect to CYSN services and identifying areas for continued improvement.

Our third area of systemic advocacy in First Nations, Métis and Inuit research will monitor, review, audit and conduct research on the provision of government-funded designated services in a number of areas. In the coming months, we will be releasing materials in relation to our multi-year qualitative research project on quality planning for children in care, identifying best practices and promoting improvements to planning, with particular attention to belonging, including connection to culture and planning for transitions to adulthood.

We’ll be releasing an overarching report on the social and economic benefits of more successfully keeping children and families safely together, to be followed by shorter topic-specific reports about opportunities to change trajectories for young children and families in need of support. We’re developing and beginning implementation of a plan to review and conduct topic-specific research in relation to identified concerns about residential services for children and youth. That’s an area that’s near and dear to Alan’s and my heart. We’ve been working on it for a very long time.

We’re developing a template for and implementing comprehensive reviews of government’s responses to previous RCY recommendations to see what’s taking. How are things going? We’re going to take a look at four areas: children and youth mental health services, youth substance use and harm reduction services, services for children and youth with support needs, and services for youth transitioning from care to adulthood.

We are also releasing two commissioned reports by Simon Fraser University’s Children’s Health Policy Centre — one on mental health needs of children in care and the other on mental health needs of children and youth with support needs, because those are complex areas that need better coordination. We’ll be releasing two commissioned reports — another area I’m very excited about, because it’s new for us — by UBC’s Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre. That’s quite the acronym. One is on the needs of gender-minority youth and the other on the needs of sexual-minority youth.

Our First Nations, Métis and Inuit research team will be releasing a commissioned special report, by the Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy, about the equitability and adequacy of funding for First Nations child and family services in B.C., and they’re preparing a report on Roots, the MCFD program for Indigenous children in care that works to connect, restore and preserve their identity and sense of belonging in connection to families. It’s also called Family Finders or Family Connections. It’s to connect to Indigenous community, heritage, culture, families and traditions.

Those are our program areas. I’ll just briefly talk about what we’ve been doing with respect to the way in which we do our work in the context of the pandemic. Another key area of significant change…. I appreciate that you were enthusiastic for us when we closed the Burnaby office, re­purposed and started to decentralize. Well, we’re got some more news. The pandemic has dramatically accelerated the plans that we had been gradually moving towards, and we have moved more quickly to a greater degree of remote working arrangements and decentralization of staffing. The decentralization is the big thing.

With the onset of the pandemic, as you know, remote work arrangements were put in place, and we were very, very pleased with the way in which staff stepped up. There was no drop in productivity, performance or engagement. We have, as you know, made that an option, on a permanent basis, for people. It’s entirely voluntary, but it is available for almost all operational staff. Most recently we’ve extended that out to some executive-level positions as well.

[8:30 a.m.]

Back then, when we decided to do that, we decentralized to one of four hub areas: Kelowna, Prince George, Burnaby or Lower Mainland and Victoria. What we have decided to do is extend that even further. What we’ve done is to enhance those flexible work arrangements and the decentralization to any area. We will be extending it to any area in which there’s a Service B.C. office or a local ministry office.

We think that that’s going to help us tremendously with respect to recruitment, because there are many people, particularly Indigenous folks, who do not want to leave their community. And why would we ask them to, if one of the things that’s important for us is belonging to culture and community? We think — in fact, it has already proven to be the case — that we are more successful in recruiting in that area.

Also, for many people who are finding that the move from a smaller community into these urban areas would have been prohibitive in terms of housing, this is opening up the possibility there. Interestingly, we’ve also had several staff move out of urban areas into smaller communities because they’ve been able to afford housing. It’s a win-win-win all around. We think that these changes will enhance and diversify RCY staff recruitment. This is another area of importance for us. We think that it will also help with staff retention over the long term.

While remote and decentralized arrangements may result in some office cost savings, there are offsetting costs that we need to account for, online engagement, enhancing our capacity there — we have people that are assisting us to enhance our capacity on online engagement internally and externally — as well as travel costs, because we will want to bring people together for team meetings, annual training, etc. We know that there are going to be some significant costs associated with that, but they will be more than offset by other savings.

Our Prince George office. We will maintain that office, that physical site, in addition to our Victoria office. Most staff there have chosen to work in the office anyway, and they also welcome walk-ins from that smaller community.

To give you a sense, our lease for the RCY’s Victoria office continues to 2027. It’s actually a very good rate. It seems likely that even with a return to normal operations, most Victoria staff will actually continue to work remotely, either full- or part-time. That office was oversubscribed previously, with many, many positions — over 30 percent of our positions — double-bunked, if you will. This will allow us to have individual offices for those who are in the office on a regular basis. But if we are still oversubscribed or if we have more space, then we’ll take a look at opportunities for sharing space with other organizations.

I’ll conclude my presentation here by noting that in addition to the modest operating increase we seek, we’re requesting a status quo capital budget of $50,000.

In 2021, my office returned a surplus of $441,460 from our operating budget, which was principally related to pandemic-related savings in travel as well as in office and business expenses because we weren’t hosting events or conducting in-person training. Although there’s been a partial restoration of these operating costs in recent weeks — in fact, I spent a week up in Prince George, along with Samantha and Pippa, just recently — we do expect a surplus this year as well. We won’t be back to the 200 or so events that I have typically done in the past.

Our budget request going forward, though, assumes there will be a return to relatively normal operating circumstances and consequent expenditures next fiscal year, as we hope the impact of the pandemic eases. Although that assumption might be somewhat uncertain, workload pressures and inflationary costs are far more certain.

Before I close, I’d like to ask the committee to join me in honouring Alan Markwart, who recently retired from the deputy rep position. He supported us through one more budget submission, but this will be his last one before handing the baton over to Pippa Rowcliffe.

Alan and I have worked together three times over our many decades — I’m over four decades; I think you’re close to five decades — in this field. I’m deeply grateful for his wisdom, experience and dry humour — much needed in this work. He has agreed to stay with us on a part-time basis to support me in the legislative review, which we must do by statute in this next year, and to work on several initiatives that are near and dear to our hearts, as I mentioned — residential being one of them.

That concludes my presentation. I welcome your questions.

[8:35 a.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Jennifer.

Thank you, Alan, for your decades of work and for laying the groundwork for this very important advocacy. Thank you for agreeing to transition out. I think that will be a big help.

I will invite committee members to ask questions.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Dr. Charlesworth, that was excellent. I have to say that a few years back, I served on the committee to re-appoint the lead as the representative. I have to say that your enthusiasm towards the file is something that I hadn’t seen.

I say that meaning…. I don’t know how you define success. That actually is, really, my question. It sounds to me like we make a little bit of progress in one area, and we still…. The better reporting information is finding that there are these things.

I’m concerned by the comment about the conflict with the federal act on First Nations, Inuit and Métis in terms of: are we working, on a national basis, in step, or have we got room to improve there?

I would like to know how you define success. You talked about bringing in the aging-out young adults, etc., and how we do that. I guess I’m just trying to think about what your office or staff needs to make this so that, hopefully, there are improvements that are clearly measurable and that people look at with the satisfaction that we are reducing the issues around children. You mentioned so many things. Frankly, I don’t know where to start. Anyway, how would you measure, in your terms, success?

J. Charlesworth: Thank you for acknowledging my passion and enthusiasm for the work. This is, for me, sacred work. I feel very called to it, and I’m deeply grateful to be able to serve.

Let’s talk about the federal act. I don’t want to characterize it in any way, shape or form as a conflict. What it is…. It’s an evolution. The federal act has created enabling provisions to allow for communities to create what are called Indigenous governing bodies and to restore their traditional laws for child well-being.

What that means, though, is that the colonial system, which has been in place, has to shift. There are many different things that we don’t have experience with and that we’re trying to figure out, and there are many situations that are just not that simple.

For example, many children have multiple identities and multiple cultural connections. How does that factor in? There are many children who have been raised in care and whose communities want them back. But their voices are also important, to be heard, because they might be in a situation where they very much identify with an urban environment, and they’re reluctant to go back into their community in a rural environment.

None of these are impossible or deal-breakers, but they do require us to be sensitive to how best to be in this transitional space as nations resume jurisdiction. It’s more about trying to get very creative about bringing people together, having the difficult conversations, trying to keep the child at the centre, but also recognizing that belonging really matters. Their belonging to culture and community is important.

I just wanted to clarify that it’s just messy, because it’s brand new for us, and we’re trying to dismantle systems of colonial oppression that have existed for a very long time. We’re trying to figure out how to do that, in a good way, while still keeping the voices of children centred. That’s one thing.

The other thing is how we measure success. What a great question. I think one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about is that as an office, we can create recommendations that are very easily measured. For example, decrease the wait time for this assessment from three months to one month — measurable, right? Or increase the number of children admitted to this program from 1,000 to 2,000, something along those lines.

[8:40 a.m.]

The problem is those are tinkering at the edges of systems that might, in themselves, be fundamentally flawed. A good example is the children and youth with support needs area, where we could ask specific recommendations, easy to measure, but fundamentally, that whole area of practice is a patchwork quilt, and it’s discriminatory. There are thousands and thousands of children that aren’t getting anything.

That’s when we start to think about: how do we achieve systemic change, deeper change, underneath the surface, that’s actually shifting the experience for children and youth?

While certain recommendations are easy to measure, the kinds of system changes that we’re talking about are more difficult. That’s an area that we’re going to be working on. Pippa has tremendous experience and is going to be bringing that in.

So trying to figure out: how is it that we actually measure the deeper change, on the ground, in the lives of children and youth? We’re doing some comprehensive re­views, as well, going back to children and youth to say: “Has it changed for you? Has it gotten better, for example, as a youth transitioning into adulthood? Is it different for you, in terms of the preparation you’ve received?” That’s how we’ll start to measure whether there are some fundamental shifts.

The youth transitions — a huge area. I’m actually very encouraged by many of the things that I’m hearing coming out of the ministry. There’s some tremendous advocacy going on, so I remain hopeful that we’re actually going to see that. That, actually, is an important area for us to measure. It’s actually a little bit easier than some areas.

It’s like: what’s the percentage of young people transitioning into adulthood that have had a transition planned from the time they were 16 on? Is it meaningful to that young person? Are they getting the kinds of supports, through agreements with the young adults tuition waiver program…? Are they getting access to the treatment and rehab and assessments that they need?

Sorry. That was very long-winded. I hope that was helpful.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): A very tough job. So thank you.

