The committee met at 12:02 p.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Janet Routledge. I’m the MLA for Burnaby North and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, a committee of the Legislative Assembly that includes MLAs from the government and opposition parties.

I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting today in Vernon, which is located on the territories of the Syilx Okanagan people.

Welcome to everyone who is listening to and participating in today’s meeting on the Budget 2023 consultation.

Today we will be hearing our last set of presentations for the Budget 2023 consultation. On behalf of all committee members, I would like to thank everyone who has participated in the consultation so far. We have heard over 300 presentations these past three weeks. Everyone who has not yet taken the opportunity to share their views and priorities can do so by making written comments or by filling out the online survey. The deadline for input is Friday at 3 p.m. Details are available on our website at leg.bc.ca/fgsbudget.

We will carefully consider all input to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be included in Budget 2023. The committee intends to release its report in August.

For today’s meeting, all presenters will be making individual presentations. Each presenter has five minutes for their presentation, followed by up to five minutes for questions from committee members. To assist presenters, there is a timer here which will count down five minutes, in green, for your presentation time. For the question period, the timer will then count up to five minutes, in red.

All audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website. A complete transcript will also be posted.

I’ll now ask committee members to introduce themselves, starting with the Deputy Chair.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Hi, there. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I am the MLA for West Vancouver–Capi­lano.

B. Bailey: Good afternoon. I’m Brenda Bailey. I’m the MLA for Vancouver–False Creek.

B. Stewart: I’m Ben Stewart. I’m the MLA for Kelowna West.

M. Dykeman: My name is Megan Dykeman. I’m the MLA for Langley East.

H. Yao: Henry Yao, MLA for Richmond South Centre.

R. Merrifield: Good afternoon. Renee Merrifield, MLA for Kelowna-Mission.

[12:05 p.m.]

M. Starchuk: Good afternoon. Mike Starchuk, MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale.

H. Sandhu: Good afternoon. I’m Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

J. Routledge (Chair): Assisting the committee today are Jennifer Arril and Emma Curtis from the Parliamentary Committees Office, and Amanda Heffelfinger and Simon DeLaat from Hansard Services.

We’ll now invite our first presenter to take their place at the table. Our first presenter is Dr. Lesley Cormack, UBC Okanagan.

Budget Consultation Presentations

UBC OKANAGAN

L. Cormack: Thank you very much. As you heard, my name is Lesley Cormack. I’m the principal of UBC’s Okanagan campus.

That, like us here today, is on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.

I’m pleased to be supporting UBC’s written budget submission and to supplement it with some recommendations and local examples from UBCO. The three themes that I want to address today are access to post-secondary education, focusing specifically on Indigenous students; housing affordability; and academic infrastructure.

I’ll start with access. As I suspect you would all agree, post-secondary education is a public good. It simultaneously creates benefits for everyone, such as building the workforce of tomorrow to meet the needs forecast by the B.C. labour market outcome while creating extraordinary opportunities for each individual student. Those individual opportunities must be accessible to all. Targeted programming is needed to ensure that historically underrepresented groups, including Indigenous peoples, have access to these opportunities and pathways into the economy that they provide.

Our Aboriginal access studies program is a great example of this. It’s an entrance program that prepares and transitions Indigenous learners into degree programs with tailored academic and culturally relevant supports. Importantly, it enables UBCO to provide access to every Indigenous student applicant, regardless of previous educational attainment, to one of a variety of pathways to a university degree.

Our access studies program has been and is an incredible success, with students successfully transferring into degree programs in engineering, management, science, arts and nursing. Indigenous students can see there is opportunity and a place at UBCO for them. Demand for access studies has been robust over the years, and we anticipate strong uptake with the resumption of in-person learning. We recommend the government make targeted investments in programs that promote access, such as this Aboriginal access studies at UBCO.

In terms of housing, the Okanagan MLAs on the committee will know only too well of the rapidly rising costs of housing in this region. This region has also some of the highest rental rates in Canada and the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country, which makes it particularly challenging for students. UBCO’s goal is to have beds available for 25 percent of our students, a high benchmark in comparison with other Canadian universities. We’re currently at 18 percent.

We’ve just completed two new residences, including the Skeena residence, the first in Canada to meet the stringent Passive House international designation. I want to thank the government of British Columbia for providing support for the Skeena residence through the B.C. student housing loan program and recommend that there be ongoing investments to support new student housing, because it is simply vital for our students.

Finally, UBCO is on a remarkable growth trajectory, already one of the fastest-growing campuses in Canada. Since 2005, we’ve grown from 3,000 to 12,000 students, bringing young, diverse, ambitious people from all over British Columbia and the world to this region. Our annual research budget has doubled in the past four years — to over $46 million this year, coming into the university and the region — thanks, in part, to the outstanding young faculty members who are choosing to come to UBCO over top institutions elsewhere in the world. But the need for space all adds up, and we’re bursting at the seams.

My final recommendation is that the government invest in cutting-edge infrastructure at UBC to create space for the critically important teaching and research that is transforming the Interior, including UBCO’s interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation building, which is a top capital priority for UBC, overall. The ICI will house our Indigenous language fluency degree programs, include much-needed additional lecture theatres and support research and teaching in areas like high-value agriculture, which is vital to the region.

[12:10 p.m.]

It will also house the new Okanagan branch of the internationally renowned Michael Smith Laboratories, an expansion from UBC Vancouver. Benefiting from proximity to agriculture producers, the UBCOMSL will provide solutions to the long-term goal of sustainable human health by prioritizing research and science-based innovations in plant health, food security, healthy environments and biotech.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your questions.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Dr. Cormack.

We’ll now take questions from the panel, and there are a number of them. The first hand I saw was Renee, then Brenda, then Karin, then Henry.

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much, Dr. Cormack, for the presentation and for your advocacy work on behalf of all of our students here in the Okanagan.

I’m going to focus in on recommendation No. 2. Obviously, there’s the current campus, and then there’s the new downtown campus. For housing investments, what sort of order of magnitude, in terms of the millions and tens of millions, would be required to reach that 25 percent, and what would be the allocation between the current campus and any downtown housing?

L. Cormack: That’s a super interesting question. I anticipate that we will need to put in three more of the Skeena-size residences, which is about 250 students per residence, in the next five to seven years. Because of where we are, near the airport, we can’t build big towers, which is both good and bad. It does mean it’s a more human-sized campus, but it does mean you can’t get those kinds of economies of size in that way.

We are looking, especially, at being able to borrow, which is what we did for Skeena, and we are probably looking at, I think, something like $20 million per one of those. That’s what I would be thinking about.

In terms of our downtown, this is a partnership with UBC Properties Trust, and those will be market housing but very small and focused towards both students and faculty and staff. We hope those two things together could bring us up to the 25 percent.

R. Merrifield: Thank you.

B. Bailey: Thank you, Dr. Cormack. It was amazing how much information you put into five minutes, so well done.

I have lots of questions, but I really just wanted to provide you another minute or so just to expand a bit on what sounds like a very interesting and successful program to help Indigenous students. If you could just give me a sense of the scale — the number of students that come through. I don’t know if you have this data with you, but if you did, the percentage that go on to further studies.

L. Cormack: Right. Well, I don’t have all of the statistics there, but I can certainly give you a little bit more flavour.

We are funded for 18 FTEs a year, and we admit about twice that many students at the moment. So it’s about 30 to 35 students that we admit per year. We have a very high success rate of moving those students into degree programs — certainly well over 60 percent or 70 percent. It might be as high as 80 percent. Of the students who go on to degrees, many of them have now graduated and have gone on to graduate programs.

I would probably also point to some of our huge successes. Candice Loring, who runs our Mitacs program was an access student, and she’s now a Top 40 Under 40 in the region. Jordan Coble, who is a very strong member of the Westbank First Nation, is an access studies student. Our former students union president is now finishing her degree and has become an elected member of the board of governors.

These are people that needed the opportunity, because they have the ability. So I think that this…. I feel very passionate about this program. Having come from away, this is probably the best access program we have in the country and should be copied by others, because it really does provide the supports for them to succeed as they should.

B. Bailey: Fantastic. Thank you.

L. Cormack: Actually, I would add one more thing, which is that we have a pathway to nursing so that nursing will take any access student who now fulfils the requirements for entering into nursing. So 30 percent of our nursing students are Indigenous.

B. Bailey: That’s fantastic.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): I’ll pass. Most of my questions were just answered.

H. Yao: I actually want to ask the same question, about your recommendation No. 1, which sounds extremely fascinating.

Obviously, we address some of the Indigenous community members of Indigenous communities from, unfortunately, sometimes, broken families and different challenging community backgrounds.

[12:15 p.m.]

For your access program, do you also have wraparound supports such as mental health and a financial bursary to help to reduce financial barriers?

L. Cormack: We do. I mean, there could always be more. I would never pretend that we have everything that we need.

The biggest thing that we do is supply great wraparound advising and very personalized advising that helps them. They also do have access to housing first with our residences. We have been doing fairly significant fundraising to make sure that we also have student scholarships and bursaries for those students.

That’s definitely our goal — that full wraparound. I think we’ve been pretty successful. But especially as we get bigger, it becomes more difficult to do that as well.

H. Yao: Thank you. That’s incredible. Appreciate that.

J. Routledge (Chair): Good timing. Thank you, Dr. Cormack. On behalf of the committee, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to present to us.

On a personal note, I’m very impressed and fascinated by what you’re doing here. You’re clearly purposefully setting out to change lives and change communities. Thank you for that.

L. Cormack: Thank you very much. Good luck with your afternoon.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Glen Lucas, B.C. Fruit Growers Association.

Hi, Glen. You see the drill. You’ve got five minutes on the green clock, and then when it turns red, it will count up to another five minutes, which signals us to ask you questions.

B.C. FRUIT GROWERS ASSOCIATION

G. Lucas: Thank you, everyone. It’s good to see many of you here again, especially our local MLAs. Some of this will be just very familiar to them.

My name is Glen Lucas. I am the general manager of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association. I’ve been manager for about 25 years. Before that, I sold all the hogs in B.C. I was in the dairy sector as well.

The BCFGA represents 324 — actually 325; someone just joined this morning — commercial tree fruit growers. That’s a person that grows more than $15,000 worth of fruit in a year. It’s mainly located in the Okanagan, Similkameen and, also, the Creston Valleys, although we seem to be expanding northwards towards Salmon Arm.

I’d like to present three recommendations to you today. I think my two counterparts from cattle and from the B.C. Agriculture Council that follow will also elaborate on some of these items.

The first recommendation is that the B.C. agriculture budget be set at a percentage of the provincial agriculture GDP. The gross domestic product, of course, is just a measure of the economic impact of the agriculture sector.

The recommendation is that that be no lower than the Canadian average. B.C., I think since I started at the fruit growers, for about 25 years, has been the lowest in Canada, although sometimes Newfoundland is competing with us for the lowest spot. We’d like to really see that move up so that we can develop our agriculture sector and contribute even more to the economy.

The second recommendation is water access — that there be local flexibility, so an increase for local water purveyors to change the rules, but that there also be provincial oversight over those local water purveyors.

Everyone knows water is essential in the Okanagan to our horticulture. Without that, it’s just too dry. We can’t grow tree fruit and grapes. Recently, water purveyors have increasingly moved irrigation licences and shifted those to municipal water suppliers. Those are focusing on residential and commercial, industrial use and less emphasis on irrigation for agriculture. We’d like to see some oversight by the province on behalf of those irrigators. One way that we can do that is through agriculture water reserves, and we’ll be pursuing that.

The other thing, though, is that those local water purveyors need freedom from some of the regulations. For example, our turn-on and turn-off dates on irrigation are currently May 16 and August 31. It would be good to extend those in some years.

[12:20 p.m.]

Last year we were in a drought at this time. Actually, we had the heat dome six days from now, last year. In that instance, instead of releasing water — basically, it flows into the Okanagan and into the Columbia River, and it’s gone — we could have started irrigating earlier with that water, filled up our soils and made things easy. It’s weird. It’s like we’re asking for two things. One is more autonomy for the local water purveyors, and the other is oversight from the province to make sure that things are okay at those local water purveyors.

Farm classification is the last recommendation. Commercial agriculture has long promoted the idea of an increased revenue qualifier that’s needed for agricultural classification on farm parcels. Increasing that qualifier would mean that in order to get the property tax reduction for agriculture, you would need to generate more agricultural activity on those parcels. We think that would drive greater intensification of use in agricultural lands. Now, that has long been opposed by non-commercial owners of agricultural land that use it, basically, for rural estates, but it’s time that we wrestled this issue to the ground.

I was at a meeting — actually, it was 30 years ago — and all of agriculture was in the room, and we all agreed: “Let’s go with the two-tier system. We’ll have one tier, a break if you’re in the ALR but not using, and another break if you get over the revenue qualifiers.”

You’d get a bigger break for using the land, and you’d get a bit of a break because it’s in the ALR. That was accepted, but the non-commercial-agriculture interests stopped that. That was 30 years ago. I think we’ve stuck on that same page for the last 30 years. It would be nice to see that logjam broken and to resolve that. That’s my third recommendation.

I’d like to thank the committee for their attention. Hopefully, we can spend a bit more time on questions but also pass my time on to the others that are in line here.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, we do have questions.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Glen. I know we don’t have a lot of time, so I’ll keep it short. I really would like to explore your recommendation 3. Specifically, what do you mean by “non-commercial-agriculture interest”?

To give you a little context, I’m from Richmond, and Richmond has a lot of agricultural land sitting there and not doing anything. I would love to really find a solution to address these issues. So please, I’m looking forward to your recommendation.

G. Lucas: Just to comment on that, a “non-commercial-agriculture interest” would be a person that’s not using the land for agriculture production and is not leasing it to someone, another farmer, to make it into agricultural production. They’re holding it there and not using it for agriculture. Basically, it’s a lawn, a tennis court or a pasture, and it’s not being intensively used.

The threshold that we would probably look at would be…. It’s a revenue threshold. It could vary by the size of parcel, but it should be much higher than it is now. Currently it depends on…. There’s a bit of a formula. It’s between, I think, $3,500 and $10,000, depending on the size of the parcel. It should be $30,000 or $50,000, depending on the size of the parcel. That would still be very low.

M. Dykeman: Thank you for your presentation today. It’s wonderful to see you here.

I was wondering. In regard to recommendation 2, do the irrigation stop dates apply on the ALR land too? It’s on all…?

G. Lucas: Yes, if it’s under a water licence, which is for surface water. It would not apply to well licences, though.

M. Dykeman: Okay. All right. Thank you very much.

[12:25 p.m.]

B. Stewart: Glen, good to see you again. Tell me: with this change — I know the one irrigation district, which used to be run by farmers, has been merged into the city of Kelowna — has the cut-off date changed now? You said it was in August that they’re cutting off the water?

G. Lucas: End of August.

B. Stewart: End of August.

G. Lucas: There may be some flexibility between districts on that, depending on their licensing. But in speaking with one farmer, that was their cutoff. As you know, if it’s a very dry fall, you want to get water on there so that the roots of the tree are somewhat moist. If you go into winter freeze with dry roots, you’re in trouble.

B. Stewart: Yeah, I think it would be good for us to know where those areas are, because that really is unacceptable for agriculture, especially since the farmers originally built the system and now we’ve got the municipality using it for other purposes.

G. Lucas: Ben, I will undertake to contact the water purveyors and get a summary on that to you.

B. Stewart: Sure.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our last question goes to Renee.

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much for the presentation. Great to see you. I’m going to go to recommendation 1, and that was on the overall budget. What percentage are we short? Is there an order of magnitude? Are we at 5 percent and everyone else is at 10, or are we at 2 percent and everyone else is at 40?

G. Lucas: We’re at about 5 percent. Of course, it changes from year to year, but around 5 percent of agriculture GDP. So that’s economic activity. That would be what the provincial government puts into the agriculture budget, which covers programs. So we’re just measuring the program input.

The rest of Canada — and Danielle, who’s coming next, may have a more accurate reading on this — is about 10 percent, on average.

We’ve had some instances I’d like to point to. For example, the U.S. had a trade war with China, starting about two or three years ago. They put additional funding into their apple and cherry sectors, and there were big direct payments made to growers down there to offset the harm that was done by that trade war. We had some program funding but not to the extent that was available in the U.S.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, thank you, Glen. We are out of time, but we want to thank you for your time.

I guess, just in closing, I’d like to say…. You mentioned a couple of times…. You referred to what was an apparent contradiction between local flexibility and provincial oversight. I just wanted to tell you that I don’t think that’s a contradiction at all. I think that in order to exercise flexibility, one does need to be assured that it is part of a plan.

G. Lucas: Thank you for that.

J. Routledge (Chair): So I get that. Thank you.

Our next presenter is Kevin Boon, representing the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association.

Hi, Kevin.

B.C. CATTLEMEN’S ASSOCIATION

K. Boon: Hi. Thank you. I’m going to jump right in, because I know how quickly that five-minute clock goes on here.

I would, first of all, like to thank you all for the opportunity to present to you. It’s good to see a lot of your faces again after just seeing you on the 2nd of June for B.C. Beef Day. So that was really good.

We are an organization…. I’m the general manager of B.C. Cattlemen’s. We represent about 1,100 members, and that represents about 82 percent of the cattle production in the province for beef cattle. You’re going to notice, as Glen pointed out, a bit of a theme. The three of us have talked, and we are working together on some of the themes. The first that I am going to speak to you about is the agriculture budget.

We would submit that the ministry is one of the most important and essential ministries within government. However, for decades, it has been given the support or funding necessary to keep agriculture sustainable within the province. We hear a lot…. I meant to say “has not been given.” Sorry. I missed out the “not,” and that’s an important word in there. It has not been given that funding.

[12:30 p.m.]

