2016 Legislative Session: Fifth 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)
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Afternoon Sitting
Volume 39, Number 2
ISSN 0709-1281 (Print)
ISSN 1499-2175 (Online)
CONTENTS | |
Page | |
Routine Business | |
Introductions by Members | 12765 |
Tabling Documents | 12765 |
Office of the Representative for Children and Youth, special report, Approach With Caution: Why the Story of One Vulnerable B.C. Youth Can’t Be Told | |
Orders of the Day | |
Committee of Supply | 12765 |
Estimates: Ministry of Health (continued) | |
J. Darcy | |
Hon. T. Lake | |
S. Hammell | |
D. Routley | |
S. Fraser | |
M. Elmore | |
Proceedings in the Douglas Fir Room | |
Committee of Supply | 12788 |
Estimates: Ministry of Natural Gas Development | |
Hon. R. Coleman | |
D. Eby | |
S. Chandra Herbert | |
H. Bains | |
R. Fleming | |
THURSDAY, MAY 5, 2016
The House met at 1:32 p.m.
[Madame Speaker in the chair.]
Routine Business
Introductions by Members
L. Larson: I have the pleasure today of welcoming new staff to the parliamentary education office.
This summer 11 post-secondary students have been hired to work in the parliamentary tour office. Over the next four months, these seven summer tour guides and four Parliamentary Players will provide free guided tours to about 75,000 school children and tourists from around the world, seven days a week, starting on the long May weekend.
You will certainly notice the Parliamentary Players, as they will be dressed in period costumes to portray four prominent personalities from British Columbia’s history: Queen Victoria, MLA Mary Ellen Smith, Francis Rattenbury and Amor De Cosmos.
I would like you to please welcome Emma Byskov, Aidan Correia, Anna Dodd, Kieran Dunch, Haley Garnett, Leah Hughes, Madeleine Humeny, Josef Methot, Elexi Mills, Giorgia Ricciardi and Fregine Sheehy.
Tabling Documents
Madame Speaker: I have the honour to have a special report of the Representative for Children and Youth, Approach With Caution: Why the Story of One Vulnerable B.C. Youth Can’t Be Told.
Orders of the Day
Hon. T. Stone: In Section A, I call the estimates of the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, Deputy Premier and Minister Responsible for Housing; in Section B, the continuing estimates of the Ministry of Health.
Committee of Supply
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF HEALTH
(continued)
The House in Committee of Supply (Section B); R. Lee in the chair.
The committee met at 1:36 p.m.
On Vote 29: ministry operations, $17,820,706,000 (continued).
J. Darcy: I would like to begin today by dealing with issues related to the B.C. Cancer Agency. Then later my colleague from Surrey–Green Timbers will be doing mental health, and then I will be coming back to ambulance service.
I’d like to begin this afternoon by discussing childhood cancer survivors and the multidisciplinary clinic that they were promised. The minister knows well that the particular group of cancer survivors who were in the galleries today were the ones who, for several years, pressed to have their needs met. They went from one agency to another to another and said: “Once our children reach age 19 and they are no longer covered by B.C. Children’s Hospital, where they were getting good care and coordinated care, there is nowhere for them to get coordinated care.”
They said that we need a multidisciplinary, specialized clinic to address the needs of these most complex patients, the ones who are experiencing a multitude of late effects of the treatment that saved their lives. That number is approximately 50 — extremely complex childhood cancer survivors.
They also said that there ought to be a system for recall of the approximately 3,500 now adults, then children who were treated aggressively with chemotherapy and radiation, which saved their lives, and who may not know, because medical science perhaps did not know but certainly knows now, that that treatment can lead to horrific late effects, that they should be monitored, that they should be recalled and that they should be referred and screened. An important part of the clinic, absolutely.
Let’s be very clear that the families who initiated this and who formed the Pediatric Cancers Survivorship Society and came to this House and visited MLAs, one after another, were saying: “We desperately need coordinated care for our children, for these complex patients, because the health care professions still don’t understand it, and the care needs to be coordinated.”
As I said to the minister in question period this morning, a few weeks ago these families — who have taken part in working groups and in planning for the opening of this clinic and who have had great hopes that finally, finally, these survivors of childhood cancer would have a place to go to coordinate this care — were told that those other pieces will be done but that the most complex cancer survivors, the ones with the most severe medical conditions, about 50 identified in the business plan, will not get the care and treatment, the coordinated care, from that clinic that they were promised.
This morning the minister referred to histrionics. I’m going to put that aside. It is too offensive to pursue at this time. Will the minister please answer the question about why these most complex patients are not going to receive the care that they were promised at the specialized clinic?
Hon. T. Lake: I did say in question period…. I’ll be happy to repeat it again and take up time in estimates to say, basically, the same information that I provided earlier today. The member seems to want me to do that and take up the time to do it, so I will.
There’s no question that when children develop cancers and undergo life-saving treatment…. Particularly if you look back ten, 15 years ago — when treatment was not as sophisticated as it is today, when adverse effects were greater than they are today and the long-term impacts of those treatments were largely unknown; many of them were new treatments — there’s no question that we see children who are alive today who wouldn’t have been a number of decades ago, but who will encounter complications and health challenges as a result of their cancer treatment. We recognize that this is difficult.
When you transition away from B.C. Children’s Hospital into other parts of the health care system, there isn’t the same level of knowledge, of expertise, dealing with the childhood cancers and the subsequent effects of treatment for those cancers. Recognizing this, the provincial health services authority worked with the Pediatric Cancers Survivorship Society of B.C. and along with the B.C. Children’s Hospital and the foundations of both the B.C. Children’s Hospital and the B.C. Cancer Foundation to meet and to decide what sorts of supports and services would be needed.
That work has been ongoing. The business case was created. The foundations have developed funding that will support this as we go through this. Of course, there are always bumps along the road in terms of getting to where you want to be as soon as you want to be.
First of all, if we get back to the news release, the news release did not promise a clinic. It promised that there would be supports through the adult childhood cancer survivorship program. When the group met, they decided that a clinic was something that would be helpful in terms of dealing with the long-term and latent effects of treatment for childhood cancers.
Work has been ongoing. The process is in development. I am told that the pieces are coming together and that the clinic will be running later this year — we hope as early as June of this year, which would be not much longer than a month from today.
J. Darcy: Let’s be very specific. Yes, the parents are part of an advisory committee. The working group comprises, as the minister mentioned, the B.C. Cancer Agency, the B.C. Children’s Hospital and representatives of the Pediatric Cancers Survivorship Society.
Back in February, at a meeting of the steering committee, two of the parents raised questions about caring for complex chronic patients, and they referred to the commitment — in the business case that the minister has just referred to — about the need for an internal medicine specialist to care for these patients. That’s in the business plan that was approved, which the minister just referred to as having been approved.
They were advised at that time that the clinic would not be assisting these patients and that, rather, these complex patients — and we’re referring here to 50 of the most complex — would be referred back to their GPs. Now, in the business case, it outlines the need for specialized care for our chronic complex patient survivors. Numerous times.
This is the patient group that is most at risk. This is the patient group that is suffering multiple, severe late effects ranging from secondary cancers to organ failures, early menopause in their 20s, inability to get pregnant, neurocognitive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and many, many other medical conditions.
The parents were told specifically that there would not be the funding to deal with these complex patients as was committed in the business plan. Can the minister please speak to that and indicate whether that promise is going to be kept?
Hon. T. Lake: As I mentioned, the B.C. Cancer Agency, the B.C. Cancer Foundation and the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation have secured funding for a space for the clinic. It’s just finishing up being renovated. The B.C. Cancer Agency is in the process of hiring a medical director for that program and completing the last steps to make it operational.
As I’ve mentioned, within a month, we hope to have that clinic up and running. The clinical decision-making as to the expertise needed for that facility will be up to the experts at the B.C. Cancer Agency. I will rely on their judgment.
J. Darcy: Yes, the childhood cancer survivors and their families are well aware that this clinic is going to open soon. The issue is a commitment that was made for a particular type of coordinated care that would be provided. They have been told, first on February 15, that funding would not be provided for the coordinated care for complex patients; again, on April 15 in a telephone conversation; and then again on April 17, at the parent and family advisory committee, when they raised these issues regarding the funding and were told that the funding was not forthcoming.
This clinic came about as a result of their efforts. A critical part of their efforts was intended…. It was agreed by this ministry that this coordinated care for complex patients would be included. Page 33 of the business plan says: “The high-risk specialty clinic would serve the approximately 50 to 60 new high-risk patients’ transition from pediatric services per year, as well as the historical high-risk patients post-recall.”
It goes on — page 34: “A subset of the high-risk patients are a smaller number of patients with multiple complex care needs. These patients are those surviv-
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ors who have multiple, severe health issues attributable to the cancer and/or therapy that significantly reduced their quality of life, including physical, neurocognitive or psychological problems.”
It goes on to say on page 36 of the business plan.… It doesn’t say it’s going to be left up to the medical director. It outlines who the health care team is going to be in order to meet the needs not just of screening people who may not even know that they might someday suffer late effects — absolutely an important thing to do.
But the business plan also said: “There will be an internal medicine or medical oncologist. Specialty with internal medicine training will be required to support up to 50 complex patients with multiple and significant late effects impacting multiple body systems. The subspecialty support is not only appropriate for patient care but will allow the oncologists to work to full scope where required with these patients and provide opportunity to continue to take on new oncology patients.”
It couldn’t be any clearer than that. It’s in the business plan in black and white. That piece of the commitment, these parents have been told, will not be followed through on because of lack of money.
Can the minister please explain why that is the case?
Hon. T. Lake: I’m not saying that is the case. They are in the process of hiring people. Why don’t we see what comes from that? The B.C. Cancer Agency knows and has met with the society. They’ve met with patients and their families. They have the expertise.
The member is, as usual, always predicting a worst-case scenario. That’s the bubble that she likes to live in. But the B.C. Cancer Agency is world-renowned. We have recognized that there are needs that survivors of childhood cancer have. We’ve gone from where there was nothing, in just under a year, to where we are developing a program in concert with these families.
I know nothing ever happens as fast as people would like, but I am confident that the B.C. Cancer Agency, working with the society and the families, will develop the kind of clinic that will look after the needs of these complex patients.
J. Darcy: It’s incomprehensible to me how the minister can refer to these questions that I’m asking, and the concerns being raised by the childhood cancer survivors and their families who were in the gallery this morning and who are here listening today…. That that’s about living in a bubble. The minister should spend some time talking to some of those families.
Interjection.
J. Darcy: If the minister wants to say that on the record, I’ll sit down, and maybe he can say it on the record.
The Chair: Minister, the member has the floor.
Member.
J. Darcy: The business plan says: “In the start-up, year zero.” That’s right now. That’s not the health spokesperson for the official opposition being in a hurry. These patients, these cancer survivors and their families, have waited years to get to this point. In year one start-up for this program, it says: “Internal medicine funding and human resource needs.” Not two years from now, not five years from now, not ten years from now. It’s not: “Have patience. Maybe. Someday. Don’t be in a hurry.” No. Year zero. Right now. Start-up year.
The other members of the team…. Some of them have already been hired. That’s a good thing. But the families, the parents of these childhood cancer survivors — and the two mothers who were on that committee are in the gallery today — were told specifically…. It was not: “Wait five years. Wait two years.” They were told: “There isn’t going to be the funding for that piece of the clinic’s vital work.”
So I’ll ask the minister again to say, not for my benefit…. I’m raising these issues on behalf of the childhood cancer survivors and their families, who have come to me once again because a significant part of the promise that they were made has been dashed, and they are desperate.
Minister: when will the commitment be met to meet the coordinated care needs of the 50 most complex patients that it was promised would be served by the new childhood cancer survivors program or clinic? When will that happen?
Hon. T. Lake: I’ve answered the question three times. I think I’ve sufficed in my answer to the repeated question.
The Chair: I advise the member to go to another question.
J. Darcy: I would certainly encourage the minister to meet with the childhood cancer survivors so that he can hear directly from them.
Let me go to some other questions related to the B.C. Cancer Agency. About 18 months ago, there were significant issues in cancer care in British Columbia that we raised in this House and that others who have worked at the Cancer Agency, past or present, raised. Those concerns were about wait times being amongst the worst in the country for access to radiation and chemotherapy.
There were also concerns about significant oncology manpower issues. Many people had left, and there were challenges in recruiting to meet requirements for timely access for cancer treatment.
Can the minister please indicate what progress has been made since this issue was last raised in the House? And what is the current budget allocation in order to ad-
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dress these pressing issues about staffing shortages, especially in the area of oncologists, and unacceptably long wait times?
Hon. T. Lake: As the member is aware, a new president of the B.C. Cancer Agency, Dr. Malcolm Moore, has been in place since September of last year. One of his first priorities was to review executive operations, and that resulted in a new organizational structure that was communicated to B.C. Cancer Agency staff on March 30 of this year. Those changes are intended to better support patient-centred care and the strategic priorities of the B.C. Cancer Agency.
Recruitment for some of those positions is currently underway, but also underway is a renewed cancer control strategy. That is work in development between the Ministry of Health and the Provincial Health Services Authority.
I met with Dr. Moore last week to discuss progress on a new cancer control strategy. It’s developing a policy paper to inform discussions with the ministry, with health authorities and other partners about challenges and opportunities to reshape the system, looking at, particularly, surgery, because the B.C. Cancer Agency has a coordination role for chemotherapy and for radiotherapy.
Surgery, however, is less under the direction and coordination of B.C. Cancer. The Ontario model is more of a coordinated model, and so there are discussions about the Ontario model and how that might improve the coordination, timeliness and quality of cancer surgeries.
That is very much in discussion between the B.C. Cancer Agency, PHSA and the Ministry of Health. They’re focusing on patient-centred care models, sustainability and planning, being provincially planned and regionally delivered, linkages with health authorities, improving the governance and teamwork and, of course, the importance of accountabilities as well.
We’re also looking at the continuum of care, because, as in many disease processes, if we look at preventive strategies, that can certainly, in the future, lead to less pressure on the cancer treatment system if we can prevent cancer — so looking at not just the healthy living strategies to help prevent cancer but also screening, diagnosis and then treatment strategies.
We mentioned survivorship and recovery strategies as well as, of course, end-of-life care, because many palliative care patients have come through cancer treatment.
All of that work is ongoing. The wait-time issue is something that is being addressed through the renewed cancer control strategy.
J. Darcy: According to many published reports, we will be facing a tsunami of cancer over the next ten years. It’s estimated that presently there are 25,000 new cancer cases in B.C. and that that could rise to 33,000 by 2026.
That obviously will have significant implications, both for capital and operating budgets and, quite possibly, the need for capital expansion in various parts of the province; also, no doubt, significant increases in chemotherapy costs; and, no doubt, major challenges in attracting and retaining the required oncology manpower and other health care professionals to meet the needs of patients and ensure timely access.
There is no question that you need significant lead time in order to bring that expanded capacity into operation to avoid even more serious backlogs and the inevitable consequences for patients. What is the minister’s plan to address what has been referred to by many as the expected tsunami of cancer patients that we can expect to see over the next ten years?
Hon. T. Lake: We know that the incidence of cancer — that is, the new cases of cancer — is increasing as a function of age. As the demographic will dictate, as people age, they’re more likely to encounter a cancer of some form.
The incidence of cancer is going up, and of course the prevalence, the number of people that are living with cancer, is also going up because people are, in fact, surviving and living with cancers today when they would not have in the past. We’re getting to the point where, in many cases, cancer is not seen as a fatal condition but almost like a chronic condition that you can live with, with a good quality of life. In some cases, of course, cure is available.
We spend about $500 million a year on the B.C. Cancer Agency. About $250 million of that is for the chemotherapeutic drugs that are used, which are quite expensive. We have new drugs coming and new modalities coming that are going to be very effective in treatment of cancer, immunotherapy being among the largest group of treatments that show a lot of promise. But of course, the personalized oncogenomic approach as well, in some cases, can prove to be very effective when other treatments are not working.
So we recognize the need. Although I would not call it a tsunami, there’s certainly a predictable increase in both the incidence and the prevalence of cancer in our aging society. Recognizing this, in the past fiscal year, the Cancer Agency was awarded 11.2 FTEs for physicians and oncologists — that’s about $4.2 million — and along with that, $5.6 million for non-physician and support staff funding.
For this fiscal year, there will be an incremental 9.2 FTEs, or $3.2 million, for physicians and oncologists and an additional $2.8 million for non-physician and support staff funding. With the development of the B.C. cancer strategy, there will be a capital plan developed in terms of looking at the need for more investments in equipment and facilities as well.
J. Darcy: When we discussed this issue last, there were some significant shortages of oncologists. The minister
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has talked about funding for new full-time equivalent positions in a number of areas — physicians, oncologists and other staff. Can the minister please indicate what the shortages are? How many positions remain unfilled at the present time at the Cancer Agency?
Hon. T. Lake: I mentioned that last fiscal year there were 11.2 FTE increases. I am told that for radiation oncology, the Cancer Agency has hired several locums to be in place until six new hires start later this year. Medical oncology currently has made offers or is in the process of offering 5.2 FTE positions. They expect to fill the remaining medical oncology positions over the next several months. So the 11.2 FTEs that were awarded are either filled or in the process of being filled. While awaiting the filling of those positions, there are several locums that are in place.
J. Darcy: I want to refer the minister to something that we’ve discussed in this House in the past, and that is the unacceptably long wait times for radiation therapy. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information report on wait-lists…. We’ve discussed earlier in this House the waits for hip replacement, knee replacement and cataract surgery, but for radiation therapy….
Can the minister explain why it is that in British Columbia, we have the worst rating in the country as far as meeting the national wait-time benchmark for radiation therapy?
Hon. T. Lake: Of course, it’s important that wait times to receive radiation therapy should be as low as reasonably possible to optimize treatment and to minimize the impact on the patient.
The Canadian Association of Radiation Oncology suggests that patients should receive a consultation within two weeks of referral. Our target here in B.C. is that 90 percent of cases receive a consultation with a radiation oncologist within four weeks of referral. Currently, 70 percent of patients are seen within four weeks, and 40 percent are seen within two weeks. Again, that was due to some of the positions that were not filled. I have said, in my earlier answer, that several locums have been hired until the full-time radiation oncologists are put in place later this year.
J. Darcy: We know that a number of positions were vacant. We know that the Cancer Agency was having difficulty attracting oncologists and that a number left and that there was a crisis of confidence, so to speak, at the Cancer Agency amongst many of the leading scientists and oncologists.
The minister says there’s a new strategy. Has the ministry done a thorough analysis of what led to these problems in order to ensure that, in fact, the strategy for the future means that we won’t encounter these problems again?
Our wait times are the worst in the country. The minister likes to talk about us leading the country and leading the world. But when we have the longest wait times in the country for radiation therapy, clearly there has been a problem.
Will the minister…? Has he done a thorough evaluation of why that’s the case in order that British Columbians can be confident that the Cancer Agency of the present and the future is going to have shorter wait times and is going to be able to retain the scientists and the oncologists and the other health care professionals that are so critical to cancer care?
Hon. T. Lake: Well, I mentioned that we did an extensive search for a new president. Dr. Malcolm Moore — who came from Ontario, highly recommended — has brought his expertise.
I mentioned that the first priority he had was to review the operations of the B.C. Cancer Agency. That resulted in an organizational structure that Dr. Moore is very confident will better support the care and the strategic priorities of the B.C. Cancer Agency. Currently, a policy paper is being completed to look at the future of cancer care here in British Columbia.
I’m very confident that the B.C. Cancer Agency is on the right track. When I met with Dr. Moore last week — and we meet on a regular basis — I asked him about the morale and the culture of the B.C. Cancer Agency. He was extremely positive that the organization was functioning well, that with the policy development that is ongoing and the cancer control strategy that is being reviewed, there is an energy and a confidence and an optimism within the B.C. Cancer Agency. I have every confidence that he has the organization on the right track.
J. Darcy: I’m going to turn the floor over to…. Well, I guess you will turn the floor over, hon. Chair, not me, to the member for Surrey–Green Timbers to pursue some issues related to mental health and addictions.
S. Hammell: I know we’ve had a few minutes this morning. I’d just kind of like to reset.
I’ve been using, quite a bit, an article that the Premier spoke of in the Leader, in our community. Again, I’ll refer to the fact that the Premier said: “What we are doing now is a system that isn’t working, and I am determined to fix it.”
I need again to remind the minister, through the Chair, that this comment was made while Surrey was in the height of some pretty serious shootings, drive-by shootings. The community is and was extremely distressed. Everyone from the Premier down acknowledged that the primary driver of the mayhem in the streets was the
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addiction of people that was being fed by the drug trade.
The Premier also said she recognized that addiction needed to be addressed in order to stop the demand for illegal drugs — which, of course, were, again, a prime function of the chaos on the streets.
To the minister — and I understand you from this morning. I know it’s complex. I know the whole situation is complicated and hard, but I do agree with the Premier that the current system just isn’t working. I would like to draw your attention to…. Let’s see if I can find the letter that I would like to work with.
I had a letter from a mom who is trying to help her son and is quite distressed by the current situation. Of course, just at this minute, I can’t find the letter. But I will move to another example.
I don’t know if the minister has followed along at all the situation around Gord Bylo and his son Brian. This, to me, is an example of how the system is so, so broken. Brian was a healthy and athletic and bright teenager when he had psychiatric symptoms starting in grade 11. He was, at that time, probably a child that you just had so much pride in and saw such a great future for. He was on the honour roll at Holy Cross. He was a soccer player. He played in the midfield. He was a leader of his team.
In grade 11, about the age of 17, he experienced his first psychotic breakdown. At 18, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he spent two months at Peace Arch Hospital being stabilized. But Brian ended up self-medicating on street drugs, as the current drug regime he was on wasn’t working. Once he was over 18, his parents were unable to have any say in his treatment.
In 2008, he started using cocaine to support his habit and turned to petty crime. Brian has, currently, 57 court entries in his file and has been incarcerated over 30 times. Once, being apprehended for mental health reasons and being under police, RCMP, watch at the hospital, he was found to be in breach of probation for not checking in, because he was under security guard at the hospital, and was immediately taken to jail instead of the hospital.
He was accepted at Phoenix House, but when he reported in, on arrival, with his parole officer, he was informed that being in a treatment facility, he was in breach of his orders. He was told that he would be sent to jail if he didn’t go back home. In a panic, he left and was picked up by the RCMP and put in jail again.
Now, Gord Bylo, his father, is a pretty sophisticated business person. He’s an investment banker. He has been unable to manage the system, walk through the system and help his son. So we have a person who is mentally ill being largely treated by the judicial system and, in fact, in jail.
I had the pleasure of listening to a person who had been a former gang member describe the Fraser Regional Correctional Centre in a description that would, for most of us, make our blood turn cold. We have a paranoid schizophrenic, who was not on drugs, now on drugs and with a petty criminal record, being treated for a mental illness by the jail system. Now, if that isn’t a waste of money, I don’t know what is.
My question is: is moving mental health and addictions issues from the criminal system to a treatment system under health care part of what the Premier is considering as a reasonable fix to a broken system?
Hon. T. Lake: There’s no question that when you look at the corrections facilities across North America…. I would say that the situation in the United States is well documented. A large number, if not a majority, of inmates at correctional facilities in the United States suffer from mental health and/or substance use challenges.
In some states, from the commentary that I have read, they have become the de facto mental health institutions. To say that in Canada and, specifically, in British Columbia that is also the case — I would not agree with that. However, I would say that there are still a disproportionate number of people in the criminal justice system that are there due to mental health and substance use challenges. There’s no question that someone that is self-medicating, looking to use illegal drugs, tends to get involved with the police and with the justice system. We have some innovative programs that try to address that.
We have Car 67 in Surrey, for instance, where a psychiatric nurse and an RCMP officer work together to try to address situations at the street level and try to attach people, who would otherwise end up in hospitals or perhaps in jail, to social services and medical services that they require so that they can get help. That kind of a partnership has been replicated in Vancouver, in Prince George, in Kamloops and in Kelowna and is quite successful. That is part of the issue.
Police officers now receive training in mental health because mental health issues are not just an issue for the Ministry of Health. They are societal issues, and all of us need to…. I’ve said this to the member before. All of society must embrace this challenge. Police officers, I think, have a much better level of understanding and training regarding mental health and substance use issues than ever before.
We have created teams that work with the police, assertive community treatment teams. As I mentioned earlier today, the partnership between Vancouver police department and Vancouver Coastal Health has resulted in an international award recognizing that the number of people that have to go to the emergency department and the number of people who have encounters with the criminal justice system are much reduced.
We are doing a lot of the things that the member is alluding to, to address and try to prevent people that are seeking help for mental health and substance use from ending up in the criminal justice system. However, I want
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to remind the member that adults have the opportunity to make decisions. It may sound simple to say: “Well, just force someone into treatment.” You can’t do that under the Constitution of Canada.
Through the Mental Health Act, you can detain someone if they are at imminent risk to themselves or others. There are many situations where clinicians — psychiatric clinicians, doctors and nurses — will make an assessment. That’s a very high bar. To detain someone of their liberty under the Mental Health Act, the bar is set very high because of the constitution. People have free will.
I want to say to the member that not everyone who uses drugs is addicted. That is a fallacy. Dr. Carl Hart, who’s an expert in addictions at Columbia University, spoke in Vancouver. I went to hear his talk. He dispels that myth. There are many highly functioning people in society who use drugs, illicit drugs. They’re not addicted.
However, we know that 15 to 20 percent of people who use illicit drugs will become addicted, and for them, it is a severe challenge. The underlying cause of being drawn to drugs may be because of mental health issues. It may not be. Regardless, they find themselves addicted, and they need to agree to be treated.
In some cases, people do not agree. All of us probably have had personal experiences — I know I have — where a patient, a person, a member of a family does not agree to treatment. We simply can’t lock that person up and force treatment on them. We have to try different approaches and be there when that person is ready to accept treatment and have the resources at the right time and the right place for that person. It doesn’t happen when we want it to happen, necessarily. We have to be there for when the patient, the person wants that to happen.
