The committee met at 8:51 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Good morning, everyone.

My name is Mike Starchuk. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

We are grateful to be meeting on the legislative precinct here in Victoria today, which is located on the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

Welcome to everyone who is listening and participating in today’s meeting.

This is the second-to-last meeting of the Budget 2024 consultations. Over the last three weeks, the committee has been meeting with British Columbians to hear their priorities for the next provincial budget.

All audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website. A complete transcript is available.

British Columbians can also share their views by making written comments. Details are available on our website at bcleg.ca/fgsbudget. The deadline for input is this Friday, June 16 at 2 p.m.

We will carefully consider all 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 will now ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves, starting with the Deputy Chair.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Chair.

Good morning. My name is Tom Shypitka. I am the Deputy Chair and the MLA for Kootenay East.

B. Banman: Good morning. I’m Bruce Banman. I would be the MLA for the riding of Abbotsford South.

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

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

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

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

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

M. Starchuk (Chair): It should be noted for the record, by Hansard, that the member for Courtenay-Comox has made it in today on her birthday.

Assisting the committee today are Karan Riarh and Jianding Bai from the Parliamentary Committees Office, and Dwight Schmidt from Hansard Services.

The format for today will…. Each participant will have five minutes to present to the committee, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments.

First up is Annabree Fairweather, the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia.

Annabree, if you can hear me, the floor is yours.

Budget Consultation Presentations

CONFEDERATION OF UNIVERSITY FACULTY
ASSOCIATIONS OF B.C.

A. Fairweather: Thank you very much, hon. members of the committee.

My name is Annabree. I’m the executive director of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C. We represent 5,500 faculty and academic staff through faculty associations at B.C.’s research universities.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I raise with you the critical need for increased funding and support for post-secondary education in British Columbia.

This year we produced an in-depth review of the post-secondary funding model in our province. The data have revealed the stark reality that funding in post-secondary education is dire and threatens the academic mission of our institutions.

In looking to the near future…. Our province anticipates one million job openings in the next decade, and 80 percent of those jobs will require a post-secondary education. As a significant pillar of our society, our universities play a crucial and pivotal role in shaping the future of our province. To ensure continued excellence and innovation, I ask you to consider the following three requests.

[8:55 a.m.]

One, commit to stable and predictable funding. Commit to allocating 5 percent of the annual provincial expenditures to B.C.’s public universities. To date, the province invests about 3.5 percent of provincial expenditures in universities. It’s insufficient to support the work of the academic mission.

Investing in higher education is an investment in our collective future. By allocating and committing to a 5 percent allocation, institutions can better deliver a well-educated workforce. They will be able to attract and retain top-tier faculty, support research and innovation in the public interest and meet the enrolment demands of students and communities. Institutions can commit to long-term continuing contracts with confidence that funding will be stable, and they can break the negative cycle of overreliance on international student tuition.

Two, fund basic research in universities. Research funding in B.C. and Canada is low, and as other colleagues have presented earlier, funding is declining compared to other OECD countries. Basic research is the foundation upon which groundbreaking discoveries and technological advancements are built.

By earmarking funds specifically for research in universities, researchers will be able to explore new frontiers, push boundaries, address critical societal challenges and support student research. These priorities also serve government’s interests by stimulating economic growth and innovation and positioning British Columbia as a leader in cutting-edge knowledge creation.

At this moment, the knowledge development fund is one of the few sources of provincial research funding. It’s limited, though, and funding that faculty are losing now…. It’s insufficient for research assistants and student researchers because they can’t pay living wages for academic work and students can’t afford to take less than living wages. It’s a huge loss to the skills-training agenda in the province.

B.C. provides less investment in research compared to other provinces, and further, that KDF excludes funding for crucial disciplines beyond STEM that would address the critical thinking skills we desperately need in a society that’s combatting anti-racism, anti-science and populist conspiracy rhetoric in our communities. There is a crucial need for research supports and disciplines like social sciences and humanities, the arts and fine arts as well as STEM subjects.

By nurturing a vibrant research ecosystem, we can attract world-class talent, retain world-class researchers and students and foster collaboration between academia, industry and government.

Our third ask is capital investment at B.C.’s research universities. The physical campus needs renewal. Faculty and students need space to conduct research on campus to teach their classes, and technology and building upgrades are needed to have environmentally sustainable, energy-efficient buildings, as well as better transportation infrastructure for accessible campuses. We need government to step up to support the physical campus infrastructure with capital investment. It also has to include deferred maintenance costs because maintenance is not maintaining pace with what it needs to.

Investing in post-secondary education is a direct investment in the future prosperity of British Columbia. The benefits extend beyond the boundaries of academia and resonate throughout our whole society. I ask you to prioritize the long-term vision of a thriving and educated society and ensure that post-secondary education receives the financial resources it needs.

Together we can shape a brighter future for this province. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak, and I thank you, as well, for your service to British Columbia.

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

Questions from the committee.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Annabree. Good morning.

In regards to stable funding, you said 5 percent of…. Are you talking 5 percent of the provincial budget? What does that 5 percent refer to?

A. Fairweather: When we look at the provincial expendi­tures on our post-secondary institutions, that’s looking at not the budget, which is an intention of what to spend, but it’s after the fact of what actually has been spent on institutions. We see 3.5 percent is currently spent on universities, and we’re asking for that to increase to 5 percent to cover the demands on institutions.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Great. As a follow-up, then, on research funding, you say basic research. I mean, it’s a pretty broad topic. You mentioned student research. There’s social, cultural, arts, sciences, technology, all kinds of different…. Is there any one focused area that we really need to work on as far as research goes?

A. Fairweather: What we mean for basic research is that exploratory research that isn’t driven from a particular outcome for industry needs or strings attached, particularly to study a particular topic of government interest or external other stakeholder interest. We mean for people to be able to conduct the research that is exploratory in nature, because that’s the stuff that drives our innovation in really creative ways.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Okay. Thank you.

[9:00 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Annabree, I have a question. You talked about research assistants and about the wages or what they earned being — maybe I heard it wrong — minuscule, maybe. Can you expand on the types of wages that those people are earning?

A. Fairweather: At this moment, different institutions are going to have their different wage ranges that they would offer for research assistants. They’re often tiered at the undergraduate level and the graduate level for students, but the current research funds that researchers might get, from the knowledge development fund, to hire students is insufficient to provide what is a living wage for students. In Metro Vancouver, that living wage would be around $21, I believe — $24. Other parts of B.C. might have a different wage.

These wages that students are offered in order to be able to be sustainable for funding research are insufficient for them to be able to take on these contracts and do a lot of the research that students drive and also participate in, and which supports them in getting jobs afterwards. Our students who are involved in co-ops and research programs are the ones who are hired more quickly, right out of graduation.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for that.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. I’m particularly pleased to hear you talk about the importance of developing critical thinking to help us in terms of creating a more equitable and fair society.

Can you just clarify again? I didn’t quite get your answer to Tom’s question around that 3.5 percent. Is it of the provincial budget that is dedicated to universities, or is it of the university’s budget?

A. Fairweather: It’s of provincial money. What they allocate in their budget isn’t necessarily what they spend. We have done an analysis that looks at what the expenditures of provincial funds to universities have been. It has decreased over the past ten years. About 3.5 percent is what the province, of its own money, spends on universities. We’re asking for that to increase to 5 percent.

R. Leonard: And it’s 3.5 percent…

A. Fairweather: …of provincial government expendi­tures.

R. Leonard: Okay. Thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Are there any other comments and/or questions? I’m not seeing any.

Annabree, thank you very much for your presentation this morning for the committee.

Next up we have David Wilks, Kootenay East regional hospital district.

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

KOOTENAY EAST
REGIONAL HOSPITAL DISTRICT

D. Wilks: Thank you very much.

My name is David Wilks, mayor for the district of Sparwood, but calling you and speaking today in my capacity as chair of the regional district of East Kootenay hospital board.

I’m speaking to you from the territory of the Ktunaxa.

About five years ago, we went down the road of starting to replace the F.W. Green Memorial Home long-term-care facility in Cranbrook. It’s a 60-bed unit. The intent with IHA and the province was to build a new 60-bed facility. Then, once that was built, transition the patients over to the new facility, and then revamp the old facility to make it an entire 120-bed unit.

At that time, the cost was going to be about $35 million to $40 million. In that time and now, in 2023, we still have made no progress. The plans had been submitted to the province by IHA in 2021, I’m led to believe, and we’ve heard nothing. I’ve had multiple conversations with Minister Dix with regard to this issue. We just want to find out when and if the funding is going to come forward from the province.

[9:05 a.m.]

We’re in a 60-40 split with the province, so 40 percent of the project is paid by the Kootenay East regional hos­pital board, and 60 percent is paid by the province. However, that project has gone from $35 million to $40 million to now well over $100 million. The costs to the Kootenay East regional hospital board and the province have exponentially gone up. We’re getting concerned that it’s going to get to a point where this project won’t proceed.

All I’m asking is that in the next upcoming budget, consideration be given to moving this project forward. It’s much needed in the southeast corner of British Columbia. We’re in limbo with the hospital board. We only move forward once the province moves forward. We have our money; we’re ready to go. We’re just waiting for the province.

That’s about all I have to say. Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation this morning, David. If you mind, could I ask what your title is?

D. Wilks: I’m mayor of the district of Sparwood and chair of the Kootenay East regional hospital district.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, David. I hope you’re enjoying some good recreation right now. I’m not sure exactly where you are.

Thanks for the presentation. Obviously, I’m in tune to what’s going on here. Can you just explain again who signed off on this? Who are the partners that we have right now?

The building itself is, I think, 70 years old. I think it was built in the early ’50s. It certainly needs a revamp. There are some safety issues involved here. Of course, the demographics in the Kootenay region are some of the older demographics in the province. I think we’re well above the average age. As far as the elderly band goes, we’re up there.

Who are the partners? Who signed off on this? You said it was five years ago. Who’s all involved that’s online with this?

D. Wilks: The Interior Health Authority is the main push forward on this. They oversee all long-term-care facilities. The Kootenay East regional hospital board is in it for the funding. We do 40 percent of the funding on all capital projects.

Speaking with the Interior Health Authority person, Todd Mastel is personally in charge — of our area, anyway. He has been getting significantly frustrated, trying to figure out when this project is going forward. He has to come back to the board every three months with an update. What we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years now is: “Still waiting to hear from the province. Still waiting to hear from the province.”

This is just a financial issue now. The plans have been approved, as I understand. The building is how it’s going to look when it’s done. It has all been approved. We’re just in the funding stalemate right now.

We need it badly. There are many seniors in the southeast corner of British Columbia that are looking toward long-term care, trying to get them out of acute care beds at the East Kootenay Regional Hospital, which is full, as we speak. We just need some direction from the province. If they’re not willing to go down this road, that’s fine. We’ll go look at a different capital project to focus on.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation and thanks for your commitment to the older folks in your community that need the help of long-term-care living.

I guess I’m trying to figure out why this is stalling. I’m wondering if there’s any other competition. Within the hospital district, is there any other competition that’s looking for health dollars? That question, on the priority of how to spend the dollars: is there another addition to the hospital, or are there other long-term-care facilities, that sort of thing?

D. Wilks: Not that I’m aware of. Thanks for the question. We are in the very early stages of a new oncology renal ward at East Kootenay regional hospital board. It’s still in the planning stage. It hasn’t even gone to the province yet.

This long-term-care facility is run by Interior Health Authority. There are other long-term-care facilities in Cranbrook, in the area, that are run by Golden Life. As far as I understand, there are no competition issues right now with Golden Life and/or IHA in that perspective.

[9:10 a.m.]

The F.W. Green long-term-care facility sits right next to the East Kootenay Regional Hospital. It needs some TLC. As MLA Shypitka said, it’s getting old. As I said, there is a plan in place. We just don’t understand where the hesitancy is here. I can’t answer that question other than that, as far as I know, there is no other competition that I’m aware of. As I said, the other big project is oncology renal, but that’s still in the planning stage.

S. Chant: Thank you very much for your dogged determination to get this done. I appreciate it.

What community is the hospital in?

D. Wilks: In Cranbrook, British Columbia.

S. Chant: It’s in Cranbrook. Thank you. You have other long-term-care facilities in Cranbrook?

D. Wilks: Yes. There is one other for sure.

M. Starchuk (Chair): David, thank you very much for your presentation in the open air this morning.

Our next presenter is Dr. Alan Low, Medicines Access Coalition of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours.

MEDICINES ACCESS COALITION, B.C.

A. Low: Thank you for the invitation to join you. My name is Dr. Alan Low. I’m the executive director of the Medicines Access Coalition, B.C. By way of disclosure, I’m also a practising pharmacist in the community and the hospital.

MedAccess B.C. advocates for the fair, ethical and timely access to medicines that are safe and effective and improve patient health outcomes by preventing disease, treating symptoms, maintaining health and improving quality of life. We are composed of 32 coalition members, which are non-profits or registered charities.

Many medicines which are needed by patients for the treatment of their medical conditions are not accessible in B.C., or, in many situations, are more difficult to access compared to other provinces in Canada. Coverage and special authority approvals of medicines shouldn’t depend on your province of residence, since we are all Canadians. Changes are needed today and cannot wait for the federal universal PharmaCare program. Each day of delay in access to medicines impacts a person’s function, mobility, productivity and their life expectancy.

One of the first recommendations I have for you is…. The current budget is insufficient to accommodate the needs of the B.C. public, particularly with respect to the newer, more effective therapies, which help to decrease the burden on the health care system, improvements for controlling symptoms and conditions, which in some cases are curative — all leading to fewer physician visits, reduced health resource utilization and a reduction in disease-related events.

With the increase in the size of the population and earlier identification of medical conditions with new technology, more people are entering their senior years and living longer, with longer life expectancies. This results in an increased use of medicines, and there’s an increased budget necessary to cover British Columbians for fair access.

The increases in the drug budget have not matched current inflationary levels nor the actual patient needs that are out there. Cost containment measures and policies focused on moving resources within the drug budget have helped, but these savings that are reinvested into the drug budget are not able to keep up with the increasing needs for medicines and the increasing costs.

New medicines are more targeted, more sophisticated and more effective, leading to a reduction in health resource utilization, but the investment in these medicines must be done early. Early intervention and preventative therapies have a more profound effect on the overall cost of an individual’s health care costs, compared to delaying therapy.

We cannot wait for any federal, national program. Medicines have been demonstrated to reduce mortality, reduce events requiring hospitalizations and other health care resource utilization. It maintains or improves the productivity of people, which otherwise would not be possible. These safe and effective medicines are available in the Canadian market today.

However, due to drug budget limits, many medicines are not listed on the public formulary in B.C. and require overly restrictive approvals before an individual can access them.

[9:15 a.m.]

Drug budgets must factor in the higher costs of new technology, advanced therapies, increasing population, expanding seniors population and early identification of disease. There is a disparity between the medicines people in other provinces can access compared to B.C., and in most conditions, B.C. is falling behind such that people are moving out of the province to enter other provinces with better access for medicines.

Recommendation 2 is that more resources and budget are needed to be allocated to further streamline and support the prior authorization and approval process for reviewing drug coverage for medicines prescribed by physicians. This includes better connectivity and access to health care data and drug information by patients, practitioners and prescribers. This is all required for good health and eliminating delays of special authority for medicines in B.C.

Also, as part of the prior authorization, resources should be put into ensuring that criteria and review processes are in line with current evidence, best practices and the needs of the patient. Health care and medicines must be delivered in an individualized manner, and one-size-fits-all doesn’t work effectively or efficiently to achieve positive health outcomes.

B.C. has one of the most burdensome application and resource-heavy processes. It’s quite busy for the physicians when they’re applying for the special authority, and that’s not the best use of their time.

An electronic process has been implemented, and, with that, further supports are needed. By focusing budget resources and properly supporting and broadening the implementation of this new, recent introduction of the electronic platform of the SA applications and review, we can further increase system efficiencies, streamline the process and reduce the wait times for patients to receive medicines. We need to leverage what has already been put in place.

For recommendation 3, more budgets and resources need to be allocated to lower deductibles and develop a new structure to the Fair PharmaCare program. These will help patients who are financially strapped. A fair and equitable structure must be developed which sets deductible levels which are individualized and sensitive to the needs and the situations of the individual. This can be part of the poverty reduction strategy.

There is an income-test deductible paid by the patient on their medicines. However, only eligible items are counted. So other medical, health-related costs such as over-the-counter medications, wheelchairs, wound care supplies, services by health care professionals, are all not considered as part of the health care Fair PharmaCare deductible. The calculation is a simple income test based on CRA-reported income. It’s not a fair approach, and it’s a one-size-fits-all that doesn’t actually look at the financial means of patients.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Dr Low.

G. Chow: Dr. Low, thank you for your presentation. Obviously, it’s a challenge, because, as you said, the population is aging, and the number of drugs and the amount of drugs that are coming on the market, I imagine, is increasing as well.

Compared to other provinces, as a percentage of the people that are affected…. The inaccessibility of the drugs — what percentage is that, compared to what’s available?

A. Low: That’s some testing and data that’s not currently available, but certainly, through all of our health coalition members, we often get many reports of patients who are moving from out of province to our province and finding that medications that were covered for them are no longer covered.

We hear the same from physicians and practitioners. So practitioners who come to B.C. to practice also find that what they were prescribing in another province is no longer available to them to prescribe for the patients. There’s a huge variability in trying to track this because, of course, medicines are being approved on an ongoing basis. As a result, it’s really hard to track that kind of information to get the percentages.

If we extrapolate some of the numbers, the per-capita number of seniors in B.C. is among the highest, and we know that the seniors are among the highest consumers of medicines. If we were to put those numbers together, and we look at just some of the medications that are not available, we can extrapolate and say that anywhere from 10 to 25 percent of those medicines that other provinces receive are not currently accessible to people in B.C.

There was a dermatology drugs report that was done, and it was showing that B.C. was approving or having coverage for 18 percent of dermatology drugs, compared to closer to 70 and 80 percent of those in Ontario and Quebec. So those are some of the numbers available in a particular area, but we don’t have the data, or it hasn’t been studied for an entire population to see what they’re missing out on.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Dr. Low. Can you give me an example, just in regards to recommendation 1, of a drug that is currently restricted or not budgeted for, or a new therapy that would be that preventative maintenance that you’re talking about, that could actually save us some money down the road?

[9:20 a.m.]

A. Low: Sure. I’ll just talk about a drug called dupixent. It is a very targeted biologic drug. It can be considered expensive if you look at the drug price itself. However, it treats a number of inflammatory conditions, including skin conditions, as well as psoriasis.

In other provinces — actually, all of the other provinces — there is access to it. It may require a special authority type of approval or prior authorization, but it is listed. In B.C., it’s not listed at all, meaning that even if a physician was to apply for a special authority, there’s no recognition or criteria set right now for that drug’s approval.

Another example might be the use of bisphosphonates. This is to reduce fractures in bones. In B.C., we have criteria that require a patient to actually have fractured before they can come on this drug and have it covered. That means we’re not allowing somebody to take this drug until they’ve fractured already.

That special authority requires that fracture to be proven. That means an X-ray. Or it has to be a painful fracture, recognizing that only one-third of fractures are painful. Those people that you see kind of curved over might have had three, four or five fractures in the vertebrae. You don’t feel them, because there aren’t any nerves in the bone.

In B.C., you must actually apply for a special authority before you can get this drug covered, whereas in every other province, it is a regular benefit. Any patient can receive it from their physician, once prescribed and covered by the province.

These are just some of the disparities. Some are just no listing at all. Others are more difficult to access, with paperwork and burden put onto the physician to prove that a patient has fractured before they can prescribe their prevention therapy. You’d think that you could trust the physician to say: “This patient has fractured, and they need a treatment.”

This isn’t across the board. Somebody with high blood pressure can get a high blood pressure pill that’s covered. We don’t wait for them to stroke or have a heart attack. Again, we prevent high blood pressure to prevent a stroke and heart attack. We’re not going to wait for that to happen before we cover that drug.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Dr. Low, we did have a list of three other people wishing to speak. We have time for one question.

S. Chant: Thanks for the work that you do.

Are there any obsolete meds on the formulary, or is it cleaned out regularly?

A. Low: I think, in general, it cleans out. It’s almost self-cleaning. When drugs are not used very much, generally the manufacturers withdraw them from the market. They’re no longer profitable for them, and oftentimes prices get pushed down in those kinds of things. So in some ways, they’re kind of self-cleaning.

However, it would be nice if we had some sort of funding process to help deprescribe medications. That is, review patients regularly, and remove drugs that are unnecessary. Currently something like that is often done by pharmacists. I do that in my practice, but there’s no funding mechanism to actually reimburse for it.

We need to charge patients privately in order to get them off drugs they don’t need. They can get started on them quite easily, and you might see a lot of seniors on many, many drugs. It takes a long time and multiple visits to try to remove that drug. It is a tapering and a process that needs monitoring.

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

Next up is Bernice Budz, the Midwives Association of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours.

MIDWIVES ASSOCIATION OF B.C.

B. Budz: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you this morning.

I’m Bernice Budz, the executive director for the Midwives Association of British Columbia. This is the professional association for midwives in B.C. The MABC promotes the profession of midwifery while advocating for the ongoing development and enhancement of its services.

The MABC provides continuing education opportunities and professional services to over 430 midwives across the province while supporting midwifery education programs. The MABC works with its members to ensure that they provide quality, skilled, trauma-informed, culturally sensitive, patient-centred and evidence-based care. This has been regulated under the Health Professions Act since 1998. We look forward to working together to strengthen the system that ensures B.C. families continue to receive high-quality primary maternity care and the long-term availability of midwifery services for all British Columbians.

Our first recommendation is to increase access to midwifery education programs. There are just over 430 registered midwives across the province. This is not enough to meet the growing demand for midwifery services in B.C. We need to attract, retain and provide security for this skilled workforce to continue to provide access to the care of newborns and families.

[9:25 a.m.]

In recent years, B.C. has experienced one of the highest rates of midwifery-involved maternity care in Canada, a minimum of 26 percent, hitting 50 percent on the Island. Indeed, the demand for midwifery services is only expected to grow, as the number of births in the province is expected to reach over 50,000 by 2025.

Midwives in B.C. play an integral role in closing the gap for families seeking health care services and are critical in delivering accessible, culturally safe and effective health care. B.C. midwives provide primary maternity care to over 10,000 families a year across the province.

Our second recommendation is to expand Indigenous midwifery and rural maternity access. Registered midwives are highly trained primary maternity care leaders, accredited through the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives, who care for people with low-, moderate- and high-risk pregnancies.

Care with a midwife is associated with better perinatal outcomes across the risk categories. For many B.C. families in rural, Indigenous and northern communities, access to midwifery care can be the only way to avoid having to travel long distances to give birth.

We recommend the creation of a secure stream of funding to enhance programs for Indigenous midwives that meet the truth and reconciliation targeted action items and promote Indigenous people to gain access to Indigenous midwives. This funding could focus on increasing pathways to education or working to address barriers to practising Indigenous midwifery in British Columbia.

In addition, we recommend the expansion of programs aimed at retaining and attracting midwives in rural and remote communities to increase access to reproductive and sexual health care, minimize the travel for families and stabilize maternity services. This could include financial incentives for new midwifery graduates to set up their practice in the province and, in various communities, to help meet the need for maternal health.

Recommendation 3 is to address the gender pay gap. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the demand for home birth has increased significantly, particularly related to the COVID pandemic. Access to midwifery care can reduce the pressure on hospital resources by facilitating early discharge from the hospital and by enabling families to receive essential services in the safety of their own home.

Undervaluing the work and worth of midwifery is common, as midwifery is associated with women and women’s care work. Midwifery work, when compared to work done by physicians, which is work historically associated with men, is drastically undervalued.

We request that B.C. midwives be considered in equal pay legislation and in any work to close the gender pay gap as the primary maternity providers caring for over 26 percent of B.C.’s birthing families.

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

S. Chant: Thank you, Bernice. Currently in B.C., how many midwifery training seats are there and in how many institutes? Do they have any Indigenous pathways at this point?

B. Budz: Thanks for the question. Currently UBC, in Vancouver, is the only training site. They have 20 seats. There is no special pathway for Indigenous people.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): In regards to home births, as far as the Midwives Association is concerned…. What’s the percentage of home births versus in hospital? My last two children were with midwives, but they were born in a hospital. How many, the percentage, are actually at home?

B. Budz: Right now, from our best calculations, it seems that it’s about 15 to 20 percent.

More and more midwives are finding that they just don’t have enough backup support to be able to do that. It’s very exhausting work. They can be in the home for a considerable number of hours, and the compensation just isn’t there.

This is one of the problems. They’d like to provide more service, but they just need more resourcing. That’s something that could really be enhanced if there were more resources for people, and it would be better comfort for the patients.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Also, I would add that it takes that stress, as you said, off the hospital itself. I think any relief we can get there is definitely well warranted.

B. Budz: Midwives would be happy to do that work.

[9:30 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): I have a quick question. Can you just go into a little bit more detail regarding the gender pay gap?

B. Budz: Certainly. At this point, midwives are able to do direct billing to government, as are physicians. However, they are not allowed to bill for similar aspects of work. As an example, if there’s a piece of work that, say, a physician was able to bill upwards of $100, a midwife might be able to bill $9 or $10, so the gap is considerable.

There are a number of fee codes that only apply to physicians. The same fee code does not apply to a midwife, despite it being the same work. So the idea of equal pay for equal work is definitely something that needs to be addressed. For some reason, the fee codes have not been adjusted for midwives to be compensated for the same work and at the same level that a physician would for the same amount of training and experience.

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

Not seeing any, Bernice, thank you very much for your presentation to the committee this morning.

B. Budz: Thank you again for the opportunity.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Jean Blake, Parkinson Society of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours, Jean.

PARKINSON SOCIETY B.C.

J. Blake: Thank you very much to all the committee members. I appreciate the opportunity. I’m the CEO of Parkinson Society B.C., and I’m here to provide three recommendations to help reduce the impacts of Parkinson’s disease on the B.C. health system.

First, some context. Parkinson’s disease, PD, is the fastest-growing and second most common age-related neurodegenerative condition in Canada, just behind Alzheimer’s disease. It’s progressive, and there is no cure.

People with Parkinson’s have limited therapeutic options, so they utilize emergency services more frequently, they have longer hospital stays, and they may be placed in expensive complex care earlier than necessary. The good news is that with expert and appropriate treatment and access to more innovative medications, disease progression can be managed, and patients can live independently for many more years.

Parkinson Society B.C. recommends that the B.C. government take these following three actions to reduce the impact of Parkinson’s disease on the B.C. health system.

First, maintain and expand specialized staff in existing health authority programs, and create new opportunities to train health professionals to better support patients with PD. Managing disease progression requires a specialized, team-based approach. In addition to neurologists, who are movement disorder specialists, other health care staff, including physiotherapists, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, social workers and exercise professionals all help to contribute to additional years of patient independence.

In 2020, PSBC committed to invest $2 million over five years in Vancouver, Victoria, Kelowna and Nanaimo to help reduce wait-lists to these critical services. The agreement was that the health authorities would take over a third of the funding in year 4, two-thirds in year 5 and continue the funding in year 6.

