The committee met at 8:31 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Deliberations

Paul Choi (Chair): Good morning. Let’s begin.

Okay. I guess we have to say this on the record.

My name is Paul Choi. I’m the MLA for Burnaby South–Metrotown and Chair of Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, a committee of the Legislative Assembly that includes MLAs from government.

I’d 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 people now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

The purpose of today’s meeting is to consider supplementary funding requests from statutory offices for fiscal year 2025-26. We’re going to begin with in-camera deliberation before hearing from our first statutory offices.

I need a member to move a motion to meet in camera.

Motion approved.

[9:00 a.m.]

The committee continued in camera from 8:32 a.m. to 8:58 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Welcome.

All righty. The first statutory officer that we’ll be hearing from today is Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth, Representative for Children and Youth. You have 25 minutes for your presentation, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. We do have a timer on the screen today to help us stay on schedule.

So now I’ll turn it over to you, if you would like to introduce your staff and begin your presentation. Thank you.

Supplementary Funding Requests

Office of the Representative
for Children and Youth

Jennifer Charlesworth: Thank you very much, Chair, and good morning to all of you, and welcome back.

I’d like to begin in a good way by acknowledging these incredible territories that we live on, the lək̓ʷəŋən people’s territories, a place to smoke herring, and the SXIMEȽEȽ and Songhees Nations. It’s on days like this that I am incredibly grateful that I get to be able to do my work — and I have raised my family — in these beautiful lands. With gratitude also to the W̱SÁNEĆ people, who have very strong ties to lək̓ʷəŋən folks.

I also want to thank you for the opportunity to, once again, come before you, and I’d like to introduce my colleagues. Pippa Rowcliffe is one of the deputy representatives responsible for, among other things, corporate services. John McNeill is our CFO and the executive director of corporate services.

Samantha is not able to join us today, because she is heading up to Port Alberni. We’re doing a three days’ worth of work there with that community, and I will be joining them after this.

My intentions for our time together are threefold: to present our ‘24-25 expenditures and how we’ve used the supplementary funding that was provided by the previous iteration of this committee, to present my supplementary budget request for the ‘25-26 fiscal year and the rationale for this request and to provide a glimpse into the work that will be unfolding this fiscal year and some key areas for development in the RCY to foreshadow what may be coming before you in the fall in terms of our regular budget request.

Going to ‘24-25, our budget that we’ve worked with was approved by the committee in December of 2023. As we’ve reported to you in the documents that we’ve distributed, we fully used that budget allocation. Supplementary requests were approved by the committee for $100,000 in spring of ‘24 and $380,000 in spring and summer of 2024. That was to enable us, primarily, to complete the work on a very fulsome child-death investigation and a systemic review of the child welfare system in British Columbia.

When we prepared the budget documents for you a month ago, we anticipated using $160,000 of those supplementary funds and releasing $320,000 to general revenue. In fact, we’ve only used $87,000 of the supplementary funding, and we’ll be releasing approximately $393,000 back to general revenue. While we didn’t use the full amount, we really appreciate the flexibility. Knowing that that supplementary funding was available enabled us to do the work that was necessary for Don’t Look Away and No Time to Wait and another report on disability services.

I’m pleased to say that because we had that flexibility and that support and that assurance that we were going to be okay fiscally, we were able to produce something that I think is very groundbreaking in the country actually. The reports have been well received and impactful. The government has accepted all of our recommendations.

Just to let you know that we when we came and asked for that supplementary funding, we didn’t do it sort of in a cavalier way. We just knew that we were going to be facing a very significant challenge. At the same time, I’m an ex-non-profit executive director, so I am very fiscally prudent. We tried to manage our expenditures in other areas so that we were able to not fully utilize the supplementary funding. That was my commitment, to try and save where we could, while still ensuring that we did a fulsome job on the reviews.

That’s ‘24-25.

Moving into ‘25-26 and our supplementary funding request, we recognize that the province and, indeed, the country is in a very uncertain and precarious time and that fiscal prudence is the order of the day.

[9:05 a.m.]

I can assure you that we’ve done a tremendous amount to achieve peak efficiency and effectiveness in our work and in our budget management. So we have a very modest request to you of about a 3.2 percent increase. We had anticipated bringing in a larger request, but we scaled that back because

effectiveness in our work and in our budget management. We have a very modest request to you of about 3.2 percent increase. We had anticipated bringing in a larger request, but we scaled that back because we felt that we would focus very much on what’s critical and essential.

We are requesting $405,000 in supplementary funding. This request comprises $52,000 to address a shortfall resulting from a discrepancy between the estimated and final direction related to the ‘24-25 wage increase and $113,000 in funding to accommodate the ‘25-26 cost of the officer’s salary that was set out in the Judicial Compensation Committee’s determination and, legislatively, a number of the IOLAs’ salaries are tied into the judicial compensation package. So we, again, had no choice in that. That’s to address those shortfalls.

But we’re also requesting $240,000 to increase direct service resourcing. That’s in two areas: for advocacy, and reviews and investigations. I’ll speak a little bit more about why that’s necessary. These amounts are recurring. However, since this is a supplemental request only, our out-year requirements, we’ll bring forward to you in the fall. And if we’re able to recruit these individuals with supplementary funding, then we’ll bring that forward as a regular ask.

Basically, this translates to two full-time equivalent positions, one an advocate and another an investigations analyst. Just to put this in context, in the Ministry of Children and Family Development and the Ministry of Health, there are, of course, reductions or freezes in hiring, but not in the direct service areas that are essential. And so I equate our request to those requests that are coming forward, where there are direct service implications, where there’s an impact on child and youth well-being.

We are, as I say, well aware of the challenges, but I feel like this is an essential requirement. The reason for that is that we are experiencing consistent increases in demand for services, particularly advocacy and reports of critical injuries and deaths. We also anticipate that families will be facing increasing economic hardship and challenges as we go forward, and we know the cycle that those kinds of economic downturns have and the impact that they have on families. We also feel it’s essential for us to maintain the full suite of services that we have in order to fulfill our responsibilities under Don’t Look Away and to assist the whole system to transform itself to be much better for children and families.

I’ll get into more specifics in a moment, but I just want to acknowledge the guidance that the select standing committee has provided with respect to inflationary increases, the assumption of about 3 percent. Of course, inflation has had an impact on our office, particularly in the area of certain expenses, travel, etc. But we are not making requests to you to have an additional sum to address those inflationary pressures. We feel that — this is the responsibility of my colleagues here — we can manage those pressures for STOBs 57, 60, 63 and 77 through cost reductions, and we’ve already begun that process for this fiscal year.

To give you a little bit more detail with respect to our ask for the FTEs, you will have seen in material that we provided to you two charts — one that speaks to advocacy and the increase in advocacy, workload and caseload. And let me just take a moment there. Caseload is basically the number of cases that come in. If caseloads go up 10 percent, then, you know, we’ve got a 10 percent increase in the numbers.

Workload is another measure that I think is really important for us, because workload speaks to, for every one of those cases, what are the kinds of expectations in order to fulfill our responsibility to them. We’re seeing an increase in both for advocacy services. For example, we had an increase from 1,662 advocacy cases to 1,940 between 2023 and ‘24-25. That’s a 16.7 percent increase.

[9:10 a.m.]

What we do when we receive a request is we essentially triage it. We take a look and say: “What can be addressed very quickly through providing some information, a timely referral, guidance around self-advocacy

2023 and ’24-25, so that’s a 16.7 percent increase.

What we do when we receive a request is that we essentially triage it. We take a look and say: “What can be addressed very quickly through providing some information, a timely referral, guidance around self-advocacy, suggestions about how they might approach things, a little bit of role-playing?”

And then there are those that we can’t address satisfactorily there. Therefore, it comes to what we call a case-carrying advocate, and they spend a significant amount more time in order to fully understand the dynamics, what’s going on, reach out to any number of people. Sometimes we find that we are the ones that are connecting the dots between services — sometimes six, seven or eight different service providers that our advocates will contact in order to try to find a resolution for that family.

We do triage very effectively, but the workload associated with our cases is increasing. The complexity is increasing. It means that what we might have been able to address in two months takes us four months. What we might have been able to address with 20 hours takes us 40 or 50 hours. So that’s the important consideration there. Both caseload and workload is going up.

Workload I often think of as the complexity of the cases. So why is that? Complex needs. I’m sure that in your constituency offices…. In fact, we’ve had some important, really vital conversations about what’s happening for families, particularly families with kids with disabilities. We have to, obviously, work across multiple ministries and the education sector, health authorities, etc.

We also are finding that because of the workforce shortages and the skill shortages in our sector, people are not choosing to work in our sector. It means that we don’t have the kind of levels of skills and capacities in some of the services in order to be able to meet the needs, as well.

If you’ve got a combination of mental health and substance use, our systems are not very good at addressing that kind of complexity. Our advocates have to get in in order to be more creative and persistent to make sure that young people get what they need.

The other factor that’s contributing to that complexity is that the staffing in MCFD and the Indigenous child and family service agencies is strained. We’ve addressed that in several reports, No Time to Wait, Part One and Part Two. The Ministry of Children and Family Development is trying to respond to that, but nonetheless, it means that their staff are not able to do some of their work or their due diligence. Sometimes we have to step in to encourage and facilitate that case planning that perhaps isn’t happening.

I also want to say, before I move on to reviews and investigations, that this team has taken a very deep dive into their practices and their procedures. They’ve modified many things. They’ve tried to find those efficiencies. We’re at the point where there’s no more elasticity in the system in order to meet the needs of young people.

And we have some important commitments that we make in terms of, especially, young people, ensuring that they speak to a live person within 24 hours — and for family members who reach out, that they are able to speak to a live person, an advocate, within three days. So we don’t want to compromise that.

Now, turning over to reviews and investigations to give you some context there, we are driven by what’s called “reportable circumstances.” These are reports that come in from injuries and deaths associated with children who were in care or who were receiving government services for mental health, addictions or child welfare services.

That number has been increasing steadily over my entire term. To give you a sense, when I started, I was reviewing about 80 a month. Now we get about 660 a month. This last month, we had 660 files that we needed to review. That’s a staggering increase. And of course, these are when things have happened to children, and they need someone to be taking a look at what’s going on.

There are three key reasons for that. In some cases, we need to help now. We need to intervene. We will receive reports or multiple reports concerning a child, and so we will reach back into the system and say: “We are very concerned about what’s happening. Are you on it?”

The other thing is that you start to see patterns and trends. When you have thousands of cases that you’re reviewing, thousands of stories that you see every year — 6,800 last year — then you start to see patterns and trends.

[9:15 a.m.]

That’s a really important thing, because when we start to see patterns and trends, we can start to work upstream and say, “Oh, okay. We’re seeing increases, for example, in certain areas” — much as we’re going up to Port Alberni. We’re very concerned about what’s happening there. There are a few hotspots like that.

So we see patterns and trends by geography. We see patterns and trends by the type of need of a child. Or we see patterns and trends that are associated

and say, “Oh, okay. We’re seeing increases, for example, in certain areas”— much as we’re going up to Port Alberni. We’re very concerned about what’s happening there. There are a few hotspots like that.

We see patterns and trends by geography, we see patterns and trends by the type of need of a child, or we see patterns and trends that are associated with the lack of services. So, we can get ahead of that and help the system understand things.

And then it also leads to us undertaking investigations or reviews so that we can begin to understand what the system is doing or not doing that’s creating poor outcomes for kids. So that’s critical.

We’ve also provided in your background materials some indication over what’s happened with respect to the injuries and reviews over the last three fiscal years so that you can see that steady increase. Essentially, it’s a 42 percent increase over the last three years. During this time, the staffing for reviews and investigations has only increased by one FTE, and that’s for an investigative analyst. Again, this team is remarkable. They are an incredible group of folks, and they have taken a look at all the different ways that they can manage effectively within the resources that we have, and we just simply don’t have any more elasticity there either.

The other thing that you should note is that in our legislation, there is a requirement that the health authorities would report to us, not just Children and Families at the Indigenous child and family service agencies. Surprisingly, the health authorities have not responded over many years. When I began, my predecessor had tried to get moving on the health authorities. It’s taken my whole term thus far, but they are starting to report, starting with Northern Health. So, we’re expecting all of the health authorities to come on and that will increase the number of reportables that we receive specifically for mental health and substance use–related injuries.

