2011 Legislative Session: Fourth Session, 39th Parliament
HANSARD

The following electronic version is for informational purposes only.

The printed version remains the official version.

official report of

Debates of the Legislative Assembly

(hansard)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Morning Sitting

Volume 35, Number 3

ISSN 0709-1281 (Print)
ISSN 1499-2175 (Online)

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012

The House met at 10:04 a.m.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Prayers.

Orders of the Day

Hon. R. Coleman: Mr. Speaker, in this House we will continue second reading of Bill 30, intituled Energy and Mines Statutes Amendment Act. Should we complete that, we would move to second reading this morning of Bill 32, intituled Energy and Water Efficiency Act.

[1005]

Then, as I laid out the committees yesterday, committee stages. And in the Douglas Fir Committee Room we are continuing the estimates of Ministry of Children and Families. Should that complete, we would move to Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 30 — ENERGY AND MINES STATUTES
AMENDMENT ACT, 2012

(continued)

R. Austin: It gives me great pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill 30, the Energy and Mines Statutes Amendment Act, 2012. And well, well, well, what a difference a day makes. No, I think that was the title of a song. What a difference a few years make in terms of B.C. Liberal changes to energy policy.

[D. Black in the chair.]

You know, a little history is appropriate here. One of the great flourishes that the B.C. Liberals put forward was their Clean Energy Act several years ago. It was supposed to transform the way that British Columbia produces energy for all of our citizens.

Historically, of course, we live in a province that is blessed with a hydro energy system that has been a Crown corporation and has benefited British Columbians for well in excess of 50 years. And it's important to note the history of B.C. Hydro itself. At one time, going back prior to B.C. Hydro, energy was produced in this province by private companies. A very visionary former Premier decided to, essentially, nationalize these private energy companies and create a publicly owned hydro corporation.

Why did that Premier decide to do that? Some might say that he was a raving socialist, but in fact he wasn't. What he realized as a Socred was that it was in the best interests of British Columbians — this being a national monopoly, the production of electricity; there can only be one provider to each household — if the public was to actually gain control of all of the production of energy.

Once the public had paid for the huge expenditures of creating that system, of building hydro dams and transmission lines across the province — once that capital expenditure was paid for — the citizens of this province would then benefit from having the lowest hydro rates, possibly, in all of North America. So it was a good piece of public policy and an understanding that in the market it was in the interests of British Columbians to actually own their own electricity-generating system.

Things went very well for many, many years through a variety of political parties here that governed, until the B.C. Liberals came in and decided that they would make a very big policy change to B.C. Hydro. What they decided to do, and the reason why we're here discussing this in Bill 30, was that for some reason it would be in the best interests of the people of British Columbia if suddenly private power producers were able to get in on the act on a grand scale and produce energy.

Now, it's been noted in the House already that there were already small micro-hydro projects that had been started in the 1990s. These were mostly small. They were micro-hydro, and they were in remote parts of the province. But they decided that what they would do was change the definition inside the act to enable and to actually give direction for B.C. Hydro to seek private production.

What did this do? Well, as we pointed out on this side of the House at that time, it would create very, very expensive electricity at a time when we could buy that electricity way cheaper on the open market, either from Alberta or from Washington. But we are all linked, of course, to the North American grid. Because we have hydro power in this province, we are in the incredible, great position of being able to buy electricity cheaply at night, store it in our reservoirs and then use it during the day or sell it to other jurisdictions when it is more expensive.

[1010]

So not only did it enable us to have very low electricity rates in British Columbia, but it also enabled us to be able to make a huge amount of money by buying and selling this electricity.

What do the B.C. Liberals come and do? They decide to change the game, to change the rules of the game and to force B.C. Hydro to suddenly go and seek power from private producers.

This was done, unfortunately, not in the interests of British Columbians. It was done, really, in order to help those who were backing the Power Producers Association and who were giving fairly substantial donations to the B.C. Liberal Party. It was cloaked not as helping their friends, of course. It was cloaked in the idea of "let's have green energy" — okay?

Well, there was nothing really green about this energy except perhaps for the colour of the $20 bills that went
[ Page 11028 ]
in inordinate quantity into the hands of those who were suddenly producing this electricity. What it did was, in point of fact, made British Columbians suddenly have to pay much, much higher electricity rates for power which we could have bought, using B.C. Hydro, from other jurisdictions.

The way that they did this was by changing the self-sufficiency rules, saying that from now on all new power that came to B.C. Hydro was not to be generated by B.C. Hydro but had to come from private power producers.

Here we have a government that portends to have huge economic abilities suddenly forcing B.C. Hydro to go and buy energy at very expensive rates which, by the way, when there's a surplus they would have to sell actually at cheaper costs than what they'd paid for it. That's right. We now had a government that was using our public policy to buy energy high and sell it low. Now, you don't have to be a genius to know that that's not really very sustainable.

To their credit, albeit late, they've come to realize the errors of their ways. Now a few years later they are reversing that policy after, it seems, spending an awful lot of ratepayers' money to pay for this mistake. In fact, Marvin Shaffer, in his analysis, reckons that in just four years alone British Columbian ratepayers have been forced to pay $1.28 billion extra than they would have done if this policy had never been put in place.

I'm here not just to just speak about how much increase in electricity rates British Columbians have had to pay because, obviously, the B.C. Liberals have finally realized that this was a chronic mistake and are undoing it, but there have also been lots of side effects of this policy around the province.

First of all, what it did was made, immediately, there be a rush to try and get tenures on the rivers of British Columbia, because people in the private power production business realized: "Hey, if B.C. Hydro is now forced under legislation, by statute, to only buy electricity from us and other private power producers, whether they be wind or solar, that means B.C. Hydro is going to have to give us the rates that we require in order to not just build it because obviously there's a huge capital cost, but also to serve us to give us our profit."

As a result, you had private power producers rushing to buy tenures on all of the rivers of British Columbia. In fact, I believe that over 600 tenures were sold to private power producers in order to try and think about ways in which they could create not necessarily micro-hydro but, in fact, large power projects.

We need to define the difference between micro-hydro and some of the projects that have come about as a result of this. Initially, when micro-hydro was first suggested as a way of creating new power, as I've said, it was meant to be small-scale in rural areas, perhaps controlled by First Nations who live in a lot of very remote places.

The idea was to divert a small portion of a stream and basically cut it away, take that water from a diversion, put it through a small generator and then use that electricity to help the community. In many cases this was going to be a very small and remote community. It was never designed to channel huge, gigantic amounts of water in large tunnels and take it away and create the kinds of megaprojects that some of these private power projects have now become.

Of course, that's exactly what happened. The private power producers realized that wow, with this new policy that the B.C. Liberals have brought in under their so-called Clean Energy Act, they would be enabled now — in fact, B.C. Hydro would be forced now to give them the contracts — to build these things.

[1015]

Let's go back to my original discussion of why we have B.C. Hydro in the first place and why it was in our interest for B.C. Hydro to be the producers of power.

To bring new energy on board is very capital-intensive. There are discussions going on right now in this province to build a major new dam called Site C in the northeast part of the province. I think the estimate, the last I saw, is somewhere between $7 billion and $8 billion. It requires an awful lot of money.

The private power producers realized that the only way to really make serious money with private power production was not to have a whole string of little minor projects but to try and scale up and have the kind of grand, large-scale project that could generate 500, 600, 700 megawatts of power at a time and enable them to make a huge amount of money — money which really should have been made by the citizens of British Columbia through B.C. Hydro, had this policy not changed.

What that has done is put lots and lots of rivers at risk. These large micro-hydro projects, of course not being the small kind, were not very safe on the environment at all. What did the B.C. Liberals do? They said: "Well, okay. Let's take this outside of the purview of the B.C. Utilities Commission. If we're going to do some policy and it's not going to be very good policy, the first thing we need to do is to make sure that this bill goes through with closure." So there was no debate on the original bill that brought this in.

Of course, they also wanted to make sure that there wasn't public oversight over this. So the independent body, the B.C. Utilities Commission, that was clearly set up in order to make decisions around electricity policy….

Don't forget that this is an actual monopoly. The prices have to be set. The taxpayers have to be paid back, or B.C. Hydro has to be paid back, in order to pay the bills for actually generating this amount of electricity. Then, of course, the profit of that cheap electricity would accrue to British Columbians. But the B.C. Utilities Commission was not allowed to have a say in these large private power projects.

That's the second thing they did. Of course, there was a
[ Page 11029 ]
huge hue and cry around the province. Environmentalists got very angry, realizing what this could do as an accumulative process in terms of all of these multiple private power projects — what they could do to fish habitat, etc. Also, there was a big discussion, in economic terms, of how economically disadvantageous this was to British Columbians.

We were essentially giving up the right to continue with B.C. Hydro being the generator of power and suddenly going to private power producers. Once they had paid their capital costs back, the huge profit in this electricity that they would sell to us would now accrue to the shareholders of these companies rather than to the citizens of British Columbia who, as I've said, over the last 50 years have enjoyed some of the cheapest industrial and residential rates.

Let's not forget that when you're talking about cheap hydro, it's not simply that the ratepayers — all of us who pay electricity bills — benefited for the last 50 years. In large part, you can say that the industrialization of this province, in part, has been successful as a result of cheap hydro, and that has given us a huge advantage over the last 50 years.

We wouldn't have seen the kinds of mills, pulp mills and other factories that have sprung up all over British Columbia without this cheap power. It gave us a huge advantage. The policy the B.C. Liberals brought in took that advantage away to the point where even some of the large industrial users came to realize that this was bad policy for them. Even some of the big donors of the B.C. Liberals realized that this energy policy was disadvantageous to them.

So here we are making this change. But it wasn't just a question of the ratepayers who've not been treated well since this policy came in. In my region a company became the largest private power producer as a result of changes in the Clean Energy Act.

We have had this debate now for a number of years, and it's largely over. In fact, the government went to court, and the company was taken to court. The district of Kitimat spent many, many years and a lot of resources of the people of British Columbia.

The reason why I'm speaking to this is because it's this policy that helped what was then Alcan, now Rio Tinto Alcan, to turn its mind from recognizing that while the aluminum industry can be very profitable — it goes through its curves up and down through the business cycle — there was actually a better and a far quicker way to make a large profit rather than manufacturing aluminum.

[1020]

When this policy came into place, put in place by the B.C. Liberals, Alcan sat down, quickly did an analysis and realized: "Wow. You know, we can make this return of capital making aluminum, or we can make a really, really incredible return on capital by simply selling our power, which we've made for the last 50 years and have always used for manufacturing aluminum, back to British Columbians."

They decided that with this change of policy by the B.C. Liberals, they would now be an electricity company, a private power producer, that would make aluminum when it suited them. This created a long debate. It went to court. It was a big fight.

In addition to the $1.28 billion that ratepayers have paid in excess of what they would have done if this policy had never come in, the citizens of northwest B.C. were put through a very traumatic time.

Of course, this change in policy then incentivized Alcan, or Rio Tinto, to decide: "Well, when we come to rebuild our smelter, what size of a smelter do we build? Do we take all of our firm power that we have traditionally used to smelt aluminum, or do we try and build a smelter which is new and modernized and which is much cleaner on the environment? Do we increase our production but still save quite a large portion of electricity that can be sold back to B.C. Hydro at rates that are quite extraordinary?"

In fact, Rio Tinto's own documents during this fight in court estimated that they produced that power in a way that only cost $10 per megawatt. There was a $5 megawatt charge for the rental of the water because, of course, the water that goes into the power production is still publicly owned. And it cost them basically $5 a megawatt to generate it, because they had paid for their generator many, many years before. So they had $10-a-megawatt power.

What did they do? They decided to use a large portion of it to build a new smelter, and I'm very thankful that they have made that decision. I want to put it on the public record just again, for those who accused the New Democrats of not supporting Rio Tinto in the building of that new smelter, that we always wanted a new smelter. We simply wanted it bigger, and we wanted it sooner.

But this policy enabled Rio Tinto to recognize that they could essentially subsidize this huge capital cost of a new smelter by selling power back to British Columbians at 300, 400, 500 percent profit — in fact, even more.

