The committee met at 8:41 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Mike Starchuk. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

I would like to acknowledge that we’re meeting in Vancouver today on the territories of the Coast Salish peoples: the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Take the time today to reflect on the lands that you are on and the lands that you work, live and play on.

I would also like to welcome everyone who is listening and participating in today’s meetings.

Our committee is currently seeking input on the next provincial budget. British Columbians can share their views by making written comments, and details are available on our website at bcleg.ca/FGSbudget. The deadline for input is 2 p.m. on Friday, June 16. We’re also holding a number of public meetings to hear from British Columbians about their priorities.

All audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website, and a complete transcript will be posted. We will carefully consider all input to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be included in the budget in 2024. The committee intends to release its report in August.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Tom Shypitka, Deputy Chair and MLA for Kootenay East.

R. Leonard: I’m Ronna-Rae Leonard, MLA for Courtenay-Comox.

B. Banman: Bruce Banman, the MLA for the riding of Abbotsford South.

S. Chant: Susie Chant, MLA, North Vancouver–Seymour.

A. Walker: Adam Walker, MLA for Parksville-Qual­icum.

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

B. Stewart: Ben Stewart, Kelowna West.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Assisting the committee today are Karan Riarh, Emma Curtis from the Parliamentary Committees Office, and Amanda Heffelfinger, David Smith and Danielle Suter from Hansard Services.

Each participant will have five minutes to speak, followed up with five minutes of questions from each of the committee members. When we get down to the questions, we’ll ask each of the committee members to have brief questions and provide the answers from the presenters as brief as possible so that we can get as much in in that five-minute period.

This morning we will be starting with Carole Gordon from the B.C. Teachers Federation.

Carole, you can make your way up to the microphone. You will have five minutes to provide us with your introductions, and then we will have five minutes worth of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours, Carole.

Budget Consultation Presentations

B.C. TEACHERS FEDERATION

C. Gordon: Thank you very much. Hi. My name is Carole Gordon. I’m the first vice-president of the B.C. Teachers Federation, and I’m here to present our 2024 funding brief.

British Columbia’s public education system has been chronically underfunded for decades. When a problem be­comes chronic, we know it can feel insurmountable. That’s why our funding refocuses on three goals we believe are achievable over the next three years.

We know that government is juggling labour shortages across sectors, but as you’re making decisions about where to focus limited resources, I hope you keep in mind the unique role that public education and teachers play in a healthy democracy.

The social and economic benefits of a well-funded public education system range from decreased poverty to increases and improvement in equity, employment, civic engagement and physical and mental health.

Our teachers provided a critical service to families during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now they are reporting even higher workloads with increasingly complex classroom demands, and they need relief.

[8:45 a.m.]

It will take a long-term, systemic fiscal strategy to re­solve the impacts of our staffing and funding shortages and build the supportive learning environments our students deserve. We believe the following investments will anchor that recovery.

Our first recommendation is a recruitment fund to relieve the shortage of certified teachers and fill projected labour needs. This year we conducted a random sample survey of our members. More than four out of five reported feeling effects of staffing shortages in significant ways. These impacts included higher workloads, less time to prepare lessons and skipping personal leave or sick days they felt they needed. The most reported impact was not being able to get necessary supports for their students, and this should concern everyone.

Chronic shortages have led more school districts to hire uncertified personnel to fill teaching gaps in classrooms, and that’s a worrying trend. The situation is only projected to get worse without intervention.

B.C.’s educational services sector is one of the top five industry groups expecting major job vacancies in the next decade, according to the 2023 labour market outlook report. Your own forecasting shows nearly 65,000 more education workers will be needed to meet rising student enrolment and retiree replacement alone.

We urgently need an accelerated province-wide ap­proach to complement initiatives like the future skills ready program. Targeted funding for teacher recruitment would enable more accessible and affordable teacher training programs and undergraduate degrees, student loan forgiveness programs, waiving initial certification application fees and more.

Our second recommendation is the creation of a fund for the retention of experienced teachers. Recruitment can only help so much if teachers aren’t staying in the profession. In our survey, 16 percent of respondents said they would likely leave teaching within the next two years. While about one-third said retirement was a factor, more than half reported poor working conditions or mental health concerns. Another 36 percent were discouraged by a lack of support for students with disabilities and diverse needs.

One way we can make teaching a more sustainable career option is by funding mentorship programs. Dedicated collaboration time helps new teachers feel supported, develop professionally and build stronger working relationships that reduce feelings of isolation, lessen workloads and ultimately provide students with better support and instruction.

Targeted teacher retention funding would enable more collaboration time during instructional hours, dedicated remuneration for experienced teachers who support new ones through mentorship programs, incentives for teachers who are approaching retirement eligibility to stay, and addressing the diverse needs of rural and remote communities, including unique housing and travel needs.

Third, we are recommending that government fully close the gap between the provincial funding provided to school districts for inclusive education and the actual cost. For years, the B.C. government has dedicated far less money for special education than districts need. As a result, districts are forced to choose between reducing special education staffing and services or redirecting funds from other operational areas that need it.

In the 2021-22 school year, the total provincial special education supplement was less than $700 million; how­ever, school districts spent more than $1 billion. The consequences are felt in classrooms and by our most vulnerable students. In our survey of teachers, only 13 percent felt that students with disabilities or diverse needs were having their needs met.

To create a truly inclusive public education system, $350 million in emergency funding is needed to eliminate the shortfall. This funding would enable meeting the needs of all students with disabilities and diverse needs, including those with high-incidence designations and those who have not yet been designated, and decreasing wait times for the assessments families need to access special education support. Special education funding benefits the whole education system because it means resources don’t need to be pulled from other needed areas.

Thank you for your time, and I’m happy to take questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Carole.

S. Chant: Thank you so much for your presentation. I think I heard you said $7 million was funded for closing the gap in the special education areas, so $7 million was funded and $1 billion was spent?

C. Gordon: It’s $700 million. We’re seeing that, consistent over the five years between 2017 and 2022, it seems to be in the $300 to $350 million range of underfunding that’s not there.

S. Chant: Okay. When you say wait times for assessments, this is to get people so they can have an IEP done?

C. Gordon: Yeah. When students don’t have designations, we work very hard to still support their needs. But the designation itself provides important information and actually results in additional funding.

[8:50 a.m.]

S. Chant: Okay. Thank you.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Carole.

Where is that extra $300 million coming from that the school districts have to come up with?

C. Gordon: They’re usually pulling it from other areas, so it could…. Any district is going to figure out ways to do that. Sometimes it’s laying off other support teachers or it’s not funding the supports in other areas. But there is usually a shortfall.

Usually what it results in is not necessarily pulling that, but there’s a shortage of services for the students that actually needed that money to provide the supports. Hence that feeling of teachers — the 13 percent that said they feel that there’s a gap and that they’re not actually able to meet those needs because of that funding shortage. I think there’s a direct link there.

R. Leonard: Thanks for sharing all of this.

We had a presentation the other day around students with dyslexia and the lack of programming for them. Could you just speak to that within this special needs gap?

C. Gordon: I can’t speak to dyslexia in particular, but I can say that the range of diverse needs that students have across all designations or non-designations…. There are lots of things that don’t have a designation that still require additional supports. What we’re seeing during the teacher shortage is that those supports are often pulled to provide coverage in other areas.

We need both. The teacher shortage is a broad spectrum of teachers to cover classrooms and to fill classrooms that are regular enrolling and taking attendance–types of class­rooms, but also those specialist teachers. So it’s not limited to just one category of teachers that we need. We need those specialist teachers that provide those supports to do that work as well.

R. Leonard: I think the piece that you said that relates to this question is that they’re not designated. So there’s the question of whether or not there are supports.

C. Gordon: Yeah. We think the special education funding…. In the block funding, there’s funding for the designations, but there are those waiting to be designated, as well, that still continue to require those supports. But I can’t speak specifically to the designations for dyslexia.

We’re also waiting, significantly, right now on an inclusive education policy to be released as well. So I can’t speak to that specifically at this point.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation, Carole. Can you expand a bit more on the 53.4 percent of inadequate work conditions and give us some examples so we can better appreciate the challenges that teachers are facing?

C. Gordon: Yeah. A lot of it, with the teacher shortage, is that we’re finding, as we said, that some people aren’t taking their leaves when they need them. They’re coming in when they’re sick. Teachers do that anyways, often. We feel that connection to our students, and sometimes we don’t want to be away.

In a teacher shortage, where we have not enough teachers on call to provide that service, specialist teachers — it could be counsellors, it could be teacher-librarians, anyone who’s non-enrolling that already doesn’t have their own classroom and provides a special service to students in the school — are often pulled to provide coverage to do that. The working conditions means that not only did your work not get done that day, or the prep time that you had that you lost and that you have a hard time to get…. It can impact because now you’re planning to find that time later on to be able to do that workload.

The specialist teachers who are providing the specialist services — those minutes are lost. They don’t get that time back with those particular students. So the workload increases just for the specialist teachers themselves, who feel that they’re trying to fill that gap somewhere outside instructional hours, and the teachers themselves who, now those students didn’t get that support, are also trying to fill that gap as well, in their own way, within the classroom.

That increased workload, that not meeting students’ needs is, I think, quite significant. Part of that is the mental health but also the actual unmet needs.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Carole, thank you very much for your presentation and for making it so clear how important teachers are to all of us that are out there and the extra work that you do that is in the system.

C. Gordon: Thank you very much. Five minutes go very fast.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes, it does.

C. Gordon: Enjoy your multiple five-minute presentations.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes.

Next up we have Tracy Loffler from the British Columbia School Trustees Association.

Tracy, you have five minutes to present, and then we have five minutes for questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

B.C. SCHOOL TRUSTEES ASSOCIATION

T. Loffler: Okay. Thank you very much.

[8:55 a.m.]

Good morning. Thank you for having me. I’m Tracy Loffler, the vice-president of the B.C. School Trustees Association.

Our first recommendation is increased funding for inclusive education. Boards of education have prioritized funding for inclusive education for decades, but the funding formula for the inclusion of students with diverse needs has never been sufficient. Additional funding to support students in various ministry classifications falls short of what districts are actually providing to students.

For example, should a child require a full-time support worker, the district is responsible for funding the costs of all wages and benefits, which is nowhere near the equivalent to the funding received for the student. Furthermore, students entering kindergarten without designations often require supports that are unfunded due to the lack of designation.

Districts are also required to ensure that the language in collective agreements is honoured, and there is disparity between the reality of inclusion in classrooms today and the outdated language created many years ago. The formula needs to be re-evaluated and properly funded if we’re going to be able to continue to support students, with attention to those with unique or exceptional needs.

Recommendation 2 is additional funding to offset inflationary cost increases. Districts have experienced significant inflationary costs in the last two years, coming out of the pandemic. Larger urban districts are cutting programs, and many smaller districts are pulling significant funds from their reserves and, in many cases, these reserves have already been depleted.

Rural and remote districts face additional cost pressures, as the costs are often higher due to the nature of transporting goods to these areas. Supply chain shortages resulting from business slowdowns during the pandemic have increased the cost for most supplies that districts require to support students, particularly for IT software and hardware, custodial supplies and food. In addition, while electricity and natural gas costs have increased in line with the general inflation rate, other utility costs have risen by over 5 percent in many areas, such as water and sewer, garbage and recycling.

The B.C. consumer price index in April 2023 was 4.3 percent higher than in April 2022, and with no funding to supports to offset these additional costs caused by rising inflation, districts are being challenged to balance their budgets, and funding that should be going to students is being diverted to cover inflation.

Recommendation 3 is a need for increased capital funding. The concern for boards of education arises due to the chronic underfunding of capital projects and maintenance. Districts are asked to use operating funds to cost-share in projects, and as that cost-sharing is being determined, projects are delayed and costs increase. Government’s priorities of addressing climate change, accessibility, inclusion and reconciliation with Indigenous communities are directly tied to capital projects, and these priorities are not able to be properly addressed when operating funds are relied on in the absence of adequate funding for capital.

With respect to new capital projects, there needs to be sufficient funding and processes for the proactive acquisition of school sites. This is imperative, given the cost and availability of sites and a board’s ability to pay for the land. New builds are further impacted by current area standards, which have proven to be too restrictive to accommodate many government-funded enhanced school programs and supports that students rely on. It may be noted that a request to review these standards has been identified as a priority by our association at our April AGM.

Due to the many delays in new build projects, portables are purchased as a temporary measure, and the cost of portables and their installation is the responsibility of school districts. Once again, this funding is coming out of operations, negatively impacting student success. For existing buildings, districts require additional funds for deferred maintenance, renewal plans, adequate ongoing maintenance and aging infrastructure.

In conclusion, our presentation has outlined key areas of concern, such as the need for increased funding for inclusive education, additional funding to offset inflationary cost pressures and the increased need for capital funding. These are pressing issues that require immediate attention and financial commitment. We urge the committee to carefully consider our submission and prioritize adequate funding for our schools, because we know that investing in education not only benefits our students but also contributes to the economic and social development of our province.

We thank the committee for their time and consideration, and we look forward to continued collaboration and meaningful action to address the funding challenges in our education system, ultimately working towards a stronger, more inclusive British Columbia.

Thank you. Happy to take questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Tracy, for your presentation.

S. Chant: Thanks very much. You’ve got three very concrete asks — excellent.

[9:00 a.m.]

Can you tell me, for two and three, what a dollar figure would look like, approximately?

T. Loffler: For capital funding, our association produced a report. I believe it was a couple of years ago. We identified over $2.4 billion in unaddressed capital funding. That was a number of years ago, considering we’ve added 200,000 people to B.C. in the last two years. I believe, of those, the first out would probably be between 28,000 and 44,000 in the K-12 system.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. I just wanted to dive a little deeper into the portable situation and how it’s in the financial plan. Is it an actual capital asset, a capital cost, or is it on the expense side? I believe it’s on the expense….

T. Loffler: I believe it’s on the expense side. I can’t speak directly to how it gets accounted, but it just comes out of operational funding.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Operational expenses, which is a big deal.

T. Loffler: It is a huge deal when you consider that the cost of a portable for purchase and installation is around $300,000.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Which would be…. Well, it’s not great, but it would be a little different if it’s put into the basket of capital costs and capital assets because it would come out of a different fund, right?

T. Loffler: Exactly.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): On the expense side, it’s more of a hit.

T. Loffler: Currently we get funding per student, and that funding per student all goes into one pot. This general operating fund — 85 percent of that is usually wages. Most districts — 85 percent are wages. But portables will come out of that additionally. It comes out of the same pot, if you will.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Do you have an idea of what that, about 60 districts, would equal? How much that expense is?

T. Loffler: I don’t, but I could get back to you on that.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): That would be great. Thanks.

A. Walker: Thank you, Tracy, for the presentation here. Looking at your first ask with the inflationary adjustments…. I’m trying to remember the number; I think it was $600 million that was increased funding for school districts. I’m just wondering if you know, off the top of your head, what the funding increase was from ’22-23 to ’23-24, and what that number should have been to keep up with the inflationary challenges you’re seeing.

T. Loffler: I don’t believe that the actual dollar amount per student increased in the last budget. It stayed the same. The per-pupil funding stayed the same in the 2022-2023 budget.

A. Walker: But ’23-24, do you have those numbers?

T. Loffler: I don’t have those numbers yet.

A. Walker: Okay, thanks.

B. Stewart: Tracy, just in terms of that report that you cited for Susie’s question about capital, does that include the seismic upgrades? We had a presentation in Victoria the other day….

T. Loffler: Yes. There was a breakdown, and I believe it was submitted also to last year’s Select Standing Committee, because…. We’re actually creating another working group to address the capital problem within our association. It did outline the numbers between the carbon-neutral programs and the seismic upgrades, etc.

B. Stewart: Can I just ask a follow on?

M. Starchuk (Chair): You can try.

B. Stewart: Sorry. Does that include…? Carol and I were talking about a particular school that we’ve been working on for almost two decades to try to get rebuilt. Does it include rebuilding of old schools that are basically just teardowns and need to be…?

T. Loffler: Yes. There’s significant aging infrastructure in my own school district. Our high school was built in the 1950s, and they are not adequate learning environments anymore for the way that we actually educate kids now. I can get the amount for portables that we’ve got. I don’t have that off the top of my head. The numbers you’d asked for the 2024 — how much that would need to be provincially and….

M. Starchuk (Chair): You’re going to get one more question. Henry.

H. Yao: Thank you so much. That’s perfect. I’m going to piggyback on Adam’s question from earlier. Based on your comment, there was no increase in per-student spending for quite a while now.

T. Loffler: For last year’s budget, our per-student funding was around $7,000, $8,000 a kid-ish, and it didn’t increase last year.

H. Yao: What amount would you like to see it increased to?

[9:05 a.m.]

T. Loffler: A lot. Sorry. Again, I don’t have that number off the top of my head. But I can take a look at it again. It gets a bit confusing because there is the per-student funding. Then there are so many different special purpose funds, also, that come in to cover different things. It’s a very convoluted budget.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Tracy, thank you very much for your presentation this morning. It has really opened up the world of math.

T. Loffler: Yeah, school district budgets. I have a bit of an accounting background on school district budgets, and statements of financial information are definitely different.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes. Thank you very much.

T. Loffler: Thank you for having me.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next speaker is Tunya Audain.

Tunya, you have five minutes to make a presentation, and then we have five minutes to ask questions or provide comments.

The floor is yours.

TUNYA AUDAIN

T. Audain: Okay. I’m hard of hearing, so I may ask for repetition of questions when it comes to that point. I am Tunya Audain. I’m here independently to talk about education. I have a 50-year experience in involvement in education advocacy. I’ve been presenting to these committees since 1974 about a shortage of services, shortage of welcoming attitudes to parents, and so on.

I have basically felt that parents are the left-out portion of decision-making which should be happening in British Columbia. I do follow the BCTF presentation, and I’m pleased to hear that they’re interested in increased funding for special needs services. This is where a parent’s voice really is left out. I’m glad to hear that, also, the BCSTA is asking for more funding for special services.

Again, parents’ voices are really needed in that area, where there are scarce resources and scarce funding and scarce attitudinal attitudes to really helping out individuals who present little challenges to the system. I have been involved since the ’70s. In the ’70s, we were able to, as a parent advocacy group….

At that time, we had a group in Vancouver called Citizen Action to Reform Education, CARE. We felt one of the most important things we needed done to get parents to really feel welcome and have a place in the schools and not always following, people protesting against consumer involvement…. We developed a parents’ rights document, and I have it here.

I feel that that’s my main presentation: to ask for more acknowledgment of the place for parents in the school systems in British Columbia. We feel those rights should be developed and accepted at the provincial level from the Ministry of Education and also in every one of the 60 school boards in this province.

I just feel that, generally, whether it’s special needs or general needs, about curriculum or education or special subjects or even the average student, which is not necessarily…. The average student may not necessarily be able to go to university after they’re finished. There’s a lack of vocational services and dedicated ways in helping people who are at different levels of capacity in the system.

When we talk about education reforms, and there are various education reform initiatives that come up from time to time, there’s usually a lot of protest and opposition from status quo people, people in the establishment and people who work in the system.

A very extraordinary experience happened in Chilliwack, and I mentioned that in the written portions which you’ve all received ahead of time. A trustee there wanted to have a parents’ rights document produced in that district. She said there were various areas in the system where there were parent rights mentioned here and there and everywhere but not consolidated in one place.

[9:10 a.m.]

She felt that if there was one place where parents know that they’re welcome, that these are the rights they have, they would feel much more empowered to be involved.

I find it very interesting about the nature of parent rights being absent from documents. If you tap into ChatGPT, “What is the status of parent involvement in schools?” they’ll say, obviously, in general, parents have the right to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: (1) choose their schools, whether it’s public, private or home-schooling; (2) be involved; (3) access their children’s educational records; (4) make decisions in a child’s academic and extracurricular activities; and (5) advocate for their child’s needs and rights in the education system.

I find it very interesting that it is common knowledge in artificial intelligence sources but not in our regular programs in British Columbia, in the education system.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Tunya.

When you mentioned ChatGPT…. I often wonder whether or not I actually will need to be here in the future, someday.

T. Audain: You will need it for fact-checking. Nothing more important than fact-checking.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Very good.

I have a question to start us off while the other members are there. Can you…? With regards to your parents rights and what you talk about, what is the difference between what you’re referencing and what would be considered a PAC issue?

T. Audain: A what issue?

M. Starchuk (Chair): PAC, the parent advisory committees.

T. Audain: Very big difference. Parent advisory councils — I know I spoke about that in previous efforts in this province — very similarly appear to be like the old PTA, and the old PTA was just part of the hierarchy of the institution of the education system.

The same thing with the PACs. They do not have much power. They’re just an outreach part of the school system that makes it function smoothly in the schools. They hesitate to talk about individual concerns or grievances of parents.

H. Yao: I apologize. I actually realize I’m going to piggyback on exactly what the Chair was asking.

I’m reading your submission, and they choose words…. Basically being involved in children’s education, such as volunteering at school. What capacity? Obviously, parents…. I assume they are already able to engage in schools by volunteering from time to time.

Is there a specific capacity you’re looking for that will extend what parents are doing? Or are you focusing more on an advocacy component when you’re referring to volunteering at school by involving children’s education?

T. Audain: That’s interesting. I think you’re talking about the different levels of parent involvement. Okay.

Actually, there are about four different levels. The average parent simply wants a relationship about their child. That’s where we need them more than anywhere else: that they’re supportive and helping to alert if there are any situations or drawbacks. Different levels of volunteering in the school also are there. They help in whatever it is, either individually in classrooms and for students, but also in the comfort of aspects of the school.

Then there are the advocacy groups. Very rarely you’ll find some parents brave enough to go out and do outstanding advocacy work. That’s difficult.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Tunya. Great presentation. It’s unique, and I like it.

Thinking about school records…. You mentioned something about school records.

T. Audain: Yes.

[9:15 a.m.]

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I’m wondering where you sit with freedom of information on retaining students school records — when they should be released, when they should be destroyed, when they should be kept in perpetuity. Where do you sit with kids records?

T. Audain: That’s not a question I’ve really talked about or thought about too much, except in the rare instances like what you hear about in the United States, where there are school shootings, where past records have been important to be investigated and looked at closely.

The Sandy Hook happening was unfortunate. Past records were looked at, and they showed a historic absence of school services from kindergarten to grade 12. That’s where retention of records are important for the system.

For parents to have access to records is important, because that’s on a daily basis and in the lifetime of the child.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Okay, right on. Thanks.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Tunya.

You talked about the parent advisory committees and PTAs. I was wondering. Are you suggesting or do you question the system that we have with electing school boards in terms of their representation of the parents and the students? Like, do you not see that that system is the way to effectively…?

T. Audain: No.

B. Stewart: Well, I’m asking you, because you’re basically saying another layer of input.

T. Audain: You bring up a very touchy point that we don’t have much time to talk about. I think the school board system is the weak link in the responsiveness aspect of schools in British Columbia. I have seen school board elections where they’re very stacked in favour of endorsements from teacher unions and not fairly…. And there’s conflict of interest when teachers are allowed to run in school boards. I think that’s wrong.

Also, as in the Chilliwack experience, it was very unfair that the teacher union had a long presentation by silent email to the school board opposing the parent rights motion, and I felt that they had an unfair influence. School board elections are a big question in my mind, the way they’re held.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Tunya, thank you very much for your presentation. As the Chair of this committee, I will say that I wish more British Columbians would show up with their personal opinions, their expertise and their knowledge to come forward to us and speak in the way that you’ve spoken with us today. Thank you.

T. Audain: I cherish your opinion. I hope it’s prominent in decision-making from today’s representations, because we need to see the parent rights focused, championed and upfront so parents all feel welcome, and that will help you bring forth more parent involvement.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next, we have Michael Thomas from school district 43.

Michael, as you make your way to the table, you have five minutes for your presentation. We have five minutes for questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

SCHOOL DISTRICT 43, COQUITLAM

M. Thomas: Well, good morning. My name is Michael Thomas, chair of the board of education for school district 43, Coquitlam.

There are three main themes, which I’m going to touch on this morning: supporting vulnerable students, sustainable and equitable funding and school district capital projects.

We recommend increasing support for vulnerable students, including those with special needs, mental health challenges, learning loss, and those in need of CommunityLINK services. The funding formulas for students with special needs and CommunityLINK are significantly underfunded and are not consistent across B.C.

There is an urgent demand for additional mental health supports for students, and we are concerned that this health service is being downloaded onto the school system. The rise in students grappling with anxiety, depression and other challenges is well documented, and we are concerned that without supports, these students may simply slip through the cracks.

Funding for early identification of special needs and applying appropriate supports is crucial for student success. We recommend that standards of appropriate support be established for students with special needs and that standard be transparent and fully funded, without undermining the overall funding.

[9:20 a.m.]

As a result of the pandemic, many students have faced challenges in achieving academic success and have fallen well below established benchmarks. With additional funding supports the situation can be mitigated but impacts are expected to last well into the future.

Sustainable and equitable funding. SD 43 has grave concerns over sustainable and equitable funding and with respect to our district’s ability to meet the needs of students. We do appreciate government fully funding this year’s collective agreement settlement. This was welcome, following several rounds of underfunding collective agreements, which translated into reduced funding for the classroom.

However, we would like to raise the issue of the recent changes to the paid sick leave provisions in the Employment Standards Act. SD 43 was required to redirect classroom funding in the amount of $1 million annually due to the underfunded ESA changes and is predicting an overall annualized shortfall of $5.5 million next year.

Other cost pressures continue to accumulate, and with inflation hitting a 40 year high, the non-funding of inflationary pressures is becoming a significant issue for school districts. Overall, the lack of sustainable and equitable funding further drains the education system of funds that would otherwise be directed to the classroom.

School district capital projects. We believe that unfunded school district contributions towards capital projects should be limited. Requiring school districts to contribute funds designated for student needs into capital projects is at odds with providing a successful education system.

Most SD 43 schools are full. Our region is growing. Immigration has increased significantly. Most concerning is that several schools continue to have dangerously high seismic earthquake ratings.

SD 43 has allocated local funds towards several capital projects to address our district’s growing needs and to meet class size and composition requirements. Over the past two years, our best effort at compliance has added over 70 classroom spaces, including approximately 20 portables, all locally funded by the school district with classroom dollars. This has also minimized the space available for on-site child care at a time when the urgent need for increasing access has been identified within our communities.

When capital funds are not sufficient, they must be redirected out of the classroom to pay for land, portables and building additions. Recently SD 43 was required to redirect $25 million towards a new joint middle secondary school in a rapidly growing community with insufficient facilities. These funds are being subsidized by redirecting $13 million from classroom operating budgets and $12 million from capital which had been set aside for other urgently needed projects. This contribution becomes even more concerning, in that $7 million of it had to be earmarked from future years’ budgets, creating a structural deficit for us.

Since I do have a bit more time…. There’s one item that’s kind of cross-cutting. I alluded to it earlier. It is the significant increase in immigration this year.

We are happy to welcome new members to our community. We’ve had almost 2,000 ministry funding–eligible international students join our district this year. Our schools were already very full, and this has exacerbated that issue. In addition, approximately 350 of them have arrived since the September 30 funding deadline. We are providing services to them, but unfortunately, they don’t come with any funding. This is further exacerbating several challenges that I alluded to.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Michael, thank you very much for your presentation.

Also, thank you for adding on that little bit. I think it’s important to hear.

H. Yao: I asked the previous presenter, and I would love to ask the same question to you as well.

There seems to be, attached to per-student funding, an increased need there. Do you have a number of what you guys are getting now and what you’re hoping to get? Are you hoping that maybe we can attach it to the CPI as well? That way, the increase matches the inflation pressure.

M. Thomas: Yeah. As Tracy mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to actually pull the numbers apart. Our per-pupil is somewhere between $7,000 and $8,000. I don’t recall the number offhand.

Two years ago, despite inflation being 6 or 7 percent, the per-pupil amount did not change at all, year over year. That created quite a crunch for us. We’ve had to draw down our accumulated surplus to very low levels.

[9:25 a.m.]

Our budgeting requires that we have some accumulated surplus that we can roll into future years. We’ve had quite a robust accumulated-surplus policy that we’re very proud of, in that any surplus automatically goes into the following three years’ budget, in order to help smooth those ups and downs that we see in the system.

S. Chant: I’m going to ask a really silly question. School district 43 is…?

M. Thomas: Coquitlam.

S. Chant: Coquitlam. Thank you.

M. Thomas: We actually service the whole Tri-Cities.

S. Chant: Okay. Thank you for that. Your name?

M. Thomas: Michael Thomas, board chair.

S. Chant: That’s a good start. What I’m hearing from you is that when you get new kids in through the school year, you don’t see funding for them until the following year.

M. Thomas: Correct. In addition, there is an opportunity, mid-year, occasionally, for supplemental funding for special needs. However, a number of the international students that are coming in are coming with needs that are undocumented. Even if they should be eligible, they have undocumented needs. So we don’t have the paperwork to back the claims.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. I thought there was a distinction between people who immigrate versus international students, who add resources. They actually pay. They’re kind of private-pay students.

M. Thomas: It’s kind of a tongue twister.

The cohort I was speaking about was international ministry funding–eligible students. Their parents are here on work permits or study permits, but effectively, when they come to us, they are counted as domestic students. That is different from an international student in the traditional sense, to whom we do charge fees. Part of the assumption is that they’ll have higher needs and that those are funded by the fees they’re paying.

R. Leonard: Do you have international students?

M. Thomas: Yes, we do.

R. Leonard: Private-pay. What percentage of your…?

M. Thomas: I believe that in the current school year, we have approximately 1,100 or 1,200.

R. Leonard: This is what kind of a percentage?

M. Thomas: Our overall student count is 31,000.

R. Leonard: So 3 percent.

M. Thomas: Yeah, you got it.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Are there any other comments or questions?

Michael, thank you very much for your presentation and for clarifying what school district Coquitlam or Tri-Cities belongs to.

Next we have Elaine Yamamoto from Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Katzie Community Literacy Committee.

Elaine, you have five minutes to make your presentation, and then there are five minutes for questions and/or comments.

MAPLE RIDGE, PITT MEADOWS, KATZIE
COMMUNITY LITERACY COMMITTEE

E. Yamamoto: Thank you for allowing me to present to you today. My name is Elaine Yamamoto, and in my community of Maple Ridge, I hold two roles that are relevant to today’s presentation.

In my role as the community outreach coordinator for the past decade or so, I work to increase the awareness of literacy issues and help provide assistance to adults with low literacy. I’m also a second-term school trustee and current chair of the board of education in Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows.

I would like to thank Michael, actually. Our board will submit a detailed written outline of our needs. I think Michael pretty much outlined it for us. It mirrors Coquitlam quite a bit. We have the capital investment needs and additional supports for students with diverse needs. Again, what we also need is adequate funding to address the rapidly changing technological landscape in education.

Today, in this dual role, my ask is that you guarantee access to basic education in correctional centres across B.C. by adequately funding K-to-12 education as a special program fund for districts that have a correctional centre.

The challenge that our board had in limiting our formal written request to three critical areas just illustrates the breadth of the challenges that are faced by the K-to-12 system. It’s really no surprise that secure program funding for K-to-12 education in ten correctional centres that are scattered across the province would have difficulty coming to the forefront and be a focus.

[9:30 a.m.]

As a trustee just beginning my second term, I’d like to acknowledge that there are many before me that have come and looked for this kind of support for our teachers in our correctional centres.

In October 2020, the B.C. School Trustees Association did pass a motion supporting that the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General and the Ministry of Education allocate special-purpose funding to school districts for year-round education services. In subsequent correspondence, we did have the two ministries acknowledge the need. There were a number of meetings, but changes happen. Again, this special program for ten areas across the province…. It is very hard to have it part of the focus.

The minimal funding that is provided now is based on the adult learning model, which is not suitable for the unique situation in correctional centres. It’s course-based funding. The population changes from day to day. The ros­ter can change from week to week. The teachers are scrambling as it is to be a teacher, a counsellor, learning support, post-secondary adviser, accountant, now, and liaison to two ministries. They are dealing with people with barriers, such as mental health, addictions, victims of abuse, learning disabilities, impulse and anger control, residential school experiences and intergenerational trauma. They are definitely a special breed of educator that take this on.

One of our incredibly dedicated prison teachers, or jail teachers, I think they call themselves, is Doug Fraser. He’s just recently retired out of Chilliwack. He presented about his tracking of graduations and the recidivism rates. Over his 13 years, he calculates that it was about $45 million plus that he saved through his 147 grads, 72 of them not returning.

My hope is that presenting to the committee today will just help to ensure that this provincial cross-ministerial issue will not be overlooked again and will be addressed in the 2024-25 budget.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I will be the first one to admit that I’ve never heard of the term “jail teachers.”

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Elaine. That was quite a fascinating presentation. Similar to the Chair, I have minimal understanding in this area. So thank you for educating us about this.

Are you looking at more of a GED, graduate equivalent, or are you thinking that because individuals are in the corrections facilities and often, as a past person mentioned before, there are a lot of special needs and special training, you’re looking more for a comprehensive preparation of…?

E. Yamamoto: A Dogwood. For the Dogwood, so that they can continue on with their life. Many of the people that, of course, find themselves in this situation struggled through their childhood and youth for various reasons. Hence, there’s a very high correlation of people who do not have their secondary school graduation level, Dogwood, who then find themselves in the correctional system.

H. Yao: You mentioned somebody who has already been teaching in the correctional facility, and there is funding for it. Does that person have any kind of experience, or maybe a report you can share with the committee? I assume that the person has a very unique teaching experience that deals with special needs, special learning disabilities or population differences that maybe can empower our education system as well.

E. Yamamoto: Once a year, the teachers that are in our correctional centres do get together. Throughout the year, they meet remotely. They share their curriculum. It is really case by case, it seems.

[9:35 a.m.]

First they have to…. The adult course-by-course funding model means that if they come into the corrections system in September, they have until September 30, when the 1701 numbers have to be submitted for funding, to try and make connections with the new faces, to create a trust, which is the main challenge, and then get the students to commit to the courses.

A year-round program and a special…. I keep saying program, because then the funding could sit with a district, just in ten districts. It just means that we have the bodies in the corrections centre, people who are dedicated. The inmates know that in June, they’re not going to disappear, necessarily, so enrolment drops off because: “Why bother? Someone’s going to leave me in the lurch again.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): Susie and then Ronna-Rae.

E. Yamamoto: I’m not sure I actually answered the question.

S. Chant: This is new ground entirely for me, so thank you very much for bringing it forward. If one would just…. To clarify for me, what you’re asking for is the school board to have a obligated set of teachers that work in the correctional system and have a recognized budget to do that work.

E. Yamamoto: Yes, a special program budget so that it’s not chasing….

S. Chant: No, so that they know what they’ve got, and they also have some continuity.

E. Yamamoto: Yes, exactly.

S. Chant: Okay. My perception is that every person in corrections, their needs are going to be different, so it’s not structured the way a school would be. You need a lot of flexibility within that budget to be able to apply it per person, really.

E. Yamamoto: Yeah, and one concept, not at the administrative level…. How it’s handled would be up to our staff, but I do know we need two specialists, like a generalist and math and science in order to graduate people, right?

