1993 Legislative Session: 2nd Session, 35th Parliament HANSARD
The following electronic version is for informational purposes only. The printed version remains the official version.
(Hansard)
WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 1993
Afternoon Sitting
Volume 9, Number 24
[ Page 6161 ]
The House met at 2:03 p.m.
Clerk of the House: Pursuant to standing orders, the House is advised of the unavoidable absence of the Speaker.
[E. Barnes in the chair.]
Prayers.
G. Brewin: It gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce some people who are in the gallery. There are eight members from the Victoria Native Friendship Society. They're here having a tour of the buildings. I would like all hon. members to make them very welcome.
REPORT ON REDUCING ERROR IN SOCIAL SERVICES
Hon. J. Smallwood: Last week I stood before this House to update my colleagues on ministry initiatives to counteract fraud and abuse in the income assistance system. Today I rise to provide a similar update on our initiatives to identify and reduce administrative error in the Ministry of Social Services. I wish to assure the House, the taxpayers of British Columbia and our clients on income assistance that I take very seriously any allegations of waste or error which threaten the integrity of this crucial and important social safety net for this province.
As recently as 1991 there was a comprehensive audit by the province's auditor general, which reported its work in June, 1992. When dealing with the Ministry of Social Services issues, the auditor general observed that the ministry procedures for dealing with income assistant payments "appear to be reasonable" for minimizing incorrect payments. He goes on to state, however, that the ministry's lack of adequate capacity to accurately measure the extent of incorrect payments -- this lack of information -- makes it difficult to assess the cost-effectiveness of "procedures designed to reduce errors."
In response to the auditor general's recommendations, I have strengthened the ministry's audit team by expanding it from 11 to 27 people. They are expected to bring about a significant reduction in administrative error in the ministry. Also in response to the auditor general's report and recommendations, the ministry developed the draft administrative report that has come to public attention in recent days. Members can judge its relative merits or demerits for themselves. I can tell you that 16 of the report's recommendations have already been acted upon. Many of them are related to anti-fraud initiatives which I announced last week. The remaining ones are directed at enhancing internal ministry communications, staff education and a range of other opportunities and improvements.
I acknowledge that I am concerned by the appearance of this draft administrative document. Does that mean that this draft document causes me to doubt the direction of our actions? No, rather, much of it confirms that we are on the right track. I am not here to defend the status quo. I am here to reform, to the best of my ability, the services to all citizens. That means all citizens, hon. Speaker, the people who are in need of income assistance and the people who pay for it.
Hon. J. Smallwood tabled the draft project to monitor administrator error and fraud, documents from the ministry documenting the initiatives and the auditor general's report, June 1992.
V. Anderson: I'm glad today that the minister is taking this issue seriously. I had an opportunity to watch the video from yesterday's presentation, and it confirmed that the minister, according to her appearance and her smile and her responses to us yesterday, was not at all taking the question seriously at that time.
We are very much aware that actions speak much louder than words. We are glad that the minister is now presenting the material which unfortunately was not presented earlier so that it could have been dealt with properly. It's also interesting that now she is presenting an increase, from 11 to 27 people, in her audit department. I'm sure the people in the community who are served by this ministry will be delighted to hear that she has increased the audit staff, but they will wish that the financial rewards to the people in the community might be served instead in quite a different way. There's a question about how money is spent, and increasing the bureaucracy rather than meeting the needs of the people is a great concern.
Two illustrations about the kind of audit that our people are looking for.... Perhaps the minister will give us some response to these. It is my understanding that the majority of appeals against the decisions of her ministerial staff -- as they are directed to do by the regulations -- are won, meaning that the original decision was incorrect.
Also, I wonder about the ministry when I have on file a letter concerning a person in a wheelchair who is not a senior and whose only accommodation is a seniors' home. That person is advised that the only way they can get a wheelchair from this government is to make an appeal and they will likely win. How come this kind of appeal process has to be gone through? The inefficiency of this government is shown by its actions, rather than by the statements of the minister last week and this week.
R. Neufeld: It's interesting to listen in the House when for the second week in a row the Minister of Social Services finally stands up and talks both times about fraud within her department and a loss of funds that should rightfully go to people that need help. This caucus has asked and made this minister aware well over a year ago -- and it wasn't just us, it was the public at large -- that there was fraud within the system and it needed to be acted on. Up until yesterday, the minister
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-- and I listened to her in the media scrum -- was serious that there was only 1 percent fraud within her ministry. Today she stood up and tabled some reports that she said she apparently hadn't read before.
Hon. Speaker, I think it's time this government looked into the fraud within the Ministry of Social Services, a ministry that has increased in funding by $900 million over two years. We wonder how much of that is in fraud. We wonder whether maybe the ministry, in its internal reporting, isn't on track. But we also wonder whether the minister and her government are on track or not. I mentioned once before that a report went from the Attorney General's ministry to the Ministry of Social Services saying that there was fraud within her ministry and that it had to be cleaned up. We wonder whether this isn't another part of finally having to have the Attorney General's ministry tell this minister that she has to get down to the basics and down to work to clean up the fraud in her ministry. We hope that with the increase in staff to look at fraud in the ministry, this will happen.
LABOUR DISRUPTIONS IN SCHOOLS
J. Dalton: My question is to the Minister of Education. Yesterday the minister stated: "I want to reassure grade 12 students that their work to date will be recognized and their access to post-secondary institutions will not be jeopardized." My question to the minister: can you guarantee that students who are applying for post-secondary institutions will be allowed a lower grade point average if they come from a strike-bound district than those students who do not come from such a district?
Hon. A. Hagen: Hon. Speaker, that is a nonsensical question. What I said yesterday was that the students in grade 12 in the districts that are currently involved in labour disputes have completed most of their year's work. They are continuing, as we know through media stories and through reports of students, to be diligent students. Their work up until now and through to the end of the year will be counted. The post-secondary institutions have assured us that the marks that are given to those students, based on that work, will be accepted in post-secondary institutions, and that they will therefore be able to continue with their studies as grade 12 students going on to post-secondary institutions, starting this fall.
[2:15]
J. Dalton: Again to the Minister of Education. I certainly don't have the assurance that she has expressed, and I know many grade 12 students certainly do not have that assurance.
However, the minister also stated yesterday that school children are an incredibly resilient group. I don't quite know how to interpret that. Does the minister mean that in spite of school district shutdowns -- and in the case of Vancouver Island north, six weeks and counting -- students will not be affected by the closure of their schools?
Hon. A. Hagen: I have said in this House that there is no disagreement among any member that children have the right and deserve to be in school. Adults have a responsibility -- teachers and boards -- to come to agreements within the economic and work situations facing them. Every person who is involved in these labour disputes has a responsibility to children. That responsibility starts in our local districts, and we have all been clear about that from the beginning. The issue of resolving those disputes for the benefit of children lies with the parties, with the assistance of the Minister of Labour. I am continuing to work with that minister for that resolution, whether we are talking about Vancouver Island north or Vancouver.
J. Dalton: Again, to the Minister of Education, I think the minister and I do agree that school closures are unacceptable.
Will the Minister of Education consult with and impress upon the Minister of Labour the need to order a 40-day cooling-off period so that school closures will be ended immediately?
Hon. A. Hagen: The Minister of Labour can respond more fully to questions that may come to him in the course of this discussion. We have gone through a very trying time this year in difficult economic circumstances, where boards and teachers have had to face up -- as this government has -- to the reality of working with the available resources.
I challenge all of us -- and that goes first of all to the boards and teachers who are currently in those disputes -- to come to a resolution that is realistic in relation to the dollars that we have added, as no other province has, to provide for the education of our children, and to take that responsibility for the kids in their districts as boards and teachers must do if the people of British Columbia are to have confidence in our public education system. That belongs, first of all, with the districts and the people who must negotiate collective agreements, as those teachers and boards have the responsibility to do.
G. Farrell-Collins: The minister talks a lot about the responsibility of parents, teachers and school boards. What she is not talking about is the responsibility of this government to see that these students get an education.
Deputy Speaker: Would the hon. member please put his question.
G. Farrell-Collins: My question is to the Minister of Labour. Will he today bring a motion before this House to order a 40-day cooling-off period to get these students back in school so that they can finish their school year and their exams in order to have fair competition to get into post-secondary institutions in this province?
Hon. M. Sihota: A number of options are available under Bill 84, and we are exercising all of those options. Because we have exercised all of those
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options, in 50 school districts in British Columbia matters have now been resolved. A number of matters are outstanding. We announced on Monday that we would meet with Mr. Foley. As a consequence of that, we have taken some action, which we announced yesterday, and which the hon. member obviously missed. Based on the outcome of that process, we will make further decisions in terms of the options that the government wishes to exercise.
G. Farrell-Collins: The minister talks about the 50 districts that have already settled, but he doesn't talk about the districts that haven't settled. If the Vancouver dispute continues, and if Surrey goes out on Monday, we could have over 100,000 students out of school in this province. When will the minister take some concrete action -- not wimpy little steps but some real concrete action -- and set a 40-day cooling-off period and get these students back into school?
Hon. M. Sihota: I want to make it abundantly clear to the hon. member that this government has taken some firm decisions with regard to teachers. We have told the teachers very clearly that there is no more money. We have told the trustees that the envelope of funds provided to them provides sufficient scope for a solution to be found. We have told the parties that if they cannot arrive at a resolution, we will provide mediation. We then took an additional step and told the parties that given the fact that they could not agree on a mediation process, we would impose upon them a special mediator. We have done that. The special mediator is meeting with the parties today, hon. Speaker. You talk about action; this dispute started on Monday. This government has taken a series of initiatives over the last three days, and if need be we will provide further assistance to the parties to help them resolve this dispute expeditiously.
G. Farrell-Collins: The minister talks about firm decisions and firm action. The North Island school students have been out for six weeks. The minister says there's no more money, yet they turn around with the health accord and jack up the increases there. We need to see some concrete action, solid action, that's going to get these students back into school, not a bunch of flimflam or labour relations rhetoric.
Hon. M. Sihota: The concerns of the opposition really ring hollow. It was only yesterday that they discovered there was a dispute in North Island. That's when they first raised it in the House. They should also know that last night there was a vote in the North Island. Teachers voted by 59 percent to accept the recommendations of the mediator. The board, subject to one issue, also accepted the recommendations of the mediator. There is one issue outstanding. I can assure the hon. member that I have a high degree of frustration with the board taking the posture that it has, and as a consequence, hon. member -- if he would just listen, he might learn something -- I will be talking to the parties further in the next few days to try to resolve that one outstanding issue.
L. Hanson: It's interesting to listen to the Minister of Labour say that he can't get his message across to the teachers that there's no money. If he was dedicated to do that, he would have a manner of doing it.
Mr. Premier, a question: students in this province are being treated as political footballs. This government is standing on the sidelines while children get kicked around in these school strikes. Are the Premier and his government so beholden to the BCTF that he's unwilling to restore education as an essential service?
Hon. M. Harcourt: Thank you, hon. Speaker. I will be quite pleased to refresh the memory of the member for Okanagan-Vernon with statements he made when he was the minister in government who brought in Bill 19 and Bill 20. He said: "We listened to what the BCTF wanted, and we gave them the right to strike." Now he's hoisted on his own petard.
Deputy Speaker: Supplementary, hon. member.
L. Hanson: Well, that's very interesting, Mr. Speaker. The Premier should do a little research on his own, so he would know that the Minister of Education brought in Bill 20, not the Minister of Labour. We know that the Premier voted against Bill 20 in that debate. If he is of the opinion that it's such bad legislation, is he now prepared to repeal Bill 20 and ban the right to strikes and lockouts in our education system? Is he prepared to repeal the system of district-by-district negotiations on teachers' salaries and move immediately to implement provincewide bargaining?
Hon. M. Harcourt: Hon. Speaker, the member had an opportunity to do that and didn't do it. As a matter of fact, I would like to quote the hon. member for Okanagan-Vernon from May 7, 1987, page 1002 in Hansard. He said: "The B.C. Federation of Labour, the Teamsters, the United Mine Workers and the Steelworkers all have the right to form a labour organization to negotiate their wages, salaries and conditions. But that is not a mandatory right by legislation, and what we've done is given the teachers the rights that everyone else has in the province of British Columbia."
Hon. member, what I have heard from both sides of the opposition is that they would like to see back-to-work orders, and they would like to see these matters go to binding arbitration. As somebody who has seen binding arbitration, I can tell you that the people who suffer from binding arbitration are the taxpayers. The taxpayers have told this government, "We can afford only so much money," and we have listened. There's only so much money we can afford. There is enough money to settle these disputes in the budget that this government has brought down.
Deputy Speaker: Final supplementary, hon. member.
L. Hanson: It's interesting to hear the reversal of the field. The Premier was a basketball player, but it sounds like he's a football player.
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In any case, even though they owe a debt to the BCTF, is the government prepared -- in view of the fact that they have appointed Brian Foley as a special mediator -- to at least ask the teachers to go back to work until there is a resolution, or at least a report from the mediator?
Hon. M. Harcourt: I didn't hear the members opposite ask that that happen in North Island, Powell River or in some of the other districts that have followed the consequences of Bills 19 and 20.
I think that this government, as you have heard from the Minister of Labour, has acted quickly to appoint a mediator. When the parties could not respond, a special mediator was appointed, who was asked by the Minister of Labour to meet with the parties. They are meeting at this moment.
LIONS GATE BRIDGE REPAIRS
D. Schreck: My question is to the Minister of Transportation and Highways. The Buckland report on the Lions Gate Bridge offers assurance of safety for five or six years, if the necessary repairs are made to the deck surface. Will the minister assure this House that every effort will be made so that the process for replacing or rejuvenating the bridge will be completed within those five years?
[2:30]
Hon. A. Charbonneau: That's a tough question, but a fair one. First, I would like to assure the hon. member that the Lions Gate Bridge is safe and will be kept in a safe condition. Second, I will assure the member that the ministry will take all steps necessary to replace or rehabilitate the bridge within five years.
Deputy Speaker: On a point of order, the Opposition House Leader.
J. Dalton: I would direct the hon. Speaker and the government ministers opposite to standing order 47A, which clearly has not been followed. The repetition of answers and the extent of those answers are completely unacceptable.
Deputy Speaker: Order, please. The Chair would agree with the hon. member that all members should study.... The standing orders are there for all members. It is advisable that all members particularly pay attention to 47A with respect to question period.
Hon. A. Charbonneau: I rise to answer a question taken on notice. On April 13 the hon. member for Prince George-Omineca asked a question, and I apologize that the answer got lost in my papers. I will deliver it at this time.
The question was: "My question this afternoon is to the Minister of Highways and the minister responsible for ICBC. Can the minister confirm that ICBC will be charged the new provincial tax on labour by autobody repair shops?" The answer is yes.
The second question was: "Can the minister then tell us just what the impact of this new GST is going to be in total dollars on ICBC, and has it been factored into the grandiose profit picture that this government projects for ICBC in this fiscal year?" The amount of the impact will be $4,213,000. That specific amount had not been taken into account; but due to the dramatic turnaround of this corporation under this administration, we will probably do better.
Hon. M. Sihota: Before I call Committee of Supply, I advise all hon. members that Committee A will be meeting to discuss the estimates of the Ministry of Tourism and Ministry Responsible for Culture. With that said, I call Committee of Supply.
The House in Committee of Supply B; H. Giesbrecht in the chair.
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF HEALTH AND MINISTRY RESPONSIBLE FOR SENIORS
(continued)
On vote 47: minister's office, $419,400 (continued).
G. Wilson: Hon. Chair, in light of the absence of our Health critic today, I've been asked to shepherd some of the opposition questions through this process for this afternoon. Just to enlighten the minister so she may prepare for the range of discussion topics, I'll just outline some of the areas that we will be canvassing this afternoon so she might get in the appropriate personnel if necessary.
We would like to look at matters that relate to the establishment of the cancer clinic in Kelowna and operational expenses around that. There will be additional questions with respect to the UBC Hospital operation. We have some questions with respect to aboriginal health and the involvement of this ministry in aboriginal matters. We also have questions with respect to fee increases for medium term care facilities. As well, we have questions relating to financing and advertising. There will be a series of questions related to mental health. I know that has been canvassed to some degree, but I think these are more specific riding concerns with respect to custody within mental health, air ambulance, travel assistance, orthopedic and wait-list problems, as well as residency requirements for MSP premiums, etc. With that, what I would like to do is perhaps turn over the first set of questions to the Leader of the Opposition.
Hon. E. Cull: I want to thank the member for his list. Unfortunately, I got a list yesterday which included continuing care and hospitals. I don't have staff available for mental health custody issues, MSP or aboriginal health, and I can't call them in on such short notice. We can probably arrange for them to be here on another day. Originally we were getting advance notice a day ahead of what was going to be happening; somehow, that seems to have ceased, Mr. Chairman, but
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I'd be most happy to arrange for appropriate staff if they give me some warning.
G. Wilson: I'm sure that we'll attempt to work around those areas as best as possible. With that, then, I would yield to the Leader of the Opposition.
F. Gingell: I've been reading Hansard on the issue of the increase in the daily fee costs of long term care facilities for those persons with an income in excess of $17,000. I noted that in your responses you continually referred to an income of $20,000, and I wondered if there was any reason for that.
Hon. E. Cull: It's important that you recognize that what we're dealing with here is net adjusted income. So one then has to ask the question: what is net adjusted income? How do we derive net adjusted income? Net adjusted income is determined by a number of potential deductions. You take the net income reported in the last income tax return, and if you are over the age of 65, as the vast majority of these people will be, you subtract $3,000. If you have a spouse, you can subtract another $3,000. If you have a dependent, which may apply in some cases, you can subtract another $3,000. And if you are disabled, you can subtract yet another $3,000. So theoretically you could, from your net income as reported on your last income tax return, subtract $12,000 off that to arrive at the income that we use for calculating the long term care fee. It's very unlikely that anyone would be eligible for all four, because it's difficult to be over the age of 65 and still have a dependent -- although it is possible.
The reason I'm using $20,000 is that I'm taking the most conservative approach here and saying: "Well, what if the only deduction you have is one -- because you're over the age of 65? You don't have a spouse, you don't have a dependent, and you're not disabled. You're just 65 years of age or older." It is confusing just to refer to the net incomes. So, to show what the income would actually have to be before you started to pay the very highest fee -- applicable now under these policy changes -- of $34 a day, I'm adding that $3,000 that we subtract. Seventeen thousand dollars certainly isn't a lot of money, $20,000 isn't a lot more, but it is $3,000 a year more which is available to that person. We have to be careful what we're talking about here, so that we're making direct comparisons.
Also, the reason I've used $20,000 is that I wanted to ask the question of my staff for calculation purposes as we were working our way through this policy: what income do senior citizens have who don't require continuing health care? What are they paying in B.C. Housing-subsidized senior citizens' accommodation. We could look at two seniors who are very similar, except that the health of one has gotten to the stage where even home care and Meals on Wheels and adult day care -- all of the things we do to keep people as independent as possible in their own communities -- are not sufficient. That person has crossed the threshold from being able to be supported at home with appropriate care to needing to be in an institution. That's the other reason I've been using the $20,000 figure. In any case, when you have a look at it, you have to ask what other deductions that person might have.
I'm going to take this opportunity just to comment as well on the question of spouse. I was very concerned about the impact on people in long term care facilities under different circumstances. You have a spouse, and they share a room with you. You have a spouse, but they're in another room in the same institution. You have a spouse, but they're in another institution. You have a spouse, and they're at home. You have the prime income -- the pension income or whatever -- and you're maintaining your spouse at home, or the spouse is at home with the income and is maintaining you in the long term care facility. You can see that a wide variety of situations could be out there. We instructed our staff to put in place a policy that where those situations existed, we would calculate the rate both ways -- combining the incomes and treating the couple as combined income, separating them and treating it as if you have your own income -- to make sure that they get the lowest rate that applied. We really didn't want to put people in a situation where, by the fact of having a spouse in whatever circumstances, you were worse off than if you didn't have that spouse. We have done the calculations in a number of different ways so that the client receives the best rate possible.
F. Gingell: You've actually answered a series of questions that I was going to move to, because it isn't difficult to think of examples. I must admit that what I thought had happened was that you hadn't recognized that income taxes have to be paid, and they had not been calculated in. Are you telling us that when there is a couple, the calculations will be made as though 50 percent of the combined income belongs to each of them, as one imagines in joint returns? Let's say that the wife has an income of $6,000 and the husband has an income of $20,000. You would add those together and divide by two, which is $13,000, take the adjustments and determine the daily charges on that basis.
[M. Lord in the chair.]
Hon. E. Cull: I appreciate that this is a fairly complicated administrative issue. I have a briefing document here that's 25 pages long and answers all kinds of questions about this particular issue. I appreciate that it's very complex. Under the Income Tax Act, I believe -- it might be under the guaranteed annual income supplement requirements -- senior citizens who are married and for all intents and purposes would normally be treated as a couple and have their taxes treated as a couple's income can declare involuntary separation for health reasons when one is institutionalized and the other is still at home, or any of those other variations that I just gave where they're separated from one another. This is a matter of law that is available to seniors so that they can get the best rate for tax purposes generally when coming to apply for various government programs that might be income-related.
[2:45]
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What we are doing with the long term care facilities is that where a spouse is involved in any of the many circumstances that I listed, we calculate the room or accommodation charge twice. We calculate it once as if the senior was separated from their spouse and had only the income of that individual. Then we calculate it as if they were a couple. We pick the lowest rate. In some circumstances it will be better to calculate the income as a couple. The instance would be if you were the one with the income, you're in the institution and you're supporting your spouse still living outside the institution at home, and that individual doesn't have an income, or has a very meagre income. Certainly it would be better to be able to claim the spouse deduction and get a lower income there. If the situation were reversed you'd probably do better not to have to deal with the spouse's income, and you can then deal only with your own income and get the lower rate. We tried to be sensitive to this because it doesn't make sense that someone should either benefit or not benefit by being married. It puts an incredible strain on people to have that happen. So we bent over backwards to do the calculations twice in those circumstances so that the individual would get the best rate, the lowest rate.
F. Gingell: It seems to me that, just on the face of it -- and it may be an unusual set of circumstances -- if somebody in a home was earning the $17,000 and was under the age of 65, then they would probably have only about four dollars a day. But I do accept the previous explanations that shed some light on the issue. It would seem here that you do have an answer on what the circumstances are for a single individual who's not over the age of 65.
Hon. E. Cull: You're quite right. Until these changes were made the rates were calculated on 85 percent of OAS-GIS, on the assumption that that would be the lowest income that anybody living in such an institution would have. For the most part, that's probably a fairly reasonable assumption. All seniors are eligible for the old age pension, and if they have no other source of income they're eligible for GIS as well. But obviously there will be cases -- some of them may be seniors who are receiving pensions from other countries; some of them may be people who are not seniors yet and have income from other sources -- which put them at lower than that amount. No one in those circumstances ends up paying more than 85 percent, and obviously nobody is forced to pay more than they have. We do allow, I guess, exceptional circumstances to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. They're quite small but they're obviously very important and very critical to the individual.
I'm also going to take the opportunity -- and perhaps you may or may not be going in this direction -- to say that one of the things that we did look at in making these policy changes was the 85 percent rule of thumb, because it does seem like that leaves very little money left over for those very poor seniors who are on OAS-GIS. As I mentioned, I don't have the list of associations we consulted with here in front of me, but I know it's in the record from our earlier debate on this. We consulted with representatives of six major seniors' organizations in the province and three organizations that represent the facilities. We did suggest to them that one of the many things we could be looking at -- because we gave them some options to consider before making this change -- was to make a slight reduction in the amount, from 85 percent to 80 percent, for poor seniors. After a fair amount of discussion and debate on that option, they recommended against it and said: "No, there are other things...." They thought that that amount, while very tight, was reasonable -- people were working with it right now, were making do with it, was one way of putting it. They saw that for the small benefit that change might make, there were other benefits that they would rather trade off. We did have rather a good discussion about the particular options available to us in continuing care and long-term care this year.
F. Gingell: One of the problems opposition members have is that we sometimes feel like mushrooms, and there is a whole bunch of information that has come out to me in this regard. Would it be possible for us to have copies of your briefing notes so that we could have them in our constituency offices, particularly where we receive lots of phone calls. It's much easier for us to calm their concerns early on than it is for us to go through this exercise. I would appreciate it.
Hon. E. Cull: The note that I'm looking at is addressed: "Dear MLA." I was assuming that all MLAs had received it. It is pretty straightforward. It is just questions and answers about how you work your way through the system, so there's no reason why I can't make this available to members who didn't receive it.
Interjection.
Hon. E. Cull: The member is asking for the date. It's April 22, 1993.
W. Hurd: I have a series of questions relating to some issues in my riding. Some of these issues may have been canvassed in the broader debate, but because they have occupied such attention and detailed response within my riding office, I was hoping to get some specific answers.
In particular, the minister may be aware of a strike at a residential care facility in my riding which created serious hardship to the residents, who were paying a significant amount of money for the privilege of not only living in residential care, but receiving a health care component for a portion of the price they were paying. The facility -- Sunnyside Manor -- is now on strike. It was difficult for me to ascertain what role the ministry had in ensuring that levels of care were maintained during the strike, and what levels of reporting existed during that strike period. My conversations with and letters to the Boundary health unit did not produce a firm idea of exactly what monitoring or auditing was in place to ensure that these people in private residential care facilities were getting the health care they were paying for, and whether the
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ministry has any role to play in ensuring that standards are maintained during a strike situation.