PSBC is a small non-profit. This was a big challenge for us, and we are unable to commit to continuing this support after year 6 in these agreements. We therefore ask the B.C. government to work with the health authorities to sustain and increase these allied health care teams.

PSBC also undertakes training of health care professionals and also offers scholarships to health care staff to increase their knowledge and expertise in Parkinson’s. However, more needs to be done, and we ask the B.C. government to create new training opportunities or help PSBC increase access to its programs.

Our second recommendation is to provide timely access to innovative medications and therapies, and, as part of this, to expand access to deep brain stimulation to ensure timely treatment. While there is currently no cure for Parkinson’s, medications can provide good symptom control for a period of time.

[9:35 a.m.]

Access to appropriate medications and therapies helps keep people with PD independent and assists with activities most of us take for granted, such as the ability to move and the ability to speak and swallow. We request that the B.C. government commit to provide timely access to new therapies that demonstrate benefits for PD patients.

Deep brain stimulation is a neurosurgical procedure for patients with advanced PD that uses implanted electrodes and electrical stimulation to treat PD and other movement disorders. In 2019, the B.C. government doubled the number of surgeries performed annually from 36 to 72, and this year they funded the recruitment of a second qualified neurosurgeon.

However, even with two neurosurgeons, B.C. is still far behind other provinces that have one for every one million people, compared to our two for five million. B.C. has a wait time of up to five years, compared to six to 12 months elsewhere in Canada. We encourage B.C. to monitor wait times and provide additional resources to ensure timely access to this very valuable surgery.

The third and final recommendation: increase and standardize funding for home care and respite. Providing these supports can make a difference in a care partner’s ability to continue to care for the person with PD. Failing health of the health care partner often results in more frequent use of emergency acute care and a faster transition to complex care. Unfortunately, access to care across B.C. is inequitable. We therefore request that the B.C. government expand these supports and ensure that services are standardized around the province.

Thank you for your attention, and I’ll be happy to meet with any of you separately after this to speak in more detail.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well done, Jean.

J. Blake: Sorry for speeding up my speech. I was watching the clock.

M. Starchuk (Chair): No. That is fine.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Jean. This one is near and dear to my heart. I worked with the society in Cranbrook. I worked with a couple of constituents who had deep brain stimulation procedures done. I know full well that we’re understaffed in that regard. We’ve got two neurosurgeons right now. I think a lot is from the advocacy that I myself and some of my constituents brought forward a couple of years ago.

Is it Dr. Honey? I can’t remember the name of the surgeon.

J. Blake: Yes, he’s the only one we’ve had for years. They just hired a second gentleman, starting in August. The society actually paid for his stereotactical training.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Maybe explain to the committee exactly the conundrum that the folks with Parkinson’s have in getting deep brain stimulation — the fact that you can’t get the procedure too early in a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, if it’s early on, but you can’t get it when it’s too late.

There’s a bit of a window there. Right now we’re waiting four, five or six years to get the procedure approved and all that stuff. Many folks miss that window in not getting this game-changing, life-changing procedure done. Can you maybe explain on that?

J. Blake: I think you just did. There is a window.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): All right. Thank you. It’s super critical, and I really support your cause. It’s admirable. It changes people’s lives. So thank you for that.

S. Chant: You spoke about having a partnership that lasted five years. When did that start?

J. Blake: It was 2020. So we’re in the middle of it. We have two of the health authorities that are just going into their fourth year of our commitment and taking on…. We have a commitment from Island Health that they will honour the third of the funding they’re supposed to take on. We’ve not had that commitment yet from Interior Health.

Vancouver Coastal is just in the second year of the agreement with us. In Nanaimo, they’ve been unable to hire a speech path until just recently. We’re just in the very first year of the agreement with Island Health Authority for that one.

S. Chant: Very good. Thank you.

R. Leonard: That was kind of my question: was there a distinction between the different health authorities in the terms of these agreements?

First of all, kudos for taking on this kind of a partnership and finding a way forward. In my community, there was a fellow who had Parkinson’s. It kind of made the big news because he got lost, and he was found, almost gone, seven days later, just a few hundred metres away from home. He came back and lived at home for a while.

The issues around deep brain stimulation and going into long-term care — those are really challenging decisions that people have to make. I appreciate that the Parkinson Society is there to help people, to support them through those kinds of decisions.

[9:40 a.m.]

J. Blake: Thank you. As has already been expressed, we just need a little greater access. It’s unreasonable to have to expect to wait five years for this kind of therapy, particularly when it’s available in other parts of the country in six to 12 months.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jean, I have a question. You had mentioned providing scholarships to encourage people. Can you just expand on that a little bit?

J. Blake: It’s to health care professionals who already are in their profession, but they don’t have an expertise or particular knowledge in Parkinson’s disease. We give them scholarships to expand their knowledge and expertise.

We often run programs ourselves. We’ve trained some of our staff to become trainers in some of these, or we provide support for sending them elsewhere to get the training.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I forgot my follow-up.

We’ve got two neurosurgeons. Where do we sit in Canada as far as that type of specialized care is concerned? I think Alberta has three or four. Can you just tell us where we sit?

J. Blake: The average is one specialized neurosurgeon for every million in population a province has. With our two, with five million, we are, sadly, still going to be behind.

The second neurosurgeon isn’t even starting until August. So there’s going to be quite a bit of time to even catch up and to bring us…. I want to say maybe three years or something.

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. Jean, thank you very much for your presentation this morning and for the work that your organization does.

J. Blake: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Becca Yu, Speech and Hearing B.C.

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

The floor is yours.

SPEECH AND HEARING B.C.

B. Yu: Thank you very much.

I would like to begin today by acknowledging that I’m calling in from the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Kwikwetlem. I thank the Kwikwetlem who continue to live on these lands and care for them, along with the waters and all that is above and below.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today on behalf of Speech and Hearing B.C., representing the needs and concerns of speech-language pathologists and audiologists and their patients. I’m the current president of Speech and Hearing B.C.

Access to communication health services is a fundamental right for all British Columbians. The ability to hear, communicate and eat are all essential to quality of life at every age. However, there’s a critical shortage of SLPs and audiologists in our province, leading to long wait times and limited access to essential services. To address this, we urge the government to continue to increase the number of advanced education seats at the graduate level, expanding the program beyond Metro Vancouver.

There are eight seats that are announced for 2024. That is a really good start, but more are needed to meet the growing demands. By continuing to invest in education and training, we can produce a larger pool of qualified professionals to improve the access to these vital services.

While more seats are needed to build future capacities in our province, our health care system needs more SLPs and audiologists now. To address this, we recommend increasing funding to access and partnering with local stakeholders for innovative recruitment and retention strategies.

One barrier to access for individuals who are hard of hearing is not necessarily their hearing assessment, which still can be a barrier, but the equipment needed once a hearing loss is detected, leading to social isolation and negative mental health outcomes. Untreated hearing loss also correlates to higher risk for dementia. Introducing funding for hearing aids in British Columbia is a crucial improvement for quality of life for many residents.

To attract talent and address the workforce shortage, it’s important to recruit professionals both locally and from outside of the province. However, the perception of licensing requirements in B.C. is that it’s excessively challenging and costly, creating barriers for professionals. By investing in right-touch regulations, we can reduce wait times, expand service capacities and create a more favourable environment for professionals to enter the field, contributing their expertise to the health care system in B.C.

Investing in our youth is another recruitment method for building capacities for our future: for example, collaborating with high school career programs to raise awareness about these in-demand professions.

[9:45 a.m.]

Let me share a story. Years ago a graduate school classmate of mine moved to Vanderhoof. During her time there, a student asked to shadow her. That student later pursued their graduate studies. When they returned, my friend was ready to leave, and ultimately, the student took over her position. This is an example of the potential for cultivating local talent and creating professionals with roots in their community. That SLP is still there today.

While recruitment is essential, retention is critical. Competitive wages and benefits, flexible work options and mentorship are some of the top motivators for our current workforce. With a critical shortage in the workforce, it’s also important to look at new types of positions, such as the inclusion of access of SLPs and audiologists to HealthLinkBC or 811, which would provide flexible job positions for those who need them and a resource to British Columbians right at their fingertips.

To address the growing demand for communication health services, we need to increase the number of full-time-equivalents, FTEs, and invest in additional FTEs. We can reduce wait times, enhance service delivery and reduce burnout for the workforce. We would also give opportunity for early intervention, preventing potential long-term consequences, reducing the burden on other sectors in the future.

To conclude, I urge the government to prioritize our recommendations in their next budget.

To improve access to communication health services, we recommend increasing advanced education seats, expanding programs beyond Metro Vancouver and introducing funding for hearing aids; implementing right-touch regulations; and investing in the creation of new job roles and positions, including access to professionals on HealthLinkBC.

Together let us ensure that no individual is left without the support they need to hear, communicate and eat effectively and lead fulfilled lives.

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

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

S. Chant: I’ve got a couple of questions if you’ll indulge me, Chair.

The first question is: how many seats are there for SLP and audiology, and where are they?

B. Yu: Currently, the program is housed at UBC, in the Friedman Building. There is a total of 48 seats, 36 of them being for SLP and the rest for audiologists. My understanding is that in 2024, there will be an addition of eight seats for the SLP portion of the program. There haven’t been further announcements of where that might be located.

S. Chant: Okay. One further question. I was speaking through an interpreter to a profoundly deaf fellow that I was interacting with in another realm, and he was saying that the loss of ASL interpreters has become quite critical, particularly male. Is there any focus on that?

This fellow is a male, and when he goes to his physician, he doesn’t want a female there interpreting for him, thank you so much. The availability of male ASL sign people has gone way down. Is there any focus on that from your association?

B. Yu: Now, our association, our members are speech language pathologists and audiologists, so the language interpreters are slightly outside of our scope. But I have spoken to the media before about that critical need because it is a huge support and a barrier to access when they aren’t able to support those services for British Columbians who are hard of hearing.

We have talked about that and looked to see how we can help support that, but it’s slightly outside of the scope of our association.

S. Chant: Very good. Thank you.

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. I think I’m a little bit lost on what you were talking about with HealthLink and 811. Is that about getting citizens to gain access to the services of speech and language pathologists and audiologists, or are you talking more about the trained professionals? I’m a little bit lost on that one.

B. Yu: Thank you for your question. It would be access to an SLP or audiologist on HealthLink. We are currently not professionals that are in that service. I know dietitians are, and nursing and pharmacists are part of the list of professionals that someone could call and access and ask questions to.

Our association feels that having access to those professionals to be that first line of support and be able to ask questions on a phone line would help some British Columbians access services much quicker.

[9:50 a.m.]

R. Leonard: Are you covered by a college? Do you have a regulatory college?

B. Yu: We do.

R. Leonard: You do. Okay. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Becca, I have a question. You gave us the story of a student that went through the system, and that’s where their career ended up. In telling the story, is there a role for the province to play in that recruitment process?

B. Yu: Yeah. I was having a thought this morning about it. I’m actually going to be speaking at a local library today to high school students. I’m going to try to do the same thing in my own community.

I think the province could look at potential grants for mentorship. Mentorship is usually done by volunteers, those who are taking time out of their already busy lives. I think, potentially, grants to support mentorship for those much-needed professions could help support those who would like to mentor but maybe find it challenging with their current workloads in their life and professionally.

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

Any other questions?

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Becca.

You mentioned the story in Vanderhoof. Is there a problem getting these people outside of UBC? I’m assuming they come in, but do they return to those areas like, I don’t know, Fort St. John, Dawson Creek, Terrace, Prince George, places like that? Is there a problem attracting and getting people in those communities?

B. Yu: I think that’s an issue that is beyond my profession — that attracting talent and different professionals, particularly health care professionals, to rural and remote areas can be difficult.

With the UBC program being housed out of the Vancouver location, it’s probably deterring some of those who see the cost of living, going down to Vancouver for two-plus years to complete the program.

Also, the UBC program particularly has a couple of prerequisites that are quite difficult to get if you’re not a current UBC student. Potentially, that’s the undergraduate program and graduate program for an individual outside of the Lower Mainland to have to kind of uproot their lives to go and do and then, hopefully, at that point, return home to practise in where they grew up.

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

B. Yu: Thank you for your time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up we have Graham Freeman, British Columbia Seniors Living Association.

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

The floor is yours.

B.C. SENIORS LIVING ASSOCIATION

G. Freeman: Thank you very much. Good morning, committee members. I’d like to thank you for your time.

I’d like to begin with a brief introduction of who we are and those we serve. Established in 2002, the B.C. Seniors Living Association is a non-profit organization, an association made up of members operating seniors housing sites and associated services.

Our membership is made up of for-profit and not-for-profit housing providers predominantly offering independent living and assisted living. Our 160 member sites are located throughout the province and are home to over 14,000 residents.

While many have a sense of what assisted living is for, independent living is often misunderstood, and it falls behind in the priorities related to care. Part of why we’re bringing our three recommendations forward today is that independent living has few financial supports for seniors in congregate settings, and it does not provide care.

Independent living is, however, a crucial part of the housing continuum for care. It stokes communities and provides social benefit. It fosters social interaction in combatting the isolation and mental challenges faced by seniors often residing alone.

As we embark on a seismic shift of demographics and a 75-plus, aging population that will require right-size housing solutions, independent living residences have the potential to be an important part of housing supply solutions. The transition will turn over single-family dwelling units for new families and immigration and serve the province’s new densification strategies.

Our recommendations. The first is a self-directed tax credit or voucher promoting seniors choice. It was developed in Quebec in 1999 and could be used as an example for reference, but high level, it is a….

[9:55 a.m.]

We’re asking for a comprehensive and universal accessible support voucher or tax credit for seniors in British Columbia, which would provide financial assistance regarding their chosen living arrangement and the supported services. They could elect for wellness programs, care or other kinds of supports. Again, the key here is that we leave the designation in how they use these funds up to the seniors themselves.

Two is an energy-efficient rebate credit program. We ask to expand and extend the energy-efficient rebates and credit programs for multi-unit dwellings. The B.C. government offered a clean buildings tax credit, announced in the ’22 budget, and it expires in 2025.

We would like to see that program expanded to identify seniors residences and extended to 2028. Renovations and retrofits take time. The municipal process can be slow, not to mention the current cost of capital investments. So extending the availability of these programs will allow for greater participation and completion.

We know that many of those 75 and older are highly susceptible to environmental extremes. So there could be a subset of protective effects and investments such as HVAC filtration and cooling strategies for these types of facilities. Long-term care currently has that, but it’s not available to independent living.

The third recommendation is a credit or special amortization for workforce housing. We’re aware of how important immigration is to meeting our country’s workforce replacement strategy. In many municipalities, the development applications are met with requirements to provide affordable housing, but they’re not specific to workforce quotients.

We recommend supporting developments with provincial tax credits or special amortization terms that incentivize workforce units so that people can live close to where they work. Many operators are struggling with labour shortages, and we see this recommendation benefiting everyone.

We kindly request the select standing committee consider these recommendations and explore their potential benefits, and we appreciate your time.

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

R. Leonard: I’m a little familiar with the independent living piece. One of my parents went into independent living. It seemed mostly available to people who had good pensions, because that’s how they could afford to have that kind of living arrangement.

My question is around your last recommendation. You said a credit or amortization, something or other. Could you expand on that a little bit, so I can understand what you’re asking for?

G. Freeman: Yeah, sure. Amortization terms would just essentially be a concession on the terms of payment. Instead of upfront DCC charges paid within an upfront term, we would ask for, maybe, an extension.

There are certain programs through CMHC that allow for longer amortizations for mortgages and things of that nature. But with tax credits, potentially that could help someone invest now, but not necessarily take the hit now, and be able to afford these things, to get them in place sooner.

The credit could serve the same purpose. I just offered both as potential solutions.

R. Leonard: So as an amortization term, extending it is still going to be at the cost of the facility owner, but making it more affordable over the longer term.

G. Freeman: Yeah, exactly. It’s almost a part 2. We would ask for the tax credit, but if that were not possible, then something to ease the ability to provide these things.

S. Chant: I had an uncle who lived in an establishment in the States that they actually created. It was a campus of care that went from independent living through assisted living through long-term care with staff living on campus as well.

Do we have anything similar at all in B.C.?

G. Freeman: No, we don’t, and we really struggled through the pandemic to even take units back and try and provide that support, where people didn’t want to commute back and forth and potentially expose their family to different issues.

Operators got around it in the short term. But no, I can’t think of an example of that in Canada, let alone B.C.

B. Stewart: I want to go back to point 3 in terms of this workforce housing. The credit you’re talking about — did you say it was for the CACs, the cost charges that the communities are going to charge to the development in their communities? Is that what we’re trying to defer or amortize?

G. Freeman: Potentially. It could be potentially related to DCCs, but the general ask is about trying to bring forward a provincial credit. It might be attractive to municipalities. Currently, they set targets for affordable housing, but they’re non-determined. In a lot of senses, that’s the way to go.

[10:00 a.m.]

In the cases of something like seniors housing, we’re bringing on a large labour force. The issue for a lot of them isn’t just the fact that they provide housing. It’s how we support the services to operate. A lot of people just simply can’t afford to live in the neighbourhoods these residences are built in.

Where we would find it beneficial would be to offer the developer, which in most cases is the operator, an incentive to build workforce housing specifically, because it would benefit them, but it would also work for affordable housing units. Currently, municipalities just aren’t specific in that nature. So they could be rented to anybody or sold to anybody, and that just doesn’t serve the labour force shortages.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): On point 1 on the self-directed tax credit. Is that just for services and care, or does that expand out to infrastructure or retrofits or anything like that?

G. Freeman: Just services and care. Again, in the funded side of the system in more acute care, long-term care and advanced assisted living, there are some supports in place. But there is literally nothing at the front end of it — very few programs.

The point of this is that most of them don’t apply in congregate settings. If people are living in their homes, then often there are supports. But as soon as you move into a congregate setting, for some reason those aren’t available to people until they enter the acute care system.

Yeah, it would be self-directed — something for seniors universally applied when they can apply it to wellness and, potentially, care that they’re getting, maybe, if they’re managing their own and with family members or even home care programs.

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

M. Starchuk (Chair): Graham, thank you very much for your presentation this morning to the committee.

G. Freeman: Thank you very much. We do have a written submission, which I believe we have until Friday to submit. I look forward to maybe even providing more information there.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes, Friday at 2 p.m., to be exact.

G. Freeman: Great. Thank you, everyone, for your time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): You’re welcome.

The committee will now recess for ten minutes.

The committee recessed from 10:02 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Marion Pollack, of 411 Seniors Centre.

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

411 SENIORS CENTRE

M. Pollack: On behalf of the 411 Seniors Centre in Vancouver, B.C., I want to thank you. The 411 Seniors Centre is a place for seniors aged 55 and over. We’re dedicated to their well-being.

We’re here to ask you that long-term core funding for non-profit, community-based seniors centres be included in the 2024 provincial budget. In her September 2022 report B.C. Seniors: Falling Further Behind, the B.C. seniors advocate recommended that the government of B.C. “develop a comprehensive plan to build the capacity of seniors centres across B.C., to better support social engagement and help older people access the support and services they need to continue to live independently.”

At the 411 Seniors Centre, we endorse this recommendation. I believe the best way to enact it is to ensure that long-term core funding be allocated to non-profit, community-based seniors centres in the upcoming budget. We’re making this as a result of, really, our lived experience. Seniors centres are more and more important with the ever-growing number of seniors, and the recent pandemic highlighted the need for senior-driven community services for seniors. We know that as a result of the pandemic and inflation, we’re seeing seniors with more and more complex issues and needs.

We know that our seniors centres, like the 411 Seniors Centre, play a crucial role in ensuring that diverse groups of older adults can age in place in a successful and productive manner. What we’re seeing is that the staff, volunteers and board of our centre, instead of spending time interacting with seniors, developing programming, are forced to look for grants, are forced to apply for grants and are forced to make reports for grants. We’re doing this instead of providing services to seniors.

We know that seniors centres contribute to the social determinants of health in a positive way. That means that we’ll keep seniors out of hospital and long-term care. We know that seniors centres are crucial to addressing and combatting seniors’ social isolation, and we know that there’s a substantial amount of evidence linking seniors’ social isolation to bad health outcomes. We know that seniors centres are crucial to keeping seniors informed and connected, and that benefits everybody. Seniors centres, we know, enhance civic engagement.

With the increased costs of everything — basic items like food, toilet paper, labour costs — seniors centres are having a harder and harder time to survive. Increasingly, seniors centres are having to deal with issues that are being downloaded from the government.

One example is that when people transition off provincial PWD when they’re 64, they have to apply for OAS, old age security, and the guaranteed income supplement. We spend a lot of time assisting seniors who are doing that transitioning to apply for OAS and the GIS, and we spend a lot of time helping people apply for SAFER and the B.C. bus pass.

[10:20 a.m.]

To sum up, our primary recommendation is that the upcoming budget include long-term core funding for non-profit, community-based seniors centres.

We also have one other recommendation, which is improvements to SAFER, the shelter allowance for elderly renters. According to the CMHC, in October, the average one-bedroom was $1,675 a month, but SAFER only pays $873 a month. What this means, and what we’re seeing so often, is seniors paying 50 percent or more of their income on their rent. They can’t buy food, they can’t buy medications, and they can’t go out and have fun with other people. So for us, improving SAFER is crucial.

Thank you very much for hearing me, and I look forward to answering your questions.

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

S. Chant: Thank you, Marion. Lovely to see you. Thank you for the guided tour that I had of 411, probably a month and a half ago, which was great fun. They treated me so nicely.

I’m interested in the work that you do to help people. The other piece you didn’t mention is how much you put in to helping people with taxes, because if people don’t do their taxes, they end up not being able to get their benefits — old age, GIS, etc. If you can expand a little bit on that, that would be great.

M. Pollack: Yes, we run an annual income tax clinic, free for low-income seniors. This year we saw over 1,000 seniors at our clinic. We also do income tax year-round.

For many seniors, income tax is the gateway to every other program. For instance, if you don’t do your income tax, you’re not entitled to the guaranteed income supplement, which means you’re not entitled to the B.C. seniors supplement, which means you’re not entitled to the B.C. bus pass, and it may have a negative impact on your ability to access SAFER. For us, income tax, in many ways, is a gateway for seniors to access provincial benefits as well as federal. So it’s really critical that we provide those kinds of services.

We also do a robust information and referral program that assists seniors with everything from applying for the B.C. bus pass to OAS to some landlord-tenant issues — often just being an ear for people to listen to. The other thing is that we have a brand-new centre, and we have a great kitchen. We just started offering low-cost soup and sandwiches one day a week. That has been oversubscribed, because so many seniors are facing food insecurity.

R. Leonard: Thanks to you for your service. Everybody knows about 411. I know my community has its own seniors centre, and other communities have seniors centres. They don’t all provide the same kinds of services.

When you’re talking about doing core funding, how do you see it rolling out? Should it be based on the seniors population? Some people are afraid to go into seniors centres. I’m just curious about how you would assess what kind of core funding and how it would be distributed.

M. Pollack: Well, one of the things across B.C. is there’s a variety of senior centres. Some receive municipal funding, and others don’t. I think that needs to be a longer-term discussion on how the core funding would roll out. I think it could be based on a combination of the work that the seniors centre does, as well as the senior population in the area.

I agree with you that there’s often a stigma, because of ageism, for seniors to go to seniors centres. We’re trying to combat that. In terms of funding, I think there could be a wide variety of funding — not just to fund programs but to fund core operations so that people can afford to run our great programs.

[10:25 a.m.]

B. Stewart: Thanks, Marion. It’s so good that you brought up SAFER. I wanted to ask you…. That number you used — I think you said $873. Is that the cap currently?

M. Pollack: It’s $803.

B. Stewart: Okay. What do you think it should go up to? What’s your…? Knowing the market has been increasing the pressures…. I mean, even the landlords and taxes and all those things that they’re facing. I guess what I’m wondering is: what do you think that the system…? How do you think it should be changed?

M. Pollack: Well, there are various zones for SAFER. I only can talk about Vancouver. I think it should talk about the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment, because that’s what seniors are facing — seniors who rent. That’s what people are struggling with. I think that it should be based on the average rent.

So $803 — I don’t know any senior who lives in market housing who pays $803.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, Marion. Thank you very much for your presentation this morning, and thank you very much for what you do for your clients.

Next up is Larry Goldenberg, Vancouver Prostate Centre.

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

The floor is yours.

VANCOUVER PROSTATE CENTRE

L. Goldenberg: Thanks very much.

Hello to many of you who I’ve met before. Thanks for the opportunity to present very briefly to you about what we believe is one of B.C.’s great science stories and to thank the government for the support over many years.

Since 1993, the Prostate Centre and the department of urologic sciences here at VGH and UBC have grown from a few scientists to a global research power. We have over 200 researchers and staff currently working here on campus.

Our scientific excellence, our infrastructure and the world impact extend beyond prostate cancer. We have made difference-making discoveries in diseases such as bladder cancer, kidney cancer, ovarian cancer, breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancers. Our discoveries are also applicable to non-cancerous illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and, most recently, the treatment of viral infections with the exciting drug discovery for COVID-19, which I’ll talk to in a moment.

In a couple of minutes, I’d just like to review a couple of examples. It’s impossible to review everything we’re doing in five minutes. One of our exciting innovations most recently that was thanks to recent government funding is the development of what we call real-time biopsy diagnosis. When performing a biopsy of a suspicious lesion — say in a prostate or, for that matter, any other organ — and also during surgery, where our intent is to remove entire cancers, we send samples to the pathology lab for analysis. It can take days to weeks or even longer to get the results.

We try our best to biopsy suspicious areas as accurately as we can or, at surgery, to remove all the cancer as best that we can, but we’re never truly sure until the pathologist has carefully examined the tissue over the days or weeks that follow.

Then, particularly after surgery, if we missed something, we’re looking at some form of adjuvant or extra therapy such as surgery or radiation or, if we’re still suspicious that the biopsy maybe missed something, we may have to bring a patient back for biopsy. This situation is stressful, particularly for patients and their families, not to mention the surgeons.

Today with the purchase of Raman spectroscopy equipment, we are operationalizing a first-in-Canada imaging system. Now, this microscope can differentiate cancer from non-cancer tissue immediately, in real time, in the biopsy room or in the operating room, letting us know immediately where we’re at with removing the cancer cells or making the diagnosis.

This is obviously better for patients, reducing stress. It will also save money and resources such as operating room time — if we send what’s called a frozen section, we may have to wait 30 minutes or so; that’s very expensive time in the operating room — or the need for excessive or repeated biopsies. We’re really excited about this technology, and we’ll report back to government about it.

[10:30 a.m.]

Now, the other innovation is quite amazing. It’s an accelerated AI virtual screening platform called Deep Docking. This was created in our centre by Dr. Art Cherkasov. It’s capable of screening tens of billions of chemical compounds that chemists can make today. This is used to seek a drug that would target a protein that is the basis of a disease, a cancer, a virus or whatever. Because of this, we are at the forefront of harnessing AI in drug discovery, and it has the potential to develop technology in ways that will have benefits locally and globally.