It has been a disaster for the aluminum industry in the northwest, because we would have had our smelter much earlier had this policy not been brought in place. It created a lot of anxiety. For the community of Kitimat you had a small community that was forced, for political reasons, to go and expend their own dollars, their own small-town dollars, to fight this fight in court when in fact it should have been the responsibility of the provincial government of this province, which has the mandate to look after the public interest.

As this policy that's now being amended shows, at that time it was B.C. Liberal policy to look after their cronies rather than the public interest. That's what has happened, and it's very sad. It divided one of the communities that I represent, Kitimat. It divided the whole of the northwest,
[ Page 11030 ]
because it created a division between Terrace and Kitimat at the political level. Actually, it even divided families.

What I'm discussing here today…. Families in northwest B.C., because it mattered so much to them, knew a whole lot about electricity generation and all the policy involved — the kind of stuff that most British Columbians don't pay a lot of attention to. That's the whole reason why we had the B.C. Utilities Commission. A place with very smart people who understand electricity policy can guide what B.C. Hydro does.

But where I come from, a lot of people, a lot of regular citizens, sat down and actually read books to understand the economics of electricity production and to understand the ecology of electricity production. There was a huge interest in the fact that the B.C. Liberals had made this policy change.

We lost that battle. The people of Kitimat lost that battle. They lost it in court, in large part because the then Premier of the province, Gordon Campbell, decided that not only would he change electricity policy in favour of private power producers, but when it was challenged in court, he decided that the B.C. Liberal government would actually go into court and side on behalf of corporate interests rather than the public interest.

[1025]

You had the industrialization act of British Columbia, a piece of legislation brought in by these previously visionary Premiers in the past who had recognized that the only way to create a vibrant new industry in northwest British Columbia was to create cheap power and allow a company the rights to a waterway, to an entire watershed, in order to create cheap power to create jobs that would come about as a result of a new industry — the aluminum industry.

All of a sudden we found that piece of legislation overturned in court by this government going to court on the side of a large corporation with its headquarters in Melbourne, Australia to decide: "Hey, it's better for our shareholders of Rio Tinto to benefit from this incredibly cheap power that we've produced over the last 50 years and use to sell it back to British Columbians at an exorbitant rate."

That was the outcome. You know, it's interesting that in this debate the government decided to put up one very eloquent speaker with a background in economics who, even when this policy was being put in place, must have gone back to his studies in economics and shuddered at the thought of what we were doing here, because it made no sense. It made no economic sense whatsoever in a province that has the capacity to store electricity as we do in British Columbia. It simply made no sense.

But he made an eloquent speech yesterday. My colleague referred to it as a very eloquent "oops" speech, and I would agree with that assessment. It's hard, I think, in public life to get up and say you've made a mistake. That's one of the things that politicians find difficult to do. I think we need to do it more often.

Certainly, British Columbians would like it if, when all of us in public life try something or change a policy and then see it doesn't work, we listen to the people who are speaking out against it and publicly say: "You know what? We've made a mistake." I think that people would perhaps look more kindly upon us as politicians if we were able to do that.

I have to commend the B.C. Liberals in having the courage, a few years too late and at least $1.2 billion later, to come in here with this amendment and change this. I think it is in the interests of British Columbia for these changes to happen. Certainly, those of us on this side of the House, who've been railing against this government for several years about this misplaced policy, can now feel vindicated.

In terms of vindication, I would just like to acknowledge that during this big fight in northwest B.C. that came about as a result of these changes in water policy, there were a number of people who came to my community to help us. I can remember standing on a stage with Paul Ramsey, Bill Vander Zalm and Corky Evans. Now, you wouldn't normally expect to see those three on a stage together, but they came up to Kitimat. In fact, the Mount Elizabeth Theatre was absolutely packed to capacity.

As I've mentioned, one of the interesting things is that Kitimat is one of those communities where when you're talking about electrons, everybody comes out to listen. It's a fascinating place. You talk about electricity, and the whole community gets it and wants to come out and listen to someone talking about electricity, how it's generated and how you can transfer electrons.

Bill Vander Zalm was a former Socred Premier, one of the Premiers who in his time in office recognized the value of B.C. Hydro, recognized that British Columbians were taking huge advantage of having this cheaply produced electricity. He recognized when he was Premier that there was no need — in fact, it would have been a disaster — to go and try to find power produced privately when the citizens and the ratepayers under B.C. Hydro could have produced it. Of course, Mr. Vander Zalm was absolutely right on that issue.

Interjection.

R. Austin: I'm glad that my colleague from Chilliwack recognizes how right Bill Vander Zalm was. In fact, while we're talking about how right Bill Vander Zalm has been, he's been in my community on other issues. He came to my community and spoke eloquently about the HST — again, another issue that Bill Vander Zalm was just absolutely spot-on with in his regards.

[1030]

But Paul Ramsey had spent time, when he was on this side of the House as a minister, having to work with and
[ Page 11031 ]
negotiate with Alcan. He realized that Alcan would have always, if they had been able to wriggle out of the industrialization act of British Columbia, been able to make far more money by just being a generator of power.

In fact, it would have been in the interest of Rio Tinto shareholders to actually have no aluminum production whatsoever in Kitimat and simply sell power, because over the 50 years since they've built their facility, the price of electricity in North America has skyrocketed. The rates of return from simply selling electricity would be far higher than the rates of return from manufacturing aluminum, but they weren't able to do that.

They weren't able to do that because governments of the day, of both left and right, looked after the public interest and ensured that Alcan only used their power to manufacture aluminum and only sold back to British Columbia at times when there was either too much water in the reservoir and they had to get rid of extra electricity or when there was such a dull market for aluminum that it simply wasn't practical to carry on making aluminum at that time. Outside of those exceptional circumstances, that's what this water was for, but this changed everything.

I want to speak for a second about exceptional circumstances, because when the B.C. Liberals brought in their energy policy, it was based on creating these exceptional circumstances. They said: "Let's close down Burrard Thermal. Let's take away that generating capacity."

Let's imagine for a moment that we have no snowpack, that there's no snow this year in British Columbia and that we have the driest of summers. It's so hot in British Columbia, and there's no rainfall for several months. Oh, and it's so very hot that we have to have huge amounts of electricity used for air conditioning. Under those circumstances we now want to make sure that we have self-sufficiency — those circumstances, one in 100 years, one in 50 years, who knows what.

They created an environment where it forced B.C. Hydro to go and seek far more power than they would ever need. Oh, and by the way, that power had to be generated by private interests, not for the public interest.

Here we are. Rio Tinto also took advantage of that. They realized: "Hey, listen. If this argument is working so well for the whole province, let's use that argument up here in Kitimat." And what they did was they said: "Well, traditionally we've always had this much firm power. But you know what? There was a year…. There in fact were two years, over the last 50, where we had a shortage of water in the reservoir, so let's go and argue now that the firm power is where there was a low-water mark."

They used that argument — the same argument the B.C. Liberals made around the province, a disingenuous argument — and in the end built the capacity of our new smelter, not recognizing that in fact there is a much larger amount of electricity that could have gone into aluminum production but that now never will. All that extra electricity, at times up to 380 megawatts, is sold back to British Columbians.

Don't forget, as I've said, that the water that generates that electricity is still in public hands. It's a public resource, even after the court case which we lost up there and which the district of Kitimat lost. The judge, Justice Brenner, ruled that the water was a public resource. However, once the electricity came out at the other end, it became the private property of Rio Tinto Alcan and their shareholders.

That water is still a public resource, and the water that generates all that electricity could have gone to better use had it been used in northwest B.C. to actually create a smelter the size of the kinds of smelters they have in Quebec. We could actually have created an increase in the aluminum industry instead of the decrease that we've seen over the last several years.

I can see my time is up. To wrap up, I just want to say that this was a disastrous piece of public policy. I'm glad that the B.C. Liberals are finally learning the errors of their ways and are putting this right. Hopefully, we can move forward, although many of us, not just the ratepayers of B.C. but all of us who live in the northwest, lost out in a big way.

Deputy Speaker: The member for Esquimalt–Royal Roads seeks leave.

M. Karagianis: Hon. Speaker, I seek leave to make an introduction.

Leave granted.

Introductions by Members

M. Karagianis: In the House we have a school group from Eagle View Elementary in my community. There are 30 grade 5s and six adults, including teachers and parents. They are visiting today, and I spoke with them just a few moments ago. They said: "While you're making laws" — a couple of them have requested — "can you make laws for mandatory three-day weekends?"

[1035]

There was a discussion on whether that would be on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday or on a Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Some of them thought Monday might be good, so I thought I'd put that before the House. I told them to also go and look at Hansard tomorrow, and they'll be able to see their classroom being introduced here, so please make them very welcome.

Debate Continued

M. Sather: I rise to address Bill 30, Energy and Mines Statutes Amendment Act, 2012. This bill is a kind of repentance on the road to Damascus scenario for the cur-
[ Page 11032 ]
rent government. I guess that it's kind of "Lord, give me self-sufficiency, but not just yet." You know that it's coming. It's all coming in good time. It's just not happening right now.

That has its pros and cons, as I hope to discuss in the next little while this morning. The self-sufficiency mandate came into being with the 2006 call for energy and the Clean Energy Act in 2010, the latter of which we really didn't get to debate. That might be unfortunate. I don't know whether the wisdom of the opposition might have turned the tide earlier, had we had that opportunity two years ago. It's all history now, and we are where we are.

The self-sufficiency mandate that the government came in with said that we must not be importing our electricity needs. Listeners may or may not know that we import electricity when we need to do so from Alberta or from the United States. The Liberals put the kibosh on that, or that was the intention. It meant that B.C. Hydro was charged with having to produce all of our electricity needs in B.C.

Now, that was a fairly tall order. We have our heritage power sources, as they're called — the hydroelectric dams that had their own effect on the footprint of British Columbia but that have certainly served us well in terms of providing power to the citizens at pretty reasonable rates. That's all changing.

The upshot of that was that B.C. Hydro is required to plan to have enough electricity every year by planning as though every year were a low-water year. As we depend primarily on reservoirs — and now more and more on run-of-river projects — the amount of power that we can produce depends on the amount of water that we get vis-à-vis the snowmelt and the rain in that year. You can have a year with quite low water levels, or you can have high or somewhere in between. Of course, if we have a low year, we need more capacity to produce the same amount of electricity as we can produce in a higher-than-average water year.

That's sort of the second part, then. The mandate was how to obtain that power, and it resulted in a plethora of largely unregulated run-of-the-river projects to fulfil the low-water requirement. It's really unfortunate, I think. If I have time, I'll get around to talking about this a bit more from another angle.

[1040]

It's really unfortunate that the run-of-the-river projects were brought in the way they were — suddenly, with great surprise to British Columbians and with no sense of planning, no land use–type plan whereby residents, British Columbians, could have input and could better understand the projects, could evaluate the projects, could hopefully have some input into which projects would be good or acceptable in terms of their environmental footprint and which ones just weren't going to cut it. That became a very contentious issue, and still is. The last speaker referred to some of that.

The run-of-river projects were delivered — long-term contracts through B.C. Hydro — at increasingly high prices. No doubt, I'm not an authority in this area, but I expect it does cost more to produce power via a run of river than it does by a large hydroelectric dam. In any event there's quite a bit of speculation involved and risk-taking and a reasonable or fairly high expenditure rate, as we've seen.

The problem became that the long-term contracts B.C. Hydro signed — the power purchase agreements with the run-of-river projects — were for premium prices, you would have to say — in today's market, certainly. We were paying, through B.C. Hydro, upward of $124 per megawatt hour for the power. We now are selling a lot of that power for around $40 per megawatt hour. One can readily see the developing problem vis-à-vis the financial aspects and the likely result on taxpayers, on ratepayers.

I'm not sure whether the government would have made the changes they're making through Bill 30 had there not been some energy developments outside of electricity, but in any event, it's happening.

If we look at the power, the net loss — the annual net cost of this power to us…. This year it's $196 million; next year, $236 million; in 2014, $361 million; and in 2015 it's estimated to be $489 million. The total estimated cost over that four-year period alone is some $1.28 billion above what we otherwise would have had to pay.

It's certainly putting us in a financial bind that, I think, has contributed to our huge off-book debt — the contractual obligations. They shot up billions — I think around some $30 billion in a year — as a result of these contracts. Of course, there were a lot of other projects. It wasn't all run-of-river.

