The committee met at 8:30 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

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

I would first like to acknowledge that we are meeting today on the Legislative precinct here in Victoria, which is located on the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

The committee is responsible for exercising general oversight of B.C.’s statutory officers. This includes consi­der­ing and making recommendations on the annual reports, rolling three-year service plans and budgets of the statutory offices, including with respect to the effective, efficient administration of each office. As part of our oversight role, we will be hearing from statutory offices regarding financial and operational updates, including an overview of each office’s workplace culture and respectful workplace policies and procedures.

I’d like to now ask the committee members to introduce themselves, beginning with the Deputy Chair.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Good morning, everybody. Tom Shypitka, Deputy Chair, MLA for Kootenay East.

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

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

R. Parmar: Good morning. Ravi Parmar, Langford–​Juan de Fuca.

M. Starchuk (Chair): We’ll first hear from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. We’ve set 20 minutes aside for the presentation, followed by 35 minutes for committee questions.

I will now turn it over to the acting commissioner, Michael McEvoy.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE INFORMATION
AND PRIVACY COMMISSIONER
AND REGISTRAR OF LOBBYISTS

M. McEvoy: Good morning, Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the committee.

I, too, would like to acknowledge that we are conducting this proceeding this morning on the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən people, known to us here in the lower Island as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

As an officer of the Legislature, I would also like to acknowledge that I’m privileged to work with Indigenous people from right across our beautiful province.

Ably assisting me this morning are deputy commissioners oline Twiss to my right; Jeannette Van Den Bulk to my left; and Dave Van Swieten, who is the deputy of shared services for the four offices of the Legislature, all of us at 947 Fort Street.

When we last met I speculated but, to be clear, did not guarantee that it would be my last committee appearance. I can now provide some certainty that today and next Monday will be my final appearances, with my best-before date as commissioner being May 5.

As you have requested, I will focus today’s remarks on the progress we have made to date on the office’s priority areas, their associated performance metrics, as well as our workplace culture. I will also briefly preview our supplemental budget request for ’24-25 fiscal year, which will be discussed in greater detail on Monday evening, although I should say that if time allows and you wish me to do so, I would be prepared to speak about that in more detail.

I begin with updates on priority areas that have been the subject of previous requests.

Our fall 2021 budget request focused on strengthening the office’s adjudication division to address the increasing demands on that team and the growing backlog of cases. A case requires adjudication when it is unresolved through our investigation and mediation services. Most cases are resolved in this way — about 90 percent, to be precise. But when this is not possible, they go to a formal written inquiry for decision by legally trained adjudicators.

At the time of our 2021 appearance, the backlog of cases was just over 200, and growing rapidly. Given the rate of incoming cases and the number of adjudicators on staff to write orders, it was clear to our team that without additional staffing, the backlog would reach 335 by the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year. Those wait times would have been unacceptable and, for that reason, our office sought your support for additional staffing. We proposed and you supported, in 2021, adding seven adjudicators, five permanent FTEs and two adjudicators for a period of three years.

Based on this additional resourcing, we projected that by the end of the 2023-24 fiscal year, the year just ending, the escalating backlog would not only be slowed but would begin a reversal to 167 cases.

[8:35 a.m.]

The numbers are now in for the end of the fiscal year, and we closed the year at 177 cases, within a mere ten of our target. With the adjudicators hired gaining important experience, this number should continue to fall, in line with expectations, to approximately 133 by the end of this fiscal year.

I want the public record to acknowledge the work of our director of adjudication, Elizabeth Barker, who undertook a careful and rigorous hiring and training process of adjudicators, which has kept us on plan. Her work has not gone unnoticed by her peers, who most recently bestowed on her the B.C. Council of Administrative Tribunals Recognition Award, acknowledging her outstanding contribution to the public and administrative justice community in B.C.

The next matter of update concerns the additional staff recommended by the committee in 2023 to address and administer new requirements for public bodies to report privacy breaches likely to cause a significant harm and to establish privacy management programs. Each reported breach to our office needs to be triaged by our staff, who work with the public body or organization to stop the breach, assess its severity and, amongst other things, determine whether individuals affected by it should be notified.

In addition to these responsibilities, it was also evident to us that a concerted campaign was needed on our part to educate public bodies about breach reporting and the need to develop privacy management programs. All of this was clearly labour-intensive, requiring more staff resources.

We looked at the experience of other jurisdictions where mandatory reporting was enacted. Colleagues across the country had warned of a marked increase in breach notifications in the first year and, as public bodies learned how the new legislation applied to them, further increases following in subsequent years before settling into a new normal after three years or so. Based on these experiences, we estimated a 300 percent increase in reports over the next few years. We asked the committee and the committee recommended, in 2023, the addition of 7.5 FTEs to support this.

We are now one full year in, and the number of reports in the public sector in the comparative period jumped from 65 to 213 reports, a 228 percent increase, well on the way, and perhaps to exceed, the predicted 300 percent increase over the next two years.

I should note these stats reflect only the public sector. We also are experiencing an increase in voluntary notifications in the private sector, and if the increases continue, it will almost certainly result in my successor discussing with you whether further resources will be warranted.

I mentioned the necessary education of the public sector, running parallel to these new responsibilities. Last fall we hosted six in-person training sessions around B.C., to educate them about their obligations to report breaches that may result in significant harm and about when developing and documenting privacy management programs was necessary. Based on the feedback and success of these sessions, we have added another round of training as part of Privacy Awareness Week, starting next week in Vancouver and continuing through May for Victoria and Kamloops.

Thanks to the recommendations of this committee, our new responsibilities are being addressed. A look into the crystal ball of future budgetary priorities tells me the greatest pressures on the office, likely to be the subject of future discussions with the committee, involve what I would describe as the meat and potatoes of what we do. I mean by that files called “Requests for review,” those matters where an individual disagrees with how a public body has withheld or severed records or where the public body did not respond to an access-to-information request within the required 30 business days.

Those files continue to increase and are putting both added pressure on our investigation team and increasing the public wait times for cases to be dealt with. Credit to our team, which has been more efficient than ever in closing these files, but their 25 percent increase in those files over the last fiscal year was difficult to keep pace with when the team is already working at full capacity.

Similar to those strains we experienced at the adjudication level, we are monitoring these requests-for-review pressures very closely while looking at efficiencies internally to manage them, including reallocating additional resources within our current budget. If these increased numbers are sustained into next year, I would fully expect that another Michael, Michael Harvey, B.C.’s next Infor­mation and Privacy Commissioner, will consider the need to request further additional resources when he makes his first committee appearance during the next budget cycle.

Two other areas where budget pressures can be antici­pated and are in need of addressing will be discussed in more detail on Monday evening. What I can say briefly this morning is that the first item stems from the legislative amendments recently passed in this House that will require updating the lobbyists registry for the ORL in the next six months.

[8:40 a.m.]

Lobbying, as I’ve noted many times, is an important facet of our democratic system of government that can inform policy and law-making. Equally important is that citizens understand those influences, and that is only possible if lobbyists’ actions are transparent.

The main vehicle for that understanding is the lobbyist registry, which offers online access to information about registered lobbyists who are attempting to influence government decisions. It is free for all to access 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Updating the registry in light of recent amendments is crucial to ensuring that the transparency it’s meant to provide is maintained. That, in turn, will require additional funds to ensure that no disruptions occur for users.

Another area of anticipated budgetary pressure and again, a priority to be addressed Monday, is a needed support position to see our case-tracker system project to its conclusion. The system’s expected go-live date is in June, somewhat later than anticipated, but that matter being largely out of our control.

We are the last amongst our corporate shared services offices, and this has afforded us some advantages of understanding what we will need in terms of resources for the ’24-25 fiscal year to support the transition to the new system and to ensure that any post-implementation requirements are prioritized and implemented. The FTE is for a business analyst position that will work with staff and developers to ensure that the system meets our day-to-day operational and reporting requirements.

I’ll now speak a bit, as requested, about our workplace culture before I conclude my remarks. Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, we have adapted and adopted a flexible work policy for staff that has allowed our team to work from anywhere in B.C. This has benefited the office greatly, as we are now able to take advantage of some of the amazing talent that exists in our province without requiring them to live here in Victoria.

We have also implemented respectful workplace training and the San’yas Indigenous cultural safety training program. The latter, over the course of eight weeks, gave staff an opportunity to learn about, reflect on and take steps to improve cultural safety for Indigenous people accessing OIPC services.

As part of this work, our office joined the other offices located at 947 Fort Street in commissioning a totem pole by carver Tom LaFortune from the SȾÁUTW̱ First Nation to support the ongoing provincial reconciliation efforts with local Indigenous peoples and to be a welcoming symbol to all people coming to our respective offices. This path supports the process of establishing and maintaining mutually respectful relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to build trust, affirm historical agreements, address healing and create a more equitable and inclusive society.

We have also scheduled training for staff with the Canadian Mental Health Association, which will take place this spring and summer. The sessions focus on increasing awareness of mental health issues, reducing stigma and, in doing so, strengthening office culture.

Finally, we have developed a number of policies to support staff and to ensure a safe workplace for all. Our harassment, bullying and discrimination policy applies to all staff and reinforces that all employees will be treated in a fair and respectful manner. It also provides complaint procedures for employees and supports our standard of conduct and B.C. government’s core policy objectives of promoting a safe and healthy workplace that supports the well-being of employees.

Our behaviour, threats and violence policy sets out to minimize the risk of harm to employees from work-related exposure to violence, threats or abusive behaviour from members of the public and to limit interference to our operations arising from inappropriate behaviour by members of the public.

With that, Chair, I thank you and the committee for the work that you do on behalf of the people of British Columbia. My team and I would now be pleased to take any questions that you have.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you very much, Michael, for your presentation and the eight extra minutes that are in front of us.

S. Chant: Lots and lots of stuff around work culture. Just a question: do you have any kind of assessment tool in place to see how people are responding to the various things put in place and how it’s working for them, please?

M. McEvoy: The workplace employment survey, which you’ve probably heard of a number of times, WES, is something we’ve done twice during my tenure as a way of getting feedback from employees. We’ve used those, actually. They’re very good tools, and they allow us to identify areas that we think need some improvement. The senior leadership team in the office, who I give great credit to, led by oline Twiss and Jeannette Van Den Bulk, have worked to address those areas.

[8:45 a.m.]

This is one area where my view has always been that this is not something that should wait, necessarily, for surveys or feedback loops, and that our supervisory team, who are very good, need to be alert to these issues at all times. They need to be open, need to create a culture where people feel very comfortable coming forward if they have issues. I think that’s been the case. That’s an issue that one has to be alert to at all times, not just at survey time, but I can say that surveys are very useful.

S. Chant: Okay, thank you.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks for that. That was great. A couple questions.

There are a lot of policies that you’re following. Indigenous mental health training. Great. One of the statutory offices that we heard from had in-house core principles. I thought that was kind of neat. Do you ever consider establishing something that’s in-house? Seven core principles, I think, is what we heard yesterday. Is that something that would be considered or in place?

M. McEvoy: Not only have we considered it; we’ve established those some years ago: a mission statement and values you’ll see in our annual reports that we file. They set out the values and mission of the office.

I should say, also, about that…. This is something that is not top-down driven. My style of leadership throughout has been to engage all employees in the kind of workplace they want to be part of and help shape over the course of my life and being.

I’m sure many of you have been in jobs where you may have had a sense of not being in particular control or not having a sense of being able to have some input into what’s going on. I’ve tried my best to bring together a senior leadership team to engage people in discussions.

I think of what happened in COVID. The way the workplace was shaped was, in large measure, driven by a team and a collective approach to that. Obviously, at the end of the day, the person who is sitting in front of you takes responsibility for things, good or bad. I think it’s important that the kinds of things we’ve done through our mission statement, for example, and other major workplace happenings are helped to be shaped by the people who work there.

That’s one-third of your life. You want to be in a place that has a deep sense of purpose, which I think our staff does. I think they understand very much the place they find themselves in, being a part of the important fabric of democracy in British Columbia and the office that we work for. And that’s something that drives and motivates people every day when they come to work.

H. Yao: Michael, before I start, I do want to say thank you so much for the term of your service. You’re super accessible and super helpful every step of way, so I want to thank you, first, for that.

Three questions I actually have. I assume three questions are okay? Sorry, I’ve been asking a lot of questions.

Whistleblowing. In case somebody within your team, say…. Maybe this is a management supervisor that they’re not happy with. Is there any kind of protocol established within OIPC system that they can bring, maybe, directly to your attention in case there’s any issue?

The second question I had talked about…. I had a similar conversation with other commissioners as well. Obviously, your line of job, your staff’s line of job takes a lot of mental health, potentially hearing trauma, hearing issues, dealing with a lot of difficult situations. What kind of mental health support do you have set up to ensure that your team, when they deal with difficult conversations regarding a complaint, have a lot of support as well, or process?

The third one is the same question I ask every time, so I do apologize for this. Are there any kind of new events in regard to ethnic community outreach? As you know, many of my community in Richmond don’t know of your existence, and we’d love to make sure they appreciate the great service your office provides.

M. McEvoy: On the first issue of whistleblowing and complaints, there’s a structure within the office if…. First of all, most issues can be dealt with through employees dealing directly with their supervisor. Sometimes that’s not always possible because the supervisor themselves might be part of the issue.

[8:50 a.m.]

In our office, for those kinds of issues, Jeannette Van Den Bulk, who sits to my left, is our public interest disclosure person and person who those can go to if they can’t go to their direct supervisor. If the issue is about me, obviously that’s something that would be difficult for anybody in the office to go, so we have an external protocol in place. I believe the Chief Electoral Officer, Anton Boegman, is the person to whom an employee would go if there’s an issue in the office, to deal with that.

As you can imagine, the vast majority of issues are dealt with on the basis of employees talking to supervisors, and that’s the kind of culture that we have encouraged. I think it’s a tribute to the leadership of both my deputies who are here this morning. There are many times where those discussions ensue and we can work through to a successful conclusion.

In terms of individual employees, with respect…. I’m trying to recall. Is it mental health issues or issues where there might be stresses in the workplace?

H. Yao: No, when they have to pick up a phone call. Obviously, a lot of calls are based on complaints. It could be traumatizing sometimes.

M. McEvoy: Yes, and that’s clearly…. This is something that I think is increasingly a challenge, and I think you’ve heard from others on this. There’s something, whether it’s the nature of social media or something, that is emboldening people to be more aggressive with staff. This is not all people, obviously. The vast majority of people treat people civilly and respectfully, but there are more frequent occasions where that doesn’t happen.

We encourage our front-line people to talk to their colleagues, to talk to their supervisor. We have run several sessions on issues of disengaging or trying to take down the temperature of those kinds of calls. Empowering our staff to have their own strategies to deal with things is really important.

Of course, at the end of the day, there are external resources that people can use. That’s something that all of our senior leaders are aware of and can help facilitate with staff that may be traumatized by an issue or some real difficulty — external resources that can be accessed within the office.

H. Yao: And the third question?

M. McEvoy: I wish, actually, our communication director, Michelle Mitchell, was here at the microphone. It speaks to issues of the language in which we communicate, both written materials but also online. I think we found appropriate translation services. Those are now working actually quite effectively and efficiently in order that a broader range of people in the province whose first language may not be English are able to access our services.

S. Chant: A while back I was on the freedom-of-information committee, for my sins. [Laughter.] One of the things that came up really solid was around schools and collection of information through elementary and high school and how that information was being collected, stored, utilized, disposed of, etc. It seemed fairly random at the time. Do you anticipate that that has improved, or do you believe that that has improved?

M. McEvoy: I’m not sure if it’s still the BCeSIS system. There were some challenges several years ago with the system, as I was aware in my capacity in the office. I was also, at one point in my life, the president of the B.C. School Trustees Association, so I was well aware of some of those issues.

It’s not an issue about which we have had any recent complaints that I am aware, but those are matters that certainly, if they come to our attention, could be the subject of a systemic investigation. As you know, we’ve focused more recently in the last couple of years on health-related matters, but the issues around personal information of our students…. That’s very sensitive information, as well, and needs to be properly protected and systems in place that ensure not just that it’s properly protected from security issues but also who sees what in the school system, the role-based access matters.

[8:55 a.m.]

As far as I know…. It’s something I can actually look into and check with staff, but it’s not something that’s been drawn to my attention recently as being a particular challenge.

R. Parmar: Michael and team, thanks so much for being here and, in particular, to you for your service not only in this role, but I completely forgot that you were president of the B.C. School Trustees Association. You’ve had a wonderful career in many different fields serving British Columbians, and I want to, on behalf of the entire committee, thank you for your service to British Colum­bians.

I had a meeting last week with the Immigrant Employment Council, and one of the things that resonated with me from that conversation was around a recruitment philosophy. From an HR perspective, does the organization have a recruitment philosophy in relation to DEI and ensuring that people from all across British Columbia have the ability to be able to potentially work for the office?

M. McEvoy: Yes, and I should just note that this assembly has a number of former school trustees, including the member, who have served their community incredibly well — and coming here and serving your community in another capacity.

The answer is yes. We think about those issues on all hires, in terms of wanting to ensure that our workplace is diverse and represents what British Columbia looks like. We’ve got some way to go on that front. I’m going to ask our deputy, oline Twiss, to talk a little bit about that issue, who’s been on the front line of our hiring matters recently.

O. Twiss: I’ll just provide a couple of examples of the ways that we’ve approached this. As the commissioner mentioned, this does come out of our office’s commitment to our work on reconciliation, equity, accessibility, diversity and inclusion. Our senior leaders across the office have incorporated Indigenous cultural competencies into our hiring practices, and we do that work with the incredible support of the HR team that report to Dave Van Swieten here.

We’ve also worked closely with that team to really expand the reach of how we post our jobs. The opportunities that flexible work brings our office doesn’t just give us the opportunity to reach more expansively geographically across the province, but we’re also thinking in terms of what the kinds of audiences are that we want to get the job postings in front of so that we can meet that goal of reflecting the people of British Columbia in our hiring practices.

Just to give you a couple of concrete examples of how these initiatives have been rolled out.

R. Parmar: Thanks very much for that.

Then my second question is a bit broader. Obviously, this assembly, over the course of, I would say, in terms of my following of the work on FOI, has done a lot of work, has had a lot of engagement, a lot of debate and discussion on it.

I think, coming from a school board and from local government, you often see in news stories across the province challenges with local governments that are relatively new to getting an FOI. I remember my time at the Sooke school district. It seems like it was just a few years ago that we had just received our first formal FOI, and we had to develop policy and guidelines and train staff and really start establishing a department.

I’m curious. For public bodies, in particular local governments who may never have heard of FOI…. I hope now, in 2024, they have, of course, and they have policies. But in the case of maybe some of those smaller entities that may be nervous about how they assemble policy, what sorts of resources and supports does your office provide to them so they are following the law and, ultimately, becoming accountable to the citizens they serve when they ask for information?

M. McEvoy: That’s a great question. We do get those inquiries, I think, often. Because public bodies and the individuals, hard-working people who…. Sometimes those people who are responsible for access to information — that may be their only task. But on many occasions, it’s not their only task. So they will phone our office to ask for assistance, and that’s what we’re there for: to lead people through the process, to assist them in what they need to do.

[9:00 a.m.]

I am heartened, actually, by the number of people across the province in public bodies, very small public bodies sometimes, who want to do the right thing, who want to understand what the right thing is to do. We can assist in that. We do that all the time.

Our staff is very good in reaching out, and they’ve developed very good relationships with public bodies right across the province, even with larger ones. As you can imagine, the larger public bodies who have maybe sometimes one or two people dedicated to the task don’t need so much in terms of the resourcing.

Whether it’s a smaller school board or a smaller municipality, for example, there are 2,900 public bodies across the province subject to the act. That’s what our team is there to do — to help. That’s something they do every day.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Michael, a couple of years ago, you talked about a case file that you had. I believe it was in a mall someplace around a realtor, the issues around facial recognition, and how they didn’t have it properly posted, or whatever the case may be, that that was what was being used.

Recently, I entered into a building for a forum, and I had to cross a casino floor. I was required to pull out my driver’s licence and hand it to them to be scanned to walk across the floor to go into the room that was being used. During that time, the person that was there said that if we had facial recognition like they do in Ontario, you would simply just stand there and be scanned. You would know that…. You can be walking through the floor and go that way.

I’m not sure if you have the ability to comment, but I’ve heard it twice from that same place.

M. McEvoy: Facial recognition, these systems, and they’re closely linked with artificial intelligence, are be­coming more sophisticated. They’re probably one of the most invasive kinds of technology, I think, that exist in terms of people’s personal information and the concerns we should all have as a society about it.

Facial recognition technology essentially works on the basis of taking a print of your face. It would be like taking a print of your finger. In the old days, you put your finger in an ink pad. That print is unique. Your facial print is unique. The technology has developed in a way where it’s sometimes surreptitiously done. It just seems so….

The example you give of…. I’m going to just put it in air quotes, “ease of use.” You don’t have to put your finger on a pad. Your picture is taken, and it’s compared against a database of others. Who knows what those others might be? The technology has been misused on a number of occasions.

The other thing that needs to be said about it is that because your face print is unique, the security issues around it are more significant. If that gets lost or stolen, obviously there’s no way of changing it, unlike a password that may get lost or stolen. That you can change. Not the case with facial recognition technology.

That was the subject of an investigation that we did into several retail stores in British Columbia — actually, they were Canadian Tire stores — that began to use that technology for the purpose of reducing shoplifting. Shoplifting is a significant problem in our society now.

As it turned out, the use of that technology in that case, first of all, was not particularly efficacious or useful because it didn’t do the job that it was supposed to do. In the meantime, it had captured the images of tens of thousands of citizens just going about their daily business, going about shopping.

Then there was a raft of other issues: false positives, where people are identified; the kinds of databases that still tend to be biased and misidentified, particularly people of colour; and so on. So there are all kinds of challenges with facial recognition technologies, and that’s the reason it was the subject of the investigation we did into Canadian Tire, for example.

I should also say, as a matter of law reform in the prov­ince…. I think that’s a matter that the government needs to examine: our private sector law, in particular, in relation to matters of technology and the need for reform.

My colleague in Quebec, the commissioner there…. It is required that where people are going to use biometric technologies, which include…. It could be an iris scan; it could be a facial scan. Those need to be registered with the commissioner there for her to be able to comment on matters, and I think that’s a good thing. It gives the commissioner and society a sense of what’s happening in the world around us and whether those things are permitted or not.

[9:05 a.m.]

I think that would be a very useful kind of provision in British Columbia that would allow our citizens, I think, greater trust in these kinds of technologies. There are places for them, for sure, but there are places, probably, where they shouldn’t be, either.

H. Yao: I think our Chair’s question is opening up a can of worms. I would love to ask about this AI, which, as we can see right now, is going through so many systems. What’s the progress in regard to it? I remember… Last time you were having conversations with other commissioners across Canada, talking about how we can address the AI privacy issues and how we can actually have a proper protocol protecting against it.

On the second one, I’m sort of piggybacking on your previous comment. I want to thank you for pointing out — there’s something new I’m learning every day — that if somebody files a complaint against a commissioner, the backup protocol is actually to go to the Elections B.C. commissioner?

M. McEvoy: Yes, outside the office.

H. Yao: Again, just educate me, if you don’t mind. Doesn’t that create a concern? Obviously, the public perception is that the commissioners, between each other, do have a working, professional relationship. Is there no third-party protocol that would be at arm’s length so that people feel more comfortable? I’m just curious about that.

M. McEvoy: Yeah, that is a good question, and we considered it at the time when we did this. This would be somebody in the office, keeping in mind that it’s an internal office complaint, so that they could go externally to somebody.

All of the officers of the Legislature obviously know each other, but we considered it sufficiently arm’s-length that it would allow people, and people would feel comfortable, to go outside the office. Those individuals, obviously, would treat those matters with considerable respect. They’re people of integrity, and would deal with things judiciously and independently. So it was felt that that was sufficiently arm’s-length. It’s a good question, though. I think it’s a reasonable question.

On OpenAI, I was smiling. I have to be careful about what I say here. I was just in a conversation yesterday with my fellow commissioners across the country. We are involved in an investigation of OpenAI. I can just say that generally, the matter is progressing. There are some very challenging issues with respect to that, and these have been publicly discussed.

I’m not giving anything away to say that the nature of what OpenAI and these other companies have been doing is to be scraping the web widely, gathering as much data as they can. There are real questions around that, legally: privacy laws, intellectual property issues, a whole range of issues.

Of course, our lane here is about your personal information and how that’s involved with artificial intelligence and, in this case, with OpenAI. That investigation continues. I was hoping it would be complete before I completed my tenure, but that’s not going to be the case. So Commissioner-to-be Harvey will no doubt be reporting to you on the results of that investigation, hopefully within the coming months.

B. Stewart: Well, Commissioner, it has been a long time and a great journey, and you’ve done a lot of things. I think about how far even this committee has come since the time the Chair and I have been on it with yourself, and the challenges that you were facing with the staff and computers and things like that.

Have you turned your attention, with all of the challenges…? Is there somebody left behind to look towards the future, about how the future of your office moves ahead? What type of either technology…? I know that we’ve got the CTS program. I guess that’s the first question. If you have something kind of…. Are you always looking at it? Rather than being responsive, I wonder if we could be more proactive.

The second question, which is onto MLA Yao’s question: how did the external review by another statutory officer come about? Where did that process evolve from? I know that that’s a question we’ve talked about in terms of other offices.

M. McEvoy: Thank you for that, Member. It has been a number of years. I’ve always appreciated the work you’ve done, and your interest in the area of access and privacy.

[9:10 a.m.]

On the last part of the question, the external came about simply because we wanted to ensure that there’s a mechanism for employees who were concerned about the commissioner themselves, that there was a place for them to go. At the time we thought about that issue, there was no mechanism for that. So we put our minds to that. It wasn’t just about the position of commissioner but within the office itself.

We wanted to make sure there were avenues, where there were issues to be addressed, whether whistleblowing issues or issues about the conduct of somebody’s supervisor, that those could be properly assessed and dealt with, to ensure that the workplace was functioning properly, as it should. That’s how that came about. It was within that larger context of the structure of resolving matters within the office.

On the CTS system, the Case Tracker System, and our new Resolve system, I actually believe that was a matter of looking ahead. It was apparent to us several years ago that our system was a legacy system. It needed to be overhauled for a number of reasons. Ultimately, it’s about serving the public of British Columbia. We wanted a system that was going to be user-friendly, that people could log on to and that they could engage with the office with greater ease of service, in effect. It took a while to find and develop that system.

