The committee met at 3:01 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Good afternoon, 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 today that we are meeting today in Abbotsford, which is located on the traditional territories of the Stó:lō people, the Semá:th First Nations and the Métis First Nations.

I’d ask everyone to take the time to reflect on the lands and the nations that you live, work and play on.

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

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 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 listen carefully to and consider all the input to make recommendations to the Legislative Assembly on what should be included in Budget 2024. The committee intends to release its report in August.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Chair. Tom Shypitka. I am the Deputy Chair and the MLA for Kootenay East.

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

G. Chow: George Chow, MLA for Vancouver-Fairview.

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

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

B. Banman: Bruce Banman, MLA for Abbotsford South.

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

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

I also want to thank Mary Newell, Jianding Bai, Kaitlyn DeWeerd and all the Hansard staff back in Victoria for their work and support for all the meetings that we’ve been to this week.

Each participant today will be given five minutes to speak, followed by up to five minutes for questions and/or comments from the committee members. I would ask the committee to remember that there are five minutes for questions and/or answers and for the presenters to remember there are five minutes for the answers that we’re asking the questions to, so we can answer as many questions that are there.

We’re going to begin with Shairose Jinnah, Archway Community Services.

Shairose, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by the five from us.

You have the floor.

Budget Consultation Presentations

ARCHWAY COMMUNITY SERVICES

S. Jinnah: I am pleased to be presenting to you today from the unceded territory of the Matsqui and Semá:th First Nations of the Stó:lō people. The Stó:lō people are “people of the river.” They have lived in and stewarded the Fraser Valley for at least 10,000 years.

My name is Shairose Jinnah, and I’m the director of counselling and child, youth and family services at Archway Community Services.

I would like to thank the B.C. Finance Minister, the Hon. Katrine Conroy, for identifying that we can build a stronger B.C. for everyone. Thank you for including the following community social service initiatives in the 2023 budget: health and mental health care; affordable and attainable housing; safe and healthy communities; helping with costs; skills for future jobs; and clean, sustainable development in collaboration with Indigenous peoples.

As an organization whose vision is “Justice, opportunities and equitable access for all,” Archway is grateful to work alongside a provincial government so committed to building a stronger community.

[3:05 p.m.]

Today I would like to share a story which will provide context for our recommendations. Ethan was first referred to Archway’s Youth Resource Centre in summer 2019, when he was 12 years old. He is the youngest of four siblings. At this time, Ethan was known to be starting fights at the local skate park. However, by September, the family had lost housing in Abbotsford, resulting in a move to another community.

In 2021, the family moved back to Abbotsford, and Ethan and his older brother were referred to the Youth Resource Centre again, this time to the community work service program, a program for youth involved in the criminal justice system and charged with an offence. Both brothers had multiple conditions: no-contacts and no-goes in the community. The case manager discussed with the youth worker the idea of working with the boys beyond their community work service hours requirements and introduced them to Archway’s In It Together program, providing wraparound supports to youth involved in gangs or criminal activity, and their families.

Both brothers were open to continuing to receive support with their youth worker through the In It Together program. However, it took several months to connect with the family as the entire family was reluctant to work with outside organizations, based on their previous negative experiences. Both boys expressed anxiety about meeting with their worker as they feared being “taken away from their parents.” The worker continually reassured Ethan and his brother that this was not his role and he would always bring them back home after their meetings.

The mistrust and previous discrimination faced by the family are not an isolated experience. Many disfranchised individuals refuse support or are hesitant to engage in services due to past trauma. We recommend that the provincial government fund training for front-line workers to strengthen their capacity to support victims of racism, hate and other discriminatory incidents.

At the time they began accessing In It Together, the family was given an eviction notice and were removed by bailiffs, literally leaving the family of six on the street with no viable options for housing. Ethan thought to call the In It Together worker to ask for help. The entire family and their two dogs landed on the doorstep of the Youth Resource Centre.

The youth worker called the delegated Indigenous-serving agency to request support. The delegated agency informed the youth worker that a protection report had been made a few months before, and they would need to come and interview the children and family prior to offering services. Obviously, the boys and family were apprehensive and worried about what would happen. With the ongoing support of their youth worker, the family was moved to a hotel until more suitable housing could be found.

During the crisis, the family was introduced to a family support worker in In It Together. The support worker was able to take the parents to housing appointments and started to build rapport. The parents wanted the support worker present at meetings to support each other and build a growing trust. This worker offered rides to food banks, applications for rent supplements and referred mom and one daughter to free counselling sessions offered at Archway.

Ethan and his family have had to move four times since 2019. As evidenced through this lived experience, securing safe, stable housing is a huge concern in our community. We recommend all levels of government work on two parallel paths to support unhoused individuals by investing in affordable and culturally appropriate permanent housing and expanding shelter and support services for unhoused individuals.

Currently the family support worker is working with all family members to discuss living arrangements, monetary support to pay rent and general household expectations as mom is away at a residential program getting addiction treatment.

Can I finish?

M. Starchuk (Chair): How long is the finish?

S. Jinnah: Two paragraphs.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay.

S. Jinnah: He takes responsibility. Ethan no longer uses cannabis or nicotine and is no longer selling drugs. He attends his updated and more intensive school program regularly and reports that he is enjoying it.

Due to the termination of provincial funding and a new federal stream of dollars being given to municipalities, In It Together funding has ended, which is a huge loss to our community and to 150 youth and their families, as based on last year’s numbers. Youth like Ethan, vulnerable youth and families won’t access services, government or police agencies as they have lived experiences that have resulted in a culture of mistrust.

[3:10 p.m.]

We recommend that gang prevention funding continue to be targeted to community-based programs to ensure that community partners can together offer comprehensive support to youth and families just like Ethan’s.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Look at that, Shairose. Five minutes right on the nose.

S. Jinnah: Thank you.

B. Banman: Thank you very much.

Shairose has just touched on the tip of the iceberg of what Archway does for this community. This particular room was underwater. Archway was innovative in finding out ways to help the flood victims as well.

I want to ask you. In addition to this one ask, if you were to ask for two additional things, what would they be, from this government, that would help you do your work better?

S. Jinnah: Definitely, we’re looking at the whole homeless initiative pieces, the drug addiction. We’re looking at stop exploiting youth. We’re looking at 11-year-olds right now that are entering our programs. They have nowhere to go. They’re being sex-trafficked. They’re being recruited to gangs. Those are where we’re starting to see huge, huge challenges in terms of: how do we address that?

We don’t have staffing. We don’t have resources. It’s so hard to recruit and retain right now. So I would say continue to look at the wages for the non-profit sector — the whole recruitment retention piece. It would be completely amazing if we can do that, because without that, we’re really stranded in terms of our abilities. And ongoing training, competencies, competent staff, not just staff that we bring in because they’re available.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Shairose, you mentioned inside there that you wanted training for the front-line workers. What would the training be, and where would you get it?

S. Jinnah: We’re noticing every day that our discrimination and our JEDI — justice, equity, inclusive — programs are just exploding. We’re getting referrals all the time of individuals that are feeling attacked or they’re feeling discriminated.

We’re thinking that if there was either online training that was available for staff, that they could take without costs, that would be available, or if in the communities, there was more collaboration around increasing the purpose of racism, discrimination, equity, justice…. How could we as a community bring this together and start looking at it as one, rather than individual organizations looking at it? So if there was a broader training that all of us could be taking, having the same understanding, and then taking it and customizing it as needed to our programs. I think that’s what we’re looking for.

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

R. Leonard: Just to get some clarification…. Thanks very much for sharing that story. It does bring it alive, what you’re seeking.

You said there is a federal program that has come into play, which is why the….

S. Jinnah: Yeah, we were federally funded for a long time. We’ve been running the gang prevention program for about 15 years in Abbotsford, from 2008 onwards. The funding ended, and then most recently, we were funded with the provincial funding that we were getting.

There is a funding that’s gangs and guns, which is now going to be coming down. There was funding that was given to each community, to the municipalities. That was supposed to be for the community, but as it stands right now for Abbotsford, the money has gone to a program that is not a non-profit or not a community program.

For now, we have over 100 people on our wait-list. We recently get calls from the schools that people are getting calls that somebody has said their brother is in the gang: “He’s going to shoot your sister.” We can’t take these people. We have nowhere to take them because we have run out of our funding.

This is a crisis in Abbotsford. It’s just touching the nip of what’s going on, but it’s a high need. Especially now, what you’re hearing in Vancouver with the Zone 43 and the Montreal gangs that are coming out to Vancouver…. They’re going to soon be recruiting youth in Abbotsford and anywhere else, right?

R. Leonard: So this gangs and guns program is not in play here as an alternative to what you have provided?

S. Jinnah: No. It will be coming. That’s for the police and the government-funded agencies. They can apply for it.

S. Chant: Thank you for the work that you do. It’s heartbreaking at times, I’m sure.

How much money…? What is an amount that would work for you?

S. Jinnah: You know, we started off very rich when we first got the program. We were housed full-time. We had a counsellor, a music therapist. We had family workers. We had outreach workers. We had counsellors.

[3:15 p.m.]

We were looking at about a $1.3 million budget. When we started to get the provincial funding, the last three years…. We would be able to function on around $600,000 for only our program.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Shairose, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon, and thank you very much for what you do for the community.

Next up is Justine Nelson, Rivershed Society of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours.

RIVERSHED SOCIETY OF B.C.

J. Nelson: Good afternoon, everyone.

I’m pleased to be here on the traditional territory of the Stó:lō  Nation.

My name is Justine Nelson, and I’m the executive direc­tor of the Rivershed Society of B.C.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today about the urgent need to prioritize the health and resiliency of the Fraser watershed and the B.C. watershed security fund in the 2024 provincial budget.

Rivershed was founded in 1996 by Fin Donnelly, following his incredible swim down the Fraser River, which he did to raise awareness of the indispensable role the Fraser plays in supporting salmon, people and the economy. The Fraser is affectionately known as the heart and soul of British Columbia. Its watershed embodies the spirit and essence of the province, making it an invaluable asset that deserves our utmost attention.

Unfortunately, the Fraser watershed is facing significant challenges. The number of spawning salmon are an indicator of watershed health. Historically, around 50 million sockeye salmon would return to the Fraser River. However, in 2022, even during a dominant sockeye year, the reported number was only around 5.5 million. This decline is alarming.

Since its inception, Rivershed’s programs have been fostering relationships between people, the land and the water, helping people understand the importance of creating a more resilient Fraser watershed. Our vision of the Fraser as a resilient watershed with salmon, people and economies flourishing in riverside communities entails incorporating the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples into our projects and programs. We recognize that without embracing a decolonial framework, we won’t be able to bring about meaningful changes in the relationships between people, the land and freshwater ecosystems.

It is crucial to understand that the climate crisis is, in fact, a water crisis and that the health of our watersheds play a critical role in providing natural defences against droughts, wildfires and floods. Rivershed is an active member of the B.C. Watershed Security Coalition. We commend the provincial government for its $57 million investment in watershed projects since 2020. These projects have created much-needed jobs, contributed to watershed resilience and helped establish lasting partnerships with First Nations.

I think everyone here today would agree that funding for projects that contribute to watershed health is critical for watershed security. Rivershed has a project that is doing just that. Our foodlands program is working in collaboration with the səýeḿ Kwantlen, the business subsidiary of the Kwantlen First Nation; Langley Environmental Partners Society; Kerr Wood Leidal consulting; and multiple landholders along the T’saikwakyan, or Salmon River, in Langley to restore private agriculture land along the river and create a foodlands corridor.

Using a decolonized framework and a holistic understanding of environmental and human health, foodlands combines traditional knowledge and Western science. The project is restoring livestock grazing areas for the benefit of enhancing salmon survival, as well as creating habitat for other species at risk. Over the next three to ten years, Rivershed and the Kwantlen guardians will prevent invasive plants from re-establishing, ensure the continued growth of native plants and track the positive impact of the restoration work on fish and wildlife.

The last time I spoke to this committee, I advocated for an annual investment in a B.C. watershed security fund to support restoration projects like foodlands. Since then, the province has made a significant investment of $100 million in a watershed security fund, which sounds great. But an endowment of $100 million will only yield $5 million a year for projects.

This is a far cry from what’s needed to implement a provincewide strategy and safeguard B.C.’s watersheds. It needs to be at least ten times larger. We need a $1 billion watershed security fund. This could easily be achieved with an investment of $300 million in Budget 2024, a federal match and an additional $200 million from the philanthropic and private sector.

The cost of inaction is far greater than my ask today. We cannot afford to wait to take action on watershed security. Recent years have served as a painful reminder of the high price we pay for droughts, floods and wildfires.

[3:20 p.m.]

In fact, B.C. has already spent close to $11 billion on recovering from consequences of extreme weather events in just the past few years.

I encourage you to demonstrate your commitment to watershed security by allocating $300 million to the B.C. watershed security fund in Budget 2024. Funding decisions must align with the pressing needs of vital watersheds like the Fraser. This investment will help ensure the long-term health of our watersheds for salmon and people and the economies can flourish in rivershed communities.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Justine, thank you for your presentation today. It was echoed earlier on today by Anna Warwick Sears. You are in great company being around Anna.

I have a question with regards to your foodlands project. What is the size of the project, like how many kilometres, how many hectares? What is the size and the scope, and what is the timeline?

J. Nelson: The timeline…. We’re looking at three to ten years of maintenance from this point forward. We’re working on….

Sorry. I’m five months postpartum right now, and my memory is not great. I’m like: numbers? I could definitely send that number to you after.

We’re working on a section of the Salmon River along Glover Road, from the highway to Ralston Crescent. We’re currently working with five landholders, and we are outreaching to another seven along the way. So it’s bringing together a group of landholders in the area.

M. Starchuk (Chair): That’s good.

H. Yao: I just would love to ask a question about….

Actually, I need a little bit of clarification. You’re talking about promoting, I guess, agricultural land around a river. Is there any concern about potential fertilizer runoff into the river that promotes any kind of algae bloom?

J. Nelson: I would say that fertilizer runoff into rivers is always a concern. I think that there are safeguards, from ministries, against that. Whether or not they’re implemented, I’m not sure. But that’s not something that we directly deal with.

H. Yao: Okay.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. Just on the funding piece. You said this needs to be a $1 billion strategy, with $400 million, I think you said, from government. You said there’s a philanthropy piece there, $200 million.

How does that work? Where do you get that from? How do you leverage that $400 million more?

J. Nelson: We’re looking at an additional $300 million from the B.C. government, as well as a federal match, and then $200 million from philanthropic or private.

There are a few different ways that could be. It could be through a charity that would be contributing. There are various charities that do this kind of work around B.C. or fund different kinds of work.

There are also other opportunities, like water rental fees, polluter-pay options or offsets for project funding, where you could use that funding and put it into the watershed security fund to help grow the endowment. That would also create a situation where either polluters are paying for the recovery of the water systems or water users are paying for that recovery.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks. That was my next piece to it.

As far as industry goes, is there any buy-in right now into making those contributions? You said polluter pays, that kind of thing. How does that money get funnelled into your organization?

J. Nelson: It wouldn’t be funnelled into our organization. This is an endowment by the B.C. government that is being co-managed. The Real Estate Foundation is involved. Right now there’s a co-development process between the province and the First Nations Water Table.

It’s not something that we would be personally responsible for. We are an organization that applies for funding for these sorts of things.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Sure. Gotcha. Thanks.

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

H. Yao: Sorry. My apologies. I just want to make sure I get my math correct. You’re talking about $300 million from the province, $300 million from a federal matching amount and then $200 million as a private…?

J. Nelson: The provincial government has already put $100 million into an endowment. So it would be an additional $300 million in this upcoming budget, a $400 million match from the federal government and then $200 million from the private and philanthropic sector.