Hon. E. Cull: As the member is fully aware, there is provision for essential services designation under the Labour Relations Code. So the employer in this case -- and I would assume it would be bargained for under CCERA, although it could be HLRA -- would have approached the labour board for the essential services designation. Those levels are set and determined. They are negotiated before the strike goes into effect so that those levels are there.
The ministry does have a role. We have a quality assurance unit in our continuing care and long-term care section, which monitors the care in all facilities, and not only during strike periods. We would have the ability to monitor and to assure ourselves that appropriate standards of care for the safety of the residents were established and were being maintained. Should we think that the essential services designation was inadequate, we would then have the right to approach the IRC and ask for a reconsideration of that.
W. Hurd: I suppose this raises the broader philosophical issue that if the ministry's strategy is to foster the growth of more medium and long term care facilities, even private facilities, this might be a significant problem in terms of the overall ministry budget. In the case of Sunnyside Manor in my riding, my office received numerous complaints that the quality of the health care component that they paid for had been slipping badly. There had been difficulties at the picket line even getting these residents out to access their doctors.
Can the minister tell us, maybe not in this specific case but in general terms, what type of auditing would be done in the event of a strike situation? Would it be on the basis of phone calls, or of inspections of what was taking place? How would the ministry make this kind of essential services assessment, and how would it determine whether or not standards were being maintained?
Hon. E. Cull: The local continuing care manager would be able to make an assessment based on a site visit, on being there on the premises and talking to the management that would still be in the facility, to the staff that were there or, indeed, even to the residents. Often a residents' council exists, and that would be a useful contact as well.
W. Hurd: So if these complaints do come in, the minister would normally expect the senior official.... Is there a group of auditors or people in the community care division with the specific responsibility to do inspections? I guess I'm a little confused, because in the case of Sunnyside Manor it appeared to me, anyway, that numerous expressions of concern about the levels of health care, including letters from my office, were met with some vagueness by the community care division as to what role they played and what they actually monitored. Can the minister give me an idea of exactly what type of services in a typical health care facility or a long term care facility that's private.... Would they be auditing, for example, whether prescription drugs were administered at regular times? Would they be looking at sanitary standards? Do they have a mandate to review the operations of the facility? I think it would be helpful if I had some idea what these residents could expect in the way of audits by the Ministry of Health.
Hon. E. Cull: The local continuing care manager is the individual who's initially responsible. There is also the quality assurance group within the division of the ministry, which can be brought in to provide particular assistance should the continuing care manager feel that additional assistance is required. The criterion that's applied is patient safety. I'm afraid I can't give you the details as to all the things they would look at, but I'm sure some of the things you listed would be considered. These are professionals whose job it is to go into continuing care facilities and make sure they are meeting the needs of patients and meeting basic standards. They have wide experience working in a number of facilities in their region and would be probably the best people, being local people, to assess whether the designated essential services levels were sufficient or not.
I could say in general -- because again, I'm not particularly familiar with Sunnyside Manor -- that when there are strikes in the health care sector, the essential services designations, the percentage of employees designated as essential and therefore to be on the job, are very high. I've heard in a number of cases from the unions involved that sometimes essential services get designated higher than the original staffing. I can't confirm that, but certainly I've heard that story enough that I don't discount it.
[3:00]
W. Hurd: Perhaps I can just generalize this question and ask the minister: given the mandate, which is to move health care into the community and to encourage more medium and long term care facilities in the province that might be provided by private companies, is there any intention in this year's budget to actually increase the funding for this type of auditing or monitoring of long term care facilities in the province, given the fact that in the years ahead, it would appear that we're going to see an increased need for the ministry to enter facilities other than hospitals to make a designation or assessment of essential service health care provisions?
Hon. E. Cull: It just goes to show that if you do enough questions on any particular subject, somebody in your ministry who is watching this will send in the appropriate information. Sunnyside Manor is not funded by the government, so our continuing care managers wouldn't have a role in this case. It is a totally private institution. The only application that the government would have would be through our licensing board, which licenses facilities. They would have similar authority to ensure that essential services were being maintained during the strike. We don't fund
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this particular institution, and of course, there are many private institutions around the province which are simply beyond the responsibility of the Ministry of Health. They are private businesses, and people purchase those services. The government's role in that regard is to license and inspect them and ensure that they are providing adequate services. With respect to the kind of intervention that might be more appropriate to government-funded institutions, this doesn't apply here.
W. Hurd: I assumed we were talking about facilities which don't receive any government funding, but provide a level of health care to the residents involved, by the very nature of the fees they collect. These are elderly patients who are taking advantage, I suppose, of a form of health care in the community which obviously lessens dependence on the ministry to provide for them. In some case they're paying $3,000 to $4,000 a month for a combined residency and long term care setup in the community.
I guess the question I was trying to address, and obviously not too well, is: looking down the road, is the Ministry of Health recognizing the fact that these types of facilities are going to proliferate and it may have a role in ensuring that standards are maintained, or is it strictly a situation where residents are on their own in terms of a strike situation? It just seems that we're dealing with a trend here towards seniors adopting different options for providing health care. When a strike does occur -- I believe that in this case Pricare is the owner of the facility and the Operating Engineers are the union representing the employees of the facility -- there's a mistaken impression on the part of the residents that when the standards slip badly during a strike and their welfare and health is affected, somehow the Ministry of Health has role to play in this, given the fact that it's encouraging this type of community-based health care to develop to lessen dependency on the system. Is the Ministry of Health anticipating providing more funds to audit this type of activity to ensure that if we are going to see this proliferation in private long term care facilities, the maintenance of standards for these residents is of paramount importance?
Hon. E. Cull: We're not encouraging this kind of facility in terms of our new directions. When we're talking about increasing the number of multilevel care beds in this province by almost 3,000 over the next five years, by over 400 in this capital budget, we're talking about those facilities that are supported in part by government funding. Some of them are public institutions; some are private institutions which we provide funding for under our program. I want to make it clear that I am not promoting the proliferation of privately funded, independent facilities for seniors. They may be responding to a market need. Many of the seniors that live in some of these institutions would not qualify for institutional care under the ministry's policies. We have to be very careful what it is we're talking about here.
In general, what guarantees does the government give to people who find themselves in those circumstances? There is the essential services designation under the labour code. The institution, the employer and Pricare have the option at all times, as do all health care employers, to return to the IRC and ask for an increased level of essential services designation if they feel that the original decision was too low. That was done by hospitals during the labour dispute in 1992, and changes were made. So it can be done.
The ministry, through the community care facilities licensing board, licenses all adult care facilities whether they are funded by the government or not. Standards have to be maintained. They are inspected. We occasionally withdraw people's licences because after receiving the original licence the standards have not been maintained. The community care facilities licensing board would have the authority to investigate during a strike situation if there were complaints made to it with respect to standards slipping.
I think there are a number of avenues available. I'm not familiar with this particular institution. My executive director responsible for hospitals and care services has had some experience in the long term care sector as well and is not aware of it. I don't know whether the complaints were made to the community care facilities board or to my office. We would certainly have directed them into the appropriate places so that the standards could be investigated and maintained. I think there are a number of options available to that employer to make sure that they are able to carry on in the event of a labour disruption.
W. Hurd: Perhaps, then, I could ask a question about hospice societies and palliative care, which is another issue that has come up in Surrey. Can the minister give us an idea of what direction the ministry is taking when it comes to funding palliative care in hospitals versus what the demands are on societies which are attempting to provide the same service? Is there a formula at work here? Is there a long-term strategy by the ministry to move this important health care function from, for example, a hospital setting into the community via hospice societies that are attempting to acquire funds but have not always met with success? Can the minister give us an idea of the direction we're going with that?
Hon. E. Cull: The whole area of hospice and palliative care is one that I support and the ministry supports in its programs. There are a number of ways that we do that. Individual hospitals are encouraged to recognize the need for palliative care as part of their overall operating budget. Many hospitals do provide palliative care beds or units. People are employed on staff to be able to assist patients and their families through dying. Hospice and palliative care programs are also funded under both the hospital-community partnership program and the continuing care community partnership program. There are a number of these that have been supported by the ministry around the province. I'm sorry that I don't have a listing for you. There are a number that have been supported, and some that are supported through other funding from the ministry.
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W. Hurd: I guess my question is on the funding of this particular health care service. Is there a separate budget or a separate allocation for hospice societies or are they in competition with hospitals for funding for this particular service? In the representations made to me by hospice societies, there is the impression -- in error or not -- that somehow, if the service is being provided at their local hospital, that reduces their ability to access funds to provide their own private services. What I'm asking is whether or not funding for hospice societies is independent of what the ministry may be providing through the district or regional hospital.
Hon. E. Cull: No, there isn't a separate hospice or palliative care budget, if that's what you're asking for. But I'm disturbed to hear that hospice societies would see themselves in competition with hospitals, or hospitals would see themselves in competition with hospice groups. I know that happens; in fact, it doesn't happen only in this instance. We see hospitals competing with one another and with community care facilities. Unfortunately, we see this kind of competition going on in too many instances around the province. We have to change that. That's part of what the New Directions strategy is all about: moving away from fragmentation existing right now in the health care system -- structured in such a way that it doesn't foster cooperation between different institutions and organizations -- to a system managed at the community level so that there is no competition -- in fact, there's cooperation. A community health council will be able to look at the need for palliative care services within a community, prioritize those needs with respect to other needs in the community, determine whether they should be provided at the hospital or somewhere else in the community, and make the appropriate planning and budgeting decisions around that. And that's what we have to move towards.
What we have right now, though, is a step in the right direction through the hospital-community partnership program. The whole concept of that program is that a certain amount of the hospital budget is actually frozen and cannot be spent until the hospital develops a partnership with a community agency to spend that money on a community health program. Many palliative care programs are funded under the hospital-community partnership program. It works relatively well, because it does bring agencies together to access money that's there but can't be accessed by them competing with one another and can only be accessed by them cooperating.
W. Hurd: If I hear the minister correctly, what she's advocating is that in the event of one or more hospice societies they should be making joint representation to the continuing care section for funding rather than, say, sending in their applications individually. That leads me to a logical question: how many of these hospice societies in the province are actually being funded? Are we dealing with a relatively large funding component here? Is the funding for hospice societies up, down or even in this fiscal year? Is there room for growth in the number of societies, or are we over-subscribed now in terms of the applications that might be on file?
Hon. E. Cull: I don't have the list of the number of hospice societies, but I can certainly get that for you and we can have a look at how many of them exist and how many of them are funded through various arrangements within the Ministry of Health.
With respect to whether there is the ability for a lot of growth in that area this year, there are two things that have to be considered. One is that the overall growth in the hospital budget is very limited this year at 3 percent, so it is going to be a real challenge for hospitals to be doing much in the way of new programs -- in terms of finding efficiencies or changing the way they are doing things right now. A 3 percent budget increase for hospitals is challenging, to use the softest word I can use. It's really very difficult for some of them to sort their way through their budgets.
[3:15]
With respect to funding that's available under partnership programs, we're reviewing that program right now, and we'll be bringing it back in a new format later on this year. Existing programs will be funded. The ability for growth in that area is marginal this year because, again, the increase of 4 percent in overall funding to the Ministry of Health doesn't allow us to do a lot of new work in a lot of new program areas. The money has been targeted, in terms of this year's budget, to community and family health, particularly to mental health, which we canvassed the other day, and to continuing care services to assist people who are not in hospital to maintain their independence longer in their own homes. Those are our priorities. We had to set priorities, and those are the ones we have established for this year's funding.
If a group in a community is interested in developing palliative care programs, certainly they should approach their hospital to inquire about partnership funds. They should also approach the ministry's care services division, where we can evaluate applications and help them look for funding to do those programs.
W. Hurd: I was quite interested in the last comment that societies should approach their hospitals for some sort of partnership. The point being made by the hospice society is that their primary orientation is palliative care within the home setting. Their whole purpose for existing is to enable people to be at home for as long as possible. Sometimes the impression exists that that's not necessarily the major thrust of a program run through a hospital. The recommendation holds, then, that a society should be approaching their hospital to dovetail programs and apply jointly for funds. Is that what I'm hearing -- that you could actually participate with the hospital in applying to continuing care?
Hon. E. Cull: The other alternative is the continuing care division staff in the region. Until quite recently there were two partnership programs, one with hospitals and one with continuing care. They are being pulled together and reformulated, so it will be
[ Page 6170 ]
changing in the future, but there are two groups that can provide direction. If the focus is on a home-based program, obviously continuing care is home based and therefore would perhaps be the group to start with. But there is a number of places the group should approach, and I would encourage them to try all the possibilities.
Even with home-based or community-based services, we are looking for integration between the acute care system, the institutional system and the community-based system. We can no longer continue to act as if there's a dividing line between them and there isn't flow across, because of course there is. People get sick; they move into hospitals; sometimes they move out of hospitals to die. Sometimes people go backwards and forwards between a home setting and an institutional setting for some time in the end of a terminal disease. There is a need for a continuum of care, and therefore the hospital, the continuing care manager or directly to the ministry.... We could do a bit of the traffic cop stuff if they need further assistance.
W. Hurd: I just have a couple of other issues to canvass in Surrey. One is the provision of psychiatric beds in the two Surrey hospitals. It appears obvious from the number of calls to my office from the relatives of people who have recently been discharged from Riverview, for example, that there's a critical shortage of psychiatric beds within hospitals in Surrey. Indeed, you've got a small ward at the Peace Arch Hospital and a small ward at Surrey Memorial.
When it comes to this critical issue in community health care, is the Ministry of Health taking any direction towards consolidating this service in one hospital and providing greater access? I can recount one case that came to my office where there was actually an apprehension order that the RCMP could exercise but wouldn't exercise because they had made a determination that there was nowhere for that person to be placed within the existing hospital in Surrey. You can imagine the stress the family was under in recognizing that the RCMP had an apprehension order but couldn't actually exercise it because the wards were full.
My question to the minister is: what direction are we taking in Surrey, one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, where this problem is already of critical magnitude and can only get worse?
Hon. E. Cull: Thank you for your patience while I got a few questions answered here. I can't give you any of the specifics in terms of the psych beds in the area you are talking about. Obviously there is a growing need for all kinds of acute care hospital services and other health services in the Surrey area, because the population there has been growing faster than the system's ability to keep up.
There are a number of things underway. First of all, there is the mental health initiative: the whole planning system around Riverview and the need for an appropriate number of acute care beds distributed around the province. As you know, Riverview has been downsizing over a number of years. The plan calls for there to be, I believe, 500 beds at the Riverview site and then other acute care beds in different parts of the province to provide acute care psychiatric services closer to home. There is an overall strategy underway that is assessing what's available in an area to meet those needs.
I don't know about the specific case you mentioned, but I'm puzzled, and I'll have staff advise me on this. Unfortunately, as I said earlier to the member for Powell River-Sunshine Coast, the list I was given did not include mental health, so I don't have my mental health person, my family and community health person, here today. The overall strategy under the mental health initiative is to look at the distribution of beds. With respect to that particular case, it seems surprising to me that somebody would not be apprehended in Surrey when Riverview is available reasonably close by in the region. The beds may not have been available there in Peace Arch District Hospital or Surrey Memorial Hospital. But certainly, if somebody needs to be in a psychiatric bed in the lower mainland, Riverview is available. So again, I'm not disputing your story, but it does seem somewhat surprising.
Individual hospitals are also doing their own planning about how to meet their needs -- whether they have the right number of medical and surgical beds, specialty programs, etc. They do planning to try to meet the psychiatric needs of their population. Surrey Memorial is developing a master plan, as I'm sure you're aware, and part of their master planning process would include evaluating the need for psychiatric beds.
W. Hurd: I appreciate the answer. I'll have to check the facts. When it came to my office, it was my understanding there was nowhere for this particular young person to go. But if Riverview is always available, I will certainly communicate that to people who call my office.
I had one other additional comment or question about the psychiatric situation, recognizing that we don't have the staff here to get into a full discussion. Another issue that was certainly mentioned by the people who contacted my office was the fact that many psychiatric patients who are released from Riverview do have rather rigid regimens of prescription drugs that are required to arrest their symptoms and allow them to continue to function in a community setting. One of the biggest complaints of residents is that there's no way of enforcing or controlling the access to prescription drugs. It doesn't take long for the person suffering from a mental illness to stop taking them on a regular basis. That in turn creates a vicious circle of making the symptoms worse. Without the support at the community level, they soon end up back where they came from. A general question is: would there be any funds dedicated under the continuing care program to assist families and psychiatric patients in making sure that they continue to take their prescription drugs on a regimented basis, recognizing the fact that a failure to do so soon renders them incapable of functioning in a community setting and we end up in this vicious circle?
Hon. E. Cull: We actually canvassed this issue at some length a couple of days ago when we did mental
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health and I had my mental health staff people here in the chamber. But I can tell you there are two things that apply here. One is that under law, we cannot compel people who are not committed to an institution to follow a treatment program. While there are people who are mentally ill who can have their illness held under some kind of control or in check through the use of medication, we can't force people to take their medication. Unfortunately, part of the problem with mental illness is that people sometimes make decisions that lack judgment and don't always act in their best interest. The only way that someone can be forced to follow a treatment program is to have them committed into an institution. That's part of the problem. When you talk about how you enforce this, there isn't any way of legally enforcing it. You have to try to use other measures.
We talked the other day about -- and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about it, because we did spend some time on it -- the plans for releasing people from Riverview and placing them in the community. We have made a commitment that people will not be released from Riverview until there are appropriate services matched up to them in the community that they're going to. If that means slowing down the mental health initiative plan which has been agreed to by consumers and mental health providers, we will do so, because it's irresponsible to do otherwise.
It doesn't mean that there aren't people already in the community who don't have access to services. There is a tremendous backlog of services to the mentally ill. Mental illness has been neglected in this province for decades. We have failed to provide for the needs of these people. Every time the government in the past had to tighten its belt, services to the mentally ill were one of the first things to be cut. This government has changed that. Last year we increased funding to mental health services by 25 percent. It made a tremendous impact in terms of the availability of community health services to the mentally ill. I urge you to read the Blues, because I read into the record the additional number of people who are able to receive services as a result of the enhancements that we started last year and are continuing this year.
Mental health continues to be our number one priority in the area of community and family health. We will do our very best, under trying financial circumstances, to make sure that the plan stays on track and that people who are being deinstitutionalized have the services they need. This means that those people who come out of Riverview get the ability to have follow-up support from health care providers. They will refuse it in some cases and that's where we get back to my first point: you can't insist. But with the 400 or 500 semi-independent living units that we created last year, people who are released and become independent again have workers who are available to make sure that they have the necessary living skills to be able to carry on independently and the follow-up support so they get encouragement to take their medication and continue with whatever treatment program is considered to be appropriate to meet their needs. We have dramatically increased services in that area. We still have a long way to go, but we know where the priority is and we're committed to following through on it.
[3:30]
W. Hurd: I just have one final question which has come through the door and, again, may have been canvassed previously. It relates to the deductible portion of a Pharmacare cost, which patients must pay upfront to acquire their prescription drugs, and, in particular, to the concern about the wait to be reimbursed. Again, I'm sure that every member of the assembly has had a few of those calls to deal with over the past year. In some cases in my own riding, which contains 50 percent seniors, I've had it reported to my office that seniors are out of pocket by about $1,500 or $1,600 for a period of time. So, if the answer lies within Hansard, I apologize for that, but that was my final question.
Hon. E. Cull: There are, I believe, five or six plans under Pharmacare; all have different rules that apply to them in different populations. It's easy to start to get confused about what applies to which individuals. Seniors are not out of pocket, ever, for Pharmacare, because they don't get reimbursed: seniors pay none of the drug costs; they pay a portion of the dispensing fee. The dispensing fees in British Columbia are the lowest in Canada, averaging somewhere around $7. The seniors pay 25 percent of the dispensing fee, so 25 percent of approximately $7 is what they pay. They pay that up to a maximum of $125 in the year, and when they reach $125, everything -- 100 percent -- is paid for them beyond that.
The ones who do have problems being reimbursed -- and these may not be seniors -- may be people who are not eligible for plan A, the senior's plan, people like you and me who have to save up our receipts until we have reached our deductibles. Then we have to mail off those receipts and receive 80 percent payment back until we reach $2,000 paid out in the year, and then we get 100 percent back. I don't know about you, hon. member, but I never seem to be able to find those receipts at the end of the year anyway; they somehow have gotten lost in the filing system in my desk and we generally don't seem to be able to find them all to make those claims -- it is a problem.
Interjection.
Hon. E. Cull: The member for Power River-Sunshine Coast is suggesting a shoe-box; I have one of those fabric things with pockets that hang on the wall, but all the pockets seem to have the same things in them, and the system has long since escaped me.
Back to the question that we have at hand here. We are introducing something called "Pharmanet," a computer network that will link pharmacies together with the Pharmacare program, so that when you go in and buy your prescription, you will be able to present your identification to the pharmacist, who will call up your account and know what benefits you are eligible for right there. The pharmacist will know whether you have reached your deductible and whether you have
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reached your annual limit. You will receive your benefits at the cash register, so you will only pay what you are eligible for and you won't have to save up those annoying little receipts and hope that you will find them at the end of the year. In addition to that, it will provide all kinds of other benefits to us, because the pharmacist will also know what other drugs you've been prescribed, will be able to immediately see whether there might be any contra-indications and will be able to spot those people who are getting the same prescription from three or four doctors. A pharmacist will be able to do a lot more with the patients in those cases, particularly with seniors who may have a huge number of prescription drugs that they are taking. The pharmacist may have a look at that and realize that it's time somebody reviewed exactly what these people are taking cumulatively and start to deal with the health impacts of having too many prescription drugs. So we are working on that right now; it should be implemented early in 1994. The computer work is being done, the network system is being put in place, and we've been working with the B.C. Pharmacists' Society to speed this up and have it working as soon as possible.
W. Hurd: Just one final plea -- a logical suggestion from one of my constituents regarding medical premium costs. Perhaps the Ministry of Health would give consideration to automatically debiting bank accounts, rather than sending out premium notices every month. I just wonder whether or not that type of streamlining has been talked about within the ministry; whether any cost savings have been identified, rather than this exchange of bills and cheques every month; and whether an automatic debit system like you have for other government accounts might be something that could be pursued by the ministry?
Hon. E. Cull: Just before answering that, I want to correct the record. Seniors pay 75 percent of the dispensing fee, not 25 percent. I flipped them around.
I don't know what the answer is to that. It probably isn't a bad idea to pursue. I would be surprised if it hasn't been raised in the past. There may be some reasons why it isn't done; perhaps with respect to subsidies and calculations and the fact that things change. But I agree it would be a lot more convenient for the person paying that amount on a regular basis, and you'd think it would be more cost-effective for the ministry to cut down on the paper work and the issuing of cheques. So I thank you for that suggestion and will ask for a reply from my staff.
A. Cowie: Yesterday the minister very kindly answered some questions about UBC hospital, which is almost in my riding. I've got a couple of questions that I would like clarification on. UBC is a teaching hospital. The minister clarified it's also going to be a community hospital. I would like to know just how that's going to be directed. Is there going to be a community council that would direct both the teaching portion and the community hospital portion? Or how would that be operated?
Hon. E. Cull: All teaching hospitals have a community aspect to them. As with VGH and St. Paul's, the UBC site of University Hospital doesn't only provide teaching opportunities for students in training. It's not just a tertiary or higher level care facility; it's a hospital for people who live in that area in many cases, and regular primary and secondary care to a certain extent takes place there as well.
As you mentioned yesterday, if you live in that part of the city and think you need the services of a doctor in an emergency, you head for UBC. So it does provide the kinds of services that any community hospital would be providing in any other community. But it does have these additional roles and responsibilities and it does tend to specialize in some of those areas.
The former board of University Hospital was managing in the interests of the teaching aspects, the tertiary care level aspects and the community aspects to strike the appropriate balance.
As I said yesterday, we have been reviewing two possible options for University Hospital, UBC site. One is a merged option with Vancouver General; the other is a stand-alone hospital that would have its own board. In either case, the board of the institution would be required to balance the needs of the teaching facility with the needs of the residents in the community.
I think one of the best ways to achieve that would be to have some community representatives on the board, people who represent not only the provincial level needs but also the needs of the west side of Vancouver.
A. Cowie: I think this is also part of the regional board for the overall Vancouver area, as I understand it, which will have five elected people on it, five appointed by the government and five from the community councils. I believe that's the way the regional board is set up.
I would guess that the west side of Vancouver would have some 150,000 people that this hospital would service, something like that. Just as a general guideline, I was wondering if that's pretty typical of a community hospital?
Hon. E. Cull: That would be a very large population for a community hospital. As a community planner yourself, hon. member, you know how many municipalities in British Columbia would have 150,000 people, or even how many regions of the province would have 150,000 people. Many community hospitals, of course, serve much smaller populations.
A. Cowie: If it was a stand-alone and not connected with VGH, then it would probably have more community people involved with it. The worry I would have is the balance between the teaching role. Doctors and professors quite often don't like to be told what to do by citizens, so I would think that might be a difficult option. However, since that decision hasn't been made, I won't press that point.
