The committee met at 8:31 a.m.

Jennifer Arril (Clerk of Committees): Good morning, Members. This is Jennifer Arril, Clerk of Committees.

Noting that the Chair and Deputy Chair are not present, I note that Steve Morissette is going to move a motion.

Steve Morissette: I move that Jennifer Blatherwick, MLA, take the Chair for this meeting of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services until such time that the Deputy Chair is available.

Motion approved.

[Jennifer Blatherwick in the chair.]

Jennifer Blatherwick (Acting Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Jennifer Blatherwick. I’m the MLA for Coquitlam-Maillardville and the Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity.

I’d like to acknowledge that we are meeting today in Vancouver on the traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ peoples.

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

Our committee is currently conducting its annual consultation with British Columbians on their priorities for the next provincial budget. British Columbians who are not presenting to the committee can still share their views by making written comments. The details on how to provide submissions are available on our website at bcleg.ca/consultations.

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

Steve Morissette: Good morning. I’m Steve Morissette, MLA for Kootenay-Monashee and Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development.

Claire Rattée: I’m Claire Rattée, MLA for Skeena and critic for mental health and addictions.

Sunita Dhir: Good morning. I’m Sunita Dhir. I’m the MLA for Vancouver-Langara and Parliamentary Secretary for International Credentials.

Bryan Tepper: Good morning. I am Bryan Tepper, MLA, Surrey-Panorama, and critic for community safety and integrated services.

Jennifer Blatherwick (Acting Chair): Assisting the committee today are Darryl Hol and Kayla Wilson from the Parliamentary Committees Office and Amanda Heffelfinger and Dwight Schmidt from Hansard Services.

We are now going to hear from a number of organizations and individuals about their priorities for the next provincial budget. Each participant will have five minutes to speak, followed by up to five minutes for questions from committee members.

First up, we have Thomas Green from the David Suzuki Foundation.

You have five minutes to speak, and there will be five minutes following for questions.

Budget Consultation Presentations

David Suzuki Foundation

Thomas Green: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. I really appreciate the important work that you do on behalf of British Columbians. I know setting the government’s budget really influences how our economy develops over the subsequent years. I think this is my fourth time coming before this committee, so I appreciate your work.

The budget consultation paper acknowledges the turmoil that B.C. is facing, from U.S. tariffs to global instability. This follows upon disruptions that we had because of the pandemic. But also, Russia invading Ukraine caused a sharp rise in fossil fuel prices, causing inflation and deepening the affordability crisis.

[8:35 a.m.]

Unfortunately, inflation was also based on the carbon tax, but the carbon tax wasn’t a source of inflation. That political misstep cost B.C. an important tool for reducing pollution, left a hole in public finances and, with the cancellation of the climate action tax credit, meant a loss of direct income support for low-income families.

We understand the B.C. government is crafting Budget 2026 with a focus on affordability, innovation and ensuring the province has a strong, diversified economy. I’d like to start with what not to invest in. We see LNG as a risky bet and a climate dead end. The International Energy Agency was once forecasting steep rises in gas demand, and now it does not see that forecast materializing.

Markets are shifting fast because renewables, storage and electrification are undercutting the market for gas. They’re racing ahead due to plummeting prices, and the demand for fossil gas is especially uncertain in Asia. Turning Tides, a report by Carbon Tracker, an independent financial think tank, found that B.C. LNG is higher cost and will come online just as there’s a global glut of LNG.

Backing new LNG infrastructure means locking in emissions, locking up public capital and locking up renewables and may risk having these big terminals rusting in the coastal rains. They’ve received $5 billion in subsidies, and yet last year they produced merely about half the revenue that the Liquor Distribution Branch did — for all the gas industry, all the royalties on that.

We’re seeing wildfires and smoke across Canada right now. LNG is a fossil fuel that importing countries will burn, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and accelerating climate change.

Now I want to get to the good news and where I think you guys can play a really, really important role. No one argues today that China made a bad bet when it invested heavily in solar, wind, batteries and EVs. It’s now dominating those markets, and those exports are going around the world and reshaping economies.

The key thing to understand about those technologies is that they’re scalable. You have factories, and you just print out more and more of them. As you produce more of them, the learning curve improves, so costs go down. Then you can out-compete these incumbent technologies.

Also interesting is that the next presenter is from the Electrical Contractors. What I’m talking about is electrifying the economy and the huge opportunities that provides for improving affordability, creating jobs and getting us off the shocks from geopolitical prices set in global markets. Instead, we’re running the economy on clean electrons that we can generate here with our existing hydroelectric facilities.

Already, the smart moves are being made by B.C. Hydro with its call for power, which is bringing more renewables, and there’s more to come yet. We see that as really smart moves. Thanks to forward-looking policy choices and early investments, we’re already starting to see the economic benefits of clean energy and technology.

We’re pleased that the government is helping households adopt heat pumps, which far outperform fossil fuel systems in terms of energy efficiency and operating costs. Energy retrofits also make homes more resilient to extreme heat, and you’re going to create a lot of jobs, improving all those homes for British Columbians.

By leveraging disruptive clean energy technologies and B.C.’s existing track record of innovation, we can tackle rising costs and geopolitical instability, create new economic opportunities and also reduce our emissions, which is great in this time when we see terrible wildfires across the country.

Thank you very much, and I welcome your questions.

Jennifer Blatherwick (Acting Chair): I’m looking here for a budget ask.

Thomas Green: As you shape the budget, there are going to be various interventions and whatnot. I didn’t want to give a specific line item or whatever, but a frame to think of. Anything you can do where the decision that the government makes on spending helps with things like heat pumps, helps with retrofits, helps electrify the economy, helps us shift away from fossil fuels and avoid further investments in LNG, further public subsidies for LNG or infrastructure to support LNG — I think those are smart moves.

[8:40 a.m.]

I’m not putting specific numbers there but more a filter to look at your broader work, because I know that one thing this committee faces is day after day of people wanting $100 million there, $20 million there.

Already this government is investing in heat pumps, because of the accord with the Green Party, which I think is a smart move. It’s going to help a lot of households. But any supports that can help with electrification, retrofits, all those kinds of things, are good.

Bryan Tepper: Hi. I just ask…. You said $5 billion in subsidies to the LNG, but the royalties are just less than liquor. Do you have numbers on that?

Thomas Green: Yeah. I think last year was $574 million for the gas sector as a whole, for royalties. Part of the problem is that the province had this deep-well royalty credit, which was extended way too long. The technology had become standardized, and yet they were still getting credit as if it was an innovative, very high-cost technology.

Bryan Tepper: When you discuss hydro, do you see a vision for expanding that?

Thomas Green: Definitely. As we electrify the economy, we need to generate more electrons. We did some modelling with the University of Victoria, and you see that across most economies, you need to double or triple electrical capacity from 2020 to 2050. B.C. is already starting on that step, but I would say that needs to continue.

Bryan Tepper: I guess my question is: how are we going to produce the hydro? I don’t think the province has discussed any further hydro dams. So how do you see us producing more?

Thomas Green: Yeah, they did a call for power and already have ten successful projects on the line, and they’ve announced a second call for power. So between those, it’s allowing us to scale up about the equivalent of a Site C but much more quickly, because the nice thing about wind and solar — it’s mostly going to be wind — is that you can build it very, very quickly. These are modular technologies.

Bryan Tepper: So you’re counting everything, not just hydro, then.

Thomas Green: Yeah. Everything. The nice thing is that B.C. has got one big advantage. Because we’ve got giant hydro dams, they can serve like a battery. So we’re in a much better position than some other economies to put on a whole bunch of wind and solar. Even places that don’t have big hydro dams, though, are….

No one expected batteries to improve as quickly as they have, and they’re now being deployed to help balance wind and solar in places that don’t have the advantages that British Columbia has. But we really have advantages here to build on.

Steve Morissette: You mentioned the carbon tax, which has been removed across Canada. Do you have any ideas on how we should transition from that? Is there something you suggest we should transition to?

Thomas Green: Well, we still have carbon pricing on industrial emissions, and keeping that is critical. I know that Saskatchewan decided to get rid of its industrial carbon price, and the Canadian Climate Institute has been very clear that’s not a smart move. It doesn’t position the economy for the future, where you’ve got to compete on lower emissions and these cleaner technologies that I’m talking about. Staying strong with industrial carbon pricing is important.

In terms of how to replace it, I think this is something that the CleanBC review is looking into, and we’ll be giving recommendations there. I’d be happy to follow up with our more detailed recommendations when we’ve pulled them all together. But it is a bit of a tough one to replace that tool.

Jennifer Blatherwick (Acting Chair): Thank you so much.

I will now be ceding the chair back to the Deputy Chair.

[8:45 a.m.]

[Elenore Sturko in the chair.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Good morning. My name is Elenore Sturko. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale. I’m the critic for Public Safety and Solicitor General, and I’m the Deputy Chair of the committee.

I apologize for being late this morning. As my colleague pointed out, I should have taken the SkyTrain.

Thank you for being here this morning. Next, I’m going to call upon Matt MacInnis from the Electrical Contractors Association of B.C.

Matt MacInnis: Good morning, everyone. Thank you, everybody, for being here.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Awesome. It’s great to see you. You’re going to have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes for questions, please.

Electrical Contractors
Association of B.C.

Matt MacInnis: My name is Matt MacInnis. I’m the president of the Electrical Contractors Association of British Columbia. ECABC represents more than 150 electrical contractors, line utility contractors and industry suppliers.

Our members are involved in every phase of electricity, from generation — our members helped to build Site C; they will help to build the upcoming wind and solar projects — through to the transmission lines that carry clean electricity, the substations that transmit it, as well as all of the buildings and infrastructure that depend on clean electricity in British Columbia: our homes, our schools, our hospitals, our SkyTrain stations and, of course, the job-creating industrial projects that we’re looking to expand.

We have limited time today, so I’m going to speak about two items of urgent importance: prompt payment legislation and ensuring that British Columbia has enough skilled electrical workers to build a sustainable future. One of these is a direct budget ask; the other is more of a fiscal policy request to support the construction sector.

I understand and appreciate the province’s current annual budgeting pressures. I also think it’s important for us to be considering both the annual budget as well as the complete fiscal picture for British Columbia. In short, B.C. needs to increase its investment in training skilled electrical workers and other skilled tradespeople as well.

We are in a unique situation right now where the ambitions of the province threaten to outrun the capacity of key parts of our building trades and of the construction sector as a whole. The B.C. government currently has its largest ever capital plan. B.C. Hydro has a $36 billion capital plan, which doesn’t include the ten to 20 privately built projects that we expect to see through the two calls for power or the northwest transmission line or the additional transmission infrastructure required to connect those ten to 20 projects to the grid.

At the same time, B.C. needs to build tens of thousands of homes and is actively working to attract investment in new mines and other industrial projects. In order to build, you need builders.

All of these things are happening simultaneous to a couple of other realities. First, 2023 and 2024 were the two busiest years in history for B.C.’s electrical contractors. B.C.’s aging workforce means that we are losing increasingly more people to retirements every year — not just people but also their experience and expertise as they exit the workforce.

Lastly, B.C. has graduated the same number of B.C.-trained apprentices to Red Seal certification every year since 2021 — about 900 annually. What we’re seeing is that while we’re losing more people, we’re actually training the same number year to year. We’re not addressing the shortage, which is growing year over year.

Our ask…. There was a commitment made by the government in the fall of 2024 to add $50 million in annual funding to SkilledTradesBC. These dollars weren’t included in the 2025 budget. We believe that investment does need to be made as soon as possible.

I understand that the current financial year is not within the purview of this committee, but we have been clear in our ask of the government. We believe that those dollars that were committed should be funded through these existing contingencies, which are available in Budget 2025, and then, through this committee and through Budget 2026, firm commitments made in the three-year fiscal plan to those dollars to ensure that training institutions have the long-term confidence to make those investments required to train electrical workers and other skilled tradespeople.

Moving on to prompt payment legislation. The topic of prompt payment legislation is certainly not new to this committee. I and other members of the construction sector have been in front of this committee a number of times, dating back to at least 2017, on this conversation. This committee has regularly recommended to the province that it adopt prompt payment legislation.

I am pleased to say that the government has committed, in the last couple of months, to developing a draft legislative proposal for prompt payment legislation, which is the biggest step forward we’ve seen on this important file over the last half decade.

In short, payment timelines are a huge issue in the construction sector. Trades and subcontractors are often waiting 90-plus days to get paid for work that they’ve not only done but have also invoiced.

[8:50 a.m.]

The reality is that when you are not getting paid for three-plus months, you’re building those carrying costs and risks into your bid. This, quite simply, ultimately ends up increasing the cost of construction.

This legislation will put into place payment time plans into law, and it provides fairness and transparency and certainty for everybody in the construction chain, all the way from owners down to the last finishing trade on a project. Prompt payment legislation exists in every single major province and has been proven to be effective where it is in place.

We’d encourage the committee to include it in its recommendations once again this year, and hopefully it ends up being a moot point, because ideally, legislation will have been passed in the upcoming fall session. Thank you.

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

Now looking to members for questions.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming here and advocating for your members and for the construction industry in British Columbia.

When we’re talking about education for the 900 graduates that are coming out of the system — there was an increase in 2021 to the 900 — where are you thinking? Which post-secondaries, which institutions do you think would be most appropriate to carry the added capacity?

Matt MacInnis: I don’t want to make enemies of any particular training institution, so I’m not going to answer that. But what I will say is this. We do know that there are pressures in certain areas.

For example, if you are an individual who today decides that you want to become an electrician, and you live in the Lower Mainland — let’s say you live in Burnaby — BCIT is the province’s largest training school for electrical apprentices. There’s currently a wait-list that extends throughout 2025.

Even if an individual made that choice right now, it’s probably at least a year before they’d be able to access training at BCIT in order to begin that step. The reality is that if you’re looking to either start a career or change a career, you’re probably not going to wait nine, 12, 18 months to make that choice. You’re going to move on to something else.

So there is a multifold challenge here, and at the end of the day, capacity is a significant issue.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you. I was hoping you could also speak a little bit to access for your members in different regions of the province. In terms of training, when you live in a rural remote northern community, what is the capacity for your members to access?

Matt MacInnis: There are training schools available in different parts of the province, which is a positive. I fully appreciate that the folks at SkilledTradesBC have a unique challenge in trying to determine where to best allocate resources, because while there is this concentration in the Lower Mainland in particular, in the more populous areas, you do still want to ensure that you can train people further away.

I grew up in Port McNeill. The closest meaningful post-secondary institution for me was two to 2½ hours away. I am sensitive to that.

The flip side of it is, though, that right now we have a situation that’s unique in construction, where there may be training capacity available in a community in the far north, and we are telling people who live in Victoria or the Lower Mainland that you can get year 3 of your training; you just have to relocate yourself and/or your family to the other end of the province for three months.

We don’t do that with any other type of post-secondary education. You never tell a second-year philosophy student that you can’t go to UVic this year and you have to go to UNBC or something like that.

It’s a tricky balance. It’s great that there is some availability in other parts of the province, but we shouldn’t be pushing people who live in one area to have to go get training far away from home or from where their job is just because there happens in two or three spaces available in that school.

Sunita Dhir: Thanks, Matt, for the presentation.

I understood the policy part, but for the training part, you gave us a dollar figure. I missed that. Could you repeat that, please?

Matt MacInnis: During last fall, there was a commitment from the governing party to add $50 million per year to SkilledTradesBC.

Sunita Dhir: Okay. Does ECABC have any training programs for foreign-educated electricians or workers? Do you give any on-the-job training as well?

Matt MacInnis: That’s a great question. Training and recognizing…. It depends a little bit on where you’re from. I’m going to be mindful of time here. The Red Seal certification is great because for those nations which have it and those regions that have it, it does provide very quick adoption of skills.

[8:55 a.m.]

For those who come to Canada or British Columbia from jurisdictions that don’t have a similar pathway, it’s more complicated. The reality is we don’t do a great job of recognizing transferrable or immediately adjacent skills because our current system doesn’t do a lot of hands-on assessments for international individuals. So there’s opportunity to enhance that.

SkilledTradesBC has expressed in the past that it’s challenging for them because it’s quite costly to do that. Our perspective has always been that it’s a worthwhile investment because at the end of the day, I’d rather have somebody who has some electrical experience transition into the trade rather than be pushed into a service sector job where we’re not taking advantage of that pre-existing experience and skills. But it is costly.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): We’re almost out of time, but we’ll go with MLA Morrissette for one final question.

Steve Morissette: The prompt payment legislation. I’ve heard that several times. I think that’s something we need to move ahead on.

On training, it’s a hard question. Is there any opportunity for construction associations to partner with the province on training? It’s a mutual benefit.

Matt MacInnis: Being mindful of the time, the short answer is that, particularly when it comes to the trades, I would argue that our members already are. Because we have an apprentice system, which is unique from other pathways of traditional post-secondary education, our members are already hiring people and giving them on-the-job training throughout their apprenticeships. So in essence, they are already significantly more involved in the training of their workforce than other sectors.

Myself, I have a bachelor of arts degree. I didn’t work for nine months of the year with an employer to develop me when I went to a post-secondary, when I went to university. I think that already exists. That said, our association and our members will always be open to the idea of doing more to support the training of workers to ensure that British Columbia has the workforce required to achieve goals.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thanks for your presentation.

We’re going to move to the next presenter, which will be Cathy Yan.

Morning, Cathy. You have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes for questions. You can start when you’re ready.

Cathy Yan

Cathy Yan: Great, thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for allowing me to present today. My name is Cathy, and as for my day job, I’m a UBC student in the health sciences sector. My five-to-nine is in climate advocacy initiatives.

The recommendations I’ll be presenting today were co-developed with two groups. One is Ritmos Climáticos, which is a youth-led climate advocacy organization, specifically for youth who identify as immigrants and newcomers. The second group that I’ve worked with to develop these is Strong Towns, which is an international movement with a Vancouver base that focuses on making cities work better for everyone.

My first two recommendations are going to align with the consultation paper’s priority of building a strong and resilient economy that’s also diversified. The first one I’m going to talk about is public transit.

For me, I don’t have a car, and I can’t afford a car. The only way I can actually get to school and get to work is through the use of public transit. In the B.C. 2025 budget, my belief is that no new investments were announced, mostly reiterating investments made into ongoing projects like the Langley SkyTrain expansion.

But as we also know, TransLink is facing a budget shortfall in the Lower Mainland, which threatens not just people’s mobility but also economic activity. If people who are highly qualified for jobs cannot get to those jobs, that is an economic loss.

Additionally, the current model of TransLink, as well as its new funding, relies on increasing fares. This is actually a vulnerability because any decreased ridership, like we saw during the pandemic, threatens the whole transit funding model.

Furthermore, transit users tend to be lower income than drivers, and placing the onus of paying for transit is an additional affordability burden. Furthermore, in the three-legged-stool funding model for transit, people who have EVs currently do not have a way to pay into the system. Although they use our roads and road infrastructure, they’re not charged gas taxes.

My recommendation is to implement a vehicle levy, which I believe the B.C. government is already discussing. I would like to further announce my support for this, because I believe that this is a very equitable way for even EV users to pay into the system and make transit better for everyone.

[9:00 a.m.]

My second recommendation is taxing LNG export profits to fund our green transition. Currently, in the most recent accountability report, B.C. is not on track to meeting our 2030 emissions targets. Also, with the anticipated increase in LNG exports, our consumer costs are also expected to rise 25 percent this year and 49 percent next year according to B.C.’s 2025 budget.

However, LNG companies, as I’ve heard some of the speakers already say, receive a lot of tax credits and subsidies. This seems to me to go against affordability. My parents, for example, have a natural gas system in their home. They would love to switch to a heat pump, but the upfront cost is still too high. Yet they can’t help but see their gas prices increase, which puts them in a tough financial situation.

My recommendation is that profits from oil and gas development should be taxed higher than that of other industries, especially profits made from exporting our LNG. This tax revenue should be used to fund expansion of CleanBC’s heat pump rebate programs, for example, as well as to bring back the e-bike subsidy and rebate, which was incredibly popular. Plus, this is another mechanism by which public transportation and clean mobility structures can be funded.

My final recommendation focuses on having safer communities and affordable housing. We understand that increased severity in intensities of climate-related disasters, like wildfires and floods, have left people both financially, in terms of their insurance, and physically, in terms of their locations, vulnerable. I live in Richmond, B.C., and the dikes are a constant, ongoing battle. However, B.C. did not announce any increased spending tied to disaster mitigation in the 2025 budget.

At the same time, the province needs to build more housing. The province has pushed to do so, but this housing needs to be located in safe places. My recommendation, in my last five seconds, is to reduce rates for small and non-profit developers who want to increase density in regions deemed as low risk for climate disasters.

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

Looking to our members if they have any questions, please.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much for your presentation. That’s a lot of stuff in a small space, but I can see that it’s, obviously, been considered thoroughly.

I was wondering if we could talk a little bit more about public transit. Your proposal would be something that the province has been considering, amongst many other options — the vehicle levy. When you’re looking at the vehicle levy, your thought was that it would be a point of purchase or that it would be on people who already own vehicles?

Cathy Yan: My thought is that it would be annual, so it would be a reliable source of income for the province. Ultimately, we want to have people transition from driving their cars to using more environmentally sound transportation methods, which could be anything from car sharing to e-bikes to using public transit. I think having just a levy at a point of purchase would be unreliable in the long term.

Jennifer Blatherwick: So something like an ICBC charge?

Cathy Yan: Yes, exactly.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Any other questions?

Bryan Tepper: You just kind of started to touch on — running out of time there — the reduced rates for non-profits, for building…. I missed a little bit of it because it was kind of quick, so I’ll give you a little bit more time to run through that so I can get an idea of what you’ve got going on there.

Cathy Yan: My consideration is that increasing property taxes is extremely unpopular, so a lot of the burden ends up being placed on developers. That’s why we see a lot of luxury apartments being built, because that’s what is profitable in the long term.

If you’re a small-sized or medium developer, or you’re not even a development company…. Let’s say you’re, like, a group of two neighbours who want to redevelop your land. That is extremely difficult to secure funding for.

[9:05 a.m.]

At the same time, if we expand the scope of affordability to thinking that the most affordable type of housing is housing that we don’t have to rebuild after a climate disaster, it becomes crucial to think about where we place affordable homes as well.

My line of thinking really follows the fact that we want to not only incentivize density and affordable developments but also place those affordable developments in places that are long-term safe — at least what we model and deem to be safe. I think a good way to do that would be to lower development taxes and fees for people who want to go forth and develop density in those regions.

Sunita Dhir: Thanks, Cathy. I really appreciate your advocacy, and your advocacy aligns with our government’s policies already — to build more housing, to keep public transit affordable. Yes, we have taken everything into consideration, and I just want to say thank you so much. It’s really a pleasure listening to your ideas.

Seeing no further questions, we’ll move to our next presenter. Thanks for your time today.

We will have now, from the Watershed Watch Salmon Society, Lina Azeez.

Thanks for joining us. You’ll have five minutes for presentation, five minutes for questions. You can start when you’re ready.

Watershed Watch Salmon Society

Lina Azeez: All right. Hello, everyone. Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Lina Azeez, and I am the habitat programs director at Watershed Watch Salmon Society.

Today I’m here on behalf of a coalition we are part of, the Lower Fraser Floodplains Coalition, also known as the LFFC. Our coalition brings together First Nations, municipalities, advocates and experts working to ensure that flood management in the lower Fraser region is equitable, climate-ready and ecologically sound.

The LFFC would like to urge the province to fully implement the B.C. flood strategy, provide adequate funding for risk assessment and flood hazard area land use guidelines and align provincial housing policy, especially Bill 44, with climate-risk and flood-resilience planning.

The cost of inaction is already clear. The November ’21 atmospheric river was the most costly disaster in B.C.’s history. According to a ’22 report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, that single event cost our province between $8 billion and $14 billion. Insured losses alone were $675 million, and public infrastructure losses were estimated at $1.5 billion, largely covered by taxpayer-funded disaster assistance programs. Uninsured losses are estimated at $5 billion, and that is seven times more than the insured losses.

This flood event is not a surprise. We know flood risk is increasing, and we know which regions are affected. Unfortunately, today we’re moving in the wrong direction. Bill 44 mandates densification in communities across B.C. Bill 44 places the onus on local governments to identify hazardous locations that can be exempted from densification. This includes flood-prone areas like the Lower Mainland, but local governments lack the essential guidance from the province on how to regulate, manage and defend their communities from flooding.

This disconnect leaves local governments in an impossible situation. They must approve new housing without the tools needed to understand and manage risk for their communities. A ’25 report from the Canadian Climate Institute predicts that additional housing development in flood-prone areas in the Lower Mainland could lead to new costs from flood events, averaging more than $1 billion a year.

B.C. has already developed a provincial flood strategy, and moving to its implementation could help break down the silos in government policy, avoid the burden of increased costs, support economic resilience and keep communities safe.

Disaster recovery funding from the federal government has, in the past, been a critical support for flood-prone communities in B.C. However, the federal disaster financial assistance arrangements, DFAA, guidelines, have recently changed. According to section 8 of the updated guidelines, properties in already known high-risk flood areas will no longer be eligible for federal disaster assistance. This is a serious issue.

[9:10 a.m.]

We understand that private insurers are providing signals that they are not prepared to step in and fill that enormous gap. The province needs to put in place supportive regulations and solutions to help communities who will find themselves in high-risk areas.

Future-thinking adaptation strategies that incorporate nature-based solutions will strengthen community and ecological resilience and create stable economies. A Public Safety Canada report found that every $1 invested in adaptation could save $7 in post-disaster recovery costs.

Despite the sobering realities, the B.C. flood strategy, if implemented, frames important opportunities for floodplain communities across the province and can be a reset from the ongoing cycle of disaster and recovery. It sets out a knowledge-based approach to risk reduction, grounded in relationships between First Nations and local governments.

The flood strategy offers pathways to multi-beneficial floodplain management. The integrated flood management practices set out in this strategy also support nature-based solutions, which we know are most cost-effective and sustainable. According to a ’24 study in sustainable cities and society, nature-based flood defences can outperform grey infrastructure in terms of adaptability, ecosystem co-benefits and long-term resilience, especially in high-risk areas like the lower Fraser.

The flood strategy, if implemented, will give communities the tools they need to guide development safely, reduce long-term costs and maintain access to federal disaster funding for extreme events. By combining the B.C. flood strategy with Bill 44 implementation, we can avoid repeating past mistakes and build climate-safe, affordable housing in areas that will remain viable for generations.

This is not just about preventing future losses; it’s also about making sure our communities are safe, sustainable and protected in the face of climate change.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you. Now looking to the panel here for questions.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Unfortunately, five minutes is not a lot of time to talk about everything.

Lina Azeez: I know. I had to skip stuff.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I’m sure. One of the things you did bring up in there was the benefits of nature-based mitigation for managing disaster and also the cost-effectiveness in comparison to some man-made structures. I’m hoping that you can talk a little bit more about nature-based mitigation and the economic benefit and resiliency.

Lina Azeez: Absolutely. As an example, in the lower Fraser, we have about 1,700 kilometres of side channels, tributaries and sloughs that are cut off from the Fraser River by old and aging flood infrastructure. These structures are undersized, based on climate change projections, and need to be upgraded, which is an incredibly expensive task to take on in the Lower Mainland.

I believe the last estimate, just for between the delta and the Port Mann Bridge…. It was estimated at $12 billion just for the dikes, which is a number we understand is very unfeasible for our province and for the region to take on.

What we have seen is nature-based solutions like enhancing wetlands for absorption, opening up and reconnecting these side channels and tributaries to the Fraser so that they can hold more water, essentially allowing the river room to breathe and to grow. It’s important during periods of floods.