We have to understand that there are three necessities in life, and that’s food, water and shelter. To see a ministry so underfunded that supplies one of the necessities of life, being food, is actually appalling in our thought base. We need support for our guys out there in ways to enable them to be sustainable for the future, and we can’t do it when we are continuously underfunded.

It’s a lack of understanding. If you look at what we went through, through COVID and through the floods and through the fires, there is a definite disconnect with the consumer as to where their food comes from and a lack of understanding as to where it comes from. When the lineups and the demand is for toilet paper and not for good, sustainable food, you have to question what the values are and what the knowledge is of what that food base coming to them is.

On that, our recommendation would be that the B.C. government increase the budget allocation to the Ministry of Agriculture by at least 50 percent for the 2023 budget and an additional lift of 20 percent annually for the next two years. Extra funding should be used for research and development as well as for field and staffing to be able to support agriculture that’s there.

The second recommendation that I want to talk about is water. I’m going to take a little different view on this from what Glen did. I have presented to this committee for ten years. Seven of those ten years I have made a recommendation to this committee to increase the support for water storage. In 2010, the Testalinden, the breach of the dam in Oliver, made government go to a system of downloading the liability and the responsibilities of dam maintenance and inspections onto the farmer or rancher, who…. For the most part, we manage about two-thirds of the dams in the province currently, which is about 960 out of the 1,500 that I believe are under Agriculture.

This water is not only used for agriculture purposes. It’s very much for recreation, firefighting and other aspects. But the full load of the maintenance and the costs associated go to the actual dam licensee that is there. We don’t feel that that is fair. The water, being one of those critical necessities of life, also needs to be there. It’s very critical to food production for us. This water — yes, there is a small percentage, about 4 percent, that goes towards the livestock watering. The rest is for crop and food production.

Our recommendation on this would be that the B.C. government supply a minimum of two engineers to conduct the inspections on the dam, to take that off our plate, and make available $1 million annually to support maintenance required for the safety and integrity of the storage facilities.

My third recommendation comes around Crown land management. There’s an unbalanced focus on timber production on Crown land versus its value for agriculture. While nearly 50 percent of the agricultural land reserve is on Crown land, there is no requirement for consideration of agriculture on these lands by forestry. The ALC and ALR acts actually trump the timber act, but there is still no accountability for that when doing forest practices.

We invest heavily in timber supply analysis and inventory. There is no such requirement for forage that grows on that land. Inventories are essential for range branch to know how we can allocate the AUMs. They are also essential for us to know how much to allocate to wildlife, which is an extremely important aspect in reconciliation and First Nations values.

We know that there is much work done to protect and grow the timber on the livestock, but we see no goal between the trees. What is happening between the trees? For a healthy ecosystem, we need everything into account. That’s for all the wildlife, all the species and everything. There is huge value in carbon sequestration, land stability, invasive plant encroachment, habitat for wildlife, recovery from wildfires and creating balanced, healthy ecosystems.

Our recommendations would be that B.C. invest in creating a forage supply data to have accurate data on Crown forage; to sustain wildlife and agriculture needs, invest in invasive plant management on Crown land more heavily; invest in research that quantifies the carbon sequestration by forage; and double the budget allocation to range, within the ministry, so that the forestry sector shares amongst it there.

Thank you for the opportunity. I’m sorry for talking longer than my five minutes.

[12:35 p.m.]

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

M. Dykeman: It’s wonderful to see you again. Thank you for the presentation.

A quick question related to the budget increase. Through the past few weeks, we’ve heard several different presentations from people involved in agriculture in different areas. A couple of things that have come up are both program delivery, which came up last night, and extension services, seeing an investment back in those kinds of services. I was wondering….

You’ve mentioned some of the research you’d like to see happen, like forage supply data and stuff. But in that budget increase related to supporting agriculture, what do you see as being the most urgent investments that need to happen right now? I know there are a lot of challenges for farmers, but just top of mind, what do you see as…?

K. Boon: So extension services, it was…. Thank you very much for supplying the word I was looking for when I was saying what we needed out there. I think it’s very important, especially for us in the Interior right now, in the livestock industry. There are a lot of areas, especially around animal welfare, animal care. We certainly need an investment into veterinarian care out there. We’re very short-staffed on that.

Interesting that you brought up, too, in there, program delivery. B.C. Cattlemen’s is one of the few organizations that still does program delivery. I think we may be the only one. Unfortunately, we’ve come to a point where we have to do it if we need the extension and the research that we have.

So for a small staff to be able to concentrate on it, we do try to limit ourselves to things that are relevant to the livestock and to the cattle industry. But it is a real challenge sometimes, and especially as a lot of those in the past five years have gone towards emergency management. We’ve been very vested in the wildfire recovery and the wildfire fighting aspects.

M. Dykeman: Okay, perfect.

J. Routledge (Chair): We have about a minute and a half left and three questions, so if everyone could pace themselves accordingly.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Kevin. I so enjoyed your presentation about how cattle cowboys combat wildfire. Anyway, I’m going to make it quick.

You talk about an agricultural funding increase that requires over 50 percent, 20 percent, 20 percent. I assume you’re referring to the percentage in reference to GDP, which would be 5, 7.5 percent, 9 percent, 11.8 percent. Is that correct, or are you talking about total amount?

K. Boon: No, I would say an increase in what we are currently being budgeted. Last year, I believe, we were in the $100 million range for it. I would suggest that ministry needs a $150 million top-up immediately to be able to function properly to make our industry sustainable. I’m not talking just the livestock industry; I’m talking agriculture. Agriculture, sustainability and food security has got to be one of the most top, key priorities for this province, I believe.

B. Stewart: Thank you, Kevin. We had a long talk last night in the Cariboo about the cattlemen that were up there. What happened to the study that the Cattlemen’s, your group, was doing on doing a processing of B.C. cattle products in the province? Where did that end up?

K. Boon: We’re still…. We’re there. What happened — I’ll be really frank on this one — is that we had a facility leased. We required investment by producers to be able to get it going. It was the best opportunity we could ever have. We did get some funding from government to move that forward. We created a company in which we needed investors. We needed to sell, and it was on a supply basis, so every share you bought meant you had to supply an animal to that plant. That would ensure that you always had an animal waiting to be processed, to get your capacity.

What happened was that we could not get the producers to invest in their own product. The prime reason that we got back from that was that they said: “How can we afford to invest in our own commodity when we don’t know if we’ll be here tomorrow to take advantage of that processing plant?”

When the confidence of the producer is such that they are willing to give up to the middleman, probably, profits that would equal what they would make at home on it and say, “We just don’t know if we’ll be here tomorrow, and we’re not sure if it’s not of use to encourage our children to be here to produce food,” that’s a pretty sad way to look at it. But it’s much the fact.

It’s still there, by the way. We have the company. We have the membership. We have the shares, and we’re getting some renewed interest. And the ownership that took the plant back…. We’re working on details with them to try and put it through to be able to produce that brand for our producers, of an actual name brand there.

[12:40 p.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Kevin. We are out of time, so on behalf of the committee, I want to thank you.

I guess I would also make the observation that I think you’re the first — or one of the first; I think the first — presenter who has made such a direct link between the funding of a particular ministry and its mandate to support those that it’s there to support. Thank you for being very concrete about that connection.

K. Boon: Thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you all.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Danielle Synotte, representing the B.C. Agriculture Council.

Hi.

B.C. AGRICULTURE COUNCIL

D. Synotte: Hi. Thank you. Maybe some of your questions will already have been answered.

Thank you, Madam Chair and other committee members, for having me here today. Nice to see some familiar faces.

I’m the executive director with the B.C. Agriculture Council. The B.C. Agriculture Council is the lead industry advocate on behalf of 28 farm associations, Tree Fruits and Cattlemen’s being two of those. I proudly sit here representing 96 percent of farm-gate sales in British Columbia and approximately 20,000 farm families.

Today I’m going to focus this presentation on how to better support the agriculture sector and the producers who work within it, while protecting food security for the future. Building off of much of what Kevin and Glen have already mentioned, I’m going to focus on one recommendation out of my submission, and that’s around the Ministry of Agriculture’s increase to their budget, as both Kevin and Glen have also touched on. I do have some further context behind some of the things that they’ve already mentioned.

Government support for the provincial agriculture sector and, therefore, food security does continue to significantly lag amongst other provinces. We understand how agriculture can be seen as small potatoes. Pardon the pun; sorry, I just realized that was kind of funny. It’s not the size of forestry or mining, from an economic driver perspective, and it doesn’t, of course, have the same needs as when you look at health or education, for example. However, some things have changed, from a full-time employee’s perspective. Agriculture supports three to four times the amount of jobs that the B.C. mining sector currently does.

When you do look at the Ministry of Agriculture’s increase over the past five years…. Spending has been an increase of about 20 percent; however, inflation is also, approximately, at about 16.8 percent. So in real terms, the spending we’ve seen in agriculture is only at about 4 to 5 percent.

My point about lagging other provinces…. Glen touched on this as well. We are at 5.6 percent of agriculture’s contribution to GDP, compared to the average, which is at about 12 percent in other provinces. In some cases, that is over 12 percent in other provinces.

The heat dome, floods, land development, land prices, droughts in California all add to food insecurity. So investing in agriculture will help with climate change and food security.

In having some recent conversations with the Ministry of Agriculture staff, who will remain unnamed, we laughed about how much you can solve with money, how many challenges you can address and help in a meaningful way. We talked about…. If the Ministry of Agriculture gets an increase to that budget, where do we have agreement on how that could be used to better the industry and producers?

We talked about the Animal Health Centre and the plant health lab getting back up and operational and to their full capacity; injecting dollars into BRM, business risk management, and climate adaptation and mitigation programs, which both Kevin and Glen have just touched on; the extension services, those that help farmers implement these programs; additional funding to support on-farm infrastructure — the water, which Kevin mentioned, as an example.

We need to put our heads together to look at the increasing cost inputs. I’ll just use carbon pricing as an example of that. We know this is going to be increasing. Plants need carbon to grow. Greenhouse growers. It’s grain producers, for the grain drying. These costs are…. The stress is starting to really settle in here for producers.

We know that there are carbon tax rebates that greenhouse growers already get. In case you didn’t know, that actually comes out of the Ministry of Agriculture’s budget, not Finance. With that being said, we haven’t heard what those carbon tax rebates are going to be, as carbon prices increase. So we are interested in that.

[12:45 p.m.]

Looking to the future, farmland in B.C. is already limited and has come under increasing pressure from competing land uses. Anybody who is following the Surrey news with the Heppell’s farm is…. It’s one reason why we are keenly interested to just come together with government and have a joint industry-government review of the Assessment Act and the farm classification, specifically. As they’ve mentioned before, it’s actually $2,500 as the minimum threshold for between five to ten acres, which is incredibly low and has been that way for a number of years.

It’s not to say that the legislation or regulations that are currently written aren’t protecting farmland; it’s just that if we’re talking about the next 50 years, we need to have a sit-down and say: “Is it written now for the future?” It was written a while back and has had some amendments, but looking forward, we should probably make some changes together.

The last thing I do want to mention is that BCAC does believe in the importance of engaging and consulting with Indigenous peoples and communities. In fact, several of our member associations already do so and have done so for several years. It’s not the case for all commodities. It’s not the case historically across the sector as a whole.

The increased efforts by the government of B.C. to strengthen the relationship with Indigenous peoples are welcome, but we do need help with the costs associated and increasing our knowledge as we move forward on this path. Consultants and advisors are in incredibly high demand, and of course, their prices are reflected so. From a sector perspective and our farm associations and their staff, we would seek to get some support from our ministry, as well, on that.

Thank you very much for your time.

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

I’ll invite the committee to ask questions.

M. Starchuk: Thank you for your presentation. I’m hoping the question I didn’t get to ask might be able to be answered by yourself. We had heard about the issue around dam inspection, the need — how there are 900-plus dams that are out there, and they’re retaining the water, and the requirement for two inspectors and $1 million, I believe, available on an annual basis for maintenance. Is two enough?

K. Boon: No.

D. Synotte: We do…. A lot of the work on the regional levels is handled, particularly, by our commodity groups. We do focus on the pan-ag-specific issues. I apologize for not being able….

Thanks, Kevin, for being here.

M. Dykeman: Thank you for the presentation. It’s wonderful to see you. In regards to the budget — again, the increase — one of the things that has come up also, through the last few weeks of consultations, is concern about succession planning and drawing youth into agriculture.

You touched a little bit on it, but have there been conversations about what sort of programming or opportunities exist under organizations like yours — if there was the ability to support youth going into agriculture? I know there are things like land-matching and other programs, but have there been any further conversations about that?

D. Synotte: I love that you asked this question, because we…. There are some programs — you’re right — that do try and encourage entry into agriculture and farming. We have a committee called the B.C. Young Farmers committee under B.C. Agriculture Council. We’ve taken it upon ourselves, currently, to form a committee.

We try and work on mentorship of the young farmers in British Columbia and then trying to encourage more of those people to come onto the committee. We do educational webinars and workshops. They organize their own socials and things like that. They have their own opportunities that they try and…. From a sponsorship perspective, they solicit sponsors to try and help build out programs. So definitely additional support to try and encourage the next generation to get into farming and to even provide additional educational opportunities for the people who are in there.

They’re constantly looking at ways that they can help build their community of young farmers in B.C. So yeah, more help in that area, for sure — we’ve just been under-resourced, really, to do a better job in that space.

J. Routledge (Chair): Mike has another question.

M. Starchuk: You had mentioned, inside of your presentation, the change of threshold for the farm grant. I believe Glen made mention of getting it to 30 to 50.

[12:50 p.m.]

Who are the stakeholders that have to be at that table to make that decision? There is a little bit of controversy around it. It was, maybe, a hobby farmer.

D. Synotte: Yep, that’s a great question. When I mentioned that we represent 96 percent of farm-gate sales, there is definitely a gap in our membership. That would be the small-scale farm operators that perhaps don’t belong to one of our member associations.

In some conversations that I’ve had with our membership, we definitely do need to consult with some of the small-scale farmers. They don’t currently have a provincial body that represents them. There are some out there like the B.C. Young Agrarians, and then there are some other groups as well, where they do belong to those Farmers Institutes, things like that from a more regional perspective — to pull that group into the discussion as well.

We definitely do recognize that there are several stakeholders that would have an interest in that threshold being increased. We would need to develop a strategy around how we move forward. We haven’t gotten that far yet, but there are also several non-farming-related stakeholders we’d probably need to talk to as well.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Danielle. We are out of time. On behalf of the committee, I’d like to thank you for making this presentation.

One of the things I think you’ve really reminded us about is how, regardless of what the climate crisis was in the last couple of years, agriculture has been at the centre of it, food has been at the centre of it — either access to it or as a solution. The ministry most directly involved has had to kick into gear in an emergency. They’ve had to shift resources to respond. I think that’s kind of what you’re addressing in its resourcing and its ability to do its job. Thank you for adding your voice to that.

D. Synotte: Thank you to the provincial government for your prompt actions and financial support during the flooding as well.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Serena Caner, representing the Shuswap Food Action Society.

Hi, Serena. You have a total of ten minutes: five for your presentation, five for questions.

SHUSWAP FOOD ACTION SOCIETY

S. Caner: My name is Serena Caner. I’m executive director of an organization called Shuswap Food Action Society. We are trying to build community around local food. We run our Downtown Salmon Arm Farmers Market. We have a food box program where we source all the food that we give to our community locally.

The project that I want to talk to you about today was something that happened as a result of COVID. We have recently started doing school meal programs. That was because when COVID hit, we had a local high school of 600 students who were not allowed to leave the school campus, but there was no food available at the school.

We had students phoning pizzas to the school. Then the principal started ordering pizza three days a week, selling it for $2 a slice. That was the only thing available. I have some friends who worked at the school, and it was like: “We need another solution.”

We came in, and we got a grant from our community foundation to start a free soup-and-bun program. Again, we were trying to source all our ingredients locally, when available. We were feeding 200 students a day. That was our capacity with the infrastructure that was available for cooking at the school.

We offered to do the program daily the next year. But obviously, we can’t offer food for free forever, so we started charging $4 if you bring your own bowl and $5 if you don’t. Our numbers dropped way down to, like, 30 students. Then, as more parents found out, it kind of got up to 60 or 70. Then we tried doing toonie Tuesdays, and our numbers doubled. We were serving about 120 students. Then when we offered free days, it was back up to 150, 180 students.

[12:55 p.m.]

I know that school meal programs are something that the government has mentioned in past budgets. I know that no money has actually been given, but I do think that it is an important program and an opportunity to include local food. In our community, our food bank numbers are going up. People are choosing between fuel and food, really. People are phoning me every day, asking to get on our food box program, and we’re full. We can’t take any more people.

I think that school meal programs don’t only feed vulnerable families. There are lots of parents who are busy, who don’t make food a priority in their families. We have lots of kids who — I know their parents have money — show up without lunches.

I think the key about making food affordable is that at a secondary-school level, kids can go wherever they want. If you have five bucks…. What kids do when there’s nothing available at school is go to 7-Eleven or the corner store, and they get a Monster drink and chips, or they go to Tim Hortons and get an Iced Capp and Timbits. I see this every day.

What I really appreciate about our program is that it’s incentivizing healthy eating. My professional background is…. I’m a dietitian. I’m a registered dietitian, and I really believe that making healthy food easier and more accessible is how you get kids to eat it. When we were doing our free-meal program, we were serving really healthy food — fruit, whole wheat buns and soup or stews — and kids ate it. They were happy, because they were hungry.

There’s a huge opportunity in that, and I really think that it also builds community at the school. Kids are really excited. They feel cared for, with people wanting to stay in school. The staff love it. The staff eat there every day. It really built a positive atmosphere at the school. Every district is probably different and every school is different. Our program at this school isn’t going to work everywhere, but I really think it’s a worthwhile thing to pursue.