M. Starchuk (Chair): If we can, we can go to Ronna-Rae.

S. Chant: Do they come out with Evergreen as well, or just Dogwood?

E. Yamamoto: That one I couldn’t tell you, but I think Dogwood is the goal.

S. Chant: Evergreen is a possibility.

E. Yamamoto: Yes. Our district has very few Evergreen graduates. The goal is Dogwood.

R. Leonard: Just very quickly, this is very complex. I really, really appreciate…. You can tell we’re all eager to learn more. A lot of people who are in the prison system are not there for that long. It takes so long to….

What kind of connections do you have after release? Are you involved with the transition planning teams to connect them with literacy services once they’re out?

E. Yamamoto: Thank you. It is only two years minus a day, so it can be, unfortunately, often a revolving door if someone leaves and then they come back and they continue.

There could be connection with our continuing education programs in the district. They don’t necessarily reside in the district, but I do know that the jail teachers as they call themselves — I don’t know why I’m uncomfortable with the term — do facilitate. That’s another piece of their work, to facilitate that transition as they leave the system, or between correctional centres. That was one thing. They make a connection, and the person is transferred.

There is an amazing presentation — I think was February of 2020; the Chilliwack school board has it still online — of a young man that was in and out of the system for 15 years and graduated through this program in 2017. He was assisted to register for carpentry and was out and providing for his young family. He spoke so eloquently as to his past failures in the education system and how he found connection in corrections.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Elaine, I think I can sum it up for the committee. This has been a very interesting presentation. I would ask that when you make written submission, that you consider some of the comments that came from the committee here. You can further give us the information that’s there, especially the last piece that you talked about as well, so we can hear from that.

E. Yamamoto: Would it be appropriate to provide the link to the meeting itself?

[9:40 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes, it would be. Absolutely.

At this point in time, I think the interest is piqued. You used the term “jail teachers,” and it is ingrained in the back of my brain forever. I don’t know what I have to lose to keep that. Nevertheless, I really appreciate the time that you’ve taken with us today.

E. Yamamoto: Thank you. They are a very special breed of educators. I’m just happy to be able to try and support them.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yeah. You’ve done an excellent job.

E. Yamamoto: Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Sussanne Skidmore, the B.C. Federation of Labour.

Sussanne, as you walk up, you have five minutes to make your presentation. We have five minutes to provide questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

B.C. FEDERATION OF LABOUR

S. Skidmore: Thanks for having me today.

I’m honoured to be here on the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

My pronouns are she and her.

I am relatively newly elected in my role as the B.C. Federation of Labour president. This is my first time presenting to the committee. So bear with me. I will try and get through all my notes in five minutes.

I’ll start out with just acknowledging that there are some big challenges that we know government has in setting budgets in incredibly changing times and meeting the needs of not only what’s happening in the province today but tomorrow’s economy and the challenges that we’re going to face in the coming years.

While the constraints of a short presentation prevent me from being able to give you a comprehensive inventory of what labour’s priorities are…. I’m going to suggest the three areas where we think government action and investment are most urgently needed for both answering the most pressing challenges of today and building a fair, more prosperous future. These are areas where strategic government investments can help meet the needs of both workers and employers in a rapidly changing economy.

The first is around climate justice and jobs. Working people know better than anyone how urgent the need is to address the ongoing issues of climate change. Our members are the ones who are on the front lines, fighting fires, cleaning up after floods and, of course, going to work in intolerable situations, such as the heat dome, and so on, and seeing firsthand the changes that are happening in the forests and the rivers and on the coastlines.

We’ll have more to say in our written submission. For now, I’ll say working people must be part of every decision that government makes, which is shaping our future at every stage.

There are investments government can make today that will address climate change, protect our economy and strengthen our communities, such as extending things like free transit programs up to the age of 18. I think this is one of the opportunities government has to build off steps that have already been taken for riders under the age of 12. It’s also imperative to remove barriers to those in school or those just entering the workforce. It helps create access, of course, builds clean transportation habits and supports community growth.

The second area is around equity and diversity. Although we will acknowledge the government has made some admiral strides in bringing greater equity to our workplaces and into our communities, we want to make sure…. We urge you not to slow down the pace on this, to continue pushing on the anti-racism legislation and on a commitment to move from pay transparency into pay equity legislation and to make sure that there is adequate funding for compliance and dealing with issues of non-compliant penalties and such for employers who aren’t doing that, as well as a dedicated office to deal with those issues.

That brings me to our third area I’d like to spotlight today, which is renewing the relationship between employers and employees and ensuring everyone’s rights and responsibilities are clear to all and backed by timely, meaningful enforcement.

The employment standards branch is critically important to B.C. workers, especially the lowest paid and most precarious. That group disproportionately includes Indigenous workers, racialized workers, women, gender-diverse folks and, of course, newcomers to our country in a variety of different ways. The ESB is where those folks go to deal with wage theft and the denial of their basic employment rights.

We know waiting times are incredibly long. We know that there has been some investment into that. We also know that there needs to be a bit of a shift. The government took some big steps in the last budget to increase the branch’s funding, but we actually think that the branch is going to continue to struggle dealing with the economy as we move forward. It has neither the mandate nor the resources to deal with the challenges of today’s workplace, from the huge explosion of gig and part-time work to the skyrocketing use of temporary foreign workers.

[9:45 a.m.]

What we’re proposing is that you further increase the employment standards branch funding. We would urge you to take this opportunity to do what we’re calling a re­imagination of the mandate and the role of the employment standards branch in the B.C. economy and go beyond just investigation and adjudication to proactive investigation in problematic sectors. So making sure the Temporary Foreign Worker Protection Act is connecting workers up as well as having meaningful and high enough penalties so that offenders don’t continue to offend workers in the province.

I will stop there. I had more, but it will be in our written submission. My folks thought I could talk faster than I do. That is shocking, because I talk incredibly fast every day.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Your folks are correct. Sussanne, thank you very much for your presentation.

I have a question here. When you talk about the em­ployment standards branch and the funding that’s there, do you have a number in mind? I mean, we are the Finance Committee. Inside of the submission that will come our way, do you have a number that would be pegged to that?

S. Skidmore: I think we’ll probably have to put that into our written submission.

One of the conversations we’ve been having is that piece around the reimagining. We actually think that the government needs to bring all the stakeholders together and see if there is a new and exciting way forward to work with employers and employees and workers in the province to make sure that people’s needs are being met and that everyone is at the same place.

There’s a level playing field for everybody. They know what the rules are going into…. When you start a job, what are the rules? What does your employer have responsibilities for and to you? All of those types of things.

In our written submission, we’ll put a dollar specific on it, for sure. I wouldn’t have that off the top of my head.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, sure.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Sussanne. It’s nice seeing you again.

I really would love to follow up on your recommendation No. 3, specifically talking a bit about young work­ers. We talk about renewing the relationship between the workers and employers. One other common theme I have been hearing is that young workers don’t know their rights. They don’t know their safety…. They don’t know how or when they can actually say no to an employer when they’ve been placed in a dangerous situation.

If you don’t mind me asking…. Maybe we’ll also hear your feedback. When you provide your written submission, maybe you can add in your dollar amount an addition to that component to really help educate us on how we can actually better protect young workers.

S. Skidmore: Sure. I mean, we do a little bit of work out of the federation and our occupational health and safety centre as well. That’s funded through the workers compensation branch. But it’s just minimal. It doesn’t even…. It just dips the toes into actually accessing young workers before they get into the worksite. A key component of what we think should be happening at the employment standards branch is the prevention piece and actually getting to workers — teaching them what their rights are, teaching them what their responsibilities are — and, also, to employers.

The amount of claims, on the other end, if you’re actually doing prevention work, decreases. That, of course, then decreases the wait times that folks are facing right now, which is unfathomable. You’re losing your pay­cheque, and you have to sit and wait for that for a whole entire year. By then you’ve lost your apartment. You’ve not been able to feed your family, and so on.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Sussanne, there is another question I have here, with regards to pay equity and not being compliant with that. Could you expand on that?

S. Skidmore: Yeah. Currently the government has put forward pay transparency legislation. We applauded that as a first step towards actual true pay equity legislation. I’ve had conversations with many of you over the years about that.

I mean, there have to be some consequences for em­ployers who are not following the rules around pay transparency and pay equity legislation. There needs to be a committed office or staff that work on that. So there needs to be funding for that.

H. Yao: I hope you don’t mind me asking another question. I’m looking at No. 1 and No. 3 here.

You talk about climate justice. Well, obviously, you’re talking about a heat dome. You’re talking about a flood. You’re talking about forest fires. They’re all causing damage, potential harm to workers, especially foreign workers. Now you’re talking about protecting the young workers as well.

Do you see a need for us to upgrade any kind of labour code to ensure, if we’re dealing with environmental emergencies, a certain amount of actual protection they need, especially dealing with respiratory illness associated as part of a forest fire? We’re talking about dealing with excess heat, heat exhaustion. I think one of our members actually had a family member struggle with that earlier. Something we’ll all find a way to actually provide better support for.

[9:50 a.m.]

S. Skidmore: Look, I mean, lots of that stuff is dealt with through the Workers Compensation Board in the system that we already have. Could it be improved? Sure. But I think what I really want to leave folks with is that — when decisions around climate change, changing economy of any kind and the shifting of how we do things in this province — workers and those who represent them should be at the table every single day.

When you’re talking about a shifting forest economy, when you’re talking about changing the way we do business in the mining industry or whatever, workers should be at that table right from the very beginning, because they have some incredible input that I think will help make decisions for all of us.

M. Starchuk (Chair): There we go. Well, thank you very much, Sussanne, for your presentation and keeping it on point. Let your membership know that you do talk quickly.

S. Skidmore: Sorry. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up, we have Sandra Lee, Decoda Literacy Solutions.

Sandra, you have five minutes for your presentation and then five minutes from the committee for questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

DECODA LITERACY SOLUTIONS

S. Lee: Thank you for including us in this public engagement and consultation.

We’re very proud to also work on unceded territory of the Musqueam, the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh.

I am Sandra Lee. I’m the executive director for Decoda Literacy. We are B.C.’s provincial literacy organization. Our mission is to enhance literacy and learning skills of all British Columbians to improve their lives. Our vision is a place where everyone has the literacy and learning skills so that they can thrive in their communities.

Decoda supports the literacy network in B.C. — Elaine Yamamoto, literacy outreach coordinator. We serve about 400 communities in B.C., working through approximately 98 literacy outreach coordinators, and they work with local groups to determine the needs and priorities. These groups develop action plans to deliver literacy programs and services that really fit and suit their communities.

The Ministry of Municipal Affairs, the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills and these community partners are working on place-based learning, so that it’s authentic and relevant. We’re grateful to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs for funding literacy outreach coordination in B.C. communities. This funding does help to plan and develop and maintain literacy and learning programs across the province.

We’re also grateful to the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills. They fund our community adult learning programs. CALP is a program that is key to reaching hard to reach and vulnerable adults.

Literacy is a key component in poverty reduction and getting people back to work, building a new workforce. Literacy is a key component in equity, diversity, inclusion, family and health. Financial literacies are key to building healthy and resilient communities. Literacy is a key component of the StrongerBC strategy.

I want to share two stories of impact. In Burns Lake, they have a bookmobile. It’s called Words on Wheels, or the WOW bus. The WOW bus weaves its way through the town and outlying areas. The bookmobile is a lifeline. It connects community. It transcends all of that digital divide, and it fosters a love of reading for all ages. It’s not just an ordinary vehicle. I would say it’s a vehicle of connection, carrying with it a treasure trove of books and computers connected to the Internet.

It serves as a lifeline to these isolated folks lacking access to vital resources. It carries with it basic foundational pieces from the local food bank as well, and it takes out library requests and holds. So I love the WOW bus because it represents a desire to make a community stronger. That’s what we want to achieve in B.C. through Decoda’s mission. Many of these communities are rural or remote, and many of them are above the 54th parallel.

[9:55 a.m.]

Another story is the story of Don. He lost his job after a mill closed. This is very typical, I think, in some communities where they are relying on one industry. He knew he needed to find another job and he wanted to drive a truck, but he struggled with the class 1 driver’s licence. It’s very technical language. Our tutor helped him, and he got his truck, and he worked, and he bought two more trucks. So now he’s a business owner, and he hires drivers from his community.

The recommendations for Decoda. Really, we would like to see further funding. We haven’t had a funding boost in many years. Specifically, we would recommend to increase our library outreach to be $3.5 million. It’s currently 2.3 and a bit. So a 1.1 increase to help those coordinators with a living wage. We do struggle with retention. Also, an ask of a bump in funding for our CALP programs, $4.5 million for those CALP-funded programs.

Secondly, we would really love a funded multiministry, multisector task force. I think what B.C. truly needs is a strategic plan for literacy in the province.

Those are our two asks. Thank you for your time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Sandra.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Sandra. Hey, thanks for the work. This is incredibly important. I really believe that.

Especially, you touch so many communities throughout the province. I imagine you’re quite across the spectrum as far as age demographics go, everything from little kids to seniors, I would imagine, as well. Is there a primary age demographic focus that you’d like to get in and get that literacy understood at an earlier age than trying to go back later? Because, obviously, you want to get people as soon as you can.

The second part was on financial literacy. I think that’s critically important, especially nowadays with the cost of everything and trying to find a budget. Where does financial literacy come into the program? Is that at early stages or is it more postgraduate or just around high school?

S. Lee: True. For financial literacy, it would mostly come through the CALP, through the adult literacy. Like I say, they design place-based learning. We’re not very prescriptive. We have a lot of resources and a lot of colleagues and friends across the province and country. They do sit with the learner and ask: “What is it that you need?”

Financial literacy is a huge piece, of course, because it’s complex, carries a lot of risk for some people. So they do work through that. We have some specific curriculum from RBC and TD. They do provide those pieces.

We do everything at Decoda. We do family literacy, emergent literacy, adult literacy. And literacy for seniors, which is mostly digital literacy — again, preventing them from risk.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation. You mentioned coordinators. With the funding that you have, what are your programs in terms of actual delivery of the program? Do you have classes? Do you have a site and that kind of organization?

S. Lee: Yes, exactly. The money that Municipal Affairs provides, for example, to the LOC network across B.C. is allocated based on population. That money does fund the tutors, literacy practitioners. Many of them are full-on qualified literacy practitioners. They meet with their students in groups. It’s mostly one-on-one. You know, certainly with adults, there’s a lot of stigma around literacy, so it’s quite a private piece.

Then they have their overhead costs, venue. They do work through task groups and steward organizations. So that might be a neighbourhood house or a community organization. Some of our programs are run through school district offices through the schools. We do have a fostering literacy program for supporting reading and positive learning with children in care, primarily foster children.

[10:00 a.m.]

That’s something that Decoda funds through private donors and gifts. It’s a great program that is, essentially, unfunded.

G. Chow: You mentioned the children in care. Is that a big problem in terms of the children not going to school?

S. Lee: They tend to be more vulnerable. Studying and learning comes with more challenges, as we found in this program. We are partly funded through RBC again. They pay the teen tutors, and they match with a child in care. It really meant to be a positive experience to help them feel that reading is a positive experience. That’s a win, win, win for a child in care. The teens get some job experience for their résumé, and they are paid.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Sandra, thank you very much for your presentation. I love the term: “win, win, win.” There’s no other way to put it. Your testimonial that you provided to us about a person with a class 1 licence navigating them through the system to be a business owner is a good story that will remain in my head for the rest of the day, for sure. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Next we have Keir Macdonald of Coast Mental Health.

Keir, you have five minutes to provide us with your presentation, and then we have five minutes with questions and/or comments.

You have the floor.

COAST MENTAL HEALTH

K. Macdonald: Thank you, Chair, and good morning, committee members.

Coast Mental Health was formed in 1972 and has grown into one of the leading organizations delivering community-based mental health services and supports to over 5,000 individuals every year through a diverse range of programs and housing sites across the Lower Mainland.

Coast Mental Health provides recovery for persons with mental illness as well as provides support for persons struggling with homelessness and substance use. Coast does this by offering assistance with housing, treatment, employment, rehabilitative, social and recreational opportunities, food and clothing. Today we are asking government to consider three recommendations as part of their Budget 2024 planning process.

The first recommendation is to fund housing with appropriate supports for people living with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders. I’d like to begin by sharing Chris’s journey.

Chris is an Indigenous man who, today, lives in supported housing operated by Coast Mental Health. Before coming to Coast, Chris had experienced homelessness for eight years following the loss of his mother, before finally being connected with and completing a treatment program at the Red Fish Healing Centre. He continued his recovery journey with Coast Mental Health’s rehabilitation and recovery program located at səmiq̓wəʔelə lands.

After graduating this program, he was fortunate to secure housing with integrated mental health supports. After years of living on the streets, Chris is now stable, living in his own home, with access to the care and support he needs.

For supportive housing to be successful, and for people to have an opportunity to thrive and achieve greater well-being, we require a more comprehensive and integrated approach, one that not only addresses basic needs but a supportive housing system that promotes well-being and includes services to promote physical health and mental health. For this reason, we ask government to dedicate new funding to support the provision of health supports in all existing and future supportive housing projects.

Our second recommendation is to invest in specialized employment, education and training programs to support recovery of people living with mental illness. For many of us, our jobs are what define us. Employment gives us purpose, social connection and financial independence that allow us to live full lives. It’s no different for people with mental illness. Indeed, the benefits that work can give are vital in supporting a stable recovery.

I would like to share a story about Justin. Justin has been a member of Coast Clubhouse for four years now. In Justin’s words: “I have a beautiful life.” Justin, who is 39 years old, has lived with schizophrenia for over 20 years and has struggled to develop job-ready skills needed for employment. As a member of the Clubhouse, Justin took part in a number of vocational training opportunities before joining Coast’s street clean team. Today he works three to four shifts a week.

Currently Coast Mental Health offers persons with lived and living experience a range of employment and training opportunities. These allow clients to try various jobs in supportive environments without the stress of interviews, being trained by strangers or losing a job because of health-related absenteeism.

[10:05 a.m.]

As part of Coast’s transitional employment program, members can also gain training and employment through one of our social enterprises: the street clean team, Landscaping with Heart and Social Crust Café and Catering.

We also train and employ members through our successful peer support worker program, with a number of members employed by local hospitals and health care agencies. However, all of these programs are only made available currently through philanthropic support and annual grants, which are simply not sustainable. So 207 employment opportunities for clients were created across Coast Mental Health facilities last year. With the $2 million annual investment, we could easily expand our employment and training programs to support more people in need.

Our third recommendation is to invest in lasting recovery through dedicated safe, stable and appropriate housing. It’s not uncommon to see repeat clients in our treatment programs because housing and ongoing health care supports were not accessible to them after they graduated.

In 2019, the B.C. government launched its mental health and addiction strategy, Pathway to Hope. One of the priority actions was to create a seamless and integrated system of care that would connect people to treatment and support ongoing recovery. Unfortunately, few treatment programs today are able to provide the necessary connections to appropriate housing options upon completion, which is why we’re calling on Budget 2024 to invest in lasting recovery and provide funding for stable and appropriate housing for individuals exiting mental health and substance use programs.

As evidenced by success stories like Chris, Coast Mental Health has demonstrated that integrated service provision works. We see every day how people thrive when provided stability and given access to longer term supports.

Thank you, committee members, for your time this morning and for your consideration of our recommendations.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Crikey, that was such an awesome presentation. I couldn’t resist using that word. I will tell you, Keir, this is the first time sitting up front that I just pushed myself away from the table and just listened. No notes, nothing.

Thank you very much for what you do and what you’ve said. You have probably touched the bones of every person that is sitting inside of this room right now.

Are there any comments or questions other than me with my crikey thing?

A. Walker: Thank you for the presentation. Your three asks are clear, and I appreciate those.

I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the three social enterprises that you have going, both what the impact is on the community and the people who are going through those employment opportunities.

K. Macdonald: Thanks for the question. The three social enterprises — Landscaping with Heart, Social Crust Café and Catering and street clean team are all social enterprises. This, in and of itself, makes them a little bit tricky and challenging at times, just that structure alone. All of them were really launched over the last ten years by Coast Mental Health. Again, we had really strong support from our foundation, the Coast Mental Health Foundation.

The cafe operates in Vancouver, just down the road. It’s a functioning cafe but also integrates with an employment training program, so we leverage the cafe business to provide those supported employment places. There’s the training, along with the on-the-job training, and it supported, I think, roughly 40 people last year. It’s great, just the training skills that they take away from that. But the on-the-job and our ability to employ people ongoing, as well, is a big, big piece.

Our biggest one is probably the street clean team. We’re able to provide about 90 employment opportunities. Again, we’re heavily supported through the city of Vancouver, local BIAs and stuff like that. They’re providing some base funding to support, really, the daily activities, which are usually two- to four-hour shifts.

Landscaping with Heart. We currently have two teams, two core staff members per team, and we then bring in additional people for work placement, work experience. Really, it’s the infrastructure needed to provide the administration, the training and support which is holding us back a little bit from enabling more people. There’s so much demand, particularly this time of year, with the lawns.

They’re doing the power washing, landscaping, those kinds of pieces. We’ve had so much support from property managers and private industry, as well, who want to support social initiatives like this. So we believe it’s such a good way to get people in with that supported employment, with the relationship we can extend and not overtax people. Often days of work are two hours, four hours. So we find it to be a really successful program.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Keir, for the presentation. Really complex. Very important that we get a handle on this.

Can you expand a little bit on what you referred to as a two-tier system with complex care designation to some housing and how you can see your ask helping this?

[10:10 a.m.]

K. Macdonald: Look, the complexity of supportive housing, as we all know, has dramatically increased, particularly over the last five years. Again, credit to government for the investment in complex care. It recognized that complexity and that the supports and the services needed to grow.

The challenge we face as supportive housing providers is…. We’re resourcing this additional set of supportive housing units. Some of them are brand-new. Some of them are existing already. When I talk about two-tier, it ultimately means you’ve enhanced one set of units, and everyone else has been left at the same level.

The complexity applies across the sector. Really, what I’m calling for…. Maybe it’s not the same intensity of services and supports and the full range that complex care housing has seen, but we are inundated with health care needs. Communities are a little bit different in terms of those relationships with health authorities. Sometimes we really feel that benefit, and they show up. Other times we’re dealing with incredibly complex challenges with staff that really aren’t qualified or hired to deal with that work.

G. Chow: Thank you for the presentation. How do the clients come to you? That’s one question. Secondly, you also run supportive housing. How many units do you run, and what kind of support or staff do you provide to the supportive housing?

K. Macdonald: We operate about 1,000 units of housing. In terms of B.C. Housing, contracted housing…. That’s probably about 400 to 500 units, when you think about supportive housing programs funded through B.C. Housing.

We operate largely in Vancouver. We have three supportive housing buildings and 160 units in Maple Ridge as well. They’re really the two bulk programs for our supportive housing.

In terms of where clients come from…. We operate 17 licensed mental health facilities as well. Those referrals come right through health authorities, primarily the 15 in Vancouver, through Vancouver Coastal Health. We operate two facilities in Fraser Health as well.

The other big piece we have…. I think these are really successful models. I talked about a rehabilitation recovery program, which is a step-down program from the Red Fish Healing Centre. Again, we’re co-located at səmiq̓ʷəʔelə. I think it’s a great continuum of care to move people from one stage to the next. Also, we operate our transitional cottage program out at səmiq̓ʷəʔelə as well, which is a step down from the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital.

These are really great examples, I think, of where we are getting these referral sources. It’s providing that continuity of care. Ultimately, the piece I talk most about, as well, is…. Okay. What’s the next step? What’s the housing? What’s the helping people to move to community?

Thanks for the question.

B. Banman: First off, thanks for what you do.

I guess the question I have…. Of the people that you help, how much of it is the rules of bureaucracy that limit people from moving forward? You get to a certain point at work. Now 100 percent of your funding is cut off, for instance. Is there a different fundamental to help people get back into fulfilling jobs? Of those that you do help, what’s their mental attitude like once they actually have a job and start working?

K. Macdonald: I think in terms of…. There are some really great investments around supported employment that we’ve seen. I think what we are beginning to recognize is….

Some people are able to go through treatment, access the supports they need and actually regain full-time em­ployment, which is fantastic. So there’s a different set of services and skills required to support them to get back into full-time work. Many might only work two hours a week or four hours a week or have disability and be very mindful of the hours that they can work.

I think what we’re experiencing is…. There’s a dedicated skill set to working with people and understanding mental illness or substance use. I think it’s so important, with supported employment, that we have those skill sets and understandings, that it’s not just a broad brush, that we have specialized expertise and staff that understand that and can work at the pace they do.

WorkBC is a program that doesn’t work very well for this right now. The Ministry of Advanced Education had a program that did a little bit more of that. So I think there are funding programs that are better suited to it. Really, it’s the familiarity with the underlying disease or mental health or substance use that really matters most and moving at their pace, being person-centred in that approach.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Keir, thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you so much for the work that you do for the clients that you have and for the community that you serve.

We are going to take a brief recess. As soon as you can leave…. As soon as you can get back, we can start hearing the next people that are there. I will not put a time frame on it.

All right. Brief, brief.

The committee recessed from 10:15 a.m. to 10:25 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. We are ready to start again.

We have Jack Middleton from the B.C. Schizophrenia Society.

Jack, you have five minutes to make your presentation. Then we have five minutes for questions and/or comments.

Now the floor is yours.

B.C. SCHIZOPHRENIA SOCIETY

J. Middleton: Thank you so much.

My name is Jack Middleton. I’m the volunteer president of the B.C. Schizophrenia Society, BCSS.

BCSS is a long-standing community-based provincial non-profit organization. BCSS provides vital front-line education and support for families across B.C. who are impacted by schizophrenia and other serious mental illness. BCSS is truly grateful for the provincial government’s commitment to improving access to and the quality of mental health and addiction services for all British Columbians.

Schizophrenia is not rare. Approximately 50,000 British Columbians have schizophrenia, and 150,000 experience psychosis. Many people living with the illness experience anosognosia, a brain-based inability to recognize that they are ill and need treatment.

The following recommendations outline ways to further improve the quality of life for those affected by severe and persistent mental illness: (1) increase collaborative partnerships with families within the B.C. mental health system, (2) increase hospital and community-based serious mental illness services and supports across all of B.C. and (3) protect the provision under the B.C. Mental Health Act that allows for the judicious use of involuntary treatment.

Family involvement in treatment is very important. As demonstrated through statistics released by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, family members can help reduce the economic burden on our health care system. An estimate in 2008 showed the cost savings across the country to be over $12 billion a year.

Primary care is the first line of treatment for mental illness. We regularly hear about the importance of having family-centred care within the health care system, but there can be a reluctance to involve family members in psychiatric services.

Research shows there are many benefits to involving family members. They provide support and assist with the continuity of care for their loved ones as they shift from a psychiatric hospital to out-patient community services, help maintain adherence to medication and watch for signs of relapse and decrease the need for frequent ER visits.

Increasing hospital and community-based serious mental illness services and supports benefits all British Columbians. In our province, schizophrenia and psychosis create more social challenges than any other medical condition. They play a disproportionate role in a person’s involvement with the criminal justice system, unemployment, homelessness and even increased rates of suicide.

BCSS programs and services have been designed specifically to help family members within the province, including those in more rural and underserved areas. This helps people better cope and support loved ones living with a serious mental illness. The continued support for and increase in community resources and education for serious mental illness will mean a reduced burden on the B.C. health and criminal justice systems in the long run.

Finally, protecting the provision under the B.C. Mental Health Act that allows for the judicious use of involuntary treatment keeps people safe. BCSS believes that involuntary treatment is an integral part of the B.C. Mental Health Act and needs to be an option for individuals who have a mental illness and require treatment but who pose a risk to themselves and others and cannot be admitted voluntarily.

Anosognosia is a key factor in preventing people from seeking treatment. When someone is too ill to be admitted voluntarily, others must step in to support them. BCSS prefers voluntary admissions where possible, but involuntary treatment under the B.C. Mental Health Act can help prevent the ongoing suffering, criminalization, homelessness and violence that affect so many people living with severe and persistent mental illness.

These three recommendations provide a clear pathway for your next budget to increase the quality of life not only for those living with schizophrenia and their families but our broader communities as well.

[10:30 a.m.]

This is one of the most challenging and stigmatized areas of our health care system. At a fundamental level, people living with schizophrenia deserve respect and timely treatment. We believe that the B.C. government and organizations like BCSS can do this together.

Thank you for your time and consideration of our three recommendations.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jack, thank you very much for your presentation.

I’m going to prewarn that the list I have in front of me of questions that we have for you…. Make the questions as brief as possible and the answers as brief as possible so we can get through a list of six. I’m not sure where we’re going to get to, but that’s the way it is.

S. Chant: I’ll get you to expand on anosognosia, because that is something that most of us are not really aware of. If you could do that, that would be great, please.

J. Middleton: One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is the inability to understand that you have schizophrenia. It causes people to avoid hospital, avoid contact with the police and authority, even causes them to distance themselves from family and relatives.

As you can see, somebody who is not aware that they are sick, somebody who is avoiding these things, isn’t going to go and seek treatment, get a diagnosis and receive treatment for their illness.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Jack. I think we’ve all been touched by this. I personally had a friend who died of suicide due to schizophrenia. The families — it’s hard to handle.

You listed a continuum of what could happen, obviously, when schizophrenia is diagnosed and it isn’t identified early. Then it’s harder to bring those folks back into the system to treat. So in your program, where do we start? How do we get that preventative maintenance so that we can identify, diagnose and then support families through local supports?

J. Middleton: The number of personal stories that people share with me when I talk about this organization is a bit overwhelming. It’s much more common than people like to admit — a lot of family members, a lot of friends. I’m here because of a friend of mine who sought treatment, received it and is doing quite well. Programs like Coast, where they’re able to find employment, benefit that.

I’d say just quickly that our organization receives phone calls. It receives emails from people who have noticed their family member behaving strangely. They’re not sure what’s going on. They go on the Internet. They google around. They look for this, and they find our organization. They see some of the consistencies, and they reach out to our educators.

People in Surrey, people in the Peace, in the Kootenays and Okanagan and all across the province reach out to them. They sit down and have a coffee and understand that the journey really starts there. It’s a long journey. It’s for life, for people. But that first step is really important, and our organization runs a lot of groups with family members to help educate and navigate the system.

R. Leonard: Thank you for your presentation. You mentioned one of the most stigmatized conditions. I wanted to ask you to speak to the perception around violence in schizophrenia and the misperception.

J. Middleton: Well, unfortunately, there is a link to untreated mental illness and violence. We do see that. But the important thing is that people who receive treatment and move down that path are able to find a level with themselves, and it reduces the likelihood of that by a significant amount. I think that’s really important.

You often see news stories that are out there about “this person has schizophrenia,” and it really leads to people not wanting to spend time with or be there for their family and friends, these sorts of things. People lose their support networks as a result of that stigmatization.

So I would say our organization is very…. We really support treatment for the illness so that people can get better, get to a point where they’re able to be grounded like that.

R. Leonard: Is there something community can do to be supportive?

J. Middleton: I think, at a fundamental level, looking at people as people, treating them that way, is so important.

[10:35 a.m.]

I think investing in services that allow for people to have job training and those sorts of things…. Important housing measures, like Coast was talking about — I think those are really important. But I really think that at a human level, it takes sitting down with people and knowing that they’re human beings and they deserve respect and to be treated well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): We’re going to try to get the last two in: Henry, and then Bruce.

H. Yao: Asked and answered.

B. Banman: Thank you for the work that you do. You mentioned the really contentious one, which is involuntary treatment. Two questions on that.

What percentage do you think or numbers do you have that require involuntary treatment, and of those, how many would be permanent, or is there a pathway to where it’s no longer required to be involuntary?

J. Middleton: I don’t have those specific statistics. I’m not going to speculate on it. We can get those to you after the fact. I do think this is unfortunately very common. There are a lot of people who have to be involuntarily treated, and it’s a really important part of the system. That’s why we believe it needs to remain there. A lot of people do not understand that they’re ill, and that’s why this is so important. But I will find those statistics. We can work on that.

B. Banman: So in your opinion, are we doing more harm by not implementing involuntary treatment in some cases?

J. Middleton: I think it’s all so situational that I would leave that to the experts, the psychiatrists, to make those decisions. But having it in the legislation in British Columbia is fundamental to making sure that people are able to receive treatment.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jack, thank you very much for your presentation. As you can see from the number of people that are asking questions, it’s a very important topic for all of us.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up we have Kendra Johnston, Association for Mineral Exploration.

Kendra, you have five minutes for your presentation, and we have five minutes for our questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

ASSOCIATION FOR MINERAL EXPLORATION

K. Johnston: Excellent. Climate change, the low-carbon future, the green energy transition, social and economic reconciliation. These are the main themes that we consistently hear from government in the natural resources sector. However, there is one file that can advance all of these initiatives at once, and that file is critical minerals.

Good morning. My name is Kendra Johnston. I’m the president and CEO of the Association for Mineral Exploration.

I’m grateful to be here today with you representing nearly 5,000 members across the province on the traditional territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam Nations.

B.C. is a globally recognized centre of excellence for mineral exploration and development. In fact, we are home to over 1,200 publicly listed exploration companies representing more than 40 percent of the Toronto venture exchange. In 2022, we saw the highest-ever expenditures for mineral exploration in the province at $740 million, with 21 percent of that being spent directly with Indigenous-owned or -affiliated businesses in remote areas across the province.

Exploration, however, is a cyclical business, and it’s not likely that we’re going to see these record levels again this year. Through Budget 2024, we must ensure that B.C. continues to be a trusted, reliable and economic source for critical minerals well into the future.

In 2022, the province dedicated $4 million to B.C.’s regional mines offices over two years for notice-of-work permitting, otherwise known as mineral exploration permitting for us, to be more efficient. This investment has been a phenomenal success. The average turnaround time for permits has been reduced from 250 days to 153, and the backlog for permits has been reduced from 77 to 31.

To help government maintain this momentum, AME is recommending enhancing the budget lift to $3 million per year and making it permanent. This would allow the regional mines offices to make the current staffing and service levels permanent and to hire an additional Indigenous adviser in each of the five regions. These positions will provide continuity, clarity and certainty for mineral exploration and ensure that consultation with Indigenous peoples remains timely and effective.

In 2023, B.C. recognized the importance of critical minerals by allocating $6 million over three years towards developing a critical minerals strategy. Although we are excited to see that the government has expedited work on this strategy, it is absolutely fair to say that it is vastly underfunded in comparison to our competitors. In comparison, Ontario announced $29 million last year, Quebec announced $90 million, and the state of Western Australia announced $40 million for critical minerals strategies.

[10:40 a.m.]

We’re asking the B.C. government to invest a minimum of $50 million to sufficiently fund and prioritize the implementation of a critical minerals strategy that elevates B.C. to the level of its peers. This funding also needs to include a minimum of $4 million annually to ensure critical minerals geoscience work is ongoing and that the data is a reliable source for internal government clients as well as the public at large.

Over the past five years, B.C.’s Golden Triangle has attracted at least four major mining companies and over $5.5 billion worth of international investment by way of acquisitions. This, coupled with the infrastructure im­provements to Highway 37 and the Port of Stewart…. The Golden Triangle is our proof that if you build it, they will come.