We also wanted to make sure that the system was one, internally, that was user-friendly, and not just user-friendly but more efficient to use, to save our staff time in the work they did, not having to do multiple inputs of things, and so forth. That’s the way the system has been developed.

I’m sure there wouldn’t be a person in this room who didn’t appreciate that when you develop new technologies or new systems, they often take a bit longer than one expects, but I think in this case it’s been beneficial to us because we’re making sure that we’ve gotten it right.

I mentioned that we are the last of the offices to roll out the Resolve system, and that’s a bit of an advantage, because we got to see the little bumps and bruises along the way. We’re benefiting from that to make sure that we can now enter the system fully cognizant of some of the challenges and issues. I’m quite sure we’re going to get through those over the next year, and with the business analyst position that we’re asking for on Monday, that’s going to be very helpful.

On successor planning generally, I just would want to extend my thanks to the Chair of this committee, who was involved in the selection process for my successor. The way that has been announced, allowing a transition period that has allowed me, as commissioner, to speak with Commissioner Harvey in Newfoundland and Labrador as he is taking the position on, has been very helpful.

I think that has really allowed for a proper, smooth transition and that he comes to British Columbia well served by a team of people, including the team that you see here in front of you this morning. I am very confident that he will move into the chair, take the task on and move the office forward.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Did you have anything else, Ben?

B. Stewart: Maybe I will ask a question, if you don’t have somebody else.

This agreement with the other commissioner…. Is it just the two offices that have something like that? I’m interested in how that got structured. Was it before your time, or was it there in existence when you assumed the office as commissioner?

M. McEvoy: Yeah, it occurred when we updated our harassment and bullying policy. I think that was several years ago. I’m not going to speak for each office, but I think each office has thought through this issue, because it’s an obvious matter. Each would have their own approach to that. This was our decided approach as we thought through it.

It wasn’t just about the commissioner but about the system generally, to ensure no bullying, no harassment, none of the issues that should ever be part of a workplace. You need to put safeguards in place to ensure that those things don’t happen, and accountability mechanisms. That was just one part of the accountability measure that we put in place in our office.

B. Stewart: Well, thank you. I appreciate that insight.

[9:15 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. I guess a question that goes…. Is it a reciprocal understanding, if there’s something in Anton’s office, that it ends up with you?

M. McEvoy: I’m not sure that that is the case, as I understand it. I’m not sure. I don’t recall that I was asked by any other office to serve as, in effect, an external source for a complaint vehicle, but I will look into that, just to confirm that one way or the other, so that the committee is aware of that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I’m not seeing any other questions.

We’ve got a little bit of time. We are meeting again on Monday. There is one question I have, and it’s kind of related to the budget we’ll talk about Monday.

With regard to the one request that was there, we all appreciate that Michael Harvey is coming from the east coast. There’s a request in the budget for $75,000, and I first jokingly thought: “Well, are we bringing the house?” Then secondly, more seriously: “How is that number derived?”

M. McEvoy: I was going to say that the committee to select my successor couldn’t have picked somebody from a location farther away from Victoria, but that is the nature of our wonderful country. I can say that the number is something that, I think, Mr. Van Swieten had looked at to assess what was reasonable. There are issues of distance, weight, the transportation. As you know, part of moving expenses are fees associated with house sales, and so forth.

That I think was a rough calculation done through shared services.

I’m going to ask Dave maybe if he wants to speak a little bit to that.

D. Van Swieten: We worked with Relocation B.C., which does this professionally for a living. The figure is made up of not only the move costs, but there are other costs too: house-hunting trips, legal fees, real estate fees. There are a number of things that stack up to come up with that number.

We worked with Relocation B.C. and came up with the best estimate we could, given that distance. I don’t know what else to tell you about it.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. I appreciate the fact that you’re using an arm’s-length outfit that that’s what they’re the subject matter experts in.

Is there some sort of policy that’s built inside of the system to say that when a move occurs…? I know that in our RCMP, they’ve got things that are inside of them, when they’re relocated to other parts of the country, that there’s policy that follows that.

I’m curious. Is $75,000 the policy, or is it case by case, where if you moved from Fort St. John, the number would be different?

D. Van Swieten: That’s a good point. Thanks for raising that.

The policy is a published policy. As Commissioner McEvoy alluded to, there isn’t a dollar limit attached to it, but there is a weight limit. No, he can’t bring his house, but there is a limit on the amount of goods he can pack.

There are limits on, for example, real estate fees and lawyer fees that are involved. There’s probably about a five-page policy. In speaking with the commissioner and helping him work through this, he’s made it very clear that he wants to stick within whatever the policy allows for and nothing above that.

M. McEvoy: He did have a chat with Commissioner Harvey about this the other day. He’s very cognizant of the public purse and aware this needs to be as reasonable as is possible in the circumstances.

M. Starchuk (Chair): No, that’s good. I appreciate the detail in which it comes. We’ll be looking on Facebook Marketplace to see what Michael Harvey is actually selling before he comes to the province of British Columbia.

Anyway, that concludes our time here today.

Michael and your team, thank you very much for being extremely thorough. We look forward to seeing you again on Monday for what would be considered your final, final goodbye.

All right, we will take a short five-minute recess to reset the room.

The committee recessed from 9:20 a.m. to 9:29 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

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

I call the committee back to order and welcome our Merit Commissioner, David McCoy, for your presentation.

Just in case there’s…. We have one new face that’s here. We will do introductions of the panel. We’ll start with the Deputy Chair.

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

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

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

R. Parmar: Good morning. Ravi Parmar, Langford–​Juan de Fuca.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. Joining us online…. There we go.

B. Stewart: Morning. I’m Ben Stewart from Kelowna West.

[9:30 a.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): I’m Mike Starchuk, MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale and Chair of the committee.

David, you have 15 minutes for your presentation followed by 25 minutes for committee questions.

The floor is now yours.

OFFICE OF THE MERIT COMMISSIONER

D. McCoy: Good morning, everyone. Chair, Deputy Chair, Members, I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

Having just begun my second year of my part-time appointment in March, I’m grateful to be able to present an operational update and briefly speak to you about the work of the Office of the Merit Commissioner.

I’ll acknowledge, with respect, that we are meeting on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking people, known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

Our office respectfully acknowledges that our work extends across the homeland of the Indigenous people within what we now call British Columbia.

I’m accompanied today by my deputy commissioner, Elizabeth Maurer, and our deputy of corporate shared services, Dave Van Swieten.

I’d also like to acknowledge the guests in the gallery today. Behind me are some of the staff from my office. They’re here today at my invitation. I felt it necessary, as we develop as a team and as they continue to grow in their professional roles, that they gain an understanding of the bigger picture of the work that we do and to which they all contribute.

Today I’m going to present a brief overview, with an update on the progress on priority areas and key initiatives, some recent performance metrics, any anticipated changes to the service plan or budget, and the overall workplace culture of the office.

The vision for this office is of a provincial public service founded in merit-based hiring and fair process and just cause dismissals. On a day-to-day basis in this work, we see the diversity of public service workers and what we rely on them to do, from wildfire experts to probation officers, bridge engineers, social workers, liquor store managers and policy analysts. Without qualified public servants who are hired fairly and in a merit-based way, government wouldn’t be able to do its work and the public would lose confidence in the services that they rely on.

To attract good candidates, people who will be engaged, qualified and passionate about public service, government needs potential job applicants to trust that government takes the importance of the merit principle in the hiring process seriously. The merit principle has been enshrined in legislation in British Columbia since 1908. It remains critical today that the people hired into public service jobs are qualified to do the work and that applicants are assessed fairly and objectively through reasonable and transparent processes, just as the public also expects that government would follow due process in the event that an employee needs to be dismissed for just cause.

We will achieve our vision by monitoring the application of the merit principle in hiring appointments and reviewing the application of best practices, policies and standards in just cause dismissals.

Let me now update you on the progress in priority areas and key initiatives.

I began my role mere weeks before my first spring presentation to you in 2023. We’ve been very busy at the Office of the Merit Commissioner. We’ve had a refresh of some staff in the office, and the recruitment of new staff to replace those who retired is now complete. I am pleased to report that throughout this change, we have grown and developed as a cohesive team, delivering on our mandate and providing an exceptional continuity of service through­out.

In addition to new people, we’ve implemented the new software management tool Resolve with both our auditors who work remotely and our in-house staff. Now, despite any techno bumps that we may have encountered, the system is working as designed, and the team is becoming ever more familiar with this tool.

In last year’s presentation to this committee, I looked forward to cooperating with the Special Committee to Review Provisions of the Public Service Act to review those provisions added in 2018. I’m pleased to report that process is complete. In addition to presenting to that committee, I provided a written response to presentations and recommendations made by the Public Service Agency, the Ministry of Attorney General and the Excluded Employees Association, some of which look to alter how those reviews occur.

I’m gratified to share that the committee’s report reaffirmed the value of independent oversight in the area of dismissal processes and also that the provisions in the Public Service Act should largely remain the same, per my recommendation. The special committee also made three recommendations to the Legislative Assembly for amendments to the Public Service Act that will support me in providing the fulsome independent oversight that is needed to assure this Legislature and the public that just cause dismissals of public service employees are held to a high standard of administrative fairness.

[9:35 a.m.]

I’ve communicated with the Minister of Finance and the Public Service Agency deputy minister in support of these amendments, offering assistance and expressing the hope for these amendments to be made as soon as practicable.

As you may recall from last year, I’ve embarked on my merit awareness and merit myth-busting campaign.

I knew you’d like that.

The purpose of these activities was to help me better understand what people know about the merit principle, the role of the office and the expectations of the office and to hear firsthand what perceptions exist about merit from organizational heads and staff alike. To date, I’ve spoken with 40 organizational heads and presented to over 100 employees about merit-based hiring. I found these activ­ities extremely helpful and informative as I look to further align our operations with our vision.

The biggest learning thus far is the misconception that in auditing, any audit resulting in a merit with exception rating is considered a positive result. This gives rise to the incorrect presumption that 96 percent of the hiring processes in the public service fully apply the principle of merit, when in fact only 64 percent have met this threshold. I’m taking action in our audit program to ensure better clarity and understanding of the legislated requirements for merit-based hiring practices.

The second biggest observation for me is discovering that some organizations are not always confident in knowing how to support inclusive hiring efforts, because they’re concerned about not being consistent and therefore not applying the principle of merit. For example, if a job applicant asks for extra time to complete a written assignment because they have a learning disability, is that a problem in terms of a fair process?

As Merit Commissioner, I reassure them that taking steps like granting reasonable accommodations in the hiring process is part of treating candidates equitably and run­ning a fair, merit-based process. I recognize the im­por­tance of having an inclusive and diverse public service to serve all people living in British Columbia, and my office is making it a priority to research and discuss inclusive hiring practices. This ensures that our expertise and guidance evolve with the best practices that are emerging in a more inclusive hiring landscape.

Lastly, it’s very clear to me that the sections of the Public Service Act and regulation that outline my independent oversight of fair hiring would benefit from a review to ensure it supports responsiveness in our changing societal environment. To that end, I hope to engage government in discussions about opportunities to enhance the act and oversight of fair hiring while improving accessibility to the staffing review process.

While our next annual report will be tabled in May of this year, there are some metrics I’m happy to share with you that have already been released. In 2022-23, my office conducted 268 audits of randomly selected ap­pointments from organizations who hire for roles under the Public Service Act. That year there were an estimated 10,970 appointments that were within the scope of our audits, which was a significant increase, about 39 percent, from the year before.

With that increase in hiring, it might be expected that the rate of merit may have fallen or the rate of errors might have increased due to increased pressures on hiring managers. However, the rate of errors, of almost all types, remained stable or even decreased slightly in this year’s audits, and the rate of merit findings continued to gently trend upwards, to 64 percent in last year’s audit cycle.

A stable merit level may be read as a commitment to merit-based hiring even in busy periods. The full results were reported in January 2024 to the Legislative Assembly in the 2022-23 merit performance audit report.

Now, there is one audit you might be interested to hear about, and it’s in my own office. I was able to engage with the public service commissioner of Canada to kindly audit my own competition file where I was the hiring manager, and an appointment I made was randomly selected to my own audit selection program. While there’s no legislated requirement for my office to be included in the audit program, I felt it only prudent to treat my office and our hiring practices with the same scrutiny and rigour to which we hold other public service organizations accountable. I’m happy, and somewhat relieved, to report that I received both a merit and qualified candidate rating on my competition file.

In July last year, we published the ’22-23 staffing review report. In that year, the staffing review line of business saw 18 reviews from eight organizations, and two reviews were ineligible. Of the 18 cases, I directed a reconsideration of the appointment decision in seven and upheld or dismissed 11 cases. This past fiscal year I received 25 requests for reviews. This is an increase. Sixteen were conducted because, unfortunately, eight were ineligible.

[9:40 a.m.]

Let me now briefly update you on the dismissal process reviews themselves. This year we reviewed 19 dismissal processes, not including files that were specific to the COVID-19 vaccination status. Our findings will be reported in this year’s annual report.

In answer to one of the specific questions you asked me to address in this meeting, I’ll begin by advising that I do not anticipate any changes to my service plan or budget request at this time.

In the fall presentation to this committee, I was asked, along with my fellow independent officers, to forecast anticipated staffing costs, which built in a projected $78,000. All of this represents a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes by the team beside and behind me and our contracted auditors. My deputy commissioner, Elizabeth Maurer, will now speak about that team and will respond to the committee’s questions about workplace culture.

E. Maurer: Thank you, Dave, and thank you to the committee for having us here today.

The Merit Commissioner’s work couldn’t be done without the people in this office and without a team approach. We’re a team of five full-time staff and three part-time staff in the office, plus four contracted auditors. We have some of them here with us today. We have another one listening online who couldn’t physically make it down, and then we have one in Italy who thought that would be more fun than coming down to spend time with us today. Go figure. But we’re really happy to have a tiny part of our small team with us today.

In the fall, this committee also approved a new position to bring some of our auditing in-house and to increase our capacity for research and special studies, and we are very grateful to be in the position of hiring for that position right now.

We are quite a diverse team for such a small team. We bring different strengths and experiences to the work, and we’re also a new team, as David mentioned.

Although I like to say that we got lucky with such an expert team of lovely and capable individuals, we have also been quite intentional over the past year to build a workplace culture that allows us to work together effectively and deliver on our mandate. For example, we’ve been very intentional in our approach to hybrid work. We balance the flexibility of telework with being physically in the office together on the same days. We invest time in relationships to get to know each other personally and professionally. That might be around the meeting table. It might be around the lunch table. It might be volunteering at a chili cook-off with a certain spirit of competitiveness.

In the work we do, we apply a great deal of rigour, as I’m sure any of the independent offices do. It requires debate. It requires hearing different perspectives. We’re also small in number, which means that we have to work together to get things done. And we’re working with a lot of change, not just a new team but the new system that David mentioned. So for us to work effectively, it’s important for us to trust each other and feel comfortable and respected.

Respectful conduct is something I’m very passionate about. It’s foundational to a psychologically safe and effective workplace. A core foundation of our respectful workplace is policy and training to set expectations. The policy framework that’s provided by the standards of conduct for public servants and human resources policies provides clear direction.

We’ve also had our staff take excellent training to help us give a shared language for talking about issues if they arise. So intentionality and relationships are part of it, along with policy and training, but the other key to our workplace culture over the last year is values. David shared our renewed vision and mission earlier when he spoke today.

As a new team, this spring we also sat down together to articulate our professional values, and there was some debate there. These are more than just words on a page for us. I would describe them as the foundation of our workplace culture. These values represent an ongoing conversation amongst the team about how we show up to work for each other and for public servants with fairness and impartiality, accountability and rigour, respect and integrity and collaboration and inclusivity.

With that, I will turn it back to David.

D. McCoy: Thank you.

Finally, I want to recognize the tremendous work by the staff of this office who, over the last year, have come together to learn, develop, innovate and deliver on our mandate to assure yourselves and all British Columbians that there is quality, accurate and reliable oversight over hiring and just-cause dismissals and organizations that operate under the Public Service Act.

That concludes my comments, and we are happy to take your questions.

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

[9:45 a.m.]

S. Chant: I’m going to do a shameless plug, which people will probably get me for. The provincial accessibility committee is releasing their first sets of standards for public consultation on May 31, and given the work that you do, I would be really grateful if your office would consider looking at that and giving us feedback, because it absolutely applies right across the board. It’s really looking at equity hiring, equity treatment throughout the life cycle of employment. If you have the opportunity to do that, I would be truly appreciative.

Thank you so much. That’s me.

H. Yao: Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. I really appreciate the presentation.

A typical question I usually ask to all of the commissioners during this round…. The first one is: you mentioned a lot of really great work around taking care of and looking after your staff. Do you have any kind of measurement or survey that’s been going out to your staff to see how satisfied they are with their work? I guess that’s my first question.

My second question right now is: obviously, your office is smaller than the typical commission that we’re talking about, but if somebody wanted to whistleblow against one of the staff members, what kind of procedure do they go through? But another quick question, which was brought up by the previous presentation is: if you have dissatisfaction with David — no offence, just scenario-wise — what are the reconciliation protocols, or how do they report a concern about this?

The third one I would love to talk about is, obviously, we want to see the greater establishment of merit across the board. To piggyback off my colleague Susie Chant’s comment earlier, how is the ethnic community aware of your service? If people feel like they apply for a position through government and are denied, are government agencies required to give out a pamphlet to everyone that says: “Hey, if you’re not happy with the hiring process, this is who you call to complain”?

I’d just love to see some answers about those questions.

D. McCoy: I’ll start with the last question, and then I’ll ask Elizabeth to jump in on the first two.

The ethnic community: how are they aware of our services and that they can inquire, should they wish to do so? As I’m sure you’re aware, our focus is restricted to internal public servants. The general public doesn’t have access to this office, based on how the legislation is written at the moment. They could go to the Ombudsperson. But my office is focused solely internally.

H. Yao: Okay, my apologies.

D. McCoy: No, no, that’s okay. Unless the mandate is changed, which it could be, at the moment, that’s how we’re focused.

Internally, I mean, part of the ethnic community…. Quite honestly, it’s the whole broader community of public servants. It’s part of my merit myth-busting and awareness campaign to know that they have the staffing review process available to them if they’re in a bargaining unit. Again, the legislation restricts it only to those staff. Excluded people do not have access to my office that way.

There is a process for them in the regulation to follow, and we’re there, and some of them don’t even know that we’re there. So it’s really important that they know. They’ve all heard of the Merit Commissioner, and they think of audits. They need to also understand reviews.

With that, I’ll give it to Elizabeth to answer your first couple questions.

E. Maurer: Thank you.

I might add, just on the really practical side in relation to that question, that when my team audits hiring competitions, one of the things they’re looking for is: were people who were unsuccessful in a competition appropriately notified in a timely way? Were they given feedback when they asked so that they, from a process standpoint, were able to have their right to request reviews? They weren’t cheated out of their right to review, because somebody didn’t tell them what they needed to tell them in a timely way. That is top of our mind for sure.

In response to your question about the survey, you noted that our team is very small. For that reason, we wouldn’t be able to take the work environment survey, for example, that government does. For any unit under 25 people, it’s too identifiable, potentially.

I would say, and I think it’s fair to say, that if any of them were unhappy, concerned or worried about something, they would tell me, and they have. That includes my contractors who will pick up the phone and say: “Hmm, can we talk about this?” That is part of the way that we get feedback: by having open relationships and making that time for feedback. But we don’t have a survey mechanism specifically for that. They could go to Dave and share that same feedback, or to our HR group that provides shared services for us.

[9:50 a.m.]

Your second question was around whistleblowers. So if somebody had a concern about mismanagement or some offside process…. Obviously, when you build a set of relationships with people, you hope that they will come forward to you as the management team. I would always encourage people to come, with any concern, if they think something is unethical or problematic. But realistically, sometimes people want to have another avenue to do that.

The standards of conduct were updated when PIDA, the Public Interest Disclosure Act, was brought into force to give people another door to go through if they want to do so. For example, they could go to the Ombudsperson and say, confidentially: “I would like to be protected from reprisal, and I have this concern.” We try to do things internally, obviously, if there is ever a concern like that, but it is important for us to give people that other avenue — for example, under the Public Interest Disclosure Act — if there’s serious wrongdoing that they become aware of.

Then your third question was: what if there was a situation where the person at the top was somebody that there was a concern about? I do think that’s a really important question.

In the Office of the Merit Commissioner…. If our team had that kind of an issue and they didn’t feel comfortable coming to one of us, they could go to the Ombudsperson. We’ve sort of set it up to have them have another opportunity, another avenue.

It’s important that people speak up if there’s an issue and to be able to give them multiple opportunities to do that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): David, I just love the myth-buster of…. The findings that you….

The numbers that you provided us…. People thought they were at 96 percent, I believe it was, and your findings were 64 percent. That’s a massive disparity.

Can you just expand on how somebody could think they’re that right, only to find out that they’re quite wrong or incorrect?

D. McCoy: I will. This is something…. This office takes full responsibility for that perception. That’s why I’m in the process of taking action to correct that.

Speaking at a really high level…. In our audit program, you can get one of three results, right? Merit applied. That’s the green light. Merit not applied. That’s the red light. Merit with exception. That’s the yellow light. If you think of it in those terms….

What people have been doing is saying: “Well, we’ll take the green light and the yellow light. In our cars, we could run a yellow light and not get a ticket. We shouldn’t, but we could.”

Anyway, we’ll put that together. When we add those two categories up, we get our 90 percent number. We focus on that small little 6 percent red light when, in fact, that yellow light…. You shouldn’t be running the yellow light at all. You can get a ticket for running a yellow light. So in fact, it’s more of a pink light. It’s not yellow, right? When you take those two numbers and put them together, the green, the good stuff…. The true green merit audits are 64. It’s the perception….

Then the next question is: what makes it go from pink to red? It’s the impact of the error in merit on the outcome. Was it negative, or was it unknown or mitigated? In other words, it could be the exact same issue. But merit with exception, if I can…. They got lucky. The person either dropped out of the process or failed the interview, a test or some piece of the process and dropped out. So it never got to the end of the competition, where it could have had a negative impact on the outcome.

It’s that perception which has…. I’m taking steps to clarify that there would maybe only be two lights on the stoplight and how to do that. That’ll be quite a shift, quite honestly, of 20 years of interpretation.

It’s a big job, but I think it’s important. Sixty-four percent is good, but we can do better, I humbly think.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. You’re going to ruin my drive back to the ferry.

[9:55 a.m.]

On that note, though, you also talked about the number of reviews. I believe it was 16 reviews that were done in this past year. Could you expand on those reviews? What would be a result of the rule? Is it just validating that the person was hired properly or not hired…?

I mean, that’s kind of my simplistic look on what the work of your office is and what you’re finding. I think you said there were 25, and out of those 25, there were 16 that were actually cases.

D. McCoy: Correct. Let’s talk about the 25, and the eight that weren’t. The reason the eight that weren’t is equally as important, I think, too.

The way the act and the regulations are written, the excluded staff, which represent about 2,500 appointments, don’t have access to that level of review, which is quite unfortunate. That’s some of the reason some of those eight were not accepted.

They have to go, through legislation, first to the organizational head for a review, and then they can come to me. If they miss that middle step…. I can’t do anything until they’ve gone to their deputy minister or head first. Or if they’re from the public, I can’t do anything about that.

There are certain reasons why I can’t accept. For some of them, I would love to, but I can’t, right?

Of those 16, the reasons really do vary in the process. We’re looking at the process — did the process result in a negative impact on the outcome, and what were the errors in the factors of merit and the principle of merit that were applied in the competition? — through a very deep and thorough investigation that my team does. Then through the act, I request a reconsideration by the organizational heads, in some cases.

Again in the act, they’re not required to let me know what they did or how it went, which is unfortunate. Some of them do, and I’m very appreciative when they do. Sometimes it results in a change to the outcome, and sometimes the outcome stays the same, even though they rerun the process.

Without getting into specific cases — we don’t want to identify people too much — that’s kind of the reason. Of those factors, is it how they shortlist or screened? Is it how they tested or interviewed? Is it how they reference-checked? Did they fail to apply the years of continuous service to the final calculation of the score? I don’t know, right? And was it fair? Was it equitable? Was the process in itself fair and just? Make sure that it’s consistent and in line with the principle of merit.

It’s quite a deep dive when we do these investigations. It’s 30 days, and we use the full 30 days to dig into it and kind of put ourselves right back as if we were in the process.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I was looking at the four recommendations. I think you might have answered it with Henry’s question there. To the four recommendations, they’re all fine. Are there any key performance indicators that ensure…? You know, what is the matrix to make sure that you’re…? I'm just looking at the four here. It was on hiring.

Anyway, the four recommendations that you had…. I had it up there for a second. I’m just wondering. What are the key performance indicators to ensure those four recommendations…?

Here they are. Establish, confirm and finalize manda­tory qualifications prior to posting. Make every effort to ensure a reasonable, diverse and equitable applicant pool. Then there’s also, on the scores….

How do you know that you’re reaching those objectives?

E. Maurer: That’s a great question.

We have an annual audit cycle. We randomly select a certain number of competitions from the public service every quarter. We do quite a detailed audit review, looking for certain kinds of things in the process, which David was talking about earlier.

This year when we looked at that, we noticed some issues. That’s what leads to the recommendations. We noticed that there were a lot of errors that we call lessened qualifications. For example, you post a certain set of qualifications, but for whatever reason, you decide to accept something. You lower the bar.

[10:00 a.m.]

That’s an error that we’ve been concerned about in the past. We can measure and judge that error, year over year, to see how many errors of that type were there. For example, this year we saw that it had improved slightly, but it continued to be a notable issue, and therefore, it became a recommendation again this year.

We have a system for typing the errors and keeping track of them. We have quite detailed tracking sort of behind the scenes so that we are able to see if the public service is improving in this area, in this type of error, or not.

This year one of the recommendations related to expressions of interest, which is a kind of competition where it’s either narrowed to a particular group or public servants only or a certain geographical area, and we noticed that that was an issue — that there didn’t appear to be the same kind of rigour, judging on the results of last year’s audit cycle. So that is something where we would pay attention to the data next year, in this year’s audit cycle that’s currently going on, and we would be able to compare and see if there’s progress or not.

Does that answer your question?

