The committee met at 8:05 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

Deliberations

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.

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

This committee is responsible for reviewing and making recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on the three-year rolling plans, annual reports and budget proposals of B.C.’s statutory officers.

Before we continue with hearing presentations from statutory offices at 9 a.m., I’ll entertain a motion to move in camera so that we, as a committee, may have an initial opportunity to discuss the presentations we received on Wednesday.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 8:06 a.m. to 8:54 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): We’re now back in public session.

We will now continue with hearing presentations from the statutory officers. Today, we will be hearing from the Office of the Ombudsperson, the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner and the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner.

First we’ll be hearing from the Office of the Ombudsperson. We have set aside 25 minutes for the presentation, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee.

[8:55 a.m.]

I know that you have a lot that you want to share with us, so without further ado, I’ll now ask the Ombudsperson, Jay Chalke, to make your presentation. Over to you.

Review of Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Good morning, Chair. Good morning, Deputy Chair. Congratulations on your recent appointment. And welcome to members of the committee that have recently joined.

I’d like to acknowledge that I’m joining you this morning from my office, which is located on the beautiful lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, the place to smoke herring, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations. I’m grateful that my staff and I feel so welcome on this territory and the waterways around us, and we look forward to deepening our relationships and the many nations around the province where we do our work.

I’m joining you today with a few of my staff. I’d ask each of them to give a quick wave so you can find them on your screen if necessary. Our executive director of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten, who you all know well by now; John Greschner, one of our Deputy Ombudspersons, who oversees our public interest disclosure mandate; executive director of intake and investigation, Rachel Warren, is with us; as is our communications lead, Sara Darling.

In your materials you have the following: our service plan, our budget and our three-year strategic outreach plan, which underlies one of our requests. In addition, for your background, we also provided to you our most recent annual report and our current 2021-2026 strategic plan. We’re currently in year two of that plan.

Since I was last before you in May, suffice it to say there has been lots of activity in my office, and the last six months have been very busy. Call volumes continue to be significant under both our statutory mandates. We launched our Ombudsperson pathfinder program, which this committee will be familiar with. As we, hopefully, emerge from the pandemic, we’ve been receiving requests from public bodies for, again, a return to in-person training and consultation services.

We’ve been busy on the public reporting front. We issued the public report Short-Changed, which was the result of an investigation into a situation involving a family that we call the Taylors. In the report, the Taylors are grandparents caring for their granddaughter, who is Indigenous and living with mental and physical disabilities. Our investigation found that federal disability benefits designed to offset the costs of raising a child living with a disability were being kept by the Ministry of Children and Family Development and placed in general provincial revenues rather than being flowed through to the Taylors, the actual caregivers.

We made four recommendations in that report, including compensating the Taylors and, because this practice was systemic, also compensating other caregiving families in similar positions — retroactively to when the government first became aware of the problem and prospectively to ensure that families, going forward, receive these funds as well.

We also released an investigative update to our major 2019 report, Committed to Change. That report focused on gaps in compliance with legal safeguards for people with mental illness who are involuntarily detained in one of British Columbia’s psychiatric facilities. Our update determined that only one-third of the recommendations that we had made in 2019 have been implemented to date — some accomplishments, to be sure, but much work yet to do.

A key recommendation, statutory change, establishing an independent rights advice service for patients, was passed by the Legislature and has received royal assent. But while implementation work is underway by the Ministry of the Attorney General, rights advisers are not yet in place. We’ll be continuing to monitor these recommendations and look forward to seeing more Committed to Change recommendations being implemented soon.

Last month we publicly announced our investigation into how two provincial emergency programs, emergency support services and disaster financial assistance programs, were administered following the extreme weather events of 2021, when fires and floods displaced tens of thousands of people from their homes and caused unprecedented damage and disruption to individual lives and communities. While, of course, we’re obtaining information from government as we always do in our investigations about the administration of the program, we’re also reaching out to the public.

[9:00 a.m.]

One of the ways we’re doing that is we’re gathering information in this investigation through a public questionnaire available on our website that is designed to obtain feedback from people who had to leave their homes for extended periods because of these extreme weather events. We announced the launch of the questionnaire last month. So far, over 300 people have filled out the questionnaire, and we expect to hear more feedback while the questionnaire remains open, until the end of the calendar year.

In addition, we’ve contacted each local government and each First Nation in the affected areas and have invited them to tell us of their experiences with those programs. Climate experts are telling us that these extreme weather events will be occurring with increasing frequency, and our public systems need to be up to the challenge. That includes emergency financial assistance programs.

We recently released our 2021-2022 annual report. That report highlighted that the number of health care complaints that came to my office last year was the highest that it has been in a decade — whether it was delays to surgery, visiting policies in long-term care, challenges in accessing care and the like. It was no surprise that as the health care system continues to experience strain, people will continue to bring their health care concerns to us. Our annual report highlights the broad spectrum of our services under the Ombudsperson Act and the Public Interest Disclosure Act and, I think, vividly illustrates the significant difference our work is making.

Before I leave the topic of the annual report, I would like to renew the call, here at this committee, that I made in that report for all of my office’s reports to be automatically referred to a legislative committee for their consideration. I’ve raised this issue several times before, and I’m calling on the House Leaders to implement this step, which is already in place for the reports of two other independent officers, the Auditor General and the Representative for Children and Youth.

This is a cost-effective and practical step to support your work as legislators, to deepen the dialogue around critically important issues that our reports raise, and to enhance transparency and accountability. The funding that this committee allocates each year goes to pay for those reports, and it only makes sense to me — I expect to you as well — to make the most of them by ensuring legislative consideration of them rather than having them simply being tabled along with so many other documents in a busy Legislative Assembly.

As I turn to next year’s budget request, I want to mention some of the undertakings of my office that highlight some of the steps we take to maximize the use of the funding provided to us by this committee.

Like three of my colleagues who will appear before you, we host and use a corporate shared-services model, where many key positions are shared between us — versus each having similar positions and duplicate functions like a chief financial officer. We use, and cost-share with three other officers, shared common space that consists of space like shared boardrooms that can be portioned off to host small or larger meetings and training sessions.

The recent implementation of Resolve is allowing staff to quickly track emerging issues, identify common themes and complaints and find efficiencies in our investigative efforts and approaches by using our complaint data to further inform our work. Our website’s complaint checker allows the public to review their complaints online to determine how to proceed without having to contact us or make a complaint about a public body that may be outside our jurisdiction. This provides better service for those people who can access the Internet and advocate for themselves, while saving our staff resources to help those who need personal service.

We’ve introduced an intake team lead role to assist the manager in training and orienting new staff. This will allow for more files to move through the early resolution process at an increased rate, bringing about resolution to complaints more quickly while also preventing bottlenecks in the manager review and approval process.

That’s a small sample of the things we do to be as efficient as possible with the funding entrusted to my office. A longer list is in the appendix to our budget document.

Turning now to our budget request before you today, our proposed budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year is $13,488,000, which represents an increase of $1,908,000 in operating funding and a decrease of $8,000 in capital funding.

The operational funding is comprised of four major elements: (1) covering inflation, annualization of prior-year approvals and building occupancy; (2) the impact on us arising from the government’s announced phased expansion of coverage of the Public Interest Disclosure Act or PIDA, which is the short form; (3) the internal impacts of our complaint handling processes arising from our pathfinder program, a key element of our Indigenous community services plan; and finally, (4) support for our three-year strategic outreach plan, a blueprint to build awareness of our office, particularly among British Columbians who need our services the most. That’s a priority that you will recall from my appearance before you in the spring, when I outlined the results of a survey that we had conducted earlier this year.

[9:05 a.m.]

Let me take a few minutes to unpack each of those, one by one. First, we’ll start with our request related to the Public Interest Disclosure Act. As you know, phase 1 of PIDA came into force in 2019. In phase 1, PIDA just covered current and former employees of provincial government ministries and independent offices like mine — some 35,000 current employees. Then, in July 2021, the Attorney General announced the government’s intention to expand the coverage of PIDA to the broader provincial public sector.

Accompanied with that announcement was a specific rollout schedule of dates and covered public authorities, which has been very helpful to our planning. This year, the year that we’re currently in, we’ve seen government deliver on that schedule with phase 2, which came into force in April of this year, adding some 30 authorities, mostly in the tribunal sector. Five weeks from now, phase 3 comes in force. Phase 3 will cover the Crown corporations — roughly another 30 organizations, the largest of which are ICBC and B.C. Hydro, adding some 18,000 current employees.

Support for the impact of those, phase 2 and phase 3, was part of our budget request and allocation a year ago, and thus we are ready to take on the challenge this year of the roughly 50 percent increase in public employees with rights under the act this year. However, the size of implementation to date is somewhat dwarfed by what is to come next year. In 2023-2024, the largest expansion of the act will take place with phase 4, which, in June 2023, adds 120,000 current health authority employees, and phase 5, with 78,000 current school district employees added as of December 2023.

This will bring the total number of employees with rights under the act to 254,000 employees. Thus, by the end of next year, 2023-2024, the number of employees covered will be more than 4½ times greater than the number at the end of this current year. So obviously, with this significant growth in coverage will inevitably come an increased number of disclosures, requests for advice and allegations of reprisal that will trigger work for us.

I want to underscore that we do not have the option of not carrying out the full range of functions we’re responsible for under PIDA. These are mandatory statutory duties that we’re required to perform by law. As such, we need to have adequate resources to meet those statutory obligations. Given the size and scope of the addition of current and former employees who will now be covered by the act — and will be imminently so — one approach to estimating workload would just increase in lockstep with this substantial growth.

A linear argument would be that a 4½-time increase in terms of coverage would yield a 4½-time increase in workload. It’s probably some relief to you that I think that’s a bit of a simplistic approach. That calculation would yield an increase of well over a dozen new investigators required this year. A more sophisticated look at that considers that there are small bodies that may have a number of disclosures, and then there are large organizations that may have few, so one has to temper the number of employees with an assessment of the organizations as well.

The workload implications of each investigation are also variable. Some investigations are larger than others. In the world of public interest disclosure workload analysis, precise predictions are probably not particularly helpful, but what we do know is that we already have had a number of people who have prematurely come to us from health authorities who have told us that they will be back once they have rights under the act. So clearly, there’s a need there waiting to be filled, and we need to make sure that we’re ready.

To that end, you can see from our budget request that we’re requesting an additional $543,000 that will enable us to fulfill our statutory requirements under PIDA by hiring six investigators in 2023, with staggered start dates to match the anticipated workload arising from the expansion. As I’m sure you can appreciate, we’ll be carefully monitoring the resulting workload from such a major expansion of the act, and we’ll be pleased to report back next year, before consideration of the implication of government’s phases 6 and 7, which are the final phases of the expansion, which will cover post-secondary institutions and other organizations, including WorkSafe.

[9:10 a.m.]

Turning to our request related to strategic outreach and engagement, when I was before you last May, I updated the committee about the public awareness survey that we had conducted earlier this year. As you may remember, I highlighted some of the data from that survey, which reached a representative sample of some 1,500 British Columbians of different demographic groups.

The bottom line from the survey results is that awareness about our office is very low among the general public. Without prompting, only about 17 percent of respondents know who we are or what we do. That number drops even lower for people who are low-income, newcomers to the province, younger people or people with less education. Fully two-thirds of respondents didn’t know that there was any entity that exists to make sure that people are treated fairly.

As I’ve said, our office currently has a three-person communications team who are fully subscribed and often oversubscribed with meeting the basic statutory requirements of our office, which focus heavily on published reports. The team is pivotal in producing those reports and the resources that we have been able to produce to date. Outreach is something that we get to as we can. But in order to meaningfully impact the awareness levels among British Columbians, it’s essential that we adopt a new approach.

If we don’t do something about this, it means that there will continue to be many, many British Columbians who may need our services, who have fairness concerns that go unaddressed simply because they don’t know where to turn. That lack of awareness is also a barrier to access to justice. Given the crisis in access to justice in Canada, increasing awareness of the Ombudsperson ought to be seen as an alternative and, frankly, a cheaper one to the complexity and cost of the formal, traditional legal system.

