The committee met at 8:34 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. We are going to get started. Good morning, everyone. My name is Paul Choi. I’m the MLA for Burnaby South–Metrotown and Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, a committee of the Legislative Assembly that includes government and opposition MLAs.

I’d like to acknowledge that we are meeting today on the legislative precinct here in Victoria, which is located in the territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking People, now known as Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.

I also would like to welcome two of our new committee members. We have MLA Donegal Wilson and also Darlene Rotchford — gosh, I always call her Darlene only, so I almost forgot your last name; sorry — MLA, who is also joining us. Thank you so much for taking your time to come and join us here in the committee.

[8:35 a.m.]

The purpose of today’s meeting is to consider statutory office budget submissions for fiscal year 2026-2027. You’ll be hearing from four offices today and five offices on November 21.

We are going to begin with in-camera deliberation before hearing from our first statutory office, so I will ask for a motion to move in camera. Thank you.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 8:35 a.m. to 8:59 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): We are back to public session. We will take a two-minute recess until our presenters are settled in.

The committee recessed from 9:00 a.m. to 9:03 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much for coming in. The first statutory officer that we will be hearing from today is Anton Boegman, Chief Electoral Officer.

Recognizing that Anton’s term ends next month, and this will be his last appearance before the committee, I’d like to take this opportunity on behalf of the committee to extend our appreciation for his service to British Columbians over the last seven years. Thank you very much.

Turning back to the budget, we have 25 minutes for your presentation, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. We do have a timer on the screen today to help us stay on schedule.

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

Review of Statutory Officers

Elections B.C.

Anton Boegman: Good morning, Chair, Deputy Chair and members of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.

I’d like to begin today with a sincere acknowledgement that this meeting is taking place on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking Peoples, the Esquimalt and the Songhees First Nations. We do acknowledge, with gratitude and respect, their stewardship of the lands that we are on.

Today I’m joined by Kerry Pridmore to my right, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer for corporate services, and Charles Porter to my left, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer for electoral finance and operations. We also have two members of my senior staff sitting in the gallery, Jodi Cooke, executive director of electoral finance, and Tanya Ackinclose, senior director of finance and facilities administration.

Thank you for your kind words. Before I begin my comments today, I would also like to note that my term ends on November 12 and this will be my last meeting with this committee.

[9:05 a.m.]

I do wish to sincerely express my appreciation to this committee, both its current and its former members, its current and former Chair and Deputy Chair, as well as the Office of the Clerk of Committees, for the respect and for the professionalism that my colleagues and I have experienced in our interactions with this committee.

Accountability and transparency are two of the core values of Elections B.C., and we hold ourselves to those values every day and are proud of the work that we do on behalf of supporting a healthy democracy in British Columbia. These values, accountability and transparency, are also manifested through these meetings with the committee and the subsequent reports on the budget requests.

I do appreciate the opportunity to share with you our plans and our budget requirements for the upcoming fiscal years. I’ll begin by providing a very brief update on our current work and our priorities over the coming fiscal year, then I’ll turn over to Kerry to present our annual core services operating budget and to Charles to present our event budget requirements.

At this stage of Elections B.C.’s business cycle, our primary focus is threefold. We’re continuing our work on the close-out activities for the 2024 provincial general election, we’re ramping up preparations for our work in supporting the administration of the 2026 general local elections, and we’re beginning initial preparations for B.C.’s next provincial general election scheduled for the fall of 2028.

More than 900 election financing reports of candidates, political parties, third-party advertising sponsors and nomination contestants were filed in relation to the 2024 provincial general election. We’ve completed detailed compliance reviews of 90 percent of these reports, as well as audits on 29 high-priority reports from candidates and third-party advertising sponsors.

Compliance and enforcement activities, including investigations and potential administrative monetary penalties, remain ongoing as of today. To date, we’ve opened 286 investigations in relation to the 2024 provincial election, 129 are ongoing, 89 have been concluded with no finding of a contravention, 54 warning letters have been issued, one individual has been disqualified from future candidacy, and 13 administrative monetary penalties have been levied. As we conclude this work, any additional penalties will be published on our website.

During 2025, we’ve tabled with the Legislature two volumes of the report of the CEO on the 43rd provincial general election, with the third volume anticipated to be tabled next week. Volume 1 was tabled on May 27 and covered the administration of the election, including key events, successes and challenges. Volume 2 was tabled on September 24 and reported on overall campaign finance activities, investigations and the overall cost of the election. This report provided transparency and accountability on political financing and compliance activities, as well as on the administrative cost of our democratic process.

Volume 3 is anticipated to be tabled next week. This volume will highlight Elections B.C.’s recommendations for legislative change, which arose from the administration of the past election. That last volume will complete the official reporting on the province’s 43rd provincial election.

While our work to close out the provincial election is winding down, preparations to administer campaign financing and election finance or election advertising rules for the 2026 general local elections are accelerating.

A key focus for our work here is producing and delivering guidance materials for local political participants, including information sessions and online training. We’re also planning the recruitment of temporary staff in electoral finance to directly support event delivery. These staff perform a critical role in that event. They are the front-line service providers, giving information and guidance to the more than 3,000 local candidates, electoral organizations and third-party advertising sponsors that participate in our province’s local elections.

In addition, we’re also beginning preparations for B.C.’s 44th provincial election and maintaining ongoing readiness for provincial by-elections that may be called.

Now to the numbers of our fiscal year ’26-27 budget proposal. Our total budget request is for $29.024 million. This is broken down into four categories: $15.498 million for the ongoing annual core services budget; $9.312 million for the event budget; $318,000 for the capital assets event budget; and $3.896 million for the annual allowances to eligible political parties.

As part of our ongoing commitments to fiscal responsibility, we believe that this funding request includes only the funding necessary to achieve our mandate. It also includes our efforts to identify savings and efficiencies in both ongoing operations, as well as event readiness and capital projects.

[9:10 a.m.]

I will now pass over to Kerry to provide further detail on our core services and capital budget requests.

Kerry Pridmore: Good morning, committee members. As outlined, I will focus on our core services operating and capital budgets for the fiscal year 2026 and ’27.

Our ongoing core services operating budget request is broken down by expense line on page 7 of our proposal. This table lists expenses that support all business areas, along with additional notes for each expense line on the following page that provide details about the nature of these expenses.

The request of $15.498 million is for ongoing core services. This represents a decrease of $55,000 compared to what was approved for our fiscal ’25-26 during our last budget submission this past spring. We were able to identify savings and efficiencies while maintaining our current operations.

This included a comprehensive review of our audit program, resulting in more audits conducted internally and fewer external contractor fees, a reduction in travel and employee training expenses by encouraging virtual event attendance and ongoing training wherever possible, and amortization savings from reduced capital costs from the geographic information system replacement project. Elections B.C. will continue to monitor and evaluate opportunities for further savings going forward.

The variance in Elections B.C. total budget often will be different from fiscal years, related to the nature of our ongoing operations. Because the electoral events we administer vary in size and number from year to year, the overall budget fluctuates greatly across fiscal years.

Based on this, the analysis on page 5 of the budget proposal compares the variance between the budgets for ’25-26 and ’26-27, focusing on STOBs that have increased in the core services operating budget, which is not subject to fluctuations like the event budget and capital budget.

The following STOBs increased by 2 percent for inflation for ’26-27. STOB 50, which is for base salaries, includes an assumed wage increase of 2 percent for both management and schedule A employees, which is an increase of $159,000 compared with last fiscal year. The 2 percent wage increase that’s been projected for both ’27-28 and ’28-29 will be updated based on the current negotiations with the BCGEU.

Under STOB 52, employee benefits, there’s an increase of $42,000. This is linked with the increase in base salaries. Under STOB 65, office and business expenses, there’s an increase of $6,000 and under 69, our utilities and supplies, an increase of $1,000.

However, as I mentioned, we have also identified savings in other STOBs, namely, travel, professional services and amortization. This means that we have an overall reduction of $55,000 compared to the fiscal ’25-26.

I did want to highlight our capital budget. We have $318,000 that’s required for the capital budget in the next fiscal year. This is, again, specific to the geographic information system project that was previously approved by the committee.

I’ll now turn it over to Charles who will highlight our event budget requirements and the required funding for eligible political parties as well as further details related to the GIS replacement project.

Charles Porter: Good morning, committee members. As mentioned, I will focus on the event budget first.

Funding for electoral events is a cornerstone of Elections B.C.’s overall budget. Being ready for and delivering events is our top strategic priority. These budget requirements represent the additional funding above our core operating budget that is necessary to administer the electoral events defined in our mandate.

The total event funding required for 2026-27 is $9.630 million. As I will discuss in more detail below, this includes funding for the 2026 general local elections, for preparations for the 44th provincial general election and for infrastructure costs to administer future provincial elections.

So $4.729 million in event funding is required for the 2026 general local elections. B.C.’s next general local elections are scheduled for October 2026, with citizens from each municipality, local administrative area and school district electing their local representatives.

[9:15 a.m.]

Elections B.C. regulates campaign financing, election advertising and financial disclosures for local elections under the Local Elections Campaign Financing Act. Other than a provincial general election, this is the largest electoral event we administer. The election period for the 2026 general local elections begins January 1, 2026. The pre-campaign period begins on July 20, and the campaign period begins on September 19. General voting day will take place on October 17, 2026.

Many of the costs for the 2026 general local elections will be incurred in the next fiscal year due to the roles which Elections B.C. fulfils, such as reviewing electoral financing reports. The required funding is needed for information systems, office expenses, professional services, advertising costs and wages for temporary staff at Elections B.C.’s headquarters.

Additional temporary staff are required primarily for the electoral finance program area. As Anton mentioned, these employees perform a critical service, providing guidance on campaign finance and advertising rules to the over 3,000 local candidates, electoral organizations and third-party advertising sponsors. Following election day, these staff transition into reviewing financial reports from political participants and implementing the post-election audit program.

As mentioned, we conducted a comprehensive review of our audit program in 2025 and made changes to increase its efficiency. Previously, candidate and electoral organization audits were mostly completed by external contractors. Now most or all audits are completed by headquarters Elections B.C. staff. One of the key benefits of this change is that there will be less need for recruitment and onboarding, as temporary staff perform more than one role over the course of longer work terms.

The other two main costs for the 2026 general local elections are for information systems and advertising. Funding for information systems includes hardware and software required for temporary staff, as well as the development of an information management dashboard and associated security audit. Funding for advertising is required for public education about key electoral finance dates for the election and the rules for participants. And $4.181 million in event funding is required for preparations for B.C.’s next provincial general election.

These funding requests and planned activities are based upon the assumption that the next election will be a fixed-date rather than an on-demand event. Since the next provincial election is scheduled for October 21, 2028, Elections B.C.’s preparations must begin in the upcoming fiscal year.

Preparations include implementing lessons learned from the last election, enhancing core systems required for election administration, hiring regional field officers to begin community outreach and to initiate the recruitment process for district electoral officers and their deputies in each of B.C.’s 93 electoral districts. We will also be conducting voting-place simulations to test systems and process improvements.

Under the Election Act, district electoral officers and their deputies do not hold ongoing appointments. Rather, they are appointed on a competitive basis for each election, and the appointments are rescinded six months after the return of the writs. District officers and their deputies for the next election must be appointed by April 2027, so the recruitment activities will need to begin in fiscal year 2026-27.

The event-funding requirements also include budget for information systems, temporary staff, office expenses, professional services and advertising costs for recruitment.

Funding for information systems is the largest component of the event budget for the next provincial general election. This funding is for enhancements to the software that runs electronic voting books and the development of a digital database to streamline and improve the accuracy of event-readiness data collected by field staff — for example, voting place attributes.

This funding also includes funding for the purchase and customization of an enterprise asset management and inventory distribution system to replace the current application, which is over 30 years old. This is critical for the secure and efficient management of election supplies and voting equipment.

Development work on the new asset management and inventory distribution system is prioritized early in our business cycle to ensure there is sufficient time to develop supporting documentation and training materials. These materials will also be required for voting simulations, currently planned for the spring of 2027, and will be refined using our experience in the simulations to ensure accuracy.

[9:20 a.m.]

Temporary staff is the other main cost in the event budget for the next provincial general election. In addition to the regional field officers, additional staff in electoral operations are required to onboard the field officers, begin preparations for district officer and deputy recruitment and plan and deliver voting-place simulations.

Also, $720,000 in event funding is required for election infrastructure to replace Elections B.C.’s mission-critical geographic information system, which is currently underway. This request is split between $402,000 operating, and as Kerry identified earlier, $318,000 in capital funding.

As highlighted during our supplemental budget presentation for 2025-26, the total cost of this project, capital and operating funds, was estimated to be $1.427 million over two fiscal years. We recently completed the procurement process for replacing our geographic information system with an industry-standard database and commercial software. Based on vendor negotiations, we’ve been able to revise the project budget to $1.397 million, a decrease of $30,000 over what was projected.