H. Yao: Perfect. Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Justine, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. Keep up the good work.

[3:25 p.m.]

I’ve often been accused of pronouncing people’s last names wrong, but I am not getting this one wrong. Gemma Martini, Motion Picture Production Industry Association.

G. Martini: I thought maybe you’d trip on the first name.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Oh, well. I’m lucky with pronunciation. You can tell this is the end of a relatively long tour. Gemma, you are speaker No. 224…

G. Martini: Oh my. Well, thank you for being here. I’ll try and keep you awake.

M. Starchuk (Chair): …over the last two weeks.

You have five minutes for your presentation, followed up with five minutes of comments or questions. The floor is yours.

MOTION PICTURE PRODUCTION
INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION

G. Martini: Thank you. Much appreciated. I am Gemma Martini, CEO of Martini Film Studios in Langley, British Columbia.

It is my privilege to be here in front of you again this year on behalf of B.C.’s film and television production industry now, also, as the chair of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C., MPPIA, having taken over from long-standing chair and industry leader Peter Leitch in June of 2022.

I would like to begin by recognizing that I’m presenting to you here on the traditional territories of the Semá:th and Matsqui First Nations of the Stó:lō people.

As you may be aware, this moment in time marks a challenging crossroads in our world of production. The present culmination of global production market shifts and restructuring economic uncertainty and prolonged labour negotiations south of the border have together brought about a downturn in production activity that we’ve not experienced in some time.

In recent years, technology shifts, production volumes and streaming models overturned previously accepted cycles and expectations in production. The industry kept growing, and our production community kept working. The industry pause is unsettling, particularly for those who are new to the industry over the past six-plus years and have known nothing but a steady and growing volume of work. With this in mind, industry organizations are providing some education and guidance across the production community.

Even as we presently confront challenging market conditions that are outside of our control, we are steadfastly optimistic that British Columbia is well positioned for sustained growth as one of the world’s premiere centres for film and television production. Our history of success over four decades of collaboration with government partners is at the foundation of this conviction.

To date, our vision, strategy and investments have led to the thriving nearly $4 billion production industry at the heart of our province’s creative economy, as well as 60,000-plus quality jobs across a spectrum of production and ancillary businesses; an internationally respected and skilled workforce and talent pool; infrastructure investment in more than 2.8 million square feet of studio space, matched by a top-tier, extensive equipment supply chain; one of the industry’s most sophisticated animation and visual effects and post-production digital entertainment clusters, also equipped with state-of-the-art LED virtual production capacities; layered economic benefits and spinoffs with evolving industry hubs across B.C. regions; and cross-sector drivers with an emphasis on tourism and hospitality.

Our collective job now is to build on our progress in all of the above categories by envisioning the future of B.C.’s motion picture industry today.

First, I want to express our industry’s sincere gratitude for your confidence and investments in a strong future for B.C.’s motion picture industry by these examples. You’ve provided robust funding for B.C.’s film commission at Creative B.C., generous development funding for B.C.’s domestic production sector and a stable program of industry tax credits.

In 2023-24, we are focused on the priorities that we believe are vital to a healthy, progressive film and television production sector that stands out in a competitive, evolving global production landscape. To this end, we remain committed to the following. We continue to take action on environmental sustainability in motion picture production. We are taking action on equity, diversity and inclusion and cultural competency strategies that are integrated broadly across all industry sustainable growth plans.

We would like to recommend the following: continued competitive and dependable tax credits central to B.C.’s position in the global marketplace, collaborative workforce development strategies that address impending labour market shortages and skills gaps in the production sector in both the physical and digital production sectors. This is among our most pressing priorities, as the industry thrives and the workforce retires.

The importance of this last point cannot be overstated. The B.C. industry’s reputation for excellence is known internationally as some of the most skilled and expert crews and talent. Likewise, our animation, vis-effects and post-sector is globally respected. Our workforce in this sector also depends on adequate and timely training, recruitment and retention of talent.

Mobilizations to address labour gaps and shortages are converging with diversity and inclusion initiatives on all fronts. Canadian and U.S. producers, labour organizations, educators, industry associations and partners are all leading on steps for change.

Our work ahead is to harness and capitalize on these efforts to date to create practical skills training and education strategies that can scale up relatively quickly in the near term.

[3:30 p.m.]

My personal note to you for this year: I’m one short year into my new role as chair of the MPPIA. Upon taking on this leadership role of our 17-person volunteer board, I quickly learned that we have our work cut out for us. I was already a member of the association and board for several years, but board leadership is active duty for our industry, especially in this time of rapid change, challenge and heightened competition.

I will admit that I’m both excited and daunted by the road ahead, but I stand for this industry, as I believe it is one of our province’s most exceptional opportunities, if we work together to grow it in the right ways. B.C.’s film and TV industry is an important economic driver, job creator and change-maker for British Columbians. It is a strong western contributor to our Canadian creative economy and a prominent contender in the world stage, and we are good at it.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Gemma, thank you for your presentation this afternoon.

B. Banman: You and I had a chance to chat once before. As I think I mentioned then, much to my chagrin, Abbotsford happens to be the Hallmark capital of Canada for doing Hallmark movies. It’s to my chagrin, but my wife loves it.

G. Martini: You do too.

B. Banman: Maybe I’m secretly dreaming of a prince one day. You never know.

Anyway, I have two questions. Take Abbotsford, for instance. What type of economic generation do you bring to Abbotsford when you do this? What does your industry do to not harm small business, where the film sites may be located, in that interruption?

More importantly, you were talking about your need for skilled people. If you need skilled people, what do we need to be doing now with our institutions to help train those people in this specific industry? How many more seats would we need to plan for now so that we have those replacements for retirements?

G. Martini: Oh, excellent questions. Thank you. I will start with your first one. Abbotsford — what kind of economic impact, essentially, does a production have?

We have the numbers. Unfortunately, they’re not at my fingertips, but I do have the one number for Vancouver, because I was speaking with the Vancouver mayor recently. In 2021, the six major studios spent $750 million, just in the city of Vancouver. That’s obviously the largest one in B.C., Burnaby is second, and Langley-Surrey about third. I know that in Langley about $80 million a year is spent there.

That extrapolates itself into between 500 and 800 individual businesses that are positively impacted by that — so basically big numbers — which leads me to the second part of your question: how does it help the businesses that are impacted? If a production is filming on your street and they are somehow impacting your business, they will compensate you for that.

It is always a conversation. In fact, there are many businesses that really enjoy having production around because in the future, it also brings people that are attracted to that area because of film tourism, so they’ll come and visit. An example is the diner out in Mission that is now the popular Pop’s diner in Riverdale, which has had lots of business since then in particular.

The third part of your question was: how many people do we need to train? What I do know is that we had an impact report done on 2017 to 2019, and that report demonstrated that we are losing 10 percent of our workforce per year through attrition, through retirement, etc. If you think about the number of people we have in the industry, what that 10 percent represents, I feel, becomes overwhelming. We could start by saying: “Why don’t we train a couple of thousand a year and eventually get ourselves up to 6,000 or 7,000 per year?”

H. Yao: Thank you, Gemma. I should also thank my colleague Bruce, who made me want to ask this question.

I noticed you listed a bunch of cities, but Richmond is not one of them. What can we in Richmond do to encourage you guys to be up there?

G. Martini: Richmond? Actually, you have an excellent representative in your film office, I will say. He’s extremely enthusiastic, and it’s wonderful. Richmond is also a popular place for filming. You have a studio there as well, and I believe Superman and Lois is located, one of the last long-running shows of the Warner Bros. suite that we’ve had here in B.C. for a long time. You’re doing a good job.

H. Yao: Okay.

R. Leonard: Thank you so much for your presentation. I had a conversation with someone recently about the labour challenges south of the border. How long has that been going on, and is there a workaround for the industry here?

G. Martini: Yeah, excellent question. The unsettled labour started with the Writers Guild. They went to strike on May 3 or something like that. Then the Directors Guild of America was negotiating. They settled just the other day under tentative settlement terms.

[3:35 p.m.]

Now we’re looking at the actors maybe going on strike on July 3. It all seems to happen at the same time. We don’t know when it will be over. We heard that it might become quite contentious. We’re just setting that aside because it’s completely outside of our control. If we do not get access to the American actors, then that creates more problems than it does with the writers right now.

We’re quite busy with those same Hallmark movies, because we need Christmas. They’re shooting quite a few of them in June, but they know that come July 1, it will be game over for awhile, because we use a lot of American actors in our lead roles. But if it goes on for much longer, it might provide opportunity for the local talent now to get more of those number one or two positions. It’s really hard to say.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Just quickly on tax credits. How do those physically work? What can be done to make them more attractive? I guess it was for skills training and for more labour. How does the tax credit thing work?

G. Martini: Generally, the way the tax credit works is that it’s associated directly with the B.C.-resident labour that you have on your production. It’s a tiered system. It depends on where you shoot, what kind of shooting you’re doing and whether there’s a DAVE credit, which is our digital animation or visual effects credit. That one is critical in bringing work from outside, even that’s filmed in the province, to the province. All the other tax credits are associated to the labour.

If I’m a B.C. resident working on your production and I’ve proved that I live here, that production now gets a tax credit associated to all the money that they spend on me as labour. That’s all processed through Creative B.C. That tax credit — a very unique structure associated to labour — is excellent, because it keeps B.C. people working, but we’re competing internationally with some very competitive tax credits. It’s something that we as an association are starting to really analyze as to how competitive we are and how we remain on the front of that competitive landscape.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Can we just get the details on those tax credits? That’d be great. I would just like to see them written down. That’d be awesome.

G. Martini: Absolutely. I can share that with you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Gemma, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon. As the MLA in Cloverdale, I can’t tell you how many times…. It seems that on a weekly basis, the main drag in Cloverdale is closed down for filming, which we welcome very well. Thanks for the work that you do. Keep up the good work.

Our next presenter is Scott Ellis, the Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours.

S. Ellis: First off, I’m going to have to say that I get to tell my wife we talked about Hallmark movies.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Considering it was Bruce, I think it would be more like a soap opera.

GUIDE OUTFITTERS
ASSOCIATION OF B.C.

S. Ellis: All seriousness aside, I do want to recognize the time and effort you guys put in for this. It’s an amazing amount of dedication you have, on the diversity you have to listen about and decide on. Wow, I tip my hat to you. Well done.

Just quickly about me. I’m the CEO of the Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia. I sit on the board of the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation, am a co-chair of the Adventure Tourism Coalition and also vice-chair of the Canadian Federation of Outfitter Associations.

Hopefully I’m not too punchy. I just got off a plane from Ottawa, so please bear with me here.

I’ve made presentations to the Standing Committee on Finance before, normally around wildlife — putting a value on wildlife investments and wildlife. Today’s a little bit different. I’ve done this by design: only one recommendation. I’m going to talk to you about why I think we need to change our thinking about what I’m calling reconciliation-based compensation.

The situation is that 95 percent of the province of British Columbia is Crown land, and businesses with tenures on that land are being pushed to a flight-or-fight response. Flight or fight is maybe something common for my sector, my industry, but it’s really getting pushed to kind of a sell or sue. That is not good for communities. I would like us to think a little bit about that.

To be crystal clear, when we’re talking about reconciliation, the Guide Outfitters Association of British Columbia supports reconciliation. However, what we need are some rules and a plan around that reconciliation to heal communities, to make communities whole. I think that’s the piece that’s desperately needed. We’re seeing escalated conflicts on the land today. I’m going to give you a couple examples in a second.

[3:40 p.m.]

In default, or concerned about lawsuits, statutory decision–makers are reducing tenure terms, they’re delaying transfers, and they’re delaying renewals. This is all bad for business, bad for communities and bad for British Columbia. You may hear the “land back” phrase, and that’s fine if done properly. One piece of this is reconciliation-based compensation. It needs to be provided when necessary, where necessary. I believe that outfitters are like the canary in the coal mine and have the ability to help.

To give you an idea, we started in the 1800s in Telegraph Creek with this tourism industry being developed by the Tahltan First Nations. Today more than 35 nations or First Nations people own guide territories. We’re proud of that history, and we’re proud of the relations that we have with First Nations. To give you an idea, of a board of 17, I have two First Nations on my board, so we think about this, I think, at a fairly deep level.

Really, what we’re looking for is a plan. What does that plan look like? Well, it would provide some rules and implementation. It would provide a path forward for all British Columbians. Without a plan, we’re in this sell or sue, and unfortunately, I have too many examples of both of those. I’m going to touch on two, because I think everyone would be able to find information on the William decision.

Almost ten years ago, first place in Canada, we’ve got declared title lands — 1,750 square kilometres provided to the Xeni. I have no problem with the Xeni First Nations on what they were able to demonstrate. However, here we are almost a decade later, and four of the five outfitters that operated in that declared title land have no resolution. Basically, they’re being starved, and they’re in a position now that they’re looking for: how do we get through this?

Without many options in those rural communities, you do not have good relations. At a time when they used to share meat or employ people, none of those things happen. So the reverse is happening without any rules and without a plan.

Former Chief Marvin Yahey and I talked for many years about cumulative effects long before his successful lawsuit in 2021. So cumulative effects are not new, but with that decision — rightly so — to fix the infringement, the province impacted guide-outfitters to the tune of $4 million. No help there. Without that help, without the rules, without implementation for staff, what you’re doing is you’re impacting and harming communities. At a time when the intent is right to come together, we have unintended consequences, and that doesn’t help anybody.

M. Starchuk (Chair): If you need more time….

S. Ellis: I’m not even going to try to define what reconciliation is. Just that this is one small piece, I believe, and it’s a change in government’s thinking on how they deal with Crown land and how they deal with remote communities. I think it’s really a fundamental shift.

Your government has been fantastic in Bills 21 and 23, changing other acts and making a paradigm shift in the forest industry. Those are all fantastic. I think we need a paradigm shift in rural British Columbia on tenures and how we deal with Crown land. We can find a path forward here that is good for all British Columbians, that helps healing for those First Nations and that helps the businesses that are there, that have been operating, to find a path forward as well.

B. Banman: Of the guide-outfitters that you have, how many of the jobs are you at risk of losing right now because we can’t seem to come to an agreement or a resolution? How many of those jobs are actually held by Indigenous people and are now at risk? How much of the meat that you’re talking about would actually go feed Indigenous people? What’s the solution?

S. Ellis: You give me five minutes?

S. Chant: That’s one question.

S. Ellis: Thanks. To be very clear, at one time, there were a lot of First Nations in our outfitting businesses, and that has really declined in the recent years, I would say in the last two generations. It’s not what it was. Nations are buying guide territories and getting in that business.

[3:45 p.m.]

They care about the land. They’re interested in economic development from the land, so they’re interested in fish and wildlife. Sorry, I don’t have a number, specifically. The disappointing part is that it was significantly higher in the past.

We share thousands of pounds of meat with local First Nation communities. So 85 percent of our clientele are American. If they choose not to take their meat home, or they choose, better yet, to give some to a nation by design, my members fly that in or take that into the local communities and share that. So we have thousands of pounds of meat that we share every year.

Then, if there’s a surplus, we actually bring it down here. I’ve distributed it in Kelowna and White Rock and even as far as Vancouver Island. Sorry, I haven’t gone home to Comox yet, but I’m working on it.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Scott. I never know what hat you’re going to be wearing when you come into these things. Thanks for all the work you do and all the different things that you’re doing for the province.

This is a tough one. You mentioned a couple of things. You said that you weren’t about to define what reconciliation is. I think that’s a key point. I don’t think, really, anybody knows quite yet what reconciliation is. Some can call it growing pains. But within that process comes a lot of uncertainty. Obviously, for industries such as yours, time is of the essence, because people can be out of the business pretty darn quick.

