Orders of the Day

Hon. D. Eby: I call Committee of Supply for the Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship in the little House.

In this House, I call Committee of Supply, Ministry of Attorney General and Housing.

[1:05 p.m.]

Committee of Supply

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF
ATTORNEY GENERAL

The House in Committee of Supply (Section B); J. Tegart in the chair.

The committee met at 1:06 p.m.

On Vote 15: ministry operations, $581,587,000.

The Chair: Would the minister wish to introduce his staff?

Hon. D. Eby: Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity. Joining me today are Tracy Campbell, ADM, executive finance officer; Peter Juk, assistant Deputy Attorney General, B.C. Prosecution Service; and Shannon Salter, the Deputy Attorney General.

M. de Jong: As we embark upon this annual exercise of reviewing the budgetary estimates, for the Ministry of Attorney General in this case, maybe a bit of a softball question to begin with. When we go through this, we can obviously look at the blue books, and the minister, the Attorney, has mentioned the number we are voting on. How that is allocated within the budget is somewhat helpful in determining priorities. The Attorney has a mandate letter, following the last election. Sometimes that’s helpful, and we may get to that at some point.

I think, at this point, what I was hoping to ask the Attorney…. Looking to the year ahead, looking to that period for which these budget estimates apply, what can he tell the Committee of Supply about the areas of priority that he sees as being paramount? I’m hopeful that at least one or two of those areas are consistent with areas that I think might be priorities and that that might give us some licence to explore those further.

[1:10 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: I’m going to be focusing my response to the member’s question on justice-related priorities. That’s the staff that are with me. I’ll take it as written — it’s the Ministry of Attorney General and Housing — that housing is a priority, and so is anti-racism. I’ll be focusing on the Ministry of Attorney General justice side of the equation in my response.

Indigenous justice is a priority for government, our continuing work on the Indigenous justice strategy.

Modernization, holding on to the gains that we made during the pandemic of transforming how justice services are delivered in the province, building on those and solidifying them.

Access to justice generally. That would include, under that subhead, legal aid or clinic initiatives, a wide variety of different programs.

Prolific offenders and crime, particularly in downtown cores, and how the justice system fits in with social services and other responses to respond to mental health and addiction issues that drive repeated criminal activity.

Family justice and family justice law reform.

Finally, our work around the regulator of legal services in the province, through the office of the superintendent of professional governance and through my ministry.

M. de Jong: We are not going to have time during these proceedings to discuss all of those areas. That’s clear.

I was pleased, a moment ago, to hear the Attorney include in that menu of priorities a couple of the areas that I would like to canvass over the next few days in these proceedings. Maybe, though, because the Attorney has alerted the committee to these areas of priority, I can ask at least this with respect to these areas.

We’ll start with the first one: Indigenous justice. I’ll ask the same question with a couple of the other areas that he’s mentioned.

We’re standing here 12 months from now, as we likely will be. Assuming the Attorney General is still in his post as Attorney General, when, or if, he is asked to outline what he believes is representative of success in addressing that priority area, what will he say? What are his objectives and the ministry’s and the government’s objectives today, going forward, as they relate to Indigenous justice?

[1:15 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: I thank the member for his patience.

The work on Indigenous justice is informed by the Indigenous justice strategy. It has been developed and signed and is in the full implementation phase right now.

I’ll run through some of the items that my ministry is working on, but to underline, the member should also canvass this with the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General, as there is significant work happening in that ministry as well. That minister is the best place to answer the corrections-related, probation-related and other policing-related Indigenous justice questions.

[1:20 p.m.]

There is also a parallel process, a Métis justice strategy. In the next year, we expect to have that strategy finalized with Métis Nation B.C. and to be in implementation of that strategy. The strategy has not been announced or released yet.

On the Indigenous justice strategy, the member will recall there are two tracks. One track is about building up capacity in Indigenous organizations in the justice sector, to facilitate increased jurisdiction and taking responsibility over aspects of the justice system as they relate to Indigenous peoples in the province.

To that end, I’m happy to say we’re celebrating the first graduating cohort of the University of Victoria’s joint degree program of Canadian common law and Indigenous legal orders. That whole program is about restoring and rebuilding Indigenous laws and Indigenous legal orders to build capacity in nations to be able to have expertise — people who have expertise both in Canadian common law and Indigenous legal orders — to work in both systems and build that capacity.

We will be, by the end of this year, marking one year of the implementation of the civil litigation directive that we co-developed with the First Nations Leadership Council and the First Nations Justice Council. We are developing metrics to determine the impact of that directive on our civil litigation program and to determine whether it’s having the effect that we hope for in terms of reducing the impact that court processes have on our relationships with Indigenous people when we need a judge to resolve disputes between us.

Then we will also have a year under our belts of the anti-racism data legislation in place. We anticipate — this is maybe a bit tangential — that depending on the data that ultimately is collected and processed through this, it may have direct implications for justice, which is why I raise it. The work of implementing that legislation will have been underway, and we expect that we will be working in some of the immediate interest areas, which could include aspects of the justice system.

We have, currently, three Indigenous Justice Centres in place, plus a virtual…. I say we, but it’s the First Nations Justice Council who are providing financial support for them. We’re funding three clinics plus a virtual Indigenous Justice Centre and providing joint support with the federal government. We have funding in place this year for up to five physical justice centres to be opened, so depending on the capacity and the opportunities available to the First Nations Justice Council, we may be up to five physical sites across the province by the end of the year.

The B.C. Prosecution Service will continue to implement its Indigenous framework and policy changes related to Indigenous offenders in the justice system. They are also developing metrics to evaluate the impact of those policies post-COVID, so when we have a chance to see how they’re operating in a more typical kind of environment. They will continue working with the First Nations Justice Council. I’m sure the member has seen the coverage of the disgrace of the overrepresentation of Indigenous women in our prisons across the country. Obviously, the public conversation about this continues.

With respect to building Indigenous capacity to deliver services — Indigenous organizations delivering services to Indigenous people — we will continue to work with Legal Aid B.C. to transition Indigenous legal aid services to Indigenous organizations.

The member will know that we transitioned Gladue report writing from Legal Aid B.C. to the First Nations Justice Council to administer that program. It’s a program, by design, exclusively for Indigenous people, and it is now being delivered by an Indigenous organization in British Columbia, building up that capacity and continuing that theme as part of my discussions with Legal Aid B.C. and the First Nations Justice Council on how we do that effectively and ensure that people receive the services they need and, ultimately, from Indigenous-led organizations.

[1:25 p.m.]

Then we’re doing work on more Indigenous courts in the province. These are more in the nature of the second track of the First Nations justice strategy, which is about the existing justice system and bringing Indigenous elements into that system. The member will recall that Indigenous courts in the province are sentencing courts with the participation of Elders, who assist in crafting a sentence appropriate to the situation faced by an Indigenous offender who has pled guilty or has been convicted of a criminal offence.

Our hope is that we will have at least one, but possibly two more, of these courts open by the end of the year.

M. de Jong: Thanks to the Attorney. This is purely for the sake of time, and the Attorney has some staff. They may want to make some notes, because I’m going to ask a whole bunch of questions flowing from that, bundled up in one, but I wouldn’t expect the Attorney to remember them all. Hopefully, that’ll be a cue to staff to try and….

What I’m driving at here: the answer is helpful, but I’d like to take a moment to drill down just a little bit further into the areas that the Attorney has mentioned. When I say, “I thought I heard the Attorney say something,” I’m not trying to put words into the Attorney’s mouth. If I get it wrong, I know that he and the staff will say: “No, that’s not what we meant.”

Here’s what I thought I heard in a variety of these areas. There is, on the justice strategy, an objective or an intent to finalize and release a plan with the Métis Nation of B.C., and when the Attorney says, “by the end of the year,” I’m not sure if he means the calendar year or the fiscal year. He can clarify that in a moment.

In terms of the jurisdictional transfer, the Attorney has mentioned the graduating cohort at UVic. That’s the first, and I presume the intention there is to see that continue into the future and to have the graduates put their unique expertise and talents to work.

On the anniversary around the civil litigation directive, which the Attorney has mentioned, he has said that the ministry is in the process of developing metrics on measuring the success. I presume the objective is, by the end of the year at least, to have that, so that there is a framework around which one can measure whether the directive is having the desired impact. I’d be interested to know today, at this stage, what the Attorney believes some of the key indicators will be, within the developing metrics.

I think the Attorney has indicated that in addition to the three presently functioning Indigenous Justice Centres, the objective is to have two additional Indigenous Justice Centres operating by the end of the year. Again, he’ll clarify whether that’s calendar year or fiscal year. He qualified that, I think, by pointing to available capacity, but it sounds like the objective is to have two additional centres operating. To the degree that he can indicate where those centres are intended, at this point, to be located, that would be helpful.

The Prosecution Service is developing metrics to measure the successful application of its policy as it relates to prosecuting Indigenous peoples. It sounds like the objective is to have that fully in place by the end of the present year.

[1:30 p.m.]

Again, I’d be curious to know, at this stage and having developed the policy, what the Attorney and the government believe the key indicators of success will be — and that we should expect to see those factors included in the metrics framework.

Finally, I think the Attorney talked about the intention to expand Indigenous courts by one or two more such institutions, again, by the end of the year. I’d be curious to know what the objectives are around where those courts might operate.

I’ve tried to track what the Attorney has said, and all of the questions delve a little bit deeper into those areas. I’ll understand if it takes a moment to gather that information.

[1:35 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: I will do my best to take the member’s questions in order.

For the Métis Nation B.C. justice strategy, we are dependent on our partners for timing, but currently we are hopeful for the end of the calendar year for completion of the strategy and publication of the same.

For the University of Victoria joint degree program, the program will be continuing. Most of the graduates will work in traditional private practice or in First Nations communities or with First Nations communities directly. Some with will work for government, but there is no specific work program through the ministry linked to that specific legal program. The graduates certainly do have a number of skills very applicable inside government, so if they’re looking for a wonderful place to work — work with great people and do interesting things — they should consider working for the government of British Columbia.

The civil litigation strategy. The challenge with the metrics, obviously, is measuring harm not done. It’s a hard thing to measure, but we think that we can come up with suitable measurements. We’ll be doing this work in partnership with the First Nations Justice Council and the leadership council. I anticipate that there would be things like efforts to reduce the complexity of pleadings, reducing the number of issues, length of proceedings, and so on. But it’s very premature, because we have not yet started that formal engagement, although the initial work has started within the ministry for us to be able to do that.

The justice centres. I’m advised that the First Nations Justice Council has not yet decided where the next two centres will go. Part of that is because there is broad interest. A second piece is that for the successful implementation of a justice centre, work has to be done with the local First Nation or First Nations, because a successful centre needs close integration with the local nation. Determining that, as the funding was just announced, does take some time for them to do, but we all feel a huge sense of urgency around getting these open as soon as possible.

On B.C. Prosecution Service metrics, I was remiss in my initial answer in failing to mention that the metrics relate to Indigenous offenders as well as Indigenous victims of crime. I focused, in my response, on offenders only. The goal is to reduce Indigenous overrepresentation both on the offender and on the victim sides in relation to crime. Metrics include data around charges, detentions and sentencing, and referral to alternative measures and other remedies.

The challenge with these data points is that the numbers during the pandemic are so out of whack with historic norms that it’s very hard to know what are policy and what are pandemic-related impacts. We’re hopeful that as we return to something more approaching normal, the data is going to become more reliable to compare with historic levels.

Finally, with respect to the Indigenous courts, I can advise the member that the group that’s furthest along is Lillooet. They have a more developed proposal and are engaged with the Ministry of Attorney General and the courts on this proposal. Port Hardy has expressed interest, but they’re in a very early stage still.

In terms of the timing of Lillooet, I would love it if we could have Lillooet in place by the end of the fiscal year — and certainly, Port Hardy as well. But again, it’s at a very early stage, I’m advised by staff.

[1:40 p.m.]

M. de Jong: Just one follow-up from that series of answers, for which I’m grateful. It was a bit unclear to me. When we are referring to the prosecution service and the metrics, my initial impression was that those are in the process of being developed, but something about the Attorney’s answer suggested to me that in fact, they have been developed, and there are now measurements and variables in place that are being tracked.

If the Attorney could clarify that, and notwithstanding whether the metrics are in place now or whether they remain to be finalized at some point during the fiscal year — on the topic of overrepresentation in terms of prosecutions, overrepresentation of Indigenous people in terms of prosecutions, overrepresentation in terms of victims — will the metrics include or do they include targeted numbers? Or is it simply a general objective and a general hope to reduce the number? Or is there a more specific target than that?

