2015 Legislative Session: Fourth Session, 40th 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)

Monday, April 27, 2015

Afternoon Sitting

Volume 24, Number 5

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

MONDAY, APRIL 27, 2015

The House met at 1:33 p.m.

[Madame Speaker in the chair.]

Routine Business

Speaker’s Statement

PIERRE CLAUDE NOLIN

Madame Speaker: Hon. Members, it is with great sadness that I advise the House of the passing of the Hon. Pierre Claude Nolin, Speaker of the Senate, last Thursday evening, at the age of 64. I will miss him. He had been a great mentor to me.

Speaker Nolin was appointed to the Senate by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on June 18, 1993, for the senatorial division of De Salaberry, Quebec, and was appointed Speaker of the Senate by His Excellency the Rt. Hon. David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, on November 26, 2014.

I’m certain the House would like to pass along sincere condolences to his family during this difficult time.

Introductions by Members

M. Karagianis: It’s a great pleasure for me to introduce a constituent of mine, Lisa Jennings, who is a paramedic. She is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She is a tireless advocate on behalf of those who have this medical condition. She’s here today to observe questions that’ll be asked in estimates. She is a truly brave woman and speaks out on behalf of many people across this province.

I would like this House to please give her a very sincere and warm welcome today.

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Hon. P. Fassbender: All the members of this House know that when we’re here serving the people of British Columbia, we miss some significant times in all of our families. Today I’m missing my wife’s birthday, so I wish the House to join me in wishing her a very happy birthday.

V. Huntington: As many of us know, there are medical students from the Medical Students’ Society at the various universities in the province visiting with us today. I’d like to introduce one who is a constituent of mine and her colleagues:Madeleine de Lotbiniere-Bassett, whose mother and I served on many committees in the municipality; and Alyssa Kim and Robin Whitty, who have met with me and, I’m sure, with others today. Would the House make them welcome.

R. Sultan: It is appropriate, after the death and destruction inflicted by the earth’s seismic instability upon Nepal last weekend, that we have in the gallery today a virtual portfolio of insurance company representatives.

The dozen representatives are: from Wawanesa Insurance, Graham Haigh; from Chubb Insurance, Anne Barnes; from Economical Insurance, Cheryl Edmunson; from Intact Insurance, Rick Howe; from RSA, Kellee Irwin, from Peace Hills general insurance, Daryl Kochan; from Northbridge, Greg Kostiw; from Travelers of Canada, Joe Licitra; from Aviva Canada, Mark Rouleau; from Gore Mutual, Ian Shaw; from BCAA, Patricia Sterling; from Desjardins General Insurance, Andrew P. Veilleux.

In addition, we have from the umbrella Insurance Bureau of Canada, Bill Adams, Aaron Sutherland, Miranda Lee and Michael Lee. Would the House please welcome these first-line defenders from such disasters as we have seen in Nepal this past weekend.

S. Simpson: I’m pleased to have a couple of guests here today: Sydney Beatty-Mills and Anna Marie Paranyo, two young women who are at the School of Social Work at UBC and have been in my office for the last few months learning about the operation of my office and working with me on a project that is looking at gentrification in my constituency and learning from community leaders about how we might best deal with that. I would ask the House to make Sydney and Anne very welcome.

L. Reimer: It’s my pleasure to introduce today three UBC medical students who visited with me just before lunch. Kingsley Shih is from my community of Anmore. With him is Tiffany Lam and Larilee Lo. Would the House make them very welcome.

Statements

RESPONSE TO EARTHQUAKE IN NEPAL

B. Ralston: As mentioned previously, a devastating earthquake shook Nepal on Saturday and thousands lost their lives. The Nepalese community in Surrey has reacted quickly and is supporting the relief efforts channelled through the Canadian Red Cross, both to provide relief and to contact relatives.

Anil Pradhan, the president of the Nepali Cultural Association of British Columbia, thanks British Columbia citizens for their support and will announce several fundraising efforts to take place at the end of the week to further advance and support relief in Nepal.

Introductions by Members

L. Throness: Experience the Fraser is a long-term initiative to connect the north and south of the Fraser River
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with recreational trails, right from the Fraser Canyon to the Salish Sea. Here today to tell MLAs about this great series of projects, which are nearly half done, are four distinguished visitors: Jason Lum, who’s a councillor at the city of Chilliwack; David Urban and Alison Stewart, with the Fraser Valley Regional District; and Wendy Dadalt, with Metro Vancouver. Would the House make them welcome.

J. Darcy: Others have already mentioned that we are very lucky today to have a couple dozen students from the UBC medical school who are with us here today. I’m looking forward to meeting with them this afternoon. I had some conversations in the lobby with a few of them already today.

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They are working very hard. They are bursting with enthusiasm. I know they have all kinds of ideas about both their own individual career paths and also about how we can improve our public health care system here in British Columbia. I really look forward to welcoming them as well. I hope the entire House will make them feel very welcome today.

K. Conroy: One of those medical students is actually from Castlegar — Naomi Macrae. She grew up there. I saw her dad on Friday, and he said to make sure that I get a full experience of her, because he says she’s incredibly smart, principled and, hopefully, is going to move back to the Kootenays to be a doctor.

G. Holman: I’m very pleased to introduce today Sgt. Andy Duke of the Central Saanich police service, which every day serves their community with distinction. Would the House please make Sergeant Duke feel very welcome today.

Statements
(Standing Order 25B)

EAGLE RIDGE HOSPITAL FOUNDATION

L. Reimer: I rise to speak about an important organization in my community which serves to support our local hospital in providing the best quality of care to residents of Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, Coquitlam, Anmore and Belcarra. The Tri-Cities is one of the most rapidly growing areas of the province, with many young families. As the only hospital in the Tri-Cities area, Eagle Ridge Hospital provides care for over 100,000 people each year.

The Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation was established for the purpose of raising funds and awareness to improve health in our Tri-Cities communities. Fundraising by the foundation has contributed over $21 million to the hospital over the past 21 years. It includes the Charity Golf Classic held at Swaneset, the annual Evening of Caring gala, the dine-out program and the Wheel 2 Heal bicycle ride coming up this weekend, Saturday, at the Coquitlam town centre.

The foundation’s contributions account for over 70 percent of the moneys used to purchase new equipment and technology each year, ensuring that patients have access to the most up-to-date screening and diagnostic services. The foundation is supported by many community volunteers. In 2013-14, 369 volunteers contributed over 37 hours of service in support for fundraising and hospital programs.

On behalf of my constituents, I would like to thank the Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation and their volunteers for their hard work in support of health care in our communities.

STEWART WALLIS
BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT IN KLEMTU

J. Rice: Today I rise to talk about how I spent my Easter vacation. I spent my Easter in the central coast community of Klemtu to attend the seventh annual Stewart Wallis basketball tournament. As many members in this House know, basketball is bigger than religion on the central and north coast, where I live, so I was very happy that I could participate in this tournament.

It brought players from Bella Bella this year. Usually, it would have a wider audience of First Nations members from around the coast, but due to some deaths in families, that wasn’t able to occur. Nonetheless, I watched some fierce basketball. We had Willy from Williams Lake, who was a former Globetrotter, come up and play, as well as Terrance Richmond, who is a well-known NCAA former basketball player, a pastor and a rapper. I had to take the ferry on Sunday, so I missed the final game where Bella Bella eked out the winning game, with eight seconds left, and won by two points.

I wanted to just talk about what the tournament was all about and why it started. It started in memory of a loved community member, Stewart Edward Wallis. He died at 19 in a tragic scuba diving accident in Klemtu.

Stewie was the youngest of six children born to Merle Neasloss and David Wallis. He was born in 1988. At five years old, he moved from Port Alberni to Klemtu, which is home to the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation. He spent his early childhood fishing and playing with his five siblings and many cousins. He was a shy boy, but his sense of humour won him many friends, as well as the adoration of the community.

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CLINTON ANNUAL BALL

J. Tegart: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to pull out your finest attire for the longest-running event of its kind in Canada, the 148th Clinton Annual Ball, coming up on May 16.
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This wonderful tradition began on New Year’s Day in 1868, when the first ball was held in the Clinton Hotel lobby to cheer up residents during a long and cold winter. It was so much fun they decided to make it an annual event. Before the arrival of the Pacific Great Eastern railroad in 1914, people would take the arduous multi-day journey to Clinton every year to attend. For many it was the social event of the year, for which they would start planning months in advance.

In the 1920s volunteers from Clinton built the Memorial Hall to honour friends and family who did not return from the Great War. The maple hardwood floor is one of the first in Canada, and it was said that the floor rose to meet the happy feet of dancing couples. Every year we continue to celebrate this tradition in that very same hall. Despite changing times, that maple hardwood floor still rises up to meet our feet as we dance the night away.

The Clinton ball and the Memorial Hall have survived the depression, another world war and significant demographic changes, but the spirit remains the same. It is a night of music and entertainment to celebrate our heritage. I welcome every one of you to dust off your dancing shoes and join me for the 148th Clinton Annual Ball.

RIDE TO CONQUER CANCER

S. Robinson: This summer over 2,000 cyclists will embark on a two-day epic ride from Vancouver to Seattle to raise money for cancer research and to test their mettle in completing this 250 kilometre journey. The ride brings together cancer survivors, their families and their friends to challenge their fundraising abilities and their physical stamina.

The ride gives us hope and provides an opportunity for our loved ones to actually do something for survivors. The ride helps find new treatments, new possibilities, so that lives don’t have to end prematurely.

This year the B.C. Cancer Foundation is hosting the seventh annual Ride to Conquer Cancer the weekend of August 29. Over the past seven years, riders have raised over $59 million, funds earmarked for leading-edge cancer research, so that when you do hear the words “you have cancer,” it is not heard as a death sentence but as a disease to be managed and even cured.

My husband, Dan, and I did our first ride in 2010 and over the years have engaged dozens of others to ride with us. Our team has raised more than $400,000 over the last six years, and we hope to continue to build our team and our contribution to cancer research.

Many are daunted by the thought of riding 250 kilometres to Seattle. These riders have ridden in blistering heat, blasting cold and pelting rain. We have slept in tents that are caked in mud and have endured the sorest of tushies on day 2 of the ride, which makes sitting on that bicycle seat catch your breath as you settle in for the 125 kilometres on day 2.

Rain, flat tires, mud-spattered faces and arms and legs and sore tushies are nothing compared to the treatments that cancer patients endure. Being sore, wet and tired are mere inconveniences because we know that eventually we will arrive at our destination. We know that eventually we will have a hot shower to warm our bones and wash the road grit off. And on those smoking hot days, we know that a cold beer is waiting for us at the end of the ride.

But those living with a cancer diagnosis, those living with cancer, have no idea what lies ahead for them. I hope my colleagues will join me, and when I put out the request for funds, you’ll support the ride.

WORK OF RUTH AND NAOMI’S
MISSION IN CHILLIWACK

J. Martin: Just recently I had the opportunity to witness the outstanding results of community spirit and compassion when the Rotary Club of Chilliwack-Fraser and the city of Chilliwack gathered to open new emergency shelter beds at Ruth and Naomi’s Mission in downtown Chilliwack. Many tears were shed as these community leaders gathered to celebrate the efforts of the tradespeople who donated their time, the companies that donated supplies and the generosity of Chilliwack-Fraser Rotarians who funded the project.

Ruth and Naomi’s Mission does incredible work in our community, offering hope through shelter, warm food and providing the opportunity for rehabilitation programs when the guests are ready to commit.

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I’m so pleased that our Premier and the minister responsible for housing have been so supportive of the Ruth and Naomi’s organization over the years. It is even more exciting to see the swell of support from the community, including this recent investment of $73,000 from the Rotary Club of Chilliwack-Fraser, to fund the renovations for the 12 new emergency shelter beds.

Ruth and Naomi’s executive director, Bill Raddatz, says: “Getting them off the streets and hopefully into a recovery program — that’s the ultimate goal. We can show them how, when they become healthier, they can also be better citizens of Chilliwack. We want them to feel like it’s home but, at the same time, challenge them.”

Working to end homelessness is something each of us strives for in our communities. Will the House please join me in congratulating the city of Chilliwack, Rotary and the impressive dedication of Chilliwack community members to help move these fine initiatives forward.

DENTAL PROGRAMS AT
COLLEGE OF NEW CALEDONIA

K. Corrigan: It was a great deal of pleasure to recently visit the University of Northern British Columbia and
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the College of New Caledonia in Prince George. I want to thank everyone, who were so welcoming.

CNC’s dental assisting and dental hygiene programs have served the community for 46 years, in the case of the dental assisting program, and 28 years for the dental hygiene program. The programs offer education, employment and health promotion. In addition, they provide important public access to low-cost dental care through their very busy clinics. There are many people who are receiving dental care that likely would not get that care but for these programs.

Two particular benefits of the program are, first, that they provide training in the north so that many students don’t have to go away from home, or at least not as far. Secondly, it also brings students to the north, students who often stay and make their lives in Prince George or other northern communities. These dental programs have been an investment into sustainability and growth in the north.

It’s also important that the jobs of both the instructors and the graduated students are, largely, jobs for women. Graduates of these fully subscribed programs are employed at a rate of 97 percent for dental hygiene and 94 percent for dental assisting. These are very high quality programs with, I am told, 100 percent pass rates on the national board exams.

Recently these highly respected and long-standing programs have been on the chopping block, as the College of New Caledonia struggles with a $2.8 million funding shortfall. There has been a partial reprieve this last week, so we’ll wait to see the final outcome for these outstanding programs that for many years have provided opportunities, good jobs and developed professional members of dental care teams that serve Prince George and other northern communities.

Oral Questions

GOVERNMENT ACTION ON GUN VIOLENCE
IN DELTA AND SURREY

S. Hammell: As every member of this House knows, a young man was shot and killed on the streets of Surrey earlier this month. His death followed 22 other incidents of gunfire in Surrey and Delta over the previous six weeks.

The community is calling out for help, for more resources devoted to supporting families in early intervention before these young people are lured into a gang lifestyle. Can the Minister of Justice tell the people of Surrey what support she is prepared to add to schools to make sure that kids are supported before it’s too late?

Hon. S. Anton: The events in Surrey are terrible for the Surrey community and dreadful for the family of the young man and for his friends. He was surrounded by a loving family, as are all these young men involved in these shootings.

As the police, as the mayor, as we have said in government, there are a lot of resources being put into this. But I just would like to reiterate the message that has been given out constantly. It is up to family and friends to come forward and help out the police.

I’m going to reiterate “friends” here. Sometimes families don’t even know, but their friends know. And if their friends come forward and help the police, that helps everyone, because nobody wants to see the bad end that can come to young men, in particular — young women, sometimes — who are involved in these incidents.

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There are very significant resources through police, through the efforts of the city, but then there have also been significant government resources. In the last four years we have provided $775,000 in civil forfeiture proceeds to local organizations’ anti-violence and crime prevention programs, including almost $300,000 this year alone, recently announced. We recently gave $20,000 in support of the Surrey Wrap program, one of Canada’s leading youth gang intervention programs.

There are school liaison officers. There are a number of programs in Surrey, because everybody in Surrey deserves to feel safe, and people in Surrey want this crime wave, this shooting wave, to end.

Madame Speaker: Surrey–Green Timbers on a supplemental.

S. Hammell: In Surrey there are only ten RCMP school liaison officers. There are 120 schools. There are 70,000 students in those schools, and that student number continues to grow. By comparison, in Vancouver there are fewer students, fewer schools and 16 police liaison officers — not ten but 16. Clearly, young people in Surrey receive less attention and some no attention at all.

Can the Minister of Justice tell this House what she is prepared to add to the schools in Surrey to prevent a young person from turning to gangs and picking up a weapon?

Hon. P. Fassbender: To echo what the Minister of Justice has said and the Premier has said and the mayor of Surrey has said, we clearly want the people of Surrey and other communities to know that they’re not alone. How we deal with the very complex issue of gangs is not something that there are simplistic answers for. But I will say this. The Premier will be meeting with the mayor and with other officials in Surrey tomorrow to talk about how we can all work together.

This is not an issue that is isolated to the schools or to other parts of the community. This touches every part of the community. This government is committing to working with those agencies to make sure we provide the best support that we possibly can.
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ANTI-GANG PROGRAM FUNDING
AND WAIT-LISTS

M. Farnworth: My question is to the Minister of Justice, whose ministry is responsible for anti-gang programs. She talked about what the government is doing in terms of anti-gang and anti-violence programs in Surrey as they relate to young people. But Minister, you have a wait-list….

Madame Speaker: Through the Chair.

M. Farnworth: Thank you, hon. Speaker.

The minister has a wait-list of over 40 students in Surrey alone who want to get into an anti-gang program, and they don’t have the funds to accommodate them.

My question to the Attorney General is this. If she’s so big on the programs that she’s doing, will she at least ensure they’re funded so that we don’t have wait-lists, so that kids can get into those gang programs and so that parents know that there are some resources that they can turn to, to ensure their young people don’t get into a gang lifestyle?

Hon. P. Fassbender: To the member opposite and the question about the Wrap program, we are very aware of the wait-list that has been talked about. I mentioned, and I will reiterate that the Premier is meeting tomorrow with the mayor, with the RCMP, with the school district. We will find a solution to ensure that we do everything possible to get those 40 that are on the wait-list into a program that will prevent them….

More importantly, the message that we need to continue to send — the Premier has said this; the Minister of Justice has said it; the mayor, the RCMP officer in charge of the Surrey detachment have said this — is that this is an entire-community problem. We need to work together to find solutions that are both sustainable and long-lasting.

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The Wrap program was initially funded by the federal government. That funding has come to an end, but we know that this is one of the most successful programs in the country. We are committed to finding a path, working with all of those partners, including the federal government, on solutions that will be long-lasting.

Madame Speaker: The member for Port Coquitlam on a supplemental.

M. Farnworth: I appreciate the answer from the Minister of Education, but he’s not the Minister of Justice. The Attorney General is supposed to be the Minister of Justice for this province. The Ministry of Justice is where people in this province expect to turn to see that programs are in place that can help communities, and we’re not hearing that from the Minister of Justice today.

My question is again to the Minister of Justice. She stood up in the House and said there are programs in place to help families deal with gang violence. Yet the record of this ministry has been one of cuts to the RCMP on their gang-fighting task force — $4.2 million. The Attorney General knows that. The Wrap program is a popular program that’s proven to be successful. Again, the minister talked about funding going to that, yet there’s a wait-list of 40 people.

We hear again that the Premier is going out to Surrey, which we hope is more than just a photo op. What we really want to see is a commitment to public safety in Surrey and communities around British Columbia. What we want to see is a commitment to resources that families can access so kids don’t go into a gang lifestyle.

Will the Minister of Justice commit that funding will be in place to eliminate the wait-list for the Wrap program in Surrey?

Hon. S. Anton: As the Minister of Education has said, there will be a meeting tomorrow between the Premier and the mayor of Surrey, and they will be addressing the Wrap program.

In terms of the resources for policing and anti-crime in Surrey, let me talk about the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit — CFSEU, the anti-gang unit. We spend $60 million a year with the RCMP on that unit. It has a very strong anti-gang focus, including the End Gang Life campaign. Anyone who is involved in a gang, who has a family member or a friend involved in a gang, can go to that website, and they can find help. People around gang members often know that they are involved in gangs, but they need a place to go for help. That’s one of the things that CFSEU does.

CFSEU is the largest integrated joint forces police unit in Canada. We are fortunate in B.C. to have this unit. It develops highly specialized officers from federal, provincial and municipal agencies around the province. It has a focus on anti-gang activity. It has stepped up to the plate completely in Surrey and is working very closely with Surrey police, Delta police, mayor of Surrey and Surrey council because they want, like all of us want, Surrey to be safe.

FERRY RIDERSHIP LEVELS AND
PUBLIC DISCUSSION OF FERRY SERVICES

C. Trevena: Last week the CEO of B.C. Ferries floated a novel explanation for the ridership problems at B.C. Ferries. It’s not because fares have risen more than 100 percent. It’s not because service has been cut on many routes. It’s not because seniors discounts have been discontinued. No, it’s because the opposition and the media talk about it.

Apparently, there are untold thousands of people in the Interior or on the Mainland travelling around the prov-
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ince who aren’t using B.C. Ferries because, despite B.C. Ferries’ extensive advertising, people don’t know how much riding the ferry actually costs.

To the Minister of Transportation, does he believe that the ridership problems at B.C. Ferries are because people talk about how much it costs?

Hon. T. Stone: I have said very clearly in this House and outside the House that we acknowledge that there is a correlation between rising fares and volumes of passengers across the B.C. Ferries system.

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That is exactly why we are doing everything that we possibly can, working with the coastal communities and the Ferry Commissioner and the ferry corporation, to apply as much downward pressure on fares as fast as possible.

Progress is being made. The Ferry Commissioner, who is independent, as the member well knows, only weeks ago pointed out, in terms of the price caps for PT4, that the price caps will be at 1.9 percent, which is roughly in line with inflation. That was our goal, and arguably, we are four years ahead of accomplishing our goal of affordability of fares at B.C. Ferries.

Madame Speaker: The member for North Island on a supplemental.

C. Trevena: There’s something of a fairy tale–like quality about this four years ahead on a plan. I have to say, if nothing else, Mr. Corrigan’s solution for B.C. Ferries is simple. It’s like close my eyes and you won’t see me. If we don’t talk about the high cost of fares, there won’t really be a high cost of fares. The only problem with his strategy and the minister’s strategy is that fares are high.

The Minister of Transportation is going to follow Mr. Corrigan’s route of pretending that the fares aren’t really high? Or is he going to do something to make using B.C. Ferries more affordable for B.C. families and bring down the fares?

Hon. T. Stone: The most novel suggestion that we have heard from the member opposite as a solution to driving down the cost of B.C. Ferries was that all passengers should ride around on Soviet-era ships with bench seats and cold coffee.

We are working very hard with the Ferry Commissioner and with B.C. Ferries to get ferries to a place of long-term sustainability and affordability.

Interjections.

Madame Speaker: Members.

Please continue.

Hon. T. Stone: Yes, that has included some tough decisions that we have had to make as government. But it has also included a record-level $180 million of funding which we have provided on an annual basis to B.C. Ferries, which is in stark contrast to the $5 million in annual funding that the NDP government provided in the 1990s. All that folks in coastal communities got through the 1990s was a bunch of fast ferries that didn’t work and were sold for a fraction of what they were originally built for.

TRUCK PERMITTING PROCESS AND
FEES AT PORT METRO VANCOUVER

S. Simpson: Last week the federal court threw out the permitting structure for trucks in the port of Vancouver. The judge called the plan fundamentally flawed and unfair.

We learned from the court proceedings that the province, which has some primary responsibility for trucking in the port now, including appointing the trucking commissioner, was consulted on this permitting process prior to it being adopted by the port. However, the result of this court decision is more uncertainty — again, in regards to trucking in the port — because of shoddy work by the port, apparently condoned by the province.

My question to the minister is, did the province raise concerns about the fairness of the permitting process at the time they were consulted, and if not, why not?

Hon. T. Stone: As the member across the way knows well, this is a complex file — what had been competing jurisdictional overlap at the port, non-union and union truckers and so forth. We worked very, very hard as one of the parties at bringing some long-term certainty to the port, and we’ve been focussed exclusively on ensuring that the provincial aspects of the 14-point joint action plan have all been delivered on.

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I’m very proud of the fact that this government has stood up for truckers. We have stood up for truckers to ensure that they’re paid what they rightfully have earned. I’ll tell you, hon. Speaker, that the independent trucking commissioner, who is in place, is working very, very hard on audits and complaints that are brought forward, to ensure that truckers receive the compensation which they have worked so hard to receive.

Madame Speaker: The member for Vancouver-Hastings on a supplemental.

S. Simpson: Part of the effort, the work that the minister and the levels of government were supposed to be doing was to reduce some of that complexity, and that included the province taking a larger role. The larger role means oversight, and apparently there wasn’t any when it came to the permitting process. But that’s not the only problem here.
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We know that in January the province announced a fee structure for truckers in the port. This was a difficult situation, as the first draft of that structure did not reflect the Vince Ready report and almost led to strike action before the plan was amended.

Here we are three months later, and the fee structure has yet to be adopted by regulation. We’re told that that may occur next month, in May. However, there are concerns that what is adopted may not reflect the agreement as it was originally planned. We know there are questions about aspects of the fees to ensure that they’re fair for drivers and owner-operators.

Will the minister, first, tell us: why has it taken over three months to get the regulation in place on the fees? And in an effort to get this right, unlike what’s happened with the permitting, will he commit to consulting with the union and with the independent drivers on all the details of the fee structure before he finalizes it?

Hon. T. Stone: First, with respect to the issue of the licence reform, we did offer a perspective to the port and the federal government on this particular matter. We made it very clear in our discussions with the port that we expected them to address the licensing rationalization from a position of fairness and equity for the truckers first and foremost.

The port, which is responsible for the rationalization of licences, undertook the program that they did, and the court has rendered its decision based on the case that was brought forward. We await the port’s decision on whether or not the port will appeal that decision.

But I can tell you this much. The independent container trucking commissioner, Andy Smith, who has been in place for a number of months now, is working extremely hard to ensure that truckers are treated fairly and, most importantly, to ensure that they receive the compensation which they have rightfully earned.

We’re going to continue to do what we need to, to support the efforts of the independent container trucking commissioner as he presses forward to ensure that truckers receive their fair compensation.

ACCESS TO FAMILY PHYSICIANS

J. Darcy: There has been a litany of broken promises from this Liberal government on health care. Perhaps the most deplorable of them is the five-year-old promise that every British Columbian would have a family doctor by 2015.

We’re now one-third of the way through 2015, and there are still hundreds of thousands of British Columbians without a family doctor. That’s putting some British Columbians at risk, because without access to a family doctor, without access to basic primary care, many British Columbians can’t access basic diagnostic procedures, like mammograms, that are critical to their health.

Will the Health Minister explain why this government has failed to keep its promise that every British Columbian would have A GP for Me by 2015?

Hon. T. Lake: The member, I think rightly, points to a challenge for health care in Canada — and around North America, quite frankly. In the province of Alberta 20 percent of Albertans do not have a family physician. In the province of Quebec it’s 25 percent.

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In the province of British Columbia it’s 16 percent, and we recognize that this is a challenge. I know that all members, in their constituency offices, face this challenge. I do in my constituency office as well.

We are working extremely hard creating divisions of family practice that work hard with family physicians to increase their capacity to attach patients to family practice.

I can tell you this. It was that government in the 1990s that failed to add one seat to medical education in this province. We have more than doubled the number of family practitioners coming out here in British Columbia. We’ll continue to work hard to make sure that British Columbians get the primary care they deserve.

Madame Speaker: The member for New Westminster on a supplemental.

J. Darcy: This government made that promise first in the year 2010. It was then repeated on the campaign trail by the Premier and many members opposite right across this province in 2013. The fact of the matter is this government broke that promise, and they should admit that to the people of British Columbia, because it has a real impact on real people.

The Ministry of Health encourages women over the age of 40 to have mammograms every two years, but because of her family history with breast cancer, Lisa Winbourne of Victoria qualifies for an annual mammogram. When Lisa tried to book one recently, she was “shocked and appalled” to find out that she could only book an appointment if she did it through her family doctor. Well, Lisa has been trying to get a family doctor for over two years. She lives in Victoria. She’s been trying as far as Duncan to get a family doctor.

Lisa is one more person who has been failed by this government’s broken promise about GP for Me by 2015. Will the minister explain to Lisa why he has failed to live up to his promise to her and thousands of other people like her that she would have a family doctor by 2015?

Hon. T. Lake: We have been in contact with the B.C. Cancer Agency mammography screening program. We’ve made it very clear that there will be a pool of physicians that are available if someone does not have a family
[ Page 7666 ]
physician. No one should be denied access to a mammogram, and we will ensure that’s the case.

The divisions of family practice and the GP for Me program have made great strides. Over 54,600 vulnerable patients are now matched with family physicians than before this program started. We are using nurse practitioners more and more in the province of British Columbia. We are using integrated care in terms of having integrated health care centres where people don’t always have to see a physician; they can see another health care professional. We’re working with pharmacists. We’re working with all spheres of the health care profession to make sure that people get the primary health care they deserve.

MONITORING OF SOIL DUMPING SITE
IN SHAWNIGAN LAKE WATERSHED

B. Routley: When the Minister of Environment met with concerned residents and the CVRD area director of Shawnigan Lake regarding the contaminated soil dump site, the minister committed to pursue environmental monitoring in response to local residents’ concerns that there is already contaminated leaching at the site into Shawnigan Creek.

The minister promised that not only would her officials do soil and water testing at the site but that the CVRD staff would be allowed to accompany and do their own testing. These commitments are much appreciated by the community. Can the minister tell us on what day the soil and water monitoring the minister promised will be conducted?

Hon. M. Polak: Yes, we did indeed have a very productive meeting with representatives from the CVRD, and my staff committed to ensure that they do have the opportunity to attend, be present and be part of the ongoing monitoring that will be needed and also to be able to take a look at and have explained to them what results are uncovered from the additional testing that they’ve agreed to.

[1420]

I don’t have a firm date. I was updated by staff that they are putting together the appropriate plan for what areas they need to test, what type of testing they need to conduct. That should not take very long, probably a matter of days, and then they will be in contact with CVRD representatives to ensure that all that can take place.

Madame Speaker: The member for Cowichan Valley on a supplemental.

B. Routley: I’m concerned that no date has been set. When it comes to a town like Jumbo, with zero residents, the minister will bend over backwards to help out and even let the community bend the rules. When it comes to Shawnigan, a real community with real people with families, the ministry doesn’t have a date yet.

Given that local residents are saying leaching has already occurred at the site, can the minister give us an explanation for the delay? Will she ensure that monitoring will be done very soon and that the CVRD will be notified and allowed to attend and do their own monitoring?

Hon. M. Polak: There is no delay. The staff immediately set about to assess what types of concerns there were specifically. Those at the meeting had outlined some additional testing that they wished to see conducted. That takes some planning with respect to the appropriate staff, to ensure that they’re on hand, that they have the appropriate equipment and that they can plan this for a time when all can attend. It may be, in fact, that staff have already organized a date with CVRD. It should be a matter of days before they have lined up what their schedules will look like. But there’s no delay at all. Staff have been working on this since the meeting that we had.

WATER QUALITY IN LIKELY

S. Chandra Herbert: Water test results near Likely, B.C., continue to show incredibly high levels of metal contamination, so high that they break safe drinking water guidelines. In January aluminum levels were nearly 15 times higher than the recommended limit, iron six times higher and manganese twice as high.

My question is to the Environment Minister. The Premier came to Likely, said the water was fine. These test results show a completely different picture. What does she have to say to the residents of Likely, who don’t feel safe drinking their drinking water?

Hon. M. Polak: Although the questions around Mount Polley don’t tend to get as much profile right now as they have in the past, nevertheless, that certainly remains a concern for the residents in and around the town of Likely and for those who are impacted by the water.

There are a number of levels that come into play here with respect to metals. There are issues of total for metals versus dissolved metals. I will not attempt to take the House through that scientific display here.

What I will say is this. We continue the ongoing monitoring of the water in the area. Those results continue to be posted on line for the public to see. I would be more than happy to sit down with the member or any other members opposite who would be interested in a more detailed briefing as to how the monitoring is continuing and what information we understand currently about that water situation.

