The committee met at 8:01 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Good morning, everyone.

I’d like to start by recognizing that we’re meeting today on the territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, the Songhees and the Esquimalt Nations.

Today we’re continuing our spring check-in meetings with the independent statutory officers. Today we are meeting with the Ombudsperson, followed by the Human Rights Commissioner.

With that, I will turn it over to the Ombudsperson, Jay Chalke.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Good morning, Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the committee. Thank you very much to the committee for inviting us to be with you in this marvellous building. It’s great to be back here again.

It sits, as does our office on Fort Street, on the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ peoples. I acknowledge with respect, and I’m grateful to, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations for their stewardship of the lands and for sharing that territory with us.

I’m joined today by Rachel Warren, executive director of intake and investigation, and of course, Dave Van Swieten, our executive director of corporate shared services, who you are all well acquainted with.

As always, I very much appreciate the opportunity to appear before you. This committee’s work in reviewing and supporting my work and the work of my independent statutory officer colleagues represents an important involvement by legislators, as my colleagues and I discharge our statutory responsibilities — in my case, the oversight of the fairness of public administration, which in turn strengthens our democratic institutions in public administration.

In particular, these spring appearances provide an opportunity to deepen the committee’s understanding and appreciation of our work that informs your consideration, in the fall of each year, of our service plan and budget presentations. Right out of the gate, to directly address the question that the Committee Clerk forwarded on behalf of the committee, I am not making a supplementary budget request at this time.

Rather, this morning I’m going to address a number of matters that I believe will be of interest and that are of great importance to my office, to the complainants who seek our assistance and to the public bodies that we investigate. It’s quite a list, covering a number of items, so I’ve ordered them to go from the macro down to the specific. If you’ll allow me to start at 30,000 feet, I promise that, by the end of my remarks, I’ll be down to where are now, just about at sea level, in this lovely room.

Let’s start at the international level, which is not something that I think I’ve talked about in front of this committee before. I think I’ll take about five minutes just to talk about things globally.

When we think about the state of the world currently, the war on Ukraine is top of mind. Currently the various ombudsman institutions in Ukraine are doing their level best to assist the people of that country as they face the horrors of this senseless invasion. My counterpart, the Ukrainian parliamentary ombudsman, Lyudmyla Denisova, remarkably, continues her work and posts updates online almost daily, sharing vitally important information about evacuation routes, food availability and medical supplies, and guiding people to the remaining government services.

In countries neighbouring Ukraine, ombudspersons are assisting with the massive population migrations that have resulted. Ombudspersons in those countries are establishing pop-up offices in train stations to help those arriving and to connect them with public services. These ombudsmen continue to play an integral role in the protection of human rights and the rule of law — and, at a higher level, democratic preservation.

[8:05 a.m.]

Ombudspersons around the world, including myself, have expressed solidarity with our colleagues in the affected countries and offered our support. We’re all operating with the goal to make sure that those fleeing the war are supported in whatever country they find themselves.

Ombudspersons are doing this work in a more coordinated and formalized way than before. Recent developments have made that possible. In just the past couple of years, there have been two innovations to establish international legal instruments regarding ombuds offices. The first was the 2019 Venice principles, Principles on the Protection and Promotion of the Ombudsman Institution, developed and approved by the European Commission for Democracy through Law, which is part of the Council of Europe. I pause just to say that despite the name Council of Europe, Canada is a member of the Council of Europe. These Venice principles are in your materials.

These principles mean that ombuds institutions worldwide have a unique, formalized set of 25 international standards — a checklist, if you will — that define the common foundational principles for the functioning and independence of parliamentary and public service ombuds. The Venice principles were followed last year by the adoption by the United Nations of the UN resolution on the role of ombudsman and mediator institutions. That resolution is an endorsement of the important rule of ombudsman institutions, specifically identifying key principles of independence, impartiality, objectivity, fairness and transparency.

These international instruments are a very welcome development, particularly so at this time, given the current threats to democracy, which include, of particular relevance to ombuds, threats to oversight. The rise of authoritarianism and many of the dangers that this development poses to democratic institutions is sadly becoming well-known to all of us in this room.

One aspect of this concerning trend relates to the attempts that many such governments have made to intimidate, muzzle or otherwise silence ombudspersons and other independent oversight bodies. This silencing of independent oversight is troubling and ultimately destructive to a democratic government that is representative of and accountable to its people.

This concern has risen to the point where it is one of the main priorities of the global alliance of parliamentary ombudsmen known as the International Ombudsman Institute, to which our office belongs. The IOI, I’m very proud to say, originated in Canada, and one of my predecessors, the highly-respected former British Columbia ombudsman, Stephen Owen, headed the organization at one point in time. While it’s now headquartered in Vienna, my colleagues and I in the provincial and territorial ombuds offices across Canada remain active and engaged members.

Repeatedly, the IOI has intervened on behalf of ombuds under threat around the world to protect those institutions and sometimes the individuals leading those organizations from efforts to silence them. I’ll give you just one example among many. In July 2020, the Guatemala human rights ombudsman, Jordan Rodas, was summoned before that country’s congress to be held accountable for activities and statements supporting marginalized communities including LGBTQ2 people in that country. His tenure in office was questioned.

The IOI intervened and wrote a letter of support citing the Venice principles and, in particular, article 14 of those principles that provides that: “The Ombudsman shall not be given nor follow any instruction from any authorities.” Following that intervention and support from others, the Guatemalan ombudsman has remained in office, and there are many other examples.

As you can see, again, from that high vantage point, ombuds are playing a critical role worldwide, but as we start to drop down, we see that some of these international issues have an impact here at home as well. In case we needed a reminder that the world is indeed a connected a place, and to return to the topic of Ukraine, as individuals arrive in British Columbia and elsewhere in Canada pursuant to the new Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel, my office will be available to them should they have a complaint or need information about public services.

Together, across Canada, my provincial colleagues and I have already seen fairness issues arise with respect to holders of the CUAET. We’re aware of questions from Ukrainian newcomers. How public services — like health care coverage, public education, driver’s licensing — for those fleeing the war can be expedited. No doubt, the issues will continue to emerge in this highly fluid situation. We will be nimble in responding and in urging public bodies under our jurisdiction to be equally so.

I’ve been spending a little time there talking about our perspective on the world, so I now want to turn the lens around and talk about what maybe not the world but the public, namely the British Columbia public, thinks and knows about us.

[8:10 a.m.]

This arises as part of our multi-stage development on how we measure the impact of our work. You may recall that we’ve been working on developing a performance measurement framework for ombuds that focuses on outcomes rather than outputs. You also may recall that advice we had received and reported to this committee was to include some surveying as an initial step. We’ve started that, and in triennial rotation, we’ll be serving each of three groups — namely, the general public, the individuals who bring matters to our office and the public authorities we investigate.

The first piece of this is to get baseline information from the public, which we did in the 2021-2022 fiscal year. This year, the year we’re currently in, we will be serving people who have accessed our services. Next fiscal year, we’ll survey staff from public bodies we investigated. Then we’ll repeat the cycle. This three-year cycle will allow us to track, in an ongoing and data-driven way, the effectiveness and awareness of our office. So lots more to come.

For today, I’m going to share just a few findings from that first piece of work, our survey with the public that was conducted in late February by survey firm Leger 360. In your materials, if you could turn to that, I’m going to talk a little bit about some of the slides that are before you. As you can see from the first slide, titled “Methodology,” some 1,500 adults in British Columbia were surveyed, with a sample made to be representative for age, gender and region.

The next slide is on awareness and familiarity. As you can see on this slide, we have some unaided questions about our office and some aided ones. For example, we asked: “Imagine that you had a problem or complaint about a provincial or local public sector organization in B.C. that you wanted to be addressed. Besides going straight to that organization, where would you go to make a complaint?” You can see that only about 17 percent of people could come up with our name on their own.

What’s more concerning to me on this slide is in the lower-left quadrant. Only one in three people think there is any organization in British Columbia whose purpose it is to make sure that the people of B.C. are treated fairly by local or provincial public sector organizations. That suggests that there are many people who have an unresolved fairness problem with a public body. They aren’t seeking help from us, and they’re probably not seeking help from anybody, because they don’t think anybody exists.

But when survey respondents were given a bit of help and our name was mentioned, you can see that 73 percent of the public are aware of us. Once our name is linked to the issue, recognition goes up significantly. As you can see on this next slide, the good news is that among those who are aware of us, some 71 percent of people say they’d be likely to use our services.