We’ve identified cancer treatments already with this technique. When we were struck with the pandemic, we were able to repurpose our procedures to search for a drug compound capable of eliminating the coronavirus. At first, Dr. Cherkasov scanned 1.3 billion compounds — that usually takes up to three years; he did it in a week — and then 40 billion compounds. We’re now at a point where he’s analyzing two novel compounds that are comparable, if not better, to Pfizer’s drug. He also has other compounds that will probably be ten times stronger than what’s available right now.

Recommendation 1 is we need to continue this fight against COVID-19. We need $750,000 for that. The second recommendation is to encourage the government to work with us to explore our new model of drug discovery for this province, which will incur better health outcomes for our patients and clear economic benefits.

I thank you for your time. As I said, this just scratches the surface of a lot of innovative initiatives, and I’m happy to answer any questions you might have.

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

S. Chant: Good morning. Nice to see you again.

A question around the accelerated AI for screening: once the compound has been found, is it something that’s already being produced somewhere, or are we then creating the medication as well?

L. Goldenberg: Yes, the compound may be in existence and taken off a shelf, but more than likely, basically, a computer generates the compound, and then a chemist makes the compound. The formulation is made, and we have to do formulation studies, solubility studies and then PK studies, or pharmacokinetic studies, in animals.

To compare that — for example, the drugs that we have for COVID — we will compare head-to-head to Pfizer’s drug. Then we have to do toxicity studies. Those are on a small amount of the compound. Then you have to generate the drug. You have to produce significant quantities of the drug to run larger-scale PK studies and different mouse models. Eventually you get it to the point of human studies. It still has to follow the developmental pathway, but it accelerates the actual discovery, by years.

If one of these two compounds that we’ve narrowed it down to now turns out to be highly efficacious, we’re not planning to sell it at huge amounts of money. We really want to provide it to the world at a reasonable cost.

R. Leonard: First, I’ll say wow. It’s very exciting, the work you’re doing.

Now, the Vancouver Prostate Centre is a non-profit, I presume?

L. Goldenberg: Yeah.

R. Leonard: Okay. What you’ve just described to us is something that should give confidence to people about the independence of the study, about the lack of interference for a profit motive.

I wanted to say: thank you very much for that. I think that’s a real benefit to British Columbians.

L. Goldenberg: We see what we call a democratization program, where people from around the world…. Deep Docking depends on having a target. It’s sort of like a key in a lock. If somebody presents us with a lock, we have to find the key that will open that lock. That key can be discovered using this AI program that Art Cherkasov has developed. It’s very unique. Nobody in the world has this. People can screen one billion compounds. Nobody can screen 40 billion compounds in a week or two, the way that Art’s program can.

We’re hoping that one day we’ll be at a point where, in partnership with the government, we’ll be able to develop a democratized system, so that people from all over the world can work with us — and we would help them — to find the compounds. There’s a lot to be discussed in this area, obviously, and to be explored with government, but that’s something that we want to do. We want to partner with the government of British Columbia to do this.

[10:35 a.m.]

B. Banman: It’s terribly exciting. Will you be able to actually zero in on compounds now that will be specifically designed for certain genetic traits? With these designer chemotherapy drugs, for instance: “This isn’t working, but this will work for you, because it’s designed to work with your body.”

L. Goldenberg: That’s an area called pharmacogenomics, where you try to match the drug to the gene of the individual. Why does a drug work in one person and not in the other, if they have the same disease? It’s because they’re genetically different. We’ll be able to work, with the gene sequence of the proteins that are responsible, for the drugs.

Whether or not…. I understand your question, but I don’t think that we’re going to be able to get to that point that quickly. Right now we are going to be designing drugs for particular disease targets, not necessarily for an individual who is carrying that disease.

B. Banman: But the potential exists down the road.

L. Goldenberg: Yes, that’s already being done. It’s called personalized medicine. That’s already out there.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Larry, thank you very much for your presentation. The obvious part, when you’re out looking at men’s health issues, is on the spinoffs that come from the research that’s there.

Next up is Roger Francis from Michael Smith Health Research British Columbia.

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

MICHAEL SMITH HEALTH RESEARCH B.C.

R. Francis: Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to address the committee today. Michael Smith Health Research B.C. is the province’s health research agency. A healthy province with a resilient economy requires evidence and knowledge generated from health research.

As a leader in British Columbia’s life sciences sector, Health Research B.C. is enabling and advancing world-class health research. We’re doing that by building research talent for the province’s future, by catalyzing change for a stronger health research system, and by mobilizing communities for research impact.

We’re going to have one recommendation for you today. The recommendation is that the government should continue to build on the momentum in the health research and life sciences sector in British Columbia by ensuring that it stays engaged, keeps investing in research, and supports new opportunities as they emerge.

We’re still building back from a challenging pandemic period, and economic vagaries linger. Sustained support for health research, however, addresses not only human health but also economic health. Combined, professional scientific and technical services and the health care and social assistance sectors are key contributors to our economy — over 15 percent of GDP in 2022. But the power behind that contribution is people, talent that’s providing the right evidence, in the right ways at the right time, to decision-makers, innovators, patients, clinicians and policy-makers.

British Columbia is home to the fastest-growing life sciences sector in Canada. The life sciences and biomanufacturing plan is positioning the province as a hub. The plan is a good reminder that investing in health research talent today saves lives tomorrow. Researchers in B.C. have delivered life-changing innovations that have improved the health of British Columbians and of people around the world. By supporting health research talent, B.C. has catapulted its expertise to the world stage during major health challenges.

For example, funding through Health Research B.C. enabled researchers to decode the SARS virus in six days. Funding contributed to uncovering the link between previous pandemic immunity in H1N1, which informed our vaccine policy. More recently — certainly, B.C.’s legacy to the world — was that nearly every COVID-19 vaccine candidate that reached late-stage development in 2020 used components that were consulted on, initiated, developed or manufactured by a B.C. company or scientist, with many of these talented researchers funded in part through Health Research B.C.

Our recommendation really focuses on how we extend that legacy. For Health Research B.C., sustained funding produces results. Since inception, we have funded more than 2,000 researchers and teams. Some 88 percent of scholars say that provincial government support is critical to their ability to secure external funding, and 90 percent of research trainees say that provincial funding progresses their careers.

[10:40 a.m.]

Now, 86 percent of scholars stay in British Columbia five years post-award, and they train an average of 12 next-generation innovators. They hire, on average, three additional staff, thereby supporting thousands of jobs.

A number of former funded researchers have gone on to establish leading life science companies right here in British Columbia. Last year the total external funding received by Health Research B.C.–funded scholars exceeded $85 million, the lion’s share of this, 94 percent, coming from sources outside the province.

The life sciences strategy and sustained funding for health research drive the economy. It incents innovation. Sustained funding also advances care. For example, an expanded clinical trials ecosystem will create both health and economic benefits. Imagine people, our neighbours in our communities, participating in and benefiting from online studies and clinical drug trials, from the testing of medical devices and from co-designing new priority studies, all right here in British Columbia.

Historically, government support for health research closed the federal-provincial per-capita funding gap. But due to the recent impact of the pandemic, coupled with changes in federal spending, British Columbia may once again be losing some ground. Health research funding is a provincial investment that ensures the attraction of other sources of health research revenue.

The B.C. government’s funding has really strengthened the province’s health research system. It has supported the people and the institutions that generate and use research-based knowledge. It has focused on better health for all British Columbians. It has contributed to our economic growth. It should continue.

Our recommendation remains. Keep building on the momentum, ensure you stay engaged, keep investing in research, and support new opportunities as they emerge.

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

S. Chant: Thank you very much for your presentation and for the work that you do.

When you’re talking about clinical trials…. I’ve had folks come and talk to me about not being able to get, say, ALS trials going in B.C. Is that something that your group would be looking towards supporting? I recognize that sounds very simplistic for a very complex process.

We’ve heard about trials for, for instance, various neurodegenerative diseases and people going to Montreal and people going to the States, etc. Is that some work that we could focus on here in B.C., supporting and getting those things happening here?

R. Francis: Health Research B.C., through Clinical Trials B.C., has a very strong enabling strategy for clinical trials. We did coordinate, on behalf of the government, a vision for clinical trials in this province, which is now looking at what gaps and what opportunities exist. How can we, as an agency, on behalf of government, help enable the environment that will produce stronger outcomes?

We don’t directly get involved with specific clinical trials. But by, certainly, supporting some of the activities, attracting some of the federal money through partnerships…. We have a platform called REACH B.C., for example, as well, which we fund. It allows volunteers interested in health research to sign up and be matched to potential health research studies.

Through that process and through an active and engaged committee that advances this enabling environment…. Those are the elements that we’re taking right now. I think to a specific type of clinical trial — that gets very complex in a response.

S. Chant: Okay. Thank you.

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

R. Leonard: Along the same lines, as Health Research B.C, are you like the NRC, federally, that researchers come and seek funding from you, or are you coordinating the streams of research? Which direction is the flow?

R. Francis: Yeah. A little bit of everything.

First off, we do have a number of funding programs. We have research funding programs, research training fund programs, health professional investigator programs.

[10:45 a.m.]

For some of these, we are working solely through our funds, through the grant from the provincial government. For some, we partner with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and other partners to bring additional dollars to British Columbia to advance those.

The normal process would be that for our current programs, we would put out a call. Interested researchers would then submit their application, if you will, which goes through peer review. Then the top peer-reviewed studies get funded through the envelope that we have available for those studies.

The partnership area is also one where we actively go out and seek to create partnerships on key priorities for the province. Key priorities are being developed internally through our priority-setting mechanisms but also through the Ministry of Health’s priorities.

Finally, we work with a lot of organizations to help catalyze and support, such as our work in co-leading the SRAC committee, the strategic response to COVID.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Roger. You suggested that there might be some ground we’re losing or that we’re slipping a little bit just recently. I wondered: what’s the biggest gap in life sciences in what you’re doing? If you were looking at a ten-year goal, what do you see as being the things that are holding us back from continuing to lead in Canada, or the world?

R. Francis: When it comes to losing the provincial lens, I suppose, from government funding, there has been a slip in those. But to really build that back is really about ensuring, I think, that we focus on some key priorities here in the province.

We have a great opportunity with the life sciences strategy that’s been announced. We have a great opportunity to really become a leader in clinical trials in Canada, with a strong coordinated approach. I think that’s the route we’re taking right now in this province.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much, Roger, for your presentation to the committee this morning.

Next up is Sandra Behm, Appraisal Institute of Canada, British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours, Sandra.

APPRAISAL INSTITUTE OF CANADA,
B.C. ASSOCIATION

S. Behm: Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the entire committee for inviting me to speak today on behalf of the British Columbia Association of the Appraisal Institute of Canada, or AIC-BC. I’m Sandra Behm. I’m president of the AIC-BC. I am an AACI P.App accredited appraiser. We represent over 1,200 appraisers across British Columbia and the Yukon.

We are an essential part of Canada’s real estate market. Appraisers hold expertise to deliver independent, third-party valuation fundamentals while mitigating risk by ensuring that lenders, insurers and consumers have the important information required to make informed decisions when they’re buying and selling real estate. A large part of what we do as professionals includes working with homebuilders, realtors, mortgage brokers and buyers by providing researched and reliable market valuations.

Strong valuation fundamentals are needed to support British Columbia’s real estate market as it grows. AIC members contribute to maintaining those market fundamentals by providing real estate expertise and knowledge to the lending industry, government and stakeholders, with the delivery of sound valuation advice. Thus, we recommend that appraisers be included in all government consultations and decisions on housing.

One of the most vital resources an appraiser has is accurate market data. Accurate data is necessary for appraisers to complete quality evaluations. Currently, appraisers face challenges in accessing reliable and up-to-date information that is necessary to provide British Columbians with appraisals that will allow them to make informed decisions when they’re buying a home.

Appraisers’ access to market data is fragmented across the province and, in some cases, the data is incomplete and inaccessible due to varying obstacles. A lack of quality information puts the financial system and homebuyers at the risk of misleading market activity and potentially inaccurate valuations.

[10:50 a.m.]

To combat this and to ensure stability within the real estate market, we need government to support advocating for consistent, comprehensive and unobstructed data sources for real estate appraisers that can assist in providing fair and equitable evaluations.

Finally, housing affordability continues to present a significant and complex challenge for British Columbia. While your government has made serious commitments to add housing supply and adjusted certain policies to improve the building process, rising inflation and interest rates threaten to destabilize the provincial housing strategy.

The government of British Columbia’s housing strategy will only be successful if we can comprehensively understand the real estate system. Appraisers are experts in that real estate system and can provide the level of knowledge and understanding.

We recommend creating a program that funds appraisal research to ensure the government has a complete scope of the real estate market. This measure will help ensure that government has accurate data when deciding on housing policies or affordable housing projects.

Appraisers are the unbiased participants in the real estate transaction. We would remain a valuable resource to the government. Such a program would be of significant value to both British Columbians and the government.

We are asking for the government to support the work of appraisers, which will help the housing policy development process. By including appraisers in decision-making, supporting greater data access and funding research done by appraisers, the government will have a more complete picture of British Columbia’s real estate market. By working together, we can ensure that affordable housing projects are built on time and on budget. As committed partners, we can tackle the housing affordability crisis that British Columbians are facing.

Again, thank you for inviting AIC-BC. I would be happy to take any questions that you may have.

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

G. Chow: Thank you for the presentation. Can you give some examples of the inability for your members to access data? Some of the examples that you may want to give us.

S. Behm: Right. We have varying places to get data from. More from a residential perspective is where a lot of the challenges will come from. Some of those are the provincial government, like B.C. Assessment data, that type of thing, where sometimes that data becomes limited and inconsistent in different areas as well.

Previously, more data was available. Over time, that has been lessened and decreased a little bit for varying reasons.

That’s one example of some data that, then, becomes, perhaps, sold and repackaged and sold. It limits the access, and then appraisers are trying to find different resources to go and get that same information. That’s one example of a challenge they face.

G. Chow: That’s transaction data you’re talking about, then, the market transactions. You’re not able to get it readily. That’s basically…?

S. Behm: Yeah. Again, on that example, for instance…. We used to be able to access B.C. Assessment data. We would have homeowners’ names and the transactional dates and that type of information. Now those homeowners’ names are no longer there. There was a piece that was taken out for privacy reasons or what have you. In turn, appraisers then need to go to a secondary source, land titles, to purchase that information from another source.

That’s the type of information that slowly gets pulled away. What’s important, in understanding the market transaction, is when you have all of the information, not just bits and pieces in varying places, right?

G. Chow: Why would that be important — the ownership, the names of the owner? Also, the other question would be: do you have to pay when you access B.C. Assessment data or the land transaction office?

S. Behm: We don’t pay directly. B.C. Assessment has packaged it and sold it to another third party. We can then subscribe to them.

[10:55 a.m.]

Again, say, for instance, when we’re going to say who owns the property and why it’s important to know that…. In order to understand the real estate transaction that’s occurring, you have to understand the parties involved. This will help you determine if it’s an arm’s-length transaction or not, and then if it’s reliable market data.

It may not be market data, right? That’s one of the steps that appraisers use in qualifying the details and the information on a specific transaction. We don’t want to hang our hat on information that’s not true market data.

B. Stewart: Sandra, are there members, in your 1,200 members, that are working for B.C. Housing, or do you do contract work for them?

S. Behm: I believe there are various departments within the provincial government that have actual appraisers on staff, working for them. As well, there are appraisers who contract to different arms of the government for different projects. I would imagine that there’s quite a mix in there.

B. Stewart: Just to George’s earlier question, I think demonstrating how that information affects the market would be helpful for the minister, in terms of us making a recommendation as to supporting that.

You can do your written submission before Friday at two o’clock.

M. Starchuk (Chair): There you go.

A. Walker: I’m just wondering. More information about this research project you’re hoping to undertake. What kind of cost is involved in this, and what are you hoping to discover through that project?

S. Behm: Right. The recommendation isn’t specifically for funds. It’s more for the provincial government to have a budget to allocate towards contracting appraisers to provide consultation and advice on whatever the project may be.

These policies or projects would be forthcoming, potentially. We would ask, then, that there be funds available for you to hire consultants and appraisers to advise on those. So that could be for different housing policies, but it’s not even strictly just housing policies. This could extend to green building initiatives, climate change impact on the markets, various departments and various things that indirectly or directly impact the real estate market.

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

The next presenter is Alvin Singh, the Vancity Community Foundation.

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

The floor is yours.

VANCITY COMMUNITY FOUNDATION

A. Singh: Thank you. My name is Alvin Singh. I’m presenting on behalf of the Vancity Community Foundation in my capacity as the director of communications and advocacy.

I’m presenting to you today from the unceded and traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.

Thank you very much for inviting me here to speak. The Vancity Community Foundation was established in 1989 with a belief that if we work together, we’ll have the resources we need to build thriving, vibrant communities. In order to get there, we leverage financial tools, provide support to non-profits, facilitate philanthropic contributions and advocate for policies that make life more affordable.

Some of these recommendations and policy asks I want to share with you today. The first is to partner with the Vancity Community Foundation on our affordable community housing program and accelerator fund. The lack of affordable housing across British Columbia continues to hurt people, and it’s holding back our economy. We all know the role community-owned and -operated housing can play.

Now, these community landowners have got significant land equity, and they’re eager to build and preserve affordable rental housing. Unlike market developers, they face challenges accessing the early-stage capital required to get their projects off the ground. That’s where we come in.

The Vancity Community Foundation accelerator fund supports the early phases of a project, the ones that are the most risky. At its core, it’s a pipeline that speeds up the delivery of investment-ready projects to funders like B.C. Housing and CMHC. In fact, six out of the seven projects funded through B.C. Housing’s 2021 community housing call received our early-stage support.

That’s why we’re requesting that the standing committee recommend that the government of B.C. partner with us on this program to help rapidly increase the number of affordable community-owned housing projects across the province.

[11:00 a.m.]

Our second recommendation is to partner with us to deliver climate-ready affordable community housing. As climate change continues to impact our province in increasingly severe ways…. We know that those who are struggling the most with the housing crisis are also the ones that are disproportionately impacted by extreme weather.

Now, updates to building codes and new heating and energy technologies will help the buildings of tomorrow be more resilient, but non-profit, co-op and Indigenous organizations are struggling with making sure climate-ready buildings remain affordable at the same time. And we’re here to help.

By providing affordable community housing developers with funding and financing supports at the concept and design stage, we can ensure that affordable homes that we build today are safe for the growing issues of heat and air quality that we know that we’re going to be confronting more and more in the future. So we request that the standing committee recommend that the government of B.C. partner with Vancity Community Foundation to deliver on climate-ready affordable housing in Budget 2024-2025.

Our third and final recommendation is to advance reconciliation, resilience and community safety in the Downtown Eastside with an investment in 312 Main, Vancity Community Foundation Centre for social and economic innovation. So 312 is located in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. It was the former VPD headquarters. It’s a six-storey building with 100,000 square feet of space. It’s a dynamic, accessible and inclusive community workspace used by almost 100 impact organizations to create new opportunities for collaboration and innovation. But there’s still a lot to do.

First, there are jail cells, still, on an undeveloped floor, and the physical presence of the jail cells is a hurtful reminder for the building’s Indigenous partners of historical and ongoing impacts of colonialization. The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, UBCIC, and others have called for the removal of these cells. As part of our commitment to reconciliation, we want to honour this and not only have them removed but allow us to develop the space for other Indigenous organizations.

So 312 Main is also fully equipped with bathrooms and kitchen facilities and other spaces. As we see increases in climate events and those that are disproportionately impacted in the Downtown Eastside, 312 is the ideal location for a disaster response centre and coordination in the neighbourhood.

We’re requesting that the standing committee recommend that the government of B.C. invest in 312 Main to not only advance reconciliation efforts but to also improve safety and resiliency for the Downtown Eastside in the event of an emergency.

With that, I’ll thank you all for the consideration of these requests, and I welcome any questions or future follow-up.

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

I have a question. At the beginning, where you talked about supporting the early, risky parts of the development, can you describe what the risky parts of the development are?

A. Singh: Yeah, of course. Let’s imagine you’re a non-profit. You’re a small seniors support organization, and you have land. You’ve owned that land for a long time, and you want to turn it into housing. Before it gets to the rezoning phase, you need to hire consultants and architects and maybe you need to get a consultant to work with the city.

Those are all things that introduce a lot of risk into the process. If you go to a bank, or even if you go to B.C. Housing, they’ll be pretty reticent to give you funding right off the bat, until they’re more sure that this project is going to actually get to its end stage.

So that’s where we come in. We can come in with grants, pretty small amounts of grants, or up to about $1 million, to hire those folks to do that work. We also can help these organizations that might be doing this for the first time actually learn the ropes of the building industry a little bit.

Once we can get them through that rezoning phase, once they have drawings, once they have an architect, that whole package can go to an organization like B.C. Housing or even a conventional bank, and it becomes incredibly easier to get that project off the ground.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you.

R. Leonard: My understanding is that B.C. Housing has PDF funds to help people get to that project-ready state. But this is a private foundation, non-profit foundation. So what are the parameters around accessing your funds?

A. Singh: We’re actually a very patient lender, and we’re very flexible. The funds that you mention that B.C. Housing has…. They do have some of that stuff but not at the stage that we come in at.

[11:05 a.m.]

It’s interesting, because…. For example, the Housing Minister, a few weeks ago, was at an opening in North Vancouver, a really important housing project, a many multi-million-dollar project that B.C. Housing was involved in. What he didn’t know and what most people didn’t know is that that project came through our funds at the very, very early stage.

We’re not a very big part of the capital stack. So we don’t show up in press releases and things like that. We should probably do a better job about that. But what we do….

If you talk to the folks that get our funding, they’ll tell you that if it wasn’t for that early stage, where they are hiring their first consultant, or they’re going through training, the project wouldn’t be viable at all. So we work with religious organizations. For example, we’re working with the archdiocese in Victoria to do a portfolio review of their entire landholdings. We’re working with other organizations, like seniors groups. We work with some names that you might recognize, like Catalyst Community Developments, Brightside.

We’ve worked with established organizations, and we work with organizations that are doing this for the first time. But our only requirements are that the homes that are being built are community owned, that they’re affordable. We’re actually moving into a space, as I kind of outlined, around making sure that these homes are also net zero and climate ready.

We’re patient, we’re flexible, and we come in very early.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Susie. Then, if there’s time, back to Ronna-Rae for her birthday question.

S. Chant: So one of the questions that’s come up fairly regularly in my riding is around co-ops. We’ve got a lot of co-ops that were built a number of years ago and are aging like the rest of us and are needing more maintenance than they can really afford. When they start trying to levy people, it’s more than they can afford in that way as well.

Do you do any work with co-ops?

A. Singh: Yeah, for sure. Like any organization, if they want to go through our training programs to learn more about what a redevelopment would take, the folks that they may need to hire, the people that they need to work with, we’re more than happy to work with folks like that. In fact, we have already started to talk with some folks in government about how we can support some of these co-ops that are coming up for renewal and need to potentially have a redevelopment take place.

We’re more than happy to work with these organizations.

S. Chant: What about just upgrades, not redevelopment? Just getting the work done.

A. Singh: That would be something that would be a little bit outside of our purview. If we were to be able to get an investment from the provincial government, we’d be willing to take a look at what the parameters of that investment were. But our core competency is in new builds.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ronna-Rae.

R. Leonard: Oh, I thought there was someone else in front of me. Thank you. I should pass. It’s time.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): On your birthday question?

R. Leonard: On my birthday question? Okay. All right. Thank you.

When you’re asking for a provincial partnership, is it in a lending form or is it in a granting form that you’re looking for?

A. Singh: It would be a granting form, and let me tell you why.

When we’re able to get low- or no-cost funding, because of our connections with Vancity credit union and our history working with financial instruments, we’re able to leverage that money. We can take that money. We can invest it. Then, combining the no-cost money with very low cost, we’re able to go out to the investment community that wants to make an impact and say: “Look, we’ll give you a 4 percent return or a 5 percent return.” The rates of return, as you all know, are going up, but we can give you that return.

Then we can take that money and lend it out at 2 percent, simple interest. That’s what our interest rate is to organizations. So when it’s that low, and when it’s simple, these organizations know exactly what the impact is to their pro forma. It’s not very much. They know how they can pay it back.

It keeps rents low, and we can still provide a return to these impact investors. So if the government were to give us, for example, $1 million, we can turn that into $2 million or $3 million by going out and leveraging it in the market.

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

Next up is Chris Schultz-Lorentzen from the British Columbia Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils.

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

The floor is yours.

[11:10 a.m.]

B.C. CONFEDERATION OF
PARENT ADVISORY COUNCILS

C. Schultz-Lorentzen: Good morning. Thank you for having us.

I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking to you today on the ancestral, shared and unceded territories of the Katzie First Nation and the Kwantlen First Nation.

I’d also like to acknowledge our Métis partners and friends living in these territories.

HÍSW̱ḴE.

The B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, BCCPAC, in operation since 1922, is the voice of the parents of over 570,000 children attending public schools. BCCPAC maintains an unwavering commitment to advocating for high-quality education programs and services for our children throughout this province.

Although the provincial education budgets have risen, costs continue to outstrip funding increases. As a result, cuts to programs and services continue to occur. This is not a result of a lack of foresight or poor budgeting. Rather, it is due to the fact that the purchasing power of our dollar has declined, while costs, challenges and expectations have increased.

The cost of providing an inclusive education program is one example of the challenges faced by school districts. Parents have seen an increase in the level of stress placed on staff, students and parents as they strive to ensure student success in the absence of sufficient resources. BCCPAC believes that higher per-capita funding will enable school districts to more fully address the needs of all students.

BCCPAC is asking government to develop a funding formula that fairly and equitably supports our students and that addresses the needs of our communities throughout this diverse province. Adequate, stable and predictable funding is critical if we are to provide high-quality education and programming and the resources that support them.

BCCPAC’s three recommendations for Budget 2024 consideration include (1) an increased funding envelope for resources and supports for students with diverse learning needs, disabilities and unique needs, as well as funding to support early identification, intervention and funding for programs such as anti-racism; (2) targeted additional funding for the purchase, maintenance and relocation costs of portables and that the use of school portables be temporary, with a timeline defining temporary use clearly outlined; (3) adequate funding for capital expenditures to ensure that, as soon as possible, all children across this province will be learning in seismically safe schools.

BCCPAC strongly believes that public education must remain at the forefront of government priorities for the benefit of our future. The provincial government must act to safeguard adequate, stable and predictable funding, both operational and capital, to ensure the provision of education programs, student-focused resources, including those for mental health and well-being, food security, wraparound services and personnel that meet the actual needs of all students.

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

Questions and/or comments?

I’m going to start it off with…. You talked about the portable use and a definition of age. Are we talking about the age of the structure, of the actual portable that’s there, or the amount of time that it spends on the grounds?

C. Schultz-Lorentzen: What we’re hearing from our PACs and parents across the province…. It’s the amount of time that it’s on the school grounds. Portables were always meant to be temporary where a school was overflowing and needed an extra space, but many schools are actually running out of spaces to put portables.