Well, it’s time to start building again. B.C. has incredible potential to find and extract the critical minerals needed to meet the demands of tomorrow. But to do that, our industry needs to have strong, risk-averse funding. AME is recommending a one-time investment of $30 million to create a professionally managed equity investment fund for mineral exploration, as supported by the 2018 Mining Jobs Task Force report.

This equity investment fund will support projects with high exploration potential; have ESG-based criteria with a focus on collaboration with First Nations; provide opportunities for capacity-building, training and employment in local communities through revenues; increase investor confidence by demonstrating alignment between industry, government and nations; provide high-quality due diligence on investments, making it a sought-after strategic partner; make B.C. the most favourable destination for mineral exploration in Canada; and enhance B.C.’s critical minerals strategy by focusing on funding critical minerals projects.

This fund is modelled off the success of the SIDEX fund in Quebec, which initially invested $50 million and has now provided over $105 million in direct investment to mineral exploration. These funds are further leveraged by private investors.

In our own case study, we took 25 companies actively exploring in B.C. between April 2019 and 2023 and found that a $30 million investment invested strategically in these projects would have yielded over $100 million by 2023. Similar to SIDEX, this fund would hold a certain level of prestige among the investment community and would leverage the funds by ten to 12 times, thus encouraging quality exploration, advancing reconciliation and showcasing B.C.’s best practices in ESG.

This fund, as part of the critical minerals strategy, will signal to investors, industry, communities and Indigenous people that critical minerals are in fact the key to unlocking B.C.’s future.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Kendra, thank you very much for your presentation.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Kendra. I know it’s a shock that I’m going to be asking a question here. I’ll take a stab at it here.

Critical minerals strategy is essential. You have identified it. There are several other provinces in the country that have developed a critical minerals strategy. You mentioned Quebec. Back in 2020, I believe, they had a five-year plan. They’re almost coming to their second term on their critical minerals strategy. We have yet to develop ours.

There are a lot of barriers — electrification to remote sites, investors needing to come back to B.C., geographical barriers, capacity-building with First Nations. Is there anything specific that you could expand on that really would make your day a lot better in getting a good critical minerals strategy? What are the barriers to securing our critical minerals, not only for low-carbon futures, like you said, but also national security for us and our allies, health care, diagnostic equipment, you name it? It is critical that we have this in place. What would be the biggest barriers that you could share?

K. Johnston: That is not a simple question. All the things that you’ve just mentioned are really important, and they all feed into that critical minerals strategy and can be supported by a critical minerals strategy. So I’m thankful to have Michael coming up next, representing the Mining Association and the next step in where this goes.

From an exploration perspective, the grassroots geo­science is an integral part to understanding where those deposits might be found. The time and energy to go out and find a new deposit, something that is economically viable, environmentally and socially responsible is not an easy task.

In fact, once you have made a discovery, which may or may not be economic, it’s at least a 15- to 20-year time period before you get into construction, which isn’t even mine development. So having that grassroots geoscience to be able to rely on, I think, is a path to a lot of those other things, whether that be Indigenous reconciliation, increased ESG standards, working with local communities, understanding the whole ecosystem of where we want to go and what we need to be able to accomplish.

[10:45 a.m.]

H. Yao: I’m looking over your numbers. Thank you so much for your presentation. You’re asking for an investment of a minimum of $50 million in Budget 2024. I see you talk about the $30 million for a mineral exploration equity investment fund and another $4 million per year for geoscience work for data. What happened to the other $16 million? Do you have any plan for them as well?

K. Johnston: It needs to go towards the implementation of the critical minerals strategy, which I think includes a lot of the other pieces that we’ve been talking about. It’s everything from looking at new innovations for by-products and metallurgical process. It’s talking about infrastructure. For example, the Bob Quinn airstrip up in the northwest could use some improvements that would therefore increase the exploration in the Golden Triangle.

There’s a variety of pieces that need to go into that critical minerals strategy, and it will all need implementation dollars. There needs to be a bucket there that once we’ve developed this critical minerals strategy the government is currently working on, there are funds to then implement it.

H. Yao: But obviously a $30 million permanent investment is not included there.

K. Johnston: We would prefer if it wasn’t, if it was a separate ask for sure, but I think it’s certainly an integral part to supporting the critical minerals strategy.

G. Chow: Thank you for the presentation, Kendra. On that $30 million exploration equity investment funds, and you talk about industry and investor confidence, how is this fund going to get the money and grow? What’s the return to the fund? How does that work?

K. Johnston: What we’ve done is looked at 25 companies that are exploring across the province. And doing our best to remove hindsight, we went through and made a makeshift portfolio and produced those funds in the graph in front of you.

There’s a threefold increase in those prices over the four years we looked at, using Quebec as a model. They have a professionally managed fund with an independent board who makes the investment decisions into those junior companies. Those funds are then leveraged by other pri­vate investors that look to that fund for due diligence, for quality, for expertise, and they tend to follow the investments of that fund.

We’re looking at it to be a big player, investing sort of 9 percent of shares within companies, and the possibilities are endless for it to grow. I think over the next four years, given that we’re going into a bit of a down cycle, it’s a great time to get it started, providing that opportunity to get in at a low price and hopefully ride the wave up during the next cycle.

G. Chow: Yeah. Okay, thanks. Obviously, you take an equity position. I was just thinking, oh, it’s money dispensed to exploration companies who would just spend it, and then you may be successful or not. I was just wondering how that money returns to the fund. Thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): On that note, Kendra, thank you very much for your presentation this morning.

Next up, Michael Goehring, Mining Association of British Columbia.

Michael, you have five minutes for your presentation, and then there’s follow-up with five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

MINING ASSOCIATION OF B.C.

M. Goehring: Thank you. Good morning. My name is Michael Goehring. I’m the President and CEO of the Mining Association of B.C. I’ll start by saying I too have a family member with schizophrenia who was diagnosed about 23 years ago. The level of psychiatric care that she receives is probably about 15 minutes every three months. I think that’s something that the members should all think about when reviewing your budget recommendations.

I want to recognize we’re here today on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Thank you for the opportunity to share our budget recommendations for Budget 2024.

I would note MABC fully supports AME’s recommendations. You should know there’s a distinction. Exploration is upstream. It’s exploring and looking for minerals. MABC represents the 17 operating mines and two smelters in the province, along with a number of advanced development projects.

Our industry supports 35,000 jobs across the province. We spend some $3 billion on goods and services across 3,700 small, medium and Indigenous-affiliated businesses. Last year we estimate that all levels of government took home some $3 billion in taxes and revenue from our industry.

Since I presented to you last year, the critical minerals agenda has really come to the fore continentally, nationally and provincially. It’s now a global imperative. We produced 16 of the 31 critical minerals on Canada’s list here in British Columbia, and it offers us a generational opportunity.

[10:50 a.m.]

In a recent meeting with the Mining Association of B.C., the U.S. Ambassador to Canada identified that critical minerals are the very nexus of climate action and allied security needs amidst growing geopolitical change, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise of authoritarianism in China. Critical minerals are also indispensable in B.C. for Indigenous economic reconciliation and providing job and contracting opportunities.

We were pleased to see Artemis Gold Blackwater mine receive its permits two months ago. That leaves six projects right now that are in advanced stage of permitting and are close to making a final investment decision. That would mean 6,400 construction and operating jobs, $4 billion in capex in B.C. and $10 billion in economic impact.

Beyond these projects, there are a further dozen critical mineral projects that are entering regulatory review over the next 18 to 36 months, and beyond these, there are opportunities for mineral processing and recycling. One example, FPX Nickel, is proposing to mine and refine nickel near Fort St. James that would provide enough nickel sulfate to meet 17 percent of the projected North American EV battery market for nickel in 2030. Then Teck Resources has the potential to recycle lithium-ion batteries, like the ones used in Teslas, at their Trail smelter in the West Kootenays.

In short, B.C. mining and smelting is poised to make a substantial contribution to climate action and our allied security needs. There are billions in economic benefits and thousands of jobs on the table, along with opportunities for Indigenous partnerships and equity participation. The stakes are high, the opportunities unprecedented, but it’s not going to wait for us. We need action now across three areas: permitting, Indigenous economic reconciliation and carbon pricing.

Briefly, on permitting authorization, we recommended to the province and to the federal government that the governments, as we would expect, need to work together and align their processes for a portfolio of critical mineral projects here in B.C.

Designate those projects as regionally significant. That would trigger concerted provincial and federal efforts to secure free, prior and informed consent, if it hasn’t already been obtained. And that would help expedite the proponent’s efforts to obtain EPIC. We would like to see those projects be surrounded by joint federal project tables with senior government oversight and all relevant agencies participating.

Finally, we do believe that the best place regulator rule must be in place, making one project, one process the rule rather than the exception in terms of federal and provincial environmental assessments.

Secondly, we need to see greater government involvement and financing for Indigenous governing bodies, in order to build their own governance, administrative and technical capacity on their terms. And we need to see true partnerships between Indigenous nations, government and industry. Here we need greater emphasis on Indigenous co-ownership, equity positions in projects and other financial instruments to enable Indigenous nations to participate fully in mining projects.

Last, carbon tax — the transition to OBPS. We fully support this. I was here last year recommending that. We’ve sent two letters to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Environment. We’re very concerned that there is no line of sight into the policy process and what is actually being put forward for this carbon price.

We fully support a carbon price, but we’re very concerned now that our members who have the lowest carbon emissions globally in terms of mines will still pay the highest carbon tax globally and not be on a level playing field with mines in other Canadian jurisdictions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Michael, thank you for your presentation. Before we go to…. I have a list of four questions that are coming. I want to just say thanks for sharing your personal experience before your presentation.

I will just remind members and yourself, Michael, that we will try to make the questions brief and the answers equally as brief.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Michael, for that. I’m so glad that we’re at a different point than we were last year when we talked about output-based pricing system.

[10:55 a.m.]

Based on what’s been announced and what you just said, I want to know: how do we get a better line of sight, as you put it, in terms of helping make certain that there’s alignment in terms of the objective of this pricing on carbon tax and the mining industry. How do we get to a place where it’s helping the industry and making certain it’s doing what it’s intended to do?

M. Goehring: With the importance of critical minerals in climate action, it’s disappointing we don’t have a line of sight into the development of the policy. We need to have a two-way conversation with the climate action secretariat. That doesn’t exist right now. They will cite that it’s a budget issue. We have said we are willing to go under a non-disclosure agreement to provide input into the development of the policy itself, including stringency, benchmarks and other pieces of the policy, and that’s what’s needed.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Just to piggyback off of that, first of all, you identified 16 critical minerals. I think I got up to about 18 or 19. Bauxite, or maybe not….

M. Goehring: Give or take a few.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): But aluminum would be the smelters….

Anyway, for the OBPS, we need to ensure that the industry is at the table. How would you recommend that we do that with government? How involved…? I mean, it’s critical that we get this right, because as a result, if we’re not globally competitive, we lose this industry to carbon leakage to other jurisdictions around the world that aren’t as environmentally…. ESGs aren’t as good in other jurisdictions. So how do we make sure that we get this right?

M. Goehring: The point of an output-based pricing system, of the federal government’s OBPS, is to reduce the risk of carbon leakage. That is the transfer of investment and talent to other jurisdictions with lesser regulations.

Every other jurisdiction in Canada outside of B.C. does provide that protection, so the risk is that while mines can’t pick up and move, there is a thing called end-of-mine life. What you’ll see is either the people who operate that mine will not explore around the mine and will just let it end, and/or investment in new projects will go to Ontario or Quebec or Chile or Peru, and British Columbians will miss out on the opportunities and benefits of those critical mineral projects.

H. Yao: Thank you so much. I assume AME was referring to the association of mine exploration, when you said AME earlier?

M. Goehring: AME is the Association for Mineral Exploration.

H. Yao: Okay. I just wanted to double-check.

M. Goehring: That’s Canada’s organization.

H. Yao: I’m really interested, when you’re talking about mineral recycling, talking about smelting in the northern B.C. area…. I guess my question right now…. As we advance into more of a battery-powered, electrified economy, do you foresee if there’s any way we can actually maximize our carbon reduction, how we transfer all those used or out-of-order batteries to a recycling centre in a way that we can capture as much material as possible with minimal environmental detriment?

M. Goehring: We’re very supportive of what they call the circular economy. Teck Resources is already a leader in recycling lead acid batteries at their Trail smelter, and they’re looking, as I mentioned, to recycle nickel batteries. That is a huge opportunity for B.C. and for the continent, because right now there isn’t such a facility in North America that could recycle those batteries, and that’s a very important thing. The more electric vehicles there are, the more batteries there will be and the more need there is to be able to recycle those critical minerals and reduce waste.

G. Chow: Exactly the question I was asking. The recycling of batteries…. You mentioned Teck. Is there any company from the mining sector who will be investing in the recycling of lithium batteries? You mentioned lead acid by Teck — and the nickel. Is anybody embarking on that?

M. Goehring: Well, in British Columbia right now, you have mines that are operating, and they’re focused on mining. The recycling of batteries is a whole different industrial process, Mr. Chow. Right now, Teck is the only company in British Columbia that has that type of capacity and facility.

[11:00 a.m.]

G. Chow: I think that’s great — for the mining company to actually invest in recycling battery companies. Certainly, like you mentioned, a circular economy. I think that should put us in a better path in terms of our green products. We’re actually completing the circle in terms of mining and recycling. Lithium batteries will be coming, for sure.

M. Goehring: I believe there are a lot of people working on how to recycle lithium in a cost-competitive and environmentally responsible way.

G. Chow: We even have someone who is coming from the municipal level asking about battery recycling. I thought: “Well, if the mining company were to invest in that kind of venture, that would be great.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): Michael, thank you very much for your presentation this morning.

Next up is Viveca Ellis, Centre for Family Equity.

Viveca, you have five minutes for your presentation, and then there’s five minutes for questions and/or comments.

CENTRE FOR FAMILY EQUITY

V. Ellis: Hello and thank you very much for the opportunity to present to you today. My name is Viveca Ellis, and I am the executive director of the Centre for Family Equity.

The Centre for Family Equity, formerly known as the Single Mothers Alliance, addresses family poverty in B.C. through research, policy recommendations, legal action to address human rights violations, and targeted programs. Our intersectional equity approach tackles discrimination, and our community-engaged model enables us to determine strategic priorities that meet the needs of families in B.C.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to discuss our three recommendations with you today: free transit for youth, the completion of our universal child care system and access to justice and legal aid in family law — all budgetary priorities that will address family poverty in B.C.

The Centre for Family Equity takes a human rights approach. We approach access to justice in family law as a human right that is upheld in B.C. by our budgetary priorities and available programs.

A family law lawyer is, on average, between $350 and $450 an hour for service in B.C. Most cases take hundreds of hours to resolve. Many middle-income parents must still enter substantial debt to fund their legal costs. For low-income parents and, especially, mothers fleeing intimate partner violence, a situation too often defined by poverty and financial hardship for women, our current system is simply out of reach. This leaves justice out of reach. When justice is out of reach, safety, security and well-being are out of reach, and human rights are denied.

The income cutoff for eligibility remains too low, and funding is too restrictive to meet existing needs and ideal caseloads. For the few who do gain access to legal aid, the number of hours provided is too few to meaningfully address the complex cases.

Let’s bring access to justice for low-income parents back into reach. We recommend significant investment to increase the provision of legal aid for low-income parents and caregivers to ensure access to justice and fairness in family law.

In 2018, a commitment was made to build a fully universal child care system in B.C. within ten years. Fast-forward to today, and there are now only 12,729 spaces at $10-a-day ChildCareBC centres in the province, despite significant federal investment to build a $10-a-day child care system by 2026, in every province.

While B.C. was off to a strong start, and despite necessary affordability mechanisms now in place, we are lagging behind in our systems building. We do not yet have an actual system that functions equitably for B.C.’s families. Since our current system is half-built, it does not serve the province adequately. It functions too much like a chaotic lottery, with some benefiting from universal spaces and many still unable to find a spot at all.

Our research with UBC, through 2022, on a $10-a-day system access for low-income lone mothers has revealed the positive impacts on marginalized mothers’ incomes, health and well-being. Working parents need dependable, quality before- and after-school care, located on school sites.

A child care system was promised to British Columbians, and Budget 2024 is an opportunity to bring this promise to fruition. We recommend the expedited completion of our $10-a-day child care system, including before- and after-school care at school locations, to ensure a spot for every child that needs one.

[11:05 a.m.]

Finally, we value the Get on Board program, implemented in September 2021, which provides free transit for all children up to age 12, in every transit system in B.C. This impactful program unburdens thousands of families from the cost of transit to get their families everywhere they need to go, at a time of skyrocketing inflation — most importantly, their children’s right to access school every day.

However, youth 13 to 18 have been excluded from this necessary program. They do not deserve to be. Our research with the city of Vancouver on the impact of free transit access on low-income communities revealed the extremely beneficial impact of unlimited transit access on families and poverty. We also heard much about the impact of free transit access for low-income and at-risk youth. That is indeed a lifeline to shelter, food security, services, safety and well-being.

Transit for Teens is a solution: a solution for at-risk youth; a solution for congestion and climate change; a solution for mobility, poverty and transportation access for all families. It is a solution that B.C. needs now.

We have an opportunity to ensure that every youth can access school every day, while building a new generation of sustainable transportation users for life. We recommend free transit for all youth in B.C. through the extension of the Get on Board program up to age 18.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to bring our recommendations to you today. I look forward to answering any questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Viveca.

I have a question to start off with, with regard to your survey of transit that was done in Vancouver. Was it done outside of Vancouver? If it was, what would those numbers be? On top of all of that, what are the numbers of people that would be included into those transit users?

V. Ellis: The city of Vancouver reduced-fare transit pilot project was funded by the provincial government, I believe through UBCM. It was a pilot project that was run by TransLink, the city of Vancouver and four community partners. We were one of the four community partners invited to participate in the pilot, and 100 low-income individuals in the city of Vancouver were provided with a TransLink unlimited monthly pass for six months.

Then, partnered with researchers, we looked at the impact of the unlimited transit on low-income community members. We were responsible for 30 participants, and we recruited women living in transition shelters, low-income families, immigrant and refugee families, single-mother families.

To answer your question about numbers, that particular pilot took place just for the city of Vancouver — it was controlled by the city — and they were one-zone passes. The city of Vancouver does still have this data. We held focus groups and collected a lot of our own information on the impact.

The reason we launched our Transit for Teens campaign is because of what we heard from the at-risk and low-income youth, especially, in the program. Their lives just opened up when they had access to free transit in every way. They started going to their counsellor’s office, joining after-school activities and thriving.

If we were to include youth 13 to 18 in the Get on Board program, that would be all youth 13 to 18 in the whole province. That is what we’re aiming for here, to just let them all have that unlimited access so that they can get to school every day.

G. Chow: You mentioned $350 to $400 per hour for lawyers. The law society will be speaking after you, but are you suggesting there could be a better solution to settle family disputes?

V. Ellis: Yes, our family law system, in our perspective, does need an overhaul because access to justice and family law is in crisis at this time. Because of the cost of legal services, the majority of families — almost all of the members of our organization, who are families living below the poverty line, single mothers — cannot afford it at all and also may not have access to debt, which isn’t necessarily a good option, either.

The fact is that many middle-income families experiencing relationship breakdown have to go into that substantial debt. We don’t want that outcome either. When they don’t qualify for legal aid, can’t afford the market price and can’t go into debt, the reality is that they just simply go without, which leads to so many negative outcomes for so many families.

[11:10 a.m.]

We are interested in an increase in mediation and looking at ways to keep families out of court. Court is always seen as the last resort, but those solutions are not going to come that quickly. In the meantime, and generally, we would really emphasize increased funding for legal aid.

This has been a very underfunded area in B.C. for a long time. Drastic cuts were made in 2002, and the system has never recovered. It’s quite ugly when you look at the impact of lack of access to legal representation for families in very, very complex situations — child custody, often. Our position is raising the income eligibility and increasing the actual amount of service. We know that Legal Aid B.C. has a budget and a certain caseload that they can take on based on that, but we would like that significantly increased to meet need.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much. I wanted to just go to the child care spaces you touched on, the number of 12,700. What’s that number…? What should it be at if it was to…? What’s the target? Based on how things have been rolled out — and I heard you talk about schools; I’m not certain the space is there in the school system to accommodate where we need it — what should we do at this point, in your view, to address and come up with a solution?

V. Ellis: I think it’s time to have a significant second investment. When this province committed to building our child care system, there was a very significant upfront investment for three years. Now it’s time for the second allotment of that.

Our perspective on the schools and the public spaces is we’re advocating for a full system within our education system that is publicly funded and publicly provided — that means that families won’t be shut out and excluded from the child care we need — until spaces are as ubiquitous and common as a kindergarten spot, for example. Your child needs to go to kindergarten. You sign up with your local school. You are guaranteed a spot, and you get a spot.

That needs to be the case for child care. We would like to double the number of spaces that we have in $10-a-day sites, but also build that system so we have the fully universally accessible sites that are no cost, available and quality. But also increasing the wages for the workers to make sure that there’s retention and quality care and training to make those sites good.

My one last answer to your question would be around before- and after-school care. We have a very, very patchwork system in British Columbia now. A lot of different providers. A lot of inconsistencies between programs. It’s very hard for parents to get a spot. Our members talk a lot about…. Often they’re trying to get off income or disability assistance. They are in that process. Without before- and after-school care, they have to turn down jobs because they can’t work a shift until seven when they have nowhere for the child to go after school.

We are advocating for a publicly funded, publicly pro­vided before- and after-school system located within our Ministry of Education and Child Care that provides as seamless an opportunity as possible for parents. Children would transition to after-school care, hopefully, in most of the non-profit provided before and after-school care.

Hopefully it is on school grounds. That is the idea: it would be co-located in the school environment when the class hours are over and that there would be continuity there and that dependability. You’re picking up your kid at five, or whatever it is that you finish your day in the labour market, and you can trust that they get that spot, and it’s a quality spot and it’s available. It would alleviate an enormous burden off low-income families and all working families in B.C.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much for your presentation, Viveca.

Next up is Don Avison, the Law Society of British Columbia.

Don, you have five minutes to make a presentation and then there are five minutes for questions and our comments.

The floor is yours.

LAW SOCIETY OF B.C.

D. Avison: Thanks very much, Mr. Chair, and thanks for the opportunity to appear before the committee this morning.

I’ll start, as others have, with a recognition, with both gratitude and respect, that we have the opportunity to meet today on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh.

[11:15 a.m.]

I’m here, as was indicated, on behalf of the Law Society of British Columbia. I thought I’d start by just talking a little bit about some of the key initiatives that are happening with the Law Society at the moment before I focus on the key issue that we wanted the committee to consider this morning, which is entirely compatible with what you’ve just heard in relation to the importance of investments in the provision of resources for legal aid assistance in relation to family law matters.

The Law Society, as I think you all know, pursuant to the provisions of the Legal Profession Act, is responsible for the regulation of lawyers in the province of British Columbia. That role includes setting the educational standards for new lawyers who enter the profession; establishing the rules that govern the practice of law — and there are a lot of rules; and regulating the profession, which includes licensing, the oversight of continuing professional development and the operation of an indemnity program that’s considered amongst the best in the country.

We also operate a professional conduct process, through our intake, investigations and discipline departments, that deal with more than 1,000 complaints per year. Discipline matters are dealt with by the Law Society Tribunal. We’ve introduced a number of significant reforms, over the course of the last several years, to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the discipline process. This has included the implementation of administrative penalties, alternatives to discipline in appropriate cases and a consent agreement process that has significantly accelerated the time to completion.

We’re a member of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada and are considered a national leader in anti-money-laundering initiatives. Our commitment in this re­gard was positively recognized by the Cullen commission report. We’re working towards making further improvements based on a number of the recommendations that were set out in Commissioner Cullen’s report.

We’re also an organization that’s very much committed to the principles of reconciliation. Much work remains to be done on that front. This has been made very clear with the recent introduction and provision of the Indigenous Engagement and Regulatory Matters Task Force report that was provided to the benchers of the Law Society at their last meeting and that will be considered, with the recommendations, subject to decisions by the Law Society at their meeting on the 14th of July.

I should mention that our commitment to reconciliation also includes the development and the implementation of a six-hour cultural awareness course that every lawyer in the province must complete by the end of this year. The course is also now a condition of employment for every new employee at the Law Society. We’re looking at going one step further: it will be a condition of employment for every person who works at the Law Society. We’ve also added trauma-informed training for most of the people that are involved in our investigation and discipline process.

The profession and the Law Society are also very much committed to improving access to justice. Lawyers from across the province dedicate significant numbers of hours to pro bono services, but that, in itself, is not enough. B.C. was one of the first jurisdictions to develop a law foundation where the interest from trust accounts goes to the foundation and is then made available to support access initiatives. There are a number of others. Courthouse libraries, in my view, were the unsung heroes of COVID with the resources that they made available to the public through a very difficult period of time.

They really are a critical aspect of the access ecosystem in B.C. They’re there for members of the public who seek support and information. Most people looking at the courthouse staff would reasonably conclude that those working there are part of government’s justice infrastructure. That’s not the reality. The operational funding for the courthouse libraries comes from the Law Society and from the Law Foundation.

Additional funds are made available for access programs, like Access Pro Bono and the Rise Women’s clinic, with funding generated through a portion of the licensing fees that lawyers pay each year. We’re also supporting other access initiatives and innovations through service delivery alternatives supported by our innovation sandbox program.

The Law Society also plays a significant role with Access to Justice B.C., chaired by the chief justice of the province, but more needs to be done. One emerging opportunity comes from the anticipated legislative reforms to establish a single legal regulator for lawyers, for notaries and for licensed paralegals who have an elevated capacity to offer some measure of independent legal advice. We see significant potential for access improvements, particularly with respect to the role that licensed paralegals might play.

[11:20 a.m.]

The Law Society is supportive of the general direction of these changes, but this will be subject to ensuring that any proposed governance changes do not impair or compromise the essential independence of the legal profession. I anticipate we’ll have more to say about that in the coming months.

With access, we’ve acknowledged in the past and do so again today that government has taken steps to improve access. The family law projects in Victoria have been very successful, and the evidence is clear that lessons learned there should be utilized to inform broader system reforms.

Funding for Indigenous law centres, administered by the First Nations Justice Council, is also seen as a very positive development. Tech infrastructure to widen the reach of the justice system into lesser-served communities has also been encouraging, but more remains to be done on that front.

Recent budget cycles have seen improvements in legal aid funding, but there are too many situations still where women, particularly women, in need of support to deal with difficult family law situations — where the support necessary for them simply isn’t there. This is a gap that we have consistently identified for years, but that gap remains. Our plea this morning, once again, is to ask you to identify this as a significant priority to be considered in the development of the budget for Budget 2024.

I’m happy to answer any questions that members of the committee might have.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Don. I have a question to start off with, with regards to your mention of a six-hour course. I’m curious how the curriculum was developed for that.

D. Avison: We did it on our own. A number of law societies — not enough, in my view, around the country, but a number of them — have utilized a program called The Path, and a couple of jurisdictions, Alberta in particular, made it a mandatory requirement. Other jurisdictions are moving in that direction.

The Law Society built our own program so that it was very much focused with a greater degree of emphasis on the relevance of the law and the evolution of the law, because so much of that change has happened in the province of British Columbia, in part because of the fact that we didn’t have, with the exception of Treaty 8 territories, treaties in the province of British Columbia. So Delgamuukw, Guerin and Sparrow and so many of the other decisions that are critical decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada we feel are very important to lawyers having an understanding of that background in the province of British Columbia.

Of course, it took quite a bit of time. Decisions were made by the Benchers to make it mandatory for all lawyers. There was some opposition to that. We’ll see how it plays out by the end of the year. Alberta has just gone through the exercise of being faced with some opposition to the requirement to complete the course, but that was successfully resolved, and we anticipate the same thing here.

I think the course, if I may say so, is a very important development in making sure that all lawyers have an understanding about the nature of what they must understand in their engagement with Indigenous people and with Indigenous communities throughout the course of British Columbia.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Great. Thank you.

G. Chow: You mentioned that the Law Society is considering some kind of a program for the practice of family law that could help to settle family disputes without getting into court. Well, you didn’t say that, but that would be with the intention of…. What is the Law Society proposing or doing?

D. Avison: Well, a couple of things. One is that the program that has been dealt with essentially as a pilot project, both in Victoria and in Surrey, has resulted in the resolution of a significant number of matters prior to them getting to court. The court does play an active role in that process, so systematizing that change and bringing it into force in a number of — well, really all — communities in British Columbia we think would be a very positive development.

There are reforms that could be initiated in a number of other areas. We have really an extraordinary number of people that are representing themselves in courts in British Columbia. That comes at a cost, when you consider the loss of court time as a result of a proceeding that is unnecessarily going to be a little bit more cumbersome than it would otherwise be.

I mentioned some of the other possible reforms that might well take place, including the licensing of paralegals with specialized expertise, not just in family law but a number of other areas where some measure of independent legal advice can be provided by legal professions other than lawyers. So we see an ecosystem emerging with a role that can be played by lawyers, by notaries and by paralegals.

[11:25 a.m.]

For me, I think the greatest promise in that is the potential for an enhanced role for licensed paralegals who would have the opportunity to appear in court in relation to some matters and also to engage in some of the expansions around unbundled legal services to make legal services more affordable.

But that doesn’t deal with the issue adequately in relation to the importance of improving access to legal aid. Understandably, legal aid funds disproportionately go to those whose liberty is at risk. But we’re left with a gap, particularly in those situations where women are facing a very difficult problem trying to extricate themselves from a difficult marital relationship. It’s a gap that has existed for a long period of time.

We have a role to play, but we believe government does as well, in making sure, as some of those improvements in legal aid are made, that that’s at the top of the list of the things that have to get consideration.

G. Chow: I agree that legal aid is not for the purpose of settling family disputes. So in terms of the pro bono service, is that something that’s funded by the society? Is it something funded by the lawyer’s office?

D. Avison: Both. There are significant numbers of lawyers in the province that provide pro bono services. But in addition to that, we do provide funding, through the Law Foundation, to other pro bono services in B.C. There have been some additional programs that have been initiated, including some support that’s provided through Access Pro Bono to people that are coming through the Court of Appeal.

We’ve also utilized the innovation sandbox to increase some of the opportunities for the expansion of the reach of entities like Access Pro Bono and the provision of services, most significantly in communities that are underserved currently.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Don, thank you very much for your presentation this morning.

Next up is Leah Zille, the Treehouse Child and Youth Advocacy Centre.

Leah, you have five minutes to make your presentation, and then followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

TREEHOUSE CHILD AND
YOUTH ADVOCACY CENTRE

L. Zille: Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today.

I am honoured and grateful to be here with you on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, which includes the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

I am Leah Zille, and I serve as the executive director of the Treehouse Child and Youth Advocacy Centre in Vancouver. We are one of nine operating child and youth advocacy centres, also known as CYACs, in British Columbia. For context, CYACs provide a collaborative, comprehensive and trauma-informed response to child abuse.

I’m sure you can all imagine the turmoil a child might experience when they realize the abuse they have been enduring has been discovered. Visits to police departments, social worker offices, introductions to support workers, being asked to repeat the unspeakable things that happened to them over and over again to every new professional who enters the process. The CYAC model brings all the experts to the child in a safe, comfortable and welcoming environment.

At the Treehouse, we have a team of detectives from the Vancouver police department, specially trained in child abuse investigations, embedded on site full time, along with social workers from the Ministry of Children and Family Development; the delegated Indigenous agency, VACFASS; victim support workers from Family Services of Greater Vancouver; and an accredited facility dog from PADS.

The Treehouse strives to ensure that the child only shares what happened to them one time. Our team meets regularly to discuss each case, and the family is supported from the moment they are referred to the Treehouse, all the way through the court process and beyond.

The Treehouse streamlines communication between the systems and improves how information flows to families. The integrated case management process ensures that the specific and unique needs of each child are identified, discussed and addressed, and relevant supports like trauma counselling, medical assessments, caregiver support and court preparation are in place.

We have closed the gaps between systems through which young people too often fall. The professionals working in the CYAC model cite time and cost efficiencies and improvements to how they do their jobs due to the collaboration. Children report feeling heard, and families routinely speak of how supported they felt throughout the process.

The child and youth advocacy centre model works and is highly cost effective. Unfortunately, we continue to struggle to get traction on stable and adequate funding from any level of government, putting this crucial service in jeopardy. For the Treehouse, our federal funding has been cut nearly in half this year, as more child and youth advocacy centres emerge while the federal funding envelope doesn’t grow.

We have yet to realize adequate and stable funding from the province, despite having received recommendations in the past four provincial budget consultation reports. We have yet to be successful in securing funding from the city of Vancouver.

[11:30 a.m.]

This year over 70 percent of our operating budget is expected to be raised through grants and donations from foundations and private donors. Yet with the aftermath of the pandemic and a volatile economy, being dependent on the generosity of community makes our ability to keep the lights on and doors open, year after year, precarious. Sustainable operational funding would free up time which could be better spent expanding service delivery to neighbouring municipalities, enhancing service offerings to our existing framework and focusing on crucial awareness and prevention work in the community.

I want to share a brief story of impact. A ten-year-old girl who came to our centre last year springs to mind. When this young girl arrived at the Treehouse, she was terrified and distraught, so much so that she couldn’t bring herself to actually enter our facility. Our victim support worker brought Nessa, our facility dog, to the building lobby to meet this young girl. Within moments, the young girl connected with Nessa, and she calmed down enough to be able to enter our space.

In the supportive environment of the Treehouse, she was able to open up to police, where they got a disclosure about the sexual abuse that was happening to her. A plan was put in place, and she was immediately able to start her healing journey.

Imagine that scenario had that same young girl arrived at the police department instead of at the Treehouse that day. Had the Treehouse team not been there for her that day, it is probable that she would have carried her secret for years, with the impact of the abuse she endured manifesting in all sorts of complex ways.

Unaddressed childhood trauma shows up in many ways. We see it every day in the myriad of social crises the province aims to solve — homelessness, the opioid crisis and complex mental health issues, to name a few. These issues are having a profound impact on the lives of all British Columbians, affecting livability and eroding perception of public safety. Imagine what our province would look like in 20 years if all children were given the opportunity to heal from abuse they have experienced.

It is the goal of the Treehouse to get children who have experienced abuse back to feeling like kids again. The collaborative approach of the CYAC model is proven to be the best way to respond to children and youth impacted by abuse. CYACs are the foundation of the infrastructure needed to best protect children in our province.

As such, my recommendation is that the provincial government provide ongoing, sustainable operational funding to all CYACs in the province. Together we can get in front of the social issues plaguing our province, break cycles of abuse and give children and youth a chance to heal so that they can go on to realize healthy, productive, fulfilling futures.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Leah, thank you very much for your presentation.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Yeah, thanks for the presentation. Protection of our children is critical. Obviously, if it’s not treated or not recognized, the impacts further down the road get geometrically bigger and bigger and just dramatic.

You’ve mentioned something that really caught my attention. That was children reporting once and not being retraumatized by going over and over, with the RCMP, with your detectives, with your support. It’s heartbreaking to hear that kids go through this kind of stuff.