On the next slide, titled “Perception of independence,” there’s also fairly positive news in relation to what people perceive in relation to our independence from government or the public bodies we investigate. However, as we’re going to see later, independence of our office is important to people, so my view is that perception of independence still isn’t high enough, and it’s something that we need to work on. That 27 percent of people who are unsure is a priority to me.

The next slide, titled “Perceptions of the Ombudsperson’s office,” contains a list of attributes and asks members of the public how they perceive our office. On this slide, we see some additional positive perceptions of the office. Some 93 percent of respondents said that their perception of us is that we were respectful, 92 percent said we provide professional services, 89 percent said we do work that’s important to British Columbians, and the same number said we have integrity — all very positive.

What are some things that we could do better on? Accessibility and timeliness, obviously, are areas that the public thinks we need to improve, and we’re actively working on both of those.

The last slide, “Importance of key attributes,” looks at what the public thinks are the most important attributes of our office. Most important for them, as you can see from this chart, is that they want us to hold government to account. Impartiality is critically important to them, as is independence. These are areas that we know we want to keep very strong as we move forward.

As this is the first plank in the floor as we look at outcome performance measurement, we’ll be reporting these in more detail in our annual report. We made some promises in our service plan about the public reporting of this. In our upcoming annual report, we’ll be including a more detailed description of these, but I just wanted to give you a small taste of what the public is telling us. This surveying, as I mentioned, is part of a suite of outcome performance measures, and this is all new for us.

[8:15 a.m.]

I now want to turn to another area of new work for us — namely, development of our Indigenous community services plan, a plan that this committee has been involved with for the past few years. Effective April 1, a month ago, phase 1 of our plan, which was before you in November, moved to the implementation phase. That plan has three components, the most significant of which is our brand-new Ombudsperson pathfinder program.

After careful consideration, and supported by an Indigenous advisory panel, we’ve contracted with five highly skilled regional engagement specialists who will be working in Indigenous communities across B.C., raising awareness of our office among the Indigenous public, and acting as a bridge to building trust between our office and communities, as well as assisting Indigenous people who wish to bring forward complaints to us.

We know there have been historical barriers to Indigenous people accessing public services, including ours, and we know that we have to change our approach. Ombudsperson pathfinders will be gathering important perspectives so that, in partnership, we can make the changes we need to make as part of our collective reconciliation journey. We will have lots more to say about this program in months to come.

Before I leave this topic, I’d just like to make special mention of our Indigenous liaison officer, Jolene Andrew, who is with us in the gallery today. Jolene is Wet’suwet’en and has worked with Indigenous communities for almost 20 years specializing in Indigenous approaches to justice and social development in communities. As we dig deeper into this work, we’re learning much from Jolene. Her knowledge and perspectives are motivating to think in new and often uncomfortable ways. Thank you, Jolene, for everything you’ve done and continue to do to ensure Indigenous people are being treated fairly in this province.

I do want to mention that later today we’re starting a one-week orientation for the Ombudsperson pathfinders to be held at our office here in Victoria. To that end, I’m very pleased that one of the pathfinders has arrived already and has joined us along with Jolene in the gallery. Lenny LaRock is here today. Lenny LaRock will be the Ombudsperson pathfinder for the Fraser Valley. Lenny is from the Sts’ailes First Nation. We’re very excited about getting to know her and her Ombudsperson pathfinder colleagues more.

I look forward to a very interesting week as we impart information about all things Ombuds to assist the pathfinders as they start their work. More importantly, I look forward to listening and learning from their experiences. The information they share with us will be vital as we continue our work to strengthen our services to Indigenous communities.

I now want to ask Rachel to update you on the work we’re doing to proactively promote fairness by public bodies. Rachel has spent the past five years setting up our public authority consultation and training team, also known as PACT, offering consultation services with public authorities trying to make their services fairer and delivering educational programs on administrative fairness and complaint handling to public sector staff throughout B.C.

We’ve seen the value of this proactive work and know that where unfairness does arrive in public service delivery, having a culture and pre-established processes in place to resolve that unfairness quickly mitigates the risk of maladministration. We all know that an ounce of PACT prevention is worth a pound of ombuds cure.

With that, I’ll turn it over to Rachel.

R. Warren: That joke never gets old.

Thank you and good morning. As you know, our PACT team has been providing training and voluntary consultation to public bodies since this committee first provided funding for a pilot program in 2017. In that time, thousands of public sector staff have developed strengthened expertise through our workshops, webinars and training on everything from fair decision-making to complaint handling to understanding how to exercise discretion fairly and to avoid bias.

These are difficult and complex topics that are vitally important when providing public services, and the feedback we continue to get from the public employees across the province is that our training and proactive advice on administrative fairness is helping them improve their services to the public.

We continue to expand our suite of products online, as well as to deliver virtual and, hopefully again soon, in-person fairness workshops. Our written publications promoting fairness are being used worldwide. Just this week we received a request from the Office of the Ombudsman Thailand for permission to translate one of our popular tip sheets into Thai language. I was pleasantly surprised when I spoke to the ombuds for one of the branches of the U.S. military, who told me that he often distributes our tip sheets on fair administration within that branch of the U.S. armed forces.

So lots of activity on the training front and lots of interest. In fact, our latest round of “Fairness in Practice” workshops filled up in just a few hours from being advertised.

[8:20 a.m.]

Our PACT team, along with our public interest disclosure team, is also supporting the implementation of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, B.C.’s whistleblower protection legislation. For example, we developed our most recent e-learning offering, which is an online course, designed primarily for employees, that outlines how to bring a disclosure of wrongdoing forward, either internally within their organization or to our office.

A major component of Public Interest Disclosure Act support was the April 1 onboarding of over 30 new public bodies that cabinet applied the whistleblowing law to as phase 2 of the act’s implementation. Those public bodies are mostly tribunals, and thus, many are small, but each had to take steps to get ready. Our office worked with leaders from each of those public bodies so they would be ready to assume their new responsibilities on day one when the act applied to them. In addition, we promoted the idea of taking the occasion of the act applying in their organization to renew their focus on integrity and to foster a speak-up culture within their organization.

Come this December, phase 3 of the act’s implementation will occur as it is further expanded to apply to Crown corporations. This will involve a much bigger cohort of employees, so we are already rolling up our sleeves to support implementation to that diverse range of organizations and their employees.

So there is lots of important work happening from the PACT and PID teams to support public bodies to deliver their services fairly — and, hopefully, avoid complaints from escalating; and to ensure that they have systems in place to respond well to any concerns they might receive, either internally from employees under the Public Interest Disclosure Act or from the public they serve.

J. Chalke: Next I would just like to give the committee a very brief update on our new case management and management information system conversion project. You’ll recall that we’re migrating from our 30-plus-year-old proprietary system to licensing a customizable, off-the-shelf system known as Resolve. As you know, this is a major project of our four offices in our corporate shared services model.

My office is going first, and we are currently doing user acceptance testing. We’re looking for a long weekend in the second quarter of this year to select as a go-live date. This will minimize the disruption this operational change would have on those who rely on our services by permitting data conversion to take place over a long weekend. The Police Complaint Commissioner’s Resolve development is well underway, and the other two offices’ implementation will follow that.

Turning now to our public reports released since I was last before you in November. In December we released our report titled A Bid for Fairness, our investigation involving the fairness of municipal property tax collection. We investigated the tragic case of a 60-year-old Penticton woman we call Ms. Wilson, who was living alone in a house she had shared for many years with her now-deceased mother. She had failed to pay $10,000 in property taxes even though she had the money to pay.

Ms. Wilson had a number of health conditions that prevented timely payment of her property tax. As a result, her house was sold by auction in a municipal tax sale process, resulting in her home being auctioned by the city of Penticton for a fraction of what it was worth. The B.C. assessed value at that time was $420,000, and her house was sold at action for $150,000.

Our investigation found that written communication from the city both leading up to and following the sale of Ms. Wilson’s home contained numerous errors, including incorrect deadlines and inaccurate references to sections of the Local Government Act. At same time, it failed to include key information that would have informed Ms. Wilson about the consequences of the tax sale process. We also found that the city had not taken adequate steps to check with either the Interior Health Authority or the Public Guardian and Trustee to see if Ms. Wilson was vulnerable and needed assistance.

We recommended that the city compensate Ms. Wilson. While at first the city declined our recommendation, following extensive media coverage, the city reversed its position and did so. That reversal was an example of what over 35 years ago the Supreme Court of Canada said was one of the purposes of an Ombudsperson’s public report — namely, in the words of the court, “to marshal public opinion behind appropriate causes.” We also recommended changes to the provincial tax sale framework to make the process fairer for people who may be in this situation in the future. All those recommendations were accepted by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, and I look forward to monitoring the ministry’s progress later this year.

