PROCEEDINGS IN THE
DOUGLAS FIR ROOM

Committee of Supply

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF SOCIAL
DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY REDUCTION

The House in Committee of Supply (Section A); S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.

The committee met at 2:33 p.m.

On Vote 40: ministry operations, $3,105,460,000.

The Chair: Minister, did you have an opening statement?

Hon. S. Simpson: I’ll do this. I’ll be very brief about this. I know we have a limited amount of time, and I want to be sure that my friends across the way have as much opportunity as possible to ask questions, so we will be quite brief about this.

I really want to start with introducing the staff that are here with me to support these efforts — my deputy, Sheila Taylor; the following assistant deputy ministers: Molly Harrington, Michael Lord, Chris Brown, Debi Upton and Rob Byers; and also the CEO of CLBC, Seonag Macrae.

All I really want to say is that everybody knows this ministry. We have gone through changes since the new government has been put in place. These changes included significant changes around the initiatives to come from this ministry.

They started with a change of the name of the ministry from Social Development and Social Innovation to Social Development and Poverty Reduction. That really highlighted a focus and an emphasis for this ministry moving forward to work on dealing with questions of inequality and poverty reduction in the province of British Columbia.

[2:35 p.m.]

We had six items in the mandate letter that the Premier presented to me. Three of those items have been accomplished: an increase of $100 across the board in terms of assistance rates and disability benefits; an increase in the earning exemptions for persons on social assistance and disability benefits; and the resolution of a transportation supplement, which will implement on January 1.

Obviously, there’s a lot of work still to be done on the other matters, which include the poverty reduction strategy, the basic income pilot and a homelessness action plan and homelessness count for the province of British Columbia.

What I’ll do is with that, I’ll just leave it and let the member get to his questions.

M. Hunt: First, I want to begin by congratulating the minister on his appointment. I think the article in the Sun on the weekend is very indicative of how you have come around full circle to where you are. I hope and trust that that bodes well for the changes that the minister is wanting to bring in the ministry and the accomplishments that we hope to see under his direction in the ministry.

I want to start with some general questions. I’ll come back to things that you also referred to in your opening comments. Just to start generally — that is, let’s start with the issue of the budget itself. What is the budget for this year? What is the change from last year? And is there any change in that budget between the February budget and the September update?

Hon. S. Simpson: The budget for this year is $3.11 billion. That was an increase of $367 million over the last budget and an increase up from February of $124 million.

M. Hunt: Can the minister tell me how many staff are in his office and where they’re actually located?

Hon. S. Simpson: I have in my office, the total of my political staff, all the staff in my office…. I have five staff people. Four of them are located here in Victoria at the Legislature, and one works out of my constituency office in Vancouver.

M. Hunt: How many employees are there in the ministry? How many of those would be social workers? What kinds of vacancies and turnover rate do we have within the ministry?

Hon. S. Simpson: We have 1,900 FTEs in the ministry. About 1,460 of those are in direct service delivery. We don’t have any social workers in the ministry. They’re all employment and assistance workers. They are not social workers. The attrition rate is about 19 percent.

[2:40 p.m.]

M. Hunt: Help me with my vocabulary. You just used a different word that I’m not…. I should have scribbled it down while you were doing it. You said that there are no social workers. There are…

Interjection.

M. Hunt: …employment and assistance workers. Now, are those through contract under employment services and the appointment and services side of things, or is this directly within the ministry itself?

Hon. S. Simpson: These are direct ministry employees. Of the 1,900 or so FTEs who are direct employees of the ministry, they are direct employees of the ministry. They deliver the direct line services to our clients.

M. Hunt: There are also contract workers. There are a number of contracts that you have with service providers. I’m wondering how many contracts you have within the ministry, how many contract workers and what the value is of the contracts that you have. And is this separate and distinct from the 1,400 number that you just used?

Hon. S. Simpson: As the member says, we do have contracted services. Mostly those are related to Work B.C. and Work B.C. contracts and the employment contracts there. We currently have 73 contractors. We have 84 service centres around the province that deliver contracted services. We contract with them. Those service providers determine their own staff complements and don’t report the specific numbers over and above the contract values.

M. Hunt: Then, within the ministry itself — to make sure that I’m understanding this correctly — we have employment contracts. We also have program delivery contracts and program delivery services. You’re frowning. Correct, incorrect? Have I got it wrong? How do we also deliver programs within the ministry?

Hon. S. Simpson: Maybe just to clarify for the member. In terms of the services delivered, all of the services we deliver to the clients, whether they be temporary or social assistance clients or persons with disabilities, are delivered by our employees directly. That’s the 1,460 employees I talked about before, among the 1,900 FTEs.

[2:45 p.m.]

We deliver those all directly. They’re identified as employment and assistance workers, but they, essentially, are the jobs that, in the past, might have been done by financial aid workers and social workers under a different regime back years ago, before it was restructured. So all of those workers are the people who deal day to day with clients of the ministry.

The only contractual arrangements we have of any significance are, of course, those that are delivered through the Work B.C. programs and the employment programs in the 84 employment centres and those that are delivered by Community Living B.C. through the contracted agencies that they have that deliver services to their clients. Other than that, most everybody that we work with, their services are delivered by direct employees of the ministry.

M. Hunt: I have a larger question mark, then, because we have groups such as…. I’ll simply refer to ones I know of in Surrey. We have groups like Sources. We have Options, Lookout — different ones that are delivering various services within our communities.

Can you explain to me how they fit and where they come within the ministry?

Hon. S. Simpson: With those organizations, we believe, they deliver programs — many of those are multiservice organizations in the community — that are either contracted with Community Living B.C., if they’re delivering support services to the clientele of Community Living B.C., or they could be delivering employment B.C. programs, which would make them part of those 84 centres — the 73 contracts.

Other than that, it’s possible that they hold contracts with the Ministry of Children and Family Development, which also contracts with those agencies. So there are a number of agencies across the province that have come together with others and bid the contracts to be able to deliver employment B.C. programs. They do that on an ongoing basis, or they become service providers that are supported under CLBC.

M. Hunt: That’s a whole piece I obviously need to work on discovering. Thank you for that.

Persons with disabilities. I’m given to understand that they have to report monthly on their situation and these sorts of things. Many people with disabilities have trouble filling out the various reports that are needed. My question is: what is the ministry doing to streamline these reports?

[2:50 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: For persons with disabilities, they have no regular monthly reporting requirements. What they are required to do is they’re required to report if they have a change of address. They’re required to report any earned income.

You’ll know that there is an earning exemption here, which is up to $12,000 a year of annual earning exemption. So if they’ve earned money in a monthly period, they need to report that money. They would report a change of address, those kinds of things. Other than that, there is no obligation for reporting.

A small number of annual reviews are done of persons with disabilities, but it’s a very small number that are done, and it’s very periodic and would certainly not be an annual event for persons with disabilities.

M. Hunt: The next question is: how many classes of disabilities are there for persons with disabilities, and how are they clearly defined?

Hon. S. Simpson: Currently within the ministry, we have three classes that receive any and all assistance from us. We have persons on temporary assistance. We have persons with persistent multiple barriers, and we have persons with disabilities. There are no other categories.

M. Hunt: Okay. Thank you for that.

When it comes to the issue of income and reporting of income and the exemptions to which you referred, one of the questions that has been raised with me concerns ICBC and claims that a recipient may get from ICBC. The question is simply: what is and what is not income? And where is there a list of what is considered to be income? Or where can it clearly be found what is income?

[2:55 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: Let’s deal with the question of the ICBC issue, because it’s one that we can get to. First of all, I would say that there are income and asset tests in the ministry across the board to determine people’s income and what assets they have.

In the case where somebody had a settlement…. Just to be hypothetical here, let’s say that somebody had an accident and received a $10,000 settlement from ICBC for that incident. That would be deemed, in that month following the month that they received it, or the month following, to have been an asset there. It would impact their income for that month, but that would be the end of it at that point.

In the case where people have had catastrophic issues and received very large settlements, often those get structured, in fact, by people into trust accounts and things that fall outside of the exemption model and would be protected.

M. Hunt: I have two examples of that from two different people, so two completely different situations, one of which was a person who had a vehicle. The vehicle got involved in an accident. The vehicle was written off. A payment was made for the vehicle. The recipient then went out and bought themselves a new vehicle. Then, all of a sudden, they were getting their income reduced because they got a settlement from ICBC, which was simply replacing a vehicle with a vehicle.

In the net, they should not have gained anything. They have simply replaced an old vehicle with a new vehicle because of an accident outside of their control, and now they’re being hit for it. That becomes question No. 1.

Question No. 2, then, is someone who is riding on a bus. The bus is involved in an accident. They receive injuries. They go and get their injuries taken care of. They are given compensation for their pain, their suffering. They have been out emotionally, mentally and physically because of this whole trauma that they have gone through. They have been given compensation for it, and as a result, they lose their income for a month. The question is the question of fairness and equity.

Would the minister explain both of those situations?

[B. Ma in the chair.]

Hon. S. Simpson: Hon. Chair, welcome to the chair.

As I would reflect for the member opposite, of course, we are still operating under the system put in place by the previous government, and all of these are challenges that I’ll be happy to look at. Having said that, there’s a correction to be made here.

In the case where you have an exempted asset — i.e., you’re on PWD and you own a vehicle that has been exempted…. You have that vehicle, and you’re fine. If that vehicle then is involved in an accident, and what you do is replace the vehicle, then that shouldn’t be deducted. If the member wants to provide details about the individual to my staff, we’ll look into it, because if that was the circumstance, they shouldn’t have been deducted.

In the second case, it is the situation that, as I pointed out, in the case where there are significant dollars coming in, there are exemption processes through trust funds and such. But we do exempt based on income and assets, and there are clawbacks of that, essentially, when in fact those are in place and you receive significant resources.

[3:00 p.m.]

M. Hunt: Yes, to the minister, I recognize he hasn’t been there long enough to change everything, but these are simply the realities that these people live through. I just want to make sure that the minister is aware of them so that we can — and I will — check with the individuals involved.

Now, shifting subjects, it’s my understanding that people who receive disabilities will now be able to choose between receiving a bus pass or receiving $52 in additional assistance on their next cheque. Is that correct?

Hon. S. Simpson: The member will know…. Certainly, he was a member here, and he will know the challenges and the frustrations that people in the disability community felt around the previous move around bus passes, where there was concern that bus passes were being removed or that there were additional costs being put in place for those.

What we’ve done to deal with this is put in place a transportation supplement that’s available to everybody, all persons with disabilities. That’s a supplement of $52 a month. We are making that available for people to use as they see fit for their transportation purposes.

That includes…. If they want an annual bus pass, they can, and numbers of people have signed up for that, asked for that to be the way that they use their supplement. In that case, people will be getting annual bus passes for that $52 starting January 1 and moving on. Other people will take the $52 because they buy bus tickets. Other people might take the $52, who live in communities without bus service, and use that money in different ways.

I’ve often used an example…. Say there may be people in outlying communities. Their neighbour drives them to the market once a week to do some shopping, and they give their neighbour a few dollars for gasoline once in a while to cover that. If that’s their transportation alternative, then that’s a reasonable alternative.

What we have said with this is: “You have a $52 supplement, and it will be your responsibility to determine how you use that to meet transportation needs. It will appear on your cheque notifications as a clear line item, as a transportation supplement valued at $52, separate from your benefit payment.”

M. Hunt: I’m sure the minister was fully aware of the reality that I would bring this up here, in the midst of estimates. I would like to read a government news release. It said: “Beginning September 1, people with disabilities will receive a $52 transportation support allowance. They will have the choice of receiving the transportation support allowance on their assistance cheque or in the form of a B.C. bus pass.” That was, of course, from the former B.C. Liberal government last year. Sounds very familiar and very similar to the program that the minister has created.

Could the minister please explain to me the difference?

Hon. S. Simpson: I think the difference is very clear. We have provided everybody on PWD an additional $52 that was not available under the previous government. That is different money. It is new money that has been provided to everybody to, in fact, pay for that supplement.

Under the program that the member talks about, in fact, that $52 would have been taken out of what was their benefit payment, if they chose the bus pass. We have added $52 to the cheque. So people are getting $52 over and above their basic benefit.

M. Hunt: Well, I’m sure that the previous minister would argue that, in fact, it was an addition of $52. I think the addition, actually, was something like $75 totally, but there was a $52 bus pass that was in there. We’re calling them supplements, allowances, but it all seems to be exactly the same — that you have the choice of either $52 or a bus pass.