You also mentioned a plan. What is that plan until we get through these growing pains? We’ve got a strategy in front of us right now, the 30 by 30 that the federal government plopped in the hands of British Columbia now. What needs to be in that plan that’s going to make it sustainable for yourself? Where do the guide-outfitters play in being a part of the stakeholders to form that plan?

S. Ellis: I was in Ottawa talking about 30 by 30. I think that 30 by 30 can be a very good initiative. The issue that we’re going to have with this…. One of the things in the mandate letter for Minister Cullen is around IPCAs to get to the 30 by 30. That’s Indigenous protected and conserved areas. We have two in the province of British Columbia right now — one in the Smithers area and one on Vancouver Island — and they’re very, very good. There have been some others that are very — how do I say this? — positional.

I don’t think these should be in a rights and titles conversation, but it’s pretty arrogant to come from me, to be honest. I think that if these are park-like…. In my world, if I see that, and it’s a light footprint on the ground, maybe non-mechanized people are allowed to recreate there…. We have a huge outdoor recreation community. It’s billions and billions of dollars. If they’re allowed on the land and can do that with a light footprint, I think that’s a path forward.

Maybe I’ll be so bold as to say that if everyone has to get off, and it’s a different kind of preserve, I think that’s another source of conflict. I think that as we go down these paths, the intent is good. Again, the execution on the ground is the piece that’s missing.

If 30 by 30 is going to happen…. I don’t speak for the forest industry or the mining industry, but I am concerned about healthy ecosystems. I do like what we’ve done to the forest industry, as that evolves in the paradigm shift. I do think we’re doing some good things in protected areas on the ocean. The devil is in the details, Tom.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): The second part of that question is about input from industries such as yours. We talked to Jesse Zeman earlier today at BCWF. We really need that input of those people that are on the land base, ones that are right there on the ground floor, groups like yours and members such as yours.

I guess it goes without saying that it’s critical we have that input on these strategies going forward.

S. Ellis: It’s one of the reasons why I’m here.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Scott, thank you for taking the time out of your day to join us after your trip to Ottawa and back here. It’s greatly appreciated.

Our next presenter is Blair Qualey, New Car Dealers of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours, Blair.

[3:50 p.m.]

NEW CAR DEALERS ASSOCIATION OF B.C.

B. Qualey: It’s great to be here. Good afternoon, everyone.

I’m privileged to serve as the president and CEO of the New Car Dealers Association of British Columbia and, of course, to be gathered here with you on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Sumas First Nation.

The NCDA is the provincial association that represents just over 400 franchised new car and truck dealers in 55 communities around the province. Our members provide about 27,000 family-supporting jobs, and from our recent economic impact study, approximately 27 percent of our members’ workforces are women.

Our sector is responsible for almost $16 billion in retail activity, providing $260 million of direct tax revenue in B.C. and $610 million of total tax revenue to all three levels of government. Our members also provide an estimated $1.2 billion in total tax revenue to all levels of government after factoring in the federal and provincial sales tax paid by consumers on purchases they make.

The new car dealers of B.C. definitely want to be part of keeping our economy moving, and there are three priorities I’d like to touch on with you today that will help support our efforts going forward. Members of the committee may be familiar with my submissions in previous years and will likely recognize all three of these.

The first is the negative impact of the B.C. luxury tax on families and middle-class affordability. Second, critical labour shortage facing new car dealers. Third, predictable funding to maintain B.C.’s leadership position in zero-emission vehicle adoption.

Our submission is focused on building on the areas in which we’ve enjoyed collective success with government while also drawing attention to areas that have their impact on consumers and the economy.

The B.C. luxury tax. The tax, as you may know, kicks in at a $55,000 purchase price, while at the same time, today, the average cost of a new vehicle is $61,000.

A few key statistics to note on the rising cost of new vehicles. Forty percent of new vehicle sales in B.C. in 2022 were at the $55,000 or higher threshold versus 21 percent in 2018. Forty-six percent of mid-size SUVs in B.C. were priced at $55,000 or more in 2022 versus 10 percent in 2018, and 47 percent of compact vans in B.C. were priced at $55,000 or more in 2022 versus just 8 percent in 2018.

The reality is that families pay a luxury tax on the purchase of a van or SUV that they need to get their kids and their friends and the dog and the hockey bags and the groceries to and from various activities. The present luxury tax also captures many pickup trucks that may be required for work or because a family or individual lives in a rural or isolated setting where that form of vehicle may be required.

This presents another layer of taxation on B.C. residents, who are already facing enormous affordability challenges. The NCDA recommends, as we have in the past, that the threshold and, I guess, the tax be reviewed, as this committee has recommended its last three reports and because the tax is not reflective of a luxury item. Perhaps you might even give it a name change. We might now call it the necessities tax as opposed to the luxury tax.

Training to address skill shortages is our second one. Like many other sectors, the auto sector faces a critical labour shortage with an anticipated need for up to 20,000 workers over the next decade. There are many career opportunities for those looking for jobs in a stable, growing industry in positions such as automotive technicians, other career opportunities ranging from finance, marketing, business development, human resources and more.

The association has received extensive feedback from our members about the labour challenges they face, and the challenge of finding qualified local talent is one of their top priorities. We’ve engaged with various government agencies to try and find solutions for these workforce challenges, including SkilledTradesBC, WorkBC and its employment services centres and other labour agencies.

We recommend that further dedicated funding and efforts are necessary to support apprentice and jobs training programs that will be critical to the industry and the consumers our members serve.

Finally, a touch-base on the CleanBC go electric vehicle purchase rebate program, charging rebates and further investments in public charging infrastructure.

[3:55 p.m.]

We’ve been proud, as an association and with our members, to administer the CleanBC go electric program on behalf of the province since 2011. It speaks to a strong collaborative partnership with government, which has helped place British Columbia in a leadership position in electric vehicle sales in Canada on a per-capita basis. The number of registered light-duty zero-emission vehicles has increased from 5,000 in 2016 to more than 100,000 today. That’s a 1,900 percent increase.

Last year 30,000 zero-emission vehicles were purchased in B.C., representing 18 percent of all light-duty vehicle sales in the province. Sustainable, predictable funding would only serve to enhance and build on our collective success in zero-emission vehicle adoption and help push the provincial government closer to its zero-emission vehicle targets.

In conclusion, the NCDA and our members are eager to be part of the solution and keep the economy moving in the right direction while supporting a cleaner, greener future. Our recommendations will help encourage consumer spending and address critical requirements in our sector while creating career opportunities and adjusting or removing onerous tax barriers for working families.

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

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Blair, for the presentation.

You mentioned name changes on the luxury tax, the necessity tax. Maybe I’d suggest the subaverage tax or the rural tax.

The reason why I say maybe perhaps a rural tax is that I know where I live…. I just googled it up here. Here in Abbotsford, the average F-150 is about 70 grand. That’s what people in my riding would predominantly buy. In the Lower Mainland, with closer access to rapid transit and those types of things, you might not need an F-150 down here. You can look out the window right now, and you can tell how many in the parking lot are of that style.

To get away from the name changes and to make it a true luxury tax, what do you think the threshold should be?

B. Qualey: Well, it definitely should be over $55,000, clearly. I mean, with the average price of a vehicle these days at $61,000…. The last time this threshold was adjusted was 2016, I think. Since then, inflation has had a lot of impact on the price of vehicles and the materials. Everything with technology has gotten more and more expensive, right? If you take the time value of money in 2016 and look at it today, $55,000 is probably $80,000, $90,000.

B. Banman: I have two questions. It points out to me that if I’m a shop and I buy tools, I can put those as a tax reduction. Yet the mechanic that wants to work there — now I understand we are losing mechanics to Alberta in drastic numbers — cannot use that as some form of tax credit or tax reduction on their own income tax. Would something as simple as changing that help retain mechanics in your opinion?

Then the other one is that I understand that when it comes to the sales tax for First Nations, there’s no standardized form. This is all over the map. What do you have to say about that? Do you have a solution for that?

B. Qualey: With respect to your first point, the tax credits, I think, would help a great deal — giving mechanics a chance to write off their tools, absolutely. But it’s bigger than that. I mean, the volume of people that are needed today to fix vehicles going forward…. I think the average age of a technician in this province is 55 or 58 years old. We have a huge problem as, in the next number of years, the number of people leaving this industry…. Those kinds of jobs are not one that you can work a long time in because they’re a little more physical.

We need help in encouraging people into the industry, into the schools, more spaces in the schools. We need policies that will help facilitate qualifications for others coming from other jurisdictions. It’s no different than what we’re hearing in health care and in other sectors. Trying to find people is a huge problem, and it’s all hands on deck.

On the First Nations side of things, you have streamlining forms. It makes a lot of sense, and we’d be happy to talk to anyone in government around how we can help support that effort.

A. Walker: Thanks for the presentation. I’m just wondering. From your perspective and your members, what is the impact of the electric vehicle incentive, having it income-tested? What has the impact been for your industry?

[4:00 p.m.]

B. Qualey: Well, it has created, quite frankly, a lot of confusion amongst consumers and a bit with dealers. We’re trying to clear it up with the dealers.

The way the system worked before the income testing was that you knew, both the consumer and the dealer, that the money was there at the time of the transaction. So it didn’t slow things down. Now if the consumer knows that they need to go and get online and fill out the form and get the proper approvals for their income level, that’s great. They’ll come in, and it’ll work fine. Nobody really knows that. So then you’ve got a slowdown.

Part of the challenge at this time, as well, is that you’ve got a huge shortage of electric vehicles. So when something is on the lot and somebody wants to come in and buy it, it’s like…. Well, I have 500 people waiting for this.

The challenge is: does somebody want to take the time to do that? Under normal circumstances, the money would have been there at the time of the transaction.

We’re all trying to do what we can. We understand what was behind that move. To be honest, it has complicated things, and it has slowed things down.

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

To Adam’s question and your answer at the end, I really hope that there’s a way that we can get around that. My office does receive calls on a monthly basis. It’s not taking up a lot of phone time for the CAs, but there is that little bit of confusion as to how it all works. I think there are some people that show up on the lot and think: “This is what I’m going to get.” It’s not exactly that way.

B. Qualey: No. We’re all working closely together with government, and soon B.C. Hydro will be helping with the funding of the program, to see if we can streamline the system and improve the communication to everyone.

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

Next we have Gillian Fuss, the Emergency Planning Secretariat.

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

The floor is yours.

EMERGENCY PLANNING SECRETARIAT

G. Fuss: Good afternoon. As you said, my name is Gillian Fuss. I’m the program manager for the Emergency Planning Secretariat.

We have a board of Mainland Coast Salish First Nations leadership. We work with 31 Mainland Coast Salish First Nations from Yale to Semiahmoo to Squamish, supporting with resilience planning and emergency preparedness. We’ve been about non-stop for the last five years, as you can imagine, between COVID, fires, flooding and now more fires. Yeah, there’s a lot going on.

We’re currently working to support communities with tactical capacity development and advocating for regional resilience planning, to push us away from the stressful and responsive way that we’re working right now to something that’s more regional resilience planning, to a proactive and structured resilience-centred approach that allows for the proper management of values and wellness.

The idea is, eventually, if we can get to the point…. Current predictions are that we will expect three times the amount of rainfall that we got in 2021. Ideally, we would be able to design communities that would be able to withstand that amount of rainfall with minimal impacts. That involves improving drainage practices, policy funding and all of those kinds of things.

I don’t mean resilience in the way that we think about New Orleans, where they consider themselves to be resilient because they keep, essentially, recovering. We want to have resilient structures and infrastructure so that people don’t necessarily have to be resilient, if that makes sense.

What I want to talk to you about today, though, is…. We’re a founding member of the Lower Fraser Floodplains Coalition, formerly the Build Back Better Together crew. We are a group of organizations and experts with a shared goal of helping B.C.’s flood recovery and management efforts to achieve the best possible outcomes by addressing systemic challenges and improving flood planning for the region.

We essentially got started after the floods of 2021, recognizing that a lot of the flood recovery that was happening was building back the same. So putting back the same dikes in the places where they broke the first time. We wanted to emphasize…. The Sendai framework really emphasizes “build back better.” We added the last part, “together,” to include DRIPA or UNDRIP.

Since then, together with Lower Fraser local governments and First Nations, we’ve identified five principles for a made-in-B.C. approach to flood planning and resilience planning that incorporates the pillars of the Sendai framework and the commitment of UNDRIP, which the government is a signatory to.

[4:05 p.m.]

These principles are, one, reducing risk and adapting to climate change. Like I said, three times the amount of rainfall that we got in 2021 is what California got this year. That’s probably what we need to be planning for. Two, advancing reconciliation. Three, thriving salmon in coastal and freshwater ecosystems. We’re using salmon as sort of an example of ecosystem health. Four, supporting sustainable economic and resilient communities into the future. Finally, ensuring that everyone is part of the solution.

That last one is really encouraging people to work together. Previously because of the grant system, we’ve had municipality and community by community working independently. They have to apply for grants, and they’re competing against each other. We’re trying to introduce more of a cooperative model where communities are working together.

We’ve had two forums so far. One of those forums, which actually was held right over there, was where the five principles were agreed to. The third forum is being held tomorrow at Skowkale. Minister Ma is coming, which we’re really excited about. We’ve also had a sub-forum held between farmers and First Nations, talking about that land base, people who are more familiar with the land but also two of the most at-risk groups for flooding in the Lower Mainland, just to come to some agreement about how we can go forward together. So again, that “build back better together.” Everyone working together is the real core of what we do.

My ask is…. We’d like $2 million per year for five years, available through EMCR, to support process planning and for setting up subregional and regional floodplain tables and for First Nations participation. We’ve learned from our neighbours to the south and from communities we’re working with that this conversation piece and collaboration piece is really essential to resilience planning. Right now we don’t have any funding for it. So that’s what we’re looking for.

The second piece is funding for our continued process. That’s about $400,000 per year for five years. That would help us to continue supporting regional collaboration after the failure of the Lower Mainland flood management strategy and to set up future collaboration.

Then, finally, support, if you could, please, for subregional modelling and planning, such as funding for climate change modelling — so I don’t have to guess if we’re going to get the amount of rainfall that California got or if it’s something else — and also other things that are principle-based, like the Watershed Security Coalition’s ask.

Okay, I’m done.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Time to exhale.

Gillian, I have a question right off the rattle. Can you tell me if you are working with FNESS? If you are working with FNESS, what kind of assistance are you getting?

G. Fuss: Yeah. We work decently closely with FNESS. We do work with emergency response.

Unfortunately, FNESS hasn’t had a Lower Mainland or southwest representative for a little while. They’ve had Alison, but she was only in her position for about six months. We do work closely with FNESS when there is someone allocated to the area. When there isn’t someone allocated to the area, we bring them in as needed.

They provide a number of good services like fire extinguishers, fire support, FireSmart, all those things. I believe they also have a number of tiger dams. They also sit on PREOC when there’s an emergency. We work with them during those events but less so, I would say, in the day-to-day of emergency planning. There just isn’t someone here yet. If there is someone here…. Yeah. We’d be happy to work with them.

The fire right now in Chehalis is a really good example. We’re working with the community in their EOC, and FNESS is supporting B.C. Wildfire with the community connections. So we’re sort of both working on both sides to ensure that the community and Wildfire are connected.

I would also say that there are a few communities in this area who don’t work with FNESS. Their approach to engagement hasn’t always been on top, if that makes sense.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I’m getting that look.

FNESS is the First Nations Emergency Services Society.

A Voice: Thank you so much.

G. Fuss: I’m sorry.

M. Starchuk (Chair): It’s my bad. I happened to…. In fact, the executive director and I started our careers together.

G. Fuss: Oh, awesome.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes. I won’t say how many years ago but together.