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Yeah. Just going through the audit, it’s very detailed and good stuff. I’m actually going to dive deeper into it because I didn’t realize how much detail you actually go through. It’s quite comprehensive.

I wanted to know how you formulate all that. You find the errors, yet now you need to do a deeper dive into actually finding out how you can mitigate that the best you can. So I see a whole bunch of stuff in here that does that.

Thanks. It’s good stuff.

D. McCoy: If I can just add to that, part of our process, too, is when we find…. It’s not just all about doom and gloom. When we find excellent examples of hiring files that really demonstrate the principle of merit, or going through a factor of merit really well, we highlight them in that report, anonymously, but then I personally send each of those hiring managers a letter thanking them and their deputy minister for doing such a good job. So I just want to point out that it’s not always the stick. Sometimes we have carrots too.

S. Chant: A couple of things. One, as you’re doing your audits, is there evidence of, and I know this sounds a little silly, standardized hiring practices? I mean, is there something that gives a guideline for standardized hiring practices within the public service in terms of, you know, you always need to do a personal interview, you always need to do this or that or the other, or is it quite varied across the boards? If so, that must be challenging to audit. That’s the first question.

The second one is…. I’m hearing that one of the challenges was you were seeing some of the yellows, which is “qualified, with exemptions.” Are we seeing that the qualifications in the job postings are changing, the qualification requirements in the job postings are changing to sort of speak to that piece? We are starting to say there is a lot of value in other things — for instance, not just the master’s degree, as an example, that kind of thing.

I’m wondering if you look at the trends within the qualifications as posted and are seeing whether they’re evolving to sort of look at the world that we’ve got now as opposed to the world that we had 20 years ago, or we thought we had, more to the point.

D. McCoy: I can speak a little bit to the evidence of standardized hiring practices. We don’t put that out from our office’s perspective. That comes out from each organization. So if you use the services of the Public Service Agency…. Not all organizations do, but if you do, they have, on their website, guiding documents and process for people to refer to.

Some organizations have their own human resources department. They may still look at that information, but they may have their own processes. So we don’t really comment on what an organization has in place, because that’s not…. What we can do through our website is to provide guidance documents, and through the outreach, of what the expectations are of this office when it comes to the principle of merit and hiring.

[10:05 a.m.]

My example in my speech about, you know, how can we be…? We want to be nimble, but there’s this ingrained thought that we have to follow A, B, C, D, E every time, steps. I’m out there, and saying that you don’t have to be that rigid. You have the ability to be more flexible in your approach, right? I’m not fussed if you…. It could be C, D, B, A, whatever, whatever you want to do. So long as we’re respecting the merit principle and the factors, that’s what we’re looking at. We’re not prescribing the exact process, right?

That’s a shift, quite honestly. That’s a shift for the thinking of the broader public service, right? Because like I said, 1908 is when merit went into the act, so it’s been a while.

I’ll let Elizabeth answer your next question on what we’re seeing more broadly in terms of shifting.

E. Maurer: Sure. Yeah, I’m happy to do that.

It’s an interesting question. Are we seeing the qualifications and the requirements for education experience changing in today’s reality, where maybe you don’t need a master’s degree to do a certain kind of job?

It’s not something that we systematically track as part of the audit, but of course, we’re always assessing carefully. Did the hiring manager assess the qualifications, and did people meet the qualifications? Obviously, we see it, and we do notice things.

One of the things that we’re doing right now is we’re tracking what we can observe about inclusive hiring practices. One of those inclusive hiring practices can be providing language around equivalent experience or equivalent education. So you know, a master’s degree or an equivalent combination of education and experience can be one way to open up the pool of qualified candidates to a more diverse applicant pool.

We actually did, for our last year’s audit cycle, track how many of the job postings and profiles included language about equivalencies. In the fall, we’re going to be looking at a special study of diversity and inclusion in hiring. Equivalencies, I think, is one of the things that we would like to track and just observe. What do we observe about that?

Of course, some of the qualifications pieces are really also up to classification, which is a different area of human resources that is not within our purview, but we certainly do pay attention.

H. Yao: I have a really dumb question. Again, I don’t understand the Merit Commissioner’s job as detailed as I would like, so I do apologize if my question does not make any sense.

I have an interesting scenario. For example, often when there’s a hiring practice in the public system, there’s an expectation that English proficiency is an expected skill set, so there’s a lot of testing on how well a person can read and write the material. Of course, in the city which I represent, Richmond, we have over 60 percent Chinese-Canadian population, with another 20 percent ethnically diverse population.

When you look at maybe, just for example, the hiring practices on somewhere similar to Richmond’s circumstances, would there be a push to ensure that the requirement or hiring expectation matches the circumstances, allowing diverse candidates to be able to draw into a pool, instead of somehow an over-standardized practice, which Michael was talking about that sort of creates …? I don’t want to use nepotism or cronyism. but it seems to create a certain kind of minimizing of the diversity when it comes to the needs that matches the actual circumstances of the population.

Does that make sense?

D. McCoy: Yes. That’s a little outside of the purview of our legislation and mandate. That would be better directed to the Public Service Agency deputy minister, in terms of how they can do that.

I can only surmise that what’s in those job qualifications are bona fide occupational requirements, whether it’s a language requirement or a physical requirement, whatever those requirements are, they can put those into their job profiles. They can post them, and they can recruit on them. Then we come in just to make sure that what was posted not only was followed but that it also respects the principle of merit.

That’s part what we do, but the piece I think you’re referring to would probably happen well before it got to our office.

H. Yao: My apologies. Thank you so much for that clarification.

M. Starchuk (Chair): That nails it right to the last second.

David, I just wanted to say that I what you’ve said in the hiring process is exactly what I’m seeing. I’ve said to Jenn here, I am seeing a different flavour of your office, and it’s a good flavour. It’s sweet and tart and salty and all those things all at the same time.

I think it’s brilliant that you’re bringing the staff here, too, so that they can see what this committee wants to hear and the questions that are there. I’ll try to practise my word on myth-busting. I’ll get that done right some day.

Thank you for your time this morning.

We’re going to take a 15-minute recess, and we’ll be back at 10:25.

The committee recessed from 10:10 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, we’ll call the committee back to order and welcome the Representative for Children and Youth, Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth.

Welcome this morning. You’ve got some time to make your presentation and for some questions.

We will start with the introductions, and we’ll start with the introduction of the Deputy Chair.

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

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

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

R. Parmar: Good morning. Ravi Parmar, Langford–​Juan de Fuca.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Mike Starchuk, Surrey-Cloverdale, Chair of the committee.

And online.

B. Stewart: Good to see you again, Dr. Charlesworth. It’s Ben Stewart, Kelowna West.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, we’ve got 20 minutes set aside for your presentation, followed by up to 35 minutes of committee questions. I see that we have some visuals that are in front of us.

Doctor, the floor is yours.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers
and Supplementary Funding Requests

OFFICE OF THE REPRESENTATIVE
FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH

J. Charlesworth: Thank you so much, and good morning.

I’m grateful to be joining you this morning in the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən people, the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.

I think the rains that we’ve had the last little while have made the land happy.

I’d also like to acknowledge that the work of my office extends throughout British Columbia, and we respect the land and waters and peoples of the First Nations across what we now call British Columbia as home.

I’m joined here today by my colleagues: Dianne Buljat, the long-standing chief financial officer for the office, and I’m grateful for Dianne’s support over my tenure; and deputy representative Pippa Rowcliffe. The other deputy representative, Samantha Cocker, is away today, but she’s here with us in spirit.

Today I’ll be updating you on three key areas of our work. First of all, I’m going to talk about the status of the two projects that you provided contingency funding for in the last budget cycle, as well as some additional strategic priority projects that we’re going to be focusing on, going forward. I’ll also address, as you have requested, how we’re keeping our workplace culture strong and our workers strong and well cared for. And I will, finally, update you on our key performance measurement work and the evolution of that work as well.

Before I start, though, I’d like to give you a little bit of an orientation around the numbers. This is a finance committee as well. We are anticipating an operating surplus of just around 3 percent. It translates to $368,000. This will come back, obviously.

The reason for that…. We were not anticipating that. In fact, we were anticipating a budget shortfall, hence we came to you for contingency funding for the work that we’re doing on our major investigation and systemic review. But there were a number of things that happened in the last quarter that resulted in us having a surplus, primarily around staffing and some of the adjustments we had to make around the investigation timing in order to better align with what the communities needed.

We didn’t draw on the contingency funding, but I just want to say thank you very much for providing that. It provided us with a safety net, so to speak, and security as we embarked on a very, very complex and significant project and as we started to work on our website.

Our submission today does ask for contingency funding for this ’24-25 year resulting from the 2022 Judicial Compensation Commission, JCC, process, which undoubtedly you’ve heard about from other independent officers. We were able to absorb the impact of that increase for 2023-24, but in ’24-25, we are not anticipating being able to fully absorb that. It’s approximately $100,000, so we are requesting contingency funding of $100,000 to cover this, although we’d only access it if it is needed and if we aren’t able to manage within our budget.

[10:35 a.m.]

As we’ve said before, we always try and absorb things within our budget allocation and respect that process, but this was something that was unforeseen.

The impact beyond the ’24-25 fiscal year will be addressed through our regular budgeting process when the committee reconvenes for budget presentations from the legislative officers some time after the election.

I’d also like to note that as we move forward with supporting the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner to take on their own responsibility for corporate services, this will lead to a rebalancing of five FTEs from RCY to OHRC, and a realignment of our revenue and expense budgets of $730,000, which covers salaries, benefits, IMIT and office expenses. We will report on this rebalancing in our regular budgeting cycle in the fall, but I want to reassure the committee that this remains cost-neutral, as stated previously.

Now I’d like to say a few things about our work since we saw you last.

First, just to frame, we have a statutory responsibility to provide individual advocacy, review the deaths and injuries of children and youth in this province and do ongoing monitoring of services and the systemic issues. That core work is very, very busy. We are dealing with thousands of situations and stories, and the demand continues to increase.

Beyond this, though, we undertake investigations and special projects in an effort to address the upstream issues that we see in our day-to-day work and that contribute to the volume of pain and trauma that we see day to day. We are trying to help the systems to be a better version of themselves and work more effectively.

I’m going to start by telling you of the sacred story investigation and our systemic review. You know that our office is conducting the largest and most in-depth investigation and associated systemic review that our office has ever undertaken in our 17-year history. It’s in the order of magnitude of the Hughes inquiry and the Gove inquiry. As we shared with you in November, this project centres on the death of a young boy in 2021, who was tortured at the hands of his caregivers and ultimately passed.

Our investigation is documenting not just what hap­pened — there are a lot of details there — but why it happened and how it happened. That is, what was done or not done in provision of care and attention to his well-being, what was done and not done in terms of supervision and support and oversight. It’s a huge piece of work for a variety of reasons, and I’m happy to explore that further with you.

Even prior to confirming that I was going to do an investigation, I reached out to the First Nations Leadership Council, as this child was a B.C. First Nations child and, out of respect, I sought their guidance. They were very clear, as were other Indigenous leaders in groups such as the Our Children Our Way Society, that the heartbreak of losing their children is horrific and that it resurfaces traumas that are intergenerational and historic, as well as contemporary.

They wanted me to learn not only from this one child’s experience and his family’s experience but dig more deeply into the systemic and structural contributors to children dying tragically in government care or when they are receiving services. Their urging actually made good sense to us from what we had already understood in our initial and comprehensive reviews. We identified nine systemic issues that we felt were significant, and they range from practice-related systemic issues to HR to organizational structure and governance.

We have to do this work in a good way. We are very mindful of DRIPA and our responsibility and also mindful that of the children we serve, the vast majority of them, children in care, remain Indigenous children.

To do this work in a good way, particularly because I am a white settler and we are a creature, as an organization, of colonial statute, we engaged cultural advisors to both guide us and hold us accountable. We made a commitment to sovereign sacred teachings shared by the advisors and to use Indigenous methodologies.

This is beautiful work. It’s sacred work. It’s also very complicated and complex, and I’ll get to that.

[10:40 a.m.]

My overriding intention is not to find blame or shame anyone or any organization but to lift up and to clearly and honestly lay out a story and analysis from that that enables all parties that are involved to learn and to improve. That is, obviously, Children and Family Development, but Health and Education and policing and victim services are all involved. Housing.

This work obviously is affecting all of us in different ways. We are both devastated and outraged by what we are learning. The failures of care and appropriate service in this case are the most troubling I have seen in my 46½ years in this field. And I’ve seen a lot.

To name just a few of the issues the sacred story investigation work is revealing: gaps in oversight; an excessive and pervasive lack of compliance with MCFD policy and practice; a troubling cycle of inadequate responses to family violence and intimate partner violence; the inability of agencies involved in a child’s life, from the police to the health care system to the school system, to communicate and collaborate; and, ultimately and most distressingly, racism, stigma, discrimination and a collective societal mentality that a child must be someone else’s problem, not our problem.

This work is extremely challenging, with many moving parts and contingencies, as captured in the handout. But in essence, we are braiding three strands together. We’ve never done this before, but it seems to be very congruent with Indigenous methodologies and with the guidance from our cultural advisers.

First and foremost, we’re undertaking a sacred story harvest or investigation, but we’re using different language. That is, in many ways, very similar to the investigation terms that are outlined in our statute, but we go a great deal further in terms of ensuring that we are bringing in Indigenous approaches and methodologies. I can’t say enough about our amazing team, led by two Indigenous investigators, in this work. They are truly remarkable in the way that the whole team has undertaken this work. That is proceeding through interviews, analyses, etc.

The second strand in the braid, if you will, is what we call our systemic review. That consists of…. We’ve commissioned a number of research reports, and we are weaving all of those together and situating the systemic findings in the context of this child’s story as well as other stories that we carry.

The third braid is what we call engagement or partnerships. We can’t do this alone. I’m just not that smart to be able to figure out how you transform a system that has been, in essence, in existence for decades. We have, therefore, engaged advisers from across the country who know well what this kind of work entails and how to bring about change, with a heavy emphasis on Indigenous perspec­tives.

We have reached out. We’ve done partnership engagements. Hundreds of people have engaged with us, and we’ve now got surveys out to do workforce analysis — families and service providers, foster caregivers, etc. — and a whole series of focus groups that are unfolding.

We’ve gathered a tremendous amount of information, and over the next month we’ll be going back to people to say: “This is what we’ve heard. Have we got it right, and therefore, what are some of the things that could make a significant difference?” Our staff are also contributing.

So that’s in essence. This is just to give you a sense of all the moving parts and contingencies. I know it’s somewhat difficult to read, but it does give you a sense of what we’re trying to pull together.

As I say, we’ve engaged people across all systems — health, education, social services, police, victim services — and we’ve been incredibly appreciative. People are leaning in and assisting us and very, very engaged. We anticipate that we will be releasing our findings and our recommendations in early July, and I expect government to act after the tragic death of this child, when it really came to light during the sentencing hearing of the caregivers who had murdered this child. The Premier made a commitment to follow through on the recommendations, and we certainly will hold the government to that.

Of course, this is very significant for us and is demanding a tremendous amount of our care and attention. In fact, I’m going away for ten days to write my little heart out after today.

We also wanted to share with you some other things that we’re excited about and that are moving forward.

One is we have got a partnership with the Wosk Centre for Dialogue, which is based at Simon Fraser University and, of course, has tremendous expertise in bringing people together, breaking down silos and seeing opportunities to work together in different ways. It’s very transformative. They’ve been involved in some very significant transformative efforts.

[10:45 a.m.]

We’ve identified three areas that we’re going to be working with them on. We’re currently working with them in two areas and will be unfolding another one in the fall. The two areas.

First of all is the toxic drug crisis and the impact on children and youth, which, as you know, is very significant, both direct and indirect impacts. There is tremendous controversy and, I would suggest, polarization on the views of what should be done, so we are bringing those parties together, and people are very keen. We’re beginning a process on June 18, and then it will continue to work through the fall with the intention of building together, with consensus across the parties, a significant child and youth framework for dealing with the toxic drug supply.

We actually made that recommendation in 2018. It’s still not been done, so we thought maybe we could help. It’s been a pleasure to work with them.

The next area is we’ve been working with the new B.C. Disability Collaborative, BCDC, and we’ll be hosting with them and Wosk on June 19 and 20. It’s a very significant gathering of all the disability groups that have been identified to, again, think of what are the kinds of contributing factors that will support children and youth with disabilities in this province and their families.

The third area with Wosk pertains to what we call missingness. We’ve brought a report on children who are missing, lost or fleeing from care. Again, bringing multiple parties because these are typically very complex situations and no one party has a response.

I just wanted to give you a sense also that in the fall we’ll be turning our attention to further work on children and youth with special needs or disabilities. We are working on a report pertaining to what we call systems failing girls, young girls who have very complex needs, and we’re not able to meet those needs very well in this province. And then also initiating a review on residential services in another investigation.

Before I turn to a discussion about workplace culture, I just want to give you an update on the website, for which you kindly provided some contingency funding. Fortunately, we have not had to draw upon that, but we engaged Roodenburg after a competitive process.

This work is moving along extremely well, and we’re anticipating being able to go live in September with a very, very different looking website that will enable people to access information. We embrace the notion of Creative Commons. Anything we work on is accessible. It will become a hub and a portal for information pertaining to our reports as well as knowledge mobilization.

Now I’m going to move to workplace culture. I’m mindful of time here. We have done a tremendous amount on workplace culture since I became the representative in the fall of 2018. One of the things we’ve brought before this committee is how important those enabling mechanisms are to ensure that we have good foundations of our practices, policies, procedures, etc. and that we are focusing on the well-being of our staff.

As you know, we’ve embraced a fully virtual work environment. We’ve been able to hire incredibly skilled staff across British Columbia, and it’s made a difference in terms of our hiring because people don’t have to locate themselves or relocate themselves to Prince George, the Lower Mainland or Victoria.

That brings with it some challenges. Obviously, we have to make sure that we stay connected, because this is relational work. So we do bring our staff together a minimum of two times a year for all-staff gatherings. Teams also have the discretion to bring their teams together, and projects also have the discretion to bring their folks together.

The other thing with respect to our workplace culture is to ensure that our staffing reflects the diversity of the young people we serve. We have restricted hires for Indigenous staff in certain positions, and we always have preference hires to try and reflect the diversity of abilities, ethnicities, gender orientations, ages and lived experience.

We also offer a range of training opportunities — from trauma-​informed practice to cultural safety, restorative approaches — as foundational to our work, and we also encourage cultural practices, so ranging from smudging, witnessing. We have collaborations with Elders and Matriarchs, and we have a beautiful relationship with Tsow-Tun Le Lum Society, and they provide a lot of cultural supports to us. Of course, we have cultural advisers and Knowledge Keepers.

[10:50 a.m.]

With all of this as a foundation, we’ve developed a wellness framework that’s guiding us as we adapt our HR policies to reflect a more decolonized approach, and we’ve also got enhanced counselling services, because we deal with some of the most difficult and painful stories that you can possibly imagine.

We would love to speak with you more about the kinds of things that we’ve done with respect to wellness and the well-being of our staff. We also do things like…. We have regular biweekly online gatherings. We have strong internal communication strategies. And we try, despite some of the heaviness of our work, to be very celebratory of each other and lift each other up through this work.

We also have a lot of babies, which also enhances our well-being for sure. We have a lot of RCY babies. We could start our own daycare in fact. That keeps us strong.

Finally, I’ll just talk about the key performance indicators. For many, many years, we’ve had what one would call output measures. How quickly do you see people? How many people do you see, and what periods of time are you involved with them? We’ve been repeatedly calling for public bodies to focus on outcomes. What’s making a difference? So we’re holding ourselves to the same standard.

The second handout you’ve got shows how we are trying to move, with the support of our Select Standing Committee on Children and Youth, into more of an outcomes-oriented approach, starting with short-term, medium- and longer-term outcomes. How do you measure that? But we have to figure this one out, because ultimately, we want to make sure that children thrive. We’re hoping that this will provide our committees, both you and our select standing committee, with a much better sense of where we’re making a difference and also, with us, to fine-tune the ways in which we do our work.

I’ll close there, and I’d like to express my gratitude to this committee for your time today and also to the young people and the families and caregivers who entrust us with their stories so that we can amplify their voices. I have to say that I work with amazing people.

With that, I’m happy to take your questions.

I didn’t expect the emotion, but our staff are doing amazing work right now. I’m very proud.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Jennifer, it’s with extreme grati­tude that I thank you and your team for doing this impor­tant and difficult work and protecting our vulnerable youth in British Columbia. I truly, truly thank you for that.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): That’s a good segue.

Probably of all the offices, this is, in my opinion, the toughest office to work in, I would imagine. I can tell…. I know people in the industry. My wife, for example, is a social worker who works with children and youth — very heart-wrenching stories, some really good successful stories. It’s a roller-coaster in your job. There’s no question about it. I know the people that work in your office are there for the love, right? It’s quite unique.

I have absolutely zero concerns with how the office is being run. I look at everything from this groundbreaking systemic review to the wellness framework that you’re imple­menting and not being afraid to say the key performance indicators are critical and not being afraid to say: “We need to work on it; we need to figure it out.” Not a lot of offices would do that. A lot of offices would say: “We got it figured out.” That’s really important to me.

I just want to commend you on the work that you’re doing. It’s tough stuff. I guess my only question would be: do you have enough people to do this? Because it’s big work.

J. Charlesworth: I love that question.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): I know, but I mean that sincerely. It’s easy to ask, but I think this is perhaps the most important office because of what it means for generations — a lot of reasons. It’s important stuff. So maybe answer the question on where you see the office going on needing additional support to do this work.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you very much for your kind words too. We’ll make sure that our staff read that in the Hansard.

[10:55 a.m.]

I do have a bit of a failing. I used to run a non-profit, so I am incredibly stingy with the public moneys, sometimes to my failing. I actually do believe that it would be very beneficial for us to have some additional resources. We’ll come to you in the fall with some of our ideas around that for your consideration, most significantly: where do we see things going? I think there are a couple of things that are really important.

Our office is going to change over time as nations resume jurisdiction. Theoretically, there will be fewer children that come to our attention through injuries and deaths and through advocacy. But one of the things that I think is: that’s going to take generations.

Many nations are saying: “No. We’re going to just take our time. We’re going to, for example, take on prevention services and early intervention, which is brilliant cultural connections, and not do the kinds of things that are covered under MCFD with statutory services.”

While some people think, “Oh, well, you’re going to be out of a job,” it won’t be any time soon. That’s for sure. Most importantly, we have to be in service of those nations as they resume jurisdiction and do whatever we can to support them.

One of the things that’s been quite remarkable about doing the systemic review is the depth of relationships we’ve built. We were fortunate before with our relationships with First Nations leadership, Our Children Our Way Society and many other Indigenous organizations. As we’ve held these stories together and thought about what is being called for, I think that’s deepened even more.

I think it is important that we figure out how we can be in service. That might require different kinds of expertise than we’ve got right now, in terms of providing training or support or setting up an Indigenous team that then could be useful to the nations on a provincial level.

That’s one thing that’s significant. The other thing that’s significant is: how do you make a difference?

With the systemic review, we’ve done a 50-year review of report after report after report. There are dozens of reports out there, including Indigenous-led reports, and we are still dealing with many of the same issues. It leads me to think…. How is it that we support a system not just by handing a report to them and saying, “Here are some of the things we need to see changed,” but walking alongside that system so that those changes can be implemented — short, “low-hanging fruit” that are in the service of those longer-term objectives?

This is a non-partisan issue. We all agree that the systems need to evolve. We are in a different time than when our child welfare system was constructed.

I’m sure your wife has some strong views on that as well, in the ways that we can improve.

One of the areas that’s critical for us is knowledge mobilization. How is it that we can ensure, as we do things, that we’re able to translate it to the people who can actually use it, whether they’re policy-makers or they’re front-line workers or they’re executive leaders of organizations?

Those are a few areas that I think we will continue to evolve.

We’ve also found, for example, that many of the recommendations where we ask people to collaborate…. They’re the ones that are the least likely to get implemented. Hence the reason we’re doing the dialogue process, and we’re doing some of the convening and hosting. We can bring people together without any kind of territoriality. We just want people to do good things for kids. So we can host that.

Those are three areas, I think. Thank you for the question.

S. Chant: I have a really straightforward question that I should know the answer to, but the goalposts have kind of changed a little bit over the last while. What is the age of youth?

J. Charlesworth: Ah yes, great question. I know, because the federal government defines it differently for their purposes.

We talk about children, youth and young adults. Think of two parts. When we do our reviews and investigations, it’s up to the age of 19, under reviewable services. That’s MCFD services, addictions and substance use services. Youth is up to 19 for that chunk of our work.

From an advocacy perspective, though, youth and young adults, as we refer to them, are up to the age of 27. We can walk alongside young people if they’re eligible for CLBC services, the SAGE program, which is unfolding, had previous time in care, etc., up to the age of 27.

S. Chant: To follow up on that, MCFD is extending some things up to 27 as well. Are you going to expand your reviewable age piece, or are you just going to…? I mean, not that you don’t have enough work to do. I get that. However, it’s just of interest.

[11:00 a.m.]

J. Charlesworth: It’s a good question. Because the committee did the review of our legislation, we asked…. Previously the committee had supported the increase of our mandate in age. So that was wonderful. The only thing we asked as an extension to our reviewable services was a year after a child aged out of care, because we actually see tremendous risk.

Exactly. It’s the cliff. If a child had been receiving services or in care in their final years, up to the age of 19, and then something catastrophic happened to them, we wanted to be able to review, because we actually think it’s important for the system to understand what happens after age of majority. So that’s what we’ve asked the committee. We haven’t asked the committee to extend beyond that.

That’s largely because: how would you know? They’re into an adult service system, and we don’t have oversight over an adult service system. But we do want to be able to advocate for them so that they can access the adult serving system. So that’s why we focused on advocacy.

S. Chant: Okay. Another question, if I may.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Sure.

S. Chant: In terms of the various nations taking on the role of managing their own kids, percentage-wise or whatever, how many are actively looking at doing that, and how many are saying, “You know what, we’re not there yet,” as a guesstimate?

J. Charlesworth: Yeah, it’s a very good question. The Ministry of Children and Youth would be best at that. There are different levels, because of Bill 38, for example.

There are, I think, over 100 nations that have entered into information-sharing agreements, but that’s just the exchange of information. I believe that there are five that have declared that they’re going to go to full jurisdiction. Then I believe — and, again, I can absolutely get you the information — there are about 12 altogether that are kind of moving towards a coordinating agreement, which is what was enabled under the provincial legislation.