One example where we’ve actually done some work has been out in the Lower Agassiz Slough, where shortly before the 2021 floods, a floodgate was put in, sized for climate change and also a fish-friendly solution. The floodgate stays open 90 percent of the time, and it only closes during high flood events. It was the only structure that actually did not overtop in the district of Kent during the ’21 floods.

That floodgate that went in, because it’s now open longer periods of time — open like 90 percent of the time — allows for more movement of fish and water, creating healthier waters upstream. The spring after we put that floodgate in, we saw coho salmon come back to that slough after 70 years of not being able to access it.

That was a project that was actually funded through the healthy watersheds initiative, which is an amazing project — $27 million in its first year. It invested in the local community. We had students come out and do riparian restoration along that waterway. Farmers upstream were really happy that their farms were protected when the gates are closed, and the water is flowing well when the gates are open.

[9:15 a.m.]

So there were a lot of multiple benefits that we saw coming out of just that one. The cost for upgrading that culvert and floodgate was about $1 million. That’s just an example of one. Wetland is another great way to go.

Jennifer Blatherwick: So what I’m hearing from you is that you’re advocating for an investment in resilient, nature-responsive infrastructure in order to prevent further costs down the road.

Lina Azeez: Yes, absolutely.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll move on to our next presentation. Thanks very much.

The next presentation will be from the Business Council of British Columbia, David Williams.

Good morning. You’ll have five minutes for presentation and five minutes for questions.

Business Council of B.C.

David Williams: Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to be here today. My name is David Williams. I’m vice-president at the Business Council of British Columbia. We represent over 200 of B.C.’s largest employers. Around 25 percent of B.C.’s workforce work for large employers, and many small companies and medium-sized companies depend on those large businesses for their business. So we’re a very important part of the economic ecosystem and very connected into small and medium enterprises as well.

B.C.’s economy faces some very serious homegrown and external challenges. Adjusted for population, the economy shrank by around 2 percent last year, and it shrank by 1 percent in 2023. It may well shrink again in 2025 and 2026. That means living standards are going backwards. A quick look at food bank data tells you how tough people are doing it out there on main street. The private sector is already very weak. B.C. has seen only 5 percent growth in private sector jobs since 2019, whereas we’ve seen 38 percent growth in public sector jobs.

Now, compounding these homegrown challenges, we have the challenges from President Trump’s upending of global trade arrangements. The risk there is an existential one. The risk is that President Trump is saying to companies: “Don’t base yourself north of the 49th parallel. Base yourself in the United States where you won’t face tariffs and you’ll have guaranteed access to the U.S. market because you’ll be in it.”

That’s a real challenge to Canada, because our value proposition has always been that you could base yourself here and export into U.S. markets. The risk is that companies relocate. This could take a few forms. They may move, or they may simply redeploy new capital, new hiring decisions, and they all go to the U.S. side of the border. Ultimately, some operations here may be wound down, and skilled workers also could leave.

The challenge here is that if parts of our industrial base relocate, British Columbians will face a permanently lower standard of living. So our challenge that we think faces policy-makers is answering this question: why should companies choose B.C. to base and build their operations rather than the U.S. or elsewhere? We have to have an answer to that question. That’s the challenge that President Trump’s policies are putting in front of us.

We have three recommendations to try and answer that question. The first is that we need to stabilize our public finances. We believe that the provincial budget deficit is already north of $14 billion, or 3.2 percent of GDP. That sends a very negative signal that future taxes will have to be significantly higher to stabilize our public finances.

The prospect of significantly high taxes in future is a very negative signal to a business about whether to base and build your operations in B.C. It’s a very negative signal to skilled workers about whether to try and build your life in B.C.

To demonstrate a commitment to fiscal discipline, we recommend establishing a fiscal anchor. The timing may need be to be flexible due to external threats. But still, having a timeline to either balance the budget or get debt-servicing costs down to around 3 to 4 percent of expenses or get provincial debt-to-GDP under 20 percent over time would, I think, demonstrate that fiscal discipline is important — important to the public and to ratings agencies.

Second of all, we recommend exempting capital inputs from the provincial sales tax. We impose the country’s highest marginal effective tax rate on new investment. About 25 percent of the pre-tax return on a new investment is lost in B.C., mainly because of the inefficiencies around the provincial sales tax, so we recommend removing the PST on capital inputs.

[9:20 a.m.]

Thirdly, we recommend reducing the province’s top marginal personal income tax rate to under 50 percent so that people can keep at least half of the extra dollar of income that they earn, making the effort to do so worthwhile.

We have the fourth highest personal income tax rate in North America among the 60 U.S. states and Canadian provinces. That comes in at $252,000. If you are a skilled worker, or you’re an entrepreneur or senior leader, where would you base yourselves? We need those people to expand operations in B.C. But in Washington State, the top rate would be 37 percent and that would not kick in until $860,000 CAD. So that makes it very hard to try and attract the sort of people that we need to expand businesses to succeed in B.C. Thank you.

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

I’m looking to our MLAs for questions.

Steve Morissette: You’re saying raise the level that people are taxed at the highest rate. What do you propose…? How do you see the lost funds being replaced?

David Williams: Well, if a skilled worker ups and leaves to the United States, we don’t get any revenue.

Steve Morissette: Right.

David Williams: We don’t get anything in the first place. So we don’t just lose the next dollar of income above $252,000; we lose all the revenue from the dollars up until $252,000.

Claire Rattée: Yeah, I agree with that recommendation because my riding is where LNG Canada is based, Rio Tinto smelter. I know a lot of people that don’t take overtime simply for that reason. My partner is one of them. He still does take the overtime, but it’s not worth it. You get taxed so badly that it’s not worth it. So I think from that perspective, we’d probably see an extra injection into the economy if that tax rate was lowered because people have more money to be able to spend and they’re going to spend that here in British Columbia. It makes a lot of sense.

I appreciated all of those recommendations. I think they were great, thank you.

David Williams: It’s a lose-lose-lose scenario. The people lose. Workers lose because they don’t get the extra income. Companies lose because they don’t get the skilled workers that they need. The province loses because it doesn’t get the revenue that it needs to fund public services. Everybody loses.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll move to the next presentation. Thank you very much.

We’re going to hear from AIRS program. Maggie Milne Martens, please.

You have five minutes for your presentation and five minutes for questions. Begin when you’re prepared.

AIRS Program

Maggie Milne Martens: Great. Thank you so much. I want to thank you for honouring this important democratic process and allowing citizens to come and voice their concerns before the committee.

My name is Maggie Milne Martens. I am here as the artistic director and co-founder of the AIRS program, or the Artist in Residence Studio program. It is an innovative collaboration between the Vancouver school board and the arts community for bringing back art into the public elementary schools where they have been largely evacuated.

In B.C. over the past three decades, inadequate funding and adverse educational policies at all levels have resulted in critical and devastating losses in arts expertise, art spaces and material resources in public educational schools, particularly in elementary schools where creativity is most crucially formed.

Currently, access to arts education is only accessible to those with the financial means to outsource it. Longitudinal research overwhelmingly shows that sustained participation in expert-led arts programming increases academic performance. It increases literacy, graduation rates, employment opportunities. Creativity is, after all, the leading attribute sought by business leaders and is essential for a nimble and resilient economy. It increases volunteerism and civic participation. And most notably, these results are most marked for youth experiencing social and economic disadvantage.

The arts are also critical for mental health and well-being. Children are growing up in a world characterized by widening economic disparities, systemic injustice, human rights violations and violations of democratic freedoms, and economic degradation.

[9:25 a.m.]

At the same time, the level of technological sophistication means that children’s lives are ever more mediated and controlled by digital algorithms and profit-based social media platforms. We are seeing that students are anxious and depressed. They are disconnected, they are apathetic, and they have a loss of purpose.

Our program is a working model. It’s an intervention for restoring the arts in public elementary schools. We create studio spaces in a school and match a local artist to work with teachers and students across the school one day a week to deliver impactful programming. We are in 18 underserved schools in Vancouver. We work with 28 local artists, and we reach 4,000 students during the course of the year.

We have been gathering data for nine years now, from teachers and students. Teachers consistently report an impact on creativity, on problem-solving and, crucially, on resilience, confidence, and a sense of belonging and well-being in school.

Students have also shared why art matters to them in school. Art is, first of all, a space of creative freedom for them. “There are no rules, and I can speak my own way through art. Art is how I share my creativity with the world.”

Art allows them to express their emotions. “In art, I can tell my feelings without saying anything. Art is my space of calm. It is a safe place to stop overthinking and focus on what I’m doing. Art makes me feel less angry.” Art is also a place where students discover who they are. “Art helps me find myself as a person. I feel more me when I’m making art.”

Art also gives purpose. It allows us to see the beauty and the possibility in the world. Art is beautiful. It connects us together. Art is an unlimited world in our hands. If there was no art for me, there would be no colour in the world. Art is aspirational. It holds the space between the now and the not yet, what is and what is possible. If we cannot imagine a better world, we cannot create it.

Our AIRS program is proof that the arts make a difference. It is also proof that cost-effective, innovative solutions are available that not only restore the arts in public education but provide meaningful employment for artists, which is sorely needed.

I have two recommendations. First of all, that the Ministry of Education and the ministry of arts and culture see their shared joint responsibility for ensuring that every child has access to arts education, as is their right, and to set up an independent review committee to assess the situation.

I invite the Ministers of Education and Child Care and also Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sports to attend a round table in May of 2026 that is bringing together leaders in arts and education across B.C. to discuss this very issue.

What is sorely needed, the third recommendation, is to set up a joint, dedicated and protected innovation fund so school districts can apply for funding to collaborate with local organizations to be able to tailor comprehensive, culturally appropriate and sustainable arts education offerings for all of their students.

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

Sunita Dhir: Thank you so much for promoting arts. Mind my ignorance. You are working with elementary schools, with the Vancouver school board or just elementary…?

Maggie Milne Martens: We are an independent organization. We collaborate with the Vancouver school board. Our program really is to think about system change. We’ve been trying to create a working model for how to restore arts in education. We’re exclusively working with the school board as a way of thinking through system change.

[9:30 a.m.]

We work primarily in elementary school, which is where there are no specialists and no expertise. Aside from music specialists, there is no arts happening.

Sunita Dhir: What’s your current funding model?

Maggie Milne Martens: Currently, a third of our funds come from the school board, and then the other two thirds are coming from private donations, from partnerships and from grant writing, which is an unsustainable model, I should say. It needs public funding.

Sunita Dhir: You’re promoting all different kinds of arts, not just visual arts but drama, music?

Maggie Milne Martens: Primarily visual arts, but we also do theatre. We don’t do music because there are still music specialists in schools. We’re working in the gaps, and we are in 18 elementary schools. There are 90 elementary schools in the VSB, so there’s a long way to go.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, thanks for the presentation.

We’ll move to our next presenter. From Arthritis Research Canada, Alison Hoens. Good morning.

Alison Hoens: I encourage you all to stand, as a physiotherapist. You might like the break from sitting all morning.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): You’ll have five minutes for your presentation, and five minutes for any questions from our members. Thank you.

Arthritis Research Canada

Alison Hoens: Good morning. My name is Alison Hoens, and I come wearing many hats. I’m a knowledge broker at Arthritis Research Canada. I’m a clinical professor at UBC. I’m a physiotherapist. I’m also a person living with rheumatoid arthritis, and I’m the mother of a daughter who was diagnosed at 17 with rheumatoid arthritis.

I’m presenting on behalf of Arthritis Research Canada, and although I look normalish, a diagnosis…. Despite being a national and provincial athlete, I was unable to work or look after my children and had two lengthy hospitalizations. Now, because of the research undertaken at Arthritis Research Canada, I can work full-time, walk 20,000 steps a day and live a full life while minimizing the cost to the B.C. health care system.

We thank the budget consultation committee for the opportunity to present today. It’s with deep gratitude that we acknowledge the previous funding for over a decade of $1 million annually, every dollar of which has been spent here in B.C., directly benefiting the 1.4 million British Columbians who are living with this debilitating disease for which there is currently no cure.

We’re coming to the end of our funding that we received in 2022. We understand the immense pressures in our health care system, but we urge you to consider this: investing in arthritis research is not a cost; it’s actually a savings. The package that you’re receiving will provide the details on that.

When people like me receive care based on recommendations, it improves health and reduces costs. Our research has been shown to keep people active, preventing costly complications; keep them remaining at work, contributing to the economy; and keep older adults living independently longer.

It’s a hidden disease. It’s the most common and costly chronic disease in Canada, affecting one in four people in B.C., costing B.C. about $7 million annually. It’s the second leading cause of disability and, importantly, it’s responsible for one in ten visits to family practitioners. It’s a deadly disease because of the complications from uncontrolled inflammation. But all of this can be prevented with early diagnosis and appropriate treatment.

So why invest in Arthritis Research Canada? Well, it’s the largest clinical research centre in North America, proudly headquartered here in Vancouver, with a team of experts from different areas conducting research with patients as partners. Our research has informed what patients can do to help themselves, clinical care and policy, all here in B.C. This saves precious health care dollars related to medications, disability, reduced work productivity, doctor visits and hospital stays.

We are training the next generation of scientists, attracting young talent to B.C. and ensuring that research reaches those who need it.

[9:35 a.m.]

I’d like to just highlight three areas of research.

First, preventing arthritis and its complications. We’ve designed and are testing an online program aimed at preventing arthritis after sports-related knee injuries. So 50 percent of people who have those injuries develop osteoarthritis, which is the leading cause of knee replacement. Our internationally recognized research, using administrative data from the province of B.C., has informed how treating inflammation can prevent costly and deadly complications such as heart attacks and strokes, common in our population.

Secondly, redesigning how health care is delivered to improve outcomes and reduce inequities, such as e-health technologies and partnerships with Indigenous communities to create culturally safe arthritis services. We’ve collaborated with PharmaCare to support and evaluate B.C.’s policies on transitioning from costly biologic drugs to less expensive biosimilars, which, incidentally, all the other provinces and two territories have subsequently adopted from seeing what happened in B.C. This has saved B.C. $750 million in drug costs.

Finally, supporting physical activity and preventing falls and frailty in older adults by designing programs that promote physical activity. For example, we’re assessing the effectiveness of a program that improves frailty by helping people to move more and sit less so that they can live independently longer and working with the Ministry of Health to implement a fracture liaison program.

We thank you for your previous support, and we’re requesting to be included in the regular health care funding process as an annual $1 million grant. It’s a great return on investment. In 2023-24, $11.3 million in external funding was leveraged through that $1 million investment. That’s an 11-to-one ratio.

So thank you. Your continued investment in Arthritis Research Canada will support British Columbians like myself and my daughter to live healthier, to live longer and to contribute to society while saving health care dollars that can be invested in other pressing needs.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Great. Thank you very much for that presentation.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much for your presentation, and thank you for the work that your organization does and the effort that you’ve made to come here today to talk about it.

I was hoping that we could go back to recommendation No. 1 and talk a little bit more about the new treatments reducing the need for joint replacement surgery. I think your argument about cost-effectiveness…. Prevention is always less expensive than interventionary treatment. So if you could talk a little bit more about that, I’d be grateful.

Alison Hoens: Yes, certainly.

We have learned over time, through research, that there is…. For example, 50 percent of people who have knee trauma result, ultimately, without proper identification and treatment, in severe osteoarthritis that requires knee replacement. If those individuals are identified and receive appropriate evidence-based interventions, those that are being shown to be effective, rather than any intervention provided by anybody else, that will result in less severe osteoarthritis.

That fear of not moving actually precipitates increased severity of the disease. So the combination of prevention in knowing what exercises to do when, which interventions to use, will prevent that subsequent development of osteoarthritis.

Sunita Dhir: Thank you so much for your presentation. Recently, I attended the ARThritis Soirée here.

Alison Hoens: Thank you for attending. We sincerely appreciated that.

Sunita Dhir: It was so heartwarming to see so much passion about research.

The only question that I have is: do you have any research partners? Are you working with a research institute or a health organization for this?

Alison Hoens: Thank you. Excellent question. I’m happy to say an enthusiastic yes.

[9:40 a.m.]

We have six centres across Canada, although we’re based here in B.C., and we work with ten universities across Canada. We also have international collaborations. The senior scientists at Arthritis Research Canada have collaborations provincially, nationally, internationally, and are well recognized as leaders, exemplified by the studies on biosimilars. Because of what was undertaken at Arthritis Research Canada, all other provinces, as I stated, and two territories have adopted that similar….

So it is recognized. We are recognized as a leader. Because of those collaborations, we can do more.

Sunita Dhir: Recently, I have developed arthritis of my big toe by wearing high heels. So to everybody who is listening, thank you.

Alison Hoens: I’d be happy to see you as a physiotherapist. Feel free to look up my name on the internet.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Any further questions? Thank you so much for that presentation.

We’re going to move to our next presenter: from the Alzheimer Society of British Columbia, Rebecca Frederick.

Good morning to you. You’ll have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes for questions from MLAs.

Alzheimer Society of B.C.

Rebecca Frederick: Good morning. It’s my pleasure to be presenting in front of the committee. Thank you for having me here. I’m Rebecca Frederick, and I’m the director of engagement at the Alzheimer Society of B.C.

Being affected by dementia will never be easy, as many of you will know. But there are several things that the provincial government can do to make the experience of the more than 85,000 people currently affected more manageable. This is particularly important as we expect this number to increase to half a million by 2050.

I’m here to share three recommendations with you — recommendations informed by people with lived experience of dementia: break down stigma and social isolation, improve the diagnosis experience and ensure that the right support is available at the right time.

While I speak to numbers here, each person’s experience is unique. Mei-Ling, for example. Mei-Ling was always known for her memory. She could recall the names of about every plant at the garden centre, many in both Cantonese and English. However, she started noticing changes in her 70s. Slowly, her friends pulled away. She started getting forgotten from events and regular invitations at her church.

Her daughter Melissa laughed it off to start with. But then Mei-Ling got lost walking home from the SkyTrain, a trip she had made three times a week. It took four trips to her doctor and a six-month wait to get a referral to a geriatrician, where she finally received a diagnosis. She isolated herself, she developed depression, and that exacerbated her symptoms of depression, of dementia.

Once the diagnosis was finally made, Mei-Ling and her family were referred to the Alzheimer Society of B.C.’s First Link program. Melissa tells us that it was a total lifeline for what would come next. Our one-on-one support, our education and our support groups helped her learn the skills that she needed to be a better care partner for her mom. But help could have come so much sooner.

That brings me to recommendation 1: helping break down stigma and social isolation. Stigma has a profound impact on people affected by dementia. Like it did for Mei-Ling, it can result in people delaying their diagnosis or becoming reluctant to seek help. A public awareness campaign will be a successful way to combat stigma and address misconceptions facing people living with dementia. It’ll also support people to get earlier diagnoses and access the support available to them.

We’re recommending a $10 million, three-year, provincewide public awareness campaign focused on reducing stigma and misconceptions.

Our second recommendation is to improve the diagnosis experience by establishing a clear dementia pathway and attracting more geriatricians. A timely diagnosis gives people the opportunity to plan for the future and access treatment and support which may slow the progression of the disease.

We’re recommending that the government develop a clear clinical pathway for dementia support, including consideration for forthcoming disease-modifying treatments; build on existing programs to provide additional incentives for geriatricians and physicians who commit to specializing in the care of older adults — we have less than half of what we need right now — and commit to $4.2 million in annual funding for the Alzheimer Society of B.C. so that we can continue to deliver First Link programs and services.

[9:45 a.m.]

I’ll go on to tell you about another one of the 85,000 people living with dementia in B.C. It was Friday night when Dustin, who was a university student living with his grandparents, called 911. His papa was agitated, and his nana was unable to cope any longer. His papa wouldn’t allow home support workers in to assist him. The case manager they had been assigned told them that they were likely to wait at least seven months for a placement in long-term care.

He spent two months in hospital, where he got an infection, was designated as an alternate-level-of-care patient, and while the nurses tried their best, he was agitated, disoriented and unhappy most of the time. Finally, he was transferred to long-term care, where he died three weeks later.

People living with dementia are falling through the cracks. We need to enhance the quality and accessibility of existing services to ensure that people living with dementia receive the support they need when and where they need it. This is critical not only for people living with dementia but also for the health of the overall care system.

We know that half of all alternative-level-of-care days, so people in hospital who don’t need to be there, are attributed to dementia. We are recommending three things in this regard: committing to eliminating co-pays for publicly funded home support and increasing access to adult day programs, increasing the number of long-term care spaces available and reviewing the assisted-living system in order to identify gaps in opportunities to support people living with earlier and moderate dementia.

I sincerely thank the committee for hearing these three recommendations today, and I look forward to working together to build a B.C. where people living with dementia are included and supported.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for that presentation.

As a family member of…. Grandmother and great-grandmother both died of dementia. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing in the province and am just glad you are here.

Looking to my colleagues to see if they have any questions.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I like how you just pointed to me.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): I’d be surprised if MLA Blatherwick didn’t have a question. Please.

Jennifer Blatherwick: It’s true. So thank you again, and I echo my colleague’s comments. This is essential work. I also had relatives and cared for them as they were lost in the fog of dementia. It was very hard. Good days, but a lot of real struggles as well.

I think one of the pieces that is really important that you focused on was early diagnosis and intervention, both for the patient themselves in terms of being able to retain and maintain their cognitive function but also for families.

Now, we didn’t…. Five minutes is a short amount of time. I noticed that you did touch on some of the programs that you have for education and supporting families, but I was hoping you could expand on that and talk about how those are funded.

Rebecca Frederick: Yes, I’d be happy to. We have been funded by the Ministry of Health since 2017. We, in our last application for funding, were successful in receiving $3.7 million for the next year to deliver our suite of First Link programs and services. It was slightly less than the amount that we asked for, which was $4.2 million, which represents a small increase to allow us to continue to respond to the increasing need.

I think that…. Whenever we go and talk to folks at the Legislature, I’m always amazed by how many of you are personally affected by dementia. We’re seeing those trends in the work that we do too. More people are coming to us needing support than ever before.

We also know that the diversity of British Columbians that are coming to us needing support is greater than ever before as well. And so that just allows us to continue to keep pace.

We have something called our First Link program, where people can either refer themselves — so we call that an informal referral — or somebody can be referred by a physician or another partner in the health care system so that we can support them.

We know that the earlier people are diagnosed, the earlier they’re going to be connected to supports and services. They can access support groups both for folks who are early on in the disease or for care partners. They can access education. They can access our Minds in Motion program, which is a social and fitness program for folks.

But also just having a supportive place where they can receive that one-on-one support from staff who get it — that often helps them sort of go on and face the world and disclose the diagnosis to family and friends in their life. We know that having that support is important both for the person but also for the care partner. So the earlier we can get folks diagnosed, the better.

[9:50 a.m.]

But recognizing that you’re experiencing memory problems is scary. As a room full of people who probably note their intellect as one of the top things that they’re proud of, starting to notice changes in cognition is a very scary thing.

The more that we can do to help people recognize that there is life after a diagnosis, that there are people who continue to engage in meaningful ways after a diagnosis, that can also help get them through the physician’s door quicker and get that diagnosis.

Sunita Dhir: Your first recommendation was $10 million in public campaigns. How does that compare to your current funding for public campaigns, and what are your plans to change that in the future?

Rebecca Frederick: Our current funding is really intended to deliver programs and services to people affected by dementia and care partners.

When we’re talking about a campaign, I think we need to look more downstream, and we need to help people recognize what the symptoms of dementia look like and what the myths associated with dementia are so that they’re accessing support and a diagnosis earlier.

Sunita Dhir: How much was your current budget for that public campaign?

Rebecca Frederick: This would be new funding.

Sunita Dhir: That would be totally new. Okay.

So that would go towards culturally appropriate and, like, different language materials and stuff like that?

Rebecca Frederick: I think ensuring that a diverse campaign that is going to land with folks of all different linguistic backgrounds, maybe not all but as many different linguistic backgrounds as possible, is critical.

We know that we are going to see more diversity in folks who are affected than ever before. We, with our federation partners, the Alzheimer Society of Canada, have been speaking to something called the landmark report that just speaks to the changing demographics of folks affected.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. That’s all the time we have allotted for your organization today.

We’re going to move next to a presentation by the B.C. Alliance for Healthy Living, with Rita Koutsodimos. You have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes for questions. Please proceed when you’re ready.

B.C. Alliance for Healthy Living

Rita Koutsodimos: Well, good morning, everyone. Thank you for your public service in this hearing.

The health charities and wellness organizations that make up B.C. Alliance for Healthy Living have been working together since 2003 to prevent avoidable chronic disease and promote the health of all British Columbians.

When we first started, we would tell decision-makers such as yourselves that chronic disease, such as diabetes, heart and lung disease and cancer, affected one in three British Columbians. But, remarkably, between 50 percent and 80 percent of that disease burden is preventable. We would warn decision-makers that, with an aging population, this would grow, and the burden on our health care system would pay the brunt of that.

Today the data tells us that that number has indeed grown, and it is one in two. The provincial health officer recently reported that the largest proportion of total health care costs is directly or indirectly attributable to chronic disease — so largest line in our provincial budget and largest driver of costs.

There has been progress over time with some investments that have come here and there, but what we need is, really, sustained funding for public health interventions that have proven effective. We do have a new public health framework. We’d like to see that fully invested in a robust way so that the action plans can be actioned and we can reap the benefit of those preventative measures.

We know what needs to be done to prevent that early loss of life and to reduce the burden on our health care system. We need to invest to address the risk factors, the behavioural and lifestyle risk factors, as well as the social inequities. We need healthier communities with affordable housing and social infrastructure. We need to give people the opportunity to eat healthy by addressing poverty, which is the root cause of food insecurity.

[9:55 a.m.]

We need to protect people, especially our young people, from Big Tobacco and their candy-coated nicotine. So let’s start with our young people. We’ve got a great opportunity with the $3.7 billion in the tobacco settlement funds, including $900 million which is set to come to our province this year. That’s a really unique opportunity to act boldly and make a difference.

We would urge you to allocate a good portion of that funding to provincial nicotine strategy with the goal of preventing and reducing tobacco and nicotine use. It should address health inequities and respond to new nicotine products as they emerge. The funds can be used to support youth education, prevention, clinical cessation, monitoring, compliance and research.

It’s pretty remarkable that vapour products have just been legalized since 2018. Yet in that short window, they have done tremendous damage to this generation of young people. We need to use this once-in-a-generation windfall to fight for that generation’s health.

Another group that we are highly concerned about is low-income British Columbians, who are between 24 and 91 percent more likely to die prematurely from chronic disease. This is largely from the negative health effects that come from the stress of living in poverty, as well as the high price of nutritious food and housing.

It’s notable that food insecurity is directly linked to poor health outcomes, diabetes, heart disease and mental health challenges; 63 percent of households relying on social assistance are food insecure, as are 46 percent of First Nations households. We need to make sure that our income and disability assistance rates keep up with inflation and are enough that people can afford a healthy diet. We need to continue to work on poverty reduction.

Finally, I’ll just say that housing is foundational. We also need to invest in affordable housing as well as the social infrastructure to ensure that we have healthy communities.

I just want to thank everyone here for the tremendous contribution that you make in serving our province and working together to make British Columbia a healthier place.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you. And now looking to my colleagues.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much. Thank you for all of the things that you highlighted. I think what I’d like to talk about is tobacco and addiction to nicotine that we’re struggling with in young people in this province. After decades of seeing a decrease in tobacco and nicotine addiction in young people, from 2018 we’re seeing it going up again.

I’m hoping one of the things that we can touch on is cost prevention. I’m sure this must be an area of focus for your members. The cost of treatment for tobacco and nicotine addiction over a lifetime is very high. I’m hoping you would just talk about the cost of letting it play out versus preventing.

Rita Koutsodimos: Charles, do you have numbers on that?

Interjection.