B. Banman: Thank you very much. As the shadow critic or minister for EMCR, I’m very interested in the discussion that happened with farmers and First Nations. There would be some apprehension, I am sure, on both sides of that. In particular, right behind us is where the waters came in.

How have those talks gone? More importantly, what can we do to help facilitate those talks so that there is the agreement around that table on both sides as to what needs to be done to become more resilient?

[4:10 p.m.]

G. Fuss: Absolutely. So far we’ve had one conversation devoted just to that. Then tomorrow farmers are coming in the same room as the province, federal government, municipalities and First Nations, so we hope that we can continue that dialogue there.

The first conversation, I would say, went quite well. A lot of farmers recognize that there’s a new reality now that they haven’t previously had to deal with, with the coming of DRIPA and things like that, and acknowledge that the current dikes are not adequate for the needs and that we also don’t have the money to fix them. They know that there will be some changes that need to happen.

Farmers want to be part of the solution. They’re just not sure how to be part of the solution…. Sorry, this is speaking from my experience at that table, not speaking for farmers. They want to be part of the solution but in a way that doesn’t mean that they’re the ones that lose out — so they don’t have to lose their land, which is the current concern.

We’re really lucky to work with Dave Zehnder from Farmland Advantage, who works in a similar avenue of trying to make the equation work for farmers with respect to conservation. We’re trying to do that same model with flood management. Overall, I think that the ideals are really aligned with farmers and First Nations. Both want to protect the land. Both want to continue working and living where they are but are also wanting to see more sustainable flood management and moving into this next era of DRIPA and things like that.

Farmers — it’s just a matter of making sure that their interests are looked after and that the equation works so that if we are, for example, setting back dikes, farmers are compensated for now being flood infrastructure for the rest of the Lower Mainland, something like that. Or putting some farmers…. For example, we were at a table, and there was a turkey farmer and a cranberry farmer. Turkey farmers are not so great to have in an area that gets flooded; cranberries, great. That’s the kind of planning we’re looking at.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Gillian, thank you for your presentation this afternoon. I think the EPCs, emergency planning coordinators, of the past now have a focus…. No longer is it on the corner of somebody’s desk. Traditionally, it’s probably been there since the last incident that took place. It’s organizations like yours that come forward to invigorate that EPC role and what it is that they can do in the community.

Thank you for your presentation, and thank you for what you do in the community.

G. Fuss: Thank you for listening to me and for letting me spend some time in the AC.

M. Starchuk (Chair): You can stay as long as you want. Well, actually, until seven o’clock.

Next is Gerry Dyble, Hope and Area Transition Society.

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

The floor is yours.

HOPE AND AREA TRANSITION SOCIETY

G. Dyble: Thank you. Good afternoon. I’m pleased to be able to present before this committee today.

I am Gerry Dyble, executive director for the Hope and Area Transition Society. I represent the largest non-profit in the Fraser East. This geographical area is from Agassiz, up to Boston Bar, across to Manning Park, down the No. 1 Highway, back to Agassiz. This is considered 900 square miles, surrounded by 13 Indigenous communities.

Our work entails four broad streams of service: domes­tic violence, substance use, youth and family services and homelessness. The three areas on which I would like to address this committee today are violence against women in relationships, substance use programs and rural communities.

My first recommendation is under violence against women in relationships. This must be a priority for the budget in 2024. Women are dying and going missing. Adequate funding needs to be implemented.

In the 2023 budget, it did not recognize VAW or murdered and missing Indigenous women and children. This lack of investment is shocking given that this is the seventh consecutive year of an increase in police-reported intimate partner violence, with women and girls being 80 percent of victims.

As per the B.C. Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity, Indigenous women are 4½ times more likely to be murdered than all women in Canada, and according to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, B.C. has the highest number of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls — 160 cases, accounting for 27 of all cases in the national database.

There was no new funding for women’s transition house programs, the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General that funds our Stopping the Violence and our children’s PEACE program. Not to mention any of these programs in the 2023 budget does not make these critical issues disappear. What happens is it perpetuates and leads to increasing intimate partner violence and keeps women staying in unsafe relationships.

[4:15 p.m.]

The second recommendation I bring forth is that with the announcement of $1 billion in new funding to expand mental health and addiction services, funding for community-based substance use services in rural areas needs to be a priority. A cookie-cutter approach does not work in rural communities.

The opiate crisis is taking centre stage, and other substance-related issues are not being addressed. This is highlighted in the most recent coroner’s report. Hope has seen an increase from 2016 to 2022 in illicit drug deaths — this does not include opiate deaths — from 2016, 24 people per 100,000, to a high, in 2021, of 100 people per 100,000. This is an 81 percent increase in illicit deaths over six years.

In our schools, our workers are seeing an increase in pot users since legalization. There’s greater access and acceptance. Vaping is trending up, and students as young as those in grade 4 are now vaping. We know that early-onset substance use leads to a greater increase in addiction later in life.

The number of people accessing services for alcohol dependency has increased. With the pipeline in our community, we are seeing more and more workers needing access to counselling.

An increase in mental health issues and those diagnosed with PTSD. In schools, we are seeing students with an increased level of anxiety, depression and a lack of socialization skills due to COVID. Students are unable to adapt to the new normal and are turning to various unhealthy ways of coping.

We are seeing more clients with severe depression and long wait times for psychiatry. The wait time for detox is too long and does not exist in Hope.

In regards to rural communities, my third recommendation is that rural communities need to have adequate funding, recognizing that our communities are faced with the same issues as urban centres, with limited resources, transportation and accessibility, and recognizing that the needs are not any different and, perhaps, more necessary than urban centres, as urban centres have many more options for services and resources. Linking these issues back to the first two points is the fact that Hope is considered a rural community, with parts of service areas considered remote.

Hope has a vast array of social issues, with very limited resources. Putting this into context, we have barriers in access to services due to our geographical spread; limited staff due to a lack of funding, part-time positions, recruitment and retention issues; a lack of consistent services; a lack of affordable housing; no second-stage housing; transportation within Hope and up the canyon; a lack of specialized services such as psychiatric services; no immediate supports for detox; and a lack of wellness for students and youth in schools.

To summarize, the 2024 budget needs to reflect funding for VAW programs, an allocation of funding dollars for community-based substance use programs and an emphasis on rural and remote communities. The social service sector is in crisis, and the provincial government needs to recognize the trickle-down effect that happens when critical life-saving programs and services are not adequately funded and rural and remote communities are forgotten. The whole of society pays the price.

Thank you for your time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Gerry, thank you very much for your presentation and for being bang on five minutes. That was very….

G. Dyble: I know. I did have four pages prior to coming.

M. Starchuk (Chair): If you wouldn’t mind, Gerry, could you describe Hope and area geographically?

G. Dyble: Geographically, some of our provincially funded contracts extend to Agassiz. So if we start at Agassiz, we go across to Harrison Mills, up to Sts’ailes, back up the No. 7 to the Boston Bar and Boothroyd area, across to Manning Park, down the No. 1 and then back again at Bridal Falls.

That’s 900 square miles. That’s the largest geographical region in the Fraser Health Authority, which we provide service to. Within that, there are 13 First Nation communities that surround us.

Our services are based in Hope. If we need to go out to the feeder communities, it’s anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes for a drive. Some of our programs are part-time funded from the province, so we don’t reach those feeder communities.

A. Walker: I really appreciate the request for VAW funding, violence-against-women funding. Violence in the home creates trauma for, obviously, those involved but also children and future generations, which creates a problem for the future.

In Hope, specifically, as far as….We’re looking at broader funding. What would that mean in Hope? What kind of funding would be needed just in your community?

G. Dyble: I sent a letter to Minister Farnworth back in November asking for increased funding for our Stopping the Violence program and our children’s program. It’s the PEACE program, the prevention, education, advocacy, counselling and empowerment program. I said we have not received increased funding.

[4:20 p.m.]

In 2017, they did a consultation in the province. They were going to look at, I think, ten new geographical service areas. That never happened. What they did is that they gave a small stipend to increase administrative services.

We need full-time employment for our Stopping the Violence and our PEACE counsellor, because as we know, recruitment and retention is difficult in the best of times. So when we’re talking about part-time positions, it’s hard to recruit.

S. Chant: How much?

G. Dyble: How much am I asking? I wish I would have brought that. I’m going to say I think that the information I sent to Minister Farnworth is…. I was asking…. It wasn’t more than $100,000. That’s what I was asking for, and that would have been for both programs combined.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Susie, you’re next on my list. Is that the question?

S. Chant: No. It would have been part of it.

Tell me. The name of your society is Hope and Area Transition Society. What is the transition component?

G. Dyble: We started as a transition house 25 years ago, 30 years ago. I started 25. We were a small transition house, and that’s all we provided.

S. Chant: For corrections?

G. Dyble: For women and children fleeing domestic violence. Over the course of the last 25 years, we’ve grown from five staff and $250,000 worth of provincial funding now to over $4½ million of provincial funding and 76 staff and about 22 programs that service that geographical region.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. Can you expand on what you mentioned earlier? There was a survey on geographical service areas that were examined, and that never came through. Then you also made a comment that the funding has been, basically, stalled out. Since then, there has been no increase in funding. Can you explain that survey?

G. Dyble: Yes. So the Solicitor General, back in 2017, had done a public consultation on VAW programs because they were going to increase funding. I want to say…. I can’t remember.

Was it $10 million they received? I can’t remember.

They wanted to do a consultation as based on need. I believe that they looked at ten new geographical service areas, and Agassiz was going to be one of those areas. Then it never came to fruition. My experience in consultation processes is that sometimes they do consultation, and you have to be careful what you wish for in consultation, because you discover that you don’t have the funding to actually make it come true.

I think that is, in fact, what happened. They realized that there was going to be a whole bunch of money that they didn’t have, so they just said: “We have this money, and we’re going to spread it out to you.” So I think we received maybe about $5,000 or $6,000 per program, and it wasn’t, of course, adequate.

G. Chow: So do you run transition houses?

G. Dyble: I’m the executive director, so I run all of our programs.

G. Chow: You actually have the physical facility too?

G. Dyble: Yes. We own our own home in the community. We received, 25 years ago, a grant from CMHC through shelter haven, and if we ran a transition house for 15 years, it became our asset. So it is our asset.

G. Chow: So they include, of course, children, women?

G. Dyble: Yes, and 73 percent of our women who come through our transition house have to move outside the community because there’s no housing for them. We have no second-stage housing.

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

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. Your violence-against-women programs. Now, something I’ve learned from experiences in my community with the Transition Society…. What does it look like? My understanding is that they have to be contained programs, that there’s a commitment to come to the whole program by the men.

G. Dyble: We don’t have men’s programs.

R. Leonard: It’s not a men’s program?

G. Dyble: No, it’s not. It’s women and children fleeing domestic violence. So we have a transition house. Then we have the Stopping the Violence program for women who either are impacted by historical and intergenerational violence or current violence. Then our children’s program — children from ages three to 18 who have witnessed or been abused themselves.

R. Leonard: Okay. Sorry. I misunderstood.

G. Chow: So you have to keep that location secret, at least from the spouses.

G. Dyble: Yes.

G. Chow: That’s basically what I….

G. Dyble: Yes. It’s a confidential location in Hope.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Gerry, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon, and more importantly, thank you for the work that you do. You know, 900 square miles is hard to comprehend when we think about other jurisdictions that are in the province of British Columbia. Thank you very much for what you do.

Committee members, we are going to take a recess to 4:45-ish while we see if somebody else shows up, and the rest of the group is going to come up a little bit sooner.

The committee recessed from 4:25 p.m. to 4:45 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right, everyone. Our next presenter is Colette Trudeau from Métis Nation B.C.

Colette, you have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes followed with questions and/or comments. Before we hit the timer…. No pressure, but last year, you took us right to the edge of that roller coaster. It was the best. It was the perfect five-minute presentation of the entire….

C. Trudeau: No pressure to do a repeat.

M. Starchuk (Chair): If you feel that, it’s all on you, but anyway.

All right, Colette, the floor is yours.

MÉTIS NATION B.C.

C. Trudeau: Perfect. Tanisha. Dishinihkaashoon Colette Trudeau.

Hello, everyone. My name is Colette Trudeau, and I am honoured to serve as the chief executive officer for Métis Nation British Columbia.

I’d like to start by thanking the committee for the opportunity to present Métis Nation British Columbia’s 2024 budget submission.

I’d also like to acknowledge the Finance Committee’s clear recommendations to support last year’s budget submission. In the report on the Budget 2023 consultation, the committee made the unequivocal recommendation to provide funding to Métis Nation B.C. for governance and to ensure that Métis culture is recognized. We trust you’ll value the strategic direction our nation is taking on our updated request in the broader context of reconciliation.

We recognize the ongoing need for more education about our nation. Métis Nation British Columbia is the government of Métis in B.C. We are part of the Métis National Council and represent more than 24,000 registered Métis citizens and advocate for approximately 98,000 self-identified Métis people in the province. Our mission is to improve the quality of life of Métis in B.C. by developing culturally distinct programs and services.

The province has recognized that Métis people in B.C. have certain Aboriginal rights as one of the distinct Indigenous peoples in Canada under section 35 of the constitution. In addition to our unique language, Michif, we have made cultural, historical and contemporary contributions to the creation of the province. It’s imperative that British Columbia take a distinctions-based approach to working with MNBC to ensure an understanding of how our nation defines DRIPA within the rights of our citizens.

We want to be a good partner to the province in reconciliation, but the lack of core capacity is holding us back. Our total request for this budget submission is the mere amount of $104 million. That includes governance, strategic programming and reconciliation engagement.

To speak briefly to Métis governance. MNBC has a citizen mandate to both form government and pursue self-governance. We are seeking funding for the fiscal year of 2024-25 to ensure sufficient resources for the operation of MNBC broadly and our board of directors and chartered communities.

Core governance activities requiring funding include our Métis Nation Governing Assembly; our AGM; our MNBC Senate, which is our judicial arm; Métis Women B.C., which is our women’s committee; a youth committee; and our Veterans B.C. Committee. Unfortunately, our 39 Métis charter communities throughout the province are volunteer-based, so the funding that they do receive is not predictable or sustainable in this era of reconciliation.

We are set up very similar to the provincial government. Therefore, we have various ministries that emulate the provincial ministries. Therefore, our work really does parallel quite nicely with all the work that the province is doing. Our request is for $5.23 million to support the critical governance activities, which reflects our continued growth.

Through cultural protection and strategic programming, we have various areas that are of key importance to our Métis culture. Just to highlight a few, we did sign a critical document in 2018 that was around pursuing jurisdiction for Métis children and families. This is a key area that we want to continue to pursue, as we have over 750 kids, Métis kids, in the child welfare system.

Another key area where we are seeking funding is around K to 12. Our Métis students do not receive sufficient support. As the Métis government, we receive $50,000 a year to support K to 12 and advocacy across all of our school districts.

Another key consideration is around housing and homelessness. The federal government provided MNBC with funding to support land purchases, but we really do need to receive additional support to develop the properties.

[4:50 p.m.]

A lot of our key priorities really do align with the province and your key priorities.

Around reconciliation engagements, the province and MNBC are advancing our relationship by pursuing a new whole-of-government approach to Métis relations as a partnership that respects and furthers Métis self-determination. Again, as a good partner in reconciliation, MNBC receives frequent requests from the province to engage in the development of distinctions-based legislation. We are seeking funding in the amount of $17 million to continue to do that good work.

In conclusion, thank you again for the opportunity to present MNBC’s budget for 2024. I’d love to answer any questions you may have.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Colette, for your presentation. I’d like to ask a question.