The successful procurement process has also resulted in an updated project schedule with less funding required for 2025-26 and a shift of some funding into 2026-27.

Now I wish to turn to public allowances to eligible political parties. An estimated $3.896 million is required for annual allowances for eligible political parties in fiscal year ’26-27. Section 215.02 of the Election Act requires the Chief Electoral Officer to pay an annual allowance to registered political parties whose candidates in the most recent general election received at least 2 percent of the valid votes cast in all electoral districts or 5 percent of the valid votes cast in the districts in which the political party endorsed candidates.

This funding is $1.75 per vote, adjusted for inflation in January since 2023. The estimate of $3.896 million is based on our best guess at this point in time of what the consumer price index will be at that point in time and includes two payments to eligible parties during fiscal 2026-27.

That concludes my remarks. Back to you, Anton, to present our budget forecast for fiscal years 2027-28 and ’28-29 and conclude our presentation.

Anton Boegman: Thank you, Kerry and Charles. Our budget proposal includes high-level funding estimates for the two out-years, that is, fiscal years 2027-28 and 2028-29. The total operating budget request for 2027-28 is $15.589 million and for 2028-29 is $15.843 million. These estimates represent modest increases to account for inflationary pressures and anticipated cost increases. To mitigate the impact on the overall budget, savings have been identified in other areas.

The capital budget request for 2027-28 is $60,000 for the replacement of the forklift at our warehouse, which has reached end of life. For 2028-2029 the request is $390,000, which will enable Elections B.C. to replace staff workstations as part of a scheduled technology refresh. The existing workstations are also approaching their end of life.

Our requests for public funding of eligible political parties for the out-years are $3.987 million in 2027-28 and $4 million in 2028-29. These amounts include an estimated consumer price index adjustment for each January and will be updated once the actual CPI is known for that year.

You will note that the 2028-29 figure is a round number and represents a planning estimate at this time. This is because the actual amount of public funding payable for the January 2029 instalment will be calculated based on the specific results of the 44th provincial general election. I would like to highlight, therefore, that this number is subject to change.

Consistent with past practices, event funding budgets for ’27-28 and ’28-29 have not been provided. Event budget requirements are driven by the legislative requirements for electoral events, which can occur on a scheduled or on-demand basis. For scheduled or fixed-date events, the detailed event plans and budgets are only finalized during the fiscal year before that event. Therefore, these budget amounts are included in the annual budget process for only the following year.

[9:25 a.m.]

However, in accordance with a request from this committee, we will endeavour to provide event funding estimates for the out-years on a go-forward basis, beginning with next year’s annual budget cycle. It must be noted that there will likely be some fluctuation between these out-year estimates and what is actually presented for each year’s event budget.

For unscheduled events, for additional funding that’s required as a result of legislative change or for other event cost pressures that are unanticipated at this time, the committee has previously established an alternate process whereby the Chief Electoral Officer advises the Chair and Deputy Chair of the committee in writing when these funds are required. We will use this process as required outside of the regularly scheduled committee meetings.

In closing, I’d like to emphasize that Elections B.C. appreciates the opportunity to share with members of this committee the ways in which we use public funding to administer our mandate and serve democracy in British Columbia. This meeting provides us with the opportunity to outline the specific budget requirements that are needed to administer free and fair elections in an efficient and fiscally responsible manner.

Our current budget request includes only the funding necessary, we believe, for the following fiscal years. It also includes our efforts to identify savings and efficiencies in ongoing operations as well as event readiness and capital projects.

We would now be pleased to answer any questions the committee members may have in relation to our budget proposal.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much for that presentation. We’ll now turn to questions by members.

Not seeing any yet, I will go first.

I can see that in the event budget, there is $1.635 million for information systems upgrade for software. I was just curious why that was included in the event budget instead of capital budget, because that seems to be more related to capital upgrades.

Anton Boegman: So I’ll give a very high response or maybe an introduction to a response for that question and then ask Tanya to follow up with the specific details about the differences between operating dollars and capital dollars, and event dollars and capital dollars.

Typically it just relates to the thresholds that have been set in the accounting procedures for the province in relation to what is specifically being done. So there are some software developments that are considered capital under those rules, and there are other ones that are considered operating dollars under those rules.

Tanya Ackinclose: Anton answered that fairly straightforwardly. That is the difference between the capital and operating. It’s based on thresholds and also what is included in that if we own the software.

If we don’t own the software, it’s not a capital purchase. We just pay for a licence fee. There are other things in the line item that are ongoing accounts that the staff have, telephone costs, cell phone costs. So it’s not all related to software in those line items.

Paul Choi (Chair): Sorry. What is the threshold?

Tanya Ackinclose: It’s different based on the different items. Sorry, I don’t have all of the numbers in my head. So hardware costs would be $1,000 for certain things like laptops. If it’s over $1,000, it becomes capital. For software, there are different thresholds. I believe it might be $100,000 for different things. But we can certainly get those numbers for you after this meeting if you would like to see those thresholds.

Paul Choi (Chair): Yes. That would be helpful. Thank you.

Kerry Pridmore: Those thresholds are determined by the Ministry of Finance, that we follow.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you. Any questions by other members? No? Okay. I can ask other questions as well.

[9:30 a.m.]

Your office submission references savings and efficiency related to contractors, as you guys talked about, and training.

Are those savings going to be reflected in 2026-27 budget requests? Are you guys anticipating that’s the approach you’re going to go with going forward?

Kerry Pridmore: That savings is reflected in this current submission. The $55,000 is reflected. And our hope is to continue to demonstrate savings of that nature. Of course, we have to deal with inflation, so there are some pieces there that we’ll have to monitor.

Back to Anton.

Anton Boegman: I can maybe just add that, as you may recall from previous submissions that we’ve had with this committee, a concern for Elections B.C. has been, in different work units that we have, the nature of hiring a temporary employee, training them. They’re developing expertise, and then they leave and take that expertise with them.

We found the same scenario applies for the use of some contracted services. The example is the audit function. The audit function that we’ve been performing is a relatively new program at Elections B.C. In the beginning, we relied heavily on a contractor that we secured through a procurement process. Deloitte was conducting those audits for us. But now we’re using the previous model of using Elections B.C. staff to do that, to be able to, again, develop this expertise and retain this expertise within the organization.

One of the highlights that we did have in our budget request is the temporary staff. We’re now retaining them for a longer time period so that we can bring them on board, first, to work in the compliance role. This is the front-line role, reaching out and speaking to stakeholders and political participants to explain the rules in these sorts of things, and then they’ll transition into the audit role following that.

These are the ways that we’re trying to minimize the use of contractors to be able to retain the expertise necessary within Elections B.C.

Donegal Wilson: You’ll have to bear with me. This is a first committee meeting, so my questions may be irrelevant, but I hope not.

The budget submission states that there have been changes to the project schedule for the GIS project. Do you anticipate returning any funding from the ’25-26? I see that it’s moved into ’26-27.

Kerry Pridmore: Yes. The total amount of the project has been reduced by $30,000. We do believe that that project will stay on track now that we have secured a contractor and that contractor is now in place, having finished the procurement project, so we don’t anticipate further changes.

Donegal Wilson: But the question was whether the money for ’25-26, because it was in the budget, is going to be returned and moved into ’26-27?

Kerry Pridmore: Yes. Sorry, I apologize.

Donegal Wilson: How much will be returned from this fiscal into next? Do you know?

Tanya Ackinclose: It’s approximately $300,000, and that’s split between capital and operating.

Donegal Wilson: So your budget this year will be under $300,000?

Tanya Ackinclose: Correct. Yes.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. No other questions. I will continue on.

For STOB 50, you can see there’s a 2 percent wage increase for both management and employees in ’26-27. Does that include any in-band increases as well? And what percentage of dollar amounts for wage inflation and band increase are projected for ’27-28 and ’28-29?

Kerry Pridmore: The first part of the question, it does not include any in-band increases.

Paul Choi (Chair): It doesn’t?

Kerry Pridmore: No. And perhaps I’d need you to repeat the second part of the question.

Or did somebody catch it?

Paul Choi (Chair): What percentage in dollar amounts for wage inflation and in-band increase are projected in the future? Is that going to be part of the projection for the future as well or no?

Tanya Ackinclose: Yes, I can answer that.

For the out years, we have assumed 2 percent increase again for the schedule As and the management staff. And we will adjust that once the negotiations are done with BCGEU.

[9:35 a.m.]

Donegal Wilson: For the salary of the Chief Electoral Officer, somewhere I read — I can’t find it right now — that there wasn’t an increase for that particular position. Is there not a mandated inflation increase or something related to that position?

Tanya Ackinclose: No, there is not. We don’t apply a percentage on that until we know what it actually is. So at the time once that increase happens, we will request the additional funding at that time.

Anton Boegman: The salary for the position is set in the statute.

Paul Choi (Chair): Yes.

Donegal Wilson: But the statute does not include any increase like mandatory with inflation?

Tanya Ackinclose: No. Not mandatory with inflation, no.

Paul Choi (Chair): We see that there were three FTEs that were approved by the committee last spring. Just wondering if they’ve been hired. If so, when? Any updates on that?

Kerry Pridmore: There were three positions that were approved, and all three have been hired. Fairly quickly after the decision from the committee, we moved on that.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay.

Kerry Pridmore: They are now in place.

Anton Boegman: Those included staff for the investigations team, which as you recall was…. We had determined that it was understaffed, given the scale of their mandate, particularly on the local election side, where the number of investigations had increased significantly over the past election.

We also now have our IT security analyst in place, who is working to ensure that the IT programs are meeting the necessary standards for cybersecurity and internal security.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, thank you.

The office is reporting $3.89 million underspent for ’24-25 for operating budget while absorbing $1.833 million for the January 2025 payment of the annual political party allowance. Do you anticipate a similar underspend for ’25-26?

Anton Boegman: Could you respond to that, please?

Tanya Ackinclose: Yes. No, we do not. That was…. Mostly, the surplus was from our election budget, and that’s why the surplus was so high. We do not anticipate this for ’26-27 or our current fiscal year.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Any other questions by other members, including online? I don’t see any hands.

Thank you so much for your time today. Again, I want to take this opportunity to thank the Chief Electoral Officer, Anton Boegman, for all your service and wish you best luck in the future as well. Thank you very much.

Anton Boegman: Thank you very much.

Paul Choi (Chair): We will take a ten-minute recess. Thank you.

The committee recessed from 9:37 a.m. to 9:51 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, welcome back.

Next we will be hearing from Sheila Dodds, acting Auditor General.

You’ll have 25 minutes for your presentation, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. We do have a timer on the screen today to help us stay on schedule.

I’ll now turn it over to you, Sheila, if you could introduce your staff and yourself and begin your presentation. Thank you.

Office of the Auditor General

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

The Office of the Auditor General acknowledges that we live and work, with gratitude and respect, on the traditional territories of the Indigenous Peoples, and we acknowledge our office is located on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking People, now known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.

With me today, I have on my right Bridget Parrish, who is the acting Deputy Auditor General. On my left is Marie Thelisma, who is the assistant Auditor General responsible for our critical audit support services. To her left is Dean Goodman. Dean is our acting executive director of strategic priorities, performance and policy. He has had a big hand in helping us with our service plan. To Bridget’s right is Nathaniel Morbey, our CFO, who, of course, has been heavily involved in supporting this presentation. And we do have Amanda Welch, another staff member from our office, our legal counsel, who is in the gallery.

It’s my pleasure to be with you here today and to have the opportunity to present our budget submission, our three-year service plan and to speak to our most recent annual report. And it’s been a real privilege to be acting Auditor General. It has been 11 months now, and in this period, I’ve really gained even further appreciation for the unique role of this office and the role of this independent officer of the Legislature reporting through this committee and through the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts. It really has been a privilege.

Today I’m going to provide you with highlights from our most recent annual report and then a brief update on where we’re at in this current fiscal year, then highlights from the three-year service plan that we have provided to you and lastly I’ll walk through the budget submission for the ’26-27 year.

Our annual report, which covers the 2024-25 fiscal year, demonstrates how we fulfilled our responsibilities under the Auditor General Act. We had a busy year.

In that last year, we completed our independent audit of government’s consolidated summary financial statements, and that was for the preceding year. Those are finished up in the summer. We issued 18 independent Auditor’s reports for financial statements of other government organizations, and those are for entities that are consolidated into government’s summary financial statements. We issued 15 independent Auditor’s reports for other assurance engagements.

We delivered four performance audit reports on government programs and services. We delivered our second annual follow-up report, and that consisted of 24 independent review reports on government’s progress towards implementing audit recommendations from four years’ worth of audit reports. Lastly, we conducted and reported on a special examination at the request of the Legislative Assembly.

[9:55 a.m.]

It’s a lot of work, and you can’t do that without the staff. It really takes a talented and dedicated group of professionals to deliver on this work. As an office, we have been on a very focused journey the last few years to support the professional growth and engagement of our employees in an inclusive and respectful workplace.