There were a number, I think, that were kind of holding back for a little while. A couple of things. There was a Supreme Court case that was brought by the province of Quebec that challenged the federal legislation. That got resolved, which enables the moving forward with respect to jurisdiction. A number of people were waiting for that. And there’s a lot of negotiation around funding. That’s a federal issue as well as a provincial issue.

S. Chant: What about bandwidth or capacity to do the work?

J. Charlesworth: Well, that’s the thing, Suzie. It’s that this is a huge amount of work.

S. Chant: Yeah, okay.

J. Charlesworth: As you know, we’ve got 204 nations, and many of them are smaller. Most are served by Indigenous child and family service agencies, so many of them are starting to negotiate on behalf of the bands. But it’s very complicated.

S. Chant: It is, yeah.

J. Charlesworth: And as you say, building capacity and really understanding what the needs of the kids are…. If you’re in a remote area, how do you make sure that you can fulfill the responsibility? As you know, so many kids are not close to home. It’s not for us to make any kind of decision or direction on it. But I’m noticing that many nations are focusing on prevention and early intervention, which makes perfect sense.

R. Parmar: Thanks very much, Jennifer and team, for everything you do. I want to echo Tom’s comments about your update and all that you do, all that your entire team does. I also have a loved one who’s a social worker, so I hear it at home, as well, about how challenging the role is.

I was also out in my constituency a few weeks ago, in Sooke. I was at the Sooke family resource building and was chatting with some MCFD social workers there. One of the things they had shared with me was how communities are changing. I represent a constituency that historically has been predominantly Caucasian but has become very diverse.

Could you speak a little bit about the work that you folks are doing when it comes to supporting marginalized communities and new refugees and working with settlement workers, and so on and so forth?

[11:05 a.m.]

I think that’s probably the complexity a lot of our MCFD social workers are dealing with now, compared to ten or 20 years ago, especially, I would say, here on the Island, where we’ve seen a lot of diversity happening. Obviously, Tom may be able to speak to it, and Ben, from a rural perspective as well in the Interior and the North.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you so much. I just want to say that I had the incredible pleasure of coordinating the development of the Sooke family resource centre and the Westcoast Family Centres many years ago. Those are places that are near and dear to my heart because the community, especially the community of Sooke, was amazing to work with. It really taught me what community activism and community engagement look like, so I always hold that up as such a beautiful environment that was community-envisioned and community-created.

You’re raising a really good point about the complexity or the nature of our communities, I guess, and also the time that we’re in, in a social sense. From a diversity perspective, I’m going to be honest and say I think we’ve got a lot more work to do in the RCY to recognize…. We’ve put a lot of focus on Indigenous children and youth and families in building their relationships and trying to become a culturally safer organization, be more attuned to the kinds of issues that are happening. We have recognized that we need to continue to diversify our staff so that people see themselves in the interactions they’re having with us.

That’s one thing but then also being able to do the outreach more effectively within communities and with, as you say, settlement workers, immigrant and refugee societies and whatnot. It’s one of the priority areas for our outreach and engagement work, and we’ve brought on some new staff to do outreach and engagement and community coordination there. That’s one of the areas that we do need to do better work on and to get a better sense of the kinds of issues that are arising.

Having said that, the systemic review has been really interesting, because in our partnership engagement, we’ve been reaching out to very different groups than we’ve had those relationships in the past. It’s interesting to see what’s coming back.

The other thing is that we’ve surveyed front-line social workers as part of our systemic review. Some of the questions pertain to how well prepared you feel, what support you’re getting — the training, the supervision and that kind of thing — in order to work with very diverse communities.

That will help us understand what the workers are experiencing, and then we can kind of do our recommendations in our systemic review but also improve our own practice. I hope that answers your question.

R. Parmar: It sure does. Thanks very much. It’s not easy work, and every organization is certainly, I think, undertaking that. Government is doing that through its own anti-racism legislation as well. I thank you for that.

I think, obviously, in your case, it’s very challenging, because there are different social norms in different places. Being mindful and respectful of that is very important but can be very difficult in the type of settings of social workers and the stories that your office gets at your table. So I appreciate that, and again, I appreciate all the work that you folks do holding government accountable but also standing up for the most vulnerable citizens in our society.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you very much. If I may, one of the things we’ve learned is that we have to start internally as well.

We’ve done our cultural safety and anti-racism training. Then the reworking, the decolonizing of our own policies and practices is important, because the last thing I want is for someone who is from a community that’s traditionally marginalized, or they’ve had a history as an immigrant or a refugee where they’ve been harmed by authority, to have an interaction with us that’s less than positive. We have to do our own work in order to be able to prepare well to build those relationships.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I have two questions.

The first one is more surrounding the workplace safety and culture that’s there, because you’ve got offices that are located elsewhere. What’s in place to ensure that you and your team know what’s going on and if the environment that they’re working in is strong and safe?

[11:10 a.m.]

We do hear from time to time that when you’ve got the remote ends of things, things happen, and when you don’t see a person as often as regular, you might not notice that there’s been a change or something. What systems are in place?

J. Charlesworth: That’s such a good question. In a general sense, I don’t think that we, and other organizations, have figured out what the new norm is, post-COVID, with a virtual workplace. I would say that there are a couple of things. We only have two offices now.

I should say that our Prince George office just location-wise and all those kinds of things, the environment, was very unsafe. So we have acquired a different location in Prince George.

It’s being built out now. It’s going to be a lovely space that will be wonderful for our staff but also wonderful for the people that come to visit our staff. Our Prince George office has traditionally been the one that has the most off-the-street, so to speak, traffic. That’s important. There are very pragmatic things around safety. It’s making sure you’re in an environment that’s safe and well.

In Victoria, as you may recall, we gave up one floor to the Police Complaint Commissioner, and then we acquired a smaller footprint, about a third of that space, on the first floor. In fact, we used it recently. It’s a beautiful gathering space that is designed with culture and practice in mind. We have an Elders and Matriarchs room still getting furniture. It’s taking a little while.

Nonetheless, we have gathered there in ceremony. It’s a beautiful environment for our Indigenous staff, and for staff that are trying to become more attuned, to be able to do that work in a good and safe way. There are very practical things, like: what’s the physical environment?

You raise a really good point. When people are working alone at their home and they’re dealing with the kinds of things that are really difficult, how do you keep checking in? Our managers are very good about check-ins and check-outs and regular meetings with their staff, one-to-ones on a weekly or a biweekly basis.

Then that rolls up. The deputies, in particular, will hear who’s struggling a wee bit and where we might need to lean in and where we need to bring people close together. We also do use our virtual, online gatherings in, I think, a pretty cool way, of being able to check in with one another. We’ll do small groups.

We’ve had some pretty tragic situations, not only in the nature of the work, but even within our own team. Our beloved Carissa Matheson, who’s the executive coordinator, has terminal cancer, for example. So we have to hold each other really, really carefully and tenderly through those situations. We bring people together in order to do that and to support one another.

By virtue of the culture that’s created on the teams and those checks and balances, I think we’re pretty attuned to how staff are doing. It’s relational work. It is hard to do virtually. But we’re trying to figure out how best to do that, and always looking to learn.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Dianne, you’re here for a reason right now. When I take a look at previous budgets and the variances and, I guess, the givebacks of 4 percent and 4 percent and the projected 3 percent, the projected 3 percent also includes access to supplemental funding, and it doesn’t appear that there was a requirement for it. The supplemental funding request that’s here is for $100,000.

In traditional…. Just so we’re clear, I’m not a bean counter. I don’t balance a chequebook; I don’t own a cheque. It just seems a little odd to me, when I take a look at it. You’ve done very well in the past. You know, on this committee, your budgets are what we love. That’s that seven-letter word I said yesterday, that we love surplus. But the way it’s there right now, I needed to ask the question.

D. Buljat: Thank you for the question. It’s the fluidity of the projects. There are big plans to spend the money initially, but the projects need to go the way they need to go, to involve the communities, the staff involved, the other participants. We budget for them. Unfortunately, they don’t necessarily…. The money gets spent, but over a longer period of time rather than up front.

[11:15 a.m.]

We’ve had a couple of large projects that we were budgeting for this year, and they’re a little bit slower in the spend. We’ve also had some staffing difficulties and delayed hires. Multiple positions were posted repeatedly. Two positions under me were posted twice, and we weren’t successful in filling them. Those have been some of our challenges.

The public service is…. It’s difficult to recruit today. That’s creating some of the biggest…. That’s the biggest area where we’ve been underspent.

P. Rowcliffe: I’ll add something to that just in terms of the process that we go through, Mike, to bring a request like this to you.

At the start of the year, we will always budget based on our full allocation. That requires that we do a deep dive into projects so we know what the project work will be, and we also have a very clear sense of staffing needs and how we’re going to manage that. We also have a very, increasingly, tight way of understanding forecasting month on month so that we can keep track of it.

When we come forward with a supplemental ask, it’s based on that. We’re right at the beginning of the year, and as we project out, we’re looking like we’re going to use the full allocation. So it’s the security of knowing when a large additional amount in salary comes forward that we want to be able to, again, manage within that envelope that you give us.

Our hope is, as we go through it, when we look at regular forecasts, that we’ll manage very effectively to absorb as we can. But it’s the security of knowing that if the projects and the follow-up to the systemic review and the other things we’re working on at the moment…. If they have the rhythm we’re expecting, we’ll be fully expended.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I appreciate the answer. The last thing I think this committee would want to do is put a brick wall in front of a project that’s coming through and for you to say: “We’re having to come back again to get it.” If your projects that are there are predicted to need and acquire funds, then that’s great.

Going back to what you had said, Dianne, about the trouble of filling those spots, is the position so specific, or is it just the applications are not creating…? I’m curious.

D. Buljat: It’s broader than my position, so I’ll let Jennifer answer it.

J. Charlesworth: Dianne’s positions are the hardest to recruit for because of the specificity and also just that the people with those skills are few and far between.

I want to say a couple of things. We actually don’t have a hard time recruiting for a number of our positions. The advocates — we’ve had tremendous response there, and our analysts in reviews, investigations and researchers and whatnot.

We’ve got two things. There’s always recruitment lag. What has happened in the public service is that because the whole public service is struggling, people are using temporary assignments of under seven months. It was interesting, because you had the Merit Commissioner here just before.

What you can do is…. If I was ever in the ministry, I could say: “Dianne, do you want to come and work with me? I’ll give you a 10 percent lift. Can you come next week?” Then we’re in a situation where those TAs…. Under seven months, they don’t have to be competed for. They can be taps on their shoulder. You can negotiate around the budget. So Dianne would go over, not that she would, or our staff go over, because they’re trying to build their skills and experience and their breadth of capacity, and we would not stand in the way of that.

Then, if you’ve got literally…. We had a situation. We had ten days for a very pivotal position. We can’t recruit in ten days, so that creates these lags. It’s a problem within the public service, the ripple effects throughout of the staffing crisis in the public service. So it is a very tricky situation that we’re facing.

We are not entry-level. None of our jobs are entry-level. They require a significant amount of experience. We can’t just go to the most recent graduating class and say: “Have I got a deal for you. We’ve got a job for you.”

So that’s part of the challenge as well — just the lag and the ripple effects within the sector.

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

All right. Well, Jennifer, thank you, to yourself and your team, for meeting with us this morning. I said it at the beginning. It is my extreme gratitude for the work that you and your office do for the most vulnerable people in the province of British Columbia.

There are days that I can only imagine that you just roll your eyes, and your emotions come out at the end of what’s there. I know we have the right person that’s the commissioner for this portfolio. So thank you.

J. Charlesworth: Thank you very much.

M. Starchuk (Chair): We will take a short break while we reset the room.

The committee recessed from 11:20 a.m. to 11:40 a.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right. I’ll call the committee back to order, and I’ll welcome the Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender. Thank you for making it over here.

We’ll start with introductions of the members, starting with the Deputy Chair.

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

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

R. Parmar: Good morning, still good morning for 20 minutes. Ravi Parmar, Langford–Juan de Fuca.

Good to see you all.

M. Starchuk (Chair): And good morning as well. I’m Mike Starchuk, Surrey-Cloverdale, and the Chair of this committee.

We’ve set aside 20 minutes for your presentation, followed by 35 minutes for committee questions, should there be any.

The floor is yours.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

K. Govender: Wonderful. Thank you so much, and thank you for your patience this morning. It was a bit of a ride getting over here in time. I was supposed to get over with plenty of time, but thank you for waiting for us.

I always appreciate the opportunity to be here with you all and the spring appearance, in particular, so we can share the news of our office and just explain a little bit about what we’ve been up to.

Before I continue any further, I want to acknowledge, with gratitude, that we gather today on the unceded and traditional lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, including the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations.

As an office, we work to fulfil our responsibilities alongside this gratitude that we express with our territorial acknowledgment to make sure that these are more than just words and actually meaningful commitments on our part.

I’m joined today by new colleagues. On my right is Bernard Achampong, who is our deputy commissioner. On my left is chief financial officer Leoni Gingras. Thank you both for joining me.

Today I’m going to start with some highlights of the progress that we’ve been making on human rights issues, so some updates on some of the issues and projects that you’ve heard about in my previous appearances, the work that we’ve done on human rights issues facing people in British Columbia.

I’m going to speak about some of the projects we’re working on, how we’re evaluating, whether what we’re doing is working, and then I’m going to turn to some financial and operational updates with particular attention to your request to provide updates on how we’re building a strong and sustainable organization, which is one of our strategic priorities as an organization too. We have no budget asks in this appearance or changes on that front. And I look forward, of course, to answering your questions following that.

As you know, our mandate is to address the root causes of inequality, discrimination and injustice in B.C. by shifting laws, policies, practices and cultures. We do this work through education, through research, through inquiry, monitoring and advocacy.

Just as a refresher, there are a number of aspects of our mandate that make us unique among the other officers. For example, we have no direct service function, unlike most of the other officers, and do not receive or resolve human rights complaints or individual human rights cases. This is the role of the Human Rights Tribunal. Our focus is entirely on systemic change and oversight.

Another key difference is that our mandate covers the entire province, every sector and every person, as either a duty-bearer or a rights holder under the human rights code.

Since my appointment in September 2019, we’ve been building this office in a unique context, including the start of the pandemic, just a few months into my term. Human rights are at the forefront of the minds of many and are often on the front pages of our media outlets, be it in the context of public health, systemic racism in policing, rise of hate incidents in our communities, or in many other ways.

[11:45 a.m.]

Our five strategic priorities that we developed shortly before the onset of the pandemic have taken on even more meaning over the last 4½ years, including the rise of hate and white supremacy, poverty as both a cause and an effect of inequality and the rights of those held in detention, decolonization and Indigenous rights, and discrimination in the context of employment, housing and services available to the public, which are the core issues at the heart of the human rights code.

As usual in these presentations, I have far too much I would like to highlight, so I’m going to try to be selective in what I bring to your attention, keeping in mind that these are just a few of the projects that are underway in our office.

I want to start with inquiries. The human rights code allows the commissioner to undertake inquiries to help promote or protect human rights in B.C. An inquiry is an opportunity to delve deeply into human rights implications of a specific incident or issue. We can hear evidence directly from those impacted. We can hear factual and expert evidence and make recommendations to address the human rights issues that are raised. Findings can be reported publicly and to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly.

Our office right now is working on three separate inquiries. One is an inquiry into the Adult Guardianship Act, which I’m going to go into in one moment. Another is an inquiry into media exclusion zones, so a freedom of the press–focused inquiry. And the third one is an inquiry into the use of force in policing.

I’m only going to talk about one of those in any detail today. That’s the one concerning the Adult Guardianship Act, which is looking at this portion of the act that looks at involuntary detention, so people held against their will under that legislative regime. The inquiry aims to uncover how emergency powers under the Adult Guardianship Act are used — how emergency powers are granted — and to determine whether detention practices align with human rights law, both domestically and internationally.

The Adult Guardianship Act is a law that permits designated agencies — that’s generally health authorities — to provide emergency assistance to adults who appear to be abused or neglected and seem incapable of giving or refusing consent to receive care. The practice of emergency assistance potentially includes detaining people involuntarily in care facilities for indefinite periods of time.

While there is much that is unknown about how this practice operates in the province, we do know that it has led to the detention of a number of people over the years, including an Indigenous woman who was held against her will for over a year, from October 2016 to September 2017. In another situation, a family member of someone who was detained for four months has described how neither the detained person nor his family were informed of the reasons he was being held against his will, the legal authority for doing so or what rights he had, nor were they referred to any legal supports to actually enforce those rights.

While the intent of protecting vulnerable adults is laudable and important and, in fact, in line with human rights principles, transparency about how agencies are exercising these powers is vital for upholding the rule of law and ensuring accountability to human rights standards.

As I mentioned, there’s a lot we don’t know about how this act operates, whether the act allows designated agencies to detain adults in care facilities without their consent, whether that’s actually allowed under the law, whether such detentions are always proportionate to the circumstances. Are they justified in those circumstances? How many people are detained under the act, and for how long each year? What are the demographics? Who might this disproportionately impact?

Our goal is to better understand these issues and to shine a light on how the regime operates, ultimately ensuring that the human rights of vulnerable adults are being protected in this process. We’re seeking information from health authorities, the Public Guardian and Trustee, and the Attorney General, and we’re also holding a community round table to gather perspectives from community organizations who work with people who are directly impacted by this legal regime.

We’ve also, in the process of being public about this inquiry, had a number of people contact our office who’ve either been detained or their family members have been detained, so we’re doing some of those interviews, as well, to collect some stories about the lived experience of how this operates.

[11:50 a.m.]

While inquiries are a very important step to shine a light…. I use that term a lot in inquiries because I think it really is often a role of making the things that are hidden or in the shadows public. They are an important step, and making recommendations are an important step of that. We’re also very committed to ensuring that those reports and recommendations aren’t the final step, that we ensure that our reports don’t gather dust on a shelf.

To this end, our work on responding to the rise of hate in communities also continues. You may remember that we released our Hate to Hope report on the rise of hate during the pandemic last March, which was the culmination of our first public inquiry and also the culmination of the contributions of thousands of British Columbians. Since then, we have hosted a number of events with community leaders about hate in the province and have delved deeply into four particular communities where we commissioned the painting of murals that were co-created in collaboration with those community organizations.

In Keremeos, Fort St. John, Nanaimo and Vancouver, murals in public spaces such as community centres, sports centres and the like have been a bridge between this dense report that we produced, the Hate to Hope report, and the real-life experiences of communities.

As part of our evaluation of that project, we conducted what are called intercept interviews — interviews of people walking by the murals, essentially. We wanted to assess the public’s reaction to this public art. We heard how the murals are reaffirming the need to be positive and respectful in communities and how they are counteracting homophobia and transphobia in communities by generating new conversations about these issues.

While only 20 percent of participants had heard of the Hate to Hope inquiry prior to the interviews, after the interviewer engaged with the respondent, we saw some good results. At least half of the people interviewed indicated that they will work to nurture communities that are free of discrimination at work and at school and with friends and family.

Weaving these four murals together, we created a touring audiovisual exhibit which we premiered earlier this week in Vancouver as part of an ongoing partnership with libraries, art galleries and community spaces around the province. The partnership includes bringing this immersive exhibit to four communities in B.C. It also includes a year-long book club that we are about to launch that encourages both youth and adults to engage in reading and conversation about how hate is emerging in our communities and also the role of hope in countering that in our communities.

The next stops for the exhibit are Kelowna, Nanaimo and Fort St. John, and we have some additional requests already from a couple of places in Prince George to bring the travelling exhibit there as well.

I want to turn now to the work on our baseline project, which I’ve spoken about a few times in this context. This is a multi-year initiative that aims to evaluate or look at the current state of human rights in the province. There are multiple components to this research project.

Last September or I think maybe October we launched the baseline recommendations database. This resource is a living database that anyone can use to search human rights recommendations in B.C. Currently it includes more than 1,700 recommendations from over 70 reports published in the last five years on human rights issues in the province. The database will grow, and we will keep adding recommendations as we receive and process reports.

We’ve heard positive feedback from researchers, government policy–makers and community advocates about how this tool is being used to further law and policy reform in a variety of areas. As one community advocate said: “It’s vital to review prior research and consultations so that we can move the conversation forward instead of asking people to repeat themselves.”

Earlier this month we launched our four community briefs. This is another tool in the same project to look at what is the state of human rights in the province. These briefs profile Chetwynd, Terrace, Chilliwack and Cranbrook. The briefs provide snapshots of some of the human rights issues that folks in these communities are grappling with.

In June, we will publish our first key issues report, which is kind of the third element of this project. This is the first in a series that we intend on publishing every three years. What it sounds like…. It’s a report on ten key issues in the province that we’re hearing about through a wide variety of data sources, including those community consultations I spoke about.

The project represents more than two years of work by our research team members, and we’re really grateful for the partnership of many in community to make this happen.

[11:55 a.m.]

We heard from an Indigenous leader in one community who wrote about the community briefs: “It speaks truths for the people who felt they’d had no voice for a very long time. It’s creating discomfort, which is needed in order to create movement in a positive direction. Thank you for stepping into this community to help create movement.”

Teri Westerby of the Chilliwack Pride Society also recently shared this feedback with us. They said: “The baseline project brings attention to the pressing human rights issues facing the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, revealing the harsh realities of discrimination and systemic inequalities that we are facing. These briefs provide an opportunity for everyone to listen to the voices of their marginalized neighbours so they can understand our experiences and learn to stop perpetuating injustice. Equipped with this pivotal research, we now have the means to hold leadership accountable and demand action for inclusivity and equality.”

In turn, of course, we want to express our gratitude to community partners who have made this work possible.

Finally, on the project front, I wanted to turn to our systemic discrimination project. To help people across B.C. better understand and work to counter the effects of systemic discrimination, we have developed a toolkit of educational resources to connect with different audiences across the province. The toolkit includes an introductory video, an in-person workshop or webinar and an experiential session.

The introduction to systemic discrimination workshop is offered both virtually and in-person. It introduces systemic discrimination and helps learners become familiar with the impacts of systemic discrimination and learn to be able to identify it in their daily lives. They’re also introduced to different types of actions they can take in response. We’re working right now on part two of the workshop, which will focus more on actions.

The workshop has now…. We’ve already delivered it to hundreds of participants, and hundreds more are expected, as we have four workshops ahead scheduled at this point. That includes hundreds more people.

In addition to the video, conversation guides and workshops, the systemic discrimination project includes, as I mentioned, an experiential learning opportunity known as a simulation. The simulation was co-developed with educators from across the Lower Mainland with expertise in systemic discrimination. It allows participants to adopt fictional roles within a fictional universe. It’s really designed to help people understand how easy it is to perpetuate systemic discrimination. This make-believe environment will, hopefully, allow them to be able to apply that in our real environment.

We’re doing a train-the-trainer model for this, so we are hoping for a wider distribution of this work later in 2024. We’re still in the piloting phase, so I’m not able to provide you with very many statistics about how this project is rolled out. I definitely will in a future appearance. But I wanted to share one comment from a participant in the piloting who just said: “Oh, I get it now.” It’s those kinds of aha moments that we’re really seeking to achieve with this work.

Turning now to financial and operational updates, em­bedded in our guiding principles and in our first strategic plan are commitments to accessibility, sustainability and the fostering of a workplace culture dedicated to justice, equity and inclusion. To this end, we released our first accessibility report in December of 2023. Some key priorities in the plan include improved website accessibility, an audit of procurement practices and an audit of our public events and education materials to ensure broad access­ibility.

To support a positive and engaging workplace culture, we participate in the public service workplace environment survey and conduct an internal biannual survey which delves into aspects of our workplace culture specific to the office. We have two kinds of tools that we use to survey our staff about what work needs to be done there. The results of these two tools are fed into a workplace committee that is tasked with planning internal education and fostering workplace education and action on the issues that are identified in that process.

In the last public service workplace environment survey for which we have results, in every metric related to work at BCOHRC except for pay, we scored higher than the general public service scores.

In the last year, key areas of strength for us were teamwork; clarity and alignment on vision, mandate and goals; widespread agreement on workplace values; respect for colleagues; and a belief that people from all backgrounds are treated well in our workplace.

[12:00 p.m.]

To support this environment, the office engages in ethics and standards of conduct training for all new staff and for anybody who wants a refresher, supports continuous improvement in accessibility and occupational health and safety through workplace committee infrastructure and provides a forum for addressing issues within a human rights–based framework.

Three key areas for growth that have been identified through this process are workload, growing our practices of psychological safety and increasing communication from our senior executive team out through the rest of the staff team. We’ve taken a number of actions on all these items, including training on psychological safety; an external third-party audit of all of our policies from an equity, diversity and inclusion perspective; building our internal communications tools; and flexible, hybrid work arrangements.

We’ve been growing transparency across the organization through practices like weekly staff meetings and sharing of senior executive meeting minutes, the creation of an intranet and internal newsletter, commissioner open office hours, and a number of tools that the deputy has put into place, including an online feedback box, weekly communications and open door chats.

As both Jennifer Charlesworth and I have discussed with this committee, we have been in the process of transitioning our corporate services in-house. We remain very grateful to RCY for all of their support through a shared-services corporate model that saw us through our early years of development.

Now that we’ve reached this stage in our organizational evolution, we’ve hired for a number of key corporate service roles, such as this one, to provide direct services to our office. We anticipate this will be a cost-neutral transition which will enhance the efficiency of our operations. This transition will be complete over the next couple of months. At present, we’ve hired for three positions. They are already working with us, and the rest will come online in the following few weeks or up to the next couple of months.

I won’t talk anymore. I know I’m out of time here. I don’t explicitly address the future, other than to say that all the projects I spoke about today are ongoing and future-looking. I’ve given you a sense both of what has happened on those projects and hopefully given you a sense of what’s ahead as well.

Of course, our focus on building a healthy, sustainable and thriving workplace will also continue, supported by our belief that well-supported staff will produce the most principled and innovative human rights work and that enjoying working together is a key part of being a healthy, functional organization.

Thank you for the ongoing support of this committee. I know some of our staff are listening, so a big thank-you to all the staff who make all this work happen.

I look forward to answering any questions that you may have.

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

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Thanks, Kasari, Leoni and Bernard. Thanks for being here.

A couple questions. The first one…. It was good to see there is a community brief in Cranbrook. I’m just wondering about those four communities. I think you said Chetwynd, Chilliwack, Terrace and Cranbrook. Four corners of the province, I guess. Maybe that might have been the rationale for selecting those cities, but I’ll leave that to you to answer.