We don’t know what the numbers are going to look like yet, so we’re not building that into our ask; we’re just asking you for supplementary funds to address what we have right now and then we will see what the impact of the health authority reporting is, and we’ll come back accordingly.

The other thing I just wanted to say is that we have three mandated functions. We can’t not deliver individual advocacy, reviews and investigations, or systemic advocacy and monitoring. It’s a requirement. So, if we don’t get the supports, then, of course, we’re going to have to re-examine everything that we’re doing and try to figure out, you know, what can we do less of, in essence, while still fulfilling our statutory mandate.

We could redeploy staff, but it will mean that in some areas we have to let go of certain projects or certain initiatives that are underway. We could increase the response time and put people on wait lists, etc. But if you can imagine yourself as a parent or as a family member reaching out, or as a young person who’s on the on the precipice of houselessness or homelessness, they need help right now, so us saying that we’ll get back to you in two weeks is just not acceptable.

Where we could reduce the thoroughness of our work is with respect with reviews and investigations, which, again, means that we would be less able to identify those concerning trends and patterns, and help the system improve itself.

The other thing that I want to say is that we very committed to the well-being of our staff. This is really hard work. You’re dealing with the worst of the worst of the worst in terms of what’s happening to young people and their families. We do need to also be looking out for the well-being of our staff and ensuring that we are managing the workload in such a way that they can take a deep breath every so often, they can reach out for supports if need be, and they can feel good about their work because they can see outcomes, positive outcomes for families.

And that’s a very tricky thing in light of what we’re dealing with right now with the toxic drug crisis, with the mental health acuity and concerns, with the lack of resources that we can even refer to, and with those workforce and skills shortages.

So, I will leave that with you in terms of those two specific asks and why it’s so important to us. The other thing I wanted to say is that there are some things on the horizon that I wanted you to be aware of.

[9:20 a.m.]

One is that there have been legislative amendments federally and provincially — new legislation, federally and legislative amendments here in the province — that enable First Nations to resume jurisdiction or become more self-determining with respect to child welfare.

On the one hand, as they do that, that will mean that we won’t have a mandated, statutory role because they will no longer be bound by the Child, Family and Community Service Act.

jurisdiction or become more self-determining with respect to child welfare.

On the one hand, as they do that, that will mean that we won’t have a mandated statutory role because they will no longer be bound by the Child, Family and Community Service Act. But on the other hand, what we’re finding is that many of the nations that are contemplating this…. Remember, there are 204. It’s going to take a generation or more before this actually fully unfolds. But many of them are pursuing instead sort of a stepwise transition to self-determination jurisdiction.

They’re starting with prevention services and continuing to have the protective services managed by the ministry and Indigenous child and family service agencies. They’re continuing to be in a situation where we have a responsibility. But it becomes more complex because they want more coordination, they want to have more say, they’re trying to develop some very innovative approaches, and they’re actually asking us for our advice and guidance with respect to complaints mechanisms, advocacy processes, reviews when things go sideways.

Even though jurisdiction on a very simple level might look like we’re going to have less role, in this intervening period, I would say for the next ten to 15 years, we’re going have a different and a larger role. We’re actually in conversations with one Indigenous governing body right now to have a very significant role in their laws and their development. It’s hard to know how it will unfold. That’s one area we had been contemplating bringing an ask to you to enhance our capacity in that area.

The other one was to enhance our capacity with respect to data. We have mountains of data, and we think that, as much as we’re asking government to be better with their data and to begin to understand what’s working and what’s not working, we’re holding ourselves to that same standard. So we are developing a data strategy.

We decided not to bring those asks to you. We’re going to do work internally. We’ve got a plan internally to do a proof of concept, and then we’ll be able to come to you in the fall. We also felt that that was critical, to be prudent with the limited resources that are available in these fiscally challenging times.

I just wanted to give you a little bit of an insight as to some of the things that we’re working on to try and ensure that we are being as effective and as helpful as possible as the system tries to transform itself. Status quo is not an option. It’s just not working for kids. We have a critical role to play in all of that.

I will stop then. It looks like we’ve done it just in time. I will open up for questions.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much.

Claire Rattée: My understanding is that you currently have funding for 79 FTEs but only have 74. Then we saw in the request that there were requests for more FTEs. Why have those positions not been filled, and why can they not be used for that purpose?

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: I’m going to ask Pippa because we actually only have 74.

Pippa Rowcliffe: In prior years, our allocation was 79 FTEs. When we transitioned corporate services back over to the Office of the Human Rights Commission, five FTEs went with that transition back. Our core allocation now is 74 FTEs. We downsized by…. I think it’s $730,000 that was also transferred back to OHRC when the corporate service envelope was taken up by themselves.

Claire Rattée: Okay, so right now you don’t have the funding for 79 FTEs?

Pippa Rowcliffe: No, we do not.

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: Just to give a little bit of context, we provided all the back-end corporate services for the Office of the Human Rights Commissioner for five years as they were starting up. They are doing their own, which I’m sure you’ll hear when you speak with Kasari.

So $700,000 plus went over, and five FTEs went over, so we are at 74.

Bryan Tepper: The two FTEs you’re asking for advocate and investigations analyst, what are their core functions going to be coming forward?

[9:25 a.m.]

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: Okay, great. Well, just to give you a sense, too, these are band 2 positions, so these are very experienced folks. Typically our folks come in with between 10 and 25 years of experience.

So the advocates, an advocate essentially is the person who, after we’ve done all the triaging with a call coming in for services and supports, they will work with the young person and their family in order to try and access the services that they are

between ten and 25 years of experience.

An advocate, essentially, is a person who — after we’ve done all the triaging with a call coming in for services and supports — will work with the young person and their family in order to try to access the services that they are eligible for but perhaps aren’t receiving, or that they are receiving but that are not meeting their needs.

I’ll give you an example. An advocate will be.... A young person would contact us and say: “I’m in a group home right now that is very unsafe for me. There are some things going on that are really triggering for me because of the trauma I’ve experienced. I’ve asked the social worker to go to another placement, and they’re refusing me moving. Therefore I’m running away, and I am couch-surfing.” That’s pretty standard, basic, garden-variety advocacy.

So our advocate would contact the people involved — the ministry, the social workers, the service providers, etc., and say, “I want to understand more about what’s going on. What are the kinds of conversations you’ve had with the young person? They might also work with that young person to assist them in being able to articulate their needs or self-advocate. They might go to a case planning meeting. They might talk about the different options that are available.

What we often say is: “Voice, not necessarily choice.” Sometimes the best location for a young person is the place that they’ve been placed. Nonetheless, if they’re feeling unsafe, it’s important that somebody hears. So the advocate would walk alongside them until that gets resolved.

In other situations, the advocate might be involved.... We’ve got one situation where we’ve been involved for 14 years because of the extreme vulnerability of this young person and what’s happened to them in the system. They need constant advocacy support to make sure that the system is responsible. That’s what the advocates do.

Over to the investigation analysts. Imagine receiving maybe 100 files in the course of a month, where a child has been injured. They will be taking a look at that and say: “Okay, here is the documentation.” Then they’ll go into the case records and find out what might have given rise to that injury. I’ll talk about deaths in a moment. What are some of the things that are being done for that child? Is the system appropriately responding? Is the child at risk in this situation? What does the representative — myself — need to know?

Then they prepare documents for me, and I will review all their documentation about the injury — what has been done, what has given rise to it, and what kind of a response we need to make. If there’s a situation in which we have a child’s death, then they will do more background information for me.

They really are analysts going into the public record. They will come, and they’ll prepare briefing notes, or they will prepare decision notes, or they will begin to gather more information so that I can make a determination as to whether I go further with a more comprehensive review or a full investigation. It’s a lot of trying to understand the dynamics of the system. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

Bryan Tepper: Yes, it is. Actually, maybe I could just ask: how many advocates and how many analysts do you have right now?

Jennifer Charlesworth: I think we have 19 advocates, and we have five analysts.

Pippa Rowcliffe: Well, the 19 are a mixture of intake advocates and advocates. The intake is the triaging, the early stage. I think it’s ten advocates with intake and then also, on the investigation side, seven existing investigation analysts.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Good morning. You had mentioned, Dr. Charlesworth, that you had seen an increase from around 80 to over 600. What horizon is that increase?

Jennifer Charlesworth: I started in this position in the fall of 2018.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): So over the last seven years. What are you attributing that increase to?

[9:30 a.m.]

Jennifer Charlesworth: Wonderful question, yeah. There are a few things. We started to see an increase fairly early on. I will say that that was largely because we didn’t have high compliance with the service providers — the social workers and whatnot — completing the reportable circumstances.

There were a number of reasons for that. Our office was not.... We weren’t their favourite; let’s put it that way. There was a tremendous amount of anxiety about

largely because we didn’t have high compliance with the service providers, the social workers and whatnot, completing the reportable circumstances. There were a number of reasons for that. Our office was not…. We weren’t their favourite, let’s put it that way. And so there was a tremendous amount of anxiety about interacting with our office for a long period of time.

So we did earnest work with the system to basically say it’s really important that these reportables happen because we need to know if children are being harmed. We need to know what’s going on so that we can make some good decisions together. So trying to demystify the role of the office and also make us more approachable…. I’m fortunate because I’ve worked in the system for so many years, so that worked. That was the initial increase for sure: higher compliance.

Then the other things that have been really pushing us, the toxic drug crisis…. That’s affecting in three ways. One is that kids who are using substances are experiencing catastrophic overdoses, sometimes death. We’re seeing that.

We’re seeing young people who are experiencing loss associated with it. So we had, for example…. I can’t remember what it is for this last fiscal year, but two fiscal years ago, there were 158 children who were essentially orphaned as a result of the loss of their parents. And that’s just what we see; there are many more. We’re seeing those indirect effects of the toxic drug supply.

And then also the third area of the toxic drug supply is that we are seeing young people experience more injuries when they’re seeking substances. So they’re being preyed upon. You will know this well from your work. They’re being preyed upon. We see a significant rise in sexual violence and sexual exploitation and physical violence.

So those are the three areas. So toxic drugs have really had a significant impact.

The other thing that we will be exploring more this year is what we call emotional harm injuries — children who are being placed in foster homes or staffed homes, with significant needs and their behavioural challenges and whatnot, but the staff aren’t skilled in supporting them. So we’re seeing situations in which they’re being harmed by the very people that should be taking care of them. We’ve seen an increase in that.

And we’ve seen an increase in the number of situations in which young people, because of their behavioural challenges, are dysregulated, the staff are unable to deal with them, so they’re contacting the police for behaviour management. So police intervention is increasing significantly as well, and that is very traumatic for many kids. If you’re eight or nine or ten and you’ve been cuffed and you are in the back of a police car, that ain’t a good situation at all.

We’re seeing growth in those areas, so that’s really what’s driving us — those kinds of contacts.

The other thing is mental health concerns. COVID was not kind to kids. Many kids did very, very well, but many did not. We are seeing an increase in the number of mental health concerns and associated risks there, so that’s driving it up as well. Unfortunately, because of the wait-lists and because of the lack of capacity within the system right now to meet the needs of kids with mental health concerns — or even more significant, kids with mental health and substance use concerns, or mental health, substance use and behavioural concerns — the system just simply doesn’t know what to do, so their injuries are happening that way. So those are the big areas.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Just two follow-ups if that’s okay. So the first is, do you have data available about the mental health impacts of COVID and isolation so that we could see that at some point?

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, great.

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes, we do.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): I’m looking forward to…. We would love to see that.

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: Yeah, we actually have had…. Happy to get that to you. Now, what I haven’t got is, sort of, the last couple of years, but we did a partnership with the Children’s Health Policy Centre at Simon Fraser University. And when COVID began, we actually retained them right away to say, let’s take a look at pandemics and catastrophes in other areas to see if we could predict and get ahead of it.

So we actually recommended, right at the beginning of COVID: we need to enhance our mental health capacity. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen to the extent that we wanted it and needed it.