In any event, it's put us in quite a bind in terms of our finances. We're now over $100 billion in these contractual obligations, and it's all money that has to be paid back. You know, Madam Speaker — I'm sure you do — that there is no free lunch, that whether you pay it out of your taxpayer pocket or you pay it out of your user-pay pocket, it's a cost. They all have to be made up.

It's putting a fair bit of constraint, to put it mildly, on the future — not only future governments but the citizens in this province born and living on the planet now and those yet to be born.

About all of that sort of bind vis-à-vis energy the minister said that we probably swung at a bad pitch, was the way he put it. I think our critic agrees with that wholeheartedly, and he had various renditions of that metaphor. But the fact of the matter is that it has put us in a difficult position financially.

[1045]

Somebody has got to pick up the slack — right? We're buying high and selling low, turning on its ear what prudent investors try to do — buy low and sell high. But since we are doing the opposite, it's putting us into a bind.

Of course, the residents, the taxpayers, of British
[ Page 11033 ]
Columbia will have to pick up the tab. They'll do that in the form of higher hydro rates, which they've experienced fairly significantly already — a 36 percent increase in hydro rates over the last three years, 7 percent more this year and 7 percent more next year. That's if we have the good fortune to not have our rates go up even further as a result of the smart meter program.

A lot of news is coming out that people are being billed outrageous amounts. Although Hydro has tried mightily to say that the smart meters are all working perfectly — "There hasn't been a single one," although I think they've gotten down off of that high horse a little bit — taxpayers have reason to be concerned. If you look at other jurisdictions, the self-sufficiency — although I like the idea of it in some respects, and I want to talk about that more later — the way it's panned out is costing us so much money. And we may be billed soon, and some of us already are, for additional costs through the smart meter program.

I remember, I'd have to say, that the Liberals were very gung-ho, back in the day when this all came in, about doing things like cutting out coal-burning power generation, which we didn't have much of in British Columbia. Nonetheless, coal is the dirtiest of the greenhouse gases, although methane is not as plentiful but is more detrimental on a unit-by-unit basis, if you will.

Of course, we were not to import from Alberta, where they burn coal to produce power. Now I don't know where we're at exactly, and I guess we can ask some of those questions in the committee stage — where we are at with burning coal for power generation. Probably not, I'm thinking.

What will we do, for example, with Burrard Thermal, which is natural gas but still has an effect? We weren't going to be using that, either, to make up for shortages. Maybe that's being changed too. I'm not too sure about that. Of course, we're still shipping a lot of that coal overseas to China, and so on, and a whole lot more. That will continue to have an effect on the atmosphere and on our climate there.

Why has the government now chosen this time to backtrack from the self-sufficiency, the requirement that we must be able to provide every year for a low-water year, to now being the average-water year, which takes some of the pressure off us in terms of producing power? The thing on the books now that's coming is the three liquid natural gas plants on the coast. Those facilities will require significant amounts of power, and we aren't going to be able to, as I understand it, with our current sources of power and in the near-term future for any additional power, service those needs.

Thus, we're changing. The government is changing the plan, is switching channels. Those plants, by the way, will be the largest point sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the province.

[1050]

This is all about the shale gas that has blossomed, the production of shale gas not only in British Columbia but in other jurisdictions. There's far more coming out of the northern part of our province and from Alberta to meet our needs. There's excess there, so there's lots of room for export.

The U.S. economy is not only not fully recovered from the recession, but they have a whole lot of this fracked gas, if you will, of their own. The price of our shale gas, consequently, in that market is not very good. A lot of the gas is going to be destined for China, where we apparently are going to receive what they call the Asian premium, a higher price for our shale gas than we can get in the United States currently. This is going to be a temporary fix, because China has the largest shale gas deposits in the world themselves — largely undeveloped at this point, but they're working on it.

They're investing in shale gas development companies here in British Columbia. Not only, presumably, is that a good business venture for them, but I'm sure they're going to get up to speed much quicker on the technology that's required to extract this gas, so how long we will be getting the so-called Asian premium for this gas is open to question.

How many LNG plants we'll be able to put up and how they are going to be powered…. I understand one will be by natural gas. The government has talked about clean energy. They're going to look at clean energy in order to power those plants. Where that goes, again, whether we're going to see another big push for run of river…. If so, I can only hope that the government is not going to continue to make the same mistakes that they've been making so far, and that's to not have a proper process for those projects.

In my constituency — it's my constituency now; at the time it actually was in the Coquitlam constituency — we had the Upper Pitt run-of-river project a few years ago. It was simply one that shouldn't have ever happened. I don't know. They still may be wanting to do it. It was very negative for salmon, and that's the thing. We have to protect our wild salmon resources, and this project was going to do anything but.

Fortunately, there was a great deal of opposition to it. A thousand individuals turned up at the Pitt Meadows Arena, and consequently the Environment Minister of the day, Barry Penner, made the decision not to allow the transmission line from that wannabe project to go through Pinecone Burke Provincial Park. Thus it fell by the wayside, but you never know whether these things are gone for good or just fallen by the wayside for now.

As I say, the problem, a lot of it, has been in the process around the approvals for these projects, so I'm hoping that the government has made a turn here. It has its pros, and it actually has some cons as well, but maybe they will make some changes in the way the approval process, particularly for run of river, takes place.

Now, the Premier said she doesn't want to be the one
[ Page 11034 ]
to turn her back on the environment, but she's challenged by these energy issues and job needs.

[1055]

I have to say that it doesn't seem like she's having any problem with turning her back on the environment when you look at the environmental assessment process — the willingness, clearly, to collaborate with the federal government to reduce protections of the environment through environmental assessment.

When you look at wild salmon policy, this government has shown blatant disregard for wild salmon in the way that they have approached the Cohen Commission. When you look at development of our best agricultural lands for ports, the government has yet to stand up in this House and say that they do not support that. They have yet to affirm the environmental and, of course, agricultural values of that land.

All these things make me believe that the Premier doesn't seem to be having any problem turning her back on the environment. Maybe she's thinking it over. With this one, there are some consequences, for sure.

The conservation mandate, the greenhouse gas reduction mandate — those seem to have gone out the window with this bill. What loses out in this discussion is human-induced global warming and climate change.

As much and in as many ways that I disagreed with Gordon Campbell, I have to say he did make an effort to address this issue of all issues throughout the world and in this province. It's a tough issue. It's a difficult issue. There are no easy answers, no comfortable ways to deal with climate change. Burning natural gas is better than burning coal — that's for sure — but what are we really doing to address the issue?

It seems like we're in this parallel universe of either denial or complacency. Of course, virtually all the science says that there is no reason in the world for us to be complacent about fighting climate change. We need to be putting in all our resources. We need to be working together to do this. We can't afford to let partisanship stop us from doing what has to be done.

Unfortunately, some corporate interests have been very successful in, if not changing the channel on climate change, at least causing a whole lot of static on the channel.

This bill, Bill 30, is about energy. It's about the environment, but it's also all about climate change. It really is. These are all factors relating to climate change.

I think that it behooves us to understand the basics and to be educated and aware enough of what the reality is and not what the spin is. The reality is that within the scientific community, there isn't any debate about whether climate change is happening. Some people have tried to make out that there's a debate, but there is no debate.

The gold standard in science is that you have to take your work before your peers, and you have to be able to convince them that your work has merit. They don't have to agree with everything you say, but you have to convince your peers that your work has merit. Then it gets to be published in a reputable journal.

[1100]

That virtually does not happen on the climate denying side, because you can't deny the science, and nobody is able to do it. There are lots of people out there. Some of them….

Interjection.

M. Sather: I don't know what the member opposite said, but perhaps he can inform me later.

There are lots of folks out there, as I said — many of them industry-funded, think tank–oriented — who are trying to make the case that — you know what? — there's a debate out there. We really don't know.

Well, that isn't true. I have to say that where we started with Bill 30, where we started with the greenhouse gas reduction bills that were brought into this House…. Certainly, it appears that with the run-of-river projects that have happened, there's at least a parallel intent to help some friends and insiders out.

[L. Reid in the chair.]

Having said that, I have to believe that there was an intent to deal with the problem. What this bill does is forget about the problem. Now, we do that at our peril. Yes, as I started saying earlier, there are no easy answers. It's not going to be possible to stop using greenhouse gases anytime soon. But where is the intent? Where is the effort anymore to actually try to do that — you know, little things, and maybe not so little?

A friend of mine says: "What we should be doing is run of the roof." Why don't we have solar panels on all our roofs? Why don't we actually have emission standards to require vehicles to be more energy-efficient? There are so many things, large and small, that we could be doing, and this bill is not doing that. It's going back to saying: "Oh well, what the heck. We've got natural gas in the ground. We've got bitumen coming from Alberta, and pedal to the metal."

If we were going down the right road…. I actually think Gordon Campbell started us down the right road, but we've gone way off track. We're not going down that road anymore. If we were at least started down that road, I could feel some confidence.

I'm glad that the government has recognized the financial spot that Bill 30 put us in — Bill 17, 2010, sorry. That's real, too, because that's dollars and cents for taxpayers, and that hurts. It's like throwing out the baby with the bathwater — not a good plan. Save the baby.

I hope that members will bring themselves up to speed on that subject of climate change, because as I say, the denial side have not presented any science. What they've
[ Page 11035 ]
done is tried to say, and done a good job of it: "Well, it's not decided. You know, there is some disagreement, all this and that."

Interjection.

M. Sather: The science on both sides, the member says. Well, in fact, there is not, but he's entitled to his opinion. There's actually not.

I recommend a book to the member and to everyone. It is called Climate Cover-up — written by a Vancouver author, actually. It very clearly lays out that it's not about the science; it's about the spin.

[1105]

A lot of the spin is paid for by Exxon. They've got a vested interest in making sure that we keep the pedal to the metal with greenhouse gases. It's a shame. So Bill 30 — I have mixed feelings about it. I am glad that we're looking at the real costs. That's significant.

G. Coons: I request leave to make an introduction, please.

Leave granted.

Introductions by Members

G. Coons: There are a couple of constituents of my colleague from Powell River–Sunshine Coast in the precinct today, from school district 46: Silas White, Betty Baxter, Patrick Booking and Nick Weswick. Please make them welcome.

Debate Continued

V. Huntington: I would enjoy the opportunity to speak briefly to this bill. The bill is troublesome from a number of perspectives. As usual, it is introducing tools that will enable industry to operate in a more efficient manner from their perspective. But as usual, it forgets its obligation — the government's obligation — to consider the impacts of the way in which the industry operates on the public in the area and on the land in the area, especially in the north.

Right now we're seeing situations where the citizens in the north have to fight to get hearings and to receive understandings of what the impacts of the oil and gas industry are having on their land. They have no right to require or request that pipeline corridors, for instance, or resource roads or even well sites operate or are placed in an area that would enable their family to enjoy the type and quality of life that they should be able to continue to enjoy. At every turn, every turn, the industry is foremost and has the law operating so that it can operate in the way it considers most efficient.

What the people need up there — we often joked as the member for Cariboo North and I were visiting the area — is an Erin Brockovich. That's how bad it is for many of the individuals who are impacted by an industry that everybody in this House knows is vital to the security of this province and to the economy of this province. But as usual, it has been given almost carte blanche to develop with very little consideration for the ongoing cumulative impacts on both the public and the private land owner in the area and on the land.

What we have there is a one-window institution which is considered by the professionals in the Oil and Gas Commission to be one of the finest regulatory bodies in the industry. It may well be. But yet again, we see a complete lack of understanding of what the industry and its future is going to create in that area of the Peace.

There are no cumulative impact assessments being undertaken. The forest cut permits do not have to abide by the normal regulations within our Forest Practices Act. They are issued under the Oil and Gas Commission. The pipeline corridors permits are issued under the Oil and Gas Commission. The resource roads permits are issued under the Oil and Gas Commission.

There are no requirements for looking at the long-term expectations of the companies and what their plans are for any specific area, or trying to coordinate these corridors and resource roads into minimal impacts where you can send varying pipelines down a single corridor, where you can expect a resource road to service in the most efficient manner numerous types of operations.

[1110]

Until the Oil and Gas Commission understands that it has…. I'll step back a bit. Until this province, this government understands that it must have a policy directive given to the Oil and Gas Commission, whereby it must consider those cumulative impacts on the land in the area, then nothing is going to happen. It is a policy issue, first and foremost, one that needs leadership from this government, and one then in which the Oil and Gas Commission could start to consider and work with the oil and gas companies in order to refine how they use the land in that area.