G. Lore: Thank you, Dr. Charlesworth.

A couple of comments and then a bit of a question. First, thank you to your whole team for the work that you do for kids in this province. I want to acknowledge what seems like creativity and nimbleness and seeking the opportunities in the pandemic to make your office and team work — for those who work for you, for the work that you do, for the kids that you serve. I also see that nimbleness and enthusiasm in figuring out how to best do this work with some of the changes that you’ve made.

A little bit following up on your answer and my colleague’s question. I recognize the challenge of measurables in this field.

To your point about the deeper work, sometimes that deeper work exposes more challenges. More critical incidents reported to you might be good news, not bad news, not because it’s creating more or more has happened but you know more. I see the challenge there. Thank you for thinking deeply about measurables that are actually getting at children’s well-being and lives.

The one thing that stuck out for me, just reading the budget, was the consistency of the capital budget. It’s been $50,000 for the last six years. I just wonder if you could speak briefly to the consistency of that, if the needs haven’t increased or if it’s just been an amount that’s worked.

J. Charlesworth: A good question.

A. Markwart: The short answer is that it works. Probably the major project we had a couple of years ago was a revamping of our internal information system, which is known as CITAR. We managed to do that quite efficiently. The costs were able to be absorbed. So we’ve managed.

M. Starchuk: Thank you, Dr. Charlesworth.

I, too, do not like Siri. I come from a city called Surrey, and you have no idea what complications that brings forward.

[8:45 a.m.]

We heard, in the presentations that were given to us as we travelled all over, about that section of youth that are aging out and the stories that they gave us and not being prepared. So when you said, “Starting that plan at 16,” that is a great idea, moving forward.

My one question is…. When you talked about the tripling of cases, you said it was due to better reporting. Could you just expand on that?

J. Charlesworth: Absolutely. One of the things that our team has worked really hard at, with Ministry of Children and Family Development, is, I would say, two things. One, getting really clear about what we mean by a critical injury or an injury, particularly injury — death is pretty clear — and when things should be reported to us. So there’s a greater understanding and knowledge about what does constitute a reportable circumstance and then how it should be reported to us.

The other thing is…. There has been quite a bit of fear about our office, over time. We’ve worked really, really hard to build trust, so that when people report, they un­derstand that we are using this not to be the watchdog, to kind of snap at people, but rather, that this is vitally important information, because if we don’t understand what’s happening to children, if we don’t understand the patterns and the trends, as Grace mentioned, then we don’t know what’s out there that needs to be tended to, so we can’t shine the light on those cracks and those crevices of those dark spots that need to be attended to.

The ministry and ourselves have worked really closely to enhance that trust and to enhance the understanding and to help people to know why it’s so important to report, and that’s one of the reasons that we’re getting that increased reporting.

Another area is that we did, several years ago, add an area of critical injury that we call emotional harm. That pertains to a life-altering loss or harm, a breakdown of trust. That has primarily been associated with the loss of loved ones because of the toxic drug supply and what we call caregiver mistreatment. So children that are being harmed by those very people that they’re supposed to be cared for by — foster parents and staff residential workers. That area has grown as well. So getting clearer about the provisions there has meant that we’ve got more reports.

I hope that answers your question.

P. Alexis: I echo my colleague’s comments, with respect to enthusiasm. We obviously have the right person in charge right now. So thank you for that.

A question — I’m just curious — regarding the staffers in Prince George largely wanting to be in person as op­posed to, perhaps, those in larger centres, who are working in a hybrid model. Can you tell me a little bit about that? I want to understand what goes on regionally.

J. Charlesworth: I wouldn’t characterize it as a trend. It’s a pretty small office, for one. But I wouldn’t characterize it so much as a regional difference as just personal preference.

The staff there who want to remain in the office are very clear: they’re advocates. One of the members of that team is actually acting as our reviews and investigations executive director. They are working really hard to make sure that there is a good separation of work and the heaviness of their work and their workplace. So that’s a choice there.

Interjection.

J. Charlesworth: Yes. Well, actually, that’s a very good point.

Alan just said that the commute in Prince George is a lot less, whereas, we actually have had some advocates who were working in our Burnaby office that were commuting an hour and a half each way. So for us, they’ve been like: “Oh my goodness.” We’ve given them a gift by saying they can work from home. I think that does make a difference. That’s a really good point.

P. Alexis: Can I ask one further question? What’s the breakdown between men and women in your organization?

J. Charlesworth: We actually have that information for you.

A. Markwart: It’s 83 percent women. That was the last I heard.

J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions from the committee?

[8:50 a.m.]

Well, not seeing any questions, on behalf of the committee, Jennifer, I’d like to thank you and your staff for the work you do. Your description of your work as the Representative for Children and Youth is very eloquent — the way you describe your work, the importance of your work and your connection with that work. I’m struck by your reference to it being sacred work.

I’m also struck by your pointing out that a big part of what you need to do is create trust, and that trust creates workload. That’s an important and unavoidable connection. Thank you for that.

Again, Alan, thank you. I wish you well. I wish you a rich and enjoyable retirement. Thank you for all you have done.

A. Markwart: Thank you.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you.

J. Routledge (Chair): We will take a ten-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 8:51 a.m. to 9:01 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): This is the continuation of the annual review of the statutory officers of British Columbia — three-year rolling service plans, annual reports and budgetary estimates.

Next we will hear from the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

Kasari, take it away.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Thank you. Such a pleasure to be here in person with all of you and to see you live and in person here. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here and to present about our office and what we have been up to the last little while, as well as presenting our annual budget, going forward.

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that we gather here today on the unceded and ancestral territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking peoples, including the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations.

As a descendant of migrants and settlers, I recognize my office’s obligation to work continuously to repair the harms perpetuated against Indigenous peoples presently and historically. I’m going to talk further on this commitment in just a moment.

I want to acknowledge, as well, that many British Columbians have been impacted by the floods and the storms that have ravaged southern parts of our province. I’m grateful to those of you who have friends, families and communities who are impacted by these devastating events and are still able to join us today. Thank you for that.

I am joined today by my colleagues Stephanie Garrett, deputy commissioner, and Dianne Buljat, chief financial officer.

Before you, you’ll find our annual report and service plan, as well as our budget, including a budget memo submission and financials. Our budgetary ask, as you may have seen, is $6.089 million in operating and $35,000 in capital for 2022-23, which is in line with the recommendations of this committee in the February 2021 Annual Review of the Budget of Statutory Offices.

You will also find in your materials a slide deck to accompany these remarks. You’re welcome to follow along there, if you’d like.

In my time with you today, I will take you through our impact evaluation framework, including my office’s key deliverables, and share how the activities of the last year fit into that plan. I will then return to the budget request to provide more detail before responding to any questions you may have.

As I mentioned last time I appeared before you, we have been developing an impact evaluation framework, which we are in the process of finalizing. You can see this framework detailed in our annual report.

Monitoring, evaluation and continuous improvement are embedded into each stage of our development as an organization. The impact evaluation framework sets the standards by which my office measures our work to ensure we are headed in the right direction and to help us course-correct as necessary. As such, each deliverable shapes our work and guides the way forward. That’s why I want to share them with you today.

There are five key deliverables that we have outlined in our evaluation plan. I will discuss key progress that we’ve made under each area and what work we foresee for the year ahead. I will then shine a spotlight on a couple of key projects which deserve a more in-depth overview before this committee. I will end with an overview of our budget submission.

[9:05 a.m.]

There is complexity in evaluating human rights work. Creating meaningful progress on human rights issues re­quires collaboration, sustained commitment and time. Further, because of the sensitive nature of this work, process can be as important as outcome.

Our evaluation framework recognizes and aims to take account for this complexity. That’s why our first deliverable relates to the cultivation and maintenance of respectful and accountable relationships. In the short term, this means that stakeholders will increasingly trust BCOHRC and see themselves reflected in the office’s work.

A key aspect of our work here is our Indigenous engagement strategy. With the support of our geographically diverse engagement team, I have been meeting with the leadership of Indigenous nations and organizations across the province, from Taku River Tlingit First Nation to Ktunaxa Nation. Over the course of my five-year term as commissioner, we aim to meet with representatives from every First Nation in B.C.

I am grateful for the openness that we have been met with by every First Nation in sharing their experiences and priorities within their communities with us. We have heard, for example, about inadequate social assistance rates, the disproportionate impact of the child protection system, the systemic racism in the criminal justice system and more. We heard, too, about the action that many communities are taking to redress these issues and hope for a better future.

In June, I sat with Councillor Justin Gottfriedson, who is a band council member from Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc. During that meeting — this was shortly after the discovery of the 215 children buried at Kamloops Residential School — Councillor Gottfriedson shared that alongside the grief of the community, he felt a sense of hope stemming from how the conversation was shifting quickly in response to the discovery. He was optimistic that settlers were waking up and wanting to learn more and that, as a result, things would start to change.

His comment reminded me that hope is a radical act in times like these, that holding this optimism is not a matter of turning our faces away from the pain, inequities and injustices around us but rather a means of facing them head-on. It’s a way of re-imagining our world.

It is with this vision in mind that we prioritize the continuous work of relationship-building and relationship ac­countability as an act of reconciliation, of decolonization and as a key measure of our work. With this same commitment in mind, we have engaged with thousands of British Columbians across numerous platforms, including social media, calls and emails to our office, public events, earned media, a public opinion poll, my public speaking engagements and more.

So far in 2021, I’ve spoken to more than 4,000 people at 25 events. My office has hosted digital and in-person town hall meetings to connect with 180 organizations around the province. We have invested significant capacity into ensuring meaningful response and referral to thousands of incoming requests to our office, even though we are not a direct service agency.

The second deliverable in our evaluation plan is that BCOHRC have a suite of publicly accessible educational and guidance resources and forums. In the short term, this means that British Columbians, including both rights holders and duty-bearers, demonstrate increasing awareness and understanding of human rights issues, responsibilities and remedies, the human rights code and the role of my office as an entity within B.C.’s human rights system.

Since I last appeared before you, we have delivered workshops. We are publishing new online materials to im­prove British Columbians’ understanding of the human rights code and how it can apply to them as a duty-bearer — for example, as an employer or, as a rights holder, for example, as an employee. We have published a public re­source on the law governing hate speech, which covers both criminal law and human rights law prohibitions on hate, which has now been viewed over 800 times.

[9:10 a.m.]