[9:35 a.m.]

And then when we went back to Children’s Health Policy Centre and took a look at the data, we saw again a significant increase in the mental health concerns. We were taking a look at depression, generalized anxiety disorder, self-harming, self-injurious behaviour and one other that’s just escaping me right now.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): I think I actually might have seen that.

Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth: You might have, yeah.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): But I would be curious to look again, especially as places like SD36 think of hybrid education models, which isolates kids. But anyway, that’s another topic.

What is the level of compliance, do you think, right now, in terms of reporting? So you saw in

escaping me right now.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): I think I actually might have seen that.

Jennifer Charlesworth: You might have, yeah.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): But I would be curious to look again, especially as places like SD36 think of hybrid education models, which isolates kids. But anyway, that's another topic.

What is the level of compliance, do you think, right now, in terms of reporting you saw and then the initial spike after 2018? Because people came into compliance as you helped them understand what your role really is.

And so I'm wondering, do you believe that these cases are still underreported, or whether or not we're sort of on track in the province here for reporting?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Great question. I would say we're almost there. We do have situations in which we will be taking a look…. For example, one of my analysts will be taking a look at a child's story, and they'll be saying: “Geez, there were two suicide attempts, and those weren't reported.” And we will contact them. Our manager is amazing and will contact the ministry and say: “We're the Indigenous agency. I think you've missed something.” So we'll get the historical reports.

But by and large, I would say we're probably about 90 percent compliance now, whereas I would say we were, significantly, probably just half before.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, yeah. Great. Thank you.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you.

Any other questions? No?

Okay, I have a question on this. I understand there is a shortfall in the wage from previous years. If I can pull it up…. From 2024-2025, for wage increase and those discrepancies there, could you just take us through how it was estimated and why, ultimately, there was a shortfall?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Right.

Do you want to respond to that one?

I'll pass that one on to John.

John McNeill: So what happened is in fall of 2023, we made a best estimate of what we anticipated the increase might be. BCGEU agreement had a range, dependent on inflation — kind of a floor and a ceiling. We picked a number in between there. And then what ended up happening is it ended up being about a fraction of a percent higher. So this is just to kind of bridge that gap from…. Say we had estimated 2.4, but it was actually 2.7. So it's that kind of 0.2 percent to catch us up the rest of the way, which is why it's a smaller number.

I guess why we're bothering to ask for a small number is because things are tight, and a little bit like that does make a difference. Normally, maybe, we would be fine to absorb it. But yeah, just because things are tight, we're kind of…. And we're managing our ask as low as possible just on known pressures.

Yeah, so that's where that's coming from.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much. Any other questions?

If not, I think we can end it here. Thank you so much for your time. We have a bit of time, so we can take about a 10-minute recess, and we can reset the room and hear from our next officers.

The committee recessed from 9:38 a.m. to 9:58 a.m.

The committee recessed from 9:38 a.m. to 9:58 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. We are going to begin.

Thank you very much for coming in. Next, we will hear from Kasari Govender, Human Rights Commissioner.

You have 25 minutes to present, followed by 30 minutes of questions from the committee. We do have a timer on the screen to help us stay on schedule. Now, I’ll turn it over to you. If you would like to introduce your staff and begin your presentation. Thank you.

OFFICE OF THE
HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSIONER

Kasari Govender: Great. Thank you, Chair, Deputy Chair, members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to be here today to talk about our budget and the supplemental request for funding.

Before I continue, though, I want to acknowledge that we’re gathered here today on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən people, including the Songhees and SXIMEȽEȽ First Nations, and that as an office we work to fulfill our responsibilities to the first keepers of these lands, along with expressing our gratitude to them.

I’m joined today by my colleagues Deputy Commissioner Bernard Achampong and Chief Financial Officer Leoni Gingras.

[10:00 a.m.]

I spoke a little bit last time about the history of the organization. When I last appeared, I know it was off the record…. I wanted to spend a few moments today talking about this history in terms of our financial and operational development over the course of our existence, which is about 5½ years. I’ll then turn to the fiscal update and to the supplementary funding request.

when I last appeared, I know it was off the record, but I wanted to spend a few moments today talking about this history in terms of our financial and operational development over the course of our existence, which is about 5½ years. I’ll then turn to the fiscal update and to the supplementary funding request.

The role of B.C.’s Human Rights Commissioner was established through the Human Rights Code Amendment Act in 2018. I was first appointed in May 2019 and took the role in September 2019, so that was the official beginning of the office, and I was unanimously reappointed for a second five-year term starting in September of 2024.

The Human Rights Commissioner’s legislative mandate is to promote and protect human rights through several tools provided under the human rights code, which I have detailed in my last appearance. I’m supported in my work by 42 FTEs, who I have hired pursuant to section 47.06 of the code to support me in fulfilling our statutory mandate.

When I started this role in September 2019, I was the first official staff of the organization, although I quickly brought on a deputy commissioner and executive assistant. Thankfully, we also had the assistance of the corporate shared services team through the Representative of Children and Youth’s office.

One of the first major tasks was putting together a budget for our first appearance before this committee, which was just over a month after I started in the role. This entailed coming up with a blueprint for the organizational structure, a hiring plan and a vision on how to implement my mandate.

We worked hard and fast in that first month to create a sustainable, responsible budget that could give us the tools to deliver on this statutory mandate. Our budget was designed to provide both the long-term vision to give the committee confidence in our development plan, where we were going as an organization, as well as the flexibility to learn as we went.

I am pleased to say that we stayed true to that budget presented in October 2019 and, over the course of the next three years, built our full complement of staff as originally envisioned, moved into our main office in Vancouver, built out our suite of internal policies and processes and delivered on my mandate in a number of significant ways, including publishing numerous research and policy reports, guidance for duty-bearers such as public agencies, initiating our first public inquiry, engaging in law and policy reform initiatives and launching our first public education campaigns and workshops.

As you may remember from the April 4 presentation, we also worked closely with our partners in the B.C. human rights system — that is, the tribunal and the Human Rights Clinic, as well as other clinical legal services in the province — and have established what we are calling a No Wrong Door portal to best serve the public by making the human rights system more accessible.

Since our office’s inception, our budget submissions have stayed true, as I mentioned, to that original vision. As a result, we have never asked for any significant increases beyond those required to fairly compensate staff in alignment with inflation and in accordance with the increases granted to the rest of the public service. This consistent vision guided us through the start-up phases of the organization and continues to form the backbone of our organizational structure, human resources and strategies to fulfil my mandate.

This consistency demonstrates our accountability to British Columbians, to this committee and to the Legislature as a whole. I take very seriously the fiscal responsibility that we owe to provincial taxpayers — and, more broadly, to the B.C. public — and to the primary role of this committee in ensuring our responsible use of public funds.

Turning, then, to the summary of this year’s proposed budget. In October of 2023, I presented to this committee our three-year budget for the period of fiscal year ’25 to fiscal year ’27 for consideration. As a result, the committee recommended operating budgets of $7.668 million for all three years, as well as $35,000 in capital for each of those three years.

In addition to this committee’s budget recommendation of those amounts — the $7.668 million in operating and $35,000 in capital; this is reflected in the committee’s last report to the Legislature — we are requesting an additional $249,000 in fiscal ’25-26, for a total of $7.917 million in operating.

[10:05 a.m.]

This represents a 3 percent increase from the previously recommended ’25-26 operating budget to accommodate inflation — 2 percent, based on the consumer price index — and commissioner compensation, which is about 1 percent.

In addition to applying inflationary measures to wages, we are applying inflationary costs to some key operational expenses in the next three fiscal years, based on associated

and commissioner compensation, which is about 1 percent.

In addition to applying inflationary measures to wages, we are applying inflationary costs to some key operational expenses in the next three fiscal years based on associated increases in the cost of goods and services, lessons learned in our financial assessment and consistency with other statutory offices.

We found internal efficiencies were possible by realigning operating costs to business needs, which we refer to as STOB realignment. As you likely know, STOB is an acronym for standard object of expenditure and could be described as the list of budget codes used to categorize expenses and revenue in our financial system. The STOB realignment reflects the transfer of some of our existing operating costs to wages to support salary cost pressures, as well as to establish our corporate services department after the closure of our shared corporate services agreement with the Representative for Children and Youth.

As noted in my committee appearance last year, and as you will see in the information note in our materials, the transition of corporate services in-house resulted in some FTE changes. The shared services agreement with RCY consisted of $730,000 annually, which equated to five FTEs to deliver corporate services. Through STOB realignment, we created a new corporate services team in-house with these five FTEs and one additional FTE being self-funded from other reallocated BCOHRC operating costs.

In short, consistent with what I advised the committee last year, the creation of an in-house corporate services team at BCOHRC over the last year has been cost neutral.

Turning to the costs of inflation, the practice of all statutory officers, including us, has been to incorporate wage inflation requests in budget request cycles based on the best information available at the time. Since we have not been able to confirm inflation rates for future years, we have typically not included inflation in the request for future years. This request for wage inflation is reoccurring dependent on the broader public service wage inflation direction. So, based on a 2 percent inflation measure, we are requesting an additional $136,000 in salaries and benefits in the budget year ‘25-26. I understand that this request is consistent with other independent offices.

Additionally, inflationary measures of 2 percent are being applied to key operating items such as supplementary salary costs, travel, professional contracts, business expenses, advertising and information systems to sufficiently cover inflationary costs and we’re requesting $45,000 for that bucket. The implications of not approving inflationary requests for all of the operating costs include challenges recruiting and retaining staff based on a reduced ability to provide competitive wages and reduced ability to manage rising operating costs caused by inflation, which will negatively impact BCOHRC’s ability to meet our operational and statutory obligations.

Turning then to the second small requested increase: as I mentioned when I last appeared pursuant to section 4701 of the human rights code, my reappointment last spring was unanimously recommended by an all-party legislative committee, which was unanimously adopted by the Legislative Assembly. This is a non-partisan appointment process led by members of the Legislature. A new compensation package was confirmed as part of my re-employment contract in September 2024, and this is at a cost of an additional $68,000 for salaries and benefits.

The commissioner’s compensation package is outside of my control and the control of the office as it is set by the Lieutenant Governor in Council pursuant to section 4704 of the code. If this request is not granted the implication is significant cost pressure at BCOHRC to maintain optimal operations with its relatively small budget.

In conclusion then, while you have in your materials the actuals for 2023-24, I also wanted to draw your attention to the unofficial end-of-year balance sheets for the year that just ended in 2025. Because of the timing of the written submission, which was just shortly before the end of fiscal, we were not able to provide you with those final numbers in the written submissions. That said, I can advise you now that we reached a zero balance, meaning we spent exactly as much as we anticipated when we last appeared before this committee for budget submissions.

[10:10 a.m.]

While I have spoken to the importance of our financial stability, it is also important to note that our approach has allowed us to learn along the way. Learning along the way is a key element to the success and sustainability of a new organization like ours. For example, we

While I have spoken to the importance of our financial stability, it is also important to note that our approach has allowed us to learn along the way. Learning along the way is a key element to the success and sustainability of a new organization like ours.

For example, we have shifted, as you've heard, our corporate services model to bring services in-house, allowing for a model that's more tailored to our needs.

Over the next month or so, we'll be wrapping up an organizational evaluation plan and recommendation verification process which allows us to assess where our work has been successful in creating change and providing useful oversight and where we can continually improve.

The recommendation verification is looking at all the recommendations that I've made in my time in this role and looking at whether they've been implemented, whether they're in progress, whether they haven't been implemented. This evaluation process will lead us to the finalization of our next strategic plan, which is set to be released in the fall.

Acknowledging the uncertain economic times that we are in and the context of core government conducting an expenditure and efficiency review, we've endeavoured to put forward as modest a request as possible. As you can see, we are only asking for what is required to fairly compensate our existing workforce in line with the public services approach.

On a related note, our office works hard to bring our guiding principles and human rights-based approach to life in all of our work, both outward-facing and how we operate internally. We take who we are to each other at BCOHRC as seriously as who we are to the people of British Columbia.