The confidentiality provisions demanded of the individuals who are impacted by these pipelines and roads and drilling pads don't enable the public to talk about what the problems really were. The public itself can't enjoy understanding what the values are that are being offered to the different farmers for their land. They have to go outside the confidentiality agreements. They have to reach to a farmers' advocacy group.

There is nothing there that allows the citizens that are being impacted to coordinate, learn, understand and be treated fairly — nothing. It's time that this government insisted that the Oil and Gas Commission set up an arm's-length institution that has the power to represent the individuals of that region.

Case-by-case approvals of the permits are, again, part
[ Page 11036 ]
of the cumulative impact assessment problem. How many wells are going to be drilled over the next ten, 15, 20 years? There are going to be thousands of them. If you add the impacts of each of those wells and the roads and the pipeline corridors and the waste disposal facilities that are going to be needed to operate these wells, then you start to understand that we may end up with a land made useless by a criss-cross of roads, by an absolute removal of forest cover.

You've got the edge of the boreal forest under attack right now, and we have absolutely no information on what this is going to look like five years, ten years, 20 years out, because they do not sit down with the oil and gas companies and plan out the projected development of the area.

It is a travesty. It is something that needs to be developed between this government and the Oil and Gas Commission. It cannot do its job appropriately without an effective direction from this government. I see absolutely no willingness, as usual, for the government to look at the quality-of-life issues that cumulative impact assessments deal with.

So it's very disturbing to see amendments to the act, yet again, dealing only with tools that benefit the companies and not the absolutely necessary tools that can benefit the land and the people, so that the industry that's so vital to this province can move forward in a way that is planned, understood and controlled. Right now that is not the case. We have professionals capable of doing that, but they need the policy direction from this government in which to engage in that process.

There is one other issue I would like to have seen in this act. I would like to have seen a provision in the Oil and Gas Commission whereby you would be separating the enforcement capacity of that commission from the commission itself. The enforcement arm is far too closely connected to the permitting arm. It needs a full arm's-length separation, practically a different body in itself. It needs to be an operation that the people of the area absolutely trust.

[1115]

Right now it is not trusted. Right now there are questions around whether it is doing its job effectively. In many, many instances, it is. In others, it is not. In order for it to be trusted by the individuals up in that area that are being so heavily impacted, we need to look at a complete divorce of the enforcement section of the Oil and Gas Commission.

With those comments, I'll sit down. We'll have much more to say on some of these issues as the next few weeks come ahead. I believe the member for Cariboo North will also be speaking to some of these issues.

B. Simpson: I thank the member for Delta South for her comments. The member for Delta South and I had the opportunity to spend a week up in the Peace River region, where some of this act will more directly pertain. It was a very enlightening experience, to say the least. I was exhausted at the end of it, from not only what I saw and what we heard but also just the wide range and array of public policy issues that we had to contemplate and we heard about.

I think both the member for Delta South and myself are still processing what we learned up there, and we'll have something to say, as the member mentioned, about what we learned, in the coming weeks.

The bill before us, Bill 30, like the forest and range act amendments that we had, is a bill full of amendments. Again, this bill, particularly towards the end, has multiple sections with multiple amendments that only in committee stage — the next stage after this, where we go clause by clause — will we fully understand the implications of this.

Opposition members, members of the NDP opposition have spoken primarily to the first part of this bill, which is the issue of changing the self-sufficiency requirements for B.C. Hydro. I've spoken with a number of the members who are declaring this a victory for the democratic process, for those who have fought hard against the independent power producers and what they do to our landscape, what they do to some of our rivers under the guise of this self-sufficiency mandate.

They've spoken to the politics of that — how, if you go back and look at Hansard and hear how strongly the position was taken by government members that this was a must-do.... It wasn't a nice-to-do; it was a must-do. It had to be done. Otherwise, the sky would fall. Now, of course, it is being withdrawn.

The implications for me…. I think the IPP debate will still be ongoing, because IPPs haven't disappeared as a result of this. The government is just simply changing one aspect of what was driving the move towards IPPs in a very expensive form of power force-fed to B.C. Hydro. But what it really calls into question for me is when the government will be revisiting its entire energy plan.

That's what really begs. The self-sufficiency was a core component of the government's overall energy plan, and now that that's been withdrawn, I do think that we need to look at what the government's intentions are with energy, overall. Where is the plan that has been adjusted as a result of this withdrawal? So self-sufficiency. Also, where is the plan with respect to the climate change agenda and where we're going to be purchasing power from and all the things that have been already pointed out?

In particular, related to the visit to the Peace region, is that plan should also more clearly outline the government's intentions around Site C. I do think that the move towards Site C will be another one of those that is revisited by government at some point, because the costs, potentially, of building that dam are escalating, as we know — most likely in the $10 billion range now.

The possibility of accruing benefits from the building of that, to British Columbians, is diminishing. We heard
[ Page 11037 ]
clearly when we were up in the Peace region that that dam is most likely going to be built by temporary immigrant workers who will be sending their paycheques home to wherever they come from and who will be camped out at the dam site — not going into Fort St. John so that Fort St. John gets the economic benefits from that as the cash flows around.

[1120]

So the build of that is a very, very pricey enterprise for British Columbians, but it also may be done in a way that a lot of that British Columbia tax money is going to other parts of the world and isn't directly benefiting us. Then the energy that comes from that, at the expense of agriculture, at the expense of heritage values, at the expense of recreational values along that portion of the Peace River, a river that has already been dammed to produce power for British Columbia…. That very expensive power may actually be going to facilitate an industry — the tar sands industry, in particular, or the oil and gas industry in the Horn River Basin — and may not actually be a direct benefit to British Columbians' households as it was originally sold.

That Site C has been sold multiple times by this government — for household, for self-sufficiency within British Columbia, for the population growth and the need for household demand. It's been sold for the Horn River Basin and the electrification of that area. It's now being sold as necessary to get into LNG in the Kitimat area.

British Columbians need a clear understanding of what the government's intentions are for that power from Site C, because if it's not for households, it's for subsidy to the Horn River Basin, to the tar sands or to LNG.

Not only will that be a very expensive capital project for British Columbians, it will be a very expensive project for households. Their subsidization of that industrial activity, to get into a market that gives a higher price for natural gas or a higher price for oil, means they're also going to be paying more for their hydro as a result, more for their natural gas as a result and more for their gasoline as a result of getting into those higher-priced markets.

British Columbians, I believe, deserve to know what the real intentions are for Site C, and to know this in the context of a larger, reconfigured energy plan, now that self-sufficiency has been taken off the table.

At this point, given the information I have, I do not believe Site C is defensible. I think the province ought to look at its energy plans through the lens of household self-sufficiency and community self-sufficiency.

If we can get more and more households in British Columbia producing energy for the grid, get more and more communities with community energy plants so that they're delivering more directly power and heat in their community, get more households and communities to stop drawing off the grid and get more and more throwing onto the grid, we may find in that strategy, for a billion dollars or two billion dollars in direct assistance to move down that path, we do not need Site C.

We may find that we may be able to divert more of our hydroelectric power to industry without going down that path. That's a business case I would like to see from the government.

Unfortunately, as we heard up in the Peace River region, the path we're on just now is that B.C. Hydro may only be consulting with themselves. B.C. Hydro is buying the land all along the river that they intend to dam. They're buying prime agricultural land. They're buying any land that can become available.

I was just informed, in the last day, that B.C. Hydro has actually purchased land at a very high price for some of the raw materials they need to build that dam. B.C. Hydro is being presumptive of building the dam. They are purchasing the land in advance of building the dam. As they go out and consult with landowners in that area, they may end up just consulting with themselves.

That's unfortunate for British Columbians, because we heard loud and clear — we were on one of the farms — that the bulk of their prime, class 1 agricultural land will be underwater. It's underproductive just now, because people don't want to invest in bringing that land into full productivity if it's all going to be underwater. They don't see that as a wise investment, so it's underproductive, which helps the case of Site C, but it is a longstanding farm that will be underwater. We heard, loud and clear, from many people who live along the valley that they do not want Site C to proceed.

Let's see the plan from government. Self-sufficiency has been taken off the table. Let's see a rethought plan. Let's see Site C positioned in the context of a new, updated B.C. energy plan and not the ad hoc process and the, quite frankly, political process that the former Premier embarked us on with his photo op up at the W.A.C. Bennett dam.

[1125]

The other part of this bill makes changes to the Oil and Gas Activities Act.

I'm conscious of time because I know there is one more speaker this morning. We're trying to close this bill off, so I will go through my comments on this relatively briefly. I'm getting the signal from the minister to just keep churning away.

Anyway, the Oil and Gas Activities Act has some interesting changes in it. It has some changes to road use, road use permits. It has some changes to the Oil and Gas Commission — in particular, around consultation and notification. It has some changes around pipelines and some changes around things like the master licence to cut, an issue I've raised in the House under a previous bill.

There are some interesting aspects to each of those that, when we get into committee stage, I will be curious about, because we learned a lot about all of these things when we were up in the Peace River region. But one thing I'll say, before I get into the substance of our learnings, is on
[ Page 11038 ]
the road use. This is another bill before the House that's making some changes to road use while the government has a comprehensive resource roads act in development.

We saw some changes to liability in a forestry bill that was put before us. We're now seeing changes to permitting in this Energy and Mines Statutes Amendment Act in front of us. It seems like the government is doing some of the resource road act by creep, and I'm not quite sure what the agenda is here and what's going on. I think there are a lot of people around the province just now, engaged in that process, that are also unclear why we're getting these incremental changes at the time that a more comprehensive process is underway.

And we just found recently that WorkSafe B.C. is now consulting on finally making a determination that resource roads are actually a workplace and would come under workplace safety rules. That has long been an issue in the province, particularly in forestry. Almost presumptive of what's happening with this consultation process on resource roads use, WorkSafe B.C. is acting unilaterally to move in that direction, and I heard lots of concerns at home about the implications of that.

I believe that is the course of action we need to take. I do believe that resource roads are a workplace. But moving in that direction has significant implications for all of the resource road users, and it ought not to be done lightly.

In terms of what this bill doesn't do in all of the things that it does — as I said, it talks about roads; it talks about the Oil and Gas Commission, pipelines and master licence to cut — I want to spend a few minutes just talking about some of the higher-level lessons that we learned when we were up in the Peace. I want to thank the MLA for Peace River North for hosting us for part of that trip. I think the MLA was sort of taking us at our word, because, Madam Speaker, as you are aware, we have challenged the government.

The questions are on the order paper. We have put a challenge to government: not to put a moratorium on hydraulic fracking, not to cease activity in the Peace Region….

That's what other jurisdictions are doing. I'm not sure if members are aware: Vermont is now very close. One more vote, and then they will outright ban hydraulic fracking in Vermont. Virginia is contemplating the same thing; Michigan, contemplating the same thing. A court ruling in New York upheld the ban of fracking in rural communities. New Brunswick is looking at extending its moratorium in an outright ban. And of course, Quebec continues to have a ban on fracking until it investigates it further.

All the member for Delta South and I are asking is for the government of British Columbia to look into this more closely to make sure that, from these other jurisdictions and the lessons there learned, we learn those lessons here. The response we get, of course, is that we're the best-regulated, legislated jurisdiction, that we have a world-class entity in the Oil and Gas Commission and that everything's okay, thank you very much, up in the Peace.

That's why the member for Delta South and I went up to the Peace — to see firsthand, on the ground, what is actually happening — because we were hearing very different stories from the people who live there, who actually live where hydraulic fracking is occurring, who live where gas and oil is being extracted, produced, sent down pipelines and, in some cases, processed.

On the first day that we were up there, we spent a full nine hours with the Oil and Gas Commission. It was a very exhausting, very extensive conversation with the Oil and Gas Commission. And my thanks to all of the people in the Oil and Gas Commission who spent that time with us.

[1130]

We worked right through lunch. We got presentations for everything from how the Oil and Gas Commission operates to how they do their compliance and enforcement. We got a technical presentation on hydraulic fracking. We got to talk to them about one of the primary concerns that is expressed to us, and that's the amount of water that is used.

