The committee met at 8:02 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’d like to acknowledge that we’re meeting in Penticton this morning, on the traditional territories of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.

I’d ask everyone to reflect on the lands that they come from, where they work, live and play.

I would also like to welcome everyone who is listening to 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. Details are available on our website at bcleg.ca/fgsbudget. The deadline for input is two o’clock 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 also be posted. We will carefully consider all input to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be included in Budget 2024. The committee intends on releasing the report in August.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): My name is Tom Shypitka. I’m the Deputy Chair and the MLA for Kootenay East.

S. Chant: My name is Susie Chant. I’m the MLA for North Vancouver–Seymour.

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

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

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

G. Chow: George Chow, MLA, Vancouver-Fraserview.

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

Each participant will have five minutes to speak, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments from the committee members. I would remind the committee members to make your questions as brief as possible and the participants to make your answers as quick as possible so we can get through the list of questions that we’ll have for each day.

This morning the first up is Dr. Phil Barker, UBC Okanagan campus.

Dr. Barker, you have five minutes to speak, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

Budget Consultation Presentations

UBC OKANAGAN

P. Barker: Thank you very much.

Good morning. I’m Phil Barker. I’m the vice-principal of research and innovation at the UBC Okanagan campus.

That is situated, as we are today, in the Syilx Okanagan territory.

[8:05 a.m.]

I’m here to speak in support of UBC’s written budget submission and supplement it with some local context and examples from UBC Okanagan. Thank you very much for the opportunity to meet with you today.

UBCO has taken off in recent years and become increasingly known as a place of unique opportunity for students from the B.C. interior and beyond. As the campus continues to mature, we’re realizing progress on a number of initiatives, like Indigenous language revitalization, which we see as a concrete demonstration of our commitment to truth and reconciliation, and diversifying the types of credentials, flexible learning and training opportunities that we offer. Meanwhile — and gratefully, with the support of the province — we’re growing in key areas to meet community demand, including health, biotech and engineering.

Today I’m here to discuss an initiative which speaks to a particular strength at our campus, which is rooted in regional context and is a key priority for the province. That is: mitigating the risks to infrastructure brought by natural disasters. The challenge is that natural disasters wreak havoc and devastation across B.C. every year, causing widespread damage to communities, property and livelihoods.

This reality is all too familiar here in the Interior, where we live with the near-constant threat of climate change–influenced disasters, including wildfire. Members of the committee from all regions will recall the impacts of the 2021 atmospheric river — the costliest natural disaster in B.C., where communities and supply chains were cut off when infrastructure was overwhelmed or, in the case of the Coquihalla Highway, where infrastructure was destroyed. B.C. also faces a massive threat of earthquakes that will affect our urban centres in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.

When we think about solutions, we recognize that each of these challenges demands that we build and design better, more resilient infrastructure, while simultaneously reducing the large carbon footprint of the construction industry.

This objective requires that we develop new techniques, technologies and materials. UBCO is heavily involved in research to develop these, but a gap is that innovation in building materials and practices cannot translate to our communities or to the marketplace without comprehensive safety testing in place. Industry does not have the capacity or the risk tolerance to take this on alone.

So the opportunity at UBCO that we’re proposing is the development of a unique, large-scale research and testing facility for resilient infrastructure. While training the next generation of innovators, our researchers are developing ways to make buildings and structures smarter, using monitoring sensors; stronger, with new composite materials; resilient, using new ductile materials; and sustainable, with timber, hybrid and recycled materials.

The new facility will enable these innovations to be performance-tested against all forms of natural hazards, including fire, wind, temperature, seismic activity, tsunamis and floods. By allowing new materials and approaches to be tested at scale, we can accelerate their development and translation from the lab to implementation.

How do we realize this vision? UBC has taken the first step by purchasing an existing facility adjacent to the Okanagan campus Innovation Precinct. We’ve identified about $30 million in costs to renovate the building and outfit it with the specialized equipment necessary to create a comprehensive all-hazard testing environment not found anywhere else in North America.

We recognize that projects of this scale require multifaceted partnerships that span multiple levels of government and include industry. Just last month I was part of a UBC delegation to Ottawa meeting with federal officials, including the Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Bill Blair, to seek his input and serve as a champion for the project. Likewise, we hope to meet with provincial officials in the near future, including Minister Bowinn Ma, to discuss this initiative as part of a provincial risk mitigation strategy.

We’re also exploring partnerships with industry, including producers who are facing green mandates but lack R-and-D capacity, as well as the insurance industry, which is seeking to reduce costs in the face of more frequent and destructive disasters.

[8:10 a.m.]

To wrap up, my recommendation is that government invest in academic and research infrastructure at B.C.’s post-secondary institutions that is relevant to regional context and around which our institutions have established clusters of expertise, such as the proposed centre for disaster-resilient infrastructure at UBC Okanagan. This type of investment will allow innovations in our laboratory to become solutions to the pressing challenges faced by our communities in this region and across the province.

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

B. Banman: Thank you very much. You piqued my attention right off because I’m actually the critic, or the shadow minister, for that ministry.

I guess the question I have for you is…. In addition to the money, one of the things I’ve heard is that the building code is always light-years behind, or actually stands in the way of, some innovations. Will part of your focus be on helping the province to respond quicker or identify areas within the building code that actually stand in the way of some of this innovation?

P. Barker: Thank you for the question. You’ve really, I think, put your finger on a really key issue for having these kinds of innovative materials enter the marketplace. It’s not simply the testing to show that they’re going to work in place. It’s adjusting codes so that they actually become the standard of practice across the construction industry.

We recognize that as a significant issue. Part of what I’ve really presented here is, if you will, an engineering solution to the problem. There’s a much bigger question about how you take an interdisciplinary approach to really understand how you bring this to the marketplace and have the codes adjusted.

What’s on the table for us is really a project called build back better, which is to engage not only engineers but people on campus who understand codes in a deep way — people from our department of economics, for example, from the faculty of management, who understand how to adjust policy and be part of this integrative approach to finding solutions. Because you’re right; we have to take a kind of an end-to-end approach.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation — I’ve got to say it — Dr. Phil. Thanks for identifying such a niche. This is great.

I’m interested in the facility itself. You say it’s performance tested at scale. What does that actually look like? Are you actually getting all the elements — the wind, the fire, everything — and at-scale testing? I imagine seismic upgrades would be part of your program as well, as far as performance testing.

P. Barker: Yeah, thanks for the question. By “at scale,” what that really refers to is…. It’s not adequate to test a one-foot piece of concrete that actually doesn’t form a part of a building. What we need to do is test 30-foot beams, 100-foot beams, mass timber that would actually be part of a six-storey structure. So “at scale” means testing what actually is going to be part of the building.

With regard to what that looks like, it means that the facility has to have certain characteristics such as a super-hard, resilient floor. It has to have walls against which our engineers can really exert incredibly high pressure.

There are large-scale shaker tables available, that are essentially the size of this room, that replicate seismic activity, and there are also wind and fire tunnels that can be constructed that will reproduce the conditions that would be observed in a wildfire in our Interior region. So that’s all part of what we see as the vision of this structure.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): It’s a weird conundrum because the materials that you’re trying to develop should be the materials you have to encase that type of planning. So it’s kind of wild.

P. Barker: Exactly.

G. Chow: Thank you, Dr. Barker. At UBC Vancouver, you also have that facility for testing building. For example, sheer walls and all that. Are you thinking of building another testing facility at Okanagan?

P. Barker: That’s exactly correct.

G. Chow: That’s how we actually did the research and came up with the 18-storey mass timber buildings. So you’re proposing this $30 million renovation of a building that you think is suitable.

P. Barker: Yeah, and just to be clear, we’re not going to replicate what’s on the Vancouver campus. The schools of engineering on both campuses are very tightly aligned.

[8:15 a.m.]

What this will do that differentiates it from the Vancouver facility is, back to the question just proposed by the Deputy Chair, one that will allow us to explore these materials at scale under conditions which they will, if you will, be experiencing in real life.

G. Chow: Yeah. I don’t think there…. Maybe there is. Perhaps you know whether there’s actually an independent agency to test mass timber structured beams. I think right now we’re basically relying on the manufacturer, in terms of…. Once mass timber becomes more widely used, you really need to have a sticker on there saying that it’s been kind of tested or maybe certified during the manufacturing process.

So yeah, that’s great.

P. Barker: I know we’re over time, but can I respond to that last comment?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Very briefly.

P. Barker: Very briefly, just to say that capacity does not exist. We do not have the capacity anywhere globally to test safety of mass timber at scale. This is one of the really important elements of what we’re proposing.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Dr. Barker, thank you for your presentation this morning and, more importantly, thank you for the work that you’re going to achieve at UBCO.

P. Barker: Thank you very much, and thank you for allowing me to present. I’m grateful for the opportunity.

M. Starchuk (Chair): You’re welcome.

Next up Peter Simonsen, B.C. Fruit Growers Association.

Peter, you have five minutes for your presentation, and then followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours, Peter.

B.C. FRUIT GROWERS ASSOCIATION

P. Simonsen: Thank you for inviting us here today, and thank you for taking the time to travel around the province and hear what we have to say here.

My name is Peter Simonsen. I’m president of the B.C. Fruit Growers Association. We’re a 134-year-old organization, probably the oldest farm organization in North America. I found an old pamphlet from our 1916 convention, and it’s exactly the same as the convention we had this year. It’s resolutions, elections and the whole process. Very proud of our organization. Very proud of our industry, but we’ve been struggling as of late.

I’m not going to read out our presentation. You all have a copy.

We are a very important part of this valley and our food security, the health of our citizens. We feel we’ve been kind of neglected and been off the radar in government for a long, long time. I haven’t seen the agriculture budget move very much at all. We’ve been really struggling, really lobbying. Arguing is, unfortunately… Arguing and just trying to get our fair share of what we contribute to the province.

Until recently, we really haven’t made any progress, and all of a sudden, a large amount of money kind of came into the industry, but we’re still not really sure where it’s going. Our three priorities have been orderly marketing, replant and some kind of a recovery payment from the province.

With orderly marketing, we have what we call the leftover system. It worked fine, because you don’t really know what fruit prices are going to be. When we had a unified industry, we would deliver millions of dollars worth of fruit every year. We’d just kind of say: “Goodbye, fruit.” Then we would, as the season progressed, get paid slowly and surely.

As the retail industry in British Columbia has become more and more, I guess, centralized, less competitive, there are only five retailers who buy 80 to 90 percent of all the products in Canada, and we know they’re friendly with each other. We’ve seen that many times. There’s a playbook that’s being used against us where they’ll stop buying from us and they’ll start buying from the U.S., so our industry became ruptured.

Some people said, “Well, we can do better selling ourselves,” so now we have up to 30 people selling only three million boxes of apples. The strategy has been: “Well, if I can’t sell my fruit because I’m not getting any phone calls, I’ll lower the price.”

We have these five retailers who are consistently pitting our packers against one another with our money, because we get what’s left over. We’re working on a system of orderly marketing where the packers basically share information on what the pricing is. We have the evidence from Canadian Border Services that we are consistently selling below our American competition, like 20 cents a pound.

[8:20 a.m.]

If we had been consistently getting this 20 cents a pound, the same price as the Americans — not a better price, but the same price as Washington fruit — we would probably not be here today, and we wouldn’t be arguing about it with government, and there would still be a healthy industry. Our industry has dropped the amount of acreage that’s planted in half, not because we’re not competitive but because we struggle under this system.

The good news is that we are making progress towards orderly marketing. We’re going to have a vote here fairly quickly on it, a plan and a vote. You might hear from the packers that this is terrible. This is the worst thing in the world. I think that the growers will vote overwhelmingly in favour of it.

The second is the replant and modernization of our orchards. We had, for many years, a replant program. Inexplicably, it was not renewed a few years ago. So we’ve been two years without this replant program. This is a program that is….

I don’t really know the exact numbers. From what I’ve read, there’s $2 billion that goes into oil and gas every year as incentives. Now, the reason it goes in as incentives is…. They know that the money gets spent. It gets circulated around. These are things like roadbuilding and royalty holidays in the wintertime.

This is a very similar program. I do not believe it costs the government anything for this program. We would like this to be renewed. It has been renewed with this new insertion of $300 million. Now it includes grapes. It includes blueberries. It includes raspberries and tree fruits as well.

From what I’ve heard, of the $50 million that has been allocated, $5 million has already been committed for removals. We’re very worried. Before our growers even know about the program, $5 million has been spent. I think it has been….

We had a very, very difficult winter. Over the years, a lot of growers, by default, have been planting things that they probably shouldn’t be planting and that are not suitable for this area. So a lot of grapes have died this winter. I think a lot of the money has gone towards the pullouts of these varieties.

I think it would be very important to fully fund this program.

Our last one is some kind of recovery for what we have gone through the last few years. In 2018, we went to our minister’s office and talked about the problems we were having. It took many years. We finally got sort of an inquiry. We’ve had two years of inquiry. We all know what the problem is. Meanwhile, our growers have had five years of very difficult times. The last two years involved….

We had the heat dome in 2021, which absolutely cooked and baked our little apples. During that period is when the trees make their fruit buds for the following year. The trees were under such stress that they didn’t really make a crop for 2022. So we had the lowest crop. I had my lowest crop in 40 years of farming in 2022. I had terrible destruction of my crop in 2021. Our crop insurance programs were inadequate. They just did not really fund this. So we have been lobbying and asking for some kind of support program.

Our competitors in Washington got five cents U.S. a pound during that period, a cash subsidy. We feel that a level playing field should be had around the world. They are our competitors.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Peter, I’m going to have to ask you to…. We’re going to have to end it right there.

P. Simonsen: Perfect. I’m finished.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Just a note to our members. We have a list, and we have five minutes to get through that list, so questions as brief as possible.

G. Chow: Are we mainly selling our products to the south, like apples and cherries?

P. Simonsen: No, 90 percent of it is in the domestic market. A lot of cherries go overseas. The U.S. is a good market.

I’ll tell you something about government leadership. The federal government, in 1920, started a breeding program all across Canada to improve agriculture. It’s something that I think Canadians can be very proud of.

[8:25 a.m.]

We’ve done an excellent job in Summerland of cherry breeding. We know we can’t be the first people in the world, but we can be the last. They’ve developed all these amazing cherry varieties. The further north you plant them, up to a certain limit, of course…. You can be the last people in North America to have cherries. There’s $20 million a year that goes into this breeding program.

These are the things that I think are important for government to be looking at. We’re very willing to help and suggest. We’re all looking for the same thing.

Cherries have been an amazing thing. Of course, there’s a danger of them being over planted as well.

There are only, really, two defaults in the apple industry. You either plant grapes in the south, or you plant cherries in the north. We’re concerned that the third option, which is probably, I think, the best option…. There’s no better place from Wenatchee, Washington, to Vernon, British Columbia, in North America to grow apples than this valley. Yet for reasons kind of beyond our control, very unfair reasons, we’re going down in acreage.

B. Banman: Thank you for your presentation. You mentioned the Americans. Do they have a similar system to what you’re asking for?

P. Simonsen: They do, yes.

B. Banman: If they’re your direct competitors and you want a level playing field…. Is it similar?

P. Simonsen: They do have a similar system. It’s called the Washington Apple Commission. If you’re a packer…. I’m a packer, and I phone you and say: “Hey, buddy, you need to raise your prices. We need to do this and this and this.” It’s totally illegal for us to do that.

There’s something in the U.S. called the national products marketing act. It allows these groups…. Actually, it compels the groups to talk about pricing. Our packers will get a call from Loblaws. They’ll say: “Your prices are way too high. I can buy stuff out of Washington for a much lower price.” They’ll usually sell for that lower price, because they feel they’re compelled to.

If there is a group that talks together and says: “No, we have the information from Canadian Border Services that our prices are actually too low….” Surprisingly, sometimes these people don’t tell the truth. This allows us to stand firm on our pricing and tell the growers that there’s no reason to cave on pricing.

It’s a legal method. They have it in Washington. They have it in New York state. Quebec has a similar system. This is a system that brings a level of fairness to our industry.

I think everyone has recognized that our industry is going down. It’s going to be extinct. There’s no reason for it. No really good reason for it.

When you use the word “sustainable”…. It’s a meaningless word. But when you talk about our industry, it’s a truly sustainable industry. We have the best conditions. We don’t really need to spray fungicides here because it’s so arid. We have the sterile insect release program. We’re the only people in the world who have this program. I’m an organic grower because we have this program.

We have a truly sustainable industry. Even if you’re not organic, it’s…. Very, very few sprays are used in British Columbia. It is a truly awesome industry.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thirty seconds.

S. Chant: Can you tell me a little bit about what the replant and modernization of orchards means?

P. Simonsen: It’s a continual process. In the 1990s, we traded away our support program, which was kind of a subsidy program that was brought in when the ALR was formed, for what we felt was a better system for growers and for everyone involved. We went to more high-density apples.

We went to Europe. We got experts here. We had these things. You’d look at the trucks in the parking lot, and half of them had Washington plates on them. Growers came up to learn what was happening. It was a very new, modern thing.

We took it and ran with it, but there needs to be continual improvement. We have a lot of old orchards that are only picking 30, 40 bins an acre. We can now pick 70, 80, 90 bins an acre. With the same amount of land, we can produce twice as much through modernization. We have some great varieties here. So it’s very important.