To quote the Minister of Energy and Mines, speaking about giving that choice, she said: “The minister says that it’s about freedom of choice. Just what kind of choice does the minister imagine people receiving disability have? Is it a choice between bus passes and limousines, walking or hitchhiking? Or is it a choice between going out or being homebound? What choice do they actually have?”

What would this minister say to someone who has to choose between the bus pass and the $52?

[3:05 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: What I would say is that the member and I can debate this back and forth.

I guess the thing that provides me the most comfort that we got this right is that the same people who were standing on the steps of the Legislature with a petition signed by 3,000 people — for the program of the previous government that the member had talked about — calling it a clawback and saying it was creating unfair choices for people, were the same people who sat at the table with me when I announced this, to say that this was the best solution possible to the transportation issue. The people who complained about the previous government were the people who were consulted fully in this process. They said this was the model that they believed was the best model moving forward.

I would suggest, for the member, that part of the challenge that the previous government had is that they spoke to nobody about what they were doing. None of the organizations that represent the interests of persons with disabilities were consulted about the previous model. We sat down and talked extensively. In fact, some of the criticism that I got was that it was taking too long.

We took our time because it is an important challenge. It is a challenge and a question of fairness, that you treat everybody across the province fairly. How do you do that? How do you make sure that people who live in an area that doesn’t have public transit receive a fair treatment to the people who are enjoying TransLink services.

That was what we did. We sat down with all of those organizations. We met with them until we found a model that we thought made sense and was an efficient model for us to deliver — and to deliver it simply and with as much choice as possible for people to decide how they wanted to use that money. I’m pretty happy about it, since it’s a model that was embraced and accepted by those people in the disability community who had raised the concerns about the model of the previous government.

M. Hunt: I would thank the minister for that very frank answer, because I think communications is totally….

One other question on this before I leave, and that is the mandate letter. Your mandate letter said, if I have it correctly here, to restore the bus pass. That is not what has happened here. It is, instead, a transportation allowance, just like had been previously proposed.

I’ll just leave that there. I ask: where, then, is the money coming from for this allowance?

Hon. S. Simpson: The cost of this for a full year is approximately $70 million, and that money will be in the next budget. In terms of the time between January 1 and the end of March, the end of this year, we went to Treasury Board and received a funding allocation out of the contingency reserves in order to be able to put the transportation supplement in place for January 1 leading through to the end of the fiscal year.

I would also note, on the comment about the bus pass: it’s correct, as the member says, that in the mandate letter, it talks about a bus pass. What I would say is that once we started to do the work on this, we realized that a bus pass wasn’t going to get us where we wanted to go.

There were a lot of people where…. Well, the majority of people, certainly, live in an area where a bus pass can be used, whether it’s a bus in Kamloops or a bus in Surrey, but for some people, it’s not there. So when we started to say, “How do we make this fair?” we shifted the conversation to a transportation supplement. It took some time to work that through with people in the community, to understand how it was achieving similar objectives.

It was a slightly different approach, because it was a more fair approach, we believe, that captured everybody on PWD. So we moved to that language from bus pass language that was in the mandate letter. The Premier told me that was okay. I’ll get a pass that that was okay.

M. Hunt: Thank you to the minister for that explanation. I believe the process of rationalizing it was exactly the challenge the previous minister had.

[3:10 p.m.]

Now, simply to clarify, I would like to clarify the numbers. If the minister could please tell me what persons with disabilities received before the B.C. Liberal transportation support allowance was announced, after that transportation allowance and all that was involved there, and what they will receive once the NDP’s transportation supplement is included.

Hon. S. Simpson: I’m going to work through the math. My understanding here is prior to…. Under the previous government, a person with disabilities received $906 a month prior to the $77 that was provided. That was a $25 increase plus $52 for transportation purposes, taking somebody to $983. We then increased the amount that a person receives with the $100 increase that was provided. We took people to $1,133, and we have now added $52 to that, as the transportation supplement, to $1,185.

The difference between what somebody would have been receiving would have been $983 versus $1,185, effective January 1.

M. Hunt: Thank you to the minister for that. It’s good to have the math worked through so I can work on that later.

Social innovation. “Social Innovation” was removed from your title as minister. My question is: what changes have been made to the key responsibilities in this division of the ministry?

Hon. S. Simpson: The member is correct. We changed the name of the ministry from Social Development and Social Innovation to Social Development and Poverty Reduction. That did indicate a focus of attention on the issues of inequality and poverty reduction.

[3:15 p.m.]

As to the initiatives around social innovation, none of those have changed — those conversations, those moves forward, the things we can accomplish there. There is still work being done on that, and the staff who were working on that continue to work on those projects today.

M. Hunt: The next logical question that flows from that is, then: what is the budget for social innovation? Are there any changes from last year, and how many actual employees are involved?

Hon. S. Simpson: There’s been no change. Under the previous government, when it was the Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation, there were two FTEs and about $200,000 allocated annually to that particular file. There continue to be two FTEs and about $200,000 allocated to that file. So nothing has changed on both sides of July 18.

M. Hunt: My understanding is that the director of social innovation has left the ministry. My question is: has he been replaced?

Hon. S. Simpson: Yes.

M. Hunt: Short and sweet and to the point. Then, the question is: with the $200,000 that’s being involved in this, what projects are the two FTEs working on?

Hon. S. Simpson: As has happened in the past, a portion of that is going to look at social procurement options and how to do that and engaging discussions with the federal government around social innovation that the federal government has expressed some interest in.

In this discussion, because social innovation is an area that I’m keenly interested in, I’m really pleased that I’ve had very significant discussions with the B.C. Business Council, with the United Way, which are partnering on social innovation issues. They’re doing work together.

I’ve been talking to the leadership in both organizations and to others about social innovation and how we embrace that as part of a poverty reduction initiative, knowing that the ability, whether it’s around social entrepreneurship, social investments…. How do we bring that in and make that part of a successful poverty reduction strategy? One of the cornerstones of a poverty reduction strategy will be creating opportunities for people to move forward and fulfil their dreams. Social innovation may well afford us a tool and a vehicle to help do that.

We’re talking to major and significant organizations in the business community and in the non-profit sector that are focused on this. We’ll be looking at how we draw that into the broader poverty reduction initiative moving forward.

I expect the interest in social innovation as a tool, as one of the tools we use for poverty reduction, to potentially grow as we look at what those look like, as we explore the models for getting us where we want to go on poverty reduction.

M. Hunt: Let me use that, and we’ll just slide over to poverty reduction, because it works logically at this moment in time. Obviously, it’s been added to the title of the minister. So what is the budget for poverty reduction, and where did the money come from?

[3:20 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: We have allocated, through the end of this fiscal year, $1.2 million to poverty reduction. That’s money for planned development, moving forward. We will be going forward to Treasury Board to talk about the allocation for next year — in the next budget, of course, as we move forward.

We have $1.2 million between now and the end of the fiscal year. That pays for a consultation process. The member may know that it’s paying the expenses of the advisory forum that has been put in place to assist me. It’s paid for us — expenses only, I would note — to bring in other advice around that. And it also pays for three FTEs in the ministry who are dedicated to the poverty reduction initiative. So there are three FTEs paid out of that as well.

M. Hunt: Where the money comes from. I didn’t quite catch the answer, if it was in the budget itself, or is this something that, again, has been pulled from contingencies?

Hon. S. Simpson: We approached Treasury Board. There had been some money that was allocated to the ministry, that was allocated for potential caseload increases and that, which wasn’t used. So Treasury Board approved this allocation of $1.2 million. It was a ministry request that I brought forward to Treasury Board in order to be able to support the process of developing the strategy.

M. Hunt: Obviously, social innovation at $200,000 and two FTEs. Poverty reduction, $1.2 million — obvious why that should be changed in the title; it’s obviously more significant — and three FTEs.

But if we just do the quick math. That’s got about $900,000, if I just do a quick, rough comparison between the two. Saying the two FTEs, spending $100,000 each, in social innovation and taking the three…. That’s $300,000 I take out of that, just for the sake of argument. That’s got about $900,000 for consultation in two months. That’s an awful lot of money, Mr. Minister.

Hon. S. Simpson: The consultation involves a number of pieces right now. We have put in place the advisory forum to the minister, which has 27 people on it. It covers their expenses.

I would note that for the large majority of those people, we’re not paying them to be on that forum. It covers the cost that we have contracted with the Social Planning and Research Council of B.C. to do a consultation in 20 communities around the province on this so that we’re able to reach into communities and make sure we’re talking to people in communities — people who are living the experience of poverty — and agencies and organizations and local governments who are struggling with dealing with the issues of poverty in their community. So they will be going around.

They will be doing this work, preparing reports related to those consultations and feeding that back in to me, as well as to the advisory forum, as we evolve these ideas on this. Also, we put in place a website that has received thousands of hits, seeking advice also on poverty reduction.

One of the things that we believe is that we need to engage people. Poverty reduction will not be successful because this one ministry is taking the task on. It will be successful because we have engaged and built community support around the need to do that, and we have engaged other ministries, obviously, as well, in their support. It will be a multiministry effect.

[3:25 p.m.]

It’s part of that process of going out and engaging people. It’s included in our contract for consultation, the work of the forum. We will be getting some technical advice on measurements, moving forward, and we’ll be moving that forward. I expect that will cost us, expense-wise, some dollars and the website.

M. Hunt: As we start going down this road of poverty reduction and all the process that is obviously going to be involved with that, my first question in this process is: what is the working definition of “poverty” that the minister is going to be using?

Hon. S. Simpson: We’re using the market basket measure. The member may know that there are three measurements that are used by different groups in the country around low-income cutoffs — the market basket measure, those….

The best advice we have is that market basket measure is the best measurement. That’s, essentially, looking at a basket of goods and services, determining what the cost of that would be in a given community and then evaluating people’s ability to buy that basket of goods and services — food, housing, transportation, etc. — to measure those who are in poverty and also to help to measure the depth of poverty, which is equally as important a question.

That’s the measurement we’re using at this time. That’s the same measurement the federal government uses, primarily, for measurement as well. We’re looking at that. I will say that we’re having conversations with some of the academics who specialize in these areas and in measurement about how we should use that, moving forward, and about whether any adjustment to that to deal with the specifics of costs in British Columbia…. I think of things like housing costs, which may be more challenging than in some other communities in the country — whether we need to look at adjustment to that.

The measurement we’re using, which is widely accepted, is the market basket.

M. Hunt: You actually anticipated the next question beautifully, so thank you very much.

What is the current rate of poverty? As we begin this process, you sort of need those baselines to be able to know where we are, as we move forward. So my question on that is going to be: what is the current rate of poverty in B.C.? And what is the current rate of child poverty in British Columbia?

Hon. S. Simpson: Just a little under 700,000 people living in poverty, about 689,000 people. That’s 14.8 percent of our population. Child poverty — 14½ percent of children live in poverty.

We know that over 40 percent of those people living in poverty are working poor. They’ve got a paycheque coming into the house, and they can’t make ends meet. For persons with disabilities and in the Indigenous community, the rate is double what it is with the rest of the population.

M. Hunt: As we look at the poverty rates…. There was recently a report that came out on that. We ended up with interesting anomalies that happen when we look at these reports. My question is going to be concerning a particular anomaly, and that is: how does the minister account for the high rate of poverty in Richmond?

[3:30 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: I think that’s a pretty good question. I can’t give you an answer for why Richmond would be in one place and other communities in another. We have looked through, and we’ve looked at communities across the province. That’s part of the task of both that investment of that $1.2 million and other dollars that allow us to dig more deeply with that.

We will use those resources to help us to figure that out and also to figure out why some communities seem to be more hard hit. And are there unique aspects of what’s in those communities that are different?

The member will know.... I anticipate, because I know the member takes his work seriously, that he’s been looking at what organizations talk about when they talk about poverty reduction and the initiatives that are talked about by different groups. The challenge we have, really, is to say all of those are smart ideas. They are ideas that have merit. But really how we move forward, how we apply a strategy, where we set the priorities, how we identify what impacts poverty in Metro Vancouver — and maybe separately in subsections of Metro Vancouver versus what happens in Quesnel, Cranbrook or in Williams Lake.… They are different, and there are different factors.

We’re looking pretty hard at why those factors…. Why are they different in different places? What are the things that compel those factors? And then being able, hopefully, to develop a strategy that allows us to be nimble enough to be able to emphasize certain initiatives in certain communities where the best information we have says we are, in fact, tackling the issues that are most prevalent in those communities.