I want to know a little bit more about the regional directors who are appointed by the government to manage or direct the regional hospitals. I believe these
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regional directors are appointed by the government to manage. Do they have the right to veto council budgets?
Hon. E. Cull: There aren't any executive directors appointed to oversee, manage or direct hospitals, so I have to assume you're talking about the six individuals we have recently assigned to look at regionalization. These individuals are seconded from other parts of the ministry. Their jobs are temporary. We did canvass this extensively yesterday, hon. member. Their responsibilities are to facilitate the development of community health councils within various regions. With six of them, you can imagine each is working in large chunks of the province. Their job is to initially work with those communities and provide them with guidance and assistance. Things like the report -- the book that we talked about yesterday, the guide for developing community health councils and regional health boards -- will assist them to work their way through that. That's who those individuals are, if that's the group that you were referring to.
While I'm on my feet, I'll just comment on the five appointed that you mentioned. There isn't any such plan. I don't know where those numbers came from, but they certainly did not come from the ministry. There may be a community proposal that such a combination of individuals be formed into a board, but that's not agreed to by us.
A. Cowie: The minister is correct. I believe that was part of a proposal from Vancouver for the regional board, so there would be a community role there, which the minister speaks about.
The executive directors are appointed. Those are temporary jobs, I guess. My understanding is that they are definitely political appointees. The one in Vancouver definitely is a political appointee -- Sharon Martin.
Interjection.
A. Cowie: I know, but she's very political.
Interjection.
A. Cowie: And she's a nurse -- and very well qualified as a nurse. I just assume they are political appointees. They are temporary until a more professional system is set up -- is that the idea?
[3:45]
Hon. E. Cull: I'm laughing because I'm thinking of what some of these individuals will be saying when they read Hansard and learn that they are now political appointees. I'm getting all the names of them here now. We are dealing with people who are -- with the exception of Sharon Martin, whom the member singled out -- all employees of the Ministry of Health. Sharon is an employee of the Vancouver health board, and we've seconded her to assist us, because of her knowledge in working for the city of Vancouver in the health area. We have Garry Olsen, who is with the alcohol and drug program -- he was the director for the Kootenay region; Ron Crawford, also with alcohol and drug programs for the north region; John Mullin, who is the head of continuing care in Victoria; Pat Wolczuk, who is the executive director of our health promotion branch here in Victoria; and Karen Abrahamson, who I believe also came from the alcohol and drug branch. These are all people who have been working in the Ministry of Health for some time. The deputy looked for people who understood the regions and who understood the New Directions in health care. He has reassigned those individuals to these tasks, as is the right of a deputy minister: deploying his staff where he sees fit.
A. Cowie: I'm just trying to find out how politicized the bureaucracy is. In this particular case, Sharon's sister is the ADM for Housing. It gets very political in those sorts of situations. I note also that in Vancouver...
Interjection.
A. Cowie: There are political people within all bureaucracies. Vancouver has lots of NDP people within it, and they're well accepted within the system. All I'm saying is simply that, in the housing report, this person was definitely picked because of their political alliances. I would have thought that this was the situation with Sharon Martin.
That will be my last question. Thank you for answering them.
L. Fox: I was listening with great interest to the discussions with the member for Surrey-White Rock around the tertiary care issue. The minister suggested, in an almost promissory way, that no further removal of patients from Riverview or those institutions would be made until there was alternative housing available to them in the communities that they were going to.
That was of particular interest to me because when this initiative was tabled back about four years ago -- I wasn't a member at that point in time -- the north had been promised that beds would be located in the northern part of the province. That has not yet come to be. In fact in some communities there are significant incidents of increased violence and increased crime because some of these individuals have not taken their medication as they should. As the minister pointed out earlier, she hasn't the authority to force them to take their medication. It's becoming a very large concern among municipal leaders in northern British Columbia and as well among health care deliverers.
Would the minister, not necessarily make an announcement, but give us some assurance that before we deal with the existing patients, who are still in those institutions, we deal with the ones who have already been released and are presently in a situation that (a) is not good for their health and (b) does not consider the interests of the rest of the community.
Hon. E. Cull: I want to tell the hon. member that there has been considerable time and effort over a number of years -- on the part of providers of health care to the mentally ill, groups that advocate on behalf
[ Page 6174 ]
of the mentally ill, people who suffer from mental illness, the ministry and others from the larger health care system -- spent on developing the mental health initiative. There is agreement. If not total consensus, there's a very large majority of opinion coming from families and consumers themselves that they want to move out of Riverview and get back to their own communities. They want a life that is as normal as possible.
Deinstitutionalization in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's a bad thing if it's done without planning and without preparation. In the past, not only in this province but in other jurisdictions across North America, promises have been made to people about thoughtful deinstitutionalization and have not been followed through. I have instructed the head of Riverview Hospital and our mental health staff to ensure that all patient transfers go with appropriate staff and services. It's not just housing; in some cases it is housing, but in other cases it's making sure that there are the appropriate resources in that community for the individual to have the best chances possible to retain their health.
That is looking at the people who are coming out of Riverview right now. People don't want to see that slowed down -- with the exception of the conditions that I've just talked about. Putting it on hold and saying that we're not going to de-institutionalize anybody else from Riverview until we've fixed all the problems out there for people who never went to Riverview, were discharged years ago or somehow come into the community without adequate services would enrage people who have spent a lot of time working on a very thoughtful plan. We have to work along on both streams. We have to ensure we don't make the problem any worse by moving people out of Riverview without appropriate services. At the same time, we have to start to systematically pick up the people in the communities who are not getting adequate services right now. The reasons for that are complex. They're not simply funding problems, although we have made a significant commitment through the 25 percent funding increase to the mental health budget to try to deal with what can be dealt with by putting money to the issue.
But we also have -- and you know this full well, being a member from the north -- incredible problems with psychiatric services: getting psychiatrists into the north to deal with the patients who are in crisis, as opposed to those who are well enough to do office visits. We have some real difficulties in getting the appropriate human resources in the right places. That's not simply a problem of money; it's a much more complicated problem.
You particularly talked about beds in the north. The mayors of Prince George, Quesnel, Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Williams Lake and probably a few others have all raised with me their concern about the plan having no tertiary care beds for mentally ill people in the north. I was surprised about that, too. I recently asked staff when this decision was made. It was made two years ago. As a result of the fact that the decision is two years old and an awful lot has changed since then -- including the government, but certainly the strategy around health care, the royal commission talking about Closer to Home and our new focus on making sure that services are where the people are -- I've asked for a complete review of that decision. It is underway right now.
Some of the analysis that was originally done may not be applicable any longer. I have made a commitment to the people in those communities who I've talked to and who have written to me that we will reconsider that decision and let them know what our outcome is. The decision is out of date, and the world has moved on considerably since it was made.
L. Fox: I appreciate the need to review decisions that are made and not acted upon from time to time, but it's of very little comfort to the communities who at the same time are seeing increasing acts of violence and disruption in the community itself, certainly to the point that it has increased costs of policing and all those different areas. There are concerns, at least three in Quesnel and three or four that I'm aware of in Prince George, that these particular patients are wandering around the community without support staff and the proper spot to live and are becoming a huge concern to the families of those individuals and to the community at large.
In Quesnel they've had acts where an individual has hitchhiked. A logging truck driver picked that individual up and that truck was literally destroyed by that individual. The individual was coming from Alexandria, and that is where he was sent back. Yet there's no way to offer that individual the help he needs, so he takes it out on whomever he comes in contact with. These acts are extremely concerning. I've spoken to the mayor of Quesnel on the issue, and he is frustrated. I've spoken to other health care deliverers in that community, and they are frustrated.
Really, I guess the minister's words are reassuring, but in the interim period some kind of action is necessary to deal with individuals who are in need of care now. Another study is fine, but the delay is really not meeting.... In the view of municipal leaders in the north, it's not taking a step in the right direction. It may very well be, from the ministry's point of view, but in their view they need some kind of interim direction to handle these particular people while the study is in process.
One further question I might ask is: what kind of money is allocated in your budget this year to deal with those issues, particularly in the northern two-thirds of this province, which I recognize has something less than 360,000 people in it but geographically is very large?
Hon. E. Cull: Hon. Chair, we're not talking about doing another study. This government has done more to improve services to the mentally ill than any other government in the history of this province. I urge you to read the Blues; we went over this the other day. We have provided in one fiscal year, last year, a 25 percent increase in funding, $52 million going into mental health. If you want more -- and I don't disagree that there should be more funding put into mental health --
[ Page 6175 ]
I have to tell you that that kind of increase was as much as the system could absorb in one year. It takes time to hire people, to get programs in place and to get those services out there. Notwithstanding that, last year we were able to provide mental health services to an additional 5,000 children and youth affected by serious mental disorders. Five thousand children who were not receiving those services in 1991 received them in 1992. We provided emergency services to an additional 2,000 people, including homeless people, who were not getting services. We provided additional services to another 5,000 seniors. So we have made a dramatic improvement and increase in the level of services. We are not doing another study.
The whole program around Riverview, which has been in the works for a number of years, has not yet been completed. Not only has a decision not been made about them going to the north, they haven't gone to the interior or to the Island yet. There is more work underway. There is a process in place that involves the people who are most concerned with mental health services, and we have got to let those processes take their course. They have pretty well come to the end of it. But part of the planning that took place in the past under your government was that no tertiary beds would go to the north. I'm saying we should review that. That decision was brought to my attention in February this year -- that that had been decided two years ago and that decision was being pursued. There's no reason why staff would act in any other way; they don't throw out all decisions made by a former government when a government changes. But when the mayors of those communities brought that to my attention, we agreed that we would review it.
When it comes to housing, again, last year -- in one year -- we increased housing spaces available to the mentally ill by almost 600 new living spaces.
[4:00]
L. Fox: How many in the north?
Hon. E. Cull: I'll have to look at the total numbers here. There were 85 self-contained living units with B.C. Housing Management Commission. Some of those would have been in the north, but I don't know exactly which ones. There were 11 self-contained living units targeted directly to the north, 44 to the Thompson, Okanagan and Kootenays. I'm just looking here to see what else might be in the north. Again, short-term assessment and treatment facilities for the northern two-thirds for the province, as you point out, includes a very large area. Yes, there is a need for beds in the north. I don't deny that. There is a need for beds everywhere. The bulk of the population, unfortunately, isn't in the north. We provide our services according to where people are. There are people in Vancouver, on Vancouver Island, in the Kootenays, in the Thompson-Okanagan area, who require more services. By the increase in funding that we did last year, we have made a commitment. We're making progress on it, but you cannot reverse decades of neglect in mental health in one fiscal year or in 18 months. We have made it our number one priority, we will continue to fund it as the number one priority, and we will start to make a difference in the lives of the mentally ill in this province. But we're not going to do it unless we continue to provide a commitment towards the funding. I think we have shown that.
Last year, when we had an 8 percent increase in the Health budget, it was easier to give money to those projects. This year, when we have half the increase in funding, we have maintained funding to mental health, and we have increased funding to mental health. There is $22 million in additional funding going in this year. It's a very tight budget year, but we have maintained our priority there. I think it's very clear that we are going to support the work done by health care consumers and providers in the mental health area. We will continue to advance this plan in a way that meets the needs of patients in this province.
L. Fox: First of all, let me just talk a little bit about the decades of neglect. I realize that society today looks upon mental health patients a lot differently than we did even ten years ago. The thrust to mainstream these people is very similar to, and followed a little behind, the thrust to mainstream handicapped children into our school system. That started some 20 years ago, when I was on the school board. I think the minister was on the school board in or around the same time.
Interjection.
L. Fox: Oh, you weren't. I thought it was that long ago.
I do recognize that there has been a thrust. I think the problem that the people and community leaders in northern British Columbian have is that they always feel -- as a community leader myself in the north for eight years, I felt similarly -- they are the last to see the results of any program initiatives. We are less populated. We recognize that the money has to be spent where the majority of people are.
Also, we have the same problems. While the numbers may be smaller, the significance in terms of disruption and what happens with the community is usually more significant and probably more noticeable because the communities are smaller. Obviously, the direct bearing on the individuals within those communities is a lot closer because everybody knows everybody. You have a relationship and perhaps an exposure to these kinds of people that not everybody in the city of Vancouver would have. There are some genuine concerns on behalf of those municipalities. We're really looking to see.... I did not ask. Every time I stand up, the minister points at me and makes the assumption that I'm asking for more money. I've never asked for more money in any of the estimates or any of my discussions. I have from time to time talked about changing the priorities, but I've never asked for more money to be spent.
What we're asking for is that equal consideration be given to those communities with smaller populations and that their needs be recognized. I'm sure that's all those municipal leaders in northern British Columbia are asking for as well. I would like to know what new
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initiatives are in the budget for this year to address the concerns of the municipal leaders in northern British Columbia with respect to the tertiary care issue.
Hon. E. Cull: All of the mental health funds are distributed according to demographic formulas, so we do provide funding to communities based on their needs and on their populations. It does mean that not every community gets the same number of dollars -- that wouldn't be reasonable -- but we do recognize the needs of northern communities.
It's interesting to talk about the decades of neglect, because in the decades that mental health was being ignored in this province, your government was in power. Your government had the ability to do something about this. You say other places were doing that. Twenty years ago -- when you say we were just starting to think about this -- I left another province that had already started to recognize this problem. They knew they had a problem then with the way deinstitutionalization was occurring. It seems that British Columbia managed to stumble along for another two decades before they realized they had a problem. The mental health initiative announced by your government wasn't funded, but they carried on moving the people out into the communities.
We have stopped that. Not only have we stopped it, we've said that we will fund it. We increased the mental health funding last year by $52 million. That was probably the first major increase in mental health funding that had ever been seen -- certainly in the last couple of decades. With respect to the tertiary level beds, the mental health initiative has a statement about the relocation of the beds from Riverview. The planning is still ongoing. Those beds have not been reallocated.
When I was travelling in the north in February, I met with a group of health care people who were very concerned about mental health services in the north. They provided me with an excellent strategy to deal with psychiatric and other services available to the mentally ill. We are reviewing that report. We're hoping that we will be able to use that as the basis for making some changes in the way mental health services are being provided in the north. I received that report a couple of weeks ago, and the fact that I met with the people who wanted to make that presentation to me indicates that we are taking this very seriously.
As part of our overall strategy we are also developing a policy for health care in the northern part of this province. While we have a lot of programs, we still have a lot of problems. And I will give credit to your government for putting in place a number of programs to allow specialists to travel to the north, to fund doctors in the north with additional premiums and to train people from the north so that they can go back and practise health care in their communities. I know we have problems, because people like you keep bringing them to my attention, saying that we are not providing for the health care concerns of people in the north in the way that we can. For that reason, one of the actions in the New Directions strategy is to establish a task force of northerners and people from small communities to work out a policy for us so that we can provide better health care services to the north.
Mental health services in the north-central interior were enhanced last year by $718,700, so a significant amount of new money went into the central interior. The Prince George area is receiving enhanced emergency and urgent-response services following the hiring of six general practitioners who provide emergency standby and joint-recruitment effort between the Prince George Mental Health Centre and Regional Hospital.
There are outreach services. Community residential housing for people with serious and persistent mental illnesses has been increased by 50 percent. The rehabilitation services that go with them have been increased by 20 percent. We've contracted direct services in Burns Lake, and they've been increased from one and a half to two full-time clinicians. It's a small amount, but as you pointed out, we're dealing with small numbers. It is problematic in a small community, but in that case, even that does assist us.
For the first time we have a full-time mental health clinician in Fort St. James. We've increased the sessions available to general practitioners to provide medical consultation and support to a new mood disorders clinic. We have just this year opened an eating disorders program in Prince George, for the first time. I've got quite a list here. I won't continue to read it; I'll send it over to you, hon. member.
L. Fox: Thank you. I appreciate the litany of programs. Most of them were in place prior to this minister being in government and were obviously started by the previous administration in recognition of....
Interjection.
L. Fox: It seems strange that.... I wasn't here 20 years ago in government and neither was the minister. By her own admission, she didn't even live in the province, so I don't know how either one of us can go back and suggest that the government of the day didn't recognize the needs. I don't know what the needs were and neither does she. However, I'll leave that topic.
I know that if the needs are not met, the minister will be barraged by mayors of the northern communities. They will articulate their concerns extremely well. One suggested to me that he was going to bring a couple of his problem people and sit in front of the Legislature with a sign.
However, I want to get on to another aspect of the estimates. On page D-37 of the Closer to Home document, an issue that draws my attention is that the commission recommends that two separate bodies be created that would provide a clear separation of the membership and promotion functions from the licensing and discipline functions of the professional health care deliverers. When I look at some of the information.... Before I get into it, perhaps the minister might elaborate on whether or not she supports that recommendation.
[ Page 6177 ]
Hon. E. Cull: Yes, I do.
L. Fox: One area that I wanted to address, because it appears there are two associations: the Registered Nurses' Association of British Columbia and the BCNU.... The nursing association supplies the regulatory function and the BCNU looks after the advocacy function. As I understand it, the BCNU has a membership of about 20,000, and there are 30,000 in the nursing association, so I would suggest that there are 10,000 in management functions throughout our province who are not covered by the BCNU.
The union recently passed a resolution that would request that a third body be set up in the form of a college. I guess the intent was to include the 10,000 nurses who presently are not in the union. It is also my understanding that it would require an amendment to the Nurses (Registered) Act in order to accommodate that kind of body, but I'm wondering if the minister supports the union and its resolution requiring that a third body be set up with the nurses or whether she would support the association, which suggests that the two bodies that are in place are sufficient.
Hon. E. Cull: The 10,000 would not only include management nurses but also nurses who are not working, but wish to keep their registration so that they may return to work. It would include nurses who are working in non-union situations. There is a variety of possibilities there.
As I said, in answer to your first question, I do support the clear separation of the union advocacy function for the betterment of the nurse as an employee or as a person who provides a service and earns a wage for it from the regulatory function that licenses and disciplines nurses and holds them accountable to certain standards and standards of ethical conduct. The RNABC, which has existed for many years -- and which existed prior to the BCNU -- contains not only the college-like functions of registration, discipline and the like but contains some functions that are more of a professional advocacy nature. That has given rise to concerns by the royal commission in looking at it, also by the BCNU and some nurses, and also by the ministry.
[4:15]
As I said very clearly, we support the separation, and that goes for all health care professionals. I've met with both the BCNU and the RNABC with respect to this issue. I've been working with them to pull the groups together and to look at two options. One is the creation of a third body that would create a college of nurses to take on the regulatory function of health care professional colleges; the other is for the RNABC to review its roles and responsibilities and eliminate those that take it beyond the confines of a college. Both of those options are in fact acceptable to both parties. Certainly the BCNU has said they would look at either possibility. The RNABC is willing to look at the possibility of reducing some of its responsibilities; it's not keen to see a third body established.
Indeed, if two bodies are good enough for doctors and good enough for many of the other health care professionals that have both a professional association and a college, it probably should be good enough for nurses as well. But there are some problems with the functions of the RNABC in that they do blur the two. Both the BCNU and the RNABC have been advised that the matter has to be addressed. There are possibilities for addressing it, and we're working towards making the necessary changes.
L. Fox: I take it then that we have the commitment of the minister to work with both bodies in order to come to some kind of consensus as to what's in the best interests of the professional nurse.
Hon. E. Cull: Yes, and that's indeed what I've been doing in talking to the two bodies. There has been a suggestion that we all get together and start to look at it, particularly to look at the option of what would have to be eliminated from the RNABC functions to make it meet a college and to see whether that's acceptable to everybody who has concerns about this. Otherwise, we'll be looking at the other possibility. But yes, we will work together; we will try to achieve consensus on this. Given the discussions that I've had with the two associations, I think it's quite feasible that we'll be able to do this.
L. Fox: I've had occasion to meet with another group that has a similar concern. I know that the ministry received this particular document only within the last few days, I think. It's a presentation on behalf of the College of Dental Surgeons of B.C., which also has some concerns and wants to look at the structure. As one association, at least since September of last year, they have fulfilled both roles, but they have two separate identities. It has been a pilot project as to how these two separate identities can work within the college structure.
[E. Barnes in the chair.]
Another issue has come into play, and that's the issue of whether dental hygienists would function under the college or whether there was a need for them to develop on their own. The particular model that was presented to me only today -- I know that the minister, given her hectic schedule, would have had some difficulty in consuming this information -- provides the dental hygienists with a separate regulatory board -- under the umbrella of the Dentists Act -- that would function parallel to the college of dentists. In between them, a dispute mechanism is set up that seems to be a very fair process involving three members from both parties and then some lay people, along with the registrars of both associations. Has the minister had a chance to look at this presentation? Does she agree that the College of Dental Surgeons of British Columbia should be able to continue to function without splitting off into two groups, as the Closer-to-Home document suggests should happen?
Hon. E. Cull: The hon. member is probably aware that it was his government, with the support of my party and opposition, that passed the Health Profes-
[ Page 6178 ]
sions Act, which clearly established the requirement for the separation between these two functions. We have made a commitment not to put everybody under the Health Professions Act but to take the principles which are embodied in it and ensure that other acts that establish colleges are brought into alignment. We have been working with all of the health professions around what changes might be necessary to move them in this direction, and I think there is general agreement. Certainly, the royal commission held that particular piece of legislation up as good legislation and as a good model to follow in terms of regulating health professions. I haven't seen the document that you're referring to. Last night I did discuss the hygienist issue in particular with members of the College of Dental Surgeons, who were here in Victoria meeting with government caucus members.
As the member may be aware, the Hygienists' Association has made an application to the Health Professions Council. The council has heard the application, held hearings and heard from all of the interested parties and issued its report. The report is available: I released it publicly some weeks ago. The government has not yet made a decision on the recommendations of the Health Professions Council to establish a separate college for dental hygienists. The process that we have followed is to release the report, send it to all of the parties who made submissions to the Health Professions Council and ask them to write to the ministry if they have any further comments to make. Last night when I discussed this with the College of Dental Surgeons, they indicated that the time line we had set was a bit tight and asked for additional time, which we have granted to them. They will be taking a few more weeks to get their comments back into us. When we receive the comments of all of the parties, we will then reflect upon them and on the recommendations of the Health Professions Council and decide what steps are necessary at that point. The steps could be taking a recommendation forward to cabinet to implement the recommendations of the Health Professions Council or going back and having more discussions with any of the parties to get further clarification on issues that may be in dispute. We're in the process; the Health Professions Council has done its work and made its recommendation. The time will go on, and we'll get the reports in, and we'll make decisions as we receive these comments.
With respect to the proposal by the College of Dental Surgeons to do both under one organization with an administrative structure to separate them, I haven't looked at the proposal, but I believe the appropriate route for that would be also to refer it to the Health Professions Council to have it give us some advice as to this particular model. It would be different; it would not be in keeping with the act, but we would certainly ask them for their advice. I'll take this opportunity to publicly complement the three individuals who are now in the Health Professions Council for the very fine work that they have done. Their responsibility is to adjudicate these applications in the public interest, so they are having to weigh off competing interests of different professional groups in making their recommendations. I think they have done a very good job in the three reports produced to date -- hygienists, opticians and midwives -- and I would like to publicly congratulate them.
L. Fox: Just one question before I let the member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi -- I think that's the correct riding -- ask some questions.
I understood the deadline for submissions to that is May 21st. Is that the extended deadline, or was that the deadline that was originally in place and you've extended it beyond that?
Hon. E. Cull: That was the original deadline, and in discussion with the college last night we agreed to a three-week extension.
D. Mitchell: I know that the minister has likely received lots of representation and a number of questions on the Closer to Home document over the last year or so. But I'd like to ask her a specific question on the philosophical underpinnings of a decentralized, community-based health care system, which I think the majority of British Columbians support in principle. I'm wondering in particular whether the government can both decentralize the delivery of health care in British Columbia and at the same time downsize the health care system. The minister has spoken about that, particularly in the context of the closure of Shaughnessy Hospital, where there's been some discussion about downsizing some of the hospital services.
I wonder if the ministry has done any particular studies of other jurisdictions -- such as European models -- that have experimented with community-based health care systems. Has the ministry been able to determine in those other jurisdictions whether the general health of the community affected has been improved and whether or not the costs of decentralizing health care have been contained? So particularly in those two areas, where we've gone into these kinds of systems, has the health of the communities been improved and have costs been able to be contained?
Hon. E. Cull: I've always said Closer to Home means two things: out of Vancouver and into the regions, which means regionalization; and out of the institutions and into the community, which means downsizing of institutions, if you like, or restructuring of where care is provided.
Closer to Home can mean services that stay in Vancouver -- moving from a hospital to a community -- as well as services that move from, say, Prince George to Vanderhoof. I'm just trying to give you some idea of the two aspects of the Closer to Home strategy. A number of different studies have been done on regionalization and decentralization concepts as they have been introduced into other jurisdictions. One which I would recommend to you if you haven't had a chance to have a look at it was done for the BCHA, by a student writing her master's thesis. Her name is....
An Hon. Member: Alison Rualt.
[ Page 6179 ]
Hon. E. Cull: Alison Rualt. I will have to give Hansard the correct name later. But she had a look at other jurisdictions in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and, I believe, Britain -- and maybe Holland; I can't remember which European one she looked at. But she looked at all of these, analyzed what they had done and analyzed what the success factors were, because they were not all successful. I found that to be a very useful document in terms of providing advice to us as to what works and what doesn't.