S. Hammell: I guess the answer is no. So let me move on to another issue.
Interjection.
S. Hammell: Pardon, Member? Were you talking to me?
I’d just like to sort of punctuate the situation, again, that I was talking about. Maybe the minister was talking about something else.
Brian was a healthy, athletic and bright teenager before he had a psychotic breakdown. He’s now 31, around that time, and has had a huge interface with not only the health care system but also with the criminal justice system. I remember raising this issue last year in estimates and talking with the minister regarding us turning our jail systems into the new asylums because so many of our mental health and/or addicted people are in the criminal system.
Clearly, a person doesn’t have to give permission to be put in jail. Maybe that is the underlying reason why we choose to incarcerate people who are clearly mentally ill and/or addicted.
My question to the minister was: is part of the new plan, if it is a new plan, or the extra plan that the cabinet committee…? The Premier has indicated in this interview that the government is working on a new mental health plan. I have to assume from the minister’s answer to my question that, no, looking at moving more from an incarceration and jail system to having people with mental health be more caught up in a health care system is not part of the fix.
That’s interesting, because I would think that there is opportunity to have a certain shift of funding from the penal system or the criminal justice system to the health care system specifically for a particular group of people that would probably be better off in the health care system. But I’m not as wise as some of the other people that obviously are dealing with this, like the cabinet committee.
I mentioned a letter that I was looking for. I do just want to take a minute to read this into the record also. This person is from White Rock. She says:
“Our son has a clinically diagnosed mental illness and issues of addiction.”
There are many, many letters, and I’m sure the minister maybe is even tired of hearing of this area. But just struggle through with me.
“Since 2012, he sought to enter Creekside Withdrawal Management Centre, in the Fraser Health Authority, several times. Each and every time he has attempted to enter this facility, the wait time has been three to four weeks.
“The staff at the facility also direct applicants to not come to the centre ‘sick.’ If you do not possess the knowledge of addiction, this term may not be familiar to you, but this sickness is the result of being in a state of substance withdrawal.”
The question becomes: how does an individual without any support system or funds wait this length of time without continuing to abuse their substance of choice? This wait only serves to increase the economic and social costs to all the taxpayers in this province.
Rehm et al., 2006, estimated that the cost of substance abuse in the year 2002 was $6 billion, as cited in the British Medical Association, 2009. This figure does not include the additional cost attributed to the silent suffering that is endured by family, friends and significant others.
The BCMA also identified nine gaps in the health care delivery system in relation to addiction care and proposed several recommendations. The third gap identified was “to expand flexible detoxification service capacity.” I’m sure the minister knows the detail of the recommendation. It was 240 new flexible beds. This is back in 2009. A three-to-four-week waiting period for an individual to access a detoxification facility is unacceptable.
My question to the minister — remembering that the Premier is determined to fix a system that isn’t working: are more flexible detox facilities part of the cabinet committee and the new plan that is about to…? Is there going to be a fix around detoxification beds?
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Hon. T. Lake: The member says that I might be tired of hearing stories. I’m never tired of hearing stories. I have personal experience with these stories. I feel for the families that experience these stories. To insinuate that somehow I don’t care is beneath the member. I care about these things every single day. We work hard every single day to try to make a difference.
The member wasn’t there yesterday when we announced the reopening of the Crossing at Keremeos, a very important facility for people aged 17 to 24, in a setting in Keremeos where people can seek the treatment they need for substance-use challenges.
The member wasn’t at the concurrent disorders clinic announcement at Lions Gate Hospital, where we are creating unique spaces for young people, adolescents, with concurrent disorders of mental health and substance-use challenges.
My mandate letter from the Premier says that we will create 500 new recovery spaces, addiction spaces, by 2017. All health authorities are on track in three phases of opening up new addiction spaces. We are in phase 1, at 76 new beds; phase 2, 144 new beds — and 220, with those two phases. Phase 3 is underway in planning, and 280 more will be added.
I think it’s clear from my mandate letter, from the work we are doing — both in the ministry and in the cabinet working group — that we are addressing a gap that has been there historically, with the creation of 500 new addiction spaces around the province of British Columbia.
S. Hammell: I’d like a recess.
The Chair: Hon. Members, the member for Surrey–Green Timbers will take a moment to come back.
During this period, with your indulgence, I would like to take a moment to introduce a special guest in the gallery.
I met him 14 years ago in the hallway in this House, and after 14 years, he came back for the first time from Beijing to visit us. Would the House please join me to give him a very warm welcome. His name is Chunming Zhang. Welcome to the House.
The committee will recess for another five minutes.
The committee recessed from 2:43 p.m. to 2:57 p.m.
[R. Chouhan in the chair.]
D. Routley: I’ll have to apologize in advance for a lack of background on these issues. I’ll ask these questions, in any case, and hope the minister will give me some latitude with my lack of comprehension on the issue. These are questions that others have asked to be asked.
The first one relates to fee increases. I would like to ask the minister if there have been any fee increases or new fees imposed, particularly related to mental health services.
Hon. T. Lake: When someone is in a residential placement for addiction services, there is a daily fee that is to cover, essentially, room and board — which, I believe, is $30.90 a day — and there has been no plan to increase that.
D. Routley: Can the minister share how much net revenue this is generating?
Hon. T. Lake: The charge of $30.90 per day in residential addiction is similar to what one would pay in what we call alternate level of care. That’s someone that’s in the acute care hospital and waiting for placement in residential care. That is to cover the costs of meals and, essentially, the basics of room and board.
We are working on getting the amount of funds that is attributable to that per diem that is charged. At $30.90 per day for room and board, I would suspect — we will confirm that — that that would barely cover the cost of providing room and board for someone for a day.
D. Routley: Thank you to the minister.
The next question relates to transfers between ministries. What funds have been transferred from other ministries, and what programs are funded with those transfers?
There’s never been a time when I’ve appreciated a minister ragging the puck more than now.
Hon. T. Lake: There is one inter-ministry transfer. This is from Social Development and Social Innovation. This is for services for persons with disabilities. That is $588,000.
D. Routley: Can the minister share how many youth mental health beds currently are being staffed on Vancouver Island?
Hon. T. Lake: There are substance-use beds, and there are mental health beds. There are a total of 28 substance-use beds. That’s a mixture of supported housing, of youth-supportive residential services or supportive recovery, youth transitional services, youth withdrawal or detox-facility-based and youth detox supportive residential.
In mental health, these are acute care in-patient beds. There are 13 on the Island. But there is a provincial approach taken, so if there was a need for more beds on the acute and tertiary side, there would be an effort made to find space in the provincial system.
D. Routley: Could the minister provide a breakdown of which communities those services are located in, particularly in Victoria versus the rest of the Island?
Hon. T. Lake: The 13 tertiary care beds are located at Ledger House here in Victoria. That services the Island. Tertiary care, of course, is a very highly specialized level of care. It is often the case that the highly specialized services are located in larger centres. That’s on the mental health side.
In terms of the substance-use side, of the 28 beds on the Island, 15 are in Victoria, ten are in the central Island, and three are on the north Island.
D. Routley: I wonder if it might be possible for me to ask a few questions on ER services in Nanaimo Regional Hospital. Thank you for the flexibility from the minister and staff.
I’m hearing, as a representative of part of the region that Nanaimo Regional General Hospital serves, that there have been significant changes in the way the emergency room is functioning, particularly with the recent introduction of new IT systems. I’ve heard from ER doctors and nurses that there is grave concern over patient safety in the transition to this new system.
The staff did not really comprehend how to use this system, how difficult it was. They felt there was poor planning in its introduction and even shared stories of being focused on entering something into a computer program that was relatively irrelevant — in fact, just a difficult quandary for the staff — and not noticing that there had been a serious adverse drug reaction on the part of a young four-year-old, I believe, who had to be air-lifted for more critical care because of this miss.
Not in an effort to politically pinch the minister here but in an effort to perhaps voice those concerns on behalf of the staff there, I hope that the minister might have some information that could help them feel as though they will get the supports needed to adequately understand how to use the system and still carry out their regular duties.
Hon. T. Lake: I visited Nanaimo Regional General Hospital…. I want to say it was about six weeks ago. It would have been in March of this year.
Now, Nanaimo Regional Hospital has had a couple of very exciting investments. The emergency department itself is probably the most modern emergency department in the province of British Columbia. It is remarkable in the way that it flows, the way it sees patients, the new technology that’s available.
What the member is referring to is the IHealth project, which is an electronic health record which connects the patient and all the information about the patient, from entry all the way through their hospital visit.
With any project of this type, there is going to be a need for a very careful change management system in place. While you can minimize the impact on staff when this change occurs, it’s impossible to have zero impacts. But what Island Health has done is provide 100 support resources that have been on site providing shoulder-to-shoulder support to physicians and clinical staff.
When I was there, I walked through the process with an emergency doctor as he was using the voice-recognition software to input information about patients. The addition of voice recognition is an important part of the system that was added after clinicians indicated that it would, in fact, slow things down if they had to key-entry all the information. So the voice-recognition software was extremely helpful.
We walked down the hall to where training sessions were ongoing, where people from Cerner, which is the software that’s involved, were working with team leaders and with medical personnel, going over all of the systems and training them so that they would understand how they would function. They were to go live on March 19, and they did.
Now Nanaimo Regional General Hospital is the seventh site in Canada to implement this breadth of electronic health record. I believe it’s referred to as an HIMSS 6 level, which is a very high level of sophistication in connectivity of the patient’s medical record. Island Health is, in fact, the second-largest organization in the country to achieve this scope of connectivity.
To the member’s point, there’s no question that it has required a great effort on the part of clinicians and health care personnel at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. But since that activation, over 300 medication alerts have been triggered by the system.
With this bar-coding system and with the clinical computerized order entry, if the clinician inputs information and then the nurse goes to give the medication and scans the code, a trigger immediately occurs if it is the wrong medication or the wrong order or even the wrong dosage. So far, 300 alerts have been triggered, which in many cases would have prevented an adverse event from happening.
The turnaround time for diagnostics — that’s getting lab work done or radiographs or other imaging done — has been reduced by approximately 20 minutes, which, of course, increases the flow through the hospital. As I mentioned earlier when we were talking about Cowichan Hospital, everything in a hospital is about flow. The system depends on everything moving through at a certain rate, because if one part of the system backs up, it tends to create a domino effect so that other areas back up as well.
We had a first sepsis alert, which was fired after the IHealth system came on, for a patient who presented at 5:07. So again, the communication system, the computerized connectivity, created an alert that prevented a very serious condition of sepsis in a patient so that it was able to be treated.
While I don’t doubt that there has been some really incredible work that has had to occur and that there probably were times when people felt distracted while they
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were doing their entries or getting used to the system, that is recognized as a problem with change management that needs to be mitigated as much as possible.
From everything I have gathered and from everything I saw on site, I think Island Health did an admirable job of managing down that risk as much as possible — not eliminating it completely, but to manage it down. We are seeing some very positive benefits with the electronic health record system that now will be expanded to other parts of Island Health. I believe that Oceanside and the residential care home close to Nanaimo Hospital are also connected to this level.
Now we will reach out through other parts of the Island.
D. Routley: I will just pass off to my colleague from Alberni–Pacific Rim.
I thank the minister and staff for helping.
S. Fraser: Thanks to the minister and staff for making themselves available.
If you can bear with me, I have a few different local issues that I would like to touch on. I hope that’ll work out with staffing arrangements.
I had a request for a meeting with a constituent, Dr. Douglas Hanton, and his wife, June, in Tofino. It was about their grandson. Merric is eight years old. He was born with a condition known as Treacher Collins syndrome. I was unaware of this syndrome before my meeting, by the way, so I learned much about something I’ve never heard of before.
One of the symptoms of this syndrome is its progressive hearing loss, really, right from birth. The challenge is, of course…. I have some challenges with hearing myself, and the hearing aids for mine are pretty cyborg-like. This young gentleman, Merric, has had to have repeated changes to his hearing aids to deal with the progress of the syndrome. Also, of course, at eight years old, he’s a growing young fellow. It’s been changing for his whole life.
The only offset to the cost of the hearing aids ended when he turned about 3½ — through the ministry. This is an out-of-pocket cost now for the family. I mean, it can be addressed through charities. Sometimes a Kinsmen Club and these types of organizations that do great work in the province can provide some assistance, but it’s not a sure thing.
I want to know if the minister has any information on why funding would stop for offsetting the costs of these hearing aids at that age, or at any age, of youth. It is a necessity.
Hon. T. Lake: We’re just awaiting a bit of a staff change to answer the member’s question.
A previous question from another member was around interministry transfers. I want to correct the record. Apart from the one we mentioned that comes from Social Development and Social Innovation of $588,000, there is also a small transfer from Finance of $310,000 for the temporary premium assistance program and one transfer out of the ministry to the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services of $161,000 for a building lease.
I just wanted to get that on the record, and we’ll be back with the member’s answer in a second.
I’m advised that no hearing aids are covered under the PharmaCare program. It may be that there are programs through the Ministry of Children and Family Development. We will check with our colleagues, take the question on notice and get back to the member.
S. Fraser: To the minister, thanks for that. I appreciate that information. I know that the family will be awaiting that. I know that the minister took it on notice, but I’d just like to say that the issue, in this case, I think is larger than just the medical equipment that’s required, because it’s an essential tool for Merric to be able to learn at school.
I would relate it…. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch of an analogy, but children with developmental disabilities are eligible for supported child development funding specifically so that they can go to school. That funding usually deals with a care aide, which is a necessity for someone with severe autism or whatever to be able to attend school, learn and get those great outcomes.
I would suggest that the hearing aids are just as vital to Merric and other children that are going through a similar situation. Again, this Treacher Collins syndrome I’d never heard of before.
If there was any way of using this example as a rationale to make sure that there is this funding available, if it isn’t already — which it doesn’t appear to be, for Merric — I’m hopeful that that argument might sway, if need be.
I’ll move on to another issue until we have an answer. I see the minister is receiving something, so maybe I’ll just sit down in case there is an answer forthcoming.
Hon. T. Lake: The B.C. early hearing program covers the costs of the first set of hearing aids for infants and young children identified with permanent hearing loss, when eligibility requirements are met. Hearing aid services are provided through local public health audiology clinics.
Yes, the eligibility requirements for this program are: under 3½ years of age — so I think that is what the member is referring to: the B.C. early hearing program — hearing test results provided by an audiologist identifying permanent hearing loss, and approval from the child’s medical doctor. Those are the eligibilities.
I take the member’s point that if a child is unable to hear properly, that will impair their ability to learn. As I say, when we look at the allocation of resources we have in the Ministry of Health, these are the kinds of debates
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that we have. I thank the member for bringing this to my attention. We will have that discussion within the ministry and perhaps with the Ministry of Children and Family Development as well.
S. Fraser: Thanks to the minister for the answer and the confirmation of that. Three and a half…. I am hoping to have further conversation on this with the minister or his staff to find out if we can make this more universal. Does the minister or his staff have any…? Is there a rationale for a cutoff at 3½? That seems like an arbitrary age.
Certainly, the needs for the child or children in these situations don’t end in any way. From here on through to teens, there’s going to be a great growth period for the child, and the refitting so that the hearing aids can work is going to probably require an acceleration of turnover of the hearing aids. What would be the rationale from the ministry to do a cut-off at 3½?
Hon. T. Lake: I don’t have the history of the program available to me, but I can, I guess, offer this rationale. The B.C. early hearing program is to help, first of all, identify young children with hearing loss as they go through that critical period of learning language skills. The first set of hearing aids is provided so that they can overcome that challenge of learning speech.
Like many programs when they first start, there are a certain amount of resources — not dissimilar to the insulin pump program that was up to 18 years of age. We’ve expanded it to include 25 years of age. We’ve had discussions about expanding it further.
I think that the member brings up a relevant point about: should resources become available? Should we look at expanding this program? Those discussions will take place in the ministry, together with the Ministry of Children and Family Development.
S. Fraser: Thank you, again, to the minister for that answer.
I guess it’s not a rhetorical question in any way, but…. While the early years, up to 3½, are fundamental to learning speech and verbal skills, it certainly doesn’t end at 3½.
Again, I submit that there is a requirement, here, from a government. The child — Merric, or children in his case — would require the equipment to be able to further their education beyond…. I mean, 3½ is before school starts. But it’s a necessity for school. A child that cannot hear appropriately in class will not be able to have the outcomes that are necessary for them to succeed in the academic world.
Would the minister…? I mean, it’s not his ministry, but isn’t there a requirement to provide the medical equipment so a child can be successful at school — or even be able to attend school? Again, I would use the rationale of the supported child development funding for children with developmental disabilities. There’s a recognition that the child needs to be at school.
Legally there’s a requirement for the child to learn — be taught — in our society. Wouldn’t that take precedent over…? I know there’s funding restrictions, but wouldn’t the requirement of a child to be able to learn at school take precedent — even a legal precedent — of need?
Hon. T. Lake: The member brings up an interesting discussion. I accept his argument that to be able to learn properly in school, being able to hear is an important part of being able to learn. Although, certainly, we know of individuals that overcome challenges.
The Canada Health Act says that the provinces should provide health care which is medically necessary, but it doesn’t say what is medically necessary. So this is the debate that is ongoing about a lot of things that we cover.
We’ve had this same discussion over insulin pumps for people that are over 25 years of age. One could argue that they are medically necessary. Others could argue that there are alternatives available that meet the needs to treat the medical condition.
It is a matter of how you allocate resources. When you look at the spending on health care, it is encroaching on 43 percent of all spending by the provincial government. Yet there are still unmet needs. It is not an easy task to say what you won’t do or what you won’t expand because you need to do something else. The example that I’ve used a lot is the addition of drugs that can cure hepatitis C in many cases and the expense that comes with that.
As I say, it is a matter of dealing with the resources that you have available and allocating them in the way that provides the largest benefit to the population while, of course, taking into account that there are unique situations individuals and families face. You hope that the system will be able to help with those situations.
One person may go through their entire life with needing very little from the health care system, whereas others require millions and millions of dollars through their lifetime. That’s the grand bargain that we strike through our public health care system. As resources become available, we always look at how we can best expend those new resources or, if there are savings that we can find in the system, how we would reallocate those resources.
As I said, the member has brought up a good point. It will form part of a discussion we’ll have with the ministry.
S. Fraser: Thanks to the minister for that. I appreciate that the discussion is going to happen. I certainly will await any change or the outcomes of those discussions and pass those on, I hope, favourably to Merric and his grandparents and his parents. I’ll move on from this issue for now, if I could.
Within my constituency in Alberni–Pacific Rim, there is a medical facility in Bamfield — a relatively small com-
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munity, a fishing and tourism community in beautiful Barkley Sound. It’s magnificent, actually, but quite isolated. The road is not paved. It’s not maintained all that well sometimes. I’ve dealt with the Minister of Transportation repeatedly — or many repeated Ministers of Transportation — on that.
However, the issue right now is around the helipad that’s required for medevacs and emergency situations. Because of the isolation of the area — I know that it’s been an ongoing discussion with Island Health and the local government and the regional district directors and the hospital boards — the community has determined that they do need a helipad and that the favourable location for that helipad is located at the health centre. There is another identified location, potentially, at the airstrip, which is actually not proximal to the health centre. There are all sorts of problems with that.
First of all, there is no formal ground transport to move patients from the medical centre to the further airstrip, so there’s that issue. There’s also the fact that the emergency transport often involves the advanced life support team. They can get to the helicopter faster if it’s at the health centre.
The health nurse is actually not allowed to leave the centre in many cases. In the case where he or she would need to accompany a patient to a remote setting if they did have, say, an ambulance come in from Port Alberni to transfer the patient from the health centre, that’s a two-hour drive one way if the road is passable.
I just wonder if the minister can give any updates. There’s concern in the community that Island Health is moving towards, I guess, maybe a cheaper option. It’s the one that’s more remote, at the airstrip. It’s not the one at the health centre. Can the minister comment, please?
Hon. T. Lake: Just reading the background of the situation, the landing area near the health centre doesn’t meet Transport Canada regulations. There is a neighbouring property, and apparently, when a helicopter was landing one time, a couple of kayaks became airborne because of the rotors of the helicopter — so not a safe situation.
Interjection.
Hon. T. Lake: A very extreme sport.
The need is to develop an alternative. The member had talked about the private strip, which is about 1½ kilometres away from the health centre. The challenge, then, is transporting patients from the health centre to the airstrip.
Island Health has conducted a study of the alternatives. One is working with the community to develop a first-responder program that then would allow the transfer of patients from the health centre to the airstrip. The other is construction of a floating helipad. No decisions have been made. They’re looking at those alternatives and, of course, would have to work with Transport Canada.
Transport Canada has been increasing their requirements for helipads over the last number of years. I know we’ve had situations in my own hometown of Kamloops where helipads have had to be reconstructed due to these new requirements by Transport Canada — all in the name of safety, of course, but it does raise the bar in terms of costs often for helipads.
Island Health is aware of it. B.C. emergency health services is aware of it. A couple of options are being looked at, at the moment. If we were able, through Island Health, working with the community and working with B.C. emergency health services, to develop a first-responder program in the community, that might actually be a good alternative. Of course, those first responders serve the community in many different ways, and it may be able to help us solve this problem.
We will stay in touch with the member, in terms any of updates we get from Island Health, to see if they’ve come to a decision on that.
S. Fraser: Thanks to the minister for that. I’ll be finishing off here, noting the time.
I would just like to comment that I appreciate the minister’s comments. But if there was establishment in the future of relying on volunteers, that’s not the same level of care as an advanced life support team, for instance. It would require ongoing training, especially with turnover. This is a fairly small population. There are all sorts of challenges there.
Since the health nurse is not currently authorized to leave the health centre to transport a patient to another location, if it’s more remote, in a critical care situation, with a life at risk, the transportation team would require suitable training and expertise that might be difficult to guarantee with volunteers on an ongoing basis. I mean, there is a cost to that, certainly, and it would be an ongoing cost, an incremental cost.
Certainly, I would hope that the minister and his staff and Island Health will look into that, because having it at the centre, as close as possible to the centre, could save lives because of many of those situations. Again, there is no…. The Ambulance Service is two hours away, too. I would hope that will all be taken into consideration in the discussions that follow and that the regional district….
I would note, also, that the Alberni-Clayoquot regional hospital district board passed a resolution on April 13. The minister probably has that, but they sent a letter. I’ve sent a letter also, as MLA, urging that, hopefully, it will be proximal to the health centre to save lives.
J. Darcy: I’d like to move to the B.C. Ambulance Service, if we could. The member for Surrey–Green Timbers will not be returning today.
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The minister is certainly aware of — and we have discussed in this House — concerns about ambulance wait times and concerns expressed by the municipalities, by ambulance paramedics, by firefighters, by municipal governments.
Last year B.C. emergency health services commissioned Operational Research in Health, an international expert in emergency response demand analysis and deployment modelling, to conduct a review of the services that it provides. That report clearly identifies that for last year, for 2015, ambulance call volumes — well, in recent years — have been increasing at a rate higher than population growth as a result of an aging population, changing demographics, population health needs and required care outside of hospitals.
It pointed out that response times were deteriorating and pointed out very clearly that, in the absence of change, response times would deteriorate even further over the next four years and onwards.
The Ministry of Health and the B.C. emergency health services released an action plan a few weeks ago that said a lot of things, but it did not specifically address the significance of the current staffing needs that had been identified in this report, nor did it set out a plan that outlines and immediately addresses the service levels for the public, nor the workload and stress levels for paramedics. My question to the minister is: what are the specific staffing commitments flowing from the action plan?
Hon. T. Lake: The ORH study, demand and employment study, of B.C. emergency health services in the Lower Mainland resulted in looking at over 350,000 incident responses as well as data from 17 first-responder agencies that were dispatched to assist paramedics in medical emergencies. These are, essentially, fire departments that also act as first responders.
The action plan is based around several pillars, if you like. First of all, to improve activation and mobilization time. When a call comes in, if you take from the moment the call comes in to when the ambulance is on site, there’s a series of things that happen. The activation and mobilization are the first things that happen. There are plans to improve the activation and mobilization, which will shorten times.
Change the way we respond to low-acuity calls. There are situations where someone will call an ambulance and we need to ensure that we’re getting the highest needs met first. There are conditions which are not as acute as others. We want to make sure an ambulance gets to the situation where it can be life-saving in the shortest possible time. Looking at the way we respond to some of those low-acuity calls is one of the strategies.
To standardize patient handovers within health authorities is another part of the action plan. That means…. Currently when an ambulance goes to a hospital, the paramedics will stay with the patient until the patient is handed over to emergency department personnel. There is a variation in the way that this is managed in one health authority versus another. We want to look at best practices and make sure that those are standardized across all health authorities.
There’s a multi-year funding strategy for strategic investments in resources — human resources and capital resources — and also to look at innovative changes and practice that will improve patient care and use resources more appropriately.
Primary response units is one of those things that may be used, where you have a single primary care paramedic going out in a car, perhaps, rather than a full ambulance, ahead of the crew to assess the patient and respond to the acute needs and be in contact with a physician and manage and triage that call, on site, to get there sooner. That’s one of those changes. Another would be what is known as treat and release. Ambulance paramedics arrive on scene, examine the patient, are in communication with a physician, and a decision may be made that that patient does not, in fact, need to go to the hospital.
Because of the other problem I identified earlier, the handoff of the patient to the emergency department, if we can reduce the number of patients that actually have to go to the emergency department, that means resources stay on the road more of the time, instead of being tied up in hospital.
Immediately, what we did, as we’re developing the longer-range plan…. There was an investment of 34 FTEs and eight new ambulances — three in Surrey, two in Langley, two in Abbotsford and one in North Vancouver — and, as I mentioned, the addition of 34 full-time-equivalents to add to the human resources in the Lower Mainland. So the initial strategy: to close the immediate gaps that were identified. Longer-term strategy: to increase the efficiency and the resources available for B.C. emergency health services.
J. Darcy: I’m aware of the commitment that was announced a number of weeks ago about eight ambulances and 34 staff, I believe — 34 FTEs.