Ombudsperson services worldwide are often seen as an important pathway to accessing justice. In a study conducted in 2016 by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, it was estimated that 50 percent of Canadians over 18 will experience at least one everyday legal problem in their lifetime, but just 6 percent of those people will be able to access a formal court or tribunal process. Those unresolved issues, the study estimated, will cost Canada $700 million dollars in health care, employment and social assistance costs each year.

When people come to us with their issues, we make a real and significant difference, and ensuring that British Columbians know about our office and what we do means that a broader set of fairness issues will be addressed. That, in turn, benefits everyone because of the improvements to public administration that arise from our work. The free services of the Ombudsperson represent an important pathway to resolving disputes without invoking courts. In this sense, the office is a cost-effective and critical tool in the fight to improve access to justice. Ensuring that organizations in the justice system themselves are aware of the office’s role will be a key outreach priority.

In facing the challenge that this year’s survey presents to us, in your material you will see a separate document: our three-year strategic outreach plan. It’s developed with some specific goals and strategies to build awareness of our services over the next three years. The plan is designed to make the most of a quite modest resourcing base by focusing on key target audiences and relies on time-limited, part-time, contracted outreach specialists with lived experience in the communities we’re trying to reach.

Furthermore, knowing that much of the engagement and awareness in today’s world happens virtually and online, we feel it’s imperative to add a digital engagement specialist with a high degree of accessibility expertise to join our office. Our goal is to meet provincial and international accessibility standards and to ensure that our office complies with all aspects of the new Accessible British Columbia Act by identifying and removing barriers to people using our services.

Ensuring communication about our office is fully understood by a diverse public is no longer a good-to-have. It’s a must-have. To ensure we fulfil this important goal, we’re requesting a budget add of $215,000 to implement our strategic outreach and engagement plan. I think this is a modest request for quite an ambitious and creative plan that leverages existing community resources and networks and does so in the most efficient and effective way possible.

[9:15 a.m.]

Now, turning to our request related to additional resources in relation to the work we do to provide our services to Indigenous British Columbians. As you know, a year ago Phase 1 of our Indigenous Community Services Plan was before you. With this committee’s support, we initiated our Ombudsperson pathfinder program. By May, the pathfinders had been selected and the program was launched. The pathfinder program relies on five part-time engagement specialists who have deeply lived experience in Indigenous communities across British Columbia. They are already busily connecting with their communities, building awareness and trust in our office.

While they’re spreading the word about our office and our services, they’re also hearing about issues of concern in their communities, issues that, as we build awareness and trust, we can see being the subject of complaints to us about public authorities, whether it be land use, social issues, experiences of discrimination in health care or the education sector. Their work is hard, and I’m so very grateful that these incredible people are walking with us on our reconciliation journey.

What we’re hearing from Indigenous communities is a strong need for Ombudsperson services to be delivered in a way that’s welcoming, accessible and trauma-informed. People want us to take time with them, to listen deeply. This approach is going to require, frankly, some changes to business practices which, given the number of complaints that come to us, have efficiency and speed as a core principle.

We know that to build trust, we need to put a new watchword at the forefront of our work with Indigenous people: time. I’m so appreciative that this committee has also been supporting this journey, last year providing us funding for that outward-facing pathfinder program. Now this year we see, from that work, that we need further support so that internally, we’re confident that we’re responding to and investigating these complaints in a culturally safe and trauma-informed way.

When the pathfinders started, we knew that we’d have to respond to complaints that come to us from Indigenous people differently. We designated six of our own staff, as part of their current roles, to comprise our pathfinder engagement team. These staff are the contacts for the pathfinders to engage in consultation on individual cases or to directly link the office with community and allow a person to come directly through our complaint process without having to talk about their experience multiple times with different staff members.

This model is more in line with a culturally safe and trauma-informed process, which we know is important, especially when working with Indigenous communities. This all makes sense, but it’s real work, and it’s not off-the-side-of-your-desk work. We have to reduce the regular caseload expectations for those engagement team members in order that they can devote the time to this support work. We’re asking for four additional staff that will support our pathfinder team and the internal impacts their work will have.

In looking at our current workload, we’re estimating that two additional investigators are needed. Investigators on the internal engagement team all have, at any given time, regular caseloads of approximately 30 files each. Adding two investigators would allow us to reallocate work so that the engagement team members spend more time with cases that come to them from the pathfinders and spend time in the field with the pathfinders at complaint clinics or at events where investigative expertise is required.

We estimate, based on what we’re seeing currently, that this will likely be at least once a month in various parts of the province, for several days. Not only is lightening caseloads important through this lens, it’s also necessary if we’re going to be able to fulfil our commitments to staff working on Indigenous complaint files to have enhanced training in trauma-informed practice, unconscious bias and decolonizing practice, as well as reviewing and staying up to date on the state of Indigenous law and thinking about how Indigenous law, under UNDRIP, can inform the tests that we apply in the Ombudsperson Act.

As we gain experience through our pathfinder model of Indigenous engagement, we continue to make improvements to adapt our front-line service to be more culturally safe and responsive to concerns brought to my office by Indigenous people. As you know, intake handles all of the complaints and inquiries my office receives each year, and for many of those complaints, we’re referring people back to the public organization’s complaints process if they haven’t pursued that matter with them first.

One of the enhancements we’d like to make is to provide more support with those referrals: on certain types of complaints, have a follow-up service, to ensure that the person was able to have their issue resolved by the organization that we referred them to. This is currently not possible with the high workload that intake has, but we know it’s important, not just for Indigenous people who will be bringing their concerns to us but also for other people we serve, who may face barriers in pursuing a remedy with the public body. If we make a referral, we want to know it’s a real thing and a positive step for that person.

[9:20 a.m.]

In addition, we’re creating a framework to collect socioeconomic and demographic data from the public we serve. Given that seven of eight members of the public are served only by our intake and early resolution team, ideally, this data collection would happen at that early stage, rather than only with matters that proceed to investigation.

However, at our current level of resourcing, our intake team is challenged to simply keep up with the incoming work. Collecting this demographic information takes additional time to process, which requires additional resources at the front line. When people come to us, they’re upset and confused, so more robust data collection, while useful, needs to be done sensitively, carefully and with compassion.

Like with our investigators, our engagement team member on intake will carry a reduced caseload, as they will be spending additional time attending specialized training, consulting with their assigned pathfinder on complaints and jurisdictional issues and supporting the pathfinder in their community to conduct complaint clinics and raise awareness. We estimate it to be one extra resource to create this capacity on our intake team.

Finally, given the significant logistics involved in having five contracted pathfinders working across the province concurrently, we’re requesting permanent funding for a coordinator for the pathfinder program and our Indigenous community services plan overall. This funding would support a range of needed paths, including guiding office training and engagement activities that promote cultural knowledge, conducting research on Indigenous practices, protocols, policies and laws, facilitating relationships with Indigenous service providers and coordinating aspects of the pathfinder program.

Finally, you will see that we’re requesting $693,000 to cover inflation, annualization of positions hired midyear this year to match work to demand — thus, only partial-year funding was requested for 2022-2023 — and a coordinated facilities-planning request with two other independent officers of the Legislature.

A word about the collaborative space plan. Both the Police Complaint Commissioner and my office require additional space at a time when the Representative for Children and Youth is able to reduce the need for a Victoria leased footprint for them. Our three offices are collaboratively working together to meet each of our offices’ needs.

Our office…. We currently have hybrid work options for the majority of our staff positions, and that has partially offset the amount of required space. However, even with this partial offset, we still have insufficient leased space in the Ombudsperson’s current leased footprint for our needs.

With government’s five-year, seven-phase expansion plan of the Public Interest Disclosure Act that I talked about earlier and the resulting necessary growth of our team, we simply need some more space. Even with our hybrid model, this increase means that we need incremental leased space, definitely not as much as if we hadn’t adopted a hybrid work policy, but we need some incremental space. As I said earlier, the collaborative approach we’re presenting to you we believe is a cost-effective way to manage that space.

The other two officers will discuss their needs when they’re before you, but in defining the needs for our office, a brief review of the last five years of our growth informs the basis of this request. Our space has not increased in the last five years, since the introduction of the new legislation. Over that time, as you know, our staffing has increased. With this committee’s support, we established the public authority consultation and training team and the public interest disclosure team.

Space is tight, despite staff using a hybrid model of remote work, but through the coordinated facilities planning with my two colleagues, the opportunity to secure additional space with 19 offices will meet our growth requirement from the past, when we didn’t seek incremental space, as well as what we anticipate in the next few years. To make this even more appealing, we’ll be able to acquire such space without any tenant improvements, and that’s a big cost savings and has tremendous value. Without utilizing the freed-up space of one of the other independent officers, we’d have to seek additional facilities that would cost significantly more.

Turning briefly to the update on the Case Tracker System replacement, the committee has noted with two of my colleagues who have already appeared before you and reported on our quarterly update, the replacement of our Case Tracker System has an updated project plan that has the project going from a two-year project to a three-year project with no increase in overall costs but spread over a greater period of time.

For my office, the rollout of the new case management and management information system is complete, and it’s been in production now for some seven weeks. The launch of the software was a great success, and we’re very pleased with the end result.

Finally, I would just like to take a moment to acknowledge the staff of the office that I’m privileged to lead.

Here’s just a sample of a story of the humanity, compassion and commitment to service that our team brings. A senior, who was in a psychiatric facility, contacted our office recently. This woman was very concerned about some of the conditions in the facility, and she talked at length with one of our intake staff.

[9:25 a.m.]

Then, afterwards, after that conversation, she took the time to re-contact us to express how grateful she was that someone took the time to listen and fully look into her problem. She told us that she felt fully heard and that her complex mental health challenges were really understood.

I’m so proud to work with such a dedicated team of people who share a deep commitment to ensuring British Columbians are treated fairly, all of them.

These last couple of years have been incredibly difficult for everyone but particularly so for the many people who turn to us who are struggling — struggling with mental health challenges, poverty, language inaccessibility barriers, a lack of knowledge about how government systems work, and the list goes on. For these people and all British Columbians…. Every member of our team is dedicated to our organizational mission of being British Columbia’s independent voice for fairness and accountability.

With that, I’d be happy to take your questions.

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

I see hands. The first hand I saw was Henry. Then I think Tom was next.

H. Yao: Jay, thank you so much for your presentation. I was really excited to listen to everything you have been saying so far.

I do agree. It does sound rather modest when you are talking about $250,000 for outreach. You mentioned all kinds of outreach challenges, especially with language barrier groups. I would love to really hear, in regards to addressing some of the challenges, especially in the community of Richmond, where we do have a lot of Chinese Canadians who do not speak good English…. They use a social media platform which is disconnected from a lot of Canadians who prefer the typical social media platforms. There does seem to be a complete disconnect in regard to the awareness of government services or how to protect their rights.

I’d love to hear from you…. What kinds of strategies has the Ombudsperson, the office, been considering?

Also, another thing I would love to say is…. Has there been any consideration with changing the name from the Ombudsperson to something…? I think for people who are newcomers, the Ombudsperson title itself can seem intimidating to try to pronounce. People seem to disconnect when they’re trying to find out what you offer, even though you guys offer such great services to our community.

J. Chalke: I’ll start with the second part first. The name of our office is really up to you. It’s not up to me. It’s a matter for legislators.

I certainly am well acquainted with the challenge of familiarizing people with the role of an Ombudsperson. It does have a global brand. That’s the upside. There are ombuds all over the world. So it does bring that global understanding. But it is challenging, absolutely. There are other terms that are used in various jurisdictions around the world. Ultimately, I think what is the most important thing is what our actual role and mission are. Certainly, as it relates to outreach, it can be challenging.

For the time being, we’ll carry on as we’re currently called. It’s certainly something, I think, for the Attorney General, who has responsibility for the Ombudsperson Act, I’m sure, to consider from time to time.

With respect to your question, though, about the details of our outreach, I’m really…. I agree completely with you about the point about diverse social media. That’s why one of the features of this plan and the only actual staff position that we’re….