I was just going to quickly say, in response to the last…. As a parent, I wouldn’t encourage my children to farm, because it’s not a financially viable job. As someone who works with farmers, I think we need to make it financially viable to farm in B.C.

Thank you very much.

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

H. Sandhu: Thank you so much, Serena. A wonderful presentation — and the work you do.

I just need a clarification. You mentioned the program that you have tried to run temporarily, which seemed to be permanent later. Are you asking for a recommendation in our budget for this specific program? I also heard that you are encouraging that school meal programs should be general.

S. Caner: We’re part of the Coalition for Healthy School Food. I think their recommendation — actually, I wrote it down — was to fund school communities to build capacity and increase readiness to deliver and expand on food programs. Then, in the first year, commit a minimum of $100 million to school communities that are ready to build on existing programs and increase students’ access to healthy food.

Our school district is ready. We are having schools asking us to expand our programs to their schools. If funding were available, that would be something that we could do next year, no problem. I don’t think that every school district would be, and not every school in our district would be ready. For us, it would be helpful, probably, to do a few more schools next year and then expand that way.

With schools, what works…. The reason schools are asking us is because they’ve heard positive things about our project. If things didn’t go well, people wouldn’t want to expand. Word of mouth in small communities is really important.

H. Sandhu: Thanks for the clarification. One more thing. I think you were mentioning that kids sometimes have money, but they don’t eat. I’m also thinking about picky eaters. No matter what you pack, they won’t…. But when others are eating, they’ll eat what’s available.

S. Caner: Yes, I’ve had that. I have one of my kids like that. When all their friends are eating, suddenly, they love it.

[1:00 p.m.]

B. Bailey: Thanks very much for your presentation, Serena. I wonder if you could share your thoughts in regard to that thorny question about funding for a school program, across the board, for everyone to access food for free. Is there a way of designing it so that folks who can afford to pay should pay? What are the pros and cons, and where do you fall on that challenge?

S. Caner: When our numbers really dropped and we started charging money for it, we were asking those same questions. That’s why we were testing different things. We also tested a pay-what-you-can model.

What we find is…. It’s really hard to communicate with parents of high school students, because the students don’t talk to their parents. I’ve had lots of parents tell me that they didn’t find out about the program until May. They just, for whatever reason, didn’t know about it.

I think a toonie is affordable for most kids. On our Toonie Tuesdays, the uptake is about the same as on our free days. It’s a sort of place to land in between.

You can do the pay-what-you-can. We didn’t have very many people using it. I think they didn’t know about it. I know, across Canada, there are communities that have tried that. Some people say that people abuse it. Some people say that it’s good. I don’t know.

What we did do is…. We worked with counselling staff and the Indigenous ed staff and let them know: “If you have students that need cards, we can subsidize those.” We did kind of work at it internally.

It’s nice when everyone is paying the same amount. It feels like there aren’t the people who can’t afford and the people who can.

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much for your presentation and, also, just for your service to your community and to those kids.

I think you mentioned that right now you are in the high school. Is that correct? You said you have other schools asking. Are those largely at the high school level, or is it across the board, K through 12?

S. Caner: K through 12. We have two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.

High schools are more likely to have a kitchen. A lot of elementary schools do not have the infrastructure. What we are doing at elementary schools next year — or we’re talking about doing — is piloting the paying of a parent to cook food at the school, one day a week, to serve to all the kids. Again, it would be a toonie. We’re talking about Toonie Tuesdays.

At the high school, we’ve had a lot of success just cooking in large Instant Pots. In the school at Jackson, we only have a single oven, and we’re still able to serve up to 180 or 200 kids using other implements. Obviously, it’s not ideal, but it’s the reality.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, we’re out of time, Serena. Thank you very much for making your presentation.

On behalf of the committee, I’d also like to thank you for stepping in during the pandemic, when you saw an emergency, and then using that experience to develop a broad analysis and thinking in terms of a big plan in terms of moving forward. Thank you for that.

S. Caner: As a dietitian, you get…. Healthy eating is quite important to me.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Ian Graham, Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society.

Hi, Ian.

I. Graham: Hello. Good afternoon, everyone.

J. Routledge (Chair): You have ten minutes, five minutes for your presentation. The timer will count down, in green, the five minutes. Then it will start counting up another five minutes when it’s time for us to ask you questions.

OKANAGAN SIMILKAMEEN PARKS SOCIETY

I. Graham: Very quickly, the Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society has been around for about 57 years now. We were instrumental in getting parks like Vaseux Lake, Okanagan Mountain Park, Cathedral Park all involved. We were at the ground floor of those. That’s kind of what we do.

[1:05 p.m.]

Basically, unlike the people who came before me, I’m not talking about one particular ministry here. I think one of the things that we have found, in doing these presentations in the past as well as in writing letters to government, is that certain ministries pull strings on other certain ministries. It tends to happen. What we feel is…. Basically, we’re predicated on the belief that actions follow resources — that this is a really good group to come to with some of our ideas.

Proposal 1 is that there be resources for sustainable, evidence-based management plans for sites identified during the LRMP consultations and other protected areas. Now, that’s the land and resource management plan, and that was done way back in the ’90s. It’s still being carried through. Unfortunately, in the Okanagan-Similkameen, it still has not been completed. We suspect that part of that may be because of the wrangling with the federal national park. There are certain areas…. While there was an agreement on protection, it has never been carried out.

One of those might be Oliver Mountain, where we have been monitoring the plans over time. They were actually here five years ago and did a, “Let’s see if we can introduce a little bit of motorized traffic,” and so forth. We’re now about to go back into that again and to say, “Okay. What’s happening?” because that, obviously, has not worked.

These particular ideas would include information or direction on enforcement. I think enforcement is important. It’s dedicated to a reporting contact line of some sort, whether it’s web-based or telephone-based or whatever — a way to get in touch.

In-field protection personnel. We are not talking about somebody that you sometimes see on the side of the road on his or her way up to a particular place. They go for a day up here, and so forth. We’re talking about actual people out there — what used to be called park rangers, and so forth.

Reasonable areas to be monitored. Another thing, with many of these people, is that they’re given these humongous areas. So yeah, I have to drive 50 miles one way and 300 kilometres in the other in order to get to a place where I’m going to be doing my activity. In other words, something that is reasonable.

Auditing is important. Education is important.

I also would like to ask, proposal 2, the resources for government review and response of a true economic status of our wildlife habitation, resource extraction, whether it’s lumber or mining or whatever…. What is the true cost of doing that compared to the value that we’re getting from that wilderness? I think if that was looked at by a third party — an independent commission, possibly a government commission, whatever program you wanted to set up — you would find that we need to get more value for our money. There’s a lot coming out that the public of British Columbia is not getting back.

The third one is a proposal, basically, to ask for education around the idea of wilderness and what our natural world does for us. That education might take place in sponsoring school presentations. It might be campsite or community presentations. It’s in the media. It could be for parliamentarians. It could be for the general public. There are many different ways of getting it out there but just to generally talk about that.

We might be talking there about things like climate and the sequestration of CO₂, water conservation, monitoring and, above all, probably our mental health. With where we’re going today, if we don’t do that, we’re going to have more and more of a dissolution of the life that we all enjoy.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Ian. I’ll invite members of the committee to ask you some questions.

M. Starchuk: Thank you, Ian. I was trying to write, and I was trying to remember. Those two things don’t go together at all, in any way, shape or form.

You talked about a third party to do a study and about the value of the money that was there. So my question is: did your organization do a study to show that there was?

I. Graham: We have, in some areas. In the past, we have managed to do that, and we’re looking at some others.

[1:10 p.m.]

For example, a perfect example, the government just passed into law the protection of the donut hole in Manning Park. So there’s this additional piece. What has not been done there yet is a survey to have a look at what actually exists there. What are the values? Where are they at? That’s one that our group has thought we will at least get started. We may not be able to do the whole thing, but we’d like to get a piece started.

The other one that I mentioned is Oliver Mountain. We are going to actually, just about 100 percent…. The news is out here now. We are going to hire a biologist to go in there and have a look at Oliver Mountain and what it is that we’re actually protecting. Right now we know, from various people giving us input, that we’ve got things like antelope bush and — I’m trying to think of the bird; I’m not an ornithologist — one of the birds that is in there. There are quite a few values in that area, so we do put money into that.

The government did a great job by saying, “Hey, let’s protect this area in Manning Park,” but we want to see it taken to the next level. Going back to that first predication is: hey, if you’re going to take an action, it has to have resources. This committee can say what those resources are, and as it goes through the appropriate ministry, the resources come out. They may not all be money. They may be manpower. They may be scheduling. But there are ways that we can have a look at this.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you for that. This is more a comment. You know, in Japan, they’ve got the forest bathing. When you talked about mental health, it just reminded me of the importance of or the ability for nature and wilderness to really be therapeutic for young people — and older people — with respect to mental health. I just wanted to acknowledge that. I’m glad you made that connection.

I. Graham: Well, my wife, Donna, back here, is an instructor at Okanagan College. Part of her program is about getting people out into the forests. She instructs education assistants who are working with children — those education assistants you see out wandering with kids through the community. It’s not just: “Let’s go for a walk.” It’s: “Let’s get out there and take some of this stuff in.”

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, I’m not seeing any other questions, Ian. I want to thank you on behalf of the committee for taking the time to make your presentation and to thank you for making such a powerful link between mental health and quality of life and our relationship to nature and the role that parks play. You’ve provided us with some very concrete, practical ways to ensure that we, as a society, are able to continue to do that.

I. Graham: Okay. Well, look forward to some more coming to you in the mail. Thank you very much, and enjoy the Okanagan while you’re up.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Louise Pedersen, representing Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C.

Hi, Louise. We have a timer to help you keep track on your five minutes, and then you’ll have five minutes to take questions from us. That timer will be in red.

OUTDOOR RECREATION COUNCIL OF B.C.

L. Pedersen: Good afternoon, everybody. It’s a real, real pleasure to be here in person after four years. I’ve been making Zoom presentations, but it’s really, really nice to actually see you in person. My name is Louise Pedersen, and I’m the executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Council of B.C. We are based in Revelstoke, but we cover the entire province.

The ORC is a charitable organization that is composed of organizational members, including this organization that we just heard about, representing the broad and diverse spectrum of outdoor recreation user groups, including pedallers, hikers, mountain bikers, equestrians, snowmobilers, dirt bikers, sport fishers and other nature interests.

We indirectly represent more than 100,000 British Columbians. We work to promote and advocate for access to and responsible use of B.C.’s outdoors for outdoor recreation. We build bridges between different user groups, and we represent the broad interests of this large community to government and industry.

I’m here to make three recommendations, and I’ll get to those very, very soon.

A new Ipsos survey conducted on behalf of the Outdoor Recreation Council showed that seven out of ten British Columbians have participated in outdoor recreation in the past year and that 93 percent value the benefits of it for their mental and physical health. And 90 percent agree that participating in outdoor recreation helped them grow their appreciation for nature.

[1:15 p.m.]

Three out of four agree that access to good outdoor recreation opportunities is an important reason for why they chose to live in their community. Lastly, 85 percent of outdoor recreation participants support more government investments in the development and maintenance of trails, parks and other recreation amenities in the province.

One of B.C.’s greatest assets is really our natural environment. From our national and provincial parks to local trails and green spaces, these are the building blocks of a diverse and sustainable economy and healthy and thriving communities.

As communities in this province strive to develop sustainable and diversified economies, outdoor recreation offers a promising path to prosperity. Yet these resources that this outdoor recreation economy depends on cannot be taken for granted. The more we protect and invest in outdoor recreation infrastructure on public lands, create supportive legislation and policies, and provide opportunities for collaborative land use planning, the greater and longer-lasting the dividends in the form of healthy communities, healthy economies and healthier people.

The first recommendation is to increase the budgets of B.C.’s two provincial recreation agencies, Recreation Sites and Trails B.C., and B.C. Parks.

As has already been raised during this consultation by several of our members, including the Federation of Mountain Clubs of B.C., the increasing demand for outdoor recreation activities amongst British Columbians and our visitors and historic underinvestments by the province mean that our outdoor recreation assets are facing several pressing issues, including degradation of infrastructure through a lack of maintenance and overuse and lack of essential facilities, such as toilets and outhouses, wildlife-proof garbage containers and signage. There are lots of environmental and cultural impacts and insufficient staff and budgets to plan and maintain these valuable assets.

We ask that the annual operational budget of Recreation Sites and Trails B.C. is increased to a minimum of $20 million and that the annual budget of B.C. Parks is increased to $100 million.

The second recommendation is to adopt the recommendations from the Provincial Trails Advisory Body to amend the trails strategy for British Columbia to confirm adequate provincial financial support for the implementation of the updated strategy. The Provincial Trails Advisory Body’s, PTAB, main role — and I’m co-chairing it — is to advise the provincial government on implementing the trails strategy for B.C., which came out in 2013, and also to conduct a regular review of the strategy.

The PTAB concluded a thorough review of the strategy a year ago and presented its recommendations to the provincial government on the implementation status and how best to improve the strategy to ensure it delivers as much value to British Columbians as possible. An improved strategy, along with the resources to facilitate effective implementation, will help ensure that we can take a much more strategic, coordinated and collaborative approach to trail-based and any other kind of recreation and leverage the province’s strategic goals for reconciliation with Indigenous people, rural development, diversity and inclusion, active transportation, healthy lifestyles and COVID-19 economic recovery efforts.

The third recommendation is to invest $10 million in a new B.C. trail fund to provide reliable funding for trail clubs. First Nations and local governments deliver ongoing stewardship of B.C.’s network of recreational trails and facilities. The development and maintenance of our trails and infrastructure rely heavily on grassroots support all over B.C. by hundreds of — at least 200 — community-based recreation groups, who report increasing burnout and a very limited access to funding to support their work, in particular for trail maintenance. It’s sometimes easy enough to find money for new trails but not for the ongoing upkeep. It’s a big problem.

This yet-to-be-established B.C. trail fund would be created in response to a long-standing need for a reliable and diverse funding model to support the trail system. Actually, it was recognized by this committee as well in past years.

Thank you. I can see that my time is out. I’m sorry. It’s a lot to fit in. I hope I could still be understood.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Louise. I’ll invite members of the committee to ask you some follow-up questions.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. It was incredible. Of course, I’ve always believed in the importance of outdoor recreation with mental wellness.

I wanted to go back to some of the numbers you threw out there. Were you talking about increase to $20 million or increase by $20 million?

L. Pedersen: To $20 million.

H. Yao: And increase to $100 million, not by $100 million?

L. Pedersen: Yes — so not increased by. Right now it’s under $50 million a year. But studies have been done that show that to actually create a solid, sustainable park system, we need at least $100 million a year for infrastructure and operating costs and also for all that trail maintenance.

H. Yao: If you don’t mind me just following up quickly, does that $100 million also include anticipating climate change–based damage that might require additional funding to support repairs?

L. Pedersen: That might require…. You know, this report was done maybe ten years ago. The world is really changing a lot, so we would need to update it and really take that into consideration.

H. Yao: Perfect. Thank you so much.

L. Pedersen: But there has been lots of damage, with the recent flooding and wildfires.

[1:20 p.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next question is Ben and Harwinder. Did I miss anybody?

B. Stewart: Thanks, Louise. You just mentioned, to Henry’s question, that there is a report that was done about ten years ago on this. Okay.

I guess my question is…. We’ve heard this presentation over the last couple of years that I’ve been on the committee. There is a fair amount to be done, far more than can be attempted in a season or even a…. From a strategic point of view, how would the government know where the priorities are? Who would they help support so that they focused in on those areas?

L. Pedersen: I would, of course, like to speak up for our members. Those are a lot of the trail groups, the recreation groups that work in partnership with B.C. Parks and work with Recreation Sites and Trails B.C. So much more can be done to support them — by supporting a B.C. trail fund or being able to provide them with some sort of financial support so they can buy the tools and the supplies that they need to help maintain this trail network we have, and the sites.

We do have a trail strategy, but the government never actually put much money towards it. We’re talking about pennies towards the implementation of this trail strategy. There’s really nothing wrong with it, other than it’s just lacking the teeth. Where’s the money? An updated trail strategy will provide an opportunity for everybody to get together around a table and come up…. It’s not all resting on government’s shoulders.

Organizations like ours are very, very willing to participate. Again, we need to make sure that we provide lots of opportunities for Indigenous governments to participate in the planning and the management as well. We need a mechanism that enables that, and it has not been very effective until now.

B. Stewart: Just to be clear, if the government…. The amounts that you’re talking about might be justified, but there needs to be a strategy with all these stakeholders. That’s probably the first step. The second step is the bigger funding ask.

L. Pedersen: Yes.

B. Stewart: Okay. Thank you.

H. Sandhu: Thank you, Louise. Just a quick question, to piggyback on the budget, some clarification. As I was writing and thinking, as Mike said earlier, I think I missed something.

Besides the $20 million and the $100 million that you proposed, you also mentioned about government investing $10 million in a new B.C. trail fund. I don’t know if I’ve got the actual title. I’m just curious if you can elaborate a little bit more about what that fund will look like and where it will be used to meet the needs.

L. Pedersen: Thank you so much for that question. The Provincial Trails Advisory Body created a subcommittee two years ago. I was leading that subcommittee. We were tasked with coming up with some sort of a model or a solution — that solution will only be part of the overall solution, of course — to help solve some of those issues that we see on the ground. Recreation organizations, local governments, Indigenous governments are not able to participate as much as they would like. They’re lacking that funding.

Often, we’re really just talking about maybe 50 percent of the cost. They could put in the volunteer time as well. We looked at different models across the world — New Zealand, Australia, down in the U.S. — and we came up with a model where the B.C. trail fund would provide grants. Often what these trail groups really need is somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 a year. That can make a big, big difference.