But I guess the vast majority of the homework on this issue was done by the royal commission that was established essentially to do that kind of work on behalf of the ministry when it was appointed in 1990 by the former government. They did a lot of work in this area. They came up with recommendations, some of which we have decided to implement virtually as they were written. Others have been modified as a result of the extensive consultation that took place between November 1991, when the report was released, and February 1993, when we released our New Directions paper.
[4:30]
As you're aware, we had an advisory committee of 26 members representative of places around the province working with us -- half of them health care consumers, half providers. We had six working groups, including one looking at regionalization and another one bringing together the shift from institutions to the community. We had two health care forums. In the forums we brought together for a two and a half day period -- one in July and one in October, if my memory serves me correctly -- about 150 people representing all kinds of groups that have interest in health care -- not just the health care providers themselves but the advocacy groups, consumer groups and also groups that represented significant portions of our society with particular health care issues, such as aboriginal people, for example.
The health care forums worked with the material out of the royal commission, then the material that was coming out of the working groups and out of the advisory committee, and really focused a lot on how to make a structure here in British Columbia that would represent the special needs of B.C. While you can look at everybody else's system -- and I think Alison's work was useful because she picked out the key elements or attributes that made it successful -- you're not going to be able to take anything from anywhere else and just slap it down on the province of British Columbia. We all like to think we're unique and different, but our geography is pretty compelling if we're looking for differences. That and some of the particular problems we have with the way the population is distributed, the age of the population, significant ethnic and aboriginal populations, means that we do need something that's built for B.C. Those people really worked very effectively with us to come up with the ideas that we finally incorporated in our New Directions document.
D. Mitchell: I'm very intrigued by the answer, because she's indicated to the committee that there are a number of processes that were put in place before we launched into this brave new world of community-based health care, which we all hope is going to work out. But I'm intrigued, in terms of any international comparisons with other jurisdictions, that perhaps the major study is actually a master's thesis that was written here...
Interjection.
D. Mitchell: ...and the royal commission document, the minister says. The two main questions, though, remain unresolved: can we do this in a way that actually improves the health of communities in British Columbia? Can we do this in a manner that allows us to contain costs in the health care system? I guess there's a bit of a leap of faith that's taking place as we launch into this direction. The minister is indicating that that's the case -- that we don't have much experience to draw upon.
In terms of the closure of Shaughnessy, using the example the minister referred to, can the minister tell us whether...? We start looking at decentralizing and downsizing, and then we have an incident like the closure of a hospital, which is a major event in the history of any province. Is it possible for the ministry to give comfort to citizens, to taxpayers and to patients who were serviced by Shaughnessy Hospital, that they will still be able to receive treatment in the region? I'm particularly interested, of course, in Lions Gate Hospital. I'm wondering whether there is now going to be extra pressure on a facility such as Lions Gate Hospital on the North Shore as a result of the closure of Shaughnessy -- whether that is going to have any impact and whether that is provided for in the budget that we're reviewing.
Hon. E. Cull: One of the more frustrating experiences of having estimates that take place over the course of a couple of weeks is that issues that were canvassed at length earlier on get recanvassed when members decide to drop in and to ask their questions. So I'm not going to give a full, detailed answer to this. I encourage you to read the Blues, because I think we spent a full afternoon with the opposition Health critic asking these questions.
The simple answer is that the services of Shaughnessy Hospital, those serving patients who required provincial-level or tertiary-level programs, are being redistributed to the other teaching hospitals and other tertiary facilities in the Vancouver area. So people who would have gone to Shaughnessy to receive a certain service that's only available in one or two hospitals in the province will be going to VGH or St. Paul's or perhaps Royal Columbian or some of the others that are in that area right now, so the services are being redistributed there.
The other services that Shaughnessy was providing -- the more community-based services provided to people who didn't live in the Vancouver area but couldn't get those services because the beds in Surrey and the Fraser Valley were full, because the population there has just outstripped any ability to be able to keep pace with the needs of those people are going to be
[ Page 6180 ]
repatriated to the communities that have the patients, and they will be provided there just as they would in other communities around the province which are able to meet the needs of their own regional population.
You talked about Closer to Home, and I think the major problem we have with costs in the health care system is providing the wrong care in the wrong place. We don't have a well-integrated system. We end up with people who can't move easily from one part of the health care system to the other. The best example I have -- one that comes out of a lower mainland community -- is a hospital that has calculated the costs of having alcohol and substance abusers show up at the emergency room after hours. There is an alcohol and drug treatment clinic in that community which is open from nine to five, so from five to nine the people in crisis go to the hospital emergency room. The hospital has calculated that it could save $90,000 a year if it just took the money that was needed out of its budget, gave it to the alcohol and drug treatment centre, and said: "Open 24 hours a day." People would be better served; they would be in the right place, getting the right treatment; the hospital would have its emergency room freed up somewhat; and the hospital would be $90,000 ahead at the end of the day -- if the calculations of the chief executive officer are correct.
It sounds great! Why don't we do it? It's really practical. It can't be done under our existing system, because we have one body over here and one budget over there that's the hospital. The ability to deal with another body that is funded in a different way, is part of a different system and managed by totally different people is very difficult.
I think that community will probably do it because of the power of the personalities involved and the management there. But we shouldn't have the system set up so that it is difficult for logical, practical decisions to be made around health care funding. If we can facilitate a more integrated system by having the decisions made at the community level wherever possible, by having the decisions made by a body that oversees not just the hospital and acute services but continuing care and the community health services, so that priorities and budgets could be set across the system and resources deployed across the system, I can tell you we'll find lots of those $90,000 savings. And we will be able to provide a much more cost-effective health care system -- one where people don't fall between the gaps of the fragmented system we have right now.
D. Mitchell: I thank the minister for that answer, as well as her patience with the process. I'm aware of the discussion that took place earlier about Shaughnessy, but I think that her answer has clarified a concern I have. She has talked about rationalizing the health care system. If she can achieve that and at the same time contain costs, I think she will have the support of most British Columbians.
In terms of a community-based health care system, after looking through Hansard I'm still not comfortable that the issue of universality of health care -- that all British Columbians will have equal access to the same high-quality health care -- is going to be provided. For instance, the member for Prince George-Omineca was talking about some specific issues in his constituency. Is there any way for the minister to allay any concerns that someone in the community of Vanderhoof will -- under the new system of community-based health care -- have access to the same quality of service as a resident of Vancouver, for instance? I don't think the issue of universality has been satisfactorily addressed in the public's mind.
Hon. E. Cull: The question of equal access is one of the major issues the royal commission presented to us as a problem that needed addressing. When they looked at our health care system, they told us that it was one of the best health care systems in the world. Then they said: "But there are a lot of problems." One of the biggest "buts" that they raised for us was the fact that people are not equally healthy in British Columbia -- depending upon where you live, you have a greater likelihood of suffering from different diseases or becoming ill or having other health consequences that are not as positive as the average in the province -- and that we don't all have equal access to health care services. Clearly, people who live in the north, in small communities, on the Sunshine Coast, in Powell River or in isolated places where travel is difficult don't have the same benefits that you have in West Vancouver and that I have in Victoria. I think that goes for a lot of the services, unfortunately, that larger centres are able to provide more easily to their residents.
It doesn't mean, though, that we can't try to overcome that. One of the things that we have been trying to do through the New Directions strategy is redirect some of those resources. Some of that money that's in Shaughnessy Hospital right now is going to go out of the Vancouver area. It's going to go into the fast-growing parts of the province, particularly to try to bring the number of hospital beds and hospital-based services in those communities up to the average or up to the target that we've set for ourselves, which is 2.75 beds per thousand. That's going to benefit those high-growth areas.
Some of that money goes into the overall hospital budget this year. The additional money that's in our hospital budget is being reallocated according to a funding formula that we worked out with the hospitals themselves. That funding formula recognizes the age and needs of the population. There is redistribution taking place there, and some of the redistribution is pretty painful. You can look at a community like Prince Rupert that has seven beds per thousand, and you can look at a community like Surrey, which has something less than two beds per thousand. In this case it's Prince Rupert that actually has better access to that particular type of health care, because the waiting lists are less and your ability to get a hospital bed is better than if you live in Surrey. It's not all as we might think in terms of the larger centres having the best services.
If you look at the health care system overall, we probably do have some areas that are far less equal than others. That's what we're trying to address through redistributing the resources. It's going to take some
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wrenching decisions in some cases. The nicest or easiest thing that we could do would be to have a look at everybody, set a base and bring everybody else up. We'd just leave all of those other communities that might have a higher level of resources than is warranted. That way we would have the least amount of howling.
Unfortunately, we can't afford that, so we have to do both. We have to bring some communities that have too many resources down and others up. Whenever you start shifting resources, taking from one area to give to the other, my very short experience in this portfolio has taught me that those who have it taken howl really loudly; those who get it go quietly about their work, get those services in place and start getting on with what they're paid to do.
There are certainly some inequities. We have addressed particular inequities in our New Directions strategy: northern and isolated communities through a strategy to deal with health care policy around them; and particular groups in our society such as the disabled, women, aboriginal people and multicultural populations, which often have less than equal access to at least some health care services, depending on the circumstances that affect them.
I think the best thing that we could do in terms of universality and access to health care services would be not only to find a way to attach our funding to the level of services you have now and to the size and age of the population but also to find a way to target services to the health of the population. My colleague Mr. Foster, who is a geographer, is very fond of giving me maps showing me that disease is not equally spread about the province and that health is not equally spread about the province. You can start to focus in pretty easily on the communities which have the poorest health. I think that we should start directing our dollars to those in greatest need regardless of the population and the other things that are there. That's a refinement we can bring to our funding formula. We haven't got it there yet, but I think it would have a tremendous impact and would really start to get at the equal access issue. It's not so much that everybody should have an equal opportunity to access services. What we should be striving for is equal health status, making sure that people have an opportunity to be equally healthy. It might require providing different access or different levels of services, but that is the outcome that we should be focused on.
[4:45]
D. Mitchell: Thanks to the minister for that very interesting answer. Clearly there's a huge management challenge in accomplishing the objectives of the strategy that she's outlining. The fact that she's utilizing the professional services of a geographer makes the challenge even more interesting. I know the member for Powell River-Sunshine Coast would agree in wishing you luck with that challenge and that a geographer can probably add to the value here.
One specific question concerning the closure of Shaughnessy has been raised by some constituents of mine. It deals with the cystic fibrosis unit at Shaughnessy which, of course, collaborates with Children's Hospital. Can the minister say anything to alleviate the concerns of individuals who have children currently being treated at the cystic fibrosis clinic at Shaughnessy Hospital? Where are these young children going to go as they progress into their teenage years? There's a real concern about that, among parents as well as the caregivers of these patients, focussing really on cost. There appears to be a great efficiency with the current arrangement. When that arrangement is no more, with the closure of Shaughnessy, where will these patients go and will the treatment be as cost-effective?
Hon. E. Cull: I had the opportunity to meet with the people from cystic fibrosis the other night. We had people from the national board as well as people from here in B.C. At the meeting we were able to put to rest a number of their fears about how the program's services will be maintained in the future. They made it very clear to me that the location of the CF clinic was not an issue with them. They weren't there to lobby me with respect to one particular hospital location or even with respect to keeping Shaughnessy open. They were concerned that the particular needs of people with cystic fibrosis be recognized and that the clinic be moved intact.
People who have cystic fibrosis build up real relationships with health care providers. Because they have CF from birth they work with people for a long period of time and develop very close working relationships with the people who assist them. We spent a considerable amount of time going over their concerns that those relationships not be disturbed, and that the particular sensitivity of the emergency room staff would be there to provide the kind of immediate access that is very desperately needed when there is an emergency situation.
The final decisions have not been made yet with respect to the disposition of the various programs from Shaughnessy. As I have said earlier in the estimates debate, we're expecting the final report from the transition team very soon but it's not here yet. I think the people we met with on Monday evening went away satisfied that we had heard their concerns, that we understood what their needs were and that we were committed to continuing to work with the experts in CF care, with the association and with their families to make sure that in the end we did the right thing in this decision.
D. Mitchell: Thanks to the minister for that answer as well.
I have a general question for the minister relating to physicians in our health care system. As a result of events of the last year with the B.C. Medical Association -- that and other events have produced what perhaps might politely be called a strained relationship between doctors in our province and the government -- there seems to be a subtle change taking place in terms of the role that physicians play within the health care system. That might, I believe, have an impact on the physician-patient relationship as well. I'm wondering if the minister can comment on this: that increasingly this government's actions seem to indicate a shift from the
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physician's role of working directly with patients, especially with respect to the physician's ability to be an advocate for patients. I wonder whether or not the fee-for-service arrangement, to which there have been some proposed changes, is heading more and more towards a kind of salaried arrangement with physicians in B.C. If that's the case, then when a patient is dealing with his or her physician, is the patient dealing with the doctor or is the patient dealing with the doctor's employer? More clearly than ever, that employer is the government, and that relationship between patient and government seems to get involved in this complex relationship.
Could the minister comment on whether this is by design and there's an intentional desire or strategy to change the patient-doctor relationship, or are the subtle changes that this member observes perhaps not correct?
Hon. E. Cull: The relationship between a patient and the doctor is a very important relationship and not one that we want to see changed. We do not want to interfere with that relationship. It's a very important and privileged relationship, and it's one that I see will continue to be significant and important in the future under the changes that we're making in the health care system.
Doctors have always been in a rather interesting situation when it comes to being, as you say, advocates for their patients. We expect doctors to recommend what is best for their patients and to advocate for the rights of patients. Right now they are also the gatekeepers to the health care system. They determine who comes in, and how often they come in. Under some of our payment mechanisms, a lot of these things start to get really mixed up with one another in terms of patients' rights, doctors' rights and the rights of the taxpayer to have some control over the system. It becomes very difficult to remain purist about any of these things.
If you take the attitude that the doctor's role should only be as the advocate for the patient -- that that's the only responsibility the physician has -- you have to then accept that whatever the physician asks for in terms of the patient has to be paid for by the taxpayers. When we look at the increase in funding over the last number of years in health care, when we look at the amount that health care takes out of the provincial budget and when we look at the pressures that are on this government -- that would indeed be on any government -- to keep spending down and not to increase taxes, these things start to come directly into conflict with one another and to create some real difficulties. Other provinces have used a number of different means to deal with this. Ontario, for example, has caps on individual incomes that I assume interfere with the advocacy role once the doctor has reached the income cap. Other provinces limit the right of doctors to practise in certain areas of the province, or it discounts their fees should they do so. I would assume that that may also have some impact. I think it is difficult. What I guess I'm trying to do is say yes, there is an interplay here, and it's difficult to always make sure that there isn't an interplay.
With respect to salaried physicians, we did talk about this at some length earlier in the estimates debate. We are attempting, through our alternative payments group, to respond to a lot of pressure that we've had from physicians to move off fee for service and into an alternative payment mechanism. As I said in that debate, we expect fee for service to continue as the way the vast majority of doctors are paid, but of the 6,500 doctors that we have right now, 1,300 are already on alternative payment. Doctors have come to us in some cases and said: "This isn't working for my practice. I would like to explore alternative methods of payment." We are doing that with them through a variety of different methods that are available.
I think whether the doctor is his own....
An Hon. Member: Her.
Hon. E. Cull: I alternate backwards and forwards. I'm talking to the doctor down here, who's saying that some doctors are she. My pharmacist example was a she, if you're paying attention.
In this system, whether physicians are being paid by the taxpayer, a hospital, a community health clinic or centre or in any other arrangement where doctors could be in a salaried circumstance, they still have to balance that role between being gatekeepers and advocates for their patients. Obviously I'm not a doctor, but it seems that one of the things that is very strong in the training of the doctors I have talked to is their ethical commitment toward their patients. The vast majority of doctors I have come to know over the last year and a half put their patients' needs first -- above their needs, in many cases, and certainly above the considerations of the system. They act as very strong advocates for their patients.
With respect to joining us on a tripartite medical services commission, where we will manage the Medical Services Plan budget, we have asked them to do what other provinces have been asking, through joint committees or other approaches that they have put in place, and that is that physicians also work with the government to manage the system. Because they are the gatekeepers, we need their assistance, and in some ways they need the government's assistance for them to be able to do that job, as well. As many doctors have said to me, we don't put the guidelines and protocols that are backed up by the government in place; that is done by the doctors or by the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
But if we back them up by not funding them through the Medical Services Plan, we give them some assistance in saying to their patient: "You don't need this test or procedure, but if you really believe you do need it, you can have it done; but the government's not going to pay for it." We pay for medically needed procedures; we don't pay for the ones that are not medically needed. But sometimes doctors will say to me that they feel very pressured by aggressive patients who believe they know what they need. Some doctors have said: "If we don't do the test, someone else is going to do it." The pressure they have on them from patients sometimes can be quite immense.
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D. Mitchell: Thanks to the minister for that answer, as well. I'm pleased to hear the minister say that the government supports what might be called the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship. Her comments about the role of the government, though, leave some room for ambiguity as to whether or not the changing relationship between physicians and the government will have any impact, directly or indirectly, on that patient-physician relationship. Is the minister indicating in her comments that there could be an inherent conflict in a physician playing the dual role of advocate for patients as well as gatekeeper for the system?
Hon. E. Cull: We're being very philosophical here. There are potential conflicts that arrive if you are advocating on behalf of the patient but are also acting as a gatekeeper to the system and are a part of a health care system conscious of the use of limited resources. I can imagine that those particular roles might come into conflict with one another from time to time, but the strength of the system that we have is the training and the dedication of doctors in terms of their ethical code and their commitment to their patient and the patient-doctor relationship, which is very strong. That allows us, probably 99.9 percent of the time, to resolve those inherent conflicts in a way that is best for the patient and doesn't lose sight of the other considerations that anyone in the health care system has to be paying attention to these days.
D. Mitchell: On a less philosophical note, a specific question dealing with hospitals and how services which are either emergency or non-emergency are designated. There's some confusion about this in terms of some representation I've received. I'm wondering if the minister can tell this committee whether or not the ministry defines an emergency or non-emergency service for a hospital, or whether a local hospital society develops those criteria.
Hon. E. Cull: I'd just like to get a little clarification on your question. Are you referring to diagnostic services here for hospital in-patient services? When you're talking about emergency and non-emergency, could you be a bit more specific, because there are too many variations for me to be able to focus in.
[5:00]
D. Mitchell: I wasn't implying any specific categories. But when a patient goes into a hospital for emergency care, I'm asking what is defined as emergency. I believe that some hospitals have the ability to charge a fee-for-service for non-emergency services. I'm wondering who would decide where the fee-for-service would come in for non-emergency services.
Hon. E. Cull: We have a little bit of confusion around your question, so I'll take a stab at answering it. If I'm not addressing the area that you want addressed, I'm sure you will get back up and tell me so.
When someone goes to emergency, the physicians there determine whether it's an emergency or not, and people are treated sort of in order of priority. I would imagine that if someone showed up with something that was really not an urgent emergency and was really quite frivolous, they would be directed to go see their family doctor the next day. But in terms of what is an emergency, what is urgent and what is not quite an emergency, I guess they triage at the emergency room and determine who gets treated first and which are the emergencies.
With respect to payment, the doctors get paid for the services they provide, whether they're emergency or non-emergency services. Whatever they do, they sign up for a particular fee code. They indicate what they've done, and it's paid for according to the fee code that's established.
D. Mitchell: I take it, then, that the Ministry of Health in this province does not provide guidelines for what might be considered an emergency or non-emergency. That's dealt with on site. I guess there is a potential concern there that this might be handled differently at different hospitals if there are not overall guidelines. I'd appreciate the minister's response to that. But also, I understand that some hospital societies have the ability to assess a fee-for-service for non-emergency cases that come their way. Would the Ministry of Health provide guidelines for that, or is that decided on a hospital-by-hospital basis?
Hon. E. Cull: The problem of people going to different hospitals and getting a different assessment is no different from what would happen if there were two identical people with identical conditions going to different doctors; they may get different assessments there. The physicians in the facility make the assessment about the emergency and about the treatment. It's not a bureaucratic or administrative function, and I think people would be horrified if they thought it was. We want the professionals making decisions about treatment -- not hospital administrators or anyone else.
I'm not aware of any hospitals that are charging a fee for non-emergency cases at the emergency room. Certainly we wouldn't be sanctioning it. In fact, if it was happening I suppose it would come under the Canada Health Act, and we would have the same situation as we have with the extra-billing of doctors. Again, I'm not aware of this. You may have information that I don't have on this one.
D. Mitchell: For the sake of efficiency of the committee, I will share with the minister some correspondence I've received on this.
I'd like to move on, if I could, to one other specific area. It deals with the care of cancer patients. I know that the minister has dealt with this previously and that she has had some questions on the care of cancer patients. But as a separate topic, I've had some representation -- I know the minister has probably had the same -- from cancer patients in British Columbia who bemoan the fact that now that we have the technology and the medical diagnostic ability to detect cancer at earlier stages where it is treatable, unfortunately treatment seems to be unavailable to
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them because of what are considered to be cutbacks or closures or waiting lists.
I wonder if the minister can comment with respect to the care of cancer patients. Where we have radiation equipment sitting idle, is it not perhaps an inefficient use of the medical resources that we have within our system to not be providing treatment to cancer patients under those circumstances? Can she clarify some confusion that exists on this?
Hon. E. Cull: We went over this one yesterday. There has been a reduction in the waiting lists and waiting times for radiotherapy services over the last 12 months. The services are subject to the availability of very highly specialized staff. There is a worldwide shortage, as I mentioned yesterday, of radiation oncologists and radiotherapy technologists, so it's not an equipment problem, not an operating budget problem; it's a staffing problem. We have done a lot in the last number of years in terms of expanding the capacity to provide the services. Certainly the Surrey cancer clinic will be coming onstream in 1995, Kelowna in 1996 and the expansion of the Victoria clinic also in 1996. As an interim measure, until the opening of these new clinics, we've funded the B.C. Cancer Agency for extra shifts on the existing facilities, and we've also reluctantly negotiated contracts with Washington State for certain radiotherapy services.
But the problem remains the specialists -- the people needed to operate the equipment that we have. The solution to that, as I said yesterday, is really a long-term one. We are working on that in terms of expanding training programs for radiation technologists. That's already been done, and we actively recruit radiation oncologists, but there is a worldwide shortage of those people. Again, as I mentioned yesterday, some jurisdictions have solved their problems by raiding the specialists from another jurisdiction, which is sort of moving the problem around geographically, not solving the overall issue.
D. Mitchell: I thank the minister for that question as well. I have just one final area that I would like to canvass with her, and it deals with an area that I also plan to raise with her colleague the Minister of Advanced Education: the training of medical practitioners and, in particular, those who are doing post-graduate work in the area of family practice. Again, I know the minister has had some representation on this issue, as well. But in the context of the Closer to Home strategy and community-based health care, I understand that it has been deemed as an objective in our medical school here in British Columbia, at UBC, to achieve a 40/60 split between family medicine and specialty training programs. There's a concern about whether or not there's enough funding for family practice residencies. There appears to be a lack of support for our own students here within the system to fund additional residency positions in family medicine. Can the minister comment on that?
Hon. E. Cull: Another item that we have already canvassed in the estimates. The simple answer to that is that the parties involved -- and I haven't got the briefing notes here in front of me -- Advanced Education, Health, the medical school and a couple of other bodies training medical students, are coming together to develop the plan to make sure there are sufficient two-year places for the family practice unit. That report is due back to me very soon. So the problem has been identified. The analysis of the problem, as I've been able to determine, is that everybody has pointed to everybody else's turf and said: "This is not our problem; it's somebody else's problem."
I think both the Minister of Advanced Education and I have gotten frustrated with that particular question as to why this isn't being addressed. We have attempted to fix -- and, I believe, will fix -- the problem, by putting the parties in a room and saying: "Sort it out. We'll provide additional funding."
Last week I was at UBC talking to the medical school people there, and they seemed quite satisfied with the approach and the time lines we've put in place to make sure this is addressed. There were also medical students, representatives from the medical students' society and from PARI-BC were there as well. I think they were also glad to see that this is finally getting resolved.
We are also working with physicians in Prince George to have training take place in Prince George in an effort to get young doctors trained closer to home for northerners in the hope that some of them may discover there is life beyond Hope, and there is really a wonderful province out there where they can live and practise.
D. Symons: I have a variety of questions on a variety of topics for the minister. The first one deals with biomedical research funding. I gather that this funding has been cut from $10 million to $2.5 million -- a 75 percent cut -- and that after the cut was made, there was a task force set up to study funding of biomedical research and the restructuring of this biomedical research initiative. I'm concerned that it seems a little backward to cut the funding and then set up a task force to look at the way you're going to do it. It might have been better to have structured the system first and then made the funds to match it. I'm wondering if you might comment on that.
Hon. E. Cull: Because the member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi is not a member of the official opposition or the third party, I granted a certain amount of leniency in terms of revisiting subjects that had already been canvassed by the opposition critic and the third party critic. The member who has just asked this question is a member of the opposition party. The opposition critic and I spent considerable time on this. I will say that the funding available to the research foundation this year is more than was available last year. There was a task force appointed. There is a two-year advance notice of changes, and the Blues have all the details on the rest of the funding.