There’s just one staff position involved in this, and that would be for a digital engagement specialist. So someone who can — I want to be careful here in case my kids ever read Hansard, and they think dad was talking about social media — move us beyond Twitter, if I can put it that way, which I think is pretty cutting edge. It’s been explained to me that maybe it isn’t.

We clearly need someone who is going to look into all of those communities and figure out the best way to reach not just linguistically diverse communities but also age-diverse communities. I’m told that not a lot of teenagers spend their time on Twitter. So we just need to figure out better ways to reach people. The digital piece is important, but we wanted to complement it by also reaching out to specific communities.

[9:30 a.m.]

We have, as you’ll see in the plan, each year two contracted specialists who will go into specific communities for a year, develop a network but also, as part of that exercise, develop a long-term, sustained plan. So when their year is up, we’ll have not just the benefit of their year of work in that particular community but also a sustained plan that we can use, on a go-forward basis, to continue to reach into that community. Hopefully, we get a permanent uptick effect from the one-year focus.

Great points. It’s going to be a challenge. It’s actually really exciting. I do think that there are lots of resources out there that we can work with and leverage. That’s why we’re trying to keep the costs down, through that kind of partnership approach, as opposed to a communications approach that would involve us buying lots of expensive television ads and maybe not really having that big an effect but spending a lot of money.

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

Next I have, on the list, Tom and then Harwinder.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Chair.

Thanks, Jay, for that presentation. I had a lot of questions on PIDA and the implementation here on pages 6 and 7, but you answered pretty much all the questions I had.

It appears to me, in the budget, that you are requesting an additional 14½ full-time employees this year, I think, up from 94 to 108½. You mentioned briefly, on the pathfinder program, four additional FTEs, and then you said two investigators. I’m not too sure if that was part of the four or not. I’d like to know, if you know, the breakdown of those 14½ full-time employees throughout the office.

I’m looking at some things — I think it’s in your service plan — that indicated the performance measures that you had on investigative files versus non-investigative files. Unfortunately, the investigative files within 180 days had a target of 80 percent. It’s now down to 52. Perhaps some of those FTEs are going to those types of investigations and, of course, all the other stuff that’s going on in your office right now with PIDA.

Do you have a breakdown of those 14½ full-time employees throughout the office?

J. Chalke: Sure. There were a bunch of questions in there. Hopefully, I’ll get them all. If I don’t, please bring me back to that point.

I’ll talk just about the performance last year. Last year we spent a lot of time on user design of our new case management system. That work was unfunded in the sense that it was staff time that was devoted to supporting the new system and all of that to the extent…. It was, at that time, contributed by people who normally carry caseloads. Obviously, that was time that wasn’t spent doing that. So I acknowledge that last year was a difficult year from that context.

Going forward, in terms of FTEs…. Maybe I’ll ask Dave to chip in if I don’t get to cover off everybody here.

Your first question was with respect to the Indigenous request, with respect to the four staff. Yes, those two investigators are part of the four. So it’s not four and two others. The idea there is…. We have a number of members of our pathfinder engagement team that carry investigation caseloads. To free them up, at least partway, so that they can support the pathfinders, we want to reduce their caseloads, and we need to give them to somebody. So two new investigators would go to serve, basically, the work that the pathfinder engagement team does.

There are definitely different ways…. There are different staffing models one could employ to accomplish that support for the pathfinders, but we think we get a lot of benefits from having our investigators and our early resolution officers intimately connected to the pathfinders. It’s creating greater awareness among the organization.

For example, if we had one specialist, one or two people who only did that pathfinder support, we wouldn’t be infusing that knowledge and that appreciation of Indigenous issues across the broader piece. Plus, we want the opportunity sometimes to be able to assign that particular investigation, maybe, to that particular member of our engagement team because they’ve already invested some time with the pathfinders. So there are reasons why we’ve adopted that model.

[9:35 a.m.]

The other two positions in that role are one early resolution officer, basically for the same rationale but just early on in our intake level…. We just don’t have the capacity, in intake, to absorb any kind of resource shock. Then the fourth position is for a coordinator to…. There’s a lot of logistics work to supporting the pathfinders out there in the community. So those are the four positions there.

The big ask relates to the public interest disclosure expansion. We’re seeking three staff that would start on April 1 and get ready for the health authorities coming on stream in June and then three more staff starting in October. They would be on board in time for the school districts coming on stream next December. So the idea is that those six staff will come on there.

There are, basically, two staff equivalent positions in the outreach plan, one for the digital engagement specialist, and then these two half-time positions that are outreach engagement people in particular communities, different communities each year. So basically, six half-time positions spread over three years, two half-time positions per year over three years.

Dave, I don’t know if you’re keeping count of that, if I’ve missed anybody or if that’s….

Okay. I’m getting the non-verbal…. Probably the Hansard people would like me to say that the Deputy Chair just held his thumb up.

D. Van Swieten: I can add, Jay, that the balance of the FTEs are the inflation numbers and the annualization. The PIDA resources last year were only for a partial year. So add another 1.5 FTEs for the annualization of that.

There are also two positions in corporate shared services, which is funded through the formula we’ve presented to the committee in the past, where each new position that a client office adds creates a small sum of money for CSS. Eventually, we get enough money to hire another resource to make sure the offices remain supported.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Perfect. That’s 14.5. That’s perfect. Thanks.

J. Routledge (Chair): Our next question is from Harwinder.

H. Sandhu: Thank you, Jay. This is Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

I want to add to MLA Yao’s comment earlier. It’s not only among the immigrants, who are a diverse population. Working in my office, over the last couple of years, people who have been born and raised and even some families here for generations don’t know about the office until they reach out to us. So the lack of awareness is quite big. I wonder if maybe we need to explore some outreach strategies to make people aware of this amazing work that the office does.

The question I have: what are the current timelines, and how is the backlog currently? This week I met one of the constituents. The person is waiting to hear back. She said that they were told the office is too busy. We have had similar feedback prior to this. So I wonder if there are backlogs and timelines and if there is a strategy that will be developed to address that.

J. Chalke: Thank you, MLA Sandhu. With respect to your comment…. I know it wasn’t a question, but I couldn’t agree more about the fact that, even among the general public, there are issues of awareness.

You’ll see in our outreach plan that we’ve identified not just new British Columbians as a target audience for particular outreach strategies but also ones that cut across different characteristics. One of them, for example, is a plan that will…. One specialist will work with respect to low-income British Columbians. One specialist will work with people who live in rural and remote communities. So we’re trying different ways of identifying communities that could use our help and that may be otherwise unaware of it.

[9:40 a.m.]

In terms of the question regarding workload, I think what I’m going to do is probably ask Rachel to speak to it in just a moment. Certainly, what we find is that our most concerning area is really our intake. We want people to get a quick answer about whether we are going to look into a matter initially.

The challenge is, with respect…. And that’s a very, very busy part of our organization, and we do work very hard all the time to try and make that work as quickly as possible. We do get spikes and peaks and valleys in the incoming work, so we do, from time to time, have time horizons that are a little longer than we want. But we also, through things like Complaint Checker, try to make things as efficient as possible so people have alternatives, rather than having to give us a call.

On investigations, I think it’s always a challenge to know at the outset how long a particular investigation is going to take because it’s an investigation. By its nature, we’re dealing with challenges that might range from organizations that we may have difficulty getting records from…. We may have incredibly complicated problems. Not all issues are easily solved. Sometimes we have to go get legal opinions, or other times we have to do a detailed, decades-long review of history of a particular land use problem, etc. So some of these matters just simply take a long time to investigate.

I think that one of our challenges has always been to try and stream the cases that can move quickly and deal with them quickly in order that we can give the more complicated cases longer attention.

I’m going to ask Rachel just to speak a bit more about the work that we’re doing in that regard.

R. Warren: I guess I would just add that, with the pandemic, we’ve certainly seen an increase in volume of calls to our office and an increase in the complexity of those calls that take a bit more time to work through and process and listen to the person’s concerns. Certainly, people, we know, have felt escalated and more stressed during the pandemic — so taking a bit more time on each of those calls and cases.

We’ve seen an increase in calls to our office. So certainly, we are finding ways to process complaints more efficiently. As Jay said, we implemented an intake team lead. We’re looking at ways that our email and web forms can be processed more efficiently as well. The Complaint Checker, as Jay mentioned, has helped people to be guided to the right process more efficiently. These are all things that we’re doing.

People can contact us by phone anytime. We answer all of our calls within about a minute or two minutes of being received. That is the quickest way for people to reach us, if they’re waiting to hear back. If they aren’t sure where their complaint is at, please invite them to call because our intake team is very responsive.

Complaints are different in terms of urgency, so we triage complaints based on urgency, based on a person’s need that’s been communicated to us. Whether it’s an urgent need for food, housing, income security, we look to process those complaints more urgently. But we do invite people to call us if they’re wondering where their file is at. We’re always available by phone.

I hope that answers your question, MLA Sandhu.

H. Sandhu: It does. Thank you. It’s complex work, the nature, so I really appreciate all you do.

J. Chalke: The one thing, I guess, I would also just add is, interestingly, we took a step recently to actually eliminate one of the ways people could make a complaint to us as a way to create more efficiency. And that is the phenomenon of email.

We opened up the door to incoming email complaints a few years ago, and that, actually, has turned out not to be a very positive way for people to make complaints to us. We’d much rather speak with them on the phone, or we have an online form that guides them through them providing us with the information we need. But free-form text email hasn’t actually proved to be that successful, so we thought, “Well, everybody who has email also would have access to be able to get to our online form,” because, really, the links to both were right near each other.

We felt that it was both more efficient but also will serve people better because it will get us the information more quickly if they fill out our online form. But, as Rachel said, phone is the best way to reach us.

[9:45 a.m.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. We have two more questions…. Three. Ben, then Brenda, and we may have time for Henry’s.

B. Stewart: Ombudsperson, thanks very much for what I’m sure is a complicated and difficult task for you and the staff, and the additional responsibilities that they’ve added to your workload. I just wanted to confirm. In your remarks, you said something about 19 offices. Does that mean that there are 19 physical offices that you’re operating?

J. Chalke: Sorry. I mean workstations. The space planning exercise that we’re doing with the Representative for Children and Youth and the Police Complaint Commissioner is to reallocate the space among ourselves. As you will hear more, I’m sure, from my colleague the Police Complaint Commissioner, he has a plan with the representative to be able to accommodate the space he needs, and that way he’s freeing up space here at 947 Fort. That’s what that reference was to.

So, no. We have one office for the entire province. It’s here. We’re simply getting, in this collaborative space planning approach, access to some more offices here in the building.

B. Stewart: The next question I have is…. A letter was sent from the committee to your office on March 10, and it outlined some very specific requirements that we were looking for to help guide what we were looking at in terms of increased pressure. There’s no question your office is one of the most pressured because of responsibility.

I guess one of the things that…. I look at the three-year…. On your statutory office budget submission template, table 1 looks at your lift in wages on STOB 50 of 17 percent, which you’ve covered off with some of the questions. What I don’t see is how this increased workload is covered off in your future years’ submission. Your wages are flatlined at $9,225,000, unless I’m misinterpreting this.

I guess my question is that the idea of the committee is to try and fairly give information to the Ministry of Finance as to what the future looks like on a three-year rolling average, and I don’t see that from this submission. Can you just clarify why that is that way?

J. Chalke: So with respect to inflation, and I’ll ask Dave to pitch in on this in a moment, we have not made assumptions when we prepared these documents with respect to wage inflation. We’ve adopted a conservative approach, which is that we only put in what we know, so we have not adopted any kind of assumption around wage inflation — at this point, anyway.

Dave, I don’t know if you want to add to that.

D. Van Swieten: Absolutely, Jay. You’ll start nodding your head when I speak.

Recall, too, that in past years when we’ve come before the committee to request resources, those resources been asked for a limited time. For example, results coming from ICBC’s change in litigation model. So those limited resources come due next year, in year two of the budget submission. So those resources are actually coming out. There was a second resource ask a few years ago for the case tracker implementation. We won’t need those resources in that year, so those resources come out. The workload that Jay had spoken of around PIDA — there is an increase in resources for that next year.