We’re going to the province first, and we’re asking them if they would be willing to support this and provide some seed funding for an endowment fund. The problem is that funding can come and go. There has been rural dividend funding available, and there has been some tourism funding, but there has not been one dedicated funding source for these groups. They are all working super hard.

We want to try and make it as low barrier and as accessible as possible. The idea is to approach the corporate world and seek individual donations, and foundation grants as well.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you so much for your presentation. We’re out of time.

I guess I’d like to conclude by saying that British Columbia is, in many ways, defined by our relationship to natural beauty. It’s the natural beauty of British Columbia that attracted many of us to come to British Columbia and/or to stay in British Columbia. As you’ve pointed out, it is not something we can take for granted. We need to be proactive about looking after it.

[1:25 p.m.]

Our next presenter is Jeremy Vandekerkhove, representing Air Rescue One Heli Winch Society.

AIR RESCUE ONE HELI WINCH SOCIETY

J. Vandekerkhove: Good afternoon. My name is Jeremy Vandekerkhove. I’m with Air Rescue One Heli Winch Society. I’m the executive director of Air Rescue One Heli Winch Society, AROHWS. I’ve run the Air One program since 2014. I’m also an advanced life support paramedic, avalanche forecaster, SAR team leader and crew member of the Air One program.

Who we are. AROHWS is a benevolent not-for-profit charity formed in 2017 to provide fundraising and promotion and to deliver the Air Rescue One program. We are composed of Air Rescue One team members, medical directors and support volunteers. We have no affiliation with any private helicopter companies.

What is Air Rescue One? It’s a team of medical rescue techs that are on a winch-equipped rescue helicopter. It was formed in 2014 following an MOU with the province of B.C. to look at the feasibility of winch rescue with SAR in B.C., run in conjunction with B.C. SAR, EMBC and Vernon Search and Rescue. At the end of the program, it ended up being the first civilian SAR helicopter winch program in Canada, and many have followed suit.

Our primary sponsor is the Thompson-Okanagan. Our secondary region is the entire southern Interior. Over the past eight years, we’ve responded north to Blue River, south to the U.S. border, east to the Alberta border, west to Manning Park and everywhere in between. Since its inception, we have rescued over 150 people.

What we do: we’re a team of doctors, paramedics, rescue techs, nurses, fire specialists. We utilize a winch-equipped Bell medium helicopter capable of multi-hour missions. When we get a call, we typically have a vague description of what’s happened and a GPS coordinate. We fly directly to the site. We winch down our rescue techs with medical equipment. We stabilize the patient’s injuries and package them. We then winch them back up into the aircraft. We fly, then, directly to a hospital or definitive care, all while carrying on treatment. During this whole time, we can do the entire mission without ever touching the ground.

We’re dispatched through the 911 system. We work with all regional SAR groups, BCEHS, RCMP and local fire departments through EMBC. We’re tasked to rescue the sickest patients in the most technical terrain. Our missions are typically quite high risk. Our missions start where task agencies’ health and safety programs end. Our charity and our rescue program manage this risk, completing these rescues within a robust health and safety program. We have a perfect safety record.

Why do we do it? Collectively, our team has over 150 years of rescue experience. In that time, we have witnessed firsthand a need for the rescue program that we provide. Without a dedicated rescue helicopter, we have seen people suffer needlessly, rescue volunteers and emergency service workers put at elevated risk, and people dying from their injuries in remote locations.

Who are these people that we rescue? They’re you and me. They’re our neighbours and friends. Most of the people we rescue are normal folks working, recreating or travelling through our province. Accidents happen, and when they happen, we’re there to help.

Why am I here? What is our problem? Over the past eight years, we were constantly unable to respond to all of our rescue requests due to a lack of helicopter winches and pilots. This is due to a limited availability of rescue helicopters. We have to compete against forest fires globally and other industries such as heli-skiing. This means we could not respond to rescues when we were needed. While these rescues still happen, they take hours longer, putting more emergency personnel at risk, increasing pain and suffering and risk of death to patients.

What is the solution to this? Our goal is a dedicated rescue helicopter available 24-7, 365 days a year. We have a three-step plan to achieve this goal.

The first step is to fundraise and secure a dedicated winch at a cost of $400,000. The dedicated winch will allow us to utilize multiple available helicopters, pilots and air carriers. However, we’ll still have gaps in coverage. Step 2 is to lease a dedicated rescue helicopter at a cost of $800,000 per year. This will cover the cost of the helicopter, pilot, engineers and insurance. Step 3 is to build out full capacity for 365 days of staffed operation from 6 a.m. to midnight, accessible directly to tasking agencies. The cost of this would be around $2.5 million per year.

We want the program to be directly accessible to tasking agencies, the RCMP, BCEHS, local fire and Ministry of Forests. This can be achieved through non-response-based funding at the regional or provincial level.

Where we’re at: we’re close to achieving the first of our goals. We’ve raised $200,000 since October from regional fundraising and are applying for a matching capital grant from gaming. We plan to have the winch in operation this fall, but we need your help to reach the next steps in our goals.

[1:30 p.m.]

Our crews are trained, equipped and ready to serve. We need consistent, dependable funding to secure a dedicated helicopter so that we can respond to rescue requests.

On behalf of all of us at Air Rescue One Heli Winch Society, I thank you for your time and consideration today.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you. We have lots of questions for you.

The first one is Mike and then Renee.

M. Starchuk: Thank you, Jeremy, for what you do. The report is really succinct. I guess my question is….

Your ask of $800,000 and then 2.5…. What’s your current budget that you have right now. Is this…? Everything is volunteer right now, everything is by donation right now, and you want to move to a paid model.

J. Vandekerkhove: Everything is by donation, and everything is paid per response. However, we end up getting into this loop of…. We don’t have a machine, so we can’t respond to rescues, which then impedes on our funding. Having the dedicated rescue helicopter would cover off that base level of expenses of having the helicopter available. However, you would still be paid per response, as per existing structures.

The $2½ million would be to, essentially, prepay for a lot of those rescues in order to have the staff available and have it as on call, immediate, ready to go within 90 seconds, like an ambulance.

M. Starchuk: Very good. Thank you.

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much, Jeremy. It’s great to see you again. One of my questions was already answered, so I’ll ask this other one.

Just to put a note on it as well…. We oftentimes think of this service in the remote and more treacherous terrain. It’s also for our highrises and when we had the crane accident of last year. If only we had…. I’m sorry. If only we had a helicopter available.

On that, you had talked about how many people you’ve already rescued. How many could you rescue if this plan was fully funded?

J. Vandekerkhove: Hundreds.

R. Merrifield: Thank you.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Now you’ve got me emotional.

I’m on the North Shore, and North Shore search and rescue is very, very busy. What you’ve got with the winch and what you’re proposing here…. Is there anything else in any other part of British Columbia that utilizes this?

J. Vandekerkhove: No. We started the program for winching. North Shore followed suit last year. However, we’ve all been struggling for funding, since the beginning. SARs is a great program in B.C., but the models to fund the more expensive aspects of it don’t exist.

Talon is the air carrier for North Shore. They’re able to concentrate a lot of calls in a small area. They also utilize that to service different groups. But even they don’t have machines all the time. They suffer from the same problems that we have.

We want to have a similar model that’s found in New Zealand or the U.K.

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

J. Routledge (Chair): Henry, then Megan, then Brenda, then Harwinder. I don’t know if we’ll get through all of those questions.

H. Yao: I’ll make my question quick. It’s just one comment.

You keep calling it SAR. I keep on thinking about SARS, the epidemic. So apologies for that. It was a bit distracting there, for me, for a second.

R. Merrifield: Search and rescue.

H. Yao: I know. My apologies.

You’re talking about $2.5 million. Then you talk about $800,000. Lastly, you mentioned about 150 people. So you’re probably wanting about $22,000 per rescue. Does that sound about right?

J. Vandekerkhove: No. Honestly, though, the rescues are about $15,000 per rescue, when you actually calculate in the flight time. A typical rescue takes about 2½ hours of flight time, plus crew and everything else. That’s what the cost of it is, which is actually cheaper than what B.C. Ambulance would be doing, with similar types of things, without responding into technical terrain.

H. Yao: I’m assuming, with the $800,000 and the $2.5 million, you can actually keep the costs down further.

J. Vandekerkhove: Much further. Yeah, absolutely.

H. Yao: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

M. Dykeman: I know you’ve touched on this a little bit. Exactly how do you get the helicopters you’re using now?

J. Vandekerkhove: Right now we utilize, basically, the excess capacity the private operators have. So if their machine is not tasked to fires or to heli-skiing, we use it in the time that they have it available, without giving them any money for it, except for the tasks. This means, for the summertime, we typically lose it for the entire summer. Over Christmas, we lose it. If there’s unforeseen maintenance, we lose it.

I have much more information that I couldn’t share just because of the limitations, but you can kind of see the graphs. Essentially, we’ve been going downhill on the amount of availability as increase in demand for these machines is globally…. They ship them all over the world. We have a global helicopter industry here. So we’re having to compete with that with very little money.

[1:35 p.m.]

What we want to do is add to the capacity of the province to have a machine dedicated and available for whatever the tasking agencies need it for.

M. Dykeman: Okay. Thank you.

J. Routledge (Chair): Brenda and, if we have time, Harwinder.

B. Bailey: Mine is very quick.

Thanks very much for your presentation. If you were successful in getting that $800,000 for lease and pilot and upkeep, is there availability?

J. Vandekerkhove: Of the machines? Yes. We have one in West Kelowna today.

H. Sandhu: Just a quick question. I wanted my colleagues to ask. We met, and I got my questions answered. How many volunteers do we have, Jeremy?

Also, I want to make a comment to committee members too. Time is of the essence when those situations happen. They not only rescue people; they provide on-site care. I have my colleague…. Amazing doctors volunteer. We all know doctors are a precious commodity, but they’re out there because that’s what they’re passionate about.

I really appreciate you coming and making this presentation.

What is the number of volunteers that we have, or do we have a challenge?

J. Vandekerkhove: We have 13 volunteers that provide coverage for 90 shifts a month. Essentially, for the past eight years, when we’re not at work, we put ourselves on the schedule to be on the machine.

Honestly, the reason why I haven’t been here is…. We’ve been pushing for this through sheer force of will for so long. With COVID and the changes in the industry, we basically hit a wall where we can’t continue to do it the way we’ve been doing it. We’re now going out asking for help. We should have asked for help many years ago. Unfortunately, we were too busy trying to deliver the program.

H. Sandhu: Thank you.

If any of you can watch the video, it’s pretty impressive how they do it. It’s on their website.

J. Routledge (Chair): Jeremy, we are out of time. Thank you so much for what you do, and thank you so much for coming and explaining it to us. I don’t think a day goes by when we don’t see, on the news, either a good story of someone who was rescued or a tragic story. You and your colleagues put yourselves at such risk every day to save them. Thank you so much.

Our next presenter is Taryn Skalbania, representing the B.C. Coalition for Forestry Reform.

Welcome. You have five minutes. Once you start, this will count down to zero, and that should be a signal to wrap up your presentation. It’ll start counting up again, in red, to five. When it hits that five, then we are finished asking you questions.

B.C. COALITION FOR FORESTRY REFORM

T. Skalbania: Thank you very much. I just want to acknowledge the ability to speak here on behalf of the community voice. It’s wonderful. I’m very impressed with your schedule. I see that I’m on the very green agenda this morning. Lots of food security.

I feel for you about SAR or SARS. I think it’s species at risk. So that would be a budget item — changing the acronyms.

I’m here on behalf of the B.C. Coalition for Forestry Reform. I remember some of you from last year.

I acknowledge that I’m on Syilx territory, unceded yet welcomed to be here.

I was born in Vancouver and have lived my life in Vancouver, Whistler and Victoria. That’s Squamish, Musqueam.

I’m here for the B.C. Coalition for Forestry Reform. They are a grassroots alliance. Just like Louise, who came two before me, we started as a recreation group. We gathered together, on very sort of first-world issues, to protect our trails and our ski hill, for vistas, and our property values, for scenery, cross-country and hiking routes, and some hunting and fishing.

Then we realized there were many groups across B.C. that had, actually, deeper issues — flooding, landslides, water issues. They’re all community groups. We banded a loose coalition across B.C. We meet, in person, annually, pandemic depending. We meet on Zoom regularly, and we have a very good following on Facebook that we interact with.

We have decided…. The premise of this talk is not anything other than forestry reform. We think there is a clear and present issue with the amount of logging going on in our province and the type of logging and that selection logging would be far better suited to our environment.

I’ll let you read your own background when I’m finished, because I don’t want to waste my precious time.

[Interruption.]

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Should we be worried about…?

A Voice: Probably an earthquake.

[1:40 p.m.]

T. Skalbania: You got the Okanagan on a good day. Some of you live here, of course. Earthquakes are not our specialty. We have fire, drought and flood.

I grew up very privileged in Vancouver, living in forests and protected areas. When I moved to the Okanagan, I became alarmed at the multi-use process in our interior and rural areas. Peachland is a prime example of that, as is most of the Okanagan. We call it the canary in the coal mine.

What we’re asking for our province is not to spend more money on forestry and forestry reform but to spend it in different places. We are hoping to enact some changes in forestry, and we would like a two-part change — an overall change — but they must go in tandem.

We must change the legislation and the forestry laws that allow timber extraction first as the primary value. We have to treat all values at least equally — if not putting water, ecosystem services, biodiversity, wildlife, protected areas and things like flood controls and fire controls first. We must understand that removal of the forest canopy affects all these things permanently.

We also then need…. After — and simultaneously — changing the legislation, we would also like to change the tenure system. It needs a complete elimination, a cancellation. The tenure system has been involved in B.C. since 1947. It’ll be a great change. There will be some pushback, but in the long run, it’ll be better for the long-term health of our forests and, therefore, our forestry industry, our jobs and our communities. We will have to spend less money on things like flood controls, replacing fish-bearing streams, penning caribou; the list goes on and on.

Last year’s budget item was $19 million to spray fertilizer. Well, forests fertilize themselves. So we would like just a deeper look. That deeper look would be an audit. We would like somebody to actually come up with what forestry gives our province, as it’s standing, and what it takes. We’ve sort of privatized forestry yet socialized the costs.

In my town of Peachland, it’s $25 million to build a water treatment plant. Last year’s budget item was $30 million for watershed protection. Well, the Grand Forks watershed flooding alone cost $400 million. So I would like the committee to consider: what are the true costs of clearcut logging in our province?

I think I could end on that and have three seconds over.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you.

Questions?

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much for the presentation. It’s great to see you again. My question is around some of what you were mentioning, in terms of the canopy and clearcut, but also around the use of fertilizers and chemicals.

What have you noticed, specifically, in the Peachland watershed? I know that that’s a passion of yours. Where do you see that we need to go as a province?

T. Skalbania: Well, fortunately, Peachland watershed licensees do not use glyphosate because we don’t have enough deciduous to kill. But Hydro uses it on all their rights-of-way, as do all railways. Just further north here, in this area and the White Rock Lake fire, there was a lot of glyphosate used in brushing. It dries out your forest. It removes the fire-retardant trees, the trees that fight fire. It removes all the vegetation and browsing.

There has been a big hue and cry. When the rural communities had glyphosate spraying, the opposition to it got nowhere, but when B.C. Timber Sales decided to spray glyphosate from Hope to Squamish and all us hipsters that lived in Vancouver decided that their berries, fruit, water and fish were going to be affected, there has been a big cry. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot of it on the news recently. The First Nations people are calling it Indigenous genocide — to remove their berries and deciduous plants by spraying poison.

If you can’t harvest sustainably and have the trees grow back, then maybe you have to go back to the beginning of your plan. It’s the same with the fertilizers: ask. The federal government has banned fertilizer use because it’s bad for the climate change. So here Trudeau is pulling back on the nitrates, and Premier Horgan is promoting it. I’m not sure why.

[1:45 p.m.]

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you for that. Earlier today Ian Graham, from the Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society, also talked about an audit and looking at the true value of logging and forestry. Have you talked to each other? Is that the same thing you’re speaking about in yours — to look at that true value of what logging and forestry actually provide?

T. Skalbania: That’s so wonderful. When we formed the Peachland Watershed around, literally, my kitchen table, one of our members was another organic farmer that came to the table. His name was Joe Klein. He’s been here for 30, 40 years. He’s on the board of Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society. He has always been a champion. He’s saying that it’s just the true cost of logging. It would be almost impossible to do in the province. But if you did it in a logging community versus a non-forestry community versus a clearcut community versus a park, you might find some baseline where you could see what the costs are.

You know, how many jobs…? I’ll give you an example. Harrop-Proctor mill community forest gets nine jobs per cubic metre. That’s nine jobs per utility pole — a 35-foot pole. What do we get in the rest of B.C.? Less than two jobs. The way we’re harvesting our trees in the rest of B.C. is not sustainable or affordable or good for jobs. In Scandinavia, what do they get? They do value-added to their trees. They don’t ship them raw. They don’t allow them to be shipped raw. They get 30 jobs per telephone pole.

We can do better. We know how to do better. We just have to do better. We need incentive, which comes from the government. The people ask you what they want. You make the change. You find an influencer.

B. Stewart: Taryn, thanks very much. I just wanted to…. Based on your description of the forest management, I wonder if you’ve observed any difference between volume-based logging versus area-based?

T. Skalbania: Yes. We do need…. The difference, I don’t know. They both have their problems, but we have seen better in area-based. We have, just in our Okanagan, with the Westbank First Nations, Ntityix. They have an area that’s a community forest, of course. But they have actually not met their permitted volume, or their AAC, for reasons. It’s actually illegal. They could lose their permit. I don’t think anyone would dare take away a First Nations’ permit in this day and age. But other licensees do not have to hit their volume if they don’t think it’s there.