For the small amount of government money that goes in…. The rest all comes from the grower. It’s just an incen­tive. It’s a little push. Growers go: “Okay. There is support. The government believes in our industry. Let’s go for it.” That’s why I think it’s such an important…. It’s a morale booster too. It’s sort of like: “We care.”

[8:30 a.m.]

I think that is a priority. I know we have it now, but I’m worried. This morning I just got an email saying: “We’re cutting off funding on June 16.” We’ve hardly told our growers about it yet. Very few of our growers even know about it.

I don’t know where all the demand has come from, but it hasn’t come from the B.C. Fruit Growers Association. We just assumed $15 million was enough for everyone.

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

Next up is Miles Prodan, Wine Growers B.C.

Miles, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

WINE GROWERS B.C.

M. Prodan: Good morning. Welcome to B.C. wine country. I’m glad to see everybody here.

My name is Miles Prodan. I’m the president and CEO of Wine Growers British Columbia, previously known as the B.C. Wine Institute. I think our name change is indicative of the realization that there was a lack of understanding in government and in the public that we are growers like our colleagues in the cherry and apple businesses and whatever other ag programs or growers there are in this province. We are the same.

We’re unique, though. We’re in control of our product, from the grower perspective, all the way through to the actual final production of wine. We are the largest value-added ag product that there is, and we’re proud of that fact.

Recently we did an economic impact study where we recognized over $3 billion worth of economic impact to this province because of our industry. But it’s not without its challenges. Being farmers, as was alluded to earlier, we’re subject to Mother Nature. Mother Nature is fickle. Mother Nature is getting more and more difficult to deal with, given climate change and some of the impacts that we’re seeing there.

Last year I presented before this panel asking for some support for a replant program. I’m very happy to say that this has come through. We’re taking advantage of that, along with our other fruit-growing colleagues as well.

Today I’m here with two recommendations. The first is support for wine tourism specifically.

We currently partner with Destination British Columbia and get some funding through there, but it’s limited. We need to share that pot of money, along with our other tourism sectors, as they’re called, including mountain bike and freshwater fishing. I think there are over 20 of them. That limited amount of money…. We always max out that money that we share.

We need a firm investment in the wine tourism sector. We’re unique in that we’re rural and by the very fact, as I alluded to, that we’re farmers. Most of our wineries are, in fact, rural. What we look to do is disperse tourists across this province, and we’ve got the product to do that. The highest margin a winery will make on the sale of a bottle of wine is at the farm gate, at the winery. It’s a great investment into not just the province, in dispersing tourism across this province, but also in getting to maximize those visitations.

The real opportunity for us this coming year is the investment government has made in bringing world-class events to the city of Vancouver. We take a look at FIFA. We take a look at the World Indigenous Games. There’s a number of them. We need to be able to make sure we’re maximizing moving those people out and around the province, and wine tourism is well suited for that.

In my recommendation, I’ve given you some numbers. We’re looking for about a $2 million investment over the next four or five years. We can see a great return on that, with that economic impact I spoke of earlier.

The second recommendation we have isn’t really us asking for funding. It’s a concept that will help increase funding revenue to government.

We currently are in a unique situation with liquor in this province. It’s not just this province. We are subject to all sorts of trade negotiations and trade treaties that really restrict our ability to access different kinds of funding and markets.

[8:35 a.m.]

What we propose is…. Growers here in the province are subject to a carbon tax. We think it’s only fair that those wines that are imported into this province — not all of them, but there are some — should be subject to that same tax. The importers of wines are always asking for equal treatment to what we get, and we’re saying that should be the same. Our calculations show that by doing that, we could probably generate an extra $6 million annually for this province in treating…. Import wines want to be treated fairly. We say: “Yeah, we agree. They should be treated fairly and be subject to the same carbon tax that we are.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Miles. I have a question right off the rattle in regards to when you talked about import. What is the definition of “imported”? Are we talking province to province, country to country?

M. Prodan: Country to country.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Country to country, okay.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. Just to touch on that as well, B.C. is developing an output-based pricing system right now. You’re suggesting an input-based pricing system. I know the concrete industry also suffers the same thing. They’re an emission-intensive industry and, of course, they have to pay into that carbon tax, and they’ve got to compete with cement coming from overseas. So the same kind of thing.

I guess what you’re suggesting is that maybe when government develops this output-based pricing system, to consider something like what you’re suggesting here. I think we hear it from other industries, not just the fruit industries.

M. Prodan: It’s unique for us because we’re always…. Importers are always complaining. They’re complaining and always threatening trade challenges for some of the government programming that we get — which are critically important to our industry, by the way. We’re always in the defensive mode.

We’re just saying, to your point: “You want the playing field level? We agree. Let’s make that truly level, and you pay the same carbon tax that we are subject to as well.”

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Yeah, 100 percent.

M. Starchuk (Chair): With regard to the marketing, I assume the money that comes from Destination B.C.… I assume Kelowna has their own destination Kelowna.

M. Prodan: Yup.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Is that coming from the same MRDT?

M. Prodan: Yeah, no. I think there’s a room tax that’s applied in certain municipalities that contributes to Tourism Kelowna. I think there’s one here in Penticton, for instance. They will access some DBC money but, really, it’s the sectors that I talk about. That’s, like I say, the mountain-biking, fresh…. I don’t know why I choose those two every time I mention it, but there’s a bunch of them. It’s because I like kayaking and mountain-biking.

There’s a pool of money there, and it’s important for us as well, but it’s limited. It’s capped. We’ve had discussions with DBC, which encourages us to make these kinds of presentations. They also have restrictions on how that money can be applied, so they encourage us to look for direct funding so that we can build specific programming around wine and food tourism across the province.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, good. At one time, I think they were looking at increasing that part of the room tax, because it’s actually those people that are coming to visit.

M. Prodan: Yeah. That’s Tourism Kelowna in that instance, right? They may have some wine tourism programming around that, within the city of Kelowna. What I’m speaking about is a provincewide food-and-wine tourism program.

A. Walker: You contribute so much to B.C., and I personally enjoy much of your product, so thank you for that.

I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about how COVID impacted your industry and then, maybe, also what that $2 million would mean for your producers.

M. Prodan: Thank you for that question. It substantially damaged our industry. I mean, clearly, we’re not alone. People were not able to travel anywhere nearly as they did, and those that came were restricted in how they could visit a winery. So the facilities were down by 50 percent in what they were allowed.

We were excited that when a lot of the travel restrictions were lifted, we’d see an increase in that. We’re not seeing that for a variety of reasons, I think not least of which is not just concerns about travel but fire. In a lot of research that we do, we see a lot of people choosing not to come to British Columbia in anticipation of a forest fire. That’s important. We need to build that up.

Again, I think what we really want to focus on is that investment the province has made in showcasing the city of Vancouver. If we can just convince or make it of interest to those people to travel outside, that would be good. That really is this dispersion strategy that we talk about. That could help to offset some of the downturn we saw from COVID.

[8:40 a.m.]

R. Leonard: I get to say something similar to what Adam said. No wine passes our door without it being from B.C. It’s great. Kudos to the growers.

The question you’d mentioned about the wine gates being the best return. Is that where you want to focus your tourism marketing, like bike wine tours?

M. Prodan: Yeah. It’s encouraging tourists to go and visit wineries. Again, there are wineries outside of the Okanagan. I’m always reminded that we are Wine Growers British Columbia, not wine growers Okanagan, so we do have wineries, literally, across this province. The concept is to make sure and encourage people to go and visit the specific wineries and wine tours and restaurants. The accommodations that support all of that, including the example that you suggest, like Tourism Kelowna, could well collaborate on that kind of program.

Thank you for your support. We’re very fortunate that about 90 percent of our product is consumed here in the province of British Columbia, and it’s to consumers like those here that support us. We know we’re not the cheapest option on the shelf, but we know we’re fortunate that British Columbians support homegrown.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Nor are you the most expensive.

Miles, thank you very much for your presentation this morning.

Next up is Julia Smith, Small-Scale Meat Producers Association.

Julia, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

SMALL-SCALE MEAT
PRODUCERS ASSOCIATION

J. Smith: Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Julia Smith. I’m a founder, past president and currently executive director of the Small-Scale Meat Producers Association, and I have a farm in the beautiful Nicola Valley.

We represent B.C. farmers who are raising meat outside of the conventional industrial system. We are a registered non-profit society, building greater stability and growth opportunities for small-scale meat producers in B.C.

The first issue I want to address is related to the licensing of groundwater for non-domestic use and the huge backlog in the application process. Under the Water Sustainability Act, users of groundwater for non-domestic purposes had until March 1, 2022, to apply for a licence. At that time, there were an estimated 20,000 non-domestic wells in the province, with an excess of 8,000 being used in the agricultural sector. As of March 2022, only about 38 percent of these users had applied.

In a survey of our members earlier this year, 42 percent had not yet applied, with the main reason being that they don’t trust the government to fairly adjudicate their application and that the application process is too complicated. Of the 58 percent who have applied, most have been waiting months and up to six years to hear the outcome.

Given that the government is so far behind in processing applications, we recommend that funding be increased for FrontCounter B.C. and the Ministry of Forests to hire more staff to expedite the process of processing these applications.

To address the trust factor and the fact that thousands of farmers have not yet applied, we recommend that industry associations like ours be provided with funding to work with farmers and encourage and assist them in applying.

Secondly, there is a meat processing crisis in British Columbia. At a time when we are seeing unprecedented market demand for locally raised meat, producers cannot meet this demand due to a lack of processing capacity. Based on the results of an extensive industry survey SSMPA conducted in 2021, we estimate there are about 7,000 small-scale meat producers in B.C., and 94 percent of them are not able to earn a living on their meat business. Overwhelmingly, the biggest barrier to preventing these businesses from growing is a lack of meat processing capacity.

We currently import 85 percent of the beef, 74 percent of the lamb, and 84 percent of the pork that we consume in British Columbia. This represents a significant lost opportunity for economic growth and food security in B.C. communities. For example, almost every calf born in B.C. is shipped to feedlots in Alberta for finishing and sold back to us as Alberta beef.

Virtually all of the profit on that animal is realized after it is slaughtered, and as such, very little of that money makes it back into the B.C. economy. Farmers and ranchers are subsidizing their operations with off-farm income, savings and their physical and mental health while foreign-owned conglomerates reap the rewards of their hard work.

[8:45 a.m.]

Regionalizing meat production offers an opportunity to revitalize the economies of rural communities. But building meat-processing facilities through regulatory standards is prohibitively expensive. This is why we lost 80 percent of them when the new meat regulations came into effect in 2008. We need support for infrastructure and for training to ensure that we have a competent, reliable workforce that is ready to grow as the industry develops.

For my final recommendation, I note that it is easy to get caught up in flashy new tech solutions to many of the problems we are facing today like climate change, growing population, increasingly virulent viruses. The term “regenerative agriculture” is gaining popularity and is often associated with technology solutions, but it is important to remember its roots. Long before modern agritech, Indigenous farmers around the world were practising regenerative agriculture. These techniques and practices allowed humans to produce food for thousands of years and develop many of the crops and livestock species that we now depend on, and they did it without fossil fuels, synthetic inputs, drones or smartphones.

Investing in regenerative agriculture practices like no-till, diversification, cover cropping, livestock integration and well-managed grazing will pave the way for B.C. to be a leader in climate change solutions. Agriculture is often demonized for its emissions and land use practices, but regenerative agriculture is a powerful tool in climate change mitigation.

There is good work being done by organizations like ours. There is already some good funding for these beneficial management practices, but the amount of funding available is not proportionate to the scale of the problem and the potential solution offered by regenerative agriculture. Farmers need support to learn about and transition to regenerative practices. Please support organizations like ours and Indigenous partners to facilitate this learning and knowledge sharing and increase funding for adoption of beneficial management practices.

I get really excited about the opportunities for young farmers in British Columbia. There is so much potential. I hope you will consider this in the upcoming budget and give our sector the leg up it so desperately deserves. You won’t find a harder-working group of people or a better investment. Thank you for your time.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Julia, for the presentation. Super critical, food security. All that Alberta beef: a lot of it comes from B.C., as you said.

You mentioned water licensing. I know grazing tenures are becoming more and more hard to identify and those kind of things. When you sell that calf in the fall, you’re not getting a lot of return and it goes off to…. Yet the price of steak and everything goes up but also the cost of feed and fertilizer and all the other stuff that goes along with it.

J. Smith: Isn’t that crazy? Yeah.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I’m interested in regenerative agriculture. Can you just expand on that a little bit more, on how we can bring that into the fold and work on that?

J. Smith: Regenerative agriculture has six main principles. I can provide some more material, subsequent to my presentation, around that.

Basically, we’re looking at not disturbing the soil; leaving the soil covered and protected; increasing its water retention capacity, which is really important, especially these days; integrating livestock into systems to help build that soil; moving them around. We didn’t have a problem thousands of years ago. We had the same number of ruminants on the planet. They just moved around, and they were part of an integrated system. We’ve taken that away.

We’ve seen what happened with the dust bowl, when we till and till and we lose all that topsoil. It takes thousands of years to build topsoil and just a heartbeat to destroy it. The soil is the basic foundation of our food system. If we don’t take care of it, we’re going to be in real trouble. We have the capacity to feed all of the people in this world, but we need to adopt more regenerative practices so that we can be sustainable.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation. You made the comment that you lost 80 percent of the processing facilities when the new regulations came in. I imagine those are the Canadian meat regulations.

J. Smith: It was inspired by federal regulations, but our regulations in B.C.… I’m talking about our provincial.

G. Chow: Provincial. What that means is we actually had a lot of the processing facilities, but they no longer meet the new regulations.

J. Smith: Right.

G. Chow: And that’s a huge challenge.

[8:50 a.m.]

J. Smith: Yeah, a lot of them still exist. You drive around the province, and you see all of these shuttered meat shops. It’s like a graveyard for meat shops in this province.

G. Chow: So in essence, it’s a higher standard in terms of provincial regulation?

J. Smith: Yeah, they increased the standards, and most of these facilities couldn’t justify the investment to bring their facility up to the new standards. So we literally lost 80 percent of our meat processing capacity overnight.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Julia, we heard, I think it was last year or the year before, about the groundwater licensing and the issues that were at FrontCounter. It’s my understanding that they’re going to begin addressing that with staff.

You had brought up the issue around help to help the farmers navigate the system. Can you explain what that cost would be and who and how it would be done?

J. Smith: Well, I think the government would have a better sense of the cost of that. We’ve tried. We had somebody come and do a webinar for our members prior to March of last year. There was an hour-long webinar to explain the application process, and most people are just throwing up their hands and saying, “I don’t have time for this,” and a lot of people don’t have access to the Internet still.

We’re dealing with…. In our sector, the average age is over 44, and a lot of people are not comfortable using Google Maps to figure out where their well is on their property.

There is enough regulatory burden and administration, trying to think of a more appropriate word, for farmers to get through without adding another even more complicated layer. So funding organizations like ours, who already have that connection to the farmers, seems like a much more appropriate and efficient use of valuable funding than for the government to take this on, especially when they’ve demonstrated so clearly that we have a trust issue with the farmers and the government. Using organizations like ours is a bit of a buffer to bring people on board so we can send people out and sit down with the tablet and help them with it.

I think most people want to be compliant. We want people to be compliant as an industry, but you got to stop making it so hard for us.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Julia, all I will add is to make sure that your presentation touches on that part in your submission to us. Thank you for your time and your presentation this morning.

J. Smith: Thank you. Good to see so many ag people here today.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Heather Miller, OSNS Child and Youth Development Centre.

Good morning, Heather. You have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or answers.

Heather, the floor is yours.

OKANAGAN SIMILKAMEEN
NEUROLOGICAL SOCIETY
CHILD AND YOUTH DEVELOPMENT CENTRE

H. Miller: Good morning, and thank you very much. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be here this morning presenting on early intervention in pediatric rehabilitation and supported child care services on behalf of the OSNS Child and Youth Development Centre, which has been servicing the South Okanagan for over 46 years of not-for-profit.

We’re an organization with a diverse leadership and staffing team. We serve a diverse and vulnerable community. We disguise hard work as play, with the goal of building confidence through providing services in early intervention, family supports, autism intervention and behaviour support. This includes physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, behaviour support and, of course, early-years learning.

Please note that OSNS is a $10-a-day daycare site and has been since 2018. Also of interest: OSNS provided child care for the essential service workers through the global pandemic. All these services are delivered with a social service lens, including governance and operational policies to guide our work.

[8:55 a.m.]

OSNS daycare and preschool are inclusive of all developmental needs and conditions to support children for attendance. That’s a very unique and rare service. I understand there are many competing pressures, which makes it that much more convincing to invest in early intervention to reduce those pressures in the immediate, in the short term and in the long term for impact.

My name is Heather Miller, and I’m honoured to be the OSNS Child and Youth Development Centre messenger today. We have three asks for recommendations.

First, please invest in multi-year stabilization funding in existing services with a proven track record for children and youth with neurodevelopmental conditions and children and youth with support needs. Long-term, sustainable funding allows increased service delivery hours and creates opportunity for families and communities to thrive.