D. Symons: I guess this points out the difficulty of operating two Houses. I was in the other House earlier
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and I didn't hear all the questions of member for West Vancouver-Garibaldi because I was asking questions of the Attorney General. That's one of our difficulties in opposition of running two things. You can't be in two places at once and keep track of the debates.
Interjection.
D. Symons: The critic is unavailable to be here today. Another thing of interest to me -- and maybe this has been discussed as well -- is where this research appears in the estimates. I note that there is a health special account in the estimates. I notice that it had $18.5 million in the estimates a year ago and it's gone up to $104.5 million now. That's an increase of almost 500 percent from last year's amount in that account.
I'm wondering how you can account for the money that's currently going to be spent in that particular account this year and whether you might give a little larger explanation. In the estimates book, it just simply says -- well, the items are too numerous to mention, I suppose. It doesn't really give any indication -- when we have a 500 percent increase -- where that money is going. I wonder if you can give us some idea of how that money under the Health special account is being disbursed.
Hon. E. Cull: I don't know of any account that's gone up by 500 percent. I would ask the member to check his figures or perhaps point out specifically what he is talking about. The $2.25 million that is available out of our operating funds to contribute to the $12.25 million the B.C. Health Research Foundation has this year is in the strategic and support services part of the budget.
D. Symons: For the minister's benefit, I'm on page 90 of the supplement. The bottom line on that page, under Health special account, had the total expenditure for '91-92 of $18,550,000. The expenditures for '92-93 are...I beg your pardon, these are for '93-94. I'm in error here. It has jumped in there to $104.5 million. I'm wondering if you can tell me then....
You know what I've done? I've grabbed somebody's else's book, and it's not for this year. He's got last year's book. I beg your pardon. I have one of this year's and one of last year's mixed. Obviously it isn't page 90. I'm terribly sorry about that.
Let's just see if I can find what the figures are in relation to the figures I was giving you for the year before. There was a whopping increase from '91 to '92. This is a modest increase, certainly not the 500 percent I was referring to. Could you give a description of item 95? When you look up item 95 in the back of the book, it basically says special accounts. It doesn't tell you anything more.
[5:15]
Hon. E. Cull: If the member will refer to the estimates document as opposed to the supplements, on page 168 he will see the description of the subvote for the Health special account under item (g). In case it's not absolutely clear, the Health special account is the account that was created last year to fulfil the commitment of 50 percent of lottery dollars to Health. That's why there was such a dramatic increase last year in the amount that you were referring to when you were in the wrong book and why there has been a more modest increase this year.
D. Symons: Some of the items under (g) on page 168 then are also items that are covered elsewhere. I notice that you have in here: "to fund administration, operation and delivery of health care...." Those things would also be covered elsewhere in the estimates, so it's sort of an assistance to those particular items, I assume.
Can I go to another topic then -- the topic of Pharmacare? I believe one of the subvotes provides for delivery programs, and the budget for that particular item was up around 10 percent. According to information I was given, salaries have increased by 23 percent. We seem to have increased the amount of the deductible in Pharmacare, yet there is this large increase in the salary aspect.
Hon. E. Cull: The increase this year includes annualization of the '92-93 wage increases that were negotiated for employees in this division, plus additional funding of $216,000 for 7.2 FTEs.
D. Symons: Thank you. Another topic I have concern for is one that I raised last year regarding assistance for people who have to travel for medical purposes. I know this has come up in another instance. I asked last year regarding somebody from Powell River, I believe, who had to use the ferry at regular intervals to go across for treatment. Although they weren't on social assistance, which would have helped them in that situation, the fare becomes very onerous when you have to go for treatment on a regular basis. I asked then about the possibility of a ferry pass that doctors could give to their patients when they are in this sort of thing. I also gather that questions have been asked -- it was in the paper recently -- about a woman coming down from up-country to Vancouver for treatment for one of her children. This was a very onerous task for them. There was a suggestion that they could use the frequent-flyer points. Last year, your response to me was: "We have looked at it and we're continuing to look at it. It is certainly a priority of mine in terms of trying to improve health care services that can't be resolved quickly this year. It couldn't be resolved in this year's budget. We will leave it to the future to work on how we might restructure insurance for catastrophic care costs."
You've had a year since that response. I'm just wondering if you could tell me the things that you have done in relationship to that issue.
Hon. E. Cull: Hon. Chair, we did canvass this item earlier in the estimates. I'll repeat what I said very briefly: we have continued to work on it. We are making progress and will be making announcements in due course.
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D. Symons: A different topic, related to travel and health care: the air ambulances. The government announced on August 14, 1992, that it had purchased the third air ambulance jet. I'm wondering if the minister might just give me a little information on that air ambulance. Does it carry one or two stretchers? I'll just throw a few more out at the same time. What percent of emergency flights would require the two-stretcher capacity, if indeed it has that capacity? What percent of the flights are providing emergency services compared to providing other government services? By other, that might mean transporting government personnel, MLAs or whoever about the province.
Hon. E. Cull: Hon. Chair, I've made a note of those three questions, and we'll get answers back to the member.
D. Symons: I thank you for that; I'll wait in anticipation of those answers.
A further question I have here involves the Medical Services Plan. I notice that in British Columbia in 1987, the premiums for a person.... I just have to check the particular group this was for, but there are similar groups.... The cost for a family was $456. In 1992 that figure rose to $840. It hasn't quite doubled, but it is getting that way. In that same five-year time period, Alberta went from $432 to $648, which is about a 50 percent increase; Ontario went from $714 to no premiums; and all the other provinces don't charge health care premiums. I'm just wondering why B.C. has had this rather dramatic increase in health care premiums in comparison to other provinces throughout Canada.
Hon. E. Cull: Because the former government saw fit to raise premiums. Premiums did not change at all in 1992-93 and this year we have made a $2-a-month increase in premiums for families of three or more. We have done that to offset the cost of eliminating premiums for 430,000 British Columbians who can least afford to pay those premiums and another 135,000 British Columbians who will pay lower premiums because of the redistribution. There has been a very modest increase for families and for individuals: $1 for singles and $2 for families. That money has been used to offset the elimination or reduction of premiums for 565,000 people and their families.
D. Symons: I'm not too sure that blaming the previous administration for the dramatic rise in health care costs, saying, "Well, we've just raised it a few dollars for people to give others a reduction," really answers the question. If the previous government was incorrect in raising the fees by that much, I would assume your government would have reduced them rather than maintaining the status quo. So I don't know whether the answer really satisfies me there.
I noticed that at least one province in Canada is considering -- I'm not sure of the current status of it -- changing the residency requirements for their medical services plan from the usual six months to three months. It seemed that this was partly in response to the fact that so many of their citizens were spending a good deal of time in retirement resorts or on holidays in the southern United States. The thought was that by not being here and doing their spending in Canada -- they're doing it south of the border -- they aren't really contributing through the variety of ways the plan is financed. I'm wondering if the ministry is considering anything of that sort to take care of the people who spend a lot of their time and a lot of their income outside the province and who aren't really supporting the health care program here yet come back here to use its services.
Hon. E. Cull: With respect to the topic we were just talking about, you pointed out in your figures that the premiums had almost doubled from 1987, I believe, to now. My point in talking about the former government is that almost all of that doubling is the result of their decisions. We would like to see premiums eliminated, but they raise $760 million, and it is not easy to suddenly pull that kind of money out of a budget unless you're going to replace it with something else in terms of a tax. This year we've made a very minor adjustment that has benefited over 500,000 British Columbians, and I think it's a step in the right direction. Certainly we're making sure that those who can least afford to pay premiums do not have to do so.
We're not planning any changes in the six-month residency requirement. People are required to maintain their residence in British Columbia for six months of the year before they can be eligible for medical services in this province, and I believe that is common across Canada. I hear what you're saying -- that somebody's considering changing it -- but we have not considered doing that.
D. Symons: On to a different topic, involving organizations that provide health care services. I had a call today from such an organization. They were somewhat concerned because when they moved into a new community, there was basically a health care service that had that community tied up, so to speak. They were concerned because they thought that they could offer the service at a lower rate, since they were, in a sense, operating at less overhead and also giving a larger proportion of the money that the ministry pays for this service. I believe that for homemakers the government allows approximately $18 per hour to the agency, but the actual home-care giver is getting somewhere in the neighbourhood of $9 per hour. There's almost a 50 percent cut in there.
This one fellow was suggesting to me that they would be giving more of that to the person themselves, that their people were equally qualified. I'm just wondering if there's not some way that there can at least be a bit more of a bidding system or some way here that would allow for a bit of competition. It seems, in the way that it is currently set up, that very few firms get a hold on that and seem to almost have a right to it. If there's some way that competition could be brought in, we might get our costs down.
[ Page 6187 ]
Hon. E. Cull: The way we purchase services is through a bid process, and contracts are then given. So if this individual has a more cost-effective service that meets the needs of our contractual requirements when the contract with the other agency is up, that individual will be more than welcome to bid on it. In fact, I would urge them to make their services known to the ministry now so that we can become aware of that and the service that they provide. Obviously we do contract with agencies for services, and contracts are not on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis. There is a period of time, and we must honour those contracts until they've expired. But we do go for bids for services.
I'm very concerned about the money not being passed through to homemakers. That's why we have established money in our budget for pay equality and have put stipulations on agencies that they have to pass that money through to their employees. Over the last year we have been providing money to raise the wages of homemakers and others who are working in non-union environments -- where, as you point out, they often get less than half of what the agency is paid -- to ensure that that money goes into the pockets of these very low-paid women who do this very valuable work for people in our province.
D. Symons: I would gather, then, that the minister is indeed confirming that a number of these are collecting from the government a fairly large amount, and that about half of it actually goes to the worker in the field -- which I think is terribly unfair. So that's being addressed, and I applaud them for that.
Another concern that has come up in my riding and elsewhere, because I'm noting here that the same concerns seemed to come up in Mission from a news report of March 3 of this year that deals with orthopedic surgery and hip replacements. It seems the problems here were somewhat the same as in Richmond a year ago. They say that surgeons performed 22 hip replacements at Mission Hospital alone, and there were 17 patients on the waiting list. What basically happened was that the budget for that particular operation had run out and the number that they did was all they were allowed to perform. The others simply have to wait, sometimes in agony, for a longer period. I gather that this is not uncommon throughout the province. Indeed, in my riding, I believe the patient wait-list is somewhere in the four- to six-month period for hospitalization, although serious cases seem to get bumped to the head of the list so they're not in dire need. But I would gather that in Vancouver, at the Vancouver General, the waiting period is somewhat longer.
[5:30]
I'm just concerned that the way moneys are budgeted within the hospital would allow the situation whereby the budget can be used up; therefore they have to wait until the next fiscal year before they can perform more of those operations because there's no money to buy the prosthesis needed for the hip replacement. What was pointed out to me is that people from offshore can come, pay to have the surgery and, if they can pay for the prosthesis, they can use our hospital facilities on a pay-as-you-go basis whereas local people couldn't. If they had the money and they wanted to go to the hospital and they said, "Look, if your budget is run out for this, I will pay for the part that's needed," they're told: "Well, no, we have a free health care system, and since we have run out of the budget, you'll have to wait until next year." We seem to have a two-tier system, then, when somebody from out of the country can come in, pay for the part and have the operation done, whereas people within B.C. don't have that option.
Hon. E. Cull: First of all, in terms of the general issues around wait-lists, all emergency cases are dealt with as emergencies. You say they get bumped to the top of the list, as they should be, so it's elective surgery that we have waiting lists for. We have managed over the last year to dramatically reduce the heart surgery waiting list. We have reduced moderately the cancer radiation therapy waiting lists. And I predict that when we continue to apply the strategies that we have used in those areas to general surgery, particularly orthopedic surgery, we will be able to start to bring the wait-list down there as well. Many hospitals will tell you that they have spent the budget on joints and replacement items. The Ministry of Health does not give them a budget for such items. They are given a global budget, and they are to manage that global budget. Sometimes hospitals set budgets for joints, for their own reasons. -- in terms of managing their budget or their wait-lists or divvying up their operating room time. But that is not something that is funded, stipulated or specified in any manner by the Ministry of Health.
The monitoring of the waiting lists for surgery reveals that 75 percent of patients who need surgery have their operations within eight weeks, 85 percent have them within 12 weeks, and a waiting period of four to eight weeks is considered to be acceptable. I know there are longer waiting lists for particular orthopedic surgery. such as joint replacements, and some of those are very troubling. The thing to recognize is that in some cases hospitals use this as a way of achieving other management ends; thus, it has that consequence for their patients.
But a patient in Mission can have their physician refer them to another orthopedic surgeon in another hospital in the lower mainland area who may have no waiting list, or a much shorter waiting list. We learned that the cardiac surgery waiting lists were very long, but only for some surgeons. For other surgeons, the waiting lists were much shorter. By providing an information system we have managed to bring the waiting lists down. The same can apply to orthopedic surgery, and that's what we're working on right now.
D. Symons: I thank you for that answer, because the question I asked last year revolved around the case of a particular woman who was in utter agony. She had to stay in bed and was only able to move with great pain. And it was certainly bothering her husband that she was caught in this bind. I admit that the hospital had made their allocations of money and the budget had run out. I have recently spoken to the doctor to ask
[ Page 6188 ]
how things are going now, and they are somewhat better. But there are still these situations where people are on wait-lists. Although it's called elective surgery, it is certainly surgery that makes life much more livable for the person involved.
My remaining questions relate to the issue of mental health. I think you said earlier -- just as I was coming in from the other committee -- that you wanted to canvass that another day. They are general-type questions. Should I bring them up now, or would it be better to handle that at another time? I'll follow through on that.
Hon. E. Cull: We have canvassed mental health in general already. We can continue to do that, although I will refer you back to Hansard for questions that we have already answered.
If you want to get into specifics about particular mental health programs in your own community, I do not have the staff here today that can answer that. As I said earlier, we were asked by the critic for the third party to deal with hospitals, continuing care and long term care today, and I have staff here that are available to do that.
I now have a list from the member for Powell River-Sunshine Coast which includes mental health and aboriginal health. We've covered virtually everything else that was on the list you read out, one way or another.
Interjection.
Hon. E. Cull: Powell River General Hospital. We're prepared to do that; it didn't get crossed off the list. So right now my list for tomorrow, for those members who are paying attention and care to note, is mental health and aboriginal health, and I'll have staff here for those two areas.
D. Symons: I think my question is sort of general rather than specific. It refers to a specific case. It's one that I canvassed last year. It was something that was being looked into. This involves a young man who is schizophrenic. Basically, he's on the downward path to self-destruction, and my concern at the time, I suppose, was sort of involuntary admission or detention, and how we can look after people in that respect. It gets into the civil rights of the person involved versus doing something for their own good. I have the real problem that this family is still suffering with watching their son who's likely to kill himself, or possibly, when he's having a bad day, kill somebody else either intentionally or unintentionally. They're just sick at heart over the fact that everybody recognizes the problem, but nobody is able to do anything about it. I'm wondering if there is any resolution to this problem.
I would gather that there was a study done, and there were proposed changes to the Mental Health Act involving that particular aspect. I have a document here called "The Mental Health Act and You," a review of the Mental Health Act by the community consultation project. In there it did speak of those various items dealing with -- I'm just looking for the portion in here -- involuntary admission and detention. But as I read this I still see this particular situation falling through the cracks, where there's a person who's not taking their proper medication. In fact, they're taking illicit drugs and everything else, striking out against society because they've got a disease that they don't understand and don't accept, and they're in a self-destructive mode.
Hon. E. Cull: The Mental Health Act has indeed been under review for some time -- at least two years. It was under review when the government changed in 1991, and that has continued.
You have very accurately pinpointed the difference of opinion in the mental health community. One group of people and organizations is extremely concerned about the need to treat people who cannot, because of their mental illness, make appropriate decisions around taking their medication and following a treatment plan. I have met with the parents, particularly with those in what used to be the Friends of Schizophrenics and is now the B.C. schizophrenic association, and I have listened to the heart-wrenching stories. They are very difficult stories and point out how troubling it is to family members who watch a mentally ill person refuse treatment and deteriorate to the point where they can be committed again.
On the other hand, we have another equally strongly held set of views that pertain to the rights of individuals who may be mentally ill. There are a number of associations, some of which include people who have been consumers of mental health services, that insist, equally strongly, that they have to have the right to make decisions about their own life. They can't be subject to their family members, and they have a right to live at risk.
[M. Lord in the chair.]
I find it very difficult to find any common ground between these positions. It's not as if we have the vast majority over there and then a minority group over here, or that there's a lot of fuzzy areas in between. These are two large, strong groups with positions that are 180 degrees from one another. There was, I think, a heroic attempt by my staff over the last six months to try to bring together the group that's been looking at the Mental Health Act so that they could find some of this common ground, but they have not yet done so. I have indicated quite clearly to groups representing both opinions that we are not prepared to bring forward amendments to the Mental Health Act until greater consensus has been reached. In other words, it's an impossible job to play Solomon on this one and to try to somehow cut this in the middle or decide in favour of one side or the other. Each of those sets of positions is valid and has some merit. There is some possibility for the groups to find some common ground and I have instructed them to continue to work on doing that; in fact, they are doing that.
D. Symons: I do recognize, as the minister said, the complexity of the problem. I think the reference to Solomon is quite true here, because it is a very difficult question between one's civil rights and the responsi-
[ Page 6189 ]
bility that we have to see that some people don't destroy themselves. In the process, of course, there is not only the one individual whose civil rights are being protected, but there is the family and the community, who in a sense are left vulnerable because of this lack of it.
I will read a few comments, if I might, into the record here from a parent who says it's the same old story. I shared this mental act with him and asked for his opinions on it:
"It's the same old story I've listened to for the past 14 years. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of the taxpayers' money is spent on useless surveys, steering committees, lawyers, social workers, etc. -- and for what? To come to the same old conclusion of putting some poor soul back on the street to become more of a menace to himself and in some cases to the people around him or her."
He goes on: "If I were to house animals in the conditions similar to what the mentally ill live in, I would be charged with cruelty to animals. I have personally seen some of the dives my son has lived in, and the above is no understatement."
What I'm leading up to is housing. For a while, his son was in a group home. This provided a needed sense of normalcy to him. It provided somebody who would see that he was taking his medication and all the rest. But the problem was -- and I'll just read from his letter again: "The schizophrenic who does not take his or her medication and follow the house rules will find him or herself out the door." That was the case there. You have the facilities set up to house some of the people with mental disorders, but if they don't follow the rules fairly closely, they will find themselves out the door and on the streets again and a greater menace to themselves and the community. There seems to be a problem here. We provide the housing for them, but we provide rules in such a way that until they really do get standardized and moved into society and act in a responsible manner, they have the possibility of being put back on the street, which is just on the downward slide again.
Hon. E. Cull: I agree with the hon. member if he is implying that nobody should be removed from treatment simply because they are unable to follow the rules. If they are disruptive to others in the group home, then they should be transferred to an alternative form of treatment. If that is not happening, then something has to be changed. You can't say to somebody in those circumstances, that they're not abiding by the rules so they're out on the street. There has to be some alternative plan put in place.
I take it that the member is casting his vote, I suppose, on the treatment side and the rights of society and the state to intervene in these cases. I will add your opinion to the thousands of opinions that have been given to me over the last number of months, and simply say again that it's very polarized. At this point I'm not sure that we would accomplish an awful lot by deciding in one case or the other. We will continue to work with the mental health community to see if we can pull people closer to some solution that will, if not satisfy all, at least find a little bit of common ground between them.
If we are unable to do that, the issue will be resolved by the courts. Sooner or later somebody will challenge the legislation and a decision will be made by the courts. I would prefer, in advance of such a decision, that the parties involved help us come to a solution.
[5:45]
G. Wilson: I'm not sure how familiar the minister is with the game of cricket. It is one of those games that I was subjected to in my days growing up in the colonies. They had a strategy where they would keep one or two of the batters back until the bowlers were fatigued by the length of the game. Then they would come out with a strategy to score large runs because the bowlers would be so tired they would simply yield and give them whatever they wanted.
With that strategy in mind, I come to Powell River General Hospital. I'm honestly delighted by the fact that there are so many geographers present in the Legislature today. In fact, I went out to look up whether it was Richard Hartshorne or Carl Sauer who said: "Go forth, multiply and save the earth." This is clearly what geographers.... It was Carl Sauer. Whether or not the members opposite come from the school of Hartshorne or Sauer, I'm not sure. Nevertheless, we're here to try to do that.
Earlier I made available to the minister a letter from Powell River General Hospital which has come forward. It's with respect to some of the issues in that letter that I would like to get some answers. I suspect they're not only related to Powell River but in fact would occur in other hospitals as well. On the first page I notice: "The operational review suggested areas of increased resource allocation...." I'm reading from the bottom of the letter dated April 29 of this year. It also says: "Subsequent to this review, we received about $35,000 for a diabetic day program, only after we threatened to cancel our existing program because of lack of funds." Then it suggests that one of the reasons for that was the question of isolation. In looking at the increase in the day surgery program, I note that the isolation component once again comes into play. I wonder if the minister might want to comment, first of all, about the idea of an expanded day program for people who are coming in for diabetic treatment; and secondly, when they talk about day surgery programs, how that outreach component might also be facilitated in order to account for the isolation of that community, recognizing the difficulty of travel.
Hon. E. Cull: Hon. Chair, my apologies to the member. I've been trying to read the letter, read the answers and listen to his questions at the same time, and I've discovered it's impossible to do all three. It certainly is impossible to do any of them well. I believe you were asking, though, about our support for day surgery and our commitment to that program. Yes, there is a commitment to try to move appropriate surgery to a day care program, where that can be done, and to provide appropriate support to back it up.
[ Page 6190 ]
G. Wilson: I'd just draw the minister's attention to the second paragraph on the second page, where there seems to be a catch-22. The hospital administrator is saying that the hospital is trapped into a kind of catch-22, where they have to reduce beds to reduce expenditures in order to submit a balanced budget, but the community services that are demanded are not available at sufficient levels to be able to meet the demands that are placed on it. Part of the reason for this, I understand, is that the continuing care division is really becoming a spokesperson in favour of these outreach components in the community. Could the minister comment on that?
Hon. E. Cull: One of the more interesting things I discovered in the seven weeks I spent travelling around British Columbia this spring is the number of hospitals that are not aware of the existence of community care programs to assist people who may be discharged early or who may come in on a day-patient basis. Without knowing the specifics of Powell River, I would suggest that one thing may be a lack of communication. I've had homemaker agencies come to me and say that they have to regularly go around and remind the doctors in their community that they are there, because the physicians either change or forget or are not using their services, and they are often wondering why. So that is one thing that would certainly be worthwhile looking into.
Clearly the kind of direction we're moving in with an integrated council will make that kind of communication much easier in the future. We should be able to provide better integration between hospital-based services and community-based services.
One of the things I think we have to recognize -- and this gets back to the answers I was giving about the difficulty of transferring dollars from one part of the health care system to another -- is that we are asking hospitals to change what they're doing and economize and not to get more dollars for it. A 3 percent increase in funding, which doesn't translate into 3 percent in many hospitals, is creating some real challenges for them in terms of providing their services. But we are giving them a very clear signal that we expect a lower utilization of beds, we expect more ambulatory and day care and we expect them to achieve that by reallocating their resources. We would encourage hospitals to look at discharge-planning units, and to work with the continuing care division to be able to address that linkage between the acute care sector and the community.
Hon. Chair, I've just been given the signal. It's a few minutes to six and I guess it's time for us to move that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit yet again.
Motion approved.
The House resumed; E. Barnes in the chair.
Committee of Supply B, having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.
Committee of Supply A, having reported resolutions, was granted leave to sit again.
Hon. M. Sihota: I would like to report that resolution and substantial progress was made with regard to the estimates of the Ministry of Tourism. By agreement of the parties and in accordance with the rules, there will be the usual polite exchange here tomorrow with regard to the estimates of the Ministry of Tourism.
With that said, hon. Speaker, I move adjournment.
Deputy Speaker: Before we move on that motion, for the benefit of the House I would like to ask if leave was granted for the variance in that sessional order to have the summary of Committee A tomorrow morning.
Leave granted.
Hon. M. Sihota moved adjournment of the House.
Motion approved.
The House adjourned at 5:54 p.m.
The House in Committee of Supply A; D. Streifel in the chair.
The Committee met at 2:44 p.m.
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF TOURISM AND MINISTRY RESPONSIBLE FOR CULTURE
(continued)
On vote 56: minister's office, $330,000 (continued).
C. Tanner: We are anticipating finishing this afternoon at 4 o'clock. There are two or three members of my caucus and one independent member who are coming in to ask questions. I suspect we're going to be all over the place, although we had arranged before that we would be dealing only with the cultural side of the minister's portfolio this afternoon.
Mr. Chair, in my view, this government's election platform raised the hopes and expectations of the cultural community. In fact, promise No. 42 said: "The New Democratic government will expand artistic and cultural opportunities throughout British Columbia."
[2:45]
This is the point of my question: "We will improve the funding of both the amateur and professional arts and will assist the continued growth of the B.C. film industry." I know the minister has had some success with the film industry, and I will question that later on, but as far as the balance of the cultural community of this province is concerned, how has it been improved financially since this government took office?