Rita Koutsodimos: So $5.6 billion in the last year for lung cancer across Canada.

As I said before, chronic diseases are a major driver in the health care costs. I don’t have the specific number for that, and I apologize for that. I should come more prepared. But it is significant, and I can follow up with you and get that number to you afterwards.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you. I think we’re all aware of the huge disparity in cost between prevention, which is a relatively small investment, and the cost of someone’s health concerns caused by tobacco and nicotine over their lifetime. So I appreciate you. Thank you.

Rita Koutsodimos: Right now, we have $900 million, which is a unique opportunity that may never come again, so we can address this in a really robust way.

[10:00 a.m.]

Bryan Tepper: I’m just wondering what you have for programs around activity, exercise, anything like that. I think at this point it’s the number one driver of longevity and in keeping people out of hospitals. To bring up smoking, apparently, it’s better than stopping from smoking. So if we’re looking at things like that, do you have a program around exercise, basically?

Rita Koutsodimos: Yeah, yeah. We have been working since 2007 with the province in coordinating the physical activity strategy. The physical activity strategy initially was launched with a $7 million investment.

We oversaw seven initiatives, with a number of partners, to deliver initiatives for Indigenous communities — for daycare and early-years providers; for Elders, in a program called choose to move; as well as active communities, which provides funding to local communities in terms of their facilities and programs. That initial investment contributed to 52,000 people becoming active. What’s significant with that is that segment of people was considered the hard-to-reach, the more difficult, the less active populations.

Just recently we were granted a $4 million investment from the Minister of Health, in 2023, and we’re working on a number of different initiatives, including an after-school active play initiative. During the pandemic, children’s physical activity decreased significantly. That hasn’t returned yet. What we know is that a lot of families struggle with low income and with transportation. We’ve got parents working lots of jobs. Locating those physical activity programs in the after-school hours really can make a difference and set those kids on a life trajectory of being physically active.

Bryan Tepper: I’ll follow up on that. Do you have any funding for that right now?

Rita Koutsodimos: We do. We have funding to take us to 2026.

Again, the funding comes in these little dribs and drabs, yet prevention is so poor. We’d really love to see an investment in that public health framework, so that it’s not just here and there, you know, with leftover funds at the end of the budget cycle.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, thank you. That’s all the time we have for your presentation.

We’ll move now to the Canadian Cancer Society, Charles Aruliah. Good morning, Charles. You have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes’ time for questions. You can start when you’re ready.

Canadian Cancer Society

Charles Aruliah: Thanks so much. Just quickly to address your question earlier, I remembered the number off the top of my head: it’s $688 million that tobacco costs our health system, in B.C. specifically.

Thank you for allowing me to speak to you today. The Canadian Cancer Society is the only charity that supports Canadians with all cancers in communities across the country. CCS plays an integral role in our cancer care system by elevating patient perspectives to clinicians and government decision-makers.

Cancer care continues to feel the same stressors which are felt elsewhere in our health care system. This is further challenged by the economic environment B.C. finds itself in. As our province prepares for the economic impact of tariffs, it is important that the province continue to invest, as economically as possible, into cancer care. I will be highlighting three areas where it could do so.

Each year, tobacco causes $688 million in health care costs in British Columbia and kills 5,800 British Columbians. Lung cancer, by far, is the largest cost driver in our cancer care system. Even after all these years of tobacco control efforts, tobacco products remain the leading preventable cause of disease and death in B.C. When it comes to vaping, B.C.’s youth vaping is on par with the rest of Canada, with usage tripling amongst high school students in recent years.

B.C. recently received $3.7 billion as a result of the Canada-wide lawsuit settlement against tobacco companies, which was launched to recoup tobacco-related health care costs. It is critical that funds from the settlement be reinvested directly into tobacco control efforts. The B.C. Ministry of Health is currently renewing its tobacco and nicotine strategy, which is over 20 years old. The province should ensure that settlement dollars are used to fund the new strategy adequately, so that a new generation of British Columbians do not become addicted to tobacco and nicotine products.

[10:05 a.m.]

Secondly, for people living with cancer, clinical trials offer access to new treatments that might be more effective or have fewer side effects than current options available. They also provide significant economic benefits to our health care system, including guiding clinical decision-making, extending lives, improving quality of life and providing access to over $1 billion worth of medications in Canada.

Cancer accounts for approximately one-third of ongoing clinical trials. Despite the important role clinical trials play in our cancer care system, there remains inequitable access to clinical trials in B.C. Trials are often introduced as an option either too late or not at all. Even when a trial is identified, logistical and financial barriers make participation out of reach for far too many.

One population group impacted by this inequity in access are those living in rural and remote communities, including Indigenous communities. Canada’s vast geography limits the capacity of clinical trial sponsors and researchers to run trials outside of major urban centres. Additionally, public health insurance does not cover clinical trial participation and associated fees, which disproportionately impacts rural and remote and Indigenous communities, who face additional barriers such as travel costs.

B.C. is taking positive action to address these gaps by utilizing $900,000 in existing funding to better understand the needs of these communities, through engagement and increased staffing at regional centres. Further funding needs to be allocated to ensure that this important work continues, ensuring that all British Columbians have access to life-saving research through clinical trials.

Finally, as B.C.’s cancer incidence is expected to increase with an aging population, there remains a need to further invest in B.C.’s palliative care system. B.C.’s hospices are an integral part of the province’s ability to deliver community-based palliative care, and they serve over 120,000 British Columbians annually.

Delivering palliative care services within community and outside the acute care setting system has been shown to reduce the costs for our health care system. Despite this, hospices remain underfunded, and where funding exists, it is unequally distributed. Additionally, British Columbia, like other Canadian jurisdictions, continues to lack comprehensive data on who is receiving care.

Recent data by the B.C. Hospice and Palliative Care Association estimates an investment of over $3.3 million over three years in hospices could save the province $145 million annually by delivering care within communities. This funding will go to sustaining and scaling grief, bereavement and palliative care services in communities, strengthening rural hospice capacity and launching a provincewide data reporting system to BCHPCA’s standardized hospice data framework.

Continuing to invest in cancer care during economic uncertainty, while challenging, is also necessary. Cancer does not wait for the good times. More than ever, it is important that we invest in cancer where we can have the biggest impact, and it’s important that we do so together.

Taking on a problem as big and complex as cancer really does take all of us. It truly takes a society.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

Questions from the panel? MLA Morissette. Let’s start over there this time.

Steve Morissette: Thank you for the presentation.

I’m just curious. You know, vaping is relatively new and pretty popular. Are we seeing any research from it on the chronic illness it’s causing, or is it too early?

Charles Aruliah: You’re correct. Since vaping is relatively new, the research is still developing. When compared to traditional cigarettes, e-cigarettes, while causing less harm, still cause harm.

We’re seeing research into kind of the effects that inhaling the chemicals from aerosols have, particularly with cancer-causing substances. But, of course, more long-term research is needed.

What I want to make clear is that the vaping is often put forward as a harm reduction tool. What we’ve actually seen is that people who have never smoked a cigarette in their life, particularly youth, are taking up vaping. So it’s not a harm reduction tool. In fact, it is creating harm among youth. There is more research that needs to be done in terms of long-term health impacts of vaping, but there is already quite a lot of evidence for its harm.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I really appreciate your advocacy around clinical trials and access for rural, remote and northern areas, on access to those clinical trials.

Can we just expand a little bit? You were saying that a chunk of that funding is being used for, like, research into how to improve that situation but also for supporting regional centres. Could you speak a little bit more about the regional centres?

[10:10 a.m.]

Charles Aruliah: Yes, I can speak a bit about that. Currently, the Canadian Cancer Society is actually putting together a report around clinical trials and the gaps that exist within the system. We’ve been speaking to all actors within the field — so cancer agencies, industry, patients — to see what those gaps are. Access for rural and remote communities is one of those gaps.

Through our conversations with B.C. Cancer, which is utilizing that existing funding for rural and remote communities…. Right now, from our understanding, that’s still in the preliminary stages, where they’re going out to these rural and remote communities and Indigenous communities to understand the needs, to understand how they can improve access.

There’s a lot of trust-building that needs to occur. So it’s still within the preliminary stages at that point. More work needs to be done beyond that. That existing funding envelope is time-limited. I don’t give an exact date on when that runs out, but that still needs to improve.

Overall, in Canada, only about 4.7 percent of newly diagnosed Canadians access clinical trials, which is quite low. In some provinces, that’s as low as 1 percent. So really, raising awareness of the clinical trials, establishing a national database, is one thing that we’re working together with our partners on. There are a lot of moving pieces, but hopefully that answers your question a little bit.

Jennifer Blatherwick: It does. Thank you. That was very helpful.

I really appreciate your advocacy for investing in palliative care. You mentioned that the plan is to ask for funding to invest in palliative care outside of intensive care or hospital settings. Are you thinking just hospices, or are you also referring to in-home care?

Charles Aruliah: We’re referring to both. I’m specifically speaking to the role that hospices have, just because through our work with the B.C. Hospice and Palliative Care Association, which represents all hospices, we have a better understanding of the impact that those hospices have. Community-based and in-home programs a bit less so, but hospices, particularly those that don’t have hospice houses, do offer at-home services and supports.

The reason that we’re asking for that funding to be funnelled through the BCHPCA is that funding is typically distributed unevenly between hospices. Those hospices that have hospice houses typically receive about 54 percent of funding, whereas community-based hospices only receive around 22 percent funding, despite the fact that they’re valuable to the community. They provide a significant number of services for the communities. For example, they provide about 70 percent of the grief and bereavement supports for the community. So we just need to see more equity in the distribution of that funding.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): That’s the conclusion of your time today. Thank you very much. This committee will take a recess till 10:25.

The committee recessed from 10:13 a.m. to 10:25 a.m.

[Elenore Sturko in the chair.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, thank you, Members. We’re going to call our committee back to order, and we’ll begin our presentations, again, of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

Our next presenter will be from the Parkinson Society of British Columbia. I call Joanne Baker.

Thanks for joining us today. You’ll have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes of questions from our members. We can begin when you are ready.

Parkinson Society of B.C.

Joanne Baker: Good morning. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to present today.

A brief introduction to Parkinson’s disease for those who are unfamiliar with this condition. It’s the fastest growing neurodegenerative condition in Canada. More than 17,500 people in B.C. live with Parkinson’s disease. The disease is projected to increase by 32 percent over the next decade. Parkinson’s disease is progressive, and there is currently no cure.

The Parkinson Society of British Columbia, who I represent today, has existed for 55 years. It is a non-profit organisation governed by a board of directors and funded entirely by donations. We believe that every person touched by Parkinson’s disease deserves to have the very best information about their condition and to know that they need not experience it alone. We provide a range of educational events, counselling, health care system navigation, social activities, exercise classes and physiotherapy. We have more than 50 volunteer support groups in communities across the province.

A recent report by Parkinson Canada, titled The Economic Burden of Parkinson’s in Canada estimates the total cost of Parkinson’s in B.C. to be around $238 million. So $167 million are direct costs incurred by people with Parkinson’s and the health care system. People with Parkinson’s incur 56 percent of those direct costs. They also estimate over $70 million in indirect costs, due largely to loss of productivity. The larger share of these costs, as I say, is shouldered by people with Parkinson’s themselves.

The good news: early, expert and appropriate treatment and access to the latest innovative medications and surgical treatments means that disease progression can be managed and people with Parkinson’s can live independently and well for many years.

Our three recommendations. Firstly, increase access to neurologists who are movement disorder specialists. It is not uncommon to wait two years for a consultation and diagnosis with a neurologist.

Access to neurologists and a movement disorders clinic is patchy across the province. They exist in Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo and Kelowna. There is currently no movement disorders clinic nor dedicated specialist in the North. We recommend that a movement disorders clinic or neurological model is funded in the North.

Second recommendation: increased access to allied health professionals. Managing Parkinson’s requires a specialized, team-based approach, where, in addition to neurologists, there are other allied health professionals, such as social workers, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and nurse practitioners.

I would be happy, in question time, to speak more about an innovative partnership that the Parkinson Society has entered into with four health authorities to jointly fund allied health positions. However, my recommendation to the panel today is that increased funding is considered to movement disorders clinics and their staffing with allied health professionals.

[10:30 a.m.]

Third recommendation: expanded access to deep brain stimulation surgery. This is a neurological procedure that uses implanted electrodes and electrical stimulation to treat Parkinson’s and other movement disorders when medications that control motor fluctuations are ineffective.

There are currently only two neurologists in the province who are funded to perform this important procedure. It is often life-changing, and wait times are commonly five years. Our recommendation is to double the funding for deep brain stimulation in B.C.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Excellent. Thank you so much for your presentation.

Claire Rattée: You were mentioning lack of funding for northern B.C., that there are no clinics out there currently. I represent a northern riding. I’m wondering: do you have statistics on how many people are living with Parkinson’s in northern British Columbia?

Joanne Baker: I can obtain those for you, although it’s very difficult, and there is a very big problem with underdiagnosis and complete absence of diagnosis. I believe there are many people living in your region who are experiencing symptoms and are not getting the treatment or diagnosis that they need. But I’ll provide you what I can.

Claire Rattée: Thank you. I appreciate it. I would agree because I think that I do know some people living with Parkinson’s in my riding, but our access to health care, in general, tends to be fairly inequitable. So I would appreciate having some statistics on that, if that’s something you’re able to obtain. Thank you.

Bryan Tepper: Two questions, I guess. How many people are doing deep brain stimulation therapy right now? How long does it last, and what kind of results are you seeing?

Joanne Baker: Between 50 and 60 operations are performed a year. It can last for many, many years. A decade, certainly. Follow-up treatment can include changing batteries. However, there are developments that mean that’s going to be less necessary.

There is a front-end cost of preparation for surgery and the actual surgery. However, people manage very independently after that. And deep brain stimulation costs about half of what a common alternative medication regime would be.

Bryan Tepper: What kind of results…?

Joanne Baker: In terms of results, I have been with people who, before deep brain stimulation, have uncontrolled shaking and tremors. They lose a very large amount of weight because their body is constantly in movement and it is hard to eat and digest. Deep brain stimulation can absolutely eliminate those symptoms, whereby a person can then walk, cook, socialize with friends, live a normal life. That is what I mean when I say life-changing. The before-and-after is stark.

It is a very safe procedure. I’m sure that most of us hear deep brain stimulation or any kind of brain surgery with trepidation. It is an extremely safe procedure. I think we’ve been socialized to get used to similar procedures for the heart. This is somewhat similar for the brain.

Sunita Dhir: Thank you so much, Ms. Baker, for the presentation.

You mentioned that, currently, Parkinson Society of B.C. is entirely funded by donations. You also mentioned that the province should increase funding for allied health care and also double the funding for the electrode surgery that you mentioned. Is that within the public health care system, or is your ask for the society to get this funding?

Joanne Baker: Within the health care system. We are not asking for funding for the society directly. I mentioned that we are entirely funded by donations because I think it speaks so well to the Parkinson’s community and those who support them.

Sunita Dhir: Thanks for the answer.

[10:35 a.m.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude your time here. Thank you very much for the presentation.

Our next presenter is from the Prosthetic and Orthotics Association of British Columbia, Yvonne Jeffreys.

Thank you so much for coming. Just to let you know, as you set up, that you’ll have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes for questions. You can start when you’re ready.

Prosthetics and Orthotics
Association of B.C.

Yvonne Jeffreys: Good morning. My name is Yvonne Jeffreys. As a certified orthotist, I’m here on behalf of the Prosthetic and Orthotics Association of B.C., known as POABC. Since 1974, POABC has supported British Columbians in regaining and maintaining mobility, independence and high quality of life through prosthetic and orthotic care.

A prosthesis is worn by someone with limb loss. This might be absence from birth. It might be through trauma, cancer, maybe diabetes. An orthotic device is a brace not worn just in your shoes but from any part of your body, from head to toe, that requires external support to overcome physical impairment or pain. These devices are essential for physical, social and economic participation of people across the province, from youth and children to working-age adults and seniors.

Our goal today is to share several ideas on how government and our organization can work together to strengthen access to prosthetic and orthotic care as part of a more cohesive, patient-centred health system.

Prosthetic and orthotic reimbursements in B.C. have remained largely unchanged for the past ten to 15 years. Many people who need devices cannot afford them under the current patchwork of programs. Under the current PharmaCare system, some children have access to benefits while other kids do not. The fragmented system means the same orthotic device is not accessible to patients who are the same age and similar family incomes.

Additionally, regulated reimbursement rates under the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction have not been updated since 2008. I see firsthand how this impacts my patients.

Gordon has a painful foot deformity. After a foot fracture, he needs his foot orthosis to walk without foot pain or medication. Without them, he can’t walk for more than ten minutes and he is dependent on painkillers. With reimbursement rates frozen since 2008, he must pay 30 percent of the cost of his orthotics, because they are not fully funded under SDPR benefits.

For persons on income assistance, paying for orthotic devices is not a realistic option, as they are balancing food insecurity, rent and their health. Many go without orthotic care and suffer more serious, expensive health care consequences down the road. These orthotics are a health issue; they are not a poverty issue.

Our first recommendation is to eliminate the age cap that cuts off coverage for orthotic care at the age of 19. This would allow all British Columbians, regardless of age, to access orthotic devices and services under the same Fair PharmaCare plan they use for pharmaceutical benefits. This model is successfully implemented in other provinces across Canada. The data shows that when provinces make this change, more people have access to the services they need.

For example, Barb was born with a spine condition. She has worn braces her whole life to walk. She is enrolled in a business program at UBC. But at 19, her braces were no longer a PharmaCare benefit. In the past three years, she has had to use her wheelchair because she cannot afford her braces.

Sadly, she has put on weight. She must crawl in her condo because it’s not wheelchair friendly. She feels that people treat her differently at school when they look down at her in her wheelchair. She is losing her self-esteem, her grades have dropped, and she’s become depressed. Continuing her bracing coverage as an adult could easily have eliminated these problems.

Our second recommendation is to create a dedicated prosthetic and orthotic plan within the Fair PharmaCare system. This structure would preserve the province’s principle of cost-sharing while improving affordability and predictability.

I can tell you that Selima needs her prosthesis to fit so her leg doesn’t fall off when she walks and to reduce the pressures from rubbing. She regularly has her socket adjusted, but when no further adjustments are possible, she dreads getting a new device because she never really knows how much is going to get covered. Advance clarification of exact costs of what’s being reimbursed would reduce Selima’s anxiety about her leg. Just like you, she uses her leg every day, but to keep it in good working order is a financial stress.

[10:40 a.m.]

In conclusion, the reforms we are proposing — removing the age cap and establishing a dedicated PharmaCare plan — are targeted, fiscally responsible and consistent with the principles of B.C.’s health care system.

We hope your committee can highlight these changes to bring fairness and clarity to patients in year 2026 recommendations. I’m happy to answer some questions.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you for the presentation, and thank you for bringing props.

I just want to make sure that I fully understand. You’re asking, in our first one, to remove the age cap on funding so that people who are any age can come and they are sure that their prosthetic or orthotic will be covered. But you’re also asking for PharmaCare rules coverage for the costs around the creation of the device, the fitting of the device. Is that correct?

Yvonne Jeffreys: That’s correct.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Okay, so can you talk a little bit about, for those of us who are not experienced in this area, what the process is for fitting and what the costs are around not just the device itself, but all the costs surrounding designing, creating, implementing, fitting the device to a person?

Yvonne Jeffreys: Yeah. I guess I’ll start, just to clarify that prosthetics…. If you need a prosthesis, you can actually get PharmaCare coverage for your entire life. But for an orthotic device, once you turn 19, you fall off the edge of the earth. So if you have a stroke and you’re 55 years old, that is not a PharmaCare benefit, to use this device. Just to clarify a little bit about that.

The process of getting a device is that we would do an assessment of someone’s leg, for instance, if it’s for a brace or a prosthesis. Then we have to take a casting of the leg to get an impression, and then we fabricate the device with some sort of shell or their socket, if it’s a prosthesis. We do some diagnostic fittings, and then we do some follow-up to make sure that it’s working well.

With a prosthetic device, the volume of a residual limb can change considerably, so there are a lot of ongoing costs to actually adjust that. They wear different kinds of liners so that they don’t get skin breakdown. Those liners will wear out because they’re more of a silicone material, so they have to be replaced frequently.

The part about PharmaCare is that if the deductible is quite high, maybe $4,000 for your deductible, you have to come up with $4,000 before you’re going to get any PharmaCare coverage. A brace like this, to get a pair of these…. If someone has a $4,000 deductible, you’re paying 90 percent of this cost of this brace every single year as your child grows, and you’re never really getting the benefits from PharmaCare, even as a child being covered, depending on your family deductible.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude your time here. Thank you so much for the presentation.

Next we’ll have the B.C. Dental Association, Dr. Anita Gartner.

Morning, Dr. Gartner. You’ll have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes allotted for questions from our panel. You may begin when you’re ready.

B.C. Dental Association

Dr. Anita Gartner: Good morning, everyone. My name is Anita Gartner, and I’m the president of the B.C. Dental Association and the chair of the Access to Care Committee. I’ve practised as a specialist for 28 years in B.C. I treat children, specifically, and special needs individuals without an age limitation. I represent 4,000 dentists who are committed to the oral health and overall general health of British Columbians.

We want to thank the government for continued support for enhancing dental care access, especially for those most vulnerable populations, including children, oral cancer patients and low-income individuals.

The Canadian dental care plan has now expanded, and more Canadians are eligible. It’s so important to have efficient and effective delivery of oral health care. It has never been more vital. There still remain urgent challenges that remain an issue that need to be safeguarded for patient access and quality of care.

Our first recommendation to the B.C. government is to immediately implement strategies addressing the acute dental staff shortage. These include innovative training modules, such as the work-integrated learning programs that are available in other provinces. These are needed to maintain uninterrupted access to dental care.

[10:45 a.m.]

The B.C. Dental Association has projected a need of over 1,300 certified dental assistants and 560 hygienists to fill the gaps. We have an issue because it worsens as there’s chronic underfunding of dental education programs, resulting in multiple institutions that are now cancelling or reducing dental programs.

The most recent one is the Vancouver Island University, which no longer will be accepting any certified dental-assisting programs of 2026. This shortsighted decision will eliminate 15 percent of the BCDA graduates and strip educational opportunities in the region, including Indigenous communities, worsening the province’s already critical dental staff shortage.

Our second recommendation is that the B.C. government pause on the implementation of the Health Professions and Occupations Act, or HPOA. We would like to see full engagement — and meaningful engagement — with consultations with stakeholders. Although the act passed in 2022, this did not involve engagement with the stakeholders.

This is sweeping change for the B.C. health professions regulations, and unintended consequences will be occurring, such as…. The new act is very complex, very costly and will deter health professionals from living and working in British Columbia. It will reduce access to care and increase costs to patients and practitioners.

Although we welcome an improvement to all the acts of regulation, we would like to be able to discuss how this is going to be a long-term effect, because no other act like this for health care exists in Canada.

Third, our last recommendation is for the B.C. government to modernize dental coverage fees and improve coverage limitations for low-income and disability assistance clients. The Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction dental coverage serves the most vulnerable populations, and these rates have been frozen for almost 20 years.

Currently, the current rates cover 30 percent of the BCDA-recommended suggested fee guide. This is the lowest reimbursement rate in all the provinces across Canada. Compared to this, the consumer price index has risen over 50 percent, creating an unsustainable gap between reimbursements and actual costs. Many patients are unable to meet the CDCP requirements. Those that face language barriers or homelessness and persons with disabilities or digital illiteracies still rely on the B.C. not-for-profit dental clinics, and these profits, quite frankly, are unsustainable at the current rates.

The current limit for coverage is $1,000 for a person with disabilities and $2,000 for children. Again, these limitations cause people not to be able to seek treatment, which means that they are seen in emergency rooms for preventable dental issues, providing a strain on our health care system.

The BCDA looks forward to working collaboratively with the government and would like to continue to provide world-class oral health care to British Columbians.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Great, thank you.

Looking to my colleagues. Any questions?

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming in to present to us today and advocating for dental health in British Columbia. I’m wondering if we could talk a little bit more about…. I think maybe I need a little bit more of a walk-through for modernizing the fees for low-income and people who have a disability and are seeking dental care.

You’re saying that there’s a fee cap, a total limit per year of $1,000 for people who have a disability, $2,000 for children. The model I’m most familiar with is the MSP model where there’s a procedure, you submit and you’re paid by procedure.

You’re saying that you submit the bill for services and then there’s a cap of how much they’ll reimburse?

Anita Gartner: That’s correct. If individuals cannot pay for that difference themselves, they can go untreated or wait until the next calendar year. If this involves infection or pain, they end up in emergency rooms, where we’re paying with a much higher dollar than if we were to be able to offer those services in a timely manner right away.

[10:50 a.m.]

Claire Rattée: Thank you for that presentation. It’s really important talking about underserved populations and especially people that are low-income or unhoused. As somebody that experienced that when I was unhoused and on income assistance…. I’ve had to bear the brunt of that throughout my life with a lot of issues of my teeth. Quite a few of them are fake because of it. I know, especially for people that have substance use disorders, some of the damage that that can do to people’s teeth. That’s a really important part of your health overall.

I’m curious if, in your profession, you guys are starting to see a change in people’s dental health, a significantly negative change in people’s dental health, as food insecurity becomes more of an issue. I think that nutrition has so much to do with our health overall. I’m curious if that’s causing significant problems that are being seen immediately from food insecurity and people turning to food that is less expensive but not good for dental health.

Dr. Anita Gartner: Yeah, absolutely, we see that. Unfortunately, because I work with children, I see early childhood caries where there’s a lot of infection in a mouth. So it certainly happens. That’s why these underserved populations need to have more assistance.

Bryan Tepper: Was it the CDA program that was cancelled?

Dr. Anita Gartner: Yes, it was.

Bryan Tepper: How many spots were there? Do you know why it was…?

Dr. Anita Gartner: Ah, 36 or 38. It’s because they’re running at a loss, and they don’t have the financial support. It’s a public program.

We don’t have enough spots currently today, let alone losing another 36 spots. So there’s a huge discrepancy, and at any given time, at least 30 to 40 percent of the dentists are looking for staff. At this point in time, if I’m lucky enough to get a staff member, that means somebody else has lost that staff member. Or if a staff person isn’t available, we’ve had to cut down the number of patients that we could see.

Sunita Dhir: Thank you so much for the presentation. I have a question about the Health Professions Act. You mentioned that it’s not ideal. Which part, do you think?

Dr. Anita Gartner: It’s almost a 300-page document. There are a lot of issues that are in it. It’s just that we haven’t had the consultation. It’s very far-reaching, overreaching by the government. And as I said, there is no other province or territory that has such a weighted act. We want to make sure that we evolve and that our health acts are modern, but this is so far-reaching that it’s going to really turn off people.

I’d need to be able to sit down and talk to you much longer than my remaining 28 seconds.

Sunita Dhir: Yes. Have you given anything in writing? Like what changes…?

Dr. Anita Gartner: Absolutely.

Sunita Dhir: Okay. I’m going to follow up on that for sure. Thank you so much.

Dr. Anita Gartner: Perfect. Yes, I have a package also if you want to see us later.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude your time here. Thank you, Doctor, for your presentation.

Next we’re going to have a presentation for the city of Maple Ridge. Calling His Worship, the mayor, Dan Ruimy. Five minutes for presentation, and five minutes for questions. Please begin when you’re ready.

City of Maple Ridge

Dan Ruimy: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thank you to the committee for the opportunity to appear before you today.

My name is Dan Ruimy. I’m the mayor of Maple Ridge, and I’m here to propose two recommendations for Budget 2026 that focus on strengthening British Columbia’s economic foundation through investment in industrial land development and core community infrastructure. These targeted investments are urgently needed to respond to growth pressures, economic uncertainty and increasing demand for housing and jobs.