The question about Richmond is a good one. I will assure the member that as soon as we find out why Richmond is different than Burnaby, we’ll let him know.

M. Hunt: I appreciate that answer. But I have a challenge mentally with the use of the word “nimble” when we deal with large government bureaucracies — a massive challenge for you, Mr. Minister. We know it’s just going to be a challenge to work through — and that nimbleness, a great ideal.

My thought is that possibly the reason why we’re seeing a higher rate of poverty in Richmond might actually be because of international students living in community, and my question is going to be to the minister: how do we…? Because here in British Columbia we have a very attractive educational system to the rest of the world. We have a tremendous number of students in our…. Right from kindergarten to grade 12, as well as in post-secondary, who are in fact international students, many of whom do not have incomes in Canada…. They’re here taking advantage of our educational system and by the way, paying for it, and that’s perfectly fine. I have no problem with that.

How is the minister going to deal with those types of things, as we deal with…? Again, the minister has said, “Well, we’re going to try and look at community” — community, I guess, in the real sense. I’m drawing to his attention that there are those types of things. I think he’s already answered my question in the fact that he’s going to attempt to try to look at the differences of communities and those sorts of things as we work along.

One of the mandates that the minister has in the issue of poverty reduction…. He has a mandate to set targets and timelines. So the question is: how will the minister set those targets and timelines, and what is he looking at in terms of setting targets and timelines?

[3:35 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: I thank the member for the question. The issue of targets and timelines, and how we identify those, is exactly the work that’s going on right now. That’s why we are engaging these processes that we’re in, why we’re having significant conversations with the academic and expert advisers that we have — to help us with determining how to set the measurements, the targets and timelines.

The first question that I’ve really put to the advisory forum is to talk about the issue of targets and timelines, to look at how other jurisdictions have addressed those issues and give me the best advice they can on how we do that and how we incorporate targets and timelines into legislation and into the plan itself — the two pieces, both the legislation and the plan. That work is exactly what’s going on right now as we head for next year. It will look mostly, I would say, at those broader issues.

The anomalies of why a Richmond is here or is it foreign students or that will be considerations, but we certainly are looking at the broader questions when we look at targets and timelines. But it’s one of the significant questions that’s on the table as to how to establish those in a credible way and in a way that we’re able to measure moving forward, hopefully, to be able to meet them.

M. Hunt: The obvious question that goes right on the end of that one: recognizing the challenge that that is. Which is why I raised the question.

As we look at the other poverty reduction strategies across this country, we see very clearly that those have failed. They have failed particularly in holding themselves accountable and actually continuing that process on. So my question to the minister is: while you are setting the targets and timelines, how is the ministry going to hold itself accountable — a year, two years, three years, four years — as we continue down the continuum of time?

Hon. S. Simpson: I think that’s a really good question. I’ve had a look at some of the other plans across the country, and we are digging more deeply into those plans to see what worked, what didn’t work, why it did work and why it didn’t work.

The member is quite right. Many of those plans did not meet their objectives. Some of them got lost along the way, I think. Some of them — I’m not sure that their objectives were what they should have been. Some of them ran out of gas along the way. Some of them had political champions who maybe aren’t there anymore.

There are a variety of reasons. That’s why we’re trying to learn from that. Maybe that’s the advantage of having every other province in the country have poverty reduction strategies and B.C. not have one. We at least get to learn from what did and didn’t go before.

We’re going to legislate. The first thing is…. As the member may know, every other province has a poverty reduction strategy. About half of them are legislative and about half of them are programs. We’re going to legislate this so it becomes the law of the land that we are going to attack the issue of poverty. We are going to put a commitment around targets and timelines into there. We are going to put a reporting process into that legislation that will ensure that, on a regular basis, there is reporting, so people can see how initiatives are moving forward, what’s working and what’s not working. All of those will be issues to make it successful.

As the member knows, the other thing that will be absolutely critical will be that we have a government in place in the province that commits to this, moves forward and continues to make it a priority. That’s a question of who’s sitting on the government side of the House.

M. Hunt: And/or who the actual members are that are sitting in that government and which side of the House they are.

Thank you to the minister. I recognize they are not easy questions to answer, and I didn’t really expect answers. Rather, I simply wanted to raise the issues because I think they are critically important, walking through this — and that we don’t walk in with illusions of grandeur. I know that.... From the member’s background, I have absolutely no question of his sincerity in what he’s doing. That is absolute.

The minister also mentioned the issue of homelessness. Normally, when we think of homelessness, we immediately cop that out to the Housing Ministry, and we let them work on that. But there’s so much more that’s involved within that whole side of things.

[3:40 p.m.]

My question is: how will the ministry work at reducing homelessness outside of the Ministry of Housing?

Hon. S. Simpson: Well, as the member may know, the issue of homelessness is both in my mandate letter and in the mandate letter of the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing. We have the same obligation in both of our letters, and that is for a provincial homelessness plan and a provincial count.

We’ve been working together on this, to do the work moving forward. We have engaged and pulled into this the new Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, because there are connections, as I’m sure the member is fully aware. Many of the people who are struggling with homelessness often are facing other challenges in the area of mental health and addictions. So we brought the three ministries together.

We have taken first steps around modular housing and the announcement around 2,000 units of modular housing, along with operating dollars to support those units. Those units are now being allocated out. I believe, I think, seven municipalities, local governments, have now received and approved locally to have modular housing, and the units, I think, are going out into those communities now.

We are doing the work now on what a provincial count might look like and what a plan might look like moving forward. There’s still a lot of work to be done on that, because the complexities probably are in building the partnerships with local governments. We know in some communities that will be a greater challenge than others — and making sure that all of the players who have to be there are there in the partnership. That work is going on now, and the member should expect some announcements around that in the next calendar year, as we put in place the steps for both the provincial count, which is part of my mandate obligation, and a homelessness action plan moving forward.

M. Hunt: That raises the question: which ministry is responsible for the homelessness action plan?

Hon. S. Simpson: It is a joint responsibility. Obviously, the bricks and mortar side of this comes from Municipal Affairs and Housing. B.C. Housing is part of that ministry, and obviously, B.C. Housing is the vehicle for delivering the bricks and mortar and putting together many of those arrangements. Some of the broader planning issues…. Again, the three ministries are working very closely, but this ministry will be taking the bulk of the lead responsibility around helping to evolve that plan and the count — the strategy for the count.

M. Hunt: Shifting subjects to supportive recovery houses, my question is: what is the current social assistance rate for persons residing in registered recovery houses?

Hon. S. Simpson: For registered recovery houses — and they’re required to be registered through the Ministry of Health — the payment is…. There is $30.90 a day that’s paid to the recovery house for individuals who are there. For people who are staying at the recovery house, they receive $95 a month as a comfort allowance, and the house receives $30.90 a day for the time they’re there.

M. Hunt: Thank you, Minister. There’s recently been increased support to those on income support, those that are disability rates of $100 a month. My question is: why would those people who reside in registered recovery houses not receive that increase?

[3:45 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: Thanks to the member for the question. As I’m told now, effective December 1, the comfort allowance for people will be $222.

M. Hunt: Mr. Minister, that wasn’t the question that I had asked. My question is simply…. Currently the recovery houses are receiving $30.90 per day. If you multiply that by 30 days, that comes to the $900 that persons…. I’ll just use the example of persons with disabilities since you gave us the math for that previously. That comes out to $900 a month. You have increased those good people to $1,185 or will be when your transportation supplement comes in.

If you divide that by 30 — just to put it into a per diem — that comes to $39 approximately, give or take a few cents. But that’s not what is being given to recovery houses. That is my question. Why is the number not being increased for those who are residing in recovery houses?

Hon. S. Simpson: Well, I haven’t done the math off the top of my head, but I would suggest that if you take the $30.90 a day and multiply it by 30 days and then add into that the amount of comfort allowance that goes to the individual staying in the recovery house, you get to about the number you’re talking about.

M. Hunt: Well, the interesting thing on this is that the recovery house gets the $30. They don’t get the $200 or whatever the comfort allowance is that the individual gets. As a matter of fact, the recovery house also doesn’t get…. If that person receives, because the person happens to be diabetic…. They don’t receive any money for the extra food or the change in diet that they have to deal with, with someone who is a diabetic. That money is now stripped away, and they stay at the $30.90.

It’s very difficult for those who are running and operating registered recovery homes. We’re not talking about flophouses. We’re talking about registered recovery homes. It is very difficult for them to be dealing with the transitions of costs when they’re still getting paid the $30.90 per diem.

[3:50 p.m.]

They’re also providing transportation. They’re also providing all these different things for these individuals, and they are receiving absolutely no increase whatsoever. In fact, the ministry is stripping, as I said, dietary supplements from them.

My question is: why is there not an increase to the recovery homes for the individuals that are residing with them?

Hon. S. Simpson: The member makes a good point. There has been no increase probably for a decade on those houses. There has been no increase on home shares and no increase for foster parents and no increase in a wide range of areas, where costs have continued to grow and grow and grow, and the government has not supported those costs for service providers.

This is a very real issue that the member raises. What I want to assure the member is that I’ve met with recovery house operators, as I’ve met with some of those other groups that are delivering those services. They have all come…. Believe me. They came very quickly after July 18 to talk about the resources and how they struggle to deliver services.

The issues that the member raises are not insignificant issues. They are issues that this government takes very seriously. As the member, I’m sure, will appreciate, we’ve had about a decade of no increases at all for a whole range of residential service providers of different kinds. Those will all be matters for consideration as we move forward, but I think that the member raises a good point that they probably should have kept up over the years.

M. Hunt: The last thing on earth I would do is blame this ministry for what has been described as “the 16 years.” I’m not at all raising that. I am simply raising the issue of the decisions that this minister has made. This minister made the decision to increase all recipients by $100 a month and has neglected those who are operating the recovery houses on behalf of those who are the recipients of those dollars. I leave that with the minister because that is the process of his decision.

I’ll bring another issue to his attention, which I’m sure they brought to his attention as well. I’ll just raise it once again. That is that often clients are released from the court system to recovery houses. The client immediately becomes the responsibility of the home, and there is no funding for that client until they are accepted for receiving social assistance. Since the client is simply moving from the Ministry of Justice, corrections…. I believe that’s the current title. I could have the title wrong. You understand who I’m talking about anyhow. He’s moving from the ministry responsible for corrections — we’ll say it that way — to the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction.

Why must the recovery house pay for the transition from the expense of one ministry to another ministry?

[3:55 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: We do have a system of intake procedures that is integrated with health care, with hospitals, with prisons. People are in those facilities, either they’re incarcerated in a corrections facility or they’re long term in a hospital, and they’re being released. Those systems…. We do work on an intake process with them so that if they’re released, they should transition immediately over to our system.

If the member has cases where he knows that hasn’t occurred, I would invite him, if it’s possible, if the people are agreeable, to make that information available to us. We’ll see where there are challenges with the system.

M. Hunt: Thank you to the minister for that offer. I certainly will get that to him.

Concerning registered recovery facilities, a question from the general public is: how are these facilities monitored for quality of care and for value of the programs that they produce? How are these monitored?

Hon. S. Simpson: They’re registered and administered through the assisted living registry in the Ministry of Health. The ministry, through that registry, has the obligation for oversight of those houses — first of all to register them and then to provide the oversight. That’s provided through the Ministry of Health. I believe the health authorities are the actual vehicle for going out and doing that work.

M. Hunt: The simple question, then, is…. The Ministry of Social Development provides the money, the per diem, but it is the Ministry of Health that regulates them.

Hon. S. Simpson: The recovery homes fall under the Ministry of Health in terms of registering them for oversight and quality of service and all of those things. Then we provide support to people who come into the recovery houses who are our clients. That’s why that support is only provided to those houses that are registered with the Ministry of Health.

M. Hunt: Good recovery homes provide good programs that cost money that is in addition to the $30.90 that the ministry is currently providing to them, hopefully bringing good results that, in fact, save taxpayers money in many different ministries.

[4:00 p.m.]

The question is: does the ministry support — in any way, shape or form — these costly programs at recovery homes?

Hon. S. Simpson: The extent of the support that this ministry provides is the $30.90 per day for people who are resident in the recovery houses who are on our caseloads. I am not aware, at this point, of who else would provide program dollars. I suspect that they probably don’t get other program dollars there. I know that it’s a live conversation. As I said…. Clearly, the member has been talking to people in recovery houses, as have I. I’m sure it will be a live conversation, moving forward, as we try to improve.