These two resources were created to help demystify two important but complex areas of law. We know that both duty-bearers and rights holders struggle with understanding and operationalizing rights and responsibilities in this area, so these resources were created to help them address this issue.

In the coming months, we will be launching a number of new educational initiatives, including the next installment to “I Love My Human Rights” storytelling series — a short, sharable video to help people understand the different components of the human rights system — and a large-scale public awareness campaign to reach British Columbians who might not otherwise follow human rights developments. The public awareness campaign follows up on last year’s “Am I racist?” campaign. This year we’re intending on focusing on the rights of people with disabilities.

Launched earlier this month, our most recent story­telling video, the “I Love My Human Rights” video series, featured Syrian-Canadian author and LGBTQ refugee advocate Danny Ramadan. Danny shared his story of coming to British Columbia as a Syrian refugee and the work he has done since to support the resettlement of other LGBTQ+ refugees here in B.C.

In the video, he says: “It’s a lot of fun to see what a person who has always been denied freedom is capable of doing when offered that freedom.” Sharing Danny’s story exemplifies the project’s key goal of building empathy and support for human rights through sharing the personal experiences of British Columbians.

The third deliverable is that BCOHRC provides recommendations to the B.C. government and other duty-bearers on ways to prevent, reduce, mitigate or improve systemic human rights issues. In the short term, this means that increasing numbers of duty-bearers use BCOHRC recommendations and materials in their teaching, training, policies and practices.

This deliverable requires not only devising evidence-based, community-rooted recommendations; it also re­quires continual oversight and support to ensure that those recommendations get implemented. To this end, we have been supporting the implementation of our recommendations on disaggregated demographic data collection for systemic change, which the Ministry of Attorney General, the Parliamentary Secretary for Antiracism Initiatives and the Ministry of Citizens’ Services are all working to implement.

The call for the collection of disaggregated demographic data emerges from decades of activism, particularly from racialized communities, calling for the data needed to develop policy that effectively addresses systemic inequities. When data reflects the lived experiences of many, it allows those stories to be amplified and heard clearly by decision-makers.

This collection is not easy, and it does come with potential pitfalls. Our Grandmother Perspective report provides an important framework for undertaking this collection, and we are pleased to see the uptake of this research in policy circles, not only within government. But certainly, we’re very excited about those developments.

I’m also pleased to say that our recommendation to amend the human rights code to explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of Indigenous identity was proposed in the form of Bill 18 last week. We have been calling for this change alongside Indigenous leadership and the Human Rights Tribunal because despite the human rights issues facing Indigenous people in B.C., it is clear that Indigenous people feel excluded from the very system that is designed to protect them.

This is an important step in the right direction. The next step towards a more inclusive and effective human rights system must be banning discrimination on the basis of poverty, which we have been recommending for some time.

Earlier this year we also had the chance to make oral submissions and recommendations before the legislative committee examining changes to the Police Act. Since then, we have been preparing written submissions supported by extensive analysis of data from five police forces in B.C. on the disproportionate impact of certain policing practices on Indigenous, Black and other racialized peo­ple. We will be releasing our submissions later this week. To our knowledge, it is the largest study ever done on policing data in Canadian history.

Looking forward, we’ve begun work on a major project that will issue recommendations on employment equity. These recommendations will be aimed at a wide range of employers across various industries, and we anticipate significant interest from the public and the private sector, as many employers have come to us seeking guidance in this area.

[9:15 a.m.]

The fourth deliverable is that BCOHRC develop legal arguments to influence case law. In the short term, we are hopeful that our legal arguments will be cited or accepted by tribunals and courts, which will ultimately help ensure the evolution of human rights law and support the implementation of our recommendations for change.

As you may recall, intervening is when we get involved in an ongoing case before the courts or the tribunals to help the decision-maker understand the broader implications of a case. We don’t represent either side in a dispute. Instead, our role is to assist the decision-maker. Our re­commendations always focus on the systemic aspects of the issues at hand, including ways that human rights law might evolve or be clarified through the case.

I’m pleased to report that we are currently intervening in two ongoing cases before the B.C. Supreme Court. The first concerned the legal test to determine whether family status discrimination exists. Family status discrimination concerns issues such as a failure to accommodate a worker with child care needs. That decision was heard at the end of October, and we are awaiting a decision.

The second case concerns a human rights complaint against Chilliwack school trustee Barry Neufeld. We’ve been granted leave to intervene in this case to make submissions about the regulation of online hate as part of our ongoing work to ensure the protections against hateful speech and actions are meaningful and effective. That case has not yet been heard.

Our first indicator of success in these cases has been the grants of intervenor status by the court. We need to first seek permission from the court to be there, and we’ve been granted that permission in both of these cases. We will be closely monitoring the subsequent decisions of the court to understand what impact our substantive arguments have made. In the longer term, we hope to see the law develop in a way that promotes and protects human rights to the fullest degree possible.

The fifth, and final, deliverable is about our internal op­erations. Our goal is that BCOHRC has a culture and a suite of policies and practices that align with our human rights–based approach, our decolonizing approach and our guiding principles. In the short term, this means that a diverse group of qualified candidates apply, are hired and thrive at our office and that the office space and technology are safe, inclusive and accessible for staff and for the public.

We are close to hiring our full staff complement, other than a couple of positions that are currently in the hiring process. Similar to many employers, we have faced some delays due to COVID. For those that we have not yet had a chance to hire as full-time staff, we have been filling those gaps with contract supports.

As part of our commitment to serving British Columbians across the province, we now have staff in Vancouver, in Victoria, in Kelowna and in Prince George. Recently we established a space-sharing agreement with the University of Northern British Columbia, allowing us to build foundations for more direct and ongoing engagement in B.C.’s north.

We are occupying our head office space in Vancouver. Some staff are working from the office, while others re­main at home. Over half of our staff have chosen a combination of the two. We are building a flexible work model to account for a changing workplace, which we do not anticipate to have an impact on our expenses.

Taken together, it’s these five deliverables that represent the framework for BCOHRC’s impact evaluation and that serve as kind of a barometer for our work.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I want to shine a spotlight on a couple of areas of work, to give you a better sense of how we’re using our resources to serve the public.

As a newly formed, independent provincial human rights organization, when the pandemic hit in March 2020, we suddenly had a vastly expanded mandate to protect and promote human rights and to provide guidance to British Columbians on how to do that, within the context of serious public health considerations and government restrictions, which, as we all know, have changed rapidly over the course of the pandemic.

Within a week of the state of emergency being declared in the province, we mobilized to issue extensive policy guidance to employers, landlords, service providers and individuals about how to ensure human rights are protected in relation to urgent public health priorities.

[9:20 a.m.]

As the pandemic wore on, we published our November 3, 2020, publication on mask-wearing, A Human Rights Approach to Mask-Wearing During the COVID-19 Pandemic. That’s what it’s called. That included guidelines on how masking requirements must accommodate those with disabilities or medical conditions that prevent them from using masks.

After the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General issued a mandatory mask order on November 24 of last year, we noted a significant uptick in incoming calls and emails and confusion over that order.

In response to these developments, on December 17, our office issued updated mask-wearing guidance and a simple poster to help clarify mask-wearing exemptions that were permitted under the law. That poster quickly be­came the No. 1 most-visited page on our website, with nearly 22,000 views in last fiscal year, accounting for almost a quarter of our web traffic during that period. It now has over 53,000 unique page views. The poster has been frequently seen in B.C. businesses, and the guidance has been relied on in cases before the Human Rights Tribunal.

In July 2021, we released our guidance on the human rights implications of mandatory vaccine orders, aiming at a similar audience as our mask guidance. We have continued to update our guidance and our poster as the public health situation and orders have evolved.

When the PHO announced the vaccine card requirements, our office was flooded with thousands of calls and emails from people expressing their concern about how this requirement impacted their sense of bodily integrity. Our team needed to pivot quickly to respond in a way that recognized the deep values at stake while also re-articulating our position.

That position is that proof-of-vaccine requirements are permissible under human rights law and may further human rights values by protecting the most vulnerable among us, as long as they take into account the human rights of all, including by accommodating those who may not be able to get the vaccine for medical reasons.

We liaised with the public health officer to express concerns around the lack of medical exemptions in the an­nouncements and were pleased to see the introduction of limited exemptions in the order itself when it was released.

Our work on a principled approach to proof-of-vaccine requirements garnered international attention, and last month, I was invited to present, virtually, to the UN Hu­man Rights Council’s social forum in Geneva. We will continue to dedicate the resources that are needed to ensure that our pandemic policy responses are useful and are updated as long as required.

Turning to the last project I want to spotlight for you today, you may recall that a year after I stepped into this role, in September 2020, legal changes came into force which allowed me to inquire into matters that promote and protect human rights in B.C. and to report my findings and recommendations to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly.

In August of this year, I announced the subject of our first inquiry, which is into the rise of hate during the pandemic. Our intent is to examine hate in all of its forms, not only racism and racial hate but hate directed at a wide range of people and groups in our society who are protected under the human rights code and under international human rights law — for example, hate that’s perpetuated against a person on the basis of their religion, their gender identity, their Indigeneity, their sexual orientation, whether they live in poverty or without a home, etc.

We chose to focus our investigation on hate in the pandemic because of the significant increase in reported hate-related incidents, including online incidents, in B.C. since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Human rights are an essential component of a crisis response. It is precisely when our societies, our families and our homes are most under threat that human rights are most precarious and most in need of protection. The intent of the inquiry is to better understand what led to the rise of hate during the pandemic and how to prevent this in future states of crisis.

The inquiry is an important investment into the future health of our province. I want to highlight this work to you today, because it’s a significant undertaking that will make good use of the budget that we have been granted. I expect it to run for the next year, with a report to be released sometime next fall.

[9:25 a.m.]

On November 4, our office hosted an opening ceremony to mark the official beginnings of the hearings on this inquiry. To begin the inquiry in a good way, we had 11 knowledge holders share their intentions for the process. I want to share what a couple of these folks had to say.

Zara Chaudhry, who is the project manager for the In­clusion Project, said: “The public inquiry into hate is a pivotal moment that can strengthen the voices of community, centre their experiences and address hate with a trauma-centred approach. The inquiry will allow the many communities impacted by hate to be more than just a statistic and to build a brave space to be in right relations with one another. The ceremony is a critical step in this journey to ensure the community leads a path forward.”