The second one is more on the Adult Guardianship Act. We just had children and youth most vulnerable, so we’re going to the other side of the spectrum here with some of our other most vulnerable, which are seniors, perhaps. I see this a lot in my riding, and I’m sure others have seen it as well.

I know you’re going into an inquiry about this, but what is the trigger, the mechanism, that places an adult into involuntary care? Which are the agencies that can make those decisions? Is it a medical recommendation? Is it a legal recommendation? Is it a criminal recommendation? I know the health authorities have, obviously, input on that, but how does that work?

K. Govender: Thank you for those questions.

On the four communities that we selected for the baseline briefs, that is part of it, the regional spread, for sure.

We also wanted diversity on a number of fronts: diversity in size of the community and the diversity of the community. Some of those communities have, for example, very high Indigenous populations compared to the province as a whole; it was good to know that going in. There were different patterns of immigration in each of those communities, different landscapes as well and, I don’t know if I said this, different sizes of the communities. We wanted to have some diversity, and from Chetwynd to Chilliwack is quite a different population size.

[12:05 p.m.]

Those were many of the reasons that we engaged in those particular ones. We will continue work in those communities. We developed a number of really important relationships as we did this work and had the opportunity to visit the communities a number of times. We’ll also continue to spread that out. It’s not that those will continue to be the sole focus of the baseline work.

On the Adult Guardianship Act, part of what we’re trying to figure out, to some degree, is exactly what triggers the emergency mechanisms. It’s section 59 of that act, but I think part of what your question is getting at is, as you say, who makes those decisions. Under the legislation, it’s the delegated agencies, all the health authorities and Community Living B.C., that are able to make the decisions.

Who within those authorities are making those decisions is something that we’re asking. Is it always a doctor who makes that decision? Is it always a social worker? We’re hearing some diversity so far in the data that we’re getting about what professionals are making those decisions within the health authorities.

Does that answer both of your questions?

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Yeah, I think so. When I go into the guardianship link that you provided, it says: “The AGA is legislation that permits designated agencies such as health authorities….” So I thought there was maybe something other than that.

K. Govender: Community Living B.C. is the only additional one to that.

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

H. Yao: Thank you, Kasari. Sorry for missing the first few minutes of your presentation.

First things first. I’ve got to say I’m just checking out the Human Rights Commissioner’s website, especially with the language translation — incredible. I think out of all our commissioners — I’ve been telling people to make sure they provide translations — yours has definitely upped the bar. You set a higher standard, and I’m just so impressed with it.

I do have a few things I would like to add. Maybe you can complement the current excellence you guys demonstrate here. Unfortunately for a person with a different language, when they first open your website, they have to click “Select language.” Unless they read English, they don’t know that what’s called “Select language” is meant to change the language translation.

What I would recommend is to maybe have a landing page starting with the term “human recognition” or “translating different languages.” So, for instance, they click it, and they go straight to the language of preference. All the great work will be stopped if people don’t know how to access it in the first place.

The second comment I will say is that you have a phenomenal translation. I assume it’s powered by Google?

K. Govender: The translation?

H. Yao: Yeah.

K. Govender: Not our publications. We get our publications properly translated, but some of the website has some Google Translate.

H. Yao: The only things I don’t see translated are the graphics. You have this one, on the breakdown of human rights in B.C. The graphic is in English, even though it’s embedded in a traditional Chinese translation. If you guys could make sure that the graphic can also be updated, I think that would be helpful.

Otherwise, it’s incredible. I just want to say kudos. I’m hoping that you can reach out to other commissioners and let them know this is the stand-out. I would love to see that happen. Thank you so much for your great work.

K. Govender: Thank you so much for that feedback. That’s really useful.

M. Starchuk (Chair): That public service announcement brought to you by Henry Yao. [Laughter.]

S. Chant: Next public service announcement. Just to be aware, I’m shamelessly plugging. The provincial access­ibility committee is just bringing out its first set of standards. They will go out for public consultation on the 31st of May, and I’m really hoping that in your department, with all the myriad things you’re already doing, somebody in there would take the opportunity to see what you think and give us feedback.

There has been a lot of work done with folks with lived experience, etc., but we are hoping for many sets of eyes to take a look and help us make it the best it can be. I would really appreciate that. The other thing around the adult guardianship…. Now, I will tell you I’m coming from a lens of weird places, having been the adult guardianship coordinator for my program for many years as it was evolving.

Over about a 15-year span, from “Oh, we should be doing something about adult guardianship….” In my environment, anyway, for anybody that we were looking to place in care, the first step was determining whether they were “able to make that decision themselves” or what we had to do to work through that decision. It’s a critical decision, and quite frankly, we don’t have care beds for everybody. So we need to also be mindful that way.

[12:10 p.m.]

At one point, we had a number of people who went in and investigated in-care facilities and were talking to various people: “How are you doing? Do you think you should be in care?” and they’d come back and say no. At that point, they’re doing very well. However, what would happen is that then, perhaps, they’d come out of care. Within about three months, they’re back to not being able to manage themselves. That set up a real challenge, down the way, of managing people in the correct environment. Just a cautionary tale.

Once folks get into a care environment, with luck and good management, they’re well hydrated, they’re medicated properly, they’re getting exercise, socialization, etc., and they’re no longer in the environment that brought them to care.

Sometimes that lens gets lost. So I’m just hoping that it stays in place or is one of the lenses that’s available for the assessment.

K. Govender: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate the many elements of the adult guardianship regime — it’s legally complex but also just ethically complex — and the incredible value of having legislation that is designed to ensure that our society takes care of vulnerable adults.

I do want to emphasize that we recognize the human rights value in that but want to ensure that we have a legal regime that protects the human rights of folks in that context, who should be able to also say: “I shouldn’t be in care, and here’s why, or my family member should be able to say here’s why.” You know, have that argument.

Right now it may be the only regime in B.C. that detains people without any of those procedural protections. That’s quite alarming, I think, from a human rights perspective. I just want to ensure that those protections are in place for people, not kind of throwing out the entire regime — to ensure that vulnerable adults also have the care and attention that they need as well.

S. Chant: Thank you. I appreciate that.

R. Parmar: Kasari, good to see you. Thanks so much to you and your team for being here, and for your update as well.

Just at the outset…. I know I’ve shared in the past, but I also wanted to share in this committee my thanks to you for your provincial leadership on standing up for our most vulnerable communities, in particular at the anti-SOGI marches that have been happening across the province — of course, much of it focused in the Lower Mainland — and the work that you’ve been doing to really send the message that trans rights are not up for debate. I appreciate that on a personal perspective, and I know many of my colleagues share that.

On that, maybe just building off Tom’s question around these community conversations, I know that it can always be very challenging to talk to people, especially in these rural communities or in any community, about these really tough subjects. I’ll share with you an example.

I was in Kelowna last week, in my role with international credentials, and specifically speaking to inter­na­tional students, who have been exploited and are very vulnerable. In particular, in Kelowna there have been, as you may be aware, a number of incidents where international students have been racially attacked, and so on and so forth.

In those community conversations that have occurred or in future conversations, will there be a way in which…? I’m not saying that it’s not important to be able to engage with local law enforcement and local service agencies, but how do you and your team really get on the ground and routed to the community leaders that may not be elected or appointed or a part of an organization and chat with those folks who really are the ones on the front line dealing with many of these systemic issues?

That would be my first question, Chair.

K. Govender: Sure. Yeah, I really appreciate what you’re saying. I think it’s important, when we connect with communities, that we connect with many different actors within that context and hear what’s happening on the ground.

Some of the ways we’ve done that…. The two examples that come to mind are the baseline briefs, the ones that we talked about with Chetwynd, Terrace, Chilliwack and Cranbrook. We worked with a number of community organizations in that context. That’s who we were able to sit down with — food banks, for example, direct service providers, as well as organizations that did more systemic work in some of those contexts, and of course, First Nations in all of those communities as well.

We’re talking to both formal, kind of more government leaders — First Nations leaders and municipal leaders — and also to community-led organizations and people doing direct service work, so that we were ensuring that we were hearing what was happening on the ground.

[12:15 p.m.]

Another way that we’ve been doing that is through the work through the barring-the-hate inquiry. I personally have had more of a chance to travel in that context.

We had a number of what we were calling echo events. We did the launch of the inquiry report last March in the Lower Mainland, then wanted to ensure that we weren’t just doing media around the province but were actually going to other places in the province and having those conversations. This was before we did the murals.

We had events in a few different communities, in Fort St. John, Penticton and Nanaimo. We had events and brought together a wide variety of folks in communities, again people with more formal leadership roles and people working in community as direct service providers and leaders in that space. That was really….

We had different ways of generating conversations. For example, in one community in Nanaimo, we did what’s called a living library. I’m not sure if any of you have had a chance to do that kind of engagement. A community organization working with us there, who was a wonderful partner and support, was able to bring together folks with a variety of lived experience in human rights. Then people were able to go table to table and hear about their experiences. It’s instead of reading a book, essentially a living library. It’s your story to tell. People shared their stories of immigration or discrimination or a variety of other experiences. That was a really key way.

I had the privilege, then, of hearing directly from folks as well. I was able to be in those communities and speak to people and, interestingly, really hear the gratitude from northern communities — that one was Fort St. John — about how important it was to have the commissioner come up themselves, because of feeling like they so often get left behind from the rest of B.C. in these conversations. That certainly reinforced, I think, for myself and our team, how important it is to make sure we get out and about in this work.

Those are a couple of examples of how we’re doing that. Certainly, it’s not isolated.

R. Parmar: Great. Thanks very much for that.

The second question I would pose is kind of going back to where you started in your report around data. What I would say is…. It’s very challenging, I’m sure, as a brand-new commissioner, starting up an office here in a province where we have not been collecting data. Obviously, we’re in a better place now because we have the anti-racism data.

Some of the reports that you have brought forward…. In particular, the one that stands out to me is the report on the work that you’ve done on the police school liaison officers. Much of that data has been from down south and other parts.

Do you feel that…? When those reports have come out and there has been criticism of those reports because they’re not based off of data, in many cases, in Canada but in other countries, it really…. I don’t know what the word is I’m looking for. It really impacts the quality of your recommendations and your suggestions when the data is not — I hope you get what I mean — localized or even from Canada.

K. Govender: Actually, I’m grateful to have the chance to set the record straight on some of those. The media hasn’t, in my view, always accurately represented my position on school liaison officers.

My recommendation on school liaison officers to government and, then, to school boards is to do that research and ensure…. I think that is an area that we don’t have the data here in B.C.

What we do have, though, is…. We do have information, as you say, from the U.S. and from other jurisdictions talking about some of the dangers and risks to racialized students and to students with disabilities of school liaison officer programs.

What we do have, which we did the research for…. It was very extensive research, the largest piece of research done on policing in Canada that we know of, in terms of systemic discrimination. It was a report that we wrote called Equity is Safer. We released that in the fall of 2021. In that report, we looked at a few different policing practices and what impact that had on different communities, to make that a little more grounded. We looked, for example, at arrests and detentions.

We looked at five police jurisdictions here in B.C. — some municipal, some RCMP — and found a very highly disproportionate impact on Indigenous people, on Black people and, to a lesser extent, on West Asian or Arab people in terms of arrests and detentions. For example, an Indigenous man is 17 times more likely to be arrested in Vancouver than a white man.

We can look at that data and say…. With that kind of experience for students in their communities and looking at the data we have from the south specific to school liai­son officer programs, we can say: “Look, there’s a reason to have a big question mark about how these programs are operating, whether they have a disproportionate risk.”

[12:20 p.m.]

Let’s do that research to make sure that we can know whether school boards should actually do…. School boards will now then be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions about whether to continue their programs or not. It is quite a specific call for data.

I’m a very big believer that human rights are best ad­dressed through evidence-based policy-making. That’s how we ensure that we are actually having the effect that we need to. That’s the call to action there.

I will say that our first big report, the grandmother perspective report, was what led, ultimately, to the Anti-Racism Data Act and greatly informed that piece of legislation. I also put a great deal of stock in ensuring that we, as all public institutions and core government, are collec­ting that kind of information to inform all policy decisions. I look forward, as we move forward with this process and the Anti-Racism Act that was introduced this session, to further this work.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I have a couple of back-to-back questions.

What we’ve heard today and what I’ve learned today is that in some of the independent offices that are there, the commissioners…. When somebody inside of their organization doesn’t feel that they’re being heard or whatever the case may be, they’ve got arrangements with other commissioners to have that person from their organization go over there and express whatever their matters might be. So a question is: is that in your organization?

The other part was that you talked about the survey results and the numbers. I would have expected them to be higher than every other agency in the province to begin with. That would have been one of those I would have taken to the bank. I’m just curious, if you’ve done it over years, has the has the score maintained, or is it actually increased?

K. Govender: Sure. On your first question, we have a couple of different mechanisms to ensure that people can bring complaints forward or concerns forward. One of them is an anonymous feedback form to ensure that if someone doesn’t feel safe particularly addressing something with leadership with naming a particular leader, they have a way to bring that for that feedback forward. So we have an anonymous mechanism.

Bernard is our ethics adviser, so I’ll turn it to you if you have anything else to say in just a moment.

Of course, we have the arrangement, in terms of PIDA, in terms of the Ombudsperson’s role, that also applies to our office. So if somebody feels that there is something to bring under that legislation, they can do so through the Ombudsperson’s office.

Is there anything else you wanted to speak to there, Bernard?

B. Achampong: The only thing I’ll add is that we are really careful to also have an open door policy, confidentially, for folks to really have the confidence that they can come and have a conversation with myself and that it will be kept in a cone of silence. If needed, we will then work with the Ombudsperson or whoever or other officers that we need to talk to. I have a really good working relationships starting with each of the deputies in each of the offices as well.

K. Govender: Thanks, Bernard.

Then on the work environment survey, this year what we have is an alternating system. One year we do the public service, WES, the workplace environment survey. Then the other year, on each off year, we do our own survey that we developed with more human rights principles that are specific to our organization.

This year was a public service survey, and we’re just awaiting results, actually. We should have them any day now. I was hoping to have them to be able to speak to you in this meeting. The ones I gave you were from a couple of years ago. What we did see, though, is because we have this alternating year, it’s not exactly apples-to-apples comparison, because it’s not the same survey, so we can’t do a full statistical analysis.

I can say we saw some improvement on some of the areas where we were able to see some parallels between the two surveys. We saw some improvement in survey results between those two.

H. Yao: Yeah, thank you so much for talking to us. While listening to you answer some of the questions, one comment that came to my mind is: what is your office doing regarding to combat misinformation, disinformation, especially information that, I almost want to say, discriminates or unnecessarily stereotypes or demonizes vulnerable populations? That’s one question I would love to talk about.

The second comment I have is that, as you know, a lot of people from a Chinese-Canadian background use the social media platform WeChat. It sort of isolates a lot of community members from the typical mainstream social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. So, because of the way it’s set up, it creates a bit of an echo chamber sometimes. Unfortunately, the message there can be a bit difficult.

[12:25 p.m.]

Do you have any kind of outreach strategy you’re also exercising to help people appreciate human rights and to help people appreciate what your office does and some of the policies you stand by, through email or the WeChat platform?

K. Govender: Maybe I’ll just address that one first.

We do have a couple of strategies that I can speak to now, one of which is to reach multilingual…. You’ve already spoken, of course, to the translations of actual materials. In addition to that, we have done a lot more social media advertising this year to promote our materials actively, so not just an organic promotion but paid adver­tising to promote our materials and promote public awareness on some of these issues. We’ve done….

Some of those ads have been translated directly so that we have multilingual social posts going out as well, and some on our own social, so not just our paid advertising. For example, when we’re promoting, we launch translations of all of our workshops. Rather, we did 12 languages of our human rights code workshop, and we launched videos of all of those on our website. In promoting those, all of our social posts, of course, are in the language of the materials that we’re promoting.

We also have actively engaged multilingual news outlets. For example, I’ve done a number of…. I often speak…. I don’t speak multiple languages, unfortunately. I wish I did. But I still often get requests to speak on South Asian radio stations, for example, and on Chinese-language TV stations and radio stations as well. We frequently get those requests and do that kind of direct promotion to those outlets as well.

I will say particularly…. I think we’ve gotten a lot of requests, particularly around the hate work and the policing work that we’ve done. That’s my impression. I don’t have the stats at my fingertips. But my feeling is that I’ve done most interviews with multilingual sources on those two issues.

H. Yao: Do you mind if I piggyback? That’s exactly the reason I’m asking this question. Obviously, we thank you for your great outreach and your great translation, and you’ve done a lot of paid advertisements.

As soon as you mentioned paid advertisements, it tells me you haven’t reached into WeChat. WeChat doesn’t allow paid advertisements, I don’t think. It’s a social media platform that separates itself from Facebook, Twitter, Insta­gram. Unfortunately, often a lot of people who struggle with the English language don’t even touch the mainstream social media platforms. They stick with the small WeChat. It sort of creates isolation or disconnect, and of course, a lot of community members are dealing with racism, Islamophobia. They’re dealing with a lot of challenges.

I would love for your presence to be there to really help people, one, know where to reach out if they’re facing a racist situation, and two, to help people create more of a balance, because there’s a certain amount of potential, generalized…. I don’t use the term hate, but discriminative comments have often come out in those circles. So that’s one of the comments.

When you’re talking about Chinese-language social media, I’m used to Chinese-language media. Often it’s Cantonese versus Mandarin. I’m not sure how much you’d be interested in Mandarin, but the majority…. The dominant one is Cantonese, and individuals who speak Cantonese tend to be on Facebook.

My question right now is really: how are you reaching out to a Mandarin-speaking population? Unfortunately, I have seen…. Especially with a lot of past incidents, it shows me that you guys need to do greater outreach and greater education and greater opportunities to connect.

K. Govender: Thank you for the feedback, and I appreciate that insight in terms of the role of WeChat as well. At this point, we haven’t moved to that platform. We’ve mostly focused our attention on Twitter, now X, and Insta­gram and LinkedIn to some degree as well. But I really appreciate that feedback. Thank you.

S. Chant: A while ago it seems to me that you were doing some exploration into the rights of the unhoused, and I’m just wondering where that’s at, please.

K. Govender: Yes, absolutely. Sorry, I just realized I didn’t answer the question about misinformation and disinformation as well, so I’ll answer both of those.

On the misinformation and disinformation side, we’ve done one key piece of work and have another one planned. We haven’t made any public announcement about the one planned, but I think you’ll be very pleased to see it, and I will say, essentially, doing some big public awareness work within our education team around misinformation and disinformation. The reason that has been identified is that the piece of work that we have done is within the hate inquiry.

I know it’s a giant report, but there is a section particularly on online hate, which speaks a lot to misinformation and disinformation. As well, there’s a section on the drivers of hate. There’s a section there.

[12:30 p.m.]

I learned probably the most…. Well, there are a couple areas that I probably personally learned the most going through that process about the role of what creates this kind of environment where hate is considered acceptable and normalized. One of those is around the role of disinformation and misinformation and what a huge driver that is of hate and why that was particularly problematic during the pandemic, because we spent so much more time online.

We see the growth of misinformation and disinformation over that time being a key contributing factor to why we saw hate spike in the way we did. I see it as a really important element of human rights, particularly in this moment of time, in this moment in our history. That’s why we’re engaging on some big public awareness work that I’m not sure…. I don’t think we’ll have it launched by the fall, but we’ll certainly be underway in terms of our planning of that.

The last thing I’ll say on this is that one of our 12 recommendations in the Hate to Hope report is specific to the Ministry of Education and K-to-12 education. It is the introduction of misinformation and disinformation to the digital literacy curriculum that the ministry has, because right now it doesn’t speak to those issues. I think that’s really key to a well-functioning society, to be honest. I can even be that broad and grand about it, because I think it is such a problematic factor of why we see the rise of discrimination and hate.

In terms of the rights of the unhoused, yes, we continue to do quite a bit of work in this area, particularly in the context of encampments. I can’t remember how much I’ve spoken to in my last appearance here, but we had quite a bit of work in the fall where we worked with municipalities. A number of municipalities put out guidance on a human-rights-based approach to dealing with encampments, trying to be as practical, and provide as practical and implementable guidance, as possible in that context. Because I think it’s easy as a human rights professional in this context to get quite grand.

I think that’s important that we understand the larger human rights context and understand that evictions, for example, are illegal under international law, including with enforceable removal, including encampments. That’s what the right to housing means. But what happens, then, if we have a fire risk? What does that actually mean? Providing really grounded guidance is on our website.

We distribute it widely to municipalities across the prov­ince, all municipalities. We reached out to all municipalities who had encampments in their communities. Then we continue to do some more targeted outreach where there are particular encampment issues. For example, we’re in regular conversations with the city of Vancouver around what’s happening in Crab Park right now in Vancouver.

The last piece there is that the inquiry that I very briefly mentioned, which was about freedom of press, is actually about freedom of press in the context of the Hastings encampment in Vancouver, if you’re familiar with that decampment effort. Media were kept out of the zone in which the decampment happened. That’s what that inquiry is actually looking into: that day and what happened there with restricting media and trying to prevent future violations, there, of international law, which could speak directly to excluding media and restrictions on freedom of media and what implications that has for human rights of unhoused people in particular.

Those are some key…. I should say, we have a very useful and productive relationship working with the national housing advocate, who has also turned her attention to encampments here in B.C. We’re making sure we work collaboratively across offices there to give feedback to the provincial government as well as feedback to a number of municipalities across the province.

S. Chant: Just as a follow-up to that, if I may. The work that you’ve done — do you feel like you’re getting a good uptake on it?

K. Govender: A range, I would say, to be honest. I think some municipalities haven’t taken us up on it. Some have. As I say, in the city of Vancouver, we have frequent meetings on decampment efforts in that city and have received, certainly, some uptake from other communities.

We have included the rights of unhoused people and also just the issues around housing. Not just isolated to encampments but the broader issues around housing in the province were a theme that showed up across our community briefs, which I’m sure would surprise no one, because it’s such a huge issue in all of our communities.

One of the things that I’m hoping those briefs do, and certainly what we’ve heard back so far, is empower community advocates in those communities to then take the briefs and be able to do their own advocacy with it. I’m hopeful that that will also make a difference on these issues.

[12:35 p.m.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Well, thank you for this afternoon. I just wanted to say a couple of things.

First and foremost, as the Finance Committee, we saw your vision early on, as you were building out your office, and there were some enormous asks that were inside of there. But it was a good plan. It is a good plan. Nobody is surprised where you are today. We are, as a committee….

I’m likely to say we’re glad there are no supplemental submissions that are there, because what you’ve predicted is exactly what you’ve wanted, and you’ve grown the office to the point where it is today. Thank you for that.

It was the look on your face when you were talking about outreach in the smaller communities. I know that as the Finance Committee, when we bounce around the province to hear from those smaller communities, they are so engaged. They are so happy that that some form of government has chosen to come to their neck of the woods and they finally have their say and they have that direct line to this building here in Victoria.

I don’t know whether you wanted to expand on what’s coming or just what’s happened.

K. Govender: Thank you, and I appreciate your positive feedback, as well, on the vision.

Yeah, one of the things that we have planned, so far, are the community briefs. While we have launched them out into the world, and that has just happened, what we haven’t done yet is, and I’ve done some regional-specific media in regards to those community briefs, had the opportunity to travel to communities and ensure that they’re able to have their moment to celebrate these launches.

We’ve given grants to some community organizations, and that will be happening over the next number of months. For example, I’ll be in Cranbrook at the end of June, speaking to the launch of the community brief in that context. So that’s one piece of work that we have planned.

The other is the travelling exhibit that I mentioned. That’s the other piece where we’ll be: the exhibit itself. And some of our team will be travelling around with that exhi­bit, and my hope…. Right now we have three communities more planned. We launched in Vancouver, as I say, just this week. We’ve had a couple of requests from a couple different actors in Prince George to be able to bring forward the exhibit there, and my hope is to be able to do it broader as well.

Those are a couple of key places that we’ll be continuing to engage. Also, I haven’t had a chance to mention that we are engaging in a big organizational evaluation, as an organization, over these next number of months, and publishing that in early 2025. We’ll be doing some engagement in that process, as well, to ensure that we’re hearing from British Columbians about what’s worked and what hasn’t and ensuring that that isn’t focused all here in this corner of the province but spread across the province and hearing those voices as well.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, well, thank you, Kasari. And thank you to your team for making it out here today.

On that note, we are going to recess to 1:15 sharp.

The committee recessed from 12:38 p.m. to 1:15 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): Good afternoon. I’ll now call the committee back to order and welcome the Ombudsperson, Jay Chalke, to make a presentation.

Before we do that, Jay…. There’s a newer person here and nobody online right now. We will start with introductions, starting with the Deputy Chair.

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

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

R. Parmar: Good afternoon, everyone. Ravi Parmar, MLA for Langford–Juan de Fuca.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I am Mike Starchuk, Chair, from Surrey-Cloverdale.

Jay, we’ve set aside 20 minutes for you to give us the update. Then the clock will reset for up to 35 minutes for possible questions.

Jay, the floor is yours.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers
and Supplementary Funding Requests

OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSPERSON

J. Chalke: Good afternoon, Chair, Deputy Chair, members of the committee. I’m pleased to be with you this afternoon and to have this opportunity to update you on our recent accomplishments.

As a guest on lək̓ʷəŋən terri­tory, I want to express my deep gratitude and esteem to the lək̓ʷəŋən people and ancestors, on whose traditional lands our office is located, and to the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations, whose bonds to those lands remain strong and inseverable to this day.

While our physical office is located on lək̓ʷəŋən terri­tory, our work takes place across many territories of the First Nations peoples of the province. We thank and honour all of them for their generosity as we do our work. In making this acknowledgment, I want to reaffirm my personal commitment to reconciliation.

I’m accompanied this afternoon by Stephanie Garrett, Deputy Ombudsperson, strategic outreach and inclusion; David Paradiso, Deputy Ombudsperson, investigation, intake and early resolution; T’oila McIntyre, our manager of Indigenous initiatives; and, of course, Dave Van Swieten, our deputy of corporate shared services, who has made a great many appearances before you.

First, a bit of a quick update on recent reports. Since my last appearance before you, we’ve released two new public reports that arose from the investigation of complaints from individuals.