How, with proper funding, will your organization en­sure that there’s a synergy between support staff, RCMP, detectives, all of those, so that children only have to go through this traumatic reporting once?

L. Zille: That’s actually what’s happening right now in the nine operating centres in British Columbia. Every community has a different type of model, of the nine, but the premise is that it is a collaborative response where all the partners are there. The children are brought to a child-friendly space, and everybody is working in a collaborative environment.

That is happening. I would say that approximately 55 percent of children in this province have access to a child and youth advocacy centre model right now, but we know that there are still close to half the children in this province that don’t. In neighbouring communities around Vancouver — and, I know, in Cranbrook — they don’t yet have a child and youth advocacy centre, although there have been discussions underway.

In terms of what the funding would allow us to do, that would allow us to actually free up our time so that those of us that have been doing this important work in the province and that have the experience and the expertise would be able to invest more of our time in supporting the developing communities and working in terms of collaborative models.

In Vancouver, perhaps it’s how the Treehouse could support some of our neighbouring communities. I know we’ve spoken in the past about Richmond, and we’ve had a couple of files that have been run through the Treehouse this year where Richmond professionals have come on site to run their files.

[11:35 a.m.]

We’ll be able to do more of that as soon as we’re freed up so that we’re not spending our time knocking on doors and asking for funding to keep our doors open.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, we have two questions in 2½ minutes.

H. Yao: I’ll make it quick. You know, I’m a big fan of your work right now so far.

Two quick questions. The first one is: how much money are you asking for per centre, approximately, and do you have a database demonstrating how your early intervention of avoiding retraumatizing children will save the government in the long run, when it comes to financial costs so that we have more numbers we can play with?

L. Zille: Okay. The first question in terms of how much per centre, that really depends on the community and the number of children that are being served and how that model is set up. We did an analysis last year, and to fund all of the operating child and youth advocacy centres in the province would be approximately $6 million. My colleague Brooke McLardy is going to be here in two weeks to speak to you, and we can provide more data at that time, if you’re interested in that piece.

Your second question was around the evidence that supports…?

H. Yao: The financial benefits of, actually, if your centre is established, how much money can we save provincially? Like health care, employability, avoid homelessness…

L. Zille: We had a social return on investment study commissioned last year by MNP. It shows that for every dollar that’s invested in a child and youth advocacy centre, $5.54 is returned to community.

I caution that that’s a very conservative estimate. We’ve only been in operation for ten years, so some of that was based on future projections and certainly doesn’t take into consideration the long-term impact of children not accessing the justice system and all the other issues like homelessness and the cost of that, should they not get the help they need.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Susie.

S. Chant: Asked and answered, thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Leah, thank you for the work that you do. I’m very familiar with Sophie’s Place in Surrey on a topic that is usually leaving most people speechless when, in fact, it’s a topic that people could talk about all day long. So thank you very much for the work that you do for the people that need the protection the most.

L. Zille: Thank you very much, and thanks for the op­portunity to speak to you today.

M. Starchuk (Chair): For those of you…. You probably notice that we’re running a little bit behind time, and I thank you for your patience.

Maureen Donegan from Vancouver–Fraser Valley CoSA.

Maureen, you have five minutes to make your presentation, then we have five minutes to provide questions or answers. Before we even start, there was a question that was over there. So maybe as you start, you can give us what the acronym is.

The floor is yours. Use it wisely.

CIRCLES OF SUPPORT AND ACCOUNTABILITY,
VANCOUVER–FRASER VALLEY

M. Donegan: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Maureen Donegan, and I’d like to thank you for the opportunity today.

I coordinate a program called Circles of Support and Accountability, Vancouver–Fraser Valley, or CoSA VFV for short. We’re a non-profit society and one of 15 CoSA sites across Canada.

CoSA is a proven volunteer intervention to prevent sex­ual offending. For the past 20 years, VFV CoSA has provided individualized circles for over 250 male, female, transgender, non-binary and BIPOC individuals who have been released from prison after serving time for a sexual offence.

The released offender is supported and held accountable, focusing on mental health, addictions and other risk factors, helping them to reintegrate successfully and keep our community safe. With over 100 community volunteers providing up to 40 circles throughout the province at any given time, we operate the largest CoSA program in Canada.

Backed up by many studies, CoSA has proven that the recidivism rate of sex offenders who participate in CoSA is reduced by over 80 percent compared to offenders returning to the community without CoSA. CoSA’s vision is: “No more victims.”

[11:40 a.m.]

For over 20 years, we have worked closely with the Correctional Service of Canada, community parole officers, B.C. Corrections probation officers and the Vancouver police department high-risk crime unit. Probation and parole officers consistently say their work is made easier when their clients have a CoSA circle, and they often refer their clients to us.

For the last two decades, CoSA VFV has been funded primarily through Public Safety Canada, supplemented by the Pacific region of Correctional Service of Canada. We have also raised a small percentage of our budget through private donations, including gifts from faith communities. The only funding we have received from the B.C. government has been two civil forfeiture grants, which helped but are not the reliable funding we need.

It is important to note that after ten years, two five-year projects, CoSA has been without federal government funding for the last year, and there is no new project funding on the horizon. CoSA needs the B.C. government’s support. It’s not just about maintaining our program anymore; it’s about the very survival of it.

Although we regularly seek out other donors, the idea of supporting sex offenders is intuitively repugnant to most, who are unable to understand that what CoSA is really doing is not supporting sex offenders. It’s helping to keep vulnerable people in their communities safe. CoSA is a public safety program, and it needs to be supported by all government levels.

Our three recommendations. First, that CoSA, a volunteer-led community reintegration program proven to be a highly effective intervention to decrease sexual reoffending, be recognized as a critical piece in building community safety and receive the funding needed to become viable and sustainable in the province of B.C.

Secondly, that the province of B.C. budget $5,000 per core members for CoSA in B.C., up to 40 core members a year, for a total of $200,000.

Finally, that the government of B.C. recognize the cost savings of funding this program — a program like CoSA that reduces the cost of probation or parole, approximately $18,000 per individual, or compared to the cost of incarceration up to $180,000 a year.

Thank you. I’ve also submitted a brief with more details, and I look forward to answering any questions you might have.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Maureen.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): An 80 percent success rate: that’s pretty impressive. What keeps your clients accountable to being in the program? Can they just in and out? How are they…?

One could argue that the success could be attributed to…. Those that wish to be accountable for their actions join the program, and those that don’t leave. That could be accountable for the success rate that you have. So what keeps your clients in the program?

M. Donegan: I think the support as well as the accountability. We build a relationship. Most sex offenders have lost every other support in their life. Here they have three to four people who are willing to work with them as long as they are accountable. I would say most of the clients have hit a bottom. They’ve reached that very bottom. We have a lot of dangerous offenders federally, and even the ones who are provincially may have served long sentences and now are on a two-year. I think it’s the commitment of that other help, plus the…. Hit their bottom, so to say. And the support of their probation officers and parole officers.

I think we’re pretty well known now. They really want it. We just can’t begin to take everybody, and the parole and probation officers know that. That’s why we’re here for the first time ever saying: “Hey, look. This is really, really important.” Correctional Service of Canada is funding a very small part, three-quarters of a full-time-equivalent, and they’re saying: “Where’s the provincial funding?” They have been pushing as well.

[11:45 a.m.]

We’ve also expanded. Six of our core members currently are throughout the province — a couple in Prince George, one on the Island, some in the Interior — and there is a growing need. It is a cost-saving reduction for the prov­ince. It isn’t asking for a huge amount, but it’s an amount that can make this program viable. The success rate, the 83…. Now they’re saying…. Most of the recent studies are saying a reduction of 83 percent.

I think it’s people who care. I mean, I don’t want to say sob stories, but we just had a transgender last week who said to me: “You know what, Maureen? This is the first time anyone has ever really cared about me.” People who are not paid. I am paid, and they know that. They look at me somewhat like their parole officer and staff.

These people care about that they’re from their same community. They’re in Vancouver. Our volunteer base is Vancouver, although I have to say we have a lot in West Van, all over. When I say the volunteers, I’m just talking about ones who sit on the circle — not the board, not our committees.

The big, big issue for us now is so much of staff time is going to looking for funds, rather than the support of the circles. It’s not a huge amount, but it is a desperate amount. It is an important program.

So I ask you…. I’m sorry, I went long. You can tell I’m passionate.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I appreciate that, and there are other questions that we are not going to get to.

Bruce, go ahead.

B. Banman: Thank you very much for the work that you do. From the sounds of it, it seems like a no-brainer, in a lot of ways, but what percentage of sexual offenders do you actually see? Of those, how many actually come through your program? Do you have that number?

M. Donegan: No, I only take what I can, and it’s mostly referrals in the institution from the internal parole officers or in the community. Probation officers will phone and say: “Maureen, can you help? This guy is not doing well.” Or: “This woman isn’t doing well.” But no, I wouldn’t have any idea, because we can’t begin to take them all.

We try to take the highest risk.

B. Banman: The highest risk.

M. Donegan: The highest risk — with no other supports, because if they’re doing well, they’re not going to really be committed in the same way to being accountable around their risk factors.

At every meeting: “What are you doing with your deviancy? What are you doing with your sexuality?” They’re honest with us. We have had occasions where we have reported: “We think things are going south. We’re closing the circle.” And even the officer said: “I’m not sure.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): Maureen, thank you very much for your presentation. There is no doubt in my mind, or anybody’s mind, about the passion that you have for the program that you provide and the service that you provide to the people that are out there. So thank you very much for your time this morning.

Next up we have Ninu Kang from Ending Violence Asso­ciation of British Columbia.

ENDING VIOLENCE ASSOCIATION OF B.C.

N. Kang: Thank you, Chair, and thank you, friends, for having me.

I’m grateful to be on the ancestral, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

I hate to stand between you and lunch. I’m sure that people are like…. I think I have one more person after me. I will do my best to keep you entertained…

M. Starchuk (Chair): Two more, but who’s counting?

N. Kang: …so that this issue is important to you.

I’m Ninu Kang. I’m the executive director of Ending Violence Association of B.C. I bring three recommendations here to you today. These recommendations aim to collectively respond to the devastating increase we have seen in the rates and the severity of gender-based violence, particularly during COVID.

I was preparing and finalizing my notes here Monday afternoon, to get here. You know, it’s just under 48 hours. And as research shows, on average, a woman has been killed by her intimate partner in that time, from gender-based violence, whether it’s through intimate partner violence in a relationship that is supposed to be loving and trusting; sexualized violence; or survivors of childhood sexual abuse, women, men, non-binary folks. Sometimes hurt people hurt people, and sometimes there are just survivors who are hurt by those who are hurt.

[11:50 a.m.]

In addition to the research that these forms of violence can lead to death of women, sometimes their children, their families, and unfortunately, sometimes even, by the cowardly act, of the abuser by killing him or themselves.

In our province, this administration, three years ago, put $20 million back into the province through the sexual assault response funding. Awesome. Right now this administration has just gone through a procurement process, and money is being put back into this province for sexual assault response funding as we sit here — super-exciting times.

At a national level, there is a national action plan on gender-based violence. We’ve been waiting for around 12 years, and finally the federal government made it happen. We’ve been engaged, and we’re super excited about it.

As we sit here, this administration is creating a provincial action plan on gender-based violence. Super exciting. This time right now, in my 30-year career…. I am excited that we are doing something in this country to move gender-based violence forward.

Here’s the thing, folks. The statistics are not decreasing. In fact, we’re seeing a more severe increase in gender-based violence, and we’re seeing deaths of women. The latest femicide report, which you probably have seen if you were listening to the media and other things — like I said, a woman killed in less than two days, on average, in Canada. We used to talk about one woman killed every six days. Now we’re starting to use statistics like one in every two days.

What are my three recommendations for you to consider for your budget? Our sector — we are an umbrella organization for 300 programs in our province. These are individuals that are working in their communities. Many of them are in urban centres, but many of them are in rural communities.

We have anti-violence workers responding to and supporting the survivors of gender-based violence. These workers, my friends, on average in the social services sector, are getting about $6 less than other individuals that are providing supports to those in the social services sector.

My first recommendation to you, my friends, is that we look at and increase the salaries of these front-line services.

Two, survivors not only come in contact with gender-based-violence workers; they come in contact with police — as my friends have talked about — the legal system, the health care system, and so on and so forth. We at Ending Violence Association of B.C., for over 20 years, running a coordination initiative to support communities across our province to come together with police and other systems. We call it community coordination for women’s safety.

Those tables across our province that are pulling these groups together receive no funding from the province. They often provide those initiatives. They come together just because they are workers that are getting paid to pro­vide support to survivors. We are asking that the province considers funding coordination for those initiatives out there.

Three. My friends, we had a death review committee done by the coroners about eight years ago. Some good recommendations. Some we followed through with; some we didn’t. EVA B.C., Ending Violence Association of B.C., is recommending that we start a death review committee that is community-led, similar to other provinces, and we’re willing to support that initiative.

I’ll leave those three recommendations on the table for you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Ninu, for your presentation on a topic that you give to us as exciting and, at the same time, not so.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Ninu. I really appreciate the great work you’re doing right now.

I do have a specific question, talking about a death review. Through my community engagement, in most work, there are a lot of ethnic communities that actually are not really well connected with the mainstream society and often fail or are unable to appreciate the importance of us limiting gender-based violence by reporting it.

So my question is: why are we focusing on death, specifically, when it almost feels like we should actually be expanding the data collection further into reporting how different populations are underrepresented and how different communities actually disengage?

I think one more thing is…. You mentioned that the frequency and severity of gender-based violence increasing obviously contributed a lot to COVID-19’s consequences. And there, too, I think that while we could start collecting better data, hopefully a more inclusive environment, those opportunities come with a higher number.

I’d love to hear about data choice. Is there any way we could actually make it an even stronger plan for better data to help us have better advocacy?

[11:55 a.m.]

N. Kang: Henry, you ask an excellent question. Both need to be done.

Here’s why death review: because death review, by doing an ongoing, regular review of deaths…. What it helps us understand is where we failed, where systems failed, where we worked in silos and, as a result, survivors fell through the cracks. So it’s an excellent opportunity to learn and, as a community-based organization, pull in key stakeholders together through our work that we’ve done on developing community coordination.

It’s one window into a better understanding of when we fail somebody, when they died. It’s a kind of a case review, and it’s a very effective way of creating recommendations into those particular systems. So I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think it’s both.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I have a question. When you talk about the death review, what would be the makeup of that group of people?

N. Kang: We see justice, health. We see the coroner’s office. We’ve been in communication with the coroner’s office, because the last death review was done through the coroner’s office. Of course, they’re overwhelmed, just like everybody else is, and they’re like: “Yeah, we’ll get to it.”

No disrespect, but we also realize the coroner’s office has a huge mandate. They’re doing lots of things. It’s really in our interest, in the gender-based violence sector, to push for that and bring the coroners to our table.

H. Yao: Going back to your recommendations 1 and then 2, you mentioned about $6 less than a typical social worker. The reality is that people who deal with gender-based violence are also absorbing the individual’s trauma while addressing it. So what would you actually recommend as the wage top-up? If you can put a number to it, that’d be much appreciated.

The second one is obviously, when we talk about a community coordinated circle, how much funding do you think about per circle? Can you maybe give us a bit of an actual number?

N. Kang: I had my phone there, and I was just quickly doing a calculation for you folks. I was thinking even if we were to put about $30,000, a very modest figure, into community coordination tables right now, we’re looking at about $3 million, because we’ve got about 70 coordination tables around the province.

We, EVA B.C., get funding from you folks, from the provincial government, to coordinate community coordination, but we want to get this money out into those communities that are actually pulling those meetings within their communities. They’re the ones that are doing this work from outside of the table, Henry.

Your other question was around the salaries. My suggestion is…. For here, I’m working at various tables at a community social services round table, and we’re pushing for recruitment and retention issues where salary is a significant factor.

I think what I want you folks to take away today is that the gender-based violence sector is marginalized within the social services sector. It’s just what we see in society out there, and we have it within our systems.

To your point, when we have a worker there that’s listening to and absorbing the trauma, experiencing vicarious trauma, having a high skill set to respond, knowing they’re taking that into their life, into their relationships and all of those things, they’re not compensated for that. Sort of separate to this, EVA B.C. and many of us in our sector are really focused on addressing vicarious trauma. So for another day, I’ll tell you all the cool things we’re doing around supporting survivors and vicarious trauma health.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ninu, thank you very much for your presentation this morning. You’ve nailed everything. Thank you for the work that you do.

N. Kang: I have to say last that we’re working with your bureaucratic tables, and it’s an exciting time that we’re all working in partnership and we’re moving some of these initiatives forward. So thank you. I really wanted you to hear it, but I also want to give credit to those that are working with you closely, with us as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you.

Next up we have Martha Rans, Pacific Legal Education and Outreach Society.

Martha, you have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes to follow up with questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

PACIFIC LEGAL EDUCATION
AND OUTREACH SOCIETY

M. Rans: Great. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here again.

My name is Martha Rans. I’m the supervising lawyer and legal director of the Pacific Legal Education and Outreach Society. PLEO’s specialized services have provided thousands of hours of pro bono services, largely without provincial funding.

[12:00 p.m.]

We were the only service available to artists in this country to access legal services in the first three months of the pandemic, because we had already pivoted to digital. Within the province itself, we were also first out of the gate, providing virtual services to non-profits across the province.

Over the course of two years, we’ve provided 46 separate webinars. From, literally, April 2020 till mid-2021, we responded to every single issue, from commercial rent issues to employment to returning — everything. This was on behalf of the 29,000 non-profit societies in B.C. You’ve heard from many of them. Indeed, EVA and members of Treehouse have attended our workshops and will speak highly of the work that we do.

Each one advocates for the needs of some of the most vulnerable and their struggles to maintain legal compliance. What corporation or government ministry, for that matter, with revenues over $50 million, would be expected to function without a compliance officer or in-house legal support? It is little wonder that errors are made, yet the non-profit sector, led by hundreds of thousands of community volunteers, are held to that standard.

Mr. Yao asked the men’s support centre — indeed, we heard some commentary this morning from Treehouse — what percentage of administrative costs should be covered in government grants so that we can reduce that burden and allow organizations to focus more on programming than fundraising or, indeed, lawyers?

Look at B.C. Housing’s unallocated costs for legal counsel. Those are public moneys that are going to support non-profit housing providers who have come into legal crisis. It is in the many millions of dollars, and you are perfectly happy empowering private sector lawyers to use those funds rather than enhance and support the capacity of the sector with its own legal needs.

Last week the New York Times reported the first known case of a lawyer using ChatGPT to prepare a factum for trial. When asked by the judge to explain how he ensured the veracity of the information, the lawyer said: “I asked ChatGPT if the cases were real, and it said yes.”

Today I’m here to speak to you about lawfornonpro­fits.ca, which is our most recent and predominant issue over the last two years. Law for Non-profits is a digital platform. You have a handout that is, if you will, a ChatGPT without the GPT. It is designed to prevent legal crisis, so that non-profits can, indeed, focus on programming.

Together with our partner, the Justice Education Society, which is providing accessible digital tools enhancing access to justice across the province, we recommend that a significant commitment by this government, through the Attorney General, be made to public legal education. This commitment is long overdue. My understanding is that at present, it’s at zero.

However, we would suggest that this is not solely the responsibility of the Attorney General. It is our belief that the Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation should take an active role in facilitating our access to funds that would help us build more reliant tools and potentially scale those tools to other sectors of the economy. We could also build in wraparound services in communities across the province, as you’ve heard today.

The federal government committed half a million dollars to the development of lawfornonprofits.ca. We would respectfully suggest that a half-a-million-dollar commitment from the provincial government would ensure that this would be a reliable and accessible tool for time to come.

[12:05 p.m.]

Our last recommendation is that the B.C. non-profit network — that is in development, was supported by the parliamentary secretary for the non-profit sector — be funded through a budget allocation not unlike the allocations that are presently made to Innovate B.C. and Small Business B.C. This is so that they have the consistent support that they are going to need in order to ensure that non-profits don’t fall into crisis and aren’t front-page news, and that we’re not spending money on lawyers where we do not have to. I say that as a member of the bar, and a KC at that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I know I want to clap; I really do. Thank you very much for your presentation, Martha. I don’t know how to put it in words, but you are saying: “Let’s spend the money where the money needs to be spent.”

M. Rans: Yeah. If you’re going to put money into the Community Legal Assistance Society and you can direct funds directly to CLAS, you can direct funds to others.

I’m going to say that directing funds to the Law Foundation is limiting. We have been told, year in, year out, that they don’t want to fund another continuing program. Well, how the hell do you expect communities to deliver better services if there aren’t any moneys going to truly innovative services?

Rise B.C., when it started, did not get a dollar of Law Foundation funding. I incorporated them, and I got them charitable status, and they got not a dime from the Law Foundation, despite what we all know is the crisis in family law in this province.

I would argue there are many crises. There are employment crises; there are tenancy crises. There are many crises, and we can pivot and do stuff, but we can’t get a dollar of provincial funding because we are outside the legacy providers in this space, and they don’t collaborate. We need more collaboration so that we can be working together. Anyway, I can go off on that ad nauseam.

I do want to make clear, though, that we have a very committed partner in the Justice Education Society, which does provide literally hundreds of digital tools and which supports the making of digital tools to many communities, not only across this province but across the world.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Any other comments?

A. Walker: Thank you for your passion on this.

On the Law for Non-profits program that you have here, I wonder if you can talk to some of the successes that you’ve seen through that already.

M. Rans: Well, today we launched the new website, which is lawfornonprofits.ca. We’ve been operating a bit under the radar because we’ve been doing a lot of testing. What Maria Turnbull, from Vantage Point, told me was that the clients she has been working with directly have been very enthusiastic.

Here’s what we know. You don’t need to have a lawyer file an annual report when somebody can explain it to you. When Access Pro Bono is advocating for the provision of legal services to do that, I have a few questions around that.

We have four areas of law covered. We have the Societies Act, employment, privacy…. Privacy is one of the major issues that we’re confronting throughout — including digital privacy. Many organizations don’t even know what the terms of use are. They don’t have them on their website. They’re unclear about what to do. Those are the kinds of things that they can learn, quite simply, by accessing what we’ve called the legal self-help guides for non-profits. We’ve been approached by Manitoba and Yukon about the possibility of using that software to develop, there, a tool in those jurisdictions.

How do we do that in the absence of funding? How do I license the technology to the University of Manitoba when we’re not able to access the innovation funding that is going to start-ups just like us? We’re a start-up, and we can’t access the digital innovation funds. You’re pouring a lot of money into things that are completely untested and that are losing money every day. We don’t make money either, but we’re delivering services every day that make a difference.

[12:10 p.m.]

G. Chow: Thank you for what you do. I’m impressed with this handout here. Even as a non-profit, you laid out those four topics, and you just repeated them. I think it’s certainly very important in terms of fulfilling the Societies Act, which has been revamped substantially in the last few years on privacy, recordkeeping and, lastly, employment. We’ll have to look into more of what you do. Thank you.

You got a half a million dollars from the federal government through the Canada Council for the Arts.

M. Rans: Yes. That’s because our mandate included artists and arts organizations. They were willing to take a chance on us. I almost want to break into song, but I won’t.

G. Chow: How long have you been around?

M. Rans: We’ve been around for 20 years, and we’ve been developing this platform for the last four years. I should mention that we also got some funding from the Vancouver Foundation through their systems change, but their systems change grants are on hold. So our future is tenuous, my friends.

I’m sitting here as somebody who has devoted the better part of 40 years to this work in the non-profit sector and, knowing what we know about the potential of technology to actually deal with some of this stuff, we can do this. We’re already doing it. We just want a chance to show you that we can do it and to bring in the new leadership of today to take this on and move it forward.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Martha, thank you for your passion on this subject, and if you want to break into song and dance, I’d say go for it, absolutely.

A Voice: I just want to know what the song is.

M. Rans: Well, you know: “Take a chance on me; take a chance on you….” I would add: “Take a chance on all of my colleagues today.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you. Absolutely.

Our next presenter — that is what I would refer to as a tough act to follow — is Claire Kanigan, from Prisoners Legal Services.

PRISONERS LEGAL SERVICES

C. Kanigan: I indeed do not have any songs prepared for today.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. My name is Claire Kanigan, and I am a staff lawyer at Prisoners Legal Services. We administer all prison-related legal aid for people held in federal and provincial custody in B.C. We advocate for the rights and dignity of people in prison, including their liberty rights, protected by section 7 of the Charter, their human rights and their right to safe and adequate health care.

People who are subject to incarceration are among the most marginalized members of our community. Provincial custody facilities are disproportionately filled with people who are Indigenous, people with mental health issues and people with adverse childhood experiences, including abuse, poverty and other forms of trauma. These communities deserve a meaningful place in the upcoming budget. Our recommendations are directed accordingly.

First, we call on the province to fund community-based organizations to reduce involvement with the criminal legal system and provide support to those returning to the community after incarceration. A report commissioned by the province last year found: “It is not sustainable, desirable or effective for police to continue to bear the primary responsibility to manage people who offend repeatedly.” Instead, the report called for a significant expansion of mental health resources and for collaboration between actors beyond the justice system and law enforcement.

The safer communities action plan was announced shortly following the release of the report and was framed as having both an enforcement and an intervention track. However, funding has heavily favoured enforcement thus far. So $230 million has been allocated, over three years, to fund RCMP units, including hiring new officers, and $87 million has been dedicated to B.C. Corrections core funding and launching two new enforcement programs.

This, frankly, is a far cry from the report’s recommendations. As acknowledged by the report, we cannot police or imprison our way out of the underlying causes of repeat encounters with the criminal legal system, and the province must accordingly shift its focus to intervention and prevention at the community level.

[12:15 p.m.]

Second, we call on the province to address the ongoing use of solitary confinement in provincial jails — including by increasing the capacity of the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital to serve people who are certified under the Mental Health Act while in provincial custody.

It is well established that solitary confinement causes serious psychological harm and increases the risk of self-harm and even death. These risks are especially acute for people with existing mental health conditions.

The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital, or FPH, is the only facility of its kind in the province. It has 190 beds, and this number has, reportedly, not been increased in 15 years. Currently, if someone is certifiable in provincial custody, FPH is the only treatment facility they can be transferred to. All too often, people who are certified while in provincial custody are then held in segregation, including conditions of solitary confinement for prolonged periods of time while they wait for a bed at FPH.

People with mental health issues must be spared the life-threatening harms of solitary confinement. At the very least, a shortage of beds must not be a justification for subjecting them to these harms. Finally, we call on the province to fulfil its commitment to hiring Indigenous patient navigators to assist with transitions from all provincial correctional centres. Funding should be directed to health authorities, such as the PHSA and FNHA, to ensure autonomy from the correctional system. This is necessary to ensure that IPNs can advocate freely for their clients’ health and well-being and keep release planning focused on community and not corrections.

Indigenous people continue to be heavily criminalized and incarcerated at growing rates; 35 percent of people in provincial custody are Indigenous. The province must invest in Indigenous-led initiatives to reduce encounters with the criminal legal system and provide alternatives to prison in order to end the mass incarceration of Indigenous peoples. However, for those already subject to imprisonment, Indigenous patient navigators offer valuable support in connecting to community organizations, including health and wellness resources, upon release.

When people are incarcerated, they are cut off from their community networks and service providers, and are often leaving custody with worsened health. The need for supporting Indigenous people in this situation is especially significant, given the ongoing negative impacts of colonialism on Indigenous peoples’ health and the racism endemic to the health care system as recognized in the In Plain Sight report.

Providing Indigenous patient navigators to all facilities is one of the province’s many obligations to Indigenous peoples who have been harmed by the prison system. Currently, there is only one Indigenous patient navigator for all four male institutions across the Lower Mainland — who does not support women at the Alouette Correctional Centre. There is one in Prince George and one in the Interior. Clearly, there is a long way to go with this program.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Claire, thank you very much for your presentation. I have a question with regards to the Indigenous patient navigator. We all know that it’s disproportionate to who’s incarcerated. That’s not an unknown factor; that’s out there.

My question is: how do we compare at all to other prov­inces? Are we way, way behind, or are we equally behind, or are we comparable to what’s there? What would be the number that you would be looking at for how many of these positions there would be? If we said today, “Here you go; we want to fill these positions,” how many would that be?

C. Kanigan: To clarify, are you asking about the percentage of Indigenous people incarcerated compared to other provinces, or the availability of the navigator?

M. Starchuk (Chair): The availability of the navigator.

C. Kanigan: Okay. I don’t have that information available right now, but the need is clearly there in B.C. The commitment, I believe in November 2022, was to have a community transition team with an Indigenous patient navigator at every correctional facility. But there should be at least two. It’s a very heavy job. I would say there should be at least 20, if not more, of these positions created.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, good. Thank you.

A. Walker: Thank you for the presentation. There’s a lot of information there. I don’t know much about the challenges with solitary confinement. What kind of a wait-list are you looking at when somebody is needing psychiatric care and those inmates are placed in solitary confinement? You mentioned that there’s a wait-list for those 190 beds. Are we talking days, weeks, months? What does that look like for some of these inmates?

C. Kanigan: I don’t want to commit to a specific number, but certainly weeks at least.

[12:20 p.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Any other comments?

H. Yao: For recommendation 1, do you mind helping us put in the dollar figure per individual released from prison?

C. Kanigan: Sorry, for…?

H. Yao: For recommendation 1, you’re talking about more mental health, education, intervention and potential employment, as well — all kinds of positions instead of going to policing — dealing with individuals that are released into the community. Do you have a dollar figure that we can work with? We have report to Treasury Board.

C. Kanigan: Of course. The province has been prepared to spend $230 million on funding RCMP units. So I think they should be prepared to spend the same amount of money on making sure that people are not re-entering the criminal legal system when they’re released.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Any other comments or questions?

G. Chow: The Indigenous prison navigator is not a probation officer. It’s more of a social worker or a counsellor. That’s their role?

C. Kanigan: Yeah. They’re not a probation officer. They work in collaboration with the community transition teams, which are under PHSA. They’re not under Correc­tions. Those teams are a multidisciplinary team that includes social workers and Indigenous patient navigators.

This model is actually used in health care as well. For instance, individual hospitals might have Indigenous patient navigators to assist people in ensuring that their needs are met when they’re interacting with physicians, for instance. It’s not a correctional position.

A. Walker: While we have you, and we still have time, the community-based organizations you mentioned…. Nanaimo Correctional Centre has one for people who are currently detained. It’s called the Inside-Out program, and they work with our local university.

I’m just wondering if you can highlight some of these community-based organizations that you’re aware of that can maybe put a face to some of this request.

C. Kanigan: I think I’m going to have to pass on that particular question. All I would say with that is that the funding for these community organizations….

When I say there should be funding for these organizations, I mean organizations that are not associated with Corrections, that are purely community organizations, so people can be meaningfully transitioning out of the correctional system and truly into the community-based organizations they can continue to have a relationship with.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Claire, thank you very much for your time and your presentation this morning.

To the rest of the committee, we will recess for lunch. If we can be back here, seated, for 1:05 this afternoon, ready to go.

The committee recessed from 12:23 p.m. to 1:07 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right, everyone. We will call the meeting to order.

First up is Rick Barnum, National Coalition Against Contraband Tobacco.

Rick, you have five minutes to make your presentation. There are five minutes for questions and/or comments. With regards to questions and/or comments, we will try to make the questions as brief as possible and the answers as brief as possible so we get the most amount of questions and answers.

The floor is yours.

NATIONAL COALITION
AGAINST CONTRABAND TOBACCO

R. Barnum: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here in British Columbia and have the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon.

My name is Rick Barnum. I am the executive director of the National Coalition Against Contraband Tobacco, also known as the NCACT. I joined this organization after 30 years of working as a police officer. I retired from the Ontario Provincial Police as a deputy commissioner in charge of organized crime and serious investigations.

At the NCACT, we’ve begun to see an increase in criminal gang activity tied to contraband tobacco within the province of British Columbia, which is why we have increased our engagement recently within your province.

Contraband tobacco is a national issue. It impacts every province inside this country. The RCMP estimates that over 175 organized crime groups are involved in the manufacture and sale of contraband tobacco throughout our country. They are also involved in other illicit activities and other illicit trades. These include the sale and the distribution of illegal cannabis, cocaine, fentanyl, illegal firearms and also human trafficking.

While the government of British Columbia revenues have declined by 2 percent, taxes on tobacco have in­creased by 36 percent since 2018. This sharp rise in taxes has unfortunately led British Columbia to become a more fertile ground for illegal cigarette sales. While a carton of legal cigarettes now sells for about $160, a carton of illegal cigarettes sells for as low as $40. This is a major price difference, and the availability of contraband tobacco has allowed criminal gangs to begin selling more and more cigarettes in this province, and they’re helping to fund other illegal activities.

To address this rise in criminal gang activity, we recommend that British Columbia follow in the footsteps of other successful jurisdictions, such as Quebec, New Brunswick and Manitoba. While the B.C. Ministry of Finance already houses 14 investigators that oversee and investigate contraband tobacco tax-evasion issues, more must be done.

Through conversations with various B.C. government officials, we have determined that the best way for B.C. to address this growing issue would be to create a contraband tobacco enforcement team housed within the B.C. RCMP. This would allow the province to have law enforcement directly involved in combating illegal cigarettes and have criminal gangs, with the support of the Ministry of Finance, arrested and removed.

[1:10 p.m.]

It would follow the successful model in Quebec, where 60 Sûreté du Québec members make up their contraband tobacco enforcement team. That team has reduced Quebec’s rate of contraband tobacco by over 50 percent. It returned over $200 million to its public treasury in one year alone. The Quebec government estimates that for every dollar spent on contraband tobacco enforcement, they return approximately $14 in increased tobacco tax revenues.

To further support the fight against contraband tobacco, we recommend that government create a public awareness campaign highlighting the organized criminal links to contraband tobacco. Many smokers that buy illegal cigarettes see it as a victimless crime. This could not be further from the truth.

Lastly, we recommend that the government maintain a prudent taxation approach until contraband tobacco action is implemented. Evidence shows that increased taxation pushes smokers to the illegal market, which in turn fuels organized crime.

To conclude, the time is now for the B.C. government to address this growing issue. Without some action, there is a risk that B.C. could join other provinces, such as Ontario, and become the epicentre for contraband tobacco in Canada. Already in Ontario, one in three cigarettes sold in that province is illegal.

Thank you again for your time this afternoon. I’m happy to take any questions that you may have.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Rick, thank you for your presentation.

Are there any comments? I have one to start.

Go ahead, Tom.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation.

You mentioned $1 invested to $14 back. Can you just expand on that a little bit?

R. Barnum: Yes, sir. The government of Quebec funds their contraband tobacco enforcement team. For every dollar that they put in to fund that team, the team returns back $14 in taxes that would have been diverted. The number of seizures that they make from organized crime, the number of cigarettes that are seized, had they been legal cigarettes, that would have been $14 that the government would have had through spending. That doesn’t count the amount of seizures that they make in cash.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I was going to say civil forfeitures.

R. Barnum: Yeah, forfeitures, exactly, which is huge for them.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. At the end, you spoke about the increase in taxes that are driving people, but the purpose of the increasing taxes is to drive down use. I’m curious if you know the statistics around….