So what you’re seeing is, in effect, some resources coming out and some being added in. So it appears as though it’s flatlined, but it’s actually not. Does that make sense?

B. Stewart: Well, you know what…. To be honest, Dave, if you look at your budget for the last six years, it’s almost doubled. Okay? I mean, you’ve got a strategic document. You’ve done lots of work on what PIDA is going to do to the Ombudsperson’s office. And I guess my thought is that you don’t know exactly, and you don’t know what success or failure looks like.

I think that the role of budgeting is what our responsibility is. We’re trying to get better clarity on what this means to the government. That’s what I’m looking for. Anyways, it sounds to me like it has not been quite approached that way, but I’ll leave it at that. Thanks very much.

[9:50 a.m.]

B. Bailey: Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation.

I’m struggling with the challenge of recognizing the incredible work that you do — and the importance, which is clear to me — and this very big lift. I mean, it’s almost 19 percent. This is a significant increase. I am aware that two years ago, I think, there was also a 15 percent increase. If I understand the materials correctly, with the post-secondary and WorkSafe coming online in the future, I’m assuming there might be additional increases. There’s a $500,000 lift for the two that are being added on now.

I’m very concerned about how much money this is, in the context of the fact that every single presentation that we’ll see here, and every presentation I’ll see on Treasury Board, is feeling incredible pressure in regard to inflation. This is a huge challenge we have in front of us: to really prioritize what has to happen now and what could wait.

I’m looking at the multitude of asks here, and I’m wondering if there’s perhaps an opportunity for a prioritization exercise, if we came back to you and asked that. I’m struggling with, for example, if this is the right year to be asking the question if people’s referrals are being met when I know that there’s just so much suffering in our community. We’re going to see really, really serious pressures at Treasury Board in regard to things like disability rates.

I put that to you, because in the context of this really, really important work, it’s up against all the other really, really important work as we look at how we decide to use the government resources. I guess my question might be: is there anything in this budget that could be delayed for a time when we’re not under such extraordinary pressures? Or is this the budget you feel you absolutely have to have, going forward?Part B to that question would be: as the post-secondary and WorkSafe pieces come on, do we expect to see another significant request in the coming years?

J. Chalke: In terms of things that can wait, I’m not in charge of the rollout schedule. That’s up to cabinet and the Attorney General. I have mandatory statutory duties that relate to government’s decision to impose on us the obligation to respond to disclosures. I have no alternative, obviously, but to carry out those statutory obligations. That is the biggest lift this year. Also, as you go back, as you have done, and point back to prior years, those are the biggest lifts in those prior years as well.

It’s a significant initiative by the government to bring in whistleblowing legislation. It imposes on us a major new statutory function. We need to be able to have the staff to deliver those responsibilities well, to do so in a timely way and, obviously, to carry out investigations that are professional, appropriate, accurate and correct — and, at the end of the day, to find wrongdoing or not find wrongdoing. These are very significant investigations. It’s just a function of having that new work that takes us there.

Going forward, we anticipate and have built in, in the budget for next year, as well, with respect to university…. That’s already in there. We’ve tried to do that as well. I totally appreciate that it’s a material issue. In terms of percentage, it’s obviously, in the work that Treasury Board does, not a big number in comparison. It’s obviously a significant priority for the government to give public sector employees these rights, but these rights don’t mean anything if there aren’t people to carry out the work that arises from them exercising their rights under the act.

[9:55 a.m.]

R. Merrifield: I’m just piggybacking a little bit on the conversation that Brenda had raised, on how the volume of work was determined. This being a new portion of work, how was that? Will there be some assumption of a slower onboarding, as members of the public become aware of this service?

J. Chalke: I would say that in the very early years, if you’ll look at the materials that we did, we were able to estimate, pretty accurately, the workload that arose in 2019-20 and 2020-21 — in those early years when, really, the act was covering ministries. In the more recent year, I just think that applying that same math will yield a number that…. If the committee finds 17 percent challenging, they’ll find…. If you just did the math and say, “Well, it’s a 4½-fold increase; therefore, it’s a 4½-fold increase in work,” that would be a very large number of investigators.

My goal is to manage it at a much lower number. That’s what we’re setting out to do. As I just said to MLA Bailey, it is a significant obligation. If it turns out that we aren’t able, we’ll be back. That’s a statutory-obligation problem, but I anticipate that we can make do with a considerably lower number. It’s not easy to estimate how many people in the health authorities and in the school districts have concerns about wrongdoing and are unsatisfied with disclosing it internally. It’s not just: “Do they have a concern about wrongdoing?” It’s: “Do they have confidence in their employer?” They have options, under the act, to make those disclosures internally.

It’s a pretty complicated formula to try and figure out the number of people who have concerns about wrongdoing, don’t necessarily have confidence that their employer will deal with it, so choose to make that disclosure externally to our office. We thought: “It’s best to start conservatively.” We’ll start with a relatively conservative prediction. If it turns out to be an issue, we’ll be back — which, I appreciate, is an issue for you.

We think it’s better to do that, rather than to estimate high and then have those costs and not need the resources. That’s the approach that we’ve taken.

H. Yao: I’ll make my comment quick. It’s not something complicated. I noticed you guys were talking about how phone access tends to be the more efficient method of connecting with individuals who have concerns or complaints, compared to email.

I just want to throw it out there that in my past life, working for bc211 and other non-profit sectors, one of the thoughts we had was that for younger generations, text messages tend to be better. Especially after COVID-19 and especially after social media, not everybody is actually comfortable with calling a stranger to file a complaint. I just want to put that out there, so that you guys can have a comfortable conversation around it.

I will leave it, but thank you so much for your presentation.

J. Chalke: If I could just go back to the question that was asked earlier, about setting a priority list. My concern with saying, “Here are things that I think are important now, versus later,” is that really, our ask is about three quite basic things. One we’ve talked about already, which is this question of a new statutory obligation. Another is addressing fairness for Indigenous people, reaching out to them so that they’re aware and confident and can trust that we are going to effectively and impartially investigate government as to whether or not they’ve treated those people fairly.

[10:00 a.m.]

As part of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the journey of reconciliation that we are all on, I think it’s time. I would resist the notion and urge the committee not to think, simply because it’s not a new statutory obligation, that this is somehow.

J. Routledge (Chair): Thank you, Jay. Just in closing, a response to your presentation…. One of the things that I’m struck by is your attention to knowing that you’re not a call centre, and that when people phone you — and a lot of people phone you or contact you — it’s with high emotion and with high expectations of needing to be heard and needing to be included.

I think in your presentation and the way you’ve answered our questions, you’ve made that very clear and made it very clear that this is a very difficult time. People are feeling quite fragile, and you’re there to reassure them, to make sure that they have access to justice, that they know that they have access to justice and that in the end, they feel like we’re all part of the same society. In fact, that’s kind of what’s at stake right now.

Thank you so much for your passion. Thank you to you. Thank you to your whole team. We really appreciate it.

J. Chalke: Thank you very much. If you require anything further, just let us know.

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. Thanks. Bye.

We’ll take a two-minute recess to regroup for our next presentation.

The committee recessed from 10:02 a.m. to 10:11 a.m.

[J. Routledge in the chair.]

J. Routledge (Chair): Welcome back, everybody.

We’ll now call on the Human Rights Commissioner, Kasari Govender, and her team to make her presentation.

We’ve set aside 25 minutes for your presentation and about 30 minutes for the committee to ask questions. Please proceed.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Thank you so much, Chair and Deputy Chair, and members of the committee. It’s a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all this morning.

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge that I am joining you today from the unceded and traditional homelands of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. I’m grateful for the care that they have provided for these lands and these waters for so many generations. I recognize that that gratitude needs to be coupled with a sense of responsibility to continually try to repair the damage caused by colonialism, past and present.

This lens is not just a way to start our conversation here today but very much is a shaping force in how I approach my role as Human Rights Commissioner and how our office approaches our work as the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner. I’m joined today by my colleagues Stephanie Garrett, Deputy Commissioner, Dianne Buljat, Chief Financial Officer, and Charlotte Kingston, our Director of Communications.

As you know, my office is charged with promoting and protecting human rights in the province. The Human Rights Commissioner is unique as the only independent officer of the Legislature responsible for protecting all people in the province, with a focus on those most marginalized, and promoting awareness and respect for rights among all duty-bearers, including employers, landlords and service providers representing every sector and every industry.

Today I’ll be speaking to the progress that we’ve made on human rights issues falling within each of our six strategic priorities. I will speak to the rights issues arising in each area, how our work is addressing those rights issues and how we are evaluating whether what we are doing is working. Finally, I will speak to the budgetary context and provide some forecasting for the year ahead.

Last year the committee recommended the presented budget of $6.826 million in operating for ’23-24 and $35,000 in capital budget. We are requesting a status quo capital budget of $35,000 and an operating budget of $7.703 million for fiscal year ’23-24, which represents a modest increase, the bulk of which is inflationary. I look forward to, of course, answering your questions after that.

[10:15 a.m.]

I want to start with our focus on addressing systemic discrimination. Discrimination in schools, workplaces, stores, restaurants and other public spaces remains a significant problem in B.C. At least one in ten people say they believe they have experienced discrimination in the last year, and 41 percent of respondents in a provincial poll said they often or sometimes avoid posting comments to social media platforms because they are worried about receiving discriminatory or hateful responses.

A recent poll we commissioned showed that people with disabilities, in particular, face high levels of discrimination. Of those polled who identify as having a disability themselves, one in four have personally experienced discrimination in the last year. Among people who have experienced or know someone who has experienced discrimination in the past year, almost half said it happened at work. It is unsurprising, then, that, year over year, human rights complaints based on disability form the largest single share of complaints brought to the Human Rights Tribunal.

Targeting discrimination is really at the core of our mandate. A key reason that our office exists is to ensure that the rights guaranteed by the human rights code are protected and respected. We focused a number of our initiatives over the last year on preventing and addressing systemic discrimination in this context. For each of these initiatives, we’ve gathered feedback and put into place key performance indicators that allow us to measure progress over time.

For example, last year we managed 45 special program applications, which allow duty-bearers to prioritize historically marginalized folks in the context of employment, tenancy and other protected areas in the code. I have powers under the human rights code to insulate such special programs from a claim of discrimination when a duty-bearer prioritizes hiring, serving or housing a person who falls within a protected ground within the human rights code and, therefore, their program furthers the purposes of the code.

The impact of this work was demonstrated by the Burnaby Public Library, which began hiring under a BCOHRC special program in the fall of 2021. The head librarian, Beth Davies, wrote us with her experiences. She said: “Our small, ten-person management team is mostly white, and we want the team to more closely reflect Burnaby’s racial diversity and meet the needs of our community, where more than 50 percent are immigrants and more than 50 percent speak in a language other than English at home.”

Since the program started, we’ve hired for three positions and, in each case, had a stellar field of Black, Indigenous and other person-of-colour candidates. We’ve heard from applicants for these and other positions that the special program was evidence of BPL’s, Burnaby Public Library’s, commitment to anti-racism and it was one of the reasons they applied to work with us.

Last year we also kicked off our employment equity project, examining how employers across B.C. can support equity in the workplace. This is in response to what we know are significant equity gaps in B.C. for employees. For example, we know that racialized people and people with disabilities continue to be underrepresented across the public sector and that gender pay gaps in B.C. continue to rank among the worst in the country.

This summer we sat down with over 25 public, private, and non-profit organizations to hear about their need for guidance materials as employers. We are in the process of drafting and producing a number of fact sheets aimed at helping employers build more equitable workplaces, including through hiring, retention and compensation. The employment equity materials will build on the existing educational materials that we have on our website and continue to build there.

These pages use plain language and case studies to help people understand their rights under the human rights code in the area of employment, housing and services. The pages were launched in October 2021 and have accumulated nearly 9,000 views at this point.

Another area in which we are speaking to employers is through our public awareness campaign on ableism, launched earlier this month and running until late November. The Rewrite the Rules campaign is aimed at addressing ableism and helping folks understand how they can begin to question these unwritten rules of ableism.