Can you provide us with some examples of the types of programs and services that MNBC runs for its citizens and of where there may be gaps between the federal and provincial funding for those types of programs?

C. Trudeau: Absolutely. In general, MNBC receives the vast majority of our funding from the federal government. We have seen an uptick through the signing of our letter of intent with the province, which has really worked on moving towards a reconciliation agreement. But really, in terms of federal funding in comparison to provincial funding, there is a major imbalance. Quite a huge proportion of our programs are, primarily, federally funded.

Just last year, we have seen an increase in the relationship with AEST, but we ran out of funding to support Métis students in post-secondary, short tickets, long tickets. We were able to support over 2,800 Métis people with education, but there were still a number of them on a wait-list.

Other key areas that we’re focusing on…. Again, there is that discrepancy. It goes back to getting Métis people into homes. We are just about to launch our first-time-homebuyers program for citizens. We have an initial investment of $1 million, over five years, from the federal government, but that simply isn’t enough. We know that there are so many Métis people — and again, I say 98,000 self-identified and 24,000 citizens — and we’re wanting to help them get into homes.

We’ve done a number of social infrastructure engagements that have really demonstrated the importance of creating Métis community hubs. Being able to access distinction-based funding for housing is really critical to us.

In addition, with the increased cost in food, we do have our food program, which is helping Métis citizens with the rising costs of groceries. But we’ve again been using federal funding to really do some of these more specific programs that support key gaps that our citizens have identified.

I would say that there are really great programs that are happening across MNBC, and that partnership between the province and MNBC could really help ensure that we’re supporting all of our citizens in a really good way.

H. Yao: I think I asked this exact same question last year. I do apologize.

I’m a bit troubled by the idea of funding. Obviously, as the Métis Nation, you’re here to have a government-to-government conversation. We should be talking about revenue-sharing instead of funding by the government. I should have said it this way.

Of course, unlike Indigenous communities or a First Nation, there’s no land title that really allows us to actually define the revenue-sharing. If you don’t mind me taking a step back from your booklet, do you see any kind of planning strategy talking about how we can have a future conversation around really more of a government-to-government talk and about revenue-sharing in a way that you think might work for Métis Nation B.C.?

C. Trudeau: Yes. We have started on that process. We are working with the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation to start down the path of a new fiscal framework. We’re very much on the front end of it. We’re creating a policy paper to really see what that looks like.

We see an opportunity through a new fiscal framework to ensure that…. We recognize that whole-of-government approach and that government-to-government approach, where there’s an opportunity for MNBC to function as a government, to identify the gaps and to be able to fund areas that we truly need to fund, rather than just one-off different programs that are very prescriptive.

[4:55 p.m.]

We see this as a key opportunity to truly meet the needs of our citizens. Again, we are at the front end, but we know the province is in a position where they want to advance reconciliation. This is a key way to support us on our path to true recognition as the Métis government for Métis in B.C.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation. Just going through the requests here. I’m stopping on recommendation 3, on reconciliation engagement. There’s a need here for capacity-building.

As the MNBC form of government is somewhat similar to what the provincial government is with ministries, what part of capacity…? Which ministry do you find that needs the most capacity? In the provincial government, there are some that might be okay, but some ministries need a lot of capacity.

C. Trudeau: I would say our Ministry of Women and Gender Equity is incredibly underfunded. I know there has been a lot of work around missing and murdered Indigenous women, gender-based violence. There’s a lot of work being done in that area, but there are simply not enough resources, quite frankly, that are going from federal to provincial and that end up being able to support grassroots women and communities in doing the work that needs to be done. That is a key ministry that I would say is underfunded.

S. Chant: Thank you very much for your presentation, and thank you for the work that you do in advocating and representing. It’s wonderful.

You’re speaking about a lack of core capacity funding for the 39 Métis chartered communities. Tell me a little bit more about what a “chartered community” is and what that core funding would look like. If you can, give me a dollar amount.

C. Trudeau: Absolutely. Thank you for asking that question. This is a key part of education that we need to do. Métis Nation B.C.’s governance structure doesn’t exist without our chartered communities. They are our community.

Not to get long-winded, but our communities are the reason so many Métis people are being able to reclaim and revitalize our culture. Our communities are set up as non-profit societies. They have boards of directors that lead, quite frankly, the day-to-day operations and are looked to, to run events and to do all the administration — submit books, do all of that work — with no staff capacity. MNBC has done everything in our ability to support them. Without them, we don’t exist.

Really, our communities are seeking the opportunity at this point to be able to have an office for people to come in and get support, and to have someone be staffed to be there and continue to grow, put in proposals so they can continue to do that work. I know for many of them — we are split up into seven regions, and we have communities all throughout and having from about 100 Métis citizens to 4,000 citizens or more — their needs vary. They’re all in different places but truly make up our structure.

On that capacity, if they were sitting here, they would say: “Well, probably the full amount that we ask for would be sufficient.” From my standpoint, being able to give them…. If we were able to put a dollar figure of baseline $50 million a year, we’re looking at maybe $1.5 million per community to do make sure that they have the staff in place and to continue to do that cultural revitalization work that they need to do.

Right now we’re looking at: what we can take off of our administration. What programs can we third-party administer? Our agreements are not always as flexible that we can provide funding to our communities to then deliver those programs.

We’re looking for every mechanism, but we truly want to advocate so they can stand on their own and do the work that they need to do in community rather than everything being required to be volunteer-driven. No other non-profit really has 39 different non-profits connected to them and that ask them to work strictly as volunteers.

M. Starchuk (Chair): The final question. We’re nearing the final end of our five minutes.

R. Leonard: You say the vast majority of your funding so far is from the federal government, and you’re asking for just over $100 million. What is it that you get from the federal government on an annual basis?

[5:00 p.m.]

C. Trudeau: Our annual budget federally is over $80 million that we receive, plus or minus. Again, those are all program, service, primary. So we have very specific, prescribed pieces that we have to cover. That also includes our housing and homelessness and getting Métis child care centres in place.

So there are a lot of infrastructure dollars that we have that the federal government has provided. We generally haven’t operated at that level, but with the focus on housing and child care, we have seen an increase in our annual budget.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Well, Colette, thank you very much for your time and your presentation this afternoon.

C. Trudeau: Thank you so much, everyone.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up, we have Coletta Holmes, LIFE Recovery Association.

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

The floor is yours.

LIFE RECOVERY ASSOCIATION

C. Holmes: Thank you very much.

Good afternoon, hon. Members of the Legislative Assembly. Thank you for the opportunity to present today. I am Coletta Holmes, executive director with LIFE Recovery Association here in Abbotsford.

You will already know why recovery matters. You’ve likely heard many stories, perspectives and needs in your constituencies. I’m here as one of many registered charities stretched yet still supporting women with addictions.

LIFE Recovery Association is a faith-based, abstinence-based, residential recovery program for adult women. We have a biopsychosocial spiritual model implementing the 12 steps, community meetings, group work, counselling and health supports, as well as social and recreational activities. For almost 25 years, LIFE has delivered programs to women in addiction largely through fundraising and a social enterprise, LIFE’s Second Chance Thrift Store.

LIFE owns four residences in Abbotsford. One house hosts the 90-day program known as First Stage. This program is registered with assisted living as supportive recovery. Two second-stage residences offer safe, sober, affordable housing while residents build recovery capital by working their recovery plan, pursuing education and/or employment and/or custody of their children. The fourth location is a safe, sober, affordable, independent living house with a tenancy agreement. Here, residents have a private bedroom and share common space.

We do not have a contract with our health authority as we do not serve residents who are following medication maintenance therapy. As a registered assisted-living, supportive recovery residence, $50,582.88, or 46 percent of 2022’s $110,575.54 First Stage program revenue is provided by the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction. Program revenue is client or agency payment for an individual’s First Stage program.

In 2022, the ministry’s per diem covered 11 percent of First Stage’s $443,809.11 program costs. It should be noted that this residence is mortgage-free due to our fis­cally responsible board of directors, our focus on long-term sustainability, and committed donors.

To emphasize the need and importance, we are offering but one recommendation today: to increase the per-diem rate from $35.90 to a minimum of $60. Our rationale is that LIFE’s actual cost is $101.33 per day, bearing in mind again that there’s no overhead in terms of mortgage or rent payments.

According to appendix 1 of the travel allowance from the gov.bc.ca website, accommodation rates for government employees staying in private lodging is $37.29 per day, and the meal per diem for government employees group 1 is $58.85.

The other rationale: the benefit to society, the cost savings in policing and emergency health services and the dependence on the social services sector to provide recovery programs should be as valuable as the meal per diem noted. Though registered for up to 18 clients, communicable disease prevention protocols and worsening mental health has caused us to decrease our occupancy to 12. So our revenue, of course, is down.

Thank you for your consideration.

[5:05 p.m.]

B. Banman: Well, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to see you, Coletta.

I can tell you firsthand the good work this organization does. They’ve been in our community and a staple of our community for a long time. They do have a fantastic thrift store, and I encourage all to go stop at it. It’s right at the end of South Fraser Way before you go over the Peardonville overpass.

That aside, I want to zero in on…. Your program is not necessarily for everyone because it is a sober program. So two questions. One, do you feel that you are being punished because it is a sober program? What is your success rate for those who go through your system? What’s your success rate for those that go on? You do give them job opportunities within the thrift store and help them on, what’s your success rate?

C. Holmes: Thank you for your question. I don’t feel that we’re being punished. I do feel that it’s not recognized that there needs to be choice.

If you look at the residents bill of rights under the Community Care Act, one of the points is that residents’ rights have services that are tailored specifically for them on the basis of their unique capabilities, needs, cultural and spiritual preferences. And I will maintain that for many people of many faiths, they will say that is a cultural issue. It’s a tradition. It’s a part of a way of life. It’s not just strictly a matter of — do they pray before they go to bed at night?

I don’t think we’re punished, but I don’t think that it’s acknowledged how much that an individual’s spiritual life is part of their whole life. I would also say that abstinence space is not for us. The fact that it’s completely sober isn’t a spiritual matter. It’s a matter of the feedback that we have from the clients that we have, and what they’d like. They are looking for something so that they’re not on another substance.

Typically, they’ll say: “I want to go cold turkey.” They’re advised not to go cold turkey — so many complications. Many of you will know about that. There are other ways that they can go through detox before they come into the program. But for us, we’re not seeing people who may not be as clear-minded because they are just getting used to other substances being introduced to help them with their withdrawal.

Your second question…?

B. Banman: Success rate.

C. Holmes: Our success rate. Well, you hate to really quantify that, and I’ll tell you why. It’s, really, anecdotal. For us, it’s about: how many sober days do they have? How many days were they able to make amends? Were they able to restore their families? Were they able to go back to the business that they stole from and say: “Let me pay for that”? Go pay their fines with the motor vehicle branch and ICBC and all the rest. Go to court. Take parenting courses.

They may do that for a year. They may do that for a year and a half, and they may have a three-week slip. Then they come back, and they go back into the program, and they do the same thing for three years. Then they might have a slip, and they go back into a program. Sometimes it’s our program; sometimes it’s another organization’s program.

Sometimes you need to go through several different programs to hear it from a different person before it clicks for you. So success to us is anybody that has the trust in us to come back to the program again, that knows that trust has been built while they were there in their 90-day stay, and they don’t feel shame about returning.

S. Chant: Thanks very much, and thank you for the work that you do. It’s hard work. It’s very hard work.

So if your cost is $100 a day, and you’re getting a per diem of $36 and change, where’s the rest of the money coming from?

C. Holmes: Fundraising. Donors. We do have a gaming grant. The gaming grant is $100,000. So the expenses that I listed are for just the First Stage program, because that’s the one that comes under assisted living as supportive recovery. The other programs we run…. All of the pre-admission work we do and the post-recovery, as they go out into community — none of that do we have any funding for.

The individuals in our Second Stage houses and our sober independent living just pay a flat rent of $500 per month. We don’t receive funding for those locations. What we have are donors that provide a lot of generosity, and we divide it where it needs to go. I will say our social enterprise thrift store provides about 40 percent of the revenue required for all of our operations.

A. Walker: Just wondering how many people you are able to serve a year, and do you have a wait-list?

C. Holmes: It’s very interesting. In the summertime, normally, you would see your numbers go down. That’s what everybody expects because people don’t mind camping or being housed in a different way. We actually are at capacity, right now, with 12. Our capacity was 18.

[5:10 p.m.]

That’s what we’re registered for. However, we choose to operate with less because of staffing and other issues. Currently we’re at capacity with, I believe, six on our wait-list. That’s a huge change for our organization, and, talking with some others, we’re seeing a bit of a trend about that as well.

We say 12 at a time for a 90-day program, but you really can’t do the math that way because there are people that come from Corrections that are there for a week or two weeks to meet obligations that they have there, and then they leave, so then it’s not just strictly 90 days, 90 days, 90 days. Last year, we had 71 people come through our first-stage program.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, Coletta, thank you very much for your presentation, and thank you very much for what you do in the community.

The last thank-you I will give is to yourself and Tony for altering your schedules to fill a gap that we had in today’s presentation roster. Thank you very much.

On that note, Tony Rebelo, CUPE Fraser Valley district council.

Tony, thank you for coming in early as well to fill in those gaps that are there. You have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of comment or questions.

The floor is yours.

CUPE FRASER VALLEY
DISTRICT COUNCIL

T. Rebelo: Perfect. Thank you.

Good afternoon, members, and thank you for having me for presenting today. My name is Tony Rebelo, and I’m the president of CUPE 7000, which represents SkyTrain workers in the Lower Mainland. I’m here today in my capacity as a vice-president of the CUPE Fraser Valley district council, a regional group of CUPE locals that works to improve the communities CUPE members work and live in.

Our council represents workers from Surrey through to the Fraser Canyon who work in the municipal, library, education, non-profit, emergency services and social service sectors. Today, I’ll be speaking about a key community service across British Columbia, and that’s public transit.

Our transit systems make excellent use of public resources by providing sustainable and affordable mobility to all citizens, connecting people to the services, education, employment and community resources that they require. Accessible transit helps address inequity by providing equal access to mobility and amenities and helps address the climate crisis by replacing personal vehicle transportation with far more environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

While the highly urbanized areas of the province have good access to a diverse range of transit options, rural and suburban communities are challenged by inaccessible systems. For far too many British Columbians, transit is too indirect and too infrequent to be a reliable transportation option. This is particularly true for rural and remote communities, where travel between communities and to a regional centre is often required to access health care, employment, education and other basic services.

Even in locations where transit is widely accessible and meets the needs of citizens, as in Metro Vancouver, fares can be a huge barrier, and reliance on fare revenue can create an unstable funding environment, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We recommend that Budget 2024 include increased investments in public transit, including urban, suburban, rural and intercommunity systems and a permanent funding for the B.C. Bus North. This investment will facilitate growth in services, reduced reliance on fees and gas taxes, help B.C. address the climate crisis and provide good jobs to workers, all while getting citizens where they need to go in support of families, communities and businesses.

Our second recommendation is to invest in the public operation of public transportation systems. In 2022, British Columbia saw its longest transit strike ever. A year later, another transit strike is on its way to reaching that same milestone, as CUPE 561 members right here in the Fraser Valley have been on strike since March.

These disputes are indicative of a contracting-out model that appears to deny workers of fair wages paid in publicly operated systems like Victoria and Metro Vancouver. By expanding public delivery, wage inequities across the sector could be corrected, virtually eliminating recruitment and retention challenges by providing lifelong, family-supporting jobs along with a pension.

Fair compensation and retirement security encourages qualified applicants to join and stay with high-quality employers, producing a positive effect on the service provided. Moving to public operation strengthens the connection between elected officials and the public services they oversee on citizens’ behalf, ensures that private profit doesn’t subtract funds from public services and provides stability in service delivery for the benefit of our communities and economy.