Since I last appeared before the committee, we also issued an investigative update on one of our reports. These public updates help us in our role of holding government to account by outlining our assessment of the progress those government bodies have made in implementing our recommendations. In January, we released our final update on an investigation highlighting gaps in oversight of the regulatory scheme that seeks to protect some of B.C.’s most sensitive ecosystems as urbanization pressure occurs.

[8:25 a.m.]

Our initial 2014 report, Striking a Balance, examined what is now known as the Ministry of Forest’s use of the professional reliance model in the protections of lands surrounding streams, lakes and inland waters where development occurs. The investigation found that there were significant gaps in how this system operates and recommended changes to strengthen oversight, compliance with the law, public accountability and transparency. Most of those recommendations have now been implemented.

Just last week the Attorney General introduced Bill 23, the Mental Health Amendment Act, which is now before you down the hall. This bill is an important first step to implementing a central recommendation from our 2019 report, Committed to Change, which found that mental health facilities in the province were systematically not complying with their obligations in the Mental Health Act when admitting patients involuntarily. Among other changes, we recommended that B.C. adopt the approach of most provinces in Canada and establish a system of independent rights advisors. While there are many important details to fill in at the regulation stage, this legislation is a key first step in implementing that recommendation.

As always, issuing public reports is a critically important way for us to hold government to account. In the coming months, we’ll be issuing several reports that I look forward to sharing with you when I see you this fall.

There’s no question that these past few months have been busy. As we move through the pandemic, we’ve seen seismic shifts in public administration — for example, a move, in some instances, from in-person services to a largely online service delivery model. Employees of public bodies have had to learn whole new ways of delivering public services and then revise that delivery as the pandemic changed. This instability in the delivery of public services, of course, has made our work challenging, as entirely new questions of public administration fairness have arisen as services have changed.

To further complicate matters, there has been — as I mentioned to this committee the last time I was before you — a marked increase in the emotion and distress that complainants are experiencing during the pandemic. That distress is felt by my staff, who are on the receiving end of much of the public’s confusion, frustration and, sometimes, anger, because we take the time to listen to their stories. Sometimes these callers say we’re the first people to take the time to do so.

It’s been a significant challenge and one that I’m very proud to say my staff have met, and I’m extremely grateful to them for their excellent work throughout the year. People who come to us have received vital information about how to navigate complex complaint pathways. Their complaints have been thoroughly assessed and investigated where needed, and the recommendations that we continue to make to public bodies continue to hold government to account and, overall, make public administration and government fairer.

Now, hopefully, we’ve arrived at sea level. With that, I’m happy to take your questions.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you so much for that very interesting and detailed summary of what you’ve been doing and what’s going on out there — the context. I know that there will be questions and things that people want to pursue in more detail.

L. Doerkson: A couple of questions. First off, thanks for the presentation. I wanted to go back to the pathfinder program, which I’m excited to hear is going on. You mentioned five pathfinders are hired. I wondered if you could give a little clarity around which regions will have those folks working.

Secondly, with respect to complaints that your office is receiving and the file counts — which you know I’m a stickler about — I’m curious to know if there’s one sector that is sort of the heaviest load. Whether it’s health or whether it’s…. I’m just wondering where the complaints are coming from.

J. Chalke: With respect to the pathfinders, what phase 1 of our plan proposed and this committee approved in the fall was a model where we would hire five contracted part-time contractors to work in Indigenous communities across the province. Each of them will be responsible for…. Think health authority, roughly, more or less — so one for the Fraser Valley, one for Vancouver Coastal, one for the Island, one for the Interior and one for the North.

Their role will really be to build awareness, bridge that trust and help people make complaints — very practical, hands-on work. If someone does have a complaint and they need some help articulating and making that, they’ll be helping to do that.

[8:30 a.m.]

That’s how we’re starting. We’re just engaging an evaluator so that, hopefully, when we’re back here in a couple of years, I’ll be able to have something to say: “Here’s the sense of how that’s working. Does there need to be something else or something more?”

I’m very excited about getting this started. I’m looking forward to it. Each of them has a contract for about, roughly, 60 days of work. Times five, that’s 300 days that they’ll be in Indigenous communities this year. I’m really excited about that.

L. Doerkson: That’s great.

J. Chalke: A question about numbers. Basically, in our annual report, we always publish a ranked list for the prior year of the number of complaints and inquiries we receive about every single authority.

I would say that what we’re really interested in is trying to figure out whether the last couple of years are representative, because there have been some changes in the last couple of years to the distribution of those complaints. But we’re in an incredibly unusual time right now. So whether — touch wood — as we emerge from the pandemic right now we revert to pre-pandemic patterns of complaint distribution or whether there are real, ongoing changes….

To give you an example, before the onset of the pandemic the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction had been our No. 1 complaint authority for more than a decade, every single year. However, during the pandemic, they have dropped to No. 5, as of our last published annual report. It’s hard to exactly attribute why that would’ve happened but, certainly, during the pandemic, they waived a number of the reporting criteria, as well as provided supplementary benefits, both of which are often the source of complaints we get.

So an interesting question will be: as we and they move forward out of the pandemic, which of those pre-pandemic rules and requirements are going to be reinstated versus what lessons have public authorities learned during the pandemic?

I think that everybody is certainly talking the language of trying to fall forward not fall back, as we come out of the pandemic, in terms of the lessons learned from public administration. That’s something we’re certainly promoting and working with public authorities on specific changes that we’ve seen where we think: “Well, maybe that’s actually a better way of doing something. Why not…?” Yes, it was the pandemic that precipitated that innovation. But don’t necessarily get rid of it and go back to your pre-pandemic way of doing business.

So a lot of work with public authorities to try and really talk through what those lessons learned are that we can see.

M. Starchuk: Thank you, Jay. Coming from the city of Surrey often brings its own nuances, we’ll say. Recently there have been some issues that have made the local press. I’m not a person that reads the local paper going: “Everything I read is true.” So there was an issue that came forward regarding the ethics commissioner in Surrey, where you provided comment that the city decided to ignore. I guess that’s the word.

Can you just…? I mean, I assume that you’ve read the article, and you provided the advice to the city. Can you expand on what was not taken as advice?

J. Chalke: Right. I’m not sure which article you’re referring to, but I know the issue. So the city council of Surrey gave three readings to a bylaw that would’ve put a moratorium on the reception of and investigation of new ethics complaints by something known as the Surrey ethics commissioner.

Surrey is one of two municipalities in British Columbia that, to their credit, established ethics commissioners to look into allegations or complaints of ethical misconduct by councilmembers. Whereas our office is interested primarily in public administration, the administration of a city government, the focus of the ethics commissioner is on the councillors.

[8:35 a.m.]

That bylaw would have basically provided that there was a moratorium on not receiving any new complaints from the morning after that council hearing — so that was on April 11, right away — through until after the upcoming municipal election.

Such moratoria are not unusual in municipalities in Canada that have ethics commissioners. You can look at Toronto, Vancouver, others in Canada that have ethics commissioners. It’s common for there to be a moratorium. The purpose of that moratorium is so that there can’t be people who make high-profile complaints for purposes that relate to the election and that there was no chance for the ethics commissioner to investigate them before voting day.

It’s not unusual to have such a mortarium. The issue, certainly, in Surrey’s case, though, was the duration of the moratorium and the fact that it was arriving with no notice. I simply wrote a letter to…. They had not given fourth reading to the bylaw. I wrote a letter urging them to reconsider and listen to their own ethics commissioner, who had actually prepared a report on the issue the prior year and who had proposed a moratorium of some 46 days as opposed to six months.

I made that suggestion to Surrey council. They decided to proceed with passing the bylaw that they had given the three readings to before.

M. Starchuk: This is just a follow up, Jay. I want to make sure that I’m not remiss of the Penticton case. I think what your office did was awesome in Penticton, and it really covered that off.

But with regards to the 46 days as opposed to the time frame that was there, how relevant is that 46 days in the rest of the country?

J. Chalke: The suggestion by the Surrey Ethics Commissioner, which was, as I say, around that period of time, fits in. I mean, I think all of the major municipalities…. None of them are identical. They have a bit of a range. It probably falls somewhere in the middle of the range, I guess — I would describe the suggestion from the Surrey Ethics Commissioner. But there’s a range that goes somewhere from July through to much closer to voting day.