Ableism is a set of unwritten rules that favours the needs and experiences of non-disabled people in a variety of ways, and they show up in many different aspects of our lives, from health care to schools to our workplaces. So we’ve pointed these out across the campaign.

[10:20 a.m.]

We developed the campaign working closely with key members of the disability community. We engaged representatives through organizations across the province, including the B.C. Aboriginal Network on Disability, Disability Alliance B.C., Terrace and District Community Services Society and Kelowna’s Third Space Charity. Leaders from these organizations served on a community review committee and informed the campaign by sharing their experiences of being people living with disabilities and, also, serving people with disabilities. They provided feedback throughout the campaign.

In addition, each organization is hosting an event in their communities that’s related to the campaign. For example, later this week, Third Space Charity will host an event at its offices to really engage people in a conversation around ableism. They’re hosting a panel, and they’re really trying to have that conversation with members of the public using the rewrite the rules campaign in that event.

People across B.C. will see this campaign in their communities, whether in major urban centres or rural or northern areas, on bus shelters, in airports and in their social media feeds. People in every region of B.C. might also see this campaign on posters in B.C. public libraries, thanks to our partnership with a network of B.C. public libraries. The social media ads are translated into 12 different languages in order to reach a broad range of folks in that context.

We are running a targeted evaluation plan for this project to help us better understand what the impact is of doing public awareness projects like this. Is this the path we want to continue on? The literature on public awareness campaigns is divided, so we’ve developed quite a robust evaluation plan as a result, including before-and-after provincewide polls to understand changes in public opinion. We’re doing on-the-spot polling in front of some of the posters to understand people’s reactions. That should put us in a good place to use our money most efficiently going forward when we launch further public awareness campaigns. What’s the best way to change people’s views?

While we’re committed to hearing directly from community members in a wide range of our work — and I’ve just highlighted some of them — we’re also travelling across the province in November to hear directly from people about their concerns on a wider range of human rights issues in the province and in their communities.

Last spring the committee here asked me about whether there is a way to establish a baseline from which we can measure progress on human rights over time. Indeed, we’ve been laying the groundwork for our baseline project almost since the beginning of our existence and for quite some time. This fall, I’m very pleased to say that our research and engagement specialists will be travelling to Terrace, Coquitlam, Chetwynd and Cranbrook to train and support community organizations to conduct a series of nearly 40 focus groups with people with lived experience of discrimination to understand the most salient human rights issues facing those communities.

This is the first four of 12 communities that we will be diving into over the next couple of years. The focus groups will be accompanied by a yearly provincewide poll, as well as a number of targeted interviews in every community to ensure that we have a comprehensive snapshot of communities’ experiences, successes and struggles.

To ensure we are supporting the human rights work that is already happening across civil society and across the province, we have extensively reviewed the existing academic and community-based recommendations for change that have already happened over the last few years. We’re set to launch a publicly accessible database this fall to make those recommendations more searchable and usable for those who made the recommendations — I want to use them in their advocacy — and also for those who are subject to those recommendations, to make this easier for duty-bearers to be able to see what community is saying to them.

I want to turn, then, to our strategic priority on addressing decolonization. The crisis of Indigenous children being removed from their communities into state foster care continues. In 2022, First Nations, Métis, Inuit and urban Indigenous children outnumbered non-Indigenous children in B.C. government care by a ratio of almost three to one, even though they make up only 10 percent of the total population of children in the province.

Indigenous people are twice as likely to live in poverty as non-Indigenous people, and in addition, Indigenous people continue to be overrepresented in our jails and across the criminal justice system. For example, in Vancouver, Indigenous men are 17 times more likely to be arrested than non-Indigenous men.

[10:25 a.m.]

To address the latter issue in particular, last year we brought together the most comprehensive analysis of policing data on systemic discrimination, or systemic racism in particular, in B.C.’s history. We used that work, that research, to inform our recommendations to the legislative committee looking at reforming the Police Act. Our research revealed disturbing patterns of racial disparities across the province, and we recommended reforming a range of policing activities to reduce systemic racism and improve public safety through improving equity.

As Grand Chief Stewart Phillip said: “It’s going to take incredibly strong commitment, leadership and decisive action to fully eradicate racist attitudes inherent to all police forces within B.C. and right across Canada. First Nations must be true partners in changing policing in B.C. The commissioner’s recommendations give us a basis for badly needed action. Importantly, those recommendations start with a government-to-government relationship to First Nations on changes to the Police Act.”

I am pleased to report that our research and recommendations generated significant interest from police boards and chiefs across the province. I was invited to speak to the B.C. Association of Police Boards as well as to meet with specific police boards and chiefs, to talk about what they could do so that they could better understand the data and recommendations.

We recently announced that we will be continuing this work on systemic anti-Indigenous racism in policing by auditing a recently announced settlement agreement. As many of you may remember, in December of 2019, Maxwell Johnson and his granddaughter went to the Bank of Montreal branch here in Vancouver downtown and tried to open a bank account. After looking at the pair’s identification documents, including their Indian Status cards, BMO staff called 911 to report an alleged fraud. Attending officers from the VPD, from the Vancouver police department, put both the grandfather and his granddaughter in handcuffs without asking them any questions or conducting any investigation.

Following the 2019 incident, Maxwell Johnson filed a human rights complaint on behalf of himself and his granddaughter against the Vancouver police board. At the end of September, the parties to that complaint announced that they had reached a settlement agreement, which they made public.

As Human Rights Commissioner, my role in this…. I was not a party to the agreement, but the agreement outlines that our role will be to audit the success of their commitments that are made in that agreement and to report on the parties’ compliance with it, including the Vancouver police board’s commitment to take certain steps such as improving training for police officers and improving accessibility of complaint mechanisms for Indigenous complainants.

My office’s role as auditor arises out of a request from the Heiltsuk First Nation, representatives of the complainants and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and was agreed to by the Vancouver police board. Ensuring that the systemic actions outlined in this settlement agreement are fully implemented is one step that we can take towards addressing the significant human rights issues that we raised in our policing report.

Hate is another significant issue facing our communities, and it is another key strategic priority of our office. More than one in four British Columbians have witnessed hate incidents during the pandemic, including 50 percent of those aged 18 to 24. One in ten have directly experienced a hate incident during the pandemic, including 20 percent of Indigenous respondents and 15 percent of East Asian respondents.

Over the course of the pandemic, disturbing reports of hate incidents have emerged. I’m sure many of us have seen them, really daily, in the media. They’ve included graffiti, online hate, violent assault, spitting, threats, and so on. My office has been monitoring those reports, and we have, as you may remember, launched a public inquiry into what has caused this rise of hate and what we can do about it.

Through our inquiry, we have confirmed that hate has risen dramatically over this time. Since the opening ceremonies of the inquiry, we’ve received more than 100 submissions from over 60 organizations. We have partnered with five prominent scholars to develop research on the roots of hate, the experiences of online hate, the impacts of the pandemic on domestic violence and Indigenous legal responses to hate.

[10:30 a.m.]

We heard from over 2,500 people through a prov­ince­wide poll that was translated into 24 languages and learned a lot about people’s experiences of hate. We have learned that hate stems from a fear of losing power during this time of great uncertainty and is rooted in long-standing issues around racism, misogyny and other discriminatory beliefs.

Isolation increases hate and violence within private spaces, and it is difficult to disentangle the factors that are related to the pandemic, which I’ve just spoken about, and the rise of populist movements in the years leading up to the pandemic. Both are key influencing factors, and both are set against the rapid rise of the role of the Internet in our daily existence. We anticipate releasing the report in the spring of 2023 with actionable recommendations to address, eliminate and prevent hate incidents during times of crisis and beyond.

Addressing poverty as a human rights issue is another key strategic priority. One in five British Columbian children are still growing up in poverty, which is approximately 156,000 kids. Of course, children’s poverty is intimately connected with their family’s economic well-being.

Workplace discrimination continues to impact women’s economic security. Fourteen percent of women in B.C. report experiencing unfair treatment in the workplace, with 9 percent reporting that it has resulted in a loss of potential employment. We’re committed to working towards effective and meaningful domestic protections for economic rights, engaging with poverty as a human rights issue and dismantling discrimination against people living in poverty.

One of the actions we’ve taken on this issue is intervening in Gibraltar Mines v. Harvey. I spoke briefly about this the last time, or the time before, I appeared before you. The case involves a human rights complaint from Ms. Harvey, a welder employed at Gibraltar Mines. Ms. Harvey alleged that her employer discriminated against her by refusing to allow her or her husband, an electrician employed at the same workplace, to change their schedules to accommodate their child care responsibilities.

The case has made its way up to the B.C. Court of Appeal and will be heard later this fall. We are continuing to intervene in this case to ensure that the human rights code provides meaningful protections for women and other parents who experience discrimination at work based on their caregiving responsibilities at home.

Finally, the rights of those who are detained by the state is the last substantive strategic priority of our office. BCOHRC believes that we all have the right to be free from arbitrary detention, abuse of power and unfair treatment if we’re detained by the police in correctional centres or in mental health systems.

A number of human rights issues arise in the context of detention, including the systemic discrimination issues I’ve talked about in the context of policing. Another example is that people who suffer from both mental health and substance use issues made up 32 percent of B.C.’s prison population in 2017, up from 15 percent in 2009. Despite those increases…. Critical health supports are still badly needed in correctional facilities.

In addition, across Canada, in the year prior to March 2020, almost 9,000 people, including 138 children, were forced into immigration detention in Canada. Ninety-four percent of those immigration detainees are held for administrative reasons and pose no risk to the public, according to the Canada Border Services Agency. As one former detainee said: “I didn’t feel like a human in there. I felt like a dog. The guards would just open the latch to feed me.”

In 2021, we joined Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as well as a diverse range of community partners in calling for the end of immigration detention in B.C. jails by ending their agreement with the Canada Border Services Agency. After conducting a multi-month review, I’m very pleased to say that the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General decided to end that agreement. B.C. has led the way in making this decision, which has set the precedent as the campaign is now unfolding across the country.

I want to turn now to the operations update and budget request. As an office established in 2019, our sixth key strategic priority is to build and sustain a healthy and diverse workforce. In 2021-22, we hired 25 people, we developed an internal education program, we delivered Indigenous cultural safety training to all staff, and we collaborated with Simon Fraser University on sustainable procurement practices to understand the human rights impact of the items we use and purchase for the organization.

[10:35 a.m.]

As the increases in our operating budget ask relate to operational issues, I’m going to combine them here in my comments. I will note that the inflationary ask is $475,000, which is 54 percent of the total increase requested. The remaining $402,000 is comprised of the following items: one additional staff increase, a retention package and two major operational projects.

BCOHRC has been able to build a new organization and on-board almost all of our staff virtually during the pandemic. We only existed, as you may remember, about six months before the pandemic started. In ’22-23, BCOHRC is working to shift from the interim work strategies and measures that have supported staff during the pandemic towards a long-term vision of the future of work that considers flexible work as well as hybrid and remote work.

Our focus in developing our approach to the future of work is on the health and wellness of our staff, belonging and retention as well as effectiveness and performance. In this context, we are working to improve our approach to internal communications as we continue to build out our office and deliver on our mandate.

Throughout our development, we’ve been focusing on using accessible and appealing communications tools to have the broadest reach across B.C. as possible. Anecdotally, we understand that our communications work, such as our website and our report design, has served as an example for other commissions across the country. Last fiscal year we had significant success with our communications work, including over 1,200 media mentions and 193,000 unique visits to our website, representing a 116 percent increase from last year. We’ve also had nearly 27,000 views of our Human Rights 101 video to date. That’s just one example of the resources we have available on our site.

Recognizing the importance of creating accessible communication tools for those across the province, we are now working on bringing those same strengths to our internal communications tools. This critical internal communications infrastructure will respond to where we’re at in our growth as an organization as well as the evolving nature of our hybrid workforce, facilitating more effective and efficient information-sharing between staff who are in diverse locations across the province.

This project includes the building of an intranet and integration of a task management system. The total ’23-24 request for this is $45,000.