So I would say area is better. And why area? You just can’t cut a square cutblock — maybe just a valley or maybe just a hillside. The area should dictate the amount harvested, if at all. Maybe rest is part of the harvesting plan.

By the way, I spent last Monday at Quails’ Gate at that wonderful statue unveiling. Tonight I’m going to The Lake, the premiere opera of nx̌aʔx̌aʔitkʷ, which means “the lake monster,” that Quails’ Gate has sponsored. We’re very involved here in the Okanagan.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Taryn. We are out of time, but I want to thank you for coming and presenting to us.

I did note down here that the tenure system goes back to 1947. I think what I get from what you’re telling us is that we’ve been managing our forests, we’ve been managing logging as if there’s more than we know what to do with, and that is no longer the case.

T. Skalbania: Yes. As you said in the closing remarks with Louise, people move and stay in B.C. because of “Super, natural B.C.” I think we’ve taken it for granted.

Thank you very much for this opportunity.

J. Routledge (Chair): We will take a recess. It will be a short recess till 1:55, so make the best of it.

The committee recessed from 1:49 p.m. to 1:57 p.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Glenn Benischek, representing VantageOne Credit Union.

Welcome to the Finance Committee. You have five minutes to make your presentation. Our timer will count down to zero, which will be an indication that you should wrap up your presentation. Then it will start counting up to five, which gives us five minutes to ask you questions. When it hits five, we will conclude.

Over to you.

VANTAGEONE CREDIT UNION

G. Benischek: Thank you, and good afternoon, hon. Members.

I’m Glenn Benischek, president and CEO of VantageOne Credit Union. We’re a community-based credit union based here in Vernon, British Columbia.

I first would like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the northern part of the unceded Okanagan First Nation’s territory, and many descendants of the Syilx/Okanagan live here today.

I would like to thank you today to have me come and talk to you about the credit union system. I’d really like to talk to you about us being your economic secret weapon.

As you’re all aware, our economy is measured by gross domestic product, or GDP, and our provincially regulated credit union system plays a significant role in that area. What has been learned by academics over the past many decades is the importance of community banking in GDP growth.

The leading economies in the world have strong community banking systems. This includes countries such as the United States, Germany and even China, who adopted a community banking model when they modernized in the late ’70s that has allowed them to achieve their ascent in the world economy.

Why is community banking so important to GDP growth? Community banks and credit unions are more effective at lending to small business than the very large commercial banks. Small business drives GDP growth. They accounted for 34 percent of GDP in 2020 and employ 43 percent of all workers in the province. As of 2021, credit unions have the largest loans to small and medium-sized businesses in B.C., collectively, at 21.1 percent of the market. Understanding the local economy and working with entrepreneurs and small business is our strength.

My credit union is no exception. We have a significant investment in small business, close to $100 million in commercial loan portfolio, and we assisted close to 300 small businesses through the pandemic with CEBA loans. We are the only financial institution in the communities of Peachland and Edgewood.

[2:00 p.m.]

In addition to our strength in driving GDP growth, we are also a strong partner in important government priorities such as anti–money laundering and climate change. Being rooted in the communities, the credit union system is uniquely positioned to assist in these areas.

Many credit unions, such as ourselves, have embarked on ESG programs, all for the betterment of our society and community. An example is our credit union’s work with an organization called home zero. This is a non-profit organization based in Vernon that is looking to do home retrofits for clean technology through a neighbourhood approach, rather than a house-by-house approach. By doing that, they’re looking at reducing the cost of the project overall and leveraging financing tied to the property with supportive funding from government sources and the credit union system.

The organization has received both local government and national government support, and they’re looking at piloting their program in the next year. We look forward to see what it will do to help improve our carbon footprint in our community and potentially all communities in the province.

In summary, my goal is quite simple. I want to make you aware that the credit union system is your economic secret weapon. We are a strong community finance sector. We have been resilient. We have been through pandemics, financial crisis, market crashes, dot-com busts, etc., and have come out on the other side strong and continue to support both consumers and businesses in the community.

My message is one and one and only: we need to avoid burdening the systems with excessive regulations that reduce our effort to drive GDP growth. When we look at our Crown corporations and our government regulations, we have to be mindful of the strength and the contribution that the credit unions provide to our community. We’re uniquely positioned to partner with the government to meet mandates such as money laundering and climate action. I encourage you to leverage our system and continue to strengthen our province.

Thank you. That’s my presentation.

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

Our first question is from Karin, then Brenda, Mike.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Glenn. I love the role that credit unions play in our communities.

I know this is a bit different than what you’ve just talked about. So many consumer mortgages make up a large part of the portfolio of a credit union. Are you concerned about the mortgage rate risk and your customers at this point, as we see the numbers going up? You’ve got a good, close relationship with your customers, I’m sure, and how to mitigate this.

G. Benischek: The big driver of delinquency is what our big concern would be. It’s job slowdown and economic slowdown. Interest rates rising…. We are still at very low levels, historically. We don’t see any weakness in the consumer at this point in time, and jobs remain plentiful. The big risk would be a significant slowdown in the economy that would cause job reduction and unemployment to move up. That’s when we start to see weakness in our portfolios. We have not seen that.

There still is a very positive energy out in the economy today, even though rates have risen from very low rates to probably still low rates, historically. Adjusting and the speed is also the concern. But at this point in time, the consumer is doing very well, and there are plenty of job opportunities available in the province.

B. Bailey: Thanks very much for your presentation. I’m not that familiar with the banking sector, so forgive me if this is a dumb question.

I’m interested in your comment about supporting SMEs in a different way than perhaps large banks like RBC might. I’m wondering: does that approach have any negative outcome in regards to default rates with your clients, or is it the opposite?

G. Benischek: I’d probably say it’s the opposite. Because we’re so locally committed and visit our commercial clients so regularly, we’re probably more on top of what’s going on in their business than maybe a larger commercial bank might be, with larger portfolios.

Our account managers have a limited base of clients that they work with on the commercial side to ensure we have the human touch, as we call it, with our commercial businesses, especially ones that are in phases of growth or expansion — that are a higher risk than, say, an existing business that has a proven track record. That would be our key difference there.

B. Bailey: Thanks for your support for the small business sector.

[2:05 p.m.]

M. Starchuk: Thank you, Glenn. With regards to your comments earlier, with retrofitting houses and pilot programs, what is your role in that?

G. Benischek: It’s been an advisory role and, potentially, a financing role. Home zero is looking to have a model that will allow them to…. The consumer would pay nothing except the monthly fee for the retrofit of their home. The capital funding behind that would come from financial services like credit unions and other government sources to help fund that with the loan paid off over…. I think a 20-year lifespan is the time span of the equipment on the house. It’s easy for the consumer to get in. The cost is lower, and there’s financing already in place.

The model is in a theoretical state right now. A pilot program needs to be done to prove concepts, etc. But right now we’ve been taking an advisory capacity on the business case and the financial projections and trying to be real about potential demand, because changing one’s home is a big step. Convincing consumers that they need to switch in a climate that can get to minus 30 is a big step. They have to prove that these technologies are effective in our climate.

J. Routledge (Chair): We have about a minute and a half left.

H. Sandhu: Thank you so much.

Just a quick question. I think you answered part of it. I was just going to ask when this pilot program will be launched and what the hurdle is at the moment. I think you did highlight a little bit….

G. Benischek: They actually are well structured, well in place to start a pilot this fall. I think they have $5 million funding from a national entity. I can’t remember exactly the name of the entity they’ve received funding from to do the pilot. It’s exciting to see that it is on the horizon.

H. Sandhu: Awesome.

B. Stewart: I just really wanted to ask about the home zero and what the government could do in that case, but you’ve answered a couple of questions.

When you say the credit union movement is our secret weapon, is there more that the government could be doing, or just continue to do what it’s doing?

G. Benischek: Probably it’s through regulation. Regulation through the Financial Institutions Act regulates how much we can lend to small business. We are capped. If I do any more than 35 percent of my loan assets, I have to take more capital away. That restricts the amount that I can lend to a small business. Reducing that or making the penalty less onerous is a good thing.

Looking at how our capital is regulated and how we are regulated is an effective way to ensure that we have a sound system. We want to keep a sound system, but we want to make sure we don’t get too restrictive in the regulatory regime as we move forward.

We’ve seen some countries face severe financial impacts on their financial institutions through the financial crisis. Canada was not one of those places. I think we should pat ourselves on the back that we have a strong regime. We shouldn’t try to strengthen it even more, at the detriment of community-based credit unions especially, who are key to driving this small business lending.

Hopefully that answered your question.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Glenn. We are out of time.

Thank you so much for coming and advocating for credit unions.

As you were talking about the role of credit unions, I was thinking about my own community. I think about generations of families and houses that families own only because there are credit unions. People who work in our credit unions and lead our credit unions are our neighbours and have personal commitments to our communities as well, so thank you.

Our next presenter is Dan Rogers, Kelowna Chamber of Commerce.

Hi, Dan.

D. Rogers: Hello.

J. Routledge (Chair): Here’s your timer. Five minutes for your presentation, then it’ll turn red, and it’ll be five minutes for questions and answers.

KELOWNA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

D. Rogers: Thank you, Madam Chair and representatives of the standing committee. It’s a pleasure to be with you today and have a few minutes. As a now fully recovered politician and former broadcast journalist, doing anything under five minutes is always a challenge, but I will do my best. It’s great to have the clock in front of me.

I represent the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce. We are a member-driven organization that has been around for 116 years. We like to say we’re the original economic development engine in the Central Okanagan, much in the same way as chambers of commerce in almost every community across this province have been creating stronger economies and prosperous communities for more than 100 years.

[2:10 p.m.]

I am pleased to present to you today. I have three recommendations that were put forward. I’m conscious you’re able to read, and we have submitted, in writing, the recommendations.

I’ll briefly mention each of them, though I would encourage all members of the committee to get, as soon as possible, the resolution book that was completed by the B.C. Chamber of Commerce, following our AGM, most recently in Prince George. We just passed many resolutions that affect the economy right across, whether it’s in Dawson Creek, Fernie, on the Island or in Metro Vancouver. It’s a good read. It’s not quite ready yet. But I would encourage you…. As you move through your deliberations towards next year’s budget, that would provide some insights of where chambers of commerce and the business community are.

There are three recommendations that we have put forward. I’ll mention them briefly, make a comment or two very quickly and then provide some opportunity for questions, obviously.

One of our recommendations is to ensure…. We’ve made this case before. As one of the fastest-growing CMAs not just in British Columbia but in the country, the Central Okanagan, and the Okanagan even broader, needs investment in transportation infrastructure to ensure the good movement of goods and people through this region. I’ve made the comment before that as part of our policy, because we are in a growth mode, addressing, from a planning perspective, those long-term needs now is the most cost-effective way to accelerate growth overall.

We believe one of those opportunities exists now, particularly with consideration of a second crossing of Okanagan Lake. The city of Kelowna is undertaking a major planning exercise on the north end, as they look to add almost the population of the size of West Kelowna into Kelowna within the next 20 years. Forty thousand people are anticipated. The question is how they move around.

When you look and reflect on the Lower Mainland and greater Victoria, just think. If you actually had foresight and planned transportation ahead of time, how cost-effective would that be? You’re at that stage, we believe, in the Okanagan, where long-term planning will pay long-term dividends in the transportation infrastructure.

It’s also much broader than that. It’s economic-driven development. We talk about building centres of excellence. We have a centre of excellence for aerospace that dovetails on KF Aerospace, one of the largest private sector employers in the Okanagan and in British Columbia, harnessing the energy of the university and Kelowna International Airport — which was, pre-pandemic, the tenth busiest airport in the country. The fundamentals are there and in place.

The second point we’d make is around looking at local government as a form of government. We did some work recently to look at tax rates pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. The trend for increased property taxation is almost identical now as it was pre-pandemic. There were some local governments that gave tax breaks, but that trend continued of increase in property taxation.

We know that the government — understandably, as a former mayor in local government — is not likely to impose forced amalgamations, but there could be greater collaboration. We would encourage incentivization and ways for adjacent communities to work more effectively. We see the tangible results of the lack of that cooperation with significantly different timelines for applications in adjacent neighbourhoods. Sometimes it’s weeks in one community and months, if not years, in another.

The last point we would make, with respect to recommendations, is around the spec tax. I won’t go long. If it’s not being removed, we do want to be on record, as we have in the past, that it should be, we believe, more focused on a benchmark rather than just a regulation that says it will be imposed on one community without some indicator of why and, if that changes, when it comes off.

We think that would be a better approach — more understandable than the existing regulations, which just list the communities where there’s extra tax. Whether it achieved the desired outcome or not, we think it’s better policy that it’s geared towards an actual indicator.

Thanks very much for your time.

J. Routledge (Chair): We have questions for you. Thanks, Dan.

The first question is from Karin.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Dan. When you’re talking about the spec tax and you’re talking about a benchmark rather than the list of places that it applies, are you looking at things like rental or vacancy rates? Is that what you’re talking about?

D. Rogers: That’s correct. I made the comparison. I’m not sure whether the New Car Dealers Association has made a pitch to you. I know they’re looking at the point at which the higher-level tax kicks in for vehicles.

[2:15 p.m.]

That’s the same approach with…. You wouldn’t take the approach to say that anybody who bought a vehicle in Kelowna would pay more because they buy it in Kelowna. You’d say what that luxury tax point is and then if it comes and goes. That seemed to make more sense for us, and that’s the point we’re trying to make.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): So there are communities where we may be trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist, and that allows you to measure that.

D. Rogers: Yeah. I think, fundamentally, our approach…. What we’ve said is that it’s transparent so people know why it’s being imposed and also know when it may come off. It’s equal to all British Columbians. It’s not just specific geographic regions.

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

B. Stewart: I’ve got lots of questions. I was going to ask about the spec tax because I was trying to understand the measurement or the metrics you were talking about. You used the New Car Dealers, because of course, luxury tax starts at $55,000, I think, or $56,000 and goes up.

Can you maybe elaborate as to how you see that, just give us an example, in housing — i.e., at a price point, across the province? Is that what you’re suggesting, or am I misunderstanding that?

D. Rogers: I guess if I could, Madam Chair, to MLA Stewart.

It’s more on the principle to understanding when this tax would be imposed — that’s the issue — so it’s understandable and transparent. Primarily because…. When it was imposed — to be honest, and based on our records with the Real Estate Association — there was very little speculation by foreign buyers. It was less than 1 percent in the Central Okanagan.

We understand that speculation in the real estate market is real. We understand why Metro Vancouver is a major concern. We did not see that level of investment, though the majority of transactions were, frankly, Albertans and Saskatchewans coming to retire and getting ahead of the game.

We also see — if I could, MLA Stewart — by the imposition of that, we get comments of those that…. “Okay. To avoid it, I’m going to go into Lake Country, the adjacent community two minutes away.” So they avoid it, and what that causes is sprawl, and that’s back to why transportation is so critically important — to be able to move labour.

Not everyone can afford downtown Kelowna. So how do you move labour, particularly if you’re trying to avoid a tax? You move to an adjacent community. People are making that evaluation in their decision-making, if that helps.

M. Starchuk: Thank you, Dan. I just want to be clear. You kind of hinted around amalgamation and some of the reasons that were there, where a project may take six months here, six weeks there and six years someplace else. Is that the focus point, as far as infrastructure and builds?

D. Rogers: I will make the observation, and I would draw it from the chamber of commerce. I mentioned the movement’s been around for a long time. Unfortunately, even in the Okanagan, some chambers have gone dark. They just could not survive. So many non-profits looked at unique ways to survive the pandemic. That means greater collaboration and cooperation.

What we’ve seen is very little of that, but we do hear of the impacts. We understand local governments, particularly smaller ones, have a tough time attracting the experience that they need to process permitting. But we have homebuilders that will…. They advise us. Based on what they see in Kelowna, it will take a week or two, depending on the complexity. A similar application in an adjacent community will take months if not years. It’s virtually the same fundamentals.

Understanding that those other communities are trying to attract. They’re seeing the same labour challenges. We say that just trying to spend more to recruit more is not just the answer. Looking at ways you can collaborate in shared services is a reasonable approach that, I think, is applicable to every level of government, but certainly in the local government. That might help those smaller communities along the way, as well.

J. Routledge (Chair): Renee and then Brenda, and that’s probably all we’ll have time for.

R. Merrifield: Brenda, I’ll yield to you so that you can ask your question.

B. Bailey: Thank you, Renee.

Thanks very much for your presentation. I was interested in your comment that it’s probably unlikely that any government’s going to force amalgamation, but your suggestion that incentivizing it is a good way to go — incentivizing collaboration. I wondered if you could just share with me, perhaps, a couple of examples that you might have had in mind.

D. Rogers: I think we know of OneDesk, when you look at business licensing and having regional business licensing. That’s a good example of where government acted and responded — that type of one.

I’m not sure how you would incentivize, although we had a position recently — and we shared that with the Finance Minister — that we didn’t think government should give any money for housing to any community that doesn’t allow secondary suites. There are tools available to, certainly, the province to incentivize those greater collaborations.

[2:20 p.m.]

It might be just looking at best practices and sharing those best practices, because we hear very often from some of the rural communities that are within our catchment area in the Okanagan. They can’t find the people that will come to those small communities, and it’s a real struggle. The bigger communities could help. There are models out there where….

We’re encouraging the province…. It is the parent, to a certain extent. I don’t like saying that, as a former mayor. Between the Community Charter and the Local Government Act, there are tools available for the province.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, thank you, Dan. We are out of time.

Thank you so much for coming and joining us today and making your presentation. The big takeaway that I have from your presentation and your answers to the questions is that we need to do more creative, long-term planning and think ahead and anticipate things that we need to address.