That has to do with the way that financing is structured for brand-new schools. It can take much longer for new schools to come in than some school districts can provide space for the students. They end up putting portables there, and then the portables end up staying and become part of the maximum size of the school. They’re meant to be temporary and end up being permanent.

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

G. Chow: Can these portables be made permanent as a wood-frame building?

C. Schultz-Lorentzen: Well, they are at many schools. There are some schools where they don’t need them, and other districts have picked them up.

[11:15 a.m.]

I don’t know what the longevity of the portable is. The cost now is anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000 for each portable, and that has to come out of each district’s operating budget. So it’s not part of their capital expenditure because it doesn’t count as a school. Even though it’s a classroom, each district has to withdraw from their operational budget to pay for those portables.

They are put in as schools expand with students, where there’s no other room to put them. So they’re meant for each year as they come along, but some of them have been there for years and years. There is a cost for maintenance. There is a cost to relocate them as different schools need them.

What we hope to see is, eventually, the elimination of portables altogether and that the space in the school is actually the space in the school and not necessarily housed outside, where there may be limited access to washrooms for students, limited access to water in some cases and they have to go in and out of their own school, essentially, to participate in the gym and those kinds of things.

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Chris. I just wanted to ask, with portables…. We get the school districts in here. We get individual principals, vice-principals — all the different presentations. Is there any strategy about ending the use of portables or restricting it?

I mean, you’re a big organization. You’ve got all of these groups. It’s a broad statement to say to eliminate them, because they’re purposeful. I know the funding model. But I guess…. Is there any strategy you’re aware of, or is there anything you could do to help maybe work with the districts, rather than just a single one, as a provincewide attempt at harnessing kind of a strategy about how we actually do that?

I’m sure the ministry probably has…. They ask themselves that, I’m sure, every day.

C. Schultz-Lorentzen: Yeah. My understanding is it’s a complicated process in that there may be space within the school district but not space where….

It takes municipalities, in terms of their planning, where they’re building massive townhouses around a school that has limited space, so they have to build portables around that school to meet the infrastructure, the new zoning that they’ve done for highrises or townhouses or whatever, where it’s already exceeding the capacity of the school that’s in that area.

I think it does…. I think more space needs to be allocated to schools in the original capital planning of a newly built school. So there need to be more discussions, where the area standards that the ministry uses to build new schools need to be looked at, where some areas are expanding.

We just had a new school, for instance, that was built just two years ago, and within a year, it’s already exceeding the capacity, and portables need to go onto that school ground. So in the building of new schools, I think we need to have bigger discussions with the Ministry of Education, school districts and municipalities about what that population in that area is going to look like.

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

C. Schultz-Lorentzen: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it, and good luck with all the ones you have to hear.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Jen Mezei, English Language Learners Consortium.

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

The floor is yours, Jen.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS CONSORTIUM

J. Mezei: Good morning. I’m grateful to be joining you today from the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Kwikwetlem Nations.

My name is Jen Mezei, and I’m a trustee on the Burnaby board of education and the chair of the English Language Learners Consortium.

The English Language Learners Consortium is a group of 12 school districts that, in addition to professional collaboration, has taken on an advocacy role in creating an understanding of the needs of newcomers to Canada and the resources required by school districts to provide effective ELL programs and settlement supports.

In recent years, the consortium has also become a strong advocate for settlement workers in schools, or SWIS, programs. Our members include representatives from Langley, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Coquitlam, Burnaby, Surrey, Vancouver, Richmond, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Delta, Mission and Abbotsford. Collectively, the districts of the English Language Learners Consortium support over 80 percent of the 73,000 ELL students in B.C.

In the brief before you, there are three recommendations. I’m not going to read them right now. Today I will focus on the first recommendation.

[11:20 a.m.]

The consortium and its members have raised the issue of newcomers who receive settlement services and those who are ineligible for federal Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, IRCC, funding, such as temporary residents and refugee claimants previously. In some districts, between 30 to 50 percent of students and their families receiving settlement supports in schools are not being funded by the federal government.

Our position is that all newcomers, regardless of their immigration status, should be eligible for funded settlement services. In B.C., settlement workers in schools, SWIS, provide settlement supports by providing comprehensive school-based settlement programming that maximizes the integration of settlement of immigrant and refugee students and their families, through a seamless and systematic delivery model, recognizing that schools are natural community hubs and often a first contact for newcomers.

Workers within the SWIS program are highly qualified and supported within the school system, accessing a suite of professionals and inputs such as meeting spaces for families throughout the city, modern technology and supporting materials.

The federal government provides financial support for the SWIS program, which provides important programming for newcomers to Canada and makes use of unique delivery models, which allow flexibility in programming that reflects local context. Although many districts partner with non-profit service providers, there are 11 B.C. school districts that receive funding from the federal government and manage the projects directly — including Surrey, Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam, Delta and Langley.

Although the federal government provides settlement services to permanent residents, it is the province that provides funding to support temporary residents, in­clud­ing foreign workers, international students and refugee claimants as well as naturalized Canadian citizens. The provincial government provides this funding through the B.C. Settlement and Integration Services program, BCSIS. The BCSIS services are also available to Ukrainians arriving through the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel program.

What I would like to bring to this committee’s attention is that school districts that provide direct settlement supports to students and their families have not been able to access provincial funding for temporary residents through the current funding allocation model. The ELL Consortium strongly urges the provincial government to support settlement workers in schools, SWIS, programs by including school districts to provide direct service when providing funding for settlement supports for temporary residents, naturalized Canadian citizens and Ukrainians arriving through the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel program.

In Surrey, the largest district in the province, 1,200 students and their families of temporary foreign workers were enrolled in this year alone, and 440 students from Ukraine and their families were also enrolled. In Vancouver, the second-largest district in the province, over 1,100 students with parents on temporary work permits were registered, and 238 students from Ukraine and their families required settlement supports. In Burnaby, 416 students with a parent who is a temporary foreign worker and 193 students just placed from Ukraine were registered this year.

All of these families require settlement supports. However, districts are not receiving that temporary funding. School districts are being stretched financially, and many face structural deficits. School districts that provide direct settlement supports to students and their families, must be included in provincial funding allocations for temporary residents and should be included in Budget 2024.

Our other two, as I mentioned…. Actually, I’ve got eight things, I think. Recommendation 1 is to provide supports for newcomers to Canada throughout the settlement workers in schools program. It’s recommended that Budget 2024 provide financial support to school districts that provide settlement supports for newcomers to Canada who are ineligible for federal funding, including refugee claimants and temporary foreign workers.

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

Questions from the committee?

B. Stewart: Jen, just in terms of these people that are not eligible for the funding or the support and that don’t fit in the calculation: they’re temporary, but are they here with a long-term goal of becoming landed immigrants? I mean, do you know any of that detail?

J. Mezei: I don’t. I can’t provide that information. I think what’s important to understand is that we have students who are enrolled in our district, to whom we’re providing settlement supports. They’re qualified for funding for education, and when they come into our schools, we’re providing supports for everyone.

The challenge is that there are students who are ineligible for federal funding, and the school districts that provide direct supports are not being able to access the funding that is available through the provincial government.

[11:25 a.m.]

B. Stewart: Yes, having been the minister at one time, I can tell you that that’s the easiest way to have problems: by not having people being able to communicate and work in the province.

Anyways, those numbers are quite staggering. I looked at the population this morning. I see we grew by almost 115,000 people last year.

J. Mezei: I think it’s important to note that schools really are the first point of contact for a lot of families who have children. What has really been amazing is to see some of the work that districts are doing to support families and really welcome students into our communities.

R. Leonard: I know that provincially we’ve upped the ante for immigrant welcome centres, the settlement services in community. I’m wondering what your relationship is with those organizations.

J. Mezei: I think that what’s important to understand is that settlement supports were, in 2000…. Actually, you know what? I’m going to change my background to show you the difference.

Basically, between 2007 and 2009, there were 21 school districts which actually received settlement support funding directly from the provincial government. Then in 2014, those funds went back to federal allocation and disbursement. There are 11 districts that still maintain their own settlement supports and provide direct services to families.

I think there’s a bit of a disconnect where those 11 districts are providing the settlement supports, but they’re not being able to access the funding that is intended for organizations to provide settlement services for temporary workers and temporary residents.

S. Chant: You may have answered this question, but I’m still confused, so bear with me. When you opened, you said there are 12 districts that band together that do this work. The rest of the districts in British Columbia — that says to me that they do not access provincial or federal…? There are 11 that do, but the rest of them access none.

J. Mezei: There are 12 districts which are part of the ELL Consortium. Some of them actually have settlement workers in schools, but they are provided through a non-profit organization.

For example, in West Vancouver, the settlement workers they have are actually a non-profit. I think it’s Impact North Shore that provides settlement workers. They get funding through…. It’s the non-profit that receives the funding.

There are 11 districts that have agreements directly with the federal government and that receive funding for settlement supports. For example, Burnaby and Delta are some of the districts that hire their own SWIS workers, their CUPE workers who provide those settlement supports in their district.

What is important to understand is that the funding that is coming from the federal government is for the permanent residents. But it’s the temporary foreign workers who we still provide settlement supports for that we’re not being able to access the provincial funding for if they’re a district that provides direct support.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much, Jen, for your presentation this morning. The way to introduce a prop into the background so that you get more information out at the same time — that’s genius. You are the first and only one that has used their backdrop to provide information to this committee. So thank you for your presentation.

J. Mezei: Here’s another one.

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. Unless it’s your birthday, Jen, we will end that discussion.

Our next presenter is Amber Papou, SelfDesign Learning Foundation.

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

The floor is now yours.

SELFDESIGN LEARNING FOUNDATION

A. Papou: Thank you today for inviting me to share with you a topic I’m extraordinarily passionate about. That’s education and, in particular, education for our province’s most vulnerable youth.

My name, as the speaker indicated, is Amber Papou. I am a B.C.-certified educator. I’ve worked in the public school system, and for the past six years I’ve had the opportunity to take on the role as the president and CEO of the SelfDesign Learning Foundation.

[11:30 a.m.]

The foundation is going to celebrate its 40th anniversary next year. It has grown to become a leader in the development of programs that foster personalized and lifelong learning.

Our largest program is a K-to-12 school called the SelfDesign Learning Community, or SDLC. It’s also celebrating a milestone anniversary. Last year, actually, was its 20-year anniversary operating as an online independent school in the province of B.C. Currently it’s one of the largest provincial online schools independent of POLSIs in the province of B.C. It’s a school record for approximately 2,000 kids every year in K to 12. An additional 500 B.C. children are enrolled in our home-schooling program.

Last year we also introduced a new program called the HomeLearners Network. It’s a program that is a highly engaging online program for children in our school and outside of our school. It includes partnerships with the Canadian Mental Health Association where we offer programs in mental health and wellness for children.

Our program is very unique in its delivery, yet it still aligns 100 percent with the B.C. curriculum. In particular, we foster inclusion and celebrate diversity. We’re proud supporters of SOGI 123. Our program is largely based on the principles of Indigenous learning, and we respectfully share in the responsibility for reconciliation.

We currently work with 180 B.C. certified educators in K to 12; 69 of those are specialized in working with children with special needs. We have a very low teacher-to-student ratio of one to 33, and that’s regardless of whether they’re in kindergarten or in grade 12, which then leads me into the fact that our 10-to-12 program is very unique in the province in that we are interdisciplinary and we do not cross-enrol. We’re also proud to say that we have a 95 percent completion rate, which is incredibly high based on provincial standards.

We’re also the largest school of record in the province of B.C. for children with special needs, and that’s regardless of whether it’s public, online or brick and mortar. We currently enrol 1,000 learners in our program; 765 are considered low-incidence learners, and another 250, approximately, are diagnosed with high-incidence learning needs. We also have an average of 100 to 150 wait-listed for our special needs program, and we try to accommodate those children as best as we can throughout the year.

It should be noted that our high-incidence learners, which are the 250, are incredibly vulnerable children. They do require specialized learning needs, but we do not receive additional funding from the ministry to support those needs. We support them out of our general grant, which is approximately 50 percent less than what the public online schools receive.

My purpose for speaking with you today is to offer two recommendations for consideration. One is an acknowledgment and thank you to the government of B.C. for increasing funding for children diagnosed with low-incident learning needs next year, in the ’23-24 school year. My recommendation is more so about just asking the government to continue to monitor the needs of these children and increase funding as required.

Second, I’d also like to acknowledge that the Ministry of Education and Child Care has increased the per-student rate of the general grant for next year for independent online schools, and although the funding is greatly appreciated, it’s still considerably less than the 21 percent that was cut from our general funding in 2020.

The reason for me bringing that up is I’d like to request that the committee consider increasing the funding that’s received by the provincial online schools independent category 1 back to the 2020 rate and preferably to the amount that’s received by public online schools. The reason for that is largely to do not only with supporting the children in our general program but also incredibly to support the children who need it the most, and those are our high-incidence learners.

In closing, I’d like just to say, again, thank you for allowing me to speak. SelfDesign has been working for 40 years to support learners in our province, especially those most vulnerable. Again, just thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Amber, thank you very much for your presentation to the committee this morning.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for the presentation, Amber. You mentioned that the funding was cut in 2020 by 21 percent and the ministry did increase funding in ’23-24, $300 per learner. What does that 21 represent as far as per learner goes? Do you know?

A. Papou: I’m sorry. Can you clarify? The 21 percent….

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Well, you said that in 2020 the ministry cut per-student funding by 21 percent, but then the funding was increased for 2023-24 by $300 per learner.

A. Papou: Yes.

[11:35 a.m.]

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): What is the 21 percent cut? How does that equate to per learner? That 21 percent — how much was that?

A. Papou: In 2019-20, our rate was $3,843 per learner. Then it was cut to $3,180 per learner, in 2020, for the 2020-21 school year. It has been increased by $300, to $3,480. That’s our general funding, so that funds all of our learners.

We receive additional funding for low-incidence learners. That was acknowledged. Thank you to the government for that. But to put it in perspective, our general funding does go to support those learners in high incidence that do not receive additional funding from the ministry but require significant supports. We support them off what will be $3,480. In comparison, the public system, in ’23-24, will receive $69,060.

B. Stewart: I think I missed that. Pre-2020, it was $3,800 per learner, and then it was cut to $3,100.

A. Papou: Yeah, roughly $3,180.

B. Stewart: Then, of course, there was $300 added in 2023. So there’s still a $500 difference there somewhere.

S. Chant: Help me understand here. Am I hearing that there’s money for low-incidence learners, additional funds, but there is no funding for high-incidence learners, not outside of the regular funding? There isn’t anything additional to help with high-incidence learners. Is that just in your type of school system, or is that right across the province?

A. Papou: I can’t speak for the public school system. But for our category…. We’re category 1. We’re an independent category 1 provincial online school.

S. Chant: So for you, there’s no additional funding for high-incidence learners.

A. Papou: No.

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

Not seeing any, Amber, thank you very much for your presentation to the committee this morning.

Our next speaker is Barbara Parkin.

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

The floor is now yours, Barbara.

BARBARA PARKIN

B. Parkin: Thank you for accepting my application to speak before the Finance Standing Committee today as you seek input to improve public infrastructure. I consider schools part of that infrastructure.

My perspective comes from being a B.C. public school teacher with 25 years experience working in Metro Vancouver. I spent 20 years as a classroom teacher, and I’m currently a resource teacher. In all my years, I’ve never witnessed a year such as this one.

The need for in-school counsellors is greater than I’ve ever seen. My request here is for targeted funds specifically for hiring more school counsellors. Our current model is one counsellor for every 535 elementary students. To support student learning, wellness and mental health, I am asking for a new ratio to support students in schools of one counsellor for every 400 students.

My second request. Classrooms are increasingly complex environments where the pressures on the classroom teachers are tremendous, and much more so than in past years or decades. The role of the teacher is changing to provide more social services and for the school to act as a hub for access to broader social and community services. For this reason, I’m requesting an allotment for education assistants directly into classrooms.

This is a request that is in addition to the existing student support workers who are present in schools based on a formula created by the Ministry of Education to specifically support designated students. Education assistants would be classroom workers for all students, under the direction of the classroom teacher or administrator. Many of the problems I witness in schools could be largely addressed by more adults in the building delivering student services and programs but not simply links to mental health programs.

[11:40 a.m.]

Related to the increased pressures and changing role of the classroom teacher, I’ll make my third point. I’m requesting targeted funds for the mentorship of classroom teachers in their first five years, many of whom started or trained during COVID years.

The attrition rate of new teachers is higher than anyone would like. In my opinion, targeted funds for mentorship provided by the school district, with paid release time of one full day and two half-days throughout one school year, would be proactive and could effectively address some of the teacher retention issues.

New teachers can get easily isolated. Voluntary mentorship programs are not enough, in my opinion. Workshops delivered by the district, designed to help new teachers manage and prioritize the multitude of duties and expectations upon them, would be significant.

The reality is that, increasingly, families are turning to teachers and schools to get help for themselves and their children. Family supports, parenting workshops, family physicians and access to mental health units are in tremendous demand, often with extensive wait-lists. This fact can leave some families struggling to cope.

New teachers clearly need strategies to manage their role, which far exceeds the expectations of even six or seven years ago. School districts would benefit from targeted funds to develop paid, supportive mentorship programs to new teachers.

Thank you. I’m happy to answer any questions you have.

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

Before we start, can you just clarify, do you represent a group?

B. Parkin: No, I’m an individual in this case.

S. Chant: Thank you very much. Do you think there’s any benefit…?

Oh, sorry. Thank you for the work that you do, because I also understand that it’s been getting more and more challenging in the classroom for a variety of reasons.

Is there any benefit…? You’re talking about providing workshops to help new teachers. Is there any benefit in looking at the teacher training programs with an eye to the complexity of the current classroom? Has that work been done, or is that something that could prove also helpful?

B. Parkin: It may also help prove that. But I think, specifically, that there are such differences district by district in how they approach helping families and students access different services and programs that it is somewhat of a district-by-district knowledge.

It would be, I think, most effective if new teachers, once hired by a district, were supported in their district to learn how to manage and refer families, or to even become familiarized with all the services available. They often don’t know them, of course, and why would they?

R. Leonard: Thank you for taking the time to address us today.

Your first ask was around the school counsellors, and you say that right now, there’s one counsellor for 535 students, and you want to see it down to one in 400. I’m wondering how you arrived at that one in 400.

B. Parkin: Well, I didn’t want to come and say: “Please double it.” So I was trying to do something in between “please double it” and what it is. I came to that number…. Often, some schools are working at around…. Many schools are 300 to 400, at least in the district that I’m in.

Being able to have a counsellor there most days would be of huge impact to student success, classroom success, family supports. But right now, I work in quite a small school. It’s just under 200. So we are allotted one day, and that just simply isn’t enough.

R. Leonard: So you really need one in 200 to meet the needs of….

B. Parkin: I think, ideally, it would be even higher. But it’s something that you can start. If a change can take place, maybe it’s more likely if it isn’t as big an ask as all that. That’s why I came to that number.

[11:45 a.m.]

B. Stewart: I just wanted to ask about the…. You mentioned, in the school that you’re in, that it’s one day that there’s a counsellor available. What types of wait times does that present for students that are looking for counselling types of services?

B. Parkin: Well, for some of the really deeply problematic things that come up in schools, counsellors might refer…. School-based counsellors might help the family access the bigger supports through Coastal Health or through the mental health units.

In terms of a counsellor servicing a specific student in the school…. If it’s urgent, they’re immediately prioritized to that counsellor. But the counsellor could be doing, if they were here more, much more proactive and preventative things with classes and small groups of students and work on issues around bullying. That could be addressed more if the counsellor was actually here to do the work more. To come once a week…. It is pretty difficult for follow through.

B. Stewart: Okay. Thank you. I appreciate you taking this on individually.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes. That is an excellent point, Barbara.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak out as an individual, as a teacher in the system for 25 years. We appreciate the time and the effort that it took to provide us with the information.

Next up is Andrea Welling, Futurpreneur.

Andrea, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of questions and/or comments. The floor is now yours.

FUTURPRENEUR

A. Welling: Thank you very much for having me here today to discuss how the government of British Columbia can catalyze the economic recovery and create a sustainable economic impact by investing in young and diverse entrepreneurs.

At Futurpreneur, our mission is to help young entrepreneurs aged 18 to 39 build and launch successful businesses across a wide range of sectors through a combination of free resources, business coaching, collateral-free loan financing of up to $60,000 and two years of dedicated mentorship. Since 1996, we have helped over 2,000 businesses launch across B.C., investing over $56 million into the province and helping to create over 10,000 jobs.

Young entrepreneurs, though, across B.C. face many barriers to launching businesses. Our programs specifically address those — in particular, access to financing and mentorship.

As the government has recognized, these barriers are even greater for equity-deserving entrepreneurs, including women, youth, racialized, newcomer and Indigenous entrepreneurs. This is why we are so supportive of the government’s commitments in the StrongerBC economic plan and the development of the small business diversity and inclusion action plan.

Thanks to support from the government of B.C. through the rural economic development and infrastructure program, we are excited to support rural entrepreneurs to both launch new businesses and acquire existing ones over the next two years. However, to fully realize the economic potential of B.C.’s young entrepreneurs, Futurpreneur needs long-term support from the B.C. government.

Last year, we supported 93 new business launches across the province, which is well below the 120 that a province with B.C.’s youth population could be achieving. In our experience…. In other provinces where we do have long-term funding partnerships, we are able to provide at least a 6 to 1 return on investment, multiplying the impact of government funds many times over.

Our ask is to ensure that B.C. realizes the full economic impact of diverse young entrepreneurs. We are requesting an investment of $450,000 in loan capital per year for three years, $1.35 million in total, which will be exclusively available to young entrepreneurs in B.C., helping us to launch at least 120 new businesses per year and 360 in total over the term.

This investment will be matched many times over by contributions from the federal government and the corporate community, creating a significant return on investment for the province of least 8 to 1 and leading to economic growth in rural communities and urban centres alike.

The province’s investment in Futurpreneur will contribute to the government’s priorities by directly supporting equity-deserving entrepreneurs who would not otherwise be able to access the loan capital and mentorship they need to succeed.

[11:50 a.m.]

Thank you for taking the time to consider our request. I look forward to your questions.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Andrea. Futurpreneur — I’m a pastpreneur, I guess you would call it.

I started off in college, and I got a grant. In the 1980s, the government of the day had a $2,000 small business grant, and all you had to do was show that you had a viable plan, a spreadsheet, a balance sheet, an income statement and all that stuff to prove yourself. That $2,000 really got me my first business. It launched me into owning bars, nightclubs, pubs, restaurants. I’ve employed thousands of people since then.

I love what you’re proposing here. On the $450,000 in loan capital you’re requesting, for those futurpreneurs, what type of threshold do they have to meet to access this funding? How does that differ from traditional lending institutions?

A. Welling: In terms of the threshold, we look at their credit, and we look at their business plan, but it is an unsecured loan. For most young people between the ages of 18 and 39 whom we serve, if they go to a bank and they don’t have any assets, most banks are not usually prepared to take that level of risk on an entrepreneur. We’re really one of the first places they can go for financing.

In addition to the financing, we also offer two years of mentorship. What we know is that it’s not easy for businesses to continue to succeed. This is a really unique part of our program that’s combined with our financing, and this really helps lead to success.

On the unsecured loan, we also offer interest-only payments in the first year, to make it really accessible. We have capped our interest rate at 9 percent, so we offer as competitive a rate as possible on an unsecured loan. It’s always important to compare it with the unsecured rates, because we don’t want our entrepreneurs to be, maybe, using their Visa card interest rates. We would much prefer that we can help them with some loan financing. Thank you for that question.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): The follow-up to that would be…. You touched on it, with interest rates. How would those interest rates reflect to traditional lending institutions? Obviously, with unsecured loans, you carry a little bit of risk. Would it be comparable to financial institutions, traditional ones? Would it be a discounted rate, or is it a premium?

A. Welling: It’s a very competitive rate. If you look at Community Futures or Vancity and you talk about an unsecured loan, usually those will be anywhere from 9½ to 11 percent. Sometimes with other institutions, it’s a bit variable, depending on the business.

We’ve capped ours at 9 percent, and we’re seeing that we’re very competitive within the marketplace. I think it’s really a great way for entrepreneurs to get started, and I’m glad you understand the entrepreneurship journey, because it’s not an easy one, but we want to really encourage our young entrepreneurs to make a difference in the province and bring their passions to reality.

B. Banman: Quickly, in the time that we have left, how many of the young entrepreneurs are women, where this would be their only option, for some of them? What’s your best success story?

A. Welling: Women-led businesses are between 44 and 50 percent within the province of B.C. We have a lot of women entrepreneurs that apply to our program. One of our greatest success stories is Tara Bosch. She created SmartSweets when she was 21, and just a few years ago, she actually sold that company for hundreds of millions of dollars. She kind of hit the lottery.

Nonetheless, I would also say my success stories are local bakeries, like Working Culture in Victoria or Bishop’s Cycles in Victoria. It depends how you define success, but I think when entrepreneurs get to lead their dream, it can look like any size of business for them, in any community in B.C.

S. Chant: Thanks for what you do. You indicated that this past year you graduated, let’s say, or you had about 90 people through. Is that related to not a lot of people applying, or is it related to funding availability?

[11:55 a.m.]

A. Welling: Over any particular year, we have over 250 leads in every month. Basically, the challenge we face is being able to really nurture all of those leads.

We’re able to have quite a strong conversion rate from our leads to apply every month, but with more staffing, with more funding, we could be converting more of those leads, we could be educating more entrepreneurs, and we could be helping them move their way through that process. A lot of them are young, and they need extra support to build that confidence.

The additional funding would really help us to do that. That loan capital we’re asking for would really help at least an additional 30 entrepreneurs to be able to go through our program, and the one-to-one support that we do through our business development managers and our entrepreneur in residence.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ben, before we take our recess, you have the final question.

B. Stewart: Andrea, where does the capital come from that you’ve been using?

A. Welling: In the evergreen fund that we currently have, we’ve been a non-profit. We’ve been going for 27 years. That has been a combination of different funders.

We are funded by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, which has been our primary funder. Then we have had some corporate sponsors, as well as other provincial governments. Currently we also have government funding: Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia and Manitoba. We’ve basically accumulated a loan capital fund over the years. Nonetheless, in order to serve more entrepreneurs, if we were able to increase that fund, we could do more with that.

We also have a Black entrepreneur startup program, which RBC supports with additional loan capital that we’ve secured in the last two years. That’s what that funding would be able to help us do.

B. Stewart: Good for you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation to the committee this morning, Andrea.

A. Welling: Great. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

M. Starchuk (Chair): On that note, we will take a recess and try to be back in the room shortly after one o’clock.

The committee recessed from 11:57 a.m. to 1:05 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. Starting this afternoon, we have Anastasia French, Living Wage for Families.

Anastasia, you will have five minutes for your presentation, followed by up to five minutes of questions and comments.

The floor is yours.

LIVING WAGE FOR FAMILIES B.C.

A. French: Great.

Well, hello, everyone. I’m Anastasia. I am provincial manager for Living Wage for Families B.C.