[5:15 p.m.]

I want to close by speaking about the challenges parents experience accessing child care when relying on public transit. Multiple and out-of-the-way locations for child care services force parents out of public transit and into vehicles, undermining affordability and adding needless and environmentally harmful traffic to our communities.

For many who can neither find affordable programs in their neighbourhood nor afford a vehicle, child care is simply out of reach. These struggles persist because B.C.’s model for child care is one in which nearly all spaces are provided by for-profit and not-for-profit operators.

Central and convenient locations for child care. Ones that are on major and rapid transit routes come with huge price tags, undermining the already fragile private market-based financial model. Where high-demand space is used, facility costs cut into the limited resources required to pay staff a fair wage or produce high fees.

British Columbia needs a public child care that provides reliable and easy-to-access spaces in every community. The integration of before- and after-school care into the public education system is the beginning of such a system. Public child care in schools means fewer transitions and better care for kids and a single drop-off and pickup location for parents that is generally accessible to vehicle and transit users alike. This model could be implemented across our province using existing spaces and, in many cases, using existing and underemployed staff already working in our schools.

Accordingly, our third recommendation is to vastly expand integrated child care operated in-house by school districts to create thousands of new, affordable and accessible child care spaces in our communities.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Tony, thank you for your presentation this afternoon.

B. Banman: Tony, thank you very much for coming in. Thank you, also, for getting here early.

T. Rebelo: No problem.

B. Banman: If you were to say to this table one thing….

You know, we do not want this strike to become the longest.

T. Rebelo: We don’t either.

B. Banman: It doesn’t help. It doesn’t help your members, because they’ll never recover. It doesn’t help the citizens that rely on this service. If there is any piece of advice you could give this table, what would it be to help solve this striking and get the wheels moving again?

M. Starchuk (Chair): I’m going to jump in here and say, Tony, that I’m going to ask you not to answer that question here if that’s okay, unless there’s disagreement with that. It’s a different table.

B. Banman: Fair enough. I apologize.

T. Rebelo: You can call me later, and I can answer that question if you’d like.

B. Banman: Yeah, we’ll do that.

T. Rebelo: Sounds good. Please do.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Tony, I have a question with regards to when you talked about rural transit and your members that are there. We’ve been hearing it elsewhere about rural transit and the issues that are there. Do you believe that you have the membership…? Should transit be expanded to get greater hours, longer hours, more frequency? Do you have the membership to actually provide the service?

T. Rebelo: CUPE, as our members?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yeah.

T. Rebelo: Right now with rural transit, there are not a lot of CUPE members that provide that service. I think, given the opportunity….

In the North, there is no bus service. There’s no constant bus service in the North, and there’s the Highway of Tears. We need to address the North. I think if you provide good jobs that are supplied by B.C. Transit, we’ll be able to get those members there for sure.

A. Walker: We’re hearing from a lot of different groups about the challenges of not having access to affordable, accessible, quality child care. I’m just wondering, from your members, what’s the impact that you’re hearing from some of your members about not having access or maybe the cost of it?

T. Rebelo: A lot of our members are…. I know, personally, people who have chosen not to work because (1) it’s too expensive, and (2) it’s hard to get into facilities. People are looking for ways to get into a facility that’s affordable so those folks can actually go out and contribute back to life and work and just be a contributing partner to this society. There are a lot of folks that have those challenges right now.

We’ve already got a system in place. We have the schools, right? It’s almost a no-brainer where…. Let’s start moving down that direction, and we can provide good…. There are good people with education assistants that are there already that know how to take care of children, and we’ll be able to provide them more hours. You’ll attract more folks into the EA position.

[5:20 p.m.]

If anyone knows an education assistant, it’s a very tough job. I’ve learned that over the years by talking with members who are educational assistants. I would never want to do what they do. They face a lot of things.

I think the people who do that work really care about the kids. It would just be a great, good step going that route, and we’ll also be providing affordable, good child care across the province.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Tony. I just have a quick question. Assuming the child care system you’re referring to gets established, how many individuals do you think or what percentage of labour can be released back into our labour force in a way to help us to make up the labour shortage that we have right now?

T. Rebelo: That’s a really good question. I don’t know if I can give you a percentage, but just based on folks that I know that are choosing to stay home because child care is just too much and it would cost them more to go to work, maybe another 5 or 10 percent. Again, based on a very small number.

H. Yao: Small sample.

T. Rebelo: Small sample, yes.

G. Chow: Thank you for your presentation there, Tony. You mentioned EAs, education assistants, in terms of being in the school. You also are now advocating, which I agree, for before- and after-school care. But it wouldn’t be handled by EAs, unless you totally retrain for child care. It’s something other than just what they do now. There are additional qualifications you need to do child care.

T. Rebelo: There are a lot of educational assistants that have early child care training. So you actually would be able to start implementing that right away. There are some school districts that are actually doing some pilot projects, and those are the districts that I would reach out to and ask how well they’re doing.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Tony, thank you for your presentation, and thank you for your representation of your members. Thank you for coming in early.

T. Rebelo: Thank you for having me. If you’d like to give me a call, just grab my number, and I’ll answer that question.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Dr. David Lim, British Columbia Dental Association.

Dr. Lim, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes’ worth of questions and/or comments.

You have the floor.

B.C. DENTAL ASSOCIATION

D. Lim: Good evening. My name is Dr. David Lim, and I’m the president of the B.C. Dental Association, representing 4,000 members across B.C.

I grew up in Abbotsford, and I feel very fortunate that I’ve been able to come back and serve this community for the last 15 years. I’m also very thankful that I can present to this committee right here tonight.

BCDA thanks this government for its ongoing funding support for oral cancer patients and the 21 not-for-profit dental clinics across B.C. Today I draw your attention towards significant regulatory and policy changes that will have major impacts on delivery of oral care in B.C.

Our first recommendation is that the B.C. government revisit the new Health Professions and Occupations Act, Bill 36, and undertake further consultations with those impacted the most: the public and health care professionals. We have several concerns with this act, including the lack of consultation on items that were not part of the 2019 consultation process. The act is extensive and unprecedented in Canada, with many unintended consequences.

First, there is a risk of increased regulatory costs due to added layers of oversight, which will only drive up the cost of care to our patients. Second, it will impede B.C.’s ability to attract health care workers. Lastly, it will limit innovations in health care by hampering professional growth and confidence. At a time when oral health professionals are already dealing with multiple challenges and a new national dental plan, introducing legislation of this scale and nature without proper consultation will impede the delivery of care rather than enhancing it.

Our second recommendation is that the B.C. government must implement timely measures to address the dental staff shortage prior to the full implementation of the Canadian dental care plan and also include oral health care in B.C.’s health human resources strategy.

[5:25 p.m.]

The crisis in dental staff shortages has been an ongoing issue for many years, made worse by the pandemic. Many dental practices are now cancelling or postponing appointments. Some are even contemplating closing due to lack of staff. This is both a rural and urban issue.

Certified dental assistants, CDAs, who play an integral part in providing oral care to patients, have not increased at the same pace as dentists or B.C.’s population. In fact, in 2020 to 2021, the industry lost 1 percent of CDAs. As the national dental plan rolls out by 2025, just under 1.2 million British Columbians will be eligible to access the plan, triggering a surge in demand for dental care. We urge the government to increase options for distance learning programs across B.C., expand dental staff training seats or cohorts in public colleges and collaborate efforts between relevant ministries.

Lastly, our third recommendation is for the B.C. government to collaborate with their federal counterparts to ensure the best possible oral health care for British Columbians. The launch of the national dental plan is an opportunity for the province to re-evaluate its existing provincial plans to ensure maximum benefit for British Columbians.

For instance, the B.C. Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction’s dental plan has not changed in almost 20 years. The adult plan limits and fees are restrictive and cover only 38 percent of the current BCDA suggested fee guide. I am aware of cases where a child receives extensive dental care under general anesthesia and uses up their limit, and then they must wait up to 18-plus months to receive any additional preventive care. This situation has been impacting the patients’ quality of life and straining the health care system, with patients presenting in the emergency room for pain relief and serious oral infections.

Further, establishing a seniors dental plan is becoming critical, as B.C.’s population is aging, with a high percent of low-income seniors. Increased frailty and medications can accelerate dental decay and potentially lead to hospitalization.

Lastly, as the Canadian dental care program rolls out, appointing a provincial dental officer will be critical in coordinating efforts within different levels of the government, stakeholders and, besides, carrying out oral health promotion activities in B.C.

With that, I thank you for all your time and this opportunity to present.

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

A. Walker: Thank you, Dr. Lim. I appreciate this. My neighbour is a dentist, and the three asks that you had were the same ones he raised with me about a month ago. It’s good to have consistent messaging.

I’m wondering if there are some details. I’ve heard about this federal dentist program for a while now. I don’t know who’s operating it or what the provincial responsibility is in that. I’m wondering if you can share anything you know about that program and, if there are details to be filled in, how you’d like the province to take a role in that.

D. Lim: That’s a loaded question. We’ve been working on this for the last past year. Currently it’s a federally funded and federally run program. To my understanding, the provinces are not interested in taking this on, and therefore the challenge lies in front of the federal government to actually put together a program that they’ve never done before. To be frank, they don’t understand dentistry.

It’s coming in stages. Currently, we have children 12 and under who fall under a certain household income that can qualify for it by registering in the CRA website. Sometime this year or possibly early next year, children under 18 and the elderly will be in this program, and we expect that by 2025, it will be fully in place. Like I said, we expect that it will be about 1.2 million British Columbians that will be eligible to access this program.

One of the main concerns that we have is…. It’s an issue that we’ve called de-insurance. What that is….

[5:30 p.m.]

We’re concerned that small businesses might choose to drop their dental plan or coverage they provide to their staff, thinking that this federally funded program will cover their dental needs. I can go into depth about it, but we’re very worried about it.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Dr. Lim, can you just…? What is your position with the British Columbia Dental Association?

D. Lim: I am the president.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. There we go. Thank you.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Dr. Lim. It’s nice to see you again.

I have a question about your 38 percent. You mentioned how…. The example you gave is how a child went through dental surgery and then, all of a sudden, for 18 months, couldn’t get any preventive dental work. As you and I both know, that could actually reduce a lot of health care costs in the future.

Are you able to give me a number? How much could there be savings-wise to the health care system, in regard to the preventative measures that the dental support can provide, if we could actually increase the percentage?

D. Lim: Currently the BCDA is running a program that’s looking at the impact of people who are choosing to go into the hospitals’ emergency rooms and how that is impacting the cost really. We are currently running this study. So I can’t really, actually, give you the numbers. We are looking into it.

That’s one of the models that we’re going to provide. Hopefully, that will make it a bit more clear about the need to…. Dentists should be, really, taking care of these patients and not having them go through the ER.

H. Yao: So a need for preventative measures.

D. Lim: Absolutely.

B. Banman: Thank you very much.

You talked about senior care and youth care as well. There’s a connection between heart disease and poor oral care. Do you have any studies that say…? “You know what? If we were to spend a little bit here…. We’re going to save a huge amount over here with heart disease.” Are there any studies, which you’re aware of, that reaffirm that?

D. Lim: To my knowledge, no. I don’t know of any studies that actually put a number to it. There are studies, basically, linking periodontal health, oral health, to heart disease, inflammatory disease, mental disease as well.

There are links, but these are links, right? Hopefully, there will be more studies that actually show a stronger link and the cost that’s associated with it as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Dr. Lim, thank you very much for your presentation today. Thank you for what you do.

Our next presenter is Dr. Zehra Gerretsen, the B.C. Chiropractic Association.

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

The floor is yours.

B.C. CHIROPRACTIC ASSOCIATION

Z. Gerretsen: Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I’m Dr. Zehra Gerretsen, the chair of the B.C. Chiropractic Association.

I want to acknowledge that we’re on the traditional territory of the Stó:lō people, the Sumas and Musqueam Nations.

The BCCA represents over 1,160 doctors of chiropractic who are available in every community in B.C., including rural and remote communities.

I want to tell you today about how chiropractors are working in many communities, mostly for free, to help vulnerable populations who often suffer disproportionately from pain. The kinds of pain chiropractors treat include back and neck strains and sprains, arthritis and some types of headaches and migraines.

This work by chiropractors is providing much-needed pain management care for vulnerable and at-risk patients who are experiencing poverty, homelessness, addiction and chronic pain. They are connecting workers in careers with a lot of physical aches and pains to treatments that help avoid self-medication and opioids.

A chiropractor at the Maxxine Wright Community Health Centre in Surrey is providing care one half day every two weeks to support women who are pregnant or have young children and are impacted by substance abuse and violence.

Just up the road from here, in Chilliwack, a team of chiropractors at the New Hope Clinic provides services one half day per week for patients who are struggling with the effects of poverty, homelessness and addiction. About half of them are Indigenous.

In Tofino, a chiropractor offers time to First Nations and travels to isolated Indigenous communities along the west coast of Vancouver Island, including Flores Island, Hot Springs Cove and Hitacu.

[5:35 p.m.]

In Kamloops, in 2021, a chiropractor volunteered after work at the Kamloops wildfire camp six days a week for six weeks to treat firefighters and other front lines battling the wildfires. The Wildfire Service is now hiring a chiropractor every season.

B.C. chiropractors have the skills and capacity to take these examples further and to help deal with the two biggest challenges facing our health care system: limited access to primary care through family physicians and nurse practitioners and the opioid epidemic. Chiropractic care can complement the care given by a physician or a nurse practitioner and can reduce the need for those professionals to treat some types of pain and chronic pain.

As well, untreated chronic pain is often a contributor to self-medication and substance abuse. In fact, a 2018 B.C. coroner’s report found that 79 percent of people who died because of illicit drug toxicity sought help from the health care system in the year before their death, and 56 percent of them were seeking help for pain. About 41 percent of British Columbians who received long-term opioid prescriptions also had low back pain, a condition that can often be treated through non-invasive chiropractic care.

As the health system continues to tackle both the opioid epidemic and a shortage of health care professionals, chiropractors have the capacity and the capability to help on both fronts. Chiropractors can help relieve the pressure on primary care by co-managing patients with pain or pain-related substance issues. Better pain management can possibly decrease the reliance on the use of prescribed or illicit opioids or even prevent their use.

That’s why our recommendation today is for the government to recognize the key role chiropractors play in helping British Columbians who experience persistent pain and those who may be living with or are at risk of substance abuse and to expand access to our services. We are ready to help people access treatment for their pain and to mitigate the current overdose epidemic.

Thank you for your time today.

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

Unsurprisingly, Bruce, you have a question or a comment.

B. Banman: Yeah. Well, this one hits a little close to home. What can I tell you.

One of the other things that I wanted to talk about is…. Thank you for being here. I want you to express to this board the frustrations that chiropractors have with accessing something as simple as a radiological report or being able to order X-rays or order imagery and what help you think you can have when it comes to avoiding people going down the opioid pathway to begin with.

Z. Gerretsen: Okay. That’s a big question and a very frustrating question as well.

Chiropractors in B.C. cannot order imaging directly. A patient must go to their physician, get a requisition from their physician or nurse practitioner and then get an image. Typically, what happens at that point is that patient has to go back to their physician, receive the report and then relay it back to the chiropractor.

Sometimes we can fax requests to the health authority or the hospital where it was done to receive the report. Sometimes we get the disk to actually look at the imaging ourselves and sometimes not, which is really unfortunate. If it’s done at a private centre like MedRay, we don’t typically see the report or the disk, as they charge the patient to burn the image on the disk. It’s a little bit of a telephone game.

Chiropractors have extensive training in radiography and radiology. We spend many, many hours in that dark room. None of us know what day or time it is, usually, at school.