You say there are growing numbers of people using contraband, but does that equate to more people smoking? Or is it the entrenched smokers, the continuing smokers?

R. Barnum: I believe it’s both, personally. I know that in British Columbia, they do have the lowest rate of smokers in the country: 7.7 percent compared to 10.3 in other prov­inces. However, that doesn’t measure the illegal market, obviously.

We have the opportunity to deal with and get statistics from various groups, including manufacturers that have to legally report their statistics. When we evaluate those statistics, we’re starting to learn that in British Columbia, there is an increase within this province, mostly in youth smoking, of contraband tobacco use.

R. Leonard: Where are they accessing it?

R. Barnum: Again, it’s organized crime. It’s available in most communities. When I deal with the retailers association for convenience stores, I’ve heard stories from those individuals where, when they close their shop at the end of the day, a minivan will pull in and start selling cigarettes right out of their store parking lot. They’re losing huge amounts of income. Most of their income is tied to legal cigarette sales at convenience stores, and many of the businesses are suffering over 50 percent loss in income as a result of that.

B. Stewart: Where the enforcement has stepped up, did they change anything about buying, the people that are buying contraband? Is there anything changed from a prosecution point of view?

R. Barnum: Yes, sir. There are different approaches that they’re using in Quebec. For instance, they’re laying fraud charges now. The penalties for contraband tobacco sales and possession are very minimum. It’s a maximum of two years in jail.

In my time in policing, I’ve never known anybody to go to jail for contraband tobacco sales. The penalties under that specifically are relatively minimum, but fraud charges go on the tax. The Ministry of Finance individuals will count the number of cigarettes and lay a fraud charge that’s appropriate for that much that would have gone to the government. There’s some better luck that way in the courts using those charges.

[1:15 p.m.]

We’re also finding in Quebec, where the team has been the most successful, that the availability just isn’t there. They target, as we recommend…. Targeting major organized crime groups, for instance the tractor-trailers that are driving across this country delivering millions of cigarettes to your province…. That’s where we want the specialized teams to target. It’s not a local approach, where we’re going into various areas and targeting that. That’s not really successful. You’ve got to get the high end, which Quebec has the model for.

B. Stewart: Okay, but to my point, did they change the laws to make that a criminal offence?

R. Barnum: No, sir, they did not change the laws.

B. Stewart: So it was already pre-existing. Thanks.

A. Walker: Thanks for this. You mentioned one in three cigarettes that are sold in Ontario are illegal. Do you have a rough number of what that would be like in B.C.?

R. Barnum: I don’t have the exact number here. I can tell you that we know it’s on the increase. Over the last year, our numbers are indicating that, but I don’t have a specific number for you, sir.

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. Not seeing any other comments or questions, Rick, thank you very much for your presentation and your time this afternoon.

Next up we have Chris Lam, from the B.C. Lung Association.

Chris, you have five minutes for your presentation, and then five minutes for questions and comments.

You have the floor.

B.C. LUNG ASSOCIATION

C. Lam: Thank you, Mike, and a great segue from Rick’s presentation. Here I am, the B.C. Lung Foundation, and a big part of what I’m here to talk to you about is, of course, tobacco and tobacco use and everything of that matter. It is World No Tobacco Day, so it’s very timely for us to be here. Thank you for your time on that.

For those of you who don’t know, and I’m grateful I have had a chance to speak to many of you about what we do in lung health — I see Susie here; good to see you again — we’re an organization dedicated to giving patients hope, help and a voice. This counts for all British Columbians right across our province.

It’s my honour to speak to you today. I’m going to go through this very quickly because there’s lots to talk about. I do want to highlight three things for your consideration in particular, the first of which is an investment in tobacco and vapour education for our kids. It’s one of the most important things we can do for the future of our province, and I’ll go into some detail about that shortly.

The second thing is that we need to make an investment in a provincewide radon action plan. Radon is something that isn’t widely known across our province, particularly for our citizens. It’s time we changed that, because it is indeed the second-leading cause of lung cancer, and you can imagine the burden on our health care system that will create.

The third item that I want to talk about is an investment in a provincewide air quality education program. Wildfires are happening with more frequency. It is so important that our citizens know what they can and should do during wildfire season and what the effects of wood smoke are for their health.

Let’s start right back at the beginning. A topic that a lot of you are familiar with is tobacco and vapour and our kids. This investment needs to be a fairly strong step at this stage. Our province has made very strong steps, particularly with vapour, but now it’s time to use the science and take even bigger steps.

We know that vaping is at epidemic levels, particularly in the schools. It’s causing cognitive and respiratory issues. It’s creating a generation that’s normalizing smoking. Tobacco continues to be the number one preventable cause of cancer in our province. Now, if you relate that to what that means to our health care system down the line, those numbers will be staggering. It’s something that we need to do today as we talk about prevention.

The second thing I want to talk about is the radon action plan. Radon is an odourless gas that naturally occurs. It comes out of the earth. It represents the second-leading cause of cancer after tobacco use. There’s something that we can do as a province to mitigate against that, to create mediation plans, to create our citizens with a sense of ease and, really, a way for us to test their homes.

That needs to be a provincewide effort, and it can be coordinated in a way that it doesn’t scare people. It can be a scary topic when you start talking about lung cancer in people’s basements. It’s lurking in their homes. We can mitigate that with a provincewide education program.

The last thing is air quality, a topic that unfortunately all of us know a lot about, especially over the last little while. Wildfires are burning right throughout the province. I know some of you are worried about your constituents back home. Right now, especially in the Interior, we’re cov­ered in smoke. That smoke is something that all of our citizens are breathing in. That, besides the particulate matter, can cause significant lung damage and accelerate people’s needs for hospitalization.

[1:20 p.m.]

Again, as I relate this to the burden on our health care system, this is an incredible burden that we can prevent with the right types of education. If we sort of mitigate what those things are, we can come up with a way that really does support our citizens in a much better fashion.

We do have a program that’s ongoing right now that is supported by the government, but it actually highlights an incredible need for us to have education around wood smoke and what wood smoke does to our lungs. We have advocates all over the province, as you can imagine. We just heard this week that on Salt Spring, one of our advocates is being harassed and bullied by their neighbours, for no better reason than they think that wood smoke is okay and they should be able to do so.

We’re not trying to take anything away from people. We want to educate people about the harms to their health, and I think that is a responsibility we can all take quite seriously.

That’s my time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

I want to make one comment before we start. I appreciate the work that you do. My former career as a firefighter…. We succumb to lung cancer at a rate higher than most people in the world, so I consider myself an advocate of what you’re doing, but I also consider myself a walking, talking, ticking time bomb.

It’s the work you do that will be there for the future people, because when I started, the more smoke you breathed, the better you were. We’re smarter than that now.

C. Lam: That’s good. Thank you, Mike.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. I’ll make it quick, two points.

On No. 1, on the investment in tobacco vaping prod­ucts, would you support legislation on the ban of flavoured vaping products for young kids, like those exotic flavours like tutti frutti and mango and all that kind of stuff that really isn’t geared for older folks — probably more for the youngers?

The second one would be on air quality for wildfires, and where does prescribed burning fit into that. We know it’s important for eco health as well as mitigating, I guess, big wildfires.

So those two points.

C. Lam: Two excellent, excellent questions.

On the first one, without a doubt, the flavours need to be taken out of the marketplace in British Columbia and nationwide. Here in British Columbia, we do have regulations around what flavours are available. I think there’s a further step that we can take, given what we know. In fact, basically only tobacco flavours should be available.

I think to answer that holistically, none of those things should be available to kids, period. That’s undoubtable. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to say smoking anything is not good for your health, let alone our kids, creating an entire generation of new smokers. So bold steps in that regard are going to be needed, starting with an education plan.

Your second thing on prescribed burning is a fantastic one as well. I think Mike as a former firefighter probably understands this topic quite well. There’s no doubt that that would help mitigate how large the wildfires are going to get. It should be something we do. I think where that needs to be done is in consultation with our air quality experts, where we do that in a pattern where it’s away from major communities and it’s away from our citizens, because the wood smoke inhalation is one of the most significant toxic things we can breathe in. It has absolutely tragic consequences on our health.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. I’m going to be going a bit more — talking about radon. I’m looking at SFU’s citizen scientist project for oil and gas. It’s scary looking at it. It looks like 50 percent or more of British Columbia is in a risk. Do you mind giving us more explanation of what is radon and how it impacts and how it actually becomes contributing to lung cancer?

C. Lam: Absolutely. I’ll do my best in two minutes on the topic of radon.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Or less than.

C. Lam: Or less than.

It’s a fantastic question because radon, like I mentioned before, is a naturally occurring gas. It’s when it gets trapped in one compartment and you breathe that in — that’s when it’s like getting a chest X-ray. You can imagine, when you go to the dentist and they put the camera in your face and they all run for cover with the lead vest. They’re shooting one becquerel of radiation into your face.

When you have your home sealed up, particularly in the Interior, in places where we’re all about energy efficiency and you’ve sealed all your windows and all the cracks, you’ve actually trapped that gas. That’s the equivalent of getting a chest X-ray. That’s what causes the lung cancer. It’s the breakdown of that radiation in your lungs.

You mentioned the statistic of 51 percent of British Columbians. What’s alarming for us is as we’ve started to test more and more homes in our province, we used to think that in the Lower Mainland and on the Island, it really wasn’t an issue. What we’re finding now is more and more incidence of radon high levels in those areas.

[1:25 p.m.]

I do want to make it very clear, though, that just because your neighbour has radon or a radon issue doesn’t mean your home does. There are ways to mitigate this that are quite simple. It’s just an education plan that needs to be implemented that will get us there.

M. Starchuk (Chair): George, last question.

G. Chow: Thanks. My question, basically answered, was about radon gas, so thank you. Thank you for your presentation.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, well…. Ronna Rae.

R. Leonard: Very quickly, the previous presenter talked about increasing smoking by youth. Do you have statistics on what’s going on with the rate of…?

C. Lam: We do. They’re all very preliminary because, as you probably know, the statistics on vaping are quite young. Pardon the pun on that. The truth of the matter is that vaping is starting as young as ten years old. That’s grade 5. What we’ve also found is it normalizes this con­cept of smoking, and it creates this gateway into tobacco smoking.

While we’re seeing levels of vaping start to level, what we’re seeing is that this isn’t a fad. This is a real thing that’s here to stay, that’s creating an epidemic, that’s also creating a gateway into tobacco use. That is something that we really need to remove from the hands of our youth.

Look at me: right on time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): There we go. Right on time. Thank you, Chris, for your presentation today. It’s very insightful. Good luck with your endeavours.

Next, we have Adrienne Montani, First Call Child and Youth Advocacy Society.

Adrienne, you have five minutes for your presentation, five minutes for questions or comments.

You have the floor.

FIRST CALL CHILD AND YOUTH
ADVOCACY SOCIETY

A. Montani: Hello, committee members. Thank you for your time and attention. I think you have my presentation. We submitted a written submission, so I assume you have that. I’ll simply say First Call is focused on child rights and well-being, particularly as those issues are affected by public policy.

Our first recommendation for next year’s budget is to continue investments to reduce the poverty of those groups of children known to have higher poverty rates. That would be including children in lone-parent families, Indigenous and racialized families, immigrant and refugee families, youth leaving care and those living with disabilities. That’s some of the high points there.

This recommendation is informed by the research in our 2022 B.C. Child Poverty Report Card, where we see that 59 percent of poor children in B.C., in 2020, lived in lone-parent families — so the majority. And 38 percent of those children in those families were poor, so it’s a very high rate, much higher than the overall child poverty rate in that year, at 13 percent.

The small snapshot of data we have for First Nations reserves child poverty in B.C. showed a 29 percent child poverty rate. So just a few quick snapshots from our report card.

Thanks to pandemic income supports, we saw child poverty rates drop in 2020, yet we know that the pandemic disproportionately impacted women’s employment, especially single mothers, and other groups with high poverty rates. As these emergency income supports ended, low-income families with children are now facing a crisis due to inflation in rent and food and transportation and other essential living expenses.

We recommend government make sure that direct in­come supports such as the B.C. family benefit, social assistance rates and portable rent supplements continue to rise with inflation. Parents in the labour force or labour market need family-supporting wages, better access to affordable, quality child care and increased protections for those in precarious work. Accelerated investments in the affordable housing supply, along with better renter protections, are urgently needed by low-income families.

Our second recommendation is for next year’s budget to focus on investments in prevention and early intervention for young children. We know that over 33 percent of B.C.’s children are entering kindergarten with developmental vulnerabilities. What’s happening or not happening in those preschool years is something we need to…. What’s contributing to this high level of vulnerability?

Of course, poverty is one powerful factor. But additionally, families raising young children need timely access in B.C., all around the province, to parenting supports, early intervention therapies and assessments and high-quality, inclusive child care.

Government’s review of the service delivery for children and youth with support needs must commit to increased investments to eliminate wait times for time-sensitive inter­ventions for children with developmental delays, physical disabilities and complex medical needs.

Young parent programs are highly successful in helping young parents continue their education, get jobs and sometimes get their children returned from government care. These programs need additional investments around the province. Increased funding is also required for family resource programs which offer barrier-free drop-in programming and help combat isolation for families with young children.

[1:30 p.m.]

The vital work of reaching and supporting Indigenous families with young children through the Aboriginal in­fant development and supported child development programs require more funding, as do the non-Aboriginal IDP and SCD programs, because they are also starved for dedicated funding.

Of course, a key solution to the recruitment and retention crisis facing child care in this province is establishing a competitive wage grid for early childhood educators so they can afford to stay in the profession. All those new spaces being built, which we’re very happy about, need a workforce in place to welcome the children and families who are waiting for access.

Our third recommendation is around the inadequacy of funding for public schools. Increased education funding is needed to reduce inequities in our K-to-12 system, between both districts and schools, due to income inequality among families and communities and, therefore, schools and districts that rely on parent fundraising.

School staff need more hands on deck in schools and more professional development to deal with the increased needs among their students, some arising from the effects of the pandemic. Children with extra support and diverse learning needs are still being sent home from school when supports are insufficient in the school setting, denying them their right to education. Many parents have told us that the lack of access to school-age child care means they can only work during school hours, so expansion of before- and after-school child care, preferably on school sites, is an urgent poverty reduction measure.

We applaud the new investments in healthy school food programming and urge the creation of a dedicated multi-year funding stream for schools. Yes, to help meet the nutritional needs of low-income students, but also because of the multiple benefits these programs have on children’s learning and social development.

Thank you for your attention, and I welcome your questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Adrienne, for your presentation.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much. I wanted to ask you about….

In your recommendation No. 1, you talk about the census family low-income measure, and I wonder…. That’s the number that, essentially, that $500 family benefit grant impacted, right? That’s what you said.

A. Montani: The annual $500 boost to lone parents in the family benefit? Yes, that’s a good thing. Happy to see that.

B. Stewart: Okay, so what I was really getting at is…. Okay, this is measured below the poverty line. Can you just tell us what the poverty line is in terms of what that threshold is for a lone parent?

A. Montani: I don’t have that because it depends on the family size. It depends on how many children they have. So if you look at our child poverty report card, this little chart in the back…. I don’t have all those figures in my head at the moment. It changes year to year, so I might have an old number in my head.

B. Stewart: I’m just surprised that $500 was enough to….

A. Montani: No, it’s not enough. We always praise small steps, but it obviously needs to go up higher.

B. Stewart: So what would the number be? What would be success?

A. Montani: Well, I think, again, looking at our report card, the average poor family with children in the province is $11,000 to $12,000 below the poverty line. So there’s some room there. The $500 doesn’t quite get it there, but every bit helps.

H. Yao: I’m looking at recommendation No. 3, where you talk about before- and after-school child care.

You and I both appreciate and understand that a lot of low-income, single parents and ethnic communities, especially women, tend to be forced to work shift work. Do you have any recommendations about how we support them so that they can actually continue employment and not have a financial burden or be restricted for employment?

A. Montani: Yeah. Well, we need flexible child care access for shift workers. Absolutely. That would be the…. Those models exist in some places, but they are fairly rare. Most child cares are open working hours or less. Yeah.

Investments in child care and meeting the needs of those kinds of working parents…. Those parents, also, often in those precarious or…. They don’t have benefits and stuff like that. So that’s another thing that families are really struggling with.

S. Chant: I got some information from my colleague, but for, let’s say, a two-person family, what is the poverty line? I’m sorry. That sounds like a dumb question, but….

A. Montani: For a two-person family? I don’t have it, sorry. But it’s in our report.

S. Chant: Okay. For one person?

A. Montani: I don’t have that. They change every year. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I wouldn’t quote it properly. It’s something like $30,000, roughly, or something.

S. Chant: Okay, fair that. Thank you.

A. Montani: There is a little chart in the appendix of our child poverty report card. You can see the poverty lines for the different family sizes there.

[1:35 p.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Any other comments or questions?

Not seeing anything, Adrienne, thank you for your time and your work on behalf of those people that sometimes are unheard.

Our next presenter is Karla Verschoor of Inclusion B.C.

You have five minutes to present, and then there are five minutes for questions and/or comments.

You have the floor.

INCLUSION B.C.

K. Verschoor: Thank you for having me this afternoon.

Inclusion B.C. is a non-profit federation working with partners to build community and enhance the lives of children, youth and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. We are supported by a membership of individual people, families and 65 member organizations that provide direct disability-related support to people across the province.

In preparation for this submission, we brought our membership together and asked a really straightforward question: if the government of B.C. could make one investment to improve the lives of those we work for and with, what would it be? Our members agreed that the top funding priorities are a livable income and secure housing, closely followed by improved health and mental health supports for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The combination of these three inequities continues to keep people marginalized in their communities and from their systems of support.

Our first recommendation for you today is to raise the person with disability, or PWD, rate to $2,200 per month, increase the associated health supplement benefits and add 400 additional portable rental supplements on top of the $500 shelter allowance to ensure people can access safe, accessible and inclusive market housing anywhere in B.C.

As we advocate for the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, we see the relationship between disability and poverty every day. We know that according to a 2018 fact sheet published by Inclusion Canada, 73 percent of working-age Canadians with an intellectual disability who live on their own are living in poverty, and less than 25 percent are employed.

We also know that safe and affordable housing is a barrier for this population. In a 2020 report by Inclusion B.C. and Community Living B.C., we found that over 5,000 people in B.C. alone will be looking for a home in the next five years. However, the current shelter allowance won’t give them access to inclusive housing, and a portable rental housing supplement is a mechanism to achieve that.

Our second recommendation: a targeted investment of $1 million for the development of a health and mental health strategy to adequately respond to the health and mental health needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and to create a provincial oversight structure to provide leadership of these services.

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities have more complex health needs and a greater presence of coexisting health issues than neurotypical people. For example, professionals report that the prevalence of co-occurring mental health conditions in adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities is as high as 40 percent in some studies.

The fragmented services and limited understanding of the health and mental health needs of this population leave them significantly marginalized. For example, the developmental disability health and mental health services are unable to respond to demand, and we have up to a 24-month wait-list in our province.

A provincial strategy is long overdue to address the following: the gap in provincial leadership and data collection; the need for specialized and bridging experience between health and all services, being Community Living B.C., health authorities and service providers; the need for essential community nursing supports for children, youth and adults; and the need to support the health-related needs for this population as they age.

Having a dedicated leadership structure to provide oversight, collect data and offer training would provide the coordinated approach that is much needed to meet people’s health and wellness needs.

Our final recommendation is to establish an innovation fund of $1 million through the office of the Parliamentary Secretary for Community Development and Non-profits to support the community living organizations to invest in new solutions and approaches to strengthen the inclusion and resilience of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in their home communities.

As a social service sector that was built on community development approaches to supporting inclusive pathways for people, the ongoing surge in administrative costs such as technology, rent, property tax and wage compression have diminished the administrative structure needed to support the transportation of services required to meet the changing needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

[1:40 p.m.]

In a sector whose number of eligible adults increases by 5 percent per year, we need to transform the services and supports to ensure that each person is given the opportunity to flourish in community with supports prepared to support them.

Investment in community living organizations and person-centred societies is an investment in the better lives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Karla, for your presentation.

Do we have comments or questions?

H. Yao: As you probably heard earlier, some of my colleagues were talking about the poverty line. May I ask? Why did you pick $2,200 per month? Maybe educate us on the decision behind that number.

K. Verschoor: To Adrienne’s point, it’s a very debated…. Do you use the poverty line, the market basket index?

For me and for Inclusion B.C.…. What we think would adequately, at this point in time, lift people out of poverty, as long as it was indexed to inflation, would be a $2,200 base as well as a $600 rental supplement. It would put them at $2,800 a month. Depending on where you live in the province, it will range between $28,000 and $32,000. That would be a significant and a sufficient investment.

R. Leonard: Thank you for presenting.

I have to say…. You spoke fast. All of my blood is in my belly after lunch.

K. Verschoor: Well, three things in five minutes.

R. Leonard: When you got to the third thing, that’s where I started to lose it. I’m admitting it. Come on.

What was the third thing after housing? You talked about a livable income, secure housing and….

K. Verschoor: My first recommendation was around a livable income and secure housing combined. A mental health and health strategy was the second recommendation. Then the third was an innovation fund.

Does that help?

R. Leonard: Yes. I did actually get all three of those. It was in your introduction where I was getting lost.

S. Chant: Thank you very much for your presentation.

I’ve worked in and around this field for a long time. The aging-in-place piece I’ve observed, in my practice, to be particularly challenging amongst many, many challenges. Is there anything, in particular, you could suggest that allows a bit of a focus there?

K. Verschoor: Absolutely. I think this is something that our sector has done incredibly well when resourced appropriately.

I think the three pieces that would be the most beneficial there are a coordinated approach between Community Living B.C. and Health, an investment in community nursing supports that will allow people to age in place as well as transition teams that would help people when their age-related needs come on suddenly. Their unit may not be accessible for them. Their mobility may be declining quickly.

It comes down to…. Responsiveness and a coordinated infrastructure of support, I would say, are the fundamentals there.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Karla.

There’s an allowance for people that are collecting PWD to be able to work. I know it has been increased.

I’m just wondering: out of the people that are in that category, what’s the percentage that are able to work?

K. Verschoor: It will look a little bit different for everybody. The shelter allowance….

If you were to look at people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the workforce, we sit right under 25 percent. Within that 25 percent, many are coming nowhere close to the top end of that shelter allowance. The top end is probably benefiting fully about 5 percent of people that have intellectual and developmental disabilities. Many people are making between $6,000 and $10,000, which isn’t a sufficient enough income to really pull them out of the depths of poverty but certainly helps.

B. Stewart: I guess where I was going with that is…. There’s currently a significant labour shortage. Often inclu­sivity and looking at other opportunities…. I realize that there might be some challenges.

I only ask: what’s the percentage of…?

K. Verschoor: There’s an incredibly untapped workforce here. With the right supports in place, they could be contributing very strongly to our economy in a way they’re not right now.

B. Stewart: That’s what I’ve found. By helping…. That change, from whatever the limit was, how many hours a week they could work…. They got that increase. It gave them all sorts of freedom and independence.

[1:45 p.m.]

I realize that’s not for everybody, but I just think that it would certainly help lift….

K. Verschoor: I think everyone can work with the right supports and services.

B. Stewart: Okay. Thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Karla, thank you very much for your presentation and speaking out for those people that may not be able to speak out.

K. Verschoor: Well, there’s one of them here today who can speak for himself. You’ll hear him later this afternoon. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. Next is Shari Monsma, Fairness for Children Raised by Relatives.

Shari, you have five minutes to make your presentation, and five minutes is saved for our questions and our comments.

You have the floor.

FAIRNESS FOR CHILDREN
RAISED BY RELATIVES

S. Monsma: Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Shari Monsma. I am a widowed, retired, senior grandmother and great-grandmother, and have been raising my grandson for the past 15 years. I’m also the proud president of Fairness for Children Raised by Relatives. We are a non-profit society comprised of volunteer kinship caregivers who have come together to advocate for the rights of all kinship care children in B.C.

My first topic is inequities in the provincial kinship support program that both time and MCFD have forgotten. It is a Child in the Home of a Relative program. This program was discontinued in 2010, and those previous recipients were grandparented.

As of March 31, 2019, there were still 740 children receiving these benefits and, as of December 2022, there were only 240 children still enrolled in this program. Our children have not received a single rate increase in 13 years since the program ended, and the amounts they receive are drastically less than any other MCFD family support program.

CIHR rates range from $257.46 a month to $454.32 a month. While in comparison, the ministry’s EFP, out-of-care and foster care program rates, as of April 2023, are between $1,465.86 and $1,655.91 per month. This is a difference of approximately $1,200 per month. While we are grateful to the Ministry of Finance for including our kinship families in the 2023 budget with a 47 percent increase, we are, once again, disappointed that our children in CIHR were excluded.

Even though CIHR is the responsibility of MCFD, our children’s benefits are being administered through the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction. That ministry provided six increases in financial support between 2010 and 2022 for their social programs.

Many of the caregivers, like myself, have been raising these children for over 13 years and are now seniors on fixed incomes. This inequity is putting our families in financial hardship. We need your ministry to be proactive in providing these 240 CIHR program children and youth a clear pathway to receiving equitable benefits as others in care.

We are recommending an increase to the budget to allow for the children still in this program to be compen­sated at the same monthly rates as others in care. In addition, those in the program between April 2019 and April 2023 receive appropriate retroactive pay.

My second topic is MCFD’s 54.01/54.1 program — 54 program children, especially children with disabilities, continue to be treated unfairly compared to children in all other ministry family support groups. MCFD receives the Canada child benefit, up to $550 a month, and for those eligible, the disability child benefit of $250 per month, meant for 54 children and their family. This is due to its claim under the federal Children’s Special Allowances Act.

As eligibility for many other children’s benefits, both federal and provincial, are based on a family’s receipt of the federal Canada child benefit, MCFD’s CSA Act renders 54 children and their families ineligible for many other programs, including the B.C. opportunity benefit for low-income families, up to $133 a month. The transfer of their disabled child’s federal disability tax credit denies eligible families up to $3,000 a year in tax savings, intended to support disabilities and services.

The new federal dental program denies many low-income 54 children without dental insurance the basic dental health that’s offered to MCFD families.

For many 54 program families, this is a loss of up to $683 a month in addition to dental benefits, all of which children in EFP are receiving because MCFD is not claiming their federal allowances. For 54 program families with federal disability tax credit–eligible children, the loss is over $933 a month, plus the loss of dental benefits.

[1:50 p.m.]

To ensure equality for all children throughout its family program, B.C. must stop claiming 54 program children’s benefits from the federal government. It’s just not fair; it’s discrimination.

Our final topic is youth aging out of care. Children and youth can enter kinship care at any age, but in British Columbia, support for youth in kinship care ends abruptly when the child turns 19. When youth age out, the government services and supports they rely on are cut off. We also know kinship caregivers of these youth are mostly single grandparents now on fixed incomes, and this is putting these families at risk.

Our recommendation is that the current suite of benefits announced by MCFD in March 2022 for youth aging out of care include all kinship care youth, including financial housing support, which is especially important, allowing kinship care youth to remain in their current home environments, improving their chances of completing a higher education.

I know; it was a lot.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Inhale; exhale. There we go.

Thank you very much for your presentation.

A. Walker: Thank you so much for the presentation.

I am the MLA for Parksville-Qualicum, and we obviously have a lot of seniors there, but we have a lot of seniors that are raising grandkids. I’ve met with many parents, and the three asks are similar to what I’ve heard from a lot of these families, in addition to their inability to feel connected with other grandparents. As a parent, it’s easy, because you can hang out after school. But grandparents feel very isolated, and I’m just wondering what work your organization is doing to connect with some of these grandparents.

S. Monsma: Actually, it’s funny that you mention that because coming up in two weeks, we’re going to be having a kinship care gathering to which we invite all of the kinship caregivers across the province. We had one last year in Nanaimo, on the Island, and this year we’re going to be in Kamloops. We’ve got one grant, and we’re trying to give them as many supports as we can so that they can come. So far, we’ve only got about 40, I think, coming. But it’s a start, right?

When we did this last year, the most impressive and the most exciting piece of it for me was when we got them all together and they introduced themselves and told their stories. It was just amazing. By the end, they all felt really connected, and it was really good.

S. Chant: New information for me. Thank you.

When a child ends up being cared for by its grandparents or by another family member, do you apply through MCFD for funding for that? Is that…?

S. Monsma: There are a bunch of different ways.

S. Chant: How does somebody get to that? It seems to me that there’s a heck of a lot of discrepancy here.

S. Monsma: It’s really, really hard for people to find out information, and that’s another thing that we’re trying to do with our Fairness group. There are over 13,000 in B.C., and probably half of those are only on MCFD supports. The other ones are informal agreements.

There’s a lot of fear. There are a lot of people that won’t go to MCFD because of their practice of removing children from grandparents. It’s a lot fear-based, so it’s very hard for them to find out.

We are a spinoff of Parent Support Services, which has been working for kinship care for many, many years. They kind of brought us together and brought us in the fold and said: “You guys need to get out there, and you need to advocate for yourselves and get more information so that people know what’s going on.”

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation.

I’m just having a problem with recommendation No. 2. Can you kind of expand on that: “MCFD stop claiming the $54.01 children’s federal benefits”?

S. Monsma: The 54.01 and 54.1 is one of the MCFD programs where they have guardianship. It’s the only program where the MCFD actually takes its cut out of the child benefit.

I’m not sure if any of you saw…. In May 2022, there was this article from the Ombudsperson, Short-Changed. I’m more than happy to leave this for you, if you would like to have it. I brought a copy just in case anybody wasn’t aware of it. It explains everything that’s going on and his recommendations as well.

I’ll just leave that there for you. It’s special report No. 50, and it was published in May 2022.

[1:55 p.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Shari, thank you very much for your presentation and speaking up for those people that are out there and that need the care of the grandparents — or, in your case, great-grandparents — that are out there.

S. Monsma: Is it all right if I leave these brochures be­hind for Fairness?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Oh, absolutely, yeah, at the front desk.

Next up we have Erin Seeley, YWCA Metro Vancouver.

Erin, you have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes for questions and comments.

You have the floor.

YWCA METRO VANCOUVER

E. Seeley: Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Erin Seeley. I’m the CEO of YWCA Metro Vancouver. Thank you for taking time to hear from me today.

YWCA is a registered charity. We have a vision of a just and equitable future for women, families and allies. We’ve been operating here in the region for over 125 years and offer integrated services, safe and affordable housing, early learning and child care, youth employment and training programs, as well as single mothers support, violence pre­vention, and advocacy. Many of our services support women living on low incomes; Indigenous women; newcomer and refugee women, increasingly; and single mothers and their children.

We have 76 programs across 130 locations in Metro Vancouver, and we serve thousands of women and families. We know that our services continue to be in demand and that there’s a wider group of people reaching further afield who need support. As beautiful and as prosperous as British Columbia is, we know it’s incredibly challenging to survive. We have a housing and affordability crisis.

Our three recommendations focus on solid foundations for women, not just to get by but to break the cycles of poverty and create brighter futures for themselves and for the next generation.

The first recommendation is to raise income and disability assistance rates at least to the poverty line and to tie them to the cost of living. This is also consistent with the calls for justice in the national inquiry report from the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls inquiry.

Many YWCA program participants, especially single moms, can’t meet their basic needs, as $690 is the shelter rate if you’re on income assistance. You can’t find accommodation anywhere for that. Measures taken over the last years to raise rates are in the right direction, but the system is still regressive, and it fails to meaningfully address systemic poverty. We recommend a full-scale review of income assistance, with the goal to evolve from providing financial assistance to helping people, particularly women, break that cycle.

Our second recommendation is related to early learning and child care: adjusting ChildCareBC’s current framework, which is pushing non-profit providers like YWCA to incur operating deficits as a normal course of business. It limits our ability to open new child care centres. We’ve been operating child care for more than 30 years in the region, and we know that the costs of salaries are the biggest costs. We want to honour, and pay a living wage to, our early childhood educators.

We recommend creating a capital replacement fund for child care as centres age. We also recommend being able to waive the one-year wait time which is currently in place if you’re applying for $10-a-day funding. Operators are expected to somehow self-fund their deficits for the first year and to operate on a wing and a prayer until they can even apply for $10-a-day. New spaces funding to secure capital is great. The operations are the biggest challenge.

I’ll reiterate other calls. We want to see attraction and retention of qualified ECEs. We’re actually training them at YWCA to add to the labour force. But having a competitive wage grid is critical to make this a living wage, which is deserved by caregivers.

Our final recommendation is around housing: addressing the need for urgently funded affordable housing, creating multiple funding streams and having consistency and continuity with funding streams, instead of having one stream open occasionally and, maybe two years later, having, potentially, another stream open.

It’s the ability to plan that’s critical. We’re planning now for 2028-2029 for housing. Knowing with certainty when funding will be available and lining up to be able to apply with the partners on the land is critical.

An example of this is to immediately release additional funds for the women’s transition housing fund. We know the housing crisis continues to disproportionately impact women. We urge you to make all the policy levers available at the same time and to consistently keep them open with annual, repetitive streams so that applications can continue to be submitted.

[2:00 p.m.]

In our submission, you see other creative ways with housing. I think we’ve managed through many partnerships. We know it takes the private sector, it takes government, and it takes non-profits to address this crisis. We’re very willing to be innovative and take risks, but we require more support that’s continuous and consistent at every stage of housing, from early acquisition and negotiation to operating housing without the deep deficits. That goes back to income assistance shelter rates as well.

Thank you all for your attention today. To conclude, we are seeking ongoing, robust social investments to take bold action to address poverty, child care and affordable housing in the region. We strongly believe that investing in an inclusive economy is more critical than balancing the budget within the next decade. Your support for women and families now will pay dividends long into the future.

Thank you for your time today.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Erin. I do have a question I’d like to start off with.

You talked about training ECEs. I didn’t see it in your report. Can you just expand on what it is that you’re delivering to create that position?

E. Seeley: We have an integrated program approach. In our employment programs department, we’re delivering a program called Discover that is training early childhood educators. It’s a partnership with Sprott-Shaw College. It’s operating not only here, but we have a partnership on Vancouver Island with the YM-YWCA there. So trying to address that gap, and still seeing that the wages are not competitive to retain in the field.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for doing a presentation.

I’m looking at your recommendation No. 1 on raising income and disability rates to a living income. I think the other person sitting right behind you recommended $2,200 as a starting point.

Is that something similar to your recommendation, or do you have a different number in your mind?

E. Seeley: We would rely on the research of other organizations. I think those examples are consistent with what we’re seeing.

I think the other piece is the need to keep it pegged to inflation so that it’s not static — that you can continue to allow people not to fall behind but to keep up.

Shelter rates are particularly important, as are the earning…. I heard about this. The earnings exemption — not making it regressive. I would argue…. That was even in your report last year, around looking at that earnings exemption. That’s a critical piece to incentivize participation in the labour market.

H. Yao: I have another question I would love to ask you, as well. You mentioned about finding a way to support women and people with low income with child care. One of the things I presume we’re still struggling is how we help shift work people and people who are experiencing a lot of poverty, or like women, single parents, who tend to be stuck in a lot of shift work.

During your recommendation, as has been presented, is there any way we can help people in shift work with their child care needs?