Moving on to the first recommendation, a strategic industrial project fund: that the province establish a strategic industrial projects fund with annual funding supports for industrial land development partnership projects.

In light of recent trade tariff challenges with the United States, it is more than ever critical that B.C. strengthen its trade infrastructure and economic development potential. There is an acute shortage of industrial lands, especially in the Lower Mainland.

This issue has been recognized for years by industry, planners, developers and all levels of government. Industrial land accounts for 4 percent of Metro Vancouver’s land area but supports 22 percent of the region’s jobs. These are high-value, trade-related jobs linked to transportation, goods, movement and economic productivity.

[10:55 a.m.]

Metro Vancouver’s 2024 Economic Impact of Industrial Land Study highlighted the essential role of trade-oriented lands in supporting regional goods, movement and supply chain resilience.

Local governments alone cannot preserve or expand industrial lands. Provincial leadership is essential to prevent further loss and to support land replacement and expansion.

Establishing a strategic industrial projects fund would help municipalities and regional governments finance planning, site servicing and redevelopment of industrial lands, ensuring long-term prosperity, competitiveness and economic stability.

Our second recommendation is an infrastructure fund for municipalities. The recommendation is that the province establish an infrastructure fund for municipalities with annual funding support for roads, bridges, emergency and community infrastructure partnership projects.

Rapid population growth in areas such as the Lower Mainland have created an urgent demand for servicing and transportation infrastructure to accompany housing development. Meeting provincially mandated housing targets depends on the timely expansion of municipal infrastructure. Without it, housing projects may stall, and residents will face growing access and quality-of-life issues.

Upcoming BRT, or bus rapid transit, expansions under the mayor’s access for everyone plan require road and bridge construction to succeed. There is currently a provincial and federal funding gap for emergency infrastructure, particularly roads, which puts communities at risk during times of crisis. B.C. cannot afford to rely solely on federal programs, which are subject to shifting political and fiscal priorities. The province must step in to ensure long-term municipal infrastructure investment.

Infrastructure investments are an economic catalyst. They generate high-paying jobs, support families and seniors and make communities more attractive for residents and employers alike.

We can talk about this and talk about this, but the reality is that municipalities contribute a lot to this province, and we can’t keep downloading the cost of doing business every single day. Allowing us the ability to apply for municipal infrastructure funding, as well as strategic industrial project funds, doesn’t only serve us; it serves the entire region, and it serves the entire province.

In closing, I respectfully urge the committee to support these two critical recommendations. Again, create a strategic industrial projects fund to protect and grow our industrial land base and regional economies, and establish a municipal infrastructure fund to support road, bridge and emergency infrastructure in fast-growing communities. Together, these targeted investments will position B.C. for long-term economic strength, job creation and community well-being.

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

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

Claire Rattée: Thank you. I don’t have a question. I just wanted to say thank you. It’s funny. We were discussing this last night — literally going for dinner — about the need to look at different ways to help funding municipalities.

I think some of us have experience, previously, with municipal government and understand the challenges that are being faced right now, so I appreciate what you brought forward. Thank you.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, thank you, Your Worship, for coming down and participating.

Dan Ruimy: Can I add something just in response to the comment there?

Having been a federal Member of Parliament, I understand there are federal programs that are out there. They’re either oversold or underfunded. This is something different. When we look at where our needs are in our communities, we just can’t do it on our own. I look at my community, a lot of the stuff that we’re doing, we have to fund ourselves but benefits the entire region. Again, it’s just something that needs to happen, and I look forward to the budget coming up.

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

Seeing no further questions, we will now have a presentation from AbbVie. Excellent. We’ll hear from presenter Jill Kravinchuk. You’ll have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes allotted for questions from the panel. You may begin when you’re ready.

[11:00 a.m.]

AbbVie

Jill Kravinchuk: On behalf of AbbVie, thank you for the opportunity to be here today in person to present AbbVie’s input into Budget 2026. My name is Jill Kravinchuk, and I’m the market access and government affairs manager at AbbVie.

I’m here today to speak to you about access to innovation in health care, a matter that profoundly impacts every British Columbian. Access to the latest advancements in medical treatments is not just a matter of health but of equity and progress. AbbVie’s mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve the serious health issues of today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow.

We strive to have a remarkable impact on people’s lives across several key therapeutic areas, including immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across our Allergan Aesthetics portfolio.

In British Columbia, AbbVie employs 63 people and in 2024 operated 76 clinical trial sites involving 343 patients across the province, investing nearly $5 million. We continue to make investments each year.

In addition, we have a multi-year, multi-strategic partnership investment in B.C.-based biotech company AbCellera. Clinical trials and investments in local biotech companies not only advance innovation for our patients and improve standards of care, but they contribute to the local economy by creating high-quality jobs and attracting leading scientists and medical specialists to our universities and our health care facilities.

B.C.’s life sciences sector is well positioned to become an economic driver for the province. However, it cannot rely entirely on government funding to grow. It needs to attract venture capital and pharma partners. In return, these companies invest where their innovation is valued and there is a predictable, timely pathway for innovation to reach patients.

AbbVie has two recommendations today regarding the prioritization of access to innovative medicines for the committee’s consideration. First, we recommend B.C. fund medications that have undergone Canada’s rigorous health technology assessment process and have concluded a net price agreement with the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance. Innovative medicines are at the forefront of treating complex conditions and offer new hope to patients who may have exhausted all other options. New breakthroughs can greatly improve patient care while reducing stress on our burdened health care system.

In Canada, new medicines undergo rigorous reviews through Health Canada and Canada’s Drug Agency to ensure innovations are safe, effective and provide value. Manufacturers then negotiate prices with the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance, which is a coalition of the provincial drug plans, to ensure Canadians secure value for money.

By focusing Budget 2026 on expanding access to innovative medicines, British Columbia can position itself as a leader in health care innovation to ensure all residents, regardless of financial circumstances, gain access to the latest medical advancements leading to better health outcomes.

Second, we recommend B.C. implement consistent and predictable timelines for access to innovative medicines and accelerate timelines where there is a high unmet need. Not only is the current pathway for access to new medicines complex; it is also lengthy, taking two years on average. In B.C., the 2023 average timeline from Health Canada approval to coverage by B.C. PharmaCare was nearly 27 months. Timelines were similar for coverage of cancer drugs, at nearly 23 months.

We urge the B.C. government to commit to a predictable timeline of funding new medicines in no more than 90 days following the successful completion of the pan-Canadian drug assessment processes. In B.C., the 2023 average timelines were 136 days for B.C. PharmaCare and 156 days for B.C. Cancer.

We further recommend that B.C. prioritize medicines addressing areas of high unmet patient need, providing access to new treatment options by funding them as soon as possible. For example, ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecological cancer. Women diagnosed with late-stage ovarian cancer have not had a new, effective treatment option in ten years. Earlier access to innovative therapies may offer hope, a longer life and a better quality of life for British Columbian women living with this devastating disease.

Thank you very much for your consideration.

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

Looking to the panel. MLA Blatherwick?

Jennifer Blatherwick: I appreciate it. I am very grateful to you for taking us through the pathway to medication approval so clearly.

Often, when new medications come through, when they are first implemented, that is their highest cost point. They are most expensive when they are first brought onto the market.

[11:05 a.m.]

What I am wondering about is…. So many of the medications that we see in treatment, as you were pointing out, have longevity. We were just hearing from another group that was advocating for biosimilarity, but many, of course, of these new medications will not reach any point of being able to have a lower-cost version of the medication for more than a few decades. So I’m trying to do a calculation here, in balancing effectiveness with cost. I’m sure that that has been a consideration in development and where development is focused.

I’m hoping you can walk me through some of the logic on that, when you’re bringing new medications to market, the focus and balancing of cost versus effectiveness. I think you’ve already done that a little bit, in choosing to focus it on high-need areas where there has been a dearth of new medications, but there are definitely other factors in consideration.

Jill Kravinchuk: Well, I think, as I mentioned, when we introduce new, innovative medicines into the health care system, we’re addressing an unmet need, where patients have exhausted all other options.

Is there anything specific you’re referring to?

Jennifer Blatherwick: You’re doing good. You’re speaking to exactly what I was hoping you would focus on.

I think there is a huge, unmet need on many cancers, especially for women. There has been a lack of development on women’s cancers. I really appreciate your bringing up ovarian cancer. There is a track record of not bringing forward medications that have been tested and have had clinical trials specifically on the people that they are designed to treat. Thank you for exploring this and bringing this to our attention. I really appreciate it.

The timelines are very ambitious, in comparison to what they are currently. The timelines for approval are very ambitious, in comparison to what’s already there.

Do you have any figures for what it costs to take a drug through the provincial process for approval to completion?

Jill Kravinchuk: With the Ministry of Health here in British Columbia, and what that would take to bring a medicine?

Jennifer Blatherwick: Yeah.

Jill Kravinchuk: I’m not aware of that. You would have to ask the Ministry of Health.

Bryan Tepper: Along that line, the timeline of 28 and 23 months, and then to 90 days…. Is that including the trials, for the 23 and 28, and then we’re bringing it down to the 90 after that? If you can answer that.

Jill Kravinchuk: Yes, absolutely. The 27 months and 23 months I was referring to were for the entire process after Health Canada approval.

The 90 days I was referring to is that once a new medicine or a new indication for a medicine has gone through those pan-Canadian processes, once it gets to the jurisdictions, here in B.C., on average, it’s about four or five months, for both cancer and non-cancer drugs. Our recommendation is to bring that to a consistent and predictable timeline of 90 days.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Well, thank you very much for the presentation. I see no further questions, so we’ll conclude your time here.

We’ll move to our next presenter, from the Physiotherapy Association of B.C., Andrea Burton. You will have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes allotted for questions. You may begin when you are ready.

Physiotherapy Association of B.C.

Andrea Burton: Great. There are a lot of things I could ask for money on with physiotherapy, but I’m going to focus today on MSP. More than 20 years ago — 23, in fact — the B.C. government increased the rates for the reimbursement model for supplementary MSP benefits, for those who are on premium assistance. Just as a reminder, people on premium assistance have an adjusted household income of $42,000 per year, slightly more than the minimum wage for one person.

They can access ten visits a year — that’s combined across physiotherapy, massage, chiropractic, naturopathy, acupuncture and non-surgical podiatry — and only $23 is reimbursed for each of these visits. A typical physiotherapy session is between $85 and $115 in the province. That’s $23, in comparison to the $90 that most insurers are paying for an average physiotherapy visit.

[11:10 a.m.]

I think we should all be pretty mortified that the numerous successive governments have failed to even look at this. We need to support vulnerable British Columbians. Exercise and education are the first-line treatments recommended by all major clinical guidelines, yet most patients in the public system only get access to care when they’re already on a surgical wait-list.

According to World Health, low back pain has the highest prevalence globally among musculoskeletal conditions. It’s the leading cause of disability worldwide. Low back pain costs the B.C. health care system an estimated $910 million annually in direct health care costs and lost productivity. In contrast, people with low back pain who receive physiotherapy are about 60 percent less likely to need advanced imaging or surgery.

The story is similar for hip and knee osteoarthritis. Surgery for hip or knee replacement is between $10,000 to $20,000 per patient. A full, conservative care plan with physiotherapy costs less than $1,000, and it might delay or even prevent surgery entirely. This isn’t a luxury. We’re talking about evidence-based prevention. Unfortunately, because of the gap in MSP coverage, many low-income British Columbians either have to be pushed towards more costly care, or they don’t get any care at all.

Imagine your dad is diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and he’s starting to lose his balance. He has fallen. You know physiotherapy could reduce his mobility issues and the possibility of another fall. It could strengthen his movements. His care team agrees, but your dad is on premium assistance. So you call around, call all the physiotherapy clinics, and they say: “Sure, we can take your dad for the $23 that MSP will pay, but there’s going to be a $40 co-pay, because we have to keep the clinic lights on.”

That physiotherapist is taking $30 less a visit, even with the MSP, but your dad can’t afford that, so he stays home. He moves less. He loses strength. He becomes isolated. A few months later, he falls again, ends up in the ER and is admitted to assisted living. He qualified for care, but our outdated MSP premium payments made doing nothing his only option.

A while back, I received a call from Cassie, who’s a single mother in Chilliwack. She was desperate because she’d fall down the stairs. She had surgery on her ankle. She saw her physiotherapist in the hospital. You get one visit, generally, after surgery, with a physiotherapist.

Her surgeon said to her: “All right, go out into the community. Find a physiotherapist. Come back walking in three months.” Cassie has five children under the age of seven, and she’s a single mom. She does qualify for MSP. She does make less than $42,000. She can’t have her ten-month-old at home, because she can’t walk. She’s not weight-bearing.

We tried everything we could think of to find a physiotherapist who could take her, but the lowest co-pay we could find was someone who would do it for $40, and Cassie can’t pay $40 a week and put food on the table for her kids. So she’s at home, and I have no idea if she’ll be able to walk again or how long it’ll be before she requires another surgery. These are preventable outcomes, and we need to do better.

We are asking for a reasonable, responsible, phased approach. What we would like to see as soon as possible is an increase to $60. That’s still $30 less than an average physio visit, but it actually would make the difference for whether or not patients can see a physiotherapist or not.

We would like to increase coverage for up to 12 visits instead of ten in a year. Again, those 12 visits are combined against all the health care professionals. I’m going to say that you will probably hear from my colleagues in other associations with similar challenges with MSP.

By 2029, we’d love to see it raised up to around the same rate as other insurers pay, which is around $90.

We would like to see…. A third recommendation would be for some kind of structural modernization, so that we’re not, in 25 years, sitting in front of you, begging you to make the rates reasonable so that patients are not falling through the gaps.

I speak for physiotherapists. I speak for our patients here. There are too many people that call us, and I don’t have an answer for them. I can’t explain to them why government will only pay $23. Modernizing this is an investment in prevention, equity and system sustainability, and prevention is cheaper than delay.

I think we need to fix this together, and I think we can work together to make changes to the system, but one of the things we need to do is make it very well known that our patients deserve the respect of being able to receive the care they need, when they need it. In so doing, we will actually save the health care system a significant amount of money.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Questions from MLAs?

[11:15 a.m.]

Claire Rattée: I’ll just say that it’s nice to see you again. Thank you for bringing this up. It is really important. I appreciate you coming.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. We’ll conclude your time there, seeing no further questions.

Moving on to our next presentation, we’ll have the B.C. School Trustees Association with a presentation by Bob Holmes.

Good morning. You’ll have five minutes for a presentation, followed by five minutes for questions from the committee.

B.C. School Trustees Association

Bob Holmes: Good morning, esteemed members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services. My name is Bob Holmes. I’m the vice-president of the British Columbia School Trustees Association, BCSTA, and a member of the board of education for the Surrey school district.

BCSTA is a non-partisan provincial advocacy organization representing boards of education across B.C. As a singular voice for governance in public education for nearly 120 years, we know that education matters to communities across the province and to members of the select standing committee.

Today I want to address two critical concerns raised by our members. First, B.C.’s K-to-12 public education system needs more equitable, sustainable and non-targeted funding. Second, specific and dedicated support to hire, train and retain qualified teachers and support staff, particularly in rural and remote areas.

Investments in students are stable investments in our future, offering a guaranteed return. These investments are how we protect our economy and secure our future. However, the funding landscape over the past decade has dramatically changed.

In the 2001-2002 budget, public school districts received 15.5 percent of the provincial budget, which has plummeted to just 7.97 percent in ’24-25. This decline has resulted in severe structural deficits across school boards, forcing them to make difficult decisions that impact students’ success. Rather than prioritizing student needs, boards grapple with questions like: “What cut will have the least impact on our students?”

Let’s be clear. It’s not just about dollars. It’s about children’s right to a quality education. Our schools should be able to evolve and expand programs, ensuring equity for all students. Increased funding would empower schools to enhance supports for students with disabilities and students with diverse abilities, Indigenous students and children in care. It’s crucial that funding be allocated in a way that respects the autonomy of individual school boards, allowing them to meet the unique needs of their communities.

Across the province, music rooms are being turned into classrooms and playing fields into fields of portables, and at every turn, an opportunity for a student is being lost. This is the reality of places like Colwood, where the ten-year-old Royal Bay Secondary School was over-capacity the day it opened. Multipurpose rooms have been converted to classrooms and funding meant for student programs has been diverted to cover capital costs of a field of portables to house the overpopulated school. Even when classroom space was found for students, access to spaces like the gym and the resource centre is seriously limited.

Elsewhere, the Kamloops-Thompson school district is facing ever-increasing substitute costs stemming from much higher rates of illness-related absences, which have doubled in the district over the past five years. As a result, the district was forced to reduce 79 full-time-equivalent positions, cut their popular strings program and eliminate all library assistants to pay for these unfunded operating costs to ensure they could keep certified education assistants. They are not alone, as no other cost has increased as much provincially as substitute costs.

If the province does not fund the actual costs of complex classrooms, inflationary pressures and staff costs, many other districts will be forced to reduce support staff at a time when the number of students with complex needs continues to increase.

Additionally, there’s a growing need for specific, dedicated support to hire, train and retain qualified teachers and support staff, particularly in rural and remote areas. A critical shortfall exists in our educational workforce, with an annual gap of 600 to 700 teachers. This issue extends to essential support staff, including education assistants and IT personnel. Operating with such deficiencies is unsustainable and detrimental to students’ educational, physical and emotional well-being.

As of last month, there were 331 teachers on letters of permission, LOPs, in B.C. LOPs are temporary authorizations granted by the ministry that allow a school district to employ an individual who is not a certified teacher when none are available for a particular teaching position. Given the ongoing need to staff these districts with LOPs, students often experience multiple years in classrooms with individuals who lack training in essential areas such as classroom management, curriculum planning and assessment.

We have rural and remote schools that do not have any certified teachers and rely on LOPs year after year. Additionally, the inability to hire specialty teachers limits students’ choices and creates inequity in the educational system. In understaffed schools, students struggle to receive the personalized support they need. The repercussions of neglecting these fundamental staffing needs will have lasting effects, particularly among students with unique learning requirements.

[11:20 a.m.]

We can reverse these trends. Increased and predictable funding for B.C.’s K-to-12 public education system can secure students’ futures and their success in a world of their own making. Investments in general funding and specific initiatives for staff recruitment and retention will pay dividends for our students, our economy and our future.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Great. It’s nice to see you again.

Bob Holmes: Good to see you.

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

Questions from the committee?

Bryan Tepper: I hear a lot about funding models not working. Do we have proposals coming forward from groups like the trustees association, or what are we looking at?

Bob Holmes: Well, we’re certainly working on a paper right now that expands greatly on different financial needs. It’s something we’ll have very soon. We’d be more than happy to share it with the group if you would like.

The funding model — there are always different opinions on exactly what it should look like. My concern always is when we look at changing the funding model without changing the funding, then all we’re doing is taking money from one district and giving it to another. Every district has unique needs. There are needs all across the province. So with any new funding model we might look at, we definitely would want to see increased funding. Otherwise, like I say, it’s just pitting one district against another.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, thank you. I see no further questions. I appreciate the presentation.

We’ll go to our next presentation from school district 38, Richmond, and presentation by Cindy Wang.

Ken Hamaguchi: Actually, there are two of us, if that’s all right.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): There are two of you? That’s okay. I’ll just get you to introduce yourself, please. I’m assuming you’re not Cindy.

Ken Hamaguchi: No. Cindy is much better looking. My name is Ken Hamaguchi. I’m the board chair of Richmond school district.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): It’s nice to meet you. Thank you.

You’ll have, as a team, five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes for questions from our committee. You can begin when you’re ready.

School District No. 38, Richmond

Ken Hamaguchi: Dear committee members, thank you for the opportunity to present the Richmond board of education’s key priorities for the upcoming provincial budget. This submission reflects the united voice of the board and our education partners in Richmond community.

I don’t know if we’re unique, but we work really closely with CUPE, with the Teachers Association, with the Richmond District Parents Association, the Richmond management team and so forth. In the past, we would have all these people come. But we told them: “Don’t worry about today.” There’s so much traffic and everything, and everyone is so busy. But we do represent a large group, not just the students and the parents.

We’re highlighting three critical priorities in this presentation, which I’m sure you’ve probably heard from all the other school districts. Number one is our capital funding for a new school in Richmond City Centre.

The board of education has been advocating in recent years for two new elementary schools in the City Centre to address the growth pressure. This area continues to experience significant growth driven by high-density housing and the influx of young families. We’ve been working very hard in the last number of years to secure a new school site in the City Centre. This work reflects our strong commitment to addressing the urgent needs for public education infrastructure enrichment.

Over the last few years, the numbers in City Centre have really blown up. It’s gotten to the point where two of our elementary schools are bigger than our high schools. We’ve been dealing with it by putting portables in and temporary structures, but that doesn’t help us in the sense of we still only have one gym. As is turning out, I talked to the principal over at Brighouse School, and she said that all the kids get 30 minutes in the gym a week.

Now, obviously, they still do…. We go outdoors, and we make the best of it. But it still doesn’t get away from the fact that they only get to spend 30 minutes a week in the gym. When the weather is great, not a problem; when the weather is lousy, like it is for most of the year, it is a problem.

We put so much emphasis on the kids’ health and well-being. Meanwhile, when I went to school many, many years ago, we had PE every day. In high school, you could take PE all the time. When I find that it’s only 30 minutes, I do have trouble with that one, mainly because of my love for PE and the importance of kids being healthy.

[11:25 a.m.]

To meet the ongoing projected demands, two new schools are necessary to ensure that students have access to neighbourhood schools and appropriate learning environments. We look forward to ongoing collaboration with the province to ensure capital investment aligns with community needs and provides the foundation for long-term student success.

Several years ago, we sold one of our high schools, and that money was put into our capital account with the idea that one day we’re going to need to buy a school. Now, of course, prices have gone up since we sold it and everything. But I give lots of credit to our secretary-treasurer and our finance department, in that we’ve been able to actually use that money to…. When COVID came around, we put $14 million into ventilation because that was seen as a very important thing, and having clean air in classrooms obviously is very important.

But along the way, we’ve been able to sort of manage with the money we get from the city through the building the school fund or whatever. We’ve done a good job of putting some money aside, and we are trying to be as creative as possible, knowing the situation of the government and the tough financial times.

I take my hat off to our financial team because they’ve done a great job of putting us in the position where we may not need as much as some of the other schools to build schools because we’ve got money put aside for that. Once again, we need a bit of help.

Two, continued investment in the seismic mitigation program. We live in Richmond. We are facing an urgent need for capital funding to complete the seismic mitigation program.

Twenty-two schools in our district, including 18 elementary and four secondary schools, have been identified with a high seismic rating. This means that over 10,000 student seats remain in dire need of a seismic mitigation measures. The health, safety and well-being of our students and staff must remain a top priority. We respectfully request the government provide timely funding to fulfil this commitment to public safety.

It doesn’t help when we have earthquakes like last year, and all of a sudden people start buying first-aid kits and getting their home all set. From a school perspective, they go: “What are you guys doing?” and “What if something happened with this last earthquake?” and “What about the next earthquake to come?”

We tell them that we’re doing all we can and the government is doing all they can. But at the end of the day, we still have a number of schools that are seismically challenged. And as I said, Richmond — beautiful place to live, but earthquake-wise, not a beautiful place to live. School-wise, we want to avoid any kind of catastrophe that comes with these earthquakes.

Last but not least, stable and sustainable education funding. We also respectfully call on the province to provide stable and sustainable funding for public education, an essential pillar of our democratic society. Reliable funding is critical to support student success and implement a new ministry initiative, such as early learning and child care programs.

In addition to program delivery, we are managing significant unfunded cost pressures. The current funding model does not address increases in employee benefits or salary grid increments. These structural funding gaps are compounded by the cost escalation caused by inflation and global economic uncertainty.

We continue to practise prudent budgeting, strategic procurement and long-term planning; however, these measures alone are insufficient in maintaining service levels without sustainable funding. Adequate funding is essential to preserve the quality and accessibility of public education in B.C. We know…

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you. Sorry.

Ken Hamaguchi: …that everything is going up. We have tried to pick the low-hanging fruit and save money here and there, but you can only do that for so long.

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

Ken Hamaguchi: Oh, that went longer.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): It’s okay. You were worth it.

We’ll now go to the panel for questions, please.

Seeing no questions, I thank you for your presentation today.

Ken Hamaguchi: Do you want to know where to send the cheque to? Do you need the address?

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): What do you think, MLA Blatherwick?

Jennifer Blatherwick: Always good to see you, Ken.

Sunita Dhir: Oh, I have a question. What was Cindy’s role? Was she supposed to speak after?

Ken Hamaguchi: Cindy is our secretary-treasurer. I was told that I was supposed to speak. So when you said that, I thought: “Oh, wait a second.”

Sunita Dhir: Oh. I was waiting for her to speak the whole time.

Ken Hamaguchi: Oh, you know what? It would have been worth it too.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): The committee is now in recess until 12:50 p.m.

The committee recessed from 11:30 a.m. to 12:52 p.m.

[Elenore Sturko in the chair.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Good afternoon, everybody. I’ll call the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services back to order after our lunch break. We’re going to start this afternoon with a presentation from school district 41 in Burnaby, from Kristin Schnider.

You have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes for questions from our committee members. You can begin when you’re ready.

School District No. 41, Burnaby

Kristin Schnider: Thank you. Good afternoon. As mentioned, I’m Kristin Schnider, and I’m here on behalf of the Burnaby board of education. I want to speak to you about three urgent funding issues in K-to-12 education and the impact not just to school districts but, most importantly, to students in B.C. schools.

Firstly, let’s talk about inequity in K-to-12 funding. In 2016, the Supreme Court of Canada restored class size and composition language that had been illegally stripped in 2002. To respond, the province introduced the classroom enhancement fund, or CEF, as a temporary fix meant to bridge the gap until new agreements and new funding formula were in place. But nearly a decade later, this temporary solution has been a lasting source of inequity. CEF has created winners and losers, and Burnaby has consistently lost.

When the language was removed in 2002, Burnaby and other districts chose to protect classroom supports, making deep cuts elsewhere — administration, operations, maintenance. While other districts dismantled classroom services, we held the line, and we’ve been penalized for this ever since.

When CEF was first introduced, it was rewarded to districts that cut classroom teachers, by giving them greater funding to bring back these needed teachers. Districts like Burnaby, however, who upheld the spirit of collective agreements, received less — no recognition of other cuts, no adjustments, no equity. Over the past decade, Burnaby has lost nearly $70 million compared to other districts that cut classroom supports before contract language was restored.

Looking more broadly, there are districts that receive hundreds less per student than the average provincial CEF funding. That’s not just a past adjustment. It’s a compounding and annual deficit that continues to undermine student support today. I would note that CEF is one of the primary sources of public education dollars.

[12:55 p.m.]

Unfortunately, CEF isn’t the only source of funding inequity. With the provincial rollout of the federal national food program, Burnaby, B.C.’s fourth-largest district, received the fourth-smallest allocation, just $7,800 for 27,000 students, or 29 cents per student for the entire year, not even enough for one apple per student.

Meanwhile, some districts have received 100 times more based on socioeconomic index from the 2016 census, a flawed measure that overlooks many vulnerable populations.

Our recommendation is the province review and revise staff allocations, special purpose funds and all education funding to ensure that they reflect equity so districts that made responsible, student-first decisions are no longer penalized and to assure that vulnerable learners, regardless of what district they attend, are no longer left behind.

Secondly, I want to talk about temporary resident registrations. Burnaby and other districts in Metro have seen a sharp rise in enrolments from temporary resident registrations, or TRRs, students whose families are in B.C. on work or study permits. This year, Burnaby welcomed nearly 3,500 TRRs, with 276 arriving after the September 30 funding cutoff. Last year it was nearly 3,000 students, with 436 arriving between October and December.