I’m calling from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

Before I go into our three top recommendations for Budget 2024, I’ll start with a quick introduction to what we at Living Wage for Families do.

At Living Wage for Families, we partner with the CCPA and with community groups across the province to help calculate what the living wage is. For those that don’t know, the living wage is the hourly amount that someone needs to earn to be able to make ends meet. It includes things like the cost of essentials, like food, rent and child care, but doesn’t include things like savings for retirement, savings for education, paying off debt, big vacations, anything like that. It really is a bare-bones budget.

Last year the living wage went up by nearly 20 percent across the province, because of the increased cost of living, in particular, the increased cost of food and housing, which are the biggest essentials that a family needs. So the living wage for Metro Vancouver is now $24.08 an hour, whereas the minimum wage is only $16.75 an hour. So that’s a really big gap between the two.

Secondly, we certify employers who pay their staff and contracted workers a living wage. There are now over 350 employers across the province who do this, and that’s really great. They vary from small businesses like Jillian Harris Design in Kelowna, Sovereign Lake Nordic Club in Vernon; municipalities like the city of Burnaby and the city of Langley; non-profits, including Neighbours United in the Kootenays; and large companies like Vancity credit union, Lafarge concrete-makers and YVR airport. These businesses have found that paying a living wage doesn’t just benefit their workers, but it benefits their businesses too.

What I’m really proud of is that over 1,300 people this year already, since January, have received a pay increase to be brought up to the new living wage. So that could be as much as an extra $6,500 in their pockets. That really does make such a difference to their lives.

The final thing that we do is advocate for government policies to help lift wages and make life more affordable, which is why I’m here today. So fitting in with the parameters that are set within this, we have three main asks for Budget 2024.

The first ask is to help lift the income of those low-wage workers who aren’t yet receiving a living wage, starting with implementing a living wage policy for all direct and contracted provincial government staff.

The government plays a significant role in local economies through its role as an employer, as well as through large procurement contracts. The largest employers in many regions are governments and public institutions, such as health authorities. Also, many government-funded service agencies are pillars in their communities.

Committing to pay a living wage to all government employees and enabling government-funded agencies and contractors to earn a living wage would highlight this government’s commitment to poverty reduction. Further, it would signal to other employers that paying a living wage is a normal and acceptable part of doing business in B.C.

One of the reasons we’ve seen such a growth in living wage employers is when a municipality becomes a living wage employer and puts requirements in their contracts for contractors to pay a living wage too.

As I mentioned earlier, paying a living wage yields benefits for businesses as well as workers. So 97 percent of living wage employers in B.C. found some kind of benefit from being part of the program last year. They’ve told me it leads to lower staff turnover, easier recruitment and increased morale. So it’s a benefit to businesses, to communities and to employees when everyone earns a living wage.

At the same time and linked in with this, as well as looking at government contracts and direct staff, Budget 2024…. We’d love it if they could look at what incentives the B.C. government already provides to small businesses and non-profits — for example, in grants, tax breaks and loans — and what it can do to adapt these programs to encourage these organizations to also pay a living wage to their staff. Increasing wages will help lead to higher tax revenues and help pump more money into local economies. So it’s win, win, win.

[1:10 p.m.]

Our other two asks are focused on how we can, potentially, one day lower the living wage to help make life more affordable for people, starting with the growing issue of food insecurity.

As I mentioned, last year the living wage increased across B.C. The main reason for this increase is the dramatic increase in food and in housing, the two biggest essentials that anyone needs to be able to get by and the two things that it’s hardest to cut back on.

The price of groceries needed for a healthy diet for a family with two young children last year spiked by an extra $161 a month, or 17 percent. Last year food overtook child care to be the second-biggest item in a family budget. I was at the Richmond Food Bank yesterday. They told me that the demand for their services has gone up by 56 percent in one year.

At the same time as families are really, really struggling to pay for food, the major grocery chains, which we’ve all heard of, have made record profits. Actually, ironically, the front-line workers that are working in those grocery stores stocking shelves are often earning just above minimum wage.

We’d like Budget 2024 to include plans to address the growing issue of food insecurity and unaffordability and actions to basically prevent price gouging and ensure that consumers are paying fair prices for food so that they can help make ends meet.

Our third ask is one that the government has already taken several steps on but that we’d like to continue. It is to protect and expand affordable housing stock and implement policies to protect renters.

The biggest and fastest-growing expense in the living-wage budget, every single year, is housing. Shelter costs in the living wage last year went up by 17 percent. That’s an additional $355 a month.

There are a lot of families across the province that have been lucky enough to stay in stable housing and that have benefited from rent control measures, but they’ve always got one eye on the door, scared that they might be renovicted at any point. As soon as they are renovicted, they’re finding that their rents are increasing dramatically.

As vacancy rates have declined and housing prices have spiked in B.C. communities across the province, the difference in rents that new and long-term renters are facing has sharply widened. So to protect housing affordability and slow down the rapid increases in rent, the provincial government and the budget need to include plans to protect the existing affordable housing stock and co-create more affordable housing options for families across the province.

A massive and ongoing increase in public housing investment should be a top priority. We welcome the investments that have already been made to date, but more needs to happen to help to ensure that families in B.C. can afford to pay for a roof over their head and to pay to feed their families.

That’s a whistle stop tour. I think I’m over time. I’m very sorry about that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I believe you’re just slightly over time as well. Anastasia, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon.

Questions and/or comments?

I actually have a question right off the rattle. You were talking about employers that were there. Some of the ones you listed…. In a province of, whatever there is, 190 municipalities, where do we sit percentage-wise with a living wage?

A. French: We have about ten municipalities. So we’ve still definitely got a long way to go.

Some of the largest municipalities…. Burnaby, Victoria, New West and North Vancouver have all committed to paying their direct staff and contracted workers a living wage. We’d like to see more municipalities, particularly outside of the Lower Mainland, join the program.

They’ve made that commitment because they know that poverty reduction is major and that it starts with their own workers and their own contracted workers.

R. Leonard: Paying a living wage is based on full-time work. I’m curious about the perspective on a universal living wage and part-time work.

A. French: I guess one of the flaws of the calculation is…. It’s an hourly wage, but it’s based on the assumption that someone is going to be working full-time. We do know there are lots of reasons why people may not or cannot work full-time.

The calculation is based on someone working a full-time wage. That’s how much they need to be able to earn a year. Of course, if you’re only working a few hours a week, you’re not going…. That $24.08 an hour makes a difference, but it won’t make as much as you need. That’s where all of the other things that we’re saying about making life more affordable will really benefit absolutely everyone.

S. Chant: Thank you for your presentation. Can you tell me if the $10-a-day child care has made a difference in the things that you’re seeing, the things that you’re measuring?

A. French: Yeah. It’s made a slight difference. As I mentioned, child care went from being the second-biggest item in the family budget to the third. That’s because of a lot of the fee reductions that have come in.

[1:15 p.m.]

One thing that we’re conscious of and that we’re hearing from our community partners is that the availability of child care spaces isn’t necessarily keeping up with the…. If you’re lucky enough to get a $10-a-day spot, that’s amazing. But there are lots of families who are on wait-lists and have to be on wait-lists for a very long time. So that’s something we’re looking at when we’re looking at this year’s calculation.

It is making a difference. I think it’s one example of the power that government policy can make. A few years ago the living wage actually went down. That was because of government investments in child care and helping families with children. That’s great. That’s why our recommendations are now focused on housing and food. That will benefit absolutely everyone.

B. Stewart: Anastasia, I just wanted to ask you about the economics.

We had some presentations before, during these hearings, and they were talking about the overall cost of wage lifts through minimum-wage increases. The problem is that it’s not just minimum wages that go up. The problem with this cost-of-living issue is that it forces up other wages. So we get this compounding effect on top of one another.

I’m wondering, from an economics point of view, whether you’ve worked with anybody to come up with…. I don’t know how you do it. That’s the problem. You do one. Then it keeps…. We know that inflation and the cost of living in B.C. went up 6.9 percent last year. The minimum wage went up, but the problem is that it pushed everything else up.

I’ve heard that from quite a few businesses. They’re just like…. The problem is that they try to pass it on. So it comes back to your affordable groceries and all the long list of things. It’s kind of like we’re chasing things here.

I’m just wondering if there’s a way to somehow get there and try to not have it make the impact that it is, because it keeps going up.

A. French: I’d argue that the things we’re seeing the big increases in aren’t because wages have gone up. It’s because of other things that have led to those increases. The reason food is going up is…. As I said, food shops are making record profits, also supply chain issues and stuff like that.

The living wage is almost like the lagging effect of…. Stuff is costing more, and this is how much wages need to go up to keep up with those costs. I mean, we hear every year the minimum wage goes up…. Businesses say that they’re going to struggle to do it and that it’s going to lead to increased inflation. I don’t think we have really seen that.

The reality is that it is really, really expensive right now. So these wage increases in the living wage are just to be able to make ends meet and just to be able to pay for food and essentials and things like that.

As I said, paying a living wage yields lots of other benefits for businesses and can help with recruitment and retention, which we’re also hearing about as a major problem for businesses across the province.

B. Stewart: That is a good idea, from the benefit side of it. I’m glad you’ve listed them in your presentation.

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

Next up is Olga Stachova, from MOSAIC.

Olga, you have five minutes for your presentation, followed by up to five minutes of questions and/or answers.

The floor is yours.

MOSAIC

O. Stachova: Thank you very much.

For 45 years, MOSAIC has been committed to improving the lives of immigrants, refugees and temporary foreign workers in British Columbia and is one of the largest providers of settlement, employment and language services in Canada.

MOSAIC welcomes the opportunity to share our recommendations to improve the well-being and the outcomes for newcomers in B.C. These recommendations are based on our front-line experience, our close collaboration with partners and social service, community and health care organizations as well as feedback from the newcomer communities themselves.

The first recommendation is to waive the waiting period and minimum residency requirement for B.C. health care for returning seasonal agricultural workers, granting access upon arrival.

Migrant workers are essential to B.C.’s economy, filling over 32,000 jobs in 2022, with agricultural workers being the most significant category. More than 80 percent of seasonal agricultural workers have been returning for more than six years. Our farms are relying on experienced staff that return year after year, yet many are not eligible for provincial health care because they do not meet the threshold of residency or have to go through a waiting period every year they return to B.C.

Without access to public health care upon arrival, as is the practice in Ontario, seasonal agricultural workers are left to the patchwork of expensive and insecure private insurance plans that require them to cover medical costs up front and navigate the complicated reimbursement processes without the availability of appropriate language support, often relying on the goodwill of their employers and adding vulnerabilities to their already precarious employment.

[1:20 p.m.]

MOSAIC recommends that the province waive the three-month waiting period and the minimum six-month residency requirement for all returning agricultural workers, as the lack of access to B.C. health coverage leaves them vulnerable to unanticipated medical costs and undermines their potential to contribute to our economy. This would demonstrate the province’s acknowledgment of the critical agricultural labour that they provide year after year and reduce costs to our health care system by alleviating the burden on emergency care.

Recommendation 2: increase the number of training seats as well as post-secondary institutions providing bridging programs for internationally educated nurses. Just two weeks ago, the federal government launched a new category-based selection of skilled immigrants, with health care professions being one of the top in-demand job categories. It is expected that upcoming draws will be prioritizing internationally trained health care professionals.

In order for the internationally trained health care talent that we already have in B.C., and the increased number that will be admitted through the targeted draw, we need to be able to invest into bridging programs that allow newcomers to apply their training in B.C. MOSAIC calls upon the provincial government to increase the number of seats allocated to internationally trained nurses and expand the number of post-secondary institutions offering bridging programs.

While the provincial government added 602 new nursing seats last year, only 35 were designated for internationally educated nurses, with only three post-secondary institutions in B.C. offering this type of program. With our projection of needing an additional 26,000 trained and ready nurses over eight years, we already have international talent in B.C. But it currently takes internationally educated nurses approximately two to six years to become registered nurses in B.C.

Investing in training seats and bridging programs would have the dual effect of improving access to health care for all while creating a more robust participation in the Canadian economy for newcomer professionals and preventing the loss of their highly needed skills while they are forced to find long-paying employment outside of their profession.

The third recommendation is to provide dedicated funding for anti-racism education in our schools and communities. The recent surge in hate crimes, despite the increased awareness and continued effort to combat racism, calls for immediate action. Also, the provincial government has taken considerable steps by conducting the inquiry into hate during COVID-19 as well as launching the K-to-12 anti-racism action plan.

There is a dire need to act now in response to matters that are adversely impacting our communities. There are racist incidents occurring in our schools every single day. Within the Surrey school district, MOSAIC has been contacted by over 20 elementary schools just in the past few weeks to facilitate anti-racism workshops at all grade levels.

As the leader of the Resilience B.C. Anti-Racism Network in Surrey and White Rock, MOSAIC recommends a designated funding envelope for B.C. schools to have anti-hate and racial equity educational workshops for K-to-12 students.

Following up on our request to mandate anti-racism education in B.C. schools, MOSAIC believes that immediate action is required to respond to everyday incidents at schools that need to be addressed while the adaptation or creation of curriculum is considered and implemented.

While these learning opportunities are provided to students, there should be a budget allocated to racial equity sessions for teachers and staff, as well as parents, so that the whole school community is informed and engaged.

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

B. Banman: Thank you very much, Olga, and thank you very much for what you do.

Pardon me if I take a second…. A while back, when I had a dental hygienist work on my teeth, I found out that she was actually from Siberia, and her education was to take rare metals out of tailings from mines. She had proprietary knowledge. She was an engineer. Here’s this brilliant mind who had found that what she had to do is go and become a hygienist in order to make a decent living here. I say we’ve got some of the most educated taxicab drivers on the face of the earth, sadly.

What is the biggest impairment to be able to get someone’s credentials recognized, and how does MOSAIC help with that?

O. Stachova: I would answer in particular in reference to the recommendation about internationally educated nurses as an example.

Recently the provincial government has been creating more funding envelopes to support the grants and fees, because they’re costly. It might cost an internationally trained nurse between $30,000 and $40,000 to be actually recognized as a registered nurse. So the support for funding and grants is absolutely important.

The biggest barrier is actually this lack of programs to go to. If you need to sign up for a bridging program, there are only three post-secondary institutions currently in B.C. who provide those programs. The seats are very limited. There is about… It goes to 700 internationally trained nurses every year, accessing assessment and wanting to be recognized.

[1:25 p.m.]

There just aren’t enough seats, and that’s the recommendation: creating, yes, funding and grants to support the accreditation process — because it’s costly, and the prices are rising — but also access to the seats and actually bridging programs that allow you to get that accreditation and go and practise.

B. Banman: A follow-up on that. That’s great for nurses, but this is in all trades. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a welder, whether you’re…. There are all these different things. Do you think that Canada…? Seeing as how we give you preferential treatment to immigrate to Canada in some cases, do you think that we should have programs in place so that the knowledge that they have can be challenged somehow and they get credit in some way?

Because what you’re saying is basically, “Yeah, that’s great that you’re a nurse, but you’re going to start from scratch from day one. We’re going to make you retrain all over again,” which, to me, seems problematic and a waste of time. Is there a way that MOSAIC thinks that we should have better ways to challenge and get those foreign credentials recognized?

O. Stachova: Absolutely. Again, a good example is nurses. Recently, there was a decision that the nurses, actually, who are practising in English-speaking countries, like the U.K. and New Zealand, maybe don’t have to go through the same hoops to be able to practise.

But, again, can it go further? There are other countries around the world where English is the official language. If we’re worried about language, can we actually make it accessible to those…? Or what about the nurses who actually practise in English-speaking countries? They were not necessarily educated but spoke, so they can demonstrate….

I think, absolutely, what we can do is to have programs and remove the number of hoops newcomers have to jump through to be able to demonstrate: “Look, I actually have the knowledge.”

For us, the absolutely main barrier, usually, is the access to the first job. For internationally trained doctors, it’s the access to residences. Again, very limited spots for internationally educated medical doctors, and you can’t practise as a licensed doctor until you get that practical experience, that residency.

In non-regulated jobs, we see underemployment too. How do we, as employers, create opportunities and learn to recognize the skills and experience so that you don’t have to, as a newcomer, start in the minimum wage job, as most of us did when we came to Canada?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Olga. I have a quick question with regard to the anti-racism that is in our schools, that’s out there. How was the curriculum developed?

O. Stachova: Currently, the curriculum is not developed through an official level. Currently, it’s provided by organizations like MOSAIC who develop our curriculum and deliver upon request. We have requests from employers and from schools.

Our call to the government was to actually send a letter to the Ministry of Education asking: can we actually establish an official curriculum that is mandated in B.C. schools? The same way, as we have said, that our students, K-to-12 students, have to achieve four credits in Indigenous history education.

Could we actually have a standard curriculum developed and employed in the schools? Until that’s considered or implemented, can we do something now? We cannot afford to wait.

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

Our next presenter is Amanda Claeys, Canadian Addiction Treatment Centres.

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

You have the floor.

CANADIAN ADDICTION TREATMENT CENTRES

A. Claeys: Thank you, committee members, for the opportunity to speak with you today on behalf of Canadian Addiction Treatment Centres. I’m also speaking on behalf of our patients. My name is Amanda Claeys. I’m director of operations for western Canada, and I work in British Columbia.

This is the third year that CATC brings this recommendation to the committee. The current fee-for-service funding covers limited clinical care despite the attention to the overdose crisis and need for addiction treatment. The monthly drug and alcohol fee paid by the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction could be paid for all patients who seek opioid addiction treatment services across the province, not just with our clinics specifically.

This change would remove an economic barrier to treatment. Many people who seek treatment are challenged by even a modest monthly fee that’s charged to them and are at constant risk of being a statistic in the next coroner’s report.

This payment interaction with the health care system for their opioid addiction treatment also brings further shame and stigma, not to mention the damage it does to the therapeutic relationship. The government, in essence, forces clinicians to become collection agents.

[1:30 p.m.]

CATC provides medication-assisted opiate addiction treatment through the utilization of methadone, buprenorphine and slow-release oral morphine. We also, though, provide basic primary care, hepatitis C treatment, HIV treatment. We give out naloxone kits, and we provide comprehensive counselling services.

We are amongst a group of clinics that have the capacity to provide this medical treatment service. Our outpatient clinics serve over 1,600 patients per month in Surrey, Vancouver, Abbotsford, Chilliwack and New Westminster. We also deliver virtual addiction treatment in Kitimat and Prince Rupert, through a partnership with Northern Health Authority. The convenience for people to access all of these services in one location creates a network of support and accountability.

In B.C., harm reduction strategies and high-barrier recovery homes, which require sobriety to participate, get all of the attention. They are but two tools in a continuum of care. The current B.C. model neglects a wide swath of people, vulnerable people. These are people at risk, but they are also people who have jobs. They work shift work, in particular, but don’t have access to employer-paid health benefits.

At CATC, we support these people — like a young man, a new father, who has been seeking support from an addiction treatment physician at our team, who has visited regularly with a substance use counsellor at our clinic, who has asked for resources to manage his mental health and who has discussed candidly the impact that having a new baby was having on his financial situation.

He expressed worry about being able to continue treatment, due to the financial burden. He is a hard-working dad, trying to make ends meet. He feels that ultimately, he’ll have to make a choice between continuing treatment or providing for the needs of the new baby.

Heartbreakingly, I see patients in this situation all too often. You see them in your constituency office, too. They are not on income assistance; they have jobs. They are working very hard to keep everything together for their family. Ultimately, their own recovery is at risk, because they don’t have employer-paid health benefits and aren’t eligible for any assistance to receive treatment, because they are not on income assistance. So they have to pay, out of pocket.

In this case, we were obviously able to work out a pay-what-you-can option with this new father, but many patients are ashamed about their inability to pay. They move from clinic to clinic, sacrificing their continuity of care just for a reprieve from the mounting financial pressure.

Extending the alcohol and drug feed to all patients seeking care at any qualified clinic across the province would cost the B.C. government somewhere between $10 million and $12 million a year. This is based on our estimates of publicly available information.

In the middle of a relentless overdose crisis, it is beyond time that the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions and the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction examine this policy and seriously examine the return on this modest investment, considering the full impact of increased productivity, lower health care spending now and in the future, not to mention reduced criminal justice costs.

Thank you for your time, and I welcome any questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation this afternoon, Amanda.

I have a question. You refer to it as a “qualified clinic.” What makes it a qualified clinic?

A. Claeys: A qualified clinic has an addiction medicine physician, or several. They are basically qualified to be taking care of someone with an opioid addiction, using methadone, buprenorphine or slow-release oral morphine.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I’ll come back later.

B. Banman: First off, thank you very much for what you do. I think the single biggest crisis we face right now is the addiction process that we’ve got going. We’re losing seven people a day.

When you do your treatment centres, is this after someone has gone through an initial addiction…? Or do you see people straight…? They phone you and say: “I can’t live like this anymore. I need help.”

A. Claeys: We see patients at all steps in their recovery journey. We receive those phone calls, like: “I can’t do this anymore. Can I come in today?” And they do.

[1:35 p.m.]

Then we also receive referrals through family physicians, counsellors. We will occasionally receive patients who have done an in-patient treatment stint of 30 to 90 days, and then they see us in their out-patient support. So we really support people at all steps in their journey.

B. Banman: Do you track your success ratio? Keeping in mind that this is an addiction, and it comes back — those neurons don’t ever stop screaming for that drug, basically — what is your recovery rate, or whatever you want to call it, where you actually help people go on and handle their addiction?

A. Claeys: Two metrics I can share…. Right now our retention rate, after 90 days, is 40 percent. That means 40 percent of the people who start our program are engaging with programming after 90 days. They are actively taking the medication prescribed, and they’re working through their recovery journey.

Secondary to that, we have…. About 60 percent of our patients are not on income assistance. That means that they are actively working and what I would consider stable, in terms of working the program and doing the best that they can to maintain all of their life responsibilities.

We have seen, over the last year in British Columbia, at our clinic specifically, an increased graduation rate. That means that someone, basically, no longer needs the medication and has moved on to an abstinence-based method of recovery.

G. Chow: Thank you, Amanda. You talk about the success rate. I mean, people get out of the program and relapse. People come back. How frequently would that happen?

A. Claeys: We don’t have data on that specifically. I would say…. For some people, it’s one and done. They can come in and start the program and be successful. Others trip up and have to return several times.

Obviously, there are other social determinants of health that impact that success. Someone who doesn’t have a home and whose life is a bit more chaotic can, obviously, have a more difficult time being retained on the program. We do a lot to make sure that those people have a cell phone so that we can reach out to them and follow up and have information on where they’re staying, which shelters, so that we can encourage them to retain on the program.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Amanda, one last question. When we’re talking about the $10 million to $12 million a year investment…. I think your words were “an exponential return on that.” What would you forecast as the number of people that we’re talking about?

A. Claeys: Sorry. The number of patients?

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes.

A. Claeys: In our last review, it was 23,000 patients in British Columbia.

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

Thank you very much for what your organization does for those people that are out there.

A. Claeys: Thank you, all, for your time.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Robert Lees, the Chilliwack Youth Health Centre.

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

You have the floor.

CHILLIWACK YOUTH HEALTH CENTRE

R. Lees: Thank you very much for this opportunity. For a bit of context, I’m a registered psychologist in British Columbia. I’ve worked for 32 years with the B.C. public service in child and youth mental health. I’m currently the voluntary director of counselling at the Chilliwack Youth Health Centre.

I want to bring to your attention the need for funding for the prevention of mental health disorders and, in particular, the funding needs of the Chilliwack Youth Health Centre and an inequity in funding with other communities in the Fraser Valley.

Hopefully, you know about the Foundry model — inte­grated health, mental health and addiction services for young people ages 12 to 24. Foundry operates in 23 communities, and the Foundry vision is for 50 in all.

Chilliwack was not chosen for funding, so for the last eight years, the community has cobbled together parts of an integrated service through what we call a stone soup model.

[1:40 p.m.]

We have gone from 400 services in 2015 to 4,000 in 2022, training 79 young professionals last year alone, from six different post-secondaries. It’s been a remarkable accomplishment, all based on limited grants of about $150,000 a year.

In contrast, we understand that Foundry now funds communities at $800,000 per year for very similar work. You can understand that the people in Chilliwack don’t comprehend why integrated mental health services in Abbotsford, Langley, Maple Ridge, Surrey, Richmond, Vancouver, Sunshine Coast, Fort St. John, and so on, are funded at $800,000, and Chilliwack scrambles to do the same thing on $150,000.

Foundry has done some good evaluation, and in a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, has noted the proof of concept. The question is: why be so timid with implementation? If it has been shown to work, why not fund it across the province immediately?

The Chilliwack Youth Health Centre has been an exemplar of community collaboration, but it’s desperate for funds. Services like this play a role in the upstream prevention of addiction and homelessness downstream. While communities across the Fraser Valley seem to be feasting on $800,000 a year, the Chilliwack work is in danger of crumbling. Chilliwack, as you likely know, is a community of over 100,000 people. Last year it was rated the second-fastest-growing city in Canada next to Kelowna. If something works, just do it.

Now to speak about mental health literacy. We have a vast, largely untapped potential for mental health education sitting right under our noses, but we don’t often use it. Chilliwack Secondary School has had a partnership with the local university, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Chilliwack Youth Health Centre to provide extracurricular training for high school students on mental health.

In grade 11 and grade 12, these students go to elementary and middle schools to teach mental health literacy. The elementary school principals tell us that when the high school students come, they are treated like rock stars.

The high school students find out just how hard it is to be a teacher. The little kids see someone they will look up to giving them solid information about mental health coping. The high school students integrate knowledge, and we know that we learn best what we teach. This is an unfunded program but could be something that transforms the mental health landscape for the next generation of citizens.

I encourage the committee to write into the next budget significant funding to properly fund the Chilliwack Youth Health Centre; to fund and research the work at Chilliwack Secondary School, and see it as a potential provincial model; and to empower communities with money for mental health literacy. Please do not roll it out through existing bureaucracies, but use the closer-to-the-ground not-for-profits that exist across this province.

Thank you very much.

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

S. Chant: Thank you very much, Robert. I had the opportunity, I guess, two years ago, and you did as well…. We did outreach to that program and learned what the kids were learning in, I think, 9 through 12 and what they were doing with it and also to sit in with the students. I guess they were university students who were part of getting their preceptorships and such. I was truly impressed by that.

For the Chilliwack Youth Health Centre, what kind of funding would you say is funded? What would you say would be a reasonable amount to fund it, to see it through a year, or ongoing?

R. Lees: Well, if we had the Foundry money, we could certainly expand and do much more. To really continue, we need about half a million, $500,000.

S. Chant: Annually?

R. Lees: Yeah.

I remember your visit. Thank you very much.

S. Chant: There are a couple of us that are here that were there.

[1:45 p.m.]

R. Leonard: Thank you very much. I remember you very well. It was a very impressive program you have in your facility. The physical location and how it’s all set up are quite amazing.

You’re a registered psychologist. You’re helping form and see how things progress. Foundry has this sort of cookie-​cutter program that can be replicated anywhere. Chilliwack, great. You’ve demonstrated through your successes. How can it easily be replicated in other communities so that other non-profits that are doing the kind of work that you’re doing, but not under the umbrella of Foundry, can be more streamlined and be able to be funded?