I’m not quite following the minister’s response. On the one hand, I thought I heard him say a minute ago that there was a multi-year resource plan that included increased funding for staff and capital. But at the end of his comments, the minister appeared to just say that for the future, it was a question of looking at efficiencies and strategies.
That’s without, really, any details in the report — that I could see — about what those efficiencies and strategies are that are going to enable the Ambulance Service to meet what is referred to in the report as a growing demand — a situation where wait times will get worse, not better, unless there are significant changes. So beyond the
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eight ambulances and 34 staff, what is that resource and capital plan that the minister referred to?
Hon. T. Lake: Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I said that there were immediate steps taken, which was the addition of the 34 FTEs and the eight ambulances, and that the action plan identified five overarching strategies to drive performance, to increase performance over the system. Those will form part of the development of the strategy moving forward.
B.C. emergency health services is working with the Ministry of Health, health authorities, municipalities and other key stakeholders to look at a longer-term plan that will involve, likely, more human resources and more capital resources. That is in development at the moment. I don’t have the results of that longer-term action plan, but that is under development.
In the meantime, we didn’t want to wait, and that’s why adding the resources that I described was done right away.
J. Darcy: The addition of 34 FTEs and eight new ambulances — does the minister believe that that meets the objectives that were identified in the ORH report?
Hon. T. Lake: I’m obviously not making myself very clear. We took some immediate steps, and a longer-term plan is being developed to meet the identified needs of the Lower Mainland through the ORH report. I understand that the business plan with those actions and the resources necessary has been delivered to the ministry, and the ministry is analyzing that business plan now.
J. Darcy: The ORH report dealt with urban ambulance service in urban areas. It does not address paramedic resources and plans for non-metropolitan areas — urban and rural areas in the rest of the province.
What is the solution for urban areas with long-standing inadequate ambulance resources and considerable hospital delays and considerable transfer demands like Kamloops, Kelowna and Prince George? Many of those communities, smaller cities, have serious problems with wait times, response times, and are not captured by the various strategic plans to date.
Hon. T. Lake: Well, many of the strategies that have been developed as a result of the ORH study of the Lower Mainland will have transference to other health authorities.
For instance, decreasing the activation times will help all over the province. Standardizing the handoff at the emergency departments will help all around the province. Looking at innovative ways of managing patients, through treat and release or the use of primary care units, will be helpful around the province. There are things that were studied in the Lower Mainland that can be transferred and will be transferred, in terms of practices around the province.
Of course, one of the challenges in non-metro areas is the recruitment and retention of paramedics in smaller communities. It was certainly true of the 1990s. It was strictly a voluntary system in smaller communities. Later that developed into an on-call kind of a system, where paramedics either were at the ambulance station and were paid an hourly rate and then that rate increased when they were called out or they were on a pager and paid a smaller hourly rate and, again, that rate went up if they were on call.
With the announcement recently of community paramedicine, 80 FTEs will be added over the next couple of years. That will bolster the paramedic numbers in rural areas and smaller communities and allow people to make a full-time career of being a paramedic.
We think that will strengthen not just response times in those communities, by ensuring that we have an adequate number of paramedics — because it can be difficult to recruit and retain into some smaller communities — but also to be able to strengthen primary care, by adding on duties to a full-time paramedic that, in the past, was simply a part-time, on-call paramedic.
J. Darcy: The report that we have been discussing deals with ambulance wait times, response times, in the Lower Mainland and Victoria. Is there a plan to do a similar study for smaller or medium-sized communities, like Prince George, Comox Valley, Cranbrook, Kelowna, Kamloops, Penticton?
Hon. T. Lake: Of course, response times in more rural areas are, expectedly, going to be longer than they are in urban areas. When we look at some of our key mid-size cities, however, the response times are actually pretty good. In Nanaimo, for instance, lights-and-sirens average response time is eight minutes and 41 seconds.
Now, there is no national standard. I know people talk about a national standard. It is probably in metro areas, urban areas. The lights-and-sirens nine-minute average is one that is often used. Again, in more rural areas, that is unlikely to happen because of the distances involved. But again, in Nanaimo, we have a very good response time of eight minutes and 41 seconds. In Kelowna, we have an average lights-and-sirens response time of nine minutes and 49 seconds. In Kamloops, ten minutes and 33 seconds. In Invermere, ten minutes and 26 seconds.
If we go to a more rural area, somewhere like Keremeos, it goes up to just over 13 minutes. So there is a difference, certainly, between metro areas and more urban areas. Much of what we have learned from the ORH study…. Once it’s applied to these other parts of the system, we will be monitoring these response times. But we don’t feel
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there’s a need to do another analysis of these response times in these medium-sized cities because we feel very confident that the learnings from the ORH study in the Lower Mainland can be applied to these other centres. We’ll be monitoring the response times as a result of those changes.
J. Darcy: But we’re also talking about even smaller communities in rural British Columbia — Chilcotin, Peace, Columbia — where often we have long distances between communities and hospitals and long distances between ambulance stations.
Is the minister saying that we can take directly…? He just referred to ambulance wait times varying between urban communities and rural communities. Does the minister think that he has adequately studied the issue of ambulance response times in those rural communities where the distances are quite significant?
Hon. T. Lake: Well, we’re always looking at how we can improve the system, and certainly, after we’ve had an opportunity to have the community paramedicine program in place for a while, we’ll be able to evaluate what effects that has. We’ll be able to evaluate changes that are implemented as a result of the ORH study, not just in the Lower Mainland but in other areas. Of course, we have an air ambulance fleet, also, that serves more rural communities — to either use helicopters or fixed-wing to transport patients from more rural and remote areas into hospitals.
As someone who represents both a medium-sized city and a rural area, it will come as no surprise to people who live in rural areas that there is a longer distance to be travelled. A longer response time is part of the expectation that people have in those smaller communities.
In a province like British Columbia, where we have a relatively small population of 4.6 to 4.7 million people living in an area encompassing the area of Europe, with terrain that is extremely challenging and mountainous — we have isolated areas — people understand that it is challenging to provide all of the same services everywhere in the province.
We try using technology, using things like the air ambulance service, to make sure that people living in smaller communities and remote areas of the province have access to health care in as quick a time as we possibly can. As I say, we know that in smaller communities, more rural areas, the response times will be longer than they are in the metro area. We will continue to monitor those.
We meet with leaders of small communities every year at the UBCM. I can tell the member that in my meetings over the last several years, the idea of community paramedicine has been extremely positively received by these communities. In fact, many of them indicated that they wanted to be part of it. Many of them have become part of it.
I can tell you, from talking to some of the mayors of these smaller communities where community paramedicine will be implemented, they are extremely happy. They don’t talk about response times as much as they talk about making sure they have the ability to recruit and retain paramedics in their communities. We feel that with this program, we’ll be able to do that.
J. Darcy: The minister referred earlier to national response times. I know that we discussed this issue somewhat in this House, in question period, a number of weeks ago.
The report, as I recall, said very clearly — it was a very troubling finding — that in the greater Vancouver area, the Lower Mainland and Victoria, which were the areas that were the subject of the report, the national target, which the minister says is about urban…. I’m not going to pursue the rural response times just now, but for urban areas that were studied, that response time was only being met 50 percent of the time.
My understanding of the action plan flowing from that report, the action plan from the ministry and emergency health services, was that the new target was to meet that nine-minute response time three times out of four by the year 2020, which is four years from now. Is that, in fact, the target that this ministry thinks is acceptable?
Hon. T. Lake: Yes.
J. Darcy: The minister will be aware…. He was present when they made the presentations, I believe. The Heart and Stroke Foundation visited the Legislature and held an event. There were many members from both sides of the House in attendance. This was part of the case they were making for ensuring that there was access to defibrillators in far more public spaces.
In fact, they believe it should be a requirement that there be more defibrillators in public spaces like arenas and libraries and so on. They pointed out that once you get past the 12-minute mark when you’re dealing with somebody who has suffered cardiac arrest, as I recall them saying, the chances of survival go down to about 5 percent.
I must admit that I have trouble reconciling, as I’m sure many people do, how the minister can say it’s an acceptable target that still one out of four British Columbians in the urban areas — forget rural — could expect to have an ambulance within that nine-minute target — and only, then, four years from now. How does the minister explain that to cardiac patients, to the Heart and Stroke Foundation and to others who would be concerned?
Hon. T. Lake: Well, you create a system that…. Again, if the member wants to have a guarantee that 100 percent of the time ambulances will arrive within five minutes, we could use that as a target. Or we could say 95
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percent of the time, they’ll arrive within five minutes, and the member will say: “Well, what about the 5 percent where they don’t?”
These are targets that are set to provide a high level of care to the people of British Columbia. It is a provincial ambulance service that is one of the largest ambulance services in North America, with a sterling reputation, with highly trained advanced-care, primary care and EMA-level paramedics and dispatchers that are extremely good at their jobs.
We celebrated, just a couple of years ago, 40 years of this service in British Columbia. Before that, it was a patchwork of for-profit and non-profit services all across the province, and it has developed into one of the best services in North America.
The Heart and Stroke Foundation does amazing work. In fact, we have partnered with them, through the public access to defibrillation program, to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, to put defibrillators in place. I would say we’ve done more than that. The great people who work for B.C. emergency health services have provided training for people on how to use and how to maintain those defibrillators. They also provide a registry for those defibrillators so that when an ambulance is called, when 911 is called, they can tell the person where the nearest registered defibrillator is.
We have recognized people who have been on the phone, that have provided the right kind of information so that people can arrive on scene in the shortest period of time. They’ve stayed calm. They’ve done what the dispatcher has said, until the ambulance gets there.
It is a combination of people and resources that come together: the B.C. Ambulance Service, through BCEHS, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Ministry of Health that supports them and, importantly, first responders — who are great partners with B.C. emergency health services, who arrive on scene, have defibrillators and, in many cases, in urban areas, will have resources that are available and will often arrive slightly before or sometimes at the same time as the paramedics. They have the ability to use a defibrillator. Again, I’ve seen firsthand how those teams work together to save lives.
Yes, I did say there is no known standard. But the study, and the plan coming out of the study, said that our goal over the next number of years is for lights-and-sirens calls, three-quarters of the time, 75 percent of the time, to have a response time under nine minutes. I think that is an admirable goal and one that will serve the people of British Columbia very well.
J. Darcy: I wonder if the minister could provide a breakdown, year over year — say, the last five years — of the number of full-time equivalents employed by the Ambulance Service?
[R. Lee in the chair.]
Hon. T. Lake: The budget, first of all, for B.C. emergency health services has increased 117 percent since 2001-2002, from $148 million to $322 million. The number of full- and part-time paramedics has grown by 25 percent in that time period, from 3,157 to 3,945. That was until ’14-15. If we go back the last…. Did the member ask for five years, I believe?
J. Darcy: Sure. Or if you’ve got ten, that’s fine.
Hon. T. Lake: Okay, great. Well, let’s start at 2007-2008. We had 3,466 employees; in 2008-2009, 3,618; 2009-2010, 3,640. For 2010-2011, I believe that was the one year where there was a reduction to 3,596; 2011-2012, 3,678; 2012-2013, 3,814; 2013-2014, 3,881; 2014-2015, 3,944; and 2015-16, 4,007.
J. Darcy: The minister referred to a 25 percent increase. Which year-over-year is he referring to there?
Hon. T. Lake: That was, I believe, from 2001-2002 to 2014-15.
J. Darcy: The number that he referred to at the beginning of that was what again?
Hon. T. Lake: In 2001-2002, 3,157. My note here says in 2014-15, 3,945, but this other note says 3,944; there’s a discrepancy of one in 2014-15, so let’s call it 3,944 to be conservative.
J. Darcy: There are a number of…. I won’t canvass them. We all have them in front of us. There are numerous recommendations that are detailed in the action plan — the emergency health services plan.
Can the minister please inform the House: what’s the timeline for implementing those recommendations? This is an action plan that is meant to be implemented over what time period?
Hon. T. Lake: As I mentioned, the business plan outlining that strategy and the required resources has just been submitted to the ministry and is being analyzed by the ministry. I don’t have that information, because we haven’t had the opportunity to review and analyze it.
J. Darcy: Just a couple of last questions on the ambulance service. It is my understanding that in the last year — B.C. emergency health services — there have been approximately 30 terminations of long-serving managers in the last year, all of whom received an additional 18 months of pay and benefits in addition to their pensions.
Can the minister provide the costing? How many
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of these terminations and payouts occurred to long-service managers?
Hon. T. Lake: There have been, certainly, some changes in management positions, over the last three years that I’ve been minister, in B.C. emergency health services. However, any terminations and accompanying compensation would be in line with guidelines outlined by the public service. I do not have a figure as to the total. We can take that on notice and provide that if it’s within the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
J. Darcy: Can the minister confirm that there have been in the last year terminations and packages for 30 long-serving managers?
Hon. T. Lake: No, there have not.
J. Darcy: How many terminations of long-term managers have there been in the last year?
Hon. T. Lake: Some restructuring has occurred over the last year, but there have not been 30 long-term managers terminated in that process. My understanding is that between six and ten positions were affected over the last year as part of that restructuring.
J. Darcy: The minister said that the payouts were consistent with public service guidelines. My understanding is that that would be 18 months of pay plus benefits, in addition to their pensions — roughly $150,000. Does that reflect the minister’s understanding?
Hon. T. Lake: I’m told that it would range from two months up to 18 months, depending on years of service.
J. Darcy: Well, certainly, of course it depends on length of service. I understand that these were mainly or almost exclusively long-serving managers, which would mean that this cost was significantly higher.
The minister referred to restructuring. Does that mean that these positions were eliminated, or have they all been replaced? So how many positions were eliminated, and how many were replaced? Restructuring implies eliminated.
Hon. T. Lake: It’s a combination of restructuring and terminations. As I mentioned, some people who are no longer there, either through restructuring or through termination, would have received compensation based on public sector guidelines. That would range from two months to 18 months.
The member is implying that all were long-serving members of the public service. I’m saying to the member that the compensation awarded ranged from two months to 18 months. Therefore, not all of them were long-serving members of the public service.
J. Darcy: Can the minister provide the amount? He said it wasn’t 30; it was between six and ten. Can the minister provide the total amount of these compensation packages?
I understand that the individual agreements are confidential, that people sign non-disclosure agreements in order to get the payouts. Can the minister please provide information about the total amount that was paid out — how many positions and the total amount?
Hon. T. Lake: I already said that I would provide that information if I was authorized to provide it according to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. It is information we will have to accumulate and then ensure that we protect people’s privacy at the same time.
M. Elmore: Thanks to the minister and staff for the opportunity to raise some questions that have come to my attention from a community organization called Sanctuary Health, who advocate on behalf of individuals who are undocumented, who have precarious immigration status.
We’re seeing increasing numbers in B.C. and in our country, particularly with the recent changes last year to the federal government temporary foreign worker program — increasing numbers of folks who are in British Columbia without official status.
It was brought to my attention that…. Maybe I’ll just read the background and present the situation. Currently under the Medicare Protection Act, MPA, the Medical Services Commission determines if babies are eligible for MSP. Procedurally, babies are granted MSP coverage if they are residents of B.C. and if they are the legal dependents of a resident of British Columbia who is also a beneficiary of MSP.
However, there’s a roadblock if the applying parent has restricted or no access to MSP due to their precarious immigration status. The example is that when these parents apply for MSP for their babies, parents’ identity and residence documentation is already required. This is problematic if the parents are undocumented.
Many of these parents want to apply for MSP for their babies but do not do so because they rightly fear being deported. These parents are concerned about providing the information to the Medical Services Commission out of fear that the commission will report them to the Canadian Border Services Agency or otherwise release the information. As a result, we are seeing — and it’s being shared with me — that Canadian babies are being denied important health care that they need as infants.
Some of the examples that have been brought forward, and I’ll just put them on the record. Canadian babies,
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residents in British Columbia, who have restricted or no access to MSP due to the precarious nature and the criminalization of their parents immigration status include a baby of undocumented parents who was denied MSP because the parents were not eligible for MSP; also, a Canadian baby of undocumented parents does not have MSP because the parents are undocumented, and they’re fearful of applying for MSP; and a Canadian baby of a temporary foreign worker was granted MSP but only till the expiry of the mother’s work permit, rather than the longer term provided to all other beneficiaries of MSP.
It has been brought to my attention that this has been changed. It’s either a regulatory change or a policy change. Previously if babies had been born, they were granted MSP. I was wondering if the minister is familiar with this issue — and also to address the important principle of babies being born in British Columbia being covered by MSP and having access to health care and medical services.
Hon. T. Lake: No policy has changed. If a baby is born in Canada, they are a Canadian citizen and immediately eligible for MSP.
M. Elmore: Thanks to the minister. Maybe I’ll get some more information — there are specifics — and follow through with that. I think it may be a function, as well, that we’re seeing more numbers, just in light of the federal changes bringing in the time limits, particularly for temporary foreign workers. We’ve seen that these numbers every day since last year have been increasing. So I can get some of the details and follow up directly. I think that would be helpful.
Also dealing with the increasing numbers of folks who are undocumented accessing medical services at hospitals, it has been raised that there is the experience of individuals who are undocumented, precarious immigration status, who go to a hospital for treatment, medical services. Their experience is that their information is transferred to Canada Border Services Agency. Particularly in the case, I believe, of Fraser Health, there were over 500 instances where individuals’ immigration status was transferred to Canada Border Services Agency, resulting in some deportations, people being removed from British Columbia.
That has been raised as a concern in terms of the reluctance of individuals who have precarious immigration status to access health care if it’s needed.
I just wanted to raise that to the minister — if there’s a policy on board with that. Or what steps are in place to ensure that individuals in British Columbia have access to health care if needed?
Hon. T. Lake: First of all, I want to make it clear to the member and anyone listening that medical services are never denied to someone needing medical services. Once the medical service is supplied, then, in some cases, if there doesn’t appear to be coverage under MSP, the health authority needs to recover the costs.
In some cases — and this seemed to be a practice within some health authorities — they would contact CBSA to try to find out whether someone was resident or not and, therefore, how to collect the money owing. That has been discontinued. There are no health authorities that are contacting CBSA in that regard anymore. I know that was a concern of Sanctuary Health, and health authorities have discontinued that practice.
M. Elmore: Thank you to the minister for that clarification. I know that there had been reports to me that that was not the policy implemented in Vancouver Coastal. There were, I guess, different approaches amongst different health authorities. Certainly, that principle is appreciated.
The challenge is…. In terms of the increasing numbers of individuals without status in British Columbia, this is within the realm of responsibility of the federal government. There are discussions underway and initiatives from Vancouver city in terms of adopting the principles of a sanctuary city to ensure that individuals have access to services without fear of detention and deportation. So that’s good news to hear that. I appreciate that.
Hon. T. Lake: I just wanted to clarify that they will not contact CBSA without the patient’s consent. If the patient consents, then they might. But if the patient does not consent, then they will not.
M. Elmore: Thanks to the minister for that clarification. I’ll convey that back to the organization and advocates. I’m sure they’ll be very heartened to hear that news.
J. Darcy: I’d like to turn to the issue of Lyme disease.
Back in 2010, the government commissioned a report — a confidential report, I understand — by a Brian Schmidt, who found that the incidence of Lyme disease is rising and likely to increase. This report also exposed what was referred to in the report as the woeful inadequacy of testing and treatment for Lyme disease in B.C. The author of the report stated clearly: “Doctors should be able to prescribe therapy unless that therapy poses a greater risk to patients.”
This is an issue we’ve discussed in previous estimates. The Lyme patients who come to see me quite regularly, here in the Legislature, the Lyme foundation, as well as in my constituency office, remain very, very concerned about inadequate programs to support them, about wait-lists of two and three years in order to get appointments, much less treatment.
The complex chronic diseases program, CCDP, at Children’s and Women’s Hospital, as the minister knows, was created with a mandate for screening, diagnosis and
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treatment of various diseases, including chronic Lyme disease as well as patients with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Now, I know that a few weeks ago there was considerable concern amongst patients with Lyme disease, as well as Lyme disease advocacy organizations, that there had been information given to some Lyme patients that the clinic was not going to be treating patients with Lyme disease.
I also understand that since then, it’s been said that that information was not, in fact, accurate. Either the decision has been changed, or the original information was not, in fact, accurate. I would just like the minister to clarify whether or not patients with Lyme disease are still considered one of the three key groups to be treated at the complex chronic diseases program?
Hon. T. Lake: I want to welcome Dr. Bonnie Henry, our deputy medical health officer, to support us today.
The Schmidt report that was produced in 2010 was a report that had a lot of information in it, obviously, and some recommendations — and some conclusions that certainly appeared alarming. But I think it’s important to note that the B.C. Centre for Disease Control was not involved in the preparation of the report. The Schmidt report was not vetted or peer-reviewed by scientists or clinicians. It was a collection of perspectives regarding the needs of patients who have complex chronic diseases.
The B.C. Centre for Disease Control has done its own reports and undertaken several studies over the last ten years. It has confirmed that there is a low, stable rate of Lyme disease in the province of British Columbia and that they do not expect to see large increases in the disease in this province.
The organism that causes Lyme disease is an organism called Borrelia burgdorferi, which is carried by some species of ticks, particularly deer ticks in British Columbia that appear west of the coastal mountain range. Less than 1 percent of ticks in B.C. that can carry Lyme are infected with that Borrelia organism.
Having said that, patients that are diagnosed with acute Lyme disease are treated by family physicians. They are well trained to recognize the clinical signs — the history of a tick bite, the bull’s eye that appears on the skin and the other clinical signs — that are presented by someone with acute Lyme disease. They are certainly well within their practice scope to recognize and treat Lyme disease, which can be treated in the acute stage with a course of antibiotics and can be very effective in treatment.
The complex chronic diseases program provides care for people who suffer from a group of complex chronic diseases, which include but are not limited to myalgic encephalomyelitis, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia syndrome and chronic Lyme disease. The acute stage of the disease is treated by primary care physicians, whereas more chronic complex forms of Lyme and other syndromes are treated at the complex chronic diseases program.
J. Darcy: I understand that there are differences of opinion, including amongst scientists and medical specialists on this area. Certainly, the Schmidt report pointed to a very real problem and one that Lyme disease patients say continues to exist.
When the CCDP was first established, it was supposed to offer more than what was at that time a very inadequate status quo for Lyme disease patients. Lyme disease patients say that they are now waiting almost three years to get into the program and that they are having their Lyme disease diagnoses overturned because of faulty blood tests. If they are actually lucky enough to receive a diagnosis of Lyme disease, they’re only provided with a very limited course of antibiotics, which will not eradicate an entrenched infection.
What does the minister say to the Lyme patients who are raising these concerns? Why are people waiting as long as three years for an appointment?
Hon. T. Lake: Well, first of all, we don’t know if they are Lyme patients or not. That is part of the conundrum of these complex chronic diseases.
The Schmidt report certainly, I would say, carried the view that many patients suffering from complex chronic diseases have. They want to know the cause of the problem and how to eradicate it. That is a natural tendency. I’ve spoken to patients on this and understand their frustration. It’s a frustration that is shared by not just patients but by the medical and scientific community. There are some syndromes which are not easily explained.
The testing that is accepted by experts in both the Centre for Disease Control here in Vancouver and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is not the same as some other testing laboratories which claim that their tests are more sensitive and more accurate and provide, I guess, what some people who suffer from chronic complex diseases want to hear — that they have Lyme disease.
It is not as simple as that. The experts in diagnostics will tell you that those tests, which are often carried out in private for-profit laboratories, are in many ways misleading people into a false-positive diagnosis.
The complex chronic diseases clinic. Yes, it is busy. It was restructured to try to address some of the issues around the long wait times. Since November 2014, with the restructuring and with the recruitment of physicians and the team restructuring, new patient consultations and follow-up visits have increased significantly.
Are people getting in as quickly as they would like to? No. But there are, of course, other avenues. There are other people who will see people with these chronic
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complex problems. But the clinic in Vancouver certainly provides resources and supports that aren’t available in many primary care settings.
I won’t speak to the treatment modalities that are offered because I am not a physician that is working in that environment. I would leave those decisions to those people who are qualified to make them.
J. Darcy: Well, the minister says he’s not a medical specialist, and I certainly don’t pretend to be a medical specialist either. But the minister refers to chronic complex diseases. Lyme disease is an infection — right? — caused by a tick.
Hon. T. Lake: Acute Lyme disease is recognized to be a result of a Borrelia burgdorferi, which is a bacterium carried by a tick. When a tick bites a person — or, in my veterinary practice, bites a dog — it can release that organism into the bloodstream. That organism can cause an infection. Sometimes the body will be able to fight that infection. Sometimes it goes into a chronic stage and will settle out in joints, in kidneys, in neurological tissue.
But when it goes into those stages, it is not as easily diagnosed as it is in the early stages of the disease. In the acute stage, diagnosis is relatively straightforward. If someone is suffering from a chronic complex condition that they believe is Lyme, it can be extremely difficult to confirm that because the organism has moved past the stage where the current state of diagnostics is capable of corroborating that.
There are other immune-mediated and other chronic complex diseases that can mimic the chronic Lyme state, which makes it difficult to differentiate one condition from another. Of course, as technology and science make advances, we hope that we will be able to separate out and determine the cause of complex chronic conditions like fibromyalgia, like chronic fatigue syndrome, like chronic Lyme.
But at the level that we are at today, it is extremely difficult to do that. And to claim that there are tests out there that provide false hope is, I think, disingenuous and is not adhered to by the vast majority of the scientific community.
J. Darcy: What Lyme disease patients and advocates said to me, and the minister is aware…. The complex chronic diseases program acknowledges that the diagnosis of Lyme disease is supposed to be a clinical one. I gather that’s because of what they see as concerns with the current blood tests. Yet, patients have to wait up to three years to get an appointment.
My understanding is also that the specialist, the infectious disease doctor at the CCDP, only works one day a month. So how are Lyme patients supposed to be able to get a diagnosis?