Supporting aging facilities, infrastructure and projects equals affordability. Modernizing existing facilities is one way we can improve our services and sustain them. On average, 100 children come through our facility in one day. This includes their caregivers, siblings, community volunteers, our staff and collaborating partners, which we can’t do our work without. This creates a need for maintaining an environment, inside and out, of our space and equipment, including access to assessments, services and evolution of the growing needs of the community.

Early intervention creates opportunity for children and youth to reach their unique and individual full potential. Although fundraising and grant writing at times can be good team builders and create awareness and educational opportunities for community engagement, when these activities are necessary for sustained operational needs, focus is taken away from the critical services for vulnerable children and youth.

Our second ask is investing in mental health and wellness in family supports for children receiving early intervention. Neurodevelopmental children are more likely to experience mental health struggles, which means that siblings, parents, caregivers, extended family and peers struggle with them.

Families in need. We have some families with financial crises. They need gas money, transportation, nutrition, just some basic needs to access these important services. Mental health and wellness and family supports will alleviate financial and emotional burdens on families in crisis and on individuals that may be in medical crisis. Co-occurring conditions are known for this vulnerable group, as well as supportive programs to reach success.

If we can support the diagnosis and the programs that we know work for these co-occurring conditions, it is the best option to reduce the unmeasurable impacts when support services are not available and not provided.

Our third ask: invest in the development of a cohesive continuum of service for children and youth with neurodevelopmental needs, creating an equitable continuum for addressing systemic barriers of health and developmental and social barriers. Best practice is keeping children and youth in their home communities for services while providing a quality continuum of care.

Funding for training and developing staff in staying current with evidence-based best practices. Supportive contracts from government allow area experts to focus on service delivery and quality hours. This includes pediatric clinicians and child care supports. We also want to establish an outreach component so that we can service our rural communities out of our centre hub.

My closing remarks on these three asks are that they are consistent and supported by the BCACDI recommendations that have been posted, which OSNS is a member of. These asks are also consistent with the Representative for Children and Youth’s report released in April of 2023.

Early intervention is prevention as well as intervention. Early intervention addresses the needs to enhance quality of care for children, youth and families, and it reduces long-term financial costs for future social supports when individual needs are met. We want to help children and youth develop to their full potential.

OSNS is a service and an equity-seeking group with needs for equipment, inclusion, access and assessments, and for training and retraining a skilled workforce so that we can deliver the shared goal of a community which has a quality standard of rehabilitative and child care.

[9:00 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Heather, thank you for your presentation this morning. You started off with a quote that I’m going to use for the next little while: “Disguise hard work as play.” That will be the quote of the day.

Comments and/or questions?

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Heather, for the presentation, a really good one. A couple of questions here.

On investing in mental health, you’re talking about more in-house counselling, family support, those kinds of things — I’m sure not enough — and then, also, on investing in the continuum of health. Can you maybe touch on children that age out, that transition, and how that can be supported?

H. Miller: For sure. At this time, our contract from the Ministry of Children and Family Development supports us, for example, doing autism assessments on children six and under. Our wait-list is up to two years at this time. So we’re not aging children out of the assessment process. They stay on our wait-list until that assessment is completed.

However, for other children that maybe aren’t being identified at that early age, they’re having to go to either private industry or Kelowna for those assessments. So when we talk about supporting families locally, that obviously just increases pressure on families to get to Kelowna that maybe are in Oliver in regard to parents or caregivers having to take time off work, transportation, etc. It just compiles the pressures of the situation. As you all know, it’s very emotional to be going through some of these processes.

A. Walker: I might have misheard, but you said there’s a two-year wait-list for the programs for those who have neurodiverse abilities.

H. Miller: For example, the autism assessment.

A. Walker: Oh, the assessment. Okay.

H. Miller: With our early intervention, we have ability to do some services prior to the assessment. However, it’s also a very competitive environment.

A. Walker: My question would be relatively simple. What would it take to reduce that wait time?

H. Miller: Well, it’s a complex situation. Funding, obviously, is one piece, but also having access to a psychologist that’s qualified to do the assessment. We have a pediatrician that’s local. She has the ability to do assessments for the six and up but not the six and under. That’s part of a B.C. standard.

I’m not here advocating on changing standards — I believe in quality — but being able to figure out a way to support getting services in place earlier, while children are even waiting for that assessment. There are things we can do for them with identified needs. Being able to do both at the same time would be ideal, but obviously, building in capacity for more assessments is bigger than just one organization.

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

A. Walker: With the last moment here, I just want to thank you for the work you do in the community. We, through our offices, work with a lot of families with children with some significant challenges, and when they fall through the cracks, it’s amazing to have organizations like you that can help pull that together. So I really want to thank you for the work you do.

H. Miller: Well, thank you. We’re a very big team and very dedicated group. I’m just one person. Please know that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation this morning, Heather, and thank you for what you do for the community.

Next up is Henry Sielmann, First Things First Okanagan.

Henry, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours, Henry.

FIRST THINGS FIRST OKANAGAN

H. Sielmann: Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to address this committee. My name is Henry Sielmann, and I’m here this morning to represent First Things First Okanagan. We’re based in the Okanagan Valley. We network with other regional organizations to strengthen climate change awareness and stimulate effective action.

I used to be, before my retirement many years ago, an engineer and project manager for GE Energy, and I implemented electric utility upgrades using tools and processes that could also be applied to increase the resiliency of the B.C. energy supply.

In this context, I would like to present three recommendations. The first one would be to provide funding for a B.C.-specific study with the goal of minimizing disruptions of our power grid due to natural disasters and analyze the use of micro power grids with battery storage in developing a resilient energy infrastructure, with emphasis on rural and remote areas.

[9:05 a.m.]

The province of B.C. is a leader in the use of clean natural resources to generate electric power. However, the generation and distribution of power is highly centralized and prone to outages as a result of natural disasters such as fires or floods. This lack of resiliency can be corrected by the targeted installation of local and regional micro grids.

Micro grids can provide energy generation and storage at the local level. They can incorporate emergency power supplies, solar panels, wind turbines and battery storage used to smooth out fluctuations in the use or production of electric power. The advancement is part of a larger trend to increase, decentralize, decarbonize and automate the power industry.

In 2018, Natural Resources Canada published an extensive study titled Smart Grid in Canada. More recently, B.C. Hydro presented their integrated resource plan under the banner clean power 2040. Neither publication adequately addresses the opportunity for achieving increased resiliency by implementing microgrids. Therefore, we feel a B.C.-specific study is required to develop the most effective strategies.

Recommendation 2: fund the development of new guidelines for B.C. power generators and utilities to maximize micro grid interoperability. It’s a little technical lingo. I have to apologize for that. I can’t get around it.

Offer customer incentives to shift discretional power consumption to off-peak periods and to integrate battery storage systems, including electric vehicles located at customer sites. A B.C.-specific analysis should be conducted to enable utility management of the end-user energy environment, including time-of-day pricing, management of distributed generation electric vehicles, etc.

Tools need to be in place to properly integrate electric vehicles and optimize their potential as battery storage devices. Initially, EVs will place a significant burden on the existing power grids. However, EVs can be integrated into micro grids and provide enhanced resiliency by offering dynamic localized battery storage.

This features is of particular importance in areas where the supply of reliable energy is expensive and may cause high pollution rates, such as remote and Indigenous communities where diesel power is still used.

Finally, recommendation 3: provide funding to implement rigorous privacy policies and minimize intrusive controls when managing consumption patterns and battery storage devices located at customer sites, and mandate effective tools to provide cybersecurity for all transactions.

Micro grids will require coordinated control of all installed components. If client-owned battery storage and EVs are integrated, the client would transfer some of the control of the micro grid to the micro grid controller. Example: residential users may plug in their EV as soon as they arrive at home, but the micro grid controller determines the timing of the charging process, and, if required, draws power from the EV battery. This process will be difficult to institute without being too intrusive or disruptive. Processes and controls must be mandated to protect client privacy and provide cybersecurity for all data.

By analyzing opportunities and challenges offered by micro grids, the government of British Columbia will be well prepared to realize the full benefit of these new technologies. Large, centralized suppliers such as B.C. Hydro and Fortis may not be too interested in promoting local or regional utilities, as this may dilute their position as monopolies. This is where the government agencies must provide oversight and develop the required policies and incentive programs.

Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Bang on, Henry. Five minutes.

H. Sielmann: Wow. Engineer. What do you say?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Henry, I’m going to start off here with your micro grids. Are there other jurisdictions that have that?

H. Sielmann: They’re all over the place, not under that name. Most hospitals, many military facilities, etc., do have backup power, do have ways of ensuring that the power can be provided all the time. Now you see more integration of wind power, of solar panels, that kind of thing.

These systems are getting more complicated, and it’s no longer a matter of firing up a diesel generator. Now it’s a matter of using the most suitable and least polluting device that is available.

[9:10 a.m.]

There’s a term called islanding, and islanding means that if the power around you disappears, as the result of a flood, for example, or forest fires, as we witness it right at this moment, you can isolate yourself from the disaster zone and keep going with your own power. If you have electric vehicles, you can even do it at the residential level, the neighbourhood, the community level. But there are a bunch of issues associated with that, and I just wanted the opportunity to touch on them.

B. Banman: Thank you very much, Henry. Perhaps you could expand a little bit. The grid is actually a lot more fragile than we think it is. As we push harder and harder to EVs, for instance, especially if we want to go into EVs of 18-wheelers, the amount of power that’s required will actually turn the grid upside down.

Could you expand for us so that we understand how fragile that grid is and why this is important?

H. Sielmann: Well, you use the electric 18-wheeler. If you want to charge that, you draw more than a megawatt, which is like 50 households at the same time. That means an entire neighbourhood is suddenly being drawn on in terms of energy consumption. Personally, I’m not a big fan of electric trucks, but that’s a different story. I think there are better methods of doing the same.

The problem is that as we add assorted devices — solar panels, wind turbines, at the regional, at the private level — the system becomes more and more fragile. As we substitute continuous power, such as nuclear or coal-burning or gas-burning devices, with something that fluctuates depending on whether or not the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, it becomes more and more difficult to manage the situation. We have to avoid that we don’t kind of slide into a situation where we lose control.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Henry. Fascinating stuff. I’d like to talk to you more offline about this stuff. What you’re talking about…. As we try to electrify the economy and everything that we do, we leave ourselves vulnerable to disruptions, especially with climate change and everything else you’re talking about here.

You’re suggesting a pretty large infrastructure change from the micro grid to at-home service with battery storage. What does that physically look like, battery storage? We’re moving to decarbonize, yet I’m getting the feeling here, with this infrastructure change that you’re suggesting, we’re going to need a lot more mining, a lot more minerals, a lot more copper, nickel and those other great things that we’re going to need. How do you square the circle on that — on trying to decarbonize but also increasing our natural resource extraction?

H. Sielmann: It’s a very, very good concern, a very good question. I think one has to look at the time evolution. We have been used to gasoline-operated vehicles for about 100 years, and I’m sure the first ten, 20, 30 years were not very pleasant in terms of what they did to environment, or even becoming user-friendly.

One reason why I don’t like the idea of electric transport trucks is because the battery that goes in one of these trucks could easily go and service 20, 30 electric vehicles. There are other technologies available for that. B.C. has a marvelous opportunity to use the current 96 or more percent production capacity of clean energy. We are one of the jurisdictions where you can actually say: “Okay, if I use electricity, I’m helping the planet.”

In terms of new batteries, we eventually enter a cycle where material gets recycled. I didn’t want to get into that today. But a few years from now, I would hope that all electric vehicles have recycled batteries in them. The technology is actually developing quite quickly, and it’s also quite lucrative in certain jurisdictions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): We’re going to squeeze one last question in.

G. Chow: It’s quite an exciting idea. If it’s a new housing development that would be a potential installation of a micro grid, I’m not clear on the role of the electric vehicle. Is that going to be an energy provider as well as the energy receiver, depending on what the vehicle wants to do there? So if you build a community like that, micro grid–connected, you obviously have to have the provider, like the wind and solar power generation, right? I think it’s a great idea that we’re really implementing in terms of a prototype.

[9:15 a.m.]

H. Sielmann: One thing that B.C. does not yet have is time-of-day billing. I have an electric vehicle. If I plug it in at home, it draws power right away. But there’s a feature in the car that says: “Don’t get going until one o’clock in the morning when no one else is using power.” So that’s a very, very simple way to implement.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Henry, thank you for your presentation and the work you do in retirement. For all of us, this has really kind of energized the day, so to speak.

H. Sielmann: Excited to wear a shirt.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Oh boy.

Next up, Jesse Zeman, B.C. Wildlife Federation.

Jesse, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

B.C. WILDLIFE FEDERATION

J. Zeman: Great. Thank you.

Morning. Thank you for your time. My name is Jesse Zeman. I’m the executive director for the B.C. Wildlife Federation. With over 41,000 members and 100 clubs across the province, the B.C. Wildlife Federation is the largest and most active conservation organization in British Columbia. Additionally, I recently completed some graduate work related to sustainability and funding for wildlife management. That will tie in nicely to the committee’s role here.

Over the past generation of British Columbians, our fish and wildlife had gone from abundant to in decline. Some are at risk, some are endangered, and some are now extirpated. You all know about the declines and the associated costs with recovering mountain caribou. The same is true for Interior Fraser steelhead, which have gone from thousands to hundreds to an estimated 19 individuals in the Chilcotin River in 2022. Moose generally are in decline, as are mule deer and sheep in parts of the province.

It takes orders of magnitude more money to bring a species back from the brink than it does to manage it routinely. The most fundamental issue B.C. faces is a lack of funding for our land, air, water, fish and wildlife. Since 1993, B.C. has reduced the proportion of the provincial budget spent on these resources by over 75 percent. In fact, 2022 appears to be the worst year on record with just over 1 percent of B.C.’s budget being spent on conserving our natural resources.

On the fish and wildlife management side, British Columbia spends fewer dollars per person, per species and per kilometre than our neighbours to the north, to the east and to the south. Between 1954 and 1994, B.C. cut the proportion of funding for fish and wildlife management by over 85 percent as we added millions of people and millions of threats. These cuts have gotten us widespread declines in fish and wildlife, record-setting wildfires and floods that are now costing British Columbia and British Columbians billions of dollars per year.

I am going to ask you for two things, not three, today. The question is: how do we fix it? We can dedicate and increase licence fees and fines. We will never fix this problem by hoping that general revenue will be properly distributed, and there are plenty of British Columbians who are willing to support a move in the direction of dedicating licence fees and fines.

The Fish, Wildlife and Habitat Coalition makes up over 25 member groups in this province, 900 sustainable businesses and over 273,000 British Columbians who want to see licence fees dedicated for the sustainability of fish, wildlife and habitat. That includes hunters, anglers, guides, bear-viewers, ecotourism from one end of this province to the other.

Additionally, the B.C. Wildlife Federation and the Fish, Wildlife and Habitat Coalition recently sent letters in to the province to triple the fine amounts under the Wildlife Act. There’s an easy $700,000 to $800,000 a year that would be dedicated.

The licensed hunter moose harvest in this province has plummeted from over 12,000 per year in the 1970s and ’80s to just over 4,000 by 2018. My graduate work on moose hunters demonstrated a tremendous willingness to pay if licence fees were dedicated and changes to wildlife management occurred.

The current licence fee is $25, of which $5 is dedicated to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation. If licence fees were dedicated, hunters would be willing to pay $114 for that same licence, nearly a fivefold increase. Restoring moose to historical highs would mean an increase of up to $200 per licence, and changes in governance would be anywhere from $65 to $124 per licence. We’re talking about orders of magnitude of change that people have in their pockets that they want to give to you. The trick is to dedicate it.

The BCWF is also a founding member of the Watershed Security Coalition. In 2023, the province dedicated $100 million. We need $200 million more. We will help you match it with the federal government, and we will find another $200 million from private investors.

[9:20 a.m.]

We would like to see $200 million put into fish and wildlife conservation immediately. All resource projects should be required to contribute back to conservation. If you make money off the land, you put money back into the land.

The approach of dedicating funding has the ability to increase funding levels by orders of magnitude, and we can make it bigger. If you move it outside of government, we can leverage it. The B.C. Wildlife Federation, Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, Ducks Unlimited — we all take $1, and we turn it into $4 easily. Sometimes we turn into $10 or $15.

In 2017, the B.C. Wildlife Federation started the Southern Interior mule deer project with $5,000. It is now the largest collaborative wildlife research project in B.C.’s history and has turned into a multi-million-dollar project, with two PhD students, over 1,300 volunteers and funders from government, foundations, clubs and individuals going to the province. In addition to that, millions of dollars worth of volunteer time.

By dedicating, increasing and leveraging funding, we can restore fish and wildlife, take care of our natural resources and prevent people’s houses from being burned down and flooded out.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jesse, thank you for your presentation this morning. I think when you talk about the fines, it would be a better society if we never had to issue one. I have to say that right off the rattle. But when you talk about tripling fines, what other jurisdictions come close to that amount?

J. Zeman: I’ve got reams of data. We undervalue fish and wildlife everywhere we go in this province. So I can just go into the compensation program, which is through B.C. Hydro. We spend about $5.6 million in our 30 percent of the Columbia Basin for compensation. In the United States, in Bonneville, the other 70 percent, they’re going to spend over $500 million. So we’re talking two orders of magnitude. The reality is that when we look all around us, B.C. does not take care of fish and wildlife.