R. Lees: Well, we hope that we will eventually become part of the Foundry network but that they would respect some of the unique features of the model that we’ve been building. From our conversations with them to date, we think they’ve grown to the point of maturity where they’re now able to work with communities and be less cookie-cutter.

I appreciated your remark about that. That was a major concern we had. In the past, in other communities, they have a commitment to stand-alone buildings in communities. Our model is to be dispersed across our city in as many different locations as we can be.

Right now we’re in three of the four high schools, we’re at the university, we’re at Stó:lō Health, and we’re at the high school that you attended with me. We’re at two middle schools, as well, but we’d like to be in all the high schools and all the middle schools and feed those young people into the closest locations. That’s what our real hope is.

As for the other program, the one with high school students teaching mental health literacy, we think we do need to build a strong evidence base for it. We think with funding for it and some funding for study of it, it could certainly be something that other schools and districts pick up.

R. Leonard: Yeah, I think that’s the really critical piece for us to grow as a society. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Not seeing any other questions, I think what I’ll close it off with, Robert, is: the amount of work you’re able to do utterly amazes me and other committee members that are here.

To provide that kind of mentorship to a high school student that goes backwards — it’s maybe not necessarily the right word, “backwards” — into an elementary school, to turn them into that rock star, as you so eloquently put it, must go a long way for that student in their lifelong career, whatever they go into. Thank you very much for being that person to allow those other persons to flourish that way.

Next up is Stacy Ashton, the B.C. Crisis Line Network.

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

The floor is yours.

B.C. CRISIS LINE NETWORK

S. Ashton: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Hello. My name is Stacy Ashton, my pronouns are she/her, and I’m the executive director of the Crisis Centre of B.C.

I’m honoured to be joining you on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

The Crisis Centre of B.C. is part of the B.C. Crisis Line Network, ten crisis centres located across the province answering the 1-800-SUICIDE and 310-6789 mental health lines. Here are some examples of our challenges.

A 35-year-old mother of two calls the line in crisis. Her partner evicted her after discovering she had been taking illegal opioids for chronic pain. She’s been living in her car, has not slept for three days, is in withdrawal and has no idea what to do. Our only option is to refer her to a shelter, with no guarantee that space or care will be available.

A 24-year-old man calls the line in crisis. We answer. He’s tortured by thoughts of suicide. He has enough pills to kill himself. He doesn’t want to die. He’s not armed. He’s not violent. He just wants help. He’s terrified by the police and mortified by the possibility of being put in handcuffs. It’s 3 a.m., and that’s the only option available.

A person calls the line in crisis. No one answers.

[1:50 p.m.]

The province is investing in solutions for these challenges. We’re part of these solutions, but we could do much more. I have three recommendations for you.

The first one is: double funding to the B.C. Crisis Line Network. Right now B.C. crisis centres answer half the calls we receive. My crisis centre in Vancouver answers 30 percent of our calls right now. The Vancouver line receives over 8,000 calls per month. Over 4,500 go unanswered. I’m operating with a $400,000 deficit this year, relying on COVID surge dollars to enhance our service levels. That money is one time. It’ll be gone by March 2024.

The crisis line enhancement project is putting all crisis centres onto a shared call centre, which will help us back each other’s overflow, but a network that underfunds Vancouver and Surrey centres puts the rest of the province at risk. When we get on the network call centre this September, Vancouver’s overflow of 4,500 calls per month, plus Surrey’s overflow, will be answered by crisis lines in smaller communities, essentially blocking smaller communities from accessing their local crisis lines.

We recommend doubling the province’s current investment in the B.C. Crisis Line Network from $2.5 million a year to $5 million so we can close the gap and protect equal access to crisis services across B.C.

Second recommendation: allocate specific funding to coordinate crisis line service with in-person response. The safer communities action plan provides funding for policing services, co-response teams through cars and peer-assisted crisis teams. None of these services can be easily accessed if crisis lines are not integrated into the planning.

The issue of how dispatch will work has not been answered. If you don’t use crisis lines as your first point of contact, your police emergency and non-emergency lines, your B.C. Ambulance clinical hub, your crisis mobile response intake lines and your PACT intake lines will have to hire additional staff to answer calls that may or may not require an in-person response. You’ll also see a higher rate of in-person dispatch than needed because you didn’t start with a phone intervention designed to de-escalate the crisis.

Our crisis service responders de-escalate 98 percent of our calls through collaborative safety planning, and we refer the 2 percent who need in-person support to the right service. With appropriate funding and service coordination, we can provide public access through 310-6789 to cars, health authority response teams and community-based PACTs, relieving the intake workers from acting as a mixed bag of small, inefficient crisis lines.

We recommend investing $150,000 in the B.C. Crisis Line Network’s efforts to build consistent protocols with 911 police, B.C. Ambulance, health authority teams and PACTs and ensure these protocols are piloted, tested and refined for maximum conservation of in-person services.

My third recommendation is to create an integrated crisis hub by investing in the Crisis Centre of B.C. redevelopment project. If we invest in crisis response without investing in crisis resolution, we’re not going to fix our revolving door problem: we bring folks in crisis to hospital, the hospital has no space, and the person in crisis doesn’t get help.

Our crisis centre owns our property mortgage-free at the heart of the Broadway corridor. We want to build a mental health crisis care and suicide prevention wraparound centre. Including the two properties next door, which are available for purchase, we have the land to support an 18-storey building, and the zoning as well.

We’d use three floors to house the phone- and chat-based crisis services, our suicide intervention and crisis intervention training services, and we could co-locate with allied services like mobile crisis response teams and crisis stabilization beds. We’d dedicate the other 15 storeys to affordable rental housing.

We estimate that our adjoining properties could be secured for $10 million. Our location meets the criteria for the Ministry of Transportation’s land acquisition fund for property within 500 metres of a SkyTrain station, and we’d be more than happy to discuss how pouncing on this very unique opportunity could best serve the needs of Vancouver’s most vulnerable.

Thank you. I’m here for questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Stacy, thank you so much for your presentation. There’s nothing in life that I love more than lofty goals, especially ones that are lofty and achievable, as you’ve pointed out to us.

G. Chow: Whereabouts is it on Broadway? Is it on the east side?

S. Ashton: Yeah, Broadway and Fraser. It’s going to be right between the VCC station and the Main Street station.

G. Chow: Right now at Broadway and Fraser, they actually have a new building, but that’s probably for the youth facility. Okay.

Which corner are you talking about, then?

S. Ashton: If you know where the Kentucky Fried Chicken is, that’s our corner.

[1:55 p.m.]

G. Chow: Okay. The zoning is for 18 storeys, like you said.

S. Ashton: Yeah. The new community official plan came out, I think, last November, and it’s 18 storeys.

G. Chow: So you own the land, and you’re looking for money to build housing?

S. Ashton: We own the middle lot, and then the same neighbour owns the two places beside us. We’ve been talking to him, and he’d be interested in selling, so we’d have the opportunity to assemble those lands together. We’d be looking for land acquisition, and then we’d also be looking for development partners so that we could design something that would work best for all of us.

G. Chow: So what would be the estimated capital cost, including…? Well, let’s say in two components — acquiring the land and also building the building.

S. Ashton: I can’t answer that yet, because we don’t have enough details on what we would actually want to build. I think those are the conversations we should have with the province first, in terms of….

The financing of affordable rental housing is a different matter than the financing of condos, for example. So we’d need to have a good idea of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to fund it to really settle on the bottom line of how much it’ll cost.

B. Banman: Thank you very much, and thank you for what you’re doing. It sounds like an amazing project, and I hope everything lines up for you so that we can actually get this done, because it’s definitely needed.

The question I have is actually…. Since the pandemic, we’re now getting to that two year-cycle. Two years after any crisis is when…. I’ve got farmers out in the valley that went through the floods, and we know at that two-year cycle…. All of a sudden, that’s when some of the mental health issues really start to come home.

So what increase are you noticing, and are you noticing a trend or any particular item that caused this? For government, how much do we need to brace ourselves for in the next little bit?

S. Ashton: Well, you’re already experiencing it. So if you’re not braced now, then you’re not braced. We’re waiting on the coroner’s reports to see what’s happening to suicide rates.

Anecdotally and just through news media reports, we know there are a lot of suicide attempts and activity happening out there. Pre-COVID we were getting about 3,000 to 4,000 calls a month, and now we’re getting 8,000 calls a month. So the level of distress that we’re seeing is maintaining after COVID, and we’re definitely seeing more overdose deaths. It’s showing up all over the place.

S. Chant: Hi, Stacy. How are you?

S. Ashton: Good.

S. Chant: When you’re talking about the money to build protocols — the funding, $150,000 — have you already got an appetite from the partners you’d need to work with and done some of the groundwork so that if you got this funding, you could dive right into it?

S. Ashton: Yeah. With B.C. Ambulance, we’ve got the protocols already. They’re ready to pilot. We’re waiting to see if we can get some funding to support that, but that’s ready to go.

With the PACT teams, we’ve been in very good communication, and we are part of their North Vancouver advisory team. Again, it’s a matter of working out and testing the protocols. With the crisis mobile response team, at least in Vancouver, we’re on their triage planning table.

We’re involved in all of this, but right now I’m doing it off the side of my desk. I don’t have any dedicated funding to support our work in that, and I would like to be able to do it off the middle of my desk.

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

I think all of us are looking forward to that day somewhere when our 911 system includes organizations like yourself that’s there so we’re not sending the whole cavalry when we can send the qualified person to deal with the crisis at the time of crisis.

S. Ashton: Well, thank you very much for your time. Have a great afternoon.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Megan Worley, VisionQuest Recovery Society.

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

The floor is yours.

VISIONQUEST RECOVERY SOCIETY

M. Worley: Thank you so much and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Megan Worley, and I’m the executive director of VisionQuest Recovery Society.

[2:00 p.m.]

VisionQuest is an 80-bed non-profit supportive recovery society specializing in substance use disorder. While we are open to everyone, we focus primarily on low-income demographics and those entrenched in the justice system. Approximately 75 percent of our residents come to us from incarceration, and 90 percent are on social assistance.

VisionQuest’s mission statement is “Crime prevention through rehabilitation,” and our metrics demonstrate that this strategy works. So 89 percent of the residents who complete our minimum six-month program don’t go on to reoffend for at least two years, and 81 percent of residents who remain with us for a minimum of two months also don’t reoffend after leaving us.

Through the Ministry of Social Development, the province of B.C. is our biggest funding partner. Our goal is to bring equity to B.C.’s system of care. We deliver trauma-informed, in-house psychoeducational classes and provide trauma therapy and drug and alcohol counselling.

It is extremely difficult to fund this with the current per-diem funding we receive now, especially as we have moved into a time of high inflation, while most businesses and charities are still trying to dig out from underneath the impacts of COVID, the wildfires and floods, all three of which greatly impacted VisionQuest. Compared to per-diem funding of $35.90 a day, our expenses are at $90 a day.

Public policy plays a pivotal role in the supportive recovery sector. The challenge of solving impacts of substance use disorder, SUD, in marginalized communities has been largely carried by non-profit social enterprises like VisionQuest. B.C. has embraced a tiered system of treatment for SUD, with charitable non-profits, occupying the bottom level of those tiers, needing help to maintain viability while advocating for the most vulnerable populations.

This tiered strategy ultimately costs taxpayers more, as the costs of SUD far outweigh the expenses of supporting us in confronting this challenge head on. Public policy can reduce SUD’s financial and social costs by modernizing the system, adequately funding the service providers and providing sensible regulations that impact measurement standards.

Today we’ll focus on effectively funding recovery operators to bring equity to an unequal system of care. B.C. sees costs at over $6 billion attributable to SUD and places much of that responsibility on private and charitable organizations to address this disorder. The recent announcement by the province of an investment in the recovery sector was great news, but it didn’t account for the existing social enterprises, which is an unfortunate oversight.

The insufficient funding for existing beds creates several issues within the treatment and recovery sector: long wait-lists, fewer beds, lower service levels and a brain drain of educated and experienced employees leaving for higher wages.

Comparing the disparity between private businesses and publicly funded non-profits demonstrates how higher-income individuals can often access a well-rounded continuum of care quickly, thus giving them a higher chance of success. Therefore, without strong public policies in place to support non-profits more effectively, the lower-income demographics will continue to struggle with this disorder disproportionately compared to higher-income earners.

Social enterprises cannot compete with private companies when a significant amount of financial capital is necessary to operate a full continuum of services. The last per-diem increase applied to us was four years ago. While greatly appreciated, that amount needed to be increased then. Now with severe inflation, we need another increase.

The provincial government should focus on strengthening the existing sector before expanding. Strengthening current operations will result in existing organizations scaling themselves naturally, adding more beds and services as needed.

Ultimately, my recommendation to the Finance Committee is to increase the basic per-diem rates to $60 for the established minimum standard of care. This is urgent, due to recent significant inflation rates that have especially hit social enterprises hard. Costs continue to rise while revenue remains stagnant. This has forced and will continue to force the closure of non-profit centres, thus eliminating any gains by adding beds.

When making budget decisions and financing social enterprises in the treatment and recovery sector, B.C. must consider the over $6 billion spent and the costs resulting from SUD. When factoring in health care costs, productivity losses and justice system expenses, the financial capital loss alone tells the story of challenged funding policies.

Accounting for the loss of life, the generational trauma, the poverty and homelessness and loss of human capital is staggering. Considering that all these losses come from a single source and affects everyone equally but is not treated with equity, one wonders how Canada can say its health care is universal.

Using public policy to support social enterprises that address human capital losses will go a long way to equalizing that care. Providing sufficient funding will close the gap between social enterprises and for-profit organizations, ensuring a more competitive sector, with an effective and successful standard of care.

Thank you so much.

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

Karan confirmed for me that this is the third presentation on a similar subject, and it comes up with the same ask of $60.

[2:05 p.m.]

You had mentioned that your expenses are $90 a day, if I remember correctly, yet you’re asking the per-diem rate to go from $35.90 to $60. Can you explain that disparity and how that’ll affect your organization?

M. Worley: Increasing to $60 will have an enormous positive effect on our organization. The reason that our expenses are higher than what I’m asking for is we actually have a partnership with B.C. Housing, so that offsets a considerable amount of our funding.

For us, we support the rest of the sector in increasing it. I mean, right now our balance sheet is showing a line. We walk a tightrope every single year, and that $60 will ensure that we can pay our bills without any concerns and that we can actually increase our services as well, which I think is a really important thing to focus on.

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

S. Chant: Thank you for the work you do. How long is your program? How long do folks ideally stay with you? Do you have somewhere to transition them to when they have finished the in-house program?

M. Worley: Our first-stage program, the initial recovery program, is at minimum six months long. We have the second-stage program that supplements that.

They’re able to attend our second stage, re-enter society and find work or school in a safe and accountable environment. When they are finally ready to transition out, whether it’s to our second stage or whether it’s to a different second stage, we work with them to find safe and affordable housing.

S. Chant: Very good. Thank you.

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

Megan, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon.

More importantly, thank you for the work that you do for those clients that you serve on a regular basis.

M. Worley: Thank you so much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Marina Mulligan, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society of British Columbia.

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

The floor is yours.

CANADIAN PARKS AND WILDERNESS
SOCIETY, B.C. CHAPTER

M. Mulligan: Thanks a million.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Marina Mulligan. I’m a conservation campaigner with Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, a grassroots environmental NGO that supports protected areas and Indigenous conservation throughout B.C. both on land and in the ocean.

I’m delighted to join you from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver.

I stand before you today to present three transformative recommendations that can shape the future of conservation and restoration across British Columbia. These recommendations demand immediate action, significant investment and unwavering commitment to protect our precious natural spaces and secure a sustainable future for generations to come.

As many of you are aware, B.C. has a commitment made to protect 30 percent of land by 2030, with a focus on establishing and recognizing Indigenous protected and conserved areas. The provincial government has also promised to put money towards a coastal marine strategy, habitat management and restoration across B.C. and to advance reconciliation. But this can only be done correctly if the adequate funding is provided.

So to our first recommendation. Based on the promises made and careful consideration, CPAWS B.C. recommends tripling the current land use planning budget. Why? Because to advance the 30 by 30 goals, we need to double the current amount of protected areas in just seven years.

The government has identified modernized land use planning as a preferred pathway for establishing these protected areas and for Crown recognition of IPCAs. However, despite the commitments made by the WLRS to establish 12 LUP processes in the last fiscal year, growing to 14 in the current year and 17 by 2026, only five are currently underway. This is just not good enough.

Adequate funding is sorely needed to bridge this gap between financing and the commitments made to take action and support a workplan that can achieve these mandates. It goes hand in hand with investing in community health where functioning ecosystems are vital for providing clean air and water, mitigating against floods and wildfires and capturing carbon. Now is the time to get this right.

[2:10 p.m.]

Our second recommendation is to allocate funds to support the implementation of a coastal marine strategy, which was co-developed with Indigenous nations.

Alongside terrestrial areas, these coastal marine ecosystems are also facing serious challenges. Due to climate change and human activities, we’ve witnessed declines in salmon populations, increases in ocean acidification and devastating mass die-off of intertidal marine life, especially with heat domes. One billion animals were estimated to die during the 2021 heat dome, as an example.

It is clear that the ecosystems are at risk. To address these pressing issues, the B.C. government committed to enacting a coastal marine strategy to run from 2024 to 2044. It’s crucial that we allocate funds for this in the upcoming budget and ensure the ongoing co-development and successful implementation of the CMS going forward. We can uplift coastal communities and economies that depend on these ecosystems. And more importantly, it allows the government to advance meaningful acts of reconciliation with First Nations.

The coastal marine strategy has the potential to bring about significant positive change, but only if we don’t let it fall short of its potential due to a lack of funding. I urge you to prioritize the allocation of necessary funds to support a successful coastal marine strategy.

Finally, and lastly, we recommend allocating $200 million for fish and wildlife habitat management and restoration throughout the province. This substantial investment will enable locally-led conservation initiatives to flourish and succeed. It also aligns directly with the Together for Wildlife strategy’s goals 3 and 5, promoting long-term sustainability, stability of wildlife populations and the conservation of B.C.’s rich biodiversity.

Our ecosystems are in crisis, and the time for half-hearted measures is over. We must take decisive action to safeguard the long-term stability of species. With over 1,800 species on the brink of extinction in B.C., we cannot afford to hesitate any longer. This can extend from restoration efforts in habitats for salmon and grizzly bears but also to provide funding to revive habitats, combat invasive species and breathe new life into struggling ecosystems. We also advocate for the establishment of a chief ecologist position to lead the way.

The urgency for action on this cannot be overstated. Biodiversity loss, habitat degradation and climate breakdown pose significant threats to our ecosystems and communities. There is a responsibility to act now to reverse these trends and to build a resilient future.

By championing these recommendations, you have an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the well-being of our environment, wildlife and communities. It’s up to you, the government, to seize this moment to secure a healthier and sustainable future for B.C.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation this afternoon, Marina.

Questions and/or comments?

A. Walker: Thank you for the presentation.

The funding requested for the land use planning tables or whatever the framework is there, 12 underway last year and 14 for this current year. What number would you like to see? I know the increased funding request. What is the number you’d like to see, and maybe where in the province are we not seeing those take place?

M. Mulligan: The promises for last year were 12; for the current year, 14; and for 2026, to have 17 land use planning processes underway. We currently only see five of those enacted. We are already in a situation where we’ve fallen behind the targets that were set out by the government for last year. This needs to be advanced pretty quickly.

I think in terms of reconciliation and the Indigenous rights act, as well, it’s an incredibly important reconciliation measure. We definitely advocate in terms of Indigenous-led conservation, and to see these land use planning processes be co-developed with First Nations is the ideal and certain situation.

But five underway when we should be at 14 for the end of this year — that’s where we’re looking at. A push needs to be taken there to push those out on a bigger scale.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks Marina. I’m with you on all of this stuff. I’m a pretty big advocate for wildlife and habitat restoration, ecosystem — getting us back to where we should be.

I’m looking at the ask here, and it’s a lot of money. There’s $200 million for wildlife management. The coastal marine strategy — I guess that’s got to be another $300 million or so, probably on the north of that. Then, of course, the other stuff for land use planning.

I also would add management to that, because it’s a good thing to plan for land use, but we also need to manage those lands that we put aside for 30 by 30.

[2:15 p.m.]

It’s going to be tough for government to come up with half a billion dollars, because we’ve got a lot of other priorities. Would you be receptive to more of an independent funding model that would incorporate other independent sources of revenue?

I know that CPAWS is with the fish, wildlife and habitat coalition. Thank you for that. It’s a pretty strong voice. I know they support something like that. Would CPAWS be supportive of an independent funding model, so that we can get other sources of revenue to drive and leverage money that we got from the provincial government to do this stuff?

M. Mulligan: Yeah, it’s actually great that you bring that up. In terms of what we’re looking at, as well, I know there’s a conservation financing mechanism due to be announced in August of this year and enacted by the end of the year. Hopefully, we’ll see that happening.

I guess, in our view, in terms of independent funding, if it’s sustainable and if it can be issued to communities in a way that’s kind of long term and lasting…. I think what can happen in terms of third-party investment in these things is they can pull out quite easily, whereas government commitments can be ongoing.

Just to give you a little overview and snapshot of the financial aspects of this, this extends from tourism and ecotourism into fisheries, into climate mitigation strategies, into coastal marine strategies.

We’re not talking about $200 million that isn’t there. When you look at the climate preparedness and adaptation strategy, which was set up in May 2022, there was $500 million allocated in that strategy to look at climate preparedness. We would argue that nature-based solutions would be one of those opportunities.

Then in terms of tourism and ecotourism, that provides over $20 billion to the economy. In comparison to that, it’s only a small investment to make now to protect against the future and for climate resilience.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Right on. Thanks.

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

M. Mulligan: No problem at all. Thanks a million, folks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Abra Brynne of FarmFolk CityFolk.

FARMFOLK CITYFOLK

A. Brynne: Good afternoon. FarmFolk CityFolk is B.C.’s oldest and largest food and agriculture charity. We earned a reputation as a sector collaborator, program catalyst, community-builder and trusted voice for food growers. We work, from seed to plate, to address barriers to sustainable farming and support the sector through innovative programs, policy advocacy and education.

FarmFolk City Folk operates on the unceded and sovereign territories of many Indigenous nations. We work together to deepen our understanding and take action personally and within our organization’s programs. seeking to address this colonial reality.

Our first recommendation, therefore, is for the province to make significant investment into reckoning with land justice in B.C. Canada and B.C. both enacted legislation to integrate the United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

Additionally, with the repudiation, by the Vatican earlier this year, of the concept of terra nullius, colonial governments can no longer make the argument and perpetuate the practice of simply asserting sovereignty over territories that have been occupied and stewarded by Indigenous nations since time immemorial.

The majority of B.C.’s land has never been part of a historical or modern treaty. For many, the idea of truly reckoning with land justice is unimaginable, but just because we cannot imagine what it will mean to come into something resembling a fair and honourable relationship with the First Peoples of the place called British Columbia does not mean that we can ignore the task. Indigenous peoples around the world laboured for decades to bring about UNDRIP. We can expect that the same determination and vision will be applied now that terra nullius has been repudiated.

We urge the B.C. government to be proactive, thoughtful, humble and generous in tackling land justice within our province. The level of investment will need to be significant, and it must include substantial funding to enable the leadership and full participation of Indigenous nations in dialogue and action.

These are uncharted territories in terms of settler Indigenous collaboration that does not subordinate Indigenous peoples to the colonial state, but B.C. has long been a leader of visionary undertakings. The time for land justice is long overdue.

Our second recommendation is to make strategic and targeted investments in the Indigenous and settler fishers and farming professionals who contribute so much to B.C.’s food security. We appreciate the investment in communal food security and food supply resilience by the provincial government.

[2:20 p.m.]

The atmospheric river that brought about the flooding of Sumas Prairie also severed the Lower Mainland from the rest of the province. Since the vast majority of B.C.s’ food supply flows through the Lower Mainland, this disruption of all transportation corridors amply demonstrated the vulnerability of long supply chains and of just-in-time delivery that is so common in the food sector. In order to ensure that future extreme weather events here and elsewhere do not undermine the food supplies of B.C.’s communities, it is vital to rebuild distributed capacity throughout the province.

This means that where local conditions are suitable, diverse agricultural sectors are supported to thrive in each food shed, and fishing knowledge and infrastructure is found throughout our coastal communities. We cannot build our future food resilience by drawing on patently wrong assumptions that bigger is better, that concentration has only upsides and no downsides, and that monopolies serve the public good.

It is vital, when climate change and political unrest are threatening our access to distant food sources, that we invest in the people and infrastructure here in B.C. that produce nutrient-dense foods for our own population. People can grow chlorophyll on their windowsills, but they cannot produce dairy, oils, root crops or protein very easily.

Private investors may want to chase the current vertical farming trend that produces lettuce and strawberries, but public dollars need to be spent so that the core dietary needs of our population will be secured to the greatest degree possible. We need to understand farmers and fishers as the professionals at the critical foundations of our food supply chains.

Our third recommendation is that farmers and fish harvesters need targeted programs to enable them to invest in practices that will help them to shift to more climate-friendly practices and build resilience for their enterprises. Despite the fact that farmers and fish harvesters are so essential to our daily lives, they are both in sectors with a long history of marginal economic viability. As such, they are rightfully risk-averse, making the best decisions that they can each day, with little financial wiggle room.

Equity-deserving farmers and fish harvesters, those marginalized within our societies, face even more significant challenges. Farmers and fishers need investments to assist them in shifting to cleaner and more ecological practices, lowering risks and contributing to our collective 2030 and 2050 climate goals, which can be met through two measures: funding that assists with necessary infrastructure investments, and knowledge mobilization.

These two measures are elaborated on in our written submission. Thank you for this opportunity to address you, and thank you very much, most sincerely, for all your hard work.

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

You had made mention, right at the end — my pen can’t keep up to my brain sometimes — about farmers, fishers and targeted programs. Can you elaborate on what those programs might be?

A. Brynne: Well, a lot of them need assistance with shifting from the infrastructure they’ve been investing in, some of them over decades, in what have typically been our food systems, in order to shift to things that have lower emissions and carbon sequestration, etc. To do that, they need assistance in making that kind of shift.

There’s also a real need for a lot of knowledge mobilization for farmers and fish harvesters to be able to adapt. As we know, conditions for producing food are changing dramatically throughout the planet. Particularly here in B.C., we’re seeing that across sectors. The extreme climate events are really having an impact. There’s a need to adjust to, maybe, different selections of perennials or shifting livestock production practices for animals that may be more stressed by extreme heat, as an example.

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

Not seeing any other questions or comments, Abra, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon.

A. Brynne: Thank you. I really want to acknowledge that your committee is receiving a host of very diverse demands on a very complex consideration. I really appreciate your giving us the time today.

M. Starchuk (Chair): You’re welcome.

On that note, we are going to recess until 2:40.

The committee recessed from 2:24 p.m. to 2:46 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Ruth Kamnitzer, For Our Kids.