I stated clearly up in the Peace River region — and I'll state it again today — that the Gasland video that's going around shows lighting water taps on fire, all of that stuff…. That's not the debate we need to have in British Columbia. We do deep fracking in British Columbia. Our debate, as the member for Delta South couched it, is more a cumulative impacts debate.

What are we doing to the land base? What are we doing to air quality? What are we doing in terms of greenhouse gas emissions? In particular, because it is very deep shale beds that we're going into — sometimes two or 2½ kilometres deep — a massive amount of fresh water is used to do that. Fresh water that has toxins added to it becomes a toxic soup mixed with sand and toxins, which then has to be disposed of.

We canvassed all of that with the Oil and Gas Commission, and it was a very interesting and exhausting day. The next day we spent the morning in the B.C. Hydro community consultation office with the member for Peace River North and some of the staff from B.C. Hydro there to get a sense of where the B.C. Hydro Site C dam was situated and where the floodplain was. But the minute we got on the ground, we understood — and I'm putting words in the mouth of the member for Delta South…. I think we had enough conversations there to be able to get licence to do that.

We understood that something wasn't right. It doesn't take long. The minute we got on the ground, we understood that there were public policy gaps that desperately needed to be addressed so that we do not end up in the situation that other jurisdictions are, where people begin to say no to this activity outright. That's our intention.
[ Page 11039 ]

That's what we would like to see happen — thoughtful public policy debate leading to thoughtful, meaningful changes to the regime we have so that health and safety is in fact protected, so that planning is in fact done, so that cumulative impacts are in fact understood and managed for, and so that British Columbia does in fact maximize the benefit it gets from this unsustainable, limited resource.

We have a very narrow window to extract this resource. We better make sure we do it right. We better make sure that if we're going down this path and going to enable this, then we get the maximum return to British Columbians from it.

So what did we find out? Well, we visited Farmington, a small community just north of Dawson Creek. In Farmington, as we went around there, what we were told about and what we saw ourselves was the industrialization of a farming community — one of many in that region. We stood at one site where someone invested in a house, probably in the order of $400,000 or $500,000, that had a beautiful viewscape all around it when the house was built last summer and completed last August.

In a short six- to eight-week period that individual now looks at three fracking sites, three permanent wellheads in their viewscape — one out their living room, one out their kitchen and one out their bedroom window. Those sites are all very close to each other, and they have criss-crossing pipelines.

It has dramatically increased industrial traffic on the road. We experienced it. In fact, the member for Delta South almost got run over by one person that was booting down the road. As we were standing and just simply looking at one of these sites, this person was on their phone, not paying attention, and was flying down that road in a rural farming community, going at highway speeds on a dirt road that wasn't built for that. The truck traffic, the pickup traffic, was phenomenal.

What we saw there was unplanned development, and the Oil and Gas Commission has no planning function. So this is not a blame of the Oil and Gas Commission. The Oil and Gas Commission simply doesn't have a planning function.

What we believe needs to happen, from our trip up there, is that there needs to be a community-level planning function added to the development of oil and gas up there so that pipelines do go — and this bill speaks to pipelines — in as narrow a corridor as they can where possible, that there is planned development of the road infrastructure and use of the road infrastructure, and that there's a collegial approach between the residents and the companies.

[1135]

We heard companies tell us that they understand that in order to keep their social licence, that planning function has to be put in place.

We also heard loud and clear that the concerns around water are escalating. They are not diminishing. The two pipelines out of the Williston reservoir have escalated those concerns, and that needs to be addressed. Again, no cumulative impact assessment has been done.

The Oil and Gas Commission is moving in the direction of giving better reports, better searchable reports on water, but again, they do not have a mandate to manage water from a cumulative impact perspective. That rests with the Ministry of Environment, and they are not doing that up in that Peace region.

Greenhouse gas emissions. The Oil and Gas Commission could not tell us what the greenhouse gas emissions were from the expansion of oil and gas. Independent authorities say that alone will negate any chance that this government will achieve its 2020 and 2050 targets — just the expansion of oil and gas alone and the greenhouse gas emissions coming from that.

Then this bill speaks to master licence to cut. Certainly, one of the concerns I have up there is that we issue this master licence to cut licence, and we really don't have a sense of what's happening and the fragmentation of that land base. Some changes have been made that are benefiting the land base in how they put seismic lines, etc., out there. But again, there isn't that cumulative aspect to it.

So there's no planning function, no cumulative impact function, and quite frankly, there is no true consultation process. This bill speaks to changes in consultation and notification. I'll be curious to canvass the minister on those changes in the next stage of this bill. What the Oil and Gas Commission has is a notification process, not a consultation process.

Just a couple more points here. The member for Delta South spoke to it: compliance and enforcement.

We were told, not just by people on the ground, that compliance and enforcement must be separated from the Oil and Gas Commission. We were told that by companies up there. Good companies operating above the minimum regulations have indicated that unless we get more compliance and enforcement, more stringent compliance and enforcement, then the whole industry will come down to rock bottom and, in some cases, below the regulatory framework.

We were at one disposal site where it was clear and evident that their economics are pricier than other disposal sites because they operate above the regulations. They said to us, on a number of occasions: "We know customers out there have cheaper options to go to, but we want to make sure we're doing what we need to do to work above the regulations." That's a call for a stronger regulatory framework, but it's also a call for stronger compliance and enforcement.

I do believe that the Oil and Gas Commission is too close to the industry to do compliance and enforcement. It ought to be separated, and it ought to be a separate arm, possibly even under FLNRO.

Then one of the statements said up there all the time is:
[ Page 11040 ]
"But this pays for health care and education." This pays for health care and education: that's a mantra that we get from government. What we heard up there…. The joke was: "Yes, it pays for health care and education, in Alberta." Fully 60 percent of the workers, the contractors and the trucks that are licenced with their insurance plates on there, all of that, is accruing to Alberta.

Alberta workers who live in Alberta pay income tax in Alberta. The contractors buy their supplies in Alberta. So we are not maximizing the economic flow to British Columbia from there. As we move into more and more temporary foreign workers filling vacancies there, then that will only get exacerbated.

Again, we need a plan to make sure that we are maximizing the returns to British Columbians, and it isn't moving some income assistance recipients up to the Peace. That's not a plan.

Finally, I again want to reiterate that the member for Delta South and myself are not calling for a moratorium. We're not calling for a cease and desist. What we are calling for is a thoughtful reappraisal of what we're doing up there. This is the perfect time to do that because that is British Columbians' resource. We ought to have that resource for as long as we can. We ought to bring it into the marketplace in a reasonable way that maximizes benefits to British Columbians.

[1140]

As the price of natural gas comes down — they're telling me up there $1.50 this summer — there isn't really a reason to continue, and I think we're going to see a collapse in the activity up there.

There isn't a reason to continue to subsidize that, make the activity happen. We should take a pause. We should take a break, and we should take this window to simply do a more thoughtful appraisal and address some of the issues that were addressed to us by the people who live in that region.

M. Mungall: Well, when I first saw this bill come up and its changes to the Clean Energy Act and the concept of self-sufficiency when it comes to our hydroelectric energy here in British Columbia, I wanted to make sure that the good people of Nelson-Creston got to have their say on this topic. This is a day where I have to say that people in my constituency feel quite vindicated for everything that we said in 2009 about the private power projects and how wrong they were for British Columbia in terms of our economy, the financial aspect of these deals and the environmental component of these deals.

We said that they were wrong, and now the government is admitting that we in the Kootenays were in fact right. The minister used this to characterize their change of tune on this issue — that they swung with a bad pitch.

I think it was our excellent and knowledgable critic, the MLA for Juan de Fuca, who pointed out that this indeed was a swing and a miss — a swing and a miss. Exactly what this story highlights is that this government again goes up to bat and swings for its corporate buddies and realizes that it misses because the people got in the way. That's the story of what happened in Nelson-Creston, actually.

That was just three years ago, actually, almost to the day. It was around this time in the spring that we were in an election, and people were outraged, absolutely outraged, that it could happen that a multinational corporation housed in eastern Canada could swing into our region, propose to build dams on creeks — one of which is home to blue-listed bull trout, which is genetically unique to that creek because of the Duncan dam — divert the water into 16 kilometres of tunnel and generate private electricity, private power.

We as the ratepayers would be paying above market value for that private power so that B.C. Hydro could turn around and sell it at a loss. It made no sense now, and we are relieved in the Kootenays to find out that the Liberals realized that we were right.

It's interesting, though. When I say the word "vindication" — and some members across the way scoffed at that — I use it very intentionally. At that time three years ago the Liberal candidate and, in this Legislature, Liberal member after Liberal member after Liberal member got up and insisted that self-sufficiency and their definition of it was the very best thing and that it was desperately needed to be done in this province. It was the very best thing that we could do for B.C.

We've heard several other examples which were apparently the very best thing to do for B.C. Might I highlight the HST? And we've seen where that went. Well, this is another example of the very best thing for B.C., according to the B.C. Liberals, and then having to backtrack on that because they realized that it wasn't the very best thing and that the people, the public, were actually the ones who were right.

[1145]

They were so confident at that time and a year later that it was the very best thing for British Columbia that they passed the Clean Energy Act after shutting down debate. They passed it via closure. They shut down debate. They shut down the opposition's opportunity to go clause by clause and have an analysis of the entire bill, to ask these types of questions. Why are we going this route of self-sufficiency? Why are we doing this? Is this really what we need?

The member for Juan de Fuca pointed out all the technical points that needed to be made with that process and that weren't because the Liberals invoked closure. It shut down debate, and the bill was passed. They were so confident that this was the best thing for B.C. Now we see them backtracking on that.

I would like to take a few more minutes and just tell the story a little bit about Glacier-Howser and what that meant for my area. The other day I spoke about it just for
[ Page 11041 ]
a moment, on the smart meter project motion that we had, highlighting how people at the north end of my constituency…. Not only are they now dealing with smart meters, but they had dealt with another issue around B.C. Hydro that left them displeased three years ago. That was Glacier-Howser.

The response I got afterwards from some of the Liberal members was: "Oh, you don't need to talk about that anymore. You're just playing politics." I think what that Liberal member did not seem to understand was that for people in my area, this was a galvanizing issue. This was an important issue. This cut to the core of who we are and what we believe when it comes to our natural resources.

What it was, for Glacier-Howser, was that…. I already mentioned that these are incredible parts of the Kootenays. There's this one spot on the way up to Glacier Creek, where the proposed dam was going to be. It really is, I think, one of the pinpointed areas that is the best place in the world.

Those who have had the journey up this road know exactly where it is. You come around a bend. There's a sharp cliff down, and you can see the entire valley and all this natural beauty. It's not a protected area. There are no cutblocks. It's just beautiful valley, slopes covered in trees and with this incredible, pristine Glacier Creek running down it. That's why it's called Glacier Creek, because it's glacier-fed. The water is crisp, and it is beautiful.

If you are there in the spring, the flowers are starting to poke out. It's just absolutely phenomenal, and it takes your breath away. Behind you is the glacier that feeds that creek. It's incredible.

So when it was proposed that the water in that valley bottom was no longer going to be flowing because it was being diverted, that devastated our sense of what we want to do with our region and how we want to develop it for economic benefit for the entire region, not just some shareholders, looking to make a profit, who live somewhere else in the world.

People started to talk more about how these private power projects were going to be working, how it was a scheme of buying high from people — who, by the way, at that time had donated over $800,000 to the B.C. Liberal Party — and selling low and how we as ratepayers were going to have to pick up the slack on that.

We started talking about it. We started having community meetings, whether it was in the Balfour Hall or Meadow Creek hall or in the basement of the Nelson library. We started having these community meetings, and we started to talk more. We started to get more informed. One thing that you can be rest assured of when you go to talk to people in the Kootenays is that we are all hydroelectric geeks. We love talking about hydroelectricity.

[1150]

Between my house and the member for Kootenay West's house, which is a 30-minute drive, there are ten major dams — ten major dams. This is something that we live and breathe every single day.

We started to learn more about what these smaller projects were going to look like and whether or not they were good for our environment and for us as the public. After we started to learn more, we came to the conclusion that this was something we didn't want.