This would be the same as health care and education. If we didn’t fund health care and education, we would have a bunch of people that couldn’t get jobs and didn’t live very long. That’s exactly what we’re doing to fish and wildlife in this province.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Jesse. I’ll try to dive into this conversation here a bit. Thanks for all the work you do. You wear many hats. You’re on many different organizations.

You mentioned the Fish, Wildlife and Habitat Coalition. We’ve got every representation in British Columbia, from bear viewing to guide outfitters to the Sierra Club. You name it; it’s on there. Nothing like a crisis that brings people together, and you’re leading the charge. So thanks for everything you do.

You talk about funding, independent funding. It would be great if we had a private member’s bill, maybe, that would identify something like that. I’m sorry. I’ve got to plug it again.

It would be great to leverage that money through that type of forum, and I totally support it, 100 percent.

You say “undervalue.” I don’t think we put any value, to be quite honest, on our fish and wildlife. A $200 million ask. If that was placed into an independent model, what do you think you could leverage that $200 million into? You said four times.

J. Zeman: It depends on the projects. We have projects that start at $5,000 and go to $2 million to $3 million. So generally speaking, we can take one direct dollar and turn it into four relatively easily if it’s something that people are passionate about.

That mule deer project I talked about…. We just had volunteers process 2.6 million camera trap photos all over the province on our behalf. There are people all over this province, hundreds of thousands of them, that are so committed that they will sit in front of their computer for 20 to 30 hours a week, or drive….

We have over 150 camera traps in the whole southern interior of B.C. People do volunteer. They take their vehicle out and put 5,000 or 6,000 kilometres on it to move camera traps across because the ministry doesn’t have the funding. There’s huge passion in British Columbia to recover these resources and everyday citizens who are willing to give their time and money. We need a way to facilitate that.

B. Banman: Thank you so very much. By the way, I had to look twice, because you could be the doppelganger for my brother. So my mom and I need to have a talk, clearly. Trust me. She’ll smack me later. She still actually hunts.

It comes as a shock to some people. How could someone that wants to go hunting actually care that much about wildlife and, as you say, spend thousands of their own dollars to help us do our job better? If you could…. How many of the hunters and fishers, fishing licences, that you’ve talked to…?

[9:25 a.m.]

What was the percentage of those that you encountered that are more than willing to spend that kind of money just so that we can get better management of our wildlife?

J. Zeman: Yeah. That was my graduate work just recently, around moose. They said that just by dedicating it — just dedicating it, never mind any other changes — on average, people would be willing to pay $114 for a licence that is currently $25.

B. Banman: What was the percentage of those you asked, though?

J. Zeman: That’s the average. There are people on either end. There are people that are going, “I’ll pay $500 or $700 for a moose tag if it goes back to the resource,” and there are people on the other end. So that’s the mean. That gets us right into the…. The average person is saying: “I want you to increase this 4½ times over what the current price is, but it has to be dedicated.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jesse, thank you very much.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): One last question. The funding is one thing, money. You can throw a lot of money at it. We hear this all the time.

What needs to be done legislatively to put the value on wildlife so that it doesn’t get overburdened by other types of acts: Water Sustainability, environment act, all that kind of stuff? What needs to be done?

J. Zeman: That’s the next question. You set the money up, then it goes into science, monitoring, research and on-the-ground actions. Counting stuff does not make more stuff. I think that’s the big message, right? Government is really good at counting stuff and watching it decline. That’s what we’ve done for the last 40 years. The other piece is that you set legislated objectives that require, compel the province to actually act.

We talk about this Interior Fraser steelhead. There are 19 fish in this river that people from all over the world used to go to angle, First Nations have a major interest in and the province, quite frankly — it’s same with the government of Canada — is nowhere to be found. It’s a major crisis. Legislation helps that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, Jesse, thank you for your presentation this morning, and thank you for what you do in the community as well.

Next up is Nadia Chan, Invasive Species Council of British Columbia.

Nadia, you have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or answers.

The floor is yours.

INVASIVE SPECIES COUNCIL OF B.C.

N. Chan: Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Nadia Chan. I am the chair of the Invasive Species Council.

I also work for the city of Surrey, so you’re always going to be Councillor Starchuk to me.

The Invasive Species Council of B.C. gratefully acknowledges the territories of the Indigenous peoples of B.C., where we live and work to maintain healthy ecosystems for all.

The ISC is the largest charity on invasive species in Canada. We spearhead behaviour-change programs to help protect our province from invasive species. We work in collaboration with strong partners, including the province, Indigenous peoples and communities, the federal government, local governments, business and industry, and community. In community, we include national environment NGOs, local boots-on-the-ground stewardship groups, provincial organizations, and regional and local invasive species committees and organizations.

Invasive species are one of the top threats to biodiversity in B.C. They threaten our province’s goal of protecting 30 percent of B.C. by 2030. We’re seeing an increased risk of new invasive species being introduced to the province as well as species that are already here being moved around the province. This is in part due to climate change and increased travel, globalization and trade.

We like to tell a story of invasive species. They’re like forest fires’ silent cousin. Forest fires hit, and they spread rapidly, and they’re big, and people notice them. Invasive species are this quiet, little thing that creeps around the province. You don’t really notice them until they’re there, well-established and creating economic and environmental damage. We just don’t know that they get established until it’s too late, quite frankly.

This happens across the province. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an urban community or a rural community. Knapweeds and hawkweeds are taking over sensitive grasslands and damaging rangeland. We’ve got things like blackberry, ivy and holly that are taking over urban green spaces. We all know how important those small urban green spaces are to the mental and physical well-being of our citizens. It’s really important that we start protecting and taking more care of our land.

We also have species like knotweed that damage infrastructure, like drainage systems. Streams will get wiped out because there’s no bank stability.

[9:30 a.m.]

Then we look at the larger landscape, and we have spongy moth that’s threatening our forests, which could lead to increased risk of fires and floods, loss of carbon sequestration. Just like with forest fires, we really need to act to prevent the spread of invasive species, but we also need to act quickly to respond to those species so that we can prevent long-term damage.

ISC is committed to working with Indigenous peoples and communities to help protect and heal the land. We believe that Indigenous knowledge is an integral part of our fight against invasive species in the province. The ISC and other organizations have come together, and I think you’re hearing from them during your tour and through written submissions, to call for a collective call for action.

We have three recommendations.

The first is to change the funding approach for invasive species management in the province. We’re recommending that the province invest a minimum of $15 million annually, in their core budget, to fund things like research, staffing, grants for non-profits or other organizations, boots on the ground. There are so many different things the funding could go towards. Stable funding is vital for effective prevention, eradication and management of invasive species. We also believe that there should be increased resources to support Indigenous leadership and stewardship of the lands and waters in the province.

Our second recommendation is that we develop one piece of legislation for invasive species management in the province. We currently have four that speak to invasive species management. It would be really helpful to have something that’s a bit tighter and that local governments, non-profits and other people can use.

The final recommendation — I couldn’t have come after a better person, with Jesse — is to invest a minimum of $10 million in an invasive species trust fund. Similar to Nature Trust of B.C., create a trust that can help leverage partnerships with federal government, non-profits and research organizations, to tackle the invasive species management issue in the province.

I think I’m just hitting my five-minute mark.

Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much, Nadia, for your presentation and for the comments that you had at the beginning. I’m a big fan of both SNAP and SHARP, which are in Surrey.

Just as a side note, I got my legs ripped to shreds one day being shown where all the invasive species were. “Just go that way.”

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Nadia. Another really key issue, as far as places where we play out in the back, and it’s also in the urban centres, like you said. Quagga mussels, zebra mussels, those kind of things are super deadly and invasive. Changing the funding model, with more stable funding, for sure. It’s not only invasive species but invasive diseases — prions, CWD, these things that are coming in.

The presenter before you had similar kinds of common threads there, where I think we can all work together. You’re looking for the same essential things as the previous presenter had. Would the Invasive Species Council be receptive to working together in a larger picture? You know, $200 million for the previous presenter. You’re asking for 10-plus. Would it be better just to work together as one, and would the Invasive Species Council be receptive to that?

N. Chan: Absolutely. We all are seeking the end result: to make a healthier province for ourselves and for the environment. We are very much open. That’s how our organization is built: on collaboration and partnerships. We run by consensus on our board. We really do like to look at all of our options and come together to an agreement and a pathway forward. So we’d be very excited to work with other organizations.

R. Leonard: Thank you for the work that you do. It has been a part of my life for a long time, and both of my kids have been involved with it. It’s important work and something that was relatively unknown until it started having economic impacts.

Actually, Tom just went down the road that I was thinking about, about having that opportunity to be part of the watershed security fund. That’s a big piece of it, right? If you could carve a piece out of it for invasive species management….

[9:35 a.m.]

I guess the question that I wanted to ask you was around using Indigenous knowledge for greater management. Can you expand on that a little bit — about what you’re discovering now?

N. Chan: That’s a conversation that could take quite some time. We’re trying to meet with Indigenous organizations and communities, kind of twofold.

One is that we’re going into communities which have expressed interest in training and developing their residents to give them skills so that they can go through unemployment, get gainful employment, stay in their communities and work. We were fortunate to receive StrongerBC funding. That allowed us to hire a lot of youth and unemployed people after COVID, to help train them and work. That’s one of the things we’re doing with our Indigenous partners.

The other thing is that we’re trying to learn. Indigenous peoples have used controlled fire to manage lands in the province. I could go on for a long time. We’re just trying to see how they’ve managed the land in the past, what we can learn, and what we can help them implement, if they would like to partner with us.

The other thing, very interestingly, is that a lot of Indigenous people don’t have names for invasive plants or invasive species. So when they’re talking to their Elders, they’re saying: “That plant that didn’t used to be here.”

So we actually are looking at a program to work with some communities to start naming these invasive species — my area is plants, so I always kind of go back to that — so that they can look at it and, when they do their storytelling and pass the knowledge down to generations of that plant, say: “That grows with this one and that one, and we use it for this, but there is a plant that shouldn’t be there, and we need to remove it.”

We’re working on a bunch of different projects. I’d be happy to speak more.

R. Leonard: More than on the angle of what Indigenous knowledge is — what has been lost because of the introduction of invasive species. Thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Nadia, thank you very much for your presentation today, and thank you for what you do in the community as well.

Next up, Peter Doyle, B.C. Snowmobile Federation.

Peter, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

B.C. SNOWMOBILE FEDERATION

P. Doyle: Good morning. Thanks for the opportunity to present today. My name is Peter Doyle. I’m the volunteer president of the B.C. Snowmobile Federation. We submitted a written document to you, prior to this presentation, with the details of our recommendations. I’m here to hit the high points with you and, hopefully, answer your questions.

I’d like to start by thanking the province for hearing our recommendations last year to increase the budgets for our partners at B.C. Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails. The budget increase they received for operations and recreational infrastructure was long overdue, and we hope to begin to address the backlog that has accumulated. Additionally, the one-time endowment of $10 million awarded to the Outdoor Recreation Council demonstrates your commitment to investing in outdoor recreation groups and the value they bring to the communities of B.C.

We do believe that B.C. Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails could use a further budget lift to help them reach their potential, but I’ll focus my presentation today on two other areas of need for the snowmobile sector, which also benefit other outdoor recreation sectors.

Our first recommendation relates to the existing off-road vehicle trail fund. This fund was established in 2018 when the new Off-Road Vehicle Act was implemented. Currently $11 from each registration of every snowmobile, ATV, UTV or off-road motorcycle in B.C. is deposited into this ORV fund. The investment represents our riders’ money and currently supports a sustainable annual investment of $400,000 in ORV infrastructure and safety programs.

With this year’s intake, though, it is clear that this level of funding does not meet the needs on the ground. The snowmobile sector alone had almost $400,000 in projects apply and only $133,000 to allocate for our sector, which left many great projects without funding. We also know that many clubs do not even apply because of the competitive nature of the fund.

We believe that if the province matched the $11 into the fund with the required investment of $400,000 per year, then we would create an investment of over $1 million a year in ORV infrastructure safety programs. This would include the existing rider funds, the matching funds from the province and our ORV club operations continuing to invest 30 percent into our project cost.

[9:40 a.m.]

The benefit we see of utilizing the ORV trail fund for this investment is that it is already an established program with the provincial government. This makes the investment easy to administer within existing government processes, as a defined policy structure in place will ensure alignment with the current government priorities, including the provincial trails strategy.

Our second recommendation relates to access roads in B.C. Our clubs have worked really hard to establish the almost 200 sites we have on public land and within the parks system. Where we see the gap today is in the access roads to these sites or trailheads. We have one arm of government working to establish important recreational assets for the public benefit, and we have another arm of government that does not have the funding to maintain the road to the asset.

Currently, it takes three to five years to get a site established, with many hours invested by the provincial government, Indigenous governments, stakeholders and our recreation clubs just for the permissions, and then adding in the time and money for our clubs to actually build it. Increasingly, though, our clubs and other recreation groups are making these investments and going through this long process only to lose access to the site because of budget constraints within the engineering branch.

Our clubs do not have the expertise or equipment to take on road maintainer status, and our collective insurance rates would rise with a new area of business, attitude or policy, risking our club sustainability long term. Yet the province engineering branch is also claiming they do not have enough money to maintain access roads. Therefore, we are faced with years of effort and investment being potentially lost.

To illustrate, our member club, the Valemount and Area Recreation Development Association, has one of those sites, and they’ve maintained three sites. Valemount is one of the top five snowmobile destinations in Canada, generating $5.7 million just for the community of Valemount.

Recently, the engineering branch has decided that in one of their main areas, it’s too expensive to maintain the road and has made the decision to decommission the road. They pulled the bridge out with 30 days notice to our club, and we’re told that complete deactivation is planned for the future. This will remove the club’s ability to groom and maintain this area and represents a loss of one third of their business and economic potential for Valemount.

The answer we received when we inquired about options is that there is no budget for the province to maintain this road and, therefore, this access and our investment will be lost. This scenario has repeated itself across B.C. and different recreation sectors, and needs a solution.

We are recommending that at least $2 million a year is established within the engineering branch as the separate and dedicated funding for roads with established recreation infrastructure. If it was valuable enough to establish it, it should be valuable enough to maintain access to it.

Thank you for the opportunity today, and we hope that our recommendations will be considered.

Just one final point, if I have time. Our next economic impact, we feel, will come in at $400 million to $450 million a year. This is on the backs of volunteers. We have no help from the provincial government, virtually. We do this on our own. It’s just guys like me. When I was younger, I’d cut trees. Now I run paperwork, right? Now that I’m 75, almost, it’s a little more difficult to do some of that stuff.

This is a big economy that we run, and we’re just asking for a little bit of help. Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation this morning, Peter.

We’ll start with Bruce.

B. Banman: Thank you very much, Peter. It seems to be a theme, the last three speakers. I’m going to ask the question again. Is there an opportunity where, if we were to rededicate some of this money….?

The one thing you all have in common is that you love nature and you love the outdoors. The same people that snowmobile are probably the same people that, probably a lot of them, buy a hunting license or a fishing license. Is there an opportunity, if those were 100 percent dedicated, that we could also take off-road licensing and pool that in as well? Would your organization be willing to pay higher fees to be able to use that if it was 100 percent dedicated and we could get the three of you all working together?

[9:45 a.m.]

P. Doyle: Well, this is kind of complex. We started the ORV Act because there was no registration of OR vehicles. I was part of that group that worked on that. We’ve just got up to the point now where we’re getting 40,000 snowmobilers and one million dirt bikers and ATVers that understand they have to pay their way. I don’t know if we could make that big of a change that quick.

We’d need more enforcement. If you’re going to make that change, you’ve got to hire some COs — just saying, as a retired law enforcement guy. We’re not doing enough on the ground on enforcement.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. You’ve been doing it for a while.

P. Doyle: Thirty years.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thirty years. Great. That leads into my question. In the last 30 years, what have you seen as far as access? Has it increased or decreased — the road systems, the pinch points? What does the network look like — and changed in the last 30 years?

P. Doyle: It has changed with logging. We follow logging after they’ve left. It opens up access for us.

It has changed, night and day. I mean, 30 years ago, we were in the back roads. I can remember, in the ’90s, snowmobiling in Valemount, where you spent all day getting to where, maybe, you’d take your first coffee break. It has changed tremendously.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Just a follow-up. We dedicate access points and roads, but we can’t maintain them. What I’m getting at is maybe…. There has been such an increase in logging and access and the network is getting so big that it’s harder to identify all of them at once.

P. Doyle: It’s primarily the bridges, Tom. We have our site where we have our main parking lot, a staging area. Up the hill from that, we groom to our chalet and our other outbuildings, our entire riding area. There’s one bridge, and if that bridge right before our parking lot comes out, we’re done.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I’m just saying that there could be many other bridges as well. There are many other logging activities that are going on. So it’s getting harder and harder….

I’m just trying to find some kind of justification. I totally believe in access, and I totally believe in the recreation that you’re promoting right now. I’m just trying to find out the rationale, why you’re not getting the dedicated funding that you’re getting.

P. Doyle: The engineering branch of Forests, which looks after the roads, doesn’t have the funds to maintain these bridges. When a 160,000-pound truck can’t go over it any longer, they condemn it, and they remove it, which then stops what we want to do. We can’t put a snowmobile over a condemned bridge. We’re saying these bridges should be maintained.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I helped a recreator in my riding when the floods came through and took out a bridge. I worked really hard with the ministry and, also, the private land owner to put an ice bridge in just so he could facilitate his operations, a snowmobile guiding outfit.