Hon. H. Bains: I seek leave to make an introduction, please.

Leave granted.

Introductions by Members

Hon. H. Bains: In the gallery, we have, I think for the first time, my granddaughter, all the way from Regina, Anna Bains Hudema. She’s here with us, along with her mom, my daughter Jasmeen Bains Hudema; our son-in-law, Darren Hudema; and my wife, Rajvinder Bains. They came all the way from Saskatchewan to see the beautiful city of Victoria and our province.

I hope that they will be encouraged, along with the other 107,000 who came to B.C. from across the world, a lot of them from other provinces, that they will join with them as well, this year or next year, whenever they feel appropriate.

We would love to have you here, because we do need more doctors.

Please help me give them a very warm welcome.

Debate Continued

Hon. D. Eby: The member — I understand his confusion, because the situation is within the Prosecution Service, somewhere in the middle. They collect data, currently, on a whole array of issues — time to trial or convictions, and so on, referral to alternative measures and so on. For Indigenous-related data, they’re very reliant on information that’s collected from police, so the baseline is not great, and it’s really hard to have targets or anything other than try to identify broad trends.

While they collect this data right now, the work that’s happening around the metrics is to identify which ones are most representative of where we want to go and how to measure whether the broad trends are indicating one way or another. I think it’s helpful to think about this data as not being in isolation but being related to other initiatives. Do we see a change in a community that has an Indigenous sentencing court in terms of what the Prosecution Service is seeing?

[1:45 p.m.]

If they have an Indigenous justice centre, are we seeing a difference in those impacts? If we open a restorative justice program, does that make a difference? If there is not a restorative justice program, does that make a difference? Trying to identify the interventions that we can put in place that will have a positive impact on these overrepresentation rates so that the Prosecution Service, through their policies, can measure these things. It’s also informative for government around other initiatives that I’ve talked about in our response.

M. de Jong: I’ll make this in the form of a statement because, again, we’ll need to move on.

To the degree that I think there is wide acceptance of the proposition that Indigenous people continue to be overrepresented in the justice system, overrepresented in a negative way in the justice system, and that there is a desire to address that and see that change in a significant way, I will urge upon the Attorney and the government the advantage that will accrue to them and us as a society if we are able to demonstrate to society that the actions being taken are having a positive impact and to demonstrate that empirically as opposed to just, in a general way, suggest that we think we’re doing better.

To the extent that the metrics can include empirical measures that can make the case or help support the case that progress is being made, I think that’ll be helpful.

Let’s move on quickly, then, to another area that the Attorney identified as a priority area, and that is modernization, a label that can capture a range of areas.

The Attorney made specific reference to some of the changes necessitated by the recent pandemic as it relates to how court proceedings are conducted, the use of technology. So some perhaps more specific indicators that….

The Attorney is wise enough to know why opposition has asked these questions — a year from now, to be able to say, with the investments of tax dollars being made: “One year ago these were the objectives around modernization. Were they met?” What, in a more detailed way, should we look for, and how will we measure whether those objectives were met 12 months out?

[1:50 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: Under the heading of modernization, I would include a number of different programs that I expect to make significant progress this year. All will not be implemented by the end of the year, but they will be worked on significantly throughout the year.

The Virtual Indigenous Justice Centre will continue their work and hopefully expand it with our online connectivity initiative to rural and remote communities. Those are primarily Indigenous communities. Those communities will now have access to that service, so we will be looking to see — and I know the First Nations Justice Council is hopeful as well — increased use of that from rural and remote communities.

We have our northern bail program that has been in place towards the latter half of last fiscal, and this year we will continue and expand the use of virtual bail through the Interior. That program’s measures of success on the court’s evaluations relate to the displacement of offenders from different communities for bail — whether or not offenders need to travel to attend court for bail hearings, and so on.

Traffic court online we hope to have implemented this year. The member will recall passing legislation to enable that.

We have something called the digital evidence management system for Crown, which currently…. We’re hopeful for implementation in the middle of 2023. This is a project that aims to respond to the overwhelming growth in digital evidence collected by police in response to crimes and to ensure that it’s managed properly to assist in the conviction of offenders.

We have and will continue to expand Teams and Zoom implementation in courthouses across British Columbia. That includes Wi-Fi expansion in 55 courthouses.

We also have underway approval, and the work is in the initial stages, to update and replace legacy systems. The member will recognize some of these names, I imagine — CEIS, CORNET and JUSTIN — if he had exposure to the criminal justice system. These are very, very old programs that manage key aspects of the justice system in the province. That work to replace those systems is underway.

Then we’re also — it’s a relatively minor program in terms of expense but a relatively significant program in terms of access to justice — delivering more online, user-friendly forms for matters such as divorce so that individuals are able to access justice and fill in forms in a way that courts will be able to process their applications more readily.

[1:55 p.m.]

Then we also will be expanding our use of family justice virtual supports so families in crisis do have access to family justice counsellors wherever they are in the province, as we continue our work to expand our early resolution program, which is currently in Victoria and Surrey.

M. de Jong: Are the procurements relating to the software systems internal to the Attorney General’s ministry? The ones I think I heard the Attorney say are, I believe, court judicial programs. If that is so, has that procurement process started?

I will say this candidly. From my recollection, if there was one way to send ministers fleeing in despair, it was to bring a technology procurement before them. The question is an obvious one. What order of magnitude are we talking about in terms of cost?

This has been a recurring theme that transcends any single government. Technology procurements that run amok cost double or triple and then don’t work or, at least, partially don’t work. What can the Attorney tell us about this particular procurement upgrade and the rough order of magnitude, where we’re at, and the degree to which it has been organized in a way to try to avoid some of the pitfalls of the past?

D. Davies: I seek leave to make an introduction.

Leave granted.

Introductions by Members

D. Davies: I just happened to notice, while I’m sitting here in the chamber, that a couple of my fellow northerners have joined us in the gallery right now. We have the mayor of Fraser Lake, Sarrah Storey, and a city councillor for the city of Prince George, Cori Ramsay, who are down here with UBCM. I’ve been bumping into them lots lately, in Fort St. John for NCLGA and the meetings here.

Would the House please make them feel welcome.

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Debate Continued

Hon. D. Eby: The member is right. These are programs related to the administration of justice in the province. CEIS is a civil litigation scheduling database program. JUSTIN is a criminal justice system database, and then CORNET is a police-related database.

The current budget is $9 million. It was just recently approved, so no vendor has been selected yet. The member will immediately intuit from that number that this is a very light-touch repair-and-replace mission. There are a number of Oracle components in these systems that are no longer supported by the vendor. So it will be to replace those components that are no longer supported or simply are not working.

While that work is happening, the idea is that the new components will be implemented on a platform that can be built incrementally, through what is described as an Agile development process — lots of report-backs — but an iterative process, going forward.

[2:00 p.m.]

It won’t be that one day we turn off the old systems and turn on the new system. It’s more that the existing system will be replaced one piece at a time and, in doing so, at the same time, a new platform will be transitioned to that supports that kind of development process.

M. de Jong: Okay, if you say so. All right.

I want to just take a moment to reveal a bias in this general area of modernization. I don’t think I did this last year, but I’d like to do it this year and seek the Attorney’s views on this, because we’re a year…. Much of what the Attorney has described relates to the use of audiovisual technology that allows proceedings to traverse great distances at a reduced cost. A little bit later I may actually canvass with the Attorney — ironically, in what I’m about to say — some cautions around circumstances in which video technology in bail hearings…. We have to be a little careful; but we’ll get to that in a moment.

I’ll preface my question with this observation, and I’ll try to be fair. I am concerned — for reasons that we’ll get to momentarily — about the perception that the public has of our justice system, and confidence diminishing. I’m not going to suggest that that is a phenomenon that is entirely recent. I will try to make the case later that it may have accelerated a bit recently.

The general lack of confidence that has developed around our institutions of justice is something that has troubled me for some time. I believe that that lack of confidence is further enhanced, as is generally the case, by a lack of understanding of how some of our institutions of justice operate — the complexities, the protections that necessarily must exist.

I have thought for some time now that one of the ways to address that is to give the public greater access through the use of technology, despite the institutional push-back that would exist around broadcasting proceedings. When we say “broadcasting” today, we don’t mean network TV; we mean streaming live, giving people access in that way. The advent of these technologies, for purpose of the administration of justice, lends itself to a broader application that would allow the public — those that are interested, at least — and media outlets, which no longer can afford to send people down to the courthouse.

We get, sometimes, very skewed reports of proceedings, because the day of the courthouse reporter dedicated to a lengthy trial is over. Media outlets can’t do this anymore but might be able to assign someone to watch proceedings from a central location. All to say that for all of the reasons that modernization and technology utilization, for the purpose that we have just described, make sense, ensuring or expanding the use of technology to grant the public better access….

Look, I’m talking in general terms. There will be circumstances that the Attorney can think of and I can think where that might not be appropriate. But as a general rule, allowing the public, who can now go to a courthouse or have always been able to go to a courthouse and watch but don’t do that…. Granting them access through the use of this technology seems to me to be one means by which we can reverse the trend that we see around diminishing confidence in our judicial institutions.

[2:05 p.m.]

It has been a while since I sat in the Attorney’s chair, and I don’t know to what extent, if at all, institutional resistance to that approach and that position has reduced. It was certainly there when I sat in the Attorney’s chair.

I am curious to know to what degree the Attorney General and the government are supportive of the basic proposition that as we utilize technology to facilitate the internal management of justice and administration of justice, we should similarly be prepared to make use of that technology to facilitate a greater public opportunity to watch the operation of our institutions of justice.

Hon. D. Eby: It does seem to be that it really depends on the court. The Supreme Court of Canada, as the member knows, routinely broadcasts their proceedings.

[2:10 p.m.]

The B.C. Court of Appeal, in my opinion, had great success, during the pandemic, broadcasting their hearings. People were interested and watched, and I know that those who did enjoyed having that access. I was very appreciative that the court did that. I share the member’s opinion that it does assist in educating the public about court processes.

I know when the member for Prince George–​Valemount, for example, was Attorney General, there was an application to court to broadcast a large-scale criminal proceeding involving a large number of defendants, which the court rejected. That case, and some related cases, does establish a core judicial authority, constitutionally based, for courts to control their own proceedings and the broadcasting of the same.

We have, during the pandemic, implemented Teams-based hearings, for example, for bail hearings, and so on. In order to observe those hearings, you have to essentially…. For the members in the House who are familiar with the Teams platform, you have to become a participant in the meeting. It’s not like you can just watch it.

That has brought with it challenges in ensuring that the platform is locked down so that participants are not able to, then, interrupt the proceedings. It has led to concerns from the court about recording and reposting of testimony, and so on, despite judicial cautions that that should not be happening. Historically, not currently, there have been concerns about the security of Crown counsel, their likenesses being broadcast, especially if they’re involved in organized crime work. All of which is to say that there are definitely, as the member has raised, institutional challenges to a full broadcast.

Now, I agree with the member in principle on open courts, including in this modern age. Open courts mean available to watch on a computer monitor or TV. We’re of a mind on that.

I can advise him that there is a very lively discussion, not just in British Columbia but across Canada and in many other parts of the world, following the pandemic, about what it means, given the number of proceedings that have shifted to these online models, to have the open court principle, which is also a constitutional right — that the courts should be open to the public — while we have these online proceeding systems that have, almost by definition, very limited access. Beyond that, as we expand, as I advised the member, Wi-Fi and Internet capacity within the courthouses, it becomes possible to expand public access.

This will be a dialogue with the courts, without doubt. It will be, ultimately, the decision of the chief judge, the chief justice or the chief justice of British Columbia which hearings are broadcast and which are not, or widely available or which are not.

I appreciate the member raising the question. I can advise him that those exact conversations are absolutely happening within the province. There is this shared concern between the courts, the bench, the bar and the government about ensuring the public maintains access, even in virtual hearing environments.

M. de Jong: The general topic is of sufficient interest to me that I’ll make a short reply. Then we can move on, unless the Attorney wishes to respond.

As I listened to his comments, he reinforced my own understanding and suspicion that with the use of Teams and Zoom…. What the pandemic forced upon us and forced upon the courts and the Prosecution Service and the civil litigation departments was the use of this technology through Teams and Zoom and all of these platforms. The problem, ironically, became restricting access to those platforms.

[2:15 p.m.]