We had 45 days in the environmental assessment process to actually say that to government — only 45 days — and we accomplished the impossible — over 1,000 letters into the environmental assessment office to tell government that we did not want that project in our region.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Hon. Speaker, 1,300 people attended the meeting in Kaslo, another 200 in Meadow Creek and another 300 in Invermere. When the government refused to have a meeting in Nelson, which is the hub of the West Kootenays, I held one, and 500 people attended that meeting. Our voices were heard, and we stopped that project. Now to come to Bill 30, we find that we did the very right thing. We appreciate that the Liberals have finally recognized that we the people knew what was best for our region.

With that, I'd like to close debate. I'm not too sure of the appropriate words to do that, but we'd like to close debate on second reading of Bill 30.

Mr. Speaker: Are you adjourning debate, or are you finished speaking?

M. Mungall: I'm finished speaking.

Mr. Speaker: Seeing no further speakers, the Minister of Energy and Mines closes debate.

Hon. R. Coleman: Given the comments of those members, I have a litany of things I want to remind them of in Hansard and quotes and issues with regards to IPPs and First Nations and smart meters and the history of energy in North America. I think what I'll do is reserve my position and adjourn debate until after lunch.

Hon. R. Coleman moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Committee of Supply (Section A), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.

Hon. M. Polak moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 1:30 this afternoon.
[ Page 11042 ]

The House adjourned at 11:53 a.m.

PROCEEDINGS IN THE
DOUGLAS FIR ROOM

Committee of Supply

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF
CHILDREN AND FAMILY DEVELOPMENT

(continued)

The House in Committee of Supply (Section A); J. McIntyre in the chair.

The committee met at 10:08 a.m.

On Vote 16: ministry operations, $1,333,291,000 (continued).

The Chair: Good morning, everyone. We're in the process of reviewing the estimates for the Ministry of Children and Family Development.

M. Elmore: Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to pose some questions on the area of child care. I'd like to start off with…. If the minister could provide a listing of the line items for the program in terms of the budget allocation — including, for example, child care, operating fund, the amount for subsidies, minor and major capital grants — just to get clear on those numbers.

[1010]

Hon. M. McNeil: The Ministry of Children and Family Development budget allocation for child care in 2012-13 is $295.9 million. It is expected that the funding will be allocated in the following ways: $142.1 million for a child care subsidy program, $74.2 million for the child care operating funding program, $700,000 for the child care minor capital program, $9.7 million for the child care resource and referral program, $57.3 million for the supported child development program and $11.9 million for child care administration.

M. Elmore: Thanks to the minister. And can you tell me what the amount is from the federal government — the federal transfers to the provincial budget?

Hon. M. McNeil: As part of the social transfer from the federal government, it's $81 million.

M. Elmore: Can the minister just give an update in terms of the minor capital grants? It had been suspended previously, and a number of concerns, I heard, were registered in terms of the difficulties and challenges of many child care operators, in terms of upgrading their facilities and meeting the inspection requirements. It's a very important component of being able to maintain their facilities in a high-quality manner.

Can I just hear, in terms of the commitment to the minor capital grants…? Also, going forward into the future, will this be a consistent program that will be maintained?

[1015]

Hon. M. McNeil: In the child care minor capital funding program, for the '11-12 year, we had 104 applications totalling around $200,000. Applications were approved, supporting more than 3,600 child care spaces. That was for '11-12. As I read previously, we have $700,000 in the 2012-13 budget, and it's anticipated that that will remain. That will continue for the next couple of years.

M. Elmore: Thanks for the response. Just to clarify, to make it clear to me…. In terms of the impact on the minor capital grant program, it had been previously cut from 2009, from the amount of $5,000 to $2,000 per application. My understanding — and I remain to be corrected — is that now the annual allocation for minor capital grants is $700,000, and I understand that that is a cut as well from the previous level. I believe it was $1.1 million a year. Just to clarify that.

Hon. M. McNeil: We currently have what the actual spend was, not what the budget is. I will have to get those numbers for the member, and I agree to do so as soon as I can.

M. Elmore: Thanks. I look forward to receiving those numbers and the confirmation. It looks like the minor capital grants have been further cut back, but I'll wait for the results to confirm that.

I've certainly heard, and I know the minister has heard, of the need for child care spaces across the province and families needing to have high-quality and affordable spaces to feel secure to leave their children in those spaces and have the opportunity to go to work. I was wondering if there are plans in child care for the expansion of new spaces, and the allocation under major capital grants.

[1020]

Hon. M. McNeil: Child care spaces expansion is demand-driven, which means licenced operators actually come forward to the ministry, and then we provide funding under the child care operating funding — CCOF. There is no ceiling in that program. If a licenced operator comes forward, it is demand-driven and the money is given.

You asked about the number of organizations, and I have some numbers here. The number of organizations in '08-09 was 3,940. In '11-12 it was 4,028. Total number
[ Page 11043 ]
of facilities in '08-09 was 4,886, and it rose to 5,054 in '11-12. The total number of funded spaces in '08-09 was 92,729. In '11-12 it rose to 102,616.

In answer to the other question, at this time there is no new money available for major grants in the major capital program.

I do want to correct something I had said in reading out the numbers in the budget allocation for child care. The $700,000, or the $0.7 million, is for child care minor and major capital programming.

M. Elmore: Thanks to the minister. Sure, I guess that the clarification on the $700,000 is…. Primarily, it's minor, but yeah, there is not any major investment, I think, which is a shame. There is certainly a need for more affordable spaces for families.

[1025]

I'd like to ask about the issue of subsidy and the provision of subsidy to families and just note that families have been quite hard hit by the recent adjustment, in lowering the income rates for families to qualify to $21,480 — nearly a $12,000 drop from the $33,300 previous requirement.

I know I've heard that that has been quite a hardship for families. That's quite a low-income threshold. Particularly, it puts additional pressure on the low-income families — that, combined with dropping the full subsidies for children under the age of six from $340 to $210. Those two matters combined put increasing pressure on low-income families.

My question is: are there plans contemplated to raise that income level? What are some of the reasons behind that? Is the minister considering, in light of the response, raising that income level and also raising the subsidy rates?

Hon. M. McNeil: There was a subsidy reduction for approximately 4,600 kindergarten-aged children as a result of the move to full-day K. Those are the people that had the reduction.

What we basically did is we took the same rules that apply for six-year-olds and above who attend full-time kindergarten down one year to the five-year-olds. As the member opposite will know, with the introduction of full-day K, the five-year-olds no longer needed the full day of child care, just before and after. That's where the reduction was made, for those with five-year-olds that were now attending full-day kindergarten.

[1030]

As you do know, we did increase in 2005 the income threshold from $21,000 to $38,000 gross income for families with children under five.

At this time, and in the current fiscal environment, there are no plans to make any increase.

M. Elmore: I would just like to note that the income threshold of $21,000 is very low, and it has a very heavy burden on low-income families.

I'd like to ask a question with regards to licensing and the issues in the news. I'm sure the minister is familiar with the Monkey Tree Daycare. Just in terms of licensing and the ability to put daycare inspection reports on line and the ability of parents to be able to access those reports and to be fully informed, as best informed as possible, in terms of the quality of child care providers that they are considering looking at.

Hon. M. McNeil: As you know, the licensing of a child care is within the Ministry of Health. They would be best to answer any questions on that.

It's my understanding that Ministry of Health is in the process right now of putting the inspection reports on line so that parents have access to that. Again, it's Ministry of Health, and they would be best to answer those questions.

M. Elmore: If the minister doesn't have a date or hasn't been informed of a date in terms of the implementation or when that would be going on line, I guess I can follow up with the Ministry of Health in terms of getting an idea on the timeline for that.

I was wondering: has the minister considered implementing regulations for earthquake preparedness for child care providers in B.C.? I think it was raised as a concern, certainly, in light of the situations that happened in Japan and that really had a negative impact on the society there. Those questions were raised in terms of British Columbia being also susceptible to earthquakes.

So I was wondering if the minister has considered that and would also look towards implementing earthquake preparedness regulations for child care providers in B.C.

Hon. M. McNeil: The member raises a very good point. It's my understanding that earthquake preparedness is actually in the licensing area as well, so that would be part of Ministry of Health. But it's certainly something that I will bring up with my colleague, because I agree, it's something of interest.

[1035]

M. Elmore: Thanks for considering that and bringing that forward. I think that certainly would be in the best interest of ensuring the safety of children. Also, that we, as a society, are prepared for such an event….

I would like to ask a question with regards to the Success By 6 funding. I think that's been a very popular program and, also, a very strong program — able to leverage and bring together community partners with the credit union movement and also with community groups to deliver quality programs. I was wondering what the commitment is towards Success By 6 in terms of budget allocation and also if the minister is looking towards a
[ Page 11044 ]
long-term commitment to the Success By 6 program.

Hon. M. McNeil: Success By 6 is a wonderful program. On a recent tour in the Kootenays, I did drop by a school where we announced continued funding. It's wonderful to see it not on paper but actually in action.

As you know, it is a partnership. It's a partnership with the United Way and the credit unions of B.C. Over ten years the province has invested $34.8 million in Success By 6, with an average annual investment of $3.4 million.

I'm delighted to say that in spring of 2011, last year, even though we were in some challenging fiscal times, we did feel that it was seen as a priority. Success By 6 is a priority of the ministry, so we were delighted to enter into an annualized funding contract with the Success By 6 program.

M. Elmore: Just to clarify, the funding is continued for 2012-13, and has there been a commitment beyond that?

[1040]

Hon. M. McNeil: As you know, we've got $3.4 million in this year's budget, and at this time we have absolutely no plans to change our commitment. We see it as a priority for the ministry. But we're also working with our partners out in the community on various initiatives — Success By 6 being one — to see how best we can leverage and do more with it. But right now we have no plans to change.

M. Elmore: Thanks for the response. I think it has been a positive program. Certainly, you've had the opportunity to visit the different programs across the province. The strengths of it are excellent in terms of being able to leverage that extra support and really get great value for the investment. It really is an advantage in terms of allowing children who are able to be accompanied either by a parent or a caregiver to access those problems.

It's certainly very supportive in terms of early childhood development and providing that stimulation and support to families in the community. It doesn't address the challenges of working parents who aren't able to accompany their children to the programs. Nonetheless, I think it has been very positive.

I'd like to ask about the issue — it's been put to me as the crisis — around the retention and recruitment of early childhood educators. I'm sure the minister has had the opportunity to visit and talk to many early childhood educators. Certainly, they strike me as very committed, very dedicated and passionate about the issue and pursuing that career in terms of looking after children but also really allowing them to develop their potential.

In terms of the challenges in our child care system in British Columbia, there's a need for spaces. The issue of affordability is quite stressful in terms of just the parent fees, on the one hand, for quality child care spaces and the challenge of the lowering of the income threshold cutoff for access to subsidies.

I'm wondering if any steps are being taken in terms of addressing the low wages of early childhood educators. I know that in Kelowna and Vernon, in a number of child care facilities there, the early childhood educators receive a wage of $13.44 an hour. Even in Kelowna and Vernon, that's not a living wage. I'm just wondering if there are plans to address what's being put to me as a crisis.

[1045]

Hon. M. McNeil: The member raises something that I, as minister, am certainly aware of. It's one of the things that we're doing a better job of in the ministry. Recruitment and retention are always an issue and not just in our ministry.

Certainly, we have found it, and that's something I've been hearing in my travels around the province. Certainly, the more rural and remote communities really struggle with getting the people they need in order to make a difference in the lives of children and youth.

I actually met with Darryl Walker of the BCGEU, and it was, I think, the main topic of discussion we had. It's not necessarily a matter of resources; it's a matter of finding the people. We need to do a better job, I think, of attracting people into the field, because it is so rewarding.

We have been trying to track more closely numbers within this. I know that the median hourly wage for all child care staff over the last seven years, as reported in our child care provider profile, has gone up from $13.88 an hour to $16.25 an hour with that. It has been increasing consistently in that time.

In addition, I have been advised that the hourly wage in B.C. was slightly higher than Alberta, which is at $15.32 — and Manitoba even less than that. So it is something we have been tracking, and I think it is an important issue that the member has raised.

I'm not sure if the member opposite is aware that next month we are, in partnership with the Provincial Child Care Council, hosting a forum on child care with stakeholders, as we did in November last year with early childhood.