In other provinces, they do have some direct referral rights. We are trained extensively, but we are unable to do it in B.C.

This could take the pressure off of patients making appointments with their physician or their nurse practitioner to get an imaging request, then going for the imaging, back to the physician and then back to us.

H. Yao: Thank you so much for your presentation. I really appreciate it.

I’m going to ask a different direction regarding your presentation, specifically talking about how current practitioners are going to different parts of the province, providing care for people who are suffering in pain and trying to deter or, I guess, prevent individuals who end up choosing self-medication, who are passed over right now. I want to thank you so much for that.

I’m curious. How much public engagement has the chiropractor association been doing to support this kind of work and to let the public become aware? It just feels like the good work you’re doing supports not just the individual but also humanizes the people that have been using substances in a way….

[5:40 p.m.]

It’s not just using those Downtown Eastside images but realizing that it could be a professional. It could be your everyday mom and dad who are dealing with pain that they cannot manage.

Z. Gerretsen: Absolutely. We have public campaigns and marketing that we do through the association. We do often talk to government as well, third-party insurance. We’ve been having discussions through WorkSafe and ICBC and then reaching out to different associations as well — the Construction Association, things like that — who really see a lot of physical pain in their members, trying to prevent it upstream.

S. Chant: If you could wave a magic wand, what are you asking for, please?

Z. Gerretsen: I wish I had a magic wand. We are currently working on a pilot project that would put chiropractors in ten different communities, two in each of the five health authorities, to work in primary care networks alongside physicians, nurse practitioners and other health care professionals. We are asking for funding for that. It would be on a sessional basis. But our magic-wand wish would be to place a chiropractor on each one of those teams, for people to have better access to care and help with pain management.

B. Banman: Seeing as nobody else is asking…. Currently, if your income falls below a certain level, you get a little bit from the government. Is that still there? It’s been a while since I’ve actually had to fill that form out.

Z. Gerretsen: Yes.

B. Banman: What whopping amount does the government pay currently versus what is the actual recommended fee schedule?

Z. Gerretsen: Right now, for premium assistance through the MSP program, those individuals who qualify for that get ten visits at $23 per visit. But it’s not just for chiropractors. They have to choose whether to use it for chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, naturopath, physiotherapy. There’s a handful of professions that that counts for. It’s ten visits at $23 a visit. Most chiropractors…. The average rate that we charge for a subsequent visit is $70, so those individuals are out of pocket for the balance, which makes access very difficult.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon, and thank you for taking care of the patients that you have.

Z. Gerretsen: Thank you for having me. Nice seeing everyone.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Denise Praill, Canuck Place Children’s Hospice Society.

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

The floor is yours.

CANUCK PLACE CHILDREN’S HOSPICE

D. Praill: Excellent. Thanks, Mike.

My name is Denise Praill, and I’m the chief executive officer of Canuck Place Children’s Hospice. Thank you very much for inviting us to once again present to the committee.

I’d like to acknowledge that we’re gathered here today on the traditional and unceded territories of the Stó:lō peoples.

Today I’d like to tell you about Canuck Place and our role in B.C.’s health care system. Canuck Place is British Columbia’s pediatric palliative care provider, offering critical services to our province’s most vulnerable children and youth. We operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year providing specialized care for children, from birth through age 19, with life-limiting conditions or serious illness.

More than 871 newborns, children, youth and families received care through Canuck Place last year. With our in-patient, in-hospital, community-based and in-home care, virtual care and 24-hour clinical care line, families receive care no matter where they reside in the province right when they need it.

Our approach to pediatric palliative care includes medical and nursing care, expressive therapies, counselling, bereavement services and medical respite for families. Canuck Place has two provincial hospice locations, one in Vancouver and one here in Abbotsford, and we are the pediatric palliative care consultation team for B.C. Children’s Hospital and B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre. We also provide responsive specialized care to children in homes, hospitals and communities across the province.

Last year Canuck Place saw a 63 percent increase in family members receiving overnight respite care in hospice. Respite services allow families to temporarily receive much-needed rest, renewal and support while their children receive 24-hour care by skilled professionals for their complex illnesses. This allows children and families to make the most of the time they have together.

During respite stays, children can participate in school, and they spend time creating memories, immersed in music, art and recreation therapy activities. There is no cost to families to access Canuck Place services.

[5:45 p.m.]

Pediatric palliative care differs significantly from that of adult palliative care. Children are cared for from the time of diagnosis until end of life, which is an average of six years on the Canuck Place program, after which point their family is supported in their bereavement for a further three years.

Quality pediatric palliative care is whole-person, holistic care that improves quality of life, manages symptoms, alleviates suffering and respects family choice. It is relational care that is team-based, collaborative and family-centred. Pediatric palliative care addresses serious medical conditions including genetic disorders, cancer, prematurity, neurological disorders, heart and lung conditions and others.

Diagnosis for a child and family is incredibly difficult, and the burden of disease can have a profound impact. Many children with serious illness who require pediatric palliative care live with uncertainty and have conditions requiring a high degree of complex care, use of medical technology and challenging symptoms. Our team is able to support this type of care that in adult services would typically be managed in hospital intensive care units.

At Canuck Place, the patient-family experience informs our care. We have two formalized mechanisms: the family advisory council and the family engagement coalition. We are committed to person-centred care by providing opportunities for meaningful collaboration and partnership with families to improve care and services.

Canuck Place is a training site for UBC pediatrics medical residents, and we routinely support undergraduate nursing student education through clinical placements and teaching activities by our staff. We are approved by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons to be a full pediatric palliative medicine fellowship training program location. We’re only the second in the whole country. I’m proud to say that last year, we had 44 clinical trainees. That included medical residents, fellows, student nurses and research trainees.

Earlier this year, we became the first pediatric hospice in the world to achieve certification by ChildKind, a global non-profit initiative that works to reduce the pain and unnecessary suffering of children. Certified organizations have developed standardized institution-wide collaborative approaches to the treatment of children’s pain and are recognized for excellence in providing pain care. To date, nine pediatric hospitals in the United States and two hospitals in Canada are ChildKind International–certified.

We are proud of our role in B.C.’s health care system. We regularly collaborate with the Ministry of Health, Child Health B.C. and other partners to advance knowledge and engage in quality improvement initiatives that benefit children and families. With our expertise and extensive partnerships in the health and community sector, Canuck Place is uniquely positioned to continue to support the province in this work.

Canuck Place supports investment into British Columbia’s health care system. On behalf of the entire staff and volunteer team at Canuck Place, I look forward to our continued partnership with the government of British Columbia.

Last but not least, we welcome MLAs who wish to visit our hospices any time to learn more about our work.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Denise, wow.

D. Praill: Thank you. It’s an incredible team, Mike.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes, absolutely.

Susie.

S. Chant: I went to school with Brenda Eng.

D. Praill: Oh, our founder. Lovely.

S. Chant: A little while ago, just to say.

What is your staffing model?

D. Praill: What is our staffing model?

S. Chant: At Canuck Place proper, not at the hospices.

D. Praill: The hospices are the home base for our community-based care, so we have…. I would say nurse-led would be the first thing I would come up with.

We operate six beds in Vancouver and four at Dave Lede House. For our beds in Vancouver, we fill based on acuity and the seriousness of the illness. Generally, that is a four-nurse model, so we’ve got four nurses on staff each day. We tend to have two nurses at Dave Lede House here in Abbotsford.

That team is supported by counsellors, by recreation therapists at each site and also by personal care aides, and we also have physicians and nurse practitioners as part of the collaboration team.

S. Chant: It’s a rich model.

D. Praill: Sorry. Can I add one more thing? We need those registered nurses. Because of the complexity of care, there’s no way that we could…. We’ve played with the model. We’ve had LPNs, but it really does have to be nurse-led and RN-led.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Denise, and I want to take up your offer. I would love to visit your facility.

D. Praill: Excellent.

H. Yao: I do also want to say…. I know the Lions Club has been fundraising for Canuck Place, which you must be very grateful for.

D. Praill: Yes. We’re very grateful.

H. Yao: I didn’t hear any ask in your speech. I assume you’re not here specifically asking, so I will ask a different question. How are you supporting your staff’s mental health? I would love to learn from you, because I assume the experience and the relationship being built and then having to live with the fact that everybody is expecting you to move on in a way that is premature….

[5:50 p.m.]

Please, maybe you can enlighten us. What strategy has been successful, and how can we learn from your professionalism?

D. Praill: Absolutely. Thanks, Henry. We do place a lot of emphasis on care for our staff. We actually have a committee that’s called care for the caregiver. So we have extensive, I guess, formal benefits that you might see in other health care settings: health care, mental health support, counselling support.

We also invest an awful lot in supporting each other…. I hate to say “socially.” That sounds like a throwaway. It is so important in this work that this team trusts each other and is able to debrief and pull each other through these scenarios, because it is a chosen line of work. We tend to have nurses that join us, think they can do the work, then cannot, and exit quickly. Or we have nurses…. One of our founding nurses, Doreen, is still working in our Abbotsford location today — for 27 years, she has been with us. It is a calling.

We learn, we also invest, and we encourage people to take their vacation time. You must. Of course, we run into the health care worker challenges, the overtime, but it’s not sustainable for Canuck Place. We have encouraged people to take their vacation and be mindful of the overtime. We’re trying to manage that as a leadership team, too.

I’ve just come from the Quality Forum downtown, Health Quality B.C. The focus of the forum this year was on people, investing in people and keeping that team robust. I feel like our strategic direction, and what is coming to the fore for Canuck Place, are being echoed throughout the health care system.

G. Chow: Thank you, Denise, for what you do. I have visited your facility a number of times. The last one was in December, when it was snowing very heavily, and it was unfortunate. We still had the ceremony and everything else, but the snow was just too great. Thank you for all the work you do. We’ll continue to visit your place, particularly during Christmas, to support your fundraising activities.

D. Praill: I appreciate that. Fundraising is a significant part of Canuck Place’s health. We do appreciate the community support, as well as the support of the province of B.C.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Wow. Thanks, Denise. I guess “wow” was a good word to use. You probably see a lot of cheers and a lot of tears, I guess. With that, there would be a lot of emotional ups and downs. Burnout — you probably see a lot of that. The team you keep referring to — I can’t even imagine so many different types of specialized work and volunteers.

First question would be, how big is your team? Where are you lacking in the skills to replace workers that are moving on? Where is your biggest area of concern?

D. Praill: Pediatric palliative care is a very small and specialized field of medicine. If I look at a nurse who’s coming out of school, can she walk out of school and come work at Canuck Place? Not really, no. Susie is shaking her head: no. We need some pediatrics experience, and we need some palliative experience before we would graduate to the Canuck Place team. That shrinks the pool of nurses that have the ability to join Canuck Place readily.

You asked me what the size of our team is. We’re about 200 live people walking around, but we have a lot of part-time and a lot of casual nurses. We share, across the floor, with B.C. Women’s and B.C. Children’s. So we’re getting that expertise, and we’re sharing between the sites. We were joking with Sarah Bell earlier. I said, “We need a no-trade deadline here, where you can trade staff for a little bit,” but it’s quite a collaborative and friendly relationship.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): That’s awesome. Thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Denise, thank you very much for your time. I don’t know what else to say. The work that you do is so needed in the province of British Columbia. I’m proud to say that we’re part of that team that allows everything to continue on the way it does. Thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon.

Our next presenter is Margo Levae.

Margo, you have five minutes for the presentation followed by five minutes of questions and/or answers.

MARGO LEVAE

M. Levae: Thank you all for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Margo Levae. I am the parent of a medically complex child with high support needs.

Parents of children with high support needs and disabilities are struggling to overcome barriers to access child care in British Columbia.

[5:55 p.m.]

Systemic change is decades overdue, and funding for supported child care isn’t even under the same ministry as provincial child care funding. However, the infrastructure needed to distribute, target and monitor funds already exists. Increasing the budget can make a positive impact on vulnerable children and their families through existing channels right now.

I am asking the committee to prioritize funding for supported child care in three ways for Budget 2024: (1) increase funding and contingency funding for CYSN supported child development, or SCD, in all regions; (2) increase wage enhancement for certified special needs early childhood educators, or SNEs, inside existing funding channels so that no child care provider needs to turn away a child because of budget reasons; and (3) dramatically increase and dedicate contingency funds for CYSN in-own-home child care contracts to regional contract holders. I’ll go back to each of these recommendations as I share my personal experience.

As administrative manager for the Steveston Society of Children’s Centres, I recently advocated for a parent who was offered a coveted $10-a-day child care spot in one of our infant-toddler classrooms. The adult-to-child ratio in an infant-toddler class is 1 to 4. However, this parent expressed concerns for her child’s safety because of concerning behaviours that would be impossible for a worker to manage with three other toddlers in their care.

This parent is on every wait-list, under every ministry. She has done everything to advocate for early intervention; however, she also needs to work. As a child care provider, I was obligated to tell her that if we couldn’t support her child safely within ratios — and her SCD contractor, Aspire, couldn’t offer enough funding, or any funding at all, to move her child off the wait-list — she would be responsible to pay the full cost of necessary support personnel out of pocket, or otherwise be forced to withdraw her child from our centre.

Wait-lists for inclusion funds cause exclusion. Asking parents of children with disabilities to pay child care fees and pay out of pocket for a support worker costs a lot more than $10 a day. That’s the disability tax the current government incentives fail to address. Your budget committee can change that by prioritizing an increase to CYSN-supported child development funding. Your budget committee can further remove systemic and ministerial barriers for parents and child care providers by increasing existing wage enhancement funding for SNEs as $10-a-day child care should be for all children, regardless of ability.

This parent’s struggles hit close to home for me. My own son is profoundly affected by a rare genetic variant called Bryant-Li-Bhoj syndrome. My son needs one-to-one supervision, 24 hours per day in all settings, to stay alive. He represents an ever-growing number of children whose extreme support needs are unable to be safely met even in the most inclusive child care and classroom systems.

We tried traditional child care, and we failed. As I faced unemployment, our regional SCD contractor, Kinsight, came through with an in-own-home care contract. That enables my son to receive after-school care in an environment where he and his caregivers can be calm and safe. However, the funding doesn’t bridge the gap in cost of care between our child and a typically developing child of the same age.

[6:00 p.m.]

After Kinsight deducts their administrative fee, my son’s support worker is funded at $10 per hour. In addition, we are responsible for all mandatory employment-related costs, business insurance, banking and accounting and, of course, funding the difference between $10 an hour and a fair market wage.

Since our contract occurs in-own-home, we are ineligible for provincial subsidies that we would otherwise have access to in a group child care setting. Further, we are ineligible for any child care provider fee reductions because we do not care for other children. And on top of it all, I now have a small business to run.

My child is almost eight years old, and even with the in-own-home child care funding, I’m still paying $700 a month for two hours of aftercare and up to $1,600 per month when school is not in session. The only reason our child care costs more is because my son has a disability.

Yet despite this discrimination, we are lucky. Many parents like me are unable to work at all. Many families suffer long-term financial consequences because wait-lists for support are too long.

Your committee can do something about this. Dramatically increase and dedicate contingency funds for CYSN in-own-home child care contracts. No parent should have to consider giving up custodial rights because they are unable to financially support themselves while ensuring care needs are met for their disabled child.

I welcome any questions. I also have contact information in my submission form.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Margo, thank you so much for your presentation. I will use the word “courage” to be in front of us. I’m sure, for some people that we’ve heard throughout our submissions that have come forward, it becomes a little daunting to sit in front of this panel. I thank you for sharing your story and providing us with the submission that we have in front of us.

A. Walker: If your community was lucky enough to have a seamless child care program, would that offer you the supports that you would need?