One major accomplishment from that last year is that we fully implemented a new compensation framework policy. This is providing a fair, equitable, transparent and competitive approach to salary progression that reflects work experience and successful job performance.

Last year, we saw an increase in our employee engagement score, and we’ve seen a steady increase in employee engagement. Our score of 76, which is included in our performance indicators in the annual report, surpassed our target for last year, and it surpassed the previous year’s results. In the three years reported in our annual report, our overall engagement score has gone from 66 to 76, so a pretty significant increase and, really, an indicator of the work that we’ve been doing to support the people and the culture of the office.

Another goal that’s highlighted in our annual report was that we accomplished a project to modernize our IT infrastructure through what we called the IT rationalization and migration project, also known as RAMP. It was launched in January 2024 and completed in 2025. The project, which was supported by this committee with funding for that project, was successful. We successfully moved from an in-house data centre to an off-site, professionally managed service environment.

The process also involved a rationalization piece to look at the business tools, the licences, to streamline operations and to improve overall effectiveness. As a result, it did deliver substantial cost savings. It has minimized our risk exposure, and it has introduced significant operational efficiencies.

The transformation of our IT infrastructure has positioned us for improved performance, scalability and the long-term sustainability of our IT operations while establishing a new level of cybersecurity maturity. As we’ve spoken to this committee when we were looking for support for the project, we have a responsibility to protect the information that we have, and we have access to government information for our audits so it’s really important that we were able to modernize that infrastructure.

Now I’ll turn to the current year, the year we’re in. We are in quarter three of the ’25-26 year, and we are on track to deliver on our commitments in terms of reports for the Legislative Assembly and within our approved budget.

I will note, though, that the BCGEU job action is impacting our ability to progress some of our performance audits. It’s difficult to access staff when they’re either on strike or having to cover the work for essential services. So we’re doing what we can, but it is causing some delays for our work.

As an office internally, we have continued to really focus on creating that engaged and respectful workplace through efforts that we’ve been focusing on to enhance the quality and efficiency of our audits and the related support functions. The pride in the quality of work is part of the engagement that we have.

We’ve been focusing on increasing our capacity to examine areas of growing importance to MLAs and the people of B.C. We’ve been implementing our growth-based employee performance development and management processes that align with the strategic needs of the office and are supported by our compensation policy. We’ve been prioritizing and implementing elements of our employee training and development framework — again, just really supporting that growth of our professional staff.

So things are going well this year.

Now I’ll turn to the service plan, looking ahead to the three years — 2026-27 to 2028-29. The service plan aligns with the Auditor General Act, the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act and the performance-reporting principles for the B.C. public sector.

It’s an interesting time for me to be sharing this forward-looking service plan, as it will be taking effect under a new Auditor General. But despite the transition, it doesn’t change the foundation of our planning — that we are looking at constantly continuing to improve the ways that we manage our work and also always looking to foster that engaged and sustainable workforce while maintaining the quality of the audits and demonstrating their impact.

Every one of our objectives in the service plan is tailored to enhancing the work we do for the Legislative Assembly and how it contributes to financial transparency and accountability and improvements in public sector programs and services. Our service plan underscores the strengthening level of employee engagement that we’ve been seeing through these annual staff surveys.

[10:00 a.m.]

Our growth-based compensation framework and performance development and management processes are now fully implemented, and they are key drivers behind the strong results that we’re seeing in employee engagement.

For this next year in particular, a core strategy for us is to continue to enhance the quality and efficiency of our audits and the support services in the office that support delivering those reports. We are reviewing audit management practices and identifying opportunities to accelerate audit staff development to increase the quality and efficiency of the actual work. We’ve also been investing time in working towards enhancing corporate performance metrics and reporting to support that continuous improvement.

From a people-management perspective, we will continue to prioritize and implement our employee training and development framework. That includes ensuring that staff participate in training that supports our commitment to fostering an equitable, diverse, inclusive and culturally safe workplace and to developing Indigenous-related competencies.

Those are the highlights of our service plan. I’m going to now just transition to the budget submission. Our budget submission focuses on the resources that we’re requesting for the ’26-27 years, so just the next year. You’ll see that the operating budget that we’ve asked for is the same as our current-year budget.

Now, although we are facing some inflationary pressures, we look to find efficiencies and to reallocate some of the planned expenses to be able to absorb inflationary pressures within the same budget envelope. We have budgeted a 2 percent increase in base salaries, with approximately 1 percent attributed to wage inflation and 1 percent to performance increases.

However, the ongoing savings from our IT modernization project have enabled us to absorb the planned increase in salary and benefits. We also have a planned increase in travel costs, which is partially inflation and partially related to our work. We’re absorbing that pressure as well.

Now that our IT modernization project and office renovations are complete, our anticipated capital budget requirements are significantly less in the current year from last year. We’re requesting a capital budget of $280,000, mainly related to maintaining the ongoing IT operating and structure.

In the budget tables that we provided for those two out-years, for ’27-28 and ’28-29, our estimates include actual amounts where they’re known. Our operating lease is fixed, so those amounts have been factored in. Where we’re anticipating inflationary pressures in those out-years, we factored in a 2.5 percent inflation rate. We are also forecasting the need to increase our staffing by 1 FTE, starting in ’27-28.

In conclusion, we’re maintaining our momentum as an organization. We’re going to continue to find ways to enhance the quality and efficiency of the audits that we deliver and the related processes that support delivering those audits.

Since my appointment as acting Auditor General last November, I’ve received tremendous support from all the staff in the office, from our financial and performance audit teams, from critical audit support services and from the executive and leadership teams. We’ve been achieving a lot. I think we’ve been very successful, and it has been done as a team. I couldn’t have done it without these excellent people. We will continue to provide our best work on behalf of the Legislative Assembly and the people of B.C.

With that, I’ll conclude my remarks.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you very much for the presentation. We will now turn to questions by members.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Congratulations on the completion of your IT project and also on the improvement of your workplace improvement score. That’s a notable achievement, and I really appreciate you including that as part of your report to us. It’s always wonderful when people and workplaces improve, so thank you for making that a part of this discussion.

When we’re talking about your plan to coming back for IT, you’ve implemented this project. How are you reviewing or determining the success of this project? Have you budgeted for that monitoring?

Sheila Dodds: Thank you for the question. I would say the success of the project has been the fact that we have decommissioned on-premise servers that were running very old software.

[10:05 a.m.]

We now have our modern servers set up in Kamloops, in the Kamloops data centre, which is where the government programs have their servers. We have an operating agreement with the company that will maintain those servers.

In the office, for what we’re managing internally, we do have software that we need to purchase to support, whether it’s tracking applicants on a recruitment process or a system for being able to internally track our time. We do have people do timesheets and understand where the work is going. We have licences for the different software and for the cloud services. We’re always looking at that, but we do forecast what we will actually be needing.

We have identified significant savings in that we had software that we were no longer using that we were able to get rid of. We’ve been able to rationalize the licences that we require, so there are licences that haven’t been renewed because we determined that we no longer needed them. As we look to license new products, we do look at what we need, not just blanket licensing.

We’re going to be monitoring the strength of the system, the cybersecurity awareness, to continually ensure that we are protecting the data that we have and, as part of our focus on looking at operational efficiency, looking at how we best use the IT staff and resources we have to deliver that. We don’t have a specific, ongoing, monitoring program, but it is part of monitoring our office performance, time and budget.

I’m just going to turn it to Bridget, the Deputy Auditor General, and see if she has anything to add.

Bridget Parrish: She can tell that I do have something to add.

Before we started the RAMP project, there was an IT assessment to see where our maturity level was as an organization able to safeguard that type of information. Now there’s going to be, I believe, another one to see where we’re at. That’s a routine thing that would be occurring — not every year but every third year.

That’s one of the ways that we monitor and make sure that we’re keeping up to date and that we’re not falling behind. Of course, our budgets would adjust if we found something wrong there that we needed to address.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you, Bridget. I’m just going to give Marie Thelisma, who’s the assistant Auditor General responsible for that to see if Marie has anything to add.

Marie Thelisma: I totally agree with what Bridget has put forward. Our team consistently assesses, and we also not only assess the technology but also assess our staff to see their technical needs and make sure that they’re up to date on all the technology that we are using. That’s part of the process of monitoring and making sure, like Bridget was saying, that we do not fall behind.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Excellent, thank you.

I do have other questions, but I’m willing to wait for other members to ask.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Any other questions? You can continue, MLA Blatherwick.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Fantastic.

I noticed that you emphasized you have a growth-based compensation framework. Could you tell us more? You were talking about it as being related to the improvement in your workplace improvement score and some workplace efficiencies. Could you describe this more for us?

Sheila Dodds: Yes, I can. That framework is actually supported by this committee as well. A couple of years ago we were at a point where we realized it was very difficult to be competitive in the marketplace to attract skilled professionals. At the time, particularly on the financial audit side, the accounting firms were struggling to keep staff, and we were in competition with them.

When we were looking at the way that we were applying the framework that the public service uses for staff classification and compensation, we were finding that it was very difficult if we needed to hire somebody in, say as a manager of financial audit. The salary they were expecting and that we would need to pay was higher than for our existing staff, a manager who’d been on the job for three years, because there was no mechanism to recognize their growth in that position.

What we had proposed to this committee was a framework where we would align with the public service framework. We do classify our staff, and the compensation ranges are consistent with the management classification and compensation framework that the province uses. But we wanted to be able to have a way to identify levels of performance within a range and to identify compensation that would be able to match with that.

[10:10 a.m.]

It’s sort of similar to the way the union positions work, where there is a classification and there are steps within it, but our steps are now based on performance. What we were able to do with this framework was to define performance expectations for all levels of staff in an introductory position and what that looks like as you progress from an auditor to a manager to a director, to see what that progression would be.

So if you are meeting those performance expectations and are developing and growing in the role, there’s the opportunity for a small increase within that compensation band.

What that framework has done is provide clarity and transparency on how we classify people and how we compensate people. It allowed us to recognize, for somebody coming in from outside: “Based on your experience in the role you have, this is where you will be placed in our compensation framework. By demonstrating growth and performance over time, you have the ability to move up within that salary range within that band.”

Having that clarity created a more competitive situation for us, but it provided staff with that understanding of: “This is what I need to be able to do to be able to progress in the organization within my current role and to be able to progress to the next role.” I believe very strongly that that clarity and the transparency that supports the fairness on how we are compensating and progressing staff has really contributed to the engagement. People see where they fit, and they know they’re being recognized for growing in their roles.

I would just see if my colleagues have anything to add.

Bridget Parrish: I would just say that it also really helps improve the performance conversations, because the expectations have been set out so clearly that staff are able to do a fairly good self-assessment and know how they’re progressing, themselves.

It makes the performance conversation so much easier for our supervisors. It just makes it really about trying to grow someone and not about a number on a page, like a 4 or a 5. It’s really more about: “Okay, these are the skills that you need to have, and let’s make sure you can get them. So how are we going to get them for you?” That’s the type of conversation that we’re having now.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you, Bridget.

We’re seeing the impact in the quality of the work, and we’re seeing the positive impact in staff engagement as well.

Jennifer Blatherwick: That’s fantastic. Thank you. I really appreciate how you focused on the importance of clarity when you’re talking about employee expectation. It is so important.

I’m just looking, also, at your projected increases for wages over time and that this year you’ve requested a 1 percent increase for wage inflation. You touched on this, I think, a little bit in the presentation, that there is projection for 2027-2028, 2028-2029. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Also, one of the things we’re seeing from some of the other offices is an increase in benefit, the usage in benefits and an increase, especially as we’re seeing more women employed in these positions. Sometimes there’s a shift in how benefits are consumed, and the costs that are related to that. If you could touch on any of that…. If you have information about it, that’d be great.

Sheila Dodds: Thank you for the question. Yeah, we have factored in, as I’d mentioned, a 2 percent increase to salaries, some of it related to the ability to progress. That’s not a blanket progression. Again, it’s based on growth and performance in a position, and it was difficult to anticipate inflation.

What we’ve done is…. We haven’t asked for an increase to the budget because we will absorb that. If that increase ends up being more than that, then we will figure out how to…. It probably would be our professional services budget that we would look to, to be able to fund any increase there.

In terms of the benefits, we are seeing, I guess, with some of the maternity and parental leaves, that there is that long-term leave, but that’s been a pretty consistent pattern for a number of years.

I’m wondering, Nathaniel, if there is anything that you would have to add on the benefits piece.

Nathaniel Morbey: Sure. I’ll just add that the PSA handles a lot of our benefits for us, and they charge us a flat rate for everything other than parental leave. As Sheila was saying, our parental leave has been very similar over the last decade. We’ve had a long history of people taking parental leaves from the office.

[10:15 a.m.]