Just to say, it was more a question of there were no municipalities in Canada that we knew of that had a duration as long as that which was being suggested.

M. Starchuk: Okay, great. Thank you.

J. Chalke: Certainly, from our perspective, it causes concern. I’m going to be following up with the Minister of Municipal Affairs to say that perhaps there should be something that should be standard for the province. We want….

Certainly, it’s a good innovation that local governments consider ethics commissions. With new legislation that was passed last fall, all councils, after the upcoming general municipal election, will have to at least consider the question of whether to establish standards of conduct for their council. They don’t have to establish them, but they have to at least have that debate. If they decline, they have to provide reasons. That was the legislation that you and your colleagues passed in the fall.

In that context, certainly there will be opportunities there to appoint an ethics commissioner, if that’s so inclined. We might see more ethics commissioners. Certainly, my suggestion to the minister will be to develop some sort of standard for the province.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): I guess Hillary Clinton would have benefited from a six-month moratorium.

Thank you for this presentation. I’ve got a couple of questions. I’ll just start with one, and we’ll see how much time we have here. With the implementation of Resolve, you may already do this, but in terms of your data tracking, are you able — and this kind of goes into the pathfinders — to determine if your process is an impediment to Indigenous peoples actually accessing your office? Is this something that you can tell now, or will this Resolve help you to be able to kind of better understand the demographics of folks who are accessing your office?

J. Chalke: That’s a great question, and it’s something that we spend a lot of time thinking about in the organization. I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t necessarily had a data-rich environment, historically, on demographic information about complainants or, for that matter, people who have problems that don’t come to us, which is just sort of at the root of what we’re doing with pathfinders.

[8:40 a.m.]

Even among people who do come to us, historically we haven’t necessarily collected that information. We have been starting to have that discussion in the context of, of course, the Human Rights Commissioner’s recent report and, if media reports are true, some legislation that may be coming soon. We’ll certainly be doing a lot of work to try to develop that, and, to the degree that that legislation authorizes the collection of that information, do so in the context of collecting more information in our new system. It’s work yet to come but absolutely a priority for us.

It’s important for us to make sure that we’re collecting that information well so that we can figure out whether there are gaps in our service. I think it also starts to provide better insight in terms of where there are problems in public administration, if we’re getting complaints in particular sectors.

B. Stewart: Jay, I just wanted to ask you…. I’m not quite clear on the timeline when ICBC and those public organizations fall under your authority. With the introduction of no-fault insurance last year coming into effect and a change away from the tort system, I think there was some allusion that there might be significant increase in terms of workload. Can you just…? How has that worked out? Or has it worked out differently than you…?

J. Chalke: To answer the first question, ICBC is a public authority under our jurisdiction, under the Ombudsperson Act, and has been so since their inception. But under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, their employees are not yet covered by the act. They will be later this year. Because they’re a Crown corporation, they’ll come in as part of the Crown corporations. At that point, their employees will be able to make disclosures of wrongdoing to us.

With respect to no-fault, no-fault came into effect, as you recall, last May. I was before you a year and a bit ago and said that this has the potential of resulting in complaints to us because instead of courts being brought in, in the tort system, to resolve matters, it would be something more akin to a compensation scheme that we might see, for example, at WorkSafe. There is, in fact, compensation being done by public officials that are subject to our oversight.

In addition, there was a new fairness commissioner established, also a public body under our jurisdiction. Some disputes — not all, but some — would be going to the CRT, also a public body under our jurisdiction.

At that time, we weren’t sure. We were talking to ICBC a lot. We were concerned, because obviously, ICBC already is our number one public authority by complaint volume, now that the Ministry of Social Development no longer is. We were concerned that even a relatively small percentage increase could be material to us. So we sought this committee’s approval for one incremental staff person for the fiscal year just completed and the one we’re just starting right now.

We’re watching that. The complaint time, the cycle time for complaints to come in, is pretty long, because of course, it has to be an accident on May 1 or after of last year — so just one year now. Then the person has to go through all of the internal processes of ICBC, be dissatisfied, and then come to us. It’s very typical that we would see, in that kind of complaint system, that it might be a year or 18 months before we even receive people who are unhappy with their outcome under ICBC’s new no-fault system.

We’ll be, at the end of this fiscal year, in a better position to say, “Yeah, that one person meets the need,” “That one person was excess to our needs,” or where we’re actually seeing a trend that worrying and we’re thinking that we need more. So it’s a work in progress. I’m looking forward to reporting back in the fall.

[8:45 a.m.]

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): This isn’t a follow-up; it’s a different question. I’ve had some constituents contact me. There seemed to be some confusion between what you take to the Auditor General and what you take to the Ombudsperson. I think, Rachel, I may have even asked you about this when we met down in the rotunda. I don’t expect you to remember this.

I had a constituent who was aware of some inaccurate reporting to one of the ministries. The ministry actually pays some money to an organization based on this inaccurate reporting. The person had gone to the ministry over three years, and no investigation was ever launched into this. They contacted the Auditor General because it was a financial misdealing. They were then told to contact your office. Somebody at your office said they should contact the Auditor General’s office.

Sometimes, to those things, is it a bit fuzzy between them, or was there some inaccurate information in what we were told?

J. Chalke: I’m not familiar with the case that you’re mentioning, but….

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): It didn’t progress.

J. Chalke: Certainly, we have to look to make sure…. All we’re really interested in is making sure it fits within the terms of the Ombudsperson Act. If we have a sense that something might be more appropriately dealt with by another officer of the Legislature, we certainly can liaise with that other officer and say: “Is this something that would be more appropriate to put in your bailiwick?”

It’s unfortunate if that scenario played out the way you suggest it did. Happy to look at the details if you want to provide them to us, and we can take another look. Without knowing more, one of the requirements, just to say, is that under our act, we have to have somebody who’s aggrieved. That means that basically, they’re affected. So that’s just a limitation in our act. But we try to look at that in a way that is sufficiently broad. But being affected as an ordinary taxpayer doesn’t make you aggrieved, if I can put it that way.

So we look at all those questions, but again, probably best for us to simply look at the specific case. We can take another look.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): I didn’t mean to put you on the spot about a specific case, but just in general, if there’s a grey space…. But you’ve just told me in what you’ve just said that it isn’t your office, because of your answer, so thank you very much.

J. Chalke: Certainly, we liaise a lot with the other officers. We have a number of times where we think: “Well, we could look at this, but there might be another officer of the Legislature that might be more appropriate.” Other times, it’s actually something outside of our statutory jurisdiction, and we’re suggesting that they go to that other officer for a review.

B. Bailey: Thank you very much for this presentation. As someone who is new to this committee, it’s been very informative, and I really appreciate it.

I’m particularly interested in the pathfinders program. I’m excited to meet two of the pathfinders here today.

Welcome. Nice to see you.

I know, of course, that Indigenous folks are very often over-policed and have a disproportionate relationship with child welfare because of the history of colonialism. I’m wondering about the model that you’re going to be using for pathfinders.

Is it an intake model, where the pathfinders will bring people in for service, or will they be providing the service directly? Also, I’m curious about what the measurements are going to be and how you’re going to look at whether the program’s successful, whether it will need more staffing in the future — all of those sorts of things. I wonder if you could just take me a little bit further into the weeds on the pathfinders program.

J. Chalke: I’ll start with your second question first. We’re just currently finalizing the evaluation and selecting an evaluator and evaluation criteria, etc. We’re trying to make sure that we’re collecting and retaining as much baseline information as we do have, so that evaluation, when it does start, will be able to look at that. But I think those evaluation criteria will relate to the purposes of the program, which, as I said before, are raising awareness, building trust and facilitating complaints. That’s really the purpose of the program, so we’ll be building criteria that kind of relate to those things.

In terms of the model, it’s a terrific question. What we’re working on is a model in which…. Pathfinders are not responsible for doing investigations. What we really want them to do is to help people make complaints to us, if the complaint should come to us. But what we want to avoid is them just sending people to us if the complaint should go somewhere else.

[8:50 a.m.]

They’ll be working with materials that we provide to facilitate the appropriate direction and suggestion being made to someone who is thinking about complaining to us but maybe should be going somewhere else. If someone speaks to a pathfinder and they’re an Indigenous Armed Forces veteran and their complaint is about DVA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, there’s a Veterans Ombudsman at the federal level, but it’s not us. That’s a pretty straightforward one. The pathfinder could simply guide the person to contact the Veterans Ombudsman directly.