As you know, we have a shared corporate services model with the Representative for Children and Youth. RCY provides human resources, IT and financial services to BCOHRC, modelled off of the Ombudsperson shared-services agreement, in order to make our corporate services as efficient as possible.

In late ’21-22 and early ’22-23, RCY and our office undertook an assessment of the current shared-services arrangement, with the support of a third-party consultant. We are currently in the process of implementing the recommendations that we heard through that assessment process, including reviewing the services agreement to refine the scope of work and the governance structure required to support that work. The work is being undertaken in the second half of the ’22-23 fiscal year and may result in future implications for BCOHRC internal resourcing.

Later this fiscal year BCOHRC will vacate the Auditor General space in Victoria as they prepare for tenant improvements. RCY will provide flexible work spaces to BCOHRC staff in Victoria, who will remain remote-based, in alignment with our future-of-work strategy and our shared goal to find efficiencies. Similarly, BCOHRC will provide the use of flexible work spaces to RCY staff who are located in the Lower Mainland in our office space there at no cost to either organization.

We are grateful to the Auditor General for the use of their space since 2019 and to RCY for this new space and shared corporate services arrangement.

When I appeared before you in the spring, I discussed the results of our workplace environment survey. One of the key concerns that emerged from that survey is that our compensation levels are not keeping up with the cost of living or with comparable positions and organizations. This is also reflected in feedback we’ve had from departing employees as well as prospective employees and is in keeping with what we’re hearing from other public employers.

[10:40 a.m.]

We are currently conducting a compensation review in view of increased competition to recruit and retain employees, which is being experienced across sectors and industries. This review includes a market analysis of comparable public and non-profit positions.

Preliminary findings illustrate opportunities for increased BCOHRC competitiveness and salaries. Extensive work still needs to be done on our compensation review in the coming months, including a review of public and private markets. So we’re anticipating returning to the committee with further increases, should that be needed following this review.

In the interim, if we are granted our budget request, we will be implementing a 5 percent increase, representing $198,000 in salaries and benefits in fiscal ’23-24 to mitigate the significant and ongoing financial and programmatic risks that retention represents for our office. This is in addition to the inflationary increases as noted in our budget submissions.

As you round the corner into our fourth year of existence as an organization, we can reflect on the significant growth that we’ve seen in the public’s interest and engagement in the work of the office. Last year, we provided human rights system information and referrals to over 20,000 members of the public who contacted BCOHRC via phone and email. This number is nearly ten times the public requests that we received in ’20-21, when we received 2,000. So it has grown, in one year, from 2,000 inquiries from the public to 20,000.

Part of our response to this influx of referrals and questions is our promotion of a No Wrong Door approach to working with the other pillars of B.C.’s human rights system. That’s the clinic, among other clinics in the province — the human rights clinic — which provides legal advice and represents individual complainants, as well as the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, which screens, mediates and adjudicates human rights complaints. Working collaboratively with the clinics and the tribunal ensures that individuals and organizations are able to access the system in an efficient, effective and empowering manner.

In this budget ask, we’re requesting funds for one additional front-line position, an intake coordinator, to support the No Wrong Door initiative by managing the vast increase in public requests for information, applications for special programs and engagement with the commissioner role. This public-facing position will be the first point of contact for many members of the public, fielding questions and triaging internally and with the clinic and the tribunal to enable greater overall organizational efficiency in responding to requests from the public.

This position will fill a need across all of our departments while simultaneously streaming the public’s interactions with our staff, contributing to the No Wrong Door goal of increasing accessibility to the human rights system. The salary cost of this position is $71,000, with the total cost — including benefits, IMIT, and so on — calculated on a per-FTE basis of $129,000.

In addition, we plan to embark on a critical, high-impact initiative for this No Wrong Door project through the creation of a unified web portal for BCOHRC, the clinics and the tribunal. This unified portal will ensure that regardless of whether someone is looking for human rights resources and education to file a complaint, or for support with their complaint, they will be able to access the appropriate institution more easily. The project will create what we’re thinking of as a single front door for the human rights system in the province.

This represents an important step in improving access to the human rights system, as evidenced by the third-party assessment that we conducted late last year on this. So the ’23-24 financial request for this web build is $30,000.

Those are my comments and submissions this morning. Thank you again for your support of our ongoing work to promote and protect human rights in the province. I look forward to your comments and questions now.

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

I’ll now invite the committee to ask questions. The first question is from Henry.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. I just cannot overemphasize how much we appreciate the great work the human rights commission is doing for our community. I do have two questions. I will ask one first, and then, if there’s no one else, I’ll ask the second one.

The first one is…. Earlier, you were talking about a different kind of outreach regarding cross-cultural and actually being able to also have an engagement process. So my question, and there’s almost a bit of concern, is: do the engagement process and the outreach process follow a similar path?

[10:45 a.m.]

My challenge here is that — as you probably know, from linguistic diversity of British Columbia and, unfortunately, which also reflects on our social media diversity — a lot of our community members become very silofied, and they don’t see what other communities are doing. If there isn’t a specific targeted outreach to them and an outreach process just follows a similar process of a previous outreach, we might fail to capture their lack of awareness or lack of opportunity for them to advocate for their rights.

I’d sure love to hear feedback about that part.

K. Govender: Thank you for the question. Certainly, a significant preoccupation of ours is to ensure that we’re reaching a diversity of British Columbians in many different ways, including diversity of language groups and countries of origin for those who are newcomers to our communities. We’re doing that through a variety of ways.

You have heard, probably through what I said, of some of the materials that we’ve translated quite broadly. And not just translated the straight materials…. For example, in our inquiry into hate, we had a company who facilitated…. We hired a company to facilitate such a significant scale of the survey that we launched, and we had people who were able to support by phone those who called in with a variety, a broad range, of languages, as I said. I think it was 24 that I mentioned earlier.

So we’re doing some of that straight translation. We also engage directly with media outlets from a variety of language and cultural communities. While I do those interviews in English, we are engaging with multicultural and multilinguistic radio and media sites. For example, I was profiled in a South Asian magazine this year to be able to do some outreach to that community, in particular.

We also work directly with a number of community organizations who serve a diversity of communities. We partnered in our hate inquiry. Not only did we provide multilingual services, but we have partnered with a number of community organizations or, rather, created relationships with those organizations, who then provided peer support to help people engage with the survey: “Why would I fill this out? What does this mean?”

I think that speaks directly to your point about ensuring that we’re meeting people where they’re at and not just simply translating the same processes and same language to multilingual sources.

H. Yao: May I have a follow-up on the same question, Chair.

J. Routledge (Chair): Yes, you may.

H. Yao: If you don’t mind, I just want to clear it for my curiosity. How much work have you invested in the WeChat platform for social media?

K. Govender: Sorry, can you say that again — in the…?

H. Yao: My apologies. I just have a scratchy throat. I talk very fast. The WeChat platform.

K. Govender: We have not invested in it. We do not use WeChat, so we haven’t invested any resources in that.

H. Yao: Okay, and bear with me. This is just my observation, and I’d love to share it with you. I do understand for a lot of Richmond residents, who I represent, unfortunately the only source of information and media access is through WeChat. So my concern, based on my previous question, is: how can we support them to make sure they have become aware of what the Human Rights Tribunal can be doing for them?

Unfortunately, a lot of members in my community…. Once they’re on the WeChat social media platform, they don’t really reach out anywhere else, and therefore, they become like what I mentioned earlier — silofied within that circle. Then when they face discrimination, they don’t know how to reach out to community members for support.

K. Govender: Thank you. I appreciate that feedback and insight.

J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions?

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Commissioner, for the work that you’re doing across the province. I know that not only is it a challenge opening a new statutory office, but throw in COVID and other things like that….

[10:50 a.m.]

I just wanted to ask, based on our…. You mentioned about the salaries, that they were going up, and I forget the exact percentage. But on the table that you provided for your budget, you show it going up $483,000, or 17 percent. I guess…. You said that it was just based on wage increases. Could you just perhaps explain that in a little bit more detail?

The second part I wanted to ask you is footnote No. 5, where you talk about retention bonuses. I just wondered if you could…. Or employee retention. Can you just help me understand what you’re having to do to retain staff and what this is looking like?

K. Govender: Sure. Thank you very much for the question. I’ll answer from my vantage point, and then perhaps refer back to Dianne to fill in any of the more technical gaps here.

There are two kinds of buckets, if you will, for the salary increases. One is the inflationary increases, which are really about the increases, as I think you’ve heard from many of the other officers, related to the GEU negotiations and how that will then be brought across to those in the MCCF, the management scale. Those are outside of our control. Those are PSA-determined. We are responsible for implementing them. That represents a significant increase there. Both the ones that we’re facing for the current fiscal — but that’s not what we’re talking about here today — and then the ones going forward.

We also are coming before you to…. Part of our ask is a 5 percent retention package. We are conducting a compensation review process to do a more in-depth analysis of how our salaries compare by doing a market analysis, but we have got some preliminary data that help us know that the 5 percent is justified within a market analysis and really necessary from a retention perspective. Retention is costing our organization in significant ways, both in productivity and also just in terms of dollars, in terms of slowdown. We’re trying to counter that and also to address what we’ve heard through staff.

So there are those two pieces. In addition, we are asking for one additional staff person, through the form of this intake coordinator. That includes the salary that we’re asking for there.

Dianne, do you want to fill in? Do you want to speak to any of that?

D. Buljat: That’s correct, Kasari. That calculation that MLA Ben Stewart, I think, provided was based on the intake coordinator, the retention package that you referenced in your speech and also the salary increase. And just to speak to that, as we didn’t address it previously, it’s based on what was, when we wrote all of our information out, the tentative BCGEU agreement, which has now been ratified. So the numbers have remained the same and are correct.

It’s based on the 2022 increase of 4 percent and the 2023 increase of 6.75 percent. Current inflation rates, when I looked them up, to August, just a matter of days ago, was running at about 7.3 percent. So I’m fairly confident that the increase that we’ll see next year will hit that 6.75, which was the top end of the threshold in the tentative BCGEU calculations.

K. Govender: Thanks, Dianne.

J. Routledge (Chair): Henry, you have another question.

H. Yao: Actually, I think Tom had his hand up earlier.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Henry.

Thanks, Kasari, for that presentation. Some troubling statistics that you presented. One in four witnessing a hate incident was one that really stood out for me. A lot of them — actually, discrimination in the workplace, elsewhere — just on the rise. Because your office has been in operation for such a short time, the bulk of it being during the pandemic, and now that we’re weaning from the pandemic, do you anticipate — and, hopefully, knock on wood, we’re going to see — a decrease? Is there anything out there that suggests that that might happen?

K. Govender: It’s such an important question as we think through what the future of our province looks like, even regardless of what our work as an office looks like, just all of us as citizens here.

[10:55 a.m.]

I think it’s a bit of a mixed answer. I think some of what we’ve seen cause the increase, certainly in hate incidents, has been connected to the level of isolation that some folks felt that not only created a disconnect from community and the social cohesion of our communities, which feeds hate narratives, but also drives online time.

I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but there’s data around how much more time people spent on the Internet. As we heard from one person who appeared before us in the hate inquiry who was a former white nationalist member of a group…. They spoke to how it used to take months to convert someone to the far-right ideology. Now that can be done in a weekend using the Internet. So you can imagine how the increased use of the Internet in our daily lives, but particularly over times of isolation, has that direct impact.

Unfortunately, there are some other forces at play here that could last long beyond the pandemic. I think our changing political discourse both before the pandemic and that has continued, that has normalized hate and violence in mainstream ways, in ways that we hadn’t imagined a decade ago, has really influenced what is seen as acceptable. Truly hateful rhetoric has become much more mainstream in a way that I think we hadn’t seen before, and I don’t anticipate that ending with the end of the pandemic. So my projections are a bit mixed on that front.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): A very quick follow-up on that. Of course, as one tide goes out, meaning the pandemic, another one comes in. I’m just wondering on something a little bit different — on the situation of asylum seekers from Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, and how that affects the office, and the ending of those immigration detention contracts that your group, your office, is trying to pursue. How much of an impact has that put onto the office?