While we make many breakthroughs and, of course, some missteps along the way, we are grateful to be named a top work unit award recipient for the B.C. Public Service in 2024. The award reflects the exceptional teamwork, job satisfaction, accountability and passion of people and our leaders. Those recognized by this award are in the top 20 percent of those surveyed using the work environment survey through the public service. That's a questionnaire measuring employee engagement and satisfaction with their jobs and workplaces.

Before I wrap up, I want to express on the record my gratitude for the hard work and unwavering dedication of our staff team to delivering on our statutory mandate. This work requires learning and working through some of the most pressing social issues of our day, and it takes fortitude, vision and hope to create tangible results that make a difference in the lives of British Columbians. The difference they make is clear. So a huge thank you to our team who does this so well.

Those are my comments and submissions. Thank you to all of you for your support for our ongoing work to promote and protect human rights in the province and for your service and dedication to this work on behalf of all British Columbians. I look forward to your questions.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you for your work and what you do for the people of this province.

I'm just wondering if you could talk us through a little bit more of the transfer of corporate shared services from RCY to in-house. What metrics are you using to capture whether or not it's equally effective, whether it's providing good value for service dollar to your agency in comparison to the old service?

Kasari Govender: I can say that it has been a really useful transfer to us. It was incredibly helpful to have the RCY shared services agreement in place when I started.

As I mentioned, starting an independent office is literally starting pretty much from scratch. The ministry had done some work to establish and there were some great people working on that end, but it doesn't officially start till the commissioner starts. So building up an office, we were very reliant on the support of RCY, but it was a team developed for RCY's needs as opposed to ours.

When we got to the point of developing to the size we are, to the complexity of the work that we do, it started to become more and more important, I think, to both organizations that we allow our services to be tailored to what we needed. And I can say it's been really successful from our end to be able to do that.

To give you an example, it has allowed our executive team, our executive directors, to take much more control over spending within each of their areas, which has just provided greater efficiency this year. Being able to have our own in-house CFO and work on processes that will work for each of our staff, and for Bernard and I, it as allowed a much more tailored approach.

[10:15 a.m.]

That's the overall impressions of the success of the transition. The metrics, I think, being that we reached a zero balance, for example, and spent very close to what we had predicted and how that required really close relationships between our financial services team and all of the folks delivering programmatic work in a way that we couldn't do when we were working with another organization. There just wasn't the capacity.

I think being, you know, that we reached a zero balance, for example, and spent very close to what we had predicted and how that required really close relationships between our financial services team and all of the folks delivering programmatic work in a way that we couldn’t do when we were working with another organization. There just wasn’t the capacity to do that tailored work for two organizations.

So what that’s meant is we’ve had much closer tracking of our financials along the way and allowed us to come out to the level we are. We’ve also improved hiring times in the organization because we’ve brought human resources in-house. It’s allowed us to come up with more tailored IT solutions because, again, we’re not looking at kind of across the board for two significant organizations. We’re tailoring our needs to our organization and what we require. And we brought IT in-house as part of corporate services as well.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you for letting us know about your staff. I was hoping you could take us through your FTE that you have on your payroll. I was hoping you could break it down a little bit more for us, like staffing positions, what they do, what they achieve within your organization.

Kasari Govender: Sure. When we first developed the structure of the organization, we did it to echo the structure of the human rights code, so the tools that are laid out for the commissioner and the code.

We have a research and policy team, because I have the power under the code to conduct research on human rights and to advocate for changes to law and policy. Those two teams are part of the same department. They do complementary work because, of course, we use the research to support the policy work, and doing evidence-based policy work has become a real cornerstone to the work we do.

We have a number of research officers and policy analysts. The research officers…. Our research team leads projects like desegregated demographic data in B.C., the grandmother’s perspective. Our policy team works on helping me, supporting me in advocating for implementation of our recommendations.

So, for example, the recommendations in the grandmother perspective report were almost wholly adopted by the government in implementing the Anti-Racism Data Act and then the Anti-Racism Act. That required significant time and effort on our part. It was the policy team that did that work. So that gives you some examples of what’s happening there.

Also, when we do inquiries, the policy team then works with me to ensure that those recommendations don’t just gather dust on a shelf, that they actually have life breathed into them and that we work with duty-bearers to implement those recommendations. They’re also the ones leading the work on our recommendation verification process that I talked about that we’ll be publishing soon.

We have a legal department that works on our public inquiries and our interventions. We have the ability under the code to intervene in cases, which means to not work on either side of litigation, but to get involved in a case that has human rights implications to help a decision-maker like a tribunal member or a judge understand the broader implications. It’s kind of an assistance-to-the-court type of role. We have in-house counsel to work on both of those areas as well as provide advice to the executive team on corporate services issues and various other support to the whole team.

We have a communications team, which works on sort of the full suite of communications tools. We have a strong social media presence. We have very strong media presence. We have significant uptake on our releases. We usually get millions of people in the audience of when we are releasing reports through both earned media and social media. They manage all of that. They do the report production as well and various other pieces of kind of communications management type of portfolio.

We have an education and engagement team. Our engagement team is responsible for ensuring that we’re doing work that is community-based. They work also closely with the research team, which does community-based research. But our engagement team is responsible for building strong and sustainable relationships with a wide range of stakeholders and community members.

Our approach is “Nothing about us without us,” so we want to ensure that our work is really based on what’s actually happening in the lives of people in this province, and our engagement team leads that work.

[10:20 a.m.]

We did some community briefs over the last couple of years, doing deep work in communities to understand what human rights issues were happening in those areas, everything from small communities like Chetwynd, for example, to Cranbrook, to a variety of communities around the province. Our engagement team and our research team worked closely on that work together.

We have education and engagement work together. Our education team does what it says: educates or leads our education work. Education is

everything from small communities like Chetwynd, for example, to Cranbrook, to a variety of communities around the province. Our engagement team and our research team worked closely on that work together.

We have education and engagement work together. Our education team does what it says: educates or leads our education work. Education is a very key piece of the mandate to shift hearts and minds, a big piece of changing a culture of human rights in the province. They have led, for example — I spoke briefly about this last time — our guide dog work in the organization. We’ve done work working with guide dog users and also working with the taxi industry and the service industry to help support all three of those communities, really, to ensure that service providers — wait staff, for example, in restaurants, and taxi drivers — understand their obligations to accommodate guide dog users.

We were able to work with the industries to understand what would be helpful to you in having this information — having posters in your taxi cab, for example. We produced those materials but also worked with guide dog users to ensure that we were reflecting and making change related to their needs. That’s an example of the kind of work that education does. And then you’ve already heard about our corporate services team.

Finally, there’s our operations team. Our operations team is in the same department as communications, and they really provide the scaffolding for the organization. They provide our centralized administrative support, support with our project management, for example, various operational tasks along those lines, facility support and that kind of thing.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Just a follow up there. How many people are on your operations team, in your administrative side?

Kasari Govender: We have three people on the administrative side and five people on the operations team. Am I calculating that correctly?

Bernard Achampong: Yeah, total five. We have admin — three — and we have project management, and of course, the manager.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I’m sorry, what was the second thing you said?

Bernard Achampong: Manager.

Kasari Govender: We have three administrative staff in that team. We have one person who works and supports project management across the team, and then a manager of the operations team.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Considering your mandate, you have an enormous responsibility for public distribution and visibility. Can you talk about how you manage your budget for media distribution and how you balance it between traditional media and social media?

Kasari Govender: In terms of the budget implications, or more broadly how we….

Jennifer Blatherwick: Budget implications.

Kasari Govender: Budget implications. I don’t think that we have at our fingertips how much we invest in each of those. They’re very staff-driven costs. Other than staff costs, we’ve done a couple of press conferences. They’re not expensive endeavors. The last one we did was in the legislative building, so it costs much less, actually. We’re very grateful for that space. So really, it’s staffing costs, and I don’t have that number. We can get it to you if that’s of interest.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I think one of the things we’ve been looking at a little bit is costing for advertising and the effectiveness in distributing that information to British Columbians.

Kasari Govender: I see.

Jennifer Blatherwick: And so comparison between the cost for traditional media and who it reaches and the cost for non-organic social media and how that reaches British Columbians.

Kasari Govender: Thank you. Sorry, I misunderstood the question a little bit. I appreciate the clarification.

There are a couple of ways that our advertising shows up. It isn’t actually all through our communications team. We do spend some minimal on social media boosting, but a lot of that is actually more organic. We post, so that’s what I meant by the staff time that’s required. We, you know, do daily posts across all of our platforms. We do designing of social media campaigns, in terms of releasing our materials and so on. That’s almost entirely staff costs except for minimal boosting, which is within our advertising budget.

We also run large public awareness campaigns, and that’s our education and engagement team. We’ve run four, although one was a bit unique. We’re just in the cycle of running the fourth around the role of mis- and disinformation. Those are more significant costs associated with those public campaigns. We’ve done one campaign on racism. We did one on ableism called “rewrite the rules” a couple of years ago, and that I don’t know if we have…. Do we have those numbers at our fingertips for those campaigns?

[10:25 a.m.]

Leoni Gingras: I have some of the campaigns, but I don’t know about those ones. I’ll look them up.

Kasari Govender: See if we have rewrite the rules. I think, maybe, it’s in there. I’ll just let Leoni take a look at that, if we have that at our fingertips.

That’s the significant outline in terms of advertising — what falls within the advertising costs. Thank you.

Leoni Gingras: These are the project costs we put together.

Leoni Gingras: I have some of the campaigns, but I don’t know about those ones. I’ll look them up.

Kasari Govender: See if we have rewrite the rules. I think, maybe, it’s in there. I’ll just let Leoni take a look at that, if we have that at our fingertips.

So that’s the significant outline in terms of advertising — what falls within the advertising costs.

Leoni Gingras: These are the projects costs we’ve put together.

Kasari Govender: Thank you. Okay, I don’t have the rewrite the rules campaign in front of me, but we can get you those numbers. It wasn’t in this fiscal, just for clarity.

Jennifer Blatherwick: No worries.

Okay, next one. Another big piece that we have discussed is your capacity and your work to ensure that recommendations are implemented. Of course, you will not have this broken out, so this is not a dollar-for-dollar request. But can you talk to me a little bit about your best guess about what your staffing time, what your budget percentage, is that is focused on making sure recommendations are implemented?

Kasari Govender: That’s an interesting question. So that is all within our implementation. After recommendations are made, some of those staffing costs would fall within our legal team, because many of our recommendations come through the inquiry process. Not all of them.

The recommendation verification process that we are in the process of doing now ran till the end of August of last year — so the end of the first five-year term. By that point, I’d made about 160 recommendations. Some of those were within our public reports. Our Equity Is Safer report on policing had 28 — I want to say — or 20-odd recommendations. The hate inquiry had 12. You can see that there were a number of those recommendations that also came through letters rather than through reports.

When they come through the inquiry reports, we do significant work with duty-bearers, with those who are making recommendations too, before we release the report. Those involve both policy staff and legal staff and, of course, myself.

For our recent report on the Adult Guardianship Act, we met along the way with the designated agencies, the health authorities. We did the draft recommendations, we brought it to them, and we said: “We want to know if there are practical barriers to you implementing these to ensure that we’re developing something that actually can be implemented.” As well as both the Ministry of Health and the Attorney General and the PGT….

After the recommendations are made, they move over to our policy team, and it varies hugely how long or how intensive that work is. So it really depends on the investment of duty-bearers and that process.

We haven’t worked really closely with government on the hate inquiry recommendations. Some of them have been implemented, but that hasn’t been an extensive process on our side. We’ve monitored them closely, so it has taken monitoring work, and we’ve certainly done some advocacy, but it hasn’t been a close relationship.

Whereas on The Grandmother Perspective report, we had regular staff-level meetings as well as regular commissioner and minister meetings all through that implementation process. So really different levels of investment depending on the type of recommendations that we’re talking about. Of course, some of that is also under non-disclosure agreements, so I can’t describe it in detail.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you. That is very helpful.

I was going to ask…. We’ve had a variety of different estimates from the different offices about inflationary costs around possible leasing changes, around staffing, around all of these things. Can I just ask — and if you don’t know or if this is not a thing, it’s fine — how much conversation do you have across the different offices to be consistent with your asks in terms of inflationary pressures for operational, non-wage increases?