What the member will know is the recovery house initiative, when it first emerged, was a bit of a mixed bag between those where the most sincere of efforts were made and good practices were adopted…. Those houses have added value in terms of supporting people with challenges. We know that there were others that were less so the case. Some were dubious, at best. So the registration process has been very helpful in ensuring that we’re focused on and supporting those that are actually out there trying to support people and help people to improve their lives and get their lives back together again.

I think it’s a fair question as to how we support them. Our support comes through the amount that we pay for people to be resident in those houses. I know, in fact, that many of those operators, probably in a collective fashion, are talking to myself and my colleagues at the cabinet table about whether there are other opportunities there. We’ll look at those in the coming year.

M. Hunt: I think this is another example, as we talked earlier about the homelessness thing, where that’s an interministry thing that works together to create the action plan. We’ll see how that one does.

This is a situation where, again, we see multiple ministries involved in something. I would suggest that there are some gaps that are created by the ministries and that possibly the ministries should be getting together and working on including Mental Health and Addictions, Health and this ministry. They all have a piece of the stake and a piece of the puzzle that’s there — all hopefully having the same end but having the difficulties of multiple ministries being involved in it and, therefore, gaps because of multiple ministries. I’ll just leave that as a comment rather than getting something back.

Shifting subjects once again, truth and reconciliation. How has the ministry responded to the call to action of truth and reconciliation?

Hon. S. Simpson: The question that the member has just put is an important question. The member will know that every mandate letter for every minister included the issues of UNDRIP and the TRC and the calls to action. Every minister was obliged and told that we are to create a lens that we ensure we see our programs and our initiatives through as we move forward.

That’s why, with the discussion, for example, around poverty reduction, we have engaged a significant discussion with First Nations. We have five or six people, Indigenous folks, including representatives from the summit and the friendship centres and the Métis Nation, on the advisory forum to the minister. They’re there.

We’re also engaged in a significant discussion about how we move forward around making sure we’re providing supports, particularly for the urban Aboriginal community. As the member will know, on reserve is primarily a federal responsibility. Off reserve is a provincial responsibility. So we’re quite engaged in those discussions moving forward.

The other thing is we’re in constant contact with the Ministry of Indigenous Relations, which carries the file for making sure that…. They keep an eye on these relationships, moving forward, in a wide range of areas. We’ve been seeking their advice, as well, to make sure that as we move forward, we are, in fact, engaging and talking to the people we need to be talking to and making sure that the points of conversation are the ones that need to be done.

[4:05 p.m.]

I just want to move back here to the comment that the member made about the silos. We all know about silos, and we all know about different ministries. I think those are very fair comments.

The member may know, if he looked at how the Premier structured cabinet, that he created a new cabinet committee, the social initiatives committee of cabinet. It’s a significant committee. About half the cabinet, maybe a little more, sit on that committee. It’s a committee of cabinet that I chair, and that’s the place where many of these discussions come to. We have the ministers at that table. That table also, of course, triggers a deputies committee, so the deputies are having these conversations at the same time.

We have also created a number of cabinet working groups, which the member may be aware of when he looks at the cabinet structure, including for mental health and for housing and for other initiatives — for child care. So there are those committees that have been created, as well, involving people who kind of are attuned to these conversations.

That’s not to say that solves the problem of siloing in government. We know that’s a problem that probably every government anywhere of any stripe has struggled with. But we’re trying to get at that and make sure that on a regular and continuing basis, the conversations around these critical issues — which are more than a single ministry initiative to be successful — are had at one table and that they’re an ongoing conversation, not just one-offs.

M. Hunt: Continuing on with the call to action for truth and reconciliation, at this point in time, then, if I’m hearing the minister correctly, you’re basically putting this into the poverty reduction side of things, and that is where the initiatives are going to come from. Are there other areas or other programs that the minister is looking for — for example, training for staff, those sorts of things — or different issues that came out of the calls to action on truth and reconciliation?

Hon. S. Simpson: Clearly, the area, because of the focus right now and it being a relatively new initiative, is poverty reduction at the moment. Many of the things the ministry does will be weaved into that, moving forward.

I think the question is a fair one. That’s what we have been tasked with, as ministers, across the government — how to engage that relationship with First Nations as it affects the government’s operations. How do you determine self-determination, which is the compelling issue in many cases, around UNDRIP and much of the TRC?

As we move forward on these issues, that becomes the conversation. My ministry, like many others, is engaging that process by talking to the leadership council, by engaging First Nations and Indigenous service providers — like the health council, like the friendship centres — and talking about these issues as we move forward and building a relationship where we can support capacity-building on that side and make sure that we’re sensitive in terms of how we move forward with services that will either be delivered predominantly or in some large portion to the urban Aboriginal community, which is our primary focus.

I think it really is a work in progress. I don’t think embracing UNDRIP and the TRC is kind of a check on the box. It’s going to be about building a relationship between parties who have to learn to partner together in ways that have not happened very well in the past.

[4:10 p.m.]

It is a learning exercise for us, and that will be reflected in a number of ways, including how people get hired, how services get delivered, who delivers those services, how you make sure that services have cultural sensitivity when they move forward. I think this is going to be quite a work in progress for some period of time, moving forward.

The challenge here is to make sure that it stays in the forefront of conversations, I think, and to make sure that we’re building on the strong base foundation that came out of the gathering with the chiefs that happened a couple of months ago, where I know I had, I think, a dozen or 15 bands that came and met with me at that time and identified issues that were important to them, in terms of their work.

Other groups have come to me in the urban communities and have identified issues, and the challenge will be to make sure that we’re working with them in the partnership moving forward, rather than in some paternalistic fashion.

The Chair: At this time, this committee will enter a nine-minute recess. It is currently 4:11. We will recommence at 4:20.

The committee recessed from 4:11 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.

[B. Ma in the chair.]

M. Hunt: Shifting to employment services, what is the budget for employment services?

Hon. S. Simpson: About $299 million comes from the federal government, through their share, and about $29 million of provincial money. So that would be $327.9 million total for this ministry.

M. Hunt: Since there’s a federal and a provincial number, am I to assume, then, that all of the money from the federal government goes directly into services and none of that is taken by the ministry for administration?

Hon. S. Simpson: Of the federal share of money, the $298.9 million, $20.5 million is the administrative cost, to administer it, that the province spends. We take $20.5 million for administrative costs.

M. Hunt: Are there any changes planned for the procurement of these programs?

Hon. S. Simpson: There has been a bilateral negotiation going on between the province and the federal government over that federal pot of money and around the conditions and the stipulations that the federal government puts on that money. We are very close to what we hope is a successful conclusion of that in the next couple of months.

That will be followed by discussions with the current service providers and people in the sector, ultimately leading to a series of requests for qualifications and requests for proposals. The new contracts will be let effective April of 2019. This next year will be the period of RFPs out there, allowing people to make their applications. That will be resolved over the next year, along with, of course, allowing enough time…. It’ll be a fairly quick process moving forward in some ways. We’ll want to make sure that if there any changes in service providers, obviously, there’s time for transition from one to the other and still have consistent services.

[4:25 p.m.]

M. Hunt: Obviously, continuous improvement is the general concept that we want to have. My question is: how does the minister plan to ensure that vulnerable youth and persons with disabilities achieve better employment and career outcomes?

Hon. S. Simpson: I think that’s a great question. That really leads, I think, to part of the challenge that we see in front of us to be successful around poverty reduction and a reducing-inequality initiative.

One of the things that I’ve said through that process is that there are two main tracks to that, I believe. One is the affordability issue that we ran on in the election, and it’s very important. We’re going to achieve affordability either by reducing costs for essential services for people who don’t have much money, people on these programs, or improving their resources, and probably some combination of the two.

The second piece is around creating opportunity. We want to break the cycle of poverty. We need to create opportunities for people. We’ve seen that in some of the government initiatives that have come forward from other ministries, like eliminating fees for adult basic education and English language learning, the support for kids aging out of care in terms of paying for post-secondary education. Those are a couple of initiatives. We believe that we’ll see that with the increased minimum wage, once the Fair Wages Commission comes back and reports out its recommendations to get to $15 an hour as the minimum wage.

The employment programs are part of that too. The member may know that the program that was put in place by the previous government was structured into what were called four tiers. Tiers 1 and 2 were largely people who were relatively job-ready. Then structures 3 and 4 were people with more complex issues, including some of the people that the member talks about in his question. We’re looking at that and ways to increase flexibility to ensure that those service providers are able to provide the services necessary to have the outcomes that we want moving forward.

One of the criticisms of the program up to this point has been that it seemed to have spent too much time on output and not outcomes; i.e., it was checking the box of how many people came through the door, many of them relatively job-ready people who maybe needed some help with a resume, maybe needed a little bit of job search skills, access to a computer, somebody to photocopy their resumes, those kinds of things, and then they were pretty well together to go out and pursue employment on their own. There are other groups of people, a significant group that require more help than that if they’re going to be successful.

My hope is that, depending on the negotiation with the federal government, because they have expectations for the almost $300 million that they give us to provide these services, if we can increase the flexibility there, we’ll be able to enhance those services to people with PWD, to kids who have aged out of care and are maybe looking now for what they do. That is very much what I hope we’ll see, moving forward, when we see some of the efforts, depending on once we can hopefully get this exercise with the federal government resolved in a positive way. We’re feeling good about the negotiations, so I’m hopeful about that.

M. Hunt: Some would argue that raising the minimum wage to $15 is going to, in fact, decrease the employability of some of these individuals.

[R. Glumac in the chair.]

My question is going to be: how are the minister and the ministry going to work at dealing with that gap between affordability or — I’m trying to think of the words for it — the skills that the individual has versus the dollars that are having to be paid for those skills and that gap between the two, with these? How are you going to work at addressing that?

Hon. S. Simpson: I think that’s a great question. I don’t believe and I have seen no evidence to suggest that an across-the-board increase over time, in a thoughtful way, to a $15 minimum wage in fact will impact employment opportunity. We need to create opportunities in other ways to make sure that people are there.

I think the point that the member makes, which is a good point — and that’s part of the key to this — is improving people’s skills.

[4:30 p.m.]

I’d heard and I think I read the member’s comments in the article that was written on Sunday. I don’t agree entirely with him, but I do agree with something that the member said, which is that education is the key component here to success, and I think it’s a big part of the key to poverty reduction.

I remember when I brought legislation, as an opposition member, around a poverty reduction strategy, often the previous Premier and the previous minister made the case that the best poverty reduction strategy was a job. I would argue that if you want to break the cycle, it’s probably an education. It’s probably giving people the skills that they need to go out and have the confidence and the skill set to approach employers. I think that becomes a very big piece, and that’s why Advanced Education, Skills and Training is such an important part of a poverty reduction initiative moving forward. That ministry is engaged fully in our conversations about how we go about doing that.

We’ve also had significant conversations. I’ve met, in the last month or so, with the leadership of the B.C. Business Council and the leadership of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce. We have a representative of the chamber of commerce who sits on my advisory forum — appointed, essentially, named by the chamber.

We’ve had conversations about how they can support poverty reduction and about how they can support the kinds of things they can do to encourage employment opportunities, primarily for persons with disabilities. But they’re also very open — and the conversations are very positive — to how we create those opportunities for other people who face challenges to be able to get into the workforce and make their lives better.

I was very encouraged by that, and I’m hoping that as we move those conversations forward about how we can work together in a collaborative way, business will be there, educational opportunities will be there, key parts of the non-profit sector will be there, the ministry and other ministries will be there, and that together we can make some progress that maybe has eluded us for a period of time.

M. Hunt: I have no illusions on the challenge that the minister is facing on this. I simply give two simple examples of it. One, a young man with disabilities that used to flip hamburgers at Burger King. As minimum wage rose, technology took his job away, simply because now, today, nobody flips hamburgers at any of the burger joints. It’s all done by technology and machines. So technology becomes one of those unintended consequences.

You also have ones where…. I remember a Christmas party where this young man was excited, looking forward to actually meeting his boss, because he did piecework. He took the components of bifold doors, loaded them into a plastic bag and then sealed it. He did piecework, and that was employment that he had.

For both of these individuals, great dignity in having a job, great dignity in having paycheques. But by the same token, the challenge of minimum wage simply made them unaffordable, and technology has taken over.

My question to the minister, again, is: how are we going to deal with these types of challenges, particularly the illustrations you’ve given? I would agree with you and argue that it is still in those two top categories. Those are the people that are easily employable. The other categories of those who are not as easily employable — how are we going to work with them?