Ingrid Mendez, the executive director of Watari Counselling and Support Services Society, said: “BCOHRC’s inquiry into hate in the pandemic will be the first of its kind in B.C. This inquiry will open a space in a formal process to hear the voices of those impacted by hate and systemic discrimination. It is an honour to be a part of this journey through ceremony, and I hope the findings and recommendations of this inquiry will be taken with respect towards justice and equity for all.”

The result of this inquiry will be a series of recommendations for change, aimed at how to prevent and address hate during future states of emergency, and we will continue to monitor and support the implementation of these recommendations long past the close of the inquiry itself.

You’ve heard about our impact evaluation framework and what change flows from our actions. In the longer term, all of these deliverables serve our mandate by im­proving respect for human rights in our laws, policies, practices and institutional contexts by duty-bearers of all kinds, including government actors.

Turning, then, to our budget request, the resources re­quired to support this work going forward are entirely in line with the submissions we made to you in February this year, with only an inflationary lift. As I mentioned at the beginning of my comments today, we are asking for $6.089 million in operating, which includes a minor inflationary lift to account for an anticipated 2 percent salary increase for our staff and a minor increase in building occupancy charges. We are also asking for $35,000 in capital, which is status quo and does not include any increase from the recommendation last year.

I do not, at this point, anticipate any need for us to come back to you and ask for any increases over the course of the year ahead. While we may experience some savings this year due to COVID, we do not anticipate that same trend in future years as the pandemic, hopefully, winds down. We haven’t adjusted our budget for next year, because we anticipate that as of April 1, 2022, we will have returned to more regular operations.

As outlined in our strategic plan published last year, the 2021-22 budget allows us to grow into an effective Human Rights Commission, including by reaching our full staff complement. The budget request for ’22-23 will allow us to refine our established policies, practices and activities, including through launching our third public awareness campaign, delivering a final report in our inquiry into hate during the pandemic and engaging in extensive research and guidance to employers about how to achieve greater equity in the workplace.

I am grateful to this committee and to the Legislature for recommending and approving a budget that allows for the long-term sustainability of my office so that we can continue to improve respect for human rights in B.C.

Those are my submissions. I look forward to your questions.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Commissioner, Kasari.

I’ll now invite members of the committee to ask questions.

H. Sandhu: I’d like to say thank you to the commis­sioner, Kasari Govender.

Thank you, Stephanie and Dianne. A very good presen­tation, as always. Thank you for the work you do. We do appreciate it. It is much-needed, complex work, and you’re doing a great job.

I have a question regarding outreach. I think we still have a long way to go when it comes to education and awareness. Do you have any strategy or plan to do active outreach in schools, or are you developing one? If there is already one existing, how does that work?

[9:30 a.m.]

K. Govender: You’re referring specifically to K to 12?

H. Sandhu: Yes.

K. Govender: We are working on more youth engagement — a plan for more youth engagement — in the coming years and months, but I will speak to that a little bit. With every one of our “I Love My Human Rights” series, we are releasing, as well, a discussion guide that goes along with that. That has had some good pickup from schools as well. That video series will be continuing to roll out for the rest of my term, and we already have some that are ready to go for the next few months as well.

We are also just going to do a little film based on some conversations we’re having in elementary schools around how children perceive their human rights — what that means to them. That will be coming in future as well.

Then we’re trying to adjust all of our education to be fairly accessible. So even where it’s not designed specifically for K to 12, all of our workshops and our online materials are aiming to have as successful language as possible and promote those to educators of all sorts.

H. Sandhu: Thank you. I just want to do a quick follow-up.

I think schools and teachers are doing a great job. What I’ve been hearing, from when kids face discrimination — whether it’s kids with disabilities or racially marginalized communities or Indigenous communities — is oftentimes their parents or they don’t know the support system exists — the feedback that I’ve received. I was wondering. That’s what prompted that question.

Then how do we create that awareness among those groups of people or kids who are facing…? Sadly, it’s still happening, despite the work that’s being done by schools and here. It depends on which areas of the province you live in.

K. Govender: Absolutely. I think one of the key pieces here is that education for young people goes hand in hand with education for their caregivers and their parents so that they can guide that work — so really seeing changing our generational views through the full life continuum.

Certainly, our public awareness campaigns have a big part of that. They are really the piece of the work that we’re doing that’s aimed not at those who are looking for human rights guidance but those that just happen to see and interact with the more public aspects of our campaign. Last year, as you may remember, we did a bus ad campaign. We’re still working through the logistics of this year’s campaign, but again, it will be designed to reach those who aren’t searching out human rights information necessarily.

J. Routledge (Chair): Other questions for Kasari?

G. Lore: Mostly just a comment — a recognition of the timing of the pandemic as it relates to your term and the setting up of this office and the challenges with doing that work in circumstances that forced us to be disconnected and to reconnect in different ways. I just want to thank you, and your whole office, for the leadership that managed to find ways to get this critical work underway, to build the capacity in a context that made it all the more challenging.

K. Govender: Thank you so much for that. I really ap­preciate that recognition. I know all of us have struggled with it in different ways. I’m incredibly grateful to our staff team who have formed a cohesive office in the context in which most of us haven’t met in person.

Absolutely, the challenges are here.

M. Starchuk: Thank you for your presentation. I often like it when I’m so…. Everything that you said…. It was hard to write anything down. But there was one little tidbit. It always comes when it’s with numbers and your social media side of things.

I believe you said that your hate speech video had 800 views. But then your other pictures and your other social media were talking about 24,000 and 50,000. Is 800 views considered a success?

K. Govender: I feel like the hate speech work is successful. First of all, we launched it.

The other one that I spoke about was actually just our website views. It was the mask guidance and the masking pages. I think, because it has such immediate, daily impact on people, it received in the thousands. In fact, to date, it’s got over 53,000 hits on that page, including…. It really speaks to a diverse range of folks.

[9:35 a.m.]

It speaks to those, all of us, who are required to wear masks — in particular, people with disabilities who have faced harassment if they are unable to put on a mask themselves. A lot of people have reached out to our office saying: “This has been really helpful to us. We want to know more. What are the exemptions? How do I assert my rights on this?” But also for business owners who are trying to navigate this guidance to understand what their obligations are under the law. So I think that because of the daily impact that has, it has received considerable attention.

The hate speech piece is a bit more dense. You really have to want to sit down and read it. It was also launched later in the year. It was just launched in August. That’s just over the last few months. So I expect to see a lot more attention to that, especially as we roll out our work on hate and get more and more public profile on our inquiry on hate.

I think more people will be seeking out this kind of information to understand: “What are my remedies? How do I seek redress?” One of the key pieces that we hear about is that police need to be effective in addressing this, but also, lots of people don’t want to reach out to police. So: “What other remedies do I have? How else can I address it?” That’s part of what we’re trying to get at. So even if it doesn’t have the same kind of huge breadth of appeal where it can reach people, I think it is a success that people are reading through it.

M. Starchuk: The other thing that I wrote down…. I’m sure everybody in this room got the same kind of feedback when the proof of vaccination came out. I would probably venture to guess that most of it was negative, as opposed to the few people who reached out to our constituency offices and said: “Thank you for doing that.” So what would that be, representative for your office?

K. Govender: It was overwhelmingly critical, although we did hear some people who were happy about it. But it was overwhelmingly critical. It was a range, though, I think, in terms of the critical views. There were many people who felt: “My human rights have been violated by my personal freedoms being infringed upon.”

We had quite a bit of education work to do around what the human rights code in B.C. actually requires. It doesn’t actually protect our freedoms; it protects our equality. It protects us against discrimination. That’s quite a different lens — quite different than our constitutional human rights protections. So we did quite a bit of work of education there.

We also had a number of people — certainly not the majority — reach out and say: “I’m really worried that the PHO has said, publicly, that there will be no exemptions, and I’m somebody who’s been told by my doctor that I can’t get a vaccine. What am I supposed to do in these circumstances?” It certainly helped, as well, strengthen our work in pushing for those exemptions.

It was a mix but overwhelmingly negative.

J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much, Commissioner.

I wanted to follow up on Harwinder’s question about the outreach to schools, etc. What I’m not really seeing clearly in your budget submission is, now that the office is up and running and everything and the people have been hired, which we were talking about the last time we met, what about the outreach in terms of the real cost?

I know that social media is one of the options, but you talk about bus campaigns, and I see an amount of about somewhere between $73,000 and $100,000 for advertising. If you’re going to ramp up, where are the resources going to come from? Or do you not expect that to happen?

K. Govender: I expect that we’ve built in the resources that we need to do the kind of engagement and outreach that we are planning. We have a team of people working on education and engagement. Those are actually two separate but joined teams. So our education team develops educational materials: workshops, curricula and visuals. For example, this short film I mentioned just really briefly. Last year we produced a little video on the basics of the human rights code.

This time we are doing one on the different aspects of the human rights system. We mentioned a moment ago that people often don’t know where to turn. This will help people understand, because there’s a lot of confusion. “Are you the tribunal? What is the difference between a tribunal and a commission? There’s a human rights clinic. Are you a clinic?” So this short video will be differentiating in that way. Our education team does that kind of work. Those are a few examples.

[9:40 a.m.]

Our engagement team…. Their primary work is building relationships within the community. For example, we are working on, I think, quite an ambitious Indigenous engagement plan that we are partway through. The goal is to meet with leadership in every First Nation in the province. We are actively doing that. They do a lot of that relationship-building and laying the groundwork.

They do relationship-building related to every one of our projects so that we build both what we are learning from community but also what we are feeding back to communities. We are building reciprocal relationships. Every one of our projects has an engagement strategy that attaches to it, or pretty much every one of our projects does. Those are already built into the staff structure that we have. We’re actively working through…. Certainly, some of what we’ve been doing for the last two years is just building that.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I think about the cost of large-scale promotions or anti-hatred or anti-racism. We just came through that. As your office got started, we were dealing with it on a large-scale basis. Of course, I mean, it goes on still in jurisdictions, probably including British Columbia.

In order to get…. All right. You’ve got the office set up. You’ve got the staffing component. I’m assuming that there must be a baseline, in terms of B.C. human rights, that you are starting as a measurement. You talked about First Nations. I think about the people that are here that are from other countries that have settled here, immigrants, etc., and the baseline. In terms of improving, you mentioned, I think, the fellow from Syria.