Kasari Govender: Do you want to speak to that?

Bernard Achampong: Yeah. We do have a committee of practice of all the deputy commissioners across the ILS. We do consistently meet monthly. For example, in the last three months, we’ve been really working together to talk about our differences and also commonalities and how we can, sort of, share information around these different parameters.

Kasari Govender: So there’s a fair amount of conversation. The officers also meet fairly regularly — not once a month, but fairly regularly — and have these conversations.

[10:30 a.m.]

We want to ensure that where we can, we’re presenting something to all of you that makes sense from a holistic perspective while maintaining our independence and ensuring that we are getting our individual needs met. Because as you know, they’re quite different across the board — not just in terms of how we’re set up financially but our mandate

We want to ensure that where we can, we’re presenting something to all of you that makes sense from a holistic perspective while maintaining our independence and ensuring that we are getting our individual needs met because, as you know, we’re quite different across the board — not just in terms of how we’re set up financially, but our mandates are wildly various, so they require very different kind of inputs as well.

Paul Choi (Chair): I also have some questions.

I can see that there was $5,000 that was anticipated for grants, but you ended up spending $236,000. Just wondering what contributed to that big discrepancy.

Kasari Govender: Yeah, so our grant funds are a little bit difficult to predict. I was glad that we actually got it as close as we did this year, because in other years, there’s been bigger variance in that, a credit in part to our new corporate services team and the new level of financial management that we have that’s more tailored to us. So grateful for that.

The grant funds are used…. Grants and contracts are both — something very much in common, they’re — used to ensure that we have external expertise, where we simply don’t have the capacity in-house because we have such a broad mandate. We can’t possibly have all the capacity in-house. On the other hand, they’re quite distinct in terms of form and process. Contracts are, you know, directly hiring someone, need to do something that’s delivered to us for our interest rather than grants that are more in the public interest.

Most of our grant funding this year went to the University of Victoria, and what we’ll be doing with them is two things. We are able to get co-op students through UVic. We’ve had a really strong relationship with the co-op programs across UVic as well as doing what we’re calling seed grant money for small research projects — lit reviews from faculty and, I think, graduate students at the University of Victoria. Yeah, graduate students as well.

So that’s the goal of that. That’s really, again, kind of bringing expertise in-house, but doing it where we need more targeted funds to hire someone to do a specific task versus where we need somebody to do some thinking on this that can be in the public interest but support our work. So those are different considerations that go into those.

Paul Choi (Chair): Was this the first year that we pursued co-op students and stuff like that? Or was it…? Because I’m also still trying to figure out why there was a big discrepancy. If it was something that was happening in the previous years, perhaps that could have been anticipated.

Kasari Govender: No, it was not the first year we’ve done it. We’ve had a relationship with them. We have some funds that we can continue to use for co-op students, so what wasn’t required…. The same level of funds wasn’t required this year to support the co-op program because we have some remaining from previous years that we can continue to use. We do have co-op students. We will continue to have co-op students over the next year when those funds…. The seed grant funding, though, although it was part of the agreement we had with UVic, we haven’t done a lot of that research funding. So we’ve just started to work more closely with them to get this new area of small research projects like lit reviews to support on a wide variety of topics.

Paul Choi (Chair): Could you give us some examples as to what sort of result you got from some of the schools like UVic?

Kasari Govender: In terms of research?

Paul Choi (Chair): Yes.

Kasari Govender: We’ve had a research grant through the JID program, the Indigenous law program at UVic, to support our hate inquiry. This was not within the last fiscal, but there is a professor by the name of Dr. Sarah Morales who did some work on Hul’q’umi’num’-speaking people’s legal traditions in response to hate. That report is published online.

Again, it’s in the public interest, and it became a significant piece of the hate inquiry report and informed our recommendations. But that was given through a grant process.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Could you also talk about how grant is tied to professional services, because it seems like, perhaps, you’re using what you would for professional services and then applying it to grants. But you mentioned that professional services are for your own specific needs, whereas grant is for the public interest.

Could you talk about the intersection between those two?

[10:35 a.m.]

Kasari Govender: Do you want to…?

Leoni Gingras: No, it’s okay.

I think that historically they’ve used grant funding and contract funding and salary funding interchangeably.

Could you talk about the intersection between those two?

Leoni Gingras: I think that, historically, they’ve used grant funding and contract funding and salary funding interchangeably. Last fiscal year, the one that you’re referring to, where we had $236,000 in grants, was due to staffing problems. We had key positions vacant that we weren’t able to deliver our mandate as effectively through staff. So we turned that funding to grant funding so that we still could be effective in program delivery and effective in using our budget when we had issues with not having key positions filled.

Kasari Govender: I just want to add a little bit of a gloss to that. Definitely, the salaries is the other piece of that kind of picture. And there is a letter on file that articulates this from two years ago, I want to say, with a select standing committee, because we were asked some of these questions. It does lay out each of those categories.

Definitely, especially after post-COVID — kind of COVID and post-COVID — it was a little bit harder to hold on to staff. There was a lot of fluidity in the workforce. And so we were using contract support at times to fill that gap. But there is a clear distinction between grants and contracts. We’re not exactly using them interchangeably; we’re using them where there are different purposes for each one.

So definitely some of them could be…. We could have a contract for our research services, but it would be because we’re asking for something very specific. Can you do exactly this? The delivery of that is something that we want to have some control over. With grants, we hand it over. It is the role of the university to decide what’s the content of that. There’s an academic freedom piece to that. So it does have a different purpose and a different role. But they’re all to meet the kind of substantive needs and capacity that we need to deliver on the breadth of the issues that we’ve worked on.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much. Any other questions? No?

Okay, I think that is it then. Thank you so much for coming in and presenting to us.

We are going to now take a short recess, and we’ll reconvene at 11:15.

Kasari Govender: Can I add one tiny thing to that last question?

Paul Choi (Chair): Of course.

Kasari Govender: I just realized that it was worthwhile saying that one of the reasons that it’s very hard to thoroughly predict what kind of expertise we’re going to need is that we need to be responsive as an organization. It’s impossible, truly impossible, for any organization, probably, but particularly for a human rights organization, to predict every human rights issue that’s going to arise during the course of a year. So we have used some of those grants and contract funding, depending on what the need is, to fill in where there’s been a new issue that’s arisen. So I’m afraid I was…. Just wanted to add that on the record. Thank you for your patience.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Thank you so much. All right.

We are now in recess.

The committee recessed from 10:38 a.m. to 11:05 a.m.

The committee recessed from 10:38 a.m. to 11:05 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Deliberations

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, I will call the meeting back to order and seek a motion to meet in camera for deliberations.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 11:05 a.m. to 11:28 a.m.

The committee continued in camera from 11:05 a.m. to 11:28 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Thanks for coming in. Next up, we will be hearing from Sheila Dodds, Acting Auditor General.

[11:30 a.m.]

You have 25 minutes to present, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. You do have a timer on the screen to stay on schedule. I’ll now turn it over to you, if you’d like to introduce your staff and begin your presentation. Thank you.

Supplementary Funding Requests

OFFICE OF THE AUDITOR GENERAL

Sheila Dodds: Thank you very much, Chair, and good morning, members.

With me today, I have

you have 25 minutes to present, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. You do have a timer on the screen, to stay on schedule.

I’ll now turn it over to you, if you’d like to introduce your staff and begin your presentation. Thank you.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you very much, Chair, and good morning, Members.

With me today I have Bridget Parrish on my right, who is our acting Deputy Auditor General, and Marie Thelisma on my left, who is the assistant Auditor General for our corporate services area. We call it the critical audit support services. To Marie’s left is Carlos Caraveo, who’s our CIO. He’s here, if there are any questions around the IT migration project that we’ve been working on in the past year.

To Bridget’s right is Dean Goodman, who’s the acting executive director of strategic priorities, performance and policy. Dean’s been instrumental in helping us with our service plan and annual report. And we do have in the gallery three of our staff who wanted to witness the session. We have our brand-new chief financial officer, Nathaniel Morbey, who has just joined us this month — next time he’ll be at the table with us — and Amanda Welch, our legal counsel, and Nicholas Johnson, who’s the director of communications in our office.

So, yes, a big group. Thank you for having us this morning.

I’m just going to begin by acknowledging, with respect, that the Office of the Auditor General of B.C…. We conduct our work on Coast Salish territories. I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to Indigenous peoples, from today and from the past, for allowing me to work and play on these traditional Coast Salish territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, now known as Victoria.

We appreciate the opportunity to meet with you today to provide insights into our recent accomplishments and the current priorities of the Office of the Auditor General. I’m going to provide some highlights from our 2023-24 annual report that was tabled last June, an overview of our new service plan for the three years starting with the current year, 2025-26, and then we’re going to walk you through the budget update just to highlight how we are reallocating within our voted appropriation to manage the pressures that we have right now.

With our 2023 annual report, it looks at the accomplishments and the progress from the office from April 2023 until March 2024. It was a very busy and a very productive year. I just want to note that Michael Pickup was our Auditor General through that entire year. He just retired in November, so you’ll see that he was a big part of that particular fiscal year. And Michael and I worked very closely during the year, as I was the Deputy Auditor General at that time.

We were very pleased to exceed our performance targets for the year, and we accomplished a lot internally in terms of supporting our people and producing high-quality products under Michael’s leadership. From a people perspective, we completed the transformation of our physical office to better support our hybrid working environment.

We made significant progress on our compensation framework and policy, something that we’ll talk about more in our upcoming annual report. What we’ve done is establish a total compensation package that is competitive with the market. It recognizes an employee’s growth in a position, and it is fair, equitable and transparent.

There are two performance indicators in the annual report I just wanted to draw your attention to. One of them is our turnover rate, and it’s on page 20 of the annual report. It has been decreasing every year since 2021, when we created the baseline measure. It has gone from a 21 percent turnover rate to 13 percent as of March 2024.

And our employment engagement score, which is on page 19, increased 23 percent in that same time frame. Through the work environment survey, we went from a score of 66 to 75 as of March 2024. These are two of many indicators that really highlight our excellent progress when it comes to people and the culture of the workplace.

From a culture perspective, we have embedded that lens of equity, diversity and inclusion in how we approach our organization and our work.

In terms of our product, and that’s our financial audit work and our performance audit work, we delivered five performance audits in that year, three assurance and information reports and our second annual follow-up report — that looks at the performance audit recommendations from reports since 2019. There were 24 performance audits reflected in that follow-up report.

[11:35 a.m.]

We also issued our annual auditors report on the government’s summary financial statements to the Legislative Assembly. There were also 34 independent auditors reports for other financial statement audits and assurance engagements that were completed.

Our next annual report, for the fiscal year 2024-25, will be released in a couple of months. It will be released before the end of June. In addition to highlighting our audit commitments, we will include an update on the IT migration project

auditor’s reports for other financial statement audits and assurance engagements that were completed.

Our next annual report, for the fiscal year 2024-25, will be released in a couple of months. It will be released before the end of June. In addition to highlighting our audit commitments, we will include an update on the IT migration project and the work done on our compensation and performance management frameworks.

Turning now to the service plan that we’ve provided in your package, off the top, I just want you to know that our service plan aligns with the Auditor General Act, the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act and the performance reporting principles for the B.C. public sector. You’ll notice that in service plan we’ve highlighted four key corporate strategies in the plan that are building on the momentum that we’ve gained over the last several years.

The first priority is to continue to enhance the quality and efficiency of our audits and the related support functions.

Two is to increase capacity to examine areas of growing importance to MLAs and to the people of B.C.

Our third corporate priority is to implement growth-based employee performance development and management processes that align with the strategic needs of the office and that are supported by the compensation framework that we’ve implemented over the last couple of years.

The fourth strategic priority for us in this next year is to prioritize and implement elements of our employee training and development framework.

That third point, around growth-based employee performance, has been a significant undertaking to develop and to implement with our workforce, but it has brought real clarity on performance expectations and is helping to support employee growth and success and to build the capacity within the office.

As I said, it’s supported by our compensation framework, something that has taken us a few years to develop. Again, it’s fair, it’s transparent, and it has been a huge help to allowing us not only to attract but also to retain our employees. We will continue to foster an engaged and respectful workplace with that lens of equity, diversity and inclusion.