Our purpose is very much to encourage and foster the making of jurisdictional complaints to us. We’ll be supporting the pathfinders so that they can pass those complaints through to us, and then we can start our work.

L. Doerkson: Just a quick follow-up to that. Yeah, I understood the program to be outreach as well. So you’ll be actually going to communities and…?

J. Chalke: Yep.

L. Doerkson: Perfect. Thank you.

J. Chalke: Absolutely. Building awareness, bridging trust, facilitating complaints means…. I think we first have to start at awareness.

I’ve had conversations with Indigenous leaders who will describe a thing that has happened to them and say: “But you can’t help me because I live on a reserve, right?” I’m like: “I totally can help you. That was a problem that you had with a provincial public body under my jurisdiction. I completely could have….”

I think, really, we have work to do in terms of building that awareness.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, I’m not seeing any further questions. I’d like to, on behalf of the committee, thank you and your team for the work that you do and for engaging with us today.

I guess a personal comment I’d like to make is…. I was really moved by the fact that you started out by putting what you do in the context of world events and the threats to democracy that are happening around the world. It really underlines the important work that you do and other ombudspeople do to preserve democracy. It also underlines that it takes a lot of courage, in the context of world events, to be doing what you do. So thank you for that as well.

J. Chalke: Thank you very much.

J. Routledge (Chair): We will take a brief recess.

The committee recessed from 8:52 a.m. to 8:59 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Now we’re pleased to turn it over to the Human Rights Commissioner.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Good morning, Chair, Deputy Chair, members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to present to you today about what we’ve been up to at the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

[9:00 a.m.]

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

As the descendant of settlers and migrants, I recognize that this gratitude must be coupled with taking responsibility to work continuously to repair the harms perpetrated by the colonial state on Indigenous people, both presently and historically. I’ll return to that theme and talk about how our office is fulfilling that responsibility, throughout my comments.

I’m joined today by my colleague Stephanie Garrett. Dianne Buljat is now well, and she is joining us in the gallery today.

I want to take the opportunity to thank all of you very much for the work that you have all done since I appeared before you last fall. The budget that you recommended in your report has allowed us to serve British Columbians in a variety of ways, and I hope you will see the impact of that budget in action as I go through my comments today.

When I appeared before you last fall, I reviewed the impact of our evaluation plan. At that point, it was still in development. This plan has now been finalized and implemented, and you can see the framework detailed in our annual report. The evaluation plan and the strategic plan that it flows from has provided us with clear direction for our work planning for the year ahead. I’ll speak to some of those plans again throughout my presentation.

In my time with you today, I’m dividing my speaking notes into three components. First, I will speak to you about the current context of human rights in B.C. and globally, and how this unique context has driven our work in a number of ways. Next, I will do a deeper dive into one project in particular, which is our inquiry into hate during the pandemic. Finally, I will turn to how this unique context of the pandemic has impacted our operations and some of the ways that we are striving to build a thriving workplace during what is a stressful time for many of us. After that, I look forward to answering your questions.

We have been building this office in a unique context. Human rights are at the forefront of the minds of many in a way that is unprecedented in Canada in my lifetime. Our five strategic priorities that we developed shortly before the onset of the pandemic have taken on particular meaning during this time, including the rise of hate and white supremacy, poverty as both a cause and effect of inequality, the rights of those held in detention, decolonization and Indigenous rights, and then our standing priority, which is discrimination in the context largely of employment, housing and services.

Protests against police brutality directed at Indigenous people and Black people, a growing awareness of the ways in which racism impacts health outcomes, including from COVID, and a movement to push back on the mainstream emergence of white nationalism have brought systemic racism into the consciousness of the masses. As a result, tackling systemic racism has become a significant focus of our work.

We have been working for the past year or so to provide guidance to government as they work to implement the recommendations we issued in our first report to the Legislature — that is, Disaggregated Demographic Data Collection in B.C.: The Grandmother Perspective. The report and recommendations speak to how to collect disaggregated demographic data in a way that leads to better government decisions without increasing the stigma already faced by marginalized communities.

The grandmother perspective is that data must be collected with the same care that a matriarch collects data to better meet the needs of her family, rather than using a model in which government acts as a kind of Big Brother. I’m pleased to say, as you all well know, that legislation is being introduced today in the Legislature, which was co-developed by Indigenous communities. The new law, if passed, will address systemic racism in the context of data, following many of my office’s recommendations.

I’m also pleased to say that the Legislature passed an important amendment to the human rights code in the fall to add Indigenous identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the code. Despite the significant human rights issues facing Indigenous peoples in this province, we know that the Human Rights Tribunal was underutilized by Indigenous peoples as a method to address those issues. Alongside the tribunal and the First Nations Leadership Council, we advocated for changes to the human rights code to ensure that Indigenous people could see themselves reflected there.

[9:05 a.m.]

In November, we issued a submission to the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act, addressing systemic racism in policing. Our submission was accompanied by what we believe to be the largest set of data and research report ever done on policing data in Canada.

This report confirmed what Indigenous, Black and racialized communities have been saying for years — that policing practices such as arrest rates and mental health checks are disproportionately targeted at them and have a disproportionate impact on them. For example, we found that Indigenous men are 17.3 times more likely to be arrested in Vancouver as their presence in the population would predict. Our work spoke to these numbers and to the solutions, going forward.

Last Thursday the committee released its recommendations and report on the hearings and submissions it received. Our submissions are relied on in that report, and some of our recommendations are reflected there. We’ve been busy since the release of our report, briefing government staffers, police boards and police chiefs. We are now able to move into a mode of greater advocacy and monitoring of the implementation of our recommendations.

We’ve also provided submissions and critical analysis to government on a number of ongoing policy issues related to systemic racism. For example, we recently made submissions to the government in response to their review of the agreement between the Canadian Border Services Agency and the provincial government regarding migrant detention.

Despite the fact that 94 percent of immigration detainees are held for administrative reasons and pose no risk to public safety — that’s a stat according to CBSA — they are treated like criminals by being held in provincial jails, including in solitary confinement. There is strong evidence that racialized people and those with disabilities experience harsher treatment and are detained for longer periods of time. As one migrant said: “I didn’t feel like a human in there. I felt like a dog. The guards would just open the latch and feed me.”

Our recommendation is for the government to cancel its agreement with CBSA and to call on the federal government to gradually abolish immigration detention while expanding community-based alternatives that can support individuals. This is the first review of its kind in Canada and presents an opportunity for B.C. to lead in this area. We anticipate the results of the government review in June.

All of these submissions and recommendations speak to the deliverable in our evaluation plan to provide recommendations to the B.C. government and other duty-bearers on ways to prevent, reduce, mitigate or improve systemic human rights issues.

In addition, we have a goal of developing accessible educational materials, which is a tool we are also utilizing for the purposes of tackling systemic racism. For Black History Month, we produced a number of videos on the importance of teaching and learning about the history and experiences of Black British Columbians and Black people around the world. As part of our “I Love My Human Rights” storytelling series, film-maker and historian Anthony Brown spoke to us about the role of early Black pioneers on Saltspring Island and across the country.

He spoke about his experience as a seventh-generation Black Canadian — as the descendant of Americans who came to Canada to flee slavery and Jim Crow laws in the U.S. He said: “Black history in B.C. is important because it has never been told, and it’s time that it gets showcased.” During the launch of the video, students from Daily Dose of Blackness noted the importance of teaching both about slavery and oppression and also about the joy, beauty and contributions of Black people.

Alongside the video, we developed two conversation guides to facilitate learning: one for adult learners and one for grades 4 through 9. Our goal when we create these types of guides, which we do for all of our storytelling videos, is to help create safe, structured and productive spaces to grow the conversation beyond videos into classrooms, adult education settings, workplace learning sessions and other organizations — and to provide a list of community resources for further learning.

If you haven’t yet seen the Anthony Brown video, I really encourage you to do so. You can access it, of course, through our website.

As you may hear through these examples, we are working hard to communicate to people about important human rights issues in accessible, appealing and interesting ways. To this end, we have been working with the B.C. Association of Broadcasters on the Never Accept Hate or NAH campaign.

[9:10 a.m.]

This campaign is running on radio, TV and print across the province and has a significant investment from the broadcasters association to get it seen as widely as possible over the course of the year. It aims to use interesting and innovative messaging, including calls to action to communicate that hate in our communities is unacceptable and we can all work together to address it.

We are leveraging this private sector partnership to speak to a wide public audience about the prevalence of hate in our communities and, more importantly, to communicate that we are not powerless in the face of that hate. The key messages of this campaign are to stand up, do more, speak out and to never accept hate.