If the PSA were to charge a higher flat rate, that would affect us. But I have no indication that that will happen, so we’ve used the current rate.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Actually, that’s a wonderful indication of office culture. If you’ve had a very steady uptake of parental leave over time, that means it’s good that you’re not having a sudden increase. It’s a good indicator of a healthy office culture, which is a compliment to you.

My last question. Did we touch on finding a tenant for the space? We had talked in the past about finding a tenant for your space.

Oh, I’m so sorry. I see that there’s a smile happening there.

Sheila Dodds: We have been trying desperately to find a tenant. When we first went forward with the proposal to renovate the building and reduce our footprint, the real property division of the Ministry of Citizens’ Services was the project manager. They were convinced that they would be able to get a tenant with no problem. Then the landscape has shifted.

We have been doing quite a bit of work. I’m going to actually ask Marie Thelisma to speak to it, because she’s been the one pounding the pavement. It’s really unfortunate. We’re seeing buildings emptying, but we are still working hard to find a tenant, because it’s a fabulous space. But Marie, could you speak to what you’ve been doing?

Marie Thelisma: Yes. The property is listed with a realtor, with the property manager. So with our Colliers realtor, it is listed. We’ve had a couple of interests. However, it hasn’t been completed, or it fell through in the end. We’re trying to even just paint the floor, that area. When we did our renovations, we of course left it as is to see if the new tenant…. Whatever they wanted to do, they could do it. But now we’re just going to do a simple paint, just freshen it up a little bit to see if we can attract different people to rent it.

We’ve had lots of discussion in the office on trying to come up with creative ways of maybe how we could use this, including some of our other independent offices. So we will see what will come out of it, but it is very hard right now. The market is very competitive. We have lowered the price per square foot that we started with to make sure that we are competitive in the price that we are asking per square foot. So we are just waiting, but thank you for the question.

Jennifer Blatherwick: I appreciate it.

Sheila Dodds: We are in regular contact with the realtor, who is tied to our landlord. It has been difficult, but we’ve been pushing it constantly since we’ve done that renovation. It’s just a very difficult time.

Jennifer Blatherwick: All right. Well, please be sure to let us know if you do rent it. We will celebrate with you if a rental finally happens.

All right. That was the end of my questions.

Paul Choi (Chair): Any questions from other members?

I have a question myself. According to the ‘26-27 budget submission, there were 102 staff following the management compensation classification framework. So 18 are schedule A, and 12 are other. Just curious who represents the “other” category there.

Sheila Dodds: The other category is our executive and our executive leads. So the way that the government’s compensation framework works, it goes up to the band 6. We have positions up to band 5, but the members of executive are classified in the executive classification.

We do have…. Our principles in our performance audit, financial audit and our professional standards groups are classified in the executive lead band.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, thank you.

Another question I have is…. I don’t know if this might have been touched on, but I just want to clarify. The office reported $1.893 million operating underspend in ’24-25. Do you anticipate that underspend for ’25-26 as well?

Sheila Dodds: Not to that extent. Right now we’re tracking on budget, but we do have some vacancies, so we are in the process of building up a couple of our teams. Depending on the timing, if there is delay in filling some of those positions, there could be an underspend on salaries again.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, and could you tell us roughly how many vacancies you currently have?

Sheila Dodds: I think we probably have about ten.

Marie Thelisma: Yeah, about ten.

[10:20 a.m.]

Sheila Dodds: About ten, primarily in our…. Actually, it might be a bit more, because we’ve just had a couple of people move on in our financial audit area. So we’re posting on the financial audit area.

We also always have a turnover there because we are a training office. We train CPAs. We’re in the process of lining up new CPA students to come in for the new year.

We are building up our performance audit team. In our critical audit support services group, there were a number of vacancies last year, but those are all filled.

So I would say about ten positions that we are filling right now over the next few months.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much.

Are there any other questions from members?

Donegal Wilson: On your RAMP project that you did, there were some anticipated savings on that project. Are they being realized, or have those expectations been adjusted at all?

Sheila Dodds: Thank you for the question. Yes, they have been realized. We realized more than we had anticipated when we brought forward the project plan, the budget submission — I guess that was two years ago, in 2023 — that we were able to…. Our CIO referred to it as cleaning out the garage.

When we had all of the servers on premise, the IT team went through what was there to decide what needed to be moved to Kamloops. We ended up needing less storage than we had planned for in Kamloops at the time, so we have room to expand over time as we need more.

And as I mentioned, we have rationalized some of the licences, so we’ve seen some savings on IT licences, and I think on some of the software as well.

Actually, maybe, Nathaniel, did you have anything to add there?

Nathaniel Morbey: Do you want me to quantify it?

Sheila Dodds: If you wanted to quantify it, that would be great. Thank you.

Nathaniel Morbey: Yeah. It was about…. It was over two years, right? The RAMP project was over two years, and the savings each year was almost half a million. I think the whole project from the original conception of it is close to $1 million under budget that we’ve saved over those two years.

Sheila Dodds: And then a savings ongoing in terms of projected licence costs.

Nathaniel Morbey: And then the ongoing savings.

Sheila Dodds: So part of our underspend last year was related to the RAMP project.

Donegal Wilson: Can you quantify what the savings for this year will be?

Sheila Dodds: This year is ongoing operations. We’ve done that shift, so now we are maintaining the servers in Kamloops and maintaining our operations. The budget that we’ve put forward for ’26-27 and what we had in our budget for this year is reflecting the cost of those operations, and we factored in the savings.

You’ll see there’s a decrease in the IT expenses in the budget, because we have reduced that, and that’s part of how we were able to absorb inflationary pressures with this budget request for ’26-27.

Donegal Wilson: I think that answered it. Thank you.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much.

Any other questions? Seeing none, I want to thank you for coming in and presenting to us.

We will take a short recess for ten minutes.

The committee recessed from 10:23 a.m. to 10:41 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Deliberations

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, we are back. I’ll call the meeting back to order and seek a motion to meet in camera for deliberations. I’ll get a member to move that motion.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 10:41 a.m. to 11:16 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Now we will take two minutes’ recess for the officers to come in and get settled in. Thank you.

The committee recessed from 11:16 a.m. to 11:21 a.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, we are back. Next up, we will be hearing from Dr. Jennifer Charlesworth, Representative for Children and Youth.

Thank you very much for coming in. You have 25 minutes for your presentation, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee. We do have a timer on screen today to help us stay on schedule.

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

Review of Statutory Officers

Office of the Representative
for Children and Youth

Jennifer Charlesworth: Thank you very much, Chair.

Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be with all of you today. Some of you I’ve had the opportunity to work with, both as MLAs and as members of this committee. Others, we are new to one another, so I look forward to working with you.

Today I’m here to discuss the RCY budget submission, as well as to share a little bit about the work of our office and address any questions that you have. Joining me today are Pippa Rowcliffe, who’s the deputy representative responsible for reviews and investigations as well as corporate services, and John McNeill, who is the relatively new CFO and into a new position as executive director of corporate services. So I’m well supported by my colleagues here.

As we begin, it’s my practice to acknowledge the people on whose traditional lands we are gathering today. I hold my hands up to the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples and the Songhees and Esquimalt or xʷsepsəm Nations, and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to do this work on their lands.

Before I dive into the budget details, I’d like to take a few moments to situate the work of our office within legislation and describe our responsibilities to you as Members of the Legislative Assembly, as well as to young people in B.C., because I know that some of you are familiar with our office but others less so.

Following a review of the child welfare system in 2006 by the late Hon. Ted Hughes, the Legislative Assembly voted unanimously in support of the Representative for Children and Youth Act. Then we were established in 2007, and I am the third representative. There are three statutory responsibilities that have been enduring through that time.

The first is to provide individual advocacy to assist young people and those who care for and about them, to ensure that the children and youth receive the designated government services that they are entitled to and that they need.

The second is to review and investigate injuries and deaths of children who either are in care or have been receiving reviewable government services in the year prior to their injury or death. I’ll talk a little bit more…. There are some interesting nuances there, but we’ll get back to that.

Then the third area — we’re very fortunate in British Columbia because not all advocate offices across the country have this authority; B.C. has stood out in this regard — is to monitor government programs and services, their effectiveness and government’s response to recommendations that my office puts forward.

In day-to-day practice, what this looks like is that we undertake direct service work through advocacy, working alongside young people. About 2,000 young people a year are served. We review thousands of injury and death reports. There were close to 7,000 in ’24-25.

[11:25 a.m.]

From these stories and these data points, we try to discern patterns and trends and identify opportunities for improvements. We don’t want to just continue to see the terrible things that are happening. We want to move upstream and try and prevent them, which I think we’d all agree is really important.

We’re the only entity in this province that has that kind of statutory authority and has the privilege, quite frankly, of seeing things from multiple vantage points and putting the pieces of the puzzle together. There are tremendous people out there doing advocacy work for sure, community agencies, social workers in the ministry and whatnot. But oftentimes they are very constrained, and they don’t have a statutory mandate. We’re unique in that regard.

In undertaking this work, I’m accountable to the Legislative Assembly, of course, as well as to the children and youth of this province — all children and youth. Much of our work focuses on those who are more vulnerable, by virtue of all sorts of things going on in their lives and who are experiencing harms. But as we see and we learn through this, we see opportunities to improve the systems for all children.

We are a rights-based organization. Of course, Canada is a signatory to the UN convention on the rights of the child, the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and the UN declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. We uphold the rights of young people as they’re expressed in all of those conventions and declarations.

That gives you a little bit of context for us. I’m going to be focusing on two of the three statutory responsibilities today, as this is where we’re experiencing considerable and outsized pressure, but please note that all of our three statutory responsibilities are intertwined. We’re very complementary in our work.

I’ll be referring to two documents that we’ve shared with you in advance, and there are three components to our budget submission. Two focus on our people and our capacity. We are requesting four additional FTEs to sufficiently staff our advocacy and our reviews and investigation statutory function. The third component of our request relates to the inevitable fiscal impacts of inflation.

I want to start by saying that I have been very prudent over the 7½ years of my term and have often not asked for resources. I’m a former executive director of a non-profit society. I know how to make the dollar stretch. Having said that, I’m at that place where, with additional understanding that we have, I’m coming to you knowing that we are in a difficult fiscal climate. I just want to let you know that I’m very happy to talk with you about that, but I also am not coming here with a request that is in any way frivolous.

I also want to provide a little bit more context of the challenging times that we are in and the consequences for children. Of course, we’ve got challenging fiscal circumstances, but also social, political. That has resulted in significant instability for many children, housing and food insecurity, difficulty being able to stay connected to school, given some of the things that are going on.

Young people are suffering. There’s no question about it — post-COVID, the mental health crisis, the toxic drug poisoning that so many of you know a great deal about. No doubt as MLAs, you’re hearing from families of children with disabilities, with mental health and substance use concerns, where they’re unable to get the help that they need.

We’re also connected, as you may well be through your community-based work, with young people who are struggling because they don’t know if and where they belong. They’re being exploited. They’re experiencing violence. We’re seeing a rise of trafficking and sexual exploitation. And they don’t have a safe place to live. That’s the world we live in, and these are challenging and complex.

You know from your MLA work how intertwined mental health and substance use, family distress, historical trauma, current trauma, violence…. They’re all interconnected. What we feel very strongly about is that now more than ever, our statutory responsibilities to walk alongside young people and to understand the dynamics are very, very important.

Let’s talk about the first element of our request today. When we met with the committee in the spring — some of you were there — we said that we were going to be undertaking, under John’s leadership, a very robust workload and caseload analysis. We have done that.

[11:30 a.m.]

We’ve been concerned for some time based on anecdotes and stories and reports from our staff that they were feeling under tremendous pressure, within advocacy in particular, but what we needed to do was to quantify that.

Particularly, how do you quantify complexity? It’s one thing to say: how many stories or reports are coming in? How many are you responding to? But how do you understand the complexity of the work, given the nature of things that are going on for kids? Now we have that capacity.

Our current budget supports 12 advocate positions plus three staff who are responsible for receiving calls and providing what we call early resolution, where appropriate. We’re grateful to this committee for providing us with supplemental funding in April that enabled us to increase our advocacy complement. But because of the rising complexity and seriousness of the advocacy cases our direct service staff work on, they’re carrying an average of 75 cases each. There’s been an increase of 51 percent in annual advocacy case volume since fiscal 2022.

Because of this volume, our advocacy managers…. So we have our front-line advocates, and then we have advocacy managers. They’re there to assist in supervision, in identifying when we need to escalate cases to higher levels of review, and to assist staff to manage the complexity of their work. Our advocacy managers are now carrying cases, where that isn’t the intention of that role. We’re fortunate that they’ve stepped up to do that to just beat the demand.

Our dedicated advocates are doing everything they can to continue to meet our responsibilities and deliver high-quality services. We have very clear standards of what those quality measures are, but this workload is too much. It’s not sustainable, and I worry about the well-being of our staff.