Hon. T. Lake: I just had a great physiology and medical lesson from Dr. Henry. So just to review — see if I’ll pass my mid-term — the acute stages of Lyme disease will show clinical signs. I mentioned the history of a tick bite, the bull’s eye. Primary care physicians will see that and don’t need to test. They will institute a course of antibiotics right away.
In someone that has the latent stages where the bacteria have disseminated through the body, ending up in other areas like the joints, for instance, the blood test will diagnose that. That can be done at the primary care physician’s office as well.
If that test comes back positive, these patients are put on a course of antibiotics. They may need to have a longer course because now it is in areas of the body where the bloodstream doesn’t cross into the joint fluid as readily, so they may need a course of intravenous antibiotics. But that, once it’s diagnosed, can be treated at the primary care physician’s office as well.
Now we’re left with people that believe they have Lyme disease, but they’re negative for the test that is approved in Canada and by the CDC in the United States. They may have a positive test from one of these for-profit laboratories. They’re often referred to as alternatively diagnosed chronic Lyme-like syndrome, and they will not respond to antibiotics.
The studies have shown that if you take the people that have the alternatively diagnosed chronic Lyme-like syndrome and put them on antibiotics…. In fact, four randomized controlled studies have shown that there is no benefit to antibiotics. In fact, there are serious side effects, including infections with C. difficile, for instance, as the bacteria wipe out the normal flora of the intestinal tract and C. difficile takes over. In fact, some deaths have resulted.
So there is no benefit, if there is not a positive test for Lyme disease using the test that is approved by the Centre for Disease Control, to long-term antibiotics, and there may be serious harms, which is why people that have not had a positive diagnosis with the approved test are not put on long-term antibiotics.
J. Darcy: I hope the minister and his staff will excuse my pronunciation of these terms.
Can the minister please explain what blood tests are used to pick up Borrelia hermsii and Borrelia miyamotoi? Do I have that right? What blood tests are being used at the clinic or in British Columbia to pick up these?
Hon. T. Lake: The Centre for Disease Control here in British Columbia employ tests that cover all of the species of Borrelia, including hermsii and miyamotoi.
J. Darcy: Are those blood tests offered through the CCDP?
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Hon. T. Lake: Yes, they could be, but also available in the primary care setting as well, if they were suspected of having those organisms.
We have not found Borrelia miyamotoi in British Columbia. There is evidence of Borrelia hermsii in parts of the Okanagan. It causes a separate disease called relapsing fever, but again, blood testing is available for that organism.
J. Darcy: I’m wondering if the minister can provide tick-infection rates in communities like Cultus Lake, Squamish and Coquitlam.
I understand that the ministry believes or the public health officers believe that the infection rate of what are referred to as black-legged Ixodes pacificus ticks is very low in B.C. — a maximum of one in 200 ticks being infected. But certainly the Lyme disease advocates, the Lyme patient advocates, that I’ve spoken with believe that surveillance by the Centre for Disease Control is picking up pockets of infected ticks in areas where the infection rate is much higher.
It would be very helpful…. Can the minister provide information, either here or subsequently, in writing, on what the infection rates have been in those specific areas in the past few years?
Hon. T. Lake: The deer tick Ixodes pacificus is the tick that is responsible for carrying the organism responsible for Lyme disease. The Centre for Disease Control and our public health officers created ecological niche modelling to look at the types of areas of the province where you would expect to find Ixodes pacificus and then went and field-tested in these areas for three summers in a row.
There were over 500 ticks that were found and tested. The prevalence of Borrelia in those ticks was one in 200, or about 0.5 percent, which is not higher than we’ve seen in the past. We also examined ticks that are submitted by veterinarians, by physicians, by citizens. Again, the prevalence of Borrelia in those ticks is within that same range.
In terms of the three communities listed, we will go back and see if we have specific data for those communities and provide those to the member.
J. Darcy: The minister will be aware, of course, that a couple of years ago a bill was passed in the Parliament of Canada calling for a national Lyme disease strategy. This bill, which was approved unanimously, I understand, in the federal parliament, was to include an action plan by every province and territory in the country.
Can the minister please speak to what his ministry is doing to put in place a comprehensive plan for Lyme disease patients in British Columbia? Specifically, what kind of consultation is happening with Lyme disease patients in developing this strategy?
Hon. T. Lake: The national strategy is being developed. There’s consultation that is beginning. In fact, on the 15th, 16th and 17th of this month, they will be meeting here in British Columbia.
Interjection.
Hon. T. Lake: Sorry, it’s in Ottawa. Dr. Henry gets to go to that one. But at least it’s a better time of year to go to Ottawa.
It is being led by public health officer Dr. Greg Taylor, the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases and a patient advocacy group. That is the first meeting that will bring all these groups together to discuss what provinces have learned, and we will look to see the results of that meeting next week.
J. Darcy: My next question was going to be about that conference, actually. So the Ministry of Health is participating? Or the public health officer’s office is participating directly in that conference? That’s a yes, I gather.
My question had been…. It was actually a question that I asked, I believe, two years ago, shortly after that bill was passed. Is the minister saying that there hasn’t been a provincial strategy developed yet, flowing from that bill, and it’s awaiting that national conference?
Hon. T. Lake: A national strategy does not mean that provinces have to do anything. A national strategy, particularly when it comes to health care, is to bring people together and look at best practices.
We are ahead of many provinces with the formation of the complex chronic disease clinic. It is one of a kind across the country, so I’m sure people at this meeting will be interested to hear about our experience.
We are participating in this conference. The member should not be under the illusion that the federal government has ordered provinces to do any particular work in this area, but we are sharing our knowledge and our experience with other partners at this conference in Ottawa. And yes, Dr. Bonnie Henry will be attending on behalf of the province of British Columbia.
J. Darcy: That concludes my questions on Lyme disease. Thank you to the minister and the staff.
I have a couple of other areas I would like to pursue, since we would appear to have a little bit of time left.
Interjection.
J. Darcy: What are they? Auditing of private clinics and walk-in clinics — and if we have time, MSP.
[ Page 12786 ]
Interjection.
J. Darcy: On October 30, 2014, the minister said that the government had and was currently auditing private-for-profit clinics that they felt had broken provincial and federal laws. The direct quote was: “….we are auditing and have audited some private clinics that we feel have broken the statutes of the Canada Health Act and, provincially, the Medicare Protection Act.”
Does the minister have the results of these audits?
Hon. T. Lake: The Cambie clinic is one of the clinics that we have been auditing and we continue to audit. Cooperation from the Cambie Surgery Centre and the Specialist Referral Clinic has not been the best, I would say. We have attempted to do on-site audits, and the cooperation by these organizations has been limited, which has made it difficult to carry out the auditing process.
As the member well knows, we are due in court in September on this issue. We continue to defend the government in this lawsuit and look forward to the opportunity to present all of that evidence in court in September.
J. Darcy: How much is British Columbia expecting to lose in Canada health transfer payments as a result of any extra billing that has been discovered to date?
Hon. T. Lake: I can go through the various years. The Canada Health Act says that if there are cases of extra billing, the amounts will be subtracted from the Canada health transfer by the federal government. In 2000-2001, that amounted to $4,610; 2002-2003, $72,464; 2003-2004, $29,018; 2004-2005, $114,850; 2005-2006, $42,509; 2006-2007, $66,194; 2007-2008, $73,925; 2008-2009, $75,136; 2009-2010, $33,219; 2010-2011, $280,019; 2011-2012, $224,568; 2012-2013, $241,637; 2013-2014, $204,145. I do not have figures past 2013-14.
J. Darcy: There are certainly some significant numbers there. To the minister: what monitoring and enforcement measures will the government take to ensure that government funds are not, on an ongoing basis and in the future, being siphoned away via illegal extra billing by these for-profit clinics?
Hon. T. Lake: We are, of course, in court because of our actions that we have taken to recoup the results of extra billing through the auditing we have done. We are vigorously defending ourselves in that lawsuit that is brought forward.
I think we have demonstrated that we do not find it acceptable and that we will recoup those extra billings from clinics that carry this out. That’s why we’re in the situation we are, where we’re defending ourselves in court. I understand the federal government has entered as an intervener or a participant in that court process as well.
J. Darcy: The minister mentioned the Cambie clinic, and the other was the surgical referral centre — the clinics that had been audited.
Hon. T. Lake: The Cambie Surgery Centre and the Specialist Referral Clinic have a common ownership group. For both of these facilities, we are undertaking audits, or attempting to undertake audits.
J. Darcy: What’s the time period for which the ministry is attempting to audit those clinics?
Hon. T. Lake: Well, we go back to 2008 and 2009, when these clinics were notified of intent to audit. The first audit focused on Cambie Surgery Centre and the Specialist Referral Clinic. There were legal challenges that challenged the Medical Services Commission’s power to undertake extra billing audits. The B.C. Court of Appeal rendered a decision on September 9, 2010, confirming the powers of the Medical Services Commission to conduct these audits, and the audits started on site in January 2011.
An interim report was presented in May of 2011. Further information was requested which warranted additional on-site work, and the final audit report at that time was July 2012 — when that was made public. It established extra billings totalling $500,000 in private charges and $70,000 in MSP claims out of a sample of 468 services covering, mainly, August 2008, December 2010 and January 2011.
The follow-up audits commenced in December 2012, and we continue to attempt to conclude those on-site audits. Obviously, with the legal challenges that have taken place, and there are roadblocks that have been put up to finishing those audits, time has gone on.
There is, I guess, a tendency to look to the September date when the court case will commence, and hopefully, that will allow the completion of those audits once all the legal road blocks have been cleared.
J. Darcy: Have there been audits undertaken of any of the other private clinics?
Hon. T. Lake: There have been other clinics that have been brought to the attention of the audit and inspection committee. Our legal advice to date has been to proceed with the investigations, the audits, that we are doing and the court case that we’re involved in to make sure that we have the reasonable grounds to continue on those audits.
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We are acting upon legal advice to await the outcome of the legal proceedings that we have, hopefully culminating in September.
J. Darcy: Perhaps it’s late in the day, and that’s why I’m not understanding it.
Does that mean that the ministry does not believe — or the legal advice the ministry is being given is that there is not a reason for concern or suspicion — that there is illegal activity happening in any of those other clinics?
Hon. T. Lake: Our legal advice is that while we may have cause for concern that extra billing is going on, that while there is the legal case that was coming before the courts in September, it would be prudent to await the outcome of that case before proceeding with more audits.
That does not mean that we can’t do those audits at that time and, of course, go back in time with those audits and recoup any extra billing that is determined through that auditing process.
J. Darcy: I have a couple of questions about walk-in clinics. The first one the minister may want to get back to me on, if he doesn’t have the information at hand. Does the minister have any idea or, more importantly, any figures on the current numbers of how many British Columbians use walk-in clinics as their primary source of primary care?
Hon. T. Lake: We do not have those types of numbers, because the MSP billing codes, which we use to track health services obtained by British Columbians, doesn’t differentiate between a walk-in clinic and any other type of primary care.
J. Darcy: There is one other question I want to ask, and I’m concerned we may run out of time if I don’t have a chance to.
I know that the newly formed Walk-In Clinics of B.C. Association has been to the Legislature to meet the minister. They’ve met members on this side of the House as well. One of the issues…. In fact, on the front cover of their document, as the minister knows, they quote him as saying that walk-in clinics are “an important service.” They were not aware that that was something you said in question period in response to a question that I asked, but whatever.
One of the things that the association is pressing for, as the minister knows, is a re-examination of the MSP cap that limits the number of patients that a GP may see. They are urging the province to change that so that in walk-in clinics, GPs can see more patients per day than the present MSP cap allows.
What is the minister’s response to that proposal?
Hon. T. Lake: My response is: not at this time.
J. Darcy: Okay, I’ll ask one last question — or leave it with the minister — that is just a follow-up on the previous one. Does the minister not think that it would be valuable information — and important enough that we should look at it as far as MSP billing codes — to know how many British Columbians use walk-in clinics as their primary source of primary care?
Hon. T. Lake: Well, data is always useful, for sure, in health care planning. There may be other ways to get at that information — through surveys, for instance. I’m not aware of any that have been done, but as I say, the MSP billing codes don’t differentiate between a walk-in clinic and any other type of primary care.
I would note, however, that the College of Physicians and Surgeons has made it very clear to all primary care practices that as soon as a patient walks in the door, you are responsible for that patient. There has been the notion that has been fostered over the years that if you attend a walk-in clinic, the clinic has no responsibility for your care. That is not the case, according to the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
I think that data that helps us manage the health care system — and that can be obtained through a number of different ways — is useful in planning. As I mentioned before, the issue of primary care is an ever-evolving one. There isn’t one type of primary care that works for every British Columbian or works in every community, and the primary care model that is utilized throughout the province will continue to evolve.
Noting the hour, I move that the committee rise, report progress and seek leave to sit again.
Motion approved.
The committee rose at 5:42 p.m.
The House resumed; Madame Speaker in the chair.
Committee of Supply (Section B), having reported progress, was granted leave to sit again.
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. Monday, May 9. Safe travels, all.
The House adjourned at 5:43 p.m.
[ Page 12788 ]
PROCEEDINGS IN THE
DOUGLAS FIR ROOM
Committee of Supply
ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF
NATURAL GAS DEVELOPMENT
The House in Committee of Supply (Section A); S. Hamilton in the chair.
The committee met at 1:39 p.m.
On Vote 37: ministry operations, $24,218,000.
Hon. R. Coleman: I have six staff with me at the moment and maybe one in the gallery.
To my right is Jeff Vasey. He’s the assistant deputy minister of housing and construction standards. Greg Steves, who’s the executive director of the residential tenancy branch, is behind me. So is Ranbir Parmar, ED and CFO of oil and natural gas development. Trudy Rotgans is the architect, AIBC, executive director of the office of housing and construction standards. Jarrett Hutchinson is assistant to the executive director, buildings and safety standards branch, and Shayne Ramsey is the CEO of B.C. Housing.
D. Eby: I thank the minister for the introduction of the staff, and it’s certainly a pleasure to see you all here again. I thank you for your support of the minister here today in answering the questions that I’ll be raising around housing policy in British Columbia. I appreciate it.
The last time we were here — there have been a number of developments since then — the minister told me that homelessness had functionally been solved in the province. He said if someone was homeless: “Provided they wanted to move or they wanted to go into housing, they could actually, in most cases, take care of that the same day.”
Now, there weren’t enough beds in Maple Ridge for the tent city. There weren’t enough beds for the 162 homeless youth in Langley. And when the tent city sprang up on the courthouse lawn here, the minister was in the media saying, “The B.C. government has homes for every courthouse camper, but some are refusing to leave,” and he said it was “forcing him to go to court to take down the camp.”
Then when he went to court, the Supreme Court judge there said: “It is unnecessary for me to resolve the actual numbers of homeless and the numbers of beds and shelters presently available to them. I am satisfied that the number of homeless in Victoria continues to exceed the available beds and shelters in the city by a considerable amount, and this disparity will only worsen when some of the presently available beds are closed.”
In my opening question, the minister continues, despite very obvious evidence to the contrary, to refuse to recognize that the information he has about the number of beds, the number of homeless, is not correct. I keep asking him to do a provincial homeless count so he has good information. He refuses to do that. Now he’s been found by a B.C. Supreme Court judge to be totally incorrect about the number of beds and shelters and the numbers of homeless.
Has the minister any plans in this budget to get better information about what’s actually happening in British Columbia with respect to homelessness?
Hon. R. Coleman: If we’re going to spend the afternoon in an accusatory environment, this is going to be a long afternoon. But I will say to the member opposite that at the time I made the comments about the homeless camp in Victoria, I had enough beds for everybody that was in that camp. As a matter of fact, since the camp came into place, 180 additional people have been housed in Victoria. Additional spaces have actually been optioned in addition to that.
I didn’t agree with the comments coming from the particular judge in regards to it, but in deference to the member, I actually take the judge or a statutory officer’s decision as it is, and I’m not going to spend time criticizing the judge. We will work towards going back to court in September, or if there is a health or safety issue that’s significant to the point where public safety is at risk, we would make the decision to go back quicker.
I liked the comment about the 162 homeless youth. The thing is that there has been no count. I actually met with that organization, which thinks that what they need is about six beds for transition, for youth to transition in and out of housing with regards to youth in Langley. That number is the number of clients they might see coming through in a year. It wasn’t about a specific homeless count with regards to those folks.
With regards to Maple Ridge, we actually put a shelter in place in Maple Ridge, and the camp disappeared. I’m sure the member is aware of that.
D. Eby: This is the core of the problem. The minister does not know how many homeless people there are in the province, because he refuses to engage in a standardized count. I’m not saying the province has to pay for it. Many of the cities are already doing these counts, but they’re not standardized between the cities. It’s inconsistent, the methodologies they’re using, so it’s not as useful.
There’s a report in the Langley Advance: 162 homeless youth in Langley. The minister says we need six beds. There’s a B.C. Supreme Court judge, a chief justice, who says that on the evidence before him, there are more homeless than beds. The minister says…. I don’t know. I assume he was surprised by the fact that more homeless people showed up in the homeless camp in Victoria.
Again to the minister, does he have any plan to get better information about what’s happening on the ground in British Columbia with respect to the actual number of homeless people?
Hon. R. Coleman: The story he wants to refer to in the Langley Advance or Langley Times, whichever paper…. Actually, the person in the story was an executive director of a group that supplies services to youth. I met with that individual a little over a week ago, and we walked through what the parameters were, what their concerns were and where the 162 came from. It wasn’t from a count; it was from clients that come through and will cycle through. They connect into services within the community — not necessarily all of them defined as being true homeless.
I asked them what they needed in order to make it work so they could manage this issue. I asked if ten beds would be enough for them to do the transition management and connect people to housing. They said they felt it would be done with six. So they are the ones that were in the story and gave me that information directly.
Municipalities do counts. We standardize that approach with municipalities in counts across the province. We use that information when working in any individual community. And the federal government is doing a homeless count analysis right now, federally.
The challenge with any count is that it’s a snapshot in time. In actual fact, for the first time in probably a decade, we’ve seen a significant uptick of people in British Columbia that are finding themselves homeless. That uptake has also been enhanced by the number of people we’re seeing coming into our facilities from outside our jurisdiction.
We’re managing that, because we have, obviously, a role to play if people move here from Saskatchewan or Manitoba or Alberta and find themselves homeless. We continue to work with them and to find them facilities and opportunities. We actually have a pretty dynamic approach to that.
Like I say, it’s the first time in a decade I’ve seen an uptick like this. It’s probably a result of certain economic things that are having an effect on it. Quite frankly, I think the guys at B.C. Housing and in the communities we’re working with are doing a pretty good job of trying to deal with this new pressure.
D. Eby: If the minister’s information is correct…. Presumably, he’s obtaining that information from somewhere. Now, I don’t understand why it is that the federal government would see it necessary to do a federal homelessness count in order to get a grasp on the problem that’s facing Canada — the amount of funding that’s required and where the resources should be directed — and yet our province doesn’t feel that’s necessary or why we wouldn’t do this to support the federal government’s effort to get a handle on the problem and to use it to advocate for more federal money to solve the situation that we face here.
It just seems like common sense to me that if you’re trying to solve homelessness, you need to know the number of people you need to house, and then you work to get that number down. The minister asks us to rely on anecdotes instead of actual numbers. And I’m going to ask the minister….
Interjection.
The Chair: Through the Chair, Minister, please.
D. Eby: The minister disagrees with my characterization of what he said. I invite the minister to clarify what he said. What numbers are we to rely on here? He doesn’t do a homeless count. So what numbers are we to rely on here?
Hon. R. Coleman: I’ll speak slowly for the member opposite. Each community does a count. They do it with us in cooperation with them. They do homeless counts. Then we design the homeless strategies in those communities, with those communities. We have numbers in these communities where we do the count.
Why the federal government chooses to do a homeless count is entirely up to them, right? They’re trying to do stuff so they can probably come to the ministers’ meeting in June and have some discussions in and around what investment they want to make in housing and what form of housing investment they want to make in Canada.
At the same time, the deputy ministers and the ministers and housing staff are working with each jurisdiction with regards to the priorities of each. By the way, from province to province in this country, they are remarkably different, whether it’s up in the Northwest Territories or Nova Scotia or here.
There are socioeconomic impacts on housing. All of these things come into play. I’m comfortable with how we do it. I’m comfortable with how the counts are done. We sit down and look at the counts as they’re done, and we also look at our shelter space. We look at all of the stuff we do.
We continue to build, to fill in gaps where we think they’re necessary and will continue to do that. And we will continue to do that with regards to housing, as we’ve done for the last decade.
D. Eby: The minister knows that each community in B.C. does not do a homeless count. A number of communities do homeless counts. Their methodologies vary. For example, Langley. Does Langley do a homeless count? I don’t believe they do. But if the minister has one, I’d be glad to see it.
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I think the issue here is the inconsistency between communities in B.C., the fact that we don’t have a count and that B.C. Housing is not compiling all of these counts into a provincial assessment of where we’re at — snapshot or otherwise. That’s the issue. I’ll move on to the next issue. I certainly invite the minister to respond if he has something else to add.
Also, last time we were here, the minister said he thought housing in Vancouver was “actually pretty affordable.” Does he still feel that way?
Hon. R. Coleman: As the member knows, we’ve seen a…. I’m not going to get into housing prices and market with the member today because that’s really not this ministry and what we do. But there’s no question that on the Lower Mainland, supply and demand have been spiking, where supply is being outstripped by demand. We’ve seen an increase in housing not just in Vancouver but across most of the Lower Mainland.
There are some exceptions to that. For instance, in the last year, in some statistics I saw recently, the condo price in Langley has actually gone up by zero percent in the last six months because there’s a lot of supply. The same thing on townhouses — a very minimal increase on townhouses. Some single-family subdivisions have gone up dramatically at the same time, because there is less supply of single family.
The issue around affordability is depending on markets — single family, multiple family, condo, whatever the case may be — and whether somebody’s wanting to enter the market and buy a small one-bedroom condo in Vancouver or whether they’re trying to buy a waterfront property in Kerrisdale or Kitsilano.
There has been no question of a spike in that. That’s why the government, through the Minister of Finance — I encourage the member to take this up with him when he does his estimates — has done things with the property transfer tax on new construction and those sorts of things. Any work that we do will be done in trying to come up with some affordable options to leverage, basically, equity, from municipalities, and options we’ll take back to some municipalities, to find other affordable ways for the purchase of housing. That work will get done, and it will be taken into the Minister of Finance’s decisions and discussions with regards to affordability.
D. Eby: I want to clarify. If I have questions about housing affordability in Metro Vancouver and the ability of people to get into housing — I’ll just focus on housing for purchase — I should direct those questions at the Ministry of Finance? The Housing Minister is not the right person to ask these questions to?
Hon. R. Coleman: I would say that’s correct. The affordability piece — as the member knows, the Minister of Finance has started a number of initiatives with regards to affordability. B.C. Housing takes responsible for homelessness, mental health and addiction housing for people, not in the health sector, but working with Health. We take responsibility for social housing and opportunities to help folks who are in need the most — the core need. The other side of the ministry is housing and construction standards, which is the building code and those sorts of things.
Government has chosen, because of the Real Estate Act…. Any tax law that would affect the ability to drive affordability back into the cost of housing, really, and the Real Estate Act itself sits with the Minister of Finance. That would be the appropriate place to collect the information with regards to affordability. We are working with that ministry with regards to affordability.
On this side of the ledger, we don’t have responsibility for the Real Estate Act. It sits with the Minister of Finance and his decisions on tax law. As you know, taxes are always held completely in confidence until he either announces them or puts them in a budget because they could affect markets. He has responsibility for that piece of it. So I would suggest, given the fact that we’re working with the information coming into one place, that the best place to put those questions would be to the Minister of Finance.
D. Eby: Can the minister advise what work his ministry is doing with the Minister of Finance on affordability?
Hon. R. Coleman: What we’re doing is we’re doing a study on behalf of government on the affordability factors that will be given to the minister with the Conference Board of Canada that will form the discussions within government as we build policies around it. It basically still comes down to supply and demand, but there also is work we can do with local government.
We’re building those options now where we would come away with other forms of ownership, long-term lease with some share equity and those types of things we’ve done in the past. We’re building that package to take in to the Ministry of Finance to have a total package with regards to affordability.
Conversations have already started with municipalities with regards to whether they would put up land, forgive development cost charges, or whether they’re going to not take community amenity charges but actually enforce their rules in and around the percentage of a project that has to go to affordable housing. If they did that and they left their equity in, there’s ability to leverage on those things.
That work will be ongoing. We’ll be doing that work, which eventually has to come into a Finance decision with regards to whether there is any borrowing that affected debt-to-GDP, how we would underwrite mortgages if necessary, those sorts of things. That work comes
[ Page 12791 ]
through to the Minister of Finance. At that point in time, we would have the complete package.
We do know that we could…. We’re working with, like I say, municipalities now, looking at how we could be innovative with regards to affordability. That is really taking some of the equity that could be in community amenity charges or land and driving down the price of something tied into a purchasable asset that would have inflationary controls tied to it so it couldn’t have an advantage for somebody to make money on the back of what was contributed by the taxpayer, by land or CACs or mortgageability.
Coming out the other end, the next buyer would still be able to get affordability — and the next buyer after that, affordability. There are some good examples of that, some that I actually did personally in the 1990s. I think those pieces, which we’re compiling now, will provide some interesting options for affordability, should we think that they can actually be done.
Depending on which community we’re talking about, we could find ways to have some affordable homeownership for those people who are in between the gap of a high price and a low price in some areas of the province. We can find a place for them to buy and, at the same time, let them build a small amount of equity but make sure we’re retaining the equity that’s invested by land and the other offsets these people — municipalities and government — would put into it that so the affordability factor would continue to be there for the next purchase for generations to come.
D. Eby: When the minister says he’s looking into that, is there money in the budget for it? Has there been a commission of some kind set up? Are there staff researching it? What does that mean, that the minister is looking into it?
These all sound like wonderful ideas. I’ve heard them. Land trusts — great idea. Capping the resale price and limiting who the home can be resold to, someone else who requires affordable housing — they’re all wonderful ideas. I’ve heard them, just as the minister has heard them. I’m wondering: what actual work is being done? How will this manifest in terms of reality? What efforts are being put in to turn this into something on the ground as opposed to a good idea?