The first, No Notice, No Benefit, was an investigation into the Ministry of Finance’s administration of the one-time $1,000 B.C. emergency benefit for workers. It was rolled out in the early days of the pandemic and helped thousands of British Columbians offset employment losses resulting from pandemic-related shutdowns.

We found that the ministry did not inform many recipients of a retroactive change to eligibility criteria related to the timing of the filing of their 2019 tax returns. As a result, I concluded it was unfair to require those who had missed that unknown deadline to repay the benefit.

Unfortunately, the Ministry of Finance has not accepted our recommendations to address this unfairness in the program and to ensure that similar programs are administered fairly in the future. I’m quite disappointed in the ministry’s response. Notably, we continue to receive and investigate other complaints with respect to this benefit and other concerns on its administration.

More recently, in March, we released On the Road Again, whose title is a nod to the fact that this report addresses the same matter identified by the first Ombudsman, Karl Friedmann, in 1985. It has to do with a section of the Transportation Act that deems roads that cross private property to be public if certain criteria are met, with consequences for private property owners. Nearly 40 years later, after Ombudsman Friedmann found the effect of the deeming provision to be analogous to expropriation without compensation and, therefore, unjust, I came to the same conclusion.

Happily, technological and other advances have been made since the 1980s that now enable the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure to accept all seven of my recommendations to remedy that unfairness. We will be monitoring and reporting on their implementation in the years to come.

I also want to discuss the recommendation monitoring work that our office does.

I was pleased to see the Premier’s apology to the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors community in the Legislative Assembly on February 27. This fulfilled a long-standing recommendation of our office, first made in 1999, and a commitment made by the Attorney General in response to our monitoring report last summer.

We’ve heard from many in the community about how important it was to be able to hear those words of acknowledgment and apology. However, there’s still work to do in relation to our recommendation for compensation. To that end, I was also pleased that the Premier, when he met with the community in the Hall of Honour immediately after the apology, committed to, in his words, “make it right.”

[1:20 p.m.]

Time is of the essence. Sadly, since the apology, another elderly member of the community has died. That for me, and hopefully for the government, has reinforced the urgency of this matter. To that end, I have informed government that I plan to issue a further monitoring report before the end of the summer.

I was pleased to see that Bill 17, the Police Amendment Act, finally addressed something I’ve been calling for, for over the past seven years — namely, to provide for the independent oversight of detention guards in police cells and RCMP police municipalities. Under the bill, that oversight would be carried out by the Police Complaint Commissioner. This fills an idiosyncratic but real gap in ensuring there are eyes and ears in locked facilities, where the public can’t access, to ensure rights protection and investigation of complaints.

Just this week I released a report that provided an update on the implementation of the 26 recommendations made to the Ministry of Children and Family Development in our 2021 report alone, which examined the use of separate confinement at Burnaby Youth Custody.

Custody centres are, by their nature, closed places, and our 2021 report was an unprecedented insight into how separate confinement is practised on youth. We found that female Indigenous youth were disproportionately the subject of extended periods in separate confinement, for periods, in some cases, exceeding a month. My 2021 report sought to strengthen the system of oversight so as to make more visible the youth who are most vulnerable to the harms of separate confinement.

What I’ve seen from the ministry, in the three years since, is a refusal to take many of the steps that are well within its power to open up that system to outside scrutiny, whether it’s providing information to the Representative for Children and Youth or the Public Guardian and Trustee or developing an independent inspection process. Rather stunningly, earlier this month the ministry is now declining to even share information with my office about whether and how it has implemented those recommendations, recommendations that, I want to remind this committee, the ministry publicly agreed to three years ago.

I want to assure legislators and the public that we will do everything we can to get to the bottom of what the ministry is doing or not doing to implement our recommendations, despite their current reluctance to provide that information.

Turning to complaints volumes, we continue to see a consistent volume of individual complaints to my office. Every year we receive 7,000 to 8,000 complaints, and the 2023 fiscal year was no different. However, in the post-pandemic environment, we’re seeing some changes.

I’m going to ask David Paradiso to speak to three factors that appear to be changing among those incoming complaints.

D. Paradiso: Thank you, Ombudsperson Chalke.

What we’ve been seeing is an increase in the number of complex cases and the degree of complexity in those cases. As more public organizations are developing internal complaint mechanisms to resolve the concerns of their own users, it’s only those that are more complicated and the entrenched issues and the most intransigent issues that come to our attention.

We are glad to see that the public bodies are implementing and using the resources that our office has developed for their use. They deliver their services more fairly. They develop robust complaints mechanisms. However, for our purposes, the impact of those organizations strengthening their complaint processes means our office is dealing with more of the more complex and difficult cases, which are often long-standing, entrenched disputes.

Another challenge is something that I think we’re seeing across the public service generally, and your constituency offices will probably say the same thing: the increase in the number of callers and complainants that are living with mental health conditions that influence their ability to successfully resolve the issues that they have with the public bodies. When they get to our office, they’re often frustrated, and their emotions are escalated. It impacts their behaviour and how we’re able to respond to their needs and their expectations in an efficient way.

The increase in the number of crisis calls we receive places high demands on our staff and reflects the real changes that people are experiencing across B.C.: issues with access to housing, health care, income security and similar issues.

Lastly, we’ve also seen an increase in the proportion of what we call jurisdictional complaints to our office since we introduced what we call our complaint checker on our website. It’s an online tool that the public has ready access to 24-seven, that they can go to.

[1:25 p.m.]

It provides information about the organizations that people contact us the most about, and it gives referral information for those that are not within our jurisdiction, such as the police, banks, federal government. This self-service tool means that people who previously would have contacted our office to speak with an intake staff member can now find a more efficient and convenient way to find the help that they need.

We’ve been tracking the use of our complaint checker now, and in this past fiscal year, we’ve seen it used over 9,000 times. While we are pleased to see that it is being accessed so frequently, it means that for us, the ones that do get through to us are a steady stream of ones that are non-jurisdictional and difficult to deal with.

We can’t say with certainty that the complaint checker is entirely responsible for the reduction in the non-jurisdictional cases that we see, but there is clearly an inverse relationship. Thus, more complaints that we received were jurisdictional, requiring additional staff time, effort, sensitivity and effort. All of this has led to an increase in the workload for our staff.

J. Chalke: Thank you, David.

Last year, turning to questions of diversity and inclusion, I formally established executive-level responsibility for DEIA through a deputy ombudsman strategic outreach and inclusion. This role, newly held by Stephanie Garrett on my right, who joined us from the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, is responsible for championing our DEIA work. We’re fortunate that she brings some two decades of experience in this field to contribute to our goals in this regard.

With a new deputy in place, with a portfolio that links strategic planning with diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility and reconciliation, our team has been hard at work on the strategy side to ensure alignment among our various workforce and other plans. This has the dual benefit of ensuring that we maximize our impact but also do it in a resource-efficient way.

Stephanie is going to speak to our accessibility and outreach plans, and then I think T’oila is going to speak to our Indigenous initiatives.

S. Garrett: Thanks, Jay.

Earlier this month we published the final version of our accessibility plan 2023–2026, developed in accordance with the requirements under the Accessible B.C. Act. It contains accessibility priorities and goals that are closely linked to our strategic priorities and broader DEI efforts, as well as our outreach plan, as Jay has mentioned.

The plan’s goals are focused on improvements to our service delivery, as well as on making our workplace more accessible and welcoming to people with disabilities. Of course, we’ll be engaging with people with disabilities and community-serving organizations to hear feedback on ways we can further improve our services.

As you’ll recall, last fall we received funding from the committee to move forward with our targeted outreach strategy. Our overarching goal as an organization is to deepen connection with the public. We’re currently working to develop an outreach and engagement plan that furthers this goal by increasing awareness of and knowledge of our office and building trusting relationships with organizations that serve the people we aim to reach. Our outreach efforts will be intersectional, collaborative, and we’ll learn and adapt our approach as we learn from communities.

We have, through internal efficiencies, hired an engagement specialist, who joined our team at the beginning of April, and work is well underway to identify and establish connections with key community organizations. With funding approved from this committee, we’re also planning to hire two auxiliary six-month community liaison positions. Those individuals will have lived experience in the communities that they’ll be conducting outreach in, in the second half of this fiscal year.

These temporary staff will work to further identify and facilitate those community connections, build awareness and knowledge of our office and how we can help. They’ll be responsible for preparing future-year sustainable outreach plans for the 2024-25 focus areas, which are the disability community and those who are experiencing houselessness and experiencing low-income situations or economic precarity.

Then in ’25-26, we’re going to be focusing on two further underserved demographic groups, namely youth and newcomers to B.C.

Having successfully completed a phase 1 pilot of our Indigenous community services plan, and with the support of this committee in funding a permanent program structure, which we’re very excited about, we’re in the final planning stages for phase 2, under the seasoned leadership of our Indigenous initiatives manager, who’s with us today, T’oila McIntyre, who’s going to speak a bit about this area.

[1:30 p.m.]

T. McIntyre: Thank you, Stephanie.

Good afternoon. It’s good to see all of you.

I’m happy to be here on lək̓ʷəŋən territory to give you an update on Indigenous initiatives.

In phase 2, we will sustain wise practices based on our lessons learned and what we’ve heard through our engagement efforts and service provision, while scaling up our impact and enhancing our services to Indigenous peoples in a few important ways.

First, we’re in the process of building a permanent staff team transitioning the pathfinder roles from a contract structure. We’re very grateful for those who served in the role for the past two years. They laid the foundation for our approach. The staff pathfinder positions will be open to Indigenous people through a special program approved under the human rights code. This approach will support further integration of our reconciliation efforts internally and sustainable relationships with Indigenous organizations and communities across the province.

Second, we’ll be shifting to a long-term Indigenous outreach strategy to maximize the efforts of our small team. This strategy will work in alignment with our office’s broader outreach strategy. We’ll include ongoing regional community outreach by pathfinders and outreach to friendship centres, First Nations Health Authority and Indigenous justice centres over the next 18 months. We anticipate this will lead to greater knowledge, awareness and access to our services by urban Indigenous populations, which will complement the focus in phase 1 on rural, remote and on-reserve Indigenous populations.

Other components of our phase 2 plans beyond outreach include ongoing training and competency building of our staff teams, integration of reconciliation as an ongoing and key principle within our investigations, including systemic investigations, and much more.

J. Chalke: Thank you, T’oila.

I’m really proud of the work that we’re doing to date in this area. Among our Ombudsperson colleagues across Canada, we’re really considered to be a leader in Indigenous outreach. We’re frequently asked to share information that we’re doing with our colleagues across the country as our colleagues look to implement similar models and they look to improve their service in their jurisdictions.

We’re seeing a sustained rise in the number in the number and the complexity of complaints from Indigenous people, and that’s exactly what we were hoping for with this project. We’re going to be working on strategies about how we manage that workload, and we’ll be back to talk about that, probably in our next budget submission.

As I indicated to you when I was before you last November, we’ve been receiving requests from Indigenous governments for assistance in looking at their own administrative fairness. Over the last several months, our public authority consultation and training team has been working with the Nisg̱a’a Lisims Government to provide ad­min­is­trative fairness, advice and capacity-building and, at their request, to review their Administrative Decisions Review Act.

I really want to thank this committee for supporting my request for one additional staff resource to support this and other requests that we’re receiving from First Nations for consultation on administrative fairness. These are not public bodies under the Ombudsperson Act, but this is really an act of reconciliation as we support their governance. Next month, we’ll be delivering administrative fairness training for two days to Nisg̱a’a senior government officials. In June, we’ll be travelling to their community, at their invitation, to support their review of their 20-year-old administrative fairness legislation.

I want to just turn to our budget request. Last fiscal I appeared before you — I think it was in March — to address an unanticipated budgetary pressure that arose in STOB 54 related to the work of the Judicial Compensation Commission, or JCC. That lift was approved by this committee.

I’m pleased to confirm that our office came in on budget with that additional funding. In fact, our final budget numbers revealed a budget surplus of less than $9,000 on a $13.9 million budget, or less than 0.07 percent. Still has your favourite seven-letter word, Chair, but only a little bit.

As we enter a new fiscal year, the salary pressure caused by the JCC will continue to require support, with an adjustment in the additional amount of $23,000, as set out in my April 12 letter to this committee. In total, my office anticipates that the total impact of this increase will amount to $100,000 for the ’24-25 fiscal year.

[1:35 p.m.]

As stated earlier this year and in my April 12 letter, we’re advised that government ministries were funded for the impact of this STOB 54 lift, and there’s no principled reason why we should not be as well. To do otherwise would basically amount to a reduction of one FTE among our staff.

As we look to the future of operations, my office recently hired a new chief information officer, as our longtime CIO retired. That hiring has driven an anticipated and planned review of our in-house information technology department, which I expect will happen over the next nine months. The review’s purpose is to identify any potential improvements in how our IT services could be provided. We’ll be in a position to advise this committee on the results of that review when we next meet.

Finally, to touch on workplace culture, as requested by the committee, we have all the basic infrastructure in place, of course. We apply the public sector core policies on standards of conduct, bullying and harassment. We have two designated officers for the purpose of whistleblowing or other reasons for people speaking up. But as importantly, our team has the opportunity to share feedback on our organizational culture through managerial open doors, specific staff surveys and round tables.

We participate in the workplace environment survey, or WES. I’m pleased to report that we consistently receive high scores in WES. Where we see gaps, we work through our annual HR workforce and operational plans to prioritize those and address those. For example, in one WES, we saw that the area of staff training needed attention. We made that a priority, and by the time of the next WES, the scores had markedly improved.

We just received the 2024 work environment survey results this week. I was very pleased to see our overall engagement score of 83. This is an all-time high for our office, despite the challenging post-pandemic societal environment in which we deliver our service. I was very pleased to see very high scores for the questions related to ethics and integrity in the workplace and staff knowing about who they can speak to about ethical issues. The respectful workplace driver in WES is linked to one of the areas that we had identified back in 2022. So very pleased to see those scores.

The pandemic brought the wellness needs of our employees into stark relief. Wellness is foundational to everything we do, as we need to ensure our staff thrive, so they can provide the best service to the public. We support wellness through our flexible work arrangements, our commitments to DEI, a focus on accessibility and reconciliation and our prioritization of cultural, psychological and physical safety.

Beyond the general public service program, we’ve established counselling support for work-related trauma, because some of our work in receiving complaints from the public can cause distress and harm to our staff. In collaboration with the other independent offices within our corporate services model, this year, our staff teams are going through mental health awareness training provided by the Canadian Mental Health Association as we all work towards better integrating mental wellness in the workplace.

It is, as I’ve said before, and as you know well through the work of your constituency offices, a tough time to be in the complaints business. Supporting the mental well-being of our staff is essential if we’re going to continue to attract outstanding individuals and to retain them as they pursue their careers.

Finally, just before moving to your questions, I’d like to thank the committee for its continuing support and awareness of the value of our work. I’d also like to recognize the dedicated people in our organization who do that work. They are unwavering in their commitment to serve the people of British Columbia. They continuously strive to hold public authorities accountable. They provide support to those who contact our office in working to achieve resolution and identify systemic barriers to fairness. I’m very proud of our entire team.

That completes my remarks, and I’d be pleased to take your questions.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Jay, and thank you for the underspend and the surplus that was there, but it’s directly correlated to the amount of time you went over.

Interjection.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yeah, it’s a wash. It’s a wash. Thank you.

S. Chant: I’ve done this in two previous presentations, so my colleagues are going to not like me very much, but that’s okay. The provincial accessibility committee, on May 31, will be releasing the standards on employability and service access for public consultation.

They’ve been working very hard on putting those standards together. I would really appreciate it if someone from your office could put eyes on them and give us some feedback, because we’re looking for really broad feedback. Given the information that comes to you, I suspect your lens would be really, really valuable to it.

J. Chalke: I’d be pleased to.

S. Chant: I would be delighted. If somebody has a card, I’ll connect you with Sara, who’s our mover and shaker in that area.

J. Chalke: Absolutely.

[1:40 p.m.]

S. Chant: Thank you so much for that.

Thank you for the work that you do and for being there for people that feel like they’ve got nowhere to go. It’s truly appreciated, and I know the work is very challenging. I’m very glad that you’re there to do that work.

The Indigenous work that you’re doing lifts my heart. Thank you so much for that.

R. Parmar: Thanks very much, Jay, and the entire team, for your work.

I also want to echo Susie’s comments on the specific work that you’re doing on reconciliation. I very much appreciate that and very clearly see it as a focus for the organization.

A couple areas where I wanted to put some questions out. A lot of these are from your strategic outreach plan that I was able to dive into.

You acknowledge that awareness of your office is a goal. I wanted to ask, maybe, for some in-depth examples of two parts. One is younger British Columbians, where you’ve acknowledged getting the word out, but also to new immigrants, people of colour in particular. I’m curious what work is ongoing at the moment or in the future that you see, specifically on younger British Columbians and also new immigrants and our racialized communities.

J. Chalke: You bet. I’ll ask Stephanie to comment on those particular priorities, because those are both areas that we have identified among the six areas of focus over the next three years.

I would start by saying that there’s almost a double disadvantage. The first challenge we face is that even among all British Columbians, awareness of an office like ours is relatively low. I think, in that strategic outreach plan, you saw the statistics even just among the general population — the challenge of having a Swedish name for your organization that isn’t necessarily easy to say or understand.

Also, it isn’t necessarily intuitive for people, given our broad jurisdiction over a thousand public bodies under our jurisdiction, that people would necessarily think, “Oh well, you can complain to the Ombudsperson” about some entity that you may have only a distant connection to, something that’s happening in Victoria. People generally think, “Well, the Ombudsperson has jurisdiction over the government of British Columbia,” but may be less familiar that it’s also true that we have jurisdiction over a college or a tribunal or other things. I think that’s the first disad­vantage.

Then I think the second challenge that we have is that, when we have looked at questions of awareness, it’s definitely true that it’s highest among people who are economically advantaged, who are older or who are longtime, multigenerational Canadians — new Canadians, people who are younger or others who may come from a country where complaining about your government isn’t necessarily a valued and trusted thing to do.

There are lots of challenges that we have in the area, but those are things that we’re happy to take on. That’s really what that outreach plan is about.

S. Garrett: Thanks, Jay.

Yeah, we’re really excited about the opportunity to be doing this work. Even though we’ve identified those six areas that I had mentioned, we’re taking an intersectional approach to it, because we know, obviously, the disability community is filled with a whole variety of people — by different ethnicities, genders and different languages they’re speaking. We’re also connecting it to our Indigenous community services plan.

There are a few things that we’re doing initially. First, it’s recognizing that we have to take an efficiency approach to this and be really targeted in the way that we’re conducting the outreach. We’re starting by doing a full-scale mapping exercise that our team is going through currently to really see, actually, who’s out and working at community-serving organizations in those areas and who’s got the greatest influence and impact on those people that we’re looking to serve.

We’re hoping to actually identify champion organizations and, through that, then identify people with lived experience who may support that outreach, much in a similar vein to the lessons learned that we’ve found through our Indigenous initiatives program and the pathfinder program in particular.

Youth is an interesting one that you bring up because, actually, one of the pieces of work we’re going to be doing this year is revamping our digital engagement strategy. We have found that things have gotten complicated without the ability, for example, to be able to advertise on Facebook. It has cut off a whole area of engagement for us. We also recognize there are different platforms to engage youth. Interestingly, we’ve included youth and post-secondary within that outreach strategy. There are some really good practices we’re seeing with post-secondary outreach that we’d actually like to bring into the youth space. There are a lot of interesting components to this.

[1:45 p.m.]

With regards to newcomers, obviously, as Jay had mentioned, language is an issue there as well. We’re doing a review in terms of translation. I have the benefit of having worked at the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, where we were looking very closely at that. I’m bringing some of the learnings there to apply to this space, while recognizing there’s a bit of a different approach that we’re looking at when we’ve got a direct-service model.

We’re keenly aware of the importance of evaluation and performance measures when we’re doing this work as well. We’re looking at understanding the percentages, not just of awareness and understanding but also recognizing: “Are people coming to us with the right complaints that we can actually have the ability to work on, or do we need to send them elsewhere?”

It’s that balancing of what is the work that needs to come to our office, whereas also, how can we support referral services and build the capacity of a community-serving organization to meet people where they’re at and provide them with the referrals to get people into the right places, in a spirit of a no-wrong-door approach.

T’oila, I thought you could also maybe mention quickly our recent experience at the Gathering Our Voices conference, which was really positive.

T. McIntyre: Absolutely. Thanks, Stephanie.

One of the events that our pathfinders attend annually is the Gathering Our Voices conference where thousands of Indigenous youth come to attend. It’s a really uplifting sort of event, where they can attend different workshops and participate in different activities. It’s a really special event that happens every year. It’s hosted by the B.C. Association of Aboriginal Friendship Centres.

We have a booth there, and that’s a really good place for us to be able to do our outreach, along with other events that we have scheduled, where we can actually reach the populations of people that we wouldn’t normally be able to. Events are a big part of part of the outreach that we do — and being really strategic in events that we attend. Gathering Our Voices is one of them.

R. Parmar: Thanks very much for that. It’s challenging work, for sure. It’s not just your organization, but I’d say most organizations often are facing those challenges and, I think, rightfully touching on some of the challenges of being able to engage with young people.

I was chuckling a bit, because I still fall within that demographic. You know, social media may not be the only mode to be able to communicate with people, especially young people, right? Some of the bans that Meta has brought in on news sources have certainly impacted my generation quite a bit in how it gets news, for sure.

Now, in looking at 2026 and 2027, when hopefully, you’ve embedded a lot of these strategies and you’re doing well on the feedback side, can you explain to me the public awareness survey, what that essentially looks like, and if there is anything else that you’re doing besides the public awareness survey to be able to measure your success?

Apologies if I missed it in the document, the strategic outreach plan, but do you have metrics that you’re specifically hoping to meet, to measure targets and that sort of thing?

J. Chalke: I’ll deal with the first part of your question first and then the second.

Three years ago we established a triennial cycle of surveying. Three years ago we surveyed the general public and then the next year the public authorities under our jurisdiction and then, most recently, complainants. Then in this fiscal year, we’re now again back to the general public.

Later this fiscal year we will have our second round of the survey. Then we’ll be able to look. What’s really impor­tant to us is to see the longitudinal impact of the survey work and make sure that those numbers, as challenging as they were three years ago, are at least moving in the right direction.

We’re a little organization with a relatively small budget for this sort of work. So we — I’m quite sure, rightly — came to the conclusion that we wanted to focus our efforts where they would have the most impact. Rather than trying to boil the ocean, we would focus on specific demographics. That’s what led to this “six demographic groups over three years” approach that Stephanie has outlined.

We will, though, when we do those surveys going forward, start identifying those groups as subsets within the demographic groups, within the surveys that we assess to make sure that we’re reaching those demographic groups and that those numbers are going up.

[1:50 p.m.]

S. Garrett: Yeah, and I can just add that we’re in the planning phase on just that. It’s very fortunate that we have an individual who used to work in polling and market research as well who’s part of our outreach team. That’s been really helpful.

We’re looking at three types of evaluation, which you may be familiar with. A formative evaluation — that’s at the planning stage, so we can get some baseline, especially as we’re scaffolding this, where we’re starting with two sectors of population and moving to four and then six, obviously, over the three years. We’re looking at some pre-survey to understand web traffic, gathering both quantitative and qualitative. We also have a lot of internal data and information from our staff who are dealing with complainants on a daily basis.

Within some of the groups — for example, people living with disabilities — we actually do receive a high degree of complainants accessing our services. What we’re looking at, though, is drilling down into….

Disabilities is an incredibly large and broad scope of people. Even in the early mapping phases that we’ve done, recognizing there’s not one umbrella organization for people with disabilities…. There are many different types of disabilities and community-serving organizations for those people. It’s the same with the complainants that we’re seeing. So we’re really looking at: where are we not finding those complaints, or where are the larger issues and the greatest vulnerabilities? We have a lot of that qualitative data as well.

Then we’re going to be going through a process evaluation. We’re actually looking at measuring our progress towards our goal. We’re looking at the numbers and types of meetings we’re having, the connections that we’re making, the concrete steps, the level of initiative of organizations coming to us. We’re going to be looking for feedback through that process as we’re building those collaborative relationships.

Then at the end of this three-year period, we’re going to be doing a summative evaluation looking at: what kind of a difference did we make? We’ll be doing a post-survey on our website. We’ll be looking at our policy and processes, internally, to see if the changes that we’re making through a continuous improvement approach are supporting that.

Then we’ll be looking at behaviour change. That’s a trickier one because that’s a longer-term thing, so we don’t anticipate that within our first year we’re going to be able to evaluate behaviour change at the end of that year. But at the three-year phase, we may start to see some of those early changes taking place.

It’s a long road, and this is just the beginning of it for us.

R. Parmar: One quick comment to finish off my remarks. As you know, I was elected in a by-election last year, but I know we’re heading into a general election. One recommendation I would just have is that we’re probably going to have lots of new MLAs and new constituency advisers. If there’s something in your outreach plan where you can pass on some information and possibly even hold a session for our staff and new staff, I think they would really….

S. Chant: And us.

R. Parmar: Yeah, and us as well. I think everyone would really benefit from that. You’re absolutely right. We often get lots of folks coming to constituency offices looking for support and being referred to the avenue where they can make the appropriate complaint.

J. Chalke: I would say that we deal with MLAs and constituency offices, particularly after an election, kind of on three levels. One is, through the work in the Clerk’s office, there’ll be an orientation after the election to the independent offices. We participate in that. We also receive invitations sometimes from the constituency assistants when they gather as a group here and speak to them as a group.

In addition, I make a point, whenever I’m in a community, of going out and meeting with the constituency office and their staff, for example, on when they might want to refer a matter of a constituent to us and those sorts of things. So it can happen a bunch of levels, but absolutely, it’s good advice, and we’ll take it to heart.

Turning to your question about metrics, you asked a bit about metrics. We have, traditionally, output metrics, and those are published in our annual report. But what ombuds really all over the world have struggled with, generalist ombuds like us with broad jurisdiction, is assessing outcome or impact. It’s not very straightforward, because, as you might imagine, things like the deterrent value of having a public body that holds other public bodies to account — what’s the effect of that? It’s not easy to measure, so it’s been challenging, I think, for ombuds all over the world to assess that.

[1:55 p.m.]

I was determined to try and rise to that challenge, as it were. A number of years ago we started down this path. We sought some advice and received it. This was the subject of many presentations to this committee in prior years. It resulted in those surveys. We started doing the longitudinal survey approach. That was, really, the suggestion for where we start.