We’re maintaining our standards of responsiveness right now, which means that we respond either immediately or, if a call comes in after hours, within 24 hours to any youth and to any call from caregivers within three to five days. But there’s no question that if we continue at the pace that we have, timeliness will begin to suffer. That concerns me because so many times we get called because families, young people, caregivers are not getting any response from the system. We don’t want to escalate their stress and their trauma by being unresponsive.

In accordance with the workload analysis that John led, we’re requesting three additional FTEs for advocacy as well as the continuation of the position we requested in our supplemental request in April.

Again, I would just want to say this is not based on speculation. I’ve been before this committee before when they’ve said, “Well, tell us when the numbers increase, and we’ll come back when our mandate has expanded,” etc. What I’m saying is this is what we need right now. We may have an increase in a number of cases going forward. Likely we will, but we’ll come back to you at that point. This is just what we need right now.

The other thing that’s part of that request under advocacy is related to getting some professional legal services to assist us in navigating the transition to jurisdiction to First Nations. This is a historic shift. As you know, child welfare is…. First Nations can create an Indigenous governing body under federal and provincial legislation, and they can begin to resume jurisdiction over child welfare. Many are starting small — prevention — and then moving up, in time, to protection.

Any transition is tricky. We don’t want to see children fall through the cracks, so we need some good advice. How do we show up to support the jurisdiction, to support the transition, while also respecting autonomy and self-determination?

This, by the way, was a consideration in our report Don’t Look Away, which talked about how the lack of understanding and the uncertainty associated with who had what role when there was a movement towards jurisdiction resulted in no eyes on a child and a tragic death.

The budget request for our RCY advocacy services is $571,000.

The second component of our request regarding increased staffing focuses on the need for robust and stable staffing for our mandated review functions.

[11:35 a.m.]

As you know, we receive reports of critical injuries and deaths, and on average, that’s 575 a month. We review every story that comes to us. Some of them meet the threshold of what’s called critical or life-altering injuries. That includes suicidality, self-harming, significant mental health crisis, toxic drug poisoning. Sexual and physical violence are huge, exploitation and trafficking, gang involvement.

It also includes children who are experiencing profound loss because they’ve lost a sibling or a parent to the toxic drug poisoning crisis that we’re in. Unfortunately, many are harmed within the very environments that they should expect safety, within foster homes, within group homes and with extended family caregivers. We review those as critical injuries because of the level of harm.

When we do those reviews, what we’re able to do is, first of all, immediately refer things to advocacy, if we think that that’s going to be helpful, or escalate up into the service delivery system to the provincial director of child welfare or the Indigenous provincial director so that they can take a closer look at what needs to be done for that child. We do that, obviously, with a tremendous amount of respect. Many times they are aware, but sometimes they are not.

The other thing that this allows us to do, when we have such volume, is we begin to see those patterns and the trends. We begin to see when there’s a growth, for example, as we have been seeing, of sexual violence against girls. Then we’re able to say: “What do we need to do about that? Who needs to know? What do we need to understand about that? And what can be done about it?” That’s why those investigative analysts are so critically important to our work.

To give you a sense of the work of reviews and investigations, the report that we released, Don’t Look Away, in July of 2024, which called for a fundamental transformation of the way in which…. It set the new North Star for child well-being that government has embraced. Frankly, it’s having ripple effects across the country, with Manitoba and Ontario in particular. I was just in New Zealand sharing our work as well.

People are coming to terms with the outdated systems that need a fundamental overhaul. All of that was started through our reviews and investigations. We wouldn’t have been able to do that had we not understood what was going on, been able to act on that story and then been able to see patterns and trends.

The trend line of reports coming to our office is going up. Since fiscal 2022, the reports that are within our mandate — so those are the critical ones that by law require us to review — have increased by 27 percent. Our current budget supports six of the analysts that are the front line for this work, and then we also have two staff responsible for the documentation, the data quality and administration related to looking at those reports. They also document all of the out-of-mandate ones so that we can begin to see patterns there.

As a result of the workload analysis, again, we’ve established a target of 495 reviews of in-mandate critical injuries and deaths completed per review analyst annually. We feel strongly that that target is essential to maintaining our quality standards and timeliness. Our staff right now are already working at full capacity. As we watch that trend line going up, our staff will exceed the sustainable workload levels shortly. Our analysis indicates that one additional investigation analyst is needed for fiscal ’26-27, and the costs associated with this position total $120,000.

The consequences of us not being able to do that are…. We’re concerned that it’s going to be increasingly challenging to complete the necessary work, to appropriately review each report and to identify those trends that I noted. Again, I just want to say that we’re the only entity in the province that provides this critical oversight, and if our role is weakened, so too are our young people and our ability to act on behalf of young people.

Just to break down, once again…. The total base salaries, and this is in the budget documents we’ve shared, for additional advocacy and review staff is $447,000. All of the positions we’re asking for there are band 2 positions under the management classification and compensation framework.

[11:40 a.m.]

We’ve also noted in our request the necessary supplementary salary costs for benefits, travel, etc. We’re also requesting the support to ensure that we have the professional expertise to address the jurisdictional considerations. That total for the staffing and our capacity is $691,000.

The other thing that I wanted to turn to now is our inflationary risk. We are requesting a $489,000 increase there, and that is to ensure that our salary requests are appropriate. It’s been a long-standing practice to only request inflationary wage increases in the GEU settlement years. So we’ve not had an increase to salaries and benefits since the collective agreement expired.

But what we received was direction from this committee to actually put in incremental adjustments every year and include wage and inflation for this year and all future years regardless of the collective agreement coverage. So we’ve adjusted our practice accordingly, and that’s reflected.

We have used the Bank of Canada rate of 2 percent inflation target as a proxy, knowing that we don’t exactly know what’s going to arise out of the collective agreement. To account for inflation, we are requesting $209,000 for a retroactive 2 percent increase to salaries and benefits for fiscal ’26 and $280,000 for a 2 percent inflation adjustment to salaries, benefits and all other operating expenses for fiscal ’27. That concludes the summary of our request.

I also wanted to say, though, that we recognize that everybody in government is going through a review of expenditures. We, too, are doing that as well, and I wanted to let you know that we have been closely monitoring a number of areas. One is leave liability. That is when staff don’t take vacation and then they end up getting paid out in time. We’ve managed that down, and we hope to save about $100,000 compared to previous years for this fiscal.

We’ve cut down on in-person meetings and travel, and we’ve got all sorts of other ways that we’re managing that to ensure that we still travel to meet with young people. But we have done that through our regional service delivery model, so we expect to save close to $250,000 this year.

We’ve reduced the amount of grants that we have issued in the past and expect to save $120,000 there. What we’ve done, though, is reallocated some of those savings to staffing supports to address those urgent resource needs. But we do expect that the portion of our savings will be returned to consolidated revenue fund for this current fiscal.

At the end of the day, our total budget is relatively small, given the work that we do. My request today totals $1.292 million, approximately a 10 percent increase, and would put our total budget at $14.248 million.

I just want to say, too, that despite the fact that there are cuts in many places, the government has recognized that cutting direct services is not in the best interests of young people. The Ministry of Children and Family Development, for example, has received an increase, including a funding lift of almost 25 percent for their direct service staff. So that provides a little bit of comparison.

With that, I’m happy to answer any questions.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you so much for your presentation. We’ll now turn to questions by members.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you so much for your presentation. I am so sorry that I can’t be there in person today.

It’s a pleasure to see you again. Thank you for the work that you and your team do to keep children and youth safe in this province. We deeply appreciate what you do.

Now I’m going to talk about finance stuff. My apologies. We could talk about you and your kids and the changes you make all day. I have been trying to follow through the documents during your conversation. I think what I’m struggling with a little bit is that I don’t have a clear picture of your organizational flow chart as it relates to the work.

[11:45 a.m.]

I think it’s because we’re using slightly different terminology in different sections of the report. Could you just streamline it for me? When you bring in a case, you have early resolution staff. You have advocacy managers. You have investigation analysts. But I just want to make sure that I’m understanding it correctly. Could you do me a flow chart of how it works? I think that will help me understand.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Wonderful. Great question. Thank you.

Let’s take them each separately, because there’s a different flow chart for each. So advocacy…. Imagine we have text, chat, emails, phone calls. People come to us, and they say: “We need some help. We think we need some support.”

What happens right away is that there’s an intake call coordinator that receives that call. They’re on all the time in business hours. They have the immediate conversation with them. They gather the information about the nature of their concerns, who they are, whether they’re interested in having a follow-up conversation or whether they’re simply seeking information.

Then what happens is that that gets, essentially, triaged. Some are addressed right away. Others go to what we call an intake advocate. They’re ones that gather additional information to better understand the nature of the concerns.

Again, we see that as early resolution. If they can address the concerns right away — it might be coaching them on self-advocacy, identifying who it is that they need to go and follow up with, identifying the resources that are available — we address things there.

From there, any of the things that are more complicated or complex will go to what we call a case-carrying advocate. They’re the ones that will walk alongside a family or a young person for a much longer period of time. They’re the ones that will receive the information, and then they might be reaching out to the government bodies to find out what’s going on, to participate in meetings, to try and resolve impasses or conflicts, to identify the kinds of expectations that we would have in order for that young person’s rights to be upheld.

That’s the flow — call, triage, initial assessment. When we have a longer term responsibility to that young person, then they go to a case-carrying advocate. That’s where we’re talking about…. Our case-carrying advocates have got 75 cases.

Now, to give you a sense of that, what we see is a tremendous growth in the complexity. That includes that…. Most of the children that are being served by our case-carrying advocates have three or more issues going on — mental health, substance use, disability, poverty, housing precarity. They don’t have a safe placement. So that requires a lot more coordination. That’s the change we’ve seen over time.

Is that helpful in terms of advocacy?

Jennifer Blatherwick: Yeah, I think. Maybe if I can just ask…. Consider the intake call coordinators, the intake advocates. Those would be part of what you would refer to as early resolution staff?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Exactly. Yes.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Okay. Then in the document, the case-carrying advocates that you’ve just described would be your advocacy managers, which is the terminology we’ve used in the document?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Right. Okay. Thank you for clarifying. No. There are the advocates, the case-carrying advocates. Then, as in any organization, you’re going to have supervisors or managers. We have managers. Those managers are separate from those 12. They are supposed to provide the supervision.

Then if, for example, the advocate says, “I’m getting nowhere; I need your help,” they will undertake escalation to higher levels within the system and then may bring it up to the executive director, our deputy or myself to, essentially, escalate.

The case-carrying advocates are not the same as the managers. The managers are separate.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Thank you. Actually, looking at the document, that is clear. I think I was just getting a little….

Then you mentioned that there were two work flows. The investigation analysts are part of a separate work flow?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes. Exactly. Let’s talk about the reviews and investigations. Just so that you know, in our annual report — what is that? Page 38? — we’ve tried to identify that work flow as well.

[11:50 a.m.]

But basically what happens is if a child or a youth under the age of 19 is in care or is receiving what we call reviewable services — that includes mental health, substance use, disability services, early intervention services — if they’ve experienced an injury or have died, the expectation is that the public body providing that service would submit what’s called a reportable circumstance.

When those reports are received, we receive a copy. They’re received within the public body, so it might be the health authority, it might be an Indigenous child and family services agency, it might be MCFD. Once those are received, they’re to come to us.

Those reportable circumstances, RCs is what we call them, come to us. We receive all of them. It might be that a child has broken an arm because they’ve fallen off…. A child in care has broken an arm, and they’ve had to be hospitalized or have a whatever. Those come to us as well as if a child experienced a catastrophic overdose and is experiencing a brain injury.

We, through our investigation analysts…. They start to triage again. What are ones that are associated with the delivery of the service and that meet that threshold of critical or life-altering, and what are those that are what we call out of mandate?

It’s important to note…. For example, if a child is repeatedly experiencing injuries, physical injuries like broken bones, then maybe we have to question supervision. So we kind of track those behind the scenes, but they don’t take us long to enter.

The ones where we focus our attention are those that are critical or life-altering. That’s sexual violence, suicidality, self-harming, mental health crises, toxic drug crises, gang affiliation, trafficking, those kinds of things. Once our investigative analysts have identified those that are out of mandate, they go into the records — we have access to all of the integrated case management records — and they take a look at what the origin story is, what might have contributed to this.

They identify what has happened, what the history is and what has been done. They evaluate whether the response of the system is appropriate to those circumstances. They then prepare a two- to three-page summary, and they bring that to me and to my senior staff. Every month we review all of those. It’s typically between 250 to 350 that we review, every single one, and we try and identify what we need to do to respond.

So that’s, again, the process of…. This work is done outside, it comes to us, we review it, our analysts do the first analysis, and they bring things forward to us, and oftentimes, they’ll have recommendations. Recommendations might be to go to advocacy, escalate this as a case of concern, do further review or, potentially, investigate. Then I make the decision, alongside their expertise.