The only thing I would say, to place on the record at least, is…. The presumption today…. The presumption has been, for over a century, that I can walk down to a courtroom, and the door will be open. At the courthouse and a courtroom, the doors will be open. I can sit and watch those proceedings, whether I am connected with them or not. The presiding judge or justice has the right, in exceptional circumstances, to restrict my entry, but she or he must justify that with some manner of reasoning.

The use of this more modern technology to enhance access to the courts can operate no differently. The fundamental shift that has not occurred yet in the thinking of the courts and, quite frankly, many of the participants, not all but many of the members of the bar, is…. This is still a sanctified setting that mustn’t be sullied by having it available on what I still refer to as the airwaves, but I think we know what we’re talking about.

As attractive as that traditional approach might seem to some, I believe it will continue to undermine the public’s understanding of what takes place in these important institutions and undermine their confidence. So to the extent that the conversations are taking place, to the extent that the chief justices and the chief judge of the province have some appreciation for that fact and, with the assistance of the Attorney General and the Ministry of Attorney General and the court services branch, are prepared to cautiously move into this area….

The highest courts in our province and in our land have found a way to do this. Now, I understand they don’t hear witnesses. They don’t take evidence, generally, from witnesses. There are, of course, some logistical issues, but it is in the long-term interests of these institutions to find a way to capitalize on the work that took place over the last two years and apply it in a slightly different way to enhance the public’s confidence.

If the Attorney wishes to reply, I’ll sit down. Otherwise, I’ll carry on.

Another area that the Attorney cited as being a focus for him and the government and the ministry in the coming year was family justice. The question is not dissimilar. Beyond that general label, what are the more specific measurable initiatives that we should look for in the 12 months ahead as they relate to family justice services?

[2:20 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: There are a number of significant initiatives that are in early-stage implementation around family justice. The member will know we have the early resolution model in place in Victoria and expanded it to Surrey relatively recently. We do have the evaluation back from Victoria, and we saw a very high satisfaction rate among participants.

The whole program…. The idea of it is that a family in crisis…. The parents who are separating meet with, separately, a family justice counsellor who helps them identify what issues they have that they’re trying to resolve through court, works with them to ensure that they get all their documentation together, and tries to, if appropriate, broker agreements on issues outside of court.

The goal of all of it is to reduce the number of issues that ultimately go to court and ensure that the families are fully prepared when they do go to court with all of the documentation. You don’t get this scenario of taking the day off work to show up in family court, and the judge says, “Okay, do you have your tax statement for the year from Canada Revenue?” and the person says: “I didn’t know I was supposed to bring that today.” Then the judge says: “Okay, I’m going to put this over for a couple weeks. You need to bring all your tax materials. Come back.”

I sat in family chambers. It’s a horrific thing to watch for people who are not going through this program, because you can see the frustration on the families, working with duty counsel, trying to figure out what was needed, and so on. That’s why this program has been so successful.

One of the data points that came out of that evaluation was the number of…. Only 31 percent of the issues identified by families ended up having to go to court, so there was a better than 60 percent reduction on the number of issues that went to court, and that led to huge reductions in the number of trial days, court time and, obviously, acrimony between families, reducing conflict between families — one of the key goals here as well as efficiency.

[2:25 p.m.]

That program…. We’re interested in potentially expanding that model to other places, and we’ll explore the possibility of that.

In Kamloops, we have an informal trial process, a pilot program. This informal trial is, by consent, a process where a separating couple will agree to participate in this. It’s like a mediation-arbitration process. The judge will conduct this informal trial, and really, it is much more like that arbitration kind of model than a formal court process. It will be evaluated for success and satisfaction, reduced time in dispute, reductions in conflict, and so on. Depending on those evaluation results — as I say, it has just been launched this fiscal — we’ll look at whether it’s something we should be looking at adding to other registries.

We have just implemented the new family law rules. This fiscal will be the first full fiscal year of the new family law rules, which are meant to simplify and modernize the process when families do have to go to court to resolve issues.

We have just launched the recalculation service in registries across B.C. So when a member of a separated couple has an obligation to pay support to the other partner and they get a new job that pays a higher salary, the recalculation service allows for child support to be recalculated and a new level set without a full court appearance — without any court appearance — and implemented. So it’s a time savings for those individuals who recognize that these are very much formula-based determinations around child support, and it reduces burdens on the court.

Then the member will know that we passed, in this place, the legislation adopting the international convention around recognizing child support orders from other jurisdictions and vice versa. We’re hopeful that we’ll be, in partnership with the government of Canada, able to be implementing that this year.

M. de Jong: A couple of things, then, with respect to the early resolution model. I’ll press the Attorney somewhat. He has spoken of potential expansion beyond the Victoria site — which has been, apparently, evaluated — and the Surrey location. This is where I ask the Attorney: as part of the budget for the coming year, are there funds allocated for a further expansion, and if so, where?

Hon. D. Eby: There are no funds currently allocated for further expansion.

M. de Jong: I wanted to ask something relating to this area that we talked about 12 months ago, when we were having this discussion — that I think, as I recall, the Attorney and I were similarly positively disposed to — related to the initiative around paralegals, specifically in the family law sector. It had encountered some challenges and some obstacles as it relates to early resolution models and even, I dare say, informal trial processes.

[2:30 p.m.]

It strikes me that there is very much a role to play for paralegals to assist families in organizing themselves so that when they do come before a mediator or a judge in those settings, they have organized their documents in a way that lends for the mediator or the arbitrator or the judge to more accurately and more efficiently get to the heart of the matter. Any progress on that front as it relates to the deployment of paralegals?

Hon. D. Eby: I recall discussing this issue with the member, my critic, last year. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think we both expressed some chagrin about the decision of our colleagues, in a member resolution, to delay the implementation of family paralegals after the Law Society did ask government to pass legislation enabling exactly that. We did so, and we’re still waiting to see the outcome of those internal deliberations within the Law Society.

I can say that there has been a very significant development since we last spoke, which is that government has committed to and we have shared with the Law Society, with the regulator for notaries and with the paralegals in the province that it is our intention to move to a single regulator for legal services in the province. The core focus of this regulator will be the public interest, and a second animating principle will be ensuring access to justice for British Columbians.

There will certainly be discussions about respective scope of practice of those existing categories — lawyers, paralegals and notaries — as well as flexibility around new categories of practice. The member will surely be familiar with legal advocates that deliver many legal services in our province yet are not recognized in that work and, in some cases, may even be considered to be offside in terms of the monopoly on practice enjoyed by lawyers in our province.

Having some flexibility around that, within that regulator, will be very important to recognize where legal services are being delivered and ensure that they’re being delivered in a way that protects the public interest. So this is something that I have indicated to these groups of professionals is going to happen.

Beyond that, though, I am really counting on the lawyers and the paralegals and the notaries to work together and to work with the folks in my ministry — with the superintendent for professional governance, who is an expert in these areas, and his team, in partnership — to come up with a model we all, at a minimum, can live with but even better, hopefully, we are excited about in the sense that we believe it will achieve the goals we all have — independence of lawyers from government; of protection of the public interest to ensure the public is looked after when they purchase legal services in the province; that they’re getting high-quality services and that there’s accountability when they don’t get what they pay for; and that access to justice is a key and animating consideration of this regulator in deciding issues related to areas of practice.

[2:35 p.m.]

I’m excited about this work, and I’m very positive about it. It has been met with, I will say, enthusiasm around engagement on the part of the notaries and the lawyers and the paralegals. I’m very hopeful that we will co-design a system that achieves the goals that, I think, the member and I discussed in some detail last year.

M. de Jong: That’s all helpful and useful information. What can the Attorney or what will the Attorney tell the committee about his and the government’s intention around the timing of the legislation that will be required to create the single regulator? Because it will, ultimately, require legislation. This session of parliament is due to expire after one more week. By the time we come back, the government will be in the final two years of its mandate. Time marches on.

Does the Attorney have a timeline in mind for the tabling of legislation? Is he intending to communicate that or has he communicated that? I’ve seen the letter that was sent out to the notaries and members of the Law Society, and I don’t recall it including a specific date by which the Attorney intends to table legislation. But has he communicated a timeline to those parties and representatives of the paralegals? Is he in a position to advise the committee today whether his intention, at least, is to table that legislation creating a single regulator over the course of the next 12 months?

Hon. D. Eby: This is the timeline that has been communicated to the participants in this important process. Engagement is underway as I speak. The government will be developing an intentions paper based on this engagement, which we will publish later this year. We’ll take feedback on the intentions paper and use that feedback to develop legislation to be introduced in fall of 2023.

M. de Jong: Right. The Attorney, in response to my initial question, referred to several other areas, and I simply want to place on the record: each one of these areas is worthy of careful and lengthy discussion and scrutinization. We don’t have time to do that, so I don’t want anyone who might be observing these proceedings to think that there is not regard, on either side of the House, for the importance of the issues. But we’re working within a time period, a legislative calendar, that we need to abide by.

The area that I want to spend a little bit of time with in these proceedings is one of the areas, happily, that the Attorney mentioned. He spoke of prolific offenders and crime. I think the Attorney knows that that is an area I and the opposition have some interest in, because we perceive the public to have an interest in it. I’ll start, again, with a very general question that will afford the Attorney an opportunity to offer some general thoughts on the topic that he has recognized and indicated will be a priority for the year ahead.

[2:40 p.m.]

My question is this: do we have a problem? I think we do, but my opinion matters much less than the Attorney’s and the government’s in that regard. So as it relates to the actions of prolific offenders and their contribution to criminal activity, do we have a problem? To what extent does the Attorney think we have a problem, and how does he see that problem at the moment?

Hon. D. Eby: I think we have two problems, maybe three. The first problem is a shifting in crime patterns. I think when you look at, especially, property crime data — but, in Vancouver, including violent crime — you wouldn’t see numbers that would cause a great deal of alarm. In fact, you might see numbers that would cause you to believe — certainly, could cause me to believe — that things are actually remarkably positive. Yet, when I meet with mayors from communities, or other leaders, they identify that there are very significant and growing issues — in particular, in their downtown cores.

The data are, to that extent, concealing the first problem, which is that shift in criminal activity and patterns that took place during the pandemic. That shift is problematic for a couple of reasons. One is that the stores and businesses and restaurants, and so on, that took a real hit during the pandemic are now under pressure. Due to perceptions of safety, people are reluctant to come downtown, hearing on the news about prolific offenders or seeing activity downtown that causes them to feel unsafe, or actually being a victim of crime.

That’s a problem. It’s a problem for recovery from the pandemic. It’s a problem for lively, attractive downtowns. It’s a problem for, in bigger cities, our goals of supporting people to live closer to work, to live closer together to reduce carbon pollution and also to increase innovation and opportunity. So it’s a problem we need to address. It’s sort of a pattern of where the criminal activity is a problem.

A second and related problem that I see and that has been identified for me, again by mayors and various leaders in the community, is a small number of people creating an outsized amount of havoc in communities — again, typically in downtown areas. I hear it from hub cities like Trail, Terrace, Quesnel — smaller centres but centres of even smaller and more remote communities; and also from the mayors of many of B.C.’s biggest cities, from the Vancouvers and the Victorias and the Nanaimos and the Kelownas; and I could go on.

What I hear from these mayors is that there are small groups of individuals in our communities, and the data appear to support that. These individuals cause a great deal of havoc, everything from low-level assaults to property damage, shoplifting, uttering threats, and so on.

[2:45 p.m.]

Within this category, there are two different groups: one group that seems almost particular to Vancouver, which has been identified by VPD, committing random, violent attacks on strangers, unprovoked; and another group with serious mental health and addiction issues committing chronic property crime.

These issues are distinct, but I think they’re very linked, obviously, given the fact that these offenders have such an outsized impact. This is the goal of doing what’s possible to disentangle what’s happening — these different trends that have been amplified through and following the main pandemic public health restriction period.

It is currently being undertaken by two experts in this area — one an expert in the practical application of policing in community in relation to chronic offenders, Doug LePard, and another, Dr. Amanda Butler, an expert in the success, or lack thereof, of previous initiatives trying to grapple with mental health and addiction issues and corrections and the best way to respond to people with profound challenges that lead them to interact, again and again, in a negative way with the criminal justice system and with the public. That work is underway.

M. Lee: I seek leave to make an introduction.

Leave granted.

The Chair: Please proceed.

Introductions by Members

M. Lee: I just want to take the opportunity to welcome, in the gallery, 28 students in grade 6 from Sir William Osler Elementary in the riding I represent, Vancouver-Langara. I had the opportunity to meet with them in the lower rotunda — and the teacher, Mr. Patrick O’Hara. I had the opportunity to participate in their vote process, when they vote for various candidates. I think I won that one. But I appreciate the opportunity here.