Hon. R. Coleman: Well, I think something’s going on the ground pretty quickly. It’s a question…. I do think it’s also self-sustaining. The projects I did in the past where I did share equity…. One municipality put in the price of land, took $100,000 of land for a park in the community, the other $250,000 — this was back in the 1990s — was put in to buy down eight units in the building. They were bought down and given to a non-profit to manage for seniors, rental housing in the downtown core of that community.
The other 40 units were tied into a shared equity, long-term lease. The purchaser would buy their unit — obviously, below market value because it was a lease and also because of the pricing relative to the equity. When the unit resold, a percentage of the land, the price, that went up, had to go back to the municipality to go into a land trust, whatever you want to call it. In their case, I think, it was more like a sinking fund. Then the owner would get whatever increased equity was there after they gave up the percentage to the city. That project has proven that it can sustain affordability.
At the end of the day, because I’ve learned from watching it over the years and having done others, there are a couple of tweaks that I think we could make, and I think we could make it self-sustaining, which would mean I wouldn’t need a budget for it as much I would need to have partners in municipalities and land to show them how to make it work.
D. Eby: I believe the city of Vancouver has 20 pieces of land that they’ve brought to the minister for affordability initiatives for innovative projects. He’s got a city partner, certainly, in Vancouver. I believe Victoria is in a similar position. I’m sure there are cities across the province where they’ve got land for innovative affordability initiatives. Is it that the minister is expecting the cities to do this, or does the minister see a role for the province here?
Hon. R. Coleman: We’ve been doing projects with cities in an innovative way for a long time. I met with the mayor of Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and we talked about where they’d like to go with regards to some of their affordability options. We talked about some of the ideas that were out there and some of the challenges they were facing with some of their properties and talked about the timing and zoning and capital — all of those things.
We’ve had a very good working relationship with the city of Vancouver. I’ve done 14 new buildings there in the last few years, over 2,000 units, purchased probably another 2,000 units in the city of Vancouver, about 1,000 of which have already been renovated.
We’ve always been prepared to do things with regards to units under construction, where we come in…. Oftentimes our role, which can be a substantial saving to the construction of affordability, is financing. If you go to a CMHC financing relationship, you have a different interest rate, but you also have a lot of fees attached, whereas we can come in and work with a non-profit, particularly, and actually underwrite that in such a way that those costs are eliminated and save a substantial amount of money during construction financing.
We have ones where we’ve gone in, in those types of models, helping with the financing of the units, and come out with…. For instance, in one case, there were 79 condo units, and 18 of them ended up to be social housing
[ Page 12792 ]
in the building. They were self-sustained because of the equity that was remaining in them. The rest of the building was supported by the marketplace.
Those are the things that we’ve been doing for a long time. We’re going to continue to do them. We think, though — and in conversations that are coming up — that we can expand that. We will certainly work on those more. Any innovative idea in housing, we’re prepared to look at. If it affects the fiscal plan, obviously, we have to go to Treasury Board. But I do believe there are a lot of these things that won’t affect the fiscal plan that we can do within our envelope in Housing. We’ve proven that we can do that.
I think the affordability piece that’s been in the media lately has brought a different look at it from a number of our partners, saying: “We’d like to step up and try something different as well.” So that’s where we’re sitting down with folks, municipalities and those who have land, and saying: “What would you like to do, and where can we help?”
Oftentimes, in those cases, we provide some of what we would call pre-development funding so that they can go research the land, maybe look at it, get a consultant to come in. What densities could they get? What affordability could they get out of it? How would they mix? How would they transition? All of those things. That usually leads to another proposal that we would work with the municipality and our folks on.
D. Eby: That leads me to a question about provincial land. What was the minister’s involvement in the Jericho lands sale?
Hon. R. Coleman: It was pretty cursory. I do know the First Nations involved. I did talk to them as they came through that, but that negotiation was conducted through, at that time, the Deputy Minister of Finance.
With the First Nations on the Jericho lands and all of those complexities that would have been around how that deal came together, it would have been negotiated by that deputy and then taken through to the Minister of Finance.
D. Eby: Something that I can’t understand, and maybe the minister can clear this up for me: why, in this deal, are the First Nations paying the community amenity charges on the site, when clearly the community amenity charges are going to go into affordable housing? There’s no question.
First Nations are disproportionately homeless. They’re disproportionately underhoused. For some reason, these First Nations are being required to fund the community amenity contribution that’s going to build affordable housing on the Jericho site instead of the province. Can the minister explain to me how that makes sense?
Hon. R. Coleman: It makes sense because this is a commercial transaction on a piece of land. It’s not land that’s on First Nations land. It’s not reserve land, and it’s not treaty land, so they are bound by all the rules that would exist with regards to developing in the city of Vancouver. At this point, that’s how they feel they want to go with the development of these lands.
It’s no different than if any other company had bought those lands. There would be community amenity charges. Those can be put into an investment on land to provide some affordable housing.
I know that these First Nations are very interested in using the opportunity on this land to provide more housing for their own folks, to provide some affordability on the site over time. All of that will depend, quite frankly, on what they get as they zone the property relative to density and value. The community amenity charges would be a discussion they could have with the city, whether they want to reinvest them in there or not. I think that conversation will take place.
I do think this site is probably a few years away. There are two sites, as the member knows, one that they also bought from the federal government that would have to be worked out, I think, in some kind of a development proposal, which will take significant community input.
I think the nice thing about this is that the First Nations asked for the opportunity when we were talking about the Jericho lands. They stepped up and negotiated with government. Government worked out the terms with them. All parties came away happy, and First Nations are now going to have an economic opportunity on those lands.
D. Eby: I know the minister just misspoke. I’m sure he…. I mean, it would be surprising for the Musqueam to hear that these weren’t First Nations lands. This is, obviously, unceded Musqueam territory. It was a First Nations village for millennia. Artifacts are regularly dug up that show the long history of this land being First Nations land. So I’m sure the minister simply misspoke on that point.
First Nations people, on and off reserve, are disproportionately homeless. The minister is receiving…. I understand from the deal that government’s receiving in the neighbourhood of $400 million on this project. It may be give or take.
Will the minister commit to using all this money received from the First Nations, putting it into housing initiatives — for affordability, for social housing — in the province to support those First Nations people in our province who are homeless and who are struggling with getting into housing?
Hon. R. Coleman: First of all, I didn’t misspeak. Basically, the land was there. The Tsleil-Waututh, the
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Musqueam and the Squamish came to us wanting to purchase the land on a free market price. Obviously, if we were selling the land to another individual group, individual or company, we would be sitting down with the First Nations and talking to them about what the accommodation would be if we were selling that land to them.
That took place. The accounting of that was taken into the net price after that accommodation with the First Nations in negotiations. I don’t know what is commercially sensitive here, so I would say that maybe you should ask Finance about that piece of the transaction, because I didn’t do that transaction.
It’s no different than when we put land up for sale at Grassy Point. We provided an accommodation to the Lax Kw’alaams when we put it up for a site up in Grassy Point in the northwestern part of the province.
There are transactions. It is basically strength to claim, and those things are analyzed, and a negotiation. In this particular case, the three First Nations came together and wanted to negotiate on that land, and an accommodation was discussed as part of the purchase price that they accepted in a deal. So the deal got done.
The deployment of those moneys is not the decision of the Minister Responsible for Housing. Any money that comes into government from any transaction goes through Finance for whatever government priorities there are.
We have $355 million in our budget to do additional housing over the next three to four years — or five, if it goes out that long for request for proposals. Matching those up, we think we can get to a substantial match with municipalities, the federal government and other non-profits. We have an envelope that we think we can do some pretty good things with.
The deployment in how those funds are managed, with regards to the sale of land, have always been managed by the Minister of Finance, not by this ministry. We don’t have that type of authority.
I think the beauty of the Jericho lands opportunity is…. I’m as excited about that as I was excited about these three First Nations when they came together the first time. I remember meeting with them when they came together, the three First Nations — the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam — saying that they wanted to look at some of the lands that we were selling. They bought the Willingdon lands, the old LCB lands, in a partnership. There was accommodation discussed at that point in time as well. They’re actually entering into some economic development opportunities, jobs, return on investment, things that they can do.
The Musqueam, in particular, have a block of land out by UBC that they also want to proceed on with regards to development, which would really drive some additional dollars into that First Nation. They think that’s one of their better opportunities for them to add additional housing to their reserve in South Vancouver. I’ve met and talked with them about that too.
Really, the outcome of the financial transaction goes to Finance. We don’t negotiate it; we just help continue to build the relationship. We have a really good relationship with the Musqueam, in particular, and, actually, the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh.
We’ve done a number of things with the Musqueam over the years, on both accommodation and what have you, on lands that we’ve been involved in developing. These guys are great guys. They have a tremendous passion for their community. They really want to build long-term sustainability and opportunities for the community, and I’m glad that they have this opportunity.
D. Eby: Metro Vancouver is desperate for affordable housing. This is a large parcel of land in the least affordable city in the world, a $400 million windfall for the province. Will the minister commit — he’s a member of cabinet — to going back to cabinet and fighting for this money to stay in affordability initiatives?
This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity…. This site, in the middle of the least affordable neighbourhood in the middle of the least affordable city in the world, is an opportunity to build critically needed workforce housing, to address some of the dramatic and problematic homelessness issues we face in the community — a windfall of hundreds of millions of dollars from the province that came from the First Nations. Surely the minister recognizes the need to invest at least some of this money into housing initiatives, if not on this site, then on the 20 sites that the city of Vancouver has come forward with.
The minister has only $50 million this year committed to new housing initiatives. He doesn’t have $350 million; he’s got $50 million. This is eight times that amount. Will the minister at least commit to going to fight to keep some of that money in affordability initiatives in a city that is struggling quite badly with affordability and homelessness problems?
Hon. R. Coleman: Well, I mean, I think we’ve done pretty well with Finance over the last decade or so. We’ve invested $3-point-some billion in housing in British Columbia over that period of time.
The reason for the five-year window with regards to the 355 is that in some communities, even if they had a piece of land today, they’d take about two to three years to get it zoned and ready for us to build on. What we try and do is we try and push that out. If we had to move money up for projects that were able to be done sooner, we would do that. I’ve had those conversations with municipalities. We have the request for proposal out. We’ll see what we get back in with regards to those.
We have continued to be as innovative as possible. We’ve added thousands of units to British Columbia in the last few years. We’ll continue to do that. We do that
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by working well with the Ministry of Finance and the rest of government when it comes to our priorities in our budget discussions. I don’t think anybody would suggest that we haven’t fought for dollars to invest in housing in B.C., given the quantum that we’ve put into housing just in the last decade, which is well over…. It’s almost $4 billion and thousands of units in a number of forms. We find innovation is very important here.
I think the city of Vancouver, working with the Musqueam, the Tsleil-Waututh, the Burrard, is going to have to be very focused on density with regards to the Jericho lands. As the member knows, density can drive affordability within the project, especially if you can reinvest some of the money in units within the project that could be integrated for rental, which could be affordable by using our rental assistance program to buy the rents down, or by actually putting some housing within the project that would be some form of social housing, sometimes supportive housing for people with mental health and addictions.
You can do that in an integrated form, but it comes down to the zoning process. It will start with a visioning process for the Jericho lands, I would assume, then through to Vancouver, then the discussion on density and then the wish of the developer, which is the three First Nations, the owners of the land, as to what mix they would like to achieve.
At that point in time…. I’ve always made it clear that when you come to the point in time when you want to talk about the mix and how innovation can be dealt with, we’re happy to sit down with them and work with them to help them try and accomplish that.
D. Eby: The minister says thousands of units. I see schedule E of the report to CMHC. For 2011-2014, 1,245 housing units, and the 2014 extension agreement, 283 housing units. So not quite thousands between 2011 and 2014, inclusive.
I don’t know. The minister says we should celebrate, but there are tent cities in Victoria, Abbotsford, Maple Ridge, a record number of homeless shelters outside of Prince George, a record number of homeless people in Terrace. Not a lot of celebration about the success the minister has had in raising money to deal with these problems.
Will the minister commit to reinvesting that $400 million in housing initiatives in the province? It would be huge. It would be so significant. This was a windfall for the province. I would join the minister on the stage of that announcement. I would say he has done the right thing here. I would use his words. I would say: “This is an historic investment in housing, and he should be congratulated.” Will he do that? Wouldn’t that be fun?
Hon. R. Coleman: Again, maybe I should correct the member on his facts. The facts he’s reading from CMHC are only on projects that CMHC has been involved in a cost share, which is a minimal number of the units that have been done in British Columbia for the last decade. It’s been an average of 1,200 to 1,500 per year by the province in partnerships with municipalities without CMHC’s involvement, simply because there hasn’t been an economic investment from that level of government in a long time in housing.
We continue to leverage our assets and our opportunity to continue to build. Obviously, as we go through the discussion…. You know, I don’t even know when the Jericho lands funds would flow, given the fact that there is a closing date somewhere down the road, I suppose, and whatever happening with it. Obviously, when we go into our budget cycle every year, we come in and present where we think some priorities are with regards to housing and what our budget should be. Up to this point, I haven’t been disappointed in the ability for government to work with us to build our budget and build more units.
D. Eby: The minister says the answer to affordability at Jericho — he said it a few times, actually, today — is increasing density. Is the minister not concerned about the concern that people have across Metro Vancouver that investor speculators, both domestic and international, are buying units and holding them vacant as investments? If you build luxury condos, which is almost inevitably the outcome of any land development in Vancouver these days, they sell and are held vacant or are lived in part-time or less, and the increase in supply has no impact on pricing. That is the concern of many people in Metro Vancouver that I’m bringing to the minister here.
I will be raising that with the Minister of Finance, as the minister has directed me to. But he’s said a few times now that it’s a matter of supply and demand. The figures that I’ve seen as a ratio of units to population has been very consistent in Metro Vancouver for more than a decade now. There’s the same number of units per people who live there. I would encourage the minister to have a look at that.
I’m disappointed we’re not going do that media event, because I think that would be awesome.
Now, for some reason, and I hope the minister can explain this, in 2016, the government said it would be $395 million from the sale of B.C. Housing assets that would go back into housing initiatives within the province. The number changed from 2015, when they said it would be $418 million. So somewhere in there 23 million fewer dollars are going into housing developments from the sale of assets. Why is that?
Hon. R. Coleman: It’s actually not a difference of that relative to the long-term return. When we first put the program together, we did an analysis of value that we thought we could get, which I think was pretty accurate.
If closing dates go outside the particular fiscal plan years, then they’re not put into this cycle, but in actual fact, they’re still going to take place. With our non-profit transfer, every dollar is being reinvested in housing in B.C. That’s the agreement we have with Finance, hence the $355 million that we’ve committed to, that Finance has given us to work with. That number, presumably, will go up as additional properties actually do get to their final in their closing dates, and those dollars can be added into the amount.
D. Eby: The budget documents walked back a commitment that the Housing Minister made with the Premier that this money would be used for new affordable housing units. Budget 2016 says that the funds will be used for new units and renovation of existing units. Can the minister clarify for me how many units are going be renovated or what the proportion of money will be that goes to renovation instead of new units, as were promised?
Hon. R. Coleman: That comes from, basically, our relationship with the federal government. They have indicated they might want to match some money on renovations. We actually do, as the member knows, in addition to building new, sometimes purchase buildings that are not full or not being used to their maximum where we think we can go in and get a value out of the land to do some new build on the same site where we might want to purchase the existing building — to quickly, because of zoning and timing, improve the stock within a community.
Those usually require renovations on top of purchase, so we blend the numbers together with regards to what they are. There’ll be new build; there’ll be purchase; there’ll be renovation. Most of the renovation will be relative to what I described. Because of that, there are situations that exist in some housing stock.
It’s not so much in B.C. Housing stock, but there are some older non-profits that have some significant infrastructure deficits with regards to being able to keep their building so that they’re actually occupiable. Sometimes we’ll step in and help with the renovation piece to protect the asset long-term for the non-profit and for the social housing that is in those particular buildings.
It’s a moving target. Of course, with the feds talking about putting up renovation dollars, we needed to at least have in there the ability to match, so we actually build that in too. So we have the ability to match if they come up with money that we can use within British Columbia to match. Obviously, if we can get two-to-one dollars or three-to-one dollars, we can do that much more with it.
D. Eby: How much of the money will be used for the renovation of the type that the minister described, where existing non-profit housing is renovated? What proportion of the money?
Hon. R. Coleman: We expect very little. Our proposal call is out, so we’ll see what comes back from communities and non-profits with regards to purchase and new. Our expectation, looking at the feedback we’re getting at this point, is that it’ll be mostly new build. There may be some non-profits that have identified a particular building within their community that think they can do some work with and do some renovation and buy, which means we step up and finance and help them buy if necessary.
We won’t know those specifics until we get back the RFP, first of all, and see what kinds of responses we’re getting to the RFP, which will decide how much money in each fiscal year we’re going to need and then to deploy. Then, in addition to that, we also have to look at all the deals. Some of them will not make sense, and some of them will be better than others. We will fully report out on the entire allocation of the $355 million as we go through, over each year — how many units and what it is we’re doing with them.
D. Eby: With respect to that call for proposals, is the minister permitting for-profit companies to bid in the process?
Hon. R. Coleman: The odd time we do get a non-profit and a particular company come together with a joint proposal, it’s for the benefit of the non-profit. But sometimes a company will have land that they’re prepared to discount and a non-profit has identified that particular location for a specific use. So we would entertain that proposal, because we’ve done those types before.
Back in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, it was really a market-driven thing, both under the former Socred government and the NDP, where a non-profit, through a consultant, would option retail land and get together with a company that would then, basically, do all the pre-development work and come up with a proposal. The government then would get it built out and turnkey it over to the non-profit to operate for the next 60 years under a mortgage provided through CMHC or B.C. Housing. There are models like that.
Sometimes we get philanthropy from a company that says: “We’ve got a piece of land. We’re looking for a non-profit.” They’ll go to a non-profit and say, “We’d like to help fill this need in the community,” and that partnership can also come into an RFP.
D. Eby: Is it a requirement of the RFP that any for-profit have a non-profit partner that is involved?
Hon. R. Coleman: About 90 percent of the time, what you describe would be correct — except that if there was a large development and a company had identified a piece of the project that was going to go to affordable housing or whatever, they could come to us and ask us to help
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them find a non-profit that we thought would be suitable for them to work with.
We might run that proposal call, in looking for a specific group that has the ability to manage a specific product. Then that group may end up working with the developer in that case. But it’s always because there’s something they want to give and they want a non-profit to work with. That can happen. It’s not very often, but it can happen.
D. Eby: So no initiative out of this pool of funds would be approved, ultimately, with respect to a for-profit organization unless there was a partnership with a non-profit? The scenario is that a for-profit comes with a proposal and then you pair them up with a non-profit, or they bring a non-profit to the table, or the proposal comes exclusively from a non-profit. There’s no other situation where a for-profit organization would be running affordable housing under this proposal call?
Hon. R. Coleman: That’s correct.
D. Eby: I’ve had reports — I’d like the minister to clarify whether or not this is accurate — that non-profits that have purchased housing from B.C. Housing have been told that in order to pay for maintenance costs, they are to take units out of rent control, out of affordable-housing designation, and make them market units and use the proceeds from market rent to pay for the maintenance in those buildings.
If it’s true, can the minister tell me how many units have been converted from affordable units linked to income into market units, in order to pay for maintenance under projects overseen by B.C. Housing?
Hon. R. Coleman: That has not happened.
D. Eby: I always appreciate those very clear answers. It makes it very straightforward. Now, the minister has had some….
[D. McRae in the chair.]
I see we have a new Chair coming in. I wonder whether now might be a good time for a break. Or if the minister is happy to continue, I’m glad to continue.
The minister has spoken publicly about a proposal to have a ticketing system in place for landlords and tenants who violate the act. Does the minister anticipate revenue generated from this would go back into the ministry for Housing? If so, what type of revenue is he expecting? What kind of volume of tickets is he expecting to be issuing? What is the plan here for the ticketing system? There are a lot of questions and not a whole lot of answers.
Hon. R. Coleman: There are a couple of aspects that take…. We’ve been given an uplift in our budget with the residential tenancy branch to go to do the work on the legislation and then allow us to proceed down this route. Until we actually have it in place, we won’t have a budget with regards to what revenues it would bring in. We have had some additional revenues coming in from our changes of fees.
The ability to do this is not presently contained in the act, so we have to have an amendment that would tie us back to the Offence Act for the purpose of this. That allows us to get to the administrative penalty piece, where we could issue the fines from the branch. Today the only ability we have is to go to court to get an administrative penalty financially that way. I think I got that right. But I do know we have to make a change to the act in order to implement the plan.
D. Eby: So the existing administrative regime under the act would be the same. The only difference would be that there would be tickets issued instead of an administrative penalty issued for the courts, or would there be new offences added, as well, to the act that could be punished through a ticket system?
Hon. R. Coleman: The work that’s being done is to strengthen the ability to level penalties. One of the challenges…. When we made the changes a few years ago, we thought it would work as far as administrative penalties, but now we’re finding that Crown doesn’t want to take these through the court system. As a result, we basically don’t have the strength, the teeth, in the administrative penalty assessment that we have, so we want to strengthen that.
We want to move more into administrative law rather than the courts, which we can do, and then it will give us the ability to compel people to participate in the investigations, which is all part…. This act has always been based on trying to manage disputes between a landlord and a tenant, which, traditionally, was not as significant a level as we’ve seen in some areas with some bad landlords or some bad tenants. That worked pretty well, for the most part.
For this piece here, because we have not had good experience with how the act can perform in the courts, we need to go to more administrative law, so that’s the work that’s being done. Then the penalties would be defined as we came through that, respectfully, by strengthening and improving the director’s role in compliance and enforcement rather than having to go to laying of charges. It gives us the ability to move quicker and more nimbly with regards to those types of offences.
D. Eby: The minister has some building standards folks here. One of the issues that was raised by the real-
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tors, I believe, was the fact that the province doesn’t have a former grow op or a former drug house remediation standard. If a landlord rents out the home and it’s used for drug production, including a grow op, and then recovers the home from the tenant, there are no standards for them provincially in terms of remediation of the property to what acceptable standard, in terms of removing the mould or any other issues — restoring appropriate electrical safety, that kind of thing.
Is the minister preparing anything along these lines for reforming our provincial building code or establishing a provincial standard in terms of drug house remediation so that the home can be sold to someone with some level of confidence that it’s a safe place to live?
Hon. R. Coleman: I have a note that I read the other day with regards to this. For some reason I don’t have it here, so I’m going to ask my office to see if they can find it and flip it up here.
Really what it comes down to, on grow ops in particular, is that national guidelines are in place that municipalities can base their bylaws on with regards to the national building code and the ability to remediate. That’s where we’ve left it all through this, because there are different forms of drug and, actually, issues with regards to grow ops. Municipalities have been taking the lead in many cases with regards to that, and wanted to. Some put something on title; some have remediation.
The one thing I’ll say about this is that there are two people who have significant responsibility relative to this issue. If you’re going to rent a property, you enter into a rental agreement as a landlord and a relationship between you and your tenant. You have the ability to inspect that property at 24 hours notice at any time, which should allow you to know whether there are operations that are questionable going on, on your property. There’s some responsibility to the landlord to make sure that their property is being used properly. I mean, that’s their investment. They should be taking some time with that.
On the other side of it, there is a requirement, which we had the realty agencies change a few years ago, to add on the property condition disclosure statement whether the property had ever been a grow op or a drug operation of any kind. It has to be checked off on the box, yes or no. Failure to do that could allow somebody to come back and say: “I’m not going to follow through on my offer, either.”
The Real Estate Association suggested that we could amend the existing legislation, either the building code or the Homeowner Protection Act — it wouldn’t fit into the Homeowner Protection Act — to implement a disclosure and remediation process for residential properties that have been used as grow ops. The disclosure piece is already on the property condition disclosure statement, and I covered that with them when I met with them.
The building code regulates new construction. It’s basically not for damage or remediation of an existing building, so that doesn’t fit there. What the Homeowner Protection Act does is it establishes the licensing for builders and for residential builders. Up to this point the local governments and not the province have had the authority to monitor and ensure the health and safety of existing buildings in their communities. They can issue and revoke occupancy permits, set standards of maintenance and inspect the completed work.
There was a working group led by the Ministry of Justice that was established to explore options to develop strategies to eliminate, disrupt and mitigate harmful effects of illegal or unsafe drug production properties through a collaborative stakeholder approach which includes municipalities and what have you. That work will continue, to see if we can come up with an additional solution.
However, the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health has published guidelines for the safe re-occupation of grow operations and clandestine amphetamine-derived drug laboratory cleanup guidelines. This guide can help local governments regulate the health and safety of the buildings in their community, and they may choose to issue building permits for the required repairs and inspect the completed work based on those guidelines.
D. Eby: I could swear that it was this minister that, when he was introducing his provincial building code, extolled the virtues of a standardized set of codes that were predictable and understandable across the entire province. I’m just curious why those provincial standards applied then but don’t apply to this.
This is an issue that is going to be — no pun intended — a growing issue in the province with the increased use of marijuana for people who use it for medical purposes. Inevitably, I think we’re facing a legalized recreational market as well. This will be a growing issue across the province. What’s the minister’s reluctance to establish this provincial standard?
Hon. R. Coleman: In this case, because there’s a national guideline, we saw no reason to establish another guideline that would have been the same as the national guideline, which is basically the basis of the building code as well. The national building code is the base standard, so we use the national building code as our reference point on the building code to start with too.
I’m not sure I agree with the member that there will be increasing grow ops. As a matter of fact, if there are, they might be growing for a legal sale of the product. The experience elsewhere has been that growers have seen their market diminish where there’s been a legal movement. I was actually reading an article on it last night, where growers are saying: “We can’t get the money for
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it, so we’re dropping our prices in legal grow operations because now there’s a plethora of distribution and sales of this stuff.”