Hon. S. Simpson: It’s a good conversation and an important one. We have some resources to support that, and we have some validation to support that. The member may know that, established under the B.C. Liberal government, particularly around supporting persons with disabilities, was the presidents group. The presidents group is a group co-chaired by the CEO of Vancity and the CEO of the airport authority.

It’s been in place for a while. It’s a number of senior people in government. They have been providing advice, and I’m very grateful for them. I’ve had a chance to meet with them once. They’ve been providing advice on how we create those opportunities to bring people into the workforce who have faced particular challenges. In that case, it’s really around persons with disabilities. So there are some people there who are pretty committed.

[4:35 p.m.]

The interesting thing…. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with a number of employers who have employed persons with disabilities. Without exception, they have said to me: “You know, our challenge was how to make the fit work, and once we sorted out how to make the fit work, we got an employee who is incredibly dedicated, who is good at what they do, who is diligent, who never misses work, who is enthusiastic about their job, and we couldn’t be happier. That’s not because we met a social responsibility, but we added a real asset to our success as a business.”

The trick for us is to get that word out to business leaders. We are not asking you for some level of charity here. We’re asking you to understand there are hundreds of thousands of people out there in British Columbia — over 300,000 at the last guess — with disabilities. Many of them have an incredible amount to offer. How do we help you? And together, how do we create that fit so we can start to give some of those people an opportunity that isn’t just you doing the right thing. It’s you getting an employee who makes your business more valuable. I think that’s a doable thing. Not easy — it will take some work, be a challenge, but I think that opportunity is there.

I think, increasingly, we’re seeing business leaders understand that. I’m heartened by the business leaders that I talk to who say they know their success and the success of the economy isn’t a simple bottom line on the dollar number. It involves more than that. They get it — that the world is a changing place and that we need to view things differently.

I think we’re getting there. It will not be easy. It will be a challenge. But, hey, none of this stuff is easy. I’m hoping we can get there. I’m counting on the member opposite to stay on my case over the years to come to help us get there.

M. Hunt: I’m always up for a good challenge like that one. Let me use an example from the recycling industry, where the recycling industry obviously is a challenging industry because we’re competing with other countries in the world that don’t have the wages that we have. Their wages are astronomically lower than ours.

Yet by the same token, I can give you an example of an employer I will not name. I’ll not name them, whether the employer or even the portion of the industry, so as to not identify them. But they, in fact, hire…. They look for those who are mentally challenged because they are able to take boring repetition and handle it. Where you and I would just get frustrated at the job, they don’t get frustrated. They work through it. They love it. They have a great ability doing it. But again, they’re in these international markets and the challenges of the minimum wage and everything that goes with that becomes a financial challenge and makes things unaffordable.

I don’t know how to ask the question, except to say: is the minister looking at ways and means that those who are in the lower categories of employability can find a way to work with employers to be able to create good, meaningful employment for these men and women who have tremendous disadvantages compared to you and I?

Hon. S. Simpson: I think that comes back, and we’ll come back to the employment programs of B.C. that we talked about before when I talked about the negotiation with the federal government and our efforts to increase flexibility and increase the ability for innovation. That requires the federal government to concur with that in a number of areas, and the conversations are positive.

If we do that…. We talked about getting to those people who have more complex issues. If we’re in a position to be able to enhance case management around that, then in fact those agencies — those Work B.C. centres, those employment centres, people who are working around that in other areas — then have the tool to go and work with employers to find that fit.

[4:40 p.m.]

I’ll go back and reiterate that employers I’ve talked to, when they’ve hired people with disabilities, what they’ve said is the biggest challenge was finding the fit. That became a responsibility both of the employer, in terms of identifying their needs; of the potential applicant and their desire and what their confidence was moving forward; and people who are supporting that applicant, who can help and say: “We can support in, maybe, a variety of ways, with specific training. We can help with, maybe, some on-the-job supports.”

Again, it’s the innovation of people who work in that field who are way smarter about that stuff, certainly, than I am, about how to get at and support that. What we need to do is give them better tools to be able to do that and the mandate that says: “Our expectation is this is going to be a priority part of your work moving forward: supporting people to be able to realize their dreams about employment.”

We see it everywhere. I talk to people with disabilities, from very complex disabilities and to people who are less so. Almost without exception, when you talk to these folks, right high on their list is that they say: “I want a job.” They want a job because they have value as people. They want to be valued, and a job is part of that.

We know that sometimes shortly after “What’s your name?” people get asked: “What do you do?” We need to create an opportunity for people to be proud and excited about answering that question. I feel confident that we can make some significant gains with this. It won’t be easy. But it would be tragic for us not to make the effort to try to do that.

Reducing poverty is about breaking the cycle. That doesn’t mean just giving people more money so that they can live a more affordable life, as important as that is. But it’s getting them out of that cycle and the opportunity to do other things and take their lives in different directions. That’s the piece that excites me the most about a poverty reduction strategy. That’s an important piece moving forward.

M. Hunt: I thank the minister for those comments. He used the word earlier called “nimble.” I would suggest that in this area, in particular, the word might be “creative.”

Interjection.

M. Hunt: Precisely. I’m happy with both. All of the above because I think that’s really what’s going to be needed. I think we’ve got to be very, very careful walking through that in that kind of innovation.

Specifically, now, let’s shift. We’ve dealt with the disabled piece of that. Let’s deal with Indigenous youth, particularly — Indigenous people, Indigenous youth in particular. Do we have special thoughts and plans concerning Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous youth?

Hon. S. Simpson: That’s an important question. It’s an important question, as I mentioned earlier, when we were talking about poverty numbers. Persons with disabilities and Indigenous people are twice as likely to be poor as other people, so it becomes a big issue. With Indigenous youth, it’s particularly a big issue.

The approach that we’re taking to that, again, as we’ve involved a number of people in the conversation…. But I think the most important parts of that conversation moving forward are the people that we’re hoping will help us with this.

As I said, we’ve engaged the friendship centres across the province. There are 25 friendship centres across British Columbia, aboriginal friendship centres. In many communities, like a Prince George, they are the biggest social service agency in the city. They deliver more services. They have more assets. They’re important. In the Cariboo — the same thing.

[4:45 p.m.]

We’re working closely with them. We’re working closely also in Vancouver, where we have the friendship centre. We also have Urban Native Youth, an organization we’re working with, which focuses on aboriginal youth in the city of Vancouver, where there are very complex challenges. They would work, I know, with young people in the member’s community of Surrey as well.

We’re working with those organizations to help us decide what that strategy looks like moving forward. As we move to the kind of specific content around program development or that looks at employment opportunities and opportunities to deal with what is often an array of issues that people have, I think we’re going to rely on being able to partner with those organizations that are credible service providers in the Indigenous community across the province to help us to evolve and deliver the programs that make sense.

That’s a work in progress. It’s a piece that we have to get farther on. It’s part of that parallel track. I talked about the poverty reduction strategy and about the fact that we know for the Indigenous community, some kind of urban strategy is going to be necessary as well.

They are going to have a lot of crossover. There’s no desire to separate them entirely in the Indigenous community, so they’re going to blend together. But there are going to be aspects that are going to require particular treatment and particular insight. We’re counting on those organizations, over the coming months, to help us to evolve that, as we put these plans more specifically in place.

M. Hunt: Continuum of employment. How is that being considered in supporting both people in the employment program as well as the income program? I guess I can expand on that by saying this. Marginalized people often get precarious employment. They’re short-term, casual, part-time. Vulnerable people are often only able to participate in the workforce on a casual basis because of their disability, their health, whatever else.

How does the minister intend to ensure that these people are fully supported and have that ability to work along with their skills and abilities, over time, to be able to contribute, to be engaged and, ultimately, contribute to society in the context of all of the programs that you’re responsible for?

Hon. S. Simpson: Two pieces I’d like to reference. First of all, the member will know that we increased the earning exemptions. For somebody on PWD, it had been $9,600 a year as an annual exemption. We’ve increased that to $12,000 now, to allow people to earn up to $12,000 before they lose any of their benefit.

That’s a first step, and that’s a pretty important step. I mean, we know that at the point when we increased this — I think it was October 1 — we had about 1,500 people, I think, that were getting right up against it in terms of their earnings. You know, not a major number, but an important number. They now have more room. So we’ve increased that to allow people on PWD to, on average, be able to earn upwards of $1,000 a month before they face any loss of their income. Of course, they continue to maintain and keep their benefit packages — medical, other benefits — through all that. That helps there.

The other thing…. I’ll go back to the conversation we had about employment B.C. and about the work that we’re doing. The current practice is around outputs. So what that does when it measures outputs…. The way that works is that those agencies put in a bill for having delivered some very specific services for an individual.

[4:50 p.m.]

These would be things like resumé preparation, job search, employment counselling, interview preparation, financial needs assessments — some of those things. You can put the list together, and I think the member would understand that here’s the variety of services.

Well, our conversation now is to move away from that model somewhat to an outcomes model, to say: “Okay, in the conversation with John or Jane Doe, the person we’re working with, what is it that we’re looking to accomplish here?” What do they want to accomplish? What’s the goal here that the service provider and the individual client, consumer of services, agree is an achievable objective? What is it we’re trying to achieve here — employment, whatever that is? Work towards that outcome.

That obviously means more than you got a job, you hung onto it for two months, and then you’re back where you started again. That’s the work we need to do. There’s design work around that, as we try to make the employment B.C. and the Work B.C. programs respond in a more innovative way, in a more accountable way, to meeting the needs of the people who probably need those services the most. Those are the kinds of steps that we’re looking to take at this point to, hopefully, be able to get at some of those issues there.

I’d just like to reference back. I had to take the opportunity…. I should have commented about this before. The member spoke about technology and what’s happening in technology and automation and robotics and artificial intelligence. We all know that this is not something exclusive for people with complex needs looking at their employment futures.

This is a time like we went through in the industrial revolution. We are in a different place and a different time. We need, obviously, to be sensitive to that and think that through. The role of government is to provide protections and supports, where necessary, to people as we move through what’s a fast-changing, uncertain future around those issues. I think we’re going to have to do that with everybody.

The member is absolutely correct. For people who face those challenges, who have additional challenges over and above what the member and I might have, we’re going to need to stay aware of that. But I think that challenge of automation and robotics and artificial intelligence is one that we will be struggling with for everybody in this province, not just for the handful of people who receive support from my ministry.

M. Hunt: Well, all we have to do is look at the automotive industry. We can see what that did to the horse industry. Those are the realities of technology. Fortunately, new jobs are created from that.

Shifting gears again — the single-parent employment initiative. Could the minister please tell me: what is the current number of clients participating in the single-parent employment initiative program?

[4:55 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: We’re going to get, potentially, some more information, but I’ll give the member some information as of right now. As of May 14, 2017, about 4,877 single parents have participated in the initiatives. To put that in some context, as of March of 2017, there are about 18,400 single-parent families on income and disability assistance in the province. The total who have received support is about 4,877.

M. Hunt: Now, the numbers that the minister gave were from May 14. Did I catch that correctly?

Interjection.

M. Hunt: May 14 of this year. Then, the minister hasn’t been tracking the last several months. This is now November, and I’m just wondering the transition from May to the present.

Hon. S. Simpson: The current number, I’m told, is 5,657 families.

M. Hunt: The B.C. Liberal government regularly released those numbers publicly. Is it the minister’s intention to continue not to release those numbers?

Hon. S. Simpson: I understand that they were released. They haven’t been released in the last couple of months. I certainly have no problem with releasing them, and we’ll release them.

M. Hunt: Does the minister anticipate any changes to this program in the future?

Hon. S. Simpson: As the member will know, it’s been about two years or so since the program was put in place. There is an evaluation going on right now. It’s just a standard practice: “It’s been a couple of years. Let’s look at how it has worked. Has it achieved what we wanted? What’s it doing?” I’m looking forward to results of that.

Also, one of the things that we will do as part of…. Single moms and poverty have got a lot in common. We will also be feeding the information about those programs — as we will with a variety of things — into the poverty reduction process, into the advisory forum and seeking the advice from people who have the lived experience, who are advocates in the area, who work in health, and others who make up the forum. I’ll be seeking advice from them, too, as to whether they may have some insights in the ways that we can enhance that program that make more sense for creating better opportunities for single parents.

We’re in the middle of an evaluation right now that is kind of standard, two years out — evaluation from the commencement of the program.

M. Hunt: Would the minister, then, say in his general evaluation at two years, recognizing that he hasn’t got all the details from his staff…? Would the minister characterize this as being a relatively successful program?