Another key theme of our times is individual freedoms versus systemic equality. Debates around whether public health orders are better characterized as restrictions on our freedom or protections for our health have amplified a larger debate about individual freedoms when the exercise of those freedoms may harm the collective good or the rights of a minority group.

The role of my office is to ensure that the rights of the minority do not get trampled on by the exercise of personal freedoms by the majority. Our work is focused on our collective responsibility to share the burden of COVID across society and not to lay that burden solely on the shoulders of those most medically vulnerable, including elderly people and people with disabilities. To this end, we have worked closely with the public health officer on a few public policy issues that have touched directly on human rights issues.

For example, I recently engaged in an important conversation with the PHO about whether the removal of the mask mandate was permissible using a human rights lens, a human rights analysis, particularly in the context of schools and transit. In a letter I later made public, I said that without the assurance that those they encounter in public spaces will be masked, many seniors and people with disabilities will feel that they must isolate themselves from society or risk their health.

Indigenous people and racialized people are overrepresented in high-transmission work environments and are at greater risk because of higher incidents of chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. Children under the age of five are not yet eligible for vaccination but of course are attending schools without masks.

I received an outpouring of support from those who are immune compromised themselves and those who have immune compromised loved ones. As one Twitter user said: “Thank you, Kasari Govender. Feeling very grateful that she has written this letter to our PHO on the unequal effects of lifting the mask mandate. Thanks on behalf of my ten-year-old with asthma who isn’t attending school this week and my son under five who can’t be vaxxed.”

COVID has amplified a public hunger for conversation and information on human rights. We have had significant engagement with our office as result. In the last year, we fielded nearly 21,000 calls and emails to my office. That’s not a typo. It’s not 2,100; it’s 21,000. Many of those calls were about human rights at the time of COVID and others were speaking to us about trying to get information to better understand how they could access the human rights system and access protections for their rights and for potential violations of their rights.

In response to the public confusion about the human rights system, we have produced a new video about the three parts of the human rights system in B.C., including the Human Rights Tribunal, which receives and resolves complaints about specific human rights disputes. We anticipate releasing this video in the coming weeks.

This video is the second in a foundational educational series speaking to British Columbians about their rights. The first was our Introduction to Human Rights video, which we released last year. This has now been watched over 19,000 times, which speaks to the deep need across the province for basic information about the human rights code and the human rights system. Indeed, according to a recent poll that we conducted, only 35 percent of British Columbians believe that they understand their rights as protected by the code.

The public’s high degree of engagement with our office and our work is relevant to the deliverables in our evaluation plan related to the cultivation and maintenance of respectful and accountable relationships, as well as our goal of developing a suite of publicly accessible educational and guidance resources and forums. Our goal is to ensure that British Columbians, including rights holders and duty-bearers, demonstrate increased awareness and understanding of human rights, responsibilities and remedies; B.C.’s human rights code; and the role of B.C.’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner as an entity within B.C.’s human rights system.

[9:15 a.m.]

COVID has also, as we know, led to an increase in hate incidents. Since I last appeared before you, we have been working hard on our inquiry into the rise of hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goal is to make recommendations about how we, as a society, can better respond to hate in times of crisis and beyond.

You may remember that we announced our public inquiry into hate in August of last year in response to the significant increase, as I noted, in hate-related incidents that we’ve all heard about in the news. For example, the latest StatsCan report, released just this March, shows the latest data for 2020. While the overall rate of police-reported crime dropped by 10 percent compared to that same time in 2019, the number of hate crimes reported to police across the country went up 37 percent over that same time period.

Since our announcement, we have been in the evidence-gathering phase of the inquiry. We have heard from 98 individuals, representing 60 organizations, over the course of months of hearings, which we just wrapped up last week. We heard from community organizations, Indigenous organizations, former white nationalists, academics researching hate, school boards and other public bodies, private institutions and unions, religious organizations and others.

We have conducted a public poll and a detailed survey, which thousands of British Columbians responded to. We have conducted research into gender-based violence during the pandemic, the role of the Internet in the proliferation of online hate, the psychology of hate, the roots of hate beyond the pandemic, the rise of hate against health care providers and, importantly, Indigenous legal responses to hate. We have requested information from a wide variety of organizations, including police forces, social media companies and government agencies.

We have learned that hate has been taking a devastating toll on our communities. Four out of five British Columbians are either very concerned or moderately concerned about the situation. More than one in four British Columbians witnessed hate incidents during the pandemic, including many young people.

Almost one in ten British Columbians directly experienced a hate incident during the pandemic, including many Indigenous responders and East Asian responders. We’ve heard many of their stories, from random attacks on Asian Canadians on the streets to young people harassing and mocking LGBTQ2SAI+ students online.

We are in the process of analyzing the significant data that we’ve received and are moving into the writing phase. We expect to release our report, with recommendations, in early 2023. I anticipate that our recommendations will address whether our existing legal and institutional mechanisms are sufficient to hold perpetrators to account for hate, how the education system might be used as a tool to prevent hate from happening and how our emergency response systems may need to shift to include hate in their emergency response plans, among other issues.

The fifth and final deliverable of our evaluation framework 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 principles and our decolonizing approach. In the short term, this means that a diverse group of qualified applicants apply to us, are hired and thrive at BCOHRC and that the office space and technology are safe, inclusive and accessible for staff and the public.

In late fall, we conducted a workplace environment survey with our staff team. Despite operating through most of our existence in one of the most stressful times in our society, we are deeply committed to doing what we can to help our staff thrive at BCOHRC. To that end, we are putting significant energy into actioning the feedback we received through the workplace environment survey — for example, by engaging in detailed and robust work planning as a means of creating more manageable workloads across the team.

While there are no doubt stressors in building our office during a global pandemic, I’m grateful that we designed our workspace from the outset to be flexible and accommodating of the needs of diverse staff working from diverse locations across the province. Flexible workspace has allowed us to also offer both meeting rooms and hot-desk space to other independent officers and their teams when they are in Vancouver. This decentralized model of staffing and workspace lends itself well to the new world of work that we find ourselves in at this point in the pan­demic.

[9:20 a.m.]

We anticipate having a mixed model of working from home and from the office for all staff working in Victoria and Vancouver, with ongoing remote work from Prince George and Kelowna, although we are still in the process of working out those details.

You’ve asked us, in the letter you sent, to consider how we might find potential efficiencies and savings. I know that you’ve asked us to report back on that in the fall. As you heard from Representative Charlesworth last week, RCY and BCOHRC have been evaluating our corporate shared-services agreement with an eye to figuring out what is working about the model and how it might shift to better accommodate the needs of both offices. Especially as we have now gone through our biggest phase of growth and are moving to the sustaining phase of our development as an organization, although we still remain very much in a start-up trajectory.

As you’ve heard, the primary concern that’s been identified so far is resourcing. We greatly appreciate our colleagues at RCY, both at the leadership level and within corporate shared-services, for their generosity and their hard work over the last two years. Now it’s time to ensure that the shared-services model is adequately resourced so that both organizations are getting what they need with adequate supports to the staff involved.

We are working together to assess how we can appropriately resource the model within our existing budgets, and both offices are very keen to do so. I anticipate being able to report back to you in the fall about where we are at, at that point in our work, including our assessment changes and plans for the corporate shared-services model going forward.

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

I want to leave you with these words from students who we had a chance to work with for Human Rights Day in December. I had this opportunity to speak to an incredible group of grade 4 students about what equality means to them. One child said: “People who are lesbian have the right to like each other, and trans people have the right to be whatever gender they want.” Another said: “We should be able to practise our own traditions without being made fun of.” Another said: “We should all be treated equally, because on the inside, we’re all the same.”

Through the eyes of these children, human rights are clear and essential — something they should be able to take for granted. In our office, we are striving to make their vision a reality. Through these opportunities to connect with schoolchildren, through the direct-request management with thousands of British Columbians who have reached out to our office and through the thousand more who have accessed our materials it is clear how deeply British Columbians care about human rights issues and what an important and increasing demand there is for human rights education, reform and promotion across the province.

I am very proud of the work my office has done over the last year and the impact that we’ve so far achieved in the first three years or so of our mandate. And I’m incredibly grateful to the dedication and hard work of our staff team who have made all of that happen.

Those are my submissions, and I look forward to answering any questions that you may have for me.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): I always worry because I’m always the keen one who puts her hand up first, so my apologies.