Despite being legally entitled to public education, TRRs are only funded if they register before September 30. That leaves hundreds, many of them newcomers and English language learners, without funding, placing pressures on already stretched resources. Refugee claimants, by contrast, receive mid-year funding when they enrol after September 30. So why the discrepancy? The district should not have to split their resources thinner and thinner to provide services to students legally entitled to a publicly funded education.

Our recommendation is the province extend mid-year funding eligibility to temporary resident registrations, aligning it with what is already provided to newcomer refugees. TRR students deserve the same opportunities, and districts cannot bear the full cost of their education alone.

Third is unintended downloaded costs in school districts. School districts are absorbing millions in costs downloaded from well-intentioned but underfunded policy changes. Recent improvements to extended health and dental benefits through provincial bargaining have resulted in higher claim expenditures. This has led to significant increases in benefit premiums that are borne solely by school districts.

In Burnaby alone, we are facing a $4 million increase in benefit premium costs next year alone, with no additional funding from the ministry. We are also grappling with higher staff replacement costs driven by rising sick leave, a post-pandemic reality that we support, but it’s led to $750,000 in replacement costs in Burnaby this year alone.

We know this challenge is being faced by many school districts year after year. While the province’s five paid sick days for all workers is a welcome policy, one that all workers deserve, districts must now pay sick leave to casual workers who decline shifts, with no funding to offset it.

Finally, staffing costs tied to labour settlement are only funded based on staffing levels at the start of the year. But in districts like Burnaby, enrolment and staffing growth is continuing after September, and yet those salaries remain unfunded. We support these worker protections, but without corresponding funding, we’re forced to make cuts, cuts that hurt students.

Our recommendation is that the province fund the full cost of negotiated benefit increases, paid sick days and post-September staffing growth so districts are not forced to choose between respecting workers’ rights and maintaining student services.

I’ll say this in closing. Public education is meant to be the great equalizer, but that promise only holds true when the funding follows the students and when equity, not history or averages, determines allocations.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. I will now look to our committee members for questions.

Bryan Tepper: Just to clear up…. I actually didn’t know…. So casual staff, or is it TOCs…? If they turn down a shift, they can claim the one of the five sick days?

Kristin Schnider: Correct. So as that was determined under the Labour Relations Board with the changes to the Employment Standards Act, they have five eligible sick days that they’re able to claim, which is inclusive of two shifts they turn down as a TTOC. Same with casual EAs.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude your time. Thank you very much for your presentation.

Our next presentation is from Breakfast Club of Canada, Ryan Baker.

Thanks for joining us. You have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of time allocated for any questions from the committee. Begin when you’re ready.

Breakfast Club of Canada

Ryan Baker: My name is Ryan Baker. I’m the national programs lead for Breakfast Club of Canada. We are a national non-profit that provides funding and support to more than 300 school nutrition programs in B.C. We enhance access to nutritious high-quality food to more than 18,000 students in B.C. every school morning.

[1:00 p.m.]

StatsCan just announced that from 2021 to 2023, households with the lowest incomes allocated nearly 20 percent of their paycheques to food. The most recent Canadian income survey found that in B.C., over 30 percent of children under the age of 18 were living in food-insecure households in 2024. This is a steep increase from 2021, when this number was below 20 percent.

The consistent and dramatic increase in grocery prices for basic food items has caused significant challenges for many families. These spikes in grocery prices have been more dramatically felt in smaller, more rural communities.

In 2023, British Columbia invested $214 million over three years through the feeding futures program from the Ministry of Education. This investment has increased the availability of high-quality school nutrition programs to many more schools across the province.

In 2024, British Columbia agreed to invest funds provided by the government of Canada, under the national school food policy agreement to enhance and further expand school food programs. This is to be done by the delivery of school food programs or by providing school food funding directly to school boards to support and encourage the delivery of programs and services directly or to consider funding support programs and services delivered by not-for-profit entities.

Breakfast Club of Canada was happy to support and be part of both announcements. As highlighted in the recently released State of School Food Programming in Canada, ‘23-24: Pre-National School Food Program Baseline, the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and Food is supporting school districts to work towards purchasing 30 percent B.C.-grown food, connect with B.C. food producers and processors and enhance local food literacy via the Feed B.C. program.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Food also funds 14 regional NGO food hubs. These food hubs can indirectly support school food programs by offering commercial kitchen space, equipment, storage and distribution, with food sourced externally and staffing provided by the school district.

In 2024, Breakfast Club of Canada had a third-party study conducted that interviewed food security stakeholders, including B.C.’s Minister of Education, to assess and evaluate the current state of school nutrition programs and identified gaps and pilot project opportunities to increase efficiency, coordination and food procurement and logistics opportunities in B.C., Alberta and Ontario. Three pilots were recommended.

The B.C.-focused pilot that I would like to highlight today is focused on school district 5, southeast Kootenays. This pilot aims to support the 6,000 students across school district 5. We are currently supporting two schools with funding and support from Breakfast Club, but we have 14 schools on the wait-list.

We’re currently partnering with a third-party community organization and the school districts to support the centralized procurement and distribution of food to schools with a goal of more than a 500 percent growth in the number of children reached via Breakfast Club support. Breakfast Club of Canada is leveraging our national network, supporting food providers to ensure that SD 5 can procure high-quality, nutritious food at aggressive pricing, highlighting opportunities for large-scale donated products and opportunities to dramatically increase the availability of B.C. food for schools in SD 5. We are also working with logistics providers to ensure that this food can reach all schools across the school district.

School district 5 is currently facing four main pain points, which, after our research for this project, are not dissimilar to the challenges faced by other school districts across B.C.

Last-mile delivery. Transport and delivery is a significant challenge, given limited population and lack of regional partners.

Human resources. Adequate staff and volunteers to effectively run breakfast programs in schools are limited and often squeezed by budget constraints.

Limited infrastructure. Districts and schools have limited facilities and ability to accommodate large volumes of food and the cost of food.

Most schools still procure food independently from supermarkets, leading to cost inefficiencies, labour challenges and questionable food availability, not to mention the fact that B.C. food is not readily available at many grocery stores across the province.

Breakfast Club of Canada is investing more than $250,000 to support the increased infrastructure needs of the school district, with pilot launch expected during the ‘25-26 school year. Scalability of this project is possible by starting the pilot with high-value, high-volume products and expanding the offering over time. By year 3, this project will serve all 16 schools, feeding 75 percent of the students daily.

We are designing the implementation and assessment of this pilot in such a way that it is exportable to many more districts across the province. We hope that this will serve as a model for similar projects across the British Columbia, providing more B.C. schools with a centralized model to offer high-quality, nutritious, B.C.-grown food to their students at a reasonable cost.

If you see gaps or opportunities within your riding, please reach out to Breakfast Club so that we can work together to support B.C. students.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much.

Question from MLA Blatherwick.

[1:05 p.m.]

Jennifer Blatherwick: Hello, and thank you for your work and your advocacy today. I just want to make sure that I fully understand the pilot that’s happening in the Kootenays in SD 5.

Your role is not just limited to producing the food, but your primary efforts there are in centralizing the procurement of food.

Ryan Baker: Centralizing the procurement of food, centralizing the logistics to make sure that the district has support to get food out across all communities within their district and then also supporting the individual schools with running those programs.

In most schools, school nutrition programs are run by teachers, principals, EAs, youth workers — not people who are necessarily trained in operating high-quality programs. We provide resources, support, school visits, open houses to make sure that those people running school nutrition programs have all the support they need to operate effective programs.

Jennifer Blatherwick: So you would be trying to engage with people who are primary producers or food distributors to try and up the amount of B.C.-grown food in there.

Ryan Baker: Absolutely.

Jennifer Blatherwick: That’s really interesting. Can you talk about the efficiencies there? I’m sure that even though you’re investing in British Columbia produce, because you’re going directly to primary producers or distributors, there’s a significant cost saving to the district.

Ryan Baker: There is. Most schools that we approach are already purchasing food for their schools, but they’re doing it independently. They’re going to their local grocery store and buying food for one school.

We want to start working with more districts across the province to centralize that procurement and reach out to some of the large-scale provincial producers and get some of that food directed to schools so that B.C. students are eating B.C. food.

Claire Rattée: I think that makes a lot of sense, trying to leverage the buying power there.

Have you guys ever done any partnerships or any pilot programs working on agricultural programs within schools to encourage children to be growing their own food and doing agricultural programs? I know there have been a handful of pilot projects that have gone on — not necessarily in my riding, but close to it. There have been mixed levels of success.

For my riding specifically, we’re up north, and we have hardly any agricultural development, which is a huge frustration to me. It seems like starting kids early on, while they’re still school-aged, at getting involved and interested in agriculture would be a really efficient way to try and address some of these issues around food insecurity and to fix the problem downstream as well, in the broader sense that we have a significant issue with food insecurity up north.

So I’m curious if there’s anything that you can shed light on about that, if that’s something that your organization has looked into.

Ryan Baker: We don’t currently support local growing programs at schools through funding or investment. Certainly, I think that there’s…. It becomes a circular process, right? I think that with high-quality school nutrition programs, there’s an education element of that: teaching students healthy eating habits, teaching students where their food comes from.

We’ve run into many schools that are operating small grow boxes or small greenhouses. I think they’re wonderful programs. It’s just not something the Breakfast Club of Canada invests in.

Sunita Dhir: My question is also along the same lines. Do schools approach you? Do they enrol you, or do you approach schools and enrol them?

Ryan Baker: Schools currently approach us about accessing funding, but more and more, our wait-list grows beyond our capabilities to support more schools. So we’re trying to partner directly with school districts now and approach those school districts to inform them of how many schools in their district we’re already supporting — with funding, support, equipment, infrastructure — and start to centralize some of that support at the district level.

It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg. We’re currently accepting applications from individual schools and districts, but we’re also going to districts in which we already support many individual schools.

Sunita Dhir: One more. I understand that you get donations and some grants. Are you getting any federal grants as well, or only provincial?

Ryan Baker: We currently just received $4½ million to support school food infrastructure needs across the country, of which I’m really proud to be helping to support many schools, school districts and non-profits in B.C. with infrastructure to support increased access to school nutrition programs. That’s the only federal funding that we do receive. It’s one-off funding.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): One final question, from MLA Tepper.

Bryan Tepper: Sorry, I just wanted to ask which two schools you’re highlighting on this.

[1:10 p.m.]

Ryan Baker: We’re currently looking to pilot at all of the schools in SD 5.

Bryan Tepper: You said you were in two?

Ryan Baker: We currently support two schools.

Bryan Tepper: Do you know which ones they are?

Ryan Baker: Offhand, I’m not sure. But I can get that information to you. We currently support those two schools, and what we want to do is help the district kind of wrap their arms around all the programs in their district and get more support out to the other schools.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, thank you very much. That’s all the time we have for your presentation.

We’re going to conclude and move to the next presentation from school district 46 board of education on the Sunshine Coast, from Amanda Amaral.

You have five minutes for presentation, five minutes for questions. Begin when you’re ready.

School District No. 46,
Sunshine Coast,
Board of Education

Amanda Amaral: Thank you very much. Hello, I’m Amanda Amaral, representing the board of education from school district 46. Our board wants to talk to you about inflationary pressures, cybersecurity and child care.

School districts are experiencing extraordinary and sustained financial pressures. While costs have increased across the board, funding has only been adjusted to cover provincially negotiated labour settlements and enrolment changes. These adjustments do not reflect the full spectrum of financial pressures facing districts, many of which are beyond our control and directly impact student learning environments.

Take sick leave costs, for an example. They’ve been a significant challenge for us. Since COVID-19, we’ve seen a significant rise in both the frequency and duration of employee absences. This reflects an important cultural shift around staying home when unwell, but it comes at a cost. Our sick leave expenditures have more than doubled, from $850,000 in 2019 to $1.8 million in 2024. This increase stems from both unfunded wage increases and higher utilization, yet no corresponding funding has been provided to offset it.

Employee benefits are another place we’ve seen sharp increases. In the past year alone, extended health premiums rose by 20.34 percent and dental by 7.6 percent. This adds almost another $300,000 to our budget.

If you think about it, consumer price index is applied to our budget, to non-salaried goods and services. Districts are effectively running with 20 to 25 percent fewer real dollars than five years ago. School districts…. If we’re to sustain healthy, inclusive, engaging learning spaces for our students, the province must ensure the funding model reflects the full range of real and rising costs, not just wages and enrolment numbers.

With cybersecurity, digital tools and data systems have become essential to school operations and instruction, and cybersecurity has emerged as a critical area of vulnerability. While we appreciate that work is being done at the provincial level, school districts are ill-equipped and not funded to adapt to the modern cybersecurity needs. Threats are constant and constantly evolving, and the system that supports K-to-12 education requires ongoing investment in training, infrastructure and response capacity.

In our district, we’ve had to redirect operational funding away from student-facing supports to address urgent need to improve cybersecurity and information technology systems. This means less direct supports for our students in classrooms. The absence of stable, targeted funding for cybersecurity leaves districts more vulnerable.

We want both sector-wide strategies, shared infrastructure opportunities and long-term supplemental operational funding to ensure all districts can meet baseline cybersecurity expectations without sacrificing direct supports that students need to succeed.

Child care services. I believe that school districts play an increasingly important role in supporting access to high-quality child care. This makes sense. We have the facilities and we have the relationships to make a real difference for child care. However, the current approach to implementation places a disproportionate financial and administrative burden on districts with insufficient supports.

Beyond capital and operating costs, districts are absorbing significant administrative demands, including complex and repetitive grant applications and the corresponding compliance reporting; human resource challenges, including hiring, supervision and integration of staff into collective agreements; invoicing; fee collection and unrecoverable accounts; licensing; insurance; and operational compliance requirements. I’d like to point out that they’re often inconsistent between health authorities across the province.

These responsibilities are added on top of our existing K-to-12 obligations, with additional funding being uncertain and insufficient to sustain support for growth in these services. So we’re asking the province to please provide predictable, multi-year capital and operational funding that reflects the true delivery costs for child care and improved cross-ministry coordination, particularly with MCFD and local governments.

With appropriate resourcing and clearly defined expectations, school boards can be trusted, effective partners in delivering sustainable, community-based, excellent child care.

[1:15 p.m.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for that presentation. Very good.

Looking to committee members with questions.

Seeing no questions, that will conclude your time. Thank you very much for the presentation.

Now we’re going to hear from the Vancouver school board, from Victoria Jung. You’ll have five minutes for the presentation, followed by five minutes for any questions from committee members. You can start when you’re ready.

Vancouver School Board

Victoria Jung: Thank you very much. I am here on behalf of the Vancouver school board. My name is Victoria Jung, and I’ve been the chair since 2022.

I am very grateful to be here today to present our education budget considerations for the upcoming provincial budget. As you consider the priorities that will shape the future of British Columbia, we respectfully urge the committee to focus on these three critical areas that will strengthen our public education system and ensure equitable access to quality learning environments for all students.

First, we call for equitable and sufficient funding for education that reflects the real and rising costs of delivering inclusive, high-quality K-to-12 education. This includes ensuring that Indigenous learners and students with diverse abilities receive the supports they need to thrive. Staffing shortages, particularly among student support assistants, or SSAs, specialist teachers and psychologists, continue to strain our ability to meet student needs.

Despite growing complexity in student needs, funding allocations have not kept pace with inflation, leaving school districts to stretch limited resources further each year. For example, since 2017, the changes to funding for school districts reflect provincially negotiated labour settlement costs and funding for increased enrolment but fail to acknowledge the inflationary cost increases for benefits, services, supplies, utilities and other expenses.

As we heard from the previous speaker about the consumer price index, the increase for B.C. over that time period was 24.2 percent. We urge the government to close the gap between what is currently funded and what is required to deliver inclusive education and to adjust operating budgets to reflect inflationary pressures.

Secondly, we emphasize the urgent need for targeted investments in technology and future-ready learning environments. Students must be equipped with the tools and skills to navigate an increasingly digital world, including access to assistive technologies, AI learning resources and up-to-date science and library materials.

Many schools lack the infrastructure and expertise to support this shift, creating inequities that disproportionately affect students from lower-income households. We recommend funding to modernize classroom technology, upgrade digital infrastructure and provide professional development for educators to integrate emerging technologies into their teaching practice. Without these investments, students risk falling behind in a world where digital fluency is essential.

Finally, we urge the government to continue investing in safe, accessible and inclusive school facilities. While we are grateful for past investments in seismic upgrades, no new seismic mitigation projects have been approved in Vancouver this past year. This is despite four annexes, 28 elementary schools and 11 secondary schools remaining at high risk in a seismic event.

Total costs of repairs and upgrades required within five years, or deferred maintenance costs, continue to grow across the province, from $5.9 billion ten years ago to $9.61 billion this school year. That cost has almost doubled. While the cost of deferred maintenance continues to grow, our aging infrastructure requires urgent attention. In many cases, school districts are forced to divert operating funds to cover capital needs due to the lack of sufficient funding for the maintenance of facilities.

We also highlight the need for improved accessibility across school buildings, including elevators, washrooms and learning spaces, as well as expanded funding for inclusive playgrounds. These investments are essential to ensure that all students, regardless of ability, can participate fully in their school communities.

[1:20 p.m.]

We also encourage the province to streamline approval processes for capital projects to ensure timely delivery and cost efficiency.

I thank you very much for your consideration of these priorities, and we welcome the opportunity to provide further input or clarification as needed.

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

Any questions from committee members?

Victoria Jung: I came prepared. I’ve got lots of answers.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Unfortunately, I see no questions.

Oh, MLA Rattée.

Claire Rattée: Thank you. I will just say, especially because some of them are still here, I think the reason that we don’t have any questions for all of these school-related ones is because for two days now, we’ve been hearing the exact same problems.

We are very aware of these issues around a lack of funding for education. It’s certainly something — I can only speak for myself — that I’ll be pushing for, so I appreciate you all. I’m sorry I don’t have questions, but it’s because we understand the pressures that you guys are facing.

Victoria Jung: Thank you. I appreciate the time that you’ve taken to listen.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for participating.

We’ll now call upon B.C. Teachers Federation. Clint Johnston, thanks for being here. You’ll have five minutes for your presentation, five minutes for questions from our committee members. You can begin when you’re ready.

B.C. Teachers Federation

Clint Johnston: Thank you very much. Based on the last comment, brace yourselves for more.

I’m presenting three critical recommendations from the B.C. Teachers Federation today on behalf of those members who are working every day to provide B.C. kids with the education they deserve throughout our province.

Rec 1 from us is to provide a consequential increase to overall education funding that exceeds inflation and enrolment adjustments. We worded that very carefully, because I know that every year it’s announced that we have the highest spending ever. Unsurprisingly and linked, I have the highest grocery spending ever every single year in my household. I say that not entirely tongue in cheek. We need to make sure that it exceeds inflation and addresses the actual problem.

Schools that are in need of paper, overcrowded classes in portables, band programs cut, students with disabilities sent home or not having a EA — these situations are all becoming increasingly common. Unfortunately, they’re becoming normalized in B.C. education.

We know school boards across the province are addressing budget shortfalls, including, this spring, by cutting vital EA, counsellor and other teacher positions in the middle of a staffing shortage. The cuts are occurring exactly when the opposite is what is needed. We need increases to provide the educational experiences all of our kids deserve.

At the BCTF, we’ve conducted a random-sample survey with our membership this spring that provides concrete evidence, we believe, that funding shortfalls play a role in the increase we’re also seeing in violent incidents in B.C. schools.

Overall, in our survey, 15 percent of B.C. public school teachers reported that they have personally experienced workplace violence during the 2024-25 school year. Some reported on a daily basis. As one teacher shared: “Schools feel unsafe. Violence and aggressive language is being normalized and even strong, experienced teachers are struggling. Student learning is becoming less of a focus.”

This is not, I emphasize, about individual behaviour. This is not inevitable. It is violence that stems from austerity and the result of years of underfunding of B.C.’s public education system. When children don’t have the support they need to thrive at school, their behaviours are urgent pleas for support. If we keep funding our education system in the same way we have, going forward we should, unfortunately, expect to see the same results.

Previous provincial budgets, in our opinion, have failed to provide the significant additional funding for new programs or services in education that have been rolled out, which exacerbates the problem. New investments in our public education system are required if we want safe and welcoming schools in our communities.

Recommendation 2 is to close the inclusive education funding gap by providing, at a minimum, funding for special education, staffing and services that fully covers what school districts actually spend on inclusive education. School districts have an obligation to provide a meaningful education to all students. That’s what inclusion provides for, and it’s the right thing to do. This has been affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada.

[1:25 p.m.]

Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned, the funding provided to B.C. school districts, particularly for inclusive education, has fallen behind the needs year after year. Every year those districts spend more on inclusive education than they receive in funding. It’s been this way for a long time.

In 2023-24, for example, provincial government funding only covered 72 percent of what school districts actually spent to provide inclusive education services. This means that there was a $340 million funding shortfall that districts were forced to cover with their core operational funding, funding that is already stretched thin.

Some of those you’ll see in the press, if they’re in major metro areas and there’s enough attention on it, but a lot of them go unnoticed around the province in the remote areas. The funding gap forces districts to ration staff and resources out, often, unfortunately, inequitably, and impacts every single student, not just the students who rely on inclusive education supports.

We have to begin to reverse the trend by increasing the funding. Rec 3, specifically, is enable the provincial government to live up to its promise to place an education assistant in every primary classroom and a counsellor in every school.

This government that’s sitting promised pre-election that it will provide every public school with a mental health counsellor and every K-to-3 classroom with an education assistant. We applauded that when we heard it, because we know fulfilling this promise would have a major impact on students and on our members.

Unfortunately, we’re far from meeting those promises so far, and getting there will require dedicated funding to attract new staff and support current ones.

The long and the short of it is that teachers care deeply about students, and we don’t have the resources to do the work we need to do every day.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. I know that you skipped a few pages, and I know that there’s a lot more information, I’m sure, that the BCTF could provide.

Are there any questions from committee members?

I have a question. Just if you could provide more details into the types of violence in the classroom that some of your teachers are experiencing and what you believe actually are some of the priority measures that could be taken to help mitigate that violence.

Clint Johnston: I appreciate that question. I’ll do the best I can.

To be honest, it runs the gamut. It goes from verbal violence up to and including being hit, struck, broken bones, cuts, concussions. I appreciate that look, if I may. We’re talking about children, and that can be hard for the general public to wrap their heads around. But if you have a child who’s in, say, grade 4, 5 or 6, maybe has grown a little ahead of the curve and is almost the same size as me, and they throw a chair across the room, there are significant repercussions.

I really want to contextualize, because that is a plea for help. It is a point that nobody should ever get to. That student should be able to go speak to a counsellor before they get to that. They should be getting a toolkit for themselves to deal with those kinds of issues from kindergarten. It shouldn’t be trying to deal with one-offs.

When you ask what’s necessary, it sounds expensive, but this is what’s necessary: that student should have a counsellor in the building every day, that’s an adult they get to know. If you expect a grade 6 or 7 preteen student to phone someone on a telephone to talk about a deep personal problem, then I don’t feel like you’ve met very many preteens or teens. They will not do that. They need to know the person. They need to know that they’re supported.

So we need the people in those buildings every day that create relationships that help them to defuse these situations and create a toolkit for that child who’s going to live with the rest of us, their whole lives, in our communities.

Claire Rattée: Do you know if any studies have been done to see if there are any kind of specific markers around increases in violence and schools maybe that don’t have the same level of mental health resources, different socioeconomic backgrounds?

Obviously, we know that a lot of families, most families now, are struggling with cost-of-living crises. Food insecurity is a big issue, especially for young children in the province. Is there any, even anecdotal, evidence that there is a tie between the two, where we’re seeing increases, that mental health needs aren’t being met and quite possibly needs at home not being met, and that’s somehow linked the two?

Clint Johnston: That’s a really excellent question, and what I’ll commit to — after my answer, also — is to look…. We’re part of the Canadian Teachers Federation, and this is an issue pan-Canadian. It’s global, but pan-Canadian. There may be some resources there that have more specific data.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that often it is more remote or rural, smaller communities where the problem is exacerbated in the way that you’re asking about.

[1:30 p.m.]

I say that because on a recent trip up to the Arrow Lakes district, the Arrow Lakes local, I was driving around with the president, who is a counsellor. He was talking about how if those counselling resources aren’t available in schools, they’re just not available. Because the community is too small, they cannot attract counsellors to come and do the health sector work of counselling. Community counselling work — they can’t get those either.

So if they don’t get it in school, it’s not available in the community, unless you have larger resources than most families in British Columbia right now.

There is a link, I think, between the socioeconomic and the geographical location of districts.

Claire Rattée: Thank you, yeah. I would agree with the geographic one. I’m a northern riding, so I know we don’t have mental health resources like there are available down here in Vancouver. As you said, if they’re not in schools, then where are they getting them?

Clint Johnston: They’re often intermittent as well. No offence, but in northern communities, often people come and stay for a little bit, but they go, and those relationships don’t develop.

Bryan Tepper: Yeah, I wasn’t going to ask, but since we’ve been talking about it, the availability of counsellors for the schools, especially once you get into the Interior. Is it feasible to even get the number of counsellors we need, or at least we could have rotating ones, something? I mean, I would be happy to have anybody in a community. So what do you think about that?

Clint Johnston: Thank you for the question. I think it’s feasible. We have done some lobbying recently with counsellors from our counsellor provincial specialist association who put forward solutions to those issues that were raised by MLAs and the minister when they questioned, which are great questions.

There are quite a few people who have left the counselling practice in schools, because they’re being limited on the counselling they can provide. They would like to provide these kinds of services on an ongoing basis, but they’ve left and gone elsewhere.

We believe those people could come back. They want to work with children. They want to support children. There are counsellors available right now who we can bring back in.

There are ideas for how to train more that we need.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you, Mr. Johnston. That’s the time for the presentation and question period. Thank you so much for coming today.

I will call upon the B.C. Federation of Labour, Sussanne Skidmore, for her presentation. Five minutes to present, followed by five minutes for questions. You can begin when you’re ready.

B.C. Federation of Labour

Sussanne Skidmore: Thank you, and thanks for having me. I want to acknowledge the unceded and traditional territories that we’re on today of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ peoples.

This B.C. budget will be one of the most consequential in recent memory. Working people have faced huge economic upheaval in recent years — technology, the climate crisis, global economic shifts and disruptions and now Trump’s tariff threats. We believe our solutions must be grounded in what really matters, and that’s in B.C. workers, who are the real engine of B.C.’s economy, and of course, the good jobs that they do.

Investing in our workers and in our communities should be the resolute focus of B.C.’s economic policy and of this budget. Consistent with the format you’ve set out, let’s talk about the three areas, we believe, budget action is the most important.

The first is bringing B.C. services back home to public administration, public control and public delivery. We need to ensure B.C. focuses on providing services to B.C.’ers, instead of profits to large corporations. We need to ensure that they do the most good possible for people, communities and businesses that rely on them.

We’re calling on the government to thoroughly review its privatized services and to find and act on opportunities to repatriate them — services like LifeLabs medical testing, for instance; handyDART services relied on by people who are living with disabilities. In fact, I challenge you to look at the whole public transit system for opportunities to insource those services.

Instead of shipping revenues out of this country as corporate profits and dividends, let’s keep them here, where they will be reinvested in our local economy. That will give the public system added resources to improve services, quality and accountability and address the workforce shortages we see when corner-cutting companies suppress wages, benefits and job stability.

The second area is revenue. Our provincial government has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. When so many B.C.’ers are struggling, the solution can’t be belt-tightening and service cuts. The government has a responsibility to ensure there is enough revenue to deliver the programs and services families rely on.