I don’t know where that’s all going to trade out. I don’t think we really have clear from the government, when they do move on to legalization of this product…. If it came like a product of liquor, it probably would be set up where you’d have a legal entity that was licensed by government that could be allowed to sell a legal product, and the distribution would be set up accordingly to come through a specific place.
But the member is right. I think the piece that…. Maybe not so much the commercial side, but I think you would see, if you had legalization, people wanting to grow in their yard, particularly, or somewhere, if they’re allowed to grow it legally, and that could offer us some challenges.
What we’re doing is we’re working with the federal government to be prepared for some national guidelines that can move into provinces with regards to those issues the member has identified. As we come through the discussion with the federal government, what they decide is how they would deal with this product if there’s a legalization and how it would affect operation in the provinces but also in the individual residence.
That work’s being done by officials, as I understand it, throughout Canada. They’ll obviously be trying to parallel those guidelines and decisions so that we could bring the package together so everybody would have a clear understanding.
D. Eby: The B.C. Housing service plans for 2015-16 and 2016-17 show that housing subsidies are forecast to be $18.7 million underspent for 2015, relative to the estimated budget in last year’s plan. And rental assistance was $1.7 million underspent. Can the minister explain why it appears that these items were underspent? Is it a lack of applications for it? What’s happening there?
Hon. R. Coleman: On the one, the subsidy money can include capital underspend on projects behind schedule and affected by schedule from year to year. Also, the timing of the receipt of federal money — at particular times, you’ll see that that’s just a forecasted number.
It’s the same thing for RAP. RAP is a forecasted number for the statutory program. If we have money left over, it’s a result of us predicting what we think would come into RAP and the actual applicants matching up to RAP.
Basically, in this particular case, the underspend would be that we predicted a certain number for rent assistance being applied for and approved, and that was actually under what was projected. That can go up and down, depending on wherever you are right now.
With $35,000 or less income, you can apply for RAP. So what we will do over a two- or three-year cycle…. We started this program at $21,000 in income for families. We’ll look at our spend and look at our uptake and say, “Has there been a move in the shift of income?” where we need to move that number to a different level to attract — to allow for more people to participate.
We don’t do that in such a way that we just think we’ll do it this year or next. We try and follow our patterns and see if there’s any need for any adjustments to the program. There are 11,200 low-income working families presently on RAP, in properties all over the province.
The average that they get to us is that their rent is about $405 a month. Depending on rent, income and location — because, obviously, the rents fluctuate across the province…. We do find that with CMHC stats and stuff, we adjust that too — up and down, depending on rental supply, cost of rent and those sort of things — to make sure we’re staying with the marketplace.
Those are adjusted on a regular basis. So the second one on RAP is just that we didn’t have as many people apply or get approved for RAP as we anticipated.
D. Eby: The minister will be aware that many co-ops have lost their federal funding support and, as a result, have increased their rents dramatically to market rents. Yet the rent supplement program does not allow people who live in co-ops to apply for rental supplements. If the minister is underspending, if he doesn’t have the applications that he expected, why doesn’t he open up the program to people who live in co-op housing?
Hon. R. Coleman: Back when the devolution of properties with CMHC was done, we looked at the contingent liabilities with regards to co-ops. They wanted to devolve them to the province, but they weren’t prepared to pay any money with regards to, basically, the liability with roofs, siding, ingress of water, structural — all of those things.
Over the years, the federal government hasn’t been prepared to enter into a conversation about us taking a program like RAP into the co-ops, because they’re federally funded, and they’re a federal program.
They are now. We’ve entered into discussions with the federal government with regards to anticipating whether we could use RAP in the co-op housing. We’ll be meeting with the minister, as ministers, in June with regards to that. We’re also in conversation with the Co-Op Housing Federation in and around this.
Because it’s been totally outside the program, like a form of social housing…. We don’t do rent assistance in social housing because it’s rent geared to income in social housing, so there’s a subsidy that covers the entire project.
It’s always been one of the anomalies out there. Up to this point, we haven’t had the ability to have the conversation. That conversation has started, and we’ll see how that progresses over the period of time going into June,
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, when all the ministers of housing, along with the federal minister, meet in Vancouver.
D. Eby: The minister raised it. I’m going to jump ahead to it. I might come back to it later.
How much money is the province going to get from the federal government under the current budget for housing initiatives? What are the minister’s intentions in terms of spending that money?
Hon. R. Coleman: First of all, I want to say to the member opposite…. Frankly, if the federal government reads our Hansard: “Thank you for stepping up and being part of a longer-term solution to housing in Canada.” They’ve made a two-year commitment to funding with regards to housing in Canada, and $150 million of that would come to British Columbia.
We’ll be able to match with that, because some of it will go out…. Obviously, you don’t build it all in one year because you’ve got to find the land, zone it and all those sorts of things. We can move it over from two-year funding into two and three as long as we’ve committed to the match, which we obviously have the ability to do.
The standards for this first $150 million…. There are four places it can go. One is to new-build a product. Another is for renovation. The other one is for victims of violence. And the last one is for seniors.
Over the next 18 months, the federal government has committed that there will be a discussion with provinces and ministers and other stakeholders with regards to a national housing strategy, which they hope they could come to ground with, relative to funding, within the next couple of years. Then they would look at what they might be prepared to match up in an investment from year three to year ten.
That work will continue on. That would then drive our…. What we do as government usually is that if there’s an opportunity to match, the government goes and gets the money to match, and that allows us to lever. Obviously, if you’ve got $355 million and you could turn that into $760 million, and if you could match up to land and match up to some issues on DCCs and CACs and some other opportunities for private donations, it’s quite easy to lever up to well over $1 billion, $1.2 billion with regards to housing with some innovations.
It’s the first time we’ve had the opportunity. We’ve already signed the agreement that we will do this with the federal government, and we’re the first province to do so.
D. Eby: I’m curious about the $150 million in federal money and where that fits into the $355 million that the minister announced over the next five years. Is this in addition to? Or is that money counted twice in those announcements?
Hon. R. Coleman: It’s in addition to. So it’s in addition to the $355 million. And whatever they would do in three to ten, we would also do, in addition to what we’re prepared to match. Because it’s matching funds, you have to have your money, and they have their money. So it’s in addition to.
D. Eby: Does the minister have an idea about where he’s going to be allocating this federal money in terms of…? I’m going to be frank. My particular interest is new-build, new-unit housing. How much of that $150 million will actually end up in that — and certainly for victims of violence, certainly for seniors, certainly for other vulnerable groups — versus renovations or some other use, like rent supplements?
Hon. R. Coleman: The federal government has required that $50 million of the $150 million would go to economic stimulus in the form of renovations. The renovations would be $50 million of the $150 million. The other $100 million would be to new. We don’t have to match the $50 million on renovations. If we have a project that we thought we might renovate, we can actually direct their funds to there and use ours for new build.
So we get the leverage there, and we are the ones that decide where the money gets actually directed to. They’re giving us the latitude, within our portfolio and the work that we do, to decide how that $50 million and the other $100 million would be spent. The new build out of that is $100 million, with $50 million to renovations in this first two years of funding because they’d like to see some economic stimulus coming out of the renovations.
D. Eby: When will the minister be doing the RFPs for those renovation and new-build projects?
Hon. R. Coleman: We have a detailed asset management plan with non-profits. So $50 million will have no difficulty going out to non-profits, which we’ve already been working on to identify the need for that.
The RFP will obviously dictate where the new build will come from. We will match into that. Obviously, it allows us to lever up our dollars, because we have additional capital we can spend, which means we’ll be able to do more projects. Hopefully, if the RFP comes in higher than anticipated, the other $100 million will help us do even more and meet those other needs within communities as they identify them through non-profits.
None of the renovation is going into any of the housing product that’s owned by B.C. Housing. All the renovation money will go to non-profits.
D. Eby: I assume that none of the new-build housing will be owned by B.C. Housing. This will all be owned and operated by non-profits. Is that right?
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Hon. R. Coleman: To protect any money we put in, we would have some form of ownership under protection. We won’t manage and operate any of the housing. It will all be to qualified non-profits, who will either have been there from the beginning or would have come through an RFP to become the non-profit to operate, long term, the facility.
Some of the models we use…. For instance, we might own the site. We might have the title vested with the Provincial Rental Housing Corporation, where we hold our titles, do a 60-year lease with the non-profit, finance and take care of the operation of the non-profit to operate, which they do over the 60-year period. We would still hold, for the purposes of any issues relative to any liabilities against the site, the title, until such time we would sit down with the non-profit and look at how that might be dealt with differently.
We won’t be in the build, own and operate side, because we find that the non-profits do a very good job of operating any housing that we build with them.
D. Eby: Page 129 in the budget and fiscal plan shows that capital spending for housing, just housing, which includes the Provincial Rental Housing Corporation and B.C. Housing, for 2015 is forecast to be $21 million underspent relative to the budget. Can the minister explain why this underspending is taking place?
Hon. R. Coleman: It’s basically the same description as the other line item the member was asking about. That money’s committed to capital build. However, in each year you can have some go one way or the other simply because of rezoning, construction delays, completion dates, issues with regards to the asset acquisition and the close of the land you want to build on — all of those things.
We build between 1,200 and 1,500 units a year, and in that portfolio you will have projects that could be delayed, or they could have taken longer in rezoning than anticipated, so that capital is there. It goes into the next year and continues those projects. But because of those aspects, they’re not all necessarily done in that 365-day period.
D. Eby: Page 12 of the B.C. Housing service plan shows other revenues to B.C. Housing, which are tenant rents and revenues from builder licensing fees, forecast as almost $7 million over budget. Why is this so much higher than anticipated?
Hon. R. Coleman: Where that comes into play is that as we move housing stock into the hands of non-profits, we no longer collect the revenue. They do. They have it in their operating budgets, and it leaves our operating budget, because they’re now collecting the rent and operating the facility. The rent is collected by them, and that’s why that other revenue is reduced.
D. Eby: I maybe misspoke. It’s page 12 of the B.C. Housing service plan. It’s the “Other” revenues line — so this is a revenue line — which forecast that B.C. Housing is taking in extra $7 million over what was planned from tenant rents and revenues, from things like builder licensing fees. It wasn’t under what was expected; it was over what was expected.
Interjection.
D. Eby: Mr. Chair, I think I’m going move on to the next question, because I think the error is mine, not the minister’s.
Page 203 of the estimates shows Provincial Rental Housing Corporation gross revenues for fiscal 2015 are $120.1 million under budget, expenses forecast to be $33 million under budget, net revenues to the province, $116.8 million under budget, and it shows a reduction of $120 million less than the province expected it had taken last year.
I’m wondering why the Provincial Housing Corporation took in $120 million less than was expected.
Hon. R. Coleman: That’s part of the asset transfers. Some didn’t complete in last fiscal year, so the projection of what would be completed, in fact, this year was that shortfall. It would now be completed in the next fiscal year, so the dollars will come back in on the projections to match up over time. But if the completion dates don’t match up to, let’s say, March 31 and they take place on the 10th of April, they are actually booked in the next fiscal year.
D. Eby: The minister, perhaps unwittingly, answered my next question too, so I’ll just move on here.
One of the suggestions that we had from the association for B.C. students was that a great deal of rental housing could be freed up in the province if the province allowed universities to build self-supporting residences on campus. The issue is that universities and colleges are not allowed to borrow money without the permission of the provincial government. They want to borrow money to build the housing, which is then supported by the rents of the students who live in the buildings. They are still not able to do that.
The estimate of the ABC group, which is I think a reliable estimate, is potentially as many as 10,000 rental housing units across the province. They could be built in very short order on university and college campuses, and that would free up a huge number of rental housing units.
I know that in a throne speech, the former Premier, Gordon Campbell, said that he was committed to fixing this. It didn’t get fixed. Can the minister say whether this is an idea that they’re taking forward? Is it on the table at all in terms of increasing rental housing supply?
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Hon. R. Coleman: That reminds me that I haven’t had that conversation with the minister for a while with regards to it. It has been something we brought up before about how we could probably get there. There are some requirements with regards to changes of legislation, I think, with regards to that ability to borrow.
The anomaly, of course, the member well knows, is UBC. They’re basically on endowment lands and an entity unto themselves. Some entities have managed to do private-public partnerships to produce some housing on some of their campuses.
The issue in and around student housing is one that…. Given the B.C. Housing mandate, it hasn’t been something that they’ve been driven to.
Certainly, what I’ll do for the member…. I can’t tell him where the status of this would be right at this point, because I haven’t had the conversation. I will undertake to have the conversation with the minister to see whether there’s any work undergoing, whether we would be interested in doing something with regards to this.
S. Chandra Herbert: I’ve been very curious about Sunset Towers. I know it’s been put up for sale, as Nicholson Tower was earlier. However, the difference is that Nicholson Tower…. The request for expression of interest and the request around what would be expected for somebody to purchase the property was public. But so far, I’ve been unable to get my hands on a copy of the request for expression of interest or request for proposals for Sunset Towers.
Is it possible for the minister to release a copy to me?
Hon. R. Coleman: If the member goes to the MERX home page, he will find PR274961 under the posted bids. The information is there. It was the second thing that came up when we googled it just now.
S. Chandra Herbert: Thanks to the minister. That’s a new thing. I googled it a couple of months back, but I didn’t find it. So I appreciate that the minister googled it for me and found that information.
I wonder. Can the minister tell me whether or not he believes the sale of Nicholson Tower…? Should Nicholson Tower go to 49 percent, I guess, mid-range rental, as is proposed in the earlier documents…. Instead of all low-income housing, it’s possible that up to 49 percent could go to renters who make up to $60,000. I believe that is what the figure said. Does he believe the sale of that property will lead to a net addition of low-income housing units?
One question many constituents have is: why would we sell a social housing project potentially leading to less lower-income housing in the community if we lose 49 percent of the low-income housing in that building now? I know the minister has made the argument that the money can be reinvested in other housing elsewhere.
I guess the question really is: can he demonstrate that it leads to a net increase in low-income housing? All my community can see at this point is potentially a net decrease in low-income housing if 49 percent of the units go to market rental for those making $60,000.
Hon. R. Coleman: First of all, by moving the asset to the balance sheet of a non-profit, they have $50 million in leverage over time with regards to additional product they can add to the marketplace. None of the subsidies that are in place for rent-geared-to-income are being reduced. They’re still there, so they would be able to continue to operate exactly how they are today with subsidies.
We’ve always felt that the non-profit sector knows their clientele and their changing clientele over time. In the future, they may want to change their investment or whatever. Anything in the RFP which talks about a percentage is really a placeholder for future direction with regard to any redevelopment or management of the project. But there has been no reduction in any subsidies whatsoever to this project, so the money is there.
The nice thing about this program is we take the asset, and we put it in the hands of a non-profit. They can, in the future, densify, add more product and do innovative things for their clientele. But it also brings $355 million into government to be reinvested in new housing.
Levering it up with a $150 million match we’ve already got in a commitment from the federal government, that takes it over $500 million. If we add in land and DCCs and other things from municipalities, we can push it probably up to $800 million. In other matches, we think that we can probably do at least $1 billion in additional housing for additional clientele, for affordability and social housing and particular client groups. It’s actually something the non-profits have asked for, for a long time.
We’ve selected people to do things like Nicholson Tower because they have a mature record of managing properties and have a good understanding of the product. We know they’re fiscally strong in how they manage something. We’ve left all the subsidies in place so that the actual tenants can all be continued to be subsidized. Nothing need change, but in the future, this gives them the ability to be innovative.
S. Chandra Herbert: I understand that the current subsidies would continue as long as those tenants would be there. I think the question was really: can we see a net increase in low-income housing in the West End, as opposed to a net decrease? I understand that that is unanswerable at this point, but I appreciate the answer anyway.
I just went on the MERX website the minister referenced, and it requires somebody to send in a request for expression of interest in order to get the bid documents.
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I’m not planning on redeveloping that site, but maybe I can follow up with the staff afterwards to see if there is another way of getting the fuller detail on that. In the previous bid for Nicholson Tower, I could see the actual document of how many units and what the expectation was of people to be taking over that site. Now, potentially I’m looking at the wrong site. If so, maybe the minister can redirect me.
I had a question around fixed-term tenancies. It’s becoming a practice used more and more often in my community and in other communities, I think, where there’s a very low vacancy rate. My understanding is that a fixed-term tenancy is supposed to be just that — that you agree to stay from one month to another month, and you agree together that that’s what you’re wanting to do. However, some landlords are now starting to use it as a way to evade rent controls and evade the rules that the minister has put in place for how rentals are supposed to be operated.
People are told: “There’s no vacancy. If you want to stay here and you can’t find another place, well, agree to stay for a year, and at the end of the year, your contract is up, and you have to move out.” They are then told: “But don’t worry about it. We’ll just continue on after that.” They sign an agreement. They find at the end of the year that the landlord then says: “Well, if you want to stay here for another year, you have to pay a 25 percent rent increase.”
I wanted to ask what the minister would say to tenants in those situations. They’re finding that they’re having to make poor choices, as there isn’t a lot of vacancy, as the minister well knows, and landlords are able to use this leverage, unfortunately, sometimes over those tenants.
Was the intent of fixed-term tenancies just that — that it was a fixed term and, after that, you’re out? If a landlord wanted to continue with the same tenant, would the minister agree with me that the intent of the law was that it should be, then, considered a month-to-month tenancy as opposed to just an evading-rent-control style of tenancy, which some are abusing the system to do?
Hon. R. Coleman: We’re now looking at this in terms of a back-to-back tenancy. Somebody that would be abusing would be saying: “Okay, I’m going to rent it to you another year.” We’re looking at that piece of it, but that’s the only piece we’re looking at.
In the past, the lease side, which is a business arrangement…. For a year, you’re going to get your rental at this price. In the market, sometimes that can fluctuate down as much as up. Obviously, at times of tighter rents…. We’re actually looking at how we can fix that with regards to the continuation of a tenancy.
We have to balance that, though, along the way. The next argument would be: “Because I was going to go in a back-to-back and I wanted to stay where I was, he had to apply the rental formula and therefore, he said he’s not renting to me. He’s going to rent to somebody else.”
That part, because it’s contract law between them on the first piece of the thing, is the place where you might get some complaints coming the other way, so we’re doing some work on that. We’re going to continue to do that.
S. Chandra Herbert: I appreciate the difficulty with it. I know some have suggested just not allowing the fixed-term tenancy, but I know a number of landlords use fixed-term tenancies for legitimate reasons. Maybe they’re out of town for a year or something like that. Maybe other reasons.
Is there a timeline for that work? I know it’s becoming more and more of an issue in communities across this province.
Hon. R. Coleman: Yeah, it’s just been started as we work through these issues relative to residential tenancy. I would suggest that…. We don’t know if it requires a change of legislation. If it does, the earliest we would probably see it, because of legislation drafting, would be the spring of 2017.
S. Chandra Herbert: I’d like to thank the minister for that response. Certainly, it would, hopefully, help address that issue. I know some have argued it could just be as simple as a policy directive so that the residential tenancy branch knows what the intent is of the law and that this indeed is how it should be read. I will look forward to hearing more on that.
My colleague is back, but I have one more question, regarding Airbnb. Airbnb in my community in Vancouver has become a real challenge, in that purpose-built rental housing is being effectively turned into hotels and not housing. That’s happening, I know, in Victoria, Whistler, Tofino, Kelowna — many communities across this province.
I wanted to ask the minister: does he have plans to address this in terms of how housing is used? I know Oregon and a number of other jurisdictions have said: “Well, some Airbnb is acceptable but not if it takes the house out of the rental market completely.” Maybe for a month, if somebody is leaving their home or that kind of thing, but not exclusively for that style of housing.
If the minister might be able to inform me on what he has planned to deal with this challenge to affordability, I’d appreciate it.
Hon. R. Coleman: This does not affect the Residential Tenancy Act, but it could affect the operation of the strata rules and strata properties. The challenge with this is that an Airbnb, if it’s in an area or municipality that allows it to be licensed as an Airbnb…. There are some municipalities with blanket approvals for bed-and-breakfasts, and that’s all this is. Airbnb is a phenomenon on the Internet. They can do the vacation rentals and rent their suite out in their
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home or a number of units in their home with regards to it under a business licence and go ahead and do that.
The municipalities are having some difficulty identifying it. I don’t think it’s actually an issue in Whistler, because Whistler has two types of stratas in their documents. One is basically a normal strata, and the other one is a phase 2 strata.
The phase 2 strata, which Whistler did a number of decades ago, was to encourage people to rent out their properties when they weren’t there. So none of them ended up in what you would call condo hotels, where a rental pool is established, they’re rented out within the rental pool, and people use their unit 60 days a year — half-and-half during spring and summer or whatever the case may be.
I remember there was quite a discussion many years ago about what we called STOR caps, which are short-term, overnight rentals. It was really related to places like Sun Peaks, Big White, Whistler, where there was a separate taxation thing put in place. Short-term overnight rentals paid a higher rental than a guy who just owned a condo for a vacation property. Then, in some cases, it was reversed, where the incentive was to rent out, so then the taxation reversed the other way. There was quite a debate back then, a number of years ago, on this.
This actually touches a number of acts and ministries. We met with some of the stakeholders yesterday, or my folks did, and we’ll probably bring the ministries together to see what the issue is, how big it is. But if a strata allows it and it’s allowed to get a business licence within the community, then there’s nothing we can do to stop that activity.
If it’s against the rules of the strata and the strata doesn’t want any more, they can actually go and decide how many they want to limit it to within their strata, with their bylaws. They would have to deal with that at that level, because that’s where they would set the rules.
They may have a thing that allows rental, but not short-term rentals. If they haven’t defined it, then, of course, that means…. If it’s not defined, it always becomes contentious between people with regard to the use of the particular unit.
It is a growing phenomenon with regard to vacation use, but it’s actually been around in many vacation areas for a long time. If they’re paying the business licence, they’re being taxed appropriately and the municipality allows it, then there’s not much we could do about it at all. If it’s being done illegally, then they have the ability to inspect and say, “Where’s your business licence? It’s not allowable use,” and that sort of thing to pursue it. That’s where the bylaws would affect that type of activity.
S. Chandra Herbert: The reason I referenced Whistler is just…. Maybe it’s more of a tourism issue. Tourism operators are finding that housing for their workers is a challenge now, as some units that used to be very much available for workers are gone now as they’re being used for Airbnb.
I wanted to ask…. It relates, but it’s maybe more of a residential tenancy issue. I’ve heard of cases now, more and more, where a renter will sublet their unit to use as an Airbnb-style situation. They’ll rent a property…. In a high-profile case, I think it was rented for 2,000 bucks, but then they re-rented it out because the landlord couldn’t unreasonably withhold consent to sublet. They re-rented it out for $2,500. They never lived there. They just were pocketing the money off somebody else’s property.
It’s a challenge when we look at how sublets are described in the legislation. I’ve had discussions with a number of rental housing advocates and landlords who say that they’re perplexed about what to do about it. I just wondered if the minister might be able to provide, whether it be advice…. Is he looking into this issue to make it much more clear about what a legitimate sublet is versus one that might be abusing the system just to profit or something like that?
Hon. R. Coleman: Well, the legislation clearly states that you cannot sublet your property without, in writing, permission from your landlord. If you do that, it’s a material breach of your tenancy. Therefore, you could be served notice of the end of your tenancy, and you could be evicted.
Having said that, what I wish everybody in B.C. would do is go on line, whether they’re renting a coach house, basement suite or a number of units, and use the standard form — at a minimum, the tenancy agreement; put down whatever terms and conditions they have with their tenant, whether it be no pets or you can’t sublet, all of those things, in addition to whatever other concerns; and the two sign that. It sure would help our arbitration process.
In this case, it’s in the act. They can actually act on it with or without a tenancy agreement, because the landlord’s not got anything in writing, hasn’t put anything in writing giving permission.
[J. Yap in the chair.]
With all the other things that affect residential tenancy…. You’ll find probably around 80 percent of the time, it’s affected because the two parties haven’t signed a tenancy agreement. Somebody comes in and says he’s got a dog in his unit. The tenant says: “Well, I’m allowed to have a dog.” He says, “No” — he’s not allowed to have a dog. “Do you have a tenancy agreement that says you can’t have pets?” No.
Well, our arbitrators, chances are, are going to say: “Well, there’s no tenancy agreement in place. We sort of
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have to go on the basis that the dog has been there for a year, and this is the first time you’ve brought it to us.”
These are the types of things that could really be cleared up by somebody actually using tenancy agreements in tenancies. It’s always been on line. It’s easy to access, and you can adapt the conditions on it by just adding it into your document and signing it. It would tend to clear up a lot of these things. But in this piece, where there’s…. Without permission of a sublet in writing from the landlord, it is cause for eviction.
S. Chandra Herbert: I guess the question was — I appreciate that tenancy agreements are very important, and I always urge people to sign them as well — can the landlord withhold consent just for no reason whatsoever? I’ve been led to believe that the landlord was unable to withhold consent unless they had a really good reason if, in the agreement they had signed, there was no clause saying no sublets.
Hon. R. Coleman: We’re going to get that information for the member. The only place I would see that happening is with somebody who was in a long-term arrangement on a tenancy agreement, like we were talking earlier, for a year or two or three. Circumstances change, and the landlord says: “You’ve got to pay me the rent for the next three years, and you can’t sublet.” I think there might be something unreasonable — but not in the actual sublet relative to what the act is intended to cover. But we’re going to clarify that. We may have to get the information over to the member.
H. Bains: I’ve got a question here. The minister may tell me it’s not part of his ministry, but I’m going to ask it anyway, and we’ll find out. It was brought to our office that the government changed the legislation about the Local Government Act to end the land use contracts early. There used to be land use contracts in place with a sunset clause of until about 2024. Now, with the changes in legislation, it is ending immediately.
My question to the minister is: what was the purpose of ending those contracts that early, and what is the impact? This is one of the manufactured home owners who is really worried. If there are no land use contracts left, what happens to their future?
Hon. R. Coleman: You’re right. It isn’t here. But I’ll give you the best explanation I could come up with. You might want to take it up with the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development.