I totally support you. Thanks.

P. Doyle: Yeah. We’re just losing access.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Peter, thank you for your presentation today. A couple of comments. First off, you can’t see behind you as you speak — at least, I don’t think you can — but there were smiles from the previous presenters — nodding their heads, smiling, doing that kind of thing. It’s a very supportive group.

I think what’s really important is how you accentuate the use of volunteers. We can never thank the volunteers of British Columbia enough for the work that they do.

P. Doyle: No, we can’t. When I go to an AGM and 200 people show up, I tell them they’re part of…. We’re 60 clubs. There are five people in every club who do all the work. That’s 300 people. You guys…. The 200 that are here, the 150 that are here, are responsible for almost $400 million a year. That’s huge. I mean, that’s into the cruise ship category.

M. Starchuk (Chair): It’s not lost on any of us. Not at all.

Thank you for your time and for your presentation, Peter.

P. Doyle: Thank you very much for having us.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up Dan Rogers, Kelowna Chamber of Commerce.

Dan, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of comments and/or questions.

The floor is yours.

KELOWNA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

D. Rogers: Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. It’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Dan Rogers. I’m the CEO of the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce.

I’m pleased to join you and acknowledge the fact that I am privileged to work, live and play on the traditional territory of the Sylix/Okanagan Nation. We acknowledge and thank them for their rich history and culture.

[9:50 a.m.]

We have provided handouts. We’ve also provided a submission. I’m sure you have lots of reading ahead of you. I will spend the time today touching on a few items that we wanted to raise. Thanks for the opportunity to speak.

The Kelowna Chamber of Commerce is the largest business organization outside of Metro Vancouver. We have over 1,000 members representing 30,000 employees primarily in the Central Okanagan, but we have members from throughout the province.

We’re also very proud to be part of a strong provincial and national network. I’m privileged, in my work at the Kelowna chamber, to also sit on the Canadian chamber board, some of which I will speak to today in my short time. We also speak with one collective voice, across the nation, on some of the issues that are not uncommon to business from coast to coast to coast.

The areas that I want to focus on very quickly include…. I will start and likely end with infrastructure.

We do want to, first, bring attention to the need for transportation investment. We suggest planning, to start. We are the fastest-growing, in the Kelowna CMA, metropolitan area, one of the fastest, not just in B.C. but in Canada. Yet we see very little investment in planning or tangible projects to improve the infrastructure.

Coming down this morning, I was fortunate to get through the slide. That was a matter of just lucky timing, I believe.

We are calling for a much broader view and a long-term vision for infrastructure investment, particularly on highways, in Okanagan’s transit transportation network, including planning for a second crossing of Okanagan Lake. That seems to have fallen completely off anybody’s radar, which is interesting.

The city of Kelowna, in their most recent OCP, expects to add a city the size of Penticton by 2040, within the next ten-plus years. The same goes for West Kelowna. We are growing at a rapid rate, and there needs to be much better planning to actually have some solutions to the challenges that we’ll see beyond 2040. Highway improvements to accelerate the movement of goods are the prime concern of the Kelowna Chamber of Commerce and our members.

I also want to flag…. Labour mobility is huge. If people can’t afford to live in the Central Okanagan…. We are rivalling Vancouver and Victoria for cost of living. Those that we’re trying to attract need to be able to afford…. If they can’t afford, they need to be able to have labour mobility.

We believe a transit commission, similar to, perhaps, what’s in Victoria, is the discussion that needs to be occurring with local government to set the stage for the future of how we invest in transit and make sure there’s local accountability in resource to revenue.

The second one I just want to flag…. You’re going to hear it a lot more likely. I know you have to meet some of my colleagues from the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade and some of my other colleagues in the Lower Mainland. It’s the cost of doing business.

If there is one thing that has been consistent through the pandemic and as we’ve engaged our members and members across the province…. The cost of business has continued to rise. It is the top issue affecting businesses. In the last survey that was done by Abacus, in the fall of last year, 80 percent said things are getting worse. It’s a 20 percent jump from the previous survey that was done across the province.

The cost of doing business is huge. One step that we will echo, and you’ll likely hear from others, is upping the employer health tax to $1.5 million from its current $500,000.

I will just wrap up by saying that the provincial government…. We would also like to see attention on some of the issues stemming from illicit drug use and decriminalization. We are looking seriously at…. We have an office in downtown Kelowna. We are looking at other options and leaving downtown. I thought it would be a financial decision. Frankly, it’s a safety issue. My staff — and I have a staff of nine — are not feeling safe. We have drug consumption on my doorstep every night and property crime.

We appreciate the province’s efforts to address violent criminal offenders, repeat criminal offenders. We would suggest the same approach needs to be taken on the property crime issue.

With that, I certainly thank you for the opportunity. We’ve provided a summary for you.

The last piece is…. Housing is a key factor. Greater investment by the province, particularly to offset DCCs, would help local governments and potentially help drive the rental stock that we need so much to attract and keep and retain those young professionals.

[9:55 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Dan, for your presentation this morning.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. Could you just go over that last piece you talked about — I just missed the beginning of it — around increasing rental stock.

D. Rogers: Yeah. I’m conscious of the time. So I cut it short, very quickly, to squeeze it in. I can certainly elaborate a little bit more.

There are a lot of policy suggestions that we’ve tabled through the B.C. chamber. They are now B.C. chamber policy.

One of the issues that we’ve raised with local government and with some members of government is…. In the late ’90s, the unconditional grants were taken away from local governments. There are some grants available. The unconditional ones were used for infrastructure.

I spent 15 years in local government as an elected official. There was no choice. We’ve made this case with the city of Kelowna, which continues, like many others, to increase their development cost charges, because they need revenue to pay for infrastructure. In the previous years, it was funded by other levels of government — or at least some assistance.

What we have flagged is…. When that shift occurred, you went away from the reliance on other senior levels of government paying for infrastructure and shifted what, in essence, is a burden on, with DCCs…. It shifted the source of revenue from income to property. If you own property, in essence, you pay more.

DCCs, as we’ve made the case, several times, with local government…. It just gets passed on to the consumer as development cost charges and amenity agreements. At the local level….I’m not blaming. It’s just a reality. They’ve had no choice but to increase their development cost charges and amenity agreements.

That threshold became so high. That’s just passed on to the consumer. We see that clearly, based on the housing stock in Kelowna and other communities.

We made the case to the federal government. They have deep pockets. They should be helping provinces and local governments in this way. That would be a strong way to make a strong signal to help reduce some of those costs, particularly if it’s targeted on rental stock to offset DCCs.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation. It’s interesting to learn that Kelowna, actually, is the fastest-growing region in all of Canada. I think that due to the geography and everything, people are moving here.

I think your airport is also a great asset to this region in terms of the number of flights and also the management. How is that running? It belongs to the municipality.

D. Rogers: I should clarify. We’re one of the…. I think we were No. 4 across the country. We’re not the top, but we are among one of the fastest growing. We expect to add 60,000 people to the CMA in the next ten-plus years.

The airport has been a key driver of the economy in the Kelowna area. It’s not just the airport. I think we see…. We’ve made the case, provincially, to look at the aerospace industry in the Okanagan as an area where we could develop a cluster, not just because of the international airport, which, pre-pandemic, was No. 10 in the country, ahead of Victoria, in traffic.

It’s going to be a slow recovery, as you’re well aware. But because of two other factors…. KF Aerospace is the largest private sector employer outside Metro Vancouver. It continues to grow and get national, provincial and international maintenance contracts. Beside that is one of the world-class institutions, in UBC Okanagan. I should also acknowledge the work of Okanagan College. Their training programs dovetail and provide the opportunity for professionals.

The scene is set for growth. The pandemic has hit the airline industry and the aerospace industry significantly, and it will be some years before we see it recover to where it was pre-pandemic.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): A couple of points here. One is the cost of doing business and upping the threshold to $1.5 million on the EHT. What would that mean for affordability and sustainability for businesses and affordability for the consumer? What kind of a positive impact would that have?

Also, you seem to draw parallel lines between decriminalization, which was brought in at the end of January, to property crime and people moving out. We’re only four months in. I don’t know if you have any raw data yet that would suggest that that is what’s kind of happening there.

Maybe touch on those two things.

[10:00 a.m.]

D. Rogers: Yeah, I could touch on the second one, and then I will come back to the first one, and you can…. I just wanted you to clarify if you have a question.

On the second aspect, we just came back from the B.C. Chamber of Commerce where we tabled a policy that sought to have the provincial government put some parameters around where legal consumption of illicit drugs could occur. Currently, we’re aware of local governments — at least some — pushing to create some no-go zones around parks. What we’ve seen — in particular, in downtown urban major commercial centres — is that the activity has increased. I am daily removing people from my doorstep.

I understand the mental health issues that are associated with this and the need to address that as well, but the costs that are being borne by those in major commercial areas is significant. We are a non-profit organization. We have 100 non-profit members that belong to us. They too are being impacted by increasing costs.

It’s those that are preying on those that are facing health challenges that we’re concerned with and the repeat property crime offenders. So with as much vigour as the province…. We certainly want to acknowledge the efforts of the province to deal with the repeat violent offenders. The same is on the repeat property offenders. It’s just check in and check out. So that is the issue we raised.

We also suggested that the province look at just overdose prevention sites and then your home residents for consumption. We understand that may be viewed in the same way that the local governments were trying to address and create no-go zones around parks. So we know it’s a significant issue.

I think the big thing, Mr. Chair, to Mr. Shypitka, with respect to the cost of doing business is what we hear from business is that even a recognition by some level of government of what we’ve gone through, particularly for the small businesses…. Even a slight adjustment in the EHT would be seen in a positive way. That’s what they’re looking for.

They understand taxes have to be paid. Some businesses accept there’s a need for that to provide public services. But we’re hearing from many that say: “We’re not hearing from our federal government or our provincial government, and, by the way, my property taxes went up as well.”

That addresses the second one, but I can’t remember the…. Sorry.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Just raising the threshold to $1.5 million. That impacted me.

D. Rogers: I know there have been some in the Legislature that would like to see that threshold. I have, you know, nine that work for me. I now exceed the bottom threshold, partly because labour costs have risen in the Okanagan. In order for us to be competitive, even as a non-profit, all my salaries have jumped 10 to 15 percent. By doing that, even the size and scope of my organization didn’t change, but compensation did. Now I’m caught in that.

I think what we’re hearing from very many small businesses is that even some movement on that would be helpful, up to $1 million or $1.5 million.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Thank you for your presentation this morning, Dan. Thank you for the work that you do on behalf of your members.

D. Rogers: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Nicci Cabrejos, CUPE Okanagan Mainline district council.

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

The floor is yours.

CUPE OKANAGAN MAINLINE
DISTRICT COUNCIL

N. Cabrejos: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nicole Cabrejos.

I am just wanting to acknowledge that we’re on unceded land right now of the Syilx Okanagan territory and to acknowledge that the Penticton Indian Band is also on reserve land.

I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to present to the committee. I am representing the Okanagan Mainline district council as well as the library workers in the region. I’m also the president of CUPE 1123, which is the library workers for the area. My career has been serving in our public library system, so I’ll start with that.

[10:05 a.m.]

The topic that I really want to emphasize today is the importance of libraries in small communities. B.C.’s small rural libraries, funded by local municipalities, are often the only place for people to go to access free services such as Wi-Fi or even just a community space that they’re able to be at without the obligation to spend money.

These libraries are not resourced the same way that our bigger libraries are funded, and this is impacting the Indigenous communities as well as people that would not regularly have access to libraries. Funding is needed to support all libraries, but specifically the remote libraries and libraries that would serve Indigenous communities.

The pandemic intensified the work of all public libraries. The public needs are far more than what our sector is able to provide for them alone. Libraries are warming centres in the winter, cooling centres in the summer. They provide free educational spaces for children and youth, but they’re also a refuge space for vulnerable people in the community.

Our day-to-day jobs are expanding as library workers, and we’re also facing a pay equity gap that is similar to other sectors. The March 2023 library funding of $45 million from the provincial budget was welcome, but the bulk of that money was actually allocated to administrative support and not the library workers on the ground. The one-time funding also doesn’t address the pay equity gaps that we have for library workers relative to the other sectors. Library workers, in general, are a feminized workforce, and it is essentially keeping our members in long-term poverty.

Another area of lack of investment in our municipalities is public transit, having this huge impact to smaller communities, rural communities. Bus service, especially in northern cities, is a lifeline that people don’t have access to, and many communities are lacking interservice supports in that way.

Public transportation in these communities often runs too infrequently for working people to depend on it. In most rural parts of rural B.C., people travel between communities to access employment, education and health, and we know that profit-driven private companies aren’t willing to provide the services that these people actually need.

If B.C. is to be able to shift away from private vehicles, the province must make public transit reliable and convenient for everyone, including smaller and rural communities. The answer is public transportation rooted in the public sector, not for-profit.

Importantly, the first recommendation of the Highway of Tears symposium report is the implementation of affordable bus systems along the entirety of Highway 16. The extension of this funding is a good start. The next step would be to permanently fund and expand this life-saving service, ensuring fair wages and safe working conditions for B.C. bus northern workers.

I would like to close by just addressing the rising cost of living and the housing crisis. Working-class people provincewide are finding themselves with less and less ability to generate financial equity. People who live in small communities are not only unable to buy into the housing market without generational wealth but are also struggling to find rental housing because of the shortage of market rental stock. In addition, there are extremely limited, if any, non-market housing options for most rural and remote areas.

Private development has been B.C.’s answer to the shortage of affordable housing, and the private development of market rental stock has been focused on urban geographics. But this model is downloading costs onto renters. Even worse, in small communities, many people who have faced historic marginalization face significant discrimination in all areas, including accessing housing — for example, Indigenous people, gender minorities, single parents, seniors, children and youth, racialized people and people from the 2SLGBTQIA community.

[10:10 a.m.]

Non-market housing throughout the province for all those who need it, including small and rural communities, can offer safe and identity-specific homes to people who face discrimination.

There is no market-based solution for the housing crisis in this province, not for urban or rural communities. Increasing non-market housing stock is the solution for the housing crisis — to focus on homes, rather than ownership.

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

A. Walker: Thanks for the presentation. Also, thanks for the work you do in our library system. The libraries, as you described, are an incredible resource for all of our communities.

I’m sure you saw the news. There’s a recent announcement with B.C. Bus North, or whatever the phrase or those words are, to ensure that there’s the continuation of service in the North, which is desperately needed.

You mentioned early on, though, that there is a difference in funding for library systems here versus some of the municipal libraries. I’m wondering if you can expand on the struggles you’re facing and what that difference is.

N. Cabrejos: I’ll speak to our system, which is the Okanagan Regional Library system. We have something that’s called a FAMA analysis. It means that whatever taxpayer money comes from the community stays in that community. It’s not shared regionally like it was before.

That means that a branch…. We’ll use Keremeos as an example. They recently had layoffs. They had to close one full opening day for the entire year. We now have three branches in the area that are not open Thursdays at all, so the entire community has no access to libraries for one full day a week, and it’s the entire area.

The funding for our system is different from other municipalities. We are not tied to…. We’re our own library. We are a non-profit, but we do have funding from municipalities. Some of the other library systems work differently. They’re not regional systems, so they have a different pool of money.

The grant money that we get does go towards the smaller libraries, but it’s a small portion, right? It’s a larger pot, and it gets shared, but it’s not the priority to lift the smaller libraries up or to give them the resources that a larger library would have.

A. Walker: Makes sense.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): It’s not really related to the sum of the funding, but on the library services…. We were having a discussion earlier today on financial literacy and how the library systems can help with that.

You saw that Bank of Canada interest rates just went up another quarter point, and affordability is always an issue. I think some of the kids and youth that are coming up right now just don’t fathom the power of interest and how it can work for you and against you. Where can the library system help with financial literacy, and what age should it really start?

N. Cabrejos: It’s a great question. Thank you, Tom. I think overall it will be up to each individual system to decide how they are going to implement that.

For us, as I mentioned, we’ve had a lot of work added onto our plate through the pandemic. This would fall under that. We do see the need for that, but do we have the capacity to take that on without extra funding or extra staff? For those types of events, we would usually bring in outside presenters, things like that, if we’re capable.

I have not seen any mandate from our employer or anything that that’s a task that we need to put at the front. But one of the goals of the library is to promote education through all levels, through all ages, and it’s…. The opportunity is there, but as I said, we are lacking the resources to actually deliver that to the community.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Yeah, you just want to be sustainable first of all and not put more on the plate. I think it would be something good to package up and bundle up to say: “This is another service that we really would like to provide, and we need the funding to do it.”

Thanks for everything you do.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Nicole, thank you very much for your presentation and for your representation to your members as well.

N. Cabrejos: Thank you everyone.

I would also like to acknowledge that I see the Moose Hide pins. Thank you for that as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): You’re welcome.

Just for the members’ notice, we’re going to go through two presentations, and then we will take a short recess.

Ian Graham, Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society.

Ian, you have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or answers.

The floor is yours.

OKANAGAN SIMILKAMEEN PARKS SOCIETY

I. Graham: Thank you very much.

Good morning. My name is Ian Graham, and I’m the president of and represent the Okanagan Similkameen Parks Society. We have been involved in the establishment and protection of parks and protected areas in the South Okanagan and Similkameen region for nearly sixty years.