M. Levae: I don’t know that there have been any promises in seamless day child care to promote inclusion. I think the idea between the two ministries — because, of course, they will remain disconnected — with seamless day would be that MCFD would still hold the funding for supported child care. But that is the chronic issue — that they are underfunded. So I don’t think it would change anything.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Anybody else? A comment and/or question?

Oh, Bruce, sorry.

B. Banman: There are a couple of presentations that will probably make me lie awake at night. This will be one of them.

Let me see if I heard what you said between the lines when you said that no parent should have to give up the custody of their child. What I hear you saying is that your only option is to make your child a ward of the state because you cannot afford the care. Did I hear that…? Is that what I heard?

M. Levae: I said that not because that is my particular situation….

B. Banman: But it’s others’.

M. Levae: Absolutely. There’s been recent media coverage about it. I believe the family lives in Maple Ridge.

It is absolutely the case for a parent who did not have the privilege of wealth and all the privileges that I have which enable me to be here speaking for this panel today. It is absolutely the case for many parents.

B. Banman: Where would a child like that typically end up? In a foster home where we actually pay the foster parents to look after the child?

M. Levae: Yeah, there is no option right now that I know of, unless there’s going to be a recent or new announcement from MCFD.

[6:05 p.m.]

But there is currently no option for biological parents to be receiving caregiving benefits the way that that would obviously be accommodated if they were in the foster system.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation. What kind of lift is required? What are we looking at?

M. Levae: Well, I am a citizen. I think what I’ll say is maybe…. It’s a little bit of a question to answer your question. There is very little transparency right now between the contract holders. I used two examples in my presentation.

Those contract holders from MCFD are not required…. In fact, I did actually reach out and ask them if they would provide me with the wait-list data, which they declined. Parents are constantly hearing and child care providers are constantly hearing: “No, the wait-lists are too long. Oh, there just isn’t enough funding.”

In fact, I actually have a meeting next week because another child in one of our centres, who currently has a contract…. The contract holder is threatening to reduce it, so the parents would be forced to pay out of pocket for that support, just citing budget reasons.

I guess the question that I’m posing back to you is that I wish I knew how much to tell you. Right now there’s absolutely no transparency.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Margo, thank you for your presentation today. As I said earlier, it has to take a ton of courage, and that is what you have in front of all of us. So thank you very, very much for your presentation this afternoon.

M. Levae: Thanks to you all.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Leslie Gaudette, Council of Senior Citizens Organizations of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours.

COUNCIL OF SENIOR CITIZENS
ORGANIZATIONS OF B.C.

L. Gaudette: Thank you, Mike.

Good evening, everyone. My name is Leslie Gaudette, and I am president of the Council of Senior Citizens Organizations of B.C. Thank you for inviting me to present to you today.

COSCO represents 80,000 members of more than 70 affiliated organizations located in all parts of the province. We promote healthy aging in older adults by advocating for key social determinants of health: social connectedness, housing, health care, income security, transportation and anti-ageism. We strive to inform our members of programs, including those from your government, to ensure that B.C. seniors can stay active in their own homes.

Our first recommendation is to fund and develop a senior strategy to harmonize programs and policies affecting older adults. The strategy must incorporate the social determinants of health and provide sustained core funding to support the critical role seniors centres play to connect seniors with services.

Our seniors population is increasing. Seniors are living longer with increasingly diverse backgrounds and needs. Baby boomers are reaching age 75. The time is now to plan. Many seniors live on very limited incomes, food insecurity is increasing, and we are disproportionately affected by climate change events. Seniors centres keep seniors out of the hospital. They combat social isolation through recreation and education programs and help older adults navigate myriad programs and services. Funding for seniors centres is insecure and sporadic. Budget 2024 needs to provide core sustainable funding for these centres to ensure that our seniors remain healthy.

The senior strategy, together with age-friendly communities, must include planning for affordable, accessible housing with integrated public transportation centres. Publicly funded transportation is key in all parts of the province, both urban and rural. As one example, handyDART funding must be increased and its management brought back into the public system.

Our second recommendation as part of the senior strategy. Budget 2024 needs to allocate funds to programs that improve the economic security of low-income seniors. Of the one million seniors in B.C., half live on $31,000 or less per year, or between $1,700 to $2,500 per month.

[6:10 p.m.]

That’s the cost of rent of an apartment in Vancouver. This is less than minimum wage. COSCO welcomed the one-time increases to the B.C. seniors supplement, yet the current rate of $99.30 per month’s lease is one of the lowest rates in Canada. We ask that Budget 2024 fund increases to this supplement to bring it up to among the top three in Canada and that it be indexed to the rate of inflation.

As I’ve noted, rent is the main budget item for many low-income seniors. We hear from our members that Shelter Aid For Elderly Renters, or SAFER, is not working. We ask that Budget 2024 provides funds so that rent ceilings for SAFER be increased to reflect actual market rents and that income ceilings be adjusted each year for inflation. Budget 2024 needs to also fund senior subsidized housing units to increase the supply of truly affordable housing with rents based on 30 percent of income.

Our third strategy is that the senior strategy must address ongoing improvements to publicly funded health care and keep seniors out of expensive acute care and long-term-care facilities. Budget 2024 must provide increased funding for community health centres, along with expanded primary care networks, and thereby leverage support from community non-profits and senior centres. These team-based models provide longitudinal, publicly funded primary care to enable seniors to manage multiple chronic conditions.

Your budget needs to increase funding for home support to eliminate the daily rate for publicly funded home support services. One hour of home support per day runs close to $9,000 per year. And once the senior’s income rises above $28,000 per year, they may be pushed into expensive long-term care.

Budget 2024 needs to fund improvements to publicly funded long-term-care services in British Columbia, including working with the federal government to plan for and implement the new long-term-care standards. To that end, COSCO is supporting the association for Reform of Residential Care for the provincial government to set up and fund an advisory forum to plan for system change based on these standards.

Thank you for considering these proposals.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation, Leslie. I have a question to start off with. You talked about raising the supplement to get to the top three in Canada. What would that top three be from the $99.30?

L. Gaudette: They’re in the range of $200 to $300 per year.

H. Yao: I’ll piggyback off my Chair’s question. Which three provinces right now are the top three that we can learn from?

L. Gaudette: It’s in the seniors advocate report. I don’t have the details, but there are other provinces. We are very much near the bottom. As you will recall from the seniors advocate report, B.C. seniors are falling further behind because so few programs are funded that most other provinces are funding at least some of.

B. Banman: Thank you very much for your presentation.

I want to go back to the heat dome. It affected, by vast majority, seniors, and one of the recommendations…. What other states have done is that they have figured out how to get air conditioners into some of the more vulnerable seniors.

Would an organization such as yourself be able to look after air conditioners and loan them out to places that need them, or would you be able to help connect those dots of vulnerable seniors so that if, God forbid, we go through another heat dome like we did, we can help prevent the tragedies that occurred?

L. Gaudette: I think this is why we put so much emphasis on the senior centres, because they’re the organizations in many communities that do have seniors as members, and they have staff that can help with that kind of thing.

Our role at COSCO…. We’ve been sending our representatives to various sessions organized by various cities in the Lower Mainland, in particular, and informing people and seniors how to cope with the heat. I found it quite…. The heat was intense. It’s been known for 20 years that people can die of excessive heat, from my epidemiology background.

It was also surprising that a lot of simple things that people can do to cool themselves were just not that well known.

[6:15 p.m.]

So it’s getting sometimes very simple messaging out from the public health departments, through organizations such as ours and through senior centres.

A. Walker: I appreciate this. There are a lot of facts here. I appreciate your newsletter. We get it at the office regularly. I live in Qualicum Beach. We’ve got a median age of about 68 years old, so this is all hitting home for me.

One of your requests was dedicated core funding for senior centres. I know in Qualicum Beach, our centres have got almost 1,000 members. I think it’s over 1,000 now. What does that look like for core funding from the province for our senior centres?

L. Gaudette: I think we’d have to sit down and figure out what it would look like. There’s a quite….

The senior centres are very diverse. Some are independent. Some are funded through the municipality. Most of them are very concerned about the amount of time they’re spending writing grant proposals and using staff time that could be better used to meet the needs of their clients and their members as opposed to…. You have to research them, write the proposal — we’re in the same position — and then report on them. It gets quite onerous after a while.

B. Banman: I just wanted to compliment you on your comment that there are some simple things that can be done. For instance, I looked up how to make a redneck air conditioner out of frozen hot water bottles and a simple fan. Simple things like putting your feet in some water.

I want to thank you for the advocacy that you do. That’s basically what I wanted to say. Appreciate it.

L. Gaudette: Thank you. We look forward to working with you further. If you ever want to come, I’d invite any of you that wish to speak to or meet with our delegates to let me know, and we’ll be happy to arrange a time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Leslie, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon and for the people that you…. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Next up Matt Dirks, Communitas Supportive Care.

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

The floor is yours.

COMMUNITAS SUPPORTIVE CARE

M. Dirks: Good evening, members of the committee. My name is Matt Dirks. I’m the chief innovation officer at Communitas.

Communitas is a charitable, faith-based, multi-funder organization providing care to persons with disabilities. Our services range from 24-7 home living care to skills-based day services, vocational training, mental health supports and respite care. Last year we served 870 individuals in 18 communities across the province.

Personally, I have volunteered and worked in social services for the last 16 years, but I also have personal experience. My older brother has Angelman syndrome and continues to rely on the social and home living supports he receives here in Abbotsford.

I’m going to present three recommendations to address challenges impacting Communitas and the community social services sector.

My first recommendation is regarding equitable, timely access to services for people with multiple barriers. It’s been our experience of late that persons with multiple barriers are encountering difficulty in accessing the services they are entitled to. The difficulties faced differ case by case. For some, it is about a lack of suitable, customized service options. For others, it is the wait-list for service. Yet others are shuttled between different funding bodies, as each provider attempts to shift the responsibility of care onto another party.

An example I’ve seen on a number of occasions goes as follows. A person with a developmental disability also has a diagnosed mental illness. They’re experiencing poor mental wellness and attempt to receive supports from the local mental health centre. It is found out they have an intellectual disability, and they are told they need to seek services through Community Living B.C.

Primary care, community health, mental health units and developmental disability services often struggle to collaborate effectively, leading to disjointed care for individuals with multiple diagnoses. When you are vulnerable and in need, no door should be the wrong door. Individuals with complex care needs should not be penalized for having more than one disability.

In many cases, these funded services are struggling themselves with staffing, training on complex care and working within their own silos. This undoubtedly has contributed to an outcomes-based, person-centred approach to serving needs in community being disincentivized. This impacts eligibility in practice and creates inequality of access.

We recommend additional supports to develop capacity across government funders and service providers, specifically specialized training for supporting individuals with multiple barriers and greater focus on developing and funding integrated services across disciplines.

My second recommendation is to ensure responsive, reliable and flexible funding streams that can meet the evolving social needs in communities.

[6:20 p.m.]

Organizations like ours are consistently expected to do more with less. Increasing demand combined with insufficient funding and overly restrictive guidelines on funding usage are hindering our ability to meet the growing and evolving needs within our community. Inflationary pressures are increasing the cost of delivering services.

As an example, our contracts to provide home living supports for adults with developmental disabilities have not had global funding lifts to line items like food, shelter and transportation since 2010. These three line items have experienced 49 percent, 33 percent and 43 percent increases in costs during that time.

When budget lines are capped and we are not permitted to use savings from one area to offset increasing costs in another, it creates inefficiencies and obstructs our ability to be responsive in the face of rising costs and rising need.

We are also experiencing an increase in demand for our services. B.C. Stats reports that the population of B.C. grew by 2.8 percent in 2022, the largest annual growth rate since 1996. Suffice to say, increasing demand and fiscal constraints are both inhibiting our ability to scale quality services. We recommend indexing program budget lines to inflation, increasing caseload funding by population and demographic changes and enabling flexible fund management. We can foster adaptive, timely and efficient responses.

Lastly, we need to invest in the leadership of the sector. Outflows of leadership and an inability to attract new leaders into community social services is posing a significant threat. According to the B.C. CEO Network, 40 percent of senior leaders will leave the sector within 36 months, and 58 percent of those organizations will need to hire externally.

Implementing effective succession planning initiatives will also be critical to address this impending leadership gap. Investing in professional development will enhance skills and knowledge of professionals within the sector, aid retention and prepare them for positions of progressive responsibility.

The sector also faces fierce competition from related sectors, making it challenging to attract and retain managers and senior leaders. The Community Social Services Employers Association is working on benchmarking management in excluded positions. We ask government to review this benchmarking data when completed and to fund historically omitted management and excluded positions. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Matt, thank you for your presentation this afternoon. I have a question with regards to how you closed off with talking about investing in leadership development. How do you see that unrolling in the sense of who’s going to provide what? Where does that training come from, and what kind of funding stream would that need?

M. Dirks: Absolutely. I think there are multiple ways this could happen. I think, like many things, we need to be working in partnership with our funders, whether that’s our regional health authorities, Community Living B.C. Often they are the vehicles that funds flow through to us historically.

In terms of leadership development, a big difficulty for us has been the administrative funding rates that have been diminished over time. Some of that latent capacity to do some of that career-pathing…. Capacity, internally, has actually been significantly reduced, and then you compound that with a number of people retiring in the sector over the next couple of years. We’re losing that capacity to do some of this internally, so that’s why it’s such a pressing need right now.

In terms of funding, it could be through an existing funder. It could be a one-time sort of budget allotment to the sector that’s distributed through grants. I think there are a few ways that it could be done.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you.

Any other comments or questions?

R. Leonard: How many clients do you serve?

M. Dirks: Last year we served 870. We have a staff of about 430 currently.

R. Leonard: In 18 communities across the province.

M. Dirks: Correct.

R. Leonard: Are you in rural and remote as well as urban settings?

M. Dirks: We’re predominantly urban and semi-urban. We’re all across the Lower Mainland from Boston Bar until about Surrey, New West, and then on the Island, we’re in the Comox Valley, so Campbell River, Courtenay, Port Hardy.

S. Chant: Do you have a referral process to get to you or…? How do people get to you?

M. Dirks: Correct. Yeah. A number of our services…. About 95 percent of our funding is through government contracts, whether that’s through MCFD, CLBC, Fraser Health, B.C. Housing. Those are our predominant funders.

[6:25 p.m.]

Most of our services are referral-based, so they either come through the mental health centre…. They come through an analyst at CLBC who has a family come to them, and they say, “We have employment needs for our child,” and then they would be offered service providers like us who could offer that, and then families would select. That is predominantly how we come.

However, we have, like I said, been experiencing increased need. We’ve been trying, where we can, to address need as it comes. Obviously, budgets are quite tight, but we do have something called the hope fund, where we’ve been able to put some funds from our administrative budget to try to meet needs as they arise, where people fall through the cracks.

Maybe they haven’t been referred, or they didn’t get an early diagnosis and get into the system. All of a sudden, they’re at a point where a family is going, “I need help now,” and they don’t know how to navigate the system. Or it’s a child who’s aging out into adult services, and they’re going: “It’s a completely different world. We’re not sure how to connect the dots.” That’s where we often try to step in and provide capacity where we can. Again, it’s quite limited in what we can offer.

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

Not seeing any, Matt, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon, and thank you for the work that you do for those clients that are out there.

M. Dirks: Absolutely. Thank you for your time. I appreciate your consideration for the budget.

M. Starchuk (Chair): That will conclude our hearings for the last couple of weeks.

Matt, before you leave, you are the person that meets the 237th person that has made a presentation to us in the last two weeks.

M. Dirks: Hopefully last but not least.

M. Starchuk (Chair): No, no.

On that note, to our listeners, we will be adjourning shortly, but we will be back at it at 8:30 Monday morning, back in Victoria.

A motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 6:26 p.m.