These were, basically, land use on title things that were put in place years ago — pre-existing zoning and bylaws and community plans. At UBCM, a number of years ago, this came up within a conversation from communities saying we wanted a sunset clause put in place with regards to that so they could actually develop the land for more use and appropriate use within communities.
Some of them were on the Cambie corridor, some in Surrey, some in Richmond — very low density. A lot of it was running down because nobody was investing in it, because it was sort of like out there in limbo. There was a change made to the act, to put in place a sunset clause. I don’t know how long. These would be sunset out and be allowed to go back into the normal zoning process of a municipality and be caught in the community plans.
That’s the entire amount of information I have, hon. Member, so you might want to take it up with the Minister of Community, Sports and Cultural Development. They could probably give the rest of the details to you.
H. Bains: Yes, I think the minister mentioned those different areas. There is a property on King George, one on 140 Street. There’s one in Fleetwood. I’m told that the sunset clause was to last until 2024. But because of the change in legislation, now the municipalities are ending it immediately. I think they’re really worried.
The density issue. The minister and I have talked about this issue, about manufactured home owners. There are a number of them along King George. They’re really worried because of the light rail or the SkyTrain or whatever the technology that they use.
When you talk about density declining in those areas along that route, they’re all worried that their houses could be gone. If this is the process, perhaps the Minister for Housing could at least stand and let them know what they can expect and how they can protect themselves from that kind of development, or potential development, because of the light rail.
We’ve seen what happened when there is light rail, or the SkyTrain. Every station there is a glut of all those highrises, which is the right thing to do. But that’s the worry these folks have. There are thousands of them, actually, all over in that part of the Lower Mainland. They’re really worried along King George Highway. I would ask the minister to comment on that.
Hon. R. Coleman: There is a provision of early notice. But if they do…. Basically, what it means is that the contract that this changed is now subject to local government bylaws and zoning. That doesn’t mean something is going happen with the property tomorrow or the next day or whatever the case may be. It would still have to go through a zoning. It brings it back into the local authority or the municipality on these.
Of course, there are rules in and around if you want to move somebody out of a mobile home park. But it doesn’t force development. It doesn’t require it. It’s just that the title changes with regards to its land use.
I don’t know. I have no idea what might be affected on King George. Whether it is or is not in a land use contract
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or a zoning bylaw or whether it’s appropriate zoning as it is today and zoning would be changed if it’s…. I don’t know any of that part about those particular properties.
I’d suggest that, in addition, there are two places the member could go to get a bit more clarity. One would be to the minister. The other would be to your own local government in Surrey as to what particular mobile home park was under a land use contract and whether it’s being changed to being covered by local zoning bylaws, and then what that means.
H. Bains: Perhaps the minister, at least look at…. I think we’ve had this conversation here for a number of years now. If notice is given by the landlord, the park owner, to develop that land for other use, under the act right now — under 42 and 44, I believe it is; I think those are the sections — yes, 12-months’ notice is required, but the moving expense is the issue. As the minister knows, I believe in 2003 or 2004, the act was changed to moving expenses of 12-months’ equivalent of rent. When you look at it in today’s terms, there are pad rents of $400, $500, maybe $700 to $800 — in that range. Even if you take the high number of $800, that’s $9,600 in moving expense, and you cannot move those homes with $9,600.
Some of those houses cannot be moved because the prospective park that they’re going to move to has an age limit on those homes, so they’re not allowed. Or the houses are too old, and they cannot be transported because they will simply fall apart or they don’t meet the code.
The issue here is: those folks then become homeless. Many of them are very vulnerable members of our society — seniors on fixed income and others on disability. If the minister, at least — one more time, I’m requesting on behalf of all of those manufactured home owners — could consider changing that part of the act.
I know the member has suggested many other suggestions, which I kind of agree, about the role the municipalities can play. But here, the province can play a role in revisiting the transportation cost part by going to, at least, today’s numbers, what it really costs to disconnect all those services — electricity, the plumbing, moving the skirting, all that stuff — and then put them on a truck, transport, and then rehook all those. These are people, like I said, on fixed income.
Can the minister look at, at least, changing that part of the act?
Hon. R. Coleman: There’s quite a history around this, getting back to the days I did estimates in opposition with the former Attorney General, Ujjal Dosanjh. We went back and forth. One of the issues back then, when everybody was saying the act should be changed, was that it should go to a notice and a set period of time rent, because there were nothing but arguments over what it was costing to move an individual unit in parks all over B.C. when they would have to be moved. That was the reason behind this.
Now, I do know, Member, and I’ve talked about this before, that municipalities in their rezoning…. It’s happened in Surrey, so I think the people in Surrey that would be affected by this could have some comfort in the fact that Surrey has stepped up and done this in a few of these situations around manufactured home parks. In one case, the developer decided what Surrey was putting on them — what they needed to do for relocation and all the rest of these things for the tenants coming out of the development…. They wanted to decide to leave the mobile home park in place. Surrey has a record of stepping up and saying: “Well, we’re not prepared to let this form of housing leave without some compensation out of the development in addition to what’s required under the act.” I think you’ll see that same history in Surrey.
Good examples are some developments in Surrey where they’ve done it and improved it and kept it, and others where people were relocated. Also, Port Coquitlam and Coquitlam have some very good rules that other people could look at. The municipalities have recognized….
Abbotsford did this too, when there was a significant big-box store going on a property where there was a manufactured home. The compensation to the homeowner…. The homeowners walked away pretty satisfied with the compensation in that particular case.
I think it’s a balance in today’s land use. Of course, the member knows land keeps going up. I do think municipalities are, more and more, stepping up and saying: “Part of your ability to get this zoning and to do what you want to do is this compensation to the people that live there.”
Up to this point it’s…. I haven’t really had a file in the last year that’s really been a problem on this, so I think a lot of them are doing this and being pretty focused on it.
D. Eby: The ministry issued an information bulletin about the West Hotel, where a $5,000 administrative penalty was issued. Can the minister give an update? Did the ministry recover that $5,000 penalty?
Hon. R. Coleman: There’s a 60-day period to pay. That hasn’t ended yet, so we don’t know. There is some indication that they may want to do an appeal, which is also part of the process.
At this stage of the game, the 60-day period is not over. We have not been paid, but then the 60-day period is not up yet. We haven’t received any further documentation as yet.
D. Eby: There was an issue raised with the minister in question period about a report done on the administrative penalties review. There were a number of recommendations in the earlier drafts that were ultimately severed
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from the final report that was issued. Can the minister release those recommendations and advise why they were not part of the final report?
Hon. R. Coleman: This is the one where the member for Vancouver–West End accused me of breaking the law in question period the other day, which was incorrect. I do have a question of privilege that is being filed with the Speaker in the next day or so with regards to that language, which I’ve double-checked in Hansard, very clearly saying that I amended a briefing note and I destroyed something and didn’t have it go for FOI. That’s fine. That’ll be dealt with by the House.
All it was, was…. It’s not unusual for a minister to receive a briefing note. He looks at it, and he says: “I want some more work done on this or that. I’d like something to be tougher here or there.” That’s basically what happened here.
It wasn’t a report. It was a briefing note with regards to some discussion we’ve been having with regards to things like earlier discussions around administrative penalties and how we would do that. Do we require legislation? Can it be done by regulation? All questions I would normally ask during the briefing, and that’s all it was. The work is continuing by the branch with regards to what I earlier alluded to in the earlier portion of the estimates.
D. Eby: Oh, I thought the minister was made of sterner stuff than that. I think he understands that the minister is responsible for the acts in his ministry, and when he’s asked in question period about recommendations being removed, that’s how he’s being asked.
In any event, there was a report. It was released by the ministry. I’ve read the report. I’ll refresh the minister’s memory. Here’s an email from Janet Donald to Audrey Panter and Alexis Gordon. “Subject: Review report, first cut, version 4. Hi. You’ve done a great job pulling this together. The recommendations need a bit more work. What is the end goal that we are making recommendations to work toward? What are the options, and what is recommended?”
So there’s a report. There were recommendations in the report. I think the minister is talking about something else when he says that there was a briefing note. There’s actually a report that was issued by the residential tenancy branch. It’s on their website, or it’s on the minister’s website. I can find it if the minister needs. But it’s not what he’s talking about. There was a report with recommendations. When the report came out, the recommendations weren’t there.
Hon. R. Coleman: I’ll let the Speaker in the Legislature deal with the point of privilege and not the member opposite. But it’s very clear what the member said in question period and the accusation that he made that I broke the law. That’s something that I didn’t do.
The document the opposition member is referring to is an internal working draft for the administrative penalties review. Providing recommendations is not part of the intent of the report, so any portion of that was deleted before the report was finalized and given to me.
Based on the review of the report and discussing it with my people, we’re now looking at options to improve the administrative penalty process, like I said, in cases where a stronger approach is needed. It’s too early to say exactly what changes will be made. The final report is posted on the residential tenancy branch website, and I would encourage you to go look at it.
There can be a number of draft reports over time. Those drafts can take place. They’re transitory, for people to be able to have a conversation and a discussion about the issues in front of them and recommendations they might bring to or discuss with me as the minister. That’s all that was.
D. Eby: What is the number of new housing units that will be completed in 2016? I’d certainly appreciate having the number now, and the number of new housing units that were completed in 2015 by the province. Especially, though, I would like the minister, if he can, to provide a list of those to me afterwards. I suspect he won’t be able to do that today. But a list of those projects.
Hon. R. Coleman: In 2015, the forecast for the number of new units is 1,287. We expect to exceed that target in 2015-2016. In 2016-17, our target number is 1,191, and we also expect to exceed that target. The average has been anywhere between 1,200 and 1,500 a year for the last decade or so.
D. Eby: I apologize to the minister. I missed the very first part of his answer. I was looking for the specific number of new units in ’15 and ’16. If he said them right at the beginning, I missed them, and if he didn’t say them, I wonder if he could tell me exactly how many.
Hon. R. Coleman: The ’15-16 forecast was 1,287. We expect that to be in the 1,300-plus number, so we will exceed the forecast. We’re just finalizing those numbers because of completions and timelines and year-end. I’ll be able to get that to the member.
Hon. Chair, if it’s possible, maybe we could take a five-minute break.
The Chair: This committee will take a brief recess.
The committee recessed from 4:03 p.m. to 4:19 p.m.
[J. Yap in the chair.]
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S. Chandra Herbert: I just wanted to make a request again. I double-checked the website that the minister provided for the Sunset Towers purchase. I actually checked with my researcher as well. She had tried to use that website to be able to access the request for expressions of interest. The response was that she had to say she was a developer or somebody interested in purchasing the property. She’s not. Nor am I.
I just wanted to ask if, after this, the minister might commit to getting me those documents outlining what is for sale, what the expectations are. That would be much appreciated. Sunset is not publicly accessible.
Hon. R. Coleman: We checked on it. Because the RFP had closed and was done, the information was no longer on that site, so we will provide that information to the member.
D. Eby: Just before the break, I had a question about the number of new housing units, and the minister gave me his target for 2015-16, which was 1,287, which he hopes to exceed.
The rest of the question was how many units in the previous year, the most recent year, that are actually completed. What was the total number of new housing units?
Hon. R. Coleman: For ’14-15, approximately 1,388 units. For 2015-16, for the member, the forecast was 1,287. We expect to exceed that forecast. The target for 2016-2017 is 1,191, and we expect to exceed that forecast.
D. Eby: Will the minister provide me with a list of those projects? I’ll tell the minister why I’m asking. It’s not just busywork. The concern is that I’ve heard B.C. Housing and the minister, in the past, include shelter beds, temporary housing, various forms of housing, as being new units of housing — mats on floors. I want to have clarity about the actual projects the minister is talking about when he’s saying 1,287 or 1,388 units. If he would provide that to me, that would provide great assistance. If he wishes to clarify what he means by housing units in terms of these numbers, I’d invite that, but it’s not necessary if he’s going to send me the list.
I’m going to move on to a report that was issued by Megaphone magazine. They do an annual report each year. It’s called Still Dying on the Streets: Homeless Deaths in British Columbia. This is the second time they have done this.
Key findings: 46 homeless people died in 2014, which was a 70 percent increase from 2013. Fourteen homeless people died in the Fraser region in 2014, a 100 percent increase from 2013. And 48.3 percent of all reported homeless deaths are accidental. In the general population, that number is a third of that. And 15.6 percent of all reported homeless deaths are aboriginal people, despite the fact that they’re just 5 percent of the population. And 40 to 49 years old is the median age of death for a homeless person in B.C.
They’re very concerned that the numbers they have are not accurate, that they’re actually significant underestimates. Part of the reason for that is that the coroner’s service does not have a definition of homelessness that they accept as sufficiently broad to include everyone who is homeless. They make a number of recommendations for the coroner’s service related to tracking the deaths of homeless people.
I would like to ask the minister whether he would consider working with the coroner’s office on these recommendations, given his responsibility for homelessness.
“The Coroners Service should broaden its definition of homelessness and work with regional health authorities to capture the true state of homelessness and deaths in British Columbia.”
“The B.C. Coroners Service should track the deaths of women in violent relationships,” in particular because women in these situations are often in and out of a dangerous living arrangement and are homeless quite frequently.
“The B.C. Coroners Service should offer more robust and detailed data on aboriginal homeless deaths” so that they know how homeless deaths disproportionately impact the aboriginal population.
And finally, B.C. should support the B.C. Coroners Service to create an annual report that provides some analysis on this so that we know what’s happening in terms of homeless people dying in the streets of British Columbia.
I’d invite the minister to provide his thoughts to this organization, on their recommendations that they bring forward about the deaths of homeless people in British Columbia.
Hon. R. Coleman: No, I have no intention of commenting on an article from a magazine that I haven’t read, in estimates here.
I can tell the member opposite how the Coroners Service does it. There’s usually a recommendation that comes through their own business, or it’s recommendations from government. They’ve not made any requests from us for any recommendations with regards to that. We could check with them and see what they’re thinking.
Then the other challenge is that the definition of homelessness for some people, in some statistical models, is that there’s no fixed address. It could be a fixed address; we just don’t know about it at the time. The member has gone to the assumption that the numbers could be higher, but evidently if they could be higher, they could also be lower.
I’ve got no comment on that particular magazine article. We’ll deal with the issues in estimates. I can check with the coroner’s office on how they’re tracking deaths relative to people who may or may not be homeless. That
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would be what I would do, and I can tell the member that I could do that.
D. Eby: I’d appreciate the minister following up on that.
Just for clarity, this is a non-profit organization that runs a social enterprise where homeless and underhoused individuals sell this newspaper. They prepare this report every year based on freedom-of-information requests through the coroner’s office. I mean, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to describe it as a magazine article.
I’ll make sure the minister gets a copy of it, and I sure appreciate that he’ll reach out to the coroner’s office to talk to them about how they track that information. He is the minister responsible for homelessness and tracking trends in the province. If he doesn’t do it, I’m afraid it won’t get done, so I appreciate him doing that.
I wonder if the minister can give me an update on the situation in Maple Ridge. There was a proposed project at the Quality Inn, which has been abandoned. Where are things at now?
Hon. R. Coleman: By agreement with the city, we’ve extended the shelter to the end of June. RainCity is the operator and has agreed to continue operating it. There are 28 people in this shelter. With our service providers in the community, we’re finding spaces for them now. We’re taking this through to the end of June. We will reassess mid- to late June.
We have committed with the city, and we’re working with the city, on a $15 million purpose-built facility which includes supportive housing and a shelter. We’re also always watching the market to see if there’s another opportunity for us to do other things or to find.
Our guys are working with the city, and the city is cooperating with us in finding a site that they think would be appropriate, that they’d like to provide for a location, or one that they feel they could support the rezoning of for the use.
D. Eby: Just for clarity, as things stand right now, the minister is waiting for the city to identify a site, and there may be something that comes up, an opportunity in the market. But if it doesn’t, for a purpose-built facility, currently the minister’s waiting for the city to identify a site. Is that correct?
Hon. R. Coleman: Yeah, it’s being done in partnership with us. They’re looking at their scan of land. We’re looking at lands we may have, whether it be Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure or whatever. We’re doing a scan as well.
We’re working with the city with regards to an appropriate location, which could be one of the sites that could be identified or another site that’s identified that neither of us own. We’re working together to find a location. When we find that location, we will take it through the appropriate zoning and processes with the city of Maple Ridge to build a long-term solution for this.
I always say that we could be in the market — because I never know, frankly, whether we’re in the market or not, but we usually are looking in markets for opportunities — not advise when we’re in the market specifically, simply because we hold that very much in confidence when we’re optioning property until we option it. It can affect the price of so many things if B.C. Housing happens to be the client that’s interested in buying something. So we try and keep that confidential, for obvious reasons.
If we find a site or a piece of land and there’s something that we could tear down to make it work, we would take it to the city and see whether, if we optioned it, they thought that particular location would be suitable, whether it could be supported by their zoning process.
D. Eby: There’s a group of very vulnerable people who are in this temporary shelter facility in Maple Ridge. Can the minister advise what services are being provided or offered in terms of health care for the people who are there?
[S. Hamilton in the chair.]
Maybe some people need addiction support. Maybe some people need trauma counselling, basic nursing care. What services are available in this old retail store?
Hon. R. Coleman: We have actually managed to house a number of people through this shelter already. RainCity is a very experienced operator. We find them to be very good, and they’re a very good operator. Fraser Health, the health authority, is on site looking for if there are issues with medical or other aspects for these people. There are meals being provided as well.
D. Eby: When the minister says that Fraser Health is on site, does that mean that there’s a nurse on site or that there’s medical support being provided on site? What does that mean?
Hon. R. Coleman: Addiction and mental health support is provided in cooperation with Fraser Health with RainCity. That’s my understanding.
D. Eby: Maybe the minister later on, when he has more information about what these specific supports are, could feel free to pass those along to my office.
Can the minister provide an update on Abbotsford, the tent city in Abbotsford and the resolution of that issue?
Hon. R. Coleman: The tented area in the Gladys field is gone. We opened a shelter in Abbotsford. We’ve extended that shelter. It will remain open with a profes-
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sional operator and outreach workers until the…. We’ve signed the contracts, basically, to build a purpose-built shelter and supportive housing in Abbotsford, and that project will get constructed. We’ll continue the shelter until such time as it’s complete.
D. Eby: How many people are in this shelter right now? Has a site been identified for the new permanent shelter and housing development the minister is talking about?
Hon. R. Coleman: The temporary shelter is a 40-bed facility. How many would be in it in a day? I don’t necessarily know, because it fluctuates, as all shelters do. Basically, we’re building on a piece of land that’s been provided by the city of Abbotsford. Abbotsford Community Services will operate the new development and work with Fraser Health and other service providers to provide additional programs and services. It’s expected to be completed in the spring of next year.
In addition to that, the building will actually include a caretaker unit, lounge, kitchen, laundry room and bedbug sauna, which is something we put in all our new buildings, because if you heat them up, obviously…. I think the member knows that. We’re providing $5.1 million in new supportive housing to the project as well as the operating for the particular facility. They’re providing the land, as well as other land for additional things we might want in the future. It’s been a good collaboration with Abbotsford to get to a longer-term solution with regards to that.
That particular project will be finished by the spring, and then we would close the temporary shelter and move folks into it, depending on how many were in there at any particular time. Some might need shelter. Some would be able to go into supportive housing. There are an additional 30 beds there for new supportive housing units as well as this shelter.
D. Eby: Has that site been through the rezoning process in Abbotsford? Is it ready to go?
Hon. R. Coleman: Yeah, it has. I think it actually may have started construction, but it would be at a very early excavation level. But yeah, it’s been all through the zoning and everything — the city approvals and all that.
D. Eby: Can the minister provide an update on the Victoria tent city at the courthouse? Where is that at?
Hon. R. Coleman: The tent city went onto the courthouse property, I think, in about December. There were about 40 people there to begin with. We have continuously worked for opportunities to find a solution to this particular camp. To date, 180 people have been housed. Basically, we created a temporary shelter. We bought a building. We have done some things to the old youth detention site with regards to it.
We continue to look for other opportunities. We had a very big concern after the courts decided not to allow an injunction to do something with the site that we had…. It started to get worse, from a crime perspective and from concerns about particular types of structures that might get built on it. It could go on fire and cause danger to health and safety, which was a big concern.
We tried to work with the campers, but there are a couple of factions down there that don’t exactly get along. We decided that we would work with the city through all of this, a very qualified couple of people from the Portland Hotel Society that worked with very vulnerable populations before. They’re trying to put in place some standards of practice with particular egress and ingress and separation of tents, like we managed to do in Oppenheimer Park a few years ago when we actually dealt with that one and managed to rehouse the people out of that particular camp. They’re doing that, as well as working with the folks there.
There has been a little bit of a breakthrough in that I saw a picture yesterday where there are actually now some gravel pathways in there. Before, it was pretty disorganized. The intent is to get it organized and then work with the additional population.
We do have some additional product we think we can bring on line that would allow for another amount of housing. Effectively, I think we won’t be very far away from, in the next short period of time, being able to have identified a home for everybody that’s on that site, in addition to the 180 people that we’ve housed.
It’s been a challenge because, as I said earlier, there’s been quite an influx into some of the housing issues in B.C. in the last year, particularly on the shelter space and the homeless file. In this particular case, it’s become not only an issue relative to the camp, but it’s become a bit of a destination where people are coming to camp. We’re trying to help. We’re working very closely with the city. The city, mayor and council have been very supportive in the work we’re doing with them to find a long-term solution to this particular situation.
In this case, we’ve actually housed over three times the amount of people that were initially in the camp or had been there over the winter. Three times over, and we still have people there. We’re still trying to find additional housing for them and long-term solutions for people with regard to mental health and addictions as well, which creates quite a collaboration.
Island Health Authority is working very closely with us on this. The Portland Hotel Society, folks that are down there, is doing a great job. Everybody is trying to work with the population to try and find them secure and safe places to live.
[ Page 12810 ]
D. Eby: Can the minister provide more detail about what’s happening at the youth detention site?
Hon. R. Coleman: There are about 50 people there, some in tents, some inside. We’re looking at some expansion in the future.
It’s actually an interesting story on this particular one. These people moved as a group from the camp. They chip in on meals. They chip in on maintenance. They are actually working together there.
This particular piece…. Some folks didn’t want to come inside. Because we had grounds there, inside the fence, and being able to access washrooms, there are maybe 20 that would stay in tents in an area where they’re not building permanent structures and stuff. The health and safety issues are there, and the meals are there. That’s what’s happening there. That population has become pretty stable. We’re just looking at how we can enhance the facility over time.
D. Eby: Which of the responses to the Victoria tent city are permanent, long-term facilities, and which are temporary and are expected to close at some point in the future?
Hon. R. Coleman: We have two things to do here. Both the youth detention and Mount Edwards, which has the ability for quite a bit of additional capacity…. We’re using the first floor because we were able to renovate it quickly. But there are probably another, I’m going to say, 70 to 80 beds available on the other two floors of this particular facility, which also has a very good setup with an inner courtyard and washrooms and showers. There’s a half bath in each unit there.
The first piece is…. We’ve actually, basically, purchased it. We can operate it for a year, but we have to go through a rezone, which we’ll do through the city of Victoria, for the change in use to allow for supportive housing versus what would have been long-term care before, a number of years ago. At the youth detention, we will also go through a community consultation and rezoning process to see if we can move to more permanence. At that point in time, we will decide what additional investments we can make in it. We’re going to go through both those processes.
The shelter that we also opened has been extended and will stay open until we find long-term solutions for that. We’ve been able to extend the lease on that to be able to continue it. We will work with the community and the city on long-term land use there as well.
When you do these, you can find temporary facilities sometimes, or you can purchase something, but then you need to get…. Sometimes you may have to get a change of use. So far, there seems to be an indication, both at Mount Edwards and at the youth detention particularly, that both communities will support a change in use. This would allow us, if we got an indication…. If we didn’t have a change of use, in the meantime, we would go into the market to look for something to replace it over time so that we would be able to build a backfill if necessary.
D. Eby: What services are available to the populations in these different facilities? Are you providing meals? Are you providing health care? Are you providing counselling? What supports are available to people who are in these facilities currently?
Hon. R. Coleman: I think the member knows that in a vulnerable population, each individual is an individual case and each one needs different types of services. The basic service, we have found, from many years ago…. When we first dealt with homelessness, the trend was, for decades, to open up a shelter at eight, nine or ten o’clock at night, close it at six or seven o’clock in the morning and have the population leave and then line up and come back in again that night. That went on through the ’90s and into portions of the 2000s.
Early on, when we started to do some things — in Vancouver, particularly — with some of our pilot projects, we found that when we put some supports into housing, whether it was a shelter or a single-room-occupancy, we started to get different outcomes. The first outcome we really noticed in our shelters was to not empty them but to allow them to be 24-7.
In 2001, there wasn’t a single 24-7 shelter in British Columbia. Now most of the shelters, including the temporary shelters in the wintertime, are 24-7. And there are about four times as many today.
We then added in meals. Nutrition seems to be one of the biggest keys for vulnerable populations. Nutrition allows them to…. Well, it just helps them healthwise, and then they can start to look at other decisions.
Then you now try and connect them with certain types…. The first thing we try to do — in shelters, particularly temporary, and in places like Mount Edwards…. Oftentimes they haven’t done something as simple as get a CareCard or apply for social services, social assistance or whatever they’re allowed to have. And connect them with doctors and supports.
The health authorities work with us on that. Island Health works with the stuff on the Island, and they’re pretty good. We have outreach workers that do the same thing on the streets and go into the camp and try and work with those folks too. To date, out of Mount Edwards, for instance, they stabilize…. We find people maybe are doing well enough that they want to move into a different type of facility rather than a supportive housing model, where they have meals, they have a room with a washroom, and the showers are communal, which is often the case in supportive housing.
Thirteen people have already moved into other forms of housing, more stable housing. Some people have ac-
[ Page 12811 ]
tually gone to work — found jobs and are now working. That’s all part of the transition. It all starts with the home and the society that understand the population. You will find, as you do this, it’s tough.