You are seeing, as I mentioned to you — because they were looking at the Hansard booth…. You can see all the technology at use. Now you’re in the chamber, and you’re seeing, on the floor of the Legislative Assembly, the estimates process with the Attorney General of our province and the member for Abbotsford West, the critic for the Attorney General.

I was that critic for 3½ years. I have many fond memories of many debates and discussions with the Attorney General about various topics, including community safety.

That’s what you’re seeing here. Have a great rest of your visit. Welcome to the Legislative Assembly.

The Chair: Welcome to the students.

M. de Jong: The students should know that if there is a member of this assembly that can lower the voting age, his estimates are on the docket right now.

Debate Continued

M. de Jong: That initial exchange is helpful. I’m going to take a few minutes and explore with the Attorney the magnitude of the problem he has alluded to and seems to recognize exists. I want to explore that a little more.

It struck me, though…. I have used the terms “prolific offender,” “chronic offender,” and those terms are used interchangeably. I’m not terribly concerned about that. But I did think that for the purpose of this discussion, we should probably try to establish who we are talking about when we talk about prolific offenders.

As I will from time to time during our exchange, during these estimates, I’m going to ask the general question of the Attorney. What is the definition that he and the ministry apply to decide who is a prolific or chronic offender?

As part of that conversation, I’m going to refer to a document that I came across from the Attorney General’s ministry in the United Kingdom, a study they did, I think, two or three years ago. I made a copy so that the Attorney is not flying blind as we have this conversation. I’ll ask that perhaps it can be sent over to him.

[2:50 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: The member and the article he has shared really hit the nail on the head here. The phrase “prolific offender” is not defined in the Criminal Code. It doesn’t by itself form the basis for any B.C. Prosecution Service policies, currently. It’s typically used by police services. For example, the B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus correspondence, which I know the member is familiar with, defined a prolific offender as an offender who commits greater than 30 offences per year, and it also uses the term to describe persons involved in 30 “negative police contacts” in a year, which is different than an offence.

In that same correspondence, Abbotsford PD describes prolific offenders as individuals with ten to 29 convictions. Others have observed that prolific offenders are people who “repeatedly break the law and are at high risk to break it again.”

There are a number of conflations of different issues as well. There’s the discussion of the complex needs of someone with a mental health and addiction issue who commits a property crime as being a prolific offender, regardless of the number of offences. So the challenge around that is one of the reasons why I asked for a specific and clear definition if possible, a working definition that we can use, from the investigation team that is looking into this right now for my office.

Defining these terms is important because it enables a couple of things. One is it enables us to identify the size of the group — the relative size of the group — in different communities. It enables us to measure progress of any interventions we put into place. We’re seeing fewer prolific offenders. We’ll assume some meaning. We won’t be sort of talking at odds with people who are identifying a different issue when they say prolific offender than when we say prolific offender. So the definition is critically important.

M. de Jong: I think part of the Attorney’s answer is what gives rise to some of the concerns and frustrations that he and the government have been confronted by, where he points out and acknowledges that the notion of a prolific offender isn’t presently the basis for any policies within the Prosecution Service. Over the course of our discussions, I am going to suggest that that is a problem. The Attorney, I expect, is going to tell me that he is working on that problem with the study that has been called for and will eventually appear.

I’m going to press, though, a little bit, by making this point: we’re not alone. A lot of this work has been done. The study that I have, the portion of the study from the United Kingdom Ministry of Justice from May 2019, includes some pretty specific stuff about how we define prolific offenders.

[2:55 p.m.]

In their view…. They break it down. They make the point that depending on the age of an individual, the criteria could be very different. Someone that’s 18 years old has not, presumably, had the same amount of time to accumulate a record of convictions that a 50-year-old has. But they do try to quantify in a specific way.

The Attorney and his officials can see from the document that I have provided that they talk about a juvenile prolific offender as someone aged ten to 17 who has had four or more previous…. The word they use is “sanctions.” A young adult prolific offender, someone between the ages of 18 and 20, who has had eight or more previous sanctions, of which four or more were received while the offender was between 18 and 20. And then an adult prolific offender is anyone over the age of 21 who has had 16 or more previous sanctions, of which eight or more were received when the offender was over the age of 21.

The point being in developing…. Perhaps the Attorney and I don’t disagree on this point. I think we need to develop…. I think we should have had some policies — we should have some policies — and we need to develop those policies. But we need to know who we’re developing them for.

With the greatest respect, I’m not sure we need a further study to develop a definition for what constitutes a prolific offender. The Attorney is quick to make the point that there can be any number of reasons that someone becomes a prolific offender. No argument from me. We’ll need to be cognizant of that. But what is a prolific offender?

The United Kingdom seems to have — to their satisfaction, at least — determined what that is. Police departments around the province have developed some loose definitions, but I don’t think that they’re particularly formalized.

The question to the Attorney General is: if he is serious about wanting to develop policies directed to restrict the criminal activities of prolific offenders, isn’t it essential that the Ministry of Attorney General now, quickly, reveal to the public whom they believe or what they believe the criteria is for a prolific or chronic offender? And to what degree does he believe that the approach — he may quibble with the numbers — taken by the United Kingdom in breaking it down on an age basis, in the way that they have, is an appropriate way to go?

[3:00 p.m.]

[J. Tegart in the chair.]

Hon. D. Eby: I think the first clarification I’d like to make is just that the investigative work that’s underway right now into this issue is not set up to…. The reason for asking these two esteemed individuals to do this work was not to provide the government with a definition. I think a definition is necessary to measure the success of anything we implement. It’s part of what I’ve asked.

The goal is solutions around this issue, which I think the member and I both accept is a real one. Certainly, the mayors and the police to whom I’ve spoken believe it’s a real issue. So I don’t know that there’s any debate about that.

In order to measure the effect of the program or programs that we put in place to respond, whether the problem’s getting worse or better over time, I do think we need a definition that everybody agrees on. It could be the U.K. definition the member put forward. It could be other definitions that are used in other places in Canada or North America.

I believe we have the right people on the job to establish that definition independent of me. The reason why that’s important is…. I think, reasonably, someone could say: “Well, you’re choosing this definition to make it look like the problem is less than it is” or “You’re choosing this definition because you can address that problem, but you didn’t put this in the definition because you can’t.” It gives us something that’s established at arm’s length from government and that will enable us to wrap our heads around the problem and address it. Just by way of clarification.

The other piece is…. I think it’s important for people to know that there are a number of initiatives in place around prolific offenders, especially those with serious mental health and addiction issues, in different communities. We have the downtown community court in Vancouver. We have a community court in Kelowna. We have one in Victoria.

Now, I say that all while noting that these are three of the communities that have come to us asking for help. So we have these resource-intensive courts that are operating in these communities notionally to support the management of these prolific offenders. These mayors are coming to us and saying: “Hey, we’re in distress.” At least, Victoria and Kelowna have really focused on prolific offenders in their concerns that they’ve brought to me. Vancouver is slightly different.

[3:05 p.m.]

Why are those courts not responding to these issues? Why are these particular offenders resistant to the programs and processes that are put in place in those courts? These are important questions. I don’t know the answers to those, and this is some of the work that is underway.

I agree with the member. The lack of a definition, a provincial definition, is troubling. It’s strange that we don’t have one. Police services all use their own. They’re all slightly different. We need one. Yet that doesn’t mean that nothing has been done on this issue.

There is also another category of offenders I want to flag so that the public knows that this group of offenders does have a process and policies in place: high-risk offenders at high risk of reoffending in relation to a sexual or a violent crime, particularly against vulnerable groups. These high-risk offenders….

There’s a national program. They’re tagged in the criminal records. It forms the basis for dangerous offender applications, long-term offender applications. So there is a full program within the Prosecution Service, which is part of a national initiative around this group of offenders. A different set of considerations, really, than the group that I believe that we’re talking about.

I hope that’s some clarification and response to the member’s question.

M. de Jong: Yeah, I don’t think that we’re going to solve this matter today. We are having a discussion that hopefully will be helpful in terms of conveying concerns and hopefully, ultimately, some suggestions.

By the way, just so the Attorney knows, I have some ideas that eventually I’d like to convey to him. One derives from something that he just mentioned as it relates to violence against…. The term has changed over the years, but I think today it is violence against intimate partners. There is a suite of policies that the ministry, over many years, has developed to address that very specific issue, and ultimately, I’m going to suggest that what we’re dealing with here warrants a similar approach.

I was heartened to hear that the Attorney recognized it. If we are to do that, we should know the group by definition, the group that we are dealing with. That will require a definition of sorts. I disagree with the Attorney that it would somehow be inappropriate for him and, by extension, the ministry to develop that definition. I think the body of literature around this that exists is sufficiently well developed that, unless the government and the ministry adopted something so extraordinarily out of sync with that literature, the prospect of being criticized is pretty remote.

The U.K. approach, as the Attorney and his folks will see, speaks to two criteria that need to be applied to the three age quotients. Offending history, which is the minimum number of previous convictions that need to have occurred in the various age groups. Then a second criteria, criminal history pattern. The point there is…. If someone has committed 15 offences as a non-adult — as a juvenile, to use their language — but only one as an adult, the point is made that that probably disqualifies the person from being considered a prolific offender, unless that pattern continues.

All to say that there is, I think…. If we’re going to address this, we need to formalize who it is that we are targeting, if I can use that word. The question…. I would prefer it be done sooner rather than later. I expect the Attorney has already…. Well, he has already signalled that he intends to wait until his report is complete.

[3:10 p.m.]

The question. Whether it’s now or subsequent to the receipt of his report, can he commit to the committee that there will be a definition? For any policies that might follow, it will be clear that the Ministry of Attorney General and the Prosecution Service, in particular, consider anyone that meets the following criteria, for the purpose of prosecutions, to be a prolific offender?

Hon. D. Eby: I can assure the member that I did indeed ask for the definition, the best recommendation of the investigators who are looking at this matter, and I’ll receive that from them. I can’t, in advance of receiving it, commit government to adopting it, but I can certainly say that our government is committed to dealing with the issue of prolific offenders. Part of that, in my opinion, involves government adopting a definition so that we can track our success, or lack thereof, with the initiatives that we put in place to try to go after this.

We will be adopting a definition. Whether or not it’s the one that’s put forward by the investigators is another question. But I have asked them to do that work indepen­dently, and ultimately, as the member knows, I’ll bear poli­tical responsibility for that. I’ll take some comfort from his reassurance that he and his colleagues will not critique that definition when it’s adopted. I’ll read this portion of the Hansard back to him when it does happen. I’m just kidding.

The staff had a quick look at the member’s paper and the U.K. prosecution service. They weren’t able to find within the U.K. prosecution service a definition or policy used within that service. So if the member is aware of that, I’d encourage him and welcome him to share that.

[3:15 p.m.]

We do have the white paper the member sent over, and we’ll use that to inform our work. I don’t know why that paper was produced or what context it was produced in, whether it’s for developing a policy for the Prosecution Service or so on. But any other relevant documentation that the member wants to share to inform the work that’s happening would be welcome.

M. de Jong: A couple of things. Notwithstanding my impatience, I am gratified to hear that the Attorney has committed to the fact that the ministry will adopt, and presumably do so publicly, a definition of “prolific offender.” I would urge him to do so as quickly as possible, and he has indicated, forthrightly, the schedule he intends to follow in that respect.

Just for information, the document I sent over is, I think, part 4 or part 5 of a report published May 16, 2019, by the Ministry of Justice, specifically on prolific offenders. The last reference I’ll make to it to emphasize the point that I think the Attorney General has accepted…. On the bottom of the third page of the document I sent over, under the heading “Definition of ‘prolific offender’,” which is actually set out above, the authors point to some statistics on a table on page 4 of the document. I’ll quickly read it into the record.

Of all prolific offenders, by virtue of their definition, 4 percent were juveniles aged ten to 17, 8 percent were young adults aged 18 to 20, and 87 percent were adults. They further break that down, tracking the graduation — if that’s the right term — of young prolific offenders into adult prolific offenders. That’s all to say that, having adopted that definition, they’re able to generate these kinds of statistics for the purpose of at least trying to better understand what is taking place and by whom.

For all of those reasons and, obviously, more, I commend the report. We’ll be watching closely for the adoption and publication of a definition that will at least allow all of us to agree on who it is we are talking about when we use these terms.