E. Seeley: I think the spaces are critical, and that’s part of it. In fact, we’re very supportive of looking at shift work models. You have to go back to what you’re paying your employees as early childhood educators to also be staying into evening hours.

That’s where the compression happens in the operating model: having subsidies, particularly for unusual hours of operation, for occasional child care, which YWCA operates, for example, at Crabtree Corner, where you don’t have to book Monday to Friday, but you can book it on an as-needed basis.

I think that the ChildCareBC strategy needs to include those kinds of what would be non-traditional models in order to incentivize operators to do that. We prioritize families who are more vulnerable. We keep our rates deliberately within the band set so that parents can continue to get the operating subsidy. That’s critical. But the ways that you can reward the workforce to work late and leave their own families are going to be critical to those spaces being available.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Erin, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon.

Next, we have Meredith Crough, Ishtar Women’s Resource Society.

Meredith, you have five minutes to present, and then there’s five minutes of questions and/or comments.

You have the floor.

ISHTAR WOMEN’S RESOURCE SOCIETY

M. Crough: My name is Meredith, and I represent Ish­tar Women’s Resource Society. We’re a women’s anti-violence organization operating out of Langley, B.C.

All of the recommendations I bring are specific to Langley but also stand in solidarity with women’s anti-violence organizations across the province. You’ll hear me echo a lot of the calls from my prior presenter as well.

Our first recommendation is around housing. That is, to fund an aggressive expansion of a flexible continuum of housing supports for survivors of violence as well as prioritizing rental supplement top-ups for those who are fleeing violence in the immediate.

[2:05 p.m.]

We know that housing is a challenge for everyone in this province at this time, but there are unique factors that lead women towards housing instability; in particular, women who are experiencing violence in relationships.

Ishtar had the privilege to host a public consultation on the government’s poverty reduction strategy this year. Unanimously, the report from women participating in the consultation is that housing is both the number one issue that keeps them trapped in poverty as well as the number one external factor that prevents them leaving violent relationships. Housing and violence are inextricably linked with one another and require a commensurate response from government.

Women also spoke to the need for a flexible continuum of housing supports, both those that are more supportive and kept within a homogeneous group, so all survivors of violence in the early days for immediate survivors, as well as the dignity of community integration as their healing process goes on.

Women were in great support of moving towards mixed-model development where buildings have a portion of below-market-rate and market-rate rentals as well as a hearty support for a robust return to the funding of the co-op model that was more popular in the ’50s and ’60s and has never returned since prior administrations gutted those programs.

Women advocated that these would allow them to integrate into the community and actually prevent the cycle of violence from continuing.

They also advocated for increased rental top-ups for those who are on the wait-list for B.C. Housing who would otherwise have been placed in buildings but are currently on wait-lists for upwards of three years. They need additional funding to be able to find market housing in the meanwhile.

Our second recommendation is about legal aid and access to legal services. We know that adequate legal representation is a right and a necessity in a free and democratic society. For women who have experienced violence, it is also a matter of life and death. Abuse does not end when a relationship ends. In fact, it is the riskiest time for a woman once she leaves a relationship, and abuse often continues and is exacerbated through the court system with abusers who continue to use criminal harassment, stalking, threats of harming their children and taking away their property or depriving them of income.

Legal aid is there for survivors, and there is some priority. However, we know that the income threshold to qualify is highly restrictive. The most recent numbers say about 50 percent of those who apply for legal aid don’t qualify, and 50 percent of those who do are not able to resolve their legal matters with the amount of hours provided. This is even more true for survivors of violence, who are engaged with ex-partners who will use vexatious behaviours to drag out the legal process as long as possible.

We’re advocating for an increase of funding that would allow those income thresholds to significantly increase, so allow more people to go on; as well as to prioritize a stream for women survivors of violence to access unbundled legal services that would be more cost-effective and allow them to triage their concerns all the way through; as well as funding support for training for those in the legal profession to be able to address dynamics of coercive control and give real meat and teeth to the spirit of the Family Law Act, which is meant to take those factors into consideration.

Our third recommendation is to expand ministerial contracts to women-serving organizations commensurate with population growth in their locations. We provide highly specialized services that require specialized training in our workforce. Our contracts, unfortunately, have not kept pace with the increase in population in our cities, which means we’re relying on the highly unstable grant funding model, which…. We know most grants don’t support existing staffing structures.

Staff are being asked to come on, to take on the burden of writing grants off the side of their desk, taking away from time for service delivery to engage in a grant that will sort of rise and fall, typically within a cycle of 12 to 16 months. The program will end. Staffing will be lost, and services will be cut. We need stable, long-term contract funding for organizations to expand.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Meredith, for your presentation. It does not go unnoticed from myself as the Chair that when you deliver an eyes-up presentation, it means an awful lot. You’re speaking to an issue that’s out there that we are becoming more and more familiar with as the day progresses.

[2:10 p.m.]

H. Yao: Thank you so much for the presentation. I really agree with a lot of things you’re saying so far.

I do have a question about the flexible continuous housing for women experiencing violence. I used to be a 211 call-taker. I think one of the worst things I ever had to experience was trying to get somebody to a shelter and the shelters were all full, when a person filled up with courage wanted to leave.

At the same time, in my head, there’s a contradictory issue of having a housing supply shortage right now, so I can see the population having struggles with the idea. Obviously, we want housing to be available when the person is seeking it, and housing has to be accommodated to the needs of families, as the mom usually comes with little kids who have witnessed violence as well.

Do you have any recommendations on how we can keep this support flexible without, at the same time, putting additional unnecessary pressures on the housing market that could cause, I guess, potential public pushback?

M. Crough: Yeah. That’s the need for a continuum model. We do need additional funding for transition houses themselves and women-specific shelters that will take women and children in the immediate aftermath of vio­lence. That’s sort of a separate and different thing from building housing, either in a mixed-model rental kind of a model or through co-op housing that would be able to house women and children and animals, which is also one of the largest barriers.

We know pet abuse is also intimately linked to intimate partner violence as well. Women often are fearing to flee because of what’s going to happen to an animal. As well, animals are also psychological support.

There are additional barriers for women to find market rental housing because they have children and because they have animals, so that’s the separation between, sort of, first-stage, immediate transitional housing and supportive second-stage housing and then creative alternatives for the longer term.

B. Banman: First off, thank you for the work you do.

My question. I don’t think you addressed it. In addition to housing, how many of these women actually now need the ability to go on for education, be it vocational training or furthering their education? How many are trapped in this cycle because of a lack of education to begin with and need that now to break the cycle of poverty?

M. Crough: Yes, absolutely. That came up with the public consultation as well — wanting training, whether it’s post-secondary or vocational training. Yes, a lot of women get into a relationship and then depart from the labour market and need that additional support to be able to re-enter and support themselves.

Women, in fact, were advocating that: “We don’t want just to be on income assistance. We want to be working. We want to be supported in that.” So that’s high value as well.

A. Walker: Thank you for your presentation. You made a comment about increased top-ups while waiting on B.C. Housing waiting lists. I think it’s a brilliant idea.

I guess the two questions…. I’m unaware if that exists currently. And then also, what would that mean for someone who’s trying to take out a lease but doesn’t have a fixed end date? If they were to get a top-up, how would that impact their ability to actually find a unit with those constraints?

M. Crough: There are rental top-ups for those who are fleeing violence right now, as well as a number of emergency measures, but they are very short term — typically, first and last months’ rent and damage deposit. That’s typically a one-time thing. We’d be looking at something that would increase over a span of six months, say, to get somebody along.

Sorry, could you clarify the second question? I didn’t quite….

A. Walker: Yeah. If this is sort of predicated on them being on a wait-list, waiting for more permanent housing, it could come up in two months or three years. So if you’re signing a rental agreement as a tenant, it’s difficult to negotiate that with a landlord without a fixed end date, often.

M. Crough: In reality, that two months to six months — that’s unlikely. The waits really do tend to be more like one year to two years. That’s less problematic, but we would encourage people to be on month-to-month agreements.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Great. Well, thank you very much, Meredith, for your presentation and also, more importantly, for the work that you do. Thank you.

Up next is Jennifer Gray-Grant, Collingwood Neighbourhood House.

Jennifer, you have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by five minutes with questions and/or comments.

You have the floor.

COLLINGWOOD NEIGHBOURHOOD HOUSE

J. Gray-Grant: Great. Thank you very much. I’m sorry, this will be a little bit eyes down, as I’m filling in for somebody else. Sorry, guys, but thank you for the opportunity.

I’m executive director at Collingwood Neighbourhood House. We’re a multiservice agency in Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood in East Vancouver.

[2:15 p.m.]

Neighbourhood houses offer a wide range of services, programs and initiatives. Our annual budget is over $11 million. We have more than 200 staff and several hundred volunteers, over 40,000 participants.

Today I’m focusing on seniors, and I’m hoping our example illustrates what’s happening in British Columbia as well. We want seniors to live in their homes for as long as possible. They’re going to be happier, they’re going to be healthier, and there’s less overall cost involved in that. There are a couple of issues that we see that lead to some recommendations.

One is housing insecurity. This is a true story. One of our participants, Jim, is in his 80s. As he has aged, he has developed mental health issues. He recently lost his very-long-term housing and became homeless in his 80s.

Three months ago our homeless team found Jim, and they were able to quickly place him in a hotel, work their contacts and then get him into a seniors residence. It was very unusual that a space came available. He moved in, with our help, and was able to access on-site social activities. He gets weekly housekeeping, and he gets breakfast and dinner. It’s low-income housing, so his limited income covers the cost.

It feels really good to tell that story, and probably to hear it as well, but sadly, it’s really unusual. In our east side Vancouver neighbourhood, there are many seniors who have been long-term renters who are losing their homes. Often, landlords suddenly need their unit for their family and evict the senior.

In our neighbourhood, about 70 percent of residents speak English as a second language. About 13 percent cannot carry on an extended conversation in English, so they live in fear of losing their home and not having the language and skills to seek appropriate affordable housing. They’re faced with crushingly expensive housing and few options. We have limited funding to help them.

I also wanted to mention seniors’ food insecurity. During COVID, the issue of food insecurity, for many people, was exposed, and organizations responded. Collingwood Neighbourhood House expanded its food programming during and after COVID.

We set up a community fridge. We take food, give food, and we also fill it regularly. The neighbourhood can take food or give food. We’ve noticed that a lot of seniors are visiting it regularly. We also hand out bags of food weekly, and we noticed that of the 90 participants weekly, probably two-thirds are seniors.

Grocery shopping during COVID. We started a grocery shopping program because seniors did not feel safe to go shopping. We discovered that many seniors also face issues of transportation — their own mobility and the strength to carry their groceries. Some grocery stores will accept online orders and will deliver the food, but many seniors cannot navigate the online, computer-based service, as required, and they don’t have a computer. Many don’t in our neighbourhood. As well, they don’t have credit cards, which are required for online shopping.

Our volunteers take the orders by phone, and we accept cash or cheques. Our staff pick up the groceries and deliver them to the seniors. What we’ve noticed is that they tend to order very low-cost items, like inexpensive, unhealthy, highly salted frozen meals or dry ramen noodles.

We started a frozen meal service because many seniors simply cannot cook, or they do limited cooking. So we have a frozen meal service. We offer a weekly subsidy of $20 a week towards the cost of the meals.

We offer housekeeping, weekly and biweekly, $25 an hour, and we’re able to subsidize for some of the clients. There is a really long wait-list for this and all of our services.

We have a shuttle, and for this, we offer weekly social trips. It’s an important social outlet for many seniors.

So how can you help? All of these have…. We can’t promote these, because we’d be overwhelmed, and they all have massive wait-lists. This is in one neighbourhood of 22 in Vancouver.

Recommendations — I mean, I feel like “Me too,” after what I’ve been hearing since I arrived — are just more seniors’ affordable housing. I mean, there’s more affordable housing needed everywhere. But for seniors, in particular, we’re seeing just a crushing need.

Second is seniors’ access to food. There needs to be more coordination on the provincial level. There’s a bit of a pointing around a circular table, and we’re finding it hard to access the funding specifically to get food to seniors. That seems to be a problem.

I guess the third would be long-term stable funding. We’re piecing together all of this funding, and some of it is from the provincial government, for which we’re very grateful. We’ve pieced it together, for example, from Better at Home, the Ministry of Health, United Way, B.C. Housing, Alexandra Foundation, Queen’s University. We’ll apply for it wherever, but we need your help for some long-term stable funding for these issues.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Jennifer.

[2:20 p.m.]

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Jennifer.

I think you mentioned the question I was going to be asking at the end. I know the Better at Home program pro­vides volunteers, does the food delivery, grocery pickup. It does the transportation, including driving people to doctors appointments. It sounds like you guys are also part of the Better at Home program.

J. Gray-Grant: Yeah, we were one of the pilot sites for it. It was originally called CASI, Community Action for Seniors Independence.

H. Yao: I know the program itself is actually thriving, especially during the COVID-19 period. Are you suggesting something like that, but it’s expanded?

J. Gray-Grant: Absolutely expanding. We have always been part of…. As I say, we were one of five pilot sites for it, and then it became Better at Home because it was so successful. During COVID, also, they had Safe Seniors, Strong Communities, SSSC, that was also very successful.

The problem is the funding. You know, people think post-COVID, all the problems are solved. They’re not. We’re not just going back to what we had pre-COVID.

COVID ripped the lid off a lot of problems that were existing beforehand, and that COVID funding allowed us to tap into. The grocery shopping is a really good example of that — the frozen meals. We weren’t doing that before. We’ve scrambled to find the money to provide that now. But what that funding did, which was so important…. It was the provincial government that offered that funding, as well as other organizations. It ripped the lid off, showed that there was a need.

The need hasn’t ended because of COVID, but a lot of the funding has.

G. Chow: When you said you need long-term, stable funding, is that as an organization, for your other program, or are you talking about the seniors issue that you specifically mentioned here?

J. Gray-Grant: I’ll take it for all of it.

I mean, we do way more than seniors. I’m focusing on seniors today, because it’s such a critical need. You know, it was hard for us to pick one, honestly.

George, you know about neighbourhood houses. I know you have South Van in your constituency. We do the entire life spectrum in a huge variety of ways. We’re focused on seniors today because it’s particularly…. We found that during COVID, there was a real issue there that had been quite hidden, probably for a variety of reasons. When we talk about stable, long-term funding….

I mean, the federal government…. We have some five-year agreements with them for settlement funding, for example. Those tend to be five-year contracts. So it is possible for government to do that. It would mean that we would spend less staff time and time from the grant on the administration and applying and reporting and all of that, and more on getting food to seniors.

G. Chow: You have an $11 million budget per year. Can you give a breakdown as to where you get your funding? It seems to me — I have heard a lot of the organizations — that a lot of effort is being spent on just getting funding.

J. Gray-Grant: Absolutely.

G. Chow: Do you get any money from the city, for example?

J. Gray-Grant: Yes. We have federal government, we have provincial government, and we have municipal. We also have…. United Way and Vancouver Foundation are big ones for us as well. We have a huge number beyond that. I mean, we have staff applying for $500, $1,000 grants for food security, for example, for food programs.

I mean, it’s huge. I could show you our annual report. We’re just trying to get money wherever we can so that we can bring those services to our neighbourhood.

G. Chow: Specifically for these seniors in the Collingwood Neighbourhood House…. Obviously, it’s a very diverse community with a lot of the immigrant seniors who have difficulty with language. Now food is becoming an issue in terms of food banks and all that after the COVID. Yeah. I’ve heard, of course, these kinds of demands.

You also mentioned housing — that these seniors are losing their homes. How does that come about? Are they now living in somebody’s basement or rental and now are being kicked out?

J. Gray-Grant: Yeah, for family members. That’s happening or, because of the cost…. I mean, our senior staff told me this. I didn’t know this, and I couldn’t believe it. Some female seniors are harassed within their homes, and they’re scared to complain because they’ll lose their housing. So maybe they’re going to…. They may have to talk to an adult child or couch-surf with a friend, or they are homeless. They’re absolutely homeless on the street. It’s really bad.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jennifer, thank you for your presentation. I just wanted to just say, when you said “rips the lid off….” I can tell you in my community, in my constituency, there is a similar organization with a community kitchen.

[2:25 p.m.]

They found that during COVID, people needed some help, and so on and so forth, and now that COVID is not the issue that it used to be, the demand has not shrivelled up one iota. Thank you for the work that you do.

J. Gray-Grant: You’re welcome. Thank you for the opportunity.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Michael McLellan, B.C. Self Advocate Leadership Network Society.

Michael, you have five minutes for your presentation, and then five minutes for us to provide comment and/or questions.

B.C. SELF ADVOCATE LEADERSHIP
NETWORK SOCIETY

M. McLellan: B.C. Self Advocate Leadership Network has only been a non-profit society for one year this past February of this year but has been going since 2019.

My first thing to bring up is Community Living B.C. As of numbers right now that we know, there are 27,000 people registered in Community Living B.C. Then you’ve got about 1,100 people coming into the system each year, about 5 percent. Now, we have these people who have been looked after by their parents who are getting elderly. So how do we…?

We need to find a way, and my first recommendation to you is that we need to give more money to Community Living B.C. We’re gaining people in their 50s, 60s, because mom and dad are starting to get older and can’t look after them anymore.

My second thing is PWD, persons with disabilities. My first piece to this is that we need at least $2,200 a month. Rent, just at the minimum, is $1,000 or more. You’ve given people with disabilities a shelter allowance right now of $500. That’s just half of the $1,000. When I was looking for a place last year in Nanaimo, the lowest rate I found was $1,250, and that was for a one bedroom. My recommendation to that is that we raise that rate, and we need to find a way to do that with the portable rental subsidy.

We at least reach out to 400 people or more. This is so important to us as an organization, to help grow our organizations and grow the people who could use that support. As I say, we really could use CLBC to have that extra funding and help grow and deal with the health of seniors, the mental health, and have it all connected so that we can get more people feeling comfortable about being in their community.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I was a little bit caught off guard. We were much, much early.

Ronna-Rae, first up.

R. Leonard: Thank you for coming and presenting, Michael.

Michael, just to let you know, is a recent recipient of the WOW! Award, Widening Our World. Yeah, he’s not only a champion; he’s a great role model.

I really appreciate you coming today and speaking on behalf of the organization that you have helped move forward.

[2:30 p.m.]

I appreciate the comments that you have made around the number of people who are entering into the CLBC world and how that’s being impacted, particularly around the aging of people who have had a stable environment with their families. We’ve heard from others today around how important family supports are. As you age, losing those supports can present real challenges on the face of it.

So in terms of solutions, what do you see, particularly around the issue around housing? Do you see people in their 50s and 60s, who have lived in family homes, moving out on their own? Or do you see something around group home living? What do you see as a solution?

M. McLellan: I see aging depending on where they’re at with the developmental disability. And I guess the third part of my recommendation is finding a way to find that accessible, affordable and inclusive housing. The solution around aging is depending…. How bad is your developmental and intellectual disability? What supports are you needing?

If you are coming into Community Living B.C., it depends on what supports are needed, and that’s why they have the evaluations they do. Are they needing a home-share service being in a home, or are they able to now…? Do they need housing, so they are able to do this stuff? I think, where you find that solution has to be up to not just the family, but also the person who’s coming into CLBC to get services.

[T. Shypitka in the chair.]

The way I’m looking at it is that the accessible, affordable and inclusive housing is such an important…. Because, as I said about the PWD not being enough, you can also see how many times you’re going to have to…. For just looking at the $1,250, is that person in a one-bedroom or whatever? You’re looking at grocery…. You need to buy a two-bedroom? Well, that’s two grand or $2,200 just to have a roommate to help pay the rent. It’s that crazy, because now you’re deciding bills and groceries.

B. Banman: Thank you very much. What I hear you saying, if I’m reading between the lines properly, is there is no one single, one-size-fits-all, depending on what that person with disabilities has. So in some cases, we need to build more group homes because they need that group environment to be able to have that social interaction and also to have that support around them.

In some cases, they can live perfectly fine on their own. So we need more flexibility within the system itself to be able to get the appropriate needs and services that that individual requires.

M. McLellan: Correct. But I’m also going to say it’s not so much a group home; it’s a home share, which is lacking in CLBC too. Because if you’re thinking about it in the best way possible, you want to try and get the people into home shares than group homes.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much, Michael, for the presentation. It definitely touched a lot of our hearts here, I think, for sure. And, really, thank you for making the effort to come here and explain that to the committee. Thank you very much.

Moving to our next agenda, the regularly scheduled committee recess will now be amended as we’ve got a last-minute new presenter here. It’s Corey Cyr. She’s representing individually.

Corey, just please come up to the seat. We’ll give you five minutes for your presentation, and then after that, we’ll have a five-minute Q and A.

The floor is yours.

[2:35 p.m.]

COREY CYR

C. Cyr: Thank you so much for squeezing me in. For background, I’m a retired pharmacist and I have 25 years’ experience working with seniors and patients with complex health issues, mental health conditions and substance use disorders.

I’m going to talk about three things. The first thing is around seniors housing and care. I believe that we need to rapidly build more low-income seniors housing across all levels — that’s independent living, assisted living and long-term care — and have a focus on meeting the dementia care needs of patients. I believe we need to expand home care support to allow seniors to stay safely in their homes until the transition to care homes is needed.

We all know that we have a rapidly aging population and that our seniors housing and health care systems are already in crisis. Experts are predicting massive increases in the number of patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia and other health conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, which will put further stress on our systems.

Many more patients will require home care services to prevent hospitalizations and to allow them to stay in their homes as long as they can, but eventually many will need to move to seniors facilities that provide more comprehensive care.

Unfortunately, most seniors homes have huge waiting lists already. For assisted living, the wait-list is often one to two years. By the time their name comes up, many have deteriorated too far to be accepted and must then go on wait-lists for long-term care instead, which may also take a year or more. Some patients are ending up spending weeks or months in the hospital until a space comes available.

Home support services are equally stressed due to staffing shortages. Even though subsidized, home support can still be expensive for seniors when there are so many other services they need to pay for themselves, such as housekeeping, laundry, Meals on Wheels, etc. Home support services really need to be expanded and reworked so that there’s more flexibility to ensure seniors are receiving the care that they need. Perhaps even a hybrid option, with a home care allowance that patients could use to pay for some private services when the public system can’t provide them.

Families are in crisis and struggling to find affordable home care and supportive housing for their elders. I really think we need to fix this, and we need to fix it urgently.

My second item is around coverage for mental health and addictions treatment. In order to help address our mental health and addictions crisis, we need to remove the financial barriers to treatment. As was done with birth control, I would like to see government make psychiatric medications free for life. I would like them to make counselling services a benefit under MSP and cover all medications and rehab services for substance use disorders and build more treatment beds.

Many patients with mental health conditions and substance use disorders face financial and logistical barriers to treatment. Their conditions are chronic and often lifelong. They may have periods of remission but are prone to re­currence and relapse at any time. The illnesses, by nature, may also cause them, at times, to be unstable, unemployed, unable to manage their affairs and suffer homelessness. Yet with our current system, we have created a complex web that we expect them to be able to navigate in order to receive medication coverage and get the treatment they need.

Unless patients are already on welfare…. In order to be eligible for full PharmaCare coverage for psychiatric medications, they have to have MSP and Fair PharmaCare in place already. Then their doctor, who is already overburdened, must complete an application for plan G and fax it to a local mental health office, which, in turn, sends it to PharmaCare for review. That can take four to six weeks to process.

Depending on the situation, coverage may only be approved for three months or six months or a year, and no one notifies the patient or their physician or their pharmacist when coverage is going to expire. Patients only find out when they go to fill their next prescription and their payment is rejected. Patients often end up stopping their medications.

For those suffering with substance use disorders…. When they have that moment of clarity and they want to get clean, they, too, may find their medications are not covered and no treatment beds are available.

We need to remove the financial and logistical barriers for patients to access the medications and treatment they need so they can live healthy lives and contribute to society. I think, like free birth control, the expense up front will likely save money to the health care system in the long run.

In the meantime, I think we need to transition the plan G application process to the same electronic submission process we have for special authority medications and make it a single application that lasts for the patient’s lifetime. We can maybe even allow pharmacists to have the authority to do that to take the burden off doctors.

Lastly, I’d like to share a quick word on climate change. I believe that to mitigate climate change and ensure a sustainable future, we need to fund programs to rapidly de­crease our carbon emissions and protect our environment. We need scientists and experts and government to help us rethink and diversify our forestry practices and resource-based economies and transition to clean energy in transportation.

Sorry. That’s a lot.

[2:40 p.m.]

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): That was right to the second. That was excellent.

Well, thanks a lot, Corey, especially just coming down here as an individual to advocate for such a wide range of topics here. I think, obviously, these all touch all of us, but for you to come down here as an individual is very admirable, and I congratulate you for that.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Corey. I really appreciate you talking about psychiatric medication and the need to ask for it to be accessible, affordable, preferably free to access for the patients. Our individual…. I apologize for that.

I guess I have a twofold question. One, do you have an approximate estimated cost for government, and two, do you have any idea how much, like maybe a rough estimate — I know it’s big numbers we’re looking at — how much benefit…?

You mentioned earlier, health benefit, long-term-wise; improving quality of life; allowing a person to stay engaged; and most of all, allowing the person to be functional within the community too. Do you have any number maybe we can borrow from you? If you don’t, we totally understand. I know it’s a big ask that I’m making here.

C. Cyr: I don’t know those numbers at all. I’m hoping PharmaCare and the Ministry of Health has that data for you guys. I do know, from my experience working as a pharmacist, that I’ve seen thousands of patients who fall through the cracks all the time.

I live downtown in Yaletown. I see that population struggling all the time on the street when I’m walking around. I think there’s a really large number of people, and it’s maybe bigger than we know. I think it’s costing our health care a lot more than we realize on the other end of things, whether it’s ambulance services or all the things that go around that vulnerable population.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Excellent.

Any other questions? Okay. Go ahead.

H. Yao: I’m hoping we can talk a bit about home care right now. I really appreciate you talking about…. We already had a presentation about Better at Home, how we’re providing seniors with volunteer services. Of course, the goal is to allow them to stay home as long as they can. You mentioned about a sister living in long-term living, so that area I won’t touch for now.

I’m wondering from your experience in regard to Better at Home programs being delivered through various non-profit sector, do you see that support as something worth continuing expanding further, or do you see no, we need to actually advance further in order for us to provide proper care for seniors?

C. Cyr: I think those sort of non-profit programs like Better at Home and Meals on Wheels and all those things — we have to support those and continue to do that. Those are really integral parts that are helping seniors. But I think where we really need help is to fix our public system of home care and home support. They’re kind of two different things.

What we’re finding is that a lot of people…. There are wait-lists for those services. They’re stretched so thin that patients are maybe only getting an hour a day or not at all. A care aide might come and have time to give them a bath and maybe they could put a load of laundry in, but they can’t stay to transfer it to the dryer or help them fold or anything.

Some of the support services are actually kind of ex­pensive. The way the model works, it can cost $25 a day just for someone to have a medication reminder phone call twice a day. Well, that adds up a lot over the month.

There are just not enough services and staff to support all the people and all the needs that they have, and they’re very restrictive. Sometimes you can’t say: “Well, maybe this person only needs once or twice a week for someone to pop in and check on their meds.” You can’t do that. Like in Northern Health, it’s an all or nothing. You either pay $25 a day and have them come every day to check their medications, or they come once a week to do a bath, but they can’t comprehensively help all those variations of levels of need.

It’s quite restrictive in what you can have. I know this from personal experience, because I’m a caregiver for a family member with Alzheimer’s, and I have other friends in health care — nurses and care aides that work in those systems.

It needs kind of a real boost and an overhaul, I think.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Right on. Excellent.

Thanks a lot once again, Corey. You’ve touched on some critical pieces here, and we thank you all for that. Thank you for your submissions.

With that, we will now take a quick two-minute recess, and we’ll bring on the next presenters after that.

C. Cyr: Thanks again for taking your break time.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): You bet.

The committee recessed from 2:45 p.m. to 2:54 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right, we will reconvene our hearings, and we’ll start with Tim Agg, Board Voice Society.

Tim, you have five minutes to present, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

[2:55 p.m.]

BOARD VOICE SOCIETY OF B.C.

T. Agg: Thank you very much.

The Board Society of B.C. represents the volunteer boards of directors of non-profit social service agencies across British Columbia, including both small and large organizations. We have two primary areas of work. We support strong governance with a new program called Building Better Boards, and we advocate for improved social services and social policy. We are a participant in the Social Services Sector Roundtable hosted by Minister Malcolmson.

I need to note that we applaud the recent compensation settlement in the community social services sector, including the commitment to make comparable adjustments for non-unionized personnel. These are important measures in what is now a challenging labour market.

Our members deliver a very, very wide range of services across many communities in the province. Most recently, we’ve been listening to members — in the last couple of months, few weeks — and three issues have percolated to the top of that list. They’re what I’m going to focus on in terms of recommendations today.

The first relates to senior services. The B.C. government should develop a funding stream for senior social services outside the health system. A stronger focus on services and programs that support people in the community and support their engagement in the community will ease pressures on the health care and long-term-care systems; will support healthy activity, mental health and well-being; and will better allow seniors to contribute to community life. Such a new funding stream should be designed in consultation with seniors organizations.

The second recommendation relates to housing, which you’ve been hearing from all sorts of people about. We simply urge the government to redouble efforts to increase the supply of housing for those who are not well served by the market. We draw particular attention to the needs of women and children, especially those fleeing intimate partner violence, and of seniors living at or below the poverty line.

The third recommendation relates to social services infrastructure. Our members typically focus their attention on service needs. They currently also identify important infrastructure challenges and want government to work with us in order to solve them. Some examples: the need to invest in technology and cybersecurity, difficulties attracting and retaining senior leaders, underinvestment in management and administration, contracting and funding regimes that are both too complex and dated.

Some successes, such as the recent employee training initiative in the sector, need to be regularized, and we need to explore with government ways to provide stable funding for and accountability of community social service agencies as whole organizations and to move beyond treating them simply as unrelated masses of contracts for specific programs.

Those are my three recommendations.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

H. Yao: I’ll ask one question. If you have the time, I will ask another.

In your recommendation No. 1, you talk of senior funding outside of health. Thanks so much for bringing that up. How is that different than what municipal governments often provide — more like recreation, community engagement funding? Are you looking for something else that’s different between the two, provincial health and the municipal government?

T. Agg: It’s a new and emerging issue for us. It has kind of burst on my radar just in the last couple of months with increasing numbers of seniors service organizations, usually the stand-alone ones — the one in my neighbourhood is 411 Seniors Centre in Vancouver — where funding streams are inadequate and, in many cases, erratic.

The process of sort of constantly chasing small amounts of program dollars begins to be quite problematic. There’s a view I’m hearing from a number of seniors organizations that say that if we were to find a way to invest better and smarter and somewhat more in those kinds of services in the community, we could help reduce the demand on the formal health care system.

For us, it’s early days. I’m expecting to be deluged by a number of people at our conference at the end of June who are wanting me to, sort of, pick up that challenge and run with it. So I’m sure I’ll be back to talk to you with more detail.

[3:00 p.m.]

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. Some novel ideas here.

I’m curious. I worked in the non-profit sector, and I hadn’t heard of this organization. How do you get your members? How many have you got? What sectors? Give us a little bit of colour.

T. Agg: Community social services is our scope and limit. At the moment, we’re just doing renewals right now. We have about 60-odd agencies across B.C. Some very, very tiny ones and some big ones. We’re funded by membership fees that range from a hundred bucks a year to $2,000, so it gives you a sense of the scope and variation in size and the kinds of communities they come from — all over.

H. Yao: Thank you so much. I would like to ask a question about your third point, talking about stable financing, where you’re talking about multi-year funding as well. One of the questions I would love to ask, too, because we’re trying to find out, is where government provides grants and funding, should we have a higher percentage of administrative cost to cover, obviously, as you and I both know, operation and management costs, so that both private donations and other forms of grants can be focused more on programming?

T. Agg: If you’re funded by Community Living B.C., I believe the administrative allowance is 9 percent of your budget. If you’re funded by MCFD, it’s 10 percent. I have no idea what some of the other ministries do. It seems to be all over the map. That’s my first point.

And secondly, that formula came out…. I don’t know. I’ve been in the business for 30, 40 years, and as long as I can remember, it’s been that kind of formulaic approach.

We didn’t know about cybersecurity. We didn’t need to be designing our own computer systems and software. We didn’t need to face massive increases in insurance. We didn’t even need to face massive increases year over year in audit costs. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s in there, much of which organizations have no control over.

In a world that has become much more complex, I think what’s probably needed is a collaborative conversation between government and the sector to unpack that stuff and actually look at some of the elements and say: “What’s going on here?” and “Are there things that need to be solved on an agency-by-agency basis? Are there things that, perhaps, could lend themselves to some sectoral solutions?” We saw that with that training fund; that opened up some really interesting opportunities, I thought. “And are there some innovative ways that might reduce the cost of addressing some of the current needs?”

I don’t know how we deal with occasional random attacks or cyberattacks on agencies. I’m aware of one right now that’s spending a very large amount of money trying to solve this problem. That’s kind of scary for folks. This was not on the radar when those formulas were developed, and the kind of risks that are emerging these days…. I don’t think it works anymore for government to simply say to the agency, “Well, you know, suck it up. Your problem,” because I think when you look at the degree of complexity around the clients that we’re serving, it’s kind of government’s problem, too.

Some mutual thinking about how to fix some of this stuff would be just long overdue. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Tim, thank you for your presentation. I think when we hear about senior social services that are outside of the health care system, it’s along the lines of how do you feed somebody better so they never need to go to a hospital. I love the analogy that you provided.

T. Agg: And we know we’re opening new conversation around that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Very good. Thank you very much.

Next up is Terry Lake, B.C. Care Providers Association and EngAge B.C.

Terry, as you would know, you have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes for our questions or comments.

You have the floor.

B.C. CARE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION,
ENGAGE B.C.

T. Lake: Thank you, and if you put me on two times like you do your podcast, I’ll get through a lot more material.

First of all, thank you for the work you’re doing. I know you just came off a very busy legislative session. Now you’re going all around the province. A lot of work, and we appreciate that.

The three recommendations we have basically can be summarized in more spaces, more hours of care and more choice and flexibility.

First of all, the spaces. British Columbians are facing significant challenges accessing continuing care services. The office of the seniors advocate says there were 3,430 seniors waiting for publicly funded long-term-care beds last year, and the long-term wait-list has more than doubled in the past five years. The number of seniors waiting increased by 40 percent in 2022 alone.

The Conference Board of Canada has projected that over 30,000 new long-term-care beds will be required in B.C. by 2035.

[3:05 p.m.]

Now, in the estimates debate, Minister Dix announced that there was just over $2 billion in a ten-year capital plan, but it’s costing between $500,000 and $750,000 per long-term-care bed now. So that money, as impressive as it sounds, is going to fall far short of what we’re going to need to be able to accommodate the number of people requiring long-term care.

In fact, if you look at long-term care as part of the system, we see so many people waiting in hospitals now for appropriate placement in long-term care, and that does two things. One, they’re not getting appropriate care, and two, that bed is taken up so that the number of surgeries or the number of people that need to be hospitalized backs up, so the whole system suffers. We’re recommending that between $3.5 billion and $4 billion be set aside to construct 5,000 new long-term-care beds over the next five years.