And then if we decide to do a more comprehensive review or an investigation, then we have another part of that team that we haven’t focused on here — might be confusing. Those are investigators. They are part of the reviews and investigations team, but we have sufficient capacity there right now to fulfil our responsibilities.

Where we don’t have sufficient capacity is that investigative analyst that is figuring out what we need to do here and what we need to identify. Their work is very, very important. Even when I don’t take things to further review or investigation, they enable us, through their wonderful data analysis, to see these are the kinds of patterns and trends that we’re seeing, so we can get ahead of the game if we’re starting to see an uptick in certain things.

Is that helpful? I know it’s a bit complicated.

Jennifer Blatherwick: All right. Let me explain it back. It’s that you have an investigation analyst who is the first line of defence. Sideways to them, sort of laterally, is the investigator. They sort of stream the workflow, and if there’s further work to be done, then that goes off. But if there is a determination that it really does need to be escalated, the line of responsibility then goes to you and your senior staff.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes, yes. And I should say the executive director responsible for reviews and investigations may see a situation and go: “Well, we need to do this right now.” And they’ll apprise Pippa and myself of that and then just go and do it. It doesn’t have to wait for my thorough review on the monthly basis.

[11:55 a.m.]

But yes, you’re absolutely right. That’s the analyst, sorry, that front line, if you will, and then we make determinations and flow things accordingly from there.

Jennifer Blatherwick: Okay. All right. Thank you for that very thorough explanation. I think I was struggling a little bit with the terminology but also where your pressure points were in terms of the intake. This really helps me understand why it is that you are specifically asking for this case at this time. So thank you. I appreciate it.

I will stop now in case there are other questions.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yeah, thank you. Just to reinforce, I’m so appreciative of the questions.

Our pressure points are really in the ability to fulfil our mandate around the case-carrying advocates walking alongside young people to get what they need when they need it and to assess the growing volume of reports of critical injuries and deaths.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Hello, and thank you for your continued, amazing work that you’re doing for kids in the province.

This is actually not necessarily budget related, but I did have a question. You had mentioned when there are multiple injuries for the same child, that that would trigger further analysis within RCY B.C. Are there concurrent investigations that take place, then, within the Ministry of Children and Family services?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Such a good question.

I would say no. What ends up happening — and this is where I think we’ve got a unique role — in my experience with MCFD and the Indigenous child and family service agencies that are delegated is that they look at episode by episode. So you’ve kind of got: “Okay. This child has had this broken bone.” And then we move on.

The child has had a broken bone, but the dots don’t get connected. But we do. We actually have a way of tracking where there are kind of recurring situations.

A really good example, actually, that I’m sure you can appreciate, is that we track when children are missing from their placements, from their foster homes or their group homes. That is not actually in and of itself a critical injury, because it’s not life altering that they’re missing.

But we track if they’re recurring. If they’re missing over and over again, we see that as a pattern. So we might say, “Look. This child has not been in their placement, in a safe place, for 12 out of the last 30 days,” or “They’re constantly going missing and experiencing injuries while they’re missing. This is a pattern, and we need you to pay attention to that.”

We see that, and unfortunately, that is not something that’s common practice within the ministry.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): I see this as problematic. I wasn’t aware that there were not concurrent investigations at the….

Jennifer Charlesworth: Oh, I should probably clarify. Concurrent. I might have misunderstood your question. I’m sorry.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Okay. Yeah. I’ll just clarify my question then.

Let’s say that there’s a child in care. They have repeated injuries, and that would trigger an analysis by your office of saying: “What’s the pattern? Why? Is there a problem with supervision?”

Thinking back to Colby’s story and the lack of supervision — right? — and the lack of checks, has there been a change, then, reflecting on those previous circumstances outside of RCY B.C., within the ministry? It’s like: “We see a kid that has multiple injuries, and now we’re going to begin an investigation into the care.” Like, is that…? You know what I mean?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Yes, I do. Right.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Because in Colby’s story, we’re talking about things that were happening with the child. He wasn’t receiving the follow-ups that he should have with social workers and other people doing the checks and balances that would have found out what was happening potentially — well, obviously.

In the case of the representative’s office finding out that data set, then, are you checking to make sure the ministry is also looking at that case?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Right. Okay. Great question. Bear with me because there are actually two things going on here.

One is, like in Colby’s case, we never received a reportable circumstance, because if you back it up, there were no eyes on, and they weren’t seeing the kinds of things that he was experiencing. So he was not on our radar until he died. So that’s one thing.

[12:00 p.m.]

Is the ministry following through on their policy? Are they complying with their policy and their guidelines and their practice standards and whatnot to ensure that children are getting the kind of oversight and care that they need? That’s one question.

If there are significant circumstances…. Well, there are two things that the ministry does. One is that they audit policy compliance. They kind of have a cycle. I think it’s every three years, but I don’t know exactly.

But they have an audit cycle. They’ll go in and, without an issue identified, they’ll say: “Are the staff meeting the standards?” That’s one thing.

They also have a situation where if a significant injury or death has occurred, they will do their own review. Their review is more limited than our review. So that’s one thing.

The other thing that you’re talking about, though, is if, for example, there are things that kind of don’t get on the radar necessarily because they seem to be more childhood challenges and injuries and things like that. This is a tricky one because it’s only once you start to see the pattern that you might be going: “Well, I wonder what’s actually happening there.”

I would say we don’t…. Our investigative analysts, if they’re seeing that there are multiple what we call non-mandate injuries…. Every report I get indicates how many non-mandate injuries. If we see a high number, we’ll go back in and figure out what that might be.

The ones that we really pay close attention to are those where they’re missing and no one knows where they are or where they’ve experienced some sort of physical injury but we’re not entirely sure if it meets that threshold or if it was as a result of the lack of supervision and support that they needed.

I don’t know if that answers your question.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): It does.

I just have one follow-up, if that’s okay, Chair.

My only follow-up is, then, given the circumstances of the Don’t Look Away report and knowing that the child Colby was…. No eyes were on him for so long that he…. There was no one checking, because they didn’t see. So what is the delay or the time frame between getting those reports from the hospital or whatever…? What’s the time delay between that report coming and the analysis being done, for example, so that we’re identifying those critical injuries?

Related to the budget, is this one of the concerns within the budget? That you do not have enough people to look at those cases, to do the analysis, to flag things that may be of critical interest to intervene in? Is that what you’re saying?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Fabulous question. Okay. So about 80 percent of the reports that we receive are received by us within 30 days, from between one and 30 days of the injury having occurred. So that’s good.

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Too long.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Pardon me?

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): Too long if a kid is waiting.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Well, that’s true, but then that’s why we also have advocacy, because we can respond more quickly there.

In terms of our analysis, right now, for example, all of the reports received in the month of…. What month are we in? We’re in October. All of the reports that we received in September were completely reviewed and reviewed by me this Wednesday. So we’re always about three weeks after the end of a month, a month’s package, when it comes up to senior staff for in-depth review.

It could be, for example, that an injury report might come two weeks after the injury. It comes in to us, and it might come up to me four weeks later. If, however, the staff ever feel like there’s something that needs to be done right now, they will bring that up with the executive director and will notify us and take action accordingly.

Does that answer your question?

Elenore Sturko (Deputy Chair): It does, and it also emphasizes the importance of ensuring that proper staffing levels are there to catch these types of critical injuries and incidents that are happening so that we can intervene as fast as possible to possibly even save a child.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Exactly. We have had situations, for example, where the team has said: “We’re really worried about this child right now.” I’m thinking of an example. They’ve been in and out of hospital emergency rooms. They have no safe place to stay. They’re using very…. They’re polysubstance users, and they’re being preyed upon, which is an increasing problem that we’re experiencing in this province.

[12:05 p.m.]

So my staff would say: “We need to do something right now.” The advocate might reach out to the young person saying, “How can we be helpful?” and/or we can also raise that and say to the provincial director’s office: “We’re very concerned about this young person. They are one overdose away from death. So what are you doing, and how do we wrap around this child?”

As you know, it’s very tricky, because if young people are deeply entrenched in their addiction or are being trafficked or exploited, they may tell us to buzz off. But it’s like: “What else can be done to try and keep them as safe as possible so that we don’t lose eyes on them?”

That is the pressure. I worry that we won’t be able to have as quick a turnaround, and that’s what we’re committed to.

John McNeill: Can I just add that an added challenge is that because the organization is so lean, there’s not any fat to reallocate, right? Otherwise, we would just manage it internally, but that’s why we’re here.

Given the gravity of the situation, we know how difficult it is, but there’s nothing to reallocate. It’s a very, very lean organization. Otherwise we wouldn’t be asking. We would just deal with it internally. But here we are.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you. Just because we are starting to run out of time, and we have a lot of budget-related questions, I would ask the members and everyone just to ensure that the questions are directly related to the budget we have at hand and to keep your answers concise. On those other questions, can I ask the members to follow up after?

Donegal Wilson: Building off my colleague here, looking at the budget, your own charts clearly show the very sad trend that these things are increasing, but your forecasting in your budget is flat.

Your own charts show that by fiscal year ’27, you’re already not meeting your own targets, and your budgets for ’27 and ’28 are not reflecting what your own charts are showing you. Why is your forecast not accounting for that future?

Jennifer Charlesworth: A great question. Maybe I’ll take a quick stab at that, and then I’ll pass it over to you, John. One of the things in the feedback that we’ve gotten from this committee in the past is: “Don’t be speculative. Deal with the real numbers.”

What we’re saying is that to deal with the real numbers in fiscal ’26, we need this amount, with the understanding that if this trend line continues, if this forecast is accurate, then we would come back to you for subsequent years to say: “This is what’s now happening, based on our workload analysis.”

John McNeill: That’s a pretty sufficient answer. I’ll leave it there, unless there are follow-up questions. I can expand, but in reference to the Chair’s request, I’ll leave it there.

Paul Choi (Chair): Any follow-up?

Donegal Wilson: I agree in not being, necessarily, speculative or using a crystal ball, but there is a trend line. There is data to back what’s happening. My concern is that even in this budget, you’re still extremely lean, with no ability to pivot.

I guess that at a 10 percent increase already, my concern is that this is a trend coming forward from previous years. We’ve failed to…. We’ve kept you so lean. That curve is going to keep going, and it’s going to be increasingly hard for the asks coming forward, I think. I guess it’s more feedback.

John McNeill: Like Dr. Charlesworth said, the committee has instructed us not to be speculative. We’re trying to show fiscal restraint by really limiting our ask to the next fiscal year only. If the committee would like us to adjust our ask to account for what we forecast in ’28 and ’29, we’re willing to do that.

Donegal Wilson: I’m new to the committee, so don’t take that as direction. We will have a conversation offline.

Bryan Tepper: Thanks for being here. I’m really just going to kind of answer, which we could wait to discuss till later. On the same thing, I do appreciate you guys using the budget like you do and being lean. You’ve done this in the past, from what we saw in the springtime, till now.

I think what we’ve got as the problem is that the fiscal situation we’re in has left everybody…. What happens is that we’ve got youth that are in trouble, they need the services, and the services aren’t there, because we’re cutting the budget. Then the youth suffer more.

[12:10 p.m.]

We’re in this bit of a spiral, but I know you guys are trying to keep it where it’s supposed to be and work with what you’ve got. So I just want to say thank you to you guys right now. It’s really not a question either.

Jennifer Charlesworth: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Donegal Wilson: On the grants section, you had mentioned that you had rolled back grants. Are those grants to families for front-line things or grants to other service organizations?

Jennifer Charlesworth: Great question. No, what we’ve used grants for is to partner with research institutes and universities to undertake research based on their areas of expertise. So no direct service grants to families. We don’t deliver any of those kinds of case management services. It’s more to bolster our internal expertise and capacity with resources in specialized research institutes, primarily.

Paul Choi (Chair): Any other questions? Not seeing any, I have a question.

Thanks for clarifying the new FTEs you’re asking for. I know that 0.4 that you’re asking for. I just want to clarify. Is that the legal service? Or is there something else that was related to that? You said it’s corporate services.

John McNeill: To make sure that there’s HR, finance or IT support for the organization as it grows, we have a markup for 10 percent, related to admin for corporate services. That 0.4 FTE is in order to support this on-boarding.

Of the four new staff, we’d like to bolster our corporate services teams by 0.4 of an FTE. That way, if we continue with that pattern, we can avoid having to come to the committee with specific requests for records management staff or training and development staff. That’s something that we can manage internally based on need and the requests of our staff.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, thank you. If you can also clarify the status of the corporate service team and service approach now with the Human Rights Commissioner dedicated to internal corporate services. I believe you might have touched on this a little bit, but if you can clarify that. Has the corporate service agreement concluded? Or does your office continue to share some services there?

Jennifer Charlesworth: The easy answer is that it’s concluded. They have their own corporate services now.

Pippa Rowcliffe: What’s important to know is that that relationship concluded, but we do still make use of some very important shared services that are offered by PSA. We’ve noted those in our submission as well.