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

The floor is yours.

FOR OUR KIDS

R. Kamnitzer: Thank you very much.

I’m here today to present on behalf of For Our Kids. We’re a network of parents across Canada working for climate action. We’re primarily volunteer-led, with over 1,000 supporters in B.C. We’re also non-partisan, and our priorities are generally set through feedback from our volunteer members. With that in mind, I present the following recommendations.

The first recommendation is additional funding for electric school buses. Despite progress over the past few years, most school buses in B.C. are still diesel, yet diesel exhaust is linked to an increased risk of lung cancer, cardiovascular impacts, asthma and more. Children are at higher risk because of their developing lungs.

For many children, school buses are a significant source of diesel exposure. This happens when they ride the bus, when those buses are idling in parking lots and when the buses drive along streets where other kids are walking or riding their bikes to school.

Now, electric buses do cost nearly three times as much as the diesel buses, but because running and maintenance costs are much lower, they’re more economical in the long run. As well, there are savings from avoided health care costs. A 2022 report commissioned by the Pembina Institute showed that switching over all of B.C.’s public-owned school fleet of 1,280 buses would save the province $15 million in avoided health care costs over the 12-year lifespan of those buses.

I appreciate that B.C. has already taken positive steps by providing funding for electric school buses through the CleanBC go electric school bus program and other initiatives. However, these programs still leave a shortfall of approximately $110,000 to $145,000 for the most common bus types, and while there is additional funding from the federal government, the cumbersome application process on that is a deterrent for many school boards.

What we would like to see is that the B.C. budget include sufficient funding so that all new school bus purchases can, by default, be electric and that the funding comes directly from the provincial government for those purchases.

My second recommendation is to increase funding for old-growth forest protection. As I’m sure you know, decades of industrial logging have really decimated our forests. Approximately 20 percent of our forest is now classified as old growth using age classes. Obviously, continuing to log even this amount of old growth is unsustainable in the long run. However, the 20 percent figure masks the true effect that industrial logging is having on our ecosystems.

The biggest treed old growth with the most productive forests was always naturally rare in B.C. and covered just 3 percent of the province. Those big trees were preferentially logged, and now less than 2.7 percent of that 3 percent remains, which is obviously a tiny fraction.

Again, I appreciate the positive steps that have already been taken, including $25 million allocated recently for new forest landscape tables, innovation in the forest industry, retooling mills, etc., but more financial support and action is urgently needed.

[2:50 p.m.]

We’d like to see funding in the B.C. budget for developing value-added wood products to generate employment for communities, support for Indigenous-protected areas and other measures to implement and go beyond the recommendations from the old-growth strategic review. We urgently need to move to a more sustainable way of using our natural resources and valuing our forests for many values, including all the ecosystem services they provide and carbon sequestration.

My third recommendation, which I’ll speed on because I see the clock, is support for energy-efficient buildings, including support for municipalities to implement that.

Currently, 11 percent of B.C.’s emissions come from buildings and homes. Two-thirds of detached homes and half of all homes overall are still using natural gas. Again, I appreciate the progress that has been made through the B.C. step code and the B.C. Roadmap to 2030, but there is still more room for improvement, and that will take financial investment, including training for those in the building industry, rebates for heat pumps, electric water heaters, insulation, and more.

Along with this, we really need to ban gas hookups to new builds. Quebec, New York, Washington state already have that kind of legislation, as well as other jurisdictions. I know Vancouver has taken some steps too, but we’d like to see that kind of regulation all over B.C., and the financial support to do that.

Thank you very much for your time, and I welcome any questions on these.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation this afternoon, Ruth.

S. Chant: Thanks, Ruth, and thanks for the work that you and your group do. We’ve got to have something left for the kids.

How much is your average electric school bus to purchase?

R. Kamnitzer: It is about $450,000, a little bit less, and a diesel bus is about $145,000, I believe. Prices are going up, I have to say.

S. Chant: Okay, thank you.

R. Kamnitzer: But they do…. There is an 80 percent projected savings in running costs — the cost of electricity versus gas — and 60 percent in maintenance costs.

I think…. We all know there’s an incalculable cost on the health of our children and, of course, the health of the planet in the long run. We all know we are moving to electric vehicles. We need to do it sooner rather than later.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ruth, on that note, could you tell us if electric buses work in all school districts, when we’re talking about school buses in the province of B.C.? I’m thinking of some of the routes….

We’ve heard from different educators that are out there where they talk about the kids having to be on a bus for an hour and a half, and it’s up north, and it’s cold weather, and other things that are along those….

R. Kamnitzer: I know. I worked with For Our Kids specifically on this, so I’ve talked to a lot of school bus operators across B.C. and even elsewhere in Canada. I think there are two answers to that question.

The first is that, you know, they do. For most school districts, most routes are perfectly fine with an electric bus. The projected range varies a bit with the climate and who you talk to, but I think generally about 150 kilometres is pretty safe.

The second thing on that is a lot of school managers say: “Oh, we need them for field trips.” First of all, yes, maybe they still need one or two. The transition will take time. The technology will improve. But we don’t need…. I think we actually need to ask the question: do we want our kids sitting on a bus for more than 75 kilometres to go on a field trip?

My daughter participates in a lot of sports. She loves her sports. The way it works here — I’m in the East Kootenays — is that they go to places that are an hour and a half away. They do a tournament. It’s a two-day tournament. They drive there one day, back the same day. The next day they do the same thing. I don’t want her to do that. I want them to schedule tournaments that are with less schools but in a closer distance.

So when school boards say, “We need our diesel buses because we have all these field trips,” we need to ask: do we need to offer field trips in…? Knowing what we know about the climate, knowing what we know about the health risks of diesel pollution, are those long field trips worth it, or can we work in a way to do field trips that are closer to our schools, within a distance that is doable by an electric school bus?

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Ruth.

I wanted to ask…. I understand the goal of having electric buses and that price differential, that delta, is quite substantial. I was reading or hearing something the other day about the infrastructure for charging to meet our goal of having, I think, electric vehicles entirely by 2035 federally, and the gap that we have in terms of charging infrastructure.

[2:55 p.m.]

I don’t know about all 61 school districts. I guess my question is: have you done any research to know that they have the ability to do fleet charging or whatever is going to be required?

R. Kamnitzer: I know a little bit less about the charging. I know in some places, that is one of the steps they have to do. They have to put in the charging infrastructure. There is some funding for that changeover. That’s a problem in my school district.

The other thing is that they generally park the buses away from the school, at the driver’s home. That’s something that’s going to shift.

What I also know is the school districts, like Sooke school district, like some of the other ones on the Island, Victoria school district…. The ones that are doing it are addressing those problems. So when you hear that feedback, I don’t think that is a barrier to their adoption. I think it is a sign that we really need to set the standard here and let schools know we’ve got the funding — “We’re going to ask you to do this, or we’re asking you to do this” — so that they can come up with those solutions.

There are solutions. The infrastructure can be put in. It just needs to be done quickly.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Ruth, thank you very much for your presentation to the committee this afternoon.

R. Kamnitzer: Okay. Thank you very much. All the best.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Next up is Martin Luymes, Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada.

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

The floor is yours.

HEATING, REFRIGERATION AND
AIR CONDITIONING INSTITUTE OF CANADA

M. Luymes: Good afternoon. Thank you so much for this opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Martin Luymes, and I am the vice-president of government stakeholder relations for HRAI.

HRAI is the national trade association for the heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration sector. Our members include manufacturers, product manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and contractors, roughly 1,250 members across the country, representing about 50,000 jobs and $12 billion in economic activity.

I will say that our industry and our association has been really at the forefront, in many ways, of addressing climate change — action against climate change, to decarbonize homes and buildings. Our members are in a position to play a very significant role in delivering solutions. Therefore, that’s really the main theme of our engagement here today. We want to provide some recommendations that speak towards the government’s priorities and some of what we feel are the urgent needs of the sector.

Speaking to what we’d like to see in a budget for 2024, I’m going to say that most of our requests aren’t particularly costly, but they are urgent, and they do require that they be addressed.

The first is that in order to address the significant and growing shortage of qualified tradespersons in our sector, there’s action needed. We have a really rapidly growing market for residential heat pumps in the province. Therefore, we’re advocating that the government of British Columbia support and expedite the creation of a residential HVAC trade modelled on a trade that exists in several other provinces, including Ontario, Manitoba and Quebec, which ties a residential trade, as a branch or a tier, to the existing refrigeration trade.

We’re recommending that the government first expedite adoption of this trade in regulation and then provide an allocation of funding to promote this trade directly to young people, as well as establishing a program for reskilling for existing workers in the industry to take on new low-carbon technologies, such as heat pumps.

This recommendation, I believe, connects to the government’s commitment to building a strong, sustainable, clean economy by ensuring that the workforce exists to deliver on market expectations. These expectations are growing rapidly year by year and month by month. It will also aid in making the energy transition more affordable to households across the province.

[3:00 p.m.]

We’ve seen a bit of a growing gap between supply and demand of low-carbon technologies. There is, thanks to existing government programs — provided by CleanBC, the city of Vancouver, Fortis, Hydro B.C., and so on — a lot of growing interest and stimulation of demand for the technologies of our sector, clean technologies like residential heat pumps, ground-source and air-source heat pumps, and so on.

What we’re facing, at the same time, is a severe shortage of competent and qualified technicians available to install and service that equipment. With that growing gap, that gap between supply and demand, the inevitable result is the inflation of product prices in the marketplace, which is not delivering an optimal outcome for consumers.

In some ways, our ask is more of a regulatory and a policy issue. We are suggesting that once a program is established, which we will work on with SkilledTradesBC…. Once a program is established, and we’re hoping that can be done in a relatively quick time, there will be a need for funding to promote this program to young people, to displaced workers and to others seeking meaningful employment in the trades, particularly a trade that creates an avenue for young people to make a difference in addressing the province’s climate action goals.

There’s a great need for more tradespeople in our sector. It’s not unique to our industry, but there is this particular need for this sector, the residential sector, to have that gap addressed.

In light of the province’s ambitious goal of getting to net-zero carbon in buildings, the need for these programs is urgent. I’m going to say, given the length of time needed to implement programs, that immediate action really is needed to allow us to hit our targets. That’s our first recommendation.

The second one is that while HRAI has applauded and does applaud the government of British Columbia for establishing SkilledTradesBC and for recertifying the various pipe trades of our sector as compulsory trades, there is a sense…. There needs to be a budget allocation, or a financial allocation, to require the effective enforcement of those certifications in the field.

That’s only just beginning. To really ensure that the right people are doing the right jobs in the field and in the right circumstances, there is a need for effective public enforcement, regulatory enforcement, of those trade requirements. That will require an investment that hasn’t been made in previous years.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Martin, I’m going to have to interrupt here. You are just slightly over your allotted time. I would ask you to wrap it up now, if you can, please.

M. Luymes: Okay. That’s our second request.

I’ll just make a very quick third one. There’s a need for an allocation of funding to support training related to the emergence of mildly flammable refrigerants coming into the sector. There is a need to retrain many people in our industry. I’ll just leave it at that.

Thank you very much for your time. Is there time for questions?

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Martin.

There has been quite a bit of discussion, with previous presentations, about heat pumps in cold weather. Being that British Columbia…. A large part of it is quite cold.

Is there a definitive answer on whether heat pumps will work in colder climates, where it’s minus 25 or greater?

M. Luymes: The short answer is yes. The technology is improving year by year.

It’s not the low-cost option in the marketplace. There are cold climate air-source heat pumps that have been proven, through field testing, to work down to negative 40. Of course, even where those appliances are used, often there is a requirement for an electric resistance backup or, in some cases, a natural gas backup, where available. Either is fine.

The fact of the matter is…. It has been proven, for the most part, that these technologies will work even down to very cold temperatures. Geothermal heat pump systems perform consistently year-round regardless of outdoor air temperatures.

I think the answer is yes. You can safely bank on investments in heat pumps solving the problem.

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

Just to piggyback off my colleague here. Does the price go up exponentially once you start getting those heat pumps that work in those minus 40 temperatures?

We’re talking about somebody’s heat pump that may not operate at the worst of times, when it’s minus 40 and two in the morning. If they don’t have the backup, the hybrid system, like you suggest, with natural gas or electric heat, that would have some dire effect. It can’t be a maybe. It has to be a for sure. What is the price to that?

[3:05 p.m.]

M. Luymes: To be clear, there are products that will do the job entirely on their own. These are the ones called cold climate air-source heat pumps. They will perform consistently on their own, fully, without any type of backup support. The cost is higher. I would not call it exponentially higher.

I would suggest…. A really important consideration is the one I raised. One of the reasons prices are where they are in the marketplace today is it’s a capacity issue.

First of all, the product is seen as a premium product, as a bit of a niche product. It’s not standard issue. It’s not a commodity as yet. We have a desperate shortage of companies and workers available to work with those products. The simplest way to defer that business, or to push it off, is to raise your prices. So part of the capacity constraint is what’s contributing to these significantly higher-than-usual prices.

In time, with proper supports, for workforce development, for the market to grow for heat pumps, we’re confident that the average price of heat pumps will drop dramatically.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): My original question was going to be on energy use. What does the average kilowatt per hour…? What is the average use, and an average temperature? I know it fluctuates between different types of heat pumps, but on average, could you give me a ballpark on how much energy use that would be per day in kilowatts per hour?

M. Luymes: Sorry, I don’t have an average there. I would say that a simple way of describing it is the optimal performance of a residential — like a resistance, heat system, baseboard electric system — is 100 percent efficiency. All heat pumps outperform 100 percent efficiency, and some will perform as much as 350 percent efficient, or 3.5 COP.

On the coldest days of the year, that performance drops to closer to what I would call about 1.2 COP, or 120 percent efficient. That’s the worst performance they do. The actual electricity draw will completely depend on the size of the system, the size of the home and many other factors.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Martin, thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon to the committee.

Next up is Jessica McIlroy from Pembina Institute.

Jessica, if you can hear us, you have five minutes to make your presentation, followed by up to five minutes of questions and/or comments.

The floor is yours.

PEMBINA INSTITUTE

J. McIlroy: Great. Thank you very much. Hopefully you can hear me okay. My name is Jessica McIlroy. I’m a senior analyst with the buildings team at the Pembina Institute, as stated. I work out of our Vancouver office.

The building team has prepared some recommendations and filed those for the budget this year, and I will do my best to go over those very succinctly and quickly.

Our first recommendation is that the B.C. government allocate budget specifically for the creation and implementation of a B.C. building retrofit strategy to ensure that all buildings in B.C. meet climate resilience and net-zero emissions commitments. As we know, retrofitting buildings is a very key piece to not only meeting our climate change targets, as recognized in CleanBC, but also ensuring that all of our residents across the province are living in safe and healthy homes.

A retrofit strategy is really key to bringing together all of the different policy pieces, plans, funding subsidies, utility DSM programs and all the different pieces we have currently right now addressing our housing supply and building climate work into a single, succinct piece of work that is going to focus our efforts and ensure that we can actually get on track.

Right now, we are not on track to actually meet the building emissions reduction goals, and we’re not on track with the retrofit rate that we have to be producing in this province.

That strategy will help us achieve emissions reductions and resilience targets. But it also is a key piece in addressing the findings of the coroner’s report on heat-related deaths in B.C., introducing cooling, active and passive cooling, and air quality standards within our buildings.

Our second recommendation is a specific budget ask that addresses the funding gap that’s currently being seen for deep retrofits in residential and commercial buildings. The Pembina Institute did a piece of analysis a couple of years ago and produced a report called the Renovation Wave that speaks to the amount of public support that is needed to achieve a 4 to 5 percent retrofit rate.

[3:10 p.m.]

This will help us achieve our 2040 and 2050 climate targets and increase our industry capacity, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country and millions of dollars in GDP revenue for this sector.

What we identified is…. In British Columbia, there’s a $1.3 billion per year gap in the funding that is required. It’s to be allocated and brought together with support from the private sector, in utilities and all levels of government and aligned across all three and four levels of government.

Moving on to our third recommendation. We are doing some work currently on what specifically would be needed to fully fund and support low-income and non-profit housing in British Columbia to achieve those retrofit targets and to ensure that they are not only achieving net-zero emission standards but also achieving those livability standards within the buildings.

As we continue that work and look at what’s required…. We are supporting the Ecotrust Canada ask, which they have put forward. That is to allocate $300 million per year to retrofitting and electrifying all of the B.C. households that are currently experiencing energy insecurity. Through different research across Canada, what we recognize is that there are about 272,000 B.C. households that are currently experiencing energy insecurity due to different factors: the energy performance and quality of their home, energy and electricity rates and the different types of mechanical systems that they have in place.

Ecotrust Canada has identified that dedicating about $30 million per year from now until 2040 should address this issue. That’s based on the retrofit cost of approximately $18,000 per household to put in a heat pump system and do some basic mechanical and envelope upgrades.

We recognize that the B.C. government has created income-qualified programs for retrofits, and the utilities themselves have created programs that address the different income needs across the province. At the moment, we’re not seeing the level of uptake and the level of retrofits being achieved at the levels that we need to. Again, we need to consolidate these efforts, ideally having a low-income component and a larger public component of investment in retrofits, pulled together into an overall retrofit strategy.

I will leave it there and answer any questions that you may have.

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

S. Chant: Hi, Jessica. Thank you for presenting. Nice to see you.

J. McIlroy: Good to see you.

S. Chant: When we’re talking about retrofits, do we have a lot of companies or whatever that do this work, or is it fairly limited as to who does the work and has the knowledge and expertise and capacity?

J. McIlroy: In British Columbia, we do actually have a very robust retrofit industry and, overall, a high-performance building sector.

As we see, we have a very high level of quality in our new construction. Buildings are being built to really incredible standards in British Columbia. We do have a number of companies that have historic work in the area. We need to recognize that that’s not equal across the province. There are regions in the province that have different abilities to access those companies and access the support. So there is a level of skills training and support for industry development that’s needed in different areas of the province.

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

Jessica, you had mentioned that the levels of uptick aren’t what you would have thought or aren’t what they are. Is there a rationale behind that?

J. McIlroy: I think what we’re finding is a combination of the challenge in reaching homeowners themselves. Retrofits are a very difficult piece of work. We need to actually reach homeowners and building owners or building managers to make those decisions.

[3:15 p.m.]

Making those decisions doesn’t come with a financial payback and a financial benefit in the way that some other investments would. Our current rebate and incentive programs are not actually geared towards timing when end-of-life and natural building cycles come into place. When homeowners and building owners have a point of failure or a life cycle of the equipment has come to an end…. That is when we need to be allowing them to access financial support and access the resources that are needed for them to make the decisions that we need to make.

Quite often what we’re trying to do is reach people and ask them to upfront still a significant amount of capital at a time when it’s actually not aligned to when equipment is failing or when major decisions are being made. That’s one example of why we’re not seeing the rates that we need to see.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Not seeing any other questions, Jessica, I will thank you for your presentation to the committee this afternoon.

J. McIlroy: Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Peter McCartney, the Wilderness Committee, presenting on behalf of the Just Transition working group.

Peter, you have five minutes for your presentation and up to five minutes for questions and/or comments following that.

Peter, you have the floor.

JUST TRANSITION WORKING GROUP

P. McCartney: Hello, members of the budget committee. Thank you for this opportunity to share some proposals from the B.C. climate emergency campaign’s Just Wransition working group.

I’m the climate campaigner at the Wilderness Committee and chair of the group, which includes the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, the Poverty Reduction Coalition, the Worker Solidarity Network and the climate emergency unit. Our group was formed to give life to the campaign’s demand to leave no one behind in the transition away from fossil fuels.

While our briefing note contains many policy proposals, I’ve chosen to highlight three broad recommendations that could also provide a path to accomplish the others. Just transition is bigger than one budget item or program. It’s about reimagining the role of government and planning and preparing for both the impacts of climate change and the implications of the global push to eliminate pollution.

Climate change and the effort to halt it will have transformative effects on our society over the next several decades. Certain regions and populations are especially at risk, and the sooner work begins to ensure their long-term well-being, the more likely our chances of success. With that in mind, here are three of the recommendations of the Just Transition working group to help secure the most positive outcomes possible for these communities.

The first one is to create a youth climate corps which provides employment to anyone aged 35 or below for two years and works on climate mitigation and adaptation projects in their communities. Local or regional boards could develop these priorities to further the goals of an overarching provincial just transition strategy.

This could include things like installing passive and active cooling for all low-income residents, including those living in B.C. Housing projects, installing heat pumps for energy efficiency upgrades on First Nations reserves or planting trees in neighbourhoods with a lack of access to green space to help cool down the area during summer heatwaves. There’s a tremendous amount of work to be done to address the climate crisis, and governments should fund positions in every community to make it happen.

The second proposal is to provide skills training for gas workers to successfully transition to new employment in the event they lose their jobs due to climate policy or declining demand for fossil fuels and to support pension bridging for those nearing the end of their careers who are interested in early retirement. This has been done in Spain and other jurisdictions. Most of the job impacts that can come from the transition away from fossil fuels can actually be managed just through the attrition of people on their way out the door.

At the same time, income supports and poverty reduction efforts, especially for marginalized communities, are necessary to help people in communities who lose jobs both to climate disasters and the transition away from fossil fuels. B.C. is heading into a tumultuous few decades where we’re likely to experience significant shifts in the physical and social systems that people rely upon. Having the policies in place to take care of people can ensure that nobody falls through the cracks.

Third, we’re proposing that we launch a community-led process, with clear direction and funding commitments, to examine strengths and opportunities across northeast B.C., consult economic development experts, engage key stakeholders and identify investment priorities for the region.

This could mean a high voltage transmission line to Edmonton that could help the region further its clean energy development, or a fibre optic cable could allow it to build data centres on former gas sites. These proposals need to come from the people on the ground who know their communities and can envision what the region looks like after fossil fuel development is no longer taking place.

As part of this effort, we should provide resources and capacity for First Nations to pursue their own strategies for economic development on their territories. One of the suggestions of the working group is…. This could include an office to help First Nations navigate regulatory approvals for emissions reduction initiatives like clean energy, housing retrofits and transportation.

[3:20 p.m.]

The third is really to tease out what the economy looks like in northeastern B.C. after fossil fuel demand has declined and after B.C. is no longer extracting the gas.

That’s my presentation. I’m looking forward to hearing your questions.

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

Just to note that you’re the second in-vehicle presentation of the day. It’s not quite a pioneer, but close.

P. McCartney: We’re in Vernon doing some fieldwork.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Comments and/or questions?

I have a question. You talked about the Youth Climate Corps. How do you envision that completely unfolding? What kinds of numbers of people are we talking about?

P. McCartney: It would be in the thousands. The climate emergency unit has a policy proposal on youthclimatecorps.com that goes into more detail. Ideally, this would be a provincial program that eventually gets adopted federally and employs people in every community, basically offering a job and employment to anyone who wants one.

We work with youth all the time who are disillusioned. It’s pretty hard to go to work at a fast-food job when you understand the implications that the climate will have on your future and what you’re saving for. Giving youth an opportunity to participate in mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis would offer a tremendous amount for their mental health and would also offer the country an ability to get done all of the work that we need to do.

We need, essentially, to transform every community in the country in a matter of decades. That kind of workforce that we’re looking at for youth would be pretty significant to do that job.

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

Okay, Peter, I’m not seeing any other questions from the committee. Thank you for taking the time out of your afternoon and finding a safe parking spot to be able to make your presentation to the committee this afternoon.

Our next presenter is Ben Simoni from the Youth Climate Corps of British Columbia. If I had looked farther down on the agenda, I might have saved a question.

Anyway, Ben, you are up. You have five minutes for your presentation, followed by up to five minutes of questions and/or comments.

YOUTH CLIMATE CORPS B.C.

B. Simoni: Thank you for having me today. I’m the executive director of the Youth Climate Corps B.C.

I’m calling in from the traditional and unceded territories of the Sinixt, Syilx and Ktunaxa people in what is very rainy Nelson B.C. — thankfully, rainy.

I’m excited to talk with you folks today about how Youth Climate Corps can support the goals of CleanBC, the climate adaptation and preparedness strategy, and the future-ready action plan.

Youth Climate Corps provides young people with opportunities to make a difference in their communities while earning living wages and developing skills that prepare them for meaningful work and engaged citizenship. By taking part in climate action projects that have a real impact on their communities, Youth Climate Corps participants improve their own lives while becoming part of something bigger than themselves.

The programs are four to six months long and involve four to eight young people aged 17 to 30. The focus area of the projects is climate action. We work with local governments and stakeholders to develop climate action projects that reflect the community’s priorities. For example, these are wildfire mitigation, building retrofits. We often do community engagement and education, letting community members know what incentives are available to them to engage with climate action.

We focus on community leadership, building up the leadership of young people through curriculum and connecting them with networks within their community, and workforce readiness. A lot of the workforce that is needed to tackle climate action is currently not, at its current scale, what it needs to be — for example, connecting young people with trades opportunities and careers in climate action.

[3:25 p.m.]

In 2023 — we’ve been running since 2021 — we’ll be operating in the West Kootenays, in partnership with the regional district of Central Kootenay; in Kimberley-Cranbrook; in Golden; in Kamloops, in partnership with the city of Kamloops; in Vancouver; and on north Vancouver Island in partnership with the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw revitalization project, which is an Indigenous-led initiative. The program is running in Indigenous, rural and urban settings.

We’ve seen a tremendous impact from this program, from the youth and from the communities. We won the 2020 Sustainability Leadership Award from the city of Nelson and have heard tremendous feedback from community members. I’ll share a quote from an alumnus from 2020, whose name is Alex:

“This year I’ve stepped into a longer-term role as the climate action assistant” at the regional district of Central Kootenay, “and we are developing a climate action plan for the upcoming electoral cycle.

“Through this work, I have run into many of the same industry experts whom I met through the Youth Climate Corps program, watched my Youth Climate Corps colleagues continue on their own professional careers, and still often call upon my Youth Climate Corps supervisors for advice. I can’t stress how much of a support this program and staff have been for me over the recent years of my life and career.

“Youth Climate Corps is now an integral player in climate action in my local community and will, hopefully, have the capacity to collaborate with the regional district on the implementation of our upcoming climate action plan. I would love nothing more than to see this opportunity extended to youth in…communities around B.C. and beyond.”

I’m happy to say that Alex was part of the coordinating of our partnership with the regional district of Central Kootenay.

We’ve seen a strong need to involve young people in marginalized communities in climate action in a very meaningful way. We pay them a living wage to engage in these projects. It’s a very meaningful, solutions-oriented, boots-on-the-ground approach to climate action, which I believe this province is lacking. We are seeing municipalities, and the province as well, struggle to meet their climate goals. This is a way that we can accelerate climate goals while lifting up young people, who will be affected most by climate change throughout their lives.

We have been working with local governments, as I said, quite closely to make these projects happen. However, the economic burden often lies on the front lines, which, in this case, is local government. We’ve made these projects happen through investments in local government, philanthropy and some grants. However, we’ve seen that this is unsustainable and see the need for further investment for communities in the province to meet their climate action goals while fulfilling a just transition and giving young people opportunities to build their careers in climate action.