There are many places to find that revenue, like a 1 percent increase to the corporate income tax and a 2 percent increase to the top two personal income tax brackets. We could address the misclassification of employees as independent contractors, which is costing the government hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

The province could make strategic investments with multiplier effects that raise both GDP and revenue. Greater investment in public affordable child care increases workforce participation. Supporting worker-owned co-ops can be wealth in the community. Buy-local policies and public procurement reforms mean our government’s spending recirculates in the local economy. Improving public transit has an initial economic boost from construction and an enduring increase in productivity and economic efficiency.

Investing in public post-secondary institutions and trades training will up-skill workers into family-supporting jobs where we need them, like construction, trades, education, help care and health care. This means higher incomes and more spending in the community, all of which translates into more revenue.

[1:35 p.m.]

Let me underline that there’s always pressure to cut taxes and reduce revenue. Doing that will actually cause harm. So we urge the government to resist any cuts to revenue without an explicit plan to fully offset them.

Finally, our third call to government is to ensure the full and fair participation of workers in our economy. It’s a matter of fact that many workers have long been excluded from taking full part in B.C.’s economic life and prosperity. That’s always an injustice. In this all-hands-on-deck moment that we’re living in, it is a serious liability.

We urge you to reduce the factors that marginalize workers at work and in their communities, with measures like fully funding the anti-racism action plan and implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and expanding the job classifications covered by the provincial nominee program and improving pathways to citizenship.

We urge you to reform and better fund the employment standards branch so it can stop wage theft and workplace violations, through education and proactively investigating problem sectors. It needs a targeted strategy to support migrant workers, who continue to face some of the most egregious exploitation in our workplaces.

These investments will help ensure B.C.’s economy is making full use of the working people at the heart of our prosperity.

Thank you. I look forward to any questions.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you.

Questions from members?

Steve Morissette: Thank you for the presentation. Just around bringing services back home, you mentioned handyDART, public transit. Could you just elaborate a little bit there?

Sussanne Skidmore: Sure. Yeah, I’m happy to. We’ve been talking about this for a while. Many of our affiliated unions in the federation….

There have been some pretty good studies done by, I believe, the Columbia Institute, in previous days, as well as the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, around the cost of privatizing services. We would say that the privatizing of public services is actually costing taxpayers more money. So we’ve been urging and asking government to consider, as these contracts come up, handyDART’s for example, that they be brought back in-house, that those services, as most British Columbians, I think, would assume….

If you ask anybody out on the street today if handyDART was a public service, I think they would think that it is. They wouldn’t think that it was built on a private, for-profit model which oppresses the workers that are working in it, who are making lower wages and often don’t have pensions or have lesser pensions and benefits than those that are doing similar jobs in the public sector.

We think there’s a case to be made to bring those services in-house.

Sunita Dhir: Thank you so much. It’s always great to listen to your opinions, Sussanne.

Sussanne Skidmore: Thank you.

Sunita Dhir: So your third recommendation, getting workers involved in the economy and bringing up the economy. Are you suggesting we should have more provincial nominee program candidates and more migrant workers?

Sussanne Skidmore: Yeah, the current classification system is very limited, and we don’t actually meet the needs of workers, unions and the population of our province. The requirement to have full-time jobs offered with one employer is prohibitive for workers. In industries where it’s common for workers to work for two or three employers to meet those 40 hours a week, we’d suggest that there’s an opportunity to increase that.

You know, only four job classes and above are accepted for health care–related fields, except for the northeast development region of the province. We think that the province has a role they could play in this: accept unions as sponsors; accept multiple part-time job offers equalling one full-time offer.

Also open up additional NOCs in the tier 4 and 5 in job classifications. The provincial government does have the power to determine the NOC codes eligible for provincial nominee programs in their jurisdiction. I think we need to open up the tier 4 and 5 NOCs for affiliate members that are currently in educational programs to go into those classifications.

So, yes.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude your time.

We’ll be calling upon a presentation by Ending Violence Association of B.C., Ninu Kang.

[1:40 p.m.]

I just want to just make one comment while I sit here. For a minute there — and still, I mean — there are so many women leaders sitting in this room with us. It’s incredible to see so many women coming and representing organizations and making presentations to the government and taking leadership in shaping what’s happening in the province. I thank you all for being here today.

You’re going to have five minutes for your presentation, followed by five minutes of potential questions, and you can start when you’re ready.

Ending Violence Association of B.C.

Ninu Kang: Thank you for acknowledging that, Elenore. I really appreciate that. It is delightful to see that.

I want to recognize the traditional lands we’re on: xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

As you all know, my name is Ninu Kang. I’m the executive director of Ending Violence Association of B.C. We support, train and advocate for over 300 programs from across B.C. that are funded by the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, MPSSG. We also coordinate between sectors and lead programs that work to prevent gender-based violence in schools, communities and workplaces.

Today I bring to you recommendations to respond to the continuing impact of gender-based violence in our province. While intimate partner violence and sexualized violence is a global crisis, some groups are targeted at greater rates. For example, perpetrators target Indigenous women, women with disabilities, racialized women, 2SLGBTQQIA+ people and young women aged from 12 to 24. These groups face significant systemic barriers in gaining access to support and justice.

Having said that, the impact of gender-based violence is far- and wide-reaching in our society, impacting not only victims but their children, their families, even the perpetrators and society at large.

If we don’t appropriately address gender-based violence, we will continue to see a spread of wider violence in our communities, like street disorder and organized crime, highlighted in your budget consultation report. By improving our response to gender-based violence, we can help create safer and stronger communities. I just wanted to make sure that I make the link of gender-based violence to all the other violence that exists in our communities.

What I would like to do here for the budget is make three recommendations.

Recommendation 1. We need $1 million, which is $20,000 to 50 communities in our province. These communities already provide services to victims and survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual violence. Currently, front-line workers from the side of their desks, without additional funding, coordinate with cross-sectoral partners to work together to improve quality of service to victims, survivors and prevent further trauma and harm.

This modest investment of $20,000 to support organizations that have stepped up to enhance coordination in our communities would allow them to put a few extra hours towards coordination work in their communities. This could be them helping facilitate meetings, develop local protocols, build a relationship between communities, police, health, children’s services, the ministry, and strengthen the complex web of supports that survivors need to address GBV.

Recommendation 2. Create a hub that will provide community-based victim service workers access to JUSTIN, which is estimated, again, at about $1 million. JUSTIN is an integrated justice case management system that includes sensitive criminal court information and updates that can impact safety for survivors. EVA B.C. has been working together with the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General to improve access to JUSTIN for community-based victim service workers. We need, now, dollars to put to it.

We know, for example, unfortunately there are far too many women killed in B.C. after the accused has been released from jail. We want to create faster access to information for victims, survivors of violence and assist them in their own safety planning.

Finally, my last recommendation. In B.C., we need a commitment from the government to implement an intimate partner violence death review committee. Between 2012 and ’22, there were 135 intimate partner violence deaths in B.C. Between the ages of 25 to 65, there was a spike of 32 percent over the eight-year period of 2014 and 2022.

[1:45 p.m.]

For seniors age 65 and older, in intimate partner deaths, there was a 42 percent increase over those eight years.

We need funds now to support the intimate partner violence death review. I know there is a will.

These models of intimate partner violence death review are there for us to see across Canada, and we have our own experience. Now we need to build on those models, and the funding from this committee will provide a critical understanding of factors that contribute to intimate partner violence deaths, improve gender-based violence death response and prevent, frankly, lives from being killed in B.C.

Bryan Tepper: The hub for victim service workers for JUSTIN…. Maybe can you explain: why a hub, and is there a reason why they’re not able to access JUSTIN?

Ninu Kang: That’s a really good question. Police-based victim service programs already have that access. Most of them are inside the system, with police and systems. So they have done all the security checks and all of that. It’s a system that’s already operating.

Community-based victim support programs that are out in the community — frankly, it’s not the will to be honest; what it has been is…. It just takes a heck of a lot of time. You have staff coming and going, and it’s almost structurally impossible to create access to the over 300 programs that exist in our community. It’s kind of like a structural issue.

EVA B.C. has been working with the ministry. Funding will come to EVA B.C. We’re already in the works. We have, kind of, already started this process, and what we will do is triage. We will triage. EVA B.C. will create a hub, we will hire workers and they will be able to access JUSTIN. We will do our communication with our over 300 programs, and they will be able to tap into us.

When I say 300 programs, it’s actually a smaller group of victim service workers. Three hundred programs are all of our different programs of STV and so on and so forth. So we’re really looking at about less than 100 programs — sexual assault programs and victim service programs.

We will be triaging that information and, hopefully, that information will land in the hands of front-line community-based victim service programs where we know survivors come to. We know the data that not all survivors are coming to the police, especially sexualized violence survivors; 5 to 6 percent are accessing police and ending up in our system. We know the issue is a lot greater. I hope that helps.

Bryan Tepper: Yes.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): I was wondering: what is the difference between the panel for the reviews of deaths from intimate partner violence versus a regular coroner’s inquest?

Ninu Kang: That’s a really good question. What we’re proposing is we have the coroners, and we have the government involved. We are willing to step in and be a community partner and engage other community partners.

If you look at one death and you have recommendations that come out of it, which we have had — two in our province in the past…. Frankly, when we look back at those recommendations, many of those recommendations have not seen the light of day.

When we say a continuous death review committee, there are many models that exist in other provinces, territories and across the world. What that does is it’s a continuous improvement of our systems. It’s not some big flashy, “We’re reviewing one death, and now we’re going to put recommendations out and do press releases,” and so on and so forth.

What we’re looking at is ongoing key stakeholders from the different systems coming together on a regular basis, reviewing deaths, collecting data, making recommendations back into the systems and really having high-level policy-makers being able to implement those improvements at an ongoing basis. So we’re proposing an ongoing death review committee in our province. Does that help?

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): It does.

Ninu Kang: So rather than one-time off recommendations, we’re talking about ongoing improvement of the gaps — identifying gaps, looking at data and then ensuring that we’re learning from that so that we’re preventing further deaths.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Yeah, I was thinking it would be something possibly using information from the Coroners Service but also using background information if it was accessible from investigative bodies and social services, etc., and combining it into report reviews for the ministry.

Ninu Kang: Absolutely. For sure there would be some system…. I think where B.C. is, we just haven’t moved the dial on this. Where we are…. The reason, you’ll notice, I did not put a dollar sign to my third recommendation is because, I think, if the ministry steps up, if the coroners office steps up, we’re willing to step up and create, because we have relationships in the IP world from cross-sectoral partners. We think we can bring key stakeholders that need to be part of that. I think we should use this year coming up as a development year.

[1:50 p.m.]

We should review what’s going on in other parts of the world. How will it work for us here in B.C.? Let’s set those key stakeholders up. Let’s get it set up so that we can make it. I know, Jennifer, you and I have spoken about this. Let’s get this ball rolling and get the system set up.

We test review, and then we adjust if we need to. But we can’t just be sitting on our heels with it. This issue has been out there far more than what I’m bringing to you today — far longer.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Any further questions from committee?

Okay, then we’ll conclude your time. Thank you very much for the presentation.

We will now call, from the YWCA of Metro Vancouver, Amy Juschka. You have five minutes for presentation, followed by five minutes’ time for questions from the panel. You may begin when you’re ready.

YWCA Metro Vancouver

Amy Juschka: Thank you so much for having me. As I said, I’m Amy Juschka. I’m the vice-president of communications and advocacy with YWCA Metro Vancouver. Thanks so much for having me today. I know that it’s probably been a long day for you, so I appreciate your attention.

We’re a registered charity with a vision of a just and equitable world for women, families and allies. We focus on housing, child care, youth development and mentorship, employment training, violence prevention and advocacy work for systems change. We’ve been operating in the community for more than 125 years. Many of our services support women living on low incomes, Indigenous women, newcomer and refugee women and single mothers and their children.

Women, of course, play a critical role in B.C.’s social and economic resiliency. We are concerned that B.C. is falling behind in investing in women as a key population group. If we want a prosperous future, investing in women must be at the forefront. To do this, we believe there are three key areas government must focus on: child care, housing and women’s labour force participation.

Our first recommendation is to deliver on the promise to create a real universal child care system in B.C. by expanding funding for the $10-a-day program and removing barriers for operators like the YWCA to participate in the $10-a-day model. The B.C. government is not delivering on its promise to create child care as a core service families can rely on.

Today 74 percent of children still do not have access to licensed child care. Only 10 percent of available spaces have achieved $10-a-day fees, and 45 percent of child care employers report losing more staff than they can hire. The $10-a-day model as it stands across the province is just not equitable.

Government has not allocated new provincial funding over the next three years, despite a demonstrated need for continued and significant investment. To get us back on track, we recommend government transition all existing child care programs to $10-a-day and increase access by funding new child care where there are wait-lists. Support new spaces by waiving the one-year operating requirement for public and non-profit providers like us to be eligible for $10-a-day funding.

Deliver on your election promise to create a $500 million capital plan, which should include capital replacement, and invest in quality by investing in early childhood educators and implementing a competitive wage grid that starts at, at least $30 to $40 an hour for ECEs, along with comprehensive benefits.

Our second recommendation is to support housing security for women and families. We desperately need more housing across the entire continuum for women. The YWCA’s housing is targeted towards single mothers and their dependent children because we know this family group are the lowest-income earners across the province.

Currently 715 women and children live in our housing communities, but more than 1,600 are on our wait-list. That’s an increase of 30 percent from 2022, and 70 percent of these families are looking for deeply affordable rents. Capacity for the women’s transition housing fund is just one-fifth of the capacity for the community housing fund.

As intimate partner violence and child poverty impact tens of thousands of British Columbians, we strongly recommend the government increase funding to allow for up to 1,000 new units per year under the women’s transition housing fund. This would almost double the current number and support housing across the spectrum, aimed specifically at women and children.

Our priority as an organization is to provide deeply affordable housing at the lowest possible rents. But we continue to struggle with ongoing operating and capital repair costs, especially as our buildings age. We recommend the government establish an operating funding framework based on a multi-year review of operating agreements. This would consider key cost drivers like wages and inflation and, of course, capital repair costs.

[1:55 p.m.]

Our third recommendation is to invest in women’s labour force participation and economic well-being. Women, especially those who are Indigenous, racialized, single mothers and newcomers, experience disproportionately high rates of poverty in B.C. They are concentrated in low-wage, part-time and precarious work, and they rely on income and disability assistance at higher rates.

To invest in women’s economic well-being, we recommend government raise income and disability rates to the poverty line and tie those increases to inflation. We also recommend government raise the shelter portion of income and disability assistance by at least 25 percent across all family types.

Finally, we recommend government invest in employment and upskilling programs for women as a key target population, along with wraparound supports.

Of course, our three budget priorities, child care, housing and women’s economic well-being, are deeply interrelated. In an economic crisis where all British Columbians must work together to support and grow our economy, we can’t afford not to provide affordable child care, housing security and pathways to employment for B.C. women and families who are struggling to make ends meet.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. We’ll now take questions.

Bryan Tepper: Yeah, the barriers for child care. I’m certainly not an expert on the $10-a-day child care, but you said there are barriers for you — let’s just pick you, for instance — and a one-year waiting period. How does that affect you?

Amy Juschka: It does. When we’re looking at developing new child care, opening new spaces, we have to wait for one year before we’re eligible to apply for $10-a-day funding, which means that we are taking on all the risk with none of the certainty around being able to qualify.

We operate four early learning and child care centres across Vancouver. We have another one that is in development in Burnaby. We have more than 5,000 families on our waiting list right now for our child care centres. Waiving that requirement for known operators who have been doing this work for many years, I think, would support us to look at developing more child care spaces.

Bryan Tepper: Okay, for follow-up, then, just so I’m clear…. If you have ten spots right now, and you add the extra one, you would be eligible for those ten and just not the other one for another year?

Amy Juschka: Yes. If we wanted to develop and open new child care, we would have to be in operation for one year before we would qualify to apply for $10-a-day funding. So we want more certainty.

Claire Rattée: Sorry. I apologize. I think I’m still a little bit confused — also not my forte.

It’s not a one-year wait-list if it’s a new facility. It’s for the new spot. Your organization operates existing child care. You’re proven already. You’re not saying that anyone can just open up a child care centre and should be able to apply for the $10-a-day funding. They have to have that one-year wait time to prove that they’re going to be a good child care area.

But for existing locations, you’re essentially saying: “Don’t make us wait a year to be able to apply for this funding after this revenue stream becomes available.”

Amy Juschka: Yeah. I think that because we already operate child care, we’re a trusted provider. Allow us to actually secure that $10-a-day eligibility, and then we can have more certainty as we look to develop new child care spaces.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay. Thank you very much. Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude your time.

This committee will go into recess till 2:35.

The committee recessed from 1:58 p.m. to 2:32 p.m.

[Elenore Sturko in the chair.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): We’ll call our committee back to order. We’ll continue presentations for the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services by calling Karen Fisher-Hagel.

You have five minutes to present followed by five minutes for questions by our committee. You can start when you’re ready.

Karen Fisher-Hagel

Karen Fisher-Hagel: Thanks, everyone, for what you’re doing, for sitting through all of us telling you how we want you to give us more money that you don’t have to give us. I really appreciate this opportunity. I signed up for the opportunity and then was on the wait-list, so I only found out yesterday that I had a spot. I’m really happy to be here.

My name’s Karen Fisher-Hagel. I live in Richmond, B.C. I have many, many hats that I’m coming to you to talk about. My topic is the B.C. fairs, festivals and events grant. The reason that’s my topic is that that grant has been discontinued. Before I talk about it more, I’ll tell you a little bit more about me.

I work in the non-profit sector in a few different ways as an employee of a track club. I manage a track club. We put on events, we host road races, we have big track meets, and we run programming for kids. We get gaming grants. We are really dependent on the province.

We have a great community in Richmond. I’m also part of the Shoebox Project, which is a federal charity that collects gifts for women in the later part of the year, and we work with many non-profits in our community. Depending on the year, we give about 500 to 600 boxes to those groups in the community.

I also sit on the Richmond Sports Council, which has recently started a new fund called the active recreation and sport fund. It is aimed at helping kids who want to participate in activities when the families have financial need and their chosen activity doesn’t qualify for KidSport or the city funding; there are gaps. I think that’s my theme for what I want to talk about: the gaps.

[2:35 p.m.]

I do lots of other things in the community. I also work for MLA Kelly Greene in Steveston and have done for almost five years now.

I want to talk about the grants and the importance of them. If you don’t know too much about them, they were created coming out of COVID. They were to help organizations like the ones I’m talking about recover from the downtime of everything being closed during COVID, financially, and just from a volunteer perspective, how difficult that was.

I know from my involvement in lots of different pieces of the community how important those grants were. When they continued for another year and another year, it created a feeling for lots of organizations that it might keep continuing. Minister Popham did come to Richmond, met with the sports council and did talk about how she understood the value of those grants and what they meant to all these different organizations.

As an ideal for you on what that means, in 2024, the last of the granting went to over 1,100 different organizations throughout the province. That was Williams Lake, Victoria, Richmond and all over the province. The variety of the amounts in the grants…. My track club got a $2,900 grant for our 8K road race that also has a 1K kids run in it, which is super cute.

Small grants like that, and then much larger grants to organizations like I want to talk about, which is the Steveston Salmon Festival…. The salmon fest has existed for 75 years. It’s a free event. Community, everybody can come. It starts with a parade in the morning. It’s huge, shuts down roads all over that corner of the city. There are street musicians. There are things for kids to do. There’s a whole kids zone set up around the playground that’s got face-painting and all those things that you would take kids to the park for.

Last year, the city of Richmond tourism council estimated the participation in that festival at 80,000 people. That’s a free festival. You have to pay for the food and the booths and things that you want to participate in. But 80,000 people being able to go to this festival…. Those kinds of things are super, super important. They give people a sense that they can be part of something, whether they financially are able to or not.

My point is that organizations like the salmon festival no longer have that grant funding for events. It’s not just big things like the salmon fest, but all those 1,100 different organizations would have that same lack of funding.

I’ll just keep talking for a sec to say that one more piece with non-profits and their events is that the volunteer landscape has really changed. Gone are the days when you had volunteers who would spend days and days and days doing events and planning, just off the side of their desks and their jobs. As someone who recruits volunteers for different amounts of commitment for my events, it’s difficult.

One of the things that events, organizations and non-profits need is some financial support to reward those people, to entice them to continue. I don’t mean big payouts, but for my track meet…. We just had a three-day track meet, and we had $25 Tim Hortons gift cards that we gave to the people who were there all day and did much above and beyond.

It’s a tough financial climate. I know you don’t have lots of money, but this particular grant has huge value to lots of communities.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you. Now time for questions.

Claire Rattée: Do you know how much money was given out through these grants? Are you aware of any of the financial situations — how much money was available? How much of it was utilized during the program’s time?

Karen Fisher-Hagel: I could find the figure for you about what was granted each year. I know that there were organizations who didn’t receive money because there more applicants than there were funds available. I know that some organizations — one of mine, in particular — asked for $5,000. They got $2,900, so I think there were always constraints like that.

Claire Rattée: It was fully utilized, but you don’t know how much the actual pot of money was.

Karen Fisher-Hagel: I could look it up. But yeah, it’s several million dollars. Off the top of my head, I don’t know.

[2:40 p.m.]

Jennifer Blatherwick: From another family that spends a lot of time organizing track and field, thank you for your service. I think my question is going to be related a little bit to MLA Rattée’s question.

These investments in community create fairs and festivals and destination events. I think, in your particular activity, you organized an event yourself, and you were in charge of that. Can you just talk about how many people or attendees it brought to your community?

Karen Fisher-Hagel: So for the few different ones…. Actually, I’m glad you said that because one of the things that happened with the grants…. I’ll just sidebar before I answer your question.

There was a replacement grant put forward. It’s called the destination events program. It is sport-oriented only, which is fine for one of my hats, but it’s not about me. Where you have things like Canada Day festivals and things that don’t fit under arts or music or that don’t already have an umbrella organization, I think that that’s where those gaps are.

Sorry, your question was about the…?

Jennifer Blatherwick: The ones that you personally organized, the amount of people that that brought into your community.

Karen Fisher-Hagel: For the road race that we organized in Steveston, we run it in January. It’s called the Icebreaker because it’s the second Sunday in January. You’ve got to really want to run or really be kind of crazy to come.

We sell out at 1,000 runners for the 8K run. We also have a 2.5K, which is another 200 kids. Every time you have a kid, you have a parent bringing that kid. Then there’s a 1K kids run, which is really the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, and that’s another set of parents. So in the dead of winter, in a very touristy part of town, we brought a couple thousand people to our community on a quiet January Sunday.

To me, that’s exactly the kind of community thing…. It doesn’t all have to be big. We don’t all want to go to big things. But to have something where people could come out…. We had face painters, and we did things to engage the crowd and make people feel part of what was happening. I think that’s super important.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no other questions, we’ll conclude your presentation.

We’ll be moving to our next presenter, which is the Treehouse Vancouver Child and Youth Advocacy Centre, and the presenter is Leah Zille.

You’ll have five minutes of presentation time, followed by five minutes for questions.

Treehouse Vancouver Child
and Youth Advocacy Centre

Leah Zille: My name is Leah Zille, and I’m pleased to be here on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Nations.

I’m the executive director of the Treehouse Child and Youth Advocacy Centre in Vancouver. We provide a welcoming, child-friendly space where police, child protection and victim services work together to respond to suspected child abuse. Our job is to make sure children and families get the help they need quickly, safely and with as little trauma as possible.

We are one of 11 child and youth advocacy centres in B.C., also known as CYACs. While I speak from the Treehouse’s experience, my voice reflects the collective call from all CYACs in British Columbia. We know these are difficult times. Public systems are stretched, families are struggling, and public trust is low.

I am here today with a clear message. The child and youth advocacy centre model works. CYACs are the path forward. To meet the needs of all children and youth who need us, we need provincial policy that mandates coordination and funding that allows it to last.

The urgency could not be clearer. The recent UNICEF report card ’19 gave Canada a failing grade for child well-being. Of 39 wealthy nations, we ranked 23rd in mental health, 24th in physical health and 28th in social skills. These numbers should alarm us, and they should also motivate us. We cannot build a strong Canada without placing children at the centre of our priorities.

B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth echoed that urgency in the Don’t Look Away report, which served as a wake-up call about how badly our systems are failing kids. The report made clear that systemic transformation is essential, and yet even as CYACs were named as a bright spot in this report, we continue to operate without stable provincial funding.

We see the downstream impacts of these failings every day on our streets: unprovoked assaults, mental health crises, gender-based violence and other growing public safety concerns. These complex issues often trace back to a common route: unresolved childhood trauma.

[2:45 p.m.]

The good news is there are solutions. By intervening early with the right supports, we can change a child’s path and shape a stronger future for our province. CYACs are that early, coordinated response.

At the Treehouse, when abuse is suspected, children are welcomed into our cozy space. They’re met by our team comprising police, child protection, victim support and even a facility dog, all co-located and working together in real time. The child shares their experience once, in a trauma-informed environment. From there, we plan the next steps, provide supports like specialized counselling and remain involved to guide them through medical care, justice processes and recovery. We don’t just respond; we coordinate care and walk alongside families every step of the way.

On Monday, Hon. Minister Bailey spoke to you about the review underway to ensure the work of provincial ministries is truly landing as intended. CYACs are doing just that. We are dismantling fragmented, colonized systems that too often serve bureaucracy more than people and closing the gaps between services like policing, child protection and health. In their place, we are building a more efficient, cost-effective and compassionate way to protect children and support families, one that delivers the outcomes the province intended.

This cannot remain just a vision. It’s time to act with commitment and investment. CYACs are a smarter use of public resources. From a public safety and child protection lens, it leads to stronger investigations, more reliable disclosures and better outcomes for children. It also allows front-line responders to focus on what they do best as part of a unified team.

From a gender equity perspective, CYACs are just as vital. The majority of sexual abuse victims are girls. CYACs ensure those disclosures are met with care, dignity and cultural safety. At the Treehouse, we also support caregivers, often mothers, grandmothers or aunties, because when they are supported, they can better support their child.

Despite all of this, each year, CYACs spend enormous time and energy just trying to survive. At the Treehouse, a significant portion of my time goes towards writing grants and making donor calls — time that could be better spent scaling services, strengthening supports for children and deepening the partnerships that make this model work.

A CYAC is not a charity; it is a smart public policy. We reduce pressure on health care, justice and social services. We create safer communities and stronger kids. We help get children back to feeling like kids again. But without provincial leadership and investment, the system remains patchworked, where the access depends on where kids live rather than what they need.

To fully implement this model as outlined in our guidelines, the Treehouse requires approximately $1 million annually to operate. Other CYACs will have different numbers, but the challenge is the same. We’re all being asked to deliver critical public services without a sustainable foundation.

You’re going to be asked to solve a lot of complex problems in the weeks ahead. This isn’t one of them. The solution already exists, and it works. What’s needed now is a commitment to ensuring that a consistent, trauma-informed response to abuse is available to every child in B.C. We are calling on the province to establish the policy and provide the funding to make that happen.

For the children and youth who need us, let’s meet this moment. Let’s move from recommendations to results. Let’s not look away. Thank you.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Great. Thank you for the presentation. Looking to members of the committee.

Jennifer Blatherwick: It’s so nice to see you again. Thank you to you and your team for the work that you do to support children and ensure that their experience after trauma is as supported as possible for them and their families.

I was hoping that you could speak a little bit to the challenges that you resolve in terms of having your team integrated into one location, as much as you can. You don’t have enough space in our five minutes of presentation to talk about the integration that you do between the different services that are available, and I think that’s really why your model works so effectively. Could you just talk a little bit more about the integration?