John, do you want to say a few words about the things that we do have access to? We are fairly efficient in terms of how we come up with it.

John McNeill: What I’ll say about BCOHRC, that relationship is included. And included in our budget submission was the adjusting entry to our future budget, because when we were here last, it was a supplemental request. From a mechanics perspective, we couldn’t deal with that then.

We’re minusing the five FTEs that we were given to share those services. So we’re dropping five off, and then we’re netting out or zeroing the increase in salaries related to those five FTEs. So that’s coming off, but it’s balanced by also removing the internal recovery that we would have had from OHRC for those salaries.

The whole thing is kind of a net-zero cost, with the minus five FTEs. In what we do in our office to try to be administratively efficient, we participate in government IT support services, the OCIO, which is why our IT team is able to be just three FTEs, mainly focused on desktop support and delivery and the support of our case management system, which is unique to our office. We also do payroll through government centrally, so we are trying to take advantages.

Even though we’re not sharing services with OHRC, we are sharing services where appropriate and where there are savings with government, like I said, to help keep us lean and make sure we can put as much of our resources as possible towards our staff who serve children and youth.

Paul Choi (Chair): Well, thank you so much for that. I know we’ve got, potentially, some questions that we can follow up after. I want to thank you for coming and presenting to us, on behalf of the committee.

We will take a break until around 1 p.m.

The committee recessed from 12:15 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Deliberations

Paul Choi (Chair): We are back. Thank you everyone for coming back in such a speedy pace.

I will now call the meeting back to order and seek a motion to meet in camera for deliberation.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 1:01 p.m. to 1:11 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): The committee is now in public session. We will take two minutes for the next presenters to come in and settle in. Thank you.

The committee recessed from 1:12 p.m. to 1:14 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Welcome back. Thanks for coming in.

[1:15 p.m.]

Next we will be hearing from Kasari Govender, Human Rights Commissioner. You have 25 minutes for your presentation, followed by 30 minutes for questions from the committee, and we do have a timer on the screen today to help us stay on schedule.

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

Review of Statutory Officers

Office of the
Human Rights Commissioner

Kasari Govender: Good afternoon, members of the committee, Chair, Deputy Chair. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here to review our budget, as always.

Before I continue, I want to recognize with gratitude that we gather today on the unceded and ancestral territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən People, including the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, noting that as an office, we work to fulfill our responsibility around decolonization and addressing Indigenous rights, along with our appreciation to the first keepers of this land.

I’m joined today by my colleagues Deputy Commissioner Bernard Achampong and Chief Financial Officer Leoni Gingras. Given your instructions to focus entirely on the budget in this submission, and given our minimal requests this year, I’m going to be quite brief this afternoon in my comments. I look forward to your questions after that.

This spring, I appreciated the opportunity to present before this committee twice, first to provide some background and an overview of our work and then to make a supplementary funding request. This is reflective of the unusual way that last year unfolded with the election in the fall and with no opportunity for officers to present our budgets before the provincial budget was announced.

However, given that the committee composition has changed a few times since then, I do want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about our context before delving into the budget request. But as I say, I will be brief, and then I’ll turn to the fiscal update as well as the budget submission.

The role of B.C.’s Human Rights Commissioner was established through the human rights code amendment in 2018 through Bill 50. The Human Rights Commissioner’s legislative mandate is to promote and protect human rights through several tools provided for under the human rights code, which I detailed, as I say, in my spring appearance.

I’m supported in my work by 42 FTEs. There are 43 altogether, including me, and I’ve hired those FTEs pursuant to section 47.06 of the code to support me in fulfilling the statutory mandate.

The mandate to promote and protect human rights is a task wholly focused on systems change. My office is entirely separate from B.C.’s Human Rights Tribunal, which is the quasi-judicial part of the human rights system in B.C. We do not have any role in the filing, triaging, settlement, mediation or adjudication of human rights complaints under the human rights code.

The Human Rights Commissioner role was created in 2018, and I was the first commissioner appointed in that role in 2019. My task in my first term included both establishing the office — building the office, the staff, the resources that we needed, the physical space — as well as delivering on our mandate. I am now into my second term. I’m a year and a bit into my second term. I’m pleased to say that we have developed a strong and stable organization over the last six years.

This includes staying true to the three-year budget that we presented in October 2019, about a month after I started this role; building our full complement of staff over the next three years, as originally envisioned; moving into our main office in Vancouver; building out our suite of policies and internal processes; delivering the substantive mandate in a number of significant ways, including providing duty-bearers some guidance, such as public agencies, and initiating our first public inquiry and many inquiries since then; engaging in law and policy reform initiatives; publishing numerous research and policy reports; and launching our first public education awareness campaigns and workshops. Again, much of that is since then as well.

We have also worked closely with our partners in B.C.’s human rights system, the tribunal and legal clinics who represent human rights litigants. We have worked together to establish a no-wrong-door — that’s what we call it — portal to best serve the public by making the human rights system more accessible.

[1:20 p.m.]

Staying true to the original vision of how we would deliver on my statutory mandate since the inception of this office, we have never asked for any significant increases beyond those required to fairly compensate staff in alignment with inflation and in accordance with the increases granted to the rest of the public service.

This consistent vision guided us through the start-up phases of the organization and continues to form the backbone of our organizational structure, human resources and strategies to deliver on the legislative mandate. This consistency demonstrates our accountability to British Columbians, to this committee and to the Legislature as a whole. I take very seriously the fiscal responsibility that we owe to taxpayers and more broadly to the British Columbia public and to the primary role of this committee in ensuring our responsible use of public funds.

You may have seen, on Tuesday, I tabled my office’s new strategic plan for the rest of my term as Human Rights Commissioner. I have, as I say, almost four years left in my term. It’s a plan to act on areas where we can make the most impact in promoting and protecting human rights in B.C., while being alert, agile and responsive to emerging human rights issues.

We are uniquely situated to do this work. We are the only body legislatively mandated to promote human rights issues across B.C. We are fully independent, and we have powerful tools at our disposal to ensure that we can make a difference.

This strategic plan lays out the substantive priorities of our office from 2025 to 2030, which guides both the scope of the work and, of course, the associated resources that are needed to do that work.

I’ll turn to an overview of the budget. As you will have seen in our written submissions, BCOHRC is requesting a 2026-27 operating budget of $8.03 million, followed by an operating budget of $8.19 million in 2027-28 and $8.36 million in ’28-29. This represents only a 2 percent inflationary increase and no additional requests. In making this budget case, we acknowledge the fiscal environment and continue to be as fiscally prudent as possible, as demonstrated by this modest budget.

Informing this request are our final numbers on last year’s spending. I’m pleased to report that we functionally spent our entire budget this past fiscal. On a line-by-line basis, though, we did have a few variances.

We had some overspends. On base salaries, we overspent by 22 percent and on benefits by 21 percent. This is because of the move to an internal corporate services model, and we were also investing in staff rather than contractors, which increased those budget lines. To reinforce, though, these are all internal allocations. These were not additional funds that we came to the committee for.

We also spent 16 percent higher in supplementary salary costs — that’s for maternity and parental leaves — and 9 percent higher in legislative salaries, which is the commissioner’s salary, which is, of course, not set by the office but set by Lieutenant Governor in Council and is outside of our control. As I say, these were all internal variances, so these overspends were offset by the same underspends in other categories, so in other line items.

In professional services, we underspent by 24 percent. As I said, we spent more on salaries and less on consultants, moving away from a reliance on the contractor side of things and to try to build our long-term internal capacity and sustainability.

We spent significantly less than we thought on advertising and publications. That’s because this year’s public campaign did not involve externally paid advertising. Savings were used to manage other funding pressures in other areas.

We also underspent in grants. Grants are only given if funding is available, and funding is used to support budget pressures in other STOBs as well as bring in external research and external expertise.

I’m going to turn, then, back to some more detail on this year’s proposed budget. In October of 2023, we presented our three-year budget for the period 2024-25 to ’26-27 to the committee for consideration. At that time, the committee recommended operating budgets of $7.668 million for all three years, as well as $35,000 in capital for each of those three years.

[1:25 p.m.]

In May 2025, the committee recommended supplementary funding for up to $188,050 for operating expenditures in this current year, ’25-26, for inflationary expenditures and the commissioner’s salary and benefits. And as I say, I know many of you are aware that the process this year was unusual in sort of framing it as “we get our base budget, and here’s the supplementary funding,” because we didn’t have the corresponding opportunity that we have this year, this fall. That brought BCOHRC’s operating budget for ’25-26 up to $7.856 million.

As I’ve already noted, we are requesting for next fiscal an operating budget of $8.03 million, followed by an operating budget, as I say, of 20 percent more each year, so $8.19 the next year, $8.36 the next. This represents only a 2 percent increase for salaries, benefits and select operating costs, including travel, office and business expense and professional service contracts. So 2 percent on all of those line items. We have used the most recent consumer price index to guide our salary increases. As we all know, the collective agreement for those bound by it is not yet finalized.

We are not requesting any increase for amortization or for grants. In 2027-28 and ’28-29, so the two out years, we are requesting an additional 2 percent per year, again, for the same reasons, inflationary, plus an increase for the commissioner contract, for my contract, based on this employment contract. Again, that’s outside of our control.

For the sake of clarity then, at the risk of repeating myself, we’re only requesting the budget required to cover inflationary costs and no other increased costs.

As part of our commitment to fiscal responsibility, we have taken a number of steps to find efficiencies and cost savings, particularly in the IMIT, the information management and technology realm, where we have faced significant pressures. We’ve been moving to cloud-based storage, and we’ve seen significant cost savings from that. We’ve reduced the number of cell phones in use and reducing their cost in services and reducing the number of computers on hand. We have also improved budget literacy across the organization, including the delegation of budget responsibilities which has resulted in efficiencies as decision-making is now most often happening by those who are best positioned to find savings in each expenditure.

Finally, we’ve been working on increasing staff resources over more expensive external contracted resources, as I’ve already mentioned, that we did last year. That, of course, is more cost effective and more sustainable for the stability of our organization.

Turning for a few moments to the cost of inflation, the practice of all statutory officers, including us, has been to incorporate wage inflation requests in budget request cycles based on the best information available at the time. Since we have not been able to confirm inflation for future years, obviously, we have typically not included inflation for the request for future years. This request for wage inflation is reoccurring, dependent on the broader public service inflation direction.

As we’ve noted already, since the new collective agreement is not yet finalized, our request this year is based on estimating wage inflation in the future, using, again, the consumer price index as a guide. Based on that 2 percent inflationary measures, we are requesting an additional $138,000 in salaries and benefits for the upcoming year. I understand this request is consistent with the other independent offices.

Additionally, inflation measures of 2 percent are being applied to key operating items such as supplementary salary costs, travel, professional contracts, business expenses, advertising and information systems to sufficiently cover inflationary costs. We are requesting $36,000 for this, which brings our total funding request for fiscal ’26-27 to $174,000.

The implications of not approving the inflationary requests for all the operating costs include challenges recruiting and retaining staff based on a reduced ability to provide competitive wages and reduced ability to manage rising operating costs caused by inflation, which negatively impacts our ability to meet our operational and our statutory obligations. Inflationary measures are simply required to maintain current operations.

While I’ve spoken to the importance of our financial stability, it’s also important to note that our approach has allowed us to learn as we have developed, a key element to the success and sustainability of a new organization. As you know, for example, we have shifted our corporate service model to bring services in-house, allowing for an approach more tailored to our individual needs.

[1:30 p.m.]

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

On a related note, our office works hard to bring our guiding principles and a human rights–based approach to life in all of our work, both outward-facing in how we operate as well as how we operate internally.

We are grateful to have been named a Top Work Unit recipient for the B.C. Public Service in 2024, and that award reflects exceptional teamwork, job satisfaction, accountability and passion of the people and leaders at BCOHRC. Those recognized are in the top 20 percent of the work environment survey, which is a questionnaire measuring employee engagement and satisfaction with their jobs and workplaces.

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

Those are my comments and submissions. Thank you, again, for the support that this committee has given to promoting and protecting human rights in this province. I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you so much for your presentation.

We will now turn to questions by members.

Donegal Wilson: Thank you very much for the presentation and your work.

I’m new to the committee, so forgive me if it doesn’t make sense.

In your report, you mentioned that the committee previously declined to fund in-band increases associated with your retention plan. But then it goes on to say that you made those decisions and proceeded with it anyway. Are those increases included in this budget then?

Kasari Govender: We haven’t asked for anything additional. We never got those increases to start out with. We have found internal funds in our budget. So yes, they are accounted for in here, but we never came back to ask for an increase on that. We found internal efficiencies to pay for it.

Donegal Wilson: So you moved it from another line item up to your salaries?

Kasari Govender: That’s right. Yeah.

Donegal Wilson: But it is in your….

Kasari Govender: Or found efficiencies within salaries. Sorry to interrupt you.