While I chat, I’ll send over another document that I’m certain that the Attorney has. I just realized that the Attorney and the ministry have millions of documents, and it’s not always easy to get their hands on it quickly. What I’ve sent over is the Vancouver police department report to the police board on crime stats, which I know that the ministry has, that I’m sure they have. It’s dated February 7, and it was submitted to the Vancouver police board on February 24.

On the second page of that report, under the heading “Violent crime,” on the first bullet, it reads: “At the end of 2021, the number of violent crimes was 5,866, up 1.5 percent from the same time in 2020…. The 2021 year-end violent crime total is 7.1 percent higher than the three-year average of violent crime incidents….”

[3:20 p.m.]

The point I think the author is making is something the Attorney General referred to earlier, and that is that through the pandemic, because of its impact on movement of people, that had an impact to skew the numbers.

Further down in the second bullet, the fourth subpoint, the report says: “Serious assaults decreased by 1.1 percent; however, the number of serious assaults in 2021 is 28.5 percent higher than the three-year average between 2017 and 2019.”

My first question to the Attorney, with the assistance of his staff: does he accept those numbers as a description of the problem? Does the Ministry of Attorney General accept the data, as reported by the Vancouver police department to the police board, as being accurate with respect to the reporting of violent crime?

Hon. D. Eby: I have a couple of different sets of statistics to share with the member. Starting in fiscal year 2017-18, I have reports to Crown counsel received from police. A report to Crown counsel is where there’s been an offence, and police have been called. They’ve done an investigation, compiled everything together and prepared a report to Crown, recommending charges. Then Crown does their deliberations.

This measures the inputs coming into the Crown office. It’s a good indicator of trends. From ’17-18 through to fis­cal year ’21-22, there was a 27.8 percent decrease in the number of reports to Crown counsel received. The reason for that is just a collapse in the number of reports to Crown counsel in two categories — one is property offence reports to Crown counsel, and the other is administration of justice reports to Crown counsel.

[3:25 p.m.]

Property offence reports to Crown counsel were down 44.1 percent, and administration of justice reports to Crown counsel were down 41.9 percent. A significant but smaller decrease was in other offence reports to Crown counsel, which were down 17.5 percent. The one outlier is what Crown counsel described as person offence reports to Crown counsel. This would definitely include violent crime. It’s really any interference with another person, which were up 12 percent over the same period. So that would show a trend not inconsistent with what the member had read out.

Now, I have different numbers than the member around police data on violent crimes, Vancouver police violent crime data. This is from the Vancouver police department annual reports. The violent crime trend line from ’16-17 through 2021, in their data, indicates an increase from 5,266 incidents in 2017 to 5,865 incidents in 2021 but a similar, marked decline in property crimeI from 40,711 property crime incidents in 2017 to 28,733 property crime incidents in 2021. If you look at the total number of offences for Vancouver over that period — again, it’s a remarkable reduction, from 52,062 offences in 2017, total, to 40,239 offences in 2021, total.

This reflects in the overall crime rate per 1,000 members of the population. In 2017, the number was 77.74 offences per 1,000 members of the population of Vancouver; in 2021, the number was 58.05 offences. When you take into account population growth, even with population growth, it does moderate, a little bit, the increase in violent crime that we’re seeing. You’ll see that in 2017, the crime rate per 1,000 population was 7.86, and in 2021, it was 8.46.

In these numbers, to put them in some historical context, violent crime was 9 percent higher and property crime was 11 percent higher in 2012. Vancouver, the city, had a smaller population, yet crime, in just gross numbers, was remarkably higher.

The member rightly notes that over the pandemic period, we have seen an increase in violent crime. When we look at the provincial statistics, which provide a bit more of a breakdown about what might be driving that violent crime, there’s whole bunch of things that fall under that category.

We see somewhat staggering increases in offences described as uttering threats; indecent or harassing communications; and what are described as assault level one, the definition of which is an interference with another person — it could be a push, a shove — that doesn’t result in a significant injury to that person but could be quite terrifying for that person. In 2017, assault level one, provincially, 20,634 offences; in 2020, 27,352 offences. Uttering threats, in 2017, 8,660 offences; in 2020, 16,362 offences. Indecent or harassing communications, 5,651 offences in 2017, and 9,431 in 2020.

[3:30 p.m.]

Some of this is confounded by a change in Statistics Canada’s definition of how they…. It comes out of the Unfounded investigation in the Globe and Mail, where police deemed, in particular, sexual offences, alleged disproportionately by women, to be unfounded, and they were not recorded as offences. The federal government took a perspective — and rightly, in my opinion — that women, and victims of crime generally, who bring allegations forward should be believed and that it should be reflected in data.

That change happened between the years 2018 and 2019. You can see a marked increase. I don’t believe it explains the full increase that we’ve seen. There are many explanations that have been offered about the decline in civility and the increase, in the shadow pandemic that was described, of violence against women and associated uttering of threats, racial epithets and other activities that we’ve seen increase during the pandemic. I think we’ll be researching for many years why this is happening.

It is a complicated picture in terms of both provincial and Vancouver crime statistics. The trends that the member has identified, I think, are correct. I have different numbers from the annual reports than the one that the police board report has.

Of interest, perhaps, the crime severity index, which is monitored by Statistics Canada — I only have this for the provincewide numbers — has decreased from a high in 2019 to be more consistent with the long-term average, but it’s still higher than normal. For violent crime severity in British Columbia, we are currently lower than violent crime severity was in 2011-2012 in British Columbia. But at 89.5 on the severity crime index, we are significantly higher than we were in 2017, which was 74.5.

For the youth crime severity index, happily, the numbers are much lower. In 2020, the most recent year for which I have data, 28.2 is the crime severity index measurement. That is actually the lowest crime severity for youth since 2011, according to B.C. Statistics.

M. de Jong: Thanks to the Attorney.

A number of things flow from that that I would submit to the Attorney. This is a difficult forum in which to throw huge numbers of numbers around. I think the Attorney has accepted my proposition in directing him to this particular collation of data from the Vancouver police department around the general trend lines.

In the document that I’ve provided, on pages 4, 5 and 6, there are a number of bar charts that relate to the trend line upwards for violent crime, for homicides, for shots fired. Happily, there seems to have been a significant decrease in bank robberies, for example — and by the way, to put on the record, seemingly a significant decrease in property crime. But in these other areas, the numbers — as I was listening to the Attorney — whilst perhaps they are slightly different, didn’t strike me as being all that different from the numbers he is quoting from.

It’s all to say that the proposition I am hopeful the Attorney General will agree with is that trend lines around crimes against persons, violent crimes, are heading in the wrong direction. We don’t have data for the most recent period.

[3:35 p.m.]

The Attorney, I expect, is getting the same anecdotal advice from the prosecution branch, the police, the mayors and community leaders that the trend is accelerating in the wrong direction, which speaks to the importance of taking steps to try and arrest that.

One other point about the Vancouver police department report — I provided a copy to the Attorney — is on page 10. I’ll just direct him and his staff to that. I think this is going to be relevant to a conversation that is going to arise at some point — and maybe, peripherally, already has — and it relates to section 28 Mental Health Act apprehensions. I wondered if the Attorney would comment on, first of all, whether he agrees with the statistics and then, secondly, whether he had any comment around the apparent modest decrease, in 2021, of Mental Health Act apprehensions.

At some point, we are going to have a conversation about what causes prolific offenders. The Attorney is going to, quite rightly, point out that there are many causes and that they can relate to mental health issues and addictions. I was a bit surprised by this — by the fact that at the time persons crime and violent crime are on the rise, apprehensions under the Mental Health Act seem to, ever so slightly, be decreasing.

That was not my perception or my expectation, but I’m sure that the Attorney General’s ministry and the officials are aware of this. I’m curious to know from the Attorney whether they were surprised or what explanation they would have for what seems to be a bit of an inconsistency there.

Hon. D. Eby: We have very limited line of sight into Mental Health Act apprehensions for the reason that typically, if a police officer does apprehend someone for a Mental Health Act apprehension, they will bring that individual to the hospital. The person may be admitted as an involuntary patient to that hospital. There is no contact with the justice system and, therefore, no data collected by Crown and so on.

Happily, I do have some data that may assist the member in understanding the trend. We have done some work on the mental health rights advice service, and we have some statistics from the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions. I would recommend the member to direct sort of more…. Or perhaps Public Safety and Solicitor General may have an explanation about police activity in this regard.

The number of individuals with involuntary status in acute care facilities has been increasing steadily over the last 15 years. When we look between 2005-2006 and 2017-18 — I apologize; these are the only data I have — the number of involuntarily admitted patients increased by approximately 79 percent, whereas voluntarily admitted patients increased by only 12 percent. It is possible that one of the reasons why there are fewer apprehensions is that individuals are spending longer in involuntary status in an acute care facility.

[3:40 p.m.]

That is purely speculation, because, as I advised the member, I don’t know. This ministry does not have the detailed data on this kind of activity.

M. de Jong: Before I go any further, I was remiss. The Attorney has introduced to the committee the very capable staff helping him. I want to acknowledge a woman who has helped me.

Karen Bill plies her trade with great diligence and little fanfare. Our ability to have this conversation is, in large measure, a tribute to her helping me compile some of this material so that we can — at least, in a reasonably efficient way — have this conversation about the minister’s budget. So thank you to Karen Bill.

All right. I think we have established some measure of agreement that the trend lines around violent crime in the city of Vancouver — we’ll come to other parts of the province in a moment — are headed in the wrong direction. I suppose the question that requires asking is: what explanation, or any, does the Attorney General have for why this is taking place?

Hon. D. Eby: This is exactly one of the questions we’ve asked the investigators to look into. We’ve had a meeting with the Vancouver police department to discuss this issue. They’ve identified, specifically in Vancouver, an issue of random stranger attacks, which they were at pains to point out is distinct, in their assessment, from the group of prolific offenders. So in the terms of reference for the investigators, I set those out separately.

In conversations with them, what’s driving this kind of activity…. There were no easy answers. I think if they had easy answers, they would be working overtime to address those, if they were policing responses that were required. I’m sure they are working overtime to address these issues.

I will say I’ve been heartened by some of the recent coverage around increased foot traffic downtown resulting in decreases in crime. News 1130 recently had an article headlined “Vancouver’s West End Sees Decreases in Crime amid Loosened Restrictions.” There was a similar article in the Globe and Mail, Francis Bula–authored, talking with the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association.

I think and I hope that we’re starting to see a crest in some of these kinds of activities, but the member may be right. Given the real-time nature of the issue we’re dealing with, we’re…. I can’t point to anything aside from increased foot traffic, the number of people downtown, potentially driving these decreases in some of the activities that were causing a great deal of distress earlier in places like the West End — whether that is a trend or whether it’s a blip.

I think the core of the work that I’ve asked these experts to do is: “Can you identify why these things are happening, in terms of the random stranger attacks? Can you help us identify ways to prevent them or respond to them more effectively?” That is the work the government is doing.

M. de Jong: Well, who says the media can’t be an authoritative source for crime information, crime stats.

[3:45 p.m.]

I am obliged to ask the Attorney this question and will do so. Insofar as the data began to reveal a trend line in the wrong direction, particularly in the areas of violent crime, the question that he has seen posed in those same and other media outlets and that I will pose now is why it took until last month or two weeks ago for the Attorney General to take the very preliminary step of calling for this study to be undertaken.

Hon. D. Eby: The question is premised on an incorrect assertion, which is that this investigation is all that government has done in relation to the issues of mental health and addiction driving criminal activity and the feelings of a lack of safety in downtown cores. The member will know that we have taken very significant measures to address large-scale encampments in downtown Victoria and downtown Vancouver and the Whalley strip, that we committed in the budget 500 complex care beds for people with serious mental health and addiction issues.

Cities like Vernon that track these numbers carefully are now reporting a 50 percent decrease in crime in their downtown core thanks to supportive housing that has opened there, getting people inside and addressing their core needs that were driving some of the criminal activity that they were engaging in — very positive results from that community.

Situation tables are providing positive results, funded by the provincial government, in communities like Quesnel, yet despite that work…. And as the mayors themselves will say, we’ve worked together closely on complex care and on delivering these programs.

There is a group of people who will not take up these voluntary programs, and the extent of this problem, I think, surprised them. It certainly surprised me. In the context of what I would describe as historically low levels of overall crime in Vancouver and the province, certainly we were aware of the disorder issues, the challenges downtown, but the impact of this small group of prolific offenders driving some of that disorder downtown…. When they initially raised the issue with me and I asked them to collect some data on this so that we could have a look at it, I think we were all unpleasantly surprised by the results, which led to that investigation.