The last area I wanted to just highlight is the budget update document that we provided. Recognizing the current challenging economic time we face in our province, we are not requesting supplementary money or funding for ’25-26 to achieve our planned work for the next cycle. Our budget estimate for ’25-26 was prepared in September of 2023, 18 months ago, and although we are facing some new cost pressures, we have been able to reallocate within our operating appropriation to address those pressures.

Within our budget update document, you’ll note that we’re reallocating budget between expense categories to support our operational and strategic priorities but keeping that bottom line the same. We have been able to find some efficiencies, and we have made some strategic shifts in how we operate.

One of the shifts in that update is to reallocate money to salaries and benefits to enable us to increase our financial audit professional staff and reduce our reliance on contractors for our financial audits. Our financial audit work has become more complex in recent years, between new accounting standards and new auditing standards. We want to strategically build the expertise within our financial audit staff, as I said, rather than relying on contractors.

Another pressure for our financial audit team is that for many of the organizations that we audit, senior financial staff have been retiring in recent years. So you’re losing that expertise, and that creates additional pressure on the financial auditors in being able to support the work that’s being done in those organizations.

Another reallocation we’re making is from our IT systems budget, where we did find some savings as part of our IT migration project, to our travel budget. We’re seeing that our travel for audit work has been increasing in the last couple of years from the pandemic levels. During the pandemic, of course, travel ceased.

It has just slowly been coming back, and we’re getting to a similar place to where we were, pre-pandemic. That’s a good thing, because it’s very important for in-person meetings, when we’re doing audits, to build those strong relationships with those that we’re auditing. It also helps us to really understand the environment and the risks of the organizations that we’re auditing.

So we are not asking for a supplemental budget increase, but we do appreciate the opportunity today to come here anyway and be able to speak to our annual report and service plan, and how we are using the appropriation that we have.

[11:40 a.m.]

In conclusion, Michael’s four years of leadership brought a lot of improvement — internally, to our culture and work environment, and externally, in how we deliver our audits. What we have provided in our service plan is showing that we’re maintaining that momentum. We’ll continue to find ways to enhance the quality and efficiency of the audits and the support process behind them

leadership brought a lot of improvement — internally, to our culture and work environment, and externally, in how we deliver our audits. What we have provided in our service plan is showing that we’re maintaining that momentum. We’ll continue to find ways to enhance the quality and efficiency of the audits and the support process behind them. We’ll have more capacity to do audits in areas of growing importance in our province thanks, in part, to our growth-based performance development framework.

We are very grateful for the resources entrusted to us to fulfill the mandate, and we will continue to provide our best work on behalf of the Legislative Assembly and the people of B.C. With that, I’ll conclude our remarks, and we welcome your questions.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you so much for that presentation. Questions from members?

Claire Rattée: I’m sure we probably have the same question here, but I’m wondering if you guys can just give us a breakdown of — it seems like a significant amount of savings from the IT systems change — what exactly is included in that and where those savings came from?

Sheila Dodds: Thank you for the question. I’m going to ask Carlos, our CIO, to answer that.

Carlos Caraveo: Thank you, and thank you for the question.

There were two main reasons why we had those savings. The first one was when we initiated the project, we had many servers that we accumulated over the years — over 100 of them — and, as you can imagine, a lot of information and applications that were stored in those servers. When we did the migration, one of the main things that we wanted to do was to actually do a full review and assessment of what we had installed on those servers and do a significant rationalization of the things that we needed to continue using in the new environment. That reduced the number of applications needed, licenses, things that we don’t require anymore, because now it’s going to be handled by our vendors without maintaining that infrastructure. That was one of the biggest savings in that matter.

The other reason was that we had some delays on getting, first of all, the approval last year from the committee to actually start the project. Until then, we couldn’t put in orders to buy the hardware. That caused some of that delay, which in turn, actually delayed some of the migration and the need for restoring our information in the new environment. So we were not charged for restoring that information or backing up that information for about six months. It took all that time to just finish the migration of the information. We’ve seen those charges coming in since January when we finished the project successfully.

I think those are the main reasons that we had savings.

Claire Rattée: Okay, thank you. Out of curiosity…. I’m sorry it might be in here. How much did it cost you guys to do that work? That’s a pretty significant amount of savings. I’m wondering…. Or isn’t it? I thought it was.

Bryan Tepper: It’s a lot.

Claire Rattée: It’s a lot of money. But I mean, for the amount that you’re going to save over years, that’s pretty considerable. I’m thinking the future of many other places should be doing that, maybe.

The other question I had was just about the restructuring of some of that money so that you’re not as reliant on contractors. I know there was mention of a significant amount of reliance on the contractors. I understand how that makes sense, but obviously, that also increases the operating budget every single year, because you’re hiring more staff. Do you find that the workload is increasing and that it’s necessary and that these are positions that are going to be well utilized in the long term? Or is there kind of a strange thing going on right now that it’s becoming busier? Or are there other calculations there? If you could just expand on it a bit.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you for the question. We have always looked at that balance between having staff and leveraging contractors with financial audit expertise. I would say there are two things. One of the areas is it’s harder to find contractors who will provide financial audit work. We’ve been in competition with the large accounting firms for staff. So to be able to have that supplemental resource during our peak time — it’s also the peak time in firms. So we have, over the last several years, really focused on building and maintaining our staff complement — that focus on attracting and retaining a skilled staff.

[11:45 a.m.]

But as I mentioned, the standards that apply to audits — they are getting more complex, and you’re needing additional expertise, and so we’re really wanting to be able to build that knowledge in-house and not have to be relying on those contractors who we are in competition for.

I’m just going to ask Bridget, our Deputy Auditor General, to speak to the complexity of the standards and how that’s impacted.

Claire Rattée: Yeah, and I just

you're needing additional expertise and so we're really wanting to be able to build that knowledge in-house and not have to be relying on those contractors who we are in competition for.

But I'm just going to ask Bridget, our Deputy Auditor General, to just speak to the complexity of the standards and how that's....

Claire Rattée: Kind of quickly, before you start responding to that, I just wanted to mention because my concern would be, and you kind of touched on it there, peak times. Are these necessary to be full-time positions? I know that you're not going to get people probably that are qualified for them if it's not a full-time position, but at the same time, are these going to be full-time positions that they're not actually required full-time?

Sheila Dodds: But we have work that our financial auditors can be doing, other assurance work. So what we're looking is to build the skill set to have financial auditors also support performance audit work. It's how do we leverage that capacity so it's fully productive all the time.

But sorry, I will let Bridget just add to that.

Bridget Parrish: It's mostly about making sure that we have the competence in-house to carry out the work that we need to be able to do. The complexity is only increasing, so we can't rely on a contractor to deliver the same level of quality that we can from an individual who's in-house, who's trained, who's accountable under our performance management system.

A contractor may not be able to deliver that, and that can actually result in increased costs because it can delay the audits because they're not completed because the quality isn't there, and we're not able to sign off until we get the quality where it needs to be. So the risk is higher, I think, on having the contractors than it is on having internal staff where we have a nice critical mass of good qualified staff that we can rely on to get those audits done. That's what we're hoping for.

Bryan Tepper: Back to the IT stuff. We've got 3.5 million for operational funding for ’25-26, ’26-27 for that. Is that going to end or is there more required after that? I'm assuming we're going over here.

Sheila Dodds: I'll just start and then I'll hand it over to Marie and Carlos.

We came to this committee a couple of years ago with a funding request to be able to modernize our IT. We had on-premise servers, we had security concerns and we have migrated to the Kamloops data centre.

The budget that was approved, there was a portion for the project to do the migration and then there's ongoing operational funding that has been built going forward.

Carlos Caraveo: Just to expand a little bit on that. When we came, we also were planning for growing our infrastructure and the requirements for restoring for the next five years. So that's also embedded into the request that we put initially to the committee — to allow us to have that growing capacity and not come back every year to the committee asking for more funds. So we were planning for that future growth into our needs for future audits and requirements. That was one of the things.

But also going back to the savings that I mentioned before, we did a lot of the cleanup of necessary things that we needed to keep moving forward. That also allows us to have now more space allowed for us to continue that growth if needed in the future.

Bryan Tepper: Do you have a projection of what it's going to cost? Is the project over though, or are there continuing costs?

Carlos Caraveo: Yeah, the project is actually completed. We finished the project at the end of March, and now we are into operational mode. So since January of this year, we actually have a better understanding of how much we are requiring because we migrated all the information. Now we're fully operational in Kamloops.

It’s only been a few months since we had all the information being fully backed up and stored there. So that is giving us a better understanding now fully how much will be required in the future.

[11:50 a.m.]

But I can say it was a big cleanup exercise, right? Basically, we cleaned up the garage, and then we wanted to keep it like that. But that requires also to continue having good monitoring of what we're using and be more conscious about the information that is stored, and do we need it, and we have to do that going forward. But yeah, I think we are projecting having a reduction from the original ask because of that amount of work that was done to rationalize the information going forward.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I’m just looking back into the past at

amount of work that was done to rationalize the information going forward.

Bryan Tepper: Okay. Good.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Hello. I’m just looking back into the past at your office redesign project. One of the intentions with the redesign project was when you changed the space, you would reduce the square footage you were using and hopefully be able to sublet out some of your capacity. I’m hoping that we could get an update on that.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you. Yes. That has been a challenge. So when we came forward with the budget request to do the change in the building and to free up a floor, we worked with the provincial leading workplace strategies group, and the costing had been around being able to rent out the space.

We have struggled with…. Well, LWS, the leading workplace strategies, worked with us for a couple of years trying to find a tenant, and they have been unsuccessful. And we are actually working right now with the property manager of the building, who’s staying in contact with LWS, to more actively look for a new tenant for that space.

It’s been a challenging time that over the last year and a half. There’s been a lot more empty space in downtown. Marie, did you want to add anything there?

Marie Thelisma: Yeah, no, this is correct. We’ve listed the property, so it is actually listed with a realtor, with the property manager, so it is fully active to hopefully find someone shortly. We’ll see what we can do, right?

Sheila Dodds: And we have toured a number of potential tenants through, but the interest has not been what we had anticipated that it would be when we were originally working with LWS.

Paul Choi (Chair): No other questions?

I have a question. Thanks for finding efficiencies and not requiring additional funds. My understanding is, like other offices, your caseload and complexity has gone up but you were able to find efficiencies within your office to be able to deal with that. I’m just wondering if you can give us more detail as to exactly how you were able to do that.

Sheila Dodds: I think the issue of caseloads…. Our operation is different than some of the other independent officers where we don’t deal with requests for audits and that drives our work. You know, as an independent office of the Legislature, we do have the mandate to be able to determine where we will direct our resources.

But in terms of looking for efficiencies, we have, as Carlos pointed out, found efficiencies around this migration project and being able to rationalize the software and the licence that we have and the storage that we need for systems.

We are sort of looking at how do we best use the resources we have to deliver on the product. We have done a lot of work around the performance development framework, really looking at articulating the skill sets that staff need to demonstrate as they progress through their careers and looking at the work that they can do. And this is around leveraging those skill sets on more product.

We have actually…. For the year that we’ve just finished, we have underspent on our budget. Part of that underspend is related to, as Carlos had mentioned, the IT migration and not starting those operational costs with the Kamloops data centre until about six months later. Another area was in our professional services budget, which is contracts. We have actually been looking at doing more with our staff and having less reliance on professional services for corporate support as well as for audit support. That’s where we really have found some efficiencies there as well.

But you’ll see one of our corporate priorities is to continue to find efficiencies in how we do our audits and how we support our audits, so we are continuously looking at that improvement internally.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Thank you so much. No other questions? Okay, that’s it.

Thank you so much for coming in, presenting with us today.

We will take a short recess — five minutes — and then we will reconvene and come back and have a discussion.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you for your time.

The committee recessed from 11:54 a.m. to 12:01 p.m.

The committee recessed from 11:54 a.m. to 12:01 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. To try to power through and finish everything by three, if we can…. Yes, we will come back from recess, and I'll ask for a motion to meet in camera.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera at 12:02 p.m.