[ Page 6191 ]
Hon. D. Marzari: The actual funding -- the dollars from the provincial government that are going into culture, into the performing arts, into visual arts, into publishing, into the cultural services branch this year -- remains stable in a year when many other services and possibilities in culture have been cut back, both at the federal level and in other provinces. By staying the course and holding the line, this province has given a message to the cultural community that in times of fiscal restraint and in times of financial cutback, the cultural services that they render to the community shall not be cut back. Although we cannot, at a provincial level, throw money into the purse of culture in this fiscal year, I believe it is a major statement that, unlike the federal government, unlike other provincial governments, we are capable of standing here and saying: "We have taken a risk; we have held the line on funding for culture and the arts in this province. We recognize them as a part of the economic mainstream as well as a part of the intellectual life of this province."
One of the other promises I made last year during these estimates debates was that we would increase the capacity of this province to develop mechanisms to receive funding, and start the discussions and debates and negotiations with the private sector, the federal level and all other potential donors to see that the province became a facilitator and a catalyst and an enabler rather than a passive donator to the arts. To that end we have taken a number of initiatives that enhance and increase the capacity of our provincial cultural services and conservation branches to expand their role and the possibilities they have to increase funding in the future.
We have formed an interministerial committee around film and the promotion of film -- both indigenous film in British Columbia, to promote the abilities of our local producers, directors, writers, performers and technicians to have jobs and to create, and also the film that comes to us from other places, most notably California, to give them some assurance that they have the vehicles they need to make a living and leave some money here in British Columbia. Our interministerial committee on film has just produced its first report. It is not yet public; it is now being reviewed. It should be out presently, so the whole community can look at some of the things the provincial government can do to enhance and create new opportunities for employment and creativity for our own people here in B.C. in the area of film.
In the area of cultural industries -- those areas like publishing, sound recording and post-production in film -- we will soon be establishing a cultural industries task force comprised of entrepreneurs and representatives of people engaged in cultural industries in British Columbia. They too will be approaching the task and challenge of putting together, not the policy -- because the policy is to create wealth and assist and promote these industries as a piece and part and parcel of economic development in the province -- but direct mechanisms by which we can assist and help finance in a fair and equitable way the industries related to culture which can serve our interests well.
We know that film alone generates about $250 million in our economy. Those are dollars left in our economy by California film producers, for example. We know that the money we invest in B.C. Film every year levers itself into a 7-to-1 to 10-to-1 possibility. When we invest in publishing -- such as a publisher's book grant that we offer every year through the cultural services branch -- we know that we're investing in writers and in publishers, and we know that we're creating potential wealth and that we are investing here.
In answer to the member's question, I would suggest that the steps we are taking on the cultural side of the ministry, whether they are in the form of creating task forces and taking a look at how to make things work better or creating new pots for federal money to flow into -- we are doing this by sending constant delegations to the federal government to initiate new forms of partnerships -- or looking at new forms of governance for existing institutions here, the ministry and the department are doing everything they can to create an infrastructure for culture to thrive in.
C. Tanner: Relating specifically to what the minister said about the film industry, does she have any knowledge of, or has she lent support to, an application to use a hydro site in the harbour area by a film company that would like to promote what the minister is very keen on -- the film industry in Vancouver -- and bring it to Victoria?
Hon. D. Marzari: No, I have no knowledge of this production.
D. Mitchell: Mr. Chairman, I'd like to raise a couple of questions with the minister on the cultural side of her responsibilities. I think the cultural industries in British Columbia will welcome the comments she made on some of the initiatives by her ministry. The need to apologize -- if that was a tone of apology that I detected in the minister's statement -- is there because of the promises that were made to the cultural industries prior to the last election and during the election campaign. We canvassed this at some length during last year's estimates, and I don't intend to go into it in much detail. The truth is that the initiatives the minister is taking, as positive as they are, probably are interpreted as a form of an apology for broken promises -- promises that were unrealistic in terms of the cultural funding levels promised but that are not now being met, weren't met last year, are not being met in this year's budget. Perhaps the minister could tell us: is it true they're unlikely to be met in the future as well?
Hon. D. Marzari: I don't think that's an estimates question; it's a political question. All I can do is reiterate to the member that new infrastructures are being created, task forces are being established -- not to look at major policy, but simply to look at implementation of what exists as an obvious commonsense thing to do, which is to create new opportunities, to partner with the private sector, the corporate sector and the federal government to increase and enhance the quality of funding to the arts in British Columbia.
[ Page 6192 ]
To that end, every effort is being made inside this ministry by people and by professionals who have not in the past necessarily put themselves in the business of creating change to create more. I am hoping that over the course of time we'll be able to look at new vehicles and improved delivery systems, and we'll be able to take the dollars that do come into the arts, which, granted, are not substantial, and stretch them and make better use of them -- not to look for efficiencies in the arts, but to look for efficiencies and improvements in the delivery mechanisms so that we can better partner with the arts, and promote and give the message to our society that culture is important to all of us.
D. Mitchell: I would like the minister to know I don't doubt her commitment at all to the arts, but I think what has become obvious is that the government is unwilling or perhaps unable to live up to the level of commitment that the minister would like to see to her constituency in this respect. I'm not sure what happens when the minister appears before Treasury Board, and I'm not asking about that, but clearly the promises that were made that were in the governing party's election manifesto during the election campaign haven't been lived up to in terms of the specific percentage of total government expenditure that was going to be given to the arts community. I take it from what the minister says that it's unlikely to realize those commitments, so perhaps the promises were unrealistic.
In terms of the infrastructure that the minister refers to, could the minister tell the committee why British Columbia is the only province in Canada that has not successfully negotiated a cultural ERDA? Why is British Columbia the only province that remains without such an agreement?
Hon. D. Marzari: This obviously relates to future programming, but I'd like to assure the member that discussions are now taking place around a federal-provincial agreement in culture.
D. Mitchell: I'm not so much concerned with future policy as the fact that these discussions have been ongoing for many years now -- in fact these discussions were going on before the last election -- and British Columbia does remain, I believe, the only province without a subagreement with the federal government on funding to cultural industries. There must be a reason why we haven't been able to achieve such an agreement. This is a federal election year in British Columbia, and I'm wondering if the ministry has a particular strategy for finally achieving a subagreement this year. Is there an opportunity there, and is the ministry pursuing that opportunity?
Hon. D. Marzari: Yes.
D. Mitchell: Could the minister tell the committee the size of the agreement? I understand it is in the range of $10 million, but could the minister indicate the amount that is being negotiated? Is it possible for her at this stage in these longstanding negotiations to indicate what can be expected in terms of positive, practical and tangible results from these negotiations? Are we on the verge of this agreement being consummated?
Hon. D. Marzari: No. I am not able to talk about the nature of the agreement or the amount.
D. Mitchell: Just one more question on the ERDA agreement or the lack thereof. Can the minister reveal to the committee why this has been such a problem for British Columbia, as opposed to all the other provinces in Canada which have been able to negotiate successfully such subagreements to the benefit of their arts communities? Why has British Columbia lagged behind? What has happened since this minister has assumed office that would shed some light on this problem?
Hon. D. Marzari: It's best for me to say at this point in time, Mr. Chair, that my staff are presently working on the nature and the structure of the agreement. Previous governments were not working on the said agreement. In fact, two major agreements over the past five years were reaching a point of conclusion and fell through miserably and were not picked up. So we almost started from scratch with the ERDA. In fact, it was the Ministry of Economic Development that was working with the remnants of old agreements when we first picked this up. At the present time things are rapidly coming to a close; the negotiations are ongoing and the commitment is there.
[3:00]
D. Mitchell: Just one further question on this then. I take it from what the minister is saying that other ministries in the past have been involved in this process. I'm not sure if she's indicating that part of the problem was that there were too many participants in the process. Can the minister tell us if her ministry is now the sole agent responsible from the province of British Columbia for negotiating a cultural subagreement?
Hon. D. Marzari: I would say right now that we are the lead ministry on the negotiations. Economic Development still has an interest in the negotiations.
D. Mitchell: Just one final question, and I'll move off this topic. The minister indicated in her statement earlier that the ministry was taking some risks with some of its initiatives, and she referred to the fact that investments in some cultural industries -- most notably film-making and book publishing -- have a very positive spinoff on the economy of British Columbia.
The minister may be aware that a federal study was done recently and reported on in some of the news media, in particular in the March 31 edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail, which says that investments in the arts community -- for the relatively small investment that they constitute -- have a very positive spinoff, and that cutbacks to such funding actually increases public debt. It's an interesting study. I won't go into any length in quoting it, but I wonder if the
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ministry has done any similar studies in terms of the effect of cultural funding on the economy of British Columbia.
We all know stories about how individuals working in the cultural industries are effectively subsidizing those industries through wages and salaries that are relatively low by comparison with the average industrial incomes in British Columbia. Has the ministry done any kind of studies of this nature which concretely show the spinoff of investments in the arts community and cultural industries in British Columbia?
Hon. D. Marzari: If the member had been here for my opening remarks, he would have heard me quote the same Globe and Mail article. I'm sure that we all read the Globe and Mail's arts pages every Saturday. That is the point from which most of us in the arts across the country, including most cultural ministries, take their statistics, as well as the federal studies that are done through the Canada Council or the Department of Communications. We in B.C. have no such economic impact survey of the arts on our economy, and it would be a useful exercise. The member should be aware that those federal studies are important, and they provide a critical mass of dollars invested in order to be able to make some substantive claim to the arts in Canada. Doing provincial studies of investment in the arts might not be quite as productive as taking a look at the aggregate numbers in investment that the federal government is capable of doing.
I know that our studies around film and our study into cultural industries have given us some good numbers with which to say there is a massive impact; there is a big multiplier; there is a GDP there -- a factor that cannot be ignored around cultural industries. Those are credible. Those are the numbers we will be using. Even those numbers around film and cultural industries are very much aggregated with the numbers of other provinces, the numbers coming out of Statistics Canada and the Canadian numbers. I must say that they are credible, and they are good. Engaging in a full-scale study here in B.C. right now might not be as important as actually getting the job done and getting some money injected into culture and the arts, which is the real need. That's not to make a case for the necessity, because I think the awareness and the commitment are there to develop the mechanisms to actually get the job done.
A. Warnke: Hon. Chair, I have a couple of very quick questions. The first question concerns ministry operations and something that I just happened to pick up here. Under culture and historic resources, I notice that recoveries have increased from $86,000 to over $2 million. I'm curious as to the reason why.
Hon. D. Marzari: This is the first budget in which members and the public will see that a decision has been made to allow heritage properties and to allow the Royal British Columbia Museum to keep the proceeds of admission fees in their own budgeting arrangements. Proceeds from that source will now remain with the heritage properties and the Royal British Columbia Museum. So it shows up as a piece, as a part and parcel of their particular budgets. This may be like measuring out cultural contributions with a teaspoon, but it's a major breakthrough for the heritage sites and museum to know that the admission fees will be going towards their operations rather than into general revenue.
A. Warnke: From the minister's answer, then, I'm getting an impression that it is a direction towards self-sufficiency in terms of its financial operations. Is that correct?
Hon. D. Marzari: I don't know if we can talk about self-sufficiency as being a goal here. I don't think that we could ever say that it's a goal that the museum be self-sufficient, or that Barkerville, Fort Steele and other heritage properties be self-sufficient. It is not a goal, nor is it part of the vision or the business plan for these organizations; and it would set up false expectations and create instability in the heritage community. That's not a worthwhile endeavour. But it is an incentive for certain activities that take place at the heritage sites and the museum. To be able to experiment and do some different kinds of activities might bring in revenue which will assist somewhat in defraying the operating costs of these sites and this museum.
A. Warnke: There's a second area I just want to explore very briefly. I'm cognizant -- as I suppose most British Columbians are -- that 200 years ago, Alexander Mackenzie touched base up the coast, and I haven't really heard of any projects or any initiative on this. Perhaps it's just due to the fact that myself and other members are just so busy that we haven't been able to keep up with it. I usually try to keep up with such things. Is there anything that the ministry is embarking on to recognize the 200th anniversary of the crossing of Alexander Mackenzie?
Hon. D. Marzari: Yes. Although Government Services is the lead ministry in coordinating the activities around the centenary of the Alexander Mackenzie-Grease Trail, the Ministry of Tourism and Culture is very much involved in the planning and discussions surrounding the activities along the trail. One of our senior people is up there today talking to the different bands along the trail, because the grease trail was and is, of course, a native trail. It is very important that the aboriginal heritage of that trail be recognized and delineated. So the Ministry of Tourism and Culture understands that this is an important event, and it is working very closely with Government Services to provide real substance to the events of this summer.
A. Warnke: Just one last question, in recognizing that feat, I'm wondering how much funding the ministry is anticipating allocating towards this project, and how does that amount compare with similar projects?
Hon. D. Marzari: This ministry will be contributing in a small way towards the event itself.
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Government Services is pulling together an integrated interministerial package of dollars for the event. Tourism and Culture is not the funder for this event. We are providing services in kind and will probably be putting a few dollars into it but, as I said, we are not the lead ministry here.
L. Hanson: I was aware that the ministry had agreed to let the entrance fees for the museum and the heritage properties -- Fort Steele and Barkerville -- go to the society, the association. Who sets the level of fees? Has that changed?
Hon. D. Marzari: The ministry sets the fees, and the Friends collect but do not keep the fees. The fees come back to the ministry and are recycled into the heritage sites. In other words, the Friends do not own the fees.
L. Hanson: I do understand that the fees that are collected go directly back to the museum. At least, they go through a route, but the exact amount that's collected goes back. That's why you reduced the budget from 11-something to ten-something in the museum. So how they get there is really.... But the ministry still retains the power of setting the fees.
C. Tanner: Just going back to the museum again, since the museum itself now has control of those funds, or at least it appears in that budget, if museum management made the decision they could do better by dispensing with the fee and asking for donations, would the minister condone that decision?
Hon. D. Marzari: The ministry would take a look at any requests. Obviously the ministry is involved with fee-setting in all the heritage sites and at the museum. We would take a look at any request that would be a part of the business plan. In fact, the Royal B.C. Museum is putting together a five-year business plan right now which will pinpoint and be very specific about areas of revenue that they can look toward, and the working relationship between the government and the museum, and looking toward governance. There are major decisions to be made concerning the museum in the next while which will not destabilize the museum by any stretch but will give it a construct of business and revenue projections to carry it through to the end of the century.
C. Tanner: I congratulate the minister on the fact that she's got the Royal B.C. Museum doing a five-year plan. That's exactly what the rest of the industry would like to have the opportunity to do, and this minister should work hard to provide them with that opportunity. In the museum itself, there is a very successful and extremely well-run shop which sells articles to the public, and I think it raises at least $1.5 million, if not more. I don't see it anywhere within the budget of the ministry. Where would that appear?
Hon. D. Marzari: The Friends of the Museum, the society that basically supports the museum, makes that money and then donates it to various projects within the museum. That money does not circulate through the province. Just as Friends societies at Barkerville and Fort Steele have their own donation boxes and their own sometimes-retail operations, this money does not circulate back through the province. The province collects admission fees at the gate.
[3:15]
L. Hanson: I'm just a little confused on the process of the fees. The Friends of the Museum will man the gate, so to speak, and collect the entrance fees. They will go into general revenue. Then the government will return a like amount to the museum. That doesn't seem to be included in the estimates. I'm not sure I understand the accounting procedure. Can you enlighten me?
Hon. D. Marzari: The admission fees are under "Total Recoveries," the second-to-last column in the supplement to the estimates on page 105. STOB 99 reflects those recoveries. Those are the admission fees, and they are collected by staff, not by the Friends. The Friends are at Barkerville and Fort Steele, at their retail operations, at the donations box, and they are partnering into projects: that is separate money into the Friends societies. The admission at the gate is collected by our staff, and we in turn are putting that under recoveries. Those recoveries as of this year are going to be circulated back into the heritage properties and the museum. That is the reason -- as you noticed -- that the budget for the museum is down $1.6 million, because the anticipated revenue from the gate will make that up. But the Friends, as their retail operations do their thing, are not audited by us. In fact, the Friends recoveries -- their money -- comes through to us in partnering projects inside the museum or Barkerville and Fort Steele.
L. Hanson: Then the actual amount that the museum will get this year is $10 million plus whatever the gate fees are. In the estimates you've netted that, not really taken the recovery into revenue and then paid it out. Or wouldn't that $10 million be higher? I'm not an accountant, and I'm trying to understand it.
An Hon. Member: They've reduced it $1.16 million from last year.
Hon. D. Marzari: The estimates as you see them printed across the page, complete with the recoveries, are net recoveries. So you are seeing the total picture here. In fact, we broke it out this way so that the accountability factor would be better enhanced than it has been over the last number of years. What you see there is a total picture for the museum.
L. Hanson: Regardless of how this accounting is done -- and I guess I'm too old to learn how to become an accountant -- the fact is that the museum is going to end up with something very close to the $11 million and some-odd they had last year. However it is shown here, that's what this means.
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C. Tanner: There is another income in the museum, which the minister mentioned before, and that is the income raised for projects within the museum by the store, which doesn't go through the government books. Isn't that correct?
Hon. D. Marzari: That is correct. I believe, from my discussions with the Friends, that those revenues were over $1 million last year, gross.
K. Jones: I have a few questions to have you address. Could you tell us what the gross sales were that were raised by the demolition sale at the Cloverdale transportation museum?
Hon. D. Marzari: They were $907,000.
K. Jones: How much? That's nine, zero, seven, zero, zero?
D. Lovick: Zero! Another Zero.
K. Jones: Yes.
Hon. D. Marzari: Four zeros all together -- one comma.
K. Jones: What were the administration and overhead costs? Could you give us the detail in the breakdown paid to Maynards, to advertising and for private tours for U.S. persons -- people from Nevada and other interests from the U.S. who were given privately conducted tours of the museum -- and could you break down the advertising between Canada and the U.S?
Hon. D. Marzari: I believe that the total costs of dispersal that we have thus far tabbed are $451,000, not including the auctioneer's fee, which is still being calculated.
K. Jones: Was that 451?
Hon. D. Marzari: Yes. Four, five, one, zero, zero, zero.
K. Jones: Can the minister tell us what the total operating costs were for the Cloverdale transportation museum for this past year, excluding the cost of the auction?
Hon. D. Marzari: The automobile museum closed down in June '92. Previous to that the total expenditures for running the museum ranged between $500,000 and $1 million a year.
K. Jones: Can the minister give us the operating costs for the 1992-93 fiscal year -- the actual costs incurred by the museum? Can she give us the costs of staffing -- even though some of it was part-time -- and administration, the cost of the property lease, heating and lighting, and maintenance of the vehicles -- all of those factors?
Hon. D. Marzari: I don't have the costs at hand, but I will provide for the member an actual operating cost for the museum from April 1, 1992, until April 1, 1993. I suppose you want the operating costs for the last year, although I must reiterate that the museum was closed in June '92. I must say again that the total cost of wrapping up the museum, fixing up the cars to get them out to the communities that we were sending them back to -- as you know, 60 communities were in receipt of cars that had historical value to British Columbia -- and advertising and the business of dispersal in closing down the museum, came to $451,000. But as for the costs of actually operating a closed museum, I'll check it out, see what's there and give it to the member.
K. Jones: Could the minister please give me a detailed breakdown of the various factors: the cost of the lease arrangement, the heat, light, administrative staff -- part-time and full-time -- for that period, and other factors that are involved in the costing of that? Could the minister also commit to bringing forward the cost of the billing that the province is getting from Maynards the auctioneer, a breakdown of the total advertising and a breakdown of how much was done in Canada and how much in the United States? Could you also give us the other costs involved -- the various extra costs relating to the sale of the 120 vehicles, plus all the auxiliary artwork and heritage features that were discarded by this ministry and dispersed throughout the province and into the United States? Could you give us an indication, further to that, of what the net gain was as a result of this decision to close down the museum, and the net gain from the sale alone -- two items?
Hon. D. Marzari: I do know that three of the 180 cars actually went to the States. Most of the cars were bought by British Columbians. As I said, 60 communities are in receipt of cars that were of historical value and historic significance, and that were of museum quality. They have been repatriated to the communities, very often, from which they came and are being very much enjoyed by the communities. Almost on a weekly basis I am speaking to communities that have received one or some of these cars, and there's a lot of real community spirit there surrounding the retrieval of cars that had been sent to Cloverdale.
The difference between $907,000 and $451,000 is the amount that came back to the province as a result of closing the museum, which obviously helped defray some of the expenses of maintaining the museum over these past few years.
K. Jones: Could the minister then give us that figure?
Hon. D. Marzari: I will ensure that the member gets as much of this information as we can pull together, and it will be delivered to him.
K. Jones: In view of the ensuing costs of the sale, and taking the amount of sale there was, could the
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minister please tell us where she has allocated in her budget the use of the money that has been gained?
Hon. D. Marzari: The money that was actually made on the sale -- if you can put it that way -- went to general revenue.
K. Jones: Does the minister mean to say that she had value and assets within her ministry that were turned around and lost to the ministry? Does that mean that there is no benefit to tourism and the cultural heritage of our province, because the minister did not take action to see that the money was put back into the heritage of this province? Is that what the minister is saying?
Hon. D. Marzari: No, that's not what I'm saying. I said just the opposite, as a matter of fact. A number of dollars, of course, were dollars that Pavco paid rent to the facility on. A number of those dollars were dollars that didn't come out of the Ministry of Culture at all. The transportation museum was, as you know, cobbled together a few years ago after the Expo show, and it managed to hang together as a loose affiliation between the museum and Pavco. So many of these dollars were not heritage, cultural or museum dollars at all. They were Pavco dollars paying Pavco rent.
[3:30]
I must say that of the $907,000, the $450,000 that was actually spent on refurbishing and getting these cars -- the ones that were of value to British Columbians and British Columbian communities -- back to their communities was money that was very well spent, and it was certainly the value of those heritage cars. I do believe that cultural and heritage interests have been very well served here, that we have managed to pull together and get back to the communities vehicles that really mean a lot to those communities, and that we've spent an appropriate number of dollars doing that. We have provided a community service here in many respects by being able to use those dollars for that purpose. Additional dollars were made on the sale of the other cars, which weren't necessarily important or unique in British Columbia history. The difference between what we spent and what we made is now in general treasury.
K. Jones: Does that mean that they are totally lost to the cultural and heritage area of the community, even though those artifacts were part of the heritage of this province? You have just written them off. You failed to maintain your responsibility as the Minister Responsible for Culture by allowing that money to just fritter away. Is that right?
Just to help the minister, the actual net gain, according to the figures she's given, is less than half a million dollars; it's $456,000 -- just to save the ministry the trouble of calculating the subtraction.
Hon. D. Marzari: I knew you'd get it, Ken.
K. Jones: But I thought the minister would get it, too.
Interjection.
K. Jones: Yes, everything in due time.
The Chair: Through the Chair, please, hon. members.
K. Jones: Could the minister tell us where the Beatles's psychedelic Rolls Royce is at the present time?
Hon. D. Marzari: This is an estimates question? It's in the basement of the Royal British Columbia Museum.
K. Jones: Could the minister tell us why it is in the basement of the Royal British Columbia Museum?
Hon. D. Marzari: Because it is in storage.
K. Jones: Could the minister please tell us why an item that is so desirable to see, from the community's standpoint, is in storage? Do you have a secret or something in the way of timing with this thing? Is there some special event that you're planning for it?
Hon. D. Marzari: No decision has been made at this point as to where the safest and most convenient place would be for this vehicle.
K. Jones: Is the minister saying that after a year and a half of knowing that that vehicle was going to be removed from the site -- because she had plans to destroy the transportation museum in Cloverdale -- she has still not decided what to do with a major item in the collection?
Hon. D. Marzari: That's correct.
K. Jones: Is the ministry at the present time -- since they haven't done a lot of planning in the past -- planning to sell, trade or display that vehicle?
Hon. D. Marzari: The ministry is discussing various options for the vehicle, but there are no finalized plans at this point.
K. Jones: In view of the ministry discussing plans, where in the minister's budget does she have plans to do whatever she's going to do with it?
Hon. D. Marzari: The vehicle is now under the purview of the Royal British Columbia Museum. It is under the Royal British Columbia Museum's STOB or budget item; you will find it under vote 57, under the RBCM in that vote.
K. Jones: Does the minister show the value of that as an asset, then, within her ministry?
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Hon. D. Marzari: I don't think our estimates book shows the assets that we have here; no, it's not shown as an asset.
K. Jones: It's interesting to find that with the government having hidden liabilities, maybe now we have a hidden asset, too. Is the minister trying to say that she has a major asset -- a $1 million-plus asset when it was purchased, and probably today worth many, many more millions -- and yet she doesn't show it in the books as an asset to the province of British Columbia?
Hon. D. Marzari: I think the member has a point here. I think that henceforward the book should show that the museum as a capital asset is worth something like $600 million to us. If we could show that in our operating budget, Mr. Chair, we'd be away in terms of proving our cultural credibility.
K. Jones: I think that's probably a good idea. Perhaps all our museums throughout the province should be shown as assets, because that's really what they are. They're heritage assets to the people of British Columbia, and they need to be properly identified for what they are. I think it's important that the ministry do something about that, and bring forward a statement of the true assets of the value already held by the people of British Columbia.