D. Rogers: If I could…. I didn’t have time. Just a pan-provincial approach. We know how Metro Vancouver is. Part of our infrastructure is creating redundancy so that we don’t just have one. We have multiple strong regions economically — and, I think, within our infrastructure as well.

Thank you for your time.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Micki Materi, representing the Archway Society for Domestic Peace.

Thanks for joining us today. The drill is that you have five minutes to make your presentation. It’ll count down to zero. Then it will start counting up to five again in red. That’s the signal for all of us to shift into questions and answers.

ARCHWAY SOCIETY FOR DOMESTIC PEACE

M. Materi: Okay. Sounds good. Yeah. It’s going to be interesting.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I know you have my written recommendations. So I’ll just try to summarize and endeavour to stay within the minutes.

My name is Micki Materi. I’m one of the co-executive directors of Archway. We provide a continuum of support for women and their families who have experienced domestic or sexual violence in the North Okanagan. Our programs include shelter, outreach, counselling, victim services, sexual assault services and advocacy.

We have 16 programs in six different locations, funded by a variety of funders, both federally and provincially, and through donations, fundraising and various project grants. We provide school-based presentations. Also, we chair the community-based coordination committees, such as Violence Against Women in Relationships, the Integrated Case Assessment Team and the sexual assault services committee.

Our first recommendation — no surprise — is for the establishment of multi-year increased funding for all of our programs. Demands for our supports have increased, while the funding has not.

We’re funded provincially, through B.C. Housing, for our transition house and our outreach homelessness prevention program. Public Safety and Solicitor General funds our counselling, outreach and victim service programs, and MCFD funds our support to young parents and teen shelter beds within the transition house. We also receive gaming funds to assist with our prevention and awareness programs, family therapy and ICAT. Sorry, the Integrated Case Assessment Team. I have to try to stop the acronyms.

All of our programs are subsidized through fundraising, donations and grants. Of course, the funding provided doesn’t cover all of our costs for delivering our programs.

Over the past year alone, our programs and services…. The demands for our supports have increased by 67 percent just in the last year alone. Situations have become more complex. We need to increase our staffing hours, across all programs, in order to reduce wait-lists and stabilize our staffing. As a unionized environment, we had to increase our grid levels last year because of a request for job classification reviews by our staff. We’re paying more, and we’re not funded for that.

Our second recommendation, of course, is also no surprise. We need housing, across the board. Honestly, the housing crisis only continues to get worse. Our homeless prevention program, which provides rental supplements, etc., for low-income families, doesn’t even cover it. She’s really been struggling to even find housing. Finding housing alone — never mind affordable — is challenging.

[2:25 p.m.]

In 2018, we were approved for second-stage housing. Across the province, transition houses were to receive second-stage funding. As of now, there has been no progress. It would be really great if we could move forward on that. The difference between a woman staying in an abusive relationship and leaving is often the access to a safe, affordable place to live. Second-stage housing is essential to give them time and space to rebuild their lives.

Our third recommendation is to ensure the B.C. government’s commitment to ensuring gender equity is reflected in the provincial budget.

As mentioned in our written submission, there is a significant discrepancy between funding provided for our women-only supports and victim services, which provide support for both female and male victims. As well, the second-stage housing, which is so important for women and their families, has had no progress in four years, while there have been other projects that have gone forward. You can imagine the perception of gender bias as we develop our funding formulas.

Truth to tell, I have a gender bias myself. I absolutely believe in women and our capacity to contribute in significant ways in our communities. Investing in women is the best way to improve the quality of life for all of us.

Thank you for your time.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you so much, Micki.

Our first question is from Karin, followed by Ben, then Henry and then Renee.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Micki. Thanks for the work that your organization does. We’ve heard, repeatedly, that multi-year contracts are important and that increasing the administrative fees paid on those contracts is important. It’s a consistent message.

I just want to clarify something. You’re unionized. But are you not, from MPSSG and MCFD…? Are they not reimbursing, on their contracts, for the full wages at this point?

M. Materi: Okay. At this point…. As I mentioned, as a result of staff requests to review the job classifications, we had to up a grid. They were at grid 10, and now they’re at grid 11 for the support to young parents program — and from an 11 to a 13 for victim services.

When we approached them…. As of now, we’ve not received the increase. They’re looking into it. Truth to tell, we actually don’t…. They’ve not really given us our budget for this year yet either. We don’t even know if we’re going to get an increase. There have been significant increases with the collective agreement in the last couple of years.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): So you’re fundraising to fill a gap there.

M. Materi: Yeah. We always do, but it’s getting more and more — and grants. We were fortunate that we were able to get some funding through the federal government because of COVID.

This year we’re able to cover a lot of those shortfalls, but next year we’re going to be back to square one again.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Micki. You’re one of many organizations that seem to have the same scenario — uncertainty in funding towards core things, etc.

You mentioned that you were fundraising. I guess my question is: what resources do you have to put in to fundraise? If your total budget is, I don’t know, whatever it is…. In total, how much does it cost you to do this fundraising? I see that as churn, in terms of the cost of operating hundreds of organizations like yourselves. Are you able to quantify that or give us a percentage?

M. Materi: First of all, in the last couple of years, we haven’t really been doing fundraising. With COVID, it’s been difficult. We’re very fortunate in this community. The community really supports all of the programs. So that’s been really great.

When we were really doing fundraising types of events, we recognized that the amount of money we spent on, even, staffing to organize these events was actually, at the end of the day, netting us not very much in revenue. So we’re re-examining how we’re fundraising as well, because there really aren’t dollars for fundraising. It’s off the sides of our desks. And we have a good contingent of volunteers.

I don’t know if that answers your question.

B. Stewart: Maybe I’ll just ask it in a different way. Of the total dollars you spend, how much of that is done through fundraising?

M. Materi: We’ve been really fortunate with donations the last couple of years. Typically, we would be fundraising probably for about 20 percent of our revenue — specifically fundraising through our own events.

[2:30 p.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): We have Henry, Renee and then Harwinder. We have less than two minutes left.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for answering the question. I’m going to echo some of the comments that were made a bit earlier. Obviously, we had quite a few groups already talking about how we can actually support women in our communities through, like, combatting gender-based violence. Thank you so much for your great work.

My question is referring to recommendation No. 2. You’re absolutely correct that housing is necessary for us to actually continue transforming transition houses into a sustainable lifestyle so they can continue to live independently. How much housing do you think is necessary for us to consider for the northern Okanagan so that we can actually alleviate the wait-list — those stuck in a transition home waiting to get into second-stage?

M. Materi: We were approved for 25 beds. We’d be happy with that for our second-stage.

Across the board, I think there have been a few…. We have actually been approved for a number of — across the community — low-income housing and supportive housing units. Once they’re actually finished and we get people in them, I think it will reduce it quite a bit. But there’s always going to be a wait-list.

For example, the Canadian Mental Health Association just built a number of units. So we’re like: “Oh yes, let’s get our women in there.” Unfortunately, they already have 300 people on the wait-list, so we’re not even going to be able to be considered for that.

Those second-stage units are really important to bridge that gap too, because what we want is women in forever homes.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, I’m looking at the clock, and I don’t think we have time for another question, to tell you the truth.

Thank you very much for what you do. Thank you for your advocacy, and thank you for your presentation. I hope you do find it reassuring to hear that, of course, you are not the only presenter on this topic. Everywhere we’ve been in the last three weeks, people like yourself, who do this kind of work, have been making a similar request.

M. Materi: Yeah. Our voices are definitely getting louder. Thank you very much for taking the time to hear me out.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Paul van Donkelaar, representing Supporting Survivors Of Abuse and Brain Injury Through Research.

SUPPORTING SURVIVORS OF ABUSE AND
BRAIN INJURY THROUGH RESEARCH

P. van Donkelaar: Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for this opportunity. First of all, I’d like to thank Micki for setting a wonderful context for what I would like to speak about.

As mentioned, my name is Paul van Donkelaar. I’m a neuroscientist and a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus in beautiful Kelowna, and my research focuses on brain injury.

Like a previous speaker, we are focusing, in our work, on domestic violence, or intimate partner violence. Unfortunately, up to half of women in Canada will experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime. This is from a recent Stats Canada study.

In addition, the World Health Organization calls violence against women a global public health problem. During the pandemic, it has only been exacerbated, as survivors have been forced, in many cases, to live in lockdown with their abusers and are unable to access some of the supports that may be available to them.

Many survivors of intimate partner violence, as many as 92 percent, will suffer one or more brain injuries as a result of the abuse, most often from head impacts leading to concussion or, unfortunately, from strangulation, which is also very common in this experience.

The Centers for Disease Control in the United States did a study a few years ago and found that 2.3 percent of their respondents endorsed that they had experienced severe physical intimate partner violence in the past year. If you take that percentage and translate it into the Canadian population of women between the ages of 18 and 55, that works out to 230,000 women every year getting a brain injury from intimate partner violence. If you apply that 92 percent figure that I just mentioned before, that means that around 212,000 women in Canada will get a brain injury from intimate partner violence every year.

How does that compare to the sport that we all love — ice hockey — where sports concussion is the focus of a lot of research and policy change to make that sport as safe as possible? It’s hard to get exact numbers. Every year in the NHL up to around 38 to 50 players will get a brain injury or a concussion as a result of playing that sport that they love. That means, in terms of a ratio, for every NHL player that gets a brain injury playing hockey, over 5,000 women in Canada will get the same injury as a result of domestic violence.

[2:35 p.m.]

Brain injury is an invisible injury, quite often. It can cause many issues with different aspects of brain function, and that’s what my research is all focused on. It can lead to things like cognitive challenges, emotional dysregulation and other issues. For many survivors of intimate partner violence that experience brain injuries, these symptoms or deficits can be chronic in nature and range from difficult to everyday life to completely debilitating. Often — very often — they go undiagnosed and untreated.

In 2016, together with my partner, Karen Mason — who’s sitting back there; who at the time was the executive director of the Kelowna Women’s Shelter — we started a community-based collaborative research initiative called SOAR. It stands for Supporting Survivors Of Abuse and Brain Injury Through Research.

I notice my time is very short, so I’ll skip right to our recommendations and then have some time for follow-up questions.

There are a number of different things that we would recommend. One is increased funding for research to continue to better understand this intersection between brain injury and intimate partner violence. Actually, British Columbia is one of the leading areas of the world in terms of the number of people who are looking at this intersection.

In terms of pragmatic recommendations, I think more funding and support is required for training on brain injury from intimate partner violence, across a number of different sectors that provide support for women. This can include people that work in the justice and legal systems, child protection and health care. As a start to this, we’ve developed some training for workers — who are staff members in women’s shelters and transition houses — that have been shown to be very successful.

A third thing that I think is important to consider and recommend, in terms of funding, would be support for navigators and advocates to work within the health care system and other settings to help survivors as they work their way through some of the challenges faced in terms of making their way through the support system.

Currently, there’s no defined pathway for health care for women who experience brain injury from intimate partner violence. Having a brain injury makes it even harder to navigate some of these systems, such as the legal and justice systems. In this patriarchal structure that is already leaving women underserved, particularly when it comes to access to and custody of their children, I think this is something that we need to change.

Thank you for your attention. I’d be happy to take any questions you may have.

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

We do have questions. The first one is Renee, then Brenda and then Henry.

R. Merrifield: Thank you, Paul, for the presentation. It’s great to see you, and not just in airports.

My question is actually around your recommendation No. 1, which is the increased funding for research. As B.C. is a leader, hopefully on the right side of this issue, what order of magnitude…? What’s the dollar figure that you would see that recommendation being?

P. van Donkelaar: We were fortunate enough to get a grant for $1 million from the federal Department for Women and Gender Equality near the beginning of our research. It has really just scratched the surface in terms of our understanding of what goes on in terms of this intersection and then, maybe more importantly, how we can effect change out in the community — so how we can support folks like Micki in the work that they do so that they take brain injury into account to be able to provide better supports. It’s hard to put an exact number on that, for sure.

B. Bailey: Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s very interesting research. It’s an area that I’ve paid attention to. This isn’t an issue that I’ve really had a line of sight on, so I appreciate it. Thank you.

I’m wondering about the practical implications of being able to identify this type of injury. Are there benefits from early diagnosis? I wonder if you could just help me understand that piece a little bit.

P. van Donkelaar: Yeah. I think that’s probably the key — providing the space to allow people who’ve experienced this to have enough capacity to deal with everyday life. An anecdote that we always like to bring out is that if you’re a weekend warrior and play for a soccer team and you get a brain injury as a result of participation in that, quite often the system, the family, society, accommodates and adapts to that. It gives you the space required, and that’s really hard for women who are in intimate partner violence situations.

[2:40 p.m.]

If they’re showing up at a transition house, they’re going through a lot of change associated with moving on, hopefully, from the abusive relationship. Trying to do that while also having a brain injury is very, very hard. Funding to support creating more of that space and raising knowledge and awareness around this intersection I think would only benefit those folks.

B. Bailey: I understand the point about support and the specific need around it. In terms of their medical outcome, is there any benefit to catching it early and understanding…?

P. van Donkelaar: Yeah, absolutely. Brain injuries from other injury mechanisms…. If you have more than one, you have a much greater chance of developing longer-term neurodegenerative disorders.

In intimate partner violence situations, those brain injuries tend not to be caught, not to be diagnosed. Any treatment or any supports that could be provided, both in terms of the brain injury itself but also around the person’s ability to escape the abusive relationship…. It makes it that much harder. So you’re more likely to suffer subsequent brain injuries as a result of that.

B. Bailey: I understand. Thank you.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciate the number you’re presenting. Even based upon your recommendation No. 1…. It sounds like we have at least seven million Canadians, or one million British Columbians, who are actually suffering from a brain injury due to intimate partner violence.

I have a question about recommendation No. 3. You specifically talked about returning to work based upon individuals who are trying to recover from a brain injury. You talked about health care services. I’m wondering: is there any kind of a discussion maybe around social service navigators, who actually probably provide a better way of getting back, or is it focused more on the rehab component of this?

P. van Donkelaar: It’s a great question. I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to IPV survivors. I think in any complex system, where there are multiple disciplines helping to support the person…. If we can break down the silos between those disciplines, then a person is more likely to successfully access them and make their way through them.

Right now, because they tend to be more siloed…. This concept of having an advocate or someone holding a person’s hand to work through the systems with them I think can only benefit them. I guess it’s a potential short-term fix for something that is a much longer, bigger picture change, which would be great for, I think, various governments to address.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, Paul, we are close to out of time.

Thank you very much for raising this with us. Some of the numbers and comparisons you’ve shared with us today are shocking. Even though, once you’ve presented them to us, they’re not…. They shouldn’t be that shocking.

Forty years ago I was on a board of directors of a transition home. I find it hopeful that the conversation that we’re having today is so different than the conversations we were having then. Thank you for your leadership on this.

P. van Donkelaar: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Julia Fraser, Central Okanagan public schools.

Hi, Julia.

SCHOOL DISTRICT 23,
CENTRAL OKANAGAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

J. Fraser: Good afternoon, members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services and hon. MLAs. I’m Julia Fraser, representing the Central Okanagan board of education.

I humbly acknowledge that I’m presenting on the unceded, traditional territory of the Okanagan people.

Now, I’m going to be speaking on three topics: the annual facility grant, the cost of portables and inflationary costs.

With regards to the annual facility grant…. The AFG is extremely underfunded. The district has deferred maintenance work of $9.8 million, and we can’t keep up with the capital maintenance of our buildings. Next year we will add to that amount and defer more and more of our maintenance each and every year. It just grows. It’s never ending. There’s never enough AFG to keep up the maintenance of our buildings.

We have 48 schools. This increasingly becomes a liability for government as roofs need to be repaired and other maintenance as well.

[2:45 p.m.]

We also, in addition to that, require new schools due to growth. We require capital funding to replace two very old schools due to growth. The age is around 70 years old. We have Glenmore Elementary and Rutland Middle School. Repairing them doesn’t make sense at this point, as the repairs and maintenance are costly. As we wait for replacement, those costs and repairs could go towards a new building.

The next topic is the cost of portables. Portable costs are not funded within the capital budget. So we end up having to convert funding, which should be going to support students, to local capital to cover the costs of portables, which is about $3 million. That’s $3 million that should be going directly to support students.

After this year, the 2022-23 school year, the district will have 127 portables on our sites. Next year, for the 2023-24 school year, we are expecting to need 12 more portables, because we don’t have enough space.

We actually are a growing district. We’re growing every year to the equivalent of a small middle school and a large elementary school, which is about 400 new students year after year. Per capita, we have more portables than Surrey, which is the largest school district in B.C.

When the Premier was here for the announcement of the H.S. Grenda Middle School in Lake Country, he said that his priority was to get rid of all our portables. Unfortunately, we’ve seen an increased growth in portables and an increased need for portables year after year.

New portables cost approximately $250,000 to $300,000 each. Used portables, to transport and install, cost $100,000 to $150,000 each. This means that we need to divert money away from supporting students to pay for these portables.

Lastly is inflationary costs. With 6 percent inflation along with other cost pressures and no change in the per-pupil amount for the 2022-23 school year, it has forced our school district to find cost savings of $3.3 million from the 2022-23 annual budget. This puts extreme pressure on our ability to provide services to our 25,000 students to the same level as the previous year.

Another example is…. Compared to other similar size school districts in the Lower Mainland that have a municipal bus system, for example, our school district does not have a consistent, reliable or accessible civic bus system to transport all of our students. Therefore, we spend another $3 million over and above what is allotted to us for busing to ensure that our students have equitable accessibility to schools. These transportation costs are an additional cost, and they’re not covered by our FTEs, our per-pupil funding.

As the fifth-largest school district in British Columbia, with close to 25,000 students, we are hopeful that more funding will come to our school district to provide adequate, accessible and equitable education for our students.