No question. This will be a situation of monitoring and testing — not for months but probably for years to come.

[End of question period.]
[ Page 7667 ]

Orders of the Day

Hon. M. de Jong: I call, in Committee A, Committee of Supply — for the information of members, the estimates of the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training — and in this chamber, second reading on Bill 11.

[1425]

Second Reading of Bills

BILL 11 — EDUCATION STATUTES
AMENDMENT ACT, 2015

Hon. P. Fassbender: I move that the bill now be read a second time.

This legislation amends the School Act, the Independent School Act and the Teachers Act, to focus on four main objectives. Before I get into the discussion on those objectives, I wanted to say that whenever a bill is introduced in this House, it is done with the clear recognition of the responsibility that we have to the taxpayers of the province, to the citizens of this province and, in this particular case, to the teaching profession, the school trustees.

[D. Horne in the chair.]

When I was in Banff recently, at an international symposium on the teaching profession, I had the opportunity to speak to many other Ministers of Education from jurisdictions around the world. There were two things that became very clear to me. One, British Columbia is seen as a leader in the world when it comes to educational outcomes. That is not by accident. That is by the hard work and the diligence of the teachers of this province, of the school districts and, indeed, of the province of British Columbia.

What was also obvious, as the second thing, is that the world of education has changed already, continues to change and needs to be ready to meet those learning outcomes for students so that we can ensure that they are successful in their chosen careers. That is, again, an awesome responsibility that requires our vigilance on what changes need to be made, how quickly those need to be made and how we do that in concert with all of the stakeholders involved in the future of education in this province.

Within the education system there are many stakeholders that are directly involved that we are well aware of. But we’ve also seen the need to further broaden the net of involvement in education in the future by partnering with the business and industry sector, trade unions and other people who can provide the kind of support to a system that needs to be flexible and nimble.

Getting to the four major objectives and facilitating a change in education that is necessary at this time, I would like to talk about what those four pillars are in this legislation. It does amend the School Act, the Independent School Act and the Teachers Act, to focus on those four objectives. The first is to build a framework for continuing professional development for all certified teachers in the province.

As we have done a review of other professions not only in this province but in other jurisdictions and, indeed, around the world, we clearly recognize — I heard it in Banff as well — that it is the quality of the teachers in the classroom that is one of the most fundamental aspects of the success of students. In recognizing that, looking for professional development and broadening professional development outcomes for teachers is at the heart of this particular legislation.

[1430]

The second pillar is facilitating the delivery of shared services amongst school districts. Ever since I had the honour to serve as the Minister of Education, in every public speech that I have made, both to the School Trustees Association, to other groups, industry groups and so on, I have said that we need to find every way that is practical and achievable to find savings that can be invested in the quality of the programs in the classrooms.

The third one is to ensure that we have a more flexible accountability framework within the K-to-12 system that ensures that we have the flexibility to meet the needs as they’re identified and as research and other practices around the world indicate to us.

The final one is aligning the provisions on the use of student data with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

Currently, the Teachers Act is silent with respect to continuing professional development, better known as CPD. The proposed amendments will set a general framework for CPD in order to continue to enhance the reputation of the teaching profession, which is well respected, again, around the world, and support teachers. The key word there is “support” teachers in developing and maintaining the knowledge and the skills necessary to support the transformation of B.C.’s education system.

The proposed amendments will define CPD broadly, as I’ve said. And it’ll include participating or presenting a course or program, mentoring or other initiatives related to the training and qualifications of the teaching certificate holders.

I have had many discussions with the executive of the BCTF since I have been appointed as minister and have said — and they have also agreed — that the quality of teachers in the classroom, as I said earlier, is one of the key criteria for student success. Inherent in that, then, is a clear recognition by all of us of professional development, ensuring that we set the minimum number of CPD hours for teachers to complete each year, approve the broad subject areas for CPD and provide exemptions for certain types of teaching certificate holders.

We recognize that that is an important element, and we
[ Page 7668 ]
are committed, through this legislation and regulations that may flow out of it, to collaborating with the BCTF on the development of that framework and ensuring that it meets, first and foremost, the needs of the teachers and the support that can be provided.

We spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on professional development year after year, and we have to ensure that that is applied in the way that has the most benefit for teachers and, ultimately, the students in their classrooms. Through this legislation, the director of certification at the teacher regulation branch will be authorized to approve specific CPD courses or other activities that are jointly developed between the ministry, the BCTF and teachers, and will also allow for exemptions to individual certificate holders and establish a process for verifying CPD compliance.

The word “compliance” is not being used in a negative way. It is simply saying that if we establish standards, then the expectation on the part of all of us should be that those standards are being met and that there is a process in place to ensure that.

Teachers will still be able to customize CPD to meet their individual training and development needs. We clearly know that different teachers are at different places in their careers, so that ability to individualize it is inherent in where we are going to move in the future.

I will say very clearly that the ministry is committed. I’ve communicated that to the BCTF and to the BCSTA — that we will work with the key education partners to develop specifics. It will include post-secondary institutions, which are responsible for training new teachers and training them in terms of what they can expect when they go out and are certified to teach in schools throughout the province.

The intent of the legislation is that we would not be bringing it into force in terms of regulation until such time that we have completed that work.

[1435]

With respect to shared services, the School Act clearly gives boards the authority, currently, to enter into agreements to purchase or provide certain services. The proposed legislation will amend the School Act to clarify that a board’s ability to enter into agreements is not restricted to agreements that relate solely to the operation of schools in the district but to the district generally. Again, I have said consistently to the BCSTA and trustees that we will work with them in identifying that.

I want to correct what I think is a misconception: that there has been no discussion or consultation on that direction up to this point. There have been extensive discussions at every level — within the ministry, within the administration of school districts and, indeed, in the times that I’ve been before the trustees of this province. This is a goal that we are going to meet on behalf of the taxpayers — and the accountability we all share in how the dollars that are invested in education are spent.

The proposed legislation will amend the School Act, yes, to enable the minister to require boards to use designated service providers for specific services, where it makes sense. That will be bathed in a very clear and articulated business case as to why that is being expected and what the outcomes and the benefits will be.

The legislation will allow the minister to designate service providers for some or all boards. This will provide the necessary flexibility to set provincewide as well as local shared-services requirements. That discussion has been ongoing and will continue until we move forward on any of those initiatives — again, based on a solid business case and in the best interests of the districts, the taxpayers and the system as a whole.

The next one is to enable the establishment of a new accountability framework. The current School Act provisions require boards, on an annual basis, to submit numerous plans and reports. Some of those plans and reports, we’ve clearly heard from school districts — we have been listening — are not seen to be effective by the people who have to submit them.

The district literacy plans will all be removed, with provisions regarding the appointment of superintendents of achievement and establishment of school planning councils. What we have clearly been told is that they have not been operating effectively, that we need to change that process. By changing the act, we’re providing, again, the flexibility and the ability to be nimble when changes are identified and agreed to so that we can move forward.

The current provisions regarding the appointment of special advisers and the issuance of administrative directives to boards of education will be broadened. They are significant in the current act. They will be broadened, providing the flexibility to implement new requirements for increasing and improving student achievement, beginning in the 2015 and ’16 school year.

I’ve clearly heard, as every member of this House and the public has, that we need to continue to improve those outcomes. We cannot stand on our laurels. We need to find new and creative and innovative ways to do that. I heard that again when I listened to the other experts and other ministers from jurisdictions around the world. Everyone is moving to that paradigm. It is not one that is done lightly. We know the responsibility we have for student outcomes and achievements, and we’re going to be focused on that.

The new policy requirements are being constructed — I think it’s important for me to say it very clearly — collaboratively with the B.C. school trustees, with their administrative staff, with their teachers in their districts. We are going to work with them. We are also going to engage in a more proactive way with parents around this province and other people who have a vested interest in the success of students for their futures.

[1440]

Finally, the last item is with respect to personal educa-
[ Page 7669 ]
tion numbers. This legislation will align the School Act with the more current provisions — and the safeguards, I might add — found in the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. This will allow the ministry to make better use of student data to improve the K-to-12 system while protecting personal privacy, consistent with the standards across British Columbia in the public sector, including health and other social services.

I know clearly that education is one of the key foundations of the future of this province, of this country and, indeed, of the world. We live in a global economy. We live in a world where education borders are not narrow; they are wide.

British Columbia is a leader. We’re rated No. 3 overall in the world. Against Japan and Finland, which are very often touted, we are No. 3 — not Canada but British Columbia. We’re there for a good reason. It’s because we’ve worked hard. We’ve developed a strong and robust system.

We need to be flexible. We need to be creative. We need to be engaging with other sectors of society to ensure that we have a system that continues to lead and that we have an education system that meets the need of every single student — no matter who they are, where they come from, their backgrounds — whether they have unique needs or whether they are coming from other countries and English is a second language. We are committed to making sure that B.C.’s education system stays in the forefront and is seen as a leader, as it is today.

R. Fleming: I can’t say I’m pleased to take my place this afternoon in this debate. I feel obligated to do so. The opposition and my colleagues will make known the concerns they have about Bill 11 from the perspective of constituents that they represent, elected officials who share their constituents in the areas that they represent.

I’ve got to tell you that here, at second reading on Bill 11, you could not find a better symbol of how completely out of touch with the priorities of parents and kids and the education system Bill 11 is, to the things that they want to see debated about driving improvements in public education.

I began my day this morning like a lot of parents, hundreds of thousands of parents in British Columbia, at my kids’ schools. I can tell you that nobody on the school ground this morning — parents, grandparents, teachers, special education assistants, nobody — was talking about the ridiculous introduction, the rationale for Bill 11 that has been offered by the minister and this government.

Now, there was a lot of discussion about the PAC fundraiser coming up, to make sure that we have technology. We’ve got hardware that’s six years old in our school. There was a lot of discussion about how in British Columbia special needs learners can actually have a graduation rate 30 percent lower than the regular graduation rate. There’s concern amongst parents, amongst non-aboriginals and aboriginals alike, about opportunities for young First Nations learners in our school. There’s a yearning to drive better results from our school.

Most of the discussion, though, is about how this Premier, in particular, seems to have an endless, unboundless agenda against public education in British Columbia, and they wonder why.

This bill shouldn’t even be before the House today. I will try to make that clear this afternoon — why that is not just my opinion. It’s not just the opinion of the official opposition. It’s the opinion of every single major stakeholder group in the public education system in the province of British Columbia.

[1445]

At this stage of debate on Bill 11, having had no consultation beforehand from this government when the bill was dropped in…. I don’t think a 15-minute phone call to the leader of 40,000 professional teachers in British Columbia 15 minutes in advance of tabling this legislation counts as consultation. I’m sorry. It does not.

I don’t think some vagaries about an accountability framework months ago, completely disconnected from legislation that gives the minister centralized powers that we’ve never seen before in British Columbia, counts as consultation with elected school boards in every region and corner of this province.

It’s a failure, and that’s why this legislation shouldn’t be before the House today. It’s fundamentally illegitimate. It’s illegitimate. It lacks any input from those who are our partners in delivering public education on a daily basis on the ground in the school system.

Interjection.

R. Fleming: The minister is saying it’s not true. Well, I would ask the minister to do this. He should have done it before he made his introductory remarks, but it’s never too late. We’re at second reading. I would ask him to just take a little bit of time — I know listening to other points of view isn’t his strong point — to read the reviews of all of the stakeholders, elected officials and others, all of the key partners in “collaboration” — the word he likes to use and abuse.

The reviews are in about Bill 11, and every major organization in British Columbia is calling upon this government, this minister, who never asked them their opinion in the first place, to withdraw this illegitimate bill at this stage. That’s what they’re asking for.

Now, I know he had a very busy schedule, and he couldn’t attend the recent B.C. School Trustees Association annual general meeting. Too bad. But there was a resolution, if he hasn’t caught up to this yet, passed by that organization. This is hardly an organization that waves placards and banners, if I can put it that way.

The B.C. School Trustees Association, having had no advance benefit of the contents of this legislation, had its
[ Page 7670 ]
first opportunity to gather in Vancouver last week to look at the bill, to talk to their administrators, to talk to each other and figure out what the implications of Bill 11 are for them. They looked at that bill, and they concluded — as I’ve concluded and others who’ve looked at this legislation — that Bill 11 is wrong. It goes too far, it goes too fast, and it should be withdrawn. That was the resolution that was passed by the B.C. School Trustees Association.

It’s unbelievable, really, that Bill 11 is before the House at this time. This government forgets what it says from one month to the next. It honestly does. Sometimes it’s even shorter — maybe a day, if you’re lucky. But I distinctly remember the Premier saying….

After the longest, most disastrous school disruption endured by 550,000 kids, their parents, families and communities across British Columbia, she finally got it after it was all over, after their lives had been turned upside down. She said: “You know what? I think in the school system right now” — her words — “it’s time to heal.”

That was October. It’s now April. Apparently, the healing is over. It’s now time to get back to that well-worn pattern that we’ve endured over a decade, particularly when she was the Minister of Education, and as the Premier, where she takes a particular delight in poking those involved in public education in the eye over and over and over again for the sake of confrontation. That’s what Bill 11 represents. It’s the latest chapter of over a decade of this.

This bill, as I’ve said and as others have said, goes too far. The incursion that it would allow the Minister of Education to make into the daily administration of our school system is such that it would allow him unlimited power to second-guess, overrule and even dismiss our elected school board officials.

[1450]

Now, he’ll say: “Oh, but the School Act allows some of that already.” Yes, it does. The School Act is very specific and has been for decades that elected school boards have a fiduciary responsibility to balance their budgets — which is an incredibly tough job, especially in these past few years. But it’s a fiduciary responsibility that school boards year after year live up to, based on tough budget-making at the local level. It’s based on consultation with all their schools and with school leaders in their districts. It’s based on some painful decisions, some compromises that have to be made.

It’s becoming more and more difficult, as we know from debating the budget here in this chamber, with this government implementing and forcing through another $55 million cut on school boards when they said that they wouldn’t. But it’s a responsibility that school boards have fulfilled.

Government, on very, very rare occasions when boards have not lived up to their fiduciary responsibilities in the School Act, has taken the highly unusual step of placing those boards under trusteeship, under administration. You can probably count the number of times on one hand. It should be rare — it is rare — in B.C.

The balance of power, the co-governance between the Ministry of Education and locally elected school boards, is such that each partner fulfils their responsibilities. This bill upsets that balance, which has been understood between those two major partners for decades in our province. This bill is now going beyond the exceptional, rarely used procedural motion of putting a board under trusteeship in the event that they fail their fiduciary duty. It’s changing all that.

The minister now has the power to say: “It’s not enough that you balance your budget. You must balance your budget in the way that I say you have to balance it.” That’s the difference now, and that’s a significant escalation of the minister’s powers.

It changes in the amendments here too. It becomes a less accountable, arbitrary power that he will have. He doesn’t even have to go through Lieutenant-Governor-in-Council to make that decision. He doesn’t have to consult his colleagues in the executive branch. We don’t have the benefit, for example, of maybe the Justice Minister saying: “You know what? That’s not a good idea for the schools I represent in my constituency.”

It actually circumvents having any cabinet debate. Checks and balances and checks and balances removed by this minister in this bill before the House. That’s why Bill 11 needs to be defeated.

It goes too far on another matter that’s contained in the bill. It goes too far in the scope that government gives itself to solely determine, to control through the ministry, teacher professional development in this province.

Now, there is an exciting conversation to be had in B.C. There is a dynamic program to work through with teachers and school districts and faculties of education, quite frankly, to drive better results in British Columbia by looking at teacher professional development. That’s something that’s going to take time. That’s something that has to be a strategy of the government. There has to be a plan to do that.

That’s an opportunity that should be seized. This is a legislative fiat that gives the minister complete control over what professional development could or may not look like, going forward. We shouldn’t make laws like that in British Columbia or any other jurisdiction. Blank cheque legislation is dangerous. How many examples do we need of that in history? That’s what this is.

Professional development will be his purview, not even the people who do the teaching. He says: “Oh well, we’ll consult them after the bill becomes the law. We’ll consult them on the regulations that I write up later.”

[1455]

That’s frightening. People in British Columbia aren’t in any mood to give him any kind of benefit of the doubt on something this far-reaching, this important. People in British Columbia have learned, unfortunately, that they
[ Page 7671 ]
actually can’t take this Minister of Education at his word.

Last summer, recall, when this government kept tweeting and saying that it was sitting down 24-7, working its hardest to get to a settlement, and then we find out it had one meeting in August. That’s it. Then they said: “No, Vince Ready’s not available.” “We don’t want him here right now.” No, let it play out.” They let opportunity after opportunity…. “Let’s get locked in a room.” “Let’s unlock the room and let it dissipate.” They blew it time and time again.

That 24-7 meant one meeting in one month, and it meant that the school disruption that happened on September 2, which nobody wanted in British Columbia, happened and dragged on for three weeks after a two-week school shutdown before.

Isn’t it interesting, now that it’s all over, that you can’t even find Vince Ready in a press release or a photo op for this government — the guy who saved the day, saved this government from themselves? That’s the thanks he gets. That’s an aside.

British Columbians have learned you can’t take this minister at his word through this budget process. Remember, through all that labour disruption, the minister said, the Premier said: “Don’t worry, this contract’s going to be fully funded when we get there. We got this. It’s ours.” And that’s the least this minister could have done.

Don’t forget that the 25,000 support staff that reached a settlement last spring were entirely funded by school districts, who don’t have the money to fund that sort of thing, from administrative savings. Now he’s back at the same well again.

Well, what he said as recently as late September about fully funding the cost of the teachers’ contract…. Lo and behold, in the budget lockup in February, when school trustees were there — and let’s face it, their expectations were already pretty much in the basement, but they did hold on to that promise because the minister made it so many times — fully funded all of a sudden wasn’t fully funded on budget day. It was a $55 million cut that comes out of the ability to pay for the negotiated increases for teachers.

He didn’t keep his word. He said, actually, the other week that underfunding is a myth in B.C., that parents actually don’t have to raise money for the sorts of things, the menu of items, that used to be basic and part of the education package.

When this minister says “collaboration,” as he has in his introductory remarks about what the professional development clauses of this bill represent, can anybody take him at his word? The word “collaboration” in a Liberal thesaurus means something absolutely different — a word that’s probably not parliamentary, and I’ll avoid it.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

This bill is moving too fast, as well — too far and too fast — because what it represents is rushed legislation. As I mentioned at the outset, and I’ll come back to this point, it has not had any meaningful consultation with trustees, with parents and with professional teachers about what its implications are, what motivates it and why it’s being introduced at this point in time — and why it’s being introduced without the benefit of a full and open dialogue, contrary to commitments the minister again has made, over and over and over again.

He even made them in a signed document called the memorandum of understanding, committing to partner and consult with school trustees on major initiatives within his ministry. That was signed on December 4. When I said that this government can’t be trusted to keep its word and it varies from one month to the next…. That was four months ago — signing a document witnessed by hundreds of people at the B.C. School Trustees Association. You’d think it could be lived up to, that 4-month-old document, around a major piece of legislation that amends the School Act, but it doesn’t.

[1500]

That’s also why Bill 11 should be withdrawn — because these key parties weren’t given any say. That’s a recipe for bad legislation. Not only is it bad form and bad protocol, it breeds bad legislation when you make laws like that.

When I said at the beginning of this debate, also, that what people are talking about — in the playgrounds and assembly rooms and in the administration offices of school districts where elected officials are in the budget-making process right now — and what they want to be talking about with government is a completely different conversation than what Bill 11 brings up.

We have something incredible to celebrate here. It’s a public education system that has problems but largely works for kids, for communities, for families. When you think about it, it’s not easy to run a large and diverse school system like the one that British Columbia has. And it absolutely benefits from the wisdom and the proximity that elected officials and administrators, with their talents and their pulse on the communities that they represent, provide to those communities.

We want to have a conversation in British Columbia about the economy. Why this government never talks about an investment in education being one of the key drivers to boost and make gains and increase the productivity of an economy is beyond me, because every other successful jurisdiction that sees a growth rate that’s well above the rate of inflation has made those kinds of investments. That’s what people want to talk about in British Columbia — their hopes and aspirations for the education system.

You talk to new Canadians in this province, who have immigrated to this great place. You talk to those who have been here for successive generations, living in small or large communities. Talk to First Nations communities. Every one of them has an understanding that to be resili-
[ Page 7672 ]
ent, to make your way in the world, to exist in this globalized society that we now live in requires a solid education. Nine in ten kids in this province — even though this government has tried everything to reduce that number — still attend public schools in British Columbia.

What they want from this government, in making their kids more resilient and confident and able to go out and succeed in the world, is more choice and diversity in the programming and the opportunities that are offered by the school systems where they live. That’s the conversation they want to be having — not about ministerial centralization of power. I mean, nobody thinks that’s a good idea.

Maybe the minister could tell us how many letters he’s had from around British Columbia, since he’s been minister for the last two years, saying: “You know, Minister, I think you need more power. That’s the way forward in British Columbia. That’s what we should be talking about, to drive better results in public education.” Put your hand up if it’s a zero, Minister. I’m guessing it’s zero letters.

Now compare that to your inbox currently. Let’s go back — oh, I don’t know — the last three weeks, since Bill 11 was sprung on British Columbians. You’ve got a pretty significant stack of letters there, don’t you? I only get cc’d on some of them, so I can only imagine how many hundreds of letters there are in your inbox telling you that Bill 11 is a bad idea that nobody wants and nobody asked for.

We are reliant upon public education in this province to develop our economy. That is the single best lever and strategy that we have in B.C.

[1505]

If we want to have a citizenry that is innovative, creative, that is democratic in its mindset and its thinking, socially minded…. If we want a province that continues to encompass people of all social and economic backgrounds, we need to have a school system that is there for them, that is providing for their needs. Based on our history and based on the outlook that we have about the future of this province and maintaining our well-being, this reliance is entirely well placed.

The development of individuals — and collectively for us — to make contributions to what is a bold and successful multicultural society that we live in is completely unimaginable without our public education system. It is K-to-12 education and the access and expansion to higher education that has made the aspirations of British Columbians an achievable possibility and a reality.

I can’t think of any other investment we have made in our province to make it prosperous, to make it just, to make it a livable place that is good and decent, with rising living standards for all, with rights and freedoms that are enjoyed — to build a life, to raise a family…. Nothing in the history of this province has provided more substantial and sustained dividends than our investment in public education. It’s time to renew that investment. That’s the debate we should be having in British Columbia.

That’s why what people talk about in my community and communities around B.C., the ones that I visited…. It’s not the contents of Bill 11, these absurd amendments in sum total. They’re talking about this government’s record over 14 years. They’re talking about, in particular, the last eight years, because we have recent reporting that shows what I think is so unforgivable in light of what I’ve just said about sustaining prosperity in B.C. and the need for investment in education to keep those dividends paying off for individuals.

What British Columbians are aware of under this government is that we’ve actually declined from the second-best-funded jurisdiction in Canada to now the second worst — the second worst behind Prince Edward Island, I might add. It’s a pretty small jurisdiction. We’re now $1,000 below the per-pupil funding average in Canada. In 2006 we were at the average.

Oh, the minister is scoffing. I know. He likes to be just like the Stephen Harper government and say that Stats Canada can’t be trusted, but I’m citing Statistics Canada. It’s an apples-to-apples comparison. B.C. is second last in the country. Don’t take my word for it. Take it from the taxpayer-funded statistical agency of Canada. Don’t take it from the Liberal spin doctor points or the press releases, because those are numbers you can never believe. I’ll take Stats Canada any day over a Liberal press release.

Maybe the minister would take the news better if it came from — I don’t know — a business organization. How about the Conference Board of Canada? The Conference Board of Canada, which has scolded British Columbia, published a recent report that shows that of all of the western Canadian provinces, British Columbia is dead last — and has been for the last six years — on funding. Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba — some of those economies growing a lot faster than British Columbia — have made much, much more significant investments. You know, we’re in the same country, but we’re competing with those provinces as well.

It’s the Conference Board of Canada’s view that this government’s complacency is going to be damaging over time. That’s not the NDP. It’s the Conference Board of Canada that said that, and people want to talk about that in British Columbia.

They also look at this budget. I’ll go back to this point again. They also look at Bill 11. You know, it’s just a little bit overshadowed by the recent budget that this government introduced, the one that said the teachers’ contract would be fully funded — and then it wasn’t — the budget that actually gave the top 2 percent a $230 million tax cut while all these unfunded needs in our communities and our schools continue to go unfunded and now get worse with a $55 million cut. What a dichotomy. That’s what people in British Columbia want to talk…. How could they make that a priority?

[1510]

We had a Finance Committee. There are some mem-
[ Page 7673 ]
bers here on both sides of the House that were part of that committee. They should be patted on the back for going out and consulting British Columbians — something the minister should have done on Bill 11 and never did. They went out and said: “What are your priorities for the budget?” Nobody said a $230 million tax cut for the top 2 percent — nobody. How did it…? In fact, they recommended stable, consistent, predictable multi-year funding for education.

Deputy Speaker: Member, are you the designated speaker?

R. Fleming: I am, Mr. Speaker.

Deputy Speaker: Carry on.

R. Fleming: And yet here we are, debating Bill 11 with a backdrop, a context of a $230 million tax cut that nobody asked for, that the legislative Finance Committee of this assembly heard from nobody about. They heard and made recommendations — thoughtful recommendations, bipartisan recommendations — to make this budget an opportunity to address some of the problems that I’ve already discussed this afternoon in the education sector, and they were completely, utterly ignored by this government.

Perhaps that’s why, in light of the budget, this government seeks the distraction of Bill 11. They’ve got to know that British Columbians are not going to buy into their cynicism about our schools. Maybe they’re gambling that if the noise in public education is distracted by bad legislation, parents will tune out from this debate, or the debate we should be having in British Columbia of how we transform a very good education system into one that is truly great. Maybe that’s the government’s strategy: distract with bad legislation and overcrowd the issues around funding, which communities are dealing with right now.

I think it’s quite clear that this government wants to degrade the debate that we should be having and make it a demoralizing exercise that is legalistic, as in Bill 11, and confined, ultimately, to their continued agenda of conflict, power and control. I think that’s what the Liberals are doing.

The teachers were the bad guys, according to the government. They’ve spent hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of your tax money to tell you so, while the school system has spiralled out of control and your schools were shut to your kids. But now they’ve got a new bad opponent. It’s called school boards, elected officials. “We can’t trust them. We need a nanny state in Victoria to second-guess all their decisions.” We’re going to upset the balance of power that we’ve had for decades in B.C. because the minister right now thinks that’s a good idea. That’s the distraction that the Liberals seek to create. Now we’re not talking about the budget cuts, are we?

We’re talking about a bad bill that nobody wants. Except it’s not working. It’s not working. Let’s be clear. Bill 11 supporters, in this province of millions of citizens, barely number in the dozens. You would have to probably turn over one solitary rock to see the scurrying, scant support for this bill. You’d have to look across our vast province to find the sum total of nodding heads in agreement with this bill. And the only place that you can find them is over there on that side of the House, nowhere else in the province of British Columbia.

Support — if I can call it that, in all its meagreness — for Bill 11 is literally limited to the minister responsible; to the Premier; and very likely, sadly, to the whipped votes of this government. That’s all there is to the limited, insular extent of support for this arrogant and ill-conceived legislation.

Who the members opposite — the back bench of the Liberal Party, who I would like to appeal to today — should be talking to are their colleagues, the elected officials who administer our 60 school districts, the ones that come from all political stripes. Most of them probably count themselves as having no party affiliation or political background at all. That’s not why they ran to be elected officials on the school boards.

They wanted to get in there to make a difference in their community. They took their responsibility seriously. Some of them, I think 40 percent of our school trustees, were elected for the first time just this past November. They were elected under the rules and the legislation in the School Act that we had, which gave them serious responsibilities that they understood and ran to uphold.

[1515]

Now those responsibilities are being stripped away by a bill that can impose cyborg-like special advisers any time this minister sees fit to do it, on his orders alone — no cabinet scrutiny, let alone legislative scrutiny. All we’re getting is the next two stages of debate to look at how wrong-headed this step can be and how disastrous it can be for the province of B.C.

Remaking the balance of planning and oversight, the fiduciary responsibilities that are codified in the School Act, in one fell swoop, as this minister proposes to do — that’s why this legislation is so wrong-headed. It shreds the historic partnership of delivering public education in a co-governed manner in our regionally diverse province. It gives the minister more unchecked power to do as he will on a mere whim — without, as I mentioned, cabinet consent, as limited as a constraint as that may have been in the past, without even that — going forward.

Ministerial orders can be made, taking away the rights and responsibilities of those who actually administer and deliver public education in our province. History is not really all that kind to rash government experiments that centralize power and control, are they? We can all think of programs pursued by government — or IT system
[ Page 7674 ]
disasters, if I want to bring it up to date — centralizing thrusts that weren’t well-thought-out in advance, steamrolling over those local voices who play a role in providing the service and ignoring them, ignoring the front line.

That is almost always a recipe, in this province and others, for disaster. That’s why we need to have a second look at this bill, at the very least. That’s why we need the minister to live up to his commitments to consult people before the bill was introduced. He didn’t do it.

So do it now. Do it now. That’s the point that we hope to make at this stage of debate. There are options. There are ways he can do that. Perhaps we’ll see if we can bring him around to an amendment that would be able to achieve that. Maybe we can save him from the humiliation of once again reading his words that are so at odds with his legislative action. Maybe we can help him fulfil a promise or a signed memorandum of understanding, a signed document, to consult with his education partners. Maybe we can help him to dial this thing back.

We’d be happy on this side of the House to give the minister a redo. I think we can get around to saying he deserves that. There are second chances. But pushing ahead and making a mistake like Bill 11, giving the minister more and more power that can be exercised from his comfortable chair in his office without the say of those who actually deliver public education in B.C.? That can’t be undone once it’s done.

So let’s have a redo, Minister. Let’s see if we can work on an amendment together.

Let’s be clear. The minister — the government — hasn’t exactly shown the demonstrated urgency of getting Bill 11 through before the end of this spring legislative session. They haven’t. On any of these four areas touched upon in this bill, none of them are urgent. In fact, government did a rather bizarre kind of thing with blocks and circles on it that promised there would be dialogue, on something called an accountability framework.

They didn’t say “on a draconian piece of legislation that gave the minister more power.” But on an accountability framework aspect of this bill, I guess, they promised the B.C. parent advisory committee, local DPACs, and school principals and trustees that they’d have a say on any changes on the accountability framework that they had in mind, and they never did it.

[1520]

I want to show the House the sum total of the government’s consultation on this bill. It’s right here. One page — March 26, 2015. It was put out five minutes after the bill was tabled. That’s when the consultation began and ended in the province of British Columbia. That’s the dialogue. A one-page typed monologue is the dialogue that we had on Bill 11. That’s all it is.

And the people who write this stuff? Wow, they’re good at obfuscation. Let me just quote from the back of this document. “The legislation sets the foundation and the starting point. We look forward to working with our education partners on approaches and solutions that better meet the needs of students.”

What does that mean? It doesn’t say anything about firing school boards and handing himself new powers. It doesn’t say anything about taking over the entire professional development regime for professional teachers in B.C. It’s not in there. This is the dialogue. This is the consultation right here. You paid for it. We all paid for it, the taxpayers of British Columbia, and nobody got any.