But I'm very fearful that the moment the Minister of Finance finds out we've got an asset, he's going to find a way of converting it into cold cash so that it can be put against another expenditure that he wants to spend, spend, spend on. We'd have the same result we've had this past year, and lose more and more of our heritage to the wiles of the Minister of Finance, who wants to take anything anybody's got and turn it into cash so he can spend it on his other things.
The Chair: Order, hon. member.
Hon. member, we are examining the estimates of the Minister of Tourism and the Minister Responsible for Culture. If you could bring your questions to focus on those areas immediately under the administrative capacity of the minister's office, I think the debate would be aided.
K. Jones: The fact of tax revenue is totally tied to this; the total revenues included are included here.
The Chair: Order, please, hon. member. Only the administrative capacity of the Minister of Tourism's office is examinable in these estimates. Matters of taxation fall under the purview of the Minister of Finance, and I encourage you to engage in those debates at the appropriate time.
D. Schreck: I found it very interesting listening to the exchange between a current member of the Public Accounts Committee and the former Chair of the Public Accounts Committee on accounting concepts and how we might well be better served, and I hope this discussion comes up in that form. What I've heard is that through the leadership of this minister we've taken valuable assets rarely seen by British Columbians and stored in one old warehouse, and increased their cultural value by dispersing them throughout communities in British Columbia, thereby having them seen by many thousands more people. I wish to congratulate the minister for increasing the real value and use of the heritage assets of British Columbia.
K. Jones: The hon. member for North Vancouver-Seymour is absolutely correct. The ministry has actually taken and dispersed throughout this province 117 heritage vehicles that were given to the province in trust to show for the people of British Columbia, and now they are in the private hands of individual collectors who will show off their newfound acquisitions when they go out for a Sunday afternoon drive, or something like that. They are no longer the province's assets, and the public has no say or no right to view them. Up until this government decided that it didn't believe in heritage, those assets were publicly available in the province. Now we sell them off because moneygrabbing is more important to this government than protecting the heritage and the trusts that the people have given to this province. I think that's shameful.
I'd like to ask the minister one other vital question with regard to the responsibility that the minister has to look after the site cleanup of the Cloverdale transportation museum. I'd like to know where in her budget the minister has the dollars to accommodate site cleanup?
Hon. D. Marzari: Mr. Chair, the member has deliberately not heard the answers that have been given during this estimates process. Although he may have a good mailer to send out to some of his constituents and members of the old car clubs of this province, I should remind him that the Kelowna museum doesn't agree with him; the Prince George Railway Museum society and forestry industry museum society don't agree; the town of Golden and the Kamloops museum and archives don't agree; the village of Chase, the city of Richmond, the Fort St. John North Peace museum, the city of Burnaby, the city of Williams Lake, the town of Comox, the town of Oliver, the corporation of the village of Cumberland, the Vancouver Museum, the Campbell River Museum and Archives Society, the Atchelitz Thresherman's Association, the Regional District of Fraser-Cheam, the Port Alberni museum, the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association, the city of Quesnel and many others will not agree with the member's analysis of whether or not the cars sold were of heritage value.
In fact, a committee of the B.C. Museums Association, as well as the Royal Museum and lay people interested in heritage cars met for some while, and the minister had no involvement with this decision. They decided on the basis of museology standards which cars were in fact valuable to the history of this province, and those decisions were made on a professional and community basis. So the member is misleading this committee.
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In answer to the cleanup question, I can only say that I will provide those numbers since they are not readily available to me now. I do believe that Pavco, which is the Crown corporation that engaged in the rental, is probably the lead ministry here and that the question might better be put to them.
[3:45]
K. Jones: I think that the minister has to take responsibility for the museum as it is within her area of responsibility, and the complete job of destroying that museum is in her hands. She has to find the money to pay for the cleanup, and I would also like to suggest that there may be a requirement for a toxic cleanup on that site. I think that the minister had better seriously look at that before she just passes off the responsibility for it, because there is an indication that that property also has toxic materials within its perimeters. Those were left since it's been in the hands of the government, and therefore the responsibility for cleanup will also fall upon the ministry. Perhaps the minister should seriously look into that and make her first visit to that site. She has not been there yet, unless she's been there in the last few weeks; up until the time of the auction she had never been on the site. She didn't even know what she was dealing with. I think it's really a sad situation when a person works in such total isolation while making decisions that affect all the people of British Columbia.
Hon. D. Marzari: Let me reiterate, and I won't do it again, because time is marching on here: the Ministry of Tourism and Culture owns the cars that were deemed to be of museum quality, that were unique and that belonged back in their communities. The Ministry of Economic Development, with its arrangement with Pavco -- a Crown corporation that reports through the Ministry of Economic Development -- owned the lease and paid the rent. Insofar as this minister owns the cars through the museum, I have seen the cars. In fact, it has given me great pleasure to give the cars back to the communities from whence they came. The communities from whence they came are more than grateful to receive these heritage cars, work on them, fix them up and keep them in good repair. There has been a real community outpouring of sincere gratitude to have these cars back home. Pavco paid the rent on the building. If there is any difficulty about cleanup of the site, it will be Pavco's.
K. Jones: Therefore the minister is saying that any cleanup will be passed over to the Ministry of Economic Development. Is that what you're saying? You will have no responsibility for it?
Hon. D. Marzari: Yes.
K. Jones: I just want to see whether the minister had been recognized for her response. Did the Chair recognize her and therefore get her response on the record?
The Chair: Hon. member, the Chair recognizes those members who stand for recognition.
C. Tanner: I've just got a couple of quick questions to wrap it up this afternoon. As I said yesterday, I don't specifically want to go through the actual awards that were made, but there are a couple of noticeable changes this year from last year. I notice, for example, that a number of Okanagan agencies missed out or didn't get grants this year that they got last year. Is there any specific reason for that grouping?
Hon. D. Marzari: I can't give the member a direct answer on that, as the Arts Board adjudicates all of the applications on a regular basis. It could be because the particular groups did not reapply or didn't have projects. I will ask the Arts Board, and in due course the member will receive a response. Would the member please give me a list of those groups that he may be concerned about?
C. Tanner: I appreciate the minister sending me those in future.
The other one that I have a little difficulty bringing up, seeing that I used to be involved in the business, is the block funding to B.C. book publishers. There has been quite a change, and again I assume that changes are made by a committee that is not directly within the ministry. There has been quite a considerable change in the grants to B.C. book publishers. Perhaps if I gave her a list of those, too, the minister could get the same information from the committee.
Hon. D. Marzari: Yes, that would be fine.
As for the book publishers' grant, the block grant has remained stable, and I have given the publishing community the commitment that it will not have its grant eroded. The Arts Board has concurred in that opinion. I do have the list and would be prepared to discuss these items with the member after consultation with the Arts Board.
C. Tanner: The minister has frequently referred to the film industry in the province, and I want to put to her one problem.
First of all, let me say that I think the film industry comes from the United States into Canada and particularly into Vancouver for three reasons. One is that the rate of exchange is favourable to them. The second is that there used to be in place a coalition of unions that made it possible for the film industry when they came to Canada to negotiate with one body rather than with six or seven bodies. That's fallen apart. Is the minister working on putting it together again? I think it was a very vital part of what happened in past.
The third reason is that, by reputation, the unions in the province were prepared to go that extra way, because they weren't working to rule, as was the case in the United States. All those circumstances could be here today and gone tomorrow. I think the minister should be aware that that industry, while important to us, could just as easily dissipate and go to another part of the world.
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For example, we had an opportunity to bring a film into Canada from Texas recently. The Texans offered us 10 cents on the dollar to overcome our rate of exchange in favour of Americans coming into Canada. Could the minister comment on the problem with the unions? Has she been involved, and has she had any success?
Hon. D. Marzari: There are a number of constraints that beset the film industry, and there is a list of items that have to be addressed appropriately by this province if we are to be considered credible by the film community that wants to come to British Columbia from the United States. We have to deal with issues of whether there is one place where they can consolidate and receive advice on everything from location to financing. We need to consolidate the relationship of B.C. Film, which tries to promote indigenous culture and film-makers.
There are some suggestions that B.C. Film might be exploited by American film producers coming in and taking advantage of the point system that B.C. Film has. These are all issues that need to be addressed: whether or not B.C. needs a venture capital program for American film-makers and whether or not we can provide the cheap dollar. When the dollar is the way it is now, there isn't a problem. That 10-cent or 20-cent dollar in Texas right now is basically competitive with us, but it might not be five or six months from now.
There are a number of issues to be dealt with, not just the union issue. The unions have in the past pooled together as a coalition and have served the industry very well. There are exceptions, and there are certain problems that come up from time to time. I have asked Joe Weiler, who sits as the chair of the round table of film-makers in this province, to take a look at some problems that exist now. Within the next month I'll be sitting down with union representatives to discuss some of the ways we can provide real labour stability and some commitments to labour stability to the American film producers, which will also, of course, assist our own producers and directors here at home.
H. De Jong: I'm not sure whether this subject has been discussed at all, but I have real concern about the sharp increase in assessments, which obviously affects the taxation of many of the recreational spots in British Columbia. I have one of those in my riding: Aquadel Acres, at the east end of Cultus Lake. It's a Thousand Trails institution, you might say; it belongs to Thousand Trails, which is basically a family type of entertainment -- places where families go with their trailers and stay for a week or two for holidays because it's something they can afford. Yet the taxes on these places have gone up tremendously over the last couple of years. For Aquadel Acres, it has at least tripled over the last two years. There are many others within the province; I'm sure the KOA camp places have the same problem. Is the minister aware of the real problem that these people are facing in terms of what they now have to recover from the average Joe taking a holiday with his family?
Hon. D. Marzari: The ministry has been taking a very careful look at fees and licences, which have sometimes caused some difficulties for resort and waterfront recreational operators. I have not yet received any formal communication about waterfront recreational tax as an impediment to the ability to do business, but I would appreciate details on the operation. I assure the member that we will be in touch with the operator. We'll see what we can do if there is an overall concern about this particular assessment.
H. De Jong: I appreciate the minister's answer, although I would have thought that by now she or the ministry would have realized the impact. There's been a lot of talk about the increase of assessments throughout the province, and particularly on these types of recreational facilities. The operators are certainly very worried about not only the effects on their pocketbook, but on the ability of the average family to have a reasonable holiday. Those are the places that are hardest hit. They have no other things -- like a hotel will usually say the liquor outlet will carry the thing, or whatever. These are very modest recreational facilities, but a good family recreation. I would be pleased to forward the information that I have on Aquadel Acres and a couple of others. I hope we get a positive response, because I think we can look at recreation from the larger perspective: getting the people in from the United States and so on. That's fine; they are very welcome to B.C. But surely we must keep in mind the importance of British Columbians being able to have a holiday at home within our province.
Vote 56 approved.
Vote 57: ministry operations, $56,026,000 -- approved.
D. Schreck: By agreement, the Attorney General's ministry will be called next -- if we could have a brief recess while the Chairs change place.
[4:00]
A. Warnke: Just a point of clarification. Could the Chair direct the committee as to whether the statements will be made during that recess or later on?
D. Schreck: I believe the critics and the minister have agreed it will be at 10 a.m. tomorrow.
The Chair: The committee will enjoy a ten-minute recess and will reconvene with the Ministry of Attorney General.
The Committee recessed at 4:01 p.m.
The Committee resumed at 4:11 p.m.
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF ATTORNEY GENERAL
(continued)
On vote 19: minister's office, $419,486 (continued).
[ Page 6200 ]
A. Warnke: After a quick recess and looking outside, it's nice to be back, I suppose. I want to pick up from where we left off the last time. We had canvassed some of the issues surrounding the horse racing industry, and I believe the member for Abbotsford raised it in the context of refurbishing the track, and so forth. I'm particularly interested from one vantage point. A number of people have written letters -- and, I suppose, many of us have -- about the decision to improve Exhibition Park. The concern I want to express on their behalf is that there would be an expenditure of $30 million here of public moneys. One of the arguments that had been put forward is that the alternatives to that involve no public funding in terms of the industry. I would appreciate some clarification from the ministry. The minister had outlined some of the rationale for the decisions to improve Exhibition Park, but I suppose I'm looking for a response in the context that here is $30 million -- of public moneys being applied as opposed to the alternative, where there is no public funding. I would like a rationale for that from the Attorney General.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The suggestion from the member, that the Western Delta bid for a site in Burns Bog is without public money, is true only in the same way that there's no public money involved at Exhibition Park. Revenues from the handle -- the dollar that's bet -- will be the source of funding for improvements at Exhibition Park. In the proposal that the government received from the other proponents, the same kinds of arrangements would have been required. In addition to that, there would inevitably have been an obligation on the Crown to have picked up the pieces if the other venture turned out not to be successful over a period of time.
[4:15]
The Exhibition Park renewal and development of a training facility in the valley will be funded from the revenues generated at the track; and as I indicated the other day, should we be successful in moving into teletheatre betting, additional revenues coming from that will also go to fund the improvements. So there will be no money coming from the general consolidated revenue, no taxpayers' money per se. This will be money generated from what we anticipate to be a healthier industry, one which will therefore produce not only money to improve itself, but also additional revenues to the government.
A. Warnke: So the Attorney General is suggesting that there is some sort of financial consideration after all. As the minister sees it, there are obviously some financial benefits in this, insofar as the minister has defined it: there is no public money -- just leave it that -- in the option to improve Exhibition Park. I do wonder if the Attorney General could clarify a little bit whether there was a financial calculation as to how much it might cost the government in terms of pursuing the Western Delta option.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: First of all, in terms of that option a series of considerations led us to reject the proposal. One was the concern we had about the viability of a $100 million project, in terms of the ability in the lower mainland of British Columbia to sustain a track of that size. There's been a lot of discussion about a "world-class, Santa Anita-style track." Well, Santa Anita and other "world-class" tracks are generally in areas with significantly higher population bases than we have here. So there was serious concern about the viability of such a track. There were also serious concerns about environmental issues in respect of the bog. There were a lot of other issues that we considered carefully, which is why we took the best part of a year to make the decision.
But it all boiled down to a conclusion that we could in fact revitalize the industry in the way we proposed. We didn't do that simply by a political decision or on advice from staff in the ministry. We did that after very careful consultation with people involved daily in the horse racing and horse breeding industry in this province.
I just say again, as I indicated the other day, that we see this as a significant industry in our province. It's one that can produce -- it does produce -- a lot of jobs. It's one that can produce a lot of revenue and one that has the potential of having growth. It's a good kind of industry. It's not, except in a very minor way, a polluting industry. It's one that can be really very beneficial.
And there may well be some things we can do here in British Columbia that will make us a part of an international effort in respect of horse racing. We have a lot of land, and this province is very suitable for raising horses. We can do much more here than we've done to date, and we want to pursue all of those options.
In the consultations with the industry this solution was clearly the best, most affordable, most predictable and most likely to sustain itself of those we had to choose from.
A. Warnke: I think the Attorney General is actually quite correct to point out the potential spinoffs from the option that has been taken. However, I suppose one could pose the counterargument that by developing new facilities, the spinoffs -- in terms of jobs and increased revenues from spinoff industries, and so forth -- could be great. But to a certain extent it's a bit hypothetical in that context as well, and this is obviously where a minister has to make a decision on the basis of the information provided.
By the same token, I want to pursue it a little further. I don't want to belabour this subject much longer, but the contract that has been extended for improving Ex Park still has a very limited term, does it not? In that context, could the Attorney General, in terms of the calculations in making a decision, leave open the option of readdressing the prospect of a world-class facility as articulated by some people in the industry?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I suspect I'll be long gone from this ministry before a decision of that kind faces government. Clearly what we're doing is ensuring that we don't preclude that option in the future. We want to be sure that we leave as many options open as possible
[ Page 6201 ]
as we proceed. There is no doubt at the moment, in this situation, that this solution is most likely to guarantee the survival of the industry. That's not me or the government saying that; it's the industry itself saying that.
W. Hurd: I have just a few questions on Exhibition Park. The minister will be aware of the concern of the Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association with respect to the surface at Exhibition Park and the fact that this facility was actually built on an old landfill. Has the minister specifically addressed that concern by requesting an analysis of the soils on the site? There are complaints by the horse owners that old car parts are coming up through the track on occasion. Are these valid concerns, or is it a case of the horsemen perhaps overstating the problem a little?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The horsemen -- I'm uncomfortable with a language that says "horsemen," but I'm going to use it because that's what they use; any other term doesn't quite work -- have very clearly and quite properly expressed concern about the running track at Exhibition Park. It is very unsatisfactory, to put it mildly. It has caused injuries and, in fact, some owners will not race on that track surface because of the problem. The stories about old cars and artifacts from dumps reaching up through the track and causing havoc are, I think, exaggerated a bit. There has been a lot of concern. I think the stories are told to illustrate the fact that the track is not prepared properly -- like building a highway without first properly making sure the base is going to sustain the load. That was never done properly at that site, and we intend to fix that. A significant part of the remedies that are required at Exhibition Park is to restore that track or to construct the running surface so that the current problems won't continue.
Perhaps the next question is: is the undersurface appropriate or can this be done? The answer to that is yes. We've had that looked at by engineers, and the answer is that we can get the track up to a proper standard.
W. Hurd: Perhaps the minister can advise us of what studies have been done. Having some knowledge of the difficulties in foundation work, often the problems with a surface are located only after you do some excavation. The opposition has received information from the horse owners -- perhaps I can use that term -- that states that the entire site may be unsuitable for a track. They as an industry seriously question the investment of that amount of public money in a site that really doesn't have long-term viability.
So I guess I have two questions here. The minister has indicated that the Exhibition Park solution has a broad consensus of support in the horse breeding and horse owning industry. My first question is: where is that support? It certainly hasn't come forward to the opposition. Secondly, what specific studies have been undertaken or specific moneys spent to identify whether this site is suitable for a track and whether the industry that the minister seeks to save will be jeopardized by the refusal of reputable horse owners to bring their animals to this track?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: An engineering firm actually did a study on the site to ensure that if we were to rebuild it, it would not be wasted money. We had a positive answer to that. This can in fact be rehabilitated properly.
If the HBPA had some concerns about it, they would have expressed those concerns to me. I see the member now has the letter in front of him that indicates unanimous support from the executive of the association for what we are doing. By the engineering work that has been done to give that assurance, we're convinced that we can do what we are planning to do with no problem.
A. Warnke: The Attorney General has responded to my colleague for Surrey-White Rock. On this particular point, I received a copy of the letter from the Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association of British Columbia that the minister was referring to the other day. I think it is useful to refer to another letter that has come to my attention. I don't want to pursue this much further, but for the record, it was brought to my attention that there is a concern that the people the Attorney General addressed, as it was pointed out in one letter, as "hand-picked...." The Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association voted unanimously at a meeting on February 24 -- which I think the Attorney General was made aware of in our debates on estimates -- that: "The members will not be satisfied with any less than a new racetrack one mile in circumference with stabling for 1,500 horses. Accordingly, the NDP government's proposed renovations are not suitable to meet the current or future needs of the industry." I gather from the Attorney General's meeting with the Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association that the Attorney General has had a full discussion in which that resolution does not apply. I suppose the Attorney General has convinced the executive of the Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association that some of their concerns are being met by the minister. This is what appears in the letter. However, I think a number of people in that association would take exception with their own executive. Frankly, it's neither the Attorney General's role nor my role to get involved in the internal politics of that. I just want to point out that the unanimity does not exist to the extent that the Attorney General is making it out. The Attorney General might want to respond to that as well.
[4:30]
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I think we canvassed it pretty well last week. I'll simply say that there are very few issues on which organizations with 2,400 members would express unanimity. There are some individuals who do not agree with their executive, but that even exists in political parties occasionally.
D. Symons: I have just a few questions for the minister. The first one involves a magazine or a brochure I received approximately six months ago from
[ Page 6202 ]
a symposium called Dry Roads. Being the Transportation critic, I of course thought this had something to do with the highways, and some way of drying the roads off. It turns out that Dry Roads is to do with drinking and driving. This symposium came up with quite a few recommendations, which the minister maybe remembers. I'd just like to canvass your reaction to some of those recommendations, and possibly what the government may be doing in that line. I'll give you a moment to find the document.
The first recommendation called for swifter and more certain penalties for those charged with impaired driving, with licence suspensions on the spot, etc. Has the ministry moved in that direction -- to see if we can do something about those who seem to be repeat offenders, as far as drinking and driving go, and maybe swifter penalties for them so we can remove this scourge from the highways?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: First of all, I want to respond in general on the issue. I don't think there's a member of this House who doesn't want to find ways of addressing, in a more effective way, the scourge of drinking and driving. We've had amendments that the previous government brought in over the years that received unanimous support -- enthusiastic support -- in the House. I remember debates on several occasions as we, members of this Legislature, have collectively tried to send a message out to drivers in this province that we will just not tolerate drinking and driving. We've made good progress: the CounterAttack program, the awareness programs that are underway, the increased penalties that are in place, and the public sanction that comes from changing public values and public attitudes on this question have all had a positive impact on what has been, and still continues to be, a serious problem.
Early in our mandate we decided that we needed to do more on this topic. Cabinet established a small cabinet committee on traffic safety which included the minister responsible for ICBC, the Minister of Transportation and Highways -- which used to be two people; it's now one -- and the Minister of Health and me, as chair of the committee. We have been working our way through a number of proposals, together with the motor vehicle branch and ICBC, in respect of all of these issues.
The member talks about quicker remedies to problems. Manitoba has an interesting approach to that issue now, which we're looking at. There are a whole series of initiatives on which legislation is required that I hope to be able to bring to the Legislature, and that I hope to be able to take forward publicly in the coming months. No doubt there won't ever be a conclusion to it; this will be an ongoing process until we, hopefully, reach the day when it's not a problem anymore.
There are a series of initiatives. I certainly welcome any advice and help from all members of this House, because this is not a partisan issue. We are all in this together, and I suspect that there will be complete concurrence with any initiatives we could take that will successfully reduce the amount of drinking and driving that occurs.
D. Symons: I know 40 years ago, when I was visiting a relative in Oakland, California, they mentioned their own process. This son apparently had lost the family car due to a driving infraction, and the state simply impounded the car and sold it. The money went to the state, not to the person, for that. I am wondering if the impounding of vehicles when there's a drinking offence.... I don't know if the province should necessarily sell it and retain the moneys, but I think that sort of direct response to an infringement of drinking and driving might drive it home and sober up the people who are doing that.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I referred earlier to a program in Manitoba, where they do in fact administer an impoundment of vehicles. They don't sell the vehicle, but there certainly are costs involved in storing the vehicle. The driver doesn't have access to it and the owner, who sometimes isn't the driver, doesn't have access. We're looking very closely at that particular scheme in Manitoba. There were some concerns earlier about the legality of the program. They appear to be resolved, but you never know with those questions. Manitoba is certainly continuing successfully with its program.
D. Symons: I am very pleased to hear you're investigating it. That might be a very useful method to use to drive home the message that we're serious. Another method you might consider is compulsory treatment for drinking drivers -- to take programs that would qualify them to get their licences back. Rather than just a simple time period or a fine, in a sense they have to earn their licences back by showing that they've taken an appropriate program -- either a drink-related or a highway safety program of some sort. They have to do this to justify the ministry or the motor vehicle branch returning their driver's licence to them -- before they get that licence back and the right to drive again.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: That too is an idea now being pursued within the motor vehicle branch. There are clearly different approaches for different individuals, and we need to make sure the programs are effective. That speaks to the whole question of making sure that what we do is in fact going to work and in fact will be useful, and not simply doing things because it seems like a good idea or it responds to an emotional need to do "something" -- you know, the "please do something, do anything" mood that sometimes exists around issues. I would rather wait and make sure that it's right and effective, even if it means we wait a few more months before bringing it in, than do something which turns out not to work and then makes the introduction of other new ideas more difficult.
D. Symons: I thank you for that answer. After having seemed to be rather strong on some of these, I think it's important, when we bring in any regulations, that they allow the judge or whoever is making the decision -- the motor vehicle branch, or whatever -- to be flexible and meet each situation and its own needs. We saw a case recently where a fellow had used his car
[ Page 6203 ]
to stop a runaway car; ICBC went by the book to begin with and sounder steps were taken later on. If we give the flexibility to those making these decisions, to look at each situation and not necessarily follow a set guideline that might be too rigid, that's important to take into account.
I was reading in the Dry Roads booklet about a return of warrants. It says: "Several years back, traffic warrants were issued to allow the courts to force offenders to pay outstanding traffic fines, but that system was discontinued." I wasn't aware of that being discontinued. I'm wondering what the current status on warrants is, and how we can manage to bring people back to pay their fines.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: It depends here whether we're talking about Criminal Code infractions or traffic offences, which are a civil matter. I'm not completely able to deal with the issue in terms of whether it's changed in the last few years in respect of traffic violations, but I'll try to get back to you on that if I can, in a few minutes.
D. Symons: I suspect I am simply reading in here that it might not be a case of the law changing, but enforcement seems to be -- possibly that. Another suggestion you were making was separate court sittings, possibly the night court, for drinking-driving offences, so that we could bring them to the fore and settle them much sooner than having people wait for a long time before their court cases may come up. Is there any thought of expediting the legal process on these?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: Apparently that initiative was tried some time ago and was found not to be a successful way of dealing with the issue. If the member would like, subsequent to the estimates I can probably provide more details in writing as to why that particular initiative wasn't successful.