Anyways, is there a kind of metric that your organization is using to tell us that we’re making an improvement or a difference? I say that meaning that based on the marketplace, today, with labour, we’re going to need a huge influx of people that are immigrants to come in here. They’re going to come from all over the world.

I’ve spent my entire life hiring people from different…. I do farm. I say that. I’ve also been the minister responsible for that. I know how difficult it is for everybody to see the value in why these people are coming into the country. You can see it in every case today.

I am interested, in terms of their acceptance by the broader population and knowing we’re making progress on that. If anything, the challenges are going to become more difficult for British Columbians to welcome…. We want them to welcome them, but how do we do that, and how do you know that you’re making a difference?

K. Govender: Thank you for the question.

Yes, it’s an apropos word you use: baseline. That’s what we’re calling our project that we’re rolling out, to do exactly what you’re suggesting. We are rolling out what we’re calling our baseline project. The idea is to be able to take a state of play in the province — where are human rights at now? — and then, over time, be able to measure that.

We have a number of tools that we’re using to do that. Starting with, for example, we’ve looked at every recommendation that’s been made in the province related to our five strategic priorities and beyond on human rights. Then we’re looking now to see how many of these have been implemented, what’s the state of them and what was the experience of people in the implementation. Did it work to solve the problem that it was supposed to solve? That’s one aspect of the baseline study. That will begin to set the stage.

Maybe I’ll pass it over to Stephanie in a moment, to build a little bit more out on our evaluation plan. Before I do that, I just wanted to add one more thing to your first question, related to education, which is that the other aspect of public awareness is not our paid advertising but our earned media. We have been fairly successful so far in getting media attention.

I originally had some stats in my report to help you understand that, but they’re hard to measure. The numbers are a bit inflated, because they give you…. The estimates are in the millions and millions of people who have seen it. It’s sort of hard to estimate it. So I didn’t want to give you any unrealistic picture.

We have had hundreds and hundreds of original news stories, let alone additional hits, so considerable media at­tention, which, I think, has quite a bit of educational value in shifting the landscape and what people know about human rights, how people understand the role of the commission, how people understand their rights and obligations in that context.

I’ll just pass it over to you to speak more about evaluation.

[9:45 a.m.]

S. Garrett: Sure. Thanks, Kasari.

Thank you for the question. To your previous question, with respect to the budget around that, we’re a people-powered organization, so you’ll see within the pie chart at the end of the budget memo that much of the budget is related to staffing costs.

Commissioner Govender also spoke to the importance of representation across the province. One of the things that we did early on was recognize that we needed to have representation in various regions, and that’s why we’ve actively got engagement advisers in Kelowna, surveying the Interior region; in Prince George, surveying the northern region; and then Island and Mainland representation. The benefit of that means that those individuals are embedded in their communities, already have existing networks and are actively working through those.

One of the other innovations that we’ve done, which has been represented within our IMIT costs, has been in building out stakeholder relationship management systems. We’ve been actively working on that this year.

What’s exciting about it is being able to start from the ground up. Building that in tandem with doing our stakeholder analyses has meant that we’re able to capture a lot of information and data within that, in alignment with our grandmother perspective on demographic data collection and doing things in the right way. What it means is we’re going to be able to track and trend issues over time with every interaction we have, whether it’s a one-to-one meeting that we’re having with an organization to the types of forums that we’re going to be putting on in a post-pandemic world and the types of focus groups and other organizational events and meetings that we have.

We’re starting to see those trends now. It’s a matter of taking the internal information and data we have and linking that to our baseline project, where we’re actively working with our research team to code and analyze that information in a way that’s reflective in many different categories, whether it be demographically or regionally speaking, so that we can understand, point-in-time: what are those issues, and what are the improvements?

As you know, there’s a breadth of human rights issues out there, but one of our key focuses is on the intersectional analysis of those and recognizing that all individuals have multiple parts of their identities that impact in the context that they’re living in. We see that today in what’s going on around the province with the most recent crisis that we’re facing, and we’ll continue to see that, going forward. That intersectional piece is really important to us, and we’re finding, actively, new and innovative ways of measuring that through our evaluation project.

G. Kyllo: Thank you, Commissioner.

I’m wondering what the staff complement is that you’re trying to achieve this year. Could you just share with the committee members where you’re at, at the current time?

K. Govender: Absolutely. I’m just going to pull up the numbers here. Including myself, we presently have 33 full-time staff. We are currently recruiting for two more positions in our communication and education engagement departments. This means that we will, shortly, have hired for 35 out of our 36 full staff complement. So 22 of those staff are in Vancouver, seven are in Victoria, two are in Kelowna and one is in Prince George — and then me. I’m in Vancouver.

The final vacancy…. You may have noticed there’s one missing there, which we are filling through a temporary assignment in our engagement team for the time being.

G. Kyllo: Fantastic. If I may, you mentioned that you’ll have an underspend this year. Do you have any budget on what that underspend would be — how much would be returning to treasury at the end of this fiscal?

K. Govender: I defer to you, Dianne, on that.

D. Buljat: Our current forecasting is producing a savings of approximately $200,000.

[9:50 a.m.]

G. Kyllo: Great. Thank you.

If I may, at the outset of your comments, you had mentioned one of the legal tests that you have underway. It has to do with family status with respect to child care. Could you just expand a bit on…? Was this something that was requested of your office? How did this come about, and has there been any consideration to the potential, I would imagine, and probably pretty significant cost implications to British Columbia should this test case prove to move forward in the vein that you’re reporting on?

K. Govender: It’s an intervention. The case was already ongoing, whether we were involved in it or not. The case exists between a company and a person, an employee, who has filed a human rights complaint. The legal issue that arose from the tribunal is now being considered by the courts and a judicial review of the tribunal decision.

We are looking at…. We kind of keep our eye on all of the tribunal decisions that are going through, as well as judicial reviews that are going through the court system, to try to identify those cases that fall within our strategic priorities — I’ve got a longer list of criteria — essentially fall within our list of priorities, have the possibility of having systemic implications and where we think we have something unique to contribute that it might be useful for us to be there. Those are some of the criteria that we use to determine whether it’s a case we would get involved in.

This case was selected — and there will continue to be more — as our first one. Family status discrimination is already prohibited under the human rights code, so it is an existing ground of discrimination. That won’t change. But the legal test that’s used to determine whether a claim is successful or not under the code is…. There is a higher bar set for family status discrimination than for other forms of discrimination. So it’s harder for somebody to prove that they’ve been discriminated against on that basis.

This case gets at the aspect of that legal test, and we think that that has important systemic human rights implications both on the basis of family status and also on the basis of gender, since we know that women continue to be the primary caregiver for children, and many family status cases concern the role of women as caregivers and the balancing within the workplace.

While I do expect it to have systemic implications — and that’s why we’re there — the case will go ahead with or without us, and we’re there to help the court understand: “This case will have implications beyond the parties involved. Here’s what we assess the broader implications to be.”

G. Kyllo: What is the name of the case, if we wanted to look it up to actually see what the original tribunal’s decision was?

K. Govender: Sure. It’s called Harvey v. Gibralter Mines.

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. I guess that concludes our questions.

I want to thank you — Kasari, Stephanie and Dianne — for taking the time to come and meet with us today. I think it was really important that you framed your presentation by reminding us about the complexity of evaluating human rights work and reminding us that process is as important as outcome.

I also, personally, want to say how much I appreciate you taking a proactive approach to the rise of hate in the province. I, for one, worry that it compromises our sense of right and wrong and can transform morality in this province if we’re not alive to it and nip it in the bud.

Thank you for reminding us that you can be a resource to us in doing this work.

K. Govender: Thank you again for the opportunity to be here.

J. Routledge (Chair): We will take a five-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 9:54 a.m. to 10:01 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): I’ll reconvene the committee. We’ll ask the Auditor General, Michael Pickup, to make his presentation.

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

M. Pickup: Good morning. Thank you so much.

I would like to start by acknowledging, with respect, that in our office, we typically work on the lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, known today as the Esqui­malt and Songhees Nations. We are grateful for being visitors on the land and strive to be mindful of the connection it holds to the Indigenous people of these territories. As a member of the Miawpukek First Nation, I’m particularly mindful of this.

Before turning it over to John McNeill…. I certainly want to thank John, in particular, for the time and hours he has put into this budget. If he looks tired today, that is well earned. His leadership and commitment on this have been just wonderful. This has resulted in this document that you see, which I hope you have found fairly easy to use.

I also, of course, want to thank our leadership team for their excellent work, commitment and flexibility through­out this. This document comes together with a lot of work behind it. I very much appreciate it.

I’m going to turn it over to John to walk through the highlights.

Thank you, John.

J. McNeill: Thank you for the opportunity here to share our budget. Maybe what I can do is walk through the highlights first.

The main element of our budget request relates to a workspace redesign. In February 2021, the committee asked us to examine our building requirements and find opportunities for savings and alternative arrangements. Our office has been working with a team in government called workplace strategies and planning to prepare a proposal to do just that.

With their help, we’ve created a business case to achieve leading workspace certification. The proposal will allow our office to reduce its footprint and occupancy costs while improving the effectiveness of our current space. The new space would be built to accommodate a hybrid workforce and flexibility.

The proposal is attached to our budget submission. It’s fairly detailed. So I thought I’d give you the option of just asking questions. Or if you want, I can run through and summarize the proposal.

Does the committee have a preference?

J. Routledge (Chair): I think you should do a run-through.

J. McNeill: Okay. Perfect.

If you can flip to the second part. Basically, as you all know, COVID and the public health measures have been pretty disruptive to working in the office.

Interjection.

J. McNeill: Oh, yeah. So page 12. Sorry.

Thank you, Michael.

It has been fairly disruptive to our office, and much of our workforce has been working remotely.

[10:05 a.m.]

Right now we are gently transitioning to a hybrid ap­proach and finding our way through that. As a result — it’s not a surprise — we find that we have a significant portion of our office that’s underutilized. This proposal basically serves to find a way to use that space effectively.

We’ve been working with the workplace strategies and planning team. They’re experts in office planning. They’ve done what they call LWS, or leading workplace strategies, for many of the branches of government.

Basically, we’ve submitted three options to you with the recommendation. The first option is what we call a lighter touch. That’s basically smaller tenant improvements, furniture purchases, with the goal of reducing our office footprint by a third. That third would be shared or sublet out, which would result in a net savings of $1.6 million over the life of our lease, more if our lease is extended.