The committee recessed from 12:26 p.m. to 1:23 p.m.

The committee recessed from 12:26 p.m. to 1:23 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): The committee is now in public session. Thank you so much for coming in a bit early to accommodate our schedule.

Next up, we will be hearing from Anton Boegman, Chief Electoral Officer. You have 25 minutes for your presentation followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. We do have a timer on the screen today to help us stay on schedule.

So now I'll turn it over to you if you'd like to introduce your staff and then begin your presentation.

ELECTIONS B.C.

Anton Boegman: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Ms. Deputy Chair and committee members. Thank you for the opportunity today to meet with you and present our supplementary funding request for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

I'm joined at the meeting by my two deputy chief electoral officers here at the table with me. On my right is Charles Porter, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer of electoral finance and operations. On my left is Kerry Pridmore, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer of corporate services.

Jody Cook, our executive director of electoral finance; Tanya Aiken-Close, senior director of finance and administration; and Andrew Watson, senior director of communications, are also in attendance.

[1:25 p.m.]

I'd like to begin by acknowledging that our meeting is taking place on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, represented by the SXIMEȽEȽ and Songhees First Nations. I acknowledge with gratitude and respect their stewardship of the lands that we are on. I'm always pleased

and Andrew Watson, senior director of communications, are also in attendance.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging that our meeting is taking place on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples, represented by the SXIMEȽEȽ and Songhees First Nations. I acknowledge with gratitude and respect their stewardship of the lands that we are on.

I’m always pleased to attend these meetings. It’s an excellent opportunity to share with members of this committee and through you, the entire Legislative Assembly and citizens of British Columbia, the activities of my office and the way in which we use public funds to serve democracy in B.C.

This meeting provides us with an opportunity to put forward the budget requirements that are needed to achieve our mission in an efficient and fiscally responsible manner. As outlined in our annual report and service plan, our mission is to serve democracy in British Columbia through the delivery of modern, accessible and trusted electoral services designed with British Columbians at the centre.

Before speaking to the numbers that comprise our budget request, I’ll make a few brief remarks on the work of Elections B.C. and our priorities for the upcoming year.

After the intense effort in 2024-25 to deliver British Columbia’s 43rd provincial election, our work in ’25-26 will focus on election close-out activities and reporting. And 2025-26 will also be a time to maintain our information technology infrastructure that allows us to administer elections, ensuring we can successfully deliver future events, and also to prepare in earnest to administer the campaign financing and advertising rules for the 2026 general local elections, which are just over one year away.

As I reported to the committee earlier this month, we’ve also been focusing on cybersecurity measures to protect electoral integrity from new and emerging digital threats.

This past year has been one of significant milestones for Elections B.C. The 43rd provincial election transformed ways that elections are administered in our province. Following amendments to the Election Act in 2019 and 2023, it was the first general election that used technology in the voting process to better serve voters, to make the voting process more accessible, to report preliminary results faster on election night, to support campaign efforts to get out the vote, and to make voting and counting processes more efficient overall.

We are currently preparing the first volume of the Chief Electoral Officer’s report on the 2024 election, which will cover our administration of that event and which will be published this spring. Charles will provide more detail on the 2024 election and our preparations for future electoral events in his comments.

Before addressing the 2025-26 budget requirements, I would like to formally express my great appreciation to all British Columbians who supported the election, either by working as an election official, by standing for office, or by voting. Our elections depend on thousands of temporary staff from across the province, including many individuals from the districts committee members represent. This election would not have been successful without their tremendous dedication to our democracy.

Our supplementary funding request has three elements. The first is a core services operating budget, which is the amount of funding required each year to administer our ongoing operations. The second element is our event budget, which is the one-time funding required to administer current and pending events, such as elections. And the third element is required funding to administer the political financing requirements of the Election Act. This is pass-through funding, with Elections B.C. receiving the funds and then distributing them to eligible political participants according to the legislated schedules.

Our key requests for 2025-26 are summarized on page 2 of our budget submission. Our core services operating funding requirement is $965,000. This represents an increase of $492,000 or 3 percent compared to what was recommended by this committee in the fall of 2023 and $473,000 for four new FTE positions. Further details on the request for new FTEs are included in the business cases which form part of our submission. Kerry will provide more detail on our requirements for the core services budget in her remarks.

Our event funding requirement for ’25-26 is $5.099 million, comprising of three elements: $3.377 million for closeout activities related to the 2024 provincial election, $742,000 to administer the campaign finance requirements for the 2026 general local elections, $980,000 to replace the geographic information system that is used to administer provincial elections. This latter includes $575,000 for operations and $405,000 for capital.

The requirement for public funding of political financing activities is $8.394 million, including $3.805 million for annual allowances for the political parties, $4.589 million for reimbursements of eligible election expenses.

[1:30 p.m.]

In accordance with our legislation, of course, Elections B.C. must pay an annual allowance to registered political parties based on turnout and support received in the most recent general election.

To summarize then, our overall budget

expenses. In accordance with our legislation, of course, Elections B.C. must pay an annual allowance to registered political parties based on turnout and support received in the most recent general election.

To summarize then, our overall budget requirements for the 2025 fiscal year total $14.458 million: $965,000 for the ongoing core services budget, $5.099 million for the event budget, and $8.394 million for the public funding of political financing activities.

Kerry and Charles will now provide more detail on the specifics of these requirements.

Kerry Pridmore: Thank you, Anton, and good afternoon, committee members. It's my pleasure to appear today before the committee and to provide details about the numbers that you see in the budget proposal document.

I will focus on our supplementary core services operating budget. As Anton mentioned, this budget includes an increase of $492,000 from which was recommended to this committee in the fall of 2023. This is required to fund the statutory wage increases for the officers of the Legislature, increased professional services for ongoing IT security assessments, legal services, auditing services and amortizations based on new capital requirements related to electoral events.

The supplementary core services budget also includes a funding request for four critical FTE positions. This is required to fund three positions in investigations and one IT position. The investigations funding is required for two investigators and one senior investigator, and the IT funding is required for a senior security analyst.

On the investigation side, we currently have an investigations team of only two FTEs, a band three director of investigations and a clerk 15 investigations program coordinator. Historically, the investigations team has increased staff capacity with temporary staff for significant events, such as provincial and local government elections.

However, the legislated and regulatory environment has changed in recent years, adding new responsibilities for Elections B.C. and requirements for significantly more oversight at both the provincial and local levels. These changes necessitate a different approach to investigation staffing, one that ensures a stable and professional team that is able to effectively manage the increasing demands of investigations.

Our experience is that recruiting and retaining sufficient staff, qualified investigators is very difficult on a temporary contract basis. Having trained staff with both investigative and elections knowledge and experience is critical to ensure effective enforcement.

Temporary staff are effectively always looking to find a permanent position. This disruption caused by investigators leaving mid-contract is significant. Training and onboarding time is significant. There is often not sufficient time for it in the middle of a contract period if replacement positions need to be staffed. The loss of institutional knowledge and experience creates a risk related to effective case file management. We are therefore requesting these three new additional positions, in addition to the existing director and coordinator.

Moving to the information technology positions, as the legislative and regulatory environment has changed in recent years, so has the cybersecurity landscape. Elections B.C. is seeking to add a permanent senior security analyst to ensure that industry-leading cybersecurity measures can be enhanced and maintained between and during elections.

Elections and electoral management bodies are recognized as high-profile targets for cyberthreat actors as modern elections employ extensive use of technology.

In B.C., we deploy tabulators, laptops, printers and networking equipment to over 1,300 advanced and final voting places. This is in addition to opening 94 district electoral offices for the event period for approximately three months, all of which have their own network computers and printers.

In addition, Elections B.C. continues to add public-facing applications to meet demands for efficient online services. These applications are targets for cybersecurity actors.

[1:35 p.m.]

The candidate nomination application system, which allows candidates to submit their nomination paperwork, electronically is an example of a critical application that must be protected. In 2024, Elections B.C. undertook a comprehensive review and enhancement of its IT infrastructure

The candidate nominations application system, which allows candidates to submit their nomination paperwork electronically, is an example of a critical application that must be protected.

In 2024, Elections B.C. undertook a comprehensive review and enhancement of its IT infrastructure in response to cybersecurity incidents, including government networks, and in preparation for the 2024 provincial election. Adding a permanent role will ensure that the resulting IT security framework is maintained between elections, avoiding costly ramp-up activities leading into an event.

The senior security analyst will be responsible for developing and maintaining the information security framework to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of Elections B.C.’s information and technology assets. With more technology deployed, and new public-facing applications available, Elections B.C. will requires a dedicated security position to monitor and respond to cyberthreats.

Detailed business cases in these positions are included with our budget proposal.

And with that, I will pass it to Charles for more detailed information on our budget requirements.

Charles Porter: Thank you, Kerry.

Good afternoon, committee members. As mentioned, I will focus on Elections B.C.’s event budget request. Before getting into the funding request details, I would like to briefly outline where we are at in our business cycle and review the events of the 2024-25 fiscal year, including an update on close-out and reporting activities for the 2024 provincial election.

Currently, Elections B.C. is in between major electoral events. We are completing administration of the 2024 provincial election and preparing to administer campaign finance rules for the 2026 general local elections. Our role in local elections is limited to administering campaign financing and advertising rules and does not include administering voting or candidate nominations. We are also preparing for the 44th provincial general election and readying for any number of on-demand electoral events.

There are a number of important activities related to the 2024 election that have continued into this fiscal year. These activities include conducting and implementing lessons-learned reviews, audits of election financing reports, consolidation and repackaging of returned election supplies, the production of the final election voters list with voter participation statistics, producing reports to the Legislature and ongoing investigations.

Elections B.C. received 565 campaign financing disclosure reports related to the 2024 election. The reports were reviewed for compliance with the Election Act. These reviews may result in audits or, if infractions are found, monetary penalties. This is to ensure that participants adhere to the rules in the act. Typically, this work takes place for about a year after the filing deadline.

As Anton mentioned, we are also preparing the first volume of the Chief Electoral Officer’s report on the 2024 election. The report will highlight several significant administrative milestones we achieved this election.

Better service for voters was one of them. On average, voters had a wait time of 2.5 minutes on final voting day. Voter surveys showed a 98 percent satisfaction rate with the service they received at the polls.

Faster and more complete results reporting on election night…. We reported preliminary results on election night faster than ever before by using electronic tabulators to count paper ballots. The polls closed at 8 p.m. on election night. By 8:30 p.m., 59 percent of preliminary results were reported, and 85 percent of results were reported by 9 p.m. By comparison, under manual counting processes used in the 2020 election, only 14 percent of preliminary results were reported by 9 p.m.

Because of the new model, 97 percent of all ballots were counted and reported on election night, compared with about 90 percent in past elections.

Over 2.1 million votes were cast in the 2024 provincial election — the most votes ever cast in a B.C. election. Turnout at advance voting was the highest ever, with over one million advance votes cast, and for the first time ever, more votes were cast at advance voting than on final voting day.

We also received more than 111,000 requests for vote-by-mail packages — more than any previous election except for the 2020 election.

This was our first provincial general election under new, complex, modernized election rules, procedures and technology. As a result, the election provides us with an excellent learning opportunity. We’ve completed an extremely thorough review of data and election materials, conducted surveys and held a comprehensive lessons-learned process to learn from the event. We are at work optimizing all procedures and processes and addressing any issues consistent with our continuous improvement approach.

[1:40 p.m.]

Now I will turn to our event budget funding request for 2025-26. The details of these funding requests can be seen on pages 2 to 4 of the budget proposal.

Our event budget requirement for 2025-26 is $5.099 million. This is comprised of a number of components: $3.377 million is required for post-election

requests for 2025-26. The details of these funding requests can be seen on pages 2 to 4 of the budget proposal.

Our event budget requirements for 2025-26 is $5.099 million. This is comprised of a number of components: $3.377 million is required for post-election work necessary to complete our administration of B.C.’s 43rd provincial general election. Broadly speaking, funding for these closeout activities falls into the categories of salaries for temporary staff, information systems and office expenses, which includes professional services. Event closeout activities include reviewing and auditing election financing reports, consolidating repackaging returned election supplies, processing voter registrations and updates, producing the final voters list and participation statistics, as well as ongoing investigative and reporting work related to the event.