K. Govender: Well, I’m glad to say that B.C. didn’t…. Although it’ll take a year for that ending to actually take effect, they have publicly announced that they’ll be ending the agreement with CBSA. But they needed to give CBSA, Canadian Border Services Agency, 12 months’ notice, so it will take that long for it to end.

There are much better ways to ensure that migrants stay connected to services and have the support they need as well as are able to go through the legal process without a lot of hitches. That process can be really community-based as opposed to coercively, as it has been done in the context of immigration detention. So I think we’re going to see that shift and, I hope, a corresponding investment in community-based services that can support refugees and migrants who might have been otherwise detained to stay, again, connected and be able to follow through the legal process.

I am not sure how much that will change with this particular immigration pattern, but the way you started out, your comment, is particularly fitting here. As one wave goes out, another one wave comes in, and I think that’s true as we see refugees in the country. There is, unfortunately, another…. I’m sure there’s another major humanitarian crisis that will drive another wave.

We do know that immigration detention disproportionately impacted migrants who are racialized. We know that they were disproportionately detained, and detained for longer under harsher circumstances, which would have, generally, less impact…. Of course, there are Ukrainians of all colours, but less of an impact generally on Ukrainians than it might on African refugees, for example.

I was going to add one more thing to your previous question, but it’s gone from me. I’ll return to it if it comes back to me.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks.

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay, I’m noting the time, and we do have another presentation this morning. So Henry, if you can ask your question fairly quickly.

H. Yao: Thank you, Chair. I will make my question as quick as I can.

One observation I noticed recently seems to be that people are placing discrimination against the Indigenous community with the multicultural discrimination, even though the relationship with the Canadian community is completely different due to our historical contacts and, unfortunately, residential school and unceded territory concerns at the same time.

[11:00 a.m.]

I’m wondering. From your perspective, what can we do to actually help us to really create a separation so that what we don’t have is a society that continues to talk about multiculturalism and dilutes the important work behind truth and reconciliation?

K. Govender: If I understand your question, it’s that we don’t want to have to choose between multiculturalism and anti-racism initiatives that have to do with newcomers versus decolonization, both of which are vitally important.

H. Yao: My apologies. I should be more clear. I apologize. I’m trying to speak as quickly as I can.

Basically it feels like, right now, a lot of times when we’re dealing with external organizations, they categorize discrimination against Indigenous communities in the same category as discrimination against other cultures, even though we understand they are two completely different paths. Of course, Indigenous communities require even more support and understanding for us to help them address the issue of overrepresentation in different categories they shouldn’t be overrepresented in.

It sometimes feels like community groups might end up diluting the importance and attention needed to be focusing on truth and reconciliation and decolonization and categorizing them under the same category — as just simply multiculturalism and anti-racism.

K. Govender: I think that is a really important issue, and I think we have a couple of legal tools to help us draw those distinctions. We have anti-racism work, which is that there are commonalities across groups experiencing racism, for sure. But the impact of colonialism and our direct engagement as a state with colonialism, both historically and presently, require a different approach.

I think UNDRIP, the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples, the Declaration Act that brings that into law in B.C.… Truly breathing life into that, realizing the commitments there that are distinct to the First Peoples of this land is what will get us to this point where we can really understand some of the different issues that flow from colonialism rather than anti-racism more broadly.

I will just add that point to Tom’s question earlier, if I could just say quickly, the part he remembered, which is that, unfortunately, we know that there are future crises coming, whether it’s another pandemic or climate crisis or something else. We are devising our recommendations in our hate inquiry, really, to what happens in times of crisis. How can we be better prepared next time?

J. Routledge (Chair): Well, thank you, Kasari. On behalf of the of the committee, I’d like to thank you for this very important front-line work that you’re doing and thank you for your very detailed presentation and for your thorough response to questions.

On a final note, I want to thank you for the way you’re taking on the issue of hate and hate crimes. We all know that hate is on the rise. We kind of know the what — maybe not the dimensions, but we know the what. What many of us don’t know and grapple with is the why, and your analysis of why it’s happening, why it’s on the increase, is very informative and useful in terms of us figuring out what we can do about it. So thank you so much, and with that, we’ll bid you goodbye.

In the interests of time, we’re not going to be able to take a break. We’re going to go right into our final presentation of the morning, which is the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner.

We’ll move right into your presentation today, so we’re now hearing from the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner.

We have about 25 minutes for your presentation, then no more than 30 minutes for questions and answers. With that, I will turn it over to you, Clayton.

[11:05 a.m.]

OFFICE OF THE POLICE
COMPLAINT COMMISSIONER

C. Pecknold: Thank you for the slot just before lunch. I’ll try to be as brief as possible. Thank you again, and good morning, albeit virtually.

Before I begin, I’d just like to acknowledge that our office and where we’re located is on the unceded traditional lands of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ people, the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations. Because we do our work throughout British Columbia, we honour the many territorial keepers of the lands and waters throughout our province.

With me this morning, virtually, is Deputy Commissioner Andrea Spindler and Mr. Dave van Swieten from our corporate shared services, who I know you know.

By way of orientation, I just would spend a few moments providing some brief remarks on our statutory mandate, partially as a reminder for those members of the committee who have heard from me before but also for the benefit of any new members of the committee.

In our submission to you…. We’ve outlined it somewhat, but I’ll just hit a few points. The accountability for municipal police in this province is a shared framework and a shared responsibility. It’s a shared responsibility among the police and amongst governing bodies. Under our independent oversight in this province, the police themselves are responsible to investigate allegations of misconduct and make disciplinary decisions in the first instance. We perform an oversight function by determining the admissibility complaints and initiating investigations and, when required, referring matters for independent judicial review.

It bears repeating that we at the OPCC do not conduct investigations, although I’ll note that the media often describes them as our investigations. We are the oversight agency. These are police professional standards investigations. Our role is to, essentially, oversee a highly specialized employment law regime, and we open and close gates and support thorough investigations through impartiality and fairness to all parties involved.

Our analysts oversee the investigations in real time, providing advice and direction and generally ensuring that a complete and thorough review of the matter takes place. They also have a very significant role in assisting complainants in navigating what are very often complex procedural processes under our statute. This is a model that envisions layers of accountability, a balance of powers and authorities, and most importantly, independent of governments and police.

This independence is critical and one we hold very close to our hearts. The independence is critical when one recognizes the unique operational independence of the police in juxtaposition to their often direct relationships with governments. You will note that a very important matter of police-government relations is under scrutiny in Ottawa as we speak, through the inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act.

Our office, reporting to the Legislature and not the government, stays well apart from political considerations. In addition, through the employment of retired judges to perform adjudicated reviews of police conduct decisions by the police themselves…. That adds a further layer of a check and balance.

Like any administrative tribunal, scrutiny and accountability for my decisions or for the decisions of adjudicators are through the courts, through judicial review. We also provide and have a significant role in providing outreach programs and services for the purpose of informing and educating the public on the powers of our office. We maintain a list of support groups, neutral dispute resolution service providers and agencies that may assist complainants with mediation or other informal resolution.

As well, we are required to provide information and assistance to persons making complaints, members of the police departments and former members of police departments, discipline authorities, police boards and adjudicators themselves.

As I have mentioned previously, in other submissions, part 11 of the act, the part of the Police Act we operate under, is highly prescriptive and includes very specific timelines within the statute itself. It’s intended to ensure that the complaint process has a very low bar of admissibility and accessibility, and this, in my respectful view, is intended to support marginalized and vulnerable populations, many of whom are in crisis and experiencing significant trauma in their lives.

[11:10 a.m.]

In 2019, the statutorily required audit of complaints and investigations took place to manage our compliance with the act, in terms of timelines and documentation. A number of recommendations came out of that committee report specifically with respect to accessibility but also with respect to legislative reform.

On that note, and before I get to the specifics of our request, I’d just like to make a few further comments, contextually, for you. You may recall that in my appearance before you last spring, I spoke to you about the balance between confidentiality and openness that we have to navigate under the statute as we try to tell the story about police accountability and the work of our office. The legislation, as I noted, has strict confidentiality requirements, subject only to very specific exemptions and overarching considerations of the public interest.

However, as I noted then, and as I note now, we do live in a world where, unfortunately, at times the thirst for simple answers to complex questions appears somewhat insatiable. But our work must thread through facts, through evidence and the application of legal principles. dispassionately and thoroughly. The work of our office — and the police-led investigations we oversee — is ultimately a search for the truth, no matter how inconvenient that truth may be.

As I noted in the spring, I have been turning my mind to the intersection of confidentiality and more open reporting, in the context of the various public interest factors we must consider. I’ve been doing so, borne in part from a growing concern I have that inaccurate narratives may persist if left unchallenged. Where these narratives are motivated by protectionism, self-interest or privilege, I believe we, as an independent office, have a responsibility to give voice to the facts and give voice to those who are vulnerable or disenfranchised from power. Of course, we must be careful not to descend into the arena or speak to matters yet undecided.

To illustrate, I would draw your attention to the now fully concluded matter involving the handcuffing, at the Bank of Montreal, of Mr. Maxwell Johnson and his granddaughter Torianne, both of the Heiltsuk First Nation. Despite the very apparent trauma these events brought to them and their community, you will know that through their tenacity and resolve they successfully pursued meaningful systemic change. Their achievements are most laudable and solely attributable to their efforts. I hope it assists them with their healing.

Our role at the OPCC was to ensure that the specific conduct of the police officers was fully investigated and that the expectations of accountability were met. In that case, we exercised various existing oversight powers under the Police Act and directed a number of investigative steps to ensure that all material aspects were fully canvassed. Ultimately, and after decisions were made by the police with which I disagreed, I was compelled to send the matter to a retired judge, to ensure that accountability was achieved.

I highlight this matter for two reasons. The first is to emphasize that despite the narrative that emerged from some quarters initially when this matter came to light — that the handcuffing and actions were appropriate and that it was somehow attributable to bank employees’ actions — that narrative was inconsistent with the evidence. Of course, it was very apparent to me that that was inconsistent with the evidence at the time that those statements were made.

The second point on this matter is that it took considerable time to be investigated and decided in the first instance. Under the present act, I have no ability to refer a matter to adjudicated review before a senior police officer, acting as a discipline authority, makes their decision — notwithstanding that the public interest considerations strongly gravitated towards a hearing before a retired judge in this matter at an earlier stage.

There have been recommendations made in the 2019 report of the all-party committee of the Legislature, the special committee, that might well have mitigated this, mitigated the trauma that occurred and improved the timeliness of the outcome. To date, although we have had some consultation with government — I’m confident that the ministry is alive to the issues — they have not been acted on. I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity, on the record, to say that in my respectful submission, they should be acted upon with a sense of urgency.

[11:15 a.m.]

Finally, before I turn to the specifics of the budget request, I also wish to acknowledge the staff who support the work we do. This is very difficult work. It has been made more difficult at times by the impacts of the pandemic and, of course, by some of the very trying social issues that we all face.

Our staff take great pride in their professionalism, and they take great pride in their impartiality. They take great pride in navigating, carefully, the complex world we operate under, doing the best they can to provide the best possible outcomes for all concerned. Working here is a challenging job, and we have a lot of very, very bright and committed people. I would like to acknowledge their work and thank them for their work.

To our budget request, I’m alive to the fact that the committee is interested in the impact of the recent municipal elections in Surrey. As I’ve mentioned in past appearances before you, we’ve been approaching our budget request, in light of the various external pressures and external needs, in an iterative way each year, and now with the benefit of some additional resources — which I’d like to thank the committee for providing to us — against the various metrics that we’re facing. You’ll see that in our submission we’ve tried to provide more metrics to you than we have in the past. We hope this is an ongoing effort.

As we’ve been building out this internal capacity, our efforts have been linked to the various external drivers to build out our capacity in the organization. It has also been related to the Surrey Police Service rollout. With the results of the most recent election, we’ve certainly seen, in the media, the issue of reversing the transition in Surrey and the complexity of that question. I don’t comment on the political aspects of that, of course. From a legal perspective, this is a decision for the various levels of government. Ultimately, if it’s to be rescinded, it’s a decision of the provincial government, by way of cabinet, to rescind any appointments to the Surrey police board.