Leah Zille: Yeah. I’ll speak to it from two different perspectives. First, the most important is the support that it provides to children and families. Imagine having to go into a police station to share your experience — for a child to have to walk into a police station to share what has happened to them. Then they have to go to tell their same story to a social worker. If they’re lucky, they might get connected to victim services.

Families are upended. It’s very confusing to know what the next steps are and to have any sort of coordination to know what’s happening in that process. CYACs like the Treehouse take that navigation piece away. We bring it all together so that the child only has to come to one space. They’re supported in that environment. They don’t have the trauma of having to go into a police station, and everyone that needs the information is getting it at once.

From that perspective, then the team is able to come together and coordinate what actually needs to happen for that family. We’re keeping kids at the centre of the decision-making.

[2:50 p.m.]

So it might be that what a police officer would do if they didn’t have the full picture of what’s happening for that family actually changes when they know the complete picture and are able to share information and plan together with child protection and with victim support and know what the needs of that family are so that we can get the families and the children on the path to healing faster.

From a service delivery perspective, there’s a tremendous amount of time that is being saved and effectiveness that’s happening when those systems are working together. So you can imagine the amount of time that must happen, when a police officer has to try to reach out to a child protection worker, picks up the phone, calls them, waits for phone calls back. Sometimes it can delay things by a day or two while they’re waiting for that to happen.

With those professionals all working on site in our space, it’s literally that they’re rolling the chair back and asking the child protection worker what’s needed. They’re co-located. They’re working on site. We have four detectives from the Vancouver police department, one from the Ministry of Children and Family Development, and we’ve got three victim support workers that are working on site.

A social return on investment study that we had done pointed to the fact that this method of serving children saves the system a considerable amount of money. Families tell us that they feel supported through the process. All the professionals working in the system tell us just how much better they’re able to do their jobs.

I could go on, but I will stop there.

Jennifer Blatherwick: That was a really great summary of how your integration saves time, money, effort in the system. Could you just talk a little bit about your current funding model? You do receive provincial funding, yes?

Leah Zille: We receive an annual grant from civil forfeiture, but it’s not sustainable, ongoing funding, so every year we have to apply for that. We’re two months into the fiscal year. We’re very grateful that we received funding, but we just received notice of that yesterday. We’re already two months into the fiscal year, and it’s very difficult to plan when we don’t know where that funding is going to be coming from year after year.

I’ve got maybe about 60 percent of my budget secured for the year. The rest of this now is going to be dependent on donations and grants and crossing my fingers and hoping the money rains down from the sky at some point. We do have a contract with the department of justice Canada as well. We have a funding agreement that provides about 15 percent of my budget for the year, but that’s it.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Some of your staffing, though, is not paid for through COA, I see. Some of the staffing is cooperative staffing from other agencies.

Leah Zille: Our multidisciplinary team, the police and social workers and the victim support workers are all coming from agencies that are already funded by the province. We’re providing coordination of that and, essentially, helping them do their jobs better.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Yeah. Then, can I just clarify? So you’re looking for, like, contracted funding.

Leah Zille: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jennifer Blatherwick: So, say, through…

Leah Zille: We need predictable.

Jennifer Blatherwick: …SDPR or PSSG or….

Leah Zille: Correct. The challenge with us is it’s cross-sectoral funding that’s needed, and we don’t fall under any one particular ministry. We serve multiple ministries: Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, Children and Family Development, Education, Health, mental health services. All of that is provided through our centre.

Right now, we provide counselling services, but those are all fundraised dollars. We can provide as much counselling as we’re able to find dollars for. But we get no funding to support the mental health needs of these children with any kind of government funding whatsoever.

None of the support for our staff comes through that as well. It’s all fundraised or through the grants that we’ve received.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, thank you.

We’ll move to our next presenter, which will be Kids Brain Health Network, and we’re going to hear from Geoff Pradella. Thank you for coming to present to us. You’ll have five minutes for a presentation and five minutes time for questions from the panel.

Kids Brain Health Network

Geoff Pradella: Great. I see a number, so I know how to pace myself.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to come here and appear before the committee today on behalf of Kids Brain Health Network, or KBHN, to talk about our priorities and programs, many of which are shared with the government.

[2:55 p.m.]

KBHN is a unique national network of centres of excellence that’s dedicated to improving the lives of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities and challenges and their families and caregivers through discovery research, knowledge mobilization and a multitude of partnerships. We strive to see a world where all children and their families can thrive.

I’m here today to offer some appreciation and ambition. Appreciation for all researchers, community leaders and families across Canada who’ve worked with us on the groundbreaking work related to autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, ADHD, fetal alcohol syndrome and other neurodevelopmental differences. Our ambition is to mobilize this research into better diagnostics, treatment and life experiences for our kids.

I also want to acknowledge something we should all be extremely proud about. KBHN is a national organization but was born here in British Columbia and continues to be based here. Our work is shaped by the values, institutions and communities who we’re proud to call our home, and it’s right here, where we get a chance to lead in new and groundbreaking ways.

We come before you today with three asks to keep B.C. at the forefront of children’s neuroscience and research and the delivery of prudent supports and services.

First, we ask the province to match the funding we’ve secured from the federal government through the strategic science fund. With this federal funding, we’ve been able to build momentum across Canada by expanding access to early intervention and developing models of family-centred care. Funding from British Columbia would double the impact of our work and show a strong signal the province stands with neurodiverse families and communities.

Second, we’re seeking the province’s support to create a pilot program for the implementation of one of our programs called Dino Island, starting at the Children’s and Women’s Hospital here in Vancouver. Dino Island is a personal favourite. It’s an innovative, evidence-based and gamified tablet-based platform that helps children build executive function, improve emotional regulation and social cognition through immersive play.

It was developed for children but with children. It’s much more of a game though. Its implementation in clinical settings allows us to integrate therapeutic play into care pathways, making treatment more engaging, accessible and effective.

Today, while created in Victoria, it’s being implemented in five U.S. children’s hospitals through generous of funding by Schwab. So let’s be the first province to implement this incredible Canadian solution here in Canada.

Third, we’re seeking B.C.’s investment and support over the scaling up and commercialisation of research that is ready to be deployed in homes, clinics and communities across the province. We’re sitting on a virtual goldmine of implementation of ready innovations, developed here in B.C. and across Canada, but we’ve often seen Canadian innovations either fail due to investment opportunity or wind up being taken south of the border.

KBHN has a proven record of bridging this investment, improving program services and technologies, enabling them to expand and increase access, shorten wait times for kids and achieve positive lifelong impacts on the lives of our kids, their families and caregivers. We know the science; we have strategies; and with your help, we can get them into the hands of every child and family who can benefit, one step at a time.

These are investments in innovation, but they’re also investments in hope for families. They’re part of a bigger picture where scientific discovery is literally translated into hands-on, positive change, ensuring that every child has the support they need to achieve their fullest potential in spite of their life challenges.

So thank you for your time and consideration and the opportunity to speak today, and I look forward to any questions that you might have.

Bryan Tepper: Dino Island — what is the cost on something like that?

Geoff Pradella: Dino Island is developed. All of our programs…. There are 16 of them at present that have gone through proof-of-concept, trialling. So they’re developed. We’re really just looking now at implementation partnerships and implementation costs.

To implement in a hospital: some minor training of some of the staff. The hospital staff are already in place as we’ve seen in these other examples. So for a two- to three-year pilot program, we would look to an investment of about $250,000. That, importantly, unlocks our federal funding.

A requirement for us under the strategic science fund is that we have non-federal funding partners for every dollar we spend. So your $250,000 turns into $500,000. That would enable a pilot of only one hospital but potentially up to five, at least over one year, or two hospitals over two or three years.

[3:00 p.m.]

Jennifer Blatherwick: Having four neurodivergent kids myself….

Geoff Pradella: Ah. Bless you.

Jennifer Blatherwick: No, it’s all…. They take care of me.

Geoff Pradella: You’re one of our families.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Yeah. They’re fantastic. It’s a gift.

Geoff Pradella: It is.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Tell me what the functional pathway is for Dino Island and how this helps develop executive functioning in comparison to more traditional therapies.

Geoff Pradella: Sure. The innovation in Dino Island is leveraging the science of neuroplasticity — so a series of gamified modules on a tablet with animated dinosaurs that children play….

The module’s progress, starting through repetitive stimuli that help improve the child’s responses…. It starts with a focus on focus and attention, and then, as focus and attention build, it moves on to increasingly complex puzzle- and problem-solving. The game is built-in with machine learning and AI. So in real time, as the child is playing through a particular module, it can either ease off the difficulty or ramp it up.

But it’s primarily this concept of neuroplasticity and repetitive stimuli and the engagement and focus of the child playing the game that creates better and better decision- and problem-solving pathways.

Bryan Tepper: I’ll ask a quick one on that. Ages for that — what would happen if I played it? What ages does it work for? What if we do it?

Geoff Pradella: In our space, when I talk about ages, I’ll talk about sort of intellectual and functional ages as opposed to physical or chronological age. Kids who are in a space of, say, four to ten years old is where the game’s sweet spot is right now.

The team — through some funding that we provided, matched by philanthropic money — is now working on more teen- and older-teen-based…. So a little more mature animation and gamification. But at present, the focus is four- to ten-year-olds.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay. Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude the presentation and question period. Thank you for joining us and providing us this information. Appreciate it.

We’ll continue presentations by calling on His Worship, Mike Hurley, Burnaby’s mayor, to deliver on behalf of Metro Vancouver.

Hello.

Mike Hurley: Good day, everyone.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): You’ll have five minutes for presentation and five minutes for questions.

Metro Vancouver

Mike Hurley: Thank you for this opportunity.

First, I’d like to acknowledge with gratitude and respect that we are located on the traditional territories of the ten First Nation communities located within the Metro Vancouver region.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you in advance of the 2026 provincial budget. As has been said, I’m Mike Hurley, chair of the Metro Vancouver board of directors and mayor of the city of Burnaby.

Metro Vancouver is a federation of 21 municipalities, one treaty First Nation and one electoral area. We are the regional body responsible for providing critical services such as drinking water, wastewater, wastewater treatment and solid waste management to over three million residents, which is more than half the population of B.C.

I would just like to add here that these are not nice-to-have projects. These are must-have projects that are critical to the health and well-being of the residents.

In this time of global, political and economic uncertainty, we recognize that all orders of government are facing serious financial pressures. And now, more than ever, we need to work together to build and maintain the services and infrastructure our residents rely on.

[3:05 p.m.]

I’ll start with infrastructure. The Iona wastewater treatment plant is a good example of strong partnerships across orders of government. We are grateful for the provincial government’s 2023 contribution of $250 million to phase 1 of the project. And we appreciate the province’s support in securing a federal contribution of $250 million, which will be delivered through the provincial stream of the Canada housing infrastructure fund.

This investment required provincial legislative change to adjust Metro Vancouver’s development cost charge program to meet the federal government’s funding terms. We were able to find a path forward that addressed the need to incentivize housing development while mitigating impacts to local taxpayers.

Moving forward, the federal government has announced their plan to reduce development costs charges for multi-unit residential housing by 50 percent over five years while working with provinces and territories to ensure that local governments remain whole. That’s a big key to this whole…. I’m not sure how that’s all going to come together, but that’s the big key for us.

We ask that the province commit to working with Metro Vancouver to explore funding solutions that can respond to the growth while maintaining local government revenues.

I’ll move on to housing. Our shared goal of building more homes will only be achieved through our combined efforts. We look forward to finding new ways to increase the supply of non-market homes through leveraging public lands, advancing modern construction methods and streamlining approvals processes.

Metro Vancouver Housing remains well positioned to play a critical role in addressing Canada’s housing crisis. Already we are one of the largest non-profit housing providers in British Columbia. Metro Vancouver Housing operates over 3,400 affordable rental homes, serving close to 10,000 people, and is actively developing over 2,000 additional non-market rental homes — with significant support, I might add, from the province.

Now we’ll move on to working with local governments on trade and investment challenges. Our nation is already coming together to strengthen our economy and boost interprovincial trade. Local governments need to be included in B.C.’s response to trade and investment challenges. Invest Vancouver, Metro Vancouver’s regional economic development service, focuses on diversifying the regional economy through enhanced attraction strategies to Europe and Asia and beyond.

Invest Vancouver is well positioned to support B.C.’s trade diversification strategy. And together, we can expand B.C.’s access to international investment and build a stronger and more resilient regional economy in the face of trade tensions. Local and regional governments like Metro Vancouver are your partners in making a positive difference in British Columbia.

Time and time again, we’ve seen the impactful results that are possible when we work in alignment. I look forward to continuing to work with you to address infrastructure needs, affordable challenges and economic resiliency. Thank you for the opportunity to appear.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for the presentation. Great to see you again.

Questions?

Jennifer Blatherwick: Hello again. I was hoping — this is an area where I didn’t work in municipal government as closely — you could talk a little bit about how Metro Vancouver Housing works and how it’s connected to Metro as a larger body. That would be really helpful.

Mike Hurley: Metro Vancouver Housing has being around since the 1970s, and it has continued to grow over those years. Mostly it’s rent-geared-to-income housing and family-based housing. It’s really serving a big need in the community. Our staff go to a great deal of effort ensuring that those housing projects are developed in a family-friendly way and develop a community. It’s really a critical part, I think, of the housing needs being met by Metro Vancouver.

We can do a lot more in partnering with our local partners — 21 of them — who usually give us land, and then we develop the properties to be as affordable as possible in conjunction with the province and the federal government.

[3:10 p.m.]

Jennifer Blatherwick: Actually, this is our budget consultation. Could you talk a little bit about how that is funded? Where do the funding sources come from, and how are they administered?

Mike Hurley: The funding sources come from a variety…. Once the housing is built, Metro Vancouver Housing is self-sustained, for the most part, unless it’s in areas of different needs, where the province will fund some of what’s needed to allow us to house certain people. But for the most part, after the projects are built Metro Vancouver Housing is self-sustained through grants, through taxation. I think it’s $5 million a year comes out of the Metro Vancouver budget. But for the most part, once the projects are built, they are very much self-sustaining projects.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay, seeing no further questions. Thank you, Mayor Hurley, for the presentation today. We will conclude your opportunity, and we’re going to move on to a presentation by CNIB Deafblind Community Services from Angela Bonfanti.

Thanks for joining us. You have five minutes presentation time and then five minutes for questions from the panel if they have any. And you may begin when you’re ready.

CNIB Deafblind Community Services

Angela Bonfanti: I’ll first sign my introduction. I’m Angela Bonfanti, President and CEO of Deafblind Community Services Canada. Thank you for your time today.

If I were deafblind appearing before you today, I wouldn’t be alone. I would have an intervener, a professionally trained communication facilitator who would be using tactile communication methods to tell me everything in this room that I can’t see or hear. They’d let me know who was sending text messages, who may be yawning during my presentation, who’s nodding along and who’s taking notes. They’d be using tactile language or print on palm to share your questions and help me to respond.

Without the support of an intervener, a person who is deafblind would not be able to participate in this discussion today. That’s the reality for many British Columbians who are deafblind without intervener services. They are excluded from the conversations that frankly shape their lives.

But with the right support, people who are deafblind don’t just get by; they thrive. At the heart of our work are interveners, professional communication facilitators who empower individuals to engage with their communities, attend medical appointments and navigate their lives safely. This is not a luxury. This is a human right. In many cases, it is life-saving services.

In 2025, we received $538,000 in provincial funding from this government. This allows us to provide just six hours a week out of the 168 hours the rest of us have to communicate. So six hours a week of 168 hours a week for our 40 clients. In contrast, in provinces like Ontario, clients receive up to 24 hours a week for these important services. That’s six hours a week to attend medical appointments, go to the grocery store, engage with family, learn Braille, open your mail. It’s not enough to meet even the most basic needs, and it does nothing to address our growing and urgent waiting list.

We now have 40 more individuals on our wait list. Many are in crisis, facing language deprivation, homelessness or a series of mental health challenges in communities across the province — because we serve the entire province from the southern point in the Lower Mainland all the way to communities like Dawson Creek — that are on our wait list. We also know that there are over 1,000 British Columbians on the cusp of needing the intervener services who are blind and are just starting to lose their hearing.

I’m here today to request $820,000 in Budget ’26-27, with an additional $100,000 annually up to $1.5 million to expand our services and meet the needs of our clients, which are growing monthly by 13 percent.

Since 2022, Deafblind Community Services has been delivering services in B.C. through grant funding from the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction. As you can imagine, grant funding is not ideal for a service that requires sustainability. We’ve delivered almost 6,000 hours of service with that $530,000.

Our request for support next fiscal is modest, but the impact of service is anything but. They are life-changing, in many cases life-saving services. We don’t do it alone. We need to partner with organizations like Wavefront, who provides tactile ASL in Vancouver, and that’s just the beginning. I do believe that if we find a sustainable solution for anchor funding with the government, we will be able to create partnerships to enhance the growing need and diversify our revenue.

[3:15 p.m.]

So 50 percent of our participants are between the ages of 40 to 60, and the other 50 are beyond 60 years old. I’ll tell you quickly the story of somebody in that 40 to 60 category, a gentleman by the name of Neil who I had the pleasure of spending time with a few months ago, who lives in a men’s shelter in Burnaby. He’s 42 years old.

Neil is deafblind, and because of his disability, he can’t hear what’s happening around him, and he can’t see who’s coming or going. Every night before bed, Neil has to spray his sheets with a homemade mixture of vinegar and water. He does not sleep under his covers because he has no way of knowing who has been in his bed during the day, and he has no way of confirming if it’s safe, clean or even still his.

Right now, because of funding constraints, Neil is only able to be eligible for nine hours of intervener services per week. That’s just over an hour a day. It’s the equivalent to solitary confinement, which the Supreme Court of Canada deemed as unconstitutional for prisoners back in 2018. For many people, this is the reality. There are many Neils out there, unfortunately, and we need to be there for them.

An investment of $820,000 in ’26-27 and additional investments in subsequent years will help to continue our services in the province; will increase our service hours; will support those on our growing wait-list; will move toward equitable access to essential services; and it will prevent isolation, reduce reliance on emergency services and uphold the human rights of people who are deafblind.

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

Claire Rattée: Thanks for coming to present. I know some others from your organization came and presented to our caucus recently, and it was really powerful seeing them there with the interveners and being able to really understand what people that are deafblind go through on a daily basis.

I just want to make sure I’m understanding this budget request clearly. Currently your organization has received $530,000 already this year.

Angela Bonfanti: Correct.

Claire Rattée: Are you asking for an additional $820,000?

Angela Bonfanti: No, the total would be $820,000.

Claire Rattée: The total would be $820,000, and then in subsequent years, an additional $100,000 on that to bring it up to $920,000.

Angela Bonfanti: It’ll be $1.5 million in total to service all 80 people that we know of today, after the $820,000.

Claire Rattée: So $1.5 million in total for the 80. Then you’re expecting that those 80 are going to significantly increase in coming years.

Angela Bonfanti: Right now we’re looking at that increase, which is why I think we’re looking for stability as a start and then partnerships to grow and to weather that storm.

Claire Rattée: Okay, so this $1.5 million — how many hours is that going to provide each of these clients with a week?

Angela Bonfanti: If we go with all 80, we’ll be able to get to maybe up to nine. Still not a lot.

Claire Rattée: Sorry, what did you say Ontario was?

Angela Bonfanti: Twenty-four. To be fair, the service has been around for over 50 years in other provinces. We are in year 4 right now. We are growing.

Bryan Tepper: I’ve become confused on that. This year, $820,000. Are you working up to the $1.5 million?

Angela Bonfanti: That’s right.

Bryan Tepper: So $100,000 each year till you get to $1.5 million?

Angela Bonfanti: That’s right. That’ll be detailed in our budget request. Yes.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, thank you so much for your presentation. It was actually very informative and compelling. Thank you for what you’re doing for people in the province, and I look forward to hearing more about the organization as it continues to grow.

Angela Bonfanti: Thank you so much for the opportunity. We’re excited to be partners and to continue to fill the gap in services.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Now we’re going to hear the next presentation from the B.C. CEO Network, from Janice Barr.

Thanks for joining us. You’ll have five minutes to present, followed by five minutes for potential questions from members of the committee. You can begin when you’re ready.

B.C. CEO Network

Janice Barr: Thank you for giving me and the B.C. CEO Network the opportunity to tell you about the work that we’re doing on behalf of and with people with intellectual disabilities and their families. My name is Janice Barr. I’m the president of the B.C. CEO Network as well as the CEO for Community Living Society.

The B.C. CEO Network is a provincial network of over 125 community service agencies. All members hold contracts with Community Living B.C., or CLBC, and provide services to adults with an intellectual disability. Our members provide the vast majority of services to the 28,000 individuals eligible for CLBC services across the province.

I want to begin by thanking and highlighting the provincial grant that we received to support recruitment initiatives in our sector. The Community Living career campaign was launched in fall 2024 and continues to be seen on billboards, Global News and social media.

[3:20 p.m.]

Although we work collaboratively and diligently with CLBC and the provincial government, there are key issues that need to be addressed. Firstly, since the inception of CLBC, home share has grown to become the primary model of housing offered to individuals eligible for CLBC services.

At the beginning of 2025, there were more than 4,000 home-share arrangements in the province, serving over 4,200 individuals. The coordination of this service has been fully transferred via contracts to agencies throughout B.C., who have assumed all the risk, liability and responsibility to deliver this service model.

Sadly, the tragic death of Florence Girard is emblematic of the many issues facing service providers delivering this service. Serious underfunding, critical caseload issues, inappropriate referrals to this service model and lack of access to essential allied supports like nursing and community inclusion services all contribute to the problems that currently plague this service model and have resulted in an inability to provide a level of oversight that keeps people safe. B.C. CEO Network has produced a position paper on home share based on a comprehensive provincial survey of the sector, focus groups and interviews.

Based on the outcomes of the coroner’s inquest on the death of Florence Girard, as well as the feedback through the survey process, we have the following recommendations: reduce the caseload for home-share coordinators; increase the wage rate for home-share coordinators; fund supervision and oversight for home-share coordinators; ensure funding for ancillary supports, including community inclusion and respite support for home-share providers; increase compensation for home-share providers; and continue to support the development and maintenance of the current online training for home-share providers that was developed by the B.C. CEO Network with a grant from the provincial government in 2020.

Our second area of concern. Health care supports are vital safeguards and necessary for the quality of life of many individuals with intellectual disabilities. Access to health services for community living supports as well as mental health services, family physicians and behavioural support services is increasingly difficult to obtain, if at all.

The population served by CLBC has steadily increased. Increases to health services for community living provided through the Ministry of Health has not kept pace. Furthermore, the provincial medical health officer and provincial nurse consultant positions in our sector have not been in place for many years. These positions provide critical oversight analysis of health care trends and a conduit between community living services and the health care system. The lack of appropriate professional supports has resulted in serious decrease of safeguards for individuals.

Our recommendations are to increase funding for health services for community living, ensure that individuals have access to health care and professional supports in a timely manner, and reinstate the provincial medical health officer and nurse consultant in our sector.

Lastly, currently, we are stuck in a cycle of managing crises instead of achieving long-term solutions. CLBC has made limited investments in housing options other than home share. Home share is an unsuitable choice for managing crises. It is not a model that can respond to people with significant, complex needs. A recent survey we conducted provided information about the reasons agencies are declining to accept referrals for home-share services. The primary reason that was indicated was the complexity of the needs of individuals that were not suitable for this service model.

Our recommendation is to provide additional funding to develop and expand the current repertoire of services to meet the changing needs of people eligible for CLBC services.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. Thanks for remembering Florence Girard. I was very saddened by her death and, frankly, horrified to have to…. All of us remember what happened, again, in her inquest. So I think that bringing forward suggestions, as you have, for improvements to ensure that another person does not suffer the way that Florence Girard suffered, when she should have been receiving care and love and support in community…. I really appreciate that.

Looking for questions from the panel.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you for bringing forward these important suggestions for change within the system.

[3:25 p.m.]

I was going through your different recommendations under the changes to home share. The first one, supervision and oversight — you’re talking about clinical supervision and oversight for home-share providers?

Janice Barr: The home-share coordinators provide the oversight for home-share providers. At this point, there’s no funding to allow for oversight of those home-share coordinators.

In the beginning days of the development of this model of service in community, an agency might have one or two home-share coordinators that had a caseload of 25 or sometimes 30 different home-share providers. Many organizations, like the organization I work for, have four home-share coordinators, but there is no funding for oversight of them. There is no clinical supervision for the home-share coordinators.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you. Can you talk more about the past role of the provincial health officer and the nurse consultant? What was their role in the system?

Janice Barr: Yeah. They were key. Both the nurse consultant as well as the medical health officer tracked trends in health care issues for people with intellectual disabilities and conducted mortality investigations and reviews, which would have been helpful with Florence Girard.

The nurse consultant ensured that there was consistency across the province for health services for Community Living. These are the nurses that provide support to the individuals that we serve. As I said, health services for Community Living have not grown in well over ten years, although the number of people being served that have an intellectual disability through CLBC has grown exponentially. So there’s a significant gap.

We do believe that had Florence Girard had support from a nurse, given that she had dementia and health care issues, that would have been a critical safeguard.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude the presentation. But again, I thank you so much. Thanks for the important advocacy and work that you’re doing and for taking the time to present to us today.

Janice Barr: We appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Our next presentation will be from B.C. and Alberta Guide Dogs, from Bill Thornton.

Thank you so much for coming to present to us. You’ll have five minutes for a presentation, and you’ll have five minutes for questions from the members of this committee. You can start when you’re ready, please.

B.C. and Alberta Guide Dogs

Bill Thornton: Lovely. Thank you very much. Good afternoon, committee members, Madam Chair. My name is William Thornton, and I’m the CEO of B.C. and Alberta Guide Dogs. Many thanks for this opportunity to present before you.

B.C. Guide Dogs is located in Delta on the traditional and unceded territory of the Tsawwassen and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people.

We’ve been providing canine support to British Columbians with disabilities since 1996, and we were founded initially to provide guide dogs for individuals who are visually impaired. However, over the years, we’ve expanded our mandate to meet the growing needs of children with profound autism, aged three to seven, and we also now include veterans, RCMP and first responders suffering from operational stress — post-traumatic disorder.

We’re a registered Canadian charity and a B.C. society, and next year will be our 30th anniversary. We’ve been professionally breeding and raising guide and service dogs to international, accredited standards as prescribed by Assistance Dogs International and the International Guide Dog Federation. We are an approved organization under the British Columbia Guide Dog and Service Dog Act.

I should just stress that there is no commercial application to our work. All our dogs are bred for purpose and service within our own programs. We have graduated and placed over 300 partnerships in 55 different communities across British Columbia throughout our history.

[3:30 p.m.]

Just to pick on a few of the committee, we have dogs in Burnaby, Surrey, Williams Lake and Sparwood — and pretty much everywhere else. There are a lot of dogs out there.

Individuals and families are matched with their guide or service dog and receive in-depth professional training from our staff. Thereafter, they are receiving support in their home communities for the working life of the individual dog. This is typically for about eight years.

Most importantly, our dogs are costing our organization upward of $35,000 each to breed, raise, train and support throughout their working lives and, indeed, through their retirement period up until their final passing. All of our services are provided 100 percent at no cost to our clients.

We have an overwhelming need for our services. Frankly, at the moment, we’re swamped, and the demand only keeps growing. We receive requests for support on a daily basis from people asking for either a guide dog or a service dog. Unfortunately, our wait-list has grown so long that people are waiting four years for a dog, which is truly not acceptable. The COVID period didn’t assist, as we had to shut down all of our training for almost an entire year.

This is a critical problem for us, and we’re now looking at addressing the issue. And that’s what has brought me to this committee today.

For a number of years now, we’ve had an exciting project in the works. We’re in the process of building a state-of-the-art breeding and training centre of excellence in Delta. Construction is underway, and we expect the project to be completed by December 2025.