On behalf of the Central Okanagan board of education and as chair of the finance and audit committee, I thank you for your time and consideration.

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

Our first question will be asked by Megan, followed by Renee.

M. Dykeman: Hi, how are you? It’s great to see you.

J. Fraser: Nice to see you too.

M. Dykeman: Just one question. You might have said it right at the beginning. I may have caught it. What is your year-over-year enrolment trend looking like? How many numbers of students do you see coming into the district?

J. Fraser: It’s progressively getting larger and larger. About 400 students, anywhere between 350, 400 — the size of a large elementary school or a small middle school. We could actually use five new buildings, new schools, today, even though they take about four years to build.

M. Dykeman: Just for clarification, are you seeing that in elementary or across the board with families moving in at all stages?

J. Fraser: It’s all across the board.

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much, Julia. It’s great to see you today. Thank you for sounding the alarm bell.

The numbers that you were using, in terms of the $3.3 million of inflationary costs that are going to have to be cut from somewhere else, are quite alarming, especially considering where the inflation numbers are today — right? — and where they could go yet.

[2:50 p.m.]

My question to you is: if that $3.3 million grows, where does it come from? What are the next things that you will have to cut?

J. Fraser: Those are difficult conversations that we have at the board table all the time — over this past year, in particular. It’s hard to predict where they come from. Even if they come from custodial, we need our custodians. We’ve just been through the COVID situation. So definitely…. There’s really no place that we can cut that will affect our students.

H. Sandhu: Thank you so much for your presentation and sharing about the challenges. My question is…. You’re probably well aware, Julia, that the province committed to fund $102.7 million to build a new school in West Kelowna with 1,200 seats. It will be completed by 2027. It’s a state-of-the-art school, and the additional is the site purchase for the building.

How much pressure will that take off in portables, and what is the rate of portables in West Kelowna versus Kelowna?

J. Fraser: It will take portables away from Mount Boucherie Senior Secondary. But I believe the school itself will be full, pretty much, on opening day. So it’s just ever-growing. We definitely…. I think we’re also looking for…. In West Kelowna, we need a new elementary school, as well as a middle school, because Constable Neil Bruce is burgeoning at the seams as well.

H. Sandhu: Absolutely — and the growth, which is hard to keep up with. Thank you so much.

J. Routledge (Chair): I’m not seeing other questions. I think that’s partly because you’ve been very clear about what choices you are faced with and the implications of those choices. You’re not the first spokesperson for a school board that has told us how dire the situation is. It’s around the province.

J. Fraser: Okay. Well, thank you very much for your time.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Did you do a written submission, Julia?

J. Fraser: No, but you can have this one.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): If you can maybe send it to us, it’d be great to have one. Just email us. That would be great. Thank you so much.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Brooke McLardy, representing B.C. Network of Child and Youth Advocacy Centres.

Thanks for joining us today.

B.C. NETWORK OF
CHILD AND YOUTH ADVOCACY CENTRES

B. McLardy: Thanks for having me. Hello. I’m Brooke McLardy, coordinator for the B.C. Network of Child and Youth Advocacy Centres.

I’m honoured to be with you here today on unceded Syilx territory.

Thank you for inviting us to present again this year. Our network is extremely grateful for your recommendations to the past three budgets to fund the evidence-based, collaborative response delivered by child and youth advocacy centres in the province.

You heard from one of our network members last week. Leah Zille presented to you on behalf of Treehouse CYAC in Vancouver. Leah was able to share the impact of abuse and violence on the children of our province.

She covered that one in three children in B.C. experience physical, sexual or other abuse before the age of 15; the detrimental long-term effects of abuse on children and how that progresses into the many social and health issues we see today; that our centres are formal partnerships between police, child protection, Health, First Nations and victim-serving organizations; and how CYACs ensure that children get the immediate interventions they require in order to grow into healthy adults.

Leah also described the difficulties CYACs face in terms of funding. We serve the most vulnerable members of our communities, and we need to fundraise every dollar to do so. My hope for today is that you will accept our recommendation that the province of B.C. provide child and youth advocacy centres ongoing operational funding for coordinated services to children and youth who have experienced abuse and violence.

You all represent communities where children experience violence. Are you confident that your community has the best practice model of child abuse response? CYACs have been operating in B.C. for ten years, and last year we served 867 children, plus their siblings and their caregivers. We ensure that every child who has experienced abuse has a culturally safe, trauma-informed and coordinated response that meets their unique needs.

This collaborative approach to service delivery has consistently proven to be the best way to support children and the most efficient and effective way for service providers to provide that service. This model is not new. It was established more than 40 years ago in the U.S. and is the legislated response to child abuse in that country. That’s because it works.

[2:55 p.m.]

There are severe negative outcomes for children and youth who have been victimized, and these negative outcomes affect all British Columbians. It impacts the costs of health care, policing, child protection services, corrections, mental health services and substance use treatment. By funding a response and prevention model that intervenes immediately after trauma, not only do we prevent these long-term negative outcomes, but we also save the province the high cost of addressing the resulting social and health issues.

It will be of interest to you that we are just completing a social return on investment analysis. We want to show the impact our centres have and the value our network brings to the province of B.C. Preliminary findings suggest — and this is very conservative — that for every dollar spent coordinating a CYAC service, there is more than $5 of value recognized. The full report will be published at the end of the month, and we urge you to visit our website to read it.

Our network in B.C. is extremely progressive. We are paving the way nationally in many areas, through a comprehensive strategic plan. We’re providing training, practice guidelines and conducting a provincial evaluation of our services. We’re creating a working table to ensure that Indigenous children, youth and families are served in a culturally safe and trauma-informed way, and we’re influencing policing standards with respect to response to child abuse. In short, we are creating massive system change, yet we’re far behind in terms of sustainable funding for our centres.

Every year our centres struggle to raise the funds required to operate. We have had limited support from the federal government for project-based activities as well as yearly CFO grants, but this is not nearly enough. We are coming to the end of the federal project grants in March of 2023. The need for provincial support to coordinate and operate these centres is imperative for us to continue to coordinate this high-level service.

The government is already investing in child protection, social services and policing. In light of the savings provided by CYACs in the prevention of long-term social and health issues, the amount that it would cost to fund the coordination of these centres is nominal. CYACs provide a way for government to spend efficiently, get in front of social issues and have a positive impact on the outcomes of children. We ask that the province commit $6 million annually towards the operations of child and youth advocacy centres.

Thank you for your time and your commitment to the children of British Columbia. I’m happy to answer any questions.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our first question is from Karin.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much. I don’t know if you know…. I know Leo Allen was there when Treehouse was starting up, so I certainly know the value of the CYACs.

I wondered about your role in the network. The network is kind of an umbrella organization that the CYACs belong to. How is that funded? They don’t have any money, so how are they contributing to you?

B. McLardy: Good question. Yes, the network is an informal entity. We are a membership. Anybody that is running or developing a CYAC is invited to be on the steering committee. This is a very side-of-the-desk piece of work. We have some funding through a private family foundation that funds my role part of the time. But most of the work is coming from the collective group, to come together, because we have a lot of big projects that we’re really passionate about. So we’re working together to share resources and get those things done.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Oh, that’s great. Keep advocating. This is great.

M. Starchuk: I’m really interested in the social evaluation that’s done there. I’m curious. I mean, the return on the dollar…. I guess it’s important sometimes. When you take a look at the work that you’re doing, it says it all to itself. But it would be interesting to know, in depth, the factors that were considered in how you got or how you will get to those numbers that are there.

B. McLardy: I’m really excited for this report to be published. It should be the end of next week. It goes into so many qualitative factors that really can’t be quantified in terms of the dollar amount. But the well-being of the children and youth that we serve is clear. Again, I don’t have that report just yet.

H. Yao: I was just going to ask the same question about return on investment in regard to social equity. I know quite a few non-profits in the past, during the presentations…. Some of them return $17, $15 or $14, so $5 seems to be a bit low on that end. But we understand what you’re doing is phenomenally important, and that’s the reason why I’m a bit concerned about the 1-to-5 ratio, actually.

When you talk about $6 million, are you talking about specifically funding the network? Or is it actually that $6 million will be to fund multiple centres in different jurisdictions?

B. McLardy: I’m going to address both parts of that if that’s okay.

H. Yao: Please.

B. McLardy: We’ve had two other social return on investments done on CYACs in the country, and ours is, by far, the highest. The last one that I saw was just over $2, so this is a substantial difference, which is good.

[3:00 p.m.]

The $6 million is to operate the centres. We went through a really comprehensive exercise, where we took the accreditation standards for CYACs in the States and asked each of the CYACs to take a look at that and budget what they would need to actually meet those accreditation standards. We brought that together and created an average. That was $645,000 a year per centre, and with the nine operating centres and a little bit for the network, that comes to $6 million.

J. Routledge (Chair): I see no other…. Henry. Then Ben has a question.

H. Yao: Ben will go first.

B. Stewart: Go ahead.

H. Yao: Sorry. I ask too many questions.

What is your relationship with the Representative for Children and Youth? I would love to hear how you guys became a part of that to really actually advocate for the great work that you guys are doing.

B. McLardy: I’d say we have an emerging relationship with the RCY. The centres themselves do quite a bit of work with the RCY, as cases come across our desks. But in terms of as a network, that’s an emerging area.

B. Stewart: I didn’t see a written submission. I think it would be really important, for what you’re advocating for and the different groups and the diversity — that that be submitted.

B. McLardy: Yes. It was submitted this morning. I have a paper copy if you’d like it.

B. Stewart: No, that’s okay. Thank you. As long as it’s in before Friday.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Brooke. That’s it for our questions. Thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for the advocacy, and thank you for reminding us that abuse of children affects all of us.

Doing this work on social return on investment, personally, I think, is really important. I think it’s really important that we provide something concrete that we can share with the public, who may not be thinking about this every day and thinking about what their tax dollars go towards and if it’s worth it. You are helping to prove the point that, yes, it is.

B. McLardy: Thank you. I’m very pleased that one of our members will be speaking to you this afternoon. So you’ll hear more from us.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Kristi Rintoul, representing United Way British Columbia.

Hi, Kristi.

K. Rintoul: Hi, everyone.

J. Routledge (Chair): We have a timer here to help you stick to your five minutes. When it turns red, it will start counting up, which means it’s eating into the question-and-answer time. We have five minutes for your presentation, five minutes for questions and answers.

UNITED WAY B.C.

K. Rintoul: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, hon. Members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. My name is Kristi Rintoul. I’m the manager of community impact and investment for United Way British Columbia, and I specifically serve the Interior of B.C. I work very closely with our UWBC food security team, which is the lead, provincially, on food security initiatives for United Way and which is why I’m here today.

Food insecurity continues to rise across the many communities we serve. Rising inflation, recent health and climate emergencies have exposed the complexities of addressing food security in our province. Over the past three years, community-led programs and agencies have stepped up to play an even more critical role in supporting access to food and basic needs for those with compounding vulnerabilities. In partnership with other key stakeholders, United Way B.C. has established a significant role in support of local networks of community food-based organizations.

Our first recommendation for your consideration is for the province to invest $4.1 million over three years for annual food hubs and food costs for seniors, families and children, including a centralized data-capturing platform to better understand the food insecurity needs of communities across the province.

United Way Regional Community Food Hubs meet immediate local food security needs and transition from an emergency food model that’s reactive and temporary to a regional food hub model that’s holistic, permanent, supports food access and ensures an ecosystem of wellness for all.

Currently, there are 20 United Way food hubs across B.C., from Williams Lake to Cranbrook — there’s one here in Vernon — throughout the Lower Mainland and on the Island. They work closely with more than 80 community organizations in 16 regions. We’ve supported over 150,000 people with their food needs, and 2.2 million meals and hampers have been served alongside thousands of volunteers that are engaged throughout the province.

More, working directly in communities, we’ve also been able to identify deficiencies in areas such as food acquisition, distribution logistics and collaboration. There’s a lack of a centralized platform where community needs are recorded in real time. Through the creation of a centralized data-capturing platform, United Way is connecting those with food to those without and utilizing that data to inform our food security work.

[3:05 p.m.]

Our second recommendation for your consideration is for the province to invest an additional $3 million over three years to provide infrastructure support to rural remote and Indigenous communities to enable those communities that are most vulnerable to build organizational and community capacity to respond to local food challenges.

Over the past three years, communities across the prov­ince have had to contend against multi-layered crisis situations from disruption to food supply chains, increasing costs, massive shortages in food and other essential services. Fires and flooding have affected these commun­ities’ access to local Indigenous foods and medicines. The gaps in systems of care are leaving many rural remote and First Nation communities falling through the cracks of accessing healthy foods.

I wanted to speak today about a community between Lytton and Kamloops. The Cook’s Ferry First Nation is an Nlaka’pamux First Nation government located in the central Interior region. Cook’s Ferry was hit by fires and flooding this year. Due to our relationship with this community, United Way B.C. learned that all of the fridges and freezers needed to be replaced, so we worked with our partners to bring new freezers and fridges to all of the members.

We also knew that the evacuation order and loss of power came a week after the winter’s worth of salmon had been delivered to this community, so we helped support the resources necessary to replace some of that essential stock for the winter months. Looking at the long-term recovery of the community, we were also able to finance support for Elders and community members with the resources necessary to plant Indigenous berries along the riverside to help reinforce the riverbank in case of another environmental emergency, which as we now know is inevitable, as that community is once again on flood watch from this year’s freshet.

An investment from the province supports the development of a food infrastructure ecosystem tailored to the unique needs in rural remote and Indigenous communities. It will not only enable people living in these communities to access food but also to access it in a sustainable and culturally sensitive way.

Our third and final recommendation for your consideration is for the province to strengthen multi-sectoral partnerships to address the challenges within the food ecosystem in B.C. A commitment from the province to continue its support toward community-led and local community-driven initiatives by strengthening multi-sectoral partnerships in the food ecosystem landscape will help meet the gaps in this issue from a position of strength to strength. The continued support of multi-sectoral stakeholders in the food ecosystem will ultimately help individuals and families remain food secure, not just during emergencies but, as well, in the long run.

United Way B.C. is a trusted community partner with boots on the ground in urban and rural communities across the province. We’re privileged to be able to steward this work, but we’re also in a unique situation to hear and react to the needs of community members firsthand. From the expansion of the Regional Community Food Hubs to bolstering food infrastructure and ecosystems across the province, UWBC continues to strengthen vital connections by providing holistic access to food in a community-based model.

Thank you so much for your consideration.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Kristi. Well done.

Our first question will be asked by Megan, followed by Henry and then Brenda.

M. Dykeman: Thank you for your presentation. I’m not familiar with your food hubs. I have heard of them. Do you have any connection with local production and farmers? Could you describe a bit about how they work and what the cost of a food hub usually is to set up and run for a year?

K. Rintoul: Absolutely. They’re new, as in the last three years, and really came into place during COVID. The idea is to provide funding to a steward organization locally — it’s a hub-and-spoke model — that then connects in with all of the other organizations within that region that work in food security. That could be with the farmers, local food producers, food banks, schools, different organizations, food policy councils and others.

Here in Vernon, it’s the Okanagan Indian Band as well as Land to Table as well as the school district that are working together to make sure that food not only is accessed in a holistic way but also in a dignified way. It’s set up sustainably, collaboratively in the regions, and there are over 20 of them. I think I said that.

M. Dykeman: Wonderful. Just the second part of the question: how much does it cost to set up and run one for a year?

K. Rintoul: They’re about $80,000 annually, depending on the location. We started our food hub in Williams Lake with $60,000.

M. Dykeman: Wow. That’s really fantastic. Thanks for that information. Thanks again for your presentation.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. I personally visited Commissary Connect in Vancouver and, of course, the Victoria food hub, which both play the spectrum between social entrepreneurship to the actual food hub, which provides distribution among the community. Once we have we learned that, the food hub, for its ultimate sustainability, must have a certain amount of entrepreneur incorporated into it — to allow local food producers to be able to produce their products and serve the local communities.

So I’m wondering. Maybe if we’re pushing this idea forward, would you be able to entertain the idea of a merged version of a food hub that seems to be working in the Vancouver area?

A second question I have is about the $4.1 million for three years. Are you talking about $4.1 million per year or $4.1 million total for three years?

[3:10 p.m.]

K. Rintoul: Total for three years, to answer your second question.

On your first question: absolutely. There’s a new food hub that has just opened in Kamloops, where I’m from, and it’s called The Stir. It’s run by the Food Policy Council. We’re working really closely with them to help support those local farmers and their ability to sustain their crops and their work through the production. In order to make sure that we follow that line, we want to make sure that it’s also accessible by all the agencies that are supporting their work. Making those connections, and allowing for that collaboration, is what United Way does.

H. Yao: Perfect. Thank you so much.

B. Bailey: Thank you for your presentation. I think the work that you’re doing is really exciting, and the vision that you’ve presented is really compelling. I appreciate that.

I’m curious, as my colleague asked, about the $4.1 million for data collection — a platform. I just want to get under that number a little bit. Is that creating your own platform, using something off the shelf? Is it including training? It just strikes me that $4.1 million is a high number for a platform for data. If you could help me understand that, I’d appreciate it.

K. Rintoul: Yeah, I’m glad you asked. That $4.1 million is for the food hubs, in addition to the data collection platform. That’s something that we’re already working on, and we’re actually piloting it this summer here in Vernon and at one of our food hubs down in the Lower Mainland. It’s something that’s already in creation, but we want to be able to make sure that it continues. Again, that money will be split. That will help to further the platform as we scale it out provincially.

This is a platform that will be accessible by our food hubs, our community partners throughout the province. Basically, for example, for a food share, if there was a grocery store that had an excess of strawberries, they could upload that into the food platform. Then we know that there’s a community kitchen that is also linked into that platform — say, here in Vernon — and they would be able to say: “Oh, we could use those strawberries.” It’s all done online through an app. It’s something that already exists and that we’re just building right now but looking to scale out provincially.