As it stands now, within the legal regime that we operate, there are 300-odd police officers who fall within our jurisdiction, within Surrey, that have been hired and that, notwithstanding, are not fully deployed throughout the city of Surrey. They are under our jurisdiction, both for on-duty and off-duty conduct. As well, the police board remains under our jurisdiction for the purposes of service and policy matters.

Parenthetically, I would certainly note that the Vancouver mayor-elect has committed to hiring an additional 100 police officers in Vancouver — which will factor, eventually, into our workload as well.

Clearly, the decision with respect to Surrey will continue with the three levels of government. For planning purposes — and, no doubt, if I may say so, for the many police officers and civilian employees who have been hired — may I be so bold as to suggest that a timely decision, with some predictability and certainty, would be welcome and in the interests of overall public safety in the province. I will perhaps leave it there, subject to any specific questions you have.

In terms of the specifics, our request includes funding for inflationary pressures next year, as well as funding for organizational capacity and enhanced services to the public as a result of our growth and the various external drivers associated with that. The amounts are certainly there for you within our memo.

With the support of our corporate services, we’re also seeing a net reduction in some aspects of the case tracker system, which I understand that you certainly have a continued interest in, as do I.

[11:20 a.m.]

Although we’ve noted to you in the past that we may request access to contingency funding beyond our existing envelope, I’m not making any requests for access to contingency funding at this time. I will certainly identify these to the committee should our adjudications take a pathway that requires us to consider a request for further access to contingencies.

These are in the hands of independent adjudicators and various legal counsel and the parties involved. I have no ability to advance these matters, other than as one of the parties and as one of the participants, so it is somewhat challenging to identify with certainty what those costs are at a given time. In past years, what we’d do is monitor the budget in real time. If we require any additional funding, we will identify it to the committee immediately.

We have, in the last year, identified a need for additional contingency funding but were able to fund the vast majority of it through operational savings. Now, of course, that was deliberate on my part. I did my best to free up, through delayed hiring, some funding in our operational budget to mitigate the impact of that request.

In the meantime, you’ll see that our performance metrics, which we’ve provided to you in our stats, have shown that we continue to see an increase in the average growth rate of our files.

For any questions…. The deputy commissioner has a mastery of all those numbers and can answer any questions.

Last year we saw an overall increase in complaints of 26 percent compared to a 9 percent increase in the previous fiscal year. That’s a pretty significant increase. We are still trending for an increase, but I will say that so far our stats this year are not suggesting it will be of that magnitude.

Any number of reasons for this, of course. The questions of police accountability have been significantly higher in the public mind than they have been in the past. And of course, through our outreach efforts, our office becomes more well known and more accessible. More accessibility, more expectations that people will come to us, a low bar of admissibility. So our workload potentially increases.

It is one of the highest increases and something we’re monitoring carefully. We’re certainly, with the benefit of some added expertise within our staff, going to be able to dig deeper into the stats and provide some more qualitative analysis in the future.

I will say, in terms of actual investigations…. It’s important to emphasize that they can vary significantly in terms of complexity and resource requirements from file to file. No one file requires the same level of resources as the next file.

That’s because a single investigation may involve multiple witnesses, multiple complainants or multiple police officers, which significantly adds to that complexity as well. In addition, depending on the pathway of the file, there might be multiple proceedings — multiple simultaneous adjudicated proceedings — all of which have to be monitored and all of which have to be resourced as they take place.

We do try, notwithstanding that we don’t presently have a systemic mandate, to apply a preventative approach to our work to try to prevent the recurrence of misconduct, if we can, or to at least assist the police and police boards in doing that. We do that through making recommendations directly to police boards on matters of public policy or procedures or to the director of police services or to the minister to examine any legislative training or cultural or systemic issues.

Last year I made 11 recommendations on matters involving E-COMM communications services, firearms calls, sexual assault investigations, the use of trauma-informed practice, items related to cultural significance and use of force, and various workplace culture and other issues associated with respectful workplace cultures.

Quickly, in terms of accessibility…. I’m pleased to advise that we’ve made some progress now on some of those 2019 recommendations on accessibility. We were certainly delayed somewhat by the pandemic, but we built up our capacity. We now have policy and support capacity that we didn’t have before. That’s helping us update our website material and our public-facing material.

[11:25 a.m.]

We have a major initiative to translate all that material into major languages. So that increases accessibility. Certainly, if there are questions on that, the deputy commissioner can answer those as well.

We’ve also been working internally with the Public Service Agency’s business consulting services — and that work continues — to look for best efficiencies and the highest and best use of various resources within the organization. That’s a service that’s available to all government organizations. It’s also available to us as an independent office, and it’s been very helpful.

We, again, were able to, as we…. I never want to say we came out of the pandemic, but as we are where we are, we were able to come together on a renewed strategic planning process. It was well delayed. I’d hoped to have done it at the beginning of my tenure, but it did not occur. We were able to bring our strategic planning process together and update our alignments of our priorities.

As I mentioned, we’ve also established a dedicated data analytics role, which was also a recommendation from the 2019 report. That role supports our overall responsibility, with effective statistical information, to report out. I think this is also an important role when one thinks about the importance of us developing a better understanding of our race-based data in light of the legislation and all of the other factors that relate to that.

Just as a reminder, we continue to examine a variety of resource strategies to use our funds as efficiently and effectively as possible. We use a number of approaches, including auxiliary employees and others. Of course, our employees are allowed, with some limitations, to engage in temporary assignment opportunities for their development.

We’ve also, more recently, brought in — again, with the assistance of the committee — two positions that perform strictly admissibility functions. Now, these are at a different classification than our core analyst functions. That freed up opportunities for analysts to focus on their oversight role. The admissibility, especially when you look at our numbers, can be a significant time pressure. That’s working very well. I think it’s allowed us to provide better qualitative work on the analyst side, and I expect it will improve consistency on the admissibility side of things.

Finally, our current request builds on those efforts, as I’ve noted. Just as a reminder…. We have a piece of legislation where we have very little flexibility in terms of our processes. We are mandated by the legislation itself, not by regulation but by the statute itself, to certain timelines, to overlapping timelines. I don’t like to use the term “conveyor belt,” but it’s a constant, moving system. I have no ability to pause any part of the process. The timelines are prescribed by statute.

Within our budget submission, we are seeking funding for a number of front-line staff and support positions. Depending on the funding that will be provided, that’s about five positions. These resources are intended to support the growth in files that we’ve seen, in terms of the increase in our metrics. They’ll also allow us to build out some of the various support systems we’ve been allowed to build out, including, for example, training, which we’ve built out, and our data analytics capacity.

I’ve talked briefly about the metrics. I don’t think I will go into that anymore. They’re there for you to look at. Suffice to say, we’ve seen a more or less across-the-board increase in our incoming metrics.

Then I’d just point out two things about our physical locations. You’ll see that there’s a request, in out-years, for a space in Vancouver. We’ve identified that to the committee in the past. You’ll see that we’ve pushed that out further again. It’s not in this year’s request.

[11:30 a.m.]

Part of that is because we’d like to deal with our Victoria footprint first but also recognizing…. Going back to the comment about our iterative process, until there’s some certainty as to the size of our catch basin in the Lower Mainland, I didn’t think it prudent to advance that in this fiscal year. That’s something that we would come back to the committee with. But I did want to let you know that that work continues to look at that.

We have outgrown our space here in Victoria, and working with the Representative for Children and Youth and the ombuds office, who has some need for further space, we think we’ve come up with a good submission to increase our needs here, notwithstanding that we have a hybrid flexible work model that we’re going to continue to work on. We do have a need for more space, and we are hopeful that the committee will look at this favourably and will see that it’s a win-win for all the offices.

In our service plan, you’ll see that we’ve made a major commitment to our staffing. We’ve made a major commitment to retention, to training and to the health and wellness of our employees, and we wish to continue that journey. That’s important for a number of reasons.

You’ve heard, no doubt, from other offices about the challenge with staff turnover and retention, but you’ll also see that, as we have evolved to more of a civilian organization, we bring in highly educated people but not necessarily with experience in this milieu. That means we have to invest in their training.

Historically, the organization would hire former police officers and former professional standards investigators, and although we do hire people with that skill set, we hire very much focused on other skill sets as well. The most recent cohort included quite a few folks with master’s degrees in criminology, for example. So we have a hybrid group, but that means we have to invest in training. That means we have to invest in education, because we deal with some highly complex issues.

That, I think, is where I’ll end my comments, and I hope I’ve met my time. We are certainly ready and eager to answer any of your questions.

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

I’ll now invite members of the committee to ask their questions, and the first one is Ben.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Commissioner Peck­nold and your deputy.

I have to say that this evolving Pandora’s box that you kind of keep getting dealt with, with increases and having to staff up, is a challenge.

I guess my question really is…. We’ve given you a lift over the last two years of about 55 percent in your budget for all the different things that you mentioned. The increase this year is up over…. Last year when we talked to you, we talked about…. I mean, we kind of knew that Surrey was coming online and you were staffing up for it. The increase that we’re looking at over what you kind of presented last year is about 13 percent. Subsequently, the lift next year is forecast at 10 percent.

I’m just trying to…. I mean, the idea of this process is to provide to bring certainty, and I know that you have a very structured role in terms of commitment and obligations. So can you give us…? Knowing that you don’t know what’s going to happen with the Solicitor General and Surrey…. But is that…? What’s making these increases, I guess, come to light after we had quite a bit of discussion about this in previous years?

C. Pecknold: Well, the staffing resources that we’re looking at — in terms of, I guess it would be, the 616 amount — relate to our basic projection of what we would need to add to our analyst cadre. Now, that reflects pushing those hirings out further in the year, so next year it’s not necessarily hiring at April 1 for those positions.

The other aspect that’s included in that is…. We’ve been looking at our legal costs, for example, and we think we’re getting to the point where we could see a role for an in-house counsel position, much like they have at the IIO and have at other places. What I’m looking at is: where do we hit that spot where it makes sense to bring resources in-house as opposed to necessarily contracted at other rates?

[11:35 a.m.]

In terms of the overall funding request, this is somewhat reflective of what we probably would expect from the Surrey rollout — because certainly when we submitted this to you, it was pre-election — but also with respect to what we anticipated we were going to need in light of our continued growth rate of inputs as well.

I am often uncomfortable with the way that this is a bit of a bouncing ball. We’re just making our best efforts based on all of these inputs, in terms of our increase in inputs — which did take me by a bit of a surprise this year, I will say; that’s a pretty significant year-over-year increase — and what we were anticipating to come out of the Surrey increases.

In terms of long-term trajectory, I would say that, all things being equal, if the transition in Surrey continues, our main needs beyond this year will be, potentially, outreach positions located in the Lower Mainland — that’s in our long-term planning — and possibly a footprint in the Lower Mainland, as I alluded to earlier. But this request really relates to FTE functions.

I guess I would add that, all things being equal, I don’t see the trajectory to be continuing to rise. I’d see it to be stabilizing and levelling out and plateauing.

B. Stewart: Thank you, Commissioner.

J. Routledge (Chair): Any other questions? I’m not seeing any hands on the screen.

Okay. With that, I’d like to thank you, Commissioner, and your staff for the work that you do and for your very thorough presentation. We do recognize that in making a presentation to us and engaging with us, you are trying your best to predict a situation, going forward, that is kind of unpredictable.

We also really appreciate how sensitive you are to the size of the requests that you’ve been making over the last few years and going out of your way to put them in context for us. We also recognize that you do your work in circumstances that are quite public and to which there are a lot of opinions about the nature of what you’re investigating.

With that, I’d like to thank you again on behalf of the committee and say goodbye to you for today.

C. Pecknold: Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

J. Routledge (Chair): Okay. Those are our presentations for this morning. We will reconvene on Wednesday, October 26, to hear from the Office of the Representative for Children and Youth and Elections B.C.

With that, I’ll now entertain a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:38 a.m.