In respect of collection of fines and all that, we are doing a number of things. Let me back up. Shortly after assuming this responsibility I discovered there were some $80 million of uncollected fines in this province, most of which were motor-vehicle-related. People were not really caught until their driver's licence expired, which could be as much as five years later; and others were not caught at all if they moved, or whatever. We have moved in a number of ways to try to remedy that, to make sure that if an infraction occurs and there's a fine payable, it's paid quickly. We will be doing some other things in the near future that will assist very dramatically in making sure there are consequences for infractions. We're determined to bring that up to a much higher standard than has existed.
D. Symons: One might say that's a fine answer. I'm wondering, also on the subject of fines, if there's any thought of -- how can I put this? -- the fines representing the ability to pay of the person who's committed the offence. A fine for somebody working at minimum wage could be a lot more onerous than for somebody who's an executive of some large firm who's getting a salary of $100,000 or $500,000 a year. So is there any way you can be just, in giving fines of different magnitude for the same offence, depending upon the person's ability to pay? It seems that fines in a sense favour the rich.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: In theory this is, you know, "Make the rich pay," which....
D. Symons: I've heard that somewhere.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I've heard that line somewhere before. I'm surprised to hear it coming from over there, I must say.
Clearly, the matter goes to court and the judge is involved in sentencing. Then the judge can -- and does -- make a determination about what the appropriate sentence or penalty should be. In terms of traffic tickets themselves, these are set amounts. People can contest them in terms of whether they're guilty or not. But to try to figure out how to set different amounts based on income would be more than I want to take up in my time in this job.
D. Symons: I suppose it would take the wisdom of Solomon to do that. I guess I should be going through the Chair each time, shouldn't I? I should acknowledge there's a Chair in the room. I beg your pardon.
[4:45]
There was some concern expressed last fall from a driver training school that the Pacific Traffic Education Centre was basically unfair competition -- with some government support for that unfair competition -- to the private sector driver education programs in the province. I'm wondering if the minister might be able to comment on whether that is indeed the case.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: There were discussions between the Justice Institute and the private driving school that the member refers to. I'm going to have to defer at this point -- the question is so specific around a particular issue, and I don't have the answer as to where the discussions led. But I undertake to get that to the member in due course, as quickly as I can.
D. Symons: I appreciate that answer, and I'm sure that the driving school involved would also appreciate the answer.
Another concern that was expressed to me involved the probate services that.... These were available through government agents and have been relocated to insurance agents. This has to do, I suspect, with trucking, because it was a trucking firm that drew this to my attention. There was some concern here that the privatization of this didn't seem to be working so well, at least for this individual. What was the rationale for this change?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The licensing functions are ICBC's responsibility now. A lot of licensing that used to be in direct government hands has been transferred into ICBC's hands. Their network, of course, is through the insurance brokers. This enables people who are dealing with licence issues to take advantage of one-stop
[ Page 6204 ]
shopping. They can do all of their business at the broker. Clearly, there are more brokers around than there are government agents' offices, and as a result, the service should be superior to what it was.
W. Hurd: Just a few additional questions about alcohol while I'm on my feet. An issue that I continue to raise in estimates every year and in letters is the plight of resort communities in the province, which face a dramatic escalation of policing costs during the summer months. Certainly this issue will be of interest to the hon. member for Okanagan-Vernon. Where massive costs are faced to police resort areas, and in fact, the enforcement of fines.... Their collection and the additional fines accrue to the province without any financial help for the resort areas. This continues to be a serious concern in ridings like my own, where during the summer months the population of the city of White Rock doubles during a normal weekend, costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in police overtime. I understand they've made many representations to the province on this issue. I would imagine that the city of Penticton has made similar representations. Given the magnitude of this problem and the fact that we are experiencing a major population boom in British Columbia, is there any plan of the ministry to deal with this critical concern in resort areas of British Columbia?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: Well, the answer is the same as it was last year. However, it would be interesting to see whether or not the municipalities concerned -- I think of Penticton and White Rock and others -- would be interested in transferring all the additional revenue to the province that they receive as a result of this increased activity in their communities. Perhaps, in exchange for that, we might be able to make an arrangement for the additional policing costs. Clearly, when a community decides to put on a festival -- I grew up in the Okanagan, so every community had its own festival during the summer -- there is increased economic activity in the community as a result of that. Motels and restaurants are full; the shopping is accelerated. So there's tremendous economic benefit to these communities, and that's why they sponsor these activities. When they do, there are often additional costs involved to service these events. One of the costs, on occasion, is increased policing.
The province bears a big chunk of this cost, in any event, because of the provincial policing component in every one of these communities. All the police officers in the community work together -- whether they're provincially or municipally funded -- in these instances. So there already is significant provincial participation.
In addition to that, the negotiations for the RCMP contract, which were concluded a year or so ago, involved municipal participation in reaching the agreement. It was signed off by all parties, including the UBCM, us and the federal government. That's the arrangement that's in place. I've had meetings with various municipalities about the issue, and the answer to them is the same as it is to you, which is the same as it was last year during these estimates.
W. Hurd: I find that a curious response indeed. If you look at the effect of the festivals on these communities, I would suggest that the province collects far more revenue from an influx of tourists than the municipal government does.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Chairman, I can't think of much direct economic benefit to a municipality by having the hotels and restaurants full. What is happening, however, is that small municipalities are forced to cancel these festivals altogether, thereby costing the province revenue. They simply cannot meet the additional costs of policing. In the case of the city of White Rock specifically, we're talking about a healthy chunk of their total police budget just to handle one area of their municipality. Unfortunately, we're seeing a situation in the province now where the policing costs are actually having a direct impact on the number of festivals and whether or not they can even be held.
I hope that the Attorney General would at least accede to doing some sort of cost-benefit analysis to determine what the province is gaining from the influx of the tourist dollars in the form of sales tax and every other type of revenue in holding these festivals, compared to the additional costs of policing, which are really jeopardizing their future in many small communities in the province.
Hon. C. Gabelmann: There's another issue here that I haven't talked about this year -- I did last year, if my memory is correct -- and that is the kind of planning that goes on in a municipality around these events.
One of the things we've learned over the last few years is that some municipalities prepare very effectively for their long-weekend events, festivals or whatever. They don't have the kind of trouble that some other communities have had.
If we were to assume all the incremental costs of policing that come from a festival or other activities, then the incentive for the municipality to develop a plan of action for the festival would be diminished considerably.
Many municipalities -- Nanaimo is one -- have virtually eliminated the kinds of problems that may still persist in some communities. That's because the police, the municipal council and others in the community have worked out a very careful plan of action in respect of how they conduct the festival. I think that's the responsibility at the local level. I think in the long term we can avoid the excessive costs that some communities have had if we just do careful planning.
Last summer the village of Osoyoos invited a very popular rock group to come in. This is a village of 4,000 or 5,000 people, and they suddenly had 25,000 or 30,000 people descend on them with no advance planning. That's not appropriate either. We've got to make sure that the communities take some responsibility for their actions. If we simply pick up the whole cost, then we'll get involved in doing all that kind of planning. Then members from the opposition will scream at us for having yet an even bigger bureaucracy to try to do all these things as we take power away from local government, which we don't want to do.
[ Page 6205 ]
W. Hurd: It's always good to know that the answers don't change in this committee from year to year. I would suggest, however, that there's ample evidence of community festivals being cancelled altogether, rather than having to deal with the problems of policing. Alcohol is often a factor in that cancellation. The kind of revenues that the province collects from alcohol consumption being what they are, you would wonder whether the province is actually forgoing a great deal of revenue in taking a non-active role in trying to solve these policing problems.
On the issue of alcohol, perhaps I can ask the minister to comment on another matter which many members of this assembly have received representation on: the neighbourhood pub issue. Last year the owners of those neighbourhood pubs were very concerned about going into competition with the government liquor stores. Can the minister advise us in this set of estimates where that process sits? Are we dealing with further consultation with the neighbourhood pub owners? Are government liquor stores going to be open with cold beer and wine, or is this issue a matter of further study during the current fiscal year?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I've met a number of times with the B.C. hotel association and the Neighbourhood Pub Owners' Association of B.C. over the issue of cold beer and wine in government stores. The hotel association, the Neighbourhood Pub Owners' Association, the liquor distribution branch and ourselves reached an agreement about the location of government stores -- which ones would move towards providing refrigerated beer. There were 14 locations selected in British Columbia, by agreement. We now have one store with cold beer up and running. Because of the argument about competition, which is a valid one, the surcharge for a dozen beer at that store -- and in the other 13 when they're up and running -- is $1.20 per dozen.
As far as cold wine is concerned, what we have done in a number of stores is to provide what I call the dunking machines: you can stick a bottle of white wine into a cold-water container which, if you wait three minutes, will cool your wine down to a drinkable temperature. That's proceeding in a number of stores. The idea of refrigerated wine is not proceeding; it's the dunking.
The issue of refrigerated beer is proceeding in 14 locations agreed to by the two associations and ourselves, with a surcharge in place to pay for the costs incurred by the LDB for the capital costs of the refrigeration itself.
W. Hurd: I'm delighted to hear that those negotiations and discussions with the neighbourhood pub owners and the hotel owners are indeed ongoing. The minister will be aware that one of their great concerns, however, was pricing. They had indicated that they were having to buy their supply, by law, from the government liquor stores, who then enter into competition with them in cold beer and wine sales. In terms of pricing, how is the minister proposing to ensure that there is fair competition between cold beer and wine stores and the government liquor stores, who are actually supplying them with the alcohol that they need to compete? Can he assure the committee that the hotel and pub owners are completely satisfied that the playing field will be level when these 14 liquor distribution outlets are in full operation in the province?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I'm sure the member knows that the cold beer and wine stores -- the LRSs, in the jargon -- purchase their liquor at a 10 percent discount. They are then able to set whatever price they choose, which is usually above the liquor store price. They can price as they wish. We put the surcharge on the cold beer in the government stores for two reasons. One was to repay the extra costs that we would incur, and the second was to ensure that we weren't undercutting the cold beer and wine stores and it was a competitive situation. Just for the information of members, the anticipated capital costs of renovation and providing the refrigeration is about $22,000, and the anticipated payback time is between 18 and 24 months -- two years at the outside.
[5:00]
W. Hurd: If I understand the minister correctly then, the cold beer and wine stores will realistically only be able to charge $1.20 over the price that would normally be charged during daylight hours in a government liquor store. Is the minister satisfied that the location of the government outlets will in fact enable the pub owners to levy their own price, or is he at all concerned that they might be the captive of that $1.20 surcharge at the government liquor stores when it comes to pricing their own products?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: There are several elements to this answer. First of all, by their own numbers -- I'm doing this from memory but it's approximate -- 35 percent of the volume in cold beer and wine stores is sold on Sunday. We're not open on Sunday, so immediately 35 percent of the volume is in an uncompetitive market. Secondly, the locations we've chosen by agreement are not next to, or not in close proximity to, cold beer and wine stores. The question of going into a mall and saying "Should I go to the liquor store or to the cold beer and wine store?" isn't an issue. Therefore the convenience issue of being able to go down to your neighbourhood pub, which happens also to have a cold beer and wine store, is still there, because you might have to drive another five miles to find a government store. Certainly in my community you would have to drive another three or four miles at least.
It has been worked out in that way. I know that there was a lot of concern during this process. There was a little media attention and a lot of letters. I had a lot of meetings, and a lot of concern was expressed. That concern still exists. Lots of people in the public are certain you can never trust government, so they're always suspicious. It's good that they are; they're always wise to be suspicious. But we have given them an undertaking that this is our program and we're
[ Page 6206 ]
doing it by agreement. We're underway, and so far only one store has come on stream.
W. Hurd: As a member of the opposition, I can say that it always pays to be suspicious. That's what we're paid to do. However, I accept the fact that consultation is going on and that the private operators may be happy with the pricing formula. I'm sure that if they aren't, the opposition will hear about it, along with the government.
Perhaps I can shift the focus of the discussion to an item that I understand was canvassed at some length last week, but my questions may be a little more direct than what was talked about. I'm referring specifically to the Young Offenders Act, which has received a great deal of attention in the municipality of Surrey, as the Attorney General will be aware. I understand that it's a federal statute and that the power to change that statute lies with the Solicitor General, but it is administered, of course, by the province. Since the Attorney General has, I'm sure, received many letters on this topic -- I'm sure he's received thousands -- is there any voted expenditure for articulating a provincial position on the Young Offenders Act, particularly as it relates to areas like Surrey, where we have a burgeoning population growth and increased incidence of serious crimes involving people who fall into the category of juveniles? Is the ministry going to develop a position on this, or is it something that it intends to leave totally within the purview of the federal government?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The moneys that we are debating and voting on in this debate are contained within the corrections budget. The corrections branch has a number of trained professionals who are experts in these areas. Similarly, the criminal justice branch, for which we are also providing money in one of the subsequent votes, has people working within it who are trained and expert in matters relating to juvenile crime.
It's our obligation to enforce the law -- the Criminal Code -- and treat young offenders according to the provisions of the Young Offenders Act, and we do. It's my obligation, beyond all of that, to give serious consideration to the concerns that are expressed by many communities. I think I mentioned this last week. In meeting with municipal councils around the province, which I do, this issue comes up on every occasion. There is a widespread concern about young offenders that is often expressed in this way: the court system is too lenient, too soft, on young offenders who are committing their first offence. That leads, people say, to a disrespect for the law and the process and "an encouragement" to accelerate the degree of the crime. There's some merit to those concerns. One of the ways we can respond to that -- there are many, which are mostly community-based in terms of appropriate responses -- is by developing effective diversion programs, particularly for first offenders.
I was in Prince George on Monday and Tuesday of this week -- it seems like a week ago, but it was yesterday when we got back -- and met there with the Elizabeth Fry Society. They are involved in a youth accountability committee, I think they call it, which is a diversion program for young offenders. They can provide some very direct accountability for a youngster who's involved in their first encounter with the law. They have the kid go and spend some time one way or another, depending on what's appropriate, with the victim, the family where the B and E occurred or the store where shoplifting might have occurred.
In fact, they say that in this community program, and others have confirmed it to me, the accountability and lesson that is learned by the youngster is very effective, there's very little recidivism and these kids generally go straight after that kind of program. When I talk to communities, I talk to them about the need to make sure that kids understand the consequences of their action in the early going, because if it gets too far down the road, it's difficult to train people who are wedded to a life of lawbreaking. If we can find ways of making youngsters understand that their action has a consequence and if we can do that at the first instance, then that's the kind of program I want to encourage.
The traditional route of going to court and getting sentenced to something isn't going to work. Your 14- or 15- or 16-year-old who does what is described as a minor offence the first time around isn't going to end up in jail -- and shouldn't. What other sanctions does the court have that are as effective as what these diversion programs can accomplish? So we're encouraging communities to be more involved in dealing with the issues in that way. I have talked to ministry staff about my desire that whenever a community comes forward with a program that they think might be appropriate for their community, we are to help them within the general rules that apply around these issues. The programs that they develop don't have to be the same in every community; they can be different, and they are in fact different in different communities.
W. Hurd: I certainly recognize the value of community crime-prevention programs and their mitigating effect on juvenile crime. I guess my question was a little more specific, however, and it related to the existing act under which juvenile offenders are dealt with in the province. The question I was asking is whether the Ministry of the Attorney General, which has responsibility for administering this act on an ongoing, daily basis, has identified and communicated to the federal government any expenditures or areas where the act can be strengthened to deal with serious and violent crimes. There is public concern that the Young Offenders Act limits the courts' ability to deal with completely antisocial behaviour, with serious crimes involving threats or damage to individuals. Is the Attorney General satisfied that the act enables the courts in our province to deal with young offenders in a fair and just manner?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: In answer to the very last part of the question: for the most part, yes, but not entirely. I should say that the reason I answered the question, or maybe didn't answer the question -- the reason I responded in the way I did -- is to convey my sense that all of the solutions to these problems aren't to
[ Page 6207 ]
be found in redrafting the Young Offenders Act. I really try hard to persuade local community leaders of that fact.
Having said that, senior ministry staff are in continuing discussions, and have been for years, with the federal government in respect of the Young Offenders Act. Those discussions led to amendments a year or two ago that extended the sentence availability for murder from, I think, three years to five years in respect of young.... May of '92 it was. So the maximum sentence could go to five years for murder. Other changes relate to the conditions under which youngsters can be raised to adult court, and we are monitoring that issue closely now to see if that's effective. In terms of violent crimes, I think there are clearly occasions when those matters should be tried in adult court. Some of these crimes are adult crimes and should be tried in adult court. We make application to the court to raise on occasion. The courts don't always agree, but we certainly make application when we think the deed is of sufficient violence or is such as to merit adult court.
We have a justice ministers' meeting in Quebec City in a couple of weeks, I think. The issue of the Young Offenders Act and the concerns that have been identified by our ministry staff will be on the agenda for that meeting as well.
[5:15]
W. Hurd: I have a couple of other issues that I wanted to canvass here. I'm trying to follow a chronology, but since I'm not the critic, I may venture into what's already been canvassed. Another issue that was raised last year was the inquiry into regional policing, particularly in the lower mainland. I wondered whether the ministry intended to make any progress with that issue during the coming year, particularly as the lower mainland begins to become, for all intents and purposes, one large, autonomous region.
A series of hearings was conducted last year about regional policing and the cost benefits that would accrue as opposed to having a whole bunch of RCMP detachments approaching municipalities for money. I understand that the whole issue has been put on the back burner by the negotiations with the federal government on a policing contract for RCMP service. At least in some municipalities in the lower mainland it has; I am thinking of my own. Can the minister give us an idea of where we stand in the province on this regional policing issue, particularly in the lower mainland?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: There are two parts of the province where it is an issue: here on the lower Island and in the lower mainland. There have been calls by some municipalities for amalgamation as opposed to regionalization. I think that's not likely to happen. The pure amalgamation of the forces isn't on the agenda at this time.
The question of regionalization really has to do with cooperation, so that different forces in neighbouring communities can talk to each other on their police radios and a whole series of their daily activities can mesh more effectively than they do now.
What we're doing within the ministry, and what the RCMP and the local municipal police forces are doing, is to work to see how we can provide better coordinated regional services -- whether it is through common computer systems or communication systems or through joint sharing of other resources that may be more available in one community than in the neighbouring ones. So there is a lot of work toward that, but it's not leading -- on our agenda -- to amalgamation of the forces.
W. Hurd: Does the ministry accept the argument that by going regional, as we see in metro Toronto, there are huge savings to be attained in administration and policing costs? Or are those savings largely mythical in terms of saving money for the taxpayers?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I think they are mythical. The studies that we've had done on that question don't lead to the conclusion that money can be saved by amalgamating forces. In fact, it may well be counter-productiive in terms of effective policing. What we really need to do is find ways to get policing closer to the community. Having one metropolitan police force from Hope to Bowen Island, including White Rock, would probably be counterproductive to the direction that we think needs to occur.
What should happen and has to happen is a coordination of the systems that are in place so that everybody can communicate with each other and have an effective response from one municipality to another. That's the challenge in front of us at the present time.
The RCMP have one computer system, and the municipal forces often have a totally non-compatible system. We've got the debate going on here on the lower Island right now about what kind of computer systems are going to be in place. I want them to be able to talk to each other, and often they can't.
W. Hurd: Continuing to address the issue of small police forces trying to cope with the process of cross-referencing, I am particularly interested in the issue of police boards and the fact that in some small municipal police forces there seems to be a disparity in accountability to the public, so to speak, for the kinds of things that might occur, for example, where somebody was in custody and had a complaint about their treatment. Has the ministry looked at this problem of police board accountability and whether or not the police forces operating on the lower mainland should have, for example, similar standards for handling public complaints? Or is it really a big issue?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: It is an issue, and it's one that Justice Wally Oppal is looking into at the present time. I'm concerned about the issues that flow from what the member is talking about. I know that representations have been made to Justice Oppal, and I'm looking forward to his report later this year so that we can get on with making some changes which clearly have to happen.
[ Page 6208 ]
W. Hurd: Just a point of clarification on that answer. When we're dealing with an RCMP detachment, would there have to be some dialogue with the federal government on how to make the detachment more accountable? I know one of the concerns expressed to the opposition has been that in fact the level of accountability by virtue of there being a police board is better with some municipal forces than it is with the RCMP. How would the minister envisage bringing about a common standard for public accountability for police detachments throughout the province, but particularly in the lower mainland where we have, I guess, three or four municipal police forces?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: It's clearly a problem, the fact that we're dealing with the RCMP, which is a federal force who operate under the guidance and direction of the federal Solicitor General. Without a negotiated agreement to establish police boards, for example in RCMP jurisdictions, we couldn't do it under the current arrangements. Again, this is something that I know a number of municipalities have expressed concern about because they feel the need to have a greater ability to direct the activities of the detachment in their community and to have some greater accountability for the detachment's activity.
The way that will happen is through discussion and negotiation with the RCMP, both at a local level between mayors and superintendents, or inspectors or officers in charge; at our level in terms of our continuing discussions with the RCMP and with the federal government; and beyond that in discussions that the RCMP and the federal Solicitor General will have.
Clearly we are not in a position, in RCMP jurisdictions, to be able to establish the jurisdiction of the Police Act in respect of police boards. We don't have that authority under the current arrangements.
W. Hurd: I just have a further series of questions here. One specifically relates to an issue that was raised in the House today, that of welfare fraud in the province and the rights or abilities the RCMP have to deal with complaints that might come before them. I understand that the RCMP, in fact, cannot access records at Social Services, which I accept as a necessity. But in a situation where they might have reason to suspect that fraud is taking place, would they be required to report that information directly to the Attorney General or directly to the local ministry office? How would the RCMP deal with a complaint that they had reasonable and probable grounds to believe was in fact a real fraud involving the Social Services ministry in the province?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The RCMP -- or any other police force for that matter -- in their proper jurisdiction cannot go on fishing trips. They can't go searching through the files in the hope that they might find something that will give them evidence to do a more exhaustive investigation.
But if a matter is brought to the attention of the police and allegations of fraud are made, the police will investigate. It doesn't matter who the allegation is about. Whether the allegation concerns the fraudulent receipt of social assistance or the allegation concerns an employee of the ministry, the police not only have the right but the obligation to investigate those matters. If they feel there is sufficient evidence to take to Crown counsel to determine whether charges should be laid, they will do that. They will do that independent of me and independent of the Ministry of Attorney General per se, because in that respect the criminal justice branch is independent and not guided by me or the ministry. They make independent judgments about that.
So if there is a specific allegation about an instance of fraud, then the police should know about it. The suggestions that there is fraud in the system aren't enough; there has to be a particular identification of some details that can lead somewhere in an investigation. The police will, in those circumstances, investigate.
W. Hurd: Certainly the minister will be aware of the comment made by a member of the RCMP detachment in Surrey regarding the extent of welfare fraud in the municipality of Surrey, which I must confess I found a rather startling statement for a member of the RCMP to make without apparently being able to access all the records of the Social Services ministry.
Can the Attorney General tell the committee whether he is satisfied, when the RCMP suspect a major fraud is occurring, with the level of cooperation that exists between that ministry and police, or does he accept that there is any truth or substance to the complaint by the RCMP that they are not able to access at times the records they need to further their investigation and make recommendations to Crown counsel?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I'm not sure what the member is referring to in terms of the Surrey issue, other than to say I know that the Surrey RCMP and the Minister of Social Services have had discussions. From everything that I understand, there is no problem between the ministry and the RCMP in respect of the RCMP doing their job.
If ever it got to the situation where the RCMP felt they couldn't get a document or documents that they needed, they would simply get a search warrant and proceed to get it.
W. Hurd: I have to confess that I had understood that under statute the records at the Social Services office were in fact exempt from a search warrant. Perhaps the minister could clarify that.
D. Schreck: I'd like to compliment the member from Surrey-White Rock on the conditional nature of many of his statements regarding unfortunate allegations that have been in the news media. I had the privilege in the seventies of being the chief executive officer responsible for one-quarter of what was then called the Ministry of Human Resources, and I can tell all members that in that capacity I had search warrants
[ Page 6209 ]
served on me for the production of welfare records and that no statute has changed in the interim.
[5:30]
Hon. C. Gabelmann: I can't imagine a situation where a statute would exist which would thwart a potential criminal investigation.
W. Hurd: In the event that an RCMP detachment forwarded a complaint to the Attorney General, would it be normal practice for the Attorney General to bring that to the attention of the minister, or would it be totally internalized in terms of whether a recommendation was made to press charges against an individual?
Hon. C. Gabelmann: The RCMP wouldn't bring the issue to the Ministry of Attorney General. They would go to the regional Crown or to the local prosecutor's office and seek to have the proposed charge approved. That's not something that comes to my office. It shouldn't, and it doesn't. This is something that's done independently between the investigating force and the Crown counsel.
With that, I'm supposed to move that the committee rise, report resolution and ask leave to sit again.
Some Hon. Members: No, report progress.
The Chair: For the clarification of the committee, we completed Tourism ministry estimates, so the appropriate motion is to report resolution when this committee rises. It in no way affects the debates in the examination of the Attorney General's ministry.
The motion before you is that we rise, report resolution and seek leave to sit again.
Motion approved.
The Committee rose at 5:32 p.m.
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