We’ve been doing a lot of work together on the issues of helping communities recover from the pandemic, helping address issues of disorder in downtown cores, address issues of open poverty, drug addiction, mental health issues, suffering in the streets that really detract from feelings of community safety and, for the people suffering with those life situations, address in a compassionate way their challenges and make their lives better with better outcomes, as many of the reviews of our supportive housing do show. So there’s lots happening, but this is another layer of a complicated problem, and we’re going to go after that too.

I move the committee rise, report progress and seek leave to sit again.

Motion approved.

The committee rose at 3:49 p.m.

The House resumed; Mr. Speaker in the chair.

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

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

Hon. L. Beare: In this chamber, I call continued estimates of the Ministry of Attorney General.

In the Douglas Fir Room, I call Committee of Supply, Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure.

Committee of Supply

ESTIMATES: MINISTRY OF
ATTORNEY GENERAL

(continued)

The House in Committee of Supply (Section B); J. Tegart in the chair.

The committee met at 3:52 p.m.

On Vote 15: ministry operations, $581,587,000 (continued).

M. de Jong: The Attorney’s last comments are probably as good an opportunity as I’ll get to offer this confession to the committee. We all come to these conversations with certain biases, and they colour the way we analyze these things. I think this is one of those times, and I’m happy to lay on the record a bias that I have.

I accept absolutely the notion, the proposition and as a fact that many of the people who commit crimes, commit acts that are outlawed in the Criminal Code, do so from a position of diminished capacity, whether that is by reason of mental health issues, addictions. There is no question that is based on firsthand observations from a time when I used to be involved in the courts.

I must say there is another group…. We had an exchange, the Attorney and I, in a different forum in this place, which is less amenable to thoughtful exchanges, where I tried to, I suppose clumsily, make that point. There is a group — happily, I think, a much smaller group — who is not so burdened.

[3:55 p.m.]

They are burdened by and burden society because they have made a decision to pursue a life of crime, and they conduct themselves accordingly. There are other reasons, I suppose, in their backgrounds that may have contributed to that decision, but it is not always attributable to our traditional notion of mental health issues or addictions.

The reason I say that is…. The Attorney will, as he already has, point out steps that the government has taken to address that group of people who are impacted by mental health issues and addictions. I am less convinced that steps have been taken recently to address what I acknowledge is a smaller group but a group that in my view is responsible for much of the havoc that the Attorney General is receiving submissions about from leaders like the mayors.

That is a good transition for us. The next document, if you will, that I wanted to refer to — and I’m sure the Attorney has it over there — is the letter he received on April 5. If he doesn’t have it readily available, I have a copy, if that makes it easier. I know he has it. I’m not suggesting….

Hon. D. Eby: We have it.

M. de Jong: You have it.

The B.C. Urban Mayors Caucus finally, frustrated by what they saw happening in their communities, wrote. They wrote with respect to a particular concern. They wrote to the Attorney. They also wrote to the Solicitor General. They highlighted what, for them, has been a particular source of frustration.

Now, I’ll try to deal with this in a couple of steps here. Early on in their letter, they talk about the issues their communities are facing with repeat offenders. They used the phrase “catch-and-release policy.” I know that has acquired a partisan distinction. They do, however, use the term in their letter as well.

I’ll start merely by asking the Attorney this. In a general sense, the urban mayors, and a number of non-urban mayors, are saying, and have done so in their letter, that something has happened of late to amplify this as an issue, though we haven’t yet defined the term “prolific offender,” where prolific offenders are committing criminal acts on a repetitive basis for which they and their communities perceive no sanctions to be imposed and no measures being taken to protect their communities from those repetitive criminal acts.

Does the Attorney General accept the proposition that this behaviour is on the rise and is contributing to genuine safety concerns in communities in B.C.?

[4:00 p.m.]

[S. Chandra Herbert in the chair.]

Hon. D. Eby: We spent a brief moment discussing the member’s question, and I’ll acknowledge that we are a technical ministry when it comes to questions.

Does it mean…? Someone is arrested. There’s a question of whether they should be released, either at the scene of the offence by the police officer, catch and release — that’s something that can happen, that does happen; be released under conditions agreed to that the prosecutor proposes, catch and release. That is something that happens. A person still comes for trial and for hearings and so on, procedural matters, or their counsel does, but they’re waiting for their trial in the community, not in a remand facility; or they appear in front of a judge, and the judge says: “I have decided that I can release you back into the community with these conditions.” Catch and release — that’s something that happens.

Those are all stages at which someone can be caught. The police can have reasonable and probable grounds that the individual committed the offence. They’re arrested, and they’re released at some stage along their journey, or they’re sent to a remand facility to wait for trial.

One of the things that we’ve seen, I can advise the member, in terms of trends, is a decline in the prison population in British Columbia, over the course of the pandemic, of about 20 percent or so that has not yet recovered. There’s a number of reasons that I’m given for why that has taken place.

The decline in property crime rates and reports to Crown counsel. There’s just the restriction in the number of criminal trials that took place during the pandemic. Many were adjourned, so people completed their sentence in facilities, were released, and they weren’t replaced as they normally would be by incoming people from criminal trials that were concluding — someone being convicted and sentenced to time in a facility. So we have a lower number of reports to Crown counsel, lower rates of crime, restricted court access. Courts were still open but processing fewer individuals.

And then one particular category of offence, which is administration of justice offences, had two separate initiatives impact…. I read to the member, earlier, statistics about the collapse in the number of administration of justice offences. Those were one of two categories with remarkable declines.

Bill C-75, out of the federal government, requires courts, prosecutors, to use least restrictive means when someone is arrested on an offence. They’re put on conditions to, wherever possible, avoid custody; to use least restrictive means in terms of the conditions that are imposed; and when someone breaches those conditions, to only pursue an administration of justice offence breach of conditions in significantly restricted circumstances than before bill C-75. So that was one.

[4:05 p.m.]

The second was a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, on a case called Zora, where the court admonished all actors in the criminal justice system about having people wait in jail for their trials as one of the default responses and that prosecutors and judges need to be much more careful in holding someone in custody waiting for their trial.

In that respect, many people who have been caught by police, or police have probable grounds to believe they committed an offence, are not spending their time waiting for trial in jail anymore. They’re waiting in the community. I’m told anecdotally by our Crown — they don’t have data on this yet — that they are seeing more and more individuals coming into the court for prosecution, being arrested by police, that have multiple offences that are in process than historically has been the case. A person will have five, six offences that haven’t yet gone to trial.

This means that the person has been released back into the community and has committed another offence that caused them to be arrested and then brought back in. This is something that is showing up more frequently.

There are a number of explanations for these trends that seem very persuasive to me in what is driving them and, I think, present a challenge to the province. The first is that these are federally initiated changes that are implemented by an independent judiciary and an independent prosecution service. Even if neither of them were, I would have trouble directing them not to follow the federal law, which is Bill C-75, in relation to administration of justice offences.

They are bound to apply that federal law in the Zora decision, and they do so, and that’s their job. They are independent of me to prevent political considerations from interfering with that critical work. So that presents a challenge.

The second challenge is really more in the nature of an opportunity, which is that even though we do not prescribe the law that decides whether or not someone waits for their trial in custody or in the community, as a province, we do have a number of opportunities to respond to situations where…. And it might be through….

We’ve canvassed some of these possibilities in the Legislature. I set out a number of them in the terms of reference for the investigators. Opportunities to provide supports to the justice system to recognize that people would be waiting for trial in the community in a way that they weren’t before — to mitigate these potential harms while they’re waiting for trial.

I did set out things like electronic monitoring and support services that would be mandatory, available to judges to access. Perhaps there are other opportunities available out there. This is the work that we have tasked these investigators to do. So we’re working within this federal context, but there are opportunities that come from the challenge to address these issues.

M. de Jong: So a few things flow from that that I can convey to the Attorney General in advance of my question. First of all, in the course of this discussion, I may be interested in other things, but what I can attempt and what the opposition can attempt to hold the government and the Attorney General to account for are things within their control. Insofar as there are other factors at play, the Attorney won’t and shouldn’t be concerned that I will endeavour to hold him to account for those things.

[4:10 p.m.]

For example, we are now, on the strength of what we have heard from mayors and community leaders, delving into a matter as it relates to the release policies for persons charged with criminal misconduct — persons that we might reasonably consider prolific offenders, based on their records.

I understand and accept that members of the Prosecution Service, once the matter is before a court, do not make that decision. It is made by a judge, on the strength of submissions made by the Prosecution Service and counsel for the defendant. It’s made by an independent judge on that basis. The nature of the submissions and the position taken by the Crown is something that I can explore with the Attorney and perhaps even provide some thoughts and submissions around.

Secondly, I will say this to the Attorney. It’s something that we’ll get to either later today or next day. I have heard him refer to two sources of law that have complicated this matter — I’m not sure if he has used that word, but I will — from the perspective of Crown counsel. One is jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Canada, and the other is Bill C-75, passed by the federal parliament.

I’d like to explore both of those with him, to go beyond the general statements and find out what precisely is at the source of the complication or the difficulty that these represent when it relates to the detention of prolific offenders, but we’ll get to that momentarily.

The reason being that if, in fact, there are provisions of C-75 that are contributing to the problem and contributing to the challenge that communities and community leaders have identified and are beating on the Attorney General’s door about, this is the opportunity to articulate them. If the federal parliament got it wrong, then let’s tell them that. More importantly, let’s have the Attorney General tell them that. They don’t care what I think, but they may care what the Attorney General thinks. But we’ll get to that in due course.

It’s all to say that to the extent…. I’m not sure that we’ll get there today. Having those two or three decisions…. I can forewarn that the ones I was interested in were Zora, Jordan and Antic, as the three that seem, to me, to have been referred to as having been problematic — at least, others have said that they’re potentially problematic — and, of course, C-75. Having that available would be helpful.

In the letter that has sort of prompted this and that I’m referring to in this discussion today, there are some anecdotal references. I’m not going to ask the Attorney General to comment on specific accused persons and specific cases. He can be assured of that. But I’m going to refer to them, because I’d like to get them on the record and then ask him some general questions about these kinds of circumstances.

The mayors cited, on page 1 of their letter, at the bottom, an example from the Abbotsford police department, which happens to be in my hometown. They claim to be monitoring 81…. They use the term “prolific offenders,” which they define as individuals with 10 to 29 convictions, believed to be criminally active. They say that this is a 33 percent increase from 2019 and that 50 of those are considered “super prolific.” That’s a new term, super prolific, meaning that they have more than 30 convictions.

Now they don’t say within what period of time, and they don’t break it down as young offenders versus adult offenders, but assuming — and I do — that information is correct, from the Abbotsford police department, that’s very troubling.

[4:15 p.m.]

They talk about, in Vancouver, 40 — and here again, a slightly different term — “super chronic offenders” who have an average of 54 convictions per offender, So 40 people with a total of 2,152 convictions. They list for almost a dozen communities.

Then they get very anecdotal, and I’ll mention three of these examples. In Abbotsford, an individual who, at the time the letter was written, had several outstanding warrants for his arrest for the second time within two weeks. His latest release order was issued and breached the same day.

Last arrested and charged with theft of a motor vehicle, robbery, assault, assault with a weapon, resisting and obstruction of a peace officer and driving while prohibited. In 2021, initially remanded for two weeks, then issued a release order. The latest three convictions were for breach of probation, breach of undertaking and breach of release order. That’s the example from Abbotsford.

In Kelowna, an individual who, apparently, since 2016, has generated 346 RCMP files and received 29 convictions for property crime and assault offences and currently has “no-go” conditions to 11 businesses. The offender is routinely released with conditions and subsequently reoffends.

Finally, a third example that I’ll refer to from the letter. In Nanaimo, an individual who generated 300 crime files, was a young offender until 2019; grom 2019 to ’22, as an adult had 113 files, 20 of which generated charges; from 2019 to present, they had 21 criminal charges, resulting in seven convictions and one non-conviction, one pending, eight stays of proceedings.

We don’t know what that definition — prolific offender, super prolific offender…. But assuming these descriptions are correct, they are likely to fall within that category somewhere.

By the way, the one I didn’t mention, from Victoria: 248 offences for an individual in a short period of time.

Let me ask this. To what extent does the Attorney General’s ministry and the Prosecution Service track…? I mean, we know that when a report to Crown counsel comes in, Crown counsel does their work. They assess the charge and make a decision to proceed or not. They have to make a decision on submissions around detention or release.