I really enjoyed that. I just, first, wanted to thank you. From my experience on the Reforming the Police Act, the presentation that you gave was very impactful and really did enter into a lot of the conversation, so thank you for that. I also think you’ve had a very challenging time, and your office has handled it so well with, during the pandemic, people using that shield of “this is my human right” to excuse bad behaviour and undermining, perhaps, some of the work that your doing that way. I think it was very well measured in the work that you did.

Here’s a question. I know there are changes in the code, and I’m going to muddle it up if I try and explain my understanding of that. But there has been work you’ve done, I believe, on decolonizing, even, your process for people to come and to make a complaint and to work with you.

Is that something you feel you’ve been successful at now? Is that something that’s still in process?

K. Govender: The tribunal has done a great deal of work in changing their processes. I’ll just back up for a moment maybe.

[9:25 a.m.]

There was a report written by Ardith Walkem, now Justice Walkem, who was a very well respected Indigenous lawyer who was appointed to the bench shortly after she wrote this report. She was commissioned by the Human Rights Tribunal to write a report to help them better understand why Indigenous people were not utilizing the human rights system. That report was called Expanding Our Vision, and it was released in, I believe, January 2020.

There were a number of recommendations that came out of that report. Some of them were systemic in nature. Those are ones that we’ve been more focused on, the primary one there being the expansion of the human rights code to explicitly name Indigenous identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination.

Some of the others were more practical, tangible changes to the Human Rights Tribunal processes or their staffing complement, ensuring that they have Indigenous adjudicators and case managers. The tribunal has been doing that process, which is separate from us. They’re the ones who manage the incoming complaints and adjudicate those complaints and settle and mediate them.

We have been, however, participating…. They’ve got an Expanding Our Vision committee, and our staff have been participating in that committee to ensure that we are able to have the conversations and be part of those conversations that are happening around that table and also to make sure that the information is going back and forth to both organizations. I also have very regular meetings with the chair of the tribunal to ensure that, while we totally maintain our independence and have strong lines between us, we’re able to provide some of that coordinating function to better serve British Columbians.

Maybe I’ll actually take the opportunity to speak briefly to another project. I didn’t mention it here. We’ve mentioned it a few times. Of course, you will not have heard of this yet because we haven’t been here. Our No Wrong Door project is a collaboration with the other actors in the human rights system, including the tribunal, the Human Rights Clinic and other legal clinical services that provide legal advocates or lawyers to assist people in bringing their complaint through the system.

We’ve been working on trying to reduce…. You heard we’ve got 21,000 people calling our office. Some of those people are the same people calling all the other entities. So we’re trying to streamline those processes. It’s one of the ways…. We’re also trying to ensure that we’re increasing the value to British Columbians of the work of our office, while trying to do that. We’re not sure we’re going to be able to but working to do that within our existing budget envelope. We’ll be able to speak to that more in the fall.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much.

L. Doerkson: Thanks for the presentation.

To be honest, I can’t imagine how busy your office has been over the last year. I’m sitting here thinking that we’ve received hundreds of emails on the topic of mandates and masks and everything else. I’m probably understating that, to be honest.

My question for you is: what does the process look like for all of those people? To me, it doesn’t matter which side you’re on. Many of those people feel that their human rights have been affected. Many of them have stood strong and lost their jobs. Other people, on the other side, of course, feel that their human rights are being affected because of that. So I can absolutely appreciate the complexity.

What I’m wondering is: what does resolved look like for any of those people, on either side of this equation, making a complaint?

K. Govender: They can make…. The ones who are calling our office sometimes are looking to make complaints, in which case we’re directing them either directly to the Human Rights Tribunal, where they can file that complaint, and/or to a service that can support them through that process. So we are doing much of that.

We have a small but dedicated engagement team who is responding to all of these calls and emails. Then we have a communications team who is responding…. Of course, much of what we get…. Not included in that 21,000 is the very high participation we have on our social media channels around these issues, in particular. We tend to get the vitriol there, to a large degree, except, actually, for that last bit that we did on releasing the letter that I wrote to the public health officer. A very surprising degree of positive response to that, which is why I highlighted it.

Some people we are getting who want to just express their views — as you say, on one side or the other — and some who want to file a complaint. We’re providing referrals to those who want to file a complaint.

The tribunal — which again, is separate from us — has introduced a fast-track system for COVID-related complaints. They face a significant backlog at the tribunal and are working through that but, as a result, created this fast stream early on in COVID, actually. I think they may have been the leader in Canada in doing that. Certainly, they were early in that process of creating that so that people could get some resolve on things that, obviously, had really immediate impacts on them.

[9:30 a.m.]

On our side of the office, we are trying to provide people with as much information as we can. I think there’s obviously a great deal of stress associated with these conversations on people on all sides. But there is somewhat of a flip side to it, which is: it’s amazing how engaged people are in human rights issues that I don’t think they have been in the past. So we’re trying to use that opportunity to talk more about what human rights mean and really take people at their word in terms of having important conversations about human dignity and what that means for them, regardless of which side of the debate they’re on.

Our engagement team has had some success in it. Sometimes they get really aggressive emails back, but sometimes they are actually able to have important conversations with people. They deserve a great deal of credit for that process. We also have produced a number of guidance documents throughout the pandemic to try to create some lines about where, I believe, the law can allow for some of these complaints to go forward and where they can’t. I don’t bind the tribunal with my commentary. I’ve been clear where there’s an unresolved issue that the tribunal will end up deciding.

But I’ve been clear that from my perspective, personal choice not to get vaccinated…. It’s maybe fine in your personal choice, but discrimination on that basis, or not getting access to a service on that basis, for example, doesn’t qualify as discrimination under the human rights code. These fall within the prohibited grounds of discrimination under the human rights code.

I’d put that out in guidance to the public, for example, and also that people should be granted exemptions from mask wearing where they’re not able to wear masks for all kinds of reasons, including not being able to take it on and off themselves. We’ve also been clear on some of those limits. We’ve produced posters that many businesses have put in their windows to try to explain: “This is what your rights are, and this is what they’re not.” So it doesn’t include…. I hope that answers some of your question.

L. Doerkson: It does. It’s interesting that you bring up the poster, because the poster, certainly in my communities, almost created more problems, if that makes any sense. It sort of gave just an inch to people that took, obviously, a mile. I know that we were presented a number of times with the posters from the tribunal, saying: “I don’t have to wear a mask.”

Just one final question. How does your office, then, work with the tribunal? It doesn’t, obviously, fall under your office. That might be a silly question on my part. But I’m just wondering how that relationship works.

K. Govender: Sure, yes, no problem. The tribunal is entirely separate from us. They have their own chair and leadership. Their budget is administered through the Attorney General’s office. There is an office that deals with administrative tribunals, and their budget is administered through that stream.

But we do have an important relationship with them. Despite the fact that our office was abolished, or a version of the Human Rights Commission was abolished, in 2002, and then this incarnation was created in 2019, their office continued over that whole time. So there was always a human rights tribunal adjudicating complaints even when there was no public body charged with addressing systemic human rights issues.

Since our creation…. Unfortunately, while that’s been, I think — I’m very biased on this — a very important step to create this office, it’s also resulted in the spike in complaints. Now, it’s a bit difficult to separate that from COVID, since our office was created six months before the pandemic hit. But there’s been a great deal of press. We were out in the world talking about human rights issues. This is such an important time in human rights, as we’ve just discussed, so complaints have gone up.

We’ve been working with them in a couple of key ways, including, as I mentioned, the No Wrong Door project, including an information-sharing agreement that is discussed in the legislation which allows us to access their case database in order to understand trends around our own human rights, as well as to potentially intervene in ongoing cases. We have a right to intervene in cases at the human rights tribunal, under the legislation. Then I have regular meetings with the chair to ensure that communication is flowing both ways. So some of the ways that we interact with them.

L. Doerkson: Thank you very much, commissioner. Thanks to your staff, too, for the unbelievable work they must have done over the last year.

[9:35 a.m.]

M. Starchuk: Thank you for your presentation. It doesn’t go unnoticed that this is a review of financial and operational updates, and we haven’t talked about financials at all. So the work that you’re doing is very keen in what’s going on.

The issue that you brought up…. You said that there’s a report that’s coming out in June with regards to Canadian Border Services and detention. I think all of us probably have a story that we can talk about, where people are fleeing other countries and coming to Canada and being detained at the border in a non-human kind of way.

Most of the people that I speak to are happy that they’re here. It was a bump in the road to get here. At a time when the people of Ukraine are fleeing in a mass exodus — and obviously, with a last name as I have — I have a keen interest in what’s going on, because my grandparents fled the country for similar reasons nearly 100 years ago.