The breeding and training centre is a fully accessible building with a canine medical laboratory, veterinary exam clinic — and these rooms are equipped with ultrasound equipment, endoscopes and other reproduction specialty equipment — a neonatal ward, nursing ports and a whelping room, or a delivery room in human terms. Upstairs we have veterans training hall, which will be used for the individual training of our veterans and first responders and also for running our puppy raising classes.

This building, I would stress, is the first of its kind in western Canada. In fact, I believe it’s the first purpose-built building in Canada, even though some of the eastern provinces have got breeding centres. The breeding and training centre, over 25 years, will allow us to train in excess of 1,500 service dog teams, allowing us to double the number of people we serve within five years, increasing production from 30 per year to 60. This process is underway, as this last year we graduated 40 new partnerships in that single year alone, a record for the organization.

In 2024, we received $2.7 million from the federal government from the enabling accessibility fund, which allowed us to break ground and begin construction late last year. Construction is on time and budget and will be completed in December.

I’m here to request a one-time contribution of $1.35 million from the government of British Columbia towards the building of our breeding and training centre. B.C. and Alberta Guide Dogs prior to this project has not sought any government funding for our programs, and this would be a first, following the federal government.

I thank you for considering our modest request for funding and support. We recognize that they are great demands on the province. Thank you for your time.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much for the presentation. This is a great leaflet, with some cute dogs in it. I’m just kind of sad that you didn’t bring any free samples for us to pet.

Bill Thornton: I didn’t want to take undue advantage of other applicants.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Well, that’s true, actually.

Calling on MLA Rattée for a question.

Claire Rattée: Thank you. I have the same feelings. That’s the only thing I didn’t like about your presentation. I was hoping I was going to get to see dogs when I saw this on here.

I have a couple questions. My first one would be: is your organization the only one in British Columbia right now providing guide dogs?

Bill Thornton: Yes, we are — guide dogs, yes. Not service dogs.

Claire Rattée: It’s a lower threshold for training, right?

Bill Thornton: Oh gosh, I’d be shot if I said that. They all have their challenges, but I would say, being a guide dog mobility instructor for many years, I do think the challenges faced by a guide dog are greater than that of a service dog with some of the vision and what have you.

Claire Rattée: Absolutely. Okay, thank you. My second question is…. You were saying that upon completion of this, this is going to significantly increase the amount of guide dogs and service dogs that you’re able to breed and train and, obviously, provide to British Columbians and Albertans. I didn’t write down the number that you had said.

Basically, what is the difference overall in what you’re going to be able to produce from this new facility comparatively to what’s going on right now?

[3:35 p.m.]

Bill Thornton: Yes, so we have conditions that were set when we got the $2.7 million from the federal government. Once the building’s complete, over three years, we have to submit returns, we have to show our growth, and we have to reach an output of 60 teams or partnerships, let’s call them, each year.

In order to do that, we’re going to have to breed at least 100 puppies a year, because about 40 percent will not get through the program. We presently breed about 80 puppies, but a lot of it is off site, and it’s becoming very, very problematic. So we need to bring it on site. We will still have some of the broods, the mothers. Some of them will still be whelping off site, because it’s not a good idea to put everybody in one spot in case you get a virus or something like that.

Claire Rattée: For sure. Thank you.

Then my last question is…. I’m sorry. I might have missed it. So you’ve secured funding from the federal government already. Obviously, it’s B.C. and Alberta guide dogs. So have you also gone to the Alberta government? I think I’ve….

Bill Thornton: No, we haven’t been to the Alberta government. But we do receive some funding for our programs for the partnerships that we produce in Alberta. But I would stress that 75 percent of the dogs we produce stay in British Columbia.

Claire Rattée: Okay, great. Thank you.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay. Seeing no further questions and because you didn’t bring any puppies…. I’m just kidding.

Bill Thornton: I shall bring copious amounts next time.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Well, you know what? The fact that you’re helping people with disabilities and challenges by providing them service dogs and seeing eye dogs…. This is just a tremendous service. Thank you very much for presenting to us today and sharing your time with this committee.

We’re going to continue now with a presentation from CUPE Metro Vancouver district council, Sarah Bjorknas.

Welcome. You didn’t bring any puppies, did you?

Sarah Bjorknas: I did not, and I was also sad that there were no puppies.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): You’ll have five minutes to present and five minutes allotted for questions, should any of the panel members have any. So you can start whenever you’re ready.

CUPE Metro Vancouver
District Council

Sarah Bjorknas: Okay, thank you.

As you said, my name is Sarah Bjorknas. I’m the president of the CUPE Metro Vancouver district council.

I acknowledge that the work I do is on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm peoples.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees, CUPE, represents workers in K-to-12 schools, colleges, universities, libraries, health care, transportation, municipalities and community social services. Our council is the regional voice of CUPE in the Metro Vancouver area, representing tens of thousands of workers who are members from 25 affiliated local unions.

I appreciate this opportunity to speak to you about the 2026 budget for the province. Our first recommendation is to fully fund the community social services sector through increased funding to community social service organizations. This will ensure adequate support is provided to British Columbians who require assistance of these organizations.

The community social services sector has experienced substantial underfunding, resulting in recent and significant layoffs along with ongoing recruitment and retention issues. Many of these program reductions and the consequential layoffs have occurred due to a refusal to increase funding to match the escalating costs of providing services.

We believe these program reductions and layoffs will result in staff being forced to work alone with inadequate resources, increased unmet needs in our communities and escalating unemployment in B.C. Community social service workers are currently reporting untenable employment conditions with increased exposure to workplace violence, including sexual and physical assaults — and where risk-based decisions must be made. This, coupled with unsustainable workload, leads to burnout and additional WorkSafe claims.

Many community social service workers end up being first responders as a result of the current poisoned drug epidemic. Additionally, they report that the reduced staffing as a result of reduced funding has a compound effect on them, and they are struggling with increased addiction rates, mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Many are on the brink of burnout. Citizens of B.C. are consequently suffering as a result of the decreased services available to them.

Increased and full funding of the community social services sector is necessary to maintain an adequate workforce that can successfully address increasingly complex social needs and issues during these challenging times. B.C. must recognize that social services are an essential support to our most vulnerable population and that workers in this sector sustain the social structures in our communities that prevent community breakdown.

[3:40 p.m.]

Our second recommendation is that the B.C. Treasury Board fully fund and support the implementation of the Accessible B.C. Act, ensuring that such implementation is included in ministerial mandate letters and the provincial budget.

It is imperative the provincial Treasury Board solicit internal submissions relating to the implementation of the Accessible B.C. Act. This cross-government implementation of the act will lead the way to ensuring every British Columbian, regardless of ability, has equal access to opportunities, services and supports.

The act received royal assent in June 2021. Since then, through the Ministry of Social Development, the Parliamentary Secretary for Accessibility, the accessibility directorate, accessibility consultants, the provincial accessibility committee and two technical committees have worked to develop recommended standards in the areas of service delivery and employment. Their goal has been to eliminate barriers to access to public services and employment for people living with disabilities in our province. Without financial and legislative commitment from the provincial government and the Treasury Board, their work will be moot.

Currently, 27 percent of the provincial population lives with one or more disabilities. In 2024, according to Statistics Canada, the wage gap between non-disabled and disabled British Columbians widened from $1.91 per hour to $2.21 per hour. In times of austerity, we need to invest in citizens with disabilities. People living with disabilities have tremendous skills, talents and abilities that can provide considerable intellectual, social and financial benefits to our communities.

Thank you for listening.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

Looking at panel members.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

Now, I was just wondering if you could talk more about what professions are included in the community social service sector.

Sarah Bjorknas: That is not my sector of work as the president of the council, although one of our locals, local 1936, is, and they do work across the social service spectrum. So, unfortunately, I would not be able to speak about the professions.

Really, our ask around funding is looking at organizational support, because we know that funding typically is by client and by individual person, and there might be specific needs there, but to operate the system and to operate the organizations that support those workers, there also needs to be funding which is not tied to individuals.

Sorry, not an exact answer to your question, but….

Jennifer Blatherwick: That’s okay. Thank you.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

Seeing no further questions, we’ll move to our next presenter, which is Jenny Konkin from Whole Way House Society.

Jenny Konkin: Thank you so much for having me.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): You’ll have five minutes presentation time and then five minutes for any potential questions from the committee. You can start whenever you’re ready.

Whole Way House Society

Jenny Konkin: Thank you. My name is Jenny Konkin, and I am the president and co-founder of Whole Way House Society.

At Whole Way House, we aim to build healthy community and housing by partnering with non-profit housing organizations to support vulnerable veterans, seniors and people with disabilities who are living in subsidized housing. We currently support more than 1,000 seniors living across the Lower Mainland, in Burnaby and Victoria, and we provide on-site community building programs to help them age well in place.

You may not know, but 24 percent of our homeless population in Metro Vancouver are seniors, and 45 percent of them became homeless after the age of 55 for the very first time. These numbers do not sit well with me, and I hope with you as well. They are the fastest-rising demographic in our homeless population.

We have identified the gaps in the system, why low-income seniors are becoming homeless in the first place. For the first time in our province, we are seeing them surpass every other demographic. By 2030, one in four people in our province will be a senior, and we want to get ahead of the curve in preventing homelessness amongst seniors.

[3:45 p.m.]

We partner with non-profit housing organizations to go on site to be a third party to support seniors to age well in place by providing community-building programs, everything from morning coffee so you have a reason to get out of bed, get ready, see your neighbours and make social connections, as well as tenant support services, so navigating government systems, accessing support that is available to them and especially navigating the health care system.

If you’ve ever supported a senior who wants to age in place, we know that we can mitigate a lot of the factors that would cause someone to go to long-term care.

In our province, we do not have enough long-term-care beds for what we are projecting we will need — or at the moment. The current acute wait-list is over six months, and according to our B.C. seniors advocate, more than half the people who are on the wait-list for B.C. Housing will wait over five years for subsidized housing.

We want to respond to those who are already experiencing homelessness but also prevent those who are already housed from slipping through the cracks. So we work with both Health and Housing in order to provide these support services so that we ensure seniors are accessing the resources that they need, not falling into homelessness.

Currently in Vancouver, we do not have any homeless shelters for seniors specifically, so they’re extremely vulnerable, as well as that they are often put into regular supportive housing, which is inappropriate for their needs.

Our services include, as I said, everything from social activities to keep people active and engaged, that help build their social network, so that people are able to step in and help and not fully rely on services but also ensuring that they’re getting connected to the health care system, which can be extremely difficult to navigate.

We’re also able to step in during crisis. During COVID, we supported over 19 buildings and served 300,000 meals in partnership with B.C. Housing, so seniors could isolate safely.

During the extreme weather heat domes, we were able to ensure that none of our seniors…. As we saw over 850 seniors in our province pass away, we were able to set up chill zones in every building and have eyes on our clients to ensure that they weren’t experiencing heat exhaustion.

As well as during elevator breakdowns, which we are seeing all across our province right now with older buildings, we’re able to step in and support and ensure that they have the supplies that they need.

We’ve seen through our studies…. We’ve been studied by a federal study called Aging in the Right Place, with SFU. As well, the city of Vancouver, the United Way of British Columbia and B.C. Housing have all done studies on our program, with very strong data to show that this is a very cost-effective model. In fact, Jill Atkey, the CEO of the B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association, came for a tour and is working closely with us to advocate for our services to be scaled across the province.

Our cost is approximately $1,500 per senior, per year, which is an extremely cost-effective way to keep people housed by creating this organic support network led by staff who are specialized in supporting seniors.

Currently, we have eight sites that we’re supporting, and we’re able to support, as I said, over 1,000 seniors. Our ask is that we’re able to expand that as well as support other organizations to do our work by training them. So we’re looking at $1.5 million per year for the next three years to be able to expand this program across our province and support other organizations and rural communities to be able to do this type of support work.

I have 19 seconds left.

I just want to tell you that my friend Lorraine, after only one year of our program, being in her building, with the help of her doctor, was able to come off her antidepressant medication after 14 years because she found purpose and joy in her life by connecting with her neighbours. Not only does it save people from homelessness, but it really improves their quality of life in their older years.

Claire Rattée: This sounds great and very important, because it is a really significant issue right now, and I appreciated what you were saying about putting seniors into a lot of the supportive housing right now. It’s not an appropriate place for them to be, and I think we need to do everything we can to avoid that happening. It’s an interesting thing that you touched on about senior-specific shelters. I mean, it’s sad that we’re in a position where we need that, but it’s certainly something to be looked at.

I’m curious how you are currently funded. So the eight buildings that you are supporting, the 1,000 seniors you’re supporting right now — what is your current funding looking like?

Jenny Konkin: We have one site, our Veterans Manor, here in the Downtown Eastside, funded through the supportive housing fund with B.C. Housing because we have a very complex clientele there. So that’s on our three-year cycles of B.C. Housing.

We had four sites with B.C. Housing where they were studying us as a pilot project. That started during COVID. That funding came to a very abrupt end with 11 days’ notice. So we are currently self-funding those sites from our savings, from generous donors who are helping us. But that study is supposed to be done in July and will be published, and we’ll be taking that to the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Housing to hopefully work together to create this across the province.

The other sites are funded through either the landlords, finding funding in their budgets, very minimally, or through hustling and fundraising. So it’s very unstable at the moment.

[3:50 p.m.]

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation. Seeing no further questions, we’ll go to our next presentation. Thanks for the work that you’re doing.

Our next presentation is by Kylie Williams of Foresight Canada. Welcome. You will have five minutes, as well, for presentation time, followed by five minutes for any potential questions from the committee. You can start when you’re ready.

Foresight Canada

Kylie Williams: To create a strong and diversified economy that is resilient to economic turmoil, clean productivity that leverages clean technology is the answer. B.C. must rapidly commercialize and deploy innovation across our public and private sectors to demonstrate to the world what a sustainable, clean and secure economy looks like for our current and future generations.

Good afternoon to the committee, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Thank you, also, to the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Nations, upon whose traditional unceded territory we’re meeting in today.

I’m Kylie Williams, director for B.C. and sector innovation at Foresight Canada. Our CEO, Jeanette Jackson, sends her regrets as she’s in Ottawa championing clean productivity programs for all Canadians, that were built right here in B.C.

Foresight is Canada’s largest clean tech innovation and adoption accelerator. We connect innovators with customers and capital. We de-risk and simplify public and private sector adoption of the world’s best clean technologies to improve productivity, profitability and economic competitiveness, all while addressing urgent climate challenges.

Here in B.C., our work is currently focused on four critical sectors: forestry, mining, transportation and water. We’ve directly supported nearly 700 B.C.-based companies, helping them raise $1.64 billion in capital, generate $326 million in revenue and create over 6,000 high-quality jobs.

Developing a clean technology, growing a small business around a novel idea or adopting new technologies in traditional risk-averse industries is not easy. From our work with over 1,600 SMEs across Canada and deep ties to major industry adopters and investors, we know where the pressure points are and what we need to do together to smooth the path to a clean, productive and thriving province.

Here are our recommendations for Budget 2026 to make B.C.’s clean economy possible.

One, sustain and expand the B.C. net zero innovation network. Three years ago the government of British Columbia, along with PacifiCan, invested $7.5 million in the B.C. net zero innovation network. Foresight took this investment and turned it into $154 million worth of tangible economic returns and 350 high-paying jobs.

The model we employed was progressive yet simple: convene diverse industry players to tackle shared non-competitive challenges and encourage adoption of new technologies; pool resources to make ambitious transformative projects economically viable; and seed projects to de-risk innovation and attract significantly larger private investment.

With over 70 projects, including 26 with Indigenous participation, unprecedented progress was made in decarbonizing our mining sector, diversifying forestry with value-added manufacturing and advancing vehicle-to-grid infrastructure to manage our clean energy resources, to name just a few.

We are asking the B.C. government to invest $20 million over three years in the next phase of the B.C. net zero innovation network, allowing us to build on the momentum we’ve established in forestry, mining, transportation and water and to expand that impact to carbon management, power and the built environment, continuing to accelerate clean tech adoption across B.C.’s key industrial sectors. All these outcomes will lead to stronger global competitiveness and export pathways. Let’s show the rest of Canada how our national blueprint works.

Our second ask is to restart and expand provincial funding programs that help B.C. technology companies. The early-stage SME support system in B.C. has stalled out due to a shift in funding towards later-stage companies. But without supporting early-stage companies, the funnel is empty.

[3:55 p.m.]

Over the last several years, Foresight has redefined the role accelerators play in connecting innovators to customers and capital. Our strategic guidance is sought by other provinces and regions worldwide on our innovation programs and platforms. Despite this success, funding for early-stage supports through programs like the venture accelerating program have completely stopped.

The best way to help B.C.’s SMEs is to invest in B.C.’s high-performing market accelerators with proven models and track records and to expand provincial funding to innovation programs. For example, Foresight’s deep domestic acceleration expertise and established global market networks can help more B.C. companies scale across Canada and internationally, accessing global capital and export opportunities.

Strategic public investment today scales B.C.’s competitive advantage tomorrow. It drives productivity, exports, job creation and decarbonization, all while cementing B.C.’s leadership on the global stage.

From humble roots here in B.C., Foresight has been supporting technology acceleration and adoption for over a decade. We’d love to use our experience to help the province here and collaborate with you on any opportunities.

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

Questions from the committee?

Jennifer Blatherwick: I got a little lost there on what exactly Foresight does. I know that you’re an accelerator, but I wasn’t totally…. What exactly do you do to help promote SMEs, help promote clean tech organizations?

Kylie Williams: We have two models. Half of our business is programming for different ventures at different stages — everything from that technology readiness level of 1, where it’s just an idea that’s evolving, right up to commercializing and being bought out by another company, so right up to the TRL 9 and 10.

We have about 15 different programs through the IRAP funding federally, to accelerate and move all of those. They get together in cohorts, either at a similar stage or in a similar industry, and they move through together, do training, meet investors, meet with industry and move to that next level. That’s one part.

The other part is what the B.C. net zero innovation network does, which is bring together groups. For example, the mining companies in B.C. are all in one of our working groups. All of them are interested in decarbonizing their trucks, their processes, but they’re all facing the same challenges. Is there enough electricity? Are there enough transmission lines to get energy to all of these sites? They can’t all buy electric vehicles at once and electrify overnight. These are the kind of groups that we gather together.

Also, there are a whole bunch of people in B.C. that are making seaweed into something. What markets are they going to expand into? They’re competitors, but they’re also allies. What we do is…. We don’t have a bias towards a particular industry or a particular outcome. We just want clean technology to be adopted more easily. We help through programming and through connecting and funding and piloting projects.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Let me explain that back and see if I understood properly. Your function is to be like a convener, a connector, providing the expertise in execution, in networking, in collaborative group thinking, in order to streamline the processes for businesses — not individual businesses or individual innovators but also for bringing together sectors in order to overcome barriers, work on collective challenges.

Kylie Williams: Yes. Nice work.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Okay. Perfect. Thank you. I got it.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Seeing no further questions, we’ll conclude with your presentation. Thank you so much for your time. Take care.

Our next presenter is Kelly Scott from B.C. Road Builders and Heavy Construction Association.

Welcome. You’ll have five minutes for your presentation time, followed by five minutes of time for any questions by the committee. You can begin when you’re ready.

[4:00 p.m.]

Kelly Scott: Thank you for taking some time to see us. I’m with the B.C. Road Builders and Heavy Construction Association. My predecessor talked about ideas and that. We take the ideas and put them to work. So we build your bridges, your tunnels and your roads, and we maintain all the roads throughout British Columbia. That’s what road builders do.

Road Builders have a very, very unique relationship with your Ministry of Transportation — something that we don’t see across Canada — and it’s a working relationship.

If we go back three and a half years, we had this atmospheric river hit us in the middle of COVID. The 911 call came out from the Ministry of Transportation. Overnight, Road Builders came together as one. Their question was not, “How much are you going to pay us?” or: “Where’s the contract?”

The question was: “Where do you want the equipment? Where do you want the people? What can we do?” It’s this unique relationship that’s allowed road builders to stitch this province together on your behalf. And it’s a very unique geography, as you well know.

What really stands out for us during that moment with the atmospheric river was…. What was thought to be months or years of a project was done in 35 days. What we’re very proud of, though, is zero lost-time accidents during that time. So we showed the world how collaboratively we can work together and that we can deliver, for our public, safe roads and really look after those communities. As you recall, Chilliwack was an island during that time. How do we reach out to them and look after them?

One of the things I’ve noted as I look at your files is B.C. has 3,000 bridges. Half of those bridges were built in the ‘50s and the ‘60s. At those times, when they were built, there were no such words as “climate change” or “atmospheric river.” Those bridges were built to a standard of 50 years. That’s how long they were built for back then. Those bridges are 75 years old.

We have an aging infrastructure that the government needs to look at. The government knows this. They’ve done an inventory. They know the audit. But there are bridges out there that are well past their sell-by date. Certainly our recommendation to ministry and yourselves is that we continue to look at our infrastructure.

It’s critical, not just for us that live in the Lower Mainland. As you get out of here and go to those communities that rely on roads and bridges to connect those roads, if they get washed out, they’re isolated. They don’t get to go to their educational, their health care…. Anything else about those communities. So the bridges are really a critical artery, if you will, within our infrastructure that we certainly encourage everybody to look at.

I know we’ve got bridges here we should be looking at. But one does come to mind in the northeast corner, a bridge called Taylor, which is eventually going to fall in that river, for all the welding we’ve been doing on it for the last 70 years. That is a critical core component of that whole northeast section for us and our resource development as we’re going forward up there.

Mr. Trump has brought the word east-west…. Interprovincial barriers are coming down. We need to open up our territories. We need to open up Prince Rupert and Vancouver so that we can bring our goods across from other areas, which means we have to invest in roads. As much as we talk about bridges and infrastructure and that, it’s our roads that we need to invest in.

If you recall, a lot of trucks — I think there are 50,000 going up and down the Coq every day — are bringing our goods to a port. As we witnessed during the atmospheric river, if we shut that down, we shut our country down. Nothing moved. Roads, rail, pipeline that you and I own. Nothing moved at all. So we need an infrastructure, and we need roads going on.

We’ve noted, as you have, if you go up the Fraser Valley…. You’re certainly opening up the Fraser Valley for us, which is great. But there’s a huge corridor that goes from Kamloops to Alberta. We started to put four-laning in with federal funding, but we’ve stopped now, and only 39 percent of that road from Kamloops to the Alberta border is four-lane. You can’t have trucks passing cars or cars passing trucks without having an accident sometime down the road.

So we encourage government to look at that corridor and get the feds in there. It’s critical. As we open up the east-west trading corridor, we need to have safe, efficient transportation corridors coming down to Vancouver but also the Port of Prince Rupert, another critical one for us that needs some investment in our infrastructure. Those are the two big ones we see, going forward.

[4:05 p.m.]

The thing I’ll note for you is that we have capacity. In our business, we call it the horizontal construction business. We’re very different than the vertical guys, as we call them. We’ve had Site C shut down, we finished the Kicking Horse Bridge, the pipeline that we’ve just built and the Pattullo Bridge — all four major projects.

We have workers sitting around wondering where their next job is going to be, and we have contractors saying: “Where are we going to go?” We’ve said to government: “We’ve trained these kids. We’ve made them into good operators for us. We don’t want to see them go east or go south.” So we encourage the government to look at infrastructure.

We look at infrastructure, and there’s a multiplier effect. When you go to downtown Smithers and open up a project there, our contractors go up. They hire local. They train local. They stay in the hotels, the restaurants. They buy local. There’s a real multiplier that goes on with infrastructure-building, certainly, within our province.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. We’ll move on to questions from committee members.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I will say, out of all the presenters we had today, you’re the one that looked at their paper the least.

I was hoping you could speak a little bit more about the investment in the Kamloops to Alberta roadway. A significant portion of that was expanded to four lanes, but there’s still more to go. You were talking about how 50,000 trucks per day move on the Coquihalla.

What’s the usage there, from Kamloops to Alberta? How does the bottleneck affect traffic?

Kelly Scott: It all comes in…. We all went to Amazon. So these truckers are on the clock as soon as they pick up in Calgary. They know where they are, and they’re in a rush to get through. The bottlenecks are when we have snow and we have avalanche control or there’s an accident on the road. It just stops everything up. And the pressure on the truck drivers is immense.

Once we get into Kamloops, we’re fine, because we’ve got the Coq. Generally, it’s open. If that’s not open, then of course, No. 1 comes down.

But it’s getting that four-lane to Alberta, which is really critical for us as we start talking to Carney about our east-west connector. We need to open up this province to that, because we need to go west. And the Port of Vancouver…. We’ve got T2 being talked about already. With Terminal 2, there’s going to be a real need for more roads, more rail — a safe, efficient traffic network coming through.

Bryan Tepper: Actually, the first thing I’ll say is that I would assume you know John Dodds.

Kelly Scott: Sure do.

Bryan Tepper: There you go. Father-in-law.

Kelly Scott: Oh, you say hello to him from Kelly.

Bryan Tepper: Yes, I will. We could discuss this for a while.

I had a bunch of questions. Let’s start with Port of Vancouver, actually — getting roads out of there. Do the Road Builders have any plans, any thoughts about that?

Kelly Scott: Yeah, bring us the contracts. We think there’s a need for another rail line going out of here. Living on two isn’t good enough for where we’re going as a country.

And certainly, some of the overpasses have got to be looked at. I know there’s work being done. Though I must say, at times, I know truckers hit our overpasses a lot. It’s a nice $5 million job for our contractors. I always send a thank-you note to the Trucking Association guy. But that’s another one that needs to be looked at.

I think the transportation corridor is here, but we need to enhance it. If you go to Coquitlam there, by Ikea, it’s just a dog’s breakfast what’s going through there.

Bryan Tepper: For me, personally, I keep thinking about the north-south out of there, as well, because we have a lot coming down, being in Surrey. Would there be a way of overpassing down, say, Knight Street. a building that you guys see as feasible?

Again, we’re talking global warming now and everything else. We’ve got trucks that are constantly stopped. We need moving traffic. That’s what we need.

Kelly Scott: It’s a great, great question. Once that tunnel goes through, there’s going to be more volume coming through here. Whether they go on an overpass, Knight Street is the feeder to the port, coming from the south. We built that South Fraser Perimeter Road, which helped alleviate some of the traffic coming into Vancouver, but there still has to be something done on that north-south connector.

Bryan Tepper: All right. Well, I would invite you to see if you have any ideas about what we could do.

Kelly Scott: Maybe we could get Mr. Ford out here from Ontario. We’ll put a tunnel in, like he wants to do through Toronto.

Bryan Tepper: That’s not a bad idea.

Well, you know what? Hopefully, somebody else came up with something for a second, because I’m going to rethink what I was going to say.

[4:10 p.m.]

Jennifer Blatherwick: My riding is Coquitlam-Maillardville. So thank you for highlighting the adventure that is that area.

When you’re talking about a rail line leaving this area, you’re thinking of a rail line going north?

Kelly Scott: No, a rail line coming in from the east.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Oh, coming in from the east. Thank you.

Kelly Scott: Yeah. I think that with the volume we’ve got coming in here, this port…. It’s a world-class port, and we’re not feeding it enough. We can do more here.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Final question, MLA Tepper.

Bryan Tepper: It was answered, that’s why I forgot it, because you asked, so that was one.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay. Good.

You may be interested to know that the Taylor Bridge was actually the subject of question period at one point, and someone even sang a song about it, talking about how critically it needs some attention. So thank you for your presentation and highlighting it once again today.

That concludes presentations for today. We’ll continue hearing presentations tomorrow.

I’ll look to members on any other business.

Seeing no other business, I’ll seek a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 4:11 p.m.