To what degree does Crown counsel track — individually and, perhaps, cumulatively — these files that, if we had a definition or when we have a definition, might fall into the category of prolific offender? How is the Prosecution Service set up — or is it? — to address what to any reasonable, thinking person would be examples of gross, ongoing, blatant criminal activity, concentrated criminal activity that really wreaks havoc in communities?

[4:20 p.m.]

Hon. D. Eby: A couple of thoughts and some background for the member. In a lot of these stories that have come forward, a number of them are from smaller communities. In smaller communities, these individuals are well known. They’re well known by police; they’re well known by Crown. It’s their history, and for judges in the area, for everybody, it is generally not a revelation when they’re arrested and appear in court.

In terms of process, when someone is arrested, Crown counsel will pull all previous files. The reason they do that is to determine — let’s say it’s a bail application — whether the person is going to show up for court, whether the person is likely to reoffend, whether there’s a pressing public need for the person to be detained to ensure public confidence in the system. The back files, the history of these individuals, informs that evaluation by the Crown of how to move forward.

I’m advised that this process is done on an individual basis, that there are not categories — you know, you’ve crossed over a certain threshold, so now it’s a different approach. It involves an assessment of those previous files and the pattern of behaviours.

I’m also advised that typically, in these kinds of situations — not every time — defence counsel for the person who has been arrested will work with Crown counsel, and the person will typically agree to plead guilty to a number of the offences they’ve been arrested for. They will be sentenced for those offences. Typically, these individuals are not those engaging in the most serious crimes — serious assaults, sexual assaults, murders. These are lower-threshold, still incredibly disruptive and problematic activities in community, but not the worst offences.

[4:25 p.m.]

What happens is that the longest sentence, under the criminal system we have in Canada, for someone seized for this bundle of offences that they’re going to plead guilty to is less than two years. That’s at the outside. That’s really a more exceptional circumstance. Most times it’s going to be less than that in the sentence that the judge imposes. That person is going to be back out on the street, and then the cycle will repeat. That’s how you get to those kinds of numbers.

In that process, it’s hard to see the obvious opportunity to interrupt this kind of pattern. The person has pled guilty, been sentenced, gone to jail, served the time, been released, repeat and recycle again and again. That is the important work that government is doing — to figure out how to interrupt this cycle. What supports, what interventions, what approaches are going to have the most success in interrupting that?

This is the Crown counsel. As the member said, we’re not going to go into specific offenders, but in a typical “prolific offender” — we’re going to use the term, even though we haven’t defined it — case, this is the pattern, and this is the problem.

M. de Jong: I’m not sure if this was communicated to the Attorney, but by agreement, my friend the Leader of the Green Party, I expect, is here, expecting to participate in this at 4:30. Okay. Good. Then the collaborative work of the opposition and government is on track for the moment. I will make one further submission on this point, and then I’ll pick it up, I think, likely when we return to these proceedings in the week following.

I’m going to say a couple of things, in response to the Attorney General, that are not intended to be argumentative, but there are elements of what he said that I disagree with. I’ll begin by making this observation, as it relates to people who have shown a proclivity to offend and reoffend — that notion of the prolific offender. Seriousness is in the eye of the beholder.

To be fair, I’ve heard the Attorney say that when you are the victim of one of these acts — an assault that doesn’t qualify as attempted murder, perhaps — it’s still, certainly, serious for that person. I don’t think the Attorney argues that point, but there is a tendency — as someone who has been involved in the court system — to measure these things. The idea: for someone who has been convicted 20 or 30 times, I think the reasonable person would observe that it’s starting to get serious. It’s long past the point, because of the numbers of people that are being negatively impacted.

The Attorney has referred to the statutory test for judicial interim release, and I’ll say this. We know what it is. It’s in the Criminal Code. I know the test of the reasonable person. One is cautious about applying it as it relates to something as complex as the Criminal Code, but the test around the likelihood of reoffending, I think, confuses a lot of people, when someone has been convicted 30 times.

Even in the scenario that the Attorney General has laid out — I’m not quibbling with it — the person, the average person, the member of society, the mayor says: “I think I can make a pretty good case that this person is going to reoffend after the 30th time in three years.” The degree to which that doesn’t seem to be reflected is in some of the approaches and decisions.

[4:30 p.m.]

I’ll say this. There is a paragraph on page 3 of the letter from the mayors. I’ll read it into the record: “Importantly, not all prolific property offenders require a health care response but rather require that their repeated and constant offending be deterred and denounced. These individuals are having a negative and costly impact on the local business community, putting extreme pressure on policing resources and eroding the sense of public safety and trust in the justice system by residents in all our communities.”

That’s the assertion in the letter. I agree with that. I’ll go further in a moment. I’d like the Attorney General to indicate in this committee whether he agrees with that statement.

I’ll say this, and it’s not something one likes to say. But in the case of someone who persistently chooses to engage in doing harm to others or even other people’s properties and refuses to cease that activity and over a short period of time consistently reoffends and is convicted, it may be that the only way to stop that person is for them to be detained, pending the trial, and, following the trial, a further period of incarceration.

I get that in many circumstances people are challenged with other things in their life — mental health, addictions — for which that response may not be appropriate or isn’t appropriate. But I think we have forgotten the group that is causing these communities and these mayors a lot of their concern. In the day ahead or the days ahead in these proceedings, I’d like to explore with the Attorney General how we might better respond to those concerns and offer up some suggestions about how that might be done.

But I’m now over the time I promised to cede the floor and also want the Attorney to have an opportunity, if he wishes, to respond to what I’ve just said.

Hon. D. Eby: Just one point of concern is that there seemed to be a conclusion reached by the member that the Crown, in these kinds of situations that the member has described — a person’s got a long history of re-offending — would not be seeking that individual’s detention. He said it seems like they’re likely to re-offend and that public confidence in the justice system requires seeking detention. Crown does seek detention.

C-75 does not prevent Crown from seeking detention, and neither does Zora in appropriate circumstances. The challenge is…. And Crown often gets that detention order. Then the person’s in custody waiting for trial. That’s typically when — and I ran through the process for these individuals — they’re sitting in jail. They’re like: “Okay, I don’t want to wait for trial.” Their defence counsel reach out to Crown. They come to an arrangement to plead guilty. There is a sentencing. The person serves the sentence. Then they’re back in the community, and the cycle begins again.

[4:35 p.m.]

I said that that’s the typical process, and that is also the problem. Now Peter Juk, ADAG, reminds me that pre-charter in the Criminal Code, there were provisions that allowed you to hold prolific offenders essentially indefinitely. Those provisions are no longer available. We’re bound by the Criminal Code sentencing provisions, and while I agree with the member that when you’re a victim of crime….

If someone pushed my wife and kid into the street, it would be a level 1 assault. It wouldn’t feel level 1 to me, or to them. But it would certainly be subject to Criminal Code provisions where sentences were not life sentences — in fact, were significantly less than that. The challenge that we have is: working in this federal Criminal Code context, and working within the Charter that we’re all bound by in our work, how do we address this problem?

I agree with the member. There are criminals. There are people who commit crime for profit that choose that lifestyle willingly. Now, I will say that I suspect strongly that there are serious capacity issues in an individual that has 300 offences where they’ve been caught and prosecuted. I don’t mean to laugh. That just seems so ludicrous that…. I don’t know what the reaction is. If not laughing, then crying, that this is such a dismal situation. It feels to me like that person has a pretty serious capacity issue, but really, semantics, I guess, at the end of the day, when we’re talking about people who are choosing to engage in criminal activity.

Mental health and addiction issues are serious issues that cause people to be more involved in criminal conduct than they might otherwise be, because their judgment is impaired. Because their volition is impaired by the organic brain injury or by the mental health issue or by the substance that they’ve ingested, it causes them to participate in criminal activity, and, too often, in problematic ways.

In many ways, I agree with the member. I’m not sure that we have a significant point of departure. It’s very difficult to talk about these things in the abstract, but almost necessarily so. But I’ve enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to the questions from the member from the Third Party.

S. Furstenau: For the Attorney General’s benefit, I’m going to be asking a lot of questions, to start, on housing. I’m not sure if there’s a difference in staff.

Hon. D. Eby: I have housing staff coming Monday and Tuesday of the next sitting week. The staff who are here — the B.C. Prosecution Service…. The Deputy Attorney General is here. I can endeavour to do my best to answer the questions, or the member could bring her questions when B.C. Housing is here as well. I’ll have, perhaps, more detailed answers.

M. de Jong: Why don’t we huddle here for a minute.

I think, to ensure the efficiency of the proceedings and in fairness to my friend, she will pick this up when the staff are here in the area that she is interested in.

We’ll come back then to where we left off in the exchange. Earlier in these proceedings, the Attorney General referred to the data he had around charge approvals.

[4:40 p.m.]

I wanted to canvass that here in this section, where I’m trying to review with the Attorney the magnitude of the issue and how it’s reflected in the information that we do have available to us now.

The material I’m going to refer to for a couple of moments is actually material that, happily, the Attorney General provided to a colleague of mine in a letter he wrote on September 15, where he provided some of those statistics around charge approvals. Again, I hadn’t warned the Attorney General specifically that I was going to refer to that letter, and I have a copy of it here if he….

Hon. D. Eby: We have it.

M. de Jong: You have it.

The Attorney General responded to my colleague from Kamloops–North Thompson, who had made queries about charge approvals in Kamloops and the Interior region. He did so with an attachment to the letter that included a couple of tables that showed the numbers.

This will take a moment, but I’ll get this on the record, and if the Attorney and his staff have the table, it’s probably easier for them to follow than to try to make sense of the numbers I’m going to read into the record.

These are statistics that provide an insight into the number of times, following the receipt of a report to Crown counsel from police, the decision is made by Crown counsel not to proceed with a charge. That’s the material that the Attorney provided to my colleague. I’ll summarize, as follows.

There were three tables. One was for Kamloops. And just by way of example, in 2016, the Prosecution Service received 3,244 reports to Crown counsel. Of those, the decision not to charge was made in 440 cases — about 13½ percent, according to the data.

I’m not going to read all the numbers into the record, but the trend line goes as follows. In 2017, the decision of no charge was 11 percent. In 2018, it was 14 percent. In 2019, it was 16 percent. In 2020, it went to 27 percent. And for the first half of 2021, it was tracking at 20 percent.

The other interesting feature is that the number of reports to Crown counsel received decreased fairly significantly. I didn’t do the math, but it looks like by almost 33 percent. That similar trend appears in the Interior region, where in 2016, the decision of no charge was 14 percent, and it tracks at 14, 13, 15, until we get to 2020, when suddenly it jumps to 22 percent and remains that high.

For the province of B.C., again, and these are larger numbers because it captures the entire province — 73,486 reports to Crown counsel in 2016. In 12 percent of those, the decision was not to charge. It tracks at 12 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent and 14 percent in 2019. Then it goes to 20 percent. I mean, not quite doubling, but almost at double — again, at a time when the number of reports to Crown counsel goes from 73,486 down to 64,000.

[4:45 p.m.]

The number of reports coming in is going down, but the number of times a decision is made not to proceed with a charge is going up significantly enough, starting in 2019 and 2020, I would say, to register our attention. I guess the obvious question is why. What’s happening to explain that phenomenon?

Hon. D. Eby: The question is a sound one and an interesting one. There were two remarkable trends over the last couple of years. One is indeed this trend around Crown file approval. The other, as the member has rightly identified — the collapse in reports to Crown counsel.

The numbers that I have in front of me…. For the Interior region, for Kamloops, a 36.6 percent decrease, fiscal year ’19-20 to ’21-22. Over the two-year period of the pandemic, in the whole Interior region, a 22 percent decrease in report to Crown counsel. And it wasn’t just something weird in the Interior region. Double-digit decreases: 22 percent, Vancouver Island; 23 percent, Vancouver region; 19 percent, Fraser region; 8.2 percent, northern region.

[4:50 p.m.]

I don’t think there’s a memo that went out to police saying: “Hey, everybody, file fewer reports to Crown counsel.” It may be that police didn’t have regular staffing levels. It may be that crime…. Because everyone was at home, and a lot of property crime takes place when people are at work, away from their home, so therefore, there was just a reduction in that kind of crime. It’s really, really hard to explain that kind of a change over that time period. We don’t have an explanation for it yet.

The other piece, the decline in Crown counsel approval of files…. We have two theories about what has gone on here. One is in relation to the files that are facing the highest level of non-approval by Crown. They are administration of justice offences. That will ring a bell for the member. These are breaches of conditions on release, where someone is arrested for breaching the condition and then brought back. Police are recommending a charge of breach of conditions, and Crown is not approving that charge.