I would certainly be very pleased to extend an invitation to the member opposite to attend. I know last year she had asked about the Provincial Child Care Council, and I want to also suggest that perhaps in September, at a future meeting, she is able to attend with me. I think it is of value to be there and speak with the great people that we have volunteering on that council.

We're also looking at ways that we can do a better job linking. It's something that I care about deeply. I have a daughter in the business of early childhood education, and it is something I certainly hear about personally as well as in my role as minister.

M. Elmore: Thanks to the minister for the invitation
[ Page 11045 ]
to attend the child care forum being hosted, coordinated, by the Provincial Child Care Council. I also look forward to attending the next regular meeting. I appreciate that.

Just to follow up with regards to the early childhood educators. The minister stated the average hourly wage and referenced that that's based on reports back. Is it a survey that is collected? I'm just wondering if I would be able to have access to those documents, because it doesn't quite mesh with the reports that I am hearing.

I'd just be interested to look at the data in terms of basically how, on the one hand, the child care providers are able to increase their wages with the child care operating funds remaining constant and with the decrease in minor capital grants. Presumably, the wages would have to be offset by increasing parent fees. I'm just interested in having the opportunity to take a look at the data behind that, if that would be possible.

[1050]

Hon. M. McNeil: It's my understanding that the profile is an annual survey that the ministry does with all licensed providers, and it's part of this government's open government initiative that we're embarking on. We will be posting the profile on site annually, and that should happen in the fall. That will be open to anybody who wishes to access it.

Having said that, we are certainly able to give the member opposite the data that we have right now. This year's data won't be ready until the summer, but we certainly have what we have for previous years, and we will absolutely make it available to the member.

M. Elmore: Thanks for the opportunity to take a look at the data. I'll be very interested to see the surveys and to have an idea of the feedback from the licensed providers.

Part of the challenge with the recruitment and retention, particularly in the northern and rural areas, is around the regular hours and the difficulty in terms of providing full-time employment, often with gaps being created and challenges that child care providers are seeing with more children going into all-day kindergarten. Often it leaves that gap, and there is a need for provision of before- and after-school care. So that's a challenge in terms of meeting that, and the wages further complement that.

We have excellent early childhood educators in British Columbia. I just would hope that we can also support them in their career choice, in that they're a very important component of having an affordable, accessible and quality child care system in British Columbia.

I'd like to ask some questions now with relation to big-box private daycares and the growth that we're seeing, the expansion of big-box private daycares in British Columbia. I'd just like to ask the minister's position on that and what the minister thinks about these types of child care providers increasingly coming into British Columbia.

Hon. M. McNeil: There have been, as you say, concerns expressed about the expansion of corporate child care facilities in the province. I think probably….

[1055]

This is an interesting issue, because we also want to give parents choice, and it's about giving parents choice. So there's a fine line that we walk here, but all child care facilities must meet provincial health and safety standards as set out in the child care licensing regulation. Regardless of who the operator is, facilities are inspected and certainly monitored by the provincial health authority.

We're currently as a ministry monitoring the website of commercial child care providers and tracking new ones as they enter. But again, they're under the same regulations that fall within Ministry of Health. Again, we want to make sure that we give parents the opportunity of choice.

M. Elmore: I'm sure the minister is aware of, specifically, Kids and Co. with regards to the 24 percent hike on their child care fees and that the parent fees are being raised from $1,550 a month to $1,915 a month by September and that those fees are already quite high. There is a quote that parents were quite shocked by that.

Child care is a very high cost for families. Generally, it's considered the second-highest cost for families behind housing. But in terms of the fees being charged at this facility, the comment from the parent was that child care is their highest cost as a family. I'm just wondering if the minister can comment on that specifically.

Hon. M. McNeil: The challenge we have here is that MCFD does not control the marketplace. The rates are market-driven. Again, it's parents' choice. What MCFD does do is provide the operating grants to child care facilities, as well as subsidies to low- and moderate-income families. That's where we fit in the picture.

I think there's no question. Certainly as minister, but also as a mom and a grandma, I see that balancing your role as a parent with any work life is a challenge.

[1100]

It's something that we're constantly looking at seeing as a ministry: what are those things that can be done? Again, there is a role that we play, and that's offering operating grants and subsidies to low and moderate income. Other than that, it really is a market-driven operation.

M. Elmore: The owner was claiming that they had lost $150,000 at the facility and that that was the reason behind the increase in the parent fees. I think it underlines a question as well, in terms of the direction that we envision for what the future is for providing an affordable, accessible and quality child care system in British
[ Page 11046 ]
Columbia — what the role is that big-box daycares play? — and also the question of money going to stakeholders in the corporations.

I think it's a very serious concern and also pose that to the minister in terms of, specifically, money going to shareholders and what direction the minister envisions for providing an affordable, accessible, quality child care system in B.C.

Hon. M. McNeil: As I mentioned in my earlier answer, I certainly recognize the challenges that many families are facing, including my own. I think it is something that…. As a ministry, we have to continue to look for ways that we can improve our early learning and child care policies so that we can better support the families.

It's also one of the reasons I'm really looking forward to that child care forum in June. I think we're going to get a lot of good people around the table, and we can have these good discussions.

The Provincial Child Care Council. We have posed certain questions to them as folks who care about the industry and have asked them to take a look at affordability and what some of the things are, in a challenging fiscal environment, that we can think about doing.

We're going to continue to work collaboratively with our partners in the field and look for opportunities. Will it be easy? No. Again, it's something that is a priority for the province.

M. Elmore: Certainly, in terms of the challenge for parents to find affordable and high-quality spaces, often they're caught in that dilemma. There often are wait-lists. I know I've had questions in terms of wait-lists and being able to have an accurate reporting of, concretely, what the wait-lists are across British Columbia through our urban, suburban and rural areas.

I was wondering if the minister has considered conducting an inventory of child care spaces and also an inventory of affordability, just to have an accurate picture of what is available. What are the real needs? What are the wait-lists? Also, across British Columbia, what is the range of affordability and parents' fees that are being paid to be able to put children into quality child care?

[1105]

Hon. M. McNeil: It's my understanding that we are in the process of building a better picture of what is actually out there. The work is being done right now. It was seen as a priority, because obviously, for me, better information gives you a stronger ability to make the changes that you need.

I understand that it is within our operational and strategic directional plan, so it is seen as a priority. It's a good point that the member opposite raises.

M. Elmore: Thanks for the response. I'm wondering if it would be possible to have access to that information, or is there a timeline in terms of when you're expecting it to be completed? Is that something that will be made public? Is that also the first time that the minister has conducted this work — I don't know how you characterize it — generally, to compile an inventory or to get a clear picture in B.C.?

Hon. M. McNeil: It's my understanding that we are working on it right now. I don't have an actual time frame. When it is done, it absolutely will be available to the member opposite.

We do have some current information that I have here, child care data at a glance, that we can make available to the member opposite right away.

As to the full…. We are doing this, actually, across all six service lines, delving in and really creating a better picture so that we have the information we need to make better decisions. That is happening. The time frame is unknown, but I do have some data that I certainly will make available to the member.

[1110]

M. Elmore: Thanks for being willing to share the data that you have available. I look forward, once the inventory is complete, to taking a look at that as well.

I'm just wondering if the minister has looked at a governance system for child care in British Columbia. I think it's accurate. I don't know if the minister agrees, but in terms of the provision of child care in British Columbia, it has often been characterized as a patchwork in terms of the different providers across British Columbia.

I was wondering if the minister has considered looking at some sort of governance system that would be able to take a coordinated approach to the system — bring all those parts together and be more effectively able to address the gaps, address the shortfalls and make recommendations in terms of more effective delivery of child care in B.C.

Hon. M. McNeil: Actually, no, it's not something we had looked at. But that might be a very interesting issue or topic to bring forward at the child care forum in June. I would actually almost encourage the member opposite to…. Maybe we can have some discussions on it, but maybe that might be something that you bring forward and see what the reaction is at the forum. I think it's well worth taking a look at.

M. Elmore: Also, a little bit along those lines, I was wondering if the minister has considered looking at a child care plan for British Columbia in terms of being able to systematically address the many issues around affordability, accessibility and quality — one, if there is a plan, if the minister is considering looking at a plan.

I know earlier there had been an early care and learn-
[ Page 11047 ]
ing plan that had been shelved. I don't know if there are new plans to bring that through or what the status is of a possible child care plan in British Columbia and, then, of an early learning plan, which had been developed but tabled and not released.

[1115]

Hon. M. McNeil: We actually have not framed anything as a plan, if you will. Having said that, with the ECD forum that was held in November and also with the child care forum that's coming this June, we are looking to use those two forums so that we can put together a three-year direction for both early childhood development and child care. I think that will help inform our operational and strategic directional plan as well, so it is something that we're looking to, to use the two forums. What we really want to have is not necessarily the plan but certainly a three-year direction for both of those programs.

M. Elmore: I wonder if the minister has had an opportunity to read the child care advocates' early learning and care plan, and what the minister thinks of the plan.

Hon. M. McNeil: Certainly. The Coalition of Child Care Advocates B.C.: I've had meetings with them. They've come to my constituency office.

Just a short diversion. One of the folks involved I went to high school with, and I hadn't seen her since high school. Of course, we both looked the same, so it was quite fun.

I'm very aware of it. We've had an opportunity, and I've had an opportunity to chat with her since. Certainly, it's something that's actually suggesting changes to the funding and delivery of child care. We know that. It's a very fulsome plan that, as you know, comes at great cost. That's an issue in this challenging fiscal environment.

However, there are elements of the plan that we are certainly taking a look at with respect to things that we can do in legislation or various things. We are aware that it has significant support from a variety of local governments, but again, it's the cost issue. It's something that we need to do.

If there were pieces that we could take out and take a look at and work together with them, certainly that's something we can consider doing. We are looking at ways that we can enhance our programs and services. Again, it's about partnerships with all the various stakeholders. It's about continuing our discussions and seeing what we can do within a pretty tight, challenging fiscal environment.

M. Elmore: I'm glad to hear that you were able to, I guess, be reconnected with your high school friend — that's always fun — and also that you were able to have a good discussion with the child care advocates on the plan.

I've been advised that, yeah, the support continues to grow. The city of New Westminster, I believe the Surrey Board of Trade and also the Dawson Creek school board have endorsed and supported the plan.

In terms of addressing the challenges around affordability, accessibility and quality, I know the minister addressed the three-year direction for early learning and child care. I'm wondering if the minister can talk just more broadly around a specific vision or strategy, moving forward, for addressing the crisis in early childhood educator retention and recruitment, affordability and accessibility.

[1120]

Hon. M. McNeil: A staff has reminded me that I moved the child care forum from May until June. It is in fact in May. For some reason, June just stuck in my head. It is one that I hope the member opposite will be available for, and I'm really looking forward to that.

You know, recruitment and retention is an issue not just in MCFD and not just with the one, as I've mentioned. It's something that I understand other jurisdictions struggle with as well. What we are going to be doing is working…. We have worked with the ECD to understand the services and locations. We had the forum, as you know, last November, and now we're going to be doing the same thing with child care in May.

There are a lot of things that go along with the work that we are doing. One is simply listening and understanding what the challenges are out there. But to put that together, along with our internal mapping that we are doing so that we can have better info when we work with our partners and develop the plan….

It's my understanding that work will be done on the direction for both ECD and child care over the next six months. It is going to be a very open process. We will certainly keep the member informed. We actually have a SharePoint site up now on line that's been developed for ECD. We will also be doing the same for child care. I can give all that information to the member outside of this forum here but certainly would welcome any input.

M. Elmore: Thanks for the information. I look forward to having access to that and, also, an opportunity to bring forward some recommendations.

I had a question with regards to the child care resource and referral program. Also, has the minister had the opportunity to visit some of the centres? I think they deliver excellent service and really are a valuable resource in the community. Can the minister tell me how many programs are operating across B.C. and also if the minister has had the opportunity to visit some of the offices?

[1125]

[J. Thornthwaite in the chair.]

Hon. M. McNeil: The number of child care resource
[ Page 11048 ]
and referral offices that we have, by region, are five on Vancouver Island, 14 in Coast-Fraser, 13 in the Interior and eight in the north. Although I've been aware of them, I actually have not visited one, but I will rectify that.