Assisted living is also a concern. There is a huge wait-list for publicly funded assisted living. We know that the office of the seniors advocate is currently doing a review. So we look forward to that review and seeing what the future holds for assisted living.

In terms of hours of care, in British Columbia, we have gone from about 3.1 hours of care in 2018 to 3.36 hours of care in 2020, and now we’re up to about 3.5 hours of care. But data going back 20 years suggests four hours of care per day. This is the nursing care, the care aides spending time with the residents of long-term care. The research shows that it should be four hours of care per day.

In fact, Ontario is moving to four hours of care a day. Alberta is talking about 4½ hours of care per day. We’re still at a minimum of 3.36, and we’ve gotten a little bit over that, but we’re calling for more investment in hours of care.

Of course, that means more people to train to fill those positions that will be needed. The government is doing some very good work right now with the HCAP program for care aides and also for increasing nursing spaces, looking at getting internationally trained nurses into the system. But we can’t let our foot off the gas pedal when it comes to training more people, because we all know the demographics. The demand for seniors health care needs is going to be huge. So we need to continue to be training more people.

We heard someone earlier talk about home care. The home care we have today, according to the seniors advocate, has been inadequate, the home support system through the health authorities. It doesn’t provide flexibility and choice for people.

We are recommending that British Columbia consider a Quebec-style tax credit, which allows people to access services when and where they need it and how they need it. That may mean some of the costs of retirement living, whereby you have services provided for you to keep you healthier longer, keep you out of hospitals, keep you socially engaged, keep you physically active…. Some of that could be used towards the costs there or maybe to have someone come in and do light housekeeping, some laundry, which they can’t do under the public home support system now. That provides choice and flexibility, and it works extremely well in the province of Quebec.

Those are the three, and just to reiterate again: more long-term-care spaces, more hours of care per resident and more choice and flexibility for home care and home support.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Bang on. Thanks, Terry.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Terry, for your presentation.

In that number that you were talking about, the $3.5 billion to $4 billion for long-term-care spaces. I’m wondering. Is there…? The numbers that you suggest in here…. It’s 30,000, I think, by 2035. I don’t know if government can keep up the pace, based on the housing goals versus what we’ve actually achieved. Where does the private sector fit into this?

T. Lake: It’s a good question. If you look at the Colwood long-term-care announcement recently, that works out to about $732,000 per long-term-care space. So you have a capital plan whereby you can build health authority–​owned and –operated sites, and then you can go to the private sector — and by private sector, I mean not-for-profits and for-profit organizations — through RFPs, and that comes out of operating expenses. That’s how 5,000 long-term-care beds got built through the 2010s, and I think that is an option.

[3:10 p.m.]

We’ve talked to Minister Dix about this, and he certainly has not ruled that out. But we haven’t seen any movement in those RFP opportunities.

One of our members is opening a home here in Vancouver. He was awarded that RFP nine years ago, and those spaces are just opening now. If we don’t get behind this very, very quickly, we’re not going to meet the challenge.

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

On the number of care hours, I’m always interested in why it keeps going up. I’m kind of assuming that because we’re living longer, maybe it comes with longer complications, and therefore more care is required. The other thing I always think of, or the conspiracist in me sometimes thinks, is that we’re not compliant on the hours that are legislated now, the compliance and auditing for those hours.

Sometimes I think, and I have asked this question to somebody else: are we not due for some sort of an independent oversight? Right now you get audited twice a year, as everybody knows. Maybe you can expand on that.

T. Lake: Well, first of all, the reason we need more hours of care than in the past…. Operators tell me that 30 years ago they had parking spaces for long-term-care residents. We don’t any more. People coming into care have far more complex, chronic conditions — 60 percent have dementia or Alzheimer’s — and their care needs are just so much higher because they’re older and more complex.

In terms of monitoring, we have the seniors advocate. That office does monitor; health authorities do monitor. I can tell you that our members spend a lot of time filling out forms and verifying the hours of care, because they only get paid for delivering that care. If they don’t deliver it, it actually gets clawed back. So they’re very, very good at monitoring that.

S. Chant: My question is around the suggestion of the Quebec model. My concern around that is that it implies that people have money to pay. We’ve got a component of our population that really doesn’t. A tax credit is of no use to them, because they don’t have enough income to put taxes in on to start with. Can you talk to me a little bit about that piece?

T. Lake: Sure. This isn’t a tax deduction; it’s a tax credit. Even if you’re not paying the tax, you will get a cheque back to cover those services. If we look today, there are private-home health operators out there; there are members. If you have lots of money as a senior, you can buy all the care you want. It is for those people who don’t have that money that we’re looking to help by this kind of tax credit support. So you don’t have to have the money.

If I’m someone who doesn’t pay $8,000 in taxes a year, I still get $8,000 back to cover those services, as a tax credit. It works very well in Quebec, and it is income-tested. If it’s over a certain amount, it gets reduced. If you are well off in terms of income or even at the high middle level, your tax credit is reduced. It goes to help the people who need it the most.

S. Chant: My concern is that that still expects the individuals to pay up front for the service.

T. Lake: It’s a good point, MLA Chant. That’s why it should be supplied as a monthly payment.

S. Chant: Oh, I missed that piece.

T. Lake: Well, sorry, I didn’t get into that detail, but you’re right. They don’t have the money to put up front. So it has come in a monthly supplement.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, Terry, thank you very much for your presentation, and thanks for the work that you do on behalf of seniors that are out there.

T. Lake: Thank you very much. Thanks for all your work, and good luck with the rest of your tour.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Suzanne Gill, of Genome B.C.

Until last week, I wasn’t really overly familiar with this whole genomics and gene — the word I can’t say — until I heard about heat-resistant cattle.

You have five minutes to present, and then there’ll be five minutes for the questions or comments.

GENOME B.C.

S. Gill: Thank you for the introduction, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today about Genome British Columbia and our role in supporting the province’s life sciences ecosystem.

While our work is done in all parts of the province, I would like to acknowledge that Genome B.C.’s office is located on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, who have been stewards of this land since time immemorial.

[3:15 p.m.]

Genome B.C. is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to applying the power of genomics to pressing societal, environmental and economic challenges. For 23 years now, we’ve been supporting world-class genomics research and innovation, with the aim of growing a globally competitive life sciences sector. Our support helps researchers, government and business turn early discoveries into new products and services, resulting in tangible, real-world benefits to B.C., Canada and beyond.

We manage a cumulative portfolio of over 500 B.C.-based research and innovation projects. Through over 1,100 collaborations internationally in 42 countries, we’ve advanced more than 170 B.C.-based companies and generated 810 patent applications. Our work has attracted over $1 billion in co-funding to B.C., which has helped to grow, attract and retain top talent in this province.

Genome B.C. is increasingly focused on advancing the translation and commercialization of genomic and related technologies and on continuing to strengthen B.C.’s world-class life sciences sector. Our early investments have benefited some of Canada’s largest life sciences companies and helped build a strong, inclusive and diverse ecosystem — companies like AbCellera, Xenon Pharmaceuticals and Aspect Biosystems. In addition, our unique industry in­novation program helps B.C.-based companies develop, scale and get to market their innovative life sciences technologies, filling a funding gap and providing a path to success.

Genome B.C. works to improve equity, diversity and inclusion in our work. We apply an equity lens to ensure that, at the front end, we have a diverse pool of applicants that have equitable access to funding. We’re also working to reduce and eliminate inequity of who benefits from genomic research. That’s why we invest in first-in-kind projects like the Silent Genomes and the Northern BioBank initiative, which aim to address the health inequities faced by Canada’s Indigenous populations. The work being undertaken by those projects is recognized internationally.

Genomics is enabling British Columbians to live longer and healthier lives through precision medicine that is tailored to an individual’s set of genes. From increasingly effective treatments for cancer and rare diseases to determining the best type and dosage of medicine, from finding new treatments for antimicrobial-resistant bacteria to developing immune-based therapeutics that could combat serious infections, genomics is unlocking new opportunities to advance health care.

British Columbians are also facing the unprecedented effects of a changing climate. As we prepare for the future, Genome B.C.’s work is supporting the resiliency of our food supply, forests, wildfire and our environment. For example, genomic tools are helping farmers identify and select drought and disease resistant crops and monitor for pathogens in livestock, helping increase food security in our region.

Likewise, tree breeders can select trees that will flourish in a new, warmer climate in Canada. This is expected to result in up to 30 percent greater timber yields, supporting the economy with jobs and the ecological benefits of a healthy ecosystem.

The impacts from our work are made possible only through the continued support from the province of B.C., so thank you. Thank you for the $78 million we received as part of Budget 2022. Over the next three years, we will provide at least $246 million to support B.C. innovators and researchers. By March 2026, Genome B.C.’s cumulative work will have contributed nearly $5 billion to GDP, created more than 50,000 jobs and contributed over $1 billion to the government’s revenues.

The health of B.C.’s people, environment and economy will increasingly benefit from genomics research and in­novation. We look forward to accelerating this translation of genomics for real-life impacts today and into the future.

Thank you for your time, and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Suzanne.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. Genomics is so fascinating to me, a life science that’s so critical in all those dirt ministries that we have: agriculture, forestry and, of course, mining.

As we go forward, looking to a good critical minerals strategy, how can genomics work for the mining industry in covering water quality and fugitive emissions or mineral exploration — what’s underneath the ground? Can you share with the committee on how that can help?

S. Gill: Sure. Genomics really is about having a window at a molecular level to what’s happening in our environment, let’s say. Can we understand the biology? What is happening in terms of the biology of the systems? In mining, specifically, you can look at…. We have a project with Teck Resources right now, a $16 million project where they are sampling 15,000 sites, and they are looking at what is going on with the microbial communities in those soils.

[3:20 p.m.]

Where are the clues to potentially give us an indication of what pathways are enzymatic, perhaps, that we could look to for bioremediation strategies. That kind of project has huge impacts, in the longer term, around legacy mine sites, water quality, a healthy environment after we have industrial activities like mining.

On the other side, I think water quality is really interesting, and that is another opportunity. We have a project where we funded with a number of companies — I can’t remember them off the top of my head — where there was disappearing copper. There were copper concentrations at the top end of a stream, and then by the end of the stream, there was a much-reduced level of that particular element.

You can imagine that bugs like lots of different things, so we can understand how to sequester elements that have contamination issues like cadmium, selenium, other things. By understanding the biology behind it at a mo­lecular level, which is genomics, then we can harness nature’s effort, doing that naturally for good. So I think that’s huge potential, Tom, and I can go into other areas.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Beautiful. Thank you.

H. Yao: It is the first time we’ll be asking this question. What is your ask and recommendation? I don’t think I heard that.

S. Gill: I think we’ve been well funded in the last budget. The ask is to continue to support the life sciences sector and have a very strong research ecosystem where the B.C. life sciences strategy and biomanufacturing strategy is part of that. It’s building on the foundation of two decades of investment in our post-secondary research institutions and in organizations that are outside government, third-party providers like Genome B.C. that provide the expertise and the ability to bring groups together that normally do not have a synergistic way of working together — that is, industry, business and academia.

That is the ask. We’re not here today to ask for money, but we will be in the future.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Any other comments or questions? I guess what I’ll do is I’ll just close it off by saying that what I learned last week was amazing. My tour of the lab at KPU in Surrey was just phenomenal. I mean, as you’ve pointed out in your presentation, your imagination can run wild with what you do. It’s everything from things that you can’t see to things that you can see.

All I can say is just keep up the good work. The work that you do is protecting all of us.

Next up we have George Harvie from Metro Vancouver.

Mayor Harvie, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of comments and questions by the committee.

The floor is yours.

METRO VANCOUVER

G. Harvie: I acknowledge with such gratitude and respect that we are located on the traditional territories of the ten First Nation communities located within the Metro Vancouver region — today, specifically, the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you in advance of the 2024 provincial budget. Again, I’m George Harvie, very proud to be the chair of Metro Vancouver and the mayor of the city of Delta.

Metro Vancouver is a federation of 21 municipalities and one treaty First Nation, which is the Tsawwassen First Nation, in one electoral area. We are the regional body responsible for providing critical services such as drinking water, wastewater treatment and solid waste management to 2.8 million residents, more than half the population of B.C. Metro Vancouver projects require capital investments of over $7 billion to build, maintain and upgrade critical infrastructure over the next five years.

On the subject of infrastructure, I would like to thank the provincial government for their significant investment of $250 million towards phase 1 of the Iona Island wastewater treatment plant, which is being upgraded to meet regulatory requirements and protect the health and well-being of people, wildlife and ecosystems.

Projects like this show just how critical it is that the provincial government provide predictable and equitable cost-sharing to local governments. Ad hoc funding programs can be challenging and oversubscribed, and delay to these essential projects can have huge impacts, including inflation and escalation of costs.

Drivers for these projects include age of the infrastructure, resilience and evolving regulatory requirements. Provincial and federal funding will be integral to ensure we are delivering these projects on time, in order to meet the needs of a rapidly growing region.

We project one million additional people will call Metro Vancouver home by 2050. That’s one more million people that will be turning their taps on in the morning, having their wastewater treatment done and having their garbage picked up. It’s a challenge for everybody. It is clear that local governments need funding mechanisms that can reflect growth and economic activity. This was also a key theme at the FCM conference last week.

[3:25 p.m.]

In addition to Metro Vancouver’s critical infrastructure needs, the region’s trade and transportation infrastructure requires provincial investment in order to support the efficient movement of goods and people. We very much appreciate the province’s support of the George Massey crossing project and urge the provincial government to continue to advocate for federal support for the project. We need the federal government to come to the table.

We also support TransLink’s ten-year plan to allow our region to grow sustainably. You’ll hear more about that in a few minutes from the chair of the Mayors’ Council for TransLink.

On the housing front, I would like to again thank the province for the significant initial investment of $158 million over the next three years to support Metro Vancouver’s housing completion of 660 new homes at five sites across our region. In addition, with Metro Vancouver Housing and B.C. Housing sending an MOU this year, we are excited to be able to build about 2,000 new affordable homes over the next ten years at priority sites across our region.

As the province works on implementation of new initiatives, legislation and regulations to increase the supply of housing, including affordable housing, Metro Vancouver can play a critical role both in convening and supporting our members to implement changes in the direct delivery of new affordable rental homes. We encourage the provincial government to continue to support and streamline the development of affordable rental housing, including continuing to work closely with Metro Vancouver Housing to support the delivery of the ten-year plan as per our MOU.

On the subject of climate change, it is also important for us to stay aligned and coordinate our climate action plans. We know the window is closing to reduce emissions and to meet both regional and provincial targets. We need to take bold action now and close the gap on these targets. Many of the actions set out in Metro Vancouver’s Climate 2050 strategy and clean air plan require provincial action in order to achieve our shared commitment to emission reductions targets by 2050. To address emissions in the highest-impact sectors, such as buildings and transportation, and to meet the CleanBC targets for GHG reductions by 2030, we must continue to work together on policies included in the 2050 roadmaps.

So thank you. Thank you for all our partnerships with the province that you have provided, and please: we need to continue to work closely together to tackle the enormous challenges we all face. Metro Vancouver does deliver, and we appreciate very much the partnership with provincial government.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, George.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation. I was just curious on the climate change. Obviously, in the last decades, it’s really brought to the forefront of everyone. What is the strategy in terms of supply of drinking water for the region of 2.8 million people? Looking at the drought that is being forecast, or in the future, do we have adequate reservoir capacity for Metro Vancouver?

G. Harvie: I believe we have adequate capacity at this time, but we need to expand our delivery of our water supply, including other locations where we can actually get fresh water, Coquitlam Lake and that.

Those are plans that are in place now, and there is a strategy to ensure that we can deliver, providing the funding is there to ensure that we’re meeting the needs of one million more people that are happening.

There is only one area for them to go, and that’s out east — that’s where the development is going — and then south of the Fraser. But there are plans to ensure that those water services and sewage treatment and waste collection are in place.

We can provide that information to you, and we’ll have that submitted to the committee members here as soon as possible.

G. Chow: So we can rest assured that we will have water, even if we have two summer droughts like that. I mean, we’re going to conserve water, but at least the critical water supply for drinking and baths and for your kitchen and all that is adequate. Given what we’re doing now with the weather, it’s very unpredictable.

G. Harvie: MLA Chow, it’s with contingencies and restrictions that would be taking place. I’m confident that the water can be delivered in the Metro region as it exists today, but not in the future. With those extra million people coming in, and more housing that we’re having, that’s where we need help with the provincial and federal governments to ensure that we have adequate funding to expand those services. It can be done, but it’s all up to where the funding is available.

B. Banman: Thank you for the presentation. I just want to clarify something I thought I heard you say. Did you say that over the next ten years, we would only add 2,000 affordable homes? Was that a misspeak?

[3:30 p.m.]

G. Harvie: That’s B.C. Housing. We signed an MOU this year with B.C. Housing, and we’re excited to be able to build about 2,000 new affordable homes over the next ten years as a priority site across the region. That’s not all in Metro Vancouver. That’s just part of Metro Vancouver’s housing.

B. Banman: I guess my question is…. We’re already way behind now. What is the one thing the province can do to help Metro Vancouver add way more supply than what they currently have? What’s the one thing the province could do tomorrow that would help speed up the adding of supply of homes?

G. Harvie: One, Metro Vancouver Housing — I’m putting that off separately because that’s a separate distinct department within us. Insofar as Metro Vancouver, including our city of Delta and others, what the province can do is ensure that we have new regulations. The status quo of how we develop — it’s got to change. It’s no longer…. We can’t keep the status quo. We have to make the changes.

In Delta, we’re doing that. In other cities, we’re trying to do that. I had a good discussion with Minister Kahlon this morning with regards to Delta, which is included in the ten years. I’m glad were included in it, because we already have a couple of thousand units in the pipeline that we’re moving. We’re developing along our transportation routes, including Scott Road, 56 Street and Ladner Trunk Road. But we need the province’s assistance so that we can get those done. I think the program that’s underway now is going to help us tremendously.

A. Walker: I appreciate the presentation. What would it look like for you as an ideal solution as far as sustainable, predictable funding to support those large, capitally inten­sive infrastructure projects?

G. Harvie: I think what we need is just that: predictable, in order that we can actually plan to build these over the next number of years. The critical thing is also to involve the federal government. There needs to be a partnership between Metro Vancouver, the federal government and the province to make this a success. It just can’t be Metro alone. It can’t be the province alone. It has to include all three levels of government.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Not seeing any other questions or comments, George, thank you very much for your presentation.

G. Harvie: Thank you for all the work that everybody does here at the table.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up Kelly Scott, B.C. Road Builders and Heavy Construction Association.

Kelly, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of comments or questions.

The floor is yours.

B.C. ROAD BUILDERS AND
HEAVY CONSTRUCTION ASSOCIATION

K. Scott: Thank you. Nice to follow George, as it’s nice to hear somebody asking that we get more roadbuilders out there working and building the infrastructure for you.

A year ago I was here talking about climate change and the effect that the atmospheric river, heat dome and forest fires had on this province. It showed the province what we could do, as roadbuilders, when you all collectively came together and we rebuilt the Coke in 35 days with zero lost-time accidents. It sent a signal to the industry and to government what can be done when we get focused and how we can get work done quickly and not worry about — do worry about permits and that, but how things can move ahead.

As we see ourselves going forward today, we still see permitting as being an issue to us. We talk to people a lot, but there are issues there. You proved to the world what you can do when you focus on getting jobs done in December of ’21, after 35 days. We can’t go back to how it used to be when we get delay after delay due to permitting issues, other issues showing up. There’s work out there; we need to get going at it.

Our ask and recommendation to yourselves is to continue to look at reinvesting due to climate change. Our infrastructure is deteriorating. Climate change is hitting it. Our members are going from plowing snow on Monday to fighting floods on Wednesday to a forest fire on Friday. That’s our new reality, and our infrastructure is taking the toll. Bridges that we built 20, 30, 50 years ago are showing it. The people that we’re trying to move around and the economy that we’ve got, that we have to move around, are starting to show the wear and tear on it. We’re slowing down.

We also saw during that atmospheric river…. When we shut down British Columbia as we did, we shut down the economy of Canada. When we were around here in the port and saw all those freighters sitting there waiting for the railcars to come in, nothing was moving. It told us an example that we should be moving forward on it, but also, to us, sent a message across Canada to the federal government that there needs to be considered investment in this infrastructure to ensure our economy never falls on its knees as it did a year and a half ago.

[3:35 p.m.]

Again, our recommendation is to continue with your investment. Our view is that if we continue to invest in our roads and our infrastructure, we are going to reduce our cost of running that equipment and the trucks and up and down and that. And we will reduce our GHG emissions.

We talk, also, about procurement. Again I cite what you did a year and a half ago, how you moved through. People talk about delays of building homes and things like that. Well, there are ways around it when you get people behind you.

Procurement needs to be looked at. Low bid is not best value. Nobody ever got fired in government for giving out a low-bid contract but, my goodness, you spend a lot of money trying to recover and rebuild and go to court on the low-bid contract. You need to be looking at your procurement models. What is the best value for our citizens, and how do we promote innovation and efficiency in those bidding contracts? A very important initiative.

You are doing that. Ministry of Transportation started this a year and a half ago after lessons learned on the Coke rebuild. But you need to continue to look at that. In our industry, which is the horizontal construction industry, low bid is not the way to go. We feel there’s a better way of going. You’re looking at an alliance model, which is of interest to us.

Something needs to change. We have others in our industry, certainly, from around the world that are talking to us about how other countries and jurisdictions are going about that.

We keep hearing about capacity: “We don’t have the workers.” We have the workers; we don’t have the work. We have over 7,500 workers coming off of that pipeline that you and I own, Site C, the Pattullo, Kicking Horse. All of those projects are coming to an end.

Our industry is not a finite industry. We do a project, we’re bringing the workers, we train them, but then we expect to go on to other jobs. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing that here. Unfortunately, we’re seeing our contractors saying, “Maybe we’re going to have to move back east to other jurisdictions where there are jobs, where those B.C.-trained kids are now being sent.”

Now is our time to invest in the infrastructure here. We know there’s a lot of investment from the federal government. We feel that now, for government’s sake, is the time to come forward. We have the workers, and we have the members that are willing to bid. And when you have that, your price goes down because you have competition out there.

The other thing we’re very proud of is our engagement with the Indigenous nations. So 5.9 percent of the population of British Columbia identifies as being Indigenous. Eleven percent of our workforce in the maintenance industry is Indigenous. In fact, at one of our largest maintenance contractors, YRB out of Prince George, 30 percent of their management team is Indigenous. We’ve embraced the concept of what a CBA is. That’s who we are. We hire local. It’s in our DNA to hire local. And certainly we’ve embraced how that goes forward.

We don’t embrace union-only contracts. We feel there’s something better that government can do than get in­volved in the labour in the construction industry. It has been running very well for 30 years, and you’ve got better things to do than worry about giving us the labour. We have to go find it anyways and give it to your union hall, so we suggest you might want to consider that as you go forward.

Those are my three recommendations.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Kelly, for your presentation.

B. Banman: Thank you very much, Kelly.

You talk about infrastructure. I’ll give you the Mission Bridge as a recent example of…. We got a heatwave, and the next thing, it was shut down because there was a buckle in the middle of it from an expansion joint.

The one thing I have always thought about is…. You talked about it. Do think that there should be a continual expansion…? To take the politics out of it — I don’t want to get into it. One government had set up to have a bridge built, and the next government comes back and says: “No, no. That’s a bad idea.” I don’t say that…. I say that because cities quite often have to inherit a plan that was from a previous regime, and you continue with that plan.

Do you get the feeling that there is a lack of building for the future and planning for the future from something as simple as a bridge or extending SkyTrain or widening roads or replacing some of this infrastructure? Do you feel that the province could do a better job of having a ten- or 15- or 20-year plan?

K. Scott: They don’t share ten-, 15-year plans with us, but we do know that the Ministry of Transportation is very engaged at looking to the future. We know that they are making the builds climate-proof right now.

[3:40 p.m.]

Our example is when we built the Sea to Sky Highway. Those of us that live here remember that highway was shut down every winter. We don’t have that now because the industry and Ministry of Transportation and the government, they spent a bit more, didn’t go low-bid, innovated, and we now have a world-class highway going up to Whistler, which allowed us to show the world what we can do as British Columbians, and that’s important to us.

The other thing that you need to be looking at…. Provincially, I think we’re okay. Municipalities, I think, are struggling. We know that, and we see that. We certainly know what’s going to happen when the next flood comes down out in the Abbotsford area and Hope or Chilliwack becomes an island again. The diking needs to be looked at as well, which is probably more of a federal issue than provincially, but yes, there are issues out there.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Kelly.

I had the opportunity, the pleasure of speaking to one of your colleagues. One thing I guess he brought up, and I will also hear your feedback, is sometimes we need to find a way to break down contracts, so instead of giving it to international companies, we can actually keep as many contracts as possible in B.C. Can you maybe educate me a bit more about that part?

K. Scott: Sure. We’re always going to need international companies to come in here with their expertise. They know how to tunnel’ they know how to build some of the TransLink.

The government of the day, when they built the Coqui­halla, decided that it wouldn’t go to one major contrac­tor. It went to 13 individual contractors, British Columbia companies who learned how to build in this environment, and that, to us, was a signal. It allowed the industry to grow. It allowed the industry to train these young engineers how to operate and live in this environment, how to pave roads when it’s minus 20 and a foot of snow, which is unheard of.

That’s been our recommendation, and you’ve got a lot of mid-sized contractors out there who live in British Columbia, support B.C., grow their businesses here. I think from the government’s perspective, they should be looking at moving work around to them as well. Make it open so all contractors can bid it. Not just the big, and nothing wrong with the multinationals, but there is an issue here that we think made in B.C. is good for B.C.

H. Yao: Thank you.

B. Stewart: Thanks, Kelly. I just want to comment about the quote you’ve got in here. It was in, I think, your recommendation when it talked about the Canadian government’s infrastructure report card. It has roads and bridges at kind of roughly 40 percent being in need of repairs. I know that there’s a report on transportation, Good Roads Cost Less. It’s mentioned here as well. The point about it is, what’s the status of British Columbia? Not the Canadian. Are we ahead or behind the Canadian average in terms of that?

K. Scott: We’re ahead, and you’re ahead because government undertook an audit of all the bridge structures about five years ago. We’ve got old, aging bridge structures out there. You’re ahead in that you’re getting a much better understanding of where you are. You are not ahead be­cause you haven’t addressed it yet, but you certainly are identifying where the problems are out there.

Certainly, Canada has gone way down in terms of the world rankings of infrastructure. I think our view of all B.C. is when I talk to my counterparts is certainly leading the charge, recognizing it, getting investment here and growing it and trying to adapt to climate change.

B. Stewart: Okay, thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Kelly, thank you very much for your presentation today.

K. Scott: Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Mayor Brad West, Mayors Council on Regional Transportation.

Welcome. You have five minutes for your presentation followed by five minutes of comments or questions.

The floor is yours.

MAYORS COUNCIL ON
REGIONAL TRANSPORTATION

B. West: Well, thank you very much, Chair Starchuk and committee members, for the opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the Mayors Council.

I want to start off by recognizing how important the province’s investments in Metro Vancouver’s transit system have been over the last eight years. Over $4.2 billion in capital funding, $1.3 billion more in emergency relief funding. Our region looks and moves markedly different and better because of the support and partnership. It also looks much different than any other city in Canada and the United States, which didn’t have the support of senior governments who are now struggling with service cuts and failing transit systems.

But today, I want to focus my remarks on the people of our region. Every day, almost 400,000 Metro Vancouver residents use our transit system to go to work or school, to go to a hockey game or a park. Public transit has long been seen by most residents as a basic utility like electricity, drinking water or roads — an essential service that keeps our cities functioning.

[3:45 p.m.]

As you have heard, Metro Vancouver is expected to grow by 50,000 people per year, which is like adding a city the size of North Vancouver every year to our already crowded region. Our job as government — local, provincial and federal — is to plan for and support this growth so that current and future residents alike can succeed.

Many of our province’s most pressing challenges — housing, climate change, economic growth and more — all depend on a vibrant, successful public transit system in our region. Fortunately, the Mayors Council has a plan to meet these challenges and prepare our region for the future in our Access for Everyone plan, which was unanimously supported by all mayors in our region. No small feat, as I’m sure you can appreciate.

The plan would deliver transportation options people need and deserve, including doubling bus service, adding nine new bus rapid transit corridors and much more. It’s also designed to be rolled out quickly, with more modest improvements to our bus network to start, while we secure the new revenue required to complete the rest.

That leads me to my recommendations that the Mayors Council has made to your committee today. First, we’re looking for the province and all parties to commit to continuing to work with the Mayors Council so that we can begin delivering the access for everyone plan starting in mid-2024, because we don’t have a moment to lose to deliver the improvements that our region requires.

Second, we’re looking for the government and all parties to support our efforts to convince the government of Canada to accelerate the permanent transit fund by two years to 2024, to support the quick launch of our access for everyone plan.

Finally, we’re asking the government to join our call to the federal government to launch a tripartite national commission together with provinces, Indigenous communities and transit agencies to develop a new funding model for public transit that can get the job done in a responsible and fair way.

It’s critical we find ways to fund our access for everyone plan with our partners so we can begin work to expand the system starting mid-next year. So if I can leave you with anything, it’s the urgency of taking action now.

Thank you for your time and look forward to any questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Brad, for your presentation.

Questions or comments?

I’ll be the first one to ask. I love what you’re doing. The fact that it’s a seven-minute walk for me to get to the transit station that’s here, to get myself out to Surrey. Looking forward to when it finally gets its way out to Langley, with SkyTrain and the other improvements that are there.

Is there any other look…? Because when you say we’re so different than everywhere else. Are we different because it’s a good thing or not? Because we don’t have the light rail systems that other cities have in North America.

B. West: The positive thing about our region right now is that because partners like the province stepped up and provided relief funding to TransLink during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been able to avoid what you see in many other cities, which is this sort of transit death spiral — declining revenue, no support, service reduction, further declining revenue, further reductions, further reducing ridership — and they’ve dug themselves a huge hole that’s very hard to get out of it.

But in terms of the improvements that we’re looking to move forward with, again, it is very much focussed on delivering options to the fastest growing parts of our region, which have not traditionally been as well served.

Certainly those of you from south of the Fraser will understand the huge growth in that region and the need for transit to match that growth. We’re actually seeing in the south of the Fraser and in my neck of the woods, in the Tri-Cities, that ridership has recovered to such a level that it is surpassing where we were pre-pandemic. The demand is very much there, and it’s only going to grow.

That’s why, really, it’s from the investments in busses to BRT, bus rapid transit, to looking at further extensions to the rapid transit system. All of these things need to be called upon to deliver what people in our region require.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, thanks.

[3:50 p.m.]

S. Chant: I’m specifically asking about transit to Capilano University, because the students are really feeling a hardship. Most of the people that work and attend Capilano University do not live on the North Shore, so access to the university….

There are kids that are riding three hours a day to get to and from school, or more than that. Then once they get there, they still have to transfer off at Phibbs and miss buses because they’re full.

Our area has actually had reduced service. I recognize that our growth in the district is not as much as other areas. I also feel like there’s been some, maybe, choices made that are not necessarily representative of the needs of the folks that are getting them.

Is there any…? I know we’ve got the rapid bus coming, but are there other things out there that we could be looking at that will help the North Shore out? As a corridor up the coast and everything else, we are jammed with cars, and if we can get people into the transportation system, life would be so much better.

B. West: Absolutely, and the Mayors Council has certainly recognized that the issue of congestion on the North Shore and the need for transit improvements there is one of the most pressing needs in the region. One of the reasons the mayors have unanimously supported this Access for Everyone plan is because it would deliver significant improvements to every part of the region, no matter where you call home. The doubling of bus service in particular would represent the largest expansion of transit in Metro Vancouver’s history.

I come from a part of the region, Port Coquitlam, where people would have to spend several hours on the bus to be able to get to the North Shore. People will choose transit when it’s reliable, fast, efficient and gets them to where they need to go.

S. Chant: It’s better than the car.

B. West: That’s exactly what the plan is intending to do.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Mayor West.

Just in terms of some of the areas where, I know from past investments, there have been barriers…. Take the Surrey-Langley extension, for instance. It’s based on this population model, not more based on where the population can grow, and we’re seeing that today in terms of where people can live, find affordable housing, etc.

I see the ALR as one of those barriers to getting out into the Fraser Valley, and I think Abbotsford and Chilliwack are certainly struggling with the access, whether it’s bus rapid transit, the West Coast Express, whatever it is.

Has the Mayors Council come to grips with priorities outside of the most urban areas and looking long-term at those areas? Really, the Evergreen Line…. At one time, I had responsibility for getting that thing off the ground. I don’t know about the utilization today, but I think that you’ve got to look at the communities and where they’re growing. I just hope they’re looking, as a group of over 30 mayors and councils — that they’re focused in on that.

B. West: Yeah, and I want to express my appreciation for your work on getting the Evergreen Line. I can tell you that coming from the Tri-Cities, it is well utilized, and it’s important that we’re connected to the rest of the region. Working on extending it to Port Coquitlam, of course, but that’s a topic for another day.

What I’ll say is I think the mayors are very cognizant of where the growth is happening in our region and not wanting to fall behind, as is so often the case, where we’re constantly playing catch-up. I think there’s very much an awareness of where the growth in the region is happening and also the changing patterns of people’s travel.

Many of the residents of my city go to Abbotsford for work. They go to Surrey. The idea of everyone coming to downtown Vancouver to go to work and going back to the suburbs in the evening is not as relevant, I think, today. We understand that the region is very connected, and the service has to be as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Mayor West, thank you very much for the presentation and the feat of getting all of those mayors all on board to get this thing moving. That in itself is somewhat miraculous.

B. West: Thank you very much. I appreciate the time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Alison Silgardo, Senior Services Society of British Columbia.

[3:55 p.m.]

Alison, you have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by five minutes of comments and/or questions.

The floor is yours.

SENIORS SERVICES SOCIETY OF B.C.

A. Silgardo: Thank you, Chair and committee. I’m not sure if you received this in the email. I sent a visual one-pager. If you haven’t, I have copies.

I’m here on behalf of Seniors Services Society. Our focus is working with seniors who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in the province of B.C. I wanted to, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to present.

Last year, when I was here, I had reached out because 22 percent of the clients we were serving were falling through the gaps between provincial and federal funding the previous year. I’m happy to report that a year forward, two clients came to us that were caught between provincial and federal funding and were made homeless. So the system has been connected, and that is really a fabulous thing.

The second piece was around seniors who are homeless with attachment to health, and that’s my focus and ask for today. It’s around seniors who are made homeless due to crisis evictions because they lack attachment to health, as well as seniors who are exiting health. In November alone, we had four calls in one week from seniors at four o’clock in the afternoon. They had been discharged at noon, and they were now being discharged to the street. They were previously housed, and because of the extended stay in health, their housing had been relet. That has been problematic.

In the absence of senior-specific shelters in the province, there is no place for them to go. Traditional shelter operators are really loath to bring in a senior because they could be preyed on. These are seniors who are between the ages of 65 and 90 and are homeless for the first time in their later years.