I’ve made the case, I think, that it’s illegitimate legislation because there was no meaningful advance discussion prior to the drafting stage of this bill. It denied any consultation and input with all the key stakeholders. But I want to suggest to you that it’s also dangerous legislation.

I think this is a dangerous bill because it threatens to supplant and bypass elected trustees. It attempts to centralize and bureaucratize the most important lever to drive improvement in our schools and the successful outcome of hundreds of thousands of today’s and tomorrow’s future students by seizing control of professional development of teachers by a bureaucracy which, after 14 Liberal years, quite frankly doesn’t have the capacity to take on new responsibilities around professional development. It’s going to fail.

There’s no capacity there to rip away professional development from local school districts and schools and the teaching profession and move it all over to Victoria. Who’s going to do the work? There’s no plan behind this. It’s ridiculous. There’s no vision for it either. I’ve looked everywhere. I go back to my one-page sheet. There’s no vision to do this. It’s made up on the fly.

So what’s the real agenda here? Why would B.C., at odds with all of the progressive jurisdictions that are actually investing and working with teachers on professional development reforms, in contradiction to all of the best practices in the world that we have looked upon, including the international experts that the minister flew to the Wosk Centre in Vancouver in January?

They came here. I was a little bit skeptical about the cost and wondered who’d be in the room. I quite enjoyed myself at this summit on education. I made a lot of notes at that meeting, and I thanked the minister for the invitation again; I think I thanked him before.

I’m just going back over my notes again. We had a gentleman from the OECD in Europe talk about the European experience and Canada’s ranking in the world. It was the opinion of the OECD, based on volumes of research from jurisdictions right around the globe, the industrialized countries…. The conclusion, which was a powerful one, is that the best investment a country can make is in the professional development of teachers. And the way you do it — whether it’s Finland or another place where they’re making substantive investments, the Netherlands or Britain — is that you grant a huge amount of autonomy to the teaching profession to shape what that agenda looks like.
[ Page 7675 ]

[1525]

Teachers aren’t any different from any other profession. They want to stay on top of their game. They’re professionals. They want to sharpen their skills. They want to review the pedagogy. We’re learning incredible amounts of things all the time in various fields of science about how learning happens or doesn’t happen.

I mean, just think of…. Well, I’ll go back to another speaker that the minister brought to that conference, a neuroscientist from Toronto who talked about how much we’ve learned just in the last decade and a half about adolescent development and learning strategies that actually go along with the anthropology and physiology of the human being at that stage in their life. We’re getting better at it all the time, but we’re getting better at it because the teaching profession is centrally involved.

This model in this bill opens the door to having a completely top-down model of professional development for teachers that is imposed upon them, that eradicates autonomy and eradicates all of the things that have proven to be successful in other countries. Why would we do that? That is so ill-considered.

You know, the government actually paid people who came here, flew here in some cases, and told them exactly the opposite of what is in Bill 11 today. That was three months ago. Why would you bring those people here and then not listen to them? It’s absurd. It’s bad enough that we’re not listening to school boards or British Columbia teachers; we’re not even listening to the international experts who were brought here to give camouflage, presumably, to the ridiculousness of this bill. I think he already it in mind what he was going to do around professional development. It’s wrong.

What we heard at that conference and what we hear from teachers themselves is that the reason why there has to be a high degree of autonomy in teacher professional development is because teachers learn from other teachers. New teachers learn from experienced teachers. Experienced teachers learn from new teachers. They share their experiences. They work together. They set their priorities on what is best for their school, because no school in B.C. is alike, entirely. School populations differ greatly, depending on what community you’re talking about.

That’s why teachers need to figure out what are the most urgent things to develop in their professional skill set at the school where they actually teach at. No bureaucrat in Victoria is ever going to be able to do that effectively. It’s absurd. That’s what we risk losing by signing this blank cheque legislation that can seize control entirely of teacher professional development.

I read a very interesting column by Geoff Johnson, who is, of course, a retired superintendent and has a very interesting regular column here in B.C. He said, immediately after Bill 11 was introduced…. He hadn’t had the benefit of being able to dwell upon it or give it close reading, I presume, but he said: “I hope we can assume three things. First, that along with the proposed legislation there is actually a plan.” Teacher professional development — nope, there’s no plan. Don’t assume that with this government.

He says: “Second, that somebody in the Education Ministry has provided a background paper as to what kind of staff development has been found to be most effective in other government departments.” No — asked for that in the estimates. No such thing.

“And third, that specific funding has been identified to accomplish an upgrading of staff development for B.C.’s teachers.” No. No new funding for professional development.

Now, it’s interesting in reading the international literature — some, again, which was provided for the conference that I enjoyed attending, that the minister sponsored — that one of the reasons why Finland, which I know is a very well-studied jurisdiction…. Why their model of professional development is emulated and well studied is because in 2009 the Finnish Ministry of Education, in collaboration with teachers, began to double the public funding for teacher professional development. All the way through to 2016 they ramped it up. They had a plan.

[1530]

British Columbia has no plan. You know what? If we have no plan, we shouldn’t give this government a law. We shouldn’t give this government a law that has no plan behind it. That is dangerous legislation.

Now, I mentioned that I don’t think the Ministry of Education, after 14 years of ravaging by this government, has the capacity to take this function on, although they’re handing it to themselves through this proposed law. I would actually note that several senior positions in the ministry, who’ve actually given a vision in recent years to the government’s own education plan, are fleeing the ship. They’re all leaving the ministry, so there’s a huge drain in the capacity that has already been reduced. They’re taking their professional expertise elsewhere, to other school districts and other places.

You know what’s really hard to understand about this bill? It’s so poorly motivated by the government — that press release, everything I’ve heard, the minister’s introductory remarks. This bill doesn’t even align with the script that this government has written about its so-called record and how it would like to frame it for itself.

It actually contradicts the Premier’s message from last October. I’ll go back to that message again. She told everybody in British Columbia: “Now is the time to heal.” This bill is not healing our school system, and the Premier should explain how her words have become this bad proposed law.

We don’t want the roller-coaster pattern that British Columbians have come to endure from this government. It’s a deceitful, divisive and confrontational pattern that’s distracted and detracted from our school system for far, far too long.
[ Page 7676 ]

It began, if we want to go right back, with the unconstitutional act of ripping up and removing class-size and composition rules enshrined in legal contracts in 2003. I guess we have to stay tuned on that front this Thursday. The government has lost twice in the province’s highest court on that act. That was government’s entry point into the beginning of a decade of confrontation.

It goes on and on, year after year, both in their funding decisions, their funding record through the budget, and also in activities like what we lived through last year — two disrupted school years back to back, no end in sight.

There is huge dissatisfaction right now in the school system. People are still smarting from the beginning of September. The lesson plans have not been adopted to ensure that the curriculum in the school year can be managed and taught when you lose that many school days.

The Premier was right. It was time to heal. How does this bill have anything to do with those words that she uttered last September? It’s the complete opposite.

Now, I think the minister should actually, as I suggested a few minutes ago, pick up the phone. He missed the opportunity to be at the BCSTA annual general meeting, but I know he knows a lot of school trustees. I hope he continues to have respect for school trustees. They work hard for their communities, for parents, for teachers and staff.

I have seen it up close. A neighbour of mine, who lives four doors down, was elected in November as a brand-new school trustee. I’ve got to tell you: that was the last time we’ve seen his car in the driveway. Night after night after night of dedication and hard work for almost no pay. That’s the reality of what school trustees do for our students in this province. When they’re not out making budgets or hearing from parents, they’re out supporting their students, sharing in their achievements and their pride. They’re at school concerts. They’re at sporting events. That’s what the life of a trustee is.

They got elected to do the job as they understood it. Part of that job, the most important part of that job, is that a trustee makes the deliberations about programs, about planning, about budget-making. They fulfil difficult duties that require enormous attention and good judgment.

[1535]

That’s what the electorate hires for. They hire candidates that they think will have the best judgment for the students in their communities. But now it’s not their judgment. This legislation will allow the minister, for almost any reason, with almost no accountability, to appoint special advisers to go in and usurp all of the planning, programming and budget-making functions of a school board. What is left after that? I mean, that’s the core function of school boards in our province.

Let’s go back to the budget, because I think this bill is the companion piece for the budget. The budget shocked people in the education sector with $55 million of new cuts that this government, this minister, explicitly promised wouldn’t happen. A fully funded deal with the teachers turned into $55 million in cuts in February.

Then we started to hear a lot from the minister, and continue to hear from him, about how easy this is. The Premier called it low-hanging fruit. “Oh, $55 million? No problem.” I’ve got the deputy minister’s briefing note that actually acknowledges that before the $55 million cut, school boards were dealing with a $200 million unfunded cost pressure in this province.

There is no low-hanging fruit. If the Premier thinks there’s low-hanging fruit in the education system, she can’t have spent a single solitary minute talking to a parent, a kid or a teacher in B.C. That is so at odds with the reality in British Columbia today.

Then the inaccuracies got worse. It went from low-hanging fruit to saying: “Oh, administration costs in B.C. are 7 percent. We just want it to go down to 6 percent.” I’m paraphrasing the tweet, but that’s about it. Wrong. Administration costs in B.C. are barely over 3 percent.

In the minister’s own riding administrative overhead in Surrey school district — 2 percent. You can’t get much leaner than 2 percent administration. Payroll, legal, all of the infrastructure of a large, modern, fast-growing school district comes in at two pennies on the dollar in the minister’s own area.

I think the opposition found some low-hanging fruit just the other day in question period, and I’d like the government to go back and pick it. When they sold land at $45 million below the appraised value in Coquitlam, one of the fastest-growing and most desirable real estate locations on the continent of North America, I think we know what low-hanging fruit looks like. It’s the incompetence of people who can’t even sell real estate at the appraised value of which it’s worth. And they want to give lectures to school districts about administrative savings and efficiencies? Oh my lord. It’s the other way around.

I would like to suggest this afternoon that the minister appoint the Surrey school board to be special advisers to report on the low-hanging fruit squandered by this government in the AGLG scandal and the land sales and wherever else there is waste that could be put into public education. How about that?

Then he said he followed this one up — the misquote around what administrative savings look like and what the actual rate of administrative costs are in B.C. — by saying there’s a myth of public education being underfunded in B.C. “These things don’t go on. Parents don’t fundraise for core needs in education. It’s a myth.”

[1540]

If there was a dollar for every time that parents, grandparents, teachers, principals, trustees and small business donors in our community have to get together to deal with funding issues for books, for breakfast programs, for equipment, for technology and so on, then you know what? If there was a dollar for every time that conversa-
[ Page 7677 ]
tion happens every minute of the day in the public education system in British Columbia, then maybe we finally wouldn’t be $1,000 behind the national per-pupil funding average in the country of Canada.

It is a reality. To call it a myth is an insult to the intelligence and, frankly, the hard work that goes on every day, every week and every month in our school system to allow it to function as best it can.

I will ask the minister again. On the subject of keeping his word, which I know he surely must think is an important thing…. After all, that’s pretty fundamental to what public education teaches every kid in B.C. Do what you say, mean what you say, live up to your word — social responsibility values.

How is it possible that in December he can go to a photo op and sign a memorandum of understanding with all of the elected trustees in British Columbia that specifically commits him to consult that level of government on any major policy change or legislative change that government might be contemplating…? How could he sign that document in December, and here we are now in April, and none of them were consulted or asked or given anything related to the provisions of that very MOU that he signed? What does that say about the value of his signature?

I’ve tried to make the case this afternoon that it’s a hugely bad recipe for making bad laws. But there’s something here about the integrity of government, too, that’s at stake in this debate, when you can make a splashy show of signing these kinds of documents, using all the right words around collaboration and partnership and consultation, and make them rendered so meaningless.

What does that say about the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia and this governing party that tries to govern the province this way? What does it say to those in the public education system who are teaching our kids that that’s not the way you should be in life? I think it says a lot.

Now I want to read some letters that I’ve received from different boards of education around British Columbia, because I didn’t hear any acknowledgment in the minister’s opening remarks that trustees and superintendents and school boards around B.C. oppose this legislation. He won’t even acknowledge that what he introduced in this House has been utterly panned and rejected around B.C.

I think it’s important that somebody give voice to those in B.C. who have looked at this legislation and think it’s ludicrous and wrong. The Delta board of education, I think, makes some very good points in a letter dated April 22, addressed to the Minister of Education. It first of all asks…. I’ll go back to this point. I know I’ve just made it, but in their words it cites the memorandum of understanding that I’ve just talked about.

Let me quote the consultation and notification section of that MOU. It says — and he signed this:

“Any party proposing a change in policy or programs that will affect the other party will consult and collaborate with the other party to the fullest extent possible given the specific circumstances of any respective legislative obligation. This commitment includes, but is not limited to, timely notification of the proposed change.

“The parties recognize that there may be extraordinary circumstances that limit the timeliness of consultation. In such circumstances, the other party will be provided with the rationale for the unusual limitations to consultation.”

None of that followed either.

“New responsibilities will not be assigned to boards of education until resourcing implications have been discussed between the parties.”

[1545]

Kind of like the special advisers that will be imposed on school districts, like the minister did the other day to the Vancouver school board — a $180,000 contract to an accounting firm of his choosing, not the school board’s, to look at a $14 million structural deficit in the Vancouver school board. Didn’t even bother to tell the school board about that.

Was that the opening shot? Was that the first salvo in what life is going to look like with an expanded role for special advisers, post–Bill 11, to go anywhere, do anything that is ordered by the minister in our school boards? These are the questions that school boards are asking, and they don’t have the answers from this government. They read the legislation, and it’s quite possible, if the law is amended in this way, that’s what life will be like in the future for school boards.

It finally comes down to a request, in this letter, of the minister. I don’t know if he’s responded. I hope he has, and I hope he’ll copy me on it, because I was copied on the letter to him.

“The Delta board of education envisions that by withdrawing these provisions of Bill 11, an opportunity would be created for trustees to work with the ministry in the spirit envisioned by the MOU on co-governance. We could consult and co-construct new legislation that will enable us to work together as co-governance partners, respecting the mandates given by our constituents and providing our communities with the benefits of the local representation in meeting the needs of our students while supporting the broader goals of a strong public education system for our province.”

What an utterly reasonable request. It actually describes what the law-making process in British Columbia should look like. This government has it completely backwards. They legislate, and then they say they’ll consult.

You have to suspend any belief to imagine that this government, once it has given itself the power, will then start to talk nice and act respectfully to the parties that they promised they would do that to in the first place. They won’t have to, once they’re armed with a law in their hands, and based on all of the actions of this minister and his predecessors and this government in public education, they won’t do it. They will use the legislation for their own ends, in their own way, and this law will give them the ability to do it in ways that are completely unaccountable to British Columbians.

There is an excellent letter that came from school district 46 in Sunshine Coast, in which they say:
[ Page 7678 ]

“We are extremely dismayed at the lack of consultation prior to this bill and specifically at the changes in scope and authority that the bill gives to the Minister of Education. At the recent BCSTA annual general meeting, your own deputy minister” — this is addressed to the minister — “Dave Byng, stated that your ministry does not know the job of school boards better than trustees and that the ministry wanted to work for better ‘engagement and relationships’ with local boards. Giving the minister the power to direct boards in how they ‘manage schools and properties’ erodes trust and relationship and is disrespectful of the communities that elect their school boards.”

These letters are all addressed to the minister. Let me, just to be regionally diverse here, read one from Fort Nelson.

“To begin with, we are dismayed at the disrespect you and your government have displayed toward trustees in the province. Despite repeated public statements and the signing of the MOU in December, committing to collaboration and a genuine model of co-governance, we continue to see a succession of significant decisions on policy, budget and legislative initiatives which give no evidence of such an approach.

“Your absence from the recent BCSTA annual general meeting confirms our assessment that the relationship between trustees and you, as minister, is not healthy. While we do not contest that it is your prerogative to do so, the insistence by your government to move forward with what appears to be a pre-set agenda, despite or in the absence of advice from districts, inevitably affects the quality of any significant choices taken.

[1550]

“As with all such determinations, the results can be traced through to their impact on learners. This is where our greatest concern lies and what compels us to contact you at this juncture.”

Every school district in British Columbia is taking the time to write this minister, to give him their opinion — that they reject Bill 11. I’ve read three letters just now that all offer the minister an olive branch to wind this back and find a process that will allow consultation without the imposition of the law, the bill, dangling over their heads. You can’t have a genuine consultation and conversation with that in the background.

The minister has given no rationale for why this needs to be done right now. He’s failed to explain to anyone why he so utterly failed to talk to school boards before proposing such drastic measures that we see in this bill. The school boards, although they’re upset — and you can clearly get that from the tone of these letters — are not challenging his authority per se. They’re appealing to his decency to do the right thing as a lawmaker, to live up to his words that he signed on a piece of paper in a memorandum and to sit down and talk with them. Why won’t he do it? Well, the question is: will he do it? There’s time for him to do that.

I think what really annoys school boards about the powers that the minister will hand himself to appoint special advisers or to dismiss boards entirely if he wants to move them right out of the way is that it’s retaliation. It’s retaliation because they spoke up against him and his government when he broke his word to fully fund the teachers’ contract. He didn’t live up to that. They said: “You know what? We don’t have $55 million anymore to cut.”

Year after year after year, unfunded cost pressures have been met by the school system, and the result was the class size and composition problem that we had in British Columbia that was at the heart of the dispute last year. Everybody in B.C. wants to move past that and solve it. It’s before the courts, but it was before the bargaining table. That’s where the crux of a deal ultimately happened.

The minister is not going to hear out people on this question. He’s retaliating because they took him at his word when he said it was going to be fully funded. He’s putting in legislation that can render them useless, quite frankly, that can push them aside.

Everybody in British Columbia should be concerned about that. If they can do it to an important partner on the ground in our communities around public education, where does this agenda stop? Where does the centralizing impulse of government to push aside other local…? If I was a mayor or a councillor right now, I would be very concerned what this government is doing through Bill 11. And they are looking at it.

What annoys school boards, though, about this is the ability to foist upon them special advisers. They’ve actually taught the government how to deliver more efficient public education over the last decade. They’ve been pounded down and handed tons of pressures. We’ve seen the loss of thousands of teachers. We’ve seen school psychologists…. We’ve seen some horrible choices that school officials don’t like. They never get a helping hand from this government.

They want the government to actually come forward, after the class composition strike of last year, with guarantees. Why wouldn’t this government make its pitch, its appeal, to British Columbians by acknowledging their problems in the school system, by saying, for example: “You know what? Two to three years to get a learning assessment for your kid is too long”? Six months is too long. Two years, three years is ridiculous.

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We have students with special learning needs who fall behind in reading and math and all sorts of things. It erodes their self-confidence. They can’t get the learning help that they need in the school system because this government says class composition is their number one priority — the Premier tweeted that one too — but then misses yet another budget opportunity, ignores the Standing Committee on Finance. It ignores everybody who would make that their priority. Instead, the showpiece in the spring of 2015 is this ridiculous piece of legislation.

What school boards are also saying on the subject of teaching government how to be more efficient is: “When we proposed shared services, we school boards, and began to innovate and began to partner with local governments and partner with suppliers in the procurement practices….”

With making more efficient their legal services, with
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trying to stretch every dollar they can that government gives them to run the school system, how did they get cast as being inefficient by a government that’s shown a huge appetite to be wasteful all the time? I gave some recent examples. We could give some more examples — bigger price tags, bigger projects that have gone over budget. I will leave my colleagues, perhaps, that point to make.

How did this government hijack, in the most hypocritical fashion, the idea that shared services is their idea and that the idea that making more efficient contracting policies and administration practices is something that actually has to be imposed on school districts? That’s absurd. That’s not the history or the genesis of shared-services programs in British Columbia.

The government is trying to take what has been a bottom-up process to make every dollar count where education is delivered in the 60 districts around British Columbia…. They’re trying to make that some kind of top-down imposition.

That’s not going to work — just like imposing what professional development looks like, going forward, from the minister’s office isn’t going to work. Just like sidelining elected school officials who were elected just a few months ago, re-elected in some cases, and removing them from the decision-making process for almost any reason that this minister should choose to do isn’t going to work. There is no single improvement in public education that will benefit from that. None.

Government, again, can agree and should agree with school boards and others who are telling them that the government should pause. They should hit the pause button on Bill 11. That’s the appeal. That’s the appeal from the partner in public education that doesn’t have the power. That’s all they have — to appeal to reason, to appeal to common sense, to appeal to the ethics of signing documents saying that this partner should be consulted and then wasn’t. That’s an appeal that shouldn’t be squandered by this government.

It’s before the government now at second reading stage of debate. Government has a chance to show that it actually understands the definition of what “collaboration” is. Collaboration is not a club to be used over your education partner. It’s a real word about working together for common purposes and common goals. It’s the way forward to further innovate education in B.C. — collaboration.

Collaboration is the way that the most progressive jurisdictions, the most prosperous economies in the OECD have driven investments into professional development of teachers. That’s what we should be talking about in British Columbia.

I would urge the minister…. We’ve had strong words already on this debate. My colleagues will have strong words as well. He’s had strong words from those who’ve reviewed his Bill 11. It’s okay to pull back. It’s okay to avoid a mistake. It’s better to talk to people who have serious concerns about what this legislation will mean about how they govern public education in the province of British Columbia.

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It’s better to avoid likely mistakes than to push them through. That’s what the Minister of Education should take from this debate this afternoon and in the days ahead. It’s not too late — the ball is, in fact, in his court — to live up to his words, the promises that he has made over and over again, which he’s explicitly put in a codified document with school boards to work with the teachers of British Columbia and to finally even fulfil his own education plan.

His own education plan is better fulfilled without Bill 11 than being sabotaged with Bill 11. I would appeal to him, just as hundreds of others in the written letters that he’s received have appealed to him: pause Bill 11. This is bad legislation. It’s not needed, it’s not urgent, it’s certainly not necessary, and it’s not warranted.

J. Thornthwaite: I’m quoting. “Man’s yesteryear may ne’er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but mutability.” This is a quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Mutability. The speaker encapsulates both the eternal inevitability of change and the need for mutability or ongoing adaptive change when he proclaims the quote.

“Although Shelley wrote those words almost 200 years ago, his thoughts on the importance of acknowledging and accepting change as a constant cannot be disregarded even now. This begs the question: how do we as effective educational leaders ‘deliver the kind of results we now need to equip students for today’s world and tomorrow’s?’”

This is from the April 2015 Adminfo, the B.C. Principals and Vice-Principals Association journal. It was written by an English teacher who “says no to instructional strategies that worked in the 20th century and, instead, develops an inquiry-based project to boost student achievement in literacy now.”

I wanted to bring this up because it indicates that everybody understands that the educational system must keep up with the pace of society today, and that means all professionals involved in education must be doing the same.

I’m standing here in support of Bill 11. Everybody knows here in this House that I’m a parent, three children. Two have successfully completed the public education system. One is still in the public education system. I was a parent advisory council volunteer. I was also a school trustee. In fact, I was chair of the North Vancouver school board.

I’m proud of our world-class education system. But part of growing and maintaining a great system is finding ways to evolve. The status quo has no status. Bill 11 is about working with the teaching profession and other
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professions to help build together a modern framework for professional development.

The most important factor in student success is the quality of a teacher. One of the best ways to do this is to support quality teaching. We want to work with B.C. teachers to help strengthen the profession, enhance public confidence and, most importantly, help students reach their full potential. That’s all we’re here for. It’s to help students reach their full potential.

Most B.C. teachers participate in some form of professional development over the course of the school year. Most have access to six non-instructional days per year, and the vast majority of teachers participate. However, it is not consistent, and many parents have asked me what accountability is in the system to ensure that all teachers attend and participate in professional development days.

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Currently taxpayers spend more than $72 million for those pro-D days. School boards also spend millions on transportation, accommodation and conference workshop fees for teachers, as does their union. But the range and the quality of professional development days and attendance vary. There are no detailed requirements for teachers to maintain currency of practice, and there are no criteria or assessment of whether the activities are actually benefiting teachers, let alone students in the classroom.

This bill will provide a clear foundation on which to move forward. We need to build public confidence in the public education system — that students are benefiting from the significant investment in time and dollars that taxpayers and teachers put towards pro-D. So the ministry will be working with teachers to develop the framework.

The intent is to have these consultations first, until the legislation comes in force. There are other professionals, as well as parents, that will also be involved. I can tell you that the MLAs in North Vancouver meet on a regular basis with our school trustees, and we did just last month.

The other thing I’d like to mention is…. I’ve got a few motions that the B.C. parent advisory councils has put forward. One was: “The BCCPAC call on the B.C. Teachers Council to require that all teaching certificate holders update and maintain their skills to the standard level expected of newly certified teacher certificate holders.” And that “the BCCPAC call on the B.C. Teachers Council to complete the review and update teaching standards for teaching certificate holders prior to the 2015 and 2016 year.” This was a motion from last year.

Most professions set clear standards for ongoing professional development and to maintain their credentials, to continue practising their profession — doctors, lawyers, early childhood educators, accountants, architects, nurses. I’ll talk about dietitians, because I was a practising dietitian before being elected. They’ve got continuing competency programs and instructions for using a professional development guide, which actually is something where they can be flexible, depending on their level of practice. We know that as teachers specialize in certain levels of their education, so do dietitians and other professionals.

I just wanted to give you a little bit of an update about what dietitians have to do and have had to do for decades. I was a dietitian for 22 years. Not only did we have to itemize and document the professional development days and hours that we had to complete, but it was required to maintain our certification and to even practise as a registered dietitian. This was not only to protect the public — because registered dietitians are the only nutrition professionals that have this — but it was also to protect the profession itself.

I’m going to just give you an example. I took this from the continuing competence program for the registrants of the College of Dietitians of B.C.’s professional development guide.

“To fulfil the requirements of the continuing competence program, registrants refer to the relevant section and forms in the professional development guide to: assemble a professional portfolio…conduct a self-assessment of performance relative to the standards of practice and summarize the results of the self-assessment to identify target areas for personal professional development.

“Prepare personalized learning plans by identifying existing and/or potential professional development activities that correspond to target areas. Document evidence of participation in relevant professional development activities. Track progress towards achievement of learning goals. Complete and submit an annual” — annual — “on-line declaration of participation in the continuing competence program. Submit for review every three years a professional development plan. “

Dietitians, to use the word that the minister used, can customize their professional development to their practice. I was a clinical dietitian, but I also at some point in my career was a food service manager. I also was a dietitian in private practice. I worked for industry, and I worked for health authorities and within the community.

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At each of those levels of practice, I would devise my professional development accordingly. This is what Bill 11 is all about. It is time we put the teaching profession on the similar footing as virtually every other profession out there. I’m proud of the relationships that I have with my children’s teachers — as well as in a professional relationship as an MLA — as well as with the school trustees and the teaching profession.

One of the things that comes to mind a lot in my particular field right now, my portfolio, being the parliament secretary for youth mental health as well as anti-bullying…. I get asked questions all the time: what kind of professional development is out there for teachers with regards to child and youth mental health issues?

There are lots of teachers who do a lot of professional development on this issue. In fact, there is a group called the B.C. School Centred Mental Health Coalition. These are groups — teachers, including counsellors; health professionals; people from many different ministries, includ-
[ Page 7681 ]
ing Health, MCFD, Education, etc.; health authorities, etc. — who come together to work together on how we can improve the situations for children and youth with mental health issues.

These are the types of things that we support — these progressive teachers that are working very hard with other professions, including health care, to try to make things better for kids. All Bill 11 is doing is ensuring that all teachers are doing this.

In summary, I’d just like to reiterate my support for this Bill 11 on improving public confidence in the public school system but also helping teachers in their professional development, in whatever they choose to do with regards to their portfolios.

G. Heyman: I rise to speak in opposition to this bill. There’s such a long list of reasons to oppose this bill that it would take me far more than the allotted time I have to address them all, but I know that virtually every one of my colleagues will be speaking to this bill.

Let me start by responding to one of the final comments from the MLA for North Vancouver–Seymour that she and her colleagues support professional development, and they want to help teachers get the best possible professional development they can.

That’s an ironic statement, which I will highlight later, with regard to the complete failure of this government to show respect for teachers over virtually the entire tenure they’ve held office here in Victoria, particularly with respect to treating teachers unlike any other profession in British Columbia that self-regulates, that decides what they need for their own professional development, or even to respect the commitment that this minister has made to consult with the BCTF on any number of issues as recently as the conclusion of the collective agreement.

Once again, this minister has reverted to type. In the case of this minister, the Education Minister, his type is: my way or the highway.

Let me start by reading into the record part of a response from the Delta school district addressed to the minister on April 22 and signed by the chairperson of the Delta board of education. There are some important points made early in the letter. It says: “Delta trustees express concerns that consultation as set out in the co-governance relationship memorandum of understanding did not take place in the development of this legislation.”

Trustees focused on the following section of the memorandum of understanding:

“Consultation and notification. Any party proposing a change in policies or programs that will affect the other party will consult and collaborate with the other party to the fullest extent possible given the specific circumstances and any respective legislative and confidentiality obligations. This commitment includes, but is not limited to, timely notification of the proposed change.”

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“To the fullest extent possible” means just that. It doesn’t mean cursory and perfunctory notification moments before legislation is going to be introduced that fundamentally changes the relationship from one of co-governance to one of subservience. It’s certainly not the Minister of Education who will be subservient to the knowledge and vision and desires of locally elected boards of trustees, to build the best possible and the most responsive possible education system that they can within the jurisdiction for which they’re responsible.

The letter goes on to say:

“We are also committed to continue exercising our fiduciary responsibilities to the highest standards possible, while allocating resources to ensure an excellent public education for our students. In accordance with our oath of office, we have made many tough decisions to comply with School Act requirements for a balanced budget.”

I’ll pause in reading the Delta board of education’s letter for a moment just to highlight that this is true of every district as this government has systematically underfunded, cut funding and not covered increases in costs that they themselves have imposed.

Whether it’s the cost of power or whether it’s the requirement to purchase carbon offsets or whether it is rising MSP costs, which they are contractually obliged to pay as part of collective agreements and which rise without any corresponding funding from the government, school district after school district have done their best to ensure a quality education for students. But that, apparently, is not good enough for this minister.

This minister wants school boards to do exactly what he says. He wants them to find money when he wants them to, when he tells them to, in exactly the manner that he wishes them to and not in the manner that they deem most responsive, even within constraints imposed by the government to the needs and desires of the parents and families who elected them and hold them accountable.

The letter finally goes on to say:

“We’ve been democratically elected to safeguard the resources of our district on behalf of our constituents. We must therefore speak against any legislation that would alter this mandate by placing an unelected special adviser who is not accountable to our community in front of our trustees’ ability to serve our community.”

Parents regularly come to my office to speak with me about what they see in education — the gaps they see, the challenges they face as families, the challenges their children face as students. Whether it’s lack of resources or lack of textbooks or lack of proper class composition or overcrowded classrooms or inadequate infrastructure, too many portables, or whether students have to travel to another district because there simply aren’t enough spaces for them in the schools which may only be a block or two away from where they live…. There are any list of issues.

Every MLA in this House knows this, because parents come and talk about the challenges they face. They take time away from their busy days. They struggle with work, but they come to talk about their kids because their kids don’t get a second chance to get a good education. They don’t get a second chance to prepare themselves for the
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work world that they will face in the future and to which their education is so crucial in preparing them equitably with every child in the province, no matter how wealthy or poor their family, and which prepares them for the rest of their lives.