The second option. We call it the start from scratch. That’s where we would, with the help of WSP, completely gut our building and completely start from scratch with a fully customized approach. That’s the most expensive. It would only result in net savings if our lease was extended. If our lease wasn’t extended, the net cost would be about $520,000. The pros of that is that we get a fully customized, from-scratch solution, but then we don’t have the same cost savings as option 1.

Option 3 is basically a do-nothing option. So no upfront costs, but no savings over the life of the lease, either. It would kind of be up to our office to work with what we have and our minimal capital budgets — the odd furniture replacement here or there. That option is not one we would recommend, because we don’t think it really meets the committee’s request in terms of using the workspace effectively.

Overall, our request is to do what we call the lighter touch, which is the option that will result in net savings for government and also allow us to have a more modern, effective workplace to accommodate a hybrid workforce as well as give opportunity for other government agencies or, preferably, even independent offices to use that space. We’re already sharing with OHRC, and I know they’re looking for more space.

Looking to the future, more detailed planning would be involved, but at this level, we kind of just have the overarching idea of how we would do it and what it might cost in broader dollars. If we were to get budget approval for either option 1 or option 2, we’d continue to work with government’s team to create a more detailed plan, which would probably include details such as floor plans, more specific information on costs and exactly what they would go to. But they’ve done this numerous times. They’re fairly confident in their ability to estimate, so we imagine that for option 1 or option 2, that would be what we need to do it.

Our overall recommendation, just because it accomplishes our needs and saves government money, would be to recommend that the committee approve option 1 for us.

That’s a brief overview. I’m happy to take questions on that element of our budget.

M. Pickup: Thank you, John.

We’ve tried to keep the presentation and talking points relatively light to give you plenty of time for questions, but more than happy to dig in to any of it that you wish to dig into.

I would just add that it’s been…. I’m a little bit off script here, for my colleagues, which always, probably, scares them a little bit when I go off script. But I tend to do that.

[10:10 a.m.]

I did want to mention how busy and productive of a year 2021 has been. I was going through some notes last night and looking at the calendar year to date, because many of us…. Although we’re operating on a fiscal year, life still happens on a calendar-year basis. If some of us joining us — John — here today look tired, this will explain, partially, why.

In calendar 2021, we have issued 15 reports to the Legislature. We are on target for ’21-22. We’ve got 12 in fiscal ’21-22, on target to make our 12. Those 15 we’ve issued to the Legislature in calendar ’21 come after a calendar 2020 of having issued two. That’s a fact — an observation — not a judgment or a comment, but in the eight or nine months before I got there, there was one report issued. People have been very, very busy — not only busy but productive and efficient in getting work out the door and getting work into the Legislature. I’m very pleased with how hard everybody has worked and very proud of the achievements.

Yes, this brings us up to where we want to be, but this comes off a period where we, frankly, like I said, without judgment, had delivered, perhaps, two reports. This will bring us up. As I look back over the fiscal-year averages, the averages over the last five years have been somewhere around ten on a fiscal year. We’re on target to deliver 12. That may not sound like significantly more — 12 versus ten. It’s two on ten. There’s 20 percent more output out the door, while we are also dealing with COVID, dealing with working in a pandemic and dealing with lots of other change as well.

I only say that, again, just because I know we had lots of discussion last year on our budget and what that budget was going to enable us to do. I think I can sit here before you today and say that that budget enabled us to do what I said that I thought it would do. It’s not on me. It’s on everybody else, and a thank-you to everybody else in the office for having delivered.

Have there been a lot of tough days? Sure. I look to our new Deputy Auditor General, who is very much leading much of this. Yeah, it has been a lot of long evenings and weekends to pull this together and get this back on track. That’s not a complaint. That’s not here to say “poor us,” or anything like that, but it is, I think, worth noting. This has been what I would say a remarkable turnaround, to get us on track and to deliver. I did just want to make that comment.

For this year coming up, for ’22-23 — really, we wouldn’t be asking for anything in addition to what you gave us before if it weren’t for looking at the space, and some of the comments you made on the space and for what makes sense. Now is probably a really good time in the history of the office to look at redoing the space, so we’re coming with that.

The other part is the salary increases for our CPA trainees. It’s taken me a year to figure this out. They are probably the lowest-paid in Canada of any audit office, and that doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know how you live in B.C. on the lowest salaries in Canada. We need to fix that. That’s the other ask, and then some IT stuff.

I will be quiet now, but I did just want to share that. Given that we’re in November and that it has just been such a remarkable calendar year, I wanted to share that with you. We still have lots of energy for questions and comments, and another push.

I mean, we still have a push to get the 12 done. We have four more to get to 12 for this fiscal year, and it’s still going to be a push. We’re not living on easy street. Everybody’s going to work…. I’m looking at Sheila, because she leads a lot of this, but it’s still going to be a lot of work to get the 12, but I think we’re reasonably confident that we will get that.

Thank you, Chair, for letting me add those additional comments — probably much to the nervousness of my colleagues when I go off-script.

J. McNeill: It’s good to have some operational context. So thank you.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you to all of you.

G. Kyllo: Great to see you, Michael, and the rest of the staff.

With respect to the light touch, I notice that you’re anticipating about $1.2 million in TIs, plus an additional $370,000 in furnishings.

[10:15 a.m.]

I’m just wondering. Is it obligatory to spend that kind of capital in reconfiguring your offices in order to have the longer-term savings of carving out some of that space for alternative use? What confidence do you have in that $1.2 million tenant improvement budget?

M. Pickup: I will let John go into the detail on this, but there are a couple comments I want to make. One, to the credit of John, we are not experts, obviously, in space configuration, redesign and workflow. John has been taking this on as his current job, working with some experts and people who do know this type of thing. I’ll let John walk through that.

In one of the things we did, I had a chance to join John and others. We went out and looked at…. I might get the name right. In Langford, there’s a setup for leading workplace….

J. McNeill: Shared space that uses the principles of a leading workplace strategy.

M. Pickup: Right. It uses these sorts of leading workplace practices. We went out to have a look at it to see what kinds of things might be needed as we move to something like this. It did give me a better appreciation from seeing it physically.

I’ll turn it over to John and let John walk through some of those details.

J. McNeill: In terms of flexibility on these numbers, like Michael said, we’re working with the experts in government’s team. They have a very rigorous program where they put the square footage and a bunch of other factors in, and it spits out a result. We don’t go into further details of what can we reuse. We can’t go into the further details until we get budget approval. They don’t want to sink in hours of their time to kind of give the detailed response that your question might be asking.

The other thing…. I would say, right now, it is required. Our current workspace furniture and configuration is set up for the older, what they would call residential or a fixed-location work style. There’s not a lot density or flexibility in the type of workstations. It’s just desk, desk, desk — and larger desks, I might add. There’s quite a bit of space, so it’s going to be a function of changing the furniture and replacing it, really, to increase density, increase flexibility and increase the options for staff when they come in. My answer to that would be that it’s too soon to tell.

There might be a chance for savings. In talking with the person I’m working with, he’s very favourable and excited about this case and thinks that it’s almost like a textbook case for reducing space and saving money. When we get into the detailed planning, we can involve the committee in that, share the information we receive from them and further scrutinize those details as they become available. Right now we’re just relying on the broad strokes, on their experience, the programmer software that they input the various factors into, and the result that they get out.

Right now I would say that we need the full amount that we’re asking for. Could there be room for wiggle room in the future? We’ll have to wait and see once the details become available.

S. Dodds: I wanted to add that that cost is only to be able to reconfigure two-thirds of the space, so we wouldn’t be looking at investing money in the space that would be sublet. That would be so whoever comes into that space would be able to use it as it is or to make their changes.

G. Kyllo: Just a bit of a follow-up. The anticipation of these lease savings is all conditional upon the ability of government to reutilize that other third. There’s no guarantee that government would have uptake or that there’d be an ability to sublet the other third of the space becoming available.

J. McNeill: Exactly. There is a risk there. That’s one of the risks we’ve discussed in the paper. One is that it is a very desirable space for government entities, because it’s so close to the Legislature. In my conversation with my contact on the team there, he’s had a number of people looking for space. He thought: “If only this space were available, this would have been the perfect fit for that space.”

[10:20 a.m.]

The other thing to consider is the savings of $1.6 million. I think I discussed this in the risks. If we weren’t able to find someone for a number of years — even if it took, let’s say, halfway through the lease, like seven years, to find someone — we would still break even. That $1.6 million creates a pretty large cushion to find a candidate and still be profitable.

All of that being said, it seems very likely that we would be able to share the space successfully based on our location and even just based on our interactions with other independent officers of the Legislature.

Informally, we can’t commit to them, and they can’t…. Until we get something approved, we can’t really start making plans. But I imagine if we do get approval, it might come together pretty quick, that people are going to be willing to use that space.

I’m optimistic that we’re going to be able to find someone to lease it in the time frame that we’re planning, just based on an anecdotal yes, but based on feedback we’ve received so far from government and from independent officers.

M. Pickup: If I could just add one quick thing to that, John, it is the intangible benefit of what you can’t put a price on.

Let’s say the numbers all work here, and let’s say it seems like a slam dunk even with some risk in there. It’s the intangibles that we haven’t costed, like this has the ability to create, from a morale perspective, from a team perspective, a lot of dynamic feelings within the teams to come into this space that is a bit more modern, that’s going to meet their needs of how they want to work.

We’ve all recognized, whether we keep the same or get this new space, that we’re going to work differently. It’s whether the space is going to accommodate how we work or whether we’re going to work differently and the space is not going to accommodate, and people are going to be a little bit grumpy, and we’re not going to get that morale boost because the space is not going to be any different.

Either way, we will live with it. But I think the intangible benefit of having people coming into a space that is modern, that is fit well…. I’ve seen it even, to some extent, I think, Sheila, on the smaller scale with my space.

I’ve turned the space that I work in to completely bookable, when I’m not there, by others. People can come use my space. They can have meetings. They can do whatever. I’m like: “You want to go through the office. Go for it.” I think it’s that intangible benefit, too, that is harder to put a saving element on as to what it’s going to do for people as well. I just wanted to mention that.

G. Lore: Thank you, folks. I have a question. I’m frankly not sure if I’m misreading. I’m not an expert at reading budgets. It feels like a high risk to ask a dumb question to this team on budgets, but I’m going to.

When it comes to the new technology initiatives, does the ask there represent an increase on what you were ex­pecting to ask for this coming year when you came last year? If so, what are the new technology needs that ap­peared over this year that weren’t there last year?