[10:15 a.m.]

We currently have directors from Oliver, Naramata, Penticton, Summerland, Peachland and West Kelowna.

In order for us not to sound like a broken record again…

M. Starchuk (Chair): You had my interest from moment one.

I. Graham: …I will not repeat the points in need of being addressed that other groups will present, such as protection of our forests through overhaul of the logging industry; protection of community watersheds — a big one; and preparation for oncoming climate change. Rather, we’d like to address our local provincial parks and other protected areas — by extension, those in other parts of British Columbia.

There are three broad areas concerning provincial parks and protected areas that will be spoken to: acquisition and establishment, enhancement and maintenance, and education signage and programs that go with surveillance and enforcement.

The first category, acquisition or establishment enhancement and maintenance, is extremely important to our province on many levels. As a protection component of B.C.’s response to the future — read: climate change — it is invaluable. Our landscapes are some of the world’s last remaining carbon sinks and air-cleaning systems. They are invaluable in terms of the work that they perform and incalculable in terms of the costs they will save our province.

More protected areas will augment the goals set by the province and the federal government concerning percentages, such as 30 and 30 and 50 percent, and so forth, for viable environments. Moreover, the benefits that accrue to our citizens from parks and other protected nature are many. These include the ability to spend time in intact nature, camping, hiking, biking, skiing and, in our case, swimming and participating in other water sports.

Studies show that the chance to get away impacts both physical and mental health and provides the reset that busy citizens of the 21st century require. Fortunately, this region and the rest of the province in general possess an albeit dwindling but large array of potential areas that may be beneficially protected.

Further, a significant number of flora and fauna are in danger of being lost or greatly diminished. That makes the establishment and maintenance of our parks in the region paramount. The number of ecological values found in our valleys is very large and spans multiple types of ecosystems and environments.

A system of parks and protected areas that are connected will also provide a habitat corridor for our larger migratory species. Protection for the wildlife of our parks will be addressed in a moment, but the first step is to establish and enhance a habitat for them.

Maintenance is also an essential aspect of a strong parks and protected areas program. While it is always desirable to enhance our environment, this is generally underpinned by a methodical and up-to-date maintenance cycle. Such cycles ensure that the lands, waterways and infrastructure that is available is kept in a condition commiserate with the goals of the parks. Such maintenance programs include but are not limited to: trail upkeep, waste and trash removal, studies of flora and fauna, signage and safety considerations. Education signage and other park-related programs must become an integral aspect of our protection system.

There are areas in our region that are national and worldwide exemplars of certain plants, animals and ecosystems. It is important that the citizens of this region, and likely the province as a whole, understand the actual worth of such examples and the real cost to us if we lose them.

We would like to suggest that grants be made available for inclusion of some of the province’s ecological goals in school curricula. How about a grade 2 math book for adding and subtracting animals of the Central Interior or a grade 7 science unit on sustaining waterways? B.C. Parks may provide teacher in-service regarding the Okanagan Lake system of creeks and rivers feeding it and would allow teachers at all levels to construct lessons around materials commonly available. It’s important that this information gets out to our next generation.

I’ve got a little more to talk about in terms of….

[10:20 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ian, I hope it’s a little bit to talk about. We are….

I. Graham: Yes, in terms of protection…. Basically, I’m going to sum it up without reading here.

What we are also asking for is to be able to have more staff out there that are going to do enforcement and protection of some of our areas. There are things happening in the non-protected areas right now, as well as the protected areas, that need to be diminished.

B. Banman: Thank you very much. I want to zero in on the protection and maintenance a little bit. As we were flying in, I looked over where the wildfires were on the side of the lake, and I had asked as well: “Was there any reforestation at all that was done on that?” The answer that was given to me was: “No. It was decided not to reforest it.”

In your opinion…. I guess the thing was to let nature take its course, which I wonder about. In your opinion, should we have tried to reforest that, or should we just leave it alone and let nature take its course? Do you have an opinion?

I. Graham: Well, if you use Okanagan Mountain Park as an example of that, it started to regenerate within a couple of years, just being left naturally alone. The problem with reforestation, as it has been practised in the past, is that it’s monoculture. You look at Summerland, and we’ve got this wonderful growth of little trees that are being shipped out to various places to be planted, but they are all of one species, and that doesn’t do the job. That just leads to diminished parks and protected areas and forest.

B. Banman: So should we reforest but have mixed species or should we just leave it alone?

I. Graham: I think it’s a combination of the two of them. You’re going to have to have certain areas where you do reforest because it has requirements and issues and values. You also are going to have some places where you say: “No, this can regenerate on its own.”

A. Walker: I’m intrigued with the broken record. You started off with four things that you said that have been said a lot before — forestry, overhaul of logging, protecting watersheds, climate change. Pick one of those and share with us what’s on your mind.

I. Graham: The big one right now, and I’m sure you’re going to hear about it today at some point, is the watershed protection. If you lived in Vancouver…. And I’m not picking on Vancouver, but if you live there, your watershed is protected. I go off into your watershed with a chainsaw or with a 4-by-4 or whatever, and there’s somebody coming to stop me.

In the Interior and all the rest of the North — I’ve lived in Fort Nelson in my time — you can go into any one of the watersheds that supply water for that community, and there are no regulations. You need to protect it. A big one that’s pushing right now, and I think they’re on your agenda for later, is the Peachland Watershed Alliance. They’re one of the groups that are really fighting hard in the Okanagan right now to see to it that our watersheds are protected, because otherwise we start drawing on the lake, and we have to put in filtration systems, etc.

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

Well, Ian, I want to tell you, and I’ve said it to some other presenters as well, some of the comments that you’re giving me…. You can’t see them, but Jesse has got this big smile on his face, and he’s nodding up and down like a bobblehead in the back dash of a vehicle, agreeing in what it is that you are saying.

While in the Legislature we’re not permitted props, I think that is the ultimate of props that are there. I’m sure there are people in the Legislature too young to even know what that is. That is another question all unto itself. I thank you for your presentation, and I also thank you for your comments about driving it into the education system. “See Spot Run” is long overdue to be overhauled into what you’ve talked about here today.

I. Graham: My personal background is as an educator. I was a principal or vice-principal for 29 years and then taught at the college level for ten. So you kind of get an idea of how important we feel that is.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing with us today, Ian. It definitely becomes one of those more memorable presentations that we have.

I. Graham: Good. Thank you, and enjoy the Okanagan on this Oceans Day.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Paul Adams, B.C. Rural Health Network.

Paul, you have five minutes for your presentation followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments, and you only have to follow a broken record.

[10:25 a.m.]

P. Adams: Okay. That was a tough one to follow.

M. Starchuk (Chair): It is. The floor is yours, Paul.

B.C. RURAL HEALTH NETWORK

P. Adams: Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for allowing me to present today. I am the executive director of the B.C. Rural Health Network. We represent organizations, communities and individuals on solutions across the province on rural health.

We recognize that as a pan-provincial organization, we work in many unceded traditional territories, and we recognize that today we’re here on the home of the Syilx First Nations. I’m also a resident in the Syilx First Nation in the Upper Similkameen.

I also recognize the diversity of this group and committee. I see MLA Chant, who is a registered nurse. I know Tom Shypitka from his advocacy work in the East Kootenays and work there. Again, we represent individuals who are front-line responders, as well, such as firefighters and ambulance drivers. We certainly recognize that everybody here is a community champion.

The challenge that we face, as rural residents, with health is that we tend to not have a rural lens placed on rural health. When we went through regional centralization of services 20 years ago, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. At that point in time, we had community engagements, whether it was with hospital boards or community health tables. We were listening to residents’ voices, and we were putting those voices into policy and practice. The system was not a perfect one, and it certainly had its flaws and problems, but it did have the element of community engagement, which we see as being significantly missing in today’s view of health care.

A lot of the times…. Again, this is something that you’ll hear from others as you continue your tour. I’ve got to say that I look at your schedule, and I’m like: “Oh my gosh. You guys are driven.”

M. Starchuk (Chair): That’s another word for it.

P. Adams: Yeah. Well, one suggestion I would make to Karan would be to spend a little bit more time and spend some time in these small communities and get an understanding of what’s happening in small-town B.C. There really is a chasm which has grown and is getting deeper, and the disconnect between residents and their health care providers and their experts is growing.

We really need to narrow that gap. We need to start bringing people back into the system and listening to science and listening to the professionals who are making advice. We do see a real problem which is happening in rural B.C. all around health care.

I think yesterday you heard from one of our members. Sue McRae in Revelstoke has a community health centre. Again, we’re big supporters and champions of true community health centres. We have health authorities who have named community health centres as being such, but they are not community health centres.

A community health centre is basically a non-profit organization that establishes itself within a community. It determines the needs of the community, and it builds health systems around those needs. What we tend to do is to have a one-size-fits-all policy in B.C. We’re putting urban solutions into rural environments, and they just simply don’t work.

We champion community engagement. I’ve given you my three recommendations. The first one is that. It’s getting into community engagement. Since I came on as the executive director 18 months ago, we’ve grown our membership from 27 organizations to over 90. We represent 27 municipalities. We have two regional districts. We have over 50 organizations in the non-profit sector and in social services and on the front line of health care within communities. Some of those organizations are also urban-based organizations that have rural programming.

We spend our time disseminating that information so people are aware of the resources that are available to them. We do the same with government resources. We work with the communications branch of the Ministry of Health.

I’m here today to ask for some core funding. We need staff. We need to expand ourselves. We need to be able to reach more communities.

[10:30 a.m.]

We need to be able to do a better job in information provision to both residents and back to government. We view ourselves as a conduit between the two.

I see I’m two seconds over time, so I will end there and answer any questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Paul, for your presentation this morning.

You may see a couple of MLAs leaving the room. There is a wildfire conference call that’s going on. It’s not because we’re not interested in any way, shape or form.

S. Chant: Thank you for the work you do. The one-size-fits-all thing has been driving me buggy for a long time and is one of the reasons I’m in this role. It’s a lot to look at the needs of a population and go: “Here’s the cookie cutter. Let’s make it fit.” It doesn’t work, and I hear you.

You’re asking for core funding. How much would you ask for?

P. Adams: I’m asking for half a million dollars a year for a five-year period to give us security, with a review happening around that money on an annual basis. We’re not looking, again, just to be funded for the sake of funding. We want to make an impact and a difference.

We want to create mechanisms to re-engage communities with the Ministry of Health, and that’s going to require an extensive dialogue. But my immediate need is to have some staff on the ground who can reach out to community, gather information, collect that lived and living experiences data and share that with others.

We work very closely with the UBC Centre for Rural Health Research and Dr Jude Kornelsen. She chairs our implementation committee. Part of the problem that we have is that there just aren’t statistics that we can count on. Who’s attached to primary care providers is a number which tends to get plucked out of the sky and given, but it doesn’t have any substance behind it.

We’re looking to improve all of the data collection and being able to improve the information that we can provide back to policy-makers to see policy that is adapted to rural lifestyle and with a rural understanding. Many of our members…. We have a board member who is a firefighter and an ambulance attendant.

We meet with Leanne Heppell on a quarterly basis. She comes to our board meeting, and we provide that direct information to her so she can make decisions on improving rural service. Those are often economically beneficial solutions as well, so they drive the cost of providing service down. If you listen to the actual voices coming out of communities, that is a big part of it.

We work very closely with your friend Jane Osborne, who’s also a director on my board. She is our diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging chair. We’re really looking to reach out and to wrap around communities, within community as well as just municipalities.

We tend to look at things just from a delegation with medical billing. We have a very physician-, patient-focused system, and we really need to start listening to the community and bringing community voice back into the system.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Paul, for the presentation. I live in the southeast corner of the province. A lot of people associate rural health issues more predominantly with the North, whether it’s the northern Interior or the northern Island. But I contest that the southeast corner is on an island of its own.

We used to have really good accessibility to health care through Alberta, where it’s just a hop, skip and jump over the border. That’s been severed over the last five years, and we’re just not getting that access anymore.

You mentioned community engagement. I’m just wondering. You can throw all the money in the world at getting more people on the ground to engage and to present that to government. You still have to get past the bureaucrats and all the policy decisions, no matter who is in government.

How do you propose that we drive that message home? Quite honestly, we need radiation, we need oncology, and we need renal care in the southeast corner of the province. We’re just not getting it anywhere else, unless you want to travel 1,000 kilometres and over six mountain passes to Vancouver. How do we get there?

P. Adams: I hear your challenges in the East Kootenays. I hear them from residents in the East Kootenays almost daily, how they feel completely isolated and ignored and that there isn’t a transportation corridor that works and those types of things.

[10:35 a.m.]

How do we do it? Well, we start by recognizing that we have a rural health crisis which goes beyond the COVID pandemic. We go back to that 20-year period of regional centralization, and we start thinking about how we put a lens on this thing that makes sense.

We obviously need to have critical services centralized in large populations. But there’s low-acuity care, and there are low-acuity things which we’ve also centralized and administration that we’ve centralized. Then we don’t have people accountable to their own communities, so they make decisions based on what their boss in Kelowna or Kamloops or Prince George or Cranbrook has to say.

Again, the community piece gets incredibly complex. I have a president who lives on the east shore of Kootenay Lake. You talk about isolated community. You’re truly isolated. You rely on ferry services to reach care, as many people do on the Island and elsewhere.

So, yeah, we have to shift the focus. We have to say that there needs to be a rural health care focus within policy decision-making, and that has to come politically. So it has to come from the minister’s direction or from the Premier’s direction. Then we have to hold the bureaucrats to account for ensuring that those things happen.

As we all know, health care is not easy. It is incredibly complex, but we believe we are providing solutions. We don’t come to protest. We come with, “This is how we can fix the problem,” and that needs an investment. We invest in doctors, we invest in patients, and we invest in the voices of other health care professionals, but we’re not investing in volunteers, front-line workers, grassroots operations, people within community, and I need your help.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Paul, thank you for your presentation this morning.

On that note, we are going to take a brief recess and reconvene to start at 10:45 on the nose.

The committee recessed from 10:37 a.m. to 10:51 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, we will call the meeting back to order.

Our next presenter is Carmen Rempel, Kelowna Gospel Mission.

Carmen, the floor is yours.

KELOWNA’S GOSPEL MISSION

C. Rempel: Thank you so much for having me today. Like you said, my name is Carmen Rempel. I serve in the role of executive director at Kelowna’s Gospel Mission. We are a service that provides emergency shelters, supportive housing, outreach. We even dabble in dentistry through our low-cost dental clinic.

I’m also sitting here as the chair for the Coalition for Impactful Shelters. We’re a grassroots coalition of shelter providers in the Interior region who came together with a common cause back in the fall and have been advocating for systems change in emergency shelter provision ever since.

I want to thank you, first, for all of the work that you do here to serve our province. We’ve been thrilled with all the priorities that government has put on affordable housing and homelessness in the recent years. I’m here today as an ally in this work and with a few insights on how some decisions made in Victoria can make an impact on those who are at the lowest end of the housing continuum: those who are actively experiencing homelessness and those who are living in emergency shelters.

I’m here today asking for two things. First, that we stop funding temporary emergency winter shelters and that, instead, we provide year-round funding for this service that is needed year-round. I’m also asking that we stop turning good-for-nothing-else warehouses into shelter spaces and, instead, we start investing more in purpose-built or, at least, quality renovated shelters.

Our coalition is convinced that if these two changes are made, we would increase our efficiency and effectiveness and it would be better for all involved: those who use those services and those who provide them.

I’ll speak from my own experience. We at Kelowna’s Gospel Mission have started four shelters in the past two years, two of them out of warehouses, one out of a church basement and one out of a block of hotel rooms. Now, that’s not even including the little, temporary, emergency mat programs that we popped up on Christmas Eve 2022 and all the little ones in between.

Our catch phrase has been “Gospel Mission gets it done,” as we pull these things together with sweat, spit and a prayer in the nick of time for winter, every single year. We could turn any space into a livable space in a matter of mere weeks. We could recruit, train staff and have a full operation in swing, in time to save lives.

Of those four shelters that we’ve started, we’ve had to close three of them simply due to the fact that they were temporary in nature — three-month contracts potentially extended to six, but ultimately shut down. That means I’ve had to hand out mass termination notices to my staff on three separate occasions, telling them the bad news that that shelter they poured their blood, sweat and tears into for the past three to six months is now going to close and that those residents they’ve spent so much time caring for are going to be evicted onto the streets because there’s nowhere else for them to go.

This was the hamster wheel that we were on year after year, winter after winter, until that hamster wheel came flying right off in the fall of 2022. That’s the year when the Gospel Mission couldn’t get it done.

You heard about it a lot in the news. Our sector had a capacity issue. We were unable to operate winter shelters in the Interior region. It wasn’t that we couldn’t do it. It’s that we couldn’t do it anymore; we couldn’t do it again.

It wasn’t just us at KGM. Six different shelter operators in the Interior region signed a letter saying, “We just can’t keep doing this,” and the coalition was formed. In the gap, municipalities scrambled, insulated tents. Emergency room visits skyrocketed, and our collective hearts broke.

[10:55 a.m.]