The committee may recall from last year that I talked about the second round of work we were doing, which was related to something called peer review. Ombuds, primarily in Europe, have adopted a strategy of doing peer review, bringing ombuds from other jurisdictions in to spend a week or two at the office and assess a particular area of work by that ombuds and provide advice from their area of expertise.

As we presented last year, we did the scoping work and the design work for a peer review to take place in ’24-25. We’re looking to do that this fall. We’re just currently in contact with potential reviewers to try and line up what that would look like. That’s something that we’re going to be doing.

It’s really exciting, actually. This will be the first peer review by an ombuds anywhere in Canada. I look forward to presenting the results of that to this committee.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Before going to Tom, I just wanted to mention…. You did come out to my area of the world, in Surrey, and the COs were there. They found it very interesting, very helpful as to what the office actually did.

With that being said, there’s a significant turnover with those people that are there. However you schedule those kinds of things, I know that there’ll be a new bunch of faces for you to deal with within those offices.

J. Chalke: The work is never done.

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

I’m interested in the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors’ recommendations on compensation. Of course, there was a recognition and an apology given this year, and there was some compensation — I think it was $10 million — to keep intact some of the heritage and some of the education based around some of the bad stuff that happened.

What does compensation look like to you? Is it all a one-off? There’s everything from imprisonment to the loss of property to the loss of children, essentially. Is this a one-off? If so, how detailed could that be, and how much of a cost could that be to roll out?

J. Chalke: Those are great questions. I will say a couple of things about that.

What we said in 1999 was both individual and community elements to this. There was an element that relates to the community and the harm that was done to the community. There were also specific people and children who had been detained, and there should be compensation in that regard.

The other thing is…. I have been clear with the Attorney General, given the delay, that there also needs to be recognition that there has been…. We have heard over and over about the intergenerational effect of this. For the next generation and sometimes two generations, they have been….

The dominant event of their parents’ lives was being detained for those years in the 1950s. While their parents may have been deceased…. More than half, it appears, of the 200 children are now dead. Their families ought not to be disentitled simply because of government’s delay in extending compensation.

I will say that there is a planned discussion about this very issue being carried out by the Ministry of Attorney General and others in government in the Kootenays in the coming weeks. In terms of what that looks like, I think it’s really for the community to provide that feedback as they design what that compensation looks like.

I’m hopeful that those meetings are fruitful and productive and that the community has a really robust way to participate. That includes people many of whom are quite elderly, and they really need support to participate in these events.

That’s my hope. As I said, I’ve advised the government that I intend to be on this issue across the summer and to be reporting later this year.

[2:00 p.m.]

H. Yao: I do want to echo my Chair’s comment too. Thank you so much for coming to our neighbourhood in Richmond and helping me, educating me and educating my staff on the Ombudsperson’s great services you’re providing our community. We do definitely really appre­ciate your willingness to make time and make accom­modation.

The question I’m about to ask I ask every commissioner, so I’m not targeting anybody or anything. We just want to really explore the way we can actually create a healthier working environment. My first question is: if you have any staff who has to do whistleblowing — say something is happening in your office that we really don’t like; maybe there’s someone bullying, harassment or discrimination — what’s the protocol that you set at the Ombudsperson’s office? Then maybe you can share a bit of information about it.

The second one is that some of our commissioners mentioned that…. If there’s an issue directly with a commissioner, such as the Ombudsperson, yourself, who can they reach out to in regards to support, the individual employees, so that they can find someone who they’re comfortable with to express their concern?

I guess the third one we’ll really have to talk about…. Obviously, you mentioned it earlier, and I’ve heard a lot of really great work you’re doing…. As we further advance and as you and your staff continue dealing with a lot of more potentially traumatizing stories, are there any additional potential mental health supports, counselling supports?

I know you mentioned a lot already, without a doubt. We’d love to maybe refresh our memory a bit and just help us appreciate better how you’re making sure that staff working on the front line…. Hearing those stories could trigger a certain amount of emotional backlash in their minds or could further re-traumatize someone. How are you supporting staff in that respect?

J. Chalke: To start with, to the extent that a staff member of our office or of any of the independent offices of the Legislature believes that there is wrongdoing under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, they can make a disclosure internally to somebody known as a designated officer in each of those offices, including ours. Or in any of those other offices, they can make a disclosure to the external entity to investigate, and that’s us.

We are the external reporting agency for whistleblowing concerns for the other officers but also for all the government ministries, for the health authorities, for the school districts and others.

Where it’s our office, then those reports would go to the Auditor General, so there’s a mechanism by which that happens as well.

In terms of your question about support for staff, one of the things that we’ve established is, above and beyond the public service employee assistance plan, where staff, because of their work, have experienced trauma or distress, we also have an additional policy that permits and pays for counselling for that individual and other support. So we try to go above and beyond, just recognizing that, given our line of work, we have people who are receiving information from the public that can be quite traumatic, quite triggering.

There are definitely people it becomes very difficult to deal with sometimes. It’s our statutory obligation to receive those complaints, so we can’t not do that, but we then have to look after our staff in consequence.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I don’t see any other questions, but there was a question that came up. I believe it was yesterday or today; I’ve lost track.

One of the independent officers had let us know that if there was a workplace issue that was taking place and it maybe surrounded some of the senior staff that was there, there was another independent officer that that could go to. We also heard from other independent officers that your office is what they would use. Is there that mechanism for your office, or is your office the one?

J. Chalke: We’ll kind of separate these two things. Under the Public Interest Disclosure Act, we are the external reporting agency for disclosures of wrongdoing in any public body that’s covered by the act, and that is every government ministry, all the independent offices, all the school districts, all the health authorities, 60-some tribunals, etc., and later this year, all the post-secondary institutions in the province. That’s one example.

[2:05 p.m.]

So if the disclosure is about a senior person and it is at that level of seriousness that it would constitute wrongdoing, if they want to disclose externally, then it could come to us.

However, having said that, before PIDA came into force in 2019, a number of offices, including mine, in operationalizing what is called core policy 11, which is the bullying and harassment policy generally in place in the public service, had the situation of: what would one do? I think the Information and Privacy Commissioner put it that way: what would one do if it was about himself?

They established arrangements with other officers so that there was someone outside that someone could make that bullying and harassment…. It’s specifically about bullying and harassment. But sometimes bullying and harassment could also constitute wrongdoing under PIDA, and then someone could simply come to us.

Pre-2019 we had established that same relationship with the Auditor General, but then once 2019 happened and the statute came into force, it was the Auditor General where external disclosures would go anyway for us, so it kind of merged all into the same person.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I just wanted to be clear, because a definition of wrongdoing and bullying and harassment in a workplace might have a different definition, but I think you’ve cleared it up.

J. Chalke: I would describe bullying and harassment as a potential subset of all wrongdoing. That could include, for example, financial wrongdoing, putting life, health and safety at risk. There’s a whole range of things. Bullying and harassment would be a subset of all wrongdoing.

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right.

Are there any other questions or comments?

B. Stewart: Thanks very much, Jay. Sorry I was late joining the call.

I just have a question about some of the things that you were referring to in the presentation that I was catching about staff additions. I guess I’m just looking at your budget that was submitted from April 19. Are your staff salaries and benefits reflective of the increases that you…? Everything’s included up to 2026-27 in those budgets?

J. Chalke: Yes.

B. Stewart: Okay. I guess the impact of other changes that you were just talking about — those would be in addition to that. Is that correct? Those are the supplemental requests that we’re going to discuss on Monday?

J. Chalke: The supplemental request I have in front of you is strictly related to STOB 54, which is the same rationale as the one that was in front of you in March. It’s just that that was for last fiscal year, and this is for this fiscal year. Eventually, when this all catches up to a proper budget sequence, we’ll merge that into our regular budget request. We’re just still catching up, as a result of the timing of the JCC report.

B. Stewart: You were talking about, and I was not following, the new staff additions for the underserved populations and when those are coming forward or where you see those coming into your budget cycle.

J. Chalke: Those were in front of this committee in our regular budget request last November and approved.

B. Stewart: Okay, very good. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Have you got anything else, Ben? Are you good?

B. Stewart: Yeah, I’m good. Thanks.

M. Starchuk (Chair): All right, okay.

Well, Jay, thank you to you and your staff for coming out today. I want to just really emphasize what Ravi had said as well. When this election is over and there may be newer or not new faces within…. Our constituency advisers are the front-line people, and when they know what applies to your office and the level of expertise that they can get from your office, it really makes their job a lot easier, and they appreciate it. When you came out to Surrey, that’s all they talked about for weeks. So thank you.

S. Chant: Come to the North Shore some time.

J. Chalke: Absolutely. Thank you very much for your time. We’ll make a point of doing that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. We will take a short five-minute recess to reset the room.

The committee recessed from 2:09 p.m. to 2:15 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): I call the committee back to order and welcome the Auditor General, Michael Pickup, to make a presentation.

We have a new face at the table, so we will start our introductions with the Deputy Chair.

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

Tom Shypitka, MLA for Kootenay East and Deputy Chair.

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

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

R. Parmar: Good afternoon. Ravi Parmar, Langford–​Juan de Fuca

M. Starchuk (Chair): Joining us online….

B. Stewart: Hi, it’s Ben Stewart, Kelowna West.

M. Starchuk (Chair): And I’m Mike Starchuk, Surrey-Cloverdale. I’m the Chair of the committee.

Michael, you have 20 minutes for your presentation, followed by up to 35 minutes for questions from the committee.

The floor is yours, Michael.

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

M. Pickup: Thank you so much. I will begin by acknowledging, with respect, that at the Office of the Auditor General of B.C., we conduct our work on Coast Salish territories.

I would like to take a moment to say thank you to Indigenous people, both past and present, for allowing us to work and play on and enjoy these traditional Coast Salish territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking people, now known as Victoria.

As a Status Indian member of the Miawpukek First Nation myself on the far other side of this country, I say thank you to Indigenous people here for all that you are sharing with me on this Pacific coast.

Joining me today on my left is John McNeill, our chief financial officer. On my far right over here is Carlos Caraveo, our chief information officer. And on my immediate right, who you’ve met before, of course, is Marie Thelisma, assistant auditor general of corporate services.

We want to thank you for the discussion we had in October and November regarding our budget request and for your approval of our request. I hope today will give you some insights to how helpful your approval has been as we advance the work and culture of our office. We’ve developed a handout for you, which you have, consistent with our practice of preparing one-page summaries in our reports, with some high-level highlights of what I’ll be sharing and we will be sharing today. I hope it is a helpful aid in that discussion.

Off the top, I did want to highlight our reporting work over the last fiscal year, which you can see in your highlight. While I won’t go to the details of it as part of our discussion, if there are questions on that, of course we would be happy to address them.

Financially, for ’23-24, we’ll be coming in under budget, and we’ll be returning the surplus, of course. We saved funds in professional services and travel as well as depreciation expense, a non-cash item, related to LWS not being fully completed until April 2024. The details around the exact size of our underspend haven’t been finalized but will be released, of course, in our annual report and subject to audit as part of our audited financial statements. So on that one, it’s kind of a stay tuned.

I will now focus on the status of our key initiatives underway.

First, my favourite: IT modernization and the rationalization and migration project, what we are calling RAMP. As you recall, our IT modernization project was a major component of our budget ask. As a bit of a reminder, this project is focused on building a new data centre, hosted at Kamloops data centre, which core government uses. This ensures that the OAG data is secured to the level of government data, which of course is essential in today’s environment with cybersecurity threats. This transition will allow our office to comfortably manage security risks and ensure business continuity.

Internally we’ve been calling this our RAMP project, rationalization and migration, and things have definitely been ramping up over the last quarter on our RAMP project. Regarding rationalization, I should note that this is an area of work where we should see cost savings, and fully expect to, going forward.

[2:20 p.m.]

Just like when you move homes and do a bit of a purge, we are reviewing what data needs to move and what doesn’t. Of course, the less we move, the less costly it is, to put it quite simply.

Also, we have a dedicated project manager to oversee this project, and with that, the full project team is now in place, and detailed migration plans are drafted. Our project manager organizes and oversees tasks to ensure the project is completed successfully, on time and within budget. In addition, she will prepare the quarterly updates for this committee.

All of the required equipment has also now been identified and ordered, and we are currently investigating opportunities for cost savings and user experience improvements. Cost savings is an area we are committed to looking at as part of our initial proposal, though it wasn’t something we could properly assess until we got going into the work. Also, the rationalized efforts, so far, have reduced the amount of data and redundant information stored in our current servers and, therefore, will not be part of the migration. It won’t be necessary to our new environment, and this is great.

We are expecting further cost reductions as the migration continues, and we will provide more information on that at the next quarterly update as to what that is looking like.

Currently our team is working on finalizing the appli­cation rationalization analysis — I know that’s a bit of a mouthful — among other technical work but also with supporting configuration for the data centre, the network and the infrastructure. We have recently provided the committee with a quarterly report on this work. As requested, we’ll continue to make those updates as we move forward in the process.

I want to share a final point of good news on this. While we were concerned that a few items may be delayed, that didn’t happen. We received all of the necessary hardware before the end of the last fiscal year, March 31, and I know that was the result of a lot of hard work by a lot of people, with a little bit of encouragement from me. This will mean no messing around with trying to ask to move money from one year to the other, in that we got it.

Okay. Now I’ll move on to the leading workplace strategy, what we’ve always called the LWS in the past, which is our renovation and upgrade of our third and fourth floors at our 623 Fort Street office. The good news: we are ready to move into our new space. In fact, today is my last day working on the second floor, and on Monday I am moving up to the fourth floor. Insert big smile here.

We are grateful for the support of this committee, and we look forward to finding a date in the future for you to come see our new space and see how we are working together in this new environment.

We are working with the real property division under the Ministry of Citizens’ Services and our property manager to secure a long-term tenant for the second floor, which will be vacant.

The one small hurdle was that we had some finishing touches related to construction that finished after March 31. They tell me this is completely normal with construction projects of this size. Therefore, we need to request that the committee consider approval of an additional $250,000 for ’24-25 to cover the completion of that LWS work, which is finishing off pretty much this month in April and maybe in early May.

Despite every attempt — and I will note that we kept the scope of the work the same, as was approved, so we’re not adding on new things — some items came in at slightly higher cost than people had expected them to. So we’ve prepared that supplementary funding request for the ’24-25 capital budget to request the final budget for final construction payments that went over into the current year. I guess, in my view, that is not too bad in today’s construction and development market reality that we find ourselves in.

Now I’m going to switch to the compensation framework. Some additional positive news focuses on our compensation framework. We have made great progress developing a compensation framework that will ensure fair, equitable, transparent and competitive compensation for our employees, while also addressing a responsible use of public funds. Our goal is to promote high-performing teams in an inclusive and engaged workplace culture.

Phase 1 of this work has focused on, where appropriate, adjusting some of the salaries of current OAG employees who are under the MCCF category.

[2:25 p.m.]

This was done for a few reasons, of course, to be competitive with the external market, to have equity within the office and to reflect expertise gained through strong performance in individual, specific positions.

As indicated, this is phase 1, so you’re right to believe there will be a phase 2. Phase 2 begins April 1, 2025. I will note that this will have no impact on future dollars or additional requests. All of this work is being done within the previously approved budget. We won’t be back asking for more money regarding this piece, as I have promised to you in the past.

Phase 2 is where OAG MCCF staff who have completed one year in their position and that demonstrate successful performance will be eligible to advance one step within their salary range. And moving forward, as those staff gain additional years of experience and continue to demonstrate successful performance, they will have the opportunity to again move up within their bands. This results in a fair, transparent, performance-based approach that supports growth and development over time, helping us to continue to meet our mandate.

Now, moving on to workplace culture that you’re interested in…. I was asked to give an update on our workplace culture. One of the things that speaks to our OAG culture is the audit report release celebrations we have each time we release an audit report. We have a strong turnout for each of these celebrations. Employees from across our portfolios learn about the work we are doing and the mandate they are helping the organization fulfil.

Our corporate values and guiding principles also speak to our culture. We are committed to creating and reinforcing diversity, inclusion and safety. To gain some insight into how employees are actually experiencing working at the OAG, we gather anonymous feedback from our workforce. Each year we conduct a workplace environment survey, the same survey that is conducted every two years across the core government. Our 2024 survey is live right now. Since the 2020 survey, so four years ago, when the score for the category for respectful environment was 70, we of course have seen an improvement to 77 in 2023. That was a 10 percent increase during the time that I’ve been there.

Two more key elements of an engaging workplace are teamwork and supervision, which are also collected in the survey. Teamwork is a cultural strength in our office. In 2020, we had a score of 79. Last year we were up to 81. That is 81 for teamwork, which is, I think, pretty incredible when you think about that. Supervisory-level management is also a strength, increasing from 74 in 2020 to 80 last year. Again, nearly a 10 percent increase over the last three-plus years. I owe a lot of thanks to those across the office for these results. These aren’t my results. These are our results and for the many people who aren’t here with us today.

There are a lot more positive insights and progress from these surveys that I don’t have time to share. I wanted to give you some of the highlights in the update. We’re looking forward to seeing those scores trending up in this year’s surveys as well. But I think that suffices it to say that our T-shirt motto would probably be that the OAGBC is a place where people work hard and they have fun doing it.

One of our previous initiatives that has been very beneficial in contributing to our culture is our nature of work or hybrid policy that you’ve heard about in the past. Our renovation that you approved funding for will reinforce this flexible framework, as it provides the space for everyone to be able to come together, collaborate, communicate, connect with team members from across the office.

Finally, I would like to flag two key initiatives we have in progress related to culture. The first is one that speaks to our corporate value of commitment to creating and reinforcing diversity, inclusion and safety. Over the last year, a three-year EDI strategy has been developed, led by a small working group but involving extensive consultation with OAG staff across the office. This strategy will be launched in June.

The second initiative is one that addresses our corporate values of supporting each other to learn and develop to do our best work. We have formed a training and developing subcommittee of our expanded executive committee. This committee will establish a learning and developing framework that aligns with our strategic objectives to ensure that our employees acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to contribute effectively to the achievement of their work.

[2:30 p.m.]

If I were to summarize the culture at the Office of the Auditor General, I would say this is a place where we strive to do our best. We are focused on output and the work that we do. We believe in the value of our work. And we appreciate teamwork, diversity and inclusion and are continually learning and developing.

As I come up in August to the halfway point of my eight-year term — yes, I’m halfway through this summer — I note, as I look back, by the time August comes, it will be 40 reports to the B.C. Legislature over those four years. That’s pretty much ten a year of reports, which I think has been pretty incredible when you think we’ve gone through COVID and everything else that we’ve gone through.

We also believe in being responsive to the needs and requests put before us both as we review the landscape of work in the province and as work is directly requested of us. I should add that we were pleased to receive the direction from the Legislative Assembly to undertake the examination of the administration of grants by MNP. We take that as a vote of confidence, and we look forward to delivering on that work.

And with that I will conclude my remarks, I will note, five minutes ahead of schedule according to the clock.

M. Starchuk (Chair): A surplus of minutes. I like that: a surplus of minutes.

Michael, thank you very much for your attendance this afternoon, your report. And the OAG B.C. at-a-glance document—it’s very succinct and clear to what’s there.

At this point, open it to questions.

H. Yao: Thank you so much, Michael, for giving us five extra minutes to look for cookies.

I ask the same questions to all the commissioners because this is definitely something we’re trying to understand and appreciate. What kind of strategy and protocol…? We’re trying to ensure employees are working in an environment where they can feel safe and comfortable.

The first question is: if you have any staff member that works on your team, maybe somebody who’s working in the front, that says: “You know what. I’ve seen a huge amount of issues. I want to whistleblow.” How do they pass that whistleblow to you, in what way? Do you have a protocol or strategy to ensure that all staff members have a way to channel their potential concern in a confidential and respectful and private manner to the leadership within the team?

The second question right now. This was actually interesting because it was due to a conversation I had with another commissioner. For example, if somebody is complaining about you as direct commissioner, who can they speak to outside, externally? So that way we can protect the public interest to ensure that if any issue needs to be addressed, specifically not to you, but maybe in your position.

The third one. I know for the last few times you came to our committee asking for additional funding to support staff wages to make sure they’re competitive. Can you maybe give us a summary of how that is doing? Is that improving the staff retention as you anticipated? What kind of numbers can you share with us?

Those are my three questions.

M. Pickup: Sure. Why don’t I start with the final question, and then I’ll turn it to my colleague here, Marie, who can take the other two. And certainly, as I always say to Marie or to anybody else, if we want to take an opportunity to provide additional information or you want additional things sent in, I’m happy to send additional information as well. I think on the three of those, certainly, in terms of wrongdoing or suspected wrongdoing or any of those, Marie can walk through some of the procedures that we have in place.

Just to go to the third one that I want to hit on. We had significant changes in our wages. We had significant changes in funding here to be able to do these things. When our annual report comes out, we’ll be talking about things like the turnover rates and this kind of thing, but I’ll give you a little bit of a sense, okay.

The world’s always going to be challenging for accountants, I think, and the financial auditors, but the departure rates, I would suggest, have gone down, so not as signifi­cant as they used to be. We’ll lose a few people, but nothing like we were doing. The numbers will come through; I’m not avoiding the numbers, but I just kind of want to wait till the annual report goes through.

[2:35 p.m.]

One of the reflections of that, as you will see when we finish the year end, you’re going to see some big underspends for professional services. Why? Because we don’t have to go hire accountants on the street. Not that they’re on the street, but we don’t have to go hire accountants in firms at high rates because we’ve been keeping people. So the financial thing…. I don’t want to try and create this picture to think everything has been solved in the CPA world. It’s a challenging market. But for us, it is going much better.

I think critical audit support services: pretty good, a little bit of turnover, some retirements, but nothing super significant. The performance audit portfolio, which can in some ways be, as an accountant, I would say, one of the most challenging areas to learn…. Because people come into performance audit, and they might have a Ph.D., they might have a master’s. Highly educated people. And they’re not CPAs. So they haven’t learned audit in a financial firm. We essentially teach them audit with their skills.

If I look over the last 17 months, this is how many people have left that portfolio: zero. We haven’t had any turnover. Nobody has left the performance audit portfolio in a group of about 35-plus people. This really will make a difference for us in medium to long term. I’m halfway. I’m at the four years.

When I’m out of this job and somebody else is in this job, we’re really going to see the benefits, medium to long term, in the complexity of audits we’re doing and the amount of audits we’re doing. Because let’s face it, to teach somebody performance audit as a skill takes years. To get them to a point where they can lead on it takes even more years. So we are going to see that that benefit continue.

It’s kind of a long answer, and not necessarily all the numbers behind it, but those things will come. Like I said, you’ll see less professional fees, and you’ll see the turnover rates having improved.

Marie, on the other two questions, did you want to…?

M. Thelisma: Yeah, I’ll take those other two questions.

With reference to the wrongdoing or suspected wrongdoing question, we are lucky at the OAG. We have internal counsel that can guide us through any of those issues that may come up. That is not something that is common in every independent office, but we are lucky in ours that we do have that. Her experience has guided us through understanding, asking appropriate questions, meeting with the appropriate people, and also, as needed, relying on the B.C. Public Service Agency to ask for the questions when we need further guidance.

We also have, as you know, a strategic HR area. If a supervisor had any questions or any concerns, they can, confidentially of course, address their concerns to our HR area who will then deal with it, and if needed, will include our legal representation as needed through some of the questions. I hope I answered your question.

H. Yao: That wasn’t the answer. My apologies. I believe the Ombudsperson was explaining that if somebody has an issue with him as a commissioner, they go to the Auditor General for support. So I’m just wondering, for the Auditor General, if someone has an issue with the Auditor General, who do they go to for support?

M. Thelisma: Again, our legal counsel have that set up too. So if there was a complaint, they would come to our legal counsel, our in-house legal counsel, and she would be addressing that. We have external lawyers, too, that are contracted with us to deal with additional issues, a level of complexity, as we would say, as we go along.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Yeah. I have a question. I guess it’s more pointed at the supplemental budget that you brought forward. I believe in the last budget you talked about that there wouldn’t be the same revenue because the office space was not going to be done in time, that there was additional work that had to be performed back in December. I believe it was $100,000 for some fluorescent lighting that came forward, and now there’s a $250,000 ask to the committee.

I guess my question would be: what happened in the last five months that wasn’t foreseeable in December, and how is it foreseeable…? Whatever the date was, the 14th or something…. You’re definitely getting the knot on this one, 100 percent the knot on this one.

And John, if you don’t mind, for one of the new members, maybe talk about what the original budget was.

[2:40 p.m.]

I was a little bit shocked because I thought it was contractual. I thought the numbers were there. I thought I had recalled that we have this. It’s kind of locked up, and we’ve got a great deal. Now I don’t know what this percentage means over the overall budget, but it seems a little heavy.

J. McNeill: Yeah, it’s unfortunate.

First off, for the new members, the overall idea was that by reducing our footprint, we would be able to reduce the amount of net occupancy costs we would have, either through sharing a space with another public entity or subletting our space to a private entity. Since our lease goes until November 2034, there’ll be ten years of sublet that we’d be able to recover those funds for.

Based on the initial budget that was submitted in December 2021, we could go, I think, five or six years without a delay finding a tenant, and still break even on the cost. So the savings from the sublet or the shared space is quite large. That was the original thing. We were doing this not just for cultural reasons but also as a cost-saving measure.

Now, what happened with the extra $250,000 is, in a way, we’re still teasing out the details with RPD. They’re still trying to get to us the final cost as to whether this $250,000 is a rolled-forward underspend — so stuff that was just a timing issue — or if that is an actual cost. They’re still trying to figure things out.

In our submission, I cast it in the most conservative light, because I didn’t want to assume the best and say it’s a roll-forward when it wasn’t. I was hoping to have a response from our RPD today as to what the final cost was going to be in fiscal ’24, so that I could say with confidence: “Oh, it’s a roll-forward. This is just a timing issue” or “No, this is a net new $250,000 ask.” You’re right. It was a contractual issue, but between our architect and our project management company, there were some — what’s the best way to say it? — minor oversights.

It meant that we weren’t secure in some of the scope. It said that the scope was this in one part, and the scope was this in another. What that meant is that we, as the office, ended up being on the hook for that. It was an unexpected cost or realization.