Donegal Wilson: So in the salary section, it is reflective of the commitments you’ve made?

Kasari Govender: Yes.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. I have a question regarding your current office space. I understand it’s a hybrid workplace model you have. Could you provide details on the current lease agreement and the office’s request for a 2.06 percent increase in its occupancy budget?

Kasari Govender: The request that we’ve made is built into the lease itself. The lease is held by real property division, within government, not by us directly.

Did you want to add anything to that?

Bernard Achampong: No. That’s okay.

Kasari Govender: It’s a commitment that real property division made. Again, it’s part of the existing agreement. It’s not a renewal of the lease. It’s part of the existing agreement. I’m not sure if that answers the question.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Then, in terms of the fact that it’s hybrid and staff are located in different regions, how many staff, approximately, actually work out of the main Vancouver office, and what is the current remaining term for the lease — and the square footage, roughly, if you have that on the top of your head?

Kasari Govender: It’s a little bit hard to answer. It’s a little bit less clear-cut than it might seem, because we have staff coming in and out all the time. There are some folks who work full-time from the office, but a lot of people who work partly from the office. So it’s a little bit hard to estimate exactly how many people work there every day.

[1:35 p.m.]

We also use the boardroom office space quite a bit. Whether we’re there all day or not, we host all external meetings in the office space that we have, as well as lend it out to other independent officers who mostly don’t have a presence in Vancouver. So we’ve found some use there.

Do you want to add to that?

Bernard Achampong: The other thing I’ll add is the majority of our staff work from the Lower Mainland, so they have access to the office. When we’re talking about 43 staff, I would say about 25 of those work in the Lower Mainland and have access to the office at any given moment.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay, and when you say that it’s a hybrid working model, is it divided into each staff, on average, for example, working certain days out of the week in person and other times remotely? Or is it that certain staff work completely remotely and then some staff are working in person completely?

Kasari Govender: We leave folks to make those decisions for themselves. People are allowed to opt in. Some people prefer to work full-time from the office. Some people prefer to work…. Nobody works 100 percent from home, in the sense that we have commitments sometimes to be in the office. But we have some people who work more often from home versus in the office. It’s not like we’re all there two days a week or we’re all there three, so it’s a little bit harder to give you exact numbers on it.

Paul Choi (Chair): Right, right. Okay.

Bernard Achampong: But we do have a flexible work policy that guides this, and we do have the telework agreements that each staff will enter with their supervisor so that it’s clearer, when you come. Those that choose to come to the office more often, it’s clear as per the telework agreement.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. What’s the approximate size of your current office in the main Vancouver office? And how many staff are there on average day?

Bernard Achampong: I don’t have the square footage at the top of mind, but my understanding is that it could hold up to about 36 staff. And very similar to many organizations in the public service, we do find that, I would say, at any given moment, about a third to a half will be the occupancy of the office.

Donegal Wilson: It’s not a large ask, but in your capital operating budget at $30,000 and $5,000, which is exactly the same as last year, is that being driven by an actual IT plan, or do you just spend up to that, and when you’re out, you’re out?

Leoni Gingras: I will speak to that. It’s basically just a contingency in case things break.

We’ve been in the office now for five years. As chairs and desks and filing cabinets need replacing, we just ask for that as a contingency. We have no firm plans for those amounts. We mainly use the office of the chief information officer, and we get the computers through them. We don’t buy the computers directly. We just pay that as part of those fees to OCIO. So we don’t have specific equipment that we need to buy with that funding. It is for contingency and breakage.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Seeing no other hands, I will continue on with some questions here.

I have a question regarding grants. We understand that your office provides grants to academic institutions, particularly the University of Victoria, which wasn’t used till later in the fiscal year, during spring, when we received the budget at that time. Is there currently any remaining unused grant funding at UBC or other institutions from the previous fiscal years?

Kasari Govender: We do have some money that’s held by UVic to pay for two pieces of ongoing work. One of them…. We have a relationship with their co-op programs. We receive numerous co-op students a year in our different departments, and that’s paid for through the grant funds that they’ve held. It’s sort of an efficiency for us, to be able to have that already held there. Because they are the employer, technically, not us, they pay those directly out of those funds.

The other piece is we have a research program that we’ve been working with them to set up, so that we have more easy-access funds when we want to access that for research support in various parts of our organization. It’s both about supporting students to do that work, but also about getting the kind of expertise that we need on certain files. We have a strong research team in-house — not large, but a strong research team in-house.

[1:40 p.m.]

Of course, the scope of our mandate is extremely broad, so we couldn’t possibly hold all that expertise in-house. It’s very useful to have a relationship not only with UVic but with others as well. We’ve had research through academic institutions, others as well. But with UVic, we have that relationship where they can draw on that pool of funds to provide that research.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Do we know roughly how much is currently being held?

Bernard Achampong: Yeah, currently we have close to about $160,000, and that is going to be drawn for the next term for co-op students. Each co-op student costs about $27,000.

We’re also looking at seed program research activities that Kasari spoke of, and that will probably expand over the next six months about $50,000.

Paul Choi (Chair): So the $50,000 is the amount that will be provided in the later fiscal year?

Bernard Achampong: No, in the next few months.

Paul Choi (Chair): Next few months. Okay.

Is there an intent to give new funding to the institutions in this fiscal year or no?

Bernard Achampong: It does depend on, at the end of the fiscal year, where we stand. But we’re also very committed to have relationships with other universities. So rather than it being just UVic, start a conversation with other universities, just to diversify and also build more stronger relationships with academia across the province, particularly UNBC in the North or TRU in the Interior, really making sure that we can have that sort of expertise from various parts of the province.

Kasari Govender: So we’re working on building those relationships, but we don’t at this point have plans this year to put funds into those other…. We don’t have anything in our budget for this year to put into those other universities.

Paul Choi (Chair): Right.

Leoni Gingras: Excuse me, could I just add to that?

Paul Choi (Chair): Yes, of course.

Leoni Gingras: We do have other plans for grants to do with our current campaign, the mis- and disinformation. We are looking to give out grants to different education and social programs to help promote our mis- and disinformation campaign. So we will be using some of the grant funding. It just may not be used in the same manner, because it really depends on what programs we’re delivering upon each year as to how that funding is spent.

Kasari Govender: And that program is what we’re calling microgrants. It’s $500 grants, quite a number of them, to small organizations. For example, I spoke to a teacher this week who has applied for one of those grants to work with her students to produce some materials on mis- and disinformation, which is our public awareness campaign. It’s all about bringing that learning into classrooms or, again, into community organizations, who might do small projects to amplify that work and to work through the materials that we’ve given them.

There seems to be quite a bit of excitement, actually. We’re trying something new with this microgrant process. It was great to see the excitement in the education system of teachers applying for those small grants to be able to do that work with their students.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. So how much grant has been distributed to date for the 2025-26 budget?

Kasari Govender: I don’t think we have that figure, but we can get it for you. It’s not much this year, but we can get that number to you if that’s of interest.

Paul Choi (Chair): We noted on the ’24-25 budget, your office only used 46 percent of the grant budget for that fiscal year. Just wondering where that unspent funding was reallocated towards.

Kasari Govender: I mean, there’s sort of the three areas that I highlighted that we’ve overspent in and three areas that we haven’t — like, three areas that we underspent in. I would say that largely…. Again, the purpose of the grants has been to support research where we don’t have that expertise in-house, and it’s hard to predict that at the beginning of the year always, because we’re developing our responsiveness to various issues as they come to our attention and, of course, developing our projects.

For example, one year — not this year, so this doesn’t exactly answer your question — we used it to get some research done from a member of the JID, the Indigenous legal program at UVic, a faculty there, who did a bunch of research on an Indigenous legal response to hate in a particular legal tradition. We didn’t have that expertise in-house.

Where we’re able to support that with in-house expertise and spend that money on staff dollars, we prefer to do that, but we just don’t always have the ability to because we don’t always have that in-house.

[1:45 p.m.]

Also, of course, there’s community expertise, which we’ll never fully have in-house because we’re not doing those jobs. That’s why it’s a bit of a flexible line, because we have to adjust a bit, depending on the subjects that we’re working on and depending on what we already have inside.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Thank you.

Donegal Wilson: Just go to back, I heard something about 50K in research that was planned, that we were moving 50K, and then the next answer was that we weren’t moving any this year. Was there a 50K planned in this fiscal, or next fiscal?

Bernard Achampong: It’s already sitting with UVic. We have 50K as part of a grant with UVic. That is what is going to be…. UVic is going to have the autonomy to send it out…. They do have a proposal system for the research for students and faculty. They’re going to be soliciting proposals based on research questions that we want responded to.

Kasari Govender: It’s already come off our books. That $50,000 is already off our books and on UVic.

Donegal Wilson: I got that we moved the money out. Is that money going to spent this fiscal? We’re not going to be talking about it next fiscal?

Bernard Achampong: Yep. It’s going to be spent this fiscal.

Donegal Wilson: And is that on planned research that we have, or are we just trying to…?

Bernard Achampong: We have planned questions that we sent to UVic, yes.

Donegal Wilson: Okay. Thank you. I wasn’t sure who was driving that, whether it was the university or you.

Bernard Achampong: We are.

Donegal Wilson: Who’s driving the research and the topics that we’re covering?

Kasari Govender: I mean, there’s a bit of…. It’s a grant, so we have some…. We have to…. They have some autonomy in that as well. But the questions are all pieces that we’ve worked on, on issues that will contribute to our work.

Donegal Wilson: Thank you.

Paul Choi (Chair): Kind of related to that, your office reported $16,000 underspend in ’24-25 in operating budget and 21 underspend in capital budget. Do you anticipate that similar underspend in ’25-26, or did you guys also allocate that to somewhere else?

Kasari Govender: In the last fiscal year, we had the 24 underspend in operating.

Paul Choi (Chair): Yes.

Kasari Govender: In capital, as we’ve said, it really depends on what happens. We need it to be responsive if things break, as we said. It’s a bit hard to predict. We need a bit of contingency there, and make sure…. Obviously, we don’t spend it just for the sake of spending it. We spend it because we have to.

We always try to get as close to zero as possible at the end of the year, but we can’t go over at all, as you know. We are likely going to be a few thousand under. I don’t think we have an exact number that we can speak to at this point.

Do you want to add to that?

Leoni Gingras: I would just add that we manage to the bottom line. Last year we faced some other significant pressures, as Kasari mentioned in her speech. We had significant, like over $100,000 worth of pressures in information systems. We moved things…. We had to fund those and other salary pressures.

We won’t have a surplus, per se, to our bottom line, but whether we will spend exactly in the standard expenditures that you expect us to, I’m not 100 percent sure at this time.

Does that answer your question?

Paul Choi (Chair): Yes.

You also noted that you guys implemented improved budget literacy across the organization. Could you talk about exactly…? An example of something, of expenditure savings found in that change.

Kasari Govender: Savings found in that change.

A Voice: The literacy.

Kasari Govender: I mean, I don’t know if you want to think about an example. I can say generally why we think that would result in savings.

Leoni Gingras: Well, now that we have our own corporate services, we can really tailor our financial needs to the organization. It increased financial literacy because we divided the budget into the different departments. The different departments could say: “Well, I’ve got X number of dollars to spend on, say, research or engagement or education.” They were more aware of how we were spending our money, so that we could optimize the use of our funding.

We take our mandate very seriously. We want to use the funding that we have available to us. It was more…. They weren’t particularly looking for savings. It was more that they were becoming more aware of the funding within the organization and how to optimize it to pursue our mandate.

I don’t know if you wanted to add anything to that.

Bernard Achampong: The only thing I’ll add are two areas. Travel and contracts are areas that you really have to pay attention to.

Having budget letters for each of the executive directors sets out those guidelines, on if you’re going to contract, ensuring that it can be delivered inside by internal stuff first. Setting those kinds of boundaries helps provide clarity on when you use contracts and when you don’t.

[1:50 p.m.]

Also travel — put in some more guardrails. For our organization, particularly in the North and the Interior, travel is an important facet. But we make sure that when we’re travelling, it’s on a need-based reason for travel. So those are some of the guardrails that we’ve put in place to help.

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Any other questions from members? Seeing none, I want to thank you for coming in and presenting to us.

We will take a quick break and then come back.

The committee recessed from 1:50 p.m. to 2:05 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Deliberations

Paul Choi (Chair): Okay. We are back. Thank you, everyone, for today. That wraps up our presentations for today.

I will now seek a motion to meet in camera for deliberations. Thank you very much.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 2:06 p.m. to 3:14 p.m.

[Paul Choi in the chair.]

Paul Choi (Chair): Thank you so much, everyone, officers who came and presented to us and the staff who are here late on Friday night to support us and do all the great work that’s required to ensure that we get all the right information and make decisions that are informed and transparent.

With that, I will ask for a motion to adjourn.

Motion approved.

Paul Choi (Chair): The committee now stands adjourned.

The committee adjourned at 3:15 p.m.