My question is: what was the motivation to start the report that you say is coming out in June? We’re May 2, so I’m hoping it’s June 1 so I only have to wait 30 days to start reading it.

K. Govender: The report in June, or the report back of their review, is from government. I don’t know which date it will be revealed, but they said in June.

The process was initiated by a report that was written by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, so they have released that. It was a report on Canada as a whole, not just B.C., but certainly speaks to some of the conditions in B.C.

Those two organizations began a campaign in which they decided they would start their work by working with the provinces, starting with B.C., to work to end the agreements that some provinces have with the federal government around housing detainees in provincial jails. B.C. has an MOU like that, an agreement with the federal government around that, and they do house some people in provincial correctional facilities.

Fortunately, those numbers have gone down — I don’t have the exact numbers, but they’ve gone down — over the pandemic. So this is a good moment to be saying, “Now is the time to end this agreement,” before those numbers start going up again, as we see more and more people coming into the country and a less creative approach to detaining people.

Part of what happened, both on the migrant detention side as well as the general corrections side, is that there was a more creative approach to: “We know that people are going to be at high risk, being put in jails in close proximity to each other during COVID, so we’ll do everything we can to keep people out of that correctional kind of context.”

That policy push, and I really commend the provincial government for doing that policy push, covered both people who were detained for criminal purposes under the Criminal Code and people who were detained as migrants. That’s why this timing has arisen in this way.

When Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch wrote this report and started this campaign, I wrote a letter to the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General supporting the ending of the MOU. Of course, my jurisdiction is entirely provincial, obviously. So I couldn’t speak to the other aspects of what they were working on in terms of the CBSA — outside, of course, my jurisdiction to push for — but in that role, as watchdog on human rights in the provincial context, I wrote this letter.

In response to our push, as well as some other push from the community, and certainly from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the province an­nounced it would do this review of the agreement and invited submissions from myself as well as a select group of community organizations. I wrote our set of submissions, which we released, I’m going to say, maybe a month ago. Time is a bit of a blur. But certainly, it’s on our website. The short set of submissions is on our website. We’re waiting for the government’s review on that.

M. Starchuk: Those are all words that I want to hear.

The specific case that I always think about is the couple that flees a country, gets access to the United States, gets to Seattle and gets into a cab. The cab drives them to the border and says: “I’m done. You’re on your way.” Then they walk across the border, and then they’re detained.

With regards to your findings, what are the entry points? Are they from countries other than the U.S., where they find themselves coming into Canada to face that level of detention?

K. Govender: I can’t give you the breakdown by country, actually. I’m not sure exactly where people are arriving from.

[9:40 a.m.]

The safe third country agreement has had an impact on people coming through the U.S. because it means that Canada and the U.S. have an agreement around…. If you land in what’s listed as a safe third country, then you can’t then move on to another country and seek a home there. So I imagine that many come from a diverse range of countries.

I can say that some of the reasons that people are held in detention include not being able to produce your personal documents. That’s a reason that is used to detain people. Of course, you can imagine people are fleeing very stressful circumstances, in which they may well be fleeing for their lives. We’re including those people, and we’re holding them in provincial facilities.

As I mentioned, there’s good evidence to say that people with mental health issues and the signs of trauma are being held for longer, and the circumstances in which they’re being held are often more severe, because there aren’t good ways within those facilities to deal with people who are displaying signs of mental illness. You can imagine the relationship there between the trauma that many refugees are facing and how that will then lead them to harsher conditions and longer conditions in provincial facilities. So there are some important threads to draw through here in the human rights analysis.

M. Starchuk: Okay, great. Thank you.

B. Bailey: Thank you very much for the presentation. It was really informative. Thanks for being here today, to you and your staff.

I have two questions, if that’s okay, Madam Chair. The first one is…. I really appreciate the approach that you’ve been taking in regards to using the power of storytelling to help people understand history and racism and complex issues. I think it’s a very powerful medium, and the videos are great. I’m also really raising my hands for the NAH program as well.

I wonder about the challenge of getting that into people’s hands. How do we ensure that this, particularly the NAH program, gets into schools and gets into, especially, young folks’ hands? I think the program has the ability to resonate, but I know that outreach and getting it where it needs to go can be a real challenge. I wonder if you could comment on that for me, please.

Then the second question I have is…. This is a hypothetical, and I recognize that hypotheticals kind of stink, because you’re trying to guess about the future. So not to hold you to this at all, but I wonder if you just might share a little bit of your thoughts in regards to disaggregated race-based data and how it might impact your work, going forward.

K. Govender: Sure. Thank you for both of those questions.

On the outreach for NAH in particular, I think that’s part of the power that we’re seeing from this private partnership. The broadcasters association has invested significant dollars in the distribution of these campaigns, as I mentioned, across radio, TV and print — a really wide variety of sources. I am hopeful that the marketing campaign there will take off on those ads. There’s a variety of different concepts that are being pushed through those ads.

They’re also doing a series of decals. They’ve launched decals to engage small businesses — any business, but particularly small businesses — across the province. The decals indicate that this is a location that doesn’t tolerate hate — so “Never accept hate.” They’re kind of an endorsement of the campaign.

So I think that has the real potential…. We haven’t been able to evaluate this yet, because of course, it just launched last week, I believe it was. We’ll see how all that goes, but I know they have a really multi-pronged approach, so I’m hopeful in that sense.

Where they’re trying to drive people to, as well, is the NAH website, which includes many of the resources. It’s meant to be kind of an umbrella to pull together resources so that people don’t have to go to a lot of different places. So it has our resources on there as well as others produced in community on a variety of issues. For example, how do you be more than a bystander in these circumstances? How can you respond and stand up in these circumstances? How do you report hate? What does hate mean?

All those kinds of resources are all pulled together on this site, and that actually was the impetus for the campaign in the first place. Somebody who’s now deeply involved in this was trying to access some resources to better understand hate and realized just how spread out they were and how hard it was for him to research and find it. That’s where the original nugget of this campaign came from, and then the broadcasters association approached us to be involved. It’s been a real pleasure to work on.

[9:45 a.m.]

That’s part of what’s happening with distribution. That is what’s happening with distribution on NAH, and I’m hopeful that it will have much broader distribution than we could do on our own, so it’s a good partnership for that.

On disaggregated demographic data collection, certainly we’ve been working on trying to implement our own recommendations in our report in our organization since we made those recommendations. I believe we released that report in September 2020. A key piece…. There are a couple of key features of our recommendations, one of which is, as I mentioned, the grandmother perspective — to approach data collection, use, storage, disclosure from the perspective of care, from the perspective of what we need to know to create better services to meet the needs of community in a better way.

How that shows up is really ensuring that the data is only collected when you’re clear that the purpose of that collection is to address systemic inequality — that there’s a direct link there. It’s not a scattershot approach to data collection; it’s a targeted approach — that we treat people’s data carefully and we only ask for it when we really need it. We can then use it for a real purpose that will produce real results.

Another key feature of the recommendations is to put the decision-making around data in the hands of those whose data it is. In the government context, our recommendation was to create a community governance board which would be able to provide some direction on how data, again, is collected, used, stored, disclosed — and, in the context of First Nations, to ensure that there are nation-to-nation agreements about how that data is being used.

We can see the kind of stigma that can happen from data. We’ve seen that play out during COVID in the limited way that we’ve had data. We’ve seen some nations data being released, in one way or another, about their COVID rates and the racism that can result immediately from that — of people from that First Nation not being allowed to go into grocery stores and not being allowed to enter other communities, and so on, so really seeing that kind of ownership and control of community, for community, by community as a mechanism to counter the kind of risk that we can see from data. If people can control what happens to their own information, there’s less risk it will be used against them. That’s the idea there.

We’re working through some of how we do that. It’s really focused on this demographic data piece. We’ve had a committee of experts working with us over the last year to think through our own implementation of data standards, to that end.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, not seeing any further questions, Kasari, I’d like to thank you and your team for the important work that you’re doing. Every time you report to us, there’s more that you’re doing. I want to thank you, on behalf of the committee, for your very passionate and eloquent defence of human rights.

Thank you for reminding us that COVID is a human rights issue and that human rights are essentially about elevating and broadening the common good. It’s not about mediating individual rights with each other; it’s about the common good. I, for one, will be — as soon as I have an opportunity — taking a look at that video on your website and other things as well.

K. Govender: Thank you all very much.

J. Routledge (Chair): I will entertain a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 9:48 a.m.