J. McNeill: That’s a good question. All of our asks are incremental, so on top of the amount that was previously approved. It’s a totally fair question.

We are asking for a $90,000 increase. And $155,000 of that relates to the replacement of a server. We had initially planned to replace that server in fiscal ’24, but due to increased wear and tear, we’re having to bump up the replacement of that server one year from fiscal ’24 into fiscal ’23.

In the more detailed Excel template, I’ve asked for a reduction in the capital budget in fiscal ’24, offset by the increase in the capital budget in fiscal ’23 for the purchase of that server. Then we have $35,000 that we need on top of what we had previously planned related to the replacement or the partial replacement of our fleet of laptops. We have a few more people in office. We’ve chewed through our laptops a little bit quicker than we had planned. That’s what those two asks are related to.

M. Starchuk: Thank you for your presentation. I wrote this down: “A happy space is a happy place.” Newer is always better.

My question is more about on page 19, the GHG CO₂ reduction. Where does that number come from, and how is it achieved?

[10:25 a.m.]

J. McNeill: Greenhouse gas reduction. That’s a number the workspace team helped me to calculate. That basically comes from…. The reduction is based on our total carbon output of our building reduced by a third. The building itself isn’t actually reducing carbon, but because someone isn’t moving into a new building somewhere else, that we’re using existing inventory, is where that reduction comes from.

M. Starchuk: Does that take into consideration the new stuff that’s coming into there? Is it an aggregate number?

J. McNeill: That’s a good question. I’d have to go back to the team of experts to get that detail. I can’t comment on that.

P. Alexis: More a comment than anything else. I just wanted to say, Michael, it’s great to see you in person. Certainly, a man of your word, you said you were going to bring in more reports, and you indeed have. It’s just an amazing feat, so thank you for that. Sometimes it takes a perspective from the outside when you’re coming in to take a look at really what’s going on and all of that. So I think we’ve certainly benefited from that.

It’s a little question or perhaps a comment. Are you thinking that these trends with respect to work habits and the investment that you will make now in a hybrid ap­proach…? Do you think they’re here to stay? Just some, if you could provide…. I’m hearing different things from different businesses in downtown Vancouver where some have said: “Don’t even bother coming back. We’re letting go of the space.”

Hybrid is not on the table for some. If you could speak to that a little bit. Are we going to see this in other agencies? Are we all experiencing this? If you could, for a sec­ond, provide your two cents with respect to the approach and the investment as a result of the hybrid.

M. Pickup: Thank you for that. This is something that really occupies I think a lot of our thoughts and a lot of our interests and is one of our main priorities that we’re calling the nature of how we work together, going forward.

I’ll offer some of my thoughts, though, on a foundation that this is a collaborative approach with the entire office and us talking about what’s going to work for all of us, including perspectives of those of us who’ve worked longer and sometimes having conversations with people on how they may benefit by, at times, working together versus just working remotely.

I think where we will likely end up…. We’ll never go back to the way things were. We won’t fully be where things have been during the pandemic, with essentially most people at home. Where I think we’re going to end up with is some sort of hybrid model where people are in and around two to three days a week, and then they’re at home two to three days a week, recognizing that even within that, it won’t likely be that one approach fits all.

It may be in certain functions that people will be in three or four days. It may be in other functions where people are only in two days. But part of why I think the space coincides with that is then as you move to hotelling, you need less space. As I say to people, to put it kind of bluntly, if you’re going to come in two days a week, well, then you can’t have a dedicated space that if you were here five days a week, under an old model, you’d keep. “Well, maybe I’ll come in one day a week, but I want my space and all my things there.” We can’t do that either.

I think we’ll end up in some sort of hybrid approach — people coming together to collaborate, to work together on teams. The nature of the work we do is very team-based. It’s not individual. “I’ll see you in seven months. Deliver the report to me, and we’ll include that in the box. We’ll insert that, and the report is done.” It’s very collaborative. We need to be together at times, and we need to have the space for us to pull together.

I think we’ll get to some sort of approach like that. But again, it’s going to be through collaboration. It will be some sort of hybrid. The direction from me with folks and from Sheila is: “Everything is on the table. Let’s have good discussions, but let’s also, in an inclusive and open environment, learn from each other, including those who’ve worked longer and who know some of the benefits of and the importance of relationships and what you can get out of working together in person at times as well.”

[10:30 a.m.]

We are not sort of counting the days or weeks to say: “Okay. Everybody’s going to be back in the office five days a week, and that’s just the way it’s going to be because we think that’s how it should be.” No. In fact, we will lose people. We are in a competitive market. So this is the right thing to do, for the right reasons, but it’s also the right thing to do if you want to keep people and you want to keep the office moving along.

Often this stuff is anecdotal, but I have seen, firsthand — I’m not criticizing others; others run their organizations how they want — people lose out on candidates already. Those organizations in a similar business to us, the same business as us, have lost out on candidates because they’ve said to them: “You have to be in the office five days a week. No flexibility. That’s the way we’re going to do things. It’s five days a week.”

People have options. Our people are highly educated. The salaries are reasonable, but those salaries are available in lots of other places for people to move along. It’s one of the first questions that people are asking now. “How will we work together?”

Then I think we also have the experience of the nine people — someone will correct me if I get it wrong — who work remotely in Vancouver and have for years. We don’t have an office in Vancouver, and we have people there who have worked remotely pre-pandemic. They’re hired to work remotely as well. So we have some experience with that. Certainly, one of our main priorities — it’s called the nature of how we work together, going forward — is ongoing now.

J. McNeill: Michael, do you mind if I add a few comments?

Two things. One is that our office, broadly categorized, belongs to the professional services industry. Many in­dustry leaders in the professional services industry — large accounting firms, law firms — leading up to the pandemic had already offered a hybrid work environment — hotelling, all those ways to save on office space costs as well as to create a more dynamic work environment. So it is a large investment. It’s kind of like: “Well, how do you know you’re going to need it 15 years down the road, when there’s so much uncertainty?”

What I would say is that what we’re doing is new to us, but it’s not new to others, to industry, to the workplace strategies and planning team. It’s a fixed…. I shouldn’t say “fixed,” but it’s not new. It’s new to us, but it’s not new to other people.

The other thing I would say — we’ve all experienced this over the last two years — is that it’s impossible to predict, and it’s strategically important to position yourselves for flexibility. That’s a strategic objective. Even if things, one way or the other, are not quite how we imagined them, the workspace that we’re hoping to design is one that fosters and values flexibility, which means that if, say, more people end up coming in than we had previously planned, we’ll be able to handle that. We’ll be better positioned to handle that. This workspace design is really putting forward that flexibility.

We don’t have a crystal ball. We’re taking our best guess, based on industry practices, relying on experts. But also, strategically, to foster more flexibility in our work environment is a good decision. You know, permanent…. It’s crazy out there. When is it going to stop being crazy? I don’t know. Maybe this is just normal, and we’re all going to reminisce about how lovely it was in 1997 or 2012. “Weren’t things so easy back then?” But we’ll be better prepared for the change, hopefully, because we’ll just have accepted it and fostered more flexibility for our organization.

P. Alexis: It’s fascinating, isn’t it? You think that about 20 years ago, you would have stood here, if you existed, and you would have asked us for space, right? I mean, every single ask, likely up until COVID, was about increasing the footprint and all of that. It’s just a fascinating time that we live in.

You are absolutely right. We can’t really predict where we’re going to go. But you are being proactive. That’s for sure. You are selling the flexibility piece that maybe some other agencies, as you’ve said, Michael, are not as interested in because they’re not as comfortable with it. You don’t know exactly, but you’re going to head down this path. You’re going to be part of that flexibility movement. Fascinating. Thank you for that.

[10:35 a.m.]

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I just want to go back…. When the last renovation was done — the lease in 2014, for 20 years — obviously there was some sort of planogram or something like that about the number of people. I’m assuming that this reduction in the third has taken into account what you need to get the recovery and the long-term…. I guess that’s one of my first questions. Has there been that type of work?

Secondly, what are you going to do with the costs that were, seven years ago…? We just paid for upgrading or doing all this work, so there’s a write-down of some sort, right, because it hasn’t been fully amortized. Unless you’ve got some other explanation.

I do want to talk about IT and your CPA, your increase. Maybe we’ll deal with the office space first.

M. Pickup: Sure. Maybe we’ll share this as a team.

Partially — and anybody can correct me if I do, indeed, need to be corrected — the reduction of the space takes into account how many people we are now and how many will be coming in. But again, it is on that model. The ability to do that will be based on hotelling and sharing space. So it’s not everybody having an assigned space.

If we do the traditional models, we’ll be out of space, probably….

J. McNeill: Things are going to be tight in January.

M. Pickup: Yeah. Things would be tight come January if we were doing the traditional model of everybody having a designated space, so we’ve got to get to some sort of hotelling just to have space for people anyway. We’re going to be faced with that anyhow. This does take into account giving up the space — that we will be able to have space for everybody.

Will there still be some leadership and management needed in terms of we can’t have everybody arrive on the same…? If people are coming in for two days, we wouldn’t be able to house everybody on the same two days. So there’s still going to be a lot of coordination in terms of what teams are coming when. Perhaps it’s this team is coming in for these two days; another team is coming to use that same space for two days. There are still a lot of things that need to be figured out day to day as you use less space and what that means.

Yes. The short answer would be yes. It takes into account the number of people.

In terms of the money that was spent to redo the space and amortization of those costs, perhaps, John, you have info on that.

J. McNeill: Yeah. The tenant improvements related to when we first moved into the building, under CPPM, the Core Policies and Procedures Manual, are fully depreciated. So they’re not…. They exist on our books but at zero cost. Those are done, I guess, so there’s not going to be an im­pact. They’ll be replaced.

The plan is, actually, as well, for many of the existing tenant improvements to be maintained. So what that might be is you might have an office…. We’re not going to be getting rid of that office, but what we might be doing is splitting that office in two so it can work as a privacy room or a flexible enclosed workspace for people.

This is where we start getting into the details of what’s actually going to happen in terms of how this is going to be executed. We’re going to try our best to use as much as we have and really modify the existing space. It might be, like I said, that we’re splitting offices in two, moving one larger collaboration space from one place in the office to another in terms of creating a more suitable workflow or use of light, these kinds of….

These are concepts, to be honest, I don’t think were considered as carefully as when our office was first designed. And the thing is that many of the people who were involved in that initial design of the workplace are no longer with the office.