It takes an immense amount of resources, both human and financial, in order to start a winter shelter. A search for a new location must be done every time. There’s public engagement to be done in the neighbourhood where the shelter space is going to go. It has to be renovated to become habitable. There are leasing fees, all the upstart costs, setting up service contracts, which sometimes actually don’t get into operators’ hands until after the whole operation is finished. Not to mention the hiring and training in the middle of our current hostile labour market.

This strategy that happens every year is simply inefficient. It’s expensive, and it drains operators of our capacity to do anything else.

This takes me to my first ask. We believe that our shelter strategy can be deliberate, and it can be more affordable. We ask that there be a stop to these pop-up, temporary, emergency winter shelters and that instead there be a greater investment in year-round shelter supports, allowing us the time to build capacity in our sector, not to mention do the good work that we’re all here to do, which is to see people come into our shelters, stabilize, receive care and then move on to whatever permanent shelter is a best fit for them. This work takes time.

My second ask is closely tied to my first, and I’ll wrap it up quickly. I mentioned the two warehouses, the church basement and the block of hotel rooms. Shelters in the Interior region are a sorry mix of buildings in various states of appropriateness for programs and for people to live in.

We have shelters with nothing but outdoor bathrooms, no dining spaces, using old warehouses without accessibility. We have a shelter that’s in the middle of a gravel pit. There are no changing rooms, a lack of safe spaces for women and LGBTQ persons — old motels. Our shelters are overcrowded because they’re not intentionally designed, because they were not thought that they were going to be there for long. They’re often unsafe, and line of sight and safety are things that keep me up at night.

The picture of shelters in the Interior speaks volumes about the afterthought that they’re given and, frankly, how we think about the people who use them. We believe that shelters can play an important role in a comprehensive strategy to address homelessness. But to be an effective partner in this response, shelters require safe, dedicated programs and intentionally designed spaces, realized through deliberate, purpose-built buildings that offer more stability for the people who use them and those who operate them.

Thanks for your time.

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

We have a list.

B. Banman: The first thing I want to do is I want to thank you. I want to thank you for, in spite of the challenges that you’re from, continuing and just failing to give up, because it’s just too important. So thank you.

The question I want to ask you is…. A shelter can be that first step. What are the missing links required between that first step and getting people into the housing and the treatment that they need? Where do the wheels fall off the truck? What can we do better to get to the end goal, which is to get people back, give them their lives back and get them back to being productive and proud of themselves again and just recovering from whatever it is, whether it be mental or drug, or whatever reason they find themselves where they are?

C. Rempel: I have 1,000 answers, but I’ll start with a few simple ones.

With the housing-first strategy…. One of the calls that our coalition has been shouting at the top of our lungs, repeating over and over and over again, is that due to the complexity of the population we serve, we need a diversity of housing options to meet the diverse needs of people.

My shelters are filled with senior citizens who don’t have any mental health or addiction challenges, yet they end up in our shelters with intense physical health needs. What they need is going to be very different than the 22-year-old who is caught in an addiction. What we really need are a diversity of housing options for a diversity of people.

Right now, especially in the Interior — I can speak on behalf of Kelowna — all of the supportive housing that’s been built in the past few years has all been housing-first. People get placed in those housing-first buildings due to a VAT score. It’s a vulnerability assessment that’s done. So those with the greatest need will be placed into those units.

In the meantime, we have others who are falling between the cracks. Our temporary emergency shelter is supposed to have a cap of 90 days that someone could live there, but we have people who are there for three or four years because they’re not bad enough to get into the supportive housing units.

[11:00 a.m.]

What we need is a diversity of housing options for a diverse group of people. Not to mention transitional housing programming, which currently there is no funding for.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation on what you do. I agree that setting up and taking down shelters each winter is nowadays, with this increasing problem of homelessness, probably not the way to go.

This permanent shelter — how does it compare to, for example, what we have in Vancouver? What we call modular housing is a more permanent form of housing, on lands that are donated for a period of time, probably three to five years. The shelter that you described would be one step below, in terms of the permanency?

C. Rempel: Correct, yes.

G. Chow: Any facilities, particularly, like a washroom and all that?

C. Rempel: Yeah, modular housing would be much preferred. Right now I’m very proud….

It’s hard to speak of these things. My team has done an extraordinary job. A local owner leased us an old apple warehouse that was not even good enough to house rotten apples anymore, doomed for destruction in a couple of years and, in the interim, would lease it to B.C. Housing.

We turned it into a shelter, made it habitable for people. Yes, modular housing would be a great improvement to our old warehouses that are renovated in two months — something that could be renovated. We’re bringing in bathrooms. Blow a hole through the door, bring in a bathroom, set it up in a room, and we call it a shelter.

G. Chow: Do you have a kitchen in this kind of shelter, a food-eating area?

C. Rempel: We have a big room with some tables spread out, and we’ve constructed a few walls. We’ve got a fridge in it, so that we can serve food out of it. in a little pass-through window, but there are no ovens or things like that to actually prepare food. As far as our operation goes, it’s how most providers do it: they have a central hub where they’re going to do all their food preparation, and then they’re going to bring it out with vehicles to their different sites.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Carmen, unfortunately, we are not going to get to our other questions that are there, but thank you for the work that you do for the people that you do serve.

Next up is Lisa Scott, Okanagan and Similkameen Invasive Species Society.

Lisa, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

OKANAGAN AND SIMILKAMEEN
INVASIVE SPECIES SOCIETY

L. Scott: Good morning, Mr. Chair and standing committee members. My name is Lisa Scott. I’m the executive director of OASISS, the Okanagan and Similkameen Invasive Species Society. We are the longest-running invasive species society in British Columbia. This is our 27th year, and I’ve been with the organization since its inception.

I have presented to this committee several times in the past. While I humbly respect the opportunity to speak again, I’d like to start by pointing out that the issue of invasive species in B.C. has been brought forward for at least the past nine years, yet there has been little change. The committee has viewed invasive species as an urgent threat. Members have expressed concern about the damage that invasive species could inflict on a wide range of industries.

The committee’s 2018 report stated the importance of providing “robust funding and legislative authority to support education, prevention, monitoring, response and enforcement…and ensure funding is stable, timely and predictable.” This committee has heard us, but government has chosen not to implement the recommendations. It is time for action.

This brings me to my first recommendation: consistent annual investment as part of the core budget to reduce introductions, ensure immediate response and provide effective control of invasive species in this province. Invasive mussels are one example of a species that requires increased and stable funding. You heard about this yesterday from my colleague Robyn Hooper in Revelstoke, and you will hear more later today from Dr. Anna Warwick Sears.

I will shift to another potential threat to British Columbia: an insect called spotted lanternfly. This insect originates from China and Vietnam and arrived in Pennsylvania only nine years ago, but it has now spread to 14 states, with dead specimens showing up in California and Oregon. It is only a matter of time before it shows up in our province.

[11:05 a.m.]

Why should we care? This insect attacks over 100 plant species, including grapes, hops, apples, cherries, peaches. The environmental and economic impacts could be devastating, particularly in the Okanagan and Similkameen Valleys. This insect will put our vineyards at risk. Crop losses of between 50 and 90 percent have been reported in the United States. We need the budget to properly prepare for the arrival of this species and many others.

Recommendation No. 2. We need to strengthen, consolidate and enforce regulatory tools for invasive species in B.C. We need a complete review of invasive species legislation in the province, across all sectors. We need to identify gaps and weaknesses in existing legislation.

Did you know that organizations such as OASISS are spending provincial dollars battling invasive plants that you can still purchase at local garden centres? Why? There is no law preventing their sale. We spend money controlling them, yet they are still for sale. We have an example right here in this region. I was contacted by vigilant members of the public last month. A toxic and invasive plant called myrtle spurge was being sold at four garden centres, just in this region alone.

Back to invasive mussels. We have an emergency on our hands. Did you know there is no law requiring watercraft coming from outside the province to be inspected? The only law is…. If they see a watercraft inspection, if they happen to be passing by and it’s open, then the law is: they have to stop.

There is also no law requiring drain plugs to be pulled on watercraft, yet in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan, it’s the law to have your drain plug pulled when moving a watercraft over land.

Remember, it could take only one infested boat to change everything in British Columbia. If changes are not made and mussels arrive, I can confidently say we will wish we’d made the investments that were needed.

This brings me to my third and final recommendation. As we all know, climate change is here. It’s exacerbating the invasive species risk in our province. We need to provide dedicated staff and funding to address the effective rehabilitation of fire- and flood-impacted areas of the province. We are currently lacking the capacity, the knowledge and the budget to restore these areas.

Thank you for your time today.

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

Comments and/or questions?

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Once again, a great topic, super critical.

Spotted…. What was it now?

L. Scott: Spotted lanternfly.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Lanternfly. Okay.

The other one, myrtle spurge…. What was the invasive plant?

L. Scott: This is a spotted lanternfly here. I’m happy to pass it around.

The other species I spoke about is myrtle spurge. It’s an invasive plant.

A. Walker: What would the funding look like for capacity-building and knowledge for some of these flood- and fire-impacted areas?

L. Scott: That’s a great question, MLA Walker. I don’t feel I’m in a credible position to actually properly answer that question. I think we’d first need to define the scope for the province and come up with an action plan, with the appropriate persons in those positions.

R. Leonard: Thank you for presenting once again. On the issue…. You’re sharing some new invasive species that we’re going to have to battle next. My daughter’s master’s was on the apple clearwing moth. You probably know her.

I’m curious about whether you know how many invasive species…. Are they coming more quickly? Is it constant? What does it look like in terms of the enemies that are coming to attack?

[11:10 a.m.]

L. Scott: Thank you for your question, MLA Leonard, a great question. In my 27 years, the focus has always been…. We started as an invasive plant committee and became a society. I still see more and more plants coming through the horticultural sector. I think that’s always going to be present.

Unfortunately, some of the escaped ornamental plants, like tree of heaven, are now a host plant for invasive insects — one we already have here, the brown marmorated stink bug, and this species that you’re looking at right now, the spotted lanternfly. Again, if we didn’t have the invasive plant, tree of heaven, we would be much less vulnerable. It is a host plant for the species.

I see invasive insects as being the up-and-coming issue in my career. I’ve seen more and more emphasis of this arrival on the eastern seaboard in the port of Pennsylvania, human-assisted travel over land to the west coast, and then it funnels right up into British Columbia. A lot of these species are moving because of human travel and trade, so really, the issue is with us and with education and outreach. That’s where regional groups like ours can really make a difference.

How many, and what’s coming next? Great question. That’s where it’s about preparedness and being properly prepared for what’s coming next, because you can’t predict, I can’t predict. So let’s just be prepared with adequate dollars and a plan to be properly responsive and not reactive. That’s what I’ve seen year after year, being reactive.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): “Clean, drain, dry” legislation should be implemented, I think, for sure. Watercraft inspection stations are up and out.

But you said…. I thought there was some sort of enforceable mechanism if somebody passes a watercraft station. Is there not a fine?

L. Scott: Correct. If you do what’s called a blow-by and you…. So if you have any type of watercraft and you see an open inspection station, you are required by law to stop. The problem is people travel at night, people travel all hours of the day and don’t necessarily take those routes, or they see a long lineup and they go: “We don’t have time.” If there isn’t an enforcement officer there to assist and follow them, there’s no fine.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Lisa, thank you very much for your presentation today and explaining sometimes it’s not about the insect; sometimes it’s about the invasive plant that draws it to where it’s there. So thank you for the work that you do and your presentation this morning.

L. Scott: Thank you for the opportunity.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Patricia Tribe, Literacy Now.

Patricia, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

LITERACY NOW

P. Tribe: Thank you and welcome, everybody, to the beautiful South Okanagan–Similkameen region if you haven’t been here before. I’d like to speak to you about the importance of literacy and the multiple effects that that has on our communities.

Decoda Literacy Solutions and the provincial community literacy networks seek increased multi-year, stable funding for literacy needs within our communities. The need for literacy supports in the South Okanagan–Similkameen is larger than ever before. Communities and community service providers are continuing to ask for more to be done in help with literacy.

We are a more rural region here in the South Okanagan–Similkameen. That, along with the fact and the effects of COVID, which changed the landscape quite dramatically by reducing the exposure children, youth and adults had to community literacy supports…. We’re needing to put more effort into this issue.

The research is now showing us that some of those long-term effects from COVID…. You can look up some of this research on the EDIs, the early development instrument, out of UBC. They do this research, and they’ve been doing it for decades.

Here in the South Okanagan, we are finding that there is a higher vulnerability of little people in the area of language and cognitive. Not only is it something that a lot of people are passionate about, but the research is telling us we are in need of doing some more efforts in these areas.

[11:15 a.m.]

From the early years to youth, to adults, to seniors, all ages are needing more supports. Here in this region, we have new immigrants that are needing to learn English. We have families in need of support for the young children as they initially start to read. Some of this, again, is tying back to the effects from COVID. We have a strong need for tutoring students who are struggling in the school system, and our economy and workforce development requires many people to either learn English as a second language or to improve their skills in order to find work.

We have a lot of seniors in this region, and we are seeing more seniors requesting supports in order for them to go back into the workforce. I guess all of that is relating back to inflation. When the seniors are requesting support and help, they are asking for help with résumés — writing résumés has changed dramatically from when they normally would have done that — and, obviously, computer literacy, which is vital to all of our lives in this modern day.

All of these community supports and many, many more are being pulled together and supported by a variety of partners throughout the South Okanagan–Similkameen. It is not one group that does everything. There are a lot of different partners here, working together to build healthy, resilient communities.

A few examples of benefits of supporting literacy in the South Okanagan. By supporting our communities through Decoda Literacy Solutions, Decoda Literacy Solutions then provides funding out to the whole province, to regions. We are one of those regions.

Together with them and Raise-a-Reader funds, we worked with the Lower Similkameen Indian Band, the Osoyoos Indian Band and the Penticton Indian Band. We were able, together, to get books into their homes — especially during the pandemic and also afterwards; to update the resources that they had available to them, to be culturally appropriate, and then into the hands of families and children, both through the schools and at home.

We have worked with partners like the Seniors Wellness Society, the B and G club, the CMHA and a variety of others to provide programming for adults who might struggle with writing and literacy, through a program called Writing Out Loud. I’ll share a couple of comments.

You know, somebody asked — I’m sorry, I didn’t know who; the lady two talks before me: “Where is the missing link for some of this housing issue?” Literacy is the missing link for some of these housing issues.

Some of the work that we do with Writing Out Loud, with some of the adults and youth, is addressing folks that are homeless.

Some of the comments from folks that have gone through some of these programs: “I feel sad when writing, but after I read my writing, I felt more relaxed, and I was able to think about things in another perspective. I learned that writing helps you get everything out.” “Some activities are revealing for myself. Some have resulted in new awareness and may lead me in new directions. I have so much to process.” “This creative writing approach is actually fun. I would have never guessed it to be so.”

I’d like to end with this thought. Literacy is not something that is a quick fix. Literacy is a process. It takes time, it takes effort, and it often takes one-on-one, which can be expensive. The funding for community needs to increase and be stable, multi-year funding, so that partners can plan programming to be most effective for our citizens. It is desperately needed, since we’re seeing an increase in the needs of people within our communities.

M. Starchuk (Chair): What specifically is the ask? Do you have…?

P. Tribe: An increase in funding. Right now you are funding $2.185 million for Decoda Literacy Solutions. We’d like to ask if it could go to $3 million. That will get spread throughout the whole province. That’s not just for this region. Decoda, as I mentioned, takes that funding and spreads it evenly, according to population, throughout the province.

[11:20 a.m.]

B. Banman: Thank you very much, and I appreciate that. I was the one that asked them about the missing link. Some people say I’m the missing link. No, weak link — that’s what I’ve been called.

What I was going to say is that I think we assume, with all the education we have, that literacy is not an issue, and clearly it is.

What I hear you saying is that with the money we spend on this small ask, we could actually prevent the social needs that are costing us way more money. It would only take a handful of individuals, and that money would be recouped.

P. Tribe: Exactly.

B. Banman: The other part of literacy is…. I want to pick up on something my colleague said. There is literacy of words, but then there’s also financial literacy.

Do you think that that is something, as well, that…? Do you already incorporate that, or is that something that we could help with and that should be incorporated?

P. Tribe: That is something that we already incorporate — and then, also, computer literacy.

A lot of people…. You don’t want to muddy the waters too much. Being literate, being able to function within the community successfully is what we’re looking to help people do. So if it needs to be financial literacy and “literacy” literacy — language arts kind of literacy — then we do that as well.

R. Leonard: Thank you very much for your presentation. It’s a good passion to have.

I had an experience of having a visitor for a couple of months in the summer. He was a younger fellow. He had an app. He had a hand-held computer before smartphones. He went from having difficulty knowing where he was, getting off a plane, to being able to speak with me about the emperor of Japan and the Second World War. I mean, it was explosive.

I’m wondering what kind of technology you use in terms of literacy.

P. Tribe: Absolutely. The apps are fantastic. Some are better than others, but they are a fantastic tool.

They’re technology. For a young person, that’s great. For somebody who is homeless or struggling or a senior or some other situations, the technology can be more intimidating. We find that new immigrants, especially the older folks that come with their families, are really struggling, and they prefer to have that personal interaction.

It also helps us and literacy in the sense, especially with a lot of the new immigrants…. It’s helping people fill out forms and helping them navigate the system, which is pretty challenging if you don’t speak the language.