In all the meetings that I’ve had with constituents on the education system, strangely enough, not a single parent has come to me and said: “Gee, I really wish the Minister of Education just had power to do whatever he wanted. Clearly, the school boards aren’t doing enough hard work to find low-hanging fruit and cut our education system even further. They need a strong Education Minister who knows exactly what he wants to do to drive through the government’s agenda to underfund public education, to take resources from education to support a $236 million tax cut to British Columbia’s most wealthy citizens and to find, in the midst of supposedly looking for low-hanging fruit in the public system, 30 million additional dollars a year for independent private schools.”

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Strangely — I have to scratch my head — not a single parent has come to me to ask about that; although, in a few minutes I will talk about exactly the kinds of things they have asked from me.

We’ve seen, through this government, time after time their willingness to centralize power, their willingness to break the constitution and break collective agreements and contracts in order to bend the education system, school boards and teachers to their will. But what they’ve done in the past, or the rulings of the Supreme Court or even lower courts in British Columbia that have found…. Even when the government said they were going to change tack in order to obey the ruling of the court, they simply violated the law yet again.

This bill further centralizes government control over education, and that’s what it’s about. More damagingly…. I’ve sat in this Legislature. I’ve listened to the Minister of Education and to the Premier time after time crow about their ability to negotiate collective agreements with teachers — that that’s exactly what they did, that they found a workable agreement and that they’re going to start a new chapter in the relationship with teachers in which everybody will work happily ever after to create a better education system.

What do they do after the longest job action in B.C. history? The government failed to consult with teachers, other than a perfunctory notice moments before the bill was tabled, over something so fundamental to professionals in the education system as control over their own professional development — not only as teachers as a group but ensuring that aspects of professional development and how it’s delivered that are specific to the needs of each school district can be decided in that district by people who actually know what’s needed, who know what they need in order to best meet the needs of their students.

No, that’s not good enough for this Education Minister. Unless the teachers are doing exactly what he says, in exactly the way he wants them to do it, it’s not good enough for him, and it’s not good enough for this government.

This bill eliminates school planning councils. Right throughout this bill there’s poison pill after poison pill for any hope of maintaining locally elected democratic influence that can be responsive to the needs of parents and the needs of their children in the local education system.

This is about centralization. It’s about ministerial authority, either directly or through surrogates, over virtually every aspect of the education system, whether it be professional development, whether it be maintenance, whether it’s safety of school properties or whether it’s how the district spends its money.

The minister has the power to appoint an official administrator if boards fail to comply with his direction to engage in shared-service delivery in a particular manner. Now, there’s much to be commended about cost-efficiencies in shared-service delivery. But the people who know what will work and what won’t work are the people in the local school boards.

The minister could have said: “I’m contemplating legislation, but before I do that, I would like to have a conference of school trustees.” In fact, he might even have taken the trouble, given that he’s Minister of Education, to attend the annual general meeting of the B.C. School Trustees Association.

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It would have been a good place to get input, to take the temperature, to hear what people are considering and looking for and, perhaps, to float some ideas about consulting about how we might find real efficiencies within the school districts and school system without compromising aspects of independence that are there because, quite simply, they work better or because some aspects of shared services don’t work across regions.

But no, he didn’t bother to go to the school trustees before the AGM and talk about his ideas and consult. He didn’t bother to actually go to the AGM and be accountable for this piece of legislation to the school trustees. Maybe he wasn’t prepared to face them. Maybe he didn’t trust himself to control his reaction when trustee after trustee told him exactly what they thought of his heavy-handed legislation. For whatever reason, he didn’t go.

Perhaps it’s simply a matter of extending what’s implicit in this bill: complete disrespect for locally elected officials charged with governing and overseeing the education of kids. Maybe he’d just rather sit in his office or hang out with some friends and decide what’s best for everyone.

Having said all that, the sensible thing to do would be to bring the stakeholders together and talk about what might work instead of saying, from the start: “I’m going to tell you what to do, and if you don’t do it, I’m going to
[ Page 7683 ]
send somebody in to make you do it.”

There’s a word for that in the school yard. It’s a word that relates to the annual event around which the Premier of this province happily dons a pink T-shirt. It’s called bullying, and it’s not the first time this Minister of Education has engaged in it.

There are other aspects of this bill that are heavy-handed and, quite possibly, that violate legislation of this province. Let’s talk about access to student information. There’s a key question in these amendments. Will they allow disclosure of students’ personal information in ways that are not allowed under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act?

I wish the minister was here to hear this concern. It’s a question and a concern that will be asked of the minister….

Deputy Speaker: Member, do not point to the members who are in the House or not. Please carry on.

G. Heyman: Thank you.

I look forward to all of us having an opportunity to put this question to the minister during committee stage because it’s an important question. Section 170 of the School Act, entitled “Non-disclosure of student records,” is now deleted.

The current section 170 has strict controls over the ability of ministry employees to disclose student personal information. The amendments remove those strict controls. It’s not clear what the rationale for this is. It’s not clear to whom the personal information will be disclosed.

Is the government envisioning data linking between public bodies? Is the government considering that, perhaps, the way to raise money for schools is to sell the information to somebody in the private sector who may want to market to students? Nobody knows, because we don’t have a reason for this.

All we know is that this amendment, in particular, appears to compromise the confidentiality of students’ personal, private information. These are vulnerable children. These are children. These are people who have grown up in a world where information is so easily accessed. But they have yet, probably, in all likelihood, to develop the defense mechanisms to be careful about what’s out there. Certainly, schools have access to much personal information about kids.

Let me close this section by simply saying that the minister should go back to the drawing board on this section. We don’t know if the minister consulted with the Information and Privacy Commissioner. We don’t know if the minister intends to override that act with this amendment to the education act, the School Act. We simply don’t know.

It’s not acceptable. It’s not advisable. It’s bad policy. It runs counter to everything that we’ve talked about in this Legislature and that’s a concern in society about protecting our personal, private information. Again, this is a flaw in the bill.

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This bill risks a lot. This bill risks throwing away an ability to develop some true consultative mechanisms between this government and stakeholders in the education system. This bill risks further alienating teachers and the B.C. Teachers Federation.

This bill risks alienating parents who believe that for all the flaws in the education system, for all the funding problems, for all the cuts that the system has seen, at least they have a relationship with locally elected and accountable trustees. It now appears that the minister wants to use locally elected, accountable trustees as a screen between himself and his own accountability and the public and, when the boards do not do what he wishes or what he orders, to simply send somebody in to force them to do it.

There are already some abilities within the School Act brought in by this government to have special advisers sent into schools, but this just expands it. It expands it exponentially, and it expands it unacceptably.

We recently saw around British Columbia a series of rallies called Families Against Cuts to Education. The kinds of things I heard at the Vancouver rally were echoes of the very real and troubled conversations that I’ve had with parents of school-age children in my constituency office. But included among those concerns was a very real concern that Bill 11 eroded democracy. It undermined teachers. It undermined their professionalism. The result of that could only be bad news for their kids, bad news for the education system.

If you continue to erode and undermine the professional accountability and the respect for people in the teaching profession, you will get a predictable result. You will end up with teachers who have struggled for so long, often dipping into their own pocket for extra resources in order to give students what they need, who have tried and tried to make this government hear that it’s almost impossible for them to deliver quality education within a system that’s starved for funds and where class size and composition are completely out of whack with demonstrably proven good educational and learning conditions.

They will at some point give up. Their morale will be so eroded that it will become next to impossible for them to continue to bring the goodwill, the energy, the desire to give kids the best possible education that they have done for so long.

In Vancouver-Fairview parents have told me about their kids telling them they can’t do their homework that night because they’re forced to share textbooks — share textbooks — and it’s some other child’s turn to have the textbook. Or the parents tell me about returning from a hard day at work and having to drive their kids to some other kid’s house to get the textbook needed for homework.
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At Simon Fraser Elementary we have a school that’s operating with two portables. It’s getting one to two more. It’s very full. It includes the Olympic Village in its catchment area, so it’s going to get fuller as Olympic Village fills up.

We have stories of kids who live two blocks from the school who have to go to another school far, far away because there’s a catchment lottery system. If they don’t win the lottery, they don’t get to go to that school because there’s not an available space for them.

There’s not enough time for librarians in the school, I’m told, and I believe it.

Marlene Rodgers and Jen Stewart, two parents who are very active in organizing other parents to speak out against underfunding of education, told me that their PAC is always fundraising. They’re always fundraising for art supplies, for library books, for everything they get on the teachers’ wish list at the beginning of the school year. They say “teachers’ wish list.” Teachers’ wish list is simply a code word for the necessities of education on a daily basis.

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Parents are forced to supply reams of paper so that things can be photocopied in the school. There are delays in testing for special needs, for challenged kids and even for gifted kids. That is driving parents to an option they don’t want to consider. They want their kids to get the best possible education. They’re stretched financially, but parents who want their kids to have the best and believe they will not be able to get that in the public education system are looking to private schools to fill the gap.

They don’t want to. They’re being forced to, and perhaps…. That is clearly the government’s agenda because, as I said, school boards who year after year after year have found every possible administrative saving they could are now being told to find something called low-hanging fruit. Low-hanging fruit was picked a decade ago, and unlike the fruit in the orchards in the Okanagan, it doesn’t spring up every year. When it’s cut, it’s gone.

On the one hand, we have cuts to administration costs that are being foisted on school boards, and on the other hand, we have additional money going to private schools. I don’t know about you, but what that says to me is we have a government that has shifted focus from the great equalizer of the public education system to a private system where if you have enough money, your kid gets the start that all kids deserve and if you don’t have enough money, too bad. You will never reach your full potential because you won’t get the education you deserve.

Let me wrap up by talking about some comments from former school superintendent Geoff Johnson. Both of these were made in articles he wrote, columns he wrote in the Times Colonist.

[D. Horne in the chair.]

In the first column Mr. Johnson said, with respect to professional development:

“Teacher professional development days are historically a matter of contractual agreement. Of the five or so days each year, some are school-based and some are organized by the school district, usually in collaboration with the union.

“District-organized days are more often than not focused on instructional goals the school district has established. School-based days are determined by the staff of the school and are sometimes specific to that school.

“With the government and the BCTF already in court on the unresolved matters of class size and composition, it would be less than productive to pour legislative gasoline on that still-smouldering issue.”

Geoff Johnson was not a president of the BCTF. He was a school superintendent who recognized and still recognizes that you cannot continually torch the relationship with teachers without getting a negative result on the education system.

Finally, in another article Mr. Johnson says something that, for me, is the most unfortunate and in some ways the most frightening point made in his articles. He says: “A new study, reported in the British journal Nature last month, tells us that poverty shrinks a baby’s brain right from birth, dooming the child even before it has a chance and dooming the teachers who to try to save it.”

Now, there’s an issue a family-oriented government could really get after. According to the United Way: “Thirty percent of six-year-olds are not ready to learn by the time they enter school due to poverty and related factors.”

We know that for ten years running this government’s record with respect to children in poverty — and, of course, that means families in poverty — has had B.C. at the bottom in Canada or tied for the bottom in Canada. If the Minister of Education, the cabinet and the government are concerned about the future of our children and the best education, why don’t they take a step back? In order for every child to have the right that we’re born with to reach our full potential if we’re willing to work as hard as possible to achieve it and to realize it and to actualize it….

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If we get the support we need to get the food that children need for their brains to be healthy and grow and to get the education, the quality education, the attention from teachers that they need to develop their skills, to learn and to be the best they can be….

If the Minister of Education, if the cabinet and if this government really wanted to improve the education system, they’d start with improving lives of all children — not just the children of the richest 2 percent, but all children. They would address child poverty. They’d address the needs in the education system. Instead of underfunding the education system, they would meet every additional cost that they have larded onto the system by raising rates, not just for schools but for every British Columbian. They would put money where it mat-
[ Page 7685 ]
tered. They would ensure that kids could do the best they can and be the best they can.

Instead, we have a minister whose imagination is so impoverished that all he can do is appoint special advisers to impose his will on locally elected school boards, ignore the demands of parents to restore funding to education and programs that have been cut, and disrespect teachers who deliver that education system. That is why I and my colleagues will oppose this bill.

N. Macdonald: Okay, so I guess that was the government’s case, then. We had two speakers on a significant bill, and I guess that was the sum of the government’s case on Bill 11. So let’s just review what we heard.

First, we heard from the minister. The minister laid out what he intends to do. Then we followed with the member for North Vancouver–Seymour, who spoke about teacher professional development but showed absolutely no understanding of what actually happens with professional development. And that is the sum of the government’s case here.

By the way, just as an abstract, there is a custom that the minister shows some respect to the debate on second reading by at least listening to the critic all the way through. That that custom is not respected in this House on second reading just seems, to me, to speak volumes about the arrogance that is at the heart of everything to do with Bill 11.

Now, people at home do talk about education and about education issues. But I can tell you that no one has talked, is talking or will talk about most of the issues that are in this bill. They are not at home saying that we have to make the school boards more irrelevant and powerless. People are not telling me that they want to have the government take over and direct professional development instead of teachers and principals and superintendents.

What’s lost here is…. Professional development — half of the time it is run by the district, directed by principals and superintendents, and then half the time it is school-based. Now the government is going to impose itself, with the history this government has on education initiatives? It’s ridiculous.

The only good thing is removing one of the initiatives that was so important ten years ago, the school planning councils and the achievement agenda that the Minister of Education, the now Premier, imposed. It was such a poorly thought-through proposal that it never worked. Now, ten years ago…. That’s the only good thing this bill does. It gets rid of it. But how much money was wasted on what was a poorly thought-through initiative?

Hey, but now they’re going to take over professional development. We shouldn’t worry about that, because the record’s there, like BCeSIS. You can go through again and again where these imposed ideas have cost huge amounts of money, created all sorts of problems for teachers and those in the education system and have led to nothing worthwhile. That’s the record.

Here we have Bill 11. It is one more in an endless line of deliberately provocative and purposefully destructive B.C. Liberal education bills. It started from day one. It started with the B.C. Liberals breaking their word.

[1645]

They specifically committed to not tear up the collective agreements teachers had bargained in good faith with the government of British Columbia, with the people of B.C. The B.C. Liberals broke their word, and they forced through legislation over a weekend back in 2002. The B.C. Liberals broke an election promise.

At the time, that was somewhat shocking. Of course, nowadays that’s become so commonplace that to say that you’re shocked or appalled by such a thing is…. Well, you haven’t been paying attention, because that’s the pattern. That’s always what happens.

I think it goes beyond being simply untrustworthy. I think that we need to throw in an equal measure of incompetence, because even though there were only two NDP MLAs against them, they still bungled their stamping on teachers so badly that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that they had broken the Constitution of Canada.

Now, how does one break the Constitution of Canada? It’s an interesting question. The Constitution of Canada seems pretty much the most obvious test that one would consider when making a law. You would think that someone in the B.C. Liberal cabinet would ask themselves: “Is it actually a law that we’re putting forward that is going to be allowed by the framing document of our nation?” I think that would be a fairly basic question one would consider. The constitution, of course, is the same document that lays out the authority for the B.C. provincial government to even exist. Bill 11 has to be seen in that context.

Of course, like so many B.C. Liberal bills, we don’t actually know what we’re voting on. When we talk about professional development, it’s going to come later. It’s in rules and regulations that we haven’t seen, that the minister can’t describe.

Despite the fact that there has been no record of ever actually consulting effectively with teachers, now we’re to believe that somehow that’s going to take place in a meaningful way, and we know it’s not. There are no rules or regulations yet before us, but we’re supposed to trust.

You know, I was here in the Legislature when this Premier introduced another Education bill to fix the first unconstitutional Education bill. That was in 2012. The Speaker was there as well. That was ruled unconstitutional again. You know, that is an achievement, I’ve got to say. Pretty sure all of the NDP MLAs said that that would happen, which was not that hard to predict since the B.C. Liberals introduced exactly the same bill the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional in the first place. They did change the name, I think. That didn’t work.
[ Page 7686 ]

Of course, by 2012 an election was coming, and this Premier wanted a strike in schools. She was not just willing to have a strike; she wanted a strike. She wanted children out of classes in public schools. The head negotiator testified to this in court under oath. We need to remember the context when we look at a bill that asks us to trust the government to be honest about its intentions and be competent, when any person who has been here in B.C. and has paid attention to the education system would know that the consistent record of the B.C. Liberals is the exact opposite.

The bill is going to change professional development, which actually matters to the education system and to teachers. As I said, what’s the plan? What’s the plan we’re voting on here? Well, that’s to be determined at some point in the future. Like, as I said, more and more legislation, it is an enabling act in many ways, and you’re going to have those rules and regulations passed by order-in-council at some point in the future.

We’re sure that there’s going to be consultation. That’s what the minister and the one speaker who spoke for the B.C. Liberals said: there’s going to be consultation. But you’d have to be Charlie Brown, to the B.C. Liberals as Lucy holding the football, to actually believe in that. You know, how many times do you get away with saying “trust us” when, every single time over the last score of years, there’s been absolutely no reason to trust? Teachers should obviously not trust anything that the B.C. Liberals say, and I think parents, anyone who’s really in the know, would feel the same way.

[1650]

There are so many failures that one can point to: BCeSIS, which I’ll talk about later on; oversized classes; class composition failures; funding shortfalls; the carbon trust mess. There’s one example after another why you would not, if you knew anything about the education system, trust this group on the government side to actually do anything that was going to be helpful to the public education system.

I heard the minister on CBC, on the radio, talking, as he does all the time, about how everyone else in the education system is wrong and somehow what he says is right. I think we just need to put all of the things that he says in context, because this is a politician who, along with his compatriots who are so silent on this bill now, ran on a promise of a $100 billion prosperity fund, right? Let’s just remember that that’s one of the promises which didn’t quite work out.

In his campaign to get elected, he did promise to get rid of the provincial sales tax. I’m pretty sure it’s still there. I’m pretty sure it’s still going to be there for quite a while.

They promised 15 LNG plants. I think the first was supposed to be up and going in the next seven months. I think we’re going to miss that one. But sure, it seemed like a good promise at the time.

He promised no debt, but I think we’re up to $168 billion. When the Liberals took over way back in 2001, it was at $33 billion.

That’s all the things that we were promised. So when teachers and parents and trustees say that there are problems with the education system and with funding and this minister says something different, then I know who to believe and I know who not to believe, and the people of British Columbia who have paid attention to this, if they have, will be reaching the same conclusion.

When the minister says that there is no more money for public education, he’s wrong. The budget that is before us will give $250 million in tax breaks to the richest 2 percent in British Columbia — a $1 billion dollar tax break over the next four years. There’s money for that. What possible purpose it would have in terms of the broader public good, I have no idea. That was never explained either, but it’s there.

It’s a budget that gives 33 percent more to private schools because, of course, there’s money there.

Before coming here, I was a teacher and a principal. I think when you have a job like that, you become used to people always telling you how it should be done. Everyone has been in a classroom, so they always offer explanations about: “Why don’t you do it this way?” I think the minister, back in the day when he was a trustee, wanted the strap back and thought that would be a good idea. There are all sorts of ideas that come and go.

I’m always careful not to rush to judgment on other jobs or professions because, in my experience, I know that nursing, police, small business, farmers — these all must be hard in ways that I can never understand because I haven’t experienced them. You have to show some respect for jobs that you don’t understand and try, especially when you’re in charge of a public education system, to show respect for the people that are doing what is a very, very difficult job.

Teaching is a difficult job. If you have never been in front of a class here in B.C., then I would say to you that you don’t get it — not all of it. You get aspects of it, and you can have an understanding, but you don’t get many of the issues that we talk about when it’s a bill like this. You just don’t understand the problems.

I knew the problems with the school planning council that’s being removed. Ten years ago the Premier was the Education Minister. I was a principal at the time, and I remember I was shocked at how cumbersome and fundamentally unworkable that whole concept was. It was never going to work, and I could explain at that time, just as anyone else who was trying to make it work could explain, why those school planning councils would not work the way the government dictated to schools that they needed to implement. It shocked me.

[1655]

It was at that point that I realized that the minister, now the Premier, didn’t actually care if it worked or not. She had gone. She had moved on. I think it sounded good at a
[ Page 7687 ]
speech somewhere, so she didn’t care if it actually worked.

The problem is it meant that parents and teachers and I needed to give up evenings to go through the school budget, for instance — which may sound reasonable except that at the same time, the School Act said that I, as a principal, was responsible for that budget. We went through a process that was meaningless because the budget was set, but we had to pretend we were getting approval by people who had other things to do.

People who’d volunteered for PAC, parent advisory councils, did not want to do that work. One of them said: “That’s your job. You’re supposed to do it.” We would fill out reports, and you would ask: “Who’s reading this report? I have spent all of this time. I could have been doing something more useful for my school. Who’s reading it?” Nobody.

But it was so important at the time. All the rhetoric that we hear now from the minister, it was times ten about how big a change this was going to be. Now, ten years later, after it’s flopped completely, it’s pulled out with this bill.

Well, from day one it was a flop. If the Premier, then as Minister of Education, was on top of the file at all or cared, it would have been dealt with differently. That is the context for all of the things we have here with Bill 11.

Teaching always was a calling. It always was a tough job, but now it is more complex than ever. In this Legislature the experience that members, most members, will have is from a classroom in the ’60s or ’70s. That experience was likely not multi-ethnic, multi-language ability, complex family situations. It is tougher to teach now.

The students are integrated, and that’s what should happen. You should be integrating students. But it means that in a classroom you can have fetal alcohol syndrome, you can have autism, you can have developmentally delayed, you can have hearing-impaired, you can have physically challenged, and they’re all in the class for a period of time. Of course, that is where they should be if at all possible, but it makes it very, very tough.

Try teaching a class where one student has any one of a number of challenges. One student. It doesn’t matter if they…. Perhaps they don’t speak English. Maybe they have a wheelchair — which doesn’t even have necessarily a special needs criteria, okay? Imagine if they have autism. They need to be taught in a way where they can learn, which means that the plan for your class must also include a separate plan for that student and an appropriate plan, which means different assessment, and you better plan for recess or lunch and how they participate in art and phys ed and on class trips.

One student like that is a challenge that I guarantee you any teacher in the public education system will embrace, but it has to be impossible for teachers to embrace these challenges. Three special needs students is very difficult, but more than that at times, it gets dysfunctional.

When you talk about conversations with teachers, they gave up millions of dollars fighting for something that government should be fighting for: to have functional classes, to have classes that will actually work.

There are 16,156 classes in B.C. with four or more identified special needs students — 16,000. If class composition was in contract like it had been before this contract was ripped up, there would be zero. What would happen is if classes needed to have more than three special needs, then as a principal, I would go to that teacher and I would negotiate having more students with special needs in the class. I would make sure, and the teacher would make sure, it was going to function because I would offer resources to make sure that it functioned.

It was always possible to put more students in, but it was put in with the professional judgment of the teacher that was responsible to make sure that it was a functioning class.

[1700]

There are almost 4,000 classes with seven or more identified special needs students — seven or more identified special needs students. Members need to understand this. If you’re a teacher in a class with seven special needs students, you need to plan for every hour of every day that the school sits, and then you need maybe seven other separate or modified plans — every hour, every day — to make that work.

Bill 11 talks about the government coming in and imposing rules around the way that professional development is going to be run. But the more basic problems they have created…. Like I say, in 2001 none of this situation would be in place.

First, a couple things. I heard here in the Legislature a mother talk passionately about an autistic child. No child is a burden. Every child is incredible. Every child has something about themselves that they are going to discover, that a good teacher can help them discover. Every child deserves to be a part of our community, not hidden away. They deserve the right to discover themselves.

That’s what an Education Minister should be doing — you know, creating things where people have opportunities. This should be a beacon for the rest of the world.

I heard Malala Yousafzai on Jon Stewart. I was impressed, so I googled her. I googled her Nobel speech. She is talking partly about girls and women, but I think that if you listen to what she’s saying, she’s talking about the right to learn and the right to have an equal opportunity in science. She’s really talking about everyone.

If it’s a wheelchair or hearing or language, it shouldn’t be that that means you don’t get taught or that you’re only taught in isolation. People should be equal, at least in opportunity. That should be true everywhere, but it sure should be true here in B.C. Public education is the most precious gift a society can provide to children.

I ask members, anyone who’s paying attention out there, to just think of the children in your life. Now, I loved grade 7 to 11, and I loved teaching that age most,
[ Page 7688 ]
but if you’re imagining children, for my point you can maybe imagine kindergarten instead of the teen years. Think of that age. Wouldn’t you do anything for them? Shouldn’t we as a society have that attitude that we’d do anything for that age group?

Instead, we have the B.C. Liberals with this sloppy half-thought-through Americanization of the public education system going on. It’s insidious, and it’s damaging. But the good news is that the clown-like rollout means that it’s less destructive than it could be.

To teachers, I would say this. I do not see any grey area in this decades-long fight with the government. I see teachers as 100 percent in the right. And I want to thank them all for fighting the good fight. I really admire that. The only way to actually change things is to kick the B.C. Liberals out. I think that should be the goal. There are tens of thousands of teachers, and the strike cost teachers millions of dollars. It would be cheaper to beat them in an election. That’s what I would encourage them to do.

I also want to commend one of the critics of Bill 11, a strong critic on everything: Patti Bacchus. I’ve never met her, but I have tremendous admiration for anyone who will stand up and fight effectively for public education. You are on the side of gods when you’re doing that, I think. Full marks to you.

Like I say, I’ve never met Patti Bacchus, but if she’s in there swinging for kids in this province, I think that’s a fantastic thing. Making things better for children is a fight always worth fighting.

I’m going to vote against this bill. I taught as a volunteer in Lesotho with my wife, Karen. We taught six years, altogether, in Africa. The first two years was back in the ’80s. I thought that we, as a nation, would be a leader in providing first-class education to boys and girls here across Canada but also in supporting education in other parts of the world.

I actually thought that that’s where we would be when I turned 56. I thought that we’d be doing things in other parts of the world. But Canada not only is not meeting needs here in British Columbia but is just marginally helping out in other parts of the world. It seems that we are more interested in bombing places as much as building schools in areas that need them. That’s deeply disappointing to me.

Here in B.C. there’s no question, with this bill and with the decade of bills that have come from this government, that we’re moving backwards. We need to fight that.

[1705]

B.C. still does well, and I just want to say that that is despite what the government is doing. We have some fantastic teachers. I’ll just give you examples from my experience. We had a shop teacher. He taught auto. He produced most of Golden’s current mechanics. He was a colleague of mine for years and years. He’s not long passed away. He was a noonhour home for children who needed a home at times. He put his life into that job. And he did it for children that really admired and were inspired by him.

You have people like that throughout the system. And when you put tweets on during the strike saying that all they want is the right to have a massage and things like that…. You know, I get the politics of it, but it’s hugely demeaning to a group that is constantly demeaned by this government and disrespected.

I taught next to a teacher who taught senior physics and calculus. He would actually get the students to do a calculus chant. We were next door, and all of a sudden you’d be teaching a class and you’d hear these grade 12s doing a calculus chant, which I’m not going to try to duplicate here. I can just say that to generate that enthusiasm about calculus on a Friday afternoon was pretty impressive.

He was the first to come and the last to leave. He taught AP math and calculus, and he did it as an extracurricular. He did it on his own time completely. If there are teachers out there that know what is involved with AP calculus and AP math, these are huge efforts to give students an opportunity to excel. They’re professionals. That’s what they do. And like I say, all on his own time.

The government has many, many amazing teachers here in B.C., and you play these games with them like with this bill and make them participate in initiatives that are poorly thought out, like the school planning councils and things like that. It’s unacceptable.

You make use of a computer marks system like BCeSIS. Let’s just stop on BCeSIS for a while. The government’s record on imposing anything is best summed up with BCeSIS. As a secondary school, we had a marks system. We used Windsor. It was a commercially available program that worked quite well for the school. We all understood how it worked. We could share marks.

The government came in, and it sounded like it made sense. They said: why don’t we all use the same marks system, so that if a student goes from one school to the next, they can easily change, share data? Well, big surprise, if you’ve been in this House, that the actual choice of the IT system by this government was botched.

I mean, that shouldn’t be a surprise, given the record that we’ve seen here in the House. But the implications for teachers and for principals…. We had to work with a system that was the most archaic and inconvenient system that one could imagine. You had to close something, move it, try to get a comment, and then you had to close that. Remember, as a secondary school teacher, I was doing hundreds of these report cards with a system that didn’t work.

This government was told about that at the beginning, right? They were told repeatedly. So when the minister stands up and says: “We’re going to consult….” When have you ever consulted? When has this government ever consulted and listened?

BCeSIS was this archaic system that caused immense
[ Page 7689 ]
frustration. You’re doing your marks not during the school day; you’re doing them on your own time at night. Fair enough. Marking, prep, all of that — fair enough, When you get in, you know you’re doing it at night. But don’t take me from a marks system that works and hand me a system that you haven’t bothered to see whether it works or not.

BCeSIS was hugely expensive, and it never worked. Now it’s been withdrawn, at the cost of — what? — hundreds of millions. You know, you lose track of how much money wasted. BCeSIS — the only thing I could compare it to is if you ever try to get out of, like, your cable TV system when they don’t want you to — right? — where they put you on hold forever. By the end of it, you’re absolutely frothing. Or you’re trying to get out of your cell phone contract.

[1710]

It’s like that, except you’re doing it year after year, four times a year, with 120 kids. You put something in, and the system crashes. That was BCeSIS.

Now the government is going to come in and somehow do professional development? Wow. If you’re a teacher, with any of the initiatives from this government, you know, first, not to trust them and, secondly, that they’re going to fumble it and make a tough job even tougher.

As I said, Bill 11 is one more in a long, endless line of B.C. Liberal education bills that are intended to be provocative. I’m going to vote against it, of course, and proudly stand with those who understand the importance and value of public education.

Thanks for the opportunity. Maybe there’s a Liberal that will take an opportunity to speak. That would be a novelty. Maybe the minister at some point will pay attention. That would be a novelty too.

L. Krog: I can’t help reflecting on the remarks of my colleague who just finished speaking, who suggests there might be a Liberal stand up. It reminds me of the famous joke about Calvin Coolidge, the President of the United States, who was notorious for being a man of very few words.

There was a bet made by a Washington hostess to a friend that she could go up to the President and get him to say more than two words. She explained to the President that that was the bet and that she was going to get him to say more than two words. Calvin Coolidge looked at her and said very respectfully, in his dull, dour way: “You lose.”

I hate to say it, but the member has not been disappointed. You do lose. The reality is that we are debating a bill in a session that I think was fairly well characterized by a leading academic and leading British Columbian I had occasion to speak to the other week. I won’t mention his name for fear of jeopardizing his position.

He indicated to me that it had been a dull couple of years in the B.C. Legislature in some respects, and he agreed with me that the real problem here was that the government, candidly, didn’t really have a legislative agenda and didn’t know where it was going. I would suggest, most respectfully, that Bill 11 is pretty much in that vein.

There is no significant improvement or value to public education contained in any of these sections. This is an admission by our government that it either doesn’t know what to do or doesn’t care what it does.

I suspect, more realistically, with this bill that, as many have suggested who’ve spoken previously today, it’s really about poking the teachers of the province, rubbing it into the school boards of this province, the boards of education who struggle week after week, year after year, to try and manage a public education system with increasingly limited resources. It’s just a way of rubbing their noses in it — that they are not respected by this government, that their position and their ability to participate in the system fully are not respected.