[5:00 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: The member may know of the 5,500 to 5,600 families who’ve received support. About 1,400 have received employment under the program there. Now, there are issues about how well that employment has been sustained, and we spoke about that earlier. There have been some issues. Those are the things that are part of what we’re looking at, at this point.

I’m reserving judgment. I think the question becomes not that…. The 1,400, I think, is a pretty good number. It could be better, but it’s not a bad number. I want to understand better how that is working longer term, and it comes back to that outputs and outcomes conversation that I was having before about how we get there.

I haven’t had a chance to look at it closely enough myself. I think it’s a program that offers some possibilities and opportunities. I’m keen about that. We’ll look at whether there may be ways to enhance it so that maybe a few more people are getting success out of it or maybe we’re seeing that success be sustained for a longer period of time. I would hope maybe we’ll come back to next year’s estimates and be able to be more definitive about the answer about the success of the program.

J. Thornthwaite: My question to the minister is about handyDART. I don’t know whether or not you need any warning about that. This is on behalf of a constituent of mine who has a disabled daughter. I’ll quote what she wrote to me:

“The disabled patrons were all sent letters instructing them to purchase a Compass card and that the regular bus passes and FareSaver tickets would become invalid. The first problem was the $5 fee that is charged for the empty plastic card.

“The next problem was that the disabled patrons have to charge the card up with money. The locations where the empty Compass cards are purchased — at SkyTrain, SeaBus, West Coast Express, the airport, ferry terminals and some London Drugs — aren’t the same places where you buy your time and load your card. The cards are sold in machines with nobody to help. Disabled patrons have to go to these random locations or go on line and use a credit card. This is extremely difficult, as many handicapped people don’t have a credit card or the ability to make on-line purchases.

“Letters went out to the disabled people with instructions to buy Compass cards and get them charged up because the old bus passes and FareSaver coupons would no longer be accepted. Most people complied, as they didn’t have a choice. The handyDART booking agents were apologizing over the phone and instructing people to go back to buying the books of FareSavers from the drivers. Most of us had already bought the card and paid to charge it. There’s no way to obtain a refund. It’s a mess.

“If you look at TransLink’s website, it doesn’t provide clear instructions on how to pay for handyDART. It only specifies that an adult fare is required. I know that it’s only cash or FareSaver tickets. The drivers don’t carry change either.”

My question is for the minister. Will the ministry consider expanding the B.C. bus pass program to include handyDART trips as well?

Hon. S. Simpson: Maybe the member could confirm, but the word we’re getting is that letter didn’t come from our ministry. It may have come from TransLink, not from our ministry. I’m sure…. As the member knows, TransLink is with the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, and I would urge that issue to come up.

[5:05 p.m.]

For us, absolutely. Part of the reason that we went to the model that we did, with the transportation supplement, the $52, is to give people a little bit more flexibility at least around how they can use that pot of money. I know people who have come to me who say: “I don’t use the bus all the time, so I don’t want an annual bus pass. I buy a book of bus tickets because I only use the bus a few times, and I’m using the other money, the $52, for something else.”

I would urge the member to have that conversation — we’re always talking to TransLink — with TransLink about this letter and how this, in fact, played out.

J. Thornthwaite: Sorry. It’s a follow-up. We were told that it was a handyDART issue. I guess my question is: can we get the handyDART and the TransLink people on the same page so that one card fits all?

Hon. S. Simpson: HandyDART is part of TransLink. They’re run by TransLink. They answer to TransLink; they don’t answer to us. So handyDART is part of the TransLink system, and TransLink has oversight over handyDART.

J. Thornthwaite: So direct it to TransLink. Okay.

M. Hunt: Shifting to Community Living B.C., this is one I’m still trying to understand.

Interjection.

M. Hunt: Okay. No problem. I’ll take a moment asking the question.

Does the minister have any plans to change the governance or the service delivery structure of Community Living B.C.?

Hon. S. Simpson: The challenges that CLBC has…. I’ll tell the member that when I accepted this portfolio, I was excited about it, and it has got all of the different pieces. One of the most complex ones is CLBC, and it’s complex because of the nature of the structure. It’s essentially a Crown that delivers funding and oversight to a range of service providers. So I’ve been getting my head around understanding that component of the ministry.

I think there are couple of things here. One is on the governance side. At this point…. And the member may know that one of his ex-colleagues…. I don’t think the member was here. Tom Christensen, who was a minister in the previous government, is the chair of CLBC, and he was the chair when we became government. I asked Tom to stay and fulfil his term, and he has agreed to do that. I’m thankful for that, because I think he brings a lot of insight, and he’s very sincere in his commitment to this organization. So I’m really pleased that he has chosen to stay at least until the completion of his term.

We’ve talked about it. One of the governance issues I am looking at, and the member may know that previously…. I can’t recall back. It might have been 2014, 2013. The previous government changed the board structure of CLBC. What they did is they removed designated advocates — both self-advocates and people who advocated — and removed them as a requirement of the board. Now, there are people on the board who certainly fill that bill, but they were removed as a requirement to be there.

I am thinking about returning that, because I’ve heard from lots of people who say: “Those are voices that you need to ensure are on the board.” That should be part of the structure — to ensure that those voices remain on the board. There are people who certainly fill that position now, but that’s a minister’s choice. They didn’t have an obligation to make sure those seats were filled. I am considering that. No decision has been made, but I am considering that.

The other issue that is always a complex one for CLBC is that demands for services of Community Living B.C. continue to grow, and they grow as we see more and more people who move up and transition from youth and become consumers of CLBC services.

We are seeing people — and this is a good thing — who have developmental disabilities who are living longer lives. There was a time when lives, sadly, were too short for people who had developmental disabilities. Because of improvements in health care, people are having longer lives and more complete lives. It is growing in terms of….

[5:10 p.m.]

Of course, the costs of services continue to grow as the costs of all services continue to grow. So there’s a cost pressure issue. It’s balancing those cost pressure issues, which CLBC does a pretty good job with — and also with engaging people in the community.

Anybody who has had anything to do with CLBC, the agencies and providers, will know that they may be the most passionate people in the world. Moms, dads, brothers and sisters of people with a developmental disability — there is nobody more passionate when it comes to looking after their loved ones. They want to have a role. They aren’t trusting anybody blindly to look after the people they love. So they need to be engaged. Service providers, too.

We are always looking, and we’re certainly looking now, at ways to improve that engagement of CLBC as the agency, the Crown, that delivers this, the service providers, the home-share people who deliver much of the residential care and the advocates and the self-advocates. The message I’ve got is that those communications need to be better. People are somewhat frustrated with that, at some point, and they need to get better.

I know CLBC is committed to that. I’m encouraging CLBC to move down that road, and I’m encouraging all of those other participants to come to that table in a way that we can move forward and all work together to improve the services in an incremental way as we move forward.

In a long, roundabout way, we’re looking at those things, but we’re not talking about major change. We’re talking about how to make this a better conversation between all the people who want to be part of that conversation about services for the developmental disability community.

M. Hunt: I appreciate the long, roundabout answer. I think it was a good roundabout answer. The next question is….

Interjection.

M. Hunt: No, it is a compliment, and you covered a lot in it. I appreciate what you covered in it. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m not always as good with words as I wish I was.

Are there any plans to change the budget allocations to community-based service providers?

Hon. S. Simpson: Maybe if I could just get a clarification. Is the member talking about in relation to CLBC or more broadly?

Interjection.

Hon. S. Simpson: In relation to CLBC.

What we will see at this point…. Obviously, there may be adjustments to the budget. Those adjustments will largely be driven by caseload.

M. Hunt: Are there any adjustments planned for the funding arrangements for service providers that would promote innovation and creativity to achieve better quality of life outcomes for persons with development disabilities?

Hon. S. Simpson: As the member will know, the primary responsibility of CLBC is direct service and making sure those services are supported. We all know that there are always cost pressures on CLBC, so that happens.

What has occurred is that when service providers have come to CLBC and talked about innovative ideas and said, “Maybe we can deliver inclusion programs differently; maybe there are other approaches we can take,” those have, in instances, been supported by CLBC. I certainly would encourage them to look at ways, when service providers come forward and say: “We have a different idea about how this might work. Can we talk about it?”

[5:15 p.m.]

That also reflects back to my last answer, which is…. As we look to bring all of those players who are all committed to improving services from CLBC right to the families, the service providers and the advocates, how do we find ways to improve those services?

I’m a big fan of innovation and looking at that. CLBC, I know, has supported those innovations when it looked like they had good prospect for success. I certainly would encourage them. I know it would be their intention, if other opportunities come forward, to look at those seriously as well.

M. Hunt: Recognizing that innovative piece, we also have, from time to time, challenges where we can consider service providers to be relatively overlapping. I’ll pick on the Downtown Eastside, hypothetically, for a minute.

Say this service provider is delivering services to 400 people, but the same 400 people are over at this service provider receiving services and over at this one. So we can sort of get overlaps. That’s a hypothetical. I don’t have any real piece that I’m accusing anybody of, okay? But then also, we know we have gaps.

My question is: what is the minister doing to work at looking for overlaps and gaps and rationalizing those? Even the service providers themselves getting together and saying: “Hey, here’s where things need to be. You can do this. We do this.” That community rationalization of services to our needy clients.

Hon. S. Simpson: First of all, I think that was a broader question than a CLBC question. In regards to CLBC, that’s not an issue, in that once a service provider is identified for an individual, they essentially have responsibility to deliver the whole envelope of services for that person, unless they have a particular, unique need that can’t be met by that service provider. Then that has to be identified and provided in addition. With CLBC, that’s less of an issue.

Now, there are questions. The question that the member asked has a broader context, and I think it’s a legitimate one. We see that sometimes around housing services. We see that around services with the health authorities, potentially, and other service providers that provide a range of services. Some of it is questions of coordination and that.

Again, what I would tell the member is that I talked about the establishment of the cabinet committee on social initiatives, where all of those ministers are at that table. It affords us the opportunity to have significant conversations around issues where that is a potential. I certainly can think of a couple of times in a very short period of time where the direction was for ministers and deputies and that to go back and think about how to make sure that these things were coordinated in a fashion that reduced those possibilities as much as possible.

I think we do have some issues with what the member has talked about, and I think they’ve been an issue for a long period of time. I think it’s a challenge that governments of any stripe face. You can probably go to any jurisdiction in the country and make the case for overlap when there may be a way to do it that reduces that.

I think the question is a good one. It’s certainly one that I’m aware of. If we can find ways in some of those cases to reduce administrative costs and improve front-line services or do a variety of things that make that more efficient, that’s probably a good thing.

In the case of CLBC, that’s not an issue because of the way that CLBC funds individuals and agencies to provide direct service and capture the envelope of services for any given individual.

M. Stilwell: Thank you to the minister, and welcome to all the staff. It’s nice to see all the faces again. I used to sit on that side with all of you, so it’s a pleasure to be here to ask a couple of questions on behalf of a constituent in my riding of Parksville-Qualicum.

[5:20 p.m.]

It’s specifically in regards to the disability health supplement program. I believe the ministry has received a letter on behalf of a constituent in regards to it. I’m just really looking for an update on what might be happening with the health supplement program.

For example, in this particular case, I had an individual on PWD who broke her foot and went to hospital and was prescribed an air cast for the break. The minister just said that he’s all about innovation, and the way we treat breaks has changed over the years. It’s not necessarily something that they use a fibreglass cast for anymore. The air cast is the way to go. When you’re working with people with disabilities, sometimes a fibreglass cast wouldn’t even work for the person’s particular disability.

Anyway, in this case, an air cast was prescribed. It was not covered under the health supplement program, so a PWD client was then required to pay for it. Then, on top of that, because of her disability, they needed to rent a wheelchair to help the individual. This all happened on a weekend. When it came down to it, the wheelchair rental did not get prior approval from the ministry, so it was not covered as well.

I sat on that side. I see it’s problematic on many levels for somebody who is trying to get the best possible care moving forward to not be covered for the things that they need to then carry on through their day-to-day life because of their physical disability and to be out of pocket for those expenses, even though a doctor prescribed them.

I’m just wondering what the ministry is thinking or considering when it comes to updating what is eligible for health supplements and apparatuses or devices on that list and if the ministry is considering anything when it comes to the pre-approval process for an individual on a weekend — how complex that could be — in order to get what they need.

Hon. S. Simpson: As the member will know, because the member sat in this chair, there really has been no review of the health supplement program since 2002. So for about 16 years, nobody has reviewed health supplements.