The apps and the technology are definitely part of it, but there’s also the other side. We still just need this person-to-person interaction.

R. Leonard: So the increased funding is mostly for human interaction.

P. Tribe: Human programming integrates those apps, right? When adults come to a program for literacy, they will be given that information and help to support…. Get those apps, and use this at home to help you build your literacy. So it’s a combination.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Patricia.

I have one last question. How many people do you touch?

P. Tribe: Thousands. It varies in the year. For one to one, which is our tutoring component, we have had over 10,000 volunteer hours of people working with kids in K through fourth grade. With all the brain research and such, we want kids to be reading by third grade. Because of the pandemic, there is a major lag in that right now.

That’s just the volunteer hours that have gone in. The actual individuals are in the thousands.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Patricia, thank you very much for your presentation this morning and for those people that you help out there.

Next up we have Ciel Sander, the Trails Society of British Columbia.

Ciel, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

TRAILS SOCIETY OF B.C.

C. Sander: All right. Thank you very much.

My name is Ciel. Good morning. I’m the volunteer president of the Trails Society of B.C.

[11:25 a.m.]

Our society was created in the mid-1990s to assist the province in routing and developing the Trans Canada Trail. We support addressing barriers that limit equitable active travel within and between rural and Indigenous communities, the prioritization of health and fitness and making accessible trails for all ages and ability to be funded as planning priorities and to meet the urgency of the climate emergency.

British Columbians and Canadians have increased their usage of and demand for active recreation that is low carbon and on safe and accessible trails. So my primary ask is to consider increasing the investment to the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, which is a significant section of the national Trans Canada Trail here in this province.

The reasons why. In 2020, we lost 67 kilometres of it along the Columbia and Western. It was to be managed as an industrial resource road between Fife and Castlegar. Then in November of 2021, we lost the section between Hope and Princeton in the catastrophic flooding during the atmospheric river. We currently have a remaining intact section from Christina Lake to Princeton, which is about 400 kilometres long.

What I’ve seen in the past couple of years, in particular, is rutting accompanied by heavy rain, which has created erosion and rough and sandy trail surfaces that make it very challenging for most people. Even bikepackers are warned, as evidenced by this quote from the B.C. Epic 1000, which is a bikepacking race between Merritt and Fernie. “Don’t let the rail grades deceive you. This is a tough route…. The rail grade is often very rough with loose gravel, washouts and washboard and often hard work to ride.”

Many citizens throughout B.C. are disappointed with the deterioration. Some are travelling to other provinces and states and flying to Europe to be able to experience cycling and hiking on high-quality greenway trails. This both decreases spending in B.C. communities and increases greenhouse gas emissions.

So the good news. We were very pleased the budget for active transportation was increased to $33 million over the next three years. However, this only represents three-quarters of 1 percent of the $4.4 billion budget that goes to the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. If the province were able to allocate another one-quarter of that 1 percent, an additional $11 million would be available to improve the Kettle Valley Rail Trail so that all ages and abilities could use it.

We were also very pleased with the recent uptick in funding to B.C. Parks. An additional $11 million yearly to help out the rail trails in this province would be significant.

Let me remind you of some other benefits. People visiting and living in neighbouring local communities will be able to recreate on a rail trail, leading to increased savings in your health care costs. People will become generally healthier and happier, enjoying nature and the outdoors.

We ask the province to conserve and invest in the KVR so it is safe, accessible and comfortable for people of all ages and abilities. Investment in long-distance trails contributes to local economies, creating trail towns. Healthier communities with increased investment in public transportation between them, combined with a quality rail trail, will allow more people, from places like Vancouver and larger cities, to travel to this iconic historic corridor without motor vehicle ownership.

Lastly but very important, we want to thank you for the e-bike rebate. It was wait-listed during its first day of introduction. So it’s evident that people want to change their behaviour to support a mode shift away from vehicles. What we need now is infrastructure such as the KVR Rail Trail improved for future generations.

I appreciate the opportunity to present today. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Ciel, for your presentation this morning.

S. Chant: The reason for this is…. My husband and I have walked, biked, run or driven the Trans Canada Trail in B.C. everywhere now. We’re trying to get into the rest of the country, but we haven’t got there yet. The variety of trail is amazing. So thank you for the Trans Canada Trail in B.C. It’s amazing.

You talked about the KVR. What about Othello to Tulameen? How is that going to be pulled back?

C. Sander: That’s all the KVR.

S. Chant: That’s all considered to be KVR. Okay.

[11:30 a.m.]

C. Sander: That’s all Kettle Valley Rail Trail. It went from Castlegar to Hope.

My understanding is that B.C. Parks may be able to open up the Othello Tunnels in 2024, but it’s hard to say.

S. Chant: Thank you so much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): My question is what are we at risk for if not saving it now, investing in it now?

C. Sander: What’s going to happen is it’ll be lost. There will be too many gaps. Right now we’re kind of throwing it away as a province. The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change now is in charge of Rec Sites and Trails B.C., and my understanding is that they put in a small amount of investment over the next three years to do pieces of maintenance. I don’t know the specifics because that hasn’t been given to me.

We could have a rail trail that is one of the largest in Canada if it was taken care of, and people come from long distances to bike or walk on long trails, right? They don’t want to come for 16 or 17 kilometres, which is what I’ve got near where I live in Grand Forks. They want to go long distances. They want to go all the way to Castlegar, or they want to go all the way to Penticton. If we lose it, it’ll be gone forever.

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

I do like the comment about the e-bikes. Although as a person that rides a mountain bike, there are some conflicts from time to time with those people as we are peddling our brains out to go up a hill, and somebody says: “Passing on your left.” How is this possible?

R. Leonard: Thank you for your question. That was valuable.

Getting on a bike for the health benefits, there are two things. There’s recreation, and then there’s the practical side of getting around for your daily living. How do you see the two connecting? It’s one thing to be able to afford to load your bike up and go off from an urban centre to go biking for fun. How do we connect the two?

C. Sander: It would be really great to have active transportation planners within each road district of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure. Where I live in Greenwood, I ride a fat bike, and it actually has a pedal assist. I’ve been asked multiple times by people who work in Greenwood but live in Midway: “What should I do? What kind of bike should I get?” I’m saying: “You’ve got to get a fat bike, because that’s the only way it’s going to work for you.”

It’s only ten miles, 14 kilometres, from Midway to Greenwood. It should be an easy commute for people, but it’s not smooth enough. There’s an exceptional gradient. It’s a super easy gradient. But what ends up happening is people get displaced on the highway, which is super dangerous. I don’t want to be killed and then have a little sign that says “Ciel Sander.”

I want to be on the rail trail. It’s not as safe and as efficient as it could be. Even in the winter, if that trail was maintained, people could go back and forth. It needs to be a mode shift. There are a lot of people where I live in Greenwood where they’re buying e-bikes, and they’re not driving as much just within town because there’s no reason to drive. I mean, it’s all within a couple of kilometres, right?

It would be really great to have the existing infrastructure, like the KVR, put into the planning for active travel routes, because it’s already there. We don’t have to build it. It’s already safe and separated if we improve the trail surface.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, Ciel, thank you for your presentation this morning. And then, just so I say it publicly: I don’t want to see your name on a plaque on the side of a road either, in any way, shape or form, for that reason. I would expect to see your name on a plaque on a trail someplace saying, “Look at what Ciel has done to improve this trail,” but the other one, not so much.

Thank you very much for your presentation this morning.

C. Sander: Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Anna Warwick Sears, Okanagan Basin Water Board.

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

The floor is yours.

[11:35 a.m.]

OKANAGAN BASIN WATER BOARD

A. Warwick Sears: Thank you very much.

Some new faces here. For those of you who don’t know, the Okanagan Basin Water Board is a partnership of the three Okanagan regional districts. Our board is primarily made up of locally elected officials. A lot of mayors are on the board, and everyone is very passionate about water sustainability in the Okanagan.

We have quite a broad mandate. We were established in 1970. The purpose is to work on water issues that are interjurisdictional. It was a radical idea in 1970 to have a watershed-based organization. For some reason, it’s still a fairly radical idea. There are very few watershed organizations in British Columbia, and we’re the oldest.

I have three quite varied things that I have submitted as recommendations. I was speaking with my board on Tuesday, and they said: “Why are they in this order?” I said, “Oh, they are not ranked,” and the board instructed me to come and tell you that absolutely, their number one priority, echoing Lisa Scott’s presentation, is the need to prevent the invasion of zebra and quagga mussels.

The provincial government, the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, just came out with this report. This report was finished a year ago and was sat on within the ministry for a year. They have just now released it. They released it without any media, so it hasn’t hit the news. It’s the potential economic impact of zebra and quagga mussels in British Columbia.

We already know a lot about what kind of impacts the mussels will have on our infrastructure, on B.C. Hydro, on just the operational side of things. We know that they will…. Anybody who’s been to eastern Canada will know that they can completely cover beaches. The shells are really sharp. All of a sudden everybody has to wear shoes whenever they go to the beach. It creates blue-green algae blooms. It’s a tremendous, tremendous environmental problem.

It’s also a huge problem having to do with the restoration of fish and natural ecosystems. You may not know, but 80 percent of all of the sockeye salmon in the Columbia River are born here in the Okanagan. This is their natal area. This is because of so much habitat destruction in the U.S. If you think of all the salmon in the Columbia being born here; they are being threatened if these mussels should be allowed to come in.

In no uncertain terms, we need to have the government funding itself. The funding we’re asking for is for the government to pay its own ministries to do inspections to prevent these contaminated boats from coming in. It’s a huge concern of our board because the Okanagan has one of the best mussel habitats in Canada. We have super calcium-rich waters, warm waters. This is the kind of condition where the mussels will just explode in populations, and they will take hold very rapidly. Also, by coincidence, a majority of the boats that are coming from parts of Canada and parts of the U.S. are coming to the Okanagan, so we’re very highly at risk.

The economic costs in this report are between $64 and $129 million per year. That would be the economic impact, and that does not include things having to do with our quality of life. It doesn’t include the fact that our grandchildren won’t be able to experience beaches the same way that we do. It doesn’t account for all these intangible things that make the Okanagan such a beautiful place to be in. That is the highest priority.

Quickly, though this is also a huge deal, we really need the province to provide more funding to review and update the Okanagan Lake regulation system.

[11:40 a.m.]

In 2017, we had a very significant flood on Okanagan Lake. A lot of that had to do with how the dam was operated.

Right now the operating plan that we’re working from was originally designed in the 1970s, before climate change. Right now the kind of weather events that we’re having, with much more intense rain, is increasing the risk of those types of flooding, increasing flooding to the point where it would be very difficult to manage if the provincial dam operator had to follow the same rules that they have been.

What needs to be done…. We worked with the ministry to create a plan of study. There are 18 different studies that need to be worked through in the next five to ten years to figure out how to change the operating plan and how to upgrade the infrastructure.

The infrastructure of that dam needs to be bigger. If that dam is not made bigger, all of the modelling shows that the water will come too high. It will flow around the edges of the dam, erode the infrastructure, flood Penticton, and we won’t have control downstream.

It is a very serious issue. Right now, the provincial government, the Ministry of Forests, is in charge of that dam. They’re not funding themselves internally to do a lot of this work, and it really needs to happen. We’re just, off the napkin, asking for at least $1 million a year to do these studies, to work with us as partners. Our funding comes from the local tax base. We’re willing to step up and be partners with the provincial government, but we need the provincial government to resource itself to do this.

Okay. The final one is building on this very wonderful thing that the provincial government put in place, this watershed security fund that was just released. And $100 million hit the press — terrific. However, this is an endowment fund. This is an endowment fund where they are intending to use the interest, the income from the fund, to provide grants out to watershed groups all over British Columbia. That comes to an estimated $5 million a year. I presented this to my board a couple of months ago, and one of the mayors stood up and said: “Wait a minute.” In the 1990s, the government, through Forest Renewal B.C., was giving out $50 million to $100 million a year in today’s dollars. So it’s off by an order of magnitude over what was happening in the 1990s.

If anything, in the 1990s, the watersheds were in better shape than they are right now. We’re talking about work for people who are maintaining drinking water reservoirs. We’re talking about things that need to be done by First Nations to restore streams for fish. We’re talking about a whole range of different types of activities that need to be done on our watersheds to make them healthier.

It is terrific that the government is seeing the need to invest in watersheds. But we really believe that if the government is serious about doing this, $5 million is not a serious contribution per year. The $5 million is a token amount, and the fund needs to be grown from $100 million to something more like $1 billion for it to be a serious long-term source of funding for watershed groups.

That’s my presentation, and thank you very much.

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

Comments and/or questions?

I actually have one to start off with. When you talk about the dam that’s there and how it flows to the south, what kind of coordination needs to be done with Washington state?

A. Warwick Sears: Well, I’m on the international Osoyoos Lake board of control appointed by the International Joint Commission. We spend a lot of time talking about that. The International Joint Commission is discussing….

We have a board of control, which essentially governs the operation of the dam just south of the border, in Oroville, that controls the level of Osoyoos Lake. But they want to convert that board into a watershed board where there is much more of a diplomatic mission, if you will, to talk about future problems, issues with climate change, things that are going to have to be resolved, because it is 100 percent undeniable. I was just in Washington, D.C. this spring. British Columbia is either going to be dumping water, out of control, on the U.S. or we are not going to be able to meet the needs of their irrigation coming down out of Canada.

[11:45 a.m.]

We do not have an agreement with the U.S. about a particular amount of water that we are supposed to send down there. We don’t owe water to the Americans, but we’re either going to be shorting them under the conditions of droughts, which are expected to become more common under climate change, or we’re going to be uncontrollably dumping water on them. We have to work with them.

There is, I would say, the skeleton of a system set up to begin talking. It’s on the radar of the International Joint Commission, whose mandate is to resolve international water conflicts before they start, but we’re not there yet.

The provincial government is at that table. They’re part of the board of control. They’re involved in that process, but certainly, the province as a whole needs to stay very engaged.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation. So the contaminated boats will be coming from the U.S. or our boats that have gone down to the U.S. and are returning…. Where would be the inspection station right now?

A. Warwick Sears: The number one source of contaminated boats coming to British Columbia is from Ontario. The mussels have come as far west as, I think, one lake west of Lake Winnipeg. So they’re in Manitoba.

The issue is not just at the U.S.-Canada border. It is providing appropriate barriers between here, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, to have a redundancy of inspection stations along there. There are inspection stations scattered along the border with Alberta, and then the CBSA has a role to work with B.C. conservation officers. When they see someone bringing in boats from the U.S., they flag them, and they tell the conservation officers to come and do an inspection.

It is a system. It’s vastly improved from what it was ten years ago. But it is really not enough. If an invasion does come, if we find invasive mussels in Kalamalka Lake or Okanagan Lake, we’re going to have a giant quarantine having to happen to stop them from spreading to other lakes in British Columbia.

The province has the early detection rapid response plan if something like that happens. But here’s what happens. You go through the rapid response plan. You get to the point where, okay, the mussels are throughout the lake. The plan ends. There is no plan after that. The province has not gone internally to develop any kind of thing to do after the mussels are established. There’s not even any plan for how to run a quarantine operation.

It’s sort of like it comes to the end of this Gantt chart and it’s like: “Oh, you’re hooped.” It’s not sufficient.

B. Banman: Thank you for your presentation. I’m from a region that inadvertently had a bunch of water dumped on it from the United States. I think that there is definitely some preparedness we can do.

What’s your experience been with that commission? Have you done any work with it or had any frustrations with it or ways that we can improve that talk?

A. Warwick Sears: In general, I admire the International Joint Commission. It’s funny. It’s from the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty. It’s been in place for a long time. It is staffed by Americans and Canadians — not just staffed by them but the commissioners are appointed by the Prime Minister and the President. So you have these very sophisticated, high-ranking people.

Essentially, I would say that it also is underfunded, given the amount of work it really takes to prevent and resolve international water issues, which is its mandate. So the staff is fairly small, except for around the Great Lakes. For all the rest of Canada, I would say it was underfunded.

[11:50 a.m.]

It does whatever support it can do within its mandate. But definitely, they are very interested in issues like you have in Abbotsford, very interested in it.

British Columbia as a whole, as a province, has been a little bit reluctant to really get the IJC more involved in things. When I was at their semi-annual meeting in Washington, D.C., this spring, there were people there from Alaska who were concerned about mining pollution from northern British Columbia that British Columbia was not allowing the IJC to get involved in. So there are some issues internally with the bureaucracy of British Columbia. They just want to keep the control, right?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, Anna, thank you for your presentation this morning. More importantly, thank you for the work that you do and the work that you continue to do.

It is a very complex solution or complex plan to get there. You briefly touched on a rapid response plan, and I think everybody in this room would rather not see it ever needed. I think we have a better chance of controlling it before it happens and in being preventative than anything else. Thank you very much for your presentation.

A. Warwick Sears: You’re welcome. Thank you for allowing me to present.

Let me just say that if any of you ever have any questions or interest in anything to do with Okanagan water, the Okanagan Basin Water Board is the hub and kind of centre point for all of the municipal water interests. We’re here to answer your questions and provide help.

M. Starchuk (Chair): A note to the committee, we will be adjourning this meeting to be in Abbotsford for three o’clock this afternoon for another full schedule.

A motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:52 a.m.