Moreover, when it gets down to the basics of good governance, which is all about consultation, this government demonstrates over and over again how little they actually care about consultation.

You have to give credit, however, in one aspect to this B.C. Liberal government and this Minister of Education and, certainly, the Premier of the province, who has built a storied career in B.C. politics in attacking public education and creating chaos in her wake. The credit I want to give them today is that in all my lifetime in this province, having gone to school from day one in this province, having received all of my education in this province, I have never thought I’d live to see the day when the parents and the teachers and the school boards and the supporters of public education would be so utterly and completely united in their disgust over the state of the government.

It’s a remarkable thing to talk to teachers who, by and large, contrary to the way the government wishes to portray them as being this group of wild-eyed, radical, New Democrat–supporting people who are just so anxious to make sure the NDP get elected….

[1715]

The truth is that half of them, in my sense — I mean no disrespect — really aren’t that interested in politics. They just want to go into classrooms where there are textbooks. They want to work in schools where there’s a library or support systems in place to provide the kind of technical access that most people enjoy when they go into a public library.

They just, at the end of the day, want to be able to go home and say to their spouses, if they have them, or to their own kids: “You know what? Mom,” or dad, “today actually made some progress in educating the children or the students in their classroom.” That’s what they want to do.

Now, that is actually just about the worthiest and most important task in any society — the ability to educate the
[ Page 7690 ]
next generation that follows you. It is the noblest profession. We can’t do without any profession. I accept that. A world without doctors. Imagine. A world without — don’t laugh — lawyers or a world without engineers or accountants. But what we definitely can’t do without are teachers.

It was Hillary Clinton who popularized the phrase “it takes a whole village to raise a child.” It’s true. But imagine for a moment a community without a teacher, a community without a school. Well, the Liberals have created a few of those. With their inability, it seems to me, to be prepared to tax the wealthiest amongst us, they have quite happily forced school boards across this province into shutting down schools in tiny communities, in hamlets, thereby sucking the life out of those communities and making it impossible for young families, families with children, to move to those communities.

The very school that two generations of my family attended, in Coombs, French Creek Elementary, is gone. A hundred years — it celebrated its anniversary a couple of years ago — and it’s gone. It’s gone out of a community because this government doesn’t have the ability to be a leader in public education, and the bill before us demonstrates that in spades.

This is not about improving the quality of public education. When you have a bill that is giving the minister the right to impose professional development on teachers, you have to ask yourself: is the minister aware of what happens in the professional lives of teachers across this province? Is the minister living in some political bubble where he doesn’t see on a daily basis how teachers spend their time upgrading, educating themselves, pursuing further degrees, master’s? There’s not one person in this chamber, I suspect, that doesn’t know a teacher who has spent time on professional development.

Compare it to other professions in this province. For a lawyer, if you’re not taking a minimum of 12 hours of professional development annually, you don’t keep your practising certificate. Self-governing professions respect their members. They respect the work they do, and they ensure that their members continue to maintain standards of professionalism that are in accord with the work they do.

The teachers of this province have done it for years without having a piece of legislation that gives the minister his power or her power to impose standards on teachers who are already doing the good work of public education day in, day out. I find it astonishing that this is the best we can do in terms of a bill on public education this session.

Then if they’re not happy enough to insult teachers by suggesting somehow that it’s necessary to impose these standards on them, they go one step further. Now we’re going to give the minister the power to compel school districts to take part in shared services. What a joke.

[1720]

I won’t bother to refer to the letter that the board of education in my school district sent off to the Minister of Education, but I can assure you they were less than happy and less than amused that the minister seems to be ignorant of the fact that many boards are already doing this voluntarily in a herculean effort to reduce the cost of administration and to ensure that those scarce dollars this government seems able to provide in fact go as far as is reasonably possible into the classrooms to ensure that the students in our K-to-12 system get the best education possible.

Surely, a government that was actually aware of what was happening in the schools in our province wouldn’t bring forward this kind of legislation. They’re talking about…. You know, part of this act is dealing with the concept of updating accountability frameworks for student learning through reporting. I come from an era where you got a letter grade and, if you were really lucky, maybe half a line about how you were doing in school.

Teachers are now confronted with preparing significant reporting back to parents. Parents are encouraged in ways that weren’t possible before and asked to ensure that they keep a rapport with the teachers who are teaching their children so that they are no surprises. They will understand where special needs are identified, that special services are available.

But hon. Speaker, I’ve got to tell you. I was at a reception on Saturday night. One of the main people who works at the Child Development Centre in Nanaimo will tell you that the wait-list is up to 450 kids. It can be months before some of those children get the assistance and the programs they need in order to succeed to the best of their ability.

When I see this bill and I listen to the Minister of Education, I have to wonder: what is the purpose of this? I have heard more pious platitudes from this minister today in his opening address on this bill than I’ve heard in a very long time. I can’t help but contrast it with the reality of what I know is happening in public education. The reality, which, if the minister had chosen to do so, he would have heard himself last year, if he’d walked the picket lines and talked to the teachers.

Now, we know that this government did its level best to try and persuade the public that this was about greedy teachers wanting benefits that they shouldn’t be entitled to and that the rest of the public wasn’t getting. But we know from the parents who walked side by side with those teachers on the picket line that the parents — and the grandparents in many cases, as well — and the students themselves got it. This was about ensuring that public education got the support it deserved.

Instead, what we have seen is something that I have observed through the history of this province in my time. It’s that kind of dark, nasty, old anti-education element of the B.C. Social Credit Party. It’s alive and well over there in the minds of this government, who are prepared to
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bring forward this bill to attack teachers, to attack school boards and somehow lay blame on them for this government’s inability and failure, and indeed complete resistance, to accept its responsibilities.

Guess what. Under our constitution, public education is a provincial responsibility. So the buck doesn’t go any place else. It stops at the desk of the minister. It stops at the desk of the Premier. It stops on the desks of the members of this Legislature.

Instead of letting school boards do their work and teachers do their work, we now have introduced to us the kind of stuff that I thought went out with the collapse of communism. We’ve got old, Soviet-style central administration. We’re not happy with just giving the minister a bit of power; we now want to give the ministry even more power, and it’s quite undefined power. That’s the most amusing thing about it. It’s almost Orwellian.

If you go to section 32 of the bill, it adds more powers to the minister around administrative directives involving projects. If you go to the actual act, the minister has already got eight pages — eight pages — of very specific authority.

[1725]

For heaven’s sakes, our Lord, when he handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, stuck it on two tablets. We’ve got page after page of authority given to the minister, for heaven’s sakes, and now we’re going to add some more to it?

Joe Stalin would be proud of a government that is able to produce so much paper and give so much authority to a minister and then say: “We’re so proud of our system, by the way. Aren’t you teachers wonderful?” It is hypocrisy of the highest order.

I am just astonished that the minister had the gall to stand up in this House and go on as he did, talking about how much they value public education and how much they’re going to communicate and how much they’re going to share and work forward for the best interests of students.

I come back to my point. If it’s really working, what was that strike all about? What was the unity we saw developed amongst parents and students and teachers and school boards and supporters of public education and the BCTF? I’ll tell you what it was about. It wasn’t about some Orwellian, 1984 talk and propaganda. It was about the recognition that in a democratic society, public education is the be-all and end-all.

I grew up in a small community, Coombs, B.C. — doesn’t get much smaller and still have a name. I went to school in a one-room schoolhouse in grade 1, and then I moved on to the big school. It had three rooms — grades 3 to 7, three teachers, three classrooms. My high school, the whole high school, grades 8 to 12, had 450 kids.

I’ve seen a lot of changes in public education, but I’ve got to tell you that even under those anti-education Socreds, there was more money and more concern and more support for public education than we’ve seen from this government.

Public education…. I’ve said it to every group of teachers I’ve ever spoken to or at any opportunity I’ve had to address public education. Subject to the support of family and friends and loved ones and the luck of the time in which I was born, everything I owe, as is true of most of my generation, I owe and they owe and we owe to public education.

There is not a person in this chamber who doesn’t have the memory of those teachers who inspired them, who gave them a hand up, who recognized a weakness, who recognized when they had to reach down and pull you up or recognized when they had to guide you back on the path, who recognized that if you had some special ability, it should be encouraged. Every one of us gets that — every one of us.

Yet here we have the government introducing Bill 11. Instead of announcing that they’re going to try and enhance public education, we’re now going to give more power to the minister, and we’re going to insult teachers by giving the minister power to impose professional development on them when they’re already doing a good job of it.

I’m going to take the minister at his word. What did he say earlier today? “Next to a couple of countries, British Columbia has the finest public education system in the world.” There’s only Finland, and I can’t even remember the other country that’s supposed to be ahead of us. Oh, Japan. Japan is ahead of us.

How did that happen without Bill 11? How did that happen? How did those teachers get to be good teachers? How did it happen? I don’t understand it. And how did school boards cope with the funding cuts if we didn’t give the minister power to impose shared-service arrangements on them? How did all this happen? Was it a miracle? Did it emerge from a burning bush in Mount Sinai in a flash of light? How did it happen?

I’ll tell you how it happened. There were several generations of children and students in British Columbia who got a good public education, some of whom went on to become teachers and worked hard and were inspired by the teachers they had and worked in the public education system and wanted to see it supported.

[1730]

Instead, what we see is a government that seems devoted to attacking teachers, to creating the longest work stoppage in B.C.’s political history in public education, that seems to find endless supplies of money for private schools in contrast to public education and then has the temerity to turn to the school boards — and we’ve heard the numbers from our Education critic, the member for Victoria–Swan Lake — and talk about the low-hanging fruit. “You can find another $54 million or $55 million, no problem.”

If the school boards of this province were running
[ Page 7692 ]
the businesses of British Columbia with the amount of money they spend on administration as a percentage of their revenue, we’d be the most prosperous part of the planet. I don’t know how you get it any lower and actually fix a number or a percentage to it.

The school boards are doing it. They’ve been doing it, and they’ll continue to do it to the best of their ability. But it won’t be thanks to the B.C. Liberals, and it won’t be thanks to this Minister of Education. And it certainly won’t be thanks to the sacrifices, sadly, that are being made by students in the classroom every day.

One of the members, earlier, talked about how some students are having problems doing their homework because they don’t have access to the textbook. Imagine: in the 21st century in British Columbia, in Canada — unlike the some of the schools the member for Columbia River–Revelstoke taught in, in Africa — we have students in British Columbia who have to share the textbook.

S. Fraser: Shared services.

L. Krog: The member for Alberni–Pacific Rim, in a display of wit, which is his style, says: “Shared services.” Maybe that’s the thrust of the bill. Maybe that’s the shared services we’re really talking about. We’re going to provide a more formal program for the sharing of the textbooks. For heaven’s sake, you can go into the average church in this province and get access to the hymn book, to your own copy, so you can sing along. Surely, it’s not too much to ask in a house of education that every student has access to the appropriate textbooks for each course they have to take.

What is it about this government that they don’t seem to understand the importance of public education? With this bill in front of us, do we see some vision enunciated? Do we hear something inspirational from the minister in his opening remarks? No.

What we have seen in the last 14 years is pretty clear evidence of a government that was always prepared to give a break to people who didn’t need it in the first place. No more recent or better example is letting the 2 percent surcharge of income tax on higher-income earners just slip off into the night. Or a few years ago, you might remember, the elimination of the corporate capital tax on large financial institutions. They didn’t even ask for it. The big banks put a big smile on their face.

Interjection.

L. Krog: I see I’ve inspired a member across the way, and that gives me great comfort. I hate to think none of them are listening.

Instead of putting money back into public education, they chose to give it back to people who’ve already enjoyed the success in their lives because they had access to good public education, because the people of this province were able to get decent jobs with their training. We know we’ve gone through a training crisis in this province. We know that from the Business Council. We know it from the board of trade. We know it from chambers of commerce. We know it from experts across the board.

Instead of putting money into public education to ensure that the generations that are going to follow us will have the same opportunities as the generations who are so well represented in this chamber, instead of doing that, we are choosing to set aside, deliberately, more money for people who don’t need it and less money for those students in our school system who do.

[1735]

Even if I accepted what the minister had to say about British Columbia being the third-best jurisdiction in the world — and I’d love to think I was getting complete accuracy from the minister — I guess I’d have to say that, goodness, if we’re the third best in the world, just imagine where we’d be with a little bit of money, with a little bit of real support for public education. Why, we’d be number one.

You know, again, if I accept what the minister says and we’re spending $1,000 less than the Canadian average, imagine just if we got up to the average. We’re not asking to move to the top of the heap even. Just let us creep up to the average. If we crept up to the average, just imagine what it would mean.

I’ve got three grandchildren. Two of them are in the public school system now. One is going to get there. He’s only four. Give him his chance. He’ll get his opportunity.

I am just amazed at the work that the teachers that my grandchildren have do for them every day. I am thrilled and excited to think that they will have some real opportunity in life because of public education. But we’re not going to give my grandchildren or the grandchildren of the members in this chamber or the children of the members in this chamber — like the member for Victoria–Swan Lake — the full opportunity they deserve unless we’re going to fund public education.

Now, I know maybe for the Premier, whose child is in a private school, it doesn’t matter that much. I get that. I get it that for high-income earners, public education and the changes that this bill proposes in it maybe aren’t that important. But for those of us for whom public education is important, this bill does nothing to advance or enhance public education.

Indeed, I would argue that it does just the opposite. It sets up further opportunities for confrontation. It sets up further opportunities for divisions in our public system that are not necessary, that we should be avoiding and that we could avoid if this government finally just did the right thing and, instead of bills like this — like Bill 11, by its implication suggesting boards don’t know what they are doing and teachers don’t know what they are doing — actually engaged in some real consultation.

It’s just remarkable what you can achieve if you actual-
[ Page 7693 ]
ly talk to people. It’s called diplomacy. When it’s really successful, we avoid wars. If you work hard at it, even in a small business, you can boost productivity, increase profits and perhaps create new positions for people. In public education you can give everybody an opportunity to enjoy and thrive in their profession, as teachers and educators and administrators, and every opportunity to students to succeed in whatever they choose to do, because public education opens up a whole world for them — a whole world.

When you think of what we could be doing and what we are doing, that contrast is what upsets me the most. It’s not that hard to have communication. But when you drop a bill like this, and then the minister stands in this chamber and talks about the wide consultation, goes on about the wide consultation at every level…. You’d think, my goodness, we’d gone through the biggest talkfest in B.C. political history if you believed every word the minister had to say.

Yet what do we have coming out of the B.C. School Trustees Association, a body not unknown to those of us who support public education? How is it they came to pass three motions in regards to Bill 11 demanding that the government withdraw it, amongst others — a demand of the review of the intent of it? That didn’t come out of thin air. That in and of itself is proof that the consultation the minister talked about was, with great respect, hokum. It didn’t happen.

It certainly didn’t happen with the BCTF. As its president, Mr. Iker, said: “The changes to professional development were unfortunately announced without consultation. Government staff did say there would be a two-year consultation, and we will hold them to that commitment.”

[1740]

Well, I didn’t hear from the lips of the minister today that the consultation was about to start with the introduction of Bill 11. Unless something surprising is going to happen, it is clear it is this government’s intent to pass this legislation this session. Consultation is going to be the last thing this government will do. They had their opportunity. They didn’t do it. They’ve chosen not to.

I support what others have suggested. It’s not too late to step back. You can let this bill die on the order paper. You can go out and talk to the people in public education, who care about it. Ask them what they need. Ask them in a respectful way — the people who are actually delivering the public education, as opposed to those who just want to run the system — what they need to ensure that we can be the best we can be, that our children have the best opportunity they can ever hope to have in a democratic society.

But, as I started off my speech, I suspect I’ll be like that poor woman who approached President Coolidge, and I’m going to lose too.

S. Fraser: It’s always an honour to stand in this great place and speak as a member of the government, the Queen’s loyal opposition, dealing with legislation, with bills that affect fundamental changes to our public systems. It’s a heady experience, and I’ve always felt fortunate to have the opportunity to speak on behalf of the people of Alberni–Pacific Rim, in this case on a bill, Bill 11, that’s dealing directly with public education — direct impact on a public education system.

I’m a big fan of public education. I’m a product of it. My daughter is a product of it. We have some of the greatest educators, I think, anywhere, bar none, in British Columbia, and we’re very fortunate to have that. We have a system that needs to be protected.

By everything I’ve read, by all the conversations I’ve had, by going to school board meetings and talking to teachers, parents and students, Bill 11 is consistent in that it is reviled by everyone. This is a very controversial piece of legislation.

Standing in this House and debating it is key and fundamental to the role we play here as legislators. It gives me great concern when I hear members on the government side commenting, but not on the record. We in the opposition are putting up members to speak on this bill because it is important to the future of public education, but we’re speaking alone here. There are two sides of the House.

I just wonder what it means about a bill that the government members are bringing forward, the government of the day is bringing forward, and they’re not speaking to it. They’re not defending it. They’re not speaking to it at all — except for the minister. Now, that may change, and I would hope it does.

The comments that we hear…. The member for Nanaimo was speaking. Comments we heard from both ministers on the other side…. There are more ministers than that, but that’s good. We want to hear that debate.

I represent two districts. District 70 is Port Alberni and west. It’s the west coast — Tofino, Ucluelet and the Pacific Rim. Also, part of my riding, my constituency, goes into district 69. I was at a district 70 meeting at the end of March, and this bill was being talked about — great concern about what it means to the autonomy of school district 70 elected trustees. It’s a democratic process.

[1745]

The responsibility for dealing with a legacy of budget cuts for 14 years — it’s been very, very difficult for the trustees and the respective trustees that have followed in the 14 years, but they’ve done the job. In district 70 there have been school closures — two more school closures this year. The hard decisions are being made.

As the member for Nanaimo, before me, mentioned, we in this province are not funding our students to the amount that other jurisdictions in the country do. We’re over $1,000 less per student. That’s very challenging. And you want a local elected body to take the challenge on and
[ Page 7694 ]
be accountable to that, as they are.

Bill 11 raises the spectre of Big Brother coming in and trying to micromanage — which should be done at the local level and has been done at the local level, despite all odds.

I would note that Nanaimo’s school board chairman — that’s Steve Rae — says the proposed changes to the B.C. School Act in Bill 11 are a smokescreen for underfunding of education. He may well be right. We should have that debate. Not just the one side of the debate — we should all have the debate.

The legacy leading up to Bill 11 is one that the government should be aware of. They have a reputation, this government, for being very confrontational when it comes to public education, teachers. Indeed, the Premier in her previous role as Minister of Education brought in changes that were found to be unconstitutional and stripped the rights away from teachers, rights that are guaranteed under the charter.

That’s not a very good legacy to start with, but that pattern continued throughout, in very recent history, leading up to one of the largest, if not the largest, disruptions in our public education system in history, ever — causing mayhem for students, teachers, parents. So the idea, as the Premier had stated following that work stoppage in the school system…. I’ll paraphrase. She suggested it would be time for a cooling-off period.

To have Bill 11 dropped on the trustees and the teachers and parents at a time when some diplomacy and delicacy would be in order, even as sensed by the Premier…. “Why did that not happen?” I would say. The school trustees, in a letter dated April 20, said: “At our annual general meeting this past weekend, the membership of B.C. School Trustees Association passed the following three motions in regards to Bill 11, the Education Statutes Amendment Act, 2015.”

I’ll read it into the record for my constituents.

“That BCSTA demand the government of B.C. immediately withdraw the sections of Bill 11 that override the authority of democratically boards of education — specifically, where Bill 11 adds new provisions which broaden the ministry’s authority to issue administrative directives, where Bill 11 would amend the special adviser provision and where shared service providers are designated by the Minister of Education.

“Secondly, that the BCSTA publicly advocate strongly against the erosion of local boards of education autonomy in Bill 11.

“Thirdly, that the BCSTA demand an immediate review of the intent of Bill 11 legislation and an opportunity to recommend amendments prior to final adoption, as well as the formation of a management partners working group to participate in the development of any subsequent process of resulting regulations.”

These are not unreasonable requests. These are requests by the B.C. School Trustees Association, as the governing body, the oversight body, for school trustees in this province. It’s a request to bring some sensibilities to the discussion, to back off and have the discussion that should have happened beforehand.

[1750]

I’ve heard some of the comments from the minister. You would have assumed that those discussions had happened prior to the introduction of Bill 11 in the House. Certainly, that would be the requirement that everyone would expect, just in civil discourse, in making a big decision that could affect all trustees, all teachers, all students and all parents.

However, I’ve got a letter that’s directed to the minister, dated April 22. This is from the Delta school board, board of education. They met on April 22: “In discussing the recently introduced Bill 11, Delta trustees expressed concern that consultation as set out in the co-governance relationship memorandum of understanding” — MOU — “did not take place in the development of this legislation. Trustees focus on the following section of the MOU.”

This is a memorandum of understanding I’m going to read into the record, as cited in the Delta board of education letter to the minister, referring to a memorandum of understanding that was agreed to. Signed letters of memorandum are agreed to by both parties. In this case it would be the provincial government — the minister — and the trustees. That MOU is on consultation and notification.

“Any party proposing a change in policies or programs that will affect the other party will consult and collaborate with the other party to the fullest extent possible given the specific circumstances and any respective legislative and confidentiality obligations. This commitment includes, but is not limited to, timely notification of the proposed change.

“The parties recognize” — again, the parties being the trustees and the minister, the government — “that there may be extraordinary circumstances that limit the timeliness of consultation and notification.”

That, I would submit, doesn’t apply in this case.

“In such circumstances the other party will be provided with the rationale for the unusual limitations to consultation.”

Obviously, it's highlighting the key importance of consultation for both parties.

“New responsibilities will not be assigned to boards of education until resourcing implications have been discussed between the parties.”

Bill 11 doesn’t reflect the MOU at all.

“The Delta board of education remains committed to a robust co-governance relationship as cited in the MOU. We are also committed to continuing to exercise our fiduciary responsibilities to the highest standards possible while allocating resources to ensure an excellent public education for our students.

“In accordance with our oath of office we have made many tough decisions to comply with School Act requirements for a balanced budget. We have been democratically elected to safeguard the resources of our district on behalf of our constituents.”

That’s the democracy part.

“We must therefore speak against any legislation that would alter this mandate by placing an unelected special adviser who is not accountable to our community in front of our trustees’ ability to serve our community.”

Now, Delta said this very well and very eloquently, but it’s a key factor for me as a representative of the official opposition. How does a government sign an MOU, how does a minister agree to a process, and then bring in a bill that refutes that process? Indeed, there was no attempt
[ Page 7695 ]
by government or the minister to engage in the process that they have signed to.

If there are merits to Bill 11, let them be discussed — absolutely. Let them be discussed in this House. We’re certainly debating — a one-sided debate — but they need to be discussed between the parties. Not just out of common courtesy and civility in our society, but there’s a memorandum of understanding that states that that’s the case. That has to happen. That did not happen.

I would note that the BCSTA, in their letter, said:

“The predominant view of trustees from across the province is that Bill 11, as written, is a challenge to the autonomy and authority of locally elected boards of education.

[1755]

“Had the B.C. School Trustees Association and our member boards been provided an opportunity for participation and input, such as that given for the accountability framework or curriculum revisions, we may not have arrived at this point. The absence of appropriate consultation and review processes compounds our concerns.”

This is not just Delta speaking. It’s not just district 70, my constituency, speaking. It’s the entire province. All the elected board members, responsible democratically to their constituents to oversee public education in this province, have been slammed by Bill 11. There has been no attempt at consultation before, during or after this bill being introduced into this House.

Let’s move on to the B.C. Teachers Federation. I’ve cited the concerns and resolutions raised specifically throughout the province on behalf of school trustees, a democratic body elected to represent the communities in public education. Now I’ll move on to the position our teachers have taken through their organization — of course, the B.C. Teachers Federation.

This is to the minister:

“The B.C. Teachers Federation calls on you to withdraw Bill 11, the Education Statutes Amendment Act, 2015, and to engage in discussion with the BCTF and other stakeholders on the issues raised in the bill.

“The BCTF call is based on several factors:

“(1) The act is an infringement on the rights and responsibility of democratically elected boards of education.

“(2) The act is an incursion into teacher-led and -directed professional development.

“(3) The act allows for collection and use of student data without sufficient privacy protection.

“(4) The act provides for the extreme centralization of power and control in the role of the Minister of Education.

“(5) The act would create an unnecessary increase in government bureaucracy.

“These are all important elements that undermine the authority of school trustees in their ability to make decisions that reflect the needs of their community. The legislation also challenges the professionalism of teachers by making their professional development subject to arbitrary direction. We urge you to withdraw the bill and enter into” — once again — “consultation.”

Consultation is a requirement under a memorandum of understanding signed by this government and this minister. So full pull. Whether it’s the school trustees in this province, the bodies elected to represent their constituents in public education, or whether it’s the teachers responsible for educating our students, doing great work under very difficult circumstances, this bill has managed to be an affront to everyone consistently. This is not bringing peace into our public education system at all.

I mentioned at the beginning of my chat here in the Legislature on Bill 11 that I have representation, as MLA, responsibilities for both school district 70 and to some extent school district 69. I have a letter that was sent. I’m not the primary representative for district 69. That is Qualicum and Parksville. But many of my constituents attend schools in both of those communities and so are deeply effected by any legislative changes — draconian changes, certainly.

I was also forwarded this letter to the member representing Parksville-Qualicum. It says here:

“As a community advocate for persons with disabilities and children with special needs, you have an understanding of the positive change that can happen at the local community level. Just as each child is unique, so are the communities where the children go to school.

“School district 69, Qualicum, is as different from Port Alberni as Port Alberni is from the west coast. School boards and the trustees are a locally elected voice representing the unique needs of children in their district. Trustees of democratically elected boards of education have been an integral part of public education in British Columbia for over 100 years.

[1800]

“Whereas public education in British Columbia has overarching goals, it is the role of the local trustee to ensure that students in their care are provided the opportunity to attain these goals. The laws that govern public education in British Columbia must reflect not only the provincial goals but also the flexibility for boards to attend to special needs of their communities.”

The letter goes on, from district 69: “At the recent general meeting of the B.C. School Trustees Association, the following motions were passed….” I will not repeat those. The three motions were repeated in the letter. The letter ends with…. This is a letter to the member for Parksville-Qualicum, who is an adjoining MLA to me. It goes:

“Bill 11 has just come up for second reading in this House” — as we speak — “and as Bill 11 is debated in the Legislature this week, we urge you to consider the importance and necessity of community advocacy. You have been a community advocate. Please stand up now for this vital piece of your community and speak to the need for more time and consultation before any act is passed into law.

“We ask your support in ensuring this piece of legislation is not adopted as written. We appreciate your attention in this matter.”

That’s signed: “The board chair, Eve Flynn.”

I am beseeching the Liberal member for Parksville-Qualicum, who this was addressed to, to do just that, to speak in this House on the need for sober second thought. It’s a request to step back from a process that’s deeply flawed, divisive, inflammatory and breaking the basic premises of consultation, as highlighted by a letter of a memorandum of understanding.

I think the least we can all do in this House is take that step back. There is no hurry. Have the consultation that should have happened already. Maybe the government will see the errors of their ways and amend the bill so that it actually is something that we can all be proud of
[ Page 7696 ]
and that will benefit our students — the students, which is what this is all about, in our public education system.

D. Donaldson: I happily take my spot today to address the second reading of Bill 11, the Education Statutes Amendment Act. I say happily because, although I might not be as eloquent as some of our spokespeople on this issue, I feel I have to play a small part in trying to talk some sense into this government, in getting them to withdraw Bill 11.

Due to the amazing efforts of teachers, support workers, school board administrators, elected school trustees and parents, the Minister of Education rightfully points out that the B.C. public education system is ranked very high in the world.

Then it makes no sense whatsoever that the minister, under Bill 11, is attempting to centralize powers and really, fundamentally saying: “We know what’s best here in Victoria.” “We know what’s best for the school in Atlin” — a 2,500-kilometre drive from here. “We know what’s best for the kids in Telegraph Creek” — an almost 2,000-kilometre drive from here. Both of those communities are in school district 87 in the constituency of Stikine.

“We know better than the teachers that live in those communities, on the ground. We know better than the elected board officials from those communities. We’re going to appoint special advisers to tell you what’s best. We’re going to require shared services be implemented, because we know what’s best. We know what professional development services the teachers in those communities need best”— 2,500 kilometres away from here in Victoria.

It’s about: “Trust us; we know best.” Well, let’s look a little bit at the record of “trust us.” Trust us in shared services. The integrated case management system, which is a shared service implemented by this government between the Ministry of Children and Family Development and the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation, was recently reviewed by the Auditor General — a $208-million spend. The Minister of Social Development and Social Innovation had the audacity to say it’s complete.

It has covered off one-third of the systems it was intended to cover — $208 million, one-third of the systems it intended to cover that were antiquated and outdated. That’s the record on shared services. That’s the “trust us” that’s being asked here under Bill 11.

[1805]

The minister said — and I’ll quote from his addressing of this bill in second reading — “The proposed legislation will amend the School Act…to enable the minister to require boards to use designated…providers for specific services.”

Here’s another example even closer to home. The BCeSIS system that’s been mentioned by some of my colleagues was a system intended to have an IT system amongst schools and in schools. It was implemented by this government over a six-year period; $100 million was spent. It was found to be unreliable. It tended to be slow, especially during times of report card marking and end of school and beginning of school. Then it was abandoned by this government. There’s another example of “trust us” when it comes to shared services.

School district 54, which is another school district in my area, wrote to the minister and copied me. They talk about shared services. They have engaged in shared services already: banking with government; procurement cards; shared staff contracts with smaller, remote districts; WorkSafe B.C. administration services through school district 23 in the Central Okanagan; and attendance management through work with unions. Those are some of the shared services they’ve engaged in already.

Over the past couple of years they’ve also reduced board office staff; demonstrated ongoing energy improvements; restructured facilities, disposing of excess facilities including portables; and reorganized programs within facilities to maximize student learning and cost savings.

They’ve done all this, and they have been using, up till now, the resources that they’ve saved to continue support for ongoing professional learning for employees, to occasionally increase administrative time, to address the recruitment issues faced by remote and rural districts.

They’re doing the work already. This school district is appealing to the government to not claw back those administrative savings, like they’ve said they’ll do — $29 million this coming year and $25 million the next year.

[Madame Speaker in the chair.]

This school district 54 I also share with the Minister of Aboriginal Relations, the member for Nechako Lakes. They’ve cc’d him on a copy of this letter as well, Les Kearns, the chairman of the board of school district 54. I encourage the member for Nechako Lakes to take the opportunity during this second reading debate of Bill 11 to stand up and address some of the concerns that this school district has with Bill 11 that they’ve outlined to the Minister of Education. I certainly am. I’m certainly standing up for them.

The “trust us” goes beyond that. It goes to other areas where this government says: “Trust us.” The special adviser is of concern not only to school districts that I represent — school districts 87, 82 and 54 — but the school district in Delta, the Delta school district chairperson, Laura Dixon. I quote from what she said about this bill. “Placing an unelected special adviser, who is not accountable to our community, in front of our trustees’ ability to serve our community” is a major concern to her and her school district.

What could this special adviser perhaps insist on school districts doing? Well, one area — and that’s outlined by other school trustees — is in regards to the
[ Page 7697 ]
selling off of land, which school districts are under increasing pressure from this government to do — selling off land.