I think the member makes a very good point. The member is correct. Air casts are not covered by the program. We know that health supplements…. I had the dietitians in my office the other day, talking about nutrition supplements, which also haven’t been reviewed since about 2002. I’m glad that the member has raised the issue, because I think she’s right.

[5:25 p.m.]

We do have the letter and should be responding to it. I don’t know that the response has been prepared yet, but the questions are good ones.

My commitment to the member is that the review of those supplements will happen sooner rather than later. We will have a conversation about that because I think the member raises a good point, that times are different. Costs of supplements are different. The technologies are different. What made sense in 2002 does not necessarily make sense in 2017-2018 in terms of how we move forward. I am pleased that the member raised the issue because it just reinforces for me that it’s probably time for that review to happen.

M. Stilwell: I thank the minister for taking that initiative to look into the health supplement program and do that review. I’m wondering if he could provide me a timeline on when he thinks that review will take place and when we might see changes come into effect.

Hon. S. Simpson: What I would say is that I don’t, since this conversation, have a specific time. But what I would say is that I would anticipate that we’ll probably look at those questions in the next calendar year.

What that means in terms of specifics…. The member knows, as well as I do, the hoops of cabinet and Treasury Board and all the other ones that we have to jump through. But I will commit that there will be a review. The results of that review I’ll be happy to talk to the member about somewhere down the road.

M. Stilwell: Perfect. I acknowledge that whatever the review comes from, there will be costs associated with that review, because obviously, costs are going up and equipment costs money. There will be, obviously, something that…. The minister will have to go to Treasury Board to get that approval, should there be any changes made to the program.

It is something that, as minister when I was sitting on that side, was on my radar. So I am pleased to hear that you are willing and committed to exploring it further. So thank you.

M. Hunt: Change of subject again. One of the things, in doing my homework to come and do these estimates, is I looked over the estimates over the last number of years and the processes and the questions that were asked.

One of the questions that surprised me that came up — so I thought I should continue the tradition — was: what are the current average call times on the ministry’s phone line?

Hon. S. Simpson: The averages run, over the period of a month, between about 20 to 30 minutes. That is the time as has been noted to me. That changes depending on whether it’s cheque issue time. Mondays and Fridays tend to be busier than Tuesdays through Thursdays. So there is some change around that.

It is a question that I’m interested in — those times. A regular report comes across my desk of how we’re doing with those things every month. So I get pretty regular reports as we look at how responsive we are and at ways to improve that response for people. But the currents are about 20 to 30 minutes.

M. Hunt: Well, it does seem as though this is a tradition, so that’s why you most likely got that ahead of this. They were anticipating this.

Of course, the next one is: what day had the longest average call times last month, and what was that average wait time? I know, this is like Jeopardy, right?

[5:30 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: It will be, I’m told, cheque issue day. Now, the specifics for last…. We’re just checking what that number is for cheque issue day last month. We’re trying to get you that number right now. I would invite the member to move on to the next questions, and I’ll get back and give him that answer as soon as we’ve got it.

M. Hunt: Well, Mr. Minister, this is Jeopardy — okay? So if you’re sending it off to who you’re calling, here are the rest of them, just so that they get into the record, because for some reason, this seems to be a tradition. It is: what are the average call times for the months of July, August, September and October, and how do the call times compare to this time last year and the year before?

Those seem to be traditional questions that have got asked every year. We put them on the record. Again, someone’s obviously logging time in, and they want that. So I submit that to you, and I will assume that your answer back is that you’ll get me the answer.

Then I’d like to turn it over to the member from Cariboo.

D. Barnett: Thank you, Minister, for having us here today. I read your article on the airplane yesterday, and it was very interesting and a great story. See. Some people do read.

I have a couple of questions. One question, I understand, has already been asked, but I was not here. Just to clarify, the bus pass. In rural British Columbia, we have many, many areas that have no buses. So does this increase that your government has given the handicapped individuals recently include rural British Columbia, whether or not they have access to transportation?

Hon. S. Simpson: Yes. Thank you for the question. It includes every person with disability in the province. It’s a transportation supplement of $52. Everybody receives that. If you’re in an area that has bus service — in Vancouver, for example — you can choose, and everybody makes their own choice. We’re not going to make the choice for them. They can choose to say, “I want an annual bus pass,” and that $52 will be applied and they will have an annual bus pass.

In the communities…. The member is absolutely correct. I’ve used this example a few times. There are places in this province where there are people with disabilities where their transportation initiative may be that their neighbour drives them to the market once a week so they can get groceries, and they give their neighbour a few bucks for gas every once in a while. That’s their transportation strategy, and that’s perfectly fine with me. They can used that $52 to do that, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I’m not going to tell people how to meet their transportation needs. I’m guessing most people in this province will spend more than $52 to meet their transportation needs a month.

D. Barnett: In essence, it’s the same as the program when we gave the $77 last year, the year before. People can utilize it for whatever they wish.

[5:35 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: The fundamental difference here is that everybody got an additional $52 that they did not get under the past program. Under the past program there, people received $77, and that became the increase for people, essentially. Then the $52 came out.

What we did was to add a further amount of money to this so that everybody then could make that choice. The fundamental difference, largely, here is that we created a transportation supplement of additional dollars. We didn’t carve it out of the $77 that everybody received. We created an additional $52, which has cost us, as I noted earlier with the question. It’s about $70 million a year of additional costs to the government to underwrite that.

Everybody got an extra $52, which they get to choose how they use, to meet transportation needs, and it’s identified as such on their cheque.

D. Barnett: Thank you, Minister. In your mandate letter, it says: “Develop a basic income pilot to test whether giving people a basic income is an effective way to reduce poverty, improve health, housing and employment.”

My question to the minister is: will there be a pilot project? Where will the pilot project be? Or will there be two pilot projects, one for urban British Columbia and one for small-town, rural British Columbia?

Hon. S. Simpson: What I would say to the member is that it’s pretty early days in this conversation.

The member may know that this issue of basic income probably started in Canada in the ’70s in Dauphin, Manitoba. They put the Mincome program in place there, and they did it in Dauphin. It had mixed results and never went farther than the pilot, essentially.

Ontario is in the middle of a pilot right now, or early on. They’re about six months into a pilot program that they’re applying in three different communities there. There are some challenges with that, and we’ve looked at it closely. We’re also looking at Oakland. It’s doing this. Glasgow is doing it. Finland is doing it. The European Union has three cities in Europe that they’re doing it with.

I’ve met with and brought together an academic panel of experts — including having had conversations with the person who’s considered kind of the smartest person about the Dauphin model and people who worked on the model in Ontario — to talk about what we need to do with an income pilot so that it has value as we move forward.

It really is about identifying what questions we need to answer. For me, those are questions about: does a basic income make sense to reduce poverty? There were also questions out there, quite honestly, about whether it becomes a tool to deal with automation, as we all look at a transitioning economy. Will automation remove jobs, and how does that affect people, and how do people transition?

There’s a bunch of pieces. We have not landed on what exactly the questions are that we need to answer. And more importantly, how do we measure this? How long does it have to be? The Ontario model is a three-year pilot, moving forward. Involving about 4,000 people is what their objective is. They haven’t got there, but it’s about 4,000 people.

We’re looking at all of these and have not landed on how best to do this in a way that will give us insights about whether a model, a program, like that has value down the road, what questions we have to answer and also: how do we structure this in a way so that we’re being as cost-effective as we can with the price of a pilot, moving forward?

That includes decisions about: can you do it in two communities? Do you need three communities? I think the thing that we do know is that it’s probably going to have to be some mix. I’m guessing — though I’m kind of speculating here, and I’m probably walking out on a limb that I shouldn’t — that it’s the suburbs and it’s rural B.C.

D. Barnett: Minister, as you’ve started on this project, naturally, this poverty reduction plan, what funding is in this budget for the plan?

[5:40 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: Yup, and we answered those questions earlier. So $1.2 billion has been allocated in this current year to support the preparation for the plan. That pays for a consultation process around the province that the Social Planning and Research Council of B.C. is doing in 20 communities.

It pays the expenses of the Minister’s Advisory Forum, and it pays for the website. We have got thousands and thousands of responses. I’m told we are second only to the cannabis responses in terms of enthusiasm to want to advise and give us information about that. And it supports the expense side of some of the research that we’re doing to answer questions.

It will help us, in this period of time, to look at how we measure poverty — the measurements are a question — and support us with some advice around the targets and timelines questions moving forward that will be incorporated in the legislation and in the plan moving forward. It’s $1.2 million we’ll be needing to get an allocation to move forward in the next budget.

D. Barnett: I think probably I just have maybe one more question. My question is….

I hear you say 20 communities will have input. That concerns me, Mr. Minister, because in rural British Columbia, we have so many small communities that do not get consultation many times and have not for many years because of the distance.

Will you be going to outreach to some of these small communities that basically have lost their main employer over the years because of environmentalists or because of this or because of that? Will you being going out there to have discussions with these people?

Hon. S. Simpson: I guess a couple of things. First of all, when we put the forum in place, we were very conscious to make sure that we had people who were not from downtown Vancouver and downtown Victoria there. We have nine or ten people who come from dispersed communities around the province, including the co-chair, who’s a professor at UNBC, and others from a variety of communities. I’m very sensitive to the point that the member makes, and I think it’s a good point. We will be in those 20 communities.

In addition to that work, and that’s SPARC that’s doing that, it is my plan to travel and be in a variety of communities, as will my parliamentary secretary be doing some travelling and doing some round tables in those communities. We’re reaching out across the province to the organizations that are participating. We’re talking to the Union of B.C. Municipalities. I met with their healthy communities committee the other day, and we talked about small communities particularly and about how to make those connections with local governments.

That holds true both around poverty reduction and around the work we’re doing on homelessness as well. We’re looking at a homelessness count and how we capture as much as we can and how, in the those communities where counts maybe don’t happen, it may be that you can go to the communities and talk to the local council or to the service provider in the community.

They’ll be able to tell you: “Well, we know that there are 12 people in our community who are living homeless, because we know everybody in the community and we pretty much know what’s up.” We’ll be drawing those numbers as well. I’m very keen to make sure that we find the avenue in for those conversations and how to broaden that discussion out.

At this point, we have the forum. We have the outreach being done by SPARC. We have the website that we’re encouraging. We will have my travel in mostly January and February, and the parliamentary secretary, who will be covering some of the communities I can’t get to, to make sure that we’re talking to as many people as we can.

I would welcome the member…. If she has ideas or suggestions about how to contact or talk to some of those communities and involve them in some fashion, I’d be happy to hear the advice of the member on how she thinks we might do that.

D. Barnett: Thank you, Minister. My concern is the people who need the help. I’m very connected with my communities. I’ve been there for a long time. I find that we talk to councillors, we talk to this, we talk to that, but we don’t talk to those people. That is where I’m coming from. We need to have this conversation, in my opinion, expanded to bring these people in that we’re talking about, that need the help. So my concern is: how are we going to engage those people?

[5:45 p.m.]

We need to hear from them. I think the only way that we’re going to help reduce this poverty is to listen to the people that, basically, in my opinion, need the help.

Hon. S. Simpson: I couldn’t agree more with the member. That’s why when we put together the forum, we went out and we invited a wide range of organizations to nominate people to the forum. We specifically asked for people with lived experience. So a significant contingent of the people, I think…. Probably half the people or more who are on the forum have lived experienced, and probably six or seven of those people are living today in poverty. They’re on PWD. They’re single moms. They have developmental disabilities.

I have put them on the forum and invited them to be full participants. We’re working hard to make sure we give them the opportunity to participate fully. The challenges for them to participate are different than they are for somebody from an agency who goes back to their office and has staff and has all that. We’re very cognizant of that, and we are providing additional supports to that small group of people on the forum to make sure they can participate in the ways that work for them.

I couldn’t agree more: those voices are really critical to the conversation. We have reached out. I have met directly with most of the…. I don’t think I’ve said no to a meeting with a group that is a self-advocate poverty group in the province that we’ve been able to get to, and I will be continuing to do that. I couldn’t agree more with the member that if we’re going to get at this, we’re not going to succeed unless the voices of people who live every day with these issues are an integral part of that conversation. It’s my commitment that they will be, and it won’t just be the thinkers and the academics and the politicians who are making decisions about how we move forward.

D. Barnett: Thank you, Minister, for that. I’m more than willing to help in any way I can.

One more question is about staffing. I find that in my riding, maybe not in so many others in rural British Columbia, we have a lot of problems retaining staff in Social Development. I think one of the reasons is because they’re trained in urban centres, and we ship them off to this beautiful rural B.C., which isn’t the same type of life.