I think that the people that do this work on behalf of the province and the people of the province, the non-profit people that do work in our shelters in supportive housing, do remarkable work. They understand. For instance, we’ve had people that had gone from the camp and who had moved into housing and then gone back to the camp because they didn’t want to be inside. Each one of these has a different outcome.
What they do is they have the patience to help them through their mental health issues, their addiction issues. They try and connect them with supports and understand that sometimes the first time around — on addictions, particularly, or even mental illness, with meds — they may fail. Somebody has to be there to pick them up and give them an opportunity to succeed again.
That’s what our service providers do. They do a remarkable job with folks. We’ll continue to support them financially so that they can do that.
R. Fleming: I want to ask the minister a question about home construction as it relates to dormitories. I realize this may not be the proper ministry, but I would ask the question in relation to the relieving of pressure on a very tight rental market in the capital regional district.
The university presidents, and the president of UVic in particular, have been interested in building at least 500 to 600 new student residences on campus. It may or may not include family housing. They have a wait-list of something like 1,500 students there. It’s very important for the University of Victoria because 70 percent of their students do not come from this city. They do have to provide accommodation or be able to promise students and their families that living spaces are available in the region.
My understanding is that the Standing Committee on Finance has recommended this to both the Minister of Finance and to government. The answer so far, if I can characterize it this way, has been that government doesn’t wish to add to the debt of the province.
Even though this is an extremely low-risk, self-funded form of debt, thus far government, as it’s been related to me, has not been able to find an entity to either account for such borrowing and construction in a way that it wouldn’t reflect on the province’s balance sheets or to do so but to categorize it in way that would be to the satisfaction of the Auditor General or whoever else is scrutinizing this.
The reason I ask the Minister Responsible for Housing this is because, as he knows, the rental rate is hovering somewhere between 0.4 and 0.6 percent here. You know, literally six units out of 1,000 are vacant at any one time in this region. Extremely low churn in turnover rate. Rents going up. All of those pressures. It’s estimated to contribute to the homelessness situation quite considerably.
If there were 500 to 600 new living spaces constructed at UVic, that would obviously help alleviate the pressure in the rental market for all types of incomes and rent affordability. But so far, despite the recommendation of members of both sides of the House through the Finance Committee, my understanding is that government has not been interested or has not found a way to work with the university leaderships to be able to provide student housing.
Is there any progress that the minister could report on this? It’s an issue that’s been presented to government for several years running now. It’s something that a lot of people in the capital regional district and the non-profit housing sector have shown an interest in. They want to see more units constructed that are rental units, for example, to help the tensions that are in our rental market.
Hon. R. Coleman: We did canvass this earlier this afternoon with one of the other members from the opposition. I did say I would have a conversation with the Minister of Advanced Education.
The challenge here is there’s a borrowing issue in what they are allowed to borrow and not. None of it fits in the B.C. Housing piece. Of course, our priorities for our capital spend and our borrowing spend have been people with mental illness and addictions, the homeless or at risk of homelessness in the last number of years, because it’s a very vulnerable population. We don’t have excess capital laying around to do something like this.
There may be models, and I will discuss it with the other ministers, where you could get it where it’s self-supporting debt. It would be how you transfer land and debt and management in such a way that you wouldn’t have it affect the debt-to-GDP or, more importantly, the economic viability of the institution that could be taking on a liability. That piece….
We’ll probably have some conversations about it. I’m aware of it. It’s just that it hasn’t been something that’s come to B.C. Housing as a priority because of the other challenge that we’re facing in supportive housing, seniors, assisted living, all of those things that are managed as partnerships or programs across government. Student housing hasn’t come to us.
I do know about the recommendation. I think there are conversations going on. I did undertake to your other members that we would go have the conversation and see whether there’s someplace some of our ideas may help here with regards to it.
I know about accommodation at UVic. In my case, my roommate was my daughter. Until we got the rules figured out…. When she first went to university and I got here in 1996, we shared an apartment. I thought maybe she should go to residence at one point. A 19-year-old
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who wants to spread her wings doesn’t necessarily want to live with Dad.
I lived up by the university, very close to it. I do know we did look at residences and stuff like that back then. I think the pressure has increased there. I don’t think anything has picked up in the gap from ’96 to today, that there’s anything much new there, with regards to the growth in student population, which is probably having an impact on it.
I will have a conversation with the minister — like I said when I was talking to the other member for the opposition who brought this up — to see where they’re at with it and see if they want any of our advice or expertise that we may be able to give them. But I should be clear: our capital spend is not geared to that form of housing, in B.C. Housing, because of the vulnerable populations we’re concentrating on.
R. Fleming: Last Friday the point-in-time homeless count results were completed. Presumably, they were shared with the minister’s office.
I don’t have the press release in front of me, but I think it’s fair to say that almost all of the partners, including the coalition to end homelessness in Victoria, all of the faith-based organizations that helped canvass and do the 24-hour homeless count in the region, were more than surprised to find that the number was higher than 1,000 — in fact, significantly. I think most people thought, including a number of the region’s mayors, that the homeless population was significantly lower than what the final count was.
If I’ve got the number correctly, if I recall it correctly, it was 1,387 individuals that were deemed to be homeless in the region from that point-in-time count that occurred in February or March of this year and was reported April 30.
Has the minister received this report? Has he been asked by those organizations that were involved, many of whom receive grants or have managed housing projects within his ministry…? Have they received any kind of response from his government about what is a significantly higher count and a significantly increased scale of the problem in the capital region? Or am I asking this question at a time when it’s preliminary?
I’m interested to see what the follow-up is going to be from the minister, given that I think folks in the ministry, some of whom I participated in the count with — VIHA employees as well — were all surprised to hear the news that came Friday afternoon in terms of the scale of the homelessness problem growing yet again in the capital region.
I’m just wondering what the response is from the minister and ministry employees upon receipt of this information.
Hon. R. Coleman: The methodology was pretty broad on this count. It actually counted people that might be in jail, no fixed address and, in addition to that, those that might be in transition houses, shelters, those sorts of things — so the sheltered. So 192 is the actual street homeless count in this region, as I understand it.
One person probably not surprised that that number was up was me. Earlier in our discussions, I indicated to the members opposite that we’ve seen an uptick in people that are coming into British Columbia from other regions across Canada, a large number from Alberta. Some people would be people that would be in the restaurant domestic help–type category who are arriving and might find work but can’t find housing right away.
We’ve seen that influx. It’s the first time in the last decade that I’ve seen that type of influx and the pressure on the shelter, even through this winter. Part of it, in the capital regional district and the Lower Mainland, is that we have a lot of services available but we also have a climate that is different than, let’s say, other areas of the country. There is a bit of gravitation there, so I wasn’t particularly surprised about the uptick.
We’re also working on extraordinary measures. I think the member knows that we’ve already indicated to the CRD that if they want to do $30 million of housing, we’ll match and step up with that. If we can match another $30 million from the federal government and we start looking at land and opportunities, we could easily get up to well over $100 million in additional housing we can do in this region to push back on this problem.
I have met with a number of the groups around it over the last number of years, with regards to the groups that do the counts, the non-profits. I actually had a group in from Microhousing yesterday that are doing some stuff with the city of Victoria. It looks rather interesting as well. My commitment with them was if they found a piece of land and they came back to us, we might look at it as a pilot project if I thought it had the support of the community and that sort of thing.
We stand ready to work with both Island Health and the CRD with money to work through these issues to improve more that we can do here. The city of Victoria, I think, has done three or four sites that they gave us over the years that we’ve built on with them.
The city has probably put up more of that opportunity than the rest of the region has with regards to providing land and opportunity to do a needs project for specific vulnerable populations. We’ve already indicated that we’re ready to be a partner. We’re working through that. We’ll probably shortly sign some kind of an agreement to move forward on that.
Where I’m seeing the most significant pressured growth is some areas of the Lower Mainland and the capital regional district. In other areas of the province, I’m not seeing that same pressure. Some in the Okanagan and a little bit in some areas of the north. The biggest pressure right now seems to be in the CRD and Lower Mainland.
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That’s why we’re focusing on making arrangements with the CRD to work on getting some funds together to go at it with additional projects.
R. Fleming: Just to get a bit more specific for the minister, I wanted to ask about a property. It has been of interest to a number of housing organizations, and I’m quite sure that it may have been brought to him personally. I wanted to get a status update on whether this property is suitable and available for supervised housing of some sort.
It has been identified as surplus, previously, to the needs of the Baptist Housing Society, but I’m not sure if it’s available or for sale. I certainly don’t want to jeopardize any pending deals if this is the case, but I don’t think that it is the case. It’s the Central Care Home on Johnson Street.
Now, it’s been identified as a good candidate for funds that would be able to make supervised housing possible at probably a minimal remediation, renovation cost. It has nursing stations in it. It’s empty now, I believe. I don’t believe there are any more funded long-term residential care facilities for seniors, any services being involved anymore. But it’s not clear, depending on who you ask, whether it’s available. It’s been identified as the kind of property that might be available.
If it were available for purchase or transfer, it would be a project where there could be move-in condition achieved quite quickly. It would make a big impact and would be able to eliminate the use of temporary or wet weather shelters that come and go, whose funding dries up and whose residents are probably going to be moving somewhere out of doors this very summer.
If the minister could just speak specifically to that project so that I can report back to some individuals and organizations in my constituency who are asking the question through me, essentially, this afternoon.
Hon. R. Coleman: I can’t disclose negotiations before they’re completed on any property that we might be pursuing. It would be inappropriate because it could jeopardize any discussions. We are aware of the Baptist property. I can’t give the member publicly any indication where they may be, but I would be prepared to give the member an update personally — what I think could happen there. But you have to have a willing seller and a willing buyer, and you need to have the relationship. You also have to…. Well, you’re looking at all properties.
This isn’t the only property we might be looking at in Victoria. Mount Edwards is another one we had in our lexicon. We’re looking at a number of properties that we may or may not be prepared to option or move on if they’re available in this region. Each one of those is subject to confidentiality agreements for negotiations. It’s just the way it is.
We do expect to be making a number of announcements shortly on some of the properties we are pursuing. That would mean we’d be in a position to come to a deal or remove subjects. At this stage, we can’t go any further than that. But I can assure the member that we are very active in this market, looking at opportunities, such as he has described, in this region.
D. Eby: I’m going to bring us back to the issue of supportive housing. The minister will probably be familiar with the case of Lindsey Longe. The reason is that Lindsey’s mother, Christine Harris, has been on a campaign to raise the standards in terms of the supports that are available in supportive housing in B.C. after the death of her son.
The story goes a little something like this. Lindsey checked himself out of the hospital and returned to his home at Pacific Coast Apartments, which is run by Coast Mental Health in partnership with the province. He went up to his room. He was sick for a number of days and died. It’s believed he was dead in his room for three days before he was found.
Now, this is a facility that when it was opened, the minister said that this was where people would be connected with supports and specialized services to help them stay safe and create better opportunities, which I think is something we all hoped for.
Has the minister been notified about this incident? Has he investigated it? Has he come to any conclusions about what happened in Lindsey’s case and why? And has he taken any steps to address the issue? This was something that was featured in the media in late 2015.
Hon. R. Coleman: First of all, I’m not going to discuss an individual’s case in this particular chamber. But I will tell the member that the facility he’s referring to is operated by Coast Mental Health. It’s one of the very good service providers we have with regards to mental health. They are low-barrier facilities for very vulnerable populations.
Sometimes we will have clients that won’t avail themselves of the service, which they’re entitled to not do, because it’s a free world. The unit is still their home. It’s their private domain. We treat it like it is their home in our facilities.
Coast Mental Health is the service provider. I guess the Coastal Health Authority is the other partner with Coast Mental Health here. We actually build and provide the financing and the operational dollars and stuff on the Housing side. The operation of the building with the non-profit and the health authorities and the services provider are their responsibility. We don’t do that part of the housing.
We provide the walls and the supports and pick the society that we think can put, for lack of a better descrip-
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tion, the humanity and heart within the building, who then take care of the vulnerable clients. That’s what we do with that.
As we go through this, I would assume this is being looked at by whatever the proper authority is, if the member is referring to a specific file. We’re like the deliverer of the vehicle and the opportunity, and then the service provider and the health authority take it from there with regards to the needs of the client. That’s where their qualifications lie.
D. Eby: The Longe death was part of 82 deaths in supportive housing run by either non-profits under the supervision of B.C. Housing or run by B.C. Housing itself. In those 82 deaths, in 22 cases the person wasn’t found for two or more days. In six cases, the person wasn’t found for three days. In three cases, the person wasn’t found for five or more days. It’s very alarming information that people can literally die in their room and not be discovered for days in supportive housing.
What quality control mechanisms does the ministry have to follow up with the service providers once they choose a service provider, once they build the bricks and mortar and hit “go” on it? Where’s the follow-up to make sure that the supports that are promised are actually delivered to the people who live in the facility?
Hon. R. Coleman: We have operating agreements and standards of practice in supportive housing both through the health authorities and ourselves and our operating agreements. The 82 reported deaths were between January 2010 and July 25, and most of them, as the member said, were reported within one day.
The standard of practice in most operations is basically that every 48 hours, there’s a wellness check with regards to a tenant. That’s our expectation. In some cases, we have had tenants say they don’t want to be bothered because they want their privacy. They have to balance that issue of privacy with the person’s right to privacy in their own home. That’s something they balance. So they have the safety concerns with those sorts of things.
You have to also remember that this is a really vulnerable population with significant health issues in many cases — mental illness issues, sometimes severe addiction issues combined with that — that affect their health.
They try and do the 48-hour wellness checks. That’s why most people who have been found deceased, out of the 82 reported deaths, were found within 24 hours. We’ve made, basically, our providers aware of these numbers, as everybody else has, I’m sure. They continue to do the wellness checks and will continue to do so.
D. Eby: The issue, I think, is the quality control when the service provider makes these commitments to B.C. Housing and to the ministry to provide supports. Somebody can be dead in a room for five days, and nobody notices. The missing piece, to me, seems to be the accountability loop. This is something that…. The minister has made the explicit decision to give up some level of control. When you ask non-profits to do this instead of B.C. Housing, you give up some level of control. I understand that.
The question is: how many audits are taking place? How does that accountability happen? I mean, when you look at what happened with the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, with Portland Hotel Society…. Where organizations grow very quickly, with limited managerial training or capacity, they take on these roles, and their problems arise from that. How does B.C. Housing identify that early to avoid the kinds of situations we’ve seen?
Hon. R. Coleman: First of all, I’m not going to let the member impugn the very good work of people who give their lives to take care of the most vulnerable people in the province by saying they’re not doing their job. If there’s one that went five days, I’m sure we would’ve gone back and said: “Give us an explanation.” The reality is that it just doesn’t happen in well over the majority of the cases.
At the same time, the member should know, if you rent a single-room-occupancy unit in a hotel or in any unit where you have a tenancy agreement — in Vancouver or anywhere else, or an apartment, or you live in social housing — you have your right of occupancy, like anybody else. It’s just like you do here under the residents…. It’s your home. You’re entitled to your privacy.
If you have a particular client that says, “I don’t want you banging on my door every 48 hours; it is my home,” they have a right to have some of that conversation with the service provider. It’s no different than if I banged on your house every 48 hours, and you said: “Stop doing that.” I mean, there is a balance here. I don’t think it’s a case of somebody not caring.
I also think, like I say, that well over the vast majority of any of these deaths the member is bringing up were found within 24 hours. There is the one the member mentions about the five days. We have implemented a mandatory system to improve on that of 48 hours now because of these instances. We said: “Now it’s mandatory.” If we had one go past 48 hours now, given the fact that hour 3 or 4 after 48 hours could be the time, you could end up with more than two days, but that’s the possibility.
Whatever the numbers, the member knows what I’m talking about. We’ve actually implemented a mandatory 48-hour check with our service providers, and we’re expecting that to be followed because of the outcome of a couple of these files where we found that they were there longer.
D. Eby: I don’t understand why the minister needs to put words in my mouth when all I’m asking for is accountability for service providers.
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When people think about supports, when I think about supports, I think about what we’ve been talking about here today. I think about meals. I think about nursing care. I think about trauma counselling. Addiction services. These are services that people are willing and eager, frankly, to engage in.
The minister actually has run a very good project — unfortunately, it was closed — at the Rainier Hotel for women who were very vulnerable. I know, because my wife worked there as the nurse. It was a wonderful program.
Now, the idea that by services, I mean banging on someone’s door every 48 hours — that’s not a service. That’s a check. I guess the question is: how, when you have supportive housing…? This isn’t an SRO, where it’s run by somebody who could care less about the tenants. This is supportive housing run by the province. I guess I’m wondering, if the supports are there…. If someone doesn’t show up for a meal for a day, for example, if they don’t show up for an appointment with the nurse or whatever — that that’s noticed. You don’t have to bang on the door.
The core of the question is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t impugn anybody’s reputation. It is a level of accountability for funding, and it’s a level of accountability for services committed to be provided. Is there accountability? If the minister is saying there’s not, then there’s not. But that’s the question.
Hon. R. Coleman: There are two pieces to the question. I’ll try and answer them for the member. It may or may not satisfy him, because I’m not sure what he’s pursuing.
Our oversight of non-profit housing is regulated through a number of things: long-term operating agreements, the requirement to submit annual audited financial statements, operating reviews that examine a broad array of organizational functions, external investigative audits of a society whenever necessary and additional members to support financial and operational accountabilities.
In addition to that, if they have a service contract with, let’s say, a health authority or whoever it is with regards to other supports within the building, they have to meet up with whatever their audit and performance needs are on this. Not every building that we have has meals. Not even every SRO that is run by a non-profit has meals. It’s not necessary that everybody’s going to get meals every day, because do like to have some units that have independent living in them. People can live independently, and a lot do.
Basically, the update on this — I’ll give it to the member — is that following the death of the individual that had been reported in one of the newspapers at Pacific Coast Apartments, for instance, it implemented the following changes: a 24-hour room check if the tenant has not been seen, a mandatory weekly case management meeting for all tenants and a client record systems update to include an alert system. When staff log in, any critical tenant issues are flagged immediately.
We’re revising our P3 operating agreements, which include a mandatory 48-hour wellness check, and we’re working that through all our non-profits to include that in their agreements. When we found out the issue, we immediately moved to change some of the language in our operating agreements to make sure that this particular issue the member has brought up is being followed through on so that we can basically eliminate this concern that has come up with regards to operating these facilities.
I do know, though, that the wellness check is a big piece of this with regards to identifying if somebody has passed away unexpectedly in one of the units. The 48 hours has been there, but we’re standardizing it in the agreements. Basically, it’s standardized to 48 hours in all the agreements. If one organization wants to go beyond that — like Coast has with the one facility, the 24 hours — they’re welcome to do that. But we are standardizing it across the board for all facilities that would have supported housing.
The challenge with it, of course, is that we also operate, with our non-profits, what would just be pure rental housing. That pure rental housing could be a single-room-occupancy unit. It could be an apartment in an apartment building, or it could be a townhouse. No single family, really, that we have with our non-profits. In that case, they actually live very much more independently.
Usually, their issues are not as vulnerable as others. It would usually be an income issue, or it could be social assistance. They’re quite easily able to live independently, and so there’s no standard of practice that says we would check on them any more than we would if they were in a rental unit in an apartment building.
We have upped the ante on this to standardize the process, to make sure everybody knows the policy change. We’re working through all the operating agreements to make sure it’s added to, to make it clear in black and white that that’s the new standard in addition to what was already agreed to — but making it black and white so that we cannot have the situation the member described earlier with regards to facilities with supportive housing particularly.
The definition around supported housing is quite dramatic — anywhere from seniors care all the way down to folks that have mental health and addictions issues. So that standardization is taking place, and I would expect that we would not have a reoccurrence of what the member described.
D. Eby: I thank the minister for that comprehensive answer. As part of his answer, he described something
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called operating reviews. Can the minister give me an idea of what an operating review is and how often a service provider should reasonably expect to be subject to an operating review?
Hon. R. Coleman: Every non-profit facility in British Columbia has to submit a budget on an annual basis to B.C. Housing. In addition to that, they have to provide audited financial statements to B.C. Housing. Oftentimes, if there’s a concern, we might pick up on it. Usually, lots of times, you’ll find in a line item where Finance says we should go look at a particular thing.
But over and above that, every three years every non-profit has to go through a review. That review includes asset management, tenant relations, policies, procedure, governance of the board — basically, the asset management relative to the capital reserve for things like roofs and fridges and what have you to make sure the facility is kept up to date. All of those things are gone through every three years, through a complete review of every project in the province.
D. Eby: Is this something that’s done with a B.C. Housing employee actually attending in the facility, talking to tenants, looking at the facility, doing a formal inspection — like that? Or is this something where the service provider fills out a report of some kind and submits it, like a grant report?
Hon. R. Coleman: It does both. It’s on-site paper review — so documentation, audit, repairs, everything right down to how are you are doing your purchasing so you’re not having somebody from the board being paid, in a conflict, to do maintenance on the property. Those types of things as well as a policy, procedure and operational review, a site inspection — all of that.
D. Eby: I’m going to move on to another topic. I’m going to move back on to the topic of the sale of B.C. Housing properties to non-profit organizations.
Can the minister advise me how many properties have been transferred in the last fiscal year and for what value?
[P. Pimm in the chair.]
Hon. R. Coleman: Over four years, we will transfer ownership of about 350 properties from the Provincial Rental Housing Corporation to non-profit societies who control and operate social housing on leased land. They don’t own the properties. They actually have a lease, so the PRHC will transfer them. About 116 have been completed to date. We expect 81 properties will be done in this fiscal year.
To date in this fiscal year, $284 million has been realized from these transfers to B.C. Housing, the total coming up to the numbers we talked about earlier.
D. Eby: I think it might be clearer in the Hansard. I just want to clarify. So $284 million is the target for this fiscal year that we’re in right now. The number of properties I didn’t catch, for this fiscal year — that is, the target to sell. Then for the last fiscal year, I didn’t catch the number of properties. There was a range there from 2014, I think, which may have been 2014-15 to date.
Hon. R. Coleman: My father, who was a forensic accountant, would do this in his head. So 350 properties intended to transfer, 116 to date, another 81 this year. The balance will be done over the ensuing two years plus after that. It’s an over four–year program, so we’re now basically about into a year and a half out of the four years. That transfer will take place over that period of time.
D. Eby: As tenants move out of the units in these buildings that are transferred, will the rents remain geared to income? I tried to ask this earlier, and I think my colleague, the member for Vancouver–West End, asked a version of it in relation to the Sunset Towers. Will the rents remain the same, or will they be on the same formula as they were under B.C. Housing, under the ownership of the non-profit organizations?
Hon. R. Coleman: Yeah, exactly the same formula. It was Nicholson Tower your colleague was asking about earlier. He asked if they would continue on the rent-geared-to-income for all existing tenants, and the answer to that was yes.
The benefit that may come over time is some of these projects…. These non-profits will have the opportunity to densify and add additional product, and we will work with them on the development piece. They may do an additional mix in the future to get further benefits to their tenants, but none of the budget for the rent-geared-to-income changes on these projects upon transfer.
D. Eby: According to the CMHC, as of September 2015, the province had only claimed $148.5 million of the $240 million allocated to the province. Can the minister explain why that might be the case?
Hon. R. Coleman: I think I need a clarification on what the member is looking at on that question, because we’ve never sent any money to the federal government on anything we do. They’re not involved in this process at all. I don’t know what the CMHC numbers are related to.
D. Eby: That’s my fault for jumping around topics. I moved on to a different topic from the non-profit asset
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transfer program. I was asking about money, separate from that program, coming from the federal government, coming from CMHC. I’m trying to find the reference document here.
The CMHC said that the province had only claimed $148.5 million of the federal money that’s available to the province, which was a total of $240 million. I get the sense that that’s news to the minister. I’ll have a quick look through the documents and see if it’s the case. But I wonder if the minister is familiar with that report from CMHC?
Hon. R. Coleman: It may be related to the investment in affordable housing, which is a federal program that you claim as you use. We will obviously use all the dollars that are available to us as we use them. There’s no intention not to pursue it. As a matter of fact, we’ve also told the federal government that if they had money left over from other jurisdictions, they should come and talk. We might be able to find a way to match with that as well.
D. Eby: Can the minister give an update on the Stamps Place development? It’s a fairly major former B.C. Housing development in East Vancouver, in the Strathcona area. There was some discussion about densifying the site, adding additional units to the site. It was recently sold by B.C. Housing to a non-profit organization. Are there any updates on what is happening on that site?
Hon. R. Coleman: It went through an RFP process. New Chelsea were selected. They took it over as of April 1.
We’re doing some work with the Ray-Cam Community Centre with regards to a community centre in the city, on other uses to enhance the value of the property and additional units and community opportunities there. Obviously, because they just took it over May 1, those discussions are in early stages. But that’s what is taking place there.
D. Eby: Does the minister have an update on the Ted Kuhn Tower that was the subject of an expression of interest issued by the ministry in February of 2016? Has the building been sold and, if so, to whom? What’s happening with that?
Hon. R. Coleman: We did an RFP for Ted Kuhn and Sunset. The RFP is now closed, and the board is now doing the evaluation on the proposals to select the proponent that would be selected with regards to this property.
D. Eby: There are 189 units for seniors and people with disabilities. Was there any suggestion that the mix in the building would be changing at all to include hard-to-house individuals, as has been the case in some buildings?
Hon. R. Coleman: Both Ted Kuhn and Sunset have young adults with some mental health issues in them now.
The new operator would obviously manage that population, as well as the seniors’ component of the buildings. That mix is always worked on with the proponent of any managed project in B.C., which would be the case in this particular case.
There’s no plan that’s been put forward, other than the transfer to a selected non-profit, to change the use that presently exists in either one of these facilities. There may be an opportunity for additional units over time, which is always one of the things we’d like to see.
Noting the time, having had earlier conversations with the Opposition House Leader, I move the committee rise, report progress and seek leave to sit again.
Motion approved.
The committee rose at 5:39 p.m.
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