What’s the public record on that? “Trust us on land sales.” Is this what this government is saying, after we’ve just exposed and experienced in this Legislature a loss of $43 million in land sales by this government when they couldn’t even sell land for the value it was appraised at in the Lower Mainland in the hottest real estate market in the province, if not in the country? It’s $43 Million. “Trust us on land sales. Trust us on shared services.” Not a lot of reason to.

What could have been done with some of that $43 million? How could it have been reinvested, that $43 million that was lost on land sales?

[1810]

I asked questions of the Minister of Education in budget estimates about the incredible, incredible failure of kids in care when it comes to getting Dogwood certificates. For kids in care, the graduation rate for Dogwood certificates in the province is 27 percent. The rest of the provincial average on that is 84 percent — 27 percent Dogwood certificate graduation rates for kids in care and 84 percent for the remainder of the province on that statistic.

Land sales, a lost $43 million. Some of that could have been reinvested into the education system. Trust us on our commitment for co-governance with school districts and school boards. A MOU was signed in December, not four months ago, on co-governance with school districts. Here we are, four months later. A unilateral decision was taken to introduce Bill 11 with no consultation with school districts. In fact, school district 54, the one I share with the member for Nechako Lakes, wrote on March 26: “There was little, if any, consultation by which we could have had more flexibility over how further savings might be realized.”

The minister was quoted as saying that there’s lots of low-hanging fruit in the school administrative areas. Yet, here we have a school district that has already been diligent in trying to recoup savings in administrative services and engaged in shared services. I talked about those and many other aspects, and yet the minister says, in an insulting way, that there’s low-hanging fruit still to be had. I think that flies in the face of what has been done by school districts and by school district 54, in particular.

We also have an issue with the B.C. School Trustees Association just last week having the first opportunity to review Bill 11. This is after a co-governance document was signed. When they reviewed Bill 11, the B.C. School Trustees Association asked that the B.C. government immediately withdraw the sections of Bill 11 that override the authority of democratically elected boards of education. These are the people who live in the communities, who have the solutions to graduation rates, who have the solutions to the challenges faced in the classrooms. Yet we have “We know best” from this government — “We know best in Victoria.”

The B.C. School Trustees Association has written to the minister, demanding an immediate review of the intent of Bill 11 legislation and an opportunity to recommend amendments prior to final adoption. It begs the question: what is the rush? What is the rush with Bill 11? It doesn’t seem to be addressing any critical issues at this point. In fact, it flies in the face of the MOU signed with the school trustees and the school boards around co-governance. So what is the rush about implementing this document?

We also have other school districts who pointed out some very insightful and important failings of Bill 11. The school district in Prince George. A school trustee, Sharel Warrington, from school district 57, said: “It’s very concerning, and its implications we really won’t know until we have had a really good chance to look at what it means for board governance, what it means for board autonomy and what it means in a lot of ways.”

Again, we’re talking about local control over education within a provincial context. It’s fundamentally about democracy, about what local people have to contribute and that the solutions, I think…. From this side of the House, we know the solutions can be found in the communities. The solutions do not solely reside in Victoria under the purview of the minister — that we would get from this Bill 11.

We also have an allusion, a reference, from the Nanaimo school board chair, Steve Rae. He says and he writes: “I’m all for consolidating services if it makes sense, but to me, all they’re doing is trying to take everybody’s eye off the ball. The fact is the provincial government continues to underfund education.” We’ve heard that time and time again when it comes to education services. I gave an example of graduation rates for kids in care.

[1815]

Again, the ability to appoint special advisers, the ability to require shared services, the ability to designate what kind of professional development teachers should undergo — all centralized under this bill within the minister’s purview and absolutely flying in the face of the well-thought-out notion that people in communities, the elected officials, have the ability to find the solutions and suggest the solutions that are necessary.

The trust-me attitude does not fare very well under this bill. When we talked about shared services, and I talked about the BCeSIS system, the chairwoman of the Okanagan Skaha school board, Linda Van Alphen, pointed out: “I have a lot of trouble with this, especially when you think the biggest shared service we have in the province is the student information system, and it’s never worked well.”

Never worked well. Again, trust-me just doesn’t cut it in this case. I encourage the minister to rethink the introduction of this Bill 11 — why it needs to be rushed in with little or no consultation — to look at the provisions where
[ Page 7698 ]
power is being centralized, even though we have one of the highest-ranked public education systems in the world.

I want to reflect on…. After the dispute with teachers was settled and the Premier said that now is the time for healing, we have, really, a mean-spirited attitude represented from Bill 11 less than six months since that settlement — a little over six months.

It makes me reflect and go back to when the Premier was in charge of the file as Minister of Education back in 2002, when she tore up contracts that dealt with things like classroom size and composition. That decision was found to be unconstitutional by the B.C. Supreme Court in 2011.

Now, it seems, the minister is channeling that kind of spirit from the minister. I don’t know what the objective is other than perhaps he’s concerned about staying in cabinet if there’s a cabinet shuffle coming up in the summertime. But that mean-spirited approach, that I-know-what-is-best attitude typified by this government….

Interjection.

D. Donaldson: I see the Minister of Health laughing at that. When it comes to trust-me, he is another fine example. We know that he made a commitment under the GP for Me program that every person in the province would have a family doctor by the end of 2015. How’s it going on that, Minister? There are thousands of people….

Madame Speaker: Back to the debate — speaking to the bill.

D. Donaldson: Well, it is relevant to the debate, hon. Speaker — and thank you for that note — in that it’s another example of trust-me, and the trust is not warranted. Trust is not warranted in this government.

So mean-spirited approach. The I-know-best attitude is not the best way to be creating public policy, is not the best way to be supporting our public education system. I encourage the minister to withdraw Bill 11. I will not be voting for it. It does not support the purposes of school districts 87, 82 and 54 in Stikine, and it does not support public education in the way it needs to be supported.

Noting the hour, I move adjournment of debate to the next sitting of the House.

Madame Speaker: The committees are still in session. Does anyone else wish to speak?

Would you like to continue your remarks?

D. Donaldson: Sure, I’ll continue my remarks. I was going to continue them tomorrow, but I’ll continue them today.

I want to go back to the shared information systems and how we had an example, under the integrated case management, of a shared information system that was a total failure.

[1820]

The shared services that that represents was a $208 million cost. The Auditor General just reviewed that and said that the inefficient systems that were supposed to be covered by this were not covered. Only one-third were covered.

I go back to school district 54 and the letter the minister received and the letter that the member for Nechako Lakes received. When he had the opportunity just now to stand up and address the concerns of a school district in his own constituency, he declined — the school district shared by the Minister of Aboriginal Relations and myself.

He has schools in Houston. I have schools in Smithers. We have schools in other communities represented by that school district 54. They wrote about how they’ve worked hard on shared services, how they’ve worked hard on issues to do with administrative costs, how they were hoping to continue to spend that money within the school district, within services.

Now they’re hearing they’re going to be clawed back, and the Minister of Aboriginal Relations, the member for Nechako Lakes, wouldn’t even take the opportunity a few minutes ago to stand up and try to talk to issues in his own constituency. He’s got his head down now. He won’t bother getting up and speaking, so I’ll have to continue speaking, and I will, because it has to do with school district 54 in my area.

My area, school district 54, has written to the minister, has cc’d me and has cc’d the member for Nechako Lakes, and they’re concerned. They’re very concerned. They’ve worked hard. There’s no more low-hanging fruit. They’ve worked hard on many areas, many areas in shared services, many areas that the minister, when he said there were savings still to be had, mentioned.

They’ve already engaged in the shared services agreements — banking with government, procurement cards, sharing staff contracts with smaller remote districts, WorkSafe B.C. administration services through school district 23 in the Central Okanagan, attendance management through work with unions. What other things does the minister think that a small school district that is trying to cope with underfunding can do — a small school district that the Minister of Aboriginal Relations represents as well as I?

In fact, we’ve had shared meetings, the minister and I, with this school district about five years ago. He knows the pressures are on, and yet he won’t rise in second reading debate on Bill 11 to support the school district that represents schools in his constituency as well as mine.

They write that they…. I’ll quote from the letter:

“In the Bulkley Valley we have taken great pride in making sound financial decisions that, even in the face of ongoing declining enrolment, permit us to promote innovation while balancing the usual myriad of decisions faced by boards across the province. As a small district we are accustomed to finding every and any efficiency to ensure resources support student learning.”
[ Page 7699 ]

Over the past couple of years, as well as those shared services, they’ve reduced board office staff, they’ve demonstrated ongoing energy improvements and they’ve restructured facilities, disposing of excess facilities.

I’m sure they got the appraised market value for those excess facilities, unlike what we’ve seen with this government when, in a fire sale — in a desperate attempt to balance the budget — they sold high-value properties in one of the hottest real estate markets in Canada for $43 million less than the appraised values.

I think school districts can do a better job when it comes to that, and yet Bill 11 has the ability for the minister to appoint special advisers who could determine whether a school district should be selling off an excess facility and force them to do that. You know, the track record is it would be less than appraised values based on what this government’s record is so far.

That’s what school district 54 has done. I’ll also quote from the last paragraph because the member for Nechako Lakes didn’t want to take time to stand up and respond to this letter even though he was cc’d on it. I’ll quote from the last paragraph.

“We appreciate the economic pressures that exist in the province but struggle to understand how we might communicate the benefit of being proud of our financial record given yet more limitations.

[1825]

“Furthermore, despite the recent memorandum of understanding with the B.C. School Trustees Association, there appears to have been little, if any, consultation by which we could have had more flexibility over how further savings might be realized.”

This school district has done its utmost. It’s looked in every corner. It’s looked behind every door. It’s tried to make cuts, and it’s tried to make savings without impacting services to the school, to the classrooms, and they’ve been able to do that.

The savings that they’ve been able to accrue they’ve used to “continue to support ongoing rich, professional learning for employees. Moreover, our sound, fiscal management allowed us to occasionally increase administrative time, principals and vice-principals, as needed, to support people new to the increased demands of learning in the K-to-12 sector. It’s complex work, and given some of the recruitment issues faced by rural and remote districts, it’s disappointing that this example of district planning and leadership development may be impacted.”

We know now that it’s not “may” be impacted; it will be impacted. Any kinds savings are being clawed back by this government — $29 million in the next year, $25 million after that, for a total of $54 million. This is an example of what…. The government says: “Trust us.” I don’t think so.

Again, I’m sorry that the member for Nechako Lakes didn’t take the opportunity to respond to school district 54. We’re now nearing the end of the time for the debate today on this bill. Again, it’s mean-spirited. It demonstrates the “I know what’s best” attitude. That’s not the way to create public policy when it comes to public education in this province. I will be voting against the bill.

I move adjournment of the debate for the next sitting of the House.

D. Donaldson moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

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

Hon. T. Lake moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Madame Speaker: This House, at its rising, stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

The House adjourned at 6:27 p.m.

PROCEEDINGS IN THE
DOUGLAS FIR ROOM

Committee of Supply

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF
JOBS, TOURISM AND SKILLS TRAINING

(continued)

The House in Committee of Supply (Section A); M. Hunt in the chair.

The committee met at 2:34 p.m.

On Vote 31: ministry operations, $198,360,000 (continued).

Hon. S. Bond: Today, obviously, we’re going to be covering a number of topics. The critic has given us a little bit of a road map as to where we’re headed. So I’ll do some introductions now and some as we have other members of the team join us.

Once again, I’m supported today by my deputy, Athana Mentzelopoulos, and David Curtis, who is the assistant deputy minister of management services and executive financial officer. We also have Gary Herman with us, who is the chief operating officer for the Industry Training Authority; Scott MacDonald, the assistant deputy minister for labour market and immigration. We also have, behind me, Rob Mingay, assistant deputy minister for workforce development. Other members of our team will join as the questions would require.

[1435]

With that, hon. Chair, we’ll get started.
[ Page 7700 ]

S. Simpson: Thanks to the minister. My plan is that I’ve got a short number of questions to wrap up what we were doing on Thursday, mostly related to ITA operations. Then we’ll be moving to WorkSafe following that.

Could the minister break down the budget a little bit? I believe the budget for ITA is about $95 million, all in, give or take. Could the minister break that down as to how that breaks down between administration, program and other areas?

Hon. S. Bond: The total allocated budget, as the member opposite reflected, is just under $95 million, and $87.574 million of that is in training delivery.

Making sure that we have appropriate standards and curriculum development is approximately $2.37 million. Engagement, in terms of industry relations, is $2.9 million. Communication, making sure that we are doing things like talking about the apprentice job match tool, is $250,000. Challenger assessments, exam invigilation and enhanced assessment initiative is just over $1 million. Support business of the ITA — that includes salaries, associated supports for the office, etc., lease costs — $9 million. And support for…. This is a new category which we have in the budget. There are no dollars attached to that at the moment.

So the allocated budget is $94.444 million, with another grant of $1 million which has been provided, for a total of $95.444 million.

S. Simpson: Could the minister maybe break down the staffing at ITA a little bit — numbers in administration, numbers in direct line work and some idea of how people are allocated to do the work of the ITA?

Hon. S. Bond: The total number of FTEs is just under 100. We don’t have a specific breakdown for the member opposite. I’m happy to get one for him.

I can tell him that, obviously, we have apprenticeship advisers, which we referenced in our discussion last week. We have a program standards team, which looks at developing curriculum. So across all of those budget lines, there are people attached. Mr. Herman will be happy to bring back and share with the member opposite a breakdown of those FTEs.

[1440]

S. Simpson: I’d appreciate that and thank the minister for the offer.

I’d like to move a little bit to the ITA and some questions related to apprentices. Could the minister tell us…? Apprentices, when they’re out and with employers — how do their hours get tracked in an apprenticeship, and how do they get reported?

Hon. S. Bond: The primary way that it’s done is…. Actually, the employer is responsible for doing that. We have a system that is called direct access. It’s not like the gaming direct access or those kinds of circumstances. This is an on-line system where employers can go on line. They then record, as frequently as they wish, the hours that are accumulated by apprentices that are working with their companies.

S. Simpson: Is there an oversight function here for the ITA to ensure the accuracy of those hours and ensure that people are getting credit for the hours they should get credit for and that all of that is operating as it should to meet regulation?

Hon. S. Bond: While there isn’t a formal oversight role, there is the mechanism that the employer reports the hours and does that on line. Apprentices have access to that data as well, and they monitor themselves the number of hours that have been recorded. If there are issues that emerge, we have a process where you can actually call a line and identify that there are concerns. Apprentices do that.

Obviously, apprenticeship advisers that are on the ground have the ability to work directly with employers. But as you can imagine, we have 15 of them, and there are a lot of companies and apprentices.

So not a formal oversight role, but there certainly is…. We work very constructively with employers. Generally speaking, they do a very good job of this, and apprentices have the ability and responsibility to check their hours and those records as well.

[1445]

S. Simpson: I would agree. From the conversations I’ve had around this, I think the vast majority of employers do exactly what we would expect them to do and work very well within the system. There’s always a small number who may do something else.

It’s my understanding that there is no timeline on reporting hours — i.e., hours in a particular month or period of time. There’s no obligation that the employer report those hours out within a specific time period. Could the minister confirm: is that correct? If so, why isn’t there some sort of timeline?

My sense of some of the challenge…. The minister talks about apprentices being able to call the help line and report if they feel that there are discrepancies between what they believe they’ve done and what’s reported, but if there’s no obligation or requirement to report in a timely way, then that becomes problematic.

Hon. S. Bond: I appreciate the member’s question. As you can tell, we’re actually having a policy discussion and somewhat of a debate on behalf of the minister on the other side of the room.

Apparently, there are timelines. They are, however, within a year. An employer has to, within the period of a
[ Page 7701 ]
year, record the information for their apprentices. Having said that, the most important check and balance is that an apprentice can actually check the record, and if there is no information there, they can call the help line, and basically, our help line will work with an employer to make sure that that information is put into the system.

Like the member opposite, I asked the question as to why. There are timelines. It is one year that the employer has to make sure that the documentation is there, but I think it’s a very good question. I appreciate the member raising it, and if, in fact, the member is aware of areas where this has raised concerns, I would be very happy to hear some specifics about that.

I think it was a good question, and it is a one-year timeline.

[1450]

S. Simpson: I appreciate that from the minister. I’m not sure that I have specific incidences, but we have heard of people where there are employers where there’s a challenge.

Part of the issue, of course, is that these are workers…. Apprentices are — I don’t want to call them indentured, but there is a nature to that — essentially in somewhat of an indentured role, so they don’t have much authority or power here in this relationship. I worry that in too many cases if there’s something going on and it’s not a huge issue, it’s just easier to let it pass than potentially lose their opportunity or their position. So I think it is something that requires a bit of a look.

Just a clarification here. That year — is that a rolling period, from the time their apprenticeship starts, of 12 months? Or is it the fiscal year or the calendar year?

Hon. S. Bond: I’m advised that it starts when the apprentice begins the relationship with the employer. Within a year of that, there needs to be the documentation, and then it would be rolling from that point forward.

S. Simpson: Just a heads-up for the minister. I’ve got a couple of questions on completion rates, and then we’ll be going to WorkSafe.

Could the minister explain…? I know this is in the performance measurement report of ITA on apprentice completion rates and how that gets measured, but could the minister talk a little bit about how completion rates are measured?

We know, of course, that this is a challenge. I know there’s a lot of investment of time and effort — the McDonald report and other work — to try to look at ways to enhance and improve those completion rates as a primary objective. Could the minister talk about how completion rates are measured and the work that’s done to make sure we understand success or failure, whatever it is?

Hon. S. Bond: What happens is that there is an identified group or a cohort of apprentices. We then report the percentage that complete their program within a six-year period. We measure, over six years, a particular cohort, a particular group of students, and that becomes the completion rate.

S. Simpson: As that measurement happens…. We all know that sometimes when you’re measuring things and trying to measure success — and I’m not sure where you’d start this — it’s always good to have a baseline to measure things against and to start against. Is there any baseline of any sort to measure these completions against?

[1455]

Hon. S. Bond: I think the best way to describe this is that we actually measure it against historical data. We only began to measure completion rates in 2005-2006. We do look back over historical trends, and we would measure each cohort against the historical data.

S. Simpson: I think we’ll be about ready to move on to WorkSafe.

Hon. S. Bond: I want to, just for the member opposite’s benefit, introduce the staff that we have with us for this section of the estimates. Trevor Hughes is the assistant deputy minister for Labour. Roberta Ellis is the senior vice-president of corporate services and human resources at WorkSafe. John Blakely is the executive director of labour policy and legislation. Jennifer Leyen is the director of special care services at WorkSafe.

S. Simpson: Obviously, there are a number of important issues related to the WorkSafe file, and we’re going to try to get through those in the next couple of hours.

I want to start with an issue that has been in the media in the last few days, because I know that there are some people who joined us in the gallery here who have come to hear about that. So we’ll deal with that piece of the file at this point, to allow them the opportunity to leave if they choose.

This is in regard to post-traumatic stress disorder for first responders. The minister will know that part of this discussion is around whether that particular condition for first responders should be categorized with the presumptive clause under WorkSafe, in much the same way that the government has done for a variety of cancers as they relate to firefighters.

My question for the minister…. Or maybe it’s asking for clarification. I heard the minister’s comments in the media, but I’m wise enough to know that 15 seconds on TV does not always fairly represent anybody’s view. So I would ask the minister to tell us what her position is at this point about that possibility of PTSD for first responders being categorized as a presumptive illness.
[ Page 7702 ]

Hon. S. Bond: I want to begin by just saying that I think the issue of…. I’m actually always concerned about how media or others may portray my particular views or the government’s views about worker safety in this province. I want to begin by saying this.

The member opposite knows this. We worked together on many files. There isn’t a single person in the Legislature who is not grateful and concerned about people who are first responders in British Columbia, be they paramedics or firefighters or persons who work in law enforcement.

Many of us have first responders in our lives and in our families. In my view, this is not a partisan issue, and it shouldn’t be. I want very much to express gratitude to the people who…. While we are running from those things that are traumatic and dangerous, there are people in this province who every day run toward those situations on our behalf.

I’m very concerned when my comments are described in a way that would look like I under-appreciate this issue. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is a process in place today. This government, before I became minister, passed legislation to ensure that there was recognition that it is not just physical injuries in the workplace that impact workers. In fact, there are mental health issues that impact workers in our province.

[1500]

We became the first jurisdiction in Canada to put into legislation the opportunity for workers who believe they have been impacted — and where there is a medical diagnosis — to be able to receive the support that they deserve in Columbia.

To the member’s question, obviously I care about first responders in this province. As I said, many of us have them in our families. But I also believe that as a government, we put in place a process which allows for those who have been impacted in their workplace to receive a benefit from WorkSafe and also receive special care.

I expect that of WorkSafe. When there are, in particular, mental health issues, we would expect those people to be cared for compassionately and that it be approached in a very thorough and comprehensive way. So to answer the member opposite, there is a process in place. There is a particular set of supports in place for workers who are facing mental health challenges, including PTSD.

S. Simpson: I’ll be clear at the beginning. I have no doubt about the minister’s concern for first responders and the sincerity of her comments about that. I don’t doubt that for a minute. What the minister will know is that…. I believe it’s section 5.1 of the act that deals with this.

What we know is that is quite different than the decisions that were taken by this government, with the support of the opposition, in the case of cancers in firefighters. There was a decision at that point to go further because of analysis that was done, because of research, because of science, a variety of things and a compelling case that in fact there was a direct occupational link to these cancers and the situation that firefighters faced.

As a result, with it being now presumptive, that ensures that firefighters who are put in that situation, who are diagnosed with those cancers, no longer have to make that case that this is occupationally related. There has been an acknowledgment that in the vast majority of cases, that would be the circumstance, and that will be recognized by WorkSafe, and all of the supports that come with that recognition will be there.

The situation we face now…. The minister talks about 5.1 and the ability to use that. This is a debate about whether we need to look at replicating what has been done with firefighters for first responders, for police, for fire, for ambulance, for emergency dispatch. And I know that there were others who would argue that corrections officers and sheriffs, for example, should be included.

At this point the discussion is that first responders, as we know them, be included under a clause that gives them similar protections to what we have done and what the government introduced in relation to firefighters. The question I have is: has the government considered this? Has there been any analysis or research done on the question of linkages between PTSD and related mental health challenges and the roles that first responders play?

[1505]

Hon. S. Bond: This is a very complex and very emotional subject for people. I am very respectful of that.

When you try to look at the evolving science and understanding of mental health disorders, in particular PTSD, the advice that I am given is that when you look at a presumption for cancer, for example, in the case of a firefighter, there is a much more direct link to the work that you do being a single reason for that happening. I’m told that the work that was done regarding section 5.1 relates to the fact that when there is a mental disorder, when there are a number of…. There can be a number of circumstances that influence or create those challenges.

With the case of cancer…. Again, this is very complicated, and I am not a medical professional, so I can only rely on the best advice that I am given. In the case of cancer presumption, there is a more direct causal relationship than it is suggested there is, potentially, with mental health disorders. It can be multicausal.

What’s important to recognize here is that there are supports in place for persons who make a claim that it is work-related. There is evidence that…. In fact, we have seen a number of first responders be successful in those claims. I’m advised that there are paramedics, law enforcement officers and also firefighters who have PTSD, have had that recognized and have benefits as a result of that.

[1510]

Attempting not be too simplistic in a response, the
[ Page 7703 ]
approach that was taken in 5.1, recalling that I was not the minister at the time, so did not have the benefit of all of the background work that was done…. Having said that, it allows for people who have PTSD and who have a work-related condition, a connection to that process, to be successful through the WorkSafe process that has been created.

S. Simpson: I appreciate the minister’s comments. I, like the minister, am working to make this a discussion, and ensuring that we have no hyperbole around this on either side is my desire. I think it isn’t a partisan issue. I think it is an issue that needs to be addressed. The concern I have is that there is enough of a case here that it needs more work to make the determination whether the presumptive approach is, in fact, correct.

The minister talks about this situation. My sense of it is…. I understand that the rates of PTSD have been determined — and I get this from clinical counsellors, who have advised me of this — and are probably two to three times higher among first responders, as they would be among the military, than in the general population. We also know, when we talk about that, that this is a population where some of that gets mitigated.

First of all, people who choose these professions tend to be people of a fairly hearty constitution. You don’t go into being a paramedic, a police officer or a firefighter if you don’t bring that. We know that there is pre-employment psychological screening for those positions. So there’s a lot of work done at the outset when somebody wants to enter this occupation to ensure that they are in a place where they are fit, physically and mentally, to engage in what’s a very demanding profession.

We also know that those organizations, many of them, do provide levels of support to assist employees, whether it’s debriefs after incidences and other kinds of supports. So there is support within the organizations to help first responders who are challenged. We know all of that happens.

We also know that for first responders, like many others, there is still a stigma around PTSD and around that. I suspect it’s not unreasonable to assume that there are people who are hiding some of those conditions because they worry about whether it puts them at risk for their job or the stigma that just is applied to that.

We know that the rates are higher. We know that this group is one that probably is as well equipped as any at the outset to deal with it.

I guess the challenge I have is whether the government is prepared to start to explore this. I understand, and I could be corrected, that the organizations that support these workers — the unions, the firefighters, the paramedics…. I understand that at least one of them has been in discussions with WorkSafe about the idea of the establishment of a committee involving those organizations, employers, health professionals and WorkSafe in a serious and, hopefully, timely discussion about the option of a presumptive clause.

Could the minister confirm that that discussion is going on or is being considered, and would she support setting up such an entity?

[1515]

Hon. S. Bond: Yes, there is a discussion and a dialogue underway. Of course, I support an ongoing discussion about an area where there is continuing evolution. There’s science that we have to better understand and we have to look at. The most important discussion that WorkSafe is having is actually about how to better provide supports and services for these workers. That matters to me enormously. In fact, I’ve asked WorkSafe to continue to have those discussions. We have them underway at the moment. We’re going to continue to do that.

In fact, one of the things that matters a great deal to me is that WorkSafe works with mental health experts to figure out how to increase service and support, not how to make sure that there are as many loopholes and processes as possible. You know, the stated goal of WorkSafe regarding mental health and, in particular, PTSD is to make sure that they provide thorough and compassionate care.

I have said to them on numerous occasions that whether it’s individuals with PTSD or victims’ families related to the Burns Lake and Lakeland circumstances, all of their work needs to be compassionate and careful and thorough. They need to go as far as possible to support these families — whatever they can do.

One of the things that I am concerned about…. Yes, there are discussions underway. It is about: what can we do better to support and serve? I have encouraged and asked for those discussions. We are monitoring the evolution of the science around PTSD.

But in the meantime…. This matters enormously to me. I think that when there are conversations that imply there are no supports available for persons who are grappling with some of the most difficult experiences in their lives…. We need to be very clear about that.

If someone calls WorkSafe, and they have any issues that require immediate help, WorkSafe doesn’t sit and make sure that there’s a claim filed and that we’ve gone through the whole process. In fact, help can be assigned to that person the same day an incident is reported. What matters most is that people get help. There is a 24-7 crisis line. There are ten social workers located across the province. I understand that we have to figure out how to provide more and better service to these individuals and their families.

[1520]

But I really don’t want the message to be that there’s no help. I think that is counter to everything we need to do to support people who are going through an unbelievable….

I haven’t experienced it. I can’t make that claim. But
[ Page 7704 ]
my job is to make sure that there is help. From the moment that that call is made, there needs to be services and supports available. I am told by WorkSafe that that is the case and that they are looking continuously for ways to provide better and more service. And that’s the discussion that’s underway.

S. Simpson: I’ll get to some of this in a bit, but I just want to clarify the minister’s answer. The minister has said that there is a discussion about better service. Is the discussion of a presumptive clause part of the discussion in these meetings?

Hon. S. Bond: The central discussion has not been about presumption. Presumption has not been the focus of this discussion. The discussions that we engaged in are around understanding the science — the connection between work, PTSD, multifaceted reasons that people undergo challenges and face mental health issues in the workplace.

The member opposite knows me well. This has not been specifically about presumption. This has been about understanding PTSD, mental health and wellness in the workplace, and it has focused on how better to serve clients — to look at the kinds of service that are required. The primary discussion has not been about presumption.

S. Simpson: The minister will know…. I certainly know from my experience with people coming into my office and my experience as the critic — as well as discussions with workers, advisers, union representatives who advocate for people around WorkSafe issues who are either in the process of application or, often, into WCAT and into the appeal process — that this is a very complex process.

It’s a litigious process in many ways. Certainly, I recommend to members of the Legislature on our side that they provide advice about the options out there to get advice. But because it is so complex, it’s very problematic for people to get through those processes. That’s compounded when you have a serious condition, and PTSD certainly would be that.

What we know is that the one other province that has addressed this issue is Alberta. Alberta amended the workers compensation legislation in 2012, and it now includes this clause:

“If a worker who is or has been an emergency medical technician, firefighter, peace officer or police officer is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by a physician or psychologist, the post-traumatic stress disorder shall be presumed, unless the contrary is proven, to be an injury that arose out of and occurred during the course of the worker’s employment in response to a traumatic event or a series of traumatic events to which the worker was exposed in carrying out the worker’s duties as an emergency medical technician, firefighter, peace officer or police officer.”

We have a clause here in Alberta. It is the one province in the country that has done the work and made the determination that a presumptive clause was necessary.

I guess my question in the process is: has WorkSafe done any reviews of the work that Alberta did to make the determination that that clause was warranted in Alberta?

[1525]

The Chair: Madam Minister, before you speak, I just want to refer to Standing Order 61. I’m listening to the debate. I’m listening to the line that’s going on, and at this point in time I’m just cautious as to where it may be going. I’m not saying that we have a problem. It says: “Only the administrative action of a department is open to debate. The necessity for legislation and matters involving legislation cannot be discussed in Committee of Supply.”

At this point in time I believe the questions have been administrative and dealing with administrative questions, so I believe we’re safe, but I just want to be careful that we don’t cross that line.

Hon. S. Bond: Okay. Thank you very much, hon. Chair. I will try to stay within the terms of reference that you just cited.

The answer to whether or not WorkSafe looks at Alberta’s presumption: of course they do. In fact, they monitor what happens in jurisdictions right across the country. It should be noted that no other jurisdiction other than Alberta has a presumption in place.

I should also note that in the case of Alberta or British Columbia, there is one thing that is common to both: you must have a diagnosis of PTSD before you move forward in either circumstance. Here we continue to have, through this section, which is in legislation…. We are the only jurisdiction that has put the whole issue of mental health issues in the workplace in legislation. Most other jurisdictions do it in policy. We thought it was important enough that we put it in legislation.

So yes, we do monitor. We actually look at what is happening across other jurisdictions. As I said, it’s section 24.2 of the Workers’ Compensation Act in Alberta where it does require, similarly, a diagnosis of PTSD in Alberta.

[1530]

[M. Bernier in the chair.]

I just want to make sure that we continue to have on the record, for the member opposite, the fact that, while there is a process in place, there have been a number of first responders who have had a diagnosis of PTSD that was determined to be work-related and have gone on to receive benefits and ongoing benefits here in British Columbia.

S. Simpson: I’m aware of that, and I’m pleased that those first responders who made that case successfully to WorkSafe are able to get some supports. We also know that there are first responders who have had diagnosis or
[ Page 7705 ]
where there has been conflicting diagnosis, and they have not been successful in making that case and in getting the supports that they may need.