My question is: will you be doing a review of the staffing in the province of British Columbia — in particular, in rural B.C. — and what the needs are?

[5:50 p.m.]

Hon. S. Simpson: A couple of points in regard to this. First of all, the hiring goes on in regions. There isn’t central hiring. The hiring is done regionally. In fact, when you look at what happens with attrition right now, there is less attrition happening in outlying communities because people can afford to live in those communities better than they can afford to live in Vancouver. We are facing the challenge of housing costs and those things.

When people leave, what we’re finding as we start to track this, because there is an attrition rate…. Employment and assistance workers, which is where a lot of people come into our ministry to provide services, are not the highest-paying jobs in government. When people are leaving, what we’re finding as we track that is that they are staying within the public service and going to higher-paid jobs within the public service that they’ve now accumulated enough time and seniority to be able to bid.

People are bidding up to jobs that have a better paycheque than the one that they can get as an employment and assistance worker for us. That’s part of the challenge. These are not the highest-paid jobs by any means in government, and that’s part of our challenge.

We have a continual hiring practice going on now. Some of it is catch-up, because, as you know, we don’t get an allocation of people. We get a budget, then we figure out how to turn that into FTEs. The budget has been relatively flat for a number of years, so while there’s been some hiring in the last couple of years to try to catch some of that up, it has been flat previously, and that’s the challenge we have.

I don’t want to be telling anybody that we should be paying people more money, but the reality is that that’s what we face — people who have relatively modest incomes working for us in the public service looking for a better paycheque doing something else in the public service. And they are hired locally. They’re not hired out of Vancouver and Victoria.

M. Hunt: Moving over to the basic income pilot, which, again, is part of your mandate letter. The question is: is there any money in this year’s budget for funding of the pilot?

Hon. S. Simpson: So $350,000 has been allocated just to do some feasibility work to be able to begin to grasp some of those initial things that I talked to the member’s colleague, the previous member, about — to bring forward that expert panel in again. We covered their expenses to come together. Nobody got paid to be there. So it’s $350,000 simply to be able to do the preliminary evaluation to try to figure out how we move forward here.

M. Hunt: How much does the minister anticipate will be needed in order to fund an actual pilot?

Hon. S. Simpson: I don’t have an answer to that question. Part of what we’re trying to determine is what we need to find out. Much of that will be determined by things like: how many people do you need in a sample size in order for it to be valid and to be able to get information? How long does the pilot have to be? Some people say we can do it in two years. Some people say it takes three years to be able to get the data to move forward.

How many communities will it take to do that? What will the value of the basic income be? In Ontario, they’re doing a basic income that I think is $1,700 a month. That’s what they’re talking about for people. In Finland, it’s about $600 or $700 a month. So what are you talking about in terms of an amount of money?

Those are all questions that haven’t been answered at this point, but those, among other things, will determine what this pot of money looks like moving forward and when it starts. We still have some work to do before I could give the member an answer with any confidence to that question.

M. Hunt: So then am I to assume that the minister is putting this initiative under the poverty reduction plan, and the same process is happening there, and this will be one of the outcomes of that process?

Hon. S. Simpson: Not entirely. It has, obviously, a connection to the poverty reduction initiative and will be looked at in that context.

[5:55 p.m.]

It is an initiative unto itself as well, so we are looking at that separately from the work that’s being done with the poverty reduction initiative. At some point, it will fold in, much like the homelessness work. There aren’t a lot of people out there who are homeless who probably wouldn’t fit the bill of being poor. We have responsibilities to do that and to see how we fold those together as we move forward. I anticipate we’ll make those connections, those links, more directly in the coming months.

Right now we’re trying to do the due diligence necessary to answer the questions that the member is asking, and more, about: what do we want to know here? What’s the target group that we’re looking at to support? Is this a universal plan? Is it a plan that’s targeted at people who are living in poverty? Is it a plan that’s targeted in some other way?

There are different jurisdictions doing different things around the world on that — what questions we need to answer and what we have to do, in terms of the content of a pilot, in order to be able to get credible answers that, down the road, government can make an informed decision about whether this is an initiative that should move past the pilot stage and be looked at as a legitimate program alternative for how government should support people.

M. Hunt: How long would the minister anticipate that this process is going to take? Again, there are a lot of questions that are to be asked.

You also have the Ontario situation as an example. Are you going to wait till we hear back from the Ontario pilot? Are you going to take interim reports from them as part of your feedback? How long do you see this process happening until we actually have something physically happening on the ground in a pilot?

Hon. S. Simpson: We are. Ontario is being very helpful. They are giving us information. We’re in pretty regular contact with the province of Ontario. They’re being quite forthcoming with what they’re learning as they move forward — both the aspects of their program that they’re very happy with, in terms of how it’s working and where it’s being successful, and some of the aspects of their program that have more challenges. They’re being very good about that, and I much appreciate the support and the insights. It helps us to do the work that we’re doing.

We’re also, as I said, talking to people in other jurisdictions as well. Oakland has a very different approach that they’re taking around a feasibility initiative. We’re talking to the people in Oakland about what they’re doing and how they’re doing things that are quite different, in terms of their approach, than Ontario. We’re trying to understand the difference in those and whether one makes more sense for us than the other.

My hope would be that over the next few months, couple of months, we will be clear enough about what the path forward looks like that we’ll be able to make some announcements about how we’re going to proceed, moving forward with the pilot, and what that looks like — what the timeline looks like, how we will engage both individuals and communities, how much of the pre-feasibility work, which is the emphasis of Oakland, versus jumping right in with both feet to the pilot, which is Ontario’s approach, without too much feasibility at the front end.

That has complications, having not done that, which they’re sorting through now. The other one takes more time. So that’s a bit of the kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other that we’re having to deal with.

I hope that in the next few months, we will be able to be much more definitive and will be releasing information about the pilot. It is my intention that once we land on that, and we kind of know what the path forward looks like, we’ll be making that public.

M. Hunt: The word “sustainability” also comes into many of these discussions on this — obviously, down the road considerably. But is that also a piece of the puzzle that the minister is looking at? Is this program being a sustainable program, in and of itself?

Hon. S. Simpson: Absolutely. I think government, probably whenever it looks at programs, has to look at the ongoing sustainability of programs, and this wouldn’t be any different.

M. Hunt: Okay. I’ll accept that answer.

[6:00 p.m.]

When we were talking about recovery homes, you also raised the issue of home-share providers and the situation for home-share providers and the funding pressures that are, of course, on them — those sorts of things.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Could you give me an update as to how things are doing there? Are increases being anticipated? Are we making plans? Do we have wait-lists? What are our plans, going forward, with the home-share providers?

Hon. S. Simpson: With home-share providers…. The member may know that home-share providers haven’t seen an increase, I think, since 2009. It was the last time they had an increase. Many of them are feeling the pressure of not having seen new resources. There’s also the discussion about how they relate to service providers in CLBC and where they come in that continuum of care.

We know that they’re a valuable resource. We know that for most people who are receiving CLBC support now who need residential supports, home-share is the model that’s being used — both because it can be a very effective model, in many cases, and it’s pretty cost-efficient versus some of the staffed residential care options.

There’s no question I have been approached by home-share providers who have raised issues with me about their funding. Like everything else, it will come as no surprise to the member that I have had a variety of different entities and organizations and people who have come and talked to me about funding and about the fact that they haven’t seen a lot of lifts or support in terms of new dollars for the last ten years or so.

I’m hearing from all of them, and what I would assure the member is that, like all those other requests, we’re in the budget process now for February. We’re figuring out how to set priorities and where supports may be able to be given and where they aren’t feasible. And we’ll include all of that in the budget in February.

M. Hunt: The budget of February is going to be one of the most interesting and highly anticipated events of the year, I am sure.

Having said that, accessibility legislation…. From time to time, discussion has come on accessibility legislation. Has the minister any plans, and could we get an update from the minister as to what his thoughts are?

Hon. S. Simpson: There’s been a lot of work done around this. The member may know that the federal government is bringing in legislation in the next few months around accessibility and inclusion, disability access legislation. There was consultation with the provinces around that previously. I’m pretty excited to see what that legislation looks like when the federal legislation arrives.

I’ve been talking to the organizations in British Columbia, whether it be representatives of the CNIB or Barrier-Free B.C. or Disability Alliance or Inclusion B.C., who are interested in those issues. My commitment to them is that once we see the federal legislation and we know where the federal government has taken us, we’ll open a conversation at that point with some of those groups around what things we need to do to complement the federal legislation to improve the situation around access and inclusion moving forward.

Also, I’ve had preliminary discussions around that with some people in the business community. They will obviously be affected by some of this, potentially, in terms of what they do and how they operate. And we’ll be looking for a collaborative way to make sure they’re part of that conversation too. But at this point, we’re simply waiting for the federal legislation, which I think is coming in the spring, if not sooner. Then we’ll be looking at that and moving pretty quickly to start a conversation about how we take what the feds have done and build on that in British Columbia.

[6:05 p.m.]

M. Hunt: Monthly satisfaction reports. The ministry has monthly satisfaction reports that they work on. Can the minister please tell me what the current trends are and how the minister is going to make use of these in future decisions?

Hon. S. Simpson: I’ve just had it confirmed that we don’t do monthly satisfaction reports.

Interjection.

Hon. S. Simpson: I’m not sure, but we don’t do that. And I’m reasonably happy.

M. Hunt: Well, it is always good when the minister is happy. That’s always a good thing. I want to comment that the minister has been very quick in responding to questions that I have given him, as both of us…. This is our first experience at this on either side of this.

Many times I have watched very slow and laborious processes between the Chair saying “Minister” and “Member” that were very…. Lots of silence in between those two. I want to thank the minister for his candid and thorough and quick responses. I think, from my perspective, I have enjoyed the day, and I have enjoyed the answers that the minister has given. I’ve been very satisfied with the answers that the minister has given. So I compliment him as I give him the last question, okay? It looks like we actually might end up early, so you might want to really stall the answer to this one.

There are a lot of different strategic plans in the ministry, and I certainly was given a lot of reading material on that. Obviously, these are strategic plans for this year that were created for the previous government, not for your government. My question is: now, under the new government, as we come forward into the next year and the new set of strat plans, what changes does the minister anticipate that we might see in the midst of these strategic plans?

Hon. S. Simpson: We’re just kind of thinking about what strategic plans, outside of service plans, might be. But I guess what I want to do is assure the member of this. The initiatives that commenced under the previous government in this ministry, whether they were around social innovation, whether they were around Accessibility 2024, around other areas…. I have no interest in setting them aside because they weren’t ours. That’s not how I work.

We’re looking at all of those things and trying to say: “Let’s find the best pieces of these and make them work and figure out, as will happen with all governments, what’s substantive and what’s rhetorical.” Let’s find the substantive pieces that will make people’s lives better, that will improve how we deliver service, that will ensure that the people who need the service are getting responded to, and figure out how we improve and make those things better.

I really don’t care where those ideas come from. If they come and they’re solid ideas and they’re ideas that we can make work, then I’m good with saying: “Let’s look hard at these and figure out how to make them work.” If they need additional government support and they merit that support, then I’m happy to go forward through the processes of cabinet and Treasury Board to have those discussions with my colleagues moving forward.

[6:10 p.m.]

We’re kind of seeing them every day. Sometimes they’re initiatives. Whether they’re around service delivery, they come up as one-offs, often, and they will come up because of questions that were raised, like the member for Parksville-Qualicum talking about health supplements today. Well, that triggered something for me, and we’ll be looking at those things.

That’s about somebody who brings forward a legitimate and credible issue and says: “I don’t think we’re doing this well enough.” For the member, who was the previous minister…. I guess I could’ve taken the easy shot there, but I appreciate the fact that she raised something I think is important. She’s not alone. This member has raised things — other members, other people in the community. So we’ll work on those things as we move forward around these things.

The other comment I would make to the member is that we’ve had a very short period of time. I’ve appreciated the time. I’ve appreciated the questions, and I think they’ve been important questions that deserve answers. I’ve appreciated that.

And to let the member know that if there are things that he or his colleagues have not been able to get to, I’d be happy to receive those in writing. I will assure that the member gets a response in writing to questions that he may not have had the time to or just may not have been on his priority list to try and get out here in our exchange today. We’ll be happy to answer those questions in writing moving forward.

Vote 40: ministry operations, $3,105,460,000 — approved.

Hon. S. Simpson: I move that the committee rise, report resolution of Vote 40 of the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction and ask leave to sit again.

Motion approved.

The committee rose at 6:11 p.m.