Then the other side is that there was the contractual side of the project, the tenant improvements. There were also the furniture costs. That budget was submitted in 2021. I asked our experts: “It has been two years since this budget was approved, and we’re going to it now. Inflation has been what it has been over these two years. Are you sure we don’t need to ask for any more money related to some of these items?” Their answer was: “We don’t think so.” Based on their recommendation, we left the budget as is.

Some of the budget pressure has to do with inflation, particularly on the furniture items. As Michael was saying, we haven’t increased the scope. We still bought the same number of desks and chairs and whatnot. The only increase in scope was for the LED lights, which was that it’s the best time to do them rather than later. But there was some inflationary pressure that crept in after, when we went in January to select and purchase the furniture.

M. Pickup: Maybe if I can add, from my perspec­tive, I had all the same questions on an ongoing basis, right? In fairness to these folks, John on my left and Marie, I mean, they’re accountants. They’re not construction managers; they’re not project managers. Although they were managing this thing, we were very much relying on the real property division here, asking all the right questions, asking the questions of government.

[2:45 p.m.]

It’s the core of government that is, essentially, managing this for us — recognizing, I suppose, that to some extent, we’re probably pretty small in the whole capital construction business of government. It’s less than $2 million of how much government spends.

I just want to be fair to these folks, to say they’ve been asking all these things. They’ve been on them and asking the right things. I don’t feel it is the case of these folks not doing a really good job of trying to be prudent in trying to get all of this information. As of two hours ago, we’re still not sure if we’re going to even need this $250,000. It will depend. As much as you bug them, they have lots of other things on the go, and I guess we are one player.

Maybe I’ll leave it at that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay. I guess just to that point, I mean, the Finance Committee is kind of the wheelbarrow that this thing falls into. Then by hearing — I appreciate your candidness, John — how we got here, I’m going to ask the question: if the supplemental funding is not approved, what happens?

J. McNeill: That’s a great question. If the supplemental funding is not approved, we’ll have to pay, because we are required to, that money out of our existing capital budget for our IT equipment. This means we won’t be able to refresh any of the laptops in our fleet of laptops, and some people may not have a computer to work on — which, obviously, is difficult.

We do have a small $225,000 IT capital appropriation and, I think, $30,000 in furniture, just for bits and bobs that we usually carry every year. It would have to be absorbed in that, and then there would be no space for any other capital purchases in the year.

The real risk, especially, is on our fleet of laptops that…. For one of my staff, their laptop is having issues right now. The battery won’t charge. It’s just a three-year-old laptop. She does payroll. How is she going to be able to do payroll without a computer? That’s the challenge.

That’s where I was hoping that we would be able to say, with confidence, that this is a timing issue and we’re just rolling forward the unspent capital. As I said, the gears are still turning behind the scenes as to what the final number is for the cutoff on March 31, as well as on trying to understand and get a firm number on what could be remaining. As Michael said, the $250,000 is an estimate.

If I’d gone back in time and someone had told me, “Oh yeah, don’t worry about inflation,” I would have said: “Okay, well, we’re going to tell the committee we’re marking this project up by 20 percent to account for the two years of inflation, just to be safe, just so we don’t find ourselves in this situation.”

This certainly wasn’t our intent. We’ve tried to manage this project time-wise and financially as best we could. Obviously, it’s very difficult, personally, for me to bring this up to you, but we’re kind of in a bind.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Okay, and the last of the follow-up questions. I just want to make sure, when you were talking about the IT part of it, the $1.2 million, the money that was provided in the supplemental request in December for the IT modernization project — that that wouldn’t disturb that money that was already given.

J. McNeill: The fortunate thing is that all of that was delivered just in time for year-end. You can imagine my pain and suffering, as a CFO, as all these big-ticket capital items…. You know, it was March 15, and we were still wondering, waiting. They all came in, so that $1.2 million has been used.

The $225,000 that I’m talking about is more what has been allocated for like personal or office computer equipment. Mainly, it would be those laptops. If this weren’t approved, we’d have to dip into that, and then we might end up kind of…. We wouldn’t have enough.

R. Parmar: Michael and team, pleasure to meet you all. Thanks very much for being here and for your report and update as well. It’s very interesting, as someone who’s new to the committee, to hear some of the feedback with regard to the budget piece. That’s something that’s relatively new to me, and it’s always helpful to have some of that extra context.

[2:50 p.m.]

I want to go back…. Obviously, this committee has put a particular focus on workplace culture, as we have these conversations with folks like yourself. Kind of two areas that I’m hoping to jump in on with the time that I’ve got.

Firstly, for Michael or whoever…. A recruitment philosophy, with an EDI lens — what would you say is your recruitment philosophy?

M. Pickup: I could talk about this for a half-hour, but I will work to keep it short.

I think recruitment has two aspects. It’s recruiting the people you already have. Some people will say retain, but I think you want to recruit the ones you have to keep those folks. A lot of what we’ve been talking about here is really about keeping those folks as well.

Our recruitment. When I first arrived, we had an audi­tor position. We were lucky if we got 15 applicants. Today we might get 300 to 400. Recruitment-wise, we’re not having an issue, and it’s because of the work that so many people are doing.

It all goes together. We’re recruiting by doing things like seeing our scores go up on our workplace surveys. We’re recruiting by being a leader in our workplace, the environment we have, the hybrid working we have, the space we have. All of these things go together.

I would suggest that our executive team, from an equity, diversity and inclusion perspective, is probably the most diverse team in British Columbia, if you look at the executive group that is running this office. That has been a significant change during my four years as well. We are seeing the benefits and the impacts of that on recruitment.

I think it’s work we all do. I think it’s where I spend a fair amount of time. It’s not called recruitment, but it’s recruitment. It’s through our communications team, which reports to Marie, the social media presence that we have, the work that we’re doing. It’s me speaking at national conferences and conventions and being sought out to do this thing.

All of that is recruitment. It’s just, in many ways, cheaper recruitment. It takes a lot of time, including my time.

I think we’re fortunate now to be in the position…. Likewise, it’s not just junior people and auditors. I think of as we recruit for an assistant Auditor General. We had Marie join us from the outside. We recently hired a principle from an accounting firm, which is probably a senior manager, one level below partner. At one time, it would be very difficult to get people at that level. We had Carlos join us as the CIO, from outside.

I think we’re fortunate, but it’s not luck. It’s been a lot of hard work.

J. McNeill: On the other example, me sitting here, as the CFO…. I started in the office as an auditor. So in terms of the mix of recruiting externally and internally….

M. Pickup: That’s the short answer.

R. Parmar: Thanks very much.

I appreciate your comment around the term “recruitment” rather than retention as well. I really resonate with your thoughts on that.

You touched on it in your time in this role. You’re nearing, I think you said, 40 reports. It sounds like a lot of work in terms of what you and the team are doing. Obviously, a lot of work comes with stress.

I’m curious. For you as a leader and for the executive team before you…. How do you manage the stress and the workload amongst yourselves as a team but broadly throughout the organization?

M. Pickup: Again, I’m going to give you the shortened version of this.

Stress comes with things related to mental health. I think it comes to equity, diversity and inclusion. It comes to creating safe spaces.

I don’t believe there’s any such thing anymore as work-life balance. I think we can’t separate those two. I think we’re looking for a balance in approach and never mind the separation. It all impacts the other.

I’ll give you an example of some of the things that we’ve done. For our leadership group, that top 15 percent of the leadership group…. Very early in my days here, we all went off-site and got certified from the Canadian Mental Health Association in mental health first aid. Two full days, all of us together, off-site doing this. Those kinds of things help with stress.

[2:55 p.m.]

We’re watching typical metrics on things like overtime, how much people are working, the surveys, the results, the touch-base through the executive team with the folks down. I think all of that is working well. There has been a fair bit of stress at the executive level, obviously. If you look at the people who are in the positions at the executive table, in the positions they’re in today, none of them were in those positions when I started four years ago. I’ve pretty much flipped the place upside down, in terms of the change. It is something we watch.

There are a lot of indicators in those workplace surveys. I think that helps. Our EDI strategy, I think, helps as well — and I think, just generally being connected to people. That’s the short answer, but if you want me to touch on more of it in any part, I’m happy to.

R. Parmar: Thanks very much for your time.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Michael, thanks for the presentation. I have to echo the Chair’s concern on the $250,000, especially when you know it wasn’t too long ago that the office came to the committee and asked for $100,000 for other office redesigns, the fluorescent lights.

It strikes me as odd that auditors and accountants wouldn’t understand inflationary pressures on something that might have been purchased, or was thought to be purchased, back in 2021. It’s probably more of a comment than anything, but one of the questions I have is on the office space. There’s no office lease revenues right now built into the budget. Is that what I’m understanding, or is that to come?

J. McNeill: Yeah, there’s no office savings built into the budget right now. We’re still carrying the full occupancy costs. Then, depending on the nature of the relationship with whom we lease, whether it’s a public entity or a private one, that’ll determine whether we do a cost-sharing relationship or a sublet. Cost-sharing would probably just be a net reduction in expenses, but a sublet would be where we would show revenue related to the occupancy costs, which then, indirectly, would offset the cost of the occupancy.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Just to follow up, so if it’s a sublet, depending on the relationship of a lease, it could be a reduction in expenses, or it could be a surplus in reve­nue. Is that it? Okay, thank you.

H. Yao: Forgive me; I was listening to the conversation, John. You were mentioning, obviously, the $250,000 to buy laptops for staff. In the example you were giving, there’s somebody doing payroll with a three-year-old computer that needs to be replaced. Is that what I’m hearing? I want to make sure I heard it correctly.

J. McNeill: The issue is…. The Chair asked what would happen if that $250,000 wasn’t approved. Whatever the final amount ends up being — something under $250,000; we’re working to finalize the cost — that money will need to be absorbed by our existing capital budget, which is for our personal laptops. Our IT budget would need to absorb that, which would mean that we would struggle to replace laptops for our staff.

I used the payroll person because that’s someone who is on my team and who, I know, currently is having issues with the functionality of their computer, which will be needing a replacement. I’m just providing a real example as to what might happen if we can’t provide them with a new laptop because we used all of that capital budget to meet our financial commitments related to the LWS project.

H. Yao: Okay, so bear with me. From what I heard…. Again, maybe there’s something I misunderstood on my end, so I apologize. I thought I heard that saying one reason why you want to replace all the laptops is that one of the laptops is a three-year-old laptop used by payroll, and your payroll needs a new laptop.

I guess my question went up because I think all the MLAs are using four-year-old laptops.

J. McNeill: Well, I don’t know how old it is. However old it is, it’s starting to break down. I just say three years because that’s the average useful life, in accountant-speak, for laptops. It could be older than that. I don’t know how old it is, but I do know that it’s breaking down.

[3:00 p.m.]

C. Caraveo: I can add a little bit to that. We have a process to refresh all fleets of laptops in the office. You’re right; there are laptops that are right now seven years old. We are trying to replace as much as we can as we move forward.

This year we wanted to start actually taking some of that money that is in my current IT budget to replace the fleet before those computers start failing. It’s just a more proactive way of doing it. Unfortunately, if this money’s not available to replace those laptops, then we might be in a position of risk of, as John was saying, some positions being affected by not having the adequate equipment. I think that’s it.

M. Pickup: If I could just park, because we’re not through the financial statement audit yet…. We will be returning more money than we’re asking for. Under the operating…. It’s not called capital. If we had reprofiling here, and we could just reprofile from operating to capital, it wouldn’t be an issue. We’re going to underspend by more than that on operating, just to give you a little bit of sense on that.

In many ways, operating is something we have more control over. This capital stuff…. Again, we’re on the tail end of this in many ways. The real property division of government are the ones who are managing this.

We make a fuss. We ask the questions we should ask. But we’re pretty small on the whole context of the real property division of the government of B.C.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): Another comment was…. You said there were going to be some cost savings on professional services, I believe. That hasn’t been realized yet. You won’t know that until your financial year-end. Is there a ballpark?

M. Pickup: Yes. It’s big.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): It’s big.

M. Pickup: It’s going to be multiples times the $250,000 that we’re asking for. I’m conservative. I’m an accountant, right? We’re not through the audit yet. We get subject to audit just like everybody else. It will be multiple times the $250,000. I’m comfortable saying more than two.

T. Shypitka (Deputy Chair): That’s good. Thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Coralee, did you have anything from your neck of the woods? It looks very warm there, wherever it is. No? Okay. All good.

To Michael and to Carlos, I remember that back in December, there was this kind of panicked look over there. I’m glad to see it’s not there any longer. I’m glad that part has taken place.

Michael, to you and your staff that have taken their time out of the afternoon: thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you very much for your patience with our questions.

On that note, we’re going to call a brief 15-minute recess.

The committee recessed from 3:03 p.m. to 3:25 p.m.

[M. Starchuk in the chair.]

M. Starchuk (Chair): I will now call the committee back to order and welcome the Conflict of Interest Commissioner, Victoria Gray, to our humble abode for the last presentation of the day.

Because we have a new face at the table, we’ll just start off with introductions, and we’ll start with the deputy.

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

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

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

R. Parmar: Hi. Ravi Parmar, Langford–Juan de Fuca.

M. Starchuk (Chair): And online….

C. Oakes: Good afternoon. Coralee Oakes, MLA, Cariboo North.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I am the Chair, Mike Starchuk, from Surrey-Cloverdale.

Victoria, you have 15 minutes for your presentation, followed by up to 30 minutes for committee questions.

The floor is now yours.

Financial and Operational Updates
from Statutory Officers

OFFICE OF THE CONFLICT
OF INTEREST COMMISSIONER

V. Gray: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, Mr. Deputy Chair, members of the committee.

With me is Carol Hoyer, who is my office’s executive coordinator.

Thank you for this opportunity to address the committee about the work of the Office of the Conflict of Interest Commissioner. I know we’re the last group. You’ve been busy from early this morning and last night, so I hope I can grab your attention and be fascinating.

I’d like to provide an operational and financial update by addressing these four topics: first, our new premises and their impact on our budget; second, our 2023 financial performance; third, our work; and lastly, our workplace culture. Some of this information, including most of the financial information, is in the two-page document we provided in advance. I wasn’t going to follow the document. I was going to speak on these four topics that I’ve stated.

First, our new premises. We moved earlier this month from our heritage building at 421 Menzies Street on the legislative precinct to a portion of the sixth floor of 947 Fort Street, which is between Vancouver and Cook streets. The new premises are about a 15-minute walk or a five-minute drive from the legislative precinct.

The old building had charm and lots of space, and it was handy for members to visit. We will miss that, although MLA Chant has just told me that it’s also very much at risk of collapse and bricks falling on people inhabiting it. So maybe we’re dodging a bullet or a brick. The old premises were always too hot or too cold, so we’re happy to be moving to a modern building which we hope will have better temperature control.

My rough estimate was that the old premises were about 2,500 square feet, and they included a kitchen, washrooms, boardroom and a spacious reception area. Our new premises are about 747 square feet, not including a shared kitchen, shared washrooms, shared boardroom and shared reception area.

We would have preferred to find premises closer to the legislative precinct, but we only needed a small space, and most landlords were not interested in providing space for an office our size. Our contact with members has increasingly been by email, telephone and virtual meetings, so we think the new location is workable.

The other occupants of the building, you will know, include several other statutory officers, being the Information and Privacy Commissioner and registrar of lobbyists, the Merit Commissioner and the Ombudsperson. Previously, it also housed the office of the Police Complaint Commissioner.

My staff did a tremendous job of preparing for our move, reducing our space needs through significant reduction in our physical files. This was accomplished through storing some information electronically and shredding a lot of old files that were no longer required. We were also able to complete the move within our predicted budget.

[3:30 p.m.]

Our ’24-25 budget, approved from our last appearance before this committee, estimated $72,000 for annual rent. Our subtenancy agreement in the new premises is effec­tively $70,000, consisting of $50,000 for base rent and $20,000 for the services shared with the other statutory officers occupying the building.

We upgraded our computers in connection with the move. They were reaching the end of their useful life, and we wanted the new premises to suit up-to-date technology.

Our new premises were previously used by the office of the registrar of lobbyists. They left behind desks and filing cabinets, so we have not been required to purchase much in the way of furniture or the like.

As a result, our capital expenditures are primarily technology related and total about $20,000. That’s within our capital budget.

Our cost of the physical move was minimal owing to the significant downsizing. We had anticipated moving costs of $15,000, but in fact, the cost for the movers was only $500. We didn’t move much.

Second, our 2023 financial performance. As stated in the document provided in advance of the meeting, our actual expenses for 2023-2024 were under budget. The approved budget for that year was $786,000. The finance department gave us figures very recently. I think within the last 14 days. Our actual expenditures were $694,000. It’s under budget by about $92,000, being about 12 percent. As in the previous few years, the difference is largely accounted for in the reduction in travel expenses and the fact that there were no major investigations or inquiries requiring contracts for external services.

Third, our work. The work of our office can be grouped into three main categories. First, assisting members to comply with their obligation to make financial disclosures. Second, providing confidential opinions to members. Third, responding to complaints against members.

Assisting members to comply with their financial obli­gations includes processing the annual financial disclosures and the periodic required notices of material change for each of the 87 members of the Legislative Assembly. Some members have straightforward financial affairs, and some can be very complex, such as members who have active stock trading portfolios. This work is continuing as usual. Typically, it’s more time-consuming with new members and more routine with continuing members.

I meet with members annually and complete the financial disclosure documentation as well as try to address any other issues that may be of concern to the members. So far this year, I’ve met with 76 members. I have 11 meetings to follow before we complete the financial documentation.

Providing members with confidential opinions is ongoing work. It ranges from straightforward questions to more complex questions. Again, it’s typically more time-consuming with new members as they learn how to comply with their obligations in their particular situation.

We’ve received 28 inquiries so far this year, which is on track to be slightly fewer than last year. However, we typically receive a lot of requests for advice around the end of the calendar year. So we could end up with numbers similar to last year. This may be affected by the timing of the election and inquiries from new members.

This year…. I don’t remember this happening previously. We’ve also been receiving inquiries from individuals who are not presently members but are considering standing for election. They’re asking us about obligations under the conflict-of-interest act, including arranging their finan­cial affairs.

There have been complaints made to our office against members. So far, none have required a full inquiry or investigation.

Finally, I turn to our workplace culture. As you know, we are a small office. I work on a 75 percent part-time basis. Our administrative assistant works on a 60 percent part-time basis. Our executive coordinator, Carol, and our legal officer both work on a full-time basis.

I would characterize our culture as friendly and cooperative. One demonstration of this is the cooperative way we organize scheduling so that almost always either the administrative assistant or executive coordinator is available and either I or the legal officer is available.

[3:35 p.m.]

Sometimes issues arise that require my attention. Staff have always been able to contact me promptly when I’ve been on holiday. I have responded when travelling, including from Germany and California.

Despite our excellent workplace culture, we all agree that it would be appropriate to have a formal respectful workplace policy. We’re working towards having a formal policy, but we have not achieved that yet. I hope to do that in the next several months.

To summarize one aspect of my comments, I do not anticipate any changes to our budget.

That concludes my operational and financial update. I invite questions either for me or Carol.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you, Victoria, for leaving us with a surplus of minutes and a balanced budget, the two things this committee appreciates greatly.

H. Yao: First of all, thank you so much, Victoria. You have always been available, and your office is great at getting back to me.

On behalf of our members, we appreciate the great services. Just to hear your presentation…. We felt like we would love to hear your great work amplified elsewhere in…. We won’t name whom. Just a joke.

I have three questions. This is a question I’ve been asking every commissioner. We’ve been sort of going through the workplace, workplace health. How do the staff get to file a complaint? Obviously, due to the size of your office, it might be unnecessary, but I’m going to ask anyway.

If one of your office staff members feels like they need to whistleblow because someone else is doing something they don’t think is appropriate…. What kind of protocol does your office expect to follow? If somebody has to say: “I don’t like the way the commissioner did a certain thing….” It may be crossing a line. They want to file a complaint, but obviously, you are the leadership within the organization.

Do you have an external commissioner who you buddy up…? If your staff want to talk to somebody, they talk to another commissioner. That way, they can sort of have a third party address the issue.

My last question is: as a commissioner of conflict of interest, do you see this kind of commissioner-to-commissioner buddying up to, potentially, be an arm’s-length support? It seems like a common system that many other commissioners practise. So we’d love to hear your feedback on that.

V. Gray: Do you mean other jurisdictions?

H. Yao: Basically, we had multiple commissioners today and yesterday doing presentations. A lot of them were….

V. Gray: B.C. statutory commissioners.

H. Yao: Yeah, B.C. statutory commissioners. They have been informing us…. If one of the staff members has a concern about a commissioner’s behaviour, then typically, they have a second commissioner, like an ombudsperson, and they can report you. That ombudsperson can inves­tigate the commissioner, as needed.

Do you think that kind of setup is useful and beneficial, or do you have a different recommendation? I would like to put it out there and hear your feedback.

V. Gray: Okay. Well, first, with respect to the protocol for a whistleblower, we review that every six months, even though it’s the same four of us.

H. Yao: I’m sorry. This is a question I ask everybody. So I do apologize. I think it might not apply to you guys.

V. Gray: The protocol is…. If the concern is with respect to anybody but me, they go to our legal officer, Alyne. If the concern is about me, yes, they go to the Ombudsperson.

We have reviewed that. That’s, I think…. I can’t remember the name of the legislation, but there’s something about that. So when you said if there’s a complaint against me…. Would it go externally? Yes, it would go to the Ombuds­person.

Again, is it useful to go commissioner to commissioner? I was content with the Ombudsperson. It would be…. Yeah. For us, that seems to work.

Now, having said that, we’re looking at a respectful workplace policy, and it may be that we can join the Legislative Assembly’s use of the independent respectful workplace office, the IRWO. I’m looking into that. I think that for us to join into that, it would require a decision of the Legislative Assembly Management Committee. I don’t know if they would want to charge us a fee. I’m looking into that.

[3:40 p.m.]

They have a policy, which I have read. So has our legal officer, Alyne. We were interested in that, but they would like to have our own policy as well as the legislative policy. I’m just trying to work out how those two things would go together.

Really, one of the things on my agenda for the next couple of months is to try to come up with something. I thought the one for the Legislature was very good, and I’d like to find a way that is simple and straightforward. I’m not crazy about the fact that it may have to be two policies, but if that’s the case, then we’ll do it that way.

I hope that answers your question.

H. Yao: That’s great. Thank you.

C. Oakes: Thank you very much. Maybe just a comment. I’m glad that the move went well. I know that it was certainly stressful, wondering where an appropriate location…. I think, though, it’s a good synergy with the location where you’re at. As a smaller office, I think it is nice to have some other additional officers for support.

I just wanted to offer that and to thank your team for all the work that you’re doing. And interesting…. Also, I think it’s important for us, as a team, to understand that new candidates are reaching out. I think that’s really important as well. Thank you for providing us with that information.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I actually have a question here. With regard to your report, you’re talking about the savings accounted for with travel and the reduction in travel. I’m trying to recall what kind of a travel schedule you had prior to the pandemic. When we define what the new normal is, what kind of travel would be coming forward?

V. Gray: The main travel has been to the annual conferences of the Canadian Conflict of Interest Network. I went to the one in Yellowknife about a year and a half ago. It had my counterparts from all the provinces, the territories, the House of Commons, the Senate. There are important differences in the legislation, but there are also a lot of similarities in the challenges. I found it actually quite fascinating to attend that meeting in Yellowknife.

In the past, some staff have also attended these. They weren’t able to go to Yellowknife. This past year it was to be in Halifax, and I unfortunately was on holiday in Germany, got COVID and wasn’t able to travel. So I had to abandon my trip to Halifax, which was sad — both to miss all the meetings and because I’ve never been to Halifax and was looking forward to seeing that. Again, none of the other staff were able to go.

This year it’s scheduled for Quebec City. I’m still hoping to go, and I think at least one of the others will be able to go. I think they’ve similarly found it helpful in the past. We are scheduled to be hosting the one after Quebec City, so we’ll also have to look at it from the perspective of hosting the next one. It’s our turn. It has been something like 11 or 12 years since British Columbia hosted. It’s certainly our turn. As I said, it is quite interesting to see the common issues but also the comparisons.

I have to say that I think B.C. looks pretty good in terms of how the MLAs are doing in the conflict-of-interest world. In some of the decisions that my counterparts have had to make, I’m quite appalled at some of the conduct of the people under their charge — for example, Senator Meredith’s relationship with a constituent who was 17 years old and his toxic workplace. He was the subject of two hearings.

Anyway, that’s the primary component. Some years there has also been attendance at the COGEL conference. I can’t remember what that stands for. It might come to me.

[3:45 p.m.]

Before my appointment…. I live in the Victoria area, but I think that before pandemic, before the use of virtual meetings…. For example, the interim commissioner, Lynn Smith, lived in Vancouver, but she had a lot of meetings with MLAs around the time of the UBCM, the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention, because she was able to find a lot of MLAs handy at that point. So there were some travel expenses for staff to go with her and help out.

I think I’ve been a bit long-winded.

Our travel expenses are primarily conferences and, in the past, I’ve been meeting with members, but now I’m doing those virtually. That was a result of the pandemic, of course. I don’t think there’d been a single virtual meeting before the pandemic. The pandemic hit after I had met with at least a dozen, I think, people. Then the pandemic hit, and we came up with a way to do it virtually.

I think it’s pretty successful when it’s a one-on-one situation. I think it’s more difficult when you have multiple people on these virtual calls. I think members appreciate being able to be in their constituencies and find a convenient time for a meeting, rather than always having them here in Victoria.

M. Starchuk (Chair): Thank you.

Susie.

S. Chant: My question was asked and answered.

I was interested in the conference that’s coming here, and you’ve spoken to it, so thank you.

M. Starchuk (Chair): I do have one. I was just curious. In relationship to the staff that you have here in British Columbia, in ratios into the amount of MLAs that are accessing your office, how does that sit with other jurisdictions, other provinces?

V. Gray: I don’t know the answer to that.

It is hard to compare because, for example, in Ontario they also are responsible for all the travel expenses of everybody.

In the federal jurisdiction, they do financial disclosure, not just for the MPs but also for senior bureaucrats, which can include diplomats in Germany or wherever.

In Ontario, I know they have dozens. I think they have like 40 staff.

But I don’t know the answer to that.

M. Starchuk (Chair): It was just one of those inquiring-mind moments that I have.

Is there anybody else? All right.

Well, Victoria, thank you and Carol for taking the time out of your afternoon on a Friday to see us and provide us with your insight and your budget.

We will call it a day.

I do believe we have a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 3:48 p.m.