M. Elmore: I'd like to thank the minister for answering the questions for me for estimates. I'm going to wrap up my portion of it and hand it off. A couple of my colleagues have questions, and I look forward to participating in the forum and also offering some suggestions to address the challenge of providing affordable, accessible and quality child care in British Columbia.

Thank you very much. I'd like to pass it off to my colleague.

M. Sather: I have a question for the minister based on a letter that I sent to her in December of last year, which she kindly responded to. It's regarding my constituent Patricia Lubchynski.

She is a single working mom, and her son entered kindergarten this year. She's having a difficult time, struggling to make ends meet with a recent decline in the net income exemption threshold for the subsidy from $33,000 to $21,480 per year, so she's no longer eligible.

[J. McIntyre in the chair.]

Prior to the changes in eligibility, her cost for full-time day care was $675 a month. At that time she received the full subsidy of $550 per month, so her net cost was $125 per month. Now her current unsubsidized cost for before and after school is $390 per month, which is $265 more per month than she was paying before.

I just wondered if the minister could confirm that that's accurate and if she could respond to my question.

Hon. M. McNeil: To the member: welcome.

Before I start, I would like to just thank the previous member for her thoughtful questions. I will certainly endeavour to get the information to her as soon as I can.

I did want to also mention that the child care forum is actually on May 24, so that we have that date on record. I think that's important to note. Again, thanks to the member opposite for her questions.

[1130]

To the current member: obviously, as you can appreciate, I can't talk about any individual case. What I can say is that now that the child is five years old and in full-day K, as you can appreciate — and we canvassed this earlier — they no longer need the full day of child care. They need before-and-after care.

Having said that, there is an appeal process that is available. What I will endeavour to do…. I've asked staff if they could get in touch with the member opposite to give them the details so that they can follow through with the constituent.

J. Kwan: I have basically three sets of questions for the minister, and they all relate to constituency cases. With the exception of one case that I'm going to put on the public record with respect to the name, the other ones I'm not going to.

Let me ask about this first case. It's a case that I know the minister is familiar with. Mostly I'm following up to try to secure a meeting. The minister may recall that we had a quick chat about this a little while ago. This is in relation to the…. It's called the Sklavenitis case. The family, Angela and Leo, have raised the issue. I've written to the minister about their son as well.

To follow up, the family would really like to have a meeting with the minister. There are some issues that have been indicated by the ministry — why the choice that the family has chosen for their son to attend as a residential treatment option is not appropriate. However, the family would like to share some information with the minister, as well, to explore that matter.

I wonder if the minister can confirm and commit that she would be able to offer some dates and times for the family to meet with her so that they can discuss this matter with the minister.

Hon. M. McNeil: The member and I have been discussing this case, and it's a challenging case. I sympathize, and I certainly understand what the family is going through. It's tough enough being a parent, but when you have a child with significant special needs, it makes it even tougher. I do understand.

I would like to put on record that we as a ministry are working closely with the family. It's not a funding issue. It's about the best possible placement for the child. I certainly think that the ministry absolutely agrees with the family that the child does need to have full-time care and needs a residential placement, but I have been advised that the ministry is looking for an appropriate placement for the youth in question.

I think that's where the difference lies. Certainly, we agree with the family that there needs to be residential care sought and that it will be funded. So I would like to get that off.

I have mentioned to the member opposite that I would be willing to meet with the family, that that still is going forward, that I've asked staff behind to make sure we connect with your office to give you dates and that I will have one of the ADMs with me at that time.

J. Kwan: That's great. The issue is about the choice, or the specific facility, which the family feels very strongly about. The way in which the treatment and the practice, if you will, and the philosophy are offered at this particular residential facility is important to the family, along with the issue around stability and the fact that the school has been providing support to the son for over 12 years.

In addition to that, of course, all the people — the
[ Page 11049 ]
psychiatrists and the behavioural therapists, etc. — who have been working with this case had also recommended this particular facility as well. To that end, I don't really want to get into the details around it.

[1135]

I would look forward to receiving the dates and times from the minister so that we can set that meeting up and hopefully have the matter resolved. I think, at the end of the day, what's really important here is what's best for Peter and to make sure that the supports are in place. I know that the minister feels the same, so we can get on with that.

I want to raise two other matters with the minister. They are broad strokes in the sense that they do relate to broad policy issues, but nonetheless, they impact individual families in a very significant way.

One set of policies that the government has adopted is around the Child in the Home of a Relative. The impact of this has been very, very significant. To my knowledge, there are upwards of 10,000 children being raised by grandparents today in British Columbia.

In 2010 the Child in the Home of a Relative program, which provided financial support to some 4,500 family caregivers a month, stopped receiving new applications and was replaced with a temporary and, what I would argue, inadequate extended family program.

Children in the long-term care of family members or under legal custody or guardianship of a relative now receive no additional support for their upbringing. These changes disproportionately affect aboriginal families, who represent some 40 to 50 percent of family caregivers in the Child in the Home of a Relative program.

The extended family requires that it be initiated by a parent of the child and requires an agreement to be signed. This may not suit the situation of all families and does not provide, in my view, sufficient flexibility as well.

A number of constituents have come to my office with problems related to this program. Let me just put these examples on the public record.

One constituent who has taken in three of her grandchildren came to the office in the past year, saying: "I was able to count on the help and financial support of the Child in the Home of a Relative program while raising my two older grandchildren, but that help isn't there anymore. I'm so happy to provide a loving home for my third granddaughter, but it is going to be hard to do with just a pension income." She's a pensioner on a very regular income.

If a grandparent on a fixed income receives income assistance or disability assistance, once they are granted legal custody then they may add the child as a dependent. There is no such provision for those receiving federal benefits, though — CPP, OAS, GIS — and so they must make do on much, much less.

This constituent reflected that she felt her affordable housing unit was the only thing that supported her in providing care that she sees as necessary for her grandchildren. In addition to that, to complicate things, because she was in a subsidized, affordable housing unit, having one more person in that family unit caused a problem on the housing front as well, which then was a big problem in how you sort out that housing-need aspect of it.

There is no connection between ministries in trying to resolve these matters for families. For a government that wants to talk about how people are working across ministries and so on, there is a huge gap happening in this ministry right now, as it stands, with other ministries, particularly in the Ministry of Children and Family Development. I flag that one case for the minister's attention.

Another case. Another constituent came to the office, in which case the couple had raised two of their grandchildren and together were caring for another two grandchildren. This is a case with four grandkids. The older grandchildren had received assistance through the Child in the Home of a Relative program, but the family said that they were not able to access the EFP program for the two additional grandchildren. Further inquiries found that the grandparents did not have custody of the children, so they could not be added as dependents to their file with Social Development.

However, the grandparents said that while they did not at this time have custody, they expected that arrangement might well become a permanent one. They're fully anticipating that those two grandchildren are going to be with them in the long term. They were considering pursuing custody but in the meantime were left without any extra assistance for supporting that child.

So in the period while you think about how you're going to best manage the situation and how best to go forward, even then they were without assistance, which really put the entire family unit in jeopardy as well.

[1140]

I think this highlights the flaw of the extended family program. It is intended to be a temporary program for two years, and the emphasis is on family reunification. But the whole notion of family reunification and how the program works doesn't actually, necessarily assist the family in reunifying. It may not always be possible or in the best interest of the child either.

Funding for the kin caregivers should be better able to address the unique needs of some families in some way. The ministry's policies are in many ways counterproductive in that effort for some of these families. I want to raise that for the minister's attention as well.

The last case in this instance is related to a family unit which received support from the Child in the Home of Relative program from an agreement dating before March 2010 and highlighted an issue which may affect some of the other Child in the Home of a Relative recipients. He resides with his granddaughter in a B.C. Housing
[ Page 11050 ]
unit and received Child in the Home of a Relative money to support her. He does not have custody, and so the amount is slightly less than if he were to pursue custody and have his social development file reflect his granddaughter as a dependent.

However, B.C. Housing has no mechanism to differentiate the amount of support and still charges the flat-rate amount for the two occupants, resulting in a negative impact on this already-limited-resources family. Again, correspondence with B.C. Housing — to which I have written on behalf of the family — was not successful in having them review the rent amount charged.

So in addition to the notion of when you have additional family members in your family unit, which causes the size of the unit and its adequacy for that family and therefore jeopardizing everything…. In addition to that, there are situations in which the amount of rent that is charged for people in a social housing unit…. It's based on a percentage of your total income.

For pensioners, it's 30 percent, generally speaking — right? For a person who then enters into a Child in the Home of Relative program, you get additional income coming in. Then, all of a sudden, your income goes up and you are therefore paying more rent towards that 30 percent of your total income — but that money is meant to actually support the child as well. So they're kind of just stuck in this really hard place and not able to resolve the matter in a way that is conducive, I think, to the best interests of the child.

I wanted to bring these cases to the minster's attention in the hopes that the minister will agree with the challenges before us and be the advocate around the cabinet table. I would certainly welcome any suggestions that the minister might have in helping to resolve these cases.

These cases are still outstanding. They have not yet been resolved. We're still trying to figure out how best to assist the family in that way. Even though I've had permission from the family, I have refrained from putting their names on the record because I don't think that really assists our deliberation and discussion here, other than to try to, hopefully, get some policy changes that will affect their lives.

[1145]

Hon. M. McNeil: I think the three cases the member opposite brought up are very different from each other, but they really reflect on what are the challenges folks are having with the policies, certainly around the changes between Child in the Home of a Relative and the extended family program.

It's something that I understand…. The staff is taking a very close look at the differences between CIHR and EFP. Oftentimes changes are made and new programs are developed because it seems like the logical next step, but sometimes you need to take a step afterwards and take a look at: what are the changes in policies that may be needed? What are the unintended consequences, as the member opposite brought up? So I think it's a good time….

What the staff has just informed me — and I agree wholeheartedly — is that because we're taking a look at the policies, perhaps we could liaise with the member opposite and use these three cases as examples that we could use to see that here are three examples of three different ways that families are being affected with the changes. So I wholeheartedly agree that that would be a really good idea. If the member opposite doesn't mind, we could work with her to discuss the three cases and examine them and see if that will inform us moving forward on some changes that might need to be made.

J. Kwan: Thank you to the minister. I would welcome any and all opportunities to work with the minister and her staff to try to address this policy change and how this is impacting people's lives. Anything that I can assist, from my office or myself, and I'm sure from all of my colleagues and the critic, as well, in this regard…. We would be happy to comply with the minister. I look forward to that as well.

I just want to raise one last case. I know that we're running out of time, but another set of issues that I want to bring to the minister's attention. Again, I'm looking to the minister to provide assistance — and across ministries as well.

In this instance, I have six outstanding cases, but I'll give you three examples on the public record here. I have a single parent with three children waiting for adequate housing in order to regain custody of their children. The parent with children in foster care was residing in a one-bedroom apartment that the Ministry of Children and Family Development had deemed to be unsuitable for those children. The parent was told that they could not regain custody of their children until the parent secures adequate housing.

So this is the theme around these issues. That's one family — a single parent with three children.

I have another case, a single parent with one child waiting for adequate housing in order to regain custody of their child as well. In this instance, the family is on a wait-list with B.C. Housing, currently homeless and couch-surfing with friends. The parent had been told again that they cannot regain custody of their child…

The Chair: Member, I'm sorry to interrupt, but noting the hour.

J. Kwan: I'm going to wrap up in one second here, Madam Chair.

…on the condition that the parent can't secure adequate housing — another example, again, of a single parent with another child in a similar situation.

The theme about all of this is that these are families
[ Page 11051 ]
whose children are in foster care because they can't access adequate housing. That is the only issue on the table. Some of them have been waiting for five, six years from B.C. Housing to get access to housing, and still no success.

I've written to the Minister of Housing on this stuff and then not been able to assist the family because they cannot secure housing in some way. This is the problem. If the idea is to bring families together and, again, the housing need is so huge that that becomes the only reason that separates a family, then there's got to be a problem that could be solved with government and across ministries.

I'm asking the minister if she would work with the Minister Responsible for Housing to resolve these matters. Again, I'll be happy to work with the minister to try and resolve these cases as well.

Hon. M. McNeil: Quickly, I've asked staff that we will talk with the member offside, away from the debate on estimates, about these things. Perhaps these are things that can help inform us on how to better serve the families.

Hon. Chair, I move that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.

Motion approved.

The committee rose at 11:49 a.m.

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