Thanks to the province, on Friday, we received public funding for our SHINE program, which is around Seniors Housing Information and Navigation Ease. That places navigators in every city. We now have two navigators per region of the province, and we have about 12 cities ready to come on board. The most recent have been additions this year, with the funding to Richmond, Victoria and Penticton.

We have navigators that are not only supported through the SHINE funding but are also trained. Four years ago, we had about 15 navigators trained with every cohort of training we’ve provided. In the last two cohorts, we’ve been up to 60. So that just demonstrates the need for navigation and supports for seniors who are homeless.

It is a small percentage of the population. It’s 10 percent of the total senior population, but it is an increasing population. Over the last ten years, that number of seniors has grown by five times. Just in the Lower Mainland, the numbers show that we had seniors at 24 percent of the total homeless population, the only growing demographic of homeless.

My ask is: how can we make sure that the SHINE funding, which is effective, is continued on a multi-year basis? We have really taken a lot of time and investment in training the navigators, but with the lack of guaranteed funding, they are normally looking for jobs at the end of the year. When the funding comes in April, right after the beginning of the new year, we’ve lost all that brain power, and we restart.

My ask is to be able to secure that and to expand that with four housing units that can be rapid access housing or senior-specific shelters attached to each of them. It’s about $200,000 per hub in every city.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Alison, thank you for your presentation. Just a little tidbit. You are the 100th presentation we have heard so far, right on the nose. We need prizes.

[4:00 p.m.]

S. Chant: One of the other areas that I have noted in my practice as a case manager is when people are purchasing private assisted living, and then they go into hospital, and their care needs become complex, they’re advised that they can’t come back to wherever it was they were living.

My question, I guess, is: folks in that category — do they know about…? Are they reaching out to you as well?

A. Silgardo: Yes, they are. Most of our referrals come to us from B.C. Housing, the seniors advocate office and health authorities, quite often. We’re just in conversation with Health, where they have acute beds that have been jammed for an extended period. Our temporary housing program, which is what the four beds of access is, has demonstrated, in the last nine years, a 100 percent success rate. We are able to work with a senior who is homeless for whatever be the barriers and been able to place them with safe, affordable housing that is sustainable for their financial means.

Other than an extenuating circumstance, we’ve had five people return. We’ve demonstrated results that are working, and that has been in partnership with B.C. Housing.

Our ask is to expand that to four units. In the absence of provincial help this year, we were able to get Coast Capital to fund us with one bed per region, but that’s not enough.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I wanted to ask a question about the funding received for housing information and navigators.

Earlier in your presentation, you said there’s no housing. So how efficient…? Do you know what I’m getting at here? I mean, you’ve got funding to find places that aren’t there. So it seems to me that it’s almost like me giving this pen to Ronna-Rae with no ink in it. Here’s a tool, but you’re not going to be able to get anything done with it.

I wanted to ask about your temporary housing program. You’ve got that. I think I know what the answer is, but how backlogged is that right now, where you have people temporarily for three months looking for a place? How is that working for you?

A. Silgardo: Actually a great question. Because it comes with the supports, most affordable housing providers and even private sector housing providers don’t necessarily have the skill set to manage and work with seniors. They do the infrastructure pieces really, really well, and maintain the physical building, but they need that support piece to be able to navigate. The access to that reciprocal support, which is the navigation, has been a good value-add to housing providers.

We do have housing providers now calling us and saying: “We’ve got two people going to hospital, probably not going to come back. Do you have seniors for us?” It’s worked well for them because we make sure it is the right senior for their building, better screening.

R. Leonard: Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I’m just trying to get a sense of where you operate. You’re a society of B.C., so you’re all over B.C. I understand around the ocean of navigators. But when you say…. I guess my stumbling block is the expression “units.” If the need is so great, how is it that four units for all of B.C. works? Like, is that four…?

A. Silgardo: Four beds, four individual beds. Could we use more? Absolutely. Could we use 100? Absolutely. The intention is to demonstrate really good results and start with four.

R. Leonard: Where are they?

A. Silgardo: We don’t have the four. The 15 that we currently have are with B.C. Housing in the Lower Mainland.

R. Leonard: The Lower Mainland.

A. Silgardo: Yes, in the Lower Mainland.

R. Leonard: Okay. And you want to spread it around the whole of B.C.?

A. Silgardo: Yes.

R. Leonard: And $120,000 is for one bed?

A. Silgardo: For one provider. Yes, for one bed.

R. Leonard: Okay. It’s a pretty small ask.

A. Silgardo: A very small ask. I mean, after the conversations we’ve heard today, this is nothing.

A. Walker: I just want to thank you for the work you do. The Nanaimo Family Life Association, in Nanaimo, runs a SHINE program there, and we have referred many people there who have challenges with landlords or disputes or understanding the rules. It’s been an incredible service in my community, so thank you for that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Alison, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon and, really, thank you for being the most memorable 100th presenter that we’re ever going to see this time.

Marion Hartley, South Vancouver Seniors Hub Council.

Marion, you have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by five minutes in questions and/or comments.

[4:05 p.m.]

SOUTH VANCOUVER SENIORS HUB COUNCIL

M. Hartley: Thank you very much. Unlike most seniors, I actually take my glasses off to read.

Good afternoon. I’m speaking, as you heard, on behalf of the South Vancouver Seniors Hub Council, of which I’m a member.

The province of British Columbia has been a constant supporter of the Seniors Hub through United Way. United Way, no doubt, has given you their general goals, which I could tell you at the end of the presentation, but you’ll hear them.

We have, with that funding, been able to deliver much-needed services to seniors who have told us they want to be independent and be active participants in their community. Most seniors want to age in place. They don’t want to go into homes. With home supports that are non-medical, they’re usually able to do that. It saves the system a lot of money, but keep in mind that once a person is receiving home support services, they keep on receiving it unless they die or go into seniors housing. That means that the others on the waiting lists, which are growing, can’t receive those same services unless the funding is increased.

Southeast Vancouver has a population of approximately 100,000 from very diverse backgrounds. That’s a larger population than Kamloops and Chilliwack, and slightly smaller than Nanaimo, so you can see why we think provincial funding for our area kind of is important to some other communities. The Southeast Vancouver community is the most racialized in Vancouver and probably the rest of the province. Eighty percent of the residents are BIPOC, 69 percent have English as a second language, and 60 percent of the population over the age of 65 are first generation Canadians, many of which are considered low income. It’s quite a diverse neighbourhood, I keep saying.

South Vancouver Neighbourhood House, with which we’re associated, has over 100 volunteers, and 80 percent of those are multilingual. The services offered at the neighbourhood house would not be possible without those vol­unteers, most of whom are seniors. People really want to give back to the community. I happen to be one of them. If people that volunteered were paid a living hourly wage for their volunteer time, the amount would be over $400,000 — that’s in a year — so I think that value should be recognized, otherwise we could not do anything. The volunteers are a necessity.

The Seniors Hub Council serves as a model for other neighbourhood houses locally and even internationally, but we can’t spread the word and educate people without the funding. We have to do that in order to, I guess, make people aware of what they’re able to do. Our hub council is the connection between seniors in the community and the neighbourhood house, and council members are all seniors. We believe that we understand what is needed to assist older adults.

For example, there was a need for seniors to be prepared for the heat dome if it happened again. We were really caught short, because it happened over a weekend where there were no staff working and volunteers could not be connected. So last year, with a very small grant from the city of Vancouver, senior volunteers were able to go out to five seniors assisted living sites and explain emergency preparedness and how to build a cool kit. We’re all ready to do this again this year with six new sites.

In the last year, the Seniors Hub Council reached and connected with almost 2,000 seniors in the community. The council works out of South Vancouver Neighbourhood House. We’re independent of it, but many of the programs that have been initiated by the hub are held there.

Some of the services and programs offered at the neighbourhood house — not all of them initiated by the hub, by any means: family and friend caregiver support groups has gone over gangbusters. Better at Home, which, of course, is connected with United Way. Newcomer settlement services. Food security. Frozen meals. That goes out to many of our low-income seniors, delivered by volunteers, of course. Literacy programs that are headed mostly by volunteers. Two adult day programs. Intercultural wellness programs. These are all wraparound programs that should be recognized in improving the health and wellbeing and the quality of life for seniors, and it helps to reduce health care costs.

[4:10 p.m.]

It helps to reduce health care costs. I know I’ve got two seconds left. On a personal note, and this is the end of it, I find it very, very frustrating that staff time is spent preparing, researching and applying for....

I know; I’ve got two seconds left.

On a personal note, and this is the end of it, I find it very, very frustrating that staff time is spent preparing, researching and applying for grants year after year after year. And year after year after year, we have to prove that we’re using the grants appropriately. It really ticks me off.

I know. That was not part of my presentation.

M. Starchuk (Chair): It is now.

M. Hartley: It is now, I know.

I just wanted to say that we’re seniors working for seniors. We know what seniors need, and we advise the staff at the Neighbourhood House what’s needed in the community.

Thank you on behalf of the council. I’d like to thank you for your time. You must be getting bored out of your minds. That’s also on the record.

M. Starchuk (Chair): No, no. Not at all, Marion. Not at all.

G. Chow: Hi, Marion. It’s a great presentation. What you said — the very last thing about spending so much time applying for grants. I have the same feeling. I don’t know if we could have a better way, but perhaps after we hear everyone, we will come up with a better way.

My question really relates to what you said about seniors liking to live and age in place. Living at their homes that they have been used to for decades. The province does provide in-home services. What are those services that you could see that are being done well, and what are the ones that we need to improve on, in terms of the government services to seniors who are living in their own home?

M. Hartley: I think probably the one that stands out the most is Better at Home, and that is funded through United Way. But as I said, once you get on that and you get the services, you stay on it. It is a sliding scale for people who get housekeeping, get yard work, and so on.

This is an example. We had somebody phone up, very irate, to one of our council members saying: “I have been waiting for Better at Home for months and months, and I can’t get on.” They can’t because there’s a huge, long wait-list. I think that’s where there needs to be an improvement.

I heard the fellow talking about transit. I think transit needs to be improved, especially in our community. It is not sufficient. As somebody who uses a cane, I find it not very friendly to people with disabilities. That’s perhaps an offshoot.

Food security is another issue. So many seniors are going to the food bank at the food hub, which is, right now, situated at Langara in our area. About 60 percent of the clients there are seniors.

I don’t know. It’s such an overreaching thing for people to be able to stay in their own place. I don’t want to come too political, but I think that if people get home support, medical home support, so much of that has to be paid for, where no other province charges for that. I think that’s something that the province could be doing something about.

That’s out of my little community into the big commun­ity. I know that as a senior…. I’m not isolated, but I have had the services. Last year I was very ill. Too much information, but I couldn’t get out of the bathroom, pretty much, for four days. I didn’t eat anything. I didn’t drink anything. I was very dehydrated. My doctor told me I needed a bland diet, at which point I was just thinking: “Oh my god, what am I going to do?”

I missed a Seniors Hub council meeting. I had told them I wasn’t coming, but they phoned to find out what the problem was. At that point I said: “I’m supposed to have…. I can’t go grocery….” Really, I was quite panicking. “I can’t go grocery shopping. I can’t even manage to do online shopping right now. I can’t even think.”

[4:15 p.m.]

Next thing you know, I had the volunteer home shopper get the groceries for me, and from our food program, Randy, who is just a wonderful staff person, brought me all of this chicken soup and some bananas — my needed bland diet.

To me, that was just one time only, but it really…. I get emotional because it meant so much to me, and that made me realize how important this was to other isolated seniors.

I don’t know if that answered your question.

G. Chow: Oh, that’s great. Certainly, I’m appreciative of some of the services and where the gaps are. Okay, great.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Marion, that concludes your presentation. I know we’re getting down to the final things, but I just wanted to say that the services that you provide — and your story — go miles. As a person that’s providing the service that turns around and receives the service, it is amazing.

We talk about a circular economy in different ways, but you’re living proof of that. You know exactly what it is that you provide to the people that you serve.

Thank you very much for your presentation, and thank you very much for what you do for the people of your community.

M. Hartley: Thank you very much. I appreciate it, and I hope seniors get some support, even our last speaker.

M. Starchuk (Chair): The next speaker is Justin Good­rich, from Covenant House Vancouver.

Justin, you have five minutes for the presentation, followed up by five minutes’ worth of comment or questions.

The floor is yours.

COVENANT HOUSE VANCOUVER

J. Goodrich: Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for affording Covenant House Vancouver the opportunity to speak with you today.

As indicated, my name is Justin Goodrich, and I’m the director of public affairs.

For over 25 years, Covenant House Vancouver has been the leading expert in British Columbia dedicated to serving homeless and at-risk youth. With values rooted in unconditional love and absolute respect, we offer a continuum of services using evidence-informed theories and practices that ensure we care for the entire person — mind, body and spirit. At the core of our success is our one-size-fits-one approach, tailored to the specific needs of each individual youth.

Today I’m here to offer two recommendations for your consideration. Our first recommendation is the establishment of a dedicated funding stream to care for vulnerable youth, ages 16 to 24, who are — or are at risk of becoming — homeless and who require supportive or complex care housing.

Recently the province of British Columbia has been making significant investments in vulnerable youth, notably youth aging out of care. Before proceeding with additional comments, I do want to acknowledge these investments and their positive impact that they will have. Though youth aging out of care are an important demographic, it is imperative to note that they only make up one subset of the broader population of vulnerable youth.

From youth forced from their homes due to sexual orientation and gender identity, to youth that came to Canada as refugees, to youth who have been the victims of human trafficking, the heartbreaking reality is that approximately 15 percent of the province’s homeless population are indeed youth, many of whom are struggling with mental health and substance misuse.

With this in mind, Covenant House Vancouver proposes that 15 percent of all funding for supportive and complex care housing be allocated to youth. This funding would be part of a dedicated stream that non-profits that care for vulnerable youth could apply for to enhance or expand their current operations. One example could be the allocation of 15 percent of the funding already earmarked for the 3,900 new supportive housing units and 240 new complex care spaces announced as part of the government’s Homes for People.

Now, 15 percent of that would only make sense. Not only is it reasonable to allocate a percentage of funding that is relative to that segment of the homeless population who are youth, but by providing operational funding for both current and future operations, agencies such as ours could immediately expand our scope. Indeed, we are already delivering on the very priorities of this government and, with your financial partnership, could quickly scale up.

Our second recommendation is the establishment of a dedicated stream of rental subsidies for vulnerable youth. In Canada, one in three young Canadians between the ages of 20 and 34 live with their parents. Unfortunately, the youth at Covenant House, whom we serve, do not have this option. Moreover, youth, regardless of their background, find it challenging to rent market housing, especially in B.C.’s larger cities, such as Vancouver. In Vancouver, the average rent for a one-bedroom is approximately $2,800 per month.

[4:20 p.m.]

Given the current housing crisis, the young people that have accessed our services at Covenant House are staying longer than before, as there’s simply nowhere for them to go. Our current average length of stay is 97 days, a marked increase from 42 days in our 2020 fiscal year.

At Covenant House, we do not have a maximum length of stay and never ask a youth to move on before they can exit to stable housing settings. However, the unfortunate consequence of these longer stays is that Covenant House is unable to help as many youth as we once were. By providing youth-serving non-profits such as Covenant House with housing subsidies, youth will reduce the amount of time they are accessing our supports before they embark on their journey of independence.

In closing, we have submitted our recommendations in writing through the province’s online portal. I thank you for considering our recommendations and look forward to entertaining questions or comments. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciate it. I actually have multiple questions, but I will wait until everyone else has nothing else to ask then I will look to add more.

The 15 percent funding we’re talking about for complex care and supportive care. Obviously, when we’re talking about vulnerable youth we are also worried about when they live in the community environment with others, they also could be targeted by other people for other behaviours, such as exploitation, as you know very well.

I am wondering. Are you also suggesting for like 15 percent money to go to dedicated youth facilities or are you still thinking about it in order for us to accommodate the immediate needs, we have to find gaps with space within the current system we have?

J. Goodrich: Great. Thank you for the question. What we’re proposing, that is, when the province looks at its funding allocations for supportive housing and complex care housing, it recognizes that 15 percent of the homeless population are youth, and therefore organizations like ours and other youth-serving housing providers should be considered by B.C. Housing and such — and perhaps MCFD and the health authorities and whatnot — as demographics where a portion of that funding is set aside.

I would also point out there’s an extraordinary amount of data that suggests not only does it make social sense, obviously, to invest in vulnerable young people, there are huge economic long-term benefits to investing in young people.

The 15 percent is a demographic that often gets overlooked. They hit 18, they’re out of the system, and many of them are forgotten and come to us as a result.

H. Yao: Thank you.

A. Walker: Thanks, Justin. The work you do is so important.

I’m wondering. Over the last 25 years, and this can be anecdotally, what have you learned as far as patterns…? Are we seeing more youth, more challenges? How have things changed over that time?

J. Goodrich: Thank you for the question. Brilliant question, in fact. We have seen some patterns. Obviously the current housing crisis poses an increased challenge, but we are also seeing — and this could be a function of just we’re capturing data better over time — an increase in refugee youth, youth that have been the victims of sexual exploitation and human trafficking, marked increases in youth that are queer and Indigenous. They make up about 30 percent each, respectively, of our population.

We’re seeing, I think, a greater diversity. Again, I would submit that just could be the fact that we’re much better at capturing data now than we were 25 years ago.

A. Walker: Thanks.

B. Stewart: Justin, I guess the question I have is…. It sounds to me like the trend is going up rather than stable or declining. I guess the question really is, what should we be doing to perhaps intervene before it gets to the point where they’re leaving home, and they’re not with their parents? I realize that some of the ones you’re talking about, that’s not possible. But have you got any recommendations in that area?

J. Goodrich: I appreciate the question. I don’t know that I have any real recommendations. Every young person is sort of in line with our ethos of one size fits one. Every young person will have their own unique story.

I think certainly there are opportunities through education. The more knowledge you can give a young person about their options the better. I can’t say I have any pre-emptive thoughts on housing for youth. If a parent decides to kick their kid out because they’re gay, that’s really not something I think we can have the opportunity to intervene in early. I wish we could.

[4:25 p.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): I have a question. I’m looking at the report that’s here. You’re talking about from 2022 to now, going from a stay of 42 days to 97 days. So it has doubled in that short period of time. Is there an explanation?

J. Goodrich: Yes, sir. There’s nowhere for them to go. The housing crisis is at.… Well, it is what it is. We’re all familiar with it. Market rentals aren’t doable. Even when a young person tries to get a couple of roommates together, it’s still nearly impossible. There are no places to go. The only option takes us to our second recommendation: more housing subsidies. We are able to administer some, but the need is far greater than what’s available.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation, Justin. Like many others that were here before you, thank you for the work that you do for those people that need it.

Our next presenter is Jennifer Lyle, Alzheimer Society of British Columbia.

Jennifer, you have five minutes for the presentation, followed up with five minutes of questions and/or comments.

ALZHEIMER SOCIETY OF B.C.

J. Lyle: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Currently there are over 85,000 British Columbians living with dementia. By 2050, that number is projected to increase to about a quarter of a million people. That’s an increase of 218 percent. These changes are driven primarily by an aging population, which poses a generational challenge that has been compared to climate change.

Unlike climate change, there is no dementia strategy in this province right now to tackle this challenge. The existing provincial guide for dementia care is six years old. In that interim period, we’ve had significant developments like the creation of a national dementia strategy. We’ve had the COVID-19 pandemic and advancements in dementia treatment and prevention. These reasons, among many others, highlight the urgent need for the provincial government to develop and resource a made-in-B.C. dementia strategy. This is our first recommendation.

Why we need the plan isn’t as important as who needs it. Take Roger Howard, for example. Roger was working as a professor when he first started experiencing symptoms. When he brought his concerns to his doctor and was tested for dementia, he scored too high for a diagnosis, despite significant memory impairment. He tested repeatedly, knowing something wasn’t right. Roger waited 13 years for a diagnosis. That’s 13 years without care.

Unfortunately, stories like Roger’s are all too common. In Ontario, it’s estimated that people living with dementia wait about 12 to 18 months to consult with a dementia specialist. In B.C., we don’t know the length of time; we don’t track it. Delayed diagnoses rob people of crucial decision-making time and the opportunity to pursue options that could slow their disease progression.

Even a diagnosis doesn’t guarantee clarity on what happens next. Despite efforts to develop practice guidelines and resources around dementia care, people’s experiences with the care system is often disjointed and inconsistent. Furthermore, the lack of provincial benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate how effective we are at connecting people to the treatment and the supports that they need.

Dr. Alex Henri-Bhargava, who is a neurologist and the medical director of the Neil and Susan Manning cognitive health initiative on Vancouver Island, articulated these challenges recently: “There’s a B.C. Cancer Agency,” he says. “We do not have a B.C. dementia agency. We have a system of patchwork clinics in some cities.” This is not just my personal opinion, but focus groups, advisory boards and research studies have demonstrated these issues as being a real problem.

This shows up as poorer care outcomes for people living with dementia, including at the end of life. People who are living with dementia are far less likely to receive palliative care at the end of their life, as opposed to people who are dying from other causes. There should be a clearly defined and well-understood clinical pathway, complete with benchmarks for diagnosing and treating dementia, similar to B.C.’s approach with cancer. This is our second recommendation to the committee.

Our third recommendation to the committee hits close to home for Alicia Friesen. Alicia was working, with two young children and had a third on the way, when her mother, Olga, was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Now at first Alicia accessed an adult day program, and she worked during the day, until Olga’s abilities declined and the program would no longer take her.

Alicia tried home care but continually encountered issues with unreliable service. As the challenges mounted with finding adequate care, so did the pressure from her employer to leave her job. She left the workforce against her wishes and now provides full-time care for her mother at home. “What’s going to happen in 20 years when every other person is a caregiver?” she asks.

Access to community-based supports is critical for family caregivers like Alicia, yet we don’t support them well. Family caregivers report high levels of distress. As the office of the seniors advocate recently reported, the provision of home care services in B.C. has not kept pace with our aging population.

[4:30 p.m.]

That insufficient resourcing of community-based supports contributes to more people ending up in the emergency room, which is ill-equipped to address the needs of people living with dementia, as Aaron Craven knows all too well.

On the recommendation of health care providers, Aaron took his mother, Patricia, to the hospital, to stabilize her medication. She spent over ten hours in emerg, gradually growing increasingly frightened by the bustle and noise in the department. Eventually Patricia was forcibly transferred onto a stretcher by security guards, stripped of her clothing, physically restrained and injected with a sedative. The lack of dignity and the use of force on Patricia left her shaking and crying.

These are thorny problems, but they’re not insurmountable. There are solutions: developing a made-in-BC de­mentia strategy, establishing clear clinical pathways, investing in community-based care. These are the whats, but they’re not nearly as important, as I said earlier, as the whos who are impacted by this — the Rogers, the Alicias, the Olgas, the Aarons, the Patricias in our communities and in our lives — because behind all the numbers are the people, and it’s for them that we need to make these changes.

Thank you for your consideration.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Jennifer, for your presentation. I’m pretty sure that there’s nobody inside of this room that hasn’t been touched in one way, shape or form with somebody that they know with Alzheimer’s.

My personal story is that I worked with a person who was in their mid-40s who…. We all forget where we put our keys, but one thing progressed to another thing that progressed to another thing, and he didn’t see the light of day past 51, I believe it was. So the work that you do is well appreciated.

Questions?

S. Chant: Thank you for your presentation.

You talked about poor palliation for folks with dementia. Can you expand on that a little bit?

J. Lyle: Sure, yeah. Happy to.

If we look at the data, and this has been reported through CIHI and a number of other studies, people who have a diagnosis of dementia are far less likely to receive palliative care medication. They’re less likely to be referred to a palliative care team. They’re more likely to be declined for hospice placement or even not be referred to hospice placement.

This is despite the fact that we know, for example, that of the people who lived with dementia and passed away in hospital, 65 percent of them were identified as having palliative care needs. So there’s a significant discrepancy. The one exception is if you have a terminal diagnosis of cancer and dementia.

S. Chant: Then you’re okay. All right. Thank you.

G. Chow: Thank you for all the work that your society does. That raised a question. You mentioned that there’s no benchmark. Who’s responsible to establish the benchmarks? Is that the government, or is it organizations like your society, which is passionate about this, to actually push the government or the medical profession to come up with the benchmark? That’s basically my question.

J. Lyle: I appreciate the question. I think it’s an all-of-the-above answer because we all have a role to play in this. I know that the Alzheimer Society of B.C., in partnership with our partners across the federation — we have done work to do projections. The numbers I shared with you are from the landmark study that was done by the Alzheimer Society of Canada, released last year.

I think that we can look at other models, in other jurisdictions, where they’ve done work like this. I point to the NHS, in the U.K., where one of the things that they did was projection-based benchmarking to identify: how many people are we diagnosing? How many people do we reasonably expect, based on population characteristics, to have dementia? And then what’s the difference between those two numbers? The NHS was able to set targets and then effectively start to move the needle. They did a number of other things there as well.

To answer your question, it’s an all-of-the-above. I know that the provincial government has done significant work through the BCCDC around developing a dashboard for dementia diagnoses but, again, we know that that only captures a small fraction of the people who are actually living with the disease, as evidenced by Roger’s story, who waited 13 years living with dementia before getting a diagnosis.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): You talk about the dementia strategy. Are there other provinces we could sample from that you think would be good to implement for our own provincial strategy?

I have got personal stories as well. My wife’s sister got early-onset dementia last year. She’s going through that now, and it’s devastating. At the same time, her father has dementia.

[4:35 p.m.]

I think there’s a statistic somewhere that said that senior caregivers or family members that looked after those loved ones with dementia actually pass away before the person with dementia does because it’s so straining on the family, and it’s just such hard work.

What other strategies can we take from in Canada so that we can assist ourselves here in B.C.?

J. Lyle: Thank you very much for the question and for sharing your story. I know that — and this was said at the start — this is something that touches a lot of people in the province.

I note that recently Newfoundland and Labrador re­leased a dementia strategy. One of the things that’s interesting about that is that there are pieces that echo the dementia action plan that was developed in B.C. back in 2012, but there are also new pieces to that.

For example, Newfoundland and Labrador talks about addressing stigma through intergenerational programming. Notably, they have a recommendation around em­bedding dementia in the K-to-12 curriculum. So I think there are some interesting opportunities that we’ve seen across the board.

I would also say that when I talk about a strategy, this isn’t something that’s explicitly or exclusively a Ministry of Health issue. It’s something that crosses into infrastructure, emergency management. It intersects into education. I think that when we talk about dementia strategy, that’s one jurisdiction that we can look at. There’s a number of other jurisdictions within Canada that have done so, as well as looking internationally. I mentioned the U.K. We can look at Australia as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jennifer, thank you for your presentation. The work that you’re doing is phenomenal. You’re looking after the people that need it the most. I’m speechless at this point, and most people that know me know that’s a rarity. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Next up is Patrice Impey from the city of Vancouver.

Patrice, you have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes with the questions and/or comments to follow.

The floor is yours.

CITY OF VANCOUVER

P. Impey: I’m Patrice Impey. I’m the chief financial officer at the city of Vancouver. Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity and the invitation to address your committee regarding the 2024 provincial budget.

I have three recommendations I’d like to make today on behalf of the city of Vancouver that support the overall shared goals of both the province and the city.

First, that the province modernize the municipal funding framework to enable housing delivery; second, to take a regional approach to mental health and affordable housing; and third, to adjust its funding contributions towards housing and child care to address the significant cost escalations that have been faced by municipalities. So I’ll speak to each one of those.

First, modernizing the municipal funding framework to support growth. It’s clear we are in a housing crisis. Both the city and the province share a common goal of increasing delivery of affordable housing — by that, I mean market rental, below-market rental, social and co-op housing — to address population growth and affordability. We expect that new immigration to Metro Vancouver could reach 65,000 people per year by 2025, with approximately 20,000 of those located in Vancouver.

The city of Vancouver is a regional and national leader in setting and delivering on aggressive housing targets, as outlined in the Housing Vancouver strategy, through our regulatory powers. In fact, we have intentionally transitioned to delivering the right supply of housing. I would highlight that starting in 2020, and in each of the past three years, the city has approved more rental and non-market housing than condos.

However, this shift to rental and non-market housing, coupled with land and construction cost escalation in the recent interest rate hikes, has meant that relying on the “growth paying for growth” principle to pay for infrastructure and amenities through land value capture is getting more and more challenging. And it’s making the delivery of the right supply of housing financially unviable.

So we would urge the province to look to modernize the municipal funding framework to provide much-needed funding to upgrade basic infrastructure like water, sewer, amenities, child care and parks, to support the needed growth. Funding programs like the federal housing accelerator fund and the provincial growing communities fund recognize this need, and we want to ensure that this type of funding is provided in a more consistent and predictable fashion.

School capacity must also be adequately funded to support growth. We’re specifically requesting the province to expedite funding for the Olympic Village school, where children are travelling to other areas of the city, so that the village itself can support the objectives of creating a diverse, vibrant community for families and children.

I think the city and province have an opportunity to work together to create complete communities in the city, enabling the delivery of housing through our regulatory tools and the province funding the required infrastructure and amenities for growth.

[4:40 p.m.]

The second recommendation we have is a regional ap­proach to mental health and affordable housing. Stable housing and access to housing supports are two of the strongest determinants of long-term health and wellness for people experiencing homelessness.

Housing must also include the necessary supports for people with serious mental health challenges, substance abuse issues, acquired brain injuries, or a history of violent behaviour. The gap in these services has increased with the pandemic, and it still exists, and this has created added costs and pressures on residents, businesses and city of Vancouver staff, including our policing resources.

Right now, Vancouver has over 9,000 shelter and supportive housing units out of about 12,000 in the entire Metro region, so a disproportionate share of about 75 percent of the regional total is in the city of Vancouver.

The Red Fish Healing Centre in Coquitlam is an ex­ample of the type of facility we would like to see the province develop across the region. We would ask that the province partner with municipalities and the federal government to develop integrated policies and funding programs to address mental health and affordable housing at the regional level.

A third recommendation would be provincial funding to reflect the cost escalation and economic realities that we’re seeing, particularly related to housing and child care. For example, the province provides about $43,000 per space for child care, but the current cost of delivering child care in Vancouver is, on average, $280,000 per space. That’s seven times the current provincial funding.

B.C. Housing provides about $100,000 per door plus mortgage subsidies for social housing, but the current equity gap for social housing is $260,000 per door. That’s two times the existing provincial funding.

Like many other major urban centres, we face higher costs of construction and operating costs than other B.C. municipalities would see. That impacts the ability to deliver child care and housing. We ask that the province increase funding contributions to reflect the significant cost escalation as well as the unique urban setting that drives much higher unit costs in the city of Vancouver.

That concludes my comments. I’d be happy to take any questions. Thank you so much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Patrice.

A. Walker: Hearing that last figure about the costs for child care, I believe there has been a lot of child care that’s been funded at about $60,000 or thereabouts, but over $200,000 a space is an astronomical difference. Can you expand on what makes that so challenging in Vancouver relative to other communities?

P. Impey: Right. Well, child care really needs to be part of an integrated…. We just don’t have sort of greenfield sites where you can make a simple child care single-storey building, so it’s integrated into expensive buildings. Looking for outdoor space, etc. Finding places is expensive as well, and just construction costs are much higher in Vancouver. Yeah, it’s a very surprising number, isn’t it?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Patrice, there was a comment you made earlier that there were more rental unit approvals than condos. Why is that?

P. Impey: As part of the city’s Housing Vancouver strat­egy a number of years ago, we looked at the continuum of income, at the availability of housing and realized that we weren’t providing housing to support the whole missing middle of the population. It was a conscious effort to move to encourage and zone for rental and encourage developers to do more rental to help.

We have one of the lowest vacancy rates for rental, and as you know, rental is very also very expensive in Vancouver. That was a conscious effort by previous councils to shift to rental in order to provide that needed housing for that income group.

M. Starchuk (Chair): If you if you don’t mind, what would be the encouragement?

P. Impey: Well, for one thing, we waived DCLs for rental buildings as the first incentive to do that. That burden gets passed on to other projects as well, and then it limits our ability to really fund all of the infrastructure and amenities that we would normally fund out of our development contributions. We’ve actually cut back on some of those, and we’re not able to meet the needs of providing the amenities and infrastructure that we would normally do. There was a conscious decision to encourage more rental.

[4:45 p.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Very good.

Any other comments? Questions?

A Voice: What’s a DCL? I’m sorry.

P. Impey: Oh, sorry. Development cost levies. You might hear development cost contributions. It’s also called DCCs outside of Vancouver.

G. Chow: Hi, Patrice. Nice for you to be giving your insight from the city of Vancouver.

Can you expand a bit on the regional funding for mental health? I mean, it is kind of funded provincially, but where we locate the facility, obviously, is a factor, of course. Is that what you were saying?

P. Impey: I think there are two parts. There’s a need for more funding. I think the sense is that Vancouver has a disproportional…. We’ve expended a lot of city resources and funding to support and to build more supportive housing, to work with B.C. Housing to build supportive housing in Vancouver — probably disproportionately to the rest of Metro Vancouver.

G. Chow: Well, there’s no doubt the city of Vancouver has a heavy concentration of a lot of the housing for people who need great support. So, yeah, that’s true.

P. Impey: It would be both. It would be increased overall, but also to have what we call, sort of, regional fair share, where all municipalities are contributing.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ben, you have the privilege of asking the last question of the day.

P. Impey: Oh, am I the last person? Sorry to keep you so late.

B. Stewart: I’d better make it a good one.

Patrice, I just wanted to clarify how…. Well, actually, kind of two questions. One is…. I don’t know what rental housing, this new housing that’s being built in the city of Vancouver proper, in terms of…. Is it towers? I don’t know.

What is the modernization of the municipal funding relationship that you would like to see? I’m looking at the federal one that you mentioned, and I’m kind of wondering. How would you like to see that work out? Can you give us your take on that?

P. Impey: Traditionally in building condos, the land-value capture provides the funding for us to do the needed infrastructure: water, sewer, parks, etc. With rental, the pro forma just does not spin off in that level of funding, so developers won’t build a rental building and still be able to contribute the same amount to those amenities.

We have the ability, with our tools, to encourage rental housing, to encourage low-end-of-market rentals, but that takes away from our ability to fund the basic infrastructures and those amenities that we’re responsible for.

As a new model, or as the model evolves, in order to build that missing-middle right supply of rental, the city can use our regulatory powers to do that, but then we need funding for the infrastructure and amenities that might have been funded out of the land lift from a condo. Moving from condo to rental, you lose that. So we have been making those trade-offs over this last while in order to encourage that shift to rental, but we’re not able to do both.

With the housing accelerator fund, that’s funding directly from the federal government for us to use, that we can use for infrastructure in the growing communities. We can use that to build fire halls and things that we aren’t able to get the funding for from a rental development that we could have gotten from a condo development.

Does that make sense?

B. Stewart: Subsidized infrastructure. Or not subsidized — offset.

P. Impey: It’s just a different way. The city can encourage and focus on rental, but it won’t allow us to do our rest of what we need to do. It’s the way our funding models are set up, right?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Patrice, thank you. Thank you very much for your presentation today.

A motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 4:49 p.m.