This isn’t a question about what WorkSafe is or isn’t doing at the moment. This is a question about whether we should be looking at a practice that we have in place for health-related issues for first responders within the area of cancer in firefighters as something that should be explored in a broader way as it relates to PTSD.

If I have a concern here, it’s that it appears the discussion that WorkSafe may or may not be having around this issue is around how to do what we do in a different or better way but not around the merit of a presumptive clause. That’s if I’m to understand the minister and the minister saying that’s not what’s occurring in the discussions at this point — that it’s a discussion about doing it better, or whatever, but not around the issue of a presumptive clause.

We know that this is an issue where there is growing concern. I think the minister, if she hasn’t received them, will start receiving letters from municipalities that employ firefighters and police and are concerned about their personnel and whether their personnel are being treated in the way that those councils will deem is appropriate.

I believe you’re going to start getting some of those letters — that’s my understanding — if you haven’t received them already.

If I have an ask for the minister in this process — and we’re going to move on to other matters after this — the ask I have is to provide some direction to WorkSafe, in whatever fashion is appropriate for the minister to do that, to say that this should be a live conversation.

It’s time to bring those unions and the medical expertise and, I would say, some of the people who are suffering this — who can bring experience to make sure they have input — and WorkSafe and the minister’s officials together and have a serious conversation about: what does it take? What evidence has to be put on the table? What evidence is available that can be analyzed to make the case, or not, for why a presumptive clause may or may not be appropriate?

The concern that I have, from what we’ve heard at this point, is that that piece of work has not been done. There hasn’t been work here to make that determination. What I think I hear the minister saying — and I’m happy to be corrected — is that we have a clause. We have 5.1., and 5.1 deals with these issues in a way that is, generally, satisfactory. I’m not going to suggest for a minute that the minister said it’s always satisfactory — but generally satisfactory.

I’m not sure that that’s correct. It’s time to look at the other option, and the ask for the minister is: have the hard look, in a timely way, with the people who need to be part of the conversation, and then make the determination. I don’t see where the hard look has been had.

[1535]

Hon. S. Bond: I know this was just a choice of words. First of all, as the minister I don’t direct WorkSafe. It’s an independent organization. They make decisions about the work that they’re going to do, and that is statutory. I don’t get to do….

Interjection.

Hon. S. Bond: Yes. Well, I certainly have conversations about expectation. However, I don’t direct them in terms of what they do. That is not my job, and it’s not permitted, actually.

I know the member is going to move on to other topics, and I want to perhaps just summarize my comments by saying that we’ve had 36 months’ experience with groundbreaking legislation in Canada. Of course, I expect the dialogue to continue. I expect the science to continue to evolve.

I also look at it in the context that one jurisdiction has a presumption. No other jurisdictions do. British Columbia stands alone in having the whole “address the issue of mental health issues in the workplace” in legislation. We are the only jurisdiction at this point, I’m advised, that has that in legislation.

Of course, I expect them to continue to have these dialogues. But the most important thing to me at the moment is to ensure that when people indicate they have issues and challenges with their workplace and with their own personal circumstances, there are services provided immediately, that whatever processes we have in place are made as thorough but as compassionate as possible.

In the course of this discussion, I have been accused of being uncaring and a whole bunch of other descriptor words. This is not an issue of who cares more. I know that the member opposite is not saying that. It is a matter of working to support people who have specific needs in our province, and I expect WorkSafe to do that in, as I said, a thorough and compassionate way.

We will monitor. We will continue our discussions. They’ve been primarily with firefighters at this point in time, and that’s been a very helpful discussion, as we’ve shared information, tried to understand the circumstances, the cause — all of those things. It’s been a very productive discussion, and I know that work will continue.

I appreciate the member opposite’s respectful way of approaching this discussion. I do appreciate that it is not easy to have for him either.

I do want to recognize Ms. Jennings, who’s in the precinct today. I was not aware that she was specifically going to be here, but I did hear the introduction in the Legislature.

[1540]

As I have said in correspondence with her…. I know that she would very much like to meet, and so would I. I have said that once the appeal…. I’m advised that Ms.
[ Page 7706 ]
Jennings has an appeal underway, and as minister, I am not in a position to be able to meet with someone who is in an appeal process. That is difficult. I’ve had the same circumstances with workers at Lakeland and Babine as well. But the minute that is completed, I am happy to sit down and have further discussion about this issue.

I am extremely grateful to people who serve in this line of work, and I certainly am sincere and genuine in wanting to be sure that the services provided are provided immediately and effectively and as supportively as possible.

S. Simpson: Based on the minister’s comments, I’ve just one more question. I will assure the minister that I believe it’s important that this be kept at a level that deals with the issues and is not political in the big-p way — I don’t see much value in doing that, quite frankly — and have attempted to do that. But it’s an issue that we will continue to discuss in the coming weeks and months.

I do have a question. The minister has talked about 5.1 and the success of 5.1 and her belief that that’s an option that is working. Has WorkSafe got statistics and information about numbers of cases that have been filed that have been PTSD-related for first responders? Numbers that have been approved?

Also, and this is a difficult situation…. We know it’s the case in the military, and we know that there has been some work done on numbers of suicides or attempted suicides by first responders, relative to the general population, as an impact there. Obviously, that’s a very extreme situation when it gets to that and very tragic for a whole bunch of reasons. I’m just wanting some statistical support for the argument that 5.1 is working.

[1545]

Hon. S. Bond: Complicated numbers, but these are related to, as the member opposite would know, 5.1. The way WorkSafe is measuring the success of the mental disorders legislation is what I…. We do not track PTSD until the claim has been accepted, so I can give you general numbers around the entire pool.

Is it a success? Well, I can tell the member opposite that mental disorder claims that were registered are over 6,700 since July 1, 2012, and there is very specific breakdown. You know, 1,800 came from the health care sector, but we have 700 from transportation. Then there’s retail, accommodation, public administration, business services, and 1,600 were actually across all other sectors.

We need to remember that this is groundbreaking legislation. We’re able to look at over 6,700 claims registered. Of that, 1,055 claims have been allowed, but 1,863 of those claims, for example, were suspended, primarily because the worker…. Often workers did not want to pursue them. There were a number of other things that happened.

So 483 claims did not require adjudication, 32 claims were rejected because they had nothing to do with work issues, and 286 claims are in the process of adjudication. There’s a real…. Yes, we are tracking. As I said, we’ve had 36 months with this legislation, and we’ve seen a significant number of people take advantage of the legislation that we put in place.

I can say that in terms of the number of claims that have been made — the mental health claims unit data — the allowed claims under that section for paramedics, firefighters and law enforcement total 114 under the mental health category. If we look very specifically for PTSD from the period of July 2 to March 31, the total is 31, with the largest number of claims being accepted in the paramedic category.

S. Simpson: I’m trying to get out of this topic, but I’m not quite there yet. The allowed claims — 114 for first responders. Was that over the last year, or was that over the 36 months of the file?

Hon. S. Bond: July 2012.

S. Simpson: I’m going to move on now to a different topic. But I guess what I would say is that I would hope…. I know the minister doesn’t direct WorkSafe, but I’m certain that the minister or the minister’s staff and others can provide sage advice to WorkSafe which they will consider.

If the minister was to say, “This is an issue that I’d like to know about because somewhere down the road I might write legislation on this” — not committed to it — “so you should do some work on it,” then WorkSafe could take that however they chose, but I suspect they might do some work on it. That would be a good thing for all of us. I hope the minister will consider that, because I do assure the minister that this conversation will continue.

[1550]

I want to move to a different topic related to WorkSafe. In 2001 the government signed a memorandum of understanding between the criminal justice branch and the Workers Compensation Board. In that memorandum of understanding they essentially dedicated a Crown prosecutor to WCB. That prosecutor was dedicated. It was for one year, and that program was not renewed. That memorandum of understanding expired and was not renewed.

Could the minister speak to that? I know we’ve had this discussion previously, but we’ll have it now. Could the minister speak to the government’s thinking that they chose not to renew it and that it’s not an issue today?

Hon. S. Bond: I can’t speak to the issue of an MOU in 2001, which is a Justice issue. But what I can tell the member is that today there is an MOU that has been signed between WorkSafe and the criminal justice branch. That recommendation originated with the report that John Dyble did after the circumstances that unfolded with both Lakeland and Babine.
[ Page 7707 ]

The recommendation from Mr. Dyble was that there be a formal memorandum of understanding between criminal justice and WorkSafe. That is now in place. That recommendation also was picked up in the Macatee report. He made several recommendations about what that MOU should look like. The MOU between CJB and WorkSafe was signed August 7, 2014, and it was in line with the recommendations of the Macatee report.

S. Simpson: I know that at one point I believe I heard a reference about budget considerations with criminal justice. I know that their money is tight. I would note that in the memorandum of understanding, the ’01-02 memorandum, $165,000 was attached to that. Essentially, WorkSafe was paying for that Crown counsel. So it was an issue of the employers, essentially, paying for the Crown counsel.

[1555]

The minister will know that in Mr. Macatee’s work, he went to Deloitte and asked Deloitte to do some work. They supplied a report on June 20, 2014, Leading Inspections and Investigation Practices. Point 5 in that report says the following:

“Consider dedicated Crown counsel for investigation oversight and prosecution. As noted in Mr. Dyble’s report, there is a need for more effective interactions between the criminal justice branch and WorkSafe B.C. Many jurisdictions have successfully utilized dedicated Crown counsel to provide oversight for investigations and to conduct prosecutions where warranted. Recognizing that a memorandum of understanding between the two organizations is being created and that formal prosecutions are relatively rare, the two organizations may consider the potential for dedicated legal counsel to oversee serious investigations and prosecutions.”

Since I don’t kind of get to ask WorkSafe the question directly, I will ask it through the minister. Why was the decision made — by WorkSafe, presumably — to reject that recommendation of a dedicated Crown counsel, as was at least encouraged by Deloitte in their best-practices report to Mr. Macatee?

Hon. S. Bond: I’m obviously cognizant that this is not the Ministry of Justice estimates. Although I have been there and done that, this is not it. So I am going to be very careful about not straying into Ministry of Justice territory.

What I can say to the member opposite is that, if the member opposite looks at the Macatee recommendations, he did not recommend that there be a dedicated prosecutor. Yes, it was in the Deloitte report. It was actually John Dyble that recommended we put an MOU in place to sort out the issues that had emerged during the Lakeland and Babine investigations. That is now in place.

It is not — certainly, I learned this as the Attorney General — within the purview of the Minister for Labour or WorkSafe to require the criminal justice branch to designate anyone. That is entirely up to the criminal justice branch. They are an independent body.

What I can tell the member is that we are advised that the criminal justice branch has at least three senior Crown prosecutors that have very significant direct experience handling occupational health and safety files. They also have additional prosecutors that have relevant legal expertise. So it was not a direct recommendation in Gord Macatee’s report regarding a designated prosecutor.

[1600]

Again, criminal justice branch is an independent organization. They deploy their resources and their prosecutors as they determine.

S. Simpson: I appreciate that and respect that.

What we also know is that when Mr. Macatee went to seek best practices and to look at that — and what Deloitte was asked to do and the recommendation in relation to considering a Crown prosecutor…. The review that they did said: “The purpose of this review was to identify the characteristics of world-class compliance and enforcement organizations and identify leading practices for consideration by the administrator as he evaluates options to enhance these functions.”

That was the job that they, Deloitte, were given. They did that job, and that job included recommendation No. 5, which was to consider dedicated Crown counsel for investigation oversight and prosecution.

I absolutely respect that the criminal justice branch makes its own decisions for itself about what it does. But we know from past practice, 2001 to 2002, that the branch was certainly open to the idea of having a dedicated Crown prosecutor, especially when WCB, as it was at the time, paid for it, which is what occurred then. If that was to occur again, I would anticipate that WorkSafe would have to pay for it again. That, obviously, would be the matter of a discussion and of a memorandum of understanding and not an edict or a directive from on high.

It’s pretty clear that that’s not something that is being considered, and it is somewhat problematic, I think, in the big picture of things when we consider the past. We’re obviously going to have some time and the ability over the next couple of years to see the recommendations of Mr. Macatee and what he has implemented around the firewall and see how these investigations work, to see whether that is successful or not. I suppose time will tell a little bit on that.

In relation to WorkSafe, could the minister talk a little bit about how WorkSafe is dealing with inspections? I raise this because we go back to…. I know the minister knows this part of her file very well. When we look at the Lakeland explosion…. We know that when Babine exploded, the day before there was a significant incident at Lakeland. When I attended the inquest, I know that there were workers there who talked about a fireball 30 metres in the air. It was a very intense time as workers at the mill extinguished this fire. It was a significant fire.

The gentleman who was testifying at the time is one of
[ Page 7708 ]
the head-rig operators. He had said it was his view that because only one of the two head-rigs, which are the major saw operations…. Only one of them was operating. His concern was had they both been fully operating, we could have seen Lakeland that day and not a period of time later. But because they were only in partial operation, the ability to manage that became better, and they were successful in extinguishing the fire.

That happens. The next day we have the catastrophe at Babine. I guess what I would like to know is: how did WorkSafe then respond to inspections at Lakeland when they had this incident, which I’m presuming was reported, the Babine explosion, which all of a sudden focused everybody’s attention, I’m sure, and then all of a sudden the suggestion that maybe there weren’t any increased inspections? Could the minister tell us what report she has about how that was dealt with post that?

[1605]

Hon. S. Bond: Well, perhaps this will…. I’m not sure how the member will feel about this, but I am in a very challenging position as the Minister Responsible for Labour and WorkSafe. We are in the middle of an inquest, and so I am not going to speak to specific details about who said what and who saw what. There is testimony before the coroner, but I can speak, certainly, to practices more broadly. I’m sure that the member opposite will understand that there is still a process underway, and I want to be sure that I respect that. We do not want to have any challenges to that being successful, in terms of its completion and recommendations.

What I can do, though, for example, is describe for the member the inspection reports, orders, order follow-ups — those kind of things. When you look at the practices at WorkSafe, if you look at 2005, there were 20,444 inspection reports. By the time we get to 2012 — and, in fact, it peaked slightly higher than that in 2010 — the actual number of inspection reports that WorkSafe did in the province was 38,770. So the number rose from 20,444 to over 38,000.

The number of orders that were written got incrementally higher. There was a peak again in 2010, but orders in 2005 were 23,535. By the time we got to 2012, there were 32,079. Order follow-ups, similar statistics — 10,000 in 2005; 31,000 in 2012.

[1610]

Another interesting number when we look at the incremental number of penalties that were imposed. So 87 penalties were imposed in 2005, and in 2012 there were 260 penalties imposed. If you look at 2014, I should point out that there have been 433 penalties imposed.

Obviously, WorkSafe has a responsibility to be vigorous and to be consistent in their reporting, their inspections across the province. Those are done in a number of ways — either surprise inspections or those that are arranged ahead of time.

I can say to the member opposite that we saw a significant increase in the number of inspection reports, orders, order follow-ups, investigations and penalties imposed as a result of those investigations. In fact, if I look at the number of prevention officers that were budgeted, there were 196 in 2005, and in 2012 there were 254.

S. Simpson: I understand the minister’s caveat at the beginning of this, though I would note that I’ve been told numerous times that the inquest, of course, is not a place to lay blame, as we know coroner’s inquests aren’t. That’s not a place…. It’s a place to find solutions and answers, not blame. Presumably, dealing with some of these specific questions here, if nothing else, might add to finding the answers. I certainly don’t think it’s a matter where it would relate to blame. We already have our challenges at the inquest that we’ll deal with sometime post-inquest around how we ended up getting to the adjournment that we are in the middle of at this point.

I guess the point…. Maybe the minister can find another way to answer this question that is or isn’t specific to Lakeland and Babine.

The concern I have is that we had a significant incident. We then had a catastrophic incident in a very similar workplace that we know now has, post-Lakeland, led to WorkSafe looking at every mill in this province, looking at dust collection, looking at all of those issues and doing some very specific orders around that, that we’ve seen. A pretty aggressive approach, I believe, that they’re taking to try and ensure that this doesn’t occur again.

What I’m trying to understand, then, is when you have a situation in a workplace where you have an incident like the fire and the small explosion, arguably, that occurred before Babine. Babine, then, is the catastrophe, and there’s question about how there’s follow-up there and what that looks like.

How does WorkSafe do that? What is the process for WorkSafe? What triggers WorkSafe to choose to go out and say: “We’re not just looking at this as another incident, but we have enough indicators for other things to know that this could be a huge and life-threatening issue, and we’re going to look more aggressively”? It doesn’t appear that that occurred.

I don’t want to put the minister in a place she doesn’t want to be with what she wants to talk about with this discussion. But how is it that WorkSafe gets to that place that that investigation does or doesn’t occur in that way?

[1615]

Hon. S. Bond: I do want to just reflect that it isn’t about where I want to go; it’s where I want to be very careful about. I don’t want to put any risk in terms of where we’re headed with the inquest. Happy to answer as many questions as possible.

WorkSafe does take a risk-based approach. When it looks at inspections, it looks at historical data. For ex-
[ Page 7709 ]
ample: are employers in compliance? They look at records of the particular behaviour of an employer in a workplace, and they do target their resources to a high-risk model.

Obviously, as a result of what occurred…. I mean, we all know that it was horrific and tragic, and families will never be able to grapple with what happened to their loved ones. That goes without saying, but way better with saying. Post–Babine and Lakeland there’s been a far more formalized approach to a risk analysis unit — basically, looking across sectors, looking at where the emphasis needs to be.

I can tell the member opposite…. And he did speak to the aggressive inspection process that was put in place post–Babine and Lakeland. There was a four-phased approach to that, and that work continues today.

But again: targeted resources, high-risk model, looking at historical data, making sure that we’re targeting those employers who are most egregious. That has been emphasized and basically redesigned since the incidents at Lakeland and Babine.

The Chair: Maybe I’ll just remind the member that we have been fairly lenient on these last couple of lines of questioning. If you can make sure that your question does refer back somehow to the vote on the floor, which is the estimates of the ministry.

S. Simpson: Well, it’s all about the money, hon. Chair.

In terms of enforcement, we know that the enforcement issue is often about money. It’s about the amount of dollars that are invested in enforcement.

[1620]

Could the minister tell us what the enforcement budget has been at WorkSafe, say for the last two or three years, to kind of see where resources are being applied?

Hon. S. Bond: I apologize. We will get the specific breakdowns. I’m a bit surprised that we don’t have them, but we will get them for you. I’m sorry, to the member opposite.

I can say, though, that in terms of prevention resources, I can report to the member opposite that in 2000 there were 208 total officers. It went through sort of peaks and valleys over the course of 2001. In 2012 there were 254 total officers. As of 2014 there were 281.

As I said, there were some… In 2003 there were a few less, but it goes through a series of numbers. In 2011 it was 250; 2012 was 254; 2013 is 272; and 2014 is 281 — starting from a base of 208 in the year 2000.

S. Simpson: I’m going to come back to some of this questioning, but my colleague from Surrey-Whalley had a couple of specific questions. So I’ll allow him to ask those, and then we’ll come back to some of this.

B. Ralston: These are specific case files that are a result of constituents visiting my office and expressing their total frustration and despair in their dealings with the compensation system, and they come here as a last resort. I do want to put them on the record here.

The first one is a fellow named Edwin McCauley, aged 58. At the time of his injury, November 23, 2011, he had no previous injuries. He worked as a truck driver. He was cranking the loading gear. After a few turns, it bounced back. As a result, it jolted his whole body. He has been through a variety of treatment regimes with no cure. At the time he was earning $7,000 a month.

He was told he was obliged through the vocational process to look for work as a security guard. He wasn’t able to do that. During that period of time he was getting $860 every two weeks. Finally, he was cut off from that in August of last year. During the process he’s lost his vehicle, his house. He’s affected by anxiety, depression, alcohol dependence. Basically, his life is shattered. WCB has offered nothing to him.

I give this as an example of the cases that we frequently encounter in my community, where the system is clearly not working for individual workers. I wanted to bring that one to the attention of the minister.

A second person is a fellow named Douglas Wilson, who is aged 63. He suffered an injury in 1998 and was awarded a lifetime claim on hearing loss. He was a truck driver of some 35 years’ standing. The nature of the injury that he suffered is such that he experiences what is called recruitment. That is, when he wears hearing aids, rather than making his hearing better, they make it worse. That’s been confirmed by a specialist — not someone that WCB was prepared to send him to, but someone that he went to himself.

[1625]

He has been, therefore, unable to work because the job requirements are that he’s required to wear hearing aids, yet his hearing worsens when he has to wear the hearing aids. He similarly has been in a long-standing dispute and battle with the Workers Compensation Board, not able to work at any employment, deeply frustrated, anxious, depressed. And there’s no solution offered by the Workers Compensation Board.

WCB was the result of a historic compromise where workers gave up their right to sue individual employers. It was put into the system. Clearly, this system is not working for a number of workers. We see these cases periodically. These are two of the worst ones, in the sense that these people have come back to my office time and time again, completely at their wits’ end and looking for justice.

I would ask the minister for a response. If she’s not able to do that at this time, I’d ask for a written response at some point in the future.

Hon. S. Bond: Certainly, I spend a great deal of time working on constituency files as well, and I can appre-
[ Page 7710 ]
ciate the member’s frustration in bringing the case of Mr. McCauley and Mr. Wilson to us. I should note that WorkSafe does have a dedicated support line for MLAs so that if they have issues with particular cases, they are more than welcome to call WorkSafe.

We have heard the concerns expressed about the two specific cases. Obviously, I can’t speak to them today, and I am quite certain that the WorkSafe team that’s here with me can’t either. But I can assure the member opposite that we’d be happy to follow up with him directly through WorkSafe. Also, I would ask WorkSafe to put a response in writing to the MLA that brought the issue forward today. So we’d be happy to follow up.

We do recognize that when workers are injured and they feel there is not the attention or redress they expect, that is very difficult for them and for their families. I know WorkSafe works very hard to try to resolve those issues.

There’s also the workers advisers office, which is also very helpful in supporting workers across the province. There are those resources.

We will take those names back to WorkSafe, have them take a look and make sure that they get directly in touch with the MLA.

S. Simpson: Could the minister tell me: what is the practice? There’s an issue when inspections occur and when WorkSafe goes out to do inspections. We hear often that the employers are aware that the inspection is going to occur. I’ve talked to numerous employers who…. When an inspection is going to occur, the workers will be told that they need to take certain actions — cleanup actions, other actions — and then WorkSafe inspectors arrive on the scene sometime after that.

What is the practice around inspections and around doing these without informing the employer that, in fact, they’re coming?

[1630]

[D. Ashton in the chair.]

Hon. S. Bond: I have certainly had this question and discussion with WorkSafe on numerous occasions as well. I’m advised that the vast majority of inspections are unannounced but that there are occasions where an inspector might say to a company, for example: “I’ve asked you to deal with this issue. I will be back a week next Tuesday, and I need to make sure that that’s been taken care of.”

I have been assured and advised that the vast majority of inspections are unannounced. Candidly, I support that practice. I think that’s an important part of ensuring that people are complying for the right reasons. Most employers do that — the vast majority of them. I think it’s a fair question. I’m advised that the practice is that the majority of them are unannounced.

However, there are a series of announcements that we are very public about. That would be, as the member opposite pointed out, the inspection regimes that took place in phases 1, 2, 3, 4 post-Babine and Lakeland. We made it very clear. While not saying to a company, “We’re going to be there at two o’clock next Tuesday,” we said: “We are coming, and we are going to inspect, and we’re going to do that rigorously and aggressively.” So there was a broad sense in the industry that WorkSafe was going to be out there and they were going to be visiting those sites.

There was that sense of forewarning, but it was a broad, general provincial strategy that said: “We need to be very targeted and very aggressive.” The vast majority are unannounced. There are occasions, however, where they are not.

S. Simpson: Could the minister tell us: how was that decision made? Is that the inspector who makes the decision whether they will have a discussion with the employer prior to arriving, or does somebody else, a supervisory person in WorkSafe, make that decision about when they will and won’t do that? As the minister says, is it a kind of rule of thumb that these are unannounced unless you have some reason to tell them you’re coming?

Hon. S. Bond: Officers are given a great deal of discretion to actually make those decisions on their own, but WorkSafe’s direction — two officers — is that the general practice should be that they’re unannounced. It has also been described to me that, on occasion, there is the follow-up meeting or the follow up to the inspection, which is an arranged visit. The direction from WorkSafe, generally, to officers is that they should be unannounced, but the act gives officers individual discretion in terms of making those decisions themselves.

S. Simpson: What is the expectation around how employers report incidences that may trigger inspections? Again, I know that the minister is careful about discussions that relate to the two mill incidences, the two explosions. As an example, again, I referenced earlier the situation with the fire at Lakeland, pre-Babine.

[1635]

What is the requirement and the obligation for employers to report very immediately those kinds of incidences, and how do they get responded to in terms of inspections and such?

Hon. S. Bond: To the member’s question about what triggers the requirement for an employer to notify WorkSafe, in section 172 of the Workers Compensation Act it actually lays out the requirements that an employer has — for example, if there’s been a serious injury or, obviously, the death of a worker; a major structural failure or collapse of a building, bridge, tower; a major release of a hazardous substance.

Those are the specifics. There is a requirement that the
[ Page 7711 ]
employer must not only report but must begin that investigation. So there is a trigger. It’s also complicated by the fact that there are requirements now.

We have a relationship with the fire commissioner’s office, for example. In the case of a fire, potentially, the employer would be reporting to the fire commissioner and probably local fire authorities. We work to try to sort out the communications between those organizations, post-Lakeland and Babine. So there is a trigger. Certain incidents must immediately be conveyed to the board. That’s listed in section 172 of the act.

S. Simpson: I ask that because it’s my understanding that in the case of the Lakeland fire that preceded Babine, that wasn’t reported to WorkSafe.

[1640]

There was a company investigation. I recall discussion of that investigation when I attended the inquest. There was a company investigation, but it was not reported, though people talked about a fireball 30 feet in the air.

The question I have is: that kind of an incident…. Is it the minister’s view that that’s an incident that doesn’t require a reporting, at least, and then WorkSafe will do with it as they choose — that that kind of an incident doesn’t require the company to inform WorkSafe that it occurred?

Hon. S. Bond: I think it’s important, as I look at the act…. Technically, when you look at the component parts of the Workers Compensation Act….

[1645]

While there may not have been a technical requirement to report to WorkSafe an incident of that nature because it’s very specific — injury, collapse of certain things — in the event that there is a major fire in a particular workplace, yes, one would assume that that would be reported to the fire commissioner and to local fire authorities.

One of the things that we have done is we’ve created the fire inspection and prevention initiative. We did that in 2013. One of the reasons we did that was to make sure that employers knew about fire safety obligations, making sure there was coordination between WorkSafe, the B.C. Safety Authority and the office of the fire commissioner, which has responsibility for enforcing the B.C. fire code.

What we did not want to have happen was for there to be numerous jurisdictions trying to sort out who’s responsible for what. The fact now is that with the fire inspection and prevention initiative in place, there are protocols and expectations about reports that are made to one of those agencies. It is a cooperative process so that people are engaged in this discussion about worker safety in a way that is clearly understood. If you were to look at the technical act, there are very specific circumstances under which an employer must report and under which an employer must do an investigation.

I think, clearly, the fire inspection and prevention initiative is working to try to ensure that people understand their obligations around fire and about how to report and to make sure there’s a cooperative process between all of those important agencies.

S. Simpson: I’m going to now get to a question that I want to ask. I know that the minister…. Understandably, there are some limits on the discussion because of the inquest. There are some limits, and I respect that.

The question is this. The minister will know that the opposition and some other bodies have called, on numerous occasions, for an independent inquiry rather than an inquest. The coroner proceeded with the inquest, and that’s all good. I accept that that’s where we’re at now and that that will complete itself sometime over the next couple of months — hopefully, prior to the scheduled inquest for Babine. Hopefully, it will conclude.

My question to the minister is this. Accepting that the government believes that the coroner’s inquest will get the answers that everybody wants as to what occurred and why it occurred, is the minister open, if there is not satisfaction that those answers have been achieved and, hopefully, with a jury that will come forward with some recommendations that will be of value…? If those answers aren’t achieved, is the minister open to the option of an inquiry subsequent to this, if the inquest doesn’t satisfy those questions?

Now, I understand the issue is: “Satisfy for whom?” But if the inquest doesn’t satisfy those questions and bring some closure to this for everybody involved, is the minister open to a further investigation in the form of a public or independent inquiry?

Hon. S. Bond: We continue to believe that the most appropriate venue for discussing the circumstances related to what happened in Babine and Lakeland is the inquest that is currently underway. I’m not going to speculate about outcomes at this point in time.

I will only remind the member opposite that we didn’t simply rule out a public inquiry. We actually went and asked one of the leading lawyers in our country, Len Doust, QC, about whether or not a public inquiry would change the outcomes of the circumstances that occurred, with the difficulties that happened at WorkSafe and the decision not to pursue regulatory charges. His response, which of course we’ve discussed numerous times, was that it would not change the outcomes.

We’ve been very clear about that. I remain hopeful that the coroner will continue the work that she has started. She has very broad-reaching powers.

[1650]

It has been very difficult, I know. I have spoken with them. It’s been very difficult for workers and their families to go through the inquest to date, and there is more
[ Page 7712 ]
difficulty to come. We still have to complete this inquest.

Obviously, the coroner responded to concerns from the families that one was not what they wanted. They wanted two separate ones closer to their communities, which I very much agree with. I was very pleased to see that decision.

I remain committed to ensuring that the inquest gives families the opportunity that they deserve to have some of their questions answered.

The Chair: Minister and Member, can we take a quick ten-minute break, please? We’ll start again at the top of the hour. Would you mind? Is that okay? Okay. Thanks, everybody.

The committee recessed from 4:51 p.m. to 4:58 p.m.

[D. Ashton in the chair.]

S. Simpson: I just want to turn…. I think my colleague here, the member for Skeena, has a couple of questions related to WorkSafe.

R. Austin: Yes, I have a couple of questions. The first one I’m hoping is quite a simple answer. I’m looking for a clarification.

I have a constituent who was injured. As the minister will know, sometimes going through the then WCB, now WorkSafe process can take years. This one did take years. It was convoluted. It went for, I think, a dozen years. In the end he was successful in getting awarded a lifetime PPD pension. This original accident happened long before the changes that were made in 2002 to lifetime pensions.

[1700]

My question to the minister is this. If the original injury happened long before the changes were made to the pensions, is it fair to assume to be correct that it will not be affected by the changes that were made in 2002 and that this gentleman, once he hits 65, will continue to get whatever the deal was, whatever he was awarded from WCB as a result of this earlier accident? That’s the question.

Hon. S. Bond: Yes. The member would be correct that the rules would apply from the period of time when the accident occurred. I would also like to offer the member opposite the opportunity to make this specific case known to WorkSafe. We would want to be sure that everything has been covered off. But generally speaking, the principle would be yes.

R. Austin: Thanks to the minister for that. This gentleman will be very relieved to hear that. I did have an opinion from a legal advocate, but I just wanted to hear it directly from the minister’s mouth.

My second set of questions. Hopefully, you may be able to answer this in one answer. As you’re aware, the new smelter in Kitimat is close to completion. The great news on the environmental front is that they have monitored for five toxic substances over the 50 years that the Alcan or Rio Tinto smelter has been in operation, and four of those toxic substances are coming way down, which is great news.