I don’t know, in terms of answering your question, if that covers it, or if that’s an…. Many of the nitty-gritty details of the planning and the blueprints haven’t hap­pened yet. Right now, it’s more the high level: these are the general principles that we’re going to be trying to achieve or accomplish, this is how much we think it’s going to cost, and this is what we think we’ll save from it.

Obviously, I would be excited to work towards a good-news story and exceed your expectations in terms of coming in under budget and finding tenants to share with sooner than planned, but we’re trying to be….

[10:40 a.m.]

We’re not really trying to sell anything. We’ve done our best to follow the direction to look for a suitable business case, and we’re presenting it to you as our recommendation, but it’s up to you, I guess, whether you approve that ask or not.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Just to follow on, on cost, John, what’s the current refresh policy? You quoted another policy on the amortization — the government’s policy you have to follow. Are you on the same refresh as government, in the sense that it’s usually a three- or four-year refreshing?

I know you’re asking for….

J. McNeill: That’s a good question. I’m thinking: “Re­fresh policy. I don’t know what that is.”

The reason is it’s because we’re not on the same refresh cycle as government. We don’t get…. Like in terms of a workspace, we don’t have a refresh that comes through. This is, in many ways, the only time that we’ve asked for a refresh since the lease has started. Otherwise, we’ve just been existing in the current space with the odd incremental ask on a piece-by-piece basis.

It’s not like we have been in the building, and it’s been more than three or four years, and a refresh has already occurred. Anything that has been changed or refreshed in our building has been discussed with and approved by the committee. There’s not a built-in policy or funding regimen to do a periodic refresh. It’s all done, basically, on our own — we’re not looped into that type of a system — and at the discretion of the committee.

M. Pickup: Sorry, I was just going to add that…. Perhaps it’s a takeaway, I think, from one of the lessons learned here this morning. Perhaps we’ll expand on that next year when we put explanations in. Like on page 9, where we talk about the capital spending on IT equipment, and the question that came to me, sort of what John alluded to in terms of this advancing some of that spend. It’ll delay spending in ’24.

I don’t lose a lot of sleep at night, but one of the things that I occasionally lose sleep on is IT-type issues. I think we’ve been…. I’m going to choose my words wisely. I think we’ve been managing it closely. But we’ve also been fortunate, I think, that we haven’t had huge IT issues when we’ve pushed, probably, the life and the serviceability of some of this IT equipment pretty much to the max. I’m not super comfortable with managing IT risk that way. I don’t want to be shut down or something significant to happen where our productivity goes in half because of an IT issue.

Partially this is on me to say to the folks: “If there’s something we need to advance on IT, I think we need to come to the committee and say we need to advance something. Something isn’t going to last as long as we thought, and we have to front-load something.” It is that one area that probably makes me the most nervous — IT issues.

Sheila? I’ve got Sheila excited now.

S. Dodds: Thank you, Michael.

The question on refresh. I think you might have been asking about the refresh of laptops.

Interjection.

S. Dodds: I know. We have been in line with government with that. I think it’s a three-to-four-year period. But I would say that we were stretching it out a bit longer a few years back.

To Michael’s point, our infrastructure in the office had been very dated, and we have been going through quite a significant transition. But that server that we need to replace — there are some core infrastructure pieces that we’re paying the price of not having invested in them sort of that six, seven years ago.

Also, we have grown the number of staff a little bit over the last couple of years. Between refreshing, replacing those older laptops that are probably four years old now and making sure that they are in sync with the systems we have, that’s part of the capital there.

J. McNeill: And the increase in staff was as a result of our budget that was approved last year.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): I don’t think anybody from government — considering the challenges that we’ve faced here and what business is facing — would expect you, with all the government information that you’re auditing, not to have the most secure of systems.

Anyways, I’m not going to dwell on that. I just was wondering. It sounds to me like you’re not on the same kind of program with the government.

The last thing I want to dwell on…. You talked about the quantity of reports. We had another presentation talking about the impact that those reports have had on government — or how many they’ve acted on. What have they done?

I guess that would be helpful to know. Really, you’re the one — your office — that is holding government accountable where there are things that are…. I mean, we’re trying to find ways to make it, I guess, better for taxpayers. I mean that’s kind of what I usually think of auditors. But I’m sure there are other things.

[10:45 a.m.]

Is there something that you have done, or do you plan on looking at the effectiveness of the reports on government in terms of changes or improvements that they’ve acted upon because of the work that your office has done?

M. Pickup: Great question and one of my favourite topics. I will sincerely thank you for asking that question.

A couple of comments I would make. I don’t think I’m splitting hairs, and I know what, in substance, you’re getting to. I often say we don’t actually hold government ac­countable. We provide reports to elected officials who may wish to use those reports to hold government accountable and ask government questions with. If, in effect, we give reports to the Legislature that lots gets done with, that’s great. If elected folks decide not to use our reports to hold government accountable, then we would obviously ask questions as to why those reports aren’t being used in that way. I just want to elaborate on that a little bit.

The timing is good for your question. We are having discussions with the Public Accounts Committee, who generally call in all of our reports. They were having a discussion with us and with the office of the comptroller general to talk about the annual action plans against previous audits and to talk about what happens to the recommendations — how they are followed up and enacted upon.

They’re looking at…. I don’t obviously speak for the committee, clearly not, but I’m sharing with you that, from my perspective, the committee is looking at how that process works, including what the touchpoints are for the comptroller general and what the comptroller general’s responsibilities are, to bring forward to the Public Accounts Committee what is happening on the previous recommendations. And are they being implemented? As it is now, that responsibility lies with the comptroller general to work with those who are audited and bring forward information to the Public Accounts Committee.

We’ve been engaging over the last three or four months.

I think it’s on the agenda for this week, Sheila, right?

It’s on the agenda for our Public Accounts Committee meeting this week to talk about what happens after the audit. It’s the number two question I get asked as the Auditor General: what happens after you leave and you make all these recommendations? We are engaging with that committee to talk about what they might want from us, what they might want from the comptroller general and what that means. All of this stuff has a cost. If you start adding on a lot of audit time to following things up and giving assurance, well, these things take hours, take time and therefore take costs. So what approach do we take?

We’re also — I’m just going to be fairly open with you — having a discussion internally to say…. After we finish that discussion, is it worth doing a short report to the Legislature, to all members, to say: “Here is our process now on follow-up, on what happens after we do these audits and recommendations”? What does that mean in terms of interaction with the Public Accounts Committee? Again, we are following the Auditor General Act. We have responsibilities with the Public Accounts Committee that are laid out. We also have a mandate, and it’s quite clear in terms of what the accountabilities and reporting are to the entire Legislature.

We have to think about, as we go through with the Public Accounts Committee, who, for example approved the financial statement audit coverage plan, but they don’t necessarily approve what our approach is on follow-up. Yet we’re having a discussion with them on what they would like from us, so that we understand and are trying to meet the needs without being necessarily directed by a committee when that is not in the mandate. It’s a little bit of a dance to figure out how we best meet the needs. We are having a discussion, and once we get through that process, it may be worthwhile to have a short report to the entire Legislature to say, in answer to your question: “Here is now our role in follow-up.”

I would agree with you — and I think this was the premise of your question — that many of us go into these jobs, yes, to provide the reports to the Legislature, to fulfil our mandate to the Legislature. Most of us hope that when we do this work, the things that we recommend and that 99.9 percent of the time get agreed to by government actually get put in place. That’s what most of us want to see. That’s why we continue to do this work long after we could have left. It’s because we do want to see completion of the recommendations, because we think it improves government programs and services.

[10:50 a.m.]

We also recognize that our role is to report to the Legislature and to make audit conclusions that include recommendations, but we have no responsibility for implementing those recommendations or ensuring that those are done. That’s why governments get elected. That’s up to government. We provide the information to the elected folks. But yes, we do like to see it.

I often said one of the things I was most proud of in my six years as Auditor General of Nova Scotia — not to the credit of our office or me, to the credit of the public service and the people who we were auditing — was that when I arrived, 50 percent of our recommendations were completed within two years, and when I left, 75 percent of the recommendations were completed within two years, to the credit of the government. Now, I think we were giving recommendations that made sense and that were accepted and that they were going to act upon, but we could see that change.

This is very fluid right now — lots of discussion is going on, including this week. I told you I really liked that question, and it gave me an opportunity to explain that.

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): You didn’t give him that question before, Chair.

M. Pickup: Yeah. It sounds like a setup.

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay, with that, on behalf of the committee….

M. Pickup: Sorry, can I just make one more comment? I forgot something at the beginning. I’ll be very fast.

I forgot to introduce…. This is my bad. I’ll blame it on Monday morning. If you don’t know Sheila Dodds — maybe you met before — she is the new Deputy Auditor General. I can’t remember if you met since she took on this role in August. Sheila is the Deputy Auditor General and our first lead of equity, diversity and inclusion. That is in her title as well, and she’s taking on responsibility for that.

The person next to me here, John — and I think you probably have seen why — is now our chief financial officer. I have a lot of faith in John and gave him that role as well.

To my left is Nick Johnson. Nick is our new communications manager, who joined us in about March of last year, as well, and is settling in.

My bad for not introducing these folks at the beginning.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you for that, Michael, and thank you to you, Nick, John and Sheila for the work that you do. You have made it very clear to us that you set very high standards for yourselves.

On behalf of the committee, I also want to say that it’s clear that part of meeting those high standards has been paying attention to the environment in which you do your work and that what you’ve made evident to us here today is a strong commitment to and sense of teamwork. I wrote down “intangible benefits” — not always something one expects to hear from auditors. But you really made it very clear about the intangible benefits that you attach to transforming your workplace, turning it into a workplace of the future and recognizing the point of time that we’re in and the opportunity that this creates.

Thank you so much for coming here and being on the hotseat.

We will recess for five minutes.

The committee recessed from 10:53 a.m. to 11:01 a.m.

[B. Stewart in the chair.]

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): Committee, I’d like to call the meeting back to order, if you’re in agreement with that.

I would like to entertain a motion to go in camera.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 11:01 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

[B. Stewart in the chair.]

B. Stewart (Deputy Chair): We are now in public session.

Thank you very much to the committee for listening to­day and asking such thoughtful questions. I look forward to tomorrow morning’s deliberations. Thank you to the staff too.

I’ll entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:45 a.m.