We’ve discussed the change in the law — sometimes it takes some time to translate through — the Zora decision on C-75. We think that’s a factor. How big a factor is an open question.

The second piece…. It’s an open question. It’s not meant to be disrespectful to anybody but maybe reflects the trying conditions of the pandemic, low staff levels, and so on. It is possible that the quality of files coming forward to Crown during the pandemic period, with reduced staffing and availability of staff, from police were not able to meet the charge assessment standard. That may have caused some of this reduction.

I am advised that the Prosecution Service is seeing a return to more historic levels of approval. The most recent fiscal year, which just concluded…. It will take some time to finalize those numbers. Usually these numbers are not released until July, because there are still files that are in process even after the fiscal year ends. Currently that number is sitting in the mid to high 70s. We’ll see where that number ends up but a significant recovery from the dip during the pandemic period.

I wish I could be of more assistance to the member and say: “Well, it’s obviously this.” In fact, it’s a really unexpected shift in police behaviour and in Crown approvals during the pandemic period that we’re still working to unravel the causes of.

M. de Jong: Okay. Happily, there is agreement around the two trends that this reveals. One is the number of reports to Crown counsel received, and then the second one is the rate of approval of those reports to Crown counsel changing.

As it relates to the number of reports to Crown counsel, I’m not going to…. Well, I guess I am going to offer my opinion. Through the heightened period of the pandemic…. You’re in lockdown. No one can drive. No place to drink? No drunk driving. I mean, the restriction on people’s ability to move around is going to impact and reveal itself in terms of behaviour and criminal behaviour. That’s, obviously, not a scientific explanation.

I’m less perplexed by the reduction in the number of reports to Crown counsel than I am by the significant change in the rate of approvals. Something changed. I’ll mention the first two things.

[4:55 p.m.]

I don’t think the police suddenly started writing less reliable reports to Crown counsel. I mean, I don’t think so, unless someone wants to offer that up as an explanation. I don’t think the threshold for charge approvals changed. The Attorney can confirm that. I think the policies that were in place around…. But if they did, that would be an explanation around the public interest and likelihood of conviction. If that changed during that period, that would be an explanation. I don’t think it did. The Attorney is in a position….

Was there a change in the general policy or a temporary change in the policy around charge approvals for other reasons that don’t relate to the threshold — the general threshold, traditional threshold — that has been applied? Something had to change, and I’m curious to know what it was.

Hon. D. Eby: The member is correct. There was no change in the threshold for charge approvals. There was no change. That is not the source of the trends that we see.

He canvassed with the Prosecution Service…. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were lots of messages coming about: “We’re figuring out this disease; what does it mean for high-density living situations like prisons?” Maybe people with compromised immune systems…. Was there some consideration by Crown?

Defence counsel comes and says: “Hey, this guy has done this minor offence. He’s got HIV, and he’s got hep C. You’re going to send him to jail, and he’s going to die of COVID in jail. Let’s have some sort of proportionality analysis in this time of crisis.”

There was certainly no direction from the head of the Prosecution Service around that. However, I’m advised that Crown were reminded that this is a time of huge stress in the system and additional risks to individuals in high-density custodial situations — to ensure that Crown were alive to that possibility in their assessments and to follow Crown counsel policies carefully. That may have had some influence in some charge approval decisions, enough to show up in the numbers in the way that we’re seeing. But there was no direction of that nature — that if someone has a compromised immune system or so on, then you shouldn’t approve the charges or anything of that nature.

It may be that the individual discretion of Crown counsel manifested in this way. But we can’t point to any obvious policy change in this regard that would have resulted in those charges disappearing in this way.

M. de Jong: Okay. A couple of things I would say in response. The observation about the intervention of defence counsel might be plausible, except for the fact…. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was in the courts, you wouldn’t have defence counsel until a charge was approved. I don’t know of many folks who are hiring lawyers or going to legal aid before a charge is approved. I’m not inclined to accept the proposition that suddenly the pleas of defence counsel were at play here. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

[5:00 p.m.]

Secondly, in his earlier reply just before this one, the Attorney General, I think on the advice of officials, referred to changes in the law that we have canvassed briefly and will canvass in more detail as they relate to jurisprudence and C-75. We’ll come to that discussion, but those are decisions that impact judicial interim release — again, not relevant until a charge has been approved. They wouldn’t come into play.

As I reflect on what the Attorney General has just said about considerations that may have…. It strikes me that maybe I was wrong, because the threshold test for approving charges does incorporate a public interest element. To be fair, it sounds like somewhere along the line someone’s idea of what was in the public interest changed — for reasons, in part, that the Attorney may have alluded to.

If that’s the case, and if the flow-through of that is contributing, has contributed…. I’m not sure I can say this authoritatively, but if some of that is now flowing through and revealing itself in heightened crime statistics, then I think it’s a legitimate question, probably one the Attorney General is interested in having an answer to. If that subtle change — or maybe not-so-subtle change — in the public interest test around approving charges is what accounts for the change, it may ultimately have had a fairly profound impact.

That’s my rationale for dismissing two of the reasons given, and I’m now speculating about the third, based on what I’ve just heard a few moments ago.

Hon. D. Eby: Well, a couple of things. It perhaps has been a while since the member practised criminal law. If he did, it certainly has been a while since I have.

I do know and can advise that people are arrested, brought into cells and call lawyers when they’re in cells. Lawyers do make interventions on their behalf, even in advance of a Crown decision about charges. So I’ll dispute his disputing, for whatever that’s worth.

I am advised that in the early days of the pandemic, Crown prosecution service and judges received regular briefings from corrections about infection rates, about double-bunking, about populations within prisons. I know for a fact that that had an influence on the number of people who ended up in prison, because as I advised the member, our prison populations dropped significantly — by about 20 percent — and that has not recovered. We’ve canvassed a number of the explanations for that, and I have a little bit more confidence in the explanations for that, because that’s a well tracked, well documented, statistically measured, set channel that people move through before they end up in prison.

[5:05 p.m.]

Where I struggle and where we’re both speculating is this phenomenon during the pandemic — the cumulative impact of a bunch of Crown decisions that resulted in a decline in the approval rate that seems to be rebounding now. It could be a shift in Crown’s understanding of the public interest, absolutely. The public interest is not a defined term in the sense of “here is exactly what the public interest is.” It is a series of factors involving the individual offender, the nature of the offence, the community’s perspective.

I mean, I’ll give an example of a graffiti offence in downtown Vancouver, Chinatown, today. There may be a different assessment of what the public interest is now, given the widespread public outrage about continued defacement of public and private property in Chinatown and the impact that’s having on businesses in the broader community, than it might have been six months or a year ago. So the public interest can change in relation to circumstances, including a global pandemic.

That is certainly a possibility, but the member is, as I am, speculating about it. What we agree on are the trends, and I can advise the member that the trends are returning to normal.

M. de Jong: To the Attorney, can I refer us back to — only because the document refers to some of these numbers; it does so in a slightly different way — the letter from the mayors that we were talking about earlier? Again, there’s a chart included in that document that I’d like to refer to. I’m happy to send over a copy.

On page 4, the authors of the letter refer to data that they assign to the B.C. Prosecution Service annual report. This is how they summarize that. For the period 2016-17 to 2020-21, it reveals a decrease of 10 percent in report to Crown counsel received by the police. It then refers to, in terms of average days to conclude a file around charge approvals, 85 days. It rose to 185 days or 118 percent longer. The rate of no-charge assessments goes from 12 percent to 21 percent, with accused persons approved to court dropping 26 percent, guilty judgments dropping 20 percent and stays of proceeding increasing 26 percent.

Now, I expect both the Attorney and I know why the mayors cited that information, summarized it in that way — to illustrate what they believe has contributed to the problems they are facing within their communities. But to be fair, the first thing I should do is ask whether the Attorney and his officials take issue with the summary of the statistics that the mayors have provided there.

Hon. D. Eby: There are some minor quibbles about the data, but overall, these are the numbers that are in the Prosecution Service’s annual report. I think for the purposes of our discussion today, there’s no dispute about that.

[5:10 p.m.]

M. de Jong: The authors of the letter followed up with this. This is their observation: “In summary, this tells us that while the B.C. Prosecution Service is receiving fewer files to review, it is taking longer for those files to be reviewed. Fewer cases are being forwarded to the courts, with an increase in stay-of-proceedings, and of those that go to court, fewer individuals are receiving guilty judgments.”

I think the authors were trying to remain civil. I think they also include that as a fairly thinly veiled criticism of a phenomenon that they believe is contributing to the challenges they are facing within their communities.

I know that the Attorney has met with them and some of the other mayors, but they are, and I certainly am, interested to know the government’s and the Attorney’s response to that observation — which, I must say, I am inclined to accept as having contributed, in part, to the challenges that these communities are facing.

Hon. D. Eby: We’ve discussed the reports…. We’ll just work through the different categories in the letter one at a time.

Reports to Crown counsel received from police. We’ve been through those numbers and the remarkable decline — 10 percent is, I guess, a bit of an understatement. What we’ve seen in the reduction in reports to Crown counsel from police, 2016-17 compared to 2020-21, is a 14.7 percent decrease. That likely very closely matched up with part of the conversation we had about the reduction in crime rates, because people were in lockdown, and the reduction in property crime rates. So not a huge amount that can be drawn from that figure, except, I guess, to the extent that there are fewer files on Crown’s desk.

The second piece is the average days to conclude a file. The previous year’s number was about 100. The increase to 185 days is a reflection of the reduced capacity of the courts. This was a full pandemic year; courts were very reduced. We’ve discussed this aspect of the administration of criminal justice in the province — a dramatic reduction in the number of criminal trials that were conducted, as the courts were less available because of the pandemic.

[5:15 p.m.]

It was a very challenging time for our entire justice system, but many trials did still go ahead. It took longer to get there, and the courts were less available than they usually are. I’ll say, with respect, it’s a little bit unfair to choose average days to conclude a file when that requires appearing in court and the courts are very dramatically reduced because of the pandemic.

The rate of no charge assessments. We’ve canvassed, in some detail, this unusual dip in Crown approvals during the pandemic period and then its returning to more historic levels. Accused persons approved to court — this is related to the no charge assessments.

As to the guilty judgments declining by 20 percent, we have no control over the courts’ decision to find somebody not guilty. You could make an argument that the Crown should not have approved some of these files — in which case, then, the other critique of the previous two columns might expand. Those matters did go ahead to court, and there was a reduction in the number of guilty judgments from courts.

I’m not sure what we could draw from that, other than that the courts declined to find the individuals guilty on the facts that were in front of the court. I assume the member is not blaming the prosecutors for putting forward problematic files. Possibly he is.

Stay of proceedings, up from 34 percent to 43 percent. We did discuss the sort of prolific offender cycle. It is not uncommon and, as I advised the member, it’s increasingly common that Crown counsel will see someone facing a large array of charges. In negotiations with defence counsel for a guilty plea, there will be an agreement to plead to a certain number of offences. The person will be sentenced on those offences, and the remaining charges will be stayed.

This trend of seeing people with more offences because they’re less likely to be waiting in jail for their hearings, for all the reasons that we’ve discussed previously, is likely informing this trend.

M. de Jong: Can I just ask the Attorney for clarification? I read the second column there. Because of the source of the information, I read that as being an indication of time to review and approve, not actually…. I think the Attorney might be doing cartwheels, if the previous number of days to conclude a file, including court appearances, were 85 days. I think that number refers to file approval times, as opposed to including the period in which a matter has been approved and before the courts. I’ll ask that question.

Hon. D. Eby: I can assure the member that 70 percent of charge approvals are done within 30 days, so that figure is certainly not charge approvals. It is the time to conclude a file.

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

Motion approved.

The committee rose at 5:19 p.m.

The House resumed; Mr. Speaker in the chair.

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

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

[5:20 p.m.]

Motions Without Notice

MEMBERSHIP CHANGE TO
PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE

Hon. M. Farnworth: I have, by leave, two motions to move that will seek replacement of people on committees.

Leave granted.

Hon. M. Farnworth: By leave, I move:

[That Kelly Greene, MLA replace Mike Starchuk, MLA as a Member of the Select Standing Committee on Public Accounts.]

Motion approved.

MEMBERSHIP CHANGE TO
FINANCE COMMITTEE

Hon. M. Farnworth: The second motion. By leave, I move:

[That Henry Yao, MLA replace Pam Alexis, MLA as a Member of the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services.]

Leave granted.

Motion approved.

Hon. M. Farnworth moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until May 30 at 10 a.m.

The House adjourned at 5:21 p.m.