My recommendation is for the government of B.C. to invest $5 million a year for the next three years towards a provincewide Youth Climate Corps pilot project. We believe this program will uplift communities and young people while accelerating the climate goals for the province of B.C.

Ten seconds left.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well done. Thank you for your presentation and for the extra ten seconds.

S. Chant: Thank you very much for your presentation. I am a graduate of Katimavik, which had youth projects a zillion years ago.

What I was going to ask was what your funding model is currently and how you’re engaging with communities. How do they know about you, to look at doing projects, please?

B. Simoni: Our funding model is different than Katimavik. I’m also a Katimavik graduate. They were lucky to have stable, year-over-year government funding, which allowed them to serve, I believe, over 30,000 young people while they were around. They still are around.

Our funding model is very grants-focused at the moment — looking for provincial or federal government grants aligned with this and then partnering with local government, if possible, to try and make it happen. We’re very reliant on philanthropy, which has been available for running innovative, bold programs but is not something that we can rely on in the long term for continuing this project.

We’ve been having some really positive conversations with Minister Sharma and MLA Brittny Anderson, who’s the MLA for Nelson-Creston, and we’ve had some really positive conversations with Minister Heyman. But we’re really looking for the Finance Committee to recommend that this program get funding in the future, because despite our rapid growth, there is a strong need for this to have some senior-level government funding.

In terms of the way that we’re connected with local governments, sometimes it’s through community connections. Then at other times it’s through conferences like UBCM, which I presented at last year.

[3:30 p.m.]

R. Leonard: Thanks for your presentation. A question. We’ve had some presentations just immediately before you and the earlier presenter around the need for engaging youth and training them for the work, particularly around retrofit and climate action. One of the things they were talking about was the need to promote to young people to get into those certification programs, to get properly trained up.

I’m curious about how what you’re proposing can dovetail with reaching those qualifications and not just…. You can’t just jump into it.

B. Simoni: Yes, certainly. The success that we’ve seen is being able to introduce young people to these trades through an inclusive workspace. That is something that’s tremendously important. A lot of the culture, for example, in the trades can be not necessarily welcoming for, especially, minorities and women. The trades workspaces are represented by under 10 percent of women. So there is a strong need for folks to be….

One point of this is to frame it as climate action, because that’s what it is, and a lot of folks don’t see it as climate action, but to introduce them in a workspace that is positive, that is inclusive and that is also facilitated, which is what this program is. We see this as a step before entering an apprenticeship program.

We’re developing a program in Vancouver right now where we have a contractor on the ground who is doing climate-related work such as solar installs, heat pumps, building envelope work and is also very focused on making sure the workspace is inclusive and very positive and a safe space for women, for people of colour, and for all young people in these spaces.

This will introduce them to these careers, and then we will connect them with different training programs throughout that program — for example, different unions, BCIT, training schools — so they can continue their education or step into a climate-related career or job as that continues on.

B. Stewart: Thanks for your presentation. I’m just looking at your website here.

Tell me, what are you doing about food security? I mean, I see that that’s one of the projects. Can you just give me a short little example about how…? Well, tell me what you’re doing on it, in a brief way.

B. Simoni: The Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw revitalization project is an Indigenous-led initiative just north of Sayward. They’re reclamating some land, some previously abandoned villages up there. Some of the work that we’re supporting is building greenhouses, building garden spaces and also supporting their work with traditional hunting and gathering practices.

For a very remote community that is an hour away from Sayward, which is already a remote community, building food security is extremely important, especially when the access point is by logging roads, which can get flooded out. There was even a forest fire earlier this year.

Another example is that we’re working with Butler Urban Farm to support the work they’re doing in Kamloops. A big chunk of our emissions comes from the agricultural sector, so by uplifting these projects that are already happening around food security, we are reducing emissions.

Also, B.C. is extremely vulnerable to food security. Living in Nelson, I experience this. I’m sure some of you folks are from outside the Lower Mainland. Roads get washed out, roads become impassable, atmospheric rivers happen, and all of a sudden there’s less food on the shelves, which is quite a scary thing.

So really working with projects that are already existing to build up those local projects and also introduce young people to careers that…. You know, farming is an important career that we really need to see more young people in. I think the average age is like 58 or something ridiculous like that for farming. We really need more young farmers out there, and food security is extremely important.

There’s a couple of examples there. We’ve also actually worked with a mushroom farmer in the West Kootenays, which I think was very cool.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation, Ben, and thank you very much for reminding those of us that are around 58 of just exactly how old that really is.

B. Simoni: Oh, my.

M. Starchuk (Chair): That’s fine. That’s fine.

Thank you very much, Ben, for taking your time out of the afternoon for this presentation.

[3:35 p.m.]

B. Simoni: Thank you, folks. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Lori Goldman.

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

The floor is yours.

LORI GOLDMAN

L. Goldman: Good afternoon, and thank you for allowing B.C. citizens to have a chance to speak on important budgetary issues.

Although I’m not an engineer or a scientist, I’m a well-informed, climate-concerned citizen experiencing high climate anxiety. I’m based in Penticton, an area of great volumes of sunlight but threatened by fire, drought and floods. I’m terrifically concerned about our climate emergency, but I’m not able to do much individually to make a meaningful difference. The cost to adapt is monstrous but critical to avoid higher costs later. The stress and mental impact on residents is unquantifiable.

My first suggestion to the government is to significantly fund solar microgrids or community solar farms in small communities and to invest more in renewable electricity generation to build resilience and prepare for disasters. For example, the $6 million grant to Summerland for a solar array and battery storage will enable the town to supply only 128 homes. For greater resiliency, each community needs larger grants.

Wind and solar are woefully underused in B.C., as is tidal power and safe run-of-river projects. There are technological solutions, and the government should fund homegrown, local companies that can implement them.

The second suggestion is to swiftly and dramatically increase funding to build safe active transportation routes all over the province, linking small and large communities. People need to be able to travel to services like health care, shopping, financial and educational services. With electrified small vehicles like e-bikes and e-scooters, people can reduce emissions, improve health, increase safety on the roads and reduce infrastructure stress on roads and highways.

In my community, people want to travel to Summerland from Penticton, and vice versa, a distance of 17 kilometres. B.C. Transit buses run a few trips six days a week, but there’s no service on Sunday, and the cost is $4 per ride. Having a safe route beside the highway would facilitate active transportation, help municipalities reach vision zero and reduce traffic fatalities for all road users.

The federal government has created a fund of $400 million over five years, part of an eight-year, $14.9 billion public transit investment to help build new, expanded networks of pathways. B.C. needs to access more of these funds and add to them to increase intercommunity routes connecting cities to services. Cost-benefit analyses have been done proving that the benefits to people, the environment and road infrastructure save taxpayers’ money.

The third and final suggestion is to increase rebates to people who want to invest in retrofits and to make the rebates far easier to access. The better homes B.C. income-qualified program is horribly difficult to navigate online and, even with help from energy coaches, has many barriers which keep low-income residents from reducing methane emissions in their homes, improving indoor air quality and comfort and helping communities reach reduction targets.

The rebates are tied to expensive upgrades that are often impractical for the homeowner. To qualify, a homeowner is forced to buy a heat pump hot water heater, but the cost far exceeds a basic electric unit and isn’t possible to use in every home — like my mobile home. To upgrade my power to handle a heat pump for heating and cooling, I’m forced to use a listed contractor, but there is no electric contractor in my area.

I can only get a rebate for the upgrade if I install an approved system by an approved contractor, but the prices are inflated, and we wind up losing lots of money. Thus I cannot access the income-qualified government rebates, and I cannot reduce my emissions and electrify my home. This catch-22 has resulted in a great deal of grief and anxiety.

[3:40 p.m.]

I’ve spent countless hours trying to reduce my emissions through B.C. government rebates, and as a low-income resident, I am shut out of the program. Making the rebates easier to use, simpler to understand and greater in dollar value would have a huge impact on the health of homeowners and a reduction in methane and CO₂ emissions in the province.

Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee.

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

I have to ask at the beginning: you must be aware of Henry Sielmann from Penticton?

L. Goldman: Yes, I am.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yes. His presentation to us on the microgrids and solar power was very, very invigorating.

Any questions?

B. Stewart: There was a presentation that your MLA, Dan Ashton, myself and Roly Russell participated in with, I think it’s called, trails Okanagan. They’ve been actively working on a linear trail from, I think, Wenatchee in the U.S., in Washington state, all the way to Sicamous, and it is getting traction. There’s stuff going on by Peachland.

I do think you’re right. I just drove from Penticton last week. I know the side of the road there, and you’re right. With the slide and everything else, there’s not much room for people.

Anyways, I would try to get involved in that because it is getting traction through the regional districts.

R. Leonard: Thank you for your presentation and just walking us through what life is like trying to access different programs.

You said that a mobile home is not eligible for a heat pump. Can you describe to me why that is the case?

L. Goldman: This was a heat pump hot water heater. I can’t get a rebate for an electric hot water heater. I had a gas hot water heater sitting right beside me in my little office with a lot of emissions coming off of it. In order to access the rebate, I had to get a heat pump hot water heater, which, wholesale, is $3,000 or more. Then if you have it installed by a contractor, it’s even more, but the rebate is only $1,000 or $2,000. So I would be out thousands of dollars to get that.

It doesn’t work in my space because a heat pump sucks the air out of the room and converts it into heat to do its job. I don’t know the technical part, but I’ve had three contractors come in. They say the way this is designed, where you don’t have a basement where you could have the room for the air to be used by the heat pump to do the job of that equipment, it doesn’t work. So it would be sucking air out of my room, and I’d be freezing.

For it to function…. Yes, it’s very confusing. I’ve spent a lot of time learning things I don’t want to learn. Anyway, I had to just buy an electric hot water heater, which is not as efficient, but it was within my budget. There is no support. There’s no rebate for that. Then some of the other things are sort of controlled by Fortis and limited.

It’s really challenging and leaves me in tears, actually. As a climate activist, I’m really concerned, and I would like to participate. I’d also like my house to be a model, but I can’t really do that.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Lori. I really appreciate when we have independent presenters such as yourself because you really kind of drill down to the everyday frustrations that people feel. So thank you very much for stepping up and doing that.

On the anxiety piece, I hear what you’re saying. We see it all the time. I had a young woman that actually came to the Legislature not too long ago and expressed almost the same concerns you’ve got.

When we try to electrify and you’re trying to do the right things with heat pumps and electrifying and trying to get off natural gas and all those great things, do you find it a little contradictory that the way B.C. Hydro has got things set up right now, the more electricity that you’re supposed to use, you get taxed on? Would you like to…? You know what I’m talking about — the two-tier system? Do you think that should be revamped in any way?

L. Goldman: In Penticton, we have a different situation. There are a few communities in B.C. that have their own utilities company, and Penticton has their own utilities company.

[3:45 p.m.]

They buy the power from B.C. Hydro, as I understand it, and then we pay the city, so we are not in quite the same situation. But if we had rebates for solar panels that were higher, we could electrify our city, and our whole city would be more resilient if there was any kind of a problem with power or with disasters. There is a city in Florida that during the last hurricane was totally solarized and had no impact from the hurricane. These types of situations can actually make communities quite resilient.

The climate is changing. We have to acknowledge this, and we need more funding to move forward. I don’t think rebates for solar installation are even a thing here, which is a real sadness, because that would make a huge difference.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): That’s why I love these presentations. Thanks for that. That’s awesome. Gave me some ideas here.

L. Goldman: Yeah. Summerland has got their funding for solar array and battery storage, which is great. I don’t think our city has moved for that, to develop anything like that, but we certainly have lots of homes as well as commercial buildings that could be totally solarized and feeding into the grid, which would reduce the city’s costs and actually increase their coffers to be able to do more nature-based solutions.

Individuals can’t do this. We want to, and we see it. We deal with fire and smoke and the fears of the future, but we are not able to do these changes that make a big difference. Only governments can do that. The city government is struggling just to not raise taxes, so we really need the B.C. government and federal government to work together to help communities, to save our children.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Lori, I want to say, on behalf of the committee, thank you for your presentation. Your phrase, “Having to learn things I never really wanted to learn or needed to know,” and how you describe yourself at the beginning as a climate-concerned citizen. That is a phrase that will stick with me for the rest of the hearings that are here.

Thank you very much for taking the time out of your afternoon to address this committee.

L. Goldman: Thank you for listening.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Our next presenter is Heather O’Hara, the B.C. Association of Farmers Markets.

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

The floor is yours.

B.C. ASSOCIATION OF FARMERS MARKETS

H. O’Hara: Great. Thank you very much, everyone. Yes, I’m Heather O’Hara with the B.C. Association of Farmers Markets.

A little bit of context. We are a provincial association, about 145 member farmers markets in a given year in all regions of our province — a pretty great organization.

Just a quick thank-you to the province of B.C. for all of your support for many years in various ways.

I wanted to talk about three things in particular today related to the budget, the first one being the B.C. farmers market nutrition coupon program. Many folks across the province in communities of all sizes are probably familiar with this wonderful program.

Our team just got back from Toronto at an international public market gathering in which that program featured heavily in terms of a great way to leverage people’s farmers markets. There’s a lot of excitement for similar programs to unfold in other parts of the country and around the world. So I just wanted to let you know….

Here we benefit from this wonderful program that connects B.C. farmers directly with low-income seniors and elders and low-income families and pregnant people across our province and supports our local growers and farmers all at the same time. It’s quite a special program, as many of you know.

In terms of budget, we benefited a couple of years ago for the first time with a multi-year funding agreement from the Ministry of Health. I have to say that was quite a significant win for us in terms of certainty, in terms of planning for that program over multiple years in communities.

[3:50 p.m.]

Certainly, if we could secure multi-year, three-year, funding again with this provincial budget, we would be thrilled, of course.

Similarly, we would love to be able to attack our waiting list as well. We have a lot of people who really would like to be in this program, but with funding that’s limited, obviously, we can allocate only so much. So if there’s a way to increase that amount, in a multi-year agreement, that would be awesome — to increase the reach as well.

Secondly, I wanted to talk about food security. The Ministry of Ag has done a great deal of work in this area in recent times.

Farmers markets, as a key rural remote and urban suburban food distribution place, are quite important to food security, not only in terms of giving farmers a place to sell and distribute their food and to sustain foodlands but also connecting to consumers all across the province. Certainly, we would like to continue to have the province of B.C. invest in the operations of farmers markets going forward, including some of their infrastructure.

Last year we benefited from the farmers market expansion program, $650,000. That was CAP funded, a provincial-federal partnership. That was a game-changer. Seventy farmers markets benefited, with modest amounts of money, and made significant improvements to their food security abilities in their farmers markets. How could we do that again? That would be incredible.

We more and more realize, with climate change and the impacts of climate change, that farmers markets could be better leveraged in an emergency response and in an emergency management situation. If there’s a way to start to get at the table, have some retrofitted, interesting kinds of investments in farmers market infrastructure that can be deployed in emergency situations — which, unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more of — that would be amazing. We’ve got some great precedents on how farmers markets have rescued communities due to forest fires and flooding and other….

Finally, hatch and hype. This is a really cool project that we started in the Kootenays. We’re expanding to Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast this year.

It’s all about promoting and showcasing farm and food entrepreneurs across the province and getting budding entrepreneurs to start food businesses in all places. We’re hoping to expand that across the rest of the province, with an additional budget that we hope to secure through various programs, including the REDIP program, hopefully. We also benefit from a lot of those regional ec dev funders, like ICET and others.

That’s my wish list today. I’m happy to answer any questions that you might have.

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

S. Chant: I missed something here. What is hatch and hype?

H. O’Hara: Hatch an idea, and hype it.

S. Chant: Okay. So it’s a “get it off the ground” sort of process.

H. O’Hara: Exactly. We’ve got a great brand. We’ve got some real traction. It’s generating a lot of buzz in terms of getting people excited about starting farm and food businesses across the province.

We’re just in year 3 now. This is our first expansion past the Kootenays — to Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast.

R. Leonard: I won’t mention it. Comox.

I’m sorry. It’s just that you mentioned ICET. Its offices are located half a block away from my office in the Comox Valley.

H. O’Hara: That’s right. Denice and all of those good folks.

R. Leonard: I wanted to ask if you can put some meat on the bones. What were some of the things that the 70 farmers markets who benefited from the infrastructure funding…? What did that look like? Was that electrifying, bringing in refrigeration? What sorts of things…?

H. O’Hara: I would say the themes were as follows.

A lot of on-site storage. We take for granted these wonderful markets, but they take so much work to set up and tear down. So even having that secured storage where they operate has been a real win. That is a lot of it: on-site storage.

[3:55 p.m.]

Secondly, we had some folks…. A lot of people get signage or tents that could give people shade or shelter from the elements. A lot of people get a PA system so they could announce closing times or if there was an emergency, people have to leave or to way-find. That was another big investment.

We did have some people get power generators for their…. Of course, we’d love solar power, but that’s a little bit out of budget, and so forth. But a lot of storage and a lot of that really modest infrastructure people purchased.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I’m the Kootenay representative here at the table. So thanks for everything you’re doing out there.

I wanted to touch on the emergency response piece that you had and expand on that and how we can look to our farmers markets to jump in, in our greatest times of need.

H. O’Hara: Great. I’m going to use a real-world example. The 2017 forest fires in the Cariboo — that Highway 97 corridor was shut down for several days. When the shelves were bare at Save-On-Foods because trucks could not get north to Cariboo and they couldn’t get there via Calgary and those routes north to south, the Quesnel Farmers Market stepped up. They were the only place to get fresh produce, meat, protein in that area for, I think, three or four days.

There were farmers stranded on the West Fraser because of their own properties being at risk and not being able to leave. What the markets did is…. Neighbours came together, went to the farm, picked out the produce from Mackin Creek Farm, brought it to the market and were able to distribute the food at that Quesnel Farmers Market. The farmer was able to stay on their property and tend to their crops and their property. Really community-based, place-based emergency management.

If given the chance and a little bit more strategy, I think that farmers markets could be even deployed in a bigger way. We’re mobile and flexible and adaptable by nature. What would a farmers market maybe look like a little different in times of emergency as a way to connect food?

Secondly, the B.C. farmers market nutrition coupon program — we still delivered that in Lytton. When Lytton burnt down, we were still delivering that because we could. We worked with the farmers. We got bulk purchases of food to community members in a different way. Not at a market, obviously, but it still went on, and at a great time of need when farmers needed to find a home for that food and the community obviously needed to be fed as well.

Those are just some real-world examples in the recent past, and I think we can do even better and more with some real strategy and some investment.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Awesome. Love it.

M. Starchuk (Chair): On that note, Heather, as a person who was involved with the Surrey Urban Farmers Market that was there, what you have said is very true. In times of emergency, if the farmers market can open up and allow the farmer to be on the farm and not have to worry about that part of it, that goes an extra mile for that person that’s there.

H. O’Hara: Exactly. As you know, food is perishable. You’ve got to harvest that food, and you need to find a home for it. It doesn’t wait. Food doesn’t wait for emergencies.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation this afternoon with all the enthusiasm that you have. Good luck with your future endeavours, Heather.

H. O’Hara: Thank you very much, everybody. Have a great day.

M. Starchuk (Chair): You too.

Our final presenter for the day is Alexander Hemingway, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the B.C. office.

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

The floor is yours.

CANADIAN CENTRE FOR
POLICY ALTERNATIVES, B.C. OFFICE

A. Hemingway: Thanks very much to the committee for hearing from me today.

Starting with our first recommendation, we recommend that Budget 2024 introduce revenue-raising and inequality-reducing tax measures focused on the rich, large corporations and wealthy landowners to help fund increased public investment in critical services and infrastructure.

[4:00 p.m.]

The reality is that provincial operating spending as a share of B.C.’s GDP remains substantially lower than it was a little over two decades ago, even as urgent new social and environmental needs have emerged over that time.

Last year’s B.C. budget included important and very welcome funding increases in a number of areas. But even accounting for that, the budgeted operating spending is about $5 billion lower today than it would have been if it were returned to the same share of our economic output or GDP of about two decades ago.

Additional revenue can be raised efficiently and equitably with taxes that focus on those at the top. For example, B.C. could add additional brackets and higher rates to provincial property taxes on high-end real estate holdings, as well as expand that tax base to include the total holdings of large landowners. Other options we’d urge the government to consider include increasing top tax rates on the highest incomes and on the profits of large corporations.

Our second main recommendation is to increase provincial operating spending to address the very big and long-running challenges we face in this province in areas like health care, seniors care, housing, toxic drugs, poverty, climate, child care and education, among others. Chronic, decades-long underinvestment in the public sector has exacerbated each of these crises. We still have a lot of catching up to do.

Robustly funding public services is not only the right thing to do; it’s also an economic necessity. A large body of research and evidence shows that spending on strong public services comes with major economic benefits, including higher productivity, spurring private investment and adding jobs. The evidence is also clear in specific policy areas.

Just one example is universal public child care, which has large and well-documented economic benefits. That’s one of the reasons that the ongoing expansion of child care investment is so welcome and so urgent. The research case is equally strong in the other policy areas that I mentioned, and these are findings that we’ve reviewed in more detail in our research and publications.

Our third recommendation is to sustain and expand the scale of capital investments in physical and social infrastructure, for which there is a huge backlog of need, again going back decades, due to underinvestment. The overall scale of capital investment in the last budget was impressive, and the economic case for increasing and sustaining it is very strong.

In our submission, and in more detailed publications, we review research from institutions like the IMF, as well as dozens of academic studies, detailing the economic benefits of public capital investment and finding that public capital investment is undersupplied across the OECD economies, including ours.

The housing crisis is one specific example of an area where public capital investment can have large economic payoffs by addressing housing shortages and high prices. A massive increase in public housing investment should be a top priority in this coming budget.

One way to expand the role of public investment in housing at the very large scale that’s needed is to finance it using self-supported debt, as opposed to taxpayer-supported debt, in B.C.’s budgetary accounting. This is an approach that could be incorporated into the B.C. Builds program, for example.

To sum up, B.C. is a very wealthy but unequal province. Too much of that wealth remains concentrated at the top, and too little of it is still being harnessed for the public good, despite progress in recent years. We have the urgent need to sustain and increase public spending to meet the very big crises of our time. We have the economic capacity to do so, and indeed, the evidence tells us that underinvesting in the public sector is ultimately damaging to economic growth and productivity in the medium and long term.

Thank you very much.

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

B. Stewart: Thank you very much. The last comment you made about the housing: you said using self-supported debt versus taxpayer-supported debt. Can you just explain how that would work?

A. Hemingway: Yeah, absolutely. Self-supported debt you may be familiar with through our Crown corporations like ICBC and B.C. Hydro. Essentially, when we have Crowns that are creating assets that generate income streams over their life, whether it’s the assets of one of those corporations I mentioned or whether it’s a housing project that brings in rental income over its life….

[4:05 p.m.]

When a project is structured such that that income is sufficient to cover the costs of the upfront investment and borrowing, then that type of investment can be booked as self-supported debt. That’s something we already do in our provincial accounting here in B.C. It’s also a model, incidentally, that the leading mayoral candidate in Toronto has put forward to fund her public housing proposals in her platform.

B. Stewart: The question I would have after that is: the other barriers to getting housing, which the government has been talking a fair amount about…. That doesn’t really get around them. I mean, that’s funding it.

The real issue seems to be getting the product, getting the property to develop and getting the densification and things like that, I guess. Do you have any work you’ve done on that? Obviously, this is more than just funding.

A. Hemingway: Absolutely. We need an all-of-the-above approach. I think it’s encouraging to see that type of approach being rolled out.

The measures around the Housing Supply Act are encouraging. I’m really looking forward to seeing at what level the targets are going to be set there — those municipal-level roadblocks to housing, whether that’s exclusionary zoning that effectively bans apartments on most of the land and most of our cities or whether it’s long and onerous permitting and rezoning times. Those are big parts of the equation.

We need to come at this from all angles. We need to address the question of overall housing supply. As I emphasized in my presentation, we need to deal with the chronic underinvestment in dedicated, affordable non-market and public housing that we’ve had over the past couple of decades and that we’ve seen start to come back online again. But we’ve got so much catching up to do that that needs to be scaled up as well. So all of the above.

Actually, we’ll have a new publication out just tomorrow addressing the Housing Supply Act question.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Any other questions for Alexander?

Alexander, I’m looking at your report and how you make reference to…. Investment in public transit is recognized to boost the economic productivity. Can you just explain how that works?

A. Hemingway: Yeah. There are a lot of things going on there. In many ways, most of this will apply to both housing and transit.

Mobility within our urban centres is a very important driver of economic productivity, and a lot of this comes down to the broader question of what economists like to call agglomeration effects. Essentially, the more people you put together in a place like a city, the more connected they are and able to reach each other and interact and collaborate. There’s this emerging phenomenon of increased economic productivity that comes along with that. It’s a very robust literature.

We also know, for example, both on the housing question and the transit question, that when businesses are looking to recruit workers, that’s a big issue for them — people being able to afford to live near where they work and able to travel easily to where they need to work. Of course, it’s a question of a good life for those workers as well, not being stuck in traffic for hours and hours each day.

R. Leonard: Thanks very much for your presentation. I’m trying to wrap my head around your first ask. In terms of raising the tax bracket, the taxes on the higher bracketed individuals and corporations, what does our tax rate looks like compared to other jurisdictions?

A. Hemingway: We’re not the highest in the country. We’re at about the same level as the other big provinces. I think it’s always easier for the federal government to move on tax rates than it is for provincial governments, but we do have room to push the envelope a little bit here in B.C. in terms of those individual and corporate rates.

The property tax question is one where we have a lot more room to maneuver as well. I think there’s action to be taken on all three of those fronts.

Sorry, I see my time running out. I don’t know if I should stop.

R. Leonard: Okay. I’ll just ask one more question then.

The notion of progressive taxation. One place it doesn’t exist is, I think you just mentioned, property tax. I’m wondering if you could make comment on how we can improve our tax system to be more progressive.

A. Hemingway: Well, the good news is we’ve taken some steps in that direction with the additional school tax rates on properties worth over $3 million and $4 million. That was a good step.

[4:10 p.m.]

What we’re suggesting is to go further there. There’s room to include additional brackets further up the chain there and also room to increase those rates. When you look at our property tax rates, our all-in property tax rates, including the municipal and provincial portions in B.C., and particularly in our high-priced centres — in Greater Vancouver, in Greater Victoria — they’re extremely low. That has a whole host of negative effects, not only in terms of the lost revenue potential but also in terms of driving investment behaviour into those markets.

The carrying cost of holding real estate is incredibly low when in Vancouver, we have an all-in property tax rate of a quarter of 1 percent. So that makes it very attractive to investors. That’s one side of the equation as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you for your presentation this afternoon, Alexander.

To our listener that is out there, that concludes today’s hearings that are there, and it leaves us at 339 presenters we have heard. Taking a look at what we have in tomorrow’s agenda, should those 36 people that are scheduled to see us…. That will get us to 375 people we will have heard from.

To those people in British Columbia that are there representing organizations, or as we heard today, those concerned citizens that are out there: thank you very much for your presentations.

Motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 4:11 p.m.