Then the other funding, as said, will go to support our current food hubs and, again, scaling those out into more regions across the province.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Kristi. I see the way that things have kind of evolved for the food hubs for the United Way in just the last couple of years. I see a lot of people in this space, whether it’s food banks or people that are…. We’ve heard from lots of people that are talking about food security in terms of education, schools, etc. I don’t have any question about collecting the data.

How would you bring these other groups, the diverse groups — whether it’s the Red Cross, food banks, what­ever…? How would you propose to bring them together to see that this kind of system becomes a platform that makes it easy for the sharing of these resources?

K. Rintoul: That’s exactly the purpose of the food hub: to mobilize local resources to work collectively so we’re not wasting time. We’re leveraging each other’s skills, talents, treasures, resources to work together to battle the food insecurities in that region. By funding a steward, who’s someone locally…. The purpose is that they would know all the other folks — the players in that region — connect in with them and provide a space to collaborate.

The idea of the food hub is not to produce food; it’s to connect those who are producing food to those who are giving it out. It’s really about bringing those folks together and making sure they’re all working harmoniously in that region.

B. Stewart: Hopefully, you can get transportation in there too.

K. Rintoul: Wouldn’t that be great.

B. Stewart: Well, we heard in Terrace yesterday about distributing food all the way up to Telegraph Creek and Dease Lake, etc. That’s got to be the biggest issue there.

K. Rintoul: A barrier, yeah.

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, thank you, Kristi. We’re out of time.

Thank you for your leadership on this. I think there is a lot of people who’ve known for a long time that food security was an issue. It took a pandemic for it to become so top of mind and for us to concentrate on it so much as a society.

I represent Burnaby. Burnaby has a very active food hub, and I must say that it has been very good for our community. It has brought our community together. It has broken down barriers and has people working together in a way that we never did before.

K. Rintoul: That’s wonderful to hear. Thank you for sharing that.

Good luck, everyone. You’ve got a big job ahead of you.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next presenter is Ginny Becker, representing Child Advocacy Centre of Kelowna.

Welcome.

CHILD ADVOCACY CENTRE OF KELOWNA

G. Becker: Thank you for the invitation to present to you here today.

We’re on the traditional territories of the Syilx people.

My name is Ginny. I’m the executive director of the Child Advocacy Centre of Kelowna, but for the purposes of the next five minutes, I want you to imagine that I am a seven-year-old girl.

[3:15 p.m.]

My name is Ginny, and I’m a seven-year-old girl with a dark secret. For the past two years, my stepfather has been sexually abusing me. This is my ugly secret. It’s ugly because it makes me feel bad inside, and because I’m only seven years old, I’m not even sure why. I keep this secret because I’m afraid that by telling someone, people will get angry. I’m afraid that I’ll be in trouble.

At school, though, my teacher has noticed that something is wrong. She notices I don’t go outside at recess and that I’ve lost weight and that I seem sad all the time. She’s nice — my teacher. She asks me all the time if I’m okay. And I say no every time, because I am ashamed.

Eventually, on the way outside after school one day, I get brave enough to quietly whisper that I am not okay. So we chat, and she determines that I am, in fact, being hurt. She does as she has been trained to do. She calls for help. She calls MCFD, who will come to the school and question me to determine if it’s safe for me to return home. Then the RCMP will be called. So I’ll sit in the back of a police car outside of my school and answer more questions, but it won’t be enough, so I’ll be sent to the police station.

When I arrive at the police station, I feel very small. I see lots of uniforms and officers, and I wonder: is this where all the bad guys are? Maybe I’m bad. Maybe that’s why they made me come here. Maybe I’m bad, and maybe all of this is my fault, and that’s why I’m here where the bad guys are. I see a man in handcuffs yelling bad words at a police officer and a lady that smells funny standing nearby. Then amongst all of this, I see him — my stepfather. He looks really mad when he sees me, and now I’m frightened. I’m worried I was bad, so I’m quiet.

They take me to a scary room, where I sit in an uncomfortable chair, and they ask me more questions. And I don’t want to say the answers out loud anymore, but this is only the beginning. In the coming weeks, I’ll be required to tell my truth over and over again to social workers, counsellors, doctors, detectives. The list goes on and on. And each time I speak this horrible truth out loud, I hate myself a little bit more inside.

Now I want you to imagine it differently. Imagine that if when my teacher had made that very first phone call, on the other end of that phone call there was a table just like this one, and around that table sat a team of experts dedicated to helping me. Imagine that everyone I would need was there — police, child protection, Indigenous liaisons, health care workers, victim supports. Imagine that instead of being bounced around from one service agency to another, there would be this team waiting to wrap those services around me and place me at the centre of every question that was asked. Imagine that in this place I need only tell my truth once.

That warm, friendly place is the Child Advocacy Centre of Kelowna. After raising $3½ million, exclusively through our community, this purpose-built facility full of light and colour, designed to serve the unique needs of vulnerable children, opened its doors in January of 2020.

We are busy every single day. In the past year alone, our embedded multidisciplinary team delivered more than 2,300 unique activations of service around 485 individuals impacted by abuse. That number includes 188 primary victims, 77 siblings and 220 non-offending caregivers. Those 188 primary victims represent a new report of child abuse every 1.9 days.

This work is not a “nice to do.” We are the trauma-informed system change this work requires, and we are the upstream prevention our communities deserve. Our annual operating budget is $1.1 million, and we raise every single dollar through fundraising and grant writing, with no contracted or predictable funding in place at this time.

We need your help. We need the province to provide sustainable funding to support the core operations so that we can focus on the important work of prevention, education and expansion of services. Not one of us in this room today has the power to change the ugly realities of what brings a child through our front doors. But we do have the opportunity and the profound responsibility to change what happens next for them.

Together we can ensure that children and their families have the best possible chance to recover, to heal, to build resilience and, ultimately, to move beyond their story of abuse to a bright, productive future that they are all just so deserving of.

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

We have a number of questions. The first one is from Karin.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much. I just wanted to clarify. When you talk about your budget, you have an MCFD worker in the centre. Is that right? So you’ve got detective MCFD workers at the same…. That $1.5 million — I think it was $1.5 million — that was your operating budget…. That’s everything on top of that, then.

G. Becker: Correct.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): So the only contribution from government is, really, the salary of that MCFD employee, and then you’re getting that from policing as well.

I’ll let people go. At the end, I’d love you to paint a picture of…. It’s not people sitting around this table. It’s this intimate, wonderful little place that they can go to.

[3:20 p.m.]

G. Becker: I’ll jump in. Yes. For us, our total budget is just over $2 million, if you incorporate the gifts-in-kind that are the partnership of our liaisons.

We have an embedded four-member police specialized child abuse unit. We have embedded health care workers from the Interior Health Authority. We have victim services workers, in partnership with E. Fry. We work with MCFD as well.

The $1.1 million is my core lean team of six individuals — we are essentially the vision keepers and those that push the work forward — and the operational infrastructure costs of our 14,000-square-foot beautiful facility wherein children are welcomed to an environment that was built expressly for their needs.

M. Dykeman: Thank you for the presentation. The work you do is quite amazing. From listening to you talk, I can hear the passion in your voice for making things safe for people who have experienced violence like that.

My question is related to the children when they come into that or any other setting. Are they given the opportunity to have a victim services worker with them? That would be quite intimidating. And do you know how many of this model or if it is anywhere else in the province too? Is this a model that’s being moved to?

G. Becker: When children come to us, they come through a net new report of child abuse through the ministry or police. When they’re greeted in our centre, they’re greeted by a child and family advocate. That is a net new role in the landscape of child protection. That is someone who works for us as a centre of child advocacy. They are essentially the glue that binds the agencies together, the one that walks with that child and family throughout their entire journey as they navigate forward.

We do, also, partner with victim services. In our centre, they’re specialized to court system support. Our role is to ensure that that system is not left to self-navigate.

As my predecessor Brooke, who was up here a few moments ago…. There are now nine operating centres. We’re one of the nine that participate in the network that Brooke was outlining.

M. Dykeman: Okay, so it’s the same network. Yours was so much more detail that I was like: is this different?

G. Becker: Brooke and I…. When we talked about how we would come in today….

It’s so important to hear the work of the network, but then I really wanted you to hear the work of the centre and what we actually do in each given day, which is complex. We have six formal partners of our work and then another five-ish community partners that support our work as well. So it is a complex infrastructure.

M. Dykeman: Okay. Thank you so much.

B. Bailey: Thank you, Ginny, for your presentation and for your very powerful walk-through of that experience of little Ginny. I worked as a child protection social worker in the late ’80s and have been the person to show up at that school with the police officer. It really resonated with me, the story that you told.

However, I was left with an impression…. I apologize. It’s getting late in the day, and I admit to being tired. I just want you to correct my impression, because I think I misunderstood. A group of people are going to support this little Ginny. Her having the ability only to tell her story once but not to all of them at once, I don’t think…. If you could just help me understand what her experience would be and how that information gets to all the other players.

G. Becker: That’s an excellent question. It’s really the work of the multidisciplinary team. So when a new file breaks at the child advocacy centre…. One of the beautiful things about our work is that we’re able to streamline communications and the sharing of information.

If a child comes in, as they did yesterday, the team meets together to discuss how the interview will unfold and the objectives and priorities of the information to be gained from that interview. Typically, in our centre, the interview is done by a specialized forensically trained police officer trained for the interviewing of children.

We have three interview rooms designed like living rooms, essentially, very comfortable and soft. Across the hallway from those are three monitoring rooms. So anyone that needs to monitor that interview is in the other room, which allows for a lot of things. It provides an assurance of safety and that the child is being interviewed appropriately. It also protects the outcomes of those interviews for criminal justice.

Most importantly, what it does is allow the interviewer to get the information that everybody requires. Typically, an interviewer will step out for a few moments, ask a couple of questions of that team — “Did we miss anything?” — and then return to the room to complete the interview.

The goal of any child advocacy centre is to only interview a child once. There are exceptions to that, of course, but the goal is to not require them to repeat their own trauma through storytelling.

B. Bailey: It would be inappropriate for me to break into applause, but know that that’s what I’m thinking.

[3:25 p.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): We’re out of time. Sorry about that.

I think we’ve all been very taken with your presentation and the way you have made it so real in terms of how a traumatized child can then be retraumatized by the system that is supposed to help her. Your description of what an alternative can be and should be, I think, is very affecting for all of us. Thank you for that.

Our next and final presenter for the day is Jason Gordon, the B.C. Association for Child Development and Intervention.

Hi, Jason. We have a timer here to help you stick to your five minutes. It’ll count down. Then you’ll find that it’ll change colour. It’ll turn red and start counting up. When it starts doing that, it means we should have switched into a question-and-answer. The people around the table have five minutes within which to ask you questions, and you have within that same time to answer them.

Sorry. It is getting late in the day.

B.C. ASSOCIATION FOR
CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND INTERVENTION

J. Gordon: It is getting late, and I have to follow that presentation, which was outstanding. The pressure is on. I’ll do my best.

Thanks so much for this opportunity to share with you our thoughts from the B.C. Association for Child Development and Intervention.

My name is Jason Gordon. I represent BCACDI. We’re a provincial non-profit umbrella organization that represents 35 community-based non-profit agencies that contract with MCFD to provide services and supports to children and youth with developmental disabilities. Many of you will be familiar with child development centres across the province. That’s certainly our membership base.

I have two recommendations I’d like to bring to the committee today. One is regarding preparing our families for the transition to the new CYSN service framework, which is going to be implemented in 2024. The second recommendation is concerning the budgets for the family connections centres, which are an integral part of the new CYSN service framework.

First of all, preparing our families. Families in B.C. that have children with developmental disabilities are…. Essentially, many are in a crisis, thanks to years of underfunding agencies in the sector, a global pandemic. Now we have agencies facing increasing inflationary pressures, which are really putting some strain on their operating expenses. So we’re looking for investments in those specific areas.

For example, we request $10 million for something called the early intervention therapy program, which is physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language pathology. This is the one program that has consistently had lengthy wait times to access.

I’ve been here for about nine years presenting to this committee. You have that recommendation in that great report you produce following the budget consultations, but treasury has yet to really act in a meaningful way on increasing resources for early intervention therapies. Our concern is that we have a transition to a new model in two years. If we don’t get these families that are currently on the wait-list engaged with programs and services, they’re not going to have the resiliency and the increased capacity to really navigate their transition successfully.

Family support work is another key piece of organizations. Many of ours have embedded family support workers, but many do not. We’re looking for $3 million for more family support workers across the province, embedded in these community-based agencies — their real, key navigation role of taking these children and families and making sure they’re engaged with all of the potential programs and services that can support them. Again, we’d like to see this over the next two years to help prepare these families, build resiliency, build capacity in preparation for the transition to the new CYSN service framework.

Lastly, concerning the operational expenses piece…. Government is obligated to provide increased resources to our agencies through the collective bargaining agreement, but those increases go strictly to wages and benefits. They don’t go to operating expenses. As you can imagine, with the current inflationary regime we’re in, those operation expenses have increased significantly. What we have agencies doing is having to negotiate with MCFD to actually decrease the number of service delivery hours in their contract in order to balance their budgets.

It’s very concerning. No way to prepare B.C. children and families for this, again, impending transition to the CYSN service framework. So we’d like to see some investments specifically for the operating expense pressures that our community-based agencies are currently under.

The second piece concerns the family connections centres themselves. The family connections centres will serve as a multiservice, multiprogram organization within each service delivery area as part of this new CYSN service framework.

[3:30 p.m.]

One of the real visions for government is to increase access and decrease wait times for service through this new model. The community has this data. We have the data around wait times. We actually have been doing research for several years. On our website, you can find an actual data report that tells about wait times for the past several years to access these foundational programs. We’d like to see government invest in collaborating with community when they develop the costing model for this family connection centre.

As it stands now, we have an RFP, and we have four member agencies currently involved in the RFP for the implementation sites for the CYSN and service framework that will be selected, I believe, this fall. There was no consultation with community on what the wait times are like, what the wait-lists are like in those various service delivery areas, which we feel is just leaving a real gap. If we’re going to really meet the vision of this new transition and this new framework, we need to ensure our resources are there to effectively meet the needs of the children and families.

Those are our two recommendations today for the committee.

Thanks so much for your time. I’m happy to address any questions you may have.

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

Our first question is from Karin.

K. Kirkpatrick (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Jason. Those are really good recommendations. That’s good to hear. I wanted to ask about the potential increase in the number of young people that are going to have access to services.

You track data. You track the wait-lists, which is great. Government has said it’s going to be about a 23 percent increase, which is about 8,600 young people. Based on the young people that you serve today, do you think that’s a realistic increase? Then what you have seen, with respect to the last budget — is that going to get you there?

J. Gordon: That’s a great question, Karin. I don’t…. Again, I think the transparency around the data is a real challenge. There’s obviously some autism funding unit data that government is privy to that the community sector is not. I think that would be part of that collaboration process with any service delivery area.

We have some members that have robust autism programming. It used to be 14 of our members. Now it’s down to eight, just because of the challenges of managing agency-led services through the IF model. They would, I think, be more aware of the types of real influx of people that are going to happen into the family connection centre model.

Certainly, Karin, many of our communities don’t have those agency-led autism services. It’s really going to be…. We’d like to see the data when we develop those budgets to make sure that that influx of children from the IF funding program is effectively met.

H. Sandhu: Thank you so much, Jason. Great presentation. One of your recommendations…. I really appreciate you highlighting reducing the wait line in connection centres, to invest in a collaboration with the community to reduce wait lines. It’s a comment, and then I’ll ask a quick question after.

As far as wait times, under the previous system, I know many parents came to me, or somebody, from grade 1 until 7 — so in 1, when they identified the issues, and then the request was to get this child help, and there are several cases; and then by the time of grade 7, it was their turn. Then they’re struggling, still, in high school. Those wait times are beyond reparable, those detrimental impacts. That’s why it’s very important, and I’m happy to see the recommendation.

You ask for $3 million for community support workers to support with the transition. Is that for a year, or is that from now until ’24?

J. Gordon: I think an annual base contract funding lift for 2023 and 2024 until the transition to the new model. Thanks for the question.

H. Sandhu: Okay, thank you. Thank you for the work you do.

R. Merrifield: Thank you so much, Jason, for the presentation and for your attention to this really important area.

I, too, have a question just about the funding for the wait-list, and that is on the $10 million for the early intervention therapy. I thought you linked that to the wait-lists that currently exist. My question is: if the money is there, would we have enough practitioners to actually complete those early intervention therapies at this time?

J. Gordon: Yeah, that’s a great question. Certainly, all of us are aware of the recruitment and retention struggles in every sector of our economy right now, and therapy is no exception. We do have a lot of capacity in the system, where we have a lot of part-time staff that would be flexible to increase their hours if there were more dollars there.

We have some really innovative models in place in our membership where we have…. Some of our larger centres with some extra capacity will form agreements with our rural organizations and actually fly staff up to cover a mat leave one week a month. So it’s a really interesting staffing innovation that’s happening in our sector. Again, the more resources that are available for the innovation…. I’m confident that we could staff up accordingly and start to address some of those wait times.

R. Merrifield: Awesome. Thank you so much for that.

J. Routledge (Chair): I’m not seeing any other questions.

Jason, I would like to thank you, on behalf of the committee, for taking the time to come and engage with us about this very important issue.

I think it’s really important that you’ve proposed a collaborative approach that isn’t either-or but would help us transition into a system that serves more families and more children.

J. Gordon: Thank you for your time. End of a long day, I’m sure, so thanks so much for your attention.

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

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 3:35 p.m.