However, one toxic substance, SO₂, is being increased fairly dramatically — 56 percent, to be precise — because in the manufacturing of aluminum, there has to be a source of carbon. And because the new smelter is going to be producing considerably more than the old smelter, you’ve got to use more carbon to keep up with that increase in production. Now the bulk of this….

There’s an increase that’s been given by the government to go from 27 million tonnes to 42 million tonnes of SO₂ emissions. I appreciate that the bulk of those emissions will actually be spread out through a system where they’re going to send it up higher, and then it’ll go through the valley.

My question to the minister is this. Specifically for the worksite and the workers who are in the plant, has WorkSafe B.C. sent in folks to do an analysis of what that means for the workers in the worksite with this increase in SO₂? If so, can we share that? And just to sort of try and put all my questions together, does WorkSafe B.C. then have an opinion as to that increase in SO₂ emissions and what it means for the folks who are working in the new plant?

[1705]

Hon. S. Bond: Thank you for that question. The responsibility to have an exposure control plan is up to the employer. It is actually laid out that they must have an exposure control plan that incorporates…. There’s a series of things that they need to go through, including identification, education and training, written work procedures, hygiene facilities, etc. There is a very significant plan expected from an employer.

The standards that are set for SO₂ and any other type of chemical or substance are set by an independent scientific agency, so WorkSafe doesn’t have an opinion on the range. I think it’s two parts per million to five parts per million for SO₂, which is adopted by WorkSafe. They don’t set the standards; they adopt. This is an American institute that looks at this from a scientific perspective.

However, there is a relationship with WorkSafe because they would then inspect the facility to ensure that there’s a plan in place and that the standards that are adopted are being met. So WorkSafe’s role is to inspect, ensure the employer has taken their obligations and have the exposure control plan in place. I hope that helps the member opposite.

S. Simpson: A couple more questions, and then we’ll
[ Page 7713 ]
move to employment standards.

The current fines. I believe it’s half a million dollars, a little bit more — the value of the fines. Those fines haven’t changed, other than CPI, since 2004. Has there been any consideration or review of the fine structure to look at whether a change might be warranted? If so, what kind of review was done, and what was the result?

Hon. S. Bond: The member is correct in his question. There have only been increases by CPI, but I can tell the member opposite that there is currently a penalty policy review underway.

S. Simpson: Just so I can understand what that means, does that mean that the amounts and how they get applied — all of those matters are now a question of review?

Hon. S. Bond: Yes. It will include things like Quantum, and there is a stakeholder engagement process underway.

[1710]

S. Simpson: This is a question that, back when the minister appointed Mr. Macatee as an administrator to look broadly at WorkSafe — as a result of the two incidents but to look broadly at WorkSafe…. I’m interested to know how broad that discussion was. I had the opportunity…. I’ve had discussions with a couple of people who have expertise in the areas of organizational development and organizational structure. We had an interesting discussion around WorkSafe as an entity.

One of the issues that they raised around just these organizations and effectiveness…. They said: “You take an organization that has responsibility for compensation, which can be very broad, and responsibility around rehabilitation, regulatory. Unlike just about anybody else in government, they have the authority to write regulation, whereas for everybody else, pretty much, that’s written at the cabinet table or comes through cabinet and OIC.” They have this broad responsibility, a quasi-legislative responsibility for regulation. They have responsibility for enforcement and prosecution all under one roof.

The issue that was raised for me by folks who do that is that they said you have, potentially, some inherent conflicts within that organizationally, from an organizational development point of view. It creates challenges when it all falls under the auspices of one governance structure in that way.

My question to the minister is: in the review that Mr. Macatee has performed, in the work that I know continues to be ongoing, is there a discussion about the effectiveness of the overall structure of WorkSafe? Are there too many things going on with one entity or not? I don’t have an answer or a particularly strong opinion about that, but it seemed that the argument that it’s a question deserving review made some sense to me.

Hon. S. Bond: I was casting my mind back to the Macatee report and review. I should say once again on the record that I was incredibly impressed with the work that Gord Macatee did — amazingly capable in terms of grasping the needs of a big organization in a short period of time, because he did the work in a very compressed time frame, as I wanted to get this moving.

In the report that he made public, yes, that was a question. In fact, section 8 is about organizational change. In fact, he did do a significant amount of work looking at other models where there was perhaps a division between occupational health and safety and the other side of the work that WorkSafe does.

It was determined — and Gordon Macatee determined and came to recommendation 11 in his report — that, fundamentally, the structure of WorkSafe was still a model that would work well in British Columbia. He made no recommendation for overall organizational change, and he did a great deal of work and did look at other models that exist across the country.

He did, however, say that there needed to be internal structures that were significantly changed, as the member opposite very correctly identified earlier on — things like creating a very separate investigation process so that we do not see a replication of what happened with Babine and Lakeland, significant internal change. But yes, his work was quite extensive, and he came back and recommended that there was no need for overall organizational change.

S. Simpson: I think at this point I’m going to ask that, because the minister knows we have some constraints on our time with these estimates…. There are some other questions, previously, maybe on skills here and on things to follow. If we don’t get to those, because I’m picking and choosing things to talk about, I hope I could be able to have written questions and submit them and maybe get some response over the next few months or period of time to some of those questions. If they’re not appropriate for response, I won’t get a response, but write some written questions.

Other than that, I do want to move on to employment standards, because we have little time, and thank you to your staff.

[1715]

Hon. S. Bond: I want to thank the member opposite. Absolutely, we will entertain those written questions. Not only that, but we’re very happy to have the member opposite sit down with WorkSafe and ask some of those questions directly or work through the skills-training side with some of our senior team that’s here as well. We’re happy to do that.

I neglected to, and I apologize…. I did not introduce John Panusa when I was talking about the WorkSafe team. He is the director of occupational regulation, policy and
[ Page 7714 ]
governance and was also very supportive today. I very much appreciate that.

Happy to move on and happy, also, to provide any information that’s required by the member opposite.

S. Simpson: Around employment standards and, related to that, the minimum wage question. I do have a couple questions that relate to minimum wage there.

The minister will know that there’s a wide array of people out there calling for additional minimum wage changes and a variety of responses to that. The minister, though, and the government introduced its most recent change, which was a 20-cent increase, to $10.45, and CPI adjustment moving forward.

I guess the question I have for the minister is: is it her view now that that is kind of the end-game in terms of minimum wage — certainly for the next couple years, through this term of government? I won’t ask what happens in terms of down the road. But this term of government, for the next couple of years, is the minister satisfied that that completes the government’s initiative on minimum wage, or is she open to more?

Hon. S. Bond: I think it’s fair to say to the member opposite that this is the plan we intend to leave in place and that there will be incremental increases to minimum wage going forward. This is the base rate that we would be using moving forward. It’s one of those areas where, I know, the member and I are going to agree to disagree about the minimum wage and the base that we started from.

I think the candid answer is that we put this change in place to ensure that going forward there are reasonable, predictable and scheduled increases to the minimum wage. That would be our intent.

S. Simpson: For the moment I accept that.

The other question I have is about the decision to choose CPI. Some other jurisdictions chose average industrial wage in the private sector as an increase — a number of those models. Could the minister tell us…? Did she consider some of those options for what kind of indexing would make sense? Why was the decision made to choose CPI versus, say, the average industrial private sector wage increase?

Hon. S. Bond: Yes, we did. I looked at what other jurisdictions were doing across the country. There are a variety of methods. Yes, there are provinces that use a blended model, which in fact takes CPI and average wage and a number of other things. So basically, I considered all of those and then decided to align ourselves with other jurisdictions that utilize CPI. A good number of them do. So did I do the homework? Yes, I did.

The major policy issue for me was making sure that this was a systematic approach to increasing the wage. I think that it is more fair to people both receiving the wage and those who are paying the wage to know that there are scheduled incremental increases. That really was the focus of the policy decision I made, but I did look at all of the other jurisdictions and decided to align with others that were using CPI.

[1720]

S. Simpson: Looking at the funding of employment standards and how the department is funded, there were significant reductions in funding back in ’03-04. I’m not sure of my year, but I’m sure that the minister will know in a minute. That changed in a pretty fundamental way the way employment standards works. They reduced the resources. It meant numbers of inspectors, investigators and things changed in a pretty significant way.

Could the minister tell us what has happened, in terms of funding, in current funding for employment standards and where we are at now versus, say, where we were at before those reductions were chosen earlier back in the time of the Liberal administration?

Hon. S. Bond: The member opposite is correct. The year, I think, was 2002, actually, where significant changes were made to the Employment Standards Act.

I’ve said this a number of times this afternoon. It goes better with saying than without. At no point would we want to move away from the important principle of protecting workers and making sure that their rights are protected in the province.

There was a very systematic change to the model. The process went through a core review. There were a number of inputs, and at the end of the day, there was a decision to try to find a way to be progressive, to balance all of the demands that were being placed on the employment standards branch.

[1725]

But the member is correct. There was a significant change to the model. One of the things, as I understand it — there was an emphasis on trying to find voluntary resolutions to things. It was a fairly significant change to the model. That took place in 2002.

S. Simpson: Those changes did happen. I must say, for many of the areas…. We’ll debate WorkSafe issues, and there are lots of issues in the files that the minister has. Probably, employment standards, in some ways, is one of the ones that I have the most concern with.

My concern is it arguably, because of the nature of who the workers are who get covered…. They don’t have that assistance of a union and the representation that’s there. Often it is lower-wage workers, lower-skilled workers, workers who would tend to be more vulnerable. Not in all instances, by any means, but certainly, that’s where those workers who are more vulnerable will fall — under employment standards.
[ Page 7715 ]

And it is a problem, I think — for me, it certainly is — the decision to have gone to what we’ll call the self-help model or the self-serve model, for lack of a better term. In fact, people who have a concern are initially referred to the tools that are available for them to try to fix their own problem with their employer.

Sometimes, no doubt, that can work. But in many instances it’s either not going to work or the worker doesn’t feel that’s a viable option for them to pursue, either because they’re going to lose their job — or they believe they’re going to lose their job — or they are going to, in some way, be at risk because of this.

I know that’s the model that’s been in place for a while. My question to the minister would be: has there been a significant or an independent review of that model done to determine whether the self-serve model actually is meeting the objectives of being a progressive problem-solving tool? Or is it a tool that makes for less cases, because people don’t feel it’s an option they can pursue, or are prepared to, so they stay silent? What kind of reviews have been done to determine whether that actually works?

[1730]

Hon. S. Bond: I appreciate the member’s comments. I would agree with him completely in the sense that we want to be sure that vulnerable workers are cared for in the province and that they aren’t intimidated by a process. All of those things are incredibly important.

I did want to clarify that while the self-help kit is something that was a result of the new system, when I look at the effectiveness of the self-help kit, we’re actually seeing the numbers rise fairly significantly in terms of the people who are using them. They’re a step-by-step guide to help both parties sort things out.

It is important to note that it’s not the only avenue. A self-help kit isn’t the only way that individuals get help. For example, if you’re a vulnerable employee or if you have a language barrier, you don’t actually have to use the self-help kit. You can directly file a complaint. There are ways that we support people in making sure that they can make that complaint, because this is a really fundamental part of protecting workers in the province.

I can say to the member opposite…. I’m just going to give him a couple of numbers, because they talk to the success of the program. When you look at the number of complaints that are resolved every year, the employment standards branch resolves almost 6,200 complaints a year and recovers an average of $6.5 million a year in wages for workers. There is a help line where people can call, and we help over 100,000 callers every year.

Certainly, there have been changes, and the service is different, but when I look at the statistics — and we do monitor, and we’re very careful about ensuring that we are protecting vulnerable workers in the province — we are seeing increased use of the self-help kit. It’s not the only option for workers.

We are seeing that the vast majority of decisions that are made by the employment standards branch are upheld on appeal — 88 percent of those. If someone appeals, 88 percent of those were actually upheld. Certainly, a changed model, but we’ve seen some very good results over the last couple of years in particular.

S. Simpson: Just so I understand. If I’m a vulnerable worker or a worker who feels that I’m being exploited or dealt with in a very poor way by my employer and I want to complain, I call employment standards, and I’m referred to the self-help kit as the route to go. If I am not comfortable or I believe that my employer is not going to respond well to me coming back as a self-advocate here without some other kind of force, ability, authority, then this isn’t going to go anywhere, and it’s just going to go from bad to worse.

If I say, “Thank you, but I need somebody to speak for me because I’m scared. I’m intimidated. If this is my option, then I’m just going back to work, and I’m just going to live with it,” do they, then…? What happens to them? Does employment standards then say, “Okay, you’ve asked for us to intervene directly or to play a more direct, hands-on role” — not the self-help kit? Does that occur, or does something else occur?

[1735]

Hon. S. Bond: We’re trying to determine what the trigger is that moves a person away from the self-help kit. There is a definition that says: “If you are vulnerable or you have language barriers, you need not necessarily use the self-help kit.” I think the definition is basically that if you’ve tried to use it and it didn’t work, then you come to employment standards branch and say, “The self-help kit did not work for me” and explain that, show that you have made an effort to use it and it did not work. Then you will be invited to simply file a complaint.

A complaint can be simple. It’s not an onerous paperwork issue. It can be as simple as an e-mail or a letter outlining what the concerns of that particular employee are.

S. Simpson: So I understand. In fact, excepting, of course…. I understand if there are language issues and the ability to communicate is a problem. I get that. But when we look at other workers who are vulnerable workers, as the minister…. We’ve talked about vulnerable workers or workers who feel intimidated or exploited. For those workers, the notion of self-advocating may be a big stretch.

If the department of employment standards is saying, “You have to go and try to do that, and if it doesn’t work….” Who knows what the consequences are if you get an unethical employer? That’s a small minority of employers, but it’s real. Their option, then, in too many cases, I believe, is to stay silent.
[ Page 7716 ]

What happens to the worker who says: “If I try to step up and self-advocate here, I’m going to lose my job” — or whatever — “and I know that. Please help me”? What happens to those people if they say that and say, “I just can’t manage this. I can’t do this” for any number of reasons? What happens to them? Are they told: “Well, you have to pursue that avenue and have exhausted that avenue or try it and prove that before we’ll talk to you again”? Is that the situation that they face?

[1740]

Hon. S. Bond: Certainly I share the same concern about what the definition of “vulnerable employee” is and if you are intimidated or worried about your ability to use a self-help kit. What I’m told is that if there is a demonstration that the self-help kit…. If there has been an attempt made to use it and if it doesn’t work, then the person is exempt from using that, and they can go ahead and file a complaint.

There is another avenue, and that’s an anonymous complaint, which a person can do at any specific point in time.

When I was looking back here, I wanted to be sure that I let the member know that there are categories of employees who are also exempt from the requirement to use the self-help kit.

The member is nodding. I will just read them to remind both of us. They are: children, agricultural workers, domestic workers, garment and textile workers and workers with a significant language barrier. All of those — in addition, where the issue relates to a leave entitlement — are exempt and a self-help kit is not required.

S. Simpson: I appreciate that list. I suspect you could make the case about why some of those particular people’s circumstances are different than others who might be in that situation.

The minister talked about 100,000 people, I think, last year who made inquiries of employment standards. I believe that was the number the minister used.

Well, if 5,000 of those people are in that situation that we’ve been discussing today and the other 95,000 are perfectly able to take care of their own circumstance, use the self-help kit, advocate for themselves or at least go down that road and then come back to employment standards afterwards to say, “I couldn’t resolve it; help me,” there are still 5,000, 10,000 people out there who I think — the most vulnerable, arguably, in some ways — may be falling through the gap. I’m just picking the number out of the air. That number may be totally wrong, but I’m guessing it’s probably not too far off.

I would just urge the minister — it’s not so much a question — to get her staff to think about that. I think there is a gap in this process, where the people who most need some help may be the ones who aren’t getting it just because of the way this system is structured there. But I’ll leave that to the minister.

I did want to pursue another question around temporary foreign workers and employment standards. Could the minister tell us what services specific to temporary foreign workers are in place to support temporary foreign workers from an employment standards perspective?

[1745]

Hon. S. Bond: I do want to just return to the previous question for a moment, because I think the member’s point was very valid. We certainly will have some follow-up discussions about employment services. But we just had a clarification, obviously, from people who deal with this every day.

Also, it’s not simply if the self-help kit doesn’t work, if they’ve tried it, but also, if there is a perception, as the member opposite suggested, that this would not work because of fear or intimidation, that also would allow the person to move on to a complaint. The self-help kit would not be required in those circumstances.

Again, they would, first of all, ask: “Did you try?” Obviously, if they did and it didn’t work, then it would move on. But it also is around the perception of whether or not it would work for them. So there is, as I understand it, some flexibility there.

I did want to speak to the supports provided for temporary foreign workers. In terms of employment standards, it doesn’t matter what your immigration status is. If you are a temporary foreign worker, you have the same rights and protections in British Columbia as any other worker. When it comes to what services in terms of settlement services, there again, we do not differentiate.

In fact, we provide $4 million a year in contracts with service providers to serve clients, including temporary foreign workers. That’s on the immigration side — information, orientation services, language training, those kinds of things. We provide a total of $4 million. And we’re actually, I think, going to make it even more clear in the next round of those contracts that temporary foreign workers are included in the funding envelope for those agencies.

S. Simpson: The minister referenced the additional information she got on the earlier question. I don’t need this right now, but I would be interested in knowing if there’s any data around kind of how many people fall into those categories where they might say: “I can’t resolve this myself. I believe that. Help me now.” I’d be interested in knowing what the data looks like for people for whom that was accepted and they then received support, versus people who were then, again, referred back to self-help and told: “You have to exercise this option before you come back to us.” I’d like to know that.

With the temporary foreign workers issue, what kinds of tools are there? I’m just thinking about things like requirements. I think we’ve had some discussion around
[ Page 7717 ]
this back when this issue was in the forefront, back a number of months ago — so issues around requirements about employment standards; about information in workplaces; maybe language-appropriate information with phone numbers, call-in lines that people can call, where they can reasonably expect that they’re going to get somebody who can talk to them if there are language challenges.

Could the minister talk a little bit about those kinds of services obliged in the workplace to help make sure that people can deal with this? Again, we talked about vulnerability. Arguably, temporary foreign workers — essentially, indentured, truly — are probably more vulnerable than anybody, in many ways, in many circumstances.

[1750]

Hon. S. Bond: As the member opposite would know, the temporary foreign worker program is, obviously, a federal program, and it is jointly administered through Employment and Social Development and Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Our laws, as I said, cover TFWs who have the same rights and protections as other workers.

There’s a really good flow to the way that, when I looked at what we do…. I’ll just walk through it the way that I’ve taken a look at this. TFWs do have access to provincially funded services that are available to all workers. That includes workplace safety training, employment and housing standards, health care, consumer protection, all of those kinds of things.

If you go into one of the organizations we contract with, it doesn’t matter if you’re a temporary foreign worker. There are those services available to you.

From the employment standards branch, obviously, their job is to enforce legislation, regulation and working conditions for all workers. We do provide help in person and on line through a toll-free number. That information is made available in workplaces.

To the question about language. There is written information about employee rights, and that information is available in English, French, Chinese — both simplified and traditional — Punjabi, Hindi, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Spanish.

Employment standards often works in partnership with WorkSafe B.C., and in fact, together, they conduct education and outreach programs targeted to employers and their temporary foreign workers. There’s quite an array of supports in place and, certainly, the ability for temporary foreign workers to access that information, just like any other British Columbian worker.

S. Simpson: Is there an obligation on the part of employers of TFWs to appropriately post that information in a visible way and ensure that temporary foreign workers have easy access to the information, to phone lines, whatever, so that they don’t have to go searching to find their rights if they’re questioning what those rights are?

Hon. S. Bond: To the specific question that the member asked, there’s no requirement of employers to actually post that information. It’s not an obligation, but that is what certainly drives the outreach programs that we have.

As I mentioned earlier, there are education and outreach programs specifically targeted to the employers and/or employees in the temporary foreign worker program. Those are undertaken by the employment standards branch on its own and in partnership with organizations such as WorkSafe B.C. and the economic immigration programs branch. So not an obligation for employers to post that information, but targeted work is done in terms of outreach and education with employers.

S. Simpson: I certainly would encourage the minister to think about making that easily and more readily available so that it’s obvious to workers, particularly considering that there’s a significant number of temporary foreign workers who work in camp-like situations or those situations. It would seem it would make sense to do that.

A couple other questions around temporary foreign workers, and then we’re getting close to…. I’ve got, then, one or two labour board questions, and then we’ll, hopefully, be done this portion.

The minister recently, essentially, suspended — or maybe that’s not the appropriate term — the PNP program for 90 days to allow for some adjustment. I understand from — and I thank the minister for — the staff briefing that kind of explained some of the challenges around what, it seems to me, all of a sudden became a situation where numbers of temporary foreign workers, because of federal decisions, were now looking at the PNP program as their vehicle to allow them to stay in Canada.

[1755]

That, obviously, is not what it was ever intended to be, but they’ve created what seems like, at least, an overwhelming situation around the program.

Could the minister tell us what her expectation is — the PNP program, around that, but also around temporary foreign workers and what seems to be a situation with the federal government, who are being firm on this? How will that affect the economic development side, based on what the federal government is telling us today they’re going to do, and how is it going to be dealt with?

Hon. S. Bond: I think the member opposite certainly has captured some of the essence of the challenge we’re facing. The temporary foreign worker program — we have seen the number of applications drop very dramatically, and we have seen a shift of increased numbers of people wishing to move into the PNP stream for permanent residency. That is not new, however, in terms of the
[ Page 7718 ]
route for people who have been here temporarily to become permanent citizens.

When I looked at the numbers, the number of PNP nominees that we actually see move on to permanent citizenship is very high. It’s over, I think, 90 percent. I’ll just double-check. Over 90 percent of the nominees that we actually make for permanent residency come from people who have been here temporarily, so there has always been that connection.

What happened was with the dramatic drop in terms of the use of the temporary foreign worker program, we have just seen more and more numbers, so we did have to take a temporary pause. I am very firm about the timeline. It is going to be 90 days. We’re going to reopen the program on July 2. We really are going to be forced to look at the process that we have in place.

Currently it’s first come, first served. We need to look at that whole concept. We’re seeing other jurisdictions across the country grapple with exactly the same situation. Our numbers in the lineup are not nearly as high as some of the other provinces across the country. We’re all going to face the challenge of more people in the queue for permanent residency — far more than our allocation would ever allow us to even consider in a year.

We’ve just recently, as a result of a lot of work we did with the federal government, seen our allocation go up, and that we are appreciative of, but it’s still not enough. We’re going to continue to work with the federal government to try to increase the number of nominees.

[J. Thornthwaite in the chair.]

Yes, we’ve taken a pause. We need to look at how to make it more fair. We don’t want people in that queue waiting for longer and longer periods of time. So yes, a big shift in numbers, but it certainly has been in the past, and will continue to be, one of the ways that temporary workers find permanent residency in the country.

The Chair: Member.

S. Simpson: Thank you, Chair, and welcome to the chair.

Now, my understanding, the last number I saw, is we had about 80,000 TFWs or so in British Columbia. Maybe that number is adjusted now. I’d be happy to know what the current number is.

We also know…. That number is going to be somewhat influenced by what the federal government does and doesn’t do. It’s my understanding from news reports — not that I’ve seen documents — that as we look at the LNG potential, there have been some agreements with China and others that open the opportunity for additional temporary foreign workers to complete some of those projects.

Has that been factored in? Is that a responsibility of the minister’s portfolio, to figure out how to absorb those folks? Do they come in? What happens? How does that change this dynamic? Are there going to be limits on whether those people can jump into the PNP? Presumably, there could be thousands and thousands more if we start to see some progress on the LNG file.

[1800]

Hon. S. Bond: I do want to reiterate that we’re not anticipating seeing thousands of foreign workers come to be part of the LNG projects that we hope to see move forward. We’ve said clearly that we want Canadians first — in fact, British Columbians and then more regionally and across the country.

We are looking at a program, in terms of permanent residency, where all of our considerations, in my view…. I haven’t seen the work that’s been done by the team yet. They’re still in the early stages of looking at: how are we going to design this?

What I have said is that it needs to line up with labour market demand more accurately. We have very skewed numbers in the over 8,000 that are currently in line for the provincial nominee program. What we want to do is see a system more based on labour market demand, and that means there will still be room for those who have lower-skilled-worker needs.

There will also be higher-skilled needs that are part of that permanent pathway, and that’s really what we’re trying to work on. So no set quotas based on specific sectors, but we will look at labour market driving those numbers and how we look at who’s in that lineup.

I do want to make sure that people who are currently in that line understand that it was very important to me that they’ve been there. They were accepted under a certain framework, and they will continue to be assessed under the previous framework. They are there, and we will be looking after them and working through their applications.

In terms of the numbers of temporary foreign workers, it is important that we look at the categories. I know the number sounds like a fairly significant number, but when you look at who is in our province temporarily, the largest group, 61,758, come under the international mobility program. That includes groups like academics, youth and students.

Students are actually youth in reciprocal employment, and that is really the largest group of all. It’s 28,000 of that 61,000 who fit in that category. Certainly, when we say temporary foreign worker, I think people have a certain thought about what that might look like. But 28,000 of the total number in the province are actually students on open permits. We have professors and related research positions. We have over 10,000 in that category. The total number that fit under the international mobility program is 61,758.

[1805]

Then when you look at the temporary foreign worker program — these are numbers based from 2013 — the total number is 17,856, and we expect new data in July. I think we will see some changing in that category. There we have the high-skilled worker, the agricultural worker, low-skilled and live-in caregivers. In total, we have 79,614, with the breakdown being 61,758 in the international mobility program and 17,856 in the stand-alone temporary foreign worker program.

S. Simpson: I guess the number that jumped out at me in the 80,000…. This is a couple of months ago, a few months back. It may have adjusted somewhat. We’ve got about 12 percent of the population and just under 25 percent of the temporary foreign workers in the country. That’s the number that kind of jumps out at me — how much greater as a percentage of overall temporary foreign workers we have in British Columbia versus our general population. Maybe that has adjusted itself over time, but that was the last number that I think was a firm number that I had seen.

I’m looking at the clock here, and I’ve got a couple of questions related to the board. I do have a few other temporary foreign worker–related questions. I’d like to put those in writing sometime in the next month or so and send them along and get answers when possible.

I have a couple of questions that relate to the Labour Relations Board. The first relates to participation rates. I have been told by people in the labour movement who are engaged in the labour board on an ongoing basis — that’s part of what they do as their job — that we’re seeing a reduction in the number of folks who are going to the board to resolve issues and much more being done independently, whether it’s by employer and union decisions. That might be fine. I don’t have an argument with that. But we’re seeing a reduction in participation around arbitrations, mediations, those things.

I’d be interested…. We can get specific numbers, certainly, in the answer. But I’d really like to see, if it’s available, what those participation rates maybe look like over the last four or five years. I’d be happy to get that in writing sometime later. I’m not asking for that number right now.

Hon. S. Bond: I appreciate the member’s indulgence in letting us get the previous years’ numbers. I can say that in 2013, when I look at the number of complaints that were filed, the number is actually 1,501. Hopefully, I’m reading that correctly — yes, 1,501. The number filed in 2014 is actually 1,962. So 1,501 in 2013 and 1,962 in 2014. There’s probably some variation in years previous as well. I’m advised that there is always some variability in the numbers. Certainly we’ve seen an increase in the number in 2014 over 2013.

I just tabled the Labour Relations Board in the House a short period of time ago, and all of those numbers, at least for those years — we will go back and do the work previous to that — are in the document that I tabled.

S. Simpson: I appreciate that. I must have been somewhere else when you tabled the document. I didn’t see it.

[1810]

I have a question, and this relates to the chair. I have no interest in a discussion of Mr. Mullin and his ability. He’s been there an awfully long time and done that job for a long time. I’m interested in the process.

The minister will know there are people all over the labour community and the HR community who have views about Mr. Mullin — that comes with being in the job for that long, among other things — the same as, I’m, sure there are all kinds of people who have views about the minister and about me, and that’s all fine.

The question I have, though, is: what was the process when the reappointment was made? Not about how the merit…. Was there a process there? Was there a discussion with folks on both sides, employer and union sides, about the appointment and about whether a reappointment was good or a change was good — without getting to the specifics? I don’t want to talk about Mr. Mullin, but I want to know what the process was.

Hon. S. Bond: The position that Mr. Mullin holds is a merit-based position. What I did, as the person responsible for looking at that, was actually looked at it as a performance review. We did look at whether or not, in our view, Mr. Mullin was meeting the mandate that he was expected to meet in his position, and we also reviewed the quality of judgments that are made by the board. How often were they being overturned? So we did look at the quality of judgments.

We also talked to the parties who would be engaged — employer, union. We did have that conversation. I think it is very fair to say that there was not universal agreement that his reappointment should take place. I listened. I heard arguments from both sides. Most importantly, I looked at the fact that this is a merit-based appointment. In my view, after looking at the quality of judgment and the mandate that was given, I believe that that was being met. The appointment was based on those principles.

I did, however, make it very clear to Mr. Mullin that there was discontent and that I expected him to, in a very concentrated way, reach out. At that time, the new head of the B.C. Federation of Labour had been very clear with me about her view of this reappointment, and I asked very specifically that Mr. Mullin reach out and work to try to improve that relationship, to try to build a sense of trust and a more cooperative relationship. That was part of a very serious discussion I had with him before the reappointment was finalized.

I also had discussions with the stakeholders before the appointment was made to make sure that they were aware that I had made the decision and that I had also
[ Page 7720 ]
made it clear that I wanted to try to have a better working relationship and a different approach.

S. Simpson: I’ll just point out that I have one, maybe two questions, and then we can finish with this piece and be done, and all these people won’t have to come back tomorrow. We can go on to the jobs plan and economic development tomorrow. We’ll be done the labour side entirely.

[1815]

With the board, it’s been a while. The board has been in place, obviously, for a very long time. It has functioned in its current way for quite a period of time.

There are always debates about whether there are different ways to do things. I’m a proponent of the three-person panels, because I think it’s a way to get resolution sometimes that I think a single arbitrator doesn’t necessarily get you. Sometimes, if you’ve got wingers, you can get there in a different way.

My question, though, to the minister is this. Has there been any review, or is a review contemplated, just because of the amount of time…? Is it time to look at broadly, with all the stakeholders, how the board functions and if it’s getting you to where you want it to be? I’m just wondering whether that has been contemplated or there has been any consideration of that to really take a hard look at how it works.

Hon. S. Bond: Trying very hard to help the member get this done.

There has not been an external review. The best way to look at this is: we have a committee in place. It’s a section 3 committee. It’s in place; it has three members. There are representatives from unions, businesses. That group actually regularly reviews the organization and comes back to me with comment and recommendations. That is a standing committee, and it’s well known by the broader community who deals with this board.

S. Simpson: I certainly may have some other related questions, but again, I’ll put those in writing. I don’t want to pursue this further. I’ll just tell the minister…. First of all, thanks to the staff who have been dealing with this portion. Tomorrow we’ll get to the jobs plan — economic development. We’re done with these folks — this piece of the work. Thanks again, and we’ll get onto that tomorrow.

Hon. S. Bond: Thank you to the member opposite — some very thoughtful questions that actually have me thinking about some work that I would like to continue to do on some key areas that he raised today. I appreciate that very much and the respectful way that he has conducted estimates. Great thank you to the staff. I appreciate the road map as well.

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

Motion approved.

The committee rose at 6:19 p.m.

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