And $742,000 is required for preparations to administer the campaign financing rules for the 2026 general local elections. This includes costs to update forums, guides and training materials for political participants; legal services; and staff training costs.

Also, $980,000 is required to replace the geographic information system known as INDEA, which is used to administer provincial electoral events. This request will provide funding for a necessary technology project to replace the legacy geographic information system. This request is split between $575,000 operating and $405,000 capital funding.

Our current system, the integrated digital electoral atlas, known as INDEA, performs election critical functionality of geo-locating addresses such that each voter can be accurately placed within a voting area and electoral district. It is required for the development of electoral boundaries, voting place locations and other functions, as well as the production of related products such as electoral maps and communications materials.

INDEA was developed in the late 1990s and, at that time, it was built as a custom solution because there were no viable products in the marketplace. INDEA is now at the point where it is well past end of life, represents unacceptable risk and must be replaced prior to the next provincial election.

The current system architecture is past end of life and cannot be upgraded for continued use. While system components continue to function for the time being, they are at risk of failing or becoming unacceptable security risks. The supporting source code, database and operating system are no longer industry standards, which results in costly external support due to extremely limited resources with the necessary skill set.

Planning for this critical project has occurred over several years and significant work progressed last fiscal year. We are nearing completion of an assessment for replacing the system with an industry standard database and commercial software. This assessment has informed our capital budget request and includes an off-the-shelf software application, contractor costs associated with detailed technical design specifications and the development of custom functionality which is necessitated by Elections B.C.’s unique business requirements.

Confirmation of the current estimates for 2026-27 operating and capital funding for this project will be provided as part of our annual budget submission in the fall. The current estimates for that fiscal year may be updated depending on progress this fiscal year. On completion of the GIS replacement, Elections B.C. anticipates that all ongoing system support in the future will be able to be accomplished using in-house staff. A detailed business case for this replacement project is included with our budget proposal.

This concludes my remarks. Thank you. Back to you Anton.

Anton Boegman: Thank you, Charles. Before opening up our presentation to comments and questions, I’d appreciate the opportunity just to make a few brief concluding remarks.

Elections B.C. has a strong track record in relation to budget efficiency and fiscal responsibility. Throughout each year, on an ongoing basis, we continually assess and adjust our budget and actuals where we can find efficiencies. As an example of this, in 2024-2025, we’re able to return close to $3.9 million or 4 percent of our budget to the province.

Our proposal has been very carefully considered and includes only the funding that we believe is necessary to administer on our mandate. It includes relatively modest increases to the core services, operating and capital budgets as we have described. We appreciate that in the current fiscal environment, all agencies across government must do their part to find savings wherever possible.

[1:45 p.m.]

The funding request being brought forward today is vital to deliver on our mandate and to continue to provide high-quality services to voters. We believe that making these investments now will help to reduce costs into the future.

We’re also looking to reduce costs across the organization as much as possible, such as limiting travel and overtime. And as is protocol with this committee, should Elections B.C. be required to administer

services to voters. We believe that making these investments now will help to reduce costs into the future.

We’re also looking to reduce costs across the organization as much as possible, such as limiting travel and overtime. And as is protocol with this committee, should Elections B.C. be required to administer any future on-demand events such as by elections, or should our mandate be changed through new legislation, we will write to this committee once the budget impacts have been assessed and if any new funding requirements have been identified.

In closing, I’d like to thank you, Mr. Chair, Ms. Deputy Chair, and committee members for this opportunity to present Elections B.C.’s funding requirements. We will be pleased at this point to respond to any questions that committee members may have. Thank you.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you so much for the presentation. Any questions from members?

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation.

The investigators…. Two investigators and a senior investigator, I think, was the request for full-time employees.

What type of investigation? Are they looking into complaints of potential elections fraud, that type of…?

Anton Boegman: Any complaints that we receive, we obviously assess those complaints to determine whether they are valid complaints and there is a possibility of a contravention of the Election Act and, of course, of the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act on the local side. They are the ones who would be carrying out those investigations on our behalf.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): And you indicated before that you have a group of investigators already. Is there an increase in the amount of investigations which is prompting the requests for additional investigators?

Anton Boegman: That’s a big driver. As we noted in our comments, I believe, over the course of the last two events we’ve seen an increase in case files that were an investigation of over 223 percent — from 132 in 2020 to 427 in 2024.

The vast majority of these are related to our mandate in local government elections. There was new legislation that brought in requirements for registration of local elector organizations. There were new campaign finance requirements around what they need to have on their ads to make sure that the ads are transparent to the public. So there were a lot of people who were running at the local level who transgressed some of these, and so we needed to have a lot of additional capacity in order to investigate those completely.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you for your presentation.

I was listening to you discuss stabilizing your team with bringing on permanent staff members as opposed to responding to increased workload with temporary staffing solutions. All your reasoning is great, but I’m just wondering. If you’ve experienced situations in which you would require a staffing search, that implies to me that there’s uneven workload throughout parts of the year. So, what would the permanent staffing be doing for the remainder of the year?

Anton Boegman: That’s a great question. I’ll respond to that, and if Kerry and Charles have additional comments….

Certainly, there is a cyclical nature to our work. Where we are now with general local elections and general provincial elections, they’re scheduled for every second year. So, obviously during those two-year periods, there’s a lot of work beforehand, and then a lot of work afterwards in order to respond to complaints that we’ve received, to respond to any issues that we’ve been able to identify through our own QA processes and things like that.

What we’ve also put in place within the organization is a way to put in cross-training for people and be able to deploy resources to where they are most needed by the organization at any one point in time. As an example of that, right now we have a large group of our team working on the campaign finance reviews and feeding those into the audits of the disclosure reports that we received from all candidates in the election as well as the annual financial reports from all registered political parties. So, we’re able to deploy resources from some parts of our organization that are at a lesser workload to those that are at a higher workload.

[1:50 p.m.]

With the cyclical basis of our events now being every two years, we’re confident that the additional resources in investigations would enable us to recruit and retain people with a higher level of professional skills in this area as compared to how we’re now staffing that with temporary workers.

Charles, Kerry, any additional comments?

Are you able to expand a little bit? Have you been seeing an increase in threats, or is it an anticipation of the potential vulnerabilities that we might face?

If you can just provide more detail about maybe the level of risk that we're facing and some more detail on whether or not it's necessary for us at this time to bring in these additional resources.

Anton Boegman: Sure. I do think that the risk is real, and I think the risk is ongoing. You may recall, of course, the cyberattack on the provincial government over the course of the summer of 2024. A lot of the services that we access and use are provided through agreements with the provincial government. And so that cyberattack that happened was certainly a direct risk to our systems.

We were able to do a number of different audits to assess whether there was any penetration of our systems. And we are very happy that there were not, given where we were in relation to the election. But that is an ongoing and current risk.

Other election agencies…. Elections Saskatchewan was hit with a ransomware attack in the lead-up to their election. So there are not only foreign nation-states — I do understand that the cyberattack on the province was a foreign nation-state attack — but criminal organizations are also looking to make these types of things. I think protection of the voters list is incredibly important given the information that we have on it. We do have a number of protections in place.

This position would enable us to have an expert on site rather than relying on someone on an on-call basis. I think it would enable us to be much more proactive in terms of deploying risk prevention activities and monitoring our systems on a real-time basis. I think that this is one area where we cannot afford to be less vigilant, even though it's not in the lead-up to an election per se, because we maintain the list on an ongoing basis.

The types of threats…. I don't know if you read the most recent report from the Communications Security Establishment in the Canadian Centre for Cybersecurity, but they've certainly highlighted this as their number one threat that they're seeing.

Kerry, if you have anything additional to say.

Kerry Pridmore: I agree with your comments.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I was hoping we could dig a little bit more into the replacement of the GIS system. You've asked for $405,000 in capital and then some in funding in order to implement….

Anton Boegman: In operating funding, yes.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Can you break that down a little bit for me?

Anton Boegman: In the business case, we highlight the specifics in terms of what we're anticipating to be spent on that project over two fiscal years, so the first being ’25-26 and the second being ’26-27.

In ’25-26, there is $575,000 for operating expenses and $405,000 for capital. The capital is typically related to the actual development of customization to the off-the-shelf software that we will be looking at procuring. The industry standard for this type of project is Esri software, which is used across government, across a number of industries.

But in order to enable it to do the unique things that we require it to do as an election management body — so to be able to geolocate or geocode where voters are so we can place them in the right electoral district, to be able to handle the map base underneath it, layering on electoral district boundaries and voting area boundaries, to be able to produce files that can be used for maps and those sorts of things — there needs to be some customization of the off-the-shelf software that we will be purchasing. So that's what the capital part of that is for.

The operating expenses are for the work kind of around that necessary to make those systems work. I don't know if you have more detail on the operating side of things, Charles?

Charles Porter: That would include professional staff as well as in-house staff doing that work that relates to the customization so that it can interact appropriately with all of the provincial systems that our systems have to interact with.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Okay. Thank you.

[2:00 p.m.]

Anton Boegman: Sorry, are you looking for something more specific than what we had in the business case?

Jennifer Blatherwick: I think when I was looking through the business case, you divided the optimization of the software into capital and also into the operating. And so that was interesting to me

Are you looking for something more specific than what we had in the business case?

Jennifer Blatherwick: I think, when I was looking through the business case…. You divided the optimization of the software into capital and also into the operating. That was interesting to me — what is happening there that part of the optimization is capital and part of it is operational. But your explanation that the part that’s in operation is optimizing it to be compatible with current software within departments….

Charles Porter: And our business needs as well, but also the GeoBC’s provincial cadastre system and other systems that we need in order to be able to do the work.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Is my understanding correct? The part that’s capital is pre-operational, and the part that is operational is going to be post-implementation.

Anton Boegman: I think there’s a combination. I think the capital is mainly when you’re actually coding software, where you’re developing new…. We might need to write an interface piece that allows something. So the business process review around that would be operating, where we would have people understand the business connectors. The technical part, where you’re actually writing software code, that’s the capital part.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you.

Anton Boegman: You’re welcome.

Kerry Pridmore: We are also following government principles around what can be allocated to capital and operating. There’s a specific formula for that that we are required to follow. That is how it has been divvied up.

Paul Choi (Chair): Any other questions? No?

I have a question. We just heard that sometimes when there is a by-election…. It seems like there potentially is a variance in cost involved in holding by-elections. I’m just wondering if that’s true, and if it is, could you give us a little more detail as to what contributes to that variation in cost?

Anton Boegman: Sure. Obviously electoral districts have differing numbers of registered voters in them, and so a big driver of part of the cost is the cost to send where-to-vote cards to those voters and to staff an appropriate number of voting places to serve those voters. So in a larger electoral district with more voters, that would typically be a higher cost component than in a smaller electoral district with smaller voters.

But then there are also other factors that vary widely from where you are. The cost of real estate is a big one. In downtown Vancouver, securing real estate for a district office, securing real estate for voting places can be quite expensive for those, where it can be less expensive in other areas. Similarly, in some of northern B.C. it’s also quite expensive to procure office space because of competition for scarce resources with oil and gas or other industries and things like that.

So typically the variation is depending upon the number of voters, where the location is and the cost of real estate that we need.

There are also costs for advertising that vary in some cases. If you’re needing to advertise in provincewide newspapers there’s a higher cost to that than if you’re able to do the necessary legislated advertising in lower cost….

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much for that.

If there are no further questions, we will end it here. Thank you so much for your time and for presenting to us.

Anton Boegman: Thank you.

Paul Choi (Chair): We will take a quick five minute recess and we will go into our discussions. Thank you.

The committee recessed from 2:03 p.m. to 2:05 p.m.

The committee recessed from 2:03 p.m. to 2:05 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): I think we are all still here, so let’s just power through.

I will ask for a motion to move to in camera.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 2:05 p.m. to 2:20 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Now we are in public session.

I also need a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

Paul Choi (Chair): The committee now stands adjourned. Good job, everyone.

The committee adjourned at 2:20 p.m.